A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, a literary life

By Jacqueline Kent

Beatrice Davis, 1909-1992, was general editor at Angus and Robertson the main Australian publishing company from 1937 to 1973. There she discovered and published such writers as Thea Astley, Miles Franklin, Patricia Wrightson, Xavier Herbert, and Hal Porter, becoming a literary tastemaker in the process. A central figure in Australian literature—"respected, feared, courted and berated." Originally published to great acclaim in 2001, A Certain Style introduced this stylish and formidable woman to thousands of readers and told a history of books and publishing in twentieth-century Australia. This reissue has a new introduction and updates throughout as the author presents a compelling account of a contradictory woman and her times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Dec 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781742244303

Book preview

JACQUELINE KENT was born in Sydney and grew up there and in Adelaide. Originally trained as a journalist and broadcaster for the ABC, she has been a book editor and reviewer and has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Technology, Sydney. As well as biography and social history, she has written fiction for young adults. A Certain Style won the 2002 National Biography Award and the Nita B Kibble Award. An Exacting Heart: The story of Hephzibah Menuhin won the 2009 Nita B Kibble Award. She is also the author of The Making of Julia Gillard. In 2018 she won the Hazel Rowley biography fellowship to write a book about Vida Goldstein.

BEATRICE DAVIS

a literary life

JACQUELINE KENT

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Jacqueline Kent 2018

First edition published by Viking in 2001

This edition published 2018

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

ISBN    9781742236025 (paperback)

9781742244303 (ebook)

9781742248783 (ePDF)

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Lisa White

Cover image Beatrice Davis at home at Folly Point, 1951. Photo by Quinton Davis. State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Library MLMSS 7638

Printer Griffin Press

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

Contents

Preface to the New Edition: Beatrice Revisited

Introduction

PART I 1909–1937 | Bendigo and Sydney

Little Sweetheart

The Family Intellectual Becomes an Editor

PART 2 1937–1945 | Our Miss Davis

Counter, Desk and Bench: The Story of Angus and Robertson

‘That Woman’

Fighting Words

‘We Must Remain the Literary Hub of Australia’

Living on the Edge: Ernestine Hill

‘Like a Bird Singing, She Sings for Herself ’: Eve Langley

Mrs Frederick Bridges and Miss Beatrice Davis

PART 3 1945–1960 | 89 Castlereagh Street

‘I May Not be a Great Genius … but Nevertheless My Tonnage Cannot be Ignored’: Miles Franklin

Sydney or the Bush: Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland

Mixing Their Drinks: Women Friends, Women Writers

The League of Gentlemen

Trying Out a Lover’s Voice: Hal Porter

Beating the Bibliopolic Babbitts: Xavier Herbert

No Elves, Dragons or Unicorns: Children’s Literature

Plain Sailing: Angus and Robertson During the 1950s

Bringing the Pirates on Board: The Battles for Angus and Robertson

PART 4 1960–1973 | 221 George Street

The Backroom Girl Moves up Front

Bartonry and Walshism

PART 5 1973–1992 | Folly Point and Hunters Hill

‘I Thought You Needed Me Most’

The Final Chapter

Acknowledgements

Notes

Writers and Their Works

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION:

Beatrice Revisited

When I came to look at A Certain Style for this reissue, I wondered whether reading it again would be a bit like climbing back into one’s own bathwater. I needn’t have worried. I wasn’t very far into the book before I realised that the story I wrote almost twenty years ago felt very different from the book I was reading now.

Many things have changed since the book first saw the light in 2001; certainly in terms of publishing. A Certain Style now seemed something of a time capsule, a salute to a time in literary history that has gone.

Of course, A Certain Style was always intended to be a history in a certain sense – the story of Beatrice Davis’s life and work as general editor of Angus and Robertson between 1937 and 1973, as well as the rise and fall of A&R, Australia’s longest-surviving publishers and booksellers, which set up shop in the 1880s. But when it was written it didn’t feel like an historical document. After all, Beatrice had died less than ten years earlier, and because so many of her colleagues and authors whom I had interviewed were still alive, and so much material was readily available, her life and times seemed well within reach. In the memories of those who knew and worked with her and the members of her family, Beatrice was very much alive. And it was easy to find out about her working life, too; I had only to consult the glittering treasure trove that is the Angus and Robertson collection in the State Library of New South Wales, and there were holdings in other state libraries too. I found letters, manuscripts, invoices, book reports and office memos – in short, a wonderful microcosm of life in what was once Australia’s most influential home-grown publishing company.

