The Aunt’s Story (1948), by Patrick White,

 

This review is in two parts, from my first reading of the novel in 2005, and then my second thoughts after reading David Marr's biography of Patrick White. 

7th September, 2005

 I first read The Aunt's Story years ago, perhaps when I was at university, and my recollection was that it was more accessible than The Tree of Man.  Perhaps so, but not as an audio book?  I really liked Part I, which retraces Theodora's childhood and girlhood, but Part II in the Hotel Jardin d'Exotique, and Part III in America was very hard to follow.

BEWARE: SPOILERS (though anybody reading PW for the plot is going to be disappointed).

It begins when Theodora Goodman, unmarried aunt to Lou, which is a role she likes, is finally liberated by the death of her tyrannical mother.  White is savage in his portrait of this domineering woman, who openly preferred her daughter Fanny, who is pretty and vacuous but marriageable to Frank Porritt, a dull but comfortable farmer. Theodora's father likes his older daughter, and others, such as the travelling salesman, see her interesting personality too, but she is too stubborn to play flirting games with Huntly, and her teacher fears for her future.

Released from her mother, Theodora travels and meets an oddball cast of characters in France.  There's Katrina Pavlou, an American divorcée, a Russian military type, a disagreeable Englishwoman.  Are these characters real?  They reinvent Theodora to suit themselves, e.g. the Russian gent calls her Ludmilla, after his sister, but the conversations are bizarre.

The hotel burns down, and somehow Theodora ends up roaming around in the backblocks of America, where she is taken in by a poverty-stricken family until finally she taken away to an asylum.

What is White on about?? Is it spinsterhood that leads to madness, or eccentricity?  Or is Theodora's determination to be herself that alienates her from the shallowness of 'normal' life?  I don't know, and from what I've seen of website reviews, I am not alone. [BTW Goodreads didn't launch till Dec 2006, and Library Thing not until August 2005, so I think that this reference is to a now defunct ABC website titled 'Why Bother with Patrick White?']

But I loved Part I.  Scathingly funny and brilliant imagery.  I shall try to read it again one day.

I finished reading the book and journalled it on the 7th of September, 2005.

---

It so happens that working my way through the Nobel reviews that I have in my journals and reaching The Aunt's Story coincides with my reading of David Marr's Patrick White, a Life. It's a brilliant biography, and like all good literary bios, it analyses the influences on the novels and delves into the experiences from which they derive.  Marr tells me that PW was in Britain when he decided to cut himself free from his mother's ambitions... he had allowed her to think that he concurred with her plan for him to work in the diplomatic service so that he could go to Cambridge, but he wanted to be a writer.  This internal drama is explored repeatedly in his writing: heroes are escapees who abandon lives laid down for them.  As Theodora does.

Another gem from Marr is that PW was bored by a single PoV, he liked to lose himself by writing the PoVs of a number of characters, and 'acted them' at the typewriter.  (Hence the bizarre cast of characters in the Jardin d'Exotique.) But also...

...one of the fundamental assumptions in White's work is that all we value — society, relationships, even fortunes — are sliding into decay.  The familiar situation of most of his novels is the lone figure seeking fulfilment in a world drifting towards ugliness and violence, loneliness and poverty.' (p.151)

Marr also explains that the catalyst for The Aunt's Story was a painting he'd bought from his then lover Roy de Maistre.  It was called 'The Aunt' and was painted after Roy had visited the site where one of his relatives had been killed by a buzz-bomb late in the war. 

On a heap of rubble he found a photograph of the dead woman's mother and from this grim souvenir he painted the portrait of a woman in full Edwardian dress but with a face entirely blank, as if her clothes were on a tailor's dummy.

The image of 'The Aunt' fused in White's mind with a long-planned novel about a wandering spinster going mad in a world on the brink of violence. (p.237)

Theodora was based on PW's godmother: they were both women who thought a great deal but said very little; each was a distinguished creature in spite of her dowdiness and ugliness.  Theodora's horrible mother is based on Elizabeth Morrice, the first person to fire his literary imagination. That seems an unkind reward for introducing him to Hamlet, but there you are, that was PW. And Elizabeth Morrice had condemned her daughters to spinsterhood with her snobbery.)

As for Part II of the novel which I found so strange, this is what Marr has to say about Theodora already a little mad in the Jardin d'Exotique:

In this odd garden, Theodora becomes the people she encounters.  The writing shifts from the present to the past, from lives lived to lives imagined by the exiles in the hotel.  Theodora Goodman discovers, invents and enters their lives, drawing on her small store of experience and a deep well of imagination. These are the hallucinations of a lonely traveller, but also a picture of White's technique  as a writer.  A name, a glance, a snatch of conversation overheard leads her into these vividly imagined existences.  So it was with White, his imagination stimulated by a face in the street, tiny details of gossip, odd names discovered in a newspaper.  'How many of us,' she asks, 'lead more than one of our several lives?'

White drew into the jardin exotique the cross-currents of pre-war Europe. The German Lieselotte was a 'figment or facet' of himself born out of his experience in a world falling apart.  'I had lived in London through the 'Thirties, through the Spanish Civil War (certainly only at a distance), I discovered Spengler, and became fairly intimately involved in Hitler's War.  All those experiences contributed to Lieslelotte's remark, 'We must destroy everything, everything, even ourselves.  Then at last when there is nothing, perhaps we shall live.' (p.240)

---

You can see in my initial review that I had glimpsed that characters in Part II were inventing themselves, but it hadn't dawned on me that Theodora was inventing them...

Credits:

• The Aunt's Story, by Patrick White, Penguin Books, 1962, first published by Eyre & Spottiswoode UK 1948, ISBN 9780670001064
• Patrick White, a life, by David Marr, Random House Australia, 1991, ISBN0091825857, personal copy, purchased second-hand from Diversity Books $25

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Riders in the Chariot (1961), by Patrick White

 

If anybody ever asked Patrick White about Riders in the Chariot as he was working on it, I imagine his response:  he would have rolled his great patrician eyebrows and said, 'I am going to make these pseudo-egalitarian Australians know about their underclass, and I am going to make them care about them'.

Because although Riders in the Chariot is a masterly exploration of faith in all its forms, rich in symbolism, powerful in its themes and written in Patrick White's trademark piercing style, it also has four of the most engaging characters in modern literature, and I defy anyone to read to the end and not feel bereaved by it.

BEWARE SPOILERS (not many, but some are essential for what follows).

The book begins with Miss Hare, a tragi-comic figure of fun in the fictional town of Sarsparilla.  Heiress to a bizarre crumbling mansion called Xanadu, she is an eccentric in a society that values conformity. Too plain and too odd to have been married off by her equally odd parents she has lived on alone in Xanadu until finally she takes on a housekeeper called Mrs Jolley.   Mrs Jolley specialises in working for elderly spinsters in need of a friend to whom a fortune might be bequeathed, but she is taken aback by Xanadu with its fallen masonry, mould covered interiors and invading plant life.  Xanadu reminded me of Angkor Wat with its trees inextricably entwined through the walls, and of the gothic ruin in Karen Foxlee's The Midnight Dress.

But simple as she is, Miss Hare has a rich spiritual connection with the earth, the plants and small creatures of her estate.  She is the first of four 'Riders' in Patrick White's conception of Ezekiel's chariot and her moments of spiritual ecstasy come upon her when she is at one with nature.   Her visions derive from her instincts, her patient observations of the minutiae of life, and the timelessness of her days.   The object of patronising gossip at the post office, grubby, foolish Miss Hare in her shabby hats and crumpled stockings is linked to prophecy, punishment, purification and redemption.

Exiled on the outskirts of town, Miss Hare believes she is alone with these visions until she meets with Mordecai Himmelfarb and instinctively recognises him as one of the Chosen because he sees the Chariot too.  Himmelfarb is a Jewish refugee and former professor who - wracked with guilt because he survived the Holocaust and his wife did not - is punishing himself with a menial job in a factory, Brighta Bicycle Lamps at Barrenugli.  (Yes, White does enjoy himself with the names he has used in this novel).

The only brightness in Himmelfarb's life is the religious vision that sustains him. Denying himself all creature comforts, Himmelfarb lives the abstemious life of an ascetic.  His only possessions are the remnants of his religious life: the parchment Hebrew verses on his pitiful doorway (the mezuzah), and the prayer shawl (Tallith) and verses of the Torah (Tephillin) for his morning observances.  He carries these with him always, in a battered suitcase, because he could not bear to lose them and he knows that no home is ever safe.  His dignity is in sharp contrast to his employer, Harry Rosetree, who along with his shrill wife Shirl, has reinvented a non-Jewish self in Australia, suppressing his original identity as Haïm ben Ya'akov Rosenbaum.  It is when the men at the factory crucify Himmelfarb to 'have a joke' at Easter that we understand Shirl Rosetree's panic...

Himmelfarb's life would be one of unrelieved misery were it not for Ruth Godbold.  Like the others, she is an outsider in the town.  She scrapes a living for herself and her many children as a laundress, and bears her drunken husband's brutality as a penance.  Her Catholic faith is almost irrelevant, because she symbolises a humanistic Rider.  She cares for Himmelfarb, sharing her pathetic lamb shank in embarrassment at Easter because the shops will be closed and 'Everybody has got to eat.  Whatever the time of the year.' (p. 442).  Miss Hare puts the town's spectators to shame by entering Himmelfarb's burning house to rescue him but Ruth Godbold was already nursing his battered body after the crucifixion  at her own shack.  She pre-empts Harry Rosetree's belated restitution by burying him, like any Christian (p. 500), refuting the employer's remonstrations that Himmelfarb was a Jew and should have been buried according to their rites:

'It is the same' she said, and when she had cleared her voice of hoarseness, continued as though she were compelled by much previous consideration: 'Men are the same before they are born.  They are the same at birth, perhaps you will agree.  It is only the coat they are told to put on that makes them all that different.  There are some, of course, that feel they are not suited.  They think they will change their coat.  But remain the same, in themselves.  Only at the end, when everything is taken from them, it seems there was never any need. There are the poor souls, at rest, and all naked again, as they were at the beginning.  That is how it strikes me, sir.  Perhaps you will remember, on thinking it over, that is how Our Lord himself wished us to see it. (p. 500)

Alf Dubbo is the most enigmatic of White's Riders.  He is indigenous, and wholly alone.  He was taken from his mother who lived on the banks of a river by a well-meaning but foolish rector- who found himself attracted to the boy as he grew older.  Alf fled, and lived an itinerant and sometimes drunken life, fetching up at the factory where Himmelfarb is astonished to find him reading Ezekiel.  The moment of connection is brief, for Alf's creative life remains hidden from all:

The abo quickly took the book, and hid it amongst what was apparently a bundle of his private belongings.

Himmelfarb remained spellbound. He was smiling that slow, inward smile, which could exasperate those whom it excluded.

'Interesting,' he had to remark. 'But I shall not ask any questions, as I see you do not wish me to.'

'Where'll it lead?' The abo shrugged.  'I was reared by a parson bloke.  That's all.  Sometimes I have a read of the Bible, but not for any of his reasons.  I read it because you can see it all. And it passes the time.' (p. 350)

What Alf does not tell Himmelfarb is that Reverend Calderon and his widowed sister Mrs Pask had conjured an eccentric education for the boy, based on the premise that it's 'the useful boys who are sought after in later life' (p. 352).  So (like most Aboriginal children taken into so-called care in those days) he was taught to do several little jobs but also the conjugation of Latin verbs to build character, reading the Bible (of course) and - crucially - sketching and painting in watercolours by Mrs Pask.  For her, after a lifetime of suppressing her own creative tendencies, art is first and foremost a moral force because truth is so beautiful but she prevents the boy painting in oils because they are too sensuous.  He persuades her to permit it with an impossible-to-fulfil promise to paint Jesus Christ, and she is horrified by his attempt to depict his own life in oils.

'Dreams! But there is nothing to indicate that they are any such thing.  Just a shape.  I should have said mis-shapen kidneys!'

So that he was put to worse shame.

'That is because they have not been dreamt yet,' he uttered slowly.

And all the foetuses were palpitating on the porous paper.

'I am afraid it is something unhealthy,' Mrs Pask confided in her brother. 'An untrained mind could not possibly conceive of anything so peculiar unless.' (p. 357) 

As an adult, with his meagre factory earnings, Alf saves up to buy paints, hiding them away in his room, where they are alas not safe from marauding art dealers and a greedy landlady.  What he paints is his vision of the Chariot, an act of praise...

