A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  Judges’ decisions were not always unanimous, as the judges’ report made a point of mentioning. When Randolph Stow won with To the Islands in 1958, two of the five judges preferred Into the Morning by Elizabeth Webb. (There were some interesting contenders that year, including Elizabeth Harrower’s The Long Prospect, Christopher Koch’s The Boys in the Island and Thea Astley’s first novel, Girl With a Monkey.) In 1962 the judges were so far from unanimity that the prize was shared between Thea Astley for The Well Dressed Explorer and George Turner for The Cupboard Under the Stairs. The judges’ meetings must have been lively: two voted for Astley, two for Turner and one for Amid the Plenty by Gavin Casey. There is little doubt which novel Beatrice favoured. In her judges’ report – judges took it in turns to chair the committee – she gave Explorer high praise, saying that the main character George Brewster ‘may become as memorable in Australian writing as Sinclair Lewis’ Mr Babbitt’, while her comments on George Turner’s novel have the lacklustre blandness of mediocre jacket copy: ‘an absorbing, compassionate story of a man’s struggle for normality in a country town after treatment in a mental hospital’.23

  Beatrice maintained that she hated making public speeches, but she always spoke clearly and calmly, often without notes. Although she gave the impression that she was good at speaking off the cuff, she took her responsibility seriously and thoroughly rehearsed her speeches. The judges’ reports she prepared and delivered for the Miles Franklin Award were always direct and succinct, seldom leaving listeners in any doubt about her opinion of the prize-winning book. Beatrice seldom bothered with the usual anodyne remarks that all entrants were equally worthy and the judges had difficulty making up their minds. When Stow’s To the Islands won in 1958, Beatrice said that of the seventeen novels submitted, six showed genuine literary quality and twelve mature narrative competence, the message being that only Stow had demonstrated both. Her comments on Peter Mathers’s Trap began, rather predictably, by calling it a literary tour de force showing great comic and satiric talent, but she then said it was ‘a very unpleasant book indeed’. (She wasn’t alone there: Sir Roy McKerihan, who presented the prize to Mathers’s brother in the author’s absence, said, ‘There are parts I wouldn’t like my wife to read.’) Beatrice’s straightforward approach was very much in the spirit of Miles Franklin herself.

  One novel very much in the Franklin spirit was Careful, He Might Hear You by Sumner Locke Elliott, the winner in 1963. In a year that saw a record twenty-nine entries, with novels by Barbara Jefferis, Randolph Stow, Jessica Anderson and Gavin Casey, the judges chose the novel that was probably most closely linked with Miles herself in its evocation of a vanished Australia. But Miles Franklin’s personal taste was never a consistently strong factor, a question that came up for debate in 1959 when the prize was posthumously awarded to Vance Palmer for The Big Fellow. Palmer had died the same year and it was argued that the prize should have gone to a living novelist, as Miles had surely intended. (The question of ‘what Miles would have liked’ had disappeared entirely by 1977, the year Ruth Park won the Award for Swords and Crowns and Rings.24)

  People who serve on the same committees year after year grow to understand each other’s literary tastes, prejudices and blind spots, and this was certainly true of the Miles Franklin committee. Beatrice always looked for writing that transmuted everyday life in an imaginative way, reserving special scorn for ‘roast and boil prose’ and for flatly written studies of domestic life. At the same time she demanded clarity and precision in writing, echoing her own cast of mind and tendency to succinctness. She disliked writing that was too ‘experimental’ (as demonstrated by her reaction to Trap) and she liked a strong narrative line with memorable characters. Beatrice also had a sharp eye for personal relationships described in a way that she thought did not ring true: ‘Well, you just can’t believe that,’ she would say dismissively.25 Her opinions, however, were not always fully formed. Several writers remember that if dinner conversation at Folly Point turned to the Miles Franklin Award, Beatrice would canvass her guests’ opinions of various writers’ talent without quite admitting those writers were candidates, probably to reinforce her own instincts and judgements.

  The Miles Franklin judging process was mostly harmonious. Beatrice got on well with Jean Arnot and subsequent Mitchell librarians, and she and Ian Mudie were on cordial terms. Colin Roderick she found more difficult, partly because he persisted in interrupting and talking over his fellow judges: she considered him a cross they all had to bear. She also deplored his habit, after he had resigned from A&R in 1966 and gone to live in north Queensland, of reviewing some of the entries in the Townsville Bulletin, signalling those he preferred before any decision had been made.

  Quite often Beatrice and Leonie Kramer, professor of English at Sydney University who joined the Miles Franklin committee in the mid-1960s, sided against Roderick. The two women formed a friendship that transcended work on the Miles Franklin committee and it is not difficult to see why. Though Kramer was younger than Beatrice, they were both highly intelligent women who had carved out positions for themselves in traditionally male environments; they were quick at sizing people up, knew how to be charming to men, were articulate and impatient with waffle or prevarication. Above all, perhaps, neither particularly cared what people thought. (Another possible bond between them was that Patrick White disliked them both.) As a combination on the committee, they could be formidable – though always with great politeness.

  As time passed, the Miles Franklin Award became only one of several major Australian literary prizes, and as Beatrice gradually withdrew from prominence in literary circles she began to find reading for the prize a bit of a chore. It was a way of keeping up with what Australian novelists were writing, but she found herself less and less in sympathy with that, too. However, she never missed a committee meeting unless she was really ill. Being on the Miles Franklin Award committee was a duty Beatrice had assumed, and she had a strong sense of duty. Besides, she felt she owed it to Miles.

  In March 1960 Beatrice flew to Adelaide for the third Miles Franklin Award presentation, the only time in its history that this event has taken place outside Sydney. The chair that year was the South Australian-based poet Ian Mudie, and the presentation was the centrepiece of the very first Writers’ Week, now a celebrated segment of the Adelaide Festival of Arts.

  The first Writers’ Week was a sedate affair. Shoehorned into the festival almost as an afterthought, it was intended to be a chance for Australian writers to get together. One of the early organisers constantly referred to Writers’ Week as a ‘safety valve’: the assumption being, presumably, that if Australian writers were left in their solitary garrets their frustration, despair and loneliness would cause them to explode. Invitations to overseas visitors came later, as did the emphasis on readers casually ‘meeting the author’. During those early Writers’ Weeks, small numbers of earnest and dedicated readers would turn up to the forbidding lecture theatre at the State Library of South Australia to hear authors talking about the place of Australian literature in education or the existence of specifically Australian poetry. The whole university/tutorial atmosphere suggested that Australian literature was a worthy pursuit: indeed, good for you.

  Those first Writers’ Weeks give a depressing insight into the status of Australian literature in the early 1960s. Though Australian novels were increasingly appearing on university curricula, though Australian literature qualified for a university chair (in 1962, at the University of Sydney, with G.A. Wilkes its first professor), those who wrote it were not highly valued. In the words of Geoffrey Dutton, an Australian writer was still considered ‘a pretty crook sort of minor tradesman’.26 Being a writer in Australia was considered character-building, too; in 1962 Frank Dalby Davison suggested that writers should be content with a fairly low standard of living. ‘Domestic women’, he said, had it easier than the men, as they were supported by their husbands and could set aside part of the day for writing.


  Writers’ Week gradually widened in scope and diminished in earnestness, and from the start Beatrice was an important participant. Her eminence, knowledge of writers and social skills made her an obvious choice as a chair of panel sessions. But with her elegant, immaculate style of dressing, her quick intelligence and rather patrician manner, she could be headmistressy. When she chaired a tribute to Kenneth Slessor in 1974, David Malouf wrote:

  Like a good hostess she put us at ease, she invited us in, she offered to share with us some of the secrets of that close circle of friends and colleagues who had known Slessor and shared his work. But in doing so she remained, for all her graciousness, just a little proprietorial. One was given the clear sense that however well we might have known Slessor from our reading, we hadn’t known him as the platform did. We were outsiders.27

  Beatrice never enjoyed being on Writers’ Week panels: she went to Adelaide every second year only as part of what she called her ‘duty to literature’. Once her task was over she had a much better time, catching up with writers she hadn’t seen for years and meeting new ones. Hal Porter and Xavier Herbert, fixtures at the early festivals, always sought her out. ‘Let’s go and annoy Beatrice,’ Porter would say to Herbert, as if they were a couple of naughty children, and they would all go drinking together. At the 1968 Writers’ Week the Adelaide-based A&R children’s editor Barbara Ker Wilson hosted a party to launch several books. It was hot, and Beatrice wanted to wear a strapless dress but did not have a suitable bra. Not wanting her nipples to show through the light fabric, she appealed to Ker Wilson for help. ‘Oh,’ said Ker Wilson, ‘that’s easy. You put a Band-Aid across them, it’s the same colour as your skin and nobody will know the difference.’ Beatrice followed her advice. At the end of the evening, unable to bring herself to rip the bandaids off her breasts, she had to ask Ker Wilson to do it for her.

  Not all Beatrice’s encounters in Adelaide were literary, even peripherally. At the very first Writers’ Week in 1960 she met a man who became very important to her. One afternoon she was holding court at the bar in the South Australian Hotel when the husband of an Adelaide-based relative introduced her to his companion John Broadbent, a solicitor. Beatrice shook hands with Broadbent and both of them liked what they saw. Broadbent, a few years younger than Beatrice, was a powerfully built man, not particularly tall, well dressed, with blue eyes and a moustache. Based in Sydney, he was a former Rat of Tobruk who had won the DSO and usually led his battalion at the Anzac Day march. Intelligent, well read, interested in writing, good-looking with a military bearing and a pleasant speaking voice, he was everything that Beatrice admired. Not only did he have the same medals as her adored father, he even looked a little like Charles Herbert Davis. They very soon became lovers, spending time together on weekends at Folly Point (Broadbent was married) or attending literary gatherings. ‘We had no responsibilities except to our congeniality,’ Broadbent said many years later.28 Their relationship lasted more than thirty years.

  Bartonry and Walshism

  In the 1960s many people thought Beatrice’s life ran on oiled wheels. She seemed to have organised everything as she wanted it; she loved the house at Folly Point, her job was satisfying, her social life pleasant. In John Broadbent she had a regular, undemanding male companion to squire her to literary gatherings in town, while there was Sackville and Dick Jeune if she felt she needed to escape to a country retreat.

  Dick was now in his late seventies and quite happy to live up on the Hawkesbury, growing oranges and avocados and guarding his chickens against marauding foxes. In twenty years the house at Tizzana Road had hardly changed. Beatrice had had the phone put on, and electricity had replaced its original kerosene lamps, but it was still basically an old wooden farmhouse. Inside the layout was simple – a central living room furnished with books and pictures, including some prized watercolours and etchings, and a double-brick fireplace at the farthest end. Dick’s desk was on the side overlooking the verandah and the river, while two small bedrooms led off it, along with a tiny kitchen, scullery and bathroom. Occasionally a horse would wander over to the house and poke its nose through the kitchen window.

  Beatrice loved Folly Point, but the house at Sackville was her special place. Getting there was a chore: when she left the office on Fridays she had about an hour’s train journey to Windsor, laden with food for the weekend, then she had to take a taxi at the station for a twenty-minute drive over dirt roads to the house. But once she arrived, for two days she could stop being Beatrice Davis, editor, and forget about work and books. She rarely brought manuscripts to the house, and if she had invited friends for the weekend, as she often did, they rarely talked about literature.

  The locals were used to seeing her occasionally, and she was on friendly terms with them all, but they knew Dick better. Now a bull-necked, tanned old man in ancient baggy shorts and a shirt or safari jacket – he never dressed up in the country – Dick was often to be seen riding along the dusty road on his tractor. He was as tough as old boots. Beatrice’s nephew Charles, staying for the weekend, saw him stride into the living room one morning looking a bit shaken, and help himself to a large whisky. This seemed odd behaviour on a Saturday morning, and Charles asked whether anything was wrong. Dick shook his head. ‘Fell off the bloody roof,’ he growled.

  Beatrice continued to see a great deal of her family. Her mother Emily had died, after a long illness and with dementia, in October 1952. True to her usual practice, Beatrice had said little about this at the time, or later, and any comments she made generally demonstrated that she and Emily had never become close. But her mother’s death affected Beatrice. Knowing that dementia often runs in families, as she aged she was increasingly haunted by the fear that such a fate might be in store for her.

  Granny Deloitte had also died, leaving Beatrice’s Aunt Enid free to be an independent single woman. With very little money of her own, she moved into a small rented apartment on the north side of Sydney Harbour, supporting herself by doing clerical jobs. Her only indulgence was travel; unlike her niece Beatrice she enjoyed seeing new places by herself. Under a veneer of gentlewomanly grandeur, Enid was also very friendly, and her address books were crammed with the names and phone numbers of friends she had made in Sydney and abroad. On her first trips to England after World War II she capitalised on her not particularly close family connection with the international accountancy firm Deloittes, made friends with the chairman in London, and kept in touch with him and the company executives. When the firm’s Sydney office held special events, Enid Deloitte was always invited.

  Beatrice was very fond of Enid – the only person in the world, possibly apart from Dick Jeune, who still thought of her as ‘dear little Beatrice’. Every year Beatrice organised a birthday party for her aunt at Folly Point. Aunt and niece had many things in common: they lived alone, were unmarried and earned their own living, though Enid was more interested in Deloitte family matters and family history. Beatrice’s worldliness in sexual matters was unknown to her aunt, who, belonging to a generation that recalled the scandalous Oscar Wilde, confided in her eighties to her great-niece Anne, ‘There’s a lot of talk around the place about homosexuals. But, you know, I’ve never been really sure what they do.’

  Another crucial difference between them was their attitude to money. Enid lived frugally – Beatrice used to joke that her aunt could hold a party for thirty people on one bottle of sherry – and she was a good manager, for she had never had much money of her own. She saved enough to take two extensive overseas trips and used a small inheritance from a friend to buy her own apartment in Cremorne, north of the harbour. Beatrice, on the other hand, had always had the cushion of the Bridges estate, and with her Angus and Robertson salary she was quite well off. But she spent money as fast as she earned it – on clothes, entertaining, books, the house. Enid was far more fiscally sophisticated, in fact more of a modern working woman, making her own financial decisions independently, whereas Beatrice considered such matters irksome, p
referring to let others handle them for her.

  Through the 1960s and into the 1970s Beatrice’s Sydney was being torn down, reshaped, beginning to turn from a shabby Victorian sea-port to a more modern-looking city. Change was literally in the air as the westerlies blew around the raw, gritty dust of demolished buildings. It seemed an appropriate time for Angus and Robertson, that grand old edifice that had stood supreme for the best part of a century, to be challenged by sleeker, more functional publishing companies, all of them of British or American design.

  The first of these was Penguin Books, which had opened a sales office in Melbourne just after the war. In 1961 they started a local publishing operation, intending to produce quality paperbacks by finding good local books to reprint as well as commissioning originals. Brian Stonier was managing director, with Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris as literary advisers. Penguin were challenging A&R in a field that George Ferguson had entered with some reluctance, and indeed the Pacific Books imprint (initially edited by Douglas Stewart) was not proving particularly successful, partly because the titles brought back into print ranged right across A&R’s list without much focus. Judith Wright was disconcerted to find The Generations of Men being publicised at the same time as a book about spiders.1 Pacific Books also looked cheaper than the Australian Penguins, which generally had better quality paper and binding. With the added advantage of the Penguin name and prestige, Penguins sold better than their A&R competitors from the first.