by Jill Roe
Fred Post, whose presence she had been enjoying for over a year, left for Chicago in July 1919, a real desolation. One of his last English letters to his ‘dearest twin’ ends ‘Goodnight with XXXX’. In Washington working in the consular service office by November, he wrote urging her to pack her trunk and join her loving friends in America; but she stayed put. A passing remark to Alice Henry that he was ‘a forgetful dreamer’ is all we know of how she felt. However, there is something deferential in his letters, as to an older woman, and perhaps she thought he was too young for her. (He was thirty-one, but he looks younger in his passport photo.) It seems she did write to him in Washington, but it was a case of ‘Amiably yours’ in his last communication, dated 4 May 1920. Between March and August 1919, Miles also saw a good deal of the American poet John Varney living nearby at 157 High Holborn — possibly another late romantic figure, to whom she was eventually obliged to speak ‘too plainly’.41
At least there was an abundance of culture. Chicago had been a great stimulus, in effect her university. London would be equally significant. Miles had always read a lot and gone to the theatre whenever she could. It seems she read more and went more often to the theatre in the early 1920s than ever.
Miles’s effort to adapt to post-World War I literary modes and preoccupations was more strenuous than successful. Perhaps inspired by novelists such as John Galsworthy, who were finding success as playwrights, she tried her hand at fifteen plays between 1918 and 1927. It was to no avail. She failed to place any of them. She was not well equipped to deal with Mayfair or the flapper in the novel, and her London plays are too arch for modern tastes, even allowing for the popularity of drawing-room plots and a still class-based humour.
‘I wish I could get home to a bit of sunshine,’ she wrote to Eva O’Sullivan on 5 August 1919. She often seemed homesick, in spring especially, and unsettled, writing to American friends that she was thinking of returning to Chicago. In May 1920 she wrote to Mrs Robins that she wished she was back in the United States, but could not make up her mind what to do: ‘I know I don’t want to be marooned in the old world for life, but when I’ll bestir myself . . . I don’t know. I’ll get up with a snort one of these days I expect, and take ship.’42
The evidence does not disclose when exactly she decided to ‘take ship’. Judging by the first surviving letter from Susannah Franklin for this period, it seems Miles must have booked her passage to Australia some time in July 1923. Writing from Sydney on 14 August 1923, to her ‘dear little girl’, Susannah advised that Aunt Sarah Lampe had set up a coded address for cables — ‘Wambrook’, Sydney; ‘Wambrook’ being the name of Susannah’s birthplace in the Monaro and now of her home in Carlton — and that she was looking forward with keen anticipation to ‘good news’: ‘The time will soon fly by, when we shall see your dear long lost face once more, & I do pray you will have a pleasant and beneficial trip — won’t we chatter.’43
Miles’s diary entries beginning 31 August spell out the procedures for departure, the laborious business of obtaining that irritating document then newly required for peacetime travel, a passport, along with a visa for the United States, and the farewells. And here at last are those elusive physical details about ‘little Miles’ by her own report (not that that was always accurate, as has been noted already with respect to her age and perhaps also to her height, later given as an inch less): height 5 feet 2½ inches (158 centimetres), hair brown, eyes grey. The passport itself was issued two days later on 3 September, valid for three years; and on 4 October Miles went to the US Consulate in London for a visa.44
The diary entries also present a saga of dental work over the six months preceding departure. X-rays disclosed that Miles’s mouth was ‘a horrible sink of iniquity’, probably due to bridges and crowns imperfectly installed in Chicago. Several operations were necessary, and, rebel against it as she might, the fact was that she would have to have the dreaded false teeth. Fortunately, dental science had advanced sufficiently for her to be fitted with a quite convincing false set, as subsequent photographs indicate; and although her gums were still not properly healed when she left, she seems to have borne it with surprising equanimity.45
There was no suggestion that she would not be returning to her job. On 26 October 1923, the executive of the NHTPC granted her six months’ leave without pay, and arrangements were made to cover her duties for the duration. Mrs F. G. Hamilton of the Women’s Housing Council, the only woman on the executive, reported that the co-treasurer, Major C. P. Lovelock, MBE, feared someone might persuade her to stay away. In a farewell note, Mrs Hamilton wrote: ‘If you had been a man we would all have been singing about what a good fellow — for that is what you have been all along and through most difficult times, but we all feel it, only men are either shy or afraid of setting women up by too much recognition of their virtues.’46
Miles’s workload certainly had increased. In 1921, she was required to take over the day-to-day office organisation, and from 1923, responsibility for banking cheques — leaving Mr A. freer to swan around Europe.47
In retrospect, a homeward drift may be observed in Miles’s literary interests by the early 1920s. Thus in 1921 she wrote to George Robertson that she wished there could be a good Australian play (doubtless thinking she had written one); in 1922 she enjoyed the film of C. J. Dennis’s classic The Sentimental Bloke at Camden Town; and in early 1923 she was looking up old Australian papers in the British Museum.48
On Sunday 28 October 1923, accompanied by Mrs Aldridge, Miles Franklin caught a bus to Liverpool Street and a train to the docks to board the SS Minnewaska for Sydney, via America. According to Olive Aldridge, she looked like the legendary Mohican maiden Minnewaska herself as she sailed away, feathers flying, ‘from our ugly old docks to your far off home’.49
9
TO BE A PILGRIM: 1923–1927
The pluck that has carried you on so far is not going back on you now.1
Miles was returning home for the first time in almost eighteen years. Her diary entries tell us that for the next six days after embarkation she and many of the other passengers were horribly seasick. She was able to read a little at first, Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah, for example, and later to write a few letters, but after a week at sea her gums were too sore to eat, and it was not until the last day of the voyage that she felt well again. ‘Lord how I loathe sea travel,’ she exclaimed.2
After the Atlantic crossing, and a night spent anchored in view of the lights of New York, Miles found herself disembarking on the morning of Tuesday 6 November in what seemed like a London fog. She was met by the Childs, with whom she had stayed on her first visit to the city in 1908. Later that day, in yet another instance of her remarkable gift for retaining friends, she met the Gilmans and John Varney and his wife. In all, she spent four days in New York, catching up with old friends and WTUL colleagues, including Rose Schneiderman, who invited her to lunch at the league’s office at 247 Lexington Avenue; Mary Dreier, who gave her a copy of Freud’s General Introduction to Psychoanalysis; and Mary Anderson, now an important figure in national politics as founding director of the United States Women’s Bureau. A particular pleasure was an overnight stay in nearby Connecticut with ‘my darling Ethel’ (Mason), and she was able to see Leonora O’Reilly and her mother one evening.3
Then, on Friday, after lunch at the Women’s Club, it was off by train to Chicago, where she was met by Editha Phelps and Dr Young when she arrived at Union Station. For the next five days, staying at Dr Young’s flat on Harper Avenue, she enjoyed revisiting old haunts and catching up with more friends from league days, though it was a shock to find Alice Henry looking frail. As in New York, she took an overnight trip out of town, this time to Madison in Wisconsin to see the Dresdens, who were among her earliest associates in Chicago; and interestingly, back in Chicago. She saw Bill Lloyd, too, though no comment survives to illuminate the encounter.4
The next day, Friday 16 November, she was on the train for Los Angeles, to be
met by Kathleen Ussher and her mother, now living in Hollywood. There was much yarning. After an overnight stay with the Usshers, she set off on another pilgrimage of congeniality, to visit the Pischel family, who had also moved to the west coast and were living in San Diego. There she saw Emma and Fred — now aged fifty-five and, Miles was surprised to find, white-haired like his mother.5
Another troupe of friends awaited her in San Francisco, where she lunched with Carrie Whelan. It seems appropriate that Carrie, who had met Miles on arrival in the United States in the aftermath of the great earthquake of 1906, was the one to see her off on the last leg of her journey.
It took the Tahiti twenty-five days to cross the Pacific and it reached Sydney on 18 December 1923. The Franklin family, her old teacher Miss Gillespie and Eva O’Sullivan were there to meet her at Number 5 Wharf, Darling Harbour. So was the press. She told the Sydney Sun that she wanted to see the bush again and asked to be excused, as her parents were waiting and she was trembling all over with excitement. After she cleared customs, they went back to 26 Grey Street, Carlton, the family’s modest home in the still rather raw southern suburbs of Sydney.6
So Miles Franklin was home at last, just in time for Christmas. She settled in easily (though one of her first outings was into town to see her mother’s dentist), and a quiet Christmas was spent, with Miss Gillespie, now retired to the adjacent suburb of Hurstville, joining the family on a coolish day. The family now consisted of John and Susannah Franklin, Miles, her brother Tal and his new wife, Eva, but not her other surviving sibling, Norman, apparently up the country. In the days leading up to New Year, she lazed about, went for swims at nearby Sans Souci, and ventured into the city again to see Rose Scott and Dr Mary Booth. Towards the end of her homecoming, Miles characterised her stay for the benefit of Mrs Robins: ‘I’ve just rushed about all over the country seeing old friends. I have made the pilgrimage definitely for this & have very firmly ruled out meetings and entertainments.’7
With her father, she first visited old haunts near Goulburn, where she spent four days, from 9 to 13 January. They went by train, through Goulburn to Komungla (as Bangalore became known), and then by car to Currawang, possibly to stay with the Grahams. On the second day, the Baxters drove her around Mayfield and Longfield, and to ‘Stillwater’, where, she recorded, ‘I went up and looked at [the] kurrajong tree and had mulberries off tree (struck by lightning). Noted grass along wire fence like mat. Old places changed by killing timber . . . I went over to look at old school ground & found old tree blown out, got some wattle gum.’8
Two strenuous days at old Yarra and in Goulburn followed. Goulburn was deemed to have improved considerably. There were some ‘lovely receptions’, and much running around in the town, where she saw Thomas Hebblewhite’s daughter Mary (‘Timpy’) among others, and visited the cathedral to sit in the pew she had occupied as a child (according to the Penny Post), before catching the late train to Cooma, some 160 kilometres to the south as the crow flies. Arriving at Cooma early the next morning, on Monday 14 January — now travelling alone — Miles went by coach to Talbingo and Tumut for a wonderful ten days with Lampe relatives, ending on 23 January, when she caught the overnight train back to Sydney (a sleepless night).9
After a few days back at Carlton for the Anniversary Day weekend, on 27 January she was off again, on the Northwestern Mail for Cubbaroo, a siding beyond Narrabri on the Sydney–Walgett line, to visit her brother Norman, travelling with Norman’s wife, Irene, and their two-year-old son, Jack. This was another enjoyable but low-key time up country. Over ten days, she went riding and took dips in the artesian bore, on one occasion losing her teeth. Fortunately, Norman retrieved them.
It was from Cubbaroo that she wrote to Rose Scott about the appeal for a memorial to Henry Lawson, who had died destitute in September 1922, and was the subject of an editorial in the Herald the day she arrived back in Australia. She never forgot him — his beauty as a young man, his sensitive and gentle manner, his goodness to her when she was trying to find a publisher for My Brilliant Career — and she contributed her mite to the appeal. But she was not happy about statues to dead poets. ‘Poor old Lawson,’ she wrote, ‘he had great gifts and in a less inefficient community, might not have drunk himself into years of imbecility and a premature grave.’ In reply to Rose Scott, she explained that a scholarship for young writers would be her preference, and that by her reference to an inefficient community she had meant psychological inefficiency. There had to be something wrong with a society where so many felt impelled to take strong drink.10
A week later she again caught the train, this time travelling south with her mother to Melbourne, still the virtual capital of Australia. Over the next fortnight, staying with the Lister Watsons at ‘Iona’, Studley Park Road, Kew, with Nancy as obliging chauffeur, Miles, mostly with her mother, was able to see a good deal of the Goldstein–Champion household, and to catch up with Maud Walsöe and her son, Olaf, at South Yarra, and with Agnes Murphy, who agreed to read ‘Phoebe Lambent and Love’. One Sunday Nancy drove them out to see Walter and Marion Griffin at Heidelberg; ‘Mrs Griffin enlarged her theories,’ Miles noted laconically in her diary. (By this time Marion Mahony Griffin was interested in Rudolf Steiner’s teaching of anthroposophy, soon to be reflected in the Griffins’ experiment in community building at Castlecrag, Sydney.)11
That was her last big jaunt, though there were several small ones to come: before she went to Melbourne, she and John Maurice Franklin (‘dear old Dad’) had gone to Windsor on the Hawkesbury River, to see the grave of her maternal forebear and namesake, the First Fleet convict Edward Miles; and after she returned from Melbourne Miles and her father took a day trip to Wollongong to see her cousin Annie May Bridle and Annie’s husband, Henry. (Kept home from school to meet her famous relative, their daughter Ruby was unimpressed, recalling that Miles was ‘very short and had flat feet’, with ‘a real old Bridle nose’, though her eyes were ‘startling’, and she had ‘a lovely mouth’.)12
Miles spent her last two weeks in Sydney saying goodbye to friends. Virtually every day she went to town for that purpose. The day she went to purchase her train ticket to Melbourne, from where her ship would leave, she called on Maud Walsöe’s mother, Mrs Black, Bertha Lawson and Portia Geach in the morning, and then went to lunch with Marguerite Dale at the Women’s Club, where she also said farewell to Dr Mary Booth and her sister Bay. Sometimes she just dropped in on her friends at work, as she did librarian Margaret Windeyer. Likewise, having earlier met A. G. Stephens and his journalist daughter, Connie, and also the theatrical entrepreneur Stanley McKay (last encountered in London in 1918), one day she called at Angus & Robertson’s bookshop in Castlereagh Street and at last met George Robertson, ‘who gave me a lot of books’. Others she visited several times, especially Rose Scott, now aged seventy-seven, frail and in hospital in the Eastern Suburbs; and although fatigued with so much rushing about, she and Susannah still had to see the Griffins’ experiment at Castlecrag.13
In Fremantle, on Friday 14 March, Susannah Franklin, the aunts, Eva Franklin and Miss Gillespie saw Miles off on the train for Melbourne, from where she was to embark five days later, on 19 March. Awaiting departure, she wrote in her diary, ‘Never felt so dreary and unhappy in my life at the thought of the old folks left behind.’14
She had reason to feel miserable. There had been sad and stoic farewell letters from her mother awaiting her in Melbourne and again in Adelaide, and there were sadder still to come. ‘I begin to feel you are gone now & miss you so much, I would always like to keep you near me, but knowing your work calls you to other lands, I must not be selfish,’ wrote Susannah shortly after Miles’s departure from Sydney, adding, ‘if at any time I can help you moneytarily let me know, don’t be in want’. Susannah’s next letter, in reply to one from a miserable Miles at Fremantle, is even more poignant: she wonders if her daughter was not sadly disappointed with the whole thing and regrets that she seemed averse to any show of affection, even though
Susannah had done all she could to make her ‘somewhat happy’.15
The truth is that Miles Franklin had a divided response to this first homecoming. To place, she responded wholeheartedly. Her time ‘up the country’ had elicited a stronger response than either Melbourne or Sydney. Those ten days in the high country lifted her onto a new emotional plane. From the moment she looked out of the train window onto a lovely morning and beautiful bush en route to Cooma, to boarding another train back from Tumut with a sprig of kurrajong given to her by the mayor in her hand, the trip was an unmitigated delight; and the old bush hospitality of the John Theodore Lampes at Talbingo charmed her.16
But Miles was disappointed with Australian society. Australia had become a backwater, she confided to Mrs Robins:
[I]t seems to me that Australia, which took a wonderful lurch ahead in all progressive laws and woman’s advancement about 20 years ago has stagnated ever since. At present it is more unintelligently conservative & conventional than England, & I am sad to see the kangaroo and his fellow marsupials & all the glories of our forests disappearing.17
It was a long trip back. Sailing via Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known) through Suez to England took some forty-five days. The books George Robertson gave her, such as the latest editions of Lawson’s works, helped while away the time, with Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River a special delight. Importantly, she read Mary Fullerton’s Bark House Days, published in Melbourne in 1921, a gift sent after her departure from Melbourne by Alice Henry’s brother, Alfred.18