Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT by Patrick White. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 21s.)

Patrick White is an all-or-nothing novelist. He makes great demands on the reader and great claims. Formidable in size — Riders in the Chariot has 552 pages — his books are still more formidable in the sweep of their subject matter. The ordinary and the humdrum never appear except, perhaps, as objects of derision. He prefers the loftiest themes, the most bizarre characters. One could not say of Patrick White that he is ‘quite a good writer’: either he is a great writer or nothing. Reading his pages one recognizes Browning’s Grammarian:

He ventured neck or nothing — heaven’s success
Found, or earth’s failure:
‘Wilt thou trust death or not?’ he answered ‘Yes.
Hence with life’s pale lure!’

     Moreover Patrick White’s ambition is still growing. Take the last three novels which have made his reputation. The Tree of Man was ostensibly the story of a small farmer hacking his living out of the bush near Sydney; but it was also an Australian Everyman, stiff — too stiff — with allegory. Voss was an epic poem in which Patrick White used the vision-haunted character of the German explorer to express his own passionate commitment to the Australian continent. And Riders in the Chariot? If it were possible to compress so huge and extravagant a story — it is really four novels in one — into a single sentence, one would say it is about the validity of different kinds of religious experience; but it is also about Jews and antisemitism, about madness, innocence, racialism, the corruption of modern civilization. And its four principal characters — a madwoman, a German Jewish scholar, a half-caste aboriginal genius and a simple English woman immigrant are swept together into a Sydney suburb to take part in a violent religious drama which ends in the crucifixion of the Jew on Good Friday and the death of all the characters except one — the English woman whose simplicity and capacity for love alone seem to modify Patrick White’s pessimism.

     Described like this, Riders in the Chariot sounds totally unmanageable. And in a sense it is. There is something too artificial, too strained in the parallel of the crucifixion even though, in the story, the old Jew Himmelfarb is strung up to a jacaranda tree as a practical joke by a crowd of drunken Australians. (Patrick White even provides a Judas Iscariot in the character of another Jewish immigrant, a successful business man, who denies his faith and then hangs himself after Himmelfarb’s death.) The connection between the four main characters is too slight and too mystical to be wholly convincing.

     Yet one feels that this criticism, though perfectly valid, is rather like pointing out the obvious errors in the time scheme of Othello. It hardly affects the overwhelming, mediaeval, crushing impression which the book makes. Moreover the four separate stories out of which the book is constructed — the lives of the four main characters — are all superbly done. Patrick White has written brilliantly about madness before in The Aunt’s Story, but that madness was of a mild and tentative kind. With Miss Hare, who lives alone in a decaying mansion in the bush, he goes much further, further even than Dostoievsky in The Idiot. For Miss Hare, in the eyes of the vulgar whom Patrick White despises so ferociously, is not merely ‘simple’ and subject to fits, but deformed, brutish and obscene. Yet Patrick White enters her mind with the most daring imagination and complete conviction and endows her with an understanding that is both more and less than human — half animal, half divine.

     Wonderful though this part of the book is, it is overshadowed by the still more powerful portrait of the old Jew Himmelfarb. This is not a sketch. Pattrick White tells the story of the Jew in detail, from his birth in an East German town through the first war and the Nazi persecution to the second war, the concentration camp and escape to Israel and Australia. It is not only the picture of a man; it is a picture of a people. Has any non-Jew, has any Jew, for that matter, written more movingly of the Jewish race and the Jewish religion? At the end, perhaps, Himmelfarb is endowed with such superhuman virtues that he ceases to be real — at one point there is even the suggestion that he is the true Saviour for whom the Jews have waited so long — but the description of his Calvary in Germany and Australia is magnificent.

     The stories of Mrs Godbold, the simple English immigrant, and Dubbo, the half-caste aboriginal painter, are slightly less successful but only in comparison with these two. To me Mrs Godbold was the most sympathetic character in the book because she was the most human, but simplicity is not the easiest material for any novelist and Patrick White is too complicated a person to understand it. As for Dubbo, the uneducated aboriginal who is also a self-taught genius as a painter, he is perhaps too complicated even for Patrick White. Yet his attempt to describe the mental processes of a painter are fascinating and one remembers with respect that Patrick White is a close friend of Roy de Maistre and Sidney Nolan, who both, perhaps, have helped to fashion it.

     The message of the book is less clear and less happy. The four characters all share a religious faith and a vision of the Chariot. Miss Hare’s faith is pagan, an intuition which can distinguish good from evil by touch and finds good more in animals and birds and trees than in men. Her vision of the Chariot is the setting sun though she has never heard and could not understand the Greek myth of Apollo. Himmelfarb is an Orthodox Jew who finds his Chariot in the prophecy of Ezekiel. Dubbo is nominally a Christian — his first experience of religion is to be seduced by an Anglican parson! — who discovers the meaning of Christianity after the crucifixion of the Jew. But he is also an artist and he too has seen the Chariot in a print by a French artist (Boucher?) though his own vision is very different. Mrs Godbold—the very names are symbolical as in Pilgrim’s Progress — is a Methodist who sings hymns as she washes her sheets, and one of her favourite hymns is about ‘the King in royal state Riding in the clouds his chariot To His heavenly palace gate’.

     Patrick White seems to suggest (as indeed Christ did) that it is easier for the poor, the simple, and the illiterate to see the Chariot than for the rich, the educated and the sophisticated. (Though the artist has a chance.) Reason is despised as ultimately futile, and, provided the faith is genuine, it does not matter much what it is. Judging by this book one might imagine that Patrick White himself finds the Jewish religion the most attractive and the Catholic religion the least (because it is the least simple?), but Mrs Godbold tells us specifically that there is no real difference.

