The Living and the Dead by Patrick White

Conversation with the Spaniard returned to him, the evening in the street after the party at Adelaide's, and his own retreat from what had been too pertinent. As if the Spaniard were presenting the choice of the two ways, of the living or the dead. You wanted instinctively to close the eyes, like Adelaide or Gerald, like Muriel, or the ranks of red suburban houses, smothered in a plush complacency. Because the alternative, to recognize the pulse beyond the membrane, the sick heartbeat, or the gangrenous growth, it was too much, even at the risk of sacrificing awareness, and the other moments, the drunken, disorderly passions of existence, that created but at the same time confused.

The Standishes are a familiar upper middle-class London family: matriarch Catherine has been left to raise her two children alone by the death of her husband in the "Great War," and to rediscover her own sensuality and desire later in life. Her daughter Eden is headstrong and proud, flirting with men and politics. Son Elyot is more reserved, more aloof, unable to form a connection to the various women who demand his attention, to the people which populate his life, or to the social and political questions that engage his sister.

Elyot's dilemma is the central question of the novel: what does it mean to be alive, and what does it mean to be dead? White's setting is England between two world wars, a time of putative peace, and yet that peace is dogged by intimations of foreign war--the Spanish Civil War. White suggests perhaps that the English peace of the interwar years was a false promise, predicated on ignoring the conflicts of the larger world, ones that later exploded into the wave of fascism that swallowed Europe. The novel's simple conscience is found in Joe, a working-class laborer with whom Eden has a brief affair. Joe, shocked by the news from Spain, decides to join the war effort, even at the risk of his own life:

There was a time, said Joe, when I could read the papers and keep things in their place. That's where they belonged, in the papers. It was other people's business. It was foreign names. Then it got to being part of yourself. You couldn't keep out your feelings no more. It got mixed up with what you did. I can't think clear. I got to go, you see? There's no use, Julia says, there'll be time enough, and troubles of your own, without fighting other people's wars. As if you can keep it parcelled out. Because it's right here, Elyot, sure as ever there's right and wrong.

It's this attitude that Elyot admires but cannot adopt, even in versions less extreme than Joe's. Is Joe one of the living of the title, because by embracing his common humanity with the oppressed in Spain, he becomes truly alive, while aloof, uncommitted Elyot lives a death-in-life? Or is Joe one of the dead--because by leaving for Spain he essentially signs his life away? The power of The Living and the Dead, such as it is, is in the way White explores the connection between the political and the metaphysical, the way the soul roots itself in its relations with others, one-on-one and en masse. Except for Riders in the Chariot, which is very much a post-World War II novel, it might be White at his most consciously political (although this is, in typical fashion, somewhat hidden behind the fractious prose and streams of consciousness.)

The Living and the Dead, as far as I can tell, is the only one of White's novels to take place entirely in England. As such, it brings into relief some of White's English forebears, like Henry Green and D. H. Lawrence, not to mention Henry James. It makes it easier to see how White transformed those traditions and pointed them toward the colonial landscape, the English writers made alien and strange. It was White's second novel, and far more psychological and less plotted than Happy Valley, the novel about a backwoods Australian sheep station town that preceded it. Yet I think it holds less interest and insight than Happy Valley, and is probably his weakness overall. Still, it does interesting things--none of his other novels slides so easily, like a lubricated eye, from one consciousness to another--and some of its characters, like the hapless and moon-eyed Connie Tiarks and the crass American big band musician Wally Collins, are among White's best. I don't have any of White's novels left, now--just a few short story collections--and though I suppose it makes sense that a minor work would end up last, it mostly made me hungry for White's masterpieces, which all wisely leave England behind.