A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  Would I were Dante to your Beatrice for it was she who gave that man his pen when all (he thought) was lost … Never a kiss she spared him, and she did not spare him pain As you so often me have; she was chaste in his undoing and eventual making after he went through hell and Paradise in her name and – since his heart was breaking at least thrice daily – married a sound wife and got without complaint a family leading a proper ordinary life – rather like me, dear B.14

  Mackenzie was always short of money, and Beatrice gave him journeyman publishing work – basic editing and writing, preparing jacket copy – and tactfully ensured that he had the tools he needed. Knowing that he had no dictionary, she sent him a copy of the Concise Oxford with a manuscript she wanted him to rewrite, on the grounds that A&R followed Oxford style. She looked after his literary welfare in other ways: when his novel The Refuge was published by Jonathan Cape in London in 1954, she arranged for him to be paid a full royalty on the copies A&R sold in Australia, rather than the more common ‘colonial’ royalty. ‘It will probably mean that we will be paying a bit more for the books, but it will mean more for you,’ she wrote to him.15 She also arranged for him to write the blurb for the Australian edition, which meant another three guineas for him.

  In February 1954 Mackenzie went into hospital for a couple of days and suffered a complete nervous and physical breakdown. After he recovered, rather shakily, he went to Perth to look after his sister and her two children, telling Beatrice he could not possibly leave his sister alone, deserted by her husband. He thereby forfeited a job as a book critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, as well as further editorial work for A&R. He had also left his own wife and family in dire straits, and Beatrice advanced them £20 to tide them over.

  Mackenzie returned in November to be greeted by two pieces of news: he had been awarded a CLF fellowship and Kate intended to divorce him for failing to support his family. He wrote to Beatrice about both events. ‘Being quite unable to sleep, I’ve been working and reading the nights away, hoping for an hour or two’s oblivion after dawn or sunrise and usually getting it … it all works quite well but dear me, after the years of being a family man … I look at myself with astonishment in the mirror and say, So that’s the bloke wot spoiled it all?’16

  Beatrice replied that she was sorry to hear he had been ill and alone, with nobody to look after him, and she could certainly understand what a shock his wife’s news had been. But she wasn’t about to encourage him in self-pity, either. The CLF grant, she said, was a wise decision on their part and a great blessing, and when he was strong enough he must plunge into work. Her bracing tone and good advice drew from Mackenzie the comment, ‘Beatrice, will you marry me? I promise not to support you.’17

  Kenneth Mackenzie’s poem ‘Heat’ has the following lines:

  Well, this is where I go down to the river the traveller with me said, and turned aside out of the burnt road, through the black trees spiking the slope, and went down, and never came back into the heat from water’s ease in which he swooned, in cool joy, and died

  Early in 1955 he drowned in a creek on a friend’s property near Goulburn in southern New South Wales – whether deliberately or in a drunken accident is not known. He was forty-one, and left behind an unfinished novel, some short stories, radio plays and poems. But he left no money, not even enough for his funeral. His estrangement from his family was bitter, and it was Angus and Robertson who paid to bury him. Beatrice took charge, even writing to Sydney’s Northern Suburbs Crematorium to arrange disposal of Mackenzie’s ashes in accordance with the regulations.19 A few months later she wrote to Harold White, the head librarian of the then Commonwealth National Library in Canberra, asking the library to buy some of Mackenzie’s manuscripts for Kate Mackenzie’s sake. Even after Kenneth Mackenzie’s death, Beatrice was doing what she could to look after him and his family.

  Trying Out a Lover’s Voice: Hal Porter

  ‘Fancy you meeting Hal Porter,’ wrote Beatrice to Henrietta Drake-Brockman on 19 September 1949. ‘He is an amazing creature, the best teller of anecdotes I have ever met and the most entertaining person.’ She did not reveal that her own acquaintance with him was closer than these rather breezy comments implied.

  Beatrice probably met Hal Porter in 1947, while he was a teacher at the Sydney private boys’ school Knox Grammar and writing in his spare time. She certainly knew him through his short stories: ‘And from Madame’s’ had won first prize in a Sydney Sesquicentenary writing competition in 1938. ‘At Aunt Sophia’s’, chosen by Frank Dalby Davison for the 1943 Coast to Coast, had been nominated by Southerly as the best story in the collection.

