I had intended to go to Kandy but now find that there must be a party of four. Will have to find another first thing in the morning or the trip is off. I don’t mind. I’d save 30/-.
Dec. 10th
It is still fearfully hot, so much so that the temperature of the water in the deck pool which is straight out of the sea is about the same as the atmosphere. It’s very queer to look up on a starry night while on deck and see the Milky Way swinging to and fro like a lamp and the moon like a bouncing balloon.
I am thinking of turning my adventures with the Menu into capital, so you may see an article in The West Australian on the subject; I will ask the editor to let you have it for The Dawn if he doesn’t want it.
Well, darling, this must seem all very dry and disinterested stuff to pour down your neck. But one almost grows tired of repeating the same old longing. Don’t imagine that I have stopped feeling it, although when my surroundings are more lonely and less luxurious, I am sure I’ll feel it more still.
A dozen times a day I think of you in different positions beside me – at dinner, on the deck, dancing, in my bunk – laughing, effervescent, ever sympathetic and wonderful at listening. It is perhaps the very certainty of our liaison that stops me from talking about it so much in these letters. I never for one moment doubt our eventual reunion and am thinking of ‘eventual’ in not too indefinite terms.
That professor! He’s a scream but I must reserve his description until there is more time. On second thoughts I may write a sketch about him instead of telling you. The essay-article itch is getting me again. I have in mind writing a short story and am also trying to think of a subject for a romantic prose play. Romanticism hasn’t had a voice in Australia yet. It’s a field to be explored.
You must expect my letters to get shorter when I reach England though it won’t be for lack of inclination.
December 14th
Darling, I’m afraid you are monopolising all my writing time. I have got as far as making out a list of people to whom I should write but I never get the time to write to them – even to Mum.
Am typing out the play and getting more faith in it as I go on. Marvellous how all the little difficulties gradually smooth out, isn’t it, you being the experienced playwright? Mine will be considerably longer than yours. But still your play had a deal of substance, mine is very light social comedy. If possible, I want to send you a copy from Colombo, but it may not be finished.
Everyone on this ship seems to be looking for ways of passing the time; if I tell anyone I’ve been working, their eyes nearly fall overboard into the sea. But for me, I am glad to say, the days are still too short. Apart from your absence, this is really the ideal life, the life that I have been longing for, for years. I read for 20 minutes before breakfast, work on the play during the morning until noon, swim until 1 pm, lunch, read till 5 pm, swim and sunbathe till 6.30, dress for dinner, dinner.
Then comes the great need of the missing woman. I miss you and feel lonely and want to talk to you and sympathise and have you sympathise. So great is my need to talk that I tried to tell the Brady woman about my play and explain some of the difficulties of writing it. But one might as well address a tree. She’s a cultured (in the narrow sense) well-brought up girl but absolutely idea-less. Lord knows how her man will get on with her when he wants to explain (he’s a doctor) how he’s found a new unidentified sac in the human intestine.
I am so certain that I am coming back to you, darling, that I constantly forget the need for any reminder of my constancy, loyalty, love. But I know that it’s nice to have the iteration and as often as possible. This Brady woman never speaks of her fiancé but is constantly telling me that the jazz music brings back memories of her dear boy pal in Melbourne. Don’t you go getting any boy pals like that!
Four long weeks till I hear from you but I seem to hear your voice and see your face and feel your presence all the time. And so, dearest, I end the first chapter of the book of messages that I shall write to you on this trip. May this find you glorious in health, lovely as a star (as you always were) and the same dear girl.
Think of me always, dear
Les
7
The Girl He Left Behind
Coral would eventually have the opportunity to tell her side of this story.
Les went off to London. He said ‘I’ll come back in a year’s time and we’ll get married.’ But I thought no – what an intolerable situation for a marriage that would be. He would have all the overseas experience and I would be the girl he left behind in little Perth. No, that didn’t suit me at all. So as soon as he was gone I had to get busy to get myself over there.
Years later Coral was to turn the whole episode into part of her constructed story. She would even recount it on national radio to an audience of listeners from all over the country as part of a series of broadcasts, based on their unpublished manuscript Seven and Sevenpence, Please.
High up on deck Les had waved the tattered bunch of paper ribbons in his hand and clutching mine I waved back till my arm ached. Then his face grew smaller and smaller and all I could see as the great stern of the ship began to turn was a clockwork arm waving broken streamers. Then he had gone. And I was left behind.
Something in my mind pinged at that moment. A surge of protest rose and nearly choked me. Was I cast for the role of the girl he left behind him, the little woman who would keep for him in Perth, a place full of quiet breathing, until he came home after a year and we could be married?
In a disembodied way I began to drive my father’s old but useful car homeward, with Les’s mother and sister Averil as passengers. I looked across to the sandhills of Cottesloe where Les and I had lain, reading Yeats. The words murmured within me:
Oh what to me my mother’s care
The house where I was safe and warm
The shadowy blossom of my hair
Will hide us from the bitter storm.
