Patrick White: laureate of Australia*

 

Dr. K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR

 

            The first novel in an Australian setting that I read was Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. Those were my boyhood days sixty years ago, and wizards of detective fiction like Emile Gaboriau, Edgar Allan Poe and of course Conan Doyle were my favourites. Murder most foul: and the unmasking of the murderer! What could be more exciting and satisfying? No wonder Fergus Hume’s novel set in old-time Melbourne seemed to me something of a discovery. I don’t now remember the details, but the novel did sustain a mystery, and its resolution in the end came as a relief.

 

            Some years later when I was a teacher in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and found myself launched upon book-reviewing, I chanced to come across Henry Handel Richardson’s The Adventures of Richard Mahoney. I was almost a later-day Keats reading Chapman’s Homer! That 1000-page “omnibus” included the Mahoney trilogy: Australia Felix, 1917; The Return Home, 1925; and Ultima Thule, 1929. My long review duly appeared in Federated India (Madras) in its issue of 4 February 1931 (now reprinted, fifty years after, in the Literary Half-yearly of July 1981), I seem to have described the trilogy, with understandable enthusiasm, as “a grander work of fiction than anything else an English novelist has given us in recent years,” and hailed it as “an epic of fiction.”

 

            Again, after the passage of over a decade, a Queensland businessman, L. W. Kenyon, having read my booklet Literature and Authorship in India (with E. M. Forster’s Introduction), wrote to me in November 1944 asking me to put him into communication with the publishers of Indian periodicals (illustrated or otherwise) in the English language:  

 

            “I have in mind any publication which deals with the economic, political or cultural life of India and its component peoples... Might I say that I would be happy indeed to reciprocate in any way possible, should you desire similar information concerning this country and its people.”

 

            This led to an exchange of letters, journals and books over a period of about ten years. While I don’t seem to have retained copies of my side of the correspondence, happily I have preserved several of Mr. Kenyon’s letters. He wrote at length sometimes, and also sent special notes on Australian politics, the problem of the Aborigines and the “white” Australia policy. And the many books and magazines that he sent from time to time opened to me and my family a new world altogether–a world of huge distances and small populations, a strange yet fascinating world which Nature has dowered with the Koala, the Lyre Bird, the Kookaboora, the Kangaroo and the Platypus, a world where a scattered self-conscious community, with a history of less than 200 years, is uncertainly yet hopefully facing a future that is beset with dangers and is also instinct with untold possibilities. Mr. Kenyon sent me monographs on Australian life and literature and a copy of “the somewhat highbrow” journal, Meanjin Papers, as also a volume of broadcast talks on the Australian poets. Nettie Palmer’s Modern Australian Literature was a first introduction, and stimulated further studies and explorations.           I wrote   journalistically about      Australian literature in the Social Welfare and the Indian PEN. and Mr. Kenyon was happy that I was “the medium for presenting some aspects of Australian life and culture to Indian readers.” He added that India, alas, was “terra incognita to the great majority of Australians.” He found my biography of Sri Aurobindo (1945) “something hitherto quite outside the range of my experience.” And so on, the fraternal exchanges continued, and the mutual enrichment.

 

            Nearly twenty years after my interest in Australia had thus been aroused by Mr. Kenyon’s letters, by a quirk of fate my son Ambirajan left for Brisbane to teach Economics in the University of Queensland. Those were the years that had seen India move from subjection to independence, but voluntarily accepting membership of the Commonwealth, thereby establishing a responsible relationship with Australia and the other Dominions. An Australian statesman, R. G. Casey, had served India as Governor of Bengal. And by 1964, Australia too had come of age, holding a strategically key position, poised between the Indian and Pacific oceans, and between the old world of Afro-Asia and the new world of the Americas. It was also significant that the Australian Commonwealth Office should have given the name Hemisphere to the journal they launched in March 1957 to promote Asian-Australian cultural relations. Soon after, I entered into correspondence with Cecil Hadgraft, the historian of Australian literature, and I learnt about A. D. Hope of the Australian National University, James McAuley of Tasmania, Vincent Buckley of Melbourne and some of the other “university wits.” And of course I read about the Ern Malley poetic fabrication, and about Max Harris of “Angry Penguins” gallantly surviving the fiasco.

