The Writing Life
Page 21
‘If I’d been born in a land where they wouldn’t let me put my hand in your pocket – not yours, Edda – I’d be a good commissar. But I’m corrupted. I’m a profiteer. Will I stand by and let others take the pickings? It’s asking too much … When the golden harvest has begun, take a scythe in your hand …’
His undoing is the Blondine, in her various disguises as Mrs Downs or Mrs Kent, and the ‘Great Blond Network’. She destroys him because she is a creature of his own kind (‘I go into the daily battle with men,’ she tells the son, Gilbert, ‘I meet them on their own terms … I do exactly what your father does’); but Grant is also a victim of his own ‘sentimental innocence’:
‘– I should not say this, but perhaps I was not always as I should have been, but without any thought of harm, I swear, I was carried away. I saw her, by lamp-light, on the fresh linen, with her blond hair uncoiled and a white cat there, a picture of innocence asleep, with a rosy cheek and hardly breathing, like that princess, the Sleeping Beauty, I kissed her forehead and up there woke a rascal and a criminal.’
Our last view of the terrible pair is utterly banal: a parody Darby and Joan, suspicious, dependent, resentful of one another, still dashing off the occasional poison-pen letter. Abruptly the Brechtian farce, the ‘exemplary comedy’, opens up to let in a figure from quite another world, the world of folk-tale or nightmare, the mysterious Hilburtson (‘Gilbert’ the Negro maid calls him, in some obscure but disturbing confusion with Grant’s son) who steps out of Grant’s past, or out of his shadow, in the shape of an old, white-headed caller – Death as Grant has already imagined him – to strike the man down.
It’s a splendid and terrifying conclusion. Mere farce in the end, mere satire or morality play, could not contain Grant or properly finish him off. His end belongs to some darker genre. He is a creation of the highest imaginative order, all energy without object, replacing nature with talk, with deals, with breathless activity, but at the centre empty; when the bubble bursts there is nothing there. It is, fully dramatised and without comment, a critique both of the ‘creature’ and of the society that made him.
‘Satan’, says Oneida, the youngest and liveliest of the Massine women of The People with the Dogs, ‘finds work for busy hands is what I see. People who can’t keep still are soon at work poisoning or throttling – or slaughtering each other.’
She might be thinking of Robert Grant, though there is no possibility of her meeting him in this novel. The world she inhabits, the book, stands at the farthest possible point from A Little Tea, A Little Chat, though both deal with the same city. It is a question of tone. The People with the Dogs discovers in New York itself, and in the country upstate, another mode of social and communal existence than the cannibalistic one we see so savagely depicted in Grant’s book, or the frenetic rat-race of Letty Fox.
The centre of all this is the extended family of the Massines, ‘the Comedians on the Hill’ with ‘their wedding guests, their bride and groom, and Irene, Edward, Lou and “the morons”’ – they are wonderfully inclusive with their cult of ‘creative sloth’ as justified by Oneida’s reversal of the adage that is the basis of the Protestant work ethic; and Whitehouse, ‘the Massine enclave’ – the ‘Fiftieth State of the Union’ – established by old Dad Massine ‘with the following sweet words: “I leave you Whitehouse to furnish a roof for you all, rich, poor, working, idle. All will be free on the Home Farm to do as they like …”’
Edward, the hero of the book, the soldier home from the wars, whose slow passage towards marriage makes up what there is of a plot, salutes the rareness of what Whitehouse and the clan have achieved, while recognising that he has to escape it to make a life of his own: ‘“I can’t bear to see the Massine Republic change,” he says, with tears in his eyes … “Will you change the Republic of Arts and Letters and Human Sloth? Why there, with a little good will and mutual aid and sensible mild nonchalance, with live and let live, we take vacations from the epoch of wars and revolutions. Oh, keep Musty away. My soul! Must we be efficient too?”’
Musty is one of the many dogs who share this book with so many people. He is – in one of those allusions that playfully abound in the verbal texture of Christina Stead’s writing – ‘the dog that’s friend to man’, and his presence in Edward’s fine effusion serves to qualify its absoluteness.
Whitehouse is an ideal, but is a place for ‘vacations’. ‘Creative sloth’ does achieve something but it also lets the farm go to seed. Still, what Whitehouse and the Massines offer is the nearest thing we have in Christina Stead’s world to a society devoted to ‘all things natural and sociable’, untorn by the other instincts of personal cruelty, political tyranny and greed.
The family and its ‘innocent, unquestioning and strong, binding family love’ is one centre of it. The other is the loosely formed alternative ‘households’ of the book, Edward’s off Stuyvesant Park, the Christy refuge at Scratch Park, ‘chosen’ families of the odd, the lonely, the disaffected, the independent, the aimless, and those who simply want to be free for a little of other ties.
‘Imagine being born into your own company,’ says the actress Lydia, Edward’s future wife, ‘I have to recruit mine.’ Company here replaces the usual word, society, and enters the book free from any ‘business’ association, as a term describing, in the special light of this one novel, an association of free individuals in a spirit of play.
