A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  In 1961 Niland started research on the book he had always wanted to write: a biography of his namesake the Australian boxer Les Darcy.29 By 1963 he had finished his research but he told A&R that he was not ready to show a manuscript. Instead he sent them a novel, The Apprentices. Their reaction was so-so. The first reader wrote that, though the novel was ‘excruciatingly sentimental’, he thought A&R could get away with it. In almost all the A&R correspondence about the work of Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland enthusiasm is less than total, in spite of the fact that their books were extremely popular. It was left to their American and English publishers to praise the books with a whole heart.

  Beatrice’s letter to D’Arcy Niland reflected this lukewarm feeling about The Apprentices: ‘In spite of some readers’ doubts about the sentimentality of the treatment, we believe we can make a go of it; and it has heartwarming qualities that should give great pleasure to many people,’ she wrote.30 Dismayed and, like Ruth Park fifteen years earlier, realising that a publisher without enthusiasm is almost worse than none at all, D’Arcy Niland replied sharply. If A&R didn’t want the book, he would send it elsewhere. The novel was quickly accepted by Michael Joseph.

  By now Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland had drifted away from Angus and Robertson. The demands of five growing children and their own international careers – and also disappointment with their treatment by A&R – meant that their contact with Beatrice dwindled. When they did see each other the old affection remained, but the Nilands knew that their attitude to their work, and to publishing generally, was very different from Beatrice’s. They had learned hard lessons about marketing their work. As they said in The Drums Go Bang, they had a product and they lived by selling it; Beatrice had always had a steady job. From the beginning, Park had known that Beatrice lacked marketing intuition, judging a book on literary terms alone; Park never heard her mention readers, only reviewers.

  For some years D’Arcy Niland had been seriously ill with heart disease, and in 1967 he suddenly died, aged forty-eight. His last novel, Dead Men Running, was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1969. Beatrice saw little of Ruth Park during the following few years – Park was overseas – but when she went to work for Thomas Nelson in 1973, Park followed her. Beatrice edited her novel Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977) – it won the Miles Franklin Award and Miles Franklin would have been appalled – and Missus, about the early lives of characters from The Harp in the South. Beatrice also edited Playing Beatie Bow, which was published in 1980. After thirty-six years, then, her editorial relationship with Ruth Park returned to its beginnings, with a novel for children.

  Mixing Their Drinks: Women Friends, Women Writers

  By her early forties, most of Beatrice’s time was devoted to her job. Though her brothers and their families, the network of Deloitte relatives, her non-literary friends and her life at Sackville were important to her, her work was the focus of her life. Her role in the literary community depended on more than just her status. Miles Franklin once told Dymphna Cusack that ‘everybody’ courted Beatrice, for her self, her brain, and because of her position at A&R. Everyone in Australian literary circles either knew Beatrice or had heard of her by now. She had developed many friendships with authors, and as she believed, like Dr Samuel Johnson, that friendships should be kept in constant repair, her literary relationships lasted for many years, some for the whole of her life. Beatrice was certainly a ‘man’s woman’, as the phrase went – she placed a high premium on male attention – but her most enduring and deepest friendships were with women. Though scarcely the confiding type, she knew how to elicit confidences from other people, and was something of a mother confessor to her staff and some of her authors. Still, being fundamentally interested in her fellow beings, she enjoyed a good gossip as much as anyone, and often met friends to catch up and to swap information. One of her favourite places for lunch was the Queen’s Club, which she had joined during the war, nominated by her Deloitte aunts. Situated in a gracious old three-storey building on the corner of King and Macquarie streets, since 1912 the Queen’s Club had been a quiet and genteel city retreat for middle-class women, particularly country visitors. As late as 1958 it was the only women’s club in the city that maintained 24-hour service seven days a week. The second and third floors were given over to accommodation, and the ground floor had a lounge where members could relax and peruse copies of Punch and the Tatler direct from Home. But the club’s major attraction for Beatrice was its dining room, where members could entertain their guests in surroundings of tasteful comfort.1

