32

Revival

Sydney, 1944–1946

IN JANUARY 1944 Jean Devanny gave a bleak picture of Katharine’s health: ‘KSP is very ill mostly. She is under a Macquarie Street specialist. Angina pectoris, you know. I don’t think she will live long’.¹ According to Katharine, her doctor had forbidden public speaking because of the strain it put on her. Despite the war, despite the urgency of the political situation, she settled down to write, determined to finish The Roaring Nineties, or ‘Wasting Assets’, as she had titled it at this stage. ² It had been fourteen years since the publication of Haxby’s Circus, her last (moderate) success, and in that time her novels had fallen out of print and Kiss on the Lips, Intimate Strangers and Moon of Desire had sold poorly. But 1944 proved to be a year of revival for her literary career.

In her Darlinghurst flat she ‘used to write mostly in her bedroom in the early morning and sometimes on the small dining room table’.³ She made good progress on The Roaring Nineties in January, and enjoyed it. ‘Quite drunk with it, & going all day, scarcely able to tear myself away at 12 a. m. or even later. It was almost 2 one morning, when I decided that I’d better go to bed. It’s marvellous to have had a week with only minor interruptions.’ But she was expecting a more significant interruption in the arrival of a young communist from Perth, Annette Moore (later Aarons and then Cameron), who had been left devastated by a broken love affair. ‘So in the West they decided to send her, by plane, to me! Of course, I really don’t know the poor kid. Only met her once, but they say … I can cope with that sort of thing. Not looking forward to it you can imagine!’ She added that she no longer had patience for people’s personal woes; the ‘sorrow & pain in the world makes it seem almost egotistical to wail about one’s hurts’.⁴

Katharine changed her mind about Annette, writing three weeks later, ‘Does all the chores for me. And most intelligent & well read. Don’t mind her on the premises at all & most people, I can’t abide for very long’.⁵ Tensions emerged, though; in April Katharine wrote, ‘Two different people have told me she is looking for a flat, although she hadn’t mentioned it to me. Is a queer little person in many ways, very secretive … Rather keeps me on the jump, & hasn’t been a good stable companion of late’.⁶ Despite this complaint, Annette was to be a good friend until the end of Katharine’s life.

While in Sydney, Katharine became friends with a communist couple originally from Kalgoorlie, John and Dawn Apthorp, who were now living in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. From 1943 to 1947, they ran a left-wing lending library and bookshop on the main street of Katoomba, rented cheaply from a ‘friendly Russian named Slutzkin’. John remembers typing The Roaring Nineties for Katharine. ‘The manuscript was done on inferior wartime paper in pencil … being an ex-goldfielder was a distinct advantage in coping with place names and locations.’ She sent the manuscript ‘in batches of loose pages by courier’ which ‘arrived at all times of the day or night’. Katharine sometimes came to stay with the Apthorps. ‘She loved the Mountains and, whenever possible, would escape from Sydney to spend whatever time she could … I can recall long winter evenings around a log fire discussing the manuscript and people she’d met on the fields while researching for The Roaring Nineties.’⁷ Katharine finally visited the writer Eleanor Dark on one of these trips in 1943 when Dark showed Katharine the Children’s Free Library she had established.⁸

Katharine finished the first full, handwritten draft of The Roaring Nineties in March 1944 and then spent several months revising. It was her longest novel yet and she wrote to Jonathan Cape with some trepidation, warning of the length and asking if there was any prospect of publication. ‘Quite a thrilling cable from Cape!’ she wrote to Ric on 23 October, ‘his reply was … to send it immediately’. It was an unexpected vote of confidence from Cape after the commercial failure of her last three books with him. She was surprisingly unfazed when Cape changed the title from ‘Wasting Assets’, ‘The Roaring Nineties’ being what the British ‘call the prospecting period on the gold fields’.⁹ In March 1945, Cape telegrammed to say he was pleased with the manuscript but couldn’t publish it until 1946, due to the paper shortage.¹⁰

In April 1944, Katharine’s novel Haxby’s Circus was announced as one of the twenty-five initial titles in the Commonwealth Pocket Library, selected by the Advisory Board of the Commonwealth Literary Fund. Each title had a print run of 25,000 in a cheap paperback format sold at a low price or given away to men and women in the services, including prisoners of war. At a time of patriotism, the Pocket Library put Australian classics back in print and encouraged Australians to read their own literature.¹¹ The selection of Haxby’s Circus turned it into the most read of her books since the sales success of The Pioneers. At the same time, perhaps with the last of their paper allowance, Jonathan Cape published a new edition of Working Bullocks, meaning two of Katharine’s major novels were back in print.

