Winds of Change in the Australian Novel

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Winds of Change in the Australian NovelAuthor(s): Norman BartlettReviewed work(s):Source: The Australian Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 1960), pp. 75-85Published by: Australian Institute of Policy and Science

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By Norman Bartfett

Winds Of Change In TheAustralian Novel

An American naval lieutenant (from Boston) once nearlyconvinced nie that Australia had no claim to culture. "Where'syour national dish?" he demanded. "A sound culture marches on itsstomach." All I could conjure up was steak and eggs, now anappreciated dish along the Strand, and such exotics as kangaroo tailsoup, galah pie and damper with a draught of billy tea. With theexception of billy tea theyoung Bostonian would have none of them."Cooking," he explained in an Harvard accent, "is one of the finearts. You don't just take raw ingredients and make them palatable.No sir! You take a little bit of this, a little touch of that, youweigh one ingredient against another for taste and aroma, combinedelicately, cook gently, serve in the proper manner and enjoy withthe subtle choice of the rightwine. Steak and eggs! Don't makeme smile."

At the time (and even still) I thought the young man preciousand his literary recipe more likely to produce the faint corruptionof over-ripe fruit than otherwise. But, after five years abroad, Idon't feel as satisfied as I did with our national cultural mess andpottage. The national billy tea literary tradition?the gum leavesmake all the difference^-no longer completely satisfies. We shouldcontinue to treasure our Tom Collinses, Henry Lawsons, GavinCaseys, Tom H?ngerfords?who are exactly and authentically Australian and belong nowhere else but here?but free-and-easy literarymanners and a salty, sardonic humour that undermines pomposityand cuts empty pretention back to proper size are not enough fora country which claims to have grown up.This is not a question of being sophisticated, urban, civilised,in, say, the Somerset Maugham manner. Great literature is notnecessarily the product of high civilisation, although civilisationhelps; the Greeks produced it when they were hardly more than

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Dec, 1960 THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLYbronze age barbarians. Nor is good art the prerogative of big countries; Sweden's Ingmar Bergman produces better films than thewhole of Hollywood put together. And Greece's Nikos Kazantzakior Ireland's Sean O'Faolain add up to more meaningful literaturethan the hierarchy of contemporary Russian writers approved bythe Soviet "Literary Gazette".The troublewith the Australian literary tradition is summedup in the criticism theAmerican lieutenant brought against steakand eggs: raw ingredients made palatable by good cooking don'tamount to high art. Photographic realism presented with skillby people whose standards and tastes don't differ to any greatextent from the people they portray is entertaining, up to a point,but the point isn't high enough. Folk art, and its derivatives,doesn't answer the basic problem about the condition of man. Fundamentally, literature is concerned with man in all his aspects andrealist novels, of the kind approved by the Australian literary tradition, merely skirt the fringes of existence. Folk art sufficed, inAustralia, when we lived on the outskirts of civilisation and neededto explore our own environment and its effect on people. Nowadays, this sort of Australianism is a symptom of the disease it setout to cure?cultural subordination to a metropolitan culture. Withhumanity astir in neighbouring Asia and Africa, with the shadowof the atomic cloud hanging over all mankind, with rival ideologiesclamouring for possession of the mind of man, mateship and f.a.q.democracy seem a little thin.Great art attempts to give form and meaning to life whereasscience (and scientific realism in literature) grapples primarilywith the facts of life. It is a common assumption, and a popularone in Australia, that an accumulation of fact leads to the truth.Ortega y Gasset is nearer the core of things when he says, "knowledge does not consist in bringing man face to face with an innumerable swarm of raw facts and naked data. Neither the datanor the facts, however accurate, are the veritable stuff of realityitself. ..." Reality is that subtle something or other, that makes lifemore than a chemical compound or a psychological chain reactionand art more than the physical properties that are combined toproduce it.What great novelists seek, though they seldom find it,is some comprehension of this reality, of the Absolute, if you like,that lies behind and inter-penetrates all the facts of human living.Or, even if they reject that sort of reality, their work is a recordof their search and their rejection.

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THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL Dec, 1960In contrast to literatureof this sort, the average good Australian novel belong almost entirely to the kingdom of this world.Nor do the typicalAustralian novelists show much indication that

they are aware that any other sort of world is possible, unless itis a semi-socialist Utopia in which we could all be mates together.Compare the two comparatively poor novels D. H. Lawrence wroteabout Australia, for instance, with the average novel in the Australian realist tradition and you will see what I mean. Lawrenceis often chaotic, he goes off the deep-end into interminable introspection, you feel sometimes that you would like to kick him inthe pants, but he is alive, vibrant with life, and some of our mostlauded books are dead; dead as mutton, anyway, wholesome andfilling, o doubt, but, oh! so dull.To begin with, we should be honest with ourselves about allthis. We are, probably, the most democratic country in the worldtoday. We have successfully abolished, never had, or effectivelyneutralised, most of the things Henry James considered necessaryto the production of first-class prose literature: a genuinely leisuredclass, cultural tradition, social convention, privileged institutionsand intellectual snobbery. The most vigorous of our creators, inart and literature, repudiate what Sir Charles Snow, in his Cambridge Rede lecture,contrastedwith the culturallydeadening scientific-managerial ethos of the 20th century: a continuous culturaltradition based on civilised rather than exclusively national or currently fashionable values. Many of our writers ?tnd artists, likemost of our scientists and managers, show no evidence that theyappreciate what tradition, in the sense that T. S. Eliot uses theword, really means. Alexis de Tocqueville, no doubt, would haveblamed this on democracy. Much as he admired the vigorousAmerican adolescence he uncannily forecast the cultural dessicationthat follows, in his words, "the disappearance of a class in whichthe taste for intellectual pleasure is transmitted with hereditaryfortune and leisure and by which the labours of the intellect areheld in honour. . .

Apropos of this, the one thing about which we can be reasonably certain is that literary and intellectual ability, unless strictlypractical, has no status value in Australian society. But, to comeback to democracy, in our own day T. S. Eliot believes that toomuch of it has flattened out society to an undistinguished lump ofmedium quality dough. Indeed, many Americans?Henry James,Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot himself, even Ernest Hemingway and the

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Dec, 1960 THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLYLost Generation, are cases in point?can be said to be refugees fromthe sort of America Alexis de Tocquev?le feared. We, too, haveour expatriates. Before we belabour them we should at least grapplewith the problem as they see it. At the same time, itwould perhapsbe just as well if we recalled Malcolm Cowley's remarks (inExile's Return: New York, 1934) that the Lost Generation was lost"because itwas uprooted, schooled away and almost wrenched awayfrom its attachment to any region or tradition. . . ." After thefierce excitements ofwar and the tremendous liberation of Paris,Vienna, Europe, these young Americans (and their not-so-youngimitators) rebelled against returning to democratic suburbs. Nowonder they attempted, in Scott Fitzgerald's phrase, tomake the20's the "greatest, gaudiest spree in history. . . ." There are Australian parallels.The argument, so far, presents a dilemma. On the one hand,our traditional, realist, stay-at-home, nationalistic writers tend todull conformity with exclusively democratic values. Our literal andemotional expatriates leap to wild extravagances in art and lifebecause they are not attached to any region or tradition. The Australian nationalist tradition in literature is, as it should be, prettymuch under fire nowadays. This tradition produced, and still produces, many good and worthy books but it now acts as a stultifyingfactor in Australian intellectual life because it is hopelessly provincial and bores a rising generation, who tend to look outwardto the world and the devil rather than inward to homespun virtuesand social idealism. They are, indeed, the products of traditionalsocial idealism and they are not satisfied to do what Lawson lovedto do, sit upon his swag, smoke, and watch the world go by.

The world, today, is very much with us: a dangerous world, achallenging world, a world in which our progressive egalitarianismand content with f.a.q. standards is off the beaten track; a worldin which the very foundations of our democratic, scientific, ideological and religious assumptions are under armed scrutiny and subject to vigorous intellectual challenge; a world of Asia and Africa,where our "friends and neighbours" are not necessarily as friendlyand neighbourly as we would like them to be and who findAustralia's egalitarian bonhomie, peculiar politics and easy-goingways either objectionable or incomprehensible.Few Australians would consider trading democracy and egalitarianism for a hierarchial cuisine, either in cooking or culture. Mostof us would agree with Gilbert Seldes when he says that T. S.

