Caesar, Adrian 1955–

(Adrian David Caesar)

PERSONAL:

Born January 25, 1955, in Bowden, Cheshire, England; immigrated to Australia, 1982; son of Gordon and Ethel Irene Caesar; married Claire Allert, December 6, 1984; children: Damian, Ellen-Marie. Education: University of Reading, England, B.A. (honors), 1976, Ph.D., 1981.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Flynn, Australian Capital Territory, Australia.

CAREER:

Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, England, worked as librarian; University of New England, Armidale, Australia, English tutor, 1985-87; University College of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, lecturer, 1988-92, senior lecturer, 1992-99, associate professor of English, 1999-2004; full-time writer, 2004—. Honorary visiting fellow, University of New South Wales and Australian Defence Force Academy; also taught creative writing at Australian National University.

MEMBER:

Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow in humanities, Flinders University of South Australia, 1982-83; Nettie Palmer Prize for Nonfiction, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year award, both 2000, for The White.

WRITINGS:

Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class, and Ideology in the 1930s, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1991.

Taking It like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality, and the War Poets; Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Graves, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1993.

Kenneth Slessor, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Hunger Games (poetry), Polonius Press (Cook, Australian Capital Territory, Australia), 1996.

Life Sentences (poetry), Molonglo Press (Woden, Australian Capital Territory, Australia), 1998.

The White, Picador (Chippendale, New South Wales, Australia), 1999.

High Wire, Pandanus Books (Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Adrian Caesar's research interests include twentieth-century poetry, war literature, and the literature of exploration. He has also written several books of literary criticism and poetry. Review of English Studies contributor Stan Smith said that in Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class, and Ideology in the 1930s, Caesar "wants, somewhat quixotically, to demolish the ‘myth’ of Auden's hegemony in the 1930s." Smith said Caesar reinvents MacSpaunday and "rightly attacks Samuel Hynes's ‘reductive and tautological’ generational mythology for perpetuating the Movement premise that Neo-Romanticism was a 1940s reaction to the Auden-dominated 1930s. Such mythical periodization leads to the over-valuation of a few upper-class public schoolboys playing at revolution, and the neglect of what he sees as … lower-middle-class and/or unpolitical poets." John Morris wrote in the Journal of EuropeanStudies that Caesar's book "challenges well-established and accepted literary views and interpretations concerning the 1930s." Morris continued that Caesar "effectively set himself an impossible task…. Yet despite the reservations I have expressed about this book I have to say that it reads well, is enjoyable, and raises, even though it rarely answers, interesting questions."

Ian Gregson said in the Times Literary Supplement that "the most interesting product of Caesar's scholarship is the insight into the influence of social class on 1930s poetry which arises from his discussion of poets' backgrounds. He is not reductive about this, and it is partly through its subtlety that the case Caesar makes for the differences between the Auden group and others less socially elevated is a convincing one."

In Taking It like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality, and the War Poets; Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Graves, Caesar studied the work of World War I trench poets Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves. "Because of their upbringing and because of various dominant ideological influences, these men could not help but see suffering as a good," wrote Matthew C. Stewart in College Literature. Each of the four writers had grappled with homosexuality prior to the war, and Owen and Brooke had both suffered from nervous breakdowns because of their sexual confusion. The war provided the four with the opportunity to love other men in a socially acceptable manner. "It was a chance to live an outdoor, martial, and self-sacrificing life," wrote Stewart, "while at the same time finding theme and outlet for the supposedly feminine act of aesthetic creation." Stewart held that Caesar "excels in his examination of the causes and effects of their sexual repressions and confusions, which he says should not be thought of as unusual, but rather as ‘endemic to English society.’" Stewart concluded by calling Caesar's primary theses "both original and compelling."

In Kenneth Slessor, an analysis of Slessor's life in light of his poetry, Caesar theorizes that Slessor was influenced both by his class and by the cultural attitudes of Australia during his life, as well as a literary heir of both romanticism and symbolism. Australian Book Review contributor Thomas Shapcott noted that Caesar censures the Australian poet "for not being a 1990s Marxist-Feminist-New-Age-Sensitive male with the obligatory political correctness to appease the thought police of the new academe." Shapcott continued, "Caesar is rather like a Headmaster who not only brings down his cane on the romantic excesses of the young poet … but who has to wrap this all round with a rather salacious replay of Slessor's uncomfortable marriage(s) and attempts at ‘psychoanalysing’ the poet's sexual shortcomings." Julian Croft, however, in a review for Australian Literary Studies, found the book "refreshing." The critic explained, "Caesar has brought a new perspective to Slessor's poetry in stressing the political nature of his subject…. He writes with the same passion and iconoclasm as he does of British poetry of the same period, and he brings to Australian writing a tradition of criticism which is not heard as often as it should be."

Hunger Games is a collection of forty-six of Caesar's poems, some biographical, and many of which had previously appeared in literary journals or were produced on radio. Michael Costigan wrote in Australian Book Review that "Glass Houses" is Caesar's humorous look at the evolution of his relationship with his partner, "from trendy anarchism to a state of bourgeois conformity (‘married, mortgaged, monogamous’)." In "The Pledge" Caesar writes of his response to his young daughter's opposition to his drinking, and in "Accents" he reflects on leaving England for Australia at the age of thirty. Costigan commented that "an old Bogart classic supplies the inspiration for four of the best-executed poems in the collection." They are written under the title "Casablanca Variations." Costigan concluded by saying that "Caesar's admirable collection surely earns him a place among his adopted country's many fine poets."

In the collection Life Sentences, Caesar's poems reflect his feelings about leaving England and his familiar life for Australia and the unknown. The book is part of the Molonglo Press Pocket series. Each volume comes with a greeting card that features the cover of the book.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Australian Book Review, August, 1995, Thomas Shapcott, "Fashioning Slessor," pp. 49-50; August, 1996, Michael Costigan, "Poetry by Consenting Adults," pp. 59-60; April, 1999, Christopher Bantick, "A New Imprint," pp. 37-38.

Australian Literary Studies, Volume 17, no. 3, 1996, Julian Croft, review of Kenneth Slessor, pp. 317-319.

Choice, November, 1993, L.K. MacKendrick, review of Taking It like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality, and the War Poets; Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Graves, p. 452.

College Literature, February, 1995, Matthew C. Stewart, review of Taking It like a Man, p. 223.

Journal of European Studies, December, 1992, John Morris, review of Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class, and Ideology in the 1930s, p. 345.

Review of English Studies, November, 1993, Stan Smith, review of Dividing Lines, pp. 617-619.

Times Literary Supplement, November 1, 1991, Ian Gregson, "Class Divisions"; October 1, 1993, review of Taking It like a Man, p. 18.