[In the following essay, Walsh discusses the common aspects of White's short stories, plays, and novels.]

The scope of the eleven stories in The Burnt Ones (1964) is naturally more confined than in the novels, but the shape and proportions are the same. There is a similar sense of the depth of human nature and the same strikingly individual sensibility, giving off a mixed odour of sweat and spirituality. The people in the Australian group of stories may be ordinary (“Dead Roses”, “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight”) or drab (“Clay”, “Down at the Dump”), the events few and unspectacular, the context conventional or down at heel, the air wretched or melancholy, and yet from these unpromising constituents Patrick White constructs a celebration of human possibility which is at once lyrical and quite unsentimental. White has an eye which is gluttonous for detail. Each passage is firm from the presence of discriminated actuality. But all the solid, objective existence, convincing in surface, sure in implication, is submissive to the initiative of the writer. It is as much the result of reflection as observation, and it is composed of detail which is both authentic in its own right and quick at every point with the highly individual quality of the author's mind. This is particularly evident in the pace with which details follow one another. They tumble out with unforced vivacity, products of an endless energy. And they exhibit the peculiar violence of White's imagination which is capable of informing the mildest symptom of character or the most delicate indication of place with a strange intensity.

Not all the stories, naturally, are on the same level. The best are “Down at the Dump”, “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats”, “A Cheery Soul”. “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight”, designed to exhibit with an almost Somerset Maugham kind of cynicism that people are not always what they appear to be, is altogether too neat and deficient in White's characteristic resonance and seriousness. “Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover” is a fine, flourishing cartoon of a story with a conventionally eccentric Hungarian, an ordinary loose Australian girl, and a context of a somewhat dandruffed Bohemia. “Dead Roses” and “Clay”, one about an unawakened and emotionally oppressed girl, the other about what one can only call in an unkind but appropriate way, a compulsive loony, seem designed as comments on D. H. Lawrence's motto in his posthumous essay ‘Education of the People’,¹ ‘down with mothers’. They convey a kind of personal disrelish and they seem to attribute to the mother in each case, a malformation of the subject's nature and brutality in dealing with it on the part of the parent as a kind of effect and cause instead of, perhaps, as cause and effect. Each of these two, the beefy, Betjeman-type Anthea Scudamore and the poor, deluded obsessionist Clay, are altogether too passive and malleable to engage the reader's interest in anything more than a mildly observant way. They are specimens rather than subjects, and while the two worlds in which they live are depicted with characteristic energy and significance, the one distinctly upper, the other lower class, the central figures are altogether too weak and limp. Each story appears to have a vacancy at a point where it should pulse with life.

Perhaps I could illustrate from these stories two unattractive defects which are more obtrusive in the short stories, where they cannot be lost in a longer, more complex movement. Here, for example, from “Dead Roses”, are a few lines which illustrate White rubbing gratingly on the reader's sensibility and calling his attention to the effect in an altogether too ostentatious way:

It was only the receptacle of which she was in desperate need, in which her uncommunicative nature might spill itself, if silently. So she was hungrily grateful for this stone cell, for the sound of the bent tea-tree as it sawed at iron and silence. And sawed.

(p. 19)

That ‘And sawed’ is a calamitous application of a device White sometimes uses with success in the novels; and so is the apparent precision of the concluding phrase in the following lines, which are clearly intended to pin down and refine the meandering course of Clay's illusion:

Then she came towards him, and he saw that she herself might sink in the waters of time she spread before him cunningly the nets of water smelling of nutmeg over junket the steamy mornings and the rather shivery afternoons.

(p. 132)

‘And sawed’ and ‘the rather shivery afternoons’ are White at his more relaxed and careless.

A more impressive Australian story, “The Letters”, is the tale of a dim, dry creature, Charles Polkinghorn, who slips more and more away from the roughness of life into some terrifying remoteness. Charles's life, and the influence on it of his self-entranced mother, both indicated with tactful economy, are most intimately and subtly displayed. Her grandeur is that of the self-deifying; her possessions, including her son, are exquisite and cared for because they are hers, perhaps because they are her. The withdrawal of Charles from family, work and life is most convincingly insinuated in the quietest, mildest manner, which makes the horrifying conclusion when the fifty-year-old man is reduced to nuzzling his horrified mother's breasts, more acceptable and inevitable than the equally horrifying conclusion of “Clay”, which has about it something gratuitous and ostentatious.

