Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  But for a long time those of us who had some experience of overseas publishers had felt that there was something the matter with the prestigious firm we so revered. We felt this not only reluctantly but with a sense of betrayal. Yet commonsense can not be denied for ever. Would George Robertson be pleased with his establishment as it was conducted now, I asked myself. And commonsense answered no.

  Well I remembered how The Harp in the South had been received by Beatrice Davis, the senior editor. If it had not been for the gentleman’s agreement with the Sydney Morning Herald that novel, for one, would never have been published. Yet it had made a small fortune for Angus & Robertson.

  My first meeting with the then managing director, Walter Cousins, widely regarded as a lovable old chap, had left me feeling he inhabited a world not akin to mine. After expressing little faith in the book he stood up and murmured, ‘Well, well, we must hope for the best’ and was so plainly on the verge of ushering me forth that I gasped nervously, ‘When may I expect the contract, Mr Cousins?’

  ‘What contract?’

  He then told me that business matters at Angus & Robertson were sealed with a handshake only. Now, this was a lie. When I finally read his predecessor George Robertson’s delightful letters, I found they fairly jumped with references to contracts. But perhaps the custom had lapsed under Mr Cousins, for when I finally received the contract I found it was a copy of an English one, word for word – publishing territories wrong, and instead of the agreed royalty scale, a miniscule ‘colonial edition’ clause. In addition, on the contract I appeared as ‘Mrs D’Arcy Niland’. Back I went for revision.

  Mr Cousins was patient but puzzled. I wanted a contract, didn’t I? Well, I had one.

  Clause by clause we rectified it. But he baulked at the Mrs D’Arcy Niland. What was the matter with that?

  ‘That’s not my name, Mr Cousins. It’s my marital status.’

  He was baffled. I explained that if D’Arcy and I divorced and there was a second or even a third Mrs D’Arcy Niland, A & R might be in the soup. Who then would own the copyright?

  Oh, I could see he thought I was a troublemaker. But eventually I received another contract, this one made out to Ruth D’Arcy Niland.

  Time went by. I had some unsettling chats with older A & R writers.

  E.V. Timms wrote high-coloured historical romances. He said, ‘He’s obsessed with ink, you’ll see.’

  ‘Ink?’

  ‘Every time they do a reprint of one of my novels Walter tries to beat down the royalty rate on the grounds that the price of ink has gone up. But they’re such good people. They’d never see you stuck if you were in difficulties.’

  Leslie Rees, trying to get hold of proofs of a non-fiction book, the accuracy of which was important to him, was promised them immediately by Mr Cousins, left the latter’s office and walked out through the shop to discover that the book was already on sale.

  ‘No proofs, no advertisement, not even a notification of publication date.’

  ‘But didn’t you get mad?’

  ‘How can one?’ He laughed ruefully.

  This was the weakening factor. It was what kept us writers, and no doubt artists as well, from screeching blue murder when our work appeared with terrible jackets; blurbs so non-selling that I can recognise them still after thirty or forty years; no publicity whatsoever; few books sent out for review, and almost inevitably the worst publication date possible, such as the first week in January or the week after Mother’s Day.

  Angus & Robertson, I think, had not put aside the old idea that publishing is a gentleman’s profession, though certainly George Robertson had no such high-flown sentiments. Books could no longer be left to find their own way, they sank before the flood of other publishers’ books (excellent sellers often already rejected by Angus & Robertson), that enjoyed professional promotion and sales technique.

  ‘Books cannot be treated as if they’re tins of beans,’ said the chief executive, the gentle, sweet-tempered George Ferguson one day. When I repeated this to Colin Simpson, the travel writer, an intelligent, sophisticated man, he groaned, ‘Christ, why not? That doesn’t make books tins of beans.’

  ‘Aw, cut the pious cackle,’ said Frank Clune, one day when I was bemoaning the inefficiency of our publishers. ‘Do you return your royalty statements twice a year and have them revised? Yeah? You and a hundred others. The trouble with A & R is that, bloody beaut as all the staff are, they’ve turned comfortable. They’ll lose that firm yet, you’ll see.’ He snorted.

