Писательница Джефф Спарроу представила биографию забытой австралийской поэтессы Лезбии Харфорд

Lesbia Venner Harford was a woman who knew she’d die young but became a revolutionary all the same, who loved both women and men with a passion always overwhelming and often unwise, and who wrote exquisitely about the transformations of the modern age: what they meant and what might be done with them. Barely read during her lifetime, she has been rediscovered and championed by writers of the highest order. Les Murray called her one of the nation’s greatest poets. Gerald Murnane credits her with changing the way he understood literature. Drusilla Modjeska deems her work “astonishing”. Lesbia was born in Melbourne during the Australian shearers’ strike of 1891, a titanic confrontation between labour and capital that nearly became an armed insurrection. She was 13 when men from the Australian Labor Party, an organisation created to represent those strikers, became the first self-described socialists to form government. She was 23 when Labor leader Andrew Fisher pledged his support for the first world war, and she was 25 when that war tore the ALP in two over the issue of military conscription. Diagnosed at birth with an incurable heart condition, Lesbia forced her way into a university dominated by sexist men. One of very few women taking law in Melbourne, she publicly debated fellow student and future prime minister Robert Menzies in 1914 – and then abandoned the profession to become a Flinders Lane clothing machinist. “We are forty factory girls,” she wrote then, Two forewomen Do the best they can to make Less than human. She led a major trade union (representing clothing workers) until, with the Great War raging, she joined an illegal revolutionary group, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She understood what the decision meant. “We’ll walk in darkness, obscure, despised,” she wrote. “We’ll mourn each other at prison gates.” When Lesbia was christened, her unusual name invoked classical literature: the Latin love poems written by poet Gaius Valerius Catullus to a woman he dubbed “Lesbia”. With the term “lesbian” largely unknown in Australia, the eminently respectable Adelaide Evening Journal openly celebrated what it called “girl love”, with its columnist explaining that the love that one girl has for another […] is often truer and stronger than between so-called ‘lovers’. But during Lesbia’s brief, fierce life, a new, “scientific” repression of same-sex attraction emerged and the more fluid gender roles of the past calcified into a binary defined by doctors and enforced by police. The growing obsession with “normalcy” and “deviancy” affected many of the people in Lesbia’s circle. Yet, in 1915, as the Anzacs landed in the Dardanelles, she was still celebrating her great love, the philosopher Katie Lush: I can’t feel the sunshine Or see the stars aright For thinking of her beauty And her kisses bright. In 1920 Lesbia married the IWW orator Pat Harford, a hard-drinking rebel born in Bathurst, NSW, whose sexuality seems also to have been complicated and who constructed an entirely fictitious persona for himself as an Irishman from County Cork. Under Lesbia’s influence, Pat became an avant-garde painter. By the time Lesbia died in 1927 – penniless and unknown, just as she had predicted – attitudes to same-sex attraction had changed so much that British critic James Douglas could respond to Radclyffe Hall’s iconic novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) by saying he’d “rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel” because of its treatment of same-sex desire. Discovering Lesbia For decades, Lesbia was forgotten. The causes to which she had committed herself faded from memory. Her papers were lost and discarded. The manuscript of her novel about wartime repression (which every publisher had rejected) disappeared; most of her poetry survived only in four battered, handwritten notebooks (now lodged in the Mitchell Library in Sydney). I first learned of Lesbia Harford in 2000, the year the S11 protests against the World Economic Forum took over the streets near Melbourne’s Crown Casino. Back then, I worked in the New International Bookshop at the Victorian Trades Hall. It was one of the places where activists gathered to plan the campaign against neo-liberal economics, spreading globally since the demonstrations outside a Seattle World Trade Organization meeting the previous year. But I was also spending a lot of time in the tumbledown Footscray offices of Overland, one of Australia’s oldest literary journals. Under the charismatic editorship of Ian Syson, Overland was newly spiky and argumentative: a return, Syson claimed, to its radical roots as a journal founded by communists. As a volunteer, I read through the slush pile of unsolicited fiction, mailed books to reviewers, proofed copy and performed (with varying degrees of incompetence) other minor editorial tasks. More than anything, though, I talked with Ian; with his deputy, Nathan Hollier; with the editorial coordinator, Alex Skutenko; and with the poets, agitators and academics associated with the journal, who drank in a Carlton pub each Friday and disputed about how politics and literature related in the age of corporate globalisation. That was how I absorbed Australian literary history: through those debates, and by browsing the archives in Overland’s dilapidated rooms, where the ceiling sagged as if weighed down by half a century of poetry and prose. Ian handed me a faded copy of Overland’s inaugural issue (published in 1954), with its essays by Katharine Susannah Prichard and Nettie Palmer, and David Martin’s rhyming response to a carping review from the poet A.D. Hope: You love to play God/To toy or to praise/To brandish your rod/To destroy and to raise. But the Lord took the dust/And made it a man/While you earn your crust/By the opposite plan. Those old literary spats gripped me, perhaps because their passion implied such confidence about the written word and its importance. I pieced together the story of Overland through its feuds, reading back issues about its founder Stephen Murray-Smith’s struggle with his former Communist Party comrades for control over the journal, his (mostly) friendly rivalry with Clem Christesen, founder of Meanjin and his sharper engagements with James McAuley, who founded the right-wing Quadrant in 1956 with money from the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom. I followed the gradual construction of a progressive literary canon around authors such as Prichard, Vance Palmer, Frank Hardy and Dorothy Hewett. But I never found the cultural project of the Old Left entirely persuasive. During the second world war, local communists had advocated a literature of progressive content and national form: socialist (or, later, social) realism. Writers, they said, should provide realistic portrayals of typical workers