Most of these stories deal, as do some of the major novels, with afflicted human nature, with the wound in the mind or the burn in the soul. But whereas in the novels the deprivation, or wretchedness, or imperfection becomes a means towards another and deeper reality, in most of the short stories the malady or calamity is part of a self-enclosed system. Neither in “Clay” nor “Dead Roses”, nor “The Letters”, nor “A Cheery Soul” do we have that drama of dialectic we find in the novels. The effect in most of these is, however complex, essentially single in its impact, and the only value released appears to be a quality of intensity for its own sake. This is true even of so fine a story as “A Cheery Soul”. Miss Docker is one whose goodness is a disease. Her sickness is doing good to others. She is indeed a monster, and her monstrosity is made all the more appalling by the accuracy, sometimes the savage accuracy, with which her surroundings are conveyed: the little suburban house where she goes to live with the taciturn Ted Custance and his generous wife, the old people's home where she goes to continue her devastation after being turned out finally by the worn-out Custances, and the church where she succeeds in destroying a clergyman. Here, for example, are some lines which combine clinical accuracy and disgust:

The whole of Sarsaparilla knew something of Miss Docker's present circumstances: how, since old Miss Baskerville died, and the niece had decided Lyme Regis must be sold, there was Miss Docker, soon to find herself without a roof. Almost everyone had been the object of the poor woman's thoughtfulness. One need only mention the Christmas presents she could not afford. Miss Docker was a gift to the gift-shops: all those little ash-trays with gumnuts in relief, the shepherdesses of dusty lace, the miniature boomerangs, with the holes to hold the toothpicks, to spear the chipolatas with. Everybody knew, but almost everybody forgot. It was more convenient to remember she had her pension and her health.

(p. 151)

Miss Docker in her relations with the Custances provides a comedy of desperation:

‘For some time,’ Miss Docker said, ‘I have wondered why, amongst good friends, there seems to be a ban on Christian names.’

Ted Custance could have been warding it off.

‘I was christened Gertrude,’ Miss Docker told. ‘But everybody calls me Gee. Gee would feel she really was your friend to hear her name occasionally.’

Mrs Custance hung her head.

‘I expect we are not that kind,’ she confessed. ‘We are not exactly cold people, not formal in any way, but stiff’—here she made the greatest effort—‘yes, I suppose, too, we are shy.’

‘A name is friendship's sweetener,’ Miss Docker coaxed.

Mr Custance was sweating.

‘I'm buggered if I will!’ he said, very quiet, and quickly went outside.

(pp. 160-1)

In the old people's home the play of desperation becomes a farce of destructive cruelty. In the church the comedy becomes one of discrepancy carried to a violent extreme, and in fact the comic is quite absorbed in the horror of destruction. But Miss Docker remains at the end what she began as, a monster without insight, a hero of destruction and a kind of martyr to negation.

Good as “A Cheery Soul” is, an even better achievement is the group of Greek stories, “A Glass of Tea”, “The Evening at Sissy Kamara's”, “Being Kind to Titina” and “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats”. I do not know any modern writer who has been more successful in illuminating the opacity of the Mediterranean world, at least in its Greek aspects. It is a world scored by lines of discrepancy and incomprehension; the men divided from the women, the children from the parents, the visitor from the inhabitant. Never were Greeks so unclassical as these, altogether lacking, as they are, in coolness, coherence and austerity. They are either fractious and nervy, or indolent and abstracted, or blithely, self-centredly crazy. Europe in them seems to be shading into some remoter terrain. Malliakas in “A Glass of Tea” finds, for example, ‘that every Swiss seemed to have achieved a balance, while he, the Greek, could only oppose his undemonstrable inner life and a certain soft elegance’ (p. 89). The comparatively calm, commonsensical young man who tells the story in the beautifully organised tale “Being Kind to Titina” is transformed into ‘the awkward thing of flesh’ (p. 199) which his childhood acquaintance Titina Stavridi, now an accomplished putain, had once been, changing, among shouting uncles and neurotic aunts, into something as tense and feverish as they.