  Frank was an accountant and a smart businessman. He managed to push sales of his rough-written adventure and historical books by sheer cheek and ingenuity. He was an authentic soft touch, but worked hard at being an Ocker, swearing like a trooper and pulling people’s legs with dreadful jokes. It was rumoured that he had put the hard word on the regal Miles Franklin as they shared a car on the way to the Henry Lawson Festival at Gulgong – a probable myth that nevertheless seemed to me to sum up agreeably the slightly mad character of Australian literary life.

  ‘You and your bloke get out from under,’ he advised.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Well, writing’s not my main source of income. ‘Sides, I’m in love with Beatrice. What a little corker she is!’

  As was our way, we were so immersed in other jobs we forgot that The Shiralee was on offer in London. I was doing an immense book on Australia for a German publisher, who planned to distribute it in half a dozen European languages in the year of Melbourne’s Olympic Games, 1956. It was an enormous job, carried out as usual in the night hours and squeezed between the multitude of tasks attendant on the care of a family, but I revelled in it. Always I have most enjoyed writing non-fiction. The Golden Boomerang never appeared in English; it is a curiosity in my literary history. Its sale was large, and brought in royalties, possibly from copies sold to European libraries, for many years afterwards. German publishers are, overall, superb – prompt, efficient, and honest, the best of the many I have had to deal with in my literary lifetime. Also they tend to send you spice cakes and little tin boxes of almond paste and cherry confiture for Christmas. The only small problem is getting translations of their royalty statements for the Taxation Department.

  Within two months D’Arcy had a cable from Michael Joseph Ltd.

  WILDLY EXCITED SHIRALEE. PREDICT SPLENDID SALES. LETTER FOLLOWS. SINCEREST CONGRATULATIONS.

  D’Arcy sat in blinking bewilderment. He couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Have I struck it at last? Crikey, I must tell Beatrice!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’ll be so pleased for us.’

  And indeed she was, and sincerely, for sincerity was the essence of her character. D’Arcy was invited into Castlereagh Street for a celebratory drink with Beatrice and the much younger George Ferguson. He came back triumphantly, an Angus & Robertson author. I was dismayed.

  ‘How did that happen?’ I cried.

  ‘Mr Ferguson said that maybe they’d been hasty about their first reading of the book, which you know, Tiger, might well be the truth. And then Beatrice asked me to give them another chance.’

  ‘And you gave in! With Michael Joseph wildly excited?’

  ‘Well you know how it is. I’d walk over burning coals for that woman. And besides, it’s what I’ve always wanted.’

  All Angus & Robertson wanted were the Australasian rights. Michael Joseph could have the United Kingdom. But Michael Joseph most wanted Australia, where the sales would be biggest, and being denied them, crossly backed out of the deal.

  The novel thus became one of the first Angus & Robertson published from their new London establishment.

  ‘I don’t see why you should be so cranky,’ complained my partner as I uttered a few dismal predictions. And he put on a mulish look and said I didn’t understand the way he felt. He had his own vision of things. This originated in his first days in Sydney, when, a coatless rainsoaked kid on his way home from jobhunting, he had gazed into the windows of t
he firm’s great bookshop, yearning over all those desirable books and swearing that one day his short stories would be between covers in that very window.

  ‘At least get an agent,’ I begged. ‘You know how effective MCA have been for me in New York. Yes, I know you’ve given A & R agential rights, but what do they know?’

  No use. His publishers showed goodwill, and to him goodwill was all.

  I was surprised that he put up a fight when his editor wanted to change the title of his novel to The Millstone. Goodwill or not, he could tell that was incontrovertibly a stinker.

  Thus The Shiralee became a bestseller; a Book Society Choice in the UK; Book Club Choices in the United States, Germany and France. Almost immediately it went into ten translations and several serialisations. Its title word became famous. Little girls were called Shiralee. People named racehorses and beauty salons Shiralee.

