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An audacious novel frustrates me most in the moment I most admire it. How could a human text aspire to articulate a reality by its written, limited expression? How could a book not seek to emulate the transport and the verve of a religious experience? It’s a pleasing tension, like all unresolvable contradictions. And, more and more, an audacious novel is the only kind I’m interested in reading. If fiction doesn’t dare to be total, I won’t respect it as I’d like to.
There are many famed standard-bearers for the totalized novel that dares beyond narrative entertainment or journalistic depiction to strain into the bottomless nether reaches of perception, to span past the high boughs of language and into the spheres above that tree. To name White Noise, and Invisible Man, and Absalom, Absalom!, and To the Lighthouse, and The Magic Mountain, and Ulysses, and The Brothers Karamazov, and Middlemarch, and War and Peace, and Paradise Lost, and Hamlet, and The Divine Comedy, only gestures at the essential boldness that they all share, their audacity of intent, vision, and design that elevates them and their form simultaneously. There are many great novels other than these ones, but they don’t share the singular audacity of the books I’ve named.
The Tree of Man, by the forgotten Nobel Prize winner Patrick White, does. Published in 1955, the novel reaches into universalist reverie and roots in tactile Australia simultaneously, to imperfect effects. But imperfections in a novel that risks flaws to traverse every inch of a setting and the characters within it, in a novel flooding its form, belong just where you find them. They are its frustrations and its inspirations.
The opening line of The Tree of Man doesn’t quite announce it will plumb and map the whole of mid-century Australia: “A cart drove between the two big stringybarks and stopped.” (Though the vernacular stringybark does introduce the Australian term for the eucalyptus tree, and the cart nearly passing between them signals an entry into the virgin world beyond the two trees.) No, White announces his novel’s intent a paragraph later, when his protagonist begins his work:
Then the man took an axe and struck at the side of a hairy tree, more to hear the sound than for any other reason. And the sound was cold and loud. The man struck at the tree, and struck, till several white chips had fallen. He looked at the scar in the side of the tree. The silence was immense. It was the first time anything like this had happened in that part of the bush.
Throughout The Tree of Man, the sentences are this tactile, this attuned. And they’re also as vast as these pinpointed details. For the final sentence of the passage leaves its vantage point unclear—neither the tree or the man could comment on any “first time” for this wilderness, implying that only the narrator could make this comment, and that the narrator (or narration, if it is too omniscient to be a person) is far larger than the man or the tree. It goes on to chronicle this man, his family, his property, and his death as one, rich keyhole of the wider land coming under modernity as modern cultural and commercial development spreads inland. The Tree of Man does extend that far, and it does achieve that much, in its flawed way.
But for now, in only this second paragraph, this man strikes the tree, “cold and loud,” to collect wood for a fire. And given that this man goes on to forge a home and farm along this path he has begun blazing with the tree’s help, we might call this tree the titular tree of man.
Notice it is not a tree of life—life is not the destination of this man’s history. His name is Stan Parker, and where his trail ends, there is death. Stan’s death may well be the cost of entry into the wild, virgin world between the stringybarks, though he certainly doesn’t know it. Much to the contrary, his objective is to make a life from the wilderness, what White will later call “a shape and order out of the Chaos.” Stan hews a house from the trees and the stones, and he heaves together a farm where he labors through the decades. In time, he marries a girl named Amy, who leaves her family home to live in the unfinished house of “the clearing the man had made to live in.” In their union, horned and flowered like the pod of the crow’s ash tree, the novel seeds the two children, hardened bitterness, and inescapable fate White has devised for the Parkers.
The inherent excesses of The Tree of Man draw from that fate. Stan’s death, the light of a locomotive beaming behind its shape, casts out fingerlike shadows, where he appears, again and again, “cavernous” or “dried up a bit” or otherwise stony in his work and his relationships. In the same shadows, Amy appears, again and again, “with conviction” or “masterfully erect” or otherwise brittle as her loved ones and her desires flee from her. White can render them too thickly, like statues:
Now he was away, at a sale of farm machinery that was taking place on a property at Wullunya. The woman remembered his kiss as she stood there in the arid garden. His affection, which was kind and habitual, made her feel fretful in retrospect. Then she began to whimper quietly, for no good reason, except at the touch of her own dry and drying skin, slightly gritty from the dust, which she had touched, and continued touching, stroking her own arms.
This predestined characterization, laden with recurring adjectives and without reprieve, often blunts how the reader encounters these characters. In the self-conscious grandeur of the prose, Stan and Amy are too elemental to imagine ever meeting them, much less knowing them. Stan heaves, labors, milks, ages, and withers. Amy gardens, lightens, bears children, fattens, and grows embittered. Perhaps they are beings just distant enough to perform the myth White enacts in this novel, which is his admirable boldness, if also his novel’s recurring flaw. But the characters are also just deadened, at times.
Life, however, does abound in the hills which White embodies with keen detail in every passage where he can manage it. The stringybarks, willows, tamarisk, cattle, and “meandering, gritty tracks” through the Australian bush bear his ambition better than his characters. Though, ironically opposed to the prose encasing them, the inhabitants don’t care for such details: “In all that district the names of things were not so very important. One lived.”
