“Why Bother With Patrick White”
A now wiped website compiled by the ABC around the time of the White centenary.
ABC: “Why Bother with Patrick White?”
NOVELS
| 1939 White’s first published novel is set in an untypical part of Australia, the high country of the Snowy Mountains south of Canberra. Kambala and its countryside are almost unrelentingly sterile and unhospitable. This is not the magnificently hostile harsh “outback” but a landscape pitted with human disappointment and meanness of aspiration. Over it all hovers the keen-eyed hawk. In it can be seen White’s emergent talent for exploring the consciousness of outwardly ordinary people with spiritual aspirations and for working with the symbolic possibilities of Australian landscape. Happy Valley is not dissimilar from the Adaminaby region in the Snowy Mountains where White spent a year as a jackeroo between school and university. Oliver Halliday, the local doctor feels trapped in a sterile marriage in a sterile town. His son, Rodney, seems set to inherit his unfulfillment. Both see the possibility of rescue in the person of Alys Browne the music teacher. But the relationship between Oliver and Alys develops against the backdrop of other more sordid relationships between other citizens of the district but also against the purer and simpler lives of the Quongs, the local storekeepers. Inevitably, it would seem, the relationship falters at the last moment and Oliver leaves Happy Valley with his family. [Lawson] |
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| 1941 White was writing this novel at the outbreak of World War 2 at a time when he was attempting to set himself up as a writer in London. The novel captures the many contradictory sides of London life in that era: the glitzy almost desperate social life of those with (just enough) wealth and leisure; the insecurities of a culture that had changed irrevocably and was threatening to change even more; the idealism of those who sought to change it for the better; and underlying it all, the threat of increasing political disturbances in Europe. Elyot Standish, the central character, struggles with these choices and risks not making any. Like his creator, who later confessed to a fear of “becoming that most sterile of beings, a London intellectual”, he risks being able to live only vicariously. But like the central character of White’s next novel, he discovers some virtue in being able to “unite the themes of other lives.” There may be, that is, a genuine role for the artist as observer and sometimes participant in the lives of others. Elyot’s mother Kitty has perhaps the most memorable of those “other lives”. She is an emotionally generous lover of men and of life and she has an energy and a desire for engagement that she cannot maintain and her son cannot inherit. Kitty makes some poor judgements and her generosity is sometimes ill-directed or ill-considered and her children seldom benefit from it. Like her mother and her brother, Elyot’s sister Eden makes some poor choices of sexual partners and has a series of sterile relationships. Eden later turns to Joe Barnett, a politically-engaged carpenter, who ultimately decides to live out his own ideals by going off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. [Lawson] | |||||
| 1948 For most readers, this is White’s most challenging novel, but those who persist often regard it as his most rewarding. It is in many ways a tour de force of modernist writing and was in the years after its publication in 1948 regarded by some critics as genuinely experimental. Its movement between realism, stream-of-consciousness and what might loosely be called surrealist modes of writing are more familiar techniques in writing and cinema now than they were then. The novel is divided into three distinct parts. The “aunt” is Theodora Goodman, the plain daughter of a vain mother and a dreamer of a father, and the sister of the conventionally beautiful and socially accomplished Fanny. The obvious point of the title is that as a spinster, an outsider, an “odd one”, she can tell stories of other people’s lives but live only on the periphery of her own. Nevertheless, there are a few who can apprehend and appreciate the richness of insight and illumination that someone like Theodora might experience. In the first section, we are introduced to a number of characters who endorse this: there is a Syrian hawker who tells her that she “has eyes to see”, a spinsterly headmistress, Miss Spofforth, who momentarily acknowledges a spiritual kinship, and there is Moraïtis, a visiting Greek cellist who also recognises in her a kindred spirit. It seems more likely that Theodora will have such moments of illumination in the rugged country in which her father (unsuccessfully) farms, but after his death and her move with her ailing but demanding mother to Sydney, the crushing conformity of urban life threatens to take over. In Part Two, we encounter Theo in a small hotel in southern France with an eccentric list of fellow guests in the years just before World War 2. It is in this section that realism seems to have been left behind. Theo does indeed tell the stories of other lives and she even begins to experience and inhabit other lives. Her fellow guests are avid tale-tellers themselves and several seem to have reinvented (or even invented) themselves. The inventiveness of White’s prose and narration here is exciting and exhilarating and, in a surprising number of instances, very funny. The Russian emigré (escapee, deserter?) General Sokolnikov (not a general, really, but a general in spirit!) and the excessively ostentatious Madame Rapallo whose astonishingly successful daughter is surely invented are among them. Not surprisingly, most of these inventions will not survive the great conflagration to follow and the hotel itself is burnt down. The pace changes suddenly in Section Three and Theo leaves a train on which she is travelling – ostensibly on her way back to Australia – across the United States. Having crossed the Great Plains, Theo leaves the train at a small siding and moves up into some wooded hills and takes temporary refuge with the Johnson family, who are almost a parody of her own family. With their son Zack, she shares a moment or two of fellow-feeling but then moves further into the woods. Here, Theo confronts her past in the form of a character called Holstius. Whether Holstius exists within or outside Theo’s mind is not ultimately important. As he tells her: “There is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality.”[Lawson] | |||||
