Like his own character, Voss, he is apparently trying to “discard the inessential and attempt the infinite”, and he rejects the realm of social living as not only inessential, but as a distraction from the more permanent elements of man’s experience. He tries instead to convey through the theme and characters of Voss “what Delacroix and Blake might have seen, what Mahler and Liszt might have heard”. The next novel, Voss, was written partly as a reply to what he feels is the typically Australian novel, “the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism”. But at the same time I wanted to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and poetry which alone could make bearable the lives of such people, and incidentally, my own life since my return.” “Because the void I had to fill was so immense, I wanted to try to suggest in this book every possible aspect of life, through the lives of an ordinary man and woman. White is, if nothing else, a write on the grand scale and-partly as a reaction to specifically Australian conditions-he has deliberately aimed high. The books certainly have a largeness of conception which sets them apart from most contemporary English novels, with their prudently limited studies of social behaviour. This error in judgment, however, is symptomatic for there is a disturbing vagueness behind the enthusiasm for White’s work and, I believe, a general failure to distinguish between his intention and his achievement. And now, by a curious retrospection, The Living and the Dead, first published in America in 1941, is being highly praised on its first publication here-though this is an unimpressive book, and certainly White’s weakest. His next novel, Voss won a major literary award, and his latest, Riders in the Chariot, has received consistently favourable reviews. His rise to prominence has been quite sudden after three early novels had passed without notice, The Tree of Man (1952) was greeted as a major work, and comparisons with Lawrence, Faulkner, Melville and even Dostoevsky recurred in reviews. T here is a widespread notion, especially it seems in England, that Patrick White is a novelist of the first order.
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