Today is the 100th birthday of Gwen Harwood, one of Australia’s finest poets and most famous hoaxers. On August 5, 1961, Harwood published a pair of sonnets, “Eloisa to Abelard” and “Abelard to Eloisa,” in the Australian weekly, The Bulletin, under the pseudonym of Walter Lehmann. Unbeknownst to the editors at the time of publication, the sonnets read acrostically FUCK ALL EDITORS and SO LONG BULLETIN.
Within days of going to press, they were forced to pull the issue from the shelves, such was the deluge of complaints. The magazine, arguably the most prestigious in the country at the time, was at a loss as to why Lehmann, a supposed European emigre who had become a regular contributor to The Bulletin, would jeopardize his reputation with such a cheap and juvenile trick. (Douglas Stewart, the prominent poet and literary editor of The Bulletin from 1940 to 1961, had referred to Lehmann as a “fully formed poet; probably a genius”; while in 1961, Lehmann’s poem “Triste, Triste” was included in Australia’s premier annual poetry anthology, Australian Poetry, alongside such recognized luminaries as A.D. Hope and David Campbell.) Desmond O’Grady, the recently appointed poetry editor, first assumed the prank was an intricately devised plot from a group of Melbourne intellectuals and literary figures seeking revenge on The Bulletin, after the Sydney magazine had run an exposé on the Communist infiltration of Melbourne Universities and the local literary scene.
But it was a “Tasmanian housewife”—as the press dubbed Harwood when reporting on the scandal—who had duped them. Matching postmarks on submissions sent from Harwood and Lehmann tipped the editors off, and several days after publication Harwood received a phone call from O’Grady. The editor wanted to know why she had written the sonnets. “Because I am a poet,” was Harwood’s unequivocal reply. Both Gwen Harwood and Walter Lehmann were banned from The Bulletin.
Harwood had been disheartened by Walter Lehmann’s success. It had proved her suspicions true: the Australian literary community was a racket run by undiscerning men; a gentlemen’s club, and not a very talented or sophisticated one at that. The acrostics were sent as a literary test, with the punishment for failing the test embedded within the test itself. Harwood’s judgement on the poems was firm: “They are poetical rubbish and show up the incompetence of anyone who publishes them.” A couplet from “Abelard to Eloisa” reads “Louder than death in headlines the unkind / elements hawk my passion: stop your ears.”
It was this entrenched sexism, which permeated throughout all corners of Australian society in the mid-20th-Century, that in large-part inspired Harwood to create the character of Walter Lehmann. Harwood had struggled to gain recognition for her poetry throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, rejected by the countries’ ubiquitous male editors—until she began writing as a man herself. Lehmann acted as both mask and mirror: the prejudices and shortcomings of the industry were reflected by Harwood’s need for Lehmann, and this reflection was subsequently sharpened by Lehmann’s success.
Harwood’s interest in pseudonyms, however, went deeper than as tools for social critique. Her life-long passion for the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly the philosopher’s view that it was impossible to discern the “inner” meaning of a word—some metaphysical referent that was applicable in every case—due to language’s dependency on context, heavily influenced her approach to poetry. She agreed with her friend A.D. Hope that poets were “nomads of the mind,” and her work was often a mapping of the psychological plane and the way in which the labyrinthine psyche inhabits its physical landscape In the poem “Madame Esmerelda’s Predictions” Harwood writes “We are in the House of Language / My voice is not my own. Good poetry will change.” The disassociation between the poet and the “I” of the poem (My voice is not my own) is the foundation of Harwood’s philosophical and linguistic explorations with the development of her pseudonyms.
By the time Walter Lehmann had been banned from the pages of The Bulletin, his successor had already made several appearances in the magazine. His name was Francis Geyer and he published poems in the issues of 25 January, 1961; 24 May, 1961; and 22 July, 1961. The name was yet again a well measured pseudonym, both masculine and cultured (Lehmann translates from the German to “the man”). With no small irony, Geyer appeared in the 12 August, 1961 issue of The Bulletin, a week after the publication of the Lehmann acrostics, and a week before the 19 August issue in which the magazine ran an editorial denouncing the tasteless and obscure humor of some “lady poets.” In a letter to her friend Tony Riddell, Harwood commented sardonically “Rather good of The Bulletin to go on publishing F. Geyer considering the ban on W.L. and G.H.”
As with Lehmann, Harwood equipped Guyer with a biography, full of prejudices, desires, tastes and experiences. In this way, Harwood squarely falls into the tradition of heteronymic writings of Soren Kierkegaard and Fernando Pessoa. Heteronyms are distinct from pseudonyms, Pessoa argued, as they are “imaginary poets with real poems in them.” The purpose of the heteronym is not to provide an authorial defense through the protection of a mask, rather for the mask to be the source of creation that breaks down the protected avenues of the mind.
“In the Park” is one of Gwen Harwood’s most anthologized poems. Here it is in full:
She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date.
Two children whine and bicker, tug her skirt.
A third draws aimless patterns in the dirt.
Someone she loved once passes by — too late
to feign indifference to that casual nod.
‘How nice,’ et cetera. ‘Time holds great surprises.’
From his neat head unquestionably rises
a small balloon... ‘but for the grace of God...’
They stand awhile in flickering light, rehearsing
the children’s names and birthdays. ‘It’s so sweet
to hear their chatter, watch them grow and thrive,’
she says to his departing smile. Then, nursing
the youngest child, sits staring at her feet.
To the wind she says, ‘They have eaten me alive.’
The sonnet originally appeared in the The Bulletin issue of 8 March, 1961 under the name Walter Lehmann. In the poem, a dowdy housewife is made aware of how much her beauty has faded by the reaction of a former lover. The strength of the poem lies in the discrepancy between the platitudes the woman so instinctively rolls out on the joys of motherhood, and the unspoken recognition that she has been “eaten alive” by the children that she loves. At the time of publication, critics praised Lehmann for his insight into the female psyche, yet when Lehmann was revealed to be Gwen Harwood, the interpretation of the poem shifted.
“In the Park” was seen as a far harsher indictment of maternal obligation, and that the real “truth” of the poem came not from artistic imagining, but directly from the poet’s own experience. Critic Barbara Williams found in it an “impulse of self-expression.” Harwood was plagued by this interpretation of the poem, with interviewers questioning the closeness of association between poet and speaker; what they were really asking was “does Gwen Harwood love her children?” Harwood’s most famous riposte to such an interview reads, “read the poem. It says she sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date. Mine are never out of date.”
In an interview with The Weekend Australian in 1989, Harwood recalled the reaction to “In The Park”
<< Somebody once said to me a woman couldn’t have written that poem, she would have been too self-pitying, she would have never written that savage last line, she would have spared the poem that dreadful last line. Only a man could have written that poem with the necessary self detachment. >>
But perhaps what is more interesting than the gender of the writer is the proposition: could Gwen Harwood have written ‘In the Park’ without Walter Lehmann?
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