[In the following excerpt, Myers examines the title story of The Cockatoos, asserting that it “is not a short story but a remarkably compressed novella” that integrates complex narrative methods and variations in mood.]

This is a story about very ordinary people's suffering from lovelessness and crippling inhibitions, and about their tormented yearning for the release of passion. It is also a story about both the brutal cruelty and the kindness of which humans are capable; about the perversion of sexual love into smothering possessiveness or into neurotic fear of intimacy and the reaction to such perversion in the quest for freedom and the courage to bear this freedom. The story vibrates with intensity of vision into the paradoxes of human misery and successfully probes the inner truths of four major characters, Mick and Olive Davoren, Busby Le Cornu and Tim Goodenough. In the scope of its characterisation, the rich development of the titular image, the unflinching representation of life's and people's loathsomeness as well as their joy, and in the integration of complex narrative methods and variations in mood, this is not a short story but a remarkably compressed novella.

Structurally, “The Cockatoos” is a non-sequence of isolated scenes, with absolutely no transition from scene to scene, each being a compressed representation of suburban life-styles within the privacy of neighbouring but unneighbourly houses. It is White's aim to reveal that beneath the conventional surface of suburban respectability there are latent lives that are intensely irrational, compulsive, frightened or zany. It is the terrifying secrets of these latent lives from which normal people hide and which the cockatoos function as catalysts to release. White shows his characters suffering from their repressed traumas with techniques ranging from cool irony to farce. Miss Le Cornu does not cry in her loneliness, she blubbers, “heaving and glugging, it sounded” (p. 273). This style is similar to the distancing devices of epic theatre. Or more farcically, when Miss Le Cornu gets up after unenjoyable coitus with Mick Davoren, she says, “Next time it will be better. I'll frizzle it up” (p. 275). She is of course referring obliquely to the steak she had cooked for him.

White does similar mining operations on the subconsciousness of Olive Davoren and Tim Goodenough. Olive Davoren's adult life has been a series of sad disillusionments. As a girl she had been Dadda's spoilt darling, but now her aspirations to be a violinist have ended in humiliating failure, and the consequence of her headstrong “craving for love or hurt” (p. 263) is a bitter non-marriage. Her resentful over-reaction to the death of her pet budgie is shown by a juxtaposed flashback of interior monologue to stem really from the death of her stillborn child. But as usual, White does not allow us the slightest opportunity to misread sentimentality into this misfortune. The passage is typical of White's technique and is worth quoting in full:

She had told him, ‘You let it die on purpose. Because I was gone. You knew I loved the bird. You was jealous—that was it!’ Her grief made her forget the grammar she had always been respectful of.

‘It was sick,’ he said. ‘Anyone could see. A person only had to look at its toenails.’

‘I should have cut his claws,’ she admitted. ‘But was afraid. He was too frail and small.’

(She had asked to see what they had taken from her—you couldn't have called it a child. She had even touched it. And wouldn't ever let herself remember. He certainly wouldn't be one to remind her of it.)

(pp. 264-5)

Most of the words are devoted to trivial squabbling about the cause of the budgerigar's death. There is also incidental satire on her snobbish worrying about grammatical niceties. The real meaning of the passage is only hinted at in bracketed parentheses. And immediately after this the passage concludes in a farcical jest about the bird's name. The pathos of Olive Davoren's failure in life is thus sandwiched between dry satire and anticlimactic farce.

Tim Goodenough is a persecuted child-outsider like Clay in “The Burnt Ones,” but he is less a loony and more an adventurer struggling not just against his mother's domination, but against the conformist suburban dread of his satirized parents that he will become an artistic poof (p. 267). To sustain himself in his battle for independence and courage he maintains a private museum of “mystic” objects (p. 269) which have personal, supernatural significance as talismans. This hidden museum is the externalisation of his inner terror that corresponds to the hidden suffering of the Davorens and Miss Le Cornu.

As in many of White's stories, there is in “The Cockatoos” virtually no plot. Instead, mainly through flashbacks of interior monologue, the misery of four different lives is revealed in a stasis that is paradoxically tense with frustrated emotions. Only the birds of the title can break this deadlock and re-enthuse the drooping spirits of the characters with a brief but exhilarating rebirth of ecstasy and passion. It is an essential part of White's artistic honesty that the participant must pay for this brief splendour with death, grief and a return to the dragging isolation that is worse than it was before because it is haunted by a vague memory of the vision of grace.

