[In the following essay, Burrows illustrates how White uses observations and anecdotes about Australian society in his fiction as a form of social satire.]

At her first appearance in Happy Valley (1939), the loneliness and discontent of poor Vic Moriarty are epitomised in her absurd day-dream of being mentioned in the social pages of the Herald as having played bridge at David Jones. She pictures herself wearing a powder-blue dress (p. 37). At her final appearance in Riders in the Chariot (1961), Mrs. Chalmers-Robinson, socially rehabilitated at last, actually does lunch at a smart Sydney restaurant. She is wearing a powder-blue dress (p. 544).

Out of innumerable trifles like this, many of them similarly recurrent, there is made up one of the most striking, even obtrusive, characteristics of the work of Patrick White. It ranges from this flicker of bored but perhaps mildly compulsive distaste for a social cliché to a fascinated loathing for contemporary Australian society in certain of its aspects.

For illustration we can turn to a passage from Riders in the Chariot which seems at first sight to provide a notable exception. At the end of the novel, Mrs. Godbold—“the rock of love”, “the infinite quiver” full of “the arrows of desire”—walks up the hill where Xanadu had stood. Her outflowing of love for all she sees—children, houses, a row of young cauliflowers, an unknown woman in a dressing-gown—leads her on to a culminating vision of the Chariot. But even though this universal loving-kindness seems to be offered for our endorsement, it constitutes a programme for the Godbolds rather than an actuality for the Whites. Immediately before Mrs. Godbold's setting out on this walk, the omniscient narrator had described those very houses and those very people in language much more familiar to White's readers:

When Xanadu had been shaved right down to a bald, red, rudimentary hill, they began to erect the fibro homes. Two or three days, or so it seemed, and there were the combs of homes clinging to the bare earth. The rotary clothes-lines had risen, together with the iceland poppies, and after them the glads. The privies were never so private that it was not possible to listen to the drone of someone else's blowflies. The wafer-walls of the new homes would rub together at night, and sleepers might have been encouraged to enter into one another's dreams, if these had not been similar. Sometimes the rats of anxiety could be heard gnawing already at bakelite, or plastic, or recalcitrant maidenhead. So that, in the circumstances, it was not unusual for people to run outside and jump into their cars. … They would drive and look for something to look at.

(p. 546)

The automatic gestures of contempt in such passages as this point to more typical and, I believe, more significant aspects of White's work than does the slightly strained vox humana of Mrs. Godbold.

As Vic Moriarty's dress suggests, this antipathy to our society, or to certain things about it, has been apparent in White's work from the beginning. At first it manifested itself chiefly in characters of only moderate importance, like Vic Moriarty herself, Fanny Parrott in The Aunt's Story (1948) and Thelma Parker in The Tree of Man (1956). In Voss (1957), the Bonners and the Pringles are, among other things, the wealthy ancestors of this repulsive progeny.

Yet it was only with White's discovery and creation, presumably in the late 1950's, of that most desirable suburb, Sarsaparilla, that this antipathy came to be given heavy emphasis in his work. Whatever its meaning and whether that meaning is complex or only nebulous, it is true that Sarsaparilla plays an important part in Riders in the Chariot (1961) and in The Season at Sarsaparilla (1962). It is also true, though perhaps less widely-known, that during this “Sarsaparillan period”, White has published eight short stories,¹ three of them set in Sarsaparilla itself and three in pre-Sarsaparillas or in suburbs none too remote. (The remaining two stories are set in modern Athens and in modern Alexandria.) In addition to their intrinsic interest, these stories afford a useful way of reconnoitring an aspect of White's work that is much easier to distinguish than to define or assess.

The rapidity with which White's stories have been published suggests that the order of publication is not necessarily that of their composition. Internal evidence nevertheless indicates that “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight” is one of the earliest. Certainly it contains many of the seeds of others of White's stories, and, for this reason, it warrants a closer examination than its own slightness might otherwise recommend.

The anecdote from which the story evolves concerns a tape-recording of bird-song, in the middle of which the willy-wagtails give place to a love-scene between a married man and his secretary. No one knows of this insertion until a couple named Wheeler, visiting the unfaithful husband and his devoted wife but for the time being in the room by themselves, hear the tape. At first maliciously amused by the situation and then shocked out of their amusement, the Wheelers tacitly resolve to say nothing at all. And there the story ends.

