Their Brilliant Careers

by Ryan O'Neill

  In October 1955 the Nobel Committee announced that Matilda Young had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The news came as a shock to Young; at first she believed herself the victim of an elaborate prank. Interviews with the newly crowned Nobel laureate appeared in the London Times, the New York Times, Paris-Match and even Pravda, which noted approvingly Young’s criticisms of Western imperialism. In Australia, Young’s achievement was barely remarked on, with only one small newspaper, the Western Sydney Advertiser, mentioning it in a small column on page nineteen under the inaccurate headline “Sydney Housewife Wins Writing Competition”. The substantial prize money for the Nobel allowed Young to devote more time to the causes which were to define the remainder of her life: feminism, the environment, and advocating for the rights of Indigenous Australians.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, her international prestige, Young continued to be ignored by a number of elderly and conservative Australian writers and academics. Incredibly, not one of her poems appeared in the three massive Australian poetry anthologies of the 1960s, Classic Australian Poems (1961), The Classic Poems of Australia (1965) and Australia’s Classic Poems (1969), all edited and dominated by men. Throughout this decade, Young became more politically active, and her letters and articles decrying her country’s sexism and racism became a regular feature in progressive magazines and journals. The right-wing press, headed by Quarter, resurrected Young’s old nickname of “Whingeing Matilda” in their attacks, even making slighting references to her weight, which had increased steadily since her daughter’s death.

  In 1967, despite being past retirement age, Young was offered a post as a tutor in Australian literature at the University of Sydney, which she accepted with great humility. She initially intended to remain at the university for only one year, but Young stayed for six and was instrumental in lobbying for, and creating, a course which would examine only women writers, the first of its kind in the country. Her “Australian Women’s Fiction Studies” was derided as “Bush Studies” by Edward Gayle in Quarter and faced hostility from male lecturers, but Young was vindicated when, within three years, “AWFS” had become the most popular course in the Arts faculty, and Young one of the most admired lecturers. Though teaching perhaps took too much of her energy, Young loved the work, and only left the university in 1973 when her failing eyesight and hearing made continuing impossible. That same year she sent Patrick White a letter of congratulations on his winning the Nobel Prize, noting wryly:

  According to the newspapers, you’re the first Australian to win the Nobel. It’s lucky you didn’t write The Tree of Woman as the press would never have taken any notice of you!

  White’s response to this sally has been lost, although it is perhaps telling that he named a bitter, overweight woman in his next novel, A Fringe of Leaves (1976), “Mrs Young”.

  In spite of her ongoing health problems, including arthritis, rheumatism and a broken hip, Young continued to write poetry throughout the last years of her life, though most of her time was taken up campaigning against the Vietnam War. Her genius was finally, if belatedly, recognised in Australia, with the awarding of honorary doctorates from universities around the country. Berkeley & Hunt published her Collected Poems in 1974 and her autobiography, She’ll Be Right, in 1975, both of which sold over 25,000 copies. A new generation of writers embraced Young, including the playwright Rainy Deverall, the feminist Germaine Greer and the writer Helen Garner. Shortly after the publication of Matilda Young’s autobiography, her health deteriorated sharply, and she died in her sleep on 1 November 1975.

  Arthur ruhtrA in Sydney, 1978

  (1940–1981)

  Poor Arthur. The only constraint he couldn’t overcome was his lack of talent.

  Georges Perec, in a letter to Italo Calvino,

  29 November 1981

  ARTHUR RUHTRA, EXPERIMENTAL WRITER AND FOUNDER OF the Australian avant-garde writing collective Kangaroulipo, was born Arthur Robinson on 30 August 1940, in the foreign literature section of his father’s bookshop in Fremantle, Western Australia. His mother’s labour had progressed so quickly that there was no time to take her to the hospital, so Arthur was delivered by his father, Oliver Robinson, with only the birth scene from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), which he happened to be reading, to act as his guide.

