Their Brilliant Careers

by Ryan O'Neill

  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.” J
ames 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.”

  Edward Gayle in Alice Springs, May 2001

  (1928–2008)

  It is tempting to suggest that since so-called “indigenous” Australians are now so quick to take offence, they should be renamed “indignant” Australians.

  From Terror Nullius: How the Left’s Intimidation and Lies Distort Australian History (1999)

  ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST CONTENTIOUS HISTORIANS, EDWARD Gayle was born on 9 May 1928 on a cattle station twenty miles from the town of Stuart, in the heart of the Northern Territory. His mother, Rowena, died when he was an infant, and Edward was raised by his father, Theodore. The station employed a dozen men and women, mostly Central Arrernte Aboriginal people, who lived in cabins a ten-minute walk from the Gayle house. Theodore Gayle was an unhappy, irascible man, and his son learned to stay out of his way. Edward, a dreamy, sensitive boy, spent most of his time in the station kitchen, where he was looked after by Katie Gurnabil, a young Aboriginal woman who served as housekeeper and cook for Gayle. Katie’s daughter, Alice, was Edward’s playmate, born just a day after he was.

  The boy enjoyed a large measure of freedom in his early years, and he and Alice would spend hours roaming the property, building cubbies and playing house. The two were inseparable, though Theodore Gayle would tell the girl to “piss off” if he found her playing with his son. Edward loved Katie like a mother, but most of all he loved Alice. In 1933, when the town of Stuart was officially renamed Alice Springs, Edward believed that it had been named for her. Alice did not go to school. Edward, after he turned five, had lessons with his father. Gayle taught his son to read from the only books in the house: the King James Bible (1611) and Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). Though the lessons always ended with Gayle berating his son for his block-headedness, it was clear the boy was highly intelligent.

  By the time he was eight Edward had read Gibbon twice and the Bible five times; he could recite the book of Genesis from memory. Occasionally he would come across an old pulp magazine left by a passing jackaroo – Bonzer Science Stories or Saucy Mystery – and he would hide them away from his father and read them in secret again and again until the cheap paper disintegrated in his hands. When Alice asked him if he could teach her to read, Edward was enchanted. She was a quick study, and after only a few months had amazed him with her progress. In return for his tutoring he asked Alice to teach him stories about the Dreamtime, which he had overheard Katie talking about. Edward was captivated by the traditional stories, and after Alice’s lessons he would carefully note them down so he could learn them by heart. Unfortunately, his father saw these notes and, after whipping Edward for blasphemy, decided it was time his son should go to school.

  In February 1937 Edward was sent to St Ambrose’s College, a boarding school on the outskirts of Alice Springs. Although pleased to be away from his father, Edward missed Alice and Katie dreadfully, and sent them letters whenever one of his father’s workers came to town. Edward was terrible at mathematics, chemistry, biology and all the other subjects his father had never touched upon in their lessons, but he excelled at history and English. Even at nine his prose was fluid and elegantly constructed, yet it would never quite shake off the mustiness of the eighteenth century. During the school holidays Edward would return home to Katie and Alice and his father, who became ever more petulant as he aged. The outbreak of the Second World War saw Alice Springs develop rapidly to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of American troops passing through the town. Edward barely noticed; on his most recent visit home, at the age of fifteen, he had realised he was hopelessly in love with Alice.

  He intended to tell her when he returned home that Christmas, and had rehearsed what he would say a thousand times, but Alice was not there. Katie told him she had found a well-paying job in the military kitchens in town. Taking one of his father’s horses without permission, Edward rode into Alice Springs and loitered outside the gates of the military base until he saw Alice leaving. She was strolling and laughing with an American GI. Without saying a word, Edward attacked the soldier, hitting him on the forehead with a rock he had picked up from the roadside. The stroke was only glancing. Alice screamed and tried to pull her companion away but the GI retaliated viciously, breaking Edward’s nose, then kicking and stamping on his chest as the boy lay helpless on the ground. Finally, some other soldiers pulled the GI away, and Edward was taken to hospital. When his father found out what had happened, he gave Alice some money and ordered her away to her grandmother, who lived in Darwin. When Edward was released from hospital, his father refused to tell him where Alice was. Neither would Katie, no matter how much Edward ranted and wept. In spite of his emotional turmoil, Edward did exceptionally well in his final exams that year. His father told him he could either stay and help run the station (although he vowed that Alice would never return), or continue his studies in Sydney.

  In 1945 Edward Gayle was admitted to the University of Sydney to study history. He was a brilliant student, although his unorthodox opinions were mocked by his peers and lecturers. In particular, his contention that the doctrine of terra nullius could not be applied to Australia because of the Indigenous population’s previous cla
ims to the land became a standing joke. During his semester breaks Gayle would travel to Darwin and search for Alice. In early 1947 he finally found Alice’s grandmother living in a shack on the edge of the city, but the old woman told him that Alice had left for Melbourne the month before. Gayle spent his next vacation in Melbourne, but he found no trace of her there. He never gave up looking for Alice, but as time passed he began to lose hope. Once in a while Katie wrote to him to tell him she had received a postcard from Alice. Sometimes Katie forgot herself and mentioned where Alice was living: Perth, Coober Pedy, Newcastle. As quickly as he could, Gayle would go there and hunt for her. Over time, these occasional trips had assumed the character of holidays. He wondered if he would even recognise Alice if he passed her on the street.

  Gayle completed his undergraduate degree in 1949 and began a PhD in Australian history, surveying the agricultural techniques of the First Fleet settlers. The years passed slowly. After completing his doctorate Gayle became a lecturer at the university, neither liked nor disliked by his students, content to publish a handful of articles a year on unexciting and uncontroversial topics of Australian history. Once or twice his work criticised the invisibility of Indigenous people in the country’s historiography, but these papers were always rejected, and contributed to a reputation for eccentricity that meant he was passed over for promotion more than once. He continued searching for Alice, visiting and revisiting each of Australia’s largest cities.