| 1955 It was with this large novel of rural life in Australia that White first gained broad international attention. It is an impressive work that sweeps widely across three generations of a family of settler-farmers in the bush outside Sydney – an area that is, by the end of the novel, largely absorbed into Sydney’s sprawling outer suburbia. The area described resembles, physically and to some extent, socially, Castle Hill where White and his partner Manoly Lascaris settled (and farmed) after Patrick’s return to Australia in 1948. At the beginning of the novel, Stan Parker, a man who experiences both restlessness and a desire for stability, moves out to claim a patch of previously unfarmed bush. He and his few neighbours are, it seems, pioneers and they exemplify a range of types from Australia’s past. There are uneducated Irish “refugees” as well as the rich who have made a small fortune in the burgeoning city and wish to move out to spend it in rural splendour. The novel has a number of allegorical elements and the initial carving out of a farm from the wilderness takes on the stature of a creation or foundation myth, just as the narrative will later function (on one level) as an allegory of the historical development of European occupation in Australia. The novel studies the Parker family and its small community closely. Stan’s long but not idealised marriage to Amy inaugurates a family of three generations of ordinary people, who struggle to find and understand their place in a world whose meaning is not always clear. White’s expressed desire to describe the extraordinary within the ordinary is perhaps most fulfilled in this novel. The Parkers experience so many of the typical (even cliched) events of Australian bush life: flood, drought, bushfire, lost children, travelling salesmen, loneliness and sexual temptation, the encroachment of the city and modern life, and petty crime. But none of this ties them to the mundane or the meaningless. It is their struggle for a richness of spiritual and psychological experience within this ordinariness that gives the novel its power and fascination. In a saga, the minor characters are numerous (and perhaps fragmentary) but the cast of this book is vast. Madeleine the beautiful woman whom Stan rescues from the fire is not only a fleeting romantic heroine, she also demonstrates the limits of Stan’s ability to respond spontaneously to passion. On the other hand, Doll Quigley the postmistress and her simple brother Bub, live lives of almost painful ordinariness but do experience spiritual insight. The Irish neighbours, the O’Dowds, fill (for the most part) a comic function but they too have their moments of terror and of beauty. At the end of the novel, Stan has his own moment of spiritual insight and it is as unorthodox as his long life has seemed ordinary and average, but it is idiosyncratic in the sense that the illumination that Stan experiences is an illumination of the most ordinary of objects and it occurs – literally – in his own front yard. [Lawson] |
| VOSS | |
| 1957 Voss was written about ten years after World War 2. In an interview, White recalled two influences: his reading of a book on the German-born nineteenth century Australian explorer, Ludwig Leichhardt; and his own experience of being in the North African desert during the war provoked by the “arch-megalomaniac,” Adolf Hitler. The broad outline of the narrative is based on Leichhardt’s ill-fated journey of exploration in search of an overland route from Sydney to Darwin. Voss and his party are financially supported by a group of Sydney merchants and Voss develops a strange but compelling relationship with Laura Trevelyan, the step-daughter of one of them. The relationship between these two misfits appears to continue through letters and some kind of psychic and spiritual companionship long after the expedition has left civilisation. The relationship may not be realistic but it is convincing. Voss’s expedition passes through the magnificent settled lands of the Hunter Valley where they spend time on a station belonging to the cultivated Sandersons and then on to the more primitive farm of Boyle on the outer edge of the Darling Downs. With two Aboriginal guides, the party then strikes out into “unknown” country and confronts not only physical but also psychological and spiritual challenges to their sense of themselves as civilised subjects. There are struggles between the various members of the party: between those who are more practical and those whose motivation for joining is more altruistic, more personal or more concerned with inner understanding. The challenges faced by the expedition are of course both practical, physical ones as well as psychological and spiritual. The ways in which various members of the party deal with suffering is one of the interests of the middle part of the book. But in Sydney, there are challenges to be faced as well, though not of such an obvious kind. For Laura and for her step sister – the apparently well-adjusted Belle Bonner – there are different needs. The emerging culture of colonial Australia requires both men and women to find new ways of relating to society and to nature. Laura takes on the responsibility of bringing up Mercy, the daughter of the servant, Rose and also opens a school, while Belle becomes the facilitator of social interaction among the increasingly diverse population. At the end of the novel, the citizens of Sydney unveil a statue to celebrate Voss’ probable achievement. The highlight of the ceremony is the appearance of Judd the ex-convict who is the sole surviving member of the expedition. Judd’s memory is possibly faulty, Laura’s understanding of Voss may lack substance, and the citizen’s need to memorialise something may have very little to do with the actual achievement of Voss yet there is a clear sense that the community as a whole has grown and developed, that the ways of interpreting experience have been enlarged and increased and that the possibilities for living fully and meaningfully in Australia have expanded. This is for many readers White’s most demanding and most impressive novel. The language is not always easy and the relationship between Voss and Laura is difficult to accept in realistic terms but the reading experience is powerful, unforgettable, and deeply engaging. [Lawson] |
