The "Spy" Episode in Kangaroo

Robert Darroch

From Rananim June 1995, Vol 3, No 2

{ Endnotes 4-6 missing : JL}

On March 1 this year The Australian newspaper announced the death in France of Alister Kershaw, "a fellow of infinite jest", as obit writer Geoffrey Dutton said in his eulogy to a writer - and journalist - of singular distinction, even though he leaned, alas, to the right in his politics (hence, perhaps, his somewhat acerbic letters to the SMH on matters literary, and particularly concerning grants to writers, against which he had strong views).

Born in Melbourne, the son of an Army officer, Alister had some interesting connections with D.H. Lawrence, apart from nascent propinquinity, being born less than four months before DHL arrived in Australia. He cut something of a figure in Melbourne Bohemian circles in the early 1940s, but it was his move to France later that decade that placed him in a position to contribute something, albeit posthumously, to Rananim.

I knew his name only from the letters columns of the SMH, mostly addressed from his expat home at Sury-en-Vaux, in France. I shared his reservations about the efficacy of literary grants. Little I did realise then how closely our DHL interests would soon coincide.

I had long been interested (as many of our readers will be well aware) in the contrast between the literary, or what I call, perhaps unkindly, the couch-potato, interpretation of Kangaroo, and any effort made, either here or overseas, to look into questions of how much of the novel might have been pure fiction, and how much autobiography, or autobiography-based.

In this one of my great enemies was the Introduction to the up-till-recently-standard editions of Kangaroo, composed originally around 1950 by Richard Aldington, who not only knew Lawrence well (virtually being with him at his death-bed), but who also wrote the first major post-war DHL biography, Portrait of a Genius, But... (wonderful title!). For, in that Introduction, Aldington had set in stone the currently accepted and received interpretation of the novel (now reiterated in the new Cambridge University Press edition), which was, to paraphrase, that it was not based on any substantial element of reality, and that the main Australian events and characters in it were invented by Lawrence.

What intrigued me was how this interpretation had been born and subsequently grown into the monstrous travesty it patently was. What, I asked myself, had Aldington, who seemed an otherwise fairly sensible chap, done in the way of thinking, if not research, into the matter, that enabled him to be so dogmatic and certain about something that even blind Freddy could see reeked of first-hand experience.

RA gave a clue in the Introduction, relating that he had consulted an actual, live Australian called Adrian Lawlor on the question, and had been authoritatively assured that nothing like Ben Cooley’s sinister Diggers/Maggies could ever have existed in happy, wattle-round-the-door, children-on-the-floor, untroubled Australia, certainly in the early 1920s, when DHL was out and about Down Under. Thus the novel had to be pure fiction, apart from passing vignettes of the antipodean visit of DHL and Frieda, and depictions of such local bit-players as the taxi-driver, and the man who came to empty the dunny.

The proximate cause for my interest in Aldington was, however, a little-known letter from Frieda to him which I had stumbled on in the course of my research. It was dated 20/11/48, and was clearly written at the time that Aldington was composing his Lawrence biography (and probably his Phoenix Introductions). It appeared to be a response from Frieda to an earlier letter from Aldington asking for information about their time in Australia and the possible real-life background to Kangaroo (matters of some interest to me).

In the letter, Frieda said: "...- I think Cooley was a mixture of Dr Eder and Kot[ielansky] - No Lorenzo never went to political meetings - Jack and Victoria something like them were on the boat - No the spy story did not happen. About the only paper Lawrence read was the Sydney Bulletin."

There wasn’t much there to support my outlandish speculations, quite the contrary. Yet there were several points of interest in the letter. Firstly, it implied that Aldington had been entertaining the idea that the secret-army figures in Kangaroo might have been based on real people, perhaps Australian figures. He also seemed to be wondering if Lawrence might have gone to political meetings in Australia, or, failing that, had read about such meetings in the Press. Indeed, Frieda seemed to have been responding to a whole list of quite perceptive queries. (Her reply about Jack and Victoria being something like people "on the boat" was especially interesting, but that’s another story.)

Another point of interest was that Aldington had undoubtedly used some of this material in his Introduction to Kangaroo. He said, for example, that Lawrence’s only reading in Australia was "The Sydney Bulletin". It occurred to me that he might have asked similar questions, and gained similar information, from people other than Frieda. And in the Introduction he clearly mentioned one such person - Adrian Lawlor. I made a mental note to try to track down Lawlor.

However, it was not me who tracked him down, but my historian friend Dr Andrew Moore (author of the Old Guard history, The Secret Army and the Premier ). Andrew mentioned to me that in the Lawlor papers at the Victorian State Library, which he had been examining, he had found a letter from Aldington. I wrote there asking if I could see a copy of it. The library replied that I could not, as they believed it was still in copyright, and, as they did not know who controlled the copyright, they could not get permission to reproduce it. I would have to come down to Melbourne to see it.

Alternatively, they could send the letter up to the Mitchell Library, and I could look at it - but not copy it - there. So a week or two later I heighed myself up to the manuscript section, was sat at a desk, and the precious item was set before me. It was from Villa Aucassin, St Clair, Le Lavandou, Var, France, and was dated 30/12/48. As I now have permission to quote as I like from it, I will reveal its contents almost in full:

  •  

    Dear Adrian Lawlor,

    Alister sent me your very interesting notes on DHL, and I write to ask if you will allow me to quote from them, making all due acknowledgement. You will see at once the importance of Australian confirmation of DHL’s insight and even prophetic vision, in view of the fact that unspeakable cows of the Hugh Kingsmill breed have dismissed the whole book [ie, Kangaroo] as invented twaddle2. [Aldington then mentioned an Australian he had recently met who ‘spoke of Kangaroo with a disrespect which would have earned him a bloody nose but for the fact that he was protected by the sacred veil of hospitality’. RA went on: ]... May I bore you with more queries? What about the "neighbours", Jack and Victoria - would you not say they must have had some basis in dull fact? They are strangely like suburban characters in England,...Then the "spy" episode. Oddly enough, that followed him about everywhere. Even on the island of Port Cros in 1928 we were visited by three staff officers from Toulon who were most pertinacious in enquiries about Mr Lawrence and in wanting to see him...If that "spy" scene between Somers and Jack is invented I should be surprised. There is real rage in it, which I don’t think Lorenzo could have worked up over an imaginary episode. [Then follows speculation that the persecution Lawrence suffered in England, partly during the war, extended overseas, abetted by British representatives in Italy and elsewhere]. Aldington goes on: ... I have long thought that Lawrence’s departure from Australia was precipitated by that "spy" business. [And he adds: ] Will you let me have your views on this topic?...

  • So, far from being certain that Lawrence’s "spy" scenes in Kangaroo were "wholly imagined" (as RA’s eventual Introduction stated), Aldington was originally inclined to believe that they were based on reality. Moreover, this letter to Lawlor was dated 30/12/48, more than a month after Frieda’s 20/11/48 letter to Aldington in which she had said that the "spy" business in Sydney did not happen. Thus not only was Aldington interested in the possible factual secret army (for that is what the "spy" business refers to) background of Kangaroo, he was still trying to find out if it had any basis in reality after receiving a categorical denial from Frieda, who had been with Lawrence in Sydney and Thirroul at the time, and surely in the best position to know what happened (as many other doubting Thomases have since pointed out).

    But it seemed that Aldington, who knew Frieda very well, did not place much credence in anything she said, for his letter to Lawlor goes on:

     

  • Your suggestion that I should apply to Frieda for information about Australia (or anything else) shows a most happy ignorance of that highwellbornone’s nature. In answer to my letter [obviously the 20/11/48 letter mentioned above] she ordered me to say that L. is the successor of Augustine and Francis of Assissi and "has no place among English novelists",...It is useless to ask Frieda, she has the memory, not like a sieve, but like a bottomless bucket. That book of her’s [Not I but the Wind], apart from letters [Frieda’s autobiography contained many Lawrence letters], consists almost wholly of things she was reminded by Pino [Lawrence’s Florence publisher], Douglas [Norman], David Garnett, Huxley [Aldous], and myself.
  • But these useful insights were not the only thing of interest in Aldington’s letter. Much of it was taken up with gossip about the Alister of the opening sentence. It was obvious that he, too, was an Australian, and had left Australia to live in France. Now, I knew of an Australian Alister with literary connections who had gone to live in France: my SMH letters fellow-traveller, Alister Kershaw. I thought that if I could track him down, he might know who had copyright of the Aldington letter, which I was very keen to quote from when the time came. I asked my colleague Margaret Jones, who had been literary editor of the SMH, if she could find out Kershaw’s address in France3.

    She did, and I wrote to him in these terms:

  •  

    Dear Mr Kershaw,

    I am writing to you in the belief that you might be the "Alister" mentioned in an important letter I have just come across. [And I went on to tell him of my interest in Lawrence, inquire about Aldington’s letters, and ask if he knew who held their copyright.]

  • A few weeks later came this reply:

  •  

    Dear Mr Darich [sic],

    You have the right Alister, but I am not sure I have the right Darich: your handwriting matches me in the legibility stakes.

    Taking your queries in order:

    1. I very well remember when RA and Adrian first began to correspond. Richard had asked me if I knew anything about the "fascist" background in Kangaroo. I didn’t, of course, but wrote to Adrian Lawlor to see if he could provide anything. Needless to say, he in turn was wholly ignorant in the matter but managed to collect the information sent in the enclosed letter...

     

    5. I do indeed know who is Richard Aldington’s literary executor: me.

  • The enclosure was a letter from Adrian Lawlor to Alister Kershaw. It was addressed to "the good Alister", c/o Richard Aldington esq., and was dated 26/9/48 (and thus predated both Frieda’s letter and RA’s to Lawlor, it being the letter Aldington was referring to in his own letter of 30/12/48). The relevant parts (from which Aldington was to extract the material he finally used in his Introduction) included4:

  •  

    ...dearest Alister...Touching Kangaroo: there’s nothing particularly informative to say, I’m afraid. K. "himself" is quite clearly a figment of the Lawrentian imagination, as one of the girls, Carswell I think, says somewhere I remember. After all, L. arrived about May, leaving about August, met nobody here, except the Skinner woman (in the West, at the other end of the world) and what guide he had to local affairs was what anybody on a 3-months’ visit would have - merely the dailies and The Bulletin. [Lawlor then mentioned that Lawrence might have read some of his "jejunities" in the Red Page.]...All I remember of Kangaroo is the marvellous descriptive tissue...But here’s a digest of N.R.’s scribbled notes gleaned over the phone from Brian Fitzpatrick, Aust. History pundit, as perhaps you’ll remember. - In 1930 (about 8 years too late, by the way, for R[ichard]’s purpose, L. having visited Aust. in 1922) Aust. was caught by the Depression. In NSW J.T. Lang, Lab. Govt. Premier, pursued an economic policy radically different from that of the other States, maintaining (e.g.) the basic wage at a pre-Depression level, advocating postponement of interest payments on o’seas loans, and appointing all sorts of snooping economic committees, etc. Reactionary to all this, a number of businessmen, pastoralists and other propertied people set up a semi-secret organisation of somewhat fascist colour apparently, calling itself the New Guard. A Colonel Campbell, Sydney solicitor, was one of its animating spirits. The city of Sydney was divided by these solemn zanies into "zones"...The N.G. boys drilled themselves in their spare time (insteading of gathering up their girls and drilling them!) in vacant lots. (N.R.’s notes all but illegible here, and would you wonder, but seem to refer to a counter-opposition movement, The Workers’ Defence Corps.)...[Then follows a racy description of the De Groot Harbour Bridge incident.]...In short, No such person as Kangaroo. R.L. Somers clearly put together from elements of D.H.’s own personality and experiences...His wife - Harriet? - somewhat a sketch of Frieda. The spirit-of-place bits unquestionably and incomparably the best descriptive writing about Aust. ever. The coincidental resemblances between the "action" of Kangaroo and that of The New Gd shennanikans merely another proof of the baffling prescience of Genius....Indeed, the only point in my retailing all this deracinated gibble-gabble about the New Guards and all that is that L. anticipated, in Kangaroo, and in 1922, what did come to happen in 1930. I wish I could have offered you more, for Richard. But nobody on earth could, I believe - of course there’s Frieda herself, in Taos or wherever. Now she could tell him something perhaps about their Australian experiences. But I doubt even that. Certainly nobody else on earth could, I’d confidently tell him. If Richard wants any specific inquiries made, let me know, and I’ll do what I can of course. [The letter then trails off into personal gossip, Lawlor signing off "my dear one, ever and always, Adrian."]

  • There are a number of interesting points in this letter. Clearly Lawlor either knew nothing, or was told nothing, about Jack Scott’s Old Guard, or else confused it with the public New Guard. For if Lawrence was merely prescient, then it was prescience about the activities of the Old Guard in 1930-32, rather than Campbell’s gaudy breakaway New Guard. The Old Guard - for good reasons - did indeed resemble Lawrence’s Diggers/Maggies secret army, which the New Guard did less, for their's was not a secret army, quite the opposite.

