[In the following essay, Taylor discusses the shortcomings and the success of White's short stories in The Burnt Ones, maintaining that the stories are “fine, penetrating, courageous and illuminating in their economy.”]

Patrick White is central to Australian literature just in so far as he chooses to remain at odds with its society. To say that he is one of our sharpest and best social critics is stating a commonplace. The “suburban” world of Sarsaparilla and Barranugli receive about as much sympathy as they offer love. But one of his strengths is the ability not only to make us feel strongly about the mess we have created, but also to make us feel that it's worth feeling strongly about. For barren, ugly, or sweet and sickly though it may be, it is still the breeding ground of human lives. And where human lives are being bred, there are always some who will, perhaps even only part-consciously, grope towards the fullness of living that can be sensed among a mass of flowers and foliage.

In this volume of short stories, The Burnt Ones, White, as in “The Aunt's Story” and “Riders in the Chariot,” can turn his attention to Europe without diverting it from Australia. Four of the eleven stories here reprinted are set in the Greek Mediterranean. There is, it is true, a Greece of pines and temples on headlands, but there are also Hasselblads, and aunts who are professors in Paris, and new apartments and tinned dolmadakia. Romantic though he is, for White the Greek Mediterranean is just another place he happens to know well, where he can see taking place the same basic conflict that is taking place in Australia.

Still, it is hard to feel happy about the end of that otherwise fine “Being Kind to Titina”. It is not for nothing that the girl, the pines, the Saronic Gulf and “the man with the accordian … playing his five or six notes, as gentle and persuasive as wood-pigeons” are seen through the eyes of an adolescent. But one wonders if they are seen sufficiently through any other eyes as well. What kind of self-realisation is it that expresses itself in these terms: “As I leant out of the window, and held up my throat to receive the knife, nothing happened … and I realised that my own extended throat was itself a stiff sword”?

But the main contrast in one of the best stories, “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats,” set in Athens, is not between the Greeks and their Americanised visitors, but between an indulgent and smothering sensuality that bores, tires or irritates, and the sharp feline sexuality that succeeds it. The Americans don't escape White's characteristic censure (“‘Some people are like animals!’ she gasped; it was too hateful”). But it is not just Cadillacs and cameras that smother vitality. White would probably agree that good sensuality is good for one, but not all sensuality is good.

The funniest story in the collection is one in which this is seen in an intensely comic light. “Miss Slattery and her Demon Lover” is a satirical delight. It is Miss Slattery, usual and Aussie, who becomes the demon, and Tibby, that monstrous Hungarian, bewitched by her dexterity with the stockwhip, becomes, despite his feline name, a spaniel to his own perversion. Tibby, rather than qualifying for sympathy as one of the burnt ones of the title, comes in for a little humorous roasting.

But White does not always find life so amusing, nor is he always so kind to it. The majority of these stories have that odd mixture of luxuriance and grimness that we now expect of him. Among the rich smell of leaves and decay there is the shrill cry of the neighbor and the bony pricking of brooches. Unwanted relatives have to be buried out of sight, businesses run and acquaintances kept going. We live in a suburban society, and it has to be kept up because it keeps us up. Consequently, there are always little bits left over that, if they can't be thrown out, can at best be ignored, at worst shunned with contempt. These are the “burnt ones” of the title.

To call these oddities outcasts, rejects or outsiders is inaccurate. They are none of these. They are rather misfits, often struggling almost tragically to retain sheer normality. Some don't even realise their difference. Their difference is that they accept suffering, rather than pretend to ignore its existence. This itself sets them apart from the world of washing machines and neighbors in which normal humanity shuts itself. And, White implies, if a soul shuts itself from suffering, it must also shut itself from love. One recalls the dying Voss, and Theodora Goodman and Mrs. Godbold. But what White means by love is no simple thing. There is something of charity, and self-denial, but there is also sensuality and self-fulfilment, and a sensuous apprehension of objects by which love can and ought to extend itself to the inanimate or non-human. White's language is almost bumpy in its concreteness, and Meg Hogben, feeling “the furry darkness, as the semitrailer roared and bucked, its skeleton of coloured lights,” (“Down at the Dump”) is on the same road as Miss Hare crawling through her friendly jungle.

It is in “Clay,” in my opinion the best here, and in “The Letters,” both very fine stories, that White examines most closely the basic problems he diagnoses. Clay himself is a pathetic, unplaced creature who withdraws increasingly from the suburban world which has inappropriately claimed him. He fashions a reality of his own, finally christening her Lova. She is the love and fulfilment he has never experienced and can only amateurishly copy, after the models he has. He is a seer with nothing outside himself to see. He creates Lova in total isolation, and as isolated women tend to do, she becomes bitchy. Instead of providing the white bridal boat in which he can sail to Avalon, she ends by beating him to death with a stiletto heel. Despite the acute satirical surface and Clay's near ludicrous patheticness (“At last my ryvita has turned to velveeta life is no longer a toastrack”) White succeeds in amalgamating an astonishing variety. Clay's unpunctuated mother, both responsible and incapable, is a masterpiece of minor tragedescence.

If “Clay” is uncompromising, almost affronting, “The Letters” appears even bleaker, stripped as it is of much of the comedy. Here the satire is harsher; Mrs. Polkinghorn, the mother, responsible and not incapable, gets no sympathy. Her son Charles, like Clay, is “in withdrawal”. But whereas Clay has withdrawn to look, Charles is in retreat, hiding from threat. Among poultry catalogues he is safe; the letters locked in the box cannot threaten him. It is his sudden desire to be finally rid of threat that impels him to release the letters. And in doing so, he also releases fear: “packages contain the worst dangers, threatening the lives of politicians, diplomats …” There is only one refuge, and he is hurled from that with elderly middle-class disgust. Charles has locked himself into hell with the same key with which he opened his Pandora's box and faced fear. For he did not shut it in time to keep Hope with him.

In both of these stories, as in “The Aunt's Story” and “Riders,” White takes us over the edge of madness in an unmistakably sane manner. He makes us face a kind of morality of injustice; he makes us see that certain states of madness are in fact a state of truth and exposure that just can't cope with its own reality. The victims of this state don't become saints or heroes; their martyrdom is only partly, almost negligibly imposed on them by society, which prefers on the whole to leave them alone. It is imposed by their own condition. They are part burning bush, lights for us, and part minor and unintentional Ulysses, turned, as in Dante, into flame and suffering ‘e dentro dalla lor flamma si geme.’

None the less, White seldom ceases his muscular attack on contemporary society. Some of it is very funny. Most of it is accurate. His devastating utilisation of the phraseology and rhythms of Australian speech and inarticulateness carries his attack into the heart of the enemy, and modulates without strain into the most personal dialogue. But his satire sometimes penetrates to the point of indiscriminacy or sheer destructiveness. It's such accurate observations as his that makes his targets more than mere targets. Yet the unmitigated attack that observation furnishes leaves me with the feeling that White himself sometimes lacks the charity he is condemning them for lacking. He evaluates his “heroes” by their subjective experience. Yet condemns the hypocrisy of the majority while seeming frightened to allow his sympathy to look too closely into their own subjective life. Could they all be found to be burnt ones?

These strictures apply mostly to the poorer stories in the volume. The stories are, like any collection, a mixed bag, and the worst of them, “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight” is very slight, and creakily engineered. Some display the chronic weaknesses of the short story and White—obviousness, facile symbolism, crudeness of conception—which the expansive novels tend to eliminate. But at their best, these stories are fine, penetrating, courageous and illuminating in their economy.