by Jill Roe
Family was still there too. Miles’s cousin Ruby Brydon, who had been so helpful during Susannah Franklin’s last days, sometimes helped again at Grey Street. Uncle Gus, now ninety, always set off a flurry when he arrived from Peak Hill to stay with her Lampe cousins. And Aunt Lena, though frail, was safe at her nursing home at Hunters Hill and in regular contact, as were the Bridle sisters and the Brindabella Franklins, though intermittently. Further away, at Tumut, relatives contributed material to the memoirs that became Childhood at Brindabella.40
‘If I don’t get what they call my second wind, I’m a goner,’ Miles Franklin had written to Henrietta Drake-Brockman on 3 January 1952. She now needed it for her ‘essay’. Sometimes the research was fun, as when John Kinmont Moir drew her attention to The Pearlers, a West Australian novel published in 1933 and allegedly burned on the beach at Broome by offended locals. It would be ‘germane to my thesis’, but when she asked Henrietta Drake-Brockman about the incident, Henrietta replied evasively that maybe one copy had been burned, due to high spirits. (This led Miles to think Henrietta might have participated.) In the main, however, it was a struggle to finish, with the drudgery of checking references in the library and retyping text at home. At times Miles feared she had the wrong kind of mind for the job, and she dreaded making herself ‘a fine target’, as she confided to Ian Mudie. This was despite, or perhaps because of, her apparently modest aim: ‘I attempt only to shew the struggle the novel here had to be itself and emerge and survive as a new Australian, as if it were a person, and choose only those books that illustrate that bias and promise, but one must know all around a subject to be trustworthy.’41
Despite the good opinion of those who had read chapters along the way (Moir, P. R. Stephensen, Delys Cross) and warm responses from J. K. Ewers (‘grand, stimulating stuff’) and Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s husband, Geoff, when she sent the whole draft manuscript to them in July, it seemed there was always more to do. Katharine Susannah Prichard added her comments in August, mostly positive, as in ‘pages and pages of brilliant writing’, but had some critical observations too — to which Miles responded robustly. She was more anxious about being rendered superfluous by ‘academic practitioners’ than the comments of congenials. October 1952 found her still labouring ‘like a wounded soldier’ on her essay; by November it was ‘the accursed essay’, with still more to be done.42
Even in her seventies Miles still worried about money. For income tax purposes, she claimed to have earned £165 in the financial year 1951– 52 from her writings, a figure that more or less accords with royalties received from Angus & Robertson for the two Brent books in print plus occasional fees, but not rental income from the shops. The lot of a landlord was precarious, she wrote to J. K. Moir, with rising repair costs and, in her case, rentals pegged at prewar prices, so that she sometimes got nothing for six months. To be financially secure these days, she told Dymphna Cusack, you needed to write a radio serial for the ABC. But when Cusack later sent her a cheque for £5, stiff-necked Miles would not cash it, replying (with thanks): ‘If money doesn’t go phut altogether I shall have enough to bury me and eat for a year or two longer.’ According to the Bridle sisters she was always lamenting a lack of money. But a lifetime of economic uncertainty had led to habitual anxiety about her finances.43
Perhaps her insecurity was social as well as financial. Had family fortunes not collapsed in times past, she might have occupied a more elevated social position. There had been some admired wealthy spinsters in Sydney, most notably the philanthropist Dame Eadith Walker, who had inherited a fortune from her merchant father. Miles’s father, on the other hand, left her nothing. Indeed, he did not even leave a will. It was her mother’s estate on which she relied. Her royalties were a top-up, and in some years small.44
Now reports of deaths came often, each reminding her of her own mortality. In February she heard that her most distinguished American correspondent, the New Dealer Harold Ickes, had died.45
The gentle, rational Arnold Dresden wrote to her, ‘There is no reason I can accept for a fear of death. There is nothing to be concerned about in the prospect of a sojourn in this world coming to an end.’ Her fears were unseemly, still church-bound. Dresden, who was suffering from cancer of the tongue and would die in April 1954, was seemingly more distressed by his old friend’s anxiety than his own situation.46
Arnold Dresden’s diagnosis of a church-bound attitude misunderstood Miles’s real position. The Franklins were scarcely more than nominal Anglicans, and as she said herself, she lacked ‘a believing mind’, attending church at most once a year in later life. She probably rejected Christian teachings quite early. An undated sketch in a manuscript entitled ‘Sequel’ portrays a rebellious girl at ‘the little church among the eucalyptus trees’ who had to conform outwardly, but inwardly reflected on ‘ghastly [anti-woman] teachings’.47
