SOURCE: “Short Stories,” in Patrick White, Oliver and Boyd LTD, 1967, pp.66–89.

[In the following excerpt, Argyle points out that while White is primarily known as a novelist, his short stories show the same “intelligence” and “wealth of experience” that mark the author's longer fiction.]

When in the early sixties White began publishing those stories which he has since collected, with two additions, under the title of The Burnt Ones, many of his recent English readers were surprised that a novelist who dealt in great themes at great length should bother with an art-form used mainly by beginners. It had also become an axiom among many professional English readers of novels that the short-story was dead. Had they not, they felt, helped to kill it, assisted by a dearth of magazines and a surfeit of television and Somerset Maugham? With its roots in Scotland and its greatest modern practitioners in Ireland and America, the short-story, belonging to a wide tradition, did not fit easily into the Great Tradition. But in publishing The Burnt Ones, White was returning to a form he had first used nearly thirty years before, when he wrote “The Twitching Colonel,” which appeared in the London Mercury of April 1937, and “Cocotte,” which Horizon printed in 1940.

Neither shares the quality that so distinguishes his later stories, and their main interest now can only be in what they anticipate. The first, possibly an early draft of the fire incident in The Aunt's Story, is an old, alcoholic, Indian Army colonel's stream-of-consciousness playing over a distant past, which, superficially boring, has had its moments of excitement in battle and passion and the surrounding exoticism of Hindu civilisation to which, politically, he has been required to oppose that of the Raj. The colonel is alone in the tattered splendours of London's Pimlico, his only companion a landlady who values him for his antecedents, his medals, and his stories of India. In reliving his similar glories, he is a younger Sokolnikov, like him melancholic from age, a dead passion, and ennui. He dies in a fire which mingles with, even becomes, his memories of India. The story ends with a heavy finger pointing the heavier moral difference between us, the spectators, and the colonel: “We creep away. It is something we do not understand. We are afraid.” It is a young man's story in which a good fire removes any technical difficulties. The heavily-punctuated moral is the justification for the earlier, and the fashionable, verbal pyrotechnics.

“Cocotte” is a very much shorter impression, this time the stream of consciousness become the flood of conversation. The story takes the seemingly formless form of a Frenchwoman on a bench talking to an English sailor about her husband, who is in Marseilles, and the dog which is with her. It is in fact a very clever and funny montage of French and Gallic-English, in which the dog Cocotte—a delightfully ambiguous name—plays with Maman as Maman plays with the sailor. It ends lightly with her “good-bye, Monsieur. J'èspere. …” The breathless but purposeful sallying back and forth of the woman's monologue already shows the mark of White's mordant accuracy in selecting in order to appear to record words actually spoken.

Their French and London settings, with overtones of the Indian Empire and weekend trips across the Channel, suggest these stories could have been written by any one of a number of faintly critical pre-war ex-public schoolboys, as indeed a glance at the magazines in which they appeared quickly confirms.

White, however, is an Australian, who since the war has decided, with many misgivings, to live in Australia. Although this has clearly influenced his choice of themes and his attitude towards them in at least some of his short stories, it has had a much greater influence on his decision to return to the writing of short stories. In Australia there is a long and still very lively tradition of short-story writing, and there are many more magazines there to publish them than exist in England. Of the eleven stories in The Burnt Ones, seven were first published in four Australian magazines; two of these seven, with two others, have also appeared in The London Magazine, the only present English publication at all comparable with Australian Letters, Meanjin, Quadrant and Overland. As the reasons for Australia's relative good fortune are discussed in John Tregenza's useful book, Australian Little Magazines, it is necessary here only to suggest the possibility that English writers, by inflating to the proportions of novels what are really short-stories, have conspired with publishers to starve if not to kill the goose that used in England to lay an occasional golden egg. One is led to this conclusion by the immediacy with which one recognises the broader range of intelligence and concern in White's novels when they are compared with those of his English contemporaries, and by the intelligence with which in the best of the short-stories a wealth of experience and sympathy is shaped into an intense art.

