reviews |David Prater

REMEMBERING SHELTON LEA

• Diana Georgeff: Delinquent Angel (Random House, ISBN 9781741665437, $34.95)
  

MUCH has been written about this book and its unique subject, the poet Shelton Lea, who passed away in 2005. Lea was well known in Australian poetry and performance circles, particularly in Melbourne where he spent much of his life.
    It was almost impossible when meeting Shelton Lea not to be struck by the force of his personality. While my own reminiscences are scarcely of any interest (especially in a review of a book which for the most parts eschews personal anecdotes), I should point out here that I (like almost every poet in Melbourne over the past few decades) did meet Lea on a number of occasions.
    The interaction I remember most clearly was at a Babble reading, then a weekly event held in the upstairs room at Bar Open in Fitzroy. After reading a poem against the recent invasion of Iraq, which ended with a rhetorical exhortation to get the troops out, I rejoined the crowd, only to find that Lea, in a very frail state, had somehow managed to get onstage and past MC Phil Norton. Lea commandeered the mike and responded to my poem with words to the effect that being against the war was all well and good, as long as I didn’t criticise our troops, who should be above politics.
    My poem hadn’t criticised the troops at all – one got the feeling that Lea intended only to make his own point regardless of the subject matter of my poem. I wondered who the curmudgeonly old man was, and was slightly annoyed at his grandstanding, if not a little peeved that my own ‘message’ had been effectively sideswiped by this cantankerous yet cavalier old gent.
    Only later did I learn his name (most likely over a large trumpet-shaped joint sparked up at the back of the room) and yet it was only after reading Diana Georgeff’s fascinating book that I finally understood the twists and turns of his extraordinary life. While both the Babble spoken word nights and Shelton Lea are now gone, we are left with this shocking biography, whose appeal will surely not be limited to poets. And that’s a good thing.
    What emerges is the peculiar tension provided by Shelton Lea the renegade poet: a man of the street, but also someone raised in an upper class family in Toorak. While the former made him tough and possessed of no small amount of bravado, the latter gave him his love of reading and in particular of poetry, from his obvious association with the Romantics to his engagement with Modernists such as Ezra Pound.
    This tension gives the book its narrative focus and Shelton his humanity. Georgeff has written a tremendously engaging account of one poet’s life, without overly romanticising her subject, and has refrained from writing over Lea’s faults or ignoring his weaknesses.
    The first third describes in brutal detail the circumstances of Shelton Lea’s adoption into the Lea family of chocolate-making fortune, and in particular the fractious relationship between Lea and his adopted mother, Valerie. It evokes a feeling of horror, a sense of impending doom.
    Georgeff describes, almost dispassionately, the systems of control Valerie used in the upbringing of the three adoptees brought into the family as ‘playmates’ for her four natural children. From bizarre systems of punishment, constant surveillance via ‘the Pixies’ (a household intercom) and the sending of Shelton for psychiatric assessment at three years of age, what emerges is a portrait Valerie Lea as a woman possessed of frightening ruthlessness.
    The effects of Valerie’s ‘schooling’ of her brood might well be surmised from the book’s title, and it is interesting to learn that even later in life she did not resile from her extreme methods: Georgeff describes a bitter and tragic ‘reunion’ between Valerie and Shelton later in life.
    Georgeff’s documentation of Shelton’s perhaps inevitable behavioural implosion and eventual incarceration (first in a series of boys’ homes and, later, in prison) is presented as a well-written and engaging narrative, interspersed with selections from Lea’s poetry and his own (somewhat unreliable) remembrances of his time as a delinquent.
    The narrative is not entirely bleak, although episodes such as Shelton’s outraged reaction at being informed by Georgeff that his birth mother had named him Phillip contain a grim humour that underlines the emotional and physical scars Lea bore throughout his life.
    The true extent of Lea’s misfortunes (if such a word is satisfactory) may have been unknown to many of his friends and contemporaries, as the book’s references to acquaintances who had heard only rumours of his adoption into the Lea family demonstrates.
    Indeed, reading this book may well come as a shock to anyone who knew Lea as a well-mannered – if prone to substance abuse – poet. Well, one might say, what’s new? In many ways the Shelton Lea described here fits the cliché of the wild, Romantic poet well and this makes the narrative slightly irritating.
    While Georgeff does remind the reader of Lea’s faults, the assertion that he was a “true poet”, in every sense of the word, rings a little falsely. Perhaps this is because, while there are generous selections of Lea’s poems throughout the book, they are almost always used to back up the narrative flow, and are not analysed, critiqued or appraised.
    Maybe this is being unfair to Georgeff, whose biography at the beginning of the book makes quite plain that she is a journalist, not a poet. Nevertheless, I was disappointed not to find a full list of Lea’s books of poetry, surely something that should have been included to encourage continuing interest in his actual written work.
    While the book also correctly portrays Lea as a charismatic and highly skilled performer, he was, as many who did see him on a bad night would confirm, guilty of moments of self-indulgence. The problem with the evaluation of performance poetry, especially the poetry of Lea and his contemporaries, is that most of their brilliance has now been lost. One simply had to ‘be there’.
    For those of us who were not there, Georgeff does provide some flavour, from Lea’s first encounters with members of the Sydney ‘Push’ to the renegades shouting their verses at the (now defunct) Montsalvat poetry festivals. Georgeff also largely avoids the temptation to include ‘tributes’ to Lea from all and sundry – a decision I personally applaud, as much for its pragmatism (how many poets to interview?) as for its dogmatic concentration on the facts of the long narrative of Shelton’s life.
    For this reason I believe that Delinquent Angel will be appealing and riveting reading for anyone interested in poetry (especially the Romantic or ‘gutter’ variety), the vexed subject of adoption in the 1950s and more recently, and the (largely unwritten) histories of street culture in Melbourne in particular.
    Nevertheless I finished this book with one nagging question: just who is Diana Georgeff? Throughout the book we receive snippets of information about her own connections to the Lea family (she was a schoolmate of Shelton’s adopted sister, Honey); she also undertakes the task of finding Lea’s birth mother (who had in fact passed away years before her identity was revealed to Shelton); and she seems to spend much time being carted around by Shelton who invariably introduces her grandly as “my biographer”.
    While Georgeff appears to rail against this description (and who wouldn’t? Shelton never introduces her by name), I can’t help but wonder if there is more to this aspect of the story. Doubtless a certain distance is essential in any professional relationship, but I was left craving more of Georgeff’s own feelings.
    What led her to write this biography, and whose idea was it in the first place? Was it her status as a family friend of sorts that allowed her access to Valerie Lea’s astonishing diaries? Or was it precisely the fact that Georgeff is not a poet that led to her being chosen as the chronicler of Lea’s life and times? Perhaps we shall never know. And maybe that’s a good thing too.

David Prater is a poet and editor of Cordite Poetry Review.  

© David Prater

Overland 190–autumn 2008, p.82–83

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