The Watcher on the Cast - Iron Balcony - an Australian Autobiography

by Hal Porter

  To the west of this seaside suburb lie the outskirts of the town, the acres and acres of the Rifle Ranges, once Grandfather Porter’s domain. It is here, when nostalgic for the country and the minuter evidences of seasonal change, I can tramp for mushrooms, smell again the vanilla of Chocolate Lilies, lie spreadeagled (boyishly!) on the capeweed, staring in the direction of a lark’s song, or listening to the delirious gargle of magpies. At one corner of this grassy, sea-touching plain are some fishermen’s huts, and a rough mole behind which the fishing-boats lie. The huts are surrounded by outcrops of lichened basalt like cows lying down, by oyster shells, wormwood shrubs, sea holly, and sapling racks hung with cocoa-brown nets. I paint these huts and racks and stones often, in washes of water-colour, and with saccharine wistfulness. There is less pleasure in the deed of painting than in being surrounded by the country scent, and the country sound of grasshoppers and birds.

  If I bring my own faint ghosts to beach and Rifle Ranges, there is no need to come thus supplied to the eastern section of the town which has its own ghosts—oh, many.

  In the east is the oldest part of the town. Facing across the river-mouth itself, and the pilot lights, in the direction of

  Port Melbourne, is The Strand, the originally fashionable section of old William’s Town, a curving street of stone or brick houses, lofty, pillared, French-windowed, some of the houses almost follies. They, and their drives and stables and conservatories and gazebos, are all decaying in the shade of great English trees, and under heavy ruggings of jasmine, honeysuckle and ivy. In 1927 and 1928 many of these places are unoccupied, and can be rented, marble chimney-pieces, cedar floors, barn, dairy, servants’ quarters, cellar and all, for thirty shillings or less a week, a pointer to the fact that the age of sailing-ship captains, wealthy ship-chandlers, large families and many servants is, here, over; that William’s Town is over, and Williamstown down-at-heel, and time a killer. My childhood dislike, child-like and childish, of disintegration, is, here in The Strand, much intensified, for this crumbling and falling and going under in nets of cobweb, in self-dust and wind-chewed stone, is the objectification of loss and wastage. I become particularly fascinated by a house called Brontt and, having snapped the rusted catch of a French window, waste more time by standing inside mourning wasted time. I am happy to mourn, as I stare at the soot of long-dead fires, at the circular stain on a marble shelf left by the foot of a wine-glass from which the burgundy has been drunk years before Mother and Father are married, at the words scratched, apparently with a diamond ring, on one pane of glass:

  Divine sunset:

  Captain Taylor. Aunt Annie. Migs.

  Rawdon. Jess. Tom.

  Oct. 3. 1850.

  In the direction of the disused wharves and piers of more southerly Williamstown, The Strand changes its quality, and changes its name to Nelson Place and The Front. The farther one walks the more of a wasteland the scene becomes: empty taverns and coffee palaces, tumble-down ship-chandlers’ and providores’, deserted brothels, lanes and courts crowded with fennel bushes as high as sailors. Sailors! Once there were gander-straddling pig-tailed sailors from every port in the world, and William’s Town was a lusty port with its water-police, red-legged soldiers, convicts, nail-can-toppered Peelers, polyglot merchants, crinolined harlots, aborigines, public hangings, dolly-shops and skittle-alleys. Now, in 1927 and 1928, far fewer and mainly smaller ships berth at the unsteady wharves. It is into an almost uninhabited rubbish-heap the men must descend from the decks—the Swedes, Japanese, Lascars, Scots, Mauritiusborn Creoles, Norwegians and the unguessable. They go to Madame’s Wine Depot.

  As I rove this part of Williamstown, either with my sketchbook or my gaping mind, I walk farther into my own formless present, further into the blown-out pasts of forgotten others and, one day when the deadly scent of the sea is riding strongly in on a cold and slanting rain, I take my first few steps into one of my own futures.

  Cold and soaking, I say to myself, ‘A wine will be warming.’

  Dickens? Jane Austen? Wuthering Heights?

