James McAuley and the Grammar of Existence

James McAuley and the Grammar of Existence

Noel Rowe

James McAuley was bom in 1917 and died in 1976. When James McAuley converted to Catholicism in 1952 he had more immediate access to a tradition of natural law philosophy.

During the fifties writers like Jacques Maintain and John Courtney Murray were reviving the Thomistic interpretation of natural law, an interpretation which did not claim there was some easily intelligible code written into nature. Instead human fulfilment could only be achieved in a manner consistent with a person’s nature; nature understood in an essential and teleological sense.1

Given the social and political challenges of a post-war world it is not difficult to see why these writers were attracted to Aquinas’s teaching on natural law and natural justice. They looked at Nuremburg and saw Antigone appealing to a law higher than positive law. They looked at Nazism, Fascism and Communism and saw the individual made subservient to the State. They looked at war itself and saw a need for some common law and common good which transcended nationalism and factionalism. They looked at the United Nations and its International Declaration of Rights in 1948 and saw intuitive

McAuley’s writings are most readily available in James McAuley: Poetry, essays and personal commentary (ed) Leonie Kramer, Uni of Q Press, St Lucia, 1988.

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confirmation of their own philosophy that human rights were inalienable, having force not because they were granted by positive law but because they were derived from the very nature and value of the human person.

Finally they saw all exercises of political and legal power were limited from above by the law of justice, itself a primary principle of natural law, and from below by a system of private rights.2

The writers themselves were aware of history’s influence. Mari tain wrote:

Given a war wherein the destiny of civilization is at stake, and given a peace which also will have to be won after the war is won, it is very important that we have a proper and firmly established political philosophy.3

In Man and the State Maritain opens with a quotation from his address to the second International Conference of UNESCO and argues for natural law in view of "...ever widening crises in the modern world". Murray, while he may not quite realise the degree to which his view is American, is vigorous in defending his position against movements like individualist Liberalism, Marxism and empiricist rationalism.

Given the manner in which McAuley’s early poetry is already sketching a metaphysical map with which to navigate the crises of modem civilisation and the ambivalences of nature, and given the manner in which it already implies this map, book, law will be revealed through a metaphysical intuition, in which reason directs its disciplined efforts towards a moment of contemplative surrender it is not surprising the Catholic tradition of natural law should confirm and clarify central aspects of McAuley’s political and poetic philosophy.

It is active for instance in his editorial for the first issue of Quadrant in December, 1952, allowing him to mediate between the individual and the state in his defence of democracy, his opposition to communism, his commitment to authority and traditional sexual morality, his vision of the modem age as the first age in which all men exist in a single

As to fifties writings see especially J. Maritain, Man and the State, Uni of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1951 and J.C. Murray, We Hold These Truths, Sheed & Ward, London, 1960. I am indebted to Rev Dr James Esler of the Sydney Catholic Theological Union for his assistance.Maritain, above, n 2, p 5.

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THE GRAMMAR OF EXISTENCE

inter-communicating world and glimpse the problem of a truly universal free intellectual order in which all can participate, and of course his resistance to modernism.4

This resistance to modernism is stiffened in The End of Modernity which argues the culture of Western modernity is anti-poetic because it is anti-realist and anti-metaphysical.5

In proposing: "The number, weight and measure of verse bear a kind of sacred character by reason of their analogy with the divine ordering" McAuley is effectively advocating a natural law for poetry.6

This belief in a natural law for poetry, in the period immediately after McAuley’s conversion, a poetry of natural law. Some, but by no means all, of the important poems of A Vision of Ceremony convey his desire for a poetry obedient to the "grammar of existence".7 An Art of Poetry scorns individual, arbitrary and self-expressive art in favour of art which traces it "secret springs" to the Word, and celebrates the "universal meanings" which are disclosed to its formal, lucid contemplation.

