Miles Franklin

  She had already been among the distinguished writers invited to an evening party given by the FAW on 24 May 1933 — though a report of the event in All About Books which referred to her as ‘our novelist just returned from eight years’ sojourn in America’ implied some people had only a vague idea who she was. In fact, as befitted her trade union experience, she had now joined the FAW, which met regularly at the School of Arts, Pitt Street, though it seems meetings were not very stimulating in the early 1930s. (Jean Devanny, a feisty communist writer from New Zealand, refused to join because it was too conservative.)12

  This conservatism may be gauged from Miles’s experience in late 1933 of a debate on the topical question of ‘The Feminisation of Literature’. Putting the women’s case on 20 September, she said that although women were doing better since the war, they were still underdogs when it came to editorial chairs, top journalistic jobs, and of course income. The fact that women were now writing more freely meant that the old distinction between men’s and women’s novels had gone: men had discovered that women were not puppets. Characteristically, she asserted that what was important was ‘spiritual independence’, sincerity and self-respect. A month later, the men spoke: ‘terrible — pre-suffragette’, she wrote in her diary. Elaborating to Grattan a week later, she excused Frank Dalby Davison, ‘a nice man and he had a thought’; otherwise the speakers were ‘trivial, offensive and weak’, their arguments on the level of ‘a whistling woman and a crowing hen’; that is, in the words of the proverb, ‘neither fit for God nor men’. ‘Think of me among that stuff and no one but myself to feel the mental disgrace of it,’ she wrote.13

  It was not until political conflict arose the following year over censorship, and the visit of the banned Czech communist writer Egon Kisch, in Australia to support the Movement Against War and Fascism, that things improved. Miles was to the fore when younger members called on the FAW to take a stand on Australia’s severe censorship laws in April 1934, and when in November Stephensen and others ousted the FAW president George Mackaness, due to Mackaness’s objection to Kisch’s attendance at a literary luncheon at the Wentworth Hotel for the visiting English poet laureate John Masefield, she supported them. Because Miles was in touch with friends in Vienna and Germany the doziness of Sydney in the face of world crisis was hard to take.14

  The letters between Miles Franklin and Hartley Grattan in 1933 add a critical edge to Miles’s experience of return. Grattan did not hesitate to challenge her thinking, and this she valued, though she sometimes had difficulty in responding to his firmly expressed views, for example, on the now infamous White Australia Policy. In his writings Grattan recognised that it was ‘a racial and economic policy of enormous emotional content making it possible to use white labour in the tropics’, but this did not significantly diminish his distaste for it, as he explained privately to Miles: ‘I don’t, as you guessed, sympathize much with the policy, think it mistaken economically and socially. Also I don’t find the U.S. as horrifying racially as Australians seem to . . . in Australia I am always a bit upset by the predominance of wizened up British types!’15

  Miles felt much the same about ‘wizened up British types’, and she understood his American perspective. But how was she to respond? The White Australia Policy was supported by both sides of politics as, in the words of historian W. K. Hancock in his 1930 classic Australia, ‘the indispensable condition of every other policy’. Moreover, as Hancock also remarked, it was unreasonable to maintain that the policy was based on loftier grounds than those observed by Grattan.16

  Protesting that ‘you can’t bring in a backward (if we must not say inferior) breed of semi-slaves without having the problems so profuse in history’, the best Miles could say was that things could change. The currently collapsing world economy needed reorganisation, and a mingling of Asiatic and European types might well make a splendid race eventually. In the meantime, hard-won working conditions should not be undermined by indiscriminate immigration: ‘What are we to do after striving for conditions above starvation level?’ she asked. Even southern Mediterranean immigration worried Miles in that regard (as it did many people in the interwar years).17

  Grattan also encouraged her work. This may not seem so remarkable, but enough has been written of the unthinking sexism in Australian culture in the interwar years, and the way women writers coped with it, to mark him out as unusual. His enjoyment of her quicksilver personality is evident from the beginning, and he sympathised with her circumstances as a writer: ‘I hope your remarks about domesticity do not mean that you are neglecting your proper work. It is only by production that the battle can be won,’ he would write robustly.18