  Having as it were condoned thus my own curiosity and rake-helly behaviour, I enter the Wine Depot.

  I should say that, sipping delicately as a chicken at a port wine, aged seventeen years and three months, I have discovered nothing except that the rest of the world does not care how one hitch-hikes to the country on the other side of the fence, if I were not aware that Madame has taken a shine to me. In gratitude for not being ordered out, I behave with a circumspection partly composed of ignorance of how much can be drunk, partly to flatter Madame and myself by leaving after no more than three or four glasses. I refuse to let any of the seamen buy me drinks. Some shadowy instinct of self-preservation, some sort of scarcely tangible fear makes me as prudent as a maiden. Nor am I yet aware of the wonderful uses of drunkenness, or of any need for self-release. I return again and again to watch the others get drunk, and to hear what men say to each other—lies or truth—when many wines have drowned other truths or lies. I do not fully realize then, nor do I realize until many years after becoming a practised participant in other people’s lives, that I am a minor thief rehearsing to be a professional one. I cannot help, then as now, going about stealing the lives of others, or from the lives of others, stealing the untidy fullnessess, the bloodstained defiances, the twisted witticisms, the scrubby secrets, the clumsy displays of love, from all the others I can never be. It helps no one that I faithfully present myself naked to their attention as though protesting too truthfully, ‘Look, I’ve no jemmy! Look, there’s nothing up my sleeve!’ Nothing is stolen from me in return: no naked man ever loses anything. Having frisked myself first, nothing is left for others. Too aware of their mortality, and not enough of my own, I can cry out, in a voice tinged with their pain and not my own, ‘Those who are meeting are parting; to come together is to begin to walk asunder.’ They say, ‘So what!’ They smile, and say, ‘There, there, there!’ They shrug. I can try weeping in printed words that say, ‘It is because you do not weep I weep for you.’ They do not read. If they read they do not understand. If they understand they do not weep for me. They laugh, and offer me another heart to play with.

  In the nineteen-twenties, I am not, of course, really alive to the fact that heart-holding is a form of my old greed for abundance and information. This heart-holding, which begins there in Madame’s high-ceilinged and echoing Wine Depot, and involves sea-people of all the shades between white-and-gold and black-and-black, persists to this day, and has afforded me salutary and moving glimpses into the beauties and nobilities as well as the uglinesses and pretensions of such people as cockney charladies, London barrow-boys, Japanese prostitutes, petty thieves, no-hopers, Irish confidence-men, Jamaican spivs, alcoholic millionaires, homosexual pickpockets, and wild-eyed saints dirty as a potato. I am not of a nature to side-step the puddles on the way to the firing-squad.

  However, Williamstown and its fascinations, State School 1409 and its opportunities for garish demonstration, are two sides only of my multi-faceted life during 1927 and 1928.

  I am accepted as a student of drawing at the Melbourne National Gallery under Charles Wheeler, therefore, several nights a week, behold me, with my hair grown longer than even that of the shingled and Eton-cropped women of the day, exaggeratedly striding—my ‘thing’ of that period—‘proudly’ cleaving through the milder public, ‘head held high’, looking neither to left nor right nor at people as I hurtle (God, what unnecessary and ostentatious energy!) down the stairway of Flinders Street Station, across to St. Paul’s Cathedral, up Swanston Street, across elegant Collins Street and rowdy Bourke Street, across Little Bourke Street with its shuffling Chinese, its fan tan parlours, its talked-about opium dens, its Kuomintang societies, and shops of ivory back-scratchers and chopsticks, lichee nuts, rice bowls, and packets of jasmine tea; up the slope past the truss-, and bed-pan-, and body-belt-shops of upper Swanston Street; past the wicked end of Little Lonsdale Street where, in winter, the fearless harlots lean
outside their open, rosy doors, the clefts between their breasts intensified by the flames of the braziers that stand on the footpath, and by which they warm their flesh as they wait for it to be bought for five shillings. I reach the towering, black-and-gold cast-iron gates of the National Gallery, and race up the steps, between the statues of Joan of Arc and St. George and the Dragon. Once through the revolving plate-glass doors, I turn left. There is a hall containing glass cases filled with instructive tableaux, one only of which is recallable: a sledge of lifelike Eskimos, with Fu Manchu moustaches, being drawn through fake snow (salt? powdered alum? flour? slaked lime?—I can never decide) by stuffed huskies. Beyond this lies the door to the Art Class Studio, the door to what seems Montmartre bohemianism.

