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Australia Deserta

13y V. S. NAIPA.I.JL THE great moments of theatre are moments of embarrassment. The mischievous but acute Observation was made recently in an essay by Francis Wyndham. It defined my own lack of

enthusiasm for the theatre, and I thought it also marked the important difference between the . theatre and the novel: We go to the theatre to be embarrassed. But we go to the novel to lose our embarrassments. The great novels of the last '. hundred years have brought us to terms with our- ' selves; in recognition embarrassment is abolished.

Yet a new embarrassment, very like the embarrassment of the theatre of which Francis Wyndham wrote, has returned to the novel. It is ' an embarrassment which derives from the un- ertainty of today's over-sophisticated taste, un- certainty about the function of the novel, and a conviction that the novel as we know it has done all that it can do and that new forms must be

found. .

Possibly there has been uncertainty about the function of the novel ever since the novel be- came respectable. And certainly, reading today is no simple matter. There are as many emergent literatures as there •are emergent countries;

culture is one of the invisible exports of every Country; the universities turn out literature . Itraduates by the thousand; and literary con-

ferences have spread as far north as Leeds. ,

The result has been a corruption of the direct 1 esPonse, a corruption of taste. Jane Austen is

offered in an Indian paperback as a writer whose

l'Ne of simile is especially to be relished. Penguin books. offer Thomas Mann's extended frivolity, l'he Holy Sinner, as an epic of stark horror. The Principle of self-regarding self-denial, in India and England, is the same. In India it is a simple concern with language. In England it is a review- nourished awareness that novels can be tested for their importance by the degree of their apparent concern with Good and Evil and God. Novel-

reading has become as penitential and stately an activity as theatre-going.

And embarrassment, the little kick of self-

congratulation, is like the quivering of a rod divining the aesthetic. It occurs at a display of evert technique—the flashback it might be, or the many-narratored narrative. It occurs at Dassages of difficult philosophy. It occurs at a elising of symbols. It occurs most often at a tIRPlity of style.

Worse were the early afternoons, when people tended to disappear, and at such a time of mispended continuity Anthea Scudamore allowed the wind to carry her along the arc of beach, her feet eliciting slight felted protests from the quilted sand.

li . a classical writer a plain statement about Anthea's lonely walks on the beach in the early ttrternoons might have been enough. But 'a thrill

would have been missed. `Suspended continuity' is not strictly necessary, being contained in the words that go before; but its weightiness prepares the reader for the onomatopeia at the end. With- out 'quilted,' felted' might not have been fully savoured.

But Clay slept, and in fact he did not rise, not that morning, the first in many years, when the alarm clock scattered its aluminium trays all over the house.

The originality is inescapable.

The warm core of certainty settled stiller as driving faster the wind payed out the telephone wires the fences the flattened heads of grey grass always raising themselves again again again

The reader, noticing with pleasure the absence of commas and the full stop, re-reads and sees exactly what the writer is aiming at.

The sentences come from Patrick White's collection of stories, The Burnt Ones.* These stories are the diversions of a novelist; they will leave Mr. White's reputation intact. The manner, which has been described as stylish, cannot sup- port the matter. And the stylishness, of which the fashionable title might be said to .form part, comes over as pure embarrassment.

The story called 'Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight' is scarcely more than a smoking-room anecdote. We might imagine it being told : 'Old Arch, useld to take his secretary bird-watching. At least that was what he said. He had this tape-recorder, and one day he forgot the thing was turned on. It wasn't only birdsong he recorded.' The anecdote has been extended with much 'business': guests arriving, a glimpse of the secretary leaving the house, an accident, the tape played in error. The little joke is milked for all its significance.

Grinding out. Grinding out. So much of life was recorded by now. Returning late from a country dance, the Wheelers had fallen down amongst sticks and stones,, and made what is called love, and risen in the grey hours, to find themselves numb and bulging. . . . Little guilry, pockets were turning themselves out in his mind. That woman at the Locomotive Hotel. Pockets and pockets of putrefying trash. Down along the creek, amongst the tussocks and the sheep pellets, the sun burning his boy's skin, he played his overture to sex. Alone.

It is interesting; and not only in the writing of Mr. White, how often below stylishness and obscurity and embarrassment we find warm, un- ambiguous sex. Flagellation, as an antipodean discovery, is the point of another of Mr. White's stories. In another story Titina, ugly, poor and bullied as a girl, reappears as a radiant and rich * THE BURNT ONES. By Patrick White. (Eyre and

Spottiswoode, 25s.) _

young woman. Titina rich? The experienced reader has his suspicions. And Mr. White exalts every predictable stage of his story with his stylishness.

She accepted splendour as she did her skin, All along the beach, that rather gritty Attic sand, Titina radiated splendour in godlike armour of nacreous scales. . . .

As I wrestled with Titina Stavridi on the sand, my arms were turned to sea-serpents. The scales of her nacreous maillot . . . were sloughed in a moment by my skilful touch. I was holding in my hands her small, but persistent buttocks, which had been threatening to escape all that afternoon.

. . . 'Ace she cried, in almost bitter rage.... comes the end : 'Not a bit of it,' Aunt Calliope said. 'I have run into her before. Oh, yes, several times. In Paris.' Here Aunt Calliope laughed. 'A proper little thing ! A little whore!'

. . Outside, the lilac-bushes were turned solid in the moonlight. The white music of that dusty night was frozen in the parks and gardens. As I leaned out of the window, and held up my throat to receive the knife, nothing happened. Only my aunt Thalia continued playing Schumann, and I realised my extended throat was itself a sword.

• Mr. White's style is variable. At one time, as we have seen, he declares war on punctuation. At another he chops up a single sentence into several little pieces. Sometimes he appears to be struggling needlessly with language : 'His diffi- dence to believe in the incontrovertible reality, of herself filled Mrs. Mortlock with ironic pleasure.' The struggle leads to occasional oddities. 'The Flegg family disposed of themselves all round.' 'Although enthroned on her camp stool, familiarity had begun to make her status suspect.' It is altogether another writer, it seems, who aims at an outback lyricism : 'The heat had lifted from Attica. Autumn hung a swag of gold from the poles of the horizon. . . . So they drove on, and nostalgia grated on their minds, like a withered olive grating and turning between the cheek and an earthy pillow.'

A style composed of so many opposed elements ends by being no style at all. Mr. White is a novelist. He needs space. These stories, varied in a mood and setting, have magnified and dis- torted his stylishness; and it is in the contrast between the simplicity of what he has to say and his involved way of saying it that the particular embarrassment of this collection lies. The longest story is called 'Dead Roses.' The shy middle-class girl, frightened by passion, settles for marriage with an impotent old boor. For years she serves him. Finally she abandons him. He dies; she is rich; she travels joylessly about the world.

A roughly similar story of blighted passion can be found in Buddenbrooks. Mann's character is more resilient; through all her disasters she fattens into silly, bourgeois middle age; yet, through all the silliness, all the sadness at 'life,' run memories, less and less meaningful, of that early awakening. A life has been wasted, but with what satisfaction! The sadness, the comedy, the appalling truth lie only in the eyes of the writer. Mr. White's heroine travels. In Greece she again meets the man whose passion had once alarmed her. It is a pointless meeting; but immediately afterwards she is again assailed by sexual panic, and runs along the rocky Attic earth into the arms of an astonished policeman.

So, after sixty-five pages, Mr. White's story ends: with this knowledgeability about sex which is not far short of a snigger. This is the short- story neatness Mr. White imposes on his material; this is the aridity below his embarrassment.