Yet the memory of those beltings – how they seemed to be so integral to school life – lingers obsessively; and their consequences were very varied. I am convinced, for example, that the reason I have little Latin (the state of my Greek need not detain us) is that I was strapped for every mistake I made in every exercise of Latin For Today every school morning for a year. I dropped the subject like a hot papyrus at the first opportunity. I bear those far-off Brothers no particular ill will for their part in terminating my life in Latin. If it comes to that, I carry no vengeful feelings for the strapping, six-foot-two dairy farmer’s lads who some years later ran through me one Saturday afternoon on the Shepparton Oval and ended my football career. But that magnanimity of spirit doesn’t stop my back hurting every time the weather turns cold.

More importantly: for those Catholic students who remembered much of their secondary schooling as gloom and threat, who left without much regret after a Matriculation year devoted single-mindedly to winning an Education Department Studentship, and who descended upon Melbourne University in great numbers round about the mid­1950s – for them the apparent freedom, the mildly hedonistic ethos (God knows, it was mild enough then), the sheer range that existence seemed suddenly to comprehend, came as a heady balm after the minatory college or the cloistered convent. That apostolate, of whose growth Vincent Buckley gives such a fine account in this book, did not exercise such a powerful attraction for those particular students. We were intrigued, half-captured (I remember Buckley beginning an address to a group of Catholic ‘freshers’ of whom I was one with the words, ‘My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ’ and feeling that I understood for the first time what that appellation might mean). But far fewer of us than might have been expected became finally and fully involved even at that time of the apostolate’s flourishing and greatest promise, when many others were becoming fully involved. Among the no doubt complex reasons for this faltering was a vague, unarticulated disillusion: spirituality, belief – so inextricably bound into a fabric of duty, gloom and recrimination in school years – had got a bad name. It was not a question of lapsing or not lapsing; it was a matter of backing off, trying to fathom the nature of the disquiet. Years later, this disquiet was struggling nearer the surface, toughened and made more insistent by one’s growing recognition that spiritual reflex actions were not coping with an anarchic world. The pain in the back, it turned out, was deeper, more serious: and it was a chill wind that provoked it.

It is impossible not to revisit one’s own past in this way when reading Cutting Green Hay, for the book is like a good poem – attracting, setting up associations, teasing the mind, opening out. It has already been called ‘generous’ and the back cover adds ‘joyous’ and ‘loving’. It is, in my view, all of those: there is a mellowness about the narrating voice, which is to say it is a voice made genial by experience. We certainly don’t miss the geniality – it is not of course uniform but persuasively recurrent – but we don’t miss the experience either: much has been perceived, felt, suffered, enjoyed, longed for, lost and gained in order that this distinctive and complex tone might build here to its delicate balance.

One important contribution to this sense of the book’s tone is its humour, a characteristic worth mentioning because, in a book that will provoke so many readers to review memories, arguments and stances, what is in fact a slightly recessed but often brilliant play of wit can be overlooked. There are, for example, marvellous anecdotes: George Florence’s public singing career faltering into farce amidst the deliberations of the university’s highest administrators; Buckley himself espaliered along the spiked iron gates of Raheen in the middle of the night (a story already being honoured by the embroideries that precede full, legendary status). Then there are some splendid thrusts: ‘I doubt if I had ever met Archbishop Simonds: my contact with Victorian bishops was limited to Mannix (and to Fox, if you count being refused absolution a contact)’; ‘[the French] were even more resentful at my offering analysis, which as we all know is a French invention’; ‘Then of course, there is the hotbed cliché: a university is a ‘hotbed of opinion’ or it is nothing. But this cliché is used chiefly by people who wouldn’t know a hotbed if it singed their short hairs.’

Indeed, the author’s wit becomes one of the important ways by means of which we grow acquainted with, confident of, the narrating voice. And this is not only true of anecdotes and sallies of the kind I have quoted; it is also true of brief asides: Hope’s ‘poetry was at the opposite extreme from my neat and passionate incoherence’; ‘the ridiculous rumour… that Slessor had mentioned suing me (for bad prose perhaps)’. It is one of the ways in which Buckley, as it were, inhabits his narrative (another is by means of rare, brief and often quite jolting glimpses of private pains behind the public life). In the introduction, he says he prefers ‘to be free of chronology and of whatever bonds are entailed by autobiography and its trendy successor, the “memoir”’. When I read that, I was inclined to think that, having chosen such a tightrope, he might find himself spending most of his time in the safety net. But the book is not autobiography: it simply isn’t the story of his life, though it is the story of parts of his life. He thus avoids both the quotidian gestures to which autobiography is in some degree committed, and which is the heart and source so often of its tedium unless in the hands of the very skilled. And further, he avoids enshrining the autobiographical self, the ‘I’ who stalks through conventional autobiographies ( of course there are fine and honourable exceptions) with an apparent authority over events and a centrality in relation to them that no life as lived could ever possibly have laid claim to. The temptations in autobiography are temptations in the direction of power and omniscience: yielded to, they produce the paradox evident in all unskilled and unsubtle versions of the genre – that the recorded life sometimes reveals nothing so much as the dead hand.

Buckley’s personal presence can be strong, as in the witty asides and anecdotes or the loving depiction of his childhood and family; but it can also dwindle, in defeat or disillusion or the search for self-protection, to almost nothing, leaving the narrating voice sounding something between novelist and historian – relaying an account built up only partly from personal experience, partly from research, partly from information and advice, partly from acknowledged hearsay.

The first years of the sixties were filled with activities, some imaginative and purposive, some no more than the collapsing of ventures or the bobbing of egos, but as a whole presenting to the bemused participant observer a scene of crossing intentions and chaotic but false energies. As I realize now, I was far less involved than I seemed to myself at the time, and although I was concerned at a growing bitchiness and fractiousness, I did not foresee the explosions which were soon to come. What energy I had to spare from the terrors of my private life was directed towards poetry, Prospect, and playing my part in the Apostolate, from which, by this time I was feeling a little detached.

To these withdrawing tactics (‘bemused’, ‘observer’, ‘less involved’, ‘a little detached’) he goes on to add a description of the Knopfelmacher seminars which ‘I never attended’ (my emphasis). All of this in the cryptic context of ‘the terrors of my private life’: no autobiographical self here – whom only strangling or suffocation would prevent from fulsomely revealing the terrors of his private life – but a submerged and stricken voice beneath a surface record of chaos and tangle.

Culling Green Hay has much more the feel of a memoir, but even there it avoids the memoir’s dilettantism, the movement from this to that and from here to there as a function of the strength or humour or aptness or exoticism of particular anecdotes. A number of things dictate the movement of the book and one of them is, initially, chronology. It opens with the Buckley ancestors and goes on to the author’s own childhood and youth. But the chronological undertow soon slackens; the account begins to obey a different logic, that imposed by the shape and development of certain intellectual issues and by the personalities of the people central to them. High points emerge not as moments in a chronological sequence of events but as portraits placed to catch the right light, to benefit from the narrative’s focus at that stage. Thus the splendid portraits of A.D. Hope and Gwen Harwood and the brilliant evocation of Archbishop Mannix; the struggle to get the ‘multi-faceted’ James McAuley on to the page; and the profound weariness, the sense of irresistibly recalled personal crisis that runs beneath the depiction of Frank Knopfelmacher and his crusades.

Among many other concerns, Cutting Green Hay conjures with the phenomenon and the meaning of belief. Belief is central in the book: belief considered, belief arrived at, belief tested, belief elusive, belief wanting. And further to that, the fascinated contemplation of belief and the struggles of belief in others – in the irascible Jesuit teachers; in introverted priests and a lonely archbishop; in a succession of friends and colleagues. There is A.D. Hope, ‘as deeply religious a man as McAuley’ and McAuley himself ‘of apocalyptic spirit’; and Gwen Harwood believing that ‘the earth itself will bear me up, the waters will carry me’; and Manning Clark with his passionate Russian epiphany to communicate; and many others. Noticing this early and insistent strain in the book, one comes finally upon the following passage without surprise, indeed, with a sense of inevitability:

What was the actual state of ‘belief? What did ‘belief mean? If belief was being abandoned, what in the human psyche was abandoning it? Something had failed deep in the Christian spirit, not to speak of other less formal spiritual traditions, in the way that something fails in the blood, or the womb, or the spinal column, and the failure needed to be realized in the deepest sense. Not many of my friends wanted to hear this dire message; most of them thought me wrong ...

There, as elsewhere in the book, the dark note in this hymn of praise rings through, but it is always under control and always an undertone.

Buckley’s two decade span ends in 1965, just too early for the full force of the Vietnam crisis to impinge. He does mention Vietnam, but it would have been intriguing to see something more of the formation of his views as that storm gathered. Even without those details, there is a strong sense, as the book ends, of shoring against the ruins. Amidst anxieties and a sense of disintegration, friends are the ‘glory’ and friendship at least can be believed in.

That is the harvest. And it is a rich and promising one.