David Malouf : a life in letters

The most striking aspect of David Malouf's life in letters is the multiplicity of forms it has taken, as if one should talk of his lives in letters rather than think of it as a single life. There are poets who are also librettists, which is not so surprising; but one can't think of many poets who also have an equivalent celebrated status as novelists, in Australian literature at least. (Interestingly, two poet-novelists who do come to mind, Tom Shapcott and Rodney Hall, both come, like Malouf, from Brisbane.) If you look at the phenomenon from the other direction, in terms of novelists who have returned in a memorable way to poetry, as Malouf has in Earth Hour, you find hardly any. There are poets and novelists who write interesting, creative, formal essays, though not so many in this country as in the United States, for example. If you add to this constellation" poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, librettist" the roles of dramatist, literary critic, public orator (for so I think of the writing about Australia and Australians that Malouf offers on such occasions as the Boyer Lectures, reprinted in A First Place, and more formally in the set-piece speeches about kingship and responsibility in Ransom), as well as adaptor and imitator of classical forms, then you do have something remarkable and unique, and not just in this country.