Paul Adams The Stranger from Melbourne:
Frank Hardy: A Literary Biography 1944-1975
UWA Press $29.95pb, 212pp,
1 876268 23 9
THE SUBTITLE OF THIS BOOK is significant because it is far less a biography than an account of the social circumstances in which Hardy's most significant work was produced and the culture which helped shape it. There is very little about the man himself and in fact a photograph of the Bacchus Marsh cricket team, in which Hardy was apparently a quite tricky spin bowler, strikes one most of all by its incongruity. The chief interest of the book is its account of a quarter century of constant conflict among Communist and ex-Communist intellectuals in Australia. As Adams says, Hardy's writings 'convey to us the sense of distress and crisis which left-wing intellectuals felt in the face of disorientating change in the second part of the twentieth century.' It also accomplishes the paradoxical and formidable achievement of making Hardy's novels seem much more interesting than they seem to me to be.
The book takes Hardy's major works and deals with each of them in turn: Power Without Glory , The Hard Way , The Unlucky Australians , The Outcasts of Foolgarah and But the Dead Are Many , as well as to a lesser extent the stories in Legends from Benson's Valley . Adams' contextualising of Hardy's writing, and sometimes even of the circumstances of publication, is done very well. He points to the surprising rejection of Hardy's own rural background (like Peter Carey he came from Bacchus Marsh) in favour of 'a futuristic vision of enlightenment in the city.' If he considerably overrates Hardy's position as a 'modernist' writer in my view, he is not unaware of the romantic egoism that so often places the writer at the centre of his work, even if he dresses it up splendidly as 'a way of asserting artistic independence by making the inner self the focus of the dialectic of history.'
His accounts of the novels are heavily expository and he is implicitly critical of those writers who offer what are in effect essentialist views of the novels, concentrating on the mundane qualities of the writing or the stereotypical characterisation without taking into account the historical and social significance of the works and the circumstances out of which they sprang.
Some of these were extraordinary. The Hard Way made us familiar with many of the efforts Hardy made to secure publication for Power Without Glory but I had not realised how much research others had done on the author's behalf into the life of John Wren. Adams claims dubiously that Power Without Glory 'is the autobiographical account of the character John West and at the same time it is popularly accepted as a true biography of John Wren.' I have always felt that Hardy's deliberate and pointed invitation to the reader to identify the central figures left the book in a kind of aesthetic limbo. Do we read it as biography, in which case needs to be judged substantially on its factual correctness or do we read it as a thinly disguised roman à clef, in which case it has to be viewed, to put it mildly, as lacking aesthetic subtlety, its popularity largely owing to the surrounding publicity of the court case?
Adams quotes Hardy as saying that up to sixty per cent of the book is fiction and argues that 'Rather than 'history', the book should more properly be thought as a long and complicated yarn or 'legend' in the same vein as Hardy's early Benson's Valley stories which synthesise rumours, factual information and historical invention. But in that why give characters names which are so titillatingly close to their easily identified originals? It is rather like those two idiotic novels predicated around the idea that Jane Austen spent two years in Australia or Henry Lawson had an affair with Mary Gilmour. Despite his attacks on literary commentators like Ken Gott and John Docker, even Adams is a little uncertain about the final worth of Hardy's writing, commenting that he is one of Australia's most popular writers but later lamenting that much or most of his work is out of print.
Incomplete:
Laurie Clancy is a freelance Melbourne writer and novelist. His latest novel, Night Parking, has been published by Bylander Press