I don’t know when I developed the habit of veering in and out of multiple books at the same time, but for at least as long, I’ve been inclined to deride the practice. I’d just come down from Swann’s Way and a long season given over mostly to poetry and essays when I slapped down an injunction—I should really get back to Patrick White, maybe the most under-read and underrated English-language novelist of our time. So I began his 1973 novel, The Eye of the Storm. Yet, I read slowly—more than just a “page-hugger,” as Gary Lutz would say, I grasp the page for an uncomfortably long time, checking the texture of the paper and the number of sailboaty y’s per line, hovering over the author’s punctuation and other foibles before proceeding.
The Eye of the Storm by Patrick White (Jonathan Cape, 1973)
The next morning, on my way to a doctor’s appointment, I passed an old building being gutted and a resident bringing out armfuls of, mainly, good books. I grabbed a couple of DeLillo’s, including Cosmopolis, and read the first pages on the subway home. The Eye of the Storm and Cosmopolis began to jockey for my attention. In my free hours, I read them in tandem, though thirty years and many nautical miles separated the two enterprises. Eventually, their two styles rose up like bleeds of color and then separated into diamonds and rhomboids like in 2001’s Star Gate sequence, before trailing away from each other. I would read a sentence of DeLillo and then stop—huffing with bluster at their twenty-first century powerlifting poses. The post-Underworld novels are of a lesser scope and also lesser detail—not as many brushstrokes and in some places only an odd monochrome, white drowning out the bedrock color, with blurs and blears of cracked, rilled, and crevassed gray tincturing parts of the canvas, just like in Gerhard Richter’s series of five so-colored 2009 abstracts, displayed that winter at the Marian Goodman Gallery. I took Richter to be DeLillo’s favorite painter even before I read of his paintings detailed in the short story “Baader–Meinhof.” Many of these late narratives portray people looking at or contemplating art. The subject of Cosmopolis is a young billionaire who thinks of buying more of it (why not the whole Rothko chapel?) as he is driven across Midtown Manhattan in a stretch limo. Not an easily-relatable character, but he is like nearly all of DeLillo’s protagonists from The Body Artist onward—that is, not so much characters as a series of moods and morose anthems typifying our rampant egomania, which lets us not take things, like the destruction of the earth, too seriously. The prose bespeaks doing more with less, but one constant remains from the most honored books of the eighties and nineties—the tone of the narrator in nearly all these works is fairly consistent, a kind of husky, neo-Hemingwayesque way of relating: “He watched her. He didn’t think he wanted to be surprised, even by a woman, this woman, who’d taught him how to look, how to feel enchantment damp on his face, the melt of pleasure inside a brushstroke or band of color.” Grand gestures in the sweep of a few syllables with the occasional fuzziness like “enchantment damp on his face.” That layered sheen of Richter’s grows all over DeLillo’s late works, which themselves seem sickly, contained in the gauge-controlled atmosphere of a museum or high class gallery. Such prose is for the reader, it’s adorned and it is refined, but it isn’t exactly ennobled, and so it resembles Richter’s vaguely-colored bedrock—an art of line and color with little room for narrative; an art that skirts the issue of what it means to have a soul trapped in a body.
The canyon walls of late DeLillo had narrowed around me and I couldn’t see enough of the many-faceted world, where the vistas let the imagination stretch into the space provided. In Patrick White, as in Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Gass, there is a feeling of repleteness. One gets to the heart of the sensation, whether awe-inspiring or foul, not through winks and nudges but through full orchestration—the Sistine ceiling in person, not a postage stamp size .gif on the internet. By some synchronicity, White’s book is also about a character, Elizabeth Hunter, who has a good load of cash, though she lives in Sydney and is old and dying. The place of the author’s book in his oeuvre is also similar. Many people, even an admirer like David Malouf, view The Eye of the Storm and the novel before it, The Vivisector, as “overwrought, excessive, unlikeable books, full of larger-than-life (theatrical) characters and grotesque, lurid situations, and an oddly old-fashioned view of the artist as sacred monster.” To Malouf, they are some galaxies from White’s expansive style in his early books of the fifties and sixties: Tree of Man, Voss, and Riders in the Chariot—though I prefer The Solid Mandala, as do White and J.M. Coetzee. In returning to The Eye of the Storm, I began to get caught up, certainly by the language, but also the story—this old woman, who has multiple servants, remembers her life while lying on her deathbed as her grown children are flying in to see her off. I became entrenched in a concentrated, Henry Jamesian way, applauding how every sentence gushed with life—the wisdom of White doled out equally to every character and delivered to us in their distinct terms. Early on, the favored servant Sister de Santis passes a portrait of Elizabeth’s deceased husband:
Sister de Santis did not stop to draw the curtains in the dining-room, but hurried through its brown-velvet hush, past the portrait of Alfred Hunter (“Bill” to his friends). Mr Hunter’s portrait was smaller than his wife’s; it must have cost considerably less: even so, a lot of money, if you read the signature in the corner. For a man of wealth Mr Hunter looked rather diffident: he probably disappointed the painter, except by writing out his cheque. The nurse moderated her pace, walking with the reverence accorded to those you have not known in their lifetime, but might have. Out of respect, she endowed Mr Hunter with virtues she could remember in her father.