| 1961 With Riders in the Chariot, White moved away from the broadly historical sweep of the previous two novels towards a closer examination of contemporary Australian life. Riders abounds in detailed social observation, descriptions of a Sydney that is expanding geographically, demographically and socially, and satire that is witty and occasionally savage. As always, White mixes these reading pleasures of a more realist kind with those of a psychological, metaphysical and the specifically religious scope. In some ways, Riders in the Chariot is White’s clearest and most comprehensive statement of the necessity of understanding that religious or metaphysical enlightenment comes in the very heart of ordinary everyday life itself and is inseparable from it. As always, White’s spiritually-inclined characters achieve their moments of insight, their visions even, in the most ordinary of mundane circumstances. Despite its focus on life in contemporary Australia – the novel was published in 1961 – the novel manages to cover a vast geographical and historical range. Contemporary Australia requires a lot of explanation; its sources and origins are manifold. There are four central character, the riders: Miss Hare, Mrs Godbold, Mordecai Himmelfarb, and Alf Dubbo. While they are developed in the novel as extremely complex characters, they are also recognisable as types. Miss Hare is the lonely, isolated spinster heir of an eccentric and moderately well-off family lives in the increasingly run-down family mansion on the outskirts of Sarsaparilla, formerly a farming region, now a suburb that threatens in time to overrun the old once-grand house. Mrs Godbold is a working-class woman from England who works in Sarsaparilla as a laundress: this is a type whom White often idealises – the servant who exhibits “the most positive evidence of good”. Mordecai Himmelfarb is a major creation, a Jewish intellectual and scholar, a middle-European refugee from World War 2 who works in a bicycle lamp factory for of lack of opportunity and to fulfil a desire for humility. Alf Dubbo is a painter of mixed Aboriginal and European-Australian parentage: he is both the romantic artist figure, alienated from ordinary folk by virtue of his artistic vision and the mixed-race figure with access to two cultures but belonging to and acknowledged by neither. The novel traces the personal and the spiritual histories of the four characters towards the moment when they each meet the others and recognise – usually wordlessly – the quality of spiritual insight they share with each other, the vision of the chariot. The chariot is a symbol with a complex history in many cultures and artistic and religious traditions; most simply it is the vehicle for God’s elect, those who have seen or experienced something beyond the worldly. So, each of them move towards their moment of insight in very personal and culturally-specific ways and what marks each of them as the elect is their recognition of this quality in the others. Himmelfarb’s experience of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and in a 1950s Australia intent on assimilation of all differences, Alf’s experience of racism and poverty in rural and urban Australia, Mrs Godbold’s apparently “simple” life of suffering, service and family and the instinctual Miss Hare’s struggles for understanding with and against her housekeeper-companion, the all-too-appropriately named Mrs Jolley – all of these are developed in great detail and with a large cast of important minor characters. And not all of the minor characters are either hostile or without spiritual insight or aspiration of their own – the many forms and many degrees of spiritual understanding are explored here. The novel attracted much attention at the time for some of its more obvious religious symbolism. Himmelfarb for instance, is “crucified” in a nasty workplace prank, and many readers perceived a division of the characters into the elect and the damned which later readers have generally found to be much more complex. [Lawson] |
| THE SOLID MANDALA | |||
| 1966 Like some of the stories in The Burnt Ones and much of Riders in the Chariot, this novel is set in White’s fictional outer Sydney suburb – Sarsaparilla. White described it as one of his favourites, one of the books “in which I said most nearly what I wanted to say”. It concerns an odd set of non-identical twins, Waldo and Arthur Brown and some of their neighbours in Terminus Road, Sarsaparilla. In some fairly obvious ways, the Brown brothers represent two aspects of human nature – the rational and the spiritual or instinctive. The neighbours also represent different aspects of personality with Mrs Poulter filling the role of the more instinctively generous and good participant on the edge of Arthur’s life and Mrs Dun as the judgemental, censorious observer of oddness. Arthur is one of White’s most appealing characters, a simple “dill” in Australian colloquial terms but an earnest and above all honest participant in the life around him. His brother Waldo also has a kind of honesty but it is inhibited, repressed by his more obsessively rational side and his sense of responsibility towards convention. Like many of the families in White’s fiction, this one is initially presided over by an ineffectual but appealingly eccentric father. While it is Waldo who nurses the ambition to be an “Australian writer” – clearly in this case, not a noble ambition – it is Arthur who shows the real literary insight in his treks to the Sydney Public Library in the city where he discovers and learns to love Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The mandala of the title draws its symbolism from numerous systems of belief, usually representing wholeness or totality of the harmony of opposites. Visually, a mandala is usually represented as a square within a circle. In the novel, of course, it is associated with Arthur rather than Waldo who keeps the various parts of his life and personality separate and utterly unreconciled. It is often said that in Waldo, White painted a most unflattering portrait of his own worst traits and in Arthur, the simply nobility of spirit he craved. [Lawson] | |||
