Editing Gwen Harwood

Abstract

The term 'editor' covers a wide variety of activities related to the production of a literary text. Editors, apparently, are not always held in high regard by either academics or authors and dictionary definitions reflect the ambiguity of the general attitude. According to the 'Shorter Oxford Dictionary', editors prepare literary material and set it in order for publication, but they can also be charged with incompetence and with garbling or distorting the text. Gwen Harwood expressed opposing views in two acrostic sonnets written thirty years apart. The first, published in 'The Bulletin' in 1961 under the pseudonym Walter Lehmann, reads acrostically FUCK ALL EDITORS and gives her forceful view of literary editors, who 'couldn't tell poetry from a bunyip's arse'. In some circles it is the best known of her poems; certainly it is the most notorious. The second, published in 1992 in a short revisionary sequence entitled 'Later Texts', reverses the original judgment and reads acrostically BLESS THE EDITOR. My own experience of editing some of the prose and poetry of Gwen Harwood suggests that an editor is a chameleon and that editorial procedures raise a number of questions of literary judgment and ethical choice to which there is no clear answer. 'Blessed City', a collection of entertaining letters written during the Second World War, involved multiple editorial decisions. While I was writing a critical study of Gwen's poetry in the early 1980s she drew my attention to some letters she had written in 1943 to her friend Thomas (Tony) Riddell which he had given to the Fryer Library in the University of Queensland.