by Jill Roe
Buoyed by news of a third impression of Up the Country and the stronger sales of Ten Creeks Run (1650 copies sold in the first three months, though again mostly on the colonial market), and with over £37 in royalties for the period at last on its way, via Mary Fullerton, she had more or less decided on one more trip before she was too old. ‘I may be leaving Australia soon,’ William Blake advised Blackwood on 14 October 1930. Soon Miles was searching pawnshops for a fur coat. Mary Fullerton’s sister Em, who seems to have run a dress-making shop in Melbourne, said she would get one for her, and sent £50 as well.37
Miles was prepared to go steerage, but she still did not have enough for the fare. Ultimately the key was none other than Mrs Robins, now retired in seigneurial style in north-central Florida. In what might be read as a skilful begging letter, Miles outlined the situation to Mrs Robins. Her brother, Norman, was likely to be laid off for three months after Christmas due to ‘financial stringency’ — she probably meant in the pastoral industry, where he had been employed in the 1920s — and could watch over his son and their parents, which she said would keep him from brooding on his financial situation, so she could get away for a time, but she needed another $50. Mrs Robins cabled her the money. Miracles sometimes happen, Miles cried on receipt. That was on 8 November. Soon after, she began assembling the requisite travel documents; and later in November Norman obtained a part-time job as a supervisor at the Metropolitan Milk Board. With a final version of Old Blastus sent to Lothian earlier that month for placement with a British publisher, Back to Bool Bool off to Blackwood just before Christmas, and her parents planning a holiday in the new year, the way was clear for her to go.38
Lothian was told she wanted to keep her trip as quiet as possible, which was perhaps wise, since she had published nothing under her own name during her homecoming, not even any journalism. As in 1906, she said she would be seeking publishers in New York. She also hoped to find an American publisher for Mary Fullerton’s work. Through 1930 she had tried without success to persuade George Robertson to reissue Bark House Days, and she loved Mary’s poems, believing the grave quatrains were as good as those of Emily Dickinson.39
On 21 January 1931, the eve of her departure for San Francisco on RMS Monowai, Miles wrote a reassuring letter to her mother (on holiday in the country), that she had done the washing and cleaning and paid the bills, swept the side path, and made some plum sauce, even left some books and her best dictionary for reading. Thanking Susannah for money, Miles urged her to take a rest: ‘I’ll be back before you remember I have gone.’40
According to the date stamp in Miles Franklin’s passport, the RMS Monowai arrived in San Francisco on 13 February 1931. As in 1906 and 1923, she spent time with Carrie Whelan at Grand Avenue, Oakland, before boarding the train for New York via Chicago, where there were more reunions, including with Agnes Nestor and Dr Young, and a health check (the result was reassuring).
Arriving in New York on 24 February, she was met by Rose Schneiderman and again stayed with old friends. During her two-month stay she caught up with Mary Dreier, Margery Currey and Magdalen Dalloz, as well as John Varney and his friend Mary Barnicle. One weekend she had a ‘wonderful reunion’ with the much-loved Ethel Nielsen, previously Mason, now an up-country farmer’s wife in Goshen, Connecticut.
