Ernestine was distressed and angry at what she saw as Beatrice’s betrayal. Among a fusillade of furious shorthand on the back of Beatrice’s letter, she scrawled ‘no longer endure it but I cannot recount my sorrows in your office files’. She had calmed down by the time she replied, asking whether, if A&R did not want to buy her copyrights, they would pay for their temporary assignment. George Ferguson declined the offer on the grounds that it would not be in Hill’s best interests (or, indeed, those of A&R: his view was that the older books had a limited earning capacity).
The familiar cycle continued – Hill asking for money, A&R sending advances on royalties when they could, Beatrice suggesting that Hill finish a book and so ease the financial strain, no manuscript turning up. It all became too much for Beatrice early in 1961. In a letter enclosing a contract for the Pacific Books edition of My Love Must Wait she wrote:
You really must, my dear Ernestine, sort yourself out to the extent of finishing one book. I know what a tremendous amount of rich material you have gathered; and I know how valuable it would be for Australians even if you did not make it into completed books. But you are primarily a writer, and you simply must go on giving us something to publish … If you could finish something you would be solving your own problems – as everyone has to solve his own in the end.20
She signed it ‘yours with sympathy and affection’, but to Hill this was a stinging rebuke. She was now at that stage of defensiveness where her lack of productivity was someone else’s fault, especially A&R’s. She wrote Beatrice a cranky letter accusing them of being obstructive and demanding they revert the publishing rights to her. Beatrice politely refused.
Beatrice gradually concluded that A&R would never see anything more from Ernestine Hill and she stopped inquiring about her work, so she must have been delighted when on 8 December 1968 Hill wrote a businesslike, sensible letter that gave real promise of a good new book. This was the biography of the legendary Daisy Bates, who had lived among Aboriginal tribes on the Nullarbor from 1912 to 1945 and whose friend and literary collaborator Ernestine had been. She told Beatrice that it was she, not Daisy Bates, who had written Bates’s famous book The Passing of the Aborigines (1938) from a series of interviews. ‘Daisy never touched it,’ she wrote, ‘but all notes and material were hers.’ Drawing on previously unpublished material, Hill had now written about 7000 words on Bates’s life, which she had offered to the Australian newspaper, with pictures. They had accepted but she then withdrew the material, thinking it would work better as a book. She intended to call it The Real Kabbarli and wanted to know whether Angus and Robertson would be interested.
Certainly, replied Beatrice swiftly, though there was a snag: A&R had already contracted a biography of Daisy Bates by Elizabeth Salter. Beatrice did not see this as a real obstacle, though it is not clear why – perhaps she thought Hill would never finish hers. But Hill happily settled down and began to write.
A few months later Beatrice received a letter from Robert Hill. His mother was living with him and his family in Elizabeth, north of Adelaide, he wrote, and she was becoming increasingly difficult. There was nowhere for her to store or sort out her notes, she was ill and needed care.21 To other friends he gave more details: Ernestine was extremely thin, living on tea, biscuits, Codral and Craven A cigarettes. The weather was hot; she was stubborn, argumentative and broke. Robert Hill told Beatrice that though he had a permanent job at the South Australian School of Art his pay was meagre; he could afford only to rent the house they were living in. Would Angus and Robertson be prepared to enter into a financial relationship, giving him $2000 as a deposit on the purchase of a larger house for them all? The house could be bought in the name of Angus and Robertson unless the publishers accepted his guarantee to repay the deposit as quickly as possible. His mother, he added, knew nothing about the plan.
Beatrice replied frostily that while A&R would do what they could, taking care of an author in this way, even one as valued and respected as Ernestine Hill, was scarcely the firm’s responsibility.22 She was more outspoken in a letter to Henrietta Drake-Brockman, describing Robert as ‘quite hopeless’.23 Robert Hill did not press the point, and there matters rested.
