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 daughterRachel. 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 darlingyour letter
of July 25th yesterday. And how well I know what you were feeling. Think of
me, alone in a London boarding housereading 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.Sand 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 thatdespite 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
methough 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, butit’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 awayand am tending this
one with infinite carebuckets of water & manure & cindershoping 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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