Beatrice’s fingerprints seemed to be everywhere. It is impossible to gauge how many books she actually edited during her time at A&R, for she worked across so many categories – novels, children’s books, biographies, books of natural history. She was also an influential literary tastemaker, being one of the first judges of the Miles Franklin Award, and she was a member of judging panels for other literary prizes. She edited anthologies of poetry and prose, she gave speeches, she even wrote articles for literary journals. For someone who called herself ‘the backroom girl of Australian literature’, she certainly seemed up front in a number of ways.

Now, however, it’s impossible to look at her career, and the life of A&R, without thinking about the differences in the literary world she moved in.

Beatrice herself was the kind of woman who hardly seems to exist in Australia any more. D’Arcy Niland once summed her up by saying: ‘There goes a gentlewoman, and she’s a little beaut, too!’ It’s the kind of enthusiastic compliment that today’s editors might not necessarily be grateful for – and indeed the word ‘gentlewoman’ is not one you hear much these days. Beatrice Davis, born in 1909, was very much of her class and time. She always dressed beautifully and conservatively – she employed a dressmaker for many years – and she had her hair done once a week at David Jones. In her work, she usually maintained a smooth, professional demeanour to colleagues and authors alike; she was very much in control. Her editorial memos and the letters she wrote that deal with her working life are calm, clear and logical. She belonged to a generation who considered it ill-bred to complain about physical ailments, or treatment by professional colleagues, or lovers, or anything else that might be considered a personal problem. And it’s difficult to think of any book editor today who makes a practice of summoning favoured writers to her pleasant house on Sydney Harbour or a studio on George Street for drinks, beautifully prepared food (and lots of alcohol too), and who would sometimes play the piano for them. She was politically conservative, she believed that politics and religion were not subjects that should be discussed in public, and she raised a quizzical eyebrow at the generation of women who followed her, considering 1970s feminism to be rather vulgar and its adherents unnecessarily aggressive.

Fortunately this calm, somewhat chilly persona was not Beatrice’s whole story. She had a wild side, though she rarely spoke about it. She had a happy but comparatively short-lived marriage to a much older man, and many close friendships with both men and women throughout her life. Especially in her later years, after a ‘teeny piece’ of whisky or a somewhat larger piece of red wine, she was apt to declare how much she enjoyed sex. Possibly because of this, there were many rumours about her private life. She was said to be lesbian, to enjoy threesomes with either men or women, and that no male author was safe from her rapacious clutches. These rumours, some encouraged by the writer Hal Porter, others as often-repeated gossip, are impossible to deny or prove at this stage. (She had her defenders, of course: D’Arcy Niland, ever her champion, took severe exception to something Porter said about her at a dinner party, grabbed him by the nose and hauled him downstairs out of the house.) Like most rumours, they are more telling about the people spreading them than about the subject. However, so discreet was Beatrice about her private life that one needs to keep an open mind.

As an editor, Beatrice was widely known as meticulous, a dedicated follower of Oxford Dictionary spelling and grammatical rules according to Fowler’s Modern English Usage. However, she didn’t mind idiosyncratic, ungrammatical language in a manuscript if she thought it was integral to the text, and if questioned she usually stood up for her authors’ right to use it. At the same time, the various state library collections contain manuscripts that she appears to have attacked with a blunt instrument. She did not always consult authors about her intentions towards their texts. Sometimes they grumbled about what they saw as her high-handedness, and she was quite happy to have a robust discussion with them, yielding to their wishes more often than not, and always graciously.

She could be extremely forthright, however, and her home truths – so much at odds with her calm, ladylike demeanour – were often disconcerting. This is perhaps the strongest indicator of the way things have changed in the editing world: it’s unheard of these days for any editor to make similar statements to an author, whatever that editor’s private views may be. Beatrice’s prestige at A&R was such that she could get away with such statements, and her fallings-out with authors seldom lasted long.

Indeed, most of her authors regarded her with admiration and often affection, and finding their letters in the A&R collection was one of the delights of research for this book. When Patricia Wrightson, who became one of Australia’s most distinguished writers for children, sent her first manuscript to Beatrice, she received no reply for a long time. Eventually she followed up with a letter asking ‘the Editor’, ‘What page are you up to now?’ Beatrice laughed, replied, and a fruitful and long-lasting collaboration was the result. Henrietta Drake-Brockman, who lived in Western Australia, would write to Beatrice about all sorts of topics, personal as well as literary. She was always a good friend, as was Xavier Herbert, though the sheer volume of his correspondence could leave Beatrice feeling rather pale. These letters are often revealing, and not always flatteringly so; Hal Porter’s self-consciously Elizabethan script, all curlicues and painstakingly studied effects, shows exactly how he deliberately fashioned himself into the writer he thought he should be.

Beatrice worked on manuscripts entirely by hand, as editors always did in her time – it’s relatively uncommon now, in our digital age. Her handwriting was almost scientifically meticulous (she had trained as an editor with the Medical Journal of Australia), being small, delicate and highly legible, done with a fine-nibbed fountain pen or a mapping pen. I found no annotations in biro, a newfangled writing instrument when she began her career, and one she evidently never adopted.

These days, of course, a book can progress on screen from the mind of the writer to the editor’s work, then to the proofreader, right up to being printed without going anywhere near paper, and it is now possible to read a book without paper at all. Some older book editors these days, possibly those with a masochistic streak, have confessed to the occasional stab of nostalgia for a time when manuscripts were not neatly lined up and typed on computers in Times Roman but were bedraggled and messy, with extra copy attached, whited-out corrections, crossings-out and footnotes added in red. Frequently maddening though these manuscripts were, the process of editing them could be as interesting and surprising as the process of thought itself. It’s impossible to believe that today’s word-processed manuscripts will yield their secrets or their processes of composition in the same way.

Beatrice’s literary world has changed in other ways, too. It was at the end of the 1960s, when she had been running the editorial department for more than twenty years and wielding a lot of power, that Angus and Robertson suddenly had to contend with very significant competition. UK- and US-based multinational publishers opened new offices here, and smaller presses sprung up too. The firm that had more or less had bookselling and publishing to itself for almost a century had to think again.

The story of Angus and Robertson, its rise and fall, is as enthralling as it is exasperating. Why, given the seismic developments in book publishing everywhere, the company could not see that their days were numbered unless they changed radically, will probably remain one of the mysteries of Australian publishing. When Gordon Barton took over the company in the early 1970s, bringing in Richard Walsh to be the chief wielder of the new broom, there was consternation among Beatrice’s friends and authors, and also in Beatrice herself. She did not like the work of new authors such as Frank Moorhouse and Michael Wilding, she thought they wrote entirely too much of what she called ‘roast and boil prose’, and she resisted Walsh at every turn. When she was finally let go, many people in the literary world were up in arms. However, forty years later it is obvious that what Barton and Walsh were doing with A&R – however bruising the effects – was inevitable if the company was to survive.

Now Angus and Robertson no longer exists except as an imprint of a multinational publisher; the sandstone of the Sydney buildings Beatrice knew, including A&R’s headquarters in Castlereagh Street, have been replaced by smooth-faced glass and concrete towers; Beatrice and many of her friends, colleagues and authors are no longer with us. Books are now only one element of a much larger media mix, not most of it, and publishing schedules are much tighter. Gone are the days when Beatrice allowed a book to be published only when she was satisfied that the editorial process was complete, however long that might take – and sometimes it took months, even years. More books are published in less time now, to maintain profits: sometimes it seems that publishers, like the characters in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, are running twice as fast to stay in the same place.

Beatrice believed that a good book would find its readers with minimal effort, and she would have scoffed at the role that marketing and publicity play in today’s book trade. The growth of book clubs, literary festivals, the increasing number of prizes, exposure on mass media – all of these things, which hardly existed in Beatrice’s time, are now essential tools in promoting books. And editors, though less powerful than she was, have paradoxically become more prominent. They lecture in book publishing and creative writing courses and they have their names on the books they edited, a practice Beatrice considered nothing short of reprehensible.

As well as being Beatrice’s life story and that of A&R, A Certain Style is a study in the relationship between editor and author. It’s a rich field for a biographer, shedding a new light on the personalities and attitudes of so many writers with whom Beatrice worked, some of whom are now forgotten while others continue to be celebrated. The nature of this connection, I came to realise, has not changed since the glory days of Angus & Robertson. When an author and an editor sit down together with the aim of making the best possible book, when they must learn to trust each other and the process, all sorts of emotions are likely to be unleashed. An author may be suspicious, grateful, annoyed, angry with what is happening to his or her work – an editor might be impatient, irritated with the author’s refusal to understand what needs to be done to his or her words. Editor and author may not even like each other, or they may end up forging an enduring friendship.

