Riders In the Chariot Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Patrick White

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Part I

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Part II

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Part III

  Chapter VIII

  Part IV

  Chapter IX

  Part V

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Part VI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Part VII

  Chapter XVII

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Through the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu, Miss Hare wanders, half-mad, yet seeming less alien among the encroaching wildlife than among the inhabitants of Sarsaparilla. In this wilderness she stumbles firstly upon a half-caste aborigine and then upon a Jewish refugee. They each place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. Existing in a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibilities of redemption.

  ‘Stands out among contemporary novelists like a cathedral surrounded by booths. Its forms, its impulse and its dedication to what is eternal all excite a comparison with religious architecture’ Maurice Edelman, Sunday Times.

  ‘This is a book which really defies review; for its analysable qualities are overwhelmed by those imponderables which make a work “great” in the untouchable sense. It must be read because, like Everest, “it is there”’ Jeremy Brooks, Guardian.

  About the Author

  Patrick White was born in England in 1912. He was taken to Australia (where his father owned a sheep farm) when he was six months old, but educated in England, at Cheltenham College and King’s College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war; he returned after the war to Australia.

  He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he has turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. Technically brilliant, he is one modern novelist to whom the oft-abused epithet visionary’ can safely be applied. He died in September 1990.

  BY PATRICK WHITE

  Fiction

  Happy Valley

  The Living And The Dead

  The Aunt’s Story

  The Tree Of Man

  Voss

  Riders In The Chariot

  The Burnt Ones

  The Solid Mandala

  The Vivisector

  The Eye Of The Storm

  The Cockatoos

  A Fringe Of Leaves

  The Twyborn Affair

  Three Uneasy Pieces

  Memoirs Of Many In One

  (Editor)

  Autobiography

  Flaws In The Glass

  FOR KLARI DANIEL AND BEN HUEBSCH

  RIDERS IN

  THE CHARIOT

  Patrick White

  Introduction

  In April 1958, shortly after the appearance of Voss, Patrick White published a non-fiction piece in a new journal, Australian Letters. Ten years earlier, after more than two decades away – at school in England and then at Cambridge, in Spain, Germany, and the United States, as an air-force officer in Egypt and, with his partner, Manoly Lascaris, in Greece – White had returned to the world of his Australian childhood and ‘the stimulation,’ as he hoped, ‘of time remembered.’ He had been stimulated – wonderfully; The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957) attest to that. But what ‘The Prodigal Son’ attests to is his bitter disappointment at the country to which, like a latterday convict, he felt he had been transported, and ‘for life’:

  In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means steak and cake, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves. It was the exaltation of the ‘average’ that made me panic...1

  White was just about to begin Riders in the Chariot, the third of the novels of his return and the only one that deals with a contemporary Australia of mass migration and postwar boom. The book marks a new form of engagement in his work and much of what he lists in ‘The Prodigal Son’ finds an echo there.

  Riders is set at Castle Hill (Sarsaparilla, White calls it) on the outskirts of Sydney and chronicles the lives of four characters who, like most Australians, find themselves by an accident of fate in unlikely contact with one another: Mordecai Himmelfarb, a scholar of the Jewish mystics and an Auschwitz survivor; ‘the blackfellow, or half-caste’ painter, Alf Dubbo; that ‘angel of solid light,’ the English migrant and evangelical washerwoman, Ruth Godbold; and the owner of Xanadu, and last offshoot of a ruined colonial family, the mad Miss Hare. What these characters have in common is that they have all known ‘ecstasy’ and are members of that small band of the just who in each generation are the redeemers of the earth.

  Set against them in the novel are the upholders of the ‘average’ at Sarsaparilla: Mrs Flack; Mrs Jolley, whose blue eyes ‘see just so far and no farther’; and that beautiful torso and spoiled, toothless head – the ‘Antinoüs of the suburbs’ as White calls him – Blue, Himmelfarb’s young tormentor at Rosetree’s Brighta Bicycle Lamps workshop at Barranugli (White’s way with cod aboriginal place names is typical of his sometimes broad humour) and the instigator, at the climax of the novel, of Himmelfarb’s mock crucifixion.

  White had set out in his two previous novels to uncover ‘the mystery and poetry’ which alone, he feels, can make bearable the lives of ordinary men and women, but also to replace with a rich inwardness the obsession with material possessions – ‘the texture-brick home, the streamlined glass car, the advanced shrubs, the grandfather clock with the Westminster chimes, the walnut-veneer radiogram, the washingmachine, and the Mixmaster’ – with which the Rosetrees and others, out of terminal anxiety at their own emptiness and inauthenticity, fill the void of their days. He also writes in ‘The Prodigal Son’ of his determination to show that the Australian novel ‘is not necessarily the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism,’ or, he might have added, considering his immediate contemporaries, of rose-coloured Socialist Realism. ‘I would like,’ he writes, ‘to give my book the textures of music, the sensuousness of paint.’

  Of all his novels, Riders is the one that most aspires to the condition of music; its interweaving voices and visions barely connect at the level of the actual. But it also aspires to the condition of theatre. In the eighteen months after its completion, White produced three plays, two of them set in and around Sarsaparilla.

  He had always been drawn to the theatre, especially to the revue, that very British mix of satire, comic turns, and sometimes outrageous camp. Riders, in the emblematic names of its characters, the choric voice of Sarsaparilla – the voice of ‘native cynicism’ and ‘derision’ as it is embodied in Mrs Jolley and Mrs Fla
ck – has more than a little of the old morality play, where high spiritual drama is often intermingled, as here, with burlesque. Himmelfarb, under direction of his ‘fate,’ sees the Seder table he has prepared as so much a ‘property table’ that ‘it would not have been illogical if, in the course of the farce he was elaborating, a Hanswurst had risen through the floor.’ His Bosch-like crucifixion when it comes is suggested to his tormentors by the passing of a circus in which a clown, a Petrushka in fact, goes through a mock hanging: ‘Those who had longed for a show wondered whether they were appeased, for the clown was surely more or less a puppet, when they had been hoping for a man.’

  What follows is passed off by the foreman, Ernie Theobalds, as good-humoured horseplay, larrikin high spirits, but Himmelfarb recognises it for what it is, the same mob fury and resentment of what is different that is behind every pogrom or massacre or ritual killing. He has rejected the real Promised Land for a less promising one where carnivalesque misrule appears as mere loutishness and ‘history’ is regularly reenacted as farce.

  White is at his most characteristic in moments when the noble and the shameful are in violent but comic collision: in Himmelfarb’s appearance, an unwelcome Elijah, at the Rosetrees’ Seder; or the Dostoevskian scene at Mrs Khalil’s where, while an outraged Mr Hoggett waits for one of the ‘juicy’ Khalil girls to become available, Mrs Godbold ministers to a drunken Alf Dubbo – it is on this occasion that Ruth Godbold’s capacity for forgiveness (White is merciless here) becomes more at last than her husband, Tom, can bear. Most extraordinary of all is the travesty of the riders that Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack present as they ‘drench the room in the moth-colours of their one mind,’ which would have been ‘the perfect communion of souls, if, at the same time, it had not suggested perfect collusion.’

  Mrs Jolley, bearer of ‘the virtues’ to Xanadu, protectress of the home and the Hoover, for whom ‘all was sanctified by cake,’ is one of the great comic monsters of modern fiction. Introduced ‘feeling the way with her teeth,’ and with a voice with ‘the clang’ of a Melbourne tram in it, she shares something – her ferocious propriety but also perhaps her literary past as a Panto Dame – with Barry Humphries’s Edna Everage (Average) when she was still just a Melbourne matron; that is, before she had become, in rivalry with Joan Sutherland (La Stupenda), Dame Edna, superstar.

  Verbally, Mrs Jolley is created almost exclusively in terms of the material objects she so passionately believes in. White’s language world is full of the capacity of objects to transmute and fetishise themselves as aspects of the human. It is what gives such vivid and disturbing life to the writing and a fantastic and sometimes lurid quality to its most ordinary moments. It is also what creates the poetry of occasions when what might otherwise be inexpressible is made wonderfully present and substantial to us ‘in all the sensuousness of paint’: when the plum tree, for example, under which Miss Hare goes through her mystic marriage with Himmelfarb, becomes an oriental canopy where shadows lie ‘curled like heavy animals, spotted and striped with tawny light,’ or ‘the ball of friendship’ that appears as a ‘golden sphere’ which hangs briefly, ‘lovely and luminous to see,’ between Himmelfarb and Mrs Godbold.

  If Himmelfarb’s German world, tour de force though it is, seems a little stiff in the narration, too panoramic in movement and in detail too phantasmagoric to be more than sketchily there, it is because the rest is so protean and fluid, so dense with observed detail, so full of what Mrs Godbold sees as ‘the commotion of life.’

  Early in the book, Miss Hare worries that ‘so many of the things she told died on coming to the surface, when their life, to say nothing of their after life in her mind, could be such a shining one.’ How to communicate what they have seen without killing it in the telling is a torment to a good many of White’s characters, even those who see nothing much. It is what drives some of them to violence. He too puts more value on what is inexpressible than on what can too easily be expressed, but what he brings to the surface does shine. There are whole pages here that, once they have become part of what he has made visible to us, once we have experienced them through the texture of his peculiar music, live on in our mind as if they had been our own shining experience to tell.