Of the eleven, seven are set in Australia, four among Greeks. Except in one of the finest, “Down at the Dump,” there is no reference to myth or legend, nor anywhere that verbal puissance so readily discernible in the best of the novels. The stories in the main cannot be read as Lawrence's are, as a closer examination of themes found in the novels; nor as Faulkner's, an extension of the world the novels deal with in which even the same characters are found. Although four of them, “Dead Roses,” “A Cheery Soul,” “The Letters,” and “Down at the Dump” are set either wholly or in part in Sarsparilla, in only “The Letters” is there a character mentioned in the novels—Mrs. Sugden, the postmistress, who briefly introduces Riders in the Chariot—and her appearance in the story is even briefer. In “A Cheery Soul,” we learn, perhaps in anticipation of a future novel, that Sarsparilla's history goes back to the convict era. But that is all; and it is not important. We have instead social comment directed at Australian and Greek suburban life, not because it is suburban, but because it conforms to the mean standards set by American suburban life, which appear in the story called “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats.” On the whole, however, such comment is incidental to the main theme of generous fulfilment and its reverse, the deprivation suburban life enforces by hoisting up conformity as an ideal. The theme often takes the form of a comparison, within the timelessness memory allows, of childhood and adulthood, of past and present; but unlike the novels, in which the child is father of the man, the stories show the man as not of the same flesh, so that many of the characters echo the Young Man of The Ham Funeral: “You may even find … you have begun to feed … on memory.”¹ So starved is the present of each, that each becomes his own Chronos. Their ironic fate, which sustains many of the stories, is in their inability to digest what they so greedily devour. This difference between an idyllic past and a suburban present also introduces into the stories an element absent from most of the novels, namely marriage. Like having a two-car garage, or hot-and-cold in the main bedroom, suburbs exist to prove that trouble shared is trouble halved. An object of White's concern is to show how often it is trouble doubled, that hot and cold produce tepid water, and two cars a muttering immobility in the front drive.

“The Evening at Sissy Kamara's,” for instance, is a story wholly about marriage. It employs the “box” form, the past entirely framed by the present. Mrs. Pantzopoulos is at the dentist's and while having her tooth drilled, recalls “incidents of no significance,” one of which is a visit she and husband Basil paid Sissy Louloudis, born Kamara, and her husband Sotos. The cause and much of the substance of the visit are of the distant past, the two women having known each other as children in Smyrna, about which they reminisce. They also share a feeling of being exiled among mainland Greeks, Basil being unwilling to let them forget their provincial origins, though overlooking “his original grain of Piraeus sand.” Their common colonial origins and experiences allow the two women momentarily to overcome their differences of personality—Sissy, an unread poetess, collector of unknown artists, and a poor cook; Poppy Pantzopoulos, her always attentive because admiring opposite.

The pastness of the past is similarly indulgent towards their original social differences, which Poppy's marriage to a city bank manager and Sissy's to an anonymous clerk have emphasised. The link between frame and object is established via Poppy's willingness to have her tooth drilled without an injection and Kitty's theory, which annoys Basil the “true” Greek, that all Greeks are sado-masochists. The irony is that only a colonial is imaginative enough, because pressed by necessity, to formulate a theory to explain a metropolitan society she cannot otherwise understand, the further irony being that the theory explains rather more about colonials who try to live as metropolitans. The situation, though in the context of different societies, is one into which White was of course born.

In the two marriages the story includes, there is an added irony. Whereas Poppy loves her husband despite his infidelities, he merely tolerates her for the wealth she brought him; while Kitty ignores Sotos and is loved in return. Although this is also a variation on the theme of the Greeks' sado-masochism, the story also suggests that Kitty and Basil would find each other more agreeable than they find their spouses; so too would Poppy and Sotos. Neither Basil nor Kitty has married for that love which foreigners, and even some Greeks like Kitty, imagine as a heritage of passion from a more heroic age, a passion which marriage is elsewhere assumed to make permanent. Economic greed or necessity has played its part, leaving Poppy and Sotos, its contented victims, free to recognise in each what the other has never had. The final irony, evident in the sexual imagery of the passage describing the dentist drilling her tooth, is that Poppy at least would have been afraid to welcome it. She prefers to keep her bad tooth, somehow repaired, rather than have it removed.

At first reading a casually slight story, at second subtle and complex, “The Evening at Sissy Kamara's” still seems, because of its shape, to have a fustian air about it, which is perhaps to say more about readers nurtured on naturalism than about the story. There remain however two objections to White's use here of the “box” form. Where such a form succeeds, as in Twain's “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” both theme and style are also fustian, so that the story presents a satisfying unity; but in White's story, theme and style conflict with the form. Secondly, the two additional ironies which are the result of the box form seem insufficiently important to justify its use, if the first objection to it is granted. The life of the story is in the evening visit to Sissy Kamara's, not in the two sticks which unnecessarily prop it up.

