Their Brilliant Careers

by Ryan O'Neill

  Deverall spent weeks searching the Archives nationales in Paris, Fontainebleau and Aix-en-Provence, but found no mention of the Wernier family. Disheartened, Deverall and the author were preparing to return to Australia when she glanced at her copy of the Werniers’ marriage certificate. The “W” was florid, and smudged; it might perhaps be a “V”. Deverall paid a final visit to the archives. Within a few hours she had uncovered vital new information: Victor Vernier had returned with “une femme australienne” to the family estate in Vimy (Pas-de-Calais) in February 1836, where Wilhelmina gave birth to a son, Hugo, born 3 September that same year. Unfortunately the records were incomplete, the town hall having been destroyed during the Great War. Deverall could find no more details about the Verniers, but it was enough to encourage her to stay in France and continue her research, while the author returned home to Sydney.

  In January 2005 Deverall mentioned Hugo Vernier during a conversation with an acquaintance who lectured in French literature at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. The name struck the lecturer, who recalled that a writer called Hugo Vernier had been the hobbyhorse of one of his professors when he was himself a student in the late 1960s in Beauvais. The professor, Vincent Degraël, told his story to his students again and again: in the last week of August 1939 he had been on holiday at a friend’s villa in Le Havre, where he had by chance come across a book called Le Voyage d’hiver (The Winter Journey). It was a slender volume, the first part describing the narrative of a young man’s surreal journey to an island on a lake, and the second, longer section made up of a mixture of poetry, maxims and paradoxes, a form familiar to Degraël from the works of Léon Bloy, Tristan Corbière, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Verlaine and other canonical nineteenth-century French writers. Degraël had assumed the author of Le Voyage d’hiver to be a plagiarist, until he noticed the publication date of the book, 1864. Years later, in the many lectures he gave about his revolutionary findings, Degraël insisted to his students that these nineteenth-century writers

  were nothing but the copyists of a genial and neglected poet who, in a once-in-a-lifetime work, had known how to bring together the very substance from which three or four generations of authors would find their nourishment!

  After taking notes on the book, Degraël had returned to Paris to pursue his research, but before he could do so he was drafted into the army. He was unable to return to the villa in Le Havre until after the war, only to find it had been destroyed and Le Voyage d’hiver lost. Although he continued searching for the rest of his life, he was never to find another copy of the book; the only additional fact he did uncover was that five hundred copies of Le Voyage d’hiver had been published in Valenciennes by the Hervé Bros., Printers-Booksellers. The unfortunate Degraël eventually died in a psychiatric hospital in 1974.

  On learning about Degraël, Deverall wasted no time in locating his only living relative, a nephew who resided in the prosperous Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Fortunately Pierre Degraël had been fond of his uncle, and had kept his effects in storage after he died. It was his great pleasure to allow Deverall access to the papers. Among the hundreds of manuscripts Degraël had amassed during the decades he was gripped by his mania, Deverall found a heavy binder bound in black cloth, labelled simply and in a careful hand, Le Voyage d’hiver. The first eight pages detailed Degraël’s researches, while the rest of the four hundred pages were blank. Her heart pounding, Deverall read Degraël’s few notes. On the bottom of the sixth page she found two queries the Frenchman had written: “Pourquoi tant de kangourous? Ce qui est un billabong?” Degraël had been perplexed by the references to Australia in the Le Voyage d’hiver; he had not known that Hugo Vernier’s mother was Australian.

  In June 2005 Deverall paid a visit to the Genealogical Library in Paris, where she ascertained that a Hugo Vernier had been buried in the cemetery of a small church in the village of Lourmais in Brittany. The church had been destroyed in the Great War, then rebuilt; its register of births and deaths lay forgotten in a bricked-up basement which was only revealed after renovations at the turn of the century. The information in the register would have astonished Degraël, but it only confirmed Deverall’s theory. Hugo Vernier had died when he was two. He could not have written Le Voyage d’hiver. The only explanation was that his mother, Wilhelmina, had written the book and published it under her dead son’s name. Deverall had now been in France, alone, for eighteen months; she had exceeded the terms of her sabbatical, and the University of Sydney demanded that she return to work.

  Deverall resigned from her post at the university and remained in France, combing through the historical records of the towns around Vimy for any other mention of Wilhelmina Vernier. After a discouraging nine months amid musty archives in sleepy regional centres, she uncovered a bundle of uncatalogued papers in a forgotten room in the local government offices of Arras. Though she learned nothing of Wilhelmina’s life in the tumultuous years between 1836 and 1863, which saw the fall of the July Monarchy and the Second Republic, she confirmed that in 1871 the Verniers were in Paris during the last days of the Second Empire and the rise of the Paris Commune. Victor Vernier was killed on the barricades when the French army retook the city during “The Bloody Week” of 21 to 28 May 1871. Sometime afterwards, the widow Vernier sold all of her husband’s estates, but instead of returning to Australia she decided, for reasons unknown, to travel to England.

  Deverall flew to London in May 2006, going straight from the airport to the British Museum. There she searched for two titles, The Spring Journey and The Autumn Journey. Her conjecture was rewarded with the publication details of The Autumn Journey by Wilhelmina Campbell (she had obviously reverted to her maiden name after her husband’s death), published by McAdam & McAllister in London in 1873 in an edition of four hundred copies. Barely able to suppress her excitement, Deverall filled in the form to request a copy from the stacks. Sadly, the librarian informed her that the book was lost. Deverall contacted Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library and the Trinity College Library in Dublin, but while they all held publication information about the book, none possessed a copy. She haunted auctions of rare books and became a familiar and increasingly forlorn figure among the bookshops of Charing Cross Road, always asking after The Autumn Journey. In January 2007, Deverall’s mother and father died within a month of each other; the money and property she inherited allowed her to prolong her stay in England. Deverall’s purgatory finally ended when a disreputable dealer informed her he had located an extremely rare copy of The Autumn Journey that could be hers for ten thousand pounds. Deverall went to her bank and completed the necessary paperwork to empty the accounts she held in Australia. Within the week, she had presented the dealer with a bank cheque for the required amount, and she held The Autumn Journey in her hands.

  The title page of the slim, slightly water-damaged volume was stamped, faintly, “Ex Libris Halifax, Hickleton Hall, May 1899”. Deverall recalled a newspaper article she had read, about two weeks previously, reporting a violent robbery in Hickleton Hall in Doncaster, the ancestral home of the third Earl of Halifax. A janitor had been seriously assaulted, and a number of rare books stolen. Deverall decided that she did not care. She returned to her hotel room and, after locking the door, read The Autumn Journey from beginning to end. It was written in the same elegant, oblique, fragmented style Degraël had described as belonging to Le Voyage d’hiver, and followed a similar structure. The first section describes a nightmarish city in the thrall of a great terror from which the narrator barely escapes with his life. The second section consists of eighty-nine vignettes and sketches, from a few lines to a paragraph long. Though Deverall was no expert in English literature, she quickly identified themes, plots, characters and dialogue that would later form the basis for Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886), Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Stud
y in Scarlet (1887), Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King (1888), Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Nostromo (1904). There was not an atom of doubt left in Deverall’s mind; Wilhelmina Campbell was the most important and influential writer since William Shakespeare. Further analysis, she was certain, would reveal yet more authors, British, Australian and French, who had plundered Campbell’s body of work.

  The endpapers to The Autumn Journey contained a barely legible message written in pencil: “Spoke to Jardin, bookseller. No other books by W.C. extant. Jardin met W.C. once in 1879. Discouraged by failure of TAJ, she spoke of going to America. Damn shame.” Deverall followed this clue, requesting access to the Cunard Line’s records, which was granted in October 2007. In the company archives, she examined the passenger lists of every ship that had left a British port for America from 1879 onwards. Deverall found Wilhelmina Campbell recorded as a second-class passenger on the RMS Umbria, sailing from Liverpool to New York on 8 November 1882. On her way out of the archives, through the Cunard offices, Deverall was already calculating how she could scrape together enough money for a plane ticket to New York. In the foyer, her attention was caught by a model of the RMS Umbria; above it was a gold plaque, which stated that the ship had been lost in a storm crossing the North Atlantic on 18 November 1882. Thus ended Wilhelmina Campbell’s final journey.

  Deverall spent a further year in England and France, vainly searching for additional information about Wilhelmina Campbell, and at long last returned to Sydney at the end of January 2009. Ignoring the author’s attempts to meet her, she bought a rundown one-bedroom house in Petersham, a twenty-minute train ride from the library at the University of Sydney. In her new home she marshalled her work on Wilhelmina Campbell: The Looking Glass Annual she had stolen from the University of Western Australia, her precious copy of The Autumn Journey, six boxes from Vincent Degraël’s archive that his nephew had allowed her to take from Paris, and her own records, which now amounted to two thousand closely handwritten pages. Deverall spent months organising her voluminous research in preparation for writing her book on Wilhelmina Campbell. Then, disaster struck.

  On the evening of 7 November 2009, Deverall returned from the university library to find her house in flames. The fire service was already there, and they prevented the hysterical Deverall from entering the burning building. Though she had transcribed most of her notes and made an electronic backup, Degraël’s work on Le Voyage d’hiver was lost, as were the only copies of The Autumn Journey and The Looking-Glass Annual containing The Summer Journey. Deverall was inconsolable. A few days later she was admitted to the Southside Clinic, a private psychiatric hospital, where she remained, undergoing treatment, for almost two years.

  An investigation into the fire concluded that it had been started deliberately; kerosene had been splashed around the living room and a match used to set it alight. The police interviewed Deverall after she had been at the hospital for six months, endeavouring to find out whether she had any enemies. Regrettably, this set off an episode of persecutory delusion and paranoia in which Deverall refused to speak to any of her friends and family for over a year, convinced that someone she knew had deliberately sabotaged her research. For some months in 2010 Rachel regressed to her childhood; she became convinced that she was Trudy Tective, the sleuth she had made up when she was five years old, and that the Bearded Man, her nemesis, had concocted a diabolical master plan to steal her secret files.

  The insurance company completed its own investigation in August 2010, reluctantly paying out Deverall’s policy that December. After months of therapy and many relapses, Deverall left the clinic in October 2011, still under medication for depression and anxiety. She rented a dingy apartment in Hornsby and spent her days trying to reconstruct from memory the contents of The Summer Journey and The Autumn Journey, or in the stacks at the university library, reading her way through every journal, novel and newspaper published in Australia from 1820 onwards, seeking references to Wilhelmina Campbell she might have overlooked. She subsisted on the little money she made from freelancing for a number of Australian publishers, mainly line-editing and creating indexes for scholarly texts. Though serious research was beyond her now, she was employed as a research assistant and proofreader on Sacred Kangaroos: Fifty Overrated Australian Novels (2013) by the author of this book.

  In late 2013 she began to complain of blurred vision and migraines. Despite the fact that reading had become an agony to her, she continued to spend at least thirty hours a week on her “research”, sitting alone in the stacks at the university library, sifting through reels of microfilm and ancient bound volumes of journals, looking for the words “Wilhelmina Campbell”. Eventually her migraines became so excruciating that she could barely get out of bed in the morning; only then did she agree to see a doctor. Tests revealed that she had a brain tumour; unlike in the case of her biological grandfather, Alexander Fernsby, in 1964, this time there was to be no error. Rachel underwent surgery in February 2014, but not all of the tumour could be removed; although she endured debilitating bouts of radiation treatment, the cancer continued to grow. Her condition was pronounced terminal in January 2015, and her health slowly deteriorated over the next twelve months. During her last days she occupied herself with compiling the index for this book, a task which she completed on the morning of 14 February 2016, two hours before she passed away.

  Catherine Swan, circa 1950

  (1921–1970)

  Lord Mountford’s eyes met those of Lady Olivia across the crowded oh fuck I spilled my gin and tonic ballroom.

  From Lady Olivia’s Secret (1967)

  by Anastasia Beaumarchais

  CATHERINE SWAN, PROLIFIC WRITER OF SHORT STORIES, novels and nonfiction, was born in Lakemba in south-west Sydney on 8 May 1921. Her father, Septimus, was a poorly paid clerk who drifted from job to job, invariably being given the sack when his heavy drinking told on his work, and her mother, Claire, was little more than a cipher, endlessly nursing, cleaning and cooking for her large family. Catherine was the seventh of fourteen children; much later she would lament the fact that her father could not get paid for the one thing in life he was good at. When Septimus was in work, young Catherine was tasked by her mother with creeping into his bedroom as he slept to snatch some of his wages from his trouser pockets, before he could spend it all on drink. If she was caught, she would get a beating. Catherine always tried to help her mother; she would change nappies, make dinners and settle her younger brothers and sisters every night by telling them stories. She borrowed characters and plots from the lessons she had at school, when she was not needed to help around the cramped family home. Catherine’s tales combined knights, detectives, Martians, kings, explorers, princesses and talking animals; anything that would amuse her siblings. She could go on for hours, stop in the middle of a sentence when everyone was asleep, and start at precisely the same point the next night.

  When she was fourteen Catherine started going out with a young man who worked in a store that sold and repaired typewriters. She allowed him to paw her and in return he let her into the store after hours so that she could teach herself how to type. Through the window of the store, across the street, was a poster of a beautiful, elegant woman advertising the latest Claudia Gunn novel. Catherine would stare at the advertisment, wishing that it was the model who was kissing her, and not some spotty-faced man. This was the moment she realised that she was attracted to women. When Catherine could type at eighty-five words per minute, she decided she no longer needed the young man and broke off their relationship. At age fifteen, but looking years older, she found work as a typist in an office in the centre of Sydney. Her delicate good looks attracted the attention of the men in the office, with whom she mechanically flirted but otherwise ignored. Catherine gave almost all of her wages to her mother to help feed and clothe her siblings; the little she permi
tted herself to keep was spent on pulp magazines, which allowed her to escape into a fantasy world for an hour or two.

  On the bus to and from work, in her lunch hour and before going to sleep, Catherine read everything from Modern Bloke to Astounding Housewife Adventures and Wonder Stories of the Outback. In July 1938, when reading that month’s Bonzer Science Stories, Catherine came across the short story “Eugenicists of Cor” by Rand Washington. It was printed alongside an interview with the science-fiction writer in which he boasted of his recent literary and financial successes. Washington’s story was so badly written that Catherine was inspired to write a work of “scientifiction” herself. For three nights she hid in the toilets of her office until everyone else had left, and then emerged to type out her story, “The Time Remainer”, which she submitted to Bonzer Science Stories as the work of “Charles Swan”. Though ineptly constructed and awkwardly written, the central conceit of the story was ingenious: advances in technology have created a world in which time machines are as cheap to buy as a packet of cigarettes. The narrator is too timid to travel in time; he lives in a world that is constantly metamorphosing because of the changes to the time stream, but only he is aware of the differences. One day he is married and living in an Australia ruled by Mongols; the next he is single and riding a dinosaur to work. “The Time Remainer” was accepted by Bonzer Science Stories, who paid Catherine six pounds, the equivalent of two weeks’ wages. The money could not have come at a better time, for a janitor had reported Catherine’s nocturnal writing and in November 1938 she was sacked for misuse of company property. That same month, Rand Washington published Time Masters of Cor, which blatantly plagiarised the central ideas of “The Time Remainer”.