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Tim Thorne

Who Was That Masked Man?

In the October 1968 issue of Poetry Magazine the book of Michael Hamburger’s translation of Baudelaire’s prose poems was reviewed by Dorian J. Laurent. Inconsequential and innocuous as the review was, it was significant for a number of reasons. This was the first issue to feature a significant quantity of work by the younger poets who under the aegis of Roland Robinson had started to exert an influence on the magazine. Although Robert Adamson’s name had been included in the list of editors for the previous (August) issue, the contents of that issue had been decided before he had had the chance for input. By the December issue Tim Thorne had been added to the editorial board and the list of office bearers for the Poetry Society of Australia printed at the back of the magazine indicated that the takeover by a new generation had occurred. Significantly, the announcement of the winner of the 1968 Poetry Magazine Award (judged by Professor Leonie Kramer) was buried in small print inside the back cover, and the winning poem was never published.

The Laurent review shared an expanded review section with a demolition of David Rowbotham’s Bungalow and Hurricane by Adamson, and reviews of the Liverpool poets, and of Ginsberg and Neruda. There were poems in the October issue by John Tranter, Adamson and Thorne, and Vicki Viidikas’s passionate tribute to Sylvia Plath had appeared in August, but it was not until the April 1969 issue that the ‘revolution’ could be said to have triumphed overwhelmingly in terms of the flavour of the magazine. This latter issue began with Roland Robinson’s “The Young Men”, with its stirring (and ironically prophetic) ending: “the young men / will bury you.” Apart from Robinson and a couple of others, every contributor was under thirty.

Prior to 1968 Poetry Magazine had been linked with the Jindyworobak tradition, tempered by a connection with the safer halls of Academia. The hiving-off of Poetry Australia in 1964 after a split between Robinson and Grace Perry (who until then had been the editor of Poetry Magazine) could by no means be attributed to a lack of Australian nationalism on the part of the former. The act of reviewing a French poet, even in translation and even if only his prose poems, could be seen as the first in a line of betrayals that culminated in the ‘globalisation’ of the magazine. On the other hand, it could also be seen as the first step in a process of strengthening Australian poetry by opening it up to influences that had been largely forgotten since the time of Christopher Brennan.

Baudelaire, and even more so Rimbaud and Mallarmé, were prominent among these influences. Dorian Laurent was far from alone among the new faces on the Poetry Magazine scene in his interest in the French symbolists, but he was fluent in French and had read them closely and widely in the original, and was considered by some of the others, perhaps more than he deserved, as an expert in the area. Despite sharing a surname with Mallarmé’s mistress, Méry Laurent, he was not French. Both he and Méry had in fact been born with very different names from those they were later to use. Méry had started life as Anne-Rose Louviot, daughter of a linen-maid, Dorian as David Rennie, son of a man who claimed, at various times, to be a judge, a pediatrician, a flying officer and an electrical engineer, but who was, in fact, none of these.

An important part of the significance of that one-page review was its place in the history of the whole question of the identity of the writer, the use of masks and of personae, and the relationship between concealment and revelation. It was the only piece of writing ever published over the name of Dorian Laurent, a name which disappeared from the annals of Australian literature immediately afterwards. The name, however, was not really a nom de plume. The writer who used it used his real name for everything else he published. Dorian Laurent was the pseudonym under which he lived, but perhaps he thought that a review of a Baudelaire translation might have more credibility if the reviewer had a French-sounding surname. Nor was his real name David Rennie, but that is another and more complex story.

There are, of course, many reasons why someone would want to live under an assumed name, but what are more interesting are the reasons for choosing a particular name. It has been suggested (for example on page 270 of Robert Adamson’s autobiography Inside Out) that ‘Dorian’ came from Oscar Wilde’s character Dorian Gray, and ‘Laurent’ from the above-mentioned Méry. This is less than half correct. The Picture of Dorian Gray had for some time been a favourite read, and had almost certainly been the first instance of the name to come into his consciousness, but he had never heard of Méry Laurent. The name (Dorian James de Sauvigny-Laurent to give it its full splendour) was chosen primarily for reasons of euphony, the thinking being that, if one is to live under an alias, it might as well be an ostentatious one. Besides, unlike a plain moniker such as John Smith, which sounds obviously fake, nobody would suspect it of not being genuine.

The assumption of a different identity by a writer, either of prose or of poetry, has a long and rich tradition. It reached, perhaps, its acme in the life and work of the early 20th century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa but in the case of Arthur Rimbaud, who invariably used his own name, it could be said to have been of even greater literary importance. Rimbaud, while keeping his name, assumed the identity of “Poet” as a kind of mask, a mask which he discarded abruptly when it no longer served him. Rimbaud died young (in 1891, the year of the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray) but (unlike the case with, say, Keats) nobody seriously believes that, had he lived longer, he would have written more. Poetry was a useful tool for him and it is the cynical, callous way he regarded it that constitutes a large part of the appeal he has had for over a century. Of course, in order for this attitude to be considered fascinating, he had to have written work of genius.