“The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats” uses a comparable situation at much greater length but, despite the absence of what might be called contrivance, less successfully. The Hajistavri, rich American Greeks, visit the Alexious in Athens just after the war. Again, it is the wives who have known each other as children, the love which was only slightly suggested in the previous story here having been fiercely experienced. The Alexious live in what to their guests seems squalor, the woman, surrounded by cats, seems to dote on her husband; the man, an occasional journalist and a member of the Communist Party, tolerates her excessive amiability. The visit is not a success; the past is not strong enough to overcome the present; yet it is repeated years later, by which time Aleko Alexiou has achieved fame and fortune as a chronicler of Party history, so that they now live at a good address, which his wife has chosen, and without cats, which he has decided. The Hajistavri, whose marriage is a union of his money and her name, find them on the second visit making love in the middle of the afternoon, and leave, Mrs. Hajistavrou appalled by what she has learnt, yet enviously aware of what she has never experienced. She felt herself “submitted to Greece as never before. But she would not, would not allow herself to disintegrate. She closed her eyes against present and past. How glad she was, really, to be in a position to look forward to America.”²

As in Riders in the Chariot, the difficulties of those whose roots have atrophied or been severed is a major theme: the Hajistavri in America feel themselves to be Greeks, and in Greece are made to feel themselves Americans to the extent of responding as Americans are traditionally supposed to respond when confronted publicly by Europe's private passions. That it so easily follows such conventions weakens the story, particularly when the crasser manifestations of American materialism are also lampooned: such social comment is less than new; but the final response is only seemingly American. What apparently is the last comment on the social theme is actually the conclusion of the lesbian theme, which generates the story's occasional intensity against the torpid background of late Athenian summer. The past on which Mrs. Hajistavrou closes her eyes includes her girlish love for Kikitsa Alexou, the moments of “softest cat-flesh bundled together in the sun.”³ The disappearance of Kikitsa's cats is the result of her husband's decision to impose his own brand of normality on their relationship, which previously his wife has been content to consider a happy twinning of souls. A modest fame and fortune requires sexual conformity.

Although White twines a deal of feline imagery around the story, lest it collapse from the strain of so much journeying on foot, and by car and ship, the story still exhausts itself from trying to do too much. Ancient, prewar, and post-war Greece are all included, as well as the 1948 revolution; and because it is Greek history, it entangles the other themes, which are numerous. Occasionally in a passage like the following White relaxes from the effort to compel a novel within a short-story:

The heat had lifted from Attica. Autumn hung a swag of gold from the poles of the horizon. If the car had pulled up, all knew that the silence would have been too much for them, the ground too hard under the olive trees. So they drove on, and nostalgia grated on their minds, like a withered olive grating and turning between the cheek and an earthy pillow.⁴

The briefly heightened prose stresses the prevalence of the story's hectic chatter, to which are fastened adjectives of convenience to signpost the dazed reader across oceans of history and significance.

“Being Kind to Titina” is very different, its single theme helped by the story being told in the first person by a young man, Dionysius, transparent by nature and his first experience of love. He is a colonial, an Alexandrian Greek of a large and rich family cared for in the absence of parents by aunts from Smyrna and tutors and maids from France, Germany and Lesbos. In its fruitful mixing of European nationalities, it is a typically overseas Greek household, with its as typical closeness and snobbery a defence against the Arab world on which it lives. The children meet a neighbour's child, Titina, who is altogether pathetic, and because she is of poor family as well, the acquaintanceship lapses. Dionysius and family, of which he is a supposedly unimaginative and therefore odd part, move to Athens, where, because they are impoverished by refugee-relatives from Smyrna and their aunt's old-fashioned colonial insistence on insuring the future by extending charity to the present, Dionysius begins work in an uncle's bank. By chance he meets Titina again, now beautiful, rich, experienced, altogether desirable, with whom he goes to the beach where briefly he loves her. The next day she is to leave for Paris and her protector. Later that evening the boy's aunt, a professor from Paris, arrives and in the course of her mainly aridly abstract conversation, mentions that she has seen Titina, who is, she says, a whore. Dionysius concludes: “As I leaned out of the window, and held up my throat to receive the knife, nothing happened. Only my Aunt Thalia continued playing Schumann, and I realised that my extended throat was itself a stiff sword.”⁵

Despite its Alexandrian Greek opening, the story makes no mention of the exile theme. One sees instead a restless household being rude in an enlightened way to those obliged to be polite; one is merely left to infer it, encouraged by the commonsensical Dionysius's narration, to which his ingenuousness gives a sparkle of humour. His character, more civilised than anything around him, establishes and controls the story's single theme. He can confer distinction on a shoddy event, as when he says, “Titina Stavridi withdrew from our lives, to a distance of windows, or balconies.”⁶ As he tells of his friends already at brothels while he is still chalking “I love” on empty walls before going home to an empty bed, when “The nights were never stained with answers,”⁷ we recognise language embodying the interaction between the possible and the actual. We also recognise the truthfulness of response such linguistic discrimination in White's characters always proposes. It is this occasional distinction that prepares us for the final brief intensity of the concluding image, of knife and sword, which serves the same honest purpose as the imagery of resilience in “Down at the Dump.” That a whore can love, is not an original discovery, but to the man who recognises it for the first time, it is. The atmosphere of discovery, of innocence confirmed by experience, which White communicates so well and characteristically, makes the story valuable in a way his novels are. A thin sharp line is drawn between charity and charitableness, a character created by means of an acute moral perceptiveness.

“A Glass of Tea” is a similar story in that a slightly older but no less commonsensical Alexandrian Greek is faced by an original experience. Unlike Dionysius, Malliakas is aware that he possesses an imagination, but until the ancient Philippides tells him his story, he is without even an experience of love on which to exercise it. In other words, Malliakas, like Alf Dubbo in Riders in the Chariot is “Neither the actor, nor the spectator, he was that most miserable of human beings, the artist.”⁸ “A Glass of Tea” is White's story of Malliakas's story of Philippides' story of his experience. Whereas Dionysius recognises the worth of his experience by means of moral rectitude, Malliakas recognises the worth of his by means of that imagination Dionysius is said to lack.

In Geneva on business, Malliakas visits Philippides, the older friend of an old friend, and finds him on a summer day in his garden-house drinking tea from a glass. His wife, he explains, is out; he then begins the story of his love for his wife, Constantia. In the course of their lives in Greece and the Levant, a gipsy has foretold that he will die when the last of twelve glasses he owns is broken. Despite their travels and being in Smyrna in 1922 during the Turkish attack, they manage with the help of a peasant maid, Aglaia, to keep some of the glasses. Finally only two remain from which Philippides and his wife are drinking one evening after he has returned from bridge, a game for which Constantia does not care because of the intimacies it encourages. Her passion for her husband develops into a jealousy that suspects not only his bridge partners but her maid, Aglaia. In a temper that is perhaps madness she smashes one of the two remaining glasses, and at least in her husband's narration appears to faint, while feeling, in smashing the glass, that she has killed herself. At this point in the story, Madame Philippides enters the garden in time only to show Malliakas out, who has heard what he thinks the whole story. As she is obviously not the woman Philippides described, he is encouraged to ask about Constantia's death, the second Madame Philippides having told him she has guessed the subject of the old man's conversation. He learns that, on breaking the glass, Constantia jumped from the balcony; and that the present wife is Aglaia, whose one anxiety is for the remaining glass from which her husband has been drinking while telling the story: for if it breaks, she will have nothing left.

One of the finest short-stories in English, despite the injustice any summary is bound to inflict on it, “A Glass of Tea” is remarkable in many ways. White moves inside a culture foreign to his language, at the same time using that language to convince us of the foreignness of the culture. Although the frequent ease with which he achieves this becomes familiar, the achievement here is more involuted than on most other occasions. Chios, Smyrna, Athens, Alexandria and Geneva are involved, the differences pointed by a habit, the shape of a house, or the punctuality of a bus, the deft economy reminiscent of The Aunt's Story. The same novel comes to mind in the change of personality, or confusion, attributed here to Philippides' failing memory, which strengthens the reader's conviction of the mutualness of the couple's love. Love is also presented in Philippides at least, as an expansive affair of literally a world's extent, its intensity and constancy undiminished by the need for mistresses, or the wife's need for a girl's love of a woman. Nor is it lessened by the wife's careful preparedness to die for a love which only his serenity can threaten.

While the psychology White employs is enormously subtle, the form in which he conveys the story's modernity is correspondingly old. Not only is it a story-within-a-story, its being told at all depends on the prompting of a listener who virtually asks the aged teller, “What happened next?” That it is told in a peaceful garden, by a rich man living frugally in a pastoral atmosphere of sun, lake and mountains, recalls Boccaccio's original short-story, as the glass itself and its related imagery recalls Boccaccio's so-called “Falkenmotiv.” The setting throws into relief the violence of a drama which the obviousness of the form insists on containing within the pastness of the past. As Constantia says in an early letter to her absent husband, one “is able to re-live the past without any of the interferences—none of those jagged incidents which continue to strew the present! You may say: What about the jagged incidents of the past? Well, one is no longer cut by them.”⁹ This compelling orderliness of the past, the logic with which hindsight endows it, is reiterated even in the past's future when the gipsy prophesies that death will follow the breaking of the last glass. That White is aware of the resources he is using to etch even a love story with his own vision is most evident in the prophecy's cadence and repetition: “First you must pull a hair from your chest, and I shall take it, and dance, bare in front and bare behind, amongst the rocks at Ayia Moni.”¹⁰

