The Tree of Man by Patrick White

At the time Stan Parker was torn between the images of gold and ebony and his own calm life of flesh. He did not wish to take his hat from the peg and say, Well, so long, I'm off to see foreign places. This did not bring the sweat to the backs of his knees. He had a subtler longing. It was as if the beauty of the world has risen in a sleep, in the crowded wooden room, and he could almost take it in his hands. All words that he had never expressed might suddenly be spoken. He had in him great words of love and beauty, below the surface, if they could be found.

But all he said was, again, 'The Gold Coast, eh?' And reached for the bottle.

"The soul remains anchored," Patrick White writes in The Tree of Man. "It is a balloon tied to a branch of bones. Still, it will tug nobly." Life, real life, is an event that happens within, not without. It's for this reason that people are not really admitted into each other's lives, which are inaccessible, even people on the most intimate terms, like a husband and wife, like Stan and Amy Parker, the two protagonists of the novel. The novel begins when Stan inherits a piece of property in the Australian bush, on which he builds a rudimentary home to bring his new bride. Both Stan and Amy are what you might call "simple" people, and they live a "simple" life, but a complex life rages within them that they are unable to share with each other, or their children. Our lives, White says--I'm remembering here, because I've lost the page--do no join, only touch.

That seems sad, and it is, but in White's novels, the mysterious and incommunicable life within is also that which is susceptible to visions. It's that life that touches God. It's there, for instance, in the piece of crimson stained glass, held by little boy rescued by Stan from a flood, who saves it to look through and see the world transformed, and then disappears. It's there when Stan saves a rich and beautiful woman from a burning house--the flood and the fire being both symbols that link the raw bush to Eden, symbols of God's destructive power as well as his obscure guidance.

The most White-like symbol of all is a series of grotesque paintings, done by the husband of the postmistress, who reveals them to Amy only after he has hanged himself. The postmistress' husband is a cousin to Alf Dubbo, the aboriginal painter who is one of the title characters of White's novel Riders in the Chariot, whose art is an attempt at recording the moment of divine vision. The paintings are grotesque: a brutalized Christ, a naked woman, but they reveal to Amy the divine in simple things, too, as White shows with what I think is dry humor: "So also a bottle can express love. She had never before seen a bottle of adequate beauty. This one tempted her to love her neighbour."

Do the paintings work? Do they communicate the ineffable? The man's suicide may be a clue. But they are attempts, at least, of the kind that the Parkers fail to make over and over. Amy tries to make a gift of a blank notebook to her dissolute son, Ray, then to Stan, and then to her grandson--also Ray--but each of them is unable to think of anything to write. Stan, a farmer of few words, feels that he has "great words of love and beauty" in him, and yet the notebook remains blank, even to the end of the novel. It's no wonder that his children and their children can't find the words either, but there is something poetic in the getting and raising of children, too, a propagation of the "green shoots" in the title "tree of man."

There's always something uniquely sad about novels that stretch the bulk of a character's whole life. They confirm, I think, what we sometimes suspect or fear: that life is shorter than we realize, and perhaps adds up to less. (If you can fit a life between the covers of a book, what is it, really?) Children ease that worry a little, which is what makes it so difficult for Stan and Amy to grapple with Ray's bitterness and criminality. Toward the end of his life, reflecting on how poorly Ray has turned out, Stan says what might be the most poignant line in the whole book: "What else are we intended to do if we have failed in this?" (He conveniently forgets that the Parkers also have a daughter, Thelma.)

But White suggests that the last stages of life really may offer the vision that Stan and each in his or her own individual soul have been searching for. When an evangelist comes by the house to convert Stan in his failing age, Stan spits on the earth and says about the spittle, "There is God." The evangelist takes this as an insult, but it's not: what Stan has recognized is that God is in that life within, the "balloon tied to a branch of bones."