The Devil and James McAuley, page 2
To add to his lustre, McAuley was a brilliant and inventive pianist. Earlier in his life he had considered becoming a concert pianist; at university it was jazz piano which made him something of a legend. He could perform any number of improvised jazz and blues numbers, often with his own devilish lyrics. Metre was built into his body, even when his playing was frenzied: ‘behind the frenzy was a resilient toughness; a kind of rhythmic control’.5 As the musical director of the University Review he proved as much of a drawcard as the revue itself, undulating up and down on his seat, a cigarette in his mouth and a glass of neat gin on the piano top. He could do an imitation of a Fats Waller song as easily as one by Louis Armstrong or an adaptation of Noel Coward’s ‘Twentieth Century Blues’, and his impromptu performance of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ on the carillon in the university tower after a party became a talking point for years to come.
Like James Joyce, McAuley delighted in the blasphemous. ‘The Ballad of Joking Jesus’ was a favourite performance piece and he once offended a large part of the student body at the Arts Informal with his uninvited recital of it. He also shared with Joyce a love of ribald puns, as he showed off in a letter to an old friend:
Rejoice and begad! A litter half eye scent to Ju-Ju de Sandy Coq. Thangyou and yo sweatheard fo inseducing me. The encunter was most simulating espiciously fo me. I whope she scents me a latter. I arset her fo ein phooeygraph, tooky by delight, becoarse eye have scene her butt by moodlight by the riever’s side when darkness was diminyrendo. She has a corps delectable, witch would be nice to clammer abit on. I would demoonstrate to her my own pertickler big thick—trick! I shall contrahole her, and if she naughty I will begetting a stick to her. A bit joycy bifsteak upper a sole (o mio). You can take it with her. At leest you cunt, I can. Eye ope she’s not an offal sod that I cant get on with, like most of skurts I meat these daze. I would like to have the a-queynt-ance of a nice femurel to sooth my sorrowful s’ole, when I feel sheet on the lever. Becods I am tired of leeving alone (as the prisoner’s ballock says). But she will be a newsance too like all these freudulent women. A tun of cares in on my shudders what with one thing and an udder. I am weary of the whoreld and sickert art—titian off to make a whistler turner constable—or drinkwater. Would I had these puns in shillings and pence! Take care of the pens and the shittings will take care of themselves, not to mention the poons. I will mumble-jumble no more. Argott, Kristnamurphy, and the Holy Spillit, Ah blessed Vermin Marey, and all the higher-archies of Heaven: bawls bawls bawls.
Heil Hipbath!
Shame-us6
An immensely attractive young man with a reputation as a sexual Lothario, McAuley exerted a magnetic force-field for men and women alike. At the end of 1940 he was a turbulent twenty-three-year-old who had just completed his MA in English. He was at a loose end, having quit his post as housemaster at the prestigious Church of England Grammar School, when the headmaster pressured him to join the AIF. The army did not suit his expectations. Were he to be called up, he told friends, he would be a conscientious objector, even though his objection to the war was a bit hazy. Poetry was his passion, not politics. For all that, he had built up a remarkable collection of books and pamphlets on anarchism by diligently scouring second-hand bookshops. With the banning of the Communist Party, many people associated with the New Theatre lost their libraries in the Special Branch raids on subversive literature. McAuley thought the better of it and got rid of his collection.7 If pressed he would still define himself as an anarchist.8
Jim McAuley was the centre of a literary coterie at Sydney University which tended to congregate on weekdays in the seedy lounge of the Park View Hotel in Myrtle Street, behind the campus, while on Friday afternoon their waterhole was a smart downtown bar at Ushers. At night they would stock up on quarts of beer at the pub and go back to the house of one or another of the group, or they would hold impromptu parties till dawn, supplied from the sly grog shop, at a ramshackle place in the Rocks area they called Buggery Barn. There was also an illegal wine shop in the Rocks, entered through a lane at the back of the owner’s house. On Saturday they met at Sherry’s coffee shop in the city to discuss poetry and share their latest work. The make-up of the group might vary, but certain key members could always be expected to be around some