Although “A Glass of Tea” is one of those few perfect short-stories, the existence of which most writers admit as at least a possibility, “Clay,” despite its comparable opaque quality, fails to convince the reader of the significance of the experience with which it confronts him. Clay himself, whose name surprisingly puzzles both him and his friends, is moulded by the able hands of his Australian Mum into the shape of the dutiful son, whose father died apparently in escaping such treatment but whose spirit his wife still invokes in her frequent moments of distress. Shortly before his mother's death, Clay is set to work in Her Majesty's Customs and Excise Offices, where he becomes a credit to the institution. After his mother's death, he gratefully marries Marj, who is made in her image. Eventually and diffidently, he rebels by growing his hair long, his mother having always insisted on it being short in an accentuated form of the Australian fashion. Slowly he neglects to notice that he is neglecting his wife, and begins to write, creating out of his mother's wedding photograph and his own dreams a woman called Lova, to attend to whom becomes more important than work or wife. Marj eventually finds him dead in his own room, clutching a wedding-shoe his mother had kept with so much else of a past more interesting than the present. When Marj says she can't believe what has happened, White slides the reader out of dreamland by concluding, “Because everyone knows that what isn't isn't, even when it is.”¹¹

In part dedicated to Barry Humphries, whose country of Moonee Ponds it covers in many ways, the story begins as a comment on that place's weird matriarchal society; but with Mrs. Flack and Mrs. Jolley in mind, the reader accepts Clay's Mum as at least possible. It is when the story shifts to Clay that if falters. His childhood dreams of the neighbouring sea and its uterine attractions are real, but as they take over his adult life, converting the story itself into fantasy, we lose the reference to those values with which White encouraged us to measure Clay's family and his acceptance of it. Neither, however, does White allow us to take the fantasy seriously. On Marj's announcement to her husband, who is by now dead, that tea is getting cold, the author's laconic comment, so “traditionally” Australian that it recalls Clay's Mum, “That is the way of things”, produces a giggled response; but not at Marj's expense. Fantasy, as Kafka showed, need not always be a comic release; but here, where Clay's dreams suggest a similar rejection of a mad world, fantasy is confused with whimsy, a riddle which the oracular wisdom of the last line does not resolve. It is White's most unsatisfactory story, possibly because it suggests a parody of his best.

Another much longer but finally unsatisfactory story is the previously unpublished “Dead Roses,” the first story in the collection. It opens for no very obvious reason at a house-party on what is probably Kangaroo Island, off the South Australian coast. There the Tullochs, amiable, fecund, and nonchalantly rich enough to withstand, perhaps to need, the occasional rigour of holiday-shack life, entertain their university colleagues and friends, among whom is an acquaintance, Anthea Scudamore. She is a young Adelaide girl who is clearly, and possibly intended to be, ill-at-ease amidst so much amiability, fecundity, and nonchalance. Telephoning her social-climbing mother each evening and by day fending off the not altogether unwelcome attentions of the braw and single Doctor Flegg, she returns home dutifully and thankfully when her mother conveniently injures herself. By design she meets her ineffectual father's gay but elderly friend of former years, Hessell Mortlock, of Sarsparilla, whom she marries. Despite the indications of his name, she is as surprised as the reader to find him a mean, deadening capitalist, quite unlike the Tullochs, whose wealth came with their wit. She battles on courageously for years, symbolically trudging up hills harnessed to a barrow-load of horse-dung, her husband driving, as it were. Suddenly learning of a second wife who left him as precipitately as the first, she returns to her mother, by this time the widow of a suicide; and as suddenly, she learns that her husband, on his way to alter his will in another's favour, has died, leaving her sole legatee. After some heart-search alone in the Tulloch's island shack—for by chance she has met the wife, who is as she ever was—she decides to contest her shadowy sister-in-law's claims on the Mortlock millions. She wins the case, and with the money begins her travels. In Greece she by chance meets the amiable, fecund but impoverished academic, Doctor Flegg, surrounded by his children and garish ex-beauty-queen wife. She refers to her times on the island, and embarrasses him, so she leaves to walk along the beach, where she is approached by a young Greek whose intentions she suspects, and panics, outrunning him utterly. She then decides to return home.

The point of the story is posed by the Tullochs: what does Anthea Scudamore want from life? does she know? will she get it? Academic opinion is that she will. The reader notices that she is a fearful, frigid woman to whom riches are love's tepid substitute, which she acquires through coincidence rather than courage. As with Waldo Brown in The Solid Mandala, White is interested in her predicament, but unsympathetic towards her, first making her young and silly, and then older, so that her predicament remains as unchanged as she. There is no tension, of possibility tugging against probability. The shape of the story is dictated by coincidence which resolves the gentle complications of the prosaic world she inhabits. The passage of time is suggested only by the story's length: the Tullochs are unchangeable, so is Anthea.

