A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  Another author who shared Prichard’s and Tennant’s concern for social justice was Dymphna Cusack, whom Beatrice probably met while working on Pioneers on Parade (1939), the satirical novel Cusack wrote with Miles Franklin. Cusack, who suffered from wretched health for most of her life, had caused something of a stir with her first novel Jungfrau (1936), which was published by the Bulletin and dealt with women’s sexual being and needs. After Pioneers, she submitted several novels to A&R without success, though Beatrice admired her talent. ‘I feel that writing as easily and naturally as you do, you are apt not to take enough care about the details of writing – the art of,’ Beatrice told her gently while sending back Pillar of Fire.16 ‘But you have such warmth and spontaneity and feeling for the dramatic that your work is tremendously alive.’

  During the war, Dymphna Cusack and the journalist and critic Florence James had moved to Hazelbrook in the Blue Mountains (with Dymphna’s niece, Florence’s two children, three bantams presented by Miles Franklin, two cats and a goat), where they jointly wrote Four Winds and a Family (1947), an illustrated children’s book about their life in the mountains. They were already researching a more ambitious project: a ‘big’ novel set in Sydney during 1944, following the fortunes of a group of women involved in various ways with a beauty salon in the Hotel South-Pacific, a thinly disguised Australia Hotel.

  Until then women in war novels had generally been wives, mothers, girlfriends or prostitutes who waited in the shadows while the men got on with the fighting. Nobody, in Australia at least, had yet written about women at home in a city at war; women with jobs, boyfriends, problems to solve and ambitions of their own. The novel took Cusack and James two years to write. Both plotted the story, Cusack dictated it into a tape recorder, James transcribed and edited. They kept Beatrice up to date and Beatrice and Walter Cousins responded with eager encouragement.

  In 1947 the manuscript of Come in Spinner won the Sydney Daily Telegraph competition for the best novel of the year, with a prize of £1000 and the promise of publication in Sydney and London. The authors were jubilant until the Telegraph asked them to delete large chunks of their manuscript, excising material about the liquor trade and the hotel industry. Cusack and James reduced their work by about half, to 120 000 words, but the Telegraph insisted on further cuts, which the authors refused to make. After a great deal of unpleasant toing and froing, the Telegraph handed over the prize money and then offered publication not as a book but as an edited supplement to the Sunday Telegraph. Cusack and James said no and the London office pulled out of the deal. Three years after the competition, without ever publicly announcing that Come in Spinner had won, the Telegraph gave up the novel, which was then left without a publisher.

  A sympathetic Beatrice had been following this tortuous saga and she liked the novel very much. ‘It is a splendid piece of work, thoroughly convincing and alive,’ she wrote to Dymphna Cusack. ‘What an amazing eye you have for women’s appearances and clothes and how skilfully the bawdy touches just stop at the right spot!’17 With its vivid detail and feeling for Sydney at war – clothes, slang, interior decoration, songs, uniforms, gambling, horse racing – Come in Spinner was as much a slice of social history as it was a novel. Cusack and James no doubt expected Angus and Robertson to move swiftly and make an offer for it. Yet, inexplicably, Beatrice remained silent. Perhaps she was waiting for the novel to be offered to A&R. Finally, and probably because there had already been some publicity about the novel in London, Cusack and James accepted an offer from a British publisher.

  Heinemann in the UK and William Morrow in the USA snapped up Come in Spinner almost immediately. In January 1951 Heinemann printed a first edition of 24 000 copies – about six times the number A&R would have done – and reprinted four times in its first year. The novel sold more than 100 000 copies in its original hardback edition, was translated into eight languages and went into various paperback editions. Under the terms of the (British) Traditional Market Agreement, Cusack and James got a ‘colonial’ or lesser royalty on copies of the UK edition sold outside Britain, including those sold in Australia. Copies sold in Sydney – a city to which the novel owed its very existence – netted its authors relatively little.

  Come in Spinner was eventually published by Angus and Robertson; in 1965 A&R bought the paperback rights for their Pacific Books imprint. Beatrice asked for a further 40 000 words to be taken out because of excessive length; the authors refused, pointing out that Heinemann had seen no need for cuts, and Beatrice capitulated. The novel as originally written – all 250 000 words of it, including material about the hotel industry, the liquor trade and horse racing – was not published until 1988, under the supervision of Florence James (Dymphna Cusack had died in 1981). Ironically, the publisher was Richard Walsh of Angus and Robertson.

