Frederick Stratford, circa 1907

(1880–1933)

Life; Brisbane; this moment of June.

From Mrs Galloway (1925)

FREDERICK STRATFORD, THE BOLDEST AND MOST SUCCESSFUL plagiarist of the twentieth century, was born in Cardiff, New South Wales, on 22 June 1880. (As the academic and novelist Peter Darkbloom was later to note, “Even the name of Stratford’s birthplace was lifted from somewhere else.”) Frederick’s father, Laurence, was a customs and excise officer who worked at the port of Newcastle. His mother, Helen, kept house for the family, which comprised four sons and three daughters. Frederick was a taciturn boy, often overlooked among his more outgoing siblings. When Frederick was five his father was transferred to Sydney and the family moved with him to the city. Frederick began his education at Calvin Grammar School, also attended at the time by Henry Watkins, the future short-story writer Addison Tiller, although there is no evidence the two knew each other. Frederick was an unremarkable student. After three years, his teachers still did not know his name, and although he was not bullied, he had not made any friends. He simply went unnoticed.

One evening in June 1894 Frederick was sent by his mother to bring his father home from the local pub. Frederick found Laurence Stratford asleep on a stool at the bar. As he tried to wake him, a fight broke out nearby. A jeering crowd gathered around two brawling men as Frederick watched, mesmerised and appalled. Finally there emerged a victor, a tall, blond-haired man who stood on a nearby table, took out a much-folded piece of paper, and started to read from it through bloodied lips. Although he could not be heard over the noise of the bar the man continued to talk, and gradually the room fell silent. Frederick and the fifty or so drunkards listened, spellbound, as the man declaimed a poem. Sometimes they laughed, and at other times they had to wipe tears from their eyes. Frederick’s father came to during the final verse; he applauded with the rest as the man finished and climbed down from the table. Frederick’s father explained that the victorious fighter was a bush poet called Sydney Steele whose verses had recently thrust him into the limelight. There were even rumours that Steele had bargained away his soul in return for becoming the greatest writer in the country. Frederick stared at the grinning poet, the centre of attention, surrounded by wellwishers. There can be no doubt that as soon as he glimpsed that world, he wanted to belong to it. He quickly realised that there were two ways to achieve his aim: through violence, which was out of the question, since he was peaceable and timorous by nature, horrified by the mere sight of blood; or through literature, which is a surreptitious form of violence, a passport to respectability, and can, in certain young and sensitive nations, disguise the social climber’s origins. He opted for literature and decided to spare himself the difficult years of apprenticeship.

Frederick helped his father home, then slipped out of the house again (as usual, no one noticed) and returned to the bar. He waited outside long into the night until Sydney Steele emerged, unsteady on his feet, his torn shirt still damp with sweat and blood. Frederick followed Steele to his home, lingering in some nearby bushes until the candles in the house were extinguished, before creeping towards the only open window. Inside, the poet was snoring on a cot, his trousers hanging from a hook by the windowsill. Carefully, Frederick reached in and snatched the wad of papers from the back pocket of the trousers, then turned and ran. The next morning was a Saturday, and Frederick spent the morning leafing through the purloined manuscript. It was called Bush, Beer and Ballads, and the twenty-five poems it contained were written in a neat, almost feminine hand. Frederick copied out the poems, then destroyed the original. That Monday he showed two of the poems, “The Stringybark” and “Charlie Cobb’s Shadow”, to his English master, who had barely spoken to him in the past. The teacher was excited by the poems, and encouraged Frederick to enter them into the school poetry competition. Frederick did so, and within the month had been awarded first prize. His family were impressed, and his teachers finally seemed to know his name.

Flushed with success, Frederick submitted “The Stringybark” to the Western Star, whose editor, Jim Taylor, replied with a letter praising the work and asking Frederick to come to his office that Friday to discuss terms for publication. When Frederick arrived, a furious Sydney Steele was awaiting him. Taylor had recognised “The Stringybark” as Steele’s work the moment he read it, and he informed the poet that he had found his thief. Frederick broke from Steele’s grasp and sprinted home in terror, where he quickly disposed of Bush, Beer and Ballads down the dunny. When Steele and Taylor banged on the door of his house an instant later, Frederick flatly denied their charges. After a heated argument with Frederick’s father, the police were called. Taylor and Steele had no proof that Frederick had stolen the poems. Before they were moved on, Steele begged the boy for the manuscript, telling him it was the only copy he possessed, and he could not remember most of the poems in it. Again, Frederick denied any wrongdoing, and finally the two men departed. Throughout the course of his long life, Steele was to attempt to reconstruct Bush, Beer and Ballads many times, always without success.

