[In the following review, Hassall praises White, contending that the author's writing shows he is “clear-eyed,” compassionate, and “can tell a good old-fashioned story extremely well.”]

Most of the six shorter novels and stories in Patrick White's second collection begin, like The Eye of the Storm and The Solid Mandala, at the end of life. They are about retired couples, living out their last years together. Though three of the stories have previously been published separately,¹ the collection is a comparatively unified one, held together by the characters' common predicament—loneliness—and by their common, often violent, attempts to break out of it. It is a little surprising to find as the protagonists of these stories some of the ordinary, dun-coloured inhabitants of suburbia, people incapable of the magnificent isolation of an Elizabeth Hunter, but tough enough to withstand the helpless alienation which overwhelmed their counterparts in The Burnt Ones. Most of them have made peace, of a kind, with life, settling for what they have got as best they can. But if they are ostensibly better adjusted than some of White's earlier characters, they have not escaped from the more intimate rigours of marriage, nor from the hunger of the heart for a human companionship which might assuage the loneliness which haunts them all. Patrick White brings to their depiction his customary merciless eye for the petty squalors and deceptions of life, and a newly enlarged compassion for run-of-the-mill humanity, struggling with its own inadequacies. The result is a profound, and at times dazzlingly acute insight into otherwise humble and unremarkable lives.

Of the afflictions endemic to the latter part of life, loneliness is most emphasized in these stories, though not to the complete exclusion of poverty and sickness. The Makridis family of “The Full Belly”, for example, are poor, surviving on boiled dandelions in an Athens occupied by the Germans in the Second World War, though the younger members of the family can still sell their talents, or themselves, for food. And Royal Natwick in “Five-Twenty” is confined to a wheelchair by a combination of hernia, heart and “artheritis”, though his wife's remorseless care ensures that that is the least of his problems. In general, however, the people in these stories are wealthy enough, and healthy enough. Their loneliness is another matter. It is not the loneliness of White's elect who, however they may suffer at the hands of Blue and his boozy mates, instinctively recognize one another, and take comfort from their shared private vision. Such characters do appear briefly in these stories, but as minor figures, whose insights are not shared, and who therefore attempt violent remedies to overcome their isolation. Clem Dowson, for example, in “A Woman's Hand” gives up his lifelong self-sufficiency to marry, late in life, a woman chosen for him by Evelyn Fazackerley, a thin-blooded, genteel descendant of Mrs Flack. They come together over a discussion of how to make cumquat jam, from which it is clear that Clem, supposedly in need of a woman's touch, is in fact the better cook, though Nesta Pine, his wife-to-be, has cooked for the best families. Clem and Nesta have too much in common to need one another, and their marriage is a disaster which kills Clem and drives Nesta mad. Harold Fazackerley, who has understood something of his wife's destruction of his friend, does make a feeble protest, scattering the pearls of her treasured necklace in an uncharacteristic outburst of violence. But they are “such mates”, her concern for his comfort is so professional, their relationship is too comfortable and his awareness of its sterility too blunted, for the protest to be more than a passing flicker of life. Harold is not burnt, he is killed with kindness. His wife takes him on a tour of the Dead Heart of Australia.

Felicity Bannister, the much younger protagonist of “The Night the Prowler”, protests more fiercely, as one would expect from someone in whom the full tide of life has just begun to run. The conventional, over-protected daughter of a heavy-handed middle-class family, Felicity is released from her carefully schooled frustration by a prowler who breaks into the house and “rapes” her. Unfortunately when she gives every indication of willingly cooperating in the assault, the prowler turns out to be as impotent as Faulkner's Popeye, though without the latter's resourcefulness in finding a substitute weapon. A pathetic little man with bad teeth, he has to be forced by Felicity to drink some of her father's brandy so it will look as if he has ransacked the house as well as its daughter. Felicity's supposed violation enables her to discard the passionless diplomat to whom she is engaged, and she embarks on a quest for a real experience which will, in Addie Bundren's phrase, “violate her aloneness”.² She drops her mousy, twin-set stereotype, and takes up black leather, working in a boutique called “Pot Luck”, and breaking into neighbours' houses to assault their ponderous and ugly complacency. She haunts the park by night, seeking some ultimate experience, and finding only gangs of bikies who back off like the prowler, leaving her brandishing their captured bike-chains while they flee from a desire to which their petty lusts are no answer. Failed by man, Felicity turns on God: “I fuck you, God, for holding out on me”.³ Her ultimate revelation, if that is what it is, is one of total, Beckettian nihilism. It comes from a dying down-and-out in a derelict house: “I can honestly say I never believed in or expected anything of anyone. I never loved, not even myself—which is more than can be said of most people. … I always saw myself as a shit. I am nothing. I believe in nothing. And Nothing's noble faith. Nobody can hurt nothing. So you've no reason for being afraid”. (pp. 166-167) Cold comfort for a young girl urgently seeking some real contact with life.

