The Tree of Man

THE TREE OF MAN (1955)

Frederick McCubbin, The Pioneer

“In the end, there was no end.”

Plot: In the days before WWI, Stan Parker inherits a piece of land in the bush, not just empty but isolated too. He clears the land, builds his own shack, and woos a girl in the town, Amy. Their lives pass by in never-ending routine, as their home becomes a settlement which becomes a community. The pair experience flood and fire, love and loss, ageing, hopes false and successful, neighbourhood rivalry, and much in between. The Parkers have two children – Thelma and Ray – and Amy finds her fantasies gradually falling: Stan is a good man but not perfect, the wealthy woman she idolises turns out to be little more than the rest of them, and World War I takes Stan away, leaving Amy to seek solace elsewhere.

Thelma moves to the city, finding career, marriage and wealth as well as a child. Ray is a wild young man who only causes trouble, and who leaves one night to find his fortune. Until finally, Stan Parker must ask himself what all of this means. Father, mother and grandson ponder the ordinariness of life … and also what they have found along the way.

Editions:

  • Viking (US, August 1955, 499pp, reprinted at least 5 times)
  • Macmillan (Canada, August 1955)
  • Books Abridged, Inc. (Abridged edition, 1955 (date unconfirmed))
  • Eyre & Spottiswoode (UK, April 1956, 499pp, reprinted at least 3 times)
  • Kiepenheuer & Witsch (Germany, 1957, “Zur Ruhe kam der Baum des Menschen nie“, trans: Heinrich & Annemarie Böll [reissued as “Der Baum des Menschen”])
  • Penguin Modern Classics (1961, reprinted at least 20 times)
  • Statne Nakladetelstvi Krasne Literarny a Umeni (Czech Republic, 1962, “Lidsky Strom”, trans: Josef Pospisil)
  • Pyramid Books (US 1966)
  • Bonniers (Sweden, 1970, “Livets Träd”, trans: Magnus Karlsson Lindberg)
  • Magveto (Hungary, 1972, “Az elet faja”, trans: Endre Vajda)
  • Dom Quixote (Portugal, 1973, “A arvore do homem”, trans: Cardigos dos Reis [reissued by Circulo do Livro for Brazilian market])
  • Jonathan Cape (1974)
  • Avon Books (US 1975)
  • Plaza & Janes (Spain, 1976, “El arbol del hombre”, trans: Alvaro Castillo)
  • Progress (Russia, 1976, “Drevo chelovecheskoe” [Древо человеческое], trans: N.K. Treneva)
  • Zarbanos (Greece, 1976, “To dentro tou anthropou”, trans: K. Galanopoulou & B. Kantsane)
  • Department of Continuing Education (Audiobook, 1976, read by Brian Matthews)
  • Vaga (Lithuania, 1980, “Gyvenimo medis”, trans: Lilija Vanagiene)
  • Australian Listening Library (Audiobook, 1981, read by Wal Durbin)
  • Editura Univers (Romania, 1981, “Copacul Omului”, trans: Leontina Moga)
  • Kirjastus (Estonia, 1983, “Inimeste puu”, trans: Vilma Jurisalu)
  • Svoboda (Czech Republic, 1984, “Strom zivota”, trans: Antonin Pridal)
  • Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy (Poland, 1985, “Drzewo czlowiecze”, trans: Maria Skibniewska)
  • Visiting Teacher Service for Visually Impaired Children (Audiobook, 1987)
  • Nha Xuat Ban Van Hoc (Vietnam, 1987, “Cay nguoi”, trans: Hoang Tuy & Manh Chu’o’ng)
  • Royal Blind Society of NSW (Audiobook, 198?, read by Frank Knowles)
  • NSW St Edmund’s School for Blind and Visually Handicapped Students (Audiobook, 199?, read by Frank Kearns)
  • Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind (Audiobook, 198?, read by Reg MacDonald)
  • Qingdao (China, 1990, “人树“, trans: Li Yao)
  • Eulyoo (South Korea, 1992, “인간의나무. 상“, trans: Yong-chi Kim)
  • Penguin (1993, Twentieth-Century Classics)
  • Vintage (UK 1994)
  • Louis Braille Audio (Audiobook, 1998, read by James Condon)
  • Queensland Braille Writing Association (Braille edition, date unknown)
  • Vintage (AU 2009)
  • Atlas (Netherlands, 2012, “De Lotgevallen Van Een Pionier”, trans: Guido Goluke)
  • Nhà Xuất Bản Hội Nhà Văn (Vietnam, 2017, “Cây Người : Tiểu Thuyết“, trans: Hoang Tuy & Manh Chu’o’ng)
  • Bolinda (Audiobook, 2019, read by Humphrey Bower)