The writer who changed his name to Dorian Laurent, on the other hand, exactly a hundred years after the earliest known precocious efforts in verse of both Wilde and Rimbaud, while not pretending to anywhere near the genius of these two, had been taking the vocation of poet seriously for some seven years, and had taken it seriously enough to abandon a comfortable and provincial life (or ‘lifestyle’ as it is now called), move to Sydney with a new name attached to the old yearning and set about ‘becoming a poet’. The mask, which he had been prepared and able to remove when it had been important to appear as ‘student’, ‘teacher’ or ‘son’, was starting to fuse to his face. After some months of loneliness and poverty in the city, and after having written nothing, he was on the point of giving up when he met Robert Adamson and the group of young poets around the Poetry Society and Poetry Magazine. For the next few months he wrote prolifically. Roland Robinson was wanting to revive the Lyre-Bird Writers series of chapbooks and the timing was propitious, so his first slim volume was soon to appear.

Interestingly, in order to earn a living at this time, he felt it necessary to don another mask, that of the semi-skilled labourer. This was mainly for fear that someone who identified as a poet would be less likely to get employment or, if employed, be less likely to interact comfortably with fellow workers. The idea that a storeman or plate-glass packer would write poetry had not occurred to him at that stage, despite the heady radicalism and social upheavals of the times. To be honest, the idea hadn’t occurred to too many of his workmates either. Poetry was for poofters, as the saying went, although the emergence and expansion of the Sydney gay scene over the next few years seemed to have little effect on sales of poetry books, so that old saw was disproved. Anyway, there was another layer of concealment: a third name, a third ‘lifestyle’.

His mentor was a man of many facets, but not much of a one for masks. Robinson — dancer, journalist, greenkeeper, collector of Aboriginal stories, poet — lived and wrote with an openness, a seamless presentation of self, heart-on-sleeve and direct. The nearest he came to wearing a poetic mask was when he wrote lines like these from ‘Deep Well’: “Here I have chosen to be a fettler...” Much more typical was the poem, “The Young Men”, quoted from above, in which he responded in an uncomplicated (even simplistic) way to the excitement of poetic and political revolution. That the dichotomy considered in the paragraph above simply did not exist for him is clear from the line in this poem, “Work is poetry”. Even when he gave one of his ultra-theatrical performances of a Yeats poem, Robinson was not acting.

Laurent’s peers, on the other hand, were adept mask wearers. Adamson’s “Paper Chase”, also in the April 1969 issue of Poetry Magazine, ends with the line, “And every day he takes us for a ride.” But who is taking whom for a ride? From and to where? The poem is written in the third person, about a character who is in turn adopting a persona, but who can also be identified with the poet himself. In fact in one line the character, “(b)eing himself, breaks the law.” For the most part, however, role-playing provides a liveliness, a life, which would otherwise be lacking in the prison atmosphere which is presented as “neutral’, “monotonous” and suffused with “indifference”. Even the relatively simple poem by Fairlie Apperly, “The Armenian”, published in the February 1969 issue, has the poet creating a persona who in turn erects a barrier between herself and the multifarious richness and complexity of life represented by the polyglot TV repairman. The mask, ostensibly an obstruction, a concealing device, is in fact a necessary means of revealing the truth.

And there was the ‘underground’ Sydney magazine Free Grass, whose single issue appeared in late 1968, with no editor and no address, and whose five roneod pages were filled with the effusions of nine concocted poetic personas, including one ‘Dorian Hawthorn’, of whom the contributor’s note says: ‘26, poet, playriteer (plays performed in London) novelist manqué, videotelerecord operator par excellence who lives in Hobart god rest his soul, believes in real death.’ [Free Grass is available on the Internet at
http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/tranter/poems/free-grass/index.html]

One could speculate at great length about the origins of the mask, of its role in classical Greek theatre, in African ritual performance, in burlesque. One could look at the connection between the mask and the masque and trace the changing relationship between lyric and dramatic poetry through the ages. It is clear, however, that, starting with Baudelaire and running strongly through the work of his successors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the symbolists, Valéry, the Dadaists and the Surrealists, there was an increasing emphasis on the hiding, the shifting or the deliberate confusing of identity. This tradition ran mostly through poetry written in French, and with the exception of Brennan was ignored in Australia until 1968. It was when a group of young poets in Sydney then picked up this thread and proceeded to tie it into more and more complicated knots that they made a significant impact on Australian poetry.

Was Dorian slashing the portrait of Australian poetry or merely posing for it?

The URL address of this page is
http://www.austlit.com/a/thorne/laurent.html