 

            Indeed, since the early 1940’s, there had been a sort of war between the oldsters and the modernists, and the l’affaire Ern Malley was to have delivered a knock-out blow on “Modernism.” Writing in The Bulletin (May 22, 1979), Max Harris (Chairman Max of the Australian Revolutionary International Council) now puts on a brave enough face:

 

            “It would be desirable, but it is not possible, to pass over the now wearisome Ern Malley affair because it was the Hiroshima of what was till then a war of skirmishing. Supposedly it devastated the modernism of the ’Forties in one giant explosion. But it failed...”

 

            For the time being, it looked as though the “modernists” had lost, but it was no more perhaps than a temporary set-back or retreat or Dunkirk evacuation. There can be little doubt that Australian literature has to be Australian; but quintessentially it has also to be universalist, deriving from the European heritage­ and increasingly – from the American, Asiatic and African traditions. Australia is no doubt a huge and sprawling continent, but even Australia is no “island” absolute, but part of humanity’s Global Village.

 

            During my son’s 17-year stay, I visited Australia twice – in 1968 to attend the Second Commonwealth Literature Conference at Brisbane (and the Commonwealth Universities Conference), and again with my wife in 1979, spending my time mainly in Sydney. Earlier, in December 1965, writing on “Lights on Australia” for the Indian PEN, I had referred to the work of some of the newer writers – poets, dramatists, novelists – and of Patrick White’s fiction I had ventured to say:

 

            “Patrick White’s principal merit is that he can render Australian themes in terms of universal human experience. And it is difficult to deny a work like Riders in the Chariot an apocalyptic quality as well.”

 

            Three years later, speaking on “Commonwealth Literature: Themes and Variations” at Brisbane, I concluded with a tribute to Patrick White’s Voss (Two Cheers for the Commonwealth. 1970. P. 43)

 

“... there is no doubt that this Australian novelist has created in Voss a character endowed with elemental human dignity, and with powers of leadership and endurance quite out of the common. In this novel, both eternities – the immensity without and the immensity within – are fully explored, and are finally fused into a reality that we experience everyday as life and love and suffering and death and life’s renewal and life everlasting.”

 

            Some months after the Brisbane Conference, I retired from teaching and academic administration to Sri Aurobindo Ashram, New Delhi, only to be caught up soon in the work of the Sahitya Akademi involving literary activity in India’s twenty or more living languages. Nevertheless I read with avidity Patrick White’s The Vivisector when it came out in 1970. In Voss, the heroine Laura had speculated:

 

            How important it is to understand the three stages.

            Of God into man,

            Man,

            And Man returning into God.

 

And here, in The Vivisector, there was the teasing conundrum:

 

            God the Vivisector

            God the Artist

            God... (?)

 

            What’s the third term that wholly redeems the Vivisector­-artist? Easier to kill than create! Easier to paint the Devils than the Saints! What, then, can redeem the vivisector-artist and make him the divine vivisector? Grace? The soul-dimension? Or is that merely begging the question?

 

            The award of the Noble Prize to Patrick White in 1973, although not quite unexpected, gave the formal seal of inter­national recognition, not merely to the novelist, but to Australian literature as well. He was the first writer in English in eleven years to get the award, and this was no small thing. As for White himself, he knew that such an award could wreck one’s life forever with an the attendant explosive (and often irrelevant) publicity, flattery and envy. But even as White had survived local indifference and even a measure of academic hostility, now he was able more or less to let the heave of the aggressive global attention harmlessly pass him by, and to persevere in his vocation – or sacerdocy – as a novelist committed to the portrayal of the whole Truth. In the course of 1976, I lectured on Patrick White twice, once under the auspices of the Sahitya Akademi in Madras and later in the Andhra University, Waltair. And I kept returning to him off and, on each time discovering (as I thought) lights I hadn’t seen before.

