SOURCE: “An Indian Story: ‘The Twitching Colonel,’” in Patrick White: A Critical Symposium, edited by R. Shepherd & K. Singh, Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1978, pp. 28-33.

[In the following essay, Shepherd views “The Twitching Colonel,” one of White's earliest short stories, as a harbinger of themes that surface later in the author's fiction.]

I wish to look at an early short story by Patrick White, “The Twitching Colonel,” which appeared for the first (and only) time in London Mercury in 1937 two years before Happy Valley in 1939. This story is of special interest for several reasons. It is a very early piece and quite unlike anything in the early novels, though, thematically, it anticipates the whole corpus of White's fiction concerning the nature of “reality.” My present interest lies with the special oddness of this story, its aura of Indian-ness in the way it reflects something of the essential philosophy and symbolism of classical India. I personally approach White's fiction with some familiarity of India and its cultural traditions. Reading White I am always impressed by what strikes me as his similarity with a modern Indian metaphysical novelist, Raja Rao, especially in the treatment of ideas concerning illusion and reality, the psychological and physical, the spiritual and material.

“The Twitching Colonel” is indeed an Indian story rather than a story about India, not only in the way the narrative point of view centres around a goal of transcendence but also in the way many distinctly Indian symbols and intricate symbolic meanings are incorporated into the text. White creates a reality of inner and outer meanings where a veil of appearances thinly conceals a deeper and more cogent layer of reality. Technically, he employs a structural dualism representing the realities of surface and depth, and this schema serves to interconnect other dialectical fragments—ideas about good and evil, the absolute and the relative, the subsconscious and the ego, and so on.

The story's plot can be summed up in a few sentences. It is about an aged and ailing retired British army officer who looks back over his experiences of India from the distance of his London flat and old age. Like Forster's Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India the Colonel has undergone a rather remarkable conversion as a result of his Indian experience. For so long the typical army man, he is now struck by a quite different sort of awareness and one which reverses most of his former attitudes. The British mentality he now equates with ignorance and illusion, “the illusion of greatness that lies in patriotic songs, British supremacy, and the Stiff Upper Lip” (p. 604)¹. India, on the other hand, remains in his mind as something more subtly compelling and is described (perhaps in memory of Forster) as “the blue echo of recaptured thought” (p. 603). India is a state of mind or a way of seeing, corresponding with the view of Indian novelist Raja Rao that India is “an idea, a metaphysic.”² India and England lose their geographic referentials to become a part of the narrator's broader dialectic. England stands for “the effigies of … pomp” (p. 605), India for a deeper reality comparable in White's later works with the lands of Abyssinia, Ethiopia, Greece, and so on. The story merely registers this dawning realisation in the mind of the single central character, and ends when the Indian rope-trick (an Oriental version of Jacob's ladder) allows the Colonel spiritual release in a puff of fire and smoke.

This is the extent of the plot. But already in this early story White can be seen experimenting with prose-style and with narrative-technique. The tone of the narrative is quite unlike the simpler style of Happy Valley, though it shares the spikey and tough quality of The Living and the Dead (1941). White's approach in this story really bears closer resemblance to the Indianisms of Raja Rao than to his own methods in other stories. In both writers one finds the following combination of features: a structural mixture of concrete detail and spiritual abstraction, a certain mantra-like narrative voice, and a deliberate esoteric symbolism redolent of the Upanishads. Technically they correspond on further points: an ambiguous manner of story-telling such that author and persona merge in the same voice, a use of words such that ordinary meanings elude one's certain grasp and such that lexographical considerations become less important than the spirit in which the utterance is made, and a use of formal elements to emphasise the connections between ideas.

In “The Twitching Colonel” the Indian notion of Maya is shown to be the key to man's dualist dilemma, and hence the answer to the question about the nature of reality central in White's fiction. All of White's stories centre around this same problem, the apparent dualism between mind and body, spirit and matter. The physical world and bodily existence is a facade which must be pierced by the deeper mind in order to arrive at a better understanding.