The cockatoos are strange symbols of this grace¹ as they move mysteriously like drunken flowers through the magnolia tree (pp. 277, 286, 290). They are unknowable, worshipped messengers of nature's visionary beauty; their phallic, knife-like crests cut through the resentments, the fears, and the twisted passivity of the four main characters and draw them into a strangely compelling dance of dynamic passion. Not that the cockatoos are misused aesthetically to represent an ethereal and remote vision. On the contrary. White has observed them with meticulous care and insight, and has made of them symbols of human potential in heightened intensity. In their different moods they express a universality of human emotions. They are like the Greek Olympian Gods who are in every respect human in their passions, their rages and their weaknesses, but somehow incomparably more magnificent and dazzling in their naive expression of these emotions. Alternatively, one could see them in a more negative light as the equivalent of the officials in Kafka's castle. As inhabitants of the other, the spiritual world, they reflect in a cruel mirror-image the contrariness of human behaviour. The only transcendence they have to offer is to act as catalysts in releasing the potential of the human irrational from its bondage to rational, social norms and the appearances of civilized intercourse. True to their mirror-image reality, the cockatoos are different things to different people at different times. They can be “striding and stamping” in anger, or quiet in wisdom (pp. 261, 264, 266, 281); heartless slashers in their vicious conformist persecution of the outsider (p. 281) or have “kind eyes” (pp. 275, 282, 286); their crests are often threateningly phallic (pp. 261, 265, 281, 288), but on one occasion are seen affectionately as ladies' gently opening fans (p. 282); at times the cockatoos are a gaggle of gossiping adults (p. 282), at others, they provide a nightmare of overobvious Freudian symbolism for Olive Davoren when they pick with their beaks at her childless womb and the big clamshell (p. 279), and at other times again they inspire unexpected, uncontrollable passion. Sometimes their passion is healthily animal as an antidote to repression and to fear of sexual intimacy (p. 285). At other times the cockatoos provoke a grotesque competition to win their love and possess them (pp. 280, 281), but tend to transcend this grotesqueness in Busby Le Cornu's plea for freedom and sharing (p. 286). In this way the deadening habit of bourgeois marital possessiveness is gloriously broken, if only for a moment. The transcendence of ecstasy is there, but it is fleeting. Because the character must return to a world where “time passes: nothing better can be said of it” (p. 295).

In a slapstick farce that contrasts strangely with the preceding ecstasy, some of the cockatoos are murdered by that Victorian villain and Freudianly perverted nark, Figgis the undertaker. The remaining cockatoos then lose their godlike magnificence. They turn “a nasty grey colour, more like hens which have been fluffing themselves on an ash-heap” (p. 294). There follows an anti-vision of loathsomeness in the story's coda, featuring White's usual collection of “alkies and freaks and pervs and old women with stockings half down and scabs on their faces.” The last cockatoo undergoes a correspondingly loathsome martyrdom. It is aged and seems to offer itself for the boy Tim Goodenough's ritual slaughter in order to provide an irrational talisman guaranteeing him courage and independence from his Oedipal mother's suffocating love. The quest for manly independence comes through brutal slaughter of one of nature's wild creatures. Man's inevitable brutality, primitivity and irrationality stand tragically exposed at the story's conclusion as the necessary correlatives of freedom, independence and even love in its true form. For Olive Davoren to rid herself of sulking resentment, for Mick Davoren to rid himself of narcissistic indifference to sexual love and falsely romantic adulation of war and death, for Busby Le Cornu to overcome her neurotic terror of intimacy and for Tim Goodenough to seek courage, the inspiration of the cockatoos in one form or another is necessary. The cockatoos are a vehicle for externalisation of hidden, inner life, a ritual cleansing of inhibitions and perversions, a purification through catharsis and a tormenting enrichment of subsequent mundane life through memory of ecstasy.

The visit of the cockatoos to the society of human beings attains its ecstatic climax not in the release of physical passion but in their mysterious revelation in the magnolia tree. Here they are revealed in transfigured glory “like big white drunken flowers in motion” (pp. 277, cf. p. 286). It is a Dionysian revelation of the repressed irrational, of pre-civilized passion and barbarism and the magic tokens of superstition. It is a renewal of emotional vitality that has been sapped, in White's Nietzschean and Freudian terms, by the conformist mediocrity and deadening repressions of middle-class suburban mundanity.

Corresponding to their visual transfiguration in the magnolia tree is the magical ability of the cockatoos to provide transcendence through the spirit of music. Olive Davoren expresses her devotional worship of them with the “thin and angular” tones of her long disused violin. It seemed that “the composer was collaborating with her. And cockatoos” (p. 287) and thus she produces “moments of exaltation in what must otherwise have been a horrible travesty of the Partita” (p. 287). Olive has produced music under the influence of her love for the cockatoos so that while it remains empirically and sensually horrid, it is in another religious world where the intentions rather than the notes are heard, and this is an act of inspired grace. Interestingly enough, this provides a very close parallel to the situation in Grillparzer's 19th century story, The Poor Minstrel. The minstrel is mocked and deceived by all and seeks consolation in his violin from which he produces the most excruciating noise, off-key, off-tempo, in fact unrecognizable renderings of the classical greats which he offers up in praise to the greater glory of God. It is implied by Grillparzer that God, like White's cockatoos, accepts this devotion with inscrutable good-will and no evidence of earache. The essential difference between Grillparzer's nineteenth century tale and White's ironical study of a more zany epiphany is that Grillparzer, appropriate to his Romantic epoch, sentimentalizes his inauspicious antihero into a saint of heroism and moral self-sacrifice to coincide with his acts of musical worship, but Patrick White remains grimly naturalistic in his characterization, confronting his very ordinary characters with an environment that is often loathsome as they sink back into the greyish morass from which they had sprung for the one epiphany of their lives. Olive Davoren, for example, becomes a puzzled widow in a sealskin coat whose “weight is a comfort—even if hot” (p. 305) because it reminds her of her husband's weight on her during sexual intercourse.

