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

  The Watcher

  on the

  Cast-Iron

  Balcony

  by the same author

  SHORT STORIES

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  AUSTRALIAN POETRY 1957 (edited)

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  A BACHELOR’S CHILDREN (short stories)

  Angus and Robertson

  COAST TO COAST 1961—1962 (edited)

  Angus and Robertson

  THE TOWER (play)

  Penguin Books

  AUSTRALIAN STARS OF STAGE AND SCREEN

  Rigby

  The Watcher

  on the

  Cast-Iron

  Balcony

  AN AUSTRALIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Hal Porter

  FABER AND FABER

  24 Russell Square

  London

  First published in mcmlxiii

  by Faber and Faber Limited

  24 Russell Square London W.C.1

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Latimer Trend & Co Ltd Plymouth

  All rights reserved

  © Hal Porter 1963

  For

  that best of friends

  KENNETH SLESSOR

  In a half-century of living I have seen two corpses, two only. I do not know if this total is conventional or unconventional for an Australian of my age.

  The first corpse is that of a woman of forty. I see its locked and denying face through a lens of tears, and hear, beyond the useless hullabaloo of my début in grief, its unbelievable silence prophesying unbelievable silence for me. It is not until twenty-eight years later that I see, through eyes this time dry and polished as glass, my second corpse, which is that of a seventy-three-year-old man. Tears? No tears, not any, none at all. The silence of this corpse is as credible as my own silence is to be, and no excuse for not lighting another cigarette. I light it, tearless, while the bereaved others scatter their anguish in laments like handbills. I am tearless because twenty-eight years have taught that it is not the dead one should weep for but the living.

  Once upon a time, it seems, but in reality on or about the day King Edward VII died, these two corpses have been young, agile and lustful enough to mortise themselves together to make me. Since the dead wear no ears that hear and have no tongues to inform, there can now be no answer, should the question be asked, as to where the mating takes place, how zestfully or grotesquely, under which ceiling, on which kapok mattress—no answer anywhere, ever.

  In time, the woman, Mother, is six months large with me, and Dr. Crippen is hanged. In time, and missing Edwardian babyhood by nine months, I am born. I am born a good boy, good but not innocent, this two-sided endowment laying me wide open to assaults of evil not only from without but also from within. I am a Thursday’s child with far to go, brought forth under the sign of Aquarius, and with a cleft palate. This is skilfully sewn up. In which hospital? When I am how few months old? By whom now dead or nearing death? No one, I think, no one living now knows. Thus secretly mended, and secretly carrying, as it were, my first lie tattooed on the roof of the mouth that is to sound out so many later lies, I grow. I am exactly one week old when the first aeroplane ever to do so flies over my birthplace. On aesthetic grounds or for superstitious reasons I am unvaccinated; I am superstitiously and fashionably uncircumcised, plump, blue-eyed and white-haired. I have a silver rattle, Hindu, in the shape of a rococo elephant hung on a bone ring. I crawl. The Titanic sinks. I stand. The Archduke is assassinated at Sarajevo, and I walk at last into my own memories.

  These earliest memories are of Kensington, a Melbourne suburb, and one less elegant than that in which I am born between the tray-flat waters of Albert Park Lake and the furrowed and wind-harrowed waters of Port Phillip Bay. The memories are centred in a house then 36 Bellair Street, Kensington. Of this house and of what takes place within it until I am six, I alone can tell. That is, perhaps, why I must tell. No one but I will know if a lie be told, therefore I must try for the truth which is the blood and breath and nerves of the elaborate and unimportant facts.

  At the age of six I physically leave Kensington and 36 Bellair Street for ever, lightly picking up and taking with me Kensington and 36 Bellair Street. Until this very point in time a baggage of memories has travelled with me.

  The moment of unpacking at hand I am astounded by the size and complexity of this child’s luggage. Even now, a middle-aged man, I cannot unpack all: I have not yet the skill to unlade what a happy egocentric little boy skilfully jammed into invisible nothing.

