This first glimpse into the private writings of one of Australia’s great poets reveals a man by turns arrogant and self-questioning, gnostic and dogmatic, original and predictable, voracious and selective. The Notebooks are arranged successfully by subject, emphasising the rush of his passions and the bite of his prejudices.
One life role that A. D. Hope played was that of Augustan gentleman. Whether pose or position, this role as guardian of the classic values ‘in these last years of the Romantic Storm’ tests his readers. It was a pose in so far as he used it to belittle worthy opponents with smart-arse comments and to keep himself above the fray. But it was a position in that it defined his poetics, special philosophy and world view, with consequences sometimes spectacular, sometimes painful.
That an 18th-century man can live in the 20th century is a superfluous question. Hope enjoys making fun of modern educational models and ‘objective tests’ for ability in English. He quotes the remark, ‘We were given a simple exam which consisted of crossing out stupid answers in order to leave the least stupid one.’ Hope saw these now familiar forms of inane examination at first hand when they were being devised at Princeton in 1958, and comments:
The deviser … has to exclude from his mind all other possible ways of looking at the problem than the one he chooses. He has to eliminate imagination, and suppress his more subtle habits of manipulating and recognising the innate ambiguity of language. He has to ignore the difference that “context” makes to a question or a statement and to do this is forced to choose only run-of-the-mill contexts implying his own culture and epoch. In other words, he has to impose dullness on himself in order to frame his tests. (Book XIX, 1977)
Here Hope displays the very 18th-century value of the primacy of intelligence and imagination as the solution to problems. The enemies are just precisely stupidity and dullness. But Hope is more 20th century in his scepticism, even rejection of, systems. He is by turns naughty and gracious about religion, that lost cause of the Enlightenment, while science, the darling that could do no wrong, is a system that he mocks at every turn.
Indeed, ‘context’ and courage to stand by your own ideas animate Hope’s writing. Like Blake, Hope would never be bound to another’s system. True pleasure abounds where