by Adrian D’Ambra
The Matter of Patrick White’s Narrative Style:
“Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge – which is free indirect style itself – between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance.”
from – James Woods, How Fiction Works, 2008
Major Settings of the Novel:
- Moreton Drive, Centennial Park, Sydney – especially Chapters 1, 2 & 3 for the return of siblings, Princesse Dorothy de Lascabanes and Sir Basil Hunter, and Chapter 11 for Lal Wyburd’s visit, Lotte Lippmann’s final performance, Flora Manhood’s period and Mrs Hunter’s death
- Brumby Island – Chapter 8, especially pp 369-408, 414-428
- Kudjeri, the Hunter family estate – Chapter 10
Sex and Sexuality in the Novel:
- Flora Manhood and Col Pardoe
- Basil and Flora Manhood, especially pp 298-323, compared with Basil and Mary de Santis, especially pp 334-356 which includes the Watsons Bay / dead dog scene
- Dorothy at the North Shore Cheeseman dinner pp 286-298
- Dorothy, Elizabeth and the marine ecologist Professor Edvard Pehl on Brumby Island
- Dorothy and Hubert de Lascabanes
- Dorothy and Basil in the closing passage of the Kudjeri chapter
- Elizabeth Hunter and husband Alfred/‘Bill’ Hunter
- Elizabeth Hunter and Athol Shreve, pp 91-101
- Elizabeth Hunter and family solicitor Arnold Wyburd, pp 31-39
- Elizabeth Hunter and Edvard Pehl on Brumby Island
- The Miami Flats-Snow Tunks lesbian chapter, Chapter 4
At the time of their return to Australia Basil and Dorothy are in their fifties and Elizabeth Hunter is in her mid-eighties. Elizabeth was around 70 years of age at the time of the Brumby Island episode and Dorothy was around 40.
Chapter 1 [‘the purposeful is necessary’]
In its earliest exposition, the novel establishes the presence of Mrs Elizabeth Hunter in her bedroom as if she is a figure in a landscape. Look at the descriptive language used to describe the light, the furniture, the bed coverings: ‘the dark grove of the furniture . . . the steamy pillows . . . the wings of her hair, escaping from beneath the lawn . . . Mrs Hunter looked pretty flat . . . a straight line of sheet was pinning the body to the bed . . . “a sort of wateriness – oh yes, the looking-glass” . . .’ Mrs Hunter’s eyes are described in terms of ‘a terrifying mineral blue . . . that moment of splintered sapphires . . . their original mineral fire burning through the film’. These opening passages of the novel are clearly located at the Moreton Drive North Shore Hunter mansion in Centennial Park Sydney, but, in her semi-consciousness, Elizabeth Hunter is also simultaneously stranded on Brumby Island which is another key setting of the novel, in particular, of Mrs Hunter’s shattered relationship with her daughter Dorothy [see chapter 8].[1] Apart from the landscape of her last refuge what this wreck of a human being, Elizabeth Hunter, contemplates is the inadequacy of love. “The worst thing about love between human beings,” she tells her night nurse, Sister Mary de Santis, “when you’re prepared to love them they don’t want it; when they do, it’s you who can’t bear the idea.” [p 11]
We meet the three nursing sisters: Mary de Santis, the night nurse; Sister Badgery, the morning nurse; Sister Flora Manhood, the afternoon nurse. Mary de Santis was first employed for Mrs Hunter by the family solicitor, Arnold Wyburd, fifteen years before the current time setting of the novel when Elizabeth suffered “you could hardly call it a breakdown – a slight nervous upset” [18] following the breakdown of the relationship between mother and daughter on Brumby Island. In Chapter 1 we also meet ‘this small unhappy Jewess’ [21] the housekeeper Lotte Lippmann and the cleaning lady Mrs Cush.
Elizabeth Hunter, nee Salkeld, slips between different states of consciousness, remembering episodes from her childhood, from her marriage and estrangement from Alfred ‘Bill’ Hunter and her infidelities. She recalls, for example, her affair with Athol Shreve as ‘an essay in sensuality’. [15] Elizabeth remembers her infidelity with the family solicitor, Arnold Wyburd, making love with him during a visit to Moreton Drive when he was delivering a draft of her will. Elizabeth and Alfred’s separation was marked by the move of Elizabeth and the children from the family’s country estate, Kudjeri, to Moreton Drive in Sydney. Despite their separation, ‘She was determined to show her gratitude and repay him in affection for what amounted to her freedom.’ [35] Sensuality is often equated with exchange in this novel. Her childhood memories revolve around another girl, Kate Nutley, whose sister Lilian ‘ran away with someone, a Russian or something . . . And now she’s been murdered.’ [24] Kate, it appears, comes from a wealthier family who provide her with numerous dolls to play with. Elizabeth has carried for a lifetime the guilt of deliberately throwing the dolls in the river. She feels no remorse for her choice of lovers. ‘Don’t think I made a practice of promiscuity. Oh, I was unfaithful once or twice – only as a sort of experiment – and it did prove it wasn’t worth it. For most women, I think, sexual pleasure is largely imagination.’ [77]
The major current-time event of Chapter 1 is the arrival in Sydney from France of Elizabeth’s expatriate daughter, Princesse Dorothy de Lascabanes which is told in reverse order. In order of retrospective exposition we have first her arrival at Moreton Drive, then her navigation of Sydney airport, then her account of the Air France flight from Europe during which she flies through a typhoon over the Bay of Bengal and befriends a fellow passenger, the Dutch sea captain, who remembers sailing a freighter into ‘the eye . . . the still centre of the storm . . . You could tell the violence was exhausting itself.’ [71]
In response to Dorothy’s Dutch sea captain story Elizabeth tells her daughter about ‘her experience in a cyclone . . . I must have been too annoyed with you – flying off like that – in a rage.’ [72] This is evidence of Elizabeth’s ‘capacity for cruelty . . . to drag in Edvard Pehl. At her most loving, mother had never been able to resist the cruel thrust.’ [73] Elizabeth’s cyclone is the central, disorientating experience of her life, her experience of the storm fifteen years earlier on Brumby Island.
Elizabeth ‘was terrified her mind might crumble before Dorothy came, let alone Basil, who was delayed.’ [40] ‘But I shan’t die,’ she reassures her daughter, ‘or anyway, not till I feel like it. I don’t believe anybody dies who doesn’t want to – unless by thunderbolts . . . In any case you flew – to make sure you’d see me die – or to ask me for money if I didn’t. Basil too.’ [64] These sentiments will be echoed almost exactly by Basil in Chapter 3. At the very least he is after a few thousand pounds to fund the Mitty Jacka non-play or, more hopefully, to witness his mother’s death and secure his inheritance.[2]
White characterises Dorothy as an awkward and eternal outsider who has ‘never managed to escape being this thing Myself.’ [49] She may have been made an honorary member of the Queen Victoria Club on the basis of her family fortune and her European title but ‘Dorothy Hunter’s misfortune was to feel at her most French in Australia, her most Australian in France.’ [49] ‘[U]nreliable: changeable, treacherous,’ Sydneysiders – and, by extension, Australians in general – are seen by her as reflections of their climate. [65] Dorothy perceives Australian speech as a monotonous form of shrieking ‘out of unhealed wounds.’ [49] Throughout the novel she struggles with her dual identity as Princesse de Lascabanes and Dorothy Hunter and she struggles to relate with other people: ‘I believe rooms actually mean more to me than people,’ she says to Arnold Wyburd whom she sees as ‘the sort of person you take for granted: a nice bore.’ [51] She anticipates her reunion with her mother as a kind of murder in the making and with her brother as something fearful, monstrous. ‘I’ll only ever want the great roles,’ she remembers Basil telling Lal Wyburd when they were children, ‘Lear particularly.’ [53]
Dorothy’s visit to her bedroom [53-58] is interspersed with reminiscences of her predominantly unsatisfactory and mutually unsatisfying marriage to Hubert in France. During this scene which is retained for the film version Dorothy lies on the platypus rug on her bed without knowing exactly what kind of fur it is or remembering that it was a wedding present from her father to her mother, although the platypuses were shot by her grandfather.
Chapter 2 [‘all the elements of a performance’]
The central action of the second chapter is the reunion of Elizabeth Hunter with her expatriate son, Sir Basil Hunter, the knighted actor permanently resident in England. Evidence perhaps of their mother’s cruelty, solecism and dominance, her two children have become foreigners, not just to herself but to Australia.[3]
Basil’s return, though, is preceded by the arrival with miniskirt and orange plastic handbag of Sister Flora Manhood, the afternoon nurse. ‘Oh God, my life is slipping away!’ she thinks to herself as she is rubbing Elizabeth’s back, ‘What am I living for?’ [86][4] A separate episode in Chapter 2 is Flora’s reminiscence of a recent outing with her boyfriend, the pharmacist, Col Pardoe, who occasionally delivers Elizabeth Hunter’s medications to the Moreton Drive mansion. Writing about their daytrip to Noamurra, which means ‘Man and Wife’, Patrick White conveys his impression of the only hinterland that most Australians will ever know, the outer suburban fringe, the meeting place between bulldozers, urban progress and rural dilapidation. It is harder to pinpoint White’s attitude towards Flora. She is unashamedly and fashionably modern and very much aware of the inhibiting power of wealthy society women such as Elizabeth Hunter and upwardly mobile men such as Col can exercise, particularly over a young woman such as herself. She is also another candidate for White’s swipe at the great Australian shallowness and superficiality: ‘More than anything,’ thinks Flora, ‘it’s what you see . . . men show you their thoughts in their throats.’ [109] In the country town the young people ‘were younger than the old people of course, but elderly.’ [110] According to the omniscient narration of their visit to the country and their lovemaking in a field there is ‘the child they had made together,’ which may well influence Flora’s later entanglement with Basil. [113] ‘Whatever I may be,’ she says later to Col, ‘I’d try to better myself in my children.’ [110][5]
Elizabeth’s memory provides further retrospective exposition of her adultery with the ambitious politician Athol Shreve. [91, 94-100][6] Her thoughts are mostly occupied, though, by her incapacity and how she believes it to be perceived by her children. ‘Old people aren’t quite human for those who are still capable of escaping from the past by moving about in what they like to think is positive action: movement, the great illusory blessing.’ [92] Elizabeth is also fully aware of her children’s motives in returning to visit her in Australia.
