by Jill Roe
13
The Waratah Cup: 1946‒1950
We are such tiny sparks.1
‘What awaits us I dunno,’ Miles wrote in a postwar catch-up letter to expatriate poet-librarian Kathleen Monypenny in London. Australia was ‘sinking back into normality’, but with the prospect of another bout of profiteering, most people would be left ‘poorer and older and sadder’. The war had consumed six years; from 1942 more people had to pay taxes, and two big wars in a lifetime was a lot to bear. But with fewer casualties than World War I and a reforming Labor government in power in Australia until December 1949, hopes ran higher than in 1918, and reaction was slower to take hold.2
Miles knew that Mary Fullerton was now quite ill, and fearing that every letter would be her last, kept writing as normally as possible, but could barely suppress her anxiety, even when it was deflected to the abstract idea of death: ‘Is there to be no going-on — no continuance, no conscious carrying on of the beauty of character wrought here?’ she wrote to Mary and Mabel Singleton on 5 February 1946.3
On 25 February she wrote again: ‘Mary, my precious, my dear, have you gone beyond our voices to something splendidly different, or to blessed sleep and relief from pain?’; but on the same day she received a letter from Mary. Em Fullerton rang the next day to say Mary had already died, on 23 February.
Miles wrote immediately to Mabel Singleton, urging her to rest now that Mary’s ‘heroic suffering’ had ended. She encouraged Mabel to make a record of a ‘glorious and rare friendship’ when she felt up to it. To Mary Fullerton’s sister Lydia Chester she wrote that Mary had been ‘one of the richest things in my life’, that she had found her ‘brave and lovely and gifted beyond ordinary people’.4
The last big thing Miles Franklin was able to do for her friend was see a second volume of verse by ‘E’, The Wonder and the Apple, through the press. Colin Roderick brought copies from Angus & Robertson to Miles on 13 May, too late for Mary of course, but she had seen the proofs. Two days later, on 15 May, ‘“E”: The Full Story’ by Miles Franklin appeared in the Bulletin. It makes poignant reading today, as Miles explained what lay behind Fullerton’s insistent anonymity: ‘She was discouraged and self-doubting because of her lack of education.’ To this Miles added that when she pooh-poohed this, Mary pointed out that Miles had escaped from Australia early, whereas she did not leave for England until much later in her lifetime. And from this we may glimpse what Miles Franklin really valued and admired in Mary. Despite constraints and discouragements, she was ‘self-mastered’.5
What Miles did not realise — though she did say Mary’s letters to her contained enough effort for many novels — was that their vast correspondence would itself be a rich legacy. Mary’s handwriting got worse as she aged and some of her letters were written in pencil on flimsy paper, but it remains a rare record of a conversation between two highly intelligent, talented and largely self-educated Australian bush women.6
Miles was now anxious about her own letters. In January she had written urgently to Mary: ‘I am worried because you said you kept my letters and to you I have always written spontaneously straight onto the machine without pre-meditation, discretion or reserve.’ She asked Mary to instruct Mabel to return them, unless they were to be burned. Apart from anything else, they contained the full story of Brent, for whom Miles still had hopes. ‘Don’t be smoked-out,’ she wrote to Singleton, who had earlier taken over as Brent’s agent and was also Mary’s literary executor.7
It was not, however, Brent’s year. On 11 June 1945, a month or so after the war in Europe ended, Miles had signed a contract with Georgian House for the publication of My Career Goes Bung in 1946. Probably it came about through Ian Mudie and his association with the founding Jindyworobak poet Rex Ingamells, then a traveller for that Melbourne publisher. On 26 February 1946, the galleys of My Career Goes Bung turned up from Georgian House, and Miles found perusing them ‘interesting’. When the novel appeared in August, it was warmly welcomed by her friends. Beatrice Davis called it ‘a delicious book’; West Australian author Henrietta Drake-Brockman thought it ‘enchanting’, better than My Brilliant Career; and Miles assured her that it was written ‘at the time’ (which may be true though there had been a lot of tinkering subsequently). Dymphna Cusack thanked her stars that she had been born a generation later. Miles was pleased to hear from younger women that it still rang true — as it certainly did for Rose Lindsay, Norman Lindsay’s wife and muse, who said she enjoyed being reminded of a period and people she had known well. But was Henrietta Drake-Brockman right to see it as a study in feminine adolescence? Probably not, according to Miles, ‘since I think much the same still but with tremendous enlargement’. As for Aileen Goldstein, who objected that the book was too sexy and had funny words, Miles was amused, recalling that when she was young she had been accused of being ‘not a woman but a mind’. To Raymond Robins she wrote, somewhat immodestly, that it was the most interesting thing to hit the book world in years, a claim only partially supported by male reviewers, who tended to see it as merely a period piece.8
A good proportion of Miles’s correspondence throughout 1946 was with Dymphna Cusack and Florence James as the two younger women struggled to finish Four Winds and a Family and then Come in Spinner, one of the great World War II novels of Sydney. When Miles read a first slab of Come in Spinner she was thrilled by its scope and verve, urging even greater verisimilitude, at the same time advising that the authors needed to yard the galloping horses. She liked succeeding drafts even better (although in retrospect Dymphna felt Miles never really understood the work). ‘We are enormously grateful to you,’ wrote Dymphna on receipt of Miles’s initial response; and by working full tilt, she and Florence managed to meet the 30 October deadline for the Daily Telegraph’s new £1000 literary competition, entering the manuscript as ‘My Unabated Spring’ under the pen-name ‘Sydney Wyborne’.9
Not surprisingly Miles did not mention that she too had entered the competition, with a story about two women, Elspeth Jane and Evadne — evidently a version of ‘The Thorny Rose’, the play drafted in 1942 and initially recast for competition purposes as ‘In Pursuit of Glamour’ by ‘M. Alletts’ (that is to say, ‘Stella M[iles]’ reversed). Evidently her hopes were not high. Having suggested a temporary address for ‘Sydney Wyborne’, she remained supportive of her friends during the drawn-out judging process — her own entry did not make the short list — and when Come in Spinner won, she delighted in their success. (The Telegraph never announced the winner however, and failed to publish the novel, due, it now appears, to ideological as well as moral objections of increasing force in the Cold War era.)10
Miles seemed to be at a standstill, creatively speaking. It was probably true, as she wrote to Nettie Palmer, that she had not written anything for six years. However, a book for children, Sydney Royal, first mentioned in 1940 as ‘The Ballad of Sydney Royal’, would be accepted for publication by the Packer press book publishing subsidiary, the Shakespeare Head Press, at the end of the year.11
Suddenly, in September 1946, Miles’s pocket diary reads: ‘Got out my war novel with [a] view to final form.’ This was undoubtedly ‘War Comes to Jones Street’, entered in the Prior Prize in 1941 as ‘Let Go of Grief’, and revised as ‘Jones Street’ in 1942. As updated, the story ended in December 1941, with ‘the Australian way of life’ threatened and Jones Street engaged at last. The story was so close to home it might as well have been called ‘War Comes to Grey Street’; but by 1946 its time had surely passed.
Most of the images of Miles Franklin at this time come from her friends’ recollections of life at Grey Street. A homesick Florence James, who left with her daughters, Frances and Julie, for England once Come in Spinner had been edited and resubmitted to the Daily Telegraph in mid-1947, wrote: ‘I just can’t bear the thought of not coming back . . . I can see you in my mind’s eye tapping away at terrific speed on your typewriter in the sunshine, with [the bantams] Ginger’s and Greedy’s friends and relations c
onversing at the far end of the garden . . . How I’d love to stretch out on the floor in your front room and have you read poetry to me.’12
Miles’s hospitality, by now legendary, had come to be symbolised by the bestowal of the waratah cup on favoured guests. When Florence James received an invitation to visit and take tea from the cup, she felt honoured: ‘I shall really feel I belong to the sisterhood of Australian women writers.’ On another occasion, the young poets Muir Holburn and Marjorie Pizer came for ‘delicious food’ and experienced ‘widehearted’ encouragement. ‘If we continue our work and make some small contribution to Australian literature,’ Marjorie wrote later, ‘it will be due, in large measure, to encouragement from such persons as yourself.’13
The waratah cup and saucer, gift of Richard Baker, 1941; favoured guests were invited to drink from the cup and sign their names in the matching waratah book. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, R 230)
