Why You Should Read Patrick White
Australia's Mystic
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A few months ago, I came across an article in The Conversation asking if Patrick White is still being read, 50 years after he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He remains the only Aussie to win the award, but the anniversary celebrations were muted, if they existed at all.
This might indicate that Patrick White’s work has finally achieved the status of a “classic” – known by everyone and read by no one. But it might also have something to do with Australia. For whatever reason, Australian art is seen as second-rate, especially among Australians. For a long time, Patrick White’s great novel Riders in the Chariot was out-of-print. Fortunately, it was saved from oblivion – not by an Australian publisher, but by the New York Review of Books. Over coffee, David Bentley Hart told me that Riders in the Chariot going out-of-print in Australia is like Moby-Dick going out-of-print in America. The country that formed Patrick White, Les Murray, Joan Sutherland, Cate Blanchett, and Clive James has no trouble producing talent. But it might have trouble recognising it.
How many Australians recognise Patrick White’s talent? Outside of the academy, barely anyone. It doesn’t help that people within the academy tarnish his reputation: Simon During’s condescending book on Patrick White (published by Oxford University Press) provides a vivid example of a don belittling the work that will outlive him. (Mr During argues that Patrick White failed to perceive the changes Australia went through during the 1960s. Consequently, his novels have nothing to say about modern Australia.)
There are plenty of academics who love Patrick White, but he knew how official culture can smother art. Still, his novels don’t seem to be popular among the common reader. I can understand why. His plots tend to be serial (one thing after another) and united by symbols that aren’t firmly connected to the characters or their environment. His prose is occasionally fussy and baroque, and I don’t think any of his writing is free from longueurs.
Despite these things, I think Patrick White ranks as one of the mightiest novelists of the twentieth century. One thing that strikes anyone is his unsparing scorn for the materialism and tastelessness of Aussie suburbia. In Riders in the Chariot, Mrs Godbold is an angelic character who sings hymns, but
There was only one person who remained sceptical, and that was Mr Godbold, if he happened to be present; if away from home, and that was often, he did not think about it much. Mr Godbold had no time for All That. What he had time for could be very quickly specified. It was beer, sex, and the trots, in that order. Not that he really enjoyed beer, except as a dissolver of the hard line. Not that sex was more than a mug's game, involving the hazards of kids and syph, though he did succeed in losing himself temporarily in the brief sexual act. Nor did a horse appeal to him as horse; it was simply that the material future – which, after all, was all that mattered of it – depended on those four bleeding legs.
A few pages later, we see how Mr Godbold treats his wife and children:
The father was seated with his paper, the mother stood at her ironing. Children came and went. Although they raised their eyes to their mother, it was at their father's work-boots that they habitually stared, at the stiff, trowel-shaped tongues, and blunt, brutal toes.
Mrs Godbold, careful to use her rather trembly mezzo mezza voce so as not to inflame feelings further, had just begun her favourite: "I woke, the dungeon flamed with light..." when little Gracie ran in.
"Mu-ummm!" she shouted. "Guess what!"
And pressed her face against her mother's side, which would smell, she knew, of scones and clean laundry.
"What?" Mrs Godbold asked, and braced herself against disaster. "I am saved for Jesus!" Gracie cried.
But rather pale, as if, to please her mother, she was taking on something that might be too much for her.
Nobody was altogether glad.
"You are saved for what?" the father asked. His paper rustled. Gracie could not find the word. A robust child, she stood trying to look delicate.
"You are saved for Crap!" said the father.
Then he took his newspaper. "Crap! Crap! Crap!" Tom Godbold shouted.
And beat his wife about the head with the sheets of newspaper, so that it could have appeared funny, only it wasn’t.
Mrs Godbold bent her head. Her eyes flickered. There was such a beating and fluttering of light, and white wings. She was, all in all, dazed.
“That is what I think,” bellowed the husband and father, “though nobody in this place gives a bugger!”
The paper was scattered at this point, so that he was left with his hand, it suddenly occurred to him. After looking at it very briefly, he said, “This is what I think of all caterwaulin’ Christians!”
He caught his wife across the ear with the flat of his hand, with the result that the room and everyone in it rocked and shuddered for her, not least Tom Godbold himself.
"And Jesus," he hurtled on, as much to deaden his own pain, "Jesus sticks in my guts! He sticks that hard!"
In fact, he had to deal his wife a blow in the belly with his fist, and when she had subsided on the floor, against the table, a kick or two for value.
This is uncomfortable reading, and Tom Goldbold is something of a caricature, but every Australian can recognise the sort of person White wants to call attention to. Contra Mr During, the problem might not be that Patrick White says too little about modern Australia. The problem might be that he says too much.
His novels do more, though, than reveal “the destructive animus of banality.” Patrick White is not for small-souled readers; his ambitions were on a scale of Mahler or Delacroix. He thought the great artist should be a seer, a visionary, a mystic to rescue the world from dullness and trifles, from littleness and contingency. Although not a religious man in any recognisable sense, Patrick White had no doubts about who Australia’s prophet might be. His goal was to find meaning in a supposedly meaningless world, to reveal the extraordinary behind the mundane, to celebrate the mystery and poetry of life. William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand. At the end of Patrick White’s Tree of Man, Stan Parker sees heaven in a gob of spit: a vision of supernatural unity. Riders in the Chariot avers that, “everything, finally, was a source of wonder, not to say love.”
Christos Tsiolkas, in his book on Patrick White, links this sensitivity to the religion of White’s Greek lover Manolis Lascaris:
Cleaved from earthly power with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, Orthodoxy is marked by a fatalism that separates it from both Catholicism and Protestantism. Orthodoxy’s lore reifies the seer, the hermit, and the seeker, those who abandon earthly pleasures to find God’s immanence in the natural world. Orthodoxy eschews the intellectual quest for God.
It’s not faith that Patrick White takes from Orthdoxy, but a sensibility, one that allowed him to return to Australia and see the landscape in a way he could not before his relationship with Manolis. The seer, the hermit, and the seeker will become central to his work, and the spirituality in his novels will not arise from characters pondering the existence or non-existence of a deity, but from encountering the Godhead in the violences and ecstasies of the natural world. It’s this sensibility that connects White’s writing, for me, to the great Russian writers. It is this supreme gift that I think Lascaris gave him.
It's debatable how much of this sensibility White got from Lascaris and how much he got from the English Romantic tradition, but White’s novels assert the unity of material and spiritual; they present the saints as the outcasts and the sinners as triumphant.
Riders in the Chariot continuously reminds us of the ineffable lurking behind the familiar. Here’s a passage about the Jewish immigrant Mordecai Himmelfarb – the readers who reject White’s elevated language are missing paragraphs like these:
The bloke Himmelfarb had gone out, and was walking alongside the green river, where nobody had ever been seen to walk. The river glistened for him. The birds flew low, swallows probably, almost on the surface of the water, and he held out his hand to them. They did not come to him, of course, but he touched the glistening arcs of flight. It seemed as though the strings of flight were suspended from his fingers, and that he controlled the whirring birds.
Presently he remembered he had forgotten to ask his future employer about the money. But his omission did not disturb him, not in that green effulgence, which emanated from, as much as it enveloped him. The water flowed, the light smote the ragged bushes. Nothing disturbed, except that for a choking moment he wondered whether he had dared assume powers to which he had no right, whether he might even accept, in his very humblest capacity, the benedictions of light and water.
At the novel’s end, the Christlike Himmelfarb is attacked by a mob. The Aboriginal painter Alf Dubbo (who earlier was described with hands “gilded… with his own gold”) suffers but manages to render his visions onto canvas. His paintings of the titular chariot, used throughout the novel to symbolise a common humanity, sell for only “a few shillings” and cause “a certain ribaldry” before disappearing, possibly destroyed.
So the last shall be first, and the first last.
It’s somewhat fitting that Patrick White isn’t read much in his own country. He described it perfectly. In Australia, the oracles and romantics are defeated by the dull and conventional. Mystic visions are obscured by the light pollution of computer screens and Coca-Cola signs.
