The Best Australian Stories 2010 (16 page)

*

From
The Sydney Review
, 6 November 2001

The Dog and the Lamp-post
By Frank Harmer
Joseph Grand Publishing, 204pp, $35

Reviewed by Peter Crawley

[The following review was written one month ago, two weeks prior to the events which occurred at the Newcastle Literary Festival, at a reading of Emma Harmer's poetry. I would like to thank the many readers who sent me get-well cards, and a number of my colleagues who came to visit me in the hospital to sign the cast on my leg. I would also like to thank Emma Harmer for her many visits whilst I was convalescing, and her apologising to me on her husband's behalf. I will not comment upon the night in question here, as the police are currently preparing a number of charges against Frank Harmer. My only regret is that the debut of a most promising poet was all but ruined by drunken, thuggish behaviour. Regarding the below review – which, I would like to stress, predates the vicious assault upon me – not one word has been changed or added.]

I am one of those readers who like to write my name and the date on the inside of books. I underline striking passages and jot comments in the margins. As a critic, such notes often form the backbone of a review. After finishing Frank Harmer's collection of twelve stories, I idly flipped through the pages to see what I had written, and could find only one comment, on page forty-five. ‘No tree should have died for this.' This review is an appendix to that note.

Readers may remember Harmer from a collection of poetry published two years ago, which was reviewed in these pages. Harmer is evidently one of those pathetic species of writers who read their notices. The title of his collection, and the longest story therein,
The Dog and the Lamp-post
, is taken from a comment by Christopher Hampton. ‘Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs.' It will come as no surprise to all four of the people who endured
The Grass Cadillac
that this image of Hampton's is the only memorable one on the book. Philosophers have long been telling us that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite length of time will eventually reproduce Shakespeare's plays. This I am prepared to concede. However, I cannot accept that an infinite number of Frank Harmers in the same situation would ever come up with an original line.

Harmer, admittedly, is better suited to the bludgeon of prose than the rapier of poetry, even if the only wounds he inflicts are on himself. His stories follow loners and losers, men often burdened with literary ambition, but without the talent to pursue it. In ‘The Reader of Books,' for example, a man reads a novel aloud to his dying father. In what should be an interesting twist, it turns out that the father has Alzheimer's, and the same two pages of the book are read every night. In the hands of another, this might have been a moving piece. But Harmer could rob even a suicide note of its pathos. His characters obliterate the distinction E.M. Forster made between flat and round. Harmer's characters are square: little boxes half full of dull adjectives.

In ‘The Papercut,' one of the less boring stories, a man (Harmer's main characters are always men) cuts himself with his wife's Dear John letter. Again, an interesting premise is utterly squandered with uninvolving characters and flat prose. Harmer does not understand that the short story is a
glancing
form. His stories
stare
and writers who stare give us the same sense of discomfort as people who stare. Of the three stories ‘The Last Night on Earth,' ‘Rusty's Funeral' and ‘What ... What ... What Do You Mean? Exactly?' very little needs to be said. They are a mixture of carved-up Carver and hemmed-in Hemingway.

The longest story, ‘The Dog and the Lamp-post,' is a thinly disguised diatribe against literary critics, and one critic in particular. The main character, Paul Rawley, is a reviewer for a Sydney newspaper. He is described as having thick, square glasses, a sparse grey beard, and a round face ‘like a bulldog chewing a wasp.' (Here I would direct the reader's attention to my photograph at the top of the page.) Rawley, an impotent drunk ‘who looked like he enjoyed the smell of his own farts,' is tormented by the fact that he is merely a critic, and not a ‘true writer.' It is this jealousy that causes him to attempt to ruin the career of a flowering literary genius, Ray Charmer. Eventually (C)Harmer confronts (C)Rawley with a gun, and forces the critic to feed on the review, literally eating his own words. To say this disturbing fantasy is the best story in the collection is not to say much. At least Harmer's obvious hatred of critics (and myself in particular) brings the characters lurching to some kind of half-life, and I must admit it was entertaining to see myself caricatured, in the same way it is entertaining, for a moment, to see a child's drawing of oneself. But just as a child's drawing is disposable, so is Harmer's story.

The last three stories in the collection, ‘I'm Not Alone,' ‘The Web of Blood' and ‘With the Dead,' see the writer take a turn into horror. This is a genre that all too easily descends into the juvenile, and the stories here are no exception, though perhaps juvenile is the wrong word for such violent, misogynistic tales. The sadistic climax of ‘I'm Not Alone' does not invoke uneasiness or chills, as the best ghost story does, but mere disgust. By the close of ‘With the Dead' one begins to worry about Frank Harmer. His writing has by then begun to resemble that of a mental patient, scrawling his sordid fantasies in excrement on the walls of his padded cell.

It may be some consolation to Harmer that the very few copies of his book that are sold will undoubtedly remain in mint condition. I cannot imagine them ever becoming dog-eared. Once the reader loses his place, there is no desire to get it back. Many of my fellow critics say the novel is dead. If Frank Harmer ever writes one, then it surely will be.

*

From
The Sydney Review
, 29 December 2002

Ariel's Daughter
By Emma Harmer
McGonnigal-Marzials, 16pp, $15

Reviewed by Peter Crawley
Books of the Year #4

The announcement of this year's shortlist for the Alexander Poetry Prize caused something of a stir among the Sydney literati when, beside worthy works by David Malouf and Les Murray, there appeared the little-known name of Emma Harmer and her slim volume,
Ariel's Daughter
. I was one of three judges of the award and can recall clearly the moment I read her first poem. It struck me like a revelation. Though she eventually lost the prize to Murray, I find that it is Harmer's poems that I enjoy more on re-reading, and wonder if we judges made the right decision after all.

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 light-heartedness, 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