‘Where does he hang out?’
‘I don’t know; I’ve never asked him.’
‘I wonder how he lives,’ I said.
‘Oh, he battles round. He’s knocked about and can talk. He tells me there’s no money in poetry. He’d turn his hand to anything. I don’t know … you don’t go round asking when a bloke had his last feed.’
‘Where do you talk?’ I asked him. ‘You can’t talk in the library.’
‘No, we talk on the steps. He’s been taking me to a room above a saddler’s shop run by two old blokes—brothers, I think. They are mates of his. It’s near the Victoria Market. We go there every Friday night and they play the fiddle and sing an’ that. I’ve told them about you and they want me to bring you along. You’ll like these blokes. They’ll talk horses to you till the cows come home.’
‘They can’t be doing too good now,’ I said. ‘All the saddlers’ shops are going out. Who buys harness these days?’
‘Oh, they’re on the skids too. They play away on the fiddle and forget it. That’s what they say anyway.’
I looked forward to meeting Ted Harrington. He would be the first established writer I had met. I felt that we would be united in a common interest but when I did meet him I realised that though the struggle for survival can supply material for creative writing when recalled in times of security, the development of this material in the mind is arrested, thrust into the background in the face of more immediate problems of living.
Poets, writers, painters do not thrive in garrets, in bare rooms, tramping the streets or looking through the windows of cafés. The myth, so widely held, that great talent will always in the end manifest itself and lift those who possess it to recognition, presupposes the existence in such people of qualities that have nothing to do with the cultivation of the artistic talent lying in ferment within them.
Survival in our society demands the capacity to conform to certain restrictions and obligations the observance of which give the artist food and shelter. Side by side with the necessity of developing the artistic talents he possesses must be developed qualities that tend to suppress these talents and drive them along channels that would destroy them. He wages a constant war between the imperative of preserving his body’s survival and the desire to preserve the creative urge that dominates his mind.
Those who are ill-equipped to win the battle of survival can never win the battle for their talent’s release. It withers, takes strange forms, betrays, is placed at the disposal of ruthless, ambitious and greedy men with no interest in culture and leaves those who possess it a caricature of what they might have been.
Great talents do not always exist in men of powerful, dominant character. The very qualities that lift a man to a passionate desire to communicate, the major motive of all great art, are sometimes nurtured on what society would regard as weaknesses, weaknesses to it being an inability to make money or to exploit one’s fellow-man.
In those countries where hunger, despair, illiteracy and ruthless exploitation have kept the population at starvation level, there are the graves of a thousand great artists who sang their songs to themselves.
The creative artist starts on the road he is to follow when first his mother bends over his cot. He journeys through his home life, his school life, through society’s mortar to recognition or oblivion depending, in each section of the road, on his victories against circumstances that seek to direct his ambition into patterns of living which society accepts as suitable for its survival. There are times when its survival could depend on his destruction.
Ted Harrington was sheltering from the rain beneath the portico of the Public Library when first I met him. He wore a shabby overcoat the bottom edge of which, hanging below his knees, was heavy with rain. The soles of his shoes, held to the uppers by a few taut threads, were limp with the water of the streets.
Yet he was not in a state of depression. He obviously enjoyed the experience of a meeting with a stranger. It was a new adventure, a replenishment of interest.
He greeted me by name before Arthur introduced us and said, ‘Arthur tells me you write.’
‘I hope to,’ I said.
‘That’s the stuff,’ he said. ‘You’ll make it.’
I liked him. He gave me some of his own strength, his guts. We set off for the saddler’s shop and I asked him about a ballad of his I had read and liked—‘The Roman Road’.
‘Oh that!’ he exclaimed. ‘It was published in the Bulletin.’
He stopped in the rain and recited it to me while people passed, their heads turned to watch us.
The saddler’s shop was a two-storey building with a street frontage of about twelve feet. A square window flanked by a green door mottled by weather proclaimed its existence to the people passing. The window had the word ‘Saddler’ painted in a curve at its centre.
I stood looking in at the saddles, bridles, cruppers, surcingles, girths and collars that rested on stands or hung from the rear wall of the window. They all lacked the character that use upon a horse would supply. The link on each gleaming bit showed no wear, the buckles were fastened on unmarked straps.
I looked at the saddles that had never creaked to a canter, at their linings that had never been marked by sweat. Their power to evoke would only develop when man had used them and the strength of his muscles had shaped them and the sweat of horse and man had mellowed the leather.
Now their beauty was a product of craftsmanship, not of service.
On the floor of the window bottles of neatsfoot oil, tins of harness black and Solomon’s Solution stood surrounded by the bodies of dead flies.
Cars hooted on the road behind me. There was no clopping of horse’s hooves. I felt I was looking at a display in a museum.
Ted had opened the door with a key he had taken from his pocket and I followed the two men through the cluttered shop to a narrow staircase at the rear. The bare, wooden stairs went steeply upwards into darkness. A depression into which a climbing foot naturally fell was worn in the centre of each step.