Outside, the lilac-bushes were turned solid in the moonlight. The white music of that dusty night was frozen in the parks and gardens. As I leaned out of the window, and held up my throat to receive the knife, nothing happened. Only my Aunt Thalia continued playing Schumann, and I realized that my extended throat was itself a stiff sword.

(p. 205)

These characters show a glittering surface and a tremblingly vulnerable centre. They cannot bear to be ordinary. ‘“Average!” screeched Sissy Kamara, with an expression of triumph and a gold bridge. “Who is average?”’ (p. 143). The women have a hectic, feverish air; the men are remote or passive; each kind is a stranger to the other except for love: ‘Often Poppy Pantzopoulos refused to forgive her husband's still perfect profile until she found it on her pillow’ (p. 135). The air is melancholy, reminiscent, the memories dominated by Smyrna and the Catastrophe, things dusted with nostalgia assume a vaguely religious aspect: ‘Poppy Pantzopoulos had remembered the drawing-room on Frankish Street, the summer stealing through iron shutters, by stealth of light and grace of jasmine, to flirt with the neo-Byzantine plate’ (p. 140).

Perhaps the finest of these Greek stories is “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats”, in which Mr and Mrs Spiro Hajistavros, the owners of restaurants and Cadillacs in the United States, are reduced on their return to Greece to being simply ‘Maro and Spiro, a couple of Greeks’ come to visit Mrs Hajistavros's childhood friend, now Mrs Alexiou. This story brilliantly evokes the intense and disappointed memories of the two women, Mrs Alexiou's roof flat with its permanent smell of cat, her ludicrously intellectual husband, and the poor, rich Greek-American husband who ‘would have liked to live at peace with all men, but was continually brought to a halt on the edge of a hostile country, partly obscure, partly lambent, which he would end by recognising as the human mind’ (p. 248). With what clinical nicety the indolent intellectual is evoked:

Aleko Alexiou was staring out to sea. He had allowed wind and sunlight to prepare his head for sacrifice.

‘Take nature,’ Alexiou said.

His hand was helping him extract, or mould, a painfully refractory object.

‘Nature is so—so—un-cooperative, ultimately so unreal!’

Then his hand fell, and with it his failure, while the illusory light continued to cascade into a spurious sea.

(pp. 263-4)

This middle-class Mediterranean world of poverty and pretension, of natures both exquisite and brutal, of aspiration which wholly ignores reality, is conveyed with an extraordinary inwardness and conviction. Its melancholy, its bared human nerves, its direct and powerful tradition, its truth of resistance to the modern world: all these are conveyed with an amazing and creative accuracy.

The finest story in The Burnt Ones is “Down at the Dump”, a complex lyrical piece, engaging much that is best and most authentic in White's talent, and a triumph of sensibility which, as Henry James says, ‘Takes to itself the faintest hints of life [and] converts the very pulses of the air into revelation’. The story is set in Sarsaparilla between a ‘red brick propriety’ on the one side, occupied by Councillor and Mrs Hogben and their daughter Meg who had ‘the eyes of a mopey cat’, and the gray, unpainted weatherboard of the Whalleys who were in the bits-and-pieces trade. Everything associated with these people is astonishingly eloquent of character and ethos. The Hogbens' liver-coloured brick house had not a single damp mark on the ceiling, nor, one is sure, is there a mark of any kind on the washing machine, the septic, the TV, the cream Holden Special, or the telephone, kept swabbed with Breath-o'-Pine. And Wal Whalley had a better eye than anyone for the things a person really needs: ‘… dead batteries and musical bedsteads, a carpet you wouldn't notice was stained, wire, and again wire, clocks only waiting to jump back into the race of time’ (p. 284). If the Whalleys (Wal is still a fairly appetising male, the children 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’) stand for the richness, health and grossness of life and the Hogbens for meanness and deprivation, skinny young Meg in her cramped school uniform and surly Lum Whalley with his dreams of driving through the night in his own truck, or at least a semi-trailer, represent possibilities of renewal. Lum and Meg's first awkward interrogation of each other takes place at the Sarsaparilla dump, separated from Sarsaparilla cemetery only by a few strands of barbed wire, while the interment of Mrs Whalley's sister Daise is proceeding. The dump itself heaves with a strange, sprawling life:

Here and there it appeared as though trash might win. The onslaught of metal was pushing the scrub into the gully. But in many secret, steamy pockets, a rout was in progress: seeds had been sown in the lumps of grey, disintegrating kapok and the laps of burst chairs, the coils of springs, locked in the spirals of wirier vines, had surrendered to superior resilience.

(p. 295)

Another and purer stage of existence is implied in the vividly summoned life of Daise, the dead woman whose morals may have been loose but whose feelings were generous and tender, whether for the man who kept her or for the repulsive, deadbeat Ossie whom she wheeled home from the dump in a wheel barrow one night and nourished with food, sex and Franciscan compassion.

Not, I hasten to add, that “Down at the Dump” is in any way marked by a banal and static symbolism. Wal is really a dustman, Councillor Hogben a creepy politician, Meg a genuine schoolgirl. It is just that the things, the people, the location, all the items and gear of the fiction, carry a spontaneous, flowing significance. Moreover, the radically disjunctive consciousness, the intuition of grace and life, frequently succumbing to or only occasionally resisting the calculated, discursive and Benthamite mentality, which makes for an absolute division in some of the work, operates here in a subtler, altogether more poetically concrete way.

This story, like the best of White's achievement, springs from a pure sense of existence, which stretches in its sympathy from the dense and dirty embodiments of existence in the haphazard gear of the rubbish dump, through every kind of modulation of life up to a level of experience which is spiritual in its candour and fineness. I have called Patrick White a traditional artist. But this is not to declare that in discriminating grades of existence he freezes them into any falsely static posture. He is not in that sense a hierarchical writer. On the contrary, there is a constant touching of different worlds, a Lawrentian sort of mobility and flow. A point of contrast becomes a point of connection. The rubbish dump in “Down at the Dump” runs into the cemetery. The voice of goodness from the grave calls out to the devious town councillor. It is among the heaving rubbish of the dump that the young lovers make their first tender inquiries of one another. The mystery of existence, the mystery of self, the mutuality of experience and self—this ‘metaphysical’ theme, no more than hinted at here—rolls like a profound current all through Patrick White's work. This depth of preoccupation is the animating presence which quickens the multiplying details and orders the vast range of material in the fiction (but also, and not infrequently, which clouds the clues the artist offers to what he is about with too large and unmanageable a significance).

Just as “Down at the Dump”, simple and brief as it is, involves in undertone and suggestion Patrick White's preoccupation with being, so too it is constantly in touch, at least in hint and intimation, with the other sustaining theme of his fiction—the exploration of self. His precise interest in this short story is one that a distinction of Coleridge lights up: ‘… self—i.e. the image or complex cycle of imagination … which is the perpetual representative of our Individuum …’². Patrick White is concerned in miniature in “Down at the Dump”, in extenso in the novels, with all the subtleties of relationship between individuality and the self.

The six novellas and short stories in The Cockatoos (1975), varying in location from Sicily to Sydney, show Patrick White, if not absolutely at the pitch of his powers—since this would require a richer orchestration of theme and a larger area to manoeuvre in—certainly as possessed as ever of a ferocity of communicating skill, and as capable of constructing from common and dandruffed material a world which is rhapsodic and realistic. There is the same flow of creative capacity that one sees in the major novels, which can find, in situations of a seedy simplicity and characters of conventional mediocrity, subjects and themes of depth and urgency. The manner combines the more nearly abstinent idiom developed about the period of The Solid Mandala with the endless, burrowing, spiritual inquisitiveness so characteristic of the mature work. The stories are told with a straighter narrative, a more regular syntax, and a much less drowning torrent of metaphor. But there is still the accustomed ease and flow of imaginative energy.

There is, indeed, one positive advantage in these stories in that they head off White's occasional inability to resist gratuitous and unnecessary symbolism, of the kind, for example, which marred significant junctures in Voss and Riders in the Chariot. In the short stories, or in most of them, the movement between idea and material is vital and unbroken, the theme as intimate with the material as soul with body.

