Riders in the Chariot

John Brack, Two Typists (1955)

“I would like to persuade you that the simple acts we have learnt to perform daily are the best protection against evil.”

Plot: Four souls in suburbia are each deeply lonely. Miss Mary Hare is a slightly unhinged spinster living in Xanadu, her crumbling mansion in a suburb that is becoming overrun by time, haunted by her housekeeper Mrs Jolley, a figure of everyday evil. Mordecai Himmelfarb is Miss Hare’s neighbour, a Jewish refugee from WWII whose intellectual powers are suppressed by his economic need to work in a bicycle lamp factory. Alf Dubbo is an Aboriginal painter separated from others by his race and his strange, preternatural artistic abilities, who is already on a downhill spiral when we meet him, a victim of abuse and fear. And then there’s Mrs Godbold, a working-class washerwoman who is a simple and good soul in amongst all the noise.

The four figures reflect upon their lives and the forced attempts at integration: Alf can’t integrate because of his skin colour, his history of abuse, and his visionary skills that set him apart from everyday humanity; Mordecai could let go of himself (there is precedent among his acquaintances) but it would mean letting go of the religious and cultural values he is attempting to preserve after the horrors of genocide; Miss Hare is too far gone mentally to integrate, ruined by her upbringing and her stained reputation; and Mrs Godbold is in some way already integrated: she gives all for her family and those around her, but even then her goodness leaves her standing apart.

All of them see the chariot, the symbol of their revelation, the sign that they have been chosen.

Editions:

• Viking (US, October 1961, 532pp)
• Eyre & Spottiswoode (UK, October 1961, 552pp)
• Macmillan (Canada, 1961)
• Penguin (AU, 1964)
• Gallimard (France, Le Char des Elus trans: Suzanne Nétillard)
• Pyramid Books (US, 1966)
• Kiepenheuer & Witsch (Germany, Die im feurigen Wagen, 1969, trans: Curt and Maria Prerauer)
• Avon Books (US, 1975)
• Jonathan Cape (UK, 1976)
• Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind (Audiobook, 1983, read by Kathleen Baker)
• Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind (Audiobook, 198?, reader unknown)
• Penguin (AU, 1993)
• Vintage (UK, 1994)
• NYRB (US, 2002, introduction by David Malouf)
• Blind Foundation of Auckland (Audiobook, 2010, read by Elizabeth McRae)
• Bolinda (Audiobook, 2019, read by Deidre Rubenstein)

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Epigraph:

“The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer’d, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.”

I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he answer’d, ‘the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the North American tribes practise, & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience. only for the sake of present ease or gratification?’

— From Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

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History: After writing two massive novels dealing with Australia’s history, PW’s life in suburbia was beginning to seem overwhelming. He transitioned, for the first time, into a story about contemporary Australia. This became the first of his stories set in “Sarsaparilla”, as he nicknamed the fictional version of his Castle Hill. As he wrote the novel, PW was watching semi-rural Castle Hill become encroached by the suburbs of Sydney. The growth of houses that would one day take over the area around his beloved Dogwoods is a transition reflected in the novel’s final pages. This was also the final novel PW would write while living in Castle Hill, before he and Manoly made the move toward inner Sydney.

PW saw a painting Apollo’s Chariot by Odilon Redon, which Alf Dubbo finds in the book. Late in the writing process, he listened to Berg’s Concerto for Wind Instruments. He also listened to Bach, especially the Christmas Oratorio and the B Minor Mass, and some Bruckner symphonies. PW saw the novel as “a cantata for four voices… An expression… of faith by four different people, connected more by a similarity of aim than by the intertwining of their lives… [A]ll four are spiritually united in one shattering final incident… All faiths, whether religious [Himmelfarb], humanistic [Miss Hare], instinctive [Godbold], or the creative artist’s act of praise [Alf], are in fact one.” He was especially concerned about making Alf’s creative genius “strong and convincing enough”, a focus he would return to in 1970 with The Vivisector.

“Goats are perhaps the animals which see the truth most clearly.”

Notes: Haïm Rosenbaum, who rejects his Jewishness to become Harry Rosetree, was based on PW’s friend Fritz Krieger. Krieger denied his own Judaism, an action White deemed inauthentic, and which became one of the thorns which led to the end of their friendship. Mrs Jolley is based on Mrs Lumsden, a housekeeper who briefly looked after PW and ML when they first moved into Dogwoods. Xanadu is partly based on Kirkham (now Camelot), south of Sydney, a great house built by PW’s ancestor James White, a NSW politician in the late 19^th century .

