A Certain Style
Page 12
While White Topee was still being edited, Eve Langley sent in her third manuscript, Wild Australia. This really set off alarm bells at Angus and Robertson: the book could most kindly be described as dazzlingly irrational. Many pages were devoted to Eve’s account, as Oscar Wilde, of a trip she and her lover Lord Alfred Douglas made to Cairo so that Eve/Oscar could be operated on to become female. Rosemary Dobson reported that the manuscript could not be recommended, though skilful editing and heavy revision would certainly improve it.
Nan McDonald readily conceded that not even the most drastic editing could turn Wild Australia into a satisfactory book, and she very tactfully wrote to tell Langley so. ‘A writer who has lived with an idea and developed it and become thoroughly familiar with it often fails to realise how baffling it can be if it is presented without explanation to a reader … who has not shared in these processes,’ she said.12
Eve Langley’s reply some months later came with a document stating that she had changed her name to Oscar Wilde by deed poll.
Dear Nan McDonald,
I feel very ill. You are sending WILD AUSTRALIA back to me. I can scarcely belive [sic] it. I was banking on the book … thought I’d be able to leave the library soon and with the money the Govt gave me, come out here and write more books like it. For it clears my brain to write them. Nan McDonald, DEAR Nan McDonald I AM OSCAR WILDE AND YOU’RE KILLING ME … And I hate being Oscar Wilde because NO ONE WANTS OSCAR WILDE, EVER … Dear Nan, please reconsider your most awful decision and don’t send that book. O I know what death is now …13
The consternation Nan felt on reading this letter can readily be imagined. How was she to answer it? (And indeed, to whom?) She retreated to the editorial high ground, ignoring the Oscar Wilde problem and addressing her reply to Eve Langley, praising White Topee and pointing out that many published authors had subsequent manuscripts rejected. Nan must have been relieved to receive Langley’s next letter, written under her own name and much more subdued, even businesslike. She did not refer to Wild Australia, simply announcing her intention of sending over another new manuscript, Bancroft House. This became an established pattern: Eve Langley apparently did not really intend Angus and Robertson to publish her manuscripts, just to store them for her.
White Topee appeared in mid-1954 to lukewarm reviews: after twelve years the excitement over The Pea Pickers had well and truly died down. ‘Not so much a novel as a marvellous oddity,’ wrote Roger Covell of the Brisbane Courier-Mail, recommending that readers approach it with caution. And indeed the author photograph was not reassuring. It showed a very large Eve Langley – she had put on a great deal of weight – in a long fur coat, canvas shoes and a white topee, clutching an elephant gun. In a letter to A&R she rather endearingly described this image as ‘the British housewife on the rampage’.14
Langley announced that the New Zealand Literary Fund had asked her to write twenty books, which was fine because she had plenty to write about. In May 1955 she sent A&R Somewhere East of Suez, another fragmented and unpublishable manuscript. She had left her job at the Auckland Public Library and late in December 1956 she crossed the Tasman, intent on seeing her publishers and revisiting Gippsland. Before long there she was, a very large woman resplendent in fur coat, man’s suit and glistening white solar topee, climbing slowly up the wooden stairs to the editorial floor of 89 Castlereagh Street.
Beatrice and Douglas Stewart met her, and according to Stewart they all had an amiable and sensible discussion about manuscripts and possible future novels. Beatrice, who was meeting Eve for the first time, had quite a different impression. She wrote to her friend Hal Porter, who was working as a librarian in Bairnsdale, Gippsland, that Langley had been ‘more eccentric than we could have dreamed of ’.15
Porter, who had greatly enjoyed The Pea Pickers, was intrigued. He discovered that Langley was staying at Metung, not far from where he worked, and telephoned her. Her breathy, little-girl voice led him to expect a frail woman in floating chiffon and silver sandals, fresh from haunts of coot and hern. Instead of which, he said, she was:
dressed in a navy-blue chalk-stripe double-breasted [suit] a la Menzies, and what I call a publican’s cardigan, one of those maroon and fawn things, and a tie with stripes across it. She had quite small feet in boots, they must have been schoolboy’s shoes she had bought … Over this she had flung a very long fur coat, ankle-sweeping, quite an opulent one, made of black cat or some strange material. And topping all this, a white topee … 16
Porter went with her as she revisited some of the scenes of The Pea Pickers, and described it as a fascinating experience. She had wonderful green eyes, like those of Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp, he said, and when something took her interest she was transformed and became beautiful. ‘Drawing from within herself whatever is in a writer of her quality and a woman of her strange sort, she would come out vivacious, amusing, intelligent.’ But then Eve Langley would retreat into her own mind and this woman would vanish, to be unnervingly replaced by her alter ego, Oscar Wilde. She occasionally referred to herself as Oscar, and once addressed a passing child by that name.
