Difficult to write about Black Swans, when I have barely seen so much as the egg of the book. Yet I suppose the MS I did see in Western Australia may be considered the egg. It was a wild MS, climbing the mountain of impossibilities and improbabilities by leaps and bounds: a real rolling stone of an egg, no doubt.
There was Miss Skinner, in the house on the hills at the edge of the bush, in Western Australia, darting about rather vaguely in her white nurse’s dress, with the nurse’s white band over her head, looking after her convalescents who, mercifully, didn’t need much looking after. Miss Skinner darting about on the brink of all the balances, and her partner, a wise, strong woman, sitting plumb at the centre of equilibrium.
Oh, and the ponderous manuscript, tangled, and simply crepitating with type-writer’s mistakes, which I read with despair in that house in Western Australia. Such possibilities! And such impossibilities.
But the possibilities touched with magic. Always hovering over the borderline where probability merges into magic: then tumbling, like a bird gone too far out to sea, flopping and splashing into the wrong element, to drown soggily.
“Write,” said I, like an old hand giving advice, “an Australian book about things you actually know, which you don’t have to invent out of the ink-bottle.”
Eighteen months later, when I was in Mexico and Miss Skinner in Australia, wandered in to me the MS called The House of Ellis. It was better than the first Black Swans, because it was pretty well about happenings in Australia. But tangled, gasping, and forever going under in the sea of incoherence. Such a queer, magical bird of imagination, always drowning itself.
What’s to be done! One has a terrible feeling, in front of a MS that glimmers with imagination and chokes with incoherence. The authoress away in Australia, putting her hopes high. Myself in Mexico, too old a hand to put many hopes on the public or the critics or on anything mortal at all. Still, unwilling to play the hand-washing part.
I am not good at suggesting and criticizing. I did the only thing I knew well how to do: that is, I wrote the whole book over again, from start to finish, putting in and leaving out, yet keeping the main substance of Miss Skinner’s work. Yet let me here make the confession that the last chapters and anything in the slightest bit “shocking,” are, of course, my fault: not Molly Skinner’s.
Miss Skinner had quite another conclusion. In her House of Ellis, which I turned into the Boy in the Bush, Monica went to the bad and disappeared, among the tears of the family. Jack set off to find her: got lost: and “came to” with Mary gazing lovingly upon him. In that instant, he knew he loved Mary far, far more than Monica. In fact, his love for Monica was a dead bluebottle. Mary and Jack happy ever after, virtue rewarded, finale!
Now I have my own ideas of morality. A young man who is supposed to love a young girl through years, with passion, and whose love just goes pop when she gets in a mess, bores me. He has no real integrity: and that, to my mind, is immorality.
At the same time, this Jack had always had a second “feeling” for Mary. Australia is a land which believes not at all in externally imposed authority. There is no limit to love. All right, there is no limit to love. The popular method would be for a hero, having got his Monica, and not having got his Mary, for whom he had a latent feeling all the time, suddenly to realize that he no longer “loved” Monica, but only Mary: then an “affair,” Monica left in the lurch, sympathy streaming towards the virtuous, long-neglected Mary.
Public, popular morality seems to me a pig’s business. If a man has ever cared for a woman enough to marry her, he always cares for her. And divorce is all bunk. Forgetting, as Miss Skinner’s Jack forgot Monica, is all bunk. Once you care, and the connection is made, you keep the connection, if you are half a man.
But the further question, as to whether this one connection is final and exclusive, is up to us to settle. Largely a question of discipline. And since Australia is the most undisciplined country I have met, discipline won’t settle the question there. Fall back on evasions and sentimentalism.
Discipline is a very good thing. Evasions and sentimentalism very bad.
I wonder very much how Black Swans has wound up. When I saw it, it was about a girl, a convict, and a Peter: Lettie, I think her name was, poised between the entirely praiseworthy Peter and the fascinating convict. But there the tale tumbled away into a sort of pirate-castaway-Swiss-Family-Robinson-Crusoe-Treasure-Island in the North West.
This “adventure” part was rather pointless. I suggested to Miss Skinner that she work out the Peter-Lettie-Convict combine on ordinary terra firma.
I believe she has done so in Black Swans.
She sailed off penniless, with a steerage ticket from Tremanitlo to England, the MS of Black Swans in her bag, and hopes, heaven high! Ay-ay! anticipations! The Boy in the Bush was not yet out.
She arrived in London to be snubbed and treated as if she did not exist, and certainly ought not to exist, by the same-as-ever London literary people. Those that esteemed me, literairily, decided that Mr. Skinner was probably a myth, and didn’t matter anyhow. Those that didn’t esteem me declared that Mr. Skinner, if he existed, couldn’t amount to anything, or he would never have made such a connection. Certainly I am a safe mark for the popular moralists to aim their slosh at. “Mr. Skinner” was buried before he went any further.
Of course Miss Skinner felt badly. But if Stafford put not his trust in Princes — or realized that he shouldn’t have done — the first business of anybody who picks up a pen, even so unassuming a pen as Miss Skinner’s now, is to put no trust in the literary rabble, nor in the rabble of the critics, nor in the vast rabble of the people. A writer should steer his aristocratic course through all the shoals and sewerage outlets of popular criticism, on to the high and empty seas where he finds his own way into the distance.
Poor Molly Skinner, she had a bad time. But two sorts of bad time. The first sort, of being informed she ought not to exist, and of having her Black Swans turned down. The second sort, when Old Edward Garnett tackled her. He saw her Black Swans floundering and flopping about, and went for them tooth and nail, like a rough-haired Yorkshire terrier. Poor old Molly Skinner, she saw the feathers of her birds flying like black snow, and the swans squawked as if they were at their last gasp. But old Edward twisted at them till they knew what’s what.
I am dying to see Black Swans now, since Edward put their mistress through her paces. She is fleeing breathless back to Australia. I am laughing in the hot Mexican sun. Tonight is Christmas Eve, and who knows what sort of a child the Virgin is going to bring forth, this time!