SOURCE: “‘Down at the Dump’ And Lacan's Mirror Stage,” in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, October, 1983, pp. 233-37.

[In the following essay, Brady praises White's story “Down at the Dump,” calling it one of the author's most interesting stories “for the insight it offers into people and society.”]

‘Down at the Dump’ is one of White's most interesting stories, not merely for the insight it offers into people and society but also for the structures underlying it, structures which deepen our understanding not only of White and his art but also of his relations with his culture as a whole.

By now, of course, it is a truism to say that White's art is not mimetic, not concerned to reproduce surface appearances, but expressive, concerned with inwardness, with the writer's sense of himself and the world. This story, like nearly all of his work, relates primarily to psychic archetypes and only secondarily to social realities. But it is also an attempt at self-portraiture, at putting on stage ‘the cast of contradictory characters of which I am composed’.¹ Paradoxically this attempt leads beyond the self. As in psychoanalysis the psyche becomes a myth among myths, part of a fully fledged mythology, and the need to become aware of one's situation in inner space leads to a reorientation in the outer world. Whatever might be the case elsewhere, as far as Australian culture is concerned, this makes White something of a radical. Not only does his work attack the accepted paradigms of behaviour; more disturbingly, he implies that the ego is not an adaptive or synthesizing power but something that rises up and interrogates these paradigms in general and, most disturbingly, language in particular. ‘Down at the Dump’ calls for a transfer of allegiance from the comfortable commonsense world of Mrs Hogben to that of Daise, which is both disreputable and occult. The goal of this story, like most of his novels, is thus something out of this world to the extent that it exceeds the current boundaries of social discourse and points to what ‘you do not know, but know’. Unlike most of his novels, however, this story is presented in such a way that it becomes clear that this knowledge is not transcendent, much less mystical, but is in effect knowledge of an aspect of the self in a particular stage, Lacan's ‘mirror stage’ in which the developing self longs for a permanent image of the equivalent of what it sees in a mirror.

This becomes evident in the first place from a consideration of the story's structure, a series of binary oppositions between characters and situations. The two sisters, Daise and Mrs Hogben are antithetically opposed. Mrs Hogben reflects on the difference:

It was Daise who had said: I'm going to enjoy the good things of life—and died in that pikey little hut, with only a cotton frock to her back. While [she] had the liver-coloured brick home—not a single dampmark on the ceiling—she had the washing machine, the septic, the TV, and the cream Holden Special, not to forget her husband, Les Hogben, the councillor. A builder into the bargain.

(p. 291)

Mrs Hogben puts her trust in things and fears everything that she is unable to possess. Hence she is always busy, ‘bunched up tight’ protecting herself from thought and feeling. Daise is the opposite, abundant, sensuous, and life-giving, prodigal of herself and of the little she owns.

Mrs Hogben is also contrasted with her daughter Meg who is drawn to the warmth and spontaneity of her aunt, and with Ossie Coogan, the ‘deadbeat’, who disgusts her but whom Daise has loved and comforted. The final and perhaps overriding contrast is between Mrs Hogben and the Whalleys, vulgar but disreputably vital. In contrast with these antipathies, there is also a system of sympathies, between Daise and Ossie, Meg and Lum, Mr and Mrs Whalley and, to a lesser extent, between Daise and Harrie Last, Mr Hogben's friend, and Daise and Mr Hogben himself.

From this analysis it is clear that Daise and Mrs Hogben constitute the modal points, the centre of attraction on the one hand and repulsion on the other, of reconciliation and antagonism, and of centripetal and centrifugal movement. This binary system is continued in the spatial antithesis between body (associated with the gross and disgusting) and spirit (associated with flow and light and freedom) but most of all between the dump and the cemetery, the opposition which provides the key to the story. According to Lacan,² the formation of the ego is often symbolized in dreams by a fortress or stadium surrounded on the one hand by marshes or lawns, places where everything is smooth and ordered—as the cemetery is in White's story—, and on the other by rubbish tips where nature is in decay. The self must not merely pass between but also contest these two opposed areas in its quest for the lofty, remote inner fastness. This quest not only engages the young people, Meg and Lum in this story but, implicitly White himself. Flaws in the Glass opens with the image of the fourteen year old boy gazing at his reflection in the mirror. The failure of maternal love leaves a Narcissistic wound, the sense of mourning which prevails in ‘Down at the Dump’, and elsewhere in White's work of course. In this sense, the figure of Ossie Coogan may therefore be closest to the story's origin. Expelled prematurely from the womb and weak and vulnerable ever since, he ‘finds’ himself only in Daise's 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 cool brown water, to drown would have been worth it.

