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| Victor Gollancz Limited first UK edition, 1963 |
She went out, closing the door, shutting the room into darkness. He waited until he heard her footsteps going away downstairs, then climbed out of bed and tried to open the door, but the slippery glass handle would not turn. He stood listening to the unfamiliar sounds: leaves against the windowpanes and the swoosh swoosh of distant cars, a big dog barking somewhere in the shadows. He knocked on the door a few times but the only reply was the low chime of a clock in the hall outside. He said, 'I want Lila, I want to go home, ' to nobody and whimpering a little, crept across the room, found his suitcase in the dark and felt for his own pyjamas. He tried to take off the new ones, but Vanessa had tied the knot too hard, so after struggling for a few minutes with the cord, he put on his own pyjamas over the new ones.
The Novel: The theme of 'parent-versus-parent-with-child-caught-in-the-middle' has become a common one in the post-industrial Western world, inspiring works of art ranging from Henry James's masterful 1897 novel What Maisie Knew to tear-jerking big budget films like Kramer vs Kramer (1979) to acknowledged arthouse classics like Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale (2005). Many children, it seems, are now viewed as little more than bargaining chips by their estranged and embittered parents, as worthy of being fought over as a prime piece of real estate or any other mutually coveted possession, their emotional well-being considered significantly less important in the general scheme of things than their value as pawns in the game of marital brinkmanship.
Sumner Locke Elliott's debut 1963 novel Careful, He Might Hear You is unusual in that it focuses not upon the custody battle fought between a husband and wife, but upon a custody battle waged between two sisters for the right to raise their dead sister's child. The child in question is PS, a six year old boy who, since his mother died giving birth to him, has lived with his childless Aunt Lila and her husband George Baines in a small, impoverished but happy home in what, during the Depression years (but certainly not now), was the working class Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay.
PS has no memory of his mother –– an impetuous, universally beloved if impecunious young writer named Sinden –– and has never met his still living but permanently absent father Logan Marriott, a former soldier turned prospector whose ability to earn a steady living from his various mining ventures has always been doubtful to say the least. While the boy has relationships of a sort with his other two aunts –– a party girl named Vere whose bohemian life in King's Cross is a source of continuous pleasure and amusement to him and a religious zealot named Agnes who spends her days grimly awaiting the end of the world –– he has never met his fourth aunt who, as a teenager, left Australia for London to become the live-in companion to their wealthy if rather fatuous Cousin Ettie.
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| The Text Publishing Company, 2012 |
A letter from this unseen aunt, the austere and emotionally remote Vanessa, is what starts all the trouble. Having been told by Sinden, as was Lila, that she wanted her to raise PS in case anything 'should happen' while she was giving birth to him, Vanessa returns to Sydney with the intention of taking the boy back to England with her. In London, she calmly informs the panic-stricken Lila, the child can be raised as a gentleman in surroundings more privileged and cultured than those she and her blue collar husband could ever hope to provide for him. To introduce PS to the new, ultra-refined life she now plans to offer him, Vanessa asks that he be allowed to spend the weekends with herself and Cousin Ettie in the large luxurious house they have rented in Potts Point for the duration of their stay in Sydney –– an arrangement the boy fears and resists but is nevertheless forced to accept, as is the equally alarmed and increasingly fretful Lila.
As the weeks pass it becomes obvious that Vanessa has no intention of abandoning her quest to obtain permanent custody of her nephew. She sends him to a local private school (where he is taunted by the other children for having a working class accent) and lavishes gifts and expensive (if unwanted) music lessons on him in an effort to earn his loyalty and cure him of his 'childish' dependence on Lila –– someone, thanks to the Depression and George being sacked from his job as a trade union delegate, who lacks the financial werewithal required to contest her claim to him when the matter, as it seemed destined to do from the beginning, eventually lands them all in court.
Eager to strengthen her own position, Vanessa enlists the aid of Logan, inviting him to visit her in Sydney so he can meet PS for the first time and give her his blessing to take the boy overseas –– a meeting that produces unforeseen consequences for everyone, dredging up long-suppressed memories of the brief, unhappy and unconsummated relationship she herself had with Logan during a visit to his Victorian hometown years before he met her much younger sister Sinden and impulsively chose to marry the girl. Learning that her former brother-in-law is in Sydney, Lila also attempts to seek Logan's blessing, only to have him leave Sydney again without her obtaining it. "I'm going to write you a long, long letter about the whole bloody thing," he drunkenly promises Lila moments before his northbound train pulls out. "We'll get him away from the Virgin Queen. Don't you worry, love." Vanessa, however, is facing problems of her own, with Cousin Ettie feeling jealous of PS and throwing tantrums because she wants the whole hateful business to be over and done with so they can return home to London at the earliest opportunity.
