The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE PENGUIN HENRY LAWSON

  HENRY LAWSON (1867–1922) was born at Grenfell, New South Wales, where his father, a Norwegian sailor (originally Larsen), was unsuccessfully prospecting for gold. Partially deaf from the age of nine, he had little formal education, and was an apprentice in Sydney when he began to write verse and short stories. His first published work was in 1887 in the Bulletin, an influential weekly with which he was associated for the rest of his life. His reputation as a short story writer was established with the publication of While the Billy Boils in 1896. During two years (1900–02) that he spent in England, he enjoyed the friendship and critical support of Edward Garnett, and wrote some of his best stories, which were collected in Joe Wilson and His Mates in 1901. After his return to Australia his work showed a marked decline, and the rest of his life was darkened by alcoholism and the bitterness generated by the breakdown of his marriage. A national figure, identified strongly with Australian values, he died in poverty in Sydney, where he was given a State funeral.

  JOHN BARNES retired as Professor of English at La Trobe University in 1996. He was the founder-editor of Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review, and is now the editor of The La Trobe Journal, which is published by the State Library of Victoria Foundation. He has published widely on Australian Literature, his works including a biography of Joseph Furphy, critical studies on a variety of authors, and The Writer in Australia: A Collection of Literary Documents. He is currently writing a biography of the socialist publisher and bookseller, Henry Hyde Champion.

  THE PENGUIN HENRY LAWSON

  SHORT STORIES

  edited with an introduction by John Barnes

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1986

  Introduction copyright © John Barnes 1986

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  ISBN: 978-1-74228-428-6

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  THE DROVER’S WIFE

  THE BUSH UNDERTAKER

  II

  IN A DRY SEASON

  THE UNION BURIES ITS DEAD

  HUNGERFORD

  III

  ‘RATS’

  AN OLD MATE OF YOUR FATHER’S

  MITCHELL: A CHARACTER SKETCH

  ON THE EDGE OF A PLAIN

  ‘SOME DAY’

  SHOOTING THE MOON

  OUR PIPES

  BILL, THE VENTRILOQUIAL ROOSTER

  IV

  THE GEOLOGICAL SPIELER

  THE IRON-BARK CHIP

  THE LOADED DOG

  V

  BRIGHTEN’S SISTER-IN-LAW

  A DOUBLE BUGGY AT LAHEY’S CREEK

  ‘WATER THEM GERANIUMS’

  JOE WILSON’S COURTSHIP

  TELLING MRS BAKER

  VI

  A CHILD IN THE DARK, AND A FOREIGN FATHER

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  GLOSSARY

  INTRODUCTION

  STORY-TELLING is an ancient art, but the idea of the short story as a distinct literary form is comparatively recent. Today the term ‘short story’ covers a range of possibilities, and we are less likely than the readers of a century ago to regard the short story as the poor relation of the novel. There perhaps still lingers a suspicion that the fiction writer without a novel to his credit has, so to speak, failed to measure up to the real test of creativity, no matter how fine that writer’s short fiction may impress us as being. And in our assessment of the achievements of a short-story writer, we incline perhaps to regard most highly those stories which best bear comparison with novels. It is certainly true that critical discussion of Henry Lawson’s prose writing has been coloured by the assumption – sometimes unconscious – that in being ‘only a short-story writer’ he was less than if he had been a novelist. That is an assumption challenged in this selection, which aims to show Lawson as an original and distinctive artist whose prose fiction is only now receiving the right kind of recognition.

  In Lawson’s lifetime a combination of factors tended to cloud perception of what was distinctive about his writing. There was the general expectation that as he matured he would write a novel (or a sequence of connected stories), a ‘big’ work, no matter how commonplace, being regarded as of a higher order of creation than a piece of short fiction. The prevailing taste was for short stories with a strong narrative interest – ‘story’ in the simplest sense – and Lawson was most highly praised by local critics for those works in which he came nearest to the conventional. But probably the most influential factor was Lawson’s standing as a national figure. ‘Henry Lawson is the voice of the bush, and the bush is the heart of Australia’, proclaimed A. G. Stephens of the Bulletin, when reviewing his first book, Short Stories in Prose and Verse, in 1895, and that view of his uniquely representative status is still potent, at least for older readers. For some of us, our responses to Lawson’s writing still tend to get mixed up with feelings about ‘the real, the true Australia’. Manning Clark’s recent In Search of Henry Lawson (which he describes as ‘a hymn of praise to a man who was great of heart’) states the basic proposition on which the ‘Lawson legend’ rests: ‘Australia is Lawson writ large’. Clark’s book shows just how strong the romantic conception of the ‘national voice’ remains, at least where Lawson is concerned.

  The historical function of Lawson’s writing is undeniable. At a time of burgeoning nationalism, he was stimulated by a notion of ‘Australianness’, and was himself a source of stimulus to others. In his stories where he writes as one of the bush people he describes, Lawson impressed his contemporaries as a reporter and observer, opening their eyes to the reality around them. Reviewing While the Billy Boils in 1896, Price Warung clearly had reservations about the literary quality of the stories, but no doubt about their documentary value. ‘We do not yet, we Australians, know our country’, he wrote, going on to praise Lawson’s knowledge and concluding, ‘Whatever else may be said of it, certain it is that this book must make Australians know their Australia better’. Another reviewer – like Price Warung, inclined to devalue Lawson’s stories as being no more than ‘p
hotographs’ – thought that they would help ‘to correct false and create fresh impressions of Australian life among all who are amiably or earnestly interested in learning what our National Characteristics are and towards what they may be tending’. Yet another found ‘the genuine Australia’ in While the Billy Boils and (in the rhetoric to which Lawson’s admirers were prone) wrote: ‘Of this Australia Henry Lawson is the poet, the prophet, the singer, and the portal-keeper of its temple’. By the end of his life, the belief that Lawson was ‘the poet prophet of Australia’ (in the words of his aristocratic benefactor, Earl Beauchamp) had taken firm root, and more and more in the years that followed it affected how he was read.

  The ‘Lawson legend’ was not groundless – legends seldom are – but it was a partial and distorting view of a writer of individual gifts, and it fostered an uncritical attitude which discouraged intelligent scrutiny of what he had written. Lawson’s writing did strike his contemporaries with the effect of a revelation. What he offered, though, was not an inclusive transcript of bush life but an intense and narrow personal vision. His famed knowledge of the bush was comparatively limited, his direct experience of the Outback being confined to that one soul-searing trip to Bourke and Hungerford which lasted in all less than a year. The precision of detail and the feeling of intimacy with which life in the countryside was portrayed in his writing led some of the early readers to think of him as primarily concerned with describing various phases of Australian life. Very soon, though, there were objections that his work did not portray the whole truth about the bush or about Australia in general. The argument was really beside the point. As Frank Sargeson – himself a fine short-story writer who learnt from Lawson – once pointed out, Lawson was not a realist, in the usual sense of the word: ‘He looked at the desolation of the Australian inland, and he saw his own interior desolation’. Lawson, he went on to say, ‘uses naturalistic phenomena to express his inward-looking vision’.

  This ‘inward-looking vision’ was very different from the ‘gospel of mateship’ with which Lawson has been identified, on the basis of a selective reading of his work. True, mateship was a phenomenon of the bush life, and Lawson writes about it often. True also, the impulse to idealise the facts of mateship, and to sentimentalise relationships between men, is there from the beginning (his very first story – of a father and son – is entitled ‘His Father’s Mate’). But the insistence on the value of mateship as the most important human relationship is an aspect of Lawson’s decline. Children of the Bush, which appeared in 1902, marks the turning point in Lawson’s artistic life. It contains a number of stories in which mateship is celebrated, stories like ‘Send Round the Hat’, which are heart-warming and quite lacking in the hard-edged authenticity of the best stories in While the Billy Boils. The bush life which Lawson now lovingly evokes is a touched-up ‘photograph’, in which sentiment predominates over emotion. Lawson himself, one might say, could not face reality as he had once done, and retreated into sentimental re-writing of his own achievement. Indeed, one could say that his early collapse contributed to falsification of what he had done in the short creative period of his life.

  To those who saluted Lawson as ‘the voice of Australia’, literary considerations were of secondary importance, and the struggling artist was hardly discernible in the almost mystically conceived National Writer. A most common formulation in the obituary articles was that Lawson was the ‘Poet of Australia’, a kind of antipodean Burns, whose writings were a treasure house of Australianness. When half a century later Colin Roderick collected Lawson’s verse in three substantial volumes, it was apparent how little of it could be considered poetry. The essential criticism had been made as long ago as 1902 by Edward Garnett, the most perceptive critic Lawson encountered, when he wrote: ‘Like a voice speaking to you through a bad telephone, the poems convey the speaker’s meaning, but all the shades of original tone are muffled, lost or hidden’. There would be general agreement now that Lawson’s verse is marginal to his achievement, thus reversing the preference of his own day.

  However, although we may now claim that we are no longer blinkered in our view of Lawson – at least, not to the extent that previous generations were – we can hardly claim to have seen him steadily, and certainly not whole. Anyone looking over the quite extensive body of critical comment on Lawson must be struck by the almost patronising way in which his work – especially his prose work – was discussed, even by his admirers, before A. A. Phillips’s essay in 1948 argued the case for Lawson as a craftsman. Although Phillips’s own acceptance of the essential outline of the Lawson legend did close off lines of speculation that he might profitably have followed, his perception that Lawson was a conscious innovator – aiming at a minimum of ‘plot’ – directed attention to the previously neglected formal aspects of the stories. Brian Matthews effected a further reorientation of Lawson studies when in the first full-length critical study of the stories, The Receding Wave (1972), he argued that Lawson’s decline was not mainly the result of personal circumstances but had its origin in the very nature of his talent. Odd though it may seem, considering how much has been written about Lawson, it is only since Matthews’s book that the stories have begun to receive sustained critical attention. Scholarly study has now revealed aspects of the man and his writing that hitherto were hidden or ignored. There is as yet no adequate biography, but biographical accounts have now got beyond anecdote and admiration, and an illuminating Freudian study by French academic Xavier Pons has identified psychological issues with which Lawson’s eventual biographer will have to deal.