 

            Although Patrick White’s literary career spans a period of over four decades, if we ignore (for the nonce) the novels of his “nonage” (Happy Valley, 1939 and The Living and the Dead, 1941) and also his maturer short stories (The Burnt Ones, 1964) and dramas (Four Plays, 1965), we will be left with these nine novels, divisible into three groups of three each:

 

            The Aunt’s Story, 1948:

            The Tree of Man, 1955;

            Voss, 1957;

 

            Riders in the Chariot, 1961;

            The Solid Mandala, 1966;

            The Vivisector, 1970;

 

            The Eye of the Storm, 1973;

            A Fringe of Leaves, 1976;

            The Twyborn Affair, 1979.

 

            It is given but to a few contemporary novelists to father a body of fiction of such solidity and strength, and of such variegated richness and sustained imaginative power.

 

            Of the nine novels, The Aunt’s Story was written before White returned, after the second world war, to Australia, this time for good. The “aunt”, Theodora moves from Meroe in Australia to the Hotel du Midi in Southern France, and ends up in USA. It is the story of a pilgrimage, the travels without being counter­pointed by the journeys within. Escaping from Australia which she cannot really love, Theodora Goodman finds that, in the French hotel, “only chairs and tables are sane”; and in USA, of course, reality swings and screams upside down. Telephones, gadgetry, speed, possessions, statistics are everything, and sanity is to grow insane. And a safe oblivion covers the good woman Theodora.

 

            No use, then, White seems to murmur, no use fleeing from one’s country, for one carries one’s destiny everywhere, and the inner and outer worlds tease one another into madness. But how about the general complaint that Australia is “without songs, architecture, history...?” White articulates a fairly convincing answer to the demur and the challenge with his portraiture of Amy and Stan Parker in the 500-page novel, The Tree of Man. White had done farming himself not far from Sydney, and hence knew what he was writing about. Amy and Stan Parker too turn bleak bush into a productive farm, and they re-enact the Adam and Eve story in a twentieth century Australian context. They have their share of excitement and boredom, loyalty and betrayal poetry and prose, fire and flood, the romantic and the common place, the night of frustration and the dawn of renewal. And so convincing was the recordation that critics didn’t hesitate to bracket White with Tolstoy himself.

 

            Theodora Goddman, seeking sanity and self-assurance in the indifferent, opaque, inimical world without, fails inevitably in her quest and must lose herself in the crater within. Stan and Amy have need to make up for the outer bleakness of ordinariness by raiding upon the spiritual inarticulate, the frozen poetry within. In the next novel, Voss, the hero-modelled on the historical German explorer, Ludwig Leichhardt, who died in 1848 while crossing the Australian desert emptiness – is cast on a Faustian Ahab-like mould that cracks under pressure, and he becomes vulnerable and human and almost saintly. The outer odyssey ­false heaven, desert hell, twilight purgatory, the inherent paradisal dawn of transcendence–all unfold themselves, and the external disaster also insinuates the possible inner resurrection. Australia with its 50,000 years of nomadic non-history and less than two centuries of “white” hegemony needed a mythology of its own, and Voss was part of the answer. The action is set in Australia, and is of Australia but beyond Australia too – and its tremors of humanity and universality can be felt by every sensitive reader.

 

            After the triumph of Voss, Patrick White continued to look, behind the appearances, for the Truth behind them and to infer the poetry in the prose, the mystical in the material. The immediate result was Riders in the Chariot. The rich spinster, Miss Hare, in her great ruin of a house, Xanadu; Mordecai Himmelfarb the tragically fated German Jew, surviving the Nazi horror only to succumb in safe and civilised Australia; Alf Dubbo the half-caste artist brought up (and abused) by the do-gooder parson; and Mrs. Godbold the harassed and humane housewife – these are a quadruple study of the varietieli of transcendence of omni­present evil through the play of unpredictable and ineffable Grace. These four strangely unequal characters are yet somehow visited by Grace, for they glimpse (as they think) the redeemer-chariot of faith, goodness, hope, humility, compassion; and although broken without – or all but broken – they inherit an inner heaven, and are vouchsafed the glimpse of the Chariot, the wings of the Bird Celestial, the Paraclete’s promise of liberation. The scene is Sydney’s suburbia, White’s Sarsaparilla, a piece of the earth as distinctive as Narayan’s Malgudi, though rather more intriguing and sinister and star-crossed, and indeed a twilight area of fatality and residual sanctity.