This taciturn country of The Tree of Man, where it it always hard-bitten winter, bears the new settlers after Stan, suffers the new roads they set into its hills, but in its way does still surge against them. A flood—few narrative events are so audacious as the reenactment of our first apocalypse, Patrick—drowns men and their animals alike, so that Stan must join with the men of nearby Wullunya to attempt rescues in their inadequate, rickety boats. But the flood, despite its sudden purge of both humans and property, doesn’t unmake any of the homesteads, markets, or automobiles which continue to crowd into the land. The “shrubby, gnarled honeysuckle,” however, will overcome the clearing Stan once cut from the bush. His and Amy’s farm, “the place was that was Parkers,” is overgrown just in time for Stan’s death in his wife’s abandoned garden.
His death, at an old, tired age where he has watched his two children flee him and Amy, happens in the slow, unreal motion of something immense, as Stan notices that “great glories were glittering in the afternoon.” He sees ants which struggle over the cracks in his garden path, and Stan believes in them “like the painful sun in the icy sky,” ants and sun “whirling and whirling” and “struggling,” still “joyful.” The great, glittering madness of these, his last moments, becomes clear just as his death collapses the passage. As Stan passes from her, Amy overcomes the meager, resentful kinship of their marriage for a moment to hold her husband against herself, quite gently: “She was holding his head and looking into it some minutes after there was anything left to see.”
As Amy rises, as she wanders again into the house where she is now alone, she comments inside herself, numbly, that Stan is dead “in the boundless garden.” He was overcome by the land he had cleared, as White predestined him to. “In the end,” White writes, “there are the trees.”
But bolder than a mere depiction of the natural world held taut and vengeful against its erasure is how White imbues that world with an enigmatic God. Few of the characters feel Him in the country church where they gather, where such a faith embarrasses them, but they know Him in the embodied sensations everywhere else: “At times, though, peace did descend, in a champing of horses’ bits at a fence outside, in some word that suddenly lit, in birds bringing straws to build nests under the eaves, in words bearing promises, which could perhaps have been the grace of God.” To dare God’s presence as a descending peace—you might even have compared it to a dove, Patrick—in 1955, still in sight of the emaciated, burned, and murdered corpses attributed to godless human depravity, is a boldness. But White never writes that such sounds (which “could perhaps have been” God) satisfy Stan or Amy, a bolder step still: offering a relief to their hearts in dire circumstances, to then shrug at it, is the only gambit more frustrating than never offering it in the first place.
In this religious relief, Stan and Amy part quite bitterly, despite “their common trunk” where “their lives had grown together.” Stan senses the Lord but can never feel His peace in his rote prayers. Amy, toughening as she ages, disbelieves and only senses her husband’s God as an impediment between Stan and herself, that “he was being kept shut for other purposes.”
The narration may well prove Amy correct in her distrust, since the novel later names God explicitly at the source of Stan’s fate: “How simply Stan, a big man, had fallen down with the connivance of God, and had lain there, blasted.”
But, while God as sensed in The Tree of Man does blast in wrath, He also relieves. He might well speak Stan’s final revelation, according to the same narration:
As he stood waiting for the flesh to be loosened on him, he prayed for greater clarity, and it became obvious as a hand. It was clear that One, and no other figure, is the answer to all sums.
No other explanation is given to either Stan or the reader, and “One” remains the cryptic final answer to Stan’s life, to all the inquiries he made but never spoke. I think of John 17—I move within my own concerns, of course, but also where I guess you might allude to the highest passage possible, Patrick—where Christ prays, “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word, that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” When Christ prayed, we became One; when Stan prayed, he received One.
But what is a prayer, in the landscape of The Tree of Man? A sum, an impediment, the touch of a winter wind, or even a union. White confirms nothing, and so in my estimation he writes more boldly.
The grandson of Stan and Amy, a “rather leggy, pale boy,” plans to write just as boldly on the day he visits Parkers for Stan’s funeral, though he is no writer, and the poem he dreams for himself while lying “on the root fibres and decomposing leaves” sounds as ridiculous as you could expect from a boy “too long for his pants and for the arms of his coat.” A poem of death, at first. Then, a poem of life, “of all life, of what he did not know, but knew. Of all people, even the closed ones,” he thinks.
This grandson is not up to the task of writing such a poem, which in his mind is widening to include the “blue eiderdown that divides life from life,” the “little wisp of white cloud that will swell into a horse,” and the “blood thumping like a drum.” In these closing lines, the growing poem alludes to the novel which it is ushering into silence, so it might undo that silence. By the poem’s “shoots of green thoughts,” the novel’s final line dares its implication: “So that, in the end, there was no end.”
As the sentence which ends the novel, its nakedly obvious profundity frustrates me. Posing the paradox of endlessness at the literal end is too cutely sage, isn’t it? Yes, Patrick, it is. And yet, White dares to describe, and enact, the written reality which The Tree of Man embeds like an apple sapling in the reader. What he dares, I’ll admit he achieves—here I am, still tinkering with the novel as an audacious and monumental achievement, accounting for its splendor even as I kick at its defective stones. Its shoots of green have laid hold, and its lasting prose does not have to end.
Thanks for being here, y’all. There is much in the tragicomic middle of The Tree of Man that I didn’t discuss here, all of which is similarly rich and all of which should entice you to read the novel for yourselves.
Someday I will need to write larger, longer treatments on literary audacity in any of the novels I named earlier, but at the moment I’m writing an audacious novel of my own, which doesn’t allow other undertakings.
Will check this out! Seems like the best audacious, ambitious books were written with an omniscient narrator, but a lot of today's literary fiction is written in first person. I get that editors and readers like an authentic voice, but it's limited in scope.
I look forward to reading this. I keep hearing good things about Patrick White.