The stories behind the people who wielded the blue pencils

If you thought publishing was a sedate business, think again. Craig Munro’s lively account, Literary Lion Tamers, is full of eccentric characters, entrepreneurial derring-do, financial ruin, creative brilliance, emotional breakdown, obsession, intrigue, imprisonment and untimely death.

When A.G. Stephens was editor of the Bulletin Company’s book list around the turn of the 20th century, for example, his overworked boss J.F. Archibald, editor of The Bulletin, suffered a manic episode. The tragicomic symptom of his illness was that "⁣he suddenly began paying contributors far above the usual rate for their poetry"⁣ and ended up in Callan Park Asylum.

The Angus & Robertson editor Beatrice Davis wrangled Xavier Herbert and his writing with “her charm and persistence”. Credit:

The first of four figures who shape Munro’s book, Alfred Stephens started his working life in gold-rush Queensland as a journalist and newspaper editor. In one of Munro’s many pinpoint descriptions, he was at 20 "⁣the proud possessor of a full beard, an eye for the ridiculous, and an argumentative personality"⁣.

From Gympie to London Stephens found work before joining The Bulletin, the hub of Australian political and literary journalism. He became "⁣Australia’s most important early literary critic"⁣ and later published his own journal, The Bookfellow, despite dire financial circumstances and his own eventual breakdown.

Credit:

As an intrusive editor he was known to write lines into poets’ work. But he nurtured unconventional writing careers, notably those of Steele Rudd and Joseph Furphy, whose Bulletin stories he shaped into the respective classics On Our Selection and Such Is Life.

Munro also had a long career in book publishing, as inaugural fiction editor and publishing manager at the University of Queensland Press, and has since become an elegant writer and chronicler of the industry. He understands that a good editor – sometimes publisher as well – combines literary skills, business nous and psychology.

This book is a prequel to his memoir, Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing, and covers a century of publishing history laced with personal experience and commentary. His well-chosen characters came from Queensland, worked for UQP, or had another connection with each other and the author.

The narrative moves from the chaotic early days when individual buccaneers struggled against British domination, to Angus & Robertson’s steady growth before being smothered by corporate takeovers in the 1970s, and up to the transformations of the 21st century.

Even more colourful than Stephens was P.R. Stephensen, “a rebel and a risk taker” who shifted from communism to ultra-nationalism and was imprisoned in 1944 on suspicion of being a Japanese spy.
Munro draws on his own book about “Inky” Stephensen to create a vivid biographical sketch: radical politics at Oxford, publication in London of a secret edition of D.H. Lawrence’s banned novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, dealings with James Joyce and “the wickedest man in the world”, Aleister Crowley.

When Stephensen’s London publishing company failed, Norman Lindsay helped him get backing from The Bulletin for the Endeavour Press in Sydney. Much of his time was spent husbanding Xavier Herbert’s much-rejected "⁣Giant Novel"⁣ Capricornia into a publishable shape.

After the success of a first edition in 1938, Angus & Robertson took over the rights and the novel has never been out of print. This is the segue to Munro’s third protagonist, the great A&R editor Beatrice Davis, who for the rest of his career wrangled Herbert and his writing with “her charm and persistence”.

Jacqueline Kent wrote a fine biography of Davis, to which Munro adds his own valuable research and interviews. Throughout the book his literary detective work produces thrilling finds. He details the often excruciating birth (or stillbirth) of books with many lessons still relevant.

Davis was on the Miles Franklin Award judging panel for 35 years until her death, and championed two of her authors who won – Herbert for Poor Fellow My Country and Thea Astley three times, “without even a murmur of conflict of interest”.

She and the last figure, UQP fiction editor Rosanne Fitzgibbon, were refined lion tamers who can’t match the earlier male mavericks for drama but managed wild talents such as Ernestine Hill, Eve Langley and Gillian Mears. They exemplify professionalism under pressure in a tough industry that has always been driven by passion. Munro’s passion also shines in this entertaining gem of cultural history.

Literary Lion Tamers: Book Editors Who Made Publishing History, Craig Munro, Scribe, $29.99

Susan Wyndham is a former literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.

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