Celebration of Divine Love speaks of "secret patterns printed in our being" and "a deep sense/Of natural order in the way of things", an order which restores a world "Grown tuneless and distraught" and embodies its own moral imperatives. This vision of the "old fidelities of earth" is finally perfected in Christ, "the bond and stay of his creation". "New Guinea" describes a society where "Life holds its shape in the modes of dance and music" although McAuley’s portrait of a society instinct with ritual is not a romantic, sentimental version of the natural.

A Letter to John Dry den, a polemic against positivism, relativism, personalism, secularism, totalitarianism and other of McAuley’s preferred ideological and political enemies, sustains its attack, albeit not very successfully, by its somewhat indirect defence of the natural wisdom and morality which these various movements are seen to have discarded. Then it

Cited, Kramer, pp 207-210.J McAuley, The End of Modernity, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1959."From A Poet’s Notebook" (1958) Vol 11 No 4 Spring, Quadrant 49. This essay is included in The End of Modernity, pp 160-180.J McAuley, A Vision of Ceremony, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956. Kramer, "Credo", n 1, p 43.

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makes an explicit appeal to natural law morality, an appeal characteristic of the Thomistic apologetics of the period:

The law of Moses said it very clearly:Man cannot live by Oslo lunches merely,But by a word formed in the intellect;And as that word is false or true, expect Evil or good to follow. John, we know There can be no perfection here below;Yet men may gain a partial unityIn spite of difference, if they agreeAt least on certain things - things that are certain,Not mysteries behind a Gnostic curtain - If they accept at least the primacy Of spirit, and the moral law that’s writ Deep in man’s heart till he defaces it.

As with Celebration of Divine Love, the argument shifts into theology, becoming an affirmation of Christ as the completion of the natural order, then a complaint about the growth of sexual and intellectual liberalism, including a reference to how "seats of learning have contracted out/Of natural law".

Finally, the poem abandons its own rational premises and appeals to the heart, as if to say it is some form of intuition or contemplation which is needed to apprehend the natural law, the "cosmic map Mercator never made".8

During the sixties it seemed as if the map got lost. It was not very easy to locate the enemy, as Coleman records:

The Cold War of the 1950s has lost simplicity with the dissolution of the monolithic Stalinist Communist Party and the Sino-Soviet split; by 1963 Pope John would issue his Encyclical Pacem in Terris on dealing with Communist states and President Kennedy would have a hot line to the Kremlin. Some said the age of ideology was over, others that * &

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"An Art of Poetry" and "New Guinea" are found in Kramer pp 150 and 19. "A Letter to John Dryden" and "Celebration of Divine Love" are found in J McAuley, Collected Poems, Angus& Robertson, Sydney, 1971, pp 85-95 and pp 73-76.


a new radicalism was being bom. It was at least a new stage, and McAuley would for a time observe more and participate less.9

It was not easy to know your friends: in 1967, it was revealed Quadrant had, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, been indirectly financed by the CIA as part of a program to limit the expansion of Communist political and cultural influence. The exposure did not seriously discredit McAuley, but it did contribute to his disillusionment with public life.10

At the same time the Thomistic revival faltered. Murray had pointed out the Catholic tradition of natural law was intimately connected to a realist epistemology and a metaphysics of nature, "especially the idea that nature is a teleological concept".11 During the sixties a paradigm shift was consolidated in modem Western culture, with the absolute largely displaced by the relative, the universal by the historical, the essential by the existential, and the created by the Active. The Catholic Church felt the impact of this shift most particularly and painfully in the controversies which arose around the issue of artificial contraception.