  In the dining room of the Queen’s Club Beatrice regularly lunched with Connie Robertson, editor of the Sydney Morning Herald women’s pages. Ten years older than Beatrice, witty and sharply intelligent and with a great sense of style, Robertson was very conscious of her literary connections. She had introduced herself to Ruth Park by saying, ‘I am the daughter of Stephens.’2 (Her father was A.G. Stephens, founding editor of the Bulletin’s Red Page.) Many writers whom Robertson had known during her father’s days at the Bulletin – Mary Gilmore, Hugh McCrae, Norman Lindsay, Miles Franklin – were also friends and professional acquaintances of Beatrice’s. Meeting as equals, literary-minded women with responsible jobs, must have been refreshing for both Beatrice and Connie – and for Gladys Owen, an artist who worked for the ABC and who usually joined them.

  Beatrice’s other literary friendships were generally with her women authors. The relationship between author and editor can be intense and difficult to parlay into the give-and-take of ordinary friendship, but Beatrice soon became expert at it. Henrietta Drake-Brockman used to make a joking distinction between Beatrice her friend and Mrs Bridges her editor; with the former she enjoyed long gossip sessions by letter, with the latter she discussed her manuscripts. Beatrice distanced herself from aspects of A&R’s administrative practice: contracts and financial problems were handled by Walter Cousins or George Ferguson, and it was not unusual for authors who were arguing over their royalties with A&R to continue friendly correspondence with Beatrice.

  The Perth-based Henrietta Drake-Brockman was one of Beatrice’s closest literary friends. A beaming, large-featured woman with a fondness for wide-brimmed hats, she had a commanding presence; the much smaller Miles Franklin once described herself as ‘under her lee’. Drake-Brockman was the quintessential woman of letters: not only did she write novels and plays, but she edited anthologies and wrote short fiction, biography, radio scripts and children’s books. She reviewed books for the ABC and for West Australian newspapers and magazines, and was a founder of the Fellowship of Australian Writers and a member of every literary committee in that state. Her long letters to Beatrice, written in loopy, stylish handwriting, her thoughts linked by dashes, spilled over with opinions on books and people, discussions of literary topics and gossip.

  She and Beatrice agreed on many things. They strongly disliked any writing they considered sentimental (which included The Harp in the South) and both admired the work of Patrick White, though not unreservedly. Both disliked the way that, even in the 1950s, writers were becoming ‘personalities’, with their lives being given more attention than their work. Literary politics interested them both, though they were irritated by members of literary societies who were not writers but people merely interested in writing. They agreed with Douglas Stewart’s comment that ‘people who write poetry are the salt of the earth. But those who love it … !’3

  Drake-Brockman and Beatrice knew when to be friends settling down for a good gossip and when, as Drake-Brockman put it, to do some ‘straight business talking’. Drake-Brockman had strong reservations about A&R, once telling Miles Franklin that she continued to publish with them only because of her friendship with Beatrice. Perhaps Beatrice knew this; she certainly made concessions to Drake-Brockman, showing her her manuscripts after they had been edited, as well as her proofs. They did not always see eye to eye on editorial style, and Beatrice could be huffy. ‘As you say [punctuation] is largely a matter of persona
l style,’ she wrote, ‘and if you don’t care for our expert advice that’s your affair. (Not meaning to be snaky at all.) I myself like punctuation to be fairly logical and as unobtrusive as possible; you like it also as the vehicle of feeling which, I think, the writing itself should convey.’4

  Drake-Brockman sometimes acted as a literary scout. While researching an historical novel she came across Australian Legendary Tales and More Australian Legendary Tales, a European retelling of Aboriginal legends by K. Langloh Parker, first published in 1896 and 1898. Langloh Parker had died in 1940 and Drake-Brockman suggested that a selection of the stories be published in one volume, edited by herself. Beatrice agreed to a book of about 70 000 words, which Drake-Brockman painstakingly prepared over many months. Published in 1953, Australian Legendary Tales won the Children’s Book of the Year Award the following year.

