A Versatile Career: Ruth Park’s Novels in the American Marketplace

Ruth Park’s attraction to America started early in her life. In the closing pages of A Fence Around the Cuckoo, she recalls her ambitions as a young and aspiring journalist: ‘I had no plans for Sydney. My ambitions lay elsewhere, in San Francisco, where by design I had established a cobwebby kind of beachhead by selling numbers of illustrated articles on New Zealand and the Pacific Islands to the Examiner’ (267). She imagined cruising from New Zealand across the Pacific on the ‘luxury tourist liner, the Mariposa’ to begin a new American career. She acted on it by enquiring whether the San Francisco Examiner had any vacancies. The receipt of an affirmative response suggested the possibilities of enough freelance assignments to supplement the ‘gofer’ work that was on offer. She applied for a passport and made plans for obtaining the necessary work visa and health certificate (283). In her memoir, she described writing a letter to D’Arcy Niland in Sydney to say she was leaving for San Francisco on 10 December 1941. On 7 December, the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbour changed everything, and her attention quickly turned to opportunities across the Tasman Sea: the Sydney Sun and the Mirror and D’Arcy Niland (286–93).

While this autobiographical account might be apocryphal, for the next six decades, Ruth Park lived the life of a freelance writer, working alongside her husband D’Arcy Niland until his death, and publishing work frequently, locally, and internationally. Park’s connections with America continued throughout this career as she or her overseas representatives sought the best available outcome for the literary property they had for sale. The story of Ruth Park’s American career is one strand among many stories that can be traced in the complicated field of individuals and institutions that combine to provide the space in which authors reach readers beyond national boundaries through the publication of their work in book form, serialisation, translation or adaptation. For writers such as Park, their careers follow a transnational trajectory that extends well beyond the boundaries set by national literary histories, a trajectory that is defined by the relationships between people involved in the publishing industry as well as broader literary and reviewing cultures. As David Carter puts it in his study of Thomas Keneally’s American career: ‘Transnationalism … is less a higher form of literary being than the result of a mundane, if sometimes conflicted cluster of institutional arrangements involving publishers, agents, copyright laws, distribution networks, and so on’ (366). The ‘mundane’ processes of transnationalism provide the mechanism to more fully open the history of a writer’s career to scrutiny, providing case-studies that inform contemporary industry reports (Crosby et al.) as well as literary and publishing histories. Foregrounding the American side of this story illuminates the trajectories that any one Australian work might take before it is found in the hands of readers, contributing to a better understanding of what we talk about when we talk about Australian books, especially if those books are American ones.

By the time that Ruth Park began her career as a freelance writer in the 1940s, the trajectory taken by Australian novels towards American publication remained precarious and often included a British publisher as a significant point of transmission (Carter and Osborne). Ruth Park’s journey is no different, and the bibliographical and archival traces left behind allow us to determine how the books travelled and through whose hands. For both Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland, many hands were involved in the publication of their work. As busy freelance writers, they produced a wide variety of content for magazines, newspapers and radio. ‘D’Arcy Niland and I had many arguments over writing,’ Ruth Park wrote in the second volume of her autobiography, ‘but one thing we agreed upon was that if we wanted to make a living from writing we would have to be versatile’ (Fishing in the Styx 31). Niland later wrote that ‘Versatility is the greatest asset of the freelance’ if any sort of a living was to be made: ‘Investigate the history of those who … wrote exactly what they wanted to write, and you will find in the background a grant, a patron, or a sucker’ (Fishing in the Styx 31). With this attitude, they lived for ‘the postman’s daily round’, which brought its fair share of rejections along with the acceptances that delivered a modest income and a growing understanding of the complexities of the marketplace at home and abroad. From various addresses in Australia, a transnational network of correspondents emerged that would link Ruth Park’s creative household with significant figures in the history of publishing in Australia, England and the United States of America.