  The puzzle now seems not so much how Miles Franklin managed to maintain a writerly life in such a context — as Drusilla Modjeska first showed in Exiles at Home (1981), most women writers in Australia at this time ran houses in the suburbs and cared for variously constituted families, and Miles has left a record in her pocket diaries of how she did it day by day, down to mowing the grass — but rather, where she got the money to purchase typing paper and pay for postage on her correspondence, and how she found room to store it all in her mother’s crowded cottage. She could no longer afford an office, and her ever expanding archive contained numerous unpublished manuscripts (among which she reportedly found ‘the sequel to My Brilliant Career’ in mid-1933).19

  Just how crowded it was at 26 Grey Street is clear from a significant happening of late 1933. On 11 September the seventy-six-year-old Alice Henry arrived in Sydney from Los Angeles on the Monterey. She was en route to Melbourne, returning to Australia for good, like Miles really, and likewise out of sheer financial necessity, but much later in life. Miles and Aunt Lena collected her from the dock and took her to Carlton, where she stayed for a month. With Susannah and Susannah’s friend from Penrith days Louie Somerville, Aunt Lena and Miles already there, there were now five in a cottage with three small bedrooms and a glassed-in verandah at the back. As well, Miles’s brother Norman and his son, her nephew Jack, were often there on weekends. Miles railed against endless hospitality in All That Swagger. Marjorie Barnard benignly described the situation as ‘a homestead in the suburbs’, but Nettie Palmer came to think Miles overdid the hospitality, at least after her mother’s death.20

  Miles was also keen to get on with her work. She finished typing a first version of All That Swagger which she sent to Jean Hamilton as her unofficial agent in London.

  She had already found a niche as a book reviewer, though no one would have known it, due to a flurry of pseudonyms, such as the jokey ‘M. Seednuts’ and ‘Vernacular’. She read two new novels: an American blockbuster Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen and a manuscript by Xavier Herbert called ‘Capricornia’, which Inky gave her to read in March. Here were writings of the kind Miles delighted in — big, bold and realistic. Allen’s mammoth historical novel set in the Napoleonic era confirmed her assumptions: ‘There is no escape from the frame of reality.’ ‘Capricornia’, she told Mary Fullerton, was ‘very lively reporting — and frank about the half-caste situation in North Australia, and shows how the poor blacks are treated and makes them loveable. It shd be very controversial and sell immensely.’21

  Then suddenly she was off to Queensland as a travelling companion for Uncle Gus Lampe’s younger daughter, Metta. ‘I have always wanted to see Bourke and beyond,’ she exulted, and Uncle Gus was paying. Miles left Sydney by train on 5 April 1934 to join Metta at Narromine the next day. Two days later, having travelled via Nyngan, Bourke and up the Warrego River to Cunnamulla, they arrived at Charleville, where they spent ‘a delightful week’ at the recently built Hotel Charleville.22

  Taking the alternative route home via Brisbane, she had a day to prowl about the subtropical city, lunching with Yass-born Firmin McKinnon, editor of the Courier-Mail, and his wife, Emmie, another journalist, who failed to smoke her out as Brent. A woman journalist from Brisbane’s Telegraph also tried unavailingly to get a line on Brent, but to Mil
es’s subsequent relief wrote the interview up in a bland manner. It was Miles’s only experience of Brisbane, and although it rained, she enjoyed herself visiting the Art Gallery and eating custard apples.23

  After a pleasurable five weeks away, she returned to Sydney by crowded overnight train from Brisbane on Friday 11 May. To Jean Hamilton she wrote, ‘I love the far out places. Out there one sees what an incredible feat Australia is’ — a phrase which reappears at the end of All That Swagger and in Miles’s World War II journalism.24

  Among the letters awaiting her return was a positive response to the All That Swagger manuscript from Alice Henry, although it had still not been accepted by any publishers.