  It is not difficult to see why Beatrice was attracted to Hal Porter. He had the sort of look that she liked all her life: tall enough, about five foot eleven, with sandy-blond hair, very blue eyes and a clipped, somewhat military moustache (he dyed his hair and moustache blond as he grew older). In his mid-thirties when they met, he looked rather distinguished altogether, in a slightly overripe, tweedy-masculine way. He was also charming, articulate, had a sophisticated, bitchy wit and was frequently very funny. Most importantly, he was a serious writer in the process of developing an individual voice and style, unwilling to compromise what he wanted to say for the sake of popularity. Beatrice always admired his sense of duty to his craft.

  Some months after their first meeting, Porter joined the Army Education Unit and went to Japan, where for a year or two he taught Australian schoolchildren; thereafter Japan became an important source of inspiration for his novels, plays and stories. He then spent some time in Hobart before returning to Bairnsdale, the Victorian town where he had grown up and where for some years he was the municipal librarian. He was still writing, mainly stories, which were being regularly accepted by the Bulletin with the encouragement of the poet and reviewer Ron McCuaig, whom Porter regarded as an early literary mentor. He returned to Beatrice’s orbit in 1953 with a sheaf of poems; enough, he said, to make a collection. They were of three main types: ‘Australian landscape stuff, fairly outspoken personal stuff (i.e., about persons) and finally some “mental” poetry – you know, ducks, suffering and so on.’2

  From this point he and Beatrice became much closer; in fact, Porter had decided he was in love with her. From being rather businesslike discussions of future plans, his letters segued into the romantic. Beatrice became ‘darling’, ‘my dearest’, ‘dear little Beatrice’. On Shire of Bairnsdale writing paper he told her in 1955 that ‘You have become the very veins of my bodies – the physical, the mental and, as far as I can judge, the spiritual. All my work from now on is for you …’3 Beatrice was, he said, his muse as well as the woman he loved. ‘I think you’ve turned into an Inspiration.’4

  Flattered though she no doubt was, there is little evidence that Beatrice took these letters very seriously: her replies, though friendly and warm, were not particularly loverlike. She could see that even Hal Porter’s most affectionate, tenderly expressed letters had a studied air. The affection is genuine but they are the work of an actor trying out a lover’s voice, placing words carefully for effect, playing Noel Coward to Beatrice’s Gertrude Lawrence. Porter’s handwriting echoes this self-consciousness. In the early letters his writing is round and loopy, suitable for use on a blackboard, and it steadily evolves into a stylised script that is spikily italic, almost Elizabethan – the writing of someone who intends to have his letters kept for posterity.5

  Did Beatrice consider Hal Porter more than a friend, more than an occasional flirting companion who shared her sense of wit, perceptive intelligence and liking for good talk and whisky? Were they lovers? It is difficult to say. In 1961 Hal Porter told his biographer Mary Lord that he had never been very interested in a sexual relationship with anyone (he had briefly been married) and that his deepest love had been a young male student in Adelaide. He declared that he needed to live free from strong emotional ties. At the same time he liked people to believe that he and Beatrice enjoyed what he called a ‘notable li
aison’. After one of Beatrice’s parties, when she had gone up to bed, he announced to the remaining guests that he was about to have a bath with his hostess. He sighed and added, ‘The things I do for art!’6 He also spread the rumour that Beatrice was keen to marry him but he had decided against marriage, writing to one friend that ‘Ken Slessor thinks it a good idea too but freedom means so much to me that I think not … Keeping integrity too may be difficult if one is espoused to the Editor-in-Chief of A&R.’7 Whether people believed these assertions – Porter was known to be devious – is open to question. He and Beatrice might have had a brief affair, but their relationship was never predominantly physical.