Only in dissolution is salvation from illusion, in dream perhaps that is shadow of death, or decomposition of substance, the frail symbol of reality which man clutches, holding himself by the throat, strangling himself through fear while denying suicide, that is man, this is also Maya, this imperfection that is man denying his shadow as day lengthens, as mind is restless with striving yet afraid of sleep.

(p. 607)

The meaning of this passage relies on a number of special assumptions: that all physical life is illusion or Maya, that man's physical nature is imperfect and that it would deny its deeper self and yet remain afraid and uncertain, that sleep is virtually synonymous with the deeper reality which man fears to recognise, that dissolution of the flesh is the only way past the flesh. These assumptions, some of which are familiar to Christianity, belong to a Hindu view of the world which says that the world does not really exist, only appears to. Man's job in life is therefore to acquire the penetration necessary to understand this particular point of view.

The mental world of Colonel Trevellick during the last days of his life hovers at this threshhold. The story's impetus springs from White's ability to play ambivalently at separate levels with the symbols of surface and depth, illusion and reality. The only “event” in the story is the house-fire towards the end. But as so often in White's stories, an “event” stands somewhat uncertainly in terms of any actual temporal and spatial context. That the fire is an actual occurrence is suggested by further circumstantial detail: the fire-alarms, the smoke, the crowd of sightseers watching from below. But White thickens his textures and complicates the shapes on his canvas by the intermingling of a different sort of imagery, an Indian imagery of Hindu conjurers, rope-tricks, ceremonial elephants, and illusory facades. The result is a sort of psycho-expressionism where fragments of the real and the unreal, the actual and the imagined, fuse together in a state of psychic trance. This is the point of psychic break-through celebrated by Hindus and surrealists alike:

The smoke suspends curtains of revealing gauze but not suspense of faces demanding explanation, the whiteness and fear of upturned faces that do not realize realization in smoke, only pavement, stone, the feet planted in custom that cannot accept coralline trees whose branches substanceless, and sometimes deceptive, the deceptive hands of the Hindu producing doves from the air, and the white doves and the white faces flicker with surprise. But beyond the gauze the world is memory and non-existent, no obelisk to regret, no memorial to Trevellick, as climbing rope to window opens, I am climbing rope or smoke and the flame smiles with the warmth of smiles that welcome, no longer the half-guessed significance of smiles, of wave, of rope, of the brown eye of jewelled elephants, as slipping effortless and without elegy the world dissolves. …

(p. 609)

The story ends thus with the Colonel's disappearance in fire and smoke, a fire as real and unreal as the other fires in The Aunt's Story (1948) and The Tree of Man (1955). In this story the fire becomes an apocalyptic symbol of release, a metaphor illustrating a particular idea. The connection between inner and outer meanings is made explicit in a further metaphor describing the significance of the fire to the Colonel and to mankind more generally: “… this is what we have lived for, to lose control, secretly longing to toss a match into our desires” (p. 608). White celebrates the vitality of the soul trapped within the human flesh, which translated into an Indian context becomes a recognition of one's inner essential nature. He celebrates also the lone individual, the person who seeks a personal solution to the problem of living within an inert society.

Apart from its Indian-ness “The Twitching Colonel” anticipates another curious though characteristic feature of White's later writing. I have discussed one kind of ambivalence which tends to undermine the reader's certainty regarding the actuality of an event. There are further ambivalences, however, which cumulatively point towards ambiguity. For example, we are often uncertain how to distinguish between authorial and other voices in his fiction. It is extraordinarily difficult at times to pin White down to a single authorial position or to a single voice. The whole problem of uncertainty is compounded by White's linguistic obliqueness, by the way he will use verbal texture like a belly-dancer's veil to reveal and conceal at one and the same time. His further penchant for certain devices—such as the use of “perhaps,” or his disregard for the punctuation which conventionally distinguishes oratio recta from obliqua—permit his stories to drift free of referential moorings on a symbolic Jungian surface.

