I'm not so sure that Patrick White, whom I used to admire, has sufficient negative capability in his makeup to submit his intimations to much of a battering by fact.

These heretical thoughts were first suggested by a re-reading of The Aunt's Story some years ago—reputedly the author's favourite amongst his own novels. I came to the conclusion then that the vision White set over against grubby human duplicity was altogether too nebulous and undernourished, and The Twyborn Affair does nothing to help change my mind. (pp. 92-3)

Here's the … treatment handed out to a Sydney hotel:

As the waitresses, plump or sinewy, wove and interwove in their uniform black with white flashes, the head waiter, that giant currawong, a sheaf of menus tucked into a wing, swirling and descending, in nobody's pay yet open to persuasion, and woe to the heads he might crunch off as a reward for unworldliness … those seated at Sunday luncheon in this most reputable Sydney hotel should have felt assured, and for the most part were, the napkins so thick and nappy, the excessive cutlery so solid and elaborately incised; you could play a chord or two if you chose on either side of your brown Windsor soup.

It's not only the cutlery that's excessive; the whole passage reeks of overkill. I was reminded by all this hectic detail of Priestley on Meredith: 'We note the elaborate gestures, but nothing arrives for the mind to feed on.'

Again and again one comes on such descriptive passages. One comes too on elaborate Jamesian characterizations and personifications, but somehow solid flesh almost never materializes. Australia seems to be peopled exclusively by idiots and vulgarians, the geography similarly lobotomized into a few brash towns and the mind-numbing outback. Out on the farm they can't even eat without emblematizing the Australian Condition: 'They sat down and began their meal. Everyone, it seemed, was involved in a primitive ritual, no grace, but plenty of tomato sauce.' So whether you eat graciously in a hotel or ungraciously in the outback makes precious little difference; either way you're a spiritual oaf. All this wouldn't be so bad if the detail ever cohered into some acceptable anatomy, but for the most part these pathetic monsters seem merely willed into being like some literary Frankenstein.

Throughout the book there is a positively Swiftian loathing of the flesh, but with none of Swift's (or Beckett's) humour or underlying rationale—like so much else it is a factitious loathing, just as the inveterate social malice against Australian (if indeed they are Australian) middle-class mores is nothing more than a snobbish tic. And what has White to set over against the simulated objects of his hatred? Why he has 'grace', of course, that capacious spiritual string-bag, and above all he has his social outcasts, the holy fools, borrowed this time from Dostoyevsky. In fact the one thing that White is consummately good at is borrowing. He sounds in turn like James, like Thomas Mann, like Dickens, like Jane Austen, even like Eliot…. Patrick White goes through all the motions of profundity (an evening sky becomes 'a slash of brash sunset to warn of the menace invariably concealed in landscape and time') but has nothing whatever to say, beyond vacuous obliquities. He is a ventriloquist whose scripts are getting worse and worse—a point made by Eudoxia herself: 'Writing about oneself at night is release of a kind, but no more than of a kind—like masturbation.' (pp. 93-4)