Miles seems never to have had a Christian belief in the life hereafter, nor even in ‘the Beyond’, or in any non-Christian teachings regarding the afterlife, such as reincarnation, though she sometimes regretted it was so. In maturity she had difficulty with the very idea of a soul, as in a fragment to an unidentified American friend, possibly Mrs Robins: ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that our soul is not always with us. It can be chased away by lunacy . . . or in abeyance due to fatigue.’ Vida Goldstein said flatly that Miles Franklin had no spiritual convictions.48
Yet in a way Arnold Dresden was right. For instance, there is a surprising amount of incidental comment on religion in My Brilliant Career, though it is mostly hostile in the free-thinking 1890s manner. And in Childhood at Brindabella Miles reflects that ‘it takes a greater mind to find God than to lose him’. Later, she almost invariably adopted an agnostic position. She did not entirely reject religion, nor did she accept it; and without it or some other understanding, she remained at a loss to comprehend the end of life. In that sense, something of the old church teachings lurked in her mind, as is often the case with non-believers in a Christian culture.49
Miles never said as much, but she may have been afraid of dying alone. With no children, siblings or even nieces and nephews near to hand, and some of her most reliable neighbours already gone, that was quite possible. She told Dymphna Cusack on 29 July that she had not heard from her nephew John in two years. The Queensland connection to Linda’s family was long broken, possibly as early as Charlie Graham’s second marriage, and although his son, Edward, had lived with his grandparents at Carlton for a time after World War I, spent his honeymoon there in 1932, and was acknowledged in Miles’s will, it seems she never met him.50
Miles Franklin frequently expressed irritation at posthumous honours for writers. With the years slipping remorselessly by and the sense that she was failing physically, she yearned for recognition. But Brent of Bin Bin, not Miles Franklin, was now getting praise, most recently from the Catholic archbishop and historian Eris O’Brien, and the Bulletin when Ten Creeks Run appeared. In reflective mode, she wrote to David Martin that these days she preferred general ideas simply put: ‘If only I could get rid of my complexities, my far-flung deviousness, which sweeps me away in cross-currents when one life is sufficient only to get out one idea one aim.’51
She no longer tried to hide her anxieties. It is striking just how much time even quite casual associates spent reassuring her that she was a good writer: Joe Salter for one, Les Woolacott for another. Woolacott, by that time a newspaper editor and part-time drama lecturer at Dubbo, recalled meeting Miles in King Street in the city in 1952 after a Book Society dinner in a very downcast mood ‘because you were a failure, because you couldn’t write, and a lot of other rot’, and was pleased to hear that she had not stopped writing as she had threatened. (As might be guessed, she was wanting him to read one of her plays as well as put on some of Dymphna’s.) Much of her literary struggle, she said, had been futile and she had received very little help as a writer: ‘I have never had any help except from Henry Lawson when I was a kid. I have done endless
ghosting and revisions and readings and advising for love but never had a literary friend.’52
There was some truth in what she said. No one had any idea of the extent of her unpublished writings. On the other hand, such retrospections were hard on all those who had tried to help her, starting with her mother and those Sydney women in the early twentieth century like Rose Scott and Cara David, and especially on Alice Henry and Mary Fullerton. What she had really needed was professional help, but in her youth it was not available in Sydney except to the young men nourished by George Robertson, or under unusual circumstances, as in London in 1901, when several people had had a hand in the final editing of My Brilliant Career. Unfortunately, as Beatrice Davis would ruefully assert, Miles never could see the importance of style. Alternatively, she could not reconcile herself to being unable to write a bestseller, and envied those who could. In the end she was her own best diagnostician: ‘I totally lack self-confidence, but do not give way to self-pity.’53
The crisis of World War II focused attention on Australian culture and the urge for consolidation remained strong afterwards. The cultural output of the 1950s, from essayist A. A. Phillips’ critique of ‘the cultural cringe’ to Russel Ward’s Australian Legend, shows how strong it really was. In this respect, Miles’s own preoccupation with literary and other forms of Australian history was as much a product of the times as of her stage in life.