In “The Twitching Colonel” White ambiguously associates with, and dissociates from, the Colonel depending whether the world is regarded through the Colonel's or the author's eyes. Moreover, the Colonel's mystic vision is ironically undercut by the story's structural organisation. I have described the way “actual” and “imaginative” realities merge together in Colonel Trevellick's mind. This transcendent moment is given a lighter touch by the comic interruptions of the Colonel's landlady, Mrs. Whale. His exotic dream of brown faces, rope-acts, ceremonial elephants, and the like is pierced by the staccato crudity of Mrs. Whale's voice: “Those niggers … [are] not to be trusted an inch, they'd stick a knife in your back like winking” (p. 606). The total effect here is ludicrous; any overt affirmation of metaphysical idealism is qualified by the landlady's insistent banalities. Generally speaking, the central characters in White's stories are immune from the author's own satiric thrusts, but not always. Although we do not get to know the Colonel very well there is something Falstaffian in the mixture of serious and comic elements which make up his character. But this comparison is not quite accurate either, since the unique blend here is a blend of comedy and of metaphysics which is rather un-Shakespearean. White is fond of giving surprises, and he often seems to employ a technique of unusual forms and combinations in order to catch the reader unprepared. This kind of metaphysical comedy is yet another aspect of White's characteristic eclecticism.

These matters lead me to two conclusions. Because of the way White deliberately confuses “point of view” and authorial voice with other views and voices, and because of the way metaphysical affirmation in this story is to some degree contradicted by a comic and satiric perspective, the reader is left with a feeling of uncertainty as to where precisely the author stands and what precisely his attitude is towards the circumstances of the story. And this, I believe, is a characteristic of White's writing more generally, in which most apparently overt and undisguised statements are on closer examination hedged around and qualified by some carefully assembled technical device. The seriousness of the Colonel's transcendence is in some way qualified by the other more local details involving his relationship with his housekeeper, though qualified in a way which is not immediately obvious. There appears to be deliberate mystification in White such that whenever the author's commitment to some particular idea threatens to become too apparent he will deliberately resort to a rhetoric of uncertainty in order to vitiate any glib conclusion. Either this is mystification for its own sake, or for art's sake; or else it is mystification for the purpose of commenting on the problems involved in human communication—that while man must continue to communicate in words which are bound by the limiting conditions of space and time human certainty must remain partly doubtful.

But I want to suggest that there remains another possible explanation for this apparent uncertainty, an explanation which follows from my discussion of White's Indian-ness in this story, and this is my second conclusion. I have called“The Twitching Colonel” a metaphysical comedy because of the unusual combination of comic and metaphysical elements. Actually, the words are not mine but were used by Raja Rao to describe the special nature of his Indian metaphysical novel The Cat and Shakespeare. This is a novel (and also species of Indian literature) in which the usual formula for comedy does not strictly apply: instead of the usual comic resolution consisting of happy ending and reinstatement of the hero, the metaphysical comedy involves a moment of supreme individual recognition and subsequent clarification from the understanding he has acquired; it also involves the supervention of some metaphysical agency in the more usual processes of cause and effect. At the end of a metaphysical comedy the world is seen in its true colours as Maya and as a game (lila). A recognition of this larger reality vitiates all worldly truths, all solemnity and all overseriousness; life in its physical and temporal context is seen to be absurd and also trivial. Most of these qualities are, I think, reflected in this early story by Patrick White. This Indian view of things helps explain the place of uncertainty in White's fiction, for not only is the world Maya but all worldly differences and distinctions are seen to be insignificant in view of a deeper undifferentiated “essence” beneath appearances. Hence at the deeper levels of his fiction author and personae, direct and indirect speech, metaphor and actuality merge together in the one essence. Nor does the “comedy” undercut the “metaphysic” in this species of writing but rather defines the specific quality of the comedy. Actually, this second conclusion and Indian explanation comes fairly close to my first conclusion regarding White's linguistic and structural mystification. From the Indian point of view all attempts to communicate with words and all attempts to arrive at certainty must result in failure, contradiction or paradox.