White's portraits of these four outsiders who are invested with instinctive, religious, humanistic and creative manifestations of faith, share a common humanity.  As Mrs Godbold says, they are all the same, they are one.  And because - in contrast to his incisive and often bitter portraits of the other characters - White tells the stories of his Riders with such compelling compassion, the reader becomes emotionally engaged.  I think this is why this novel is labelled the 'most accessible' of White's novels: it's impossible to read Riders in the Chariot without caring about these characters and to feel empathy for their fate.

Riders in the Chariot won the Miles Franklin Award in 1961.  I hope that whatever the judges choose this year lives up to this legacy.

There is much, much more to this novel than I can outline here.  Do visit Andrea Goldsmith's website to see her essay The Passions of Patrick, based on her lecture at the Wheeler Centre, which I attended late last year...

Author: Patrick White
Title: Riders in the Chariot
Publisher: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961.
ISBN: none.  (Hardback first edition)
Source: Personal library, from my collection of Miles Franklin winners. 

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

A Fringe of Leaves (1976) by Patrick White

A Fringe of Leaves, by Patrick White, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1973

A Fringe of Leaves (1976) is the first novel published after Patrick White had won the Nobel Prize.  My 2006 journal notes about it are very detailed because I was reading it for the first time, for discussion in a book group to which I belonged.  It is more of a retelling than a review. These thoughts, moreover, pre-date my reading of Larissa Behrendt's Finding Eliza, Power and Colonial Storytelling, which interrogates the novel from an Indigenous point-of-view.  I have left my journal jottings as they are, despite the flaws, so FWIW here it is... NB Page numbers BTW are only approximate.  They refer to a paperback edition that I no longer have, not the first edition that I have now.

Indigenous readers are advised that some aspects of this review refer to offensive events in the novel which, as you can see, I knew to be contested even at the time I read the book.

***

A Fringe of Leaves is about Mrs Roxborough a.k.a. Ellen Gluyas who is shipwrecked off the coast of Queensland in the 1840s.  She is a woman of many selves (p.205) and the omniscient narrator names her according to her current context.  Most of the time she is Mrs Roxborough, when she and everyone defines her as Austin Roxborough's wife, solicitous of his invalid state, entitled to respect as the wife of a rich man, and respectable.  But when she reverts to her childhood state, she is Ellen Gluyas, a farm girl from Cornwall who snared a rich husband when her mother took in boarders.  After her alcoholic father died, Ellen could not take Austin in as a boarder again because the farm was about to be sold.  Austin fancied himself in need of a wife to look after him and thought he could make a lady of her.  A Fringe of Leaves is another Pygmalion story, but as is the case in so many of PW's novels, the central character refuses to be moulded into any path chosen by others.

The book begins with two narrow-minded and spiteful women, Miss Scrimshaw and Mrs Merivale of Hobart Tasmania, gossiping about Mrs Roxborough.  There are hints of a Dark Past in Cornwall — such a remote country they concur from Hobart, without a trace of irony.  They gossip about a possible dispute with Austin's brother, Garnet Roxborough, whom they had come from England to visit.  Miss Scrimshaw prefigures the arc of the story by wondering how Mrs Roxborough would act if she were tested.

Indeed she is.  She is tested by her marriage and the disparity in their age, social class and education.  She is tested by her husband's obsessive devotion to Virgil, and his attempts to get her to read it in the original Latin.  She can't even manage it in English.  She has to learn to speak 'proper' but never manages small talk and spends much of her time in silence.  She is a young, healthy woman and Austin is old and infirm, and although she is devoted to his needs, they do not love each other.

Her marriage vows are tested when Garnet seduces her.  She recognises the sensual passion she feels for what it is, and tries to behave by avoiding him, but then impulsively goes out riding, has a fall, and succumbs when he turns up to rescue her.  Guilt-stricken, as Miss Scrimshaw intuits, Ellen engineers a departure from Tasmania, and she and Austin set off for England on the Bristol Maid.  Where she will be tested again.

Austin is a most unsympathetic character.  Frail, fussy, selfish, demanding and indescribably dull.  He's a snob, despite his patronising marriage, and he often hurts Ellen's feelings through his insensitivity.  He always calls her Ellen: he doesn't forget where she's from.

He redeems himself a little when he realises Ellen is pregnant and tries to protect her a bit when they are shipwrecked.  (He doesn't know the child might not be his.  Even Ellen isn't sure.) The scenes in the lifeboat are graphic: Ellen's matted hair and her squelching shoes in the leaking boat; Austin's soaked Virgil in his waistcoat and the crumbs of mouldy bread on his lips; the lassitude and exhaustion of the survivors — all quite fearsome to read about.  I have always known that shipwreck was commonplace in those early days, but these vivid scenes force awareness of just how awful such an experience was.

Interestingly, White explores faith early on.  Austin's is based on family expectations and is mainly lip service; Ellen's is weaker still.  Faith doesn't mean anything to him, but of course he attends Sunday service to maintain marital solidarity.  (p. 107) When she was a girl on the farm, Ellen's fears had been dispersed by 'myths of place' (p.111) but the 'presentiment of evil' she felt in the presence of Garnet could not be exorcised. Nor could she be comforted by the Christian faith her mother-in-law had trained her to have.  She had thought, like a naïve child, that her Christian faith insured her against evil, but in Hobart there was no one to care for or protect her.

What is the significance of the risks she takes?  As a girl in Cornwall she had plunged into a deep pool and had breath frightened out of her by the icy water (p.111) In Hobart she sets off to ride on a frisky horse (p.112) which brings her to grief.  Is this indicative of her suppressed sensual nature, in contrast with Austin's pseudo-intellectual one?

When she comes off the horse she is accosted by a stranger, one of the convicts, smelling of rum (p135), liked her father used to.  He assaults her, blackened nails were tearing at her bosom, and he accused her of leading him on, showing herself through windows at night.  Garnet rescues her, but she does not tell Austin about it at all, confining her reflections to oblique references in her journal.

