["The Prodigal Son" first appeared in
Australian Letters
_, Adelaide, April 1958. It is reprinted in
Patrick White Speaks
_ (Sydney: Primavera Press, 1989| and in
The Oxford Book of Australian Essays
_, edited by Imre Salusinszky (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997).]
White was just about to begin
Riders in the Chariot
_, the third of the novels of his return and the only one that deals with a contemporary Australia of mass migration and postwar boom. The book marks a new form of engagement in his work and much of what he lists in "The Prodigal Son" finds an echo there.
Riders
_ is set at Castle Hill (Sarsaparilla, White calls it) on the outskirts of Sydney and chronicles the lives of four characters who, like most Australians, find themselves by an accident of fate in unlikely contact with one another: Mordecai Himmelfarb, a scholar of the Jewish mystics and an Auschwitz survivor; "the blackfellow, or half-caste" painter, Alf Dubbo; that "angel of solid light," the English migrant and evangelical washerwoman, Ruth Godbold; and the owner of Xanadu, and last offshoot of a ruined colonial family, the mad Miss Hare. What these characters have in common is that they have all known "ecstasy" and are members of that small band of the just who in each generation are the redeemers of the earth.
Set against them in the novel are the upholders of the "average" at Sarsaparilla: Mrs Flack; Mrs Jolley, whose blue eyes "see just so far and no farther"; and that beautiful torso and spoiled, toothless head--the "Antinous of the suburbs" as White calls him--Blue, Himmelfarb's young tormentor at Rosetree's Brighta Bicycle Lamps workshop at Barranugli (White's way with cod aboriginal place names is typical of his sometimes broad humor) and the instigator, at the climax of the novel, of Himmelfarb's mock crucifixion.
White had set out in his two previous novels to uncover "the mystery and poetry" which alone, he feels, can make bearable the lives of ordinary men and women, but also to replace with a rich inwardness the obsession with material possessions--"the texture-brick home, the streamlined glass car, the advanced shrubs, the grandfather clock with the Westminster chimes, the walnut-veneer radiogram, the washing-machine, and the Mixmaster"--with which the Rosetrees and others, out of terminal anxiety at their own emptiness and inauthenticity, fill the void of their days. He also writes in "The Prodigal Son" of his determination to show that the Australian novel "is not necessarily the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism," or, he might have added, considering his immediate contemporaries, of rose-colored Socialist Realism. "I would like," he writes, "to give my book the textures of music, the sensuousness of paint."
Of all his novels,
Riders
_ is the one that most aspires to the condition of music; its interweaving voices and visions barely connect at the level of the actual. But it also aspires to the condition of theater. In the eighteen months after its completion, White produced three plays, two of them set in and around Sarsaparilla.
He had always been drawn to the theater, especially to the revue, that very British mix of satire, comic turns, and sometimes outrageous camp.
Riders
_, in the emblematic names of its characters, the choric voice of Sarsaparilla--the voice of "native cynicism" and "derision" as it is embodied in Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack--has more than a little of the old morality play, where high spiritual drama is often intermingled, as here, with burlesque. Himmelfarb, under direction of his "fate," sees the Seder table he has prepared as so much a "property table" that "it would not have been illogical if, in the course of the farce he was elaborating, a
Hanswurst
_ had risen through the floor." His Bosch-like crucifixion when it comes is suggested to his tormentors by the passing of a circus in which a clown, a Petrushka in fact, goes through a mock hanging: "Those who had longed for a show wondered whether they were appeased, for the clown was surely more or less a puppet, when they had been hoping for a man."
What follows is passed off by the foreman, Ernie Theobalds, as good-humored horseplay, larrikin high spirits, but Himmelfarb recognizes it for what it is, the same mob fury and resentment of what is different that is behind every pogrom or massacre or ritual killing. He has rejected the real Promised Land for a less promising one where carnivalesque misrule appears as mere loutishness and "history" is regularly reenacted as farce.
White is at his most characteristic in moments when the noble and the shameful are in violent but comic collision: in Himmelfarb's appearance, an unwelcome Elijah, at the Rosetrees' Seder; or the Dostoevskian scene at Mrs Khalil's where, while an outraged Mr Hoggett waits for one of the "juicy" Khalil girls to become available, Mrs Godbold ministers to a drunken Alf Dubbo--it is on this occasion that Ruth Godbold's capacity for forgiveness (White is merciless here) becomes more at last than her husband, Tom, can bear. Most extraordinary of all is the travesty of the riders that Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack present as they "drench the room in the moth-colours of their one mind," which would have been "the perfect communion of souls, if, at the same time, it had not suggested perfect collusion."
Mrs Jolley, bearer of "the virtues" to Xanadu, protectress of the home and the Hoover, for whom "all was sanctified by cake," is one of the great comic monsters of modern fiction. Introduced "feeling the way with her teeth," and with a voice with "the clang" of a Melbourne tram in it, she shares something--her ferocious propriety but also perhaps her literary past as a Panto Dame--with Barry Humphries's Edna Everage (Average) when she was still just a Melbourne matron; that is, before she had become, in rivalry with Joan Sutherland (La Stupenda), Dame Edna, superstar.
Verbally, Mrs Jolley is created almost exclusively in terms of the material objects she so passionately believes in. White's language world is full of the capacity of objects to transmute and fetishize themselves as aspects of the human. It is what gives such vivid and disturbing life to the writing and a fantastic and sometimes lurid quality to its most ordinary moments. It is also what creates the poetry of occasions when what might otherwise be inexpressible is made wonderfully present and substantial to us "in all the sensuousness of paint": when the plum tree, for example, under which Miss Hare goes through her mystic marriage with Himmelfarb, becomes an oriental canopy where shadows lie "curled like heavy animals, spotted and striped with tawny light," or "the ball of friendship" that appears as a "golden sphere" which hangs briefly, "lovely and luminous to see," between Himmelfarb and Mrs Godbold.
If Himmelfarb's German world, tour de force though it is, seems a little stiff in the narration, too panoramic in movement and in detail too phantasmagoric to be more than sketchily there, it is because the rest is so protean and fluid, so dense with observed detail, so full of what Mrs Godbold sees as "the commotion of life."
Early in the book, Miss Hare worries that "so many of the things she told died on coming to the surface, when their life, to say nothing of their after life in her mind, could be such a shining one." How to communicate what they have seen without killing it in the telling is a torment to a good many of White's characters, even those who see nothing much. It is what drives some of them to violence. He too puts more value on what is inexpressible than on what can too easily be expressed, but what he brings to the surface does shine. There are whole pages here that, once they have become part of what he has made visible to us, once we have experienced them through the texture of his peculiar music, live on in our mind as if they had been our own shining experience to tell.
Towards the end of
Riders
_, White delivers one of his most savage sermons on the ugly, characterless fibro homes that have replaced the grand folly of Xanadu. Two pages later, in the beautiful coda to the book, Mrs Godbold looks at these same houses and, with her "very centre... touched by the wings of love and charity," sees something quite different. "Mrs Godbold could not help admiring the houses for their signs of life: for the children coming home from school, for a row of young cauliflowers, for a convalescent woman, who had stepped outside in her dressing gown to gather a late rose."
Only the greatest masters can stand aside and allow themselves to be admonished by one of their creations whose vision, by some miracle of autonomy, is larger than their own.
--DAVID MALOUF