A Certain Style
Page 7
Georgie had a sharp eye. Her proofreaders not only read for typographical errors in galleys, but they were expected to check dates, facts, style and references. If any A&R book had more than three typographical errors, Georgie would be the first to ask questions. At the same time she was very protective of ‘her girls’; whenever Ion Idriess made flirtatious comments on his proofs, or Frank Clune littered his with ribald jokes, she reminded them severely that her proofreaders were impressionable young women. As diminutive as Rebecca Wiley, she sat in a huge sagging armchair stuffed with cushions that threatened to overwhelm her, smoked incessantly and was famous for having the untidiest desk at Angus and Robertson. Always on the telephone, she rather enjoyed whipping up a crisis that only she could deal with. Despite this apparent sense of urgency, her attitude to deadlines was lackadaisical: manuscripts were read when she thought they should be, and not before. Georgie and her staff worked on the top floor of 89 Castlereagh Street, though they later moved to Arnold Place, off Oxford Street, Darlinghurst.
Not long after Beatrice started at Angus and Robertson, Walter Cousins decided that she should be more than a proofreader and bookshop assistant and that the company needed a staff editor after all. Beatrice therefore became Angus and Robertson’s first full-time book editor and almost certainly the first in Australia. Her pleasure in her new job must have faded the moment she saw her office, a tiny cubby-hole and former storeroom at the top of the stairs to the attic, boiling hot in summer and freezing in winter. It had a small high window looking onto a stairwell and just enough room for Beatrice, a desk and a set of bookshelves. With heat provided by an ancient heater in winter and the only exit to the floors below via a wooden staircase, Beatrice’s office made a mockery of fire regulations – and it never improved in all the years she was there.
The appointment of a woman as the only staff editor, when previously all editing had been done by men, was revolutionary. But, though Cousins, Kirwan and the other men knew that Beatrice was better educated, better read and probably more intelligent than most of them, they did not treat her as a professional equal. Walter Cousins held regular meetings to discuss manuscripts and make publishing recommendations, attended by staff from the bookshop and Halstead Press, as well as one or two of the freelance editors. Beatrice was not invited.
In her early days, just being an editor could be stressful enough. One of the first manuscripts Beatrice had to tackle was an enormous tailoring manual. It was an appalling job. The author, an ancient former tailor in a dusty suit and bowler hat, presented his work as a series of pink pages gummed together; if the manuscript was dropped everything unfolded like a concertina. There were also dozens of unnumbered, hand-drawn diagrams that had to be decoded, arranged in order, captioned and inserted into the text. As she struggled with ways of taking crotch measurements for ladies’ jodhpurs, Beatrice felt like giving up altogether.2
She took a little while to become familiar with Australian authors. One of her first letters, addressed to ‘Mr Miles Franklin’, began ‘Dear Sir’, but from the beginning she enjoyed reading and reporting on unsolicited manuscripts. Her work at the Medical Journal of Australia had developed a talent for precise summary, and she always gave a brief assessment of the writer’s literary skill. From the beginning of her career at Angus and Robertson, she had the almost forensic ability to pinpoint a manuscript’s faults in non-judgemental, logical prose. However, one thing she lacked and never developed was a nose for the popular market, a strong sense of what would sell. Her blind spots included books about sport – in 1930s Australia this invariably meant Test cricket – a subject she found boring. She had not been long at A&R when she wrote a ‘not recommended’ report for a book about Donald Bradman on the grounds that it had little literary merit. Walter Cousins overrode her, naturally, and the book sold thousands of copies.
It must have annoyed the other women in the office to see the flirtatious, elegant and cultured Miss Davis promoted above them all. Partly because of her university degree, but mostly because Beatrice did not gossip with her female colleagues, she was soon branded as stuck-up. Rebecca Wiley in particular thought ‘that woman’ needed taking down a peg or two. On the outer with the women in the office and not accepted as an equal by the men – no wonder Beatrice later said her first few years at Angus and Robertson had been tense and difficult.
