MEMOIR
The Boy Behind the Curtain
TIM WINTON
HAMISH HAMILTON
To gauge the length of the shadow Tim Winton casts on Australian fiction writing, you need only read the stories written in schools and universities, the submissions to literary agents, publishers and journals, the slush piles, the entries to competitions. Every second writer is the next Winton. He makes complex art seem simple; his characters and scenarios are known to us; he leaves his fingerprint everywhere, so universally Australian that it lures those who have let him under their skin, yet remaining inimitable.
Author Tim Winton at the house in Hillman Street, Albany, where he spent his teenage years. While Winton's DNA is in so much published (and in even more unpublished) Australian fiction, he has been shy about revealing himself through the clearer glass of non-fiction writing. He is no Pynchon, yet it has taken strong bait, most notably the Save Ningaloo Reef campaign, to lure him out of his nest. As this volume shows, however, Winton has been around long enough to accumulate a body of non-fiction work that is (unsurprisingly) beautiful and brilliant and provocative, and (surprisingly) revealing.
Sixteen of the 22 pieces in this collection have been published previously, and they, along with Winton's superb 2015 landscape memoir, Island Home, comprise the known body of his non-fiction work. They cover known Wintonian fields: the littoral environment and the sea, the struggle of writing from isolation, the West Australian policeman's son's childhood and youth that has filtered out through his fiction.
My eye was drawn to the six new pieces, some of which expose a tender underbelly of this incredibly smart, sophisticated, knowledgeable and worldly man, which is his Christianity. Twice on Sundays is the piece that takes Winton's religious history head-on. His parents turned to Christianity after his father survived a serious work injury when he was thrown off his motorbike. They joined the Church of Christ, a revivalist, dissenting, evangelical wing of low-church American Protestantism, in which scripture was read as "the prime and unimpeachable source of revelation".
This piece, from the son's perspective, picks up from "melancholy" evenings after "the epic effort of Sunday had begun to take its toll". Morning church service and Sunday school had been followed by lunch, "an afternoon of family visitation", and a "desultory" dinner. More was to come: an evening gospel service before a bedraggled homecoming at nine or 10 o'clock. The "Day of Rest", Winton writes, "required grit; it was a marathon, a test of character. Looking back I wonder if we only went to school on Monday for a breather."
This suggests an in-built and authentic irreverence. But having ebbed, the tide of this piece turns and flows in, and that's where it gets even more interesting. We can see why he hated it; now, why does he love it?
Churchgoing, Winton writes, "was my introduction to conscious living". It taught him "what a civil life might be; how crucial it is to cultivate disinterest, to free oneself from tribalism". It also exposed him to story. Long before he recognised the Bible as "a storehouse of experience and longing", Winton recalls a childhood in which, "by a process I don't understand even now, the occult power of metaphor revealed itself". He grew "increasingly enthralled" by Bible imagery: Christ as the rock and also water, Paul speaking of how creation "groans in travail". In the sun-blasted Western Australia of his youth, church was where he found the "organic and sustaining" power of language. These images and stories became the "nutrition" for his writing, about which he says: "I didn't catch the bug at school, I picked it up in church."
He remembers the boredom, which he chafed against, but increasingly the people come back to him, such as an older man named George Smith who told him that his soul was the size of his fist. It didn't make sense, but it left an afterglow and "rang true".
The young Winton fought against the dissenters' apocalyptic thinking, repudiating the contention that "this world is not my home", and moved in his 20s to "somewhat more progressive church communities", but in the end, trying to make sense of it all was a dead end. "I wore myself to a theological standstill."
What was left was mystery, and as an adult he feels ashamed of his smart-fart younger self. "There I was, a university undergrad, pounding these old geezers into rhetorical corners, hurling all my ten-dollar words and half-digested book learning at them … oblivious that every challenge was a judgment of them and the poverty of their origins."
Twice on Sundays is less of an argument than an acceptance of who the author already is. Weary of labels and varieties, Winton describes himself as "a believer". "On a Sunday evening, wherever I am I feel that tidal pull, the old melancholy descends, and it's as homely and as unsettling as the smell of the sea."
