by Ryan O'Neill
Donald Chapman?
(1903?–1937?)
The feckless waves coolly adore
The shark’s barbaric gloaming.
From “The Red Stumps of Memory” (1936?)
DONALD CHAPMAN, POET, WAS BORN IN TAREE, NEW SOUTH Wales on 19 August 1903, a few minutes after his twin sister, Deirdre. Chapman’s father was a plumber and his mother a seamstress. Donald showed little interest in literature in his youth, although in secondary school he reportedly enjoyed the short stories of Addison Tiller. After finishing his education he became a telegram boy, then a shoe salesman, a stevedore and – finally, in 1925 – an insurance clerk. Chapman lived a quiet life. On his parents’ death he moved in with his sister and her family, sleeping in a small spare room that he always kept neat and tidy. He seemingly had no interest in the opposite sex, or in dancing, music or the cinema. Sometimes he would return home furtively carrying a small package wrapped in brown paper; when Deirdre confronted him, he showed her with some embarrassment the poetry collections he had bought.
On 22 September 1937 Chapman was struck by a bus and killed as he was walking home from his office. Several months after his funeral a tearful Deirdre was going through her brother’s few possessions when she happened on three notebooks filled with the poetry Chapman had written in his last years. Wanting to preserve something of her brother’s memory, Deirdre decided to send a few of his poems to a publisher to ask their opinion. In December 1938 Paul Berryman, editor of the Modrenist magazine, opened a large envelope containing a letter from Deirdre Chapman, which gave the outline of her late brother’s life described above, a photograph of Donald, and six poems she had torn from his notebooks. Berryman glanced at the letter and briefly considered returning the poems without reading them, but finally decided to skim the first lines of “The Red Stumps of Memory”.
As well as being the founding editor of the Modrenist, Australia’s leading journal of avant-garde poetry and prose, Berryman was himself a poet. Born in Newcastle in 1900, he had been brought up on the bush verse of Paterson and Lawson. His first published poems, in the Newcastle Herald when he was sixteen, were traditional bush ballads with titles such as “Drenching the Cows” and “The Joy of Fencing”. Berryman’s approach to his craft was transformed when he moved to Sydney in 1918 to study literature at university, where he made friends with fledgling poets Jack Sargent and Matilda Young. In post-war Sydney the arts blossomed as never before, and dozens of poetry movements burst into life. Among them were the Onomatopoets, who held the sound of a poem to be supreme, as well as the cross-dressing, surrealist Mamaists, and the Metallurgists, who claimed Sydney Steele’s lost masterpiece, Bush, Beer and Ballads, as their canonical text. Jack Sargent was involved with many of these groups, and Berryman became something of a disciple to the handsome Sargent, earning the nickname “Private” from Sargent’s wife, Matilda. Berryman’s experimental verse enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 1920s, and he was hailed as one of the most promising of the new generation of Australian poets.
When Matilda Young left Sargent in 1924, Berryman was suspected of helping his friend write and distribute an obscene poem about his estranged wife. After Sargent’s death, Berryman used his influence in the Sydney poetry world to isolate Young, attacking her in print at every opportunity and spreading rumours that she had driven Sargent to drink and an early grave. In 1929 Berryman was made deputy editor of the literary journal Northerly, whose editor, Albert Mackintosh, shared his dislike of Young. Though the regular wages were welcome, Berryman despised the traditional verse Northerly favoured. He attempted to persuade Mackintosh that readers hungered for a new kind of poetry, as exemplified by the work of Ezra Pound. Mackintosh would not listen to him, and in a June 1930 editorial dismissed Pound and the poetry of “Modrenism” (a printer’s error) as “an imposture perpetrated on a credulous public”.
Berryman’s tenure at Northerly came to an abrupt end in July 1931 when Mackintosh learned that his deputy editor had destroyed a number of poems submitted to the magazine by Sydney Steele, then living in London. Mackintosh also suspected Berryman of having disposed of the work of other conservative poets rather than publish them, and Berryman was dismissed. A month before, Berryman had made a copy of Northerly’s subscriber list. He now used this information to send out a manifesto advertising a new poetry journal, the Modrenist, which Berryman would publish and edit. He promised an innovative brand of Australian poetry that would no longer rely on the old poetic conventions and threadbare themes of bush poetry.