The Orford was just passing Rottnest Island, the hot dry magical island off the mainland where two years previously Les and I had discovered each other in a blinding flash, after a long and desultory friendship. In the days and weeks that followed that revelation we had talked and planned far into the night. Driving along the Perth-Fremantle road I pulled myself sharply out of a daydream. How could I get myself to London – and quickly? I was 21 years old with a Bachelor’s Degree and a leg-in to journalism as both editor and staff of The Dawn. My salary was £3 per week. After a year on The Dawn, I had saved nothing.
Nor were there likely to be better opportunities. A city of about 200,000 people, Perth had one morning newspaper, one evening newspaper, a Sunday paper and a couple of sporting rags. Women were not admitted to general news journalism and that left only the women’s social columns with their small fixed staffs.
My only hope was to be awarded one of the free-passage scholarships given by the overseas steamship lines to the university for poor but worthy graduates wanting to study abroad, similar scholarships to the one that had just taken Les away. But these were annual awards. Some months must elapse before the next batch – not a whole year – as Les had left Perth at the end of his permissible off-season period of travel while I … I might be able to leave at the beginning of the next period, if only I could win favour. This would depend on how many graduates were in the field and how outstanding they were.
I applied at once. Fortunately my record as a student was good. So I approached our professor of English literature in whose department I had majored. I asked him to support my application. Professor Walter Murdoch’s writings as a quizzical essayist and common sense philosopher were relished from one side of Australia to the other. He was a rare, warmly human personality. He also had discernment. He smiled at me across his table, roguish eyes over thin-rimmed spectacles, bushy grey moustache and thatch of hair. In that cockle-warming Scots burr he enquired: ‘Do you two intend to make a match of i
t?’ I hadn’t expected such a non-academic question but on recovering my breath, whispered, ‘Yes.’ Murdie, as we called him, being a romantic gave me his blessing. My application had, of course, to go before the Senate.
By mid-February 1930 a trickle of letters – sometimes a wave –began to arrive in Mt Hawthorn from Les in London. They did not always arrive in the order they were posted. When the package of Les’s letters from the ship was delivered, Coral carefully arranged them into sequence and pasted them into a book. Les had written to her every day, sometimes twice a day, for thirty-five days in a row. Now it was her turn for the nightly ritual. Every evening after dinner Coral would repair to her desk and pen her letter to Les. Sometimes, she would present him with a poem, written in rhyming quatrains in the vein of the Victorian romantics they had studied and admired.
To Les
You are the breath of fragrant nights
When summer hangs on flower and lawn
And the pale moon’s half-swooning lights
Haunt shadows, like lost dreams forlorn.
You are the heavy scent of dew
Which rises from dank violet beds
The wet earth’s vapours, there are you
And the ripping showers which winter sheds.
Your voice is in the breeze of spring
Which rustles the lips of tall gum trees
Of your glad mating magpies sing
Their sunshine-bursting melodies.
The russet browns of autumn’s leaves
Are warmth upon your cheek and heart
As fitful sunshine oft deceives
The sadness that we are apart.
In all earth’s beauties do you shine
And live with me through every day,
And while there’s still a breath of mine,
There’ll be a prayer for you to say.
At other times she gave her own account of what was happening in her much smaller distant world, including her daily challenges on The Dawn, which seemed so demanding and so humdrum compared to the ‘thrilling deeds’ Les was relating in his letters.
But besides reports and the endless iterations of his love and devotion, Les’s side of the correspondence gave him the opportunity to air his ideas and discuss his literary works in progress. To these, Coral would respond with enthusiasm and warm encouragement, setting a pattern that would last. She would also, tactfully, offer suggestions. They separately articulated their plans – how they saw their future careers. The letters also gave them both time to work out some of the ground rules of their relationship and to find a path through their differences by negotiation, skills they would need to refine for any literary partnership to take shape and survive.
8
Full of Love and Literature
In the mêlée of the Clarke household Coral often found it impossible to get an uninterrupted moment or enough quiet to concentrate. One night she was trying to write with a party for her sister Jess’s sixteenth birthday going on in the adjoining room. As she complained:
– not at all a fitting atmosphere in which to discourse sweet nothings or rather passionate and important somethings to my darling. They’re making barbarous noise in there now. It’s very distracting having a flapper party in one ear. So you will make allowances, dear?
It really means that I require a harmonious atmosphere in which to commune with you – it would be sacrilege to try to tell you all the beautiful thoughts and emotions aroused in me by your wonderful letters while this dreadful party is going on.
Now that she had applied for the scholarship to go to London, Coralie was desperately raking over ideas to earn extra cash, over and above her salary at The Dawn. She was already coaching younger students at night plus running an exercise class, but now she had the idea of freelance writing. She reworked pieces of prose and poetry for submission, some of which she would try out on Les by enclosing in a letter. She was realistic and imagined she was ready for any success in the venture, or none at all.
Darling dearest Les – my lover, husband, hero and author – you’re the biggest interest in my life – without you all the literary success in the world would be as ‘a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.’
Goodnight, beloved, Coral.
