As bombs fell in the first months of the Blitz, an Australian sat in his London apartment drinking Calvados, reading accounts of early expeditions into his homeland, and likely experiencing for the first time an immensity of emptiness and a longing for the land of his childhood. Though still young at age twenty-eight, he had already published two novels and was poised to enjoy the life of a London intellectual. Yet amid the desolation and shrapnel, he considered his achievements as nothing and was gripped by despair for the superficiality of his life.
By that point, Patrick White, arguably Australia’s greatest novelist, had spent much of his life in England. Born into a family of wealthy farmers, he passed a sickly childhood at home under the care of a beloved nurse and distant parents before being sent to an English boarding school at thirteen, a place he repeatedly likens in his autobiography to a prison. After a brief stint back in Australia working as a farmhand, he studied at Cambridge and was soon mixing with London artists and intelligentsia. His first novel was well received by critics, and he wrote a third in London and Alexandria after the war, but these early works are now considered immature compared to the subsequent output that shot him to international fame. Despite White citing his dissatisfaction with life in England as beginning during the Blitz, it was the ruin of postwar London and the wishes of his life partner, Manoly Lascaris, that finally prompted his return home in 1948. He would live and write in Australia until his death in 1990.
As the late professor of literature Veronica Brady outlines, White’s departure from London and subsequent preoccupation with the discovery of meaning in the wreckage of history reflected the attitudes of many intellectuals of the time who were fleeing “the gothic shell of Europe,” as White called it in The Aunt’s Story, his third novel. For such writers and thinkers, including Jean-François Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, and Heinrich Blücher, history felt like a betrayal in which former traditions and institutions had collapsed, leaving behind a morass of emptiness and fractured communities. In response, White and those like him, Brady writes, interrogated “historical premises and complacencies,” seeking a “miraculous newness” and “a sense of power beyond but also operating deep within the self.”
And yet upon returning to Australia, White stopped writing and considered giving it up largely out of frustration at the The Aunt’s Story’s lukewarm reception. With few friends or close relatives left in the country, he settled down on a small farm beyond Sydney with Lascaris, and the two began to grow flowers and vegetables and to breed goats and Schnauzers.
“Nothing seemed important,” he wrote in “The Prodigal Son,” “beyond living and eating, with a roof of one’s own over one’s head.”
Despite their love of the land, White and Lascaris were unable to make their farm profitable, and White at last succumbed to his desire to seek truth through art, his ambition, and his frustration with Australian culture. He cited the last of these factors as particularly important, complaining (again in “The Prodigal Son”) of the “Great Australian Emptiness,” in which “the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves.” He sought an escape from such superficiality in a new novel, a passage to the deeper, buried core of reality.
Thus began the mature period of White’s career, which would lead to his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The Swedish Academy described his work as “an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature.” As this description suggests, White’s literary fame rests in large part on his ability to depict Australia, especially the complexity of its history and the sublimity of its landscape. Yet arguably the central concern of his work—and the feature which his novels unfold with profoundest depth—is the interior side of human experience, particularly the spiritual or religious dimension. White himself declared in his 1969 essay “In the Making” that religion was “behind” all his books: “What I am interested in is the relationship between the blundering human being and God.”
White’s relationship with religion was complicated. Raised in the Anglican Church, he abandoned his faith during his years in England, only to have it reawaken one night in Australia while he lay in the mud where he’d slipped carrying dog food through the rain. For a short time thereafter, he attended an Anglican parish, but he was soon dissatisfied and ultimately left out of frustration with the bigotry and narrowness he found there. He did not thereafter identify as Christian, describing himself in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981), as a “lapsed Anglican egotist agnostic pantheist occultist existentialist would-be though failed Christian Australian.” This eclecticism is well represented in his novels, which draw on Christianity, Jewish mysticism, aboriginal religion, Carl Jung, and other sources to examine the inner lives of its protagonists as they search for meaning.
