Their Brilliant Careers Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Fiction

  The Weight of a Human Heart: Stories

  Nonfiction

  Alexander Fernsby: The Definitive Biography

  Ordinary People Doing Everyday Things in Commonplace

  Settings: A History of Australian Short Fiction

  Sacred Kangaroos: Fifty Overrated Australian Novels

  Forthcoming

  The Seasonal Journeys of Wilhelmina Campbell: The Amazing Story Behind the Least Known, Most Influential Writer in Modern Literature (with Anne Zoellner)

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Ryan O’Neill 2016

  Ryan O’Neill asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in- Publication entry:

  O’Neill, Ryan, author.

  Their brilliant careers: the fantastic lives of sixteen extraordinary Australian writers / Ryan O’Neill.

  9781863958639 (paperback)

  9781925435177 (ebook)

  Authors, Australian—Fiction.

  Biographical fiction, Australian.

  A823.4

  Cover design by Peter Long

  Text design and typesetting by Tristan Main

  Author photograph: Rachel Deverall

  Photographs: page iv (Everett Collection_shutterstock),

  page 34 (LiliGraphie_shutterstock), page 70 (AnnaKostyuk_shutterstock),

  page 120 (Dark Moon Pictures_shutterstock), page 230 (MilanMarkovic78_shutterstock),

  pages 14, 48, 92, 106, 140, 152, 164, 180, 202, 218 (State Library of Victoria)

  For my late wife, Rachel

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Anne Zoellner

  RAND WASHINGTON (1919–2000)

  MATILDA YOUNG (1899–1975)

  ARTHUR RUHTRA (1940–1981)

  ADDISON TILLER (1874–1929)

  ROBERT BUSH (1941–1990)

  DAME CLAUDIA GUNN (1885–1975)

  FRANCIS X. MCVEIGH (1900–1948?)

  RACHEL DEVERALL (1969–2016)

  CATHERINE SWAN (1921–1970)

  FREDERICK STRATFORD (1880–1933)

  EDWARD GAYLE (1928–2008)

  VIVIAN DARKBLOOM (1901–1976)

  HELEN HARKAWAY (1940–1993)

  DONALD CHAPMAN (1903?–1937?)

  STEPHEN PENNINGTON (1935–2009)

  SYDNEY STEELE (1866–1945)

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  FOREWORD

  IN MARCH 1981 FRANK MOORHOUSE GAVE THE EULOGY AT the funeral of his friend, the experimental writer Arthur ruhtrA. Moorhouse ended his tribute by recalling something ruhtrA had told him shortly before his death at the age of forty: “The great need in Australian writing is still that it should go ‘too far’ and resist blandness.” In this book, with the same skill and empathy he has so often displayed in his award-winning short fiction and nonfiction, Ryan O’Neill gives us the lives of sixteen writers, including ruhtrA himself, who followed this injunction. Sometimes it was to the lasting gain of Australian literature; often it was at great personal cost. These brief, expertly condensed biographies present a unique, fascinating overview of the famous, infamous and forgotten from Australian literature’s last hundred and fifty years.

  Addison Tiller, the bane of generations of Australian school-children forced to study his short fiction, emerges here as a more complex figure than “The Chekhov of Coolabah” once memorialised on the ten-dollar note. The struggles of Matilda Young, a poet still shamefully little read or celebrated in her own country, are recorded with a similar sympathy. The time has surely come for a full-length biography of Young, Australia’s first Nobel laureate. It is unfortunate that Stephen Pennington, who also appears in this book, never had the opportunity to write a life of Young, as he had once planned. Sadly, Pennington’s fame now rests on the one malicious act he committed in an otherwise blameless life, rather than on his extraordinary biographies. It is hoped that his inclusion here will refocus attention on his considerable record of literary achievement.

  For all their flaws, Tiller, Pennington and Young emerge as essentially decent figures, but others are less admirable. There is little morality to be found in the biographies of such profoundly flawed human beings as Rand Washington, Edward Gayle, Francis X. McVeigh, Claudia Gunn and Robert Bush. Washington’s and Gayle’s sickening views on race still retain the power to appal, and it is disturbing to reflect that the works of both writers remain popular among large sections of Australian society. The equally unpleasant McVeigh and Gunn, on the other hand, are little read now, no doubt deservedly so, but their influence on Australian realism and detective fiction was significant, and their critical reappraisal is overdue. Robert Bush’s beautifully written but ultimately self-serving autobiography, Bastard Title (2004), has obscured the claims of misogyny once made against the influential editor, so much so that a short-story prize was recently named in his honour. The life of Bush given here is a salutary reminder of the great editor’s cruelty and duplicity.

  As in his Ordinary People Doing Everyday Things in Commonplace Settings: A History of Australian Short Fiction (2001), O’Neill rescues a number of important writers from undeserved obscurity. Frederick Stratford is a name that should be better known, as either the country’s most shameless plagiarist or its earliest post-modernist, or both. Another is Vivian Darkbloom, who inspired some of the best and worst books in Australian literature. The prolific Catherine Swan and the reclusive Helen Harkaway have for too long been relegated to the footnotes of scholarly articles, and it is especially gratifying to note that novels by both writers are scheduled to appear as Text Classics in 2017, with introductions, annotations and afterwords by O’Neill. Australia’s “one-man avant-garde”, Arthur ruhtrA, whose work is highly regarded in France but has always been treated with bewilderment and disdain in his native land, is also given his due.

  The lives of Donald Chapman and Sydney Steele present unique challenges to a biographer. After recent books by Thomas Keneally, Peter Carey and Helen Garner, the critic Peter Craven argued that there could be nothing left to say about the Chapman affair, one of Australia’s most enduring literary conundrums. While it must be admitted that O’Neill has come no nearer to uncovering the writer or writers behind Chapman, his life of the poet has unearthed significant new information about the rivalry between editors Paul Berryman and Albert Mackintosh, which provided the catalyst for the affair. In the case of Sydney Steele, an author whose talent was only matched by his misfortunes, it is immensely exciting to read a new account that dispels the whiff of brimstone which has for so long lingered around his memory. Like Simpson and his donkey, and Phar Lap, the bare facts of Steele’s life were long ago transformed into myth. As early as 1890 it was whispered that he had sold his soul to the devil in return for becoming a writer of genius, yet by his death in 1945 all his work had been lost through carelessness, vindictiveness or bad luck. In this life of Steele, the first since Stephen Pennington’s lost Sydney Steele: Australia’s Homer (1961), O’Neill deftly outlines the development of the Steele legend while simultaneously debunking it.

  Finally, it is impossible to be left unmoved by the life of Rachel Deverall, which is situated, thematically and structurally, at
the heart of this book. Deverall’s pioneering study on the short fiction of Lydia McGinnis, Excavating the Basilica (2001), is a classic of Australian literary criticism, yet there can be little doubt that even this great work would have been eclipsed by her Squeaker’s Mates: A History of Australian Women Writers 1800–2000, had she lived to complete it. Deverall lived for books, and in the end a book destroyed her. O’Neill’s biography of his late wife not only celebrates her early successes but also traces, with enormous sensitivity, the obsession which darkened the last years of her life, and which ruined her marriage, her career and, finally, her health. Had circumstances been different, hers might have been the most brilliant career of all.

  Anne Zoellner

  Rand Washington on Bondi Beach, October 1946

  (1919–2000)

  With a cold blaster in one hand and a hot-blooded princess in the other, Buck Whiteman prepared to singlehandedly face the dark, slavering hordes of Cor!

  From Subhumans of Cor (1937)

  RAND WASHINGTON, BEST KNOWN FOR HIS HUGELY POPULAR Cor series of science-fiction novels and short stories, as well as his extreme views on race, was born Bruce Alfred Boggs on 11 August 1919 in Wollongong, New South Wales, exactly nine months after the end of the First World War. He was to claim later in life that the last shot fired in anger during the conflict had been his father impregnating his mother just before 11 a.m. on Armistice Day. Bruce’s father, Mick, was a police constable, and his mother, Janet, worked as a maid in one of the wealthier areas of the city. The boy’s childhood was defined by, on the one hand, the frequent, brutal beatings he received from his father, and on the other, his endless reading and rereading of the novels of H.G. Wells, which his mother first borrowed, then stole, for her son from the houses she worked in. Critics have been quick to seize on these facts to explain the sadomasochistic bent of much of Washington’s writing, especially the Cor books.

  Janet Boggs’s petty thefts were eventually reported by a gardener, leading to her being sacked and her turning to alcohol. When her son was only eleven she died from cirrhosis. Bruce never forgot the gardener, or the fact that he was Aboriginal.

  By the time of his mother’s death, Bruce, having all but memorised the works of Wells, searched out the few pulp magazines that reached Australia from America, months and sometimes years after their original publication. The pulps were to have a transformative effect on the young man, both physically and psychologically. Seven months after sending a coupon cut from Spicy Detective Stories to New York, Bruce received the first instalment of “Hercules Strong’s Twelve Lessons to Physical Perfection”. Diligently following Strong’s instructions for three years, Bruce had, by the time he was fifteen, succeeded in changing his physique to such an extent that (he once claimed) he was offered a job as strongman when a circus visited Wollongong in 1935.

  Bruce’s reading ranged across every genre the pulps offered, from cowboy stories, wilderness romances and medical dramas to science fiction, fantasy and horror. He was an early correspondent of the American writer H.P. Lovecraft, whose work he first came across in the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales. Bruce’s first attempts at writing were horror short stories, and Lovecraft, always generous with his time, agreed to critique them. Though these early stories have not survived, Lovecraft’s responses have, and demonstrate the older writer’s acute literary judgment, tempered with forbearance at Bruce’s ignorance of grammar and punctuation. As well as advising the boy to buy a dictionary and thesaurus, Lovecraft warned him that filling his stories with extremist views on race could, as Lovecraft knew from personal experience, alienate editors. Bruce did not listen. Eventually, Lovecraft tired of the young Australian’s repetitive jeremiads warning of “the mongrel races”, and the correspondence lapsed after two years. Bruce always maintained he had simply outgrown Lovecraft and the weird after discovering his true love, science fiction.

  Bruce’s final communication with Lovecraft made no mention of the death of his father, Mick Boggs, which had occurred only two days before the letter was sent. Father and son had been on bad terms for months, ever since Mick had learned of Bruce’s literary ambitions and had forbidden him from pursuing them. Instead he forced the young man to learn a trade, and Bruce was apprenticed to a car mechanic in November 1935. Mick Boggs was killed two weeks later while on night patrol in the warehouse district of Wollongong; his neck was broken and his head almost torn off. The murder was never solved. With the insurance payout from the Police Union, Bruce moved to Sydney, rented a one-room flat in Kings Cross and devoted his life to writing. He was nothing if not productive. In the first half of 1936 he wrote an estimated 300,000 words, submitting ten novellas and forty short stories to Australian pulps ranging from Thrilling Housekeeping Yarns to Spooky Bush Tales. These submissions, under the name Bruce Boggs, were swiftly rejected. The dismissal of his work made Bruce intensify his efforts, and he was eventually to produce an average of 500,000 words a year from the second half of 1936 to the outbreak of war three years later.

  In July 1936, a month after adopting the pen name “Rand Washington”, the young writer finally made his first sale, “The Rockets of Uranus V” to Bonzer Science Stories for five pounds. This success encouraged Bruce Boggs to adopt the name Rand Washington permanently, and to concentrate his literary efforts on the burgeoning and increasingly lucrative Australian pulp science-fiction market. Bonzer Science Stories was one of two dozen pulps published by Siegfried Press, founded and managed by James Smith (born Johannes Schmidt), a German war veteran who had migrated to Australia in 1921. Smith was keen to expand into the novel market, and after accepting and publishing nine stories by Rand Washington in the latter half of 1936, he arranged to meet with the writer in January of the following year to discuss ideas for longer works. It was at this meeting that Washington was first introduced to the tenets of National Socialism; Smith presented him with a signed copy of an English translation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), to which Siegfried Press held Australian publishing rights. The result of Hitler’s, and to a lesser extent Smith’s, influence on Washington’s hitherto virulent but directionless racism can be seen in Washington’s first novel, Whiteman of Cor, published in July 1937.

  This book, the first in the seemingly endless Cor saga, was to set the template for all that followed. Buck Whiteman, a space scout employed by the nation of Ausmerica to seek new worlds for colonisation, is lost and shipwrecked on the hostile desert planet of Cor. Here, the “white race”, led by the love interest in all the Cor novels, Princess BelleFemme Blanch, has been overthrown and enslaved by the “Argobolin”, described as “a savage, untrustworthy, genetically inferior tribe of evil blacks”. After rescuing the princess and inciting a rebellion, Whiteman leads the new “White Masters of Cor” on a mission of extermination against their erstwhile “Aboverlords”. Despite the blatant racism directed towards Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants, which permeates every page of the Cor books, and a writing style described by the influential critic Peter Darkbloom as “sub-literate”, Whiteman of Cor was an immediate success, reprinted six times in 1937 alone.

  Smith ordered Washington back to the typewriter, and over the next two years a further twenty-five Cor novels appeared, serialised in Bonzer Science Stories and its newly launched sister publications, Bonzer Scientifiction Tales and Astounding True-Blue Science, before being published as standalone novels. All were bestsellers and, along with the translation and publication of the Cor books into German by the publishing house C. Bertelsmann Verlag, beginning with Der Weise Mann Von Cor (1938), helped to make Smith a wealthy man. Unfortunately for Washington, he had signed over the rights to all future Cor novels to Smith in June 1937 for just two hundred pounds.

  James Smith’s good fortune was not to last. The outbreak of war in 1939, the paper shortages that followed and, most damningly, Smith’s continuing and vocal support for Hitler resulted in the virtual bankruptcy of Siegfried Press by 1941. A year later Smith committed suicide by leaping through th
e closed window of his fifth-floor harbourfront apartment. Fortunately for Washington, Smith had written a new will on the night he died, naming Washington as his sole beneficiary and returning the Cor rights to their creator. In another stroke of good luck, Washington was exempted from military service because of his work in publishing, a reserved occupation.

  Throughout the war years Washington rebuilt Siegfried Press (renamed Fountainhead Press in 1942) by capitalising on the Australian public’s fear of Japan. Whiteman of Yellos (1943), the first book in a new series, saw Buck Whiteman and his insipid princess journey to the neighbouring planet of Yellos, where “yellow demons” had overthrown the race of “Purewhites”. At the same time, Washington launched a new line of pulps, including A Bonzer Homestead and Bonzer Down on the Farm Stories, to take advantage of the public’s nostalgia for simpler times. By the end of the Second World War, Washington was responsible for writing half a dozen science-fiction pulps, editing a further twenty bush, romance and medical-themed pulps, and overseeing the ghostwriting of the Yellos novels.

  One of these ghosts was Sydney Steele, the famous Australian novelist, short-story writer and poet. Steele had fallen on hard times after returning from England in 1940. Destitute and miserable, he reluctantly agreed to write a Yellos novel for Fountainhead Press in November 1944, but Washington, who despised Steele for his involvement with the Communist Party, had no intention of publishing it. He wore Steele out with his demands for revisions, forcing him to rewrite the book twenty-three times in six months, at the end of which he exploited a loophole in their contract to reject the work without payment. Evicted from his room at a Sydney boarding house, Steele ripped up the manuscript and stuffed it under his clothes to help keep him warm through the winter. Of Steele’s many lost works, the destruction of Nippers of Yellos is undoubtedly the least to be regretted.