THE WAY WE WERE - three Australian novelists

THEY WAY WE WERE: THREE AUSTRALIAN NOVELISTS

The Basking Shark in Parsley Bay: the Style of Christina Stead

There is a curious moment in For Love Alone

"Come for a swim?" she asked her brother Lance.

'Too tired,' he said. "Don't swim alone, and look out, there are rays and Portuguese-man-of wars about."

"I'll stay in the light. You come and look-out."

"Not on your tintype."

Her father, sitting on a stone bench in the garden, slapping mosquitoes, said, "Have you got a look-out?"

"You come and watch," she said.

"Nuh," said he. "Too tired. Been making Kitty's hope chest all the afternoon. More hope than chest."

Lance from behind the door said: "Hmff," disgustedly.

"Lance doesn't care for women," laughed the father in his soft voice.

"Really!" cried Teresa. "Really! Doesn't he? Oh no!"

The father laughed. Teresa dropped her towel on the steps and splashed into the water; it was so still that the splash could be heard all over the bay.

"Not out of the lights," called her father. "I saw a large basking shark up Parsley Bay yesterday." The basking shark was pale, changing colour with the bottom and all but invisible.

Christina Stead was not given to inaccuracies and was very interested in marine biology – which is perhaps not surprising when we consider David G Stead was her father. Yet here we have a basking shark 'changing colour with the bottom and all but invisible' in Parsley Bay.

Teresa, the heroine of For Love Alone, is based on Stead and her experiences. Stead's need to render them seems the basis of her literary endeavour to a remarkable degree. Many of her characters and their situations were recognised by her friends and family; they often felt the resemblances painfully true.

Teresa had been to a wedding in Neutral Bay. It was an extremely hot day in Sydney, around Christmas time when the 'spring' tides (it is actually summer) cover beaches and wash over paths where one is accustomed to tread. The spring tides effect a magical transformation – one can glide through the water over rough paths along which one has had to pick one's way.

Teresa's journey home from the wedding in Neutral Bay on the other side of Sydney Harbour has included a stopover at her aunt's and cousin's who live a couple of bays closer to the city than Teresa's home. From their place she has had to climb a steep hill to descend via the byways only a local could know to reach her home, which like the day, the wedding reception and her aunt's home seethes with elan obliterating heat, with frustration, desperation, poverty and aspiration. The bride, grief stricken at her own wedding had begged Teresa, whom she hardly knows, not to think too badly of her for sinking to this marriage; the aunt holds Teresa's cousin Anne in vassalage so that she longs to escape into marriage – with anyone. The spring tides have washed their enchantment right up to Teresa's lawn; she must partake of what relief they can offer.        

It is Sydney as it was up until the eighties and Depression Sydney in particular – determinedly Anglo-Celtic, desperately respectable and deeply sympathetic to good form yet prone to social defiance, threatened by nature and subject to magical transformations which threaten to envelop.

Teresa swims. Her splash can be heard all over the bay. Many are listening. She survives (sting) rays and Portuguese man-of-wars (a stinging jelly fish) and of course the basking shark which in any case could offer no threat because it is according to David G Stead harmless to all but 'small pelagic living things'.

What is this fantastic creature doing lazing about in Stead's vigorous sweep of fictionalised documentary narrative?

Stead's style exhausts her readers: it is relentlessly intense and particular. Seemingly raw in its reflection of 'reality', it insists upon her unsentimental clarity of vision.

For vision it is. This may or may not have actually happened to the young Stead like this but it is true in the literary sense: psychologically, socially, philosophically, historically, humanly, poetically. Stead's vision is faithful to a larger sphere than the autobiographical. Actual though they may have been, Stead's characters and their situations are a product of her mind, that mind which would not or could not seek comfort in the fantasised or ideal but which recorded for her readers a time, a place, characters and a situation – this is what it is, she says. What she gives us, her vision, is as unameliorated as it may be. Stead's insistence on the recording of character and situation can overwhelm her reader. Her unsentimentality and relentless particularising inspire awe but blear our attention. It is as if Stead had more pressing needs and higher goals than to inform and entertain us.

The Leftists of this period (and Stead was one) favoured 'realism' and this quality no doubt assisted Stead's publishing career, nevertheless the style is the woman. Her style is insistent in its determination to give more than a verisimilitude. Stead captures the surges, the backwashes, eddies, the tumults and flatnesses of situations and represents these phenomena in all their inevitable effect. Dialogue plays a big part in her efforts to represent her vision; it is sometimes laboured. While the thoughts, both spoken and unspoken, of her characters are registered in close texture, too often they partake of the dialectic so that Stead's dialogue lies heavily on the page and it is too often framed with verbs ('laughed the father') which are little more than devices of direct speech and adverbs such as 'disgustedly' (which adds very little to Lance's 'Hmff'). Stead's flow of detail is relatively unmediated in terms of narrative thrust (compare For Love Alone with Emma for example; her narrative drives neither towards reader-satisfying climax nor resolution) but it and her dialogue capture as no history ever has how it was to be these people and what that time did to them.

Of course Teresa's father would have disparaged the comeliness and therefore the marriageability of her sister Kitty because he was, in his straitened circumstances, desperate to get rid of her but also keen to keep her allure for himself. Similarly he disparages his son's masculinity by implying he might be homosexual, projecting that enticing possibility onto him. This is Sydney, the Depression, Australia, fatherhood and masculinity as it was then and perhaps universally is. It is also the theme of For Love Alone (wonderfully paradoxical title): marriage for women.

Teresa, exhausted and enchanted, manages to be aloof from this situation and to graciously humour her father as Stead herself must have done to the point of madness. Stead hated her father. Her rage against him drives her great novel The Man Who Loved Children. Perhaps drove her.

Why would Teresa's father warn her against a basking shark and why would Stead's authorial voice take up the nonsense of this threat and turn it into a rare moment in her prose – a recoiling from the unmitigated rendition of her characters' realities?

Watson's Bay (the first bay inside the great heads which protect the magnificent Sydney Harbour, the point of arrival and retreat from this edge of empire, redolent of marine adventure and disaster and in those days home to fisher people) is on this night enchanted with the great tide gently spilling across the shore and invading its sandstone littoral. So perhaps the great, colour changing and all but invisible shark is part of that enchantment. Though the spring tides do happen and this basking shark does not.

Is Stead visiting an obvious and foolish mistake upon the distinguished marine biologist her father (clearly the progenitor of her character, Teresa's father) in order to humiliate him? Is it a deliberate or an unconscious thrust into his reputation? Has Stead herself made a mistake, momentarily confusing a basking shark with the slow, also harmless (and very much smaller) carpet shark, species of which waggle their variegated ways across the bottom of the bays of Sydney Harbour? Or is the father character confident of his daughter's ignorance of sharks and in his ever sly, mocking and ambiguous manner nevertheless expressing a genuine concern for her safety? Though swimming where there is light is not going to save her (Teresa herself seems to believe a look-out might secure her) from attack by a (say, whaler) shark, a sting from a Portuguese man-of-war or from treading on a ray which might then also sting her dreadfully.

Is the point of this exchange that these men should have protected this woman or that these men are denying this woman a little refreshing adventure? Stead herself might have denied there was any general point implicit in this situation; she would have been annoyed by and vigorously resisted the idea that in this kind of way men oppress women. She was not in her fiction a propagandist and in her later life would brook no attacks on 'the patriarchy'. Yet we often do discern the universal or at least general in her vividly realised scenes and something else besides, something beyond the literal seems to be heightening their impact.

Is the basking shark an uncharacteristic moment in which Stead wishes to sensationalise her scene, maybe with her American readership in mind?