With Logan's visit having resolved nothing, the matter duly proceeds to Court where a parade of witnesses testify in favour of both parties, only to see the final decision come down to an informal chat the Judge has with PS in the privacy of his chambers. When asked why he told Vanessa he didn't want to stay with her in Potts Point anymore, the boy replies, "Lila said I had to tell Vanessa I decided myself." What PS fails to tell the Judge is that Lila tried to make him go back to Vanessa of his own accord but that he firmly refused to do so. Concerned that his stubborness might have been misinterpreted as her exercising undue influence over him, Lila made him telephone Vanessa and say he wasn't coming back to show Vanessa that the idea of staying with her and George did not originate with them but was instead expressive of his own heartfelt desire not to be parted from the only 'family' he has ever really known. The Judge, privy to none of this information, decides the case in favour of Vanessa and grants her full custody of the boy.
Although PS returns to the house in Potts Point, the victory over her sister proves to be a hollow and, in time, quite troubling one for Vanessa. Instead of arguing with her nephew as she envisaged doing, she finds him waging a war of passive resistance against her, refusing to respond or react to anything she says. 'He went about the house like a little shadow. He had developed a habit (was it planned?) of being suddenly in her path, so that hastening downstairs she would find him sitting on the landing. ("Honestly, darling, stairs are not for sitting on. What are you doing?" "Nothing.") Nothing: it was always nothing that he was doing, nowhere that he was going, nobody that he had seen today.'
Craving his affection, Vanessa finds herself spurned in favour of Cousin Ettie, whom PS showers with kisses in imitation of his high-spirited Aunt Vere. Adding to her problems, Vanessa finds herself increasingly plagued by memories of her failed romance with Logan and his accusation that she is incapable of loving him or anybody else and is destined to go through life alone. Feeling isolated and uncertain as to what the future will bring following her return to London, she throws a lavish birthday party for PS to which she invites every child in the neighbourhood, only to have this act of intended kindness thrown back in her face when she stumbles upon her nephew making fun of her lifelong fear of thunder to the obvious delight of his giggling young guests. Mortified, Vanessa runs upstairs and locks herself in her room where, following another fruitless night of soul searching, she finally admits that Logan was right about her. She is incapable of loving anybody. She can only cajole, intimidate and dominate them –– qualities guaranteed to deprive her of their trust and affection.
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| Village Roadshow DVD, c 2005 |
Armed with this long denied knowledge of her true nature, Vanessa tells PS the next day that she is sending him back to Lila. "Everybody's going to get exactly what they want," she coolly informs him, "and that now includes me." She then gives him the advice that will, in time, change the direction of his life. "You haven't had much of a chance up to now, being pushed and pulled around by all of us. Remember that grownups can be jolly well wrong about a lot of things… Listen PS, after I'm gone don't let them try to turn you into something you don't want to be. And don't just be a PS to your mother. Find you. If you can find out who you are and what you are, my dear, then you'll know how to love someone else. That's all I've got to say."
Having said her piece, Vanessa leaves the house for Circular Quay where she boards a ferry for Neutral Bay, preferring to approach Lila quietly this time instead of making her usual grand entrance in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Reconciled to her decision and to her own failings as a lover and an aunt, she enjoys being on the harbour, blissfully unaware of what fate holds in store for her. Before she reaches Neutral Bay the ferry she is riding on collides with another vessel –– an accident that kills her and costs many of her fellow passengers their lives into the bargain.
PS, however, remembers the advice his Aunt Vanessa gave him. When he visits the house in Potts Point with Lila one last time to collect the toys and clothes Vanessa gave him, he asks her and George what his real name is. Laughing, they tell him that it's William Scott Marriott but to them he'll always be PS. "No," he answers, "I'm Bill." He then goes outside and shouts it to the dog belonging to Vanessa's former next door neighbours. "I'm Bill!" he declares to the startled animal as if determined to convince it and himself of his new identity. "I'm Bill!"
Careful, He Might Hear You was greeted favourably by critics and public alike when it appeared in 1963, making it that rarest of commodities –– a genuinely literary novel that also became a bestseller. There is a seamless quality to Elliott's writing style which allows him to shift back and forth between different perspectives without the technique ever becoming jarring or even obviously noticeable, granting the reader direct access to the inner worlds of his characters that is as remarkable for its candour as it is for the understanding it reveals of their motives, failings, vices and what, at times, are their masochistic self-deceptions. Lila, Vanessa, Cousin Ettie and even the less crucial figures of Vere, Agnes, George and Logan all spring vividly to life on the page, as does Sinden whose presence in the narrative is largely confined to quotations from her chatty if occasionally desperate letters.
But it is Elliott's uncanny ability to capture the thought processes of the six year old PS that makes his novel so vivid and, in the end, so powerful. Careful, He Might Hear You is an extraordinary achievement, a book in which the central character truly thinks, speaks and acts like a child instead of like some dumbed-down version of an emotionally challenged adult. It is also a book about love and the high price paid by those who choose, for whatever reason, to banish even the remote possibility of obtaining it from their lives.
