[In the following essay, Lindsay praises The Burnt Ones, saying White's work “shows some important advances and makes clearer than ever the need to grapple with his work in full critical seriousness.”]

It is a tribute to the work of Patrick White that one is forced to judge it by the highest standards: even a qualified praise of its achievement means far more than easy superlatives evoked by writing which carries on in the closed circle of more conventionalised methods. His latest book, The Burnt Ones, shows some important advances and makes clearer than ever the need to grapple with his work in full critical seriousness. The eleven tales vary in length and value, but at their best they rank high. ‘Dead Roses’, ‘The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats’, and ‘Down at the Dump’ show his literary method, his aesthetic vision, gaining a new clarity and compactness, with nothing of the self-indulgence that can be urged against certain aspects of the novels. Indeed it is by a consideration of the sparer and more intellectually controlled form of such stories that one can bring out what was cloudy and weak in the larger canvases; what was there fabricated to suggest a grand and penetrative view of life rather than springing directly from the material and White's understanding of it.

In saying that one is forced to judge White's work by the highest standards, one does not mean that one seeks to compare it with some synthetic notion of the Great Novel compounded of all the significant works from Petronius to Lawrence. The novel is a form hard to define, and any statement of its limits is sure to break down when tested in practice. What I mean is that White forces us to reconsider the nature of the novel, its relation to social process and individual experience, its ways of exploring new dimensions of consciousness; and this involves in turn a reconsideration of the nature of man himself and of just what is happening to people in the modern world—what are the forces to which they are subjected, how they are changing, and in what direction. The modern, or modernist, age began around 1900 and had posed its main problems by 1914, problems with which we are still grappling aesthetically as well as politically. Many critics chafe at the idea that we must still go back to Cézanne or Joyce in order to come round with full effect to today's issues; but I think they are wrong. We must begin at the beginning or we shall see the later events in a distorted focus, a cramped perspective; and this is so, however complicated the working out has become.

What then are the issues in art or in literature that came with the new century and are still with us? There was a jolt, a break, that was more decisive than previous efforts to gain a new start. All existing methods of construction became suspect as based on generalisations no longer valid. The relation of individual to society became suddenly more complex, not just in a quantitative way, with more strands to unravel, but with the intrusion of quite new factors of dislocation. Something unutterably baffling had arrived with the highly centralised State: something that Kafka managed to distil in its essence. The inner division of the individual reached a new intensity; one's ‘real life’ was less and less the life one lived. To express this deepening alienation the Bergsonian formulation was found the most useful, and through Joyce and Proust it has passed into general circulation in endlessly modified forms: the opposition of clocktime (habit, the workaday world, the abstracting intellect, all that divides, oppresses, and reflects the fragmentation of man in a mechanistic world) to inner time, the intuition of the timeless moment of concrete experience. With the revolt against the clockworld and its habitual (false) constructions, the old forms of characterisation and narrative lost their virtues and appeared as forms for deadening and disguising human reality. The novelist (poet, artist, etc.), faced with such a disintegrated and delusive world, felt the need for new methods capable of grasping the concrete moment in its fullness and of breaking down the false appearances.

These comments are highly generalised, but they state briefly what have been the preoccupations of serious art for the last couple of generations. (Socialist writing has in general so far failed to solve the problems because it has assumed that the restoration of social purpose makes it possible to carry on with pre-1900 forms and ignore all that has since been done; it attempts a contemporary art without a contemporary sensibility.) White's work insists on being judged as a part of the development I have sketched; the only question is how far he contributes something new, and the ways in which he does it. He has a deep and pervasive sense that something has gone wrong with people; his theme is always the process of alienation. But his intellectual powers have not so far been equal to his emotional comprehensions. Hence his efforts to impose a mystique upon his material in order to escape from sheer pessimism and the picture of life as a dull repetitive huit clos (as The Tree of Man tends to be). It seems to me that he has turned to the tale in a sustained struggle to overcome his weaknesses and to learn how to develop the more positive aspects of his outlook. The concentrated form enables him to sharpen his judgments, to incarnate his values more directly in human beings without recourse to mystique.