Elizabeth must be enthroned in her ‘tarnished rose brocade’ gown and wheel chair ‘for his arrival.’ [116, 115] She is first transformed by Sister Manhood ‘into a glimmering ghost of the past.’ [117] Despite all the artifice of false teeth, wig, lipstick, cheek blush and eyeliner, Elizabeth declares that she has ‘decided to appear utterly natural’ for what is clearly a well-rehearsed or prepared performance. ‘Momentarily at least this fright of an idol became the goddess hidden inside: of life . . . and finally, of death.’ [121] Sir Basil Hunter’s arrival is described in equally rehearsed and artificial theatrical terms. He enters his mother’s bedroom wearing an ‘aura of charm and brilliance’, he approaches his ‘leading lady’ [momentarily mistaking her for an understudy] with ‘that distinctive limp’, presenting ‘sideways to the audience of two’. Elizabeth must also recover ‘her technique.’ [122][7] These two actors understand the fraudulent and performative nature of their relationship equally and fully, the risk of deceit and disappointment if they do not perform the exact replica of coordinated communication: ‘neither of them was more than formally conscious of an audience: which is how it becomes on those evenings when all the elements of a performance, on either side of the footlights, are perfectly fused.’ [123]
White’s characterisation of Basil Hunter, in particular, reflects his lifelong fascination with the theatre and with actors, his love of greasepaint and the stage. This fascination is evident in his characterisation of Elizabeth Hunter who is also an extraordinary performer, the Weimar-Nazi period cabaret career of Lotte Lippmann and the Bangkok episode with the troupe of London actors in Chapter 3. Basil, though, represents White’s fascination with the very nature of acting itself with the idea of what dramatic performance in the theatre represents or actually is. As a man Basil is devoid of empathy, sympathy, compassion or attachment to others; he is equally incapable of feeling or sincerity. Despite his lifetime’s reliance on literature, dialogue and lines he is not a reader and has no particular interest in or ideas about art and aesthetics. He has no greater interior depth than any other character in the novel. And yet, as an actor on stage, this empty, shallow, superficial vessel is capable of summoning within himself and evoking in his audience the most profound emotions and extremities of experience imaginable.
Chapter 3 [‘an accumulation of failures’]
Continuing the imagery and characterisation of ‘the theatre of reunion’ from the previous chapter, at the beginning of Chapter 3 Basil’s presence in Elizabeth’s room is described in terms of stage instructions, their conversation in terms of script. When Elizabeth had been awaiting the arrival of Dorothy in Chapter 1 numerous organic images associated with her survival of the Brumby Island cyclone were deployed. In what is becoming a consistent feature of the narrative structure we are told through the use of retrospective exposition why the two expatriate adult children have returned after such long absences from Australia. Arnold Wyburd wrote to them about Elizabeth’s ‘slight stroke’. [126] When thinking of the past in Wyburd’s presence Basil finds himself ‘dragging up from the wells of the unconscious the sludge in which the truth is found.’ Part of Basil’s truth is that he may have once played a brilliant Macbeth but he was a ‘premature’ Lear. [127] More immediate, is the truth about his actual motive for returning to his mother’s sickbed in Sydney ‘for a different purpose: short, sharp, and material’, a situation in which he hopes he and his sister can be ‘partners in crime.’ [127, 129] Later in the chapter the narrative voice very suggestively reveals his interior thought that ‘his survival depended on the death a materialistic old woman had delayed for too long.’ [152] Basil is not short on material greed himself as he observes, ‘All those nurses and other characters [who] must be eating up a fortune.’ [128]
The narrative then retrospectively returns to Basil’s delayed flight in Bangkok. [129-124] Perched on an airport barstool drinking Scotch he contemplates both his history of emptiness and failure and his crumbling, disintegrating, empty face reflected in a mirror. The reader is made aware again of White’s fascination with actors, the nature of acting and the paradox that an insignificant person might artificially produce an extraordinary emotion. ‘Many of the greatest have been empty,’ thinks Basil. [131] Basil believes that he inherited his gift from Betty Salkeld, Elizabeth Hunter, Mother. [132] During ‘his physical downfall at the bar, ‘the lost actor’ runs into a West End troupe of acting friends who are touring Japan, Thailand and India for the British Council and he accompanies them to their ‘second-class tropical hotel’ the Miramar. [135, 136] Their camaraderie does not provide Basil with ‘the hoped-for reality’ but he continues drinking heavily in their company. Basil reveals to his friends the extent to which his career stalled: Mitty Jacka’s largely unwritten, mostly improvised play for him. One of the young female actors introduces herself to him as a school friend of Imogen, Basil’s estranged daughter, to which Basil responds with another aching truth about his failed life: ‘She isn’t my daughter, you know. No blood offspring, I mean.’ [137] This is not the only revelation that Basil makes to Janie Carson: ‘You know why I’m here? I’ve got to raise the money for this damn play. Even if she doesn’t die she may come good with a few thousand.’ [142] ‘I don’t believe she’ll die till she wants to . . . What makes any strong-willed old person decide to die is something I’ve never worked out.’ [138] These are sentiments hardly worthy of a Lear. Nonetheless, Janie initiates a ‘madly incestuous’ sex scene with Basil in her hotel room because she wants him to keep her in mind for Cordelia in any future production of King Lear. However, Basil fails to have an erection, vomits almost on her and passes out, missing his delayed flight.[8]
Basil Hunter – ‘The Englishman he had become’ [145] – is unexpectedly brought into the company of another actor, his mother’s housekeeper, Lotte Lippmann, during an evening storm first anticipated by Mary De Santis. [144-151] Considering ‘the storm effects . . . the zinc thunder’, Basil realises that ‘He had come home to a foreign country.’ [147, 145] Lotte Lippmann’s reflections on her career as cabaret performer in the Weimar and early Nazi years in Berlin, on cooking and what would have given her the greatest satisfaction in life reveal a depth of human dimension beyond the comprehension of Sir Basil Hunter: ‘If I could choose – if I could begin again – I would ask to create one whole human being . . . Or two. Myself. And one other – out of my body.’ Remembering her cabaret audiences: ‘They aspire – to what? to be translated out of themselves? to be destroyed?’ In the face such a questioning capacity to understand the extent of human culpability and human suffering Basil is ‘too humiliated to reply.’ [148] He remains torn between another attempt at ‘Lear’s stony, perhaps unscalable mountain’ which he has thus far failed to realise and the prospect of being the central artefact in ‘Mitty Jacka’s non-play’. [149] Lotte serves Sir Basil a very satisfying meal of soup and schnitzel. At one point she explains to him what it is that she sees in his mother. She ‘understands more of the truth than most others. Basil’s visit to his mother’s room after this dinner is filled with repugnance on his part and is described in the language of religious ritual: sanctuary, acolytes, devotions, incense, vestments, shroud, sanctity, relic, rites. [152-152]
White’s Greek interlude regarding Mary de Santis, Anastasia Maria’s martyrdom of a childhood. [155-159]
‘If only one could feel more grateful for what one doesn’t want . . .’ [160] Elizabeth remembers the martyrdom of her own childhood in dialogue recalled by Sister de Santis from much earlier in the fifteen years that she has been caring for Elizabeth Hunter: ‘When I was a child, Mary, living in a broken-down farmhouse, in patched dresses – a gawky, desperately vain little girl . . . I used to long for possessions . . . last of all, I longed to possess people who would obey me . . .’ [161-162] Some time in those earlier days Mrs Hunter had given Mary de Santis a gift – one of several that she will give or contemplate giving in the course of the novel – ‘a seal with a phoenix carved in the agate.’ [162]
There are passing references to Athol Shreve throughout the chapter. At one point he is ironically invited as an aspiring politician to unveil the Alfred Hunter memorial statue in Gogong, but later he is in prison for embezzlement, ‘the greatest disappointment in Australian political life.’ [164]
Chapter 4
This is the Flora Manhood Miami Flats lesbian sleepover with her cousin Snow Tunks and Snow’s current lover Alix.[9]
Chapter 5 [‘we, the arrogant perfectionists, or pseudo saints, shall be saved up out of our shortcomings, for further trial’]
Elizabeth Hunter awakens in her ‘token raft’ early on the second morning to find Sister de Santis kneeling in prayer at the foot of her bed.[10] Returning to ‘the bottom of the sea’, she slips back into memories, sleep and dreams. ‘My enemies – and some of my friends,’ Elizabeth confides to her night nurse, ‘have called me an egoist – so other friends and enemies tell me.’ [190-191]
Elizabeth remembers her return to Kudjeri to nurse her husband Alfred during his last illness. [193-205][11]
Chapter 6 [‘brilliance at its best is a quality of heartless jewels, at its worst, of supple, ultimately self-destructive intrigue.’]
