by Jill Roe
But Miles was opposed to communist doctrine. She acknowledged that in theory it marked a step on from liberalism, but it tended to conflict with her basic beliefs in several ways. To start with, the communist focus was international first and national second, whereas Miles believed it should be the other way round. Secondly, it was, or rather its followers made it, a rigid creed, whereas iconoclasm was second nature to her. She sometimes spoke at Marx House — for example, in May 1947 on early Australian novels — but if Marx House was in some respects a people’s university, it was not so for her. ‘In evening went to Marx House to [a] very dull religious gathering of communism and Russia,’ she wrote in her pocket diary on 8 March 1947.
Thirdly, she always stood for complete intellectual freedom. No matter how valuable new teachings were, writers would ultimately have to break free of them. How interesting it would have been as a fly on the wall at Carlton when she and Katharine argued these points. If their letters are any guide, she probably had the better of it.
In these years Miles Franklin was progressive or Left leaning. The Irish Catholic complexion of New South Wales Labor did not appeal to her. Her friends the O’Sullivans were Catholic, and she had contributed to the Catholic Women’s Review in the 1930s, but Catholic teachings on sexuality were anathema, and she was never keen on organised religion. However, she supported the Labor stalwart Dan Clyne, her father’s old mate, at state level; and Carlton was represented by members of the Evatt family, whose Left-liberalism she found highly congenial, at both state and Federal level during the 1940s.23
The main thing — and surely what her radical friends found so comforting in her — was not to be intimidated. ‘All the world is afraid of USA and Russia now, some think one is the greater menace, others think the other, depending upon their political outlook,’ she wrote to Emma Pischel in May 1947, commenting thereafter on the problems of postwar Japan (‘a prize for big business and as a bulwark against communism’) and India (‘a nice mess’). To Emma she also vouchsafed her view that war was the madness of men, a point sustained to her satisfaction by renewed intermarriage between the English and the Germans, and her amusement at her German cousin’s pleasure that his nephew was marrying an Englishwoman who had her own coat of arms, so there would be two crests on the wedding invitations. Vida Goldstein, referring to the atomic bomb, was of the same opinion about the world, though she was critical of women for not doing more to prevent the recurrence of crises.24
In August 1947, Anne Barnard, daughter of Eileen Barnard, a friend of Dymphna and Florence in the Blue Mountains, wrote on behalf of the Sydney University Labour Club seeking support for the nationalist struggle in the Dutch East Indies. Miles answered that of course she supported the Indonesians’ struggle for freedom against European overlords, but felt it unnecessary that the club should throw its weight against a threatened scorched-earth policy, given the end of British India and currents in world opinion, and inexcusable in the face of world famine: ‘There has been too much destruction and death.’ The letter goes straight on to what Miles deemed urgent local issues:
I feel deeply about Australia’s position in the holocaust. How are we to give power to our ideas or methods whether blimpish, imperial ideal or merely impish? What about our own Aborigines? What about our own men who will not give women equal pay for equal work . . . What about the imprisonment of women in brothels — regulated in two states? I would like to discuss the whole question with you . . . but there is no time . . . all sorts of picayune engagements await me and nag me.25
In mid-1947 Miles began re-reading Cockatoos (and soon after re-read Up the Country and Ten Creeks Run). She enjoyed Cockatoos, and immediately began to retype it for entry in the Sydney Morning Herald literary competition for 1947, along with the updated ‘War Comes to Jones Street’. (The prize for fiction was £2000.) Cockatoos was entered as ‘The Exodists’ by ‘Banksia’, and the manuscript was to be returned to ‘M. Blake’.26
It did not win. Later Miles reflected irritably that it was a tragic story but would not be recognised as such because it lacked crime and perversion. Interestingly, Cockatoos, published posthumously under the Brent pseudonym, is now attracting attention from historians as a study in rural depopulation.27
