Table Of Content‘ F l a s h i n g E y e s a n d
F l o a t i n g Ha i r ’
‘ F l a s h i n g E y e s a n d
F l o a t i n g Ha i r ’
A R e a d i n g o f G w e n H a r w o o d ’ s
P s e u d o n y m o u s P o e t r y
Cassandra L. Atherton
Australian Scholarly Publishing
MELBOURNE
© Cassandra L. Atherton 2006
First published in 2006 by
Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd
7 Lt Lothian Street North, North Melbourne, 3051
PO Box 299 Kew, Victoria 3101
tel (03) 9329 6963 fax (03) 9329 5452
www.scholarly.info [email protected]
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Atherton, Cassandra L.
Flashing eyes and floating hair : a reading of Gwen
Harwood’s pseudonymous poetry.
Bibliography. Includes index.
ISBN 1 74097 129 9 (pbk).
1. Harwood, Gwen, 1920–1995 – Criticism and
interpretation. 2. Australian poetry – 20th century.
I. Title.
A821.3
Copy-edited, typeset and indexed
by Diane Carlyle
Publication of this work was assisted by a publication
grant from the University of Melbourne.
C o n t e n t s
Acknowledgements vii
Preface viii
Introduction: Gwen Harwood’s Unburiable Talent ix
Chapter One: Riddell and Riddles 1
Golden Wine: the emergence of Little Gwendoline
and Ginnie 1
‘Giving free rein to her fantasies’: Gwendoline
and early subpersonality theory 8
My letters, my self/selves: autobiography 9
Fantasies of a coquette 10
Harwood and psychoanalysis 13
Gwen Harwood, personality and fantasy 15
Chapter Two: The Lehmann Oeuvre: A Critical
Explanation of the Early Sources 16
Pinning notes to poems 17
Everyman’s taste for scandal 24
In the dreaded park 27
Lehmann and post-partum depression 32
Fuck all editors 35
‘Do not touch’: traditions of museum discipline –
fossils and stones 51
Post-coitus interruptus: heavy hearts and soaring
spirits 56
Chapter Three: The Choir-boy Face: A Study of
Geyer’s Middle Years 63
Play and popular psychology 64
The politics of naming 67
The Frog Prince, Kröte and frog fetishes 71
Kröte: suburban Orpheus 75
The choir-boy face: a study of Geyer’s middle years 80
The Kröte sequence as pantomime of despair 83
‘Kröte’s not well’: Kröte as Harwood’s Pygmalion 109
Harwood: Queen of obiter dicta 113
Hungary for a Magyar air 119
Chapter Four: Miriam Stone: Filicidal Tendencies of
the High Priestess 134
(S)mother: Stone as mother 135
A Stone’s throw 137
Grey Stone: four grey walls and four grey towers 139
Burning Sappho: the pen is mightier than the sword 139
Boxing Day blues 156
The winged Stone 168
Chapter Five: ‘And He Likes To Be Known as
the Angry Young Man’: Timothy F Kline and
Anger Management 177
‘Oh hell!’ cried Tiny Tim: Harwood’s crippled
subpersonality 180
Tinny Tim: the lucky last pseudonym? 182
‘The weight of day’: ‘paving paradise and putting
up parking lots’ 185
Knock knocking on heaven’s door: knock knock
jokes and the Tower of Babel 188
‘Toppletowers of suburban sweetness’: fish and
chips and plastic strips 191
Beating the schnitzel and other romantic
euphemisms for sex 194
Shotgun weddings and the beast within 197
‘The circus of the good and the beautiful’:
in God’s waiting room 200
Alan Carvosso: the long lost pseudonym 213
Conclusion: Coring the Apple 217
Notes 220
Works Cited 249
Works Consulted 260
Index 265
A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s
My warmest thanks to Professor Chris Wallace-Crabbe who
once told me that I remind him of Gwen.
I would like to thank Mary Harwood for tap dancing her
way into my life five years ago. Her biting wit, ebullience and
intelligence were everything I had expected after reading
Gwen’s letters, and more. Thank you to John Rowan for res-
ponding so generously to my queries about his subperson-
ality theory with bibliographies and articles. Greg Kratzmann
has been a fantastic sounding board as have Ken Gelder,
Stephanie Trigg and Bernard Gray who have given their time
and wise counsel. Thank you to Marion M. Campbell for her
advice and support, David Owen of Island Magazine, Paul
Kane of Antipodes and Stephanie Holt, former editor of Mean-
jin, who were the first people to publish my work. On a more
personal note, thank you to David McCooey, Maria Tako-
lander and Amanda Johnson for their friendship; my nana,
Eva Atherton, for all the proof reading, my mum, Debra, and
grandpa, John, for their unwavering faith; Tony Larkin for
giving me the time to complete this book and my ‘history
darling’ Dr Glenn Moore. Finally, thank you to Mary Holmes
for first introducing me to Gwen Harwood; she is my Vera
Cottew.
