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

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Fortunately there are some redeeming aspects to Brady’s contribution, and foremost
among these must be considered the actual assistance he gave to the artists
themselves. This aid extended beyond the Lawson, Quinn, Daley period into the
middle of this [20 th ] century. He corresponded with Muir Holburn for many years,
assisting him in a very real way when Holburn and Marjorie Pizer collected some of
the militant verse of Daley (“Creeve Roe”) and published it. 2 He also gave Holburn
useful advice and criticism in relation to his own attempts at verse. In an article on
Holburn’s verse, Brady comes close to genuine criticism of the analytical kind – some
of his remarks being germane to poetry on a wider scale than that displayed by
Holburn alone. It also gives Brady’s views on the importance of form in poetry, and
his attitude to traditional and modern verse, a topic upon which he had also passed
comment elsewhere, including his review of Chisholm’s biography of Dennis.
Regarding form as purely subsidiary to the main part of the poem (“Those certain
aspects of Thought and Inspiration which are the hallmarks of genuine verse”), Brady
considered that it evolved automatically as the poem solidified in the artist’s
consciousness. He argued to Holburn that to become impatient with traditional forms
because they were traditional, and to attempt to write without any account of form, led
to the kind of surrealistic verse which A Comment abounded; such verse suffered
severely from an inability to communicate. Brady examined several of Muir
Holburn’s poems, liked the texture (and the socialistic nature of the sentiments) in
“The People’s Voice” and the way “the artist has beaten it out on the anvil of the
imagination, where it glowed at first in the white fire of animated thought and then
took shape under the precision blows of a metrical hammer” – a comment which
seems to belie the thesis of form as self-evolving! Brady was sometimes carried away
by the ring of his own words.
But if form is subservient to the core of the poem, there must still be a control of the
poem; lack of control was not modernistic as some poets tended to believe, and Brady
commended Holburn for his management of several poems:
Outward demonstrations of inward complexes have no creative value; they are
at best symbolisms unguided uncontrolled, like bolting horses running away
with a coach…
The outsplurge of cubism, surrealism and ‘modern verse’ after the Russian
revolution worried me. I looked upon it as a hangover from a decadent
capitalism. Since which there has been a gradual return to normal forms in
the U.S.S.R. and all is well. However, these may be no more than phases in
the change-over and ultimately, it seems, balance is achieved. I think Gorki
saw that. 3
Ultimately, despite all the words, Brady praised in Holburn the qualities which he
praised in Lawson – humanity, sympathy and a desire for a better state of society
(“Art and Heart” he called it once). Beyond these qualities and an indefinable
“inspiration” Brady was unable to say exactly what he expected in verse. The fact
that he praised Holburn’s verse so highly may be due to this lack of clarity and
definition; but it is mor likely to be that he owed Holburn several favours. The
younger man had acted for a time as Brady’s Literary agent in Sydney, had helped to
recover the Archibald manuscript from its prospective published and even lent him
money on occasion; here was an opportunity to repay him in part.
2 M. Holburn and M. Pizer (Eds.), Creeve Roe: Poetry by Victor Daley (Sydney, 1947).
3 “Modernist Verse and the Work of Nuir Holburn”, A Comment, No. 23, 1945.