24
Greenmount, 1929–1930
WHEN KATHARINE FINISHED writing Haxby’s Circus she was exhausted; her five-year creative peak had come to an end. ‘It became a choice of a holiday or a break down … and she, being a wise woman, chose the former.’1 On 18 July 1929, she set off on a three-month trip alone. She spent a fortnight at Broome and then a month in Malaya (now Singapore and Malaysia) and Indonesia. ‘Men are so sex hungry in the tropics that I’m afraid for you darling’, she wrote years later to her granddaughter. ‘You don’t know all the risks … I do—having been there, when I was not so young—and still a mark for predatory males.’ Among the ‘unpleasant happenings’ she endured was ‘going for a drive with an admirer and having to do the Gracie Field act—she fought like a tiger for her honour etc’.2 Katharine’s novel Moon of Desire (1941), a romance about pearlers, would eventually come out of her notes and memories of Broome and Malaya.
From Malaya, she sailed right around the top of Australia and down to Melbourne. There was a reunion of old friends on 4 October, when Katharine, the Palmers and the Essons met ‘over a sumptuous lobster meal, the sort of festival Hilda knows how to produce with miraculous speed and gaiety’. Nettie wrote of Katharine in her diary: ‘In spite of her long days of travel she looked radiantly alive, physically even more graceful than in the past, her mind teeming with impressions of odd characters, remembered bits of dialogue … She seems to be moving along very buoyantly on a full tide of assurance’.3
Katharine then took the train to Sydney where she spent time with Christian Jollie Smith, who’d moved there in 1924. Like Katharine, Christian had been working relentlessly for the Communist Party in the early 1920s only to fall ill, in her case with pleurisy. After her recovery, she was less involved with the party, concentrating instead on her legal career, specialising in divorce and industrial cases.4
Katharine had written to the poet Hugh McCrae from Singapore, requesting he have dinner with her on 7 October while she was in Sydney.5 McCrae has been described as ‘a man of great charm and attractiveness’ with a ‘Rabelaisian sense of humour’.6 They had first met in Melbourne in 1910; Katharine had been an ‘earnest’ admirer of his poetry but he ‘had no time for earnest admirers, just then’.7 In 1927, McCrae became joint editor of The New Triad with Ernest Watt. The short-lived magazine published Katharine’s story ‘The Cow’ in January 1928. In July 1928, Watt met Katharine while he was in Perth. They talked about McCrae’s poetry, which sparked Katharine’s first known letter to McCrae.
After dinner on 7 October, Katharine sent McCrae another note, the day before she was leaving Sydney, asking if he would meet her for dinner again. He did and he gave her a copy of his poetry collection, Satyrs and Sunlight (1928). Their intimate conversation was interrupted by someone trying to talk to them. ‘Could have murdered that young man to-night. Why wouldn’t he go?’ Katharine wrote to McCrae late that night. She stayed up reading his poems, writing:
Dear Beautiful, Wonderful Hugh—I’ve never loved anything in all my life as I love your book to-night. It’s almost too much. I can’t sleep till I say so. Have been pacing this small, stuffy room like one of the beasts you see at the zoo. I’ll never love anything so much. I’m sure. Nothing I’ve ever done is in the least worthy of you. I kneel beside your book & am lost in reverence & adoration.8
In the morning, McCrae came again to see her off on the train. ‘I remember you always as you appeared to me on the railway station’, he wrote to her later. ‘I mean at the moment before you entered the carriage finally. Once you had got in I seemed to have lost you; and I’ve wondered since whether I understood the intention of a gesture you made: a single movement … hardly to be described … never to be forgotten.’9 She signed off a later letter, ‘And so—with the spirit of that gesture you read so well, and I didn’t imagine you had ever seen—Katharine Susannah’.10 In another letter she told him, ‘Seeing you in Sydney will always be one of my best memories’.11 McCrae admitted candidly to Nettie, ‘last week, I fell pleasantly in love with Katharine Susannah … It is not so pleasant now; and I wonder if I shall get over it? Of course, she is ignorant of what I felt while I was talking to her; yet she is going to stay in my heart for ever’.12
Their letters grew more intimate and flirtatious, a four-year affair of the mind. Separated by the Nullarbor, if their relationship ever had a physical element, it could only possibly have been at the beginning during Katharine’s 1929 trip. In her last surviving letter to him years later, she refers to ‘whatever it was that bloomed between us for a while’.13 Was she unsure of what to call it, or circumspect?
Her feelings for him were intertwined with her literary admiration. When she was asked to give a lecture to the literary society at the University of Western Australia in 1931 on current Australian literature, she declared, ‘Hugh McCrae, in poetry or prose, is the supreme artist of words among us. He puts words under a spell to carry, colour, emotion, thought, flavour as nobody else does’.14
KATHARINE’S THREE-MONTH TRIP ended with her arrival by ship at Fremantle late at night on 22 October 1929. ‘Despite the hour,’ the Daily News reported, she ‘went straight to her picturesque home at Greenmount … When asked if she intended beginning work on a new book, Mrs. Throssell said, “Not for a long time; my holiday was purely for a rest, and I am not going to settle down to work yet”’.15
A week after her return, the Wall Street stock market crashed and the Roaring Twenties began to give way to the Great Depression. Western Australian unemployment rose from 9 per cent in September 1929 to 25 per cent at the end of 1930.16 During 1930, a thousand unemployed men were settled in the old army camp at Blackboy Hill in Greenmount, near the Throssells’ house.17 The Depression was coming close, and it was to come even closer.
FOR KATHARINE’S NEXT novel she had settled on the title of Intimate Strangers—borrowed from Hugo’s account of his romance with Henrietta Watson—before she had written any of it, mentioning it by name in a letter to Louis Esson in November 1928, intending ‘a study of the married relation, urban, and as close in as possible’.18 The tensions in her marriage had been a starting point for the novel and her experiences in 1929 shaped it further—a month-long holiday by the beach in Rockingham in January, the three-month trip without Hugo and Ric and her feelings for McCrae.
She began it in January 1929 before the Depression and finished the first draft at the height of it. The shift in the real world is mirrored in the atmosphere of the novel. The first half of the book is set on a four-week holiday at Calatta, a fictional beachside holiday suburb. As a setting, Calatta brought together two significant places in Katharine’s married life: the beach—especially Rockingham but also North Beach and Rottnest Island—and Wandu. Greenmount’s Wandu is fictionalised in the Hartog family’s house on the coast, Eendracht, the social centre of the holidayers at Calatta. Like Wandu, social life revolves around its tennis courts, bridge games, music and dancing; at the end of the novel, Eendracht is even to be turned into a guesthouse like Wandu.19
Elodie and Greg’s 15-year-old marriage is strained. Elodie lives with the disappointment of giving up a career as a musician when she fell pregnant a few years into their marriage; she now has two children to look after and a hopeless maid. ‘The mirage is breaking up’, Elodie murmurs on the beach early in the novel and Greg repeats the phrase. ‘He knew what Elodie was thinking as she said that, Greg told himself.’20 Greg is obsessed with Margaret ‘Dirk’ Hartog, an athletic young woman from an old Western Australian family fallen on hard times. Elodie has endured his flirtations with different women for years. Now she takes revenge, allowing herself to be charmed by Dirk’s worldly cousin, the sailor Jerome Hartog. She contemplates sailing away with him.
In the second half of the novel, Elodie and Greg return home to the suburb of South Perth as the Depression hits. First Greg’s income is reduced and then he is sacked; Elodie must become the breadwinner of the family, teaching music and playing at restaurants and nightclubs. Greg’s trauma as a war veteran is made explicit in a nightmare: ‘“God! It was awful,” he moaned, clinging to her, weak and distraught. “That first night in the trenches again … I was digging them out, Elodie, faces and arms and legs, smashed and putrid: then your face turned up …”’21 Paralleling Hugo’s problems during the Depression, unemployed Greg spends money recklessly. When he loses the family home, he writes a suicide note and takes out his service revolver, only to decide against going through with it.
