A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  The first two novels in the series, Up the Country (1928) and Ten Creeks Run (1930), had been published in the UK by Blackwood and edited by Miles’s friend Mary Fullerton. In 1950 Beatrice decided to start the A&R series with Prelude to Waking, the first manuscript written under the Brent pseudonym, originally submitted to Blackwood – and rejected – under the title of Merlin of the Empiah. Beatrice thought there was a very good reason why the novel had never seen the light of day, but she kept her misgivings to herself, even managing to write to Miles about it with some enthusiasm.20 Angus and Robertson published Up the Country and Ten Creeks Run, the best two in the series, in 1951, followed by Cockatoos (formerly rejected as The Outside Track ) in 1954, with Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang (originally and puzzlingly entitled Piccadilly’s Pants on the Hoof), and Back to Bool Bool in 1956.

  In all her dealings with Miles about these books, Beatrice followed the convention that Miles Franklin and Brent of Bin Bin were two different people. She sent letters addressed to Brent of Bin Bin (and deciding how to address him must have caused a few unsettled moments: Brent? Mr Bin Bin? Lord Bin? Beatrice sensibly settled for ‘Dear Sir’), c/– Miss Miles Franklin, 26 Grey Street, Carlton, and she wrote to Miles’s other friends about Brent with a straight face: ‘Brent, by the way … says he will reveal his identity when all six of the books are published but will burn the unpublished volumes, if he is revealed before then. So we are not trying to fathom the mystery, though we are madly curious – and wonder what part Miles might have played. She is inscrutable.’21 Years later she wrote that she never had the nerve to tell Miles she thought her guilty of pointless deception. ‘She could have had reasons that were important to her, and I loved her too much to upset her.’22

  It is interesting that Angus and Robertson so readily published the Brent of Bin Bin books when their general editor thought them undistinguished at best. After Miles’s death, Beatrice allowed herself to be much tougher and franker than she had been while the author was alive: ‘With her intelligence, I find it almost incredible that in all those years, with all those rejections, Miles learned almost nothing about literary style. She was an innocent who believed that vitality and love of Australia were enough.’23 Perhaps Beatrice convinced her male colleagues that Miles’s books, however ordinary, should be brought back into print as a contribution to Australian literary history. It is just as likely that she was fond enough of Miles to want to make her happy, to assure her friend that her work had not been forgotten.

  Beatrice recognised that the casual, ‘spoken’ quality of Miles’s style translated much better to the lecture hall than to the page. In 1950 Miles gave a series of CLF-sponsored lectures in Perth about Australian literature. Beatrice had offered to read her notes with a view to publication, and she was relieved to find that they were good. Angus and Robertson published the material as a series of essays entitled Laughter, Not for a Cage in 1956.

  Beatrice continued to keep an anxious and loving eye on Miles, as did Miles’s other woman friends. She worried when Miles developed an ulcerated throat in Perth, continued to give her books, sent her a new typewriter when Miles’s was being mended. Miles had asked Beatrice to be her literary executor, assuring her that very little needed to be done, but never during her lifetime did Miles Franklin drop so much as a hint about the bountiful gift she was preparing for Australian writers.

  In the early 1950s, though she was well into her seventies and battling depression and cardiac problems, Miles was still spirited, not to say acerbic, defensively quick to stamp on any remark she considered patronising, especially if uttered by a man. She wrote to Dymphna Cusack that at an English Association dinner she had sat next to ‘a Prince Alfred gun-doctor. He said, “You are a graduate of this university?” I said I was illiterate. He recovered from that sufficiently to remark that one doesn’t have to go to a university to learn to write. I said no, my mother taught me my alphabet. That really sunk him …’25

  Despite such flashes of self-assertion or crankiness, Miles often seemed depressed. Beatrice worried that she spent so much time alone, but she recognised Miles’s impregnable independence and knew there was little she could do. As Miles’s health declined, Beatrice grew more and more concerned. The final corrections to Laughter, Not for a Cage were due early in 1954, and Miles was unable to decide what to change and what to leave alone. Realising how ill she was, Beatrice decided to trouble her no further, giving the manuscript to young Nancy Keesing for final checking. In June Miles had a heart attack and was taken to the home of her cousin Mrs Perryman in Cheltenham, a northern suburb of Sydney, to convalesce. Hating her inability to look after herself, Miles fretted about her book, alternately demanding to know why it could not be published immediately and saying she wanted it destroyed.