Every detail ‘aggravated the disease of foreignness from which she suffered’ during Dorothy Hunter’s first evening at the Queen Victoria Club. [212][12]
Dorothy’s interior monologue: ‘I’ve come back to coax a respectable sum of money out of an aged woman who happens also to be my mother . . . if coaxing fails, to bully the money out of her . . . If neither coaxing nor bullying what if you should kill an old woman or mother . . .’ [214-215]
Dorothy’s movement between ambivalence and hatred of her mother is linked to her memories of her assumed humiliation by her mother at Brumby Island and her mother’s assumed seduction of the Norwegian marine professor, Edvard Pehl. ‘The wild horses racing at dusk along the beach sting your cheeks with flying sand and horsehair whips.’ [215] For Dorothy that episode remains a living flagellation of her flesh and a repudiation of herself as a sexual being at the hands of her mother.
Dorothy dreams of Arnold Wyburd’s ‘transparent testicles dangling, trailing over her thighs’ in a confused incestuous reverie. [216] Her delicacy, we are told, rather than her husband’s perversities, ‘had ripped the ribbons off their marriage.’ [219]
During her second visit to her mother, Elizabeth’s ‘shrunken head’ reminds her of the one she had seen as a religious relic at Assisi, Italy, the skull of St Vitalis, patron saint of venereal disease. [223] During this visit Dorothy convinces herself that her mother’s ‘parasites, the artistic housekeeper, pampered cleaner, and frivolous or over-indulgent nurses, were sucking her dry,’ hence squandering her inheritance. [228] Whilst he would agree with her fully, Basil’s approach is different. He would rather get them onside. In an overheard telephone conversation she hears her brother talking to his mother about buying the attendants gifts.
Elizabeth Hunter: ‘I need fire – when the fire’s almost out.’ [226]
During his morning shave Basil contemplates the early positive notices of his title role performances of Richard II and King Lear, the disasters that these productions quickly became and his most recently curtailed West End season. We learn about his recent London history with Mitty Jacka who wears an Ethiopian ring identical to the one Basil sent his mother: ‘he had often regretted parting with it, though the gesture had produced material results.’ [238] Mitty has convinced Basil that far greater material results could be extracted from Elizabeth Hunter to fund their play should he return to Australia and should she die. ‘Nothing,’ he assures his London accomplice, ‘will persuade Elizabeth Hunter to die.’ [247] Basil has rationalised his return to Australia: ‘his object not to bully an old woman into handing over a fortune even if it killed her, but to renew himself through bursts of light, whiffs of burning, the sound of trees stampeded by a wind when they weren’t standing as still as silence. And mud . . . between the splayed toes of his bare feet.’ [249] Hence his later determination to return to Kudjeri. He also remembers his boyhood broken arm at the family farm. [244-245]
Basil’s interior monologue: ‘I have been able to control my own life ever since I learnt the technique of living, which is also the technique of acting.’ [241]
Mitty Jacka [237-249]
Arnold Wyburd’s office with Dorothy and Basil [252-273]
This is the first reunion of the siblings. Basil is running late because he was ‘determined to relax and enjoy this whizzing vision of a city . . . he offered his love to its plate glass and neo-brutal towers.’ [252][13]
Wyburd’s office is decorated with a coach clock that belonged to Bill Hunter and was given to him by his widow, and a signed photograph of Bill. Arnold remembers the transition from young, inexperienced family solicitor to a friend capable of crying at Bill’s funeral. [253]
Dorothy to Wyburd: ‘Mother specialised in slaves, of whom Father was the most valuable.’ [257]
Basil sees himself and his sister as Regan and Goneril – the avaricious daughters of King Lear – dividing their parents’ estate between them. [261] They discuss the possibility of placing Elizabeth in Thorogood Village. Dorothy sees in both Basil and Wyburd incestuous manifestations of ‘the husband she had failed to devour, she was not on any account prepared to be carried away to the point of incest.’ [263]
Basil eating Wyburd’s biscuits. [265]
Basil’s shirt button popping. [266]
Wyburd hands over envelopes. [268]
After the meeting Dorothy sits in the Botanical Gardens where she gets a splinter in her bottom and is affronted by the sight of two lovers embracing on the lawn. [271] Basil walks down to Circular Quay, buys cooked prawns, walks around eating them, decides against a ferry ride and also goes into the Botanical Gardens: ‘There had been a time when he saw clearly down to the root of the matter, before his perceptions had retired behind a legerdemain of technique and the dishonesties of living.’ [273]
Chapter 7 [‘Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.’]
At Moreton Drive:
Ten days have elapsed and rumours of the Thorogood Village retirement village have circulated amongst the staff at Moreton Drive.