  Although, busy at their easels, there are several ridiculously antique people of thirty-five or so, ‘suburban’, ‘plebby’ people dressed like people, I am satisfied with the much greater supply of young women with harsh, geometrical haircuts, jade-green dresses patterned à la Tutankhamen, and smocks and tongues deliberately dirtier than they need be. There is also a supply of young men wearing beards that could be richer. I can get no further in this arty ploy than a yellow moustache based on Ronald Colman’s, and a mingy yellow tuft under the middle of my lower lip.

  The Studio is as alive with plaster reproductions of famous statues as with unfamous students; its walls are hung with the casts of hands and feet and swags of fruit and sprays of acanthus leaves. The Studio smells of Fixatif, a preparation atomized on to the finished charcoal studies to render them unsmudgeable, and of threepenny Cornish Pasties bought from the pie-shop, diagonally opposite the Gallery, on the corner of Swans ton and Little Lonsdale Streets. The shop is run by a skull-faced man wearing a wig of corrugated, ox-blood-coloured hair. The harlots, slapping down always a pound note, buy pies and scented Musk Lollies from him, and all call him Bella. I should like to talk to them but dare not lest they ask for the five shillings I need for so many, many other things.

  As for the drawing lessons, I most vividly recall Charles Wheeler’s hand—or, rather, the thumb curved back almost in a semi-circle—appearing, without word or warning, on the Michelet paper pinned to the easel at which I am working. The thumb smudges out a faulty shadow. Charles Wheeler makes some soft remark supporting the thumb’s action. Or the thumb tick-tocks backwards and forwards above the charcoal marks to commend some more successful attempt at chiaroscuro.

  ‘Getting nearer,’ says Charles Wheeler, speaking for the thumb. ‘Nicer tone. Get-ting near-er.’

  As when I was a little child, and the appearance of others was vaporous, so it oddly is with the appearance of Charles Wheeler. There is the curled thumb, there is the soft voice, there is the impression of someone small, delicate, and very very gentle. Blue-eyed? He may have been eight feet high with eyes of brimstone. I never really see him. I am, at first, too interested in my efforts to make three dimensions out of the rubbing on and rubbing off of charcoal. I am, later, interested less in the working side of the Studio than in the social side.

  Since I am indubitably an ignorant country youth, and impatient (at this time), and am jet-propelling myself through experiences I can scarcely be said to have, since I am still enfevered with my own tiresome adolescence, it never becomes clear to me, at that time, what the purpose of working minutely, night after night, on the cross-grained Michelet with the vine-stem charcoal and a piece of fresh bread as eraser, really is.

  I am taken several times to visit Max Meldrum’s studio. I see his students at work. The through-a-glass-darkly technique bewilders and irritates me.

  In Williamstown, I foist myself on R. W. Sturgess, who lives along The Esplanade and who, like Meldrum, has work hung in the National Gallery. I regard his water-colour work as wishy-washy even though it is the sort of thing I try out myself in my wistful treatments of the fishermen’s huts on the edge of the Rifle Ranges.

  My arrogance, the arrogance of half-educated youth, towards the work of two mature men who are charming to me, now appals me. These men are fools, I say to my fool self. Line is the thing. Line is me. I see myself as Ingres, as Clouet, as Holbein, as Hokusai, although knowing—oh, although knowing well!—that I possess absolutely not one skerrick of the strength and ability to reach within a thousand miles of them. I am too flibbertigibbet, too divided against myself. I discover Aubrey Beardsley and John Austen and, more unfortunately, Harry Clarke, whose macabre illustrations to Perrault’s fairy stories and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner excite me into buying mapping pens and Indian ink and cartridge paper so that I can decadently embroider away, with monstrous detail that keeps me up until three in the morning, and makes Aunt Rosa Bona waspish about electric light bills, at my own set of illustrations to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes.