(p. 304)

While the mirror stage in the formation of the self, arising between six and eighteen months when the child, still lacking motor coordination, begins to perceive an image of itself, anticipates future mastery, the mirror stage can also be a permanent state. Then, as here with Ossie, personal identity comes to depend on maintaining a dialogue between the self and its reflection, its desired image.

But it is in the image of Daise, however, that one senses the author leaning forward most strongly, holding in his gaze not an image of weakness (as in the creation of Ossie) but of triumphant unity and then, jubilantly, assuming this image. The illusion of verisimilitude, strained anyway in the exaggerations of character and their presentation, gives way as the story draws to its conclusion and Daise returns from the dead, a suburban and feminine Christ figure calling to the ‘sour woman, public servants, anxious children and old, scabby desperate men’ (p. 311) with a message of love and comfort, countering all that Mrs Hogben stands for in her refusal to assume the armour of a social identity that is alienating, destructive to self and to others:

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.

(p. 311)

The beatitude she speaks of here leaves behind the question of identity. Instead, with her creator she is absorbed into the presence of the holy, some state forbidden to profane experience. As the pressure on the language suggests, this is a state difficult, if not impossible, to put into words; Narcissus has drowned in the pool of self-reflection, has withdrawn from the world of common experience and therefore of language. The omniscient narrator is the only one who sees Daise and hears what she is saying:

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. The risen dead—that was something which happened, or didn't happen, in the Bible. Fanfares of light didn't blare for a loose woman in floral cotton. 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?

(p. 311)

Her message is not merely threatening to people like Mrs Hogben, custodian of commonsense and common morals, to them it is also wicked. Yet Meg, Mrs Hogben's daughter, begins to understand. Even though she had never exactly succeeded in interpreting her aunt's message, she is stirred by something she senses at this moment in herself and in the natural world:

She did experience, however, along with a shiver of recollected joy, the down [of Lum's face] laid against her cheek, a little breeze trickling through the moist roots of her hair, as she got inside the car, and waited for whatever next.

(p. 312)

In Daise's words about love, she has glimpsed an image of her own possibility, an image that is both formative and erogenic. So the story concludes with a promise that she and Lum are moving in the direction in which Daise's life has pointed them, the mysterious renewal of life figured in ‘the flattened heads of grey grass always raising themselves again again again’ (p. 316). Providing for them an image of completeness, Daise has made it possible to grow beyond the limits imposed on them by society and family.³

In contrast, Mr and Mrs Hogben and Horrie Last, to a greater or lesser extent, find Daise a threatening figure, since she reminds them of the self that might have been and of their failure to recognize it, their misconstruction of reality.⁴ Thus as the story concludes they seem condemned to perpetual restless movement—in contrast with Lum and Meg settled in a ‘warm core of certainty’ (p. 316): ‘driving and driving, in long, lovely bursts, and at the corners, in semi-circular swirls’ (p. 314). They represent mere desire, not appetite but hunger in Marx's sense which is the product of inner need rather than of longing for something outside the self and is thus forever insatiable and eccentric. They drive for the sake of driving, self-enclosed unable to make contact with anyone or anything else, whereas Meg's existence is dialectical:

The landscape leaped lovingly … she could have translated any message into the language of peace … the wooden houses stuck beside the road, the trunks of willows standing round the brown saucer of a dam. Her too candid, grey eyes seemed to have deepened, as though to accommodate all she still had to see, feel.

(p. 315)

The Whalleys, also ‘driving … driving’, are different again, aware at least of their bodiliness and delighting in it but aware of little else. In them, the antithesis between body and spirit, dump and cemetery, reveals its significance. As Lacan points out, the ego which constitutes itself as a unity in fact constantly needs to defend that unity, swinging between two affective poles of jubilance and paranoia. The Whalleys exemplify this swing, now exulting in their bodies, now quarrelling with them, aggressively on defence against a society they affect to ignore. ‘Mucking around’ in the dump, the place where nature shows its power in decay,⁵ they are in effect laying claim to an image of themselves unified with nature—in contrast to the Hogbens who belong in the smooth abstractions of the cemetery. But, the story suggests, this unity is not theirs, nature is in control, not they. So the last image we see of them is discontented, Mrs Whalley is grumbling, ostensibly at Lum but actually at her existence:

It was not strictly Lum, not if you was honest. It was nothing. Or everything. The grog. You was never ever gunna touch it no more. Until you did, and that bloody Lummy, what with the Caesar and all, you was never ever going again with a man.

