A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  Despite the difficulties they all faced, their combined literary output totals well over a hundred published works: novels, plays, poetry, children’s literature, travel books, autobiography and literary criticism – plus a cartload of first-class journalism and scriptwriting for radio and television. The old adage that ‘success as a writer is achieved by applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair’ was proudly upheld.

  But what effect does a two-writers-in-one-family set-up have on intimate relationships? Does the dream of a marriage of true minds survive the rigours of family life? From the lives of these three literary duos it seems clear that if literary partnerships are to survive, one partner needs to make greater sacrifices than the other, and in each of these cases it fell to the female partner to make them. It was almost the duty of the female partner to make them, being as she was of her time and place. Many creative people avoid having committed relationships; many more choose not to have children because of the added burden of responsibility parenthood imposes. But each of these Australian literary couples launched into procreation.

  Like everything, such a decision came with a cost. Especially for Coralie. Despite growing up as the eldest of six children and seeing how hard her own mother worked, she was stunned by the domestic turmoil the first little person would bring into their lives. Coralie Clarke Rees was beginning to make a name for herself as a writer and broadcaster. By choosing to settle in Sydney, my parents had physically isolated themselves from their large extended families in faraway Perth. There were no doting grandmothers to call on and there was no such thing as childcare as we know it today. And there were no refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, even hot water systems. Domestic life was highly labour-intensive and endlessly time-consuming.

  My mother was suddenly faced with the question of when she would ever find the time or energy to do her writing. When I was born two years after my sister, she was again boiling cloth nappies in an outdoor copper and winding them through a hand wringer instead of addressing herself to the typewriter. When she did get to write, it was to fire off short stories about the role of women and the dreadful choices they have to make: children or a career. Meanwhile her consort was flourishing, striding through the heart of the Sydney world like a literary lion while basking in the glow of a beautiful wife and two small daughters at home.

  When Coralie was offered the full-time job of anchoring the ABC Women’s Session, a role made for her, she had to turn it down ‘because there is no-one to mind Dymphna’. Since I discovered that sentence in one of her letters, I have carried a mixture of guilt and sadness while being secretly reassured that she put my welfare first. There is no doubt she made that choice with much heartache and disappointment. A similar thing happened to Ruth Park a few years later when offered a salaried job on The Sydney Morning Herald immediately after winning the Herald prize for The Harp in the South. Though the pay was, in her estimation, ‘the stuff of fantasy’, Ruth demurred faintly: ‘But I have two little children.’

  It is clear that my mother struggled to balance the demands of her family life with her literary career. She must have written of her frustrations to her writer friend Frank Dalby Davison because he wrote back to her saying:

  Sorry to hear that the B.B.’s are still interfering with your career, Coralie; and I don’t know what to do about it […] I know that you can make resolutions about setting aside even a little bit of time each day, and holding that sacrosanct – but when the bit of time comes round you may be feeling too tired, or upset, or if not that, then some demand is made on you that can’t be disregarded. It’s a hard world for women, Coralie, if they want to do something.

  When I came across two typed letters from Frank written at the beginning of 1946, I found my mother was sharing her disappointments with him and that he was writing back to her, and her alone. Some years before, she had dramatised his Children of the Dark People, a delightful children’s book about two Aboriginal children lost in the bush. Coralie had adapted it into a series of twenty-four episodes for radio. No doubt she and Frank had their heads together on this project. My father told me that Frank had once been in love with her. Although he had remarried by the time he wrote that letter, I was surprised by its intimate tone and the depth of empathy and support he offered, more than one would expect from a male colleague who was having his own literary success. There seemed nothing covert or even particularly affectionate in his letters but it made me question whether Frank was showing her more understanding than Leslie was. Then there was that sepia studio portrait of Frank, inscribed ‘To Coralie from Frank, 1946’ that set me wondering. Perhaps, he wanted to remind her there was still some lingering tenderness there. (I also pondered long and hard about what ‘B.B.’s’ might stand for, since it referred partly to me. Was it Frank’s term or my mother’s? I came to the conclusion that the second initial stood for ‘brats’ – a common name at the time for the irritating young, and one my mother was prone to use and with her usual emphasis. But the first B? It could be ‘blasted’ or it could be something else. This is one of the prices of peeping into your parent’s private correspondence!)

  One of the perils of being a literary wife was to be cast into the role of sounding board. Apparently George ran everything past Charmian, even handing over each page as it came out of the typewriter for her critique and praise. The time and energy spent doing this would have markedly reduced Charmian’s own output, which in turn resulted in her being seen as the lesser writer. Coralie suffered to the same degree. She was an intuitive listener, empathic and instantly engaged. My father once told me that was why he fell in love with her. In his earliest letters when they were separated by oceans, he kept mentioning how he missed her listening to his ideas. Ruth, who admitted to being ‘darkly secretive’ about her own work, revealed that D’Arcy never read any of her novels, though she was his perennial sounding board.

  Sounding boards are rarely acknowledged by their sounders. In my father’s books of drama history, the dedications read: ‘To Coralie, who has always sat at my right hand, both within the theatre and without.’ When I commented to my mother that this was a lovely tribute to her, she said: ‘Yes, it is lovely. I wrote it myself, that’s why.’

