Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  20. Patrick White, The Solid Mandala

  Patrick White’s first novel, Happy Valley, appeared in 1939, in London, and won praise from the critics. In Australia it had a more guarded reception: it misrepresented country life, said reviewers, and its style was unnecessarily difficult. His second novel, The Living and the Dead (1941), came out first in the United States, where his publisher was prepared to back him strongly, seeing in him presciently an heir to the great English-language modernists: Joyce, Lawrence, Faulkner. The book was ignored in Australia.

  The indifference with which his third novel, The Aunt’s Story (1948), was received plunged White into gloom, and for years he gave up writing. Then, after what seems to have been a mystical illumination, he began work on The Tree of Man (1955).

  The feeling for the Australian landscape that he there rediscovered in himself did not extend to Australian society. He was dismayed by the pressure toward conformity, by a spirit of prudishness expressed in a rigid censorship system and a general policing of morals, by the single-minded immersion of the middle class in the pursuit of money. Riders in the Chariot (1961), in which a small company of artists and visionaries is subjected to the malevolent small-mindedness and xenophobia of the suburbs, expressed in extreme form his alienation from the social world.

  The loneliness and suffering of the artist, reviled or persecuted or ostracized for telling truths that the multitude cannot bear, is a recurrent theme in White’s work. Voss (1957), the novel for which he became best known, embodies the Romantic myth by which he lived and from which he drew sustenance. Johann Ulrich Voss, explorer by vocation, ventures into the forbidding interior of the Australian continent; in the course of suffering and dying there, he gains visionary insight into the mysteries not only of the land but of human existence, and of the human heart.

  It was hardly to be expected that an artist who saw himself as marked out for a lonely, higher destiny would be taken to the bosom of an Australia that prided itself on its egalitarian ethos. White’s achievements were not recognized at home, nor indeed in Britain, where the complex music of his prose and the mystical bent of his thought were alien to the modest domestic realism of post-war British fiction. In the United States, however, The Tree of Man, Voss, and Riders in the Chariot secured his reputation as an Antipodean William Faulkner.

  The studied coolness with which White’s writing was received at home underwent some change in the 1960s, as Australia began to shake off its sense of cultural inferiority and, in the arts, to assert a degree of independence from Britain. Riders in the Chariot was widely read; from then on, White would be grudgingly admired if not loved.

  At this very point in White’s career, however, influential critics, particularly within the academy, began to lose interest in him. To Marxists he stood for elitist high art; to cultural materialists he was too much of an idealist; feminists felt he was a misogynist; to postcolonial critics he was too wedded to European canons and too little concerned with the advancement of Australia’s Aboriginal minority; while to postmodernists he was simply a belated modernist. By the end of the century, ten years after his death, he was little read in schools and universities; his name had faded from the national consciousness.

  Yet Patrick White remains, on most counts, the greatest writer Australia has produced. All of his novels from The Aunt’s Story onward are fully achieved works, with no weak link in the chain. He himself nominated The Aunt’s Story, The Solid Mandala (1966), and The Twyborn Affair (1979) as his best. Voss was not on his list, perhaps because he was sick of being identified as Patrick White, author of Voss.

  It is hard to think of a more unappealing character than Waldo Brown in The Solid Mandala. Waldo is envious and spiteful and vain. Convinced he is an unrecognized literary master, a genius in hiding, he is nevertheless too idle or too timorous to sit down and write the masterpiece he believes lies in embryo within him. Everything in life that is bountiful or generous he regards with suspicion or contempt. Concerned to present himself to the world as a figure of rectitude and authority, he has no idea that people regard him as a figure of fun. Although the actual physical being of women repels him, he deigns to offer his hand in marriage to a girl, and is then bewildered when she turns him down. Not for a minute does he entertain the thought that he may be homosexual. His obsessive sexual imagination finds its most natural expression in masturbation.

