Death by Persona

During that torrid season when I was trying to place my forever unplaced and ultra-controversial novel Complicity (now called The Blood Judge, with good reason) one well-known and basically sane Fiction Editor comforted me. ‘You see, we don’t just publish a book, we have to market a personality.’ He later became even more famous for trying to market a white author (whom he had never met) as a black one. I would still do many things to have that novel published but, I’ll tell you what, I still wouldn’t try to turn myself into a ‘personality’. By ‘personality’, of course, what the editor meant was not personality – which is the product of a life being lived – but persona, which is a one-dimensional cultural role made palatable to an audience’s pre-experience. Virginia Woolf wrote of ‘the genius of personality’. Personality requires experimentation and the courage to be ridiculous or boring if that is what liberty requires. Old artists usually have personality. Persona, however, is something no artist should ever keep. Persona always kills. I was reminded of that again by the recent deaths (granted that death is always recent) of John Forbes and Vicki Viidikas. My first reaction was to wish that Forbes’ fervour for politics had been reciprocated by good politicians. The NSW Premier Jack Lang once arranged that the drunken Henry Lawson be subsidised to live in the Riverina Prohibition area. But then Lang was Lawson’s brother-in-law, cared about him as a writer and person, and wasn’t at all impressed by any persona of drunken poet. Forbes once told me he would ‘walk across broken glass’ for a job at a university. Somewhere to think, write and work quietly and seriously. How many literary academics do you know who die slowly fuddled with misery on cheap chemicals? If Sydney University hadn’t sacked Christopher Brennan, Brennan would simply have written much longer and much better. One of the true functions of a university is always to provide a sheltering Riverina so that artists don’t have to die of persona out in the cold. Vicki Viidikas was over-defined early as the wayward, kind-hearted, promiscuous druggie Valda in Michael Wilding’s prose. Her own prose was limpid and disciplined, with a more private, exploratory ontology than most of her poetry, which has a long, declamatory insistence on a persona who sometimes seems trapped in some cross between Sylvia Plath and Capote’s Holly. She had a sharp, sweet, rambling and self-contradictory impulsiveness which could also manifest itself in rage against easy targets like family. But not so much against more difficult targets, such as her peers who set up, write and gossip about personae. It isn’t all that easy, however, to remain one-dimensional. And that is where the drugs come in. When I was about twenty-one, John Tranter lent me Starkie’s biography of Rimbaud, which was precious to him at the time. I responded that I felt Rimbaud’s philosophy of disorganising the senses through drugs in order to achieve a more true and perpetual incarnation which would lead him to the gold of poetry and alchemy was invalid –just because one should not try to be real and incarnate all the time. It is as necessary for the writer as for anyone else to disincarnate and think, as much as it is to own responsibility for the moment and to be. Drugs provide both a compulsive incarnation and a pseudo-disincarnation which is too closely linked to the self-conscious persona to allow for private growth and thought. As a logical consequence of his philosophy, Rimbaud’s only escape from the incarnatory tom-tom beat of his poetry was into the greater materialism of selling slaves in Africa. Perhaps this was an early equivalent of those modern poets who carefully buy and sell expensive Real Estate. Real Estate is a genuine persona problem, I think. One professional poet’s wife was forever telling other people that I should move into the inner city, even if only Concord, for the good of my literary soul. It was people like her who irritated and enthralled John Forbes, and they sometimes made much of him. But they also set him an impossible social hurdle. A rich poet’s house is no place for a poor one. Whilst I do believe in Nye Bevan’s ‘You can always live like a millionaire for five minutes’, a poor man in a rich man’s house is one-dimensional. If a sensitive, clever writer wants to become lengthily one-dimensional, only cheap drugs or alcohol would suffice. Sometimes, of course, a merciful nervous breakdown can intervene against persona. When Les Murray returned to Bunyah and suffered the breakdown he has described so often in the media, he regained for a time much of a personality I would like to think of as ‘Leslie’. He told me once his mother, who died when he was a child, always called him ‘Leslie’, a name he then found embarrassing. Leslie was perhaps a quiet, plump, academic little boy who went to work at a university in Canberra and needed to write poetry. He still does sometimes, and we should hear more from him, as we did from the antipersona side of James McAuley, at the last. Sitting here with no persona, I was as astonished as I was delighted when the Victorian FAW rang to tell me I was to receive their Christopher Brennan Award for a lifetime of achievement in poetry. I began to wonder to whom they had given it. Promises elsewhere prevented me from attending their dinner, but if I had, I wonder what they would have thought of this tall, greying, bright-eyed, dark-eyed woman who might have made either a very good speech or none at all. I wrote them that they had caused more poems to be possible, which is the best outcome of such awards. They sent me a plaque by Michael Meszaros. It shows a curtain: on one side, the human profiles are dim, on the other distinct. Thus, the sculptor explains, the artist reveals the individual. Yes, but (if I have a mantra, ‘yes, but …’ is probably it) the plaque also shows another artistic process. There is a time for being public, conceptual and neat and a time for lying fallow, vague and private behind the curtain. The curtain must shelter the irreverent, irrelevant personality – or outside the trapped persona dies to please.

Jennifer Maiden

From the New Issue

Vincent Namatjira edited by Vincent Namatjira

Mothers of the Mind: The remarkable women who shaped Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath by Rachel Trethewey

A Memoir of My Former Self: A life in writing by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson

Three recent short story collections

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