To some of the younger generation of writers, however, Miles was now an oddity, almost a museum piece. At an FAW meeting in January 1952, the rising young writer Ray Mathew saw her as ‘an amusing figure, a kind of combination of Mrs Pankhurst and Mary Poppins’; but she surprised him by greeting him with enthusiasm for making mud-pies of Australia, a reference to his poem ‘Australian-Made’, the second stanza of which begins: ‘This is my land, I made/Mud-pies of it . . .’ Later in the year, with other Lyre-Bird folk, Mathew enjoyed a supper at Carlton: ‘Miles Franklin’s house looks ordinary enough from outside on a dark night but when the door opened and the dear head poked around the corner it was most extraordinary.’ The house was neat and tidy (except the bookcases); the conversation was anything but, with Miles telling tales of theatre in New York and expressing her literary likes and dislikes freely, while the waratah cup and waratah book did the rounds.54
The ‘amusing figure’ had become the ‘dear head’. When they first met, Mathew had already read My Career Goes Bung, but it was not until the end of the year that he read My Brilliant Career, and he wrote immediately saying how much it had delighted him — it was so honest and true to Australia. ‘I think M. B. C. is your saddest book that I know and your happiest; Career Goes Bung funniest and most educationalest; All that Swagger your bravest.’ Keep writing, he urged her, and bring out those plays. Miles was pleased to hear from him, and in reply expressed the hope that after fifty years he would not find, as she had, a total inadequacy of talents — but then it was a different age, with a different memory, and he was ‘a different kind of bird’. ‘Write to me when you feel like it and come and see me if you want to,’ she concluded.55
Then aged just twenty-three, Mathew was a talented and under-appreciated poet and playwright who left Australia for good in 1961, dying in New York in 2002. According to Myfanwy Horne, a friend from student days, he was ‘Australian-made’ to the last. In 1963 he published a significant monograph on Miles Franklin in the series Australian Writers and their Work. Although short and limited to then published sources, it was the first literary assessment of the whole of Brent’s oeuvre — Angus & Robertson published the last volumes in 1956 — and it also took Miles Franklin seriously as a woman.56
Mathew began by acknowledging that Miles Franklin’s literary reputation was fragile and might not last without her vivid personality to reinforce it. In his opinion, nothing from a literary point of view happened in her life after the traumas associated with the reception of My Brilliant Career in 1901. Thereafter, he proposed, came despair and incomprehension at a changing world, until the Brent persona set her free and enabled her to write honestly again. Mathew argued that although Cockatoos was the only one of the Brent books likely to survive in its own right — ‘irrefutable in its own backyard’ — the series was her masterpiece, likely to live on in the ‘archives of imagination’. A strong but provisional conclusion could then be drawn, as follows: ‘On that possibility, on the probability that My Career Goes Bung will live as a minor classic and on the certainty that My Brilliant Career is a classic (important in our literature, good in any), the case for Miles Franklin . . . could confidently rest.’
Mathew’s generous conclusion was largely adopted by literary history, but his approach to the Brent series has been less easily accepted.
Dealing headlong with Miles’s reticence about sex, he postulated an underlying ‘sexual confusion’ or uncertainty in the plot of Prelude to Waking. ‘This sexual confusion,’ he argued, ‘may either irritate or amuse the reader, but it does force the author into extraordinary studies of women desiring but incapable of consummation which are subtle and unique in Australian writing.’57
That her reputation might come to rest not on her life or her work but on her approach to sexuality, a subject rarely mentioned directly in her books, would probably have appalled her.
