[In the following review, Heseltine asserts that The Burnt Ones is “an essentially uneven book,” but that through the unevenness “shines one of our great creative spirits.”]

“Dead Roses”, the story which Patrick White has placed at the beginning of The Burnt Ones, is long, previously unpublished, and resumes the chief features of the ten which follow it. It is largely concerned, for instance, with the influence on Anthea Scudamore of her dreadful, domineering mother. It is a theme which has already engaged Patrick White in his novels; but he has imagined no more hatefully satirical version of it than those scenes in “Dead Roses” where poor Anthea has to make long-distance telephone conversations to Mummy in the delighted presence of some holidaying friends. Yet it is not even in “Dead Roses” that White vents his hatred of Australian matrons with the most passionate intensity. He reaches the height of his hate in “Clay” and “The Letters”. In both stories, a son suffers at the hands of an over-possessive mother; in both, the son takes refuge in total psychotic collapse. In both, the pattern of the prose seems to be woven less from satiric comment than obsessive emotional need; in both, the almost hysterical tone spreads out so far beyond the necessary requirements of dramatization as to endanger the balance of the whole performance.

While on her brief holiday from Mother, Anthea Scudamore has a brush with the untrammelled life of the senses in an attempted seduction by a physicist, Barry Flegg. Her rejection of such experience, however, does not represent White's only or final valuation of his theme. In a number of other stories he registers further attitudes towards a life of passionate sensuality. “Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover” is a grotesquely funny tale about an Australian girl who becomes entangled with a Hungarian migrant who has a penchant for stockwhips and mirrors on the ceiling. One Bohemian party, in particular, reads like a scene from a Coward comedy to be performed in a chamber of horrors. A vein of grotesquerie, indeed, runs through many of the stories wherein White investigates passionate relationships. It swamps most of the other elements of “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight” in bizarre comedy. In the climax of “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats” it shines through with genuine brilliance. In “Dead Roses” it less successfully motivates the image of Anthea, yoked to a two-man harness, helping her ageing husband to drag a barrowload of manure up a hill.

For Anthea Scudamore does marry—not Barry Flegg, but a middle-aged, respectable, atrocious businessman. Hessell Mortlock translates Anthea to a now familiar corner of White country, Sarsaparilla. Several other stories in The Burnt Ones also contribute to our knowledge of this mythical Sydney suburb. The Polkinghorns (mother and son), of “The Letters,” live there, in isolated splendour and psychological decay. The main scene of “Down at the Dump” takes place at Sarsaparilla cemetery and the adjacent rubbish tip. The Sarsaparilla Sundown Home for Old People is the focal point for much of “A Cheery Soul”. The map of this region is filled in with each new action that White places within its boundaries; it is a Hell where evil masquerades as middle-class respectability, decency is too easily destroyed, and grandiose designs run to seed.

The fullest study of Sarsaparilla vice disguised as virtue is, of course, Miss Docker in “A Cheery Soul”. The hypocritical destructiveness of her cloying sweetness is exposed mercilessly and totally. The Custances, protected by their simplicity and a streak of toughness, escape before disaster overtakes them; but in Mr. Wakeman, the Anglican parson of Sarsaparilla, Miss Docker finds a victim altogether worthy of her talents. Mrs. Wakeman's anguished cry over her husband's dead body is one of the great moments of The Burnt Ones: “Miss Docker, you have killed my saint. Only time will show whether you have killed my God as well”. After that, one can only regret that White allows himself the petty revenge of a dog urinating on Miss Docker's leg. Even her realization that “dog … is God turned round” cannot, it seems to me, save the ending of “A Cheery Soul” from the sense of a major imaginative achievement unnecessarily cheapened.