Sunday morning 9th July 2006

White depicts the Aborigines as aggressive savages, and cannibals too.  The writer Eric Rolls made claims of Aboriginal cannibalism in one of his books.  I don't remember now whether it was A Million Wild Acres: 200 years of man and an Australian forest (1981) or Sojourners (1992).  Whichever one it was, I was so taken aback by this claim that I wrote to Rolls to ask him what his evidence was, but never received a reply. [Although often described as an historian, Rolls had no tertiary qualifications in history].  This issue is certainly not something widely discussed these days and I don't know what PW's source was.  All I know is that there are some horrific scenes in the novel.

When the Bristol Maid ends up on the coral reef, the passengers and crew take to the longboat and the pinnacle.  They row together at first, but are eventually abandoned by the pinnacle which is being hindered by the ineptitude of Captain Purdew.  They drift for a long time, Ellen's hair and clothes becoming more bedraggled.  They are maddened by hunger and thirst, and worst of all, Ellen gives birth to a stillborn child, an appalling indignity which PW scampers over in a paragraph or two, giving no indication of how long labour usually is.  They eat mouldy bits of bread with an occasional tot of rum to sustain them, and when they finally land they eat a putrefying kangaroo.

Disaster strikes when the Aborigines arrive and take offence.  Austin is killed by a spear.  In an uncharacteristic act of bravery he had gone to the defence of Captain Purdew.  White depicts the violence as initiated by the Aborigines, who send a spear to the head of the procession of survivors (p.238), and a second spear to graze Purdew.  He, crazy though he is, entreats the crew not to retaliate, but they do, and he then gets a spear in the ribs and Austin gets one in the neck.  The rest of the crew are captured, stripped, led off and later found dismembered.  Ellen herself is stripped, beaten, dragged off and forced to nurse an infant covered in sores.  She is given only scraps to eat, beaten into shimmying up a tree to beat out a possum, and eventually raped.  These scenes are loathsome and horrible, and her utter defencelessness so ghastly that I could hardly bear to read it.  She acquiesces to it all because she has no choice if she is to survive, but she finds the Aboriginal way of life disgusting.

Finally, she encounters an escaped convict called Chance, with whom she makes her escape.  They become lovers, but it's not clear if this is just the necessity of having him guide her back to Moreton Bay.  He is terrified of the lash and the death penalty as punishment for his escape, but she promises him mercy — the irony of her reclaiming her status as Mrs Roxborough and proclaiming the power to give him this, is quite tragic, when she is naked, shorn of her hair and wearing only a fringe of leaves.  She loses even her wedding ring as they flee through the bush, though she had managed to conceal it in the fringe of leaves for so long.  It is the last vestige of 'civilisation' when she surrenders to Chance: she has absolutely nothing left except a false dignity and compassion for another, even when she learns that he had killed his own wife.

The scene where she finally reaches a farm is unforgettable.  She lies prostrate in the furrows of the plough, and Mrs Lovell, good soul that she is, covers her with a blanket.  She lends her some clothes — black widow's weeds and a smart garnet gown, and eventually Ellen's hair grows back.  But they are all afraid of her and what she has been through.  She seems not fully in command of herself, given to outbursts and odd remarks.

Miss Scrimshaw, governess to the governor's children, is to escort Ellen back to England, and they form an unlikely friendship.

So, how did Ellen Gluyas fare when tested?  She showed courage, determination and acceptance, initiative, an ability to learn, and compassion.  And yet she is not a likeable character.

I finished reading the book and journalled it on the 4th-9th of July, 2006.

***

In David Marr's Patrick White, a Life (1991), there is an analysis of A Fringe of Leaves — but he too, was reading the novel and writing about it before Larissa Behrendt's ground-breaking book.  I have no doubt that both he and Patrick White would consider this novel from a different perspective had they had that opportunity in the 20th century.

Do read my summary of Behrendt's analysis of the Eliza Fraser story.  It's essential reading, whether you've read A Fringe of Leaves or not.

***

Following on from a conversation with Carol Jones, see below, I've trawled through the index of the Marr bio to see what he has to say about A Fringe of Leaves.  Marr covers many pages in each chapter without referring to dates, so even with the help of notes at the back of the book, it's not easy to identify a clear chronology.

• p. 377-8:  PW sets off for Brisbane by steamer to research the book he's keen to begin.  This was to be based on the ordeal of Eliza Fraser after the shipwreck of the Stirling Castle in 1936.  White wanted to sail along the Australia[n] coast and explore Fraser Island off Queensland, where all the survivors of the wreck were killed by blacks, except for the captain's wife who was kept by them as a slave. She was stripped of everything until she was reduced to wearing a vine around her waist — in which she hid her wedding ring.  At a corroboree she found an escaped convict who took her back to civilisation.  Marr goes on to say that White first heard this story from in Florida, from Sidney Nolan who had done a series of paintings on the theme, and the bio moves on to discussion about the ugly public feud with Nolan after Cynthia Nolan committed suicide.
• p 401: a reference to the MS of A Fringe of Leaves lying untouched in a drawer, ?about 1962.
• p.413: (?1963) Talk of an opera based on Nolan's paintings of the Naked Lady, prompts PW to rough out a brief synopsis from the abandoned manuscript...  
• p.425: Early 1960s, in London where his mother was in her dying days, a visit to the Nolans and Cynthia's beautiful garden in Putney, which makes an appearance as the garden of Jack Chance in AFOL.
• p.436: the opera, and collaboration with Sculthorpe falls apart. Exactly what the creative differences were isn't clear to me  except that PW thought that Sculthorpe had failed to grasp what Mrs Fraser was all about.  Some years later after collaboration with historian Alan Moorehead and the critic Roger Covell, Sculthorpe produced a theatre piece called Mrs Fraser Sings and an orchestral suite called Mangrove.  
• p.529: AFOL has been lying dormant in a drawer for ten years.  This trip to the Barrier Reef to be immersed in the seascapes and light before embarking on the Mrs Fraser novel is the one referred to on p. 377-8 above.  PW and Lascaris fly north and take a cruise ship through the Whitsundays.  They had planned to stop at Gladstone on the way back but the plane wouldn't land for just two passengers.  When they got back to Sydney, the news of the Nobel broke...
• p.538: PW and Lascaris escape the fuss in Tasmania, where his research for AFOL focussed on its colonial history, the rattle of chains and execrable roads.
• p.542-4: PW wanted to turn the Eliza Fraser story from something which would otherwise have been a mere adventure story into a novel of psychological interest.  He changed the real Eliza's birthplace into Cornwall because he knew Cornwall but not the Orkneys, and besides, he was not writing an historical novel.  He wanted to turn to his own purposes the story of the wreck of the Stirling Castle and the ordeal of one survivor, Eliza Fraser.  'I feel historical reconstructions are too limiting, he told Alan Williams, 'so I did not stick to the original facts.' He marries Eliza to an infirm gentleman and drew on the Cheltenham landscape where he had suffered as a boy in boarding school.  He boned up on sailing ships and the sea, and his portrait of Roxborough fussing over nautical details is self-mockery.  PW writes to his American publisher Huebsch with a summary of the trajectory of the novel:

'Half the crew attempted to reach Morton Bay (Brisbane) in one of the boats,' White explained to Huebsch.  'The other finally landed on a large island off the coast, where the men were gradually killed off by the blacks, and the captain's wife kept as a slave.  This Victorian lady was stripped of everything, until she was reduced to wearing a vine round her waist — hence the "fringe of leaves" — to hide her wedding ring and anything else she had.  In the course of her duties she was made to shin up trees to fetch possums and wild honey, and when she objected a fire stick was simply held under her behind.  She became quite skilled at climbing.  Then at a big aboriginal corroboree she happened to meet an escaped convict who had been living for years with the blacks as one of themselves.  In fact it took him some time to remember his English after coming across a white woman.  However, he decided to rescue her, and they set out to walk the 160 miles or so to Moreton Bay both stark naked, in return for which she was to get him a pardon.' (pp.543-4)

Marr says that while the story of the wreck and ordeal was as outlined, he was now interested in the relationship between the convict and the woman.  He attributes this as a new freedom that appears in White's  writing after the Nobel.

• p.546 and p550: Writing AFOL coincides with the Dismissal in 1975 and the campaign to save Fraser Island.
• p. 551: PW donated $1000  to FIDO (the Fraser Island Defence Organisation) for the campaign against sand mining:

FIDO used the money to solve in one way a problem White himself was facing as he worked on A Fringe of Leaves.  Little was known about Aboriginal life on Fraser Island, for the tribes were now scattered and their culture extinguished.  The Queensland government was reluctant to send archaeologists over the island, apparently fearing that discoveries might hamper mining.  Sinclair found an independent archaeologist to collect evidence for FIDO, and White's $1000 paid his expenses.  White, meanwhile, had to recreate the life of the tribes for his novel, and he turned to his old friend David Moore, who was now an anthropologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney.  Moore confirmed what Sinclair already knew: there was almost nothing in libraries and museums.  So the ceremonies and speech of the Aborigines in A Fringe of Leaves were a feat of White's imagination, while the cash he gave FIDO helped to reveal one of the most important Aboriginal sites yet to be uncovered in Australia.

• p.553: Discussion about White's late relaxed sensuality and how that is expressed in the loving relationship between Eliza and the convict Chance, and the rest of the references in the index are about the completion of the novel and its publication.

So.  The index confirms that there is no discussion in Marr's biography about the source of the details of the Eliza Fraser story other than Sidney Nolan's paintings as a catalyst, but it also confirms that the representation of the Aboriginal way of life came from PW's imagination.  The issue of cannibalism isn't specifically addressed at all.  Did the idea of it originate with the Nolan paintings, or from PW's imagination?  Perhaps a scholar can enlighten us.

For further reading, see Living with the Locals, Early Europeans’ Experience of Indigenous Life, by John Maynard and Victoria Haskins which, as I say in my review is a combination of tales of shipwreck and escape, a glimpse into indigenous life and culture at First Contact, and an analysis of the ways in which these survival stories were told and misappropriated afterwards.

***

Update 10th December 2020

Handicapped by the lack of an index, I've re-read Behrendt's Finding Eliza to see what specifically what she says about A Fringe of Leaves.

• p. 43: In discussing 'captivity narratives', Behrendt makes the point that the demonising of Aboriginal men is generally done without any irony or reflection on the subordinate and subservient place of women in European society at the time.

Patrick White's novel A Fringe of Leaves was inspired by Eliza Fraser's story but in several ways digresses from the classic captivity narrative.  White can always be relied on to explore the complexities and hypocrisy inherent in a society's class system.  In the case of this novel he investigates these themes through a working-class heroine elevated in social status by marriage.  This allows him to cleverly compare the drudgery faced by women from England's working and poorer classes with the labour required of women in a hunter-gatherer society.

• p. 108 Arguing that beliefs about cannibalism were hard to shake in Europeans.  Even accounts sympathetic to Aboriginal people were quick to try to place the practice in a context rather than to question whether it ever existed at all.  

In Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves, an act of cannibalism is used to symbolise spiritual communion as Ellen (the character based on Eliza Fraser) reconnects with and embraces her sensual, primitive self.  When Ellen, uninvited, comes across the performance of funeral rites for an Aboriginal child, she can see from the 'greasy smears on lips and cheeks how the flesh had disappeared' from the body of the child.  In response to this discovery, Ellen feels a range of emotions including fear, amazement, disgust and pity.  She looks down and catches sight of a thigh bones, and although her initial reaction is to kick the bone out of sight,  uncontrollably, she partakes of the practice.

• Behrendt then quotes the relevant passage from A Fringe of Leaves (though, alas, not the page number) in which White describes the scene and Ellen's queasiness, self-disgust and determination never to think of it again.  On p.109 Behrendt then continues:

The tasting of human flesh is described as feeding her spirit.  Cannibalism connects Ellen to the primordial and savage part of the self that Western culture has repressed.

Academic Veronica Brady observes that A Fringe of Leaves is not about the Aboriginal people, but rather about being non-Aboriginal in Australia and the unease that Australians need to settle as they build a nation.  For Patrick White, Aboriginal people are representations of the repressed parts of the European self, symbols for the repressed white psyche.

Patrick White, was, of course, writing fiction, and not writing Australian realism either, so he was at liberty to write whatever he liked without regard for the historical truth.  But by reviving elements of a legendary story for his own purposes, he perpetuated aspects of it that contribute to a negative portrayal of traditional Aboriginal life.  Whatever his intentions were — and the biographical record is clear that he supported land rights and other aspects of Indigenous self-determination — A Fringe of Leaves is, in the light of what we know today, a flawed novel.

***

And with that, I think I'll call it a day and leave it to the scholars!

Author: Patrick White
Title: A Fringe of Leaves
Jacket painting by Sydney Nolan
Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 1976, (First edition)
ISBN: 0224012908
Source: personal copy, purchased second-hand $10.00

Cross-posted at ANZLitLovers. 

© Lisa Hill

White, Patrick "Voss"

 

Opening Lines:

“There is a man here, miss, asking for your uncle,” said Rose.

And stood breathing.

I love this opening.

I can just see Rose, the hard-working, impatient, put-upon servant being asked to do something she doesn’t normally have to do on a Sunday, and doing it huffily and with attitude. All it took Patrick White was three carefully placed words.

I’m not sure why I found these opening chapters of Voss so off-putting as a nineteen year old. I had pretty much read all of Jane Austen by that point, so the drawing room drama was something I was not only familiar with, but enjoyed. Curiously, back then, I had an idea it was set in Adelaide for some reason. It was only as I was doing the pre-research for this readalong that I realised it was a Sydney book. I obviously wasn’t paying attention at nineteen!

Patrick White dedicated the novel to Marie Viton, Madame d’Estournelles de Constant. She was a French translator who persuaded Éditions Gallimard to buy White’s first three books. They enjoyed a regular correspondance as she worked on his translations. According to David Marr in Patrick White: A Life, Viton encouraged White to begin writing again after he had moved to Castle Hill.

Voss is not an easy book to summarise.

There is an epic, majestic quality about PW’s intentions regarding Voss and his writing that almost translates into Voss’ own story and intentions (I say almost, because after 460-odd pages, Voss is still a mystery to me), but what is it all about?

On the surface it’s an explorer gets lost story, but then, by the end, something should be found? It could be said that Voss found love at the end – an equal, deep, mystical love to sustain him ‘to meet the supreme emergency with strength and resignation‘ (i.e. death). But I was unable to read this as a love story.

Said explorer was also a megalomaniac, so it could be said that Voss was searching for humilty and redemption. Perhaps Laura and Voss did heal each other. Perhaps Voss did conquer his pride at the end, but again this was not obvious to me.

I didn’t feel like I ever really got inside Voss’ mind or understood him. And by the end I didn’t care too either.

Usually I love books that explore the interiority of its characters. Voss & I should have been a good fit. But the story never really engaged me fully. I could appreciate and admire PW’s descriptive writing, the way he could turn a phrase and startle you with his imagery, but Voss’ journey, the physical and metaphysical, never really convinced me. I was more interested in Judd’s story, or Angus or Dugald or Rose.

The time period was fascinating and well-researched. You could sense that PW knew a lot more than he actually included. One of the reasons I read historical fiction is to see how the characters react and behave in situations where they do not know how it will end. This advantage lies with the reader. The trick then for the author is to bring this uncertainty alive. To convince the reader that the characters way of acting and behaving was reasonable given the knowledge they had at the time. I wasn’t as convinced as I should have been.

White knew he had a hard task ahead of him when he wrote to Ben Huebsch (partner in Viking Press US) that,

Two of the practical difficulties have been to try to make an unpleasant, mad, basically unattractive hero, sufficiently attractive, and to show how a heroine with a strong strain of priggishness can at the same time appeal.

Patrick White: A Life | David Marr (first published 1991; my edition 2018) pg 290

Reading Voss has been a worthwhile experience and I’m glad I read it, but there were good points and some not so good.

Voss himself regularly overwhelmed the story, and at times I felt the ponderous presence of Patrick White looming over the pages. The religious symbolism also felt very heavy-handed and tedious. I do not enjoy reading books laden with religious imagery where it feels like the author is evangelicalising or on some mission to convince you to see the light too. According to Marr, ‘Catholics were very interested in his work; nuns were writing theses on Voss’ (p330), but it was all too much for me.

Given that PW had never been to any of the remote desert areas of Australia, his descriptive powers were impressive. Apparently his knowledge of the scenery came via the paintings of Sidney Nolan, particularly those dedicated to the ‘ludicrous journey‘ (Marr p293) of Burke and Wills.

Less convincing was his portrayal of Aboriginal life that he had gleaned from readings he found at the Mitchell Library. PW’s views on colonisation and the impact on Aborigines may have been in advance of the average Australian from this time, but there was still a paternalistic overtone that rubbed me the wrong way many times. Marr also revealed that PW relied on M. Barnard Eldershaw’s A House is Built and Ruth Bedford’s Think of Stephen for background details of early Sydney life (Lisa’s review of A House is Built indicates why this may not have been as useful as PW thought).

When I first started researching Voss, several authors and books were cited as being influences on PW whilst he was writing, but White himself felt that he was ‘conscious of being influenced more by music and painting than writing‘ (Marr p294). He claimed Mahler meant most to him as he was writing, while Berg’s Violin Concerto got him through Laura’s illness and Bartok’s Violen Concerto helped him with Voss’ ending.

Finally Marr explains that PW was finishing Voss as the British and French troops entered the Suez Canal. He wrote to Huebsch saying, ‘it is difficult to concentrate for the stink of history just at present‘ (p295). Megalomaniacs were in the news and on his mind.

Voss was White’s attempt to challenge the accepted Australian mythology of the adventurous outback hero by creating an almost anti-hero whose journey was more interior than actual. There is a LOT to unpack and analyse if you so desire, or you can simply be swept away by PW’s epic, often startling prose.

I still have reservations, but I have not been put off Patrick White. The Tree of Man is lurking somewhere on my TBR shelf, and I really should read David Marr’s biography in full, not just the pages with Voss references! One thing I have learnt during the Voss Readalong though, is that Patrick White is best in small doses. Men with such grand visions can be rather exhausting to be around, whether they be fictional characters or real life authors.

Facts:

•  First winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1957

• Originally posted by Brona @This Reading Life

Download #FREE @ReadNobels December Wallpaper: Patrick White's Voss

(Originally posted on Guiltless Reading)

The year is ending and with it now December, it's almost time to wrap up my Read the Nobels annual challenge and my little wallpaper project.

Over the year, my calendar wallpapers were a fun little way to drum up some interest in the Read the Nobels Reading Challenge for 2016. I've featured 12 authors who have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, featured a book cover, and a quote. Check out the full list down below.

How has your Nobel reading been going so far? It is my hope that this challenge has opened up new reading avenues for you!