Her colleagues knew very little about Beatrice’s private life, and she told them nothing about Frederick Bridges. This was not just because she was a reserved and private person but because she intended to marry him. Beatrice knew the rules: only single women worked, and she had no intention of leaving her new job. At lunchtime on 6 July 1937, when she had been at A&R for only a few months, she slipped out of 89 Castlereagh Street, walked to the Sydney Registry Office, married Frederick Bridges, took off her wedding ring and came back to work. She did not mention her marriage to anyone at A&R for a long time.
Beatrice and Frederick first lived in his rented apartment at Gordon on the north shore. They both enjoyed entertaining, and their double income enabled them to hold large parties. A regular guest was the painter Percy Lindsay, whom Frederick had known for years. Frederick and Beatrice sometimes saw other members of the Lindsay family at Percy’s brother Norman’s house in Springwood in the Blue Mountains. Norman might even have drawn the beautiful Mrs Bridges; a nymph in one of his etchings is reputed to be Beatrice, wearing nothing but an elaborate headdress.3
Not long after they married, Beatrice and Frederick began looking for a house to buy. The north side of the city was rapidly being developed now that the Harbour Bridge had made it accessible, but it was still peaceful and close to harbour and bushland. Professional cellist Tal Craig and his singer/pianist wife Elsie, whom Beatrice had probably met through her musical activities, had bought a steep block of land at Cammeray, overlooking a quiet reach of Middle Harbour. The Craigs were stylish people and they employed an architect to design their dream home: a three-bedroom, two-storey art deco house.
When completed in 1938 and painted white, the house looked as if someone had cut a slice from an ocean liner and set it carefully on a corner of land overlooking a gleaming sheet of water. It was much admired: behind the stairwell was a wall of glass bricks, used for almost the first time in an Australian home. There was space for an outside deck on the first floor, and the living-room floor was specially sprung for parties and dancing. The house even had literary associations, though not very happy ones: out the front was a gum tree from which the bush poet Barcroft Boake had hanged himself with his stockwhip in 1892.
But the Craigs had overcommitted themselves financially and were soon forced to sell. Frederick immediately offered to buy the place, and the owners agreed. Early in 1939 Beatrice and Frederick moved to 102 Cammeray Road, Cammeray, overlooking Folly Point on Middle Harbour, with Beatrice’s piano and two small terriers appropriately named Whisky and Soda. It was a house Beatrice loved from the moment she saw it, and it remained her home for more than fifty years.
Now that Dr and Mrs Bridges were truly At Home, Beatrice was discovering more of Frederick’s quirks. She had always known of his disregard for convention. When she decided to join the extremely genteel Queen’s Club in the city, she had to state on the application form the clubs to which her husband belonged. Frederick, who ridiculed all clubs as snobbish institutions, took the form and wrote ‘Christmas ham club, sixpence a week’. Once, he greeted his party guests in a black cloak that reached from neck to ankle. Not until he turned away to pour the drinks and the cloak swung open did it become obvious that he was naked underneath. Beatrice laughed, but in truth she was ambivalent about this sort of thing. While she always enjoyed people who went their own way regardless of what others thought, and had a large streak of this kind of individualism herself, she also had the Deloitte respect for the rules of ‘correct’ behaviour.
These conflicting feelings came out in her dealings with Frederick’s family. Peter and Robert Bridges had lived with their
mother since they were small and Frederick had made little effort to get to know them. Beatrice did not approve of this dereliction of fatherly duty, and she felt that now Frederick’s sons were young men, the time had come to mend fences. But Frederick wasn’t particularly interested, and Peter was understandably indifferent to a father who had had so little time for him. (Peter’s younger brother Robert occasionally spent time with Beatrice and Frederick.) Beatrice commented to Vincentia Anderson that she thought Frederick had been very hard on his children.