The anxieties, the need for encouragement and occasional bluntness – all are familiar to editors everywhere and always have been. And like her successors, Beatrice Davis knew that, even if an author is less than a brilliant writer, the joint work of shaping a manuscript, bringing it through the publishing process to the reader, is often deeply satisfying. Her working life bears witness to her attentive pleasure in exercising her craft.

Introduction

On a cold July evening in 1980 a small elegant woman climbed the wooden staircase to the first floor of the Kirribilli Neighbourhood Centre on the north side of Sydney Harbour, almost under the bridge. She moved slowly, clutching the rail – the stairs were steep, she was seventy-one and a lifetime of cigarette smoking had made her wheezy – pausing for breath only when she reached the top landing. From behind a half-open door she heard the murmuring voices of about forty young women who were waiting for her to speak to them. Most were in their twenties or thirties, young enough to be her daughters. In one sense that is exactly who we were.

We were book editors. Most of us worked for the Australian branches of the American- and British-based publishers who had dominated the local publishing scene since the early 1970s. Like book editors the world over, we were mainly middle-class women with university degrees. Almost none of us had started our working lives as editors – we were former teachers, librarians, university tutors, researchers – and we all knew we would have been better paid if we had stayed in our original jobs.

Yet we had turned our backs on more financially rewarding jobs because we wanted to work with books. Most of us found seductive the idea of engaging with the minds and imaginations of writers. And whatever our problems with schedules or costs, ridiculous deadlines, impossible authors or execrably written texts flung together to catch a market, we still enjoyed turning a manuscript from a pile of paper to a finished book, and seeing ‘our’ books in bookshops and on library shelves, knowing that – maybe – they would not have been as good without us.

We had come out on this midwinter night because the speaker we were about to hear knew more about the craft of editing than anyone else in Australia. She was legendary, and for many of us she had been a role model from the day we started in publishing. It was this woman, Beatrice Davis, who had written: ‘Nothing quite equals the surprised by joy feeling when an editor comes upon a writer, previously unknown, who shows signs of the creative imagination that is so rare, so hard to define, so immediately recognisable.’

We knew that Beatrice Davis was the bridge spanning modern Australian literature from Miles Franklin to Tim Winton. She had been with Angus and Robertson for thirty-six years, from 1937 until 1973, and was now the Sydney editor for Thomas Nelson. She had been much more than a polisher of other people’s prose. In the early 1940s, with Douglas Stewart, she had founded Australian Poetry and Coast to Coast, ground-breaking anthologies which presented the work of an emerging generation of Australian writers, among them Judith Wright, A.D. Hope, Dal Stivens and Judah Waten, and which continued to publish outstanding poetry and prose for more than thirty years.

She had been a friend to dozens of Australian poets and novelists, including Thea Astley, Hal Porter, Xavier Herbert, Douglas Stewart and Ruth Park. As a judge of the Miles Franklin Award from its inception in 1957 she had influenced public perception of what was best in Australian fiction. She had trained a generation of editors to follow her. Douglas Stewart had written about her: ‘As much as anyone else, and more than most, she kept Australian literature alive for more than a quarter of a century.’ She had been made an MBE in 1965, Bookman of the Year in 1976, and was shortly to be made an AM. We also knew that Beatrice Davis had been dismissed from Angus and Robertson in 1973, at the age of sixty-four, a casualty of the company’s takeover by Gordon Barton’s IPEC. Richard Walsh, who had fired the bullet, was still excoriated seven years later. Some of us were eagerly indignant on Beatrice’s behalf, ready to consider her a martyr to the feminist cause.