(p. 314)

Normally this rivalry between the two sides of the self is controlled and diminished by the introduction of a third regulatory term, a socially assumed image of the self. But this the Whalleys are unable to achieve, while, at the other extreme, the Hogbens remain imprisoned, unable to come to terms with the physical world and their own bodiliness.

In this sense the goal of unity implicit in the story remains unachieved. Daise may be a triumphant figure, but the integrity she represents is out of this world, the completion of the life in which she refused to assume a social identity, living independent of her sister and society in general. So too with Meg and Lum with whom the story ends: the ‘warm core of certainty’ they experience is as undefined as what they have seen, now know and wish ‘to cherish’ (p. 316). What is implied here is either sentimental, ‘working off in words and feelings [they] haven't really got’ (D. H. Lawrence) or cannot be believed to have or, what is worse in the terms the story sets up, social—that is, that they will one day marry and live happily ever after. This inability in White to ground his ideal in social reality points to the crucial problem, the sense of defilement, the nauseating and nauseated consciousness of physical and social reality evident here in the descriptions of sagging bodies, decaying teeth, ‘liver coloured’ houses, smelling sinks, rubbish dumps and so on. Meg's relationship with Lum begins, for example, on the day ‘he threw dog poo at her’ (p. 289), and White goes on to detail her disgusted reactions, as if delighting in them. So too with descriptions of social and personal relations, which also suggest an inability to establish a connection between the self and its physical environment. The violence in the relationships between the sexes, between parents and children and between the sisters Daise and Mrs Hogben, suggests that it is impossible to trust, much less believe in social appearances or values. This distrust is intensified by the melodramatic intensity of the language which forces what might seem indifferent to take its place in what is ultimately a moral schema. Mrs Whalley's eyes are not merely blue, for example, but ‘blazing’ blue, and their attractiveness has to be qualified by the ‘something’ which happens when she smiles, ‘her mouth opening on watery sockets and the jags of brown, rotting stumps’ (p. 285). Similarly, Mrs Hogben is not merely seen as cold and superficial but punished for it, made to whimper, ‘very faintly, for everything you have to suffer, and death on top of it all’ (p. 288).

From one point of view, as Sartre argues, a nauseating consciousness of reality of this kind can be a means to freedom, protecting the self from surrendering to the immediate and contingent, pressing it to go further—as White's imagination does here in the figure of Daise and to a lesser extent, in Meg and Lum. But from another point of view, from where most readers stand, the urgent question rises: where, if anywhere, can they exist? As we have said, although Daise is meant to represent the ‘real’, existence as it should be, she does not belong in the world of commonsense and what she represents is not verifiable in its terms. More crucially, although she gives life to others, the ecstatic goal of her life is the loss of self, the undifferentiated identification with all that is which is characteristic of Eastern mysticism. Moreover this identification is with nature, with the image of ‘grass always raising itself again again again’ (p. 316) with which the story concludes, as much as with human beings. But, as the pervading images of decay insist, this endless return of the natural world mocks human beings with their desire for immortality, the desire to which White pays tribute in bringing Daise back from the dead. If nature is the equivalent to the City of God in the contemporary imagination, Mary Douglas has commented, it is a city of silence since it has no human citizenship.⁶ Elsewhere, White equates nature with the physical necessity which makes human existence tragic—unless, of course, one believes in an after life. Yet here, even though there is a suggestion of this in Daise's return, there is no real belief in immortality. The narrator may hear her promise: ‘“I will comfort you. If you will let me. Do you understand?” … Nobody [else] did, as they were only human’ (p. 311). We are left, then, with the conclusion that the transformation has not occurred, the writer has not been able to assume the image he has created.

Nonetheless, this story offers some important insights into White's project as a writer, his attempt at the reconstruction of reality which involves the expression of what ‘you do not know, but know’, an experience which is neither symbolic nor imaginary but something in between, an experience foreclosed to analytic experience, to the rational language and ordering of the culture he lives in which still relies on the promises of the Enlightenment. As I have said, the strain of this attempt is most evident in the language, in the melodramatic pressures upon it in the lexical and syntactical distortions and violations as well as in the concreteness of description—of ‘the saliva of bitterness’ (p. 291), for instance—and anthropomorphism—the Whalley's house ‘was threatening to give in to them’ ‘because they were in the bits and pieces trade’ (p. 286). Finally, the writer's uncertainty, the lack of commonality which leads to the autocratic individuality, appears even in his narrative method. The story is discontinuous, does not develop according to a logic of its own but depends on the will and intention of its teller who transfers us suddenly and without reason between the different worlds and most suddenly of all produces the figure of Daise risen from the dead. While aesthetically there may be problems with these tensions and discontinuities, they throw light on his concern as a writer not so much with things as they are but as they may be, what James calls the ‘possible other case’.

