James McAuley had a gift for overcoming first impressions. Manning Clark, the future ­doyen of Australian historians, met the twenty-five-year-old poet in the crowd at an Aussie Rules game. McAuley was blind drunk, full of wild slogans about art and politics, and looked wrecked even by the usual standards of young poets. (When McAuley was later introduced to Clark’s wife, she thought he looked at least forty-five.) And yet, Clark would write years after, “beneath the appearance of degradation I sensed a mighty spirit.”

There was something about McAuley—what his hymn-writing partner Richard Connolly called an “inner, mysterious power.” The Malaysian writer Salleh Ben Joned arrived at the University of Tasmania in the early ’60s, soon after McAuley had been appointed professor of English. Salleh, a leftist in his politics and a modernist in his tastes, was wary of this notorious Catholic reactionary, but came under McAuley’s spell and never forgot his generosity as a teacher, his “political courage,” or his poetry. McAuley was “a remarkable and, to me, even a great man.”

In the years after McAuley’s death in 1976, that would not have qualified as a controversial judgment: Even his enemies had to admit his importance. McAuley was so disliked in the Kremlin, for instance, that a Soviet anthology of Australian poetry carried a preface announcing: “We deliberately decided not to include his poems.” But today, McAuley’s books are out of print, and were it not for the magnificent work of the Australian Poetry Library, which has put most of his verse online, he would almost have disappeared from view. Even in McAuley’s centenary year, which has just passed­—he was born on October 12, 1917—there was hardly a nod of recognition from the academy or the literary press.

You've reached the end of your free articles for the month.
Subscribe now to read the rest of this article.
Purchase this article for
only $1.99
Purchase
Already a subscriber?
Click here to log in.