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THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL Dec, 1960Eliot's conviction that all art must be aristocratic and religiousis irrelevantto contemporary society,which is neither, because it isdifficultto foresee (or desire) a return to a highly-stratified ndhierarchic state in theUnited States or, of course, in Australia orBritain. But to dismiss T. S. Eliot as archaic and his solutions asirrelevant?as most Australians would?is to miss the point, whichis: the problems that T. S. Eliot raises are problems fundamentalto the life ofman, in or out of the State. For instance, because"Murder in the Cathedral" deals with God and the King it is notas irrelevant to this day and age as the average CommonwealthDay speech. We, in Australia, are apt to forget the pitfalls ofwhat C. S. Lewis calls "chronological snobbery" (he also calls it asign of provincialism), the snobbery that thinks that an atomicscientist or a socialist agitator is more progressive than, say, aCatholic prelate or a rioting peasant because he comes later inhistory.The main debates about the condition ofman have not beensettled. Certainly, they have not been settled by a few mates,gathered for a spree in an Australian pub or united in a conviction that, irrespectiveof principle,good blokes stick together. Thereis, of course, more to the Australian tradition than this. But eventhe best of the traditional novelists find it difficult o shake themselves out of the climate of their time and place. The narrowertheirmental place chart, themore restricted their time range, theless likely they are to write more than provincial novels. True, mostgreat novelists are products of time and place. Dostoevsky, a product of 19th century Russia if ever there was one, is falso a greatcreative artist, grappling with devils, pursued by furies,wrestlingwith God, creating an imaginativeworld inwhich things are nottrue to fact but lambentwith reality. That Dostoevsky wouldappal any decent, intelligent, progressive, down-to-earth Australianbanker, scientist, manager, trade unionist or newspaper proprietor,is understandable. That he should appear incomprehensible (in factifnot in theory) to a large number ofAustralian novelists (judgingby their works) is the measure ot our provincialism.

Incomprehensible, I should add, not because these writers arestupid or lack intelligenceor reading but because they are devoidof interest in the questionswith which great literaturemostly deals:the larger questions of man's fate which rise way above contemporary politics or nationalisms or fashionable cliques. Or, in another field, one wonders how many Australian writers and journa

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Dec., 1960 THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLYlistsconsider almost automatically thatTom Paine is the intellectualsuperior of Edmund Burke because Paine superficially ppears to beinwhat we have adopted as the Australian tradition? What weneed now is to apply to ourselves D. H. Lawrence's remark: >4Oureducation from the start has taught us a certain range of emotions,what to feel and what not to feel, and how to feel the feelingsweallow ourselves to feel. All the rest is just non-existent." Appliedculturally, this "certain range of emotions" amounts to provincialism, a "geographical snobbery" to put alongside our "chronologicalsnobbery".To say that we are living in a time of crisis has become acliche which flows over our minds without making much barbedimpact. How many of use realise that this crisis is somethingmuchmore than 20th century turbulence after what now appears to manyof us as 19th century smugness? As Ortega y Gasset points out inMan amd Crisis, an historical crisis is something much more shattering than the normal clash between generations, the old battlebetween fathers and sons which Samuel Butler chronicled in TheWay ofATI Flesh, an English literature text, by theway, in someAsian schools. The difference, he goes on, "is that in the first, something changes in our world; in the second, the world changes."The world has changed. The contemporary crisis is as deep, andwill take as long to even out, as the crisis between the AncientWorld and Christendom and between the medieval Age of Faithand the modern Age of Reason. The Age of Reason is itself underchallenge and, whatever emerges, will be something vastly differentfrom our comfortable notions of political progress, social evolutionand scientific certitude.