All of which is beautiful and true because it describes rather than explains. As Popeye concedes, "I yam what I yam". Whatever this mystery is, it infuses Winton's writing and, behind that, the sensitivity towards people and nature that can be found in books as long as Cloudstreet and reflections as short as A Walk at Low Tide, a two-pager in this collection that brings to life William Blake's quote: "Where Mercy, Love and Pity dwell/ There God is dwelling too." It is this sight of the sacred in the ordinary that probably accounts for some part of why Winton's writing recedes from his imitators' reach.
Like Island Home, this collection reveals some of the connective tissue between the novels and the man. Revisiting published stories such as Havoc: A Life in Accidents is to go back to forgotten knowledge. This piece, originally in The Monthly, is required reading for anyone wishing to inquire into that connective tissue, in particular the sense of life turning on a dime, often disastrously, that forced open the eyes of the policeman's son and made him the novelist he is. "For all the comforts and privileges that have come my way over the years," he writes, "my life feels like a topography of accidents."
There is as much pleasure in discovering new dimensions to Winton's childhood. A Space Odyssey at Eight is a very funny recall of the bewilderment of seeing Kubrick's classic movie when too young; and the title piece, The Boy Behind the Curtain, is an exploration of fear-driven extremism through Winton's memory of pointing a rifle through his front window at people passing by on the street.
Had Winton published no non-fiction, his novels would still stand where they are and lose not an ounce of their influence. But these pieces provide a fascinating glimpse of the mind that asks, probes and remembers restlessly but is still, at the end of the day, stumped for answers.
The Boy Behind the Curtain
TIM WINTON
HAMISH HAMILTON
To gauge the length of the shadow Tim Winton casts on Australian fiction writing, you need only read the stories written in schools and universities, the submissions to literary agents, publishers and journals, the slush piles, the entries to competitions. Every second writer is the next Winton. He makes complex art seem simple; his characters and scenarios are known to us; he leaves his fingerprint everywhere, so universally Australian that it lures those who have let him under their skin, yet remaining inimitable.
Author Tim Winton at the house in Hillman Street, Albany, where he spent his teenage years. While Winton's DNA is in so much published (and in even more unpublished) Australian fiction, he has been shy about revealing himself through the clearer glass of non-fiction writing. He is no Pynchon, yet it has taken strong bait, most notably the Save Ningaloo Reef campaign, to lure him out of his nest. As this volume shows, however, Winton has been around long enough to accumulate a body of non-fiction work that is (unsurprisingly) beautiful and brilliant and provocative, and (surprisingly) revealing.
Sixteen of the 22 pieces in this collection have been published previously, and they, along with Winton's superb 2015 landscape memoir, Island Home, comprise the known body of his non-fiction work. They cover known Wintonian fields: the littoral environment and the sea, the struggle of writing from isolation, the West Australian policeman's son's childhood and youth that has filtered out through his fiction.
My eye was drawn to the six new pieces, some of which expose a tender underbelly of this incredibly smart, sophisticated, knowledgeable and worldly man, which is his Christianity. Twice on Sundays is the piece that takes Winton's religious history head-on. His parents turned to Christianity after his father survived a serious work injury when he was thrown off his motorbike. They joined the Church of Christ, a revivalist, dissenting, evangelical wing of low-church American Protestantism, in which scripture was read as "the prime and unimpeachable source of revelation".
This piece, from the son's perspective, picks up from "melancholy" evenings after "the epic effort of Sunday had begun to take its toll". Morning church service and Sunday school had been followed by lunch, "an afternoon of family visitation", and a "desultory" dinner. More was to come: an evening gospel service before a bedraggled homecoming at nine or 10 o'clock. The "Day of Rest", Winton writes, "required grit; it was a marathon, a test of character. Looking back I wonder if we only went to school on Monday for a breather."
This suggests an in-built and authentic irreverence. But having ebbed, the tide of this piece turns and flows in, and that's where it gets even more interesting. We can see why he hated it; now, why does he love it?
