[In the following review, originally published in Antipodes: A Journal of Australian Literature in 1988, Bliss maintains that the stories in Three Uneasy Pieces “lack the convincing density and scope of the major novels and even of much of White's short fiction.”]

Patrick White's Three Uneasy Pieces is a slender, 10,000-word short story collection, which makes a sharp and caustic statement in its timing, an intriguingly antiphonal suggestion in its prose. Published in December of 1987, it was rushed into production before 1988 in order to avoid any appearance on White's part of having validated Australia's Bicentennial by issuing a celebratory volume. So anxious was White to disassociate himself from the Bicentennial hoopla that he snatched the manuscript from its original Melbourne publisher, when that house was unable to meet his December 31 deadline, and handed it over to astonished and delighted Pascoe Publishing, a small firm whose head man, Bruce Pascoe, admits that the book's acquisition is “more of a windfall than a coup.” Taking full advantage of its windfall, Pascoe had the book typeset in a matter of days, took White's corrections on the proofs by telephone, and reportedly “camped” at the printer's until the first run of bound copies was delivered. The volume's triumphant copyright date is 1987.

Judgmental, preemptory, irascible: White's censure of the Bicentennial seems of a piece with his recent public persona. But his book collects “uneasy pieces,” works which shed a very different light on Australia's only Nobel Laureate in literature, an indisputable master of his art and one of the twentieth century's greatest novelists. This new light is a gentle and subdued one: mellow, conciliatory, finally almost serene. All three of the volume's pieces are written in the first person and adopt a voice which begins in reflection and moves toward confession. Thus, while the book sounds again the note of penitential self-exposure that has counterpointed White's fiction at least since The Vivisector, it settles at last for a kind of shriven self-acceptance that expands in the direction of a wider reconciliation.

The first “uneasy piece,” entitled “The Screaming Potato,” is a scant two pages long. Within this meager space, however, it manages to develop an image of excised potato eyes into a comment on the inevitably cruel and murderous exigencies of living. Like Heriot in Randolph Stow's To the Islands, the elderly narrator of “The Screaming Potato” is forced to equate life itself with preying and to offer up the prayer to be either absolved or disabused of his deep sense of guilt. In this story, even lettuce, parsnips, and potatoes whimper or scream as we prepare them for our nourishment, and all our acts are marked and marred by “a fair bit of gouging” and “the chopping to be done.”

The narrator of “Dancing with Both Feet on the Ground” is also an old man, one who has learned that life must be celebrated only “cautiously.” In its opening image of careful, arthritic dancing in a kitchen—“Over spilt milk. through lettuce leaves and potato peelings. Bloodstains too …”—“Dancing” echoes the volume's opening piece, as it also does in the rest of the story's prevalent food imagery, which pictures sustenance as always inadequate, saccharine, or accusatory. The story's other controlling image is that of dancing, whether in a solitary moment of unreason and abandon which “M” might term “senility,” or in the ballroom of a winter-locked European hotel remembered from the days of youth. As the story not so much unfolds as dilates, the act of dancing begins to suggest the teleological nature of time, which drives over those it fells or will fell. These include the pretentious, widowed Contessa whose feet of Australian clay paddle the air when she slips on the hotel dance floor, and the still upright narrator who shuffles toward an uncertain future and shares with the sham Contessa a need for faith aroused by the icy draughts of approaching mortality. As in White's novel Voss, life in this story is like a river which runs over “upturned faces,” but also a river whose light and motion mirror “figures of the timeless dance.”

The center of the book's interlocking pieces is the last and longest story, “The Age of a Wart.” Here we find again the White who notes the extramundane dimensions inherent in the humblest, most disgusting physicalities. In A Fringe of Leaves, a boil became “spiritual matter”; here it's a wart. Wart and boil are put to similar thematic purposes: to link characters of spiritual affinity, in this case the narrator and his afflicted schoolmate Bluey Platt. As youngsters, both the boys grow matching warts on their right hands, and the narrator is sure he caught his from his classmate. Bluey, whose real name is Tancred, after the Christian Crusader of history and Rossini's opera, resembles the narrator in other ways as well. Both will be artists, one working in lives and substances and the other in words; both could be mystics; and they are, as Bluey claims and the narrator later acknowledges, “twins.” Yet the latter initially chafes at this identification with someone of indifferent academic achievement and an address on the “Wrong Side.” Accordingly, he cures himself of his emblematic wart through, as it eventuates, an act of deliberate will. Soon he also loses proximity to his friend, as Bluey's sojourn with western Aboriginals and the narrator's schooling in England separate them.

Following his formal education, the narrator and his bad chest sit out the subsequent War in a Scottish hotel, where he begins to write the novels which will bring him fame, honors, degrees, and self-contempt. He describes them as works which only “pretended to search for truth, reality, in carefully chosen words and the studied sentences of literature.” Suspecting that Bluey, whose wart must have survived to “praise … the ugliness of life,” could admit him to a reality he circles unsteadily and desperately craves, the narrator mounts an instinctive crusade to reclaim him.

Tancred, meanwhile, carries his own crusade against suffering through the worst of the War and its aftermath, leaving signs to surface everywhere for the narrator. Still, he remains beyond reach of his friend. The search for Tancred thus becomes a pilgrimage whose stages are signaled by relics and testimony, but only intermittent and unsatisfactory epiphany. True revelation must await the reappearance of the wart, which seems to the now dying narrator a melanoma whose darkness may engulf the world. His extremity summons twin Tancred, who rejoins him in a reconciling vision in which evil dies, a brotherhood of suffering and survival is affirmed, man's potency is proclaimed, and the story closes.

The “three uneasy pieces” of White's latest book thus ultimately yield the ease of resolution. Yet a caveat is called for. White could be tempting us to make too much of this resolution, something the style may be warning us against. These stories lack the convincing density and scope of the major novels and even of much of White's short fiction. Instead of proceeding by means of a rich proliferation of ambiguous, evocative, but finally consonant detail, they merely gesture toward implication through a shorthand predicated on suggestive imagery.

Nonetheless, transcribed in the reader's heart or soul, which, as always in White, receive more credence than the intellect, the signs of this shorthand constitute a prayer much like that of Le Mesurier in Voss: a petition that the spirit come to rest “in true love of all men and in you, O God, at last.” It is a wrenching prayer to raise, one founded in a humility which White's fiction insists must be forever and painfully repossessed. These stories, too, trace that repetitive process. But they also hint that if White shuns the chauvinism of the Bicentennial, the volume which heralds this renunciation simultaneously reaches toward the family of man. As a member of the family, I welcome him amongst us.