Character Assassination

Book Reviews

The Devil and James McAuley
by Cassandra Pybus
University of Queensland Press, 1999

When he died in 1976, "so clean a spirit" was a typical epitaph for James McAuley:  poet, co-author of Australia's most famous literary hoax, public servant, founding editor of Quadrant, literary critic and anti-Communist campaigner.

Cassandra Pybus, however, can barely conceal her detestation of this "iconic intellectual of the right" in her new biography, The Devil and James McAuley.  Instead, she paints a Dorian Gray portrait of a lower-middle-class snob, a man tormented by inner demons, a credulous and fanatical Catholic, a man malignant towards his foes and traitorous towards his friends, an adulterer, an alcoholic and a hypocrite.

She saves her final assessment of this complex and talented figure for her book's incredible postscript:  that the key to understanding McAuley's life and opinions was self-torturing dread of repressed and unacknowledged homosexuality.

But after having dined out on McAuley's reputation and spat the bones on the floor, Pybus hasn't enough credit to pay the bill.  As unbelievable as it may seem, despite 26 pages of endnotes, for almost none of her seamy allegations is there any independently verifiable documentation.

Instead, she relies on reminiscences by McAuley's ageing friends and colleagues of events which happened up to about 60 years ago, arguable interpretations of contemporary correspondence, recollections of gossip and recollections of gossip about gossip.  All of which she solemnly buries in endnotes without querying the reliability of her sources' memories or the strength of their prejudices.

Such is her suspicion of her subject that she presents as fact events whose evidence seems to be simply that McAuley was the awful sort of person who would have done this awful sort of thing.

Here is one outstanding example of Pybus at work.  She twice makes the damning claim that McAuley was an ASIO informant who dobbed on colleagues during the Vietnam War period.  As evidence she refers both times to a book by David McKnight which claims that ASIO used to supply McAuley with briefing papers.  But McKnight says nothing, zilch, zero! about reports supplied by McAuley on staff and students.

This is history by hearsay and hunches.  If a historian has a hypothesis, she ought to produce documents.  If there are no documents, she ought to shut up.  Save rumours for cold nights, a warm fire and a bottle of port.

The stated aim of The Devil and James McAuley is to "foreground" McAuley the political intellectual.  But what Pybus achieves is something quite different:  a biography which paints him as a deviant, sterile sport, a weird one-off in intellectual history.  She interprets his fierce anti-Communism as a transferred fear of diabolical activity and his religious beliefs as a transferred fear of sublimated homosexuality.  Ultimately 30 years of McAuley's voluminous writing are trivialised as the working out of childhood hang-ups.

Despite much detailed and painstaking research, this biography sheds very little light on McAuley's place in Australian intellectual life.  A great pity, for his intellectual journey is fascinating partly because of its links with other intellectual and literary figures, both here and overseas.

It is extraordinary, for instance, that Pybus has overlooked the influence of Sydney University philosopher John Anderson on McAuley.  He claimed that he had shaken off Anderson's ideas, but with many of McAuley's students winding up as libertarians and anti-Communists (including Donald Horne and Peter Coleman), surely something must have stuck.

Echoing other critics, Pybus treats McAuley's conversion to Catholicism as a flight from his own inner turmoil.  This view ignores conversions by other major literary figures, like T.S. Eliot or David Jones in the UK, Francis Webb or Les Murray in Australia, and James Baxter in New Zealand.  The American poet Allen Tate was a Catholic convert whose career, social thinking and philosophy bear interesting similarities to McAuley's.  Something funny was going on there.

By treating McAuley as a unique case, Pybus misses important leads which could have made her work far more substantial.  Why did both of the Ern Malley hoaxers, McAuley and his mate Harold Stewart, turn to religion, McAuley as a Catholic, Stewart as a Buddhist?  Why did they both hanker after "traditional" society?

If there is one criticism of McAuley I would share with Pybus, it is his penchant for apocalyptic posturing.  "Suddenly this one huge glaring visage, this enormous mask made of blood and lies, starts up above the horizon and dominates the landscape", was the way he described the threat of Communism in Quadrant's inaugural editorial.  He had his reasons -- 50 million or so sacrifices offered to the Moloch of Marxism (as he might have put it) were more than enough.  But while this kind of over-heated rhetoric wins friends in some circles, it makes enemies in others.  Like Cassandra Pybus.