The Solid Mandala

Dorrit Black, The Lawn Mower (1930)

“There’s a truth above truth at times.”

Plot: Over the course of their lives, twin brothers Arthur and Waldo Brown witness world wars, a changing culture, and a bond which ties them together despite often mutual animosity in their lives at Terminus Road, Sarsaparilla. Arthur is a simpleton of sorts: childish but wise, he manages to find joy in the library even though he is slow of body and mind. Arthur’s good nature contrasts with Waldo, a repressed intellectual, determined to be a writer and convinced of the path of cold pragmatism. Waldo is ultimately a deeply bitter man, repressing his sexuality as much as everything else. While both the brothers seek solace and love, the joys and pains they find will ultimately be of the more mundane variety. Their twin natures counter each other and yet reinforce their inextricable bond.

Editions:

• Viking (US, Feb 1966, 309pp)
• Eyre & Spottiswoode (UK, May 1966, 317pp)
• Penguin (AU, 1968, 316pp – reprinted 9 times in 30 years)
• Gallimard (France, 1970 – Le mysterieux mandala, trans: Andree R Picard)
• Avon Books (US, 1975)
• Jonathan Cape (UK, 1976)
• Claassen (Germany, 1978: Die ungleichen Brueder, trans: Matthias Buttner)
• Penguin (AU, 1983)
• Penguin (AU, 1994)
• Vintage (1995)
• Association for the Blind of Western Australia (Audiobook, 1999, read by Maureen Taylor)
• Bolinda (Audiobook, 2019, read by Humphrey Bower)

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Awards: The novel won the Britannica Award 1966 but PW rejected it, having made a decision not to accept any further awards.  It was then planned to win the 1967 Miles Franklin which he also declined, saying that the award should go to one of the truly deserving newer novels of the year. This was the last time he would win any Australian literary awards.

Epigraphs:

There is another world but it is in this one. – Paul Eluard

‘It is not outside, it is inside: wholly within.’ – Meister Eckhart

‘. . . yet still I long for my twin in the sun . . .’ – Patrick Anderson

‘It was an old and rather poor church, many of the ikons were without settings, but such churches are the best for praying in.’ – Dostoevsky

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History: PW foresaw saw The Solid Mandala as “the last of the Sarsaparilla novels” – his suburban satires – when he began writing it in 1964, originally as a novella. The novel would indeed turn out to be the last such work, in part because PW began packing up the house at Dogwoods during this period to relocate to inner Sydney, whose tones and textures would make themselves known in his next two novels. PW found his rhythm quickly, completing the first draft by the end of 1964.

Notes: David Marr notes that Arthur brought back fond memories of PW’s cousin Peggy’s son, who had been on the spectrum and ended up in an asylum after a rough youth, but whose bursts of intellect had touched PW during his visit to the family in New Zealand. The mandala of the title is a sign of symmetry and of the perfection of life, of hidden messages which represent wholeness through harmony. The unsuccessful writer Waldo is PW’s least flattering portrait of an artist; he is another of the many people in PW’s fiction who are “dead”, that is, not engaged with life. Thelma Herring regarded Mandala as “less grand and ambitious in its design” than the previous PW novels but “enriched by a deeper warmth of understanding, a broader humanity.”

Publication: The novel was excerpted as “A Social Occasion” in Meanjin 24.1 (March 1965). The UK edition, with a cover by Desmond Digby – a young artist who had earned PW’s respect with his theatrical set designs of the author’s plays – sold moderately well, with 12,700 copies across the UK and Australia. But sales were far down from Riders in the Chariot, and PW became unhappy with his UK publishers Eyre & Spottiswoode, convinced they were not promoting the novel enough. A split between writer and publisher was all but assured. Still, the mixed appreciation of the novel in the Commonwealth was better than the 5,700 copies which sold, slowly, through Viking in the US; the novel did not earn back its advance there.

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Reviews:

• William Ready, Library Journal 15/1/1966
• A.A. Phillips, Meanjin 25.1 (1966)
• Alwyn Lee, Time, 11/2/1966:
  • A fiercely negative and powerful review
• Tony Tanner, London Magazine 6.3 (1966)
• J.D. Scott, NY Times Book Review, 13/2/1996
• H.P. Heseltine, Australian Book Review 5.5 (March 1966)
• Roderick Cook, Harper’s, March 1966
• Bernard Bergonzi, The NY Review of Books, 17/3/1966
• John McLaren, Overland 34 (1966)
• T.G. Rosenthal, ‘Ironic musings in moronic suburbia”, The Australian, 2/4/1966
• “Scrutarius”, Walkabout 32 (Oct 1966)
• Charles Higham, The Bulletin 14/5/1966:
  • “I do not share Mr White’s vision, and have to reach a long way to grasp it. That vision has seemed to me thinned out in some recent works. But here it again flourishes, in images of destruction that have haunted me for days. In a leaden period, when the novel is dominated by smart opportunists, this kind of pain in reading is most welcome and most rare.”
• Thelma Herring, Southerly 26.3 (1966)
• HG Kippax, SMH 14/5/1996:
  • “The full-length portrait of Waldo, impressionistic in technique, scarifying in its exposures of a self-regarding, mimetic, maimed life, is Mr. White’s finest comic characterisation, and this section of The Solid Mandala is his most sustained stretch of inventive and observant comic writing… Part Three (“Arthur”) seems to me to be among the marvels of modern literature.”
• Francis King, Sunday Telegraph (London), 15/5/1966
• Irving Wardle, Observer, 15/5/1966:
  • “[T]he book seems just the kind of coldly exhibitionistic thing that Waldo might have written”.
• Arthur Calder-Marshall, BBC Radio World of Books 17/5/1966
• Karl Miller, New Statesman 27/5/1996
• Kay Dick, The Spectator 25/5/1966
• Judith Barbour, Nation, 28/5/1966
• Neil Jillett, The Age 28/5/1966
• TLS, 9/6/1966
• Kirkus Reviews, June 1966
  • “The theme is interesting and its pursuit is patient; however, curiosity stops short of sympathy and the lack of involvement diminishes the power intended, particularly in the macabre finale.”

Also published in 1966: Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower; Peter Mathers, Trap; Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People; Truman Capote, In Cold Blood; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea.

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