Rediscovering White country
by Professor Peter Pierce
It has been a good year for Patrick White, even though he died in 1990. Not only his first but his last novel have been published. Happy Valley, his first, appeared in 1939, but – for obscure reasons – he never allowed it to be republished. White no longer has a say, and the novel has been reissued in a fine hardback edition by Text. In the case of his last, The Hanging Garden, White had instructed that the manuscript of this intriguing, unfinished work should be destroyed. His literary editor, Barbara Mobbs, decided otherwise and a novel that had been assumed lost by the few who knew about it, or never suspected by most, was published early this year, a century after White was born. It’s time, surely, for what seems to have been a too long deferred critical reassessment.
White’s decision to close down Happy Valley meant that it became a rare book (four copies only are listed on the web, in the range $1500-$7500). Now it is within almost anyone’s range, and what a revelation awaits them. Not only is the novel a splendid, quirky achievement in its own right ("One of the most mature first novels of recent years," said Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen and Stephen Spender joined in the chorus), here can also be found many of the themes and situations that White would deploy in his subsequent fiction. Besides this, there are his efforts to forge a distinctively mannered and theatrical prose style. The autobiographical element is also marked. In his early 20s, White worked as a jackaroo on a station near Adaminaby in south-eastern NSW.
That is the region to which he returns as he introduces Happy Valley under winter snow.
The "jackeroo (as it’s spelt here, and whoops, the epigraph from Gandhi is missing) epic" of Peter Craven’s alert and appreciative introduction to "the undiscovered country of Patrick White" opens arrestingly: "It had stopped snowing. There was a mesh of cloud over the fragile blow that sometimes follows snow. The air was very cold. In it a hawk lay listless against the moving cloud." It is the hawk’s-eye view that we are first afforded of the townships of Happy Valley, Moorang and Kambala.
Then the occasionally intrusive narrator takes over. His interest is more historical than scenic. The towns were founded on gold prospecting. A number of their residents are of Chinese descent. Little has disturbed the peace save that "the publican before the man they had at the moment once set fire to his wife, and on another occasion a drover from the Murray side ran amuck and crucified a roadman on a dead tree".
Recollection (or actually premonition) has probably pulled us up before we get to the detail of the crows all over the body, "dipping their beaks into the buttonholes" We are likely already to have thought of the hawk that Theodora Goodman shoots in White’s first great (and not far away) novel, The Aunt’s Story (1948), of the mock crucifixion of the Jew, Himmelfarb, in Riders in the Chariot (1961), of the jackarooing episode that Eddie Twyborn endures in The Twyborn Affair (1979). And this is not to mention characters whom we have not yet met in Happy Valley, from among whom White would create many successors the pretensions to gentility of Vic Moriarty, wife of the asthmatic schoolmaster, the rough, laconic and sexually predatory rural male, here given his first outing in the person of Clem Hagan.
The point of view shifts between the characters of the novel, giving each an individual voice. We encounter the dreamy, bullied Rodney Halliday, son of the restless local doctor; the patient and suffering Alys Browne (one of White’s most poignant female portraits); Mrs Belper, the bank manager’s wife, "who in spite of breeding dogs had her Artistic Side"; the squatter Furlow who "hadn’t a mind, only a mutual understanding between a number of almost dormant instincts" (White’s satirical mode is already developed, as we can see). The influence of modernist pioneers is evident throughout Happy Valley, for instance in the stream-of-consciousness passages that recall James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. White was in training for the extended, virtuoso performance of this technique in The Aunt’s Story.
Happy Valley has some striking set-pieces, such as the annual autumn race meeting (when it usually rains), where assemble "the cockle farmers, the Kambala Chows, that little man with the broken nails and the cap, or broken-voiced bookies and their clerks, and the vaguer faces without purpose that peer from a corner over a dark glass of stout". Other scenes such as the lengthy one in a courtroom strive less than successfully for a burlesque effect. Nevertheless, this is a remarkable first novel, already discernible as the performance of a master whose apprentice work cannot be glimpsed. We are fortunate indeed that Text has reopened the front door in the house of Patrick White’s fiction.
Peter Pierce is an Honorary Research Fellow and Professor at the National Centre for Australian Studies in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University.
This article originally appeared in The Canberra Times.