    Another interesting point is where Lawlor got his (highly misleading) information from. N.R. was Norman Robb, a Melbourne ABC talks producer, and a friend of Lawlor’s. Brian Fitzpatrick was indeed an Australian historian, and, as such, it is rather surprising he apparently knew nothing of the Old Guard. This is especially odd when you know he was a member of the Victorian equivalent of the Old Guard (the "White Guard") that emerged from the shadows during the Melbourne police strike5. That was in 1923, the year after Lawrence was in Australia.

    But what is most surprising, and perhaps of greatest interest, is Aldington’s persistence in pursuing his suspicion or feeling that Lawrence must have been leaning on reality in the "spy" business in Kangaroo. First he asked Alister Kershaw (who was acting as his secretary at the time). He knew nothing about it. Then he got Kershaw to write to Lawlor, who again pooh-poohed the idea, citing Norman Robb and Brian Fitzpatrick. Then he asked Frieda, who also said no. Still not satisfied, he himself wrote to Lawlor, asking if he was sure there could have been no truth in the "spy" business. Alas, we do not have Lawlor’s reply (it is, apparently, lost in Aldington’s papers in the University of Southern Illinois). But the reply must have been firmly in the negative, for RA decided in the end to rule out any possibility of reality behind Lawrence’s Diggers or any possible real-life models for Cooley and Callcott.

    Why was Aldington so persistent? (Most other critics and commentators, before and after, have been quite content to accept Frieda's line that there was no factual basis for the plot of Kangaroo.) Is it possible that during their many later conversations in France and elsewhere Lawrence might have said something about his Australian experiences, or Kangaroo, that might have led Aldington to suspect that there could have been more to the "spy" business that mere fiction? Could it, perhaps, have been brought up following the visit of the three French officers to Port Cros in 1928? We do not know. It might merely have been, as Aldington said in his letter to Lawlor: "If that ‘spy’ scene between Somers and Jack is invented I should be surprised. There is real rage in it, which I don’t think Lorenzo could have worked up over an imaginary episode."

    What he was referring to, of course, is that part of the "Jack Slaps Back" chapter where Jack Callcott comes down from Sydney to give the Lawrence figure Richard Somers a dire warning:

  •  

    "You’ve found out all you wanted to know, I suppose?" said Jack.

    "I didn’t want to know anything. I didn’t come asking or seeking. It was you who chose to tell me."

    "You didn’t try drawing us out, in your own way?"

    "Why, no, I don’t think so."

    "I should have said myself you did. And you got what you wanted, and now you are clearing out with it. Exactly like a spy, in my opinion."...

    "Then what do you want of me now?" he asked, very coldly.

    "Some sort of security, I suppose," said Jack, looking away at the sea....

    "Pray what sort of security?" he replied, coldly.

    "That’s for you to say, maybe. But we want some sort of security that you’ll keep quiet, before we let you leave Australia."

  • I have always thought that this passage is the most chilling in the novel, and agree with Aldington that it does not sound invented6. If Lawrence did run across a real secret army in Sydney in 1922, and did "try drawing them out" to get material for his novel of Australia, then a passage like this rings very true.

    Had Aldington been given any hint that such a real secret army existed, let alone that the man who was the chief-of-staff of the Old Guard in 1930-32 - Jack Scott - is the very image of Jack Callcott in Kangaroo, then we might have got a very different Introduction to that so-influential 1950 Phoenix edition. For which insight, I am very grateful to the late Alister Kershaw.

     

    - Robert Darroch

     

    ENDNOTES

     

    1 I had, however, come to learn not to place too much reliance on Frieda’s recollections of their Australian sojourn. In a later radio interview, when again being questioned about Lawrence’s Australian visit and possible real-life sources, she denied that Lawrence had read any newspapers in Australia, which was patently untrue. Besides, Lawrence himself was on record as denying that Cooley was based on Kotielansky, telling another curious correspondent: "Kot was never Kangaroo - Frieda was on the wrong track."

    2 Kingsmill, a left-wing literary journalist, had published one of the last pre-war biographies of Lawrence. It was highly critical of Lawrence and rubbished Kangaroo in particular.

    3 I did not know it at the time, but researcher John Ruffels had already tracked Kershaw down and written to him asking if he could recall anything that Aldington had said about Lawrence’s time in Australia.