Several elements are of particular importance to how White understood and depicted this search. As literary scholar David Coad shows, these include White’s capacity to bestow upon his characters and their journeys mythic significance, Christian themes of redemption, and especially a “double vision of man and reality” that bifurcates the spiritual and sensory realms.
White’s fourth novel, but the first written in Australia, The Tree of Man (1955), is suffused with such themes and sets the tone for his work thereafter. It follows the life of one Stan Parker, an Australia farmer born in the late nineteenth century whose reflective desposition increasingly brings him into conflict with everyday life. Much as White had on his farm, Stan grows beyond the limiting confines of the consciousness of the townspeople, transcending the prosaic nature of the reality around him. His “development is a progressive movement away from the world in which the majority spend their lives,” as Garrett Barden puts it, and we find him frequently caught up in reveries, even visions, at odds with the surrounding world:
In spite of moments of true knowledge that came to him, animating his mind and limbs with conviction, telling him of the presence of God, lighting his wife’s face when he had forgotten its features, bringing closer and closer a trembling leaf till its veins and vastness were related to all things, from burning sun to his own burned hand—in spite of this, Stan Parker had remained slow with men. It was a kind of unrealized ambition to communicate with them. But so far he had not done this.
As Barden shows, White doesn’t so much attempt to analyze or theorize about Stan’s internal life as allow the reader to experience it with him, “to enlarge the reader’s experience so that in some way he will participate in the new dimension.” The reader is made to cut beneath the surface in the story’s progression, to move from the world of exteriors to the world of spiritual depth.
This tension preoccupied White in subsequent works. Voss (1957) engages a similar dualism set in the coastal and interior regions of the Australian continent, which represent the superficial world of money, status, and seduction, on the one hand, and the interiority of the self, on the other. Based on the life of Ludwig Leichhardt, a Prussian explorer who went missing in Australia in the nineteenth century, the eponymous character arrives on the continent in 1845 with the hope of being the first person to cross it, but his quest is equally one into his self and towards truth. A mythic figure, Voss is a mix of Nietzchean superman and Christ, firmly convinced of his own divinity and that others ought to and shall worship him. In scholar Susan A. Wood’s analysis, Voss “is intent on building a monolithic self that is spiritually and emotionally invulnerable and cannot be washed away by the tides of failure inherent in his own personality.” Megalomania both alienates him from humanity and pushes him inland.
Voss enters the wilderness on a quest for self-discovery and the prideful domination of both the land and the weakness he despises in himself. He’s perfectly explicit about his goals, explaining that
in this disturbing country, so far as I have become acquainted with it already, it is possible more easily to discard the inessential and to attempt the infinite. You will be burnt up most likely, you will have the flesh torn from your bones, you will be tortured probably in many horrible and primitive ways, but you will realize that genius of which you sometimes suspect you are possessed, and of which you will not tell me you are afraid.
This quest, as scholar Shirley Paolini shows, mirrors in many respects Christ’s foray into the desert, a pattern of descent and ascent from a “region of unlikeness” developed in works by Augustine, Dante, and T. S. Eliot.
As a search for dominance and autonomy, however, Voss’s quest is destined to fail, for it’s based on an illusion of self-sufficiency and super-human status. To achieve the purification that he seeks, to arrive at the revelation of his “genius” that drives him into the wilderness, Voss must be broken down, step by step, until he’s learned humility and found once more his “human status,” which can be discovered only in vulnerability and love. His journey, then, is one of material failure but spiritual success; it’s doomed from the outset, for it’s a discovery of truth, and Voss has built himself on lies. Voss’s journey follows the largely Christian trajectory of expiation and redemption from the sin of pride; the constellation of the Southern Cross hangs over him just before his death.
