Sex for Three

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD--Patrick White--Viking ($2.50).

The general theme of Australian Patrick White's novel is that the living and the dead are sworn enemies, that the archenemies of living hope are the indifferent, "the stultifying, the living dead." This fervently stated theme is worked out too intricately in personal terms to make much general sense. But the work-out is an uncommonly searching and sordid study of three middleclass, pre-war Britons.

They are Mrs. Catherine Standish, her son Elyot and her daughter Eden. Elyot, as the blurb says, "represents death," Eden "struggles up to life," the mother "wavers between the two." They are presented, in their mutual oppositions, with considerable psychological skill. It all converges, in the long run, on sex for each. Elyot, a scholar, a "raker of dust, a rattler of bones," winds up in bed with an art-gallery Jewess as hard & cold as chromium. Eden, a sultry semi-Marxist, follows an abortion with a hot, sterile series of affairs, finds what she needs in a calm carpenter who dies for Loyalist Spain. As for their red-haired mother, Mrs. Standish, Nature "had her tiresome, if inevitable way."

She got her last chance at love with a night-club saxophonist named Wally Collins, and in her fever for what was left of living, abjectly destroyed everything she had, her class, her selfesteem, even her self-deceit. Her Golgotha was a hideous gin-party in Maida Vale with Wally, a model, a radio pianist, an auto racer, a girl who stood on her head and drank two pints of beer.

The working-class characters in The Living and the Dead are done as if from a Junior Leaguer's notebook. But the sterilities of Elyot, the smolderings of Eden, above all the nervous, bogus charm and climacteric rut of the mother, are very real indeed; and scene after scene is worked out with exactness and subtlety which no second-string novelist can scent, far less nail to paper.

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