by Jill Roe
By the end of January 1926, Miles confided to her diary that she was feeling like a dish rag, looking after the office and the older women there, for whom she cooked meals and otherwise soothed. She was sustained by hope of ‘Old Blastus’, her play of 1924–25, and in coming months made numerous attempts to get it staged. People said it was a good, even excellent play (Agnes Murphy said it was magnificent); but she had no success with publishers, and the London theatre world proved unresponsive.39
She also turned to other manuscripts. She re-read ‘The Other Side of Love’, retitled it ‘Three Women’, then sent it off. ‘What am I to do?’ she cried to her diary when yet another script came back. What she did was predictable. She wrote another play, a comedy in three acts ‘by a practising nonentity’, called at first ‘Daphne’ then ‘Bouquets’. Begun in August 1926, it was finished at the offices of Minerva Club resident Hilda Mary Baker at 275 High Holborn just before Christmas, for immediate despatch to the theatre producer Alban Limpus (and was under revision the next month).40
In March 1926, Mr Martin, the new head of the NHTPC, took up his position at Russell Square. It was not too long before Miles decided he lacked stamina. In April, Aunt Lena Lampe and a friend, Barbara Donaldson, arrived from Australia for a lengthy stay; and by July other old friends had again turned up, including Miles’s Welsh friend Phyll Meggitt and Amy Somerville, Miles’s god-daughter, originally from Penrith. Amid the outings and entertaining, such as she normally enjoyed, Miles was increasingly perturbed by what she took to be heart trouble, not helped by the strengthening conviction that she was wasting her life on dunderheads. Nell Malone urged her to leave the council, but what, she asked herself, was she to do?41
A fortnight’s holiday in Scotland and Ireland in August with Aunt Lena and Barbara Donaldson failed to lift her spirits. Arriving back in London on 27 September, Miles dashed around seeing all the new season’s plays before returning to the office, but felt too stale and dispirited to write anything. She had become an occasional literary adviser to Mary Fullerton, and Mary, in turn, was increasingly supportive of Miles. But Miles had begun seriously contemplating leaving London and was now looking for a way home. In April 1926, shortly before Aunt Lena’s arrival, she had written to A. G. Stephens, then travelling in Europe: ‘I’m getting so embedded here that I’ll never get out and I want to tell you what I’ve been up to, and get your advice and assistance.’ In August she must have told her mother she was thinking of returning. A reassuring reply from Susannah dated 19 September 1926 reads as follows: ‘If you intend coming home . . . how glad I’ll be to see you & what a warm welcome waits you.’ Susannah Franklin warned that she was not strong financially but would do all she could to help, adding that she supposed Miles would be loath to break up her connection in England, ‘but what is the use if it is a continual strain on your health’.42
The decisive moment came on Wednesday, 24 November 1926. Miles had felt a little better the previous day, but her heart was bad again, and she was depressed, so she went to her doctor. The doctor told her to give up work immediately. She did so. At one o’clock on Thursday, 25 November she left the office at Russell Square ‘for ever’: ‘thus ends an ignoble and deteriorating situation’. At its next executive meeting, the council determined that Miles Franklin’s job should terminate on 1 December 1926 and voted her an honorarium of £50 in lieu of notice. The minutes conclude the matter with a decision to send Miss Franklin a letter of thanks for her service together with best wishes for her future.43
‘I have treated myself to a nice little Corona [typewriter],’ Miles wrote to Eva O’Sullivan on 15 January 1927. Although still feeling unwell during this coldest of months, she was now free to concentrate on her own work. In her diary on 3 February 1926 Miles recorded that she rose at eleven and tried to work on a new manuscript, ‘Three Rivers’. The next day, having written a little, she went to the British Museum to look up old Huguenot names and locate old Australian works. And after some ten days in the museum researching early Australian history, she resumed her writing. By the end of the month she was reading bits of her ‘old time novel’ to friends, like Mollye Menken, who responded enthusiastically. Mary Fullerton was especially encouraging: ‘Like Oliver Twist I want more. Your story delights me. I think you have hit it. Found yourself and your theme.’ She encouraged Miles to try to place the manuscript, and significantly for the future, she offered to try to place it for her later, if Miles’s efforts were unsuccessful. She told Miles that an epic of Australia had not been attempted before. ‘Can she be right?’ Miles wondered.44
The first draft of the ‘Three Rivers’ story, which became Up the Country (a phrase from Henry Lawson), was written at speed. Tucked into the 1927 diary is a typed memorandum, summarising its progress in three points:
Really got steam up on February 14 and finished on March 20 — five weeks, averaging 3500 words a day.