In her dress of fine blue wool, stockings and black high-heeled shoes, with immaculately waved grey hair, discreet makeup and elegant jewellery, Beatrice seemed to belong in the old Queen’s Club, a place of antique furniture and gleaming mirrors. Barbara Ker Wilson, a former colleague of Beatrice’s at Angus and Robertson, introduced her, speaking with enthusiasm of Beatrice’s achievements and honours. Some of us noticed Beatrice give her a swift, quizzical glance: Darling, let’s not overdo it. A minute later she began to speak. Her hands, we noticed, were empty: her skill and experience in public speaking evidently transcended the use of notes. ‘I have been asked to speak to you about the role of the editor,’ she began in a low-pitched voice, her vowels rounded in the cultivated Australian speech of an earlier era. ‘And although I can see that this audience consists mainly of women, I shall throughout refer to the editor as he.’ She paused and looked around the room, her chin raised.

The few editors who had worked with Beatrice smiled at each other. They knew her dislike of inclusive language, her distaste for the distortions she considered feminism had imposed on the language of Fowler and the Oxford English Dictionary. But others frowned and folded their arms. If Beatrice noticed this evidence of resistance, she gave no sign. ‘I shall begin by saying that editing should never be obvious,’ she continued evenly. ‘The author’s voice is sacrosanct, and the editor must always remember that the book does not belong to him, but to the author.’

Beatrice was echoing the words of Maxwell Perkins – the legendary US editor of Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway – who had once observed that in the end an editor can get out of an author only what that author has in him. Yet as Beatrice continued – ‘The editor should …’ ‘The editor must …’ ‘It is the editor’s responsibility to …’ – some of us felt uneasy. We knew Beatrice was condensing almost fifty years of her professional life into half an hour, but she seemed to be speaking to us not as colleagues but as students, laying down the law: in effect, ordering us to be submissive. We found difficulty in believing that a woman with such a strong personality, someone so much in control, even bossy, was quite as deferential to her authors as she was telling us to be.

When the time came for questions from the audience, an editor in her early thirties challenged Beatrice on her attitude to inclusive language. Looking irritated, Beatrice invoked traditional English grammar in support of her position, her snappy tone making it clear that she considered the subject closed. The editor was ready to continue the argument, but the feeling of the meeting was against her: it seemed the height of bad manners to wrangle with such a distinguished guest.

For some years after this, I met Beatrice Davis at various literary events; we acknowledged each other, but never really had a conversation. Then in 1983 my first book, a history of Australian radio, was published. Not long afterwards Beatrice greeted me with: ‘I believe you’ve written a book, dear.’ When I admitted this, gratified that she had noticed, her reply was: ‘You are an editor. Editors do not write books.’ I felt that I had been slapped on the wrist.

A few years afterwards we had a more interesting encounter. It was October 1987 and I was coming to the end of a dreadful year. Kenneth Cook, the author of Wake in Fright whom I had married in January, had died of a heart attack three months later and I was still raw. Beatrice came up to me and said crisply, ‘I’m sorry about your husband, dear.’ I was touched and thanked her. ‘Yes,’ she added, ‘it’s really difficult when you have to bury them, isn’t it?’

Them? How many men did she mean, for heaven’s sake? There was something about the blunt tactlessness of her comment that I found, and still do, oddly endearing, perhaps because it was so unexpected. For the first time I realised that Beatrice’s genteel, ladylike persona was only part of her story. Later I discovered that she was famous for her forthright comments to, and about, authors. ‘Go to bed with Xavier Herbert?’ she said to his biographer. ‘No. He never stopped talking long enough.’ (She was lying.) I also learned that Beatrice had cut quite a swathe through the male literary community, though her comment to me suggested that she considered men expendable.

When Beatrice left Angus and Robertson, about eighty of her authors – some of whom had been the subject of her blunt remarks – put together a book of tributes to her. Their words give a softer picture of the acerbic woman I was beginning to know. Thea Astley, whom Beatrice had discovered and whose first novel, Girl With a Monkey, A&R published in 1958, said that her first editor had always been ‘a helpful friend who has the capacity to advise without hurt, to correct without making the author feel ashamed or inadequate’. Others commented on Beatrice’s elegant appearance, the time and care she put into training a new generation of editors, her thoughtfulness, the sensitive sympathy and practical help she gave to many writers. Granted that critical comment is unlikely to be found in this kind of informal Festschrift, the genuine affection that Beatrice inspired among writers of poetry, fiction, children’s books and non-fiction was still striking.

After Beatrice retired in the late 1980s, several people suggested she write her memoirs. She refused, adding revealingly, ‘Most of the authors are (or have been when alive) my friends. How could I expose them?’