If her demon lover were one day to materialize, like Miss Slattery's in The Burnt Ones, and if they were to marry and grow old, Felicity would eventually find herself in the same situation as her parents, and most of the protagonists of these stories. The main focus of The Cockatoos is not on isolated loneliness, but on the special kind of loneliness which exists within long and ostensibly successful marriages, a theme White has not really attempted since The Tree of Man. In the title-story Mick and Olive Davoren have not spoken to one another for seven years, since he let her budgie die while she was away at her sister's funeral. They exchange essential information by writing notes on a pad in the kitchen. It becomes apparent that they do not have much to say to one another anyway. Mick has taken to sometimes having tea with Busby Le Cornu, a spinster up the road, and once in a while their relations have been more intimate, though Mick shows as little enthusiasm for love as he does for talk, and Miss Le Cornu does not seem to mind too much. The women in this triangle share an interest in music—Olive used to play the violin and Miss Le Cornu is partial to a velvety mezzo-soprano—but they never succeed in talking about it. The catalyst which introduces life, and death, into this long-standing deadlock is the arrival of a flock of brilliant, wild cockatoos. Olive and Mick take turns to feed them, and their shared enthusiasm for the birds leads them to exchange words, and even inarticulate love, for the first time in many years. Mick is shot trying to protect the cockatoos from a neighbour with a shotgun, and the women join hands supporting his dying body. Despite this violent, almost melodramatic ending the story is understated. White's observation is as superb as ever, and his sympathy, sometimes vitiated by a patrician contempt for the herd, is here allowed full scope. There is the sureness of touch of his best work in the spare, compassionate, unsentimental view he takes of his three central characters. Listening to a favourite aria in her backyard, Miss Le Cornu “was crouching over what might have been her own lament for a real passion she had never quite experienced”. (p. 287) This elegiac note pervades the story, and indeed the whole collection. As the unravished Felicity complains to her passionless stick of a fiancé, “how can love be ‘engaged’? … and how can an engagement be ‘broken’? Anything big enough ought to be ‘shattered’!” (p. 143) But nothing big enough comes to the people in these stories. They must make do with the altogether more mundane realities of marriage. Love is something else.

They do not give in, however, without a struggle, often a surprisingly violent struggle, to snatch something closer to their aspirations, and further from their fate. The couple in “Sicilian Vespers” are superficially more than content with their lot. “Prudence was a virtue normally present in both of them. What had made their marriage such an exceptionally happy one was its balance.” (p. 198) Not exactly stirring stuff, but comfortable. Dr. Charles Simpson has retired from practice, and with his wife Ivy is touring Europe. Like so many of White's couples they are childless, and their retirement, and travelling, have thrown them entirely on their own, and one another's resources. Just what those resources are is relentlessly exposed in the following pages. The doctor comes down with a toothache, and meditates on the difference between his public self, responsible, reassuring, healing the sick, and the true self inside the image: “What if all the patients who had brought him their forebodings as well as their actual cancers—what if Ivy were to realize that inside the responsible man there had always lurked this diffident, whimpering boy?” (p. 199) Inside Ivy there lurks the plain daughter of a flamboyant artist who was greatly disappointed by her lack of ton and told her so. She has pursued his withheld approval all her life—without success. In Sicily she has one last try to escape from the irreproachably comfortable world she has made for herself, into the imagined bohemian splendour of her father's. Her partner is Clark Shacklock, an American staying at their hotel. Leaving his wife and her husband at the hotel, they visit the duomo of San Fabrizio in time for Vespers one evening. Ivy overwhelms Clark and they make love on the “particularly fine” Cosmati paving, watched over by “a very beautiful Passion”, while the service continues in the almost dark church. The splendid comedy of the scene—they are locked in, and Ivy immediately worries about getting home for Charles's dinner—is flanked on one side by the casual squalor of the adultery, and on the other by Ivy's long-suppressed religious yearning to “learn … how to climb a ladder of prayer”. (p. 139) She seeks both these extremes deliberately, if guiltily, as escapes from the prison of her marriage, which is no less a prison for being filled with sweetness and light. In the unlovely moment of her coupling with Clark, she looks down on “the box in which He my Dearly Beloved Husband has thrown off the sheet is rising from amongst the limp grey wrinkles on the yellow bed offering Himself afresh for sacrifice under the extinct acryllic object”. (p. 243) Ivy betrays her escape in a farewell letter to Clark the next morning, only to find that he has already fled the hotel and what she had called her “bizarre Sicilian reactions”. (p. 252) The quiet desperation underlying lives of steady and useful purpose has seldom been more expertly revealed. Once again the distance from the characters is just right. We can laugh at the beautifully observed surfaces of the Simpsons, their petty snobberies, their pseudo-matiness, the sterile clichés of their relationship, without losing sympathy for the haunting insecurities which have driven them to seek this refuge, which time and habit have metamorphosed into a prison from which they are losing the will to try to escape.

