Beatrice did not like to go to social functions alone, and women of her generation were expected to be accompanied. She soon found a very practical solution in the form of Edmund Jeune, known to everyone as Dick, and by 1944 he had become Beatrice’s escort. A tall, solid man, bald as an egg – at parties Percy Lindsay used to greet both him and Frederick by bestowing a kiss on each glistening pate – Dick Jeune was a ship’s providore by profession who lived by himself in a hotel room near Circular Quay. Then in his fifties and divorced without children, he had known Beatrice almost as long as she had known Frederick. Children found him very glamorous. Beatrice’s nephews firmly believed that in his youth he had been not only a gun-runner but the strong man in a circus, able to lift a horse from the ground by grabbing its mane in his teeth.
Dick Jeune was very particular about such things as dress, speech, correct grammar and the treatment of ladies, although there were times when he forgot to be a gentleman. Once, driving through the city with Beatrice’s nephew Charles and attired in his usual town ensemble of tailored suit, snowy shirt and tie, Homburg hat and monocle, he stopped at the traffic lights on the corner of George Street and Martin Place. A rough-looking character took exception to Jeune’s resplendent appearance and, as he crossed in front of the car, diverted slightly and rammed the meat pie he was eating through the driver’s window onto Jeune’s shirt. Dripping meat and gravy, Jeune parked in George Street and got out. Charles watched him stride up the street after his assailant, then saw a well-tailored arm flash forward and a flurry in the crowd as Jeune’s victim hit the footpath. Jeune strolled back to his car. ‘Bastard!’ he growled as he drove off.
Dick Jeune seems to have made it his mission to look after Beatrice, whom he adored, on Frederick’s behalf. He was a kind-hearted, dependable man, always willing to escort her to dinners, meetings and the theatre, even though he made no secret of the fact that he found many of these functions excruciating. Some of Beatrice’s literary acquaintances – those who did not share her appreciation of human foibles and eccentricity – were bemused by him: why was the dainty, elegant and beautiful Beatrice being seen in public with such a rough diamond? Jeune was rather deaf, and at meetings of the Fellowship of Australian Writers or the English Association was apt to nod off in the front row. A young academic giving a talk at such a meeting was disconcerted at the sight of him, very obviously asleep, and afterwards apologised pointedly for being so boring. ‘No, no,’ said Jeune briskly. ‘That’s quite all right. Nobody else has ever apologised.’3
Beatrice enjoyed Dick Jeune’s company and was grateful for his support, for life was becoming increasingly grim. By June 1945 it was evident that Frederick would not live much longer and he was moved to Prince Alfred Hospital, where he had once been medical superintendent. He died there on 30 July 1945, just before the war ended – and, as Beatrice often bitterly pointed out, not long before the invention of the streptomycin that could have saved him.
In his will, which named Beatrice and his elder son Peter joint trustees and executors, Frederick provided for his young wife generously. After leaving her his personal effects and £500 for each of his sons, he directed that Beatrice should have the net income from his investments during her lifetime. After her death the income would revert to Frederick’s sons or their families. As the house at Folly Point was part of the estate, Beatrice had the right to live there for the rest of her life. Despite what she said in later years, she was in a position not to have to work again.
Beatrice was now a widow, living in the house she loved, but alone. Did she wish, even for a moment, that she had had Frederick’s child? If so, she never told anyone. However, when her friend Miles Franklin wrote a characteristically sympathetic and generous note the day after she heard of Frederick’s death, Beatrice opened her heart just a little.
My dear Miles
It was a wonderful letter you wrote me & it warmed my sad heart. I didn’t tell much about Frederick, but I’ll tell you about him someday. Have just come home from staying with my brother John on his selection by the Namoi near Narrabri, where I immediately fled. The loveliness of the countryside helped, and hard work, cooking on wood stoves and doing jobs with sheep and cattle.
May I really come to stay with you for a night or two? Perhaps you’d have me one weekend, because weekends will be difficult in this house that was, and is still, Frederick. But I’m going to tear into my job in earnest and, I hope, learn to play the piano again …4
And so she did.
To the great satisfaction of A&R’s management, the Australian publishing boom did not end with the war. ‘The future never looked so bright to me and that is saying something,’ wrote Walter Cousins in 1948 with giddy optimism, though typically he added his doubts that A&R could keep up the pace.5 Not that the new poets and prose writers who had come to prominence during the war in Australian Poetry, Coast to Coast and the Bulletin were selling in huge numbers; for A&R the big sellers at the end of the war were still the old stalwarts Ion Idriess and E.V. Timms, as well as Frank Dalby Davison. But newer books were doing well: Rohan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo had sold almost 30 000 copies, My Love Must Wait about 50 000, and two 10 000-copy reprints of Flying Doctor Calling had also walked out of the bookshop. George Robertson would have been proud to see how well his company was doing, wrote Cousins: ‘We have at this date hardly started publishing.’
But though readers were buying Australian books in greater numbers, the problems of publishing remained. At the end of the war, the federal government had decided to continue allowing overseas publishers to reprint their books in Australia on generous terms; the Australian Journalists’ Association and the Fellowship of Australian Writers claimed that cheap paper editions of English-originated work were flooding the Australian market and putting local writers at a disadvantage.6 The AJA and FAW asked for a parliamentary committee to look into the book publishing industry in Australia, for legislative protection against the dumping of US-produced books, for a quota system to ensure that bookshops bought at least 20 per cent of new books by Australian authors, and for tariff protection for the writing and publishing industries. Time after time since World War II these problems, and solutions, have surfaced. They can be summed up as a small market in a big country, and they bedevil Australian book publishers to this day.
The arguments in favour of autonomy for Australian publishers became even more strident with the reintroduction of the Traditional Market Agreement, drawn up and enforced by the (UK) Publishers Association.7 By 1953 Australia was the world’s biggest market for British books outside the UK, and it might be argued that with such influence Australian publishers, led by Angus and Robertson, could have tried harder to negotiate separate rights deals for overseas books.8 But they did not, and for many years the Traditional Market Agreement was a reminder that Australia, certainly in this respect, was still a British colony.
At the beginning of the 1950s Beatrice felt that she, if not Australia, had quite enough autonomy to be going on with. ‘Tearing into her job in earnest’, originally a solace after Frederick’s death, gradually became an end in itself. She told correspondents she was busier than she had ever been, and in that statement there was a certain pride. Watching Frederick die had been dreadful and Beatrice still had moments of desolation, but she had survived. She was continuing to do her job, and to do it as well as she could.
From the late 1940s Beatrice’s department (PBE or ‘poor bloody editorial’, as it was sardonically called) had been acquiring the shape it would maintain throughout the next decade. Beatrice, who at the start of the war had signed her letters ‘Beatrice Davis, Editorial Department’ (never had so few tried to be so many), was, by the end of it, ‘Beatrice Davis, General Editor’. She used this title to differentiate herself and her staff from the very new education department, set up in 1945 and headed by a young, bullet-headed Queenslander named Colin Roderick. Roderick speedily acquired his own staff, as well as an interest in everyone else’s job besides his
own, and a tendency to inform others that it was educational books that made money, not the literary stuff.
During the war Beatrice had taken on Elisabeth Hughes, whose job was to handle non-fiction, particularly cookery and gardening books. In 1949 John Swindells, one of Guy Howarth’s most promising students, was employed as an editorial assistant. He left to travel after a year and was replaced by a dark-haired, judicious young man named Alec Bolton, who remained at Angus and Robertson for fifteen years. He was immediately smitten with Rosemary Dobson; they married in 1951 and a year later she left Angus and Robertson to have their first child.
Though the editorial staff was expanding, their offices in the attic were small and cramped, with no concessions to ventilation or changes in temperature: one winter day Ruth Park saw two of Beatrice’s editors actually shivering with cold. At the very top of the stairs was Beatrice’s room, with the only door that was ever shut; her secretary Judy Fisher, whose family had known Frederick Bridges, had a small office nearby. The four staff editors shared two further offices. The first held the reference library, which was replenished from the downstairs bookshop whenever necessary, as well as a huge wooden cupboard containing unsolicited manuscripts and those waiting to be edited. Beatrice, as editorial traffic controller, allocated texts according to each staff member’s area of expertise. Every manuscript submitted, however hopeless, was read and reported on by two readers, usually from within A&R, though outside experts were sometimes called upon. Unless the books were government publications or works of strong topical interest, there was no urgency in the editing process; editors worked on particular books until they felt they had finished. Indexes were prepared by another editor or a freelancer, often Guy Howarth’s wife Lillian.
Opposite Judy Fisher’s office was the proofreaders’ room. Most of the proofreaders, of course, worked at Halstead Press, but Grace George always had her office in the editorial section and shared it with a copyholder. Beatrice and her editors, who generally worked quietly, were used to the sounds of murmuring from Georgie’s room as the copyholder read aloud the original manuscript and the reader marked errors on the proofs. On one notable occasion someone called up the stairs, ‘How do you spell “warring”?’ The copyholder called back, ‘W-h-o-r-i-n-g.’9
After Beatrice the senior editor was Nan McDonald, now in her early thirties. Nan’s family came from south of Sydney, but she lived with her sister Margaret, who worked in the Mitchell Library. Nan dreaded Beatrice’s absences from the office because she then had to write letters and talk to authors, and she was extraordinarily shy. Her other dread was E.V. Timms, a demanding and difficult author who wrote long, bossy letters that she sometimes could not bring herself to read for several days.
Beatrice and her editors spent little time together outside the office, nor did they go to lunch as a group; their main social occasion was the tea break, which Nan in particular insisted upon. At mid-morning and mid-afternoon Judy Fisher or the most junior editor brought the tea tray, with teapot, milk, sugar, cups and spoons, up the narrow staircase from the floor below. Everybody gathered in one of the editorial offices, drank tea, swapped opinions about the manuscripts they were working on, and discussed books and the arts in general. Authors and manuscript readers who were on the premises joined in; a frequent guest was the children’s writer Ella McFadyen. Other members of A&R’s staff thought the editorial department spent too long over tea, but this was the only time they got together during the day, unless one editor consulted another about a problematic manuscript.
With a staff of editors, Beatrice found that she needed to spend less time doing hands-on editing, though she always worked on the manuscripts of her favourite authors. The newer members of her staff marvelled at the surgical precision and care with which she worked on manuscripts, making marks in tiny handwriting, usually with a fountain pen or a fine-nibbed mapping pen and red ink.10 Beatrice used red, as schoolteachers traditionally did when marking essays, but her manuscripts looked far more intricate and decorative. ‘Your handscript always looks as if it could be played on the piano,’ Miles Franklin once told her. The short-story writer Margaret Trist said she didn’t mind being corrected by Beatrice because her manuscripts always looked so beautiful.
Although Beatrice’s editing might have looked delicate, often it was anything but. Her approach to a now almost forgotten novel, Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s The Wicked and the Fair, is typical. In August 1956 Beatrice wrote to the author:
At last The Wicked and the Fair is ready for the printer, having been carefully checked and its problems, typographical and other, discussed by me and by Nan McDonald – the two most experienced publishers’ editors in the country. I say this to remind you that no suggestion or typographical alteration has been made without due thought, for we do consider this a most important manuscript on which no pains should be spared.
