Uncollected Stories by Patrick White

UNCOLLECTED SHORT STORIES

Justin O’Brien, Greek Burial (1947)

The Twitching Colonel (1937)

Plot: Seen through the eyes of his fellow residents, a retired colonel lives in London. He drinks and remembers with sorrow and nostalgia the life in India he has left behind. Finally he dies in a fire, but one gets the sense death was not entirely unpleasant for him.

History: The short piece was inspired by an elderly drunk whom PW noticed at a tuberculosis clinic in Pimlico. The piece is written in the fiercely modernist style which PW loved in his 20s, most evident in his first novel, Happy Valley, which he was writing at the time.

Published: London Mercury 35, April 1937.

Published in Selected Writings.

Cocotte (1940)

Plot: A stream-of-consciousness monologue by a lonely woman, who uses her dog as a lure to attract men into her life.

History: Not long after “hitting the big time” with a poem in New Verse, PW managed to get in with the exceptionally fashionable Horizon, edited by the great Cyril Connolly. This was a sign of a different path that PW could have perhaps returned to after the war, had he wished.

Published: Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art, Volume 1, No. 5, May 1940

Uncollected but available online at The Unz Review

The Sewing Machine of Tobruk (1942)

Plot: An Australian soldier drinks and wanders in the ruined city of Tobruk until he is killed by shrapnel. The sewing machine is an item he stumbles across in the street which seems woefully out of place, but also a reminder of how war has upended everyday life.

History: A short story PW sent home from military service.

Published: In Australia, the National Journal, January 1942. This short story has never been collected in a publicly-available volume. Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3

After Alep (1943)

Plot: A story about the lives of soldiers whose only relationships with family or girlfriends are through letters, as they travel through the Middle East.

History: Written in Haifa in 1943.

Published: In Bugle Blast: An Anthology from the Services, ed: Jack Aistrop and Reginald Moore, published by Allan and Unwin, 1945. This short story has never been collected in a publicly-available volume

Reviews: See Annalisa Pes, The Boredom and Futility of War in Patrick White’s Fiction (2016)

On the Balcony (1945)

Plot: Women in Athens at the end of the war are all anxious to find a husband. One courtship fails, and hope can only hold out for so many years…

History: Written in July 1945 while PW was in Greece at the end of WWII. One of PW’s earliest Greek pieces, this prefigures the many stories in The Burnt Ones. In 1957, Harper’s Bazaar offered a fee of $300, to tie in with the release of Voss. After years of having his short stories rejected by magazines, PW was now a bankable author. He dug this story out of the archives and, in the years following, gradually developed an interest in the format.

Published: Harper’s Bazaar, August 1957.

Published in Selected Writings.

Fête Galante (1977)

Plot: During the days of the German occupation of Greece, two half-sisters attend a small town party where all of the love and lust is being channelled in the wrong direction.

History: PW began this short story on a trip to Athens in 1976.

First published in Meanjin 36.1 (1977). Collected in Selected Writings.

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