[In the following essay, Beston asserts that the short story form “does not offer White the space he needs for his greatest strength,” which is the portrayal of his characters' fantasies.]

In The Cockatoos, Patrick White's latest collection of stories, there are only six stories against the eleven in The Burnt Ones (1964), his last collection. Two of the stories are of novella length (“A Woman's Hand” and “Sicilian Vespers”), and another two could also be considered novellas (“The Night the Prowler” and “The Cockatoos”). Nevertheless, White's concept of the novella is no different from his concept of the short story, so that one can validly refer to all the stories as short stories.

The short story as a form does not offer White the space he needs for his greatest strength, the portrayal of a character's fantasy. It is in her fantasies that Theodora Goodman comes most to life in his masterpiece, The Aunt's Story; to White, a character's fantasies represent his most real and vital self. But in order that the reader can interpret the significance of a fantasy, the author has to provide a background of fact and experience from which the character's fantasy can emerge. Even in a full length novel like The Aunt's Story, White is normally sparing with this background; and in these short stories he is too sparing entirely. In “Sicilian Vespers,” for instance, we know only enough of Ivy Simpson's relationship with her father to understand her general makeup, not enough to interpret her dream or fantasy life. Likewise, we see Felicity in “The Night the Prowler” acting out vandalizing fantasies in what we can recognize as angry retaliation against restrictive and asexual parents; but White fails to differentiate these parents from the parents of other characters whose reaction is less extreme. We remain aghast at the bizarreness of Felicity's behavior rather than saddened by its inevitability. Except in the title story, “The Cockatoos,” White is too eager to leap into the fantasy life of his characters, failing to lay the foundation that would explain how the fantasies originate and what they tell us of the inner life of the character.

For some reason, the short story brings out all that is most negative in White's thinking. There are, for instance, no illuminates in these short stories—and the illuminates of the novels represent his major concession to positive thinking. One would have to describe The Cockatoos as a negative collection. The main themes that run through the stories are the sterility of marriage, the lack of communication between people, and the vindication of aloneness. White does appear to be making his point especially of Australian marriages and of the Australian inability to relate to other people (he opposes the Shacklocks to the Simpsons in “Sicilian Vespers” to the Americans' credit), but he is not exempting other countries from his sweep.

All the marriages portrayed in this collection are sterile. Most of them are childless; the two couples with a child, the Bannisters in “The Night the Prowler” and the Goodenoughs in “The Cockatoos,” are no less sterile than the childless couples. In fact, as a result of their own problems, they destroy their child's hope of a healthy adulthood.

The marriages cover a range of social classes, from lower middle class (the Natwicks in “Five-Twenty”) to professional (the Simpsons in “Sicilian Vespers”). The Goodenoughs and the Davorens in “The Cockatoos” fall somewhere in between. White makes some very acute, if malicious observations on the kinds of behavior that are characteristic of couples at the various social levels. Against the Natwicks, fairly average Australians, he directs a satiric scorn: their lives are filled with consumer goods and the contemplation of life at one remove, the traffic that crowds Parramatta Road in Sydney. In accordance with her social class, Ella Natwick spends her life within the four walls of her house, leaving it only to shop. She is sexually frigid, but compensates by strange fantasies, involving some aspect of rape or murder. Ivy Simpson is married to a doctor, but differs from Ella more in degree than in kind. Ivy is less afraid of social contacts than Ella, but her dealings with people are hardly expansive. Her social and economic class enables her to deal with people at a first meeting, but she shrinks from a second, which demands more from her than the superficialities she has exchanged at the first meeting. She is terrified when she meets the Shacklocks at the elevator on the day after she has made an outing with them.

All the marriages in these stories are shown as asexual. White implies strongly that sex has become an embarrassment for the couples and so is either abandoned or is a ritual exercise to be performed at prescribed intervals (every two weeks for the Simpsons). The most “successful” marriages depicted are those in which the couple are able to maintain the illusion of being good friends, to cover the essential emptiness of their relationship. In fact they do not communicate with one another in any meaningful way. Even the accumulation of shared experiences over the years does not bring them any closer together.

White has never presented marriage favorably. His most detailed study of a marriage, that of Stan and Amy Parker in The Tree of Man, shows the relationship as a deteriorating one: conversation becomes an exchange of question and answer, and habit comes to substitute for love. In the marriages portrayed in The Cockatoos, the people simply do not communicate with one another. At the most literal level, that is true in the title story of the Davorens, who communicate only by writing on a pad of paper. But it is true also of the Goodenoughs in the same story, who do at least speak to one another. When young Tim Goodenough overhears his parents discussing the Davorens, he is not surprised:

“Lots of people don't speak,” said the boy. …

“I never heard of anybody, Tim. Not when they live together.” The mother was more concerned about the contents of her pan.

“Lots,” said Tim. “They speak, but don't say.”