  Ruth and D’Arcy first met Leslie in his capacity as the ABC’s drama editor. They had submitted a play to one of the play competitions my father was running. Whatever their play, it didn’t stand a chance against the winner. But the competition had a very helpful long-term consequence for Ruth and D’Arcy: with Leslie’s encouragement, it started them off writing for radio, something Ruth would continue in the years after D’Arcy’s death with her long-running serial for children The Muddle-Headed Wombat.

  Play competitions were one of my father’s innovations for drawing out hitherto undiscovered talent. This particular competition for verse drama (a form in vogue in England and America at the time) had discovered a real jewel. Leslie was to declare he was prepared to burn his boats that The Fire on the Snow was ‘the finest-written play to come out of Australia and among the finest half-dozen from anywhere’. His judgement was vindicated, of course. Not only did the play divert Douglas Stewart from his desk on ‘The Red Page’ of The Bulletin and push him into the world of playwriting, but The Fire on the Snow had an illustrious career of its own. When I sat for the Leaving Certificate in 1957 it was a set text for English in New South Wales – an embarrassment for a schoolgirl as my father featured in the dedication and had also written a lengthy appendix published with it. Even worse, another of our set texts was my father’s Modern Short Plays collection.

  Douglas Stewart was at first reluctant to have his verse drama produced on radio but he came to be grateful.

  I owe Les a great personal debt as he put me on the map as a playwright by insisting on performing The Fire on the Snow, and steadily supported my work thereafter. But, apart from that, I think he has done more for the Australian playwright than anyone e
lse, ever.

  In the Sydney literary milieu of the 1940s, Coralie and Les and Ruth and D’Arcy had much in common, including small children of about the same age. The couples became friends. Ruth inscribed a lavish gift, a Phaidon edition of Van Gogh reproductions, with this rhyming couplet:

  To Leslie Rees and Coralie Clarke

  From D’Arcy Niland and Ruthy Park

  For many years I treasured a little china hippopotamus with an impossible grin that Ruth had given me for my birthday. Such ornaments were scarce and probably expensive in the postwar years, making it all the more precious. The gift spoke of Ruth’s easy capacity to connect with children. I remember her as a shy person who once retreated from one of my parents’ noisy literary parties to sit on the end of my bed and tell me stories.

  Some years later, Ruth and Leslie collaborated on turning The Harp in the South into a stage play. Les described the process thus:

  Ruth had no experience of stage writing and evidenced very little interest in it. She was a practical worker, applying herself to specific markets, and the theatre certainly didn’t qualify. But she allowed herself to be persuaded by me. I mapped out a detailed scenario; and while (like Mary Gilmore) peeling potatoes or washing dishes in the Nilands’ tiny flat, Ruth shaped line after line of agile dialogue, some of it very different from the printed novel’s version. She gave me scene by scene on odd bits of paper. I brought my knowledge of theatre craft to trimming or adjusting; she added one or two extra bits of scene; I added extra shreds of dialogue; and so at last the play was formed.

  First produced by Doris Fitton at the Independent Theatre, North Sydney, the play has remained a favourite with amateur theatre companies over the decades since.

  In the mutual back-slapping way of literary people, D’Arcy at one time published an article titled ‘Kids Are His Business’ in a small journal targeting commercial interests, the article’s subject Leslie Rees, author of popular children’s books. When my father brought a copy home and read it out to us, there were hoots of laughter. Just the irony that a story about a writer was included in a magazine about making money was reason enough for our mirth. But we all howled at D’Arcy’s luxuriant epithets describing each member of the family. There was Leslie with ‘hair like a silver fox’, Coralie ‘his beautiful honey blonde wife’ and daughters ‘the golden-braided Megan and the elfin Dymphna’. These descriptions were quickly absorbed into our family lexicon. Although we were used to getting publicity in the print media, never before had we been described in such lavish terms.

  At the time of this friendship, Charmian and George were still living overseas. However, they visited Shellcove on several social occasions when they returned from Hydra. As Leslie was planning to retire from the ABC in 1965 to get on with his writing, he was not involved in working with George and Charmian on the television adaptation of Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack. A young ABC producer named Storry Walton who had been his protégé in the Drama Department took a key role in the production. The series was hailed as a success, due as much to Charmian’s scriptwriting abilities as to the novel itself.

  My mother used to say, ‘No-one knows what goes on in marriage except the two people involved.’ True in some cases, but two of these six writers wrote autobiographies, and two wrote novels that were undisguisedly autobiographical. So there is some evidence from their own pens about how these literary unions played out.

  Coralie did not publish any work about herself but several years before she died, she recorded her oral history with Hazel de Berg for the National Library of Australia. She chose to open her life story with this statement:

  This is Coralie Rees, wife of Leslie Rees. And therein lies the story of our marriage: I call [pronounce] it ‘Reece’ and he calls it ‘Reeze’. Nevertheless, we recently celebrated our thirty-seventh wedding anniversary, and on that day I said to him, – ‘Well, the fairest thing I can say is that if I had my time over again, I’d like to make the same mistake twice.’