While both writers looked to local and overseas markets for their work, Ruth Park also looked closely at the rat-infested, poverty-stricken streets surrounding their home, and, in response, looked to a much longer form, writing The Harp in the South, the novel that made her name in Sydney, Australia and abroad. Winning the £2000 Sydney Morning Herald novel competition in 1946 with the unpublished manuscript and negotiating the blast of negative reviews and letters to the editor during the serialisation of the novel in the Sydney Morning Herald did not mean that Ruth Park enjoyed the competition’s promise of publication with Angus & Robertson without some hesitation from the publisher’s staff. When faced with the prospect of publishing The Harp in the South, Angus & Robertson’s Senior editor Beatrice Davis wrote, in response to her reading of the novel on the newspaper’s galley proofs, ‘It’s not the kind of book A&R cares to publish but we have a gentleman’s agreement with the Herald’ (Fishing in the Styx 151). While Beatrice Davis was reading her set of galleys, another set was sailing to the London publisher Michael Joseph, resulting in a different response in the form of a telegram from publisher’s Deputy Chairman Robert Lusty: ‘HARP IN THE SOUTH SUPERB MAGNIFICENT STOP EXCEPTING HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY BEST NOVEL MICHAEL JOSEPH HAS HAD PRINTING DOUBLED’ (Fishing in the Styx 151).

Serving her writing apprenticeship in the world of newspapers, magazine and radio, Ruth Park was perplexed with this mixed response to her first novel, declaring, ‘I don’t understand publishers. I’m going back to newspaper work’ (Fishing in the Styx 151). But the germ of a long-lived career was established in the similarly long-lived associations that the writer had with her Sydney and London publishers, remaining with both in one way or another for the next forty years. The stability of Ruth Park’s position in the British and Australasian book markets only needed the interest of an American publisher to produce the trifecta that many Australian writers yearned for. This interest would come, eventually, from the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin, ensuring that The Harp in the South was published in three separate book markets throughout 1948.

Even though the work of Australian writers had been appearing in American editions for almost a century beforehand, achieving this milestone was not an easy proposition. Angus & Robertson’s association with the talent agencies Leland Heyward and later MCA Inc provided the direct connection to publishers in New York that helped draw attention to new prospects, such as the prize-winning and controversial Harp in the South. Alongside Jon Cleary’s You Can’t See Round Corners, the second prize winner, Park’s novel was under consideration at Charles Scribner’s, but was rejected by senior editor Burroughs Mitchell:

With a good deal of regret we are declining Ruth Park’s THE HARP IN THE SOUTH. It had color and warmth and the author certainly knows how to write, but her approach to her material is really pretty sentimental, many of the situations are so familiar that they seem stock, and we don’t think that the book has either the strength of story or of character to make it a hopeful venture in this country.¹

But the interest of Boston’s Houghton Mifflin remained constant, leading to an American edition in the same year as the Australian and British editions. The triad of Angus & Robertson, Michael Joseph, and Houghton Mifflin published the next two Park titles, Poor Man’s Orange (in America with the title 12 ½ Plymouth Street) in 1951 and The Witch’s Thorn a year later.

A Boston institution for more than a century, Houghton Mifflin maintained a strongly traditional publishing culture. As the historian John Tebbel puts it, ‘Houghton Mifflin managed to convey a feeling of tradition and of “family” among the staff to all those who came in contact with it’ and added that ‘[e]mployees and others were made conscious that this was the house of Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Hawthorne, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, and Browning’ (225). In the 1940s, Houghton Mifflin maintained its ‘customary high quotient of both quality and popular writers’ (224–25), and it was into this milieu that Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South was accepted. Houghton Mifflin was never a major publisher of Australian fiction, with the work of just three dozen Australian authors accepted in the publisher’s one hundred and fifty year history. Dorothy Cottrell’s The Singing Gold (1929) and Earth Battle (1930) joined Dale Collins’s Rich and Strange (1931), Beatrice Grimshaw’s The Mystery of the Tumbling Reef (1932) and Joan Colebrook’s All That Seemed Final (1941) as the small selection of Australian books accepted by the Boston publisher in the three decades before The Harp in the South (AustLit). More than twenty years would pass before Houghton Mifflin published another Australian novel. Few records of Houghton Mifflin’s initial negotiations with Ruth Park have survived, but the subsequent history suggests that a three-book deal could have been offered. If this was the case, the publisher’s staff had more than enough confidence that the work of this unknown Australian writer would strike a chord with readers.

The confidence of Houghton Mifflin staff was soon shaken as sales results began to be tabulated. Park’s first two novels received positive reviews in America. Seymour Krim, better known in subsequent decades as a member of the Beat Generation, provided a positive boost in the pages of the New York Times, a coup for a new writer: ‘Miss Park’s novel has a weight and solidity that put fancier books to shame. … [I]t gives out enough heat to warm the chill print of half a dozen of our streamlined models’. But in the four years after publication, sales of the American edition of The Harp in the South had peaked at just over 5,700, leaving a debit balance with the publisher after all costs were calculated. Not unusual, such sales positioned Park’s early work in the market as a ‘modest seller’ that had the potential to attract additional returns through subsidiary rights (Carter and Osborne 336–43). Nevertheless, the follow up to The Harp in the South, 12 ½ Plymouth Street in America, fell short of these numbers. In February 1951, Houghton Mifflin’s Paul Brooks wrote to Park with a batch of reviews, including Sterling North’s praise from the New York Telegram, parts of which featured in Houghton Mifflin’s advertisements for 12 ½ Plymouth Street: ‘It is a laughing singing, weeping, praying, loving, living slice of life’. A long-time advocate for Australian literature in America was C. Hartley Grattan, but his review in the New York Times compared Park’s latest work unfavourably to other Australian works, Louis Stone’s Jonah and Kylie Tennant’s Fouveaux, concluding ‘Casual readers will probably vote this novel “good” on the ground they express the heart. Dour Critics will find them rather less powerful than more artfulness could have made them’. A negative review in the New York Times might still be a positive outcome for the attention it brought, but Brooks could report sales of only 3,556 copies by January 1951. A third book was required for Park to break through in America, as well as the support and persistence of her publisher.

Houghton Mifflin’s editor-in-chief provided that support, displaying the personal touch of traditional publishing houses through the correspondence he shared with a writer living almost ten thousand miles away. Responding warmly but politely declining the suggestion that she travel to New York to meet with her publishers, Park expressed bemusement with the tastes of the American reader:

For a long time, naturally, I’ve tried to comprehend the American market for myself, by reading and analysing the books we are told are best-sellers. … There seems to me … that the present leaning of the American reader is towards novels which assure him of some solidity and reassurance, in a world which appears likely to go up like a bunch of fireworks any moment.²

Ruth Park had seen the success in America of the Australian-based South African Daphne Rooke, whose novel Mittee (1952) was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, and hoped for the same for her novels. Her American publishers were sympathetic to the Australian author’s plight. Summing up her future prospects in the American market, Brooks wrote, ‘My dream is that your next novel may have all the qualities of 12 ½ Plymouth Street without the obvious sales hurdles that we faced this time. Have you another book in the works?’³ That book was The Witch’s Thorn, Ruth Park’s tale of smalltown New Zealand, ‘funny, joyful, pathetic, horrible, [and] tender’ as a review featured in advertisements for the novel put it (‘A Natural Storyteller’).

The transnational nature of Park’s career was set when, in the early months of 1952, Michael Joseph announced the forthcoming book in its circulars before Angus & Robertson knew anything about it. In Boston, Paul Brooks was also blind-sided by Michael Joseph’s catalogue, immediately dispatching enquiries about Park’s new book to the British publisher, and expressing his enthusiasm to the author for her work: ‘As you have perhaps gathered by now, there are several people on the Houghton Mifflin staff, including myself, who have a very special feeling for your work and every confidence in your future’.⁴ The enthusiasm of Houghton Mifflin’s staff was repaid when the novel was announced as an American Book Society choice, guaranteeing larger sales of the hardcover edition, specially packaged and sent to Book Society subscribers. Park received further good news when Houghton Mifflin decided to participate in an innovative publishing arrangement with the newly-formed paperback publisher Ballantine Books, ensuring that her novel of New Zealand would reach a broad cross-section of American readers.