Original price: US $4.59  // UK: 18s  // Paperback reissue: 7/6

Awarded: ALS Gold Medal, 1956

Dedication: To Manoly

Epitaph

(none, but on the jacket):

There, like the wind through woods in rot,

Through him the gale of life blew high…

The tree of man was never quiet:

Then ‘twas the Roman, now ‘tis I.

–A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

History: PW began the novel, with a working title of A Life Sentence on Earth, while living at the property on Dogwoods in 1950. This was a slow, infrequent type of writing, exemplifying the difference between his former life – as a “bright young thing” in London society – and his current role as a quiet small farmer, partner, and refugee from war-torn Europe. Leaving the draft aside for months at a time, PW finally developed motivation in 1953, changing the book’s title and delivering the final typescript to Viking in 1954.

The novel was a simplification of his earlier style, with “no plot, except the only one of living and dying”. PW felt this book had to encompass all of life; it was a reflection on everything he had given up – Europe and the USA, and the world elsewhere. The Tree of Man feels like an author making peace with his decision to ‘settle down’ in every sense: a committed relationship, real roots in the form of home and dogs, of neighbours and a local profile, and a life which had finally taken the set direction his life after a chameleon youth. 

I wanted to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary”

Marr, p. 285

I felt that life was, on the surface, so dreary, ugly, monotonous, there must be something hidden in it to give it a purpose, and so I set out to find a secret core, and The Tree of Man emerged.”

Marr, p. 284

Ben Huebsch of Viking loved the book instantly, and PW’s relationship with his US publisher was assured. However his former UK publisher, Routledge, no longer had an interest in publishing literary fiction, and numerous other British publishers, such as Victor Gollancz, believed the manuscript to be 25% too long, if they considered it at all. Finally, through Huebsch’s direct intervention, White signed with Eyre & Spottiswoode in the UK. They were late to the party, publishing eight months after the Americans.

Sales: US critics championed the novel almost without exception; The Tree of Man made the front page of the New York Times Book Review. The book sold 10,000 copies in the US in the first fortnight, followed by another 6,000 which apparently was a disappointment given the book’s promise, but still seems good for literary writing at the time. PW earned a $1,000 advance on this. The novel was apparently the subject of a television programme in Chicago in 1956, using the old “professors debate live on air” formula.

The response from UK critics was, to quote Hubber and Smith, “positive but not so enthusiastic”. The first UK print run was 20,000 – literally 5 times the print run of the previous UK book, and reprinted with at least 10,000 more.

In Australia, the book sold through its first printing of 8,000 copies. Reviewers in PW’s home country were largely laudatory, although A.D. Hope made his mark with his infamous, brutal review, as quoted below. In an interview in 1956, PW reflected on the reviews: “They have been raised in an an age of Reason. Mysticism frightens them, religion frightens them… If it hadn’t been for the Americans, I would have felt like putting my head in a gas oven.”

The Tree of Man has been translated into at least 20 languages. The legacy of high literature can be cruel, however: in 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the book had only sold 464 copies over the previous decade.

Notes: The novel combines realist imagery (the early sequences on the farm are routinely compared to a Tom Roberts painting) with the techniques of symbolism and stream-of-consciousness. But this is also very conscious stream-of-consciousness: that is, the reader can follow the thought patterns of the narrator with obvious signposts, as opposed to having to connect the unconscious dots, as in a Joyce novel or, for that matter, The Aunt’s Story. Mark Williams feels The Tree of Man achieves: “a direct, passionate and morally serious rendering of lived actuality.”

Reviews:

  • Charles J Rolo, The Atlantic, 1/7/1955
  • Kirkus Review, 1/8/1955:
    • “There is much to be commended in the universality of concept, the basic human values, the inherent drama of life in the raw. But for me the characters remained conceptions rather than fulfillments:- Stan Parker, throughout his life span was the inarticulate, awkward, sensitive youth growing into manhood and old age, virtually unchanged; Amy, the orphan girl he took as his wife, was never convincingly the frustrated lusty woman he has made her, despite her yearnings and ultimate fall… The community itself comes alive only in disaster- and even then the women remain observers, not participants- a far cray from Richter’s creation… It is a strange story, redeemed by compassion, but rarely allowing the reader full participation in its oddly detached emotional values. The style is erratic, uneven, occasionally derivative from the early Faulkner.”
  • Walter Havighurst, “Pioneer down under”, Saturday Review 13/8/1955
  • James Stern, “The Quiet People of the Homestead”, New York Times Book Review, 14/8/55,
    • “Almost all novels are transients, very few remain on, permanent residents of the mind…From these rare works of literature characters emerge better known than our most intimate friends, for every human being has a secret life, one unknown to all but himself and which he takes with him to the grave… To reveal in a novel this life (which is that of the soul)… is not only the prime function of the novelist, but the artist’s greatest ambition – and surely his rarest achievement… Only in retrospect is the magnitude of this feat fully realised. Not until, with a sense of wonder and profound satisfaction, the novel had been laid aside… The novel grows a little the way nature grows…Many passages in this novel are as rich in humour as pages of Joyce’s Ulysses, as tragi-comic as the early plays of O’Casey. A tireless work of art from which no essential element of life has been omitted.”
  • William Bittner, “A first rate novel from Australia”, The Post magazine section 14/8/1955:
    • “The Thomas Hardy of Australia…Anyone would be a fool not to read this book carefully, running the excellent prose over his tongue and squeezing the meaning from every last nuance.”
  • Fanny Butcher, Chicago Sunday Tribune, 14/8/1955
  • Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune, 15/8/1955:
    • [The novel is] “sure-footed, with a deep sense of the rhythm of the seasons and of the inexorableness of age… Mr. White is a poet as well as a novelist. His aim is to articulate the wordless passions of the inarticulate and his success is remarkable… It is expressed in poetic imagery reminiscent of the King James Version in vigor and aptness.”
  • Taliaferro Boatwright, “The rich stuff of life in a fine Australian novel”, Herald Tribune 14/8/55:
    • “It is a beautifully burnished novel. Its Australian idiom is piquant rather than obscure… In concept, theme and execution it is a monumental work, and the world it creates is far broader and more meaningful…Certainly it is one of the finest novels to have come to us out of Australia.
  • T. Francis Smith, Library Journal 15/8/1955
  • Orville Prescott, New York Times 15/8/55:
    • “A majestic and impressive work of genuine art that digs more deeply into the universal experience of human living than all save a few great books.”
  • Theodore Kalem, “Australian with a Hoe”, Time 15/8/55 [Pacific edition]:
    • The novel “becomes a kind of endurance test”
  • Jane Voiles, San Francisco Chronicle, 26/8/55
  • Booklist, 15/9/1955
  • Riley Hughes, Catholic World, 10/1955
  • New Yorker, 29/10/1955
  • Bookmark, 11/1955
  • Stanley Cooperman, Nation, 5/11/1955
  • Seymour Krum, Commonweal, 9/12/1955
  • Peter Quennell, “Mr White’s tree has firm roots”, Daily Mail, 19/4/1956
  • Geoffrey Hutton, “A Poet at Loose on Cow Cockies”, The Age, 12/5/1956
    • Hutton criticised PW for yet again not writing the Great Australian Novel, that in fact it was pleasing to foreign authors only because they didn’t get Australia, and perhaps even they were overestimating PW because they didn’t know Australian literature.
  • Books and Bookmen, 26/5/1956:
    • “A work of considerable importance. How impressive a novel it is… the greatest novel written by an Australian.”
  • “Fine Australian novel emerges”, West Australian, 2/6/1956
  • A.D. Hope, “The Bunyip Stages a Comeback”, SMH, 16/6/1956
    • [Hope loved to be a luddite. He hated Joyce and Lawrence, and found the prose of this novel “fancy”.]

