Vincent Buckley poet, teacher, critic, essayist and iconoclast who died in 1988 at the early age of sixty-three, would probably have dismissed as self-contradictory the media buzz-term ‘public intellectual’. For him, an integral part of the life of the intellectual and the poet was assuming the mantle of the public figure; Yeats’s ‘smiling public man’ was a line he quoted grimly. Deeply introspective and often melancholy, Buckley was intensely engaged with the major social, intellectual and political issues of his day, although he was pessimistic about being remembered by more than a few people. Here, in a late poem called ‘An Easy Death’, he meditates, thinking of Thomas Hardy, on his own post-mortem identity:

But think of your name as something
burnt up in a moth-flight
thrown off by a self which has learned
to seize its oblivion
for the sake of memory.

Buckley’s temperament was informed by his awareness of the skull beneath the skin, and this is evident even in his early writing. In his engaging and well-researched biography, John McLaren notes that Buckley once told a friend ‘what daffodils had been for Wordsworth, death was for him’, evidence of a saving sense of humour and self-irony.

The simultaneous appearance of these two books makes possible a re-evaluation of Buckley’s very considerable contribution to literature and the discourses of public life in the thirty years before his death. Publication has been made possible by the efforts of some of those knew him well: John McLaren, the biographer; the poet-academics Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Peter Steele, who have worked on the Collected Poems; art historian and former student Patrick McCaughey, who encouraged the project from the start; and Buckley’s widow Penelope, who gave her generous support to it. For readers new and old, the experience of reading the biography and the Poems side by side is enlightening. Buckley, ever the astute literary commentator, warned that biography is ‘the leaning tower of the bad critic’, a memorable definition of the autobiographical fallacy if ever there was one. McLaren, an informed critic, seldom falls into this trap, but rather uses his knowledge of Buckley’s life to elucidate the poetry, which from first to last is strongly grounded in the sadnesses, political engagements and joys (muted though they tend to be) of the poet’s lived experience. Since he himself is a literary critic, it is hardly surprising that McLaren has so much to say about the poetry (he is particularly good on ‘Golden Builders’), but, despite the shrewdness of his explications, they become from time to time a distraction in his exploration of the life.

Gwen Harwood first met Buckley in 1961, when they collaborated to hoax Leonie Kramer as editor of Australian Poetry. Harwood was one of many writers who were deeply drawn to Buckley, as man and poet. (He had dismissed some of her early work as being ‘muddled and derivate’; in her turn, she was to parody his symbol-clotted religious poetry in the pseudonymous Abelard–Eloisa sonnets which caused such a stir when they appeared in the Bulletin.) In one of her finest late poems, written after a visit to the Buckley household, Harwood commemorates the death of her ‘Irish darling’, remembering a game of Scrabble played with his young daughters, and paying tribute to the animating power which the country of his ancestors plays throughout his writing:

Our last day on earth together.
Grania waits through the game
To put down her one word: Ireland.

‘Grania’, here, is more than the name of the beloved last-born Buckley child; the name is a metonym for the Ireland of her father’s imagination. Etymologically, Graínne has two opposing strands ‘love’ and ‘she who inspires terror’. Like his friend and sometimes antagonist James McAuley, who said theatrically, ‘I’m terrified of the Ireland inside me’, Buckley knew the ‘terrible beauty’ that his Irish-Australian Catholic heritage entailed.

Buckley’s Celtic heritage was more a case of estrangement than community. As an adolescent, he was absorbed by the ‘matter of Ireland’, mediated through his reading. But his experience was like that of so many other descendants of Irish and Scots (as opposed to English, Mediterranean or Jewish settlers): there was scant sense of an inherited community and shared traditions and values, and his Irishness was largely a matter of his Catholic upbringing and education, within what he called a ‘persecuted church’, at St Mary’s Convent School in Romsey, and then at St Patrick’s College in East Melbourne. His sense of isolation was partly a product of his relationship with his morose and distant father; one of his best early poems, ‘Father and Son’, lovingly and wistfully recreates his desire to connect with this thrawn figure who refuses assent to the son’s simplistic view of Irish identity:

If mind falters in what I say,
Love cannot guard the entered way:
‘It’s black Orangemen own these farms,
Crushing us with their pious arms.’
‘Ah, they’re no worse than our own,
Who’s strip you to the shuddering bone …’

The first of Buckley’s visits to Ireland occurred in the mid 1950s, when he was a postgraduate student at Cambridge. He discovered early that the Ireland of his imagination could no more be realised in Dublin than in Melbourne. His experience of the people showed him a pattern of dispossession from tradition that was disconcertingly similar to his own. But he continued to return, and to live there for long periods, making a strong, if sometimes ambivalent, commitment to the Republican cause after the outbreak of bitter sectarian conflict in the late 1960s. Whatever reservations might have been voiced in Melbourne about his views of Republican politics, there can be no doubt they were informed by the same passionate commitment that he had brought to debates about Catholic belief and social action, communism and European politics generally. Whatever disagreements one might have with his views (which were susceptible to change over time), Buckley, as his biographer eloquently demonstrates, had a lifelong abhorrence of apathy. Is it simplistic to suggest that his involvement with Irish politics and letters (even in an Ireland which could never be his spiritual home) became a way of filling the void caused by his disenchantment with the Church brought about by the promulgation of Humanae Vitae and the Vatican’s accommodations to the communist bloc?

