It seems impossible that all Clune’s books could have been written by one man, and in fact they weren’t. From the time of his early successes in the 1930s Clune employed P.R. (‘Inky’) Stephensen, first as his editor, then as his ghost writer: Clune supplied research material and anecdotes and Stephensen structured the books and put them together. Neither Clune nor Stephensen ever claimed that the result was literature, and Beatrice and her staff agreed with them. For years the editorial department’s shorthand description of a dreadful travel manuscript was the (apocryphal) first sentence of Clune’s High-ho to London, describing his parting with his wife Thelma at Sydney airport: ‘Well, it’s chocks away, and farewell to Brown Eyes!’
Clune’s research often left something to be desired. He involved Angus and Robertson in litigation, once because he libelled a bank and then because he adopted the name of a living person for a character in one of his books. He could also be careless about names and dates. These things never worried him unduly: he assumed that a footnote on the appropriate page in the next edition would solve the problem. Beatrice was always asking him to fix things, requests he usually ignored. But he was very fond of ‘Beetruss’, often declaring that he was in love with her. She was also fond of him, despite his carelessness, which irritated her considerably; she respected his knowledge and efficiency and was amused by his heavy-footed gallantry. She was also shrewd enough to know that his blokey casualness was partly an act. ‘I think Frank is really a nice person,’ she wrote to Rohan Rivett, ‘at heart kind and generous I believe. I should not be surprised if he were really a sensitive, shy type (don’t laugh) who hides under that caricature of the Australian that has become his role.’3 For a long time Frank Clune looked after Beatrice’s financial affairs, and almost every year she hosted a birthday lunch for him at the office, or organised a drinks party when he had yet another book published.
Another authorial friend of long standing was Norman Lindsay. Though not really part of the Lindsay inner circle, Beatrice occasionally visited him and his wife Rose at Springwood, usually with Douglas Stewart and his wife Margaret. Beatrice was closer to Norman’s elder brother Percy, whom she had known during her marriage and who occasionally came up to Sackville. Her relationship with Norman had its prickles; he could be very prescriptive about what he saw as her role at A&R and she wrote at least one blunt and damning report about a novel of his, which seriously offended him. Because she knew Douglas Stewart admired Lindsay – and also because Lindsay was important to Angus and Robertson, able to transform a book of poetry from a doubtful proposition to a sure seller by adding a drawing or two – Beatrice was usually circumspect. She admired Lindsay’s energy and ability to inspire and vitalise other people, and believed that his talent was in making people realise the possibilities they had within themselves.
Beatrice also had a Lindsay connection through the lyric poet Hugh McCrae, who had known Norman and his brothers from the time they were all young writers and artists in Melbourne. A talented illustrator, McCrae had also been a film actor, poetry editor, writer for radio, journalist and public lecturer. He was, however, best known as a poet, having published his first collection, Satyrs and Sunlight, in 1909, and four other volumes by 1939. By the time Beatrice met him, probably during the war, the kind of lyricism he and Lindsay celebrated in their art and poetry – nymphs, satyrs and mythic wood-women grafted onto the Australian landscape – was waning in scope and influence, though McCrae’s lyric gift was still admired by some younger poets, including Kenneth Slessor and Douglas Stewart.
Even in his early seventies, when Beatrice knew him – he was born in 1876 – Hugh McCrae looked like Hollywood’s idea of an older poet: tall, strikingly handsome with a firm profile, white hair and very blue eyes, rather flamboyant in manner. In an admiring piece published by the Sydney Daily Telegraph in May 1949, Ronald McKie called him ‘the last of the Bohemians’ who, he said, could ‘easily be a character from the Odyssey, or King of the Fairies or a drinking cobber of Villon’ (readers of the Telegraph in those days presumably knew who Villon was). McCrae, he wrote, talked and laughed constantly in ‘volcanic chuckles’, discussed everything from pigtails to poetry and claimed he couldn’t count or keep money.4
In the interview McCrae said he considered himself a living link between Australia’s current literary life and that of the 1860s and 1870s. ‘I’m the Lazarus of our dead literature,’ he added, ‘dug up and restored, then varnished, by R.G. Howarth, George Ferguson and Beatrice Davis.’ And indeed, during the 1940s and 1950s, A&R published and promoted his work. His collections Forests of Pan and Voice of the Forest Poems, edited or arranged and introduced by Guy Howarth, were originally published in 1944 and 1945. Beatrice oversaw their passage through the press and Howarth introduced her to McCrae during this period. But it was over his prose collection Story-book Only (1948) that he and Beatrice became friends.
Even though they saw each other often, they established a lengthy correspondence. Letter writing was an art McCrae enjoyed and practised constantly: he was well known for his elaborate epistles, full of jokes and anecdotes, often exquisitely decorated with pen and ink or pencil drawings in the margin. Beatrice’s letters tended towards the incisive rather than the whimsical, but she was often tempted to write longer letters than usual, if only for the pleasure of receiving his detailed replies. But she never let her guard down: McCrae, she knew, corresponded with many people, and he could be malicious (Douglas Stewart once observed that ‘McCrae would write anything in a letter’5.) He busily spread the rumour that she was madly in love with the mystical poet Peter Hopegood, another member of what he called her ‘seraglio’ of older admirers.
Their relationship settled into a pattern that Beatrice often followed with older men: she played the flirtatious, pretty and practical young woman, McCrae the roguish, adoring and romantic swain. Their letters could be teeth-achingly twee: ‘You’re a darling thing,’ he wrote to her on 24 January 1946, ‘and when you say your brain (sometimes) resembles suet pudding, I imagine a beatific feast. Truly, I could gobble you up, every bit …’ He wrote a great deal of this sort of thing, to which Beatrice replied in an amused and businesslike tone while expressing appreciation for his ‘delicious nonsense’. In 1949 she wrote to Henrietta Drake-Brockman that ‘Hugh has just been in, laughing gaily and telling completely untrue anecdotes with great zest … He is a precious person and I hate to think of a landscape without him flitting on and off it.’6
Hugh McCrae’s nonsense concealed a darker side; his general bonhomie and over-heartiness hid shyness, insecurity and a surprising dread of having to talk to people. Several writers commented on his habit of fleeing to avoid conversation. Ethel Anderson once arranged to meet him at home, but as soon as he saw her he leaped from his rocking chair in the living room and bolted to his bedroom; Anderson said that the sight of the chair, still rocking, was the nearest she came to meeting Hugh McCrae for years. He also suffered from depression, which worsened as he aged. Though he had a loving family of three daughters and eight granddaughters (his marriage had been unsuccessful), he often said he felt very much alone.
Beatrice became aware of McCrae’s other side while editing his play The Ship of Heaven (1951), and he grew increasingly frank about it. ‘I’m lucky to have you and George Ferguson to look after me,’ he wrote to her in July 1950, ‘especially now that I begin to lose my hold on things. This vile melancholia, like a nightmare-octopus, plays with me … One doctor attributes it to high blood pressure, plus old age, plus malnutrition, but I myself from inside knowledge am certain that its origin is emotional.’7 He was sure, he added, that his seventy-fifth birthday would be his last.
He might have been drawing a long bow for the sake of effect – McCrae could be a hypochondriac – but there was real anxiety in his words and Beatrice recognised it. Their relationship gradually shifted. The ‘volcanic chuckles’ of his laughter became more subdued and he ceased to play the part of the gallant, amorous poet, becoming warmer
and more reflective. Beatrice responded with kindness, looked after his literary interests and cheered him up as much as she could.
Early in 1957 she wrote to Guy Howarth, then professor of English at the University of Cape Town, asking him to edit a selection of Hugh McCrae’s poetry with a biographical introduction. Having worked on two previous collections, Howarth was a natural choice, and Beatrice asked whether he could do it soon, while McCrae was still alive: ‘Certainly he is a mere eighty years old,’ she added, ‘but the dear creature behaves as if he thinks he ought to be dead and will achieve this goal as soon as possible …’8 McCrae, she wrote, had become rather pathetic, refusing to see even her, insisting that he couldn’t talk or think, or do anything much. Howarth agreed immediately, and by March Beatrice was able to tell McCrae that a proper collection of his poetry was under way. He replied to his ‘dearest and only Beatrice’ that he was very grateful to be remembered. The thought of the collection cheered him so much that when Tom Inglis Moore offered to compile and edit a selection of his letters, McCrae accepted. This annoyed Beatrice, who wished Guy Howarth were editing the letters as well.
Hugh McCrae died on 17 February 1958, before his collected poems were published. ‘No doubt you have already been told of the sadness of Hugh McCrae’s death,’ wrote Beatrice to Guy Howarth.9 ‘Our world will never be quite the same without him: yet he had so withdrawn from life and so much wanted to die for at least the last three years that his death did not come too soon.’
As often happens after the death of a writer, McCrae’s reputation dwindled, not helped by the fact that A&R did not publish Howarth’s edition of The Best Poems of Hugh McCrae until 1961. Possibly in memory of old friendship as much as from her admiration for McCrae’s talent, Beatrice undertook to write to Australia’s major universities suggesting the book as a set text for literature courses. The response was lukewarm, even discouraging. Almost all heads of English departments said that there was not a great deal of interest in Australian literature (this was, after all, 1961), and if they were inclined to set another book of Australian poetry they would choose Slessor or Brennan; in any case a guinea a copy was too much for impoverished university students to pay.
The Letters of Hugh McCrae also had a bumpy publishing history. Despite McCrae’s agreement, Beatrice had never wanted Tom Inglis Moore as editor, and she sent her own letters from Hugh McCrae to Guy Howarth, hoping to persuade him to take on the job. Douglas Stewart suggested Robert D. FitzGerald. Inglis Moore was understandably annoyed but Beatrice was adamant: her first preference was Guy Howarth, her second FitzGerald.
Howarth pulled out and FitzGerald edited the letters. While he was sorting and compiling McCrae’s correspondence – Beatrice complained to Howarth that ‘Fitz’ had omitted some of the funniest letters because he had no sense of humour – he joked to Beatrice that her letters (which Howarth had sent back from South Africa) began as love letters and ended as diatribes against ‘Anguish and Robbery’. Beatrice thought it might be diplomatic not to publish those that were less than flattering about Angus and Robertson on the grounds that they might offend Lady Cowper, Hugh McCrae’s daughter and wife of A&R’s then chairman Sir Norman Cowper, and so they were omitted. Angus and Robertson published The Letters of Hugh McCrae in 1970. By then the world had moved on, and the book did not sell.
In July 1960 Guy Howarth wrote to Beatrice about her relationship with Hugh McCrae:
What emerges most clearly from the letters is Hughie’s passage from an arch or playful affection to genuine love, as well as gratefulness for the personal kindness you showered on him. You knew him for longer – I mean towards the end of his life – than any others of us, and the reward of the relationship, in Hughie’s words, is a really precious thing to have … You were his nearest friend to the close.10
Though Beatrice usually flirted, not always subtly, with any man who crossed her path – one of her women authors once acidly said that flirtation was a reflex with her – she treated her male authors in slightly different ways, depending on their ages. The older ones she ‘bullied and cherished’ (as she once told Miles Franklin she did to Dick Jeune), thoughtfully organising their manuscripts, looking after them without fuss. Men her own age were comrades or sometimes mildly exasperating younger brothers.
She did not see a great deal of her own brothers during the 1950s. John was still farming at Narrabri and, though his children came down to Folly Point for holidays, he and his wife rarely left the farm. This suited both John’s wife and Beatrice very well, given their opinion of each other. Del had been in the navy and left to run a prosperous stock-feed business in Lismore, northern New South Wales, where he lived with his wife and four children. The brothers had different attitudes to their sister and her circle: John was uncomfortable with Beatrice’s literary friends, conscious of the fact that he had left school early and gone out to work on the land, but he was very proud of his sister and her accomplishments.11 Del was extroverted, witty and amusing, a good person at a party. He had become an accomplished jazz pianist, a talent Beatrice rather deplored. ‘Must you play that awful music, darling?’ she would ask plaintively. But Beatrice’s guests occasionally felt that Del’s music enlivened the atmosphere when literary discussion became too inward-looking or intense. Del teased Beatrice, who would smile indulgently: he was always her little brother.
In July 1956 Beatrice learned that Del had been in a horrific, freakish car accident at Tweed Heads, not far from the border of New South Wales and Queensland. He was the passenger in a car that, travelling too fast, had hit the side railing of a wooden bridge. The railing sheered off and a huge splinter went into the side of his head, taking off his ear and going right through his brain. Del was rushed to hospital in Murwillumbah, then to Brisbane. The splinter had seriously infected his brain and he had to undergo eight major operations.
Fortunately the Brisbane hospital had an international brain surgeon on the staff, whom Beatrice happened to know from her days at the Medical Journal of Australia. She called him and he told her that the splinter had caused an abscess and that Del was not expected to live – news the hospital had kept from Del’s wife Joan. Beatrice ensured that Joan was told, and kept in touch with the hospital. Del was in Brisbane Hospital for twelve months, eight on the critical list. Miraculously, he survived.
When he came out of hospital his memory was seriously impaired. He gradually regained some of his skills, learned to read and write again and to play jazz piano. He and his family left Lismore to live in the Sydney suburb of Mosman, and then north of the city at Soldiers Point, near Port Stephens. Del was never quite the same as before the accident, and after the agonising ordeal of his near-death and recovery Beatrice was even more protective towards her little brother.
At work Beatrice could be bossy to men of her own age. While she appeared deferential to George Ferguson, she was often less respectful to him outside the office, occasionally ticking him off for reading less Australian literature than she felt he should have done. Her other male publishing contemporary, Colin Roderick, she found exasperating, particularly his habit of interrupting her at meetings. ‘He would say, “Beatrice, let me finish!”’ she told Anthony Barker. ‘It used to make me furious.’ But at some time she must have given him what he construed as encouragement because he asked her to marry him.12 She turned him down, and when he did marry later he told her, ‘Well, Beatrice, you had your chance.’
The poet and novelist Kenneth Mackenzie, four years her junior, Beatrice treated as an honorary younger brother. By the time she met him, during World War II, he was well known as the author of The Young Desire It (1937), a semi-autobiographical and, some thought, scandalous novel about the sexual and social awakening of a fifteen-year-old boy at boarding school. He had also published two collections of poetry, Our Earth (1937) and The Moonlit Doorway (1944), and a few years later he published Dead Men Rising (1951), a novel about the 1944 breakout of Japanese and Italian POWs at Cowra, western New South Wales.
If Hugh McCrae looked like the boulevardier poet, the last of the bohemians, Kenneth Mackenzie represented the sensitive thoughtful model. Slight and handsome with long, thin hands, clear blue eyes and fair hair, he was a curious mixture of sensuality and anxiety. Although his eager interest in living made him fun to be with, according to his friend Douglas Stewart his nervous tension meant that he was almost unable to handle the rough and tumble of ordinary existence. ‘Wild comedy and wild adventures tended to break out wherever he was,’ Stewart once wrote – adventures that could be amorous entanglements but that always involved large quantities of alcohol.13
Beatrice came to know Mackenzie through Douglas Stewart, who edited his poetry for A&R (he published his fiction in the UK) and who considered Mackenzie to be a poet of fine talent and promise. When she met him, he was living alone on a small property at Kurrajong at the foot of the Blue Mountains while his estranged wife Kate was in Sydney supporting their two children as a teacher. And while Beatrice probably had a more than platonic relationship with him, they were essentially friends. Mackenzie tended to confide in Beatrice as to a sympathetic elder sister.
He also wrote poetry to her. Once, in gratitude because she had found his fountain pen for him – ‘now I have him again, with his extra fine golden nib sniffing up the ink and nosing his way along the paper’ – he wrote:
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