Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  She was twenty-six years old and she was right to go.

  PART II

  AMERICA

  1906–1915

  5

  AMONG THE ‘MURKANS’: 1906–1911

  I guess this is the place for me.1

  Miles Franklin was one of 162 passengers aboard the RMS Ventura when it steamed out through Sydney Heads for San Francisco on the afternoon of 9 April 1906. Advertised as a ‘magnificent new twin screw ship’, the 6200-ton Ventura would call at Auckland, Pago Pago and Honolulu. The ad offered travellers an enjoyable experience among interesting up-to-date people, with great scenery and cheap through-fares to England. Fares to San Francisco ranged from £16 to £40, and the voyage normally took twenty-one days.2

  Like Vida Goldstein, who four years earlier had travelled (also alone) to the United States on a sister ship, the Sierra, to represent Australasia at the inaugural International Woman Suffrage Conference in Washington, Miles had trouble with the ship’s vibrations at first, but according to a postcard to Linda from Auckland, she soon settled down. By then she had met ‘a nice girl’, Edith Jones (‘Jonesie’), an Adventist nurse from Sydney. Edwin Bridle received a letter from Auckland, and it seems there were more cards and letters posted en route; but apart from that early postcard to Linda, the only item to survive is a snapshot of a group of young men and women sitting on the ship’s deck, with Miles hanging onto her hat and looking distinctly queasy. In later correspondence with Jonesie, Miles portrayed herself as ‘a rotten sailor’. She also mentioned several young men on the Ventura. Allan Levick, sometimes said to have been a resident of Tumut, was one. Another was a journalist (and later a Queensland politician) named Ryan, who rang when All That Swagger appeared in 1936 and insisted he had proposed to her on board, though she could not recall it. More memorable was Oscar Unmack, a New York insurance agent who sent Miles the snapshot and remained in touch until 1912.3

  For Miles, Honolulu was a beautiful locale — ‘a place of sunshine and flowers’, as Vida Goldstein described it — but the Ventura arrived there to appalling news. As Miles reported in an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 23 June 1906, when the ship drew in, locals shouted news of the San Francisco earthquake six days earlier (18 April 1906), in which at least 1000 people were said to have been killed and the great city wrecked. The news cast gloom ‘on the scented day’; many were distraught, and extra coal was taken on to hasten the Ventura through the six days it would take to reach its destination.4

  Miles’s first glimpse of mainland America on the morning of 1 May 1906 could not have been more dramatic. In the aftermath of the earthquake had come a great fire, and at first light the once beautiful west-coast city was obscured by mist and smoke. With daylight, the extent of the devastation became apparent: the city ‘looked like a series of great rubbish tips cut out in squares where the streets had been, and from it all arose the odour of a great burning’.5

  The immediate dilemma for arriving passengers that morning in May 1906 was how to find their friends. Miles’s contact was Miss Carrie Whelan, a friend of the New York suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, and, through her, of Vida Goldstein. In later life Miles thought of Carrie Whelan as ‘my first American friend’, and in affectionate letters to Carrie written from 1929 to 1937 she showed she never forgot her, nor her sister Ella. With reason. Ella chartered a tug to get Miles off the Ventura. It was Miles’s first encounter with confident American women and the national ‘can do’ attitude. ‘Your sister opened up a whole new world,’ she wrote to Carrie twenty years later.6

  The address Miles had for Carrie Whelan was in central San Francisco: 307 Kohl Building, on the north-east corner of California and Montgomery streets, a site of great devastation. The Whelans had relocated to 1217 6th Avenue, East Oakland, where Miles advised folks back home to send her letters; and they not only took her in but Jonesie as well. Thirty years later ‘Jonesie’, who returned to Australia in 1911, still remembered their kindness to two lonely girls.7

  Miles was not planning to stay away for very long. Detail is lacking, maybe deliberately so, but her main aim undoubtedly was to get more of her work published — as we have seen, plenty had accumulated — and even allowing for evasions and prevarications in letters to Edwin Bridle, it is obvious from his replies that she meant to return quite soon. Sometimes it seems she hoped to be back in Australia by year’s end; and until his very last extant letter of 20 March 1907, Edwin Bridle was hoping she would soon fulfil her mission and return to become his bride.