Similar motifs recur in White’s most explicitly religious work—and arguably the apotheosis of his spiritual vision—Riders in the Chariot (1961). Set in Europe and Australia in the decades both before and after the second World War, it follows four outsiders bound by common destiny and their shared visions of the heavenly Merkabah, the chariot of God described in the book of Ezekiel. There’s a similar dichotomy between the one-dimensionality of civilized society and the spiritual experiences of the four main “riders in the chariot.” The world of illusion is expressed largely by the ignorance and hostility of the locals of Sarsaparilla, the fictional Australian suburb where much of the story takes place, towards the protagonists and their oddities but also more subtly through the arrogance of unnaturally rigid horticultural space, which, as outlined by Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, “extends the fall of humankind by privileging human reason above the order of Providence.” While many in the book, including the Nazis, are interested in building gardens and parks in which all weeds and foreign elements are absent—an echo of the horrors of the Holocaust—the protagonists dwell in a mixture of the human and the wild; they are open to that which is beyond their control and so are able to experience the transcendent.
Yet pride is also a primary fault of the most central of the protagonists, Mordecai Himmelfarb, born to a Jewish family in Germany. Mordecai is caught in intellectual hubris and arrogant desire to be a kind of Kabbalistic messiah able to “gather the sparks” of the divided world and return them to the divine. As argued by scholar Hedda Ben-Bassat, Himmelfarb is seeking the “integration of spirit and matter—the marriage of Heaven and earth—in God and man.” To arrive at this integration, however, he must be stripped, like Voss, of his own pretensions and the schisms within his self. Haunted by his selfish abandonment of his wife on Kristallnacht, Himmelfarb represents the Jewish mystical notion of a split between the “feminine” and “masculine” aspects of God, the estrangement of the divine sparks present in created things from the larger life of the deity as a result of evil. On the ethical level, such a division is seen in Himmelfarb’s failure to live his spiritual ideals through action. He must be humbled into earthiness, into his humanity wherein he might integrate with a larger community and learn loving-kindness on a basic level, freed from pretensions to any spiritual heroism. This process is enacted through his experiences with the other riders, who teach him humility.
Himmelfarb’s final transformation comes in a mock crucifixion that occurs at the hands of his coworkers. His suffering mirrors the death of Christ, but through it he realizes the absurdity of his pride, that “it had not been accorded to him to expiate the sins of the world.” It’s only in dying while being cared for by two fellow riders that Himmelfarb achieves the humanity and love wherein the spiritual and the earthly might truly be united; while dying, he experiences a vision of this unity:
Again, he was the Man Kadmon, descending from the Tree of Light to take the Bride. Trembling with white, holding the cup in her chapped hands, she advanced to stand beneath the chuppah. So they were brought together in the smell of all primordial velvets. This, explained the cousins and aunts, is at last the Shekinah whom you have carried all these years under your left breast. As he received her, she bent and kissed the wound in his hand. Then they were truly one.
This unity is subsequently shared by the other riders in their own modes. As Marion Spies tells us, “by their suffering or their witnessing the visionaries have made possible the second creation, the state of ‘sinlessness.’”
Riders in the Chariot demonstrates that White’s vision, though deeply dualistic, seeks the spiritual world “in this one,” as an epigraph attributed to Paul Éluard states at the beginning of The Solid Mandala (1966). The two worlds of his corpus, then, ought not to be understood as an absolute and necessary dichotomy between the sensory and the body, on the one hand, and the spiritual and moral, on the other. They require integration in the humility of a whole humanity, in the marriage of earth and heaven. As Coad states, “It is simplistic and inexact to say that White suffered from a Gnostic disgust of the flesh,” for the “taking on of flesh is an essential part of White’s double vision of man—a vision based on the idea of incarnation.”
Throughout his work, White seeks such truths in the spiritual lives of his protagonists. All of them are on journeys of discovery, on pilgrimages to purity, simplicity, or humility, understood not in dogmatic terms but in the living experience of human fragmentation and wholeness, suffering and redemption, pride and love. Through these dichotomies we trace the divisions that still blind and separate us, divisions that White worked so hard to overcome in order to show that there’s “another world in this one.” In his work, White argued that the sparks are all around us waiting to be whole, if only we can make the journey through the desert of our own defeat back to human status.
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