Harwood, Gwen

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Gwen Harwood

Though Gwen Harwood (1920–1995) began to publish her poetry relatively late in life, in her late thirties, she became a favorite of both readers and critics around Australia and beyond. "By the end of her life," wrote Alison Hoddinott in The Australian, "Gwen Harwood was arguably the finest and most highly acclaimed poet writing in Australia."

Harwood belonged to no school or trend, and her poetry is difficult to classify as a whole. She wrote about her rural upbringing and about the natural environment on the island of Tasmania, where she lived as an adult. Yet the quizzical Austrian language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein also influenced her as a writer, and her poems occasionally refer to him or embody his ideas. Involved with music throughout her life, she often wrote about it in her poems. And no list of the qualities of Harwood's writing would be complete without a reference to her sense of humor. Hilariously sharp letters she wrote as a young woman were later published and enjoyed by the Australian public, and her poems abound with jokes, puns, and, in one famous case, an obscene acrostic.

Grew Up on Citrus Farm

Born Gwendoline Nessie Foster in Taringa, Queensland, Australia on June 8, 1920, Harwood spent her early childhood near Mitchelton, then a rural area but now part of greater Brisbane. Her family, as she later sketched them in her letters, was slightly eccentric; her father, a salesman and war veteran, had a dachshund to whom he fed tea in the morning. Citrus trees and vegetable gardens surrounded their small cottage, and they kept a small population of livestock. The family moved to Auchenflower, closer to Brisbane, when she was seven. Harwood was sad about leaving her rural paradise when she started school, and she was never enthusiastic about the classroom. She graduated from the Brisbane Girls Grammar School in 1937 and said, according to Hoddinott, that as a student she was "undistinguished in everything except music and poetry."

It was in the former field that Harwood first thought about making a career. Having taken piano lessons from an early age, she dreamed of a career as a concert pianist. At one point she auditioned for the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein when he was visiting Brisbane. The performance did not go well for Harwood. "Once she played / for Rubinstein, who yawned," she later wrote in a poem (according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography). Harwood switched to music education, taking courses with Australian musicologist Robert Dalley-Scarlett. She was awarded a music education certificate with honors in 1939 and took a job as organist at Brisbane's All Saints' Church.

Attracted to an assistant clergyman there, she gave him free piano lessons as a way of getting to spend more time around him. But the romance fizzled, and a disillusioned Harwood entered an Anglican convent in 1941. That course of action did not last, either, and she took a job at the War Damage Commission, a veterans' insurance agency.

It was during this period that Harwood struck up a correspondence with Tony Riddell, a friend who was serving in the Australian navy. Harwood's voice as a writer flowered in these letters, and they were later collected and published in a collection called Blessed City, her name for Brisbane. It was named book of the year by the Australian newspaper The Age. She explained to Riddell that she drew on one of three alternate personalities when she had to attend a wedding; the Young Genius, the Soulful Maiden, or the Embittered and Disillusioned Musician. Any one of the three might help herself to snacks set out for those at the head table. The bureaucrats at the War Damage Commission came in for rough treatment at Harwood's hands. She teased her supervisor by talking to herself in German because he "has that strange habit, that public servants acquire after long years, of reading his mail over to himself in a mumbling voice, with slight inflections at the paragraphs," she wrote to Riddell (as quoted in The Australian). "This makes me laugh so much that he looks up, and because he doesn't know what I'm laughing at, he gets frantically annoyed and then goes on reading and mumbling with suppressed rage. Today he asked me why I didn't behave in a normal manner, and I replied, 'Little Gwendoline was never quite like other girls.'"

Moved to Tasmania

One of her poems, "The Rite of Spring," was published in the literary journal Meanjin, in 1944. But by that time Riddell had introduced her to a navy friend, Bill Harwood, and the two were married in September of 1945. Harwood's husband was an aspiring professor of linguistics, and when he was offered a job at the University of Tasmania, the couple moved to Hobart, Tasmania. At first Harwood missed the mild climate of mainland Australia (Tasmania is a large island off Australia's southeastern coast), but she came to love her new home and remained in Tasmania for the rest of her life.