  ‘I don’t know about the merit or value of my work’, wrote Lawson in ‘ “Pursuing Literature” in Australia’, a bitter apologia in the Bulletin in 1899, ‘all I know is that I started a shy, ignorant lad from the bush, under every disadvantage arising from poverty and lack of education, and with the extra disadvantage of partial deafness thrown in.’ He did not exaggerate the disadvantages, but they can be seen in another light as not being disadvantages at all, as far as the writer was concerned. Many have sought to imitate Lawson’s simplicity of style, but no other Australian writer has managed so well to create that effect of natural, unaffected Australian speech, which is Lawson’s hallmark. A few years of elementary education in ‘the old bark school’, taught by a teacher whose weak points were ‘spelling, English grammar and singing’, may not seem much of a preparation for a writing career; and Lawson was always rather defensive on the point, easily hurt by the criticisms of his ‘cultured critics’. But though his spelling was always shaky and he suffered from feelings of inferiority, Lawson’s very lack of education meant that his style was largely formed on the speech of the people amongst whom he lived. He had learnt to read from Robinson Crusoe, and Defoe’s plain style undoubtedly had some influence on the formation of his own. Lawson read little throughout his life and took little from what he did read. The absence of pretension, and of self-conscious literariness, enabled Lawson to write in a genuinely simple style. He had confidence in the vernacular as literary language (most other Australian writers have thought it suitable only for humorous effects) because he knew no other. His prose at its best shows him acutely aware of tone and inflection as registers of feeling in the voice. His deafness may have shut out a great deal in his adult life, while preserving uncorrupted the memory of voices heard in childhood.

  Asked by an aspiring writer what was the best early training for a writer, Hemingway replied, ‘an unhappy childhood’. Lawson might well have given the same answer. More important than the vivid memories of places and people was the intense loneliness he felt. He was the eldest child of a foreign father and an Australian-born mother. His father was Nils Larsen, a Norwegian sailor who had left his ship to join the gold rushes in 1855. His mother, Louisa, who changed the family name when registering her son’s birth in 1867, was the dominant parent in the marriage: a remarkable woman of great determination, she had literary talent and encouraged her son to write. Lawson’s parents were
the models for the couple in ‘A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father’, though it would be a mistake to take the story as straight autobiography. In his ‘Fragment of Autobiography’, a meandering and patchy account of his early years, Lawson touched on the misery of his childhood, but shied away from looking closely at the family situation:

  Home life, I might as well say here, was miserably unhappy, but it was fate – there was no one to blame. It was the result of one of those utterly impossible matches so common in Australia. I remember a child who, after a violent and painful scene, used to slip out in the dark and crouch down behind the pig-stye and sob as if his heart would break.

  A weak, dreamy boy, whose aunts always said that he should have been a girl, and whom town boys called ‘Barmy Harry’, Lawson knew periods when he seemed to live on his own: ‘when Mother and brothers, but not so often Father, seemed to go completely out of my life’. Later in the autobiography he remarks: ‘As I grew the feeling of loneliness and the desire to be alone increased’. The partial deafness which afflicted him from the age of nine added to his isolation. ‘I wasn’t a healthy-minded, average boy’, says Joe Wilson (in ‘Joe Wilson’s Courtship’), and there is no doubt that he speaks for Lawson.

  The Lawson family was broken up in 1883 when the parents separated. Henry and the other children went with their mother to Sydney, where she became a prominent advocate of women’s rights, founding Dawn, the first Australian feminist journal in 1888, and publishing her son’s first book, Short Stories in Prose and Verse, in 1894. Lawson’s early years had been spent in the countryside around Mudgee in New South Wales, where his father had variously been a prospector, selector, and carpenter, but from 1883 onward Sydney became his home base. Lawson’s life was never settled for very long, but it was always to Sydney that he returned after his various trips – to back o’ Bourke, to Western Australia (twice), to New Zealand (twice), and to England. These journeys brought him fresh ‘copy’ (Lawson favoured the journalist’s term though he did not have the journalist’s approach to writing) in the shape of new impressions, but they did not fundamentally alter his vision of things. The impulse to write grew out of the keenness of his youthful feeling. Looking back late in his life, Lawson knew that he had lost the power he had possessed when he began to write as ‘the lonely boy who felt things deeply and wrote with his heart’s blood’.