Life is absurd, grotesque. So the Colonel twitches. So he proceeds to disintegrate. And so, finally, he disappears in a ball of smoke, ending with neither a bang nor whimper, but rather in the spirit of absurdist drama, with a sound more like the well-known raspberry.

Notes

1. The London Mercury, 35, 210, April 1937, pp. 602-609. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

2. Raja Rao, The Serpent and the Rope (London: John Murray, 1960), p. 380.

Brian Kiernan (excerpt date 1980)

SOURCE: “The 1960s,” in Patrick White, The Macmillan Press, 1980, pp. 83-7.

[In the following excerpt, Kiernan observes that The Burnt Ones is marked by abrupt contrasts in setting, mode, and tone among the stories in the collection.]

Although it is as a novelist that Patrick White has established his reputation, his shorter fiction and drama have their own intrinsic merits, as well as interest in relation to his novels. The stories and plays written in the period framed by Riders in the Chariot and The Solid Mandala can surprise the reader, by revealing unexpected attitudes and departures from what for many came to be seen as the ‘typical’ characteristics of White's work. The range of modes and moods in the stories and plays suggest an element of self-conscious literary play that needs to be balanced against presumptions of too direct an expression of the writer's attitudes, or his presentation of rigidly pre-conceived ideas, in the novels.

In 1964, short stories which had appeared in Australian and English magazines over the previous couple of years were collected, with two previously unpublished stories, under the title The Burnt Ones. The ‘burnt ones’ refers, though ironically on occasions, to those who are seen in each story as having encountered life in its vital and ambiguous manifestations. This theme common to the stories, of the natural life of the instincts and the imagination breaking through the repressive social surface, runs throughout the novels also. Yet, what is most immediately apparent with The Burnt Ones is not the thematic connection, but the abrupt contrasts in setting, mode and tone between the stories. The most obvious division is between those with Australian settings, in which a range of satiric tones predominate, and others set in Greece which with a virtuoso flourish, suggest an intimate acquaintance with the complexities and subtleties of another culture. Formally, the stories range from a one-act comedy, ‘Willy Wagtails by Moonlight’, or a revue sketch, ‘Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover’, which although presented fictionally could be readily translated to the stage, to extended psychological studies like ‘Dead Roses’ or ‘The Evening at Sissy Kamaras'. These latter enable the reader to observe how, in the more extended forms of his novels, White works through similarly compressed sequences of scenes, and, as here, equips each character with a complete personality, or psychology, of his own through vivid and symbolic details from his past. One story, ‘A Glass of Tea’ adopts the conventions of the nineteenth century tale, the story of a story one character tells another, replete with mysterious possibilities and a surprise revelation at the end. Another, ‘Clay’ is a surreal fable, a parody of the sensitive biographical study of the imaginative youth at odds with his society.

