Ann-Marie Priest

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The Harwood Memorial Fruitcake Award

The parodic inventiveness of Gwen Harwood by Ann-Marie Priest

For 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

everything Harwood sent him under her own name. She was disheartened to be proved right (as she then believed) about McAuley’s execrable judgement. ‘All Souls’ was a mere ‘mishmash religious poem’, but McAuley had fallen for it. He had even written Geyer ‘a little note’ saying he was ‘an interesting poet’. To Harwood, this was proof that McAuley’s supposed ‘brilliance is about 15 watts’. At Meanjin, Clem Christesen had similarly snapped up Geyer’s ‘Landfall’ and ‘Mid-Ocean’, poems Harwood had written ‘in a few moments, a collage of literary scraps’. All three poems she considered to be ‘very pretty but quite meaningless’. (Critics, incidentally, did not agree. Chris Wallace-Crabbe would later describe ‘All Souls’ as the best thing in her second book. He included it in his anthology The Golden Apples of the Sun [1980].)

Of the same vintage as the Bulletin hoax was a Harwood poem entitled ‘The Sentry’, which was actually written – with Harwood’s knowledge and collusion – by Melbourne poet and academic Vincent Buckley. She was delighted when it was accepted by Meanjin in late 1961, and later chosen for Angus & Robertson’s annual Australian Poetry anthology. ‘Is it yours? Is it mine? Or the Muse’s’, she chortled in a postcard to Vin:

Whose hand drove the talented pen? With the right hand that never refuses a guinea, I signed it. Yours, Gwen.

Both Harwood and Buckley kept the secret of the true authorship of this poem, though word leaked out that there was some mystery about it. In Brisbane, a young Thomas Shapcott, tipped off by a friend of Buckley’s, puzzled over it, writing to Wallace-Crabbe that if it was a parody, he couldn’t see whom it was parodying. Shapcott, who was ‘fascinated by [Harwood’s] antics’, soon began a correspondence with her, which developed into a lasting friendship. Her acrostics inspired him to write one of his own. In 1963, ‘Return is not Again’ appeared in the Bulletin, its acrostic message, a phrase from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, reading ‘Kiss Gwennie Where She Says’. Harwood was delighted. But when he asked her about ‘The Sentry’, she played dumb: ‘Whaddyer mean, “trick or puzzle”?’ She went on to include the poem in her first book, giving no hint that it was not her own work.

Buckley was her most skilled impersonator. Late in 1961, he wrote a parody of Geyer entitled ‘Dead Guitars’, which he submitted to Meanjin under Geyer’s name. This time, Harwood knew nothing of his plan. When she opened Meanjin to discover an unknown poem by her own alter ego, she ‘felt like a sniper who’d got one in the bum’. Buckley was now poetry editor of the Bulletin, and she took her revenge by sending him a new Geyer poem, ‘Soiree’, that contained yet another acrostic (‘Mon Semblable, Mon Frere’). When he unwittingly published it, she sent him a gleeful note.

Some seven years later, still enamoured of the art of parody, she inaugurated the Harwood Memorial Fruitcake Award, inviting some of her young poet-friends to write a poem featuring her character Kröte for a chance at the grand prize of ‘1 beaut fruit-cake’. Geyer had originated Kröte, but Geyer had long since been unmasked (by Shapcott and Rodney Hall, as it turned out), so Harwood had taken Kröte over herself. A European-trained musician who had somehow got stuck in Australian suburbia, Kröte was often drunk, and always bitter at a plebeian world that simply did not appreciate him. He was spiky and malicious, and while Gwen thought of him as a comic character, there was pathos in his struggle to relinquish his dream of being a great artist. Gwen told Tony that when she read back through her Kröte poems, she could see herself in him.

‘What kind of PERSON is this Mrs Harwood?’ asked a horrified Nancy Keesing

For the Fruitcake Award, she gave competitors the first verse of a poem they were to ‘Complete in four (or more) tetrameter quatrains’: ‘Honours candidates are expected to express three of the following: anguish, humour, political indifference, gaiety, sexuality, boredom.’ The stanza she wrote to start them off clearly belonged to a comic poem:

Kröte plays for a fiddler scraping that Bee Piece from a violin. There’s little prospect of escaping back to the green room & his gin …

Roger McDonald, who was then working as poetry editor at the University of Queensland Press, took Gwen’s instructions seriously, sending her a poem he described as ‘a student piece, which is written to exemplify the six humours as located by Professor Eisenbart in Herr Kröte, during a cerebral dissection at the bar of the “New Sydney” Hotel’. His poem begins:

The Problem of Kröte: Doppelganger as Alcoholic

Boredom He scratches a note with his toe, from timber – nobody registers karri on suede; And then upon teeth he rattles a number ad-lib, called Ivory Tribute To Jade.

