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NLA News - home October 2002 Volume XIII Number 1
Rehearsing the Novel
Kylie Tennant with her husband Lewis Rodd and son 'Bini' c.1943
Kylie Tennant with her husband Lewis Rodd and son 'Bim' c.1943
Photograph donated by Hemisphere Magazine
Pictures Collection

Jane Grant reveals that Kylie Tennant often adopted different lifestyles to bring authenticity to her novels

This camp is full of copy. If I never moved out of here I’d have that book’, wrote Kylie Tennant to her husband Lewis Rodd from the outskirts of Yass in 1938.

Cover reproduced from Faveaux (Sydney: Sirius Publishing company, 1946) and title page reproduced from The Battlers (London: Gollancz, 1941) both by Kylie Tennant
Cover reproduced from Faveaux (Sydney: Sirius Publishing company, 1946) and title page reproduced from The Battlers (London: Gollancz, 1941) both by Kylie Tennant

The book she refers to is her third novel The Battlers. For three months of 1938 Tennant took to the roads of southern and western New South Wales in a horse and buggy to experience firsthand the lives of the men, women, and children dispossessed by the Great Depression. For a while, she toyed with the idea of calling the novel The Hungry Track, for as she observed: ‘This is a very hungry track between Goulburn and Yass—no towns at all.’ The 80 kilometre stretch of barren and wind-swept sheep country would have been particularly bleak to walk. Towns at least meant the possibility of the weekly food handout, colloquially known as ‘the dole’. Towns, however, were not necessarily hospitable to the unemployed. As Tennant sardonically remarked in a letter to her husband: ‘It is the custom in Young to only give one dole or at the very most two because the police have “got tough”, and they do it to clear off the scum of murders, toughs and travellers who come for the cherry picking’.

The letters of Kylie Tennant (1912–88), now held in the National Library, document the life of an Australian writer who went to extreme and unusual lengths to ensure the veracity of her ‘copy’. Tennant was a highly unusual woman. At the age of 20 she set out to walk from Sydney to Brisbane, stopping off en route to marry Rodd in Coonabarabran, before continuing her journey alone. After the couple moved to the town of Canowindra in 1933, she tramped hundreds of kilometres in the district gathering material for her first prize-winning novel Tiberon. Her second novel, Foveaux, was drawn from her experiences living in the then disease-ridden slums of Redfern and Surry Hills in the late 1930s. In 1945, having tried and failed by more legitimate means, she decided to replicate (and thereby understand) the life of a drunken prostitute. Her attempt won her a week in gaol.

Portrait of Kylie Tennant early in her career
Portrait of Kylie Tennant early in her career
Pictures Collection

The nature of Tennant’s research necessitated long periods of separation from Rodd, and this, perhaps, has ensured that her record of her experiences have survived in the letters she wrote home. It is clear that her husband was equally unusual. She would claim that it was ‘Roddy' who insisted that she live among the itinerant misfits and underclasses who would form the characters of her novels. In a draft of an article Tennant wrote: 

‘I can see it now’, my husband said, ‘you will need to go to gaol’. He had just written down on the list of my plans:—‘Fortnight in a jam factory, fortnight as a barmaid’, and then methodically wrote underneath ‘one week in gaol’. I was pleased he had made it a week. He was quite capable of writing down ‘one month’.

Rodd was also her sternest critic. In 1945 he wrote to Tennant: ‘There is nothing wrong with the little sketch you sent down if that’s an example of The Vegetative Eye, a la Harris’.  Evidently Tennant’s experimentation did not please Rodd. The only novel of the poet and ‘Angry Penguin’, Max Harris, had been thought by many to be pretentious and unconvincingly modernist when it was published in 1943.    

The youthful letters written on the road suggest the complexity of Tennant’s character. In part, she is the serious young writer whose novel The Battlers was hailed by the American press as the Australian Huckleberry Finn. The letters reveal her thoughts on writing, as well as her opinion of other Australian writers. Her observation on Henry Lawson is penetrating: ‘you know, when you are on the track you cease to think. Your mind feeds itself like an embered fire on charred scraps of book or verses twisted and warped to fit your footsteps. That was the trouble with Lawson’s poems. He made them up as he walked and beat naturally became more important than phrasing.’

Kylie Tennant in school uniform c.1928
Kylie Tennant in school uniform c.1928
Photograph donated by Hemisphere Magazine
Pictures Collection

Yet it is Tennant’s delight in the ridiculous, her comic ability to portray herself as a character in a story reminiscent of The Magic Pudding, that makes the letters so memorable. In a letter written to Rodd shortly after she had set out from Canowindra she relishes the absurdity of her appearance:

Item: one pair of brown sandals, one pair of white tennis socks and one pair of grey stockings all very dirty indeed.  Item: one sagging. Much spotted pair of grey pants. Item: one singlet. (this is wearing out now) one cream woollen jersey belonging to a lass three sizes too small. Item: one navy jersey, voluminously three sizes too large.  Item: Navy blue man’s coat, the worse for wear. Item: bottle green ladies raincoat so small that it would not meet in front herby exposing chest to what the Scot refers to as ‘the blast’.  Finish with knap sack, blackened billy can and blanket; one red sunburnt face, one battered greasy felt hat and you have the ensemble. Describing her journey between Crookwell and Woodstock in the Southern Highlands, Tennant writes:

I passed no one until at midday and five miles from Woodstock a commercial traveller in a green Essex passed me.  Rather unkind I thought it, considering my feet, the cramps in my neck, my thirst, the flies and the way the drops of sweat fell on my eyelids and blinded me.  However providence works in weird ways.  Twenty yards further on the blighter in the car stopped and emerged. ‘Hah’ I says ‘engine trouble curse him. I’m glad’. He performed a little war dance to the side of the road and returned with a mighty staff and whacked with it a very large dust coloured snake with a yellow stomach, which was lying clean across the road.  He then got into his car and drove away leaving me behind beside the still writhing reptile.  Now had that commercial traveller come ten minutes later I would have grumbled along and placed my foot on the snake whereas (contrary solution) had he picked me up I would [also] have trodden on the snake and I would have been in Woodstock before 4 pm.

In another letter she describes being woken in the night by a group of drunken men:

I cannot say I bade them welcome or made them feel at home. At first they showed a disposition to linger and to indulge in any persiflage. I refused a drink. I refused a cigarette; no, I had no bottle opener—and then I opened out and gave it to them on the horrors of drink in an exhortation which would have done credit to a Salvation Army captain.

Kylie Tennant c.1914
Kylie Tennant c.1914
Photograph donated by Hemisphere Magazine
Pictures Collection

Tennant’s representation of the scene might be amusing, but it is also an attempt to conceal from her husband the very real danger of her circumstances: a young woman camping alone being harassed by drunken men in the middle of the night.

Published in 1941 by the London company Gollanz, The Battlers was internationally acclaimed and Tennant was compared favourably to John Steinbeck and Mark Twain. George Orwell’s review for The New Statesman on the 25 January 1941, however, was mixed. Although he commended The Battlers as ‘sincere’ and ‘interesting’, he also thought it ‘spoilt in places by a feminine coyness about bad language’. Perhaps Tennant was also thinking of this slight when many years later in 1953 she wrote to thank Douglas Stewart for his review of The Joyful Condemned:

I remember an American review of The Battlers jeering at my ‘lady-like avoidance of bad language’. Alas, I was waiting for you to level the same charge against The Joyful Condemned.  When I consider those rich manure-flavoured adjectives which were all thrown out, spoiling the rhythm and vigour of the language, those adjectives rise again silently within me.

Depression 1930s: Swaggie
Depression 1930s: Swaggie
R.C. Strangman Collection
Pictures Collection

Tennant points out in this letter that it was the strict laws against ‘obscenity’, rather than her ‘feminine coyness’, that censored her writing. As she wrote to Rodd at the time of researching The Battlers: ‘The trouble with my copy, lad, is that it’s all unprintable’.

For all Tennant boasted to Rodd about no longer being referred to by her battlers as ‘the lady’, there were times when she felt alienated. Of two travellers with whom she had parted company she complained that ‘the constant filth of their conversation, while picturesque, gets on my nerves. You’ve no idea how it can grate after a time. I don’t mean swearing. I mean filth. They were darling, but Chaucer alone could have stood it for any length.’  

Although only Tennant’s side of the correspondence from The Battlers’ trip survives, it is evident from her letters that Rodd was becoming increasingly anxious about the length of time she had been away. Confidences such as ‘the gang declare I’m on the track for life and will not go home’ would not have reassured him. After a stint waitressing in Leeton, Tennant finally returned home in time for Christmas with the same remarkable determination to write the novel over the holiday period that had made her earlier pronounce to Rodd: ‘I want this copy and I want it good’.

JANE GRANT completed a PhD on Cynthia Nolan at the University of Sydney in March of this year

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