  To Mary Fullerton, Miles reported that authors were now paying Stephensen to publish their work, and the books were mostly tripe. An exception was Eleanor Dark’s startling eugenical novel Prelude to Christopher, which Miles liked as much as the manuscript of ‘Capricornia’ and reviewed for the Australian Mercury as a brilliant modern novel (though written without her own experience of ‘alienists’ and reformers).25

  Miles was now increasingly concerned about the past as well as the future of Australian literature, and her own place in it. Late in 1934 she had contributed an appreciation of Tom Collins (Furphy’s pen-name) to a celebration of Joseph Furphy’s ninety-first birthday at Yarra Glen in Victoria, organised by Kate Baker, and in 1935, again prompted by Baker (and also Nettie Palmer), she tried to promote something similar in Sydney for A. G. Stephens, whose death in 1933 had passed unnoticed by the Bulletin’s ‘Red Page’. Likewise, early in 1936 she would attend a ceremony at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains to mark the spot where Charles Darwin had paused on his only inland trip in Australia a century before, and later that year she would begin speaking up for the nineteenth-century South Australian writer Catherine Helen Spence.26

  Partly it was her age that made her more historically minded. It was also the peculiar cultural situation in which she found herself. In the interwar years, the forces of modernism made more headway in Sydney’s ‘sea coast of Bohemia’ than elsewhere in Australia. Yet with all roads from the depressed hinterlands leading to Sydney, there were plenty of keen (though less well documented) advocates of an Australian bush culture too. The result was ‘a conflict of opposites’, with ideological and class tensions tending to cancel one another out and little space left for the idea of a national literary culture. Moreover, the whole scene was blighted by heavy censorship and ongoing expatriatism. (Miles thought with some justice that she and Stephensen were exceptional just because they had come home.) There was a post-colonial intelligentsia in Sydney, but support was limited outside journalism; and with only one small and poorly funded state university, it soon became clear that allies in the project to secure a new field for fiction were few. Miles believed that the future of Australian literature was unlimited, and that a distinctive technique, the ‘yarn’, was being established, but that the lines were simplistically drawn between those committed to the ‘gum tree’ school and those who felt themselves above and beyond it. As she rightly observed, unlike the English oak, the alphabet of the eucalypt was hardly known.27

  P. R. Stephensen and his wife, Winifred (front row, right), as Brent of Bin Bin and Mrs Mazere (a character in Up the Country) at the Artists’ Ball, Sydney, 1935. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, P2/476)

  Nonetheless, although it was not a red-letter year for Miles, 1935 saw her profile rise. In an article on Australian women writers published during Authors’ Week in April she was said to be one of the pioneers still doing good work, and she remained to the fore in the campaign against censorship, asserting at a meeting called by the newly formed Left-wing Writers’ League that same month that ‘if the world were made safe for fools, it wd soon be fit for nothing else’. While the FAW-sponsored Authors’ Week irritated her, especially when she was patronised by ‘would-be society women’ and found that books published overseas, as with Brent, were not on display, she pitched in with a talk on ‘Novels of the Bush’, delivered at the Blaxland Galleries and broadcast over 2BL. Unfortunately Miles was not there to appreciate the joke when P. R. Stephensen turned up at the Artists’ Ball as Brent of Bin Bin, with Winnie as one of Brent’s characters, Mrs Mazere.28

  In May 1935 Miles was awarded a King’s Silver Jubilee medal, which she graciously accepted with words commending the New South Wales Governor’s support for Australian writing and stressing the importance of a vigorous and distinctive national literature. The award took her by surprise, and the family was unimpressed, except for her cousin Metta at Peak Hill, who sent congratulations to the only member of ‘the tribe’ to be honoured. Miles still didn’t think much of the local literary societies, but she was probably nominated by one of them, and they sought her out, for instance to address the Junior Literary Society and as a judge of plays at the Savoy Theatre in mid-1935. Such occasions enabled her to promote her ideas.