 

            Between Riders in the Chariot and the next novel, The Solid Mandala, appeared the collections of White’s plays and short stories. So far, in novel after novel, White had been exploring the dualities within and without, and looking for the principle and power of balance, integration and harmony, and essaying defeat and disaster, and hinting at the resurrection beyond the crucifixion. Theodora cannot understand, or come to terms with, the outside world: Stan and Amy find lose an earthly and inner felicity: and Laura’s mystic bridge of understanding with Voss is never realized in physical terms: and the four “minor saints” of Riders in the Chariot, for all their “wholeness” within, yet fail in the face of the ignorance, violence, hate, mistiness and collapse of humanity without.

 

            In The Solid Mandala, the twins Waldo and Arthur clearly embody intellect and instinct (intuition) respectively, and they are a visible and obtrusive duality, a dissected schizophrenic personality, a chilling “twyborn” actuality; and the whole drama of the novel is the search for completeness and integrality, and the catastrophic failure to attain it here and now “on this bank and shoal of time.” Waldo, the younger by no more than a few hours, is buoyed up by his intellect and acts as the guardian to Artjur who has a fondness for marbles and assiduously cultivates wholeness, and understanding, and love. His four marbles – one in speckled gold, one in cloudy blue, one in a whorl of green and crimson circles, and the last a knotted one – are (as he imagines) charged with distinctive powers, and once he paces the song of the “mandala” on the hillside in the bay of the blackberries before the good Mrs. Boulter, who is yet another of White’s minor saints. In a mood of ecstatic self-illumination, Arthur dances first the dance of himself, then the dance of his unselfish love for Dulcie, then the dance of his self-tortured and difficult brother, and last – at the centre of the Mandala – the dance that comprises “the passion of all their lives, the blood running out of the backs of his hands.” And yet for all this freak ecstasy and fulfilment,    the novel ends in disaster. Cheated by his sterile intellect at last, in an effort to kill Arthur, Waldo kills himself, and Arthur–like Theodora – loses himself in the twilight totality within.

 

            White’s massive next novel, The Vivisector, appeared four years after. It is the life-history of the painter, Hurtle Duffield, from the fifth year to his death in the plenitude of old age. Duffield is no Waldo writ large, nor Arthur either; rather is he a creature of both emotion and intellect, memory and nightmare, uncommon aspiration and indubitable achievement. As a painter, he is a cross between the romantic and the demonic, and the demonic and the divine. He does dissect on his drawing-board, down to the core, the nerves of matter, and finds that somehow “pure truth, the crystal eye”, eludes him. Yet he perseveres: the dis­sector, the vivisector, the viewer who fears under the microscope, is also – at auspicious and predestined moments – the creator breathing into his paintings the Promethean heat of life, making them capable of the heart-beats of sensibility, and the light and leap of the soul. The vivisector is the artist as well, and could even be – when Grace “intervenes - the rescuer, the paraclete, the redeemer. Sold “like a horse” by his impove­rished parents to the rich Mrs. Courtney, Hurtle Duffield runs through the wilderness of modem life losing himself in art and sensuality and aspiration and defeat and fulfilment. When after his stroke, Duffield realises that a new lease of life has been vouchsafed to him, he is now determined on one final, supreme, almost superhuman effort to reach at the Truth – Truth inclusive and splendorous and total and transcendent: Truth beautiful and bountiful and blessed and blissful. What’s it he is reaching for? What if it should exceed his furthest grasp? But the Ultimate lures him irresistibly, the Ultimate without a second or a sub­sidiary, the Ultimate that will be cheated with no phoney substitutes! Beyond form and colour and convention, beyond craft and artifice and art! Duffield is old, and impaired, and shaky, but he will not weaken or waver, nor fail to hanker:

 

            “During how many days, not continuously, but a week, probably, he had been working on what he no longer con­sidered a painting ... An immensity of space had given him his visual freedom, or more: he was being painted with, and through, and on...he experienced a curious sense of grace....”

