The Eye of the Storm by Patrick White

Without much thought for her own wreckage, she moved slowly down what had been a beach, picking her way between torn-off branches, great beaded hassocks of amber weed, everywhere fish the sea had tossed out, together with a loaf of no longer bread, but a fluffier, disintegrating foam rubber.  Just as she was no longer a body, least of all a woman: the myth of her womanhood had been exploded by the storm.  She was instead a being, or more likely a flaw at the centre of this jewel of light: the jewel itself, blinding and tremulous at the same time, existed, flaw and all, only by grace; for the storm was still visibly spinning and boiling at a distance, in columns of cloud, its walls hung with vaporous balconies, continually shifted and distorted.

The aged, dying woman at the heart of The Eye of the Storm is the perfect vehicle for Patrick White's preoccupations and style.  He's so obsessed with the minutiae of the body, its various colors, smells, textures, effluvia, but he's no materialist; there's always the possibility of metaphysical transcendence.  Perhaps transcendence is, for White, what the everyday experience of living is made of, and death its ultimate expression.  So he has a field day with the body of Elizabeth Hunter, the eighty-six year old socialite, motionless and mostly blind, but often tricked out by her nurses in gaudy makeup, inherited jewels, and a lilac wig.

Sensing the end, Elizabeth Hunter's adult children return to Sydney to provoke a little bit of money from their mother, and hopefully shunt her off to a home.  Her daughter Dorothy, the Princess des Lascabanes, needs an infusion of cash to keep up the lifestyle she leads in France after her husband leaves her.  Her son Basil, a famous theater actor in London, wants to fund a misbegotten modern theater piece.  (There is something here about Australian anxiety toward the culture of Europe; something the materialistic children are drawn to, but not their mother.)

Both Dorothy and Basil despise their mother, who they consider to be cold and cruel, though this seems to be a matter of interpretation.  While not warm, White gives Elizabeth Hunter a kind of aloof wisdom, and suggests perhaps that the spiritually stunted children are incapable of seeing what is remarkable in their mother.  Among other things, she insists that she can and will die at the exact moment she wills it.  It's her night nurse, Sister de Santis, who really understands her.  Another nurse, the delightfully named Flora Manhood, is as drawn to Elizabeth as she is repelled; she cracks a plan to have the visiting Basil impregnate her for obscure reasons.  Nurses, housekeepers, cooks, the lawyer: these hangers-on make up a kind of family that supersedes Dorothy and Basil.

I couldn't help but think of May Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.  Both novels are about older women trawling through memories: dead husbands, incomprehensible love affairs.  "The past has been burnt into me, I suppose," she says, "like they do with cattle."  But it's The Eye of the Storm that's really a novel about genius, partially because White's bizarre writing really is genius, and partially because it has no need to use the word genius: it abides there in the metaphysics.  The central transcendental moment is the eye of the titular hurricane; as Elizabeth Hunter recalls, abandoned on a remote island by her daughter, she hid in a bunker during a typhoon and experienced, all alone, the strange magic of the eye.  The transcendence of it--described by White in typically sensual fashion, above--is predicated on a kind of lesson of contingency.  Elizabeth sees the storm, and knows that she exists by grace only, and it only follows that such a grace cannot be permanent.  To know these moments of heightened life is to know, also, death.  No wonder Dorothy remains forever jealous of the experience.

When she does die, as she obviously must, it's on the toilet.  White's old body-obsession and potty humor.  But the moment is described as a kind of becoming, a fulfillment rather than a loss.  It slips rather beautifully into Elizabeth's point-of-view: "Till I am no longer filling the void with mock substance: myself is this endlessness."  I don't know if it's a good death, like the Archbishop's, but it seems beside the point; earlier in the novel she tells us that dying ought to be the hardest thing you ever do; that's the point of it.  It's not beautiful either; White's books never are, but it has a kind of power and truth I never find anywhere else.