The Difficult Business of Writing: The Story of <em>Return to Coolami</em>'s Publication

Abstract

In Eleanor Dark's archive, there seems to be an infinite number of royalty statements, contracts, and letters between her, Curtis Brown (her literary agent), and American and British publishers.1 In her article discussing the ill-fated publishing history of Prelude to Christopher,2 Drusilla Modjeska does an excellent job of untangling a story from such documents, piecing together Dark's persistent and frustrated attempts to get Prelude reprinted in Australia, Britain, and America. Modjeska's article provides me the essential bones and background for unraveling Coolami's publication story from this confusing papery mess, for Prelude seems to have competed against Coolami throughout time: the author's favorite text vs. the public's and the publishers' favorite; the literary novel vs. the popular novel; the macabre theme vs. the predictable gratifications of the romantic plot. Modjeska says that she turned to Dark's archive to work out what caused the author's formal retreat from modernism, as represented by her Timeless Land trilogy (76). Her essay thus traces how Dark's modernist experiments were hampered by publishers' expectations as to what a female colonial writer can or should be writing (79). am turning to Dark's papers primarily to get a sense of Coolami's publishing over time, as background for my research on how the novel might have been understood by its original readers. Whilst the data in these papers does tell me what the novel meant to these readers, does show how many people thought the book worth buying, whilst offering insight into what publishers identified as the novel's qualities. The following paper is intended to supplement Modjeska's essay on Prelude's publication history with detailed information on Coolami's fate.The correspondence regarding the publication of Return to Coolami seems to begin in October 1935, with a letter from Collins Publishers regarding the proofs of the novel.' By March 1936, Collins was writing to Dark to congratulate her on the particularly sales of Coolami: 1,840 had been sold at home, and she had achieved 1,110 Colonial sales.4 (Could anything make Dark's Antipodean status clearer than how these figures were divided and named?) Collins stated that hers were very good figures for a first adding that Coolami had been accepted by Macmillan in America. Collins also commended Prelude, but noted that would be easy to handle as Coolami, though everyone was very interested in it. Collins added that Dark's new unpublished novel, Gnome in Sunlight,5 was thought by its in-house readers to be more disconnected and not quite so as Coolami. At the end of March, Dark replied to Collins with thanks, telling him that her own readers of Gnome all agreed it was considerably than Coolami.6 She also declined an invitation to visit England due to everything seeming unsettled: she and Eric did want to risk leaving work and their sons when might become difficult if impossible to get back to them. This shows how shifts in European politics were, even before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, perceived from Australia as being both significant and dangerous. Dark also pleaded for understanding in regards to her rate of production: I am working hard at my new novel, but write slowly and with truly awful difficulty!In a letter to Collins in April, Dark described Coolami as cheerful,7 and hoped that Prelude's winning of the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal would make way for its Australian re-release. (Coolami was printed before Prelude in Britain; in Australia, P. R. Stephensen's original 1934 edition of Prelude sold only 500 out of 1000 copies.8) In July, Collins wrote to Dark expressing the hope that Prelude would have even better reception from the press than Coolami.9 Modjeska seems to see Coolami's success as overshadowing Prelude's potential and perhaps, in America, did. …