In the lost first draft, completed before Katharine’s trip to the Soviet Union in 1933, Greg did kill himself. ‘When I returned home my husband had died like hers. It was too painful then to write of what had happened to me. I changed the end. My literary conscience failed the test, I suppose. So the book was a failure.’22
In the published version, the novel ends with Elodie and Greg unconvincingly converting simultaneously to communism, ‘the fire of a regenerating idea in which it seemed they would attain freedom and unity’.23 Katharine seeded the conversion by introducing a communist character, an Italian fisherman named Tony, as Dirk’s true love interest early in the novel. Later, Elodie and Dirk attend a rally of the unemployed in Fremantle and hear Tony declare that they must ‘organise against the Capitalist system which breeds unemployment and war’.24 Greg reveals in the final scene that, unbeknown to Elodie, he had ‘knocked round with the unemployed a good deal’ and now, inspired by Tony and Dirk’s parting words as they elope, he tells Elodie, ‘I’m thrilled with the idea that there’s a big job on hand building this new way of life … It’s like being born again’.25 By the time Katharine finished the novel, she had thrown herself back into the work of communism. She set out in Intimate Strangers to depict the ennui of middle-class life; by the end, she needed to announce the solution she had rediscovered.
Katharine wrote about sex more frankly in Intimate Strangers than anywhere else. Over and over, Intimate Strangers circles around the questions of finding sexual and personal fulfillment in marriage and out of it, with sexual attraction pulling people away from commitment. There is no simple lesson; the appeal and the problems of adultery are both presented. As in the earlier play Bid Me to Love, it is the wife who actually has sex with someone else while the flirtatious husband reveals he has stayed physically faithful. Elodie ‘had always believed a woman was not entitled to exclusive rights in a man; nor was he entitled to exclusive rights to her. She despised the frenzy for possession which afflicted so many lovers. There was something ignoble, ungenerous about it’.26 The climax of the novel has Elodie and Greg recommit themselves to each other at the same time as they applaud Dirk’s escape from her marriage. In the moral world of the novel, Dirk’s escape is permissible because her oppressive marriage mirrored that of the capitalist oppression of workers, her husband Ted controlling her money and beating her up.
In one incident, Greg is no better. Elodie won’t have sex with him while he’s infatuated with Dirk, telling him ‘I won’t be made use of’.27 Frustrated and insisting a man should not have to be a ‘eunuch’ in his own house, he rapes Elodie:
His head fell against her neck. He was kissing her arms and breast with the loose devouring mouth of rage and hunger.
‘Greg!’ Elodie besought moving away from him. He clung heavily, overpowering and crushing her. ‘Don’t, don’t! For God’s sake,’ she pleaded, ‘I’ll never forgive you.’
He laughed ruthlessly, undeterred, overwhelming and destroying her resistance. When she lay weakened and vanquished, he tried to be tender again, smoothed her hair: whispered, ‘Elodie… Elodie, darling.’
She lay limp, unresponsive: perspiration beading in tears all over her body. Her immobility, air of suffering, troubled him. She looked extraordinarily helpless, violated in some supreme way. He was really sorry for her.28
Rape in marriage was not legally recognised in Australia until decades later. The scene echoed the message of the Freewoman discussion circle when Katharine was in London. She put that message of the circle directly into the mouth of another character, the more enlightened Jerome: ‘Marriage is a business contract … A woman sells out all sexual rights in herself for maintenance, and a man insures to himself a vicarious immortality for himself through his progeny’.29 Another instance of rape in marriage in a later work—The Roaring Nineties (1946)—reinforces its significance for Katharine. In that scene, Sally and Morris are prospecting at a goldrush when, at night, he ‘flung himself upon her’ in their tent, ‘the crude, vicious copulation … an outrage he had committed against their love’.30
Disingenuously, Katharine claimed Intimate Strangers ‘was a simple story of two friends who recognised themselves immediately when they read the book’.31 Decades later, Ric Throssell, frustrated at autobiographical readings of the novel, named the friends as Les and Rose Atkinson.32
Four years younger than Katharine, Rose was a musician like her fictional counterpart. A newspaper article profiled her at the time Katharine was writing the novel:
Mrs Atkinson has had a varied and interesting life. She was connected with the theatre and dramatic art for some time, and later was associated with the Melba Conservatorium. She was slow to decide upon her actual work in life, because she is intensely interested in her fellow creatures. She is perhaps, above all things, a lover of beauty, and in her various ventures has managed to include some form of music—of singing or instrumental work.33
Like Elodie, Rose seems to have given up the chance for a professional career in music with the birth of her two children. In another similarity to Elodie, the Depression provoked a new interest in social issues for Rose and she worked in both advocacy and practical help for young unemployed women.
