James McAuley


James Phillip McAuley was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic, and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism. He was involved in the Ern Malley poetry hoax.

Life and career

McAuley was born in Lakemba, a suburb of Sydney. He was educated at Fort Street High School and then attended Sydney University, where he majored in English, Latin and philosophy and Canberra. After the war he also spent time in New Guinea, which he regarded as his second "spiritual home". There he is rumoured to have shot a Japanese soldier dead on Manus Island in order to satisfy his curiosity about what it was like to kill somebody.
McAuley came to prominence in the wake of the 1943–44 Ern Malley hoax. With fellow poet Harold Stewart, McAuley concocted sixteen nonsense poems in a pseudo-experimental modernist style. These were then sent to the young editor of the literary magazine Angry Penguins, Max Harris. The poems were raced to publication by Harris and Australia's most celebrated literary hoax was set in motion.
Peter Coleman considered that "no one else in Australian letters has so effectively exposed or ridiculed modernist verse, leftie politics and mindless liberalism".
In 1952 he converted to Roman Catholicism, the faith his own father had abandoned, following an intense spiritual experience at a Catholic mission in New Guinea.
This was in the parish of St Charles at Ryde. He was later introduced to Australian musician Richard Connolly by a priest, Ted Kennedy, at the Holy Spirit parish at North Ryde and the two subsequently collaborated to produce between them the most significant collection of Australian Catholic hymnody to date, titled "Hymns for the Year of Grace".
Connolly was McAuley's sponsor for his confirmation into the Roman Catholic Church. McAuley had been influenced during his undergraduate years by communism, anarchism and the freethinking philosophy of Professor John Anderson.
He remained staunchly anti-communist throughout his later life. In 1956 he and Richard Krygier founded the literary and cultural journal, Quadrant and was chief editor until 1963. From 1961 he was professor of English at the University of Tasmania.
A portrait of McAuley by Jack Carington Smith won the 1963 Archibald prize.

Death

James McAuley died of cancer in 1976, at the age of 59, in Hobart.

Poetry

Under Aldebaran Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.A Vision of Ceremony Sydney: Angus & Robertson.The Six Days of Creation An Australian Letters Publication.James McAuley 'Australian Poets Series' Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Captain Quiros Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Surprises of the Sun Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Collected Poems 1936–1970 Sydney : Angus & Robertson.A Map of Australian Verse Melbourne: Oxford University Press.Music Late at Night London; Sydney : Angus & Robertson.Time Given:poems 1970–1976 Canberra : Brindabella Press.A World of its own Canberra : Australian National University Press.

Prose

The End of Modernity: Essays on Literature, Art and Culture Sydney: Angus & Robertson.A Primer of English Versification Sydney: Sydney University Press.C. J. Brennan Melbourne: Oxford University Press.Edmund Spenser and George Eliot: A Critical Excursion University of Tasmania.Hobart Sydney: Current Affairs Bulletin.Versification: A Short Introduction Michigan State University Press.The Personal Element in Australian Poetry Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, Townsville. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.The Grammar of the Real: Selected Prose 1959–1974 Melbourne: Oxford University Press.The rhetoric of Australian poetry Surrey Hills: Wentworth Press.

Editions and Selections

Australian Poetry 1955 Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Generations: poetry from Chaucer to the present day Melbourne: Thomas Nelson.The Darkening Ecliptic Los Angeles: Green Integer,

Hymns

Hymns for the Year of Grace Sydney: Living Parish Series.We Offer Mass Sydney: Living Parish Series.

Translation

Song of Songs Darton: Longman & Todd.

Selected individual poems