Stead knew her father's work very well. In 1906 David Stead had written of the basking shark 'The Basking Shark … attains huge dimensions and is one of the largest fishes existing, reaching a length of forty feet' and in 1963 somewhat unscientifically by today's standards, 'Apart from the verbal records given to me by seafaring men as to the occurrence of this shark in Australian waters, on three occasions ships' captains have reported to me that they have met with a "sleeper", or "sleeping", shark floating motionless at the surface of the ocean between Sydney and the New Zealand coast’. Other authorities are dubious about its existence in the South Pacific.

His daughter, the novelist is, with a high lack of the characteristic, fanciful on this subject. It seems likely then that the shark is not literal. It is a symbol swum from Christina's Stead's unconscious emerging as an absurdity which gives one pause.

The context is the necessity and the dreadfulness of marriage for women (the name of the bride is, terrifyingly enough, 'Malfi'). Teresa is being warned about something, to stay in the light, close to home. She needs a man to watch over her; neither father nor brother will do so and even if they did the light will do her little good for the shark is 'all but invisible'. Its camouflage is infinite, it can be anywhere and probably unnoticed. What can it be? It prowls or glides beneath in its wondrously changing colours. It is a shape, barely detectable. It seems to be a threat yet it is in a Bay called Parsley – one of the two herbs used regularly by Australian cooks of that time (the other being mint). 'Parsley' suggests the most ordinary of domestic settings. The historical Parsley Bay was more respectable than Watsons Bay. Is Stead's image of the basking shark in Parsley Bay one of the horror which glides beneath family homes, beneath the acceptable? The rest of her work and her life substantiate this interpretation. Is Teresa's father, dreadful in his domesticity, making this point in some unconscious symbolic way? Parsley, in the old wives tales of Sydney, was supposed to protect against pregnancy. Is the basking shark the very threat of a husband, of pregnancy? Maybe the most terrible thing about it is that it at any moment might, all forty feet of it, cease to bask.

Parsley Bay seems charming in its safeness yet that is where the basking shark was seen – or where Teresa's father claims to have seen it (one need not necessarily believe him, prone to teasing his children as he is).

Or does the warning come from the author herself? For it is she who has offered a comment on the shark's nature. Why would she need to mention this creature's near invisibility? It devours. It is huge. It is infinitely various. To risk a cliché of post modern commentary, is Stead imaging her own gift? Is the basking shark in Parsley Bay a trope for her art, an astonishment in this confined circumstance, ever changing with its absorption of context? It is submerged, in touch with the depths, glimpsed only as a shape and very frightening in its unknowableness.

The basking shark might then be the shape of the devouring tendency of Stead's art. We can only glimpse its defining and 'all but invisible' form which alerts us to its context by its responsiveness to that context. Think of the inexorable flight of the anecdote which has taken us from the almost unbearable heat of the wedding reception in Neutral Bay with its 'concupiscent fever' to the stifling home Aunt Bea shares with her daughter Anne in Rose Bay (it is a rented room) to Watson's Bay transfigured by a spring tide where a father is reluctantly preparing for the possibility of one of his daughter's marriage.

Are its devouring and transforming qualities alone those which make it dangerous?

The basking shark, we might also consider, is pale, as was the knight in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. Chapter 24 of For Love Alone is titled "So Haggard and So Woebegone". Stead's mind was formed by English Literature in a way that few under sixty are now able to recognise. A young man who loves Teresa cries out to her in this chapter, "Yes, what do you care? … You're so pale and beautifully distracted, you're like a woman out of Shakespeare". Teresa only smiles at him. She is la belle dame and the knight 'palely loitering'. She must escape Australia. And thereby find a way past marriage.

Stead devoured her material - her life and that of others - in order to give it shape. Her memories were her imagination. Her detail is blindingly bright (she was very interested in the work of Virginia Woolf, she who wished to be free of the need for plot), she presses her readers to see and feel beyond the delight and horror of anecdote, to immerse themselves in the circumstances and interior life of her characters, to observe their actions and reactions thus (Stead's anecdote proliferates) unfolding. For all her insistence on the particular, her propensity for ramification – in the end because of this - Stead is able to give a sense of scale, of a – let us say tragic - force operating in the world which thwarts and frustrates and destroys people struggling for fulfilment. This prosaic tragic force is made up in no small part of the social conventions and institutions which other novelists endorse even while revealing their destructive power (think of marriage and Anna Karenina). As for the rest – we are the agents of our own undoing. Christina Stead's unflinching gaze at that process makes us squirm and start. 'Basking' in Parsley Bay may suggest complacency; Christina Stead hardly needed warning against that. But most of all, amongst the obsessive flow of her realities, the basking shark is a poetic presence, a transfiguring syncretic. Stead thus offers a sense of a higher vision than that of the mundane, the sordid - one which embraces it and makes it poignant, fabulous.

Christina Stead attracted a wide international readership who venerated her achievement. No writer was truer to her vision and she had the gift to astonish.

The Woman on the Beach: Thea Astley

It was typical of Thea Astley that she wrote about our nearest neighbours whom we consider of no significance and did our best to ignore. In Beachmasters she gives us a rebellion against a French/British ‘condominium’ administration on an island called ‘Kristi’. The name is vaguely associative of Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu; the French/English administration strengthens this association though the independence struggle also alludes to that other very close neighbour New Caledonia, a French ‘possession’. France and Britain allowed the New Hebrides to become the independent nation of Vanuatu in 1980. Beachmasters was published in 1985.

Let us move to Serua Point on Kristi where people have fled from the not very great terrors of a local resistance event.

Cordingley could only goggle at his wife with a marvelling disgust.

They were not the first on the beach at Serua Point. A score of islanders were squatting fatalistically on the sand, simply gaping into a seascape that held less threat than the land at their backs.

Cordingley is the British Resident Agent and his wife is Belle and she is worth marvelling at (‘disgust’ is his limitation). In the following ten small pages Astley captures this colonial world, the immediate situation, them, other Europeans, Chinese traders and the Islanders whose fatalism guarantees the subsiding of the rebellion. Those ten pages are exciting, hilarious, satiric, poignant and true, for Astley’s focus is constantly shifting, wide and deep. There are few ten small pages in English literature which give us so much.

Thea Astley won the Miles Franklin more often than anyone else but some people suggested Angus and Robertson’s Editor Beatrice Davis should step down from the Miles Franklin selection committee because it didn’t look good when Astley, whom they published, won it so often (four times over nearly forty years). Davis dismissed this notion: she was above such considerations. Anyway, Astley’s Drylands won the Miles Franklin (in 2000 with Kim Scott’s Benang) long after Angus and Robertson’s and Beatrice Davis had ceased to be players. She was not entirely a comfortable favourite, Thea Astley, she made people slightly uneasy, even though she was so funny. They complained, But why must she write like that? And there was that mordant glance.

Like Beatrice Davis, Astley belonged to that preceding era when self-assurance was admired (it easily became arrogance), when a writer could confidently invoke a culture, a range of referents and not feel s/he was threatening, puzzling or god forbid turning off her readers. Astley could quote from the Schubert lieder in German, or Rilke or give us a French phrase or sentence or two (as could Helen Garner of the following generation) in the expectation that we would read on in our ignorance, look it up or ask someone to explain it. Astley went further, she freely invoked a world of sophisticated experience, knowledge, wisdom. And it often came from overseas. She was confidently and inevitably, given Australia, defiantly worldly. Yet she never fled these shores in search of what they could not provide – the higher culture, greater refinement, a trust in the imaginative, a wonder at the original. The last most of all. Astley made all of that her own through literature -

Belle and her damn bomb-shells. There’d been the time … he lolled heavily under the fringe of the burao trees and dragged his handkerchief over his blazing face … that time she’d quoted that bit of Samuel Johnson (Christ! None of them had even heard of Samuel Johnson, probably thought she was having a crack at Lyndon B.!) … something about dogs in their doggy world … and the Resident Commissioner droll behind rimless glasses because he was a bit of a books man too, hanging on her words, waiting for it, and she’d gone on about a pair of copulating terriers at a Washington garden party, imagine my dears, dogs in their doggy world at a Nuremberg rally might have changed the course of history …

and insight. She saw and induced. This was why she made people uneasy. How could she know that? they worried, knowing she knew.