Les Atkinson was a teacher, not an office worker like Greg, and he doesn’t seem to have served in the Great War; both of these aspects of Greg’s character are closer to Hugo. Greg is a frustrated artist, something neither Hugo nor Les were, although Les was an amateur writer, contributing ‘light verse to the local press … and articles on children under the name of “Diminie Dee”’.34 Greg is not convincingly artistic; his art reads like a character element Katharine has grafted on awkwardly. Even if Katharine intended Greg to resemble Les, he talks and acts a lot like Hugo. Ric writes, ‘I cannot help seeing much of my father in Greg … in his charm, something about the way he is described, his pride in his physique, his flirtatiousness’.35
Echoing the beach setting of Intimate Strangers, the Atkinsons had a holiday shack in the bush near North Beach where the Throssells stayed with them at least once.36 The Throssells may have come to know the couple at Wandu; in July 1927, Rose starred with Hugo in a night of ‘mirth, dancing, and music’ put on by the Wandu Dramatic Society.37 The Atkinsons’ friendship with Katharine survived them reading the novel and recognising themselves as Greg and Elodie; incidental references to the couple in Katharine’s letters to Ric continue into the 1950s. Although the troubled marriage portrayed in Intimate Strangers seems destined to end in divorce, in real life Les and Rose remained married until Les died in 1963, at least apparently living out the unlikely happy ending Katharine gave Greg and Elodie.
Despite the fictionalisations of Intimate Strangers, the echoes of Katharine and Hugo’s marriage from 1929 to 1933 are too loud to ignore. After the beach holiday, Elodie spends months contemplating leaving her family behind and running away with Jerome Hartog to Asia, calling to mind Katharine’s long trip by herself in 1929 which culminated in meeting Hugh McCrae. McCrae obviously wasn’t present at Katharine’s January 1929 holiday in Rockingham but a letter she wrote to him in 1932 when she returned to Rockingham strengthens the association between her memories of the beach holiday and McCrae:
Walked six miles, along the edge of the sea, barefoot & drenched with spray, after crossing from the island. Dried my clo’[thes] behind a sand dune & went to sleep – again—on hot white sand. Sheltered from the sea breeze: stiff aromatically fragrant shrubs all round. Called to see Prospero, an old Genovese fisherman whose shack of driftwood stands in scrub, back from Cape Peron. He used to play to me on his steel guitar, for hours, when we were here, three years ago: and bawl arias from the operas in a great hoarse voice. But when I knocked & called nobody answered. I opened the door & the hut was empty. ‘Prospero—he died two years ago,’ men at the nearest camp told me. Sat yarning with them awhile in their boatshed. Anita & and an old Irishman who have lived there together for thirty years. The Italian is one of the Medici who has taken the simple life builds boats & mends them; goes fishing, has a queer aristocratic anarchist philosophy, and exquisite manners.
A gorgeous day! Would you have liked to be with me? I wonder.38
Katharine wrote directly about Prospero the Italian fisherman in Intimate Strangers, not even changing his name; she has Elodie and Jerome meet at his hut.
Intimate Strangers languished while Katharine became preoccupied with party work throughout 1931 and 1932. She had finished a draft when she left for London in May 1933, but she didn’t feel confident about it, telling Nettie, ‘my book still in the rough & feel as if it will never be done now’. Her headaches were making it hard to write. ‘I hate not being able to work—like hell. Tons of stuff to do & only a damaged ache to do it with.’39 Intimate Strangers was not to be published until 1937.
ON 11 NOVEMBER 1929, soon after Katharine returned from her long trip, Colonel WT Reay died in a London hospital at age seventy-one. His wife and daughters had been living in Australia for years. Two of his daughters, but not his wife, had set off for London when they heard he was ill; they did not make it in time to see him. Since the end of the war he had put his energy into reorganising the special constabulary ‘to deal with Communistic or other emergencies’, an ironic contrast with Katharine’s political radicalisation in the same period.40
In Katharine’s 1929 notebook for Intimate Strangers, she seems to have transcribed Reay’s final letter, perhaps as a way to preserve it while making it harder for Hugo to find:
The last letter to K.
(After ten years—in memoriam)
My exquisite and adored K—
Some people believe in the second coming of Christ. I have prayed for the second coming of K. But I am old and ill now, and begin to fear I shall never see your dear face again.
Has he made you happy?
I was afraid he would not.41
January 1929 marked ten years since Katharine’s telegram to Reay announcing her marriage to Hugo. Did she write back? What could she possibly say, when Hugo had ended Reay’s lingering hold over her only to bring new kinds of miseries into her life?