review | Jeff Sparrow

A CONTRARIAN LIFE

• Jenny Hocking: Frank Hardy: Politics, Literature, Life (Lothian, $39.95, ISBN 0734408366)

I know you’d share my feelings about the Iraq slaughter: in all the millions of words printed about that famous victory, how many about the thousands of Iraqi women and children killed and maimed? And now, in the aftermath of tens of thousands starving and freezing to death, and that fucking Bush washing his hands like a latter-day Pontius Pilate (who’d be a saint by comparison) . . .

The words belong to Frank Hardy and, though they refer to another war and an earlier Bush, there’s something still slightly eerie in their immediacy, as if the crackly old 78 you found in the attic suddenly filled your speakers with hip-hop beats.
    Jenny Hocking’s biography of Hardy carries the subtitle Politics, Literature, Life. Its achievement lies in tracing the relationship between all three elements, without reducing its subject to any one of them.
    Hocking reminds us that Hardy, too often remembered only for Power Without Glory, actually published nine other full-length books, twelve short-story collections and six plays. He was a multi-talented writer with a multimedia career: a Logie-winning script writer (he used the award ceremony to taunt Nine’s proprietor Frank Packer) who regularly worked the other side of the camera on the ABC game show Would You Believe?, he also wrote a long-running column for the Australasian Post, bested Tex ‘Tall Tale’ Tyrell at the Australian Yarn Spinning Championship, hosted a radio show for 3AK and penned a pop song (‘Sydney Town’) that entered the top ten in 1965.
    It is not quite the corpus you’d expect from a drab social realist, and it suggests a correspondingly contrarian life. Hocking covers the familiar details of Hardy’s development: his radicalisation during the Depression, his decision to become a writer after serving in an Army Education unit with Vane Lindesay and Ambrose Dyson, and of course the Power Without Glory case, about which she exhumes some startling new material relating to Hardy’s composite characters.
    But she also delights in the incongruities of his later years, such as his spectacularly unlikely affair with the Greek singer Nana Mouskouri or his 1986 arrest during a reading in a pub for unpaid parking fines. On that occasion, a group of drinkers rescued him from the divvy van, with Doc Neeson from the oz-rock band The Angels opening the door and saying, ‘Step out, comrade!’ While the Tactical Response Group tried to quell the developing riot, two working-class legends enjoyed a quiet beer in the back bar.
    Perhaps most interestingly, Hocking’s book shows how closely Hardy’s major texts related to concrete political interventions. Power Without Glory, of course, was planned by the Communist Party to shatter the prestige of the ALP powerbroker John Wren, a task in which it succeeded beyond all expectations. His But the Dead are Many reflected the internal struggle taking place within the CPA over the nature of Stalinism, while The Unlucky Australians brought, with considerable sensitivity, the burgeoning land-rights struggle to mainstream attention. As Hocking notes, “where [Hardy] differed from less sophisticated political writers was in his determination to render his own role highly visible to his readers, and to stress throughout the primacy of Aboriginal agency”.
    In his life, Hardy was neglected by the literary establishment, shunned by universities and writers’ festivals, and denied government funding on explicitly political grounds. The animosity continues, in some quarters at least, to pursue him beyond the grave, with Gerard Henderson recently condemning Hocking’s study as a hagiography and denouncing the Australia Council for giving her the money to write it. One doesn’t expect much from Henderson (as Hardy’s comrades might have said, from each according to his ability) but the claim that Frank Hardy: Politics, Literature, Life glosses over the question of Stalin is particularly mendacious, since Hocking explicitly identifies But the Dead are Many (perhaps the most self-lacerating mea culpa produced by any Australian communist) as Hardy’s most critically acclaimed novel.
    What really sticks in the craw of the Hendersons today (just as it enraged their counterparts of years gone by) is that Hardy’s radicalism survived his disenchantment with official communism and that, rather than join the chorus line of well-paid ex-leftists, he continued haranguing street corners on behalf of the Unemployed Workers Union until well into the 1990s.
    Even among progressives, Hardy remains unfairly neglected. Hopefully, Hocking’s fine biography will inspire a new generation to re-examine his work.

Jeff Sparrow is an author and Overland’s reviews editor.

Overland 182–autumn 2006, pp.79–80.

© Jeff Sparrow

Click here to order