In 1970, declaring himself "A Friend of the Permanent Things", McAuley speaks of the damage caused to the principle of ecclesial authority when Pope Paul VI hesitated to rule against artificial contraception, and reasserts his conviction freedon requires discipline and authority. While McAuley admits there do exist human perplexities which cannot be resolved simply by an authoritarian response, he is concerned to defend the principles of his Catholic tradition, which he enumerates as natural law morality, religious authority, and the supremacy of the sacred. In keeping with many other Catholic thinkers of the time, McAuley too confidently assumes an east tradition from natural law to specific moral laws, and so scorns suggestions divorce, abortion, homosexual acts and masturbation might in principle be moral and "at least in North America, pre-marital intercourse was all right if it was a nice boy and you loved him".12

In 1976, McAuley, making one of his last public appearances and dying of cancer, is still advocating "sober realism" and defending a traditional culture * Ill

P Coleman, The Heart of James McAuley, Wildcat Press, Sydney, 1980, p 92. Coleman, above, n 11, pp 100-102.Murray, above, n 1, p 327.McAuley, "A Friend of the Permanent Things" (1970) March-April Quadrant 40-43.

Ill


distinguished by Christianity, public morality, and the constitutional system, even if he is also confessing he has "to live in ambiguities and dilemmas, not letting go one end in order to cling with both hands to the other in false simplification".13 In his final summation "A Small Testament", McAuley contrasts Hindu and Christian worldviews in such a way as to reaffirm his commitment to what is basically a Thomistic position, advocating the absolute value of the human person, the distinction between the sacred and profane realms, and the rational basis for belief, but he also expresses disillusionment and explains how in order to sustain his traditional beliefs, he has withdrawn to a private position within the Catholic Church.14

The landscape of Australian poetry was changing rapidly and McAuley, one of the perpetrators of the 1944 Em Malley hoax found not only that Em would not lie down and die but Em now had children who were determined to come into their post-modem heritage and take revenge on the formal order of rhyme and reason which had consumed their father.

In 1963 A.D.Hope had claimed Australian poets were returning to "traditional metres and rhymes, a lucid and coherent exposition of themes" and refusing "experimental methods of free verse, Surrealist logomania, fragmentary imagism, dislocated syntax and symbolist elusiveness".15 Within a few years of Hope’s pronouncement the children of Em had well and tmly arrived. As John Tranter, a leading figure of the group which was to become known as the generation of 68, was later to describe it, these revolutionary Australian poets advocated "emphasis on individualist values against an greed social value, fragmentation against synthesis and harmony ... flux, enquiry, social change and growth rather than stasis , traditional values, social stability and consideration" and also the denial of any moral religious function for poetry.16 It was almost as if they had taken their hint from Neitzscher’s "I fear we are getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar."17

While McAuley’s response in the political and religious spheres was largely to maintain his principles, but retire like a Cold War veteran, he was not immune to the changing literary climate and began to reexamine his poetic

"Culture and Counter-culture" (1976) Quadrant 12-21.Kramer, "A Small Testament", n 1, pp 126-139.G Dutton, Snow on the Saltbush, Viking Press, Ringwood, 1984, p 160.Tranter, "Introduction" to The New Australian Policy (ed) John Tranter, Makar Press, St Lucia, 1979.K Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p 73.

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practice. Although later poems, such as Private Devotions, Parish. Church, Music Late at Night, Morning Voluntary and In the Huon Valleyl% still want to invest particular and unredeemed experiences with more general and coherent meanings, and although they still exercise formal restraints as a means to disciplined freedom, they also employ a symbolism which is more suggestive than dogmatic. This reduced symbolism is accompanied by a more reserved use of the discursive mode, a greater ease with vernacular concerns and tones, and a deeper convergence of religious and lyrical impulses. One of these poems is Book of Hours19 which is interesting because even as it looks back, through its image of the book, to the analogical universe implicit in the Thomistic notion of natural law, it registers a less ambitious reading of that text:

The world spread open through the window-frame Offers a language only known by sight.Two little girls pass by and one is lame;Six yachts ride at anchor on broken light.

Moment by moment nothing is the same:Against a blue with drifting bulks of white A windblown tree is twisted to green flame Birds shift among the branches and take flight.

And all this seems to make a kind of claim,As if it had been given that one might Decipher it: if there were such a skill

Which one could learn by looking - get it right,As children learn to read a word, a name,Another, until meaning comes at will.

