JAMES MCAULEY AND THE COMMUNIST MENACE.(Review)

JAMES MCAULEY, at the height of the Cold War, noted with wry humour that his fervent anticommunism had seen him portrayed in leftist circles as a "Catholic fascist hyena. He could also be startlingly candid about his own shortcomings. In "Exploit, a poem from 1958, for instance, he presented himself as "the monster in its lurking-place" or "the central nightmare" needing to be slain, while in an uncollected piece from his university days he unsparingly stripped away the pretensions from his confident, histrionic self ("this cardboard figure, cut/In likeness of a fighting gamecock") to reveal:

 
   A howling desolation feeds that pride, 
   At whose dead centre sits a child that weeps, 
   Lost and disconsolate, and never sleeps. 

Yet it is doubtful if even McAuley would have greeted with ironic detachment the most recent attacks on his reputation by Cassandra Pybus in her book The Devil and James McAuley (1999). There his stance against Moscow is traced back to his alleged homosexual desire, a "suppurating wound that would never heal" in Pybus's formulation, so that her "thesis is only that McAuley was troubled by--terrified by--his sexual urges, especially the homoerotic, which he displaced onto the Devil and his communist agents".

The modest "only" has not blinded readers to the magnitude of Pybus's charge. Many reviewers have been incensed by the suggestion that communism, in itself, was not an evil sufficient to call forth McAuley's critique and, as Graeme Hetherington underscored (see Quadrant, September 2000), "regardless of the hypothetical psychological road" McAuley traversed to reach his postwar political position, "communism in the hands of Stalin and others [w]as a political system straight from the Devil". What has been less generally recognised is that Pybus's "thesis" is not an isolated excess, a regrettable postscript which leaves the bulk of her study untainted, but that it is indicative of an informing bias, indeed of a concerted program of belittlement.

Evidence abounds of a reluctance to acknowledge her subject's intellectual and human strengths, coupled with a preference for magnifying his failings, even if it involves a distortion of Pybus's sources. Documenting every instance would be tedious. I shall therefore restrict myself to outlining this broad tendency, as well as to several key examples of how material has been contentiously marshalled in ways which might easily pass unnoticed. Others, moreover, have testified to this bias with understandable concern. Hetherington has detailed how Pybus misrepresented him, and another interviewee, Professor John Legge, expressed misgivings to me about how his description of a single nocturnal disturbance involving McAuley at Duntroon had silently become several in The Devil and James McAuley. In both cases Pybus's rendition of her sources works to undermine McAuley's moral and psychological standing--but her larger target is his intellectual credibility.

In Pybus's introduction she implies that his considerable reputation as a poet is owing to the partisan support of close friends such as Dame Leonie Kramer, while sweepingly Pybus asserts that

 
   without these two men [Alf Conlon and B.A. Santamaria] McAuley would have 
   been directionless: he was pulled along in the slipstream of their 
   energetic campaigns and adapted his reading of the world to fit their 
   concerns ...