Their Brilliant Careers

by Ryan O'Neill

  On 12 January 1947 McVeigh’s column in the Australian Worker informed his readers that he had been invited to return to the USSR. There he was to be personally honoured by Comrade Stalin with the International Workers’ Award of Literary Glory, for his “Stakhanovite efforts at promoting the cause of socialist realism”. McVeigh flew first class to Indonesia, then Beijing and Vladivostok, where he took a luxury cabin on the Trans-Siberian express, arriving in Moscow on 11 July. A journalist saw him welcomed at Yaroslavsky rail terminal by three stocky men dressed in dark suits, then driven away in a black limousine. McVeigh was never seen again. That same month foreign subscribers to the Soviet Encyclopaedia were sent a slip of paper describing the mean cell volume (MCV) of red blood cells, which they were ordered to paste over the entry for McVeigh, Francis X.

  The final fate of McVeigh remains an enigma, despite the opening of the NKVD archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. No official record of what became of the Australian writer has surfaced, except for one suggestive entry in a partially shredded ledger recovered from the secret police archives, dated January 1947: “File received Sydney Embassy 1 November 1946, and forwarded to Comintern. F.X. McVeigh anonymously denounced as Trotskyite saboteur. Proof attached. To be actioned.” The “proof” of McVeigh’s crimes, whatever it was, has been lost. It is unlikely that the circumstances of McVeigh’s downfall will ever be known with any certainty, but a number of literary historians, including Rachel Deverall and Stephen Pennington, have maintained that the foreign zek (inmate) described in chapter four of the first volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1974) is the Australian writer. In this chapter Solzhenitsyn reproduces the account of a political prisoner who was held at a transit camp in Vorkuta in 1948:

  There is one zek in particular who stays with me. He was red haired, and very thin (as we all were, of course) and utterly lost. He was from Austria or Australia. I forget which. He spoke English and had no Russian, and his hands shook as he offered half his meagre bread ration to anyone who would write a letter for him to Comrade Stalin telling him that there had been a mistake. One of the thieves took him up on his proposal, and the foreigner wept with gratitude when he was handed back his precious scrap of paper with some Russian words scrawled on it. I peered down from my bunk and saw that the thief had written, “Stalin is a goatfucker” five times. When the foreign zek handed the note to the guards he was dragged away, screaming, as the thief roared with laughter. I don’t know what happened to him after that.

  McVeigh’s successor as the Australian Communist Party’s director of literature cleared out his office and destroyed all of his papers, including McVeigh’s prized copy of the 1930 Soviet Literature Yearbook, which contained the photograph of him toasting Comrade Stalin. A replacement copy of the Yearbook was dispatched from Moscow including the same photograph of Stalin and Gorky, but with McVeigh airbrushed out. Yet the censors were careless: if the picture is examined closely, the faint image of McVeigh’s raised right arm can still be seen on the edge of the frame, a ghostly glass of vodka in his hand.

  Rachel Deverall in Paris, February 2005

  (1969–2016)

  If the history of Australian literature teaches us anything, it is that behind every great female writer (Praed, Young, McGinnis, Barnard et al.), there is a man holding her back.

  From notes for the introduction to Deverall’s unfinished Squeaker’s Mates: A History of Australian Women Writers 1800–2000

  RACHEL DEVERALL, LITERARY CRITIC, HISTORIAN AND SCHOLAR, was born in Melbourne on 17 May 1969. She came from a bookish family: her mother, Rainy, was a playwright and author of popular farces including On Words: A Play (1984), a satire on Kangaroulipo; her aunt Polly was an award-winning science-fiction writer; her father, Will, was a mystery critic; and her godmother was the poet Matilda Young. (The poem Young wrote to mark the occasion of Rachel’s christening, “The Lamb”, is considered among the finest of her late style.) As a child, Rachel divided her time between the theatre where rehearsals for her mother’s latest play were taking place and her father’s study at home, where she loved drawing in the margins of the dozens of detective novels that littered the floor. When she was four, her father was commissioned to write a biography of Claudia Gunn, and the family moved to Sydney. On many visits Rachel accompanied her father to “Mysteriosa”, where the elderly writer plied her with macaroons and jelly babies as her father worked in the archives.

