Christopher Brennan: a Critical Biography by Axel Clark
Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980 ISBN 0522844413
In my youth, like many other young Australians studying literature in the 1980s, I came across Christopher Brennan. To be more accurate, I came across the legend of Christopher Brennan - a looming shadow over late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian literature - lauded as the most cosmopolitan of Australian poets, a friend of Mallarme, and someone who was cruelly treated by the establishment, before declining to a sad death.
His poetry was to me in turn obscure or cringe-worthy, and yet there is definitely something lurking in the words he wrote. I have been aware of Clark's biography for a long time, and been meaning to read it for almost as long. Now that I have, I feel I not only have a better understanding of Brennan the man, but also of his body of work.
Clark's book is an expansion of his University of Sydney thesis, which examined Brennan's life up to 1914. As a consequence, it is written in a fairly dry style, which means a little dedication is required from the reader to continue through the book. However such dedication is rewarded as this book is the most complete biography of Brennan, and a useful criticism of his poetry, as Clark is not afraid to excoriate that which needs excoriation.
Brennan was truly an extraordinary character. A product of a devout Roman Catholic family. Brennan was helped by the Church to attend St. Ignatius at Riverview, which had recently been established and was already on its way to becoming the prestigious school that it is today. Brennan excelled there, and went on to become one of the great characters at Sydney University, where he gained a reputation as a greatly learned scholar, and a bit of a reprobate - he had a lot of boisterous fun that was essentially harmless, but not looked on kindly by the University establishment.
It was while he was at University that Brennan broke with the Catholic Church (some of his problems with the University sprang from the things he was heard saying about the Church, and religion generally). Clark convincingly argues that Brennan was by nature looking for a Godhead, and when the Church failed to provide, he tried to construct his own, initially by a study of philosophy.
After University he spent some time in the regions teaching (which was a failure) and conducting love affairs (which were also unsuccessful). He then won a scholarship to Berlin, which would seem to be the making of him. When he got there he fell for his landlady's daughter, and neglected many of his studies, and in his reading of European poetry -, especially French symbolist poetry - began to formulate his theory of "the Absolute" in contradiction to formal religion.
When he came back to Australia he was engaged, and really without prospects. It was then that he decided that poetry could be the way to the Absolute, and with his love of the Symbolists, he began to construct his livre compose. He worked at this project until approximately 1902, but it was a failure. Clark, through close reading of the poems, shows us that Brennan had decided that nuptial love was the path to the Godhead, but when his fiancee finally arrived in Australia and they were married, he was sorely disappointed: Clark shows us that Brennan was in love with ideals rather than the actual person of Elisabeth. Many of his poems from this period are formless, obscure and opaque. His poem "The Wanderer" describes his disillusionment with trying to find a path to paradise through verse, and he lost his way, both in verse, and in life.
He finally got a position as lecturer at the University after several travails, but his life was heading off-track. The First World War finally destroyed his marriage: his wife was a patriotic German, but Brennan had a visceral hatred for what that country had become, and wrote some truly appalling patriotic verse during the conflict, which ironically made him popular as a poet, after receiving almost no notice for his "major" works.
There is not much more to write about his personal life - he met and fell in love with a woman younger than him, and left his wife and children for her. His drinking, which had been problematic for a long time, became worse after his lover was killed in an accident, and he was let go from the University for his waywardness, His final years were in turns poverty stricken and squalid. He found his way back to Mother Church before he died, and has been memorialized over the years as a wonderful raconteur, lecturer, and friend.
Clark's biography is, given it is of someone who was renowned as a talker and bon-vivant, very serious. There are some tales (for example the time Brennan quoted from memory the first four books of Paradise Lost), but this is mostly a formal recitation of an interesting but in many ways failed life. The criticism of the poetry is, I think, harsh, but fair. Brennan never climbed the heights that many people seemed to think him capable of reaching, but he did leave a strong legacy in Australian letters, and remains an enigmatic figure today.
This book, if you are interested in the subject, is well worth reading.
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