Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This week, it is 1925, and it runs from today, 20 to 26 October. As for the last 8 clubs, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

The 1920s were wild years, at least in the Western World. The First World War was over, and neither the Depression nor Second World War were on the horizon. It was a time of excess for many, of the flappers, of

A brief 1925 literary recap

Books were, naturally, published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1925:

• Martin Boyd (as Martin Mills): Love gods
• Dale Collins, The haven: A chronicle
• Erle Cox, Out of the silence
• Zora Cross, The lute-girl of Rainyvale : A story of love, mystery, and adventure in North Queensland
• Carlton Dawe, Love: the conqueror
• Carlton Dawe, The way of a maid
• C.J. de Garis, The victories of failure
• W. M. Fleming, Where eagles build
• Nat Gould, Riding to orders
• Jack McLaren, Spear-eye
• Henry Handel Richardson, The way home (the second book in the The Fortunes of Richard Mahony trilogy)
• M. L. Skinner, Black swans: Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno
• E. V. Timms, The hills of hate
• Ethel Turner, The ungardeners
• E. L. Grant Watson,  Daimon
• Arthur Wright, The boy from Bullarah

EV Timms had a long career. Indeed, he also appeared in my 1952 Year Club list. Zora Cross has reappeared in recent decades due to renewed interest in Australia woman writers. Both Bill and I have written about M.L. (Mollie) Skinner, a Western Australian writer who came to the attention of D.H. Lawrence. And then of course there are those writers – Martin Boyd, Henry Handel Richardson and Ethel Turner – who have never “disappeared” from discussions about Australia’s literary heritage.

While my focus here is fiction, it’s worth noting that many of Australia’s still recognised poets published this year, including Mary Gilmore, Henry Lawson, Dorothea Mackellar, Furnley Maurice and John Shaw Neilson.

The only well-recognised novelist I could find who was born this year was Thea Astley.

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. Because 1925 is a century ago, I had already started researching the year for the little Monday Musings Century ago subseries I started in 2022. So far, I have written just one post on 1925. It focused on two literary societies which were active at the time, the Australian Literature Society and Australian Institute of the Arts and Literature, so I won’t repeat that here.

I found a few interesting tidbits to share, including, in a couple of newspapers, a brief report of a talk given to Melbourne’s Legacy Club by local bookseller, C. H. Peters, manager for Robertson and Mullens. He reported that the English publisher, John Murray the Fourth, said

that the Australian consumption of fiction was enormous, compared with the English market, and that, making allowances for differences in population, the Australian read five novels to every one read by the Englishman. 

Some of the other items of interest I found were …

On a cult classic?

One of the surprising – to me – finds during my Trove search was the book Out of the silence by Erle Cox. It was, says The Argus (9 October) and the Sydney Morning Herald (28 November), first published in serial form around 1919, but there were many requests for it to be available in book form, which happened in 1925. The story concerns the discovery of a gigantic, buried sphere, which contains the accumulated knowledge of an ancient civilisation. The Argus’ reviewer says that the sphere’s aim “was to exemplify the perfection attained in a long past era and to assist the human race of the time of discovery towards similar perfection”, with the finder being helped in this goal by the “dazzling Earani”, a survivor of that civilisation.

The reviews at the time were positive. The Argus says that “the story is carried on with much ability”, while The Age (17 October) describes it as “brilliantly conceived and charmingly written … original and weird, maybe a little far-fetched”. Edward A. Vidler writes for the Sydney Morning Herald that “Mr. Cox is to be congratulated on a story of rare interest, which holds the attention from beginning to end”.

It has been republished more than once since 1925, including in other countries. For example, in 1976, it was republished in a series called “Classics of Science Fiction” in 1976, by Hyperion Press, and in 2014 an ePub version was published “with an Historical Afterword by Ron Miller”, who featured it in his “The Conquest of Space Book Series.” The promo for this edition describes it as “the classic lost race novel” in which a pair of amateur archaeologists “inadvertantly revive Earani, the survivor of an ancient race of superbeings”. But this is not all. It was also adapted for radio, and turned into a comic strip. You can read all this on Erle Cox’s Wikipedia page.

On reviewing

I enjoy seeing how reviewers of a different time went about their business. Some reviews in this era – the 1920s – tell the whole story of the novel, and do little else. Others, though, try to grapple with the book, finding positives as well as negatives, and sometimes discussing the reason for their criticisms.

Reviews for Dale Collins’s island adventure The haven are a good example. It seems that Collins had decided to have the main character – the male protagonist – tell his story. The reviewer in The Age (31 October) didn’t feel it worked, writing that Collins

repeats the experiment of blending psychology and sensation which he caried out so successfully in ‘Ordeal.’ It is a very clever and original story, but the reader who wants sensation will find there is too much psychology in it; and the reader who is interested in psychological studies will discover that the author has handicapped himself by making the central figure tell the story. As a result the psychology becomes monotonous …

The Argus (6 November) on the other hand was positive about the technique of Mark telling his own story:

Mr Collins has skilfully worked out the effect of the situation on each one of his characters, but especially on that of Mark, who reveals himself through a diary of their life on the island … The author has set himself a very difficult task in the carrying out of which he has been remarkably successful.

The reviewer in The Age (25 July) – the same one? – was disappointed in Zora Cross’s The lute-girl of Rainyvale, seemingly because of its supernatural subject matter concerning Chinese vases and curses, after the quality of her previous novel Daughters of the Seven Mile, but ended on:

The story has some vivid descriptive writing, which serves to emphasise that Zora Cross’s real gifts are wasted on fiction of this character.

Mollie Skinner’s Black swans was reviewed twice in the same column in The Age (12 September) with slightly different assessments. The first writes that it is “a very readable story founded on historical events in the convict days of Western Australia” and goes on to say that she had collaborated with D. H. Lawrence on The boy in the bush but that “her unaided work is preferable”. The review concludes that Skinner had “drawn her picture strongly and produced a good novel”.

Later in the same column, the reviewer (presumably a different one?) references Skinner’s work with Lawrence and then says of this new book that the story begins in Western Australia’s Crown colony days of 1849. Skinner “sends her childish heroine and hero on adventures amongst blacks and Malays, in company with an escaped convict” then “takes them to England for the social and love interest”. The reviewer concludes that

Miss Skinner writes well, with a special anxiety to set down striking phrases and epigrams. To quote a common, phrase, she is more interesting than convincing. 

Hmm … there’s a sense between the lines here that the story doesn’t hang together, but that Skinner, like Cross, has some writing skills.

As for Henry Handel Richardson, although her novel came out in mid-1925, I found only a couple of brief references to it. Martin Mills (Martin Boyd), on the other hand, fared better with some quite detailed discussions, including in the West Australian (4 July). The reviewer explored it within the context of being part of a rising interest in the “religious novel” and ended with:

Love Gods, with its old story of the unending conflict between the Pagan deities and the restraining influences of Christianity, is a novel of unusual insight, and most uncommon power of literary expression.

There’s more but I’ve probably tired us all out by now! I will post again on this year.

Sources

(Besides those linked in the post)

• 1925 in Australian Literature (Wikipedia)
• Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine, Annals of Australian literature, 2nd ed. OUP, 1992

Previous Monday Musings for the “years”: 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1952, 1954, 1962 and 1970.

Do you plan to take part in the 1925 Club – and if so how?

I said in last week’s Monday Musing, which was dedicated to (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) 1952 “Year Club”, that I wouldn’t write about the ongoing issue of journalists and academics feeling the need to defend Australian literature, because I’ve discussed it before. However, I did read an interesting article on the wider issue that I thought worth sharing. Yes, I know the week officially ended yesterday, 27 April!

Bartlett on Aussie culture

The article I’m talking about came from someone called Norman Bartlett. Born in England in 1908, he migrated to Western Australia with his parents in 1911, so he grew up Australian (albeit he did live in England again with his mother and sister between 1919 and 1924). According to the NLA’s Finding Aid for his papers, he studied journalism, obtained an Arts degree, and served with the RAAF in World War 2. In 1952, he was literary editor and leader writer for Sydney Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. The article in question was written in reflection of the 1951 Golden Jubilee of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Titled “Let’s take stock of Australian culture”, it appeared in the Daily Telegraph (5 January). Bartlett’s fundamental question was whether Australia had “grown up as a nation”. This meant, he argued, much more than things like “Dominion status, industrial development, the fighting reputation of the A.I.F., a record wool cheque, and prowess at tennis, cricket, and, with reservations, Rugby, football”. Yes, indeed! Rather, it means

maturity in art and literature; a distinct and original “way of life”; a quickened awareness of what being an Australian means; and why being an Australian is different from being an Englishman, an American, or a European. 

A national culture is much more than a cultivated minority’s appreciation of good books, pictures, music, and architecture. 

It is the way we — the majority — feel, think, act, talk, wear our clothes, play our games, and fight our wars.

When our literature, art, music, architecture, and philosophy reflect our national idioms and attitudes they become part of our national culture. Thus, a truly national culture is the expression of a particular people living in a particular place for a long time.

Of course, he doesn’t consider the nation’s original inhabitants in any of this, particularly when he says “originally, Australians were colonials. That is, slips from older stock transplanted into an initially alien soil”. I will just leave that thought, because we are talking 1952 and I think the best thing for us to do is to recognise this context in all he says.