If Ruth Park’s first two novels reached less than ten thousand American readers, The Witch’s Thorn would find its way to more than a half million through various publishing and distribution initiatives. Mainstream reviewers of the hardback edition were not impressed by the content nor by Ruth Park’s style. C. Hartley Grattan’s opinion in his daily New York Times review compounded Orville Prescott’s weekend profile of Ruth Park to produce a negative view that blanched at the storyline of abuse and violence. Nevertheless, Prescott’s review reveals a grudging admiration: ‘The Witch’s Thorn is probably too painful and grim, in spite of its comedy, for most tastes. It is not completely successful as a work of fictional craftsmanship. But it holds attention effortlessly and is convincing proof of Miss Park’s talent.’ C. Hartley Grattan’s review offered little admiration: ‘She is popular, in both senses. … [The] Witch’s Thorn … is as unplotted and nervously episodic, as determinedly feminine, as her earlier books’ (‘From Bad to Worse’). The negative response of these two established male critics would be balanced by the enthusiastic response of readers from a different sector of the American market when The Witch’s Thorn was published in paperback by Ballantine Books.

Ian and Betty Ballantine were experienced publishers of paperback books when they established Ballantine Books in 1952 (Silverman 383–93). Ian Ballantine was hired by Penguin Books founder Allen Lane to expand the reach of the company to the United States of America, but they had parted ways by the middle of the 1940s due to Ballantine’s book choices and cover designs. Joining forces with Grosset & Dunlap, Ballantine founded Bantam Books in 1945, but that partnership would last only a few years when Ballantine’s choices began to test the limits of the thirty-five-cent cover price. Ballantine wanted to publish paperback books larger than the usual one hundred and sixty pages that the paperback business model allowed, and so he devised a strategy in which hardback publishers simultaneously produced a companion paperback. The logic of this strategy went against the usual subsidiary arrangements that saw paperbacks come out after the original hardback, building on any prestige that sales and reception provided. But Ballantine’s new method of paperback publishing would prove successful, having a positive effect on hardback sales rather than the opposite effect predicted by some critics (Silverman 389–90).

Houghton Mifflin bought into the strategy from the beginning, co-publishing Cameron Hawley’s novel of workplace politics Executive Suite in 1952 and selling 22,000 copies of the first hardback edition. Ballantine Books sold 470,000 copies in paperback, sealing the success of the first number. Working with other hardback publishers throughout 1952, Ballantine published several paperback editions in quick succession. Hal Ellson’s Golden Spike, a novel of teenage dope addicts followed, along with All My Enemies, a Cold War thriller, and Saddle by Starlight, a Western, before Ruth Park’s The Witch’s Thorn reached readers as the fifth volume in the series. It was immediately followed by Emile Danoen’s Tides of Time, a novel of crime and poverty in Le Havre. With covers designed by the best magazine illustrators, these books reached the readers who bought their books from the racks found in drugstores, newsstands and train stations. In the swirl of sales produced by this new form of publication, The Witch’s Thorn likely found more than a half a million American readers across a broad cross-section of the reading public.

The Ballantines’ enthusiasm for the work of their author far exceeded the lukewarm reception of the New York Times critics and was expressed most clearly in a personal ‘fan’ letter Betty Ballantine wrote and mailed to Ruth Park along with a clutch of testimonials from other readers.⁵ Such reception provides a unique view of a novel that, given some of the negative public reviews, other publishers may have rejected for being too foreign and distasteful for American readers. Betty Ballantine took a different stance, writing that The Witch’s Thorn ‘is a warm and wonderful book – vivid, rich and bouncing with life. I loved this marvellously fallible group of people, and was very much moved by the tenderness and humor in your writing, despite the brutality and viciousness of much that you describe’. High sales figures also indicate that The Witch’s Thorn was well-received with book-buyers, but that did not necessarily result in financial reward because of the subtraction of agent’s fees, taxes and other deductions. While offering no details, Park recalled the success of these days in Fishing in the Styx, writing ‘although it was thrilling to read that so many copies were sold per day, the royalty statements told the same old story – a large sum at the top and a smallish one at the bottom’ (181).

