Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  As we know from the modern-day politics of downsizing, such complaints don’t wash with financial managers following new agendas. Mrs Robins was highly critical in reply. Alice Henry should economise on her activities and deploy her great gift of teaching others, ‘a quality absolutely lacking in Miss Franklin’, she added gratuitously. As for Miss Franklin, she could be relieved of her secretarial duties and, in the meantime, she should take a long-delayed holiday: ‘it is not only lacking in commonsense [not to] but her refusal to take care of herself is unfair to other workers as well’.

  Matters remained there for the time being. Alice Henry was not standing down and Miles was not going anywhere. On 13 April she received an offer from Mills & Boon for The Net of Circumstance, and immediately accepted it. The following evening she cut fifty-six pages from the text in three hours then slept well. A month later, on 16 May, she returned the revised manuscript. All she had to do now was await the proofs. Her New Woman novel was coming out!54

  The arrival in April of Margaret Hodge, a friend of Rose Scott, Dorothy Pethick from London, and young Kathleen Ussher from Sydney to study at the Art Institute added spice to the daily round; and in May, Edith Ellis, the English socialist and wife of Henry Havelock Ellis, turned up at Hull House, and Miles was invited to dine with her there to help combat Edith’s anti-Americanism. Later that year Miles heard Edith lecture on ‘The Love of Tomorrow’. It is unlikely that Miles approved of her message, since Edith Ellis was proudly avant-garde and ‘a vigorous defender of the abnormal’; but Miles did appear to be making progress with romance. Decorative crosses in the diaries in May indicate that relations with Bill Lloyd had become amorous, though it seems he was about to be superseded by Fred Pischel, whose long-promised driving lessons began in June. ‘Automobiling’ and the long evenings were good for romance. The rows of kisses increased, and for a time Fred was ‘very dear’. Miles was encouraged to return to her Cupid story.55

  But by mid-June her teeth were troubling her again. An abscess developed, and so began a painful and protracted round of treatment, requiring numerous visits in the days when injections and high-speed water-drills were unknown, at a total cost of $190, almost two months’ salary, and as recorded in her pocket diary, paid off by December.56

  She was mid-treatment when Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. The war came as a terrible shock to radicals and progressives everywhere. At the office, ‘No-one thought of anything but the war.’ In her immediate circle loyalties were divided, as was the case with Margaret Dreier Robins, of German extraction, and her husband, Raymond, who supported the British Empire, and Miles had many other German-American friends, such as the Pischels.57

  On 13 September she finished the proofs of The Net of Circumstance, only to hear the next day that publication had been postponed due to the war. Ever resilient, she rang Fred Pischel and had ‘a long session’ with him (eight crosses).58

  In need of a vacation (as Mrs Robins had urged), on Saturday 3 October Miles took the train to Boston, where, the following evening, she was met by a league member, Octavia (probably Pinchot), with whom she stayed for a few days, then her old friend Aileen Goldstein found her a room where Aileen was staying herself.59

  One reason for Miles going to Boston, apart from league connections dating back to 1911, was the number of Australian followers of Mary Baker Eddy assembled there in October for the annual Christian Science convention. This in addition to Aileen Goldstein, who was intending to train as a Christian Science practitioner. This was as near as Miles came to organised religion at this time. Her life coincided with the rise of Christian Science, which attracted many thinking women. In Chicago she had recently attended a Presbyterian service with Alice Henry, but it only confirmed her distaste for traditional teachings: ‘Same old stuff I heard in the Bush, nothing to satisfy intelligence or common sense.’ Which suggests that Miles was open to the new prescription, notwithstanding ‘some rare gems’ she had noted in Demy Lloyd’s literature, and her previously expressed views on its appeal to the rich. Hope of relief from ailments as yet untouched by medical science, especially women’s health problems, made Christian Science attractive, and Baker Eddy’s core teaching, that spiritual self-discipline is the key to salvation, that it is ‘all in the mind’, struck a chord with the idealists and intellectuals of her generation. While Miles never became a member of the church, and it is hard to imagine her enjoying such a highly regulated form of worship, a relative, Leslie Bridle, recalled Miles reading Christian Science literature in later life.60