  Rachel enjoyed reading and writing, and her first stories were about a young gumshoe called Trudy Tective, who solved mysteries and uncovered secrets, but was always one step behind a shadowy arch-villain known only as the Bearded Man. One real-life secret revealed in 1975 was that Rachel’s grandmother was not dead, as her mother had told her, but in a nursing home. From April 1975 to June 1976 Rainy and Rachel spent an afternoon every month with Vivian Darkbloom, Rainy’s mother and Rachel’s grandmother. Although Vivian did not know who they were, and could not remember them from visit to visit, the old woman was always happy to see Rachel, and would ask her to read aloud from one of the books that lined the shelves in her room. Rachel usually chose one of the Little Viv books to read from, a selection that made the old woman very happy. In late May 1976 Rachel wrote a new book as a present for her grandmother, Little Viv Meets Trudy Tective, but sadly Vivian Darkbloom passed away before their next visit.

  At her death all Darkbloom’s novels, collections of stories and volumes of poetry were left to Rainy, who passed them on to Rachel. It took the girl three years to read them. She laughed at Addison Tiller’s Off Our Homestead (1917), was moved by her grandfather Peter Darkbloom’s Dancing in the Shadows (1920), mystified by Frederick Stratford’s Odysseus (1923) and bored by Francis X. McVeigh’s The Red Flag (1928). Rachel also felt guilty because she could never manage to finish her grandmother’s own novel, Ivy Van Allbine: An Australian Vanity Fair (1919), no matter how often she tried. Her mother had no answer as to why her grandmother owned only a handful of books by women. Rainy did not read many novels herself, and most of Rachel’s father’s mystery novels were also by men. Shortly after completing his biography of Claudia Gunn, he had shocked Rachel by making a bonfire of all Gunn’s books in the garden.

  Rachel’s sense of fairness was outraged by the lack of books by women in her house, and she decided that since she had read only books by Australian men for three years, she would now only read books by Australian women for the same amount of time. She began with the boarding-school novels of Georgina Fairweather, and the series of abridged classics by Naomi Plume, but then pestered her mother to take her to distant second-hand bookshops, where her pocket money purchased dusty copies of novels by Marjorie Barnard, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Catherine Swan, Eleanor Dark and Madeleine White. The three years she was to spend reading work by Australian women lengthened to four, then five. Rachel filled dozens of exercise books with her reflections and observations and by the time she was fifteen, she had developed an excellent working knowledge of Australian women’s writing from 1860 to the present day. Her favourite writer was a contemporary one: Rachel adored the short stories of Lydia McGinnis, and read McGinnis’s first collection, Basilica (1976), over and over again. For her sixteenth birthday she asked her mother to go with her to the house where McGinnis had taken her own life after publication of her last book, Ultimo Thule (1981).

  When she was seventeen, Rachel Deverall went to the University of Sydney to study Australian literature. The course bored her; she had long outgrown Lawson and Tiller, and her lecturer did not appreciate Rachel’s polite interjections when he spoke about the poetry of Matilda Young. Deverall began to skip lectures and tutorials, although her marks remained as impressive as ever, and instead sat in on French classes so that she could at least learn something new. Her interest in the life and work of Lydia McGinnis intensified. The information available on the writer was sparse, and tightly controlled by McGinnis’s second husband and editor, Robert Bush. Deverall read everythi
ng Bush wrote about McGinnis, much of it contradictory, and came to believe that Bush was hiding something about his wife’s work. Her suspicions were further aroused when she read an old account of McGinnis’s death in the Daily Trumpet, which mentioned that her suicide note had been written in purple ink. Deverall knew that McGinnis had an aversion to purple, perhaps because her husband had used that colour of ink when editing her manuscripts. This inconsistency prompted Deverall to investigate further.

