Their Brilliant Careers

by Ryan O'Neill

  The Mystery of Claudia Gunn: An Unauthorised Investigation won the inaugural Pennington Prize for Nonfiction in 1978. The Society of Australian Crime and Mystery Writers voted to strip Gunn of the Gold Bludgeon a year later. Ambitious plans by the ABC to film the Makittuq Arnaaluk novels were shelved, and by 1980 all of Gunn’s fifty-nine novels had fallen out of print. Within only a few years of her death, Gunn had disappeared from memory as completely as George Smythe, the doomed vicar in her Albino in a Snowstorm (1957). The sole critical appraisal of her work remains the devastating study Who Cares Who Killed Vincent Prowse? (1984), published by New Dimensions, which won the Society of Australian Crime and Mystery Writers Silver Hatchet Award in 1985. The book, written by Will Deverall, was the first to be published under his real name, which he had not used since he was four: William De Vere.

  Francis X. McVeigh at the offices of the Australian Worker, July 1937

  (1900–1948?)

  We must take the billy off the boil. We must put a bullet through the head of “The Loaded Dog”. The Snowy River must be dammed, and the Overflow liquidated.

  From McVeigh’s 1931 speech to the Conference of Australian Communist Writers

  FRANCIS XAVIER MCVEIGH, COMMUNIST PARTY MEMBER, pamphleteer and writer of socialist realism, was born on 31 December 1900 at his parents’ farm on the outskirts of Toowoomba, Queensland. He was a month premature and was not expected to survive more than a day or two, but Francis continued to live, though not to thrive. He was later to write that he had come early so as not to be born an Australian, as the country became a commonwealth the day after his birth. Francis was the fourth child, and only son, of Ambrose and Catherine McVeigh, who had emigrated from Scotland in 1895. Ambrose had been a schoolteacher in Hawick; having lost his job because of his radical politics, he had come to Australia in the hope it would prove a more egalitarian society than Great Britain. Catherine was an illiterate farmer’s daughter from Aberdeen whom Ambrose married after she fell pregnant. For all his socialist principles, Ambrose felt his wife to be beneath him, and theirs was not a happy union.

  Francis was a sickly child, and therefore exempt from the strenuous work of running a farm. He was bedridden for months at a time and spent his days reading and rereading the books his father owned: the novels of Émile Zola, the collected works of John Stuart Mill, and The Communist Manifesto (1848). In a speech to the Union of Australian Printers in 1935, McVeigh claimed that he had memorised Marx and Engels’s pamphlet by the time he was six. But in a letter to Katharine Susannah Prichard in 1932 he confessed:

  Would you believe I never read the manifesto till I was fifteen? The first time I tried, I was five, and the opening line, “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”, terrified me so much I had nightmares for the next six months. Every night I would wake up sobbing, “It’s coming to get me! The commonism [sic] is coming!”

  The McVeigh property was not a success. Though Ambrose worked hard, he had little knowledge of agriculture beyond that drawn from some old textbooks on animal husbandry he had bought in Toowoomba, and he refused to listen to his wife, who had grown up on a farm. Catherine worshipped her young son; he resembled her in his red hair and quiet ways. The friendless woman could not help confiding in him how miserable she was, and how Ambrose McVeigh mistreated her, confidences Francis secretly reported to his father. By the outbreak of the Great War the family had lost their property and had moved to Spring Hill, a suburb of Brisbane. Ambrose was unable to find employment and they were reduced to living off the charity of the Catholic Church. Ambrose’s radical beliefs did not extend to religion, and in November 1914, encouraged by the parish priest, he enlisted in the army, telling his son that he could not allow his family to starve. The money Ambrose McVeigh sent home after enlisting was sufficient, barely, for his wife and children to keep body and soul together. Francis’s mother and three sisters found employment in factories, and Francis became a telegram boy. His health flourished with the exercise and fresh air, although in the first months of the job he was haunted by the faces of the women to whom he delivered pink telegrams, signalling the death of a loved one. After a year he was hardened enough that he lingered on the doorsteps of the devastated families, waiting patiently for his tip.

  On 21 May 1917, the last of the telegrams Francis had to carry was addressed to his mother. Ambrose had been killed in France. Instead of delivering the telegram, Francis McVeigh rode his bicycle to the local Catholic church and smashed the stained-glass windows. He was arrested and imprisoned for two weeks; his first act upon release was to join the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical union calling for an end to the war. He took part in many anti-war demonstrations organised by the IWW, or the “Wobblies” as they were known. The earliest known photograph of McVeigh is of a protest that appeared on the front page of the Brisbane Echo of 14 August 1917. The young McVeigh can just be made out on the far left of the crowd, holding up a sign on which is printed, “War Profiteers Killed My Da”. McVeigh held to this belief throughout his life, even on learning after the war from a soldier in his father’s brigade that Ambrose McVeigh had died from syphilis contracted from a prostitute in Cairo, for which he had been too ashamed to seek treatment.

  In late 1917 McVeigh volunteered to deliver the IWW’s newspaper, the Clarion, which he would study from front to back each night before he went to sleep. He soon began to submit articles and, after a few false starts, his first published work appeared on 14 December 1917. The article was a celebration of the recent October Revolution in Russia, concluding with an open invitation to “Comrade Trotsky, hero of the proletariat” to visit Australia. Over the next three years McVeigh wrote hundreds of thousands of words for the Clarion, calling for higher wages, better conditions for workers and a general strike. When he submitted a column advocating armed insurrection against the New South Wales government, his editor refused to print it, fearing reprisals from the authorities. Disgusted, McVeigh resigned from the IWW in 1920 and later that year became one of the founding members of the Australian Communist Party. In his role as the party’s director of literature, McVeigh grew ashamed of his mother and sisters, whom he thought of privately as “peasants”. After sending them a one-off sum of ten pounds, he disowned them.

  During the next two decades, McVeigh was instrumental in bringing dozens of Australian writers into the communist fold, including John Morrison, Judah Waten, Frank Hardy and Sydney Steele. Such was his influence that some writers would only publish their work after McVeigh, and by extension the party, had approved it. McVeigh’s condemnation of Sydney Steele’s unfinished novel English Eucalyptus as “bourgeois filth” in 1924 prompted Steele to destroy the only known manuscript of a book that his friend James Joyce had considered – even in its incomplete state – a masterpiece. As well as encouraging others to toe the party line, McVeigh himself wrote over two hundred and fifty pamphlets criticising various aspects of Australian literature, cultivating a reputation as a controversialist. Among his most incendiary works were “The Kulak’s Wife: On the Class Traitor Henry Lawson”, “The Forgetting of Wisdom: The Bourgeois Australian Education System” and the utopian “Pa and Pete on Our Collective Farm” (all published in 1926). McVeigh’s position was secured in a purge of the party by the Communist International (Comintern) in 1927. The purge had been initiated a year earlier, when McVeigh sent the detailed files he had compiled on his comrades to Moscow. He further consolidated his importance to the party with the publication of a short-story collection, The Red Flag (1928), which envisages an Australia that has been collectivised and industrialised along the Soviet model. The stories feature plain-speaking, proletarian heroes who spend pages discussing Marxist dialectics, even when in the throes of passion:

  “Make love to me,” the propertied woman begged Jones.

  “Give me your child!”

  The mechanic sneered at her. “Pah! You and your husband are capitalists. You produce nothing. You live on the sweat of others. Even y
our name is decadent: Vivian!”

  “Yes, I am bourgeois, I am decadent. Overthrow me!”

  He kissed her violently, and shoved her onto his cot.

  “You are ignorant!” he said.

  “Then teach me.”

  “As Marx said, relations of personal dependence are the first social forms in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage.”

  “I’m yours!” she cried, drawing him down to her.

  The success of the collection, which spawned a host of similar works by left-wing Australian writers, was assured by a sycophantic review in Pravda. Conservative critics in McVeigh’s own country predictably dismissed The Red Flag as an almost unreadable instance of the Soviet “Boy Meets Tractor, Tractor Breaks Down, Boy Repairs Tractor” school of fiction.

  In 1929 the Russian translation of The Red Flag came to the attention of Maxim Gorky, who had been personally tasked by Stalin to promote the budding literary form of socialist realism. Gorky recognised in McVeigh’s work a shining example of this new form, and invited the writer to visit Moscow. McVeigh left Australia for Russia in April 1930 and spent the rest of the year there. During his visit he met notable Soviet writers including Mikhail Sholokhov, Fyodor Gladkov and Andrei Platonov, few of whom would survive the terror of the next few years. McVeigh was also present at Gorky’s house, along with forty other writers from Russia, Germany, Great Britain and France, in September 1930 when Stalin paid a visit. The general secretary of the Communist Party told the assembled authors they were “engineers of the soul” and instructed them to write only stories that would encourage world revolution. Each of the Russian writers in turn toasted Stalin, as did McVeigh, though he did not speak the language, and his translator had a great deal of trouble understanding his Australian accent. A photograph taken at the party, which shows McVeigh raising his glass to a mystified Stalin as Gorky looks on with a nervous smile, was published in the 1930 Soviet Literature Yearbook and later reprinted on the front page of the Australian Worker on McVeigh’s return from Moscow in 1931.

  During his stay in Russia McVeigh was shown the wonders of communism, including a tour of the White Sea–Baltic canal, then under construction, which depended on the forced labour of nearly 100,000 “enemies of the people”. The experience made a strong impression on the Australian. On returning to Moscow he wrote a detailed memorandum for his hosts suggesting numerous ways the efficiency of the prisoners might be increased. McVeigh included the formal letter of thanks from the Committee for Patriotic Works in his account of the trip, Home Is the Worker (1933), which categorically refuted the reports of horrific cruelty and death in the USSR. His long essay in praise of the project, “О реабилитации контрреволюционеров Благодаря упорной работе” (“On the Rehabilitation of Counter-revolutionaries Through Hard Yakka”), appeared in Stalin’s White Sea–Baltic Canal (1934), alongside work by Gorky, Aleksey Tolstoy and others.

  Upon arriving back in Sydney in June 1931, McVeigh called a general meeting of the Australian Communist Writers, a sub-branch of the party. His five-hour harangue on the urgent necessity of bringing socialist realism to Australia was reprinted in full in the Australian Worker but condemned in other national newspapers. McVeigh’s opening words deriding Australia’s literary tradition resulted in Iain Harkaway, the federal member of parliament for Lyne, New South Wales, calling for him to be charged with treason. Taking advantage of the controversy, the Comintern made unlimited funds available to McVeigh to advance the cause of communist literature in Australia. With this money, McVeigh established Steelman Press in July 1933, leasing a large office in Kings Cross and hiring dozens of staff, including several pretty young secretaries.

  McVeigh had been galvanised by the successful implementation of five-year plans in the Soviet economy, and saw no reason why such a plan could not be used for literature. He set a target of ten million words to be published by the press in five years; the target was exceeded by over ninety per cent. Steelman Press brought out hundreds of socialist-realist novels, as well as providing sizeable grants to communist writers including Eleanor Dark and Katharine Susannah Prichard. Although they were always well reviewed by McVeigh in his regular column in the Australian Worker, the novels were boycotted by most other reviewers and literary critics, and all were published at a loss. Rumours circulated that a considerable slice of the Comintern funding was being used by McVeigh to buy the silence of his secretaries, whom he was in the habit of seducing and then sacking.

  In the years before the outbreak of the Second World War, McVeigh’s rhetoric was primarily directed towards attacking Adolf Hitler and defending the Moscow Trials of 1936 to 1938. In his columns he also condemned Rand Washington’s short stories and novels as exemplifying the Nazification of Australian literature. McVeigh continued to denounce Washington and “his bestial overlord, Hitler” in speeches at Communist Party rallies throughout 1937 and 1938 and in a book of anti-Nazi essays, The Black and the Red, in which he argued that the most implacable enemy of fascism was not capitalism, but communism. The Black and the Red went to press on 22 August 1939, the day before the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which guaranteed non-aggression between Germany and the USSR. When McVeigh heard the news he commandeered a car and raced round Sydney buying every copy of The Black and the Red he could lay his hands on. By late afternoon he had accounted for the last copy of the book, which he added to the others and burned along with the printing plates. His article for the Australian Worker the next day included a denunciation of the actions of Great Britain and France, which had drawn Australia into an imperialist war, and a review of Rand Washington’s new novel, Jackboots on Cor, which McVeigh called “a magnum opus of science fiction.” Steelman Press, with Siegfried Press, later jointly published a novel by Washington, Whiteman of Mars (1940), in which Buck Whiteman and the Shevikibol, the intrepid ant-like inhabitants of the red planet, agree to respect each other’s cosmic borders after almost being tricked into war by the dastardly Argobolin.

  In the early months of the Second World War, McVeigh returned to pamphleteering, writing a number of inflammatory works encouraging the members of trade unions such as the Miners’ Federation and the Organisation of Waterfront Workers to go on strike. After the invasion of Russia by Germany on 22 June 1941 McVeigh’s newspaper column advocated the arrest and execution of these same union members as “fascist stooges” who had deliberately sabotaged the war effort against the Nazis. In January 1944 the Comintern, dissatisfied with Steelman Press and perturbed by gossip about McVeigh’s sexual improprieties, withdrew funding and the company was allowed to fold. A brief, blunt article in Pravda hinted darkly that sabotage was to blame. McVeigh was quick to respond, denouncing the wreckers by name. Sydney Steele and Irene Young, the daughter of the poet Matilda Young, were among the dozen party members employed by the press who were expelled for counter-revolutionary activities, which included a conspiracy to destroy McVeigh himself by spreading base, unfounded rumours about his private life.

  Throughout the remainder of the war years, McVeigh sought to repair the damage the failure of Steelman Press had caused to his standing in the party by using his column in the Australian Worker to extol the gallant victories of the Russian armed forces and the almost supernatural genius of Stalin’s military leadership. In 1945 McVeigh saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself further with the Comintern when Berkeley & Hunt announced their plans to publish George Orwell’s anti-communist fable Animal Farm in November of that year. Using his influence with the Union of Printers, McVeigh threatened the publisher
s with a strike if they went ahead. Thanks to McVeigh’s efforts, Berkeley & Hunt capitulated and Animal Farm did not appear in Australia until August 1946, when national feeling had begun to turn against the Communist Party. McVeigh reviewed the book in his column, calling it “a monstrous slander on the greatest of all nations, and the greatest of all men”. McVeigh’s only novel, Return to Animal Farm, appeared in print a week after Orwell’s book, suggesting McVeigh had written it much earlier. Despite its title, Return to Animal Farm is not a sequel but a retelling of the events of Orwell’s fable from the point of view of Squealer the pig, and follows the courageous Comrade Napoleon as he creates a socialist utopia after the Manor Farm uprising, which then spreads to all the other farms in the country. Although McVeigh reported that the print run of ten thousand copies sold out in two days, in all likelihood Return to Animal Farm sold only a fraction of that number. Its one lasting consequence was that the conservative press seized on the nickname “Squealer” for McVeigh.