A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  Herbert’s new agent, Tim Curnow of Curtis Brown, who was busily sorting out the mess A&R had made of Herbert’s royalty payments over the years, advised him to find another publisher. (Beatrice had left the company by then and was working for Thomas Nelson.) Curnow approached William Collins, whose managing director Ken Wilder was energetically steering the company into local publishing. Though Wilder knew of Herbert’s reputation as a publisher’s nightmare, he was keen to accept Poor Fellow My Country. Herbert was pleased too: his contract protected him from any editorial changes or cuts to the manuscript.

  Beatrice was not able to tell Herbert how genuinely pleased she was that his novel had finally come to fruition. He quarrelled with her at the beginning of 1974, ostensibly over the fact that she had sent Sadie, who was Jewish, a Christmas card. Her other crime had been to ask, of Poor Fellow My Country, ‘How long is it?’ He hated the fact that she typed her letters to him, he told her, and added – more hurtfully – that he had never trusted her as a publisher. Herbert was ill, racked by rheumatism, taking steroids and other drugs that apparently made him more irrational than usual – but Beatrice had helped him as far as she could, and therefore she had to be punished.

  A very distressed Beatrice replied on 1 February 1974:

  How could you write me such an unkind, such a spiteful letter? I was truly hurt, and even shocked. I always type letters to my friends; there is no commercial implication; seems sadly to show how little faith you’ve ever had in me or my long friendship. And surely your bitter stress on the Christmas card impropriety is nonsense. I merely wanted to show Sadie, in the briefest and simplest way, that I’d thought of you both. Really you are a mug, ’Orrible, in spite of your genius, evil or otherwise. I’m naturally panting to see PFMC (you must remember I’m an Aust lit addict & devoted to my country’s creative writers) but I have no wish to be in any way associated with its publication unless I could help you, which obviously, I can’t. So to hell with you, FX, and may even greater fame be yours.

  Collins were planning a big launching party for Poor Fellow My Country, followed by a black-tie dinner. Herbert told Beatrice he did not want her to attend any of the celebrations: she didn’t, which caused a great deal of indignant comment among the literary community.

  The publishers stressed the book’s size rather than its literary merit (it was known to some of its critics as Poor Fellow My Reader) and presented Herbert as a rough-hewn genius. Poor Fellow My Country sold out its first run of 14 000 in a fortnight; a month later two-thirds of the second printing – 8000 – had also gone. In 1976, with Beatrice’s wholehearted support, it won the Miles Franklin Award. By 1979 the novel had sold almost 70 000 copies in Australia, 30 000 of them in hardback. With Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, it may well hold the record for the most unread bestseller in history. Poor Fellow My Country desperately needed Beatrice’s sympathetic and fearless editorial eye.

  Beatrice and Herbert had little to do with each other after that. Now a critically acclaimed author, Herbert became a sort of bush guru, pronouncing from his fastness near Cairns and making occasional visits south, becoming increasingly cantankerous with advancing age. His greatest blow came with the death of Sadie (for whom the adjective ‘long-suffering’ might have been coined) on 20 September 1979. Beatrice wrote him a sweet and thoughtful note of condolence, to which he did not reply.

  Xavier Herbert died in 1984. When Beatrice was first interviewed about him by Frances de Groen, she spoke bitterly about his ingratitude. A little later, and shortly before her own death, she was mellower, recalling Xavier Herbert fondly as a ‘dear old boy’ who could be both funny and endearing. As Beatrice had once told Herbert, she was more Irish than he was, and she never changed her friends.

  No Elves, Dragons or Unicorns: Children’s Literature

  To most children she knew Beatrice was an exotic creature – smartly dressed, living by herself in a two-storey house; a career woman who worked in an office and who insisted on being called Beatrice, not Auntie Beatrice or Mrs Bridges. She did not encourage children to be spontaneous; when Douglas Stewart’s daughter Meg visited Folly Point as a child, she was always on her very best behaviour. She found Beatrice rather cool, not interested in childish concerns, and when Meg showed her an extravagantly praised school project, Beatrice gave it little more than a glance. Yet she was perceptive about presents – once, for her birthday, she gave Meg a tiny gold child’s ring set with a tur-quoise, which Meg loved.

  Beatrice was more responsive to children than she sometimes seemed. She enjoyed having her brother John’s children, Anne and John, to stay during the Christmas holidays, organising birthday parties for Anne to which she invited the offspring of A&R colleagues. She took Anne and John into the city, to the zoo, and for picnics on the harbour, where Dick Jeune steered into little coves and they would all eat oysters off the rocks. When John was a boarder at a Sydney private school, Beatrice and Dick would take him out (the other boys were impressed by Dick’s bald head and tough-guy look). Beatrice was particularly close to her niece. When Anne was small there was talk that Dick and Beatrice might ‘adopt’ her, at least during the school term. Beatrice, who knew that her brother John was not a great reader, thought Sydney would be more stimulating than Narrabri. Anne’s mother refused to consider any such thing.

  Though Beatrice occasionally enjoyed the company of children, she was never intuitively connected with them. As far as she was concerned, they could have the so-called magic world of childhood all to themselves. Some children who knew her suspected that she was waiting for them to grow up, to develop a few adult opinions. So it is all the more interesting that in the late 1950s and early 1960s Beatrice played such a key role in the development of Australian children’s literature.

  The earliest local children’s books grafted goblins, elves and small animals from the British Isles onto the Australian landscape. A little later came sunburned copies of English children, until in 1894 Ethel Turner’s lively, non-didactic Seven Little Australians introduced recognisably Antipodean ones. In 1918 Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding introduced a very Australian larrikin humour to children’s writing, and May Gibbs’s Snugglepot and Cuddlepie brilliantly transmuted familiar plants and animals of the Australian bush into characters. (Many Australian adults are still unable to look at a mature Banksia serrata without thinking of Big Bad Banksia Men.) Before World War II Angus and Robertson published some of the best-known Australian children’s books – not just The Magic Pudding and May Gibbs’s books but Dorothy Wall’s Blinky Bill (1933), Frank Dalby Davison’s Man-Shy (1931) and Children of the Dark People (1936), and C.J. Dennis’s A Book for Kids (1921). But despite the quality of much local writing, for many years the children’s book section of 89 Castlereagh Street was dominated by books from England and North America. Young readers would move from Seven Little Australians to the Canadian Anne of Green Gables, from The Magic Pudding to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, or other adventure stories about intrepid British boys and girls. (Punch magazine once observed that during World War II English schoolchildren captured more German spies than did British Intelligence.)

  From the early 1950s, however, fuelled by increased government spending on education, the growth of libraries in schools and the influence of school librarians, a movement grew in favour of more and better books for Australian children. In 1945 the Children’s Book Council was formed in New South Wales and its members, all unpaid volunteers, began holding annual exhibitions of children’s books, with the emphasis on Australian titles. They established their own awards in 1946: the first winner of the Children’s Book of the Year Award was The Story of Karrawingi the Emu by Leslie Rees. Other state children’s book councils were formed, amalgamating to form the Australian Children’s Book Council in 1959.

  As A&R’s general editor Beatrice kept an eye on all this, though she was not the company’s primary editor of children’s fiction. Ella McFadyen, a children’s writer who had strong opinions about
suitable reading material for young persons, evaluated most of the manuscripts that came into the office. (Describing a murder story in which ants were injected with poison so that their bite would be lethal, she wrote: ‘Very fiddly job, injecting ants.’) Until the early 1950s, acceptable children’s manuscripts were generally prepared for the press by Rosemary Dobson.

  In 1951 or early 1952 Joan Phipson, a former schoolmate of Rosemary Dobson’s at Frensham, sent A&R a novel for children about a twelve-year-old country girl and a recalcitrant brumby foal. Phipson later said she wrote Good Luck to the Rider ‘simply to please the child I used to be’, and in 1953 it was co-winner of the Children’s Book of the Year Award, sharing the prize with a ‘boys’ book’ about aeroplanes. Joan Phipson’s writing had an unselfconsciously Australian flavour, her early books reflecting the cheerful rural prosperity of 1950s Australia, though later her work grew darker and more complex. Many of her books were translated into other languages and several won prizes, including in 1963 a second Children’s Book of the Year Award for The Family Conspiracy, also published by Angus and Robertson.

  Beatrice was never Joan Phipson’s primary editor, and at first Phipson was in awe of her because of her reputation and her patrician manner. But they soon became friends and Beatrice occasionally stayed with Phipson and her husband Colin Fitzhardinge on their property at Mandurama, New South Wales. Once Beatrice was horrified to discover that Phipson did not have Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and as soon as she returned to Sydney she sent her a copy.

  In 1954 A&R received a manuscript from a young writer who lived in the Clarence River region of northern New South Wales. It was the story of a group of country children who form a secret society and become involved in looking after the local wildlife, and it languished in the unsolicited manuscripts cupboard for more than six months. The author finally wrote a very polite letter to ‘The Editor’: ‘With regard to my manuscript The Crooked Snake … what page are you up to now? Yours faithfully, Patricia Wrightson.’1

  The letter landed on Beatrice’s desk. It made her laugh and she pulled the manuscript out of the cupboard. As soon as she started reading it she could tell that the author knew what she was doing. She liked the story and the characters and before long wrote to Patricia Wrightson that A&R were interested in publishing the book – receiving ‘a yell of delight’ by return post.2 Beatrice decided that at 60 000 words The Crooked Snake was too long and suggested it be reduced to 40 000. Wrightson argued that cutting it by one-third would destroy whatever life and colour the book possessed. Beatrice responded that it didn’t need large slabs cut, just an overall trim. She gave few clues about how this could be done and Wrightson obeyed, though it hurt, taking out one chapter and deleting a word here, a sentence there. She sent the manuscript back to A&R and this time Beatrice accepted it.

  The editing process began. Beatrice did the overall editing, handed the manuscript to a member of her staff for the detailed work, and oversaw the result. She took a much more hands-on approach to The Crooked Snake than she did with many A&R manuscripts, perhaps because she knew that here she had a young writer of real promise. Wrightson was raw, defensive, full of passionate and unexpressed certainties, intense about her own work; Beatrice reacted with calm and sympathetic logic. As Wrightson later wrote, Beatrice ‘recognised a safety valve when it blew, and knew how to release the pressure in a fair and logical way’.3

  Sometimes author and editor were colleagues at work on a joint project, sometimes they were student and teacher. Beatrice refused to be argued with, bringing the big guns of grammar to bear. ‘Fowler says this, and we agree,’ she might write, but she also knew how to disarm criticism. ‘Yes, we made a mistake.’ However, when she saw that Wrightson was adamant about something, she accepted it.

  Even so, when Patricia Wrightson saw her galleys she was appalled. A&R’s line editor had attacked her text with a brick, she thought, imposing a great many irritating and unnecessary corrections. Very close to the end she saw that a particular passage ‘intended to suggest flurry had been tidied up into stodge’ and she exploded ‘in sheets of burning prose’. Beatrice agreed that the text had been overedited and promised that in future Wrightson would see all edited copy before it was typeset. This concession shows how committed Beatrice was to Patricia Wrightson’s development as a writer.

  Beatrice professed to know very little about children’s literature, but she never believed that a book for children was worth less attention than an adult novel. The important thing was that it be well written. Throughout the editing process she gently encouraged Wrightson to express herself as simply and directly as possible, with no unnecessary adverbs or stylistic tricks, tearing off what Wrightson called ‘the crepe-paper frills of schoolroom style’. It was fine, wrote Beatrice, to use ‘said’ repeatedly, instead of an alternative such as ‘smiled’, on the grounds that ‘you can’t smile dialogue’.4 With illustrations by Margaret Horder, already Australia’s best-known children’s illustrator, The Crooked Snake won the 1956 Children’s Book of the Year Award. The judges praised it as ‘a really worthwhile story about really normal children … characters of children and adults are swiftly and vividly outlined’.

  Now Patricia Wrightson began to push the limits of writing for children, to go for more than storytelling, to look below surface realities. Her second novel, The Bunyip Hole, was the story of a child who has to come to terms with fear and the possible consequences of cowardice. She felt unsure about the theme: was it too ‘heavy’ for eleven-year-olds? Was seeing the story through the eyes of one character alone too difficult, even too adult?

  Wrightson worried over this for some time and decided to ask Beatrice for her opinion. During a trip to Sydney she called in 89 Castlereagh Street with her manuscript. Beatrice received her warmly and promised to read The Bunyip Hole as soon as possible, but her smile slipped when Wrightson begged her to read it then and there, while she waited. No editor is happy to read a manuscript with the author present (it can of course also be torture for the author) and at first Beatrice refused. But so insistent was Wrightson – she had come so far, she was so anxious to hear what Beatrice thought – that eventually the editor relented.

  Beatrice read the manuscript calmly, well aware that on the other side of her desk sat a young author so tense she was almost vibrating. When she had finished, Patricia Wrightson asked her, ‘Is a story based on a character study suitable for children?’ It was a question Beatrice had never been asked before, and the fact that it needed to be asked shows how undeveloped was Australian children’s literature in 1957. Beatrice considered it seriously for a few moments and replied that, yes, this approach was suitable, provided it did not get in the way of the story. Characterisation was important, though secondary.

  Wrightson’s third novel, The Rocks of Honey (1960), dealt with an Aboriginal boy and his problems in coming to terms with white Australia, a provocative theme for a children’s book of the time. The core of the story was a chapter entitled ‘The Stone Axe’, and Wrightson asked Beatrice whether someone who knew and cared about Aboriginal lore and culture would be willing to read it, perhaps a field anthropologist such as Professor A.P. Elkin. Beatrice agreed and in due course returned the manuscript with Elkin’s comments. As Wrightson later pointed out, at the end of the 1950s the idea of having an eminent anthropologist check a children’s book was unheard of. She ‘had only hoped for someone to whom the Koori were real people’.5

  In such books as The Nargun and the Stars (1973), The Ice is Coming (1977), The Dark Bright Water (1978) and Behind the Wind (1981), Patricia Wrightson took elements of Aboriginal folklore and wove them into stories for white Australian children.6 In a note to An Older Kind of Magic (1972) she wrote: ‘It is time we stopped trying to see elves and dragons and unicorns in Australia. They have never belonged here, and no ingenuity can make them real. We need to look for another kind of magic, a kind that must have been shaped by the land itself at the edge of Australian vision.’ I
t was this search, this expression of an older kind of magic, that later permeated her work, and she credited Beatrice, her first editor, with being the first to understand what she was trying to do, to give her the freedom to explore what was possible. ‘How could a new writer fail to develop, when handled in that way?’ she asked.7

  In late 1953 Beatrice made one of her periodic trips to Melbourne to visit friends and meet Angus and Robertson authors whom she had previously known only on paper. One was a tall, slim and diffident man in his early thirties named Ivan Southall. He had started his writing career at sixteen, selling articles and short stories to Australian newspapers and magazines. ‘I don’t remember growing up,’ he wrote many years later, ‘because our little world collapsed when my father died when I was fourteen and I seem to have been working seven days a week from that moment to this.’8 In August 1948 he had offered Walter Cousins the first in a series of adventure stories about a dashing flying ace named Simon Black, based on Southall’s own experiences in the RAAF during World War II (Southall had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross at the age of twenty-three). Meet Simon Black, its author said, was ‘for ages of ten years and up to whatever age the male ceases to be a boy, if ever’.9 The novel was given an enthusiastic report by George Ferguson’s twelve-year-old son John; it was published in 1949 and did well. Southall wrote nine Simon Black books between 1949 and 1961. They were published in London, translated into French (where Simon Black in Coastal Command became Allô Contrôle, Ici Radar), Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch, and adapted for radio in several countries.

  Ivan Southall’s first A&R editor was Alec Bolton, with whom he established a warm rapport, but from 1953 Bolton was working mainly on A&R’s massive Australian Encyclopedia (described in the following chapter) and Beatrice took over. At the time of her visit to Melbourne Southall was living in Monbulk, east of Melbourne across the Dande-nongs, with his wife Joy and two small children, making a precarious living as a freelance writer. Beatrice had written asking him to meet her in South Yarra late in the afternoon which, because Southall had no car, meant twelve kilometres by bus, an hour’s train journey to Melbourne and a ride in a tram. When he arrived at South Yarra after travelling for most of the day, Southall, who was a shy man and who had thought his meeting with Beatrice would be a private one, was horrified to find her more or less holding court, surrounded by strangers, all of whom seemed cleverer, more articulate and much more sophisticated than he was.10 Disappointed, he arrived home very early the following morning, having missed the last bus from Ferntree Gully and walked the twelve kilometres home along country roads almost in his sleep.