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

by Hal Porter

  And down in fathoms many went the Captain (gesture)

  and the crew (gesture),

  Down went the owners (gesture), greedy men whom

  hope of gain allured,

  (Gesture) Oh, dry the starting tear, for they were

  heavily insured!

  I can only think of Gregan Me Mahon today with amazed affection for being so prodigal of his own time, which at his age must have been something rather to hoard, for being so prodigal of his patience and, most of all, of his knowledge and skill, with a young upstart who does not pay a cent, and who possesses not even a good voice, a voice that, even then, must have been showing signs of what it will finish up like, a voice with the quality of some bi-coloured and mangy fur, say a marmalade cat’s. To that run-down room with its uncomfortable curly sofas, its ottoman and old’ framed theatre programmes, come many of the important enough theatrical people of the day—I recall shaking hands with Beatrice Day and Maurice Moscovitch, with Allan Wilkie, Herbert Mundin, Marie Ney, Ada Reeve, Frank D. Clewlow and Oscar Asche. What makes my smiling at the insufferable young man a little wry is that, while I remember with a nostalgic frisson these encounters with the famous, he, then, is anxious for the celebrities to shove off, to leave him alone again with Gregan Me Mahon so that he can go on with his gesticulations and what he considers mellifluous shoutings of, ‘Aye, Edward will use women honourably . . .’ or, ‘To be or not to be—that is the question. . . .’

  It is through this apparently patient, lovable and kindly man, of whom George Bernard Shaw said that all he knew about Australia was that it produced sheep and Gregan Me Mahon, that the youth’s interest in the theatre, hitherto merely a matter of vainglory, begins to purify itself. Gregan Me Mahon is lavish with complimentary tickets for his own productions and those of others. It is impressive now to read the list of plays I am enabled to see for nothing in Melbourne during a period of less than eighteen months. It includes Six Characters in Search of an Author, Alice Sit-by-the-Jire, Pygmalion, Outward Bound, Rosmersholm, The Doll’s House, Juno and the

  Paycock, Old English, Strife, Heartbreak House, Lower Depths and The Cherry Orchard. As well, Gregan Me Mahon gives him the run of a well-stocked theatrical library so that, besides reading plays from Euripides to Tchekov, from Sheridan to Shaw, he can study make-up and stage lighting and the history of the theatre, hear of Stanislavsky, see the settings of Gordon Craig and Benois, the costume designs of Bakst and Lovat and Doris Zinkeisen. He becomes saturated with the lore and follies and deceits and excitements of a world of illusions.

  For a middle-aged man to use the word ‘objectively’ about the era in which he is young is a suspect thing. I therefore suspect myself of avoiding some important fact when I say that, objectively, it seems that, about thirty-five years ago, Melbourne has culturally very much more to offer the avid young than Melbourne has today. There is the quality of the plays presented, as well as their number. Between work and the exploration of Williamstown and Melbourne, between Drawing Classes and drama lessons and free seats in the dress circle, the omnivorous young man—no, not man—the omnivorous young man-shaped being is also able to take his place in a succession of theatre queues. He waits for hours, ham sandwich, apple and cake of chocolate in one hand, florin in the other, while the buskers, street musicians or acrobats perform for pennies. An hour before the curtain goes up, his queue, the queue for the gods, is admitted. He races up the stairs, up and up towards heaven. Arrived at a place on the uncushioned benches of the upper gallery, he must wait, sitting jammed upright on what are no more than the steep risers of a vertigo-inducing staircase, for the long hour, nibbling at his food. It is from these eyries of torture he sees every Gilbert and Sullivan opera, and a selection of other operas: Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Don Pasquale and L’Amore dei tre Re. He sees Pavlova dance Dulcinea in Don Quixote, Giselle, La Fille mai gardee and, unforgettably once, The Dying Swan. Far, far beneath him where he sits squashed with the other sandwich-eaters and caramel-chewers, he sees the exquisite shape, not human, not bird, exquisitely stirring and quivering in the blue light, exquisitely dying. There is a long silence filled with an ecstasy composed of anguishes defying definition. Then the silence is smashed by the uproar of hundreds of separate human beings transformed into one sound, the sound of hands striking each other with cruel joy, flaying themselves to pain that they might thus express pleasure. It is not until his own hands have punished themselves to a standstill that he finds the lapels of his coat are wet, that his tears have showered down in amazement at an example of disciplined perfection.

  It is only fair and necessary to confess here that, despite some intense early experiences such as the Pavlova one, despite being swept often enough off his young mind’s and emotions’ feet, some and often enough are disappointingly not many and always. Without any really sound critical basis, he develops strong likes and stronger dislikes, not only for individual performers but for the form of entertainment itself. Then, as now, he regards opera and ballet with a suspicion they are minor art, that there is an impure and unreasonable distortion, an artfulness. Moreover, he finds, to his horror, that the most esteemed composers—Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and those boys—leave him cold. Lusting to be warmed, to be cultured and all-informed, he spends all the money he can spare, and all the hours possible, waiting in the cheapest queues, climbing precipices of iron-rimmed stairs to the most brutally ascetic seats, sitting death-still on the chirruping chairs of symphony concerts, reading all the treatises and explanations and encyclopaedias he can, less and less happily labouring, as time passes, in the sincerest of efforts to See the Light.

  All useless; all utterly useless.

  He learns only his own incurable blindnesses; he is forced to accept that there are barren patches in his nature on which no seed will ever take root. He accepts this as one accepting news of a mortal disease but conceals the fact from others. At that period, and for several years after, he is therefore more dishonest than he has ever been before or since. He becomes adept in the jargon of the opera and ballet and music fan. He learns to be ready for the approach of certain lauded moments, and to make a gesture indicating awareness ; to lean slightly forward with lit-up eyes and sensitively pouted lips, to cover the eyes with one hand (sensitive), to slump in a simulation of relaxed ecstasy—the tricks are endless and pretty unsubtle. He is too dishonest to admit to anyone but himself that most ballets and operas strike him as affected, boring and bloody silly, and that the music called great means less to him than the sound of the ocean drawing in, and withdrawing, and drawing in again, along the Ninety Mile Beach. He is hopeful enough of one day (This Year? Next Year? Sometime?) springing the truths others so fervently accept, hopeful enough to go on suffering hours of the keenest boredom, enclosed by the meat-pie breaths of galleryites as he gazes fixedly, and with irritation, at some gross soprano shrilling away far below, or at women with legs like timber-cutters’ twirling on one toe-point while their arms execute movements that never quite express what he has learned they are intended to express.

  He is rather more interested than disappointed when it is more and yet more revealed to him that, far from being the quiveringly sentient and impressible creature adolescence makes him think he is, he is a thick-skinned and flat-footed roughneck in most matters cultural. He continues to conceal this shameful fact from the people he works with and talks with, especially from those in the literary world. He contrives to meet, either through the offices of Father’s halfbrother, Uncle John Durward Porter, or through his own machinations, such people, then eminent enough, as Louis Lavater, Frank Wilmot, Robin Croll, Basil Burdett and J. S. Macdonald. Uncle John, now and then, no doubt with the amiable idea of letting me meet ‘people who will be useful’, arranges luncheon parties at a restaurant called Ambassadors. To take part in these dull little gatherings, it is necessary for me to have a day off from school. I take Dutch leave without a moral flicker, brazenly lying that I have some vaguely defined ailment and, though f
ully aware that the headmaster does not believe me, try to remember, next day, to tone down my noisy vitality as proof of my trumped-up suffering.

  As far as the writers themselves are concerned, the overconfident and under-educated young puppy I am then, is, once more, disillusioned: they have neither the appearance nor the manner, the brilliant turns of phrase nor expected striking personalities of men of literature. To the puppy’s sincere dismay, which gallops into contempt, they do not know what he is talking about. He lards his table chatter with snippets of esoteric and, often, shock-intending references. I can blush now, and yet feel pity for that dreadfully self-possessed and conspicuous youth holding forth at a table by the Ambassadors’ great circular fountain and—there can be no doubt anywhere about this—boring Uncle John and the others as he drags in by the heels his obscure bits of information about the famous. He cannot stop talking. He peppers his conversation with French and Latin. He smokes, in a tortoise-shell holder, pectoral cigarettes, nigger-brown ones with gold tips. Sometimes he smokes Goliath cigarettes twice as long as the normal ones. He is hay-haired and hatless. He wears a wide black tie. What he is attempting to do by this performance is not now perfectly clear to me. I do recall him bringing his minutely detailed and decadent illustrations of The Red Shoes to J. S. Macdonald, and the short story manuscripts of Hell—for the Archbishop who loved two women and Death of the Czar to Louis Lavater, Frank Wilmot and Robin Croll. Their criticism is as discreet and harmless and useless as unsalted and unsugared porridge. He considers them to be oafs, insensitive and imperceptive. He has the wicked thought that they are jealous of his youth, vitality and ability. Poor young man!

  His meal, paid for by Uncle John, is invariably—partly affectation, partly because it sounds a sophisticated meal, partly because he loves it—Consomme Julienne, Chicken Maryland, Lemon Pancakes and, stealing a trick from the past and Nurse Mawdsley, tea with lemon. This last he does not absolutely enjoy but it is as ‘different’—deliberately—as a black tie, hatlessness, streaming hair and nigger-brown cigarettes. He whips up a little contempt for the ‘suburban’ tastes of the others: Tomato Soup, Roast Lamb, Apricot Tart, and black coffee. Really, I think now, what he likes most about these gatherings are the trickling and splashing noises from the fountain, the thick carpets, the frilled and diaphanous aprons of the lavender-clad waitresses, and the orchestra of three women in brown taffeta palpitatingly playing ‘La Paloma’, ‘Rendez-vous’ and ‘In a monastery garden’, melodious muck he thinks he prefers to the Grieg and Handel he conversationally pretends to love and understand.

  Just as he is drawn by the off-the-track sections of Williamstown, by that which is opposed to his own youth and bumptiousness—The Strand with its hollow, elderly mansions, and The Front with its Wine Depot, and gabbling international brawls and bloody foreign noses and brandished knives, so he is fascinated by Melbourne’s back streets still reeking of the nineteenth century and overlaid with melancholy shadows, by the little elm- or plane-crowded squares, by the cavernous markets, second-hand book shops, hole-in-corner drinking-fountains, the noseless and handless statues of nameless Seasons and Graces. He slices into genteel slum streets, into cul-de-sacs and narrow alleys, always alone, the better to savour uninterrupted their quality of hoped-for but never-revealed depravity, of suspected but unwitnessed danger.

  Shirking the roast lamb, mint sauce, three vegs., apple pie and custard restaurants, he takes to eating and drinking in foreign cafes of which Melbourne, in 1928, has far fewer than today, more authentic places not at all frequented by the general Australian who, in those times, prefers such places as Ambassadors, The Wild Cherry, The Oberon, and The Lattice which is then famous for its enormous wedges of cream-stifled sponge cake and its decor of copper vessels, and piled-up gourds and Turk’s Cap pumpkins. He is, indeed, happy to be the one conspicuously blond Australian drinking ouzo or scented Metaxa brandy and eating vine-leaf-wrapped meat-balls at the Greek Club, or shrimps fried in batter at the Japanese Hoi San Cafe. He goes with Max Meldrum and George Bell students to the Chung Wah Cafe in Heffernan Lane, a place not then touristized and, sitting among prostitutes and their Chinese pick-ups, learns to become glib about Chinese menus, adept with chopsticks, and suspiciously knowledgeable about Chinese teas. It needs hardly be stated that his unsuitable choice as favourite is Jasmine Tea. Happy country boy acquiring innocence sip by scented sip!

  He tries drinking with the Justus Jorgensen mob at the Mitre Tavern, but their floridities of sincerity are not his, he suspects the slapdash colour of their conversations and convictions. I brutally suppose, now, that he does not know what they are talking about.

  Always seeking for what, when he was the little watcher on the cast-iron balcony, he knew lay beneath the endless roofs spread before him, some magic place behind the million minute golden panes oiled by the sunset exploding over the ridge of Kensington, he wanders past the florists’ shops of the Eastern Market and the shops that sell waiters’ white monkey-jackets and chefs’ caps and butchers’ aprons and the brass pins, hook-and-heart, for grocers’ aprons; he wanders Exhibition Street, and comes to the Cafe Latin, and thinks he finds, at the top of the narrow stairs, what he seeks.

  At least he is in love again.

