Australian with a Hoe

THE TREE OF MAN (499 pp.)--Patrick White--Viking ($4.50).

Pioneer epics dote on heroes who can tame the land but not themselves. In The Tree of Man, the primitive Australian back country tames, tempers and sorely tries a Job-like settler. Stan Parker is the kind of harassed hero O'Neill and Dreiser used to delight in--the simple, inarticulate man groping his way towards the meaning of life while fate trips him up with distressing regularity. And like O'Neill and Dreiser, Australian-born Author White (Happy Valley, The Aunt's Story) more often drags than carries the reader with him through Stan's long and woeful saga.

Stan is a handsome stripling and Amy Victoria Fibbens a skinny teen-ager when they get married at the turn of the century in the rickety church at Yuruga, a town where "a person could be dead an only the flies would cotton on." Stan takes his bride to a shack deep in untracked wilderness, where the awesome stillness has not been violated since the last glacier crunched to a halt. Stan fells the giant trees, pries grudging boulders out of the earth, builds up his own herd of cattle.

The hard, lonely life agrees with Amy.

She fills out into a husky, milkmaidenly beauty. After the day's chores are done, neither Amy nor Stan have much time for romantic frills, but they love each other with an honest animal urgency.

With a Meat Cleaver. Neighbors come and stain the good earth with their quirks and vices. The drunken O'Dowd chases his chattering wife with a meat cleaver.

The idiot boy Bub Quigley frightens and revolts Amy with his drooling and twig-chewing. In a sudden funk over the death of a cow, Amy herself races crazily through the bush one night and has a miscarriage.

Against the fledgling civilization and piddling defenses of the pioneering settlers, Nature mounts her devastating counteroffensives. Droughts, fires and floods rage across the land. Stan knows what he is struggling against, but wonders at times what he is struggling for, and if there is a God, and if He cares--and hopes to find the answers in the son and daughter that his wife bears him.

His son Ray proves to be a mean little stinker who kills puppy dogs, and his daughter Thelma a snobbish, touch-me-not icicle who is ashamed of her father and mother and their back-country ways.

Ray grows up to be a spiv and live with a prostitute. Thelma grows up to marry an aging lawyer and develop arty airs at musicales. Stan's bitter cup is not full, however, until Amy. in a climacteric crisis, commits adultery with a red-haired traveling salesman. A tongue-tied Lear, Stan buries his sorrow in a drunken, big-city binge, winds up lying among empty crates in a side-street lot and spits at the "paper sky, quite flat, and white, and Godless."

With Marked Cards. Stan goes back to Amy, and they measure out their old age in rocking chairs and the stale tea of memory. Author White's notion that destiny plays with marked cards is scarcely fresh, but Stan and even Amy play the losing game with stubborn dignity, unlike their children. Author White is overfond of the eye-stopping metaphor ("She was brushed in sad gusts by the branches of the music"), but at his best, he makes long-suffering Stan at least as poignant as Markham's Man with the Hoe. Stan's mute wisdom is in knowing that endurance is all. Author White's literary unwisdom is in worrying this theme for so long that his novel itself becomes a kind of endurance test.

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