Of immediate import was a cable from the Melbourne Herald offering to serialise Back to Bool Bool, then in press. She was interested, provided the price was right, but soon became exasperated at the Herald’s apparent desire to capitalise on the Brent of Bin Bin mystery. Under her resumed identity as Brent’s agent, S. Mills, Miles haggled over the rates due to ‘native brains’, and asked such a high price to begin with (£500 for the Australian rights) that ultimately it came to nothing; but the offer encouraged her with her main objective, the publication of Brent titles and Mary Fullerton’s poems.41
Next day she sailed for London. Arriving at Southampton on 8 May, she caught the boat-train to London, to be met by Mary Fullerton and taken back to the Fullerton–Singleton abode, an apartment at 181C High Street, Kensington, where she was invited to stay, and remained until September 1932. She was just in time to visit Lady Byles in hospital. Now very frail, Lady Byles died two months later on 19 July 1931, aged eighty-eight.42
Miles was not impressed to learn that Blackwood might postpone publication of Back to Bool Bool due to a depressed economy and, as S. Mills, responded that she had before her another new novel, ‘a work of genius, outstripping any other novel circulating in its time and place’. (Probably it was ‘Helen of the Headland’ by Mary Fullerton.) However, the possibility of a German translation of Ten Creeks Run cheered her. And though Mary’s refusal to polish her work or improve her typing skills irritated Miles, she had faith in her friend and was determined to help her. According to her diary, by 13 July she had two manuscripts typed ready for Mills & Boon: Fullerton’s ‘Rufus Sterne’ and Brent’s ‘Mrs Dysart Disappears’. Soon after, she experienced several all-too-prompt rejections from other London publishers.43
At a book exhibition at Australia House she met the Victorian-born Henry Handel Richardson for the first time. Richardson’s success with the Richard Mahony trilogy, completed in 1929 with the publication of Ultima Thule, had taken Miles’s circle by surprise. She carefully read all the volumes and rejoiced in Richardson’s success, but was otherwise noncommittal.44
Between the two Australian writers lay the chasm of Edwardian feminism and colonial nationalism. Although Miles could characterise Richardson’s novels well enough, she could not really sympathise with them. Ultimately she thought Richardson was going in the wrong direction by highlighting Old World pessimism. Clearly, the literary purposes of the two writers differed markedly: whereas Richardson’s Mahony was the wandering Everyman, Miles’s characters are meant to be the settled children of Empire, distinctively Australian.45
On 28 October 1931, in the Publishers’ Circular, Blackwood announced Back to Bool Bool by ‘the anonymous but already famous Australian author’ Brent of Bin Bin, price 7s 6d net. Miles had been expecting it. Writing as Brent of Bin Bin from Blackwood’s address to Nettie Palmer some time in October, she noted that ‘it shd have been out today’, adding that Brent had two more volumes ready if wanted. Brent was not always so circumspect. Early in September he informed P. R. Stephensen that his contribution to the coming field of fiction would be out soon, and later that month boldly sent a leaflet to Sir Otto Niemeyer, the Bank of England’s adviser to the Australian government, hoping that Back to Bool Bool would help in a study ‘of the cross-currents at work in our Empire’.46
At 351 pages, Back to Bool Bool was the longest of Brent’s novels, and arguably the most readable, due to its topical edge. It was strong on environmental degradation and suburbia, while Madame Astra, the diva, dreamed that ‘art could become the fashion among the squattocracy’. Although its defence of the White Australia Policy has not stood the test of time, that was a widely approved position then. As for sex, Brent made an effort at modernity. The pivotal figure Freda Healey ‘had always meant to satisfy [her] curiosity before [it was] too late . . . [but when the major-general sought to seduce her] she did not want to surrender. She did not know how!’ Instead she took refuge in ‘the old bush chastity’ and self-restraint, as approved by the Bulletin.47
On balance, the reception of Back to Bool Bool was positive. But somehow it lacked the bravura of its predecessors, and as the third and now final volume of a trilogy — it was stated in the Author’s Note that one volume (unnamed) had been omitted for the sake of topicality, and this one is marked ‘The End’ — it did not quite succeed as a culminating creative achievement. Lower sales figures bear this out: it sold less than half the number of copies of Ten Creeks Run, and as late as 1937 sales had barely topped 1000 copies. Richardson, who had responded sympathetically to the earlier volumes, after reading a critical review in the Times Literary Supplement (‘the whole atmosphere is falsified with affectations’), wondered if Brent was �
��going dotty’. A. G. Stephens decided he was suffering from nervous fatigue.48
In any modern consideration of the trilogy, its imperial framework is inescapable. Drawing Back to Bool Bool to the attention of the Canadian-born British press baron Lord Beaverbrook, Brent suggested that literature was a potent force for bringing the Empire together; and further, that his great chronicle was a response to an earlier call from Beaverbrook’s Express for writers to leave the pavements and lickspittles of London and go to the farthest ends of the Empire to write about real people. Ever hopeful, Brent added that the forthcoming ‘Piccadilly’s Pantaloons on the Hoof’ (that is, Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang) was consonant with Beaverbrook’s interest in wool, and would make a nice serial.49
Brent wrote as well to the editor of the London Labour newspaper the Daily Herald (from 1964 the Sun) in March 1932, urging him to read Back to Bool Bool for a balanced treatment of the sufferings of British migrants under closer settlement schemes and the negative reactions to imperial migration in Australia at the time:
I have tried to be fair and fearless. It is my contribution to the solidarity of the British peoples which I have so much at heart.
