Aileen Palmer and the silence of the archive A paper given at Australia's Homosexual Histories Conference, Melbourne University, 24-25 November 2000 Three years ago I set out to find a doctoral thesis topic as far removed from gay and lesbian history as possible. This was partly because after nearly twenty years of intermittent gay activism and almost continuous gay journalism, I wanted to write about something else for a while, and partly because I did not want to be tagged from the outset as a "gay historian." There are, of course, many topics in gay and lesbian history I want to write about, but, I thought, plenty of time for that later, after I have written some "straight" history. So I decided to write about that most heterosexual of subjects, the family. I chose the Higgins-Palmer family, first because their lives are exceptionally well documented and secondly because they were all either advanced liberals, socialists or communists at various times in their lives. This gave me an opportunity to examine the history of the left through the 20th century through the medium of a three-generation family biography. But, as we used to say in the days of gay liberation, "gays and lesbians are everywhere." Even, it turned out, in the archives of the Palmer family. Or so it seemed when I found in the Vance and Nettie Palmer papers in the National Library, a letter written to Vance and Nettie in 1948 by Edith Young, a family friend in London. Young related how Vance and Nettie's daughter Aileen, during her service with a medical unit in the Spanish Civil War, had had an unfortunate romantic involvement with a man called "Dr Luted." Possibly out of a reaction to this experience, Young said, Aileen had "made strong emotional attachments to women," while in London. "I know of two girls who were what one might term 'in love' with Aileen for a time. The extent of these attachments to her own sex I cannot pretend to know, or how much they meant to Aileen." Young gave evidence for her belief that Aileen had, for some "deep-seated unconscious reason," made an "emotional transference from the feminine to the masculine role - cutting her hair like a youth's, dressing in slacks in preference to skirts, cultivating an independent boyish attitude to other women." [Edith Young to Vance Palmer, 23 October 1948, Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers, NLA MSS 1174/1/7511] Young had made these observations after Aileen's return to London from Spain in 1938, and while Aileen served during the war years with the London Ambulance Service. Since she presumably accounted herself a friend of Aileen's, this kind of tale-bearing might seem something of a betrayal. But in 1948 Aileen had had her first bout of manic depressive illness. Young presumably therefore thought of herself as doing a service to Aileen, by giving Vance Palmer information that was in her eyes relevant to an understanding of Aileen's illness. "I tell you this," she wrote, "in order to warn you that the analytical process which Aileen may have to endure will probably arouse all kinds of antagonisms." Edith Young was not only a fellow writer who knew Aileen well, but a woman who evidently knew her Freud and had some insight into Aileen's mental conflicts. "When I mentioned Aileen," she wrote, "I simply expressed my own personal view about the natural rivalry (unconscious) between you and her as writers, and I felt that she had always been frustrated in her writing, and had never been able to accomplish what she wished. This, I still adhere to." There were two issues, in Young's view. The first related to the trauma of Spain. "It always seemed to me that Spain and her experience there was the turning point of her life," Young wrote. "After Spain, all other events were an anti-climax. Spain became a symbol for her of all her deepest aspirations." The second issue was Aileen's "emotional transference to the male," as Young called it, during her period in London. This transference, Young told Vance, "would also be bound up with an identification with you, as a man, and as a writer." In other words, Aileen had come to see Vance as a competitor and a rival, an impediment to her desire both for independence and for success as a writer. Had I found a lesbian lurking in the Palmer archive? Aileen never married, and there is no mention of any heterosexual involvements in the family papers. Clearly also her appearance and manner altered greatly during her ten years in Europe, which might suggest that she had adopted the outward signs of a lesbian lifestyle. On the other hand, neither Aileen's own papers nor the family papers contain any evidence of same- sex involvements. It must be noted too that there is a similar lack of heterosexual references concerning Aileen's younger sister Helen, who also never married. Yet I have been assured by people who knew Helen that she was heterosexual. Also to be taken into account are the typescripts of Aileen's two unpublished novels, which are heavily autobiographical. In both novels she describes living with a man called Harry during her London years. "Harry" appears both in Aileen's Spanish Civil War novel, written in London in 1938-39, and in her semi-autobiographical novel "Pilgrim's Way," mostly written in the late 1960s.There are references to Harry scattered through her fictional writings. There is also one mention of him in her later papers. ("There's nothing like being an elderly lady - particularly if you can afford to be, without having to mourn too much for the late deceased (as I haven't got to, as my late-deceased was probably mainly Harry, who may be still alive, somewhere in England, but not worrying me much, just now)." Aileen Palmer Papers, NLA MSS 6759. This paper is undated, but "elderly lady" presumably puts it in the 1970s. It is not clear whether this paper was originally part of one of Aileen's novel drafts.) If this relationship did take place, it must have been a well-kept secret, since it is apparent that Edith Young did not know of it, or she would surely have mentioned it in her 1948 letter to Vance. The suspicion must therefore arise that "Harry" is a fictional figure, inserted in Aileen's novels to give the narrator a heterosexual sex-life which she did not in fact have. (It should be noted that although in "Pilgrim's Way" Aileen sets her relationship with Harry during World War II, a similar account of the relationship appears in "Last Mile to Huesca," which was written in 1938-39.) It is also possible that Aileen had a serious lesbian relationship, which has been "heterosexualised" in the novel. If Aileen was a lesbian, she may have had good reasons for not wanting anyone to know about it. She had joined the Communist Party of Australia in the early '30s, while a student at Melbourne University. She remained a Communist for the rest of her life. Her commitment to Communism is the central fact that needs to be considered in understanding her life. Although she came from a left-wing intellectual background, becoming a middle-class Communist in 1932 still meant braving the suspicions of a self-consciously proletarian Party membership. Middle-class recruits felt pressure to overcome the deficiencies of their class background and remodel themselves as a good Communist: loyal, disciplined, austere and self-effacing. Some elements of Aileen's complex personality in later life, and also some of the causes of her failure to realise her obvious talent as a writer and poet, can be traced to the inner conflicts produced by this commitment. The gender politics of the Communist Party must also be considered. Although women such as Adela Pankhurst and Katharine Prichard had been among the Party's founders, few women had subsequently been attracted to its ranks. The role of Communist women was restricted. Few rose to prominent positions, and most found themselves directed to work in the Party's fronts, such as the peace movement, rather than in "male" areas such as trade union work. The Party was hostile to feminism as a "bourgeois" movement and a distraction from the class struggle, and had a heavily masculine internal culture. The Party was also concerned to retain a "respectable" image in sexual matters: Party women such as Jean Devanny or Dorothy Hewett who broke the rules and tried to expand their area of personal freedom found themselves in trouble. (Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally, chapters 5 and 6, discusses the place of women in the Communist Party in this period. For Devanny, who was expelled as a "homewrecker," see Damousi 185, and Stuart Macintyre, The Reds, 264.) Male Party members exercised a sexual double standard without fear of criticism. The Party actively disapproved of male homosexuality, and although I have seen no references to lesbianism in this connection I don't doubt this would also have been condemned as "bourgeois bohemianism." How then is this silence of the Palmer archive on the question of Aileen's sexuality to be interpreted? Light was shed on this puzzle last month when Overland published an excerpt from the forthcoming second instalment of Dorothy Hewett's autobiography, The Empty Room. [Dorothy Hewett, extract from The Empty Room, Overland 160, Spring 2000, 4] In it Hewett recalls two meetings with Aileen in the early 1960s. On the second occasion, she reports, Aileen was burning family papers while muttering "Lies, all bloody lies." Hewett goes on: "It was Frank Hardy who eventually told me Aileen Palmer's story. As a young girl she had fallen in love with Flora Eldershaw and kept running away to her house in the Dandenongs pursued by Vance. The monumental rows and confrontations between Aileen, Flora and Vance became part of the literary gossip of Melbourne. Vance threatened Flora with legal action for corrupting a minor. I imagined that the letters I had seen Aileen burning so ferociously had some bearing on this episode." Flora Eldershaw was a well-known Melbourne writer and was 18 years older than Aileen Palmer. In view of Aileen's postwar biography, none of this is inherently improbable. It must be remembered, however, that Aileen was "a young girl" in the early 1930s, before Frank Hardy came to Melbourne, so Hewett's account is at best third-hand gossip. There is absolutely no suggestion anywhere in the Palmer papers of the events Hewett relates. Hewett's story suggests that the reason for this might have been that after her parents' deaths Aileen went through the family papers and burned all the letters reflecting badly on herself. There are two arguments against this. The first is that the Palmer archive is enormous: the Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers alone contain over 10,000 letters. Aileen would have had to do a very thorough cull to be sure of removing all such references. The second is that the papers still contain detailed descriptions of Aileen's mental illness, drunkenness, abuse of her elderly mother and other distasteful matters. Her own papers are also very frank about these subjects. If Aileen did cull the family papers, she was extraordinarily selective in what she removed. A situation like this presents the historian with difficult dilemmas. The conclusion that Aileen Palmer was a lesbian really rests only on the Edith Young letter, Dorothy Hewett's recollection of what Frank Hardy - a notorious gossip - told her, and some other recollections that Aileen dressed and behaved oddly. It is obviously dangerous to construct a biography, or a theory, on foundations of gossip and oblique references in letters. It is also dangerous to project the category "lesbian" backwards in time to a period which understood sexuality in a different way. Nevertheless, the historian has a duty to attempt an explanation of the tragedies of Aileen's life. A person of high intelligence and great talent, commitment and idealism, she died in 1988 in a mental home after decades of manic illness and alcoholism, having published little except one volume of poetry, and leaving two unfinished novels. To the end of her life she clung to an outmoded Stalinist communism. The power that the Communist Party and its ideology, including its sexual puritanism and its simplistic but demanding cultural theories, exercised over its members must be taken into account, difficult as it is for those of us who grew up in the post-1960s left to grasp. The conclusion that conflicts over her sexuality lay at the heart of Aileen's troubles seems to me to be inescapable. These were never confronted, indeed could not be confronted within Aileen's ideological framework, and therefore were never resolved. The conventions of family life, and also Vance Palmer's evident disappointment that his daughters were not sons, meant that Aileen's conflicted relations with her father could never be openly expressed. The result was an intolerable pressure which found expression in alcoholism and mental breakdown. Manic depressive illness is partly hereditary, but the degree to which an inherited tendency to this illness is actually expressed depends on the circumstances of the individual. Alcohol abuse both triggered and aggravated her illness, but Aileen's alcoholism was itself a product, rather than a cause, of her unresolved conflict. Aileen Palmer was a revolutionary, an intellectual and a writer, but for a woman of her generation these three facets of her life were, as Marxists used to say, in contradiction. Whether she was also a lesbian must be regarded as unproved, but if she was this created an additional contradiction, to which neither she nor the ideology to which she was committed had any solution.