by Jill Roe
So it emerges that by 1932, Miles Franklin hoped and believed that as Brent of Bin Bin she had founded an Australian literary school or tradition. This may take the reader by surprise; but Miles’s confidence was up, and the reviews of Brent’s book had been reassuring. Maybe the imperial curtain had lifted at last. As S. Mills, she was now urging Blackwood to reissue Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life, something his Melbourne standard-bearer Kate Baker had been urging her to arrange for almost two decades. To Baker, Brent wrote that he would be only too happy to write a preface (though this letter is undated and might refer to a later initiative).64
On 18 March 1932 Miles Franklin wrote her first letter to Hartley Grattan in New York, enclosing her response and a copy of Old Blastus of Bandicoot with the somewhat outrageous comment that she would have called it ‘Old Barry of Bin Bin’ but that Bin Bin had been used ahead of her. In a rare reference to Aboriginal culture at this time, she added that the name had several Aboriginal variants, such as ban ban, ben ben, boon boon and so on. In the correspondence that quickly evolved between the very able but rather prickly young man and his would-be mentor, Miles conceded that American readers had supported some Australian writers, but what she was talking about was a coming field of fiction, asserting that ‘verisimilitude’ would ultimately create a market (as it now has, through film especially). Unfazed by Grattan’s view that My Brilliant Career was neurotic and Old Blastus of Bandicoot sentimental, she made arrangements to meet him in New York on her way home. He too would be part of ‘the great literary adventure’ now under way.65
Suddenly, the pieces seemed to fall into place. Just as one option closed — on 9 August she learned that the Melbourne Herald had declined to take her Monkey book as a serial (as the expatriate journalist Guy Innes had urged it to do) — another opened. Happily, as noted in her pocket diary, Miles had already signed an agreement with Inky Stephensen on 30 July for its publication by the publishing house he was planning to launch on return to Sydney in a few months’ time (the contract does not survive, but presumably publication would be under Miles’s own name). Oddly enough, it seems that although she had known Inky’s wife, Winnie, in America and during her previous time in London through the Watsons, and in the guise of Brent had contacted Stephensen when Back to Bool Bool was imminent, she did not actually meet him until invited to tea by Kathleen Ussher on 3 July 1932, along with Ethel Richardson.66
For Miles Franklin it was an auspicious occasion. Jean Hamilton had them all to dinner soon afterwards (the meal cooked by ‘a Jamaican black’, Miles noted) and they talked about the publishing project. Miles was very excited. With Stephensen’s recent experience as a quality publisher at Mandrake Press in London, and with the backing of Norman Lindsay and the Bulletin in Sydney, a tremendous vista opened up. Did Inky mean it when he said she could be something in the new firm? She saw him as an Australian publisher for Brent but Inky knew Miles only as the author of My Brilliant Career, which he would have loved to get his hands on. Miles liked this ‘wild man of letters’, and his plans for Australian literature were a timely complement to her own. Moreover, his letters to Brent were wonderfully encouraging.67
Stephensen assured Brent that every one of his books was a portent of the future and that the Australian nation would live forever in his characters, urging him to throw his lot in with the new publishing house: ‘I implore you to consider the possibilities of your works reaching the post-war Australians quickly through publication by the lively Australian Publishing Firm we are establishing.’ In return, Brent enthused: ‘I have an accumulating pile of letters and articles on the need for a self-respecting Australian literature, which have been refused by the Sydney Morning Herald and similar journals . . . prophetic in view of what you want to do.’68
The Stephensens left for Sydney on the Otranto on 3 September 1932. Miles sailed for New York on the Olympic six days later. As usual there was no progress with publishers in New York, where she stayed with Margery Currey from 14 September until 10 October, again meeting old friends such as John Varney (who gave her a copy of his narrative poems First Wounds, published in 1926). Happily she also met the Grattans, and was alerted by Hartley to the importance of D. H. Lawrence’s Australian novel, Kangaroo, first published in 1923.
