Miles Franklin
Page 17
The sun shone briefly as the Moreton Bay docked at Southampton on the morning of 26 April 1924, but by the time Miles Franklin had arranged transportation for her trunks, ‘down came the rain & dank cold’; and although Olive Aldridge and Miles’s colleague Emmy Lawson were at the station to meet her in London, they missed each other, so she went straight to the office in Russell Square. Realising what had happened, she went back to look for them, and having found her friends, spent the rest of the day with them. Miss Lawson had obtained an attic room for her at the Minerva Club in nearby Brunswick Square, and in the afternoon the three went to see Monckton’s The Conquering Hero. All of which Miles appreciated. With customary resilience, she concluded the day’s long diary entry with the signs of spring: ‘Tender green on early trees. Hyacinths & tulips set out in the Square.’
The let-down was as speedy as it was inevitable. Delightful as it was to be returned from the cultural crudities of Carlton, and to lunch again with Lady Byles, the weather did not improve, and within days the attic room at the Minerva proved ‘miserable, cold, frowsy’, also noisy, with inner-city horse traffic clomping by at all hours. Henry Aldridge was worse than ever, rushing in from a Continental trip for a mid-morning meeting on Miles’s first day back at the office. Within weeks she was worrying about him manipulating the accounts, and angry at having to work on his next ‘so-called book’, Guide to the Administration of the Housing Acts, 1923, 1924, a task that not surprisingly drove the office staff to distraction by year’s end when it was published, historic as the legislation itself was.19
Furthermore, it seems that living close by had its costs: it emerges that not only Aldridge and his wife, Olive, but also his parents (certainly his mother), lived in a flat above the office at Russell Square. This meant that ‘Mr A.’ (as Miles almost always referred to him) could keep irregular hours, and took it for granted that his trio of women staff, Miles, Miss Hodgson and Miss Lawson, would do likewise; it was nothing for Miles to be kept on until 11 p.m. She was also asked to stay after hours as companion and cook for one or other of the Mrs Aldridges, which she often did because she liked them, and perhaps because her attic was so cold. Though her job as ‘literature secretary’ at the council was similar to that which she had held in Chicago, the diminutive and indeed distinctly weedy-looking ‘Mr A.’ was exploitative in ways that no woman could have been. Why she put up with it now seems a puzzle, but he was an unworldly figure, apparently oblivious to all but the cause that had brought him to London from the provinces in the first place; and a billet in Bloomsbury suited Miles in other ways.
As well, she was back at the heart of the Empire in time to experience the first Labour government in British history. One of her most audacious of London experiences dates from soon after her return from Australia. Seated on the platform immediately behind Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald at a labour women’s demonstration at the Albert Hall in May 1924, she dealt with his legendary verbosity by tweaking his coat-tails. He was astonished, but it worked, and off he went to the House of Commons, where he was urgently needed. His government, a minority government reliant on the support of radical Liberals, fell five months after this incident, and by then Miles was well and truly fed up with politicians.20
A week after returning to London she resumed work on her Clare and Margaret novel, roughed out months before on the Tahiti en route to Sydney. This unpublished novel, which she pottered away at on weekends until August and then set aside for several months to write plays, then completed in 1925, survives in typescript as ‘Maybe!’, subtitled ‘A Novel Concerning Two Women’s Reactions to Current Philosophies’. It deals with the gender crisis that, coinciding as it did with the onset of middle age, so affected Miles in the early 1920s. The work is ascribed to ‘Mr and Mrs O., Joint Authors of The Net of Circumstance’; that is, Mr and Mrs Ogniblat L’Artsau, with the additional information that ‘Mr O.’ was the author of On Dearborn Street and ‘Mrs O.’ of ‘Love Letters of a Superfluous Woman’.21
By 1924 Miles had read at least two core books on psychoanalysis. Travelling across America in November 1923, she dipped into what is generally regarded as Freud’s most appealing and accessible work, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, given to her by Mary Dreier. She also had to hand an autographed copy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘latest contribution’, the gift of Jessie Childs, possibly His Religion and Hers. (In prewar Forerunner articles, Gilman had opposed the ideas of both Freud and the influential Swedish maternalist Ellen Key, insisting that the emancipation of women must be by collective, not individualistic, means.) As Miles put it in June 1924, ‘I have already digested (or rather have chewed up and swallowed) [Freud], and Mrs Gilman’s latest on him.’22
‘Maybe!’ suggests she had not swallowed much. The amazing thing, she thought, was that a work so dull and badly written as Freud’s should be taken up to such an extent. As Miles admitted, she did not read Freud’s book in its entirety, and she seems to have missed the ‘Oedipus complex’ and the ‘libido’. (Freud had yet to develop that bête noire of late-twentieth-century feminism, penis envy.) Nonetheless she got the point, supported by modern historical scholarship, that the new sexology confounded the prewar feminist challenge to the double standard of morality, by urging women to behave more like men, instead of vice versa; and she saw intuitively what had happened to women: ‘the grey-wolf androcentric cunning of the flesh had once more engulfed them’.23
The now middle-aged Miles Franklin’s reaction to the new sexology was not just a reassertion of outdated values. Alongside older values must also be placed newer ones, which would take account, as Freudianism to date had not, of a specifically female sexuality and quest for identity. The problem was to find a middle way. If there was no simple going back, then there was also good reason to fear the forward march of male demands and the deregulation of sex.24
As early as June, a mere matter of months since returning from Australia, Miles’s diary entries become black again: ‘feel no pleasure in anything,’ she wrote. Despite summer and a pleasant break in Cambridge in early August 1924 with Miss Hodge, housing work seemed ever more uncongenial.25
‘I can’t go on indefinitely without fruition,’ reads the diary entry for 8 August, after the Cambridge trip. But, Miles added with her usual optimism, ‘it must come soon, and effulgently’. A week later she had written the first act of a play tentatively titled ‘The Ten Mile’, soon renamed ‘Old Blakely of the Ten Mile’ and later known as ‘Old Trask of the Ten Mile’. By 9 September the script was completed; a typescript was finished a week later. Early the following year Miles once more retitled the play, calling it ‘Old Blastus’, and also toyed with the phrase ‘of Bin Bin’, a play on the name of a run on the east bank of the Goodradigbee River held by George and John Maurice Franklin as Bimben East Pastoral Holdings in 1889, and first used by her in the Amykos story competition in 1896.26
During this burst of creativity, Alice Henry arrived in London in August to attend conferences in England and Europe. At sixty-six, she had recently been retired by the league (though voted a generous allowance, she was relieved to learn in December). Miles, cast in a quasi-daughter role, found her very demanding, and altogether too close at 9 Brunswick Square, but dutifully took her about, and to many plays.27
Perhaps for respite, on 18 September Miles caught a train from Euston to Liverpool, then a boat to Port Erin on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. There she was met by the Smiths’ Harley Road housekeeper, Miss Peak, who took her to a boarding house at 31 Royal Avenue West, Onchan, north of the main town of Douglas. After a week, the possibilities offered for diversion by the Isle of Man and Miss Peak’s company had been exhausted. Miles soon left for Liverpool, where she took a room near the railway and spent a week alone looking around the great maritime city, prior to returning to London on 1 October.
Back in London, she attended a matinée of Part I of G. B. Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, starring Edith Evans, which, in the words of A. M. Gibbs, ‘pres
ents a vision of humanity that has evolved to a state where sex and other fleshly pleasures have been superseded by contemplation as the principal enjoyment of humans’. At work, she found an ever worsening situation with Mr A., and wondered if his irresponsible behaviour was merely egotism, ‘or is he living a dissolute life abroad’. Most trying was the task which occupied the staff at Russell Square seemingly until Christmas, described to her mother as sending out circulars about slums, apparently flyers for Mr A.’s ‘abominable book’.28
A year had now passed since her visit to the Great South Land. One weekend she despatched forty-eight Christmas cards to Australia. ‘I wish I could be with you again this Christmas,’ reads the card to her father. Instead she spent the day with her elders in London: after lunch with Alice Henry, she called on Miss Hodge, then in the evening dined with Agnes Murphy and her friend Miss Moore. Two days later she saw Noël Coward’s controversial drama of postwar decadence, The Vortex, starring the author. Its exposé of drugs and adultery, and whiff of homosexuality, since deemed more significant, she found confronting.29
Then came terrible news. On 9 February 1925 her youngest brother, Hume Talmage Franklin (Tal), died in Sydney aged thirty-six, a victim of Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder now treatable with antibiotics. He had been hospitalised some six weeks earlier, and according to her pocket diary Miles had already received ‘two heart-breaking letters’ from her mother, who had now lost all but two of her seven children, Miles and Norman being the only survivors. Although the letter from Susannah to her daughter at this sad time, written the day after Tal’s death, urged Miles not to fret, it is apparent that they were both distraught. Lady Byles and others helped her through the grief, but she was very low. She must have read through her diaries, for she was relieved that she had not entered anything distressing in her diary about ‘my little Tal’ during her visit, and hoped that ‘his frail body and sensitive generous soul’ were somehow now comfortable and at peace, taking some comfort in the thought that he had had a happy marriage. Later in the year, her diary reveals, she destroyed her mother’s other letters about Tal’s death. The grief was almost overwhelming: ‘I seem to have too much leisure & shudder at my own society which I so craved.’ It seems her father was unwell by now too. Anxiety about her family became one of the factors turning Miles Franklin’s mind back towards Australia in the mid-1920s.30
Two significant events occurred in June 1925 to lift Miles’s spirits. The first was on Wednesday 10 June, when Mary E. Fullerton called on her at Russell Square. They had met before, in 1924, but Miles had been too busy then with an international women’s housing conference to talk for long. Miles certainly knew of her as a correspondent of Alice Henry in Chicago. In 1922, aged fifty-three, Fullerton had left Melbourne in a bid for love and freedom to join Mabel Singleton, with whom she lived for the rest of her life, and to devote herself to her writing, free of inhibiting family pressures. She was over a decade older than Miles; and although they were travelling in opposite directions geographically speaking, their literary aspirations were similar. From the moment she read Fullerton’s delightful memoir of her Gippsland childhood, Bark House Days, it was clear to Miles that they were kindred souls, as she explained in her first known letter to Fullerton, written shortly after her return from Australia in apology for not having had time to talk during the housing conference:
My dear, it brought the tug to my throat so often, and there has to be rare artistry as well as sympathy of treatment to affect me like that.
Every word of that sweet little book with its sweet little brown cover and its sweet little bark house drawing — why it’s like gum blossom honey! I wonder can it — can it — no, it cannot surely, for all its charm, mean so much to outsiders as it does to those of us whose mother tongue it is in every syllable.
Your cranberries I think are my groundberries, and the potatoes, how I should like again to see them unearthed! I have lately been to the old places where once these homes were seats of hospitality and flirtation and industry. Ah, the charm of it and the wistfulness! You have caught it all with your exquisite, delicate strokes . . . I want to talk to you.31
The 1925 meeting marks the beginning of a vital conversation which continued until Fullerton’s death in 1946. It was another step along ‘the way home’ for Miles.
Miles’s diary entry for Sunday 28 June signals the second significant event: that she had begun to write a new novel. Although referred to thereafter in the pocket diary as ‘the Natalia story’, it was submitted to publishers at the end of the year as ‘Not the Tale Begun’, and ultimately published by Angus & Robertson as Prelude to Waking: A Novel in the First Person and Parentheses by ‘Brent of Bin Bin’ in 1950, under the auspices of senior editor Beatrice Davis. The original manuscript has not survived, but the Author’s Note attached to the published version gives the date of completion as December 1925 and the author’s address is given as Brunswick Square, London (the address of the Minerva Club). Though of its time and place, and a manifesto of kinds, the contemporaneous rejections of the manuscript are unsurprising (and Davis’s decision to publish is generally regarded as one of her least impressive).32
This ‘novel in parentheses’, with its male narrator and mercurial heroine, Merlin Giltinane, was a mouthpiece for Miles’s thinking at the heart of the Empire as her time there drew to an end. Even in this most arch and apparently unreal writing, some immediate links with reality are evident, one being that on 28 April 1925, as Miles’s diary reveals, she entertained several European visitors at the office, including a former consul in Moscow named Giltinane, ‘an Irishman with glittering eyes’. However, the important point is simply that she had begun work on what would be her most important literary endeavour since My Brilliant Career.
At the time Miles was reading the recently published Life of Olive Schreiner, the story of that earlier paradoxical daughter of Empire who had died in Cape Town in 1920 aged sixty-five, written by Schreiner’s husband, Samuel Cronwright-Schreiner. She read Schreiner’s letters too (also published by Cronwright-Schreiner in 1924) and took note:
. . . concerning Olive Schreiner. I carefully read her life and also letters by her husband . . . Yes she was a great and rare soul but lost to the world for want of a little Christian Science. She lacked self-discipline. You’ll see it in those books . . . If she had written only half a page a day — the amount of work in her letters, she would have had the thing done. It was a terrible warning to me and I therefore set out at once to do these books.33
Evidently Miles had softened her views on the value of Christian Science.
Back from a break in Devon, Miles found the situation at Russell Square worse than before. The endless demands of the Aldridges had exhausted her. Privately she now regarded them as ‘selfish vampires’ and shameless exploiters of defenceless persons (by which she probably meant her fellow office workers Miss Lawson and Miss Hodgson as much as herself). There had been an awkward inquiry about Mr A.’s personal accounts from the bank in June, after which the office staff had agreed it was best to leave him ‘to cut his own throat’. Miles, who was the most experienced of the office staff, knew her work was valued by the executive of the council, but it was all very difficult. After a particularly bad day on Mr A.’s circulars, she concluded he had softening of the brain.34
Mr Aldridge resigned as secretary of the National Housing and Town Planning Council on 12 November 1925, after an office meeting called on 5 November to regularise the council’s accounts, and in the face of an interim audit of the council’s books instituted by a meeting of the general council on 11 November. The general council declined to grant his application for two months’ leave, citing ‘grave irregularities’ and ‘private difficulties’. Miles would later tell Eva O’Sullivan back in Sydney that it was all very surprising from an ‘eccentric unfleshly professor sort of old chap’, who never said a bad nor a harsh word, did not drink or even smoke, but there it was, ‘gambling & women & embezzling — the whole gamut�
�.35
Concern about the council’s deficit dated back to 1921. (Some of the council’s impeccably drawn-up financial statements belatedly tabled for executive perusal are in Miles’s hand.) Now, despite the office women’s best efforts to bring him to his senses, and council member Mrs Hamilton’s hope that the rebuke and constraints of the first meeting might suffice, there was no way out for Mr A. Having allegedly spent all night burning papers at Russell Square after the 11 November meeting, he did what he had done so often before: he bolted, leaving behind a pathetic letter of resignation. For quite some time it was unclear where he had gone, apart from abroad. However, he and his long-suffering wife simply returned to the obscurity of south London when the dust had settled at Russell Square.36
From her letters to Mrs Hamilton, it is clear that Miles felt her time was up at Russell Square. She would stay to clean up, making sure that her colleagues were looked after and that satisfactory arrangements were made for the rehousing and care of Mr Aldridge’s mother, and for reletting the top-floor flat; but new hands were needed at the tiller. Unlike her disappointment with the way things turned out after the financial crisis in the league at Chicago, she had no wish to stay on: ‘The lure of England is dulled.’ Unfortunately her hope of fresh leadership at the council was soon disappointed — she found the new secretary appointed in March 1926, John G. Martin, previously of the Alliance for the Suppression of Liquor Traffic, good at raising money though lacking in flair — but she stayed for another year, with ever diminishing enthusiasm.37
Somehow she had persisted with her writing, and now went all out on ‘Not the Tale Begun’. However, it was rejected by three publishers: Jonathan Cape, Cassell and Chatto & Windus.38
The response is unsurprising. Few readers today could credit this tale within a tale — or story ‘in parentheses’ (there are nineteen) — and full of words such as ‘caracole’, ‘a-whoop’, ‘robustious’ and ‘burstatious’, or be able to stomach the idle lives of characters called Merlin Giltinane, Hugh de Courtenay la ffollette and Lady Pamela Clutterbuck-Leeper, who live in Mayfair and enjoy weekend house parties at Great Snippington.