Astley was a teacher, high school and university. She taught and she wrote until she retired then she wrote and talked very successfully. Always make them laugh was one of her public presentation principles. She was not afraid to talk on a boat sloughing through the algae and mangrove mud weighted waters of the Brisbane River or at rail stops along an improbable Queensland narrow-gauge railway line. She told them how they were wrecking the land. And they were developers and Queensland farmers. And she made them laugh. She made them laugh at Byron Bay a couple of weeks before she died. It was a wonderful story garnered from a ‘cattle class’ coach trip to see something of America. The story embraced poor black people and not having husbands and how the driver should get the black woman without a seat a husband and some old white woman offering hers. It was about democracy and solidarity and generosity and humour of course. Astley did the voices. Her own was post war, educated Queensland, deliberately uncultured, deliberate. She moved to Byron Bay to be near her son after her husband died. How are you finding it? she was asked. Now this question was put to the supposedly caustic Astley about the pseudo hippy, eighties rich, post glam, nouveau boho, smart backpackerier, Bali-sophisticated Byron Bay, ‘Oh it’s like Gladesville or something,’ she replied deliberately.

Astley could see where people lived in their spirits. Her prose was inflected with the figurative, the language of the unconscious, of myths and dreams. There was always a poet pressing this woman determined on the prosaic. She was accused of stretching credulity with scenes such as the fight to death by men with horns strapped on their heads. Perhaps it was more than that she knew North Queensland better than her critics; perhaps it was also a trope. She was not so much attracted to the bizarre as unafraid of what it said. Her style was not only complex in its reaching out to ensnare complex reality in few words (she is the antithesis of a prolix writer) but it was also vivid for she saw vividly.

His dream took him back to that embassy party and the dramatics of his wife, younger, prettier, her hair swinging in the blunt bob that was too schoolgirlish, her round face with its innocent high colour totally giving the lie to the outrageousness of her utterances. Only this time, the dream women were crowding her begging for more, their faces drawn into long bird-like looks of greed as Belle fluttered among them dashing obscenities with the guilelessness of her face unmarked by the prurience of her stories …

Astley not only gives us Belle’s winning shtick but what makes it winning – the needs of others – in this case female repression. If Astley was a feminist, she did not spare women by denying them their fallible humanity. But what makes her not caustic is her warmth, her unsentimental compassion. She turned her empathy to the despair of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders with what might have been considered an almost obsessive concern if it had not proved so just. She gave us Palm Island before it gave us itself. Her sceptical gaze embraces the unhappiness of those living in disaffection because the mores of their time and place offend their senses of decency and justice a she herself was so offended. Her sympathies were all for the underdog. Her locale is Australian (represented on this beach by ‘the Bipis’, Mr and ‘Misis’ B P, that company’s reps on Kristi, loathed by the diplomatic corps because they are so at home in this rough world where exploitation is the key signature). Astley was drawn to the tropics where the greeds are forced into indolent expressions and roughly cast in crude hues, where striving goodness cannot be starched and savagery so often prevails in the knowledge that civilisation and its rules are far away – well, in Brisbane in any case. Her readers often did not want to believe this was their country or people could behave like that but.

She gives us the innerscapes with wonderful economy and she revels in action; her novels are filled with drama and excitement: fights and hysteria, burnings and explosions.

