Winds of Change in the Australian Novel Author(s): Norman Bartlett Reviewed work(s): Source: The Australian Quarterly, Vol.

32, No. 4 (Dec., 1960), pp. 75-85 Published by: Australian Institute of Policy and Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20633660 . Accessed: 07/03/2012 11:40
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By Norman

Bartfett

Winds Of Change Australian

An American
convinced nie

In The

Novel
naval lieutenant (from Boston)
had no claim to culture.

once nearly
"Where's

that Australia

"A sound culture marches on its dish?" he demanded. your national All I could conjure was stomach." steak and eggs, now an up

appreciated dish along the Strand, and such exotics as kangaroo tail soup, galah pie and damper with a draught of billy tea. With the exception of billy tea the young Bostonian would have none of them.
"Cooking," arts. You he don't

No sir! You
weigh one delicately, me

take a little bit of this, a little touch of that, you

another for taste and aroma, and combine in the proper manner enjoy with

in an Harvard explained accent, "is just take raw ingredients and make

one

of the fine

them palatable.

the subtle choice of the right wine. Steak and eggs! Don't make
smile."

ingredient against cook gently, serve

make

At the time (and even still) I thought the young man precious the faint corruption and his literary recipe more likely to produce I after five years abroad, of over-ripe fruit than otherwise. But, as satisfied as I did with our national cultural mess and don't feel leaves The national gum billy tea literary tradition?the pottage. all continue Caseys, tralian the difference^-no our to treasure nowhere satisfies. We longer completely Tom Collinses, Henry Lawsons, are exactly and authentically H?ngerfords?who else but here?but humour sardonic should Gavin Aus

Tom and

manners

belong and a salty,

and cuts empty a country which in, say, the

back pretention claims to have grown Maugham

literary free-and-easy that undermines pomposity to proper size are not enough for up. Great literature is not than

This is not a question of being sophisticated, urban, civilised,

Somerset manner.

necessarily the product of high civilisation, although civilisation

helps; the Greeks produced it when 75 they were hardly more

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Nor is good art the prerogative of big coun age barbarians. Sweden's better films than the tries; Ingmar Bergman produces whole of Hollywood Nikos Kazantzaki put together. And Greece's or Ireland's more meaningful literature Sean O'Faolain add up to than the hierarchy "Literary the Soviet of contemporary Gazette". Russian writers approved by

and in all his aspects literature is concerned with man damentally, realist novels, of the kind approved the Australian literary tra by Folk art sufficed, in skirt the fringes of existence. dition, merely and needed when we lived on the outskirts of civilisation Australia, our own environment Nowa to explore and its effect on people. it set is a symptom of the disease days, this sort of Australianism out to cure?cultural to a metropolitan culture. With subordination in neighbouring astir Asia and Africa, with the shadow humanity over all mankind, with rival ideologies of the atomic cloud hanging and f.a.q. for possession of the mind of man, mateship clamouring to life whereas to give form and meaning realism in literature) primarily grapples (and and a popular with the facts of life. It is a common assumption, one in Australia, of fact leads to the truth. that an accumulation core of things when he says, "know is nearer the Ortega y Gasset an in face to face with in bringing man ledge does not consist art science attempts scientific democracy Great seem a little thin.

raw ingredients made don't and eggs: palatable by good cooking skill with amount realism to high art. Photographic presented to any great don't differ standards and tastes by people whose extent from the people they portray is entertaining, up to a point, but the point its derivatives, isn't high Folk enough. art, and Fun doesn't answer the basic problem about the condition of man.

The trouble with the Australian literary tradition is summed up in the criticism the American lieutenant brought against steak

the data swarm of raw facts and naked data. Neither numerable are the veritable nor the facts, however stuff of reality accurate, life is that subtle something or other, that makes itself. ..." Reality or a psychological more chain reaction than a chemical compound to that are combined than the physical and art more properties if you like, of this reality, of the Absolute, is some comprehension all the facts of human that lies behind and inter-penetrates living. is a record Or, even if they reject that sort of reality, their work of their search and their rejection. 76

produce it. What great novelists seek, though they seldom find it,

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In contrast to literature of this sort, the average good Austra lian novel belong almost entirely to the kingdom of this world. Nor do the typical Australian novelists show much indication that
that any other sort of world is possible, unless it they are aware is a semi-socialist in which we could all be mates Utopia together. the two comparatively wrote poor novels D. H. Lawrence Compare about the average for instance, with Australia, see what tradition and you will tralian realist is often chaotic, he goes off the deep-end into the pants, but he lauded books are is alive, dead; vibrant dead in the Aus novel Lawrence I mean. interminable