  Let me immediately reveal, in my largely visual recollections of this pre-six era, that my father and my mother are not visually alive to me as the young woman and young man they then are. I cannot see them. I remember the face of Father’s gold pocket-watch, and the hair-line crack across its enamel, but not his; I remember exactly the pearls and rubies in Mother’s crescent brooch but not her eyes. Except for Mother’s singing, I cannot hear them; a mere little litter of words blows down the galleries of time, some of it aesthetically haunting, more of it unforgettably trite. I do remember his fatherliness and her motherliness, essences informed by their youth and vitality and simplicity in which I have every trust. Fatherliness, motherliness, youth, vitality and simplicity I would not now trust for a moment. Each can destroy. Each helps destroy my parents; each helps them lay waste about them. But, however omniscient the child, he dares not, particularly if he be first born, further blind the parents he has already blinded with his existence by showing that he knows they are dupes not only of himself but of nature. So, my parents, imagining their physical selves as clearly seen as they think they see themselves in looking-glasses, move with blind instinct about me and always towards me and my imperious ego. They play the fool for me. They put on voices. They spend money on rubbish, toys for their toy. They cannot know that they themselves are clouds only, symbolic blurs meaning certainty and warmth and happiness, slaves without faces in a small universe where everything else is exquisitely clear.

  The detail!

  The colour!

  Except in dreams, neither detail nor colour has ever since been so detailed or coloured; the fine edge of seeing for the first time too early wears blunt. But the first seeing is so sure that nothing smudges it. Take Bellair Street.

  Bellair Street, built about 1870, is a withdrawn street overhung by great plane-trees and is on the way to nowhere else. It is only several blocks long and, so far as houses are concerned, one-sided. This is because it is the last street, three-quarters of the way down, of several streets lying horizontally along the eastern slope of a ridge crowned with Norfolk Island pines, non-conformist churches of brick the colour of cannas or gravy-beef, and a state school of brick the colour of brick. The slope makes it necessaiy to ascend from the front gate of 36 along a path of encaustic tiles, next by eight wooden steps on to a front veranda which is therefore a long balcony balustraded with elaborately convoluted cast-iron railings. From this balconic veranda I look over the plane-trees towards a miles-off miles-long horizon composed of the trees of the Zoo, Prince’s Park, Royal Park and the Melbourne University. There are the towers and domes of the University and the Exhibition Buildings, and countless nameless spires.

  This prospect is less colonial Australian than eighteenth-century English in quality: billowy green trees, misty towers, even a shallow winding st
ream that starts and ends in obscurity like a painter’s device. Southern Hemisphere clouds pile themselves up, up above, and take on Englishy oil-landscape tones, or steel-engraving shafts of biblical light strike down, or incandescent Mississippis of lightning. Between this romantic or dramatic background and the watcher at the cast-iron lace of the balustrade innumerable more sordid elements are disposed: paltry municipal parks like seedy displays of parsley; endless terraces of houses; endless perspectives of ignoble streets and, strange as palaces, many three-storeyed stucco hotels whose baroque façades topped with urns and krateres protrude here and there above an agitation of humbler roofs of slate or terracotta but largely of unpainted corrugated iron. Sometimes, brilliant and perfectly executed hailstorms load the gulches of the roofs with white. Sometimes, a sunset behind Kensington ridge is reflected in sumless distant windows like spots of golden oil. I seem to be often watching, now and again with Mother a shape behind my shoulder, but most often alone. This watching, this down-gazing, this faraway staring, is an exercise in solitude and non-involvement. Perhaps my relish for aloneness, that deep and quenching draught, a content I have at times wrestled ferociously with circumstances to pluck from the hubbub of gregariousness, explains why no human beings appear in memories of that fanned out landscape. Disdain and self-sufficiency have sponged them off. This landscape, transfixed and unpeopled, untouchable and mute and mine, is my first glimpse of a world I am to see far too much and yet not nearly enough of and into. Let my eyes, so sated and so deprived, turn from the scene and peer at closer matters.

  Behind the watcher’s back lies a more restricted world, tangible, cluttered, comfortable, a world from which I can pick up sections and smash them to smithereens. I am too much of a good boy to do this. It is, moreover, a sensual world I like more than my view but love less although it contains more love than I shall ever need or ever need to seek.

  My parents are generous with their natural love, and exact no more from me than the barest minimum of sensible behaviour in gratitude for not eating me in a fricassée or giving me to the old-clothes-man. This lop-sided bargain, of whatever advantage to them then and none now, is of lasting advantage to me. It has fattened my confidence to the point where I can be treacherous to their conception of privacy. Had I been less loved, I could not drag them from their graves without warning, for the dead cannot wash behind their ears before appearing in public.

