D. H. Lawrence’s Reception in Australia: Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush Paul Eggert

From Rananim November 1995, Vol 3, No 3

Two themes stand out in the Australian response to Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush: gratefulness for Lawrence’s having given authentic voice to an Australian spirit of place, and sharp disputation about his commentary on Australian society and politics. Lawrence wrote Kangaroo in 1922 during his three-month stay in Australia; after revision it was published in 1923. In that year in California and Mexico he rewrote a novel by Mollie Skinner with whom he had stayed in Western Australia in 1922: it was published in 1924 as The Boy in the Bush. Together with his poem, ‘Kangaroo’, and a number of letters, these novels constitute his literary response to Australia.

R. S. Ross wrote a front-page review of Kangaroo for the Brisbane Daily Standard of 14 and 15 July 19241. Like most commentators he was amazed, given what he felt was the importance of the novel, that Lawrence had slipped into the Australian eastern states virtually unnoticed. (This had been deliberate on his part, having been irritated by his mildly lionising reception in Western Australia and feeling the urgent need to get on with the writing of a novel in New South Wales which would earn him some much-needed money2.) Ross was a man who had much to lose if there was any basis in real life for Kangaroo’s plans in the novel for a right-wing coup d’état in Australia, but he commented: ‘It reads absurd this network of conspiratorial organisation for the catastrophic bossed by the Kangaroo’.

Suggestions confidently put forward in recent years in Australia that there was a contemporary counterpart to the novel’s secret army, and that its leaders sought to involve Lawrence in it, have been discounted by Bruce Steele in his recent critical edition of Kangaroo3. There was probably at the time, he argues, a general anxiety amongst Australian conservatives about the future of the established system of government. This anxiety was understandable given the recent Russian Revolution. Ideas about private- or government-backed paramilitary forces able to assist the police in the maintenance of public order in the event of socialist- or communist-inspired riots must have been circulating. Recent evidence has come to light that such a force (a quite small, government-backed one4) was formed and used in Western Australia against miners in Kalgoorlie a couple of years before Lawrence’s arrival in Perth. There were loyalist organisations in Australia at the time (i.e. loyal to Britain), such as the King and Empire Alliance, and it is possible that groups within them contemplated forming secret armies (but there is precious little evidence to date of their actual formation prior to the New Guard of 1931). However the idea of their organising a a right-wing coup d’état, as envisaged in the novel under Kangaroo’s leadership, would run utterly against the political current of the period. Their business would have been to counteract left-wing attempts, as they saw it, to overturn established law and order, not to create a disorder of their own.

What is certain however is that since 1917 in a number of essays Lawrence had been actively considering a new political order to counteract what he believed had been the cause of the War: the European sickness of benevolent idealism, and the spiritual ossification caused by a Victorian ideology of living for others at the expense of one’s own living5. Given this background of continuous interest in a political renovation, Lawrence would not have needed more than the odd clue or hint, and a bit of local colour, to flesh out the involvement of his hero in an imagined Australian secret army.

Almost certainly, then, Ross was right to be unapprehensive, and no other reviewer gave any sign that the proposed revolution was based on a real organisation or even the possibility of one. This consideration will not convince some proponents of the secret-army hypothesis. It is open to them to reply, of course, that the reviewers did not know anything about the army because it was a secret. If so, then we will see another stage of the reception of Kangaroo played out in Australia in the second half of the 1990s. However, I am confident that Steele’s sceptical position will ultimately prevail. We will hear some more ‘secret’ details and mini-revelations, but will eventually come to believe what Ross and other early reviewers saw from the start: that the political figures in the novel essentially act out internal voices which Lawrence was proposing to himself.

This is true above all of the characterisation of Kangaroo. It involved some borrowing of details (which Lawrence could easily have picked up from newspapers) from General Sir John Monash; but Lawrence drew more fundamentally on his own friends, S. S. Koteliansky and the psychoanalyst, Dr David Eder6. There is no need, as Robert Darroch has done, to invent supposed meetings between Lawrence and the president of the King and Empire Alliance, Major-General Sir Charles Rosenthal, meetings which Lawrence is then said to have immediately written up for the novel. Again, Ross’s initial reaction has been justified: that ‘Kangaroo himself is the weakest characterisation in the volume. He’s quite un-Australian, though suggested as Australia’s personification’. Archibald (later, Sir Archibald) T. Strong, Jury Professor of English at Adelaide University at the time, found him ‘entirely preposterous . . . not so much a man as the incarnation of an idea’ (Melbourne Herald, 26 January 1924, p. 13). With the left-wing politics in the novel on the other hand, Ross felt that Lawrence was ‘right at the heart of things Labor’ and found the chapter, ‘A Row in Town’, ‘superbly colossal’. Perhaps the resort to violence, even though initiated by the right-wing Diggers, appealed to Ross’s communist sympathies. Strong disagreed. Born of an Establishment family in Melbourne but educated in England, Strong declared that the scale of violence made it ‘utterly unlifelike and impossible’ in the Australian setting7. The violence and near-violence at political rallies in Sydney in the early 1920s, as reported in the newspapers, did not approach the scale of the novel’s. But there was certainly disorder, including attempts by loyalists to break up left-wing and pro-Irish republican meetings (the Irish Free State had become, controversially, a British Dominion rather than an independent state on 15 January 1922).

The Australian playwright, Louis Esson, commended the characterisation of Jack Callcott as ‘a fine study of a real Australian type’ (Bulletin, 27 March 1924, p. 3): getting a fix on mateship was undoubtedly part of Lawrence’s formula for success. And here Strong agreed: ‘several of his characters Jack Callcott . . . Victoria Callcott, his heavily sexed wife, and the mercurial Welsh colonist, William James are so drawn as to show that Mr. Lawrence has in some ways at least got fairly deep into our national character.’8

In his next novel The Boy in the Bush, Lawrence offered a case-study of a young Briton arriving in Western Australia in the 1880s, going onto a farm as a jackeroo, and tracing his decline, as the reviewer in the New Graphic of Australia saw it, from ‘a clean-minded young Englishman into the promiscuous sensualist of the closing chapters’ (6 November 1924, p. 13).

Australian reviewers were far less interested in the fine question of the collaborators’ relative responsibilities for the novel even though they, with the exception of some West Australian reviewers, had not heard of M. L. Skinner either. The tacit assumption was that the novel was Lawrence’s, a product of his visit to Australia in 1922. However when Vance Palmer referred to the novel in his Bulletin article of 8 January 1925 as one of ‘D. H. Lawrence’s two novels [on Australia]’ he was rebuked by a correspondent (‘W.C.T.’) in the issue of 5 February: ‘Why do some writers persist in crediting D. H. Lawrence with the authorship of "The Boy in the Bush"? . . . Australian writers, who ought to be the first to honor native talent, need not divert entire credit of the book to a man whose own works have already given him a niche in the library temple’ (p. 32). In 1931, again in the Bulletin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, commenting on a recent book about Lawrence, took John Middleton Murry, its author, to task for failing to mention the name of ‘the woman with whom, after all, Lawrence chose to collaborate. When he did so, few young writers did not envy M. L. Skinner’ (1 July 1931, p. 5).

For Palmer, The Boy in the Bush marked ‘a stage in the disintegration of his powers’ (p. 415). A ‘structure and balance’ had characterised the home-life sections of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence’s ‘high point’. These qualities, which had been flung aside in his recent novels, were qualities Palmer himself pursued in his own fiction: an artless-seeming realism in a controlled, unpretentious prose style. For Palmer, then, The Boy in the Bush was not a sign of a missed opportunity or something to be envied as it was for Prichard. It was an instructive lesson about the danger of possessing genius without discipline; and it may, perhaps, have served as a consolation for lacking the former himself9. Thus was another ‘appropriation’ of The Boy in the Bush effected; and the literary work went on circulating in and out of Australia, gathering significances.