The second story in the collection, “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight,” does not attempt to raise or answer problems, but briefly and simply surprises the reader into acknowledging that there is more in a dull character than meets the eye even of his friends. The Wheelers visit the Mackenzies, who are newly rich and still embarrassed about it. They are in time to see Mackenzie's dowdy secretary leaving the house, where she has been helping her boss, whose firm she is said to run. As a mark of their having moved from colour-slides to Sydney's North Shore, the Mackenzies entertain their guests with tape-recordings of bird-songs they have heard. During the dull evening, which in the story is established by the sharper Wheelers' comments to one another, Arch Mackenzie cuts his hand on a lamp-globe his wife has asked him to change and calls her to attend to it. Correctly sociable in a North Shore way, she plays her guests a tape she does not know of Willy-wagtails singing at night, while she is out of the room. As well as the bird-song, it has recorded the drunken revelries of Arch Mackenzie seducing his compliant secretary. The Mackenzies return to the room in time to hear the concluding beauties of the bird song, which is enough to indicate to Mackenzie at least that his guests have heard more than they should have done. An offer of drinks re-establishes the level of polite dullness on which the Mackenzies normally live, by choice it would seem, but in fact from necessity.

In order that the surprise should work, the story depends on the coincidence of Arch Mackenzie's absence and his wife's choosing just this tape to play; yet it arises naturally out of the two characters themselves. She is a harmless, helpless woman, frightened of sex as a girl, Mrs Wheeler recalls, unadventurous as a cook, and daunted by the material manifestations of her husband's happy stumbling on experience. As the young girl flickers to life in her friend's memory, she grows into the woman who would await her husband's convenience to tell him a lamp needs replacing, and bandage him when he bled from grasping too hard an experience too hot to hold. Nor would she forget to entertain guests with his hobby, which, as one of them guesses, she has learnt to love out of a sense of duty.

Besides its quality of being psychologically intact, the story exhibits a structural irony. Mrs Mackenzie's characteristically pacifying remark, “A little alcohol releases the vitality,” which she makes on her guest's early joke with her husband about the need to have a drink while the host finishes showering, is not only in itself ironic: a “little” is all she has offered them, and her vitality is not strong enough ever to need release; it as well comments on the later boozy seduction scene the tape has recorded, and on everyone's final lame struggle against embarrassment.

Because the setting is Sydney North Shore and the comment on suburbia's new-rich so agreeably exact, “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight” suggests one of the limitations of Sarsparilla as a microcosm of modern Australia. While an Australian country town turned suburb, such as we know Sarsparilla to be, can plausibly include almost all manner of characters, it seems too small to have what estate-agents call desirable and most-desirable residential areas. Social comment that depends on this difference must move, like the large social group to which the Mackenzies belong, into the city, as for instance happened in Riders in the Chariot: the Rosetrees are North Shore people. The inference is that White will in future extend his fictional locale to proportions resembling those of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, in order to comment on that major social group which, unlike George Brown in The Solid Mandala, is actually given Head Office and distinguishes its members one from another by their addresses. Sarsparilla, so far as we know it, is the kind of place to which people go to die, with whatever measure of grace is in them. It is not an address to excite envious friends.

The splendidly-titled “Miss Slattery and her Demon Lover,” for instance, is a story dealing with two members of that society to which Australia House most often brings out a Briton. Miss Slattery, a door-to-door pollster for Better Sales Pty. Ltd., in the course of business, meets Tibor Szabo, or Szabo Tibor as he explains it would be in his native Hungary. He enjoys a sybaritic opulence to which, in the course of the interview, he adds Miss Slattery, without ever making her feel he considers her a match for it. In Australia, he tells her, “zere is nossing,” and despite her claim that Australia in 1961 is at least civilised, promises, or threatens to teach her what civilisation really means. The distinction is seminal to the story. Loving his ardour as much as his possessions—a Jaguar car, marble floors, a mink bedspread, the so-important view of Sydney harbour, and a mirror on the ceiling above the bed below—she wonders, sometimes in his hearing, about marriage, while he sets aside two evenings a week for her. As a token of that civilisation to which he has raised her, she takes him to what he anticipates is an “Australian-bohemian-proveenshul” party given by a lady who sculpted Hypotenuse of Angst. Suddenly Miss Slattery finds herself freed from her love for him by the lucidity it has given her. She borrows a stockwhip from “‘the crummiest crack’” of a grazier, and recalling her outback childhood, plays it across Tibor. During the rest of the story he responds to the crack of a whip with that love he has previously withheld, which she no longer wants, or needs. She is able, as she says, to leave the little fat man and his civilisation for that of thin Australians and washing-machines.