Miles even started giving little (non-alcoholic) literary parties. After a gathering at Grey Street on 13 March 1947, a new congenial, Rex Ingamells, wrote in effusive Jindyworobak style: ‘Many thanks for the bonzer corroboree and champion tuck-in of the other night.’ Others present included Harley Matthews, Roland Robinson and his first wife, Barbara, the poet Gina Ballantyne, Glen Mills Fox, and ‘some Cahill’, the erstwhile Australia First organiser Les Cahill. On that occasion it was Ingamells who drank from the waratah cup; he also entered a spontaneous verse entitled ‘Lubra’ in the waratah book, another symbolic item, given to Miles by Rose Scott in 1902, now back in use, having been in abeyance since 1908. One Saturday evening Adelaide-based Jindyworobak poets Roland Robinson and Flexmore Hudson joined Miles and Glen Mills Fox (a house guest) for the evening. The Jindyworobaks were people of one big idea, the incorporation of ‘environmental’ values, including Aboriginal values, in Australian literature. Hudson, who edited several Jindyworobak anthologies in the 1940s.14
Mid-1947 brought — as Miles said herself — a windfall, when the Newcastle Morning Herald published ‘The Thorny Rose’ as a serial. This was the Evadne and Elspeth Jane story, which dated back to 1942. As promoted by the Newcastle Herald, the ‘new and previously unpublished story’ was written ‘with a light touch and not a little humour . . . [it] concerns a Sydney girl who took a liking to a young airman. The romance has many novel complications.’ Told in twenty-one episodes and set during the ‘brown out’, the story features the young Evadne Jordain, a volunteer pianist at the Kookaburra Club who wants to be closer to the action. Evadne falls for fickle Billy Badminster from Melbourne, and pursues him there. A tangled tale of sexual misdemeanour and cover-up in the previous generation then unfolds, with the more advanced Elspeth Jane turning out to be Evadne’s half-sister as well as her rescuer from illusion.15
Comparing ‘The Thorny Rose’ with M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Cusack and James’ Come in Spinner, both of which were written at much the same time it is obvious that Miles’s war romance was tame. However, it was well rewarded: ‘Gave me 50 pounds and very pleasant attention.’16
Later in the year Miles cleaned up ‘War Comes to Jones Street’ and sent it off to yet another competition. Meanwhile, George Ferguson at Angus & Robertson had advised that decent white paper — a scarcity in the war years — was to hand for a new edition of All That Swagger. This was welcome news, since All That Swagger was Miles’s most popular work. The new edition would be the sixth since it first appeared in 1936, and the third since Angus & Robertson took the title over in 1940. It was always her best earner, with the 1943 edition bringing in £86 in royalties for the financial year 1947–48.17
Copies of Sydney Royal, over which Miles had laboured in 1946, arrived on 20 February. The proofs had caused her concern, having been returned for checking without the original manuscript, and Nan Knowles’ drawings certainly were rather conventional; but at least Shakespeare Head had not let her down, as she had sometimes feared. Subtitled in manuscript ‘A Modern Fairy Tale — Trading in Australia as a Furphy’, it was dedicated ‘To All My Young Friends Everywhere under Sixteen Years of Age’. Children’s literature was a new genre for Miles, which she had been encouraged to try in part by the availability of T. D. Mutch’s historical researches on Sydney’s Royal Easter Show (duly acknowledged); maybe by Dymphna and Florence’s Four Winds and a Family; and no doubt by Pixie O’Harris, who began with fairy stories and by the 1940s was writing romantic stories for girls. According to Pixie, children were honest and ‘your audience doesn’t grow stale, there’s always another batch coming along, like scones’. Offered as a gift item, ‘a rich entertainment spiced with humour, fantasy and drama’, the publisher’s idea was that one of Australia’s most famous writers combined with one of Australia’s most famous institutions was bound to succeed. The published version nominates Sydney Royal as a ‘divertissement’, in hope, as the blurb put it, of appealing to the ‘Young in Heart’ as well as the young in years.18
However, Sydney Royal is slight and rather patchy; the Melbourne bibliophile John Kinmont Moir felt it was mainly of local interest. Beatrice Davis loyally said it had a fairy tale quality, but sales were disappointing, and Miles was forever sending copies off as gifts, to the Alice Springs Kindergarten in 1947, for instance. She was inclined to blame the publisher, with whom she had many disagreements along the way: ‘it never had a chance’.