Began second draft 27 March, typing and licking into better shape, and in spite of much other diversions, finished on May 8 — six weeks.
Began typing third and final draft on Monday August 29, and finished Sunday, September 18, 1927 — really 19 days as I did only a page or two the first Monday and last Sunday.45
By the time she began the third draft of the ‘Three Rivers’ story, Miles Franklin was back in Australia. When she finally decided to leave is unclear, but it was undoubtedly a writing-related decision. By March 1927 London friends such as Mary Fullerton were already expecting her departure.46
Before she left London, she had an offer of publication for the ‘Three Rivers’ story. After two knockbacks — she first sent it to Duckworth and Chatto & Windus — on 25 May, writing as Miss S. Miles, c/– H. M. Baker, she had sent it to Blackwood. Going by a typescript dated May 1927, it was then entitled ‘Up the Country’, with, according to an accompanying cover sheet, the subtitle ‘A Novel of the Australian Squattocracy’, though the typescript’s title page, which is generally regarded as more reliable, was ‘A Tale of Not So Long Ago’. The author was given as ‘Blake of Bin Bin’, and there is an author’s note and a dedication:
To the Old Hands
Both Here and There and Everywhere
Most Affectionately Dedicated by One of Themselves.47
In a covering letter ‘Miss S. Miles’ (or maybe Mills) apologised for sending an unsolicited manuscript, explaining that the author (unnamed), who had already left for Australia, had specially requested that it be sent to Blackwood, and stated that she was leaving the country herself shortly. It was, she continued, still a rough draft, but an experienced reader would be able to judge its potential, and, she affirmed, there would be no problems with context: ‘The writer of the story has read widely to be sure of the vocabulary and detail of the time, and is familiar with the environment through being a member of an old squatting family in the area.’48
The evolution of Miles’s ‘Brent of Bin Bin’ pseudonym, under which she published six books and kept secret from the reading public until well after her death, can be traced back to these last days in London, when she amused Mollye Menken with readings from ‘my old squatter friend and his saga’. But the name when it first appeared in print in late 1928 took English friends by surprise. Writing to thank Miles for a volume by Brent, Lady Byles exclaimed, ‘Where on earth did you get that christening? I was staggered.’49
Blackwood’s prompt response to ‘Miss S. Miles’ came in the form of a letter of acceptance dated 27 May 1927, in which terms were discussed and an understanding sought that the firm would have right of first refusal on the next two or more works. ‘Sarah Mills’ (as she now clearly signed herself) was, however, cool-headed and confident of her product. She was still negotiating minor details in the Memorandum of Agreement prepared at her request on 14 June at the time of her departure for Australia. Although Miles made a last-minute commitment, recording in her diary on 22 June, the day before she left, ‘At 11 p.m. wrote to Blackwood finally’, there was a hitch: who precisely should sign th
e agreement? ‘S. Miles’ responded to Blackwood’s politely worded inquiry of 17 June that ‘It would be quite in order for me to sign on behalf of the author but it was my intention to send it to him in Australia and let him go on with the affair himself now.’ Would Blackwood prefer her to sign or to await signature from Mr Blake, she asked, naming an author for the first time. Blackwood felt it would be better if the author signed.50
With that clarified and time to think it through, Miles was ready to leave London. She departed for Australia on Thursday 23 June 1927, probably from Southampton, since she first caught a train and her initial comments refer to rain and mist in the English Channel. Only the two Maynard women, Mab and her daughter, Frieda, and a mysterious Kath Baker saw her off; Lady Byles, now very frail, sent a farewell note. Miles’s diary entry reads: ‘Feeling alright.’
