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'It's My Party and I'll Cry If IWant To':Recent Autobiographical Writingsof Australian Women Communists

The title of this paper came about as a response to a friendlysuggestion that the titles of my papers were a bit dull. By way of

answering the challenge I came up with this one in a spirit of fun. Butthe more I thought about it the more it came to make good sense inrelation to the subject of my research: Australian communistl womenwriters. It alludes generally to the Communist Party of Australia, morespecifically to a poem by Dorothy Hewett called 'My Party" (discussedbelow); it is reminiscent of the character Panie in Bobbin Up who spendsa lot of her time singing 50s hits like 'Dream'; and it suggests that'crying'~and I'm using the term very loosely here~is an active andpositive response to whatever it was that caused upset in the first placeand is moreover an assertion of intellectual and emotional independence.

The ongoing controversy over Helen Darville's The Hand ThatSigned the Paper is a relevant and useful point of departure in adiscussion of the publication of communist women writers. It lets us askwhat kinds of accounts of communism get to be published by mainstreampublishers like Alien and Unwin, Penguin, McPhee Gribble or CoHins?

Throughout the media debate about the book during 1995 it seemedthat had Darville not made the equation between Jews and Bolsheviks!communists then very little by way of severe criticism and good publicitywould have occurred. The ruling assumption seemed to be that allcommunists were evil and less than human and that their beingslaughtered in revenge by the Ukrainian Nazis was perfectly reasonable.Darville's only crime was to make them all Jews. Take away RobertManne's voice (easier said than done) and the debate can look a lot likea replayed Cold War spat: Eric Butler, Leonie Kramer and ChristopherKoch versus Guy Rundle and Bill Schaeffer and many others on the leftwhose voices were not heard (much like during the Cold War). This isnot to suggest that anticommunism is somehow fundamental [0 theDarville novel and its defence, or that anti-anticommunism is a cemralintention of its anackers. ~or is it an attempt to deny the anti-Semitismmediated in the noveL It is, however, to open up an unmapped aspect of

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why a mediocre book has attractedsuch attention.Whatever else it may be, the publication, promotion, rewarding and

defence of The Hand That Signed the Paper by powerful members ofAustralia's literary/political community is a clear indication that theCold War is not over and that a number of active anticommunists are stillon the warpath. And the failure of just about all of Darville's critics tomake the point that the random butchering of rank and file communistsis also a heinous crime-whatever bestialities were commissioned bytheir Party-and the correlative silence around Darville's fraudulentadoption of a working class persona (much like Pauline Hanson's takingon the battler mantle) suggests that the spirit of passive anticommunismis also well and truly alive. It seems that the 'fresh corpse ofcommunism' needs a good kick every now and tben; just to make sureit's definitely not breathing.

Communist Women's AutobiographiesSince the late 1970s there has been a spate of autobiographies byAustralian women communists. For example, Zelda D' Aprano's Zelda(self-published, 1977 and Spinifex, 1995), Nancy Wills' Shades of Red(Communist Arts Group, 1980), Amirah Inglis's Amirah: An Un­Australian Childhood (Heinemann, 1983), Audrey Blake's A ProletarianLife (Kibble/Arena, 1984), Oriel Gray's Exit Left (Penguin, 1985), JeanDevanny's Point of Departure (University of Queensland Press, 1986),'Bernice Morris's Between the Lines (Sybylla, 1988), Betty Roland'sseries of autobiographical works which began with An Improbable Life(Collins, 1989), Dorothy Hewett's Wild Card (McPhee Gribble, 1990),lustina Williams' Anger and Love (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993)and most recently Inglis's The Hammer & Sickle and the Washing Up(Hyland House, 1995). All are either memoirs or autobiographies writtenby members or ex-members of the CPA. To this list we might add thenew editions of partly autobiographical novels like Devanny's SugarHeaven (Redback, 1982) and the unexpurgated version of Betty Collins'The Copper Crucible (published by the University of Queensland Pressin 1996), and also loyce Stevens' history of the CPA Taking theRevolution Home (Sybylla, 1987). J Collins and Vera Deacon also haveautobiographies in progress. Taken as a whole this list represents aliterary movement of left-wing women writers of proportionsunimaginable in the 1950s and 1960s. What interests me most about thesewritings as a group is the question of what has changed in Australiansociety to encourage, enable and control their production anddistribution.

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But the change occurring is not only in that a lot of womencommunists are being published. Many have changed their tunes as well.Words written in the 50s or 60s come to be forgotten, recanted orexpurgated in the 70s, 80s and 90s; new positions are articulated, andsupposedly suppressed historical truths are revealed. As a result, anumber of these writers' stories are narratives of shifting politicalallegiance. What then is happening when writers like Hewett seem tohave such a radical change of heart?

In a passage from Wild Card the author remembers a moment ofdoubt in 1957:

It never enters my head to leave the Party, because I simply cannotimagine any life outside it. Not only have I spent the last twelveyears of my life defending its causes, but it has structured my wholeexistence, given it a special meaning. Without the Communist PartyI will be adrift again, at the mercy of a hostile world, with all myold fears and inadequacies waiting to destroy me. The CommunistParty once saved my life. I dare not put it aside, for maybe that waythe old madness lies: the resurrection of the weeping girl with aLysol bottle in her hand. So I tell myself there is nothing wrong withthe principles of Marxism-Leninism, only deviations, human errors,that can always be rectified. 4

The passage exemplifies Gillian Whitlock's claim that Wild Card iswritten in a strangely passive voice. 5 The Party-usually beneficent,sometimes malign-acts upon the autobiographical character more or lessindependently of her will. This power she gives to the Party (though thepersona is often not even that active) in turn prevents her from beingcritical of it.

This position can be contrasted with the one articulated in the poem'MY Party' written in October 1961 more than four years after themoment of 'self-deception' described in Wild Card, and published in theRealist Writer in 1962:6

I am not alone ... in the beating of my heartAre the songs of Lumumba, the poems of Pablo Neruda.Brecht's lost children wander through the Polish snow,'The Rail Splitters Awake' in my heart each morning,With Nazim Hikmet I have seen beautiful days,And my Party is the Party of Aragon.I have loved all beautiful things,Flowers and music and Robeson's songs,Seegar's guitar and Woody Guthrie singing,The Tennessee Valley blooming under his lips

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Tom Joad on the dusty road to California,With the cold steel ringing, singing in his heart.I have loved them all, the battlers, the lonely menWho are never alone, in the beating of their heartsThe strong men with the sun coming up in their eyes.My Party's given all this back to me;A land in bloom, a follower to the stars,And a black world made beautiful with rain.The Southern Cross swings over Bowling's chains,The five fierce stars to wrap Tom Edwards in,And Lawson walks the Sydney streets again, sardonic

Steelman,Sweeney at his side; now Clancy rides his last

triumphant ride.Oh! all my world has changed and grown, it shinesLike the eyes of the miners in the Isa mines.I ride the Freedom Train with Langston Hughes across

America.I've loved them all, the tumult of their voicesSeaman and steelman, wharfie, weaver, poet.I am not alone, in the beating of my heartAre the voices singing, singing on the high windAnd my Party is the Party of Aragon.

While there is a number of differences between these two pieces ofwriting, it is worth acknowledging at least one similarity in that the Partyis still conceived of as doing things to the narrator; all she does isreceive, see and love in return. Nevertheless, there is a clear and markeddifference in tone and content. So the question remains: which Hewettare we to believe and why?

There is a tendency in the contemporary literary community tobelieve the later Hewett. A more telling example of this is the absenceof 'My Party'-and several other of her CPA and What About thePeople? poems-in the recently published Dorothy Rewelt: CollectedPoems. 7 There is no good reason why poems such as these should beexcluded from such a collection. As Barbara Garlick suggests, 'thegreatest loss [from the collection] is some of those early politicallycommitted poems which, though uncritically enthusiastic in their politicalardour, nevertheless represent a stage in the clarity and joy of[Hewett's] journey." Someone with Hewett's record of wanting thetrue historic record to be revealed has little to fear from the exposure ofa poem like 'My Party.' The only valid explanation for omission would

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be that these poems were written under such duress or illusion that theyrepresent an utterly inauthentic Hewett. This explanation has thedisadvantage of being wrong. Hewett's correspondence with FrankHardy in the late 1950s and early 1960s reveals that she was far frombeing a reluctant or passive comrade. Never one to bow to the Party'shierarchy or formalities, Hewett struggled mightily within Party (literary)circles trying to advance the level of sophistication with which Marxistideas were applied to Australian cultural work.' She does a disserviceto herself and to history if she denies her agency at this time. We couldcontrast such a denial, if it were made, with Justina Williams'acceptance of responsibility for her choices and decisions. It would befair to say that Audrey Blake, Nancy Wills and Bernice Morris also takea high degree of personal responsibility in this regard without failing toattack the party when the occasion merits. Beny Collins, who now speudsher life engaged in New Age, personal growth and other spiritualpractices, and whose present politics are (to put it mildly) a fair wayfrom Marxism-Leninism, refuses to be critical of the CPA or give herown power of narration over to it.

Yet there is so much at stake in the assertion that, once free of theclutches of the CPA's patriarchal influence, women like Hewett, Grayand Roland have been able to 'set the record straight'. In this argumentthe CPA's suppression of women's voices or their being limited tospecific 'feminised' micro-political realms meant that many intelligentand articulate women communists were given little scope for literary self­expression. A supporting statistic is that of the 86 books published ordistributed by the CPA influenced Australasian Book Society (ABS) inits 26 year history (1952-1978) only 12 (14%) were by women, despitethe fact that many manuscripts by women were submitted. The ABSrefused to publish Devanny's novel 'You Can't Have Everything' andalso Collins' The Copper Crucible (originally submitted as 'The Mine').It is likely that Hilary Richmond's untitled novel from 1956 was alsorejected by ABS. 1o According to this interpretation, the recent writingsby women communists represent a kind of therapy. Years of suppressedemotion and intellect have resulted in a flurry of expression.

But this explanation is contradicted by those women who claim to havefound their communist days liberating ones. The oral histories in the finalsection of Stevens' Taking the Revolution Home are testimony to the factthat many communist women's lives obtained a public dimension thatwas not available in many other areas of Australian public life. Theyreceived training in public speaking, organisational activity and 'publicpolitical argument. The Party might well have imposed a structure on

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their lives, but it at least was a structure that enabled women to achievea relatively high level of social prominence and impact and some senseof liberation. And while this relative liberation theory does not apply toall or perhaps even the majority of communist women, it does apply tothe political careers of enough women to undermine the idea that thefemale members of the CPA were all oppressed, silent and auxiharydrudges. 11

The autobiographical writings of Australian women communistscontain a wide variety of positions and attitudes. It would be mostsurprising if all recollections said largely identical things about the Partyand the authors' experiences within it. The writings cannot becategorised in a binary of positive versus negative, or loyalist versusreactionary. Indeed, the various writings represent a spectrum ofexperiences and positions-sometimes contained within the covers of onebook. Inglis's The Hammer & Sickle and the Washing Up is a goodexample of this polyphonic mode. She adopts several discrete narrativevoices which represent contending ideological positions on the CPA asa way of articulating her sense of uncertainty about the Party history ofwhich she was a part. As she asks:

Why do people remain faithful? The mystery is not those membersof the Australian Communist Party who left, but those whoremained, despite everything, committed to a Soviet social systemwhich so little resembled their dream of justice and equality. 12

Perhaps such a question cannot be answered in anything but a diffident,ambiguous mode. It certainly cannot be answered by those historians ofutter anticommunist certainty like Robert Manne, Gerard Henderson andBA Santamaria. They seem to be incapable of seeing clearly the historicalindividual human beings being swayed by the legitimate arguments forrevolutionary communism and against the power of the ruling class, itsinstitutions and its propaganda. Nor can the question be answered by atotal defence of the Party's actions. Too many local, national andinternational betrayals and brutalities occurred in the name ofcommunism. Polyphony is the only plausible mode in which the questioncan be addressed.