During 1947 Miles took only a couple of weekend breaks, in February and June, to Hazelbrook to stay with Dymphna and Florence and the girls. Otherwise, it was a matter of into town as usual, almost always on literary business, mostly to the FAW or Book Society meetings. Les Haylen had succeeded George Farwell as president of the FAW in 1946, and Miles was elected vice-president, which meant chairing numerous meetings when Les, a Federal parliamentarian, was in Canberra. (Thankfully, Marjorie Barnard now chaired ‘that infernal Book Society’, as Miles described it to Dymphna Cusack.) With Glen Mills Fox, who served as secretary at this time, Miles also edited Fellowship (published 1944–c.1948), a tricky job involving in-house reviewing. She wrote a couple of minor reviews herself, welcoming an unabridged edition of Furphy’s Rigby’s Romance in March and commenting on ‘The Landscape in Our Stories’ in J. K. Ewers’ Men Against the Earth and other works in June. But the big books written by members had to be treated with great care, especially the literary event of the year, M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Miles’s view of Tomorrow and Tomorrow was that it was a great feat of composition, but lacked the creative spark. She had a point, for as we now know, the novel had been effectively gutted by censorship. But its cerebral structure and futuristic themes were unlikely to have appealed to her anyway. Much more to her liking was a new novel by her friend Henrietta Drake-Brockman, The Fatal Days, a wartime romance set in the provincial city of Ballarat, which takes a positive view of the ‘Yanks’ in Australia. Miles loved the book, and found the characters refreshingly normal, which, compared with Xavier Herbert’s Soldiers’ Women (begun at the time though not published until 1961), they certainly were.19
Unfortunately for Miles, conflict was beginning to replace consensus at the FAW. The tensions, which Miles sought to moderate, were largely ideological, a reflection of the emerging Cold War and as fierce in Australia as in America.
It would be wrong to cast Miles Franklin as anti-communist here. As early as 1946, there were suggestions that she was a communist, a charge she made merry with, as in her response that the young Red-baiting W. C. (Billy) Wentworth was ‘a bright little fellow, apparently with a semi-detached intellect’. Nothing gave her more pleasure than outwitting mindless conservatives whom she derided as a bunch of blimps, with no ideas since the Ark. ‘You know I can be brilliant if I bestir myself,’ she remarked to Katharine Susannah Prichard after one such triumph. And as she implied when writing to Raymond Robins, it rather pleased her to think she had earned the Right’s disapproval due to her membership of the Friends with Russia Society and being ‘often called to speak
for its adherents’. One wholesaler even wanted to ban her books; the prospect filled her with mirth, which seems about the only sane response. Her favourite riposte, that in one slap Joe Stalin had taken women off the midden and put them in parliament, was guaranteed to throw all Right-wing types off-guard.20
Miles was probably under the threat of surveillance herself. It was, as everywhere in those paranoid years, a case of ‘guilt by association’. There had been communists in the FAW in Sydney since the merger with the Writers’ Association in 1938, and Bart Adamson, who joined the Communist Party in 1943, was conspicuous in its affairs. And as bolder, more intellectual women made their way to the Communist Party, Miles’s personal friends were among them. Although she often lamented that communists spent all their energy defending Russia, they too were optimists, with a passion for ‘the people’ and for ideas, and she had much in common with them. Whenever Miles walked through Darlinghurst to work on Fellowship at Glen Mills Fox’s flat, ‘The Gwydir’, at 167 Forbes Street, she was entering a communist household.21
Sometimes she met Katharine Susannah Prichard there. Katharine was the best-known communist with whom Miles Franklin associated, and was back and forth from Perth in the 1940s. In mid-1947 she was again in the east, travelling to Sydney via Canberra, where she stayed for a time with her diplomat son, Ric Throssell, and his new wife, Dorothy (his first wife died in Moscow in 1946). She arrived to stay at Carlton on 22 August. John Franklin, in one of his uncontrollable moments after excessive drinking, threatened to denounce his aunt to the authorities for having communists in the house.22