Notes

1. Editors' Note: A different interpretation of ‘Down at the Dump’ may be found in David Myers, The Peacocks and the Bourgeoisie (Adelaide: Adelaide University Press, 1978).

2. Patrick White, Flaws in the Glass (London: Cape, 1981), p. 20.

3. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1966), ‘le Stade du Miroir comme Formateur de la fonction du Je), pp. 89-101. Lacan gives an example from observation. It is a necessary condition for the maturation of the gonad in the female pigeon that it sees another member of its own species, of either sex.

4. Lacan's ‘Méconnaissance’, Lacan, 96.

5. In Lévi-Strauss' scheme, nothing is the state in which nature shows its power most clearly, Edmund Leach, Lévi-Strauss (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), pp. 30 ff. In Flaws in the Glass, White connects the ‘private mysteries of his childhood with corners of the garden where things seemed to be rotting, a rich mattress of slater-infested humus’ (p. 16).

6. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols, Explorations in Cosmology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), Chapter 10.

7. ‘Down at the Dump’ appeared in Patrick White, The Burnt Ones (Ringwood: Penguin, 1972), pp. 285-316.

John A. Weigel (excerpt date 1983)

SOURCE: “Epiphanies in Tables and Goats: The Burnt Ones, The Cockatoos, and Four Plays,” in Patrick White, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 87-103.

[In the following excerpt, Weigel surveys the critical reception of White's short story collections and points out that White's short stories “employ diverse techniques for a wide range of effects like the author's novels.”]

Most of Patrick White's short stories have been collected and published in two volumes, The Burnt Ones (1964) and The Cockatoos (1975). Four of his early plays, originally produced in Australia, have been published in one volume in 1965. For many admirers of Patrick White, his shorter fiction and his plays are epiphenomena. That is, although White's reputation as a significant writer may be reinforced by them, they are not essential. Like his novels, they do, however, bear witness to the author's cosmopolitanism and his ambivalence about Australia. The stories in particular, which vary in length from extended sketches to novellas, employ diverse techniques for a wide range of effects.

When White returned to Australia after years abroad as a student, a soldier, and a wanderer, he brought with him memories of his sojourns in exotic places, material which he used in his short fiction. He was unsympathetic with the Australian literary nationalism that had emerged during the 1930s.¹ The writings of Joseph Furphy and Henry Lawson were always cited as examples of what the home folks could do. Both Furphy and Lawson were masters of the anecdotal style and their stories are easy to understand. Their homespun quality contrasts with the literary sophistication of White and Richardson, who could not conceal, even if they had chosen, their interest in the experiments of British and Continental dramatists and storytellers.

Patriots such as Nettie Palmer continued to prefer the home-made stories of Henry Lawson, for example, praising their “loose, easy look.”² At the same time, others began to break away from the old ways. Hal Porter, for one, took a new look at familiar places and people. G. A. Wilkes was one of the critics who understood what Porter was trying to do, and he tried to explain it: “The world of Porter's stories is the familiar world seen as slightly askew, the personalities sometimes neurotic, the events sometimes macabre.” Human beings are perceived as “enigmatic and astonishing.”³ Just as Virginia Woolf in England had rejected gig-lamps for the personal reality of luminous halos, Christina Stead and Randolph Stow in Australia—as well as White and Porter—began to express impressions rather than report. White's short stories, in particular, led the way.

THE BURNT ONES

Patrick White's first collection, which he called The Burnt Ones, contains eleven stories. Nine of them originally appeared in periodicals such as Meanjin, Australian Letters, and London Magazine.⁴ Several of the stories are Greek in setting and characters. One mixes modalities by transporting an Australian woman to Greece for its moment of truth. One is set in the neutral city of Geneva, while others are highlighted by the plastic suburbia near Sydney which White calls Sarsaparilla. All of them, however, investigate concerns familiar to White's readers: suffering, loneliness, and frustration as constants in the human equation, an equation in which the variables may contain humor and irony but seldom high tragedy.

