Second, Mr Alexandra says that, whereas my discussion of the 2003 Iraq War is ‘even-handed’, my treatment of World War I relies on ‘a particular account’. If he means that my preferred interpretation commands less than universal assent, then of course I must concur, there being none that everyone agrees with. But if he means that my reading is eccentric and unreliable, I must protest. The account I followed, which fingers Germany as the prime culprit, was then dominant among contemporary British and German historians. Since my book went to press in 2013, Australia’s own Christopher Clark has shifted the consensus through his Sleepwalkers, which spreads the blame beyond Berlin to Belgrade and St Petersburg. Nevertheless, according to last February’s email, not even Clark thinks that Britain could or should have stayed out of the fighting. The only historian of any prominence who thinks so is Niall Fergusson, whose thesis was dismantled in public by his fellow historians during a BBC TV discussion earlier this year.

Third, your reviewer cannot see how opposing unjust German aggression in 1914–18 could possibly have been worth the appalling costs. The calculation by which he achieves that conclusion remains opaque. But if the later war against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan was justified, then it’s not obvious why the Allied effort in 1914–18 wasn’t – the latter’s cost in life being less than a third of the former’s.

Finally, Mr Alexandra complains that the vast majority of those who suffered in the Great War were not liable for punishment. This is true, but according to natural morality, if not civil law, a death can be justified when it is not deserved. I call as witness the French civilian who, trapped in a cellar by Allied bombing during the Normandy invasion of 1944, scratched on the wall as he suffocated to death, ‘I will never see this liberation for which I have waited for so long, but I know that through my death others will be set free. Long live France! Long live the Allies!’ This innocent victim of war was not liable to the punishment imprecisely directed at the German occupiers; he didn’t deserve to die. But he nevertheless recognised that his death was justified.

Nigel Biggar, University of Oxford, UK

Andrew Alexandra replies

The onus of justification lies on those who claim that a war is just. On Nigel Biggar’s idiosyncratic version of Just War Theory, war can be justified as a ‘punitive, retributive response to wrongdoing’. In the case of World War I, he identifies ‘Germany as the prime culprit’ and thus deserving of punishment. Even if there was a prime culprit, deserving of punishment, it was not ‘Germany’, but rather a small group of the military and political élite of the German state. The war was not fought in order to punish them, and they were not in fact punished. So even on Biggar’s account, the war was not a just one.

A welcome reprint

Dear Editor,

It is with pleasure that I note the reprint of J.P. McKinney’s World War I novel, Crucible. Reviewer Rodney Hall (June–July 2014) is correct in stating that McKinney’s work does not convey the ‘brooding’ or ‘outrage’ of the better-known Great War authors such as Remarque and Owen. Crucible strikes a very Australian stance, in which the tragic and disgusting work of war is balanced against a return home to the promise of life.

However, there are a couple of points which your reviewer missed. First, he finds ‘so little [Australian] literature’ on the Great War. While often buried under the avalanche of writing from Britain, there are many Australian works: see J.T. Laird’s Other Banners: An Anthology of Australian Literature of the First World War (1971), Robin Gerster’s Big-Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing (1987), and Matthew Richardson’s War in Words: The Halstead Armoury of Australian War Writing (2004). As for novels, veteran Australian authors have provided ‘quality [which] speaks for itself’: for example, Leonard Mann’s Flesh in Armour and expatriate Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (which Hemingway considered the best novel to emerge from the conflict). Ion Idriess’s The Desert Column and G.D. Mitchell’s Backs to the Wall are also valuable, though their tone is more jingoistically dated.

My second point is to quibble somewhat with the reviewer’s dismissal of Fairbairn’s affair with Nanette. I read this as a masterly portrayal of a real woman: Nanette is passionate but pragmatic, and perhaps we have become too conditioned to the pathetic beauty of a war heroine (cf. Catherine in A Farewell to Arms). The phlegmatic French are neither shocked nor horrified by the affair: ‘the war takes our son, but gives us little Jean in return,’ says Nanette’s father. This is less ‘sketchy’ than fascinatingly understated.Jack McKinney, later the life partner of Judith Wright, went on to write fascinating philosophy, and would have considered that his life’s work. However, Crucible may prove an equivalent if not greater legacy. I am most pleased to see it reviewed in ABR.

I should mention that my own book-length study of Australian World War I narrative prose is currently in press at UWA Publishing.

Clare Rhoden, Oakleigh South, Vic.

Henry and Olga

Dear Editor,

Any suggestion that Henry Handel Richardson was a manipulator of a young female friend for her own emotional and erotic satisfaction is simply unmeritorious. I am therefore most concerned by Ann-Marie Priest’s retelling of the story told by Olga Roncoroni of her relationship with Henry Handel Richardson, and the conclusions which Priest apparently reaches (May 2014).