| 1970 The longest of Patrick White’s novels, The Vivisector develops fully a subject with which he had been fascinated since the very beginning of his literary career – the life of the artist. White had as personal friends many artists and often credited the expatriate Australian painter, Roy de Maistre with having taught him to “see”. Hurtle Duffield, the painter at the centre of this book, cannot be identified with any single “real” person but there are so many characteristics and experiences that he shares with well-known painters (mostly Australian) to have persuaded many readers at the time of its appearance into thinking that they could do so. Throughout his life and his writing career, White was obsessed by one of the great Romantic conundrums – the relation between art and life and more particularly the relation between the artist’s life and his work and the effect of this on personal relationships. To what extent, that is, do the “demands” of art take priority over normal social and personal obligations? Does the artist “cannibalise” the lives of those around him to gather material for art? The start to Hurtle’s life as an artist is unpromising: his parents are a laundress and an empty bottle-collector (a “bottle-o”) and he lives in poverty with a large number of brothers and sisters until the wealthy Courtney family (for whom his mother cleans and washes) offer to “buy” him from his parents for £500. Hurtle henceforth lives in the Courtney’s grand house, “Sunningdale” which is clearly and quite closely modelled on “Lulworth”, the house owned by Patrick’s parents during this childhood and youth and the new parents share many of the outward characteristics of White’s own. For all the details culled from his own life, there is little that is conventionally autobiographical about the book. At the Courtneys’ he is challenged by his new sister, the crippled Rhoda, sustained by his relationships with some of the servants, benignly ignored by his new father, Harry and fussed over by Alfreda Courtney, and generally exposed to a range of visual and tactile experiences that exceed his expectations. His father takes him on occasions to his rural properties and Hurtle develops a sense of colour and place beyond the urban and the cultivated; sense which are further extended by the family’s tour of Europe. In early adulthood, he cuts himself off from the Courtneys and begins to develop a career as a painter and a relationship with a prostitute, Nance Lightfoot. Both the artist and the prostitute make the personal and private into something public and for sale and Hurtle and Nance also share a commitment to the most physical aspects of life. The descriptions of their sexual relationship are racy, gross, and even disgusted at times. His painting takes on some of this intensely physical quality and the sheer materiality of the paint is stressed in prose that is itself laid on with sometimes heavy strokes. After Nance’s death and a considerable rise in his reputation Hurtle moves to a decaying inner city house that has its grand side and its less respectable back side. As always, the challenge for White’s artist figures is to unite these two aspects. The significant women in this part of Hurtle’s life are Olivia Hollingrake, a childhood friend who is now an art-collector, and Mrs Pavloussi a wealthy Greek woman. The social observation is gently and wittily satirical and there is a wonderfully funny description of a Sydney society dinner party. In his final phase, Hurtle is reunited with Rhoda, forms a strange, almost incestuous mentor-like relationship with a precocious young pianist, Kathy Volkov, and is himself adored by an acolyte-assistant, Don Lethbridge. The centrepiece of the final stage of the novel is the great Hurtle Duffield Retrospective Exhibition when his life is hung out for all to see; Hurtle wanders around incognito for part of the evening and the overheard snippets of conversation are delightful. Probably the most conspicuously successfully feature of the novel is the descriptions of painting – the physical act of making pictures – rather than of the finished objects. White wrote on several occasions of the physical labour and even the pain involved in writing and the psychological and physical effort of painting is astonishingly convincing. The numerous themes of the novel culminate in Hurtle’s moment of death and his final painterly vision of unity. [Lawson] | |||
| 1973 1973 was the year in which The Eye of the Storm was published and the year in which White finally won the Nobel Prize for Literature having been tipped as a likely winner for years. It is a major study of family and of death. Elizabeth Hunter, whose life and death is at its very centre, is an extraordinary creation, assembled with love and care and anger. And the most extraordinary thing of all is that it is Elizabeth, flawed, damaged and damaging, who is vouchsafed the vision of unity in that moment of clarity-the eye of the storm. Elizabeth does indeed experience the eye of an actual cyclone while on a holiday on Brumby Island off the Queensland coast but in the midst of a hectic and frantic life, she also experiences an eye, a still moment of meaning. At the very end, her even more selfish daughter, Dorothy who has married into the minor European nobility, wonders and fails to understand whether “anything of a transcendental nature [could] have a illuminated a mind so sensual, mendacious, materialistic, superficial as Elizabeth Hunter’s?” And Basil, Elizabeth’s successful actor-son is only marginally more alert to the possibility that his tyrannical mother may have had qualities he never fully valued. Not surprisingly, Elizabeth is surrounded all her life by a cast of remarkable people and some unremarkable ones whose lives – like those of her solicitor, Arnold Wyburd – are changed by the impact of hers. The most memorable are the four women who care for her in her last years: Sister Mary de Santis, Sister Badgery, Sister Flora Manhood and Lotte Lippmann, the housekeeper. But her husband, Alfred (“Bill”) and his love of his country properties, especially “Kudjeri”, which he transmits to his city-boy son, Basil is a version of the father who emerges more fully developed than any other in White’s fiction. The wordless, intuitive insight behind the pale blank eyes is allowed to be recognised. Shakespeare’s King Lear is never far from the surface of this novel. The dying ruler, dividing the kingdom between unruly and ungrateful children is a key element and Lear is the role that Basil covets and hopes, at the end, to be able to play again. Like the Shakespeare play, this novel also makes much of the sense of sight, of vision: what is seen – inwardly and outwardly – is a significant index of personal value. And as in Lear, we find ourselves drawn to the tyrant, the accomplished ruler of a kingdom but inept parent, whose personal suffering brings out qualities of insight and survival that are surprising and sympathetic. [Lawson] | |||
| 1976 A Fringe of Leaves takes an Australian historical incident made relatively well-known by a number of other writers and especially by the painter, Sir Sidney Nolan, who painted several series of paintings based on the 1836 events. In the historical instance, Eliza Fraser (the wife of the ship’s captain) survives a shipwreck just off the island which now carries her name when she is rescued by a group of Aborigines and taken to live with them for some time; the historical record is unclear about exactly how she comes to leave the Aborigines and return to “civilisation” – there are competing narratives – but Eliza did return to Brisbane (then called Moreton Bay) and eventually to England where she traded on her notoriety and herself wrote accounts of her “adventures”. In White’s hands this slender tale is turned into a study of the adaptation of a young English woman, Ellen Gluyas to a quite extraordinary range of environments and societies. The young Ellen is trained in the Cornish beliefs of her father’s family, transformed by her older, invalid husband Austin Roxburgh into a (not entirely convincing) Cheltenham lady, then transported to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) to meet and be seduced by the “black sheep” of the Roxburgh family, Austin’s brother Garnet. In Van Diemen’s Land, she confronts the corruption of human nature in the form of not only her brother-in-law but also of the convicts who make up the greater part of the population. The sexual encounter with Garnet is not a moment of corruption but one of adaptation: Ellen must now understand that aspect of her that made this experience possible, just as later, in the novel’s most famous and even controversial incident, she must seek to understand that which in her makes it possible for her to eat human flesh while in the company of her Aboriginal friends. But Ellen does not merely adapt to external circumstances. Each of her experiences adds to the sum total of her personal characteristics and capacities. In the hands of many writers, the journey into the wilderness is an occasion to show how the civilised portions of the self can be cast off, like inessential items of equipment. In A Fringe of Leaves however, Ellen keeps adding rather than subtracting-nothing is left behind. After recuperating at the Moreton Bay settlement, Ellen meets a merchant, Mr Jevons, with whom she shares a moment of dialect speech in which each locates and acknowledges the other as a citizen of a place each of them has long since left, but not left behind. With Mr Jevons, Ellen sails off to Sydney. In may ways, A Fringe of Leaves functions as a kind of allegory of colonial Australia. Certainly, it covers all of the significant processes of its development. Rural change in England, the sea-journey to Australia, the convict experience, the extended and ambiguous encounter with Aborigines, contact with free “settlers,” and connections to the developing mercantile economy of the increasingly self-sufficient colony are all well incorporated into the narrative. For many readers, this is White’s most accessible and satisfying novel. The prose is finely crafted and almost reminiscent of Jane Austen in the carefully turned sentences and also in the observant detail of the descriptions of interactions between characters – especially those details seldom observed by others.[Lawson] | |||
| 1979 This is White’s last major novel. It is also his clearest examination of the multiple versions of the self and another significant study of the complex nature of family relationships. Eddie Twyborn is, in a sense, twice-born: he is born Eddie and reborn as Eudoxia, the mistress of the ageing Greek Angelos in the South of France; re-emerges as Eddie again in Australia after World War 1 and then later as Eadith, the madam of a high-class London brothel during World War 2. Eddie/Eadith’s uncertainties and complexities are not merely those of gender and sexuality. Identity is also national and familial and neither of these is fixed, either. The novel’s style changes to fit the circumstances. It is mannered, brittle and even deceptive in the first part when Eudoxia is observed by a partly-comprehending Joanie Golson, friend and sometime cross-dressing partner of Eddie’s mother, Eadie. It is relaxed and expansive in Part Two, in which Eddie returns to the Australian identity he might have inherited-rural life in its terrors and splendours and simple pleasures of the body and spirit. And it strains towards reconciliation in the final section, reconciliation of the apparent opulence of the London brothel and the pain of unaccommodated identities, tension between the fullness of a life and the outbreak of a war. But the novel seeks no easy solutions and at the end, Eddie’s disparate selves are not united in any simple or obvious ways. Like Ellen Roxburgh in A Fringe of Leaves, he is the sum total of all of his various selves and experiences and any notion that these may be brought together and unified is literally blown apart at the end when Eddie is dismembered by a fragment of bomb.[Lawson] | |||
| 1986 This is a strange and playful, postmodern novel, an unexpected finale to White’s fiction writing career. It is nevertheless a timely reminder of White’s wit and humour and his playful creations of larger-than-life, more-than-realistic characters and incidents. And hovering a little closer to the foreground than usual is the figure of White the writer. The book is ostensibly written by one Alex Demirjian Gray and merely edited by Patrick White who contributes a foreword, much of which is occupied trying to establish and fix the identity of the elusive and many-named Gray. The narrative of the novel is pretty confusing and not really very important at all. The narrative is more like a stage on which the many identities or personae of Alex play out their parts. There is a sort of family history which follows the ancestors from Smyrna in Anatolian Greece (now Izmir in Turkey) to Alexandria in Northern Egypt to Sydney where she is visited by her friend Patrick: “you can rely on Patrick even when you don’t much want him”. Another phase depicts a travelling theatre company in outback Australia, starring Alex in the persona of one Dolly Formosa whose specialties are dancing and monologues. Behind it all are the figures of her dullish daughter, Hilda and her faithful but dull Patrick, neither of whom can match the richness of her life or the energy of her inventiveness. [Lawson] | |||
OTHER
THE BURNT ONES
Dead Roses : Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight : A Glass of Tea : Clay : The Evening at Sissy Kamara’s : A Cheery Soul : Being Kind to Titina : Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover : The Letter : The Woman who wasn’t Allowed to Keep Cats : Down at the Dump
These are eleven stories all but four set in Australia; those four are set in Greece. Published in 1964.