  Coralie did not harbour any romantic illusions about the institution of marriage. In the early 1960s, the buzzword for gauging the potential success of a relationship was the degree of ‘compatibility’ between the parties. When I met my future husband, in my dewy-eyed state I beseeched my mother, ‘Do you think we’re compatible?’ She turned on me like a blowtorch: ‘I very much hope so because even if you are, it can be pure hell much of the time.’ Maybe she was having a bad day and feeling particularly disenchanted with her side of the arrangement, despite her pragmatic and unsentimental attitude. Besides, my mother’s dynamic pronouncements were always underscored by hyperbole.

  In her short story ‘The One Week-End Plan’ she tells the tale of a man vacillating between two very different women – a dazzling flibbertigibbet who raises his blood pressure and a girl ‘with a sensible face’ who shares his tastes and interests. The tale ends with an ironic observation when he asks his housekeeper:

  ‘What are you laughing at, Mrs Williams?’ The old girl was splitting her sides.

  ‘Bless you, Mr Pope,’ and she wiped her eyes on the duster. ‘I was only thinkin’ of the fairy tales, you know. And they lived happily ever after.’

  And so they did, despite Mrs Williams. More or less happily; as happy as most of us, in the ratio of one-tenth bliss, six-tenths compromise and three-tenths sedimentary contentment.

  I was in utero when my mother wrote that cagey summary of married life. Despite her tone of resignation (or was it realism?), it seemed to me as a daily observer of my parents’ interactions that they had happened upon that magic potion for a fulfilling lifelong relationship. Alongside their commitment to the literary life, they had harmony, honesty and respect, affection and tenderness, well-oiled teamwork, shared responsibilities, debate that was serious and forceful, and exchanges that were lively and colourful. Conversations, even the most mundane, were facilitated by laughter, an ever-present luminescence. Pettiness, meanness, anger and resentment seemed not to show their heads. Or not often.

  When I was nineteen years old, I characterised my parents’ union in my prize-winning poem as

  the blended two of my beginning

  treasuring each a boundless sharing

  if acrimonious over detail.

  My earnestly considered phrase ‘acrimonious over detail’ produced such hilarity in the subjects to which it referred that the words went immediately into the family vocabulary, being applied to all sorts of relationships and situations from then on.

  Coralie was always modest – almost self-effacing – about her achievements. She was not one for airing her knowledge, though she had a fine intellect. However, one night the four of us were gathered round the radiogram, carefully listening to a radio production of one of Ibsen’s plays, An Enemy of the People. It was a long play and towards the end, my mother had her eyes closed as if she had dozed off in her armchair. At the time Megan and I were both doing English majors at Sydney University and were bursting with intellectual hubris. After the play finished, we were discussing it with our father in our usual opinionated fashion and laughing among ourselves. Then someone remarked: ‘Ibsen was too much for poor old Mum. She’s passed out.’

  To this, my mother opened one eye and then the other and glowered at the three of us. She lowered her brows and let forth a tirade. ‘Listen, you pusillanimous blobs! You think you know about Ibsen. I was the one who spent a whole year studying his plays. And as a postgraduate student. Now, let me correct you.’ And with this, we were stunned into submission and politely listened to a small extempore lecture on social realist drama and Ibsen’s part in that movement. Needless to say, we did not forget ‘pusillanimous blobs’.

  My parents usually presented a united front. Nonetheless, I sometimes remember the time my mother turned to me and uttered in a harsh tone, ‘Les is so domineering.’ I was in my mid-twenties and could see she was finding her life much more challenging through the increasing
deterioration of her spine. But her words shocked me, not only because they were uncharacteristic but because of their vehemence. I could sense the frustration that she lived with, the painful transition she was negotiating. At that point my mother walked with a stick and had shrunk to the height of an eight-year-old child. She could no longer stand for any length of time, could not dandle a grandchild on her knee and found the simplest tasks of daily living, like getting dressed, a time-consuming battle. The result was that the equity of my parents’ strong partnership – which she had always insisted on – was out of balance. As my father once confided to me, her agile mind and her intellect were livelier than ever, but her body and its limitations demanded that he now carry more and more of the load. How agonising this realisation must have been for her and how dispiriting. The truth was that her condition meant their relationship had entered a new zone – an alien territory – and both were finding the adjustment harrowing.

  Charmian and George fought out their conflicts through their alter egos – characters in their novels that were recognisably autobiographical, if not always accurately so. It seems from these writings that their marriage, though at times tumultuous and eventually mutually destructive, was central to their lives. They remained almost indivisible unto death, dying within just over a year of each other.

  And Ruth mourned her lost love long and hard, as she describes in the second volume of her autobiography. She called this book Fishing in the Styx, a title indicative of her misery.

  Looking back on their marriage, my father said: ‘We were friends, lovers but friends.’ In his autobiography he wrote: ‘On the writing front, we were of one approach and each other’s best critics and “word-friends”. The two-writers-under-one-roof plan had worked, at least to our satisfaction.’