  Towards the end of Riders, White delivers one of his most savage sermons on the ugly, characterless fibro homes that have replaced the grand folly of Xanadu. Two pages later, in the beautiful coda to the book, Mrs Godbold looks at these same houses and, with her ‘very centre...touched by the wings of love and charity,’ sees something quite different. ‘Mrs Godbold could not help admiring the houses for their signs of life: for the children coming home from school, for a row of young cauliflowers, for a convalescent woman, who had stepped outside in her dressing gown to gather a late rose.’

  Only the greatest masters can stand aside and allow themselves to be admonished by one of their creations whose vision, by some miracle of autonomy, is larger than their own.

  David Malouf, 2002

  * * *

  1‘The Prodigal Son’ first appeared in Australian Letters, Adelaide, April 1958. It is reprinted in Patrick White Speaks (Sydney: Primavera Press, 1989) and in The Oxford Book of Australian Essays, edited by Imre Salusinszky (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with

  me, and I asked them how they dared so

  roundly to assert that God spoke to them;

  and whether they did not think at the time

  that they would be misunderstood, & so

  be the cause of imposition.

  Isaiah answer’d: “I saw no God, nor heard

  any, in a finite organical perception, but my

  senses discover’d the infinite in everything,

  and as I was then perswaded, & remain

  confirmèd, that the voice of honest

  indignation is the voice of God, I cared not

  for consequences, but wrote. …”

  I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung, & lay

  so long on his right & left side? he answer’d,

  “the desire of raising other men into a

  perception of the infinite: this the North

  American tribes practise, & is he honest who

  resists his genius or conscience only for the

  sake of present ease or gratification?”

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  PART I

  * * *

  I

  “Who was that woman?” asked Mrs Colquhoun, a rich lady who had come recently to live at Sarsaparilla.

  “Ah,” Mrs Sugden said, and laughed, “that was Miss Hare.”

  “She appears an unusual sort of person.” Mrs Colquhoun ventured to hope.

  “Well,” replied Mrs Sugden, “I cannot deny that Miss Hare is different.”

  But the postmistress would not add to that. She started poking at a dry sponge. Even at her most communicative, talking with authority of the weather, which was her subject, she favoured the objective approach.

  Mrs Colquhoun was able to see for herself that Miss Hare was a small, freckled thing, whose stockings, at that moment, could have been coming down. To tell the truth, Mrs Colquhoun was somewhat put out by the postmistress’s discretion, but could not remain so indefinitely, for the War was over, and the peace had not yet set hard.

  Miss Hare continued to walk away from the post office, through a smell of moist nettles, under the pale disc of the sun. An early pearliness of light, a lamb’s-wool of morning promised the millenium, yet, between the road and the shed in which the Godbolds lived, the burnt-out blackberry bushes, lolling and waiting in rusty coils, suggested that the enemy might not have withdrawn. As Miss Hare passed, several barbs of several strands attached themselves to the folds of her skirt, pulling on it, tight, tight, tighter, until she was all spread out behind, part woman, part umbrella.

  “You could get torn,” Mrs Godbold warned, who had come up to the edge of the road, in search of something, whether child, go
at, or perhaps just the daily paper.

  “Oh, I could get torn,” Miss Hare answered. “But what is a little tear?”

  It did not matter.

  Mrs Godbold was rather large. She smiled at the ground, incredulous, but glad.

  “I saw a wombat,” Miss Hare called.

  “Not a wombat! In these parts? I do not believe you!” Mrs Godbold answered back.

  Miss Hare laughed.

  “What did it look like?” Mrs Godbold called, and laughed.

  Still looking in the grass.

  “I will tell you,” Miss Hare declared, laughing, but always walking away.

  It did not matter to either that much would remain unexplained. It did not matter that neither had looked at the other’s face, for each was aware that the moment could yield no more than they already knew. Somewhere in the past, that particular relationship had been fully ratified.

  Miss Hare went on, together with her emancipated skirt. With the back of her hand she hit a fence-post, to hear her father’s bloodstone ring. She would knock thus on objects, to punctuate periods which, otherwise, might never have had an end. Now she heard the redeeming knock. She heard the wings of a bird suddenly break free from silence. She sang a little, or made sounds. All along the road – or track, the older people still called it – which rambled down from Sarsaparilla to Xanadu, the earth was black and oozy in the early morning of early spring. In all that dreamy landscape it seemed that each particle, not least Miss Hare herself, contributed towards some perfection. Nothing could be added to improve the whole.

  Yet, was she not about to attempt?