Before Easter, Katharine called on the Angus and Robertson office to ask why her second short story collection, Potch and Colour, was not on sale yet. ‘Just as well. Because it had been piled up in the warehouse & forgotten.’¹² It was finally released in May. Many of the stories are goldfields ‘yarns’, sketches for The Roaring Nineties. The Age reviewer wrote, ‘The distinctive mark of Katharine Prichard’s work is sureness. She is never vague, never diffuse. Not only is the writing itself firm and well knit, sober and precise, the stories have an equal definiteness. There are no loose ends’.¹³ The Daily Telegraph review found ‘her prospectors, station hands, farmers, country pub-keepers and outback women have provided raw material for nine-tenths of Australian fiction. But Mrs Prichard invests with fresh interest the characters that two generations of our writers have made familiar’.¹⁴

The account of these stories which Katharine gave Mikhail Apletin of the Union of Soviet Writers reflects her ongoing struggle to reconcile her writing with her politics. She wrote they were ‘chiefly stories which I have had to write for the Capitalist press, so without any special socialist significance, although they are realistic of Australian conditions, and not contrary to my Marxist conception of things and people’.¹⁵ If they were stories she ‘had’ to write for the ‘Capitalist press’, they also happened to reflect her career-long interest in the folklore of regions. Her struggle was just as much trying to find Australian stories which could realistically show the working class organising itself to overthrow capitalism.

She also wrote to Apletin that while writing The Roaring Nineties ‘it was very difficult to separate my mind from problems of the moment and the pressure of this war’. With the manuscript complete, ‘For the next few months, I will be writing on subjects of immediate importance, and am going to enjoy it’.¹⁶ One of her subjects was the Ern Malley hoax. In June 1944, Max Harris and John Reed had published an issue of their journal Angry Penguins featuring obtuse modernist poems by an Ern Malley; the poems were subsequently revealed to be manufactured by two conservative poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who had been observing with ‘distaste the gradual decay of meaning and craftmanship in poetry’. Katharine believed the hoaxers ‘have rendered a service to Australian literature … by revealing a tendency to lavish extravagant praise on obscure and salacious nonsense masquerading as poetry’. For Katharine, Harris and Reed were apostates who had once been sympathetic to communism but had then adopted ‘the philosophy of irresponsible egoism’ in the work they had been publishing in Angry Penguins and in their editorialising. They had insisted ‘on the unique importance of spoilt children at a party … They have failed to understand that genius which does not seek to serve the community, but merely its own aggrandisement, destroys itself’.¹⁷

THE ROMANTIC AND sexual elements of Katharine’s long widowhood are opaque. Jean Devanny’s gossipy claims in letters to Miles Franklin are one of the only sources and, affected by bitterness, they need to be read with caution. Jean wrote to Miles that Katharine ‘will have the sense to hold her tongue’ regarding the sexual frankness of Jean’s autobiography, Point of Departure, ‘in view of the things she told me of her own mode of life’.¹⁸ In another letter to Miles, Jean was writing about ‘just how pressing the sexual impulse is with men’ and claimed that in about 1935 Katharine had told her the party needed ‘sensible women who would relieve important single workers when needed’ and, ‘I’ll say it for Kath she practised what she preached’.¹⁹ Ric writes in response that this is a fabrication and Jean ‘ignores the fact that the Party’s attitude to sexual morality at the time was rigidly puritanical’; women offering themselves as ‘sexual relief’ ‘would have been totally repugnant to KSP and contrary to the attitudes to women throughout her writing’.²⁰

Jean’s picture of Katharine’s sex life is questionable but Katharine was certainly not celibate. She wrote to Ric in 1946, ‘I feel my Jimmy still with me, though others have come & gone, fulfilling some need of the moment, and broadening one’s knowledge and understanding of humanity. So it must be. But my Jimmy & I were great lovers. Nobody could ever take his place with me’.²¹ Her words were true for the rest of her life; she never had another publicly acknowledged partner. However, one of those who seems to have ‘come & gone’ was a man named Andrei, whom she was close to from 1944 until she left Sydney in 1946. English wasn’t his first language, but Katharine doesn’t mention his nationality, his surname, or how they met; perhaps he was a party member. He had a cottage in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. He first appears in Katharine’s letters to Ric in February 1944, taking her out to lunch. Hating the ‘intense cold’, she decided on 14 May that she wasn’t going all the way to Wentworth Falls just to oblige him. Then in June she wrote Andrei was ‘v. charming on Saturday, brought me violets & a big bunch of pink carnations’; he took her to dinner at the Silver Grill and afterwards by taxi to a production of Émile Zola’s play Thérèse Raquin. In January 1945 she reported to Ric that he was to be in hospital for the next two months with a bad heart.²² Katharine liked the company of men and the account in Child of the Hurricane of her youthful ‘beguiling’ of them carried over in later life to the cultivation of her ‘boyfriends’, as she would come to refer to them in her letters to Ric.

FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S Day on 8 March 1945, Katharine took the train to Newcastle, a coalmining city north of Sydney, attending a luncheon and civic reception before speaking in the evening.²³ ‘As the glorious promise of peace draws nearer’, she declared, ‘we must pledge ourselves to work so that when Victory is proclaimed, the basis for a sound and constructive peace will be assured’.²⁴ She called on women to make time for reading about politics, attending meetings, and take action to improve local conditions, even if it meant forsaking the ‘futile polishing, shopping, and refurbishing of garments’ which waste ‘the priceless thought and energy of women’.²⁵ Katharine made several trips to Newcastle and the coalmining town of Cessnock while living in Sydney and was contemplating a coalmining novel to follow on from the goldfields trilogy.²⁶ Reflecting on the less developed workers’ movement on the goldfields, she told Mikhail Apletin of the Union of Soviet Writers, ‘I wish I had lived on the coalfields of New South Wales and could have shown the more militant spirit and better organisation of the workers there’.²⁷ The one literary work to come from the trips was ‘Hero of the Mines’ (1945), a piece of reportage telling of the effect of a worker’s death in a coalmine during World War II.

In May, Doon, Katharine’s friend from the goldfields, came to stay on one of several visits over Katharine’s time in Sydney. She was serving with the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force and, having been granted a divorce on the grounds of desertion, had married Lewis Stone in December 1944.²⁸ As Katharine worked on Golden Miles, the second book of the trilogy, Doon gave Katharine information about the goldfields.²⁹

On 9 August, the same day the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan, the Communist Party of Australia held its fourteenth congress in Sydney. Katharine was one of ninety-two delegates and she was re-elected to the Central Committee for another term. The party was on the ascendant, proclaiming that its membership had grown from 4000 to 23,000 over the course of the war. It seemed it was on the cusp of becoming a significant force in Australian politics. Yet it was to prove to be the party’s high point, followed by postwar decline.³⁰

A few days later, Ric happened to be in Sydney for work when Japan surrendered. He remembers prime minister Ben Chifley’s ‘slow’, ‘rough’ voice coming over loudspeakers along William Street to announce the war was over. He came home ‘to my mother’s kiss of thanksgiving’ and ‘stood with my arm about her for awhile watching the celebrations in the street from balcony of the flat’.³¹ Katharine felt relieved and grateful that Ric had survived the war but the ‘peace celebrations for so many carried sad thoughts, and I couldn’t be altogether joyous—though many are saved further sorrow’.³²

‘HOW VERY DISCRETE [discreet] your mother must be, my sweet’, Katharine wrote to Ric in February 1945, ‘in relationship with his girl friends. They’re mine because they’re his, of course, but there’s a queer woman-to-woman understanding, or sympathy, between us all too’.³³ Ric’s girlfriend in Perth, Iris Wells, had been waiting for him for years and was now asking if she should move over to Canberra to be with him. In the meantime, after a romance with a Janet in Sydney, Ric had become involved with a stenographer in Canberra named Bea Gallacher and seemed serious about her.³⁴ Katharine was disappointed: ‘The making, or breaking, of a man is in the true mate he harnesses with … A sweet little thing isn’t enough for the long road. You should choose a wife as you would a horse—for wind, stamina, & character & good breeding’.³⁵ Katharine liked Iris so much she invited her to come to Sydney to live with her. When she arrived in January 1945 Katharine reported, ‘I think she will develop quite a lot here & really has taken her disappointment extraordinarily well’.³⁶ For the next few months, Katharine gave Ric cheery updates about Iris and praised her, perhaps still hoping he would change his mind.