Cordingley, using Belle’s arm as a kind of tiller, began pushing her with the other European refugees through the ranks of black flesh towards the top of the ramp. Flesh parted for the gavman man. Then there was a massive grinding and scraping as the Eudora shoved its ramp up the beach. The world was chocolate and white. Missionary Lampton from Thresher Bay became unhinged. ‘Back!’ he screamed, his hands in a triangle of prayer. ‘Back! Let the women through first!’ His voice was a thin high-pitched stream of word wings as his lean fanatic body went under the waves off his flock. ‘Pipol Trinitas! Pipol Malua!’ The feathers were plucked from the syllables in a frenzied rush of money-bag rattling Asiatic merchants, who, swinging satchels vigorously like clubs, cut a clear-way for themselves straight through and on to the landing barge.

Belle laughed at the outrageousness of it.

Astley loved place, understood how people might belong to the land rather than own it (‘like Gladesville or something’). Away from the beach at Serua Point the novel’s principal character, Gavi, is coming to terms with how

It’s right we go,’ the boy said without preamble. ‘I’ve been thinking about it. It’s right. I’m sorry about you and maman, but it is right. It is time. Maybe when I’m older I can come back. If the island will have me. When I’ve learned to – well – have myself.’

The French are deporting him, a thirteen year old, for his miserable, hapless part in the rebellion.

Cordingley escapes from the beach, emerging from his panic stricken flight and clownish behaviour with the appearance of more than dignity -

Cordingley sat very straight near the stern, his blood-streaked face turned into the sun.

…

‘Turned nasty did it?’ the First Secretary asked, looking admiringly at the cut across Cordingley’s forehead.

Cordingley floated a wisp of a smile.

‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t handle.’        

Belle is still on the beach.

As the Eurydice headed west down the Channel, out to the heavy waters between Kristi and Trinitas, those who were near the rails began a relieved waving to the crowd still on the beach. Cordingley could see Belle remove her neck-scarf and trail it in the wind. It was baited with a kind of regretful memory. To his vast surprise he found himself waving, too, his arm lifting involuntarily, and to his further amazement, the people left on shore, mainly black now, were waving their despised hands in reply.

Despite all those Miles Franklins we have not yet been able to do Thea Astley justice.

Un Embarras de Richesse: Patrick White

The first, and perhaps the least confident of the three, had chosen an enormous satin bon-bon, of screeching pink, swathed so excessively on one side that the head conveyed an impression of disproportion, of deformity, of bulbous growth. But the uncertain lady was palpitating with her own daring, and glanced at the closer of her two companions, fishing for a scrap of praise.  Her friend would not concede it, however. For the second lady was secure in her own seasoned carapace, and would not have recognized her acquaintance except by compulsion. The second lady was wearing on her head a lacquered crab-shell. She was quite oblivious of it, of course. But there it sat, one real claw offering a diamond starfish, the other dangling a miniature conch in polished crystal. The unconscious wearer had divested herself conventionally of her gloves and was restoring suppleness to her hands. As she tried her nails on the air, it was seen that those, by some chance, were exactly the same shade as the audacious crab.

How the waiters adored the three insolent ladies, but it was at the third and obviously eldest that their most Italianate smiles were directed.

The third, or by now, the first lady, affected the most amusing hat of all. On her blue curls she had perched an innocent little conical felt, of a drab, an earth colour, so simple and unassuming that the owner might have been mistaken for some old, displaced clown, until it was noticed that fashion had tweaked the felt almost imperceptibly, and that smoke – yes, actual smoke – was issuing out of the ingenious cone.

Patrick White was Australian Literature for some twenty-five years. No other writer approached his reputation and esteem which reached its apogee with the Nobel Prize in 1973. Some conservatives affected to ‘prefer’ the Martin Boyd of Lucinda Brayford, a superbly written soap opera devoted to snobbery. They need not have been so bothered by White, he was essentially a reactionary himself. He dished it out to all manners and classes of our classless society but there is a tacit presence, a matter more of reflex than statement in his work, suggesting a refined sensibility and spirituality which lies somewhere amongst an Establishment or amongst Europeans like Voss. The volcano lady of the above passage is a representative of this shadowy aristocracy. Really, White despaired of Australians and sought solace amongst the rejects upon whom he placed the burden of sainthood, of spiritual perception.