  Then and always Beatrice was a staunch champion of Porter’s work and did all she could to promote it – as he perceptively commented, she usually had the ability to distinguish between her literary and intellectual judgements and her emotional ones. Early in 1955 he had prepared The Hexagon, a collection of forty poems to be published by Lyrebird Writers with CLF support. Angus and Robertson, certainly with some urging from Beatrice, became its publishers. Beatrice, who normally did not consider book design her area of expertise, took a personal interest in the size and shape of the finished book. It was politely received, though Ron McCuaig wrote a negative review in the Bulletin. Knowing how grateful Porter had been for his support in the past, Beatrice was furious. Porter was to pay no attention to the article, she wrote angrily: McCuaig was always malicious when he felt someone had a talent greater than his own. He had been just as critical of Douglas Stewart for the same reason, she added.8

  Beatrice asked Porter to edit the 1957 Australian Poetry – not an obvious job for someone who was known as a writer of short stories for the Bulletin and who had published only one slim volume of verse. The resulting book was blisteringly criticised by James McAuley. ‘Angus and Robertson really will have to think again about their method of choosing editors for their annual Australian Poetry,’ he wrote, having a dig at Beatrice or Douglas Stewart.

  This 1957 volume is not the first to have suffered from the appointment of an editor with highly idiosyncratic taste. Mr Hal Porter, to judge from his own work, favours the kind of poetry which is full of bric-a-brac and rococo elaboration, where phrases are quartzed and quincunxed and quizzed into quodlibets of flapdoodle … The result is a shocking mess …9

  He further accused Porter of ignoring the work of Judith Wright, Harold Stewart and Vincent Buckley in favour of such lesser lights as Gwen Harwood, Peter Hopegood, Randolph Stow and Bruce Dawe. Porter later described McAuley to Beatrice as nothing but ‘a silly little scapular-pinching man’.

  More important to Porter than his poetry was his novel A Handful of Pennies, based on his experiences as a teacher in Japan. He was enjoying the work, he said, though it was occasionally laborious. ‘My eyes are quaite [sic] tiny and crimson, but I labour on like one of those dull blokes in Pilgrim’s Progress,’ he wrote to Beatrice.10 He was not expecting the book to be rapturously received, he said: the main character was homosexual, which would annoy some people, and his comments about the Australian army in Japan could be considered overcritical. But, he said, the novel was highly accessible.

  Nan McDonald read the manuscript for A&R. While she agreed with Beatrice, who had also read it, that its brilliance and originality certainly merited publication, she disagreed with Porter’s view that the manuscript was easy to read. ‘The style is highly polished and finely wrought,’ she wrote in an undated reader’s report, ‘but it is one that is better suited to short stories than to a novel. Over a long course the concentrated richness and the closely packed allusiveness become exhausting. The reader feels he cannot relax for a moment.’ In her letter to the author, Beatrice watered this down to a comment that the book was ‘brilliant, but a bit too hard for the mob’, asking Porter to be a little easier on the reader in future.

  Nan did the detailed editing on the manuscript, demonstrating the diffidence that occasionally afflicts editors in the presence of highly stylised writers. ‘Is “conjole” right?’ she asked him. ‘I can’t find it in our dictionaries. I ask this in humility because your vocabulary gives me an inferiority complex … There were three similes I found rather baffling … But please don’t take the slightest notice of this if you feel they are right, because I’d rather trust your judgment in this matter than my own.’11

  Because the novel dealt in part with homosexuality, A&R felt they had to handle it with great caution. Porter was asked to delete several tricky passages and to change certain words (substituting ‘took’ for ‘entered’, for instance). He graciously agreed to these amendments and the book proceeded towards publication at the usual stately A&R pace, appearing in September 1958. The fuss that Porter had anticipated did not materialise, possibly to his regret. He had recently changed jobs and was living in Shepparton, managing a larger municipal library at an increased salary, and his stories were regularly featured in the Bulletin – so often that the Red Page had to run a justification for publishing so many. Porter was riding high; Beatrice was pleased to see him being hailed as a talented new novelist.

  Now in his late forties, Porter had a routine. For months he worked hard in provincial Victoria as a librarian, organising branch libraries, producing plays for little theatre groups, being an energetic and efficient member of the local community, while at the same time working equally diligently at whatever writing project engaged him. At such times his life was ascetic and he did not touch alcohol for weeks. But when he had finished his manuscript, or if he felt he needed a break, he took off in search of fun, often coming up to Sydney where he stayed with Beatrice, Kenneth Slessor or other friends.

