Morag Fraser

Someone talks about having to teach high school on a raft in the Mississippi because you weren't allowed to teach high

feeling of possibility, but also just wonder at someone that can produce sentence after sentence after sentence like that of extraordinary moral complexity.

She reminded me a lot of Russian novels.

I kept on thinking about Turgenev, who also gives you implacably difficult and complex characters, but you just go back to them and back to them.

What did I learn about America?

Well, details.

I mean, I had no idea that Iowa was once considered the shining star of radicalism.

Iowa's where they have the first caucus you think of, you know, backward rural America, which of course is always a mythical stupidity.

I learned about Robinson's particular passion for education and for public education in America.

There are just details about all of the elements, the essences of racism that

The more detail you get, the more you understand.

Wading through.

Now I'm writing a biography of the Australian poet Peter Porter who lived in England for most of his life.

So I've been obsessively reading Peter's poetry and poetry of anyone he was associated with in an Australian poetry that was just about everyone.

So, yes.

complex poetry that moved between what looked like amusing little riffs on his cats or a poem about Farlap in the Melbourne Museum, which is one of the classic Porter poems, to a whole series of poetry written after the death of his first wife, which is some of the best telegiac poetry written in English, I think.

I'm grappling with the problem every biographer has of dealing with someone who is now dead but who you knew while he was alive.

In some ways, it would be very much easier if I had not known the man.

You have both a death of affection and gratitude for the person you know and a sense of the obligation to tell the truth and not, well, he wouldn't want anything else.

But that's hard.