[In the following essay, Wilson praises White's short story “Down at the Dump,” asserting that it “demonstrates the superb adroitness with which White can modulate his discourse among many functions—satiric, compassionate, speculative—and give it a dimension that is metaphysical, even religious, in its range.”]

This typical and very effective example of White's prose is a reminder of how fully he has exploited the resources of language to create his literature and how well he has assimilated some of those more successful technical experiments that have given to the prose of Joyce and of Faulkner such extreme flexibility and intensity, and how White has in fact produced a mode of discourse that generates a distinctly new rhetoric. The elements comprising it have undergone further sophistication; the new mix is full of surprises, sudden switches of kind and of key and of pace. Interestingly, the prevailing tone produced by all this variety and flux most often resembles low-keyed, casual chat. Next to it, the remarkable closing paragraphs of The Dead and the equally remarkable eloquence of “Barn Burning” seem to have achieved their effects by means much more familiar and obvious. All three writers are concerned with moments of self-awareness: Gabriel Conroy and Sarty Snopes and the two youngsters Lum and Meg have their confrontation with selfhood; and there is in White's rendering of this experience a protean quality that derives from stylistic subtleties representing an important advance in the art of fiction.

White tells of the funeral of Daise Morrow, a woman of abundant compassion for those who have been rejected by the Philistine middle-class suburban society of the small Australian town. While Daise's relatives make their hypocritical self-centred visit to the graveside, the town rubbish-dump next door to it is visited by the Whalleys, a rough and earthy family whose directness and humanity White obviously prefers. He presents the story in nineteen sections, marshalled to throw into significant relationship the various human values involved—especially the relationship of all these people to the dead woman. He alternates our attention between on the one hand such figures as Daise's limited, mean-minded, and mercenary sister Myrtle, whose boorish husband Les, a corrupt town-councillor, was only sensually aware of Daise, and on the other hand figures such as the dead-beat Ossie and Daise's niece Meg, who have recognized and been fortified by Daise's great capacity for loving-kindness. White juxtaposes a section on Meg's sadly superficial parents, Myrtle and Les Hogben, with one on the vitally alive Whalleys, the neighbours who so shock their pretensions and pretences. He follows a section on citizens such as the Hogbens and the like-minded Lasts, imprisoned in loveless marriages, with one on Meg and young Lum Whalley drawn to each other as they explore their private adolescent fantasies. The method affords mobility and speed. Implicit ironies and poignancies are made swiftly and variously clear, and eventually White is ready to resurrect Daise in a section to which I now devote closer attention.

It embodies in microcosm a dynamic and fluid illustration of the idea developed in the story as a whole. White darts from description to comment, from one character to another, from irony to admiration, from one kind of narrative voice or tone to another—whether satiric, compassionate, or philosophical—working always in sentences free in syntax and often fragmentary in form. He begins the scene by the graveside thus: “Even if their rage, grief, contempt, boredom, apathy, and sense of injustice had not occupied the mourners, it is doubtful whether they would have realized the dead woman was standing amongst them.”¹ The sentence is part of the frankly omniscient manner that allows him from time to time to distance his people: even Daise is for him at this point so treated; she is “the dead woman”. He then touches briefly, sceptically, on the religious notion of resurrection which he soon uses figuratively. “The risen dead—that was something which happened, or didn't happen, in the Bible”. And this is immediately followed by the ironic: “Fanfares of light did not blare for a loose woman in floral cotton.”—with its quick synaesthetic linking of the sublime and the mundane. From these concrete images, he moves to speculation: “Those who had known her remembered her by now only fitfully in some of the wooden attitudes of life. How could they have heard, let alone believed in, her affirmation?” So to the directness of the dramatic mode: he gives voice to her spirit. “Yet Daise Morrow continued to proclaim”.

The affirmative proclamation that follows, revealing her insights and her understanding and her urgent gesture of salvation, moves us away from White's authorial conducting of the story and gives us Daise's own racy idiom.

Listen, all of you, I'm not leaving, except those who want to be left, and even those aren't so sure—they might be parting with a bit of themselves. Listen to me, all you successful no-hopers, all of you who wake in the night, jittery because something may be escaping you, or terrified to think there may never have been anything to find. Come to me, you sour women, public servants, anxious children, and old scabby, desperate men. …

It is daring of White to have risked such an explicit statement of his theme, and he makes provisions for guarding this higher-pitched rhetoric from too naked a didacticism: one is the context provided by the preceding narrative with its sharp realism and astringent ironies; another is the way this hypothetical statement—the words she might have used if she could have spoken—are characterized by Daise's own attractive humanity; a further precaution is the tempering of this passionate altruistic plea by having it include also her candid impatience; and finally White, who has had to use words to evoke his idea of a someone whose medium was not words, resumes thus: “Physically small, words had seemed too big for her. She would push back her hair in exasperation. And take refuge in acts.” We are reminded of his feeling for Miss Hare and Mrs. Godbold when he continues: “Because her feet had been planted in the earth, she would have been the last to resent its pressure now, while her always rather hoarse voice continued to exhort in borrowed syllables of dust.” And an old idiomatic dead-metaphor gains from this phrasing and this context a new force.