  In August 1954 she wrote to Beatrice saying she was short of breath with a savage pain under her left collarbone. ‘I don’t seem to have enough zip to pull out of this illness if the fact will be that I’m an invalid,’ she wrote in jagged, tiny handwriting. ‘I have struggled so long already. Still not able to read paper or to talk … memory gone and I blame phenobarb.’ Beatrice wrote to Miles’s former doctor, Douglas Anderson, the husband of her dear friend Vincentia, describing Miles’s symptoms in detail and asking whether her heart disease was getting worse. Dr Anderson recommended that she move around as much as she could, and Miles recovered enough to get out of bed.

  In early September she had to go into hospital to have fluid on her lung removed. The operation went well and she was about to come home again when she had another heart attack. Miles Franklin died on 19 September 1954 at the age of seventy-five. She had asked for a simple funeral, with no death notice in the Sydney Morning Herald and no flowers. In her will she said she wanted her ashes scattered ‘on Jounama Creek just opposite the Old Talbingo Homestead where there used to be a crossing’. After all her years away, Miles wanted to return to her birthplace.

  ‘I feel completely bereft when I realise, which is difficult, that she is no longer with us,’ wrote Beatrice to the poet Rex Ingamells, who had inquired on behalf of Georgian House whether A&R still intended to publish Laughter, Not for a Cage.26 ‘She was trying to go through the ms I had edited, but was not able to complete the job.’ The final work on Laughter must have been sad and difficult for Beatrice, with Miles’s wit and aggressive Australianism permeating every line. When the book appeared in June 1956 Katharine Susannah Prichard wrote to Beatrice to congratulate her:

  As a last word from Miles I felt so moved as I read. Although I read the lectures in manuscript, they seem better and have benefited from careful editing. But the best of Miles is in them – her unique and enigmatic personality. Miles, who seemingly was such a simple lovable person and yet more than that. Someone we never knew … [W]ith all her quirks and witty intransigence, she was incomparable …27

  Henrietta Drake-Brockman commented perceptively, ‘Dear Miles, what a wit she was, and far from confident, too, in those later days. After all, it was a shield.’28

  The newspaper tributes and obituaries were respectful – many mentioned the ‘unsolved mystery’ of Brent of Bin Bin’s identity. (Sometimes it seems that nobody fell for Brent of Bin Bin except journalists.) On receiving a copy of Cockatoos in October 1954 Dymphna Cusack wrote to Beatrice, ‘It is unbearably poignant to open Cockatoos and feel again that pulsing vitality, that sparkling commentary on life.’29

  In 1963 Angus and Robertson published Miles’s last book, Childhood at Brindabella. An account of her first ten years on her parents’ station, it was written in 1952–53, but Miles had been too tired and ill to revise it. She wrote it at the urging of a friend, the children’s writer Pixie O’Harris, who wanted her to publish a children’s story based on her own early life. At first Miles refused – she loathed stories for children, she said – but the idea of a memoir stuck. Perhaps because it is an autobiography, a deliberate looking back, an attempt to recapture in memory the part of the world that Miles Franklin drew most from
, Childhood at Brindabella lacks the jauntiness of her other work. But even in a memoir she couldn’t be straightforward, changing all the place names and identifying most of the people by their initials. Miles Franklin’s need for secrecy pervades even something as charming and unpretentious as Childhood at Brindabella.