The Wheelers are stock figures—the malicious “North Shore” matron and the pompous executive—presented sharply enough but possessed of, and needing, no great depth. So, too, are Arch Mackenzie, the bird-watcher gone astray, and his secretary, Miss Cullen. It is in Nora Mackenzie that the real possibilities and the eventual failure of the story appear: the possibilities arise when Nora promises to be complex; the failure occurs when the complexity proves only to be confusion and inconsistency.

The most obvious of the three faces of Nora is that of a discreetly status-seeking hypocrite, hardly less an object of satire than her husband and her so-called friends. Her house is “what is known as a Lovely Old Home—colonial style—among some carefully natural-looking gums.” Its furnishings, insipidly ostentatious, are “period” pieces in a string-and-beige coloured setting. Despite her courses in French cookery and the like, Nora is an abominable cook, a muddling housekeeper, and an ungenerous hostess. There is even a suggestion that she became a bird-watcher only in pursuit of bigger (if not nobler) game. Such a Nora would have served well in a story, after de Maupassant, of the biter bit. The difficulty is that this Nora is contradicted out of existence by other aspects of her behaviour. (It is not possible to argue that all this is Nora as seen by the malicious Eileen Wheeler: the hypothesis about her bird-watching may be Eileen's; but most of Nora's other unpleasantness is remarked by the omniscient narrator.)

The second Nora is a Freudian figure whose single dominant motive is a frustrated urge for motherhood. Her spinsterish self-consciousness, her motherly devotion to Arch, her altruistic concern for his employees, even Miss Cullen, and her passionate absorption in bird-watching (“The children she had never had …”) are all advanced as sublimations of the one central drive. The alliance of husband, employee, and even birds in her betrayal, the hints that she is half-conscious of Arch's infidelity, and the way in which, even when the story ends, the betrayal has yet to reach daylight, all serve to give this version a somewhat Chekhovian air. Of the three stories that are here confused, this one is the most fully evolved. If it were not for the distractions of its competitors, it would make its comic-pathetic point very effectively.

The last Nora appears only briefly and is, therefore, a threat to the integrity of her sisters rather than a figure in her own right. Yet even though, in the glimpses we are given, she is blurred by self-pity, she is recognizable as a member—and perhaps the prototype—of that little band of renegade individuals, aloof from and invulnerable to the assaults of a contemptible society, who dominate some of the other stories. In her imagination,

Nora Mackenzie was standing alone amongst the inexorable moonlit gums. She thought perhaps she had always felt alone, even with Arch, while grateful even for her loneliness.

The clashes between these different aspects of the story emerge clearly from an examination of any of a number of passages. Thus:

Nora said they'd be more comfortable drinking their coffee in the lounge.

Where Arch fetched the tape-recorder. He set it up on the Queen Anne walnut piecrust. It certainly was an impressive machine.

Presumably this passage is ironical and not mere reportage. If so, the most obvious irony seems to be directed at those (the Wheelers?) whose shoddy “modern” values lead them to be more impressed by a tape-recorder than by such a table as this. But then, we wonder, just what sort of table is this? Nothing else in the Mackenzies' home would lead us to expect that their table would be “Queen Anne” in the strict sense. If it is so only in the looser sense in which the term is used by Vulgar Australians, then presumably it is Nora's values as well as (or rather than?) the Wheelers' that are White's target of the moment.² Depending in part but not entirely upon the answer to this question, we are left in doubt whether Arch's treatment of the table is to be seen as mere vandalism or as an expression of a superbly natural ability to use an object, whatever its snob-value, for an immediate purpose. Even the innocent-looking first sentence raises a further problem. Is it offered as the casual and sensible remark of any hostess? Or is it to be seen as the satiric rendering of a cliché, directed at Nora and given force by the word “lounge”, a common Australianism which, by English standards, is distinctly non-U when it is used at all? Questions like these ought, of course, to be answerable from the text itself. That they are not is due to a blurring of satiric focus, a radical uncertainty of purpose. Here and elsewhere White is often so anxious to score off everybody at once that he does not really score off anybody at all.