 

            The desperate attempt to paint the near-impossible, the inappre­hensible, goes on, and on, all afternoon, and far into the night:

 

            “He was working ... he was being worked on ... If the hand could reach the last inch; but you would never convey in paint: in words perhaps, or phrased in music ... He was mixing the never-yet-attainable blue...All his life he had been reaching towards this vertiginous blue without truly visualising, till lying on the pavement he was dazzled not so much by a colour as a longstanding secret relationship...Only reach higher ... Then lifting by the hairs of his scalp to brush the brush airs bludge on the blessed blue ... plunge a presumptuous body crashing. Dumped.”

 

            That’s the end of the physical journey, but the holocaust of the ego perhaps signifies its merging with the infinite unnameable; it is as though the indigo blue swallows up the surrendered artist.

 

            The three novels pub1isbcd after The Vivisector seem to battle, one after another, with formidable problems thematic as well as artistic, and register convincing victories. Hurtle Duffield the vivisector grown into the artist-creator dies in the attempt to seize the ultimate in self-expression and self-realisation. The aged heroine of the next novel, The Eye of the Storm, is Mrs. Hunter a darling of selfishness and self-will and sensuality; yet she too frantically – if also obscurely – seeks the certainty of Truth and finds it unexpectedly in the “eye” of the storm, the still centre of the commotion, the abiding power and peace at the heart of violence itself. The idea of the novel came to Patrick White while crossing Kensington High Street in Sydney after a visit to his bedridden old mother looked after by nurses. In the novelist’s furious reactor, the aged Mrs. White becomes the ailing eighty-­year old Mrs. Hunter; and Mrs. Hunter and her selfish son and daughter become King Lear and his Goneril and Regan – with Cordelia’s role relegated to one of the nurses in the sidelines. Lear in the storm crosses the last frontier dividing him from sanity, and in that no-man’s land stumbles upon singular illumina­tions that almost make a new man of him. In White’s novel, while the children – the actor Sir Basil and the daughter, “Princess” Dorothy – conspire to get Mrs. Hunter into a Home for the Aged, on her part she feels inly fortified by her ambrosial memory of the “eye” of the storm she had experienced when she had been caught in cyclonic weather in Brumby Island:

 

            “This night ... it is the earth coming to a head...She lay and submitted to someone to whom she had never been introduced. Somebody is always tinkering with something. It is the linesman testing for the highest pitch of awfulness the human spirit can endure. Not death...Next morning, the light and the silence awaken her from her stunned self-consciousness: she walks out of the bunker...the storm still rages at a distance...”

 

But here there is “this dream of glistening peace”, and “inter­spersed between the marbled pyramids of waves, thousands of seabirds were at rest.” She sees the black swans, which seem to recognise her and snap the pieces of bread she offers:

 

            “All else was dissolved by this lustrous

            moment made visible in the eye of the storm.”

 

Having thus once at least been precipitated into transcendence, “the utmost in experience”, no fears can assail her now – certainly not from her reckless children. And she dies before they have time to put their sordid plan into execution. Grace guards her, and enfolds her into timelessness.

 

            It is not given to everyone to stumble upon “sanctity and peace” or the “calmest calm” experienced by Mrs. Hunter (or by Dorothy’s flight companion, the Dutchman). But once such a thing has happened, it becomes insurance for life. There is a good deal in The Eye of the Storm – as in the other novels – that is unpleasant and unsavoury, but the nectareau lights are there too, and these redeem and transform everything, and the novel remains in its climacteric moments a blaze of revelation.

 

