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| The Tilted Cross by Hal Porter Faber & Faber, London, 1961 |
It wasn't Waineright who intrigued me, however (the Australian Dictionary of Biography provides a balanced overview of his life if you'd like to know more). It was the novel's author - Hal Porter.
Porter's memoir, The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony, was published in 1963. One of the first Australian memoirs, it is widely regarded as a classic and today it's the book for which he is best remembered. Now out of print and not a novel, it still managed to find its way onto Booktopia's 2010 list of 'The 50 Must Read Australian Novels'.
As an adult, Porter lived a peripatetic life. The ADB entry reveals he moved from Bairnsdale to Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart, Sydney, taking up short-lived teaching positions, tutoring, producing plays, running a hotel. In 1949 he joined the Army Education Unit and was posted to Japan twice. London beckoned in the early 1960s but he returned to Australia, spending the remainder of his life alternating between Melbourne and rural Victoria. Homosexual, his biographer Mary Lord revealed in 1993 he was also a paedophile. Was all this movement driven by the need to keep ahead of the law, of unhappy parents and school principals?
The one constant in his life seems to have been his writing. In an oral history interview recorded for the National Library of Australia in March 1964, Porter describes himself as a 'born writer', although one afflicted with a terrible disease.
Porter published Short Stories in 1942 and, according to the blurb on The Tilted Cross, 'won all the major short-story competitions in Australia'. A meeting with Angus and Robertson's editor Beatrice Davis in Sydney lead to the publication of poetry, novels and a trilogy of memoirs. Apparently a bit of a snob, he must have been over the moon to have been published in London by Faber and Faber, joining the likes of TS Eliot, Beckett, Harold Pinter and Ted Hughes.
The Tilted Cross received mixed reviews. In The Canberra Times review published on 9 December 1961, 'FX' wrote:
He spins his words like a thick spider's web and in the depths of the web he set an evil collection of characters - the impotent knight, his adulterous wife, the nymphomaniacal spastic, sadists, drunkards, homosexuals ... The book was written under a Commonwealth Literary Fund Scholarship. In spite of Mr Porter's previous achievements and record, I feel the money might have been better spent.The full review is available via Trove.
Porter recognised that his writing wasn't liked by everyone, that some reviewers thought he was verbose, baroque and overblown. The opening paragraph of The Tilted Cross provides an example of why they might have thought that:
Van Dieman's Land, an ugly trinket suspended at the world's discredited rump, was freezing. From horizon to horizon stretched a tarpaulin of congealed vapour so tense that it had now and then split, and had rattled down a vicious litter of sleet like minced glass, that year, that winter, that day.In his oral history interview, Porter claimed his large vocabulary was due to a childhood addiction to books and dictionaries.
Porter died in September 1984. A brief obituary in The Age noted that he once said that 'posterity would see him as a passable novelist, a fair playwright but a pretty good short story writer'. He was 73.
This post was written as part of the 2016 Sydney Story Factory Pen to Paper Challenge. I'm inspired by the work of Sydney Story Factory. I'd like to help them grow so that, one day, Martian Embassies will be all over this country. So during September I'm putting pen to paper - and hopefully rebooting my blog. If you enjoyed this post, please give whatever you can. Let's help the Sydney Story Factory grow.
