L I T E R A R Y H I S T O R Y Weaving a Conversation
Jacqueline Kent
Marilla North (ed.) Yarn Spinners: A Story ‘THIS IS A BOOK about friendship and storytelling,’ writes Marilla North in her prologue large and small events in the lives of Dymphna Cusack, Florence James and Miles Franklin, The book begins with letters between Cusack and James, with Cusack an intense young teacher methodically making her way as a writer, chafing at the smallness and provincialism of Australia (1939), their lampoon of Sydney’s pompous sesquicentennial celebrations. There is a certain impossible to connect with a previous generation’s sense of humour, but Marilla North context, however, is written by the English critic St John Irvine, who takes it upon himself novel, and expressing the hope that `the shock of receiving such a letter as this will have had a point?)
Florence James returns to Australia with her two daughters to wait out the war. With Cusack, their lives and the planning of their most ambitious project: a novel about women in Sydney which was, of course, Come In Spinner. It’s a pity that we can’t know more about the collaboration Their letters to Miles Franklin seem, understandably, rather preoccupied.
But the history of Spinner’s publication is absorbing and well documented. The story is novel of the year in 1947, with a prize of £1000 and the promise of publication in Sydney and it vanished altogether when the Telegraph demanded further cuts. After much unpleasant publishing contract. This gruelling saga, which took four years, is fully covered, with Miles heavies are reliably breathtaking. Heinemann in London eventually accepted Come In Spinner something has been achieved at last and all this publicity is not only important for us but for The story then settles down: Cusack has left Australia and is building on her literary reputation James is working as a literary agent in London and bringing up two children on her own. situation and the state of local writing and writers) to her absent friends. Here the narrative There are times when firmer editorial direction would have been useful. North could have wished to add her own voice more often (a clue is the occasional presence of exclamation more critical comment would have been useful. But these are mild frustrations rather than clearly time and place, prompting the reader with notes that are almost invariably judicious The correspondence itself is well chosen and full of energy. The trio write with the enviable personalities come through clearly. Cusack is fluent and seemingly artless. Only her irritated sclerosis. From time to time, North interpolates a quiet footnote that leaves the reader in no represented of the three — possibly because, as Cusack kept telling her, she was a `deadline funny and always fully engaged in whatever she was writing about, is the opinionated letter The apparent artlessness of the correspondence can be deceptive. All three women had thoroughly unpleasant divorce; Cusack her `neuralgia’, which kept her in bed for weeks Telegraph competition. Most of what we are told about these difficulties comes from North’s A quibble: North asserts that `the dons’ decided what was to be read in the English language, flourishing for more than fifty years by the time Cusack and James published Come In Spinner.
publisher.
This is a book about friendship, yes, but is it a book about `storytelling’? Yes and no. There Marilla North has presented us with three writers, weaving a skein of words, looping back A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W O C T O B E R 2 0 0 1