  Return was contingent on literary success. Her first objective was New York: the address she gave to Ventura shipmate Oscar Unmack was Carrie Chapman Catt’s, and by September Edwin (rightly) thought she was on her way there. If she didn’t make it in New York, there was always London (perhaps via the Ventura’s offer of ‘cheap through fares to England’). Sometimes Germany was mentioned, but that was early on, and somehow it never eventuated. The imperative was to get more of her work out wherever she could find a suitable publisher. Only in that way could she escape the tyranny of the second-book syndrome, which all writers must suffer.8

  Miles left San Francisco for the east coast some time in late August. The railroad route took her first to Salt Lake City, where she worked briefly at the Kenyon Hotel. She thought it ‘a lovely city’, and the Kenyon was ‘then the best hotel’. By 1 September she was working at the Hotel Colorado, Glenwood Springs. She had a great time in Colorado; in fact, the trip to the east left her with some of her most exuberant memories.9

  It sometimes seems more men proposed to Miles than to Elizabeth I of England. Linda told her she was a naughty girl to leave so many broken hearts behind her. But it was too bad for the latest would-bes, as for those who had gone before: at this stage it was the American people, not the male component in particular, who excited her. Recalling also the Santa Fe crossing of the Rockies, Miles wrote: ‘Heaven can offer nothing more satisfying and exciting, and the people! All ranks, from the rich and cultured down to the workers, everywhere I went, I used to say I had only to present myself and the Americans did all the rest, and adopted me and kept me in cotton wool.’10

  The catch was, she thought in retrospect, that she lacked the acquisitive impulse. ‘If only I had had the qualities to acquire and be on the make what a success I could have been.’ Maybe she was already in love with America. Aged seventy-four, she could still say, ‘I love the beautiful land & its people forever, and in eternity if there is identity there . . .’11

  American writer Jack London had commented that Miles set herself ‘a big adventure’ playing ‘Mary Ann’ in the United States. According to ‘Concerning Helps’, which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 13 April 1907, she spent her first nine months in America studying the servant question. Her experience provided her with material for what seems to be her first American publication, ‘No Dignity in Domestic Service’, by ‘Mary Anne’, published on 14 April 1907 in the Chicago Sunday Tribune.

  Miles reached Chicago some time in October 1906, during unseasonal snow. It is not immediately obvious why Chicago should have been more than a stopping point, much less how Miles came to stay there for the next nine years. Although it already occupied a significant place in the American imagination, Chicago was not then thought of as a literary magnet. Quite the reverse. By the late nineteenth century it had replaced industrial Britain’s Manchester in urban iconography as the most shocking city in the world, due to its phenomenal growth, its industrial pollution and its robber barons, who exploited a largely immigrant work force remorselessly. Its climate was unattractive to say the least, not only in the winter, when the place was ‘dreary with blackened, bedraggled snow’, as Miles would later describe it, but much of the time. Situated on the south-western edge of Lake Michigan, Chicago was not called ‘the windy city’ for nothing.12

  An adequate explanation for Miles’s stay in Chicago goes well beyond the fact that it was the next major city on the rail route east. When they learned th
at Carrie Chapman Catt, Miles’s contact in New York, had gone to Europe for a long stay, Miles’s Californian friends contacted Jane Addams at Hull House, on Halstead Street, Chicago. Hull House, a ‘social settlement’ house founded in 1889 by Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in the heart of the Stockyard district as a means of bridging the chasms of class in Chicago, was by then one of the most influential sites of social reform in America. ‘Social settlement’ was a late-Victorian movement whereby better off people settled in poor areas to improve urban living conditions and promote social cohesion through educational and like facilities. At Hull House, Miles immediately encountered the progressive side of the city. Chicago would become Miles Franklin’s university.13

  She found lodgings with Miss Stout, a dressmaker, at 268 South Wood Street in the inner west, then nearby with Miss Staller, at 1505 Edgecomb Road. Later in life, Miles forgot about these brief stays, recalling only that when she first went to Chicago, she and Alice Henry lived at 71 Park Avenue, the inner north-west residence of Josephine E. Young, a graduate of the Chicago Women’s Hospital Medical College, with links to urban reform. It was to remain Miles’s address until late 1907.14

  Alice Henry, a distinguished-looking Melbourne journalist in her late forties, who had been using a modest inheritance to visit England and America lecturing on the British suffragettes and social legislation in Australia as she went, arrived in Chicago a month or so before Miles. She had been invited there by Jane Addams and the Progressivist Lloyd family to lecture in the cause of municipal reform, and was staying at Hull House. Apparently Miles and Alice had not met before, as Alice did not recognise the name ‘Miss Franklin’ to begin with; but on realising it was ‘merely Miles’, as Miles reported in a letter to the Melbourne Book Lover, it was all jolly comradeship, and ‘she annexed me at once’. Since Miss Henry had ‘a wide circle of very delightful friends’ and was much in demand as a speaker, to be taken under her wing was quite an experience: ‘there was a tremendous crowd of vital mid-westerners in those days’, Miles found. And they in turn took to Miles, whose ‘initiative’ and ‘easy adaptability’ (Alice Henry’s words) would make her ‘a valuable addition’ to reform circles.15

  Miles Franklin with her friend and colleague Melbourne-born journalist and labour reformer Alice Henry, in Chicago, 1914. (State Library of Victoria, J. K. Moir Collection, Box 32/6 (c))

  It has been suggested that Miles worked in a department store in Chicago, which may be so, though she never wrote directly about shop work, for all that it is roundly condemned as exploitative in her American novels. The literary and other evidence suggests that if she did, it was not at the counter but as a clerk. In The Net of Circumstance, the only novel from her Chicago years published (pseudonymously) in her lifetime, Constance Roberts, the ‘New Woman’ heroine, newly arrived in Chicago from the rural mid-west in hope of a different, more cultured life, first takes a course in book-keeping and stenography. She then obtains a job in ‘a well-ordered business house’ and subsequently works for a while for a relief aid society.16

  If the story of Constance Roberts is any guide, it was during these early years that Miles Franklin learned the office skills that would enable her to earn a living in coming decades. Too little evidence survives to say when she took up typing, but her first known play, signed and dated August 1908, is in typescript; and her shorthand, which she does not mention until 1916 and which remained impenetrable until the 1980s, may date from this time as well. Even so, it was social inquiry, not clerical work, that attracted her. In this she was doubtless encouraged by Alice Henry, who had been speedily recruited to serve as office secretary to the Chicago branch of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), and not long after that became editor of the league’s section in the Chicago Federation of Labor’s monthly journal Union Labor Advocate. In a letter to the Book Lover published in September 1907 Miles said she was in perfect health and getting to the bottom of social evils by studying ‘the terrifying work dens of Chicago’, eliciting an editorial comment that she had given no sign yet of return. It was thought she would see the east coast, and perhaps visit England, before she did.17

  Suddenly, from Australia, came tragic news. On 30 August 1907 Susannah Franklin wrote from Penrith to her dearest Stella that Linda had died of pneumonia on 24 August, nine days after reaching her new home at Dalveen, near Warwick in southern Queensland. Having ‘suffered so’ since her baby – Edward John Mervyn – was born, Linda had often wished to die and be free of pain, and had died quietly ‘in a strange land’. Both John and Susannah Franklin had been with her. Now they were back at Penrith for a clearing-out sale.18

  Miles was devastated. She could not have known from Linda’s letters how bad she was. In them Linda had worried more about the hard time her sister was having than herself. Now Miles had lost her only surviving sister and her best friend. Furthermore, business problems had forced her parents to leave Penrith, and they were now homeless. Susannah was obliged to return to Tumut, while John Franklin became a day labourer again, in Queensland and elsewhere.19

  In the following weeks, alone in Chicago, Miles had something like a nervous breakdown, from which she was still suffering several months later. Back home her elders worried about her. Evidently the concern was justified, and Miles was unwell. Many years later, she recalled being visited by Alice Henry in Passavant Hospital (now Northwestern Memorial Hospital) ‘when the news of my last sister’s death came’.20

  How long she was in hospital is undocumented, but it was Alice Henry who came to the rescue. In a postcard to her mother from Winnetka, Illinois, dated 14 November 1907, the young invalid reported that she would not be fit to work for months, and that she was getting ‘jolly sick of it’. The postcard identifies ‘Wayside’ on the shore of Lake Michigan, thirty kilometres north of Chicago, as the home of the Lloyd family, where the previous Saturday Miss Henry had taken her to recuperate. In her biography of Henry Demarest Lloyd, who established ‘Wayside’ as a family home and as a place of both repose and stimulus for like-minded people, his sister Caro described it as ‘part of a social settlement’:

  Under its roof was usually found someone wounded in body or soul, some outsider with no claim of friendship or kinship . . . Now it was some lonely self-supporting woman, now an overworked mother . . . now some young man away from home for the first time . . . ‘A bit of nineteenth-century heaven,’ a friend described it.21

  Miles Franklin was homesick as well as heartsick. An unpublished story, ‘The Old House on the Corner’, subtitled ‘Among the “Murkans”’, with its bumptious young Australian hero, Jack Sutherland, opens with Fourth of July celebrations similar to those reported in the Book Lover in September 1907, and the new Commonwealth of Australia flag flying alongside the Stars and Stripes at his grandparents’ abode in Chicago. It was probably written in 1910, but was never finished — it peters out into a series of drafts, and the romantic interest is undeveloped.22

  As Miles gradually regained her equilibrium, Alice Henry led her into the women’s trade union movement. Shortly before she went to Winnetka that November, Margaret Dreier Robins, recently elected president of the National Women’s Trade Union League of America (NWTUL), had written inviting Miles to become her personal secretary when she was well enough to undertake the duties (which she was assured would not be very onerous at first). The charismatic Mrs Robins, who was a wealthy woman in her own right, offered a small salary of $12 a week. As president of the Chicago branch of the league as well as national president, she needed help, regardless of the league’s capacity to pay; and as Alice Henry once remarked, Mrs Robins had the knack of picking people whose prior experience would be useful. She probably heard from Alice Henry of the writing skills that Miles would bring to the job, and knew of her empathy with working women, as evinced by the domestic service article in the Chicago Sunday Tribune. Miles in turn was keen to begin.23 She began work on 1 January 1908.

  So it was that Miles Franklin stayed on in Chicago. She was twenty-
eight and had a more or less regular job at last.

  A few handwritten letters to Margaret Robins, along with the pages of the Union Labor Advocate, tell us a little about Miles’s work. There were regular office meetings on Wednesday mornings, and during the week she undertook research as well as clerical tasks for Mrs Robins. Even before she began, she was ‘looking out for [court] cases’, and in April she was researching Adair v. the US, an important case which invalidated ‘yellow-dog’ or anti-union contracts. According to the activity lists published in the Union Labor Advocate, she also attended meetings of the knee pants makers’ union and the Political Equality League during the year.24

  Despite her responsibilities, Miles also had time to write. The play previously mentioned as preserved in typescript, and a short story, also unpublished, are both dated 1908. The four-act play, a Chicago-influenced sociological drama entitled ‘The Survivors’, gives an inkling of her thinking on the relationship between art and life at this time, and is characteristically spirited. It tackles a big theme: the relationship between rich and poor in the modern city; and the romance between wealthy actress Avis Gaylord and the embittered working-class intellectual Dick Dallas is a touch on the times. It was the first of five plays the always stagestruck Miles would write in America. (She wrote some thirty plays and film scripts overall, most of them never published.) The short story, ‘Uncle Robert’s Wedding Present’, revolves around the marriage question and the benefits of a spirited approach to it — more familiar territory.25