The first issue of the Modrenist was a success, selling out its initial run of five hundred copies, and a number of avantgarde poets began to cluster around Berryman. In response, Mackintosh, who lived in the Sydney suburb of Arcadia, formed a poetry club called “The Arcadians”, who valued poetry with regular rhyme and metre that dealt with traditional Australian themes – the kind of poetry that Mackintosh continued to champion in Northerly. The feud between the two men continued for years in editorials and articles, with each attempting to recruit poets to their side. By 1938 the erratic publishing schedule of the Modrenist had diminished to once a year, and Berryman was frantically seeking writers who would arouse the interest of his dwindling number of subscribers. It was at this time that he received the letter from Deirdre Chapman and encountered Donald Chapman’s verse.
“The Red Stumps of Memory” impressed Berryman, and on reading “The Jabberwock Saunters Along Taree Main Street” his excitement grew, but it was the third poem, a sonnet in fifteen lines, that convinced him of Chapman’s immense talents:
The Thaumaturgist’s Complaint
As I am made a killing instrument
Lust and decay vie in my heart’s dark race.
Ill thought is born amid the bride’s intent
And eldritch gales devour the sailor’s face.
So you gulp grotesque dreams beneath the ground
Therefore goodbye, go bother weaker hearts.
If there are rabid swans along the sound
Let them before your tomb unveil their arts.
Desiring nothing more than splintered tears,
Although my undecided self’s a verb
Your secret hope results in unheard cheers.
Oh basil is the most untruthful herb,
Unless you would create a kinder lie.
Now courting owls by you my darkness cry
God knows that only gods know when they die.
Chapman’s nihilistic, ambiguous poems were unlike anything Berryman had come across as editor of the Modrenist, and they could not have fallen into his hands at a better time. He wrote at once to Deirdre Chapman, asking that she send the rest of her brother’s notebooks as soon as practicable. Without waiting for a reply, he dedicated the January 1939 issue of the Modrenist to Donald Chapman, including a short biography of the poet, which he adapted from Deirdre’s letter, his photograph, and all six of Chapman’s pieces, which he rearranged and corrected under the title The Red Stumps of Memory. “The Thaumaturgist’s Complaint”, which was to become the best known of Chapman’s poems, appeared first. In his editorial, Berryman did not hesitate to call Chapman’s opaque, allusive verse the work of a genius, and he challenged Albert Mackintosh to produce an Arcadian poet with even half as much talent.
Mackintosh’s reply was swift. In his editorial to the February issue of Northerly he smugly explained how he had found two poets with half of Chapman’s talent. Indeed, the two poets together had made up Chapman. Mackintosh then printed in full a letter he had received from Les Mitchell and Tom Stirling, two bush poets from Bacchus Marsh, “proud Arcadians” and favourites of Mackintosh, whose work, including “The Fossickers”, “Only a Timber Cutter’s Daughter”, and “’E Woz Me Best Mate, ’E Woz” had appeared regularly in Northerly since 1929. In their letter, Mitchell and Stirling explained how they had grown tired of Berryman’s insulting attacks and had resolved to show him up. Over the course of “an idle afternoon” they had composed the half-dozen
poems attributed to Donald Chapman, and the letter from his equally fictitious sister. The photograph was of a local milkman. The two bush poets had not, they said, expected Berryman to be so naive as to publish their “experimental” poetry, and they had been most entertained when their creation had taken up an entire issue of the Modrenist. Mackintosh added that since the moral and poetical bankruptcy of the modernist movement had been revealed to the public, he presumed those involved would now have the good taste to remove themselves from the literary world. Predictably, while crowing over Berryman’s gullibility, Mackintosh made no mention of how he himself had been tricked by Matilda Young into heralding the Sans Souci school of poetry a decade earlier.
