Byline: Guy Rundle

The Demidenko/Darville affair is perhaps the most shameful literary deception of recent times writes Guy Rundle. FEW THINGS GIVE more pleasure to the chattering classes, and their enemies, than the dramas - or more accurately the boulevard farces - of literary life. The Chatterley trial, the Oz trial, the Ern Malley affair, even the bitchy brouhaha over the huge advance paid to Martin Amis for his most recent work. People enjoy this sort of thing because the novelist has become the pre-eminent cultural hero. The romance of novel writing has become as much a part of the literary product as the novel itself. The Darville/Demidenko affair is a different matter altogether. It is perhaps the most shameful literary deception of recent times, a shameful use of the tragedy of lived history for self-advancement. It has revived discredited and mendacious hypotheses about the background to Eastern European anti-semitism and complicity in the Holocaust, and caused unimaginable pain to the survivors of the shoah, their families and communities. More disgraceful than the celebration of this anti-semitic tract has been the hypocrisy and bad faith with which the literary community have attempted to cover their tracks. This novel was awarded the Miles Franklin for, to quote from the judges citation, incorporating "into the cultural memory first-hand experience of the major historical events of the century" and was a "searingly truthful account of historical deeds". Now Jill Kitson, the most visible of the judges, says "the author's background ... is not what the judging of a literary prize is about". Historical revisionism appears to be contagious. Other comments from the literary community have been even more disgraceful in their seemingly wilful naivete about the seriousness of Darville's actions. Thus Tom Shapcott described the presentation of the manuscript as oral history as "a tactical error" on the novelist's part. While David Marr, one of the book's strongest...