by Jill Roe
To further lift her spirits, there was a new edition of Old Blastus of Bandicoot, selected as one of ten fiction titles in a CLF-funded library of Australian classics, a cheap wartime series published in response to the demand for Australian books and known as the Australian Pocket Library. (The price per copy was to be between 1s 3d and 2s, depending on size.) Publisher George Clune of Allied Authors and Artists was in touch with Miles on 21 April, the day the initiative was announced. Irritable negotiations ensued, possibly over the sale price; but this seems to have been smoothed over, perhaps with the help of Frank Clune, George’s brother. The proofs were sent to Miles just before Christmas, and the book appeared soon after. The paper was poor, but she felt it an honour to be included in the series. A. D. Hope said that it was not only odd that it had been chosen but that ‘it should ever have been printed at all’, and R. G. Howarth wrote that it was ‘a failure that might well have been a success’, but in 1945 it sold 25,000 copies, and it remains a vivid document of the era when young women’s lives could be destroyed by pregnancy outside marriage. This point Miles stoutly defended when the book was privately criticised by Howarth as unrealistic: ‘You can be sure that the material in Blastus is as sound as something a doctor might assemble on the basis of his case book.’ (She was probably referring to ‘Miss Gillespie’s tragedy’, a real-life story about Gillespie’s sister Addie and Addie’s illegitimate son recorded in her literary notebooks.) Miles also made an ironic comment on Howarth’s view: ‘Contraceptives must have resulted in an even greater revolution than I had realized.’58
Hope and Howarth were both academics. Their views did not impinge on George Clune’s proposal in November to republish Bring the Monkey, which reached galley stage eighteen months later, but then disappeared, presumably into another publishing black hole. However, Miles also realised that she would have to cope with academic critics, whom she referred to sardonically as the ‘dominies’ (from the old Scottish word meaning ‘schoolmaster’), as well as the publishing industry and the Left faction of the FAW. As Lesley Heath has explained in a study of literary societies in Sydney in the interwar years, such societies strengthened cultural nationalism in the face of public indifference, but at the same time the academic study of literature was taking hold and ‘the passing of judgement’ became the province of universities, where the imprint of class and wealth was still very strong. Many senior writers found this irritating.59
Two instances of academic interference in literary affairs upset Miles Franklin in 1944. In the winter of that year Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw delivered the annual Commonwealth Literary Fund lectures at the University of Sydney on Australian literature. When on 9 August Barnard lectured on ‘Miles Franklin and “Brent of Bin Bin”’, Miles, with characteristic insouciance and somewhat to Marjorie’s consternation, turned up to listen. Afterwards she declined to eat with Barnard, and when she got home she wrote in her pocket diary that Marjorie Barnard had delivered ‘a venomous & cowardly attack on me; every detail of calculated malice to bring ridicule on me before [a] university group’.60
Barnard subsequently protested her innocence and asserted that Miles had taken offence when students laughed at quotes read out by way of illustration. This she no doubt believed to be the problem, and she did read out some funny bits (both intentionally funny and otherwise; for example, a reference to ‘hirsute ornaments’, that is, beards, one of Miles’s pet dislikes).61
From the text of the lecture, which survives in the Barnard Papers in the Mitchell Library, it is clear enough what the problem really was. The lecture began by outlining the pioneer novel as an established tradition, a genre that offered plenty of action and required no great labour by the author, and noted that it was the main channel of romanticism in Australian literature. The novels of Miles Franklin and Brent of Bin Bin — Barnard had no doubt they were one and the same, which on its own was enough to irrritate Miles — were of ‘historic and symptomatic interest’ in this regard. Most attention was devoted to Old Blastus of Bandicoot, ‘the perfect type of the whole tradition’, located ‘somewhere between the beard and the motor car’. When dealing more speedily with the Brent books, Barnard highlighted ‘local colour’, noting also the writer’s many ‘distracting opinions’ about women and war and the environment. In short, Barnard’s lecture placed Miles’s writings in historical perspective and adopted a critical approach; and in doing so, exposed a generation gap.62
Miles’s response to Barnard’s lecture exposed something deeper and more personal as well. Like Mary Fullerton, Miles Franklin was still sensitive about her limited bush education. In her young days, women were not deemed to need much in the way of formal education. However, by the 1940s, some younger women, including a few women writers (such as Dymphna Cusack), had degrees. Marjorie Barnard, an outstanding history and English graduate of Sydney University in 1920, personified the new order. And here she was, apparently mocking a less privileged predecessor.
Then on 17 August 1944 the second disturbing literary incident began when Miles Franklin met Colin Roderick, then a Gympie schoolteacher, on the steps of the Mitchell Library. Roderick had earlier sought permission from Blackwood to reproduce a chapter of Brent’s Up the Country in his forthcoming anthology, The Australian Novel, and the matter was referred to ‘the author’ via Mary Fullerton. According to Roderick, the outcome was an ‘untraceable’ permission from William Blake, and an apparently genial meeting in Sydney to discuss his decision to invite Miles Franklin to write a preface. However, when she later received page proofs and saw what he proposed to do, she was enraged on behalf of the authors, whose financial rights had not been considered, despite lengthy (‘stupefying’) selections. (The selection from Up the Country amounted to sixteen printed pages.) It was, said Katharine Susannah Prichard (also included in the anthology), ‘barefaced insolence’. Then when Roderick told Miles he was doing it for the good of Australian literature but expected to get a D. Litt. for his efforts, she set about organising a boycott.63
Miles Franklin had felt disadvantaged by the unequal relationship between writers and publishers. But this was a case of exploitation for academic purposes. (A later generation of writers faced a similar situation with photocopying and the student ‘brick’ or reader.) At first, Miles seemed to have some success with her proposed boycott. But in the end she had to give way, as there were no legal constraints, and goodwill — or maybe vanity — among the anthologised authors won out. When she at first declined to write the preface, Roderick replied regretting her decision, but assuring her that all the other writers were satisfied and wished the book complete success, Prichard among them. So she gave in to Roderick, deemed in her diary a ‘thick-skinned go-getter’, and wrote the requisite page and a half.64
By late 1944 it was clear that the course of the war had changed. With the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge under way in western Europe, and Australian troops mopping up in New Guinea, the Allies were on the offensive at last. As early as mid-year, Miles Franklin had detected a relaxation in suburban Sydney: ‘More people on the streets in Carlton these days. Lots of men in civvies & I saw a young woman in [the] middle of the day without babies or errand boys. Commodities creeping back into the shops. Got rolled oats — plenty of eggs, a little bacon, & a flint for [a gas] lighter’ reads the pocket diary entry for 22 July 1944.
Her nephew John Franklin turned up to spend New Year’s Eve with her, reminding her that the war was not yet over. ‘I can’t bear much more of the war,’ she wrote to Ian Mudie on 19 January 1945.65
The surviving Franklin–Mudie correspondence for 1945 amounts to some forty-five items. When she found that the last poem in his collected Poems: 1934–1944, ‘Unabated Spring’, was dedicated to her (‘my own beeyootifulll poem’) she was so thrilled she spent a whole day (2 April) in reply. She regarded Mudie as a kind of literary son, just as she felt Dymphna Cusack was her darling daughter. She thought his poetry captured the core of what she had so haltingly exp
ressed, and evidently she spared no effort in supervision and support. Thus she emphasised that the creative process was a matter of liberating what was within, as when (probably with regard to Up the Country) ‘I carried a single sentence with me for months . . . when I could get it down it was like a popping cork and about 200,000 words spurted out . . . What we people who are overwhelmed by it need is discipline and selection.’ Likewise, she laid out the task ahead for ‘bigger and more wayward souls’:
Miles and her airman nephew, John Franklin, who would soon become a source of great misery for her, Sydney, February 1943. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, PX*D250/1, No. 99)
You know we are in danger of exploding at the ferment of all the intoxicating things there are to be won from and done for our very own land, that the Aborigines — under sacrifice — gave to us, kept for us unspoiled . . . [The land] was so beautifully kept by the blacks, and they were banished and vanished so heartbreakingly that the conscience of the place can only be appeased by retribution to those remaining, and by the whites making themselves worthy of holding the land and spreading from it the news by example of a worthwhile way of life.66
Miles’s relationship with Dymphna Cusack was somewhat similar, though the outspoken Dymphna was already a celebrity in her own right. In early 1945 Dymphna and her friend and future collaborator Florence James had moved with Florence’s two young daughters, Julie and Frances, to ‘Pinegrove’, Hazelbrook, in the lower Blue Mountains, to concentrate on their writing. Miles Franklin was among their first visitors, staying for five days, from 14 to 19 February. To the delight of the children, she arrived by train with three bantams in a hatbox. She in turn delighted in them, and in the surrounding bush, identifying twelve birds from the verandah next morning, before finding a possum had pinched her toothbrush. It was her substitute for a summer break that year. Riding in the bush, knee-deep in ferns, was a happy reminder of her childhood, ‘the enchanted core of her life,’ Dymphna later recalled.67
When Dymphna stayed a couple of days at Carlton in early March, Miles gave her My Career Goes Bung to read in bed, and next day Dymphna expressed herself enchanted by the first nine chapters. Dymphna would also urge Miles on with her Easter Show story, Sydney Royal, which Miles completed in December 1945 despite much lamenting of loss of momentum along the way. And their literary partnership continued beyond that. In mid-1945 at Carlton, with Dymphna in residence for the purpose, they worked on their bookshop play, ‘Call Up Your Ghosts!’, in which the ghost of Australian literature booms from above shelves bereft of Australian books.68
Dymphna later wrote from Hazelbrook: ‘My friendship with you . . . has not only brought me great joy . . . but . . . our relationship has been of the greatest value in re-orienting me in my own country. All the corrupting influences of academicism and expatriatism had left their mark on me and meeting you swung me to my own pole again . . . You have been a touch-stone of essentials for me.’69
As the Allied momentum was maintained in early 1945, those who recalled the reactionary aftermath of the Great War of 1914–18 preached ‘reconstruction’ and ‘never again’. FAW plans to ensure the survival and development of Australian literature when the war was over took several forms. First was the already established Pocket Library. The series had print runs of 25,000, an astonishing figure today, and Miles would do well out of it herself: by May 1945 Old Blastus had earned £95 in royalties. By then she was working to get Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison included in the series as well. (As time went by Miles became ever more enthusiastic about Spence, then almost totally neglected as a writer. It seems Miles saw in Spence a prior instance of a writer swamped by social reform, the now routine rationale for her own apparently limited output.)70
There was a related Co-operative Book Publishing Program, a project in which Miles also had a personal interest. Unlike Nettie Palmer, Miles Franklin did not think Australian literature securely established, and she believed a nationwide publishing co-operative was the surest hope. A third initiative, the FAW Book Society, a club along American lines with a Book of the Month, was launched at a literary lunch on 4 June 1945 by a Yale literature professor, Henry Seidel Canby, who was passing through Sydney. Miles gave the vote of thanks. In her response she sounded a warning note. American big business was on its way and its impact on the book trade would not be benign so far as authors were concerned; Australian writers would need courage. Perhaps they would have to live off the proceeds of two-up. Meanwhile, would Australian publishers cooperate with the book club? Fortunately Canby approved of what she said, and received from Miles a copy of Back to Bool Bool.71
As a long-serving member of the FAW executive, she had worked hard on the co-operative publishing program, and then on the Book of the Month plan, which came to fruition in September 1945, when Sidney J. Baker’s The Australian Language appeared as the first title. Miles, who served as chair of the judging committee, would have preferred Eleanor Dark’s sombre study of frustrated creativity in wartime Sydney, The Little Company.72
With any mooted publishing venture, Miles invariably thought of Brent. She even had the temerity to send Back to Bool Bool to the Pocket Library Advisory Committee; and there were negotiations on his behalf in 1944–45 with the Sydney bookseller and publisher Dymocks, and a vague publishing possibility arose with someone Ian Mudie referred to only as ‘Brown’. Miles had been working over the first volume, retitled ‘Prelude to Romance’, in January, and when she re-read Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang a few months later she decided it needed very little revision. Indeed, there was scarcely a time between 1931 and 1948 — when Beatrice Davis finally proposed their publication by Angus & Robertson — that Miles was not scheming to get her outstanding Brent books published.73