At the Wyburds’:
The rumours originate from Lal Wyburd who has spoken by phone to Sister de Santis because she is appalled by the Hunter children’s plan to dispose of their mother. Lal’s confession to her husband of simultaneous defiance and solidarity is the prelude to a particularly satisfying sexual encounter.[14]
At the Cheeseman Dinner [286-298]:
Cherry’s mother died in Thorogood Village a few weeks after being admitted, giving Dorothy renewed confidence in the murder she wishes to commit. [295] ‘Why,’ asks Cherry, having watched her friend more closely than she realised, ‘do you hate your mother, Dorothy?’ [297] The Australian writer lunges at her. [298][15]
The Flora Manhood/Basil Hunter Seduction at the Onslow Hotel [298-323]:
Begins with Flora’s ‘embryonic inspiration’, ‘lying quietly somewhere inside her.’ [298] Flora has calculated that she is ovulating and is determined ‘to go through with it for the sake of the fruit it must bear.’ [313] ‘[S]he must think about this child he was going to give her: the child who would be the embodiment of unselfish love . . . she must love it for the sake of this golden child he was going to plant inside her.’ [315-316]
Basil wakes with Flora beside him contemplating a revival of the 1948 Henry do Montherlant play The Master of Santiago with himself as ‘Alvaro: an austere, destructive, while self-destroying soul – a noble inquisitor.’ [317] In the play Don Alvaro is being sent to the New World ostensibly to proselytise on behalf of his Catholic order. His real ambition, though, is to re-establish his lost wealth. Not only is this synopsis of the play an excellent cipher for Basil himself, but Basil’s description of Alvaro as a ‘destructive, while self-destroying soul’ is a brilliant insight into Patrick White’s characterisation in general. Again, there is also White’s fascination with the paradox of acting. Basil does not believe in God but as an actor he can perform a role which revolves around the deepest questions and feeling about religious belief.[16]
Basil contemplating Flora: ‘What he had always longed for , he now knew, was to be loved by some such normal, lovely, insensitive but trusting hunk of a girl, as this Flora Nightingale beside him . . . he could love this girl for the beauty of her simplicity.’ [319-322] This longing is traced back to his earliest disappointments with his mother whom he remembers saying, ‘I was never a natural mother – I couldn’t feed. But that – you see, darling – hasn’t deprived you of – of nourishment.’ [320]
On her next shift Elizabeth Hunter explains to Flora Manhood the significance of the two sapphires, blue and pink, and offers her the pink as a farcically misunderstood engagement present. Flora thinks her employer is anticipating a marriage to her son whereas Elizabeth Hunter is anticipating a marriage between Flora and Col Pardoe. ‘[Y]ou gave the pink sapphire to belove her to her chemist.’ [334]
Elizabeth Hunter’s reverie returns again to Brumby Island: ‘of course you had desires the man Dorothy ran away from.’ There are other vestiges of the Brumby Island storm such as the swans. [333] Dorothy has maintained for fifteen years the secret grievance that she ran away from her mother’s seduction of Edvard Pehl.
Sister Mary de Santis/Basil Hunter, Watson’s Bay, the dead dog [334-356]:
Basil talks to her about the ‘physical drudgery’ and the ‘electric crown’ of acting, and ‘all its illusions and your own presumption – not to say spuriousness.’ [344, 345] He thinks of what he is saying to her as empty spew. Discussing King Lear over lunch Basil knows ‘that he had not got there with Lear’ that he has only been ‘a bloody superficial Lear.’ ‘I don’t think he can be played by an actor,’ he explains to Mary de Santis, ‘only by a gnarled, authentic man as much as a storm-tossed tree as flesh.’ [348, 349, 350]
Consider the significance of Lear in the storm. He begins to lose his wits just as he also simultaneously comes to understand how pitiful and tragic the human condition is:
LEAR: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man! . . .
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join’d
Your high engender’d battles ‘gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! ’tis foul! [III.ii]
Basil spills barbecue sauce on his thigh. [350]
They turn from Shakespeare to the seascape but as the sun goes in ‘your vision is withdrawn from you.’ Instead of Australia Felix: ‘an aimless bobbing of corks which have served their purpose, and scum, and condoms, and rotting fruit, and rusted tins, and excrement’ reminiscent of that greatest modernist description of the end of civilisation, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). [352]
Following the dead dog and Mary de Santis’ fall in the street: ‘His mechanical self drove off by jerks in the tinny car. Because he never felt at home in one, he knew he would be sitting upright, his shoulders narrowed. Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir. Why? Only that on his last performance s the old king he had never felt so personally bereft, so bankrupt; technique could not protect him from it. This last gasp; and the poverty of a single bone-clean button. In this you may have conveyed the truth, if in nothing else.’ [356] Consider the extreme negation and simultaneous vision of Lear’s last words:
LEAR: And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!