In August, at Kate Baker’s behest, Miles despatched a strong message to a ceremony at Shepparton commemorating the 104th anniversary of Furphy’s birth, in which she envisaged pilgrimages to the site in the twenty-first century. Although she was happy to oblige, it was another instance of the energy Miles Franklin expended on public and professional affairs in later years. That she had reached ‘the contemplative stage’, as she assured Mabel Singleton, seems doubtful. But having had the last tooth removed from her mouth, she was well aware of the remorseless march of time. ‘Yes,’ she wrote to Emma Pischel, ‘growing old is sad because so many of our generation drop out and leave us desolate, and because of the physical inability to do for oneself.’ Most probably she now regretted her single state. (Indeed, if Dymphna Cusack is to be believed, it was virginal also.) But how could she have known that she would be the last of her family, with only John, and Linda’s son, Edward, in Queensland, to follow her? Although she wrote much about loneliness in her diaries, it should be remembered that diaries serve as a form of emotional release and self-discipline as well as a record; and that in addition to the loss of her immediate family, she endured a seemingly inexorable loss of friends. Except for Raymond Robins, all of her old mentors were gone by 1947. Even Godfrey Bentley, one of her young Newcastle friends, died in September, aged thirty.28
At least her authorial earnings were higher now. With £200 earned in addition to the estimated £160 from the Willoughby shop rentals, she was in receipt of over £6 a week pre-tax in 1947, about what a fulltime female worker in New South Wales could expect to earn as a minimum. (It has been estimated that her net income seldom exceeded that after 1945.) Still, she owned her own home and the rent came in regularly from the shops; and sometimes she earned considerably more from her writings: in 1944–45, for example, she made over £400.29
Miles’s will had been hanging in limbo since the time of Mary Fullerton’s death. She still could not quite face it; but she made extensive notes. Preserved in her papers, they serve to clarify her financial position by 1947. They show that she had almost £1250 in savings accounts, £1247 in the Commonwealth Savings Bank and maybe £20 in the Bank of Westminster, London; that is, over £2500 in savings. She also owned £300 of Water Board bonds, £250 of retrievable War Savings and £700 of Treasury Bonds (war loans); that is, another £1250 in investments. In addition, she held two mortgages at Tumut, amounting in all to £650, each earning 5 per cent interest per annum. She also listed ‘a few household effects’ and her library at 26 Grey Street, plus her published books (but not those by Brent of Bin Bin or Mr & Mrs Ogniblat L’Artsau) and a number of unpublished manuscripts and stories.30
Cold War Sydney was uncongenial to Miles and to many uncommitted intellectuals. By now she was really irritated to be dubbed a communist. As she wrote to Emmy Lawson on 6 January 1948, ‘I loved the old Liberalism of England’ (as distinct presumably from the new ‘Liberalism’ of Robert Menzies in postwar Australia, meaning in fact bourgeois conservatism). These were dangerous days for the unaligned Left. Late in January 1948, in an address to teachers on the difficulties faced by Australian writers, she spoke of a ‘postwar convalescence’, referring, perhaps, to Australia as an enfeebled or divided state.31
Jean Devanny, who had been expelled from the Communist Party during the war under controversial circumstances but was now back in the fold, arrived from north Queensland in March 1948 for a three-week stay. This did nothing to reassure Miles. Their friendship survived the ‘siege’, but only just. When the botanically minded Devanny criticised the state of her garden, Miles could barely refrain from pointing out that she was cooking Jean’s meals, and her notebooks contain an extended critique of Devanny’s views: ‘Torquemada would be a soft angel compared
with what she would decree for infidels.’32
It proved impossible for them to discuss the problems of the divided FAW. While Devanny agreed that the FAW was a mess and so far reduced as to look like a subcommittee of the Communist Party, she said it was because Camden Morrisby had sabotaged it. ‘He is . . . specially employed by Catholic Action to destroy the FAW because the RCs know that writers are dangerous. The communists know that writers are the most important people in the world and want them to be strong.’ The thing to do, said Jean, was to clear out the parasites, pimps, etc. and be more subtle about the Communist Party presence. Miles was not interested in helping the Party, only writers. She thought the FAW should be like a trade union: ‘I believe that now more than ever Australian writers need a strong non-sectarian organization on trade union lines.’ But if no writer of significance was willing to stand for the executive in the upcoming elections, she would withdraw.33
This she did, remaining a member but declining to stand for any position. Her pocket diary account of election night in March 1948 suggests that at the time she was as affected by reports of wild parties held by ‘Dulcie Deamer’s crew’ as by communist domination. Miles was also tired of chairing meetings attended by what she privately described as ‘a handful of old sleepers’ in the front row and ‘park intellects and cranks’ in the others. Jean Devanny was humiliated to find the Party did not want her to stand. However, Glen Mills Fox (just back from Melbourne) was elected secretary; and with Muir Holburn as president, the overall result was not so bad. (Miles was fond of Muir’s wife, Marjorie Pizer.)34
On 14 December 1948, the Fellowship of Australian Writers celebrated its twentieth birthday. Miles went to the party and spoke on members’ writings. But after the March election she no longer attended executive meetings and for a few months she did not even go to monthly meetings. It was the third time in her life that she had been forced to back away from a cause: the first was in Chicago in 1915 when Mrs Robins withdrew funding for Life and Labor, and the second in London in 1925 when Mr Aldridge’s antics at the National Housing and Town Planning Council nearly destroyed it. According to Dymphna Cusack, Miles became increasingly bitter that ‘“the Reds” made her leave her own Society’. She also declined office in the Book Society mid-year, on the grounds that she would be out of place amid the examination passers and blimps. Her concession was to continue for a second year as FAW representative on a (possibly advisory) UNESCO committee in July. Meantime, she went with Jean Devanny to the Easter Show. Later she decided to end her subscription to the Australian Russian Society, ‘as I must send my meagre shillings to the United Relations [sic] Children’s Fund’.35
Such circumstances, and the death of so many friends, made for melancholy, to some extent inevitable at Miles’s age; and her anxiety about death increased. By now Miles was ‘haunted by the necessity of tackling my silly will’. She had been sorting her notes since at least 1946 (one source says 1943) and clearing up her papers for even longer. (The need to do so was a consideration in her thinking about suicide in 1941, and in 1943 she told Dymphna Cusack that she had been through a trunk and destroyed ‘scores of letters’ relating to her love life.) The final version of the will was signed on 9 July 1948.
It shows she had four main concerns. The first was with various small treasures, to be distributed among family and friends, as named; the second was her nephews, primarily John, who was to receive £100 and her piano, plus an allowance of 10 shillings a week as an annuity (he was already the beneficiary of his father’s will), while Edward Graham was to receive £50. Miles’s third concern was her papers, willed to the State Library of New South Wales and today one of its treasures; and fourth, the big surprise when revealed by her trustees, was the provision for the Franklin Award, as it was originally named, perhaps inspired by the Pulitzer prizes, but more likely the Prior Prize, awarded for the last time in 1947.36
Unlike many writers, Miles gave careful thought to the administration of her literary estate. The bequest of her personal papers to the State Library would ensure that her literary remains (and those papers of Mary Fullerton and Alice Henry which had passed to her) would be in permanent professional custody. Likewise, her financial affairs, including the copyright on her published works, were left in the hands of the Permanent Trustee Company, which was to be responsible for the administration of the Franklin Award.37
Maybe Miles’s realisation that John Franklin was suffering from war neurosis was a spur to her will-making. Day by day, he remained her greatest worry. Despite his aunt’s urging, he could not give up flying, and she lived in constant anxiety that the next crash would involve him, a realistic fear given that over one-third of those killed in World War II were airmen and that terrible accidents were still occurring in Air Transport. When he turned up, at all hours of the day and night, he was usually the worse for drink, and babbling, ‘poor nervous boy’. News that he had a month’s leave in January 1948 made Miles anxious as to how she would cope. On one occasion he brought what sounded like pornographic pictures home, and threatened to burn the house down. Then, as usual, he left her feeling ill and despairing, the more so for having ‘no one to turn to, all dead’. Nonetheless they remained loyal to one another. Each was all the other had left of immediate family, and on the rare occasions John was unaffected by beer, they got along well enough; and Miles was able to look after him properly whenever he returned home unwell, with gastric and other disturbances. For the most part, though, all she could do — apart from his laundry and preparing his meals — was be there, and see him off on the next assignment, which might take him to Perth or Tokyo or some equally far-off place, such as ‘that blasted rocket range’ (a reference to Woomera, and a rare instance of Miles swearing). The irony of the airman as saviour in All That Swagger must have been obvious.38