The kind of social satire which depends upon the registering of a multitude of socio-aesthetic signs and which is most dominant in the first of “my” versions of “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight” persists, in one form or another, in all the other stories. It is at its most direct in “Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover” and “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats”. The former, an uproarious farce, consists essentially in a clash of values between migrant male and Australian female. The latter is a rambling and portentous tale of lesbians, marital troubles, and cat-worship, too much of which is given over to cheap contrasts between Greek Greeks and Americanised Greeks. Because of the damning fact that, broken English apart, the Australians of the former story are virtually indistinguishable from the “Americans” of the latter, the former can, for the present, do double duty.

When Miss Slattery, a “market researcher”, encounters Tibor Szabo, a wealthy Hungarian migrant, she is almost instantaneously seduced. For a time she remains alike overwhelmed by his lavish supply of imported luxuries—Jaguars, mink bedspreads—and by his bland assumption that she, being Australian, exists only for him to exploit. On his side, a complacent acceptance of her physical charms overrules a profound contempt for her inertness and conventionality, especially on the subject of Love. Then, at a party, she begins cracking a stock-whip, arousing nostalgic memories in them both: in her, of an older Australia of dust, cattle, and sweaty leather; in him, of the masochistic delights of being flogged. Thereafter he finds her unique and indispensable while she, nostalgic only for a moment and bored from the first by this strange new sport, gains a complete ascendancy. Tibby has been assimilated by a vast inertness, much as a sleepy leviathan might engulf a lively shrimp or as Sarsaparilla seeks to engulf the Charioteers.

At the level of farce the story is admirably sustained. The clash of opposing manners is central and lucid and the manners themselves are registered with all White's verbal wit. That the subtler possibilities of this conflict go largely ignored is manifest not only in White's willingness to record manners as such rather than to explore the attitudes that they signify, but also in an apparently naive preference for all things imported even though they, too, are only objets de bourgeois.

A second group of stories—“The Letters”, “Clay”, and “Being Kind to Titina”—is concerned with frustrations and sublimations akin to those of the second Nora Mackenzie. Widely as they differ in appearance, each is virtually a textbook instance of one or another of the classic manifestations of the Oedipus complex. And in all three stories, the broader social setting, though at times obtrusive, is really incidental. “The Letters”, where an adult son fears for a moment that his eyes will be gouged out by his mother's brooch, shows this Freudian pattern at its simplest. Mrs. Polkinghorn babies Charles all his life—“Sometimes the mother almost expected to see a pulse still beating in her child's head”—until, on his fiftieth birthday, he betters the instruction by assaulting her in an attempt at suckling. The setting, like its mistress, is Sarsaparilla-Olde-Englyshe, and it provides the occasion for touches of satire which are neat enough in themselves but which lack any fully-imagined connection with the central action. The one moment of real poignancy comes when, from the depths of Charles's memories of university, there floats up an unidentified French tag. It is a line from Racine's Phèdre, spoken when Phèdre is about to explode into confessing to Oenone her love for Hippolyte: “De l'amour j'ai toutes les fureurs”.

In “Clay”, a feeble but “poetic” son is driven from a mother whom he loves and hates, both passionately, to a wife who is her replica in everyday behaviour but whose emotional life hardly exists. His dreams of freedom from his mother's tyranny turn, after her death, to orgies of imagined incest. The mother-figure of these affairs, whom he calls Lova, bedevils him increasingly until the story ends in a manner no less erotic and even more melodramatic than the ending of “The Letters”. As a whole, the story displays White's “fine writing” at its worst. It is a painfully-wrought labyrinth of chain-images and balanced and contrasted situations, all on the best Freudian models:

One night Clay wrote: ‘I have never observed a flower-pot intimately until now its hole is fascinating the little down of green moss it is of greater significance than what is within though you can fill it if you decide to if you concentrate long enough.’

The real felicities of this story are comparatively small and spontaneous: the utterly lifeless speech of the wife; the dead and crumbling house; or the mother's Delilah-like insistence, when Clay unwarily recounts one of his dreams, on having his hair shorn to the scalp.