”The prevailing tone, nicely sustained throughout a variety of moods, is one of steely-eyed irony…
The Greek stories are, in a way, an even more impressive achievement than those where the writer explores his native surroundings. The insight into character is as real, and a somehow remote echo of Byzantine splendour pervades the air as in a dream. But it is to the Australian stories that one returns.
When so many writers are concerned to show us their enormous compassion for their characters, it is heartening to read one who creates, it seems, as easily and strongly from cold disgust as others do from love. The suburb of Sarsaparilla, in which several stories are set, is rather like “Our Town” of Thornton Wilder, with the American author’s sentimentality replaced by the beadily disapproving gaze of one who sees too clearly to fall into THAT particular trap.
White’s genius, I sometimes feel, consists in the rare fusion of two distinctly disparate talents: he has the spiritual intensity and soaring vision of a Dostoevsky combined with the bitchy elegance of a Wilde. The coldness of clarity is immensely to be preferred to the clamminess of charity. This is why these stories are so unusually entertaining. That they are sometimes touching as well is due directly to White’s artistry, and certainly not to airy sentimental attention.
The Burnt Ones may be merely a great novelist’s by-product. Nevertheless it will delight whoever possesses both an ear and a sense of humour, for the wit is the style, the style in the artful simplicity of the content.”
Australian Attitudes. Charles Osborne. 1964
| ‘ A second collection of stories, The Cockatoos, appeared in 1974. Some of the six ‘Short Novels and Stories’ it contained had appeared in periodicals and anthologies as far back as 1966 and overall, the tone of the collection harmonises more closely with White’s work of the sixties than with that of the previous decade. All but one of the stories have Australian settings, or characters, and the shifts in them from satiric caricature to poetic intensity recall something of the strained combination of modes in Riders in the Chariot. As in The Burnt Ones there is a pervasive theme of the frustration of lonely lives within bourgeois society, and especially within the institution of marriage, yet there is less here of the spirit of playfulness that marked the earlier collection. The pattern of sexual passion erupting into drab, repressed lives in story after story seems too neat, the attitude towards the characters too insistently ironic for the wit and the play with various modes to dispel an impression that these stories are schematic and lacking in the complicating dramatic qualification of the novels. [Kiernan] |
THE NIGHT THE PROWLER
The Night the Prowler is a story in which a disappointed rape victim of stockbroker respectability and a dominating mother sets about raping society in revenge for her repressed upbringing, and discovers the true nature of life, both sordid and vital, on the other side of the Park railings, begins as satiric farce and wildly Freudian fantasy but ends in absurdist solemnity. [Lawson]
The Screaming Potato Dancing with Both Feet on the Ground The Age of a Wart | |
| Published in 1987. They are an old man’s reflections on the failure of age to bring wisdom, certainty or rest. These little pieces, ‘prose poems’ White called them, are haunted by age and decay, yet are astonishingly alive… [Marr] |
| Flaws in the Glass is a composite volume in which the first 150 pages are given to the “Self Portrait”, and another hundred pages to two sections called respectively, “Journeys” and “Episodes and Epitaphs”. The journeys are vivid D.H. Lawrence-style accounts of travels with Manoly about the Greek mainland and islands – here is the background to many of the stories in The Burnt Ones, and the running commentary is seldom flattering about what man has done to a noble landscape. “Greece is one long despairing rage in those who understand her, worse for Manoly because she is his, as Australia is worse for me because of my responsibility.” The final section – Patrick White’s private gossip column, like a modern equivalent of “Coryats Crudities” – contains some of the bitchiest and most entertaining comments I have read on such topics as luncheon on the royal yacht Britannia, protests against the despoilment of Centennial Park, Sir John Kerr seen in the role of Judas in the Whitlam affair (White returned the Australian official honours he had been awarded, and now describes himself as “a Socialist and a Republican”), unflattering vignettes of Sidney Nolan and Joan Sutherland, and White’s refusal to indulge either press or public at the time of the announcement of his Nobel Prize for Literature. “Certainly, as Manoly predicted, life has not been the same since.” No doubt that section of Australian opinion which has always resisted White’s baroque style, and his savage indignation at corruption and vulgarity in high places in either of his homelands, will find this latest book loose in structure, scandalous in its family revelations, and shameless in its frank defence of sexual freedom. They may safely ignore a personal confession – often painful but always scrupulously honest – which for admirers of White’s work is genuinely revealing about the personality and predilections of one of the great imaginative writers of our time. White admits to vanity, irritability, a stubbornness and hot temper worthy of his Withycombe forebears… but his most generous tributes are usually to very humble folk, and in his lifelong search for God and a framework of belief – a “solid mandala” to which he could commit himself – he has known rare moments of spiritual illumination that he can describe with beautiful lucidity. This book isn’t any exercise in charm or graceful egoism (as with Gide or Isherwood), but a fiercely candid confession much more in the spirit of Rousseau, Dostoevsky or D.H.Lawrence. “My pursuit of that razor-blade truth has made me a slasher”, White concludes his testament. “Not that I don’t love and venerate in several senses – before all, pureness of heart and trustfulness.” [Bertram] |