  Arthur was to spend much of his childhood in his father’s shop, a small space crammed floor to ceiling with dusty books on every conceivable topic. The main source of Robinson’s income was the volumes he kept in an alcove behind a discreet curtain at the rear of the shop: novels that were banned or restricted in Australia such as No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase (1939), The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana by Richard Burton (1883) and My Secret Life (1888) by “Walter”. By the age of three, Arthur would often mind the counter while his father took a nervous male customer behind the curtain. At four, he had taught himself to read and had become proficient at the crosswords and word games on the puzzle page of the daily newspaper. Arthur was a very small child (he would never grow past five feet five inches) and faced bullying after he started school, despite attempting to teach himself martial arts from a book on jujitsu. He was shy, and a poor student; his teacher despaired of the boy ever learning his ABCs even as Arthur carried a twice-read Ivanhoe (1820) in his schoolbag.

  Arthur’s mother, Constance, doted on her young son and would pester him to play outside, but Arthur preferred to hide among the stacks, creating anagrams and acrostics. Constance’s sudden death from septicaemia, when Arthur was eight, was a blow from which he never truly recovered. Oliver Robinson, in his grief, turned to alcohol, and from 1948 Arthur all but ran the bookshop, attending school sporadically, and only when his father was threatened with prosecution. During this time, Arthur became ever more absorbed by literature. Later he was to claim that his best friend in childhood was Huckleberry Finn, his first love Elizabeth Bennet, and that he had lost his virginity to Fanny Hill.

  In 1954 Oliver Robinson was arrested for selling obscene publications, fined fifty pounds and sentenced to three months in gaol. In order to avoid being taken into care, Arthur created a fictional “Aunt Helen” to look after him, forging a birth certificate by following the instructions in a memoir by the early twentieth-century master forger W.D. Pascoe. His ploy was successful, and for years afterwards Helen Robinson appeared on Fremantle’s electoral roll. Later in life, when he was accused by a critic of being unable to create a convincing female character, ruhtrA gave the example of his Aunt Helen. Arthur spent the term of his father’s imprisonment alone in the shop. The police had confiscated the indecent books they had found, but were unaware that most of Robinson’s stock was stored in a nearby warehouse. Arthur replaced the books the police had destroyed and hired a carpenter to put a door in front of the alcove. He painted the door blue and wrote across it in a childish scrawl, “Arthur’s Room”. He moved a chair and bed into the small space, papered the walls with comic-book covers, and stored the forbidden books under the mattress. Arthur could by now instantly recognise a customer who was after the special stock, and he would guide the man into his room and lift up the mattress so that he could make his choice. When the police raided the shop again, a week before Arthur’s father was to be released from gaol, they merely glanced into the alcove. Although he was now fifteen, Arthur’s short stature and reedy voice meant he could still pass for a nine-year-old. The police tousled his hair and left a polite note for his Aunt Helen, who, Arthur told them, had popped to the shops to buy him some lollies.

  Oliver Robinson was released from prison in poor health and exhibiting the first signs of dementia. Once back at home, he rarely emerged from the small flat above the bookshop. Arthur continued to run the business; although the police returned to the premises twice in the next few months, they never found any forbidden publications. The shop turned a profit, just enough for Arthur and his father to live on, and by mid-1955 the boy, having read all of the books on the shelves
, turned his attention to those kept in the back room. He was unimpressed by what he found there, swiftly becoming bored of such fare as Common Sense About Sex (1935) and Tush in the Bush (1942). One day, as he sorted the stock, he found a thick novel that had fallen between the bed and the wall. This was Odysseus (1923) by Frederick Stratford. For the next four days Arthur barely slept. He had never read anything like Stratford’s novel and, though there was much of it he didn’t understand, the book had a profound effect on him. Arthur believed his life truly began on the day he started reading the book; he came to refer to the time preceding this great event as B.O. (Before Odysseus). He read the book a dozen times over the next year, as well as the other novels Stratford had published in the 1920s. The accusations that Stratford had plagiarised the work of James Joyce, among others, made no impression on Arthur. He would never alter his conviction that Joyce, not Stratford, was the plagiarist. Odysseus had given Arthur his vocation: he would be a writer.