By early 1971 Ernestine Hill was in Queensland, still working on Daisy Bates. She seemed almost back to her old busy self, and was excited because Robert Helpmann, who had long wanted an Australian film project for his friend Katharine Hepburn, was interested in buying the rights to the Bates story. But Hill was now in her seventies and her health was giving way; she was frail, in and out of hospital, battling emphysema and heart trouble, fretting about her notes and manuscripts. More concerned than ever, Beatrice advised her not to worry. She arranged for the National Library to contact Hill and look through her manuscripts and papers, possibly to buy them.24 Early in 1972 Hill delivered to Angus and Robertson Kabbarli: A Personal Memoir of Daisy Bates. It was published in 1973.
But Ernestine Hill did not live to see it in print; she died on 22 August 1972 in Brisbane’s St Andrew’s Hospital. She left a portable Olivetti typewriter, a camera and about $100 worth of household goods. There were of course her documents and papers, carted over broken outback roads in duststorms, in blinding heat and in the Wet, obsessively collected, maintained and worried over for so many years. Hill’s executor and agent Charles Bateson told Beatrice that they included very little real new material. ‘She seems to have spent her last few years looking very busy, but in fact doing no more than retyping, almost without alteration, a chapter or short story she had written several years before,’ he wrote.25 As for Johnnie Wise-Cap, the novel that Beatrice had awaited for so many years, only six chapters had ever been written.
‘Like a Bird Singing, She Sings for Herself’: Eve Langley
In 1941 Beatrice was invited to be one of three judges of the S.H. Prior Memorial Prize for the best unpublished manuscript of the year. Sponsored by the Bulletin, the Prior was one of Australia’s few national literary prizes, and previous winners had included Kylie Tennant with Tiburon, published in 1935, and Miles Franklin’s All That Swagger, which appeared the following year.1 Being on the Prior panel was the beginning of a minor second career for Beatrice as a judge of literary competitions and prizes and an arbiter of taste and quality in the literary world outside Angus and Robertson. While she would certainly have agreed with John Cheever’s view that ‘fiction is not a competitive sport’, she was developing a connoisseur’s eye and was keen to discover and reward writing of promise.
One of the 1941 Prior entries was a voluminous manuscript called The Pea Pickers, sent from New Zealand by ‘Gippsland Overlander’ (all entries were submitted under pseudonyms). It was an editor’s nightmare – typed in single space on flimsy pink paper with a faded ribbon, words drifting off the edge of the paper – but Beatrice had not read many pages before she experienced the prickle of excitement all editors feel when they know they are in the presence of an original new voice. This story of two sisters in their late teens who call themselves Steve and Blue, dress as men and wander around Gippsland and the Australian Alps as itinerant workers, had a combination of humour, poetry and vitality Beatrice had never encountered before. Steve, the storyteller, with her fierce need for romantic love and her contradictory loathing of her own gender (‘It was tragic to be only a comical woman when I longed above all things to be a serious and handsome man’) was an immensely appealing character.2 Beatrice was captivated by her sheer joy and exuberance as she and Blue tramped around the countryside, eager for life and experience, always with an eye out for homesteaders who might bestow on them a cup of tea and the odd fried scone. The writing style, too, was strongly individual – the wild juxtaposition of down-to-earth Australian speech and heightened romantic and literary language was just right for the mental landscape of a bookish adolescent girl like Steve. The author, Eve Langley, an Australian in her early thirties who was living in New Zealand, also knew how to evoke the physical landscape: the gum trees, rolling hills, yellow paddocks a
nd overgrown huts of Gippsland. Whenever Beatrice was asked about the books she was proudest of having discovered, she always mentioned The Pea Pickers.
Her fellow judges Frank Dalby Davison and H.M. Green were not so sure that The Pea Pickers was a worthy winner of the Prior prize. They thought it was too romantic and overwritten, preferring Kylie Tennant’s The Brown Van (renamed and published as The Battlers) or Malcolm Henry Ellis’s biography of Lachlan Macquarie. Beatrice argued that, admirable though both these were, they were not in the same street as The Pea Pickers for verve, originality and vitality. In the end all the judges had their way: each of the three books was awarded £100.