  Miles left Boston by boat on the evening of 7 November, arriving in New York the next morning in time to catch the nine o’clock train for Philadelphia, where she was pleased to find herself in an agreeable billet at 1822 Pine Street. After lunch she went straight to the first of several lengthy board meetings held over the next few days. The idea of meeting in Philadelphia was to learn from the AFL and remind it of the league’s importance, so the league women participated in convention activities. She noted in Life and Labor that only eight of 359 accredited delegates were women. But then Miles always enjoyed being with manly men.61

  What a contrast awaited her back in Chicago. ‘Poor old 200 E. Superior St how dirty and dreary after 1822 Pine St, Philadelphia.’ It was ‘joyous’ all the same to see Miss Henry and Ethel Mason at the office, and she dined with Editha Phelps at the Hearth. As Editha (and Emma Pischel) had been caught in Europe when war broke out, there was a lot to catch up on.

  On her return from Boston, Miles found Alice Henry in distress, with another, bigger, printer’s bill due. She did what she could by putting out an appeal for support, but was overruled by Mrs Robins, now on vacation in Florida. Staff meetings were called and it was decided to establish a sustentation fund. Clearly Life and Labor was in crisis. Moreover, Miles had not been paid for two months. As Christmas approached, she was obliged to stay in for lack of cash.62

  The war seemed to have intensified underlying tensions with her German-American friends. The men in her life — not only the German Fred Pischel, but the Lloyds — irritated her. Ultimately Miles gave them all up: ‘I could have had money with a man attached several times but death was preferable to “living in sin” to one of my codes and sensitiveness.’63

  By contrast, conflict at work drew the employees — for that is what they really were — closer together. A veneer of normality was maintained by them all. Just before Christmas Editha Phelps and Miles enjoyed George Bernard Shaw’s The Philanderer at the Little Theater — not surprisingly, Shaw, with his advanced views and iconoclastic wit, became a great favourite with Miles. She caught a whiff of home when Nell Malone, a Queensland nurse who later became a close friend, and Nell’s companion, Eve Midgely, arrived in September and stayed for several months. However, by Christmas she was beginning to feel like a displaced person.64

  After seven years without a home since selling up at Penrith, her parents were settled in a cottage at 26 Grey Street, Carlton, a southern suburb of Sydney, where they remained for the rest of their lives. In the interim, John Franklin had taken labouring jobs up country and Susannah had lived at Tumut and Talbingo until her mother’s property was sold in 1911. She then lived with relatives in western Sydney until, after her mother’s death in 1912, her share of the estate enabled her to purchase the modest weatherboard house at Carlton, at a cost of £510. Possibly Miles helped with the purchase, as she sent her mother £105 in early 1914, and an annotated house plan sent to her by Susannah states, ‘I am quite satisfied, hope you are.’ Susannah also purchased two shops in the village of Willoughby (on Sydney’s North Shore) for rent at this time.65

  In Chicago, the pressing issue for Miles was Life and Labor. ‘It looks to me as if Life and Labor must go under — I see no way out unless I accept full responsibility, and this I refuse to do,’ Mrs Robins wrote to Mary Dreier from Florida on 17 January 1915 when faced with another substantial bill. A dispassionate observer might think that the overall deficit was not irredeemabl
e, but Mrs Robins had been troubled for a long time, and was determined that business management be brought under the control of the executive board. When she returned to Chicago in February, a ghastly round of meetings ensued, the upshot being an agreement that publication was to be suspended while the sustentation fund was raised. According to Alice Henry’s biographer, Diane Kirkby, there had been a contest between two different conceptions of what the magazine should be. Whereas Alice Henry and Miles envisaged an expressive and elevating magazine, Mrs Robins believed the primary purpose of the publication should be propagandist. Perhaps they were unrealistic, and since Mrs Robins held the purse strings, in the end she won. The loss was significant. Though the name was retained, vitality gradually drained out of what became in effect a bulletin, appealing to neither the middle-class allies nor to working women.66

  Miles felt only relief that it was over. Little did she know what else Mrs Robins had in mind for her. Not until May did she learn that Mrs Robins planned to replace her as national secretary with league stalwart Emma Steghagen of the boot and shoe makers’ union, a far less volatile personality. Mrs Robins was tired of the complaints about overwork and misery in the Life and Labor office emanating from Miles and Alice Henry, reared as they were on protective labour legislation in Australia; and she got what she wanted. ‘Sister Emma’ was duly elected at the fifth biennial convention in New York in June.67

  Relations with Mrs Robins were now poisonous, and Miles was determined to leave. She would have liked to edit a real working woman’s magazine, but Mrs Robins had made that impossible. A plan advanced by Miles envisaged the use of voluntary labour to bring out the magazine, though the board prevailed upon her not to resign formally just yet. She told Leonora O’Reilly she was thinking of coming to New York.68

  When she did leave, it was as much as Mrs Robins could do to call by Life and Labor’s new drab little office at 166 West Washington Street to say goodbye. After such a long and rewarding association, that seems very sad. But the cultural gap had widened, and the socially hybrid league’s moment was passing. Miles was not only stoical but determined to get away, though unsure about how and where to go. Eventually, and initially without confiding in any of her friends, she decided on London.69

  The NWTUL biennial conference, New York, June 1915. Secretary-Treasurer Franklin is at the centre of the front row. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, PX*D250/1-56)

  When young in Australia, Miles Franklin had lacked a peer group. This she acquired in abundance in America. Her circle in Chicago was large, and many of those closest to her became lifelong friends. Eventually she even forgave Margaret Dreier Robins. However, by the time she came to reflect on the significance of her Chicago years, many of those women had died. There is no doubt that although few were literary, these were vital and sustaining associations, both emotionally and intellectually, of the kind taken for granted among gifted men. ‘It’s lovely riches to have a friend,’ she wrote to Margery Currey on her return to Sydney in 1933, and more extensively in 1950:

  I was going over my days in the USA and totting up what I had got out of it. The things through affection are the only ones that ever meant anything to me . . . Affection plus intelligence is the most delightful mixture of friendship and friendship the warmest most permanent thing in this existence, and I thought further that Editha, you and Ethel were my most beloved girl friends.70

  Miles kept working at the office until mid-October, where she wrote what turned out to be her last signed article for Life and Labor and prepared the next issue. To all intents and purposes, she was simply taking leave, and it was conceivable, though unlikely, that after a break she would return. She had submitted a letter ‘providing for my extermination’ from Life and Labor in early October, but its timing displeased Mrs Robins and was ignored, so that her name appeared on the publication until the end of the year, at which time she sent a letter of resignation from London and it was ‘accepted with regret’ by the board. It was not until 1917 that she formally resigned from the executive board.71

  While the farewell round in Chicago continued, travel documents, needed in wartime, were being pursued, along with testimonials from prominent labour leaders. In August Miles had set to work in earnest on On Dearborn Street, and diary entries suggest she finished a first version before leaving Chicago. This is confirmed by a letter to the Chicago bookseller and publisher McClurg & Co., dated 24 October 1915. Posing as G. Marriott of Chicago, she apologised for not having time to call for mail before leaving and asked that the manuscript be mailed to Marriott, c/– literary agent A. P. Watt in London. Mysteriously she also asked that ‘the book’ be mailed to another literary agent, Horace Paget, in New York. Perhaps she was trying to interest American publishers in the forthcoming Net of Circumstance.72

  On Dearborn Street was perhaps Miles’s boldest throw. Unusually in works by Australian women writers before the 1980s, the narrator is male, and the tale is told from his point of view. Practically all the elements of the New Woman novel are there for the finding in On Dearborn Street, along with outspoken commentary on the double standard of morality and the war. In essence it is a sustained attempt to answer the old question: ‘What do women want?’73

  On Friday 22 October 1915, having done all the usual things one does before leaving on a holiday — been to the bank, said goodbye at the office (and the Hearth), and visited a colleague in hospital — Miles went to hear the Russian, later Bolshevik, diplomat Alexandra Kollontai speak at the Commonwealth Club, and at 10.30 p.m. caught the train for New York. ‘Emma and Editha saw me off with violets.’ Even the weather was pleasant. In New York, she took a room for the coming week, and saw numerous colleagues and friends. Fittingly, on her last night in America she dined with Alice Henry at the Liberal Club; and at noon the next day, 30 October 1915, New York league officer Alice Bean, and Leonora O’Reilly and her mother, saw Miles off on the SS St Paul.74

  So ended Miles Franklin’s life ‘on Dearborn Street’. Although she was left with mixed feelings about Mrs Robins, she must have felt a pang about leaving: ‘I do hope I can come back again, & be a useful or entertaining member of the modern sisterhood,’ she wrote to Leonora O’Reilly as the ship neared England. And she never lost her admiration for the strong women of America.75

  If Miles Franklin did not quite succeed in reinventing herself as a writer during her American years, she’d certainly had a good try.

  PART III

  ENGLAND & AUSTRALIA

  1915–1932

  7

  PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES: 1915–1918

  The desire to find out can lead one far afield.1

  In November 1915, there were over a million British and imperial troops facing the German army on the Western Front, and until evacuation the following month, another 90,000 at Gallipoli on the South-Eastern Front, while a small Allied force for the relief of Serbia had landed in Salonika in northern Greece in October 1915. That same month saw British casualties top the half-million mark, and a political crisis over inept military leadership was brewing in London, soon to be followed by turmoil over conscription and the supply of munitions.2

  The realities of war in Europe emphasised the remoteness of American politics at this time and formed the backdrop to the ‘European turn’ in the life of Miles Franklin, who arrived in London on 7 November 1915. She was now thirty-six and, as Alice Henry later observed, she needed to be there. Her frame of mind was not so far removed from that of the soldiers who made ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag/And smile, smile, smile’ the most popular refrain of 1915.3

  After an uneventful Atlantic crossing, as in 1911 she made straight for Miss Brennan’s boarding house at 22 Upper Woburn Place, off Euston Road, where Nell Malone met her and took her to see Kathleen Ussher and her mother. Soon afterwards Miles found a room of her own, first at 91 Holland Road, Kensington, and then with the Usshers at 1 Milton Chambers, 128 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, on the Thames Embankment just beyond Battersea Bridg
e, where she delighted in her ‘dugout’.4

  Aileen Goldstein and artist Geraldine Rede were also in London in late 1915 on an extended visit to see relatives and friends, presumably after the annual Christian Science convention in Boston the previous year. Thus on her fourth day in England Miles lunched with Aileen at the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) headquarters at 144 High Holborn. Afterwards they attended a recruiting rally in Trafalgar Square, where those men eligible and willing to serve were supposed to ‘attest’ to it, an approach superseded by conscription in January 1916, so that soon Miles would be attending anti-conscription rallies. Within the week she had also visited munitions workers at Fulham, and on 18 November met blinded soldiers. Nonetheless, London seemed surprisingly calm, and she was feeling better all the time, lunching with old friends, enjoying the shops — Selfridge’s on Oxford Street, founded by an ex-employee of Marshall Field’s in Chicago, was the latest thing and her favourite — and attending various matinées.5

  All of Miles’s networks were in evidence, and most of the people she saw were either Australians who had visited her in Chicago or people she had met before in London or in America, such as Violet Pike (about to become Mrs Arthur Penty). Surrounded by familiar faces, Miles found it easy to relax. Within ten days she was helping Mrs Ussher at the depot distributing babies’ kits. These were prepared by members of the Babies’ Kit Society for the Allies’ Babies, founded by Dr Mary Booth in Sydney in November 1914 to provide needy soldiers’ wives with useful items such as babies’ bonnets and cot covers.