Like Olive, Busby Le Cornu experiences a similar rise to ecstasy and fall into disenchantment. Her ecstasy is also not just one of physical passion, but stems from her communing with the cockatoos via Mozart's Don Giovanni. She crouches over an aria of betrayed and abandoned love which is “her own lament for a real passion she had never quite experienced” (p. 287). But out of suffering she soars against reason (p. 288) and is rejoined by those symbols of grace, the cockatoos, “in vindicating spirals, white to sun-splashed” (p. 288). The sensation of being awash in light is one of White's favourite images to express grace. White concludes this experience with a puzzling sentence which is doubtless an intentionally obscure joke: “she could not have faced the moonlit statue by daylight: a pity, because the Commendatore might have appealed to cockatoos” (p. 288). In Don Giovanni the Commendatore is the just avenger who comes back from the grave to exact justice from the unrepentant Don. Do the cockatoos exact a somewhat more farcical and decidedly less melodramatic punishment upon the mortals who have dared to look upon them and court their favour? Figgis ends up in the insane asylum, Mick Davoren in the morgue. Mrs. Dalhunty retreats from the farcical killing to “Our Lady of the Snows, Ashfield” (p. 294). Olive Davoren alone in her bed strains her ears in vain to hear “Him bumping around in the next room” (p. 299). Busby Le Cornu cries for the one “habit” in her unstable life, Mick Davoren (p. 304). She returns to the loneliness of her house, taking all of her stimulants in an unsuccessful bid at suicide. She is not comforted by a surreal phantasy of lesbian love with Olive and prefers her isolation to the banalities of suburban chit-chat about the weather. Tim Goodenough returns guilty but triumphant from his self-inflicted initiation into manhood, but is squashed into blubbering babyhood by his mother: “any vision he may have imagined having, ever, was splodged into one, great, white blur, at the centre of it a smear of sulphur” (p. 307). That is, the vision of the liberating cockatoos is merged with and lost in his mother's suffocating apron. And as for Mick Davoren, his false romanticising of the brutality of war is avenged by the cockatoos thus: they wheel in the sky to chase and kill an outsider and he is reminded with unspeakable terror of his own aeroplane being shot down in the mid-East in the second world war. He becomes aware of the darker side of the cockatoos, of their brutality and their stench as they bash at each other with their beaks (p. 289). He withdraws in a nightmare of waking terror “an old, frightened man” (p. 289). Shortly after, he is accidentally killed by Figgis, not so much as a noble martyr defending the cockatoos as an insignificant participant in a suburban farce.

Are all of these grim endings the stern punishments of the cockatoos on human beings or simply the grotesque coincidences of life? White's elaborate parallels between cockatoo and human behaviour suggest the more romantic, supernatural explanation. That is, human beings have shown themselves to be too morally flawed to sustain the pure vision of the cockatoos in the magnolia tree. Their experiences of joy, beauty, love and courage are correspondingly blurred and imperfect, and they must pay for their brief ecstasy with an inexorable return to the dull incomprehension of their daily routine.

Note

1. Cockatoos are of course not the only birds in White's fiction to bear the symbolic import of grace and transcendence. Cf. Harry Heseltine: “the number of birds which sweep through the pages of White's books is quite remarkable. It is not often that they are there for their own sake. The advent of wings almost invariably coincides with scenes in which human beings aspire to a state of existence beyond the normal” (“Patrick White's Style” in Quadrant, VII, 1963, p. 65). Cf. Sylvia Gzell: “The white bird of the soul occurs in both Voss and Riders in the Chariot to suggest the possibility of a freedom which allows transcendent experience and is part of it. The image is frequently linked with description of awkward movement to imply the difficulty of achieving this freedom” (“Themes and Imager in Voss and Riders in the Chariot” in Clement Semmler (ed), Twentieth Century Australian Literary Criticism, O.U.P., Melbourne, 1967, p. 256). Cf. the birds which Sister de Santis feeds in a ritual ceremony at the conclusion of The Eye of the Storm and which brings her a moment of transcendent joy: “She could feel claws snatching for a hold in her hair. She ducked, to escape from this prism of dew and light. This tumult of wings and her own unmanageable joy. Once she raised an arm to brush aside a blue wedge of pigeon's feathers. The light she could not ward off: it was by now too solid, too possessive; herself possessed.” (Penguin, p. 589)