White found ideas and characters compatible with his themes—unfortunates burned by life—while living in post-war Greece where he met and sympathized with the victims and exiles whose quest for salvation had been secularized by wartime hardships. God seemed remote and improbable, often even a mockery after the “Catastrophe” at Smyrna, where many Greeks were slaughtered by the Turks and others fled with their lives only. Also, severe shortages following World War II, particularly in Athens, where aristocrats were forced to forage for food, intensified passions and escalated issues.

In “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats” White contrasts two rich, Americanized Greeks, proud owners of a Cadillac, with a married couple struggling to adjust to life in Athens. The local Greeks seem eccentric. The man is a left-wing writer, the woman a cat-lover. The “authentic” Greek woman blames her compatriots for not loving cats. Greeks, she says, are “too egotistical, quarrelsome, lazy, and gluttonous to understand the force of love” (257). The visitors find the cat-lover mad, and when they return two years later to visit their friends again, they discover that the cat-lover has given up her cats because the formerly liberal husband has forbidden them now that he is a prosperous, right-wing writer. The Americanized Greeks get the impression that the cat-lover has been transformed into a cat. They are glad to return to New York. No one has escaped deterioration.

In another of the Greek stories, “The Evening at Sissy Kamara's,” memories of Smyrna are the pedal point in a contrapuntal conversation between two couples. The hostess, Sissy, once had intellectual pretensions. She has published some poems, but “so privately nobody has read them.” Once she declaimed an epic poem—“On a theme nobody can remember,” says Basil Patzopoulos upon being informed by Poppy, his wife, that she has accepted an invitation to spend an evening at Sissy's. Of Sissy's declamation he adds: “On a mountain side. To a group of women, most of them by now dead” (128-29).

In the course of the evening the hosts and guests share a small balcony. As Sissy serves indifferent food, her husband breaks Sissy's last good dish from Smyrna. In a confusion of emotions Sissy laughs as she cries, then philosophizes: “Almost my last possession of importance … when one had hoped with age to grow less attached when age itself is the arch-disappointer a final orgy of possessiveness of of of [sic] a gathering of minor vanities” (139). Sissy also “explains” Greeks to her guests: “We are a brutal, detestable race,” she pontificates. “If we care to admit, we are little better than Turks turned back to front” (136). Although Basil and Poppy Patzopoulos disagree with Sissy, they suppress possible rejoinders and depart with feelings of guilt. There is no resolution.

“Being Kind to Titina” begins in Alexandria where a “good” Greek family and a “bad” Greek family are neighbors; then the story moves on to Athens for an ironic conclusion. There the Greek boy-man from the good family has his first sexual experience with an amoral but happy whore. The woman turns out to be the formerly plain Titina from the bad Greek family, whom he had once been forced to treat politely when they were childhood neighbors. The upgrading of Titina is contrasted with the disillusionment of the good boy. Again, however, there is no resolution.

In “A Glass of Tea” White utilizes Geneva as a neutral setting for a conversation between two casual acquaintances, both Greeks of different histories and generations. Malliakas, a middle-aged bachelor, a writer manqué in search of a story and in Geneva on business, finally decides to present a letter of introduction to Philippides, an elderly Greek now living in Switzerland. During his short visit Malliakas finds his story. It is based on what the old man tells him of his first wife, Constantia, emended by what the old man's second wife, Aglaia, tells him about the first wife and a set of tea glasses. A gypsy had once prophesied that the old man would live until the last of the glasses was broken, but it was his first wife who broke instead. At the time of the visit there is just one glass left unbroken. It will not last long, however, Malliakas knows, as he sadly leaves.

In “Dead Roses” White combines the decadence of Greece with the sterility of respectable Australia. Anthea Scudmore, a forerunner of Theodora Goodman of The Aunt's Story, is a wealthy Australian widow traveling in Greece. There she is eventually rebuffed by a former admirer also visiting Greece. She is also insulted and threatened by a beautiful young Athenian. That night the Australian woman, who is so sterile that most flowers die on her, dreams neither of the young Greek nor of her former admirer but rather of the latter's wife, who had been wearing “stained leopard-skin matador pants” (66). The story is heavy with Freudian symbols and itself ends in a dying fall—as dead as the dead roses Anthea had found in the home of her impotent husband on her wedding night.

The Australian stories in the collection often satirize generalizations that begin “We Australians,” but with a difference from the “We Greeks” philosophers. There is less poignancy in the Australians, with whom White is less patient than he is with babbling Greeks. In “Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover” an Australian lady objects strenuously when she hears her country reduced to “nossing” by her Hungarian lover. She counters at once with “we Australians are not all that uncivilized. Not in 1961” (200). Miss Slattery, however, is not taken very seriously by Tibby Szabo, her masochistic, rich, and fat Hungarian lover, until she threatens to leave him. When Szabo asks her if she is “ze Defel perheps?” she answers: “We Australians are not all that unnatural” (215).