His article aimed to analyse “whether we’ve taken root; whether we are making a collective, intelligent attempt to adjust ourselves to our environment; whether our environment reflects itself in our speech, attitudes, art, music, and literature”. He argues that by the late 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, writers and artists were moving away from “writing and painting in the English style”. They were “beginning to wake up to the fact that Australians had grown different from the parent British stem”. Not only were writers like Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy (“Tom Collins”), “Banjo” Paterson, A. H. Davis (“Steele Rudd”) expressing this difference in their stories and verse, but they were writing in “everyday idioms of the Australian people”, as Mark Twain had done in America.

He quotes American critic, C. Hartley Grattan, who argued that a fundamental characteristic of ‘this budding Australian literature was an “aggressive insistence on the worth and unique importance of the common man”.’ But, Bartlett says, with “the growth of a more sophisticated city life, many writers began to feel that aggressive semi-socialistic nationalism [as seen in many of the above-named writers] wasn’t enough”. Writers and artists like the Lindsays and Kenneth Slessor wanted to “liberate the Australian imagination from droughts, gum trees, drovers, and the wide-open spaces”. In 1923, they created a literary magazine called Vision, but soon, says Bartlett, the Lindsays’ romanticism, with its “bookish carnivalia rosy with the fumes of canary wine and cheerful with the seductions of full-breasted wantons … blunted itself on Australian realism”. Love this!

By the Jubilee, increasingly more Australian writers were “realising that life is where you look for it”. He said writers like Kylie Tennant, Frank Dalby Davison, and Xavier Herbert showed there was ‘still plenty of kick in the Australian “bush” tradition”‘ while those like Ruth Park, Dymphna Cusack, M. Barnard Eldershaw, and Dal Stivens, were “more interested in the cities”. He separates out Eleanor Dark, who, despite setting some of her novels in country towns, had “a sophisticated interest in character rather than place”. Overall, he argued, that Australia’s contemporary fiction writers were “more analytical than exultant about the Australian way of life”.

Bartlett also wrote about poetry, visual arts, music and, briefly, dance. You can read these thoughts at the link provided above. He concludes by stating that “Australians are a reading people”, who spent significantly more on books than Americans and Canadians. This rather quantitative conclusion doesn’t answer much in terms of his framing question. However, I liked his discussion of how the bush and city strands were playing out in mid-20th century Australian literature, and his assessment of contemporary writers being more “analytical than exultant” is what I’d like from our artists of all persuasions. What do you think?

Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This week, it is 1952, and it runs from today, 21 to 27 April. As for the last 7 clubs, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

The 1950s represent the main period of the Baby Boomer generation (1945-1964), but of course, those born at this time had little to say about the literature of the period! Instead, Baby Boomers, of which I am one, are the product of times that were prosperous in the west (at least) but also overshadowed by the Cold War and its fear of a nuclear war. It was a conservative time, with men in charge, and women and other minority groups oppressed, which led to the various rights movements that appeared in the 1960s.

I wrote a post on 1954 when that was the Club’s year back in 2018, so much of what I found for that year, applies to 1952.

A brief 1952 literary recap

Books were, naturally, published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1952:

• Martin Boyd, The cardboard crown (on my TBR)
• Jon Cleary, The sundowners (read long before blogging)
• Ralph de Boissière, Crown jewel
• Helen Fowler, These shades shall not vanish
• T.A.G. Hungerford, The ridge and the river
• Rex Ingamells, Aranda boy AND Of us now living
• Philip Lindsay, The merry mistress AND The shadow of the red barn
• Colin MacInnes, June in her spring (aka Colin McInnes and Colin Thirkell; son of Angela Thirkell; primarily known as an English novelist)
• Charles Shaw, Heaven knows, Mr Allison
• Nevil Shute, The far country (read in my teens)
• Colin Simpson, Come away, pearler
• Christina Stead, The people with the dogs
• E.V. Timms, The challenge
• Arthur Upfield, Venom house

Two of these writers – Martin Boyd and Christina Stead – are recognised today as part of Australia’s literary heritage. Others are still remembered, and at least occasionally read, such as Jon Cleary (whose The sundowners was adapted to a film starring Robert Mitchum in the main Aussie role!), Arthur Upfield (whose novels were adapted for the Boney TV series , and Nevil Shute (who has been adapted mutilple times for film and television). T.A.G Hungerford is especially remembered in the West where there is an unpublished manuscript award in his name.

Born this year were novelists Janine Burke, Nicholas Jose, Larry Buttrose, John Embling, Suzanne Falkiner, and John Foulcher. Suzanne Falkiner edited the first book my reading group did back in 1988, an anthology of short stores by Australian women writers, Room to move.

There were not many literary awards, but the ALS Gold Medal went to T.A.G. Hungerford for his novel, The ridge and the river. Fourtriplezed who often comments here has reviewed it on GoodReads, noting that its racist language would not be acceptable today, but that it is nonetheless “a very “important and significant piece of Australian literature”. The Grace Leven Prize for Poetry went to R.D. Fitzgerald (whom I don’t know).

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. There was the ongoing issue of writers/journalists/academics feeling the need to defend Australian literature, but I’ve discussed that often before, so will not focus on it here, because they essentially bring out the same arguments, including that Australia did have great writers, like Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, and Xavier Herbert.

However, two issues, in particular, captured the imagination of the papers – the idea of banning “indecent” or “crude” literature for Australia’s youth, and the place of “red” or Communist literature in Australian society. These two issues in particular encapsulate much about 1950s Australia – its conservatism, and fear of Communism.

On “indecent” or “crude” literature

The main issue here seemed to be the influx of American comics and movies. It got a wide range of people excited, including First Constable Pat Loftus, Children’s Court prosecutor, and the visiting Mrs J. Kalker, a Dutch headmistress representing the International Montessori Organisation. North Queensland’s The Northern Miner (5 July) cited these two as urging parents to censor what children were reading and seeing. Mrs Kalker, for example, “was horrified to see so many Australian children going to picture matinees and reading comics” and said that “some films and comics are evil influences that contribute to sex crimes and delinquency”. She also said

Australian children were more intense, more restless, and more undisciplined than Dutch children.

Ouch!

On 9 July, in the Illawarra Daily Mercury, it was the state premiers who took up the cause. Indeed, “a magazine with a photograph of a nude woman on the cover was passed around the table at the Premiers’ Conference” during a discussion about “the undesirable comic books being imported into or published in Australia”. Tasmanian Premier, Mr. Crosgrove, wanted such books and comic magazines to “be passed by the censor before their distribution was permitted” but conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies neatly side-stepped, saying that works published in Australia, to which Cosgrove had referred, was a State issue!

Meanwhile, in the same newspaper report we are told that Mr. Kelly, the N.S.W. Chief Secretary, had received complaints about children being “found during school hours examining indecent publications they kept hidden under their desks” and that he’d sought “legal advice whether a number of publications now circulating in N.S.W. could be regarded as indecent literature. Churchmen and others had represented to him that an evil existed through these publications”.

In August, there were reports in papers like Tasmania’s Advocate (18 August), about the Young Christian Workers’ Movement aligning itself ‘in the battle for a ban on the sale of indecent literature … especially the violent and sex-ridden U.S. “comics”.’ They were developing their own campaign, and were including in their sights an Australian nudist magazine.

The articles abounded, including another report later in the year from the Australian Council of School Organisations, but I think you get the drift.

On “red” literature

There was an earnestness about socialist literature at the time, one that led to what now seems like a narrow definition of what is “valid” literature. Joan Clarke, President Sydney Realist Writers, praised the Communist newspaper the Tribune (28 May), for “publishing so many of the winning poems and stories from the Literary Competitions run by the Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship” but offered a criticism of two winning stories in the spirit of encouraging development. The authors of the stories aren’t named, but their stories failed in her eyes because, while they were in the approved “realist” style, one failed to identify the “larger reality” surrounding the issue at hand while the other failed to extract “the essential dramatic truth” (as, she says, Frank Hardy does in Power Without Glory).

This was the year that the Australasian Book Society, about which I wrote last month, was formed. Frank Hardy, a member of the Communist Party of Australia, was quoted by Queensland’s Maryborough Chronicle (25 October) as saying its aim was to “foster the country’s cultural literature”, and that “the best authors were people who would concentrate upon human and down-to-earth stories” – and these, the Society believed, were realist stories.

Of course, this was the 1950s and there was much anxiety about Communist influences. On 5 September, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on a little furore regarding Commonwealth Literary Fund grants. Apparently during the parliamentary Estimates debate, Liberal MP, Mr. W. C. Wentworth, and Labor MP, Mr. S. M. Keon charged that too many of the fellowships granted by the Fund had gone to Communists. The paper presented the arguments for and against, referencing past and present Prime Ministers, and identifying several writers who were accused of being said Communists, such as Judah Waten, Frank Hardy, John Morrison, Frank Dalby Davison, and Marjorie Barnard. It was a he-said-she-said type article, with no resolution, but concluded with a reply by Labor MP, Mr Haylen. The article closes on:

“There are certainly no Communists in the literary fund, whose leader is the Prime Minister himself.”

Mr. Haylen said members of the advisory committee had done an honest job. There had not been one book published under sponsorship of the committee that had the faintest tinge of Communist propaganda.

Politics never changes!

That will do for my brief introduction to 1952, unless I decide to share a little more next Monday!

Sources

• 1952 in Australian Literature (Wikipedia)
• Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine, Annals of Australian literature, 2nd ed. OUP, 1992

Previous Monday Musings for the “years”: 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1954, 1962 and 1970.

Do you plan to take part in the 1952 Club – and if so how?