  When Arthur was nineteen, his father died. Within a month Arthur had sold the bookshop along with all its stock. Inspired by the descriptions of Paris in Stratford’s sixth novel, The Sun Comes Up Too (1926), he bought a passage to France, leaving Fremantle in November 1959 with only a suitcase containing a few clothes and his copy of Odysseus. He arrived in Paris in March 1960 and rented a small apartment off the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Hungering for experience, he frequented the cafés and brothels of the Rive Gauche, picking up the language so rapidly that he was fluent before a year had passed. During this time he commenced work on a memoir of his early life with the unfortunate title My Childhood B.O., which was never finished. He also wrote poetry, usually in free verse, producing over eighty poems in his first year in Paris. He submitted them to the city’s few English language literary journals, but they were rejected. Despite these setbacks, before long the diminutive Robinson had become a familiar figure on the fringes of the Parisian literary world, with his strongly accented French and his willingness to argue with anyone who disputed his strange notions about the authorship of Ulysses, including, on one occasion, an elderly Sylvia Beach, the original publisher of Joyce’s novel.

  Admiring Robinson’s sincere absurdity, the vice-rector of the Collège de Pataphysique invited him to join in 1961, and there Robinson came into contact with the leading French artists, writers and intellectuals of the day, including Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Raymond Queneau. It was Queneau who encouraged Robinson to put his arguments for the genius of Frederick Stratford into print. In November 1961, to mark his first publication, the polemical pamphlet Shames Joyce: The Great Plagiarist, Arthur changed his name, “marooning Robinson forever in obscurity”, as he later recalled. He spent weeks considering a suitable nom de plume, until one day he caught a glance of his signature in a looking glass, and he became Arthur ruhtrA.

  In 1962 ruhtrA met Georges Perec, who had written a mock-serious letter congratulating him on revealing Joyce to be nothing more than a copyist. Perec was then unpublished and working as an archivist in a research library attached to the Hôpital Saint-Antoine. The two men became friends, and ruhtrA encouraged Perec to complete his first novel, Les Choses, which went on to win the Prix Renaudot in 1965. ruhtrA, meanwhile, had abandoned poetry and was caught up in the first of his literary experiments. In June 1964 he published Grosswords, a collection of thirty cryptic crosswords in which every answer is a dirty word. The work enjoyed some success in France, and a measure of notoriety in Australia when a copy ruhtrA sent to Frank Moorhouse was seized by customs and destroyed, causing questions to be asked in the Australian federal parliament. Six months after the Grosswords scandal, ruhtrA completed his short-story collection Waterworks, written under one of the peculiar literary constraints he would become known for. Each story in the collection is exactly three thousand words long, and had been written after ruhtrA had drunk five litres of water. Though desperate to relieve his bladder, ruhtrA did not allow himself to go to the toilet until he had completed a story. Waterworks was published on 4 March 1965, by coincidence the same day as Perec’s Les Choses.

  Although it did not enjoy the success of Perec’s novel, Waterworks did bring the Australian to the attention of Oulipo. Ouvroir de littérature potentielle was an experimental collective of writers that had grown from the Collège de ’Pataphysique; among the aims of the group was to unite literature and mathematics, and to unleash creativity by the use of literary constraints. Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947), for example, retells the same trivial incident in ninety-nine different ways. ruhtrA was invited to meetings of the group as an observer throughout 1966, and in September of that year he made the fatal mistake of requesting to join, unaware that under the rules of Oulipo the only way to disqualify oneself from membership is to ask to become a member.

  ruhtrA was dispirited by this rebuff, but generously warned his friend Perec so that he would not make the same blunder. Perec was invited to join Oulipo a month after ruhtrA was turned down, becoming a formal member in October 1966. ruhtrA was determined to convince the group to overturn their decision, and Perec promised he would do what he could to help. In January 1967 ruhtrA commenced writing his best known work, the novel Long Time No See, which he hoped would impress Oulipo sufficiently to invite him to join. Long Time No See, a picaresque satire of Parisian literary life, is also a lipogram; it does not use the letter C in any of its 734 pages. ruhtrA worked on the novel for two and a half years on a typewriter that had the C key removed. The money from the sale of his father’s bookshop having run out long ago, ruhtrA could not afford to heat his tiny apartment, and so Perec allowed him to spend winter days in a quiet corner of his office, where he could write in relative comfort. Despite this gesture, the two men were not as close as they had once been. Their friendship, already strained by the success of Perec’s Les Choses and acceptance into Oulipo, would be in ruins by the end of 1969.

