PART 4
28
Greenmount, 1934–1935
AMONGST KATHARINE’S PHOTOS at the National Library of Australia is one of her and Ric labelled ‘on return from SU [Soviet Union]’. She is looking straight at the camera with a sad intensity, her hair white, her face aged. She’s leaning against Ric, who is dressed in a Russian peasant shirt, looking older than eleven, and smiling slightly as he looks off to the side.
Ric met her ship on its arrival at Fremantle on Boxing Day. ‘I hardly knew her. Her eyes were sunken; her face drawn and splotched with grief. She could barely walk without assistance … There was no welcoming smile, no arms to hold me: a murmured, “Nicky darling”, between her tears. I knew that it was I who must comfort her.’1
She brought Ric back to their Greenmount home, which had been empty since Hugo’s death. ‘Dead gum-leaves were piled by the gully wind against the door’, Ric remembers. ‘The stink of rotten apricots drifted from the orchard … Over the verandas grapes hung in withered wreaths. The wild oats … were hip-high in the dying garden. Everything about the house reminded me of him. I wanted to be able to forget. Katharine found some comfort in remembering.’2
Even in her grief, Katharine didn’t cry much; she had trouble understanding why others found it a relief. ‘When I cry it’s usually devastating—nearly kills me. Don’t dare to lose control like that.’3
Hugh McCrae had stopped writing to her when she needed him most. She wrote a note to him in March 1934 that said only, ‘Write to me. I seem to be losing all contact with life’.4 His silence seems cruel; perhaps he was guilty about Hugo’s suicide. When Hugo died, she lost Hugh as well.
After weeks of agonising speculation, one of the tasks awaiting Katharine on her return was to piece together what had happened. It still didn’t make sense even once she’d heard all George Withers had to say about Hugo’s last day. She wrote to Ric years later, ‘I’ve never been able to understand how Daddy could leave me like that’.5 One particular fear haunted her: she’d left behind the draft manuscript of Intimate Strangers; what if Hugo had read it while she was away and the suicide of the character Greg had pushed him over the edge? Perhaps it was hearing that Hugo slept in his ‘wife’s room’ on that last night that bothered Katharine—if he meant the workroom, it was likely where the manuscript was stored. When Katharine revealed her fear to Ric thirty years later, he reassured her the manuscript couldn’t have been the reason for Hugo’s suicide; his crippling debt and ‘old war head’ were reason enough.6
The inquest held by the coroner at the Midland Junction Courthouse on 11 December 1933 heard from witnesses and concluded that he ‘died as the result of a bullet wound, self-inflicted while his mind was deranged as the result of injuries received during the Great War’.7 Hugo’s brothers and sisters had hired a lawyer to represent their interests in the inquest, and the outcome was probably the one they were seeking, as it made it more likely Katharine and Ric would receive a pension while avoiding too much embarrassing detail of Hugo’s financial recklessness.
The Repatriation Commission was making its own enquiries in early 1934, determining whether Hugo’s death was related to his war service and, thus, whether Katharine would be eligible for a war widow’s pension. The commission asked to interview Katharine soon after her return, but she took weeks to reply, eventually writing on what would have been the couple’s fifteenth wedding anniversary, 28 January, and saying she was not up to an interview.
Nervously and physically, my husband’s magnificent constitution was impaired as a result of war service. The Medical Board has the record of his wounds and periods in hospital for meningitis and malaria: but I resent the idea that his mind was ever in any way deranged. He feared that it might become so.
In insisting Hugo was not deranged, she was risking her eligibility for the pension. She put his suicide down to him not being able to ‘withstand the torture of another crisis of sleeplessness and financial embarrassment’, telling the commission:
I consider that his ‘grateful country’ made it impossible for my husband to live. He thought he had to die to provide for his wife and child. As far as I am concerned, I could not accept anything that cost him his life; but I feel that I have no right to interfere with what he sought to do for his son.
My own health is uncertain and I may not be able to provide for our boy who is eleven years old.8
The doctor consulted by the commission, CW Courtney, disagreed with the coroner’s verdict, focusing on the fact that Hugo’s depression was not noted in his records until 1929 and on Katharine’s comment that he wasn’t depressed when he was fully employed. His opinion was that ‘it is probable that constitutional and post-war factors were mainly responsible for death by suicide’.9 Despite Courtney’s opinion, the department concluded, ‘There may be some doubt in this case but the Commission will give the benefit of it & decide death due to war service’.10 In April 1934 they granted a pension to Katharine, guaranteeing her a small income.
On its own, the pension would have helped Katharine to pursue her political work and writing without worrying as much about money. However, the financial mess Hugo had left behind was to burden her for many years. Even on paper there was a considerable £546 deficit between his assets and liabilities. Worse, all of his assets were properties, impossible to sell at a good price in the Depression. The mortgages and rates on the properties were precariously balanced with the income from rent and Hugo’s share of his parents’ estate.11
KATHARINE FORCED HERSELF back out in public two months after her return from London, making a speech at a meeting of the Council Against War in Perth on 28 February.12 ‘Only my belief ’, she wrote later, ‘in the need to work for the great ideas of communism and world peace helped me to survive a grief so shattering. Personal sorrow, I felt, is part of the world’s great sorrow, caused by war and an economic system which thrives on war and the preparations for war’.13 She spent her fifties immersed in party activities, dulling the pain of her grief by working intensely for the cause.
Her series of articles on Russia was accepted for publication by her old newspaper, the Herald; the articles ran daily for three weeks from 14 April, prefaced with the disclaimer that her opinions ‘sometimes conflict with those arrived at by other equally capable observers’.14 In the middle of publishing the series, the paper wrote an editorial about the flurry of books on Russia, ‘an average of two per day’, having the effect of cancelling each other out, for and against the communist project. ‘The Communist goes there to see an Arcadia that does not exist outside of [Thomas] More’s Utopia … The pseudo-intellectual—often a dreamer … is taken in hand by the Soviet’s powerful propaganda bureau and swears to what has been told him.’15 The Herald didn’t publish the last five of Katharine’s articles, writing to her that ‘we felt we had given readers as much of one subject as they could stand’. This incensed Katharine, and the Western Australian communist newspaper Red Star ran a front-page headline ‘Soviet Information Banned’.16 All the articles, including the unpublished ones, were collected as a book, The Real Russia, released by Modern Publishers later in the year.
Thirty years earlier, under the influence of Rudolf Broda and Colonel Reay, Australia had been the nation bearing her hope for the world—a young, progressive social democracy. Now it was the Soviet Union, the world’s first communist nation, that Katharine believed in; her tour had deepened her love of the nation and her faith in it. Her belief sat uneasily with her ongoing Australian patriotism. She still loved Australia, still strove to express the distinctiveness of its people and places in her writing, but since the Great War its politics had been a source of disappointment and sorrow which only intensified over the decades.
She began a speaking tour, giving lectures on Russia. In July, she gave two lectures in the coalmining town of Collie and went on to speak in Kalgoorlie, probably gathering some material for the goldfields project she had been planning since prospecting in Larkinville. After more speeches in Perth through the winter and spring, her lectures were to continue in Victoria and New South Wales. She wrote again to Hugh McCrae, telling him that each day when she hears the postman whistle she heads through the orchard to check the letterbox at the gate, only to find no letter from him.
‘Never again will I write to him’, she says and returns to work. So the days go.
But the Westralia sails on October 25 with all that is left of KS and one son—in long ’uns—steerage. We will be, mostly, with my sister in Victoria, Mrs P. S. Bridge ‘Kirinaran’, Frankston will find us should a letter, or a Hugh, wander that way. I am due for Sydney in January, but only for a few days.
[I]t seems too impossibly good to be true that I may see you …17
Katharine’s sister Beatrice and brother-in-law Patten had left Ceylon and settled on a property in Frankston on the outskirts of Melbourne. Over the following decades, Kirinaran was to be a second home for Katharine, ‘a rambling old weatherboard house with endless rooms and corridors’ with spectacular views over the bay and crammed with Ceylon memorabilia, including a python skin hanging on the wall.18 On this visit, Katharine and Ric stayed for two months.
Victoria was holding its centenary celebrations and the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s younger brother, had arrived on a royal tour along with the British poet laureate, John Masefield. Katharine met Masefield at a reception, a newspaper recording that she was ‘charming in a beige lace frock, and with her grey hair waving down into a bob’.19 She didn’t have much regard for Masefield, claiming in a recollection that everyone was actually crowded around Bernard O’Dowd that night, whom she regarded as Australia’s unofficial poet laureate.20
Katharine wasn’t there because of Masefield or the duke but as the Western Australian delegate to the All-Australia Congress Against War in Melbourne on 10 and 12 November 1934. The congress was held as a counterpoint to the centenary celebrations, which one delegate said were being used ‘for the purpose of creating war psychology here in Australia’.21 The congress’s keynote speaker was meant to be Egon Kisch. Kisch was a communist journalist, born to a Jewish family in Prague. Working in Berlin for years, the Nazis imprisoned him after the Reichstag fire in 1933 and then expelled him. On his way to Melbourne, he was prevented from leaving his ship, the Strathaird, at Fremantle on 6 November. Kisch was running late for the congress and had been relying on catching the train from Perth—which was faster than the ship—in order to reach Melbourne in time.22 The federal attorney-general, Robert Menzies, declared that, in order to protect Australia from ‘revolutionary activities’, Kisch would not be allowed to land.23 Kisch was sure that the Australian government was reacting to Nazi pressure. Historian Heidi Zogbaum finds no basis for this, arguing instead that the Australian government had been warned about Kisch by the British security agency only to then be denied access to the details of their intelligence.24
The situation had created huge public interest and Katharine suddenly found herself in the middle of it. Katharine and the rest of a Kisch reception committee organised a protest meeting on 9 November. Katharine moved a motion that the meeting ‘protests most emphatically against the unreasonable and tyrannous action of the Federal authorities’ in detaining Kisch, calling it ‘a deliberate violation of the rights of free speech and a flagrant breach of democratic liberties’.25
On 10 November, the congress went ahead in the Port Melbourne town hall without Kisch or the New Zealand delegate Gerald Griffin, empty chairs on the stages marking their absence. Katharine reported that the peace movement was growing in Western Australia and warned, ‘the capitalists want war, because profits are to be made’. To applause, she declared that although the Shrine of Remembrance would be officially opened the next day, ‘the best shrine of remembrance we could build was a mass anti-war movement’. With many of the delegates communists, the chairman dealt with the incongruity of the Soviet Union’s militarism by claiming, ‘The Soviet Union was carrying out a genuine peace policy, whilst at the same time they were obliged to arm themselves for the defence of classless society’.26
When the Strathaird reached Melbourne on 12 November, Katharine was selected as the writers’ representative to visit Kisch on board. There were only four allowed on board—Katharine; Kisch’s appointed lawyer, Joan Rosanove; the communist Jane Aarons who falsely claimed she had met Kisch before and could identify him for the court proceedings; and a Justice of the Peace to witness the identification. At dawn they passed the throng of supporters gathered on the wharf and walked along the gangway onto the ship. When the other three left to attend court, Katharine stayed with him, under orders not to let him out of her sight: ‘We had been warned that he might be shanghaied on to a German gun-boat which was lying in the harbour, quite near to the Strathaird’. Then, hundreds of supporters surged up the gangway onto the ship and in response, Kisch ‘held a gay informal reception … which became an anti-fascist meeting … A lusty singing of the International resounded, and drifted over to the sea to where the Nazi gun-boat lay like a grey shark on the quiet waters of the bay’.27 The next day, after Kisch’s court appeal failed, he jumped onto the wharf. He broke his leg and was forced back onto the ship as it left for Sydney.
In the new year, Katharine and Ric travelled to Sydney on the train and stayed in the city centre in ‘a one-roomed flat with [a] gas-ring and balcony, closed-off at one end by ill-fitting sheets of mildewed plywood’. Kisch came to see them and they drank coffee in the restaurant below their flat. Kisch showed Ric a conjuring trick he’d learned in a German concentration camp.28
Kisch continued his legal battles through January and February, winning much public sympathy. He finally left Australia in March after the government agreed to pay his legal costs. The affair was a boost to communist morale and made mainstream Australians worried that the government was curtailing free speech.
THE FRENZY OF activity was having its toll on Katharine. After her return to Greenmount, she wrote in March 1935 that her ‘beastly machinery’—her heart—had ‘played up’. ‘Angina, the doctor said, and if I wouldn’t go slow he’d give me a year. Don’t believe it, of course. But there you are.’29 For the rest of her life, Katharine was to live with the threat of sudden death from heart failure, warned that overexertion could kill her.
It was lonelier at home in 1935—Ric started boarding school. He had graduated from Greenmount Primary but not won a place at Perth Modern, the selective public secondary school. With Katharine unable to afford a private school, Hugo’s classmates from Prince Alfred College set up a fund to pay for Ric to attend the equivalent Methodist boarding school in Western Australia, the recently opened Wesley College in South Perth.30 As the atheist ‘son of a militant communist and a broken war hero’, Ric felt out of place ‘among the sons of the farmers and professional men of conservative Western Australia society’.31 His enrolment contradicted Katharine’s ethos but there’s no record of her trying to justify it to herself or anyone else. It shows that even in this militant period other things still influenced her decisions—in this case, the value she placed on education, her positive experience of South Melbourne College, and maintaining a link to Hugo’s legacy.
AT THE TIME of Katharine’s trip to Russia, the newly created Union of Soviet Writers had taken control of Soviet literature and was developing a doctrine of socialist realism. The union oversaw the nation’s literary journals and ran a publishing house; in order to be a professional writer in Russia it was necessary to be a member. The union’s main task ‘was to reward or punish writers, depending on their level of cooperation with the Party’s agenda’.32 The Comintern envisioned an international literary network and the union’s Foreign Commission liaised with sympathetic writers around the world. In November 1934, Walt Carmon, Katharine’s American friend from the Siberian tour, was working for it and he began a correspondence between the Foreign Commission and Katharine which was to last the rest of her life.33 Carmon’s Soviet successors cultivated a literary friendship and exchange with Katharine—she would send literary, cultural and political news from Australia and Australian books; they would send her Soviet publications and would commission her to write articles. She had an opportunity to promote her own work and that of other Australians to the union. Her letters to them became warmly personal and the correspondence her main connection to her beloved Soviet Union.
It was from this exchange and her experiences in the Soviet Union that Katharine developed her ideas about what faithful communist writing—socialist realism—should look like. One element was immersion in the work and lives of the people. In The Real Russia, she put forward the ideas of Maxim Gorky; under his influence the ‘writers of the Soviet Union were realizing the need of being absorbed into the working life of the people … What people thought and felt about their work, intimate affairs and environment, that was the stuff of literature’.34 It wasn’t a new approach for her—it validated her signature research trips to observe the lives of different industries and places. A second element found in a statement by Katharine from this time was a ‘sympathetic understanding of the causes behind the social tyranny of our time’—which is to say writing that exposed the ways capitalism oppressed people for profit.35 A third element was language. She quoted Gorky saying, ‘The simpler the language the better. True wisdom always expresses itself plainly’.36 It was a principle she adopted, moving away from the influences of DH Lawrence (Working Bullocks) and modernism (Intimate Strangers) and towards a plainer style in her late novels. 37 The critic Drusilla Modjeska writes, ‘She never wrote another novel with the passion of Coonardoo or Intimate Strangers; in the [goldfields] trilogy the tension was dissipated. She had adopted the literary technique of socialist realism at the expense of that intangible quality evident in her earlier novels’.38 In a 1956 interview, Katharine offered some further comments on socialist realism: ‘I’ve always maintained that socialist realism does not require a writer to falsify reality; that a story must arise from actual conditions of a place and its people at that time. If there is not a socialist solution arising from the conditions of the story, it is a mistake to drag it in’. Within a capitalist society she understood socialist realism as a responsibility that had to be balanced with the need for readers. ‘In our countries we can only go a certain distance if we are going to be published and if we are going to draw ever-increasing numbers of men and women to an understanding of fundamental problems in their lives.’39
While in Sydney in January 1935, Katharine and Kisch launched the Writers’ League, an Australian section of the Comintern’s International Union of Revolutionary Writers.40 It aimed both to encourage Australian writers to take up the challenge of writing socialist realism and to gain better recognition within the Communist Party of the contribution writers could make to the cause. Kisch and Katharine recruited the communist writer Jean Devanny to lead the Sydney branch. The league met in the bohemian Pakie’s Club on Sunday nights, beginning with conversations—led by party members—on working-class writing, followed by a chance for aspiring writers to read from their manuscripts for feedback.41 Stopping in Melbourne on her way home, Katharine enlisted members of the Kisch Defence Committee to launch a Victorian branch. Nettie Palmer’s daughter Aileen, who had just finished her degree and had been a communist for several years, was elected the first secretary.42 Despite the grand hopes, neither branch lasted more than a couple of years.
IN JUNE 1935 the young journalist Norman Bartlett interviewed Katharine for the West Australian, giving a snapshot of her early in a long widowhood. She took him to her workroom for the interview and, perhaps to his surprise, ‘was not a disturbing person to meet’. ‘She had a self-contained look, as though her personality was controlled from a central core of understanding’. She said her writing routine was to work ‘steadily from early morning until about midday, planning well before I start by thinking deeply over the situations and characters, and I take care to have a thorough knowledge of the subject about which I am writing’. Intimate Strangers was under contract with Jonathan Cape and was meant to have been delivered at the end of 1934; she was hoping to finish it soon and start on a new novel ‘which will deal with the cruelty of conditions which are as active in the lives of many men as drought, flood, fire and the forces of nature’. Anticipating the direction of her writing, she told Bartlett, ‘I do not mind if the reviewers hold up their hands in horror and say that at last I have succumbed to the temptation of using the novel as a vehicle of propaganda. I write to please myself, to express what I feel to be true, and not to please the people who review books’. Bartlett left her house after the three-hour interview and ‘walked down Greenmount Hill towards the setting sun’, wondering ‘how many people in Western Australia realise what a truly remarkable woman lives in the rambling wooden house’.43