Reporting to Mary Fullerton on the FAW initiatives, Miles compared the problems of the book trade with those of the theatre: ‘I said in the thanks speech that we had seen what big business in the commercial theatre had done to drama in America — ran it into the ground.’ Commercial theatre had collapsed in Australia in the 1930s and drama had survived best in the little theatres, along with radio, in the 1940s. ‘It is desperate that we have no working theatre here,’ Miles wrote to actress Catherine Duncan, and without that, as she argued later, no matter how many subsidised buildings were erected, there would be no national theatre.74
Miles had been writing plays on and off since 1908, and she probably hoped to make money from them, at least in the 1920s. But of nearly thirty plays written by 1945, only three had been read or performed, and she never made money from any of them. Evidently the competitions of the 1940s renewed her enthusiasm for playwriting. Perhaps it was her competitive streak: with so many women doing well in the field, why should not she? She had plenty of plots from Australian history, and the prize money was good. At a deeper level, she had always believed the theatre could be a powerful force in people’s lives, and she yearned for its influence and immediacy, just as she yearned for a best-selling novel. But her sense of what the public wanted was never very good, and there was an off-putting element of preaching in most of her dramatic writing.75
In October 1945 she wrote to Ben Chifley, Australia’s new Labor Prime Minister following the death of John Curtin that month, on the need for protection for Australian literature: ‘Without a literature of our own we are dumb. In the disturbed world of today, more than ever we need that interpretation of ourselves . . . which is the special function of imaginative writers.’ As a result of such pressures, an inquiry by the Tariff Board was established. Frank Clune was one who appeared at the hearings in Sydney in November, though very little in fact eventuated. Writers in Australia were still caught somewhere between the overseas publishers and local booksellers. ‘Aust. Lit. tried for its life,’ Miles reported in disgust to Ian Mudie.76
Increasingly, she often felt weak, and worried now about passing symptoms of stress and decay. With her weight down to just under eight stone (around 50 kilograms) in June, there was
perhaps cause for concern about occasional aches, trembling of the knees, chest pains and the like. Home maintenance worried her too: ‘the house is a chaos of papers & books, the garden a wilderness of weeds & rubbish’. However, it was poorly fitting dentures in the second half of the year that caused her the most trouble. An underlying psychological problem surely was that her characteristic approach to life — just pick yourself up and get on with it — did not work so well when confronting the ageing process and the inevitability of death. When Margaret Dreier Robins died in Florida in March, a great light went out of Miles’s life; and with Susannah Franklin and Alice Henry gone, there was no one to share her grief. ‘Only one or two people in all the world meant as much to me as Mrs Robins. With her rich generosity and warm courage she made life a feast and an adventure,’ she wrote in respectful longhand to Raymond Robins.77
On 13 April Miles Franklin saw ‘the troops hanging out their washing on the Siegfried Line at last’ on a newsreel, adding to the entry in her pocket diary that the cost of fulfilling ‘that rooster boast’ of 1939 had been very high. Then after peace was declared in Europe on 8 May 1945 came reports from the concentration camps: ‘German horrors,’ she noted on 30 May. On 8 August, when the news of the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came through, she noted, again in her pocket diary, the advent of ‘atomic bomb destruction, dismaying in its possibilities’. On 16 August, after the Japanese surrender, she took the train into town to join the peace celebrations in the Domain, her diary comment on this happy occasion being, ‘It was the nearest approach to a crowd I ever saw in Sydney.’ Even then her nephew John in air transport was still fully occupied in possibly dangerous work.
Nevertheless, she decided the time had come to remove blackout material from her windows. When John came home for Christmas smelling of beer she felt ill. Like many women she had reason to fear the after-effects of war. Meanwhile, she sought to reassure Frank Ryland: ‘For the present we home birds will try and keep societies and things from dying right out till the boys come home to jump into them and give them a new start.’78