The Logorrhealist

RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT (532 pp.)--Patrick White--Viking ($5.95).

Australia's Patrick White, while still a lamb in the field of letters, was unfortunately carried away by a big bad Woolf named Virginia. He still listens with the Bloomsbury ear, speaks in the Bloomsbury accent--broadened by a slight Australian snarl. In Britain, where Woolf's Bloomsbury is still held dear as well as precious, critics say he listens acutely and speaks with distinction. They have greeted all five of his novels (e.g., Voss, The Tree of Man) with little civil cries of educated pleasure. U.S. reviewers have been somewhat less impressed, and this turbid allegory will do little to improve the impression.

The chariot of the title is that same vehicle Ezekiel saw, way up in the middle of the air. Or does it signify the hidden Zaddikim of Hebraic tradition, the 36 secret saints who are born in every generation and are known to metaphysicians as the Chariot of God? Or does it simply mean the Shekinah, the presence of the Lord in every man alive?

Whatever it means, White's chariot swings low over a scruffy imaginary suburb of Sydney called Sarsaparilla. There the reader discovers five moderately interesting people who, after 440 pages of intricately imagistic prose, suddenly turn out to be the principals in a real-life Passion play that finds its climax in an actual crucifixion. The suggestion is that life is the perennial Passion of a recurrent Christ.

Author White has a fine, sweaty flair for physical detail: "The foreman stood there twiddling the hairs of his left armpit and breathing through his mouth." He has a grand ear for gossip: "I never take nothing substantial of an evening," clucks one old hen to another. "My stomach would create on retiring." And, above all, he has felicity and precision in his use of word and image: "Though her words were dead," he says of a social lioness, "the shape and colour of their sentiments were irreproachable, like those green hydrangeas of the last phase, less a flower than a semblance, which such ladies dote on, and arrange in bowls."

But Author White's hydrangeas too often turn purple: ".Mrs. Jolly had burst open," he writes, "and her white teeth were gashing the kitchen"--when all he means to say is that the lady was smiling. The fundamental difficulty is that Author White finds words more real than people. Reality in his hands becomes logorrheality.

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