The apogee of Buckley’s idealism, surely, concerns his vision of the Apostolate and the Newman Society at the University of Melbourne. He played a cultic role in the organisation, for which he envisaged an extraordinary reformist function:

It is our world, our own familiar and loved home, that is to be destroyed, and to be transformed, resurrected, after its destruction. It is to be … the University of Melbourne … the purpose of our apostolate to the university is so to sanctify it that, when Christ comes to sanctify it, there will be something there to sanctify.

Buckley would, one imagines, have had some coruscating things to say about the current ‘Dream Large’ branding of the institution which, for many years, he regarded as his spiritual and intellectual home.

Some of the most interesting sections of McLaren’s book concern Buckley’s involvement in the politics of Melbourne English department in its successive self-refashionings. This is of a piece with his general attitude of demurral from totalising and monolithic structures of belief: thus, he writes movingly that ‘there are no orthodoxies in evaluation or interpretation which we ought to support; that no ideology is privileged over others’.

It is small wonder that former students such as Axel Clark testify to their ‘love’ of Buckley for the sense of community which he extended to most of them. His early championing of the teaching of Australian literature may well be his most enduring legacy to our intellectual life. His teaching style was underlain by the credo which animated his creative life as a poet and his activity as a Catholic intellectual: what exists is never fixed and static, the world is a matter of process and continual becoming.

Only one of the six women who figure so largely in Buckley’s poetry plays a significant role in the biography: his second wife, Penelope, whom he married in 1976. Of his mother, Frances, his first wife, Edna Forbes, and the two daughters from each of the marriages, relatively little is said. One can only sympathise with the first Mrs Buckley’s wish not to be included in the book, although it is clear that hers is the story of a strong and capable woman. She was treated at best patronisingly by her husband, and by the priest, Father Con Keogh, in whose care she was placed after the breakdown precipitated by her discovery of Buckley’s intimacy with the seventeen-year-old student.

Penelope Buckley’s strength and love are evident in her preparedness to discuss with McLaren the often painful details of the relationship, which in its early phase was the subject for potential scandal. (The notion of what we now call a ‘duty of care’ shown by lecturer to student seems to have been avoided, not only by Buckley himself, but also by several of his colleagues. Strangely, McLaren makes only one mention of the Orr case, very much in the news at precisely this time.) One of the most disturbing incidents recounted in Journey without Arrival is Penelope Buckley’s account of the confidence she gave to Father Jerry Golden about the ‘celibacy’ which she and Vincent had imposed upon themselves after they became lovers; that she should have felt the need to do so is a sad reflection on the struggle between a private sense of good and an overriding sense of obedience to the views of the institutional church and its representative (however humane Golden may have been).

The Collected Poems makes possible a reappraisal of Buckley’s impressive and substantial body of work. Among his earliest critical essays is a study of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Whatever we are to understand from McLaren’s title Journey without Arrival, a reading of Buckley’s late poems shows that his journey as a poet did have an ‘arrival’; one wonders how often he thought about the well-known lines from ‘Little Gidding’:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Windswept Kilmore, metropolitan Melbourne, and the many faces of Ireland are the imaginative loci of his poetry, and in his last (and best) work, all of these places are ‘embodied’ (to use one of his favourite terms) as he reviews the preoccupations of his poetic art: loss, vivid awareness of death in the midst of life, the shaping force of ancestry and the saving grace of human love. The poetry written after Late Winter Child (1979) usually avoids the posturing and mawkishness of some of the earlier work (‘stanzas of rolling rhetoric’ is the self-ironic term he used for it). He arrives at an art of supreme simplicity. ‘Small Green Poem for Grania Buckley’, a characteristic late poem, is, to my mind, one of the finest things he ever wrote:

Deer in the open grasses,
water seaming the rockface,
sunset red as bauxite,
thoughts quick as an eel-run.
The sound of your voice
the feet speeding like rain
the backward drift of your pale
hair flying: you are fanned by space.
You put the fringe of your hand
to my cheek; it is warm as a shawl
after the freeze of fog
that drew new shapes from the land.

There are some spare and deeply moving love poems here, and it is fascinating to read Buckley’s ‘revisitings’ of ‘Brought up on the Fears of Women’, which is surely among the greatest Australian poems that explore the potent memories of childhood. I wonder how many readers could have appreciated until now the strains of wit and broad comedy that sound through the bleakness of Buckley’s habitual vision of the world?

In their different ways, both books make an important contribution to understanding the life, times and above all the writing of a distinguished, difficult and always controversial Australian poet and intellectual. There are a few minor errors of documentation in Journey without Arrival, and an embarrassing mis-setting of the author’s name on the cover. John Leonard Press has produced a rather more elegant book, well set on quality paper, and including an illuminating foreword by Peter Steele.