[In the following review, Welty discusses how the six short stories in The Cockatoos have similar themes involving characters who “come to a point of discovery” by confronting their problems.]

These [the stories in The Cockatoos] are six stories (a few are short novels) to do with lives often driven or hopeless, but what they are ultimately about is what might have been. They bring together the possibilities and the impossibilities of human relationships. They happen in Australia, Egypt, Sicily, Greece, where they go off like cannons fired over some popular, scenic river—depth charges to bring up the drowned bodies. Accidentally set free by some catastrophe, general or personal—war, starvation, or nothing more than a husband's toothache—Patrick White's characters come to a point of discovery. It might be, for instance, that in overcoming repugnancies they are actually yielding to some far deeper attraction; the possibilities of a life have been those very things once felt as its dangers. Or they may learn, in confronting moral weakness in others, some flaw in themselves they've never suspected, still more terrifying.

The common barriers of sex, age, class, nationality can in uncommon hands operate as gates, which open (for White's characters) to experience beyond anything yet traveled, hope of which may have beckoned from earliest years and gone ignored, only haunting dreams and spoiling the day at hand. Passing us through these barriers is what Mr. White is doing in his writing.

All these stories are studies of ambiguities, of which the greatest is sex. In “A Woman's Hand,” a long-married couple, traveling after the husband's retirement find themselves rather peculiarly put back in touch with two old friends out of their respective pasts—a man for him, a woman for her—representing to each a different turn than had offered itself to their young lives. The wife's wifely solution is simple and disastrous (her bothersome guilt for her own inadequacy is set at rest if she can rearrange other people's lives): instead of letting these two make things awkward, why not marry the misfits off to each other?

This is the longest (86 pages) and in some ways the most sinister of Mr. White's stories treating of the realities and the unrealities of developing human relationships. It is highly symbolic, presided over by peacocks. (According to fable, a peacock's flesh is incorruptible, which made it a symbol of the Resurrection; here it assumes the meaning of liberation from captivity.) In this story, too, the irony lies most clearly in the fact that the true and guiding relationships of our lives—for whatever inhibiting reasons—may never achieve the reality credited the ones that are acknowledged and binding but remain superficial and daunting.

“The Full Belly,” a short novel laid in Athens during the German Occupation, takes us deep into the humiliations and terrible intimacies of starving to death as a family: the excruciating pressures of competing unselfishness, the demanding self-sacrifice. Aunt Pronoë radiates a “kind of hectic gaiety” as they dine off boiled dandelions. Aunt Maro takes to her bed, declining ever to eat or drink again: “Remember the children. Who am I to deny them food?” The young boy in question is a musical prodigy, with his ticket to Paris still at the bottom of his handkerchief drawer; he goes on practicing (“play to me, Costika,” says the determined martyr, “music is more nourishing than food”) and sees everything “with a vividness which only sickness or hunger kindles.” Away from the house, there are the temptations coming out of doorways and the cautionary sights lying in the gutters: one old woman greedy for a boy's hand in her bosom—she'd give him a fresh egg; the next old woman lying dead in her decent dress with her emptied purse beside her and her shoes already taken from her feet.

Hunger and shame merge into a single monster. A terrible scene in front of Aunt Maro on her dying day spoils her victory for her: the boy and Aunt Pronoë come to desperate grappling over the plate of sacrificial rice lying untouchable before the icon, struggling together, smashing the plate and losing it all; then Costa is down on the carpet. “If only the few surviving grains. Sometimes fluff got in. Or a coarse thread. He licked the grains. He sucked them up. The splinters of porcelain cutting his lips. The good goo. The blood running. Even blood was nourishment.”

“Five-Twenty” is the time a certain car passes in the traffic line every afternoon. The scene is a front porch where sits an aging and childless married couple, a man, now an invalid in a wheel chair and imperious as ever, and his wife, a plain woman whose marriage has been one long deprivation of love, which she has taught herself to handle as best she can; she finds it easier now, being a nurse. She fastens on the 5:20 car as something to watch for and point out: it makes her day. Inevitably, the strands converge. It happens down on the garden path, after the husband leaves her a widow. A flower garden like hers, that's been overtended, and a love like hers, that's gone unnourished too long, may burst out alike into the overwhelming and monstrous.

The characters in most of these stories are men and women whose predicaments are rooted in their pasts, to whom fresh pressure is put by the predicaments of growing old. In “The Night the Prowler,” we are plunged into the world of a 17-year-old girl whose state of being has everything to do with today. When Felicity is raped, she hadn't been afraid; she'd even hoped something real and revealing might be going to occur, but the rapist is a failure and pathetic. She sees that her conventional parents, in the shock of what's happened, think mostly of themselves and that the conventional boy she's been about to marry is relieved to get his ring back, and enters into a secret life of her own. Beginning by breaking in and wreaking havoc on a house near hers and like hers, she goes on the loose into the city night with its derelicts, drunks and hoods. She remains alone, roaming the park kicking at lovers, accusing and punishing all the world, shouting up at God “for holding out on me,” calling out only to others like herself for guidance, so they can give each other “the strength to face ugliness in any form,” which might offer some kind of revelation. She herself becomes the night the prowler. As we see her “whirling in the air above her head a bicycle chain she had won from a mob of leather-jackets,” she is like some saint-to-be of the Troubled Young. This story, with all the rawness of today in it, is not without its old progenitors. Felicity's progress through the scarifying world of Sydney nightlife is also a path of self-mortification. She is divested of that pride too; when she comes in the final scene to an abandoned house and finds there a naked, diseased, dirty, solitary old man lying on a mattress at point of death, she has her revelation. It is a stunning story.

A middle-aged Australian couple is on holiday, in “Sicilian Vespers,” when the husband gets stuck in their hotel with toothache. Ivy would will herself to feel the pain for him; she believes in the efficacy of love, but suspecting her husband (with his “honest un-Sicilian eyes”) believes in it only theoretically. She doesn't confess it to him: “She did not want to damage his affection for her: it was too precious.” She is held back in her life, too, by a ghost out of her girlhood riding with her still—father. There seems nothing for it but a deliberate act of adultery with a repugnant American (another hotel guest). In the Cathedral of San Fabrizio, she drags him from the crowd into a side chapel and down onto the marble floor.

If nearly all the stories do end up on the floor, it is, after all, the natural place for humiliation, degradation, lust, despair and hunger to reach their limit. “The Cockatoos” does not—it ends with a smell of cake.

A flock of wild cockatoos makes a descent upon a residential neighborhood, alighting first at one house, then another, arousing jealousies, coveting, intent to murder, and other things, even causing a husband and wife who haven't spoken for years in the same house to break silence—“trapped into comforting each other,” they fall into bed “with laughing mouth on mouth.” The characters are wayward, rather than driven. Passions fly thick and fast but in a neighborhood level, like the cockatoos themselves, selecting the house they'd like to visit and making their choice of feeding places, setting up no more than a neighborhood commotion.

“The Cockatoos,” the only story here that's a comedy, is also the only one in which the sexual aggressor is a man. As Mick (the husband who doesn't speak to his wife) sits straddling the lady who lives down the street (it's Busby LeCornu, who waits for him every day leaning on her gate, and the only time he puts on a hat is to walk through it), they exchange these words—the subject of course, is the cockatoos:

“See here Busby … I didn't tell you about me birds to have you seduce um away from me.”

She sighed from within the crook of her arm. “I don't see why we can't share what doesn't belong to either of us.”

He was already getting back into his clothes. “The wife would be disappointed,” he said.