A Certain Style by Jacqueline Kent

Author:Jacqueline Kent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

Beating the Bibliopolic Babbitts: Xavier Herbert

When Beatrice joined Angus and Robertson in 1937, one of the up-and-corning writers was a pharmacist-turned-novelist in his late thirties named Francis Xavier Herbert. His novel Capricornia, dealing partly with race relations in northern Australia, was creating quite a stir in publishing circles. First published by P.R. Stephensen’s Publicist Publishing Co. and winner of a prize in the Sydney sesquicentennial novel competition, it then appeared with A&R in 1938. An immediate success, it was reprinted many times in Australia, published in the UK, where H.G. Wells described it as ‘vigorous and distinctive’, in the USA and in a clutch of European countries.

Beatrice met Xavier Herbert for the first time early in 1939. He was a bantam rooster of a man with a grating voice, blazing blue eyes and ferociously passionate opinions. Soon after meeting her he announced to Beatrice that he intended to enrich Australian literature, while at the same time declaring that he hated semicolons so much that he had sawed the key off his typewriter. In short, Herbert was a ‘character’ – not just the ‘odd and interesting person’ of dictionary definition, but with the added Australian connotation: here was someone who should probably be treated with caution.

Once he had become a successful A&R author, Herbert began to send Walter Cousins long and detailed reports about the progress of his next novel. In January 1940 he wrote:

I can’t hurry, I dare not. My present job is not so much to write a novel as to eclipse myself. The fact that I am regarded as an established writer does not mean a thing to me … Any fool can fluke a masterpiece and go on turning out imitations of it. I’m no such fool. The great weakness of Australian authors is their lack of sustained power. Who of us has ever turned out more than one masterpiece? None! I am going to do it, or get out!1

This was not empty boasting. In bombarding poor Walter Cousins with incessant information about his writing techniques, intended wordage, analysis of his own work and occasionally scornful comments about other writers, Herbert was utterly sincere. His commitment to being a writer was wholehearted – he told Cousins he would give up all his bad habits in order to write his book, ‘the job of my life’. He stopped smoking and for a while even grew a beard to make himself look more literary.

Cousins, who knew that, apart from his wife Sadie, Herbert had few people with whom he could discuss his work, responded to his remorseless enthusiasm with great kindness. For a while he regularly sent Herbert, who lived in north Queensland, copies of the Sydney Morning Herald carefully folded in brown paper, tied with string and labelled. He provided Herbert with white quarto typing paper and once, when the author said the rubber bag holding the ink for his fountain pen had perished, he sent several different types to choose from. But after a while even Cousins wilted under Herbert’s barrage.

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