Apart from Beatrice, the person probably most delighted by the success of The Pea Pickers was Douglas Stewart. He had known Eve Langley quite well in New Zealand, admired her richly sensuous poetry, had even been half in love with her. She was certainly attractive: a slight young woman with close-cropped dark hair and green eyes, intense-looking in the Katherine Mansfield style. Though lacking a formal education, she had always been a voracious reader who, like Steve, ‘clad her consciousness with scraps of art and literature’. Ruth Park, then a seventeen-year-old copyholder for the Auckland Star, had also become a friend; Langley would visit the newspaper’s reading room simply to talk, quoting Greek mythology, English literature, history, snatches of other languages. ‘She casts treasure around me, not caring whether I pick it up or not,’ wrote Park in the first volume of her autobiography. ‘Like a bird singing, she sings for herself.’3 D’Arcy Niland later compared Eve Langley’s conversation to a water-fall of sequins.
A woman of dazzling talent, Eve Langley clung desperately to literature: words were almost her only refuge from a life of squalor and misery. Married to an improvident schoolteacher/artist named Hilary Clark, she lived with him and their small daughter in a shed behind an Auckland tenement building, constantly ill, without much money for food, and terrified of being abandoned. Douglas Stewart knew something of this and also realised she was rather odd (she had told him she often ate earth, which she found nourishing), but recognised her extraordinary inner radiance. ‘It was squalor, but with a dark little flame in the middle of it,’ he said.4 One of the reasons he was so pleased she had won the Prior – his congratulatory cable to her included the words ‘HURRAY HURRAY HURRAY’ – was that he knew what a difference the money could make to her and her family.
The enthusiasm of Douglas Stewart and Beatrice for The Pea Pickers convinced Walter Cousins that Angus and Robertson should publish it, and Beatrice set to work on the manuscript. It was a long and difficult job, partly because the novel was so discursive – Eve Langley often let her love for out-of-the-way quotation and imagery get the better of her, and long passages of glittering words weighed down the narrative. Beatrice had weeks of cutting and shaping to do. Correspondence with the author was apparently minimal and sporadic; Eve Langley retreated into herself and Beatrice seems to have had a free hand. Langley did not, as her admirers had hoped, use her prize money to buy warmth and security for her family and herself: she spent it on presents, including a wheelchair for an old Maori woman.
The Pea Pickers appeared in mid-1942 and was much praised. Several critics commended its freshness and originality – Frank Dalby Davison observed that it ‘had the dew on it’ – and early sales were encouraging. It was not universally popular: Miles Franklin considered it phony and disliked it on moral grounds because the main characters stole other people’s food. Beatrice defended The Pea Pickers and she and Miles had a ‘stiff difference of opinion’ about it.5
With the success of The Pea Pickers, Beatrice had every reason to feel elated. For the first time she had discovered and nurtured a writer, perhaps a genius, whose career gave promise of great things. Then, a few months after publication, Angus and Robertson received a letter from Auckland’s Public Trustee Office. Eve Langley, ‘married woman, a mentally defective person’, had been committed to Auckland Mental Hospital. A&R was asked to send the public trustee all Eve Langley’s future royalty cheques and statements. Beatrice was appalled; nothing had prepared her for this. Apart from her very real distress about what might have happened to Eve, Beatrice had no way of knowing whether her most brilliant author would ever write another word.
Eve had apparently suffered some kind of psychotic episode, and following the advice of two doctors – no other medical consultation was necessary – her husband Hilary had had her committed to a mental institution indefinitely. Eve was now officially insane, and the state could lock her up and forget about her. And that is what happened: for years, Eve Langley simply disappeared.
Ironically, The Pea Pickers continued its life independently of its author’s. Dutton in New York published it in 1946, under the title of Not Yet the Moon, and were eager to option Langley’s next three novels. They were prepared to wait, they said, even though, as they tactfully phrased it, there appeared to be bad news about future work.
Nothing was heard from, or about, Eve Langley for almost eight years. Then in June 1950 Beatrice received a letter from Langley’s sister June (‘Blue’) to say that Eve had been released. June gave a heartrending account of her sister’s departure: ‘On the long coastal journey home [Eve was released into her sister’s care] she cried out at the glimpses of earth and sky, an occasional gum tree, and wrung my hand at intervals, how happy we both were …’6 A rather shaky Langley found a job in the bindery of the Auckland Public Library, where she remained for six years. She was very much alone, reluctantly and sporadically supported by her husband, who had no intention of resuming the marriage, and her three children had been taken into care.