Thus, those who still march under that once grand old banner,"Temper democratic, bias Australian", are merely marching incircles.We can finda better guiding lightfor today's complacenciesand troubles from that survivor of America's Lost Generation,Malcolm Cowley, when he says, "We hadn't learned that humansociety is necessarily imperfect" or "that it may disappear fromearth unless it comes to accept what T. S. Eliot calls 'the permanentconditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet. . . .'"We should not allow the word "God" to distract us, even though itdoes not belong to the Australian tradition, except as an expletive.We mostly prefer Bernard O'Dowd's, "Man is God, however low?Is Man, however high", a concept with which most of the world'sgreat literature profoundly disagrees. The operative words in Eliot's

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THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL Dec, 1960observation are "the permanent conditions." These conditions don'tchange with changes of government or under revolutionary leadership. Indeed, revolutions (however unavoidable) illustrate the truthof Eliot's words as classic studies in human disillusion.What then, is the permanent condition of humanity? You willfind it shadowed forth in great literature, especially in the dramaand the novel. But perhaps the bestmodern crystallisation is thatgiven by JohnHenry Newman inApologia Pro Sva Vita when hesays that "to consider the world and the ways of man . . . is a visionto dizzy and appal; and inflictsupon themind a sense of profoundmystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution." And whatis it that he finds beyond human solution? Just this, "the disappointments of life,the defeat of good, the success of evil, physicalpain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion,the condition of the whole race. . . ." In short, all the things thatpopular newspapers, best-selling novels, demagogues, TV sessionsand popular mass media avoid, gloss over, explain away or ignoreand with which great novelists grapple, each inhis or her ownway,mostly his.Newman's solution was God (" . . . as certain to me as my ownexistence . . .") and he expressed it in a great work of prose literature. Other men have sought other solutions but, if they becamegreat writers in the process, the quality of theirwork can be measured by the extent of their struggle to grapple with the dizzy andappalling vision of life^-the permanent condition of man's existence on earth, irrespective of nationality or ideological adherence.From the artist's point of view (as an artist) it does not matterwhether the vision is reconciled with reality in Newman's way orby "the fierce energy and passion and the all-corroding, all-dissolvingscepticism of the intellect", or in madness or revolutionary ardour.The essential, for great art, is not the solution (if there is a solution) but the intensity f thevision and the energy of the imaginaryworld created outv of that vision.

The result is usually not one of calm optimism or complacentbelief in the inevitabilityof evolution or revolution fromworse tobetter or a smug belief that our little era of world history and ourtiny corner of geographic space is the apex or even on the mainroad to ultimate reality. If you think Newman out-of-date, justapply his vision to theworld you know, brushing aside the superficial Dale Carnegie gloss of radio pep talks or businessmen's lun

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Dec, 1960 THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLYcheons. Not the shiny public relations world but the reality behindthe facts. The beginning of the novelist's art is a man or womanshaken out of complacency by themystery and complexity and,aye, the beauty, of existence, allied with sufficient echnical abilityto grapple imaginatively with this mystery and complexity andbeauty in prose fiction. The result would not please readers forAmerican publishers who go in for neat construction, disciplinedprose and glossy finish, but the chances are that a new work ofliterature emerges.

Let us, then, do away with the cant aspects of a national literature stemming from our democratic tradition or of an emancipatedliterature posing under beatnik cliches or advertised by excess hair,beards, horse-tail hair-dos or conventionally unconventional dress.Novels which show intimations of immortality are those whichgrapple with the immediate and the contiguous in a manner thatsuggests greater realities beyond. Nor need these realities be otherworldly or among the great masterpieces of prose. Few criticswould claim that Sir Charles Snow rises to great heights butThe Masters, for instance, is a good novel, far better than anythingof its prosaic kind attempted inAustralia. The Masters deals witha petty election in a university college, yet it reflectsthe essentialsof politics, in any time or place and under whatever "ism" operates.Admittedly, The Masters belongs to what George Steiner calls "themiddle spectrum of total experience", where most Australian novelists cling, but it demonstrates that even the prosaic main currentof the English novel is capable of realising some of the permanentrealities of the human condition. It does not exaggerate or sensationalise or capitalize on the fact that, as Arnold Bennett onceobserved,. the pleasures of the uncultivated mind are generallyviolent, witness any railway bookstall or newspaper kiosk. Nordoes it simplifyhuman psychology or attempt to crystallise politicalsolutions in neat sociological formulae. After all, as Steiner pointedout in The Listener (July 30, 1959), Defoe, Balzac, Dickens, Trollope, Flaubert and Zola "document our sense of the actual, materialworld" and they, too, belong permanently to literature ifnot to theheights or depths of great art.Australian literature, so far as I have read* it, utterly fails tograpple with the life of politics, yet politics, for those temperamentally interested, is probably the^keenest intellectual interest ofambitious or intellectually alert Australians. The few essays in thisgenre?although trapsed out in realistic trappingsr?have shown no

