Physical discomfort was bad enough, but Beatrice could set her teeth and endure that. Her greatest fear was not pain but losing her mind; she could not forget her mother’s dementia. She could hardly bear to finish David Malouf ’s novel The Great World, which she was judging for the Miles Franklin Award, after reading its opening description of a dotty old woman ‘likely to say things, and do things too, that you weren’t expecting and could make neither head nor tail of ’.8 She constantly tested her memory on the titles and authors of books, abruptly asking friends and former colleagues such questions as ‘John Tierney wrote The Advancement of Spencer Button, didn’t he?’ She was reassured to find that she had a much better memory for books and writers than most people she knew.
But her body was failing her. However determined she was to manage on her own, this was becoming impossible. Not that Beatrice admitted any such thing: when her family arranged for domestic help in the house she would exhaust herself by getting up early, doing the housework and sweetly sending the cleaner away. But for her to continue living at Folly Point the house would have to be modified extensively, with a bedroom and bathroom put in downstairs – this, with other necessary changes, would be expensive. Everyone was afraid she would fall again, and she clearly needed to move to a facility where she could be looked after.
Naturally Beatrice hated the idea of leaving her home of almost fifty years, but she realised that her physical condition was deteriorating. At about this time she began to give away her possessions, particularly her library. Some books she sold, but mostly she said, ‘Darling, if you want this, you can have it,’ as she handed to friends and relatives modern first editions, books that had belonged to Frederick, Angus and Robertson titles signed by their authors. Soon relatively little was left.9
Peter Bridges arranged for the sale of Folly Point in November 1990 and for the purchase of a unit in Hunters Hill Lodge, a retirement village in an elegant north-west suburb. Beatrice moved the following January. The idea of communal living had appalled her – eating in the dining room with ‘all those common people’ – but once she was settled she found there were compensations. Remaining aloof from her neighbours meant spending a lot of time alone, which was boring, and she began to enter into the life of the place. Hunters Hill Lodge was close to a shopping centre with a good restaurant, so she could still invite people to dinner, even though she did not cook it.
Not long after Beatrice moved to Hunters Hill Aunt Enid, who was well into her nineties, died. She continued to look after ‘dear little Beatrice’ even after death, leaving her niece the money from the sale of her home unit. A delighted Beatrice spent some of it on morale-boosting small luxuries: facials, nail treatments, having her hair done.
She was still a judge of the Miles Franklin Award and her authors, former colleagues and friends were always happy to see her at literary dinners. It was reassuring to find that she continued to be important to the people she valued. And though she sometimes called herself ‘the old girl’ or ‘the old fossil’, she was rather enjoying a new role as a literary resource. Her memories and knowledge of Australian writers and writing were much sought after; ‘Davis, Beatrice’ appeared more and more often in the indexes of Australian literary biographies. However, while she was willing to set the record straight about other writers, she was still uncomfortable with direct questioning about herself. When Anthony Barker interviewed her for One of the First and One of the Finest she complained that he was taking her ‘too seriously’, was impatient with some of his questions – she didn’t always remember events accurately – and when the work was completed in July 1990 she wouldn’t read it.10 The only editorial suggestion she made, true to form, was that the book should be shorter, even though it was only forty-seven pages long.
In February 1992 Beatrice was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters (honoris causa) from her alma mater, the University of Sydney. The degree was presented by the vice-chancellor, Professor D. McNicoll, with Beatrice’s friend Professor Dame Leonie Kramer, the chancellor, presiding. Beatrice sat in a wheelchair, a small, spidery figure, her hair carefully done for the occasion, pearl earrings and makeup perfectly applied, wearing a blue and red long-sleeved dress, her black bag in her lap. She said she could have walked onto the stage to accept her degree, but because she was so tiny the gown would have swamped her. It was an occasion she greatly enjoyed.