The exhortation switches us back to the immediacy of her own voice:

Truly, we needn't experience tortures, unless we build chambers in our minds to house instruments of hatred in. Don't you know, my darling creatures, that death isn't death, unless it's the death of love? Love should be the greatest explosion it is reasonable to expect. Which sends us whirling, spinning, creating millions of other worlds. Never destroying.

In sustaining the figurative language just noted in White's own preceding intrusion, this passage raises the pitch of her peroration one step even higher, and, as is usual at such points in his prose, the ensuing language becomes commensurately complex: able to bear the emotional intensities he seeks with it, and also able to express with clarity and force the metaphysical notion of an all-embracing, all-redeeming love, so central to this story and indeed so fundamental in most of White. “From the fresh mound which they had formed unimaginatively in the shape of her earthly body, she persisted in appealing to them.” Immediately after this he gives us on a separate line three sentences printed in the italics that have hitherto been reserved for the utterances of the clergyman as he reads the burial service. “I will comfort you. If you will let me. Do you understand?” The formal religious idea of divine succour and compassion is thus translated into the human love and understanding that the voice of the dead woman is offering to those about her.

For obvious reasons of emphasis, the fragmentary nature of the prose is continued by three similarly isolated lines. The first, in roman typeface again, gives White's rejoinder: “But nobody did, being only human.” The rancorous satire of his earlier comments on most of the spectators of Daise's life and burial is thus replaced by a new acceptance and forgiveness. He instantly underlines this by reverting to italics for another line from her in the liturgical mode: “For ever and ever. And ever.” And the next, the last, of these carefully isolated elements of prose that are introduced at this climatic stage in the narrative, shows us White rendering the story in a manner even more indirect; by taking the storytelling away from even the vocal spirit of the dead woman and by inserting a single line of scenic description that expresses the woman's benedictory words in symbolic terms which, in the immediate context, are unmistakably clear, and in the general context of the whole antecedent narrative, intensely potent: “Leaves quivered lifted in the first suggestion of a breeze.” The grammar and the lack of commas make the word “lifted” ambiguous, but both of the allowable functions of the word reinforce the same meaning: the leaves did lift and the leaves were lifted, and each interpretation continues the idea of a living, quivering energy returning to all things.

These crucial isolated lines work like verse, and White is here using the poet's device at the novelist's leisure. Or, again, they have the impact of lines delivered in a well-acted drama where the protagonist and chorus time their pauses and then break the stillness and quietness with words that reverberate portentously. They shift the discourse from the naturalistic and humorous one with its photographic snapshots of the human scene, to one concerned with abstractions, with ideas and spiritual qualities. The movement is from spectatorship to contemplation and it is achieved by means just as subtle and fluent as the move back to a note of wry affectionate irony which now follows: “So the aspirations of Daise Morrow were laid alongside her small-boned wrists, smooth thighs and pretty ankles. She surrendered at last to the formal crumbling which, it was hoped, would make an honest woman of her.” To be followed by the single quiet: “But had not altogether died.”

With which White turns from Daise to young Meg who, in her fresh faith and sensibility, has always felt awe for this woman's command of life. “Meg Hogben had never exactly succeeded in interpreting her aunt's messages, nor could she have witnessed the last moments of the burial, because the sun was dazzling her.” It is her next sentence, the final one in this whole section, which rewards the closest attention. “She did experience, however, along with a shiver of recollected joy, the down laid against her cheek, the little breeze trickling through the moist roots of her hair, as she got inside the car, and waited for whatever next.” Its principal clause, linking her with the breeze that “lifted” and “quivered” the leaves, links her too with the redeeming and energizing spirit of which White has made it symbolic; and its final clause insists on the forward-looking, hope-sustaining nature of this force by which Meg will be equipped to face with good faith her future. It is a sentence that balances finely between what is felt and thought and what is seen and heard; it shows the outward while still keeping central to our attention the inward. It demonstrates in particular terms what Daise's hypothetical exhortation can mean. The whole story, with its diversity of human types and reactions and its general ramifications is resolved into a meaningful unity by the girl's dim, excited but certain apprehending or “interpreting” of “her aunt's message”.