Less subtly conservative appropriations of the novel were provided by the parodies and gossip articles which followed its publication: these were another part of the second wave of responses. The Sydney Sunday News (16 November 1924, p. 11)

ran a review in rhyming doggerel. In its last of five stanzas, its anonymous author naturally fastened on the issue of Jack Grant’s desire for three wives:

In this I think Lawrence is quite out of date,

And simply nonsensical when

Such sentiments flow from his pen.

Three wives! Not for me, I tell you quite straight,

A fellow should have at least ten.

Despite its conscious or unconscious conservatism, parody at least acknowledges that its target has already made its mark on the current climate of opinion, that it is ‘common property’. The gossip articles about The Boy in the Bush which appeared in Britain, Perth and Adelaide made a similar acknowledgement by treating the book more respectfully for it was, after all, the peg on which each columnist’s livelihood had temporarily to hang. So the coy unveiling of Mollie Skinner as the ‘Mr M. L. Skinner’ of the first reviews, subsequent interviews with her10, and reportings of her departure from England in December 1924 and her arrival in Perth all had to have their place in the papers and magazines, fully eight items appearing in Australia11. ‘Who sits in the shrine beyond those blue-grey eyes [of Mollie Skinner]’, wrote Katharine Susannah Prichard for the Melbourne Woman’s World: the social machinery of respectability for the novel had clicked into gear.

Grant Madison Hervey’s version of The Boy in the Bush is even more intriguing. Certainly his alertness to the novel’s many exploratory interests focused in unpredictable places. Quoting Jack Grant’s angry vituperation after Mary Rath has turned down his offer of a bigamous attachment, Hervey concludes that Lawrence has hit on ‘the innate snakishness of the typical Australian [i.e. in Mary]’. He celebrates Lawrence as a novelist ‘who goes straight towards his objective, and beats us over the head without mercy’, a characteristic particularly needful, according to Hervey, for a convict country born to an ‘adoration of the whip’. There are rather a lot of references to whipping in this essay: ‘A few more floggings like this’, he writes, ‘and we shall begin to move’; he claims that the people’s fear of criticism is the real Yellow Peril and that ‘there is a great and permanent shortage of whip-wielders’; and he again welcomes Lawrence for ‘having cordially and so emphatically flogged Australia; eviscerated and thumb-screwed the Australians’.

‘Grant Madison Hervey’ was in fact the pseudonym and, on one occasion at least, the alias of George Henry Cochrane (18801933), a journalist, poet and novelist from the State of Victoria, thrice imprisoned for fraud (1915, 1923 and 1931). The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature refers to his posing as an American at Mildura in 1919, his business being ‘to drum up financial support for a new state; he was exposed by [the entrepreneur and publisher] C. J. de Garis’ who was associated with the dried fruit industry there. ‘[A]fter seeking his revenge through the editorship of the Mildura and Merbein Sun [he] was tarred and feathered by de Garis’s supporters in 1921’12. Reflecting on some reviews and articles about himself in 1925, Lawrence remarked: ‘I always find that my critics, pretending to criticise me, are analysing themselves’13. Hervey would seem to be a good case in point. His Boy in the Bush is clearly a novel of collaborative authorship to which he is a major contributor.

But the difference between him and the rest of the Australian reviewers was one of degree rather than of kind. The literary work had become, inevitably and cumulatively, a multifarious object. The printed document was successively interpreted and reinterpreted, appropriated and reappropriated, till one might wonder how the participating readers could have imagined they were all talking about the same thing. This is no doubt the fate the condition of existence of all Lawrence’s works, and perhaps of all published literary works in general.

1 All quotations below from this review are from the issue of 14 July, front page. Page numbers for other quoted reviews are given upon their first quotation only.

2 Frances Zabel who ran the ‘Book Lovers’ bookshop which Lawrence visited in Perth reported (under the penname ‘Franciska’) in the Perth Daily News on the Lawrences’ departure: ‘He is a brilliant conversationalist, and at the same time is extremely modest, disliking limelight and publicity’ (22 May 1922, p. 6).

