The signature quality of a Les Murray poem is anger — a visceral smoldering that freshly lights up the tired old landscape and turns conventional pieties inside out. A lifelong outsider and champion of the underdog, Murray grew up among impoverished farmers in rural Australia, where, as an overweight “redneck” teenager, he was mercilessly tormented at school.
Today he is the closest thing Australia has to a national poet. A sui generis autodidact (he now suspects he has Asperger’s syndrome) equipped with a fierce moral vision and a sensuous musicality, he writes subtly about postcolonialism, urban sprawl and poverty and, in his most intimate poems, reminds us of the power of literature to transubstantiate grievance into insight. (His admirers have argued he ought to be considered for a Nobel.) But he is equally capable of writing emotionally simplistic and strangely soured poems in which the enraged adolescent emerges all but unmediated. This mercurial doubleness can make his work hard to categorize or describe: this is a mind at once revolutionary and reactionary. Or maybe just a poet who’s willing to show more id than most.
Now comes a book that offers a powerfully candid view of Murray’s struggles with depression — one that will speak even to readers unfamiliar with his work. “Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression” is an unusual book. One half is a prose memoir (first written as a 1997 lecture, with an afterword composed in 2009) about his long struggle with serious depression.
The second half comprises what Murray calls the “Black Dog” poems (the phrase is Churchill’s term for depression, and has a long history) — 24 poems written over the course of his life that deal squarely either with his depression or with the subterranean anger that he believes led to it. It’s a pungent, forthright primer in what depression can look like — and surely will make many suffering from the disease feel less alone with it. It also lifts the curtain on the stagecraft of poetry and offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour, elucidating just what the special abilities of poetry are.
Murray was at the height of his career when he “went acute.” In 1985, he returned to the New South Wales farming valley where he’d grown up to care for his ailing father. “What I didn’t know was that I was heading home in order to go mad,” he writes. Two years later, approaching 50, he fell into a deep depression, occasioned, he believes, by the chance comment of an old high school tormenter who came to a local reading given by Murray and who “cheerfully recalled to me one of the nicknames she had bestowed on me 30-odd years previously.” (Murray had experienced a less severe depressive episode at the end of the 1950s.) Within days, his fingers started tingling painfully, and he later developed a sudden aversion to nicotine. He landed in an emergency room with what turned out to be a panic attack. A doctor sent him to the psychiatric ward, where his depression was diagnosed.
Like most depressives, Murray entered a kind of living purgatory, captured well in this evocative if at times overly simplified account. For years he had panic attacks three to four times a day. His thoughts were “shredded mental kelp marinaded in pure pain.” He spent whole mornings “raising the energy to walk to the next room for a book.” He cut back on writing prose and says that many of his poems during this time were “knotted” and “unclear.” He suffered regularly from “the 4 a.m. Show” in which you find “your troubles and terrors ripping into you with a gusto allowed them by fatigue and the disappearance of proportion.” Xanax took the edge off, but no other drugs worked. “What did help were work, family, routine and talks with other sufferers.” So, funnily enough, did the character Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs,” who reminded Murray that “for self-examination to work, you must tell the exact truth, suppressing nothing.” Murray endeavors to do just what Lecter commands, confronting his past and his own shortcomings without special pleading — for example, revealing that having been flogged by his angry, frustrated father he in turn flogged his own children until one day he felt a “sudden revulsion” and stopped.