| by David Marr, Random House Australia, 1991 David Marr’s biography is an extraordinary book. It took Marr ten years to write and White read it before he died. White’s response to the work is telling. ‘I brought the book to him on 17 July 1990’, writes Marr. ‘He read it over the next few days, then asked me to sit with him at home while we read it through together a second time. We spent nine days together. He corrected many spelling mistakes – in English, German, Greek and French – and identified twenty-five errors of detail. These I have corrected. He confessed he found the book so painful that he often found himself reading through tears. He did not ask me to cut or change a line. |
| Edited by David Marr, Random House Australia, 1994. Though White tried to have nearly all of his correspondence destroyed, Marr was able to collect two thousand of his letters and published 620 in chronological order. In an interview with Janet Hawley, David Marr said: ‘White knew how to wound, and as with all letter writers there are wilder bursts where he is monstering people. Some are abusive, others are superb, accurate and damning judgments. There are also what I call the Great F-Off Letters, where Patrick decides to end a long friendship which now disappoints him. ‘I have not attempted the impossible task of adjudicating all Patrick’s rows. But I sent the tough or potentially defamatory letters out to the people concerned to warn them these letters were going to appear and to give them a chance to comment so that I could add a balancing footnote. It involved months of discussion and correspondence. ‘I have the greatest admiration for many of the subjects of these letters – including Geoffrey and Ninette Dutton, Peter Sculthorpe, Tom Uren, Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley, John Tasker – that they or their families allowed the letters to be published. ‘They understood that it was Patrick’s opinion alone, not the verdict of history – and Patrick could be stubbornly wrong – so that in the interest of documenting Australia’s major literary figure as completely as possible, they allowed the material to be published.’ Hawley continues: ‘Patrick White’s last book was not his final one. All his life White was writing another masterpiece, a vast unpublished manuscript in the form of thousands of wonderfully candid private letters to his circle of friends. He constantly asked his friends to burn his letters. “Letters are the devil, and I always hope that any I have written have been destroyed,” he declared. He never kept letters sent to him. Many did as White asked, but as he became famous, more made their own decision to keep his letters for posterity. We may be grateful for their disobedience, for this unexpected cache of correspondence contains some of the best, freest, funniest, most intimate, revealing and accessible writing White ever produced.’ [Hawley] |
| The Prodigal Son. 1958 : In The Making 1970 : A Living Living-Room 1972 : Mad Hatters Party 1972 : Civilisation, Money and Concrete 1973 : The Nobel Prize 1973 : Australian of the Year 1974 : With Whitlam 1974 : Poor Henry Lawson 1974 : Kerr and the Consequences 1976 : Citizens for Democracy 1977 : A Nobel Pair 1978 : The Reading Sickness 1980 : Truth and Fiction 1980 : State of the Colony 1981: Jack Mundey and the BLF 1981 : And if a Button is Pressed 1981 : A Letter to Humanity 1982 : Australians in a Nuclear War 1983 : A New Constitution 1983 : Greece – My Other Country 1983 : Patriotism 1984 : From Wigan to Wagga 1984 : In this World of Hypocrisy and Cynicism ’84 : Hiroshima Day 1984 : Peace and Other Matters 1984 : Monsterail 1986 : Imagining the Real 1986 : The Bicentenary 1988 : A Sense of Integrity 1988 : Credo 1988 This is a collection of the speeches Patrick made about and on behalf of the country he both loved and hated. He said Australia, the land, was in his blood and when he criticised Australia it was because he was trying to straighten it out. In the first article in the collection ,’The Prodigal Son’, there is a paragraph that has been quoted as often as any of Patrick’s other writing: “Returning sentimentally to a country I had left in my youth, what had I really found? Was there anything to prevent me packing my bag and leaving like Alister Kershaw and so many other artists? Bitterly I had to admit, no. In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves.” For years after those thoughts were made public Patrick retreated to his and Manoly’s world where he dealt with problems of personal growth and survival. It wasn’t until after they moved from their property in Castle Hill to the city of Sydney that Patrick began to express publicly interest in and concern for Australian – and then global – political, social and environmental issues. In the quote that prefaces this collection, Australian poet and critic Dorothy Green calls Patrick “… the voice of our country’s conscience. He begs us to search our hearts.” [Lawson] |
| In the Rare Book section of the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney is a copy of Thirteen Poems, a collection of White’s poetry which his mother Ruth collected and had published for family and friends. The poems were written when White was a teenager and published in 1930. A second collection which was called The Ploughman and Other Poems was written when White was an undergraduate at King’s College. He submitted a number of these poems to a magazine called The London Mercury where two were accepted and published. ‘The Ploughman’ was selected for inclusion in The Best Poems of 1935, a collection of poems published by Jonathan Cape. White, however, wanted to burn all the copies of his poetry. They were not the works for which he wanted to be remembered. | |
| This play was based on an experience that the Australian painter, William Dobell told to White. In the play, a Young Man is invited to attend the funeral of his landlord whose wife has decided that the funeral, or rather the wake that follows it, is to be a memorable affair: she will feed the mourners ham! But it is memorable for the Young Man as well because the landlady tries to seduce him. The Young Man is one of the long line of White’s instinctive young artist-figures and he meanwhile has a series of significant dialogues with the unseen young woman in the room opposite his. Alma Lusty and the Dead Landlord are larger than life figures – almost excessively realistic when set beside the Young man and the Girl. White’s great influence on Australian theatre was to show it how to move beyond the realism that had been its most dominant mode. A minor incident in the play, the discovery of an aborted foetus in a rubbish bin, was one of several elements of the play that caused producers to be cautious and newspaper columnists and public moralists to react with indignation. The Ham Funeral was written in 1947 as White prepared to return to Australia but was not performed until it received a controversial production in Adelaide in 1961. [Lawson] |