In later years, Beatrice was apt to say that she and Frederick had such fun together that the age difference between them did not matter. She might have believed this, but it must have mattered to Frederick, a not particularly good-looking man with a chronic illness whose new wife was not much older than his sons. He loved Beatrice dearly, was kind and generous to her and very proud of her career ambitions, and they were lovers, friends and companions. But like most older husbands, at least since the time of Chaucer, he probably felt insecure, wondering how he could hope to hold on to such a vibrant, clever and attractive young woman. There was also a deep reserve in Beatrice, a sense that she kept some of her own secrets, that he might easily have found frustrating.
Frederick reacted by becoming very possessive. Beatrice was used to this sort of behaviour in men who were interested in her, particularly older ones – Mervyn Archdall being the prime example – and no doubt accepted this calmly. She must have found equanimity difficult, however, on the day Frederick took the album of postcards her father had sent her during the war and burned them all.4
It was a shocking thing to do. Frederick knew how much Beatrice had loved her father and what those war postcards meant to her. The most charitable explanation is that Frederick’s tuberculosis had made him subject to mood swings and that he became irrational. But burning those postcards does suggest that Frederick considered Charles Herbert Davis to be some kind of rival, that he resented Beatrice’s love for her long-dead father. What he did was at best childishly jealous, at worst vindictive. If she hadn’t known it before, Beatrice was learning that a much older man is not necessarily an emotionally mature one.
Fighting Words
All through the 1930s the events in Europe – the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, the Spanish Civil War, Hitler’s conquests – had formed a kind of background noise in Australian life, like the constant unsettling murmur of a radio in the next room. When, on the evening of Sunday 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced that Australia was at war with Germany, the nation waited to see what would happen next. Like most Australian companies, Angus and Robertson adopted a policy of business as usual. At the end of the 1930s, the book trade was going through a sluggish phase; at Halstead Press there was so little work that over several months in 1938 the proofreader Enid Moon – a very tall woman – had time to knit herself a calf-length woollen dress during working hours.
It seems bizarre to say that the Nazi onslaught on Europe was of great benefit to Angus and Robertson and indirectly to Australian literature. But so it was. U-boat attacks on British shipping soon made the export of British goods, including books, a perilous business. For the first time British publishers allowed their Australian counterparts to print under licence their own editions of English and American books. This was a reversal of current policy: some years before, British publishers, who dominated the Australian market, had formed a cartel to prevent Australian-owned publishing companies from acquiring separate rights in British-originated books. They also agreed not to buy the rights to a US-originated title unless those rights encompassed all the territories of the British Empire, including Australia. This cosy arrangement also meant, ironically, that Australian writers published overseas received inadequate ‘export’ royalties in their own country. Not only were Australian readers unable to read an American book except in a British edition (unless they imported it directly from the US), but Australian publishers could not produce their own editions of the money-spinning international bestsellers on which US and UK publishers had always depended for a large part of their revenue. Now the fortunes of war had seen this Traditional Market Agreement temporarily overturned, which meant increased profits for Angus and Robertson.1
So, too, did the federal government’s early decision to plan and develop their own publishing program of books and pamphlets for civilians as well as soldiers. Not having the capacity to print these in the quantities required, they called on A&R and Halstead Press. For the duration of the war, Angus and Robertson became Australia’s de facto Ministry of Information. Always anxious about the company’s profitability, Walter Cousins must have been delighted.
Beatrice, however, was able to contain her joy. She now had to edit and check a stream of books, booklets and pamphlets in leaden prose with such titles as A Manual of Elementary Drill, Food Shipment from Australia in War Time and Diesel Engine Practice. She complained to an A&R author, ‘I must sweat over execrably written technical works on such subjects as poultry breeding or the wool industry or diseases of the ear, which is apt to make me very cantankerous.’2
With the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and the fall of Singapore the following February, invasion seemed imminent. By May the enemy were moving towards Port Moresby on Australia’s doorstep. Only after the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 were the Japanese forced to retreat. The attack on Sydney Harbour by three Japanese midget submarines at the end of the month was a jolting reminder of what might have been.