Churchgoing, Winton writes, "was my introduction to conscious living". It taught him "what a civil life might be; how crucial it is to cultivate disinterest, to free oneself from tribalism". It also exposed him to story. Long before he recognised the Bible as "a storehouse of experience and longing", Winton recalls a childhood in which, "by a process I don't understand even now, the occult power of metaphor revealed itself". He grew "increasingly enthralled" by Bible imagery: Christ as the rock and also water, Paul speaking of how creation "groans in travail". In the sun-blasted Western Australia of his youth, church was where he found the "organic and sustaining" power of language. These images and stories became the "nutrition" for his writing, about which he says: "I didn't catch the bug at school, I picked it up in church."
He remembers the boredom, which he chafed against, but increasingly the people come back to him, such as an older man named George Smith who told him that his soul was the size of his fist. It didn't make sense, but it left an afterglow and "rang true".
The young Winton fought against the dissenters' apocalyptic thinking, repudiating the contention that "this world is not my home", and moved in his 20s to "somewhat more progressive church communities", but in the end, trying to make sense of it all was a dead end. "I wore myself to a theological standstill."
What was left was mystery, and as an adult he feels ashamed of his smart-fart younger self. "There I was, a university undergrad, pounding these old geezers into rhetorical corners, hurling all my ten-dollar words and half-digested book learning at them … oblivious that every challenge was a judgment of them and the poverty of their origins."
Twice on Sundays is less of an argument than an acceptance of who the author already is. Weary of labels and varieties, Winton describes himself as "a believer". "On a Sunday evening, wherever I am I feel that tidal pull, the old melancholy descends, and it's as homely and as unsettling as the smell of the sea."
All of which is beautiful and true because it describes rather than explains. As Popeye concedes, "I yam what I yam". Whatever this mystery is, it infuses Winton's writing and, behind that, the sensitivity towards people and nature that can be found in books as long as Cloudstreet and reflections as short as A Walk at Low Tide, a two-pager in this collection that brings to life William Blake's quote: "Where Mercy, Love and Pity dwell/ There God is dwelling too." It is this sight of the sacred in the ordinary that probably accounts for some part of why Winton's writing recedes from his imitators' reach.
Like Island Home, this collection reveals some of the connective tissue between the novels and the man. Revisiting published stories such as Havoc: A Life in Accidents is to go back to forgotten knowledge. This piece, originally in The Monthly, is required reading for anyone wishing to inquire into that connective tissue, in particular the sense of life turning on a dime, often disastrously, that forced open the eyes of the policeman's son and made him the novelist he is. "For all the comforts and privileges that have come my way over the years," he writes, "my life feels like a topography of accidents."
There is as much pleasure in discovering new dimensions to Winton's childhood. A Space Odyssey at Eight is a very funny recall of the bewilderment of seeing Kubrick's classic movie when too young; and the title piece, The Boy Behind the Curtain, is an exploration of fear-driven extremism through Winton's memory of pointing a rifle through his front window at people passing by on the street.
Had Winton published no non-fiction, his novels would still stand where they are and lose not an ounce of their influence. But these pieces provide a fascinating glimpse of the mind that asks, probes and remembers restlessly but is still, at the end of the day, stumped for answers.
BOOK REVIEW
Peter Craven reviews 'The Boy Behind the Curtain' by Tim Winton
Everybody thinks they know about Tim Winton: the working-class hero from the West; the whale of a man who’s been writing since he was a boy; the master of one of those big Australian prose styles that is muscular and magnetic and sometimes just a bit too self-delighting; someone who straddles the literary and the popular like a colossus.
Whatever you think of The Riders (1994), Dirt Music (2001), or Breath (2008), did anyone ever put them down in a hurry? If I’m sounding ambivalent, I shouldn’t be, because this new self-portrait via a suite of essays is a dazzling book, full of wisdom and wonder, written in, yes, muscular prose but with a staggering, effortless sense of drama wherever you pick it up. Tim Winton can fascinate you and bring you to the point of tears even when you thought you weren’t interested in what he’s talking about.