            In his next novel, A Fringe of Leaves: White recalls an earlier period still in Australian history than Voss. The Brumby Island where Mrs. Hunter has her taste of the “eye” of the storm is really Fraser Island off the Queensland coast, and derives its name from a “Mrs. Fraser” who was lost among the aborigines in early nineteenth century, and was later rescued and led back by a runaway convict to the settlement in Moreton Bay. In White’s novel, Mrs. Fraser figures as Ellen Roxburgh who with her husband, Austin, is on a visit to his brother in Australia. On their way home, their boat strikes a reef, and after a perilous journey on precarious rafts, they make a landing, she has an abortion, Austin is speared to death, and Ellen finds herself taken captive by the aborigines. She is stripped, and made to wear a “fringe of leaves” in which she hides her wedding-ring. Thrown by accident in course of time into the company of the convict, Jack Chance, she makes an appeal for rescue to him, and he helps her to return to the settlement although, courage suddenly failing him, he slinks back at the last moment and retreats to the bush. Strangely enough, Ellen’s life with her husband had been little conditioned by sensuality, and his brother, Garnet, had but aggressively possessed her. Ellen comes to know of true sensuality and love only in the convict’s company. A Fringe of Leaves is verily, aside from the exotic historical background, Ellen’s journey through life, and her education through suffering in endurance and understanding and compassion and love. She is now “something of a heroine,” and does pay the appropriate price in terms of unwanted publicity. But she is basically human and modest and sensible, she is full of gratitude to her late husband and her convict-rescuer-lover, and she refuses to play the pharisee, and she will not look superior, or judge others.

 

            Ellen Roxburgh emerges out of her tribulations and varied social entanglements and predicaments as a loving and lovable and humane person. She can be understanding and forgiving in almost all circumstances. Tossed between the old world and the new, between the wretched convicts and those flogging and keeping guard over them, and between the world of the blacks, the aborigines and of the flawed white colonists, Ellen grows in self-awareness and undergoes an endless expansion of her sympa­thies and of her feeling for man and nature, her sensitiveness to good and evil, and kindness and cruelty. Notwithstanding her occasional falterings and stumblings, she remains basically a pure and virtuous and tolerant and generous-hearted and compassionate woman. The former Cornish farm girl has greater stamina, physical, emotional and spiritual, to survive her hell’s pouches and purgatory’s slopes and to be able to glimpse – albeit residually, faintly or fitfully – a vision of God as love. And this, in spite of the floggings, the cannibalisms, the spectres of the existential Terror, the spurts of pettiness and cruelty around, the revelations of evil, the soul-­searing spectacle of the runaway convict hares and the sleuthing hounds behind. Her simple credo is: “No one is to blame, and everybody, for whatever happens!” Even if Ellen is not quite one of White’s “minor saints”, her saga of a voyage to the Night and back can be viewed as a tale of trial and tribulation and grace in extremity and rebirth and renewal.

 

            Isn’t the essential Patrick White canon, then, an extended testament of self-discovery by sundry individuals, gifted or not so gifted, stainless or rather seriously flawed, men and women wander­ing between the worlds without and within, the dead yesterdays and the unborn tomorrows? The Nobel citation indeed referred to White’s “bold psychological exploration of the human heart,” and there is in this a spiritual dimension as well. Theodora’s leap into insanity, Stan and Amy Parker’s transcendence of averagism and ordinariness at elected moments torn apart from the stream of life, Voss’s belated journey into the interior countries, the sighting of the mystic chariot of liberation by the four, unconventional saints self-imprisoned in their obscurity; the Waldo-Arthur schizophrenic rendition of wholeness and the culminating holocaust, the artist Duffield’s straining after the infinite indigo­-blue, Mrs. Hunter’s extraordinary rendezvous with sanctity and peace and life’s renewal and love’s sovereignty, and Ellen’s beyond­ing the everyday dualities in an affirmation and acceptance of man and Nature and hope and love that is characteristic of the Blessed Feminine...take a whole view, a panoramic-stereoscopic view, and the novels may be read as a Testament, an involved and interpenetrating Testament. It is like Sudhana’s Tower and towers as described in the Buddhist Gandavyuha Sutra:

 

            “And all these towers...each preserves its individual, existence in perfect harmony with all the rest...there is a state of perfect intermingling and yet of perfect order­liness. Sudhana, the young pilgrim, sees himself in all the towers as well as in each single tower, where all is contained in one and each contains all.” (Dr. D. T. Suzuki’s translation) Like Shakespeare, like many a great writer of yesterday and today, Patrick White has lived a life of allegory too, an allegory in progress, and the novels are the constituent milestones. And his latest novel, The Twyborn Affair (1979), is a raid on the mystery of the eternally fascinating and exasperating male-female duality. After reading it two years ago, I happened to record my reaction in halting verse.

