The Hanging Garden Part 14

They chortle for their own wit. Stumble against each other for support as they prepare to cross the road. What is both possible and impossible hangs like a pale globe above the three of us. The scrub the dusk are toppling over in a rush towards sea and the light that still skirts the bay. Bones and sticks are for breaking. Didn't the Souliot women throw themselves off the precipice?

Till Bruce elbows his way between his mate, *Comoffut-waddaya thinken-she's me sister.'

*Go on! didn't know you had a sister.'

*... the relative-me cousin...'

*On with your cousin, eh?'

Their sn.i.g.g.e.rs are feathered with relief. *Cousins's allowed, aren't they?'

*Well, good luck, Brucie.'

Bruce has become a gangling amateur of a man. He has let the side down. He kicks the stand from under the bike.

*Come on,' he orders sulkily.

Doesn't sound as though he will ever forgive you for his offence against mates.h.i.+p.

You settle yourself as he kicks free of the stationary earth. After the first explosions, the wheels splatter some obstruction flat-the battered old aluminium float? We are toiling uphill in a cloud of fumes. Bruce's ribs have contracted inside the cold s.h.i.+rt. The face you cannot see has not become the skull of the outward journey human eyes will be glooming in the sockets, eyebrows ground into each other.

You would like to say something consoling to Bruce. *Do you think she'll make the hill?' Which makes it worse.

Ally asks, *Where have you two been?' If she condemns, there is a flicker of unwilling pride inside her condemnation-and gravy stains on what was once a pretty, floral ap.r.o.n. *Your tea's in the oven-drying up fast.' She has no time to waste on kids.

Harold comes in this other evening. He is carrying an evening paper. He is out of breath from that uphill short cut he takes from the ferry, or something could have excited or frightened him out of his normal composure. He is almost at the point of telling what makes his lips tremble, but it is against his nature to give anything away if he can help it. Perhaps he has been caught out soliciting girls or he's been promoted at the Department.

He says in this funny voice, *The Germans have had it. The war in Europe is over.'

*What-only in Europe?' Bruce shouts. As though Europe hadn't even been their affair. *The war won't be over till we've socked the j.a.ps.'

You are less than ever one of them though Alison the aunt lets out a little whimper. *Poor Gerry!'

*Gerry?'

*My sister-your aunt...'

Bruce sticks out his lower lip. Above it the eyes look blank. Heard of her of course, but forgotten. No more than a name and the face in a snap. What can a dead aunt mean to the living?

Harold who is not a soak, or at any rate not in the family circle, where he makes a parade of his ginger ale, says with careful solemnity, *This is an occasion where I propose to wet my whistle.'

Ally whose eyes have been straying towards the cupboard where she keeps her gin behind the Fowler preserving jars, throws back her head and screams through veined stringy throat. *Never heard you use such an old-fas.h.i.+oned expression!'

*It's what my father used to say.'

*Your father! When you're so keen on sounding up to date.'

Harold isn't going to be deterred. He fetches out the stashed bottle of Scotch and wets his whistle. Harold who has always been bored by fatherhood except as a means of keeping Alison quiet, borrows his father's virtue, old Dr Lockhart, to help celebrate the end of the war in Europe.

Ally cries, *Oh G.o.d!' in what is between joy and despair, and makes no secret of the gin behind the preserving jars.

When the middle boys come in they say oughtn't we go somewhere to celebrate the end of the war in Europe.

They've forgotten about you. It's your fault of course-if you don't tag on. It's the best way to be forgotten. Outside this lopsided moon is hung above the empty clothesline and the fretted vegetable leaves. Anonymous cats are taking over. The boys' laughter is swallowed up in the run towards the ferry. The little kids are breaking their toys and grizzling for their supper. A cold dew is settling on your hair.

*Ireen?' Ally calls from habit through the screen, but soon gives up to cut slices of stale sponge for her Col and Wal, and resume her whistle wetting session with her unusually considerate Harold.

Now that the war is over-the real war-your war-Cleonaki will surely write, and you will return to what belongs to you. And Gil to London? To the bomb craters and his mother's coffin, and his friend Nigel Brown's ghost. Gil himself a ghost haunting the garden on the precipice in Cameron Street, as you are haunting this mouldy back yard. Twin ghosts in the one haunting.

Is this where we belong then?

When you go in the two little boys are growing drowsy in the last stages of a squabble over the open pages of the atlas.

Gin-drowsy Ally murmurs, *This is the kind of night when children are got. Thank G.o.d I'm past it!'