A season at sarsaparilla
| a_season_at_sarsparilla | |
| This play was written shortly after The Ham Funeral was performed and while Riders in the Chariot was being prepared for the press. In it, White returns to his fictional suburb of Sarsaparilla, which was such a fertile satiric source for him in the early 1960s. The set is startling – three open boxes represent the Mildred Street homes of the Pogsons, the Boyles, and the Knotts. Undermining the attempts at suburban conformity is the neighborhood dog-pack-chasing the bitch whose “season” it is. But desire is not limited to the canine inhabitants – Nora Boyle and her husband’s old mate, Rowley Masson quickly act out their desires with each other as well. Young Pippy Pogson and Roy Child, a school teacher and would-be artist both desire something beyond the mediocrity and conformity of their suburban surroundings. Like The Ham Funeral, A Season at Sarsaparilla derives much off its theatrical power from its daring blend of realistic and non-realist modes of representation. |
A CHEERY SOUL
| This is a reworking and an extension of the examination of the “sin of goodness” that interested White so much in his short story of the same name. Written shortly after A Season at Sarsparilla, the play is dominated by Miss Docker, someone whose indefatigable goodness can terrify even the citizens of Sarsaparilla. If anything, Miss Docker is more fully developed as a character with a past as well as a present in the play than in the story. There is a genuine attempt to understand her origins and her development as well as her motivation for relentlessly “doing good”, just as there are opportunities to see why her goodness makes others so vulnerable to it. These are all people whose resilience has limits. [Lawson] |
NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN
More naturalistic than the earlier plays, Night on Bald Mountain depicts the failure of a number of people to escape the society in which their characters have been formed. They include Miss Quodling, an eccentric who has escaped Sydney society to live with her herd of goats; Professor Sword and his alcoholic wife; Denis Craig, his young colleague; Stella Summerhayes, the nurse who is wooed by Craig and harassed by Sword (effectively to her death); and even a couple of hikers, whose weekend walk on the mountain is only a temporary escape. A powerful and ambitious play about the meaning and value of human existence within society and outside it, Night on Bald Mountain has never entirely convinced critics that it fully succeeds. [Lawson]
BIG TOYS
It was almost 14 years before White returned to playwriting and Big Toys is a more contemporary play in many ways. It was also less confronting to audiences which had by now become more accustomed to contemporary satire with a political edge and some theatrical vitality. Each of the three characters in Big Toys (Ritchie Bosanquet, a wealthy and successful lawyer and his socialite wife, Mag and Terry Legge, a well-connected trade union leader) are opinion-leaders, apparently moulders of the views of significant portions of society but they are equally constrained by it and by their places in it as well. Each of them is also, in their own way, attracted to the toys that that society offers its good offspring. There is much comedy in the depiction of these three but the final vision is bleak – this society and its people display a propensity to corruption that is in no measure attractive. [Lawson]
| The play concerns the married life of two older characters, Ivy and Theo Vokes and although their marriage has been a long one, this gives the play a compact and domestic scope. The title is derived from the notice appearing at suburban bus-stops; if you want the bus to stop for you, you must “signal the driver”. But Ivy and Theo are not alone on stage: there are also the Two Beings, avatars who function as a chorus but who also enable the stage action and the references to range far and wide and they give the play another dimension altogether. They are, in an important sense, timeless – they are able to evoke the past (recent and ancient), present, and future – and they are also timeless stage types in that they resemble clowns, vagabonds, tramps, licensed to comment upon life from a privileged position – outside and below. [Lawson] |
| “Netherwood” is a formerly grand old house in the southern highlands of New South Wales, an area White knew well as a boarding school child. Like Miss Hare’s “Xanadu” in Riders in the Chariot, it is occupied by a slightly odd outsider, the eccentric Mog. But Mog is not alone, she is not even in charge. “Netherwood” is an asylum, a refuge for those who don’t want to fit, those who can’t and those who can no longer. The Bests, Alice and Royce, are the carers and Alice’s relationship with Mog is ambiguous, complex, and moving. The play is theatrically and verbally inventive and playful: it ends, however, in a scene of apocalyptic dimensions, destructive and essentially meaningless, troubling those critics who think that violence should have meaning. |
| White’s final play was first performed in May 1987. It shows White interested to the last in the necessity of recognizing the interdependence of the ordinary and the extraordinary. A former travelling entertainer, Daniel Shepherd is now the rector of a small town called, brilliantly, Budgiwank, but he also has an almost missionary calling to take his work to Sydney’s most cosmopolitan, sleazy, bohemian inner suburb, King’s Cross. Daniel is after bodies as well as souls, and attempts to take a little of King’s Cross with him back to Budgiwank which thereby gains much publicity. Expelled from the church, he returns to the entertainment industry and eventually enters, literally – like his Biblical counterpart – the lions’ den and is mauled to death. While he is clearly a victim of society’s inability to accept the outsider, he is also less than completely innocent and another of White’s examples of the dangers of too much goodness. [Lawson] |