by Adrian D’Ambra
The words in this title – a brave and beautiful book – are the commendation from Rodney Hall for Paula Keogh’s memoir of love, madness and poetry, The Green Bell, which was published in Australia by Affirm Press in 2017. Keogh reconstructs a profoundly difficult period of her life when, as a young student, she suffers a mental breakdown and admits herself as a voluntary patient to M-Ward in the Canberra Hospital where she is subjected to electroconvulsive therapy – shock treatment – but where she also meets and falls in love with the poet Michael Dransfield, who is being treated for drug addiction. It is September/October 1972. Michael will be dead the following April.
In retrospect from the distance of more than four decades, Keogh writes with compelling lucidity about the experience of losing one’s sanity, as captured in these two quotations:
‘This is my madness, and I can’t tell it as it is. Madness is anti-story, anti-chronology, anti-plot, anti-character. It breaks language. It throws mud in the face. It makes story impossible. The minds within the mind won’t let me be. [. . .] In the eye of the storm of madness there’s a kernel of sanity that’s so clear and so true, you think you’re in the presence of Truth distilled and laid bare.’ – The Green Bell, (Affirm Press 2017), pp. 55, 64
She introduces her memoir by quoting in full the third part of Dransfield’s poem Geography:
in the forest, in unexplored
valleys of the sky, are chapels of pure
vision. there even the desolation of space cannot
sorrow you or imprison. i dream of the lucidity of the vacuum,
orders of saints consisting of parts of a rainbow,
identities of wild things / of
what the stars are saying to each other, up there
above the concrete and minimal existences, above
idols and wars and caring. tomorrow
we shall go there, you and your music and the
wind and i, leaving from very strange
stations of the cross, leaving from
high windows and from release,
from clearings
in the forest, the uncharted
uplands of the spirit
Dransfield is remembered by his biographer Patricia Dobrez (Michael Dransfield’s Lives: a sixties biography, Melbourne University Press, 1999) in the Australian Dictionary of Biography in the following entry:
Michael John Pender Dransfield (1948-1973), poet, was born on 12 September 1948 at Camperdown, Sydney, second child of native-born parents John Francis Dransfield, clerk, and his wife Elspeth Gladys, née Pender. Michael was educated at Brighton-le-Sands Public and Sydney Grammar schools. After ‘dropping out’ of the universities of New South Wales and Sydney, he worked intermittently on newspapers and as a government clerk.
For Dransfield, 1968 was a significant year, marked by an addiction to morphine, the severance of his relationship with Kathy Rees (to whom many of the early poems were dedicated) and the challenge of being balloted for national service. A protester against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, he was eventually excused from service, possibly for health reasons. While living at Casino he wrote of his preoccupations: love, pain, addiction and an inhospitable society; a major poetic symbol was the decaying country house, Courland Penders, into which he built his nostalgia for an older civilization. His work was accepted by Rodney Hall, poetry editor of the Australian.
Next year Dransfield grew his hair longer, joined Sydney’s counter-culture and, until early 1972, lived with the Sydney artist Hilary Burns. He was of tall and slender build, with stooping shoulders. Hall discerned that ‘there was a grace about him’, and was struck by his charm, generosity and talent for friendship. At intervals, when either hitchhiking or riding his motorcycle, Dransfield established ‘a circuit of friends from Melbourne to Brisbane’.
Celebrated by the editor Thomas Shapcott as being ‘terrifyingly close to genius’, Dransfield joined such members of the ‘Generation of ’68’ as Robert Adamson, John Tranter and Nigel Roberts in a rebellion against older, conservative poets, like James McAuley and A. D. Hope. His work appeared in Meanjin Quarterly, Southerly, Poetry Australia, Poetry Magazine (New Poetry from 1971) and ephemeral magazines. University of Queensland Press was to publish all Dransfield’s books: the first, Streets of the Long Voyage (1970), won a University of Newcastle award; it was followed in 1972 by The Inspector of Tides, and by Drug Poems which explored states of mind through drug consciousness and served his aim of social protest.
In the ‘Nimbin spirit’, Dransfield quitted the city and moved with Hilary to Cobargo where he began to circulate the manuscript of Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal (published posthumously, 1975). He suffered a motorcycle accident in April 1972. In October he received a $2500 grant from the Commonwealth Literary Fund to work on a book of prose. After many desperate months in and out of Canberra Community Hospital, trying to shed his addiction to heroin, he returned to Sydney. Dransfield died in a coma on 20 April 1973 in the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, North Sydney, and was cremated with Presbyterian forms. The coroner found that his death followed a self-administered injection of an unknown substance. During the last months of his life Dransfield had met (in Canberra hospital) a soul mate Paula Keogh and experienced a last rush of creative energy which resulted in The Second Month of Spring (1980). The manuscript was edited by Hall who also brought out selections of Dransfield’s unpublished work, Voyage into Solitude (1978) and Michael Dransfield (1987).
Keogh’s memoir, The Green Bell, deserves to be widely-distributed and well-read. I have also been disappointed to learn that there is no current edition of Dransfield’s poetry in print; neither Rodney Hall’s Collected Poems (University of Queensland Press, 1987) or John Kinsella’s selected edition, Michael Dransfield A Retrospective (University of Queensland Press, 2002). Surely this needs to be rectified.
english literature teacher 