Irony man: the sharp-edged wit of Walter Murdoch

A NEW collection of Walter Murdoch's wide-ranging and witty writings reminds us that pleasure is the first principle of the essay.

Walter Murdoch

THAT there was a time when every thoughtful Australian's bookshelf contained a volume of Walter Murdoch's essays may be deduced from their inglorious afterlife.

Murdoch's works have been a staple of second-hand bookshops in the decades since his death in 1970, at the splendid age of 95.

This dusty purgatory would not have surprised the author, who thought little of his essays and occasional pieces. He granted them a three-month expiry date after publication. And for a long while it seemed that posterity took him at his word.

The appearance of this attractive and judicious selection of Murdoch's essays -- the first assembled across the grain of his varied output in the fields of politics and language, biography and literary criticism -- puts paid to that overly modest self-appraisal.

It also reverberates with the kind of ironies that the scholar and literary journalist would have relished. It is those radical philosophes of the 1970s and 80s, scathing critics of the genteel humanism and belletristic enthusiasms typical of Murdoch's approach, who now pile up on university bookshop remainder tables.

But what survives of Murdoch, really? He, a weekly columnist for newspapers, such as The Argus, that no longer exist; a literary critic for whom Australian poetry began with Henry Kendall and peaked with Henry and Banjo; a social commentator who referred with contemporary ease to bullock-drivers and tie-studs, the League of Nations and threepenny bits? On the evidence of Imre Salusinszky's new edition, more than you may imagine.

To start with, there is a concentration on pleasure as the first principle of the essay. Like Charles Lamb and Robert Louis Stevenson before him, and Belloc and Chesterton, his Anglo contemporaries, Murdoch sugars his prosy sermons with a delightfully unforced and occasionally sharp-edged wit.

If he is Edwardian in his eccentric punctuation and tendency to moralise, he is ageless in his willingness to join the sinners' ranks as a fellow sufferer of the human condition.

While it is hard to imagine a rhetorical register would allow a donnish lover of literature to capture the minds of a generation of Australians whose cultural instincts remained raw and unformed, it is ever so easy to quote Murdoch on the fly:

Brevity and plainness are the warp and woof of our language. Why, look at two words, warp and woof - especially the second. Woof! woof! - it sounds like a dog's bark; and the English language is full of these barking sounds. The old, the fundamental English words are all short; the long words are foreign intruders.

Aside from anticipating English critic William Empson's 1951 classic The Structure of Complex Words, which contained two essays on the word dog, the sentence wittily and succinctly executes the simplicity it argues for. He is ever-willing to court the distrust of educated readers by his plain-spokenness, as long as it makes him explicable to a wider audience.

This instinct for humour and directness marks Murdoch's essays from the get-go. He invariably starts with a bang:

No new and inspired religion has come to us from the United States for over a fortnight.

Or with a wry turn:

This essay is written for the instant relief and possibly permanent cure of such as are kept awake at night by twinges of scepticism about the results of popular education.

Or with a vague professorial muddle that lures you far enough into the essay for the trap of his argument to spring:

Did you ever happen to notice that interesting remark made the other day - I forget by whom; there are such a lot of people making remarks nowadays! - that all fighting is fighting against some idea or another, and that since an idea is something in a man's head the only way to combat an evil idea is to blow away the head that harbours it?

But for all their air of learning lightly worn, their jollity and comic digression, humour is "a vehicle in his essays, not a destination", as Salusinszky puts it in his clear and admirably concise introduction: "If there is a real 'trick' in Murdoch, it is the signal device of the essay since Montaigne popularised the genre, more than four centuries ago: irony. It is the ability to derive pleasure from irony's multiple perspectives and dual meanings that shows a reader, or culture, as 'grown up'."

This sense of a nation beginning to understand itself in terms richer than the merely literal may not have been instigated by Walter Murdoch but he was the great populariser of this more complex mode of cultural criticism. His newspaper columns and radio chats made irony palatable for the broad middle class of the inter-war years. His example habituated a wary populace to the role of public intellectuals in Australia's ongoing conversation.

At their best, Murdoch's pieces were not watered-down antipodean versions of the British occasional essay but distinct native grafts. Salusinszky rightly argues the scholar's finest writings "apply the scalpel of Enlightenment reasoning to popular prejudice and illusion".

Yet it is also true that his blade is tempered by peculiarly Australian ideals. Take Murdoch's exemplary essay The Bloke, which begins with the ritual obeisance to the Oxford English Dictionary and the old British origins of a term this country has long assumed its own. Soon, though, the Shakespeare quotations give way to a local anecdote: a Perth lift-boy, saving a frock-coated gentleman from getting off on the wrong floor with the words "Hi! Bloke" and a jerk of his thumb:

The boy, with his two curt monosyllables, uttered more of the essential truth than some long treatises on democracy do. For democracy does not mean representative government or manhood suffrage, or any other piece of machinery. Democracy is a mental attitude. Democracy means a belief in equality. It is based on the conviction that we are all blokes.

Leave aside the antiquated gender assumptions and you have a vivid illustration of an unashamed patriotism. And it is this love of country - sometimes exasperated, sometimes outraged - that yokes together these disparate pieces.

"I have been accused of many things, but never literary criticism," Rupert Murdoch writes in his foreword, displaying a glimpse of his great-uncle's drollery. But nor should Walter on the strength of his landmark essay from 1899, The New School of Australian Poetry, reprinted here.

This is not to do with the quality of Murdoch's prose, or with the acuity of his critical insights; rather, it is the poverty of the materials with which he has to work. Having praised the "undeniable skill and photographic accuracy" of the characters and landscapes presented by poets such as Henry Lawson and Barcroft Boake, he asks, "Do we ever get beyond this photographic accuracy into the sphere of poetic truth?" The answer is a regretful no.

Rupert Murdoch also writes that his great-uncle "didn't have a tough political edge to his thinking at all". But this is perhaps to mistake vehemence for strength. He may have been a gentle, inward soul, but there are moments in the essays where he summons reserves of quiet umbrage and exhortation to meet those intermittent failures of ours to be our best as a nation. Who can think of our present squabbles and not wish for a voice as sane and passionately eloquent as his:

Well, I for my part am a conservative by temperament; but I feel like kneeling down daily and praying to be delivered from this shameful fear of change. I want to live long enough to see this young country known to the world as a bold experimental land, not as a notable example of caution and circumspection . . . The Blue Peter is fluttering at the fore; whether we like it or not, we must sail away today for the untried and uncharted; the question is whether we shall go with shrinking and qualms, or with high hearts, trusting ourselves and trusting one another and trusting the Power which has decreed that the history of man shall be history of unceasing change.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.

On Rabbits, Morality, etc: Selected Writings of Walter Murdoch
Edited by Imre Salusinszky
UWAP, 208pp, $29.95