Kanganoulipo

ruhtrA (born Arthur Robinson) came to be known as “Australia’s one man literary avant garde”, and was the author of several books across a range of forms and genres, including Grosswords (1964), Waterworks (1965), The Possessive S (1974) and most famously, the novel-length lipogram Long Time New See (1973).

While still only a teenager ruhtrA, sickened by the narrowmindedness and “dreary, dun-coloured… realism”[2] of the Australian literary scene, moved to Paris where he befriended Georges Perec and several members of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; or: “workshop of potential literature”). Tragically, in his desire to join Europe’s foremost experimental writing group, ruhtrA broke one of its cardinal rules; by asking to become a member, he forever disqualified himself from membership. Undaunted, ruhtrA set up his own postmodernist writing collective consisting of only Australian writers. Kangaroulipo, as he named the group, initially attracted only a few members in France, but when ruhtrA returned to Australia in 1973 the movement took on a new lease of life, with dozens of experimental novelists, artists, musicians and poets eager to join ruhtrA in waging war against the tyranny of bush realism. Unfortunately, ruhtrA’s alcoholism and drug addictions resulted in increasingly erratic behaviour, and his eventual expulsion from the group, which collapsed into acrimony in June 1980, two years before ruhtrA’s death from a drug overdose. (ruhtrA’s life has been masterfully chronicled at greater length in Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers[3] a work of astonishing scholarship which has been incorrectly marketed, with criminal incompetence, as “fiction”.)

After his premature demise, ruhtrA’s name slipped into obscurity, with his writings, and his pioneering scholarship into the true authorship of James Joyce’s Ulysses known only to a few. It appeared that ruhtrA’s most enduring legacy would be in inspiring the formation of the Frederick Stratford Society, whose aim was to promote the work of the great Australian writer, and to refute the claims of plagiarism made against him. On 16 June 2014, the Society organised a demonstration at the University of Sydney to protest the annual Bloomsday celebrations. (As every Stratfordian was well aware, thanks to ruhtrA’s seminal text Shames Joyce: The Great Plagiarist (1961), the Irish writer had plagiarised his Ulysses from Frederick Stratford’s Odysseus.) Police estimated the crowds at the protest as being between five and eight people. Among the Stratfordian demonstrators were Ryan O’Neill and Julie Koh. O’Neill’s research into the life of Arthur ruhtrA had convinced him of Frederick Stratford’s genius, and he had become a fanatical Stratfordian. Koh was apparently present at the demonstration for the sole purpose of throwing rotten eggs at one of her literary rivals, Adelaide Hegarty, who had written her dissertation on Joyce.

When the demonstration inevitably turned violent, the two took cover under a table, which is when O’Neill noticed a rare first edition of Arthur ruhtrA’s Exercises in Style (1974) had slipped out of Koh’s bag. As the police dragged away a screaming, egg-faced Hegarty, Koh explained that ruhtrA’s work had inspired her to become a writer, and she had dedicated her recently published short-story collection, Capital Misfits, to him. While choking on tear gas, O’Neill revealed his great love for ruhtrA, and his regret that the writing group ruhtrA had founded, Kangaroulipo, had been in abeyance for some three decades. It was then that O’Neill and Koh decided to form a new Kangaroulipo, or Kanganoulipo, a writing collective which would showcase the best experimental writing in Australia, and which would hopefully also be tax deductible.

O’Neill and Koh scoured the country for the nation’s most talented writers. Sadly, none of these writers wanted to join, and so they had to set their sights lower, much lower in the case of Robert Skinner. Skinner, despite being nearly illiterate, had founded and edited the short story magazine The Canary Press. It was a wild success, but mostly among birdwatchers; he was always being invited to the wrong sorts of parties. At the same time, Skinner was also acting as a research assistant for O’Neill in his writing of the much lauded Their Brilliant Careers. Skinner was a not entirely incompetent researcher, though his annoying propensity to be struck by lightning slowed down the composition of O’Neill’s magnum opus. Skinner was instrumental in recruiting into Kanganoulipo two contributors to The Canary Press, Eric Yoshiaki Dando and Patrick Lenton. Lenton’s short story collection A Man Made Entirely of Bats featured a coded tribute to Arthur ruhtrA that was so subtle, even Lenton had forgotten what it was, while Dando’s cult novel snail had been partly inspired by ruhtrA’s 1970 classic lowercase. Jane Rawson, a Melbourne writer, was asked to join the group after Lenton saw her performing a street theatre piece outside the venue hosting the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Frustrated at the judges’ continuing dismissal of genre writers, Rawson had built a four-foot-high wall of science fiction and fantasy novels, which she then proceeded to leap over, shouting, ‘Look! I’m transcending genre!’ On hand to sketch the performance, and Rawson’s subsequent tussle with Helen Garner, was artist Jeffrey D. Phillips, whose controversial portrait of Tim Winton had recently been slashed by an irate Penguin editor, costing him the Archibald Prize. Writer and academic Dave Drayton was next to be recruited. O’Neill had first come across Drayton during the writing of Their Brilliant Careers when he discovered Drayton was writing a full length biography of Arthur ruhtrA. Sadly, Drayton’s project never saw the light of day; after he mysteriously fell down several flights of stairs, his ruhtrA archive was stolen by persons unknown. Following six months of physical therapy, Drayton joined the group as archivist, though his recurring short-term memory loss due to his injuries means he has to be constantly reminded of this. Narrowly avoiding several such accidents himself, the New Zealand-born short story writer Nic Low had made several explosive discoveries regarding Australia’s literary history,[4] the repercussions of which have still to be fully understood. Low was eager to join the group, despite his suspicion that he had seen Robert Skinner before, in several places in fact, and always shortly before an accident which had nearly claimed Low’s life. Not long after Drayton’s admission to the group, William Yeoman, a Perth journalist and literary editor, was asked to join. Yeoman’s sublime essay on ruhtrA’s “symphony written on a toilet” Bowel Movements has long been considered to be the last word on the subject.

The group’s first meeting was held at a secret location in Sydney on 11 August 2015, which would have marked Arthur ruhtrA’s 75th birthday. The first decision made at this inaugural meeting was to write a manifesto which would set out the group’s aims in transforming Australian literature. The second was to send Robert Skinner out for coffee. The third was to limit the number of members in the group to twelve. The final two members to be inducted into the group were Tom Cho and Elizabeth Tan. Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing was a hugely influential text, its explorations of identity recalling ruhtrA’s Exercises in Style, and yet never straying far from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Tan’s Rubik displayed all the best qualities of ruhtrA’s writing, formal inventiveness, an obsession with language, and an absence of kangaroos.

Since then the group has met each month to plan and implement its endless war against the barren conventions of Australian literary realism. The Oulipo was once described as ‘rats who build the labyrinth from which they try to escape’ but the Kanganoulipo are, in the immortal words of Arthur ruhtrA, koalas who grow the gum trees they wish to climb.

[1] O’Neill, R. (2017) Their Careers Go Bung. Melbourne: Black Inc.

[2] Patrick White.

[3] Just $26.99 at all good bookshops.

[4] Low’s discovery and publicising of the New Writing for the Real Australia manifesto anticipated my own publication on this remarkable document by only a few days. (I was aware of Low’s research even as I rushed to complete my own.) Low is to be congratulated on his success, and the several fortunate escapes from car crashes, falling masonry, accidental poisoning and drowning which has (so far) allowed him to enjoy it.