When Porter described the day to Beatrice, she replied that Langley sounded almost as alarming in Gippsland as she had been at 89 Castlereagh Street. ‘I feel drawn and repelled,’ she added, ‘seeing the richness of her qualities and feeling the pathos of her alienation. There is really nothing one can do …’17 Beatrice also worried about how Langley was managing financially. She was probably living on an invalid pension and meagre royalties. The Pea Pickers was still in print – a new reprint was ordered in 1958 – though White Topee had sunk without trace.
And still Eve was writing, writing, pouring out endless manuscripts. On 19 October 1959 she wrote to Beatrice:
I am just going to pack up the latest book Last, Loneliest, Loveliest, and send it over to you. It’s all about my life over on the North Shore in Auckland and full of rich warm glowing material from a journal kept in those days of marriage to an artist husband and a batch of children as well … you will get The Land of the Long White Cloud soon. Then comes Demeter of Dublin Street, followed by The Colossus of Rhodes Street, then The Old Mill … Then after this one comes Remote, Apart to be followed by Portrait of the Artist at Chelsea and then The Saunterers and Beautiful Isles of the Sea and lastly Apollyon Regius … Two books come in between, introducing to you The Land of the Long White Cloud and these are The Nimrod Type and The Australian … so that’s eight to come, no nine with Golden Wattle Warriors, no eleven with The Nimrod Type and The Australian.
Beatrice staunchly replied that she was delighted Eve was writing so happily and so prolifically.
It was A&R’s usual practice to have two readers’ reports done for all manuscripts submitted. Nan McDonald was given the job of summarising the latest batch of Langley novels: ‘All these novels are shapeless and lacking in story interest; all have characteristic flashes of brilliance and originality, and all are distinctly inferior to The Pea Pickers,’ she wrote.18 She concluded that she had probably not done justice to the later manuscripts; somebody had to read them all, of course, ‘but seven full-length works are too much Eve Langley for anyone to take in a few months without indigestion … I don’t think I could face [any more] for some time to come.’
There was clearly no hope that Eve Langley would ever write another publishable book. Yet both Beatrice and Nan continued to send her kind and encouraging letters. ‘Heaven knows when we shall be able to publish all these so attractively titled novels,’ wrote Beatrice. ‘The point is that you, with your genius for poetry and fantasy, are a writer for the few who are capable of appreciating your gifts.’19 She and Nan knew that Eve could find refuge in her own mind only by writing endlessly, that she needed to rework The Pea Pickers obsessively in order to try to make whole her fragmented self. It must have been sad for Beatrice to see that flashes of the poetic talent she admired so much were still there, but unreachable, like opal in rock.
Then Langley announced t
hat she thought of settling in Australia, and asked Beatrice to help her find a very cheap house to buy, costing between £500 and £1000. Perhaps she had saved this from her royalties over many years, perhaps from a pension; Beatrice never knew, but she helped Langley apply for an Australian invalid pension, writing on her behalf to the Department of Social Services, and arranged for information about houses in New South Wales to be sent to her.
