I had met Gwen Harwood only once before I contacted her at the beginning of last year to ask whether she would consider allowing me to write about her life. I’d read Poems when I was a high-school student in Queensland and Poems: Volume Two when I was an undergraduate. As I listened to that finely tuned Queensland voice reading ‘David’s Harp’ in a lecture theatre at La Trobe University in 1987, I recalled the excitement I’d felt twenty years before, and the curiosity about the lived experience out of which poems such as ‘A Postcard’ and ‘In Brisbane’ might have come. I’d wanted to write a final year honours paper on Harwood, but she wasn’t part of the canon (Judith Wright was the only contemporary woman poet we read in Australian Literature), so I turned to Middle English dialogue poetry instead.

I continued to read her work, and after the publication of Blessed City I wrote to her. The reply, characteristically prompt and elegant, contained variations on what she has said in some of the many interviews she has given: ‘As for my life, there’s little to tell. I’ve never climbed higher than 1,270 metres or been out of Australia or divorced or psychoanalysed or pursued by a bear ... I feel like one flake of paint in an impressionist painting – the rest of the picture is what defines me.’

It is here, in part, that my interest as a biographer lies; in the outward ordinariness of her life, and in the shaping influences of place, relationship and culture. Obviously, there’s a challenge in writing about a life that has been centred for forty-seven years in one place, a life that contains few of those great events about which spectacular narratives are conventionally constructed. ‘I really wish I had been to the Greek Islands,’ she wrote, ‘got captured by pirates dressed as Orthodox monks, freed myself by heroic cunning, spent years as the Sultan’s favourite in Lulegergaz and sun in Wozzek ... perhaps by the time you come to write the book I shall have done something exciting.’ Miriam Stone Goes to Baghdad would of course be a catchy title for the film-of-the-book (Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Sultan?), but the material that’s there will have to do.

Ahl que la vie est quotidienne would hardly be an appropriate epigraph for the biography of Gwen Harwood, however modestly she defines her life in its externals. The quotidian has its own interest, of course, particularly when this is the ground of a remarkably rich intellectual and spiritual life. She moves effortlessly from cooking and (in the way of all good cooks) talking about cooking to the headier alchemies of German Romantic music and modern German linguistic philosophy. The sudden, unexpected leaps and twists of thought that characterise her poetic voice also distinguish her talk, in both conversation and letters.

That beguilingly postmodern definition of herself as ‘one flake of paint in an impressionist painting’ can mean many things, but at least one can get some sense of the kind of painting this life might be by reading her letters (her own, and those written to her by a number of those friends whom she has known for so long). The letters and postcards (there are thousands of them) to intimate friends are works of art. One of these friends, Vincent Buckley, was to my knowledge the first to note this publicly, in his 1987 essay, ‘Gwen Harwood: Notes on the Dream’, where he talks of ‘memory raised to a creative power’.

Australian has produced few great letter-writers, and it seems very likely that she will be remembered not only for poems and libretti but also for her letters and postcards (‘If I have anything private to say I generally write it on a postcard & then nobody takes any notice of it’). The letters reveal many things about what and how Gwen Harwood thinks and feels, but they are revealing in other ways, for what they have to say about the culture in and from which they were written. The extracts from Gwen Harwood’ s letters to Alison Hoddinott that appear in Gwen Harwood: The real and the imagined world, for example, have interesting things to say about magazines and their editors; such comments are extended and supported in letters to other correspondents.

Gwen Harwood has a highly developed understanding of the self as construct, but this exists together with a belief in autonomy and transcendence. She has often remarked that she speaks ‘nakedly and honestly’ in poems that pay tribute to particular people (Vera Cottew, Ann Jennings; Sela Trau, Edwin Tanner, and, most notably, Vincent Buckley).

There is a profound truth in this, which extends to the integrity of many of her letters; they reinforce, often very movingly, what she has said in interviews about how closely her friends, the living and the dead, are intertwined with her own being. Like other gifted letter-writers, she seems to enable, some of those to whom she writes to call forth their own expressive resources. Thomas Riddell recognised that Gwen Foster’s letters to him were to be treasured, and perhaps one day read by others. So too did the late Edwin Tanner (like Riddell, another fine correspondent), who sometimes alludes to future readers of letters from and to Gwen Harwood. This awareness that a personal dialogue is in some sense also public property was of course supported by their generosity in depositing their letters from Gwen in public collections; just as she has preserved her letters from friends.

I’ve already mentioned the charge of impertinence to which the biographer of a living subject is open; the fact that so much material is in archives (even if access is restricted) enables me to rationalise my nosiness. My immediate aim is to read as many letters as I can, including those that are held by their recipients. Here I’ve been encouraged by the generosity of several of Gwen’s friends. It is important that work on a biography should begin now rather than twenty or thirty years hence, while it’s possible to talk to those who know her well.

Not surprisingly, I’ve been asked what kind of biography this is going to be. This is a question I can’t answer with any sort of honesty until I’ve done more reading and interviewing. My book won’t be a psychobiography; even if I were qualified to write one, it wouldn’t be appropriate. Nor, I think, will it be a critical biography; it might have been, but for the critical texts that have appeared. ‘Life’ can’t be separated from ‘work’, of course, but my emphasis will be on life. It’s important to write about her associations with composers and musicians, since her achievements as a librettist are still not as widely recognised as they should be among those who know her only as a poet. As for the structure of the biography, I can say only that I’m not attracted to strictly chronological narrative, Mitchelton to West Hobart. (Something akin to late-medieval dream vision form might well be more appropriate for such a lover of ‘wigs, masks, beards and disguises.’)

Gwen Harwood has spoken of her need to guard her privacy, likening herself to a ‘mother duck feigning a broken wing to draw enemies away from her secret nest’. The dilemma of the biographer is the need to interrogate, and at the same time to respect that privacy. The desire to know the stops, to pluck out the heart of the mystery, drives anyone who aspires to write a ‘life’. I don’t expect to pluck out the heart of this woman’s mystery (even if I do feel sometimes like an antipodean Guildenstern), but if I can do anything to amplify the sense of Gwen Harwood as ‘eternal questioner’, the book will have been worth writing.

So far she has given me a great deal of her time, and one of the few requests she has made is that I write ‘nothing saccharine’. I shall do my best to oblige.