Happy Valley by Patrick White

All this was taking place in Happy Valley the same autumn, which was superficially the same as any other autumn, as far as its natural details were concerned. But as I have said before, one of the most noticeable features of Happy Valley was its apparent remoteness from the human element, or perhaps an ironical half-recognition, laying a trap in the shape of its own activities and then letting things slide. Autumn was a season of preliminary cold and suppressed winds. Nothing much appeared to happen besides, though a lot was really happening all the time. Because it was at this moment that Amy Quong felt those dormant and really frightening passions begin to stir, that Clem Hagan was coming into town of an afternoon and going to Moriarty's house, that Moriarty felt things closing in, all those eyes and faces at the school, and Sidney Furlow was trying to suppress the realization of her own desires. They each had their own problem, and nobody else had theirs, which is only natural perhaps, it is usually like that. And all the time Happy Valley was preparing for winter, and those that were afraid of winter had begun to be afraid, which those who have not experienced Happy Valley in winter-time will certainly not understand. If you have you will know, you will realize the extreme brutality to which man can be subjected, whatever you may have experienced of this, of brutality I mean, in winter at Happy Valley it seems to be epitomized.

Happy Valley is a remote sheep farming outpost in New South Wales, where the winters are particularly harsh and the people, it may not surprise you to find out, are not particularly happy. "I often think," says the debutante Sidney Furlow to her family's hired man Clem Hagan, "it'd be rather fun to blow out one's brains." Some of the people in Happy Valley, like the doctor's wife Hilda Halliday or the doctor's mistress Alys Browne, have convinced themselves that Happy Valley themselves is the source of their unhappiness, that perhaps they can leave their unhappiness behind if they can leave Happy Valley behind. They make plans to move to Queensland, or to California, but what ails them, White suggests, is simply what ails most people in the world: that all human beings are essentially alone. The doctor himself, Oliver Halliday, describes it this way:

I dare say most of us are afraid, he said. Not of the same things perhaps. We start off being afraid of the dark. Then your fear probably moves its centre to something more tangible. And most of it rises out of a feeling of being alone. Being alone is being afraid. perhaps one day we'll all wake up to the fact that we're all alone, that we're all afraid, and then it'll just be too damn silly to go on being afraid.

This is one of White's Big Themes: that life is really what goes on in people's heads, and that it is rare, perhaps even impossible, to make that life known outside of one's own skull. It's rare to see a character state the idea so plainly, and though Halliday's words seem rather wise to me, I wonder if White himself is so sanguine about the idea that we will one day "all wake up to the fact that we're all alone," and that this will be somehow meaningful.

The story of Happy Valley is the story of intersecting love affairs: Halliday and Alys Browne, the piano teacher; the rough jackaroo Clem Hagan and the teacher's wife Vic Moriarty; Clem Hagan and Sidney Furlow. I suppose you can throw in the relationship between Halliday's nine year old son Rodney and Margaret Quong, the thirteen year old daughter of the Chinese Grocer. (Interesting to see White depict Chinese characters, whom the Happy Valley bigots invariably call "Chows," but race hovers at the edges of a lot of White's work, as with the Aboriginal man and refugee Jew who make up two of the protagonists in Riders in the Chariot.) White is so skilled at depicting the passion of love, constructed from materials wholly within one's own psyche and which seems to have little to do with the beloved at all. All of these affairs are open secrets, more or less, and yet knowledge of each pales in comparison with the intensity of it as lived.

These separate affairs collide at the novel's end in a way that is both macabre and satisfying, though perhaps a little neat for the novelist that White would become. According to the jacket copy, White never allowed Happy Valley, his first novel, to be republished while he was alive. I wonder what about it evoked his displeasure; his uncanny style seems to emerge almost wholly intact to me, though I don't find the novel as engaging as some of his others. There is a reliance here on unpunctuated bursts stream-of-consciousness that reveals White's indebtedness to Joyce (Happy Valley isn't even two decades separated from Ulysses) but which he seems to have later abandoned. And there's little of the unnerving physicality of his later novels, the gross materiality, that anchors their psychic qualities and provides their essential irony. But already in Happy Valley one can see the sui generis style that White would produce for another fifty years.