Completing his cadetship, Ric learned in September that he was to be posted in two weeks to Moscow as Third Secretary to the Australian Legation, a three-year posting. Bea was devastated. ‘How could I leave her behind?’ Ric asked himself; they decided to marry.³⁷ When he told Katharine, she wrote back that it was a mistake to ‘take on the burden of married life’ right now rather than ‘travelling free & light’. But ‘better this than promiscuous affairs!’ and ‘what you decide I’ll try to abide with a good grace’.³⁸ The wedding went ahead in Sydney on 29 September 1945 in the sitting room of a Reverend FB Mullens, a couple of days before Ric was due to fly out. According to Doon Stone, ‘It was K herself who found a parson willing to perform the ceremony since all civil officers were closed for the weekend’.³⁹ Katharine and Bea waved goodbye to Ric at the Mascot aerodrome as he left for London on a converted cargo plane. Bea was to follow by sea when a berth was available.⁴⁰

Katharine was excited for Ric to see the Soviet Union, probably believing it would convince him of the truth of communism. Wally Clayton passed on news of this appointment to the Soviets. ‘Even before he received the appointment, “CLAUDE” [Clayton] in a conversation with PRICHARD clearly hinted to her that from the point of view of the Party it would be better if he went to a post in Europe, for example in HOLLAND. PRICHARD, however, very much wanted her son to go to the Soviet Union and had her way.’ The report assumed the appointment came about by Katharine’s influence—presumably with the attorney-general, Bert Evatt—but there’s no evidence for that and the new Australian legation was an unsurprising place for trained cadets to be sent. The Soviet intelligence, however, believed not only that Evatt had to be involved with the appointment of a junior diplomat but that there must be a ‘real ulterior motive’ on his part and they tasked Wally Clayton with discovering what it was and giving ‘detailed information about his [Ric’s] character’, showing how little the Soviets knew about Ric.⁴¹

AT CHRISTMAS TIME, Katharine’s new daughter-in-law, Bea, came to stay with her for six weeks before she could join Ric in Moscow. Katharine had spent the last few Christmases with Christian Jollie Smith at her place in Camp Cove, but Christian, wanting Katharine ‘all to herself’, hadn’t invited Bea, so Katharine didn’t go. Katharine warmed to Bea over her stay, but she thought her fragile, and told Ric to be careful of her health in Moscow.⁴²

For some time, Katharine had been expecting bad news about the mortgage on her Greenmount house and it came in February 1946. Before his death, Hugo had set up a private mortgage on the house with an elderly woman named Harriet Roberts, who died in 1941. Now, finally, the Roberts estate wanted Katharine to repay the remainder of the mortgage.

Katharine asked her accountant to try to re-mortgage the house to buy her some time. ‘Maybe I’ll stay there for a year or so.’ She needed to return to sort out her papers and possessions and do further research on volumes two and three of the goldfields trilogy. However, she thought it wasn’t going to be financially viable to live there in the long term. She was resigned to losing the house but hoped to keep a section of land ‘as a relic of our old home’, she told Ric, ‘but we must not be sentimental, lovey. Life takes us along a broad highway, and though our thoughts cling to the place where we have spent so many happy days, we must go on & camp by the way, wherever we happen to be’.⁴³

The situation escalated in March. Her accountant couldn’t re-mortgage the place. The Roberts estate foreclosed and began arranging a forced sale. Worried that all her possessions would be dumped, she ‘rushed down to the railway office to book a seat West—and they swear there’s nothing available until June 17 … And there are no boats sailing!’⁴⁴ As it happened, a federal politician, Don Mountjoy, brother of the former Western Australian communist leader, helped her secure a place on the train for early April.⁴⁵

While she prepared to head west, the forced sale was averted by the generosity of Andrei. She hadn’t mentioned her predicament to him, but Annette had, and he told Katharine he could lend her the money for a new three-year mortgage. It came just in time, with Katharine’s accountant sending a telegram on 25 March that the money would have to be cabled that very day. ‘Wonky’ with his bad heart, Andrei came straight down from the Blue Mountains to Sydney to arrange the transfer. He was the ‘very best friend in a serious emergency’.⁴⁶

In May, he sent a letter to Katharine, who was back in Greenmount by then. ‘He’s never written to me before—& I suspected that he couldn’t write in English. Nearly wept over his effort—which he said betrayed his ignorance, but there were things he wanted to say to me … chiefly, that I mustn’t send him interest. He wanted me to use the money on repairs etc.’⁴⁷ The irony of his generosity to Katharine was that it separated them; Katharine’s sojourn in Sydney was over.