by Don Doherty
Over the past 20 years, I have pursued two research projects of abiding interest to me – the life, works and times of Henry Lawson, and the 20th century cultural phenomenon in England known as the Bloomsbury Group. In this informal group were to be found such luminaries as writer Lytton Strachey, economist Maynard Keynes, writer Virginia Woolf, her sister and artist Vanessa Bell, and Vanessa’s bisexual lover, artist Duncan Grant. Duncan’s same-sex partner was writer, editor, reviewer and novelist David ‘Bunny’ Garnett.
Bunny was present at Charleston House in East Sussex on Christmas Day of 1918 when a daughter was born to Vanessa and Duncan. She was given the name Angelica, and in 1942, aged 24, she accepted Bunny’s marriage proposal, completely unaware of his previous relationship with her father. Angelica grew up to become a well known artist, designer and writer. In her writings she tried to come to terms with her unconventional upbringing and marriage. Although close to her mother Vanessa who raised her with great affection and ensured that she was an integral part of artistic weekend gatherings at Charleston House, Angelica struggled to forgive her mother and family friends for concealing the truth behind her marriage to Bunny Garnett. Hence her book entitled Deceived with Kindness. I was present at Charleston House in July 2009 for Angelica Garnett’s somewhat belated 90th birthday celebrations.
Bunny’s father was Edward Garnett – therefore Angelica’s father-in-law – a writer, influential literary critic, and a reader for the Duckworth publishing house. Among other accomplishments, he was instrumental in getting DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers published. When Henry Lawson went to England in 1900 to ‘make his fortune and achieve literary fame’, it was Edward Garnett who helped him publish some of his work in the UK. In Garnett’s collection of his writings entitled Friday Nights: Literary Criticisms and Appreciations (1922) he waxes lyrical or otherwise on various writers and poets. It includes his 1902 essay entitled ‘Henry Lawson and the Democracy’ – a reference to the sentiments expressed in While the Billy Boils of 1896. In his opening paragraph he poses the question of whether it’s Lawson’s prose or his poetry which marks him out as a writer blessed with originality. He comes down on the side of his prose and short stories, and says:
There is plenty of evidence of rattling humour and sentimentalism in the poems, and these indeed show the skeleton of his talent, but all its delicate nerves and tissues and the ligaments that make the writer truly original, one must look for in his prose.
He goes on to say,
Lawson’s special value to us is that he stands as the representative writer of a definite environment, as the portrayer of life on the Australian soil, and that he brings before our eyes more fully and vividly than any other man the way the Australian settlers’ life has been going, its characteristic spirit, code and outlook, the living thought and sensation of these tens and hundreds and thousands and millions of people who make up the Australian democracy.
Later on, Garnett enters into a discussion of a topic which many of us living in a 21st century ‘democratic Australia’ probably tend not to spend a great deal of time thinking about, namely, the question of rigid class distinction of the type which was still very much in place in late 19th and early 20th century Britain. He makes the interesting point that:
nearly all of our writers have a middle-class bias and training, and so either write down to or write up to their subject when it leads them outside their own class, and accordingly their valuations thereof are in general falsified.
He gives an example of such a writer who ‘describes her own class admirably, but her working class people are ludicrous’. And of another middle class writer he says: ‘His middle-class people are generally good, but his working men are feebly drawn’. Even Thomas Hardy is on Garnett’s hit list: ‘His West-country rustics are idealized at times to suit the middle-class taste’.
He then comments:
Lawson, however, has the great strength of the writer writing simply as one of the democracy, and of the man who does not have to climb down from a class fence in order to understand the human nature of the majority of his fellow-men. I have never read anything in modern English literature that is so absolutely democratic in tone, so much the real thing, as ‘Joe Wilson’s Courtship.’ And so with all Lawson’s tales and sketches. Not even Maupassant himself has taken us so absolutely inside people’s lives as do the tales of ‘Joe Wilson’s Courtship’ and ‘A Double Buggy at Lahey’s Creek’. Read ‘The Union Buries its Dead’ in ‘The Country I Come From’, if you care to see how the most casual, ‘newspapery’ and apparently artless art of this Australian writer carries with it a truer, finer, more delicate commentary on life than do the idealistic works in any of our genteel school of writers. It isn’t great art, but it is near to great art; and, moreover, great art is not to be found every ‘publishing season’. Read ‘An Oversight of Steelman’s’ if you want humour, the real thing, and read ‘No Place for a Woman’ if you want pathos, also the real thing. There is a little sketch of a woman in the bush, left for months alone with her four children while her husband is up-country droving. If this artless sketch be taken as the summary of a woman’s life, giving its significance in ten short pages even Tolstoy has never done better.
Garnett continues:
Art stands for much, but sincerity also stands for much in art, and the sincerity of Lawson’s tales nearly always drives them home. There is another little sketch called ‘They Wait on the Wharf in Black’, which artists may call sentimental. Well, it is sentimental; it is on a sentimental subject, and I have never found anywhere a tale that so well describes the meeting of a father with his children: it is all there in the last two pages, the family meeting, and the family feeling, and I invite the sceptical reader to turn to it.
As Garnett begins to bring his comments to an end, he makes an observation which sums up his appraisal of Henry Lawson: ‘Lawson – none better – can describe the democratic life of the road, the bush, the track, the shearer, the ‘selector’, the ‘pub’, the wharf, the river and the street.’
So there you have it – an honest appraisal by Angelica Garnett’s father-in-law of Henry Hertzberg Lawson (1867-1922) who wrote about his fellow Australians with such rare insight.
Notes: This article first appeared in The Lawsonian – member magazine of the Henry Lawson Society (September 2020 edition).
Angelica Garnett died in 2012 aged 93.