intro

spection, you feel sometimes that you would

like to kick him in

the most democratic are, probably, country in the world never had, or effectively have abolished, today. successfully most of the things Henry James considered necessary neutralised, a genuinely to the production of first-class prose literature: leisured this. We We cultural class, and intellectual art and tradition, snobbery. repudiate social The convention, privileged most of our vigorous Sir Charles Snow, institutions

no filling, doubt, but, oh! so dull. To begin with, we should be honest with ourselves about all

with life, and some of our most as mutton, and anyway, wholesome

a continuous cultural ethos of the 20th century: on civilised rather than exclusively or cur national like values. of our writers fashionable ?tnd artists, rently Many that they show no evidence and managers, most of our scientists uses the in the sense that T. S. Eliot what tradition, appreciate tific-managerial tradition based Alexis de Tocqueville, word, really means. on democracy. as he Much blamed this he uncannily forecast American adolescence no doubt, would have the vigorous admired the cultural dessication in which of a class in his words, "the disappearance that follows, with is transmitted the taste for intellectual hereditary pleasure in honour. . .

bridge Rede lecture, contrastedwith the culturally deadening scien

literature,

what

in creators, in his Cam

held

fortune and leisure and by which the labours of the intellect are
Apropos of this, the one thing about which we can be reason to come

much of it has flattened out society to an undistinguished lump of

medium Ezra quality Pound, T. dough. S. Eliot Indeed, himself, many Americans?Henry even Ernest Hemingway 77 James, and the

in Australian has no status value practical, in our own day T. S. back to democracy,

ably certain is that literary and intellectual ability, unless strictly

society. But, Eliot believes that too

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Lost the

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with the problem as they see it. At the same time, itwould perhaps be just as well if we recalled Malcolm Cowley's remarks (in Exile's Return: New York, 1934) that the Lost Generation was lost
"because from Vienna,

are cases in point?can be said to be refugees from Generation, sort of America de Tocquev?le Alexis feared. We, too, have our expatriates. Before we belabour them we should at least grapple

fierce excitements of war and the tremendous liberation of Paris, imitators) rebelled against returning to democratic suburbs. No wonder they attempted, in Scott Fitzgerald's phrase, to make the
20's the "greatest, parallels. gaudiest spree in history. . . ." There are Aus tralian The our dull so far, a dilemma. On the one hand, presents writers tend to nationalistic realist, stay-at-home, values. democratic Our literal and with exclusively Europe, these young Americans (and their not-so-young

it was uprooted, schooled away its attachment to any region or

and

almost

tradition.

wrenched away . . ." After the

argument,

traditional,

tralian nationalist tradition in literature is, as it should be, pretty much under fire nowadays. This tradition produced, and still pro
duces, many good and worthy books but it now acts as a stultifying factor in Australian intellectual it is hopelessly life because pro vincial and bores a rising generation, tend to look outward who to the world and the devil rather than inward to homespun virtues and social idealism. and social idealism

conformity in art and emotional life expatriates extravagances leap to wild to any region or tradition. because The Aus they are not attached

of traditional They are, indeed, the products loved they are not satisfied to do what Lawson to do, sit upon his swag, smoke, and watch the world go by. a The world, world, today, is very much with us: a dangerous our progressive a world in which egalitarianism world, challenging is off the beaten and content with f.a.q. standards track; a world in which gical and the very religious foundations assumptions of our are democratic, under armed scientific, ideolo scrutiny and sub as

where

ject to vigorous intellectual challenge; a world of Asia and Africa,

our "friends and neighbours"

and neighbourly as we would

tralia's

like them to be and who find Aus

are not necessarily

friendly

ways

of us would agree with Gilbert Seldes when he says that T. S. 78

and easy-going bonhomie, politics egalitarian peculiar or incomprehensible. either objectionable consider trading democracy and egalitar would Few Australians either in cooking or culture. Most ianism for a hierarchial cuisine,

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Eliot's conviction that all art must be aristocratic and religious is irrelevant to contemporary society,which is neither, because it is difficultto foresee (or desire) a return to a highly-stratifiedand hierarchic state in the United States or, of course, in Australia or Britain. But to dismiss T. S. Eliot as archaic and his solutions as is: the problems that T. S. Eliot raises are problems fundamental to the life of man, in or out of the State. For instance, because "Murder in the Cathedral" deals with God and the King it is not
irrelevant to this day and age as the average Commonwealth irrelevant?as most Australians would?is to miss the point, which

as

Day speech. We, in Australia, are apt to forget the pitfalls of what C. S. Lewis calls "chronological snobbery" (he also calls it a sign of provincialism), the snobbery that thinks that an atomic
scientist Catholic history. socialist or a prelate or a agitator rioting is more peasant than, say, a progressive he comes later in because

