Voices of Silence

THE BURNT ONES by Patrick White. 308 pages. Viking. $4.95.

Patrick White has offered his native Australia an embarrassment of literary riches. As to the riches, there is no doubt. White's six novels, from Happy Valley (1939) to Riders in the Chariot (TIME, Oct. 6, 1961), make up Australia's greatest fictional creation. Nor is there any doubt as to the embarrassment. White's bleak and austere vision is deeply antipathetic to the semiofficial Australian credo with its jovial good cobbery, manly democratic virtues and no-nonsense sex. White sees Australia, like his defeatist characters, as drifting toward a lost-generation doom of "impregnable negation, where there are no questions, only answers."

Snobbish Mother. He is obsessed by the separateness of Australian man and man, of man and woman, by the loneliness and silence at the dead heart of life. Typical is Dead Roses, best of this collection of short novels and stories. Anthea Mortlock seeks herself despite her grotesquely snobbish mother, who wants her "in society." Anthea finds brief ecstasy in a scramble on the sand with a local rebel. But he indifferently leaves town, and she relapses into marriage to a rich miser of the affections. Her husband is mercifully killed in an automobile accident, and she is left the money to wander the world, a rich exile with her looking glass for judge.

As a bald theorem, the story is nothing much. But White uses poetic means to suggest the self-defeat of a woman in whose face life has closed its door. Promised a view of an "estuary of black swans," Anthea imagines herself standing on the promontory that is covered by paperbark trees, near enough to see the writhing of the black necks. "Did she altogether want? Or touch the papery bark, flaking down, down around the grey dunny,* into opalescent scales. Sun and wind, to say nothing of moonlight, had worked upon the paper-barks. Better to watch without becoming involved in any process of skin. She withdrew her hand, finally, out of reach of further experience."

Twisting Hands. White's acerbic eye and listening ear allow no part of Australia's mores to go unrecorded. In Down at the Dump, he describes the funeral of the town tart with Gogolian rambunctiousness. Willy-wagtails by Moonlight is an equally authoritative (and equally comic) account of a dinner party of two couples. The dim hostess, Nora, "made a point of calling her husband's employees by first names, trying to make them part of a family which she alone, perhaps, would have liked to exist." Her more earthy guest, Eileen Wheeler, had been a school chum. "She had tried to tell Nora one or two things, but Nora did not want to hear. Oh, no, no, please, Eileen, Nora cried. As though a boy had been twisting her arm. She had those long, entreating, sensitive hands. And there they were still. Twisting together, making their excuses. For what they had never done." And the evening climaxes when the visiting couple learns (by hearing the husband's tape recording of bird calls that accidentally runs on to include giggles and soft cries) that Nora's husband has been sleeping with his devoted secretary. Or should climax. In fact, both couples ignore the discovery, and go on drinking.

Here, as always, White's preoccupation is not with character. It is with the silence and void in which the characters live. Grumbled one critic: "Never before have Australians been asked to contemplate such vast ambiguities in their country and their souls."

* Outdoor toilet.

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