  But the same waftiness that drifted about the Sydney office operated in London, which was run by a fussy old gentleman who had once, I believe, been a colonial administrator in the remote Pacific, a quasi-writer of sorts. Always with the best intentions, but without the author’s knowledge or permission, he gave Ealing Films a free option on The Shiralee, meanwhile keeping other film offers to himself. Years later we found out that there had been several excellent ones.

  D’Arcy went around as if in a dream. His great success with the novel had not made a dent in his natural modesty, and he agreed to the film deal in the same quiet and almost shy way. But his tense excitement was obvious to me.

  ‘Crikey, Tiger, this is the end of the rainbow. If this film does well, we’ll be able to stop freelancing, take it a bit easy, maybe even travel a bit.’

  Thus he expressed his most dearly held ambitions. Grand houses, big cars, a highflying lifestyle – for none of these things he cared a jot.

  ‘We’ll be able to give the kids the best education on offer; buy Paddy a piano …’

  Patrick, who was musically gifted, already had a piano, sweet-toned but fourth-hand and subject to asthma. His father longed to buy him a fine instrument. But, as usual, we lacked capital.

  Most readers believe that once a writer has a bestseller he is financially secure for years, if not for life. But this is not so. If that writer has another income, or a pleasant nest-egg in the bank from family inheritance or generosity, the case is different. But for the ordinary writer, starting in the basement of the literary world, living from typewriter to mouth, so to speak, he will get mighty little from his first bestseller. If the book has taken him into the top tax bracket he will lose half his income, and provisional tax will take almost all the remaining half. Certainly provisional tax will be adjusted the following year, but in that first year he may find himself poorer than he has ever been.

  Some writers, of course, along with other professionals, manage to find one of the now rare tax havens. But even these have their disadvantages.

  With what is regrettably called a mega-bestseller, the situation changes. Let it rain, let it hail, let the Tax Department do its direst duty, there will still remain enough money to bank or invest and thus form a nucleus of capital. The same is true of a film sale. If such is your luck, you have a real opportunity to put aside some monetary security for the family.

  This is what D’Arcy Niland anticipated.

  He was also delighted that Peter Finch had been cast to play the Tice character.

  When the film crew arrived in Sydney, accompanied by the usual deafening hullabaloo, he was dumbfounded.

  ‘Those blokes are batty. You’ve never seen such a carryon. What’s it all about? They talk all day, and eat and drink all night. Yet they get things done. Energy! You’d think they were all on amphetamines. Yet they’re cluey, you know. Sort of witty.’

  Neil Paterson, the Scots scriptwriter who accompanied the crew and who became a treasured friend until D’Arcy’s death, tried to advise him. ‘Dear boy, to cope with the film business a man needs stamina, as well as a certain technique to confront what is entirely synthetic. Back out. Leave for Turkey.’

  ‘But they say they need me along.’

  ‘For local press interest. Believe me, dear boy, the writer of the film is on the bottom of the totem pole.’

  ‘But this may be the only film I have, the only chance to make big money, I feel I have to co-operate where I can,’ D’Arcy said desperately. Neil shook his head kindly and said no more. Probably he had been in the same position, for he was also a novelist.

  Peter Finch was brutal. He had met his old friend exuberantly. Still lean and haggard, older after seven years of phenomenal dramatic success and even more phenomenal hellraising, he was still a fascinating mixture of urbane actor and what D’Arcy called the original tin-roof bloody hooligan. He still fantasised – ‘When I was two years old my father sold me to a Tibetan lama.’ Peter’s marriage to the beautiful Russian, Tamara, had gone bust; he had survived and indeed thrived on the international scandal of his affair with Vivien Leigh.

  D’Arcy and he spent considerable time together, laughing and drinking beer.

  ‘Don’t take all this film business seriously,’ he advised, ‘It’s bullshit.’

  ‘And I think he meant it,’ said D’Arcy, wonderingly. ‘But he’s worked hard. No matter what romances he spins about himself no one can deny he was a battler. Still is, in his way. Yet, in spite of all the fame and adulation he’s at a loss for something. What is it?’

