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NLA News - home June 2004 Volume XIV Number 9
An American poet finds Australia
Portrait of Harry Roskolenko reproduced from the frontispiece of A Second Summary (Melbourne: Reed & Harris, 1944)

Portrait of Harry Roskolenko
reproduced from the frontispiece of A Second Summary
(Melbourne: Reed & Harris, 1944)

 

Patricia Clarke describes Harry Roskolenko’s contributions to the Australian literary scene during and after the last World War

American servicemen in Australia during World War II are so often stereotyped disparagingly as ‘over-sexed, over-paid and over here’ that it comes as something of a surprise to find that among their number were several well-known poets and writers. The names of two of these poets, Karl Shapiro and Harry Roskolenko, are often coupled in their impact on the Australian wartime literary scene. To the distinguished Australian poet, A.D. Hope, their poetry was ‘novel, strange, exciting and assured’.

One of these men, Harry Roskolenko, became so much part of Australian life that he kept revisiting Australia after the war. He deposited an unpublished memoir of his Australian years, ‘When the Bottle’s Bloody Empty, Pet’ in the National Library’s Manuscript Collection and he recorded an interview for the Oral History Collection. During the war, Roskolenko also had a feature role in the unfolding of the Ern Malley affair, often described as the great literary hoax of the twentieth century.

Title page of Voices: A Quarterly of Poetry, no. 118, Summer 1944. Australian issue edited by Harry Roskolenko and Elizabeth Lambert (New York, N.Y.: E.L. Vinsi, 1944)
Title page of Voices: A Quarterly of Poetry,
no. 118, Summer 1944.
Australian issue edited by Harry Roskolenko
and Elizabeth Lambert
(New York, N.Y.: E.L. Vinsi, 1944)

Harry Roskolenko, author, poet, critic and journalist, began his foray into Australian literary life late in 1943 when he wrote to Clem Christesen, editor of the literary magazine Meanjin Papers, begun in Brisbane a few years earlier. Submitting four poems, he introduced himself as a recent arrival ‘temporarily stationed in Sydney’, the author of three books and a writer for the left wing Partisan Review, New Directions and other American literary magazines. ‘Don’t take too long, fella,’ he wrote, having already run into trouble submitting poems simultaneously to several magazines. He also asked Christesen for the names of ‘kindred folk’ in Sydney. ‘The evenings do get kind of barren in the flesh pots,’ he wrote, ‘and I’ve had enough play for the time being.’

Roskolenko arrived in Australia in 1943 as a second officer with the Small Ships Branch of the United States Army Transport Service. Born on lower east side New York in 1907, a son of Russian-born Jewish parents, he went to sea at the age of 13. At 21, then a Trotskyite, he decided to become a poet and writer; his first book of poems, Sequence on Violence, was published in 1938. To Australian poet and publisher, Max Harris, he was ‘the embodiment of the hardened yet sensitive American spirit of radical dissent’. He talked ‘with a New York accent, had burned his way through the living texture of the American skin, knew what it was all about … In the ill-defined Australian climate he found himself a vigorous role in the ideologies of both politics and literature. He became committed to Australia, wrote from his Australian experience, and stirred up the antipodean practitioners of poetry with his particular diction.’

The colourful, assertive, hard-drinking Roskolenko was soon a controversial part of the Australian literary scene. In addition to Meanjin Papers, he had poems and articles published in Angry Penguins (Adelaide), A Comment (Melbourne) and Southerly (Sydney). Within a short time of his arrival, he began editing an Australian issue of the American poetry magazine, Voices: A Quarterly of Poetry, with an English-born poet, Elisabeth Lambert (Terpening and later Ortiz), then living in Sydney. With the brashness of newcomers, they claimed to include a cross-section of ‘the various schools of writing’ in Australia—an unwise claim at a time of ferment in the direction of Australian poetry, when the nationalism of the Jindyworobak movement, the modernist expression fostered by Max Harris and John Reed through Angry Penguins and the eccentric experimentalism of A Comment prevailed. They included poems by Rex Ingamells, Rosemary Dobson, Ian Mudie, William Hart-Smith, Geoffrey Dutton, Max Harris, Brian Vrepont and Clem Christesen, as well as the fake Ern Malley, but when she reviewed Voices in Meanjin Papers, Dorothy Auchterlonie (Green) pointed to the important poets they had omitted, including A.D. Hope, Kenneth Slessor, R.D. Fitzgerald and James McAuley. She described the quality of the poems as ‘uneven’, singling out only Rosemary Dobson and Geoffrey Dutton for praise. Roskolenko complained colourfully to Christesen about this review, describing it as ‘tripe’.