3 The principal proponents of the hypothesis have been: Robert Darroch, D. H. Lawrence in Australia (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1981); Michael Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop: Australia’s Secret Army Intrigue of 1931 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble Penguin, 1988); and Andrew Moore, The Secret Army and the Premier: Conservative Paramilitary Organizations in NSW 193032 (Kensington, NSW: University of New South Wales Press, 1989). For dissenting views, see: Paul Eggert, ‘Lawrence, the Secret Army, and the West Australian Connexion’, Westerly, xxvi (1982), 1226; David Ellis, ‘Lawrence in Australia: The Darroch Controversy’, D. H. Lawrence Review, xxi (1989), 16774; Joseph Davis, D. H. Lawrence at Thirroul (Sydney: Collins, 1989); and Bruce Steele, ‘Kangaroo: Fact and Fiction’, Meridian, x (1991), 1934. For the fullest bibliography of material by Australians on Kangaroo and Lawrence’s time in New South Wales, see: Joseph Davis, ‘Place, Pastoral and the Politics of the Personal: A Semi Genre-based Exploration of D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Wollongong, 1992, pp. 40023.

4 See the forthcoming article by W. S. Latter in Labour and History.

5 In his explanatory note on 92:9, Steele quotes a section of Fantasia of the Unconscious which Lawrence wrote in 1921 before he came to Australia but which was deleted by Seltzer. It concerns the organisation of a secret army.

6 See Steele’s explanatory note on 107:40 in the critical edition for a full discussion, and p. xxix for Monash.

7 Like other reviewers, Ross found ‘The Nightmare’ chapter one of ‘the giant treatments’ of the Great War. Strong concurred, and it has been praised ever since.Strong’s father had been Professor of Classics at the University of Melbourne, and he himself was chief film censor for the Australian government, 191922. He had been tireless in support of the War effort, speaking at recruiting rallies and in his writing. He continually stressed the importance of Imperial ties: see further, ADB, ed. John Ritchie, xii. 1245.

8 On the other hand ‘Jade’, writing in Stead’s Review on 12 January 1924 and showing resistance to almost everything in the novel, felt that Callcott showed too many ‘demonstrations of affection for the other man’ to be credibly Australian (p. 66).

9 Cf. Palmer’s review of The Boy in the Bush for the Triad (Sydney, 1 December 1924, p. 36): ‘he tries to carry an absurd story to a conclusion by sheer lyrical power . . . Lawrence has trifled shamelessly with his talent, and this book almost makes one believe that there was something spurious in the lyrical style that gave him his fame.’ This review answered Francis Brien’s of 10 November.A. G. Stephens, anonymously, also did a (brief) review for his Bookfellow (29 November 1924, p. 47): ‘There is a great deal of writing, with an effort at realism, and a result of fantastic dullness’. The motto of this famous literary editor was ‘Truth is not in extremes’; he may have reacted against the novel’s imperative polarising technique.

10 E.g. article by ‘W.G.’, British Australian and New Zealander (London), 25 December 1924.

11 Daily News (Perth), anon., 20 and 31 January 1925; Western Mail (Perth), anon., 5 February 1925; Australasian (Melbourne), anon., 7 February; West Australian (anon., social column note), 13 February; Sunday Times (Perth), ‘Our Lady’s Letter from London’ by ‘Pamela’, 15 February; and K. S. Prichard, Woman’s World (Melbourne), 1 December 1924, p. 41.

12 William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, Oxford Companion to Australian Literatur (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1985), p. 337; and cf. ADB, ed. Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle, ix. 275 (1983), in particular Nettie Palmer’s quoted description of him (1933) as ‘a bulky giant with a large reddish beard . . . a caricature of those expansive young men of the Nineties...patriotic and Utopian’.

13 ‘Accumulated Mail’ in Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), p. 240.