Sexuality The fiddler pauses from pizzicato feeling upstaged but not sure why. Kröte catches the stare of a widow whose addiction to teeth is urgently sly.

Gaiety ‘I’ve another appointment’, sings Kröte, rising up from his stool at the rim of the stage. The widow flashes a bottle of Riesling which Kröte knows to be hopping with age. …

Shapcott seems to have entered more than once, but only the second of his entries – written, presumably, after he read Roger’s – is extant. His parody begins:

The Problem of Kröte: Doppelganger as Hanger-on

… Between him and his easeful tippling

lies a no-man’s-land of floor Where already Mums are rippling, determined for the last encore.

By a groaning board with aspic, lamingtons and passionfruit-cream Mrs Cholmondley eyes the heretic, and her teeth set in a beam.

Carnal thoughts plunge to her bosom (metaphorically of course), In her heart she’s young and lissom, moaning, and will yield to force …

The winning entry, however, was Buckley’s. Gwen sent copies of the typescript of his poem, complete with Vin’s dedication to her and his signature, to the unsuccessful entrants. It begins:

The Flight of the Bumble Bee

Kröte plays for a fiddler scraping

That Bee Thing from a violin. There’s little prospect of escaping back to the green room & his gin.

A piece concerned with flight – symbolic!

He murmurs, pianissimo. Somebody hisses ‘Alcoholic’

Audibly from the nearest row.

That woman with the bust! That bumbling

Amateur with an insect heart. Heaven preserve me from all fumbling spear-holders on the stage of Art.

Drunk, often. Alcoholic, never!

Here come those octaves-and-a-third. Madam, I could play on forever,

Thinks Kröte, playing his absurd

Pantomime of a great musician

Wrestling hard with his instrument. The fiddler’s nervous disposition

Rapidly throws him off the scent …

Announcing the winner to Shapcott on one of her legendary home-made Sappho cards, Gwen wrote:

Vin Buckley sits with sparkling eyes, drinking the blood-red wine; he’s won the Kröte Fruitcake Prize for 1969.

When Evan Jones of Melbourne Town stands by to beg a slice Vin Buckley merely wolfs it down exclaiming, ‘My! How nice!’ Useless to mark my Muse’s place

OCCUPIED or NO ENTRY When Vin, without a change of face, can write this, or The Sentry.

Candidates less successful plough through pies, or fish-and-chips, but Vin, with laurels on his brow, holds fruitcake to his lips.

This was the end, seemingly, of the Harwood Memorial Fruitcake Award. Harwood had another hoax under way at the time: she was masquerading as Timothy Kline, an angry young man of the same generation as Shapcott, Hall, and McDonald, who was writing anti-Vietnam War poems, among other things, with great success. It was not until the early 1970s that she turned her mind to her third volume of poetry, which would also be her first Selected. Among the new poems, she decided to include a handful of Kröte works: ‘Matinee’, which had first appeared in Australian Poetry 1969, and two previously unpublished poems, ‘A Small Victory’ and ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’. The latter poem, as it appeared in her 1975 book, was identical in almost every respect to Buckley’s prize-winning entry in the Fruitcake Award. (Buckley’s version began each line with a capital letter, while Harwood’s – in keeping with her long-established practice – did not.) As with ‘The Sentry’, she gave no indication in the book that this poem was not, in fact, written by her. Presumably, Buckley, Shapcott, and McDonald (and possibly others), were in on the joke, but none of them seems to have mentioned it either.

There is an odd codicil to the story of ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’. In the late 1980s, in a letter to Kevin Hart lamenting the demise of parody, Harwood explained that she had ‘once invited several poets I knew to complete a Kröte poem (giving them the first verse of “Kröte plays for a fiddler scraping that bee thing from his violin”)’. ‘The entries,’ she went on, ‘were so inept that I wrote it myself and thought for a while about the nature of parody.’ If this is true, it is difficult (though not, perhaps, impossible) to explain the typescript signed by Vin Buckley. Certainly, as a parody, it is exceptionally brilliant, replicating not only the style of Harwood’s Kröte poems but also their themes and diction. On the other hand, it would be entirely characteristic of her to add another layer to the story of this poem, perhaps with an eye to the frustration of future scholars (the ‘PhDs’ she often refers to with benign contempt in her letters).

‘How far can this go?’ she once asked of Buckley’s parody of Geyer’s hoax poems. ‘Copies of fakes of copies of fakes?’ The answer seems to be as open as it ever was. g

Ann-Marie Priest is a humanities scholar at Central Queensland University with a special interest in Australian women writers and biography. Her biography of Gwen Harwood, My Tongue Is My Own, for which she received the 2017 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, will be published by Black Inc. in 2022.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.