Miles Franklin

  There were invitations to clubs and lunches. After the sixth lecture, the University Wives Club gave Miles a supper, where she met the aspiring writer Alexandra Hasluck, and the Women’s Service Guild invited her to a conference, less to her taste. No feminist would pass through Perth without a visit to the Karrakatta Club; and at the Modern Women’s Club, as arranged by Katharine Susannah Prichard, she was treated to written speeches commending her lectures. The Fremantle Rowing Club got in touch too. Most striking, she spent an hour in informal discussion with each of the five tutorial classes in English II at the university, and two hours with Professor Edwards’ honours seminar. (Edwards felt she was better with small groups, telling Colin Roderick many years later that she was ‘nervous and coquettish’ in front of larger ones.) For Miles, her health problems diminished whatever satisfaction she may have felt from being able to promote her view of Australian literature to a younger generation. She was simply relieved that she had managed to get through it all.68

  Plaudits from friends followed. Katharine Susannah Prichard heard her plane pass over the Darling Ranges and wrote a caring letter the next day to underline her regret at missing the lectures and to report the positive responses of her friends at the Modern Women’s Club. Furthermore, she announced she was going to write to Beatrice Davis about getting the lectures published: they had been such a success, better than the likes of Colin Roderick could do (Roderick had recently published An Introduction to Australian Fiction, a variant on Miles’s theme) and under the circumstances ‘a triumph of spirit’.69

  Beatrice soon wrote that Henrietta had told her how splendid Miles had been, and that it would have been good to hear her make the academic ones sit up and take notice, though she made no mention of publication. Beatrice’s mind was on Brent: but for a bad printing slip Prelude to Waking would have been out, but it would be a few weeks longer. Meanwhile, Beatrice was trying to organise some publicity. Miles replied that she was still too poorly to see anyone, or even answer the telephone, but she had fulfilled her contract ‘as a matter of character’. She, too, was thinking ahead to Brent’s reappearance, having been gently badgered in Perth on that score, due to Glen Mills Fox’s efforts in alerting booksellers. Miles said that she had heard Brent was about to break out again before she left Sydney. She later remarked that Glen was a natural publicist, ‘like a kelpie pup who will work chickens and ducks or children if no sheep are handy’.70

  Without an immediate prospect of publication for the lectures, Miles did not begin reworking them into what she came to call ‘my essay’ for quite some time, as there was a Jubilee play competition to prepare for (though she did have a typescript entitled ‘Notes on Australian Fiction’ ready for entry in the non-fiction section of the Jubilee competition in 1951). Much remained to be done; and she was unable to complete the work to her satisfaction until April 1953.71

  The road to publication proved long. Professor Edwards’ plan to publish the lectures in the local Arts Quarterly with CLF funding soon fell through, and English publishers were not interested. Thus, although Angus & Robertson was not Miles Franklin’s first choice of publisher, ultimately Beatrice Davis agreed to take them on. Laughter, Not for a Cage, with its lengthy and quirky but quite accurate subtitle Notes on Australian Writing, with Biographical Emphasis on the Struggles, Function, and Achievements of the Novel in Three Half-centuries, was published in eleven chapters by Angus & Robertson in 1956.

  The title is appealing, but obscure, and very Milesian. Its meaning does not become apparent until the last page of the book, indeed the last sentence: ‘Truly there are no nightingales to enchant the night, but the mellow carillon of the magpies enlarges the spacious sunlit days and the mocking laughter of the kookaburras is not for a cage.’ Maybe it helps to know that there was a kookaburra on the original dustcover, and to recall that Miles Franklin often expressed the view that there was not enough humour in Australian writing.72

