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Description
Introduction
The Great War was "a rigorous test for intellectuals" (1) that was especially severe for two young white Australian intellectuals--only twenty-nine years of age and just married; beginning to establish themselves as writers, journalists and poets; and struggling to throw off the shackles of colonialism and forge new definitions of their Australian nationality. This era of profound change that saw the break-up of the great European empires also generated debate about the meaning of nationhood, including in dominions such as Australia, which had long derived a large part of its identity from a powerful sense of being British. The Palmers' responses to these changes were not only theoretical and polemical but personal and ambivalent. Neither Edward Vivian (Vance) Palmer (1885-1959) nor Janet Gertrude (Nettie) Palmer nee Higgins (1885-1964) were combatants--but both would ultimately be "wounded" in the war. I shall argue in this article that the war restricted and shaped the life and career choices that both of them made--and, most significantly for our understanding of Australian literary history in this period, deeply influenced their subsequent cultural production and intellectual activity.
Both Palmers are significant figures in Australian intellectual, literary and cultural history. Indeed, Nettie Palmer was the most important non-academic critic working in Australia in the interwar period (2) while Vance Palmer was acclaimed in 1959 by Clem Christesen, editor of the literary journal Meanjin, as "the most distinguished man of letters Australia has so far produced". (3) H.M. Green, the prominent literary critic, described Vance's "The Farmer Remembers the Somme" as one of "Australia's finest war poems". (4) Nettie received favourable notice for a political biography of her uncle, H.B. Higgins--the famous radical politician and judge--and gained respect among Australia's literate classes for her editorial pen and radio broadcasts. Vance was also renowned as playwright, short-story writer and novelist. Both Palmers wrote and spoke extensively about Australian life and arts, culture and politics; they have rightly been seen as influential in the recognition and support of literature in Australia. The historian Geoffrey Serle went so far as to define a "Vance Palmer-Meanjin nationalist-internationalist" tradition in Australian writing that expressed the "triple conjunction of egalitarianism, nationalism and Labor"] This tradition has often been especially identified with the city of Melbourne, and contrasted with a more individualistic, socially pessimistic, and less programmatic Sydney intellectual tradition. (6)
While the Palmers could reasonably be described as transnational, cosmopolitan and also environmentally aware, there was an emergent critique in Australian cultural history from the late 1960s that constructed Vance pejoratively as a "nationalist"--a "reading" of his life and work that was part of a wider rejection of the "radical-nationalist" tradition in Australian history that came out of the New Left. (7) But as we shall see below, Vance's view of the Great War was sophisticated and nuanced, and he never endorsed the proposition that the Australian nation had experienced a "baptism of fire" in that conflict. His Australian nationalism was not that of the "big-noter", but nor was he the pacifist that Robin Gerster calls him. (8) Multilingual Nettie, who read Greek and Latin and spoke French, German, Spanish and Italian, wrote extensively on war in literature, while never equating Australian nationhood with the Anzac tradition, nor military sacrifice with the "sacred". Like Vance, she was alive to the possibility of an Australia of the imagination that would not depend on war or blood sacrifice as the foundation for a sense of shared belonging.
Edward Said's definition of the intellectual's task of speaking the truth to power is suggestive in providing a context for examining the Palmers' response to the Great War. An intellectual is endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying and articulating a message, view, attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public--and not just in joining the collective march. Said reiterates the importance of looking at the actual intervention and performance of the thinker. (9) Other scholars have emphasised that there is no settled or universal usage of the term "intellectual", and that the concept acquires different meanings in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. (10) We can see hints of this diversity in the respective views of the Palmers. For Nettie, the intellectual was a poet and visionary, that rare creature who attempts to uphold eternal standards of truth and justice irrespective of the cash-nexus. Her "intellectual" was more idealistic than her partner's, especially when she was a young woman. Importantly, she believed this kind of intellectual activity transcended gender. Nettie was profoundly influenced by the passionate call of the influential Melbourne poet, Bernard O'Dowd, to a "militant" poetry--militant in the struggle against class oppression, as distinct from "Poetry Triumphant", which he understood as a celebratory poetry of beauty. (11) O'Dowd was influential in shaping many young writers' beliefs about social transformation, and the group that came under his influence included Katharine Susannah Prichard, "Furnley Maurice" (Frank Wilmot), Louis and Hilda Esson, Guido Barrachi, Lesbia Harford and Christian Jollie Smith--and, less directly, Vance Palmer. For Nettie, the responsibility of cultural leadership and given her association with O'Dowd, also political leadership--became pressing. Drawing on French radical-intellectual traditions, Nettie assumed both the obligation of intellectuals to intervene in politics, and their simultaneous claim to political authority on the basis of their intellectual standing.
Vance's understanding of the role of the intellectual was much more functional than Nettie's; he recognised the writer as a cultural producer, a worker, a craftsman among other workers, expressing best the truth that was within him (or her) but also subject to market forces. For Vance, the thinker offered general understandings of society or culture. He believed the poet's challenge was to awaken the people to the promise of the future, for "They will chant songs and carry banners,/In the good time, the coming time. Sowers of the fire, the dawn's forerunners". (12) Yet Vance would find that this was a function difficult to sustain during the war years.
In the Gramscian sense Vance was an "organic", and not a "traditional" intellectual in his work as freelance writer, whereas the Great War ironically saw Nettie's rapid transition from the "traditional" to "organic". (13) For Gramsci, "traditional intellectuals" eschew the notion that they are expressing the ideas of a class; but in reality, he says, their claims to universality are simply a function of the hegemony of the dominant class to which they belong, and whose interests they serve. "Organic intellectuals", on the other hand, are produced by subordinate classes and provide their class with "an awareness of its function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields". (14) Nettie, not Vance, was university educated; but after her marriage she no longer had a salaried position as a lecturer and turned instead to freelance journalism. This economic imperative is important to acknowledge in a reading of the Palmers' lives: given the constraints of the "colonial" publishing industry and the vagaries of freelance work, (15) they needed to build up a large reading public to survive financially. But they also took on the additional responsibility of creating a national imaginary imbued with the democratic and egalitarian values of a labour movement and working men and women whose essential quality they took for granted.
They were, moreover, faced with the challenge of how to respond to the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. What should intellectuals, in their professional role as thinkers, do about war? Robert Ginsberg has suggested that this is an ethical question about actions, a pragmatic question about workable means, a pedagogical and rhetorical question about persuasion, and an existential question about destiny and purpose. (16) In the case of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the novelist and a friend of the Palmers, the impact at the personal level seems clear--her brother Alan with "his dear grey eyes" was killed at Gallipoli, and this led her to an explicit and ongoing political search for a world without wars: "What are the causes of war? Who benefits by war? How can the causes be eliminated [...]? How do we make organizations for peace and international arbitration the supreme objective?" (17) This experience galvanised her commitment to the Communist Party of Australia, which was formed shortly after the war, in 1920. A key question, then, in the context of the rise of revolutionary socialism, is why some radical intellectuals such as Prichard aligned themselves with the forces of "revolution" whereas others did not. The case of the Palmers, in this regard, is ambiguous. Like Prichard, they faced their bereavements. The death of Nettie's cousin, Mervyn Higgins, the only child of H.B. Higgins and his wife, Mary Alice, haunted her to the end of her days. And while their sympathies remained politically radical, the Palmers did not join the Communist Party, although they had family and friends who did. For them, the Great War instead generated immediate and acute questions about identity, loyalty and fundamental allegiances that could not be readily resolved. It precipitated the Palmers' decision to live and work in... |
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