Their Brilliant Careers

by Ryan O'Neill

  the work of a patronising Pom who knows precisely nothing of Australia, and less about Sydney. Mr Watkins should have taken the time to read some of our famous local authors who can tell a good yarn without using too many fancy words. But lacking a firm hand on the tiller, Mr Watkins’s novel drifts away from readability and is by and by lost from view in the straits of pretentiousness.

  By a strange coincidence, directly under the review was an advertisement for Pa and Pete’s Wireless Showcase Hour with an illustration of a grinning, cross-eyed Pete shouting, “Wot a larf!”

  Mercifully, Tiller never knew of his novel’s failure in Australia. In the early hours of 1 February 1929 Sydney Steele returned to his Westminster flat from a cocktail party at his protégé Graham Greene’s house, when there was a telephone call from Tiller’s doctor. The writer had suffered a massive stroke after learning his ill health would delay his return to Australia for a further six months. The doctor told Steele that Tiller had been calling for him all evening. “I can’t see Sydney anymore,” he had raved. “Where is Sydney?” Steele rushed to Tiller’s apartment and was met at the door by the doctor, who informed him the patient was now resting. But when the two men tiptoed into Tiller’s room they found he had somehow got out of bed and dragged himself across the floor to the bookcase. Tiller had died face-down in the opened pages of a large leatherbound book he had pulled from a lower shelf. After they had gently placed the body into bed, Steele glanced at the book on the floor. It was not he that Tiller had been calling for. The pages showed a reproduction of Grace Cossington Smith’s painting of Sydney Harbour, The Curve of the Bridge (1928).

  Tiller’s will directed that he be cremated and his ashes scattered on the waters of Sydney Harbour, but such was the public grief in Australia that the federal government intervened, and the writer’s wishes were ignored. His body was returned to Australia in late July 1929, and he was given a state funeral, attended by the premier of New South Wales and the Australian prime minister. Thousands of Sydneysiders lined the streets to pay their respects. His remains were then taken under military escort to Coolabah and laid to rest in an ornate vault in the town’s small churchyard on 4 August 1929. The Addison Tiller Memorial Committee raised fifteen hundred pounds in just under a year, and two marble sculptures to commemorate Tiller’s life and work were commissioned. The eight-metre-tall figures of Pa and Pete were completed in 1932 and set outside Tiller’s last resting place, where they remain to this day.

  Robert Bush and Lydia McGinnis on their wedding day, 5 August 1976

  (1941–1990)

  Bush’s favourite copyediting symbol: “Delete”

  ROBERT BUSH, EDITOR, WAS BORN IN WOODSTOCK, NEW SOUTH Wales, on 20 July 1941. His father, Herbert, was a butcher and a respected member of the local Masonic lodge, and owned a shop on the main street of the small town. Robert was the youngest of four brothers, all of whom were stocky and dark-haired like their father, while he was frail and willowy like his adoring mother, Mildred. He was a gifted child, able to read and write before he turned five. Robert’s older brothers were not interested in books and took pleasure in tormenting him, encouraged by their father, who would laugh at their pranks. Robert’s mother was too weak to protect him.

  In later years, Robert Bush would edit out his brothers and father from his posthumously published autobiography Bastard Title (2004) by claiming that he was an only child and his mother a widow. Bush’s father never knew what to make of his son. One of Robert’s earliest memories was when he told his father that the sign on the shop window, “BUTCHER’S’”, was grammatically incorrect. Herbert Bush laughed with his customers, who praised the serious little boy for his learning. When Herbert shut up shop that afternoon he took his son into the back yard and beat him with a belt, telling him that no one liked a smartarse.

  Robert curried favour with his brothers by helping them with their schoolwork. He did this even before he started school; by the time he was seven, he was doing all their homework for them, reading their textbooks and writing their essays. The boy developed a talent for forgery; he was able to mimic his brothers’ handwriting perfectly. In return for his help, they stopped beating him and allowed no one else at school to bully him. They could not defend him from the teachers, however, and Robert learned not to correct mistakes a teacher made on the blackboard. Realising that his cleverness only aggravated those around him, Robert stopped raising his hand to answer questions, and was careful to hand in mediocre work. Writing a bad essay took him hours, as he fussed over where to place each spelling mistake and run-on sentence.