The central evil of the novel, as David Marr notes, is the persecution of the weak by the strong – obviously the Holocaust but also the oppressive everyday persecution of suburbia. This latter type is reflected in the culturally “normal” oppressing those who are different or diverse, leading to mob mentality (the crucifixion of Himmelfarb), an inability to recognise genius (reactions to Alf’s paintings), suppresses kindness (those around Mrs Godbold) or flatly rejects human compassion in favour of judgement (Mrs Jolley).

Publication: The novel was excerpted in Australian Letters 3.3 (March 1961) and Meanjin 20.1 (April 1961). Riders in the Chariot was the first time PW had existing publishers on both sides of the Atlantic who were keen to publish his next work, and the reviews were almost uniformly positive this time around. Riders rectified the complaint of some critics about PW’s tendency toward “historical” fiction, while providing perhaps more signposts for interpretation to the ordinary reader than the vast canvas of Voss.

To many critics, Riders is an allegory of the quest for enlightenment and revelation in the most ordinary of circumstances. A dissenting voice was Dame Leonie Kramer, a literary warhorse whom PW saw as an enemy. In her opinionated article Patrick White’s Götterdämmerung, Kramer argued that PW was attacking the mysticism rather than embracing it, that the chariot is deliberately unconvincing compared to his realist exploration of suburban squalor, to assert the importance of secular humanism over the transcendent. Other critics, among them Alan Lawson and Mark Williams, have pushed back on this, arguing that White remains at a remove so as to allow ironic, contradictory interpretations of the situation, but is not deliberately attempting to deflate his own moments of ecstasy.

Sales: The novel was a literary bestseller in the UK and Australia (with jacket design by Sidney Nolan), selling over 24,000 hardback copies, including 9,500 in Australia. In the US, critics were respectful, even joyous about the book, but it sold a modest 8,000 copies in hardback. Although the novel would do well in paperback reissues (30,000 copies in the Penguin edition during the 1960s alone), it was already becoming clear that, to Americans especially, PW was a literary author, not a commercial one.

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Reviews:

• Frederic W. Binns, Library Journal (1/10/1961)
• Kirkus Reviews, 1/10/1961:
  • “This book is an allegory, which will mean different things to different readers. At times the rhythmic flow of the prose has a touch of Dylan Thomas’ poetry- and like that is often confused, abstruse, difficult. Certainly not everyone’s meat.”
• Brad Darrach, Time, 6/10/1961
• Prescott, New York Times, 6/10/1961:
  • Positive but “it desperately needs an ending”.
• James Stern, New York Times Book Review, 8/10/1961
  • “Has there ever been, one wonders, a like work of literature?” – a positive comment.
• John K. Hutchens, NY Herald Trib,une 6/10/1961
• Time “The logorrhealist”, 6/10/1961
• David Dempsey, Saturday Review, 7/10/1961
• Melvin Maddocks, Christian Science Monitor, 13/10/1961
• Max Harris, Sydney Nation, 21/10/1961
• Elizabeth Riddell, Sunday Mirror, 22/10/1961
• Daniel George, Daily Telegraph, 27/10/1961
• Jeremy Brooks, “A modern classic”, Guardian, 27/10/1961
• Charles Osborne, BBC World of Books, 28/10/1961
• Charles Higham, SMH, 28/10/1961:
  • “Mr. White’s  unblinking analysis of philistinism and the physical ugliness which surrounds us in the modern world remains the book’s most immediately striking feature… Much of the book is high comedy, illuminated by some of the finest idiomatic dialogue ever written in Australia; the turns of phrase continually provoke laughter, which is soon stilted by some new and appalling revelation of human wickedness… In purpose, power and achievement, Riders in the Chariot dwarfs contemporary Australian fiction and, for me, reading it has been one of the great experiences of a lifetime. I know now something of what literary men felt when they first saw Hamlet, or slit open the pages of The Idiot on the first day of publication.”
• Angus Wilson, Observer 29/10/1961
• A. Alvarez, New Statesman 3/11/1961
• Bernard Bergonzi, Spectator 3/11/1961
• Dutton, “White’s Triumphal Chariot”, Australian Book Review, November 1961:
  • “[H]is most comprehensive achievement… This book should win White many new readers, and reassure a lot of old ones. The style, often found difficult in the earlier books, is just as individual but more perfectly modulated to experience, and the dialogue is much closer to contemporary idiom, especially where those cadences have been masterfully twisted to satirical ends… White’s primary achievement here is on a human level; he has loved those characters he can, and all too clearly understood those whom he has hated… White has a mind comprehensive and mature enough to go beyond bitterness, to give us the vision and the earth. This is a superb achievement  by a novelist we knew to be great but now find to be even greater.”
• Chris Wallace-Crabbe, “Crucifixion at Sarsaparilla”, Bulletin 25/11/1961:
  • “No other novelist in the country makes the kind of demands on our imagination that great novelists make; only White demands to be judged – even if it is to be judged harshly – against the highest standards… Riders in the Chariot is a powerful and impressive book. It seems more fully accomplished than any of its predecessors. There are faults, of course…but generally it shows a new degree of authority without relinquishing anything in ambitiousness… What we miss is the Jamesian ideal of maximum intensity with minimum strain.”
• L.M.R, “A master among novelists”, Canberra Times 25/11/1961
• Harry Heseltine, Meanjin 20.4, December 1961
• Alan Nicholls, The Age 9/12/1961
• Whitney Balliett, New Yorker 9/12/1961
• James McAuley, Quadrant 6.2, Autumn 1962
• O.N. Burgess, Australian Quarterly 34.1, March 1962
• David Bradley, “Australia through the looking glass”, Overland, April 1962

