The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

  The title of the collection is an obvious nod to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. In a lesser writer, such a title would be the merest egotism. But it is no exaggeration to say that Emma Harmer’s poems are every bit as luminous, beautifully crafted and extraordinarily realised as Plath’s. The fifteen pages and twenty-five poems which make up Ariel’s Daughter are at once an encyclopaedia and an atlas. They seem to contain the world and everything in it.

  The first stanza of ‘A Pen Is Not a Penis’ is a strident statement of intent:

  fuck him who left poor anne hathaway,

  fuck him who pushed sylvia plath away!

  a pen is not a penis.

  when i say this what i mean is,

  A dick is not a bic

  A tool is not a tool.

  Not since Greer’s Female Eunuch has there been such a passionate feminist rallying cry. And yet, Emma’s tone soon softens, and she proves herself capable of the most sublime thoughts, as in the wonderful haiku ‘Reading’:

  midsummer morning

  alone at the library

  just me and this book

  Its companion work, ‘Writing,’ offers a desolate view of the act of creation, one that will be familiar to any writer:

  composing cheaply

  pen gorges, listless dreary

  melody wails, bleak

  And then there is the magnificently angry sonnet/limerick, ‘Editing,’ in which the poet imagines filling up a pen with her menstrual fluid and using it to correct the collected works of Western literature, removing centuries of sexism and misogyny.

  It is a difficult task to quote from Ariel’s Daughter; I am tempted to continue but this would only result in my transcribing the entire collection. In fact, it is only a respect for copyright that prevents me from doing so. Ariel’s Daughter is one of those rare books which negates the critic. Essentially, it reviews itself. And with that, I will stop writing.

  *

  From The Melbourne Eon, 2 May 2005

  An African Honeymoon

  By Peter and Emma Crawley

  Xanthippe Press, 192pp, $35

  Reviewed by James Devine

  An African Honeymoon is the first travel memoir to be written by the Sydney Review’s outspoken critic Peter Crawley. Though his wife Emma is credited as co-author, Crawley has let it be known (in a furious open letter) that the half-dozen chapters she actually wrote were excised by the ‘Philistine publisher.’ Crawley has frequently upbraided Xanthippe Press for ‘inaccuracies’ in its account of the long-running dispute. This seems unfair, for if anyone has been inaccurate, it is Crawley. The very title of his book is erroneous. Mrs Emma Crawley was still Mrs Emma Harmer when she left for Africa with Peter Crawley in the spring of 2003. The two were certainly not on honeymoon.

  The events preceding their hasty departure are described (or rather skated over) in the first twenty-five pages of An African Honeymoon. Crawley gives little mention to the controversy surrounding the 2002 Alexander Poetry Prize. To this day, his fellow judges maintain that Crawley browbeat and threatened them into including Ariel’s Daughter on the shortlist. The controversy deepened when it turned out that one of Harmer’s only decent poems, the haiku ‘Reading,’ was plagiarised from American poet Billy Collins. Harmer’s flight from her husband, little-known poet and short-story writer Frank Harmer, is dismissed by Crawley in two sentences. Neither does he mention that his sabbatical from the Sydney Review was not voluntary, but rather the result of his ecstatic write-up of the execrable Ariel’s Daughter.

  Some of Crawley’s more charitable readers assumed this review to be satirical, but on reading An African Honeymoon this assumption is swiftly put to rest. One of the revelations of this memoir is that Crawley truly does believe in his wife’s genius. In their meandering year-long journey by train (once) car (four times) and plane (twenty-eight times) Crawley evidently wishes to play Boswell to his wife, recording her every comment and opinion with relish. Unfortunately, Emma Crawley is more Dr Pepper than Dr Johnson. She is sweet and bubbly, but too much of her in one sitting will make you feel ill.