‘Sometimes I feel I’d like to go to sleep one night and not wake up,’ Beatrice told Anthony Barker early in 1990. Her wish was granted: she died peacefully during the night of Sunday 24 May 1992.11
The funeral service, conducted at Beatrice’s request by her former colleague Marilyn Stacy, who had changed an editorial career for an ecclesiastic one, was delayed until the following Friday so that John Broadbent, who had been in Belgium when Beatrice died, could return. Friends, authors and former colleagues packed the chapel at Sydney’s Northern Suburbs Crematorium. It was an informal service: Beatrice had instructed Marilyn Stacy, ‘Don’t put too much God into it, darling,’ and Stacy complied.
A few weeks later there was a memorial gathering at the State Library of New South Wales, where Beatrice had so often presented the judges’ report of the Miles Franklin Award. With enormous affection writers, journalists, family and friends spoke of her calm thoughtfulness, her kindness, warmth, wit, her occasional sharpness – and above all her duty to her craft. Beatrice, who shrugged off such things and once said, ‘I’ve been given far more attention than I deserve,’ would have been embarrassed but pleased. She might also have appreciated that a travelling fellowship for editors, jointly funded by the Literature Board and Australian publishers and established in 1991, was named after her.
Beatrice was unique in Australian letters in being able to create her own niche, to invent her job. Before she joined Angus and Robertson, editing had been a schoolteacher’s skill, done on a book-by-book basis without much attempt at consistency. By her own practice and the training of her staff she brought it to the status of a craft, with its own exacting standards. Part of her legacy was the question asked by a generation of editors, ‘What would Beatrice have done?’
She was a commanding presence in Australia’s literary community. Did she long to work in a wider world, did she feel her gifts would have been better appreciated in New York or London? Perhaps. She was a proud Australian, though she doubtless felt Australia needed a fair amount of brushing-up.
Did Beatrice have a vision for Australian literature? Finding the documentary narrative style of much local fiction flat and uninteresting, she was always attentive to writers who went beyond storytelling to explore ways of writing that dominated and transformed their subject matter, who found new ways to describe the experience of being Australian. She gave Thea Astley, Patricia Wrightson and dozens of other writers the astute sympathy and acceptance they needed in developing their own voices, and she did it calmly, self-effacingly and with tact. As a judge of the Miles Franklin Award, she had a great influence on the public view of what constituted good Australian writing – recognising and celebrating the work of novelists who are now considered some of our best.
Had Beatrice possessed good marketing sense she could have been a distinguished publisher, but control of this sort was never what she wanted. According to Geoffrey Dutton, Patrick White nastily referred to her as ‘the bottleneck of Australian literature’: in fact, she was the exact opposite. She was a conduit, a facilitator, making contacts, bringing people together. ‘I had such good conversations in her house,’ said Ruth Park, and her words were echoed by other writers. Beatrice was a true reader, a lover of words and books and good writing, a sometimes ironic appreciator of the quirks of human nature. She once described herself as ‘addicted to Australian literature’. At a time when Australia was a small country that took almost perverse pride in its anti-intellectualism, she affirmed the importance of our writers in every aspect of her working life. Australian literature will always be in her debt.
She had, in th
e end, a rather ambivalent attitude to her position as an editor. While she insisted that her job was to remain invisible, if she hid her light under a bushel she rather liked people to know where that bushel was. ‘Someday,’ she said to Anthony Barker, ‘someone will write a full-length book about me.’
Acknowledgements
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Beatrice’s niece Anne Dowey, who very generously gave me access to a wealth of Davis and Deloitte family material, as well as answering innumerable questions about her aunt. I am grateful to the Literature Fund of the Australia Council for grants that enabled me to research and draft this manuscript. Thanks also to the Council of the State Library of New South Wales for the award of the C.H. Currey Memorial Fellowship in 1996, which enabled me to begin research, and to members of the State Library staff, particularly curator of manuscripts Paul Brunton, and Louise Anemaat, Rosemary Block, Jennifer Broomhead and Judy Nelson; chief librarian Roslyn Follett and the staff of the Fryer Library, University of Queensland; manuscripts librarian Graeme Powell and the staff of the National Library of Australia, Canberra; staff at the La Trobe Library, Melbourne; Michelle Nichols of the Hawkesbury City Library; staff at the Bendigo Library and members of the Bendigo Historical Society. Seminars sponsored by the Research Institute for History and the Social Sciences, University of Sydney, provided stimulating insights into the problems and practice of biography.
Thanks to the following for their invaluable help in research: Anthony Barker, John Curtain, Frances de Groen, Richard Gill, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley, Professor Harry Heseltine, Neil James, Professor Charles Kerr, Susan Lever, Valerie Lawson, Drusilla Modjeska, Meaghan Morris, Craig Munro, Robyn Sinclair, Tom Shapcott.
In the four years it took to write and research this book, many friends and colleagues of Beatrice Davis were kind enough to give up their time in order to answer questions. I should particularly like to mention: Vincentia Anderson, Thea Astley, Anthony Barker, Lyle Blair, Alec Bolton, June Bonser, Peter and Doreen Bridges, John Broadbent, Charles David, Rosemary Dobson, Geoffrey Dutton, Sue Ebury, John Ferguson, Dorothy Fillingham, Elizabeth Fulton, Patrick Gallagher, Anne Godden, Elva Hoy, Elizabeth Hughes, Tom Hungerford, Barbara Ker Wilson, Leonie Kramer, Christopher Koch, Margot Ludovici, Mary Lord, Enid Moon, Frank Moorhouse, Geoff Morley, Ruth Park, Nancy Phelan, Joan Phipson, Jack Radley, Leslie Rees, Elizabeth Riddell, Colin Roderick, Robert Sessions, Ivan Southall, Marilyn Stacy, Marley Stephen, Meg Stewart, Frank Thompson, Judy Wallace, Richard Walsh, Ken Wilder, Elizabeth Wood-Ellem, Patricia Wrightson.
Thanks are also due to Rosemary Creswell, Jane Novak, Robert Sessions, Clare Forster and Craig Munro. To Meredith Rose particular thanks: I do not think this book could have had a better editor.
Finally I wish to thank friends and family, Suzanne Falkiner and my partner John Tuchin.
Notes
Little Sweetheart
1 J.K. Haken, Australian Dictionary of Biography 1891–1939, pp. 237–8.
2 ‘Wyoming’ belonged to Quarton Levitt Deloitte for more than fifty years. The only surviving reminder of the Deloitte name is Deloitte Avenue, a narrow thoroughfare that skirts the park at Birchgrove, running from Louisa Road to Wharf Road.
3 She is called Emily here, of course, to distinguish her from her daughter Beatrice.
The Family Intellectual Becomes an Editor
1 Beatrice’s paternal grandparents both died in 1907: in 1928 Charles’s two brothers and two sisters were still living.
2 Taking shorthand was a skill that never deserted Beatrice: at Angus and Robertson she kept very clear and accurate Pitman notes of phone messages.
3 213B stood roughly on the site of the later Regent Hotel.
4 Many years later this doctor gratified Beatrice enormously by telling her how bitterly he regretted not having married her himself.
5 Vincentia and her husband had four sons, the second of whom, also named Doug, became a well-known journalist and columnist on the Sydney Morning Herald. Beatrice’s place as assistant editor of the Medical Journal of Australia was taken by Dorothy Trernlett, a colleague of hers at school and university. Mervyn Archdall continued to edit the MJA until he retired on 31 August 1957, his seventy-third birthday. He died a week later, on 6 September.
Counter, Desk and Bench: The Story of Angus and Robertson
1 Quoted in A.W. Barker, George Robertson: A Publishing Life in Letters, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1993, p. 14.
2 This story comes from Alec Chisholm’s tribute to George Robertson after his death (Melbourne Argus, 2 September 1933). According to The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, there was no definitive edition of Lawson’s verse until Colin Roderick published a three-volume Collected Verse in 1967–69.
3 Quoted in Barker, op. cit., p. 72. This view – that good grammar and proper speech were supremely important, regardless of context – persisted in Australia for many years, and not just in literature. According to actor Leonard Teale, who was playing the part of an uneducated stockman in a 1950s ABC radio production, producer John Thompson would not allow him to drop aitches and final ‘g’s because, he said, ‘people should not talk like that’.
4 George Robertson wanted his son Douglas to succeed him, but though Douglas worked in the shop for more than twenty years, his heart was not in A&R. He was a skilled builder and carpenter, not a bookseller. Father and son quarrelled seriously in the 1920s and Douglas sold his A&R shares. Their estrangement remained bitter to the end. A descendant of Douglas’s is the composer Ross Edwards. (Source: Anthony Barker, letter to J.K., 12 February 2002.)
‘That Woman’
1 Detailed information about life at A&R in the 1930s comes from J.K. interview with Enid Moon, a proofreader with Halstead for many years who died in her nineties in 1999.
2 Interview B.D. with National Library of Australia, 1977.
3 This, a Davis family story, may well be true. Beatrice owned several works by Percy and Norman Lindsay, and apparently showed this picture to at least one member of her family.
4 Beatrice told her brother John about this many years later.
Fighting Words
1 Between 1938 and 1945 A&R’s yearly production of Australian books of all kinds, including educational titles, was 73 per cent of their total (quoted by George Ferguson in his submission to the British Publishers’ Association UNESCO inquiry in 1954).
2 B.D. to Lawson Glassop, 3 March 1944.
3 Walter Cousins to J.K. Moir, Moir Collection, State Library of Victoria, undated.
4 Walter Cousins to Clive Evatt, 4 February 1945.
5 Lawson Glassop to B.D., 30 November 1943.
6 B.D. to Lawson Glassop, 12 May 1943.
7 This is a bit rich coming from Norman Lindsay, several of whose novels Beatrice turned down on the grounds of poor plotting and inadequate characterisation.
8 Lawson Glassop to B.D., 28 March 1943.
9 Lawson Glassop to B.D., 13 November 1944; B.D. to Lawson Glassop, 27 November 1944; Lawson Glassop to B.D., 1 December 1944.
10 The ‘obscene’ extract is given in full in Fighting Words , edited by Carl Harrison-Ford, published by Lothian in 1986.
11 Lawson Glassop to Walter Cousins, 9 June 1946.
12 ‘Boyd v Angus and Robertson Ltd Judgement’ in Lawson Glassop file, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
13 Dead Men Rising was not published in Australia until 1969, when ironically A&R brought it out as part of their paperback Australian Classics series.
14 For more details about this competition, which was an important one in its day, see the chapter on Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland.
15 Interview Tom Hungerford with J.K., 27 October 1998.
‘We Must Remain the Literary Hub of Australia’
1 B.D. to Lawson Glassop, 12 May 1944.
2 Beatrice’s first assistant was the young university student Nuri Mas, who stayed less than a year. She later became a journalist and writer for children.
&nb
sp; 3 Interview B.D. with National Library of Australia, 1977.
4 Douglas Stewart, Norman Lindsay: A Personal Memoir, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1975, p. 32.
5 Norman Lindsay to B.D., 1944, undated.
Living on the Edge: Ernestine Hill
1 B.D. draft blurb for The Territory in Hill file, Angus and Robertson collection, Mitchell Library; Australian Dictionary of Biography, ‘Hill, Mary Ernestine’, Margaret R. Bonnin and Nancy Brown, at
2 Notes by Rene Foster in the Ernestine Hill papers, Fryer Library, University of Queensland.
3 Walter Cousins to Alec Chisholm, 25 November 1941.
4 Ernestine Hill, The Territory, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1951, p. 1.
5 Ernestine Hill to B.D., 22 June 1948; B.D. to Ernestine Hill, 13 July 1948.
6 Ernestine Hill to B.D., 20 December 1946.
7 Ernestine Hill to B.D., 14 May 1948.
8 B.D. to Ernestine Hill, 15 March 1949.
9 Ernestine Hill to B.D., 22 March 1949.
10 Ernestine Hill to B.D., 30 July 1949.
11 Ernestine Hill to B.D., 17 June 1950.
12 Ernestine Hill to B.D., 23 April 1951.
13 Quoted in A&R publicity material of September 1952 for a proposed second edition of The Territory.
14 B.D. to Henrietta Drake-Brockman, 21 June 1950.
15 Fragment, May 1955, p. 6.
16 Ernestine Hill to B.D., undated, 1957.
17 Henrietta Drake-Brockman to B.D., 21 June 1950.
18 B.D. to Robert Hill, 17 August 1960.
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