| LOUIS ARMAND STILL LIFE WITH HYPODERMIC: MICHAEL DRANSFIELD AND THE POETRY OF ADDICTION That year winter came soon to us and, when our visions were dispelled, we too vanished. [Michael Dransfield, 'Chris'] On Good Friday, 1973, at the age of twenty-four, Michael Dransfield, then the emerging young star of Australian poetry, died after injecting himself with heroin. His death was the first drug-related fatality in the Australian literary community, and his Collected Poems (University of Queensland Press, 1987)--spanning 389 pages and including seven previously published volumes of work-poses considerable and often daunting questions which neither his editor, Rodney Hall, nor his critics have cared to address. These questions relate to larger issues, such as the history of addiction in Western culture and the concept of 'authentic experience,' though particularly these questions confront the way we understand public and private responsibility to function in the modern world. That it took such a personal tragedy for the poet to engage so definitively with the experience of addiction is lamentable. That he created, in such an astonishingly short time, a body of work as profound as it is extensive, can only be wondered at, and admired. 1 In his introduction to the Collected Poems, Rodney Hall comments that: Michael Dransfield's poems caused a ripple of excitement when they were first published [October, 1969] by periodicals in the context of poetry which tended to take pride in tailored understatement and civilised ironic commentaries on society. At that time, poets themselves where inclined to avoid all mention of what they did [...] Even then, like persons given to some vice, they tended to take refuge in football gossip or such, rather than confront the challenges of talking shop. Michael had no such inhibitions. I doubt it has ever been the case in Australia that its literary institutions represented anything other than the epitome of "tailored understatement and civilised ironic commentaries," particularly in Sydney, the poaching ground of such militant conservatives as A.D. Hope and James McAuley ("the Official Poets, whose genteel / iambics chide industrialists / for making life extinct" ['Endsight']). Nevertheless, the poverty of the literary scene at that point is something to be believed. It is worth considering, however, that at about the same time as Dransfield began publishing there appeared on Sydney's horizon that enfant terrible of Australian art, Brett Whiteley. In 1969, Whiteley (almost ten years Dransfield's senior) once again made Sydney his permanent address. He had already succeeded in becoming the Tate's youngest ever acquisition; in upsetting the London establishment (with his 1964 'Christie' exhibition); in provoking the lasting admiration of Francis Bacon and scorn of critic Robert Hughes; and in being hailed by Lee Krasner (Jackson Pollock's widow) as the next Arshile Gorky. Before returning to Sydney Whiteley also lived for a time in New York, at the infamous Chelsea Hotel, where he met Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, and where he formed a lifelong friendship with Bob Dylan. It would be hard to over-estimate the impact Whiteley had at that time on the Australian cultural landscape. At the same time as heroin was first appearing on the streets of Sydney (brought by Australian and American GIs on leave from the war in Vietnam), many of the new ideas floating about the arty cafés of Paddington and Darlinghurst (Pop Art, Mao, Buddhism, etc.) were being imported by the likes of Whiteley-whose notorious American Dream was exhibited at the Bonython Art Gallery in June 1970. According to Alan McCulloch in Art International (Oct. 1970), Whiteley was "postulating a Joycean reassessment of the new nine muses: zoology, ecology, botany, sociology, sex, narcotics, pollution, travel, and political science [...]." Many of Whiteley's ideas and obsessions were shared by Dransfield (Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Modigliani ...), and it would be interesting to consider possible influences along these lines. Certainly Dransfield must have been aware of Whiteley's work, and may even have met him on odd occasions (Dransfield's home in Balmain would almost have been within shouting distance of Whiteley's at Lavender Bay), though it is well enough known that Robert Adamson, another Sydney poet, was a close friend of both of them. 2 A lot has been made recently of Brett Whiteley's role in Australian cultural history, though the two biographies that appeared in 1995 tended to restrict their scope. Reading them, it was nice to be reminded of Whiteley's contact with the likes of Nobel laureate Patrick White, but more importantly to be given a proper sense of the unprecedented status he enjoyed in Sydney from the beginning of the seventies on. It helps explain a great deal about the orientation of Dransfield's writing: its richly cosmopolitan tone, its urgent sense of possibility, its sheer "cannibal energy" (to borrow one of Whiteley's favourite terms), and its persistent attempt to resolve difficult emotional problems. Take for instance Appendix C of the Collected Poems (originally from Voyage into Solitude [posthumous publication, 1978]), which includes three drafts of the same poem preceded by an author's note containing this remark by Albert Camus: "By the treatment the artist imposes upon reality, he declares the intensity of his rejection of it." Among others, the drafts make allusion to Maurice Utrillo, Rilke, Chatterton and Ern Malley. In draft III we find: And was it only that, or a cave painting in a room above a city [...] astonishing to find him at work creative in a country at war always, huns at the borders, and the sea, and prosperities, and distractions; he and Gaudier-Brzeska: others? Debussy perhaps, or the unknown soldier. But from the dark age of Hiroshima, how are we to see it Like Whiteley, Dransfield had a very real fascination with the question of visionary experience, responsibility and addiction. Dransfield never stopped writing about it, and it preoccupied Whiteley up until his own heroin-related death in June 1992. In Drug Poems (Sun Books, 1972), the last volume of Dransfield's poetry to be published during his lifetime, one can almost detect the palpable presence of Baudelaire--at that point a shared interest for Whiteley and Dransfield. The first section of this volume, 'Shooting Galley,' plausibly alludes to the tenth of Rilke's Duino Elegies ("the shooting-gallery's targets of petrified happiness")-which Dransfield had read-though it is more likely the case that it refers to Baudelaire's prose poem 'Shooting Gallery and the Cemetery'--which, prophetically enough, concerns itself with the object of the ancient poets ("Horace and those Poets who were pupils of Epicurus"), the vanity of man, and the pre-eminence of death. Drug Poems likewise engages questions of vanity (heroin chic) and mortality: it's nothing bury it take the way i come here bury it it will recur [...] i paint here solitude do you find it necessary? he looks around, for you, for an answer, has solved it, finding nothing [...] -because there is nothing ['Counting the holes in my arm'] Elsewhere, in the poems from Streets of the Long Voyage (1970), Dransfield's engagement with the recurrent motifs of overdose, withdrawal, rehabilitation and addiction, is devastating in its immediacy, and more often than not contains examples of his best work: becalmed now on Coleridge's painted sea in Rimbaud's drunken boat. High like de Quincey or Vasco I set a course for the pillars of Hercules, meaning to sail over the edge of the world. ['Overdose'] alerted by some signal from the golden drug tapeworm that eats your flesh and drinks your peace; you reach for the needle and busy yourself preparing the utopia substance in a blackened spoon held in candle flame ['Fix'] a needle spelling XANADU ['Birthday ballad, Courland Penders'] For Dransfield, as with Whiteley, addiction becomes the locus of the artist's interior struggle--an idea whose genealogy follows diverse paths through Modernism and the "addictive personalities" of French Symbolist poetry, back to the beginnings of English Romanticism-marking another history of modernity, one that has been sublimated within the process of schematising literature according to a perceived social function. According to Jacques Derrida ('The Rhetoric of Drugs,' 1989), this sublimation has to do with a certain tension between notions of public and private space, or between the poet's solitary experience and his perceived duty to address the universal concerns of society. This question is very much at issue in any consideration of the Romantic 'sublime,' for instance, and its 'loss of self' towards utopianism or universality-which is not limited only to the poet's experience of language but also to the ethico-political function of poetry itself. The poet, like the addict, becomes a medium for an economy that binds interiority to 'the world' through a type of indebtedness that poetry is henceforth required to supply. In the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron reveals the paradox of this process: "To mingle with the universe, and feel / What I can ne'er express, yet can not all conceal." Or, as Dransfield writes in The Inspector of Tides (1972): to be a poet what it means to lose the self to lose the self ['Byron at Newstead'] I dream of the lucidity of the vacuum ['Geography'] Baudelaire, also, recognised that there were many ways of escaping society, such as drugs, which provided a variety of opportunities for illusion to the artist's insatiable self (both in teeming religiosity and the mystical attachment to the transcendence of drug experience). In his essay on the effects of hashish written in 1851, Baudelaire speaks of the boundless fluidity of sense and imagination created by it; of the torrential associations of words, the transformation of sounds into colours, colours into music, and music into numbers; of the rhapsodic suggestiveness of the smallest noise; and, above all, of the "hurricane of pride" which leads the mind "to that glittering abyss in which it will gaze upon the face of narcissus." The significance of 'specularity' here-and of the dispersal of self, language, meaning-recalls the chief metaphor of the Romantic sublime: the ocean. Byron describes this ocean as: "boundless, endless and sublime- / The image of Eternity-the throne / of the invisible." In Dransfield, the 'sublime' and the narcissistic movement of addiction are fused together: Opposite, a pool of green, blue, or colourless, liquid, sometimes reflects sometimes invents [...] The fantasy of history. Dreams are sculptures, names are poems, nobody comes for there is no-one else, and nowhere from which to come. I am Proust, de Vigny, Owen Aherne, myself-the identities are interchangeable. The mind is an entertainment, a circus where philosophers perform. I inhabit the drawing room Rimbaud imagined at the bottom of a lake, purple tincture of opium. An identical self represents me [...] Everything is imaginary, everyone; only caprices, masquerading as ideas, populate the air. It is difficult sometimes to remember that I too am imaginary. The world has neither ended nor begun, but I may occupy myself believing that it exists. ['Chaconne for a solipsist'] As an addict, Dransfield came to represent what Julia Kristeva has called the cessation of desire. The geography of the poem, as a substitute for the poet's body, becomes a place where inner emptiness stops generating that need for things which, to paraphrase Bataille, mutilates the world and turns it into badly handled objects; where it becomes instead a 'pure' absence (addiction as subjectless economy): insufficient eats you out you start to fall over until eventually you can't get up. That's what they call terminal addiction. ['Still life with hypodermic'] At the same time, however, the addict's cessation of desire also symbolises the poet's romantic inner struggle-by isolating himself within the community the addict effectively elevates himself to a position inscribed by nearly three centuries of literary convention (Coleridge, de Quincey, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Burroughs, Artaud, Michaux, etc.). 