"The Living and the Dead" by Patrick White

[Gladys]

I have recently read Patrick White's second novel The Living and the Dead, written on the brink of WWII. The novel is set in London, where White spent most of his student years, and extends from just before WWI to the Spanish Civil War.

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I had tried three times in recent years to read the cryptic first chapter, but always gave up in despair. Once you finish the book you will appreciate why the beginning is so difficult: something about two Chinese boxes, one inside the other.

I finished reading The Living and the Dead a fortnight ago, but the plot has me entranced. Having reread the beginning and end chapters, I'm struck by the relationship between diverse elements of the plot and the repeated idea:


They were like two Chinese boxes, one inside the other, leading to an infinity of other boxes, to an infinity of purpose.

The more I read, the more the Chinese boxes. The novels of Patrick White always leave you with much to contemplate and this early, difficult, and rather dark novel is no exception.

[Raven Falcon.]

Sounds like he took the title from the last phrase of James Joyce's The Dead.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

[Gladys]

Sounds like he took the title from the last phrase of James Joyce's The Dead.

So I concluded, but wait. The phrase also occurs in The Apostles Creed as the quick and the dead, but in some versions including The Old Roman Creed:



I believe in God the Father almighty
And in Christ Jesus, his only Son, our Lord
Who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried
And the third day rose from the dead
Who ascended into heaven
And sitteth on the right hand of the Father
Whence he cometh to judge the living and the dead.
And in the Holy Spirit
The holy church
The remission of sins
The resurrection of the flesh
The life everlasting.

A version of the Roman creed is likely the source James Joyce used and alluded to. And I reckon Patrick White alludes to both.

[Raven Falcon.]

He might allude to both.
One thing I am curious about is his prose quality, since I am a beginner-writer myself. Is it as good as Joyce's? For reference, peruse the quotation above.

[Gladys]

One thing I am curious about is his prose quality, since I am a beginner-writer myself. Is it as good as Joyce's? For reference, peruse the quotation above.

Judge for yourself. Here's the ending of Patrick White's The Living and the Dead. The young man, Elyot Standish has, in a few months, lost or left his mother and his friends - they were never very close. Is anybody?



Again he walked downstairs. He began again to walk along the street, guided by no intention, taking the direction offered. The house, the shell of the house, pitched its last comment through an open window. The curtain jerked at its rings. It still blew outward in the wind. It moved. It made the landscape move. There was no fixed point, either the long and shiny ribbon of the pavement, or the fiery hub that became Victoria [huge London Railway Station].

The labels on buses expected a choice. He watched the coming and going of the buses, the meeting and flowing. He watched with a disbelief in the final destination of buses, Islington, Homerton, Camberwell. But there was the Chinese box, the infinity of boxes. The toffee-coloured terraces of Islington moved into place beside the frozen derricks of Rotherhithe. The buses became significant enough, the red threads that moved across the darkness, joining its component parts. There was no end to darkness, but there was no end also to its unity, watching the movement of the buses.

Faces peered from behind glass, gone before they had established their expressions, would be shuttled out in all directions, pale and unprotesting. But the faces in the night buses were potentially communicative. They huddled, face on hand. They swayed in the protective atmosphere of herded bodies, the peppermint drop with the steaming macintosh, the mingling of heliotrope and sweat. They touched in a haze from the last pint that merged these ordinarily hostile smells and made them for the moment compatible. But soberly, by daylight, you lived a life of segregation, recovered the instinctive defences, the compartment of a face.

A bus received Elyot Standish. It was any bus. He was bound nowhere in particular. There were no reservations of time or place, no longer even the tyranny of a personal routine. It was enough to feel a darkness, a distance unfurling. There was no end to this in the bus, trundling down its dark tunnel, in which the faces smiled gravely out of sleep, the mouths almost spoke. If only to touch these almost sentient faces into life, to reach across the wastes of sleep and touch into recognition with your hand, to listen to the voices, like the voices of people who wake and find they have come to the end of a journey, saying: Then we are here, we have slept, but we have really got here at last.

He yawned. He felt like someone who had been asleep, and had only just woken.