The main debates about the condition of man have not been settled. Certainly, they have not been settled by a few mates, gathered for a spree in an Australian pub or united in a convic tion that, irrespective of principle, good blokes stick together. There the best of the traditional novelists find it difficultto shake them selves out of the climate of their time and place. The narrower theirmental place chart, the more restricted their time range, the
True, most a pro Dostoevsky, is falso a great one, novels. is, of course, more to the Australian tradition than this. But even

creative artist, grappling with devils, pursued by furies, wrestling with God, creating an imaginative world in which things are not true to fact but lambent with reality. That Dostoevsky would
appal banker, any

less likely they are to write more than provincial of time and place. are products great novelists if ever there was duct of 19th century Russia

is understandable. That he should appear incomprehensible (in fact ifnot in theory) to a large number of Australian novelists (judging
is the measure ot our Incomprehensible, I should add, not provincialism. these writers because are

intelligent, progressive, decent, trade unionist scientist, manager,

down-to-earth or newspaper

Australian

proprietor,

by their works)

are devoid stupid or lack intelligence or reading but because they mostly deals: of interest in the questions with which great literature
contem above rise way fate which of man's questions or fashionable Or, in an or nationalisms cliques. porary politics writers and journa how many Australian other field, one wonders the larger 79

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need

lists consider almost automatically that Tom Paine is the intellectual superior of Edmund Burke because Paine superficiallyappears to be in what we have adopted as the Australian tradition? What we
now is to apply to ourselves D. H. Lawrence's remark: >4Our from the start has taught us a certain range of emotions, to feel. is just non-existent." Applied to provincial of emotions" amounts our "chronological to put alongside snobbery" range All the rest

education allow

what to feel and what not to feel, and how to feel the feelings we
ourselves culturally, ism, a "geographical snobbery". this "certain

more Man

To say that we are living in a time of crisis has become a cliche which flows over our minds without making much barbed impact. How many of use realise that this crisis is somethingmuch
than 20th century turbulence after what now appears to many shat an historical amd Crisis, clash tering than the normal is something much more the old between generations,

of us as 19th century smugness? As Ortega y Gasset points out in

crisis battle

between fathers and sons which Samuel Butler chronicled in The Way of ATI Flesh, an English literature text, by the way, in some
difference, he goes on, "is that in the first, some the world in the second, in our world; changes." thing changes is as deep, and crisis The contemporary The world has changed. the Ancient will take as long to even out, as the crisis between Asian schools. The and the modern

World and Christendom and between the medieval Age of Faith

is itself under The Age of Reason Age of Reason. will be something vastly different emerges, and, whatever challenge social evolution of political notions from our comfortable progress, and scientific certitude. under that once grand old banner, Thus, those who still march are merely in bias Australian", marching democratic, "Temper troubles from that survivor

Lost of America's Generation, that human "We hadn't learned says, Cowley, or "that from it may is necessarily disappear imperfect" society comes to accept what T. S. Eliot calls 'the permanent earth unless it . . .'" conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet. even though it to distract us, "God" should not allow the word We does not belong to the Australian except as an expletive. tradition, and Malcolm when he We "Man low? is God, however O'Dowd's, mostly prefer Bernard however Is Man, high", a concept with which most of the world's in Eliot's The operative words great literature profoundly disagrees. 80

circles. We can find a better guiding light for today's complacencies

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of Eliot's words as classic studies in human disillusion. What then, is the permanent condition of humanity? You will find it shadowed forth in great literature, especially in the drama and the novel. But perhaps the best modern crystallisation is that given by John Henry Newman in Apologia Pro Sva Vita when he to dizzy and appal; and inflictsupon the mind a sense of profound
mystery, says that "to consider which the world and the ways of man . . . is a vision And what human solution."