As we move from the title and through the poem, we are invited to participate in an argument about the fall of poetry. The title recalls the illuminated breviaries which belong to a world of traditional, religious picture-language.20 It also signals, at least in McAuley’s work, the loss of that world, since the other reference included in the title is to a work by

Kramer, above, n 1, pp 141, 221-3, 228.Kramer, above, n 1, p 61.For McAuley’s comments on the loss of traditional picture-language, see Kramer, "A Small Testament", n 1, p 136.

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Rilke, whom the young McAuley admired but the later McAuley repudiated for making poetry a substitute for religion.21 The argument is extended into the poem as it tries to reconcile its momentary impressions and sensory language with its desire for a deeper language. But the book of nature never quite discloses its secret inscriptions. While the opening line imagines the world as if it were one page from the book of creation, the third line somewhat negates this, framing then unframing the image of one little girl who is lame. In moving, as if it were, beyond the poem and its window frame, she displaces the poem’s hope of discovering a coherent explanation,a frame, a map, a metaphysical pattern. Instead the poem ends with the ambiguities of a meaning which "comes at will" which could be a meaning inscribed by God or just by the speaker’s own will, just as it could be a moment of grace given to an attentive mind or even a moment of chance. While the poem suggests that there is a "kind of calm" which the world makes, that "one" should try to understand the world’s true meaning, it also by way of the "seems", "As if', "might", "could" and "until", defers its own hope and values a process of negation as integral to its own reading strategies.

It is interesting too the landscape of Book of Hours is, in a curious way, resisting the speaker’s metaphysical quest. It is offering itself as a meditative object, inviting the speaker to dissolve into its natural order, but at the same time it is preserving its"secret patterns" and confronting the speaker with the dilemmas of human will. It is almost as if this landscape is refusing to become an objective symbol of natural law, almost as if it is saying the moral order has to be contested in the will rather than transferred onto an image of nature. An earlier poem, Credo22 had anticipated that the world of nature would more generously mediate the natural law:

That each thing is a word Requiring us to speak it:From the ant to the quasar,From clouds to ocean floor -

The meaning not ours, but found In the mind deeply submissive

In McAuley’s words "Rilke writes his Book of Hours ostensibly as a breviary of devotion to God; but Rilke’s God is, invariably, sex, the unconscious, or the Orphic essence of poetic inspiration". See Kramer, "Journey Into Egypt", n 1, p 193.Kramer, above, n 1, p 43.

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To the grammar of existence,The syntax of the real;

There is, in the difference between these two poems, a useful register of how much McAuley’s poetry has reduced, though not abandoned, its natural law ambitions, of how much it has accepted that existence, like language, is much more than grammar.

There are, of course, various ways of reading the development I have just outlined. It might be seen in terms of McAuley’s poetry recovering its lyric mode, declining into pessimism, or even persisting in a lean faith. The reading I would like to propose here is that McAuley, in adopting natural law philosophy, became involved in a story which might be called "the revenge of metaphor".

Although it often dresses up as a philosophical doctrine, natural law is fundamentally a metaphor and as such it has to preserve a balance of affirmation and negation. In theory, the Catholic tradition of natural law recognised this balance when it insisted that "natural Law" was an analogous term, giving "natural" an essential rather than biological direction and calling "law" something which is unwritten, although imprinted in being. In practice, the Thomasic tradition too often comprised its own insight by insisting that natural law could be rationally deduced, by translating it too definitively into specific moral prescriptions, and by placing the metaphor at the service of the doctrines derived from it, thus inverting the natural order of imagination and neutralising the degree to which negation is constitutive of metaphor. Maritain, more than any of his contemporaries, tried to hold the balance by distinguishing between the ontological and gnoseological components of natural law.