  Waldo is very much the child of his parents, embodying the worst features of both: his mother’s social snobbery, his father’s sterile relationship with books. After reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, his father burns it. He does not explain why, but we infer that it threatens to undermine the neat, rational model of the universe he has adopted from his British upbringing. Waldo thoroughly approves of his father’s action.

  As a child Waldo is clever in a conventional sort of way, whereas his twin brother Arthur is so backward in class (aside from his inexplicable gift for numbers) that he has to be removed from school. It is accepted in the Brown family that Arthur cannot cope with the world and needs to be protected. On Waldo falls the duty of protecting him, a duty he performs resentfully. To him, Arthur is a sort of club foot he is doomed to drag around after him. As a grown man he has fantasies of murdering Arthur: once he is rid of the incubus of his twin, he tells himself, he will be released into a life of comfort and pleasure in which his superior gifts will be recognized and rewarded. Yet he and his brother continue to sleep in the same bed in the miserable little house their father built in the remoter suburbs of Sydney.

  The climax of The Solid Mandala (the conclusion of Part Three) arrives when the twins are well into their sixties. Forced to confront the fact that he has been living a lie, that he is no genius, that if there is a genius or at least a creative force in the family it is Arthur, Waldo launches himself upon his brother. Between the two there occurs what is either an embrace or a wrestling contest, in which Arthur participates in a spirit of love, Waldo in a spirit of hatred. Locked to his twin, Waldo dies.

  At one level The Solid Mandala is a perfectly realistic story of the intimate lives of two brothers of very different psychological make-up, children of British immigrants who never quite find their feet in Australia. Patrick White was a critic and indeed a satirist of many aspects of Australian society, in particular of its hostility to the life of the mind. He had a sharp eye for significant detail and a sharp ear for speech; he had read Charles Dickens and knew how to use Dickens’s technique of building comic characters out of little mannerisms and verbal tics. The Solid Mandala can be read as a closely rendered account of the fate of a certain kind of middle-class family in the evolving social environment of twentieth-century Australia. Mr Brown, father of Waldo and Arthur, adopts enthusiastically one of the founding truisms of national Australian mythology: that Australia is a country without shadows. Much of Patrick White’s oeuvre, including The Solid Mandala, is concerned to make the shadows in and over Australia visible. Read in this way, as a corrective to Australian cheeriness, The Solid Mandala is a very dark book indeed, driven only, it would seem, by disgust and despair.

  But White had greater ambitions for the book, as any attentive reader must soon become aware. It is no accident that he makes his Brown brothers twins. To the sterile rationalism of Waldo is opposed the inarticulate metaphysical yearning of Arthur. To Waldo’s prim, fearful attitude toward the body and its appetites is opposed Arthur’s often clumsy urge to touch people. (Arthur remains a virgin to the end, yet he enjoys a range of close and indeed intimate friendships with women: in White’s world, women tend to be more in tune with their instincts and intuitions than men are.) To Waldo’s fastidious verbal art (so fastidious that he can barely put pen to paper) is opposed Arthur’s sensuous, pleasurable hand-work with dough and cream. Waldo thinks of himself as an intellectual, but his mind is closed: Arthur is the one who, driven by the urge to know, pores over the great books of humankind. Far from being copies of each other, the twins are as opposite as can be,
yet are held together by fate and by deep-lying forces within them.

  There were two writers whom White was reading closely as he worked on The Solid Mandala. One was the Dostoevsky of The Brothers Karamazov. The other was Carl Jung.

  The Brothers Karamazov overwhelmed White, as it overwhelms most of its readers. But the subjects that Dostoevsky takes up in the book, chief among them the human drive – a drive that may be obeyed or may be denied – toward a God who may or may not answer, may or may not exist, are subjects that White too felt compelled to address, in one work after another, to the extent that one can say that, in The Solid Mandala in particular, White writes in dialogue with Dostoevsky.

