In depth
Nick Totton
A Fringe of Leaves Patrick White (Jonathan Cape 4.50) Still Waters Stanley Middleton (Hutchinson E4.25) A Fringe ()/Leaves is, of course, magnificent. Once more, Mr White's extraordinary style, so crabbed and idiosyncratic when put under the microscope, proves itself in action: as one steps back from the canvas the odd brushwork transforms itself into a landscape luminous with conviction, whose intricacy validates and draws one in turn back to the technique. Very rarely does a novel achieve such a sense of depth: that each leaf in the forest, each moment of consciousness, whether or not articulated has its place in the writer's conception.
Mr White reminds one immediately and almost simultaneously of Dickens and of Henry James. On a single page, for instance, it is possible to find both this: 'Mr Garnet Roxburgh smiled absently,, if it was not incredulously, at the idea that someone might suffer from a heart.' And this: 'She was glad to hear grit beneath the soles of her boots, which not only meant she was once more standing on solid land, but her first abrasive contact with it might have disintegrated a reply which could have sounded insipid, insincere, or worse to her husband's ears— indiscreet.'
Both the Dickensian satire and the Jamesian prolixity derive from a hardheadedly innocent determination to say what is meant. Mr White turns on reality a blunt, childlike gaze, with its power to dissolve illusions, which demands and creates a style sufficiently muscular to carry it. He has to a marked degree the ability to set a world in motion, leaving his characters and their landscapes to act and interact, while the novelist watches to grasp those moments which most strongly illuminate the significance of the whole.
Ellen Gluyas, a Cornish peasant girl, is taken off in marriage by a gentleman. Mr Austin Roxburgh, and his mother, transform her into 'Mrs Roxburgh'. fit to pass in polite society. The unity of these two personalities, Ellen and Mrs Roxburgh, is at best precarious; and cannot withstand the catastrophic stroke which leaves her, alone, her husband dead, the slave of an Australian aborigine band after a shipwreck on the coast of Queensland. As she is passively exposed to the life of the aborigines, her previous,character fragments: is she 'a lcist soul, a woman, or a rational being'? And what, actually, do such categories represent ?
Eventually she encounters an escaped transportee. Jack Chance, who has carved out a place for himself in aboriginal society. With him she escapes, and on the journey back to white civilisation releases for the first time her powerful sexuality. But having brought her back, Chance retreats again to the wilderness: through fear of reimprisonment, but also-and this is part of the same conflict—perhaps because 'Mrs Roxburgh' has betrayed the relationship of equals which had begun to exist between them.
Back in white society, Ellen Roxburgh is a strange creature: in many ways a monster. ki prodigy, for herself and for others. She has partaken of a strange and 'shameful communion with the natives; she has been opened to the empathic and telepathic links between human beings which in 'civilisation' can be discussed only by stealth and indirection. And yet, in some ways, nothing has deeply changed : all her life she has been a slave, a dependent, of one person or another. one set of social conventions or another. Al the end of the novel, as she begins her return to England, it is wholly unclear what she—or any of us—will do to attain that freedom of which accident has given her a glimpse.
Summary is here particularly invidious: there arepany other threads to the work. A Fringe of Leaves is in a strong sense a feminist novel; but ultimately it represents human emancipation in the widest sense. It convinces one again that the emancipation of the imagination, the turning on social reality of that remorseless childlike stare which refuses comfortable illusion, stripping away the fringe of leaves which covers our nakedness—that this emancipation is an act of social consequence. That art and freedom are indeed, potentially, twins.
Still Waters must inevitably suffer frorn any comparison with A Fringe of Leaves. Yet such a comparison cannot be whollY avoided; Mr Middleton, in his own way, IS clearly working the same seam. Th is account of the intertwining of two Midland families, of the differences and similarities of middle age and adolescence, is really very boring when abstracted as a plot; the novel itself necomes interesting when Mr Middleton attains something like that purity of attention which Patrick White possesses to 3 much higher degree. And he does have his moments: when, for instance, a woman has a sudden vision of that which she loves in her self-satisfied. over-clever, almost slick husband: 'there he went like a twig, thrown into a turbulent stream, buffeted, ducked, caught moment: arily here, flung on, becalmed, shining. These characters are much given to sudden moments of illumination; if only, one wishes, they could articulate these moments with the structure of their lives.
There is an irritating noisiness in Mr Middleton's writing (his characters are much given to metaphorically 'banging ) which distracts both his readers and himself. It is hard to see where the Still Waters corre, in: really, what he shows is these peoples shallowness, and their aspirations for sonic'
thing more, expressed as a sense of the point"
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