Dymphna Cusack’s experience of coping with her own health problems and those of her brother who had been treated for shell shock were invaluable. She was there one weekend in March when John returned home ‘practically out of his mind’ after a disaster at Amberley air base in Queensland, in which sixteen of his mates had crashed just ahead of him, and were incinerated in front of their wives. Dymphna recalled:
God help me, I was the only one who could do anything with him. I don’t know why. I gave him two full grams of Phenobarb[itone, a sedative] (am I a menace?) and he grabbed the bottle and took two more. With Miles’ horror of drugs I daren’t tell her what they were and I dragged Jack around — when he wasn’t dragging me — and it took him 12 hours to pass out and he slept for 12. I think it saved his sanity, poor kid.39
It was probably Dymphna’s phenobarb. Not only did Miles distrust drugs (even commonly used ones like aspirin), but like many women of her generation she never drank alcohol. She was probably quite inexperienced in its use — it was not kept at home — and even fearful because of her youthful memories of her father’s drinking problem. John’s stress-induced drinking was a tragedy for them both.40
Though Miles may have felt from time to time that there was no point trying to write any more, she often returned to her plays. She was well acquainted with the theatres of postwar Sydney, in particular the New Theatre and Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre in North Sydney, the other great survivor of the little-theatre movement in Sydney in the 1930s. The Old Vic toured in 1948 too, with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. The best thing in 1948, seen at the Independent in October, was Sumner Locke Elliott’s soldiers’ camp play Rusty Bugles, set in northern Australia. Miles knew his aunt, and Alice Henry had been a friend of his long-dead mother, Sumner Locke. This play, not his first, delighted Miles: ‘Well, Sumner my dear you’ve done it . . . the Australianness was so authentic, so original and actual, and so gifted . . . The play shows how life and its tragedies catch all.’41
Another young man of the theatre, Laurence Collinson from Brisbane, brought himself to her attention in 1948. Miles had met him before, and had invited him out to Grey Street in 1947, but for reasons no
w clear — he was a troubled homosexual — she found him unresponsive. This time he asked her to read one of his plays, in which a character, Em, refuses to marry. Miles thought the play remarkable for such a young man — Collinson was in his early twenties — but the treatment needed depth. In reply to his request for further reading on sexual matters, she dredged up her old favourites: Lester Ward’s Pure Sociology, Chapter 14, and Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour. If he could not find John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women in Brisbane, she would consider lending him her own precious copy, plus her current favourite, Dr Unwin’s Sex and Culture, ‘which deals with sexual indulgence’.42
Like many first-wave feminists, Miles was perplexed by the latest thinking on sexuality. When she read Christina Stead’s novel Letty Fox: Her Luck, she waxed indignant to Margery Currey that there seemed no place left for chastity in America, where phallic worship was apparently now rampant. And when Walter Cousins at Angus & Robertson lent her a copy of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, all she could say was: ‘My, oh my! how tastes differ.’ She could not bring herself to read it closely: ‘kangarooing’ through its pages was quite sufficient. It made her wish there was a worthy successor to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She decided the emancipation of women had not yet begun. Elsewhere she worried that young women were no longer rebellious, as her generation had been.43
So true was Miles Franklin to the feminism of her youth, she could even, in a rare positive reference to Australia’s Asian neighbours, wish she was in Japan with Frank Ryland. The position of women in Japan would make a great subject, she suggested. Otherwise she maintained the Malthusianism which carried over into first-wave feminism, that there could be no accommodation with Asia until the men there controlled themselves and the population explosion was constrained. Her intemperate expressions of this view had not improved as she grew older. Interestingly they seem to have been more candidly expressed when she was writing to American friends such as Leonora Pease, to whom she reported on 28 May 1948 that she had recently heard on the radio the British nutritionist Sir John Boyd Orr, Sir William Beveridge (designer of the British welfare state and a visitor to Sydney in May) and the Australian physics professor Marcus Oliphant variously advocating ‘birth control, girth control and earth control’: ‘Very few countries other than America overeat today, we must awake about ruining the earth and as for birth control I think over fecundity reduces people to the most disgusting kind of vermin . . . they could control themselves.’44