  A few months after Miles’s death the Permanent Trustee Company, which administered her estate, wrote to Beatrice that Miles had bequeathed her ‘a silver brooch of a fish on a South Sea paddle and a silver necklet in the shape of grape leaves’. Beatrice knew that Miles’s important papers had been left to the Mitchell Library and that her accountant and Colin Roderick from A&R had been appointed to burn those marked to be destroyed.30 Friends and family received small bequests; portraits and manuscripts were to go the Mitchell Library. Miles also decreed that My Brilliant Career was not to be reprinted until ten years after her death. But when her will was made public in January 1955, its major clause caused astonishment in Australian literary circles. Miles Franklin, who, as everybody knew, had led a quiet and frugal life for years, had left almost £8000 for the benefit of Australian writers. Her will stipulated that the Franklin Awards – so named for her family, not for herself – were to be given annually to ‘Authors for the advancement improvement and betterment of Australian literature to improve the educational style of such authors to help and give incentive to authors and to provide them with additional monetary amounts and thus enable them to improve their literary efforts’. The will did not specify how many awards there should be, but Miles Franklin seems to have been thinking of only one major prize. This was to be ‘awarded for the Novel for the year which is of the highest literary merit and which must present Australian life in any of its phases’. If no novel was deemed worthy of the prize, it should go to a play for stage, radio or television or ‘such medium as may develop’, though not for farce or musical comedy. The judges of the award, to be chosen by the Permanent Trustee Company, were to be any three among a group comprising Beatrice, the librarian of the Mitchell Library, the poet Ian Mudie (one of Miles’s ‘congenials’), Colin Roderick, and Miles’s accountant George Williams. The trustees could appoint replacement judges and any others they might think fit, and they also had the power to suspend the award of the prize for as long as they wished.

  The prize, first given in 1957 and always known as the Miles Franklin Award, was almost unique at the time because it was funded from the income of a person of modest means, not an endowment made by a corporation or a wealthy individual. The money came from the sale of the Carlton house and the shops Miles had owned, and her royalties, which had been invested by the Permanent Trustee Company. The prize money in the first year of the award was £500, equivalent to more than $10 000 today, and the capital was greatly increased two decades later with the sale of the film rights to My Brilliant Career.

  Beatrice was not alone in being appalled at the deprivations Miles must have endured for the sake of the award (her diary entries describe her eating crusts of bread for dinner). She realised, too, that Miles had insisted on the publication of some of her own books partly to increase the amount of money available for writers of greater talent. It was Miles Franklin’s last and best-kept secret, and her friends deduced that she must have gained a great deal of satisfaction from it. Beatrice, who described herself as ‘bereft’ after Miles’s death, always recognised her friend’s special qualities. As she wrote to Rex Ingamells, ‘There was no one like her, nor is there very likely to be again.’31

  Sydney or the Bush: Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland

  Sometime in 1943 a young woman made her way through A&R’s bookshop and up the steep stairs to the editorial department. Though Ruth Park had been a regular visitor to the bookshop at 89 Castlereagh Street since her arrival in Sydney from New Zealand some months before, this was the first time she had ventured further than the ground floor. Angus and Robertson were considering a collection of her stories for children, and Beatrice had written suggesting they meet to discuss them. Park longed to have a book of her own published under the Angus and Robertson imprint and this was an important meeting. Beatrice she knew by reputation as a witty, stylish and elegant woman – intimidating qualities for a nervous young author. As a freelance writer and journalist Ruth Park had visited newspaper editors such as Eric Baume and Kenneth Slessor, and she assumed that Beatrice also worked in an office reflecting her status: a spacious, well-appointed room gleaming with polished wood, guarded by a dragon-like secretary.1

  What she saw at the top of the final flight of stairs was an unventilated room with a woman sitting behind a desk that almost filled the entire space. When Beatrice stood up to greet her, Ruth Park noticed how small and pretty she was, with blue eyes, delicate regular features, and dark brown hair pulled back into a graceful knot. Beatrice had started to go grey in her mid-twenties – now, in her thirties, she had bleached a lock of hair above her right eyebrow, a style she maintained for many years. For an established editor greeting a new and unknown author she was surprisingly jittery, lighting a cigarette almost immediately and smoking rapidly throughout the conversation, which did little to put Park at her ease.2

  For her part, Beatrice saw a tall and slender, neatly dressed young woman with long, red-blonde hair. She knew Ruth Park’s work less well than that of her husband D’Arcy Niland, whose story ‘The Surrealist’ Frank Dalby Davison was about to include in that year’s Coast to Coast. Park, too, had published short stories, and she and Niland also wrote magazine articles and radio plays. They were barely managing to survive by their writing and they had to be versatile. Beatrice, who viewed literature as a higher calling and understood little about the limitations and imperatives of the marketplace, would not have grasped their willingness to write anything and everything. Nor did she have any idea of their domestic circumstances. The wartime housing shortage had forced them to live with their baby daughter in the ramshackle, rat-infested inner-city slum of Surry Hills, a part of the city that for Beatrice, as for most other middle-class Sydney residents, might have been on another planet.

  Beatrice and Ruth Park warmed to each other, however, and the young author came away feeling hopeful about her book. She liked Beatrice very much and wanted to know her better. Beatrice liked Park, too, and was disappointed when wartime paper shortages prevented the publication of the children’s stories. She had little more contact with Ruth Park until she opened the Sydney Morning Herald on the morning of 28 December 1946 and saw the front-page headline ‘Woman wins £2000 novel prize’.

  The Herald had run their first competition for an unpublished novel, war novel, short story and poem, with cash prizes and, for the first three prizewinners in the novel section, the guarantee of publication by Angus and Robertson. Now the judges – Dr A.G. Mitchell, senior lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, critic and academic Tom Inglis Moore, and Leon Gellert, literary editor of the Herald – had declared the best novel to be Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South.

  This novel about the Irish-Australian Darcy family in Surry Hills – the title refers to the symbol of Ireland transferred to the Southern Hemisphere – was praised by the judges for its setting and its ‘uncompromising realism’; it was rare, they said, to find a novel with an urban setting. (Other commended novels were set in small country towns, bush settlements or the outback. Even when Australia had been urbanised for at least two generations, the bush was still widely considered the most appropriate subject for fiction.) They made similar comments about the second prizewinner, Jon Cleary’s You Can’t See Round Corners, the story of a rake’s progress in another Sydney slum area, Paddington.3

  The Herald delivered a warning about Harp in the form of a synopsis: young Roie Darcy becomes pregnant to a Jewish boy, loses the baby after being kicked by Dutch sailors, and eventually falls in love and marries Charlie Rothe (described by the Herald as ‘part-Aboriginal, but his heart and his soul were completely white’). This was followed by the unsettling statement that the novel was ‘not
for the squeamish’, with the rider that it was nevertheless ‘a moral book’. ‘If the book is superrealistic it is never deliberately bawdy,’ concluded the Herald. ‘Its quickened sympathy with the lower strata of the proletariat should have a softening effect on the hard rind of social unconcern within Australia.’ All this added up to one thing: the Herald suspected there would be Trouble.

  How right they were. No sooner had Harp begun serialisation in twelve close-packed daily Herald instalments than readers rushed for pen and paper. Most praised Harp’s freshness, vividness and true-to-life characters; if the novel made Sydneysiders aware of the dreadful living conditions endured by some of their fellow citizens, said some, it had earned its place in Australian literature. But others loathed it and accused Ruth Park of bringing disgrace to Sydney and of writing ‘filth’. After several days of letters heaping praise or abuse on the novel Warwick Fairfax, managing director of the Herald, took the unprecedented step of writing an article to explain the paper’s reasons for publishing it. The novel’s outspokenness, he said, would be unremarkable in a book from overseas.4 As Beatrice wrote to Ruth Park a few years later, ‘It is odd that we remain wowserish about our own local writing yet accept strong meat from England and America.’5 Many readers of the stately, sedate Herald obviously found it much less challenging to read about harsh reality taking place a long way from home.