BOOKS
Knight of the Will
By BERNARD BERGONZI
ATRICK WHITE is an athlete among contem- porary novelists, as befils a writer who comes from a country Where, one gathers,. old ladies eat eggs on steak for breakfast. His immense, strongly-welded fictions must require qualities of muscle and stamina to construct far beyond the reach of his hollow-chested English contem- poraries, delicately etching a Midland childhood between the wars; beyond, for that matter, many Americans, who may talk big, but are secretly worried about their virility and their blood- pressure. By contrast, White is a calm antipo- dean giant. His last two novels, The Tree of Man and Voss, established him as Australia's leading novelist. His new one, Riders in the Chariot,* certainly keeps up that reputation and perhaps takes him into the international class. I am pusillanimously cautious here, since White is a perfect example of the kind of borderline case which can be so tormenting to conscientious examiners. Does he deserve a first or doesn't he? After all, he writes so extraordinarily well, in- finitely better than the average run of candidates, and what a wealth of 'felt life' he packs into the book. Yes, but isn't he also terribly pretentious at times, isn't there rather a lot of faking, doesn't he rely on verbal bravura and intellectual energy to cover up weak places, like a pianist who plays loud and fast to conceal deeper flaws of execu- tion? It's all very difficult.
One of White's most remarkable and taxing attributes is his combination of size and con- trolled detail. His strength is not merely that of the muscle-bound big guy, pouring out fiction with the copiousness of a Thomas Wolfe; it is rather that of the highly trained athlete, which can be employed equally in large or small effects. This is very apparent in Voss, with its steady counter- pointing of Voss's epic journey through the desert and the precisely rendered triviality of Laura Trevelyan's life at home in Sydney with her aunt. White's evident determination to be responsible for every word in a prolonged narra- tive, to allow no free-wheeling, is undeniably im- pressive; but it makes large demands on the reader.
In The Tree of Man, which has just been re- issued as a Penguin Modern Classic,f the de- mands are, I'm convinced, excessive. This is a slow, simple story which moves forward with the inexorability of a glacier: in the early years of this century Stan and Amy Parker set up a smallholding in an empty piece of country: a community gathers round them; they have two children, there are floods and bushfires, Stan goes as a soldier to the First World War. In their declining years, their son goes to the bad
RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT. By Patrick White. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 21s.)
t THE TREE OF MAN. By Patrick White. (Pen- guin, 5s.)
and their daughter moves up the social ladder and patronises them. Then the son is shot. Stan has a stroke. He dies. In setting down this out- line I have fallen into the book's basic syntactic pattern, for The Tree of Man is made up of thousands of very short, very simple sentences, each of them presenting an isolated unit of ex- perience. The Tree of Man is as near to being an asyntactical novel as one can get. My im- pression of it is of a vast collection of atomistic verbal facts, almost like a fictional version of the world of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. That this does not make for easy reading goes without saying, but the absence of sustained syntax does. 1 think, mirror White's fundamental 'attitude. It is appropriate that the representative novelist of a vast, still largely empty continent should be obsessed with isolation. But it makes consider- able difficulties for him as a novelist, since the writer of fiction must inevitably be concerned with relationships and is helpless where they don't exist. In practice, The Tree of Man, with its inexorable stress on isolation and apartness, builds up into an oppressive picture of sheer negation. The 'tree' becomes, not an emblem of fertility and continuity, but a gibbet, or a cross.
In Voss, White boldly and successfully enacts his preoccupation in the central figure. The Ger- man explorer Voss ,is a knight of the will, whose very essence is to be unlike others. This fore- shadower of the Ubermensch stands out strangely in the quiet colonial backwater of Sydney in the 1840s, though it is there that he meets his spiritual partner, the formidably in- telligent Laura Trevelyan, a more conventional figure, but a beautifully realised one. Voss follows his destiny into the desert, trying to lead ail expedition across the continent, and perishes. He is, in fact, both more and less than an ordinary man: one sees him as a speck in the wilderness, a mere collection of bones and rags, but bound together by his all-consuming will. Voss can't be called a great fictional character in the tradi- tional sense, but one accepts him on White's own terms: he is one of the memorable creations of modern fiction. It is a sign of White's power and authority that in Voss one is prepared to accept so much, though the half-spiritual, half- hallucinatory relationship Voss maintains with Laura throughout his ordeal remains a piece of faking, a Gothic throwback to Wuthering Heights and beyond.
The new novel is more ambitious and more complicated. Here, for the first time, White is making a serious attempt to grasp our world and incorporate it into his fiction. But the funda- mental elements of his vision are unchanged, though there is, significantly, much more syntax in the writing. We are shown four desperately isolated figures, living in a small town on the outskirts of Sydney; the inter-involvement of their lives is apparent only towards the end of the novel, and for the most part their stories are narrated separately, their isolation being built into the structure of the book.
Miss Hare, a mad, gentle spinster, lives in a rambling, tumbledown folly called Xanadu, built by her eccentric father. She is bullied and preyed upon by her frightful housekeeper, Mrs. Jolley, who is, in turn, subtly tormented by a sinister friend, Mrs. Flack. Some of the ex- changes between these two are positively Compton-Burnettish and superbly done; these, and many other characters, are constantly articu- lating at each other, but rarely succeed in com- municating. Near Miss Hare lives Mordecai Himmelfarb, a Jewish refugee who had been a distinguished academic in Germany and narrowly escaped the gas-chambers. Now he has abandoned the intellect; he works at drilling holes in a nearby factory which makes bicycle lamps; but has preserved an intense devotion to Judaism. In the same factory works Alf Dubbo, a consumptive aborigine whose over- mastering passion is painting visionary pictures (the descriptions of these make them sound, alas, rather ecole de Gulley Jimson). Something of a guardian angel in the lives of all three is Else Godbold, who has affinities with Amy Parker in The Tree of Man; a poor, saintly, middle-aged laundress, with several children, who was born in England and is married to a brute.
In the lives of each of them is enough material to serve a lesser novelist for a whole book. White draws on vast reserves of richness and vitality, though he is at his weakest when he gets away from the Australian scene; at least, the account of Himmelfarb's early life in Germany seemed to me comparatively thin. Yet despite the in- numerable local triumphs which occur every-. where in this long novel, the total effect is unsatisfactory. And this, I think, is because White is not content to be a mere novelist; his desire to be over-explicit, to control everything, to leave the characters without any freedom, spoils him.
Thus, a common element in the lives of the four main characters is a vision of a chariot: Dubbo attempts to draw it. This, for me, is faking, a desire to impose a visionary unity on a fragmentary work. The four strands draw towards a conclusion when, on the day before Good Friday, Himmelfarb is crucified on a tree with ropes by a mob of his workmates. He is cut down, but he is a broken man, physically and spiritually. A little later he dies, and his death scene, observed by Dubbo through a window, is specifically compared to the Deposition of Christ; Mrs. Godbold and Miss Hare, who are attend- ing him, are seen as the two Marys. When Himmelfarb dies, the world of the novel is de- stroyed; Dubbo dies of consumption and Miss Hare is drowned. Only Mrs. Godbold, a mani- festation of the eternal feminine, is left: this fantastically calculated book ends with the words, 'she continued to live.'
As symbolic set-pieces go, this conclusion, it will be seen, is monstrously elaborate. I object to it very strongly: partly, I suppose, because of a distaste for Blakean visions and certain kinds of religiosity; but still more because it is dishonest. White, with a deft manipulating of symbols, has evaded the problems raised by his narrative and has abdicated novelistic responsi- bility. If he could have solved them, this would have been a great novel. Patrick White's powers remain astonishing: I hope that in his next novel he will move closer to Tolstoy, who should be his true master, and farther away from Blake and the Old Testament.
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