The size of a soul
In his new collection of essays, Australian writer Tim Winton maps the territories of his heart.
In his new collection of essays, Australian writer Tim Winton maps the territories of his heart.
In the faded photograph on the cover of his new memoir, The Boy Behind the Curtain, a five-year-old Tim Winton is perched behind his father on the back of a policeman’s motorbike. The young boy wears a troubled expression. On the line from Western Australia, Winton says he is struck by that serious little face, and wonders what was going on for him the moment the image was captured. He looks as if he has the whole world in his eyes. Winton says he was “an intense little boy”. Intense? At five? “I had a lot of ideas,” he says.
Ideas, it seems, have always led Winton into trouble. By his own affectionate definition, he grew up in a class considered “just above scum”. Not many people he knew finished high school, let alone went to university. But by 24, Winton had published two books: An Open Swimmer and the acclaimed Shallows, winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. He laughs as he remembers how his friends called him a “freak”, but it never occurred to him that he wouldn’t pursue a career as a writer. Only now does he conclude it was a “rare trajectory”.
“When I look back, I see that I was a freak. I don’t have any pride in that; it’s more wonder, really. If you’re the one in a little country town, as I have been most of my life, who does something different, you’re always going to be the town weirdo.”
Like his 2015 love letter to Australia’s landscape, Island Home, The Boy Behind the Curtain is a collection of essays, but it feels even more personal, as Winton maps the shape of his life and examines his internal landscape, the territories of his heart.
“I’ve gotten to an age where I can afford to look over my shoulder a bit, especially having spent so long going hard and pushing on.”
Winton says the incentive for such hard work – he produced a staggering eight books between 1982 and 1992 – was “keeping the wolf from the door … In my twenties, I was going hell for leather. Some of that was through pure excitement, some was fear of dropping the ball – financial anxiety, having to keep working. I’d just got married, my wife was 20, I was 21. A year or two after that, we had a baby. I was just going hard to keep things together.”
For the work of a writer who admits to being “fetishistic about privacy”, The Boy Behind the Curtain is surprisingly personal. Many of the pieces have appeared in publications before, but new stories illuminate a different side of Winton. In “Twice on Sunday”, he writes of growing up in an evangelical fundamentalist church. “Given that some of us did Sunday school, pastoral visitation on the Sabbath and church, the twice-on-Sundays label probably sold us short.”
In a hilarious and touching family history, Winton details the long days of singing, Bible school, mischief-making and prayer. It’s unexpected for an author known for his earthy, pragmatic characters, a writer grounded in wry truths and idiosyncratic Australian behaviour, but for Winton, church is the place he had his first communion with words.
“Language, I was to discover, is nutrition, manna without which we’re bereft
and forsaken, consigned like Moses and his restive entourage to wander in a sterile wilderness.”
The exposure to themes of redemption and salvation, couched in “grandiose language” has cast a long shadow over his fiction.
“One thing I have learnt from a lifetime of writing is that metaphor is central.
And it’s central to religious belief; [if] you go looking for literal things, you’ll find nothing.”
Being exposed to the wonder of that broad canon of ideas gave Winton not only a creative but a moral compass. Without that mysticism and magic, he reckons, there’s “not much ideology to embrace”.
“Whether things are more disenchanted since I was in my twenties, I can’t say. There was a period post-1968 where a whole generation were essentially trashing their own tradition. To see young people finding there’s not much at the end of the revolution except more shopping … I suspect there’s a search for re-enchantment now.”
The seeds of characters such as the preternaturally wise Ort Flack in Winton’s That Eye, The Sky (1984) reveal themselves in “Twice on Sundays”. It was in church that an intense boy could ask the burning questions. At one point, six-year-old Tim asks a church elder what the size of his soul is. Balling the boy’s hand into a fist against his little chest, the elder says he reckons it’s about that size.
“I thought about how sometimes my spirit ached like the aftermath of a sucker punch, burning right there where old George Smith had his hand and mine, like a thump in the chest whose afterglow left the feel and shape of a fist. And so this answer rang true.”
Winton has grown away from the church of his childhood, but he often writes of the wonder and raw expanse of nature. Has he found a new church to worship at? “I’m with [William] Blake,” he says. “‘For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.’”
Winton, perhaps more than any other Australian author, brings the environment bursting into vivid life in his novels. “When I’m writing a story, the place comes first,” he says. “The ecological logic of the situation produces the people, and the people produce the story.”
In The Boy Behind the Curtain, several essays detail the writer’s love for the sea, especially surfing – a pastime with which he is virtually synonymous. Indeed, our conversation begins with Winton chuckling, “I’m hoping to get this [interview] out of the way so I can go for a surf.”
In “The Wait and the Flow”, he describes how he briefly gave up surfing, because the culture was becoming occupied by aggressive men. “I gave up and walked away for shame. I put on a mask and snorkel. It was quiet and solitary under water.”
Masculinity is a recurring theme. Many of the men in Winton’s stories struggle to articulate their feelings. In his 2013 novel Eyrie, protagonist Tom Keely is emotionally defeated, but finds salvation in a relationship with a vulnerable boy.
“I was lucky in the sense that I grew up in a family that wasn’t traditionally patriarchal. The thing that has really disturbed me is the way that men, and many women, have settled for men being emotional infants. That’s frightening.”
Winton talks about expression as a form of liberation. “It’s when people can express their feelings that they’re saved from themselves and other people are saved from them.”
This, he says, goes back to being a child with a rifle at the window, referring to the opening essay, which gives the book its title. At age 12, fascinated by his father’s rifle, he would sneak it from its hiding place and stand behind the net curtain, taking aim at passers-by – an act Winton says was fuelled by displacement and anxiety.
“We’d moved into a strange town. I was at high school for the first time, not knowing anybody. The old man was a copper – that marked you out as different. We were from the city; we were called ‘Perthlings’. So there I was, defending myself and my family psychologically from the outside world, standing at the window pointing a rifle at people.”
It could have gone very wrong; Winton says “the burden of trust” placed on him by his parents and his gradually settling into his new life are the reasons he eventually put the gun away. Later, Winton would use this scene in his short story collection The Turning.
Collisions and accidents, the way you get “T-boned by life”, signpost Winton’s narrative. A car accident that almost took his father’s life left an indelible mark on the author at age five.
“I was old enough to be conscious of some of what my mother was going through. Facing the prospect of being a woman who wasn’t quite a widow, with the body still in the bed next to her, that kind of trauma – I guess I imbibed it the way a dog would imbibe the feeling in the room. You just soak it up through the skin.”
Winton was 18 and in his first year at university when he had his own brush with death. On the way home from a party, getting a ride with friends, “we managed to drive through the front wall of an Anglican girls’ school”. Winton awoke in hospital “a bit of a mess, and in the wake of that I was never quite physically the same again”.
After the accident, his plans to finance his budding writing career with labouring work foundered. “I had to make writing everything in terms of a vocation. I was compelled in a peculiar way and maybe I was gifted in a peculiar way, but I certainly was constrained by that accident.”
Luck? Fate? Perhaps the answer comes back to what he learnt in church.
“If the soul is anything, it’s that little locus of consciousness and feeling.
And the feeling is very important – it’s something that’s burning within you. It’s all your hopes and dreams and anxieties, and all your awe and fear and capacity for wonder that churns in you.”
So does Winton still hold with old George Smith’s take on the size of a soul?
“Yeah, I’m still pretty satisfied with his answer.”
“The thing that has really disturbed me is the way that men, and many women, have settled for men being emotional infants.”