Patrick White

John Colmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367281212
• eBook ISBN: 9781000639018
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Patrick White is a giant among the moderns. His massive novels, which chart the lonely paths to truth, challenge orthodox notions about fiction and reality. He has created a wholly new kind of prose to embody his prophetic visions of truth and his fierce denunciations of modern society.

Originally published in 1984, John Colmer's study of the Nobel Prize winning Australian novelist was the first to survey all his published works. It differs from earlier studies in using fresh autobiographical material, in revealing the links between the plays and the fiction and in stressing White's vision of duality rather than his much praised affirmations of harmony. Where previous studies have been exegetical this one is also evaluative. It illustrates the process by which White has come to recognize the necessity for the reintegration of the alienated visionary into society.

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INTRODUCTION
AND EARLY FICTION

Patrick White is a giant among the moderns. He offers a completely new experience to readers who are mainly familiar with the recent British novel. They will have encountered little that is comparable to his grand, archetypal themes and grotesque modes, except perhaps in the epic scale and metaphysical panorama of painter-novelists like Wyndham Lewis and Mervyn Peake. Patrick White is himself a frustrated painter and musician. He speaks in his autobiographical essay, ‘The Prodigal Son’, of wishing to produce in his fiction ‘the textures of music, the sensuousness of paint … what Delacroix and Blake might have seen, what Mahler and Liszt may have heard’ (p. 157). From such a novelist we cannot expect the social realism and decent, liberal morality of the British tradition or the formal experimentation and extreme self-consciousness of the post-modernist American novel. His mentors are Dickens, Dostoevsky and Melville. His mammoth fictions possess the amplitude of theme and profusion of detail of the great nineteenth-century novel, combined with stream-of-consciousness techniques associated with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. He also owes a general debt to European expressionism, which taught him the value of grotesque and distorted forms for expressing the irrational in human nature. Yet, in spite of such obvious debts, he has created a wholly individual kind of novel. Few modern writers have found more varied ways of dramatizing the dynamic tension between inner and outer worlds or of exploring the quest for meaning in an apparently meaningless universe. He had also created a highly personal style, so that almost any page bears the unmistakable signature of his total world view. His vision is both eclectic and eccentric. It has much in common with the social and moral paradoxes that underlie Blake’s poetry, and owes much, as the epigraphs make clear, to pioneer thinkers of the modern tradition, ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to Paul Eluard. His major novels, unlike so much sceptical recent fiction, move inexorably towards some grand, positive affirmation about life.

From the start it is important to recognize White’s conflicting loyalties to Europe and Australia. He was born in London in 1912 when his wealthy parents were on an extended honeymoon. They belonged to the Australian class which educated its sons at English public schools and Oxford and Cambridge, spent long periods in Europe, rented English country houses and Mediterranean villas, lived a patrician, privileged life, and owned vast sheep properties the size of a large English county. White’s father gave him a generous allowance that set him free to travel widely in Europe and America and to become a writer. He was nearly 40 when he returned to settle in Australia. The land he returned to was very different from the one he had left in the inter-war years. Politically and economically, it was no longer so dependent on the ‘home’ country; culturally, it was developing vigorous national traditions, especially through the expressionist paintings of Drysdale and Nolan, two artists with whom White shared a revitalized image of the vastness and mystery of the Australian outback. But, to White’s horror and dismay, the increased prosperity and independence seemed to exacerbate the materialism, philistinism and tasteless gentility of Australian suburban culture. Europe and Australia, the beauty of the landscape and the philistinism of the suburbs — these are the poles between which White’s fiction moves.

White is now internationally famous. Books on his work have been published in Australia, Britain, Canada and Sweden. Faced with such a formidably difficult writer, critics have naturally concentrated on patient exegesis. They have also paid tribute to his genius – formally recognized by the award of a Nobel Prize in 1973. But there has been little attempt at evaluation and even the most recent critical books appeared before The Twyborn Affair (1979) and the autobiography Flaws in the Glass (1981), both of which throw new light on his whole career; they also appeared before the publication of his last three plays. My own brief study covers the whole of White’s published work and combines a personal evaluation of his achievement with the kind of exegesis that readers coming to some of the works for the first time may find useful.

My account also differs from many others in stressing the duality of White’s vision, not its unity, and in regarding him as a secular salvationist, not a religious writer, in spite of his remark to Craig McGregor: ‘Religion. Yes, that’s behind all my books.’ It differs, too, in drawing extensively on the recently published autobiography Flaws in the Glass and in directing attention to White’s work in the theatre. It not only establishes various links between the plays and the novels but also stresses the dramatic tensions in White between the frustrated actor and the self-conscious revenant, between the artist who lives through others and the solitary gazer into the distorting mirrors of the self. His description of his experience as a 14-year-old in the English neo-Gothic house rented by his parents illustrates the central significance of the mirror image:

There was the Long Room, at one end the garden, at the other the great gilded mirror, all blotches and dimples and ripples. I fluctuated in the watery glass; according to the light I retreated into the depths of the aquarium, or trembled in the foreground like a thread of pale-green samphire. Those who thought they knew me were ignorant of the creature I scarcely knew myself. (FG, p. 1)

In similar fashion almost all his characters gaze into mirrors; for White, progressive revelations of the undiscovered self culminate in The Twyborn Affair in the vision of memory as a long hall of mirrors, reflecting and refracting the extreme polarities of human experience (TA, p. 351).