The story is a variation on White's theme of character-exchange, transferred experience bringing about a transfer of independence. The situation is taut with the irony of two civilisations, half in conflict, a thrifty version of Australia's post-war relations with her immigrants, and through them with the outside world. White does not take sides in this disputatious love. He is content to hint at the pathos in the situation, slowly evolving through the development of the characters as they tangle with experience, the irony tautened by the comments of Miss Slattery's friends and her own increasingly astringent response. When for instance Miss Whimble remarks at the party that “there are two men locked in the lavatory together. One is a teddy, but they haven't worked out who the other can be,” she briefly suggests he is a social-realist. The result of the cumulative irony and the underlying pathos is that at the centre of the story the previously comic Hypotenuse of Angst sparkles with possible associations, so that it becomes the symbol its pretentious creator thought it was.

Though without such physical presence, Angst is the theme of “The Letters,” set in Sarsparilla, “the friendly suburb” as it is called in “A Cheery Soul,” to which retire many of White's characters who are elderly by years or inclination. Mrs Polkinghorn, widowed, lives there with her son, Charles, whose fiftieth birthday she is proposing to celebrate. After a comparatively successful Cambridge career, he has returned to Australia at his mother's motherly prompting to prepare to take over the family firm. Instead, over the years, despite his godmother's friendship, his paranoia increases until, hearing of his godmother's likely death, he is comforted by his mother, which releases the spring that has held him back from a complete return to infantilism. As he nuzzles her breast in search of the original darkness of the babyhood she has always tried to perpetuate in him, she throws off what she calls her “unnatural child.”

While the irony of her final refusal confirms the irony of the situation, in which the mother feels herself to be in many ways younger than her ageing son, as in “Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover,” “The Letters” is most immediately impressive for its spare but compelling evocation of the paranoia of fear. Charles' terror of Time coalesces round letters he refuses to open, for as a child he had been told not to open letters, because of what he might learn to his discomfort; but the letters in adulthood are not only reminders of a childhood experience as well as the responsibilities of manhood. They also demand replies and epitomise Time's progression; and in their enclosedness they become the externalisation of his fear. Which is to say, they are a true symbol, the nexus of both cause and effect, shaping the story and our response.

“Down at the Dump” is about the other two-thirds of Sarsparilla society, the Whalley family who scavenge rubbish-tips for odds and ends that only require a change of owner to become useful again; and the Hogbens, who, like Mrs. Flack and Mrs. Jolley, disapprove of all who do not conform to their own faith in being seen to conform. Linking the two is Mrs Hogben's recently dead sister, Daise Morrow, to the Hogbens a whore, and to those who knew her well a woman of sustaining love. Their names indicate White's attitude to them—the whale-of-a-time, Whalleys, the hogpen Hogbens, and the day's morrow or morning.

They are brought more or less together by Daise's funeral, to which Councillor Hogben is accompanying his wife and daughter Meg. Their neighbours, the Whalleys, including their eldest son Lum, are scavenging the Sarsparilla dump next to the cemetery. While his feckless parents drink, quarrel and make love, Lum Whalley wanders into the surrounding scrub where he meets Meg Hogben. She has similarly wandered away from her parents, who contrive to be both dutifully bereaved at Daise's enforced absence and characteristically grieved at Ossie Coogan's unnecessary presence, Ossie being the dead-beat to whom Daise extended her last kindness. Against this background of parental hypocrisy and anarchic honesty, the two adolescents tentatively explore each other's dreams, which their parents have hitherto kept bleakly apart. Lum hopes to become a long-distance lorry-driver and leave Sarsparilla; Meg hopes to write a poem in memory of her favourite aunt, who has already left. As experience marks him, Lum's hopes of a manly mateship with his hero, Darkie, aspire to a seemly domesticity which Meg for him incarnates. She, influenced by her aunt's memory, sees herself as the loving companion to his roaming. As they kiss, they are interrupted by their parents, who drag them back into their severed worlds which, White is saying, are without tenderness and therefore merely approximate to the inviting dreams of adulthood the two children have formed round each other. What he calls “the warm core of certainty” Daise and Ossie experienced, is as briefly theirs.

Like the early parts of The Tree of Man, the story encompasses great compassion and earthy comedy, as well as the incisive comment of Riders in the Chariot and The Solid Mandala on those spiritually dead. Organised round the symbols of cemetery and dump, it resembles a collage, in which the dead and useless is enforced to contribute to life's constantly renewed permanence. Even in that Australia whose austere beauty man has often dirtied, the process goes on:

Here and there it appeared as though trash might win. The onslaught of metal was pushing the scrub into the gulley. But in many secret, steamy pockets, a rout was in progress: seeds had been sown in the lumps of grey, disintegrating kapok and the laps of burst chairs, the coils of springs, locked in the spirals of wirier vines, had surrendered to superior resilience. Somewhere on the edge of the whole shambles a human ally, before retiring, had lit a fire, which by now the green had almost choked, leaving a stench of smoke to compete with the sicklier one of slow corruption.¹²