The sound of boots upon them penetrated to some spider-web infested cavity beneath and from here came an answering knocking that made me want to climb hurriedly to where there was light and people.
At the head of the stairs Ted opened a door and released an imprisoned warmth that welled out upon us in protection. It made the room we confronted a place of security and shelter and we walked in gladly.
Two elderly men were sitting in worn armchairs before a log fire. They had turned their heads at our entrance and were looking back at us, one with lowered head so that he could view us from above his steel-rimmed spectacles, the other with lifted head so that he could see through the glasses low on his nose.
They stood up, dropping newspapers to the charcoal-covered hearth and came from behind their chairs to welcome us.
The older man, who was introduced to me as Bill, had a stooped, jerky walk that brought him across the room with quick, purposeful steps. I felt they were directed by a man with the enthusiasms of youth.
His brother, Jack, moved with more deliberation. Reasons for action only came to him after he had stood in stillness, thinking. When he had shaken hands with me he paused in thought looking back at the fire then suddenly said, ‘Yes. A cup of tea … That’s it. Yes, we’ll all have some tea.’
He was the Martha of the brothers, the one who concerned himself with household work and the preparing of meals.
Bill was a host by temperament. He pumped my hand in greeting and straightway took change of me.
‘Now then … Where would you like to sit? Take this chair,’ then, at my expression, ‘No, it’s not mine. Come on. Round here now. Look out for the wood. Wait … I’ll shift it. You’re right now. Sit there.’
He changed his tone to a different level of feeling.
‘I’ve always liked a good fire. I make it and Jack goes and pokes it. No feelings, that’s his trouble.’
He looked towards his brother, smiling.
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br /> Jack was standing before a gas stove with a chipped enamel teapot in his hand.
‘That’s right,’ he said happily. ‘No feelings.’
He opened the perforated zinc door of a safe and took out a tin of biscuits.
The safe stood against the wall in that part of the room reserved for cooking, eating and storing food. Fronting the cupboard and the stove was a small table.
There was a semblance of order in this section, but extending away from it to the walls and challenging the guard of chairs around the fireplace was a clamour of benches, stools, harness, saddles expelling stuffing, stitching machines and boxes full of leather straps, old buckles and horse ornaments.
Scattered on a bench, the surface of which was crisscrossed with knife cuts, were awls, reels of thread, curved knives and lumps of wax. Beneath the bench was a tangle of boards, stuffing for saddles, rusty hames and empty cases resting at angles on the rubbish stacked beneath them.
On the walls were pictures of arch-necked horses pulling show buggies in which men, their moustaches waxed and sharp, clung to reins as rigid as steel rods.
There was a print of men sitting stiffly upright on horses leaping a water-jump. The front legs of the horses were thrust forward, their hind legs thrust back, horses frozen forever into stillness.
Arthur had told me Bill ‘saved’ pictures of horses.
He was a heavy man with broad shoulders and short, powerful arms. The belt that supported his trousers had once been fastened in the last hole of those piercing the leather. Now the tongue of the buckle had been thrust through the first hole and those between bore the impressed bruise of use through stages of increasing weight.
He wore a waistcoat that sagged unbuttoned from his shoulders. A silver watch chain joined one of its top pockets to the other. Its hem was frayed by wear and the two bottom pockets gaped from use. The stem of a pipe protruded from one, from the other a spectacle case leaned out at an angle.
Deep lines creased his forehead and dropped from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. It was a rugged face moulded by pleasant experiences rather than worry and its eyes were young and bright.
Jack was a thinner man. His cheeks were flat and his nose more prominent but there was a resemblance between them—their eyes, maybe. Both pairs of eyes paid you the same compliment—the suggestion you were interesting.
We all sat round the fire with cups of tea resting on the hearth in front of us and Bill began tuning his fiddle, frowning as he concentrated on the sound, his eyes staring straight ahead.
Jack had a bass fiddle. The tiny prop at its end rested on the floor between his feet. He drew his bow across the strings and warm, deep tones touched us with lovely promises for a moment.
‘Now,’ said Bill at last. ‘Let’s into it. We’ll start off with “Belle Mahone” eh!’
They played ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘Poor Old Ned’, ‘My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair’, ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, ‘Botany Bay’, ‘John Brown’s Body’ …
We listened to ballads of revolt and love, of despair and hope. Sometimes we sang them.
The walls of the room moved back beyond their suggestion of confinement and there was a world for our conquest. We needed space for our flights. Each in his own way made the journey to goals that the wet street and the rain and the hunched unemployed men at street corners had obscured.
There was a power in us now. Self-conscious singing gave way to confidence and we sang messages to ourselves that still united us.
Between songs Ted Harrington rose to his feet, his back to the fire, and recited his ballads. His gaunt face changed as he delivered the words and its lines of resignation vanished.
Oh, the farmer to the plough, and the sailor to the sea,
But the droving life, the roving life, is the only life for me,
For you see a lot of country and you have a lot of fun,
And the girls are always waiting when your droving trip is done.
When it was time to go, we were reluctant to bring ourselves back to the reality of the room and the cold street beyond the window where in a moment we would be moving with bowed heads against the wind. It was hard to rise from the chair and say, ‘Well, we must go.’ But there was next Friday and the one after that. They became important nights to me. It was a shared experience and for some months we were necessary to each other.
Music grows from many soils. When tended and guided by dedicated men and women—the great composers, teachers, artists—it produces its finest flowers and from these same people the cultivated taste to appreciate them. We were wandering unguided amongst lowly plants that produced flowers just as inspiring to us.
Those who have never known the rose need the dandelion.
9
Mr Lionel Perks was the manager of the Crown Casket and Joinery Company. He wore a slate-coloured dustcoat as he walked round the factory. Its two last-remaining buttons dangled by long threads down the front of the coat, the pockets of which were beginning to tear loose from the material because of the weight of notebooks and orders with which they were always filled.
He was a short man, perfectly proportioned to his height, and always faced people as if on the defensive. He liked people to sit down when they were talking to him so that his head was above them.
He was irritable and touchy and easily roused to anger. When his anger was directed against Mr Bodstern it manifested itself in swallowing, a tension of the cheeks and movements suggestive of an irritated skin, but when it was directed against subordinates it was forced into expression by pressures he released with trepidation. The sharp, angry complaints that expressed it were delivered in fear of being struck or abused.
He shrank from open conflict. Never face up to a man was his creed; recruit the aid of others to destroy him. He was a master of the oblique smear, the insult disguised as humour.
Though the success of his job depended to some extent on my co-operation he would have willingly sacrificed this to experience the pleasure of holding me back, of proving me incapable. That my downfall might also bring about his own was recognised but rendered pale and indistinct in the flare of joy that triumph over me would supply.
The reasons why he disliked me varied from the depressing effect my confidence had upon him to his belief that every man is out for himself and expressions of friendship are used for concealment. My friendliness was suspect to him.
I was in the habit of enthusiastically announcing those achievements of mine I felt merited recognition as I was also in the habit of lamenting my weaknesses.
There were times when, after taking part in an Australian Natives’ Association debate, I felt I was the outstanding speaker of the night. Mr Perks was reluctantly interested in my debating. When he asked me next morning, ‘How did you get on last night?’ and I answered, ‘Magnificent! I was outstanding!’ he received the declaration by swallowing in distaste.
Was he not a man with connections, well-read, the brother of a wealthy man, respected and admired by his associates? These facts established the pattern of our personal relationship quite clearly. He was superior to me in social position, breeding and destiny.
There remained the problem of making me recognise this.
The pride I experienced in being ‘outstanding’ in a debate on whether the pen was mightier than the sword suggested my scheme of values would always enable me to exalt myself while always putting him at a disadvantage.
To preserve the order of our relationship I must be cut to size, I must not escape control, I must be forced to concede that to show enthusiasm for a debate on whether the pen is mightier than the sword reveals a naivete of which I should be ashamed.
Damn and blast me to hell for my smug belief that the subject was still valid and that I was outstanding and that I was applauded and congratulated!
Who was I to be thus acclaimed, a miserable clerk handing him the unopened letters of the influential with a hand surmounted by the feathering cuff of a two-and-sixpenny shirt!
I must have my stupidity revealed to me so that I would hang my head before him.
I did not dislike him. He did not seem to matter very much. Sometimes I liked him. I knew that only a conceited man reacted so positively to confidence and self-praise in another since it shook the pedestal upon which he stood. I was like that myself sometimes.
One day he asked me to come home to dinner with him. I went. His wife was quiet and dutiful. Wisdom had taught her that nothing was to be gained by flinching, arguing. She moved round within her thoughts carrying willow-pattern plates of food, the product of hard work and organising ability during the day.
She listened to him, she agreed with him, she looked out of the window and took a breath of the honeysuckle that hung across it obscuring the garden.
O what lovely things lived out there! Further than the paling fence, further than the next house, beyond the road, the hill, the trees against the sky, the horizon clouds … Over the edge and down to a welcoming place of voices that praised, that were warm and emotional, that never lectured. To a place where a lover came striding, a lover to whom she could sing her song.
I do not know whether these were her thoughts. They may have been. Maybe they were my own, born of the house and Mr Perks’ attitude towards his wife.
Mr Perks listened with controlled impatience to any remark she might make. He had long since concluded that she had nothing to contribute in the way of ideas, nothing to offer that was really interesting. He was certain that conversation in their house was lifted only by his contribution, the conversation of acquaintances only by his attention.
He was not fond of listening, however. His conscious observance of good manners sometimes gave people the impression he was interested in their contributions to conversation but should they pause he would snatch the subject from them like a crow and proceed to hit it into shape upon the stone of his convictions.
He began talking to me about the dead-end job I had at the Crown Casket Company but in such a way that it placed the blame for my bleak future squarely upon the shoulders of Mr Bodstern, not upon my own.
In Mine Own Heart Page 8