In “A Cheery Soul” a self-righteous husband and wife argue themselves into sharing their home with an unfortunate woman, a Miss Docker. When the arrangement soon turns into a domestic disaster, the “cheery soul” is transferred to a respectable institution for impecunious aged men and women. There her cheeriness moves from nuisance to menace when she challenges the minister in church, destroying his sermon and literally striking him down so that the minister's wife accuses her of having killed not only her husband but perhaps also her God. The effect of such blasphemy is devastating, as White well knew, and he later developed this story into a drama.

Reasonable people often insist on being considered both civilized and normal and are easily satirized because no one is ever quite reasonable except in his own opinion. When the hero of the story “Clay” asks his mother why she named him Clay, he receives a reasonable answer: his mother had been interested in making pottery. There is little else in the sketch, but it makes a sharp point economically. In another short piece, “The Letters,” a mother-dominated son finally tries to make love to his mother. White suggests that the son's violent behavior was programmed by his mother's devotion to him. The incest episode yields to an anticlimax. Instructed as a child never to read other people's letters, the son finally stops reading even those addressed to him!

In the most ambitious story in the collection, “Down at the Dump,” a boy-man and girl-woman meet at the line between the dump and the cemetery, having been brought to the dump and the cemetery respectively by their parents. The boy's family are “doing the dump”—which means scavenging. The girl's parents are burying a relative, Daise, a woman of easy virtue. It is clear that she is also one of the illuminati when at the cemetery her spirit speaks of love.

Although the meeting between the youths is contrived, the effect crescendoes before the quiet ending as the potential lovers return home with their respective parents, passing one another on the road: “They lowered their eyes, as if they had seen enough for the present, and wished to cherish what they knew” (308).

Big questions are asked of Destiny and Accident in the story called “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight” via a slip in the making of a tape of the song of a bird. A respectable husband, while recording the Willy-Wagtail, also inadvertently records the sounds of his adultery with his secretary. Only a visiting couple, however, hear that part of the tape, the unfaithful husband and the betrayed wife being destined accidentally to be out of the room. This trivial and bitter story is characteristic of the “black in White.” Accidents are the only miracles.

THE COCKATOOS

The Cockatoos, White's second collection of stories, appeared in 1975.⁵ It contains six substantial pieces of short fiction which testify to the writer's growing maturity. Less gimmicky than several of the stories in The Burnt Ones, these later narratives reflect the author's concern for ways in which desperate human beings confront the odds against them. Here a few of them are allowed to find a kind of salvation outside churches, or even in the improper use of a church as a place of assignation. White's secular offerings include a cup of coffee, a handful of rice, a glimpse of cockatoos or peacocks, sunsets, and an old man's urine.

In “The Night the Prowler” an old man, far into his dying, explains to a young woman that there are only two goods: to piss easily and to shit smoothly. And so when he urinates over himself as the woman holds his hand, the woman feels a momentary grace as “she continued up the hill to report the death of an old man she had discovered a few moments before, but knew as intimately as she knew herself, in solitariness, in desolation, as well as in what would seem to be the dizzy course of perpetual becoming” (168).

Evelyn Bannister, the recipient of this unusual grace, is just nineteen years old on the eventful night in which she encounters a prowler in her home. The assumption that she is raped and otherwise mistreated by the prowler is the invention of her parents and neighbors, who need to be protected from the truth that Evelyn frightens the prowler more than he frightens her. After drinking and smoking in his presence, she sends him away, disgusted by his unimaginative timidity.

Soon thereafter, using her “rape” as an excuse, Evelyn cancels her engagement to a nice young man, who is relieved. Evelyn then begins to break into houses in the neighborhood herself, not to steal or rape but to extend her freedom. In the final, good-Samaritan scene she embraces a repulsive derelict. He dies in her arms while offering her his urine.

In “Sicilian Vespers” White again challenges convention and Christian morality. The piece is a carefully dramatized tale about a failure of faith between persons who rely too heavily on rationalism and humanism. Ivy and Charles Simpson represent those Australians who accept being Australian without either glorifying colonialism or hating other colonials, such as Americans. The Simpsons are genuinely kind, honest, intelligent, and well enough off to travel. Abroad, they tolerate foreign eccentricities they would not dream of accepting at home. In Sicily their planned itinerary becomes an empty time because of Charles's almost incapacitating toothache.

