A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF EDWIN JAMES BRADY - Mallacoota ...

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But such a wish was not to be. When Quinn died, Brady wrote to Alec Chisholm that
he missed him as a brother, never wanting to visit again the Sydney he always
associated with Quinn. 1 Their friendship had extended over sixty-seven years, as he
remarked at the unveiling of Quinn’s headstone in Waverley Cemetery in 1951. 2
Lawson, Quinn, Daley and Brady were constantly in contact, either personally or by
letter, or perhaps more usually by messages passed along by mutual friends. For a
short time after Lawson joined the trio, there was some enmity between him and
Quinn. Brady, who served as mediator, wrote that “Henry failed to appreciate
Roderic’s delicate touches and Roderic regarded Henry as crude” but as the years
passed they grew to love one another and were friends, especially after Quinn gained
some fame for his verses locally and overseas. After Lawson’s death, Quin tried to
make an agreement with Brady that the first of the two to die would, with Lawson,
meet the other in the next world. As Brady said, it took “an Irishman and a poet” to
make a bargain like that.
Brady had a continuing admiration for Quinn’s poetry. “It is the critic’s task to judge;
I can but appreciate” he once wrote. 3 But his opinion was supported elsewhere. He
cited Le Galliene’s admiration of “The Camp Within the West” and Yeats’ opinion
that it contained “all the essentials of a perfect poem”. Brady also thought highly of
Quinn’s “Red-Tressed Maiden”, “The Fisher”, :The Glory Call” and “The Currency
Lass” as well as Stars in the Sea”. 4 These are competent poems and have found their
way into most Australian anthologies. They have a certain delicacy; “dainty verses –
all gleaming pearls on a golden thread” Brady called them. He admired this quality in
both Shaw Neilson and Quinn; when turning out the lusty sea-chanties and stirring
nature poems for The Ways of Many Waters he cast envious glances at Quinn’s
delicate lyrics:
Yours is the cream of literature, strawberry-stained, and I ask myself what I
am carving out of this language with my blood and brain spattered tomahawk.
I with savage lust of combat and slaughter, with relish for great unfinished
canvasses, rude and vulgar with the roar of way and trade, turn enviously to
your picture songs of spring-tides and lovers and roses, wishing maybe that
my muse had learned to walk such green and velvet lanes of letters. But the
gods ordain. 5
But in the same letter Brady objected to the too-personal note in “The Hidden Tide”,
the setting of which he admired. He affirmed that he did not want “the oyster with the
pearls, not the shells”, closing with typical Brady sentiment: “From the still deeps of
my heart where lieth the ooze of many memories, bitter and sweet, I wish your
gossamer bark a happy voyage under rainbowed skies.”
A.G. Stephens recognised the gossamer qualities of Quinn’s verse; he called them
“bubbles” – “poet’s bubbles, delicately mirthful, wistfully melancholic, shot with all
colours of his moods, reflecting all the images of his mind” and considered that The
Hidden Tide contained “the most intrinsically poetical verses yet published in
Australia.” 6
1
Brady to Chisholm, 4.10.1949, in Chisholm’s own collection.
2
The text of this address, read in Brady’s absence 2.12.1951, is in Brady’s papers in National Library.
3
‘Day Dreamers”, p.15.
4
Brady to Quinn, 9.1.1949, in possession of Walter Stone.
5
Brady to Quinn, 21,3,`1899, in Mitchell Library.
6
A.G. Stephens, “Roderic Quinn” in C. Semmler (ed.) Twentieth Century Australian Literary
Criticism (Melbourne, 1967), p.105.