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Katie Holmes

'A Decent Privacy?: Personal Revelation and History'

Private and personal papers are now used a great deal by historians, and the private lives of both public figures and unknown citizens are seen as fertile ground for historical investigation. Are there limits to privasy and to the right of the historian to enter the private domain? What do the subjects of biographies think of their published lives?

Five months ago I gave birth to a daughter—Rachel. My life changed. I tell you this, not to make excuses for the effect lack of sleep and the challenges of trying to think and write in 40 minute blocks of time (that being Rachel’s average daily sleep quota) may have had on the coherence of my thoughts, but because I want to talk today about what I’m calling ‘relational history’. This paper carries the hallmarks of an ‘embodied’ history: like much feminist history its insights bear the traces of my experience.

In my work on women’s diaries I argued that the use of such material allows us to hear women’s voices and women’s stories, sources from which we could begin to write a new kind of history. It would be a narrative where traditional understandings of history were turned on their heads, privileging instead individual subjectivity, the importance of relationships and the daily patterns of life, and attempting to breakdown the opposition between the ‘public’ and ‘private’.

I want to extend those ideas here, recognising that the historical record or narrative can’t simply be corrected by including stories of people’s private lives, by attending to the personal. Predictably, it’s more complex than that. As Joy Damousi has recently argued, emotions also have a history, and are political. We have to see the dynamic relationship between an individual’s public and private life, as well as between society’s public, political, collective ‘spheres’, and those seen as private, namely the home and family. I want to argue for a ‘relational’ history, one which explores the complex interplay of emotions which drive relationships in public and political life, the relationships between ‘public’ and ‘private’ life, and within an individual or community’s private, concealed or secret life.

But writing and researching this kind of history can raise difficult ethical questions.

Before Rachel (or BC as a friend of mine calls it, ‘Before Children’), I began working on the letters of Katherine Susannah Richard KSP to her son Ric Throssell. The collection of over 1000 letters spans the years 1944 and 1969 and is held here in the National Library.

As many of you will know, KSP left clear instructions to her son to destroy most of her personal papers after her death. ‘I do not like to be seen in déshabillé, even in manuscript’, she wrote. Ric duly burnt the personal papers Katherine had not already destroyed, but kept her letters to him. They would remain, he wrote, his alone, although he quoted from them at length in his biography of KSP Wild Weeds and Windflowers published in 1975. In his Introduction, Throssell included a letter in which Prichard dismissed any idea that her letters had a literary quality, ‘Just no’count murmuring to my dear ones, about any-day happenings and wanting to know about theirs’. She went on to explain, a quote Throssell did not include, ‘Your K.S in déshabillé, as it were.’ He did, however, acknowledge her ‘rage for privacy’. I do not know why he then donated the letters to the NLA as part of his collection, for it is now possible for KSP’s private life, or aspects of it, to be subjected to what Throssell called the ‘literary researcher’s magnifying glass, like a bug on a pin’—a prospect she hated.

I began reading KSP’s letters as part of my research on women and gardens. Other themes soon became evident: her relationship with her son Ric and his family; her continuing grief over the suicide of her husband Jimmy in 1932; and her writing. The letters provide a view of Prichard which is far removed from that of the hardened communist who stood by the party and the Soviet Union even when increasing evidence revealed the extent of abuses evident there.

For example, I quote from a letter Katharine wrote to Ric following the sudden death of his first wife from polio while he was with the Foreign Service in Moscow:

My darling—your letter of July 25th yesterday. And how well I know what you were feeling. Think of me, alone in a London boarding house—reading that terrible news about Daddy in the morning paper! How I lived through the shock and grief, I don't know. And it was weeks and weeks before I could hear what had happened. But you were there, & the thought of you helped me to survive, Maybe you will feel that you have'nt got even that stake to hold on to, a young life dependent on you. But I need you, my darling, more than ever now. So many sorrows have almost broken your K.S—and the only consolation in all my life is that you should be there, & go on with your life to its full flowering. I know you will, because the stuff that's in us has to stand up to reverses and disasters. But I know, too, the utter desolation of this loss of the loved one & mate. I've never been able to understand how Daddy could leave me like that—despite all the mental distress and tragedy of his failure to cope with financial difficulties. At least, you have'nt got such a thought to haunt you forever.…'

I feel my Jimmy still with me, though others have come & gone, fulfilling some need of the moment, and broadening one's knowledge and understanding of humanity. So it must be. But, my Jimmy & I were great lovers. Nobody could ever take his place with me—though the tragedy that befell us remains so inexplicable'. (13 August 1946)

To my reading, Jimmy’s suicide remained inexplicable to Katharine for the remainder of her life. While the rawness of her grief dissipated, it lingers through the letters like a shadow which only occasionally reveals its outline. In her fiction, however, she sought to explain the tragedies of others at least in part through the economic and social structures of their worlds.

In Throssell’s biography he suggests that Katharine survived the period following Jimmy’s death by working, quoting her: ‘Only my belief in the need to work for the great ideas of Communism and world peace helped me to survive a grief so shattering’. The certainties of Communism provided a shelter from the devastation which threatened to engulfed her. And the public face of Prichard suggests she clung to these certainties even when many of her comrades had mellowed in their views.

Prichard’s letters to Ric however, reveal other stories. I want to illustrate this through reference to her writings about her garden. She was a keen gardener and, through her writing about it, or specific plants in it, she revealed some of the deepest emotions expressed in the letters. She wrote regularly about it, tracing all its seasonal changes and her pleasure in it all, commenting after one absence, ‘I’m a peasant at heart, I suppose. I do like it here. Feel my roots are being nourished, somehow.’(26 April 1946).