As soon as Les hit London, he had wasted no time in getting to the West End. His budget was meagre – two pounds a week to cover everything – but he would rather cut out a meal than not see a play, even if there wasn’t an actual seat. He once stood for three hours to see Shaw’s The Apple Cart. The seats were so far up in the gallery he said ‘the players looked like well-dressed ants on their hind legs down on the stage and the words were hard to hear’. Shaw’s are plays of ideas and the exact words are important. He went again and stood for another three hours just to catch the dialogue.
Les wasn’t writing up the plays he saw for a newspaper – not yet. But they were filling his letters to Coral. She was envious.
Darling, it must be marvellous to be seeing all those good plays wonderfully acted – the feast of a lifetime! And to think that there’s been nothing but wretched pictures in Perth since you left! And all for 7/9 – the plays – one week’s tickets – that’s amazing. I’m longing to hear your impressions of George Bernard Shaw as a person and as a speaker. Was he disappointing? I don’t think he would be.
By the way, I’ve just read a priceless anecdote about Shaw and Barrie. Apparently they used to live opposite each other in Adelphi Terrace which must have been a rather narrow lane, because one day Shaw looked out of his study window and saw Barrie pacing up and down wrapt in pensive thought, so he threw an apple across. It did not hit Barrie but fell upon his manuscript. He affected to take no notice and bided his time; when Shaw in his turn was immersed in the fever of creation, Barrie then threw a fat pink uncooked chop at him through the window. Rather subtle repartee – because Shaw is a vegetarian. But I believe they are great friends.
Apparently, between seeing plays, Les was busy writing one. Not the one-acter he put together on the ship but a full-length play set in the newspaper world with which he was so familiar. (This work would eventually end up as Sub-Editor’s Room and become – in 1956 – the first Australian play ever produced on Australian television.)
When he explained about this work-in-progress in his letters, Coral cautioned him to be realistic about its prospects. She cited examples of other plays that took a long while to find a market.
And, as far as your big three-act world-revolutionising drama ‘The Press’ is concerned, about which critics are going to rave and make blazing Broadway lights – permit me to be comforting, darling, just in case they don’t at first. You must never tire of trying to get ‘The Press’ produced. But you’d be missing part of the business if the first manager accepted it!
Actually, I’m dying to hear more of this epic of newspaperdom – have you really completed it, or did you die on the idea? Am I allowed a suggestion, dear? Don’t call your drama ‘The Press’ if it is about newspapers and newspaper people. ‘The Press’ would be attractive if it was used metaphorically to refer to say the crushing weight of family tyranny, or some big machine that tries to stifle individuality in man’s life. Obviously, I too am influenced by Shaw (you seem to be very).
I’m almost as thrilled about your play as you are, darling. A glorious brother-playwright feeling, the pride and comradeship, and not a whit of jealousy – only stimulation to get busy myself again. I’m longing for the next lots of letters to know how the great work is going – and do hope you haven’t cooled completely off the idea.
Les suggested she try to sell her one-act play, Shielded Eyes. But there was no time for that now that she was pinning her hopes on winning that scholarship.
Thanks for the tip about selling one-act plays, Love. However, if I’m off to Europe in June, there isn’t much time to work for anything (except cash). When we retur
n to Australia, darling, nothing will stop us establishing and endowing an Australian, all Australian and nothing but Australian theatre. Old Yeats and Lady Gregory will be put in the shade. I feel the power of certainty within me, don’t you Love?
For the first time, Les revealed in a letter his deep antipathy for organised religion, stemming from the time as a child he was pushed into attending a badly run Sunday school. He said he didn’t believe in God; he worshipped only her.
Coral found this confronting, even shocking. It was the first deeply held point of difference they would have to negotiate. She had a strong faith, a Christian view of God based on the Church of England liturgy.
All the reasoning and philosophy in the world cannot make me lose my childhood faith. It is all I have to cling to when I am in trouble or doubt which goes beyond human understanding or sympathy.
She also made it clear to Les that worshipping her was not a healthy alternative.
You must not let me be your religion, dearest. Very often one sees an overwhelming passion bring about a person’s downfall. However, you are far too balanced to let even me overrule you, aren’t you dearest? And for that I must frankly confess my gratitude and admiration. I know now how much better and more valuable it is for your love to be more critical and less abject and I recognise that in that lies its infallible attraction for me. Only foolish girls revel in unqualified worship. How on earth can they take a man’s word that they are goddesses when they must know themselves that they are not.
That does not mean that you’re to drop an ounce of the reverence from your love for me, dearest, and lapse into a platonic sort of camaraderie. Even if you contemplated such a thing (and I’m sure you have no wish to) that is not what I mean for an instant. It’s the happy mean between mutual admiration and love in spite of faults and blind worship that we must strike – a state of enlightened devotion or of sure love incurred with the divine essence of self-abnegation and sacrifice […]
Darling, I too have found myself imagining that you were dead or crippled, and I independently came to the same conclusion as you did – that it would make no real difference. Poverty, failure, nothing could part me from you – only death. And when the time comes, may we go down together like the couple in that film we saw – Atlantic. Even physical death could not part our spirits, beloved – for I know that if you died first my spirit would go with you even if my body had to keep walking on this physical plane. And if I died first I would be beside you in spirit always – until you too left your body – and then forever after that.
A Paper Inheritance Page 5