He tries to write a novel as though he were writing poetry, and lyric poetry at that. It is one of the delusions of our time that novels can be written in this way… He cannot simply say that a man was thirsty. It has to be “…his ordinarily moist and thoughtful mouth, fixed in the white scales of thirst.”…When so few Australian novelists can write prose at all, it is a great pity to see Mr. White, who shows on every page some touch of the born writer, deliberately choose as his medium this pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge.”

  • On 21/6/1956, an A. Seitz wrote to the SMH to say that the criticism “saddened” him, because it was really a “personal attack on the author… I feel that his eagle eye is more concerned with context than concept, and that his heart is a little too lacking in warmth to recognise either ‘greatness’ or the bunyip. Tree of Man towers high above this particular assessment of it. The book has made a tremendous impact on me and those of my friends who have had an opportunity to read it. It is the average people like ourselves who will ultimately decide its measure of greatness. Meanwhile, it is a book to read, live with, and thoroughly enjoy.”
    • Another correspondent on the same day, R. Marsden, rather slyly accused Hope of being the bunyip himself, and argued that critics were growing at the expense of actual writers.
    • On 25/6/1956, a Raymond Fisher joined in to defend Hope against Seitz, alleging both that Hope is one of the “very few non-provincial critics” not afraid to tell the truth, and also that average people very often take their opinions from “important literary figures”, and are less likely to detect masterpieces at all.
    • A decade later, on 5/3/1966 in the SMH, Hope re-evaluated his position, and postied that White shouldn’t have been so upset. “I wasn’t at all savage about it. I thought it rather a nice book. I just thought he deserved a good smack over that chopped-up prose style of his.”
  • John Hetherington, Age, 19/6/1956
  • H.J. Oliver, “The Expanding Novel”, Southerly 17.3 (1956):
    • “It was a remarkable experience to find in America at Christmas last year that one of the books given pride of place in most displays of fiction was an Australian novel, The Tree of Man… I cannot think of any living Australian novelist who could equal Patrick White’s achievement…But what was it that Ernest Hemingway said about prose not becoming literature simply by the injection of a ‘false epic quality’?…only when a phrase or clause is particularly significant can it be allowed to stand as a complete sentence without wilful disregard of ordinary syntax…[however] they do say that even Homer sometimes nodded.”
  • Max Harris, “An Australian Faulkner?”, Sydney Voice 5.7, July-August 1956
  • Patrick Coady, Quadrant, 1.1 (Summer 1956-57):
    • “At its best, it is beautiful, catching, transforming, and reflecting life, changing and colouring the crude and the ugly… But a prism can distort: occasionally the brief sentence structure breaks down; words lose meaning, inferences lose clarity… Mr. White is not a realist – he does not give a photographer’s picture of life, but that of the artist. He softens a feature here, blocks another one out altogether, puts in a highlight somewhere else. His completed image is made from isolated parts – we cannot see its proper shape until the whole is completed. At times, the incidents of the plot appear disjointed, lacking form and direction; some parts seem to be overemphasized, others lack credibility… Nevertheless… this novelist looks at life from a certain perspective; the angle of his vision determines the picture that he sees.”
  • Landfall, 12/1956
  • Robert Martin Adams, The Hudson Review, vol 8, 1956:
    • The novel “succeeds so perfectly in what it undertakes that one can’t easily assess its real significance… The whole story is told without manners, without episodes, without morals, without conflicts, and for the most part without characters. Its prose is ungainly, naive, occasionally poetic, but mostly devoted with unfaltering persistence to the simple declarative sentence. Sometimes this simple declarative sentence is broken down for extra emphasis into the simple subordinate clause…The remarkable thing is that, with all these limitations, the novel does succeed in building up, almost hydraulically, a kind of hypnotic pressure.”
  • Douglas Stewart, The Bulletin, 18/7/1956:
    • “What on earth is one to make of a novel so massive, so impressive, so baffling and in some respects so maddening?…For quite a number of years readers of Happy Valley… have been speaking in awed tones of the influence of James Joyce and the possible arrival of a major Australian novelist… [The Tree of Man] is an ambitious project and it is carried through, in many respects, triumphantly. Why, then, is the novel baffling?… His style is, for one thing, wholly bad. At nearly all points of action when it is vitally important that he should be clear, he is foggy…. And why, on the other hand, when Mr. White is not trying to be obscure, must he be so painfully, so baby-clear?… But Mr. White writes his bad prose so painstakingly, and with such hints of possible excellence, that one has no doubt that he could write well if he chose. His knowledge of human nature in general, though the individual characters are not striking, is everywhere manifest. And… The Tree of Life, for all its length, is remarkably tight, compact, and to the point. If he has not written the Great Australian Novel this time, Mr. White may very well write one of our great novels as soon as he stops trying to.”
  • Vance Palmer, ABC Radio Current Books, 29/7/1956
  • Kenneth Slessor, “Novelist and his tree – Patrick White’s triumph”, Sydney Sun 15/8/1956:
    • “A timeless work of art”.
  • Erik de Mauny, The London Magazine, 3.9 (September 1956)
  • Mary Durack, “Only Time Will Tell”, Westerly 1.1 (1957)
  • Hubert Becher, Stimmen der Zeit, 1957
  • Der Mittag, 1/1/1958
  • Charles Osborne, BBC World of Books 28/10/1961
  • Charles Osborne, London Magazine, 11/2/1963