We begin with the dark biographical melodrama of teenage Tim, alienated and adrift, pointing a gun at passers-by in front of the curtain, not with a desire to kill, not with the gun even loaded, but knowing he could. ‘Lurking there behind my parents’ curtain, I put a gun between myself and the world. I reduced my neighbours to objects, made targets of them. Anything could have happened. None of it could.’
If that sounds self-dramatising, it justifies its every word, including the reflection that he found his way out through words. There is thus a sort of continuity when we jump back to the eight-year-old Winton being subjected to the empty spaces and psychedelic aporias of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, he says, ‘sent me through a Star Gate of my own into an expanded reality ... it was a wormhole into the life of the imagination’.
No one is better than Tim Winton at giving dramatic substance to the interface between art and life. It is extraordinary how much he fictionalises the process of factual narration.
His father, a traffic cop, was in a dreadful accident from which he might never have recovered. Something happens that fills young Winton with the terror of that memory. He says he has dreaded such sudden moments but also made them into a kind of aesthetic raison d’être. ‘In my fiction I’ve been a chronicler of sudden moments like these ... my life feels like a topography of accidents... I suppose you could say they form a large part of my sentimental education.’ This tallies with the darker side of Winton’s vision as a writer of fiction without being remotely arty or self-reflexive when he adds, ‘but now I knew that we were not, and never really could be, out of the woods’.
You could accuse Tim Winton of a kind of agnostic Calvinism where the individual is predestined to his own dark woods, but he is always so open and so sane, so modest in his bracing doubts and more bracing faith. He gives a humorous and humane depiction of the working-class Church of Christ community that shaped him and to which his parents were impelled like zealots after his father’s life was saved, perhaps by the intervention of some saint. A sauntering, naturalistic evocation of a narrowly evangelical community, it is full of laughter and farting and the face of human fun. It was that one-time Jesuit Greg Dening who said that at the heart of any absolutism there is an inch of licence that makes it tolerable. Winton is superb and convincing on the subject of how a world of straitlaced people in Pelaco shirts and staid skirts went a great distance towards teaching him what was what.
They taught him, through Scripture, the importance of story and that the example of Christ, so plain, so given to sacrifice and kindness, was a harder saying than all the blood and thunder of the Old Testament. The Word also taught him the power of all words. When St Paul said – and young Winton learned the words by heart – ‘For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’, it gave him entrée to the kind of language he would encounter in Hamlet’s ‘what a piece of work is man ...’ He grew up, he says, ‘riding incantatory rhythms toward the stifling reaches of afternoon’, but admits he never would have foreseen that the Church itself would become the greatest threat to his faith. He says he has come to like the smells and bells and that he crosses himself like a papist even if ‘a roomful of rockchoppers certainly brings out the Calvinist in me’, though most of his ‘heroes “belong to Rome”, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Julian of Norwich, Leonardo Boff’.
Tim Winton (photograph by Hank Kordas)As some of those names suggest, Winton is very much a man of the left, especially the environmental left. It is notable what dramatic power he conveys in his accounts of how he worked to save an environment where the boodie could come back, and how he pumped his fist silently ‘like a mad barracker’ when it did. He invests his environmental involvements with such a sense of drama and such an evocative sense of the beauties and places at risk that he will bring out the dormant greenie in anyone, because he makes his commitments so patently a blow for life (and analogous to the truth of art). The Boy Behind the Curtain might become a book of prayer and wisdom for the thousands of Australians like Ken Henry who share its passion.
A superb account of working to save the Ningaloo Reef involves a tribute to a cultivated Englishman. There is another evocative and semi-spectral story about the haunted house in Ireland in which he wrote Cloudstreet (1991) and where, later, he felt impelled to write The Riders. These essays are on a par with anything written anywhere in their play of mind and their command of tempo and rhetoric.