Though he was a man of the expressionist theatre, White loved the idea of the saintly, the humble, the self-effacing. This is not so extraordinary: the most egocentric theatricals employ mantra moments and some play casts initiate performances with a little meditative huddle, like net and footballers laying hands upon each other before flinging them into the air and charging out to trample their opponents or audiences. The theatricals believe their frisson of innerness lends inspiration, makes them deep, or even that it lays an ensemble spirit over their egos rampant. And so it might for the unconscious is an irresistible force.

White romped around in the psyche, bringing it to light like no other writer; he was at home there as he never was in the world. White snatched glimpses of the world and parlayed these etchings into fiction and plays. The latter have always proved the less satisfactory: while they are vivid and funny, they lack drive, they do not ‘journey’, which is odd, for the plot trajectory of White’s novels is irresistible in its sweep through many excursions and the dialogue in his novels is incomparable. White caught Australian English at its Anglo-Celtic height, before immigration from elsewhere and a diminution in the influence of the written sent it on simpler, more direct, rougher, less literate ways.

We fell about laughing at his rendition of us – ‘yairs’ we tried not to say and shrieked at ‘Kevon’. There we – well, they – were: the pretentious, the uneducated, the unsophisticated, the coarse and vulgar. We readers of Patrick White loved being lacerated by the mirror and tape-recorder he held up to the not-us. Barry Humphries was doing something of the same kind at the same time but in that case it was unmitigated by the human.

White also had trouble with the human; his characters, detailed though they are, are sometimes not fleshed out. We are asked to believe of Sister de Santis in The Eye of the Storm (surely the great White novel?) that when not attending on Elizabeth Hunter and drinking gin and wine with Sir Basil at Doyle’s fish restaurant she subsists on a diet of tea and bread with National Geographics for company. Still, White was after other dimensions than the mundane and he was able to parade before us an endless array of characters whom we recognised in print for the first time as those who surrounded us. They babble in tongues which make other writers’ attempts at Australian English seem factitious, or utter vatic, paradoxical statements. Besides saying ‘yairs’, they suck viciously at their dentures and/or their gums (the oral is a very strong presence), are yellowish with brown patches or liver spots, scarlet splattered and blue veined, their hair, where they have it, is a writhing uncontrollable force and their faces collapse or become rictus with terror or rage in various convincing ways (White knew Francis Bacon). White’s characters are often costumed in expressionistic flesh, which was a wonderful relief in those days of ‘dun coloured realism’ (his words) and often hilarious because deadly accurate and revelatory of the reality which surrounded us but which we ourselves could not bring to consciousness and so name. However there is the unfortunate danger of these characters becoming jangled literary puppets. When the ordinary are not vicious in their banality, they are saints and sometimes martyrs. The ordinary tend to belong to the lower orders. The saints apotheosise in wondrous illumination. Whilst experiencing hers, Sister de Santis is surrounded by beating wings (they belong to birds, a pigeon in particular, but we are meant to take them for angels). In rendering such moments of divine possession White took breathtaking risks with bathos and sentimentality but his readers do not realise this for they are swept along by his sincerity. His tonal range – from slapstick through satire to metaphysical exaltation – is as wide as it could be and utterly assured. His sincerity saves him from a sadistic laying about him at the vanities and defences of fallible humanity. Sincerity is a catalyst for melodrama; White also escaped this falseness, just. Perhaps it is his brilliantly rendered acerbity which protected him. There is another shadowy presence in his writing besides an implied aristocracy - compassion, a recognised common humanity. It is constantly at risk from his rage but survives everywhere in his work as a recognition of human decency.