  Drake-Brockman’s favourite subject was history, particularly that of Western Australia. She sometimes used Beatrice as a sounding board for her ideas on writing history, candidly admitting what she considered to be her own shortcomings. ‘I know I am supposed to have the novelist’s approach, but … I do like facts for their own sake,’ she wrote.5 Once, after criticising E.V. Timms for his cliched characters, improbable characterisation and habit of including extraneous information for no particular reason, she gave a succinct and thoughtful summary of the problems involved in getting the ‘feel’ of an historical period:

  It is so hard for us to remember that God and the Devil, Heaven above and hell beneath, existed … And that men as adult in every way as ourselves, good business men, shrewd observers, clear thinkers, could travel only as fast as a horse or sail could carry them, and were governed by humours, possessed by demons, knew nothing about their anatomy and physiology or the power of steam or electricity, or even the shape of the world … Perhaps it is not possible to write an historical novel at all … It is the everyday atmosphere that presents hurdles. Candles, for instance. Our whole world, the night itself, is different, lit only by candles. One must remember never to see a night scene except by candle or flambeau … to feel the hand on the sword hilt and the eyes looking for witches and robbers, the moment the sun goes down … to FEEL it, not just write about it … and at the same time to take it as a matter of course, of everyday existence.6

  The warm friendship between Drake-Brockman and Beatrice cooled only once, when Beatrice neglected to include any work of Drake-Brockman’s in Short Stories of Australia: The Moderns, an anthology she compiled and A&R published in 1967. Drake-Brockman was hurt: if Beatrice hadn’t had room for a story of hers, she wrote, couldn’t she at least have said so, or mentioned Drake-Brockman in the introduction? Beatrice hated feeling she had failed in tact and she wrote back in a fret of remorse, assuring Drake-Brockman that she greatly admired her work and valued her friendship, but that Drake-Brockman’s work did not belong in the anthology, and that was that. Drake-Brockman accepted the decision and the friendship remained.

  Another of Beatrice’s authors with a touch of grande dame about her was Ethel Anderson. Born in England of Australian parents in 1883, she married a British Army officer who became private secretary to three successive governors of New South Wales, as well as to the governor-general Lord Gowrie. When Ethel Anderson died in 1958 the London Times described her as ‘one of the most beloved of those persons who, by virtue of their position, their breadth of sympathy and their charm of character are vital links between the mother-country and the great southern land in which British virtues are finding new and vigorous embodiment’.7

  Anderson was also a working writer, with three books of short stories to her credit, as well as essays and poetry. A&R brought out one volume of short stories, the posthumous The Little Ghosts (1959), her poetry collection Sunday at Yarralumla (1947) and Adventures in Appleshire (1944), a collection of essays set in England. Beatrice greatly admired the elegance and grace of her writing and often said she wished A&R had published At Parramatta (1956), Anderson’s best-known book. Anderson took her work seriously, though rarely herself. As a straight-faced blurb for Adventures in Appleshire she suggested: ‘Ethel Anderson’s Adventures in Appleshire is a Van Tromp of a story, sweeping with a broom all other craft out of the way. I have never ever EVER laughed so much in my life …’, to be signed by her friend, the poet Hugh McCrae. He was a great admirer of hers, and frequently related Andersonian bons mots to Beatrice.

  Ethel Anderson was a regular visitor to Angus and Robertson. She approved of Beatrice’s editors, particularly Rosemary Dobson, who was the granddaughter of the English poet Austin Dobson. Though everybody in the editorial department was fond of Ethel too, they found her visits on the strenuous side. She was almost completely deaf and refused to wear a hearing aid, so that conversation with her involved bellowing into her old-fashioned ear trumpet, which she usually embellished with a scarf to match whatever dress she was wearing.

  Some of Beatrice’s literary friendships seem rather surprising – that with Kylie Tennant, for instance. How could the comfortably employed Beatrice relate to an outspoken left-wing author of novels about the underprivileged and dispossessed, an author whose world view had been shaped by the Depression, and who once said she was less interested in emotions than in how people made a living ‘because I belong to the generation who couldn’t get jobs’?8 Yet Beatrice often forged friendships with women who were very different from herself, particularly if they were talented writers.

