Ryan O’Neill
From The Sydney Review, 23 August 1999
The Grass Cadillac
By Frank Harmer
Porlock Press, 96pp, $22
Reviewed by Peter Crawley
Reading The Grass Cadillac is a unique experience. It is the first book of poems I have ever read which does not include a single line of poetry. The collection marks the literary debut of Queensland writer Frank Harmer, a name I spent a good half-hour trying to rearrange into an anagram of Ern Malley, so sure was I that some trick was being played on me. But even Ern, I suspect, would not have tried to palm these poems off to an editor, no matter how gullible. To say that the verses in this substantial volume approach mediocrity would be a compliment. Mediocrity does not figure even on the horizon of this book, though ignorance looms large. Harmer has no idea about what alliteration or onomatopoeia are, and I suspect he thinks that a metaphor is someone who fights bulls.
As an example, let us turn for a moment (though this is being overgenerous with our time) to the first poem in the book, ‘The Melting Clock.’ The title is apparently an allusion to Dali, and the poem an elegy to a dead dog, or a love letter to a married woman,
I can’t decide which. But then, neither could Harmer. The first line is ‘Th’e ni’g’’ht cas’’cades wh’’en she’s aw’’ay / cuck’old, empo’wer ti’ll da’y’s da’wn.’
This reads like a poem generated by computer, though surely a computer would do a better job. For some reason most of the poems are punctuated in the above manner, with swarms of apostrophes hovering like flies over the dead verse.
Whilst there is nothing that resembles anything so coherent as a ‘theme’ in The Grass Cadillac, the ‘poet’ himself appears regularly, every two or three pages, like a dog marking its territory. Sometimes he is in the first person, sometimes the second, and sometimes in the third, as ‘Harmer.’ Unfortunately these three people together do not add up to half a writer.
If the reader can progress past the first twelve poems there is some respite to be had in ‘To My Coy Wife,’ at thirteen pages the longest poem in the book, and thankfully free of apostrophes. The 608 lines of this epic begin, ‘I am comforted by your sock / that I carry into the twilight of luckbeams / held next to my philtrums’ and grinds on in the same way, with little rhyme and no reason, reaching its zenith with ‘I am filled with hope / that I may dry your tears of semen / so that we may grind as one / labia to labia / in search of the magnificent rainbow of love.’
I will not weary the reader with any more of Harmer’s work, though it is tempting to offer a line or two from the accurately titled ‘Shitlines’ or a particularly rancid image from ‘The Belly of the Dead Baby.’ After I had finished reading the collection, I considered not writing a review at all, in order to spare a new poet embarrassment. But Harmer is obviously proud of his work and eager to show it off, in the same way a newly toilet-trained child is proud and eager to show off the contents of its potty.
A great writer once said that criticising a poem was like attacking a butterfly with a bazooka. That may be so, but when the poem is not a butterfly, but a cockroach, then I believe that the critic is justified in the attack. If, as scientists believe, cockroaches can survive a nuclear bomb, then Mr Harmer’s poems will survive the winter of this review. I can only hope that they may be driven into the dark, under the floorboards, where they belong.
The most attractive image in The Grass Cadillac is the photograph which adorns the front cover. The caption on the dust jacket informs me that the bookish-looking man is Frank Harmer himself, and the beautiful woman beside him his wife. If that is so, then I can only congratulate Mr Harmer on his luck and advise him that he would be better to concentrate on creating the patter of tiny feet, instead of iambic ones.
*
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
Reviewed by Penny McFarlane
October 23 marked the second anniversary of literary critic Peter Crawley’s bizarre and violent death at his Sydney home. In a recent press release Hazlitt-Ruskin explained that they felt enough time had passed that they could release the first, long-delayed book of Crawley’s reviews and essays. Crawley himself was engaged in the editing of the book when his life was cut short. This edition collects all of his important criticism from the Sydney Review, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and the lectures and speeches he occasionally gave at book launches and signings. The title of the collection is taken from a remark by Brendan Behan: ‘Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.’ Crawley often jokingly referred to himself as a ‘eunuch,’ though many women who encountered him in Sydney’s literary scene from the 1970s to the 1990s would be able to give the lie to that. (In the interests of disclosure, I should say that Crawley once made a pass at me at a book reading in Melbourne in 1988. At this time the fatwa against Salman Rushdie had just been pronounced, and I can still clearly recall a drunken Crawley, at the end of his speech, declaring that he had heard the title of Rushdie’s next work was Buddha Is a Fat Bastard. In the ensuing storm, only an abject public apology saved his job at the Sydney Review.)
Since his death, Peter Crawley’s name has become irrevocably linked with that of Frank Harmer. The editors of The Eunuch in the Harem have acknowledged this by placing the twenty pages of Crawley’s writings about Harmer at the front of the book. The section opens with the review of The Grass Cadillac from 1999 and ends with a dismissive footnote in an essay on Tim Winton from 2006.
To give these writings pride of place in the collection is to do Crawley a grave disservice. His criticism of Harmer, whilst amongst his most scabrous, was certainly not his best. For that the reader should turn to the second section, titled ‘American Lives.’ Here we can find many unique insights into Bellow, Updike and Mailer (who, incidentally, called Crawley a ‘Limey asshole’ on the one occasion they met, in New York.) Crawley’s analysis of the Rabbit tetralogy has been reprinted several times to great acclaim in the US, but is virtually unknown here, and his monograph on Bernard Malamud was highly praised by Harold Bloom. It is a shame to note that Crawley’s treatment of Australian authors is spottier. Too often his praise is faint and over-leavened with sarcasm. Still, his half-dozen essays on Patrick White should be required reading for anyone with the slightest interest in Australian literature.