3 At a time when the so-called 'inner self' was continually threatened by the unprecedented rapid intrusion of images, addiction-for Dransfield-constructed a solitude which became both more difficult and more urgent for the poet's survival. In The Second Month of Spring (1980), Dransfield's bleakest collection, this crisis can no longer be resolved by a gesture of transcendence, and hence 'interiority' becomes the specular limit of the poet's self: they searched me twice and pain who comes more often says build all the starships you like try flying them without your memory try flying them without your heart to meet dead friends you must be a dead friend for others doll ['On several deaths in winter'] Elsewhere 'interiority' is a question of intensity always relating to a particular experience of 'withdrawal'. Dransfield does not miss the paradox presented here, of the poet's abstract withdrawal from a world that has become insufferably abstract itself: addiction is henceforth this continual hesitation at the limits of the self between moments of withdrawal-locked into this death-like economy by the fact that the addict himself is, ironically, the logical achievement of our specular, mechanised consumer society (its "body machinery" ['Fix']): I've started work on a new tunnel I like to have a choice of routes when I escape and the shape of all is clearer [...] down the tunnel down the sepulchral mines I burrow into my head ['Tuesday night'] In his 'Poem to Hashish,' Baudelaire also documented the faculty of drugs to give a "lost" soul a moment of "holiness," and to break "the heavy darkness of day-to-day existence." But there is also a remorse somewhat voluptuous and theatrically confessional, yet containing a plausible note of fear and a sense that the drug-induced utopia was too ravished and too ephemeral to give artists the bearing, the assurance, even the mask which Baudelaire thought they needed (a type of fetishism negated, to a greater or lesser extent, by the experience of terminal addiction). Like Baudelaire, Dransfield's vision insisted that poetry have as little commerce as possible with the middle-class world, and that the poet, in his isolation, serve only his art, which is itself in the service of beauty-where 'beauty,' as Rilke states in the first of his Duino Elegies, "is nothing but the beginning of terror." This terror, in a reaction directed by and towards bourgeois aesthetic values, also takes the form also of a type of duty. The poet is responsible for upholding his art against the encroachment of philistinism-which is the sense one gets from Dransfield's comment that: "To be a poet in Australia [...] is the ultimate commitment" ('Like this for Years'). His attachment to the role of decadent and aesthete was however, like Rilke, largely qualified by a somewhat Nietzschean ethics. For Rilke, as for many writers at the turn of the century, Nietzsche's Zarathustra had given a name to the yearning place that the poet had already hollowed out inside himself: the death of God. Or, in terms of Rimbaud, the failure of so-called visionary poetry to ground itself in authentic experience. 4 Significantly enough, much of Dransfield's poetry is not about really seeing, but about the exhaustion of seeing: "everything is delusion" ('Scriabin'), "burning towards fragmentation" ('Sunflowers, Arles'): The huge light Day falls back, baffled by drawn curtains, closed shutters. ['Deuteronomy'] The usual view is that writers this century, looking at the things around them, saw nothing-or, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, "the nothing"-that arose from a hunger for a more authentic, vivid and permanent world: How in the seasons of despair the wind is sour upon my lips the tempters ply their trade in souls and men of vision draw their nets empty from the human sea. ['July poem'] But as André Breton once said: "The great enemy of man is opacity." And it is possible, in this sense, to view much of what passes for 'Modernist' writing as more properly the art of resentment, belonging to a type of neo-romanticism (take Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium,' for example) that seeks, beyond the nothing, a trace of some prior, more authentic experience-an experience which, nonetheless, comes to signify precisely what is inauthentic (or simply 'mystical') in its own terms since it arrises from an exhaustion of seeing, a species of blindness, and is confined to the realm of subjectivity and inner vision. Reading Dransfield today, it is important to keep in mind that the 'literary establishment' in Australia during the late-sixties was very much anchored in this difficult strait between European Modernism and Anglo-Irish neo-romanticism. Though the Romanticism of Byron reached out towards the entirety of what is possible, it never took shape to the point of being formulated as a necessity-which becomes a failing in the eyes of the neo-romantics and Modernists who felt that only the alienation of man could have given rise to such contingencies of the real. In this context, Dransfield's 'poetry of addiction' raises significant questions that have yet to be addressed, and which remain pressing--particularly now, in a world where 'consciousness' is seen to be born from the gravity of a decision, and where only consequences determine authenticity. (c) LOUIS ARMAND, 1997. Louis Armand is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies, Charles University, Prague, and a lecturer in art history at the University of New York, Prague. |