During the pause the Simpsons make friends with the Clark Shacklocks, a rich American couple who seem a bit vulgar but kind. Clark may be Roman Catholic but the Simpsons are not sure. His wife Imelda certainly seems to be a Christian Scientist. As the relationship between the couples begins to get complicated, Ivy Simpson suddenly, against her better judgment, allows herself to be possessed one evening by Clark in the Duomo at San Fabrizio during vespers. Imelda and Charles, meanwhile, wait patiently for their respective spouses in the lobby of the hotel. Imelda is reading an ironically appropriate Italian novel: I Promessi Sposi.

Upon her return, Ivy Simpson remains cool and lies. She later realizes she is still hungry for a religious experience, or rather, she tells herself, at least for religious words. She had always respected the word “Godhead: as a mere word leaping at her from off the printed page, it made her turn over quickly, to escape something far beyond what Charles and she had agreed to find acceptable” (230).

In “A Woman's Hand” Clem Dowson tries to explain to his friend, Harold Fazackerly, why he and his wife have separated:

“My God,” Dowson was gasping and mouthing, “one day, Harold, when we meet—in different circumstances—I must try to tell you all I've experienced.” He was speaking from behind closed eyes. “That was the trouble between us. Between myself and that woman. We had lived at the same level. It was too great a shock to discover there was someone who could read your thoughts.”

(76)

There is no chance, however, for the two men to meet “in different circumstances,” for that night Clem is killed by a bus whose wheels he makes no attempt to avoid. Harold is left friendless and confused, realizing he has missed something. His need, however, has not been defined so there is no way of satisfying it. Also, Harold's wife, despite her good intentions, cannot understand either her husband's need or that of his friend. It was she who was originally responsible for adding “a woman's hand” to bachelor Clem's house overlooking the sea. The woman she paired with Clem, however, ends in a psychiatric hospital: she had heard the sunset shriek “with the throats of peacocks” (70). The moral is a bitter one: it is dangerous to hear the sunset shriek.

In the title story of the collection, “The Cockatoos,” a Mrs. Davoren and her husband are as alienated from one another as possible until the cockatoos arrive. They have not exchanged spoken words for years. When necessary, they communicate via pencil and pad. But when they see the spectacular cockatoos, the Davorens begin to speak to one another again—about the birds, of course—and even celebrate their reunion in bed. Their joy is short-lived, however. One day a neighbor shoots two of the birds, and in the ensuing struggle for the gun Mr. Davoren is killed. But that is not all that happens. When a neighbor boy, Tim Goodenough, finds the last of the cockatoos, a cripple, he kills it and cuts off the bird's crest as a trophy to mark his victory. Cockatoos can bring joy to those who love them but the price is high.

The two most ambitious stories in the collection are “Five-Twenty” and “The Full Belly,” each of which celebrates a secular communion and its terrifying inadequacy: a cup of coffee that is never served and a handful of rice that degrades decent people. In the former story a childless, elderly couple spend their days sitting on a porch watching the traffic pass on the highway. Royal and Ellen Natwick are dependent on the regularity in the lives of others, particularly upon a man in a Holden who drives by at five-twenty every evening. He is a flat-headed, unusual looking fellow. They have found him memorable and essential. If he occasionally misses his “five-twenty” passing, the Natwicks are upset. Their clock has betrayed them: the universe is not orderly after all.

When Royal Natwick dies quietly, Ella is left “with his hand, already set, in her own. They hadn't spoken except about whether she had put out the garbage” (184). Ella accepts widowhood and takes the pills the doctor prescribes. As far as she can, she begins to relate to her “things,” among which the man in the Holden is still real. Then one day he stops and asks to use the phone.

Excited, unable to speak clearly, she babbles in a “new language.” He is not upset. He holds her in his arms. She responds, watching “the world of his mouth”—he has a hare lip—“struggling to open.” At this moment of recognition Ella kisses him “as though she might never succeed in healing all the wounds they had ever suffered” (190). He promises to return the next day for a cup of coffee. In the meantime Ella learns how to make coffee, having had previous experience with tea only. This communion cup will contain a brew new to her.

When five-twenty comes and passes without him, Ella fears the worst. There is a bad wreck up the road. Has he perhaps been killed? He finally appears: he is late because he is ill. The symptoms indicate angina, with pains up and down his left arm. Ella vows to save him. In fact, however, in her eagerness she embraces him too forcefully and kills him “by loving too deep, and too adulterously” (196). The author's verdict is ruthless: Ella's worldly reward for all that patient watching was only a chance at adultery, no more and no less than a chance, and she lost. The coffee was never served.

