Back in May, in the thread Help re bereavement in Pffa’s Watering Hole, David Mascellani quoted part of Football Field: Evening, and reminded me of J.A.R. McKellar.

At that time I knew of McKellar only from two poems anthologized in my 1972 edition of The Penguin Book of Australian Verse, and the bio says nothing more than you could deduce from the dates and the poems.

So here are my notes as a result of doing some homework. I've amended them a few times since I first posted this, most recently on 4 November 2007.

If the future contains someone who wonders about John McKellar as a poet, here at least is a memo to start.
 

BIOGRAPHY

John Alexander Ross McKellar was born in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville on 9 December 1904. His father Neil Calman McKellar was from Victoria, and his mother was Valentine Irene, possibly née Machattie, since she was a grand-daughter of Dr Richard Machattie of Bathurst (200 km west of Sydney). The family apparently lived in the Sydney suburb of Dulwich Hill.

He attended Sydney Boys High School, did well, graduated, at once joined the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac Bank), rose very rapidly and in 1931 was appointed to Head Office.

He had (and maintained) a solid grounding in the classics, began writing poems around 1920 (say age 16), and his first publication was three poems (none of them given here) in The New Triad in 1928. The New Triad was a monthly literary and social journal edited by Hugh McCrae (1876-1958), himself a poet whose now-creaky nymphs-and-fauns-era poems are still found in anthologies, and also a noted cartoonist and drawer of comics. That means McKellar obtained a good connection to the Sydney literary scene.

As well as banking and writing, he continued to love his cricket and rugby, and in 1930 was captain of the Randwick team that won the Sydney rugby reserve-grade premiership. (The reference to surf in his poem Football Field: Evening tells you he's referring to Randwick's home ground, Coogee Oval, with Coogee Beach a stone's throw away.)

In January 1932 the Jacaranda Series published Twenty-Six, a volume of his verse. Meant to contain 26 poems in his 26th year, it contains 28 poems instead. According to McKellar’s friend, literary mentor and former teacher at Sydney High, John Wilfred Gibbes, it drew favourable reviews but little public interest.

In mid-February 1932 McKellar contracted pneumonia, and when seemingly on the point of recovery he collapsed and died on 8 March.
 

THE COLLECTION

McKellar and Gibbes were close friends. He wrote an elegy for Gibbes’ nine-year-old son [Nine] and a poem for Gibbes himself [Teams] and also dedicated Twenty-Six to him. On McKellar's death, Gibbes became his collector and our chief, almost our only, source of biographical notes. He already held an unstated number of unpublished poems, and obtained others from McKellar's sister and brother, who were happy to help. However, he couldn’t then find a publisher.

McKellar’s poems, ignored in the 30s, began to attract a little attention. The writer and critic H.M. Green gave a talk about McKellar on ABC radio (our BBC) in mid-1942, and read four poems in full and part of a fifth, all from Twenty-Six (the first of which was Twelve O’Clock Boat, given below). The writer Rex Ingamels included McKellar’s Night Wind (also from Twenty-Six) in his 1943 anthology New Song in an Old Land.

The Sydney literary magazine Southerly (No 4 of 1944), through the work of Gibbes and its editor R.G. Howarth, published both an extended biographical note by Gibbes, and 25 of McKellar's unpublished poems, virtually doubling the corpus.

The critic E.W. Parker, editing the third edition of the anthology Poets’ Harvest (1946), put in an “Additional Australian Poems” section and included three by McKellar, again all from Twenty-Six - including Twelve O’Clock Boat and These Expeditions, both below.

Also in 1946, Gibbes found a publisher at last, the distinguished Sydney house of Angus & Robertson. The Collected Poems of J.A.R, McKellar brought together all of Twenty-Six, all but one (Poverty, Chastity, Obedience) of the Southerly material, and fourteen previously unpublished poems, from his own collection and from McKellar’s sister and brother, importantly including Football Field: Evening and The Pool of Hylas.

I get the impression that just about everything else available went in, at some cost to overall quality. To touch on the vices thus disclosed, McKellar’s very frequent use of classical scenes caused Green to call him a ‘truly international’ poet (rather than just an Australian one) but in the extended selection it often comes across as a substitute for inspiration rather than a frame for it. So does his other persistent habit of including quotes and paraphrases from other poets, which weakens much of the extended material in the manner of cliché.

Below are what I think are the best poems. You’ll find faults in all of them, and a couple are slight, but they're the occasions when his style worked best in his favour, so I hope you also think here and there, Not bad!

The closest thing to a masterpiece is the pleasantly melancholy Football Field: Evening, which is still quoted. It’s possible it was one of his last works, though his last illness was sudden and there appears no suggestion that it's an elegy for himself.

The number before the title indicates the poem’s place in the Collected Poems. They don't indicate chronological order - Gibbes seems to have kept the poems from Twenty-Six in their order and somehow interpolated the rest on that frame.
 

THE POEMS: J. A. R. MACKELLAR (1904-32)
 

1. THESE EXPEDITIONS

     1914-1924

Ten years ago I climbed a hill,
And there I climbed a tree,
So, through the mist and raining, watched
The troopships go to sea.
A2—A6—the numbered list
Steamed out in plunging chain,
Till, hull down in the closing mist,
I lost them in the rain.

So now and then I wonder
If any Grecian boy
Climbed to the highest hill to watch
The ships put out for Troy;
And on his thumbnail biting,
While they went out to war,
Fain would have gone a-fighting
With Helen for a star.
 

[The French Revolution started in 1789.]

From 13. ON READING A CATALOGUE OF FRENCH PRINTS

. . .

The Marquis looks towards the lighted stage;
One hand is his; the lover’s lips engage
The other, while the lady stands between,
Calm in her beauty, smiling and serene.
Like figures poised a moment in the dance,
They stay, the living monument of France,
Nor seem to hear, beneath the ’cello’s whine,
The snarling mongrel pack of ’Eighty-nine. . .

. . .
 

[Hylas, 'companion' of Herakles on the Argo, left the group when they landed in Mysia to get water from the pool of Pegae. There Dryope and her sister-nymphs fell in love with him and persuaded him to live with them in an underwater grotto.]

15. THE POOL OF HYLAS

Down on the floor, among the waving bronze
Of weeds, and threading lilies’ roots, are fish;
And on the surface, flowers, leaves and swans.

A tarnished glint of scales, a bubbling swish
Disturbs the shadows of that cold green night
Of nibbling mouths that know no other wish.

No singing there; but, delicately white,
The petals open on the leaves above
Like butterflies that poise their wings for flight.

Nothing remains; even the mournful dove
Has vanished, and the little breasts are gone
That were too hungry for the lips of love.
 

['The Lands' means the fine Lands Department building (1876, 1891) in Bridge Street, Sydney, whose three-storey sandstone exterior is covered with portrait statues of Australian explorers.]

From 21. THE LANDS

A sweet Franciscan of the Lands
Sir Thomas Mitchell stares and stands
Indifferent to the gentle words
Of Bass, befriended of the birds
Who simulate the snows of time
By anointing him with lime,
Ere they depart to flutter thanks
In equal kind on Joseph Banks,
Or cloud with high foreboding dirt
The stony thoughts of Richard Sturt.

. . .
 

25. FOOTBALL FIELD: EVENING

Cross bars and posts, the echo of distant bells,
The cool and friendly scent of whispering turf;
And in the air a little wind that tells
Of moonlit waves beyond a murmuring surf.

The glittering blue and verdant afternoon
Has locked up all its colours, leaving dearth,
Deserted, underneath a careless moon,
The glory has departed from this earth.

The goals stand up on their appointed lines,
But all their worth has faded with the sun;
Unchallenged now I cross their strict confines;
The ball is gone, the game is lost and won.

I walk again where once I came to grief,
Crashing to earth, yet holding fast the ball,
Symbol of yet another True Belief,
The last but surely not the least of all:

To strain and struggle to the end of strength;
To lean on skill, not ask a gift of chance,
To win, or lose, and recognize at length
The game the thing; the rest, a circumstance.

And now the teams are vanished from the field,
But still an echo of their presence clings;
The moon discovers what the day concealed,
The gracefulness and grief of passing things.

Quick as the ball is thrown from hand to hand
And fleetly as the wing three-quarters run,
Swifter shall Time to his defences stand
And bring the fastest falling one by one,

Until the moon, that looked on Stonehenge ground
Before the stones, will rise and sink and set
Above this field, where also will be found
The relics of a mystery men forget.
 

[Pinchgut (also called Fort Denison) is an island in Sydney Harbour; and Vaucluse and Cremorne are harbourside suburbs.]

58. TWELVE O'CLOCK BOAT

Only the creaking murmur of the wheel,
The trembling of the engines as they turn;
The ferry glides upon an even keel,
And Pinchgut squats in shadow hard astern. . . .

The lips of ocean murmur at delay.
The lovely moon no longer will refuse,
And from the arms of darkness slips away
To tryst with young Ephesians on Vaucluse,

Naked as when some mercenary Greek
The galleys bore to Carthage stared the sky,
Feeling a wind Sicilian on his cheek,
And fell asleep with no more hope than I

Of life eternal, love, or length of days,
Dreaming he saw his Macedonian home;
Awoke, and duly went his ordered ways
To die at Zama, on the swords of Rome.

But what was moon to him, and what was sea
Two thousand years before myself was born,
Are sickle moon and silver yet to me,
Though Scipio should wait upon Cremorne.