  Considering the National Gallery’s Art School mystique, it is curious that this same Edgar-Allen-Poe-ish kind of decoration—tilted, staring eyes set in a dust of shadow, pointed chin, jaws at an angle of 135 degrees, intertwined locks of hair clotted with baroque jewellery—should win me the prize for the ticket design for the Artists’ Ball, the Bal Masque of 1928. Charles Wheeler is the judge. The prize is a double ticket. I take a long-legged art student, with a nose scarcely less beaky than my own, to the ball which is at the St. Kilda Town Hall. Her name is Wiggy Binder. She wears a tutu. Looking back, it seems to me possible that we art students must have given some sort of doll’s house performance, which may explain Wiggy’s tutu and ballet shoes, as it may explain why the hall seems overrun with many striplings dressed as I am: a Wooden Soldier in a red sateen coat, a black papier-mache busby, red-striped trousers, and with a dead-white painted face on the cheeks of which are two circular crimson splodges. The tune haunting me from my first Artists’ Ball and 1928 is ‘The Blue Room’; the action illustrating my peculiar and unnecessary, albeit quite unplanned, hypocrisy (of that ball and that year) is the action of piously rejecting invitations to contribute to the students’ drink fund. This, though I am already used to discreet tippling of wines with Madame’s seafarers. More tellingly, I look down my painted nose when magnanimously offered free drinks in the dressing-room behind the stage. This is perhaps a version of not letting the right hand know what the left hand does. More likely it is a conviction that the various activities of my life then are on different pages of the pamphlet, that the doings on Page Two have little connection with those on Page Three, except in the common factor myself, who concerns me alone. At least, so I think.

  Anyway, I am already the only mourner at one of my own funerals. I perceive that this Hal Porter, the one who was, along with the famous writer Porter and the famous actor Porter, to have been the famous artist Porter, is dead. I do perversely try to keep this one alive; but dead he is, and I know it, and mourn him with no tears, even with some amusement. The dead one goes on clowning for another decade, and Fay Compton opens an exhibition at which some of the corpse’s work is sold. The dead have their amusements and uses.

  I cannot now, slackened down by years and pain and bygone boredoms and overwhelmed enthusiasms, clearly see how the long-nosed, long-haired, long-finger-nailed—for he has started that too—and un-rattle-able youth does it all. I cannot, either, remember always how he finds his way into so many versions of Another Part of the Forest. I should admire his fearlessness were I certain it was only that, and deplore his insensitivity if certain that he was insensitive. I cannot judge him except to say that, today, I should not like to be him.

  He climbs, on what information or instinctive clue I cannot guess, the worn marble staircase of the Bijou Theatre. Everything has the dusty seediness he is beginning to expect to find everywhere. Bronze women with hairless armpits, nipple-less breasts and unsplit pubes hold up triple light-globes lit by low-watt bulbs on the stair-landings; there are acres of looking-glasses with blotched silvering, leathery palms in brass urns embossed with swastikas, roses and cherubs’ faces; the carpets are so worn into the boards of the flooring that ru ed ridges l
ine them. Beyond all this dilapidated splendour, in a shabby room hidden behind a shabby room hidden behind a shabby room, is Gregan Me Mahon, the actor-manager. Without warning, invitation or shame, the youth somehow gets through the rooms, and beards the old actor. Whatever Gregan Me Mahon, pink, bald and smelling of whisky, sees in the earnest intruder, or is yapped into seeing, or pityingly tricks himself into seeing, remains a mystery but, once more—behold the youth, Saturday morning after Saturday morning, in the room behind the room behind the room, mouthing his way through The Lotus Eaters or Morte d’Arthur or the soliloquies from Macbeth, or reciting—with gestures—a more frivolous work that Gregan Me Mahon has given him to study:

  The Ballyshannon foundered off the coast of Caribou

  (downward gesture),