Early in 1960 Langley wrote to say she had found a house in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, for the tiny sum of £75. In May she arrived in Australia and went straight up to her new home, which she called ‘Iona Lympus’. ‘I am settled well among the blue tongued lizards and the tiger snakes and Sydney wattle and waratah at above address,’ she wrote to Beatrice in a letter that carried jaunty echoes of The Pea Pickers. ‘Please forward all mail of a New Zealand or hostile character to same. The house is great … Australia Felix or Australia Beatrix it’s home to the wanderer and exile and I wish I’d never left it. Love to you and Nan and everyone from Steve.’20
From her hut in the Blue Mountains Langley continued to write to Beatrice and to make occasional visits to Sydney. But she had developed a new obsession – to travel to Greece, the home of ancient culture, where she would commune with the ancients and earn her living as an itinerant grape picker. Beatrice and Douglas Stewart considered this ambition another fantasy, but in September 1965 A&R received a letter from H.B. Gullett, Australian ambassador to Greece, telling them that Langley had arrived in Athens, alone and penniless.
Beatrice and Douglas Stewart swung into action. Beatrice prevailed on the A&R accounts department to send Eve a cheque for £50 against royalties for a forthcoming reprint of The Pea Pickers, care of the ambassador. She also persuaded Langley’s bank to advance her another £300. Douglas Stewart managed to get a grant of £10 from the Commonwealth Literary Fund. In a letter to H.B. Gullett he explained why he and Beatrice had taken such trouble.
Eve has had a thing about Greece all her life; it is – or Ancient Greece is – her Promised Land and for that reason, if she hasn’t gone right off the deep end, we’d love to have her see something of the country before she comes home … Would it be possible to let her wander off into Greece for a while, with a small grant, on the understanding that she would keep in touch with the Embassy? Or is she too bad for that?21
The trip was not a success. Langley found Athens bleak, hot and hostile. She struggled with luggage, couldn’t handle Greek money, and spent a long time tramping the streets, living on scavenged apple peel and biscuits and becoming steadily more bewildered and depressed. The Australian embassy found her somewhere to stay but she felt trapped and once more retreated into her own world. She finally returned to Australia without her luggage, and was back in ‘Iona Lympus’ by the middle of December.
Early in 1966 Douglas Stewart wrote to her about her financial position, saying he might be able to get further help from the CLF. A month later she replied, mentioning only that she had been ill in Greece. At this point the correspondence faltered. From time to time A&R wrote to her about royalties and other small matters, but there was only silence from her end. Gradually, inexorably, Eve Langley faded into her memories and the landscape of her fantasy.
In 1974 Douglas Stewart’s daughter Meg, a writer and filmmaker, decided to make a film about Eve Langley for International Women’s Year (1975).22 She had grown up loving The Pea Pickers: her father often spoke of it, her mother, the artist Margaret Coen, would quote a line from it about old boots being the flowers of the Australian bush. Meg, asked to compare two picaresque novels for the New South Wales Leaving Certificate, had chosen The Pea Pickers and Fielding’s Tom Jones. (The examiners had marked her down on the grounds that The Pea Pickers was not sufficiently ‘literary’.)
In July Meg and her father drove up to Katoomba, intending to talk to Langley about the film. They went out from the town along a winding, uphill bush road and finally came to an old gate with a NO TRESPASSERS sign. Eve Langley’s mountain retreat was a decrepit caravan and a dilapidated and rotten wooden shack in scrub overgrown with blackberries. On the ground in front of the shack’s open door were three golf clubs, perhaps intended as weapons.
Inside the shack were a rickety bed, a desk and a chair. Bundles of newspaper littered the floor, miscellaneous rubbish was everywhere – an old record player, toys, scraps of clothing, magazines. There was a coal stove and a fireplace but no sign of a radiator or electricity; Tilley lamps evidently provided light. The place must have been freezing in winter, they thought. Eve Langley was not there.
Meg and Douglas Stewart went to the Katoomba police station. They learned that, after a neighbour had noticed uncollected mail in Langley’s letterbox, a social worker had called on the afternoon of 1 July. She had found Eve’s body in front of the fireplace. Langley had died, probably of arteriosclerosis, at some time during the first two weeks of June. The police statement said that she ‘was or had been an author of some note’. One detail in the statement that particularly distressed Douglas Stewart was that her face had been partly eaten by rats.
‘Marriage unknown; children unknown; profession nil; time of death 1–13 June 1974,’ read the death certificate. Eve Langley had vanished for a third time, this time into the bureaucracy, just another vagrant.