The other major variant of Freud's mother-son relationship gives point to “Being Kind to Titina”. Here a Graeco-Alexandrian youth of the present day is so fortunate as to experience in real life what amounts to an erotic daydream of Ceres in all her bounty. This nervous youth (whose name is Dionysios!) is positively showered with maternal gold: ices, fruits glacés, “vissinada”, swimming à deux, and a gentle and expert induction in the art of love. The story varies the textbook formula in another way also: for Titina, the serene patroness, is not the boy's mother at all but a mother-substitute in the person of a little whore, younger than himself, whose patron and father-substitute he had been, in their childhood. This oddly pleasant and amusing tale is marred by the half-relevant clichés of its setting. Irritating as it can be in the original, D. H. Lawrence's sentimental primitivism about the “organic” community and the “organic” family is even more so in a tourist version. In Alexandria, it seems, even the camels are on the side of life:

I believe we were at our happiest in the evenings of those days. Though somebody might open a door, threatening to dash the light from the candles on our aunt's piano, the flames soon recovered their shape. Silences were silenter. In those days it was not uncommon to hear the sound of a camel, treading past, through the dust. There was the smell of camel on the evening air.

Oh yes, we were at our happiest.

Notwithstanding their minor merits, these three stories are damaged by the mechanical working-out of a preordained idea and by a unity of action and setting that is contrived rather than imagined. Apart from those gestures which are designed as Freudian symbols, the “manners” of these stories are, on the whole, neither closely observed nor very rich in meanings.

Although they differ radically in their degree both of unity and complexity, the remaining two stories are alike in treating clashes between social renegades and the society of Sarsaparilla. Daise Morrow, the renegade of “Down at the Dump”, has lately died and those Sarsaparillans who must are attending her funeral. Since her rebellion had consisted essentially in extreme sexual generosity—neither Mrs. Lusty nor Nola Boyle can approach her—the tone of the story is mainly reminiscent. All the obvious attitudes are represented, from the envious frustration of her brother-in-law to the pathetic gratitude of her last lover, from the puritanical intolerance of her sister to the promise of re-incarnation in the sister's daughter. To round it all off there is a sententious contrast between Daise's charitable carnality and Mum Whalley's egocentric lust.

A great deal of the naiveté, over-simplification, and sentimental dishonesty that usually vitiate White's portrayal of Sarsaparilla emerges if we briefly join him in his study of Freud. Although “Down at the Dump” is thickly studded with Freudian symbols, its central conflict looks shallow and schematic and its approval of Daise is seen to be faked when the story is considered in the light of Freud's own discussions of the very subtle, complex, and far-reaching relationships between society and the individual libido.³ No simple antithesis (Two-backs good: one back bad) constitutes an adequate comment on such complex relationships as these. And the situation is not much remedied by the presence of such qualifications as Mum Whalley affords.

Leaving “A Cheery Soul” out of account for a little longer, we can now attempt to establish a meaningful relationship between White's treatment of “manners” and the success or failure of his stories. Whereas it is obvious that manners can consist in any kind of small gesture pointing to any of the deeper workings of a personality, White seems to find significance in only two kinds of gesture: those which act as socio-aesthetic signs of class or nationality, and those which are patently Freudian.

Since they need to be—and are—comprehensible to the lay reader, White's Freudian symbols are rather simple, unequivocal, and even heavy-handed. As a result, those stories where relationships between individuals qua individuals are of central importance tend to reduce, as Freud himself never did, the subtle range of human behaviour to a few rather stereotyped gestures. In these Freudian stories, as we have seen, manners of the socio-aesthetic kind merely provide ready-made but rather incidental settings.

In those stories where the characters are above all social—or anti-social—beings, it is, of course, the socio-aesthetic gestures that predominate. Although they are not very common and certainly never sustained in the stories so far considered, there are moments of very acute and penetrating observation. There is, again, the sustained but rather limited conflict of manners in “Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover”. On the other hand, there are many occasions when the demands of that stage-villain, Sarsaparilla, distract White's attention—and a well-imagined character momentarily dies on our hands. Worst of all, there are times when White becomes the mere slave of his loathing for Sarsaparilla. It is then that the Mackenzies's “carefully natural-looking gums”, Mrs. Polkinghorn's exotic shrubs, and the “bald, red, rudimentary hill”, clad only in Iceland poppies and gladioli, to which Xanadu is reduced all stand as signs of the one Australian Ugliness. It is then that, as in the passage cited from Riders in the Chariot, a term so vague and all-embracing as “plastic” comes to be used by a serious writer as an adequate symbol for a shoddiness in our society.

