Happy Valley Read online

  PATRICK WHITE was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England and served in the RAF, before returning to Australia after World War II. Happy Valley, White’s first novel, is set in a small country town in the Snowy Mountains and is based on his experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South Wales.

  In Happy Valley White found a more honest ‘lumbering after truth’ than in the plays he had written to date. He said, ‘I began to write from the inside out when Roy de Maistre introduced me to abstract painting,’ and he dedicated the book to the artist.

  White went on to publish twelve further novels (one posthumously), three short-story collections and eight plays. His novels include The Aunt’s Story and Voss, which won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Eye of the Storm and The Twyborn Affair.

  He was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1973, and is considered one of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century.

  White died in 1990, aged seventy-eight.

  PETER CRAVEN is one of Australia’s best-known literary critics. He was a founding editor of Scripsi, Quarterly Essay and the Best of anthologies.

  ALSO BY PATRICK WHITE

  Novels

  The Living and the Dead

  The Aunt’s Story

  The Tree of Man

  Voss

  Riders in the Chariot

  The Solid Mandala

  The Vivisector

  The Eye of the Storm

  A Fringe of Leaves

  The Twyborn Affair

  Memoirs of Many in One (editor)

  The Hanging Garden (unfinished, posthumous)

  Short-story collections

  The Burnt Ones

  The Cockatoos

  Three Uneasy Pieces

  Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Patrick White 1939

  Introduction copyright © Peter Craven 2012

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by George G. Harrap & Co., London 1939

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Endpaper photograph: Patrick White as a jackeroo on Bolaro Station, c1931.

  Photo by Norris King.

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781921922916 (hbk.)

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921961175 (ebook)

  Author: White, Patrick, 1912-1990.

  Title: Happy Valley / Patrick White; introduction by Peter Craven.

  Series: Text Classics.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Craven, Peter.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  Table of Contents

  About the Author / Also by

  Title Page

  Jackeroo Epic

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  PART I

  PART II

  Text Classics

  Jackeroo Epic

  by Peter Craven

  Happy Valley is the first of Patrick White’s novels and it is a consistently compelling book, as well as the exhilarating performance of a great writer in the making. Everyone knows the legend, rooted in truth, that Patrick White finds his voice as a consequence of the war and after discovering the love of his life in Manoly Lascaris; and that the first in the long line of his masterpieces is The Aunt’s Story which he brings back to Australia with him in 1946, the token of his love/hate for the country which provides the enduring matter of his great works, the intimately suffered homeland which he cannot separate from the compulsions of his own heart.

  In fact Happy Valley is as self-consciously Australian a book as any cultural nationalist could hope for and it’s not for nothing that the novel, published in London in 1939, was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society in 1941, the year when A. A. Phillips, the future propounder of the Australian Cultural Cringe syndrome, was one of the judges.

  Happy Valley is, in fact, a panoramic novel of Australian life which reflects White’s own experience in the Monaro as a jackaroo, and the fact that it is situated in a country town and distributes the narrative interest fairly evenly among a group of characters gives the book a peculiar novelty and freshness—not least because White apparently forbade the book’s republication, perhaps because of the way it reflects some unflattering details about a local Australian Chinese family, perhaps because Happy Valley is so manifestly the work of a young writer who is finding his feet.

  But the latter point is easily misunderstood. The White of The Aunt’s Story is fully formed, even though that drama of dreams and madness and spinsterly isolation is in some ways the dragon at the gates of White’s work. Certainly from The Aunt’s Story in the mid-1940s through to The Twyborn Affair in 1979 there is a consistent maturity and confidence in every page White writes and there is also—which is both a giveaway and a signature feature—an effortless sense of drama. You don’t have to know precisely where you are in those dislocated and deranged sections of The Aunt’s Story to know that you are in the hands of a great writer (which is not to say that White did not retain his unevenness throughout his career).

  But the fact that Happy Valley is a rawer effort does not stop it from being a consistently engrossing novel. It confronts the reader with the pulsation and sheer narrative momentum which is one of the characteristics of Australia’s always rather old-fashioned master of the novel form. This—together with the fact that the book has been out of circulation virtually from the outset—is likely to trick readers who think they know the early work (and that it is not worth revisiting), as indeed it tricked me. Hardly anyone has read Happy Valley, and if they have it is likely to be under the shadow of the later work.

  Happy Valley is, in fact, the undiscovered country of Patrick White and it is a remarkable book. It shows the young White fiddling with the dominant influences of his time, and it may well be the case that he was even more embarrassed by the book’s formalistic high jinks than he was fearful of its heavy-handed (actionable) bits of literalism.