The fact that Miles Franklin remained single did not make her as unusual then as it would later. The proportion of older unmarried people in the population is now negligible (although marriage patterns have changed and marital status is differently regarded). We now have a poor understanding of a world in which a significant proportion of the population never married. According to census figures for 1921, almost 20 per cent of adults aged forty-five to forty-nine had never married; that is to say, one in five of older people. Many of them probably also had no sexual experience.58
But there were significant differences between the country and the city. In rural New South Wales there were three males for every two females of marriageable age in 1891. Since fewer than 5 per cent of country women reached their forties unmarried in 1891, and that Miles Franklin reached the median age of marriage in New South Wales (then about twenty-three for women) in 1902, she would seem to have been set to marry easily.
The years between 1893 and 1903, however, saw a sharp downturn in marriage rates, and the proportion of women reaching thirty while still unmarried in the 1890s rose from 29.4 to 40.3 per cent, a figure that remained stable for another decade or so. Prolonged economic depression and then severe drought created unfavourable circumstances for men to marry. Then, if they did marry they chose younger women. So women who were unable to find partners in the 1890s lost their place in the marriage market.59
Hera Cook’s important study of the subject in England, The Long Sexual Revolution, argues convincingly that it was not contraceptives, as is usually thought, but the codes of self-restraint and sexual abstinence created by English women for their own protection in the mid- to late-nineteenth century that brought fertility under control, and that those woman-enforced codes persisted until the 1940s, by which time it was easier to separate sexual pleasure and family planning (and to recognise dysfunctional consequences over time, such as a surprisingly high rate of unconsummated marriages). Things were probably freer, but not necessarily better, in Australia; except during the 1890s drought and economic recession.60
The period of restraint and abstinence spanned Miles’s life almost exactly. This historical perspective has yet to make its way into the common stock of knowledge, and will undoubtedly be carefully reviewed as it does. That doesn’t matter greatly for an understanding of Miles’s late dilemmas: for her, in the long run, it became a no-win situation. As the historical circumstances that shaped her life choices slowly disappeared — Cook argues the sexual revolution in England was not over until the mid-1970s, when the fertility control now taken for granted was finally secured — so the codes in which Miles was reared and by which she lived came to seem unintelligible, except in the moralistic terms implied by ‘pu
ritanism’. That is, as a young woman she made rational choices, based on socio-sexual realities, then she was trapped, not just in personal terms, but worse, in terms of her literary reputation.
It is in this context Miles’s friendships with men should be evaluated. These too are taken for granted today. But they were unusual until very recently, and required some skill and sensitivity to maintain, even as an older woman. They were the best she could do in a world where male sexuality and power were still overwhelming. The man she came closest to marrying, Demarest Lloyd, was divorced not once but twice, the second time in 1937, the year of his death, for cruelty, possibly of the kind portrayed in Miles’s shocking story of entrapment and attempted rape, ‘Red Cross Nurse’, written in 1914. In her code, divorce implied serious doubt as to a man’s moral and physical suitability as a husband, far from the simple personal incompatibility accepted today.61
By her sixties, Miles had lost her once urgent interest in sex. As she said to Jean Devanny in 1954, now that sex had come to stay, it was time to give it a rest. By then she had read Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and found elements of the behaviourist approach ‘utterly revolting’.62
Kate Baker’s death in October 1953, aged ninety-two, caused Miles to reflect that apart from herself and Norman Lindsay, there were now only a few people in Perth left who had known Joseph Furphy. When in August 1953 John Kinmont Moir asked her to identify signatures in Catherine Helen Spence’s birthday book, a rare and precious item that had somehow come his way, she was pleased to find she recognised many of them: from her American years there were the Lloyds and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and some British names as well, such as the founding settlement worker Dame Henrietta Barnett, whom Miles had met at Hull House. There, too, was the librarian Margaret Windeyer, recalled as having taken Miles to meet Rose Scott for the first time, and Ada Kidgell, the maiden signature of Ada Holman, wife of the New South Wales Premier who had helped Miles in London.63