If you noticed, my posts have not been as frequent but I am becoming my more focused on my reading choices in general. My Nobel reading has been slim but manageable and thoroughly enjoyable. I still have Alice Munro to round me up for the year. I will still continue on the with Read the Nobels (perpetual) Challenge so feel free to join in on the blog!

Looking for co-hosts! I'd like to continue with this annual challenge. I'm curious if anyone out there -- whether you joined this year or not -- to help me out. Sound off in the comments if you're interested in co-hosting or send me an email at readerrabbit22 at gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you!

***

Patrick White (photo from Goodreads)

Now, without further ado, here is December's wallpaper. This month features 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, Australian Patrick White. The Nobel Prize website cites his win thus: "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature".

On the Read the Nobels blog, six reviews have been posted so far: The Tree of Man, Happy Valley, The Eye of the Storm, Twyborn Affair, Solid Affair, and Voss.

In the award speech, I thought it was especially interesting to read:

Patrick White is a social critic mainly through his depiction of human beings, as befits a true novelist. He is first and foremost a bold psychological explorer, at the same time as he readily refers to ideological views of life or mystical convictions to elicit the support and the uplifting message which they have to offer. (Source)

I think that that is what appealed to me when I picked the quote decided to feature his book Voss*.

Here's a synopsis of Voss*: Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is White's best-known book, a sweeping novel about a secret passion between the explorer Voss and the young orphan Laura. As Voss is tested by hardship, mutiny, and betrayal during his crossing of the brutal Australian desert, Laura awaits his return in Sydney, where she endures their months of separation as if her life were a dream and Voss the only reality. Marrying a sensitive rendering of hidden love with a stark adventure narrative, Voss is a novel of extraordinary power and virtuosity from a twentieth-century master.

You can read more about White and his work here:

• Patrick White on the Nobel Prize website
• Patrick White on Wikipedia
• Patrick White on Goodreads
• Patrick White book reviews on Read the Nobels blog

Do you like poetry? Have you read any of Neruda's work?

Download the last for year, December's Read the Nobels wallpaper!

Right click image, download, and set as your desktop wallpaper. Voila! #ReadNobels makes an appearance on your computer! (Note: Wallpaper for personal use only.)

* Affiliate links

Past wallpapers:

• November wallpaper: featured 1971 Laureate Pablo Neruda's Love: Ten Poems*
• October wallpaper: featured 1969 Laureate Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot*
• September wallpaper: featured 1921 Laureate Anatole France's Our Children*
• August wallpaper: featured 1938 Laureate Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth*
• July wallpaper: featured 1929 Laureate Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain*
• June wallpaper: featured 2004 Laureate Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher* 
• May wallpaper: featured 1968 Laureate Yasunari Kawabata's Beauty and Sadness*
• April wallpaper: featured 1909 Laureate Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils* 
• March wallpaper: featured 1907 Laureate Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book*
• February wallpaper: featured 2013 Laureate Alice Munro's Runaway*
• January wallpaper : featured the first edition cover and a quote from 1982 Laureate Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude*

Yes, there's still time to get one more book in
before the year ends!

SIGN UP HERE for the yearlong event!

The Tree of Man by Patrick White

Originally reviewed by Edith LaGraziana
on Edith's Miscellany

Everyday life with its inevitable, often annoying routine is what most of us gladly pass over in silence because it doesn’t seem worthwhile to lose a word about it or just a thought. Nonetheless, the greatest part of human existence is made up of it and at least sometimes we wonder whether there isn’t some unexpected meaning or purpose behind it all – like a secret plan of God or Destiny or whatever other seminal power. The Tree of Man by Patrick White, the Australian Nobel Prize-laureate in Literature of 1973, tells the story of a man who leads just the ordinary life of a hard-working farmer with wife, son and daughter in a changing world. He does what needs to be done and accepts all vicissitudes – joys as well as trials – with apparent stoicism although inwardly he wrestles all his life to reach a deeper understanding and find God.

Patrick White was born in London, United Kingdom, in May 1912 and grew up in Sydney, Australia. After boarding school in England he worked as a stockman in Australia for two years and then returned to England to study French and German literature. Still as a student he published his first volume of poetry and brought out some plays. After his father’s death in 1937, Patrick White became a full-time writer and reworked his first novel titled Happy Valley (1939). During a stay in New York City, USA, he wrote The Living and the Dead published in 1941 when he was already working as an intelligence officer for the British Royal Air Force in World War II. After the war, the novels The Aunt's Story (1948) and The Tree of Man (1955) received international acclaim, but in Australia his breakthrough as a novelist only came with Voss (1957) followed by his most famous works Riders in the Chariot (1961) and The Vivisector (1970). In 1973 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Best known among his later novels are The Eye of the Storm (1973), A Fringe of Leaves (1976) and The Twyborn Affair (1979). In 1981 he brought out his autobiography Flaws in the Glass: a self-portrait. Patrick White died in Sydney, Australia, in September 1990. 

The opening scene of The Tree of Man shows young Stan Parker who arrives at the piece of bushland far off any human dwelling that had belonged to his late father and that became his after the death of his mother. He owns nothing else except a dog, a horse, a cart and some tools to clear the place and build a hut to sleep in, but he is strong and knows what needs to be done and how. After a while, he takes Amy for his wife. For her this marriage means a turn for the better although life on the remote farm is hard and in addition quiet and lonely. Then others begin to settle down in the area and the community grows steadily despite fires, floods and droughts. Stan and Amy don’t talk much, but they feel strongly attached to each other – be it by love or just by habit. After several miscarriages Amy gives birth at last to a strong boy whom she calls Ray. 

“The father and mother would sometimes watch the sleeping child, and in this way were united again, as they were not when he was awake. Released from this obsessive third life that they seemed to have created, the lives that they had lived and understood were plain as cardboard. Affection is less difficult than love. But the sleeping baby moved his head, and the parents were again obsessed by vague fear, the mother that she might not ride the storms of love, the father that he would remain a stranger to his son.” 

