Despite leaving its subject in mid-career (aged fifty-one), David Malouf and the Poetic covers considerable ground. While not a biography per se, the book employs considerable biographical detail to good effect. Malouf’s background – a Jewish mother with an English family, and an Australian-born father with Christian Lebanese parents – illustrates the long-standing multicultural nature of Australian society. For Malouf’s family it was the source of (often unspoken) tensions, and for Malouf (whose paternal grandfather did not speak English) it was a main source – via his mother – of an aspirational Anglophone heritage. Growing up in Queensland during World War II was also a defining event for Malouf. The threat of Japanese invasion was real, while the sinking in 1940 of the SS City of Benares by a German submarine, which caused the deaths of seventy-seven evacuated children, was a traumatic event for the six-year-old Malouf, making its way into his adult writing.

After the war, and an incipient career as an academic at the University of Queensland, Malouf joined many other Australians in the 1950s and travelled to England, where he taught, and from where he travelled. Returning to Australia, he began an academic career at the University of Sydney, a position he gave up in the 1970s to write full-time, basing himself mostly, for the next seven years, in a small Italian village.

Smith covers this biographical record admirably, and uses it judiciously with regard to Malouf’s published output. Her considerable original research, via interviews, diaries, letters, and drafts of Malouf’s work is also put to good literary-critical use. In this respect, David Malouf and the Poetic is a major resource for any student of Malouf’s work. The letters to fellow-poet Judith Rodriguez are particularly useful in delineating not just the course of Malouf’s writing career, but his thoughts about writing itself. Smith balances nicely the drive of an ambitious, self-consciously literary writer with the contingent nature of the publishing world and of being a writer. (Smith discusses, for instance, an unfinished novel on Goethe.)

David Malouf, 1984 (photograph by Rowan Fotheringham, National Library of Australia)It is debatable if Smith quite catches how Malouf moved from struggling author to one fielding bids from international publishers for his second novel, An Imaginary Life (published in 1978). But accounting for anything so mysterious as literary success is no easy thing, and it surely helped that Malouf made a number of important contacts and friendships in Sydney, most notably with Patrick White, who had only relatively recently become a Nobel laureate.

Smith outlines the cultural context of Malouf’s career briefly but effectively, and notes with an impressive economy the critical reception of his work. Her interest in theory, however, goes beyond the economical. She shows little interest in thematising Malouf’s work through psychoanalytic theory, post-colonial theory, or whatever, and has little to say, about sexuality with regard to Malouf’s work. (Indeed, the first hundred pages of Smith’s book barely make Malouf’s homosexuality clear.) Notwithstanding this, Smith’s approach – biographical and descriptive analysis – proves to be a powerful way to produce new insights into old works, a number of which (especially Johnno and An Imaginary Life) have already acquired a sizeable critical literature. The pages on An Imaginary Life, both its conception and Smith’s analysis of it, are particularly compelling. One of the remarkable things about this short novel is that its subject matter – the poet Ovid exiled to the edge of the Roman Empire – is so apparently unrelated to Australian subjects and themes.

Smith is also strong on the themes and motifs (such as ‘earth’, memory, loss, and vision) that run through Malouf’s early works. Put at its simplest, Smith makes a persuasive case for Malouf’s writing as attempting to transcend or resolve apparent binary oppositions: the tamed and the wild; the lyric and the narrative; the body and the imagination. In all of these, as she argues, the scene of writing is what is ultimately being thematised, since writing is what allows loss to be regained. (Not surprisingly, Proust has been a key writer for Malouf.) Writing, despite its apparent permanence, is associated with the evanescent, the transitory, and the half-glimpsed. As Malouf writes in ‘A Medium’ (a story from Antipodes, quoted by Smith): ‘There is no story, no set of events that leads anywhere or proves anything – no middle, no end. Just a glimpse through a half-open door, voices seen not heard, vibrations sensed through a wall ...’

David Malouf announces Eliza Robertson as the winner of the 2017 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize (photograph by Amy Baillieu)My one substantive frustration with this otherwise excellent study is the disinclination on Smith’s behalf to really discuss ‘the poetic’ of her title. ‘Poetic’ is, as many have noted, an extremely vague term. Certainly, Malouf, in his poetry and his literary prose, approaches many elements that one might associate with ‘the poetic’ (lyricism, intensity, musicality), but Smith’s attention to these is not programmatic. Her evocation of Philip Mead’s idea that poetry is an ‘eruptive force’ is perhaps misplaced for a work relatively uninterested in cultural or sexual politics. Perhaps most informative is her description of Malouf’s interest in ‘characters who struggle and communicate their unique personal visions in an increasingly technological, materialistic society’. In this regard, ‘the poetic’ can be seen as a synonym for ‘post-Romantic’, a cultural ideology that values the individual and the imagination, placing the two in tension with society via poetic ‘vision’.

The tension between narrative and ‘the poetic’ might account for Malouf’s interest in compact forms. As I have noted elsewhere, Malouf has generally been attracted to constrained forms: the lyric poem, the short story, the essay, the libretto, and the novella. Malouf’s attraction to such forms is consistent with his interest in details, the day-to-day, and the minute as sources of great insight. In this respect, Malouf’s oeuvre is quintessentially post-Romantic, bringing together the vast and small, the significant and the insignificant, to produce a body of work that is ‘poetic’ in its attentiveness to the relationship between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. Happily, Smith’s study helps us to pay closer attention, in turn, to Malouf’s important body of early work.