Struggle and Storm: The life and death of Francis Adams

By Meg Tasker, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2001, 259 pages, hardback, $39.95. Reviewed by Hugh Anderson in the June 2002 issue.

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There are many like myself who know a little about Francis Adams, but have not regarded him as a central figure in nineteenth century Australian literature. The interest in Adams lies for most of us not in his books of verse and novels, but in his essays and in the Songs of the Army of the Night, which according to the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature were 'intensely radical' and 'violent in ... outbursts against privilege, oppression and exploitation of the poor and lowly, encouraged radicalism in this country by predicting a successful democracy here'. I also found them rather dull if worthy. Until the publication of Struggle and Storm, we relied on Clive Turnbull's biographical essay, These Tears of Fire (1949) for our knowledge of Adams' intellectual scope and his revolutionary spark. And this seemed just about the right length for a biographical monograph, though in Turnbull's case it tended to slide into a laudatory manner. Meg Tasker has devoted many more words to the detail of Adams' life without adding a great deal to our understanding, but has made the most of the material at her disposal and overall has achieved a better balance between the writing and the life of her subject.

Francis Adams reviewed Adam Lindsay Gordon's 'The Rhyme of Joyous Garde' in the Melbourne Review in 1885 as a great achievement, but suggested his life and work were 'a failure with enough redeeming points to raise them from local into general interest' -- words readily applicable to Adams himself. Meg Tasker clearly shows the extent of Adams' considerable influence on the radical writers of the day such as Bernard O'Dowd, who paid tribute to him in the Socialist in 1911, finding, he said, 'in my own poetic ideals and work, he is the only writer to whom I feel, putting aside my debt of the spirit to Walt Whitman, any direct and consciously owed debt'. O'Dowd also extravagantly saluted Adams' 1888 book of Songs as 'the most virile and revolutionary poetical work yet done in Australia, or in England, since Shelley'. Earlier, O'Dowd had emphasised how prescient Adams' essays, The Australians (1893) were:

He looked with hope to Inner Australia, with its elemental discipline, its stoicism, its strange humour, its surging line of freedom and fairness, and its hatred of city sham and imposture of every kind, to develop and nourish the real Australian type, which shall, in the fullness of time, press on and sweep away the exotic civilisation of the cities, which at present dwarf, poison, infect, and denaturalise the true Australian ideals. (Socialist, 10 April 1908)

Citation

• Hugh Anderson. 'Review: Struggle and Storm: The life and death of Francis Adams by Meg Tasker' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2002. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• An unexpectedly rich tale of political passion, literary and journalistic achievement, personal courage and tragedy.
  
  Professor Lucy Frost, University of Tasmania
  
  Francis William Lauderdale Adams (1862-1893)--poet, novelist, social analyst and journalist--made a significant place for himself in Australian literary and cultural history. Born in England, he was a self-consciously modern writer of the fin de siècle; the theme of suicide figured frequently in his writings, and in death he embodied the romantic myth of the consumptive artist.
  
  Adams arrived in Australia in 1884, full of democratic and literary aspirations, and set out to explore the cultural landscape of his adopted country. A charismatic figure, he was loved by many for his personal beauty and eloquence and for the insouciant charm which smoothed over the sharp edges of his political radicalism and intellectual arrogance.
  
  But his impact on Australian cultural history was larger than the merely personal. He influenced a whole generation of idealistic young socialists in Australia, and had a leading role in the development of the Australian labour movement.
  
  Much of his best work was concerned with Australian social and political developments in the years leading up to Federation, and his book The Australians (1893) is a much-quoted classic of Australian social commentary. He was an early and influential spokesman for the Australian nationalism of the 1890s, articulating ideas of democracy and independence from England.
  
  In Struggle and Storm, Meg Tasker explores with texture and nuance both the pleasures of biography and the interesting problem of how to write a literary life a hundred years later. This engaging work is the first full-length biographical study of Francis Adams.

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