Let Us Now Praise Fat Men

Remember Robert Morley? Once seen, he was hard to forget, with his startled-owl eyes, bushy eyebrows, thick lips, quivering jowls and triple chin above a mighty belly. He was, in a word, a fat actor, and he enjoyed a long and successful career, not only in character and comedy parts. Morley was a product of a time when there were far more fat actors around – Sydney Greenstreet, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, (late) Orson Welles and, nearer our own time, Zero Mostel and Richard Griffiths, not to mention fat ladies Margaret Rutherford and Hattie Jacques, or such vintage comedy fat men as Oliver Hardy and Roscoe Arbuckle. Nowadays, if you see a fat man on screen, chances are it's a normally built actor engulfed in a prosthetic fat suit – and you can usually tell, not least because a man in a fat suit doesn't move in the manner of a fat man accustomed to carrying weight and unencumbered by prosthetics. 
   If anyone was ever going to dedicate a poem to Robert Morley, it would have to be Les Murray, the great Australian poet, who was himself decidedly corpulent. His 'Quintets for Robert Morley' salutes Morley as a representative of the legions of fat men who have always been, Murray contends, at the cutting edge of civilisation (and, in those cases where they weren't, the world would have turned out better if they had been)...

Is it possible that hyper-
ventilating up Parnassus
I have neglected to pay tribute
to the Stone Age aristocracy?
   I refer to the fat.

We were probably the earliest
civilised, and civilising, humans,
the first to win the leisure,
sweet boredom, life-enhancing sprawl
   that require style.

Tribesfolk spared us and cared for us
for good reasons. Our reasons.
As age’s counterfeits, forerunners of the city,
we survived, and multiplied. Out of self-defence
   we invented the Self.

It’s likely we also invented some of love,
much of fertility (see the Willensdorf Venus)
parts of theology (divine feasting, Unmoved Movers)
likewise complexity, stateliness, the ox-cart
   and self-deprecation.

Not that the lists of pugnacity are bare
of stout fellows. Ask a Sumo.
Warriors taunt us still, and fear us:
in heroic war, we are apt to be the specialists
   and the generals.

But we do better in peacetime. For ourselves
we would spare the earth. We were the first moderns
after all, being like the Common Man
disqualified from tragedy. Accessible to shame, though,
   subtler than the tall,

we make reasonable rulers.
Never trust a lean meritocracy
nor the leader who has been lean;
only the lifelong big have the knack of wedding
   greatness with balance.

Never wholly trust the fat man
who lurks in the lean achiever
and in the defeated, yearning to get out.
He has not been through our initiations,
   he lacks the light feet.

Our having life abundantly
is equivocal, Robert, in hot climates
where the hungry watch us. I lack the light step then too.
How many of us, I wonder, walk those streets
   in terrible disguise?

So much climbing, on a spherical world;
had Newton not been a mere beginner at gravity
he might have asked how the apple got up there
in the first place. And so might have discerned
   an ampler physics.

['Quintets' is another word for 'quintains', stanzas of five lines that can follow any rhyme scheme or meter. Shelley's 'To a Skylark', a most un-Murraylike celebration of weightlessness and insubstantiality, is also written in quintains.]