Winton, much a man of the beach, indicates that the sheer flow of surfing, its lack of point, makes it his meditation. He has a wonderful tribute to sharks, as well as a reverent homage to that celebrator of beautiful and terrible creatures Peter Matthiessen, who once felt the touch of the Great White. Winton also talks of the baleful irrationality of the Australian attitude to the killer shark. ‘Our demon,’ he says, ‘is silent and it swims.’
This is a rich and brilliant book with a great vibrancy and glow and wisdom. It has a sly account of the enigmas of Elizabeth Jolley and a vivid depiction of the annihilating horror when he discovered that the 1,200-page draft of Dirt Music was not working. There is also a fine sermon on the refugees: all about giving a child a stone when it asks for bread, all about driving an angel from your door when you deny pity, all about what does it profit a nation when it suffers the loss of its soul.
You would go a fair distance to find a better book of essays, separate pieces so powerful they have the ambience of a self-portrait without the burden of the search. The Boy Behind the Curtain justifies its cover’s family resemblance to Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest (1995).
Published in December 2016, no. 387
Peter Craven reviews 'The Boy Behind the Curtain' by Tim Winton
Everybody thinks they know about Tim Winton: the working-class hero from the West; the whale of a man who’s been writing since he was a boy; the master of one of those big Australian prose styles that is muscular and magnetic and sometimes just a bit too self-delighting; someone who straddles the literary and the popular like a colossus.
Whatever you think of The Riders (1994), Dirt Music (2001), or Breath (2008), did anyone ever put them down in a hurry? If I’m sounding ambivalent, I shouldn’t be, because this new self-portrait via a suite of essays is a dazzling book, full of wisdom and wonder, written in, yes, muscular prose but with a staggering, effortless sense of drama wherever you pick it up. Tim Winton can fascinate you and bring you to the point of tears even when you thought you weren’t interested in what he’s talking about.
We begin with the dark biographical melodrama of teenage Tim, alienated and adrift, pointing a gun at passers-by in front of the curtain, not with a desire to kill, not with the gun even loaded, but knowing he could. ‘Lurking there behind my parents’ curtain, I put a gun between myself and the world. I reduced my neighbours to objects, made targets of them. Anything could have happened. None of it could.’
If that sounds self-dramatising, it justifies its every word, including the reflection that he found his way out through words. There is thus a sort of continuity when we jump back to the eight-year-old Winton being subjected to the empty spaces and psychedelic aporias of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, he says, ‘sent me through a Star Gate of my own into an expanded reality ... it was a wormhole into the life of the imagination’.
No one is better than Tim Winton at giving dramatic substance to the interface between art and life. It is extraordinary how much he fictionalises the process of factual narration.
His father, a traffic cop, was in a dreadful accident from which he might never have recovered. Something happens that fills young Winton with the terror of that memory. He says he has dreaded such sudden moments but also made them into a kind of aesthetic raison d’être. ‘In my fiction I’ve been a chronicler of sudden moments like these ... my life feels like a topography of accidents... I suppose you could say they form a large part of my sentimental education.’ This tallies with the darker side of Winton’s vision as a writer of fiction without being remotely arty or self-reflexive when he adds, ‘but now I knew that we were not, and never really could be, out of the woods’.
You could accuse Tim Winton of a kind of agnostic Calvinism where the individual is predestined to his own dark woods, but he is always so open and so sane, so modest in his bracing doubts and more bracing faith. He gives a humorous and humane depiction of the working-class Church of Christ community that shaped him and to which his parents were impelled like zealots after his father’s life was saved, perhaps by the intervention of some saint. A sauntering, naturalistic evocation of a narrowly evangelical community, it is full of laughter and farting and the face of human fun. It was that one-time Jesuit Greg Dening who said that at the heart of any absolutism there is an inch of licence that makes it tolerable. Winton is superb and convincing on the subject of how a world of straitlaced people in Pelaco shirts and staid skirts went a great distance towards teaching him what was what.