Harwood knew little of linguistics or philosophy before meeting her husband, but the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein made a deep impression on her when she happened to pick it up and leaf through it. A dense work, the Tractatus is filled with aphorisms and philosophical conundrums that fascinated Harwood. "When I came to the end I felt like someone who'd come upon a new religion,… she wrote (according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography). "When I read in Wittgenstein, 'Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is' I took my first step towards being a poet." Quotations from Wittgenstein showed up in Harwood's poetry, and she wrote poems about other philosophers and philosophical issues as well.

It would be several years, however, before Harwood could put her poetic ideas down on paper. She and her husband raised four children, and she had a fifth that was stillborn. Harwood shared childcare duties with a friend who was likewise creatively inclined. Although she called motherhood a "beautiful tyrannic kingdom" in one poem, she rarely wrote about her husband or her family. Feminist scholars later debated the degree to which childbearing had interrupted Harwood's career as a writer.

By the late 1950s, working on poems in her head late at night and early in the morning, Harwood was ready to seek out publication opportunities. Two poems, "Death of a Painter" and "Daybreak," appeared in Meanjin in 1956, and by 1960 her work was appearing regularly in that journal and in another, The Bulletin. She began to win prizes, but they did not dampen her high spirits. After a disagreement with the editor of The Bulletin, she sent in two poems that were published in the magazine. The staff realized too late that the first letters of each line of one poem constituted a kiss-off to the magazine itself, while the other poem formed an obscene acrostic aimed at editors in general.

Wrote Under Pseudonyms

In the early 1960s Harwood published poems under her own name but also used several pseudonyms: Francis Geyer, Walter Lehmann (under whose name the nasty acrostics originally appeared), and Miriam Stone. Scholars again debated Harwood's motivations, suggesting that she adopted the mostly male pseudonyms in order to get around editorial prejudice against women poets. Harwood's own testimony on the matter varied; at first she claimed that the move was merely an example of her often-noted trickster qualities, but she later said that she had used the pseudonym device simply because she had written a large number of what she considered worthwhile poems and wanted to see as many of them in print as possible.

Philosophy was far from the only subject treated in Harwood's work, and she was often described as many-voiced. She wrote about Tasmania and about the rural atmosphere of her own childhood, often presenting versions of herself as a mischievous or troublesome child. One poem, "Barn Owl," recounts what happened when she took her father's gun to shoot an owl: she wounded but did not kill it, and it hopped toward her. "I saw / those eyes that did not see / mirror my cruelty / while the wrecked thing that could / not bear the light nor hide / hobbled in its own blood," she wrote. After her father comes in and tells her to fire the gun again to put the owl out of its misery, "I leaned my head upon / my father's arm, and wept / owl blind in early sun / for what I had begun." She wrote poems about close friends, about art, about poetry in German (a language she spoke well). After being treated for breast cancer in 1985, she wrote about the experience in a book called Bone Scan (1988).

Another frequent topic of Harwood's poems was music, and she remained closely involved with classical music for her entire life. From the 1960s until the end of her life she wrote texts for vocal compositions, often working with composer Larry Sitsky. One of their first projects was an opera based on Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. In 1993 they completed the opera The Golem, and it was performed at the Australian Opera in Sydney.

Despite her growing success in the 1960s and 1970s, Harwood still worked mostly in isolation. In the 1960s and early 1970s she had to contribute to the family income by working as a medical secretary. But the publication of her Selected Poems in 1977, with 30 new poems written especially for the book, finally brought her to a higher level of prestige. She began to show up on, and then to lead, panels at literary conferences, and a series of poetry prizes began to come her way. In 1989 she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia. She gained attention in England but was little known in the United States.

Late in life, Harwood answered a Contemporary Authors questionnaire about her outside interests with "building a yacht, breeding geese and other poultry." Diagnosed with cancer once again, she lasted for months longer than doctors expected; "she was ready to die but she was damn sure she wasn't going to do it any earlier than she had to," poet Norman Talbot told Christopher Dore of The Weekend Australian. "She was a great hero, that lady." She lived to see the publication and positive reception of her last book, The Present Tense. Harwood died on December 5, 1995, but before she did, she asked that her ashes be scattered over the Brisbane River.