It was a tease on her part, but Beatrice would never have written a tell-all memoir: such a book would destroy the unspoken compact between author and editor. Neither tells the other’s secrets. Authors often give their editors information they do not want to be made public; editors don’t gossip about their authors to the wider world – or usually not until the author is dead (as in the case of Xavier Herbert). Beatrice might also have been reluctant to tell readers what their favourite authors were ‘really’ like, having long since learned to shrug off appalling authorial behaviour as the price to be paid for a good book.

But she was not entirely indifferent to the claims of posterity. In 1977 she allowed herself to be interviewed for the archives of the National Library of Australia, although the tape is entirely without revealing comment about her authors or herself. She also co-operated with Anthony Barker, a friend and former colleague at Angus and Robertson, in a 47-page biographical study published by The Victorian Society of Editors. One of the First and One of the Finest: Beatrice Davis, Book Editor, which appeared in 1991, has many fascinating glimpses of Beatrice’s life at Angus and Robertson. Former prime minister Billy Hughes struggles up the stairs to her attic office crying, ‘Where is she? Where’s the woman I’d leave home for?’ Beatrice drinks with her authors in her studio in lower George Street, throws herself into her job after the death of her husband Frederick Bridges. It’s an admirable study, undoubtedly constrained by the fact that Beatrice was still alive and that she and Anthony Barker were friends.

Beatrice Davis died on 24 May 1992, aged eighty-three. ‘A publisher’s editor,’ wrote Kylie Tennant in 1973, ‘has to be a cross between Man O’ War and Pardon the Son of Regret, with a heart that nothing can break.’ Beatrice might not have enjoyed being compared to a couple of racehorses, but she might have liked Tennant’s assertion that she had stamina and staying power. She lived during – indeed, presided over – a time of great change in Australian publishing, guiding the careers of many of our best-known authors. Her position as a literary taste-maker remained unchallenged for many years. She was a ‘career woman’ at a time when such a creature was relatively rare. She was also a complex and contradictory character.

Beatrice spent most of her time editing non-fiction and other work she called ‘roast and boil prose’, but she always preferred to work on fiction. Most of the authors whose stories are told here are writers of novels or short stories. These are also the writers with whom she had most empathy, and her relationship with them often illuminates their personalities as well as Beatrice’s own. Beatrice also had long-standing and close friendships with imaginative writers in other categories – poets, writers of literary non-fiction, children’s authors – and where their stories illustrate Beatrice’s work practice or give fresh insight into writing and publishing, they too have been included. A strictly chronological approach to the writing of this book proved problematic: like all professional editors, Beatrice worked on several manuscripts at once, and her relationships with authors varied in duration and intensity. To avoid confusion, A Certain Style has been organised by theme along broadly chronological lines – tracing the whole history of Beatrice’s involvement with a particular author, for example. A list giving the dates and major works of key writers will be found at the end of this book.

In one way, researching the life and times of Beatrice Davis has been relatively easy because she lived in Sydney and was known to so many people who still live there. But it has been unexpectedly difficult to enter her world, to see things as she did, because so much of her Sydney no longer exists. Especially since the early 1960s, most of the solidly Victorian maritime city she knew has been pulled down and smashed. Number 89 Castlereagh Street, the former livery stables where the wonderfully cavernous Angus and Robertson bookshop stood for eighty years and where Beatrice edited manuscripts in an attic office the size of a sentry box, is now the site of the Centrepoint Tower; at the former entrance stands an automatic teller machine. At 213B George Street, the raffish and tumbledown terrace where as a young woman Beatrice flouted family convention by renting a room on her own, is a blank-faced office block. There are many other differences: bellowing traffic has superseded the cream-and-green trams that used to rattle down the city’s streets; all of the old arcades with their hatters, dressmakers, palmists and beauticians have gone; people walk faster, unimpeded by melting asphalt pavements, potholes, street photographers. Look up from Circular Quay as Beatrice did and you see not the Eiffel-like AWA Tower, once the tallest building in the city, but massively looming and largely anonymous office buildings. The winds off the harbour dodge round canyons and pinnacles of glass and concrete.