  Miles did not live to see Laughter, nor to read the many reviews it attracted. In 1950, after her return from Perth, the publication claiming attention was Brent’s Prelude to Waking. Miles received a copy on 30 August. Her dearest friends did their best to respond positively, but Henrietta Drake-Brockman had scarcely been able to hide her impatience over the Brent business even before, and Katharine Susannah Prichard obviously thought the book’s dismissive attitude to sex unhealthy, while praising it as ‘a strange, beautiful piece of work’. The Sydney press was unimpressed, to say the least. To the Sydney Morning Herald reviewer it was ‘a shallow tale of unreal people’. ‘Miss Bronte’ in the Daily Telegraph, whom Miles thought spiteful, said it was a piece of juvenilia better left unpublished. Not worth worrying about, was the verdict in the Sun. Ian Mair was even more cutting in the Melbourne Argus: ‘To write about sophisticated persons of any rank in society, one must be more sophisticated than they are.’73

  Such responses made Miles feel black, in that she felt they showed that despite her efforts over fifty years she had not become part of the literature of her country, as she put it to the Hungarian-born writer and peace activist David Martin, who would soon write the most positive review in Meanjin in July 1951. Noting the novel’s arch mannerisms, and a ‘bee in her bonnet’ about ‘Asian fecundity’, he nonetheless commended Prelude to Waking as brave, witty and true to the period in which it was set. He was the only reviewer to recognise the political point of the title, that it was time for a realignment of Australian loyalties.74

  In his review, Martin dealt with the disappointing reception of Prelude to Waking and Miles’s complaint about lack of recognition in a forthright manner. The underlying problem, he said, was Brent of Bin Bin. People were tired of the ‘mummery’, but if the whole of Brent’s very substantial literary record — ‘a dozen big books’ — could be taken into account, it would be seen that ‘she is Australia’s most formidable literary figure’. In a postscript he referred directly to ‘all of Brent-Franklin books’.

  By this time, it was widely assumed that Miles and Brent were one and the same. However, secure in the knowledge that three of the four people to whom she had ever actually admitted it (that is, Lady Byles, Mrs Robins and Mary Fullerton) were now dead, and that the fourth, Rose Scott’s niece Mollye Menken, was still in London, Miles was not about to respond to the challenge of disclosure. Prelude to Waking was merely a curtain-raiser to the projected publication by Angus & Robertson of the five substantive volumes of Brent’s saga, and her intention was to come clean when they were all out. Jean Hamilton was more or less right, after reading Prelude to Waking, when she said that Miles was too clever for the real world.75

  14

  ‘SHALL I PULL THROUGH?’: 1951‒1954

  Hold on to your essential self.1

  The first of January 1951 marked the beginning of a new year, and also the fiftieth anniversary of the Commonwealth of Australia. Ahead lay the consumer society and the worst of the Cold War. The prospect of affluence left Miles Franklin unimpressed, but the return to power of the conservative governments led by Winston Churchill and Robert Gordon Menzies in the United Kingdom and Australia, and the elevation of Eisenhower in the United States, kept her feisty. The Jubilee year meant there were literary prizes to be won, and into her seventies, she still had much to do. ‘Struggled again on the writing — shall I pull through?’ she wondered in her pocket diary on 22 September 1951.

  Though she still liked a new hat, and went into town to meet people, to read at the Mitchell Library and to see newsreels, with the increasing pressure to finish her books — given her diminishing energy — life for Miles rested even more on the neighbourhood, for the most part an undemanding place. She had many local acquaintances and some literary friends such as Joe Salter, ‘a kind and generous creature’ of humble origins who had belonged to the Modern Writers’ Club in the 1940s. With his wife, Lorna, Joe lived at Como, further down the Illawarra train line. Happily, the Crosses, Arthur and Delys, were within reach at Caringbah. Other friends included th
e journalist Frank Ryland, and Allan Dalziel (‘Dal’), aide to Dr Evatt, a frequent caller to whom Miles offered support and encouragement and many scratch meals.2