Quotes:

Parents and children: “Affection is less difficult than love.”

““She would have liked to love. It was terrible to think she had never loved her son as a man. Sometimes her hands would wrestle together. They were supple, rather plump hands, broad and not yet dry. But wrestling like this together, they were papery and dried-up. Then she would force herself into some deliberate activity or speak tenderly to her good husband, offering him things to eat, and seeing to his clothes. She loved her husband. Even after the drudgery of love she could still love him. But sometimes she lay on her side and said, I have not loved him enough, not yet, he has not seen the evidence of love. It would have been simpler if she had been able to turn and point to the man their son, but she could not.”’

Adaptations:

Film

Filmmaker Boris Cook was interested in making a film on The Tree of Man in 1962, to no avail (Bulletin 12/5/1962, p. 4). Michael LeMoignan wrote a screenplay first draft in August 1982 with Larry Lucas. They later considered turning it into a miniseres, but their application was rejected by the Australian Film Corporation on April 1, 1986 (see NLA notes). In the late 1980s, theatre director Neil Armfield was considering directing a film adaptation with producer Margaret Fink. To date, nothing has happened.

Radio

Michael LeMoignan and Larry Lucas wrote a 42-episode radio adaptation (in 10 minute episodes), which aired on ABC Radio starting on 28/7/1983 with Peter Whitford and Judy Farr in the lead roles, narrated by Ron Haddrick.

Music

Colin Spiers composed a piece for tenor and piano, 18 minutes and 30 seconds, entitled “The Day of Death and Dreams”, adapting a passage from the final chapter of the novel, in 1989. It was written for the tenor Gregory Massingham and was reportedly one of Spiers’ favourites of his own work.

Steve Wood composed a 3-minute song for tenor and piano, “The Tree of Man”, registered with the Australian Music Centre in 2002. Credited as “words by Patrick White and Steve Wood”. However Wood later realised that the text was actually excerpts from A Shropshire Lad, the A.E. Housman poem quoted in the novel.

Carl Vine wrote an 11-minute cantata for soprano and strings, “The Tree of Man”, with Daniele de Niese singing the première in 2012 with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Also published in 1955: J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey; D’Arcy Niland, The Shiralee; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Ivy Compton-Burnett, Mother and Son; Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley; James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

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