Skip to main content

Happy Valley



It was a Saturday afternoon, a student at university, and I called into Watkins, the esoteric bookshop in Cecil Court, and found a copy of 'Temenos: A Review Devoted to the Arts of the Imagination 2'. One of its four, and principal, founding editors was the poet and Blake scholar, Kathleen Raine, whose work I knew and admired, I bought it and brought it back to my room in the Hall of Residence where I lived.

The first essay I read - I recall even now - was by the French poet and ex-Jesuit priest, Jean Mambrino, entitled, 'Dining with Isaiah: On the early novels of Patrick White' (shown above). It was to lead to a lifelong love of White's work, beginning with my reading of 'Riders in the Chariot', his extraordinary novel of four marginalised mystics against the backdrop of their individual histories and how those stories collide in a post-war, distant, suburb of Sydney. It remains the most penetrating exploration of the nature of evil and the possibilities of redemption that I know.

One of the novels, referenced in Mambrino's essay, was difficult to access during White's life, because White had suppressed its republication: his pre-War novel, Happy Valley. Death knows no such scruples and in 2012 it was reissued by Jonathan Cape. I am reading it now with fascinated recognition of how it is so utterly White and yet utterly White in the making.

There are many of his key themes - most especially the distance between true expression and words - but not yet clothed aright, in ways recognisable.

One shift is in the texture and the visuality of the prose. I often thought that White would have preferred to be a painter - he was a friend and distinguished patron of artists - and one of his best novels, 'The Vivisector' is woven around an artist's life. The painterly layers of envisioned sight that is a hallmark of his later novels is here more or less absent. Here he is following the 'streams of consciousness' of his characters rather than the embodied realities of his characters' every move and gesture and you find yourself reading White yet not being slowed into the steady, encompassed seeing of his mature work. It is fascinating.

I can see why he chose to suppress it not because it is not good but because it is not him. He is not simply a set of themes but a way of saying, a certain kind of performance in which there is no idea separable from things. He is an iconographic novelist, not a symbolic one, nor a realist.

Every stroke must contribute to a wholeness of seeing. I was reminded of a painter with whom White, I think, shares much in common - Edward Burra - who explores, through different images, the marginal bearers of truthfulness, the meetings and miss-meetings of life, the edges where violence dwells and landscapes that speak - and their mutual hostility to 'interpretation' - what carries meaning is the gesture, the texture not the reflected packaging of words.





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev