Patrick White: Happy Valley

In the end it is the narrative impulse that wins out but it is fascinating to see how much the decorativeness of a late modernist technique is made to contend with the sweep and fury of a writer who wants to create a landscape equal to the most savage and erotic drama he can envisage.

It’s easy to pick holes in the upshot. The bildungsroman of the young boy could be more developed. We want more of his near-miss Chinese soul mate. All the women are a bit too much alike — as though sexuality was partly a matter of surmise to the novelist (and the siren of the squattocracy is a walking wet dream). The elements of melodrama have a slashing force but they could have been more fully and deliberately articulated.

And yet…what an impassioned, hopeful glory of a book Happy Valley is.

It shows Patrick White, as a seeker, at the crossroads from the outset. In Happy Valley White pays his dues to the towering shadows on the landscape — to Lawrence with his sexualised sense of the folk and his surging paragraphs as much as to Joyce’s musicality and rhetoric. But then White goes his own way to create a book full of portent and drama and the compounding of the spiritual search with a stabbing sensuality.

This is not a major novel by Patrick White’s standards but it is a hell of a calling card, and if it had not appeared so late in the 1930s maybe it would have riveted the world’s attention. Happy Valley is a book we need to rediscover. It gives us White as a fledgling novelist, as fresh and wonderstruck and full of a desire to recreate the world as ever Australia was blessed with. It is a fitting thing and a fine one that in this centennial year of Patrick White’s birth it should find itself back in print.

It had stopped snowing. There was a mesh of cloud over the fragile blue that sometimes follows snow. The air was very cold. In it a hawk lay, listless against the moving cloud, magnetized no doubt by some intention still to be revealed. But that is beside the point. In fact, the hawk has none but a vaguely geographical significance. It happens to be in the sky in a necessary spot at a necessary moment, that is, at nine o’clock in the morning about twenty miles to the south of Moorang, where the railway line dribbled silverly out of the mist that lay in the direction of Sydney, and dribbled on again into another bank of mist that was the south. Moorang was a dull silver in the early morning. There was no snow there, only frost. The frost glittered like a dull knife, over it the drifting white of smoke from a morning train. But to the south, following the trajectory of the hawk up the valley and towards the mountains, everything was white. It was higher here. There was grey slush in the streets of the township of Happy Valley, but the roofs were a pure white, and farther up in the mountains Kambala was almost lost beneath the drift.

Happy Valley extends more or less from Moorang to Kambala, where originally there was gold, and it received its name from the men who came in search of gold, the prospectors who left the train at Moorang and rode out with small equipment and a fund of expectation. They called the place Happy Valley, sometimes with affection, more often in irony. But in time, when the gold at Kambala was exhausted, the name applied, precisely speaking, more to the township than to the valley itself. It is here that we have left the hawk coasting above the grey streets. There is not much activity in the streets. They are silent and not very prepossessing in their grey slush. And we have no business with them yet, rather with Kambala, which is almost hidden under the snow.

Ordinarily, if you could see for yourself, there would be about six or seven houses, inhabited by families of no particular distinction. The people at Kambala are a kind of half-bred Chinese, quiet and industrious, though perhaps a little sinister to the eyes of a stranger. But there is not much crime in Kambala, in spite of the large grey erection that is a gaol. There is no explanation for its size, except that perhaps the architect could not get out of his mind the days when there were nine pubs in the town, and colonies of tents down the mountainside, and English and French and Germans digging for gold. But now it is very peaceful. In the summer the police sergeant sits on the verandah of the gaol, tilts back his chair, and swots at flies. I repeat, there is not much crime. Only the publican before the man they had at the moment once set fire to his wife, and on another occasion a drover from the Murray side ran amuck and crucified a roadman on a dead tree. Old Harry Grogan found the body. It was like a scarecrow, he said, only it didn’t scare. There was crows all over the place, sitting there and dipping their beaks into the buttonholes.

Now the gaol is covered with snow and the police sergeant is inside, writing an uneventful report that he will send later to Moorang. The gaol is an impressive white mound, the houses smaller ones. There is a general air of hibernation, of life suspended under the snow. Literally under, for in the winter the people of Kambala communicate with each other by channels or even tunnels carved through the snow. You seldom see any more than a streamer of smoke waving weakly from the arm of an iron chimney-pot or the eyelid of an eaves raised cautiously out of the snow.

In one of the hotel bedrooms the publican’s wife was giving birth to her first child. She lay on her back, a big ox-like woman with a face that was naturally red, but which had now gone putty-coloured. Sometimes she tossed about and sometimes she just lay still. She was having a child, she told herself dumbly at first, until with the increase of pain she did not know what she was having, only that she was having, having, straining, it was tearing her apart, and the doctor’s hand was on her. She closed her eyes. She had resented the doctor at first, did not want him to touch her, then by degrees she did not mind whether he touched her or not. Because the pain was there, whatever happened. She had come from Tumut with her husband a year ago. Everyone told them they were mad. And now she began to wonder herself, somehow confounding her pain with Kambala and all that snow, snow everywhere, you could hardly see out of the window except at the top. She opened and closed her eyes and moaned. The doctor was still there looking at her.

There were two other women in the room, one a silent half-bred Chinese woman with a cast in her left eye, and the other an old woman with little greasy puffs of hair standing out over her forehead in a kind of arch. They had come in to help. Mrs Steele, the old woman with the puffs of hair, always came to assist at a birth or a death. She had helped bring a lot of children into the world. She could also lay out a body better than any woman in the neighbourhood. Now she stood by the bed and stared at the doctor with all her expert experience, and resented his presence a great deal, because apart from her own experience (she could have managed the lying in herself, only Mr Chalker, the publican, had to send to Happy Valley for the doctor), apart from this, the doctor was not old Dr Reardon who had left the district a year ago, and she could not help holding Dr Halliday responsible for this. She and Dr Reardon knew a thing or two. They were a source of mutual admiration. Dr Halliday told her to mind out. Very politely though. He was a gentleman. And this was an additional point for scorn. She refused to own that ability was a possible quality in a gentleman.

Dr Halliday stood by the bed, with his back to old Mrs Steele, looking at the patient.