When I spoke of a celebration both lyrical and terrifying, I had in mind once again the binomial or rather, since one feels something tearing and intense in the artist's reaction, the Manichaean nature of Patrick White's sensibility. On one side is the flow of love and grace brilliantly exemplified in the clouds of birds glittering in the neglected suburban gardens in “The Cockatoos”, or the sudden, Franciscan flood of pity and love felt by the brutally delinquent Felicity for the dying derelict in “The Night the Prowler”, or the similar surge of devotion which the elderly, widowed Mrs Natwick feels for her cocky little friend in “Five-Twenty”, or the subdued saintliness of Dowson in “A Woman's Hand”. On the other, there is the dialectic of loathing expressed in the appalling horrors of the flesh, like the loathsome sex in “Sicilian Vespers”: ‘Like two landed fish, they were lunging together, snout bruising snout, on the rucked-up Cosmati paving’ (p. 243).

Part of the same idiom is the constant reference, both expressed and metaphorical, to what is raw, ugly, or offensive. Patrick White has always made great play in his work with such elements in Australian provincial life, which often serves as a baseline against which the reader is to measure simplicity and goodness. But where these things once filled him with mockery or bitterness, they now suffuse him wth disgust and despair. Stench, slime, mucus, excrement, decay, the ruined body—these are notes very often touched on in these stories. Even a meal in a restaurant assumes an appearance of horrors: ‘There were some splinters of fish done in sawdust. She refused to wrestle with her cartilage of mutton. Over their helpings of marshmallow and tinned pineapple-ring the honeymoon couples were beginning to uncoil’ (p. 83); and when a candle burns in church in the Greek war story “The Full Belly”, it is anaemic ‘amongst the grubby pellets, the sickly stalactites, of last year's wax’ (p. 115).

White in these shorter works, as in the major novels, shows himself not greatly concerned with originality in situation or character. The situation in most of these stories is orthodox, even traditional. An officious wife tries to arrange a marriage for her husband's friend, a Greek family looks for food under the German occupation, a young woman experiences an unsuccessful rape, birds visit and then invade a neighbourhood and the lives of the neighbours, a widow's new friend is killed by a car, two married couples meet as tourists in Sicily, a teenage girl turns to violence.

For most novelists these are circumstances and people which would pretty firmly limit treatment and development, but Patrick White's extraordinary skill allows them to become—I put it like this because his treatment, once seen, seems inevitable—monstrous and illuminating. Like the pianist with his piano in “The Full Belly” he turns this ‘furniture into instrument’. One cannot too highly praise, for example, his power of representation, the conviction of his surfaces, textures, implied depths. At the same time, his incessant interrogation of every form of existence gives to the dense reality of things and persons an intellectual and imaginative buoyancy. Everything moves, there is no arrest in personality, existence glides and turns and flows. What we see in these stories is the process of becoming. White's art is at the other extreme from the static, his universe—like the relations of his characters—melting and modulating at every point.

The stories in The Cockatoos are the product of a powerful and singular literary personality. At its centre is a vision of the violence of existence, of the intensity of being itself; and it is rendered with an astonishing energy of realisation. I have perhaps stressed unduly the separation in his vision, the divorce of grace and horror. It might be added that it shows itself in a more than usual share of the current awareness of the nastiness of certain spheres of experience, particularly in matters of sex, and a fierce disdain of the middling and the commonplace—aristocratic characteristics that White shares with Eliot. This argues, I think, a certain failure or distortion in the range of his sympathy for human nature and experience. Perhaps it is a deficiency in our civilisation forcing itself into the artist's work and revealing itself in deficiencies of tact and grasp, as well as in a certain lack of tenderness toward the language.

But at its most mature (as in Voss some of these stories come close to belonging to that category, particularly “Sicilian Vespers”, “The Cockatoos”, “The Full Belly”, and “Five-Twenty”), White's art is quickened and unified by the most powerful and creative quarter of his sensibility, namely a concept of goodness which depends upon an unspoiled wholeness of the person. Such goodness, although it may be striven for, cannot be deserved. It is a stroke of providence or a form of genius, but in any case a gift, a grace, and one most likely to be found in the possession of those commonly regarded as blemished or eccentric or hateful, like Voss, or Theodora Goodman, or Arthur Brown in The Solid Mandala. In Patrick White's eyes the supreme gift of man, existing in a context of surliness, ugliness and cruelty, is precisely this clarified consciousness. It is something which belongs above all to those he called ‘the poor unfortunates’ in the epigraph of his other book of short stories, The Burnt Ones. There is a sufficient presence of the burnt ones, the poor unfortunate ones, in The Cockatoos to justify, to put into place, the monstrous horrors of human living, of which this sumptuous and tortured talent is harshly conscious.

