No comments about Harry Williams, an Australian Golfing Tragedy.

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No comments about Australian Defences and New Guinea: Compiled from the papers of the late Major-General Sir Peter Scratchley by C. Kinloch Cooke.

No comments about Henry Simpson Newland: A biography,.

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5 comments about A Portrait of the Artist As Australian: L'Oeuvre Bizarre De Barry Humphries.

1. Paul St. Pierre's A Portrait of the Artist as Australian (2004)
   
   Paul St. Pierre's thoroughly researched text is a scholarly portrait of Barry Humphries' (the flamboyant character of Dame Edna Everage) entire career as a comic artiste extraordinaire. Humphries is a master of "grotesqueries and bizarreries," whose reputation as an actor, performer, writer, music hall artiste and Dada prankster situate him as the darling of Australian, British, and international artistic communities. The reader is invited to travel through satirical, comedic, entertaining and witty literary work with St. Pierre leading the way as a true pathfinder. Humphries' oeuvre includes dramatic monologues, comic books, (auto)biographies, film scripts, poetry, novels, and sketches. St. Pierre acknowledges Humphries' unique talents:
   
   By playing up and sending up cultural stereotypes, Humphries has encouraged Australians, and others, to laugh not only at him and his characters but also at themselves, at the negation of themselves on stage, and to come up on stage and join in the subversion of their images in the mirror. ... Thus, Humphries
   invites audiences to find pleasure in subversive things such as Dada, music hall, parody, theatre, kitsch, class, race, gender, and Australiana, as they play in the one-man show, and also to find the act of subverting pleasurable, even laughable. (133)
   
   We owe our gratitude to St. Pierre for introducing to us the world of Humphries' laughter and for his delight in researching and writing this text "not out of opportunism but out of community service, as a note of thanks to Barry Humphries and as an offering to his squillions of fans" (224). If you wish to partake in lively amusement and introspection, then sample Humphries' genius for "putting out bush fires of ignorance, pomposity, seriousness, complacency, provincialism, and political correctness around the world" and pick up a copy of St. Pierre's A Portrait of the Artist as Australian (251). In these troubled times we all need to feel the miraculous properties of laughter to heal our spirits.



2. I think the joke is on the reader only if one doesn't recognize this satire of a satirist. And Les Patterson, well, I think with his rave review he hopes we won't be aware of his close relationship to Barry Humphries. We all know that rave reviews are often the product of a reciprocal arrangement where you rave about my book and I rave about yours. Come to think of it, though, Mr. Patterson HAS written a book. But I doubt that Mr. Humphries had anything nice to say about it.
   
   Every page satirizes what the author must feel is Mr. Humphries' pompous writing style (or should I say sesquipedalian?) A writing style like this is so distinctive, so exaggerated and bizarre, how can anyone doubt the real author? Barry's memoirs and other books are wonderfully written and hard to put down, whereas I can't imagine anyone plowing through this balderdash. Excuse I for asking, but how did the author ever have the time or inclination to write book like this? More Sir Les and Dame Edna, please!
   
   Reading Barry Humphries' books requires a dictionary close at hand. But here the author has helped us out. All the big stumblers are footnoted, and we are spared having to haul a big heavy dictionary into our beds, or onto the train. But do we really care?
   
   Barry Humphries is a genius. I'm positively in love with Dame Edna and have a real soft spot for the Australian Attaché to the Court of St. James, but--and I mean this with respect--I learned a lot more about Barry Humphries from Women in the Background (not autobiographical!!) This book is Barry on speed or something, and I'd rather have another volume of his autobiography, something that will keep me up until 2 a.m. All I can say in favor of this book is the cover is great.



3. I have just finished reading A Portrait of the Artist as Australian: L'Oeuvre bizarre de Barry Humphries, which I found an engaging and informative book. Having been familiar with Barry Humphries mainly as Dame Edna Everage, from television and The Royal Tour, I evidently had a lot to learn about him. I hadn't known he was a writer, for example, the author of 29 books. Nor had I known that he draws on music hall and dada in his stage performances as Edna and Sir Les Patterson. One of the most fascinating parts of the book is a chart in which St. Pierre compares some of Dame Edna's and Les Patterson's lines with the conventional spiel of the music hall chairman, who presided over stage shows a century ago: that Humphries might be invigorating some of these old formulas I found quite fascinating. St. Pierre claims that "Sandy Agonistes", which is a Sandy Stone monoloque, is the greatest Australian poem of the 20th-century. I wouldn't know. I haven't had a chance to find a copy of the poem yet, and, I must confess, I am not always sure whether I can take all of St. Pierre's claims seriously, but he has made me very very curious. I know I have to read this poem. So now I have started looking to purchase Humphries' books, records, and CDs (St. Pierre lists hundreds of them in his bibliography), because St. Pierre has intrigued me about the man beneath the make-up, who, I am convinced, must be a great artist. I realize that I knew NOTHING about Barry Humphries before reading this book. Now I think I know quite a bit. But, more important, St. Pierre has made me want to learn EVERYTHING about Humphries. He has created an interest in me.



4. In his well researched and provocatively written book, Paul Matthew St. Pierre has made a sound case for Barry Humphries as a writer of literature. Certainly, I had not known that Humphries has been writing books throughout his career on the stage. St. Pierre addresses all of Humphries' writing and much of his stage and television work, and comes up with some original interpretations. As an academic, St. Pierre draws on some pretty infamous critics like Derrida and Barthes, but he also mentions some really interesting writers such as Es'kia Mphahlele and my late countrywoman Janet Frame, and somehow makes the mix work. In addition, he seems to be trying something nonacademic by writing a new kind of criticism. I am not sure what kind it is, but Dada criticism comes to mind, the subversion of conventional criticism. This aspect of the book offered a real challenge to me as a reader, because I realized the author was trying to change the rules of the critical game precisely as I was reading his book, which put some of the responsibility on me to play along. I see this as St. Pierre's intellectual challenge to the most avid readers.



5. The inside back dustjacket flap of this book notes that Paul Matthew St. Pierre is a Dada artist. I suspect (duh!) that he has written his Barry Humphries study precisely in his capacity as a Dadaist, as a tribute to Humphries (himself a Dada artist) but also as, what he calls in the book, a "dadact", an act of subversion in the spirit of Dada. What is he subverting? Well, I think he's deconstructing the whole idea of academic criticism, the very thing that Humphries himself deplores, being taken seriously. If you accept this premise, A Portrait of the Artist as Australian: L'Oeuvre bizarre de Barry Humphries becomes a very complicated book, at once subverting the whole idea of the academic study and undertaking a daunting research project into just about everything Humphries has ever done as a writer and a performer. Did I like the book? Yes, I think it's amazing. It's certainly unlike any other book I have read about Humphries, by John Lahr, Peter Coleman, Ian Britain, and Stephen Alomes. A singular performer, Humphries certainly deserved this kind of singular treatment. Kudos to St. Pierre for having the pluck (Humphries would say the spunk) to write it!