Cowed by the experience, Frederick made no further attempt to enter into the literary world for four years, and he gradually faded into the background of his school and of his family. There were nights when he cried with rage. Then he began searching for a solution, and he didn’t let up until he found one. He told his father of his wish to follow him into the customs service and, after passing the entrance examination at the age of eighteen, Frederick Stratford became a junior officer, working under his father at Circular Quay. One of Stratford’s first tasks was to confiscate a three-volume set of the collected short stories of the French writer Guy de Maupassant, which had been ordered from London by A.G. Stephens, editor of the Bulletin. Stephens was incensed when customs informed him that the books had been destroyed, all of Maupassant’s work having been banned by the censorship office; he was moved to write an article decrying the incident, which appeared in the Bulletin’s “Red Page” in July 1898.

A few weeks later, Stephens received a short story called “The Locket” from a contributor identifying himself only as “F.S.” The story tells of a poor woman, Mary Smith, who borrows her rich friend’s gold locket to wear at a party, and loses it. Too frightened to tell her friend, Mary instead borrows thousands of dollars to buy an identical replacement, then spends decades scrimping and saving to repay the loan, only to learn at the climax of the story that the locket she lost was a worthless fake. Stephens was impressed with “The Locket”, although he found the dialogue stilted and the Hornsby setting poorly drawn. He cut two hundred words, retitled it “True Blue” and published it in the Bulletin in December 1898. This success encouraged Stratford to submit thirteen more short stories to the journal over the next decade, under his full name. His family and his colleagues were somewhat awed by his appearances in the Bulletin, and Stratford began to be spoken of by the Sydney literati in the same breath as Addison Tiller and Henry Lawson. It was only with the submission of “Ball of Grease” in 1907 that Stephens became suspicious. He rejected the story as being overlong and over familiar, telling Stratford he was sure he had read it somewhere before. Stephens was not mistaken; “Ball of Grease”, like “The Locket” and every other piece he had accepted from Stratford, was copied almost word for word from the collected stories of Guy de Maupassant, which Stratford had confiscated, and which Stephens himself had bought and paid for.

The rejection of “Ball of Grease” marked the end of the first stage of Stratford’s career in plagiarism. While he still socialised with other writers, he “wrote” nothing for over a decade, instead working diligently in his position as a customs inspector. During the Great War he was excused from military duty due to his employment, and was quickly promoted through the ranks until 1918, when he replaced his father as director of the customs and excise office after Laurence Stratford’s retirement. In May 1922 Stratford began the second, and most audacious, period of his literary larceny, using his authority as director to order the seizure of all copies of James Joyce’s recently published Ulysses that came into the country. Stratford burned every copy of the novel bar one, which he took home and retyped over the next six months, replacing references to Dublin with Sydney and removing vulgar language. In November he submitted the retitled Odysseus to Allenby & Godwin. Lloyd Allenby found large parts of the novel incomprehensible, but was still able to recognise its tremendous skill and originality. After some hesitation he accepted the novel, which was received with equal parts bafflement and acclaim when it was published in March 1923. Odysseus entered a second printing in April, the sales at least partly driven by the fact that it contained lewd passages that Stratford hadn’t excised because he was ignorant of the sexual practices Joyce described.

With the publication of Odysseus, Stratford became the darling of the Sydney literary scene, a position cemented by the critical and commercial success of A Journey to India, published little more than a year later. He came to the attention of the powerful, and there was talk of him standing for parliament. He attended parties and soirées held in the capital’s grandest houses. Reporters hounded him; they demanded to know why he didn’t retire from the customs service to write full-time. Stratford would reply that he wanted to serve his country as well as his art. In reality, retiring from the service was out of the question; his literary career depended on his being able to seize novels as they entered the country and destroying all but one copy, which he would then plagiarise. The books he published over the next few years exhausted the superlatives of Australian critics: The Enchanted Mountain (1924), The Prodigious Gatsby and Mrs Galloway (both 1925), The Sun Comes Up Too (1926) and Hooroo to All That (1929). One perceptive reviewer for the Western Star, noting Stratford’s perfect control of an almost inconceivably varied range of styles and voices, commented, “It is as if Frederick Stratford were not one writer, but many.”

In February 1926 Stratford married Norah Seaman, a society beauty he had met at one of Vivian Darkbloom’s literary salons, and within three years they had a son, Giorgio, and a daughter, Lucia. The recently published The Sun Comes Up Too had been proclaimed as another triumph, and Stratford’s chances of being the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature were widely discussed. That same year, however, his deceptions showed signs of unravelling. Critics drew attention to examples of carelessness in Stratford’s oeuvre; the sanatorium in The Enchanted Mountain was in Katoomba on one page and Davos in Switzerland the next, and the Brisbane of Mrs Galloway had not only a British Museum but also a Piccadilly Circus. Stratford’s defenders pointed out that Shakespeare had clocks striking the hour in Ancient Rome, which didn’t make him any less of a genius. The most serious charge against Stratford came in an article published in August 1926 in the Journal of Australian Literature. “The Cries of Polyphemus: Australian Criticism and Frederick Stratford’s Odysseus” by Peter Darkbloom set out the argument that Stratford had plagiarised James Joyce’s Ulysses. Stratford angrily refuted the charge, as did a number of prominent critics, rallying together as “Stratfordians” who hailed Odysseus as a uniquely Australian masterpiece. Darkbloom was threatened with a libel action. Although he suspected Stratford of being a serial plagiarist, he did not want to further humiliate Lloyd Allenby, Stratford’s publisher and Darkbloom’s own father-in-law. He had warned Allenby about Stratford’s literary thieving, but the old man would not believe him.

