DOI: 10.14714/CP79.1240 PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE The Mocking Mermaid: Maps And Mapping In Kenneth Slessor’s Poetic Sequence The Atlas, Part Four Adele J. Haft Hunter College of the City University of New York [email protected] Midway through composing his five-poem sequence The Atlas (ca. 1930), the acclaimed Australian poet Kenneth Slessor suddenly wrote “Southerne Sea” in his poetry journal. He’d just chosen John Speed’s famous double-hemisphere map, A New and Accurat Map of the World (1651/1676), as the epithet of his fourth poem “Mermaids.” Unlike the carto- graphic epigraphs introducing the other poems, however, this map has little to do with “Mermaids,” which is a riotous romp through seas of fantastic creatures, and a paean to the maps that gave such creatures immortality. The map features a vast “Southerne Unknowne Land,” but no mythical beasts. And while it names “Southerne Sea” and “Mar del Zur,” neither “Mermaids” nor The Atlas mentions Australia or the Southern Sea. Moreover, Slessor’s sailors are “staring from maps in sweet and poisoned places,” yet what the poem describes are “portulano maps,” replete with compass roses and rhumb lines—features notably absent on A New and Accurat Map of the World. My paper, the fifth part of the first full-scale examination of Slessor’s ambitious but poorly understood sequence, retraces his creative process to reveal why he chose the so-called Speed map. In the process, it extricates the poem from what Slessor originally called “Lost Lands Mermaids” in his journal, details his debt to the ephemeral map catalogue in which he discovered his epigraph, and, finally, offers alternative cartographic representations for “Mermaids.” Among them, Norman Lindsay’s delightful fron- tispiece for Cuckooz Contrey (1932), the collection in which The Atlas debuted as the opening sequence. KEYWORDS: Kenneth Slessor (1901–1971); Cuckooz Contrey (1932); The Atlas sequence (ca. 1930); “Mermaids”; poetry— twentieth-century; poetry—Australian; poetry and maps; cartography—seventeenth-century; John Speed (1552–1629); Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) Man … has been fascinated by the mermaid; by her eternal youth, her strange, unnatural beauty; her allure; and by the mysterious ocean wherein she dwells. Her delightful custom of combing her long tresses, mirror in hand, and I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. the magic of her voice … these, too, have … I do not think that they will sing to me. often blinded him to her true nature. For the mermaid is the femme fatale of the sea; she —T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred lures man to his destruction, and usually he Prufrock” (Poetry, June 1915) goes unresisting to his doom. —Gwen Benwell and Arthur Waugh, Sea Enchantress: The Tale of the Mermaid and Her Kin (1965) © by the author(s). This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. 22 | The Mocking Mermaid – Haft Cartographic Perspectives, Number 79, 2014 DISCOVERY Two decades ago, I discovered the Australian poet admired Slessor’s and Lindsay’s works as much as they ad- Kenneth Slessor while searching for “maps” in Columbia mired his (Slessor 1970, 92–110; Lindsay and Bloomfield Granger’s World of Poetry database. Among the hundreds of 1998, 40–41, 55–64). All three life-long friends contribut- entries citing the word, one line leapt off the screen—“star- ed to the short-lived magazine Vision: A Literary Quarterly ing from maps in sweet and poisoned places.” It came (Johnson, Lindsay, Slessor 1923–1924), which promised from “Mermaids,” the exuberant fourth poem of Slessor’s its youthful readers poetry and prose that “liberate the five-poem sequence The Atlas (ca. 1930). Reading the imagination by gaiety or fantasy” (Vision 1, May 1923, 2; poem brought other delights. Seas filled with Mermaids, see Lindsay 1960, 84; Dutton 1991, 58 and 71). Cavorting Anthropophagi and Harpies dancing on the shores, por- through the four issues of Vision were Norman’s drawings tolan charts with “compass-roses … wagg[ing] their pet- of mermaids, fauns, nymphs, and centaurs—lustful crea- als over parchment skies,” not to mention Slessor’s obvious tures of Classical and Anglo-Saxon mythology that he delight in conflating the imagery of early maps with what and McCrae helped relocate in Australian literature. Then mariners actually experienced. I was hooked, especially there’s Captain Francis Joseph Bayldon (1872–1948), the after realizing that “Mermaids,” like most of the sequence, maternal uncle of Slessor’s first wife, Noela. As practical begins with an introductory quote or epigraph from an as the others were dreamers, Bayldon was a master mari- important and beautifully illustrated seventeenth-century ner, accomplished hydrographer, and writer/lecturer spe- map. cializing in Australian maritime history and exploration (Phillips 1979). Even so, he became “a major influence” And there lay the problem. Once I