The People with the Dogs is itself, within Stead’s opus, a kind of vacation book – a holiday from the darker view, an alternative, both as possibility and vision. There is death here: Phillip Christy dies under a trolley trying to save his dog; there is folly; there is also loving kindness. It is a book that celebrates American inclusiveness – people, animals, a rich profusion: ‘old boxes and trunks and drawers overflowing with the possessions, goods, gifts that they had all showered on each other … big pieces of silk, brocades, exotic rugs, things that are in the order of the Massine family love’. This is the innocent side of possessiveness. It is a world devoted, after the American ideal, to brotherliness and the pursuit of happiness.
The People with the Dogs no more denies the vision of A Little Tea, A Little Chat than A Winter’s Tale does the darker vision of Timon. It is the same world seen in a new light and re-created in a different mode. That Stead is able to do this – to step outside what might be seen as the necessity of her own vision – is part of her strength, her extraordinary intelligence and objectivity. The kind of novelist who can create, in such detail and with such force and conviction, two views of the same world that seem equally personal, equally necessary, but so different, is very rare indeed.
It is the diversity of these three books, each in its way a masterpiece, that most convinces us of her genius. She is, for some things, quite without equal among the makers of modern fiction.
The Age, September 1982
TIMON IN CENTENNIAL PARK
THE FINEST ACCOUNT I know of the artist’s life (it too is an autobiography) is the Memoirs of Hector Berlioz. Rather in the manner of a novelist, Berlioz uses himself as the basis for a ‘character’, a posturing and passionately foolish Romantic, the victim of melancholy, genius, ill luck, bureaucracy, unrequited love and the envy of his less talented contemporaries, who just happens to have written the works ascribed to the composer of the same name. The character is a masterpiece. Superbly ironic and self-distancing, Berlioz has created an autobiographical self so convincing that his real self disappears, and he is free to do this because the work of a composer, in being abstract, has no visible continuity with his life; it does not draw for its material on real, verifiable experience.
The novelist who makes the same attempt is already compromised. Much of what he has to tell will already have found its way, transmuted in the light of inner weather and significantly deepened, into the fictions, and since so much experience is shared between the life and the work we expect to be shown the link between them.
We are mostly disappointed. The gap betw
een the writer and the Writer is of the same kind as the gap between Berlioz as he appears in the Memoirs (or as he might have appeared in life) and the composer of The Damnation of Faust. All of which is to suggest that Flaws in the Glass is a book that tells us very little, save by implication, about the writer of The Twyborn Affair or Voss; about the man, that is, who sits at a desk and discovers himself in his fictions. That Patrick White we can know only through the novels, and the author of this self-portrait cannot tell us about him. Flaws in the Glass is in a different mode from the novels and comes from a different level of experience. It is written by the self White knows, and to this known self the author of the novels is a torment and a mystery:
I never re-read my books once I have corrected the proof, but if for some specific reason I have to open one and glance at a paragraph or two, I am struck by an element that must have got into them while I was under hypnosis. On one level certainly, there is a recognizable collage of personal experience, on another, little of the self I know. This unknown man is the man the interviewers, the visiting professors, the thesis writers expect to find, and because I am unable to produce him I have given up receiving them. I don’t want to pretend to be me.
But if White cannot produce ‘the author of the novels’, who does he produce and what does Flaws in the Glass tell us about him?
He produces the sensitive, generous, vulnerable, impatient, autocratic, intolerantly opinionated man – the Patrick White whose life the novelist inhabits and to some extent shares: an Australian born in 1912 into the New South Wales squattocracy, educated abroad and for a time living there, in England, Spain, Germany, the United States, Egypt, Greece, growing up homosexual, moving with his generation into a war and into the inevitable disillusionments of the period we call ‘after the war’. Because he is a great public figure, and has touched so much of the century, we are eager to hear what he has to say; but it is the man, the man in daily relationship with the world about him, who is the subject of this account: his relationship to his White and Withycombe aunts and uncles; to his mother, Ruth, and to Dicky Bird, his charming but ineffectual father; to the houses of his childhood and their moods and rituals; to the servants (especially Nurse Lizzie) who were his earliest loved-ones; to Manoly, especially Manoly, since the other great interest of this book is its account of a marriage – in the event a lasting one – between the representatives of opposing but not quite incompatible cultures and the inheritors of different but complementary histories. It is the relationship with Manoly that gives the book its final shape, as it gives final shape also to the life.
The real centre of Flaws in the Glass is what might appear to the casual reader to be an afterthought, the section called ‘Journeys’, in which White uses his travels in Greece as a way of talking about his relationship to the Greek side of his own nature, which Manoly embodies and has led him to explore.
‘Nobody writing a book on the Aegean Islands,’ he tells us in a revealing glimpse into his method, ‘would link those I’m about to include. They are dissimilar in character and from different groups, but each plays a particular role in my relationship with Greece and Manoly. Over and over, during these journeys and after, when M. tells me I hate Greece, I cannot explain my love. Again, in our more bitter, alcoholic arguments in the kitchen after the evening meal, when he tells me I hate him, I cannot prove that what I believe in most deeply, the novels for which my conscious self can’t take full responsibility, our discomforting but exhilarating travels through Greece, our life together, its eruptions and rewards, my own clumsy wrestling with what I see as a religious faith – that all of this is what keeps me going.’
