A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  Beatrice soon discovered that Richard Walsh needed to be involved in every aspect of A&R, including the running of the editorial department. He decided to change A&R’s system of reporting on manuscripts. Instead of having two readers report on every one that came in, he set up a ‘poison-tasting’ system, with one person responsible for looking through all the unsolicited manuscripts, culling those considered unsuitable and sending them straight back with rejection letters. He told Abernethy, Beatrice, Douglas Stewart and the other editors that they would no longer evaluate all the fiction that came in, that a junior editor or clerical assistant would do the initial sorting: ‘I want my senior editors editing manuscripts, not reading crap,’ he said bluntly. Beatrice took this as a slap in the face. Reading bad manuscripts and writing reports about them was not her favourite occupation, but she did not like losing part of the job she had always done.

  More infuriating still she found the types of books and authors being encouraged by ‘the boy publisher’, as she disdainfully called her new boss. Walsh’s view was essentially the same as that of his contemporary, the writer and publisher Michael Wilding, who wrote:

  We knew there was good prose around that wasn’t surfacing in the quarterlies or the overground publishing houses … no more formula bush tales, no more restrictions to the beginning-middle-end story, no more preconceptions about a well-rounded tale … we wanted to provide space for the varieties of stories that weren’t being catered for.13

  It was these new writers – Wilding, Frank Moorhouse, Kate Jennings, Bob Adamson, Pamela Brown – Richard Walsh was after. They were not the authors Beatrice understood or wanted. She considered Frank Moorhouse’s short-story collection The Americans, Baby (1972) banal, the treatment of sex clinical and vulgar. She was much more comfortable with Dal Stivens’s A Horse of Air than with David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner; had more common ground with Hal Porter’s artfully crafted novel The Right Thing than the harsh, confronting collection of antiwar poetry We Took Their Orders and Are Dead.

  Walsh was also making wide-ranging changes in the presentation of A&R’s books. The Pacific Books imprint was abandoned; paperbacks were put into either A&R Classics (often backlist titles whose paperback rights had been reclaimed from other publishers) or the much more commercial Arkon. Tie-ins – books published on the back of a film or TV series – were introduced, often profitably. The paperback of My Brilliant Career with the film’s stars, Sam Neill and Judy Davis, on the cover might have helped generate money for the Franklin estate and the Miles Franklin Award, but Beatrice considered that Richard Walsh took the tie-in to new depths. Nothing could have been further from the Angus and Robertson she had known than the novelisation of the raunchy TV soap opera Number 96, or a re-release of Norman Lindsay’s novel The Cousin from Fiji with a voluptuous actress from the ABC-TV adaptation on the cover.

  The days when Colin Simpson, Frank Clune and Ion Idriess had been the mainstays of the non-fiction list had long gone. Clune’s books slipped out of print; one or two Idriess titles were kept for the sake of the Australiana boom in the wake of the Captain Cook bicentenary, but the market was disappearing. ‘It was a new audience out there,’ said Richard Walsh years later. ‘Australian readers were younger, becoming more sophisticated. They wanted Frank Moorhouse, not Frank Clune.’14 Drawing on his Nation Review and magazine background, Walsh began to commission books from journalists and columnists – ‘newspaper’ not ‘book’ people – and to produce their work for the mass market. These cheap paperbacks were not meant to last but to supplement what people were reading in the newspapers, and they were instantly popular.

  Beatrice never troubled to hide her feelings about her new boss. ‘Despite Bartonry and Walshism we remain A&R,’ was her comment to Hal Porter, striking her usual note of fortitude under extreme difficulty.15 Very quietly and politely, with a flick of ridicule or a disdainfully raised eyebrow, she resisted almost everything Walsh was doing. He found this infuriating: he would much rather have had a head-on argument than be forced to contend with these ladylike tactics. Beatrice’s ‘extraordinarily genteel’ persona irritated him; her squeamish approach to graphic sex in print he found hypocritical considering her own history. ‘Her belief was that you could do what you liked, but you didn’t talk about it, and you didn’t write about it either, and that was fine,’ he said.16

  Of course the conflict between Walsh and Beatrice involved more than generationally opposed attitudes to sex in print, differences in political consciousness or tastes in literature. Scathing about certain authors and their work Beatrice often was, but her whole professional life had expressed her sense of stewardship about good writing, her belief that her responsibility as an editor involved maintaining standards of writing and of authorship. Her sense of authority in Angus and Robertson and within the wider literary community had derived from this role of gatekeeper, being the person who knew what was ‘good’. Now she had to contend with someone who, as she saw it, encouraged crudity above craft, dismissing her notions of quality in writing or publishing as old-fashioned or irrelevant. It was partly the difference between a woman who took the primacy of the written word for granted, who had been a teenager before radio came to Australia and a mature adult before television began and who therefore considered mass media little more than interesting and occasionally useful diversions, and a young man for whom books, though vitally important, were part of a larger media mix, with television, newspapers, the movies, even cartoons helping to influence opinion.

  In that era of impatient change that was the early 1970s the antagonism between Beatrice Davis and Richard Walsh was a microcosm of the conflict being played out in boardrooms, workplaces, educational institutions – even families – throughout Australia. Beatrice looked at Walsh and saw a shaggy-haired young man who thought he knew it all; Walsh looked at Beatrice and saw the purse-lipped, conservative representative of a bygone generation.

  It must be said that on a day-to-day level Beatrice was not the only member of the staff who found Walsh difficult to deal with. As another editor remarked, even when you agreed with what he was doing, there was something about him that really annoyed you. Often making decisions on the run, doing too much at once, Walsh appeared to have no time for people’s feelings or sensitivities. There is no way he could have changed A&R as much as he did without arousing antagonism, of course, but his decisiveness could look like cockiness; his anxiety, interventionist style and inability to delegate seemed presumptuous interference, and his brusque energy came across as a lack of respect for the experience and expertise of others.

  The staff ’s hostility became so obvious and upsetting that Walsh considered resigning: when he was offered a job in television he almost took it. But partly from pure stubbornness, he decided to stick with A&R. The staff were often as depressed as he was, though for different reasons; many people felt that with the advent of Barton the heart had gone out of the place. Beatrice and her editors sometimes sat in her office and talked about the good old days, always ending with the same question: How had this been allowed to happen? ‘I suppose A&R was an idyllic kind of publishing ethos that couldn’t go on forever,’ said Beatrice’s editorial colleague Marilyn Stacy years later. ‘We were in a time warp, really.’17

  Then, late in 1972, when morale was at its lowest, the company suffered another heavy blow. For months John Abernethy had been under severe stress, working too hard, drinking too much, trying to deal not only with a huge workload but with a difficult personal life. Shortly before Christmas he went on leave, checking himself into the Langton Clinic, a Sydney drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility, to dry himself out. A few days later, he suffered a heart attack and died there.

  Everybody was appalled: Abernethy was only in his forties. His death was particularly shattering for Richard Walsh, who had lost his only ally. Walsh was so upset that one or two of the editors wondered whether he felt partially responsible for Abernethy’s death by working him so hard. It was a
very bad time.

  After Abernethy’s death Walsh became head of the general books division as well as managing director, and the conflict between him and Beatrice intensified. She drew her own editorial staff around her, including those now working from home such as Elisabeth Hughes and Nan McDonald, both of whom had developed health problems (Nan had cancer). To Walsh, as to Abernethy before him, Beatrice’s editorial department was an implacably ladylike women’s club. Her editors were always polite enough but their animosity was constant. As well as his other responsibilities Walsh liked editing books, especially the racier titles he was then commissioning. The editorial staff never cared for these, and Beatrice in particular found Walsh’s assumption of the editorial role intensely annoying. She let her friends in the literary community know that in her opinion A&R had gone to the dogs, that despite all her efforts standards of editing and publishing had slipped. This was not like Beatrice. During the Burns business she had been tight-lipped about internal company matters, but now she probably felt that this was no longer the company to which she had given such loyalty. The word spread that Walsh was an immature young man on a learning curve who was doing a great deal of damage to little purpose.