to inspire the masses to struggle. In Australia, the Communist Party and its fellow travellers identified Henry Lawson and the literary nationalists of The Bulletin as an antidote to Anglophile conservatism, snobbery and elitism, a model for a popular writing celebrating the mateship of local proletarians. On a similar basis, Murray-Smith took Overland’s motto from Joseph Furphy’s bush novel Such Is Life. “Temper democratic,” it read. “Bias Australian.” Ian insisted that the Old Left (and the institutions it created) had fostered a working-class writing that otherwise would never have existed. He had recently republished Dorothy Hewett’s first novel, which he claimed as an antecedent of modern grunge lit. I could appreciate his argument. By then, I had discovered Ralph de Boissière’s Crown Jewel (1952), Frank Hardy’s experimental novel But the Dead Are Many (1975) and the short stories of John Morrison, all unthinkable without the Old Left milieu. But swagmen and drovers meant nothing to me, and the Furphy quote read more like a John Howard speech than the slogans we chanted at S11. Besides, the obsession with 19th-century models often corresponded with a dull indifference to literary style. When Patrick White had mocked Australian literature as the “dreary dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism”, the barb pricked writers of the Old Left as deeply as their conservative opponents. A young Christos Tsiolkas spoke at an Overland event that year. “I want books,” he declared, “to astound me.” Yes, I thought. Yes! That was the mood in which I discovered Lesbia Harford. I read her strange and intimate writing for the first time in a battered anthology, which I’d bought on a whim from a secondhand store. Initially, I wasn’t sure that I understood or even necessarily liked her poems, but I recognised their originality and power. “Into old rhyme,” she wrote in the insurrectionary year of 1917, New words come tripping slowly. Hail to the time When they possess it wholly. It was a manifesto of innovation and change characteristic of the cultural and philosophical movement known as modernism – an insistence that new times required new techniques, adequate for the dizzying convulsions of a violent era. Her writing, like Pat’s art, forged a politically radical modernism, quite different from what anyone else was doing. Take the world! Between 1914 and 1923 – the period in which Lesbia wrote most – the Great War and its aftermath killed perhaps 26 million people, with the subsequent Spanish Influenza epidemic responsible for additional deaths on a scale that still confounds demographic estimates. In that blood-drenched setting, Charlie Reeve, the imprisoned leader of the anti-war IWW, urged, “Put your arms around the world and take it yourself!” Through her life and work, Lesbia tried to do precisely that. Though Lesbia outlived Henry Lawson by a mere five years, she described a very different world, one of automobiles and mechanised war. Yet she discovered in the 20th century’s industrialised horrors a strange hope, sensing in them a different and better future, just out of reach. “[T]here’s beauty keen / as swords in a machine,” she declared. In Lesbia’s poetry, the working class was never the masculinist archetype of later Stalinist agitprop. She wrote of women more than men, celebrating factory girls who fought and swore and talked crudely about sex. She was avowedly political and splendidly partisan but almost never didactic. In one lyric, she explained that she did not want to lecture her readers. She sought, she said, to tear them apart. She fascinated me then and she fascinates me still. The long economic boom after the second world war created a new political and cultural stability. Labor became the alternative party of governance; official communism, with its suspicions of modernism, consolidated its hegemony over radical writers; a medicalised dichotomy between heterosexuality and homosexuality became central to the Cold War ideology of the nuclear family. When Murray-Smith and his comrades had launched Overland, they did so with the support of Nettie Palmer (Lesbia’s old friend) and Katharine Prichard (once embroiled with Lesbia in a disastrous ménage à trois) – and in explicit opposition to Lesbia’s university foe Robert Menzies, then in his second term as prime minister. But the authors of the Old Left were social realists whose books often described the traditional ideals of gender and sexuality associated with the 1950s and early 1960s; Lesbia had pioneered a distinctive modernism, in which she wrote of her yearning for other women. Change and destruction The tides of literary history left Lesbia stranded and mostly alone: a poetic anomaly, both modernist and progressive; an activist committed to neither social democracy nor communism but to a different program altogether; a writer of desires unbound by conventional categories. It was not until 1985 that author Drusilla Modjeska and poet Marjorie Pizer brought Lesbia’s poems to a new audience, publishing the first wide selection of her verses alongside a biographical essay that made the work more intelligible to readers. Shortly after, the academics Richard Nile and Robert Darby ushered into print The Invaluable Mystery (1987), Lesbia’s lost novel about wartime repression, which, incredibly, they located misfiled in the archives of the Commonwealth Literary Fund. On September 11 2001 – exactly a year after the protests at S11 – hijacked planes crashed into New York’s Twin Towers, bringing the boisterous optimism of the anti-corporate movement to an abrupt and violent end. The War on Terror began and I returned to study, eventually enrolling in a PhD at RMIT University. In that grim time, I wanted to think more about the rise and fall of radical hope in the early 20th century and so I researched the Australian Communist Party founder Guido Baracchi, a dilettante and intellectual whose long and eventful life traversed key moments of Australian socialist and literary history. Baracchi was, for a time, Lesbia’s comrade and lover. Her poem Grotesque addressed him directly: You Have Run Through all my veins in fever, Through my soul in fever for An endless time. On the old wooden tables of the Mitchell Library’s sun-dappled reading room, I read that and other poems in Lesbia’s faded handwriting, piecing together, as best I could, the details of a catastrophic affair from long ago. But, back then, I was telling his story rather than hers and so when I submitted my thesis I understood that a great deal remained to be said. Lesbia’s politicised modernism feels now even more relevant than ever. “To be modern,” says Marshall Berman, is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Is that not the situation we all confront today? This is an edited introduction from Somewhere Here the Future’s Hid: The Extraordinary Life of Lesbia Harford by Jeff Sparrow (Monash University Publishing).