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Patrick White’s works are rooted in the painful drama of his early life. ‘In the theatre of my imagination I should say there are three or four basic sets, all of them linked to the actual past, which can be dismantled and reconstructed to accommodate the illusion of reality life boils down to’ (FG, p. 154). Most of the sets combine a symbolic house, distorting mirrors, a wild garden and a privileged visionary whose life has been moulded by an ineffective father and a dominating mother. But because everything he has written has been ‘dredged up from the unconscious’, the transposition of life into art has been a rich and complex affair. Over and over again, White has insisted that he is not a realistic writer, nor a cerebral one, nor a moralist who ‘preaches sermons’ in his books. Nevertheless, it is true that his central moral and imaginative preoccupation has been to discover a unity that would transcend the obvious dualities of existence. In his seventies he seems to have become reconciled to a limited achievement both in life and art. ‘The ultimate spiritual union is probably as impossible to achieve as the perfect work of art or the unflawed human relationship. In matters of faith, art, and love I have had to reconcile myself to starting again where I began’ (FG, p. 74).

He began early. He wrote a play, The Mexican Bandits (1921), when he was 9 years old, a piece of romantic fiction a few years later, and three novels ‘more honest in their lumbering truth than my subsequent chase after a fashionable style in London’ (FG, p. 52) when he worked for two years, between public school and Cambridge, as a jackeroo undergoing the practical training usual for young men expected later to manage a large property of their own. In his first published short story, ‘The Twitching Colonel’, printed in the London Mercury in June 1937, one of the basic theatrical sets emerges clearly. The story is structured on a contrast between two views of reality and two responses to life; these are developed through the eccentric retired English colonel who remembers a mystical experience in India and his complacent wife who is ‘attached to her self beyond escaping’. It is typical of the later fiction that the privileged visionary is placed against a sordid physical environment and a background of jeering, uncomprehending people. Typical too is the narrative trajectory from the present to the past; the colonel’s illumination and escape from the self comes from the memory of a visionary moment in the past and is accompanied by personal dissolution in fire. Fires – real and as symbols of purifying intensity and destructive passions – are to recur memorably at the Hotel du Midi in The Aunt’s Story (1948) and in the Madeleine episode in The Tree of Man (1955). The highly lyric style of ‘The Twitching Colonel’, which incorporates irony and breaks all conventional syntactic rules, also foreshadows White’s later daring mixture of modes and his strikingly individual style.

Central to all White’s later fiction is the distinction made in the short story between external appearance and internal reality, between surface meaning and underlying significance. Through the creation of this duality he invests his world with spiritual values. For human beings the gap between the inner and outer self is often wide, as the eccentric Miss Hare feels at the beginning of Riders in the Chariot (1961).

Where the road sloped down she ran, disturbing stones, her body quite agitated as it accompanied her, but her inner self by now joyfully serene. The anomaly of that relationship never failed to mystify, and she stopped again, to consider. For a variety of reasons, very little of her secret, actual nature had been disclosed to other human beings. (RC, p. 11)

Neither is the natural world always what it seems. A special insight is required to perceive its reality. This, Miss Hare possesses: ‘All that land, stick and stone, belonged to her, over and above actual rights. Nobody else had ever known how to penetrate it quite to the same extent (RC, p. 12). Only White’s visionaries have the power to read nature aright and see into the heart of things.

The contrast in ‘The Twitching Colonel’ between spirituality and complacent materialism has its roots deep in White’s early life. His first intimations of another world came through wax effigies, witches and the Mad Woman of Sydney, dangling her ‘fish skeletons and heads’, who in his boyhood eyes ‘took on a significance above daylight and reality’ (FG, p. 20). As his autobiography reveals, he suffered acutely as a potential artist in a complacent, wealthy environment. ‘An artist in the family was almost like a sodomite; if you had one you kept him dark’ (FG, p. 57) — or tried to transform him into an English gentleman. White received his first ‘wounds’ at an Australian prep school before satisfying his mother’s colonial ambitions by serving his four years’ ‘prison sentence’ at an English public school, Cheltenham.