So far so good. But Beatrice continued:
Since all the points raised are comparatively minor ones, we did not think it necessary to return the ms to you … First there are the cuts – all minor but necessary, we think, to avoid blocks in the narrative. A list of these is appended, giving page and line … A list of queries is [also] attached. Thirdly, there is the typography, use of caps, hyphens, etc., on which we of course are the experts …11
Beatrice seldom sent edited manuscripts back, so authors often saw the changes to their manuscript only on proofs. Especially messy manuscripts were often retyped, whereupon Beatrice might show a difficult author a new-looking manuscript with a few red-ink marks added to make the editing look less extensive than it had been.12
The cuts Beatrice made to The Wicked and the Fair might well have given an author cause for concern – she simply lists them without explaining why they were made. Her changes do seem excessive, even high-handed, but it’s possible that she and Henrietta Drake-Brockman, who were good friends, discussed the manuscript in detail face to face during one of Drake-Brockman’s visits to Sydney (she lived in Perth). And Beatrice’s questions to the author are always sensible: ‘There are no lions in India. Shall we let this pass as a traveller’s tale, or change to tiger?’
It was Beatrice’s practice to discuss the major problems in a manuscript with its author, in person or by letter, persuade them to rewrite as much as possible, then have the line-by-line editing done, either by herself or a member of her staff. The manuscript was then typeset and the galleys sent to the author. If Beatrice cut too deeply or made changes the author felt were unacceptable, Beatrice either reinstated the disputed text or tried to cajole the author into agreement. It is interesting to see what an interventionist editor Beatrice often was, particularly when in later years she made a point of emphasising that the author’s voice and style were sacrosanct.
By 1949 Walter Cousins, having worried his way through the war and its aftermath, needed a rest; he was in his late sixties and his health was uncertain. He had worked for A&R for almost fifty years and, considering his retirement, had already picked out a successor. ‘George [Ferguson] has my vision 100% and will carry the torch in the future years,’ he wrote to Rebecca Wiley, who had gone to live in the US.13 ‘He has splendid organizing ability and is loved by all.’
It was a logical choice, and an expected one. George Adie Ferguson, son of Sir John Ferguson and grandson of George Robertson, was a loose-limbed, amiable man who had lived and breathed A&R since his youth. He had joined the company in 1931 after leaving university and, in the traditional manner of the heir apparent, he learned the publishing trade from many angles. He sold technical books, handed out the pay envelopes at Halstead Press, even read proofs (his copyholder complained that he constantly sucked hard sweets and never offered her any). During the war he served as a brigade major in the 2nd Division artillery and he returned to Angus and Robertson in 1945, becoming Walter Cousins’s deputy. In August 1949, after some months of illness, Walter Cousins died and George Ferguson became publishing director of Angus and Robertson.
Fer
guson and Beatrice were almost exact contemporaries: he was a year younger and they had been at the University of Sydney at the same time. They got on well, though temperamentally they could hardly have been more different. Beatrice had undoubtedly sized up her new boss as an easy-going, pleasant young man. George was ostensibly in charge but there was nothing subservient about Beatrice’s relationship to him, quite the reverse. Her staff knew that, if Beatrice wished, she could wrap George Ferguson around her little finger.
PART 3
1945–1960
89 Castlereagh Street
‘I May Not be a Great Genius … but Nevertheless My Tonnage Cannot be Ignored’: Miles Franklin
Miles Franklin cast a long shadow. In her fifties when Beatrice met her, she had been one of Australia’s best-known literary figures for more than thirty years, My Brilliant Career having appeared in June 1901 when she was only twenty-one. Attractive, wilful and opinionated, with a distinct writing voice of her own, Miles Franklin had apparently been destined for a brilliant literary career, and if she never quite repeated the success of her first novel, she nevertheless produced at least a dozen others and collaborated on a well-researched biography of the writer Joseph Furphy. Despite her many years abroad, her subject was almost invariably Australia, particularly the Brindabella country in southern New South Wales where she grew up: with the passing of time, this became an ever more insistent presence in her mind. Her first book displayed the insouciant freshness and high spirits of young womanhood, and as she grew older her writing scarcely changed – though what had been refreshingly casual writing in her youth became perhaps a little forced later in life.
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