[In this negative review of The Burnt Ones, Stilwell sharply criticizes the style of White's writing, arguing that many reviewers have overpraised his writing talent and accomplishments.]

It may seem perverse to suggest that the Australian Patrick White is among the more difficult practitioners of fiction now living and working. At first glance—and often at twentieth glance—his pages are likely to look shallow, ungainly, homemade, even simple-minded. You might suspect that, far from being masterful exploitations of language and experience, they were scribbled on rough-grained boards by a novice writer wielding a carpenter's pencil. Yet much of White's difficulty arises precisely from this unpromising “surface.” For before you can decide whether really profound matters are going forward within his work, you need a constantly reasserted act of faith to believe that such writing could be worth bothering with at all.

Once you achieve this act of faith, what then? Does Patrick White deserve, and repay, a reading in depth? I think he may, at least partially. There can be little doubt that far too many critics and reviewers have overpraised his gifts, his accomplishments. At the same time, however, there can be little doubt that his voice is incomparably the most commanding yet raised within the dialogue of Australian literature. Until recently a sort of prophet without honor in his own country, he has devoted himself, across the past fifteen years or so, to shaping a distinctive tone, an inner vision, a rugged moral fervor. His novels The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957), and Riders in the Chariot (1961) were ponderous, earnest creations, preoccupied with the largest issues of good and evil and with the sheer burden of existence. And for those who itch to rank writers there is perhaps nothing wrong with placing White beside the good lesser-lights—the Alan Patons and Brian Moores, for instance—of our day.

The present volume rakes together eleven stories, two of which grope toward novella length, completed since 1961; and many admirers of White's big novels will probably obtain from it their initial acquaintance with what he can do in shorter forms. (Although most of the pieces in The Burnt Ones—not “some of them,” as the dustjacket equivocates—have been given to Australian and English magazines, none has hitherto seen publication in the United States). The book's title represents a literal translation of the phrase hoi kaumenoi, which the Greeks euphemized to “the poor unfortunates” but which originally meant something like “those who are burned.” It makes an apt title, too; for the people in each of White's stories, as in his novels, are men and women who somehow have gotten scorched or charred by their lives, like brambles left in a blackened field.

Several of the stories are set against the backdrop of White's native Australia; others take place in Athens and the Near East, both of which he came to know as an RAF intelligence officer during World War II. What concerns him most, however, is not so much landscape as the soulscape of his characters; and at his best he can illuminate that soulscape in a particularly merciless way. To read the slighter pieces here—such as “The Evening at Sissy Kamara's,” “The Letters,” or the contrived “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight”—is rather like sipping tepid water from a broken pop bottle. The stronger stories, though, generate a kind of cumulative and hard-to-deny power. “A Cheery Soul” grotesquely inverts Flaubert's “A Simple Heart.” “Clay” presses the terrifying whole of a psychotic lifetime into twenty pages, and “Dead Roses” provides a slow, careful study of a woman's withdrawal from reality. “A Glass of Tea” explores sexuality and disaster, as do “Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover” and “Being Kind to Titina” (both replete with footnotes). And I thought “Down at the Dump” a competent seriocomic story, despite the triteness of its title and despite a sugared, ain't-everybody-wonderful ending that might cause even William Saroyan to blush.

Let me mention one aspect of White's style that distracted my respect for The Tree of Man, Voss, and Riders in the Chariot and that I found nearly intolerable throughout the present gathering of stories. It would seem immutable fact that the sovereign writers, to paraphrase Goethe, are those with whom no grammar text can possibly keep pace. Nevertheless, I don't for the life of me understand White's compulsion to litter his exposition with ugly fragments of sentences. Lumpy bits of sentences. Just chunks. Exactly similar to these. Hundreds of them. If this pidgin syntax possessed some rationale of art and truth, if it helped to hone the sledgehammer gracelessness of its author's prose, it could of course be perfectly justified. As things stand, however, I can't agree that it does. Instead, it rather reminds me of a Remedial Composition theme.