Harold of the wet-whistle and careful enunciation, *No-one was ever cruder than Alison Pascoe when she sets out to be!' His laughter implies neither approval nor censure, as he pa.s.ses plump fingers and meticulously clipped nails through the silvery hair-do.

They look only vaguely at you-at the ghost who has been haunting them.

Afterword.

A Note on The Hanging Garden.

DAVID MARR.

Patrick White took one last look at Flaws in the Gla.s.s on the Australia Day holiday in January 1981 and posted the *self portrait' to his publishers in London the next day. Hours later he began work on The Hanging Garden. As he had so often before, White would cope with the agony of waiting for his publisher's verdict by plunging into the next book.

*I have another novel coming along hot and strong in my head,' he told the critic James Stern after Christmas. Friends who heard the news in those weeks worried White was working to the point of exhaustion. He had been so ill in December he feared he would die, and there had then been terrible storms in the house on Centennial Park when his partner, Manoly Lascaris, read the scathing portrait of his family in Flaws in the Gla.s.s. But White told the stage designer Desmond Digby he had no time to holiday. *He's got to get this other novel off his chest straightaway.'

White wrote steadily through February. By happy accident, Flaws in the Gla.s.s was taking a long time to reach Jonathan Cape. On 20 February, Digby noted White was *pleased with start of new novel'. There is no sign White was ever anything but pleased with his work on the book. When his writing was going badly, he would moan about it freely to friends and publishers. He had abandoned two novels in the 1960s after tearing them to shreds in his letters. There was none of that with The Hanging Garden. Trouble lay elsewhere.

He was old; his health was failing; he was seized with a missionary zeal to save the world from nuclear catastrophe and Australia from its Tory government a and he was falling once more under the spell of Jim Sharman. The young genius behind The Rocky Horror Picture Show and a string of hit musicals on the international stage had returned to Australia in the 1970s and revived White's plays to great acclaim. A deeply grateful White dedicated The Twyborn Affair to Sharman. Now Sharman was to direct the Adelaide Festival and asked White for a play. Time was short. White resisted for weeks but by early March he was at work on both the novel and a play. He told the critic Jim Waites: *I had an idea for one but had never written it, as I didn't feel anyone would be interested.' The play was Signal Driver.

In the crowded weeks that followed, White divided his time between the two projects. A telegram on 10 March delivered Cape's enthusiastic verdict on his memoirs, but many battles with his publishers followed to defend the sharp edge of his attacks on political and personal enemies. He was intransigent. In that same spirit he broke an old rule and appeared on television to condemn the political stagnation of his country. He was inundated afterwards with letters of support and pleas for help. With pride and exasperation he told Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape: *Every other day I am expected to wave a wand and save somebody or something.'

The contrast between White the writer and White the campaigner at this time is absolute. While he raged on television against the failings of contemporary Australia, he was evoking in his new novel a more innocent time in the life of his country seen not through the eyes of an angry, sick old man but two children of fine promise. The prose is a.s.sured, unhurried and disciplined. White is everywhere and absent, as only the greatest novelists can be. Though his fears left him flailing at times in public, at his desk in the house above the park he was proving, once again, to be a writer of perfect poise.

White liked symbolic deadlines. He put the novel aside in order to finish a first draft of the play by 25 April, Anzac Day. *With all this, the novel I had begun is holding fire, but I shall come back to it as soon as I can; it is all in my head,' he told his translator, Jean Lambert. A second draft of the play followed but by early June he was rereading the ma.n.u.script of the novel. *So far I have liked what I came across,' he told Graham Greene at Cape. *It should be all right when I get it together. There is only this dreadful old age business, and one's dread of blindness and senility.' In August he told Maschler: *The novel is coming along by fits and starts. I hope I have the strength to finish it.'

He wrote in blue ballpoint pen on quires of foolscap. These five bundles, each holding roughly 10,000 words, tell us little about his creative chemistry. All the hard work was done in his head, not on the page. He scratches out paragraphs here and there, but essentially the prose rolls out in a long, clean ribbon. Characters, scenes and dialogue emerge fully formed. Corrections were made in red ballpoint pen. White's handwriting, superb at first glance, has traps and hidden tangles for the uninitiated. He can hardly be reproached for this: these bundles of ma.n.u.script were meant for his eyes only.

The novel was to be in three parts, a structure White had used as early as The Aunt's Story. But lately he had dispensed with chapter breaks so that each section of his last novel, The Twyborn Affair, has the long arc of a novella. It would seem the same was planned for The Hanging Garden: the outer sheet of the top bundle is marked *I' and the text is an unbroken 45,000 words, which he later told his cousin Peggy Garland amounted to *about a third of a novel'. He had brought this part to a conclusion by October when the whole project finally came to grief in the uproar surrounding the publication in London and then Australia of Flaws in the Gla.s.s.

The book was front-page news. White's acerbic verdicts were quoted in newspapers throughout the English-speaking world. Attacks and counter-attacks were furious. As he approached his 70th birthday, White found he had published the great best-seller of his career. He also found these weeks fundamentally exhausting. He wrote in one or two letters of hoping to return to the novel once the furies were off his back, but in November he confessed to Maschler: *The whole thing has left me very tired and I doubt I shall ever get back to a normal writing life.' As the year ended, he realised he had neither the stamina nor the will to *grind out' another big novel. He announced almost formally that he would now devote what energies he had left to the stage and political causes. *No more novels,' he told Lambert. *They are too wearing, physically and I think by now I know how to machine gun more accurately in the theatre.'

He put the ma.n.u.script away. Perhaps he hoped to turn The Hanging Garden to good use one day as he had other discarded projects. *The Binoculars and Helen Nell', abandoned in the late 1960s because it seemed *an overblown ma.s.s, of too much flesh', was mined immediately for The Night the Prowler and years later for The Twyborn Affair. The fragment *Dolly Formosa and the Happy Few', put aside because it *smells a bit of carpentry and bookmaking', would be dug out twenty years later to become the backbone of The Memoirs of Many in One. But there was to be no such afterlife for The Hanging Garden. It was found untouched in White's desk at his death in 1990.

He had directed his unpublished ma.n.u.scripts be destroyed. But his old friend and literary executor, Barbara Mobbs, had her doubts: if White really wanted this evidence of his long literary life to disappear, why hadn't he burnt the papers himself? Before leaving his old house in Castle Hill in 1964 he destroyed all his ma.n.u.scripts and hundreds of letters in a fire that burnt for days. Many times in the last years of his life White showed Mobbs the notebooks, letters and ma.n.u.scripts crammed into his desk. *But he never told me to get the matches.' She waited for Manoly Lascaris to die; took a little more time so that everything might be done in good order; and then, on behalf of the charities that are the beneficiaries under White's will, sold thirty-two boxes of his papers in 2006 to the National Library of Australia. It proved the greatest literary treasure trove in this country.

The possibility of publis.h.i.+ng The Hanging Garden was broached with Mobbs in 2010. She was sceptical but did not veto the idea. A typescript was prepared under the supervision of Professor Margaret Harris and Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby of Sydney University, as part of their work on the White papers funded by an Australian Research Council grant. Harris and I then checked the transcription together, leaving about twenty unreadable phrases to be deciphered by Mobbs, the greatest living expert on White's handwriting. We also enlisted the writer Angelo Loukakis and my colleague at the Sydney Morning Herald Anna Patty to deal with White's Greek. One impossible Greek phrase defeated us. Otherwise we ended up with a clean and unambiguous text.

It is not a first draft. White had clearly been through the ma.n.u.script at least once making corrections. Nor is it a final draft. He had left notes here and there in the text about problems a nearly all trivial a that needed to be addressed. The most substantial comes in the ma.n.u.script's last pages, where White has the news of Hitler's defeat reaching Sydney (wrongly) in the evening. He had a lifetime horror of anachronism: *Foregoing pa.s.sage on end of the war in Europe in need of revision as the news came through in the morning. First must come the address of school heads, then in the evening personal reactions of parents and children to the great event.'

Where White planned to take the novel after VE Day remains entirely opaque. I have found nothing in his letters to indicate what he may have had in mind. After he put the ma.n.u.script away he rarely mentioned it again. There is, however, a clue that Eirene Sklavos and Gilbert Horsfall might end up in contemporary Sydney. On the back page of the last of the five bundles of ma.n.u.script is this calculation in shaky ballpoint pen: 14 in 1945 50 in 1981.

Mobbs had the typescript in January 2011 and read The Hanging Garden for the first time. The decision to publish was taken in March. *I'm extremely nervous of posthumous publis.h.i.+ng, which I usually don't admire. But this is up to a very high standard and even though it is only part one, it is complete in itself,' she declared. *I have no doubt it deserves to see the light of day.'

Also by Patrick White.

FICTION.

Happy Valley.

The Living and the Dead The Aunt's Story.

The Tree of Man Voss.

Riders in the Chariot The Burnt Ones (Stories).

The Solid Mandala The Vivisector.

The c.o.c.katoos (Stories) A Fringe of Leaves The Twyborn Affair.

Memoirs of Many in One (Editor).

Three Uneasy Pieces (Novellas).

The Eye of the Storm.

NONFICTION.

Flaws in the Gla.s.s.

end.