  He admitted that ‘he was very much under the influence of Gertrude’ (Stein) who is, among all the world’s writers, the most improbable to have tinkling in the background of a novel of Australian pastoral and small-town life. He also saw himself as having been ‘drunk with the technique of writing’ and said he ‘had gone up that cul de sac the stream of consciousness’.

  In practice Gertrude Stein seems to have led him to a bit of decorative patterning, to rhythmic repetitions and paratactical touches of phrasing that sometimes make his sentences somewhat overloaded or too heavily coloured, but the other side of this, the so-called stream of consciousness, is in fact a pretty impressive and flexible adaptation of what can be learned from James Joyce and, rather surprisingly, doesn’t get in the way of the narrative.

  Happy Valley dispenses with quotation marks to indicate speech and it uses a very flexible roving point-of-view technique, with bits of inserted monologue, but the effect is the opposite of slow-moving or obscure.

  It’s fascinating to see an essentially dramatic novelist like White so enthralled by Joyce but the upshot is, for better or worse, much less brocaded and oracular than a lot of Faulkner, the obvious point of comparison.

  Anyone coming fresh to Happy Valley would conclude that the twenty-seven-year-old Patrick White reflected the techniques of his literary elders that were in the air—Virginia Woolf’s excruciated reveries, Dos Passos’s roving camera eye with its hunger for communitarianism—but they will be more struck by the confidence with which he commands his canvas in the face of the most progressive and arty impulses in the world.

  Happy Valley takes its epigraph from Gandhi (‘the purer the suffering the greater the progress’) and White proceeds to present the soul’s dark night in a range of ‘ordinary’ human hearts.

  David Marr says Happy Valley was White’s best plot. Although this is not quite true, it certainly has the sketch of an elaborate one. The doctor, Halliday, is adrift in a dry marriage and finds himself falling in love with Alys, the piano teacher. She, in turn, is the ministering angel to Margaret Quong, the pensive child of an Australian Chinese family who has little time for her drunk father and querulous white mother, but communes with Amy, her very implicit and sympathetic aunt. She is a love object of a kind—though she’s a few years older—to the doctor’s son, Rodney. At a dramatic moment in the book she is struck by the asthmatic and frail schoolteacher, Moriarty, whose happy-go-lucky wife, Vic, is conducting an affair with the loud rouseabout, Clem Hagan. He, a saturnine figure with a remote resemblance to the laconic masculine figures of White’s later fiction, doesn’t mind tumbling in the hay with Vic but he would also like to get his hands on Sidney Furlow, the squatter’s daughter wh
o is captivated by him and treats him as her plaything.

  Happy Valley builds up to a tremendous quasi-Joycean set piece in which all the voices wind in and out of each other at the races and then—just as we’re starting to think it’s all a bit orchestrated and lush—there is a murder, an act of mutilation and outrage, a further death and the hovering shadow of suspicion over one of the major characters. And then there is a solution to this which is breathtaking and weird, though very much in line with the heightened melodrama and chiaroscuro which the novel has been exhibiting throughout, where White (like Faulkner before him) comes across as a highbrow writer enacting a pas de deux with a much more red-blooded and populist conception.

  After which the novel, in its last movement, ends much more elegiacally, in a return to the saddened but not hopeless faces of the young. There is a new-found monogamy, a departure and the intimation of a less illusioned future.

  Happy Valley is a dazzling first novel in which Patrick White passionately attempts to ride the wild horse of his experimental impulses while also indulging, with extraordinary ambition, his inclination to write a saga of country life in the face of the most riddling existential and spiritual perplexities as well as every kind of violent dislocation.

  In the end it is the narrative impulse that wins out but it is fascinating to see how much the decorativeness of a late modernist technique is made to contend with the sweep and fury of a writer who wants to create a landscape equal to the most savage and erotic drama he can envisage.

  It’s easy to pick holes in the upshot. The bildungsroman of the young boy could be more developed. We want more of his near-miss Chinese soul mate. All the women are a bit too much alike—as though sexuality was partly a matter of surmise to the novelist (and the siren of the squattocracy is a walking wet dream). The elements of melodrama have a slashing force but they could have been more fully and deliberately articulated.

  And yet…what an impassioned, hopeful glory of a book Happy Valley is.

  It shows Patrick White, as a seeker, at the crossroads from the outset. In Happy Valley White pays his dues to the towering shadows on the landscape—to Lawrence with his sexualised sense of the folk and his surging paragraphs as much as to Joyce’s musicality and rhetoric. But then White goes his own way to create a book full of portent and drama and the compounding of the spiritual search with a stabbing sensuality.

  This is not a major novel by Patrick White’s standards but it is a hell of a calling card, and if it had not appeared so late in the 1930s maybe it would have riveted the world’s attention. Happy Valley is a book we need to rediscover. It gives us White as a fledgling novelist, as fresh and wonderstruck and full of a desire to recreate the world as ever Australia was blessed with. It is a fitting thing and a fine one that in this centennial year of Patrick White’s birth it should find itself back in print.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious.

  To Roy de Maistre

  PART I

  1

  It had stopped snowing. There was a mesh of cloud over the fragile blue that sometimes follows snow. The air was very cold. In it a hawk lay, listless against the moving cloud, magnetized no doubt by some intention still to be revealed. But that is beside the point. In fact, the hawk has none but a vaguely geographical significance. It happens to be in the sky in a necessary spot at a necessary moment, that is, at nine o’clock in the morning about twenty miles to the south of Moorang, where the railway line dribbled silverly out of the mist that lay in the direction of Sydney, and dribbled on again into another bank of mist that was the south. Moorang was a dull silver in the early morning. There was no snow there, only frost. The frost glittered like a dull knife, over it the drifting white of smoke from a morning train. But to the south, following the trajectory of the hawk up the valley and towards the mountains, everything was white. It was higher here. There was grey slush in the streets of the township of Happy Valley, but the roofs were a pure white, and farther up in the mountains Kambala was almost lost beneath the drift.

  Happy Valley extends more or less from Moorang to Kambala, where originally there was gold, and it received its name from the men who came in search of gold, the prospectors who left the train at Moorang and rode out with small equipment and a fund of expectation. They called the place Happy Valley, sometimes with affection, more often in irony. But in time, when the gold at Kambala was exhausted, the name applied, precisely speaking, more to the township than to the valley itself. It is here that we have left the hawk coasting above the grey streets. There is not much activity in the streets. They are silent and not very prepossessing in their grey slush. And we have no business with them yet, rather with Kambala, which is almost hidden under the snow.

  Ordinarily, if you could see for yourself, there would be about six or seven houses, inhabited by families of no particular distinction. The people at Kambala are a kind of half-bred Chinese, quiet and industrious, though perhaps a little sinister to the eyes of a stranger. But there is not much crime in Kambala, in spite of the large grey erection that is a gaol. There is no explanation for its size, except that perhaps the architect could not get out of his mind the days when there were nine pubs in the town, and colonies of tents down the mountainside, and English and French and Germans digging for gold. But now it is very peaceful. In the summer the police sergeant sits on the verandah of the gaol, tilts back his chair, and swots at flies. I repeat, there is not much crime. Only 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. Old Harry Grogan found the body. It was like a scarecrow, he said, only it didn’t scare. There was crows all over the place, sitting there and dipping their beaks into the buttonholes.

  Now the gaol is covered with snow and the police sergeant is inside, writing an uneventful report that he will send later to Moorang. The gaol is an impressive white mound, the houses smaller ones. There is a general air of hibernation, of life suspended under the snow. Literally under, for in the winter the people of Kambala communicate with each other by channels or even tunnels carved through the snow. You seldom see any more than a streamer of smoke waving weakly from the arm of an iron chimney-pot or the eyelid of an eaves raised cautiously out of the snow.

  In one of the hotel bedrooms the publican’s wife was giving birth to her first child. She lay on her back, a big ox-like woman with a face that was naturally red, but which had now gone putty-coloured. Sometimes she tossed about and sometimes she just lay still. She was having a child, she told herself dumbly at first, until with the increase of pain she did not know what she was having, only that she was having, having, straining, it was tearing her apart, and the doctor’s hand was on her. She closed her eyes. She had resented the doctor at first, did not want him to touch her, then by degrees she did not mind whether he touched her or not. Because the pain was there, whatever happened. She had come from Tumut with her husband a year ago. Everyone told them they were mad. And now she began to wonder herself, somehow confounding her pain with Kambala and all that snow, snow everywhere, you could hardly see out of the window except at the top. She opened and closed her eyes and moaned. The doctor was still there looking at her.

  There were two other women in the room, one a silent half-bred Chinese woman with a cast in her left eye, and the other an old woman with little greasy puffs of hair standing out over her forehead in a kind of arch. They had come in to help. Mrs Steele, the old woman with the puffs of hair, always came to assist at a birth or a death. She had helped bring a lot of children into the world. She could also lay out a body better than any woman in the neighbourhood. Now she stood by the bed and stared at the doctor with all her expert experience, and resented his presence a great deal, because apart from her own experience (she could have managed the lying in herself, only Mr Chalker, the publican, had to send to Happy Valley for the doctor), apart from this, the doctor was not old Dr Reardon who had left the district a year ago, and she could not help holding Dr Halliday responsible for this. She and Dr Reardon knew a thing or two. They were a source of mutual admiration. Dr Halliday told her to mind out. Very politely though. He was a gentleman. And this was an additional point for scorn. She refused to own that ability was a possible quality in a gentleman.