A Voice from Down Under

...Writers & Writing A VOICE FROM DOWN UNDER BY PEARL K BELL PATRICK WHITE, the Australian writer who recently won the Nobel Prize lor Literature, may well be unique Almost invariably, Australians with literary ambitions, like Christina Stead, have emigrated to England at an early age and never looked back White one of the very few novelists from down under who have been read outside their remote country, not only retained a distinct Australian sensibility in his work while abroad, but made the difficult choice to return home "to the stimulus of time remembered" after having lived in England and on the Continent for nearly two decades The publication this month of White's ninth novel, The Eye of the Storm (Viking, 608 pp , $8 95), provides an opportunity to examine an author who, despite his Nobel Prize and general reputation, is too little known m the United States Now 61, a fourth-generation Australian, White was born into a prosperous sheep- and cattle-owning family in New South Wales, and lived in Sydney until the age of 13, when he was sent to England to be properly educated Following his graduation from Cambridge, he stayed in Europe to travel and write Nevertheless, White has noted, during his wartime service as an RAF officer in the Middle East and Greece "there persisted a longing to return to the scenes of childhood " By the end of the War, London had become "an actual and spiritual graveyard" tor him, and in 1946 he went back to Austraha, where he has resided ever since But the need to return to his roots has never blinded White to the many harsh and shoddy truths of contemporary Australian lite Indeed, the novelist has been brutally outspoken about "the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least ot possessions, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is and the march of ma-terial ugliness does not raise a quiver from the aveiage nerves " For their part, White's countrymen, in their smug provincial fastness, have exhibited little more than distrust and hostility toward a native author who set out "to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and poetry which could alone make bearable the lives of [ordinary Australian] people " Although the Swedish Academy in making the Nobel award emphasized White's "epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature," the Australian particularity of his fiction is by no means its only claim to distinction He is very much a modern writer rather than a regional realist, and throughout his work he has displayed a characteristically 20th-century obsession with human loneliness and alienation, and with the tragic perversions of personality The Aunt's Story, a beautiful novel written when White was still living in Europe, is a tender albeit unrelenting portrait ot human isolation The spinster Theodora Goodman moves inexorably toward madness as she wanders in desperate solitude from Australia to the South of Fiance and finally to America, where her hold on reality breaks down altogether Even it one finds White's mystical linking of Theodora's madness to her exceptional clarity of vision difficult to accept, The Aunt's Story—for all its echoes of Joyce and Lawrence—remains a virtuoso performance of unmistakable originality With his next two novels, White reached back into the Australian past for the dreams and images of a raw new world As though needing to prove that he was not slavishly dependent on the sophisticated culture of Europe, White concentiated, in The Tiee of Man, on an inarticulate pioneer family—tracing its archetypal fortunes from a solitary man making his primitive clearing in the wilderness to the slow flowering ot an entire community If at times White strains to define the mythic universality of his commonplace farmers, the simplicity and precision with which he chronicles man's relation to the land are unquestionably impressive Voss, White's best-known work, is far more difficult and challenging Based on the actual attempt of the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt to cross the unmapped desolation of the Australian interior in the mid-19th century, Voss is only in its externals an account of that doomed expedition More significantly, it is a tale of an individual possessed, a destructive Nietzschean Ubetmensch who airogantly seeks to impose his will on a hostile and obdurate nature, and in the process is destroyed by his inhuman delusions of God-like power White describes the suffering and terror of the trek with great authority, but his talent is most fully revealed in the portrait of the explorer himself—an obsessed, tormented visionary seeking out "death by torture in the country of the mind " None of the works that followed Voss has equaled that brilliant achievement (though they all demonstrate in some way the novelist's awesome intellectual courage and versatility) In his most agonizedly ambitious book, Riders in the Chariot, White swells and complicates the Bibhcal-rrystic symbolism ot his narrative to preposterous excess The ironic echoes of Jewish and Christian myths, of Ezekiel and the Passion of Christ in a present-day suburb of Sydney, are laboriously inflated and overcharged, the prose, too, becomes unmanageably turgid and pompous When the wandering Jew Mor-decai Himmelfarb, a guilt-ridden survivor of the Holocaust, is crucified—on Good Friday, of course—by a xenophobic gang of bully-boys, the effect is one of literal-minded melodrama, not of tragedy The book creaks and groans at every point with a cumbersome burden of allusion and "significance" that White totally fails to justify, becoming finally a sterile exercise in self-indulgent ingenuity Curiously, something quite the opposite goes wrong with The Eye of the Storm Beyond its narrow circle of inaction and mainly repellent characters there are no reverberations of meaning, insight or perception The tiny emotions of tiny, and hearts have rarely been examined by a novelist to so little purpose, or at such great length The novel takes place in Sydney, it could just as easily be Liverpool or Chicago And throughout the volume's 608 pages one wonders why this book was ever written ELIZABETH HUNTER, very rich and very old, is dying, surrounded by an army ot nurses and servants Her two children are about to arrive from Europe, where they have lived for many years, ostensibly to say farewell but actually to see that she does not exhaust their inheritance completely before she gives up the ghost In an intricate series ot flashbacks, we are told the story of this ruthless and once dazzling woman who married a rich cattleman for his money and gave him little in return "To have loved her in the prime of her beauty was like loving a jewelled scabbard in which a sword was hidden " Elizabeth preyed upon and destroyed everyone around her, especially her children The daughter, a cold and pathetic wretch, had been married to a decadent French nobleman who left her for a wealthier American heiress, and she clings to her title—the Pnncesse de Lascabanes—as the one stable fact of a useless and empty lite The son is a vain and bitter egoist, mean-spirited and insufferably pretentious, a famous actor, he never quite made it to the supreme heights ot the English theater and is now in decline For all the tireless burrowing into the past—not only of the Hunters, but of the three nurses, the Jewish refugee cook, the devoted old lawyer, and a horde of lesser figures—none of the individuals seems worth the profusely detailed, extravagantly overwritten scrutiny that the author squanders on them The problem is that White regards his characters with too reductive and scornful an eye He is brilliantly observant yet totally devoid ot the compassion and sense of consequence that could engage us in their petty destinies Not even the finest writers can avoid an occasional colossal mistake, and the fact remains that Patrick White is a novelist of admirable substance and diversity Moreover, he has given a powerful new meaning to the idea ot an Australian sensibility, that uneasy product of divided cultural and historical loyalties A cocky and disdainful arrogance toward England masks the provincial sense of dependent inferiority in White's homeland The bitter memories ot Australia's beginnings have made for a stubbornly complacent pride in its achievement As the critic Barry Argyle has written, "Australia, unlike America, was never the promised land to its early settlers but rather a chastening land, a purgatory" Patrick White, confronted with "the Great Austrahan emptiness," has wrought a strange and somber poetic truth out ot his country's isolation, and thus bequeathed a distant region to the modern world...