Profession nil: Eve Langley produced one book that Beatrice always considered a novel of rare talent, the first imaginative prose to appear in Australia since Christina Stead began writing.23 With great regret, Beatrice came to agree with Douglas Stewart, who said, ‘What I always felt about Eve, really, you know, was that there was no continuity after The Pea Pickers. It was her misfortune and her good luck to do one great work of genius, I think … and you can’t go on.’24
Mrs Frederick Bridges and Miss Beatrice Davis
At the end of World War II Beatrice was thirty-six. Already she had a touch of the crisp, authoritative manner that came with being efficient and busy, having an assured position and staff of her own. Though she threw herself into her job, it was not her whole life. There was Frederick, of course, and her family. Aunt Enid was now living alone with Granny Deloitte in Neutral Bay, working at clerical or secretarial jobs and settling into the busy, useful life of favourite aunt and keeper of Deloitte family lore. She was still the relative to whom Beatrice felt closest. Her mother Emily, who continued to live alone in Neutral Bay once John and Del were married, was never Beatrice’s favourite person, though Beatrice was always the dutiful daughter.
Emily could be difficult, with definite ideas about how things should be done. On the second day of what had been intended as a long visit to her son John and his young family near Narrabri, she announced that she couldn’t possibly stay there as she had to be near the sea, and insisted on being taken home immediately. Though only in her early sixties, she was developing the imperious manner of an older woman, coupled with a certain vagueness. In fact, she was showing signs of premature dementia. This was a potential worry for Beatrice, as the only one of Emily’s children who lived in Sydney.
Though Beatrice was fond of her brothers and made a point of seeing them whenever they were in town, she didn’t much like her sisters-in-law – a lack of warmth, it must be said, that was fully reciprocated. They disapproved of Beatrice partly because they suspected she and Frederick had lived together before marriage. Her city sophistication made the wives of John and Del consider her supercilious and somewhat pretentious, particularly about her job. They also found Frederick’s sense of humour difficult; he had a habit of deliberately putting people off balance. Once, as Del and his wife arrived at Folly Point for a party, Frederick greeted them at the door with ‘I don’t know whether you can come in. Show us your teeth!’
‘Very special and very dear’ was how Beatrice described Frederick. Perhaps she loved him all the more because of the cloud that hung over their marriage; Frederick’s tuberculosis was incurable and they knew their time together was likely to be short. There was, though, l
ittle risk of Beatrice’s contracting the disease: the infection rate among carers was not very high.1 Beatrice might also have been influenced by the lingering Victorian view that TB was a rather romantic disease, associated with creative, dynamic people. As a doctor, Frederick Bridges knew how limited the treatment was: bed rest at home, ineffective and painful operations involving collapsing the infected lungs, perhaps time in a sanitarium. Sanitoria of the time were brutal places where, because fresh air was considered the best treatment for TB sufferers, beds were placed in front of open windows or on verandahs exposed to freezing winter nights. Frederick led as normal a life as possible for as long as he could, but finally had to give up and retire to bed.
Worried though she was about her husband, Beatrice managed to maintain her calm and businesslike exterior at A&R. By now the staff knew that she was Mrs Bridges; she probably came clean about her marriage once the shortage of men during wartime allowed married women to be employed. She did not dwell on her own problems, though occasionally she hinted at them: in 1944 she apologised to Lawson Glassop for her tardiness in editing We Were the Rats because she had been ‘off her head with domestic worries of a fairly sinister sort’.2 She did not elaborate.
Possessive, even childish though Frederick might have been, as a doctor he knew precisely what was happening to him and what the prognosis was. Beatrice could do little in caring for him; she certainly intended to continue her career after his death, and it would be foolish to allow Frederick’s illness to dominate her life entirely. Whatever anguish this realisation caused Beatrice, she accepted it, and maintained her social and professional contacts. Though considerate and practical, she was not the ministering angel type – and Frederick was evidently not the kind of man who expected to be fussed over. Beatrice and Frederick began to lead increasingly separate lives. Del, observing his sister going out one evening with little more than a ‘Bye bye, darling’ and a kiss on the forehead for her very ill husband, thought she was being hard and selfish, abandoning him for the sake of her own pleasure.