I read that paragraph aloud the first time, and I could not suppress a force that turned on, with a minor screech, the waterworks in my left eye. We garner our wisdom through parables because advice or the self-help cliché is as antiseptically sangfroidian as the white and pastel jackets such books demand from publishers. Consequently, the parabolic deftly scorches and sends us through time, letting us talk back to our parents, our lovers, and that dope on the street we won’t deign to call stranger. White’s nuggets—koan-like pronouncements and sculpted judgments on character that implant human essences in our stream—carry a strange, propulsive magic for the reader and have a secret but simple recipe: enough of this, but just enough of that. It’s a very raw feeling, an acid bath, when you’re drawn so tightly into a story that eventually you’re reading your own book, as V.S. Naipaul said in an interview—you are the character or observer in the dream (the book) unfolding in your mind.
In the course of John Hawkes’s novel, The Lime Twig, a gang member beats a woman with a wet newspaper, a scene William Gass described as “stunning, and it is so beautiful, but does that make it in a sense, less horrible? No, it makes it a monument to horror and you know what is going on in a way you never would otherwise.” This is what I want to enter, a monument built for me, the reader, to experience all of life’s sensations and reverberations, like how Elizabeth remembers sex with her late husband. White brings us inside her character, and I mean through the body cavity and up into the brainpan:
She only realized how small he was as he lay wilted and sweating, rather fatty about the shoulders, his exhausted lungs still battering at her practically pulverized breasts. At his most masterful his toes would be gripping the sheets on either side of her long legs, as though he had found the purchase to impress her more deeply than ever before. Once, she remembered, she had felt, not his sweat, his tears trickling down the side of her neck, till he started coughing, and tore himself away from her: their skins sounded like sticking plaster. She tried to make herself, and finally did, ask what had upset him. His ‘luck’, in everything, was more than he deserved; however indistinct the answer, that was what it amounted to.
I don’t exactly know what women feel about men when they have sex with them—I’ve certainly tried to find out—but I do trust Patrick White’s vision of this character, and only for the reason that every sentence I’ve read of his has demanded my attention and pushed me to read the next. I know I give him too much credit, but I would go to the mat for White—I have to, because my reading life depends on it. Certainly the staunching of male tears is relatable, I did it just the night before reading this, because I didn’t want to make a fuss while I remembered my dead father. “Fatty about the shoulders...” and “At his most masterful his toes would be gripping the sheets on either side of her long legs”—White puts one in the bed better than any Hollywood sex scene, which, thanks to the passage’s sturdy entablature, briefly flash-pointed my past (my toes too have had memorable cranings) and became my sex scene—I’m the craven fool atop a woman I use for sport, but I didn’t bury my head after wilting, did I? I’ll have to read more to find out.
White’s book did have a famous admirer, Shirley Hazzard, who wrote:
Imputing “inspiration” to novelists is as dangerous as discoursing on Nature with farmers: but each of White’s novels has been blessed and quickened with a center of narrative power—large meaning in which the author seeks to create our belief. Without at least some measure of this mysterious ignition, which is utterly distinct from “content,” the most diligently wrought book remains stationary and merely professional. White has always been able to command it in abundance: his novels, plays and stories are irradiations from related central themes in which the author participates no less intensely than his characters.
This answers Malouf’s critique of “overwrought, excessive, unlikeable books”—an analysis mainly aimed at the “content” Hazzard doesn’t prize, as she bids its bloviated pop sensibilities to return to the chintzy window-dressing it almost always is. She also perspicaciously elucidates Cosmopolis and many other books as “stationary and merely professional”; without that narrative power, as when the author is not steeped in their material (DeLillo from The Body Artist on), the rudderless reading experience is perplexing and even constipative—it might make us put down the book.
Johannes Vermeer, “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher” (ca. 1662), 45.7 x 40.6 cm, oil on canvas
I went to the Met with my uncle a few years ago and we stood at the far side of the Vermeer room to watch how people flocked to the four assembled paintings. After some moments of silence, he asked how it is that there is Vermeer and then there are the rest of the Dutch Baroque painters, and that nothing, not even Rembrandt, comes close to Vermeer’s endless sublime beauty, which might be defined as “an expression of the fullest possible range of human capabilities within the circumstances of a given narrative or situation,” per Daniel Davis Wood. This is how White, Woolf, Faulkner, and James, along with DeLillo in Libra and Underworld, light up my imagination—runway markers in a dark night. Another master, Marianne Moore, offered a telling example when detailing her own sentence structure: “...you don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of personality.” This might imbricate Hazzard’s contention that White participates in themes “no less intensely than his characters,” for if the themes and the sentences are the writer’s “personality” at the same time, they are those twin ramparts shooting through our consciousness, their powerful confluence building the sublime. But it’s sublime and egalitarian and human at the same instant, like Joyce’s mention of Bloom and Stephen comparing their piss streams at the end of a long night together, or when Elizabeth Hunter “wonder[s] momentarily whether she should give Mrs. Badgery something from her jewel box; it was easier to give presents than to waste emotions you were storing up against some possible cataclysm: as time ran on you did not know what you might have to face.” This art is not “like” life; it is as alive and breathing and blood-filled as us.
Greg Gerke’s work has appeared in Tin House, Film Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, and other publications. See What I See, a book of essays, and Especially the Bad Things, stories, were both published by Splice in the Autumn of 2019.
Banner image: Johannes Vermeer, “Woman with the Pearl Necklace” (1664), 55 cm × 45 cm, oil on canvas