Revisiting Little Women

Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott
Angus & Robertson Ltd, Sydney, 1934

Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott was the book of my early childhood. I can't remember a time when it was not part of my life. Before I started school, my older sister had read the story to me and I'm sure we all watched the MGM movie starring June Allyson as Jo and Elizabeth Taylor as Amy on many a Sunday afternoon.

Part of my fascination was no doubt due to being one of four sisters (like Louisa Alcott herself) - and having a brother coincidentally named Laurie. In my imagining, I was Amy. Jo was too boyish, Beth far too sickly and good, and Meg was boring. Who wouldn't want to be Amy with her golden curls and pretty nose that she helped to shape with the use of a peg? Looking back now there was another similarity too, one that I doubt I was conscious of. A couple of months before my 4th birthday, my father died suddenly. Like the March girls, I was growing up in a fatherless household.

The inscription by Ina Reynolds

But Little Women goes back further in my family story. In 1934, my mother was a pretty child with long ringlets created by curling her hair around rags each night. And, despite being a minister's daughter, she was desperate to go on the stage. She begged and begged her parents to allow her to take lessons and, although the country was in the grip of a depression and her father's income as a Church of Christ minister was meagre, somehow they found the money to allow her to follow her dream. So each week, little Joy walked up Frederick Street, Bexley to the top of the hill. She carried two shillings in her hand, payment for her elocution teacher, Ina Reynolds. When Mum was not quite 10-years-old, she was given a copy of Little Women by her elocution teacher. The gift, presented on 19 April 1934, was inscribed 'with many thanks for the help of both mother and yourself in Concert work ...'.

I'm the custodian of this family treasure. Published in early 1934 by Angus and Robertson, the blue cloth-covered edition features stills from the 1933 RKO Radio Pictures movie starring Katherine Hepburn as Jo and Joan Bennett as Amy. How I coveted this book! What a treat it was to be allowed to gently open it and look at the photographs.

Over the past week or so, I've done more than look at the photographs. It must be close to 40 years since I read the story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy - although it is so embedded in my memory that I can still score 89% on the New York Public Library quiz, Little Women: Which March Sister Said It?

And here's the thing - for the first few chapters, I regretted ever going back to it. Those girls, at the start of book anyway, are such whiners: we're so poor; it's not fair; why did father have to lose all his money?

'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents.'

They drove me crazy. No wonder they were given copies of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to inspire them to be better! I nearly stop reading to avoid having damage done to my childhood memory. But it is Marmee, Mrs March who turns the book around for me. Marmee, who was completely forgettable in all my earlier readings. She was barely a presence and, when she was, she was mostly offering a lesson in how to behave. But listen to her speaking to Jo:

You think your temper is the worst in the world; but mine used to be just like it ... I've been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.

Katharine Hepburn as Jo and
Joan Bennett as Amy - a still from the
RKO Radio Pictures movie

Marmee angry? Nearly every day of her life? Suddenly, I am aware of all the anger that sits beneath the surface of this seemingly gentle book for girls. Time and time again, Marmee leaves the room with her lips tightly compressed. It is wild fury that leads Amy to burn Jo's manuscript, and it is Jo's anger that almost leads to Amy drowning. Aunt March is cranky with the world - although perhaps she has a right to be, having buried a daughter and a husband. Old Mr Laurence's anger with his dead son, who ran away to play music in Italy, leads him to be tough with young Laurie. And what of Marmee? Wouldn't you be angry too if your husband's poor business decisions meant you were flung with four daughters into the world of the genteel poor and then he ran off to minister to the soldiers fighting in the Civil War?

In 1868, when the book was first published, Marmee is angry and a feminist, reflecting the views of the author herself. Although she wants to see her daughters 'well and wisely married', she also advises them:

better be happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands.

In a world where marriage seems to be the only option, Little Women offers it's readers alternatives. While Meg begins to yearn for marriage and her own home, Jo and Amy are planning on making their own way in the world, earning their fortune through writing and art. And the family newspaper, The Pickwick Chronicles, includes an advertisement for 'Miss Oranthy Bluggage, the accomplished Strong-Minded Lecturer', who is delivering a lecture on 'WOMAN AND HER POSITION'.

It's not until the sequel, Good Wives, published in 1869, that we see how Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy's lives play out. Somewhere I have my own, large-format illustrated copy. And yes, I'm going to read it. Not to see if Professor Bhaer is as lovely as I remember (although I hope he still is) but to discover whether Marmee manages her anger and continues to advise her little women to imagine alternative lives.

All quotes and images are from Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott, published by Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1934

Hal Porter: A writer I haven't read

The Tilted Cross by Hal Porter
Faber & Faber, London, 1961

Recently, I was given a copy of Hal Porter's Tasmanian novel, The Tilted Cross. Published in London in 1961 by Faber and Faber, the novel is set in Van Diemen's Land and is loosely based on the life of Thomas Griffiths Waineright, an artist, author and journalist, possibly a serial killer and 'multiple poisoner'. Surprisingly, given this colourful story, he was transported for forgery.

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.