Greece is central to White. He has shared his life with a Greek, and taken on, in no way gratuitously or lightly, all the sufferings and resentments of the Greek diaspora. ‘The Greek,’ he writes, ‘is never wholly unconscious of the echoes from a torture chamber in which his psyche is a present victim. Initiated into cruelty by Turk and German he is not above torturing his fellow Greek, which rebounds on him as self-torture.’
It is not only out of loyalty that White has embraced this version of what it is to be Greek. His sympathy with such modes of feeling predates the meeting with Manoly. His discovery of a pre-history for them gave shape to a predisposition and the vision that springs from it rather than calling it suddenly into existence.
No-one who has read the novels needs to be told that this vision is pessimistic. The pessimism expresses itself in Flaws in the Glass as black anger and a despair that is virtually unrelieved, but also has its comic side – ‘We had arrived,’ White tells us of their trip to Santorini, ‘not yet the anti-climax’ – and may seem the result, to some readers, not of a flaw in the universe but of the glass that has been held up to it; as much an aspect of the observer’s impatience and ill-humour as of ‘the nature of things’. This is one of the risks White runs in being truthful: ‘What you truly feel about a country or an individual of great importance to you shocks you when you are honest about your feelings. If you are pure, innocent, or noble – qualities I don’t lay claim to – perhaps you never develop passionate antipathies.’
It is also a risk that is inherent in the form. Pessimism here cannot transcend itself, as it does in the novels, by becoming the source of a view that is at once tragic and comic/grotesque; or through action that is blackly and piteously absurd.
In the novels too the sufferings meted out to the characters, the indignities they endure, may seem deliberately chosen by the author, but the texture of feeling is so convincing, and so deeply interwoven with events, that we accept the view as both whole and necessary: the creator takes responsibility for the world he has created. White is a stern god. He loves best those of his characters who are most tormented, those whom he has chosen to torment. ‘Lacerations and visions’ – a phrase used here of the Greek experience – comes close to defining the nature of his own experience of the world and the law of the world he creates; and it is significant that Greek, in this case, does not refer to the classical Greece of Plato and Sophocles, or even Aeschylus, but to the gaudy, decadent and god-obsessed ‘matter of Byzantium’ – or rather, the latter-day echo of it in the Smyrna Greeks, whose sufferings belong not to some remote and bloody corner of the Middle Ages but to living memory.
The Greek and the Australian worlds are in sharp contrast here. It is a long way from the experience of Dicky Bird and Ruth to the life Manoly’s sisters are enduring in war-ravaged Athens, or from the world of the Withycombe Whites in 1922 to the contemporary expulsion from Smyrna. It is part of the book’s purpose to show how White’s life, through a series of fateful encounters, has come to accommodate both, and how, by opening his fiction to the whole of contemporary history he has been able to set it at the centre of a century’s most violent extremes.
That is how the Greek/Australian connection works in the fiction. Here we see it at the level of daily living, through White’s relationship with Manoly: ‘Most Greeks cannot help but stroll, it is something to do with their legs and the nearness of the near east, while the majority of Anglo Saxons, especially Withycombes, march. So there is always a distance between us when Manoly and I go for a walk. No one else would see the invisible threads connecting us …’
Flaws in the Glass is about those invisible threads that connect a sturdy Anglo-Saxon on the march with all that White understands by ‘Greek’; it is also about the threads that connect two selves; the writer to the man and personal experience to that other form of it that grows from the writing.
Since it is ‘Patrick White’ we are dealing with, it is the account of a life lived passionately in that hell to which the writer believes we are all condemned, and which the most truthful of us recognise; which is this world and all we can know of the next. The vision is existential. It is also – to use a term we associate with Swift and with Blake – excremental: ‘the unsinkable condom and the smell of shit which precede the moment of illumination make it more rewarding when it happens’.
If the flaws that are inherent in the glass prevent White from giving us an objective view of the world, they also prevent him from being objective about himself, and it is typical of the man, as of the writer, that in allowing for his own ‘romanticism’ he should choose to err on the side of ugliness in the one and a prickly irascibility in the other. There is evidence here of a warmer character than he cares to present. He has great loyalty and affection for those who have won his trust (Lizzie the ‘Carnoustie lass’ for example, his old nurse) and a sympathy with simple, passionate, honest and enduring people that cuts across every sort of snobbery and every pre-conceived opinion. He also has charm and – surprise, surprise for those who don’t know how to read the novels – a sense of humour that is as often garish and larky as it is Timon-black. The variety and shades of humour are marvellously illustrated in one of the most entertaining bits of this collage, the telephone conversation with D (the stage designer Desmond Digby). The difficulty of integrating the campy, sardonic, spiky, morally uncompromising, vulnerable and self-parodying figure we are faced with here with the Great Author of, say, The Aunt’s Story or Riders in the Chariot, is just what this unsettling confrontation with a contemporary is all about.