[In the following excerpt, Björksten states that the short story is “not Patrick White's best medium of expression” during his discussion of The Burnt Ones.]

THE BURNT ONES

After Riders in the Chariot Patrick White wrote eleven short stories, which were published in 1964 in his first collection of short stories. He named the collection after the Greek hoi kaumenoi—the burnt ones, the poor unfortunates. The title characterizes all White's “elect”, those inhabitants of his created world who have been burnt by society and by existence. However, even if one recognizes the characters in the short stories, they are not representative of the whole of White's portrait gallery. They reflect features of some of the figures in his novels, placed in a familiar setting—Sarsaparilla and the Australian emptiness—as well as a Greek, particularly a Smyrniot Greek, background which White sometimes makes use of as a parallel. The social satire directed at a “dead” materialism and against hostility to nonconformists, with its touches of indignation, has the tendency, however, to make a trite caricature of the satire. Clearly enough, Patrick White has since realized that a biting and bitter tone, while it facilitates a statement of the case, is less capable of illuminating it. After this collection of stories (indeed in the last of the stories) he has more and more directed attention to the existence of the “dead” and to why they are dead.

Three of the stories in The Burnt Ones deal with the figure which is further developed in Elizabeth Hunter in his latest novel The Eye of the Storm, and which occurs in White even in his earlier work: the figure of the mother, the person who leaves so strong an impression on her offspring that he or she becomes ill-equipped for life without her. In these stories, the sympathy is always on the side of those who are the victims—on the side of Anthea Scudamore, who in “Dead Roses” is so moulded by her mother that finally she is changed into a barren reflection of her; on the side of Clay Skerritt who “was born with inward-looking eyes” and who in the story “Clay” embarrasses his mother through behaving differently: “You will suffer in life if you start talking queer remember it doesn't pay to be different and no one is different without they have something wrong with them.” And White's sympathies are also with Charles Polkinghorn, the fifty-year-old son who is never allowed to grow up and who in “The Letters” lives with his aunt Maud as a substitute for his mother. After her death he reverts completely to his childhood and looks for his mother's withered breasts to suckle.

The women in White's novels who are not presented as mothers of the typical White kind don't have an easier time of it; their lives too become a matter of keeping their heads above water. What threatens to drown them is their sexual nature. Life with husbands or lovers never becomes what their imaginations, wishes, or romantic literature has filled them full of hopes of. This becomes a path to degradation. Thus it turns out for Nora Mackenzie, the respectable upper-class housewife in “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight” who together with her husband invites some close friends to dinner and lets them listen to tapes of interesting bird songs, tapes which, as it happens, also contain evidence of her husband's infidelity. Thus it turns out for the Australian Miss Slattery, who in “Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover” is aroused to a height of sexual passion by the immigrant Tibby Szabo which she never believed herself to possess, but the price of which she finally refuses to pay. Sexual passion is not one of the human drives that Patrick White thinks of as a useful gift in life; it seldom happens in his novels that two individuals are united, enrich one another's lives, and become inseparable through eros. He has greater faith in spiritual love. This sets limitations on his vision, and makes it in some way a rejection of life.

In White's novels marriage is not based on a harmonious sexual life. People marry for reasons such as in “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats”, one of the four short stories in the collection that are connected with Greece: “Different in habit and variety they relied upon each other for support; he for the thorny traditions of her class which she brought to bear on daily life, she for the succulence on which her parasitic nature fed.” Therefore these people fill their lives with ersatz experiences behind which they try to conceal their emptiness and the feeling of icy monotony. The males withdraw into an inaccessible world of silence, the females devote themselves to their desire for property, their neurotic craving to rule.

The greater the experience Patrick White has of life as it is lived, the more has his understanding increased not only of its victims but also of those who shape it. The spirit of reconciliation he presents in his works seems also to have coloured his own attitude to life. The somewhat venomous, bitter conception of Australia has matured, and thus that theme appears which is fundamental to White: What happens to man in the world he calls modern, civilized, materially secure, what are the values that get lost, and what is the price we pay for their loss? In the short stories he speaks without metaphysical overtones. He hardly adds anything to what his novels have already communicated concerning his attitudes. But particularly in “Down at the Dump” one feels an optimism, a cause for hope in spite of everything. It begins with an acceptance of life as it is. And what that life is need not necessarily be in Australia, even if the story is set in Sarsaparilla. There the Whalley family are engaged in the same occupation as Hurtle Duffield's parents: they collect refuse. Myrtle Hogben has married herself to a brick house, status and security; her sister Daise has broken away from her background and has lived out her life according to what she was born to do. Now she is dead. The person who is dead as far as present existence is concerned survives the one who is still living, for she has instilled her attitude to life in her niece Meg. Meg makes friends with Lum Whalley. At the funeral of Daise Morrow it becomes evident to what extent everybody looks to himself. It is what those present at the funeral remember of the social outcast that reveals their own natures. But White does not lash the “dead” for their shortcomings. He begins to feel compassion for them, and suggests the possibility that the young pair, Meg and Lum, will become different.

The short story is not Patrick White's best medium of expression. His vision needs more space to unfold itself, the whole existence of man to give itself justice. But the short stories clarify certain points overshadowed by the huge structure of the epic. At the same time they demand concentration in characterization, in composition, in language. The reader can achieve little more than absorption of White's point of view, can achieve only the passing impressions before it is all over, when in retrospect he can examine it and his reactions to it. This is not all advantageous to White. Themes treated in the form of an etude become emasculated. The broad symphonic style, the great carefully planned canvases rather than the sketch are better suited to express White's visionary insights. But the short stories serve as an introduction to and a harbinger of his world.