The Nobel Prize honoured him as a writer who had ‘introduced a new continent to literature’. No doubt it gave some Europeans comfort that we were laughable in the ways they expected and thrilled others with exotic possibilities, not least of a religious nature (it was a neo religious era: people tried to read Hesse for example, or under the influence of the Beatles practised transcendental meditation or dressed only in orangey shades of what was supposed to be saffron in the service of their cult which instantly evaporated at the whiff of scandal). However much Australia was White’s world, his writing was universal in its appeal. He was translated and admired very widely. Overseas readers could consider the Other which was us and discover themselves.

The power of art is celebrated in his fiction, especially painting. Music is also a strong presence and theatricals blunder their ways across his pages. Painting and music speak for the spirit; the theatre is more a necessary witness to the anarchic in life. While poetry is everywhere it is little mentioned.

White was drawn to Jewishness. The lady in the screeching pink bon-bon above is fleeing her Jewishness. She has embraced a second husband and the Church of England in the shape of ‘St Marks’ (doubtless of Darling Point in Sydney, in those days a site of social aspirations). White is ambivalent; his attitude partakes of his time – Anglo-Celtic Australians tended to sneer at the social aspirations of Jews as they clambered out of the ghettos and concentration camps and into the social elite but he also had a deep respect for the adherents of the religion and an interest in their plight. Jews are parvenus and the Scapegoat. The saturnine Mrs Lippmann of The Eye of the Storm is a tragic figure, unable even in the antipodes to escape her fate – at which one must balk. Jews, for White (as they are in the present era for Christos Tsiolkas) are the dark side of Europe, a powerful, subterfuginous force. White, born to the Establishment himself, resented all kinds of parvenus and had little care for social injustice at any systemic level though he of course liked to ladle out charity (this is characteristic of the type). The Jews were fascinating in their place. The trouble was, their place was untenable. It satisfied White to abandon them to the tragedy he had allotted them. He was in his fanciful complacency both ridiculous and disgusting but let us not forget he needed his puppets and his clowns for his great art; Jews were part of his collection of stock characters.

White wrestled more with the plight of Aborigines. His Alf Dubbo (of Riders in the Chariot), Aboriginal painter, is a valiant effort but like Sister de Santis is not so much a character as a spirit presence, something White seems sadly aware of in his efforts to bring the Aboriginal to life.

God was White’s subject; he pursues it relentlessly, discovering it all over and under the place. Improbable though it might seem, the possibility of apotheosis, of sainthood, of goodness even enters the restaurant in which the Bon-bon, the Crab-shell and the Volcano sprawl, exhausted by their effort at seeming.  The Volcano remembers a maid who was ‘a kind of saint’. She ‘cranes in the hopes that saving grace might just become visible in the depths of the purgatory in which they sat’ (the Italian waiters have turned the lights out on them). Her ‘crater was now extinct’.

Who else but Patrick White could give the hilarious such a plangent undertone?

White had a fecundity of invention, an imaginative power far beyond that of any other Australian writer. The Nobel publicists were not wrong, White told Australians of themselves as no other writer and revealed an emerging spiritscape to which Europeans had so far been oblivious.

SOURCES

Stead Christina 1983 For Love Alone  Angus and Robertson Australia (according to this edition 'First published by Peter Davies in 1945' but Chris Williams in her biography Christina Stead  A Life of Letters gives the details 'Harcourt Brace New York 1944) see p 35, p 67 & p 284

Stead David G 1906 Fishes of Australia  A Popular Study and Systematic Guide to the Study of the Wealth within our Waters William Brooks and Co Sydney see p 235

Stead David G 1963 Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas Angus and Robertson Sydney see p 48 & p 50

Astley Thea  Beachmasters Penguin Books Australian 1985  pp 118 – 128, p 182 & p 184

White Patrick 1976 (first published 1961)   Riders in the Chariot  Jonathan Cape London see pp 537 – 545

The quote about the Nobel Prize commendation comes from Marr David 1991 Patrick White  A Life  Random House Australia p 541

For a fictional account of two dinners with Patrick White please see the following blog.


I am going to complete THE WAY WE WERE with studies of Helen Garner and Frank Moorhouse thus making it five Australian novelists.