The publishing industry has greatly changed, too. In Beatrice’s day many employees of the bookshop, publishing company and printery that comprised Angus and Robertson began work with ‘the auld Firm’ as boys and stayed until they were in their eighties. (Men only, of course: for many years women were expected to leave when they married.) Systems established at the turn of the century were unchanged sixty years later; estimates of print runs were sometimes given by production staff or printers likely to remember how many copies of a similar book had been printed ten, twenty, even forty years before. This kind of ‘race memory’ is almost incredible in these days of accountants and computer projections. The idea of attending regular lunchtime lectures on printing techniques by a craftsman typographer, as Beatrice’s staff did during the 1950s, is unknown to today’s book editors, wrestling with too many manuscripts and too little time. Back then ‘deadline’ still had its original 1868 meaning of ‘a line drawn round a military prison, beyond which a prisoner may be shot down’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1947 edition). It now seems almost beyond belief that in Beatrice’s heyday a manuscript was given all the time, care and attention the editor thought it required. In its lack of urgency about scheduling, its painstaking and careful devotion to the written word, Angus and Robertson was more like an old-fashioned university arts department than a modern commercial publishing company.

Most of Beatrice’s career coincided with a time when people kept in touch by letter; the telephone was used for essential communication only. (Beatrice was notorious for abruptly ending telephone conversations.) Tucked away in manila folders in various Australian libraries are hundreds of pages with ‘BD’ in the top left-hand corner – copies of letters Beatrice wrote to her authors over almost forty years. Some are formal, others friendly, irritated, waspish, thoughtful or delighted: all are written with clarity, economy and precision. It is in these letters, as well as in comments, explanations and anecdotes given by her family, friends, authors and colleagues, that Beatrice may be found.

A richly layered, sometimes contradictory picture emerges. A petite woman in her thirties sits in her tiny office calmly making tiny red-ink marks on a manuscript, her handwriting so delicate that Miles Franklin once told her it should be played on a piano. At an Admiralty House reception held by the governor-general Sir Paul Hasluck, she grows impatient with the company of the other women after dinner and, fortified by a couple of red wines, begins playing classical music on the piano in the corner. At a meeting of the English Association she quietly steers one belligerent writer away from another. Long known as a hostess, she is so nervous on hearing Douglas Stewart describe the virtues of wild duck that she drops her main course – roast duck – on the floor. Horrified to hear the children’s writer Joan Phipson announce that she doesn’t possess a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, she sends her one immediately. She makes love on the flat roof of her house; she appears in a Norman Lindsay engraving wearing nothing but an exotic headdress.

There are some surprising glimpses of authors, too. A fascinated Hal Porter, driving Eve Langley around Gippsland, hears her address a young boy as Oscar Wilde. At lunch with Beatrice at the Australia Hotel, Xavier Herbert talks so long and loudly about himself that it is too late to eat. Ernestine Hill sends exotic shells discovered by deep-sea divers near Broome. Douglas Stewart has a long and joky correspondence with her (‘Dear Miss Davis, Are you fond of poetry?’ … ‘PS: I had a tooth out last week. Would you like it?’).

Though there is no shortage of material by and about her, in another way Beatrice is not easy to find. By temperament and upbringing she was a reserved, even secretive person, giving very little of herself away. Sometimes her sense of privacy and gentlewoman’s manners exasperated her more rumbustious authors. ‘Have you ever seen her spitting?’ Xavier Herbert once asked Hal Porter. ‘I guess not. She has wonderful self-control. I think she smashes things only after one is out of earshot.’ If Beatrice ever indulged in smashing plates, glasses or furniture, she undoubtedly waited until she was alone. Her frustrations with authors and colleagues at Angus and Robertson, her griefs, bereavements, disappointments – these she rarely confided to anyone. ‘It’s all too boring,’ she would say. An A&R colleague observed that there were times when she didn’t think Beatrice had tear ducts.

But like most people, Beatrice found it impossible to behave with perfect restraint all the time. Particularly after what she called ‘a tiny piece of whisky’, or a larger piece of red wine, she was apt to let her guard drop and become quite outspoken, sometimes with disconcerting results. She wasn’t alone in this, of course – Australian literary life had always more or less floated on a sea of alcohol – but the change that drink made to Beatrice’s usually calm and discreet behaviour was dramatic. She could switch from being charming and attentive to grumpy, sarcastic, even downright rude, capable of telling certain writers that in her opinion they couldn’t write for nuts.

Fortunately, she had a more valuable, consoling means of emotional release than alcohol. ‘Music has always been the art to which I have been most devoted and most disinterestedly dedicated – an art in which I should have loved to excel, but an art in which I could never have made