The Rise of the Australian Novel
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Richard Nile The Rise of the Australian Novel (PhD Thesis, School of History University of New South Wales, December 1987) UNIVERSITY OF N.S.W. - 8SEP 1988 LIBRARY TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 PRODUCTION 34 CHAPTER 2 PROFESSIONAL! SAT ION 91 CHAPTER 3 CENSORSHIP 140 CHAPTER 4 REPUTATION 183 CHAPTER 5 MODERNISM 225 CHAPTER 6 WAR 268 CHAPTER 7 INDUSTRIALISM 312 CONCLUSION 357 APPENDICES 362 BIBLIOGRAPHY 378 THIS THESIS IS MY OWN WORK this thesis is dedicated to weirdo Those who read many books are like the eaters of hashish. They live in a dream. The subtle poison that penetrates their brain renders them insensible to the real world and makes them prey of terrible or delightful phantoms. Books are the opium of the Occident. They devour us. A day is coming on which we shall all be keepers of libraries, and that will be the end. (Anatole France 1888) I was wondering about the theory of the composite man. The man who might evolve in a few thousand years if we broke down all the barriers. Or if they broke themselves down, which is more likely. A completely unrestricted mating - black, white, brown, yellow, all the racial characteristics blended, all the resulting generations coming into the world free of the handicaps that are hung round the necks of half-casts now. (Eleanor Dark 1938) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To write this history of Australian literature was as difficult as it was enjoyable. Many times I felt very alone, locked into a private world of books and ideas. Yet many people expressed interest in this project and offered their support. My first thanks are obviously to my Supervisor, David Walker. David has been a constant companion with the thesis. On a personal and professional level, David encouraged the completion of this thesis. A specialist in the area, he successfully avoided any problems which might have arisen from a conflict of interest. Also his "Coogee Research Centre" houses a great library of Australian literature which was always a bonus for a researcher still working when other libraries were not open. Three people, I owe a special debt. Ffion Murphy, whose fine analytical mind and encouragement, has been an inspiration. She has been my best critic. John McQuilton, who from the project’s inception was willing to spend many hours discussing related problems and issues. His advice near the final draft stage of the thesis was invaluable. Rob Darby’s considerable knowledge of twentieth century Australian fiction made access to a number of sources much easier. John Murphy from the Mitchell Library (Sydney), Moira Wilson and Gillian Redmond from the Australian Archives (Canberra), Pam Ray from the Australian National Library (Canberra), Ann Stephen from the Powerhouse Museum (Sydney) and staff at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Battye Library of Western Australia (Perth) were all generous with their time. A very special thanks to Shayne Sarantos for the computer-graphics and to Sue Nile for typing the bibliography. The School of History the UNSW made available the word- processor, "mate”, on which I was able to type the thesis. Finally, Muppett the Cat! ABSTRACT There is no prescriptive formula for the study of society and the literary forms which accompany it. The most that can be said is that a relationship exists between the two. This analysis of modern Australian writing looks from both ends of the telescope. Firstly it analyses those systems which produce imaginative writing as a marketable commodity. Here books and writers are placed in relation to manufacturing and marketing. Secondly, it attempts to "unpack” the modern literary imagination. The object was to gain a closer and hopefully better understanding of modern Australia, the books it produced and the people who wrote them. The thesis details production arrangements, including some insights into the publishing industry. It also studies writers’ expectations in relation to the publishing industry and their own role as writers. Various forms of control which affect in subtle or blatant manner the way in which novels are received or understood are also examined. The perspective is then broadened to reveal some facets of modernism in Australia. The conclusions reached are, in summary, that the novel evolved with industrial society, that mass production became feasible with the invention of sophisticated printing technology and an increasing awareness of the importance of marketing strategy and that the novel was generally regarded as the most suitable form to be used by writers in a modern setting. A wide reading of literature, including poetry and drama, published from about 18 50 to the present brought to light predominant or recurring concerns which could be related clearly to the particular period which brought them forth. During the 1920s and 1930s, major social changes appear to have intensified social consciousness (and self consciousness) among ’serious’ writers, and an exploration of the themes and motifs of this literature, together with the stated concerns of the writers, has, it is to be hoped, formed the basis of a worthwhile history, both social and literary. INTRODUCTION. 2 There are four key social considerations which are explored in this thesis: writer and society; production, reproduction and distribution of literature; values expressed in imaginative writing and those posited by society; and conceptions of reading publics and the production of books. In Marxism and Literature (19 77) Raymond Williams suggested that literature, like culture and society, is a concept. Claiming that the modern form of this concept did not emerge in England until the eighteenth century and did not fully develop until the nineteeth century, Williams urged that literature was intimately connected with reading and the evolution of ’civilised’, ’cultured' bourgeois society. ’’Litterature, in the common early spelling, was then in effect a condition of reading, of being able to read”, proposed Williams, ”It was often close to the sense of modern literacy, which was not in the language until the late nineteenth century, its introduction in part being made necessary by the movement of literature to a different sense". Williams maintained that literature in this new sense replaced rhetoric and grammar of earlier periods: ” ... a specialisation to reading and, in the material context of the development of printing, to the printed word and especially the book".-*- Literature referred to composition, including philosophy and history as well as imaginative works in the longer form of prose which, in the eighteenth century, evolved in the form of the novel. If reading was the primary function of literature, argued Williams, it was the reading of social and cultural elites. Literature not only or primarily involved a class dynamic it was connected through class, ideology and hegemony to nationalism and nationality, thus the evolution of national literature as an expression of national culture. * * * * 1. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (London 19 77) pp 46-47 3 David Walker (19 76) and John Docker (19 74) have studied the connections between specific cultural and social milieux and fiction through Melbourne and Sydney cultural elites.^ Walker considered the Melbourne connection in the writings and outlook of four men from the same generation while Docker sought out what he believed to be a key dilemma in Australian literature and culture: "Australia’s European inheritance of ideas, ideologies and assumptions, and the new ’Australian’ experience and social environments”. Docker argued that this dilemma was " ... usually assumed to be monolithic". His account of cultural elites postulated that Australian literature and culture were"... mediated through the different cultural histories of Australian cities, particularly Sydney and Melbourne . ..".5 More recently Drusilla Modjeska (19 81) and Carole Ferrier (1985) have studied the personal and social circumstances of women writers in Australia.^ In Dream and Disillusion, Walker introduced the concept of a search for an Australian cultural identity by suggesting that principal figures, Louis Esson and Vance Palmer, for instance, were at least as powerfully influenced by movements in Europe - Palmer by the New Age in London, Esson by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin - as by those in Australia.5 Walker’s proposition suggested further questions for the study of Australian literature and society in the interwar years. Docker’s emphasis on intellectual traditions subverted the more effulgent notion of ’creative spirit’ suggested, for * * * * 2. David Walker, Dream and Disillusion (Canberra 19 76). John Docker Australian Cultural Elites (Sydney 19 74) 3. Docker Australian Cultural Elites ibid p 19. 4. Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home (Sydney 1981). Carole Ferrier (ed) Gender Politics and Fiction (St Lucia 19 85) 5. Walker Dream and Disillusion op cit pp 11-60, 134-147, 168 19 3. Walker also analysed this dichotomy in the figures of Frank Wilmot ("Furnley Maurice") and Frederick Sinclaire. 4 instance, in Geoffrey Serle’s From Desert the Prophets Come (1973).8 Both disclaimed A.D. Hope’s affirmation in the poem ’’Australia” (1939), from which Serle derived his title, that Australian cities were teeming sores on the rim of a continent whose sparse population derived its consciousness from the interior. Walker and Docker analysed modern Australian writing as an urban phenomenon. During the late twenties, especially after the publication of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Working Bullocks in 1926, the novel was seen to displace the short story and lyric poem as the preferred genre of Australian writers. In the early twenties the novel appeared as merely one literary form among others. Drusilla Modjeska, in Exiles at Home, argued that by the 19 30s the novel had ’’ ... broken the orientation towards poetry and short ficton that had dominated Australian literature since the 1890s.”^ Verse of the variety written by C.J. Dennis during the war was the most popular form among writers and their audience.