  He was fourteen when his next oldest brother left school, and having no need now of his writing skills, all his siblings picked on him once more. Robert observed that while his brothers talked endlessly about girls, none of them had girlfriends. Having just read Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), Robert suggested to his brothers that he write love letters for them, in return for a small payment and their leaving him alone. His brothers were sceptical, but eventually Robert’s sensitive, lyrical letters won them the three most desirable girls in town. Robert gradually charged his brothers more and more for this service, and by the time he was sixteen he had saved enough money to run away from home.

  In the early hours of 17 August 1957 Robert snuck out of his bedroom window with a large holdall. Before leaving town he corrected the sign on his father’s shop with purple paint, and posted several letters. There was one for each of his brothers’ fiancées, written in his brothers’ handwriting, in which they confessed to various acts of sexual deviance Robert had cribbed from Justine (1791). Robert also sent a letter to the Masonic lodge; the contents were never disclosed, but his father was kicked out of the order a few weeks later and his standing in the town never recovered. These were only the first acts of vengeance Robert Bush would take in his personal and professional life; he was known never to forgive a slight.

  It took Bush three days to hitchhike to Sydney, where he found a bedsit in Darlinghurst and worked at a number of odd jobs to support himself. Early in 1958 he secured a position in the mailroom of Berkeley & Hunt, publisher of Claudia Gunn and Alexander Fernsby. His predecessor had been an old man and very slow at his work; Bush soon learned that he could finish his daily tasks by noon. He would spend the rest of the day wandering around the office carrying an unaddressed envelope, eavesdropping on the editors, designers and publicists who worked there. Bush gloried in the peculiar terminology of publishing, confusing his mother in a letter in May 1959 by telling her he was working with widows and orphans amid alleys and gutters.

  Within a few months Bush had assimilated a vast amount of publishing knowledge, but he had been so eager to leave Woodstock that he had missed his school exams, and his lack of formal qualifications precluded him from applying for an editorial position. Finally, fate intervened one evening in late 1961. As Bush was about to leave the office he walked past an editor’s desk and saw there the final proofs of Claudia Gunn’s latest novel, A Cold Day in Helensburgh, which had been signed off and were to go to the printers the following day. Idly, Bush leafed through the manuscript, until page twenty-three, where he came across the following: ‘“Yes, Inspector, the murderer was fortunate,” Arnaaluk ejaculated. “In fact, it was a veritable shit in the dark!”’ Next morning Bush knocked on the door of the publisher, Claude Berkeley, and informed him of the error. The proofs were already on their way to the printer, and Berkeley cancelled the job just in time. Impressed by Bush’s enthusiasm and his knowledge of even the most arcane aspects of the business, Berkeley offered the young man a junior copyediting position, which Bush gratefully accepted.

  The senior copyeditors gave Bush their drudgework, including the proofreading of science textbooks and technical manuals. Bush worked conscientiously and never complained, developing a reputation for reliability and perfectionism. Within a year he had become an editor on the staff, working on novels such as Parade of the Harlequins (1964) by Helen Harkaway (with whom Bush had a brief affair), a
s well as Alexander Fernsby’s The Sydney Trilogy (1963) and short-story collection The Blind Sunrise (1964). One sign of the trust placed in Bush was his being given special responsibility for editing the novels of Claudia Gunn, the source of a large proportion of the company’s profits. Gunn had become more resistant to editing as she grew older, but Bush was able to charm her and, with the publication of A Snowball’s Chance (1964) and the novels that followed, critics noted a marked improvement in the quality of her prose; Gunn’s detective Makittuq Arnaaluk no longer ejaculated every other page, and the holes in her plotting were, if not eliminated, at least made less conspicuous. Gunn dedicated Murder at 32°F (1967) to her editor; it was the only one of Gunn’s numerous books not to feature a dedication to her husband, Quincy.

