A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  As time passed, Beatrice came to regard Porter as a kind of exasperating younger brother, someone to be indulged as well as worried about. ‘I feel you may fall among Monsters if you are not careful,’ she wrote as he was about to embark on a European trip in 1960. ‘I see you rather as a flower girl in Covent Garden than a fastidious passenger driven to grog by the general inanity of shipboard life. Dear old Aunty Beatrice!’15 She continued to believe in his talent. Once she wrote to him: ‘I can’t bear people calling your writing “affected” when I know it is not; I always get furious when they say, “Brilliant, but …”’16

  Porter gave Angus and Robertson his collection of short stories A Bachelor’s Children which, after minimal editing from Beatrice, was intended for publication in 1960. He went to Europe that year, partly to research a novel, partly to make contacts and to further his career. He left Beatrice with the dedication he intended to add to A Bachelor’s Children: ‘To Beatrice Davis not merely with my personal admiration and deep affection, but also on behalf of those numerous writers – dewy-eyed tyro or hard-bitten professional – to whom she has been a wise guide, a gifted and patient adviser, and a warm-hearted friend.’ Before too long, Beatrice would read those words with a fine sense of irony.

  Beating the Bibliopolic Babbitts: Xavier Herbert

  When Beatrice joined Angus and Robertson in 1937, one of the up-and-corning writers was a pharmacist-turned-novelist in his late thirties named Francis Xavier Herbert. His novel Capricornia, dealing partly with race relations in northern Australia, was creating quite a stir in publishing circles. First published by P.R. Stephensen’s Publicist Publishing Co. and winner of a prize in the Sydney sesquicentennial novel competition, it then appeared with A&R in 1938. An immediate success, it was reprinted many times in Australia, published in the UK, where H.G. Wells described it as ‘vigorous and distinctive’, in the USA and in a clutch of European countries.

  Beatrice met Xavier Herbert for the first time early in 1939. He was a bantam rooster of a man with a grating voice, blazing blue eyes and ferociously passionate opinions. Soon after meeting her he announced to Beatrice that he intended to enrich Australian literature, while at the same time declaring that he hated semicolons so much that he had sawed the key off his typewriter. In short, Herbert was a ‘character’ – not just the ‘odd and interesting person’ of dictionary definition, but with the added Australian connotation: here was someone who should probably be treated with caution.

  Once he had become a successful A&R author, Herbert began to send Walter Cousins long and detailed reports about the progress of his next novel. In January 1940 he wrote:

  I can’t hurry, I dare not. My present job is not so much to write a novel as to eclipse myself. The fact that I am regarded as an established writer does not mean a thing to me … Any fool can fluke a masterpiece and go on turning out imitations of it. I’m no such fool. The great weakness of Australian authors is their lack of sustained power. Who of us has ever turned out more than one masterpiece? None! I am going to do it, or get out!1

  This was not empty boasting. In bombarding poor Walter Cousins with incessant information about his writing techniques, intended wordage, analysis of his own work and occasionally scornful comments about other writers, Herbert was utterly sincere. His commitment to being a writer was wholehearted – he told Cousins he would give up all his bad habits in order to write his book, ‘the job of my life’. He stopped smoking and for a while even grew a beard to make himself look more literary.

  Cousins, who knew that, apart from his wife Sadie, Herbert had few people with whom he could discuss his work, responded to his remorseless enthusiasm with great kindness. For a while he regularly sent Herbert, who lived in north Queensland, copies of the Sydney Morning Herald carefully folded in brown paper, tied with string and labelled. He provided Herbert with white quarto typing paper and once, when the author said the rubber bag holding the ink for his fountain pen had perished, he sent several different types to choose from. But after a while even Cousins wilted under Herbert’s barrage. ‘You have gone to a great deal of trouble in writing me, which I do appreciate,’ Cousins wrote in May 1948, ‘but think it quite unnecessary as I always know you are well on the job. However, if you insist on doing these things, I can’t stop you.’2

  But for all Herbert’s assurances that he was at the height of his powers, and that no force on earth would stop him producing this great work, etc., A&R had seen nothing. They had been told his novel was called Soldiers’ Women, but little more than that. ‘I sometimes seriously doubt whether any of us will ever see it,’ wrote George Ferguson early in 1951 to Archibald Ogden, Herbert’s US publisher. ‘I am sure that it has already had too much self-criticism and what it needs now is the critical eye of an experienced editor.’3

  At this point Beatrice took over the job of extracting Herbert’s novel from him. He was delighted to have a new correspondent, an attractive woman at that, and immediately began sending her screeds of analysis, self-criticism and general comments about the art of writing – but no actual manuscript. Beatrice thanked him politely for giving her so much information about his methods of working, and regretted that she could not comment in detail because she had not yet seen a word of his novel. ‘Your letter of New Year’s Day has indeed convinced me that we must be patient whether we like it or not,’ she wrote. ‘But how long, O Lord.’4

  With her ready appreciation of writers’ quirks and respect for Herbert’s dedication, Beatrice warmed to him from the beginning. His intensity about his work went some way beyond normal writerly ego-tism, and her reactions display an ironic amusement almost worthy of Jane Austen. When Herbert announced proudly that he had celebrated completing a chapter by kicking his landlord, and wrote a little later that he was having trouble finding a suitable place to live, she told him, ‘I hope you will be able to restrain yourself from resorting to tactics previously used for the landlord.’5 Her response to his declaration that he had burned some work without her seeing it was, ‘I wish I had been there to advise you though I don’t expect you’d have taken any notice.’

  When Herbert finally sent A&R a long chapter later in 1951, Beatrice was delighted enough to send him a telegram of congratulation. As far as she could tell, the novel dealt with the lives of a group of women in the city during World War II, and she said she was impressed by some of the female characters. She warned him against turning those he disliked into caricatures – a persistent fault in Herbert’s writing. ‘Bring on the action and the males!’ she invited him. ‘Don’t overdo the hit and run style if you can help it; it is vigorous and vivid, but could become monotonous and tiring to read if you never varied it.’6

  She warmly supported his application for a Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowship, assuring the CLF that his novel had reached its final stages, needing only another year’s concentrated work to finish it. She knew, of course, that she was drawing a long bow, and tried to hurry Herbert up: ‘Some mean minded sceptics even doubt whether you will finish it at all,’ she told him. At the same time she astutely described his letter of application to the CLF as ‘magnificently temperamental – the man of genius rather than of letters’. He was awarded a fellowship of £200 for a year.

  Herbert’s lack of curiosity about his fellow human beings was striking. Seldom, if ever, did he ask Beatrice anything about her life or work, or comment on anything she told him that did not deal with his own writing. Beatrice admitted that she was occasionally intimidated by the energy he expended in pursuing his goals. When Herbert announced that, instead of spending his whole time writing, he was chopping wood for a living around Redlynch, near Cairns, she was dismayed: was money so tight? she asked. No, said Herbert, but he liked the balance of manual work and writing.

  Just before she left for her first trip overseas in March 1952, Beatrice received part of the third chapter, with Herbert’s usual demand for an instant response. Beatrice told him it was difficult to have an overall reaction to a manuscript t
hat arrived in batches: ‘I can only … ask whether to give more dialogue would be against your religion,’ she told him. ‘You see these people and scenes so pictorially that they sometimes come across like a silent film.’7 And with her not around to nag him, she wondered, would he continue to work?

  She need not have worried. In July Herbert sent another 70 000 words, which completed the third chapter. ‘Mr Herbert says the novel will have thirty-four chapters,’ a rather pale-sounding Nan McDonald told George Ferguson. ‘They could hardly be on the same scale …’8 Herbert’s response was not reassuring. ‘I am working as never in my life,’ he announced on 29 October in a letter that reached Beatrice on her return to Australia. ‘The stuff pours from me …’ If so, it did not get as far as A&R’s office. For the next eighteen months author and editor continued their routine of ‘I am working very hard’ versus ‘Yes, but where is it?’

  At long last, late in 1955, Xavier Herbert delivered his manuscript. After four years of friendly encouragement and largely humorous nagging, Beatrice must have been relieved to have it all together in one piece. Yet she must also have eyed it with misgiving: it amounted to about a thousand pages and 340 000 words. Then there was the title, not Soldiers’ Women but the portentous Of Mars, the Moon and Destiny.

  When Beatrice started to read it, her anxiety hardened into doubt. It wasn’t just that the book was far too long to publish profitably: she could see how cutting might be done, though Herbert would almost certainly dislike it. The problem was really the core of the book – Herbert’s subject and its treatment. The passionate indignation of his writing, so effective when directed at social and civil wrongs such as the treatment of Indigenous Australians, had quite a different flavour when he was dealing with the lives and loves of Sydney women in wartime.

  Beatrice acknowledged receipt of the manuscript in a congratulatory telegram and wrote a long letter to Herbert in December 1955, about a month after receiving his manuscript. It was not an easy letter to write: she had to offer praise while at the same time attempting to give a realistic picture of the inherent problems. ‘It is a difficult book, Xavier, because it deals almost entirely with sex, yet it is sincere, idealistic and devoid of sensuality,’ she wrote.9 She was also worried about the possibility of prosecution for obscenity. A&R, she said, would do everything possible to make the book successful, but it had to be cut drastically. ‘I think you and I shall sort it out without pain on either side,’ she assured him.

  She should have known better. For an isolated writer like Herbert, who had been worrying at this novel for years and whose exhilaration in putting words on paper had convinced him that the result was a masterpiece, Beatrice’s response must have been like a shower of icy water. He was so hurt and depressed that he did not reply immediately, choosing instead to wait for the detailed response Beatrice had promised him.

  But she did not reply for three months, procrastinating over a letter she knew would be even more difficult to write than the first. At the same time she had to tell the truth as she saw it, even though her editorial judgement would mean hurting a friend. Honesty won, and she finally wrote:

  The spate, the almost frenetic exuberance, the indifference to audience, made me quail at the practical difficulties of publication. Brilliant observation, vivid and vital writing, a passionate hatred of human degradation, an expressed ideal: but too much of everything, the lesson repeated ad nauseam, overwriting and caricature. Frankly, I was appalled by the squalor of your story … the sordid drunken scenes, the revolting fornication, made so, of course, by the terrible power of your disgust … 10

  She was also unusually frank about the reason for her delay in replying.

  Our letters over the years have given me a special attitude to you and your work, an attitude that has made it impossible for me to perform this immediate task with the deliberate judgment and ease I’ve had to acquire in my normal work. I have enough imagination to be acutely conscious that every manuscript represents a human being, and this makes the job more difficult even when I do not know the authors. With you, it’s gone beyond this. I think the emotion, the sense of life and destiny, you have conveyed to me in the writing of your opus has intimidated and embarrassed me – though I am not normally without courage. All I can say now is that I am deeply ashamed at having forsaken you for so long. Certainly I could not let you have Angus and Robertson’s verdict (I am not the firm, & could not make a final decision on this myself) until George Ferguson, our publishing director, and other senior people had read the novel too, and until it had been generally discussed, as it has now. But I could have written to you as myself, and shall not forgive myself for not doing so before, even if you can and do.

  She wrote him another letter three days later. This time she was Miss Davis, Angus and Robertson’s general editor, briskly enumerating the book’s problems. She said the manuscript was far too long and could be cut from 340 000 to 120 000 words without difficulty; the brutality of the sexual episodes would shock the average reader; the book could attract prosecution for obscenity. She concluded: ‘The power and verve and strength of characterisation are all here, but we feel you have become unaware of audience through absorption in the details of your theme.’

  Xavier Herbert reacted as if his muse had suddenly turned on him and bashed him with her lyre. ‘How am I to approach you now I find there are two of you, Beatrice my Patroness, who taught me to fear the criticism of none, and Miss Davis the Editress, who presents me with four close-typed pages of tabulated contempt?’11 He chose to assume that the real Beatrice was the woman who had given him support for so long and that the critical Beatrice was some kind of aberrant being. The real Beatrice had ‘plighted her troth’ to him over lunch at the Australia Hotel some time before, he said. (Perhaps this was the lunch when, as Beatrice later recalled, he fixed her with an eye glittering like the Ancient Mariner’s and talked so long and so intensely about his work that the kitchen had closed before they could order any food.12) He hadn’t really expected A&R to publish his book, he said; they were nothing but timid traders and money-changers. Above all, he made it very clear that he was not prepared to change a word he had written. ‘How my Beatrice would despise me if she … heard me agree to deletion of one line of what we have created between us to meet some bibliopolic Babbitt’s demands!’ he wrote.

  After another letter demanding his manuscript back and assuring Beatrice – unnecessarily, one would have thought – that he was ‘not commercial in the least’, Herbert softened his view slightly. ‘I don’t think my work is without fault … But with all its faults it is a great piece of work and I think you believe so, Beatrice, though you have been chary of telling me. Can you not tell me now? Can you not come further with me on this great adventure? I would be sad to lose you.’13

  Herbert’s insistence that the real Beatrice was the woman who had showered him with praise and encouragement and that the businesslike adviser was a poisonous changeling left Beatrice with a problem that would give any editor pause. She knew Herbert well enough to understand the insecurity behind his hectoring grandiosity. How could she reaffirm her faith in him as a writer – faith he needed and depended upon – while at the same time making him realise that the book he had just spent years writing was almost unpublishable? She tried to steer her way around the problem by emphasising what she saw as her own role, while at the same time playing down her commercial responsibilities. The letter in which she does this is probably the frankest statement Beatrice ever made about the difficulties of carrying out her job while being so closely involved with a manuscript and its author.

  Now Miss D and her associates are banished and I speak as Beatrice, the woman who has that spiritual affinity with the artist, the man of creative purpose; the woman who wants to nurture and cherish selflessly in the truest sense of mothering; the woman I should like to be and perhaps am. Is it enough for me to say that I believe in your sincerity and your talent and your idea, and that if you are satisfied and fulfill
ed by the work you have achieved, then I am too? … I think my official self must have been unconsciously submerged while I knew myself to be involved in your struggle towards the birth. That the finished work should have produced in me such a tormenting conflict was ironic and perhaps inevitable: an awakening to the ‘realities’ of the commonplace world, a descent into the conventions of a business society. This has made me suffer very much because, unaccustomed to being so divided, I have felt bewildered and uncertain; felt that I was letting you down and myself too – in the cause of ‘duty’ … [W]hile I cannot annihilate the role and the duties and the personality that have resulted from identifying myself with the firm and the job for twenty years, I can still have an inner self that believes with you and collaborates with sincerity and warmth. The situation has no precedent in my experience.14

  She admitted that the demands he made on her in the role of patroness or partner alarmed her: ‘[Mine] is often a lonely self that needs sustaining. It does not demand a great deal, and it believes in courage and kindness; it has love and compassion for humanity and admiration for the achievements of the human mind; but it is more apt to accept than to join or lead crusades.’ At the same time she thought A&R should try to find another publisher for the manuscript – though as A&R was by far the biggest trade publisher in the country it’s difficult to say which, if any, she had in mind. She even offered to help him explore ‘other means of publication’, again without giving details.

  The unusual intimacy of tone in Beatrice’s letters about Of Mars – a long way from the lightly ironical, amused manner she had adopted with Herbert earlier in their association – suggests that they became lovers at this point. It is clear that Herbert had amorous feelings towards his editor: according to his biographer Frances de Groen, he included her name in a list of lovers – real or imaginary – he made in a diary of the mid-1950s. Sadie Herbert loathed Beatrice, which implies that she had her suspicions at least. Beatrice told Frances de Groen that she and Herbert went to bed together only once. After they had spent hours at Folly Point drinking and talking, Herbert had followed her into her bedroom, climbed into bed beside her, embraced her and said, ‘Gotcha.’ He apparently lost interest once he had made his conquest.15