"the permanent conditions." These conditions don't or under revolutionary of government leader change changes illustrate the truth Indeed, revolutions ship. (however unavoidable)

is it that he finds beyond human solution? Just this, "the dis appointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical
and intensity of sin, the per the prevalence anguish, the dreary hopeless the corruptions, irreligion, vading idolatries, . . ." In short, all the things that race. the condition of the whole TV sessions novels, demagogues, best-selling popular newspapers, pain, mental popular mass media avoid, gloss over, explain away or ignore

is absolutely

beyond

and with which great novelists grapple, each in his or her own way,
mostly his. solution was God Newman's . . .") and he expressed existence (" . . . as certain to me as my own it in a great work of prose liter

and

ature. Other men have sought other solutions but, if they became great writers in the process, the quality of theirwork can be mea
by the extent of their struggle to grapple with the dizzy and exist of man's condition of life^-the vision permanent appalling or ideological adherence. ence on earth, irrespective of nationality sured the vision is reconciled with and

whether

way or reality in Newman's the all-corroding, all-dissolving by "the fierce energy and passion or revolutionary ardour. of the intellect", or in madness scepticism there is a solu for great art, is not the solution The essential, (if created outv of that vision. is usually not one

From the artist's point of view (as an artist) it does not matter

world

tion) but the intensityof the vision and the energy of the imaginary
The result of calm optimism or complacent

belief in the inevitability of evolution or revolution fromworse to better or a smug belief that our little era of world history and our road to ultimate reality. If you think Newman out-of-date, just apply his vision to the world you know, brushing aside the super
Carnegie gloss of radio pep talks or businessmen's lun 81 tiny corner of geographic space is the apex or even on the main

ficial Dale

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cheons. Not the shiny public relations world but the reality behind the facts. The beginning of the novelist's art is a man or woman shaken out of complacency by the mystery and complexity and, aye, the beauty, of existence, allied with sufficienttechnical ability to grapple imaginatively with this mystery and complexity and beauty in prose fiction. The result would not please readers for American publishers who go in for neat construction, disciplined
are that prose and glossy finish, but the chances literature emerges. Let us, then, do away with the cant aspects of or of our democratic ature stemming from tradition literature posing under beatnik cliches or advertised beards, horse-tail hair-dos or conventionally a new work of a national liter an emancipated

Novels which show intimations of immortality are those which grapple with the immediate and the contiguous in a manner that
suggests worldly

by excess hair, dress. unconventional

would claim that Sir Charles Snow rises to great heights but
The Masters,

greater realities beyond. Nor need or among the great masterpieces for instance, is a good novel,

these of

be other realities Few critics prose. than anything

"ism" operates. in any time or place and under whatever of politics, calls "the Steiner to what George The Masters belongs Admittedly, novel where most Australian of total experience", middle spectrum current that even the prosaic main ists cling, but it demonstrates some of the permanent of realising novel is capable of the English or sensa It does not exaggerate of the human condition. once on the fact that, as Arnold Bennett or capitalize are generally mind of the uncultivated the pleasures observed,. or newspaper kiosk. Nor bookstall any railway violent, witness realities tionalise solutions in neat sociological formulae. After sense all, as Steiner pointed

of its prosaic kind attempted in Australia. The Masters deals with a petty election in a university college, yet it reflects the essentials

far better

does it simplifyhuman psychology or attempt to crystallise political out in The Listener (July 30, 1959), Defoe, Balzac, Dickens, Trol
lope, Flaubert and Zola "document our of the actual, material

world" and they, too, belong permanently to literature if not to the heights or depths of great art. grapple with the life of politics, yet politics, for those tempera mentally interested, is probably the^keenest intellectual interest of
ambitious or intellectually trapsed genre?although in this The few essays alert Australians. shown no out in realistic trappingsr?have 82 Australian literature, so far as I have read* it, utterly fails to

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understanding (or realisation) of the essential human factors in volved, as in Snow's novels, much less the heights and depths that
swirl about Dostoevsky's Sex is another of political extravaganzas. a poor the permanencies about which Australian make novelists as much of sex as the censors Some of our writers make showing.

will allow but they are mostly merely attempting the fashionably prurient r?ther than honestly exploring the reality behind the facts of erotic desire. The experienced reality, in this as with the other The Australian tradition in the novel has succeeded in making the notion of Australianism what Steiner, dealing with the American novel, calls "meaningful and definable." Having done that oyr novelists, unless theywant to belong to the slick fag-end of a tradi tion that has served its usefulness, should shake themselves free from the democratic-realist orthodoxies which helped to make They're a Weird Mob our first authentic bestseller. In this, American literature is more likely to be useful than English. In
America, plaisant perhaps democracy, as a reaction there has conditions permanent art than an intimate of man's life on knowledge essential earth, is more case-book. of a psychologist's to

in the main stream of the novel. You find:it in The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, The Golden Bowl, The Red Badge of Courage, As I an Lay Dying and even in Ernest Hemingway, whose work is like way catch his laconic style, rejoice in his masculine attitudes, but show little appreciation of the fact that the Newman vision made its initial impact on Hemingway and that his style and: attitudes
are the means of the human conditions with the permanent he chose to grapple of these realisation that smouldering lot. Lacking in slick reporter be another would only Hemingway iceberg, nine-tenths hidden. The Australian imitators of Heming

