FINDING A MIDDLE GROUND


So, if Lawlor was no lightweight, how should either he or Aussie or both, be assessed?(without prejudice)

One approach to that question is to think of the careers of A.G. Stephens and Monte Holcroft – neither of whom were exact contemporaries of Lawlor but who are convenient (high water?) markers on either side of the Aussie years and provide some sense of the interlacing of what I have wanted to cover today.

The Australian Stephens, once literary editor of the Bulletin, was a committed bookfellow who, incidentally, briefly worked on the Wellington Evening Post just before Lawlor's first job as a copy holder there. Stephens' career, which coincided with the heyday of Maoriland literature, has been described by Brian Kiernan as literary empire building, notable for its continuity.

New Zealander Monte Holcroft, best known as an essayist and long-time editor of the Listener, is relevant for that phase of his life that overlapped with the Aussie years, when for a while he epitomized the courage of someone striking out to be a true, would-be writer.

He is a good source too, in a chapter in the first volume of his memoirs published in the 1980s, The Way Of A Writer (1983), for describing the Sydney of Smith's Weekly, in a chapter titled the beguiling city.

Lawlor, one time novelist, continuous editor, and dyed-in-the-wool journalist, was unlikely to ever have a career of the order or nature of Stephens or Holcroft, but in saying that he sat somewhere in the middle I am attempting to provoke some thinking about his achievements that carries a wider context, a form of continuum, and that recognises the value of the 'middle man'.