The force of all these strictures is borne out, by sheer contrast, in “A Cheery Soul”, to which none of them have any serious application. It is as if Mr. White awoke one morning and saw his world with fresh eyes. In this story alone he sees virtue in Sarsaparilla and vice in the rebellious individual. Yet this is no mere reversal: appalling as she is, Miss Docker has her side of the argument and must share in the pity that we more willingly bestow on her victims. And yet, again, her individuality lies in the nature of her tyranny, for her sin is universal benevolence. Her victims know, as Charles Dickens never learnt, what it is to be at the mercy of John Jarndyce.

Of her earlier life we are told little except that, like any other cuckoo-chicken, she has had to fend for herself since infancy. Her amiable confidence that other people are merely replicas of herself and that, being imperfect replicas, their vocation is to serve her has the air of something congenital, something confirmed rather than created when she learns of Manon Lescaut. Sharing Manon's attitudes but lacking her particular gifts, Miss Docker has to seek a little further for her one unique vocation. The revelation comes finally from the natural source of revelations:

‘I once read the Bible from cover to cover. That was when I was at the end of me tether. A whole fortnight it took me. I lay in bed, and read, and read. It was raining cats and dogs. Never stopped. Before that I was pagan. But suddenly I saw.’

‘What did you see?’

Ted Custance was looking at her now.

‘Don't be silly!’ she said. ‘You can't say what you see. But see, See?’

Even though she cannot say what she saw, there is no doubt at all that Miss Docker saw it. And we come to see it, too. It is the simple but magnificent notion of employing Christian attitudes, such as charity and loving-kindness, as weapons in her fight with a society whose lip-service to Christianity renders it completely vulnerable to her. Since she is neither superficial nor inconsistent in her display of these attitudes, she is able to win from the halt and lame the upkeep and the gratitude that are her chief social satisfactions. Since it is her specialty to act as unpaid nurse-housekeeper in households where the husband is weak or ailing, she is able to gain vicarious sexual satisfactions. And since she is no mere hypocrite, but a person absolutely self-persuaded, she is even able to solace her soul.

When she meets resistance and “ingratitude”, Miss Docker pityingly but bravely moves elsewhere. At last she overreaches herself. But Society's victory comes not through direct resistance but through a tacit conspiracy to ignore, even to deny, her existence. Thus an Old People's Home rapidly depopulates itself and the congregation of the local church disappears almost overnight. One sees their point. And yet, as she trudges along the empty street at the end, one neither fully believes nor even wholly wishes her downfall to be permanent.

As a natural consequence of this awareness that, even in Sarsaparilla, Society is made up of people and that a Rebellious Individual is not always or necessarily admirable, White's portrayal of manners takes on, almost without exception, a depth and subtlety that are lacking elsewhere. Whether she is begging the shrewdly obstinate Ted Custance to use her Christian name, plastering a woman newly-widowed with lipstick, entertaining old people with photographs of herself, or choosing the hymns that she, as sole survivor of the choir, will sing, Miss Docker is unique and lovingly-observed. And the Sarsaparillans who are her victims are also observed in a spirit of satire rather than one of contempt.

If the loving-kindness of Mrs. Godbold is over-strained not only by the way in which the woman herself is presented but also by White's doctrinaire insistence on the worthlessness of most of its recipients, that of Miss Docker is a quite spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings on her part, springing from a rare tranquility of observation and organisation on the part of White himself.

Notes

1. These stories are: “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight”, Australian Letters, IV, iii (1962), 35-43; “The Letters”, Quadrant 22 (1962), 5-17; “Being Kind to Titina”, Meanjin, XXI (1962), 5-19; “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats”, Australian Letters, V, ii (1962), 30-57; “A Cheery Soul”, The London Magazine, II, vi (1962), 6-36; “Clay”, Overland 26 (1963), 5-13; “Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover”, Australian Letters, V, iii (1963), 27-37, reprinted in The London Magazine in November 1963; and “Down at the Dump”, Meanjin, XXII (1963), 153-179.

2. These uncertainties are not relieved by the circumstance that the “piecrust” style post-dates the death of Queen Anne. If this contradiction is deliberate, White's satiric point recedes into an even wider landscape of possibilities.

3. Cf. Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis (New York, 1943), pp. 23-4.