  Miles’s gregariousness stood her in good stead. If she did not go about quite so much, people still came to her. Often they, too, were lonely or in some way needy, like Dalziel, and Glen Mills Fox, in the throes of divorce, and always they were fed well. Frequently they would arrive with contributions to the table — a couple of extra chops, a fish, or an onion or two. Occasionally they came unannounced, as when the Jindyworobak poets Roland Robinson and Rex Ingamells turned up at 26 Grey Street one wet evening in August 1951 with the young writer Nancy Keesing in tow. Confessing in her memoirs to being ‘scared stiff’, as Miles always ‘sounded so redoubtable, despite her usually gentle appearance and demeanour’ at literary gatherings, the young Nancy was soon at ease. ‘You must never be a doormat,’ she said. Later, in ‘her small, warm, living room’, with decorative soil samples collected by Miles from different parts of Australia glowing in jars on the mantelpiece, she served supper. Nancy took tea from the waratah cup, which — like many other guests — she feared to drop, and signed the waratah book. She did not care for the writings of either Miles or Brent, but she found Miles Franklin ‘an irresistible woman’: ‘I almost loved her. Her conversation was fun.’3

  In All That Swagger Miles Franklin had lamented the unstinting hospitality that frittered away the Delacy legacy at Burrabinga. Yet she maintained the old ways herself. She always made careful preparations for guests, and was never at a loss coping with unexpected visitors. The back garden remained productive, thanks to its sunny northerly aspect, and Susannah’s values held when it came to housework. Miles seems to have spent a lot of time ‘redding’ (a favourite archaism for cleaning), perhaps necessarily, given the heavy Victorian furniture she inherited: all must be spick and span, with meals provided in several courses plus supper served off a traymobile in the evenings.4

  Miles Franklin owned a radiator and an electric jug, but if the frequency of her trips to the butcher is any guide, she did not have a refrigerator, only a weekly ice delivery. Nor does she seem to have had a washing machine, a floor polisher or a vacuum cleaner. ‘Did a line of washing’ was shorthand in her diary for a morning’s work over the tubs and copper; polishing lino floors was hard on the knees. References to the occasional ‘plunge bath’, and more frequently to a ‘sponge bath’, suggest the bathroom facilities may have been limited — although it is recorded that Beatrice Davis once took a shower during an overnight stay. A classic Australian Early Kooka gas stove was standing on the back porch in the 1990s and probably dated back to Miles’s day, so there may have been a gas heater too. The lavatory was outside but connected to the sewer. Much of the household equipment we take for granted today was only just becoming the norm in Australia, where there was a profligate dependence on women’s unpaid labour. Miles’s frequently reiterated line that in Australia women were ‘wood and water joeys, nothing more’ applied to her as much as anyone.5

  The telephone was an important assurance of connectedness beyond Carlton, though not, as today, internationally or even nationally. In those days a long-distance, or ‘trunk’, call was costly and probably presaged bad news. Local calls enabled Miles Franklin to keep in touch with family and friends, and to conduct her literary business in Sydney in these later years without too much rushing about.

  Wider links depended on the letterbox and the newspapers. One of her paperboys recalls that she took numerous papers and magazines, including the Australian Women’s Weekly and both evening papers (and that it was hard to collect the money, as ‘Miss Franklin’ could never find her purse). She herself records a postman’s polite incredulity at the extent of her Christmas mail.6

  That panic about death in her sixties seemed to have faded somewhat, though she feared to lose Aunt Lena, who said she hoped to die before another winter (but happily for Miles did not, surviving as a link with Talbingo for the Lampe tribe until 1964). Increasingly though, Miles would say she would do things ‘if I live’. Inevitably, memories flooded in as she pressed on with her work. How much she valued her German cousins is apparent from letters to Theo Lampe at this time, and how much fun there had been with them when young: ‘I used to tease young men, did I not?’ she asked him. When the singer Amy Castles died in November 1951, she felt the urge to contact Eva O’Sullivan as one of the few remaining who would recall the magic of fifty years ago. That same month, writing to Ethel Mason Nielsen, Miles confessed for the first time that she would have married Demarest Lloyd, except that ‘He had a fully fledged divorced wife running about the country and I was too proud and too rigidly grounded in monogamy to enter a harem, even if he was running them tandem.’ Such was the legacy of respectability.7