He found temporary escape from English manners and Australian materialism during his two years as a jackeroo, between 1929 and 1931, when he wrote the three ‘obsessive novels’, The Immigrants, Finding Heaven and The Sullen Moon, that have since disappeared; he wrote these at the farm dining-room table, much to the amazement of those around him. Cambridge too offered escape – as it did for Forster, another homosexual writer oppressed by convention. But in White’s case liberation came from travels in France and Germany, not Italy and Greece. The sexual duality and ambivalence that pervades White’s life and art even affects the way he recalls his Cambridge Modern Language studies in masculine French and feminine German. A more obvious duality is that felt between European culture and Australian nature as embodied in bush and desert. Eventually, after spending most of the thirty-six years of his life outside Australia, he returned in 1948 to satisfy a ‘terrible nostalgia’ and to escape becoming ‘that most sterile of beings, a London intellectual’ (’The Prodigal Son’, p. 156); but not before immersing himself for many years in London artistic and theatrical circles. Through a close friendship with the painter Roy de Maistre he learnt to look for the core of reality beneath the surface – a clue to all his writing. And he spent practically all his time in the company of actors and haunting theatres. Before his return to Australia in 1948, when he had to adapt himself ‘to what seemed a foreign country and a foreign language’,¹ he had published two novels, Happy Valley (1939) and The Living and the Dead (1941); he completed a third, The Aunt’s Story (1948), on his journey home.

Happy Valley and The Living and the Dead, the first set in rural Australia and the second in a London reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s ‘unreal city’, both express the author’s painful struggle to discover meaning in an apparently meaningless universe. In Happy Valley, which was praised by Edwin Muir in England and was awarded a gold medal in Australia but which the author has deliberately allowed to go out of print, there is some confusion of purpose. The metaphysical theme and the sociological theme are logically incompatible. The first asserts that suffering is a universal and necessary precondition for spiritual progress, an idea embodied in the epigraph from Gandhi, ‘the purer the suffering, the greater the progress’; the second suggests that suffering arises from local conditions and can either be remedied or escaped. Like many works of the 1930s, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) for instance, the novel builds up a powerful composite image of the dreams and frustrations of small-town rural life.

This is a very literary first novel, which contains a soliloquy reminiscent of Molly Bloom, a Joycean sensitive schoolboy, and a very Lawrentian scene involving the death of a snake. In the climax, children play a crucial role, suggesting potentialities for harmony, as they often do in White’s novels – a conception very different from that represented by the devouring faces of the baby-boom children in the late play Signal Driver, first staged in 1982. In Happy Valley, the unhappy schoolboy Rodney finds joy and harmony in the half-caste Margaret’s company; and Margaret leaves her drunken, lecherous father and nagging mother to live with her uncle and aunt. As the hero, Dr Halliday, and his family drive away from the ironically named Happy Valley for the last time, the son Rodney sees Margaret and her uncle and aunt as a harmonious, stoical group: ‘Sometimes you thought that the Quongs were exotic, foreign to Happy Valley, but not as they stood outside the store, this first and last evidence of life’ (HV, p. 326). Less convincing and more assertive is the hero’s vision of the ‘mystery of unity’, after leaving his sleeping mistress (HV, p. 166). Here, and in the final paragraphs of the novel, the larger metaphysical theme appears contrived because insufficiently grounded in the given world of the fiction, a fault that sometimes recurs in later novels. But certainly Happy Valley is a striking study of small-town life, the stifled passions of its inhabitants and their desires for a wider life. They are caught up in its monotonous daily rhythms as are the suburban characters in White’s fine expressionistic play, The Season at Sarsaparilla (1962).

White continues to grapple with the problem of suffering in his second novel, The Living and the Dead (1941). But he now extends this theme through the processes of doubling, multiplication and fragmentation. Instead of having a single figure in search of truth, he has a brother and a sister, Elyot and Eden Standish. Each is involved with contrasted potential partners and all the characters may be seen as fragments of a whole person. At the beginning and near the end, Elyot reflects: ‘Alone, he was yet not alone, uniting as he did the themes of so many other lives’ (LD, pp. 18, 357). This theme of psychic fragmentation and empathic unity has a strong personal basis: in an interview printed in Southerly, White remarked ‘all my characters are fragments of my own somewhat fragmented character’² and in his autobiography he said of his cousin Marianne Wynne and the servants Lizzie, Matt and Flo, ‘each is a fragment of my own character’ (FG, p. 32). The theme of fragmentation is developed further in The Aunt’s Story, in the dream fugues in the ‘Jardin Exotique’ (a garden which is a fictional analogue of Dufy’s painting Le Jardin d’hiver), and in the heroine’s confrontation with the composite figure of Holstius at the end of that novel. But she is an active quester, while Elyot Standish is more static – a Prufrock figure – whose reaction to the faces in the street is that ‘the whole business was either a mystery, or else meaningless, and of the two, meaninglessness is the more difficult to take’ (LD, p. 9). Yet he certainly longs for a purpose and vitality that would redeem his death-in-life existence in London, as do many of the others characters, including his sister and her working-class lover Joe, both of whom seek meaning in life through active participation in the Spanish civil war.

In the early short story ‘The Twitching Colonel’ and in the first two novels, private epiphanies play a crucial role. However, White is not always successful in investing the apparently trivial with transcendental significance. In Happy Valley a lustre bowl is required to serve too many symbolic purposes, while in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the texts
• 1 Introduction and early fiction
• 2 Middle novels: Australian epics
• 3 Middle novels: artists and visionaries
• 4 Plays and short stories
• 5 Last novels: ‘The ordinary ones’
• 6 Conclusion: White and the critics
• Notes
• Bibliography