He consistently realises what I should call the unprecedented falsity of modern life—the widening gap between reality and what people think of themselves, between ‘real life’ and the everyday round of habitual reactions in which the stereotypes imposed from without by ceaseless manipulations grow ever more dominant. He feels all the while the need to reject this falsity and break through to the lost or imprisoned human being; and he therefore knows that the old methods of characterisation cannot help. He seeks to understand the rôle of fantasy in this situation, where it expresses both the aimless loss of self and the struggle to break through the rational (mad) world into the sphere of true human need and impulse; and he knows that this fantasy-life of the individual, destructive and yet owning the sole clue to the truth, must be more than material for the writer. It must also supply essential aspects of form in his struggle to renew the novel.

Where he is weak is in his intellectual framework. Once the old systems have been jettisoned, the novelist has to build up his own world-system, his own large scale reorganisation of tradition, philosophic as well as technical. Hence the great importance of Joyce and Proust, who most fully succeeded in merging the new sensibility with comprehensive structures of thought. White has the capacity to evolve his own system; for in the best of his tales he shows that he is securely finding his own method of defining time. (Time, in a sense, is the hidden hero, or villain, of the modernist novel.) Joyce used his inner-dialogue (apart from Marion's reverie) in what he called a series of epiphanies—momentary fusions of inner and outer in a significant or revelatory unity; the method is thus always at root dramatic and has nothing to do with a rambling drift of associations. White uses his alternation of inner and outer for dynamic effect, a radiation-out of the individual into his environment and back again. A person is thus made organically a part of his world. The tension is always sustained, the physical presence of the main actors is always felt, and this above all is what marks White out as an important writer.

As a result The Burnt Ones shows much variety of mood and attitude. There is a considerable growth in the capacity for humour; and this means a growth in human sympathy—for instance in ‘A Cheery Soul’, ‘Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover’, and indeed in several others as an undercurrent. A tale like ‘Clay’, which is more simply subjective, I find less interesting; it is built on the sado-masochistic mood which is White's main danger. It is instructive to look back at a tale like ‘The Twitching Colonel’, published in the London Mercury of April, 1937. Far more than White's first novel, it shows his characteristic powers. Invertebrate in comparison with the present tales, it attempts to find dynamic ways of merging a character with the imagery of the forces that have made him; of surrounding him with a sort of crackling field-of-force. India has got inside the colonel for all his British imperviousness, and its unrealised but shattering energies are what twitch in his body and finally disintegrate him into the smoke of the consuming fire. The ideas under the imagery are vague, thin, uncertain; yet looking back at the tale from the present perspective, we can see the seeds of the poetic method that is now maturing.

How far can one define the position now reached by Patrick White? The solid base appears as something of a D. H. Lawrence attitude: those who accept the flow of life are opposed to those arrested on points of property and convention. ‘Dead Roses’ powerfully achieves this contrast; and in more complex ways so does ‘The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats’, which is perhaps the finest thing White has done. (Yet here is an odd point of callous lack of sympathy and imagination. ‘She accepted curfews, and travel permits, not to mention his forced absence on the Island. Not even when Alexiou payed the Official Visit together with other chosen members, was Kyria Alexious more than incidentally put out.’ The Island can only be Ai Stratis. Either White does not know of the horrors endured by the prisoners there, or he is insensitive to sufferings brought about by moral and political conviction. In either case, his claim to understand the Greeks in the postwar setting is compromised. Yet his experience of the Greeks has certainly done much to help him through to a positive humanity.) He is moving to the point where he can find human values in others than the lost, humiliated, and down-and-out: thus avoiding the danger of Steinbeckian sentimentality or Beat nihilism. There are rich elements of humour and lyricism that refuse to be chilled out by adolescent sado-masochistic bitterness (such as threatens the excellent story, ‘Being Kind to Titina’) or to be flattened by the imposition of fabricated mystiques. The D.H.L. oppositions need to be extended and rooted in a fuller understanding of alienation, and strengthened by relevant intellectual constructions—not repetitions of Joycean or Proustian systems, but whatever corresponds to such systems in terms of White's sensibility. Then we shall see Patrick White's insights and skills liberated into their full scope, his vision given a true force of universality.