  I had a good idea. Peter was suffering from the ‘Is that all there is?’ syndrome as much as I was. The melancholy truth, or shadow of truth, that had revealed itself to me at the Old Manse had not dissipated. D’Arcy’s intense involvement with the film and the film crew, while I stayed home, managed a large household, listened to children’s woes and joys, wrote scripts for the Children’s Session, and finished a novel that required much historical research in a poorly documented period, had demonstrated conclusively that things could only get more complex, more burdensome, less rewarding for me.

  ‘You’re looking like a wet week. What’s the matter?’

  However solicitous the question, it was impossible to put into words my unstructured discontent, my feeling that I was not only in a trap with no way out, but that I didn’t know why I felt I was in a trap. I did, however, resist the common feminine response of ‘Nothing,’ uttered in a brave tone, which translates ‘Something is very much the matter and it’s your job to ask me sympathetic questions to find out what.’ But whenever I said ‘Nothing’ to D’Arcy Niland he believed me, and said happily, ‘That’s great!’

  ‘I’m fed up,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you are. But you’ve finished your goldfields book, and there’ll be nothing more doing on the film while they’re editing, so why don’t you go over to New Zealand and see your Dad?’

  My father was now intermittently bedridden, often very ill. But when I arrived from Sydney he was sitting up in bed, reading Moby Dick with a magnifying glass.

  ‘This joker writes like the sea,’ he said, and I thought how exactly his words described the long swell and dwindle of Melville’s incomparable text. This old man, whose only teachers had been bush and river, and the talk of men old when he was young, had been my support and friend all my life. He had written to me every week during the fifteen years I had been away from New Zealand; he had kept that country ever present in my heart. Now he had written a little book of memoirs, though I don’t think he cared any more whether his life experiences were remembered. Long illness dissociates a person from his personal life.

  ‘Are you happy, Din?’ he asked. I couldn’t bring myself to say I wasn’t and lied in my teeth. Afterwards I was sorry. If I had admitted it, he might have been able to tell me what to do about it. He took my hand and kissed it, a strange thing for an old bushman to do.

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ he said, as he had done twice before.

  Probably we both knew that was the last time we would meet, for, although I had said goodbye, I went back quietly to ha
ve yet another look at him, and saw that he had put the blanket over his head, as Maoris and many other races have done when they know all is finished.

  Here is the way he told me about his death. As I have never told anyone, perhaps the time has come when I can write it. As one inevitably does, I have pondered it for many years; was this experience subjective, was it some commonplace thing misinterpreted by me, was it a waking dream? I would say no to all these questions.

  It was months later, the depths of summer. In Sydney, summer heat does not rise to airy heights; it sinks down and down into entranced depths, dark and moist, leaching out energy, so that the land and its people seem to lie in a moveless dream, waiting for sundown.

  It was a listless, stifling day, All Saints’ Day, and the four younger children who attended Catholic schools consequently on holiday. The house was full of bickering, music, the chirping of the little ones making toffee in the kitchen, and the maddening thud-thud on the exterior wall as the boys played handball.

  In the study D’Arcy tried to work out a storyline for a novel set on the opalfields, about his character Barbie Casabon, who had been in his head for years. But the distractions were too many.

  ‘Come on, we’re going for a picnic.’

  Our house was in easy reach of many beaches, and we all swam well. From North Head to the far point of Barren-joey, the ocean side of this noble peninsula is scalloped into long shallow curves, swagged between sphinx-like headlands, marvellous beaches of fine bistre sand and never-ending surf.

  ‘Freshwater! Freshwater!’

  We liked it best, the odd one out amongst the sweeping bays, much smaller, a half moon clasped between two headlands, more like a submerged volcanic crater than anything else. In those days the beach was not popular; people said there was a villainous rip off the southern rocks, and so Freshwater had been left to itself. Low velvety dunes ran down to the beach; coarse marram grass blew in the ceaseless wind; the fresh water of its name glistened out of the sand, grew, found deep runnels at low tide mark, and spread out into a web of fissures like the roots of a tree.