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David Grayson, Hempfield (1929)

Born in Lansing Michigan in 1870, Ray Stannard Baker was an American journalist, biographer, and novelist who frequently published under the pseudonym David Grayson. In many ways he led two parallel lives. As Grayson he was a best-selling author known for his evocative and heart-warming stories set in rural America, most notably Adventures in Contentment (1907), which served as romanticised escapism from an increasingly urban and alienating American reality. Modern critics describe these stories as a search for the American ideals of masculinity and freedom, which at the time were being overwhelmed by the city life and a system in which men were required to make themselves subservient to their boss.

Meanwhile, as Baker, he was a social reform advocate who became heavily involved in progressive politics. In the latter capacity Baker gave sympathetic newspaper coverage to striking workers in Chicago, wrote Following the Color Line (1908) one of the first full-length examinations of the race issue in American politics, and became personal friends with American President Woodrow Wilson, serving as his press secretary during the Versailles Treaty negotiations, and later as Wilson’s biographer.

Hempfield sat firmly within the first of the two lives, though its subject matter borrowed heavily from Baker’s personal experience as a journalist. It is the story of Anthy, a female protagonist so-named because her parents wanted a son whom they would have called Anthony, and her struggles to run a successful small-town newspaper. The story has notable feminist undertones, though at its heart it is a love triangle in which Anthy ultimately rejects Ed Smith, the man pushing to ‘modernise’ the paper for maximum profit, and chooses instead the kind-hearted journalist Nort Carr. In essence this choice is for a personified rural ideal over the personified modern city, thus conforming to the main tropes of Grayson’s writings.

Menzies’s copy of Hempfield was a birthday gift from his parents signed and dated 20 December 1929, and accompanied by another Grayson work The Friendly Road: New Adventures in Contentment. The Menzies Collection also features the original Adventures in Contentment, as well as Grayson’s Adventures in Understanding.

The books form quite a touching memento, because they appear to represent a clear attempt on the part of Menzies’s parents to evoke nostalgia for his quaint rural upbringing in the Victorian township of Jeparit – where Robert’s uncle had even been involved in running the Jeparit Leader newspaper. Circumstances drove the Menzies into the city, but while Robert seems to have embraced the change, there was perhaps an element of regret on the part of his parents. It is worth noting that during the late 19th century Melbourne was frequently compared to Chicago, the bustling metropolis that Baker had encountered and which he so clearly disliked. Luckily, Robert’s personality and talents were such that he never got subsumed by the crowd in the manner which the author feared.