Before long they also have a daughter called Thelma, but she is a delicate girl. In other respects too Ray and Thelma could hardly be more different, he being naughty and wild, she good and quiet. Grown-up they share, however, a craving for the pleasures and riches denied them on the farm. Ray leaves without a word to make his fortune in the world, but the dishonest and cruel streak of his nature soon gets him into trouble. Thelma, on the other hand, starts a career in the city that allows her to hook herself a wealthy husband. Meanwhile, Stan and Amy Parker become older following the same farm routines as ever in a neighbourhood that has changed into the suburb of a big city… 

The setting of The Tree of Man in time and place is vague although concluding from a few place names and plot elements like the appearance of motor cars on the roads or the war against Germany it should be New South Wales between 1920 and 1955. The plot flows gently and quietly like the ordinary life of any farmer in the Australian bush, an impression that is heightened by the fact that Stan and Amy Parker are often referred to only as the man and the woman. Unexpected turns and twists of fate are rare even when it comes to natural forces striking the country and calling for action. This is because the author’s focus clearly is on the Parker family, notably Stan, and their understanding of life, of each other and of themselves. The novel has been called a domestic narrative, a fable, even folklore, but much rather it’s a character or social study of the Australian soul merging the experience of life in an inhospitable country with the heritage of European civilisation. It’s also a story about being at a loss for words to communicate with others and to express, i.e. understand the inner self. By contrast the author’s language is highly poetic and rich in powerful images that make the book an intriguing as well as impressive experience.

There can be no doubt that The Tree of Man by Patrick White is a challenging read that reveals its full charm only to those who are receptive to the meaning hidden between the lines and to its spiritual dimension showing above all in the sublime descriptions of stunning Australian landscape. It may help to read the poem from A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman from which the author took the novel’s title and quoted several verses although I didn’t bother to search for it until I set out to write this review… I enjoyed the book despite all. Admittedly, it took me a while to get into this read, but it definitely was worth it.

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:

http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2016/02/tree-of-man-by-patrick-white.html

Happy Valley by Patrick White

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1973 was awarded to Patrick White "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature".

I didn’t think that I would ever get to read Patrick White’s debut novel Happy Valley. White suppressed it for fear of litigation and perhaps also because he thought it flawed, so copies were rare and (of course) well out of my price-range. But now in a bumper year for ‘new’ books by this author, along with White’s unfinished The Hanging Garden published posthumously byKnopf/Random House, Happy Valley has been reissued by Text Classics. And what a treat it is…

People with not much better to do with their time and opinions argue, sometimes, about Patrick White. It’s a no-win situation because readers of popular fiction and the occasional academic who would rather read a phone book than Voss soon clutter up the Comments space complaining that Nobel Prizewinners are generally not worth reading, that White’s Modernism is too highbrow or that his prose is ‘stultifying’. (Turgid is also a favourite pejorative). I can only feel pity for these people. I can understand why they may not enjoy White, because reading after all is a matter of personal taste. What I don’t understand is why they want to spend their time attacking a dead author who has brought prestige to Australian writing and who ‘is widely regarded as one of the most important English-language novelists of the 20th century.’

Anyway, it’s their loss. Don’t let them put you off reading Happy Valley. It’s a delicious portrait of small town life, and an engaging, accessible story that reminds me of Thea Astley at her acerbic best.

To read my review, please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/11/13/happy-valley-by-patrick-white/.


I read and blogged my review on November 13, 2012. 

The Eye of the Storm by Patrick White

I was hoping, as I began reading Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm, that there would be heaps of erudite reviews out there in cyberspace, to help me make sense of it so that I didn’t write anything really inane here. Alas, no, hardly anybody has tackled it so at this stage I am free to interpret it any way I like and few but experts skulking in academia will be any the wiser. I expect I’ve missed heaps. Patrick White’s books are like that, and that’s what makes them so good. Each time I re-read one, especially if in the interim I’ve stumbled on some other work of literature that’s he’s referenced, I enjoy it more because I notice new things…

The Complete Review found The Eye of the Storm ‘impressive’ and recommends it for readers with ‘staying power’. Anderson Brown in Puerto Rico had a go at it, intrigued by the exotic idea of a Nobel Prize winning author being ’an Australian, no less’. But apart from noting that White’s ‘terrain is the nature of consciousness’ approached in a ’painterly’ way, he doesn’t have a lot to say in his review. Martha Duffy at Time thought it ‘pallid and self-indulgent’ and wished that ‘that the storm would blow every bit of it away’. (She was a journalist who started in fashion magazines and a royal watcher, so make of her vehemence what you will).

King Lear and the Fool by William Dyce
(Wikipedia Commons)

It is Alan Lawson, at the ABC website about White who makes the connection between King Lear and this novel. (Though the book is littered with references to Lear, so it’s not exactly revelatory. Unless you don’t know King Lear. Best to read a quick summary at Wikipedia if you don’t.)

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/the-eye-of-the-storm-by-patrick-white/

The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White (Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers)

I’m not surprised that The Twyborn Affair was a bestseller.  It’s easier to read than the High Modernism of Voss  and it’s an intriguing read.  The curious life and identity of Eddie Twyborn is told in three parts:

• in the south of France where Joanie Golson, in retreat from British scorn for ‘colonial’ Australians, discovers and becomes fascinated by ’Eudoxia’ Vatatzes, and there are enigmatic hints of a relationship that don’t make sense;
• the interlude on the Monaro where Eddie Twyborn has ambiguous relationships with the local squatter’s wife, Marcia Lushington and the manager Prowse ; and
• the life of Eadith Trist, the madam of a high-class bordello in London. 

I read and blogged this book on September 26th, 2009.  To see the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/the-twyborn-affair-by-patrick-white/ but beware, there are spoilers.

The Solid Mandala by Patrick White (Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers)

The Solid Mandala is the story of twins Waldo and Arthur Brown, told partly through the perspective of Waldo, (who seems a lot like White himself), and partly through Arthur’s point of view.  Their contrasting narratives illuminate their difficult relationship, as for example, when Waldo describes his painful attempts to negotiate friendships with girls  – hampered by the embarrassment of having a twin who’s a bit simple.

Arthur is a big shambling fellow, given to dribbling, making inane remarks, and getting over-excited.  Waldo fancies himself as an intellectual, and wants to write.  He reveals this ambition to Dulcie Feinstein, only child of a middle-class Jewish family, but has no clear idea of what he might do.  HIs father is hopeful that an influential friend might engineer a job for Waldo at the library.  Arthur drives a delivery van.

I read The Solid Mandala back in 2007, but I didn't blog it till August 12th 2009.  To read the rest of my response to this book please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/the-solid-mandala-by-patrick-white/