A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  After this shaky start his association with Beatrice blossomed, and for the next few years she monitored the sales of the Simon Black books. On his behalf she nagged the ABC, who were getting cold feet about broadcasting Simon Black in Coastal Command as a radio serial on their Children’s Session because, they said, it was too violent: later they changed their minds. A heavy smoker herself, Beatrice sympathised with (though never shared) Southall’s heroic struggle to give up tobacco. When Southall was approached to write some air force stories for rival publishers Horwitz, he asked Beatrice for permission, saying that the extra money would be useful. Beatrice, unaware that the Southall family were in dire financial straits, with tax problems and a recently born daughter who was seriously retarded, replied coldly that if he needed the money so badly she supposed A&R couldn’t stop him. However, when Southall told her he might have to sell the farm, she reacted with sympathy and practical kindness. She immediately asked whether he was being well advised about his tax, suggested he approach John Appleton of the ABC Children’s Session for possible scriptwriting work, and offered a £300 advance, which Southall accepted. (He solved the most pressing of his financial problems by selling the farm and taking a War Service loan to build a new home.) ‘Thanks once again for everything,’ he wrote to Beatrice in April 1956. ‘You’re a pal.’11 For Beatrice, Ivan Southall seems to have come into the category of younger brother: certainly he felt she considered him a young man in need of care, protection and guidance.12

  By the early 1960s Southall was doing well with his ‘boys’ books’ about aviation – not just the Simon Black titles, but a history of aviation and another juvenile series of air force stories. He also produced general non-fiction for adults, including a history of his RAAF squadron called They Shall Not Pass Unseen (1956); a biography of a World War I ace, Bluey Truscott (1958); Softly Tread the Brave (1960), about the work of mine disposal officers, and a series called ‘War in the Air’ (1958–60). But despite his satisfaction in becoming a successful professional writer, Southall was restless. He wanted to extend his range, and the idea of a new kind of book for children kept nagging at him.

  In 1961 he began Hills End, a short novel about seven children who must deal with a cyclone that destroys half their town, having to survive and keep things going without any adult help. This kind of kids-alone-battling-the-odds story has since become the stock-in-trade of many writers, but in 1961 the idea of children facing a hostile environment by themselves, trying to solve life-threatening problems without a reassuringly happy ending on the horizon, was new in Australian children’s fiction. Hills End also explored the question Patricia Wrightson had asked Beatrice: ‘Is a story based on a character study suitable for children?’ The children of Hills End were presented as individuals who used their strengths in order to survive.

  Hills End took Ivan Southall only about eight weeks to write, and Beatrice edited it lightly. Published early in 1962, it was immediately successful: ‘A solid work, strong in action, mood and description,’ according to the New York Times Book Review. It sold in the UK, was nominated a Notable Book by the American Library Association, was published in France, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium and Malaysia. When German translation rights were sold, Southall commented, ‘This is something I never imagined while I flogged the Atlantic looking for their beastly U-boats.’13 Hills End put Ivan Southall firmly on the map as a writer of complex, well-crafted books for children, and Simon Black was able to step out of the cockpit.

  In 1963 Angus and Robertson employed Joyce Saxby as their children’s books editor – making her the first full-time children’s books editor in Australia – but because Beatrice had worked with Southall for so long she continued to edit his books.14 After the success of Hills End, Beatrice told Southall she was looking forward to his next manuscript, and indeed Southall was optimistic about Crisis at Crowville, which he thought might even have adult appeal.

  Beatrice not only did not like the novel but wrote Southall a letter that shows her at her toughest. She said that she and two other A&R readers had found the adults tedious, the children marginal and the jokes unfunny, and the novel had too little action and too much dialogue. ‘This outright rejection does seem terrible and I am so sorry Ivan; but I am sure we are right and that to publish C at C would only harm your reputation,’ she told him.15 She judged, correctly, that Southall was enough of a professional to take this devastating criticism. He called it a ‘crushing judgment’ and insisted that every incident portrayed in the novel was true and that he knew the characters. ‘But,’ he added, ‘you don’t know them – so the book means nothing. Therein is its failure … There must be lessons I can learn from it, though not yet.’16 He was depressed: what if Hills End had been just a flash in the pan? Maybe he was kidding himself, he wrote; perhaps years of writing non-fiction had corroded his style and he was nothing more than ‘the modest hack I once believed myself to be’.

  Southall sat down at his desk and tried again. Before long he sent Beatrice five chapters of a new novel for teenagers. Beatrice’s response, though gentler, was essentially the same as before: he was looking at things from an adult point of view, not letting the children in the story take leading roles. Further, he was ‘chuckling on the sidelines’, enjoying his own humour too much.17 Southall did not waste any time in being offended: Beatrice’s comments, he wrote, had been pretty much what he expected and he agreed with many of her criticisms. What disturbed him was his own level of self-delusion. He hadn’t seen that he was writing from an adult point of view. He thought he had got out of touch, and wondered whether perhaps he didn’t know how to write books for children any more.

  He told Beatrice he would give it one more try. He was developing another book for teenagers, which was coming along very slowly. If this failed, he said, he would abandon all thought of writing juvenile fiction and concentrate on turning out tradesmanlike documentary books. For the rest of 1964 he worked on this novel, sending Beatrice worried bulletins from time to time. He thought it was tense and tight; his wife Joy said it was terrific; he was happy with the way it was going; he really didn’t know whether it was worth anything. Finally, on 23 January 1965, he sent Beatrice the manuscript ‘with prayerful HOPES’ and was sufficiently worried about it to write to her four hours later with a minor correction. He called the novel Ash Road.

  Like Hills End, Ash Road pits a group of children against ferocious odds, having to survive without adult help, but this time the agent of destruction is not a natural disaster but an accidentally started bushfire. Nan McDonald, A&R’s first reader, found it grimmer than its predecessor, which worried her slightly. ‘The characters of the children are well drawn, but seem less vivid than those in Hills End, probably because the crisis here is of a more active and developing kind, the terror and drama of the fire inevitably take the centre of the stage and overshadow human personalities.’ But she thought it must be published: ‘I doubt if there is a more memorable bushfire in Australian literature, and this alone should make the book a classic.’18

  A delighted Beatrice agreed and, knowing what acceptance would mean to Southall, sent him a telegram on 3 February: ‘CONGRATULATIONS ASH ROAD SPLENDID WORK WRITING BEATRICE’. She got an immediate response: ‘HALLELUJAH IVAN’.

  But Beatrice had a niggling doubt about the book’s grimness and asked Kath Commins, reviewer of children’s books for the Sydney Morning Herald, for an opinion. Commins’s response is interesting as a 1960s contribution to the continuing debate about proper reading matter for children. ‘I know that Southall was criticised by the judges of the Book of the Year for the “agonising pitch” of the suspense engendered in Hills End,’ wrote Commins. ‘I didn’t agree.’19 She liked Ash Road for its realism, pointing out that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with fear and anxiety, and bushfires are part of Australian bush life. ‘I think we adults reading children’s books need to remember, constantly, that we are very remote from today’s children,’ she added. �
��I think the children of today would take the disaster at Ash Road in their stride while reading about it.’ Her only criticism was that the novel was ‘a bit moralistic’ but this could be fixed at the editing stage. Beatrice agreed.

  Mainly because of cataclysmic changes to A&R (described in ‘Bringing the Pirates on Board’), Beatrice did not edit Ash Road, and in succeeding years her editorial relationship with Ivan Southall became more remote. He remained an A&R author for a long time. For Ash Road, which was published in twenty countries between 1965 and 1990, he won the first of his four Children’s Book of the Year Awards, while with Josh (1971) he became the first children’s writer outside the UK to be awarded the British Library Association’s Carnegie Medal.

  But before all that happened, and after the first success of Ash Road, Southall wrote to Beatrice: ‘I have hopes that rather than having entered my “prime” I may only be just beginning and that everything else has been part of the apprenticeship. Even the two or three horrible failures that A&R has seen fit to turn away have been very valuable – even if costly – experience.’20 Ivan Southall always credited Beatrice with teaching him lessons about writing that he needed to learn.21

  Plain Sailing: Angus and Robertson During the 1950s

  In 1959 Beatrice reached two milestones: she turned fifty and she celebrated twenty-two years as general editor for Angus and Robertson. There is no reason to believe she made an issue of either of these anniversaries. If she mourned her lost youth she did not say so: hers was not a generation that worshipped youth. The way women dressed – stiff skirts, hair permed into rigid waves, little hats, gloves, elaborate makeup, seamed stockings, high-heeled shoes – made them look older than they do now. Long hair, jeans, sandals, psychedelic fabrics – the clothes of a generation at play – were about to become fashionable, but not quite yet.

  Beatrice often referred to her ‘advanced age’, perhaps because she started to go grey when she was quite young. When in 1950 Rohan Rivett had asked for permission to abandon ‘Miss Davis’, Beatrice replied, ‘Yes, please do call me Beatrice in spite of my advancing years. It makes me feel younger.’1 She was almost forty-two. As with many elegant women, the look she chose in her youth she maintained all her life. Being small and slim, she favoured neat prints over splashy designs; her hemlines were no shorter than knee length, and she generally wore straight or slightly flared skirts, classic suits with short fitted jackets, collared dresses with narrow belts, discreet earrings and small brooches. Because she was vain about her legs and wanted to look taller, she usually wore very high heels.

  By the late 1950s Beatrice’s air of authority also made her seem older than she was. She was being called the grande dame of Australian publishing – not a title given to a young person. Her position as A&R’s literary powerbroker made some writers wary of her, including Geoffrey Dutton, who met her for the first time in the late 1950s. Douglas Stewart had told him that Beatrice could be fierce and abrupt if she wished, but that it was mostly an act. This bluntness became more pronounced as Beatrice got older, particularly after a couple of whiskies.

  Like most prominent people who don’t much care about popular opinion, Beatrice was a target for gossip, mainly about her sex life. She didn’t altogether discourage speculation, once announcing at a party, ‘All I need is ten lovers and a good bottle of whisky!’ Everybody knew about Dick Jeune; not many were aware that the weekends she didn’t go to Sackville she often spent with Geoffrey Burgoyne, a journalist and writer of about Jeune’s age who was also a friend of Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s. Beatrice was careful to ensure that Jeune and Burgoyne seldom met: they knew about each other and were jealous. There were other lovers. Her attitude was ‘It’s only sex, darling, just a bit of fun.’

  The rumours about Beatrice were predictable. She was supposed to be sexually voracious, a real man-eater. (According to Geoffrey Dutton, when Patrick White heard she had edited Soldiers’ Women, White sniffed, ‘She’s probably one of them.’) It was said that no male writer would be published by A&R unless he slept with her, and that it was never safe to be alone with her – an interesting thought considering the dimensions of Beatrice’s office. She was supposed to have been George Ferguson’s mistress for many years. There were stories that she was bisexual: several incidents are claimed, rather tenuously, to support this view. In the ladies’ room during the Adelaide Festival in 1960 she fingered a brooch that the wife of a young poet was wearing on her blouse, saying it was similar to one she owned; after a few drinks she flung her arm around a girl’s shoulders in the back of a cab; Hal Porter claimed that a woman friend who stayed at Folly Point for some months was Beatrice’s lover.

  It’s almost impossible to sort fact from fiction here. Some people who knew Beatrice well said that nothing she did would surprise them; others were horrified, distressed or amused about the stories, particularly the rumours of lesbian relationships. Close to the end of her life Beatrice said to Anthony Barker, ‘I feel dreadful … I do hope I haven’t got AIDS. But then I haven’t had homosexual sex for some years now.2 This startling statement was probably ironic: it sounds like her kind of tease. Like many women of her class and generation, she expressed a dismissive tolerance for homosexual men; while she was emotionally closer to women than to men, this closeness was not necessarily sexual.

  Rumours about Beatrice’s sex life, like most gossip, revealed more about those telling the stories than they did about her. A single, highly intelligent and attractive woman whose job gave her power over the literary destinies of men was bound to make a fair proportion of them feel insecure, particularly if they had tried to flirt with her and she had rebuffed them. Beatrice often made no attempt to pander to the male ego, rather the reverse. ‘Leslie,’ she once told the theatre historian and children’s writer Leslie Rees during a party, ‘you can’t write. You know you can’t.’3 Another reason for the hostile rumours is simple: Beatrice kept to her own rules and standards. She made no secret of the fact that she was strongly sensual and enjoyed sex, but she had a code of honour. She kept that part of her life private, didn’t gossip or go into details about it. In short, Beatrice was a gentleman.

  By today’s standards the editorial department Beatrice controlled in the 1950s was uncommercial to the point of perversity. A&R’s aim was to publish as many books as possible about Australia and by Australian authors. Ensuring that these books came out at the optimum times for sales – for Christmas or Mother’s Day, for example – was not considered important. Books were published only after they had been through the editorial and production processes, and no editor was ever castigated for spending too much time on a manuscript. Print runs were often decided by a combination of caution and race memory, and occasionally the printers at Halstead were asked to give an estimate. This was less lunatic than it sounds; some had been there for more than forty years, and their estimates, based on knowledge of previous publications, were often at least as accurate as the calculations of today’s publishing bean counters.

  Beatrice never thought popular taste an important indicator of good publishing, a view sometimes shared by A&R’s management. In 1952 A&R published Alien Son by Judah Waten, a collection of linked, semi-autobiographical stories about a Jewish migrant family in Western Australia during World War I, and one of the first significant pieces of fiction about the Australian migrant experience. A&R published 2000 copies with CLF support; readers recognised the vitality and freshness of the material and the book sold out quickly. But George Ferguson decided not to reprint on the grounds that doing a small quantity – say a thousand – was ‘not economically viable’, and A&R did not wish to publish any more than that. It was easier to let the book go out of print. Waten’s politics might have been a consideration too: he belonged to the Communist Party at a time when echoes of US paranoia were drifting over to Australia and when the Menzies government had already attempted to introduce anti-communist measures.

  Beatrice agreed with Ferguson’s decision, on slightly different
grounds; while she recognised Waten’s ability, she said she found his work depressing. But the CLF were appalled. For God’s sake, they said, keep Alien Son in print, and if more money was needed, the CLF would willingly supply it. Angus and Robertson reprinted. This must be the only time in Australian literary history that a government-sponsored body, and a conservative one at that, has gone against a publisher’s decision and insisted on subsidising a book by an author whose political views they opposed.

  The book that Beatrice most famously turned down for Angus and Robertson also dealt with the migrant experience, though in different terms. In late 1956 a young boy brought into the office the manuscript of a novel by his father, a former pharmacist named John O’Grady, and gave it to Colin Roderick, who had edited textbooks by O’Grady’s brother Frank. The book was They’re a Weird Mob, which purported to be the autobiography of Nino Culotta, a young Italian who tries to make sense of the Australian language and way of life. Roderick later said he started reading and couldn’t stop laughing, and he wrote Beatrice a memo saying that, with Lennie Lower’s Here’s Luck, this was a great example of cultural clowning. It would sell thousands of copies and should be published immediately.