So much of the action in Patrick White's novels is internally generated, so many distinctive idioms are managed so successfully, so often the vivid surface detail connects naturally with serious and even profound themes, that one might well have expected—apart from his known personal predilection for the theatre, as I pointed out before—had he lived in a country and at a time when the institution of drama thrived, that he would have devoted considerably more of his mind and art to the drama. In fact, four of his plays have been produced in Australia and appeared in print in 1965 (a very early one, Return to Abyssinia, of which no copy survives, was put on in London in 1947 and called by The Times ‘a disarmingly ingenuous little play’). The most dramatically effective of them, at least so far as one can tell from the printed page, is The Ham Funeral which was written in 1947 before his novelist's gift had fully formed, and produced in Australia in 1961. In this play White has been more successful than in the others in subordinating the natural intrusiveness of the novelist, particularly one with so peremptory and overwhelming a talent as his own. Nevertheless, one can see from the stage directions the bias of the novelist, which is to make himself more actively present than as a dramatist he should. Here are two short excerpts from the stage directions in The Ham Funeral:

Before the CURTAIN rises, the YOUNG MAN appears, and speaks the following prologue. He is dressed informally, in a fashion which could be about 1919. He is rather pale. His attitude throughout the play is a mixture of the intent and the absent, aggressiveness and diffidence.

The LANDLORD is seated on one of the deal chairs beside the kitchen table. He sits with his legs apart, facing the audience. He is a vast man, swollen, dressed from neck to ankle in woollen underclothes, of a greyish colour, and in carpet slippers. His face is pallid, flushing to strawberry in the nose, and in a wen on one cheek. He wears a thick, drooping moustache, and is smoking a short, black pipe. The LANDLADY is also seated at the kitchen table, with a saucepan, peeling potatoes. She is a large woman in the dangerous forties, ripe and bursting. Her hair, still black, is swept up untidily in a vaguely Edwardian coiffure. She is wearing a shabby white satin blouse, dark skirt, and an old pair of pink mules. LANDLADY continues to peel potatoes, but with mounting boredom and distaste.

These passages themselves seem to me to demonstrate the novelist's passion to be seen mastering the material and ordering each step and shade in the action. And, indeed, all the plays suggest a certain lack of confidence on the part of the dramatist in his actors and partners. Drama as a collaboration is something very hard for the novelist to accept.

White as dramatist, then, asks for a very exact and even finicky correspondence with his intentions. He also avails himself of the poetic and technical devices reintroduced into the theatrical repertoire by the German Expressionists. Now, of course, one finds them perfectly acceptable and even conventional, although one feels, particularly in A Cheery Soul and The Season at Sarsaparilla, a degree of discomfort in the passage from the allegorical to the representational manner. In The Ham Funeral, however, there is a much more natural flow between the two sides. The play is set in some vaguely London scene—really, simply in a place—in a crummy boarding house kept by Alma Lusty (even the names are somewhat obviously made to work for the theme), who is driven by an uncomprehended rage for life, and her reticent husband, Will, whose death is the main event in the play.

One of the lodgers is the young man, whose progress from fastidious, willed detachment to a more naturally and exclusive implication provides the dramatic mobility of the piece. The other side of the young man's self, his anima, or image as Coleridge puts it, is projected on to a dreary fellow lodger, Phyllis Pither. As the anima, the girl is romantic and reminiscent of the figure in Eliot's ‘Marina’ (indeed, there are several hints of Eliot in the play as one would expect from the period); as Phyllis she is a limp creature with a cold. Will, an ex-wrestler, philosopher, and finally silent contemplator of reality, dies—we do not know why, although explanations are offered during the ham tea, one even being that Mrs Lusty is responsible. The young man rejects the advances of the writhing Alma, although this is not proposed as any final rejection of life but rather as a stage of his journey towards maturity and completeness. The romantic ideal represented by the young woman, who leaves a sprig of lilac as an earnest of her reality, is a trifle thin and Rossetti-like. But there is also some superb comedy in the play, particularly a splendid scene in which the young man on his way to inform Will's relatives of his death, discovers two old ladies rummaging in the dust bins in search of bits and pieces which we realise are very much more than what they seem. And the ham tea itself after the funeral has a positively Chaucerian vitality and thrust.