Cover of Angry Penguins Broadsheet, no. 10, Dec. 1946, edited by Harry Roskolenko
A gelatin silver photograph of: (from left to right) John Reed, Sidney Nolan, Sunday Reed, and [i.e. at] 'Heide', Templestowe [194-?] (detail) by Albert Tucker

Albert Tucker (1914–1999)
On the Couch: [left to right] John Reed, Sidney Nolan,
Sunday Reed, and [i.e. at] ‘Heide’, Templestowe
 
[194-?] (detail)
gelatin silver photograph; image 25.0 x 36.7 cm
In series ‘Albert Tucker, Family and Friends’
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an23287580

Left: Cover of Angry Penguins Broadsheet, no. 10, Dec. 1946, edited by Harry Roskolenko

During his posting in Sydney, Roskolenko was involved in the building of ‘an armada of plywood boats’ for the invasion of islands in the South Pacific. Later in the war, the small tanker he was piloting to the invasion of the Philippines was blown up when it was hit by a floating mine off the Carolinas. He was picked up by a ship going to Brisbane where he was in hospital for some months with a back injury. By then he had made enormously good use of his time in Australia, establishing contacts not only in the literary world in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane but among emerging artists. While he was in New Guinea in 1944, Reed & Harris published a book of his poems, A Second Summary, containing poems first appearing in A Comment, Meanjin Papers and Angry Penguins. The Meanjin reviewer, Sydney Musgrove, was critical, describing Roskolenko’s ‘intellectualism’ as ‘largely of the desiccating or negative type’, but the book sold out quickly. Max Harris wrote that Roskolenko’s poetry did not mess around with ‘the fripperies and the adjectival curlicues’, instead ‘letting rip with gritty hard-edged lyrics, vernacular abandon, sudden connections and disconnections’.

A gelatin silver photograph of R.D. FitzGerald in 1981 by Jacqueline Mitelman
A black & white photograph of a portrait of Ian Mudie c.1970. Australian News & Information Bureau photograph
Jacqueline Mitelman
R.D. FitzGerald  1981
gelatin silver photograph;
40.4 x 30.5 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an20243454
Portrait of Ian Mudie  c.1970
b&w photograph; 21.5 x 16.9 cm
Australian News and Information
Bureau photograph
Pictures Collection;
nla.pic-vn3096421

Roskolenko was in Australia at the time of the great literary hoax of the war years, alluded to earlier, when Max Harris at Angry Penguins published, as the genuine work of a dead poet, Ern Malley, verse manufactured by James McAuley and Harold Stewart in an attack on modernism. Described by fellow American poet, Karl Shapiro, as ‘the American avant-garde nut’, Roskolenko was deeply involved. He accepted three Ern Malley poems for publication in the Australian edition of the American Voices magazine and had three of his own poems published in the Ern Malley edition of Angry Penguins. His support in endorsing the intrinsic merit of the Ern Malley poems was valuable to Harris. To Robert Peel, American poet and academic in Australia with the United States Army counter-intelligence, who reviewed this issue of Angry Penguins for Meanjin Papers, the hoax was ‘epic and exquisite’. He regarded himself as fortunate to ‘have approached the Australian literary scene at the very moment when the solemn postures of the angry penguins should have been subjected to the test of this outrageous kookaburra-laughter. The whole incident is mightily therapeutic and should clear the air for profitable discussion.’ Making the most of his embarrassing situation, Roskolenko emphasised the international publicity value for Australian poetry ‘despite the horribly funny angles of the Affaire Malley’. More than a decade later Max Harris wrote: ‘Roskolenko himself was important to the turbulent emergence of a modern Australian poetic idiom in the Angry Penguin years of the 1940s.’