Stratford, made cautious by Darkbloom’s article, published nothing for three years. After the appearance of Hooroo to All That in 1929, he agreed to an interview with Quincy Gunn, editor of the Southern Cross. Stratford considered Gunn a friend; he knew and liked Gunn’s wife, Claudia, and had been their honoured guest at their beautifully appointed house, “Mysteriosa”. Stratford was therefore shocked and revolted when Gunn demanded five thousand pounds from him to keep quiet; Gunn had irrefutable proof that not only Odysseus but all Stratford’s novels had been plagiarised from work published in the United States and Great Britain. Stratford refused to pay, instead publishing a brazen statement in the Bulletin in May 1929, announcing his recent discovery that his work was being poached by overseas writers. Retaining lawyers in the United States, France, Germany and Great Britain, Stratford launched lawsuits against E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce for breach of copyright.

The remainder of Stratford’s life was taken up by protracted legal battles, as the authors he had attacked launched countersuits against him. Hemingway sent Stratford a telegram in November 1930, threatening to come to Australia for the pleasure of punching him on the nose. Fitzgerald’s response to the blizzard of suits and countersuits was to get blind drunk; after one long weekend of dissipation in July 1929, he started to believe that Stratford had indeed written The Great Gatsby, and he, Fitzgerald, was the plagiarist. Nathanael West had to restrain Fitzgerald from throwing himself from a moving automobile. In London, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary that “Stratford is a dirty little liar, and in all likelihood a Jew.” James Joyce’s response to the lawsuit is not recorded, but it is perhaps no coincidence that in the second part of Finnegans Wake (1939), written in 1929, the following can be found: “he was dud. Dumb! Mastabatoom, mastabadtomm, when a mon stratford shat his self all long. For whole the world to see.”

At first Stratford’s publishers and a host of Stratfordian critics united in their support for the beleaguered Australian prodigy whose work had been cannibalised by foreigners. Yet it was not long before mountains of evidence proved beyond all doubt that Stratford was a liar and a cheat. His friends turned their backs on him. Allenby & Godwin, crippled by legal fees, recalled all of Stratford’s books that they could and pulped them. The firm went bankrupt in February 1932; Lloyd Allenby killed himself a few weeks later. Stratford, unashamed and unrepentant, revelled in the notoriety the case brought him, making ever more outlandish claims about the writers he had accused of copying him: Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), Stratford maintained, had been stolen from his Sydney home in a burglary in 1910. In interviews, Stratford continued to press his claims against Hemingway and the others, stating jocosely, “If I am not the author of those books, why have I suffered from such terrible writer’s cramp these last ten years?” Stratford did indeed suffer increasing pain in his right hand for the last decade of his life. In late 1932 it was realised that this pain was due to a chondrosarcoma, a cancer originating in the fingers. The diagnosis came too late for treatment, and Frederick Stratford died on 19 January 1933, disgraced and shunned by his erstwhile supporters but protesting his authorship of the disputed novels to the last.

After his death, Stratford was all but forgotten until 1961, when the pamphlet Shames Joyce: The Great Plagiarist by Arthur ruhtrA was published in France. ruhtrA argued passionately, if not entirely convincingly, that Frederick Stratford had indeed written Odysseus before Joyce had published Ulysses, citing numerous examples from the novel that coincided exactly with Stratford’s life. ruhtrA’s argument remained unknown in Australia until 1974, when the pamphlet was reprinted by New Dimensions, to derision from academics. Despite this, ruhtrA’s idea gained currency throughout that decade and the next, kept alive by the Frederick Stratford Society, which had emerged from the ashes of ruhtrA’s failed experimental writing collective, Kangaroulipo. The rise of the internet in the 1990s, which saw the proliferation of outlandish conspiracy theories, gave new impetus to the question of who really wrote Ulysses/Odysseus. By the turn of the century the Frederick Stratford Society had almost two thousand members in Australia and a further ten thousand worldwide. On 16 June every year, Stratfordians across the globe celebrate “Humesday”, named after Archibald Hume, the protagonist of Odysseus, and toast Stratford with the last words of his great novel, as spoken by Vivvy Hume: “And dinkum I said fair dinkum I will Dinkum.”