  Walsh was furious. With her formidable contacts and her ability to patronise him, Beatrice was white-anting him at every turn, publicly as well as privately. ‘It was like working with a prim headmistress who permanently disapproved,’ he said years later. ‘I’d been through that – had a fairly tough time at school as a matter of fact – and I no longer needed to go off to a place of work each day where there was a senior employee who disapproved of me.’18 In his view Beatrice had never come to terms with A&R’s need to make money and she wasn’t trying to attract new authors; in effect, she was fighting a rearguard action during a taste revolution. Walsh wanted to employ editors more in tune with his ambitions for the company and he felt that Beatrice was blocking him.

  Late in February 1973 Richard Walsh called Beatrice into his office. He suggested she become a consultant rather than a full-time staff member, being paid a certain amount per annum to work from home editing the books of ‘her’ A&R authors. An affronted Beatrice refused point blank. Walsh then told her he had no alternative: Angus and Robertson would have to let her go.

  Beatrice was never one to display emotion, not even about being fired. ‘I’m not surprised,’ she said calmly – and given the situation between her and Walsh, this was probably true. ‘I don’t want you to go tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Just come back and tell me when you’ve made other arrangements and we’ll talk about it.’ Walsh knew Beatrice had no superannuation, and believing she was not in a good financial position he offered her an ex gratia payment. Though not ungenerous, it was certainly not commensurate with her thirty-six years at A&R.19

  When the word spread that Beatrice had been dismissed, and callously, according to popular opinion, most people were shocked. They had heard of similar ruthless sackings in the US, but this was the first time such a thing had happened in Australian publishing. The Australian Society of Authors wrote that Beatrice was ‘irreplaceable’; some of her longtime authors, including Thea Astley and Hal Porter, announced that they were leaving Angus and Robertson out of loyalty to her. ‘The mythology about Beatrice was among the authors, certainly not in house by that time,’ said Richard Walsh. ‘She did have a lot of charisma, and while she was there she was very much an icon. But the new authors we were bringing on couldn’t relate to her.’20

  Nan McDonald, Elisabeth Hughes and John Tranter (who had been at A&R only a matter of months as their Singapore-based education editor) were dismissed at the same time as Beatrice.21 Douglas Stewart put in his resignation soon afterwards, and others left as well. ‘Even the tea-lady was retrenched,’ wrote Anthony Barker, who resigned at the end of 1973. ‘She had left in fine style, demanding a bunch of long-stemmed roses from Richard Walsh – and getting them – and then refusing to come out of her kitchen when the party in her honour was being held.’22

  Beatrice left Angus and Robertson at the end of April 1973. She was sixty-four. ‘A bit of a shock (though I hope I muffled this up) to find you’re not wanted,’ she told Xavier Herbert months later.23 She didn’t complain about what had happened but instead took a positive attitude, speaking to friends and family of her future plans: she could catch up on reading, it was a good time for an overseas trip, she could take Dick Jeune, now in his eighties, on a European holiday. She was not destitute. But some of those who knew her well believe that she never really recovered from being sacked from the company she had served so loyally for thirty-six years.

  PART 5

  1973–1992

  Folly Point and Hunters Hill

  ‘I Thought You Needed Me Most’

  In March 1973 the senior publishing staff of Thomas Nelson (Australia) Ltd – managing director Al Knight, publisher Anne Godden, senior editor Sue Ebury – heard that Beatrice had been fired from Angus and Robertson and was soon to leave. Like almost everybody in the literary community, they were appalled. They also saw Beatrice’s dismissal as an opportunity.

  Nelson, whose Australian office was in Melbourne, were at a crucial stage of development. Like several other English-based publishers, they had established a small sales presence in Australia many years before, chiefly to sell educational books. They had begun publishing for the local educational market in the mid-1960s and were now ready to expand into general publishing. They needed a Sydney-based editor with good contacts, someone who knew how to build a list, whose reputation would bring prestigious authors to Nelson. Al Knight lost no time in offering Beatrice the job.

  Nelson’s was not the only offer Beatrice received, but it was the one that suited her best. She would be given a regular salary, not a contract, so her finances – always a concern for a woman who tended to let money slip through her fingers – would remain secure. Al Knight had proposed she work at home, so Folly Point would effectively become Nelson’s Sydney headquarters. Beatrice could work at a desk in her study, a pleasant room with a porthole window that faced the harbour. After the past few years at Angus and Robertson, she must have been relieved at the prospect of simply doing her job, maintaining her literary contacts, without having to bother about office politics. She must also have been pleased that Al Knight, a Canadian publisher whom she did not know, had sought her out, that he and Anne Godden admired and respected her work enough to want her. Characteristically, she expressed none of these feelings to her new employers. ‘I came to Nelson because I thought you needed me most,’ she told Anne Godden. Shaken by events at A&R she might have been, but she was a woman who knew her own worth.

  Beatrice did not start at Nelson immediately but took almost a year off. Now was the time for the visit to Europe she felt she owed herself. She had not been out of Australia since her anxious trip in the early 1950s, when she had been on unpaid leave, spending as little as possible, trying to make contacts for Angus and Robertson and seething at British condescension. Now she could splurge some of her severance pay, knowing she had a regular salary to look forward to, so this trip would be very different. This time she wanted to go ‘with Dick (just 87) under my right arm while I organise travel and things with my left,’ she told Xavier Herbert.1

  While she was away, several of her friends and former authors got together to decide how best to commemorate her years at Angus and Robertson and her contribution to Australian literature. They decided on a testimonial volume, and Colin Simpson set about collecting contributions from eighty Australian authors – writers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, as far as possible covering the range of her work at Angus and Robertson. Bound in dark blue cloth with ‘A Tribute to Beatrice Davis’ lettered in gold on the cover, the book, now in the State Library of New South Wales, is a fascinating record of Beatrice’s editorial career. It bears out the fact that, like most editors, she probably spent more time editing non-fiction of various kinds than fiction. Among the contributors were anthropologist
A.P. Elkin, Ion Idriess (‘Our Favourite Editor, We of the Pen and Brush, salute thee!’); Douglas M. Barrie, author of The Australian Blood Horse, the 1956 Australian Book of the Year known to Beatrice’s staff as The Australian Bloody Horse; H.G. Belschner, who wrote one of A&R’s most successful books, Sheep Management and Diseases (it sold for a guinea and, this being the price of one sheep at the time, was a bargain). Also a successful author was Helen M. Cox, author of The Hostess Cookbook , edited by Beatrice in 1949 and still in print twenty-three years later; her book probably stood second only to A&R’s Commonsense Cookery Book on whose back, as George Ferguson once pointed out, much of A&R’s fiction and poetry had been published. Beatrice enjoyed editing cookery books – the order and precision of ingredients and methods appealed to her – though she often had arguments with the reps, usually male, who could never see why anybody would need more than one.

  The book of tributes also gives a range of reactions to Beatrice’s job as editor. Some of her authors thought of her as a strict but fair English teacher. Joan Phipson frankly admitted to being terrified of Beatrice when she first met her, hoping to meet the editor’s exacting standards. Like several other contributors, Tom Hungerford provided a variation on the idea of the iron fist in a velvet glove: ‘So quiet was she, so self-deprecating and humorous that even after 20 years I can’t believe she was ever an editor,’ he wrote. Cyril Pearl, whose Morrison of Peking A&R had published in 1967, added a witty comment:

  To Beatrice Davis

  Rara avis

  Whose counsel, tempered with a smile

  Helped many a lame writer over his style.

  Some of the most thoughtful assessments of Beatrice’s career came, predictably, from her A&R colleagues. Douglas Stewart wrote: