But of course, as is often the way, behind the myth is a reality so much less fearful. Brenda welcomed us and Bruce positively beamed, dressed up in a cravat and smart shirt, and treating us to a kind and thoughtful conversation.

They are a delicate couple of people, and the pain of living with sickness shows, but their humour, black and wicked as can be at times, makes us all laugh, and we temporarily forget the bright Manly day as we wander back among the passionate days of Beaver’s youth. He tells me about a memory he has of being disapproved of for being in love with Brenda, many years ago, not by anyone he knew but by a perfect stranger, back in Brisbane:

‘He was what I call an Australian ocker. It was in mid-summer and he was dressed in the mandatory long socks, brogues, militaristic shorts and upper wear, and I thought, my God, as I saw him coming, here comes an ocker, an RSL ocker. Some of them are OK but ... I had long sideburns at the time, which was the fashion (I was trying to keep up with Tom Shapcott). “Bloody Alfs!”, he said and walked past us. We had our arms round each other.’

‘What’s an Alf?’ I asked, ‘I don’t even know what that is’.

Beaver laughed a little and replied, ‘An Alf, that was what we call a wimp now, whatever that means. Or a Bruce ...’

This led to a discussion about names, and how difficult it was sometimes, notably when he has to go to hospital, for Bruce Beaver to lose his first name, Victor, and be called by his preferred middle name. Brenda Beaver mentioned her own family’s background, with a Lancashire-born father and a New Zealand-born mother, what they called ‘impure Anglo-Saxons’. Bruce concurred readily with the suggestion of how mixed many Australians’ heritage is. ‘My grandparent on my mother’s side came from Chichester, and her mother’s father was an Australian Jewish gentleman who came from Salzburg – Myer. We’re everything, aren’t we, out here? Thank God. I love it!’

I pointed out that he often writes in his poems about the Jewish bit.

‘Yes, well I’m very proud of that, I call it the Davidic side of me, the psalm side of me. I know I’m nothing like it but I think it’s song. I haven’t got much song in me -I’m mainly speech rather than song. And that little bit of song is Jewish, I think. The cantor, you know. I’m not that mad on cantors, actually! They do try though, don’t they, they do try hard.’

He was talking about speech-singing?

‘Speech-song, that’s right. What do the German’s call it? Sprachgesang. They had these little operas that were speech and song. I think Beethoven’s Fidelio was one. Speech and song rather than continuous arias and recitatives.’

‘When you started writing poetry’, I asked, ‘you were much more conscious of the song style, weren’t you?’.

‘Oh yes, when I began I wrote lyrics all the time. Dozens, well, I should say hundreds. I’ve since found out, reading Bruce Bennett’s biography of Peter Porter, that he had five hundred poems written before his first one was accepted. I only had about one or two and they weren’t anything like his. They were corny little mock-Elizabethan lyrics. Love lyrics mainly. I used to do one a day! It was my job. But that fizzled out when I was about nineteen or twenty and I wrote a couple of lyrics that were better than that, or more my own, and I bunged them into Douglas Stewart under the name of Victor Bruce – every time I sent them in as Bruce Beaver they’d be knocked back – and they were accepted.

‘There’s just a couple of little lyrics, the first ones I ever had published, and ten years later I met Ray Matthew -a very nice lyrical poet, he fizzled out about twenty years ago -and he said, “You’re not Victor Bruce, are you?” I said, “How did you know?” and he said, “Well, I kept this”. He’d cut out the poem from the Bulletin with later poems and he said there was a similarity. I thought it was an amazing thing and I’ve tried to look for this in other writers.’

We talked a little about how other poets who were publishing in the Bulletin back in the days of Victor Bruce had been going, chatting about the way Collecteds were sometimes Selecteds and how difficult it would be for Bruce Beaver to produce a volume of Collected Poems.

‘It’d be about five or six hundred pages. I don’t think anybody wants to do that. I don’t think UQP want to. The Times Literary Supplement asked for one, the reviewer said that they hope there will be a Collected, but it would be too much. Of course, the way out of that is to do what I feel like doing now and cutting about a third of the things out altogether. The poems that don’t measure up to what I can do at my best.’

When I suggested that, despite his dislike of them, they were there – and right – for their time, Beaver agreed.

‘Well, other people like them and since I left them out of the Selected I’ve been asked why I was so hard on my first books.’

In the Selected, it’s true that the later poems are stronger, but the development is fascinating, and I pointed out that it would be good for readers to begin with the later ones and read back towards the early ones.

‘Yes’, Bruce Beaver agreed, ‘Douglas Stewart did that in his Collected Poems. He began with his later stuff and finished up with his earliest stuff. It’s a good idea, I think. If you can stay the pace, you can read the earlier work, and it’s not forced on you to start off with.

‘I’ve only had two Selecteds, and I’ve almost a book full of extra poems that would be taken into a Collected. But I always try to make a new book as new as possible. I don’t know how many others do this, but most of my work isn’t published in magazines. I must be trying to copy Rilke in giving a new thing each time. I’m not very original.’

This seemed too much of a contradiction to let pass without challenge, but the poet explained his reasoning.

‘Well, I’ve been reading Leishman’s commentaries on Rilke’s poems 1906-1926, which were the uncollected ones, and one of his German friends said, “He had an extraordinary gift for words but a very ordinary mind”, and the same goes for me. I’ve got an extraordinary gift for words but a very ordinary mind. I can’t cope with a good intellectual. I can’t debate or argue with a good intellectual.

I’m reading Peter Porter’s best poems. They’re incredible. They’re the work of a polymath, like Auden. He knows, not something about everything, but almost everything about everything. And like myself, he’s what they call an ‘auto-didact’, self-taught, as against the university, academic poets, some of who are magnificent, not all. And I’ve just come to the conclusion that I’ve got a very ordinary mind. I’m not begging for people to say, “Oh, no you haven’t!”. I really do feel that I must try to be modest about this because I think it’s a modest sort of intellect.’

‘On the other hand,’ I suggested, ‘there are tons of words and images in your poems.’

‘Tons of words, and, I hope, imaginatively ordered, but not a great deal of original thought or original ideas. I admire people like Peter Porter.’

‘But isn’t that what poetry used to do in the eighteenth century, when the ideas were structured into those sorts of poems? Surely poetry doesn’t need to be like that now?’

‘No. I’m not Augustan, like the Popes and the Drydens. I feel that the best poets writing now are nearly all Augustans.’

‘But surely we’re not an Augustan age, so aren’t these poets out of step with their time?’

‘Yes, they’re anachronistic, in a Classical way. I try not to be anachronistic. So really, I suppose, I’m just of my time. I’m a voice of my time and that’s my role, to try and speak in the language of my contemporaries.’

‘And one of those things is getting that feeling of being out of step with the natural and pushing yourself back into it, and finding those moments of heightened awareness when you can look up and you see things and you think, “Ah!”, and it floods you.’ I was close to something here, and it pleased Bruce Beaver to be able to agree with me.

He continued, 1t gets back to a kind of therapy, which is taboo these days in critical circles. No art must be regarded as therapeutic. Music isn’t therapeutic any more. To me it’s absolute therapy, one way or another. Some of it has the opposite effect on me, I’m afraid. All arts are either therapeutic, or, to me, destructive. Both are entitled to exist.’

The black side, the dangerous side of art. ‘Should some things, I asked, ‘be destroyed through art?’

‘Well, apparently this is a necessary evil or – not an evil – a necessary thing. I’m scared stiff of it myself when it crops up in my own writing. It makes me feel sick. In one of the poems in the sequence “Tiresias Sees”, I wrote about Tiresias masquerading as Santa Claus in a big city store and instead of giving gifts, informing each child that he or she would die of cancer of the womb at thirty-five, or cancer of the prostate at sixty or seventy – horrible things like that. A monster within me wrote that, so I will cut that out if it’s ever republished, because I think how terrible it would be for anybody who had suffered the loss of a child, say, reading a poem like that. I know this is moralistic, but I feel this very strongly now. I don’t know what made me write it. Just trying to keep up with the destructive ones, I think, trying to be in the swim with the big cynics. It’s so popular now, isn’t it? I mean, irony that has fallen backwards into cynicism.’

‘You turn that on yourself, though, quite often in your poetry.’

‘Oh, that’s all right. That’s OK, I can castigate myself, although even that’s masochistic when it’s all boiled down, it’s a sort of aberration. One can’t be entirely bland.’

‘Yes, there’s often a flash of that sort of “Oh, you’re being pompous again, Bruce.” You really do give yourself a hard time.’

‘Oh gosh yes. The knowledge of that sometimes comes in the middle of writing. I was giving a reading for Richard Tipping about twenty-five years ago – he was recording me – and I ruined it by saying, “that’s absolute crap!”. I was reading this thing and I thought, “The pomposity! Cut that out!” He said, “You’ve spoiled the recording!”. In those days it was pretty difficult to cut things out. I never looked at that poem again with anything but distaste and I would not include it in a Collected. It was one of the Letters or something. I think it starts, “This to myself ...” And I go into sheer self-indulgence. But I can’t be wholly public, I’ve got to be private. It’s my gig, or bag, or whatever they call it now, my thing. I am subjective. All the time. Everything is subjectively personal. Talking to you is a subjective thing for me. I try not to make it – what’s the word? – offensive to people to sort of probe at them. I expect to be probed in tum, but I realise that not everybody likes this. Many people are really offended and hurt by it.’

‘Yes, indeed’, I agree, ‘we often expect that people will just ask us things, and when we ask them something, that they will respond. But often people will immediately back off. I asked someone yesterday, “Haven’t you lived in Sydney all your life?”, and she said, “No”, and that was it. And I thought, “Oh, perhaps I’ve offended her?”.’

‘One has to gauge one’s courtesies. The need for courtesy – I know this is an affectation – but everybody is so different. As for me, I’m so blatantly exhibitionistic when it comes to talking about myself. I mean, I could discuss anything. For instance, I tell you I have to wee every twenty minutes or so. Everybody else would faint or pass out if anybody found this out about them, you know, this terrible, awful secret. I have no secrets.’

Bruce Beaver has us laughing now, but conscious that much, much more time than twenty minutes has elapsed since we started talking. We shift around, and accommodate ourselves to the information, asking him along the way, ‘There’s nothing awful about it, is there, really?’

‘No, it’s perfectly natural in babies, and children and little boys and girls. I’m not much more than a little boy, writ large.’