Placed centrally, the passage not only confirms the assertion of life the rest of the story propounds through character, it also illustrates by means of a variation of tempo and constancy of imagery the way in which a junk-heap can miniature the wider war between nature and human nature. The mention of nature's “human ally” refers us to this metallic but ungolden age in which the gods themselves stand again in need of Promethean help. The reference immediately enhances the pastoral quality of Meg and Lum's first discovery of love. Meg, garlanded with memories of her aunt's carnations, becomes Euterpe herself, and Lum, who “walked with a grace of which he had himself never been aware,” momentarily a young god. The protégées of Daise Morrow and Darkie flood the story with a compelling light to establish it as one of White's finest achievements.

The story, however, by which he is best known, because it has been seen as a play on stage and television, is “A Cheery Soul.” Its locale is again Sarsparilla, its main character and most of its minor characters elderly, its setting an old people's home, Sundown Home, a name sufficiently near “sundowner” to indicate White's view of the attitude of those who put old people there. Miss Docker stays first with the Custances, who invite her as a challenge to their kindness. Exhausting them, she moves to the home where Mrs Brown of The Solid Mandala ended her days. Taunting their present with photographs of her past, she sets out to entertain the inmates, not entirely without success. One with whom she fails, the aristocratic Mrs Lillie, is a former acquaintance whose husband Miss Docker nursed—to death, his wife believes. In a flashback, we see Miss Docker politely angled out of her place in Mr Lillie's funeral cortège by the impoverished widow and her well-connected friends. At Sundown Home Miss Docker returns Mrs Lillie the humiliation by means of photographs and the insinuation that she, Miss Docker, was Mr Lillie's favourite. White then compounds the atmosphere of cruelty—which is only partially presented as the result of Miss Docker's Christian selflessness; we are aware from his comments of the element of spite in her—by taking up the story of the Reverend Wakeman, who conducted Mr Lillie's burial service. Miss Docker is almost the only remaining pillar of his church. She attempts to correct this fact by telling him his faults as a preacher, thereby also explaining it. These faults he only too keenly recognises; though through his wife he suspects he is not entirely to blame. In an almost empty church, he tries to preach, pointedly, on the sin of goodness, becomes tied in his own rhetoric, and finds himself arguing with Miss Docker. The strain of his life, of which only his wife knows, is finally too much for him; he collapses in the pulpit. His wife's cry, “Miss Docker, you have killed my saint. Only time will show whether you have killed my God as well”¹³ is the harrowing equivalent of Mrs Lillie's wordless distress. Miss Docker leaves for home, on the way trying to make friends with a dog, which wets her. Her conclusion, and that of the story, is that she saw for the first time that dog is God spelt backwards, a realisation she will never share because, as she says, she is “not the kind to spread despondency, encourage grief.”

Described on the dust-cover of The Burnt Ones as “straightforwardly funny,” “A Cheery Soul” is not straightforward in any way. Its comedy is certainly repetitive, as it arises from Miss Docker's directness and misplaced goodness. Only when showing her photographs to Mrs Lillie does she seem more than a one-dimensional humour. The distress her spite causes, when juxtaposed with Mrs Lillie's recollection of her own love for her husband, produces a plangent sadness, which Mrs Wakeman's cry echoes. Mrs Wakeman's response, however, is occasioned by Miss Docker's directness, so that its effect is weakened by its association with the story's prevailing comicality, itself the result of that same cause. The Reverend Wakeman himself, martyr that he is to his own ineffectuality, does appear a “stuttering stage clergyman”¹⁴ because of this same comedy of humours Miss Docker represents, despite White's urgent instruction in the play that he should not. Mr and Mrs Custance, whose embarrassment occupies the first of the story's three parts, disappear as soon as their usefulness as butts is exhausted. Similarly Mrs Lillie and her nameless friends leave without a trace when the story moves into the church. The conclusion, whose facetiousness might have amused Samuel Butler, is here at once so hoary and inconsequentially neat and earnest as to bemuse the reader as much as it enlightens Miss Docker. In the play of this story, White removes some of the difficulties, but in doing so unfortunately introduces as many more.

Notes

1. F.P., p.15

2. B.O., p. 282.

3. B.O., p. 273.

4. B.O., p. 260.

5. B.O., p. 205.

6. B.O., p. 196.

7. B.O., p. 197.

8. R.C., p. 407.

9. B.O., p. 103.

10. B.O., p. 92.

11. B.O., p. 133.

12. B.O., p. 295.

13. B.O., p. 185.

14. F.P., p. 211.