The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories

by Henry Lawson

  The Bulletin, begun in Sydney in 1880, invited contributions of verse and prose from its readers, and it was here that Lawson was first published, in 1887. The editor and part-founder, J. F. Archibald, was an important figure in Lawson’s life – the first, and perhaps the most decisive of the father-figures on whom Lawson depended. A gifted journalist, his attitude towards writing was summed up in the phrase he regularly used: ‘Boil it down’. For his part, Lawson had no guiding notions of ‘style’, and although the influence of Dickens, Bret Harte, and later Mark Twain, is there in some of his stories, he was not apprenticed to any literary master. Archibald encouraged his own natural instinct as a writer, with advice which Lawson remembered as follows:

  Every man has at least one story; some more. Never write until you have something to write about; then write. Write and re-write. Cut out every word from your copy that you can possibly do without. Never strain after effect; and, above all, always avoid anti-climax.

  Lawson’s comment was ‘I think I did all that naturally from the first’, and there is no reason to doubt him. In the same passage, Lawson offers a rare insight into his thinking on form:

  Archibald in those days, preferred the short story to the short sketch. I thought the short story was a lazy man’s game, second to ‘free’ verse, compared with the sketch. The sketch, to be really good, must be good in every line. But the sketch-story is best of all. (‘Three or Four Archibalds and the Writer’)

  In modern usage the term ‘short story’ embraces what Lawson and his contemporaries called ‘the sketch’. During the twentieth century writers have greatly extended the range of the short story to the point where the ‘story’ has become inessential. Lawson’s preference for the ‘sketch-story’ aligns him with those modern writers since Chekhov who have aimed at suggestiveness rather than explicitness. Introducing a collection of short stories, Capajon, in 1933, Edward Garnett praised Hemingway’s ‘amazing power of suggesting more in three pregnant words than other authors do in ten’, but shrewdly observed in passing that ‘Lawson gets even more feeling observation and atmosphere into a page than does Hemingway’.

  Apart from Garnett, however, the critics of Lawson’s time failed almost completely to appreciate the artistic worth of his sketches. Worse than that, Stephens in his Bulletin review of While the Billy Boils was dismissive of the ‘fragmentary impressions’ which he thought could have been written as ‘a single plotted, climaxed story which would make a permanent mark’. It was a line of criticism which disturbed Lawson and continued to worry him over the years. Stephens was right in judging the collection to be very uneven – the same point could be made about all the collections of Lawson’s stories – but his review, in effect, advised Lawson to write against the grain of his talent. Though Lawson responded by telling his publisher, George Robertson, ‘My line is writing short stories and sketches in prose and verse. I’m not a novelist’, and asking, ‘If you were a builder, would you set the painters to do the carpentering?’, the criticism shook his self-confidence and discouraged him from experimenting further with sketches or sketch-stories. Over the next six years Lawson several times persuaded himself that he was capable of writing a novel, and his failures added to the depression and despair that finally broke him.

  The stories in this selection are roughly in chronological order – the exact date of composition is not always known – and grouped to highlight themes and preoccupations. In Lawson’s writing life two journeys mark important stages: the first was to Bourke and Hungerford in 1892, returning to Sydney in the following year, and the second was to England in 1900, returning in 1902.

  Of the stories written before Lawson went out to Bourke, only two are included here, but they are among his most admired works. ‘The Drover’s Wife’, written when he was only twenty-five, was the first in which he found an individual voice. It is more of a sketch than a story (in Lawson’s terms), the anecdote of the snake being used to provide a framework within which he evokes the woman’s life. What could have been exploited for its external interest, and presented as sensational or farcical (as it would have been by other Bulletin writers of the day), becomes typical of the daily threat to existence. Much discussion of the story has concentrated on the ending, which many readers have thought sentimental. Phillips implicitly defends Lawson against the charge in the course of demonstrating his art, asking what naive writer would have resisted the temptation to put an epithet before ‘bush’ in the final sentence. The point is well made. The writing is firm, restrained, economical; and the two adjectives which are used in that final sentence – the woman’s breast is ‘worn-out’ and the daylight is ‘sickly’ – show a considerable literary tact. Far from laying it on thick, Lawson attempts to establish the emotional significance of the moment with minimal effects. This concluding tableau of mother and son is not designed to wring further pathos out of the situation, but to give it a symbolic dimension. The boy’s attempt to comfort his mother – ‘Mother, I won’t never go drovin’; blast me if I do!’ – brings into focus feelings that inhere in the predicament of the drover’s wife. The boy is dependent for his survival on the mother he tries to comfort; he cannot replace the absent father and husband; his ‘manly’ promise to his mother, with its implication that his father was weak in submitting to necessity and leaving the family, reveals his child’s vulnerability and helplessness. If ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is susceptible to a sentimental interpretation, it is partly because the central image of mother and son – I should emphasise that I see the final scene as aiming at something more complex and more subtle than is achieved in the supposed climax of the killing of the snake – is perilously close to cliché in its conception, and throughout the sketch Lawson’s notion of the woman is too close to the stereotype of the bush heroine.

  Yet ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is an impressive work to come from a young inexperienced writer. Along with ‘The Bush Undertaker’, it can be accommodated by the conventional view of Lawson as the sympathetic chronicler of bush life, but such an approach does not do justice to either story. In both Lawson is attempting – not wholly successfully – to create images which will define and express feelings he would have been incapable of analysing or explaining. The old hatter muttering ‘I am the rassaraction’ over the grave is cut off from all consolation, all hope that existence has some meaning. Uncharacteristically, in the final paragraph, Lawson distances himself from the grotesque figure he has portrayed, in sharp contrast to his identification with the ‘hollow men’ of ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’, which was written a year or so later, when he was working in the Bourke district.

  The trip to Bourke and Hungerford – arranged by Archibald who was concerned by Lawson’s heavy drinking – brought a new energy and toughness to his writing, as ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’ bears witness. He went up-country with no illusions about what he would find. A month or so earlier he had been told by ‘Banjo’ Paterson in the pages of the Bulletin:

  You had better stick to Sydney and make merry with the ‘push’,

  For the bush will never suit you, and you’ll never suit the bush.

  The two writers had engaged in a verse controversy, in which Lawson attacked the account Southern poets gave of the inland, and Paterson had written ‘In Defence of the Bush’. Arriving in Bourke in a dry season, Lawson wrote to his aunt: ‘The bush between here and Bathurst is horrible. I was right and Banjo wrong’. In the same letter he told her ‘I got a lot of good points for copy on the way up’, and ‘Took notes all the way up’. Out of the journey came ‘In a Dry Season’, which, like ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’ and probably ‘Hungerford’, was written close to the event. These three sketches included in this volume are ‘good in every line’, and repay the close attention which they may not seem to invite. Written as newspaper sketches (the form of which, I suppose, had descended from the periodical essays of the previous century), they assume a local audience, alert to local references (to Tyson in ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’, and to
Clancy in ‘Hungerford’, for instance). These sketches display a remarkable sureness and economy of treatment, and give the impression of a man writing out of an intensity of feeling untroubled by doubts about form.

  It is relevant to note here that a numbr of commentators have been inclined to suggest that Lawson spoiled a good story when he included the passage beginning ‘I have left out the wattle …’ in ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’. Such criticism assumes that Lawson’s purpose was to tell a story, and that he intruded himself to draw attention to his avoidance of the stock conventions. But this ‘Sketch from Life’, as it was subtitled when first published, was not thought of by Lawson as a work of fiction: it was a personal impression, and the passage simply emphasised the writer’s fidelity to fact in writing up his ‘copy’. (That the stock emotive devices he disdains here appealed to him is plain enough from weaker stories in which he falls back upon such consoling falsities.) Placed as it is, following the painfully detailed description of the actual burial, in which the narrator, insisting that ‘It doesn’t matter much – nothing does’, has shown how much he feels it does matter, the comment restores the unemotional reporting tone, which the narrator adopts as the representative of the union. The verbal ironies which accumulate through the sketch (more accurately sketch-story) make it a powerful revelation of what Lawson perceived as ‘the Out Back Hell’ (as he calls it elsewhere).

  ‘Hungerford’ is another expression of Lawson’s bleak vision. On the surface a mere ‘newspaper sketch’, it illustrates superbly his ability to charge detail with emotional significance while leaving the meaning of the whole to emerge through implication. In this instance, the experience of going to Hungerford becomes an experience of human absurdity and futility. As a town, a centre of ‘civilisation’, Hungerford is a ludicrous and horrifying negation of all meaning in human endeavour. The road stops short of the town; there is a rabbit-proof fence with rabbits on both sides of it; the river on the banks of which the town is sited flows only when it floods; and, most absurd of all, the colonial border divides the town in two. And the surrounding landscape is an image of desolation which appalls the onlooker. The humour of the sketch is in the tradition of bush leg-pulling, but the effect is intentionally the reverse of comic.

  Much of what Lawson wrote in the next few years was under the stimulus of the Bourke experience, though nothing else approached the direct personal intensity of these early sketches. The work, collected in While the Billy Boils, while uneven, contains some fine examples of sketch-stories with Mitchell as the narrator within the story framework. The economy and poise of such sketch-stories as ‘On the Edge of a Plain’, ‘Some Day’, and ‘Our Pipes’ is very impressive. One thinks of Chekhov’s remark in a letter to Gorki: ‘When a man spends the least possible number of movements over some definite action, that is grace’. These stories, seemingly insubstantial, suggest much more than they state – and so much more than can be stated. They are all implication. To do anything like justice to the delicate precision of their art one would have to explore them in more detail than is possible here. The appropriate comparison is with a poem rather than with a conventional story. Lawson works on a small scale, and the very brevity of the work is essential to its effect. To add and elaborate would be to destroy the effect. The stories I have selected here show, as Edward Garnett said, that Lawson ‘has the faculty of bringing life to a focus, of making it typical.’

  An important element in Lawson’s success with these slight stories is his use of Mitchell, the shrewd, kindly, and philosophical swagman. A version of Lawson, a persona rather than a fully developed character, he replaces the author as narrator or teller of yarns in a number of stories, allowing the author to create perspective. Mitchell is on the track, a man on his own except when he finds a mate to travel with; one could suggest that as a literary creation he is related to the Romantic outcast figure of the Wanderer. Mitchell’s stories give glimpses of his past, but the manner of telling and the related small actions that are described work together to have the teller reveal more than he realises. Mitchell is not so much a character to be explored in connected stories as an instrument by which Lawson can create states of feeling and so define his sense of being human. ‘On the Edge of a Plain’ is, in this respect, a perfect story. To a modern reader of Chekhov, the art of this little story is quickly recognised, but the originality of what Lawson was doing on his own went unremarked when While the Billy Boils was published in 1896.

  Most critics would now agree that Lawson is at his strongest in While the Billy Boils and Joe Wilson and His Mates, and that view is reflected in this selection which aims to represent Lawson’s characteristic strengths. Joe Wilson and His Mates was the product of his first year in England. Lawson’s decision to leave Australia grew out of his conviction that if he were to succeed as a writer he had to get away. Although While the Billy Boils and In the Days When the World was Wide had won acclaim in Australia, his life had become increasingly desperate: he had married in 1896 but by 1900 there were strains in the marriage; his alcoholism had become so bad that he had voluntarily entered an inebriates’ home; his writing did not earn him a sufficient income; he was depressed and distracted by the constant need to earn money, and he was tormented by the sense that he could not do himself justice working under the conditions that prevailed in Australia. The encouragement of English editors and publishers led him to decide to try to survive as a full-time writer in London. The ordeal that he underwent during the two-year stay in England (his wife became mentally unstable and had to be hospitalised for long periods, and he was responsible for the care as well as the support of two infants) has only recently been told. By the time he returned to Australia in mid-1902 his marriage was virtually over, he was exhausted, and there had been a marked decline in his writing. Before the end of that year he had attempted suicide. He never recovered from the crisis of that time, and although he continued to write over the next twenty years – he was writing the night he died in September 1922 – after 1902 there are only occasional flickers of the imaginative power he had previously shown. As a writer his life was tragically short: the work on which his current reputation rests was all done between 1892 and 1902.

  In this selection I have printed the Joe Wilson stories in the order in which they were written, not as they were arranged in Joe Wilson and His Mates. I have done this to encourage readers to consider each story individually. To read the group of four stories as if they constitute ‘a single plotted, climaxed story’ (the model Stephens had recommended) is to put the emphasis in the wrong place and, incidentally, to pass over quite significant inconsistencies between the stories as a result of changes in conception from one to the other. ‘Brighten’s Sister-in-law’, the first story Lawson wrote after his arrival in England, was the longest he had ever written up to that time. Lawson was aiming at writing a short story rather than his preferred story-sketch, and seeking to respond to the voices that urged on him the superiority of the extended narrative. It is a leisurely story, in which he exploits the freedom allowed by the autobiographical mode of narration, but the core of its meaning is located in the narrator’s perception of the woman as a suffering soul. The source of her tragedy is not stated directly, nor does Joe Wilson reflect on what he sees, the woman’s behaviour towards the father and son being in itself a form of revelation to the reader. In the final form of the story the link between the lonely woman without husband or child and the Wilsons is delicately suggested: her fate could be theirs.

  ‘Brighten’s Sister-in-law’ had been an important advance for Lawson, in that he had preserved the essence of the ‘sketch-story’, with its focus on the moment of awareness, within an extended narrative, such as he had never managed before. His next Joe Wilson story attempted less and was a more even performance. By now Lawson was thinking of a Joe Wilson series, but in the next story he had obvious difficulty in controlling the direction of the narrative, and what was intended as the story of how the Wilsons settled on the la
nd became the story of Mrs Spicer (the drover’s wife writ large, as Brian Matthews says). This story has some very fine passages, including the initial episode in which Joe Wilson hears Mrs Spicer summon Annie to ‘water them geraniums’. The description of the pathetic flower patch outside the Spicer hut is an outstanding example of how deftly and subtly Lawson could suggest the symbolic dimension of an experience.

  There were more attempts at Joe Wilson stories, but the only other one Lawson chose to include in Joe Wilson and His Mates was ‘Joe Wilson’s Courtship’, which is set earlier in time than the envisaged sequence and narrated in a gently reminiscent manner. Like the earlier monologue, ‘An Old Mate of Your Father’s’, this story has all the charm of tender recollection without losing a sense of the real. The ending – with Joe Wilson asking Black for permission to marry Mary – is another of those short episodes in which Lawson was so effective: it is virtually a ‘story-sketch’ in itself.

  ‘Telling Mrs Baker’ and ‘The Loaded Dog’ were both written in England in the same period as the Joe Wilson stories. In the first Lawson displays a confident control of narrative, and it is only after one has started to reflect upon the view of character that it offers that one realises the unexamined emotionalism on which the whole situation is based. The idealising of the bushmen (‘They are grand men – they are noble’) contrasts with the realistic observation of earlier stories, and signals Lawson’s turning away from the painfully real into a consoling dreamworld of the bush, in which the gospel of mateship is lived out.