The Chapman affair, as it came to be known, attracted the attention of the Australian press. Berryman gave sullen interviews to newspapers defending the poems despite their origins, while having to endure Mackintosh’s taunting in Northerly. The humbled Berryman’s allies deserted him and subscriptions for the Modrenist collapsed. Berryman brooded in silence for months and it was assumed that his literary career, along with the Chapman affair, would now fade into oblivion. However, a new issue of the Modrenist, which Berryman had financed by selling his Sydney flat, appeared in May 1939, heralding yet another twist in the saga. Berryman’s triumphant editorial explained that he had recently received a letter containing “incontrovertible proof” that its author, Bruno Claypool, was the mastermind behind the Chapman affair. Claypool, a self-proclaimed “avant-garde arriviste”, whose work had appeared in the Modrenist throughout the 1930s, asserted that he had written not only the Donald Chapman poems, but also the letter published in Northerly from Les Mitchell and Tom Stirling. Claypool had formed a plan to humble Albert Mackintosh years before, when Mackintosh had sneeringly rejected one of his poems. Claypool revealed that he had created the personas of the Bacchus Marsh poets Mitchell and Stirling and had submitted a number of “infantile” poems under their names, which Mackintosh had happily published in Northerly. Then he had spent two years crafting his “masterpieces”, the six Donald Chapman poems, and had submitted them to the Modrenist, before writing to Mackintosh, in the guise of Mitchell and Stirling, to tell him that Chapman was a sham. Claypool had wished to demonstrate that Mackintosh had no eye for poetry, condemning as he did the brilliance of Claypool’s Chapman poems while celebrating the mediocrity of Mitchell’s and Stirling’s verse, work which, Claypool claimed, had been written with the help of his four-year-old son. As if that were not enough, Claypool revealed that Mitchell and Stirling were not his only creations; he was behind almost every poem that had appeared in Northerly since 1933.
The June 1939 issue of Northerly contained no poetry, and the Chapman affair was addressed only in Mackintosh’s uncharacteristically brief editorial, which deplored the vile deception that had been practised on him and his readers, while stubbornly insisting on the merits of the work he had published by Claypool’s aliases. Privately, Mackintosh began an investigation into the Chapman affair. At great expense he hired a team of private detectives to look into the matter, providing them with a shortlist of suspects including Rex Ingamells, A.D. Hope and Hal Porter, all of whom had reason to dislike the editor of Northerly. (Mackintosh was evidently certain of one thing: only a man would have the intellect, talent and patience to carry out such an involved ruse.) Meanwhile, Berryman enjoyed his moment in the sun: the Modrenist issue revealing Claypool’s deception had sold out, and the mainstream press now lampooned Mackintosh in their cartoons. But Berryman’s victory would prove to be shortlived.
In the third week of August 1939 new issues of Northerly and the Modrenist appeared, by coincidence, on the same day, each reproducing yet another letter, this time from the poet who claimed to be behind Chapman, Mitchell, Stirling and Claypool. The letters, signed “X”, were identical in every respect, except the one published in Northerly claimed that Berryman had orchestrated the hoax all along, and the one published in the Modrenist claimed that Mackintosh was the originator of the deception. Berryman blamed Mackintosh, Mackintosh blamed Berryman, and each vehemently proclaimed his own innocence. By this time the press were bored with the affair, and news of impending war in Europe meant the most recent revelations received little mention in the newspapers. Enraged by this latest humiliation, and convinced of Mackintosh’s guilt, Berryman spent days trying to find the Northerly editor, finally running him to ground as Mackintosh made a call from a telephone booth in George Street. Brandishing a butterknife, Berryman attacked Mackintosh. The men struggled in the booth for a moment or two before a passing policeman arrested them both. Mackintosh was later released, but Berryman was charged with aggravated assault and sentenced to two years in gaol.