  Robert Bush was less beloved by other writers, including the biographer Stephen Pennington. Bush was one of four editors who worked on Pennington’s Addison Tiller: Australia’s Chekhov (1963), and he outraged Pennington by demanding, a week before the book went to press, that he cut the 1200-page biography by one-third. Pennington responded by calling on Claude Berkeley to tell him he could not work with “the butcher” Robert Bush. Berkeley, who had Pennington in mind to write a biography of Alexander Fernsby, calmed the writer and assured him he would never have to accede to any cuts he found objectionable. Pennington insisted that this promise be given in writing and Berkeley complied, though he was to rue the day he gave such a guarantee, as volume after volume of Fernsby’s biography emerged over the next four decades. Despite Pennington’s dislike of Bush, he came to appreciate his exceptional abilities, even asking him to edit his massive biography of Fernsby. Bush’s revenge on Pennington was simple: he made sure to leave one, and only one, spelling mistake in the volumes he edited, something Pennington always came across sooner or later, and which drove the biographer to distraction.

  The nickname “the butcher” stuck even as Bush was appointed editor-in-chief in 1968, although no one ever said it to his face. Writers would often emerge in tears from a meeting with him, their novels heavily annotated in his trademark purple ink. Complaints were made to Claude Berkeley about Bush’s arrogance and intrusiveness, but on the one occasion Berkeley mentioned to Bush that he might perhaps be a little less high-handed, the editor threatened to resign and move to a different publishing house, taking Gunn and Fernsby with him. A chastened Berkeley gave him a pay rise; he was keenly aware of Bush’s value to the firm. To further demonstrate his confidence, Berkeley asked Bush to take his place on the fundraising committee for the Sydney Steele Centre, a memorial to the famous writer that was supposed to have been completed by 1966, the centenary of Steele’s birth. Under Bush’s guidance, and despite a seemingly endless number of setbacks, construction on the centre began in June 1968 six miles outside of Hazelbrook, New South Wales, the reputed site of Steele’s demonic bargain.

  Bush was instrumental in shepherding Berkeley & Hunt through the near collapse of the Australian publishing industry after the death of Catherine Swan in 1970. At his suggestion the firm purchased the rights to Addison Tiller’s Pa and Pete stories from the ailing Kookaburra Books, then heavily cut and repackaged them. The collections were a great success when they were released in 1971. Moreover, it was Bush who persuaded science-fiction writer and religious leader Rand Washington to publish The Transvoidist Gospell (1970) with the company, a gamble that paid off when the tract sold in the thousands. Within five years of Bush becoming chief editor, Berkeley & Hunt’s books were making a clean sweep of all Australia’s major literary awards, and sales of foreign publication rights had increased dramatically. Writers who had vowed never again to speak to Bush sheepishly appeared outside his office to implore him to work on their next project.

  In 1973, Berkeley asked Bush to edit a new annual anthology of short fiction to replace the recently defunct Coast to Coast. Bush initially refused, as he was overseeing the final stages of the construction of the Sydney Steele Centre, but when the centre, along with the last two samples of Steele’s handwriting, was destroyed in a freak bushfire in July, he was happy to take on the task. Over two thousand submissions were received for Australian Stories 1974, and Bush spent six months winnowing them down to a shortlist, as well as continuing with his other duties as editor-in-chief. Bush’s selections proved controversial; he rejected stories from Frank Moorhouse, Arthur ruhtrA and Peter Carey, while including a Makittuq Arnaaluk piece from Claudia Gunn and a sketch from Rand Washington. In addition, Murray Bail pulled his story “A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z” from the anthology after Bush demanded the title be changed to “A to Z”. Australian Stories 1974 would be remembered for including the first publication by Sydney author Lydia McGinnis. Her short story “The Cockleshell”, which tells of a family’s disastrous visit to Manly beach, was the only piece in the anthology that Bush published unaltered. In a letter to McGinnis informing her that “The Cockleshell” had been accepted, Bush wrote,“It is as close to perfect as any short story I have read,” and asked if he could see more of her work.

  The publication of “The Cockleshell” in Australian Stories 1974 and, even more significantly, Robert Bush’s encouragement were extremely validating for McGinnis, who had been contemplating giving up writing for some time. She was thirty-three and had been writing seriously for seven years without being published. McGinnis was a dental nurse and had been married to Brian McGinnis, a taxi driver, for four years. They lived in a small apartment in Glebe, the setting of many of McGinnis’s early stories. With a couple of failed attempts at a novel behind her, McGinnis decided to write short fiction after reading Alexander Fernsby’s collection The Blind Sunrise, which had been edited by Robert Bush. “The Cockleshell” was her first story, and following its publication in Australian Stories 1974, McGinnis sent Bush the collection she was working on, None of Them Knew the Colour of the Sky. After reading the manuscript, Bush asked to meet McGinnis in person, and in November 1974 the writer came to Bush’s office at Berkeley & Hunt. Bush told her that he enjoyed the stories and was keen to publish them but felt that they needed some work, and asked if she would be open to editing. McGinnis agreed, and for the rest of the afternoon they discussed her stories and how they might be improved.

  From then on the writer and editor met at least twice a week, sometimes at Bush’s office and sometimes at McGinnis’s home in Glebe. Bush would bring an edited version of one of the stories and the pair would spend hours thrashing out the changes. The first was “The Cockleshell”. McGinnis was well aware of Bush’s reputation for literary butchery, and she leafed through the corrected manuscript nervously. With some relief she saw that the editor had only removed three commas and the last line of the story, a decision McGinnis could see at once improved the piece considerably. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before Bush’s edits became more pronounced. He highlighted eight hundred words to cut from McGinnis’s 4000-word story “Trinity”, leading to an argument that raged on and off for a month, until a compromise of five hundred words was agreed. Discussion of the removal of the word “coffee” from another story lasted for almost five hours. Although McGinnis fought for every syllable of her manuscript, she found herself gradually giving more and more ground to Bush.

  However, Bush’s changes to McGinnis’s favourite piece in the collection, “Great Death Scenes in the Australian Novel”, proved too much for her. He wanted to cut the story in half, including the first and last paragraphs, to change the protagonists’ names from Cassandra and Robert to Kim and Bob, and to alter the title to “Platypus”. In the end McGinnis lost her temper and hurled the story in Bush’s face. The editor left without saying a word. McGinnis attempted to contact him on numerous occasions over the next two weeks, telephoning his office and waiting in the lobby of Berkeley & Hunt for hours at a time. She read and reread the revised version of the story, trying to convince herself that Bush’s edits were changes for the better, until at last she decided that she could live with the new ve
rsion. She sent Bush a letter apologising for her behaviour and asking that they might work together again. Bush relented, and the editing process resumed. Although no other piece in the collection would be changed as extensively as “Great Death Scenes in the Australian Novel”, Bush’s edits were comprehensive, often altering a story’s setting and plot and the names of the characters, as well as cutting hundreds of words from the text.

  The bitter argument over “Great Death Scenes in the Australian Novel” was the first of many that Bush and McGinnis would have over the next few months. On an edited draft of the short story “Nine O’Clock Shadow”, McGinnis angrily crossed out her own name and scribbled “BY ROBERT BUSH”. At different times McGinnis screamed, pleaded, and on one occasion threw an ashtray, cutting Bush above the eye. She told him she didn’t recognise her own book anymore, and that she would be ashamed to have her name on the cover. Bush waited through her outbursts, listening to everything she said; when she had finished he would simply pick up his coat and start to leave. Each time, McGinnis begged him to stay and relented on his changes.

  Throughout 1975 Bush spent much of his time working on McGinnis’s collection. He handed over Claudia Gunn’s final novel, An Icicle for an Icicle, to another editor without informing either Gunn or Berkeley, and Bush had to visit Gunn at “Mysteriosa” in order to mollify the famous author. Berkeley, meanwhile, was unhappy about the amount of time Bush was lavishing on a short-story collection from an unknown writer that would, if they were lucky, sell only six or seven hundred copies. Junior editors in the firm were beginning to complain of a lack of direction, and the publication of Australian Stories 1975 was delayed into mid-1976 because Bush had not had time to read the submissions. In order to save McGinnis the ninety-minute trip to Bush’s office, and Bush the trip to McGinnis’s home, the editor suggested renting a hotel room halfway in between, where they could work all day without interruption from Bush’s staff or McGinnis’s husband. McGinnis agreed to the idea but did not tell Brian, who was already unhappy about how much time she spent writing.