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| SUMNER LOCKE ELLIOTT, c 1974 |
The Writer: Sumner Locke Elliott recreated his own childhood in Careful, He Might Hear You, basing the novel almost entirely on the long and bitter custody battle waged by his aunts Lilian Burns and the London-based Jessie Locke for the right to raise him. Like PS, Elliott was the son of a female novelist who died, as a result of the pregnancy-related disorder eclampsia, the day after he was born on 17 October 1917 in the southern Sydney suburb of Kogarah. Like Sinden in the novel, Helena Sumner Locke had impulsively married a freelance journalist named Henry Logan Elliott who would remain a stranger to his son all his life. Again like Sinden, Helena asked her Australian-based sisters Lilian, Agnes (a Christian Scientist) and Blanche (an actress) to raise him. Jessie objected to this arrangement and obtained a deed of guardianship from Henry Elliott, empowering the unreliable Blanche to serve as her representative in absentia. When Blanche proved incapable of fulfilling this onerous duty, Jessie returned to Australia and began the custody proceedings which were not fully resolved until her death in 1927.
At first attracted to the idea of becoming an actor, Elliott began writing plays at a young age, some of which were performed while he was still a pupil at Cranbrook, an exclusive Sydney boys' school that he was sent to at Jessie's imperious insistence and absolutely loathed. This formative theatrical experience helped him to obtain several small parts in radio serials during his teenage years and led, in time, to him becoming a founding member of a small actor-funded theatre company. It was the writing and acting he did for this company which brought him to the attention of the 'grand dame' of the Sydney stage Doris Fitton and her husband Tug Mason, who invited him to join their recently established Independent Theatre Company. Doris Fitton encouraged him to concentrate on writing rather than acting –– he was, by this time, regularly churning out radio scripts to earn himself a modest living –– and would eventually see seven of his own plays staged, beginning with The Cow Jumped Over The Moon in 1937 and concluding with the 'documentary drama' Rusty Bugles, set in an Australian army camp during World War Two, which had its Sydney premiere in October 1948. Ironically, Elliott would never see the play performed, having left the stifling homophobic atmosphere of Australia to try his luck in New York in August of that same year.
Like his most famous novel, Rusty Bugles was also autobiographical, its characters based on men Elliott had served with in 1944 after being sent to work as a clerk at the Mataranka Supply Camp in the Northern Territory. (He joined the Citizen Military Forces in January 1942 and was discharged from the army in April 1946, having risen to the rank of Staff Sergeant in the meantime.) The play generated a lot of controversy in its day, with an attempt being made by the Acting Prime Minister to ban it for obscenity until Fitton persuaded its thirty year old author to tone down and alter some of its more objectionable language. It was a great success and was the first locally-written play to be performed in two Australian cities simultaneously, with separate companies in Sydney and Melbourne performing it to packed houses each night for several sold-out weeks. The play would go on to be filmed twice by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, first in 1965 in a production directed by Alan Burke and again in 1981 in a production directed by John Matthews.
By the beginning of 1949 Elliott was living in New York City, where he embarked on a new career as a provider of teleplays for the burgeoning North American television industry which saw him establish himself as a reliable source of material for programs like The Goodyear Television Playhouse, The Philco Television Playhouse, The Producers' Showcase and The Alcoa Hour. He became a member of what was known as 'the Golden Seven,' so called because they could be depended upon to consistently supply the networks with dramatic 'gold' upon demand. He also became a frequent visitor to New York's famous Algonquin Hotel, former stamping ground of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley and other members of what was known, during its heyday in the 1920s, as the Algonquin Round Table.
Elliott also worked extensively in radio and wrote a play, titled Buy Me Blue Ribbons (1951), which had a brief run on Broadway. While he retained his affection for Australia, he became a US citizen in 1955 and, apart from a brief visit in 1950 and another in 1974 to attend the Adelaide Arts Festival, never again returned to the country of his birth.
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| Pan Books UK, 1991 |
With the live television boom over by the early 1960s and the prospect of quitting New York for the new entertainment capital Hollywood holding no appeal for him, Elliott turned to writing novels to earn a living. Careful, He Might Hear You (1963) was followed by Some Doves and Pythons (1966), Eden's Lost (1969), The Man Who Got Away (1972), Going (1975) and Water Under The Bridge (1977), based on the bohemian life led by his Aunt Blanche during the 1930s. He would go on to publish another four books and the story collection Radio Days (1983) with his final novel, Fairyland, appearing shortly before his death, from colon cancer, on 24 June 1991. Like all his best work, Fairyland was also autobiographical, being a fictionalized account of what it had been like to grow up as a young gay man in the repressive and aggressively heterosexual Australia of the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Use the link below to read the June 1991 obituary of SUMNER LOCKE ELLIOTT posted in the online archive of The New York Times:
Careful, He Might Hear You (1963) and Fairyland (1991) have been reprinted as part of the Australian Classics series produced by The Text Publishing Company.
The 1983 film adaptation of Careful, He Might Hear You –– directed by CARL SCHULTZ and starring ROBYN NEVIN as Lila, WENDY HUGHES as Vanessa and NICHOLAS GLEDHILL as PS –– was last re-released by Kino Lorber Films as a Region 1/US DVD in August 2014. The film was last released in Australia (Region 4) as a 2 disc 'Special Edition' by Umbrella Films in 2007.
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Last updated 16 March 2021