‘Clay’ anticipates a more general shift in the contemporary short story, away from realistic fictions towards fantasy, parody and elliptical fable, and the exploitation of possibilities for imaginative and linguistic play. Critical agreement seems to be that White is at his best in the short story form in his longer pieces, which approach novella length, because, in these his ability to create characters finds room to display itself. Yet there is something circular about the expression of this preference. The critics prefer the stories which most nearly approach the novels because they really prefer the novels, and their no longer tenable conception of ‘the short story form’ is of conventional novels in miniature. ‘Clay’ plays zanily with the conventions of the Bildungsroman, or story of the development of a sensitive and imaginative young man (in this respect it seems a first sketch of the ‘Waldo’ section in The Solid Mandala) and with the language and habits of the society he is at odds with. For Clay is imaginative, in a way that parodies the seers in White's novels: ‘He did, in fact, wonder a great deal, particularly while picking the bark off trees, or stripping a flower down to its core of mystery’ and he is fascinated by his mother's wedding shoe: ‘Sometimes its great boat would float out from the shore of frozen time into the waters of his imagination, rocking his cargo of almost transparent thoughts’ (p. 115). In the context of his inner fantasy life, the social satiric observations have their own surreality, as when his mother has his hair shorn by the barber to cure Clay of speaking nonsense (at the time the story was written a belief in the moral efficaciousness of short hair was general in the community). The linguistic parodies of his mother's speech, or the officialese in the letter from a family acquaintance who finds Clay a Public Service job, are wildly funny. Yet the direction, and point, of the story might very well worry the reader, as surely it is meant to. The heavily Oedipal ‘clues’ to Clay's bizarre and grotesque fantasies suggest, falsely, a key to the absurdity; and the conventional expectation that Clay, the seer, will provide a revelation in his final moments of madness leads only to the ‘moral’ that ‘everyone knows that what isn't isn't, even when it is’ (p. 135). It is a story that plays with, and against, expectations and deliberately cultivates a disorienting uncertainty in the reader.

Although the view that the longer and psychologically realistic stories are superior, and represent better White's characteristics as a novelist is open to question, it would be difficult to dispute the general agreement that the long concluding story ‘Down at the Dump’ is the most memorable in the collection. The funeral of Sarsaparilla's loose woman brings together a range of characters, some exhibiting grief, others relief, others again indifference. It shows how the venial sins of pride in respectability and hypocrisy are more destructive of life than the ‘mortal’ sin of sexual licence, and how the natural and instinctual processes of life are denied by social existence, which attempts to regulate these forces and impose its own false or inessential needs in place of what is vital and spontaneous. It is, though, the comic presentation of this romantic theme, the mingling of farce and pathos with the funeral, the satire of suburban respectability, and the sub-plot of life renewing itself down at the dump, amid ‘the bags and iron’ of Australian life that give the story its rich tonal effect. It opens at the Whalleys' place, where ‘easy was policy’ (p. 285), with Mrs Whalley's wood chopping interrupted by her husband's suggestion that they ‘pick up a coupla cold bottles' (p. 286) and spend the Sunday morning at the Sarsaparilla dump, fossicking. The Whalleys with their tumbledown weatherboard house, and old utility for fossicking on the dumps (but a Customline on hire purchase), with their concern for sensual satisfactions but disregard for respectability contrast with their neighbours opposite, the Hogbens. Mum Whalley is a variation on a stereotype that turns up frequently in the novels and plays, the ‘essential woman’ untrammelled by social conventions and possessions, a passionate earth mother, except that she has not always had children as she has wanted. Mum Whalley has, however, and all her kids ‘had inherited their mother's colour, and when they stood together, golden-skinned, tossing back their unmanageable hair, you would have said a mob of taffy brumbies’ (p. 289). In contrast with this image of natural vitality the life of the Hogbens is controlled, and denied, by material possessions ‘the liver-coloured brick home … the washing machine, the septic, the TV, and the cream Holden Special’ (p. 291).

The social gulf between the Whalleys and the Hogbens is bridged by their children Lum and Meg who, while the funeral is in progress, meet and are innocently attracted to each other in the dump next to the cemetery (which is only another kind of dump). Both feel the call of life and imagine a shared future, in which they rush together through the night in a semi-trailer. Meg dreams of her few possessions, including the pad on which she would write a poem if they ever stopped, and Lum of swaggering back to the cabin at a service station to take possession of his property. Between their shared but separate day dreams, are old Ossie Coogan's memories at the funeral of Daise Morrow having taken him into her bed:

Then the lad Ossie Coogan rode again down from the mountain, the sound of the snaffle in the blue air, the smell of sweat from under the saddle-cloth, towards the great, flowing river. He rocked and flowed with the motion of the strong, never-ending river, burying his mouth in brown cool water, to drown would have been worth it.