  When writing of local geography, the people he encounters and the adventures he undertakes, Crawley is on solid ground. Freed of the confines of criticism, he displays a disarming passion to understand Africa and its inhabitants. His description of wandering through an Egyptian bazaar is wonderfully vivid, as is his alarm at finding himself lost in a rainforest in Uganda. This leads to a superb passage in which a group of Ugandan villagers demonstrate a warmth and kindness that obviously moves Crawley, even now. His dissecting of the social mores of UN bureaucrats in Liberia is a small masterpiece of sustained venom, whilst the short chapter on visiting a genocide site in Rwanda is both sobering and extremely poignant. Sadly, we do not have Crawley’s impressions of South Africa, Madagascar, Sudan or Tanzania, as these chapters were written by his wife, and subsequently deemed ‘unpublishable’ by editors at Xanthippe Press.

  I don’t doubt that their decision is entirely justified in light of the Emma Crawley that appears in this book. That she refers to Hutus and Tutsis and ‘Tu-tus and Whoopsies’ is not charming, as her husband seems to believe, but tactless and crass. Her confusion between the two words ‘genesis’ and ‘genocide’ when questioning an old woman in Kigali is horrendously embarrassing, though Crawley strives to present it in a humorous light. Another misplaced attempt at lightheartedness, her referring to the Congo as ‘The Fart of Darkness’ after a bout of diarrhoea there, falls flat. By the time the couple cross the equator Emma Crawley has emerged as a ridiculous figure. With hilarious repetition, everything she encounters in Africa is ‘smaller than I thought it would be.’ The pyramids, the Sphinx, even Mount Kilimanjaro are described in this fashion by Emma and faithfully recorded by her husband. By the end of the book, one is left with the impression that the continent of Africa measures approximately two metres by six.

  The couple’s return to Australia proves a relief for them, though arguably more so for the reader. An African Honeymoon is by no means a terrible book. In parts, it is beautifully written and admirably perceptive. It is also infuriatingly silly and often dull. Still, I find myself in the position of recommending it, for all its faults, as have several other critics in newspapers and journals. Next time, I suspect we will not be so kind. Peter Crawley should take note that in art, as in life, the honeymoon is over.

  *

  From The Australian Literary Review, 29 November 2008

  The Eunuch in the Harem: Criticism By Peter Crawley Hazlitt-Ruskin Publishers, 656pp, $55

  Reviewed by Penny McFarlane

  October 23 marked the second anniversary of literary critic Peter Crawley’s bizarre and violent death at his Sydney home. In a recent press release Hazlitt-Ruskin explained that they felt enough time had passed that they could release the first, long-delayed book of Crawley’s reviews and essays. Crawley himself was engaged in the editing of the book when his life was cut short. This edition collects all of his important criticism from the Sydney Review, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and the lectures and speeches he occasionally gave at book launches and signings. The title of the collection is taken from a remark by Brendan Behan: ‘Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.’ Crawley often jokingly referred to himself as a ‘eunuch,’ though many women who encountered him in Sydney’s literary scene from the 1970s to the 1990s would be able to give the lie to that. (In the interests of disclosure, I should say that Crawley once made a pass at me at a book reading in Melbourne in 1988. At this time the fatwa against Salman Rushdie had just been pronounced, and I can still clearly recall a drunken Crawley, at the end of his speech, declaring that he had heard the title of Rushdie’s next work was Buddha Is a Fat Bastard. In the ensuing storm, only an abject public apology saved his job at the Sydney Review.)

  Since his death, Peter Crawley’s name has become irrevocably linked with that of Frank Harmer. The e
ditors of The Eunuch in the Harem have acknowledged this by placing the twenty pages of Crawley’s writings about Harmer at the front of the book. The section opens with the review of The Grass Cadillac from 1999 and ends with a dismissive footnote in an essay on Tim Winton from 2006.

  To give these writings pride of place in the collection is to do Crawley a grave disservice. His criticism of Harmer, whilst amongst his most scabrous, was certainly not his best. For that the reader should turn to the second section, titled ‘American Lives.’ Here we can find many unique insights into Bellow, Updike and Mailer (who, incidentally, called Crawley a ‘Limey asshole’ on the one occasion they met, in New York.) Crawley’s analysis of the Rabbit tetralogy has been reprinted several times to great acclaim in the US, but is virtually unknown here, and his monograph on Bernard Malamud was highly praised by Harold Bloom. It is a shame to note that Crawley’s treatment of Australian authors is spottier. Too often his praise is faint and over-leavened with sarcasm. Still, his half-dozen essays on Patrick White should be required reading for anyone with the slightest interest in Australian literature.

