Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  Reactions to anniversaries such as fortieth birthdays are culturally conditioned, and it is probably too early to think in terms of an impending life crisis; but with average life expectancy for Australian women then at fifty-five, Miles was well past the halfway mark, unwilling as she was to acknowledge it. A literary fragment cast in narrative form, undated but redolent of the 1920s, possibly casts some light on Miles’s attitude at this time:

  ‘One must do something. Oh God,’ she exclaimed, ‘I must do something with the kind of mind with which I have been endowed even as those who have been endowed otherwise who play bridge or mah jong all day, who shake dice all day, who flit about from one big hotel to another, I have a right to the exercise of my faculties even as they are. And I would like to make this life an experiment . . . It would occupy us and there is just a gorgeous glimmering . . . that . . . man . . . might be able to do wonderful things.’17

  The last sentence in Miles’s diary entry for 16 September 1918 reads simply, ‘Grey day. Finished novel.’ The unidentified novel was undoubtedly ‘Sam Price from Chicago’, ‘by the authors of The Net of Circumstance’, which she finished typing in early November and straightaway sent off to the literary agent A. P. Watt. The immediate outcome is unknown, but maybe it was not too discouraging, as she began revising the manuscript in January 1919, an extended process that took until August that year, when she again sent it to Watt. The extant typescript is quite long, some 80,000 words, and considering the extended and irregular hours she put in at Russell Square, and that she was also revising and resubmitting On Dearborn Street at the same time, she worked quite fast.18

  The fact that ‘Sam Price from Chicago’ failed to find a publisher despite Watt’s best efforts — by 1922 it had been rejected by no fewer than eleven publishers — does not diminish its biographical interest. Set in London during the last year of the war, ‘Sam Price from Chicago’ is about a romance between Sam, a newly arrived and idealistic young American, and Dorothy Latimer, brought up in Gippsland, Australia, with several years spent in America and recently back from service with a field hospital in Belgium, and those who aid and abet their ultimately successful courtship. Obviously Fred Post gave Miles the idea for the story and served as the prototype for Sam, and much of Miles went into the construction of Dorothy (even though she is described as tall and aged only twenty-five). The supporting cast is mostly quite recognisable, being modelled on Miles’s associates in London and Chicago (Kathleen Ussher’s mother, for one, is the template for Mrs English), or culled from the hectic social world around her, with two Anzacs thrown in for good measure.19

  Compared with Miles Franklin’s next attempt to essay the pain of women after the Great War, ‘The Love Letters of a Superfluous Woman’, ‘Sam Price from Chicago’ is an optimistic work.

  ‘The Love Letters’ are not easy to read today. They seem high-pitched, and it is hardly to be wondered that no publisher took them up. There is workmanship, but ‘insufficient detachment’, as a publisher’s reader remarked of On Dearborn Street. But then there wasn’t meant to be. And there is a boldness in the way psycho-social realities are addressed; for example, the superfluous women are not the youthful prewar women too far ahead of their time to find happiness, as in the first title to deal with the subject, Emma Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman, published in 1894, and as in Miles’s own writings in Chicago. Rather they are women well past the first flush of youth, doomed to loneliness and a hideous old age. Miles herself could not have been surprised at the lack of interest. Her observations contained ‘too much real feeling’ for her to attach her name, she explained in letters to publishers. Instead, the typescript, about 22,000 words in length, was submitted pseudonymously, as by ‘Mrs O.’.20

  In the years to 1921, according to her diaries, Miles wrote a third novel, ‘Estelle’. It probably became ‘Mrs Dysart Disappears’ by ‘Brent of Bin Bin’, which survives in a typescript dated 1931. The heroine of this postwar mystery novel, ‘with a double solution but no material explanation’, according to the cover note, is Estelle Dacre, a beautiful singer with a pure contralto voice. Three novels in three years is quite a lot for someone in fulltime employment; and in 1920 Miles was also working on ‘the bus’ story, ‘Hold Tight!’, begun during the war, which did the rounds in England or the United States in 1921, again to no avail.21

  The output of minor pieces — anecdotes, sketches, short stories and comment — during these troubled years is equally noteworthy, though some are mere fragments, or even more fugitive, their existence known only from diary references. Their subjects ranged widely, and she was quick to try her hand at new genres with two film scenarios drafted in 1920, ‘A Beauty Contest, or Venus Here and Now’ and the evidently recyclable ‘Mrs Dysart Disappears’, said to be a synopsis of a novel adapted from one of a series of six novels and plays. The fact that such items are known to exist is not meant to suggest recoverable literary merit or significance, merely that Miles Franklin always had to be writing something, and she found a lot to write about after the war. Moreover, she was always on the lookout for new opportunities to earn money from her writing. In 1920 she read a book on making moving pictures, though given her rather arrogant comments on the film scenarios she submitted it is not to be wondered that her efforts sank without a trace.22

  The most substantial of the topical writings at this time is a series entitled ‘Irish Sketches’, again by ‘Outlander’, ten written during and immediately after a three-week break in Ireland with Miss Hodge in August 1919, and two later, in 1920. The thought of visiting Ireland had filled Miles with glee, notwithstanding the tense political situation, with the Sinn Feiners refusing to take their seats in the House of Commons after the general election of December 1918, which resulted in a coalition government led by Lloyd George. ‘I am going to Ireland and am going to see all the Sinn Feiners I can, and I wish I could see the other side too. They seem to be unable to agree among themselves,’ she added blandly, or perhaps in Shavian mode.23

  The two women left England on 15 August, returning to London on the morning of 2 September. Civil war had not yet broken out, and unlike another interested Australian visitor to Dublin in 1919, Joice NanKivell Loch, who very nearly fell foul of the authorities, Miles had a trouble-free time, and met ‘the other side’ as well, thanks to Miss Hodge’s political connections.24

  They spent most of the time in Dublin, with two trips beyond, by train for two days in the old market town of Ennis, to the west in County Clare, and a day trip by charabanc (a long, light vehicle with transverse seats facing forward) to the picturesque Glendalough lake district in County Wicklow to the south, where it rained and reminded Miles of the discomforts of the bush, ‘of which I had too much in my young days’. The very first thing they did when settled in their Dublin accommodation at 55 Upper Leeson Street was attend a matinée at the renowned Abbey Theatre. The next day, a Sunday, they did the rounds of cathedrals and museums, and, having met some Sinn Feiners with the Sinn Fein MP for South Dublin, George Gavan Duffy, visited Sinn Fein’s headquarters, finishing up at Queen’s Theatre in the evening. Among other significant Irishmen met subsequently were Desmond FitzGerald, Cruise O’Brien, Arthur Griffiths and, at Liberty Hall, the prominent labour leader Jim Larkin. Miles also met some agreeable Unionists who assured her that Sinn Fein was all talk. One old gentleman who said that the Irish were only ‘dear, dear children’, who would not be able to manage for an instant without the English, reminded Miles of the anti-suffrage fogeys. ‘Is the paleolithic reactionary always to be with us?’ she asked rhetorically.25

  At the Dublin horse show, she thought the jumping superior to anything she had seen in Australia; and when she saw George Bernard Shaw’s mercilessly iconoclastic play John Bull’s Other Island, also at the Abbey Theatre, she enjoyed herself ‘uproariously’. It was a rare privilege to see Shaw presented in his native city by native-born players, and it made her more than ever confident of the social value of theatre: ‘when the drama becomes an
integral part of the life and recreation of the people . . . we shall be a deal further on the road of that culture which promotes mental health’, she later wrote.26

  Other aspects of the Irish cultural revival appealed less, however. In her ‘The Abbey Theatre’ sketch she expressed reservations about the Irish preoccupation with oppression, necessary and inevitable as the subject was, and about reviving Gaelic as a national language: the Irish, she thought, had a right to their language, but ‘I should hate to face the world with nothing but Gaelic on my lips.’27

  It was the ‘disease of poverty’ that really raised her ire. Much later, in a commentary on Sean O’Casey’s autobiographical Drums Under the Windows, written at the onset of the Cold War, Miles recalled her horror, especially in Dublin:

  The poverty is shocking, and no rage and rebellion against those responsible for upholding such a state of affairs cd be unjustified or excessive. Dublin poverty is renowned for its depths. It filled my head with lice on the only day I made contact with it in a R.C. church congregation.28

  That was in St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1919, after which experience she wrote, more diplomatically: ‘Oh that St Patrick had abolished the fleas from Ireland instead of the snakes.’ Not for the first time, a fiercely anti-church paragraph came to her:

  I said upon my first visit to the architectural treasures of the old world, I repeat it now and always, that if a few of these roomy edifices could be converted into comfortably warm and convenient, free, hot water depots with bath room and rest room attachments for the suffering and disinherited peoples that exist within their shadow, they would be more acceptable to God, more in accordance with my vision of Christianity.29

  Politics, as always, interested John Maurice Franklin’s eldest daughter. It had been clear to her from the outset that this was the main point in Ireland in 1919, and she had her own take on the situation: ‘The interest of Ireland today is neither its scenery nor its ancient relics, but the form of its immediate political demands, which make it the militant suffragette of the nations.’ The analogy may be unexpected; but it was not wrong to suggest that these latest militants were distinguished by that same spiritual exaltation and passion for martyrdom which characterised the prewar women rebels in Britain, the additional factor being, in Miles’s opinion, the extent of support worldwide: ‘The Irish secessionists have a larger and more powerful army of sympathisers and supporters in the world at large than ever the women could have hoped for.’30 Miles took the analogy a step further in ‘The Three Mutineers’, where she saw a close parallel with the British suffrage struggle. Just as the militant suffragettes had made the liberal suffragists respectable, so the republican Sinn Feiners made Home Rulers look mild, and their Unionist opponents were just like the ‘antis’, with their heads in the sand, but with their own particular bogey: anti-popery. Her conclusion is drawn with conviction: ‘Today in watching the Irish fervour and imagination squandered on a ceaseless struggle to secure a simple elemental right like national freedom . . . the heart is wrung with despair.’31

  These sketches should have found a publisher. They nearly did. Miles’s American friends tried to place them straightaway, and at least one editor found them extremely interesting, judging the material well handled and the point of view excellent. But space was a problem for him, and apparently nothing eventuated elsewhere. The literary fruits would be a long time coming.32

  Most years thereafter Miles managed to take recuperative breaks away from London and its winters, when the streets were hazardous and, until the passing of the Clean Air Act in 1956, thick fogs frequently engulfed the city. Although not always very enjoyable, the breaks were at least in pleasant places: including Scarborough (with the Smiths) in 1922, and Scotland and Ireland with Aunt Lena, who visited England in 1926–27. In addition, the NHTPC held its national conferences at salubrious sites, usually spa towns; however, if her dumpy-looking presence in a press photograph of ‘Housing and Town Planning Experts in Conference’ in Cardiff in May 1920 is any guide, they were not much fun.33

  Numerous American friends passing through London towards the end of and after the war also provided respite. Agnes Nestor had been the first of her old associates from Chicago to arrive, in April 1918. Over the next few years there would be many others, mostly en route to postwar labour and peace conferences in Europe: Mary Dreier, Mary McDowell, Rose Schneiderman, Mary Anderson and Jane Addams. In May 1921 Editha Phelps arrived to stay at Miss Brennan’s boarding house at Upper Woburn Place, as in 1911. And Margaret Dreier Robins passed through twice in characteristic style: first in 1921, and again in 1923 with Raymond Robins, whose great cause now was to outlaw war.34

  The meetings with Mrs Robins represent a kind of endnote to Miles’ association with women’s trade unionism in America. After the war Mrs Robins had conceived of an International Federation of Working Women, over which she would preside. The federation did not come to much, due to irreconcilable differences between American and European approaches.

  There was also a steady flow of compatriots to entertain and be entertained by. If the demands of birds of passage were a drain — being well brought up, Miles would always make an effort to see them — they also served to keep her in touch with her homeland. For example, P. S. and Nancy Lister Watson arrived in London in June 1922 and stayed for over a year, during which time Miles heard many stories of the old Australia from P. S., who, with his brothers, had taken over the huge grazing property ‘Gregory Downs’ in north Queensland’s Gulf Country in the 1890s.35 In addition she remained in touch with literary developments, thanks to George Robertson, who sent her some new titles for Christmas in 1920, and to the Australian bookshop on the Strand, where she obtained a copy of May Gibbs’ delectable children’s book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, now an Australian classic.36

  News from home was all very well, but it was to trends in politics and culture at the heart of the Empire that Miles responded most keenly. In a letter to Alice Henry and other American friends written on 18 October 1920, she reported with some astonishment that the new Liberal proposals for economic transformation through partnerships in industry read rather like the Russian program, a reference to that ‘big revolution which is still struggling to get its head above international tzarism’; also that worker militancy had put a stop to further warmongering and was making the West End clubmen more respectful of the trade unions: ‘Hats off to the British Workman . . . he is certainly trying to keep alight those lamps of freedom which England has indisputably lighted of old.’ The danger was, as radical journalist H. N. Brailsford had impressed upon her consciousness in 1918 (and was soon to be evidenced by the deportation of radicals from the United States and the foundation of Interpol in 1923), that there would be an international solidarity of ‘the potentates’ rather than the people.37

  Her letters at this time also contain numerous sharp comments on international affairs. The world seemed to have learned nothing from the war, she wrote to Agnes Nestor in June 1919: ‘They still believe in running things with a big stick.’ A few months later, having heard at a lecture at the National Liberal Club, ‘crammed with the flower of mental mediocrity’, that the effect of a British-led intervention in Russia had been to install the Soviets more strongly, she commented that the peasants would never have put up with the Soviets otherwise, but obviously preferred them to foreign devils. Surely, she added, the Empire was large enough to contain British energies, haywire as it had gone in places. In another letter to Alice Henry written in May 1922 she commented, quite accurately, on the problems of the lascars, the ill-paid Indian seamen who crewed British ships in the age of steam, observing that an incident in which Australians had refused to give a mail contract to a steamer crewed by lascars was probably an expression of the White Australia Policy, ‘which in its turn is rooted in fear of the coloured man lowering Australian working man standards’.38

  Feminism, however, had not ceased to be part of Miles’s world. She would continue to eat at the Minerva café
from time to time, and like everyone else she went to hear Lady Astor, Britain’s first woman member of parliament; the Misses Newcomb and Hodge’s British Dominions Woman Suffrage Union would soon be transformed into the British Commonwealth League (founded in 1926 and of strategic significance to Australian feminists in the interwar years); and she was aware of such developments as the Six Point Group, founded in 1921, with its program of legislative demands. Somehow, though, the great days were over, and the dreaded British dowdiness that Miles had remarked upon back in 1911 after meeting Christabel Pankhurst, ‘hair flying [and] untidy like all the suffragettes’, seemed the more evident, as Freud and the flappers impinged on the survivors of prewar feminism.39

  Meantime antiquated views about women resurfaced. When the famous writer Arnold Bennett asserted that the lack of women writers of the first rank showed that women were intellectually inferior to men, Miles responded vigorously, though if her response was published it has not so far been traced. By this time too, as she noted warily, an assault on old-style feminist values was under way throughout the English-speaking world. Thus, in January 1922, the year in which the first English translations of Freud became available, she attended a lecture on psychoanalysis and sceptical references to psychoanalysis began to appear in her writing. On learning that her old friend and former landlady in Chicago Dr Young was going in for it, she wrote to Alice Henry, ‘Psychoanalysis is like everything else, for those to come, but it is very crude so far — another form of egotism kindly called self expression — but I suppose human beings must puddle through dark to the light.’ Old-style feminism, which valued chastity for its own sake, was being undermined by other forces as well as the new sexology. The weakening of the class structure, for example, took with it the protective idea of ‘the lady’ (and ‘the gentleman’), though its observance lasted Miles’s lifetime.40