Ella Natwick in “Five-Twenty” delays her protest against the kiss of death represented by her marriage until after her husband has passed on. The Natwicks, like the Fazackerleys, are “such mates”, but only because Ella has worked hard and self-effacingly at keeping her grocer husband Royal conscious of his Englishness, his good nose, and the Natwick family home in Kent. Childless, they sit on the verandah of their retirement home on the Parramatta Road and watch the traffic, and in particular the man in the Holden who goes past every day at five-twenty. When he asks one day to use her phone to ring the N.R.M.A., the newly liberated Ella begins to love him. But when he comes back the next night he is ill, and dies at Ella's feet, a victim, as it seems to her, of the fierce intensity of her guilty passion for him. The point of view remains Ella's throughout this finely controlled story. The author makes no comment on the meagreness of her world, her subservience to her “Royal God Almighty” husband, her limited awareness. The result is an evenness of tone unusual in White. The pathos is restrained by Ella's lack of awareness that her situation deserves pity, and it is uninterrupted by the author's ironic or satiric voice. An inhabitant of the ageing inner suburbs, she attracts neither White's loathing for the bourgeois pretensions of the North Shore, nor his distaste for the easy vulgarity of such denizens of the outer suburbs as the Whalleys of “Down at the Dump”. Instead there is a strong but discreet sympathy devoid of any but the most gentle mockery.

All of the stories are concerned, in one way or another, with violent betrayals caused by the irruption of basic human cravings into a world which either ignores them, or builds to contain them institutions like marriage which are pitifully inadequate to the task. In “A Full Belly”, the least obviously interrelated of the stories, hunger drives Costa Iordanu and his elderly aunt Pronoë to violate both religious belief and aristocratic family decorum by fighting over a plate of rice left as a ritual offering before the family ikon. Their city has been desrated by the invading Germans, and the Greeks are driven to desecrate their own most cherished traditions in the fight for survival. In the title story nine-year-old Tim Goodenough, another of White's lonely, prescient children, despairs, like Felicity Bannister, of making contact with his parents, and spends a night in the park in a similarly fruitless pursuit of a vaguely imagined fulfilment. On his way home in the morning he kills an old cockatoo, one of the Laurentian life-symbols of the story, hoping perhaps that the violent destruction of life will enable him somehow to touch its essence. Desecrations and betrayals of this kind recur in the stories, and in the degradation which follows them it is possible, though by no means certain, that the characters will rediscover their lost humanity. Though some of the characters involved in this process are young, like Costa, Tim and Felicity, it happens most often to the old who, though they still have yearnings which the solipsistic young and the smug middle-aged might deny them, have even less chance of realizing those yearnings than the rest of us. Their attempts, and failures, chronicled with insight and compassion, make up the bulk of this volume.

An exception to the generally high level of authorial sympathy is the first story, “A Woman's Hand”, first published in 1966, when the author was fresh from his battles with the cultural establishment over the production of his plays, and when his revulsion from “Sarsaparilla” was at its height. The subtitle of The Cockatoos is “Shorter Novels and Stories”, and this, the longest piece in the collection, clearly falls into the first category. It opens in White's tartest satirical manner:

What must originally have appeared an austere landscape, one long rush of rock and scrub towards the sea, was prevented from wearing its natural expression by the parasite houses clinging to it as obstinately as wax on diseased orange branches. Not that the houses weren't, nearly all of them, technically desirable, some of them even Lovely Homes worth breaking into. Although the owners of the latter were surely aware of this, they had almost completely exposed their possessions behind unbroken plate-glass. To view the view might have been their confessable intention, but they had ended, seemingly, overwhelmed by it. Or bored. The owners of the lovely seaside homes sat in their worldly cells playing bridge, licking the chocolate off their fingers, in one case copulating, on pink chenille, on the master bed.

(p. 9)

This assault on the crass materialism, the philistine stupor of the Australian scene will not surprise readers familiar with White's other work about this time. He surveys the surface of this life with a caricaturist's eye for the vulgarity of the lamb chop and tomato sauce consuming ordinary Ocker. It is a vein that has been worked hard in recent years by Barry Humphries and David Williamson as well as White, and it has more mud than gold left in it by now. Perhaps we can look forward to more writers like Randolph Stow who, when they go out into the cold world of the outsider, remember, with sorrow as well as anger, the warmth they leave behind.

Strolling through the blasted landscape of Bandana Beach we find the Fazackerleys, comfortably off and retired. Evelyn Fazackerley's response to the scene is almost as repulsive as the author's description of it: “how vulgar they all are … there are certain standards the ones who know can't afford to drop”. (p. 10) After such a beginning, one cannot but wonder how White is going to fill a nouvelle-length story unless he introduces some real people to ballast these Dickensian grotesques. The Fazackerleys live, we discover, in a cosy and tasteful unit very like a prison cell from which they constantly escape by going on tours. But they never escape from themselves and one another, nor from the author's meticulous observation of their posturings and mannerisms, one of the best touches of which is the way they communicate, like Walter and Toby Shandy, quite independently of the actual words which pass between them.

The two characters introduced to this hermetically sealed marriage are, as we have seen, Clem Dowson and Nesta Pine, school-friends of Harold and Evelyn. Though they do not make a great impact on the Fazackerleys' anaesthetized self-sufficiency, Clem does stir vague, poetic longings in Harold, and Evelyn is able to relieve some of her boredom by arranging the poisonous marriage between them. The trouble with the story is that we see the interesting characters, Clem and Nesta, only through the eyes of the “normal” Harold and Evelyn. Thus we get external, old-maidish details about Clem, his automatic egg-remover and his three garbage cans for his three classes of garbage, but we see nothing of his inner life, nothing of the motivation for his extraordinary decision to marry Nesta. Nesta is even more shadowy, and this makes the brilliant, disturbing letter she writes to Evelyn (pp. 69-70) a rather clumsy authorial insertion. Evelyn, it seems, is to be forcibly confronted with an account of redemption to ensure that her own damnation is wilful and complete. Writing Hamlet from the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is all very well, but it is difficult not to hanker after what gets lost in the process. White has written about his outsiders with such perception and sensitivity elsewhere that it is hard to accept the mere outlines they present to the limited vision of an Evelyn Fazackerley as a truth of much value. The angle is simply too narrow. And the slightly rancid, Kingsley Amis humour of the opening does not readily modulate into what should become the tragic view of Clem and Nesta, or the ultimate pathos of the Fazackerleys trapped, like the dead souls in Joyce's Dubliners, in their own nothingness.

The Cockatoos, in which White is more concerned with the paralysed normalcy of Australian society than with its unfortunate victims, the burnt ones of the earlier collection, has a good deal in common with Dubliners.⁴ As well as a hate/love attitude towards their homelands, Joyce and White share a fine sense of irony, and a deflating awareness of the restrictions of the physical. Both find life in their native countries deadening, and the people in need of spiritual liberation. Both hold up a mirror in which the victims may see the unpalatable truth about themselves, and if they are not sanguine enough to hope, like Gulliver, for the immediate reform of the country, they do lend moral support to those characters like Harold Fazackerley or Maria in Joyce's “Clay” who make their protest, however feebly, against the stifling of their human needs. There are, however, important differences. Joyce's epic work was ahead of him when he wrote Dubliners, and he was to become one of the great innovators of modern fiction. Patrick White has already written a major body of epic work, and is a self-confessedly old-fashioned novelist. As he says in a recent interview, “I feel my novels are quite old-fashioned and traditional—almost Nineteenth Century. I've never thought of myself as an innovator”.⁵ Almost alone among major twentieth-century novelists he has not created a markedly individual form to embody his own distinctive vision, though he has certainly put the capacious potential of the Victorian novel to precise and specialized use.

