Читать книгу My Career Goes Bung - Miles Franklin - Страница 3

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GREETINGS!

Precocious effort in art is naturally imitative, but in localities remote from literary activity there is no one for the embryo writer to copy. Thus I was twelve before I wrote anything to draw attention to myself. I must have been nearly thirteen when the idea of writing novels flowered into romances which adhered to the design of the trashy novelettes reprinted in the Supplement to the Goulburn Evening Penny Post. These stories, secretly devoured, presented a world enchanting to budding adolescence. They were prinked with castles with ivied towers and hooting owls, which were inhabited by the unaccommodating guardians, thrilling seducers and more thrilling rescuers of titled maidens, as pure as angels. I used to read my versions to two or three girls, who still gaily recall the entertainment we thus manufactured for ourselves.

An Englishman, to whom some of these lucubrations were shown, directed me to the Australian scene as the natural setting for my literary efforts. The idea sprouted. Huh! I'd show just how ridiculous the life around me would be as story material, and began in sardonically humorous mood on a full-fledged novel with the jibing title My Brilliant (?) Career. I remember declaring my need of a striking name for the rampageous heroine of my ambition. An elder friend—beloved by her young neighbours for her sympathy—thereupon gave me her two Christian names Penelope and Sybylla, which she said were wasting, as she was known by a diminutive—Penny. This was an inspiring gift.

But INEXPERIENCE cannot possibly achieve any intended artistic effect. Removed as I was from anyone equipped to understand or direct my literary attempts it was inevitable that I, of all my audience, should be the most flabbergasted. The literalness with which My Brilliant Career was taken was a shock to one of any imagination.

My Career Goes Bung was planned as a corrective. I discussed with my father the absurdity of girls from all over the continent writing to tell me that I had expressed their innermost lives and emotions—confidences of fellowship in introversion, whereas I was a healthy extrovert. My father, equally with myself, lacked knowledge of practising authors, or association with people who had any conception of what authorship of fiction might entail. But he had wisdom.

"You mustn't spoil what you have done," he said. "You see, you have created an imaginary reality, and you must stick to it now. Something would be hurt in all those discontented little girls if they felt that your story lacked foundation. Besides, they are many, and I and you are only two."

I felt that my father did not quite understand, and so did not show him the story. Now I know that he was a spiritual genius in a community where there was no realisation of his giftedness nor any more employment for it than for a Spanish comb in a bald head.

The pother raised by Sybylla Penelope in print so petrified me that I closed her book and have not yet reopened it. Could I bring myself to re-read it I could, perhaps, fabricate an essay to air the dubious guesses of psychoanalysis: but that would be a preface to my first printed volume while this is a foreword to its aftermath.

This was deposited in a portmanteau of MSS and finally left with someone in Chicago, U.S.A. while I went to the World War, which is now seen to have been merely practice manoeuvres for Global Armageddons. When I returned this caretaker said Mr. X had needed a bag, and, as my old grip was quite out of fashion and contained nothing but useless papers, she had known I would be glad to oblige him. I was assured Mr. X had put all the papers in the furnace: I need have no fear that they had been left about. I made no complaint, being as sure as the caretaker that my MSS were of no consequence. Nevertheless I regret the loss of stories and plays, which glowed at the time, and which will not come again. I thought My Career Goes Bung had gone with this collection, and had forgotten the copy of it which survived in an old trunk valiantly preserved all the years by my mother.

I opened the packet with trepidation and to my relief found entertainment, but that, as Sybylla Penelope Melvyn would say, may be due solely to egotism. The MS had a dedication of gratitude to someone indicated by initials, but I cannot recall who this was nor why I should have been grateful to him or her. There was also a preface by Peter McSwat, "Who kept a diary and paid his debts." Time has cancelled this topical illusion, and it has been deleted with some matter which has been disposed of elsewhere. Otherwise I have kept faith with that girl who once was I. I have not meddled by corrections which would have resulted, probably, in no better than the substitution of one set of solecisms and clichés by another, for such abound in even the greatest English novels.

The novel returned to me out of the past with the impact of a discovery. Though a work of fiction, the people in it are oddly familiar: their story has with time shed any character but that of reality. It is now an irrefutable period piece, and, in the light of EXPERIENCE, it is to be discerned that while intentionally quite as little, unintentionally it was equally as autobiographical as my first printed romance; no more, no less.

This second portrait of Sybylla Penelope was classified as delicious by the only person to whom it was submitted at the time: that it was also regarded by him as "too audacious for publication" seems quaint today, and indicates how smug behaviour must have been when it was written. It is to-day inveterately dedicated to all Australian writers who were as young, who are as young, and who each decade for ever will be forthcoming as young as I was when first I foolhardily tried to write.

MILES FRANKLIN,

AUSTRALIA.

This tale's as true as true can be,

For what is truth or lies?

So often much that's told by me

When seen through other eyes,

Becomes thereby unlike so much

These others tell to you,

And if things be the same as such,

What is a scribe to do?

Why, tell his tale of course, my friend,

Or hold his tongue for aye,

Or wait till fictive matters mend,

Which may be by-and-bye.

So here's a tale of things a-near

That you may read and lend

Without a fear—you'll need no tear—

It hasn't any end.