world from the Tocqueville a poetic-symbolic been always

of com

strain

the best American tradition. The Australian novel, until the appearance of Patrick White, lacked this poetic-symbolic visionary strain. The baffled bewilder ment or angry denunciation which The Tree of Mam provoked in Australia exposed how far we are from a realisation of what the novel, as a work of art, is really about. As White has himself ex plained, he is searching for the reality behind appearances which is the hallmark of the great novels. Whether The Tree of Man suc ceeds in doing what White intended is largely beside the point. To a degree, I think it does. Although the story runs through all the cliches of the Australian tradition, bushfires, drought, the lost

permanencies

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it does so with and the inarticulate man, to realize that only to read a few chapters in creating lumin the author has succeeded just that imaginative In those of realistic novel lacks. osity that the average Australian us brought up on European literature the nagging doubt intrudes were not worth that these ordinary, inarticulate Australian peasants doubt than is probably little more literature has never been dominated Australian European snobbery. in the man by the countryside novelists hesitate about dealing with intellectual

child, the lonely woman a difference. You have

the weight and volume Patrick White put into his book. Yet this

ner that still makes

literature. for genuinely imaginative than many of his critics Australian common people ordinary, ostensibly ary reality which most of us common extraordinary reality tralians. Only each individual reality. But White's larger world of the imagination

the city,where most of us live. Patrick White took the traditional theme (no doubt with deliberate intent) and showed its possibilities
In this, he was more genuinely but, at the same time, he lifted extraordin into the uncommon this un find in ourselves. Perhaps most Aus is not the fact of life to is his own knows what Australian

treatment

makes it possible for a novelist to grasp the features of a changing

and violent

which,

to the and is true to literature as V. S. Pritchett points out,

does for the rea novel what The Tree of Man historical Australian an imaginative of observed such listic novel), synthesis attempts he says when Pritchett means illustrates what reality. His work artist", enables which that it is the imagination, remembering of the us to grasp the true features lived. we live, in which man has always

Patrick White, in The Tree ofMan

or reporter. a mere spectator remaining society without the will never that the imagination grasp believes Pritchett until it of the facts, as it were, the cohesion of the world, reality it (the imagin is awakened and, he adds, "facts will not awaken so is nothing and "there strengthen opinion" they merely ation), it. . . ." shut us from the world as the correct opinion about apt to

and Voss

(which does for the

that "the imagination can be awakened by the imagination, by the

not realism, which turbulent world in

novelists are now ridding themselves of young Australian in the Australian Dur tradition. enshrined of the correct opinions as Randolph newcomers such Stow, Christopher ing the past decade, Thea Astley, and perhaps Harrower, Koch, Hal Porter, Elizabeth a number others, have been trying to probe 84 beneath sociological,

In what Vincent Buckley calls "the shadow of Patrick White",

sexual,

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Letters at the beginning of 1958,White explained what he and these others are trying to do and that is "to suggest . . . every possible
behind the ordinary, aspect of life ... to discover the extraordinary . . ." the mystery and poetry which alone could make (life) bearable. or so it seems to me, an attempt is the essential to This, vision, us by New in some measure with the reality spread before grapple man and a succession of other great writers. I should perhaps In conclusion, say that these are the random thoughts is again oughly of a returned bound for Asia. exile who, after an all too brief stay at home, There has been no time to explore thor some but now, having atmosphere experienced

to the essential reality In an article written

of the perman for Australian

that certain European, I had read that inspired the same excitement I know why? in me. Now novels aroused American and English intel to convert even thus early, was Patrick "trying White, that more Now into imaginative lectual knowledge knowledge." ex to do this an involnntary are novelists Australian learning novels with new Australian patriate will no longer be able to ignore As a footnote I should add that through quite so clear a conscience. although decently not in the poetic-symbolic full consciousness Snow

thing of the new wind blowing through the Australian novel, I shall not again be content to be absorbed wholly in the main cur rents of English and American literature. As long ago as 1945 I committedmyself to the view (in the Times Literary Supplement) that Patrick White's Happy Valley and Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony were the only Australian novels

the changed

out the long late sterility of the Australian novel Martin Boyd, tradition (as opposed to the billy tea nationalism of the Australian
which Sir Charles scientific-managerial of any kind. the sets up as the necessary that stultifies concept art counter and maintained and has honestly tradition, cultural of the continuing

tradition) to poise culture

85