It is by portraying the lives of a small community, a street in a Sydney suburb, that White presents his most depressing picture since Happy Valley of Australians' inability to relate to others and their lack of any community sense. The characters in “The Cockatoos” are alone and resent any effort to make them less alone. Clyde Goodenough's door knock for the Heart Foundation is his substitute for neighborliness and community spirit (while also enabling him to pry a little into lives otherwise closed to him), but after the patter that accompanies his extraction of a donation, he is quick to make his getaway before the conversation can make any personal demands. Two women of the neighborhood, Miss Le Cornu and Mrs. Davoren, undergo a deeply moving experience together, but retreat from it into their isolation. When next they meet,

“Lovely day, Mrs. Davoren,” Miss Le Cornu said; after all, why not celebrate the fact that you are neighbours? Mrs. Davoren admitted that it was, indeed, a lovely day. To meet Miss Le Cornu in the flesh as opposed to conversing together in her thoughts was unnerving Mrs. Davoren. She had often thought that if she did come face to face with Her she would introduce the subject of music, and now this idea came into her head, but fortunately she saved herself in time.

“It'll warm up later, though.” Mrs. Davoren was quite firm about it. …

“Well,” Mrs. Davoren said, “I'm off to the city. Thought I'd start early. Walk. Look round the shops while they're still empty. …”

“Have a good time,” Miss Le Cornu recommended.

Mrs. Davoren left on accepting this advice.

Likewise, when the Fazackerleys in “A Woman's Hand” meet an old friend after some years, they stop and talk, but at their departure, no one bothers to exchange addresses.

For the most part, the stories in this collection are conceived in a lack of compassion for the characters and narrated in a tone of derision. The derision appears in the names of the characters (Fazackerley, Nesta Pine, Natwick, Goodenough), the jabs at aspects of Australian life (the unimaginative cooking, the lavender Kleenex, and Onkaparinka blankets), and a certain enjoyment of the characters' distress. As said, White is more negative in his short stories than in his novels. “The Night the Prowler,” for instance, recounts a situation very similar to the Sidney Furlow story in Happy Valley, but with a stress on negative aspects. Felicity is angrier and more violent than Sidney Furlow, thereby deflecting our sympathy; her parents are more ludicrous than Sidney's; her fiancé is more ineffectual than Sidney's suitor; and her would be rapist is pathetic against Sidney's would-be lover Clem Hagan. “Five-Twenty,” too, recounts a situation similar to the Leo episode in The Tree of Man, again given a negative twist. Whereas Amy's meeting with Leo represents a pathetic attempt to experience romantic passion, Ella's encounter with the man in the Holden grows into a disburbing fantasy.

Although few of these short stories are outstanding as examples of their genre, some are important in throwing light on aspects of White's novels. “Five-Twenty,” for instance, through its references to the cinerarias growing in the shade of the house gives the clue needed to interpret the fuchsias around the house in The Tree of Man. The color range of cinerarias and fuchsias is the same: both have the colors of flesh with blood pulsing beneath the skin. Fuchsias and cinerarias alike, growing in the shade, would appear to stand for a repressed sexuality. And the conversation between Evelyn Fazackerley and Clem Dowson in the Egyptian Delta (“A Woman's Hand”) makes clearer the emotional implications of the similar scene between Laura and Voss in the Bonners' garden. Both conversations show a woman essentially violating a man's soul in an effort to gain ascendancy over him. This point is especially important for Voss, since the Voss-Laura relationship is often mistakenly read as a kind of spiritual love affair.

The best story in the collection, and White's best short story altogether, is the title story, “The Cockatoos.” The elements of derision in the other stories are softened here by the sympathetic portrait of the boy Tim, the potential artist. In general White's sympathy flows most freely for the artist child born of sterile or destructive parents. The story is further lightened by the poetic symbol of the cockatoos, representing such things as freedom and aspiration, pride of sexuality, and a sense of togetherness.

The advent of the band of cockatoos in the lives of the non-communicating community serves as a reminder to them of what their lives could contain, and so evokes strong reactions in them for or against the cockatoos. It is naturally the undertaker who is most opposed to the cockatoos; the note-writing Davorens on the other hand are brought into verbal communication again by the presence of the cockatoos. For young Tim the cockatoos represent the world of adulthood in its finest promise, a world however that his own experiences and observations make appear increasingly warped and restricted. After his night spent in the park opposite, a sort of puberty rite, he comes upon a crippled old cockatoo, which he kills and scalps (circumcises?) in a symbolic angry rejection of the adult world that he will never accept. The story has similarities to the 1970 English movie Kes, which also treats the possibility of a boy's growth to an expanding adulthood, frustrated by the killing of his kestrel.

This most recent work by Australia's most distinguished prose writer is a strong anti-marriage tract. Australia's most distinguished poet, Judith Wright, reaches her greatest heights when she sings of love and marriage. How ironical that Patrick White and Judith Wright are distantly related—by marriage!