A Study in Androgyny

...Moreover, they share a dim, flickering belief in the structure of tradition that will keep things from falling apart (whether the Holy Ghost is He, She or It...

...Passivity is one of the key themes...

...Eudoxia is committed to the "spice merchant" lover "by fate and orgasm—never love...

...As we can see, the male guise reveals Eddie as more sensitive, more "female" than Eudoxia, in whom youth was a contributing factor to a kind of wanton brutality...

...He hopes to outgrow his physical and spiritual calluses, and to be healed by the landscape, if only momentarily...

...Animals, houses, journeys, gender, colors, names, and puns on names are but a few of the symbols that appear as palpable realities, providing humor, drama and entertainment while the baleful tale unfolds...

...Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review" Perhaps the most baffling feature of Patrick White's awe-inspiring oeuvre is its persistent reliance on anomaly and paradox to define reality...

...Eadith's attachment to Gravenor, a lordly old gentleman who visits her establishment regularly, can be sustained only if she exercises sexual restraint...

...And so she must always hold back...

...In his/her third (and all but final) corporeal form, Eadith Trist appears as a middle-aged madam of a high-class brothel in the Mayfair section of London between the Wars...

...A quizzical note...

...Some of these themes are crusted over with what seems now like a dead scab of Freudian symbols...

...The time is just before the outbreak of World War I. White, whose obsession with permanence is by now familiar to his readers, uses the rented villa as an extended metaphor...

...Suicide is one possibility...

...At the hour between the false dawn and the real, the moment when past and future converge, she was as much herself as a human being can afford to be...

...Part I belongs to Eudoxia, the young, exotic enamorata of an ailing Greek eccentric...

...Ed-die/Eadith and Eadie, his/her mother, are seated as strangers on a park bench...

...Angelos dies, and by so doing, absolves Eudoxia of the necessity of making a decision, of taking a positive action...

...Not just because revealing her "true" sex would destroy his dreams, but because her true self lies in its ambiguity...

...But what makes White's work so powerful is the seamless stitch with which his vision joins actuality and emblem...

...Nothing of me is mine, not even the body I was given to inhabit, nor the disguises chosen for it.'" Eudoxia and the Greek lover, An-gelos, are at their best when they "launch . . . into deeper seas of music, thrashing out to escape from the weeds of human relationships...

...He plunged deep into this passive yet quaking carcase (the weeping, naked Prowse) offered up as a sacrifice...

...Where surfaces blur, the result is not so much confusion as illumination...

...In Part II Eudoxia has thrown off the female attire and other female appurtenances to reappear as Eddie Twyborn, a young man from Sydney, returning from the Great War...

...But White is saying more: Precisely through their disguises shall we come to know them, and they, themselves...

...Their love shines with an almost celestial light...

...The gender transformations in this work serve two purposes: to allow for the "mingling process" of empathy and to discover the self—in the masculine to discover the feminine...

...Disclosure would be as much a lie as disguise...

...The strong yet poetic strokes, the sexual ambiguity of the underwater figure arouse the fantasy of an old Kiosk-keeper who watches and masturbates, not out of lust or passion, but in a "tremulous abstraction," remote from actual life...

...On "Bogong," he meets the earthy Marcia Lushington, wife to his boss...

...Eddie Twy-bom's feminine compassion which had moved him to tenderness for a pitiable man was shocked into what was less lust than desire for male revenge...

...They are staying at a villa on the French Riviera...

...Angelo's dying words provide the first "concrete evidence" of his partner's "true" sex: "'I have had from you, dear boy, the only happiness I've ever known.'" We are on page 126...

...We come full circle without any answers, but with a deeper understanding of the ultimate questions...

...The exotic flavor of Eudoxia is recaptured, intensified to surreal heights, the decadent light of "departing flame" lending new poignancy to the figure...

...I am the Amateur Suicide,'" begins the description of Eudoxia's descent from the rocks into the sea...

...We do not choose...

...But immersion in the destructive element is a joke for such a skillful swimmer...

...Today the view is bleaker, the hope dimmer...

...My rented garden...

...For those critics who fault White for failing to portray a single human relationship as fulfilled, may they find their cure this side of hypocrisy, and may they rush it to that other apocalyptic herald, Samuel Beckett...

...The histrionic tone of this passage is set off by the hilarity of the actual scene, which ends, almost like a Marx Brothers movie, with Angelos suddenly jumping up from the piano-stool...

...Marcia "had stuck an artificial flower in the cleavage of lace or flesh, a species of oriental poppy...

...its flesh tones tinged with departing flame...

...our paths are predestined...

...A valiant gesture...

...For the rest of us, let us be thankful for the retroactive powers of this unflinching vision, and not least, for the thing well made...

...The garden would seem an argument for permanence...

...The Twyborn Affair, White's 13th book, is an extraordinary novel of quest, an odyssey through place, time and especially gender—all three of which, by virtue of their boundaries, delimit and even alienate the individual from his possible selves...

...Yet in context the factual weight of things carries them off...

...She takes him as her lover...

...It also purges the characters and their emotions...

...The favorite time of day in this section is dawn, a time of illumination when Eadith leaves her wards to wander through the city alone...

...Finally: "As the swimmer, as the light, as the color returned, what could have remained a sordid ejaculation became a triumphant leap into the world of light and color...

...I am called by nature,' he explained, and walked rather stiffly out of the room...

...Young Twyborn almost inadvertently (not as a positive action but a decision made "by some incalculable power") talks his way into an apprenticeship on a sheep farm in the outback, perhaps in hopes of establishing a masculine identity...

...It is no news that "things are seldom what they seem...

...in the female, the male...

...The very quest for answers in The Twyborn Affair is futile...

...It is in this section that the possibilities of love are most deeply explored, not in the context of sex, but outside it...

...The whole network of parent-child relationships in the Twyborn family is an instance of this...

...Eadie hands Eadith a note she has just scribbled on the flyleaf of her prayer book...

...Natural phenomena seem tilted now toward putrefaction, petrification, death, though the book ends with "the bulbul shakes his jester's cap, and raises his beak toward the sun...

...I've always wanted a daughter.'" The Twyborn Affair, like all of White's books, is impossible to consider without reference to the themes that have haunted his work over the years...

...Such restraint, played against the backdrop of the Babylonian excess of her own establishment, lends an added frisson to the situation as well as a Jamesian note of erotic tension...

...Their duo-piano playing is "like many marriages, together and apart...

...Part III also stages a ghostly reconciliation between son and mother...

...No accident, this accident...

...It reads:"' Are you my son Eddie?'" The prayer book is returned with the message, "'No, but I am your daughter Eadith.'" Presently Eadie says, "'I am so glad...

...Perhaps nothing can be quoted out of context without laying itself open to the critique of pompousness...

...The themes themselves have not altered much, merely shifted in emphasis over the years...

...Nonetheless, Eudoxia contemplates leaving "that odious Greek," with his huge enema bag, his mad rages, his horned eyelids and veined hands that "worked like talons...

...Freud is balanced by Jung, however, and even Jung is only one way of looking at the universe through what would seem to be an infinite kaleidoscope of vision...

...But the would-be idyll ends in a shameful escapade with the "orange brute" of a manager, Don Prowse...

...The book is divided into three parts that form a cyclical whole...

...Everywhere futility shouts from the wings...