Not quite James McAuley. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: I have just caught up with the March issue of Quadrant (my own nomadic habits to blame; no fault of Quadrant) and have read with approving interest the strictures Michael Ackland levels at Cassandra Pybus, author of The Devil and James McAuley, for "forcing events to suit the author's case".

What of Michael Ackland's own performance in this regard?

In his book Damaged Men he makes use of two articles of mine, one in Quadrant (October 1976), the other in the Australasian Catholic Record (iv, 1995), quoting directly at times, at others extrapolating, paraphrasing or condensing. Fair enough; normal practice.

On page 216, in the context of the hymns I made with James McAuley, he writes that "Connolly ... remarked that the hymnist's [that is, McAuley's] celebration of cosmic love was counterbalanced by an inordinately acute `sense of evil as a dire reality'". What I had actually written was that of all the poets I had read, McAuley and Baudelaire, in their different ways, seemed most to possess an "acute sense of evil as a dire reality". I had remarked nothing about any "celebration of cosmic love" nor its being "counterbalanced" by anything. And I certainly had not written "inordinately acute sense of evil".

On page 265 he tells us that the later hymn-texts from McAuley arriving in my Sydney letterbox were "darker and distinctly personal". Certainly, some were personal, as I had mentioned in my Quadrant piece. But "darker"? ...