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The Harwood Memorial Fruitcake Award The parodic inventiveness of Gwen Harwood
by Ann-Marie Priest
F
or much of her career, Gwen Harwood (1920–95) was best known for her hoaxes, pseudonyms, and literary tricks. Most notorious was the so-called Bulletin hoax in 1961, but over the years she orchestrated a number of other raids on literary targets, mainly aimed at challenging the power of poetry editors and gatekeepers. For L’Affaire Bulletin (as she sometimes called it), she submitted to that august magazine, under the pseudonym Walter Lehmann, a pair of seemingly unexceptionable sonnets on the theme of Abelard and Eloisa. Only after the poems were published did the Bulletin discover that they were acrostics; read vertically, one spelled out ‘So long Bulletin’, and the other, ‘Fuck all editors’. The first could have passed as a harmless joke, but the second threatened to bring the Vice Squad down on the Bulletin’s hapless editor, Donald Horne. He was not amused, and newspapers around the country echoed his tone of injured outrage. The appearance in print of an obscene word was shocking enough, but the revelation that the author of the sonnets was actually a woman turned shock to horror. To many in Australian society, it was an article of faith that, as an acquaintance of Harwood’s put it, ‘No WOMAN would ever write such a word.’ ‘I had a mental picture, as I heard her pronunciation of “WOMAN”, of little bluebirds with daisies in their beaks,’ Harwood wrote wryly. She had hoped to be hailed as a hero, like the creators of the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax. Her hoax had been designed to show up the corruption, as she saw it, of editors who published inferior poems on dubious grounds while rejecting competent work (such as her own). But instead of being praised for shining a light on murky editorial practices, she found herself forced to defend her femininity. ‘What kind of PERSON is this Mrs Harwood?’ asked a horrified Nancy Keesing. The answer, alas, was that she was the kind of person who was happy to use the F-word, and who would scorn to pretend she wasn’t. The particular formulation she adopted for her hoax sonnet was probably derived from a song she had often heard on the lips of soldiers in Brisbane during the war. That irrepressibly memorable ditty began: ‘Fuck ’em all, fuck ’em all, the long and the
short and the tall’, and went on to specify particular targets in ‘the Sergeants and WO1s’, as well as ‘the corporals and their bleedin’ sons’. Fifteen years later, she adapted this satisfying construction to the literary context in a letter to her friend Thomas (Tony) Riddell, an aspiring playwright who, like her, was struggling with multiple rejections: ‘Fuck all the judges and editors too, fuck all the critics and their stinking crew ...’ The sonnet she subsequently wrote (and sent, with Tony’s collusion, to a number of editors) was a more succinct version of this sentiment. Of course, her occasional fondness for a good curse-word does not begin to answer the question of what kind of person Mrs Harwood was. She was a loving wife and mother, a fierce friend, an adventurous lover, and a brilliant, and brilliantly inventive, poet.
Image courtesy of Ann-Marie Priest
As the artist Edwin Tanner once put it, there was ‘a very strange intensity’ about her, as though she had ‘the depth & intelligence of two’. She was easily bored, as she herself confessed, and when bored, ‘extremely mischievous’. This was very much in evidence in Harwood’s hoaxes. Even before the Bulletin affair, she wrote a series of hoax poems under the pseudonym Francis Geyer, hoping to trick editors into publishing works that looked like poetry but were completely meaningless. One such poem was ‘All Souls’, which James McAuley accepted for Quadrant in late 1960, after years of rejecting almost AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021
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