Roskolenko returned to the United States late in 1944 to work as a full-time literary critic for the New York Times Book Review and New York representative of Reed & Harris. In 1946 he returned to Australia for the first of many trips and on several occasions he considered settling here. On his 1946–47 trip he worked for several months for Reed & Harris in Melbourne until the firm went out of business. He stayed on in Melbourne for some time giving talks for the ABC and the Fellowship of Australian Writers. But he found talking to Australian audiences of poets and novelists with their ‘towering envies’ was ‘like going onto a modern battlefield in your jockey underwear’.

A gelatin silver photograph of Geoffrey Dutton and Yevgeny Yevtushenko  in the 1970s by Alec Bolton Cover reproduced from Harry Roskolenko’s Notes from a Journey (Melbourne: Meajin Press, 1947)

Alec Bolton (1926–1996)
Portrait of Geoffrey Dutton and Yevgeny Yevtushenko
[1970s?]
gelatin silver photograph; 16.7 x 21.5 cm
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an14262174
Courtesy of Rosemary Dobson Bolton

Right: Cover reproduced from Harry Roskolenko’s
Notes from a Journey
  (Melbourne: Meanjin Press, 1947)

During this visit, Clem Christesen, who had moved Meanjin to Melbourne, published Roskolenko’s next book of poems, Notes from a Journey and Other Poems. Sidney Nolan designed the cover and the book included poems that had appeared in Angry Penguins, Meanjin Papers and A Comment.

In 1956 Roskolenko was back in Australia riding a motorbike from Perthover the Nullarbor to Melbourne where he reported the Melbourne Olympic Games for a United States sports magazine. His book, Poet on a Scooter, containing several chapters on Australian art and literature, was published in 1958. He again considered settling in Australia but was dissuaded by finding, as he believed, that many talented artists and writers had followed ‘the great writer’ Henry Handel Richardson in flight from Australia because of ‘frustration with the cultural climate’.

A black & white photograph of Clem Christesen [between 1940 and 1950]
Unknown photographer
Portrait of Clem Christesen 
[between 1940 and 1950]
b&w photograph; 22.0 x 16.6 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an24083627

Nevertheless, when financed by the Australian News and Information Bureau, he returned to Australia for visits in 1959, 1971 and 1972–73 to write articles, including pieces on Australian literature, about this country for American publications. In 1970, another book of his poems, American Civilization, was published in Melbourne by National Press with illustrations by acclaimed artists, Clifton Pugh, Albert Tucker and John Olsen and an introduction by Max Harris. It was his last book of poems. He gave up being a poet, he explained, because the world ‘had eradicated every moral and sensual basis for poetry as an art form … It is as empty as the American way of non-life’. He had also abandoned his radical political views and on his 1973 visit edited a special American edition of the right-wing periodical Quadrant. He included the work of several distinguished American poets, a section on literary criticism, articles on the United States in 1973, and a small section on America and Australia. During this visit he also made a half-hour television program on his 30-year relationship with Australia.

In 1976 he again returned to Australia when the Australia Council awarded him a Literature Board grant to write an autobiographical work covering his long association with Australia. He had already written several autobiographical books—When I was Last on Cherry Street (1965); The Terrorized (1967) and The Time That Was Then (1971)—some of which included sections dealing with his war and postwar experiences in Australia. In a preface to his unpublished memoir on Australia, A.D. Hope wrote: ‘He has deep roots in both countries and as he shuttles back and forth, like a migratory bird, “Going away he is also coming home” … His energy, his gusto, his engagement and enjoyment of every aspect of the world around him are reflected and reverberate from all he describes’.

Harry Roskolenko died in New York in 1980, aged 73.

PATRICIA CLARKE is a writer and editor. She is currently editing selected letters of Judith Wright with Meredith McKinney, to be published by the National Library. Their collaborative book, The Equal Heart and Mind: Letters of Judith Wright and Jack McKinney, will be published by University of Queensland Press in 2004

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