Sydney, like other Australian cities, had undergone dramatic changes in the face of war. Never a quiet city, it was now noisier than ever. Beatrice endured the teeth-gritting shriek of the one-o’clock practice air-raid siren, set against the rattle of the trams. The entrances to city buildings were piled high with sand-filled hessian bags in case of bomb blasts; the windows of department stores were either missing or crisscrossed with strips of sticky tan paper to prevent glass shattering. If Beatrice decided to remain at work after hours she emerged from number 89 into a gloomy Castlereagh Street, its streetlights dimmed because of blackout regulations. Her slow bus trip across the Harbour Bridge was followed by a fifteen-minute walk home in the dark.
Angus and Robertson followed the rules laid down by the civil defence authorities. Slit trenches were dug in the grassy strip outside the Halstead Press offices in Nickson Street, Surry Hills, as staff air-raid shelters. But they were too small to take the staff of the printery and it was suggested that a new, bigger shelter be made from the huge rolls of paper in the storeroom: evidently nobody had thought that paper might actually go up in flames. The same combination of bureaucratic solicitude and lack of commonsense was evident at 89 Castlereagh Street, where the official air-raid shelter was the basement. The fact that a bookshop was a prime fire hazard was not considered. And how was Beatrice expected to clamber down three steep flights of wooden stairs without being burned to death?
The often ramshackle preparations for war were marginally less exasperating to Sydneysiders than the government’s controls. The amount of regulation because ‘there’s a war on’ confirms the view that during World War II one of the great Australian growth industries was bureaucracy. From about February 1942, in the months when Japanese invasion seemed most probable, the federal government introduced its National Economic Plan. This had far-reaching implications for almost every sphere of daily life, from the rationing of clothes and food to the purchase of capital equipment for business.
It must have seemed to Beatrice and her colleagues that the government was trying to make their jobs as difficult as possible. What was the point of publishing more government pamphlets than Beatrice could handle if the government refused permission to buy more printing machines? There were also massive and continuing problems with paper supplies. As early as June 1940 Walter Cousins wrote to a hopeful author that A&R had too little paper available to indulge in speculative publishing – one of the most convincing reasons ever give
n by a publisher for rejecting a manuscript. Imported paper was naturally impossible to get; even the poor-quality, yellow-grey paper made in Burnie, Tasmania, was in short supply. It was also expensive, as was bookbinding cloth: according to Walter Cousins, between 1939 and 1947 paper costs increased by 350 per cent and cloth by 300 per cent.3
Another constant irritant was ‘the Manpower’, short for the Federal Directorate of Manpower. This was set up to administer a national register of the working-age population and to provide quotas for jobs, as well as to decide how and where workers could be employed in war-related industries. Even assuming Halstead Press could find and buy the necessary printing and binding machinery at the right price, and assuming they had the paper required, Manpower might not allow them the staff to use any of it.
Despite these problems, A&R was flourishing. By the end of the war, Walter Cousins could boast that ‘Nearly every worthwhile book that is published these days goes out of print within a week or two of its publication.’4 Australian books of general interest – not government-related material or textbooks – occasionally sold out runs of 10 000 copies within three months.
The Commonwealth Literary Fund was also doing its bit for the war effort and for local writers. Set up in 1908 to support creative literature in Australia, this federal government agency had in its early years been almost philanthropic, awarding pensions to distinguished authors and giving occasional financial support to authors and their families. In 1936 Labor leader James Scullin urged Joseph Lyons’s conservative government to do more to promote Australian literature among a wider public. This was slow to develop, but four years later – when Australia was at war – the CLF agreed to give fellowships and other direct grants to writers and to subsidise lectures on Australian literature at universities and regional centres.