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Overview
In 1988, shortly after moving from Sydney back to his birthplace in the rural New South Wales hamlet of Bunyah, Les Murray was struck with depression. In the months that followed, the "Black Dog" (as he calls it) ruled his life. He raged at his wife and children. He ducked a parking ticket on grounds of insanity, and begged a police officer to shoot him rather than arrest him. For days on end he lay in despair, a state in which, as he puts it precisely, "you feel beneath help."
Killing the Black Dog is Murray's recollection of those awful days: brief, pointed, wise, and full of beauty in the way of his poetry. The prose text—delicately balanced between personal and informative—gives a glimpse of the imprint that depression can leave on a life. The accompanying poems show their roots in his crisis—a crisis from which, he reports toward the close of this poignant book, he has fully recovered. "My thinking is no longer jammed and sooty with resentment," he recalls. "I no longer wear only stretch-knit clothes and drawstring pants. I no longer come down with bouts of weeping or reasonless exhaustion. And I no longer seek rejection in a belief that only bitterly conceded praise is reliable."
Killing the Black Dog is a crucial chapter in the life of an outstanding poet.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429991469 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 09/29/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 271 KB |
About the Author
Les Murray (1938-2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia as one of the nation’s treasures in 2012. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English in 1996 for Subhuman Redneck Poems, and was also awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry presented by Queen Elizabeth II.
Murray also served as poetry editor for the conservative Australian journal Quadrant from 1990-2018. His other books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Waiting for the Past.
Les Murray (1938–2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia in 2012 as one of the nation’s “living treasures.” He received the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. He served as literary editor of the Australian journal Quadrant from 1990 to 2018. His other books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Waiting for the Past.
Read an Excerpt
KILLING THE BLACK DOG
A Memoir of DepressionBy Les Murray
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC
Copyright © 2009 Les MurrayAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-18106-2
Chapter One
Killing the Black Dog
On the last day of 1985, I went home to live in Bunyah, the farming valley I had left some twenty-nine years earlier. My wife and our younger children followed two days later. My father had acquired an old forty-acre selector's block some ten years previously, and we'd built a house for him and for family visits from Sydney. In 1981, we'd extended this in preparation for a move which then got delayed by a family emergency, the diagnosis of autism in our fourth child. But now at last I was going home, to care for my father in his old age and to live in the place from which I'd always felt displaced. What I didn't know was that I was heading home in order to go mad.
All went well for the first year and most of the second. My wife had agreed to move on a year's trial, but after a couple of months she said she loved the new life and would stay indefinitely. We found better school arrangements for Alexander than any we'd found in Sydney after he'd finished with the Autistic Association's marvellous special school in Forestville. Modern communications made it just as easy for me to carry on my writing career out of Bunyah as out of Sydney; a great change that had occurred in my absence was that, where once you had to be a housewife, farmer, farm worker or timber hand to live in the bush, now all sorts of trades and none were followed there without social pressure. At first I suffered no more than the normal background depressiveness of a writer, plus the irritable defensiveness that came from a bitter division in the literary world which had begun in the late 1960s, between the so-called Generation of '68 and those who served it throughout the Australian cultural world and a minority of us whom it demonised as its opponents. The tears which had appeared as an absolute in a mysterious figure who wept in Martin Place, in a poem called 'An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow', which I'd written a few years after my first depressive breakdown at the end of the fifties, now seemed to have dried in my imagination. I enjoyed discovering that I was still attuned to the wry subtleties of conversation around my region, though I'd missed a whole generation of my friends' and cousins' kids. But if home conceals Old Bad Stuff you had not mastered the first time around, going back there, perhaps especially as you approach your fifties, is an invitation to crisis. Mine started with a well-attended poetry reading at the bowling club in Taree in early 1988.
In many ways, it was a triumph for a local celebrity. The member of parliament for our electorate was there, the dignitaries of all the service clubs were there – at the end of the evening, I was presented with the Paul Harris Fellowship of Rotary International, which I understand is a rare honour for a non-member of the organisation – and upwards of a hundred and fifty guests had come to hear me. Among them was a former schoolmate from the Leaving Certificate class of 1956 at Taree High School. This woman cheerfully recalled to me one of the nicknames she had bestowed on me thirty-odd years previously, and within a day or two I began to come apart. I started to suffer painful tingling in my fingers, I began to slip into bouts of weeping as I drove my car – 'What the hell is this?' I asked myself, but the cause of the tears wouldn't come into focus. In the middle of that year, my ongoing breakdown threw up a very happy symptom: cigars suddenly gave me up. From being an eight-cigar-a-day smoker, I suddenly became unable to endure the taste of tobacco; it was worse than burning rubber, and this change has been lasting. Around the same time, savage indigestion racked me throughout a fortnight's tour in Ireland, then ebbed away; I'd never previously suffered this complaint at all. I'd always led a crowding mental life, but now my mind became congested, jammed with ideas I couldn't formulate clearly or nimbly enough, so that they tumbled over each other and made me incoherent. During a week's residency at La Trobe University around September that year, I faced at a seminar a nasty post-graduate student who had published an insulting study of my work, mocking me for grief at my mother's death many years before, and I found I couldn't denounce him effectively, or defend myself. I did go on writing poetry during this whole period, however, and the last poem I wrote before the crisis which would get my illness diagnosed was the title poem of a book called Dog Fox Field (1990). Several poems in the latter part of that book reflect my mental state, being over-concentrated and under-explained in ways not caused by experiment.
"Excerpted from KILLING THE BLACK DOG: A Memoir of Depression by Les Murray, published in March 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2009 by Les Murray. All rights reserved."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from KILLING THE BLACK DOG by Les Murray Copyright © 2009 by Les Murray. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Killing the Black Dog,
Afterword,
The Black Dog Poems,
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow,
Midsummer Ice,
A Torturer's Apprenticeship,
An Era,
The Past Ever Present,
Where Humans Can't Leave and Mustn't Complain,
Rock Music,
Corniche,
The Beneficiaries,
On Home Beaches,
Performance,
Memories of the Height-to-Weight Ratio,
A Stage in Gentrification,
Burning Want,
Demo,
The Head-Spider,
One Kneeling, One Looking Down,
Travels with John Hunter,
A Deployment of Fashion,
The Holy Show,
Death from Exposure,
The Averted,
Panic Attack,
Refusing Saul's Armour,
Index of First Lines,
Index of Titles,
About the Author,
Also by Les Murray,
Copyright,