He dies. [V.iii]
Chapter 8 [‘Return to the source of things . . .’]
Basil begins writing in the mode of Mitty Jacka’s non-play. The siblings prepare for Elizabeth Hunter’s execution, her extrication from Moreton Drive.
Remembered fragments from Elizabeth Hunter’s dialogue: ‘I shan’t feel happy till I’ve tasted everything there is to taste and I don’t intend to refuse what is unpleasant – that is experience of another kind.’ [364] ‘I can’t reason about it Dorothy only swear that it’s a true passion whether you believe me or not tell me if you can why confident responsive women are attracted to withdrawn shadowy men? or gentle girls to hairy brutes?’ [365]
Fragments of Brumby Island in the storm: ‘its stinging sand, twisted tree roots, and the brumbies snapping at one another with yellow teeth, lashing out with broken hooves as they stampeded along their invaded beach.’ [369]
Brumby Island [369-408]:
Dorothy in Australia because of marriage breakdown in France.
The Warming children tell Dorothy of a shipwrecked woman who was stripped and enslaved by the indigenous inhabitants of the island in colonial times. [378] This fictionalised account of the survival story of Eliza Fraser on what today is called Fraser Island off the Queensland coast would become the subject of White’s next novel A Fringe of Leaves (1976).
Dorothy, Edvard and the brumbies on the beach: ‘When the actual beach over which they were squelching, began thundering behind, then around them, sand hissing, spirting, flying in great veils – whinnying, it seemed, finally . . . On reaching them the horses propped for an instant; a couple of them reared; others wheeled and spun into spiralling shadows; there was the sound of hooves striking on hide, bone, stone; a flash of sparks, and of teeth tearing at the dusk.’ [394-395]
Dorothy suspects ‘immoral purposes’ in everything her mother does on the island. [399]
Elizabeth Hunter describes her dream of walking on the bottom of the sea to Edvard Pehl who likens her to a predatory electric fish.
Elizabeth Hunter: ‘something I found out . . . on that island – after you had all run away – nothing will kill me before I am intended to die.’ [414]
Brumby Island [414-428]:
Elizabeth and the brumbies: ‘She went outside, and there were the flying brumbies approaching down the beach, their veils of manes, and in the sky the cloud feathers more tenuous than before.’ [421] The cyclone is approaching.
Her survival during the cyclone is described in insect imagery: ‘a groping, survived insect a staggering soaked spider . . . It was dry inside her funnel.’ [422] She emerges from the bunker to contemplate the wreckage. [424-425] Learns from her rescuers that Edvard Pehl had left the island before the storm, she presumes, to follow Dorothy.
Elizabeth Hunter’s Brumby Island experience is most intense in the eye of the storm, a calm period between the first and second assault. As a survivor she is ‘still too weak from the great joy she had experienced while released from he4r body and all the contingencies in the eye of the storm.’ [428] In that bewildering calm she feeds the seven black swans, sees, ‘the seabirds nesting among the dark-blue pyramids of waves and witnesses the totemic death of a white seabird impaled on a broken tree which she rightly reads as a warning to return to her bunker.
After fifteen years Elizabeth Hunter tells her daughter that Edvard Pehl did not stay with her on the island but that he left it the same day as her. [432][17]
Basil anticipates his return to Kudjeri as a means of returning, ‘to the source of things, and in doing so, perhaps even save yourself from Mitty Jacka and the death-play.’ [433]
Chapter 9 [‘she must continue to believe only in the now which you can see and touch’]
Flora Manhood: ‘like every good Australian, she must continue to believe only in the now which you can see and touch.’ [443] White will return to the limitations of this worldview in his characterisation of Rory Macrory in Chapter 10.
Lotte Lippmann plays the Fool to Elizabeth Hunter’s Lear and performs her Berlin cabaret routine. ‘I am no German. I am a black Jew from anywhere . . .’ [447]
Elizabeth Hunter documents the gift of the pink sapphire ring to Flora Manhood and shows Arnold Wyburd the gift of jewellery she intends for Lal, the turquoise necklace her mother gave her and that she wore on Brumby Island. Arnold Wyburd holds the jewellery box. [456]
Elizabeth Hunter contemplates suicide with the assistance of Flora Manhood. [459]
Chapter 10 [Kudjeri]
Basil: ‘At Kudjeri perhaps he could re-discover the real thing – if there was enough of him left to fill so large a stage.’ [466] ‘What he craved was confirmation of his own intrinsic worth as opposed to possibly spurious achievement.’ However, he is someone ‘who had renounced life for theatre.’ [477]
The meat pies [468-469]
The Gogong statue of Alfred Hunter [472]
The miserable, mismatched marriage of Anne and Rory Macrory.
Mutton and spotted dog.