  Behind the watcher’s back, one each side of the wooden front door painted and grained to resemble some other wasp-coloured wood, lie the front bedroom (right) and the front room (left).

  I am child of an era and a class in which adults are one tribe and children another, each with its separate rights and duties, freedoms and restrictions, expected gentlenesses and condoned barbarities, each with its special reticences and sacred areas. One area taboo to children is the front room. I am, of course, sometimes permitted to enter the congested sanctuary, a magnanimity that leaves me now, so far as I know, the one creature living who knows what was within. Its contents and their stylized arrangement are equally an aspect of the Australian lower middle class of the Great War years and my mother, an indictment of suburban vulgarity and my mother, and an indictment, too, of my father, marking him down as an indubitable Australian, one of a nation of men willing to live in a feminized house. My mother says, as Australian women say to this day, my dinner service, my doormats, my umbrella-stand, my pickle-fork.

  Outside the door of her front room, Japanese wind-bells hang from the passage ceiling, a dangle on threads of triangular and rectangular slices of glass from which air in motion splashes delicious scraps of sound. Thirty years later, in a brothel street by a canal in Osaka, I hear wind-bells through the giggles of drunkards and the sound of the samisen and, there, under paper lanterns large as oil-drums, see again the front room and its ritual garnishings.

  There is the richly fringed saddlebag and Utrecht velvet suite. On its mainly magenta sofa leans a magenta velvet cushion on which three padded white velvet arum lilies poke out their yellow velvet phalli. A be-bobbled mantel-drape of magenta plush skirts the chimney-shelf burdened with Mary Gregories. There are an eight-sided occasional table on which an antlered buck of fake bronze attitudinizes sniffily, two gipsy tables, a bamboo music canterbury, a Renardi upright grand of Italian walnut before which sits a tri-legged revolving piano-stool. A dog-ended nickel fender and a yard-long set of nickel fire-irons, never used, weekly burnished, the shovel pierced almost to filigree, occupy the hearth. It is a room that bruises sound; in its air that suffers an inflammation the hoofs of horses passing on the asphalt roadway come wooden and weary to the ear.

  On the other hand, the front bedroom, the parental one, is filled with a luminosity that seems to swing and sway like a bird-cage, white with a tinge of jade. Through this the hoof-beats click sharply and swiftly as though the roadway of Bellair Street is ivory, and the hoofs of carved ivory. This pretty-pretty evocation suggests that Mother has taste after all. It is scarcely so. It is what can be afforded of what offers when a young woman from the country becomes a suburban bride.

  Nottingham lace curtains, whereon a self-conscious liaison of bracts of white fern and pendent bunches of white muscatels occurs, hang at the window, their scalloped edges skimming the leek-green linoleum blotched with white chrysanthemums. In the centre of one wall, and rigidly at right angles to it, a Venetian double bed of white enamel columns banded and curlicued with nickel asserts an importance as of a sacrificial altar or an operating-theatre table. On each side of the bed, dead parallel to the dead-straight hems of the dead-white quilt, lies a shaggy white mohair mat. A fourfold Japanese screen, reeds and cranes embroidered in greenish gold on linen, conceals a cabinet that contains the chamber-pot into which, sometimes, from my own next-door bedroom, I half-asleep hear, dispassionately yet with some interest, my father or my mother urinating. Sometimes, one later than the other, I hear them both. For some atavistic reason or because of some information obtained in the womb, it is easy to recognize who is engaged. It is only during this brief period of their and my fives that such opportunities to use my untainted animal hearing happen. Very little later, the ability to distinguish without hesitation or mistake whether, for example, Mother, unseen in the next room, is talking while lying down or talking while standing or talking while moving about or talking while sitting and brushing her hair, is an ability I lose. A child is forced to abandon purely animal faculties such as this one.