  Miles’s talk for Authors’ Week 1935, ‘Novels of the Bush’, is her first known radio broadcast. It was subsequently donated to the Australian Mercury and in 2004 was deemed by Sally Warhaft one of ‘the speeches that made Australia’. She was an occasional broadcaster thereafter, giving maybe one or two talks a year, mostly over national networks, until 1951. Jean Hamilton had already been on the BBC, and other women writers in Australia (for example, Katharine Susannah Prichard) had made their debut earlier. Despite anxiety about how she would sound — an anxiety common among women broadcasters until the 1960s — Miles was keen to avail herself of this new and lucrative medium. The new possibilities included radio plays and talks, on which she sought advice about rates from Nettie Palmer. When she found out that the ABC was taking out options as well as awarding prizes in its play competition, she returned to play-writing with zest.29

  Her radio talks were not unlike her earlier print journalism. A talk on ‘Jane Addams as I Knew Her’ went to air on 17 June, and she gave four twenty-minute talks on Wednesday mornings in September and October: ‘The Fun of Being a Foreigner’; ‘Postscript on Humour’; ‘Wit and the Jurist’ (on meeting Mr Justice Higgins in Chicago); and ‘Why Australian Novels?’. But she was not always paid. At other times she would be paid quite handsomely; for instance, she received three guineas for a schools broadcast on ‘My Life and My Books’ in 1938.30

  All That Swagger was still in typescript at the end of 1935. The news from London in November had been that although four publishers had rejected the manuscript, Harraps was interested, but it would have to be cut by one-third, and made more of a story. Miles was tempted, wondering if they would give her an advance: ‘This book is a big piece of work and I could not afford to mutilate it on mere chance,’ she wrote to Jean Hamilton. In fact, she had already retyped the whole thing, cut 100 pages and done what she called ‘sand-papering’. Then she decided not to publish a cut version.31

  Still in search of publishers, she wrote to John Varney in New York before departing ‘to look over my territory’, as she seemed to do most summers, advising that on her return she would revise and retype the manuscript and make an additional carbon copy for his friend Miss Barnicle, in hope she might recommend it to a publisher there. It was a faint hope.32

  The biggest disappointment was Stephensen, who, she lamented to Nettie Palmer, had had thousands of dollars but had failed to establish his publishing house or even a literary magazine and was now in liquidation. Still, she said, Inky had published some important texts.

  The international situation was increasingly worrying too. The beginnings of German re-armament were evident in 1935; there were further Japanese incursions into north Asia; and in October, the Italians invaded Abyssinia. Writing to the Robinses at Christmas time, Miles recounted her pleasure at Mrs Griffin’s outdoor theatre at Castlecrag, where she had seen a splendid performance of Iphigenia in Tauris midyear — the amphitheatre was one of the features of Sydney in the 1930s, when commercial theatre was depressed — but added that mention of such th
ings seemed trivial ‘while the great problems are flouted.’33

  To this point, Miles Franklin, despite a rich correspondence and her active membership of various writerly organisations, not to mention her continuing literary effort, was not truly part of the mainstream of cultural politics. She lacked real authority, a situation she found puzzling. Why was it, she asked Mary Fullerton after reading a few chapters of M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Plaque with Laurel in April 1936, which she deemed ‘precious stuff quite away from the real life of Australia’, that it was acclaimed ‘and I am ignored and rejected’?

  In answering this question it must be remembered that her known literary output was limited, and since her homecoming somewhat eccentric, and that at first she had been aligned with Stephensen, whose standing diminished by the year. Moreover, although she had a number of women friends in Sydney (and could always call on Eva O’Sullivan to accompany her to events such as the opening of the annual Royal Arts Society exhibition in 1936), most were not writers. The women writers she had met earlier included Marjorie Barnard, who was impressed but too timid for an affinity to develop, and Mary Gilmore, who was older and too established, while the young Christina Stead, whose first fierce novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, had won Miles’s approval, had long since left for London. Perhaps Miles had been looking in the wrong direction anyway, to the men of the radical nationalist school instead of among the younger women. There in the mid-1930s she found some apparently unlikely ‘congenials’, such as that wild communist activist Jean Devanny, the brilliant but reserved Eleanor Dark at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, and the young schoolteacher Dymphna Cusack, a radical literary daughter for Miles to cherish. Early in 1936 Miles also encountered Kylie Tennant, whose first novel Tiburon had won the inaugural S. H. Prior Memorial Prize in 1935 and was welcomed by Miles as a work in the Brent tradition of cultural realism.34