understood how on Slessor’s “poetic career” (Dutton 1991, 142). For while map-obsessed Slessor was, it became impossible to treat composing The Atlas, Slessor discovered that weekly visits “Mermaids” in isolation as if it were a self-contained poem to Bayldon’s home in Sydney gave him access not only to like Earle Birney’s “Mappemounde” (Haft 2002), Grevel the old sea-captain’s “astonishing knowledge of nautical Lindop’s “Mappa Mundi: The Thirteenth-Century World- things” (Kiernan 1977, 7; Slessor, Haskell, and Dutton Map in Hereford Cathedral” (Haft 2003a), or Marianne 1994, 362), but also to the captain’s “magnificent nautical Moore’s “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns” (Haft 2003b), library” (Slessor 1970, 192), now preserved in the Mitchell each of which also imagines fabulous sea-creatures Library of the State Library of New South Wales. Slessor’s through a cartographic lens. “Mermaids” had to be viewed biographer Geoffrey Dutton thought that “Slessor took his in relationship to the poems around it, and to The Atlasas notebook along to Captain Bayldon’s,” because “it is full of a whole. jottings from old maps and books, lists of galleons, sloops, flying fish, sea monsters, battles and mermaids” (Dutton In four earlier issues of Cartographic Perspectives I have 1991, 144). More likely, Bayldon lent Slessor the work that begun that journey. My “Introduction” (Haft 2011) fo- inspired The Atlas and became its ultimate source—an il- cused on Slessor’s literary accomplishments, particularly lustrated and unusually lyrical catalogue titled Old Maps Cuckooz Contrey (1932), his third solo collection which of the World, or Ancient Geography; a Catalogue of Atlases & opened with the recently minted Atlas sequence. Since Maps of All Parts of the World from XV Century to Present much of his early poetry was illustrated, at least two of the Day (Francis Edwards 1929). With its poetic advertise- artists whom we encountered in the introduction reappear ments of maps and cartographers as well as its attention here. The first is Slessor’s mentor, Norman Lindsay (1879– to the period vocabulary of its items, Old Maps of the World 1969), the famously controversial bohemian artist/writer proved irresistible to a word-smith and verbal image-mak- popularized, however inaccurately, in the 1993 film Sirens. er like Slessor. What makes The Atlas unique is its poet’s According to Slessor, Lindsay’s generous collaborations response not to the physical sensation of seeing or touch- enabled the artist/writer to “exercise more influence … ing maps, but to a catalogue’s impassioned description of on numbers of this country’s poets than any other single their allure; for without that piece of ephemera, “Mermaids”— individual in Australia’s history” (Slessor 1970, 111–112). like the other poems of the sequence—simply would not exist. Lindsay repeatedly alludes to “Mermaids” in the frontis- Yet the catalogue used by Slessor, like the creatures of his piece he created for Cuckooz Contrey. The second prominent poem, is “GONE like the cracking of a bubble.” No trace artist is poet/illustrator Hugh McCrae (1876–1958), who of it can be found in the Bayldon Collection, the Slessor Cartographic Perspectives, Number 79, 2014 The Mocking Mermaid – Haft | 23 Papers at the National Library of Australia, the Slessor Why “Mermaids” came fourth occupies the beginning Collection at the University of Sydney, or any public li- of this present paper, which reprints the poem and brief- brary in Australia (Australia Trove, National Library of ly discusses the poem’s subject, artistry, and critical re- Australia). sponses before turning to the difficulties that Slessor -en countered when trying to conceptualize what he called As for The Atlaspoems themselves, my article “Who’s ‘The “Lost Lands Mermaids.” The poem’s cast of characters King of Cuckooz’?” (Haft 2012a) dealt with the sequence’s then comes into focus, followed by an introduction to the opening poem, the one most like “Mermaids” in tone, maps in “Mermaids.” After retracing Slessor’s search for even though “The King of Cuckooz” focuses on a 1620 the right epigraph, the paper evaluates his choice—the reconnaissance map of Algiers by the gunner/surveyor/ famous world map associated with the English historian/ cartographer Robert Norton. “John Ogilby, Post-Roads, cartographer John Speed—and investigates the complex and the ‘Unmapped Savanna of Dumb Shades’” (Haft relationship between Old Maps of the World and the drafts 2012b) examined Slessor’s second poem, “Post-roads.” If of “Mermaids” in Slessor’s poetry journal. Next, it com- “Mermaids” envisions seas filled with mythical creatures, pares the published poem with the so-called Speed map, “Post-roads” recasts dancer/translator-turned-publisher/ and then confronts the disparities between the two before cartographer John Ogilby into a beatific Sisyphus map- concluding that the poem, despite its epigraph, has many ping the roads of eternity.