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Clive Barry
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Clive Barry (2 September 1922 – 25 August 2003) was an Australian author, playwright, cartoonist and escaped prisoner of war.[1][2][3] His offbeat, vividly stylised prose—characterised by deadpan wit, surreal violence and a macabre playfulness—gave him brief cult status in the 1960s.[4][5]
Key Information
He won the first ever Guardian Fiction Prize for Crumb Borne[6][7]—a unique, spasmodically weird prisoner-of-war novella—likened to "swifter more sharply visual Beckett;" the literary equivalent of an expressionist cartoon laced with the strange, visceral humour of early Nabokov.[8][9]
Wilfully elusive, Barry declined to even attend his own prize ceremony, remaining in Africa—the setting for his two other books: The Spear Grinner and Fly Jamskoni. He regarded his infatuation with the Mother Continent as "a suitable reward for a dissolute life."[10]
Early life
[edit]Aged just seventeen[11]—but with his birth date falsified to meet the minimum enlistment age of twenty[12]—Barry joined the 2/13th Battalion to fight in World War II.[13] He became one of The Rats of Tobruk,[14] going missing in action during the famous siege, and subsequently being imprisoned by, whom he considered, the "emotional, and often brutal" Italians in campo 106.[15] He escaped two years later, slipping past his [by now] demoralised captors to traverse an eight-foot square barbed wire apron under desultory gunfire, then traipsed for four hundred miles over the Alps, malnourished; surviving on grapes and, infrequently, milk donated by peasants. He was shot in the shoulder on the French border, fled to a nunnery to have the wound tended to, then finally crossed into Switzerland for bullet extraction and skiing.[16][17][18]
Decades later, his escapology as a prisoner-of-war would re-emerge—warped absurdly—in the plot of Crumb Borne.[19]
Selected works
[edit]Novels
[edit]- The Spear Grinner (1963)
- Crumb Borne (1965)
- Fly Jamskoni (1969)
Radio Plays
[edit]- Tailormade (1953)
- Key Fee (1953)
Short Stories
[edit]- Sable Fable (1951)
- Hamburg Reunion (1951)
- Smooge Stooge (1952)
- Shady Lady (1952)
- Chalice Malice (1952)
- Scamper-Vamper (1952)
- Boy Blond (1953)
- The Busker and the Mademoiselle (1953)
- Pastel Veils (1953)
- Frugal (1956)
- Hyena-Bait (1958)
- Bark Ring (1959)
- Rhino Ground (1959)
- Long Dry (1959)
- Fish Bomb (1960)
- The Ten Inch Safari (1965)
- Two or three thousand stars did absolutely nothing (1966)
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Wilde, William H.; Hooton, Joy; Andrews, Barry (1994), "Barry, Clive", The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/acref/9780195533811.001.0001/acref-9780195533811-e-313, ISBN 978-0-19-553381-1, retrieved 22 November 2024
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link) - ^ "Plays and Players". Sun. 27 February 1953. Retrieved 22 November 2024.
- ^ "Vol. 80 No. 4131 (15 Apr 1959)". Trove. Retrieved 24 November 2024.
- ^ "Books of the Year". Newspapers.com. 17 December 1965. Retrieved 25 November 2024.
- ^ "Award for elusive author". Newspapers.com. 27 November 1965. Retrieved 23 November 2024.
- ^ "Guardian Fiction Prize | Awards and Honors | LibraryThing". LibraryThing.com. Retrieved 22 November 2024.
- ^ "The 55 Best Dark Humor Books To Read". Ranker. Retrieved 22 November 2024.
- ^ Webb, W. L. (1965). "A Review of The Year's Fiction". Critical Survey. 2 (3): 182–185. ISSN 0011-1570.
- ^ "Crumb Borne, Robert Nye review". Newspapers.com. 25 June 1965. Retrieved 23 November 2024.
- ^ "Briefly". Newspapers.com. 28 November 1965. Retrieved 23 November 2024.
- ^ "CHRISTMAS NUMBER Vol. 72 No. 3748 (12 Dec 1951)". Trove. Retrieved 23 November 2024.
- ^ "Enlistment standards | Australian War Memorial". www.awm.gov.au. Retrieved 22 November 2024.
- ^ "Private Clive Stephen Barry". www.awm.gov.au. Retrieved 22 November 2024.
- ^ "Australian Rats (A to K)" (PDF). The Rats of Tobruk Association. 16 August 2024. p. 25. Retrieved 23 November 2024.
- ^ Anonymous (19 August 2020). "BARRY CLIVE STEPHEN | Prisoner of War Memorial Ballarat". Retrieved 23 November 2024.
- ^ "Vol. 7 No. 36 (8 September 1945)". Trove. Retrieved 23 November 2024.
- ^ "Clive Stephen Barry". www.awm.gov.au. Retrieved 22 November 2024.
- ^ [1] Archived 28 March 2011 at the Wayback Machine Manly Biographical
- ^ "Crumb Borne, Nancy Cato review". Newspapers.com. 25 September 1965. Retrieved 23 November 2024.
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