 

Ardha-Naari

 

A reversed Divina Commedia,

            a zig-zag to Inferno,

with travestite Twyborn taking a leap

            at sexual transcendence:

See the hetaira, Eudoxia, ensconced

            in her frail femineity

and swathed in the Byzantine cotton-wool

            of beguiling Angelos,

This flawed menagerie cracks at the harsh

            touch of half-reality.

What quirk of predestination forges

            the steep ascent up the hill,

The male feat of muscular campaigning­– 

            then the canter to the Bush!

Caught between Mercia and the drunken Don,

            ancient Eve triggers’ herself

And ordains the bright world of vestibules

            and cult-cells in Chelsea.

Faster yet faster the heady descent­

            and then the blitz and the dust.

Three or more – Eddie, Eudozia, Eadith­ –

            chameleonic changes!

Her anguished soul feels stretched out on the rack

            of tortured ambiguity,

while crazed Eadie, her mother and her fate,

            feels weighted by her own rood,

The two fatalities draw near and tear

            apart into their orbits

scouring brief heaven, entire earth and hell,

            till the pathways cross again:

Ah, couldn’t they, the wretched, start once again

            and obliterate the past?

But the desperate move is pre-empted

            by the blitz-apocalypse.

 

            Ideally, one should be – in the Platonic phrase – a gymnastic fused in music: or, say, intellect doubled with instinct-intuition, or outer comprehension and activity balanced by inner apprehen­sion and realisation: or, simply, the masculine Nara in a close embrace of union with the feminine Nari. This however seldom happens, and the incomplete human seeks completion without, feels defeated more often than not, and essays gradations of frustration and tragedy. If The Solid Mandala aimed at projecting one type of duality, The Twyborn Affair is more audaciously imagi­native and elemental still. The psychic inclination and affirmation can often be more demanding than the sheerly biological fact of sex, and unless one is wedded to the concept of the Nara-Naari rounded wholeness, one can easily make a pitiful mess of one’s life. How was it possible for certain saints – of either sex – to sublimate their biological cravings and reach at wholeness, balance and integrality, and hymn the music of human harmony? Was it the result of a mystic union within, of a forged identity with the Totality? Beyond man and woman, beyond Nara and Naari – ­what’s it, who is it, except Nara-Naaraayana, the human-divine?

 

Half-man, half-woman: in this intricate

            struggle for hegemony,

Confederate sovereignties take a hand,

            and everyone joins the game.

Tiger, rhino, reptile, kangaroo, fox,

            wolf, scorpion, lion, eagle, cow­ –

Behind the neutral facade, how the eyes

            glimmer snake-like, glowworm-like,

But the sky rumbles, lightings break and blind,

            and other worlds are open.

Beyond the average and the artful,

            there’s the seer, saint and Yogi:

Animal – half-man and half-woman – and,

            prospectively, the man-god.

 

            When the writing of The Twyborn Affair was in progress, Patrick White described it in an interview (The National Times, 27 March–­April 1978) as more “ambitious” than anything he had previously attempted, and added:

 

            “Each novel is a torment that has to be gone through. The one I’m writing now more than any... can I get away with it?”

 

            He has got “away with it,” leaving the reader gaping with wonder “What next?” What has resolutely made ‘his native Australia his true home, and made himself a part of its little seen or charted spiritual physiognomy. He would like Australia to be rather more than the “lucky” affluent country, and he would like his fellow Australians to be less enslaved by blatant consumerism and more enfranchised by the breath of the spirit. But whatever may happen, for White himself Australia is part of his inalienable or inescapable burden and promise of fatality. The good Christine MacBeath writes to Hurtle Duffield towards the end of the novel:

 

            “...and you of course as an artist and the worst afflicted through your art can see further than us who are mere human diseased.”

 

            And one of his life-long friends, Boo, in a moment of divination tells the Artist:

 

            “I’ve felt that somewhere there must be some creature not quite man, not quite God, who will heal the wounds. Perhaps that’s why we look to artists of any kind, why we lose our heads over them.”

 

            Here are valid reasons enough for sessions with Patrick White, the authentic adult voice of Australia.

 

 

* A paper read at the Australian Literature Seminar, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad.

 

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