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Literature

In reading a biography of Frank Hardy, it is almost impossible to separate the man, as subject, from the work for which he is famous, the novel Power Without Glory (1950) based on the life of John Wren. If I did not want to reach for my gun every time I hear the word ‘icon’ these days, I would say that this novel still has iconic status in Australian culture. The title is a pithy reworking of Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory (1940), about the ethics of a Catholic priest in southern Mexico. Like Greene, Hardy was driven by a quasi-religious commitment, but for him it was a lifelong commitment to the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) rather than to Catholicism.

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Published in February 2006, no. 278

William Cookson was eighteen. He had been writing to Ezra Pound for three years. At last he spent a week in Italy with the great man. ‘Does he ever speak?’ Pound asked his mother. Nonetheless, or as a consequence, Pound encouraged Cookson to start a literary magazine. Cookson founded Agenda in 1959 and edited it until his death in 2003.

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Published in February 2006, no. 278

As Nicholas Jose observed in the November 2005 issue of ABR, the face of South Australian novelist Catherine Spence, currently featured on our $5 note, circulates much more widely than any of her books. Like those of several other nineteenth-century Australian women writers, Spence’s novels were revived in the 1980s but are now once again out of print. So this new edition of her autobiography, extensively annotated and accompanied by letters and a diary never before published, is especially welcome.

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Published in February 2006, no. 278