In retrospect, Miles felt she’d had a great time in the United States, but Margery Currey later deplored the non-response of New York publishers to her ‘beautiful Australian epic’ when forwarding a parcel of clothes (two dresses, for which Miles was grateful). On 10 October Currey saw her off from Grand Central Station for her trip across America, calling on friends in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. She boarded the Monowai for Sydney via Tahiti and New Zealand.69
After an uneventful trip during which Miles was able to try out a new typewriter purchased in San Francisco on accumulated correspondence — over thirty items done before Tahiti — the Monowai docked at Darling Harbour in the early afternoon of Friday 18 November 1932. There were warships in the harbour, and disembarking was fraught. She evaded reporters by hiding in First Class, and when caught in Customs, refused to be interviewed: ‘Rotters will never publish anything I write. How am I to live?’ she wrote irritably. (The press did not catch up with her for several months, until Bring the Monkey was due to appear.) Still, that very day a warmly welcoming article appeared in the Hurstville Propeller, doubtless the work of Miss Gillespie’s friend Will Carter. It concluded with a paean of praise for Old Blastus of Bandicoot, released in Australia by Lothian in August — ‘the local colour has the very glint of the gum-tips’; ‘the reader feels he is out in the bush seated upon an old bleached stringy-bark log, which has long since shed its bark’ — deeming it a fulfilment of the promise of My Brilliant Career all those years ago, and a timely marker of Miles Franklin’s return to Australia.70
With the excitement of a new novel by Miles Franklin, no one paid attention to Brent of Bin Bin. That suited Miles. She had no intention of revealing the truth ‘until he finishes his series’. With little new work in the pipeline and few remunerative prospects, she was more than ever determined to protect her intellectual capital. Besides, she was still sure the mystery was good for sales.
The return of Miles Franklin with a new book to her name was a significant event. George Mackaness, a person of considerable pomposity, was quick off the mark with an invitation to address the Sydney Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) in late November, presumably at the welcome party arranged for P. R. Stephensen to report on his new publishing house. Miles politely declined, pleading exhaustion but offering her support for the cause.71
With advance notice of the Australian release of Old Blastus of Bandicoot, Nettie Palmer had published an impressive article on Australian writers in the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail entitled ‘The “Olive Schreiner” of Australian Literature’. It began with the suggestion that South Africa was fortunate to have Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) as a fictional frontispiece: the novel was written with all Olive Schreiner’s young powers and without a hint of colonialism. By contrast, Palmer wrote, it took a long time for Australian novelists to break through colonial attitudes, with Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) one of the first and most emphatic moves. Franklin, Palmer noted, resembled Schreiner at least in that her book was written ‘in girlhood and with passion’, adding that although the novel appeared over thirty years earlier and had long been out of print, it had never been forgotten. ‘She has always been a symbol,’ Nettie said elsewhere. Recounting this to Hartley Grattan, Miles declared: ‘I am tired of this symbol business and want now to assert myself as a natural fact.’72
PART IV
AUSTRALIA
1933–1954
11
‘AS A NATURAL FACT’: 1933‒1938
My struggle was to express something of the life into which I was born.1
With a population of 1.2 million in 1933, Sydney had overtaken Melbourne as Australia’s largest city, and also boasted that first great sy
mbol of Australian modernity, the Harbour Bridge, opened in March 1932. But the money was still in Melbourne and a Federal capital was only slowly being established on the limestone plains of Canberra, so that the harbour city had yet to attain the national pre-eminence it always secretly believed to be its rightful position. Although the populist Lang Labor government had been dismissed in mid-1932, recovery from the economic slump was not in sight, and the cultural scene in Sydney was paradoxical. For Miles Franklin, no longer young, to assert herself ‘as a natural fact’ in such circumstances would take some doing.2
First Miles had to make Sydney her own, just as she had previously done with Chicago and London. Although she already knew the city quite well, it was not until her return from London in the 1930s that she really lived in it. There had been the occasional trip from Goulburn as a girl, and she had been back and forth from Penrith many times when young. She had also glimpsed (with some distaste) its postwar modernisation on that first trip home in the 1920s; and after three and a half years of semi-seclusion in suburban Carlton, from 1927 to 1930, she had some tracks marked out already, mostly leading in ‘to town’. Now, except for occasional trips up country, Sydney became her home.
Some of Miles Franklin’s friends regretted that she was obliged to reside in the unprepossessing suburb of Carlton, and from time to time urged her to move. But if Miles was discontented with Carlton, she never said so. At least, as she put it to Hartley Grattan, ‘I have plenty of food, a good roof and bed.’ It was a functional location. The shops were adequate; Railway Parade boasted a picture theatre, the Carlton De Luxe; the postman brought the world to her as readily there as anywhere else in Sydney; and provided she could rustle up the fare, it was no more than half an hour by train from the city centre, via Central Station. Being unfashionably located even had its advantages. It protected her from the busybodies of the press, quarantined the flow of country relatives, and somewhat obscured her current status reduced to that of spinster-daughter-cum-housekeeper. (The telephone installed in 1934 would help with the last point, too, though not always effectively, as when Miles answered a call from fellow writer Marjorie Barnard in a pretend maid voice, to Barnard’s understandable irritation.)3
Miles had not come home to do housework, though she had little choice about that, occasional home help notwithstanding. She had returned as an Australian writer, intending to make her presence felt. Thus on New Year’s Day 1933, a Sunday, she set off to spend a couple of days with Norman and Rose Lindsay in the semi-bushland of Springwood in the lower Blue Mountains. The Stephensens were there too, and the recently incorporated publishing company was much discussed.4
Miles enjoyed these wild men of art and letters, so full of intellectual energy and, in Inky Stephensen’s case, a roaring sort of charm. She didn’t care for Lindsay’s voluptuary art, but she greatly admired his novels, and she was delighted by his offer to do sketches for Bring the Monkey, deemed by him ‘“a delightful thing”, [which] . . . made him laugh outright in many places’. And she had high hopes for their new national publishing house with its inspired name, the Endeavour Press (after Captain Cook’s ship on his voyage of discovery in 1770). Correctly predicting that Norman and Inky would fall out when it came to coping with diverse manuscripts, she offered her services: ‘You and Inky will grow weary of that publishing house without me. Yessir — remember you have been warned.’ Her own problems, she said stoutly, had nothing to do with being female; they were entirely financial, due to lack of time to write.5
Thanks to Lindsay’s influence, the Endeavour Press was set up as an adjunct of the Bulletin. This partnership was not quite what Miles and Inky had envisaged in London, and though seemingly an advantage, it would be a problem all too soon. But with Inky already ensconced in the Bulletin building at 252 George Street, and Lindsay’s delectable Saturdee in hand, Miles felt the Press was away to a good start. Stephensen’s list included not only her Monkey book, but also a new edition of Louis Stone’s Jonah and, at Miles’s urging, an Australian edition of the Tasmanian saga Pageant by G. B. Lancaster, published in London in 1933.6
When Bring the Monkey appeared in May 1933, with its dedication to Jean Hamilton and Peter the monkey ‘in memory of variegated and heartwarming experiences London 1932’, it was a succès d’estime, but it sold poorly: 584 sales were reported by mid-1933, yielding a modest £8 11s in royalties. Reviewers were keen to welcome Miles Franklin home and to acknowledge the new publishing house; and while some expressed disappointment, most made an effort to understand the tone and setting of the thriller.7
The explanation for limited sales was that although Miles had merely hoped to cash in on the craze for detective stories, with Jean Hamilton’s monkey a nice novelty, she could not help going beyond the confines of the genre. The tale was edgy and up-to-the-minute, dealing with topics such as film-making and long aeroplane flights, and with shots at many of Miles’s favourite English targets, such as effete males, cold houses and film plots, ‘gathered together without the interference of an author’. But not too many Australian readers would have got past characters with such names as Zarl Osterley (based on Jean Hamilton), the dazzling film star Ydonea Zaltuffrie, or the second son of Tattingwood Hall, the Hon. Cedd Ingwald Swithwulf Spillbeans, much less tolerate ex-RAF flier Jimmy Wengham, said to have crashed his sacred war machine during a commercial stunt.
