The Tell-Tale Heart

Why would anyone want to read a novel in verse? Robert Pinsky, in “The Sounds of Poetry,” draws a vivid distinction between poetry and prose. “Ezra Pound wrote that poetry is a centaur. That is, in prose, one aims an arrow at a target. In a poem, one does the same thing, while also riding a horse.” So what does that make a verse novel--an Olympic three-day event with long-range missiles or some kind of Wild West stunt, with Annie Oakley hanging off the bottom of a galloping palomino and shooting anapests at a hundred yards?

The very good news is that “Fredy Neptune” is no hippodrome stunt. Australian poet Les Murray writes with a verse free enough not to lull you into seasickness yet strong enough to grip you in its iron meter like the claw of an Ancient Mariner and lead you at a pace somewhere between the calypso of Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” and the fox trot of Vikram Seth’s “Golden Gate.” Better still, Murray’s hero, Fredy Neptune, is enough of a Paul Bunyan to shoot a yarn while carrying both the horse and the 250-page poem on his back.

Born Freddy Boettcher, the son of German-speaking immigrants in the New South Wales town of Dungog, Freddy runs away to sea and finds himself at war. It is 1914, and the political map of Europe is in flames. Within a few stanzas, Freddy’s ship has been commandeered by the Kaiser and put into the service of the Turkish Navy. While wandering through the Black Sea port of Trebizond, Freddy comes upon a crowd of Armenian women surrounded by Turks.

They were huddling, terrified, crying,

crossing themselves, in the middle of men all yelling.

Their big loose dresses were sopping. Kerosene, you could smell it.

The men were prancing, feeling them, poking at them to dance--

Then pouf! they were alight, the women, dark wicks to great orange flames,

whopping and shrieking. If we’d had rifles there

we’d have massacred those bastards. We had only fists and boots.

One woman did cuddle a man: he went up screaming too.

The shock gives Freddy leprosy--but that’s just the beginning. Drummed off the ship by the Germans, Freddy begs his way out of Turkey, falls in and out of the clutches of a Berlin leprosarium and finds himself a berth on a Danish ship bound for Rio. There, in mid-Atlantic, he awakes one day to find his leprosy gone and with it all feeling. A hatch door falls on his toes--nothing. Stranger still, fire burns him, skewers stab him, leaving neither wound nor scar.

The deficits are tremendous. Love and sex are nearly impossible:

A cafe waitress there noticed

and helped me out. This part is awful to admit.

She had to tell me everything. Oh yes, you’re ready, yes,

and Stop, hey, you’re finished.

I’m flooded. Didn’t you feel that?

But so are the benefits. The Null or the Nothing, as Freddy calls his absence of feeling, also means lack of pain. And lack of pain leaves nothing to cause Freddy’s muscles to signal him when to quit. Without the signals, Freddy has the strength of seven. He strong-arms his way through the war years, from port to port, eventually landing in Jerusalem at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is there, amid “soldier tourists, and glass lamps in front of deathly pictures” that one hooded monk whispers to him the cure for his strange affliction:

Your response to the death of our sisters is good,

best of all outsiders. If ever you can pray

with a single heart to be free of it, it will leave you that day.

The message is brief and easily lost. Indeed Freddy does lose it, wandering back to Australia and America and up to China and down through New Guinea as the world stumbles through the glory days of the ‘20s, the desperation of the Depression. Freddy’s German background makes him an outcast in Australia, where his Nothing is good for nothing but strongman work in the circus (where he loses a ‘d’ and picks up a new surname as Fredy Neptune), but makes him into something of a legend in Hollywood, where his German language and his sense of loss bring him the affection of Marlene Dietrich.

Fredy believes that the ticket to his return to the land of the sensate lies with the woman he loves, a war widow named Laura, and their son Joe. But on every return to Australia, fortune makes a Ulysses of him and curses him back to the sea. On the cusp of a new war, Fredy finds himself in his ancestral land.

Germany was my people but not my country, was the short of it.

Germany was my people who had lost the War

and I hadn’t so I couldn’t cotton to their Adolf.

My Struggle was a body that wouldn’t face atrocity, and vanished:

his dead body was his Kampf-book, that he’d closed my people in.

It is here that Fredy adopts young Hans, a half-wit threatened with sterilization, and runs with him to the frontier, the shore of the Bodensee, where they are rescued by the Dowager Countess zu Knull. In the eeriest and most powerful scene of the book, Fredy discovers himself in a mid-century hell, a castle cabaret, where the countess is presiding over a cast of SS officers, Soviet generals and cardinals like some Weimar Miss Havisham:

Dig the pit in a wide green floor;

for a thousand years we’ll be metaphor.

Weak is sweet but hard is true.

Believe it. Working people do.

Nevertheless, the countess finds them a bark and once again Fredy returns to Australia.

Though many, many adventures are left to our wanderer, it is in Australia that Fredy finally confronts the challenge thrown at him 40 years before in Jerusalem. Out on an errand, Fredy comes upon a crucifix on the side of a store.

You have to pray with your whole heart, says my inner man to me,

and you haven’t got one. Can I get one?

Forgive the Aborigines. What have I got to forgive?

They never hurt me! For being on our conscience.

I shook my head, and did.

Fredy continues his debate with himself, trying to become whole, leading himself through a catechism of forgiving the victims--the Jews, the women, especially the Armenian women whose immolation started Fredy on his anesthetized wandering, until finally:

Forgive God, my self said:

I shuddered at that one. Judging Him and sensing life eternal,

said my self, are different hearts. You want a single heart, to pray.

Choose one and drop one. I looked inside them both

and only one of them allowed prayer, so I chose it,

and my prayer was prayed and sent, already as I chose it.

The religious ending will be no surprise to those familiar with Murray’s poetry. Several of his volumes have been dedicated “To the Greater Glory of God.” An earlier verse novel, “The Boys Who Stole the Funeral” (1991), made up (like Seth’s “Golden Gate”) of a rosary of sonnets, generated some critical heat for its unregenerate Roman Catholic take on abortion and the role of the sexes.

Yet ironically, Fredy’s discovery of prayer livens sensation in his body but kills interest in his life:

. . . from the first I knew no counter-prayer, no horror, nothing

would bring my null-body back. It was gone forever.

The limelight goes off me with it. We went on living. . . .

The parable is over. It’s a wonderful bit of transubstantiation--to have your wafer and eat it too--and gives pause to those of us who are certain that skepticism is next to art. “The language of prose is much less highly charged,” Pound also wrote, “that is perhaps the only availing distinction between prose and poesy.” Highly charged in ideas as in language, “Fredy Neptune” may jump from sin to salvation and from Suez to Sydney in a single stanza, but it is no novelty act. Neither archer nor centaur, it is a novel. And a ripping good yarn.