  On these visits he wasted no time in making his presence known. There are many stories of Porter arriving late, drunk and by taxi for dinner at Folly Point, demanding that Beatrice, on her balcony with other guests, throw down her key and let him in. It was not uncommon for someone to visit Beatrice on the morning after a party and find Porter in the living room by himself, drinking whisky, never having gone to bed. Once he telephoned Beatrice’s A&R colleague Anthony Barker on Saturday morning at an hour when the sound of the telephone usually brings dread to most people’s hearts: ‘l’m just about to go to bed,’ he said, ‘and Beatrice has been nagging me, saying I never get up in time to see you, so I’m making the arrangement now.’ Barker went to see him at about midday; Porter looked very spruce after a few hours’ sleep, though Beatrice was still in bed. She eventually emerged, immaculately dressed but looking ill and unsteady on her feet (she never admitted to having a hangover). She approached Barker and handed him two small earrings for pierced ears. ‘Will you put these in for me?’ she asked.12

  Though Beatrice’s staff found Porter amusing and good fun, they also thought he was a bad influence on their boss. Beatrice’s liking for a ‘teeny piece’ of Vat 69 whisky was thoroughly exercised when he was in town. Some resented the way Porter came into her office whenever he felt like it and sat there chatting and smoking as she worked. In exasperation, a junior editor once picked up a snakeskin left in the editorial office by the naturalist Eric Worrall, took it to Beatrice’s office and flung it into Porter’s lap. He went white with shock and left soon afterwards.

  Porter could always rely on Beatrice to forgive him, no matter how badly he behaved. At one celebrated Folly Point party in 1959 her most important guest was Patrick White, who arrived with his partner Manoly Lascaris. White, who had recently won the inaugural Miles Franklin Award for Voss and whose The Aunt’s Story and The Tree of Man had made him the most talked about novelist in the country, brought out all Porter’s insecurities. Not only had White achieved greater literary success, but he was independently wealthy with an assured social position: Porter came from a modest background and had had to work as an employee all his life. Beatrice was probably unaware of the depth of Porter’s jealousy, though she should have realised that anyone who liked being the centre of attention as much as he did was unlikely to welcome the presence of a
more successful rival.

  Porter and White chatted pleasantly for a while, then White indicated the son of the writer and ABC broadcaster John Thompson, a good-looking young man who was engaged to be married, and asked whether Porter thought this beautiful young man was being married off to prevent him from becoming homosexual. Porter took offence, not at the joke but because White was talking to him as a fellow homosexual – something Porter was not prepared to admit to anybody. He suggested with icy disdain that if White really wanted to know he should ask the young man’s mother. It was a definite snub and White was embarrassed and offended; seldom one to give people second chances, he thereafter referred to Porter as ‘a detestable man’.13

  ‘You should know that my blundering is only that of someone ultimately simple,’ wrote Porter to Beatrice – who perhaps chose to believe him – ‘and that my love is tediously permanent. I cannot thank you for all you’ve done for me (I’m not talking about publishing or writers) – I’m fairly safe on the spinning disc of the world, I’m only safe at heart on the pivot – that’s you.’14 On one level he might have meant this, yet he was hardly loyal to her in public. He spread rumours that she had had a long-lasting lesbian relationship with a woman friend who stayed with her at Folly Point for a while; he also said that no male author who came to A&R was safe from her. D’Arcy Niland, who once listened to Porter gossiping about Beatrice for some minutes during a dinner party, became so incensed that he stood up, took the much bigger and bulkier Porter firmly by the nose and pulled him out of the room and into a cab outside.

  When asked why she spent so much time with Hal Porter when he could be so obnoxious, Beatrice would shrug and say it was because he was fun. In reality, Beatrice had a gift for steadfast friendship and, as she told Xavier Herbert, she never changed her friends. But Porter knew Beatrice well and once told Mary Lord that Beatrice was interested in ‘the devil in the basement’. He knew that Beatrice’s ladylike exterior hid complex and contradictory elements in herself that she rarely expressed.