26
London and Russia, 1933
‘THIS IS A dull ship—and dirty’, Katharine wrote to Hugh McCrae from the SS Baradine, ‘but I sit alone [on] millions of miles of sparkling blue sea & think to you’.
I was so tired when I came on board. Slept for two days & three nights. And there was a storm. I wakened just to look at it & try to take a walk, but had to do it rushing from pillar to post—waves crashing over the deck. Smoking-room corridors smashed & sea slopping in through the works.
So the move of the sea did not afflict me. I just slept & on the third day, awoke feeling so fit that I ran along the deck & did some physical jerks for sheer joy. It being dawn & nobody but me … about.1
All through the trip, her head and heart were full of McCrae. ‘Always & always, I think of you, Hugh dear! Have a sense of you with me.’ As she travelled up the Red Sea, she wrote to him that she was ‘was exclaiming to you, at the black mountains, a full moon, all Arabia behind’.2 She hoped desperately there would be a letter from him waiting for her in London.
She wrote a letter to Hugo about the same time, echoing her words to McCrae and remembering that he travelled the same route during the war. ‘A full moon over the black mountains, the three cornered sails of dhows … made me think of my own dear man & how he had seen & known all these things. How I wanted him … No one else worth while!’3
On a stopover at the Red Sea port of Aden, she explored the city with a fellow passenger, an unnamed young woman. The woman offered to buy Katharine a shawl and a necklace; Katharine refused but accepted a gift of ‘the most delicious cigarettes & Turkish Delight’. Katharine wrote to Hugo that she didn’t have enough money to reciprocate ‘My sobriquet is “stingey”!’4
She reached London on 22 June 1933. ‘London is more of a precocious beast than ever. I feel like a small wild cat in its jaws—all of a dither & frantic to escape.’5 Her publisher, Jonathan Cape, put on a luncheon in her honour. She remembered proudly:
Edward Garnett, the distinguished English critic, sat beside me.
‘If Cape takes my advice,’ he said, ‘he will publish everything you write.’
‘I have already come to that conclusion,’ Jonathan Cape replied. It was an unforgettable occasion.6
It may have been at the luncheon that she met Henry Handel Richardson, the expatriate Australian novelist, who had been privately scathing of Kiss on the Lips the previous year. Richardson—very recently widowed—invited Katharine to visit her. With the acclaim given to Richardson’s Ultima Thule (1929), she had eclipsed Katharine in the perception of critics as the most important Australian novelist of the moment. They had a friend in common—Nettie Palmer—who had been corresponding with Richardson and become a strong advocate of her work. Katharine had read Ultima Thule in early 1930 and told Nettie she was ‘all veneration for it. A great & fine piece of work. Utterly beautiful’. But reading it caused Katharine to feel the tension between her literary nationalism and her communist commitment to internationalism:
I still feel that HHR writes of Australia as a stranger—not one of us really … I hate her attitude to the life of a little up-country town for instance, it’s so thoroughly English. No Australian could feel so superior to people who, after all, are creatures of their environment. There is some talk of Henry Handel Richardson doing an introduction to Haxby’s Circus. I would much rather she did not because I feel that we have nothing in common. I so passionately love the country & am of it—& she belongs to other conditions & probably feels a little superior to my soil besottedness. She is right no doubt. Literature should have no country. But I can’t help it. I care first for interpretations of this place—& will, with my eyes open, barter international reputation to give Australia as it is, or as I see it, to the world. If HHR loved Australia & lived here, I would be at her feet. As she doesn’t, I can’t quite believe in her as Australian.7
Despite Katharine feeling they had ‘nothing’ in common, they warmed to each other when they met in person. ‘I thought her a charming woman, & quite unspoiled’, wrote Richardson. ‘I saw her books in her’.8 The two hoped to stay in touch, with Richardson writing to Katharine the next year, ‘Though our glimpse of each other was so brief, write to me sometimes & tell me what you are thinking & doing’.9
On 7 July, Katharine went to Paris for a couple of weeks with her sister, Beatrice, and niece, Thea. While there, she signed a contract for a French translation of Coonardoo but for some reason, the translation did not eventuate and it was not until 1991 that one was published.10 Nor did Katharine’s other literary hopes for the trip come to pass. Like so many film projects, a much-publicised production of Haxby’s Circus did not proceed. William Norton, her American publisher, was not in London at quite the same time. He suggested she return to Australia via America so they could finally meet and she was contemplating doing so.11 As it happened, she did not and he decided not to publish Kiss on the Lips or, later, Intimate Strangers.
According to Katharine’s ASIO file, she contacted the Communist Party headquarters in London, probably to arrange a trip to the Soviet Union. ‘Following this she left for Leningrad with George HARDY a well known Communist.’12 After reaching Leningrad by ship, she took a train to Moscow.
‘Making my own wilful way’, Katharine wrote, insisting on the independence of her tour and thus the objectivity of her reporting, ‘I roamed about by myself, during my first days in Moscow. Nobody suggested what I should do; where I should go. I just arrived and proceeded … feeling rather a motherless foal, so dazzled and bewildered by the beauty and strangeness of everything’.13 The Real Russia (1934), Katharine’s book about her travels through the Soviet Union, is an impersonal account. Scholar Jeff Sparrow classifies it as a Stalinist travel narrative, in which the invisible narrator brings back to the West the good news about the utopian transformation of everyday life in the communist state. ‘The book is a memoir, but it is not about her.’14 She came to witness the ideals of communism put into practice, but the revolution of 1917 had been followed by years of civil war and now the brutality of Joseph Stalin’s regime. Under Stalin in 1933, there was lip service to communist ideals but tight control over people’s lives and millions dying of starvation in Soviet Ukraine as forced collectivisation of farming led to famine. The signs of the betrayal of communism were there for visitors to notice if they looked critically. Yet for those like Katharine who wanted to believe, there were things to admire—economic development, advances in education and health, well-funded arts, and a veneer of egalitarianism. If she had misgivings, she suppressed them.
She made a pilgrimage to visit the body of Vladimir Lenin, architect of the Bolshevik Revolution. ‘Processions of children are seen, with a teacher, going to visit him where he lies in the small square temple of red granite … Frail and gentle he looks, lying asleep in his everyday clothes … his long, delicate hands lie outstretched beside him.’ Disingenuously, she claimed, ‘he is an ordinary everyday person to them, not a saint of any sort—just Uncle Lenin who helped the Russian working-class to organise for the revolution which has given the children schools and school dining-rooms, factories, theatres and flats in the new model dwellings where they live with their parents’. In focusing on the children’s reactions, she avoided reporting her own, but her reverence is apparent.15
In one chapter of The Real Russia, Katharine describes, approvingly, the chistka—purge trials—she witnessed. Communist Party members were interrogated over their personal histories and held to account for accusations brought by their fellow workers—from having a ‘swelled [sic] head’ to fraudulently claiming sick leave. ‘The 1933 chiska [sic], which is not yet concluded, has been drastic and searching, clearing out of the Party all members whose light does not shine by their works.’16 At this stage of the Stalinist purges, members found guilty were expelled from the party or demoted rather than imprisoned or executed; how would Katharine have reported the murderous Great Purge if she’d been in Russia in 1936?
Originally, Katharine checked in to stay at the Hotel Lux. On 3 August, she turned up at Guido and Betty Roland’s place; they were subletting a single large room. Betty remembered that Katharine was unhappy about the atmosphere of the hotel and ‘in true Moscow fashion’, they ‘suggested to Katharine that she move in with us’. The bed had two mattresses and they took one off and put it in the corner for Katharine to sleep on. Guido was working at his desk each night until midnight, and so Katharine and Betty both slept with umbrellas shading them from the light. ‘I hope she is not aware’, Betty wrote, ‘that the situation acts like an aphrodisiac on Guido. I beg him to restrain himself but this has no effect … I trust that she is sound asleep by the time he … comes to bed’.17
Betty wasn’t jealous of Katharine; she was more worried about Guido’s estranged second wife, Neura, who he was still in love with.18 She found Katharine ‘a serene person with a soft voice and a gentle smile; even in this short time I have grown to like her very much’. However, she and Guido didn’t see much of her over the three weeks she stayed with them; ‘Katharine is very much persona grata here, being an important member of the CP [Communist Party] in Australia … She is being taken to a lot of interesting places and is meeting important people’.19 At the end of August, Guido and Betty farewelled her as they left for Leningrad where Guido was to establish an English-language list for a publishing house.20
At the same time, Katharine headed south to the city of Armavir, where she joined the kino train. The kino train had begun the previous year as the brainchild of the famous Soviet filmmaker, Alexander Medvedkin, under the oversight of the Central Committee. The kino train encouraged or shamed farmers to meet the targets of the Five Year Plan by a frenzied process of producing ‘film-newspapers’ for each place they visited, reflecting the community’s work and lives back to them.21 Katharine wrote approvingly about the kino train in The Real Russia, ignoring the famine and deportations that were part of the forced collectivisation it was promoting. ‘Films are made on the backward collectives … with close-ups, giving the names of lazy or careless workers, and kulaks who have intrigued against successful development of the Kolkhoz.’22 The experience was an immersion for her in film as propaganda, a demonstration of how an artform could be used for political purposes.
Her experience of Soviet theatre was also formative. Australia struggled to stage local plays and she was impressed by the many productions she saw in Russia, all of them responding in different ways to the revolution and life in the Soviet state. No longer a commercial enterprise, Russian productions ‘convey life and reality without mawkish sentiment, sensational trickery, or a beating-up of thwarted sexuality’.23 She was thrilled by a production of Maxim Gorky’s The Mother, the small theatre ‘filled to suffocation’, the barriers between audience and stage broken down. She also praised a play directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, quoting approvingly his declaration, ‘Art cannot be non-political … a proletarian dictatorship must develop its own forms of expression in the theatre, in literature, in painting and drawing’.24 Meyerhold, however, was already under suspicion in Stalinist Russia for his ‘flagrant modernism’; in 1938 his theatre was shut down and he was arrested on charges of Trotskyism and espionage, before being shot on 2 February 1940 and his name written out of official Soviet history.25
On 11 September, Katharine departed on a tour to Siberia with three other writers: ‘Walt Carmon, a brilliant, cynical American journalist; Sigvard Lund, a Danish writer, blonde and powerful; Helios Gómez, a Spanish artist and poet, as handsome as Valentino, and Scherer, our interpreter, a Russian, but not a Communist’.26 Speaking a mix of English, French, Spanish and German, along with their ‘odds and ends of Russian’, Katharine wrote, ‘we were a very gay and comradely party, disagreeing violently in all our languages when occasion arose’. They travelled for five days on a train, Katharine in a luxurious cabin with a writing table and her own toilet, before reaching Stalinsk—now called Novokuznetsk—in south-western Siberia.27 ‘Stalinsk, the city of steel’, she wrote, ‘flaming to the sky with its towering chimneys, mammoth silos welding the sinews of a new civilisation in Siberia’.28
As part of the journey, Katharine visited the house where the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky lived for a time—probably in Semipalatinsk (now called Semey and part of Kazakhstan) where he was sent after years in a Siberian labour camp. Afterwards, she read his semi-autobiographical novel based on the experiences, The House of the Dead (1862). She commented to a Soviet correspondent in 1956, ‘So strange that a man who could depict misery and injustices with such power, was yet lacking in recognition of the innate goodness and genius of mankind to forge a way that would rid it of the oppressions which caused so much misery and injustice!’29 But of course, Dostoevsky’s pessimistic vision was far more relevant to Stalinist Russia than Katharine could see.
Snow started falling as they left a factory tour in Siberia and Scherer, their interpreter, said the forecast was for an early winter.
Carmon swore in his best American and huddled into his big overcoat; Lund strode away taking the snow on his powerful shoulders; Gomez set off at a run, singing one of his ribald Spanish ditties; I trudged along in my rubber boots and red silk raincoat (made in the Soviet Union) delighted to think for all the autumn sunshine and golden birch woods, we were going to see something of Siberian snow and ice after all.30
She sent Ric a postcard on 2 October saying, ‘These beautiful hills are all covered with snow now & people go about in big fur coats with fur caps over their ears. Love & kisses darling, & I’ll be coming home soon now’.31 She had contradictory feelings about the weather, having written in a letter before she left for Siberia, ‘I’m beginning to feel homesick. It rains every day & already is so cold’.32
Returning to Moscow on 14 October, Katharine received three letters from Hugo and two from Ric.33 In Hugo’s final surviving letter, he had woken early on 21 August to write to her and gave an upbeat account of things at home. He had started a rodeo show on their property and it was hard work but so many people were coming he had decided to continue running the show every Sunday:
One thing that I want [to] impress on you is not to hurry home and to take every advantage of getting the information you want.
Then when you do decide to honour us again, take [American publisher William] Norton’s tip and invitation, and return via New York. We are so well and happy that it would be a thousand pities for you to tear back and not see something of Hollywood and the doings which will be so helpful to you and your work, and don’t forget that if your reports of the Bolshies is a favourable one, that the wise guys will only be too ready to say that you scampered through the place in 5 minutes and could not possibly be in a position to form any opinion of the working conditions of such a vast country.
He finished his letter with, ‘The sweetpeas are out, wattle almost finished, and the first boronia goes with this for good luck. The only complaints I have are that your jam cupboard is getting down pretty low so see to it Madam’.34
Katharine spent three more weeks in Moscow. She made two radio broadcasts on a short-wave station and was desperate for Hugo and Ric to hear them. She wrote to Ric on 2 November:
I wonder did you hear me on the air, last night. It would be about 9 o’clock in the morning in Australia. You should have been listening. I know Daddy would have tried very hard to hear the broadcast. I sent him 2 wires, really, one on the 26th & that was returned from Greenmount, Queensland. Would you believe it—nobody there knew Hugo Throssell VC? I was so angry because I wanted Daddy to have the message from me first thing, on his birthday.35
Ric remembers, ‘My Dad and I climbed out of bed early in the morning to hear Katharine’s broadcast on a neighbour’s short-wave set. We managed to catch a few phrases among the crackles of static before her voice faded again into the senseless, jungle whistles and chatter of the sound-waves. We walked down the hill, silent and disappointed’.36
KATHARINE LEFT MOSCOW in early November, arriving in St Petersburg on 8 November. She had dinner with Guido and Betty; Betty records her looking ‘thin and tired and pinched with cold’.37 Much hinges on the conversation Katharine had with Guido and Betty that day. Betty’s original diaries are lost but in the published version, she claims Katharine ‘was sadly disillusioned. None of her former optimism remained. During the weeks spent here she had seen so much and learnt so much that she had never dreamt of, and her heart was sick’.38 The only other evidence supporting Betty’s account is a sentence by Jean Devanny in a 1953 letter concerned with her own problems with the party, claiming that on Katharine’s return to Australia, she confided to Jean about the ‘many very bad experiences’ she had had in Russia.39
If Betty actually wrote that in her diary in November 1933, then Katharine’s positive account in the book The Real Russia and her continued advocacy for the Soviet Union over the rest of her life would seem dishonest. But Betty is not a reliable witness. Her ‘diary’ of the time, Caviar for Breakfast, was not published until 1979, and by her own admission is only ‘based’ on the original diaries. An earlier version of the manuscript in her papers is a conventional memoir, with significantly differing details and a milder version of Katharine’s disillusionment which reads instead, ‘most of her former bright illusions had now faded’.40 The diary form gives the book more historical authority than it deserves and hides the way the memoir is shaped by Betty’s own disillusionment with communism.41
The letters Katharine wrote while she was in Russia talk of exhaustion, headaches and homesickness, but also her jubilant excitement at all she was seeing. She wrote to Hugh McCrae from Moscow the day before she left for Siberia, ‘If only you could have been here. You would be crazy with the beauty & intense life’.42 Whatever bad experiences Katharine had were not enough to disillusion her. Her vision was blinkered and her memory selective but her love of the Soviet Union and its people was sincere.
WHEN KATHARINE REACHED London, she took a room at a boarding house. On 20 November, she picked up the morning newspaper to find, buried on page seventeen, a brief report on the suicide of her husband. ‘A telegram from Perth (Western Australia) announces the death of Mr Hugo Vivian Hope Throssell, VC. It states that he was found shot at his home yesterday with a revolver by his side.’43 A telegram had reached the newspaper before one had reached her; the article claimed she was still in Russia. ‘How I lived through the shock and grief, I don’t know. And it was weeks and weeks before I could hear what happened.’44
She had four days to wait before her ship, the Baradine again, left for Australia. She sent off a telegram to Ric. ‘She would be home soon. I must be a brave boy till then.’45 She hadn’t been in London long enough to make contact with anybody and now she didn’t feel able to reach out. When Henry Handel Richardson heard the news she rang Jonathan Cape, but he didn’t know where Katharine was or what her plans were.46
A newspaper reported Katharine ‘was allotted a special cabin to herself … and during the voyage maintained absolute seclusion. Passengers occasionally heard her tapping on her typewriter, working on her new serious book on Soviet Russia’.47 On 4 December, two weeks after learning of Hugo’s death, Katharine turned fifty. The Baradine was in the Suez Canal, having just left Port Said. She had three things left, and she would cling to them the rest of her life: her faith in communism, her writing career and Ric.