(p. 304)

The story opens to reveal these dreams, memories and desires—the world of the imagination. Ossie is the burnt one in this story, the one who experiences suffering. He is the only one to cry at Daise's funeral, much to Councillor Hogben's embarrassed disgust at his behaviour, and his relationship with his sister-in-law. Ossie's memories of youth, virility and movement meet Lum and Meg's sexual dreams, which promise that life will go on, that the new generation will escape mere social existence, at least temporarily. The story ends on an open note as the Hogbens and the Whalleys, children included, drive off in their different directions, and driving becomes an image of the continuity and restless energy of life for Lum and Meg.

The warm core of certainty settled stiller as driving faster the wind paid out the telephone wires the fences the flattened heads of grey grass always raising themselves again again again.

(p. 316)

Brian Kiernan (excerpt date 1980)

SOURCE: “The 1970s,” in Patrick White, The Macmillan Press, 1980, pp. 123-24.

[In the following excerpt, Kiernan shows that the short stories in The Cockatoos mimic the “satiric charicature” and the “poetic intensity” of White's novel Riders in the Chariot as well as the author's work during the 1960s.]

A second collection of stories, The Cockatoos, appeared in 1974. Some of the six ‘Short Novels and Stories’ it contained had appeared in periodicals and anthologies as far back as 1966 and, overall, the tone of the collection harmonises more closely with White's work of the sixties than with that of the previous decade. All but one of the stories have Australian settings, or characters, and the shifts in them from satiric caricature to poetic intensity recall something of the strained combination of modes in Riders in the Chariot. As in The Burnt Ones there is a pervasive theme of the frustration of lonely lives within bourgeois society, and especially within the institution of marriage, yet there is less here of the spirit of playfulness that marked the earlier collection. The pattern of sexual passion erupting into drab, repressed lives in story after story seems too neat, the attitude towards the characters too insistently ironic for the wit and the play with various modes to dispel an impression that these stories are schematic and lacking in the complicating dramatic qualification of the novels.

In ‘A Woman's Hand’, the longest story or ‘short novel’, Evelyn Fazackley's meddlesome matchmaking leads to the marriage of two of her self-sufficient acquaintances, but shortly afterwards to the death of one and the mental collapse of the other. ‘The Night the Prowler’, in which a disappointed rape victim of stockbroker respectability and a dominating mother, sets about raping society in revenge for her repressed upbringing, and discovers the true nature of life, both sordid and vital, on the other side of the Park railings, begins as satiric farce and wildly Freudian fantasy but ends in absurdist solemnity. In ‘Sicilian Vespers’, the wife of an Australian doctor holidaying in Sicily, a situation which allows for an amusing play with the comedy of manners, is disturbed by a confusion of sexual and religious impulses in an ancient basilica. Finally, in the title story, as in The Season at Sarsaparilla, the deadening routines of suburban life are disturbed by the intrusion of natural energies, this time none too thinly disguised as native birds.

The sense of a somewhat schematic presentation of already familiar assumptions about ‘Life’ and society's withdrawal from it would seem to confirm judgements that White, as essentially a novelist, needs an ampler form in which to develop characters and situations. This would be plausible were it not that the two shortest pieces, indisputably short stories, are the most memorable in the collection. ‘Five-Twenty’ in which an elderly couple retired from the country sit outside their suburban house to watch the peak hour traffic on the Parramatta Road, until death and repressed sexuality destroy them surreally, is a disturbing reverberant black comedy untouched by the tendentiousness apparent in the longer stories. The only story in this collection set in Greece, and also the shortest, relates indirectly to the common theme of conflict between the banality, even sordidity of existence and the revelation of transcendent life. During the German occupation, the adolescent Costa who aspires to be a concert pianist discovers how much his higher faculties are at the mercy of his primitive drives. The extremes recognised here in ‘The Full Belly’, and convincingly established through character and situation, seem however to be forced into the satiric Australian settings of the longer stories, with the result that there is not the ‘middle range’ of experience offered in the novels that appeared immediately before and after this collection.