While a diversity in recollection is to be expected, what might be lesspredictable is the way certain publishers tend to publish certain kinds ofwriting. When we look at those works that tend to be particularly criticalof the CPA and those that take the 'personal responsibility' position, wesee an interesting divide between the respective publishers. Almostinvariably, the positive works are published by alternative or 'offmainstream' houses like Spinifex, Sybylla, Arena and Fremantle Arts

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Centre Press; the University of Queensland Press publishes some also,but occupies a kind of middle position between these and the mainstreampublishers like Collins, Penguir, and McPhee Gribble which seem tofavour the works most critical or dismissive of the Party or those whichconstruct its demise as inevitable. Fittingly, Hyland House, a very smallmainstream publisher with a nevertheless significant alternative andcritical list, facilitated Inglis's equivocal memoir.

Falling Between Two CampsA framework for understanding some of the problems I have beendealing with is suggested by the American feminist critic PaulaRabinowitz in her book, Lahor and Desire. She argues that the

revolutionary [proletarian women's] narratives of the 1930s have,by and large, been ignored or disparaged by the Marxist critics ofthe period for remaining too feminist, and they have been excludedfrom contemporary feminist reconstructions of literary historybecause they transgress the gender lines dividing men from womenby investigating class, racial and geopolitical differences among

women. 13

As a result of their falling between two camps, the American proletarianwomen writers movement of the late 1920s and 1930s (which includeswriters like Agnes Smedley, Meridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen) hasproven difficult for either Stalinised Marxism or class-blind forms offeminism to come to terms with. 14

Unlike America, Australia did not have a proletarian women writers'movement in the 1930s-though Julie Wells has rightly criticised me forunderestimating the working class writers movements of this period."Following on from the sole novel of the early deceased Lesbia Harford,perhaps the work of Devanny and some moments of Katharine SusannahPrichard point to possibilities, but insofar as Australia had something likea proletarian women writers' movement, it happened in the 1950s and1960s in the work of writers like Hewett, Collins, Richmond, SallyBannister, Mena Calthorpe and others. Hewett's aside, these names arestill not familiar ones to a great number of Australian literary critics. '6

The opposition Rabinowitz describes between Stalinism and a particularand dominant mode of feminism is an important factor in the continuedmarginality of many of these Australian women writers.

The recent autobiographical writings are not merely the result ofshackles being released; even as the old forms of suppression were beingbroken down, new limits and forms of coercion have been applied. Onthe one hand, the Australian alternative and left-wing publishing and

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critical hegemony has shifted from one dominated by a nationalist andmasculinist version of class analysis to one in which gender and sex(among others factors) are considered to be more important in subjectformation and social conflict. Its narratives are bound to reject what itconstructs as the simplistic old class politics in favour of a more complexpolitical analysis which takes account of identity politics. The trouble isthat it is too easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Many womenjoined the Party because of its ostensible class politics. When they left itwas often because of its atrocious (sexist, masculinist, nationalist,homophobic) class politics and not necessarily because they had changedtheir minds or their politics. I have argued elsewhere that Hewett did notleave the Party because it was too Marxist. Precisely the opposite, sheleft because it was not Marxist enough. 17

On the other hand, the narrative structures of contemporaryautobiographies written by Australian women ex-communists andpublished in the mainstream press (i.e. by multinational capitalistorganisations) are perhaps bound to reject communism, class politics andMarxism. I'm thinking here of the way in which the inevitability ofleaving the Parry is encrypted from the very beginnings of works likeExit Left, Wild Card and the Betty Roland trilogy. When, for example,Gray announces dramatically to John Hepworth, 'I'm going to leave theparty.',8 on the second last page of Exit Left, an anti-climactic closureis performed. Inevitable not in logical or political terms, her ultimatedefection was a narrative necessity. The function of the mainstreampublished ex-communist autobiography appears to be precisely this denialof the possibility and rationality of communism, a narrative of itshistorically inevitable demise. Gray addresses the reader at one point:'Do I make [the communists] sound ridiculous? If I do, I have failedthem. They were not ridiculous,' 19 before going on to fail them utterlyin her own terms.