  At the same time as Come in Spinner, Dymphna Cusack was working on another kind of book entirely: she was editing the autobiography of a barmaid she had met in Sydney. She was also acting as the book’s agent and she sent an early draft to Beatrice early in 1949. While Beatrice found the material fascinating, she thought the book needed filling out and pulling together, and said A&R would not be interested in publishing it until further work had been done. Dymphna Cusack continued working on it and the book became Caddie, a Sydney Barmaid: An Autobiography Written by Herself, with an introduction by Cusack. She did not offer it to A&R again but to Constable in London, who published it in 1953.18

  It is nothing short of mystifying why Beatrice, as a discerning reader and critic, did not move heaven and earth to publish Come in Spinner and Caddie. She appears to have felt that it was not A&R’s place to solicit manuscripts. ‘We could, of course, never approach you because this is just not done,’ she told Cusack.19 Beatrice’s preference for literary fiction once more blinded her to market realities: when Cusack offered A&R Say No to Death in 1949, Beatrice turned it down on the grounds that it was too slight and commercial. Heinemann did a first print run of 25 000 in 1951 and sold the lot. Beatrice also turned down Cusack’s Pacific Paradise, a play about nuclear weapons – written just before Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), which became an international hit – on the grounds that plays didn’t sell and that A&R were unwilling to take a risk because Cusack was not one of their authors! The play was published and performed in many countries, including China. ‘My national pride nags me that I am not published by an Australian publisher,’ wrote Cusack ruefully to Beatrice on 23 December 1956.

  Dymphna Cusack must have found Beatrice’s commercial obtuseness thoroughly frustrating, but the two women maintained a cordial friendship for many years, mostly by letter. Cusack and her husband Norman Freehill lived abroad from 1949 until 1972, writing and travelling, with occasional visits to Australia. In her flowing, dashing writing – so different from Beatrice’s neat, minute hand – Dymphna kept Beatrice up to date with her travels and made sure that A&R were well aware of her successes with other publishers.

  Early in 1950 she told Beatrice that she had spent the previous Christmas with Christina Stead and her husband William Blake.20 Beatrice was envious. ‘I would love to know Christina,’ she wrote, ‘since her work has always fascinated me with its extremely imaginative verve and insight.’ Stead’s ‘wild genius’, she said, reminded her of Eve Langley. She confessed to Cusack that A&R had already lost one chance of publishing Stead. In November 1949 Beatrice had heard that Stead, looking for an Australian publisher, had sent a manuscript to A&R. Beatrice had been away at the time, and in her absence the manuscript had been rejected by Colin Roderick. He had sent Stead a rather brusque letter which she considered impudent and which understandably annoyed her.21 As soon as she found out what had happened, Beatrice hastily sent a letter to the New York address Christina Stead gave in Who’s Who, apologising and asking to see the manuscript again. The letter was returned unopened.

  Beatrice now asked Cusack whether she would be kind enough to approach Stead on A&R’s behalf, explaining that because of Beatrice
’s absence and the problems associated with Walter Cousins’s illness and death, the manuscript had not been properly read, and Angus and Robertson would be delighted if she would reconsider. Cusack did as she was asked and in March wrote to Beatrice enclosing Stead’s address. She added that she was sure Stead would be interested in being published by A&R, but that she was justifiably so angry over the treatment she had received that the first move would have to come from Beatrice.

  It was obviously up to Beatrice to try and mend fences. Yet, surprisingly, she delayed writing to Stead. In September – six months later – she told Dymphna Cusack that she felt ‘absurdly diffident’ about doing so. ‘I scarcely know what to say, but I suppose people don’t mind even club-footed letters from their admirers. And I should love to be the means of bringing Christina Stead to A&R’s. I will write.’22 It wasn’t like Beatrice to behave in this way: perhaps her admiration for Stead’s talent had paralysed her, or perhaps she feared another rejection. But then again, Beatrice had already shown her reluctance to solicit a manuscript from any author, however desirable. If she did write to Christina Stead at this time, nothing came of it. Stead was not published by Angus and Robertson until 1965, when a hardback edition of Seven Poor Men of Sydney was published.

  By the mid-1950s Dymphna Cusack’s novels and plays had appeared in twenty-six countries. The New Zealand Herald described her as ‘a trailblazer on the Australian literary scene through her emergence as a best-selling writer around the world’. In 1957 she offered Beatrice the Australian rights to Chinese Women Speak, her study of women in ‘the new’ Communist China based on interviews she had conducted with women from many strata of Chinese society. This time Beatrice agreed, after an enthusiastic reader’s report, but she said that 30 000 words would have to be cut. (Beatrice’s major criticism of most manuscripts was their length, though she almost never said anything was too short.) Done, said Dymphna Cusack, and the manuscript was accepted in January 1958.

  The editing seems to have progressed smoothly, though there was some confusion about spellings. China was in the process of abandoning the old Wade-Giles system of transcribing Chinese characters and Cusack was struggling with the new phonetic system. Chinese Women Speak was published in Sydney and London early in 1958 (it was a British Book Society recommendation for May 1959), and appeared in several European countries and in the US. However, the book was remaindered in Australia after only two years. Either it was before its time or – just as likely – A&R had not publicised it sufficiently.

  In October 1959 Dymphna Cusack offered A&R her novel Picnic Races, set in rural Australia during the 1954–55 wool boom and described by its author as ‘Come in Spinner set in the country’, a line that sounds like a publicist’s dream. But A&R’s readers did not like it. As Beatrice wrote to the author c/– the Writer’s Association in Prague, ‘We could have accepted in order to have your name on our list, but how could we, in fairness, do an edition of a mere 3500 to 4000 copies, which is all our sales people think they could sel1?’23 She added that almost everybody felt the flavour of the novel was ‘somehow dated’ and the structure was too amorphous. Dymphna Cusack took exception to this rather tactlessly worded judgement, but did not argue. She sent the novel to Heinemann, who accepted it. Once again, Dymphna Cusack had found a good deal with a publisher other than Angus and Robertson, and she continued to publish her work overseas.

  At the end of 1956 Beatrice met a young writer to whom she became not simply an editor, but a friend and mentor. Thea Astley was a quiet, dark-haired Queenslander in her early twenties when she approached A&R with the manuscript of her first novel, Girl With a Monkey. She was fifteen years younger than Beatrice but they found they had much in common: both had studied English and French at university, both played the piano and tried to maintain this skill. Astley, however, had become a teacher (a fate Beatrice was always thankful she escaped).

  When Beatrice read Astley’s first novel she discovered a mind that chimed with her own. Set in Queensland – as were most of Astley’s novels – Girl With a Monkey shows glimmerings of the sardonic and unsentimental observation of human beings, the gift for describing landscape, the wit and saturnine humour that became such strong features of Astley’s novels and short stories. But Beatrice was particularly thrilled to discover a young writer who, like Hal Porter, was beginning to cast off the old realism, the stock-in-trade of the Australian novel, making allusiveness, rhythm and richness of language at least as important as plot and character. It may not be too much to say that, had Beatrice become a novelist, she would have liked to have Thea Astley’s voice.

  Beatrice was not alone in recognising Astley’s individuality. When Girl With a Monkey was published in 1958, she gave a copy to the young American editor Frank Thompson, who had come to Australia with his wife and five-year-old daughter to try his luck in publishing and who worked at A&R for a time (eventually heading north to Brisbane, where under his leadership the University of Queensland Press became a significant literary publisher). He later wrote that Girl With a Monkey ‘blew my mind’, as did Hal Porter’s A Handful of Pennies, which A&R published in the same year. Other Australian writers whose work Thompson had read were:

  okay and even quite amusing but I had felt (perhaps too smugly) that there were similar American writers who were much better. These two new writers, however, were as exciting as I had read anywhere. These Australians were inferior to no one. They could really write. I read both books twice and even today I can remember the thrill of discovery.24

  Astley and her husband Jack Gregson lived in Epping, a northern Sydney suburb, so she and Beatrice did the detailed editing face to face.25 Beatrice never interfered – Astley’s devotion to correct grammar and usage was often as fierce as Beatrice’s own – but occasionally she had to prune. If Astley presented Beatrice with too many overripe adjectives, the editor would draw a line down the page with a dry ‘I don’t think so, darling.’26 Disconcerted though she sometimes was, Astley always considered Beatrice an exemplary editor. She credited Beatrice with teaching her how to develop her own natural strengths as a writer – irony, precise use of descriptive language, spareness and accuracy of observation. A series of novels – A Descant for Gossips (1960), The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), The Slow Natives (1965), A Boat Load of Home Folk (1968) and The Acolyte (1972) – was published by Angus and Robertson and edited by Beatrice. A&R’s general editor promoted Astley’s career in other ways: as a forceful member of the Miles Franklin Award committee, she influenced the vote in favour of Astley’s work more than once.

  Astley saw a lot of Beatrice over the years. The women appreciated each other’s sometimes sardonic approach to life, and Beatrice enjoyed Astley’s slow, droll way of speaking, which gave an extra edge to her wit. They exchanged news, opinions, literary gossip, and Astley occasionally visited Folly Point.

  When Beatrice retired from A&R in 1973 Thea Astley wrote:

  From my first meeting with her in 1956 until the present day, Beatrice has been a friend, and better than that – a helpful friend who has the capacity to advise without hurt, to correct without making the author feel ashamed or inadequate. This is a truly rare gift. Beatrice had a way of turning corrections into a joke (‘I think we’ll have a teeny piece of comma here!’) that entirely negated any feelings of inadequacy on the writer’s part. Beatrice Davis has taught me more about writing than anyone else. But she has, indirectly, and simply by being Beatrice, taught me as much about living. She is a truly great woman.27

  The League of Gentlemen

  ‘When I think of Beatrice in the 1950s,’ said the poet and journalist Elizabeth Riddell, ‘I always visualise her on the arm of a well-preserved older gentleman.’ Certainly by the time she was in her forties Beatrice had assembled an impressive coterie of male admirers, some of whom were old enough to be her father. When women friends teased her about this, she shrugged and said she found their attentions a bit of a bore, but judging by the flirtatious deference she showed them
and the other ways in which she encouraged them, it is impossible to believe she was completely sincere.

  Many were Angus and Robertson authors, some from the time of George Robertson. Ion Idriess called her Beatrice Mia and My Favourite Editor-in-Chief; to her he was Dear Favourite Author, and she sent him small notes for his birthday, kept his publishing record up to date for his admirers, made sure he was given copies of new books on anthropology or history. Former prime minister Billy Hughes, whose two volumes of memoirs Beatrice had edited just after the war, was besotted with her. A gnome of a man – ‘a bag of bones in gents’ natty suiting’ Donald Horne called him – Hughes wore a hearing aid that shrieked and crackled, heralding his appearance. ‘Where is she?’ he would cry as he lurched up the stairs to the editorial attic. ‘Where’s the woman I’d leave home for?’ Beatrice’s staff had been instructed to knock at her door if she had been in her office with a male author for more than a few minutes, and one day they realised that Billy Hughes had been closeted with Beatrice for some time and that some very strange noises were coming from inside. An editor knocked and opened the door, to discover Hughes serenading Beatrice with a plaintive ballad from his Welsh homeland.2

  An admirer of even longer standing was Frank Clune. A cheerful, round-headed and pugnacious man who wore his silvery hair in a spiky crew cut, Clune was an astute businessman and a very hard worker. One of A&R’s most successful writers, he produced about sixty books in thirty-five years, on popular Australian history, travel, autobiography, exploration, biography. All were racy and colloquial, and introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to legendary figures and stories of Australia’s past. Not only did Clune produce an impressive number of books, he also wrote articles, radio talks and screenplays. Clune did a great deal to popularise Australian history – and writing was not his primary job, for he also ran his own Sydney accountancy business. His letterheads (‘Clune Accounting Systems Limited, Accountants and Auditors, Managing Director: Frank Clune’) featured the words ‘Author of ’ with an ever-lengthening list of books. Though he said he treated his work as merchandise, produced at an economical figure to provide a comfortable profit margin, he was always complaining – as have Australian popular writers since – that the literati failed to respect his work.