  However, it was not Crawley the scholar, but Crawley the self-proclaimed eunuch who wrote such guiltily entertaining book reviews for the Sydney Review. In the longest section of the book, ‘A Pig at the Pastry Cart’ (another allusion to critics), Crawley selected the fifty of his reviews he felt were most enjoyable to read. Highlights include his opinion on the Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi (‘It is so terrible I doubt there would even be a place for it in Borges’ Infinite Library’) and his devastating, three-word summing up of Daphne du Maurier: ‘middle-class, middle-brow, middling.’

  Crawley’s harsh reviews of Raymond Carver’s stories are surprising, considering the fact that the two men were friends, with Carver even dedicating one of his final stories, ‘Buffalo,’ to Crawley. But Crawley’s dismissal of Carver has a refreshing quality in an era when the American has been hailed as the modern Chekhov. One passage in particular is worth quoting in full:

  [Carver] followed Hemingway’s idea of the story as iceberg, that is, only the top eighth of life and emotion would be shown, the rest hidden underneath. But in [Carver’s] stories, one can’t help thinking that the iceberg is more of an ice cube.

  Pleasingly, it is Crawley’s evisceration of popular fiction that takes up the most space. His dismissal of Stephen King is brilliantly offhand. ‘To me, his novels are more endearing than scary. King is like a child leaping out from behind the sofa and shouting, “Boo!” We don’t have the heart to tell him he didn’t frighten us.’

  As I have said, Crawley’s criticism of Frank Harmer is not his best, but it is a sad thing to contemplate that it will probably be his best read. Crawley never envisaged any mention of Harmer in his book. The section ‘Thoughts on Frank Harmer’ was added after his death. It does not make great reading. The original review of The Grass Cadillac was certainly cruel, if undoubtedly accurate. Harmer might even have taken it as an honour to be tarred with the same brush that had spattered W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney. He was obviously not aware that a review by Crawley, positive or not, would certainly help sell his small book of poetry. Similarly, if Crawley had been aware of Harmer’s history of mental instability, I have no doubt he wouldn’t have reviewed The Grass Cadillac in the first place. The accounts of their first meeting at a poetry reading are various. Harmer claimed he caught Crawley leering at his wife and assaulted him. Crawley maintained the attack was entirely unprovoked, though considering that Emma Harmer left her husband for the critic, many would tend to accept Harmer’s account.

  Crawley had already handed in his review of Harmer’s short-story collection The Dog and the Lamp-post before the incident at the festival, though it had not yet gone to press. (Incidentally, he was annoyed that Harmer had inadvertently stolen the title he had wished to use for his book of criticism.) Crawley subsequently claimed he did not change a word of his review, even in light of the broken leg he received. This is true, but it is not entirely to Crawley’s credit. As he recuperated in hospital, Emma Harmer, on one of her frequent visits, had informed him that her husband was being treated for schizophrenia. Knowing this, Crawley let stand the reference comparing Harmer to a lunatic daubing filth on the walls of a madhouse. This was a despicably cruel act from a normally kind-hearted man. Crawley could never forgive Harmer for beating and humiliating him in public, and returns to him again and again in his work in the weeks after the incident. For example, in a review of Pat Reid’s The Raphael Cipher Crawley says, ‘Bad as [this book] is, it has had the good fortune to be published after Frank Harmer’s The Dog and the Lamp-post, ensuring it will not, at least, be the worst book this year.’

  Eventually, Crawley’s editor and close friend, David Phillips, banned him from making any further references to Harmer in the journal. By that time, of course, a scandal had erupted over Ariel’s Daughter. The original review, at close to 10,000 words, was rejected by Phillips, the two men almost coming to blows when Crawley realised Phillips had cut 96 per cent of the review. (Phillips later destroyed all copies of the longer review, fearing it would irrevocably damage his friend’s reputation.) Even in the shortened form, the review is excruciating, reading like a 400-word chat-up line. And yet it must have had the desired effect, as soon after it was published Emma Harmer fled to Africa with Crawley. Her husband, pursuing them to the airport, was arrested for brandishing a knife at the boarding gates.