  It was difficult for Miles to obtain information about her nephew John. Although he had been released from Callan Park in June 1950, it seems he was recommitted soon after. Thanks to Dymphna Cusack’s experience with her brother, Miles had sought help from Dr William Farquhar Fraser, previously a medical officer at the Darlinghurst Reception Centre and now in charge of the microbiology unit in the Public Health Department. His inquiries confirmed that John Franklin was ‘somewhat psychopathic — plainly a war-broken case’: ‘they call it schizophrenia’, Miles reported to Dymphna.8

  On 12 February 1951 Miles Franklin wrote to Bruce Graham, the Liberal member for St George, her Federal electorate, to deplore the ‘haphazard’ application of immigration policy.9

  Italian immigration especially bothered her. The Italians were Catholic, and it seemed to Miles — and she was not alone — that some conservatives were hell-bent on a Catholic Australia. She reacted adversely to the plan for a Catholic university in Sydney, floated between 1949 and 1951. On 3 June, along with Dalziel and one Fitzpatrick, possibly the controversial Bankstown businessman Raymond Fitzpatrick, she attended an ‘anti R.C. University meeting . . . [Anglican Archbishop] Mowll in the chair’. Strongly opposed by Protestant and liberal opinion (and also by the Catholic Archbishop Mannix in Melbourne), nothing came of the university idea, as she explained to Arnold Dresden — though it would surely come again.10

  In mid-1951, the former prime minister Ben Chifley died. Like other Australians, Miles mourned his passing. She had listened with approval to his speeches on behalf of the Labor Party during the Federal election campaign in April (and shaken her head at her neighbour Mrs Bennett’s support for the Menzies-led Tories, ‘now trading as “Liberals”’). When the country was riven by a second attempt to ban the Communist Party, she stood firm. You must vote ‘No’ in the referendum on wider Commonwealth powers to combat communism because it was so hard to undo oppressive legislation, she told Pixie O’Harris, who was still smarting from FAW politics. But Miles steadfastly avoided any appearance of political alignment, even declining an invitation to stay with the Evatts in Canberra in November: ‘I wish to remain free.’11

  There were some sharp exchanges with Katharine Susannah Prichard, a constant correspondent in these fearful times. Though they were as one on civil liberties and the referendum, Miles did not yield to her friend when it came to the Communist Party line on the writer’s role in society, believing that the writer must always be free to dissent. In similar vein she urged Katharine not to kill herself with peace work, much as it was needed in ‘a war-demented world’. Miles was particularly irritated by communist domination of the peace movement and the scant space left for the cause in Sydney: ‘You daren’t even say you would like to see peace today or they put you down as a communist’, but ‘without two great disciplines it doesn’t matter whether we vote for . . . Uncle Joe, Churchill or Buddha or the Star and Crescent, unless the human race can regulate its verminous fecundity and abstain from war it is doomed, if not today then tomorrow’.12

  The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) had Miles on file from 1949, when it was founded, for no better reason than that she had been seen to attend a premi
ere at the New Theatre that year and might therefore be a member of the Eureka Youth League — what a loss to hilarity that she did not know about that — and because her name appeared on the address lists of individuals and groups such as her FAW colleague Alexander Bookluck, the pro-communist New Housewives Association, and the Democratic Rights Council, set up in Victoria to oppose the Communist Party Dissolution Bill in 1950. She was also a person of interest as a member of the FAW, on which substantial files were compiled at this time. And though Frank Hardy was acquitted of a criminal libel charge in mid-1951 in connection with his novel Power Without Glory, Miles’s fear had been that FAW protests were too feeble, and it was obvious that writers would be subject to ongoing political harassment by the state.13

  When, about this time, Miles heard that well-meaning colleagues had sought to obtain a Commonwealth Literary Fund pension for her, she responded with four exclamation marks. On Friday 2 March 1951 she went to see the fund administrator, H. S. Temby, about the proposal: ‘I was much hurt & depressed.’ She refused it, ‘though gratefully’. Temby’s file note reads: ‘Miss Franklin explained her position to me & said she did not desire to accept a pension until forced to do so by economic necessity.’ Perhaps the offer made Miles feel she was finished as a writer. There was her pugnacious streak too: ‘Beware the government stroke,’ she would say.14