  Deverall had always looked older than her years, and carefully made-up and smartly dressed could pass for a young reporter. Under this guise she interviewed McGinnis’s ex-husband, Brian, and the friends McGinnis had made in the Sydney literary scene, none of whom had a good word to say about Robert Bush. After a number of phone calls Deverall managed to secure an interview with Bush himself, claiming it was for a profile in the Sydney Review. During the interview Deverall stole evidence revealing the extent of Bush’s meddling in his wife’s work, and his forging of her suicide note. Deverall handed over McGinnis’s unedited manuscripts to Xanthippe Press, and their publication led to Bush resigning from Berkeley & Hunt. Although officially the university frowned on her theft, Deverall was celebrated by the literary world for her role in Bush’s disgrace. Robert Bush never pressed charges, and from time to time Deverall would wonder how he could have been so careless as to leave a stranger alone in his office with his desk drawers unlocked.

  Deverall completed her degree in 1990 and won a full scholarship to study for a PhD shortly afterwards; her thesis was on the fiction of Lydia McGinnis. Over the next four years Deverall published thirteen articles comparing McGinnis’s original stories with Bush’s edited versions. Her conclusions were unexpected and divisive; Robert Bush’s editing had, in almost every case, substantially improved McGinnis’s work, and None of Them Knew the Colour of the Sky and The City of Fireworks were undoubtedly inferior to the reworked Basilica and Ultimo Thule. Deverall’s judgment came under sustained attack from feminist academics, who accused her of falling under Bush’s spell in the same way that McGinnis had, but Deverall stood by her analysis. After being awarded her doctorate she became a lecturer at the university; her first act was to resurrect and update Matilda Young’s “Australian Women’s Fiction Studies” course, which had been withdrawn after the poet’s death in 1975. As well as Barbara Baynton, Elizabeth Jolley and Helen Garner, Deverall included the work of many critically neglected female writers, including Matilda Young herself, Lydia McGinnis and even Claudia Gunn. Deverall continued to publish critical articles on McGinnis throughout the 1990s, and her revised and expanded doctoral thesis, Excavating the Basilica: The Short Fiction of Lydia McGinnis, was published in 2001. In October of that year, Deverall’s book won the Pennington Prize for Nonfiction, beating a strong field that comprised Truth Goes Walkabout: The Great Aboriginal Lie by Edward Gayle, Kangaroulipo and Beyond: The Experimental Writers of the 1970s by Lazaros Zigomanis and Ordinary People Doing Everyday Things in Commonplace Settings: A History of Australian Short Fiction by the author of this book.

  Deverall straightaway commenced an ambitious new work, with the provisional title Squeaker’s Mates: A History of Australian Women Writers 1800–2000. She spent months in the archives of the National Library of Australia, seeking out rare issues of nineteenth-century journals such as Tegg’s Monthly Magazine, Ha Ha! A Merry Magazine for Australians and Once a Month. During the course of her research she found twenty-nine previously lost short stories by writers including Rosa Praed, Waif Wander and Louisa Atkinson. In the winter of 2003, shortly after her marriage to the author of this book, Deverall was contacted by a colleague at the University of Western Australia, who invited her to examine a cache of obscure nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australian journals that had recently been discovered mouldering in the attic of a pub in Fremantle. Fortunately, the owner of the pub had some inkling of the artistic value of the trove and had donated them to the university rather than throwing them out.

  Deverall flew to Perth in November 2003 and spent two weeks examining and cataloguing the contents of the journals, one of which, The Looking-Glass Annual, did not appear in any databases. This journal was particularly tattered. The cover was missing, as were the first three pages, and Deverall was unable to locate the place or date of publication. On a whim, she took The Looking-Glass Annual back to her hotel to read that night. It contained three short stories Deverall was already familiar with, and a complete novel, The Summer Journey by Wilhelmina Campbell, a writer Deverall, despite her knowledge of nineteenth-century Australian fiction, had never come across before. First, Deverall reread the short stories, so she was half-asleep when she began The Summer Journey, the picaresque tale of Quintus Collins, an Englishman convicted of forgery and transported to Australia in the early nineteenth century. Collins survives and eventually escapes the horrors of the convict system to become a drover, but when his wife, Clara, is killed by a snake he turns to bushranging to support his seven children. He then becomes a swagman, and is eventually reduced to stealing and killing sheep to avoid starvation. In one exciting sequence, after being cornered in a billabong by the police, Collins fakes his own drowning. At the end of the novel, after innumerable adventures, Collins remarries, makes a fortune digging for gold and returns to England, where his relentless egotism threatens to destroy his new family. Finally, Collins is found murdered in a hansom cab, and the novel breaks off before his killer is unmasked.

  Despite her fatigue, Deverall stayed up all night to finish the story. It was well written and entertaining, stuffed with unbelievable incidents and action, and without doubt the most derivative book she had ever read. Campbell’s novel contained elements of Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854), Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1874), Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), Henry Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife” (1892), Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894), Banjo Paterson’s “Waltzing Matilda” (1895), Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life (1903), and dozens of other famous Australian poems, stories and novels from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Initially, Deverall theorised that “Wilhelmina Campbell” was a previously unknown alias of Frederick Stratford, and The Summer Journey was his first, forgotten, published “work”. However, the novel went beyond mere plagiarism; it did not simply copy word for word as Stratford had done, but repurposed a range of sources to create something new. Deverall estimated that the novel must have been written after 1903, and that the short stories that accompanied it, all written in the nineteenth century, were therefore reprints.

  At first light Deverall returned to the university archives and continued her search through the towering piles of yellowed paper until she found the cover and contents page of The Looking-Glass Annual. The publication date presented her with an impossibility: the journal was dated January 1828, fully three years before the publication of the first Australian novel, Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton: A Tale Founded Upon Incidents of Real Occurrence. If this date was correct, then The Summer Journey was not only the first novel to be published in Australia, which was itself a remarkable discovery, but it had also anticipated by decades the work of Marcus Clarke, Henry Lawson and scores of others. After three days closely reading The Summer Journey, Deverall had identified a further one hundred and thirty-two similarities in plot, dialogue, character, symbolism and imagery to the most famous works of Australian literature up to Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930). Still, Deverall could not quite bring herself to accept that almost every classic work of Australian literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been derived from one forgotten novel by an unknown author published in an obscure journal in 1828.

  Despite her eagerness to publish her find, Deverall was persuaded that the next step must be to establish beyond any doubt that The Looking-Glass Annual was genuine. Six months of painstaking enquiries resulted in her finding eight separate references to the Annual in literar
y journals published in 1829 and 1830. A review in Lone Hand in 1830 noted “Miss Campbell’s amusing Summer Journey” while the December 1829 editorial in the Women’s Domestic Helper admonished writers who “journeyed too far into summer, leaving the gentle reader perspiring by the wayside”. Deverall also spent three thousand dollars from the savings account she shared with the author of this book having the ink and paper used in the Annual analysed by a forensic laboratory in Washington, D.C. A comprehensive chemical, physical and organic analysis, including radiocarbon dating, confirmed that The Looking-Glass Annual was published sometime between 1825 and 1835. Deverall’s wildest theory had been proven correct: The Summer Journey was the hidden wellspring of Australian literature, and the greatest Australian writers had all secretly drawn from it.

  Exhilarated by her find, Deverall spent the next four months scouring historical records for biographical information about Wilhelmina Campbell, her labours uncovering only a few scant facts. Campbell was born in Parramatta in 1810. Her father was a forger from Battersea in London, whose death sentence was commuted to transportation to Australia for life, and her mother was a laundress who had been transported for receiving stolen goods. Nothing was known of Campbell’s childhood or education. The Summer Journey was apparently her only publication; at least Deverall could find no others. The only additional record of Campbell’s life was her marriage to a Frenchman, Victor Wernier, in Parramatta on 9 January 1835. With her marriage Wilhelmina Wernier disappeared from historical records, but Deverall did not give up. In late 2004, conscious that she needed to exhaust every avenue before publishing her research, she determined to travel to France to investigate the Wernier family in the hopes of establishing a connection with Wilhelmina. The language posed no problem; she was fluent in French, having studied it informally at university when she was supposed to be attending English lectures. The trip also served as a long-delayed honeymoon for Deverall and the author of this book.