Unlike the novel, the short story has not undergone radical development in the twentieth century, and it is therefore a congenial form for a traditionally-minded writer. As “A Glass of Tea” from The Burnt Ones indicates, Patrick White can tell a good old-fashioned story extremely well. The brevity of the short story encourages the use of a single narrative stance, and its impersonality discourages an underdistanced authorial relation to the subject. It also comfortably accommodates the grand, central symbol of which White, like Ibsen and Lawrence, is fond. The shorter of the stories in this volume certainly gain from the inherent restrictions on the author's varying of stance and mode of narration. They have a freshness and crispness which Dorothy Green, for one, found lacking in White's last novel, The Eye of the Storm.⁶ One might be tempted to argue that White, like Faulkner, is essentially a short-story writer, and not a novelist at all, and that he makes his novels, as Faulkner does, by putting together a series of units conceived and executed as stories. His collections, particularly this one, do explore particular thematic preoccupations in the manner of Go Down, Moses, and many of his novels are composed of disparate segments juxtaposed in the Faulkner manner. The similarity between the four person structure of Riders in the Chariot and that of The Sound and the Fury, in both of which the ritual of Easter is a central symbol, is the most obvious, but by no means the only example. His novels, like Faulkner's, sometimes grow out of stories—The Eye of the Storm clearly had its beginnings in “Dead Roses”—and the author has said that he finds writing stories a useful way of breaking a writing drought, and of limbering up for a new novel.

On the other hand both authors have larger ambitions that the modern novel, with its careful scrutiny of a small and sharply defined segment of time or human character, comfortably contains. There is an epic magnitude in the conception of Voss, as there is in Absalom, Absalom, that belongs at the other end of the fictional spectrum to the short story, with the massive European novels of the nineteenth century. These two works attempt in Virgilian manner to capture the quintessential nature of the civilizations which produced them, and whose formative history they explore. Faulkner's ambition on this scale was twofold: the single, epic novel like Absalom, Absalom, and a lifetime's work recreating the South in the multi-faceted fictional world of Yoknapatawpha. It is becoming increasingly clear that Patrick White has all along been working towards a similar goal, not merely introducing a new continent into literature, as the Nobel Prize citation stated, but attempting the truly epic task of fictionalizing a lifetime's observation of the Australian experience. The attempt, like Voss's, is doomed by the very magnitude of its ambition: Voss failed, though he also succeeded. Within this grand plan The Cockatoos occupies a modest, though by no means undistinguished place. From Theodora Goodman on, a number of White's characters have been driven mad, like Gulliver, by discovering their inescapable similarity to the Yahoo, an animal first encountered in this part of the world. And like Swift he has not lacked readers ready to identify the character's madness with the author's imbalance. If any refutation were necessary in Patrick White's case, it certainly comes in this book, in which he is as clear-eyed, as unillusioned about his fellows as ever, and yet which is dominated by an insistent compassion for those growing old, desperate and unlovely, the fringe-dwellers of an empty continent of unfulfilment.

Notes

1. The stories previously published are: “A Woman's Hand”, Australian Letters 7 No. 3 (August 1966), 13-40; “The Full Belly”, Coast to Coast: Australian Short Stories, 1965-66, ed. Clement Semmler (Sydney Angus and Robertson, 1966), 225-242; and “Five-Twenty”, Southerly, XXVIII (1968), 3-25.

2. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), p. 160.

3. The Cockatoos (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), p. 164. Subsequent page numbers refer to this edition.

4. Both Dubliners and The Burnt Ones include a story entitled “Clay”. It is possible that White intended a direct reference, and it certainly suggests a familiarity with Joyce's work, a suggestion reinforced by the title of Waldo Brown's destroyed literary work, “Tiresias a Youngish Man”. Some of the similarities between A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Tree of Man are described in Bernard Hickey, James Joyce and Patrick White: A Study in Correspondences (Roma: Tip. Zampini, 1971).

5. “A Conversation with Patrick White”, Southerly III (1973), p. 139.

6. “Queen Lear or Cleopatra Rediviva? Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm”, Meanjin Quarterly, II (1973), 395-405.