Les Murray on the inner biographies we compose for ourselves

It has the grace of selection

Considered Australia’s leading poet, the “bush bard” Les Murray grew up poor in a farming community north of Sydney, which formed his poetry and his thinking about the wider world — he was very critical of “elites” — to which he returned to live when he’d become an established poet and critic. He wrote essays and criticism as well of poetry and was the literary editor of the cultural journal Quadrant. He died in 2019. This is taken from his Paris Review interview in 2005, when he responds to the interviewer’s question about his response to Les Murray: A Life in Progress by Peter F. Alexander.

[T]he book itself, well, it was me objectified and represented, inevitably lacking dimensions that I guess only I fully live in.

One such was necessary forgetting: all the unutterable gaucheries and lunacies of my earlier lives, things I'd shuddered at and grown out of. We do compose a soul for ourselves, I think, an inner biography that has this grace of selection — the poem of ourself, if you like.

I don't think I suffered much pain from reliving old episodes apart from this process I've just spoken about — and there I do suffer a fair bit, from unconquerable memory. People hear me babbling to myself as I try to blank out some forty-year-old gaffe with verbal noise.

Asked if he had “a sense of a shaping fate at work” in his life, he responded:

I get a sense of having been protected, sometimes, and given better than I deserved; but no sense of fate. Looking back, what I see are themes here and there — among them, a sense of repeated deep moral shock at the things that can be done.

I’m cursed with a strong sense of the dark side of everything; I was brought up on the idea that whatever you do will fail, that sooner or later it will crash. One thing I dare to be proud of: I managed to wrestle life onto my terms without ever rising socially.

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