They taught him, through Scripture, the importance of story and that the example of Christ, so plain, so given to sacrifice and kindness, was a harder saying than all the blood and thunder of the Old Testament. The Word also taught him the power of all words. When St Paul said – and young Winton learned the words by heart – ‘For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’, it gave him entrée to the kind of language he would encounter in Hamlet’s ‘what a piece of work is man ...’ He grew up, he says, ‘riding incantatory rhythms toward the stifling reaches of afternoon’, but admits he never would have foreseen that the Church itself would become the greatest threat to his faith. He says he has come to like the smells and bells and that he crosses himself like a papist even if ‘a roomful of rockchoppers certainly brings out the Calvinist in me’, though most of his ‘heroes “belong to Rome”, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Julian of Norwich, Leonardo Boff’.
Tim Winton (photograph by Hank Kordas)As some of those names suggest, Winton is very much a man of the left, especially the environmental left. It is notable what dramatic power he conveys in his accounts of how he worked to save an environment where the boodie could come back, and how he pumped his fist silently ‘like a mad barracker’ when it did. He invests his environmental involvements with such a sense of drama and such an evocative sense of the beauties and places at risk that he will bring out the dormant greenie in anyone, because he makes his commitments so patently a blow for life (and analogous to the truth of art). The Boy Behind the Curtain might become a book of prayer and wisdom for the thousands of Australians like Ken Henry who share its passion.
A superb account of working to save the Ningaloo Reef involves a tribute to a cultivated Englishman. There is another evocative and semi-spectral story about the haunted house in Ireland in which he wrote Cloudstreet (1991) and where, later, he felt impelled to write The Riders. These essays are on a par with anything written anywhere in their play of mind and their command of tempo and rhetoric.
Winton, much a man of the beach, indicates that the sheer flow of surfing, its lack of point, makes it his meditation. He has a wonderful tribute to sharks, as well as a reverent homage to that celebrator of beautiful and terrible creatures Peter Matthiessen, who once felt the touch of the Great White. Winton also talks of the baleful irrationality of the Australian attitude to the killer shark. ‘Our demon,’ he says, ‘is silent and it swims.’
This is a rich and brilliant book with a great vibrancy and glow and wisdom. It has a sly account of the enigmas of Elizabeth Jolley and a vivid depiction of the annihilating horror when he discovered that the 1,200-page draft of Dirt Music was not working. There is also a fine sermon on the refugees: all about giving a child a stone when it asks for bread, all about driving an angel from your door when you deny pity, all about what does it profit a nation when it suffers the loss of its soul.
You would go a fair distance to find a better book of essays, separate pieces so powerful they have the ambience of a self-portrait without the burden of the search. The Boy Behind the Curtain justifies its cover’s family resemblance to Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest (1995).
Published in December 2016, no. 387
HUMAN EXPERIENCES EXPLORED IN THIS TEXT:
Identity
Childhood
Impusles
Immigration
Religious Beliefs
Struggles
Family
Extremism
Anger
Culture
Fear
Class
Judgement
Identity
Childhood
Impusles
Immigration
Religious Beliefs
Struggles
Family
Extremism
Anger
Culture
Fear
Class
Judgement
RELATED SHORT STORY
"A Sunrise on the Veldt" Doris Lessing
https://literaryreflectionsofanavidbooklover.blogspot.com/2005/11/review-of-doris-lessings-sunrise-on.html
RELATED MUSICAL CLIP
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel - link to the Musical below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYVxYxmqHjU
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https://www.slideshare.net/missmorgan/i-know-why-the-caged-bird-sings-25337749
https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/gordon-adam-lindsay/poems/the-song-of-the-surf-0008013
RELATED FILM
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"
"A Sunrise on the Veldt" Doris Lessing
https://literaryreflectionsofanavidbooklover.blogspot.com/2005/11/review-of-doris-lessings-sunrise-on.html
RELATED MUSICAL CLIP
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel - link to the Musical below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYVxYxmqHjU
RELATED POEMS
https://www.slideshare.net/missmorgan/i-know-why-the-caged-bird-sings-25337749
https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/gordon-adam-lindsay/poems/the-song-of-the-surf-0008013
RELATED FILM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui9XVu4NGv8&list=PLuQtH44olagOSgbhB0STybjXKaUSVxNdF
"