In April 1944 the CLF established the Australian Pocket Library, a series of cheaply produced paperback editions of Australian books for the armed forces for sale from 1s 3d to 3s a copy. In editions of 25 000 copies each, the Library published such established works as Henry Lawson’s stories, as well as Robbery Under Arms, Man Shy, We of the Never Never, On the Wool Track, and newer titles such as Gavin Casey’s It’s Harder for Girls and Other Stories, Kylie Tennant’s Tiburon and Brian Penton’s Landtakers – twenty-five titles in all.
Australian readers had an unquenchable thirst for true stories about the war. A&R discovered this early in 1941 when George Johnston, then a 29-year-old journalist for the Melbourne Argus, wrote Grey Gladiator, an account of the cruiser HMAS Sydney serving with the British Mediterranean fleet. Its first edition of 1500 sold out within a week; altogether the book sold about 14 000 copies. Johnston, a rapid writer, followed this up two months later with Battle of the Seaways, the story of the British naval war. His A&R books Australia at War and New Guinea Diary also did well. Cousins, who thought Johnston was one of the country’s best writers about the war, was irritated when the journalist decided to concentrate on writing fiction. A most successful war book was Behind Bamboo, journalist Rohan Rivett’s graphic account of his experiences in Japanese prison camps and on the Burma– Thailand railway. Edited by Beatrice and published by A&R in 1946, it went through four impressions by the end of 1947 and by 1950 had sold 43 000 copies.
It is one of publishing’s ironies that a best-selling documentary novel about one of Australia’s proudest episodes caused Beatrice and A&R more trouble than almost anything else the company published during the war.
In April 1941 the undefeated German army under Rommel was ready to sweep across North Africa. Their only barrier to the Persian Gulf, and Britain’s oil supplies, was the fortified town of Tobruk on the Libyan coast, held by the Australian 9th Division. With the 7th Division they built a thirty-mile outer line of defence – about 150 posts protected by barbed wire, tank ditches and mines – as well as an inner series of defences. If the enemy broke through both lines and the mobile reserve failed to stop them, every man in the garrison was told to fight to the death: there would be no surrender. Rommel attacked on 13 April. When the dust settled the following day the Germans had 150 dead and had lost seventeen tanks and twelve supporting aircraft, along with weapons and equipment. The defenders – later called the Rats of Tobruk – with twenty-six dead and sixty-four wounded, had lost two tanks. The garrison held out against the Germans for more than eight months until Rommel withdrew.
Lawson Glassop, a 28-year-old journalist working in Cairo for the AIF News, realised that Tobruk was an epic subject for a novel. When the siege was over he interviewed dozens of Rats on leave in Cairo, and worked on his book late at night. He returned to Australia in February 1943 and by the middle of that year had completed The Rats of Tobruk, the story of a larrikin furniture salesman named Mick who enlists in the AIF and, with a group of mates, takes part in the siege. Glassop took care to report soldiers’ words and feelings accurately, getting away from the literary convention that men at war are always steely-chinned heroes. His book was not anti-war in tone – soldiers who refused to do their duty as fighting men were judged harshly both by other characters and the author – but it did break new ground as a graphic and realistic picture of Australian fighting men.
Glassop realised he had a good story and decided to try to publish it in the USA. But first he sent it to Norman Lindsay, a friendly acquaintance of his who, recognising the manuscript’s authenticity, showed it to his friend Douglas Stewart. Together they persuaded Glassop to submit it to Angus and Robertson on the grounds that, as the book dealt with Australian soldiers, it should be shown to an Australian publisher, who might later place the book in the US.
A&R accepted The Rats of Tobruk almost immediately. ‘You’ve done a great piece of work,’ Beatrice wrote to Glassop on 13 September 1943. She added some standard editorial caveats: the narrative was too long in places, elliptical in others, and there were problems with the sequence of material. She also warned of possible libel, but in the light of what followed it is interesting that she never expressed any objection to the characters’ use of profanity and blasphemy. Then and always, if Beatrice thought ‘language’ was appropriate and used effectively in a manuscript, she accepted it. Describing Glassop’s novel as an important book, she suggested he rework parts of it and send it back, or better still deliver the manuscript in person so they could work on it together. She said the novel would be published the following February, with a run of 5000 copies – and, she added firmly, its title was now We Were the Rats.