Despite the ‘smallish’ returns from American sales, Park and her literary agents and publishers persisted with the American market because these subsidiary sales were an important addition to the income received from her Australian and English editions. Little evidence of Ruth Park’s dealings with American publishers is extant during the middle part of her American career, but regular publication demonstrates that her work remained attractive to a variety of companies. From 1952 until 1976, Ruth Park concentrated on shorter works and stories for children and young adults, maintaining a connection with the American market through a variety of publishers and represented in that market by MCA, Georges Borchardt, and Curtis Brown (New York). Houghton Mifflin’s Riverside Press published The Frost and the Fire (One-a-Pecker, Two-a-Pecker) in 1958. In 1962, Doubleday changed the title of The Good Looking Women to Serpent’s Delight, which was later retained for the Australian paperback editions apparently offset from the American edition. Her children’s books of the 1960s, The Ship’s Cat, Uncle Matt’s Mountain, The Road to Christmas and Airlift for Grandee were by published by Macmillan St. Martin’s Press, while, in addition to Serpent’s Delight, Doubleday published the children’s books, The Hole in the Hill (Secret of the Maori Cave), The Road Under the Sea, and The Sixpenny Island. In 1975, the Parents’ Magazine Press published The Gigantic Balloon. Rarely were these 1960s publications simultaneous across Park’s three primary book markets. Throughout the middle period of her career as a freelance writer, American publications supplemented the income she received from British and American publishers as well as the stable income she received from the Australian Broadcasting Commission for the ‘Children’s Session’ program, which ran throughout this period until 1972. Through her work and reach across many markets, Ruth Park was the model of the versatile freelance writer she and D’Arcy Niland aimed to be. With her work for the ABC at an end, and after Collins published The Companion Guide to Sydney in 1973, she moved to Norfolk Island from where she continued to correspond with the publishing world for a decade.

The next phase of Ruth Park’s career in America began to take effect later in the 1970s when the Curtis Brown literary agency circulated copies of the manuscript of Swords and Crowns and Rings at a time when interest in Australian literature was rising due to the enormous success of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds (1977), which had set a new records for an advance at a paperback auction (Osborne 54–55). Thomas Nelson had taken over from Angus & Robertson as Park’s Australian publisher for this latest venture, and Michael Joseph remained Park’s publisher in London. Houghton Mifflin’s interest in Park’s work during the early stages of her career was not sustained in the later stages. In America, copies of the manuscript were read and rejected by representatives from Doubleday, Charles Scribner’s, and G. P. Putnam’s before representatives from St Martin’s Press expressed their interest, making an offer late in December. A \$3,000 advance and rising royalties from 7 ½ % for the first 5000 was modest and justified by the ‘very close price scale’ that St Martin’s was applying to this title from an author new to their company (Brown).⁶ The economics of publishing also affected the production of the book, which was probably offset from Michael Joseph’s English edition (which had been, in turn offset from Nelson’s Australian edition), meaning that costs were reduced for the American publisher. ‘[I]f we weren’t paying too much for the actual physical books we were importing from London,’ one St Martin’s executive explained, ‘and if we didn’t spend a lot of money on cover art or anything, we could sell to the libraries’ (Silverman 125).

Established in 1952 as an American imprint of Macmillan in London, St Martin’s began life as ‘only a jobber for the books that came off Macmillan’s London Press’ (Silverman 116), growing in stature to publish in its own right, while remaining closely tied to the London firm. It was likely St Martin’s editor Les Pockell who selected Swords and Crowns and Rings from the large selection of new books coming out of London, probably on one of his many editorial trips across the Atlantic. The ‘very close price scale’ mentioned above was because McCormack ‘had everything calibrated’; he ‘brought in the British books that he didn’t pay too much for, and they sold from 3,000 to 12,000 copies’ (Silverman 125). With this model, St Martin’s made a significant contribution to the circulation of Australian novels in New York by reprinting English editions. Unlike Houghton Mifflin, St Martin’s Press published the work of a significant number of Australian authors. Publishing one hundred Australian titles in the first forty years of operation, the numbers of Australian novels escalated during the so-called ‘boom’ years of the 1980s (Osborne 49–52): Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1979); Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1980) and My Career Goes Bung (1981); Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country (1980); Kit Denton’s Breaker (1981); and many others, including novels by Gabrielle Lord, Nancy Cato, Morris West, Robert Drewe, Nicholas Jose and Matthew Reilly (AustLit). The economy of publishing that enabled St Martin’s to buy the rights to British books cheaply (including Australian novels) opened a space for Australian writing that had few precedents. In the late 1970s, Ruth Park’s Swords and Crowns and Rings was buoyed by this growing swell of American interest in Australian writing to even more success than others.

