It is a disparate collection united by a concern with poiesis: making or creating. Malouf defines art as a ‘made thing that detaches itself from the mass and flow of phenomena in such a way as to catch our attention …’ In an essay on Utzon’s opera house, Malouf asks if ‘our supreme achievement in the realm of making’ isn’t the city. He locates landscape painter Mandy Martin’s work in a ‘sphere of “making”’, while photographer Bill Henson is introduced, rather grandly, as a ‘maker of magic’. There is also a tradesman-like ‘side of “making”’ that, he argues, is often missed by contemporary sculptors and painters. And, of course, in the libretti Malouf is the maker, the poietes.

Another thread, implicit in the collection’s title, is the physically felt dimension of performance in opera, music, dance, drama, and exhibited art. In a catalogue essay for a 2002 exhibition of the Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art, Malouf rhapsodises over the mysteries of the aesthetic exchange between creator, creation, and audience:

Every encounter of the kind I have been describing, with a painting or piece of sculpture, a poem, a play or novel, a music or dance performance, involves a human agency, and on both sides ... What we experience is an immediate and very physical sense of the body’s power and energy, both the performer’s and our own, but the revelation is of the body’s capacity to break free. Our spirit soars. We are enlightened, made lighter.

The cultural questions animating this collection have coursed through Malouf’s literary life for some fifty years. His overarching frame of reference – what does it mean to make an inherited culture one’s own, to reverse colonise it? – is shared by other expatriate cultural heroes. But unlike them Malouf chose, after an Odyssean ten-year journey beginning in his twenties, and thereafter a seasonal relocation to Tuscany, to return and to ground himself in the land his father, a Lebanese migrant, chose after his own exile. It has given him an exquisite sensitivity to place.

‘Malouf’s abiding theme – the refractions of nature and culture through the conundrum of masculine identity – is one of the great Australian stories’

The entanglements of his life story with these aesthetic questions make ‘The South’ one of the most satisfying pieces in this collection. It begins: ‘On a soft sunlit morning in March 1959, just a few days before my twenty-fifth birthday, I stood at the rails of an Italian liner, the Fairsky … [and] saw the Bay of Naples open out before me, and utterly familiar in the distance the dark slopes and scooped-out cone of Vesuvius – all just as I had imagined it, like the breaking of a dream.’

David Malouf, 28 October 2006 (photograph by Dariusz Peczek via Wikimedia Commons)

The knowing paradox is that generations of European and American artists had dreamed of the ‘warm South’ – Keats had cried out for a ‘beaker full’ of it – and travelled there in pursuit of the same dream. But the Malouf antipodean abroad had journeyed north to arrive at the legendary south: true south. What follows is a meditation of great erudition and agility on Mediterranean, particularly Italian, culture. It ends with an arresting vision of a Mediterran-eanised Australia that upends all these categories. ‘The south,’ he concludes, ‘has come to us.’

Each of the pieces in Being There affords valuable, if at times idiosyncratic, insights into the production and reception of art across, and between, different forms. And yet it would be wrong, I think, to regard the vein Malouf is working here as criticism in the full sense. Criticism implies a relationship of autonomy between the critic, the artist and the work. Crucially, a number of these pieces were written in a spirit of tacit collaboration with the artist. Malouf’s essay on Glenn Murcutt, for example, was written originally for an illustrated limited edition – an ornament to the architect’s work – that was valued at $1,800 each.

The purpose of many of these pieces – especially the exhibition and catalogue introductions – is not to criticise but to elucidate and celebrate, and they have, as a result, a courtly, flattering tone. Something vital is missing. After all, a culture that ceases to sharpen itself on the whetstone of criticism risks losing its edge.

‘a culture that ceases to sharpen itself on the whetstone of criticism risks losing its edge’

The tone is that of a connoisseur or sage rather than a critic, and it is accompaniedby a weakness for the oracular. To wit: ‘It is one of the conditions of genius that the world he is born into has already prepared a place for him; the time and place are always right. The only condition on a great creative spirit, in any art and at any time, is that he should be creative.’

At several points, Malouf claims for opera the status of popular entertainment, but it is hardly firm proof of the form’s popularity to assert that more people attended Kosky’s Nabucco than read Byron’s Sardanapalus.

Malouf’s international reputation was secured as early as 1978 with An Imaginary Life, a sure-footed historical novel about Ovid in contemplative exile on the Black Sea. He fashions for his first-person narrator a graceful, supple, and urgent English idiom at once sophisticated, writerly, and intimate; it is clearly the work of a storyteller and a poet. Thirty years later came Ransom, a reading of the Iliad’s most deeply humane episode: the exchange between Trojan King Priam and his son’s killer, Achilles. Being There closes with a version of Euripides’ Hippolytus, another example of the writer’s subtle attunement to the classical world. The play is a chariot wreck of a tragedy orchestrated by an enraged Aphrodite, and it ends in Malouf’s version, though not in the original, with a choric hymn to the ‘shortness’ and ‘sweetness’ of life; a coda dedicated to: ‘This brute irresistible force, / This fearful joy, this fatal / Impulse that drives us on.’That force has a name: Eros. And it’s as good an emblem as anything for David Malouf’s enduring aesthetic passion.