It would be a tragedy if the British family cannot enjoy that splendid (though capricious) land, where so much arduous pioneering had been done. It would be inexcusable if owing to family disagreements, outsiders should now take the plant so arduously wrought and reap the harvest of endeavour — people of lower standards of life and poorer ideals of political liberty than old Britain sends out.50
In Australia, speculation as to the real identity of Brent of Bin Bin was revived. The author again signed off from New South Wales, and the book was dedicated, boldly but obscurely:
To MF., but for whose loyalty and support this effort could not have thriven.
To rare MSS., who nourished its inception.
To DC., who can keep a secret.
To Others, to be mentioned later, or excused as they stay or betray the course.51
The initials, it is usually thought, refer to Mary Fullerton, Mollye Scott Shaw (Menken) and Dan Clyne.
A. G. Stephens thought the saga must be the work of a team of writers. And whereas Mary Gilmore thought it must be a man, others now detected a woman’s voice. Miles remained the chief suspect. (When Mary Gilmore found out, she remarked that Miles had always been something of a practical joker.) ‘Everyone loves a mystery,’ observed ‘Yorick’ in the Perth Daily News on 10 September 1932, but asserted that when Old Blastus appeared there could be little doubt that Brent and Miles were one and the same — adding that all the books made jolly fine reading.52
The modulated response to Back to Bool Bool strengthened Miles’s conviction that she had written an important book. This goes some way towards explaining what otherwise must be seen as her shameless plugging of Brent of Bin Bin and his achievements in the years to come. But for all the bravado, she was soon compelled to accept that she was not going to make money out of serious writing. The financial crisis in Australia, and in particular the closure of the Government Savings Bank of New South Wales in April 1931, meant small depositors like Susannah Franklin for a time had no liquidity, and whatever money Miles herself may have had in Australia was diminished in value by an unfavourable exchange rate; the devaluation of the British pound in August 1931 made it worse. New Australian tariffs on books published overseas further dented her prospects. In the second and barely legible of the two surviving letters to his daughter, written on 29 April 1931, John Maurice Franklin railed against ‘the money power’.53
As usual, Miles Franklin’s birthday — her fifty-second — on 14 October 1931 passed without notice, except by her mother, who hoped she would have a happy day free from worry and taxes. A fortnight later, Susannah wrote that John Maurice Franklin was in hospital, having failed to pick up after a bout of winter bronchitis, but there was no cause for concern, it was only old age.54
She was too sanguine. Although John Franklin came home from hospital, he died soon after, aged eighty-three. While it was not entirely unexpected, the news distressed Miles. She felt ‘as if the light had gone out’. His equanimity and unquestioning support over the years had meant much to her, and she learned her first political lessons from him. In later years she came to think of him as ‘a spiritual genius’ — which would seem to refer to his affinity with the land — and in a sense he had become a lodestar in her literary endeavours.55
On 11 November, as S. Mills, Miles wrote to Blackwood, ‘I may have to leave England any day now.’ However, her cousin Annie May wrote after the funeral that Susannah had held up well, and had a woman companion until Christmas; neighbours also wrote reassuringly. Susannah herself wrote that if Miles was able to conduct her business better in England and was happy, there was no need for her to come home. It was not until her sister-in-law Eva wrote later that month that Miles learned Susannah had suffered a minor heart attack at home on 20 November, but by then Aunt Lena was on her way home.56
Miles threw herself into her work. It was pleasing to hear Blackwood had a reprint of Up the Country under way; and as S. Mills she busied herself on Mary Fullerton’s behalf when Blackwood agreed to publish Rufus Sterne, on which Miles had worked hard earlier in the year. ‘Please extend this writer the same splendid and impenetrable mantle of silence as has enveloped Brent of Bin Bin,’ S. Mills wrote to Blackwood as she negotiated a pseudonym satisfactory to Mary. It was something, too, when on 12 November Cecil Palmer sent author’s copies of Old Blastus of Bandicoot, the first novel to appear under Miles’s own name since Some Everyday Folk and Dawn in 1909. When Miles’s father heard about this just before he died, he asked if it was selling. But Miles herself always regarded it as a minor work, a useful diversion from Brent’s greater task.57
When Opuscule of a Pioneer Tufted with Ragged Rhymes appeared in Australia in 1932, under the imprint of William Lothian, as arranged with Cecil Palmer, it was warmly welcomed. The circumstances subsequent to publication were lamentable. Palmer was yet another casualty of the Depression, and most of the pages Miles repatriated at her own expense for yet another edition with Inky Stephensen were lost in a warehouse fire. Miles earned nothing. Palmer never paid the £20 that she was to receive on publication and had been instructed to send to her mother, presumably to help with her father’s medical expenses. Surviving correspondence with Palmer and Lothian shows the incredible complexity of authorship as a small business. Miles Franklin conducted her affairs with competence, even flair, but the times were against her in 1931, just as they had been in 1914.58
Typically, she pressed on. She was still trying to find a publisher for ‘Mrs Dysart Disappears’ and for Fullerton’s poems, and she managed to complete the mysterious ‘Tadpole’ story. Then in December she finished writing a genre novel, an English country house detective story — or parody thereof — called Bring the Monkey, which she described as ‘a light novel’ and no doubt hoped would sell.
There really was a monkey, a rhesus monkey called Peter, owned by Victorian-born Jean Hamilton, a vivacious redhead who had once worked in Elsie Belle Champion’s Melbourne bookshop and subsequently became assistant to the Melbourne University anthropologist Professor Baldwin Spencer. Jean Hamilton had accompanied Spencer on his last, fatal field trip to Tierra del Fuego and supervised the burial of his remains at Punta Arenas in southern Argentina, after which she went on to London, where she worked for a time for Mabel Singleton and became a good friend of Miles Franklin. Miles was as captivated by the monkey as she was by its spirited owner, and seized upon the novelty for a ‘potboiler’.59
Miles was not yet ready to leave London, but it was a struggle to stay. On 2 January she had heard that her dear Uncle Theo Lampe had died soon after her father, and six weeks later, on 20 February, came ‘the dreadful news’ that her sister-in-law Eva had succumbed to cancer. ‘I feel so desolated by the bereavements in my family since I left, but one must go on,’ she wrote to Eva O’Sullivan in May 1932. ‘I am aching to be home,
and shall leave as soon as I put through things here. It is not easy in these days of financial stringency.’ Fortunately, just before Christmas Miss Hodge had generously sent her £15, and Alice Henry lent her $50. But liquidity was always a problem. When she visited Ethel (Henry Handel) Richardson in February, she had 2s 6d to her name, and by April no money at all. The occasional pound note slipped into letters by her mother must have been a relief from reliance on the generosity of friends.60
Yet in one respect at least Miles was wonderfully well off. Having taken up residence with Mabel Singleton and Mary Fullerton, and with Jean Hamilton working for Mabel at the office below (Mabel ran a domestic help agency), she was with kindred spirits: ‘We were a great quartette,’ she recalled. In her study of their lives together, biographer Sylvia Martin has described the four women as ‘passionate friends’. With Mary, she shared the literary life. With Mabel, it was the public pleasures of theatre and politics. With Jean Hamilton, it was the fun of things. ‘I am glad you are so happy in your surroundings,’ was how the practical but not imperceptive Susannah Franklin saw it.61
Susannah wrote later that she was sorry Miles had failed to realise on her writings after working so hard, and not to wear herself out further if it was no good. But Miles hung in. After all, Australian books were like wild turkeys’ eggs, left to hatch if they would; and even if she could not ‘realise’ on her writings, she had had not one but two novels come out in late 1931, with a third in limbo due to the collapse of Cecil Palmer.62
Evidently there was something more at stake than the fourth novel with which she had been associated in 1931: Fullerton’s Rufus Sterne. This appeared in March 1932 under the pseudonym ‘Robert Gray’ with a dedication to Brent of Bin Bin, and Miles assiduously promoted it in correspondence. But Rufus Sterne provides a clue to what she meant. She arranged for Nettie Palmer to be sent a review copy and wrote to her as Brent of Bin Bin foreshadowing the novel as the work of a ‘protégé’ (Nettie’s review noted it did not deal with life in Brent’s large copious way but could develop, and that Brent would be an excellent guide). Further, on receipt of the publisher’s circular for Rufus Sterne in February, as S. Mills, she grandly, if somewhat elliptically, outlined for the benefit of Blackwood Brent’s role in the production of this poetic novel: ‘Brent of Bin Bin has borne the expense of typing and editing this Australian school he has started, and his judgement was responsible for discovery [of Robert Gray].’63