Just as the publication vehicles for left-wing writers of the Cold Warperiod tended to exclude feminist voices, classed voices are marginalisedtoday. The spate of recent autobiographical writings has been a valuableaddition to Australia's socialist and feminist archive, and is one whichwe need to celebrate. But not uncritically; in the end these works areselected and shaped by the complicated agendas and contingencies oftheir publishers. It is important to remember that while some womenmight have had a miserable time of it at their Party (as the mainstreampublishers keep reminding us), others, including Justina Williams, NancyWills, Vera Deacon and Bermce Morris, had a very good time-perhapsthe time of their lives. I think the role for those of us involved in the

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production and reproduction of Australian literature and who areconscious of the role of class in literary formations is to continue to makesome space available for those voices that want to refuse the HelenDarville war comic version of the history and impact of communism inAustralia and the rest of the world.

[an Syson

E"'DNOTES:1. I have employed lower case here, using capitalisation only for the CommunistParty itself. The CPSU and its international affiliates had, by the 19305, abandonedkey principles of communism such as workers' control and internationalism, butcontinued to be identified with 'communism' both by the Parties and in dominantdiscourses. When a number of members resigned, it was often an 'exit left' in whichthey retained at least some communist principles.2. Posthumously published twenty-five odd years after Devanny's death.3. Another area that has not particularly been investigated in this context is someindigenous and Migrant writers who have not particularly been claimed by the Party,but were members or fellow-travellers. Kath Walker is one example.4. Dorothy Hewet'- Wild Card: An AutobIOgraphy, 1923-1958 (Melbourne: McPheeGribble. J990): 251.5. This was suggested by GilJian Whitlock during a private conversation in May1994. The passivity applies in both the dramatic and grammatical senses.6. Hewett, 'My Party,' Realist Writer 9 (1962): 20. Ellipses in original.7. Hewett and Merv Lilley, What About the People? (Sydney: Sydney RealistWriters' Group. 1962); Hewett, Dorothy Hewer!: Collected Poems (Fremantle:Fremantle Arts Centre, 1995).8. Barbara Garlick. Australian Women's Book Review, 8. 4 (1996): 7.9. See Frank Hardy Papers. National Library of Australia. NLA MS 4887; Doroth)Hewett Papers, National Library of Australia, NLA MS 6184. See also the essayswritten by Hewett in the mid-1960s and published for the first time in Hecate 21.2(1995): 129-36.10. This suggestion comes from correspondence I have had from Richmond'sdaughter and son.11. The figure of Devanny, in particular, illustrates the extent of both repression andsupport that women members could experience. Carole Ferrier's Jean Devanny andthe Romance of the Revolution (D of Queensland P, forthcoming [1997]) offers agreat deal more material than Devanny's own Point a/Departure for the investigationof this area.12. Amirah Inglis, The Hanuner & Sickle and the Washing Up (Melbourne: HylandHouse, 1995): 188.13. Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire (U of North Carolina P, 1991): 7.14. See also Constance Coiner, 'Literature of Resistance and the Communis! Left inMeridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen,' in Left Politics and the Literary Profession ed.Lennard J Davis and M. Bella MirabeJla (NY: Columbia UP, 1990): 162-85.

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15. Julie Wells. 'Integrating Literary and Political Activity: Katharine SusannahPrichard, Jean Devanny, and Communist Writers During the 1930s,' PhD Thesis,Monash University. 1994.

16. See AlIan GardineL 'Literary Body or Critical Corpse?' Hecate 21.2 1995: 140­41. He shows how this ignorance prevented a number of writers in the recentanthology. Dorothy Hewett: Selected Crirical Essai's, ed. Bruce Bennet!, (FremantleAm Centre Press, 1995) from making the connection between Sally Bannister andthe character Sally Banner in The Chapel Perilous.17. See my note to the Hewell essays, Hecare 21.2 (1995): 129-30.18. Oriel Gray. Exit Left: MemOirs of a Scarlet Woman (Melbourne: Penguin, 1985):226.19. Gray. 42. Nicole Moore discusses how far this could also be said of Roland'sautobiographical account of her life in 'The Burdens Twain or Not ForgettmgYourself: The Writing of Betty Roland's Life: Hecare XVIII. I (1992): 6-26.

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