One of Prichard’s most-loved plants in her garden was the wisteria. In 1950 disaster struck it. She had been away for a month during a very bad drought and she returned to find that the family who’d been living in the place hadn’t watered the garden. Many of her plants were dead. In August it looked as if the wisteria had also died.

'I’m worried about the wisteria. No sign of it budding yet, and it is such a joy, covering nearly all the front verandah, and forming a curtain for my bedroom window'. (27 August 1950).

By October she had lost hope:

'Not a bud on the wisteria. I grieve for so much beauty departed! Thirty years of loveliness will never be the same again. Too much to grieve for those years, perhaps, to weep about a dead wisteria, but—it’s sad to see the vine all grey and lifeless where the lovely lavender lace used to fall beside my window'. (22 Oct 1950)

In December she revealed some of the investment and memory she had in this beautiful vine:

Darling, your thought about another wisteria for me was as lovely as the new shoot that's appeared at the base of the old vine. I've had all the rest cut away—and am tending this one with infinite care—buckets of water & manure & cinders—hoping that one day it will show the beauty of the plant that Daddy put there by my window. (11 Dec 1950)

 

The story of the wisteria continued …

I tell you this story because I would argue that the garden is central to KSP’s world, not just because she loved gardening, but because it was a pivotal point in her perspective on the past and the future. As KSP wrote about her garden, she unfolded the many layers of meaning it carried for her. Her grief over the dead wisteria was not just for the loss of its beauty departed, but because it reawakened her grief over the death of Jimmy. Hence her comment ‘Too much to grieve for those years, perhaps, to weep about a dead wisteria’. The death of the wisteria was like a final death. Its beauty had become a symbol of the beauty of their relationship, its passing a reminder of the grief which shadowed her throughout those years.

In KSP’s letters, the garden is a potent place of memory and anticipation. She revealed there, more than anywhere else in her remaining papers, not only herself in déshabillé, but a path into the most intense, and previously veiled, emotions of her adult life. To ignore it, to focus for example on her published literary and political works, would be to miss a key place where her personal stories, fantasies and longings found expression. Further, I would suggest that we need to understand them in order to better understand the intensity and passion she invested in her public, political life.

And there’s the rub (I’m tempted to say ‘grub’). For that, as a historian, is what I’m interested in. In order to write the ‘relational history’ I advocate, I undertake the very practices Prichard despised and sort to avoid. Her words, her passions, her life, risk becoming bugs on pins. This is primarily because emotions, longings, fantasies, need to be interpreted and it is in the interpreting and exposing that problems arise.

I tread cautiously around this issue because of past experience. In the original manuscript to my book Spaces in Her Day, I had a lengthy discussion about two loving relationships a woman I called Winifred Tait had over many years with two other women. They occurred at very different stages of her life; one caused her no angst or problems at all, the other, during her years as Principle of a school, created considerable difficulty and trauma for her. In attempting to understand these relationship and Winifred’s response to them, I sought to look at the different meanings surrounding sexuality and the ways this might shape individual experience. I suggested that as ideas about women’s love for other women changed, so her experience of her love also changed, but that neither relationship appeared to be what we would today recognise as actively sexual. It was a complex and delicate interpretation, dealing with very sensitive issues. The catch was that the diaries I was using required family permission before publication would be permitted. The family refused.

The reply to my request to publish expressed concern that I had misinterpreted the diaries, that while Winifred loved everyone and had many friends, ‘there were no sexual relationships’. Had I known Winifred, this would have been apparent. The letter went on to note that its writer was a research scientist with a PhD and an international publication record: incorrect interpretation of published scientific research would be dismaying. ‘I suggest you approach your book in a similar way’, the letter concluded.

So much for my non-positivist approach to history! I did attempt to clarify my argument and suggest that the family had in fact misinterpreted what I was saying, but the response was clear: the family did not want me to use the diaries at all, and they trusted that would be the end of the matter.

My historical training had not equipped me to deal with this situation, but it had arisen as a fairly direct result of the interpretive frameworks I had used. I was dealing with sensitive material where meanings were ambiguous and where interpretations touched the delicate issues of sexuality and identity. Questions of language and meanings, notions of ‘truth’ and the censoring of different opinions all came to the fore. My interest had been in the way Winifred wrote about her intimate relationships, the language she used, the significance of her diaries in enabling her to articulate her thoughts, desires and conflicts. My interpretations ran counter to the image of Winifred held by her family. They, or one member anyway, was totally unresponsive to my attempt to open up a text to a reading which did not correspond with the image of the woman they felt they ‘knew’ and ‘understood’. I had got it wrong: there was no ‘factual basis’ to what I was trying to suggest. For Winifred’s family, ‘shadowlands’ was not the place for history.

I myself had concerns which address the ways we deal with different interpretations: was I, despite my denials, making ‘truth claims’ as well? Was I assuming I knew Winifred better through her diaries than those who knew the woman herself? However much I might insist that my reading was only one of many possible interpretations, it was the one which would be published and carry whatever authority that might bring. Ethical and theoretical issues became entwined. Does an individual or a family have the right to ‘secrets’?

In order to write ‘relational history’, we need to recognise the private passions which can motivate people’s public life, and indeed those of a community. Take the emotions and passions aired in the debate over the ‘Stolen Generation’ as a recent example. How impoverished a history of this debate would be if it failed to explore the public and private obsessions of John Howard and John Herron, let alone the anguish of the Aboriginal children taken from their mothers, and the desires of black and white Australians for some form of Reconciliation. Relational history is complex: its narratives will be layered and its interpretations subjective and even bitterly contested. But as Rachel will soon, too soon, discover, life is like that.

 

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