The impact in America of Swords and Crowns and Rings was enhanced by Dell Publishing’s interest in paperback rights, which echoed Ballantine Book’s interest in The Witch’s Thorn three decades earlier. Perhaps testing the buzz surrounding The Thorn Birds in the late 1970s and 1980s, Dell published multiple volumes of Vivian Stuart’s (writing as William Stuart Long) historical fiction, a trilogy of early Australian settlement, as well as a number of Peter Corris’s Cliff Hardy novels later in the decade. Publication with Dell meant Park’s novel had the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of readers served by the paperback market, and this ultimately drew attention to Park’s other works. Securing the rights to Park’s earlier novels, which had reverted back to the author in 1966⁷, St Martin’s Press took a chance with further hardback sales, publishing The Harp in the South trilogy later in the decade, including the prequel Missus, in 1986. These reprints draw a long line back to her years with Houghton Mifflin and the modest sales accompanied by one strong result in the subsidiary markets of book clubs and paperback distribution. All offset from Michael Joseph’s English edition, and presented with attractive dust jackets, St Martin’s Press maintained its strategy of cutting production costs in order to get good ‘British’ books into the American market. These publication events meant that Ruth Park was a prominent figure in the American boom of Australian fiction in the 1980s.

Reviews of Swords and Crowns and Rings echo much of the reception of Ruth Park’s earlier novels, but now with references to better known Australian books as a guide. In one review, Patrick White’s Tree of Man and Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds are used to identify common Australian tropes, such as bush fires, and this reviewer used McCullough’s novel to elevate Park’s novel to a higher literary scale: ‘The stylistic strength, compassion, and legendary grandeur of “Swords and Crowns and Rings” recommend the book highly. It deserves to win the readership of the enormously successful “Thorn Birds,” which it surpasses in both control and narrative construction’ (Wolfe). With a small print run by St Martin’s, the Dell paperback might have helped to reach some of Colleen McCullough’s readers if it shared display space in drug stores and train stations. As a St Martin’s author in the 1970s and 1980s, Ruth Park reached a small segment of the American reading population, many of whom, given St Martin’s sales strategies, would have been library borrowers.

Ruth Park’s long career in the American market ran alongside that of writers such as Jon Cleary and Morris West, Australian masters of good commercial fiction, whose work regularly reached American readers for more than fifty years (Carter and Osborne). In the New York Times, William Grimes, the paper’s regular obituarist, remembered Ruth Park as ‘one of [Australia’s] most revered writers’, but she was also remembered in America for her fiction for children and young adults. With a strong children’s line, Atheneum published Playing Beattie Bow in 1981, generating good sales and attracting the attention of critics and prize committees. This classic of Australian children’s fiction won the Boston Globe Horn Book Award for best young adult fiction, which might have been a reference point for Viking when it published My Sister Sif in 1991. After her death in 2010, Ruth Park was remembered in Australian newspaper obituary headlines as ‘A Writer for the Nation’s Poor’, and as a ‘Novelist [who] Shone a Light on Slums’. But more than an author for Australian and New Zealand readers, Ruth Park’s fiction touched a broad range of readers in both England and America – and beyond. As a strong example of a freelance writer whose work had such a long-lived and broad appeal, Ruth Park’s fiction reached far into the American book market for over more than half a century, remaining a touchstone for many American readers of what Australia (and New Zealand) looked like through the pages of American books.