The interesting difference of this rhetoric is quickly seen when comparison is made with sentences from peaks of significance in the The Deadand “Barn Burning”. Here are the famous concluding words in Joyce's account of Gabriel Conroy's epiphany: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”² And here is the Faulkner sentence in which Sarty Snopes first glimpses the southern mansion that his vicious father may threaten, a sentence that moves from the boy's own words (“Hit's big as a courthouse”) to hypothetical language attributed to him and then returns to the familiar Faulknerian manner:

People whose lives are part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he no more to them than a buzzing wasp: capable of stinging for a little moment but that's all; the spell of this peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stables and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive … this, the peace and joy, ebbing for an instant as he looked again at the stiff black back, the stiff and implacable limp of the figure which was not dwarfed by the house, for the reason that it had never looked big anywhere and which now, against the serene columned back-drop, had more than ever that impervious quality of something cut ruthlessly from tin, depthless, as though, sideways to the sun, it would cast no shadow.³

As might be expected in declamatory prose, the vocabulary and diction in these passages are abstract. We find in key positions in the Joyce, “soul”, “descent”, “end”, the “living” and the “dead”, and in the given context, even the material fact of the “universe” loses most of its concreteness. Similarly, in the Faulkner, except for the strong particularity of the “wasp” and the “flames”, the really operative positions are occupied by “peace” and “dignity”—both of them repeated—and by “spell”. All the other nouns itemized are robbed of a considerable degree of their concreteness by being cast in the plural and by the emphasis thus being placed on their representative qualities: “barns”, “cribs”, “people”, “lives”. Both these writers derive a considerable rhetorical force from the connotative values of words generally renowned for being highly charged with emotional overtones. White, on the other hand, seems concerned with casual conversation even with the mundane, and he appears to take pains to qualify each of the essential abstract quantities by a phrasing that emphasizes a very concrete and physical manifestation. So: the “recollected joy” is experienced by Meg with a “shiver”; this “joy” she felt with Lum is embodied in “the down” of the adolescent's incipient beard that he laid against her cheek; “the little breeze” that, in the context of the prose, connotes the spirit of loving-kindness central to Daise's gospel, is described as “trickling through the moist roots of her hair” and is thus made part of her physical response to the boy's expression of his feelings. The rendering of this crucial incident appears almost off-hand; the more familiar agencies of rhetoric have been eschewed. The fervour is there but it is all the girl's, and it is generated without the use of the more standard devices of persuasion.

The same is true of the use of rhythm. The Joyce sentence makes immense music with its alliterative, almost fugal, account of the snowfall and moves to its conclusions with majestic solemnity. The Faulkner one is frankly hortatory, calculated to make a direct appeal to the ear; it is high in pitch and elaborate in cadence, almost frenetic in its mass appeal. The White one is by comparison designed for familiar discourse; even for subdued yarning. The seven distinct parts into which it falls have been selected by him to meet the needs of analysis and arranged for the achievement of clarity, and as each comma checks our progress through it, we ponder the various ideas it contains and those relationships among them that White offers for appreciation. These are: the whole tender question of young Meg's experience; the impact upon her of her first encounter with physical love; her dim but very relevant awareness of what her aunt's life and death may mean; her obedience to her present immediate circumstances in which parents bid her to enter a car and be driven home; and her frankly eager anticipation of her future, for which her experiences with the aunt and the boy have now prepared her. This is the rhythm not of the onward rush but of deliberation, and the impact of the whole sentence is derived not from elements in it that are intrinsic to conventional rhetoric but from the context provided by the antecedent narrative, to which it deftly makes indirect allusion and reference. The ramifications of the girl's excited awareness are all the more penetrating for having been signalled by such quiet means.

As a piece of shorter fiction, ever grateful for prose of great economy, “Down at the Dump” demonstrates the superb adroitness with which White can modulate his discourse among many functions—satiric, compassionate, speculative—and give it a dimension that is metaphysical, even religious, in its range. Only the later E. M. Forster has achieved such breadth of reference with so little overt apparatus and with such throwaway eloquence. White's dramatic modes prove his ear for the mimetic to be fully as faithful, for idioms and tones, as is Joyce's, and his technical adventurousness is every bit as bold as Faulkner's. His important difference lies in his undercutting of the strident to a point where passages that are in fact declamatory in function come through as almost laconic. His is indeed chameleon prose; or, to change the figure, experimenters in fiction during the earlier years of this century have provided him with a loom on which he now weaves a fabric of lustrous texture which is not necessarily “better” but is certainly important in its kind, for it suggests one more way in which even art that has the most manifold effects can conceal its means; and one more way in which an arresting treatment of particulars in time and place can be released from the particularity of that time and of that place.

Notes

1. All references are to the first book publication of this story in Patrick White, The Burnt Ones (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), pp. 283–314. Section occupies pp. 309–10.

2. James Joyce, Dubliners, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), p. 256.

3. The Collected Stories of William Faulkner, Vol. 3 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), p. 16.