The rice becomes moot in the story “The Full Belly,” which returns to the Athenian scene. During the occupation of Greece, Athenians were severely tested not only by hunger but also by a patriotism that required strict resistance to collaboration. Two proud and elderly spinster sisters, Maro and Pronoë, have long ago bartered away all their valuable possessions for food but still refuse to collaborate with the prosperous Germans who occupy the city. The older sister, Maro, begins to starve herself to death in order to save food for others in the family. Her nephew, Costa, who is a talented music student and the orphaned son of a former President of Greece, decides to sell himself for food.

Costa first refuses the advances of a neighbor woman who would pay him in eggs. He then encounters a German soldier in one of the side streets of Athens who offers him meat in exchange for what Costa knows he has already done but this time chooses to refuse. Not much later, driven by hunger for meat, he changes his mind and searches for the soldier, who, however, has disappeared. Rushing home because he remembers a dish of rice left next to dying Aunt Maro's bedside, he finds Aunt Pronoë already there and gorging herself on the few grains of rice. They struggle for the food, breaking the dish in the contest. After Pronoë leaves in disgust, Costa kneels and picks up bits of rice mixed with bits of carpet and stuffs them into his mouth. When his dying aunt sees him, she says: “Eat, poor souls. … Fill your stomachs, children.” Then she adds, before she dies: “I only pray you'll know how to forgive each other” (118). After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

SECULAR SACRAMENTS

The extent to which one can accept White's specifications for and significance of the “course of perpetual becoming,” which for him is obviously a good—if not the only good—in living, correlates with the degrees of praise allowed these stories. The alleged epiphanies are often blurred. Grace is neither easily won nor freely bestowed by either writer or reader. Characters behaving decently in a godless universe are sometimes seen as foolish. What price courage if there is no reward here or in an afterlife? Certainly White allows little probability of judgment days that will rectify and punish fairly.

The Cockatoos is condemned as “a strong anti-marriage tract” by a woman obviously upset about the failure of marital bonds in the stories to restrain immorality. The same critic prefers White's novels, concluding that “the short story does not offer White the space he needs for his greatest strength, the portrayal of a character's fantasy.”⁶ Eudora Welty, however, praises White's stories, noting that “they go off like cannons fired over some popular, scenic river—depth charges to bring up the drowned bodies.”⁷ Brian Kiernan compares White's stories favorably with those of Hal Porter, finding that “White's style has become more muted over the years, more an instrument than a self-regarding end.” Unlike Porter, however, “White is concerned to engage life, and in the better stories, this takes the form of his emphatically imagining how life might be experienced by others.”⁸

White's shorter fiction has recently been honored by a book-length study in which David Myers explores the many “dualities” in the stories: “… not only the tragic irreconcilability of such antitheses as grace and horror, epiphany and sanity, caritative love and bourgeois conventions. … There is also the dual vision of his irony which incessantly modifies both the bitterness and the bliss of his protagonists.” Because there is less room to manipulate these dualities in a short story, the pieces are not all equally successful. Furthermore, what Myers calls “White's grotesque sense of humour” seems harsher in the short stories, and Myers notes that White has confessed that he does not like writing shorter fiction as much as he does a novel. “All my effects are cumulative,” White has said, “and one doesn't really have the time to get the effects you want.”⁹

Notes

1. See Vincent Buckley, “Towards an Australian Literature,” in Twentieth Century Australian Literary Criticism, pp. 75-85. Buckley, in 1958, was daring enough to advocate the teaching of “Australian Literature” at the university level.

2. A. A. Phillips, Henry Lawson (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), p. 138.

3. G. A. Wilkes and J. C. Reid, The Literatures of the British Commonwealth: Australia and New Zealand, ed. A. L. McLeod (University Park, 1970), p. 120.

4. All references here are to The Burnt Ones (New York, 1964); page references cited in the text in parentheses.

5. All references here are to The Cockatoos (New York, 1975); page references cited in the text in parentheses.

6. Rose Marie Beston, “More Burnt Ones: Patrick White's The Cockatoos,” World Literature Written in English 14, no. 2 (1975): 520.

7. Eudora Welty, “Patrick White's The Cockatoos,” in The Eye of the Story (New York: Random, 1978), p. 264.

8. Brian Kiernan, “Short Story Chronicle,” Meanjin Quarterly 34, no. 1 (1975): 37.

9. David Myers, The Peacocks and the Bourgeoise (Adelaide, 1978), pp. 1, 173.