Considered in its ontological component, Natural Law is the normality of functioning of the human being ... the proper way in which, by reason of its specific structure and ends, it "should" achieve fullness of being in its growth of its behaviour. ...In this first consideration (ontological) Natural Law is co-extensive with the whole field of moral regulations which concern man as man. ... But the second essential component of the notion of common law, the gnoseological component causes the extent of this notion to be greatly restricted. For Natural Law is natural not only in so far as it is the normality of functioning of human nature,

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but also in so far as it is naturally known: that is to say, known through inclination, by way of congeniality or connaturality, not through conceptual knowledge and by way of reasoning.23

Even as he is asserting the tradition, Maritain is pointing to its difficulty. In yoking "natural" and "law", the tradition creates a metaphor which has great emotional and imaginative potency, but which also threatens to overwhelm any ideas abstracted from it. For the philosophy has not simply to define in what sense natural law is natural and law, it has also to accommodate the senses in which it is not natural and not law. Maritain uses the notion of connatural knowledge as a safeguard against claiming too much for the doctrine, as a way of respecting that mode of participative awareness which is more agreeable to the way of metaphor. In this instance Maritain was somewhat out of tune with the prevailing Catholic climate which was more likely to support the position enunciated by Odon Lottin for whom "these three terms: natural law, natural right and natural reason translate one and the same reality, which has for its object act intrinsically good, acts whose morality is dictated by human nature"24 - a position which has the great advantage of seeming very sure of itself.

When McAuley first chooses the metaphor of natural law, places it within his framework of metaphors and images (where lights, stars, maps, music, and lovers all participate in mystery), and uses it to clarify his "intuition of the True Form of Man"25 he seems to want more certitude that the metaphor can provide. But this is not the whole story. McAuley’s poetry is as sensitive to disorder, chaos and despair as it is to order, coherence and hope. In later poems like Book of Hours and St John’s Park this is obvious. It is evident too in the fact that A Vision of Ceremony, which is often misread as an example of Catholic certitude, contains many poems which witness to a much more vulnerable and uncertain world, as well as in the fact that the rational argument of Celebration of Love and A Letter to John Dryden is finally abandoned for a wisdom glimpsed in the darkness of the heart, as if the poetry knows that mysticism and metaphor share a similar appreciation of

J Maritain, "Natural Law and Moral Law" (1952) Moral Principles of Action: Man s Ethical Imperative, (ed) Ruth N Anshen, 62-76. The text from which I am citing is J Maritain, Challenges and Renewals (ed) J W Evans & Lero R Ward, Meridian Books, New York, 1968, pp 213-214.O Lottin, "Natural Law, Natural Right and Natural Reason" (1958) Vol 111 No 1/4 Philosophy Today 13.Kramer, above, n 1, p 118.

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what is not. Moreover, this uncertainty is apparent from his earliest poems, such as "At Bungendore", here the blossoms have their will, but the speaker can only say, "I wish that I had mine", Envoi with its sense of "remote disorder" and reluctant hope for beauty and The Tomb of Heracles which contrasts cranes at ease in their natural order with humans whose world "is eaten hollow with despair".26 There is, then, already operating in the poetry’s inclinations a negativity which will encourage metaphors like natural law to seek their own denial. At another level, this impetus may come from the metaphor itself. There is, for example, an interpretation of the Catholic crisis of the sixties which argues that it was a necessary process of disenchantment, a process of destroying the idolatrous constructs of a theological discourse grown too complacent about its power to refer to the realm of mystery, a process of reconstituting the metaphoric character of religious language.27 I am suggesting that there is a similar process of disenchantment at work in McAuley’s writing and that, by invoking what it took to be a doctrine of natural law, the poetry ensured that its expressions of a coherent world would be shadowed by an awareness of "remote disorder" and that its"grammar of existence" would never be fully learned by heart. In other words, the poetry, by its very desire for natural law, became implicated in the lawlessness of metaphor.

27

For the three early poems cited, see Kramer, above, n 1, p 3, 42, 65.See J Shea, Stories of God, Thomas More Press, Chicago, 1978, p 16-33.

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James McAuley and the Grammar of Existence