  KylieTennant had a chequered relationship with Angus and Robertson. Her novel Tiburon, which won the Prior Memorial Prize in 1935, was turned down by Walter Cousins on the grounds that it was a first novel and therefore too risky to publish. Tennant then wrote Foveaux (1939) about early Sydney, followed by The Brown Van, which shared the Prior prize with The Pea Pickers in 1941 and was published by A&R under the title The Battlers (Beatrice preferred its original title). The Battlers was also published in the UK and the US, where its novelty was a selling point (the Cincinnati Enquirer called it ‘a convincing story of migrant workers on the other side of the earth’). Tennant fell foul of A&R over Ride on Stranger (1943), which the publishers withdrew from sale because a local Communist Party official had complained about her careless use of his alias; Tennant was particularly disgusted because A&R paid the man more than £200, and she never really forgave them.

  The friendship between Kylie Tennant and Beatrice transcended disputes about defamation and differing attitudes to political issues. Beatrice’s upbringing, social position, and literary and musical interests placed her firmly in the conservative camp: it is impossible to believe she was ever a Labor voter. The Depression apparently did not politicise her – it is tempting to believe she never came closer to the proletariat than studying it in Zola’s Germinal at university – and her interest in Australian politics appears to have been purely professional. For instance, she edited H.V. Evatt’s Rum Rebellion and Australian Labour Leader, and she and ‘the Doc’ became friends, even lunching during the war at Rainaud’s, the restaurant in the basement of the Queen’s Club. Beatrice did not judge people according to their political affiliations; she and Kylie Tennant were poles apart politically, but both had a wry appreciation of human foibles and similar taste in literature. They also shared a stoic attitude to life. Tennant had to endure family traumas and, like Beatrice, she was not a person who paraded her troubles before the world. She called Beatrice ‘a long-distance woman … with a heart that nothing can break’ and Beatrice once described her as ‘a gem of generosity among women’.9

  In 1952 Henrietta Drake-Brockman wrote wistfully that she wished Beatrice didn’t live so far away; she felt rather friendless now that her friend and fellow West Australian writer Katharine Susannah Prichard had become so ‘commo in outlook’.10 Prichard’s fiercely idealistic and total commitment to communism, her tireless work for the Australian Communist Party, was understood by few of her writer friends in Western Australia. She had converted to communism as a result of World War I on the gro
unds that the capitalist system held the seeds of war, and it informed her work from the beginning. A&R had never been her primary publishers, doing only reprints. In 1943 they put Coonardoo (1929), Working Bullocks (1926) and Haxby’s Circus (1930) into their wartime paperback Australian Pocket Library series. Uniquely among Angus and Robertson authors, Prichard preferred her books to appear in cheap editions, even the tacky A&R examples, because she felt they made her work more accessible to the people. But Angus and Robertson was tardy in keeping Prichard’s books before the public. She wrote to George Ferguson in 1954 pointing out that Coonardoo and Working Bullocks were in print in French, German, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Rumanian, Polish and Russian editions, as well as selling in Austria, Switzerland and Sweden: everywhere, it seemed, except her own country.

  Prichard’s principles informed other areas of her life. For many years after World War II she would not have labour-saving devices in her house, refusing to use any luxuries denied to the workers. She was incredulous when told in the 1950s that modern Australian workers had washing machines and vacuum cleaners.11

  Beatrice was a great admirer of Prichard’s work, agreeing with Nettie Palmer’s 1930 comment that ‘we have in Australia a few real writers and Katharine Prichard is one of them’.12 When Coonardoo and Working Bullocks were reprinting as A&R paperbacks, Beatrice, who knew Prichard was often short of money, undertook to try to sell serial and broadcasting rights for them. Prichard was grateful. ‘It’s good to have encounters and find an esprit de corps between us,’ she wrote to Beatrice in June 1955. ‘I like to think of you as one of my friends now, dear Beatrice.’13 She regretted that their friendship needed to have elements of the businesslike: ‘Our brief encounters have always made me feel that I wished you were just a friend and I didn’t have to talk about publishing to you.’14 And: ‘Not mixing my drinks – otherwise business and personal relationships – but love to you,’ she wrote on another occasion.15