10

Pomona

Melbourne and New York, 1909–1910

ARRIVING BACK IN Melbourne on 16 April 1909, Katharine started work on ‘Woman’s World’ at the Herald straightaway.¹ It wasn’t simply a column—it was a whole section occupying two broadsheet pages, and printed each week in both the Herald and its rural counterpart, the Weekly Times. The headline promised ‘Topics of the Week—Feminine Affairs Reviewed—The Fashions of the Moment’; Katharine delivered these and more. Each edition contained a lengthy, illustrated column on fashion; a report on a significant speech or meeting, often with a political or social angle to it; news relating to women; and sometimes an opinion piece. A couple of months into the role, Katharine adopted the pseudonym ‘Pomona’, the name of a lesser-known Roman goddess of fruit. The annual salary was reportedly a high one in the order of £320.² It was the only time Katharine would ever have a well-paying job, giving her more spending money and security than she would have again in her life.

If Katharine’s appointment was an act of nepotism, Reay compensated by being a stern boss.

Work on the Herald at first almost destroyed any confidence I might have had in myself as a writer … Sometimes I was reduced almost to tears when paragraphs were blue-pencilled out of recognition. In despair I told the editor and general manager, Colonel W. T. Reay, that I was afraid I could never do the job satisfactorily. He was a drastic critic, and wielded that blue pencil mercilessly; but kind and helpful too, taught me to condense, and to avoid literary airs and graces in simple statements.³

Even here, Katharine’s ambivalence about Reay comes through strongly. His ‘drastic’ criticism was destroying her confidence, yet he was ‘kind and helpful too’. Apparently in thrall to Katharine sexually and emotionally, it’s possible Reay revelled in the power he held over her at work.

After her initial contract expired, Reay sent a letter offering a new contract. He wrote, ‘Allow me to take the present opportunity to express our high appreciation of your always fine work—marked, as it has ever been, by a high ability, strict care and punctuality, and a splendid enthusiasm’.⁴ It is the only letter she kept from him.⁵

Back at the time he intercepted her in Sydney in 1907, she commented that she ‘was not interested in clothes at that time’ and felt ‘a little dowdy’ in his company; she remembered feeling it in Paris, too, prompting her to buy some glamorous clothes. He may have been encouraging her to become more interested in fashion with the ‘Woman’s World’ job in mind. In a short time, she learnt how to write about fashion and at least sound like someone with a wide knowledge and deep interest in it. Week by week, she reported on the latest trends in dresses, coats, hats and accessories, sometimes reflecting feminist advances as women moved into new workplaces and dress became less Victorian. Her fashion news also reflected Edwardian technology and fads. She covered clothes for ice-skating one week—an important topic as the Glaciarium ice rink had opened in South Melbourne in 1906.⁶ Another week she wrote of ‘modes for motorists’, opining, ‘there is still a wide bridge between the motorist and beauty. Those dreadful goggles … and … those painful stiff leather coats, which no effort of tailor or designer can make otherwise than hideous’.⁷

Katharine usually maintained a mask of journalistic objectivity but in one column there is a striking glimpse of her disdain for men of her own age:

At every dance one hears the same cry, ‘Where are the men?’ Certainly there is no lack of creatures masculine, but these are aggressively young, unbearded manlets, who consider they are conferring an honour by asking for one’s programme, whilst the boredom that twenty minutes of their society entails is little worse than the ignominy of sitting out a dance by yourself, and pretending that you are frightfully tired, or that your shoe pinches.⁸

ON FRIDAY 28 May 1909, Katharine and Nettie Higgins were at the annual meeting of the Literature Society of Melbourne when the president, Bernard O’Dowd, delivered a lecture called ‘The Poet Militant’ that became legendary. In Katharine’s account, ‘that night, blazing away at his thesis, O’Dowd was a lean, wild figure, unconscious of anything but what he had to say, and saying it with all the passion there was in him’.⁹ O’Dowd claimed that ‘contemporary poetry is saying nothing’ and the ‘misdirected energies of too many modern verse-writers are being wasted in making crazy quilts out of pretty words; while a hungry and thirsty world, deprived of so many of its traditional nurses, is languishing for the help the poets can give it’.¹⁰ The alternative was the poet as ‘an Answerer’ of the ‘real questions’ of the age, who wrote about ‘politics, religion, science, sex and social reform’.¹¹

In a tribute to him after his death in 1953 Katharine wrote, ‘He made such an impression on those of us who were beginning to think seriously that, upon leaving the meeting, we were almost too exalted and exhilarated to speak. I felt that my eyes had been opened to what I could do, as a writer to help relieve the woes of the world’.¹² The didactic play Katharine wrote around this time, The Burglar, may have been influenced by O’Dowd’s speech. Although it was followed by two romance novels, from Black Opal (1921) onwards her novels increasingly resembled what he called for—only in prose—such that her goldfields trilogy (1946–1950) is focused on politics and social reform; is frank in its treatment of sex; and also shows the ‘simplicity of form’ O’Dowd imagined.

AT THE HERALD Katharine became friends with William Moore, the art and drama critic. From 1909 to 1912 he organised four annual Australian drama nights in which ‘a group of enthusiastic amateurs would present a miscellany of one-acters in a hired hall’.¹³ The nights had an egalitarian ethos, with no division between classes of seats and an injunction, ‘Citizens in evening dress not admitted’. Although ‘with the passing of years this little enterprise has taken on something of a rosy halo’, these nights ‘gave a fillip to Australian dramatic writing, much needed at a time when the silent cinema was beginning to gobble up available audiences for entertainment’.¹⁴

Katharine was travelling back from London at the time of the first drama night in March 1909, but for the second on Wednesday 5 October 1910, her play The Burglar was one of three produced. The Burglar was presented first, followed by The Woman-Tamer, written by a friend of Moore’s, Louis Esson. The third play, The Tea-Room Girl, was by Moore. At the first rehearsal for The Burglar, Moore complained that the play wouldn’t work and so Katharine took over production, organising everything from casting to set production.¹⁵

On 8 February 1910, a burglar broke into Reay’s house in a wealthy suburb of Melbourne and stole £30 worth of jewellery.¹⁶ Perhaps the incident inspired the scenario for Katharine’s play. In The Burglar, Bill breaks into a bedroom only to be disturbed by the occupant, a young woman named Sally, who declares that she’s a socialist and has always promised herself she would, on request, give her belongings to anyone who had less than her. Working as a governess, Sally is engaged to a diamond merchant. Bill the burglar is curious enough to stop and listen to Sally’s opinions on the world. She gives a soliloquy reflecting Katharine’s frustrations with the world she was reporting on as a journalist:

Do you know there is nothing more unrespectable than so-called respectable society? It is a caucus of people who never think, and are stupid and cruel to those who do, who wear their beliefs like their skin, and cannot understand that what we believed yesterday we cannot today … Away with all stupid conventionalities, peradventures, and expediencies! I want to live in love with all the world, to kiss the children in the streets, to talk with whom I please, wander and play, sharing my purse with all who chance my way …

The play ends with a twist—Bill scrambles away, having sworn off burglary, and Sally reveals her fiancé entrusted her with diamonds for safekeeping which she has been hiding in her nightgown. ‘She drops her head on the table over the diamonds, weeping passionately.’ The diamonds she has protected represent a failure to live up to her own socialist ideals, the inevitable compromise a middle-class life involves.¹⁷

The brief reviews for The Burglar were mixed. The Age reported that ‘the matter was cleverly constructed, and the sentiments uttered excellent in their way’.¹⁸ The harshest review was published in the Worker, whose correspondent found Katharine’s play the weakest of the three, ‘too unnatural; the burglar horribly loquacious and given to excessive moralising. Fairly well acted’.¹⁹

Bernard O’Dowd probably liked Katharine’s play better. He was there that night and would have at least approved of her attempt to depict issues which mattered.²⁰

KATHARINE’S COLLABORATION WITH Louis Esson on that drama night was the beginning of a long friendship. Louis was born in 1878 and his biographer, Peter Fitzpatrick, writes that he was ‘an attractive and most unusual man, who bore the marks of enough romantic suffering to leave him touchingly vulnerable. He was witty and erudite, a gifted and admired writer with a clear and confident sense of purpose in his life’.²¹ On a visit to Europe in 1905, he had met the great Irish writer WB Yeats and been inspired to work towards the creation of a distinctly Australian theatre. He wrote a number of significant plays in the 1910s and 1920s before lapsing into literary silence, living the rest of his life in a cloud of depression. ‘The ennui was persistent, and often there seemed to be no cause in particular.’²² He was a foundation member of the Victorian Socialist Party in 1906, but in the years which followed he was to become less political as Katharine became more so.²³

In the lead up to the drama night Louis had split for the final time from his first wife, Madeleine.²⁴ He met his second wife, Hilda Bull, during the planning of the drama night. Katharine had written to her, ‘Bill Moore and Louis Esson are coming out to-night. Do come and help me with them darling!’²⁵ Katharine remembered Hilda was ‘looking very beautiful’ on that ‘very wild, wet, wintry night’.²⁶ Hilda and Louis were to marry in December 1913 while Katharine was back in London.

Katharine’s friendship with Louis was independent of Hilda, and she kept up with him even when he had separated, amicably, from Hilda. She valued his opinion of her work, sometimes sending drafts to him, and dedicating her first book of short stories, Kiss on the Lips and Other Stories (1932) to him. Paying tribute to him in 1943, Katharine mentioned his ‘gentle anonymity’ and described him as ‘generous in personal relationships: a man whose mind, vivid and intransigent where standards of art and literature were concerned, illumined every conversation’.²⁷

KATHARINE SUDDENLY RESIGNED from the Herald in the middle of 1910. The writer Mary Gilmore, who Katharine came to know in this period, had warned her she was ‘drawing on the Bank of Youth. Some day there’ll be an overdraft’.²⁸ Katharine wrote of the job, ‘I began to realize it was sapping my energy for creative writing. The experience had been invaluable as discipline and training for exact and condensed expression, but I became restless and dissatisfied because there was no time for the sort of writing I longed to do’.²⁹ A profile of Katharine closer to the time said that she ‘resigned in consequence of ill health’, which may have been the migraine headaches she suffered throughout her life during times of stress.³⁰

After resigning, Katharine spent some months in 1910 trying to eke out a living as a freelancer in Melbourne, but wasn’t making enough money. In October, just after The Burglar was performed at the Australian Drama Night, she took a ‘brief holiday’ in Sydney. She met an American journalist there, possibly Thomas Andrews, who was visiting from Milwaukee that month to cover a boxing match.³¹ He told her ‘of the wonderful opportunities and high prices paid for short-stories in the USA. With a swag of them, and some introductions from him, I sailed off across the Pacific, intending to make only a fleeting visit and return home in a few months’.³²

If the American journalist was one reason for Katharine’s impulsive trip to the United States, Reay was probably another one. Having been in Britain and Italy in the middle of 1910, he travelled on to New York, arriving there on 10 September.³³ Perhaps he invited or pressured her to join him there, talking up the prospect of another secret sojourn in a foreign city.

Katharine left Sydney on board the Zealandia on 24 October.³⁴ The ship stopped at Suva in Fiji for a day; Katharine had only ever lived in Levuka, on a different island, but ‘a breath from the land was strangely familiar: the warm dry air, smells of seaweed, copra, native matting and guavas. In a dream, I walked down the long wharf and into the town as if my brain had retained some impression of them’.³⁵

On 17 November, the Zealandia docked at Vancouver where Katharine spent just one night before beginning a long train journey across North America to New York on the east coast. She broke the train journey for a few days in Chicago, where she was inspired to hear a speech by Booker Washington, the African-American leader. Finally, she arrived in New York where Reay was presumably waiting for her.

Katharine’s most evocative description of the city comes through the eyes of Sophie in the novel Black Opal (1921): ‘A fairy city it had seemed to her with its sky-flung lights, thronged thoroughfares, and jangling bells. She saw a square of tall, flat-faced buildings before a park of leafless trees; shimmering streets on a wet night, near the New Theatre and the Little Opera House’.³⁶ But for Katharine, warned not to go walking alone as there was a murder every night, it was also a dangerous and unwelcoming place. It was freezing outside and overheated inside; the people were indifferent to her and she knew no-one. When her stories were rejected by an editor, she felt ‘naïve and stupid’ for embarking on her trip. She was running out of money and scared of being stranded in America. A fare to the United Kingdom was cheaper than to Australia, she wrote, so ‘I looked up the shipping news, and almost ran to the Cunard offices to book a second-class passage on the first liner leaving for Liverpool’.³⁷

Reay left New York on 28 December 1910 with a more positive impression of the United States, having ‘learned to admire the wonderful organised power of the great Republic, which he describes as the greatest present force in the world’.³⁸ He was on board the Lusitania, a Cunard ship, sailing for Liverpool. Also on the passenger list is a woman journalist, single, travelling second class, with an indecipherable name that could be ‘Kath Prichard’.³⁹ If it was her, after time together in New York and—more furtively—on board the Lusitania, they had a month in Britain before Reay left for Melbourne on 3 February 1911.

IN BLACK OPAL, Sophie also flees mysteriously to Sydney and then the United States. The stationmaster reports that ‘a girl in a black frock had taken a second-class ticket for Sydney’ and she was crying; she told him she was going away to study singing.⁴⁰ She sails on the Zealandia—the same ship as Katharine. Sophie eventually writes back home saying ‘when she had made a name for herself as a singer, she would come home to the Ridge to see them’.⁴¹ Sophie’s sojourn in America is much longer than Katharine’s, becoming the fictional site of the sexual and political awakenings of Katharine’s twenties. After finding success as a singer, Sophie is either seduced (1921 version) or raped (1946 version) by a playboy named Adler during a party on a yacht. Feeling ashamed, she decides that what happened was ‘just the natural consequences of all the easy, luxurious living I’d seen’.⁴² Following her ‘awakening’, she goes to live in a slum settlement in Chicago and works in a clothing factory as a kind of penance. Like Katharine, she hears Booker Washington speak there. Sophie’s sojourn of several years in the United States is only told within the novel in a few retrospective descriptions. There are no biographical specifics that can be unpicked from them but they suggest the mythical significance Katharine ascribed to her own visit to the United States.

KATHARINE WAS IN London again. Having left Melbourne in September 1910 for what she had told her family and friends would be a ‘brief holiday’ in Sydney, she was not to return for five years. ‘I was ready for a second assault on London, with more humility as to the chances of literary success than I had had on my first visit, but determined to earn my living somehow.’⁴³