Anne Macrory: ‘Kirkcaldy was Anne’s myth, her Kudjeri.’ [478]
Basil at the farm dam where he used to go yabbying as a boy: ‘What he did not dare confess was that wanted to feel the mud between his toes.’ [490] Basil sees the tree he fell out of as a child, breaking his arm. His memory of his father’s concern for him is filled with evidence of his father’s emotion and sincerity that he has never recognised and will never understand. [491] Toes in mud, Basil recites some of Lorenzo’s lines from V.i of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. [492] The lines are about Queen Dido’s absolute despair at the departure from Carthage of her lover Aeneas. Her despair will soon result in suicide. Bitten by a yabby, Basil is ‘Stranded in his own egotism and ineptitude.’ [493-494]
Thinking of her father and of Arnold Wyburd, Dorothy finds herself wondering if it is ‘better perhaps [to be] insignificant and good, [rather] than insignificant and bad.’ [499]
Rory Macrory to Dorothy: ‘I only ever believed . . . in what I can see and touch.’ [502] ‘You have the time – the nerve – to con yourselves – and others – with words and ideas.’ [502]
Basil visits the shed, old boot, father’s car.
Basil practises Lear: ‘unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal.’ [516 / III.iv]
Chapter 11 [myself is this endlessness]
Lal Wyburd’s visit, Lotte Lippmann’s final performance, Flora Manhood’s period and Mrs Hunter’s death.
Two months have elapsed since the adult Hunter children arrived in Sydney.
‘Now surely, at the end of your life, you can expect to be shown the inconceivable something you have always, it seems, been looking for. Though why you should expect it through the person of a steamy, devoted, often tiresome Jewess standing on one leg the other side of a veil of water (which is all that human vision amounts to) you could not have explained. Unless because you are both human, and consequently, flawed.’ [544] Is Elizabeth Hunter, perhaps, a more fitting Lear than her solipsistic actor son?
Lotte Lippmann had embraced her dance at last, or was embraced by it . . . she was not yet wholly released from the ceremony of exorcism.’ [547] Is Lotte Lippmann, perhaps, a more wholly realised artist than Basil Hunter?
Flora’s period and her reprieve: ‘Her lovely, blessed BLOOD oh God o Lord.’ [548]
Elizabeth Hunter’s final thought: ‘Till I am no longer filling the void with mock substance: myself is this endlessness.’ [551][18]
Chapter 12 [anything of a transcendental nature]
The siblings, Dorothy and Basil, are called away from Kudjeri by the news of their mother’s death on the morning following their night together.
Flora Manhood returns to Col Pardoe.
Arnold attends the funeral that Dorothy and Basil do not.
On board her Air France flight to Paris Dorothy is thinking of her mother’s experience on Brumby Island: ‘But could anything of a transcendental nature have illuminated a mind so sensual, mendacious, materialistic, superficial as Elizabeth Hunter’s?’ [589] The example of Shakespeare’s Lear suggests that the answer is yes, as does White’s account of Elizabeth’s survival of the cyclone.
In his drunken stream of consciousness, Basil, en route to London, anticipates a revival of Lear but his incoherent thoughts more resemble Mitty Jacka’s non-play.[19]
Arnold Wyburd’s stolen blue sapphire ring. [597][20]
Sister Mary de Santis’ next martyrdom. [602-604]
Lotte Lippmann’s suicide. [607]
[1] What lighting technique does director Fred Schepisi use in the film adaptation [2011] to capture Elizabeth’s drifting consciousness?
[2] What becomes of the Mitty Jacka non-play in the film?
[3] How is the Bangkok episode changed in the film and what is the intended effect?
[4] How is the motif of back-rubbing used differently in the film?
[5] How is Flora’s interior world communicated to us in the film?
[6] How is Athol Shreve reconstituted for the film?
[7] An actor playing life. What challenges does this set for Geoffrey Rush?
[8] What is retained by Schepisi, what is altered and what is omitted in the Bangkok-Sydney switchover?
[9] If you were adapting this novel to a screenplay forty years after it was written, why might you decide to omit this episode?
[10] When do we see her kneeling in prayer in the film?
[11] What do we learn of this in the film; from whom and when?
[12] Explain the complication regarding Dorothy’s Club that is introduced in the film.
[13] At this point in the film, how does Schepisi make use of this whizzing vision of a city, Sydney?
[14] What is this satisfying sexual encounter replaced with in the film?
[15] Who lunges at her in the film and what are the implications?
[16] What play is Basil considering putting on throughout the film?
[17] How is this information compressed in the film?
[18] What are Elizabeth’s final visual thoughts in the film?
[19] How do these last sightings of Princesse Dorothy and Sir Basil Hunter compare with our last sightings of them in the film?
[20] Compare your last impressions of Arnold Wyburd in the novel and the film.
english literature teacher 