by Whispering Gums

A post in our series featuring works published in 1924 (or by authors who died in 1924). This post is an article that was published in The Daily Mail on 12 July 1924, and is by the New Zealand-born Dulcie Deamer.

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Dulcie Deamer (1890-1972) – Mary Elizabeth Kathleen Dulcie Deamer – was, says Wikipedia, a “novelist, poet, journalist, and actress”. ADB biographer Martha Rutledge is more to the point, describing Deamer as “writer and bohemian”, while her contemporary, the journalist and author Aidan de Brune, puts it differently again, commencing his piece with, “Dulcie Deamer has had an adventurous life”. From the little I’ve read of her and her work, it’s clear she was imaginative and fearless.

Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, to George Edwin Deamer, a physician from Lincolnshire, and his New Zealand-born wife Mable Reader, Dulcie Deamer was taught at home by her ex-governess mother. The timelines of her youth are sketchy in places, but Rutledge says that at 9, she appeared on the stage with Robert Brough‘s Comedy Company. De Brune writes that she was writing verses by the age of 11. A year after that, in 1902, both agree that her family moved to Featherstone, a small bush township in the North Island of New Zealand, where, de Brune says, “she ran wild” for five years, “riding unbroken colts, shooting, learning to swim in snow-fed creeks, and going for long, solitary rambles of exploration through the virgin bush”. It was here ‘that what she describes as “memories of the Stone Age” came to her’. Somewhere during this time, according to Rutledge, she was sent to Wellington to learn elocution and ballet lessons, apparently in preparation for the stage. At the age of 16, she submitted a story to the new Lone Hand magazine, and won the prize of 25 pounds. It was “a story of the savage love of a cave-man” and it changed the course of her life.

Wikipedia picks up the story (sourced from newspapers of the time). As well as writing, she continued her stage career. She married Albert Goldie, who was a theatrical agent for JC Williamson’s, in Perth, Australia, in 1908. She had six children, but separated from Goldie in 1922. Rutledge, writes that

In the crowded years 1908-1924 Dulcie bore six children (two sons died in infancy), travelled overseas in 1912, 1913-14, 1916-19 and 1921 and published a collection of short stories and four novels—The Suttee of Safa (New York, 1913) ‘a hot and strong love story about Akbar the Great’; Revelation (London, 1921) and The Street of the Gazelle (London, 1922), set in Jerusalem at the time of Christ; and The Devil’s Saint (London, 1924). Three were syndicated in Randolph Hearst’s newspapers in the United States of America. Her themes, including witchcraft, gave ‘free play to the lavish style of her writing, displaying opulence and sensuality or squalor of traditional scenes.

Reviewing The devil’s saint for Sydney’s The Sun, The Stoic gives a flavour of Deamer’s writing. “She has style (a little too ecstatic perhaps) and she has a fine instinct for story-telling”, but there is much kissing – quite explicitly described – and “Sheikish stuff”. However, as The Stoic knows, there are readers for such writing, and s/he concludes that ‘If anybody wants romance, with a flavor of the supernatural and plenty of “pash,” this is the book’.

Anyhow, after leaving her husband in 1922, Deamer lived a Bohemian life in Kings Cross, while her mother brought up her children. She worked as a freelance journalist, contributing stories, articles and verse to the Australian Woman’s Mirror, other journals and newspapers, including the Bulletin and the Sydney Morning Herald. Like other writers we have featured, she often used pseudonyms. Rutledge tells us that Zora Cross described her in 1928 as ‘Speedy as a swallow in movement, quick as sunlight in speech … [and] restless as the sea’. Debra Adelaide writes that she was known as the “Queen of Bohemia” due to her involvement with Norman Lindsay’s literary and artistic circle, with Kings Cross Bohemianism, and with vaudeville. Various commentators and critics refer to her interest in religion, mythology, classical literature and the ancient world.

Deamer was a founder in 1929 and committee-member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. In the 1930s she wrote plays, and a volume of mystical poetry titled Messalina (1932), while in the 1940s she another novel, Holiday (1940), another volume of mystical poetry, and The Silver Branch (1948). De Brune, writing in 1933, says that she was also hoping “to contribute screen stories to the newly-established Australian film industry” but it doesn’t appear that she achieved in this sphere.

In their short entry on her, Wilde, Hooton and Andrews say that her unpublished biography, The golden decade, “is informative on the literary circles of Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s”. They also say that she features in Peter Kirkpatrick’s 1992 book, The sea coast of Bohemia. Whatever, we might think of her novels now, she was a lively and creative force in her time, and is worth knowing about.

Today’s piece, “Fancy dress”, provides an insight into her interests in the magical and mystical and conveys something of her lively, humorous style.

Fancy Dress

(By Dulcie Deamer)

Fancy balls to the right of us— fancy balls to the left of us! The masquerade season is upon us . . . Strange that the cold nights (and they are cold, believe me!) should be the signal for a general undressing. But of that more anon. Yes, winter down here in Sydney comes in with a flourish of spidery, scarlet-tighted figures, abbreviated columbines and bare backed vamps— on the posters, at least. No wonder that those same posters keep company with the advertisement of somebody’s bronchitis cure. Or is it that we are emulating the Spartan ideal, that ruled that the young and tender should be cradled naked upon a shield. Oh, we are a hardy folk, we Sydneysiders, when the mid-winter masquerades strip us of— of quite a number of essential things.

This is a deep matter, this fancy dress — not a mere shallow ripple on the phosphorescent fountain of frivolity. It has cosmic gulfs in it: what Tennyson calls “the abysmal deeps of personality.” We got star-sown profundities, as though one stood on the cliff edge of a world and looked down — or up. One realises that the influitely [“infinitely”?] absurd is the infinitely sad, and that both contain the riddle of the ages, whatever that is. But why do people choose costumes that reflect not them, but their opposites. Why did the man of the chipped flint, the Dawn-Man, wear the strong teeth of the beautiful and terrible beasts he had wrestled with and killed. Why does the still-surviving savage rub himself with the fat of his brave enemies, and cat portions of their corpses! — For the same reason that Jones, the haberdasher’s assistant, who has pince-nez, narrow features, and retreating chin, hires the trappings of a Spanish bull-fighter, right down to the sword and scarlet cloak. He could not chop the Sunday fowl’s head off, even to please his best girl’s mother, and, be-hold his choice! We all know our selves inadequate— savage, half-savage, and Jones, who lives in the next street. We are semi-formed, groping, striving things, unfinished as a sculp tor’s inchoate handful of clay from which intertwined limbs, crude bosoms, and face-blanks uncertainly emerge. We are tending towards something —have been for ages – and most surely have not yet arrived. It is both pitiful and glorious. Whenever I see a facsimile of an ogre-man’s head, brutal, wistful, and hairy, or the fetish-work of cannibal-people, or the fancy costume of Sarah Smith, I am reminded of the words of St. Paul: “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.” Wonderful, you know; charged with a quite terrible sort of hope. No four-footed thing ever thought of grappling to itself the prowess of a down trodden foe, and thereby inflating its own ego, raising the keen head of its soul above those of its mates. So when the Dawn-Man, with the stooped shoulders, and long, gorilla-arms, flayed the striped hide from some tiger car-case, and wrapped it reeking about himself, in order to assume the tiger-might, surely the morning stars sang together, for it was an incalculable moment. Something that has never rested since stirred then for the first time. And was there a foreshadowing of temples in the curled clouds— temples, sky-scrapers, colossi, gods, goddesses, angels, Oh, no— only a humming of green flesh-flies about the carcase, and the reek of the hide, and perhaps water running among stones and a woman’s triumph shriek . . .

But to return from Time’s mourning to those slightly musty depots with their behind-the-scenes flavour, where fancy costumes are on hire. From some aspects, it is not such a very long step, either. We can guess how, having gone back a little way, and then come forward again, why the underfed-looking young lady, built, if one may say so, on clothe’s horse lines, adopts the transparent trousers and tinselled body-harness of Salome, why the meek young man with pimples dresses up as Robin-Hood, and why the serious-minded girl elects to be a jazz pierrette. What an intriguing law it is, this of compliment and compensation! I shall never forget one raffish little ratist whose aura, so to speak, was always of beer and spring onions, and who turned up at a big masquerade in the frills, laces, and satin breeches of the Beau Brummel epoch. Nobody knew why— he could not explain it himself. But then, can any man even explain why he marries the woman he does! In both cases sub conscious urgencies are at work.

Fancy costumes! There is magic in the whole business, isn’t there! Sympathetic magic … Have you ever stood between those counters piled with tights, trunks, ruffles, Viking bearskins, Mephisto cloaks, court satins, gazing fascinated at the racks of swords and spears, and at the array of royal crowns, Imperial insignia, pearl ropes, and Cleopatra rings, and imagined that you were in some faintly fusty astral precinct of the unborn, where the Folk-to-Be, by grace of the Lords of Korma, feverishly selected their earth-characters. No outfits for navvies, garbage contractors, charladies, waitresses, suburban husbands, or suburban wives would be provided. Does any hiring-shop on the material plane stock such as these? But what a rush there would be— there is— for Oriental potentates, Queens of Sheba, generals, admirals, vampires, and grand-duchesses! Every one wants to be splendid, dazzling, supreme; no one desires to drudge, sweat, endure, develop physical, mental, and spiritual sinews. It is as though a single-celled animalcule could — still retaining its pin-point animalcule nature — bridge at one gasp the evolutionary chasm between itself and the Nautilis.

The whole machinery of development would have to be abrogated, of course, and even then the animalcule soul would be about as much at home in the Nautilis organisation, as a Carib Indian in the Vatican palace. One must grow gradually to the height of one’s aspirations! Such is the law.

In the meantime we can all “dress up”— just as the Dawn-Man assumed the tiger’s hide, or the cannibal islander anoints himself with the fat of the brave. And it helps — sympathetic magic always helps. What shall we wear to-morrow night?

Sources:

Debra Adelaide, Australian women writers: A bibliographic guide. London, Sydney: Pandora, 1988.
Aidan de Brune, “Dulcie Deamer (1890-1972)” in Ten Australian Authors, by Aidan de Brune, Project Gutenberg Australia and Roy Glashan’s Library, 2017 (originally published in The West Australian, 13 May 1933) [Accessed: 21 November 2024]
Dulcie Deamer, “Fancy Dress“, The Daily Mail (12 July 1924). [Accessed: 21 November 2024]
“Dulcie Deamer“, Wikipedia [Accessed 21 November 2024]
Martha Rutledge, ‘Deamer, Dulcie (1890–1972)‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1981 [Accessed: 21 November 2024]
William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, The Oxford companion to Australian literature. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2nd, edition, 1994

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