  White’s relation to Jung is quite different. He plunders Jung’s writings – which are inter alia a treasure house of arcane knowledge – for insights that he can use in his story of Waldo and Arthur. In Jung he found the following passage, which he allows Arthur to discover and meditate on during one of his visits to the municipal library: ‘As the shadow continually follows the body of one who walks in the sun, so our hermaphroditic Adam, though he appears in the form of a male, nevertheless always carried about with him Eve, or his wife hidden in his body’.1

  Arthur immediately (and correctly) identifies himself with the hermaphroditic Adam, but then (mistakenly) tries to identify his hidden Eve with one or other of the women he is close to. It is not White’s manner to make use of symbols in a strict, unambiguous manner, but Arthur might be better advised to look to his twin as his true Eve. For at its most abstract level The Solid Mandala is a book about the human psyche, and in the human psyche, as White sees it, the two warring principles, called by some the conscious and the unconscious, by others the male and the female, by yet others the moist and the dry, are in fact protean in the guises they can assume.

  Though Waldo has been instructed that he is his brother’s protector, Arthur sees their relationship quite differently. It is he, Arthur, who must protect Waldo: Waldo is lost in the world of his reading and lacks the suppleness needed to cope with the real world. Unlike Waldo, Arthur performs his protective duty with love, from the moment when, at school, he appears like a flaming angel to rescue Waldo from the boys who are tormenting him until the last day of their life together, when he comes to the chilling realization that despite all his efforts he has failed to save Waldo from himself – that Waldo has irredeemably become a Dostoevskian lost soul.

  Coming across the word totality while he is still an adolescent, Arthur innocently asks his father what it means. Trapped in his narrow rationalism, Mr Brown is unable to explain. Yet unbeknown to himself, Arthur has the answer in his pocket. A mandala (the word comes from Sanskrit) is an ancient emblem of the universe, of totality. It consists of a square, whose four sides are identified with four gods or universal forces, enclosed within a circle. Among the glass marbles that Arthur owns are four mandalas, spherical rather than circular and therefore solid. At the heart of each is a mystic or mysterious design. His favourite marble has a knot at its heart.

  (To lose one’s marbles is a common idiom meaning to lose one’s mind. It is a central irony of the book that Arthur, the person who is in all quarters thought to have lost his marbles, has been in possession of them all the time.)

  Part of Arthur’s life-quest is to identify the four persons (the four avatars of the divine) to whom the four mandalas by right belong. Waldo, as it turns out, is not one of the four; but the Browns’ nearest neighbour on Terminus Road is. Mrs Poulter embodies much of White’s mystical materialism: an ordinary Australian-born working-class woman, entirely unintellectual, without any pretensions, she lives close to the earth; in her hands the most mundane daily tasks, like fetching water or preparing food, become sacraments. In one of the great scenes of the book, Arthur dances the golden mandala for Mrs Poulter (for, as he has learned from his reading, the mysteries can more easily be explored through the physical, intuitive, non-rational medium of dance than through the rational medium of language).

  The dance scene, which shows White at the peak of his powers as an artist in prose, establishes Arthur as the true spiritual hero of the book but also exposes a tragic paradox for White himself, namely that the art he practises will not take him to the heart of the mystery of life. It is not the writer but the dancer, the holy fool whose dance can only be danced, cannot be done in words except from the outside, who leads us and shows us the way. Odious as Waldo may be, it is Waldo not Arthur who in this book stands for the writer, that is, for Patrick White. It is no accident that the next novel White published, The Vivisector, has as its central character not a writer but a painter, whose art becomes more and more insane and antisocial as he grows older, more and more an exploration of enigmatic shapes and forms lying deep in his psyche.

  After the discovery of Waldo’s stinking, mutilated corpse and the collapse of the house of Brown, Arthur makes a last appeal for help, offering himself to Mrs Poulter as the son she never had, even though he is in fact older than she. In an ideal world Mrs Poulter would accept the gift, for she belongs among the elect, the handful of people in the book whose souls are not closed to the divine. But in the world we have, as she knows and Arthur knows too, that is not possible, not realistic. So we are left with the hope that in ‘Peaches-and-Plums’, the euphemistically named institution for the insane to which he will be committed, Arthur will be received with the loving care that he deserves – that all God’s creatures deserve. But that too is not a realistic hope.