Quotes: “The rather scrubby, indigenous trees, not so much of interest to the eye as an accompaniment to states of mind, were at the moment behaving with docility, a certain, languid melancholy. (13)”

“Friendship is two knives”, said Miss Hare. “They will sharpen each other when rubbed together, but often one of them will slip, and slice off a thumb.” (104)

“Now [Miss Hare] recalled, with nostalgia, occasions when she had lost her identity in those of trees, bushes, inanimate objects, or entered into the minds of animals, of which the desires were unequivocal, and honest.” (104)

Miss Hare: “Goats are perhaps the animals which see the truth most clearly.” (380)

Miss Hare: “All bad things have a family resemblance, Mrs Jolley, and are easily recognisable. I would recognise Mrs Flack however often she changed her hat. I can smell her when you do not mention her by name.” (383)

Miss Hare: “Men usually decide to destroy for very feeble reasons. Oh, I know from experience! It can be the weather, or boredom after lunch. They will torture almost to death someone who has seen into them. Even their own dogs.” (396)

Himmelfarb: “I would like to persuade you that the simple acts we have learnt to perform daily are the best protection against evil.” (397)

The boy Alf explains his abstract blotches:

Mrs Pask: “What are these peculiar objects, or fruit – are they? – hanging on your tree?… They must mean something., Mrs Pask insisted.”
“Those”, he said, then, “are dreams.”
He was ashamed though.
“Dreams! But there is nothing to indicate that they are any such thing. Just a shape. I should have said mis-shapen kidneys!”
So that he was put to worse shame.
“That is because they have not been dreamt yet.”, he uttered slowly.

“The Train rocked and grumbled, and communicated to his still passive body something of the night of desolation. The plastic ladies, of course, had been too pastel to last, and faded out with afternoon. At night it was the men who prevailed and rumbled in the train. The facts that they were exchanging might have sounded brutal if they had not already been worn down by the users: by the thin, copper-coloured blokes, and the bluish, pursy ones, bursting with hair like the slashed upholstery in trains. As they rocked, there was a smell of peanuts, and wet paper bags, and beer, and tunnels.” (510)

“No man is better than another. It was still early days when Australians found that out. You may say we talk about it a lot, but you can’t expect us not to be proud of what we have invented, so to speak. Remember that.” (543)

“Although nobody watched, everybody saw.” (545)

“Because, he saw, with widening horror, it was his nature to betray.” (567)

“If she had been worthy of notice, Mrs Godbold’s simplicity might have become proverbial.” (626)

“Time had broken into a mosaic much that had seemed complete, obsessive, actual, painful. Now she could approach her work of living, as an artist, after an interval, will approach and judge his work of art.” (642)

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Adaptations:

In 1994, Neil Armfield wanted to create an epic adaptation of Riders in the Chariot for theatre for Company B Belvoir, and it was announced to open in 1996. Sadly this does not appear to have happened. (The company staged Night on Bald Mountain that year instead.)

South African Rodney Stenning Edgebombe, who has written extensively on White, was working on a film script for Riders around the year 2002.

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