of the time. Alan Crawford, whose passion for student intrigue was matched only by his passion for poetry, was older than his student friends, as was Alec Hope, who taught English at the Teacher’s College. Hope had taken his MA at Oxford and wrote raffish poetry, so he was still one of them, even if he did have a wife and child at home in Lane Cove. Alf Conlon, self-styled renaissance man, was also over thirty with a wife somewhere in the suburbs. A dropout from Law with an Arts degree, he was nominally enrolled in Medicine. Conlon had got himself elected student representative on the University Senate in 1939 by promising to abolish compulsory lectures and was touted in Honi Soit as ‘student benefactor no. 1’. The most flamboyant of the group was Oliver Somerville, who had taken a poor honours degree in Philosophy, much to the disappointment of his hero, Professor John Anderson. Somerville affected a shabby cavalier style and saw himself as a poet and satirist, although his true vocation seemed to be getting drunk. His friend Ron Dunlop was much more staid, a trainee teacher, who had taken an uninspiring honours degree in Greek under Professor Enoch Powell. Joan Fraser, the lone woman admitted to the circle, was also at Teachers College. She had majored in French and German and was working on a novel. Other occasional members of the group included Ian Maxwell from the English department, Jack Shepherd, a lecturer in History, Ian Hogbin, who taught Anthropology and was the past president of the Arts Society, Hugh Gilchrist, the current editor of the university magazine Hermes, Jim Plimsoll, an economist who was big in student politics, and John Reid from Maths. The precocious novice was Donald Horne, still an undergraduate.
It seemed to Horne that everyone in this circle adopted a pose of contempt for everything that was happening in the intellectual wasteland it was their misfortune to find themselves in. The attitude was captured in the poem ‘Australia’ written by Alec Hope in 1939, which described a place where ‘The river of her immense stupidity / Flood her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth’; a place populated by men ‘Whose boast is not “we live” but “we survive”’.9 In the ‘literary dungheap’ of Australia there was little that was not second-rate. The exceptions, they agreed, were the poetic geniuses among themselves, pre-eminently Jim McAuley and Hal Stewart.10
McAuley and Stewart had met ten years earlier when they were both at Fort Street High, a famous school which selected clever boys from all over Sydney and fashioned them for academic success. They had both won Exhibition scholarships to university: McAuley in 1935, Stewart a year later. Each lived in the western suburbs and for years they had travelled together from the suburbs to the city, first to school and later to university. From a friendly rivalry between two aspiring schoolboy poets, their relationship had matured into a sort of literary partnership which saw them yoked together in the minds of their companions. For all that their friends liked to see Hal and Jimmy as a pair, they were very different from one another.
Harold Stewart was small, with an open cheerful face and thick dark hair parted neatly in the middle. Donald Horne thought that ‘he looked like an honest man of the suburbs come to make some repair to the house’.11 Somewhat secretive, he was very much his own man; a loner. Having lost his scholarship because he refused to attend classes, Stewart had dropped out of university in his undergraduate years and lived a precarious existence as a poet and art critic. He had good connections in the Sydney avant-garde art world and was close to the painters Donald Friend and William Dobell.12 It was through Stewart that others in the group, such as Oliver Somerville and Ian Hogbin, gained entry to the bohemian demimonde of Donald Friend.13 How he survived was anyone’s guess. He later recalled that he had to find sixpence in the street to buy a meat pie to eat.14 A good deal of his time was spent in the municipal library in the Queen Victoria Building, copying out poems that impressed him and pursuing his interest in aesthetics and spiritualism. Stewart had a fascination for Asian art and philosophy, probably inherited from his father who had lived in India until his thirties and spoke fluent Hindustani. Another enthusiasm was the Enormous Room by e e cummings, a book he recommended to everyone. He didn’t drink like the others, nor did he appear to share their robust interest in sex. As McAuley quipped in a piece of doggerel about the sexual pursuits of his friends:
Stewart is nice, he gets his tuck
Like Onan—vide Genesis.
