Adam Lindsay Gordon: the Man and the Myth by Geoffrey Hutton
Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996 (first published 1978) ISBN 0522847080
This is a good workmanlike biography of the only Australian Poet to be commemorated in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey, the man who was lauded in the early part of last century as Australia's first poet, and who today still ranks in the pantheon of Australian verse.
In this book Hutton clearly lays out the facts - Gordon's father was a retired officer of the Indian Army, while his mother was a very highly-strung heiress, who spent a lot of her life travelling to improve her health. Gordon's main interests throughout his life, apart from verse, were horses and horse racing, in his early days pugilism, and his latter drinking. Hutton well describes Gordon's inability to find his way in life: he was indifferent at school, could not handle the lifestyle at military college (his father had ideas of Gordon following his footsteps into the Army), and drifted into the milieu that surrounded horses of jockeys, bookies and owners. He was constantly in trouble and often in debt.
He fell in love but was rejected, and so when his father suggested going to the colonies to join the Mounted Police in South Australia, he felt that there was nothing else for him but to give it a try. He wrote to his friend before departing that he only expected to be in the colony for a couple of years before returning, but he never did.
Once in South Australia, he stuck at being a trooper for a couple of years before inheriting from his father an amount that, properly managed, would have seen him comfortably well-off for the rest of his life. Unfortunately Gordon did not manage his money well. He was too generous to friends, followed a failed dream to set up a pastoral run in Western Australia, and spent too much on horseflesh. He was for a time an MP in the South Australian Parliament, but the life didn't suit him and he resigned after eighteen months.
Although one of the reasons he left England was to leave the horse racing set behind, he fell into it again in Australia. When he left the Mounted Police he started the first of a series of stables and horse-breaking and training businesses, most of which went sour. He became quite a well-known steeple-chaser, and for a time did well. Gordon's curse was that he was an upper-class Englishman in the colonies, so he fell between two worlds. He raced much of the time as a gentleman, and so didn't make as much money as he could from his exploits, and didn't have a nose for business, which meant that by the end of his life he was heavily in debt.
Gordon was a man of moods, and was quite often taciturn and morose. Hutton posits that he inherited this trait from his mother, and it could be true: he seems, in this biography as least, to have a lot of the characteristics of someone with Bipolar Disorder. His suicide was a tragic culmination of his many failures and inability to cope. It seems to me that he could not see a way out of his financial predicament (interestingly Hutton tells us that Gordon tried to take out life insurance not long before his death) and shot himself on the very day that his third and last book of poetry was published, to mainly good reviews.
So, we get in this book a good recitation of the life, but what about the poetry? Hutton was a journalist and not a poet, so in terms of criticism of Gordon in this work it is mostly at second hand. Gordon, although a member of the bohemian Yorick Club in Melbourne during his last years, was not well-known as a poet until after his death, and not well-rated as one until well after. Despite being praised by luminaries such as Wilde and Conan Doyle and other Australian authors and poets such as Marcus Clarke and Henry Kendall, Gordon's work was not seen as particularly Australian or even particularly good in the decades after his death. It was in the Twentieth Century, when a core of Gordon admirers worked assiduously to bring him forward as "Australia's Poet" that his star rose. It was helped by several intersecting events. Australia was moving beyond it's pioneering years, and nostalgia for an easier time was growing, especially after the horrors of war; Gordon not only fitted the mould as a poet that expressed what our pioneering years were like, but unlike Kendall and Harpur he actually lived the life of a bushman, with his daring riding exploits and homes in the country. He had been chosen as an archetype, and was made to fit.
He didn't fit of course - it seems clear from Hutton's life that Gordon very much saw himself as English, and indeed much of his poetry was not specifically Australian (although it is the specifically Australian that is probably the best of his work). However the truth has never got in the way of a well-constructed hero story, and so not only did Gordon get a bust in Westminster, his various homes were treated as shrines, he got a statue near Victoria's parliament house, and famously a plinth at Mt. Gambier celebrating his famous "leap". The first time I became aware of the poet and his works was by visiting his cottage in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens (although it's the Ballarat racecourse at Dowling Forest that really has more of a connection to the man in that city).
As a poet then, what can we say of Adam Lindsay Gordon? Hutton points out that Gordon often composed while riding, several companions describing him muttering away as he rode along. It seems his drafts were often written on scraps of paper and so little survives of his method of revising, although Hutton suggests with some evidence that revising was something that was an anathema to Gordon (which I think shows in much of his work). His reading was, by his peripatetic nature if nothing else, scattered, although it's clear he committed much verse to memory, and was partial to Swinburne and Browning among his contemporaries. Gordon's vanity led him to publish much that perhaps would have been better to keep back, and so the good can sit side-by-side with the bad when reading him. Certainly "The Sick Stockrider" is a very good piece of its time and place, and probably an inspiration to those that came after him.
So in summary, Hutton's book is a good well-researched life, but as a work of criticism one would need to look elsewhere (and there is a short but useful bibliography in this book).
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