  21. The Poetry of Les Murray

  One.

  In 1960 a bulky anthology titled The New American Poetry was published in the United States under the imprint of Grove Press. It contained samples of the work of some forty poets, most of them young, unknown outside the circumscribed world of poetry readings and little magazines. As a guide to a new generation of American poets it was unreliable: among the rising stars it missed out were Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Richard Wilbur. But covering the field was never the intention of its editor, Donald M. Allen. Rather, Allen wanted to showcase a surge of new writers who were not interested in the kind of poem – the compact, well-crafted, personal lyric – favoured in the New Critical schoolroom, who on the contrary, in sprawling verses, preferred to denounce the military-industrial complex or sing the body electric or report visions of the Buddha in the supermarket.

  Grove Press could not have guessed at the impact the book would have. The New American Poetry both captured and helped to create the spirit of the 1960s. In its first decade it sold 100,000 copies; in 1999 – by which time half the young rebels it had announced were in the grave – it could be republished as a classic.

  The new wave took some years to reach the Antipodes. When the anthology did wash ashore in Sydney, it was impounded by a customs service charged with protecting the morals of a notably prim public (Joyce’s Ulysses could not be openly sold in Australia until 1953). Once it was released and absorbed, however, its effects were far-reaching. The Australian body poetic divided in two, enthusiasts for the New Americans clustering under the umbrella of the magazine New Poetry, while doubters migrated to Poetry Australia, edited (from 1973) by Les A. Murray, a poet with, by then, two books of verse to his name.

  Though not unreceptive to American examples – his early poems owe a clear debt to Robert Frost – Murray was hostile to modernism in most of its manifestations. The examination he gave to the poets in Allen’s book was of the most cursory kind. In Gary Snyder, for instance, he claimed to detect the ‘almost affectless equanimity of the uprooted modern person’ – about as thorough a misreading of Snyder as is possible.1 But Murray was using Allen’s poets only as stand-ins for a larger and vaguer target: the modernist sensibility, the modernist world view. Modernists, in his dismissive diagnosis, wrote out of a ‘pathological state [of] depression’.2 ‘Modernism’s not modern: its true name’s Despair’.3

  As an antidote to modernist despair, Murray recommended a dose of Australian verse of the ki
nd popular in the late nineteenth century. To back up this prescription he went on to produce his own anthology, The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, in which convict ditties, drinking songs, and anonymous ballads were strongly represented, as well as Aboriginal songs in translation.

  Murray’s wholesale rejection of modernism may seem to mark him as simply an isolated provincial conservative swimming against the tide of the times. But there was more substance to his response than that. For a poet to repudiate newfangled foreign fashions and stand up instead for a home-grown tradition that celebrated the life of the mounted frontiersman or his outlaw cousin the bushranger was, in its Australian context, a clear political statement. In agitation for union of the six British colonies in an Australian federation – as came to pass in 1901 – the lone horseman in the bush had been used as an icon of national identity. ‘The narrow ways of English folk / Are not for such as we; / They bear the long-accustomed yoke / Of staid conservancy,’ wrote A. B. (‘Banjo’) Paterson, much-loved poet of the bush. ‘We must saddle up and ride / Towards the blue hill’s breast: / And we must travel far and fast / Across their rugged maze.’

  In truth, even in Paterson’s time there was more than a little idealization in the picture of Australians as restless frontier spirits: by 1900 a majority were settled in towns and cities (compared with thirty-five per cent in the United States). But in pitting the ballad tradition against the modernists, Murray was calling on Australian poetry to follow its own native course and foster its own native values, which would include an optimistic expansiveness that turned its back on both the ‘narrow ways’ of the old Mother Country and the cramped despair of the modernists, and a no-nonsense egalitarianism, suspicious of all pretensions, including intellectual pretensions. (Of the three rallying cries of modern democratic revolutions, Égalité has always had more resonance in Australia than Liberté.)