Most of his friends thought of Hal as a loner who just liked to keep his concerns to himself. Homosexuality was not something they talked openly about.
It was a very masculine group. Joan Fraser felt she gained admittance by suppressing her femininity. She had a sharp wit and rolled her own cigarettes, just like one of the boys. They called her Fraser and treated her as one of themselves, which wasn’t really what she wanted from Jim McAuley, with whom she was almost certainly in love. Girls were dolls, she came to understand, either conquests or ornaments, and she wasn’t prepared to be either. To get acceptance within the group was like walking on knives; she must not appear to be too clever or be too competitive with the boys: ‘Those young men, they thought if they weren’t geniuses, what were they? They couldn’t stand the idea that a woman was as good as they were.’ This was especially true of Oliver Somerville and Alan Crawford. Woman-haters, she thought. At times she felt they regarded her with naked hatred.15
Part of the reason for their hostility was her closeness to McAuley while he was writing his MA thesis. Since she was fluent in French and German she helped him with translations of the symbolist poets he was studying, poets she admired just as he did. She wanted more from him. When a sexual encounter did eventuate, she was humiliated that he not only rejected her as a lover, but he did so publicly, in a story in Arna where he loftily declared, for all the group to read, that a woman who loved a man but who could fight down her passion was ‘not without nobility’. Although they remained friends until she left for a teaching appointment in the bush in 1941, she never forgave him for it.16
Fraser wasn’t the only one who wanted more from McAuley. Hal Stewart was in love with him too, she believed, although he showed more equanimity than her in coping with McAuley’s sexual teasing; his ‘game of show and withhold’.17 It was possible that McAuley had inspired Stewart’s passionate ‘Epithalamium’, written when McAuley was living away from Sydney and published in Hermes in the first term of 1939. It read, in part:
Lost we are without each other
We are beings twain,
I am the body round your heart,
You permeate my brain …
We are that fated fatal pact,
Time nor space can part,
Because your body holds my soul,
And I disturb your heart.
In this intensely masculine world nothing was valued more highly than poetry, although the boys sometimes tried their hand at short fiction and literary criticism. Their vehicle was Hermes, a classy literary magazine funded by the university union and generally despised by the student body. For years Alan Crawford fought almost singlehandedly to fend off the efforts of Engineering, Science, Medicine and Economics to deny funding to Hermes, so that young poets such as Stewart and McAuley could have the encouragement of seeing their work in print.18 Almost every meeting of the SRC in 1939 and 1940 saw a motion to shut down Hermes, which was said to be unrepresentative of the undergraduate body and dominated by an elitist clique whose work was obscure and decadent. There was a demonstration against continued funding of the magazine after one entire issue was produced in verse. With help from Alf Conlon and Jim Plimsoll, Alan Crawford could always narrowly muster the numbers to maintain the magazine, although it remained ‘on probation’ until it moved out of the groups hands in 1941.
As well as getting them a small measure of public exposure, publishing in Hermes seems to have been a special kind of communication among the members of this male literary clique. Many of the articles and poems were written under pseudonyms, the identity of the writer known only to the initiated. Stewart often wrote as Kenning Skald while Somerville wrote as Padruic. McAuley called himself Glaucon. Later, after Hermes was lost to them, Hal and Jim invented the composite Dulcie Renshaw when they wrote in Honi Soit.
Crawford may have tried out pseudonyms as well, although he was happy to put his own name to a savage lament at the marriage of his close friend Jack Shepherd, which concluded ‘Sad that all his wine of life / Should now be stoppered by a wife’. To take a wife was seen as the ultimate act of betrayal. Ron Dunlop also felt this sting of scorn when he married a woman who played golf, prompting a parody from Somerville called ‘Epimetheus Unbound’, which featured a spineless hero who graduated ‘from Greek to Golf’. For Somerville and his friends, to give up Greek for Golf became a kind of code for betraying the bohemian principle in favour of suburban conformity.