  Now that the eye and the ear of the watcher have been brought closer enough to these humans who made my body it seems that Mother is revealed, in the furnishings of the front bedroom, as guilty of an intention to an inhuman scheme of Austral-japonoiserie until the eye swivels to the walnut duchesse dressing-table with its central swing-mirror and hinged side-mirrors, its many brass-handled drawers and bracketed shelves. On this piece of furniture, set out on doilies or crocheted runners, are evidences of humanity. Here lies the last of Mother’s girlish vanity, although not the last of her girlishness. Here are the tag-ends of courting devices. Here are many objects soon to disappear, not because the fashion for them changes or Mother’s vanity grows less but because, as the number of my brothers and sisters increases disproportionately to my father’s income, time strikes them from her hands to replace them with more brutal weapons: the vaginal syringe, the breast-pump, the preserving-pan, the vegetable garden hoe, the sewing-machine nibbling stitches into boys’ galatea blouses and flannel under-shirts, into girls’ corduroy velvet dresses, serge skirts and pink cotton sunbonnets. Here, for a little longer, and to me for ever, lie tortoise-shell-backed brushes and tortoise-shell combs, curling-tongs, hair-curlers, hairpins, hairnets, and those soft sausages of hair-padding Mother calls rats. Here hangs the embroidered hair-tidy plump with combings; here hang three horse-tail-like switches of her own made-up hair. Here are all the other humble artifices she needs to construct a woman of the conventional shape of coiffure, smell and colour to appear, without diffidence, publicly
as young wife and mother. Here are the hock-bottle-green flask of eau-de-Cologne, the atomizer, the two circular boxes of Swansdown Adhesive Powder, White and Rosée, the prism of French nail-polish, the disc of dry rouge, the cake of Castile soap in its china dish decorated with moss roses.

  Because, already scrubbed, combed and decorated, I am often made to sit on the white Dante chair while my parents finish decorating themselves, my memories of the bedroom are detailed and accompanied by memories of those gesticulations that immediately preface outings: Mother’s hands and arms soaring with sure and accidentally graceful movements to skewer on her hat with foot-long hatpins knobbed with enamelled flowers, imitation cairngorms, pear-shaped Ballet Russe pearls or ersatz cameos; Father trimming his nails with a mother-of-pearl-handled penknife; Mother buttoning her kid gloves; Father fixing through its special vertical buttonhole in his waistcoat either the gold watchchain from which hangs a sovereign or his silver chain which bears a shark’s tooth rooted in agate. Gestures of going out—how indicative it is of three-, four- and five-year-old greed for experience that I should remember, forty years later, the gestures themselves but not the faces and voices of the man and woman making them, enlarged and brilliantly lit gestures, close-ups cut from context by the knife of a selfish, pleasure-seeking eye.

  Going where?

  Going in steam-trains or cable-trams, sometimes in cabs, sometimes walking hand-in-hand with Mother or Father across streets where the crossing-sweeper pushes piles of horse-manure from before our feet, going to the places little Melbourne suburban boys of those years go with their mummies and daddies: the Museum, the Botanical Gardens, the Waxworks, Wirth’s Circus, Punch and Judy shows, the Aquarium in the Exhibition Buildings, the Royal Park Zoo. The final stage in travelling to the Zoo is done in the last horse-drawn tram left over from an earlier age. Before I have seen a sheep or a cow, and many years before I see a kangaroo, I am familiar with elephants, camels, lions and leopards, with middle-class animals like the giraffe and the hippopotamus, old-fashioned nineteenth-century creatures. Indeed, all these entertainments are, in a sense, left-overs from Victoria’s reign. Other animals like Charlie Chaplin are taking their places. The middle- and late- Victorian auras of the London originals on which they are modelled emanate from these pleasure places. Cole’s Book Arcade, of which the lofty cast-iron galleries bisect two Melbourne blocks, has the common-sense yet engaging eccentricity that is Edward Lear’s and the Englishman’s. At the great entrance to the arcade with its architectural air of Waterloo Station, two small mechanical puppets, earnestly and rosily grinning like pot-boys from Dickens, jerk ceaselessly at crank handles which rotate into view successive boards advertising in rainbow colours The Largest Book Arcade In The World and its subsidiary attractions. These attractions have not always to do with books. I remember indoor cages of monkeys, tropical palms and tree-ferns, and an afternoon tea of cream horns eaten to the music of a small whining orchestra and, upstairs, in a first floor gallery supported by brass columns, tiers and seeming miles of gilt-poxed china figurines and curly vases with gilded handles.