A Most Immoral Woman (29 page)

With half a million combatants on either side, the Russo-Japanese War escalated into the largest-scale conflict the world had ever seen. Despite the initial efforts of the Japanese to restrict access to the front, it also become the most widely reported war in history to that point. In fact, as James once wrote to Morrison, some Japanese generals grew so fond of the coverage that they would delay the start of a battle if the correspondents had not yet arrived. Almost no one ever referred to it any more as Morrison’s War.

Port Arthur fell to the Japanese on 2 January 1905. The war itself didn’t conclude until September that year, with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth. Morrison travelled to New Hampshire for the negotiations and US President Theodore Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for his role in mediating the peace. By then, each side had suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. The fighting flattened more than two hundred Chinese villages and left nearly three thousand hectares of fields trampled. Thousands of Chinese perished and countless others lost their homes and livelihoods.

In 1911, a coalition of revolutionary forces overthrew the Ch’ing Dynasty and established the Republic of China. In early 1912,
Viceroy Yuan Shih-k’ai became President of the Republic and Morrison quit journalism to become Yuan’s adviser. The Avenue of the Well of the Princely Mansions—Wangfujing—was for some time named Morrison Street in English in the Australian’s honour.

Following several other ill-fated attachments, Morrison proposed to his winsome new secretary, the New Zealander Jenny Wark Robin, atop the Tartar Wall. He was fifty and she twenty-three when they married; he worried that he might get a nosebleed at the wedding. Morrison died of illness seven years later, in 1920, just after making his final journal entry, and she three years after that. They were survived by three children.

Martin Egan and Eleanor Franklin married in 1905 and went on to edit the
Manila Times
together. She achieved international renown for her reporting from the Mesopotamian front during World War I. When she died in 1925, her pallbearers included Herbert Hoover, General James G. Harbord and
Saturday Evening Post
editor George Horace Lorimer. Author Jack London, who travelled at least once on the
Haimun
, reportedly wanted to call his semi-autobiographical 1909 novel
Martin Egan
after his good friend but Egan objected that it was London’s own story and so London titled it
Martin Eden
instead.

Lionel James retired from
The Times
in 1913 and served with the British Army in World War I, after which he managed a racing stable and stud farm, wrote books and did occasional broadcasts for the BBC before his death in 1955.

Mae Ruth Perkins married an Oakland real-estate developer about ten years after her sojourn in China and Japan. She died in her seventies in 1957, leaving no children—only the odd milliners’ bill, some yellowed clippings from the Oakland social pages and a formidable collection of love letters.

Although
A Most Immoral Woman
is first and foremost a fiction, it is inspired by real people and real events.

The idea for the novel came to me while reading Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin’s 2004 biography of George Ernest Morrison,
The Man Who Died Twice
(republished in 2007 as
The Life and Adventures of Morrison of China
). Fascinated by the authors’ brief discussion of Morrison’s affair with Mae and wanting more information, I turned to my bookshelf and found Cyril Pearl’s 1967 classic biography
Morrison of Peking
, and was then sufficiently intrigued to track down Mae’s family archive with its phenomenal collection of love letters from admirers including Willie Vanderbilt Jnr and Congressman John Wesley Gaines, as well as the long-suffering, thrice-engaged George Bew. Of all the written sources I consulted, Morrison’s own diaries and letters and the Pearl biography were most central to my understanding of the man himself. Another very important historical source was Peter Slattery’s
Reporting the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5: Lionel James’s first wireless transmissions to
The Times (Global Oriental, Folkestone, Kent, England, 2004). I thank Dr Slattery for permission to quote from and draw on so
many aspects of this fascinating book in my portrayal of Lionel James’s character, work and relationship with Morrison.

I profoundly appreciate the support given to this project by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, which granted me permission to freely and creatively rework excerpts from documents, letters and diaries in their vast and authoritative collection, the G.E. Morrison Papers. I wish especially to thank Jennifer Broomhead, Intellectual Property and Copyright Librarian of the Original Materials Branch. As I promised Ms Broomhead, although I have taken many of Morrison’s own words out of their original context for use in fictional dialogue, thoughts and journal entries, I have never intentionally used them against his spirit or character.

I also wish to thank the California Historical Society, which gave me permission to use excerpts and quotations from the George C. Perkins Family Papers (MS 1676), in particular the letters of George C. Perkins. Maida Counts was the enthusiastic and diligent researcher in Oakland who combed through the George C. Perkins Family Papers and other archives on my behalf, offered thoughtful insights on Mae’s character and social context, and made valuable comments on the manuscript.

The Times
of London kindly gave me permission to quote extracts from reports, including those written by Lionel James on the war.

I am very grateful to the Bundanon Trust for granting me a month’s residency to work on this project in the Writer’s Cottage at Bundanon, the bush property on the Shoalhaven River bequeathed to Australian artists by the painter Arthur Boyd. I am also indebted to Varuna for a Retreat Fellowship of three weeks in the Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains.

The Australian National University made me a Visiting Fellow at the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, giving me access to university libraries and the important work done by ANU scholars in transcribing Morrison’s diaries and letters. I am most grateful to Professor Geremie R. Barmé, who encouraged this project in more ways than I can say, pointed me to sources I would not otherwise have found, and took the time to read and comment on an early draft.

I am hugely appreciative of the generosity, enthusiasm and support for my research afforded me by director Zhang Jianguo and his team at the Weihai Municipal Archives in China and local Weihai historian and photographer Yang Jichen; by China’s preeminent Morrison scholar, Ms Dou Kun; Ms Li Yan, director of a documentary on Morrison for China Central Television; Tianjin historian and preservationist Fang Zhaolin; and James Yang, Director of the Executive Office of the Astor House Hotel in Tianjin.

I also thank Shiona Airlie, the biographer of Reginald Johnston and Stewart Lockhart; Lily Lynn; Janice Braun of Mills College; Jackie Ginn; Penny Mendelsohnn of the Oakland Museum; Heike Christian Bargmann; Peter French; Glenn Koch, who graciously shared his collection of ‘Poodle Dog’ (Le Poulet) memorabilia; N.P. Maling, Mae’s first cousin three times removed and the family genealogist; Robert Thompson, then editor of
The Times
of London and now publisher and editor of the
Wall Street Journal
(as well as long-time friend and lovely landlord); and writer and historian extraordinaire Sang Ye. I appreciate that Tim Smith, Sophie Hamley of the Cameron Creswell Agency, Dr Claire Roberts and the talented young writer Anna Westbrook all took the
time to read drafts of the novel and offer thoughtful comments and suggestions.

My former agent Lesley McFadzean at the Cameron Creswell Agency found
A Most Immoral Woman
its happy home at Fourth Estate with the superb publisher Linda Funnell, to whom I owe more than I can say. Jo Butler was my stellar and meticulous editor.

A Most Immoral Woman
is a novel. Any blame for distortion, historical inaccuracy or simply a playful approach to chronological and other facts lies with me, the novelist, and in no way reflects upon the scholarship of the historians, archivists and others who so generously shared with me their insights and resources.

Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers

First published in Australia in 2009
This edition published in 2010
by HarperCollins
Publishers
Australia Pty Limited

ABN 36 009 913 517
www.harpercollins.com.au

Copyright © Linda Jaivin 2009

The right of Linda Jaivin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the
Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the
Copyright Act 1968
, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollins
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Jaivin, Linda.

A most immoral woman / Linda Jaivin.

ISBN: 978 0 7322 8277 6 (pbk.)

ISBN: 978 0 7304 4597 5 (ePub)

Foreign correspondents-Fiction.

Peking (China)-Fiction.

A823.3

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