     One might accept this estimate of the supreme value of religious or mystical experience of any kind more easily if it was not matched by a distrust of reason and by an apparent dislike of humanity itself. There is something disturbingly Swiftian about certain passages in Riders in the Chariot which was not noticeable in the previous novels. It is not only contemporary urban, material civilization which seems to anger Patrick White but human beings as such. The book is full of horrifying descriptions of naked sagging bodies and grey skin. Sex, both normal and abnormal — there is a good deal of both — is always crude, obscene and, too often, commercial as well. I lost count of the number of times this sensitive and poetic writer used the word ‘piss’ to express his loathing.

     In Riders in the Chariot his loathing is directed chiefly against contemporary Australian civilization and — dare one say it? — contemporary Australians. Patrick White is himself an Australian who has chosen to live and work in Australia after spending many years in England. Voss and The Tree of Man proved his passionate commitment to his country. But Riders in the Chariot shows that this love is very far from the kind of patriotism that other Australians would appreciate. Indeed it is restricted almost entirely to a fierce, devouring love for the physical nature of Australia, for its bright light and pale colours, its strange birds and spiky plants: for the ordinary Australian he seems to have nothing but contempt.

     It is not merely that, of the four main characters held up for our admiration, two are foreigners, one an abo and one mad, but that all the many minor characters in the book who are Australian are actively vile. Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack are embodiments of evil. The rich socialite, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson, the ‘decent bloke’ Ernie Theobalds, the whores and pufters and drunken louts — none of them is spared. There can be few more savage pieces of satire than the passage in which Ernie Theobalds explains to Himmelfarb, who has just been cut down from the tree, the virtues of the Australian way of life and the Australian sense of humour. As for Sydney, Patrick White seems to see it as flooded with pools of vomit! As one who has dared to criticize the Australians quite mildly, and suffered for it, I shudder for Patrick White.

     Like all his books, Riders in the Chariot is not easy to read. It is not meant to be. Patrick White has deliberately chosen a style which forces us to read every sentence slowly. In a period when the mainstream of literary fashion is to make novels shorter and easier, Patrick White makes them longer and harder. Nothing is said simply. No statement is left to speak for itself.

     ‘You should go home,’ she said, altering her voice, although it was some time since she had used it.

     ‘We must certainly pray for you,’ Malke Himmelfarb remarked gently, hanging her head above the now crumpled and rejected sock. ‘My poor son!’

     ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it has been lovely, Mrs Flack. And now I must get back to that poor lady of mine.’ And sniffed and smiled and blinked at once.

     These quotations, taken at random from different passages, are very typical of the dialogue. The effect, hesitant, cautious, frequently qualified, is curiously old-fashioned. It reminds one of Henry James or even of Dickens.

     Of course the more poetic and descriptive passages are very different. Sometimes, admittedly, there is a lushness, a kind of Sitwellian softness about the prose which makes one understand how A. D. Hope, Australia’s best poet and one of her best critics, was driven to describe The Tree of Man as ‘pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge’. (A judgement White has never forgiven.) For instance, can one really admire such a passage as this?

     From where she listened it was faint but sure, although whether it was coming from a great depth, or horizontal distance, it was quite impossible to tell. It was all around and under her: the grey sound that is given out by tunnels, and the mouths of elephants, and sleepers turning in a dream, and earth falling in a veil from a considerable height.

     Yet Patrick White can write sharply and with great precision when he wants as in this description of a derelict harlot in the outback:

     The woman must have been white once, but the sun and her pursuits had cured her, until she now presented the colour and texture of mature bacon. She was thin enough, but might have plumped out with teeth. Inside the cotton dress, her breasts suggested small but active animals. Trying to jump at you, it appeared at times. She had those old, blue eyes which bring back cold, windy days, and not even a crow in the sky. That was not to say she did not see a great deal; she would have identified what was stowed away under the seat of a stranger’s sulky, even if the object had been wrapped in several bags.

     But finest of all are those passages in which Patrick White describes the visions of Miss Hare. If there is nothing quite so good as one or two passages in Voss — Voss dying in the desert and the girl watching his ship pass down Sydney harbour — there are many that I find deeply moving. For Patrick White is a poet doing in prose, as another Australian poet, James McAuley, once said, what poets used to do in verse but now do no longer. A hundred years ago he would have written great, long Shelleian poems. Today he writes novels filled with passages like this:

     So she would wait, with the breath fluctuating in her lungs, and the blood thrilling through her distended veins. She waited on the last evening before the person called Mrs Jolley was expected to arrive. And sure enough, the wheels began to plough the tranquil fields of white sky. She could feel the breath of horses on her battered cheeks. She was lifted up, the wind blowing between the open sticks of fingers that she held extended on stumps of arms, the gold of her father’s bloodstone ring echoing the gold of trumpets. If on the evening before the arrival of a certain person, an aura of terror had contracted round her, she could not have said, at that precise moment, whether it was for the first time. She could not remember. She was aware only of her present anguish. Of her mind leaving her. The filthy waves that floated off the fragments of disintegrating flesh.

     Later, when she got up from the ground, she did not attempt to inquire into what might have bludgeoned her numb mind and aching body, for night had come, cold and black. She bruised knuckle on knuckle, to try to stop her shivering, and began to feel her way through the house, by stages of brocade, and vicious gilt, by slippery tortoiseshell, and coldest unresponsive marble.

     If I had to answer the question implied in my first paragraph, I would say that Patrick White is a great writer. As one who, put off by the turgidities of The Tree of Man, doubted the extent of his talent when I was in Australia, I am glad to make this amend, though I shall never be one of the riders in his chariot.