7. The living are few, Frank tells us, But The Dead Are Many
7. The living are few, Frank tells us, But The Dead Are Many
An inquiring look at some things produced by Frank Hardy in his later years.
The living are few, Frank tells us, But The Dead Are Many:
Few? Many? I am more inclined to think that the most important decision about numbers for anybody considering the work of Frank Hardy is the choice between one and two. Was he one writer, or two? One personality, or more? His book The Hard Way: the story behind Power Without Glory1 has a ‘Prologue: For the Uninitiated’, which has this to say:
The Hard Way tells the story of two men, Ross Franklyn and Frank Hardy. It tells how Ross Franklyn, a battler from the bush, became a writer the hard way and published Power Without Glory. And it tells how Frank Hardy was arrested and fought back against the Criminal Libel charge. At the end, the two men meet and face together the ‘Problems of Victory’.
In case this device should puzzle the reader, I should explain that all my writing before Power Without Glory was published under the pen-name of Ross Franklyn and that Power Without Glory carried two names, Frank Hardy (Ross Franklyn). And so, when writing The Hard Way, I felt that the man, Frank Hardy, who faced the Judge and Jury, was a different man to the happy-go-lucky bloke, Ross Franklyn, who’d pulled himself up by the shoestrings to write Power Without Glory.
So the story is told that way. [read more]
