23

The Circus

1917–1930

AT AGE NINE, Katharine was captivated when Fillis’s Circus visited Launceston and she decided she wanted to be an acrobat. Another encounter when she was twenty-three and housekeeping for her brother Nigel in Pyramid Hill sparked a literary interest in the circus. On the night of 10 November 1917, a trapeze artist named Lizzie Perry was performing with Perry’s Circus in nearby Leitchville. ‘The young lady was executing one of her most skilful and difficult movements when she fell headlong to the ground.’¹ It was feared her back was broken and she was driven 30 kilometres to Nigel’s place. When she arrived, only Katharine was home. Katharine wrote:

I had to sit with her until Nigel returned from visiting a patient. The girl’s agony and the spirit with which she endured it made a deep impression on my mind. Although, when he came, Nigel relieved her pain by injections of morphia and arranged to drive her to the hospital in Bendigo for an X-ray, I was too distressed even to go out and say goodbye to her. After talking to her father, though, I resolved, some day, to write a story about her. She became the Gina of Haxby’s Circus.²

Katharine fictionalised that night in the novel, a car carrying the wounded acrobat, Gina, over a road agonisingly ‘full of ruts and old roots’ to the ‘cottage hospital’, only for the unnamed sister of the doctor to tell them he is out on another call. In her delirium, the acrobat thinks the doctor’s sister is her own sister.³

It was another decade before she began work on Haxby’s Circus after seeing a performance by Wirth’s Circus at Midland on 5 September 1927. She and Hugo were there with 5-year-old Ric. The advertisement declared:

COMING BY THREE SPECIAL TRAINS

In all its Glorious Splendour and Opulent Vastness

WIRTH BROS. LIMITED

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

All New Circus, all New White Waterproof Tents, Menagerie, and Huge Elephant Herd …

Great Grizzlies that ride bicycles and scooters; that walk on stilts; that skim on skates; bears that amaze and amuse.

And in conjunction with Wirth’s stock company of Acrobats, Animal Trainers, Clowns, Jockeys, Equestriennes, Horses, Ponies and Trained Wild Animals.

101 Wondrous Sights and Novelties. The Best and Biggest Show ever seen in Australia!⁴

During the performance she told Hugo that she wished she could travel with the circus to research it and after the show Hugo approached the owner, Philip Wirth, who agreed to the request. She packed quickly that night and took the train the next morning to meet Wirth’s at Moora, north of Perth, where they performed that night.⁵

Katharine travelled with the circus for two weeks as they put on shows at ten towns across the Wheatbelt and Mid West. Travelling on their own train, the route Wirth’s Circus took was guided by the extensive railway networks then in place across Western Australia:

From Moora, Carnamah, Mingenew, the circus train goes to Geraldton, returning by Mullewa, Dalwallinu, Wongan Hills, Goomalling, Northam, and Merredin, showing in each town for a night, and travelling during the night. Arriving at dawn in a town, the tents, by a miracle of organisation, are up in a few hours, and in the same way, when the show is over, within an hour they have collapsed and disappear again.⁶

The train ‘was nearly a quarter of a mile long’ with ‘a retinue of about a hundred and twenty people’.⁷ The shows were well attended, Katharine reporting that there would be ‘a thousand people appearing from nowhere in towns which appear to be made up of only a post office, hotel, and half a dozen shops’.⁸

Katharine was fascinated by Philip Wirth, writing that ‘thrones and chancelleries of Europe may be tottering, but no one doubts the absolute monarchy of Mr Philip Wirth in the cosmos of the circus’. He was soon to retire and she described him training an equestrian performer for the last time—his own daughter.⁹

Katharine recalled of her time with Wirth’s:

They called me the Assistant Lion Tamer. The chief one permitted me to stay in the menagerie while he trained them. It was a special privilege. Nobody else had it. I slept in the circus train but he slept beside his lions. It was a hard time for me. I wasn’t allowed to smoke a cigarette all the time. The circus proprietor put me on my honor not to corrupt his little girls by teaching them to smoke.¹⁰

One of those ‘girls’, Doris Wirth, remembered that Katharine ‘was sorry to leave it, because she had quite a good time with us. We travel by special train, you know, and she had a compartment to herself. She took all her characters from the circus—the dwarf and everybody. No, they didn’t mind, they liked her so much’.¹¹

The circus Katharine depicts in her novel begins more like Perry’s Circus in 1917—much smaller and more worn out than Wirth’s, consisting of one family with a few extra hands and certainly no train of its own.¹² At the mid-point of the novel, Dan Haxby, the circus owner, reflects:

These days, what with picture shows and motor cars, the visit of a troupe of acrobats and riders, such as Haxby’s, did not attract the crowds in up-country towns it used to. Besides there was nothing new or original about the show. It was very much what it had been ten years ago, second or third rate as compared with great circuses like Wirth’s which travelled on its own train, using ten elephants, an imposing menagerie and company of performers, tent hands, keepers and grooms.¹³

Already by the end of the 1920s, Katharine was aware that the golden age of circuses had come to an end. One reviewer, Katharine’s old journalist friend Freda Barrymore (nee Sternberg), wrote, ‘it looks as if the “Talkies” are having a reactionary effect … Many novelists are collecting material from old time entertainments, such as the circus, and the public is collecting the books built up on them in the same spirit as it seeks out antique furniture’.¹⁴ Only bigger circuses like Wirth’s were flourishing, and, echoing this in the novel, Haxby’s nearly folds, only surviving because Gina, the protagonist, inherits a fortune and brings it up to the level of Wirth’s. The transformation of Haxby’s links the two experiences of circuses Katharine was writing about, the revamped circus towards the end of the novel giving her a chance to describe a circus like the grander one she travelled with.

Wirth’s traditionally returned to Melbourne every October in time for the Melbourne Cup, opening for a season at their permanent venue, Olympia, on St Kilda Road—a large complex which included the Green Mill Dance Hall.¹⁵ A month after travelling with Wirth’s, Katharine was also in Melbourne with Hugo; Louis Esson wrote that she ‘gave an extraordinary party’ at the Green Mill to thank Wirth’s performers and crew. ‘They were interesting people of different nationalities, American, German, Danish, Norsemen, trapeze artists, bear-tamers, head balancers, mixed in with … highbrows. The ladies were delightful; and there was dancing, and an elegant supper’.¹⁶ Starting after their performance finished at half past ten, it would have been a late night.

The Throssells became friends with the Wirths, especially Philip’s daughters, Gladys and Madeline. ‘There was always the best ring-side tickets at the gate for the family when the circus came into town, and the most expensive and luxurious gifts for Katharine and Jim’s son: a carved performing bear, a whole box of forbidden chewing gum, a mantel radio, and … a black Timor pony.’¹⁷ Katharine’s friend, Annette Cameron, remembers that in the 1960s ‘when the circus came to Perth, Katharine and I went to it, she was still an honoured guest there and we went back and talked with the performers afterwards’.¹⁸

BY APRIL 1928, Katharine had written three quarters of the circus novel—then titled Fay’s Circus—when Coonardoo seized her imagination and she put the unfinished manuscript aside.¹⁹ In December 1928, Katharine’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, announced a novel competition with a prize of £1000 and the possibility of an additional US$4000 advance on royalties from Harper.²⁰ Entries were closing 31 August 1929. Spurred on again by a competition, Katharine returned to work on Haxby’s Circus. She had the novel plotted out, but as the deadline loomed Ric and her nephew Bill ‘were having mumps and measles all round me and I couldn’t give time’ so she dropped some of the planned chapters.²¹

Despite travelling through Western Australia with Wirth’s Circus, Katharine set the novel largely in Victoria. There are only a few glimpses of Melbourne; it is the regional areas that Haxby’s Circus travels through. Katharine drew on her memories and notes of the Dandenongs, the Victorian Goldfields, and especially Gippsland, from South Gippsland near Yarram and up to Mallacoota in East Gippsland where she had stayed on her journey to Lightning Ridge in 1916. Towards the end, she describes journeys much further afield through New South Wales and as far north as Townsville in Queensland, and over to Western Australia. It is a novel which engages her love of travel and the backblocks of Australia.

There aren’t obvious autobiographical elements in Haxby’s Circus, but it is a story of women’s lives. Katharine was forty-four and forty-five as she wrote the novel, two ages she specifically gives to characters in the novel. First, it is Gina’s pregnant mother: ‘Mrs. Haxby was no more than forty-four; but she looked twice that age. Her small square face was weathered and tanned; her grey eyes so flat and unemotional usually, had a light from within now, the luminousness of another soul looking through her’.²² Gina, in reaction to her mother’s enslavement to fertility and self-conscious of her deformed back, decides to live her life free of men, avoiding romance in her twenties and thirties. Then, entering her forties, she embarks on a series of casual sexual encounters, ‘suffering some deep dissatisfaction, unrest and discouragement with life’.²³ ‘I hate age. People are like fruit, they rot as they grow older or wither up. The world would be a more beautiful place if young and vigorous people ruled it—with their generosity and impulses. Not the old by their weakness, and fear—’. She has a long conversation with her brother-in-law, Jack, about the meaning of life, saying how her friend, Billy Rocca the dwarf, once told her life was a three-volume novel:

‘Billy was right after all. He said … “The first’s the book of ideals and illusions; the second’s the book of realities and noble resolutions; the third’s the book of the senses and breakdown of the will.” I think he was right, Jack. It’s the third book I’m up to now.’

Jack helps her break out of her ennui, telling her, ‘we’ve got to keep fighting—even if there’s nothing worth fighting for’. She agrees and decides to resist the cruelty and meaninglessness of the world by running the circus well and turning herself into a spectacle as a clown, ‘making herself grotesque and hideous to get the brittle crashing merriment of the crowd’. At forty-five she had reached a kind of peace with the world, ‘more placid, good-humoured and jolly’.²⁴

Gina’s transformation from a young and beautiful acrobat to an ageing, humpbacked clown was written as Katharine came to terms with her own ageing. Her hair was greying and she had let slide the ideals of her twenties and thirties for the realities of middle-class married life. She was writing at a time when her return to active political involvement wasn’t in sight. Living a comfortable middle-class life at odds with her beliefs, in her mid-forties Katharine likely shared some of Gina’s crisis of meaning.

IN DECEMBER 1929 The Seventh Gate by British writer Muriel Harris was announced as the winner of the Jonathan Cape Novel Competition. Cape wrote to Katharine offering a contract for publication and advising that her entry ‘was within an ace of getting the prize. We had over 600 manuscripts submitted and Fay’s Circus got into the last six’. Cape insisted on retitling the novel, worried that ‘Fay would be thought of as a girl’s name’ and ‘an old-fashioned English surname’ was required.²⁵ Katharine asked for a delay of a few months to add the unwritten chapters—‘four or five’ in her estimate—that she had skipped when Ric and Bill were sick. Cape rejected the request and the British edition of the novel was published in July 1930.

About the time the British edition was published, Katharine was waiting to hear back from William Norton about whether he wanted to publish a US edition. Norton wrote, ‘I sat up till 3 a.m. reading Fay’s Circus and then hardly slept the rest of the night for the heavy smell of the animals and for fear I would do a flying header from a trapeze’. He finished his letter ‘pledging his word to back it to the limit’.²⁶ He was also willing to restore Katharine’s original title.

Norton had asked for a reader’s report on Fay’s Circus from the critic Hartley Grattan, who wrote, ‘Miss Prichard continues to amaze me with her ability to live into diverse situations and I am more sure than ever that I was right in calling her the hope of the Australian novel’. However, he went on to say, ‘she has a bad habit of writing too rapidly and too carelessly. If she could be persuaded, in some delicate fashion, that her work would be more enduring if she spent a few weeks on it with a blue pencil, I am sure it would be extremely profitable’.²⁷ It was a criticism of Katharine’s writing made by others, too. Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson had read Working Bullocks and Coonardoo by February 1930 when she wrote to a friend, with typical harshness:

KP ought to sit down for three years & give her mind to improving her style & learning to punctuate. Anything so horrible as her punctuation I’ve never met with. (Norton remarked on it, too.) She throws commas about as old fashioned letter-writers used to make free with dashes. And has absolutely no feeling about separating her subject from her verb. All this makes a truly illiterate impression.

But the woman has much talent, & insight, & might under certain circumstances, become Australia’s chief novelist.²⁸

Katharine reacted defensively when such criticisms reached her but despite her insistence that she carefully edited, many of her novels were written in a hurry for competition deadlines while juggling other responsibilities. Driven by deadlines like the journalist she had once been, she wrote quickly in bursts of inspiration, many drafts produced in just months and not substantially rewritten.

Grattan also mentioned a structural problem: the abrupt change in the circus’s fortunes from the depths of despair to sudden flourishing when Gina receives a bequest from Billy Rocca. He had put his finger on the gap in the novel, the section Katharine had run out of time to write. Norton gave her the time she needed to complete the missing section—in the end, one and a half chapters of 9700 words. Putting too much stock in Hugo’s literary judgement, she read the chapters to him for his opinion. He didn’t like them and she told Norton she came close to dropping them. ‘The trouble is that having my mind set to the mould of the book, it is difficult to disintegrate and live those phases again. I do not know whether you will like them.’²⁹ The critic Carol Hetherington writes that the added material not only ‘significantly improves the structure of the novel but also enriches and extends the broader canvas of the story’.³⁰ Katharine expressed her own preference for the American edition but the many reprints of the novel have followed the earlier British edition. When Angus and Robertson sent a copy of the first paperback reprint in 1945, she replied that she wished she had ‘thought of giving you a copy of the American edition to print from’, only for the oversight to be perpetuated in all the subsequent reprints.³¹

Despite Norton’s pledge to back it, Fay’s Circus was only moderately successful. Norton reported in May 1931 that it ‘is getting good press and a fair sale; not quite as good press as Coonardoo and perhaps not quite such a good sale either. But after all, these are bad book times and nothing is selling in anything more than a limited way. Sorry not to write you more cheerful news but to a realist realism goes without saying’.³² The New York Times review called it a ‘tedious’ book; Katharine wrote, ‘It’s the only thoroughly mean review of my work I’ve ever seen’.³³ Fay’s Circus proved to be her final novel published in the United States in her lifetime.

The champion of Haxby’s Circus was Perth writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman. Her long, glowing review in the Daily News judged it ‘the best and most moving story she has yet written’. Henrietta praised ‘the masterly fashion in which she makes one aware of the essential gallantry that lies somewhere in most human souls’. The characterisation was ‘living’ and the painting of Australian scenery ‘brilliant’. ‘One lays down Haxby’s Circus feeling the richer for reading it, perhaps even a little less bitter over the frequent injustices of life, and certainly more ready to try to extend a friendlier sympathy to all those who bravely face the world in misshapen bodies.’ Her one criticism of the novel was the lack of ‘even a passing mention of the war’.³⁴ Later, she would write, ‘Haxby’s Circus becomes the most universally compassionate of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s novels. The circus represents life itself: the show that goes on, no matter what struggles, joys, disasters, overtake the individual’.³⁵