  He is in love with a cafe, and for what he can buy—Life—for half a crown. What does he buy that he calls Life? Jazzy frescoes, already dated, even to him. The smell of garlicked salad bowls. Rectangular looking-glasses edged by hat-pegs. A plump and queenly poofter called Flo who sips Strega between the cheap sad tunes he plays on the upright piano from a railed-in platform at the head of the stairs. Vast spotless table-napkins of coarse linen. Grissini, antipasto, minestrone, grilled whiting, chicken or lobster mayonnaise, Limburger or Gorgonzola, and a bottle-green half-bottle of red or white wine poured from the wickered stoneware jars that line the corridor to the lavatory. Half a crown! Two and six! The waiters, Italian, Basque, French, seem to him deft and perfect. Camillo Triachi, the proprietor, moves, tall and stately and seemingly solid with wisdom, about the room drenched in corny heavenly melody, and vile divine gossip, and the scent of women’s best dresses, and garlic, and Coffee Royal, and Turkish cigarettes, and inferior cigars. Life! Camillo drops here a word, there a sentence, from the height of his imperially handsome face. Now and then, on some more fervent Friday or Saturday, Camillo carries with him in one hand a bottle of Fiori d’Alpini, in the other a bouquet of liqueur glasses. On some inner judgement of his own, driven by his own charm or foresight or pity, he presents a glass of the scented oil, golden as those long-ago, distant, sunset windows, to this one, to that one, to me, to the watcher in Kensington, the harum-scarum in Bairnsdale, the quester through Williamstown and Melbourne, to me. Life! I learn to greet and farewell in Italian; to order zobaglione. Life! I meet Toti dal Monte, and hear her sing from Flo’s platform. Life! I meet Katherine Susannah Prichard who pours me a glass of claret while I convince her that she should read some of my short story manuscripts. Life!

  I never get drunk as I now sometimes get wildly drunk, but rise often like a bubble to planes of exhilaration in which I seem to myself to cut like flying scissors through streets filled with sage and lovely and beautifully ugly and ineffably happy people as I ‘stride’ under my streaming golden hair and streaming golden thoughts for the last electric train to suburbia, to Williamstown, to a childlike sleep. As I submerge, Flo’s music plays on in my mind: there is the fume of Mocha coffee and Camillo’s free Fiori d’Alpini; I feel a smile winding itself about my lips, engraving itself circumspectly there to remain night-long. Life and Life and Life!

  Yes.

  Nevertheless, circumstance having permitted me to find out these simple silly pleasures and to taste them with unspoiled tongue, it is time for me to be taught other things, to be admonished, even to be punished for, really, I have not yet—late 1928—been punished. It has all been too easy. I have not been splashed by another’s pain, let alone my own.

  If not yet proud, I am not yet humbl
e; if not yet gilded, not yet dirtied; if not completely undisillusioned, not yet completely disillusioned; if far from ripe, ripe enough for the plucking of coarser fingers. I have danced too long by myself. Nature abhors the solitary, and is strongly charged with the forces to strike it down. Human beings, affecting to abhor solitariness, will snatch at the contented lonely one to rob him of aloneness and content.

  The avalanche starts.

  There I am, one moment, throwing my felt hat into the Haunted Hills, sipping Camillo’s Flowers of the Alps, slipping sharp-eyed as a ferret through back streets and the old avenues of public gardens, chattering lies of culture at Ambassadors’ luncheons, performing an earnest and loudmouthed slavery for my beloved forty pupils, watching Charles Wheeler’s thumb or Gregan Me Mahon’s bald head or Pavlova’s arms, mooning along before the Blake watercolours or Japanese colour prints of the National Gallery, scribbling away recklessly, blind with words; there I am, one moment, on my swift and burning and recklessly unabashed ascent to my own heavenly nowhere. Avalanche! The next moment I am on the way down to someone else’s shocking somewhere, a somewhere not Life but life.

  There is, first of all, Miss Lucy Hart. She arrives as a temporary teacher at the school. Her clothes are immediately seen to be possibly expensive, and certainly un-Australian. Her cloche hats pierced by diamante arrows, her Garbo-ish coats with collars of deep unknown furs, her one-strap lizard-skin shoes, her handbags, her necklaces, all seem to be of colours and materials and outlines subtly different, imper-ceivably slicker and sharper and harder and more brazen. Miss Hart—and I never call her other than that despite what happens between us—seems always to be in her Sunday best, and a fashion-plate Sunday best at that. To me she seems immeasurably old. She seems also to be composed of two personalities, one dangerously hard, one dangerously soggy. She has not long returned from a trip to America.