So long, indeed, as White remains in Sarsaparilla, one has the uneasy feeling that a number of his victories are tactical rather than strategic. The satire, with its almost revue-like labelling, can be pointed rather than penetrating; the characterization a little too one-sided (straw men don't put up much of an argument). It is for this reason that I find the Greek stories in The Burnt Ones especially interesting. They are not to be cherished for any travelogue revelation of exotic places and people but because, for whatever reason, in them White has drawn on deeper springs of understanding and technique. “A Glass of Tea,” “Being Kind to Titina,” “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats,” “The Evening at Sissy Kamara's” all seem to me to embody a more complex and truthful (because less partisan?) view of individual human beings than most of the Australian stories. The relationship between Dionysios (the narrator of “Being Kind to Titina”), for instance, and Titina becomes a beautifully judged vehicle for all the boy's childhood and adolescent awareness of the world. Or the flashback technique of “A Glass of Tea” allows past and present to fuse in a vision of the nature of married love and the imagination of the solitary artist.

Concern for the varieties of love runs all through the Greek stories, as does an equal concern for the varieties of suffering. The destruction of Smyrna by the Turks casts over some of their most important pages the light of purgative flames which will be readily recognizable by any experienced reader of Patrick White. The very title of the book, The Burnt Ones (or The Unfortunate Ones), indicates that suffering is to be one of its leading themes. Three main kinds can be detected: suffering which results in a genuine purification of life (mainly in the Greek stories); suffering which, hardening rather than refining, becomes a mask for hypocrisy and evil (located centrally in Sarsaparilla); and a kind of limited suffering which causes the individual, his fingers singed by the world to withdraw from it. Of this last class, Anthea Scudamore-Mortlock is the prime example. But even Anthea has her moment of truth. With Mr Mortlock conveniently removed by death, she can at last enjoy his fortune—mainly in foreign travel. One day in Greece she encounters the same Barry Flegg who had once tried to seduce her, now married and with three children. Then, and only then, does a vision of her own emptiness come to Anthea.

The concluding scene of “Dead Roses” is, in itself, very powerfully done; not quite so powerfully, however, as to blot out all doubts about the coincidental nature of the meeting. Again, one is just a little too aware of White the technician rigging his effects to suit his prejudged ends. The whole of “Dead Roses,” in fact, has a strangely diagrammatic structure; it is a blueprint of how Anthea Scudamore turns into her mother. In other stories, any arbitrariness of plotting may be absorbed into intensity of emotional tone (“Clay”); richly rendered psychological and physical detail (“Being Kind to Titina”); the comic possibilities of situation (“Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight”). But one of the most impressive means White has found for animating his fictional diagrams is a complex counterpointing of theme and motif. It can be detected in “The Evening at Sissy Kamara's,” “A Glass of Tea,” and “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats”. But it is used nowhere more triumphantly than in the Sarsaparilla story, “Down at the Dump”. The short-term victories of the other Sarsaparilla tales could probably be abstracted from “Down at the Dump”; even the vulgarity of the episode which mars the end of “A Cheery Soul”. But any such abstraction would be critically invalid; in “Down at the Dump” theme, character, incident are woven into an organic and inseparable unity. It is the co-operating wholeness of all its parts rather than any lushness of texture which has, I suspect, led other reviewers to identify a “poetic” quality in this story. Its prose, indeed, is remarkable for its detached and ironic poise, but it is capable of containing what ultimately emerges as an oddly affirmative vision.

I have to confess that when “Down at the Dump” first appeared in Meanjin I did not admire it as I do now. Perhaps time and further re-reading will demand a corresponding adjustment in my attitude towards some of the other stories. I am sure, however, that no amount of re-consideration will alter my opinion that The Burnt Ones is an essentially uneven book. Its best stories are among the most imaginative ever written by an Australian; its worst sacrifice control to intensity, understanding to aphorism. Through all the unevenness, of course, shines one of our great creative spirits. Yet for all its rewards, The Burnt Ones does not convince me that that spirit is as fully and richly at home in the shorter reaches of fiction as in the full-length novel.