The Ham Funeral seems to me an economically organised and highly actable play, both theatrically and dramatically effective, and managed both with instinct and skill. Its deficiency, which is one rarely associated with White's major work, is a certain attenuated and misty quality in the central experience, reminiscent of The Living and the Dead. That is certainly not a charge that could be levelled at The Season at Sarsaparilla, which is described as ‘A Charade of Suburbia in Two Acts’. This is a robust and energetic play, but to me it is strangely lacking in those skills of dramatic management evident in The Ham Funeral. The half dozen principal characters are, in this context, not only orthodox but conventional. Even the little girl, Pippy Pogson, whom White describes in his novelist's way in the stage directions as ‘a forthright and astute small girl’, is more of a camera eye than a living person. (Compare her, for example, in respect of complexity and conviction with Maisie in Henry James's What Maisie Knew. How thin, and merely perky she is!) The males, whether of the office or the manual kind, and the women, whether refined or earthy, are generalised in their ordinariness. The two dim young men, one decent and one romantic, again are gestures towards personalities. The point of the contrast between a natural, breathing vitality and the clichés of suburbia are hammered home with a repetitive and unsubtle emphasis. The pack of dogs in pursuit of a bitch in heat, howling intermittently through the play, which so much engages Pippy Pogson, who was beginning to sniff at the facts of life, are a raucous and somewhat too obvious device.

The set of contrasts which constitute the substance of the play, between suburbia and life, between the artistic and the commonplace, between man and his man-made wilderness, between the Australian pastoral myth and its huddled actuality, between mateship and lust, are not articulated with White's customary mastery but lie lumpily side by side. Nor has the language that resonance and evocative power which it so often has in the novels. Here is a characteristic passage in which Nola Boyle, the unfaithful wife of Ernie the sanitary man, expresses her kind of self-indulgent and slouching sensuality:

Nola (strolling, picking at this and that in the garden, smelling here and there at a flower, soliloquising) This is the best time of all. Before the men come. (However, she looks at her watch) Even in summer, at the end of the day, when you feel you could have been spat out, when the hair is stuck to your forehead, it is best, best. A time to loiter. The flowers are lolling. The roses are biggest. (Stoops to smell) The big, lovely roses, falling with one touch … (Laughs) I could eat the roses! Dawdling in the back yard. If there was none of these busybodies around (glancing at the Pogson home)—thin, prissy, operated women—I'd take off me clothes, and sit amongst the falling roses. I've never felt the touch of roses on my body. (Examining her bare arm) Green in the shade. Green for shade. Splotchy. You can imagine the petals, trickling, trickling, better than water, because solid. … (She looks again at her watch, irritation rising) But the men don't come! They gotta come! When you expect them. Now, or then, it's the same. They gotta come. The men. Standing in bars, with arms round one another's shoulders, faces running together, to tell a bluer story. … Men are dirty buggers! But they oughta come. They're expected.

(pp. 125-6)

The combination of realistic and non-realistic techniques works uncomfortably in the suburban scene, which seems much more naturally made for a more caustic kind of realism. The play is episodic rather than organic in its development, and the themes a set of abstract convictions applied to rather than drawn out of the situation.

In two of the most intelligent treatments of White's plays, that by Barry Argyle³ and that by R. F. Brissenden,⁴ a similar point is made. Here is the shorter and clearer version of it given by Brissenden:

At the risk of gross oversimplification one can, I think, isolate these two centres of interest in White's plays: on the one hand the individual, struggling to come to terms with himself and with the universe in which he lives—a universe in which inanimate objects and the world of nature can be as important as other human beings; and on the other the cyclic processes of living, impersonal, inscrutable, and inescapable. Dramatic tensions and interests are generated in his work not only out of the relationship of the characters with each other (as in the case of most plays) but also out of their involvement with these larger biological and physical forces.

This seems to me an admirable expression of White's dramatic intentions, more fully realised in The Ham Funeral, less adequately substantiated in the other three plays. In the drama more than any other literary form, ideas and themes must be, in Coleridge's word, ‘impersonated’. The season in the title and the howling pack of dogs after the bitch in heat in the play The Season at Sarsaparilla, not to speak of other theatrical devices like the gauzily, filmy back-presence of Mrs Lillie's youth in A Cheery Soul, are wholly insufficient substitutes for actual, dramatic embodiment. They tend, rather, to give the impression of a novelist desperately seeking to reproduce on the stage the wider and subtler effects that his words are capable of suggesting in the novel.