10
ENTER BRENT OF BIN BIN: 1927–1932
One must keep faith — with reality.1
The TS Barrabool sailed for Sydney via the Cape of Good Hope. The long way home, fifty-four days in all, gave Miles Franklin plenty of time to revise her ‘Three Rivers’ story. Typically, the job was done before Cape Town, and after a pleasant day ashore, she was back on deck, writing and chatting with fellow passengers, rough conditions in the ‘roaring forties’ permitting.2
Stopovers in Australian ports made the journey seem even longer. During five days in Adelaide, where she was relieved to get news that all were well at home, Miles called on Lucy Spence Morice, as she had done when passing through in 1924. When the Barrabool arrived in Melbourne for a two-day stopover, the Lister Watsons collected her from Victoria Dock and Nancy took her for ‘a heavenly drive to hear bell-birds and kookas and black maggies and see wattles’. As usual, she called on the Champions at Punt Road — to where Joseph Furphy’s admirer, Kate Baker, sent a note welcoming her home — and, for the first time, she visited Mary Fullerton’s family.3
At last, after a fine final day at sea, she was home again, landing in Sydney on Tuesday 16 August. It was warm, and she thought the harbour looked better this time, but when the family finally turned up at the wharf, her father (whose deteriorating health may well have been a factor in her return) ‘looked terrible’. The small welcoming party, which included Aunt Lena and Miss Gillespie, went straight back to Carlton for lunch. Later she met neighbours and relatives. Within days she was feeling stressed, due to the daily chores and the noise in the small bungalow crowded with relatives and a constant flow of visitors. After a week came the first of many desperate diary entries for late 1927 and over the coming decade: ‘My God, what a wasted day. Deliver me speedily or my punishment would be greater than I could bear.’4
She knew that, unlike Olive Schreiner, she must keep writing and that meant lying low. Within days she found her way to the Mitchell Library, that great repository of Australiana on Macquarie Street, opened in 1910. After a fortnight, on 29 August, she was able to get down to typing ‘the old time novel’. That took three weeks. Then came a version of delivery: on Tuesday 18 October, writing for the first time as ‘W. B.’ [William Blake], c/– Mrs Lister Watson in Melbourne, she advised Blackwood that she was sending under separate cover the final typescript of Up the Country. W. B. apologised for not including the agreement, still unsigned due to the ‘stultifying’ effect of legal documents on his mind. The letter is also unsigned, possibly because Miles had still to devise a suitable signature for William Blake.5
The ‘Author’s Note’ included with the rough draft of Up the Country sent by Miss S. Miles to Blackwood in May had been signed ‘Blake of Bin Bin’. Now, William Blake advised that ‘Brent’ was to be substituted for ‘Blake’. In the only known rationale for the change, Miles (as W. B.) explained, ‘I have chosen Brent as nom de plume [because] Blake would be a nuisance in view of the revived interest in the great William’ (1927 was the centenary of the death of the artist and poet William Blake). In choosing ‘Brent’, maybe she was thinking of the small migratory geese known as brent which breed in high northern latitudes and migrate south in autumn, or of the River Brent, a tributary of the Thames running through north-west London near Miss Hodge’s apartment, or even of someone she knew at the time, a possibility suggested by the discovery of a man’s collar, made in London and marked ‘Brent’, among her possessions at the time of her death. Perhaps she just liked the sound.6
By contrast, no such mystery attaches to the etymology of ‘Bin Bin’. It appears on the opening pages of My Brilliant Career and was part of the ‘Australian turn’ in Miles’ writing in London — she had used ‘of Bin Bin’ for her play in 1925 (‘Old Blastus of Bin Bin’) — and, as previously noted, its relationship to family land-holdings in the Brindabella valley has long been established by literary critics.
Many women writers of the nineteenth century, most famously George Eliot, adopted a male pseudonym, in the belief that women writers were discriminated against. Miles’s attempt when young to pass as a male writer might have worked had not Henry Lawson revealed in the Preface to My Brilliant Career that it was ‘written by a girl’. During the years away she almost always submitted literary work under pseudonyms. With Brent of Bin Bin, she seemed to be creating an amiable older country gentleman who would be a convincing author for the historical novels she had in mind, and which she feared would not be credible coming from a woman whose literary reputation was still that of a young girl.7
From the outset, Miles Franklin went to extraordinary lengths to protect her Brent pseudonym. She was not only her own literary agent, operating as Miss Mills (or Miles), but also the author, operating as W. B. or William Blake, and she communicated with her publisher via the addresses of trusted friends, not her home address. For an author to conduct her business in such a secretive manner would probably not be tolerated today, though it is possible, since most professional writers have literary agents, and there are valid reasons for pseudonyms, which may be adopted for commercial reasons or to protect an author’s privacy, or even, as in the case of Doris Lessing, to test the critics; and anyone can get a post-office box. Very few, however, make it a lifelong enterprise. Even if, as Carolyn Heilbrun has suggested, writing under an assumed name is a way to create a space for the self and secrecy a way of controlling one’s destiny, it can be a hard thing to live with. Miles maintained it for the rest of her life. Indeed, she ensured that, in theory at least, Brent outlived her: the link was not definitely established until 1966, twelve years after her death, when her papers became available.8
The inaugural letter to Blackwood from William Blake on 18 October 1927 stressed that anonymity was necessary ‘to facilitate the progress of my work’. From a business point of view, these matters were finalised in a letter dated 24 October 1927, when William Blake returned the agreement to Blackwood, complete with a small crabbed but clear signature written in black ink. Meanwhile, with the help of the poet John Varney in New York, Miles was looking for literary agents in America.9
Having returned to live with aged parents, she could easily be trapped as a dependent daughter, or demeaned as an ‘old maid’. She needed time to write but the moment she finished typing her old-time story, she became ill and depressed. Her diary — since 1926 kept securely in shorthand — records: ‘Cannot live long in this awful atmosphere. Awful old people killing me by inches.’10
Find mother very wearing. Just as hard on me as she always was (11 September 1927).
Mother terrible. More intransigent than ever (30 September 1927).
I can’t go on with it. Mother is just as terrible as she was of old (1 October 1927).
Help me as before dear God. Poor old Mother is happier with strangers so help me to provide her with a companion and to do my own work well (8 November 1927).
Not only was Miles in great need psychologically, but since American days, her physical health was always of concern. Her letters at this time are full of it. Although her heart had apparently ceased to worry her — ‘Women don’t die of hearts,’ she would say —
she experienced persistent insomnia and she once more felt pressured. Certainly she was no longer young; on at least one occasion, she wrote of having returned ‘an old woman’, possibly a reference to the menopause. She turned forty-eight in October 1927, and having survived thus far could expect to live another twenty years or more (and maybe even grow more like her mother, grim thought).
Driven by desperation, she wrote at speed in whatever space there was at 26 Grey Street. A fortnight after she finished typing ‘the old time novel’, she began work on another, which was entitled ‘Ten Creeks Run’ from the outset and would be Brent of Bin Bin’s second novel, published by Blackwood in 1930. The first draft was finished in a little over six weeks, on 25 November 1927. A mere ten days later, on 5 December 1927, she made a start on what is rather loosely described in her diaries as a new story, called ‘Cockatoos’, based on an old manuscript, ‘On the Outside Track’.11
Thus, in three years, from 1925 to 1927, Miles Franklin had written the first three of the six sequential volumes of the Brent of Bin Bin saga of settler families in south-eastern Australia and embarked on a fourth. It was a pity, William Blake wrote to Blackwood on 6 February 1928, that there was no chance to talk about the series, which spanned the decades from the 1850s to the 1920s, but ‘I have planned the whole thing architecturally,’ and its interest would build; a further volume, presently in note form, would bring the series up to the present.12
Brent of Bin Bin was a demanding pseudonym, not merely a nice-sounding phrase but a pledge of authenticity, and so much writing was a drain on Miles’s intellectual and creative energies. One consequence was that, having immersed herself in Australian history and the bush, she was increasingly avid for contemporary works, like the American realist Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and Babbitt, both published in the early 1920s. Yet the historical novel was increasingly popular; and when Katharine Susannah Prichard and M. Barnard Eldershaw (the pen-name of literary collaborators Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw) were declared joint winners of the Bulletin’s inaugural literary prize in 1928, Miles thought Prichard’s now classic Coonardoo all very well but considered Barnard Eldershaw’s A House is Built, a historical novel of mercantile Sydney, the real find.13