Beatrice wrote to Eve Langley in October 1950, her letter combining tact, enthusiasm and a certain caution. ‘How many years since we have heard from you! But we do think of you and continue to find The Pea Pickers an enchanting book. In fact we hope next year – or it may have to be 1952 – to republish it and to give many more people the pleasure of having copies of their own …’ She further encouraged Eve with news that the critic and academic editor H.M. Green wanted to include Eve’s ‘The Celtic Guest’ in that year’s Australian Poetry. ‘Life and publishing go on,’ she added, ‘and I should love to hear from you.’7
But it was not until June 1951 that Langley replied. The news was good, she said, she had a new manuscript ready. Its title was White Topee and she had been working on it for some time, even during another spell, this time a short one, in Auckland Mental Hospital. It was, she said, hilarious and quite good, and she offered to send it over.
Beatrice was delighted, though the feverishly happy tone of Langley’s letter must have been a little worrying. Her next letter was also buoyant, though calmer: ‘You have no idea how splendid it is to hear from you again,’ she wrote. ‘Nearly ten years! No matter what has happened in the interim, my country still stands firm…’8 Presumably she meant the country of her imagination. Another heartening sign was that soon afterwards she sent over some poems.
Early in 1952 the promised manuscript arrived. Beatrice, who was about to go on extended leave – it was her first trip overseas – read it before her departure. Her heart must have plummeted: White Topee was a stranger version of The Pea Pickers. It had many of the same themes and characters, but much of the joie de vivre of the earlier book had gone, replaced by long, introspective monologues.
Nan McDonald, who would be editing White Topee in Beatrice’s absence, had severe doubts not only about the rambling, sometimes incoherent quality of the new manuscript but about the imperialism of its central image, the white topee. She was also worried about the possibility of libel (Langley used the names of real people) and she noticed that some of the quotations and literary allusions were inaccurate. She wrote in her reader’s report:
This novel, pruned and condensed, would certainly be worth publishing. It is written with Eve Langley’s characteristic brilliance and originality and no one else could have written it. But I am afraid that no amount of editing will be ab
le to make it as good as The Pea Pickers … With some writers it might be better not to accept a second novel that is very like the first and inferior to it. But in this case we may never see a third and there are very few writers of Eve Langley’s quality, even her second-best quality.9
The second reader echoed Nan’s misgivings, yet Beatrice replied to Eve Langley in warmer terms than either report seemed to warrant, perhaps because she knew she would not be editing the novel. She had read White Topee with great pleasure, she wrote, and A&R certainly wanted to publish it. ‘It has those characteristically brilliant passages that I have come to expect from Eve Langley, but I do think it is a little long,’ she wrote shortly before her departure.10
Nan set to work. Like The Pea Pickers, the manuscript of White Topee needed a great deal of editing, made more difficult by the author’s oddness. Nan’s letters of editorial query were short and tactful, Langley’s replies long and rambling, her enthusiasms and obsessions well to the fore. Though unsettling as answers to editorial questions, her letters remain fascinating evidence of a leaping and allusive mind out of control: ‘When first in 1900 I saw young men, handsome young men of the Waikato tribe [Eve Langley was born in 1908] I said to myself that they were descended from the ancient Greeks. And I called the country not Waikato but Vae Cato, the woe of Cato from the Latin word Vacao, to empty or to empty out.’11
Nan laboured on. According to one account she transferred phrases Eve used in her letters to enrich, amplify and clarify the manuscript. That she was able to do this shows how incoherent White Topee was, and yet how all of a piece – in obsessions, style, themes – with so much of Eve Langley’s other writing. The amount and quality of the work Nan McDonald did supports the view that editors often do their best work on the most difficult and unpromising manuscripts. It also shows why Beatrice considered Nan the best and most sensitive editor in Australia.
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