The dramatised version of A Cheery Soul illustrates this employment of inappropriate techniques and irrelevant kinds of subtlety. In A Cheery Soul the necessary element of conflict exists theoretically between Miss Docker's insensitive passion to help her neighbours and some more balanced concept of neighbourliness. She illustrates one side of the opposition, but nothing ‘impersonates’ the other. Moreover, Miss Docker is a cartoon rather than a character, limited and one-dimensional. A Cheery Soul certainly contains some vigorous and pointed scenes but they are in a strict sense farcical rather than comic or tragic. As this play illustrates, White has a brilliant sense for the dramatic situation or moment. The scene in the church between the inarticulate and virtuous clergyman and the bullying goodwill of Miss Docker combines ridicule and pathos in an original and telling way. But such things are momentary and the rest of the play appears simply as an arrangement or context in which dramatic functions may appear, not the irresistible ground for them. The last scene in the play in which a dog urinates on the frustrated Miss Docker's leg, is, like the chorus of howling dogs in The Season at Sarsaparilla, another example of willed imagery which cannot support the weight put on it.

The burden of critical opinion on Night on Bald Mountain seems to be that it is an impressive but failed tragedy. By tragedy people usually have in mind here the Greek form, a disposition enforced by the pretty exact observance of the unities, the choric function performed by the splendid Miss Quodling, the hints of incest or its surrogate psychological form, the intensity of guilt and the sacrifice of the victim. I find this account of it not so much inadequate as irrelevant. No amount of the application of Greek modes can transform the material of what is essentially a melodrama. Indeed, it seems to me a spirited and fascinating one. The characters are not particularly original but they are individually seized and displayed, the varieties of their suffering are conventionally demonstrated, and above all the language of the play and the idiom of each character are both lively and well fitted. Several critics have noticed how passive the central experience is. Hugo Sword, the Professor of English, is tortured by his own frustrations both scholarly and personal; his wife, the alcoholic Miriam, is tortured by him, and by herself, and by her addiction; Stella Summerhayes, the pretty virgin nurse, is tortured by both. The minor characters, Cantwell a grocer, and the rather dim lecturer Denis Craig, add a touch of realism and imply the existence of another world and other values, but not with sufficient force to make the experience embodied in the Swords's house and family more than an obsessively negative and solipsistic one.

The one vital thing in the play seems to me to be the language, and the most moving and potent form of it is that of Miss Quodling, whose crackling, racily active speech generates whatever is positive in the play. Too much attention has been paid to its symbolic content and shading. What is splendid about it is its force, raciness and sharpness. Here is her hymn of praise to the morning, with which the play begins:

Mornun … I love it even when it skins yer! Oh, yes, it can hurt! … When the ice crackles underfoot … and the scrub tears the scabs off yer knuckles … and the spiders' webs are spun again … first of all … out of dew … it's to remind that life begins at dawn. Bald Mountain! I wasn't born here. Oh, no! But know it, how I know it! I've learnt to understand the silences of rocks. Only the barren can understand the barren. I came, because I couldn't help it. I tasted the little, runty apples … and sour apricots … that somebody planted before they died. On Bald Mountain, nobody else has survived. Nobody else. I've lived here so long, I've forgotten now. (Pause) I don't go down … (pointing behind her) … not down there … though I watch the lights … at night … that glitter too much to be trusted. In the end, you can't trust anythun but goats and silence. Oh, yes, I know now! I've seen the mountain from a distance, too … moisture glist’nun on its bald patch … on bare rock. Sun on rock … that's the kiss that never betrays … because it doesn't promise nothun …

(p. 272)

The truth is that as a dramatist Patrick White is a casualty of the times and of the theatrical tradition in his own country. The living drama of his work is to be found in the novels.

Notes

1. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Education of the People’, Phoenix, ed. E. D. McDonald (London, 1936).

2. Kathleen Coburn (ed.), op. cit., p. 68.

3. Barry Argyle, op. cit., pp. 90-107.

4. R. F. Brissenden, op. cit., pp. 41-2.