The Living and the Dead and the Living Dead

I am old enough now that books I bought as a teenager have begun to yellow. Several spines are beginning to crack. I had a bout of sciatica around five years ago which still prods me every day or two, like an impatient passenger, eager to get where we’re going.

I finished reading The Living and The Dead, by Patrick White, the Australian Nobel Prize winner, this morning. It’s a Penguin paperback from 1977 which I found in an Oxfam bookshop for two quid. The plot didn’t appeal to me, and the cover didn’t either. But I had already picked out The Aunt’s Story and The Solid Mandela (both two pounds), and it felt cruel to leave behind the poor relative. Although I much preferred the look of the other two, I started reading The Living and the Dead because I was in London, and it was set in London. On page 42, the spine broke, and by page 116 the folios were beginning to fall out in ones and twos. A block of pages held until page 160, and just when I thought we were safe, page 266 went. After that, we were fine, and I started paying more attention to the writing instead of the flaking glue. I told my girlfriend it was like eating cold porridge, and she advised me to stop. But porridge is good for you, it sticks to your ribs.

I read the novel over the course of a short holiday, then a long train ride home to Glasgow. I read, as I often do in a dwam. A Scots word that describes an inbetweenish state of mind. Nothing so definitive as a dream, it’s more of a blank space which can only be seen in hindsight, only ever snapped out of and commented on. Apologised for. You missed the exit? You left your jacket on the bus? You let the dinner burn? You must have been in a dwam.

As I read, I thought about other things, and when I returned to the book, twenty pages had passed and no details or characters or plotline had lingered. So I frowned and focused on certain paragraphs, encountered characters I didn’t recognize. One was called Hildegard, another was called Muriel Raphael. I couldn’t picture these people. They live in overstuffed sentences and heavily perfumed paragraphs. The rooms have no furniture, only ornate curtains and cold tea cups. The people who sip those cups and pull those curtains are all thinking about their childhoods. Strangely, you are there too, feeling a little out of place. The writing constantly lapses into second person, ‘In front of your face you hung a defensive gauze of faintly irritable enquiry.’

Did I?

‘You still wanted to keep to the substantial forms.’

This doesn’t sound like me.

‘You were grateful for the outline of a chair.’

That sounds a lot more like you.

Patrick White tries to focus our attention on the ‘milky object on the mantelpiece’, or ‘a field of black glass with banks of white kid upholstery.’ Amorphous things that smell of moth balls and cat piss. As we read, we walk alongside a set of twins, Eden and Elyot, they are struggling to inherit money, poking around an England that no longer exists. So confident in its power that it allowed its strength to appear fey, fussy and silly. It’s probably still around somewhere, on country estates I suppose, receded from view of Australian novelists.

Throughout the book, we help Eden and Elyot to bully a girl named Connie Tiarks, the only character who really comes to life. Where Eden attends a concert, and frets over how to start to think about maybe enjoying herself, Connie goes to a gallery and begins to gasp, her glasses steam up, and in her last scene, she declares her love for Elyot, and falls over! But unfortunately, she has big calves, and a ‘lumpy face’, she fell out of a tree as a child, and made a grunting noise that disgusted everyone. Elyot is confused by her declaration of love. He can’t marry her, she fell out of a tree fifteen years ago. She made a funny noise. I don’t think they would have been happy together.

Patrick White’s better novels feature a range of intensely inward characters. Martyrs to art or religion or a portion of both, their lives burrowed into a patch of land, or thrown to a glimmering horizon. They prey on their families, they bully children. They paint beautiful pictures, they grind their bodies to dust in a desert. Their lives highlight a gap in our expectations of both art and life. Patrick White believes in transcendence. His characters see angels, fail to understand them, and carry on living in the shadow of their vision. When they speak, no one really listens.  

At the end of my train ride, I thought about throwing my copy of The Living and the Dead into the recycling bin. It had broken into a dozen clumps of paper. On page 327, Elyot’s mother says, ‘I’ve wasted so much time reading.’ So have I.

‘Sometimes I wonder how much will remain at the end, how much positive time to chalk up against the waste. And does one regret the waste, or is it just a matter of indifference?’

The next day, in the hour before I had to start work, I read through the last twenty pages and enjoyed them. After a few funerals, Elyot began to grow up. The last page is a long zoom out, we leave the endless sitting rooms and see London for the first time, it’s raining apparently, you wouldn’t have known it from the previous 365 pages. Elyot gets on a bus, falls into a dwam, drifts past his stop, wakes and stares at his fellow passengers, ‘Then we are here, we have slept, but we have really got here at last.’ Where ‘here’ is? Who knows. But at least we got there.

The book lay in pieces, and I decided to glue it back together. Provoked only by the last page. It’s worth preserving those pages. London, the rain, the bus passengers waking from a collective dream.

I don’t know when Patrick White’s back catalogue was last published, but I’ve never seen a recent edition of The Living and the Dead. I thought of the book being bought in 1977, for a pound and ten pence. It’s buyer would have still thought in shillings. My copy had been thoroughly read and reread, but must have lain unopened for decades at a time. Then given to charity, sold again for two pounds, brought from London to Glasgow. Then I have read and complained about it. And after that? Can I just throw it away? But if I give it to charity, will someone else in Glasgow (population just under 600,000) develop an interest in Patrick White? Will they read the good ones, Voss, Tree of Man, Vivisector, and keep going? Read the duds too? When I finished work, eight hours later, I dabbed some PVA along the innards of the books and clamped the spine with some bulldog clips. It’s pages turn again, and although I dog-eared the pages a little, I left it in better nick than I found it. I place it in a pile of books I’ll never read again, ready to donate to the Oxfam down the road.

I know that I’m Eden, failing to work out how to enjoy the music, entertaining myself by enjoying my lack of enjoyment. Better that the book go back to the bookshop, and wait for its Connie Tiarks. She’ll only pay a pound this time. She’ll read and gasp, and her glasses will steam up against her lumpy face.