Berryman’s imprisonment, and the outbreak of the war, marked the end of the Chapman affair. In 1940, Berryman was released and straightaway enlisted in the Australian Army. He saw action in North Africa and was badly wounded in a skirmish in December 1941, losing his right eye. On his return to Australia after an honourable discharge, he attempted to re-establish the Modrenist but was unable to compete with the new magazine of experimental writing, Angry Penguins. Instead, Berryman submitted a number of his avant-garde poems to Max Harris, the editor of Angry Penguins, but they were rejected as too old-fashioned. Berryman then turned to prose; in 1942 he began his account of the Chapman affair, On First Looking into Chapman’s, in which he outlined his theories as to the true identity of Chapman/Mitchell/Stirling/Claypool/X. He now no longer believed Mackintosh to be the culprit; he did not think him a good enough poet to have written The Red Stumps of Memory. Instead, Berryman’s prime suspects were William Baylebridge and Kenneth Slessor, two writers he had frequently attacked in reviews throughout the 1930s. Berryman finished his book in January 1944 but was unable to find a publisher. In June of that year he bought the latest issue of Angry Penguins and read, with an increasing sense of déjà vu, the Ern Malley poems. Although he was convinced the Malley poems were a prank, he decided not to warn Harris. When the trick was revealed, Berryman wrote to newspapers, highlighting the similarities between the Malley and Chapman affairs, but his correspondence attracted little interest. Berryman continued to live in Sydney until his death in 1953 from throat cancer.
Albert Mackintosh remained editor of Northerly but refused to publish any more poetry on principle. After the assault by Berryman, Mackintosh never again referred to the Chapman affair. Despite falling sales and accusations of irrelevance, Northerly limped along through the 1950s, when it lost many of its readers to Rand Washington’s journal Quarter. By January 1961, Northerly was selling fewer than five hundred copies a month. The final blow, however, did not come from poor sales. In late 1961 Mackintosh was involved in another scandal when an anonymous source provided the Daily Trumpet with evidence of his enormous private collection of pornography. Every day for the first week of December 1961 there was another salacious story about “Dirty Mackintosh”. He resigned a few days before Christmas and the last issue of Northerly appeared in January 1962. Mackintosh died from a heart attack nine months later.
The 1960s saw a renewed interest in the Chapman affair, sparked by the controversial inclusion of “The Thaumaturgist’s Complaint” in the canonical anthologies Classic Australian Poems (1961), The Classic Poems of Australia (1965) and Australia’s Classic Poems (1969). Since that time at least a dozen books have appeared elaborating different theories as to the identity of X; Banjo Paterson, Douglas Stewart and Roland Robinson have all been put forward as candidates, and even prose writers such as Francis X. McVeigh and Rand Washington have come under suspicion. The figure in the Chapman photograph has never been identified. Perhaps the most bizarre theory was originated by Arthur ruhtrA, who maintained that The Red Stumps of Memory had been written from beyond the grave by Frederick Stratford.
The Chapman affair continues to fascinate Australian writers; perhaps most famously, it appeared in fictionalised form in Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake (2003), as well as inspiring recent novels
and short stories by Tim Winton, Gail Jones, Gerald Murnane and Charlotte Wood. In 2009 researchers at the University of Sydney carried out a series of linguistic analyses of the Chapman corpus in an attempt to determine their authorship, but the results were inconclusive. The identity of “Donald Chapman” remains, and quite possibly will forever remain, a riddle.
Stephen Pennington at home, 11 April 2003
(1935–2009)
I now envisage completing the Fernsby biography by the end of 1967 at the very latest …
From a letter to Robert Bush, 5 January 1965
STEPHEN PENNINGTON, BIOGRAPHER OF SYDNEY STEELE, Addison Tiller and, most famously, Alexander Fernsby, was born in Eden, New South Wales, on 12 September 1935. His childhood was far from idyllic; his mother, Eve, was undemonstrative and his father, Robert, resentful and quick to anger. The Pennington family lived in a two-bedroom cottage with a small kitchen and an outhouse. Eve Pennington was the daughter of a wealthy local landowner, and Robert was captain of a fishing vessel; with so little in common, it is understandable that their marriage was made up of brief, violent arguments and extended periods of silence.
Stephen’s parents became the subject of his first, unauthorised biographies. From the few civil conversations they had, the boy reconstructed and consolidated everything he knew of their lives in one of his school notebooks in order to avoid mentioning any subject that might cause discord between them. He established that his mother was happy only when she recalled her life before marrying his father, and that to ask about their wedding, or how they met, was to earn a thrashing with a wooden spoon. His father was a more difficult study; Stephen never ascertained much about him, only that he should never appear before his father carrying a book, as the sight of one enraged him. Robert Pennington despised learning and was determined to make a fisherman of his son, but Stephen’s frequent ear infections meant that he was rarely well enough to go out on the boat.