  On 19 June of that year, ruhtrA completed his revisions of Long Time No See, and was on the way to the local post office to send the manuscript to his publisher when he happened to glance in the window of a bookshop on the Rue Morgue. The display advertised Georges Perec’s latest novel, La Disparition. ruhtrA was puzzled, as Perec had not told him he was working on a new book. When ruhtrA opened a copy, he saw what Perec had done. La Disparition was a lipogram; it never once used the letter E. Perec always claimed that he had been working on his novel before he met ruhtrA, and that the Australian had stolen the idea of Long Time No See from him just as his hero, Frederick Stratford, had stolen Odysseus from Joyce’s Ulysses. ruhtrA, conversely, called Perec a thief and a plagiarist. “I should have known,” he wrote in a letter published in Le Monde denouncing the French writer. “After all, Perec is an anagram of creep.”

  Betrayed, as he believed, by Perec and Oulipo, in January 1970 ruhtrA held the first meeting of his own experimental literary group, Kangaroulipo, at a small bar near Notre Dame Cathedral. ruhtrA modelled his collective on Oulipo, going so far as to copy their rules and structure, but with one difference: only Australian experimental writers could join. While this was a strong repudiation of the French avant-garde, it limited the number of eligible members. Just four writers were present at the inaugural meeting: ruhtrA; Lazaros Zigomanis, whose cut-ups of William Burroughs’s The Soft Machine (1961) had attracted the ire of Burroughs himself; Kiralee Sutcliffe, who under the pen name “S” wrote “mathematical erotica”, including the cult classic Seven Ate Nine (1969); and Erol Engin, poet and composer. At the meeting it was decided that the group would pursue experimental works with an Australian theme, explicitly rejecting the reactionary bush realism of such writers as Sydney Steele, Henry Lawson and Addison Tiller. Zigomanis worked on Hanging at Picnic Rock, an assemblage of a recently published novel by Joan Lindsay, while Sutcliffe repurposed the characters in Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902). Engin elected to continue his work in progress, Lazy Z, a 500,000-word novel written under the constraint of not using the last letter of the alphabet. ruhtr
A’s contribution was to be a cento novel composed entirely of previously published works by Australian writers.

  By the second meeting in September 1970, the group was a shambles. Zigomanis had resigned his secretaryship and fled Paris after a strung-out Burroughs ran him to ground in a café and threatened his life. Engin had abandoned Lazy Z after selling a book of traditional bush poetry, Brumbies in the Gum Trees, to Australian publisher Berkeley & Hunt. The only members to turn up for the meeting were Kiralee Sutcliffe and ruhtrA, who by then were living together. Throughout 1971 and 1972 Kangaroulipo met sporadically, never attracting more than half a dozen writers and resulting in few publications. Long Time No See received rejection after rejection from English and French publishers, and a depressed ruhtrA ceased working on his cento novel. Only the success of Sutcliffe’s Bush Studies, which was later adapted into the film Études de poils pubiens (1972) starring Sylvia Kristel, enabled the couple to stay in the capital.

  In January 1973 Long Time No See was finally accepted by New Dimensions, a small experimental Australian publisher, and this, along with the end of conscription, persuaded ruhtrA to return home. Sutcliffe paid for his flight on the understanding she would join him when she had finished her latest novel, but after arriving in Sydney ruhtrA wrote to Sutcliffe that he did not want to see her again, blaming her jealousy for the failure of their relationship. On its publication in June 1973, Long Time No See enjoyed faintly praising, if baffled, reviews, but sales were poor. ruhtrA had already spent his advance, and by August he was almost penniless. At the same time, the relaxation of censorship in Australia meant that Sutcliffe’s previously banned novels appeared, including the bestseller Ménages à Treize (1972). For a few months the glamorous “S” became a figure of fascination in the Australian press, prompting ruhtrA to dash off a memoir of their time together in France, which was also published by New Dimensions. The Possessive S (1973), with its lengthy descriptions (mostly fabricated or exaggerated, according to Sutcliffe) of ruhtrA and Sutcliffe’s sex life, proved to be the commercial success that had so long eluded ruhtrA.