  It is the great irony of Peter Crawley’s life that he courted controversy yet married banality. But there can be no doubt that he was deeply in love with Emma Harmer. Only a man besotted would have carefully recorded for posterity her asinine travel observations in An African Honeymoon.

  Controversially, Crawley’s last, unfinished piece, the wry essay ‘Where Is That Great Australian Novel?,’ has been included in the collection. I believe that here, at least, the editors made the correct decision. The twelve pages that survive are amongst the best Crawley ever wrote. Sadly, we will never know the answer to the question he set himself. As he was putting the finishing touches to the essay, a deranged Frank Harmer broke into the critic’s house. He found Crawley in his study, bludgeoned him into unconsciousness with a glass paperweight, then stuffed the last eight pages of the essay down Crawley’s throat, choking him to death.

  Peter Crawley once said, pessimistically, ‘The good writing about writing will go first, and then the good writing itself.’ This collection of good writing about writing has not sold well, and the publishers have scrapped plans for a second volume. I suspect this will be the last we will see of Crawley on the bookshelves, except perhaps in the form of posterity he most detested, that of three or four lines in a book of quotations.

  And the good writing itself? Crawley’s widow Emma recently changed her name to Emma Crawley-Harmer. Her autobiography, The Poetess of Sadness (with its lengthy subtitle, One Woman’s Extraordinary Journey Through Marriage, Infidelity, Madness and Murder) reputedly sold for a six-figure sum, and was released by Picador last week. While the reviews were overwhelmingly negative, the book has debuted at number two on the bestsellers list, outsold only by The Dog and the Lamp-post, now in its seventh printing.

  Repossession

  Michael Meehan

  Tom O’Reilly took two shotgun cartridge cases and rolled his note and secured it inside, forcing the lip of one case into the other till it was watertight. Then he pitched it to the darkness. A year or two later and well after his death and only by an extraordinary chance a dog out chasing kangaroos toppled into the abandoned well-shaft and stayed there barking, unable to climb the crumbling walls and save itself until they lowered the youngest of his sons into the well-shaft on a rope.

  The red flash of the cartridge caught his eye, half buried in the dried mud and the sand.

  A year later, the sons were called to rescue a child stuck up a hollow pine. The boy, down from the city, had gone up to steal a Major Mitchell’s egg. He climbed too high and out along a branch, a
nd was unable to get back. When they went up to fetch him, they found high up in the crevice a cigarette pack wrapped in plastic with a further note inside.

  After that time they went on to discover other notes, Tom’s nine children now starting to scour the wilderness for further messages, with now and then a cartridge case appearing, or a bottle or a matchbox or cigarette pack hidden within a hollow log or in a cockatoo’s nest lodged high up in a blasted Murray pine and even, once, deep in a rabbit burrow. All knew by then that through those last months of his life, Tom O’Reilly, with tumour spreading through his brain and all around him the lands that were mingled with his sweat and labour shrinking apace, roamed out across those tracts of recent dispossession to plant his mysteries and his presence, to seed his lost lands with fragments of some message, the whole of which was never to be found.

  Tom discovered just months before the tumour took its hold that the leasehold on all the land that he and his forbears had cleared, settled and straightened for a hundred years was to be resumed, the stock hunted out, the fences uprooted, the sheds demolished and the dams choked off, with Tom and his heirs left clinging to each other on a withered three-hundred-acre freehold fragment at the core. The word resumed did not mean in this instance a return to any state of being that ever was before, when the first inhabitants tracked across that wilderness. It did not mean a vacating of the land for other wandering pilgrims to return, or restoration to some pristine state where the land might learn to speak in its own voice. It was rather for the imprint of a bureaucratic story, of this way and not that way and nine to five and make sure the gate is closed. The new Decalogue was spelt out in signs and bins and chains and padlocks, the pathways and tracks closely charted and signposted with the strictest prohibitions, and camping here and not there and, of course, no open fires. The stringy box and buloke and stark stands of pine were now lost to regulation, the early nomad wanderings of Tom O’Reilly and his brothers and sisters below the vast white gums that lined the ancient lakebeds now boxed back to the padlocked gate, the official map, the jackboot grid of Management Vehicles Only.