All this was heady stuff for Glassop, languishing in a Queensland army press unit. He wanted to work on final revisions with Beatrice as soon as possible, and decided to come down to Sydney. A tanned and cheerful young man presented himself in Beatrice’s office in October, but he omitted to mention that he had gone absent without leave. Caught almost immediately, he was docked seven weeks’ pay, threatened with court martial and sent to a field punishment centre. The letter he sent to Beatrice shows how severely the army made him suffer for his art.
I cleaned dixies, made fires, lit fires, tended fires, carried fires, carried water, chopped wood, carried wood, wheeled wood, carried pig food, poured pig food, sanded pig bins, sanded dishes, emptied latrine pans, set out latrine pans, swept the latrine area, swept the shower area, scrubbed benches, scrubbed boards, dug holes, wheeled dirt, filled in holes, hoed weeds, raked weeds, scrubbed tables, scrubbed trestles, shooed cows and above all I marched. I marched in the morning, I marched in the afternoon, I marched in the evening. I would have marched at night but it was too dark …5
Glassop’s glow of martyrdom was extinguished when Beatrice told him his book would be late. By May 1944, with publication apparently no closer and with no word about the fate of his book, the author wrote to Walter Cousins, accusing A&R ofletting already successful overseas books take precedence over local ones. (Lawson Glassop seems to have completed the trajectory from gratitude to complaint even faster than the average first-time author.) Cousins apologised in the way he generally did, enumerating his own woes – too many books, too many Manpower restrictions – but it was Beatrice who applied the balm of tact. ‘Our chief fault was leading you to believe what we wanted to believe ourselves – that the book would be out in February – when, with government orders to deal with, we were not sufficiently our own masters to promise anything,’ she wrote.6
Beatrice still thought the book had problems. Glassop was too keen to include factual information about Tobruk, which she said sometimes made the novel read like a newspaper article. Norman Lindsay was less polite: he told Beatrice that while Glassop was a remarkably good reporter of actuality, he had not the dimmest notion of the art of novel writing.7 But nobody told Glassop; by now he and Beatrice had built up a pleasant, chatty relationship. Four years younger than Beatrice, Glassop apparently treated her as an elder sister, even giving her racing tips: ‘Slap the smash on Flight every time she starts,’ he wrote to her. ‘She’s a bobby dazzler.’8 Beatrice in turn lent a sympathetic ear to Glassop’s Byzantine amatory problems, many of which involved a pretty blonde on the A&R staff.
The original manuscript of We Were the Rats had weighed in at 200 000 words; Glassop had reluctantly cut about 10 per cent, but Beatrice told him it was still too long. The book simply needed to be condensed, she said, and Glassop could safely leave that to A&R. She did not suggest that he should see either edited manuscript or proofs, and he agreed to review her ‘telescoping’ when the book was published.
The result was wholly predictable: as soon as Glassop received his copies in September 1944 he hit the roof. His view appeared to be that Beatrice could make whatever changes she liked, provided she didn’t actually alter anything. He accused her of tampering with his style and wrongly correcting some of his sentences. Beatrice took a standard editorial fallback position
and quoted Fowler’s Modern English Usage, only to have Glassop retort that if Fowler had been any good he would have written a real book, not a grammar text. Beatrice had imposed her will on the book, and, he wrote, ‘If you are going to do that, you might as well put “by so and so as told to Beatrice Davis” on the title page.’ Beatrice replied that she thought the published book was fine.9
We Were the Rats was a success from the start, selling 10 000 copies in its first year. Reviewers praised its authenticity and energy; only Josephine O’Neill of the Sydney Daily Telegraph complained about its ‘passages of obscenities’, and Vance Palmer on the ABC found it rather crude. Soldiers and their families loved it, none more than the former Rats themselves. Angus and Robertson sold rights in the US, and the novelist John Dos Passos wrote Glassop a letter of congratulation. Now that Lawson Glassop could take the credit for the book’s much praised tautness and economy of words, he decided to forgive Beatrice and they were friends again.
Not quite everybody loved the book. In June 1945 the Reverend Gordon Powell wrote to A&R objecting to its ‘blasphemy and profanity’, singling out a section where a character reads an American girlie magazine aloud to some of his mates. Later the same year a Tasmanian woman read We Were the Rats carefully, decided it was obscene and referred it to the secretary of the Tasmanian Women’s Non-Party League, who agreed. The woman approached the state minister for customs, who considered the novel indecent and worthy of prosecution. Because the publisher was based in New South Wales, he referred it to that state’s chief secretary, who in turn referred the matter to the state crown solicitor. We Were the Rats was ruled obscene according to the Obscene Publications Act 1902 (NSW) – that is, it was found to have a ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt’ impressionable minds.
The police summonsed A&R, and on 24 April 1946 We Were the Rats came before Mr Farringdon, SM. The police case alleging obscenity rested on only five pages: the word ‘bloody’ appeared on two, one had a quote from the bawdy ballad ‘The Bastard from the Bush’. Two other pages in Chapter 31 comprised the section to which the Reverend Gordon Powell had specifically objected, and some of it is worth quoting to show what the guardians of Australia’s morality were up against. In a cave near Tobruk, five Australian soldiers are poring over an American girlie magazine:
‘What happened then?’ asked Jim.
‘Thought you didn’t want to listen,’ said Gordon. ‘She comes across. Turns it on like steam. She pulls her dress off. Listen to this. “He saw her slender fingers unhook her scanty brassiere and toss it away from the prominent globes of her breasts. And finally he saw her glorious young body lying irresistibly nude across his lap.” ’
‘Can’t stand it,’ said Eddie. ‘Just can’t stand it.’ And while the rest of us started to chant ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’, he got up and went outside.
‘“Her soft smooth arms slid about his neck,” and she says, “I can see how much fun I missed by remaining a virgin. And I positively do not intend to be one any longer.”’
‘Had a few virgins in me time,’ said Jim slowly, ‘but never one like that. It don’t seem natural somehow. It was usually pretty tough goin’ before they come across.’10
Farringdon upheld the case and fined Angus and Robertson £10. A&R quickly mounted an appeal, which was heard two months later before Judge Studdert. The prosecuting barrister said he did not intend to press the matter too strongly as he had read the book himself and enjoyed it. Never, wrote Lawson Glassop to Walter Cousins, had he seen a prosecution so obviously trying to lose a case.11 He thought the police had been so severely criticised for bringing the case that they were anxious to make amends.
Judge Studdert began by praising We Were the Rats as ‘a first rate book and a first rate novel’, but said that Chapter 31 was the most objectionable part of the book and he could not agree that it was intended to be satirical, as the defence alleged. He concluded: ‘I think these pages are just plain filth and I entertain no doubt that they are obscene in fact and in law.’12
Angus and Robertson withdrew We Were the Rats from the market. Extraordinary as it now seems, the novel stayed out of print until 1961, when it was republished by Horwitz, minus some of the blasphemy and the offending Chapter 31. Lawson Glassop went on to publish other books, but nothing else he ever wrote had the success or the notoriety of We Were the Rats.
A&R’s willingness to keep out of print a book that had done so well for them is hardly the mark of a brave publisher. The company had already shown similar lack of courage when in 1943 a man with the same name as a character in Kylie Tennant’s novel Ride On Stranger insisted he had been defamed and demanded financial compensation and the withdrawal of the book from sale. Although Tennant assured A&R that if the matter came to court she would be perfectly happy to settle all costs – the novel was selling well and she was sure that the extra publicity would do it no harm – A&R panicked, withdrew the entire edition from sale and paid the man £250. A furious Kylie Tennant said that it seemed impossible to overestimate a publisher’s terror at the prospect of going to court.
For some years after the war, the trouble over We Were the Rats became A&R’s reason for looking twice at any potentially difficult manuscript. Their timidity cost them at least one significant Australian war novel: Kenneth Mackenzie’s Dead Men Rising, about the 1944 breakout of Japanese and Italian POWs from a prison camp at Cowra, western New South Wales. Mackenzie, a well-known poet, had written two previous novels; his first, The Young Desire It (1937), about schoolboy sexuality, had caused a fuss. Dead Men Rising was also ‘difficult’, dealing with racism in war. Even though Mackenzie submitted the novel to A&R several years after the war, the publishers turned it down on the rather feeble grounds that it gave an unflattering picture of Australian servicemen and the soldiers who had been in Cowra might object to it. Mackenzie finally published the novel with Jonathan Cape in 1951.13
In 1949 a young journalist named Tom (T.A.G.) Hungerford, who had been in Japan with the occupation forces, brought to A&R the massive manuscript of his first novel Sowers of the Wind, a large part of which dealt with Australian soldiers in brothels. Beatrice was not at all fazed by the material: she liked the book immediately and accepted the manuscript, though she said A&R could not publish it that year. She suggested that Hungerford enter it in the Sydney Morning Herald’s competition for an unpublished novel.14 He did, and was astonished when it won second prize.
A win in a major literary competition, a good-looking and talented young author and the book’s subject should have propelled Sowers of the Wind rapidly into print. However, Beatrice now said she thought the book was ‘awkward’. This volte-face after her initial enthusiasm does suggest that she was following the cautious company line, and also confirms the view that she was sometimes influenced by pressure from Cousins and his colleagues. She couldn’t make a decision about publication immediately, she told Hungerford: did he have another novel? As it happened he did: The Ridge and the River, the story of an army patrol on Bougainville. Beatrice accepted that too.
Even though she had given him no definite answer about the publication date of Sowers, Beatrice was – rather unfairly – proprietorial about it. Clem Christesen, who was scouting for Heinemann in London, wanted to read it and Hungerford referred the request to Beatrice. She said he should do what he thought best, though having accepted The Ridge and the River the company certainly considered him an A&R author, despite the delay over Sowers. Beatrice’s charm and skill in persuading authors to remain with A&R, sometimes against their own best interests, grew more practised with the passing years. She convinced Hungerford to sever any connection with Heinemann.
The Ridge and the River went calmly through the editorial process, though at one point Beatrice asked Hungerford whether he would ‘clean it up a bit’, as a matter of taste. When Hungerford challenged her, she sent him an alphabetical list, which began: ‘A is for arsehole, B is for balls, C is for cunt …’ and so on down the alphabet. Hungerford, hig
hly amused, agreed to cut out most of these, though on the grounds of authenticity he jibbed at ‘P for piss off ’.15
When it appeared in 1951, The Ridge and the River was widely praised for its unsentimentality and frankness – six years after the war it was evidently easier to accept what soldiers were really like – and Tom Hungerford was considered a writer to watch. And still A&R hung on to Sowers of the Wind. The next Hungerford novel they published was Riverslake (1953), dealing critically with the conditions faced by postwar immigrants. In 1954 A&R decided that Hungerford’s reputation was now sufficiently robust to survive the publication of his first book, and Sowers sidled on to the market. But by then its time had passed. Several books about the occupation of Japan had now been published, and Sowers sank almost without trace. The whole experience made Tom Hungerford disillusioned with Angus and Robertson – he was not even told that his book had appeared until somebody mentioned seeing it in a Perth bookshop – and for some years he stopped writing fiction and returned to journalism. He did not blame Beatrice for his problems with Angus and Robertson and they remained friends – although, according to him, she never apologised for A&R’s treatment of Sowers of the Wind.
‘We Must Remain the Literary Hub of Australia’
Almost as soon as she started at Angus and Robertson in 1937, Beatrice had joined the Society of Women Writers and the Fellow-ship of Australian Writers, Sydney’s only real literary societies. To the monthly seminars or lectures the FAW ran in the Education Department’s offices in Bridge Street came most of Sydney’s literary luminaries – George Mackaness, Tom Inglis Moore, Miles Franklin, Flora Eldershaw, Marjorie Barnard, Frank Dalby Davison, Norman Lindsay, P.R. Stephensen. Some Beatrice knew through A&R, others she met there, and she became known to a wide cross-section of Sydney writers.
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