'Fuck All Editors': The Ern Malley Affair and Gwen ... - [API] Network

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Jumping the Queuedemand that she should revoke him. The commands to ‘Stare the sun up ... thinkyourself blind’ and ‘stop your ears’ are devastating in their harshness and for thesuffering and pain Harwood is able to evoke in Abelard’s words. Harwood incitesAbelard to sacrifice his own feelings for Eloisa’s soul to ‘Recall no ghost oflove’. 34Characters in Harwood’s poems like Abelard and Eloisa or Krote and ProfessorEisenbart are not subpersonalities. Subpersonalities express a facet of the coreself, while characters help subpersonalities explore their preoccupations. Just asthe woman in the park, in the most famous sonnet of Walter Lehmann, is acharacter that may be used to express many of Harwood’s feelings, so too Abelardand Eloisa provide a way for Harwood to reveal a deep sense of loss. The sonnetsshould be read as an expression of undying love for a lover out of one’s reach.Perhaps the unrequited love experienced by a young Harwood may well have beenthe basis for the manifestation of the subpersonality Walter Lehmann. Her psyche,helping her to overcome these disappointments, placed these emotions within theWalter Lehmann subpersonality. By using the subpersonality of Walter Lehmannto write these sonnets, the passion and intensity of the emotion cannot be misreadas a parody. The part of Harwood that is Walter Lehmann does not joke; perhapsthat is why the hoax is synonymous with the unveiling of the Lehmannpseudonym.Harwood’s hoaxes and pseudonyms were more than just a way to expose theprejudices of editors. Though she claimed that she employed a variety ofpseudonyms (Theophilus Panbury, Walter Lehmann, Francis Geyer, MiriamStone, Tim Kline, W W Hargendoor) to ensure that as many of her poems aspossible gained publication, her pseudonyms were much more than publicityploys: they revealed her as a complex psychological being who consciouslyemployed subpersonalities to explore a range of feelings she felt were notacceptable for her own public persona. Harwood’s ability to create an array ofpseudonyms reveals a psychological awareness. Both Vincent O’Sullivan andGregory Kratzmann have referred to Harwood’s inner complexity, describing heras a poet and friend with a ‘complex and enigmatic mind’. 35 This kind ofcomplexity is not an unusual trait in writers.It is Harwood’s conviction that in interviews, ‘the person to whom you are nowtalking is not the same as the one who writes poems ... the person writing is notthe person speaking’: 36 ‘invisible glass’ lies between her ‘two selves’. 37 Harwoodcontinually analysed the division she saw not only in the public and privatespheres of her life but the division she saw in herself: ‘I thought how inwardlyfierce I’d always been, but how calm and untroubled my exterior had been’. 38 Thissplit in identity supports the assertion by James Vargiu, Director of thePsychosynthesis Institute, that ‘we express different aspects of ourselves atdifferent times’: 39156Many writers have pointed out that in our personality there exist a multiplicity ofpersonages — of subpersonalities — each one attempting to fulfil its own aims,sometimes co-operating but more often isolated or in a state of conflict. 40It seems remarkable that despite the interviewers’ and critics’ emphases onHarwood’s divided self, a psychosocial, or what I will term a psychomutative orpsychovocal, reading has never been attempted. Both Hoddinott and Trigg flag the
Cassandra Athertonissue of multiple selves in their expositions, but neither attempt to read her poetryin the light of her pseudonyms.The theory of subpersonalities is appropriate for application to literature. Firstconceived by humanistic therapists John Rowan and Mick Cooper, the ‘notion ofcompeting subpersonalities also favours a more distributed sense of self’. 41 Wecan be many things at one time, just as we may feel many emotions at one time.When used as a tool for the study of literature, this theory allows the critic to ‘gainaccess to individuals in the creative acts of understanding themselves, projectingtheir aspirations and desperations, and relating to the significant individuals intheir lives’. 42 The nature of subpersonalities is best expressed by social researcherThomas R Whitaker, who captures the complexities inherent in the use ofsubpersonalities. Two opposing yet connected processes define the way in whichsubpersonalities are controlled and in turn exercise control. Whitaker describes a‘multi-dimensional ... internal community of subpersonalities ... a somewhatdisorderly congeries of partly subliminal and rather malleable entities who voicetheir feelings and knowledge when accessed or provoked by our presentsituation’. 43This is not to suggest that there is not a core self that governs these subselves.Though a personality is composed of a series of subpersonalities, there is anoverriding personality that is often referred to in the first person; the ‘I’ that ismost often present in non-threatening situations. In an interview with Beston,Harwood argues that ‘I feel that I have sometimes been handicapped by being thepoet-housewife figure; you know how she can make a nice apricot sponge andwrite poetry too. There is a savage, nasty part lurking somewhere down there, andyet this is part of the kind mother too.’ 44 This revelation adds credence to thetheory that a very divided self manifests itself in subpersonalities. StudyingHarwood’s poetry by creating dossiers on each of her pseudonyms facilitates aprocess of analysis where her poetry is read as a product of this subpersonality,and therefore provides a new insight into the psychological underpinnings of herpoetry.157
Page 1 and 2: ‘Fuck All Editors’: The Ern Mal
Page 3 and 4: Cassandra Athertonindecent. The res
Page 5: Cassandra Athertonstaff corresponde
Page 9: 25 Candida Baker, Yacker 3: Austral

'Fuck All Editors': The Ern Malley Affair and Gwen ... - [API] Network

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?