That Australia was a coming field in fiction was a favourite theme of Miles’s homecoming, along with her fervent and frequently expressed belief that the time had come to write the Australian story ‘from within’. She had already embarked on her own version. Late in January 1933 she left Sydney for a few weeks, travelling south through the Shoalhaven and on to her heartland. It was at Tallong, near Marulan, just north of Goulburn, where she stayed with relatives Edward and Maggie Bridle (the former a retired drover), that, according to her pocket diary, she noted the name for a new work, ‘All That Swagger’. ‘It came to me in a flash as just what I wanted while I was listening to an old drover telling me of his exploits. I could see the hardship and difficulties met with fortitude and resource, both gallant and pathetic, as the past came alive before me,’ she later recalled. Based on the life of her paternal grandfather, Joseph Franklin, and the fate of Brindabella, after My Brilliant Career, All That Swagger is now Miles’s best-known book. To Arthur Greening at Lothian she wrote excitedly, ‘I have a big book in my head,’ dealing with ‘three generations of Australians’.8
Given that these days Miles was urging other writers to face the challenge of the present, it may seem surprising that she herself turned again to the past. One commentator has dismissed All That Swagger as a set of warmed-over family stories, a notably superficial view of the historical novel and its place in the making of Australian and other cultures at this time. In fact, Miles had not previously written about the Franklin side of her family. Furthermore, the story came from deep within her, and was shaped as much by perceptions of the present as of the past. Nowhere is it stated, but it seems obvious now that the trigger for writing was her father’s death, and that she seized upon the Franklin experience over time as the perfect vehicle for what she wanted to say about contemporary Australia, with its still-uncertain culture and fragile environment.
All That Swagger was the book she had to write. Her perspectives had been in place since the late 1920s. At that time she had written to Blackwood of a unique era, now passing, but still alive in the fifth and sixth generations of native-born white Australians: ‘The first 130 years of British colonization in Australia involved a close touch with Nature which society may not experience again on such a primordial scale this side of Armageddon.’ Moreover, most of her thinking about ‘the Australian novel’ had already been done in London. Now she began writing about her Australia ‘from within’, and it came quickly, with a rough draft finished in August and a first typescript by October 1933.9
Meantime, Brent had lapsed into silence. So far as Blackwood knew, William Blake was struggling wi
th Cockatoos, and Mary Fullerton was told to say he was probably in the United States if they tried to sound her out. Friends like the Stephensens and Grattan tactfully avoided the subject and others lost interest or simply suppressed it, as Nettie Palmer came to, remarking with some irritation that it was tiresome of Miles not to admit that a writer was known by his style (and, she might have added, his typewriter, since the letters Miles Franklin was now writing to her in her own name evidently came from the same machine as that used for the letters she had earlier written to Nettie as Brent). Miles, however, had by no means finished with Brent of Bin Bin. She’d merely set him aside, dealing with the occasional proddings with evasive élan. Mostly she just said Brent should be left to make his own announcements.10
There was a good attendance when on 10 June 1933 ‘the distinguished author Miles Franklin just back from abroad’ addressed the Propeller Young Writers’ League at the Strand Theatre at Hurstville on ‘Literature and the Australian Outlook’. The league had been established by Miles’s admirer Will Carter and the local newspaper in 1931 to encourage talent among the under-twenties. Miles spoke encouragingly to the young hopefuls, and urged them to be brave in the face of rejection; writing was a serious vocation, calling for dedication and sustained mental effort. The door was ajar to ‘the [present] opportunity of creating our own literary background, and . . . the most unique and magical material from which to fabricate it’. Miles confessed her fear of returning to something less than she had imagined after nearly twenty years in Britain, America and ‘the Continent’, but said she found herself enraptured. The challenge was not to imitate English writing but ‘to prove ourselves worthy of its great traditions by adding to them and by enriching them’.11