More particularly, the retelling of Roncoroni’s memoir is full of creative embellishments and distortions which Priest legitimises by defining the original story as ‘a coded tale of seduction’. If we subscribe to Priest’s view that the story Roncoroni was actually telling needs to be decoded, then everything is open to reimagining. Roncoroni’s memoir is the only source for this story.

From the very first paragraph, Priest recasts Richardson as cunningly luring and ensnaring the young and vulnerable Roncoroni. Priest describes Richardson positioning herself in the cinema to scout the younger woman, dressed in male garb, behind a screen. The inference for the reader to draw could hardly be clearer. And yet, later in the essay, Priest acknowledges the artistic licence she took with this suggestive description. In fact, Roncoroni provides no description of her own appearance, and the idea of Richardson peeping behind the screen is simply inaccurate. Roncoroni records that it was she who looked over the screen to see the woman who praised her piano playing to her father. This inventive reinterpretation permeates the essay. It is then deployed as the compelling evidence for Priest’s claim that the relationship was opportunistic on Richardson’s part; and lesbian, at least within those parameters very loosely defined by Lillian Faderman.

Priest continues to question Richardson’s stated intentions in regard to Roncoroni and to construct a narrative of wily seduction. She challenges Richardson’s stated selflessness in taking Roncoroni to daily Freudian therapy sessions as ‘implausible’, and she goes on to state the truth as she seeks for her reader to perceive it. From questioning Richardson’s motives to positively defining them is too great a leap. Priest goes on to discredit the idea that Richardson’s interest in the content of the sessions could form background research for her fiction. Instead, she suggests Richardson ‘perhaps unconsciously’ used it to possess and influence Roncoroni. To the contrary, it seems very likely that Richardson would use the Freudian therapy sessions in some way in her fiction.

Richardson’s intellectual interest in Freud, psychoanalysis, and sexuality is well known. Importantly in the present context, the interest went far beyond the subject of homosexuality. Priest cites examples in Richardson’s writing of homosexual and heterosexual love to support her argument that Richardson made no distinction between the two in art or life. If we follow this line, we also need to draw links between the Oedipal and incestuous type relationships in Richardson’s stories ‘Life and Death of Peter’le Lüthy’ and ‘The Professor’s Experiment’ and Richardson’s own life, and, of course, there is no basis to do that.

Roncoroni, in 1948, took issue with Colin Roderick for equating the schoolgirl crush in the Getting of Wisdom with the homosexual relationship of Schilsky and Krafft in Maurice Guest, and went on to refute the implication that Richardson was homosexual. She stated that ‘a happier marriage than hers it would have been impossible to find’.

There is no reason to doubt that Roncoroni in her memoir did write the truth as she knew it; and no doubt Richardson, as the fiction writer with an intellectual interest in various forms of sexuality, wrote fiction. Beyond that there is not enough evidence to support the alternative reading of Roncoroni’s memoir which Priest proposes. For that reason, it should not stand unanswered.

Rachel Solomon, Malvern, Vic.

Ann-Marie Priest replies

Rachel Solomon’s unease with my reading of the relationship between Richardson and Roncoroni is understandable, if unwarranted. It is no simple matter to recreate a relationship from the past, especially one between two women. For much of the last century, social prejudice and the pathologising of homosexuality made same-sex relationships a matter of secrecy and shame, and women in such relationships had a documented tendency to ‘tell it slant’ (to quote Emily Dickinson, another writer whose same-sex friendships were highly significant). In the case of Richardson and Roncoroni, there is enough textual and biographical evidence to suggest that a slant-wise reading of their long companionship is merited. Although Roncoroni dismissed the same-sex relationship in The Getting of Wisdom as a ‘schoolgirl crush’, Richardson herself described the real-life affair on which it was based as one of the most important of her life. And while it seems clear that Roncoroni, concerned for Richardson’s reputation, would have rejected the label ‘lesbian’ (considered a slur at that time), research such as Fadiman’s into same-sex relationships enables us to see the deep and close companionship between Roncoroni and Richardson with new eyes. The result, I hope, is an enhanced perception of its richness and complexity.

Hatchet job

Dear Editor,

Congratulations on a review that may well make the shortlist in the Hatchet Job of the Year awards. Don Anderson is nothing if not consistent in his scorn for John A. Scott’s work (June–July 2014): one might wonder why ABR asked him to review this author, and why Anderson submits himself to the pain.

I myself am in favour of robust reviewing. However, while I hesitate to tell Mr Anderson how to do his job, he might well take a little time to read Crème de la Phlegm: Unforgettable Australian Reviews (2006), edited by Angela Bennie. It offers wise advice to reviewers. For the record, I found Scott’s novel N to be one of the best books I’ve read this year. But I’m an admirer of contemporary Australian literature.

Lisa Hill (online comment)