However, it was not Crawley the scholar, but Crawley the self-proclaimed eunuch who wrote such guiltily entertaining book reviews for the Sydney Review. In the longest section of the book, ‘A Pig at the Pastry Cart’ (another allusion to critics), Crawley selected the fifty of his reviews he felt were most enjoyable to read. Highlights include his opinion on the Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi (‘It is so terrible I doubt there would even be a place for it in Borges’ Infinite Library’) and his devastating, three-word summing up of Daphne du Maurier: ‘middle-class, middle-brow, middling.’
Crawley’s harsh reviews of Raymond Carver’s stories are surprising, considering the fact that the two men were friends, with Carver even dedicating one of his final stories, ‘Buffalo,’ to Crawley. But Crawley’s dismissal of Carver has a refreshing quality in an era when the American has been hailed as the modern Chekhov. One passage in particular is worth quoting in full:
[Carver] followed Hemingway’s idea of the story as iceberg, that is, only the top eighth of life and emotion would be shown, the rest hidden underneath. But in [Carver’s] stories, one can’t help thinking that the iceberg is more of an ice cube.
Pleasingly, it is Crawley’s evisceration of popular fiction that takes up the most space. His dismissal of Stephen King is brilliantly off-hand. ‘To me, his novels are more endearing than scary. King is like a child leaping out from behind the sofa and shouting, “Boo!” We don’t have the heart to tell him he didn’t frighten us.’
As I have said, Crawley’s criticism of Frank Harmer is not his best, but it is a sad thing to contemplate that it will probably be his best read. Crawley never envisaged any mention of Harmer in his book. The section ‘Thoughts on Frank Harmer’ was added after his death. It does not make great reading. The original review of The Grass Cadillac was certainly cruel, if undoubtedly accurate. Harmer might even have taken it as an honour to be tarred with the same brush that had spattered W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney. He was obviously not aware that a review by Crawley, positive or not, would certainly help sell his small book of poetry. Similarly, if Crawley had been aware of Harmer’s history of mental instability, I have no doubt he wouldn’t have reviewed The Grass Cadillac in the first place. The accounts of their first meeting at a poetry reading are various. Harmer claimed he caught Crawley leering at his wife and assaulted him.
Crawley maintained the attack was entirely unprovoked, though considering that Emma Harmer left her husband for the critic, many would tend to accept Harmer’s account. Crawley had already handed in his review of Harmer’s short-story collection The Dog and the Lamp-post before the incident at the festival, though it had not yet gone to press. (Incidentally, he was annoyed that Harmer had inadvertently stolen the title he had wished to use for his book of criticism.) Crawley subsequently claimed he did not change a word of his review, even in light of the broken leg he received. This is true, but it is not entirely to Crawley’s credit. As he recuperated in hospital, Emma Harmer, on one of her frequent visits, had informed him that her husband was being treated for schizophrenia. Knowing this, Crawley let stand the reference comparing Harmer to a lunatic daubing filth on the walls of a madhouse. This was a despicably cruel act from a normally kind-hearted man. Crawley could never forgive Harmer for beating and humiliating him in public, and returns to him again and again in his work in the weeks after the incident. For example, in a review of Pat Reid’s The Raphael Cipher Crawley says, ‘Bad as [this book] is, it has had the good fortune to be published after Frank Harmer’s The Dog and the Lamp-post, ensuring it will not, at least, be the worst book this year.’
Eventually, Crawley’s editor and close friend, David Phillips, banned him from making any further references to Harmer in the journal. By that time, of course, a scandal had erupted over Ariel’s Daughter. The original review, at close to 10,000 words, was rejected by Phillips, the two men almost coming to blows when Crawley realised Phillips had cut 96 per cent of the review. (Phillips later destroyed all copies of the longer review, fearing it would irrevocably damage his friend’s reputation.) Even in the shortened form, the review is excruciating, reading like a 400-word chat-up line. And yet it must have had the desired effect, as soon after it was published Emma Harmer fled to Africa with Crawley. Her husband, pursuing them to the airport, was arrested for brandishing a knife at the boarding gates.
It is the great irony of Peter Crawley’s life that he courted controversy yet married banality. But there can be no doubt that he was deeply in love with Emma Harmer. Only a man besotted would have carefully recorded for posterity her asinine travel observations in An African Honeymoon.
Controversially, Crawley’s last, unfinished piece, the wry essay ‘Where Is That Great Australian Novel?,’ has been included in the collection. I believe that here, at least, the editors made the correct decision. The twelve pages that survive are amongst the best Crawley ever wrote. Sadly, we will never know the answer to the question he set himself. As he was putting the finishing touches to the essay, a deranged Frank Harmer broke into the critic’s house. He found Crawley in his study, bludgeoned him into unconsciousness with a glass paperweight, then stuffed the last eight pages of the essay down Crawley’s throat, choking him to death.
Peter Crawley once said, pessimistically, ‘The good writing about writing will go first, and then the good writing itself.’ This collection of good writing about writing has not sold well, and the publishers have scrapped plans for a second volume. I suspect this will be the last we will see of Crawley on the bookshelves, except perhaps in the form of posterity he most detested, that of three or four lines in a book of quotations.
And the good writing itself? Crawley’s widow Emma recently changed her name to Emma Crawley-Harmer. Her autobiography, The Poetess of Sadness (with its lengthy subtitle, One Woman’s Extraordinary Journey Through Marriage, Infidelity, Madness and Murder) reputedly sold for a six-figure sum, and was released by Picador last week. While the reviews were overwhelmingly negative, the book has debuted at number two on the bestsellers list, outsold only by The Dog and the Lamp-post, now in its seventh printing.
Harvest