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Dec, 1960 THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLYchild, the lonely woman and the inarticulate man, it does so witha difference. You have only to read a few chapters to realize thatthe author has succeeded in creating just that imaginative luminosity that the average Australian realistic novel lacks. In those ofus brought up on European literature the nagging doubt intrudesthat these ordinary, inarticulate Australian peasants were not worththeweight and volume Patrick White put into his book. Yet thisdoubt is probably little more than intellectual snobbery. Europeanliterature has never been dominated by the countryside in the manner that still makes Australian novelists hesitate about dealing withthe city,where most of us live. Patrick White took the traditionaltheme (no doubtwith deliberate intent) and showed its possibilitiesfor genuinely imaginative literature. In this, he was more genuinelyAustralian than many of his critics but, at the same time, he liftedostensibly ordinary, common people into the uncommon extraordinary reality which most of us find in ourselves. Perhaps this uncommon extraordinary reality is not the fact of life to most Australians. Only each individual Australian knows what is his ownreality. But White's treatment is true to literature and to thelarger world of the imagination which, as V. S. Pritchett points out,makes itpossible for a novelist to grasp the features of a changingand violent society without remaining a mere spectator or reporter.Pritchett believes that the imagination will never grasp thereality of the world, the cohesion of the facts, as it were, until itis awakened and, he adds, "facts will not awaken it (the imagination), they merely strengthen opinion" and "there is nothing soapt to shut us from the world as the correct opinion about it. . . ."Patrick White, inThe Tree ofMan and Voss (which does for theAustralian historical novel what The Tree ofMan does for the realistic novel), attempts such an imaginative synthesis of observedreality. His work illustrates what Pritchett means when he saysthat "the imagination can be awakened by the imagination, by theartist", remembering that it is the imagination, not realism, whichenables us to grasp the true features of the turbulent world inwhich we live, in which man has always lived.Inwhat Vincent Buckley calls "the shadow of Patrick White",a number of young Australian novelists are now ridding themselvesof the correct opinions enshrined in the Australian tradition. During the past decade, such newcomers as Randolph Stow, ChristopherKoch, Hal Porter, Elizabeth Harrower, Thea Astley, and perhapsothers, have been trying to probe beneath sociological, sexual,

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THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL Dec, 1960economic and partisan facts to the essential reality of the permanent conditions of existence. In an article written for AustralianLetters at the beginning of 1958,White explainedwhat he and theseothers are trying to do and that is "to suggest . . . every possibleaspect of life ... to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary,the mystery and poetry which alone could make (life) bearable. . . ."This, or so it seems to me, is the essential vision, an attempt tograpple in some measure with the reality spread before us by Newman and a succession of other great writers.

In conclusion, I should perhaps say that these are the randomthoughts of a returned exile who, after an all too brief stay at home,is again bound for Asia. There has been no time to explore thoroughly the changed atmosphere but now, having experienced something of the new wind blowing through the Australian novel, Ishall not again be content to be absorbed wholly in themain currents of English and American literature. As long ago as 1945 Icommittedmyself to the view (in the Times Literary Supplement)that Patrick White's Happy Valley and Henry Handel Richardson'sThe Fortunes of Richard Mahony were the onlyAustralian novelsI had read that inspired the same excitement that certain European,American and English novels aroused in me. Now I know why?Patrick White, even thus early, was "trying to convert intellectual knowledge into imaginative knowledge." Now that moreAustralian novelists are learning to do this an involnntary expatriate will no longer be able to ignore new Australian novels withquite so clear a conscience. As a footnote I should add that throughout the long late sterility of the Australian novel Martin Boyd,although not in the poetic-symbolic tradition, has honestly anddecently maintained full consciousness of the continuing culturaltradition (as opposed to the billy tea nationalism of theAustraliantradition) which Sir Charles Snow sets up as the necessary counterpoise to the scientific-managerial concept that stultifies art andculture of any kind.

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Winds of Change in the Australian Novel