McAuley had been Hermes editor in 1937 and it was his work in the magazine which consistently impressed its few readers in the subsequent years. Equally it was his work in particular which drew complaints about decadence and sexual obsession. His jejune poems were shot through with sexual yearning and erotic fantasy. For a while he was heavily influenced by the Symbolist poets and had cultivated a brooding intensity and romantic agony—‘he too shall drink of your large breasts, O Sorrow’—which he was later to jettison as too derivative.
By 1940 the dominant theme of McAuley’s poetry was the dichotomy between elusive love and compulsive lust, with a powerful undertow of self-loathing, and it displayed a brooding, inverted narcissism, starkly at odds with the devil-may-care extrovert who was the life of the party. One celebrated poem was ‘Selene on Latmos’, published in Hermes in 1939, which began:
Late through the suburbs wandered the blond moon
With disenchanted gaze, a little wild …
Oliver Somerville took delight in satirising McAuley with a highly suggestive parody, which he wickedly called ‘Jupiter on Ganymede’. His began:
Late through the suburbs wandered the blond loon
With gin-enchanted gait, a little Wilde …19
Even though he cut a dazzling figure among his admiring university cohort, McAuley was profoundly unsure of himself, his verbal brilliance and personal aplomb masking a deep personal unease. Stewart had the perspicacity and wit to see that his friend’s impressive style was protean dissembling:
Not Looking-Glass Land’s Anglo-Saxon Hare
Could strike such poses i’ the tangled air
As McAuley, who, with his trouper’s repertoire
Can boast a wardrobeful of attitudes,
Who if his gallery applauds for more,
Will rant them vastly superior platitudes
And autograph their arses at the door.20
McAuley’s acknowledgment of his dissembling was less light-hearted and more self-lacerating, as in the poem ‘Reflections’, where the cardboard cutout of a game cock is made to strut, caper and prance before the pecking hens, while inside
A howling desolation feeds that pride,
At whose dead centre sits a child that weeps
Lost and disconsolate, and never sleeps.
This last line was not merely a conceit. He often did not sleep, spending the hours between midnight and dawn walking the city, or taking refuge in seedy all-night cafes, to keep at bay the nocturnal terrors. Since his adolescence the night had not brought him peaceful repose but uncanny visitations which increasingly terrified him. In his poetry sleep and dreams were not images of peace, but of fear. One of his first poems, published in the Fort Street High School magazine when he was thirteen, detailed the phantoms that were every night outlined against the bright street light that shone onto his bedroom wall. These phantoms were a matter of grim fascination rather than terror for him, while two years later his poem ‘Madness’ spoke of ‘great black wings that came and went / Across the deep red eye of night’.21
By the time he got to university his nights were populated with horrors. Close friends wondered and worried about the intensity of Jim’s nightmares, which would bring him screaming out of sleep. Often he would lash out violently at his tormentor and on one occasion he broke all the windows of his room.22 McAuley himself could display a certain insouciance in respect of these nocturnal terrors. Around 1937 he wrote a series of three poems, never published, called ‘Nightmare Songs’, which introduced his constant night-time companion, ‘a big man in a stovepipe hat’:
He is my shadow on the wall,
Some say he isn’t there at all,
It isn’t true, it isn’t true!
He is just as real as me or you.
Despite the jaunty nursery-rhyme form of these songs, they have a desperately dark, possibly suicidal, undertone:
Here he lies, here he lies, resquiescat.
He knew a man in a stovepipe hat.23
McAuley’s nightmares appear to have intensified as a result of a traumatic love affair which drove him away from Sydney for part of 1938 and the Trinity term of 1939.24 Friends remember raising money for an abortion; Alan Crawford took the hat around. In his poetry sex became inextricably linked to nightmare, nowhere more clearly than in the tormented, ugly poem, ‘Gnostic Prelude’, which he wrote and rewrote in the years between 1939 and 1942. From the first stanza, where conception is rendered with the brutal image of the embryo as ‘a clot of treason’, the poem is infused with sexual anxiety and guilt. Sexuality is represented as a descent of the spirit; images of intercourse are transmuted into blind groping toward agony and desolation:
