Voss

VOSS (1957)

Tom Roberts, In a corner on the Macintyre (1895)

“But the old man could only laugh, because time did not exist.”

Plot: In Sydney Town, 1854, Johann Ulrich Voss, a German immigrant, recruits a team for an expedition into the interior of the great Australian continent, still largely unexplored by white people. Before setting out with his team, Voss gets to know his financier, Edward Bonner, and Bonner’s keen-eyed niece Laura Trevelyan. At last Voss sets out with his team northward toward the interior of the country, with the aim of reaching near what is now Darwin. Among them are the ex-convict Mr Judd, the determined Frank Le Mesurier, and a skinny ornithologist named Palfreyman, as well as a drunk, a boy, and two Aboriginal scouts. It is a voyage not just inland but, as David Marr puts it, “to the outer limits of the imagination”. Voss sees more than there is in the map, sometimes he sees in spite of the map. The expedition meets with drought and storm, menace and despair, abandonment by one of the scouts, and finally mutiny.

Back in Sydney Town, Laura and her cousin Belle deal with family dramas of their own. Yet there is a gulf between the vain young Belle and her intelligent, spiky cousin, who writes letters to Voss (he has promised, also, to write to her, but the mutiny of the team’s scout scuppers that plan). Although the pair have only met a couple of times, Laura and Voss communicate through visions and revelations, emotional vicissitudes, spiritual and psychological battles, and ultimately through a shared illness. In the desert, Voss continues writing letters he will never send, but his visionary determination gradually sets him at odds with his men, especially the clear-eyed Judd. When at last mutiny breaks out, Voss has lost Judd’s support. Helpless and rejected, he subsequently succumbs to disease.

In the city, Laura has to make her own choices. When her unmarried servant girl dies during labour, Laura adopts the child. Recovering from her illness, the young woman chooses to open a school rather than follow the more traditional path laid out by her aunt and uncle. Voss is missing, presumed dead. He is commemorated by those who knew him (and those who thought they did) but some questions will forever remain unanswered. As Judd, the survivor of the terrifying trek, tells Laura, the spirit of Voss has become one with the spirit of the land.

Editions:

  • Viking (US, August 1957, 442p)
  • Macmillan (Canada, 1957)
  • Eyre & Spottiswoode (UK, December 1957, 478pp)
  • Kiepenheuer & Witsch (Germany 1958, trans: John Stickforth)
  • Longmans (UK 1965, intro by HP Heseltine, with a glossary of Australian terms and of German words and phrases)
  • Penguin (UK 1960/AU 1974)
  • Gallimard (France 1967, trans: Lola Tranec)
  • Pyramid Books (US 1968)
  • Avon Books (US 1975)
  • Jonathan Cape (UK 1980)
  • Hear a Book (Audiobook, 1982, read by Ken Waters)
  • Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind (Audiobook, c. 1982, read by Peggy Dunphy)
  • Royal Blind Society of New South Wales (Audiobook, 1992, read by David Baldwin)
  • Vintage (UK 1994)
  • Penguin Classics (2009, introduction by Thomas Keneally)
  • Vintage (AU 2012)
  • Bolinda (Audiobook, 2019, read by Humphrey Bower)

Original price: US $5  // UK 18s

Awards: W.H. Smith and Son Literary Award [inaugural] for “most outstanding recent contribution to English literature” (1000 tax free pounds). // Miles Franklin Literary Award [inaugural] (500 pounds)

Dedication: For Marie d’Estournelles de Constant

Epigraph: None.

“His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.”

[Left: Prime Minister Robert Menzies and Leader of the Opposition HV Evatt with PW at the Miles Franklin Award ceremony, 1958.]

History: PW began planning this novel as early as 1942, while he was stationed in the Middle East. As so often, the novel existed in his mind for years before he commenced. PW continued to investigate the doomed 19th century explorer Ludwig Leichhardt when he moved back home. During bitter asthma attacks in 1954 he began seriously contemplating the experiences of those who had traversed Australia’s great deserts during the age of exploration. In a burst of inspiration, PW completed the novel by 1956. One of the key pieces of writing he listened to while writing was Berg’s Violin Concerto. He said that he wanted “to write the story of a grand passion… it grows in the minds of the two people concerned more through the stimulus of their surrounds and through almost irrelevant incidents…”

Stylistically, PW seems to have been keen to recover some of the denseness of his earlier prose, while letting himself face a writer’s challenge of being constrained by the heritage style. “I want to include the crimson plush and organ peals, while making them acceptable to the sage of reason by a certain dryness of style. To a certain extent the style is based on that of records of the day… but I have also left some loopholes through which to get my own effects.”

One segment, “The death of Palfreyman”, was excerpted in Meanjin 16.3 (Sep 1957) ahead of publication.

Sales: Voss did not sell as well in the US as expected, given The Tree of Man’s great success, with only 9,000 copies sold in hardback. More would come from paperback sales, but it was a considerable downturn. There was a boost however when the US Book of the Month Club made Voss its selection(!) for the month of August 1957. This meant a minimum advance of $20,000. The Club was unhappy about the title, and requested that the publisher change it to something snappier; PW, unsurprisingly, pushed back. Nevertheless, the US reviews were “exhilarating” (to quote Hubber and Smith).

The UK Book Society took 11,000 copies, and for the first time, a PW novel had greater success in the UK. It was considered a bestseller there. This was a great boon for the author’s new UK publishers, Eyre & Spottiswoode, who had taken him on despite some risk. They responded by reprinting The Aunt’s Story to capitalise on the success. The Penguin paperback, released in 1960, would be reprinted 21 times in 33 years.

The novel has been translated into at least 25 languages. PW felt, cynically, that “perhaps the reason Voss has succeeded with more readers than the other books have, is that there are no Australians in it, except the aborigines.”

Notes: Sidney Nolan did the jacket for Voss; at the time, the two legends had not yet met. Their friendship – and its public destruction in the 1980s – lay in the future.

The Bonners’ house is based on Lulworth, White’s childhood home in Sydney. His father’s cousin’s wife, Ivy, had the maiden name Voss, and PW remembered the name years later. Harry Robarts, the boy who idolises Voss, can be seen as an example of hero worship. PW reportedly saw him as having a gay subtext, making Robarts the author’s second gay character after Elyot in The Living and the Dead. (While homosexuality would play a role in Riders in the Chariot and The Vivisector, it would be at the centre of only one novel: the late The Twyborn Affair.)

Voss is, in Mark Williams’ words, “a figure who chooses the most extreme isolation of mind open to him: radical exile from the community and rejection of its materialistic vision of the land”. Voss refuses to settle for just the outskirts of the country, its shallow façade, as it were. Voss is arguably another one of PW’s long line of artists as characters, in that he is a genius with a vision beyond what most ordinary men see. And his thwarted journey, like so many in PW’s canon, reminds us that we can never arrive at a final interpretation of Australia, any more than we can of the comet or for that matter of the Bible upon which Palfreyman’s uncle is developing a key.

Reviews:

  • Southerly 18.2 (1957)
  • Kirkus Reviews, 15/6/1957:
    • There is immense challenge in the substance of this novel of Australia’s wilderness… One needs perspective to grasp the achievement of this book, for- in even greater degree than I felt it in The Tree of Man. White has chosen to tell his story in the most involuted, oblique fashion, often seeming awkward and confused, so that the process of reading it is a burden. That he has been accepted as Australia’s foremost novelist is somewhat baffling to our public.”
  • Donald Wasson, Library Journal, August 1957
  • Borden Deal, “Search for Man and God”, Saturday Review, 17/8/1957
  • Lewis Garrett, “Proud, lonely man in wild Australia: Patrick White’s symbolic novel of a wanderer’s heart”, NY Herald Tribune Book Review, 18/8/1957
  • C. Hartley Grattan, “One way journey into a “world of desert and dreams”, New York Times Book Review, 18/8/1957:
    • “It would not in the least surprise me if in 1970 he were reckoned the most considerable novelist Australia has yet produced (not forgetting that he must, to win through, overtop Henry Handel Richardson) and one of the most considerable novelists in English of his generation… Patrick White offers a brilliant exploration of a fundamental article of Australian faith, namely the fact that Australians entertain the notion that their true and original values are rooted in the outback, not the cities.
  • Orville Prescott, New York Times, 19/8/1957
  • Alwyn Lee, Time 26/8/1957:
    • “His style is excellent for describing the shifting pastel colors of the bush but proves too rich an instrument for reproducing the leg-iron clank of Australian speech.”
  • Ben Ray Redman, “A difficult, complex novel of two worlds”, Chicago Sunday Tribune, 1/9/1957
  • Jane Voiles, San Francisco Chronicle, 6/9/1957
  • Phoebe Adams, Atlantic Monthly No. 200, 4/10/1957
  • New Yorker, 5/10/1957
    • “His prose… tends to set up an obstinate and exasperating barrier between his subject matter and the reader.”
  • Hardin McD. Goodman, The English Journal 46.8 (Nov 1957):
    • “Each of several partial plots is constructed in an individual style… The difficulty arises when these diverse elements, singularly appropriate in themselves, are woven together: they form not an integral whole but rather a mosaic. Mr. White is an accomplished storyteller but his knowledge of literary form is better than his feeling for it.”
  • David Tylden-Wright, TLS, 13/12/1957:
    • B ranking.
  • Penelope Mortimer, “The touch of greatness”, Sunday Times, 1/12/1957
  • Times 5/12/1957
  • Kenneth Young “About the human condition”, Daily Telegraph, 6/12/1957
  • Colin MacInnes, BBC World of Books 7/12/1957
  • HJ Oliver, “Patrick White’s significant journey”, Southerly 19.1 (1958)
  • Olivia Manning, Punch 15/1/1958
  • Graham Hough, Encounter 10.2 (1958)
  • Observer, 22.1 (1958)
  • Hilde Spiel (trans: Ellen Mautner), “Australia’s writers come of age”, Southerly 19.4, 1958
  • M.J.L Uren, West Australian 18/1/1958
  • Virginia Quarterly Review 34.2 (Spring 1958)
  • Alan Nicholls, The Age 1/2/1958
    • Complaining about a lack of hope in novels, although acknowledging his “imaginative power”.    
  • Clive Kelly, Adelaide Advertiser,1/2/1958
  • Kylie Tennant, “Poetic Symbolism in Novel by Patrick White”, SMH 8/2/1958
    • “Whether you read Voss as a narrative of adventure, as a psychic love story, or as a recreation of a period of history, the tension rising to a horrifying and gruesome climax will hold you… The pace of the book, the strength and power of the prose, the tension and dramatic force, were all there, but when the book slinks off into the deserts of mysticism, I am one of those people who would sooner slink off home.”
  • Ross Campbell, “Foggy weather over Leichhardt”, Daily Telegraph 15/2/1958
    • This is the review White would refer to in the future as being titled “Australia’s Most Unreadable Novelist” (it wasn’t; he was letting his memory play tricks):
    • “I don’t pretend to know what the book means, and am not over-anxious to find out.”
  • James Stern, London Magazine, February 1958
  • Sidney J Baker, “Exploration as a fine art”, SMH 1/3/1958
  • Douglas Stewart, “The Big Boss Voss”, Bulletin 5/3/1958:
    • “Overseas praise does tend to be excessive… This may be unkind, or uncultured, but none of my favourite novelists from Petronius to Fielding and Dickens ever bothers his readers with mysticism, or even by going in for too many exquisite subtleties of thought and feeling: they just paint the human comedy… Nevertheless, when Patrick White aims so high and writes so excellent a novel in his chosen method, it seems a pity thus to join in the chorus of scepticism; and it ought to be made clear… that one criticises with respect. In its mannered style and method the whole novel is, in fact, not unlike those stylised, symbolic paintings of bushrangers and explorers in which Sidney Nolan… has attempted to capture the horror of the fanatic in the wilderness; but the art is really more like Dali’s than Nolan’s, not so naïve, more richly painted, more sinister in its light-effects, more dreamlike, and there are entrails… mercifully, of horses… The journey into the wilderness is the thing; and that, in its queer, morbid, nightmarish, symbolic fashion, is something most readers will find as compelling as it is curious.”
    • Max Harris replied to this in a letter to the Bulletin 26/3/1958:
      • “I would suggest that the problem posed by the overseas enthusiasm and the Australian indifference to Voss be approached from a more sensible direction. Rather than think that everyone is out of step but the local boys, it would be better to consider seriously if Australian literary taste, and the criticism that forms it, has not developed along narrow lines… Because the Australian novel is almost wholly realistic, critics here have lost touch with, and lost their taste for, the more sublime and imaginative forms of the novel…  It is certainly most unsatisfactory to have the world acclaiming a great Australian achievement while Australia sullenly rejects the compliment.”
    • Mrs J.M. Forbes replied to Harris in Bulletin 16/4/1958:
      • “Being ‘different’ is the only thing worthwhile these days… The historical novel avoids a lot of work, because it doesn’t have to conform with truth, yet can still pick the eyes out of history for vivid colour, and so be far more popular than biography. [If Voss is Leichhardt, and not a separate creation], “the story remains an historical novel, and such a thing is an abomination in the world of letters.” [That is to say, to people overseas, this is a novel. To us, it is a poor attempt to detail our history.]
  • Marjorie Barnard, Meanjin 17.1 April 1958
  • Robert Fry, Australian Letters, 1.3 (April 1958)
  • Marcel Aurousseau, “The Identity of Voss”, Meanjin 17.1 (1958)
  • Vincent Buckley, “Novelists and Conventions”, Melbourne Prospect, 1/6/1958
  • Ian Turner, “The Parable of Voss”, Overland 12, 1958
  • Ross Campbell, “For and against Voss”, Daily Telegraph 26/7/1958
  • James McAuley, “Voss and the Novel”, Quadrant 2.4 Spring 1958
  • Katharine Susannah Pritchard, Overland 13, October 1958
  • Leonie Kramer, ABC Radio Books Worth Another Look, 19/6/1960
  • Ronald Taft, Westerly 2, 1961
  • Thomas Keneally, Guardian 16/11/2002:
    • A+ review
  • Richard Rayner, LA Times 29/3/2009:
    • “A” ranking.

Quotes: “The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.”

Voss accuses Judd of cowardice, but Judd repudiates this. ‘It is not cowardice if there is hell before and hell behind, and nothing to choose between them’. (p346)

“Every man has a genius .Though it is not always discoverable. Least of all when choked by the trivialities of daily existence. But in this disturbing country, so far as I have become acquainted with it already, it is possible more easily to discard the inessential and to attempt[t the infinite. You will be burnt up most likely… but you will realise that genius.”

Laura: “Knowledge was never a matter of geography. Quite the reverse, it overflows all maps that exist. Perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind.”

“Voss could always, if necessary, fail to understand. But wounds will wince, especially in the salt air. He was smiling and screwing up his eyes at the great theatre of light and water. Some pitied him. Some despised him for his funny appearance of a foreigner. None, he realized with a tremor of anger, was conscious of his strength. Mediocre, animal men never do guess at the power of rock or fire, until the last moment before those elements reduce them to – nothing. This, the palest, the most transparent of words, yet comes closest to being complete.”

Laura:  Do you know that a country does not develop through the prosperity of a few landowners and merchants, but out of the suffering of the humble?  (p239)

Human behaviour is a series of lunges, of which, it is sometimes sensed, the direction is inevitable.”

“I am compelled into this country.”

“With great dignity and some sadness, Dugald broke the remaining seals, and shook out the papers until the black writing was exposed. There were some who were disappointed to see but the pictures of fern roots. A warrior hit the paper with his spear. People were growing impatient and annoyed, as they waited for the old man to tell.
These papers contained the thoughts of which the whites wished to be rid, explained the traveller, by inspiration: the sad thoughts, the bad, the thoughts that were too heavy, or in any way hurtful. These came out through the white man’s writing-stick, down upon paper, and were sent away.
Away, away, the crowd began to menace and call.
The old man folded the papers. With the solemnity of one who has interrupted a mystery, he tore them into little pieces.
How they fluttered.
The women were screaming, and escaping from the white man’s bad thoughts.
Some of the men were laughing.
Only Dugald was sad and still, as the pieces of paper fluttered round him and settled on the grass, like a mob of cockatoos.
Then the men took their weapons, and the women their dillybags, and children, and they all trooped away to the north, where at that season of the year there was much wild life and a plentiful supply of yams. The old man went with them, of course, because they were his people, and they were going in that direction. They went walking through the good grass, and the present absorbed them utterly.” (220)

“When man is truly humbled, when he has learnt that he is not God, then he is nearest to becoming so. In the end, he may ascend.”

Adaptations:

Radio

Recorded (Abridged) on the ABC from 16/12/1996 to 24/1/1997. Read by Robert Grubb and produced by Rodney Wetherell.

Music

Barry Conyngham wrote “From Voss” (1980), an 11-minute musical piece taken from a larger orchestral work. For solo female voice with trombone, viola harp, cor anglais, percussion, and cello.

See also:

Voss: The Opera

Voss: The Film that Never Was

Also published in 1957: Nino Culotta, They’re a Weird Mob; Elizabeth Harrower, Down in the City; Lawrence Durrell, Justine; Janet Frame, Owls Do Cry; Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; Jack Kerouac, On the Road.

Previous novel: The Tree of Man

Next novel: Riders in the Chariot

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