I am very grateful for a government-funded Australian
Postgraduate Award which allowed me to focus myself en-
tirely on this book.
P r e f a c e
An earlier and condensed version of Chapter One appeared as
‘Fuck All Editors: The Ern Malley Affair and Gwen Harwood’s
Bulletin Scandal’ in Journal of Australian Studies, Jumping the
Queue: New Talents 21C, jas 72, 2002. This was used for a feat-
ure article for the JAS web site in January 2004.
An earlier version of Chapter Two appeared as ‘In The
Dreaded Park: Gwen Harwood and Subpersonality Theory’ in
Journal of Australian Studies, New Talents 21C, May 2005.
‘The Edge of Something: Stasis and Re-birth in the Recent
Poetry of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’, Antipodes: A North American
Journal of Australian Literature, The publication of the American
Association of Australian Literary Studies, Spring 2003, is a
reworking of parts of this book concerning Australian poetry
and subpersonality theory.
Sections from early drafts of Chapter One, Chapter Three
and Chapter Four were creatively reworked and appeared in
Island Magazine, Meanjin, Antithesis, Strange Cities, Link, 3rd
Muse and Voiceworks.
Much of this book was originally presented in the form of
conference papers at The University of Melbourne, the ASAL
conference, the La Trobe ‘Fooled’ conference and the Human-
ities conference in Hawaii. The responses from participants
provided an invaluable forum to test and develop my ideas.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
G w e n H a r w o o d ’ s U n b u r i a b l e T a l e n t
‘Every poem contains a new imp of self…each is a new self-text, a
fresh tale incorporating a newly told self.’1
‘With one hand, dear reader, I am extending my deathless
verse; with the other I am keeping you away from my private
life, which is mine and nothing to do with you.’2 Brenda Niall
argues that Harwood’s talent was ‘unburiable’3 and that Har-
wood herself reinforced this in interviews. Harwood’s obser-
vations and personal readings of her writing have transcended
her death. Her interviews, letters and even her appearances in
biographies of the literati perpetuate this slice of immortality.4
I am fascinated by this ‘vampiric’ Gwen Harwood who
gains this immortality not just through her poetry but also
through her famous interviews and carefully constructed
obiter dicta. Many of her biographers and critics accept her love
of word games, masks and disguises as something which is an
essential part of her creativity.5 I am interested in the poet
behind these constructions. I begin with Little Gwendoline
and Ginnie in Blessed City as products of her relationship with
Riddell, and discuss why she developed these early sub-
personalities during her literary apprenticeship in Brisbane in
the 1940s. I look afresh, with the new tool of subpersonality
theory, at the development of Harwood’s pseudonymous
poetry. I read her pseudonymous poetry in light of this
psychosynthetic tool and present a new critical reading and
discussion of each pseudonym as a distinct subpersonality.
Eight years after her death, Harwood was back in the
public eye with the posthumous publication of her Collected
Poems,6 edited by one of her best friends, Alison Hoddinott,
and her biographer, Greg Kratzmann. Harwood, it appears,
x ‘Flashing Eyes and Floating Hair’
continues to control interpretations of her poetry through
these friends. The endnotes in this collection demonstrate her
undying grip on her poetry, which she controls with obiter
dicta recited by Hoddinott and Kratzmann. For example, the
note to the poem ‘Dialogue’7 states, ‘The final line is based on
a Japanese folk tale, according to which demons left marks in
stones in places of sorrow.’8 This quotation is, apparently,
from a conversation between Harwood and Hoddinott. Was it
recorded or remembered verbatim? Indeed, is it necessary to
know? This is only one interpretation of the poem that is
elevated to a privileged reading by her friends.
Philip Mead’s call in 1993 for critics to psychoanalyse the
characters Eisenbart and Kröte was a clever attempt to wrest
this control away from Harwood. However, a decade on, there
is still no response to Mead’s proposal. Harwood’s deathless
grip on her verse is as firm as ever. It is my intention to
respond to Mead’s call for a psychoanalytic reading and initi-
ate the loosening of her grip. A study of all her pseudonymous
poetry, not just the two characters Eisenbart and Kröte, is the
first step in this process. In this reading, her endless comments
about masks and disguises can be read against the grain.
My discussion of subpersonality theory and how it will be
applied to a reading of Harwood’s pseudonymous poems is
threefold. I begin with a discussion of John Rowan’s book on
subpersonality theory to frame my investigation. This leads to
an examination of other books and articles published in this
area which, in turn, provides an opportunity to define the
specific terms I appropriate from this discipline into my read-
ing. In the same way that I was compelled to respond to the
silence surrounding psychoanalytic readings of Harwood’s
poetry, Rowan, psychotherapist and Fellow of the British
Psychological Society, was compelled to write a book in
response to the ‘extraordinary fact that there is at present no
systematic book on subpersonalities, and the word does not
appear in any text on personality theory known to me. It is not
in the dictionaries of psychology nor in the dictionaries of
psychotherapy.’9 He claims that his book Subpersonalities:
