Patrick White
Happy Valley
Jackeroo Epic by Peter Craven
Happy Valley is the first of Patrick White’s novels and it is a consistently compelling book, as well as the exhilarating performance of a great writer in the making. Everyone knows the legend, rooted in truth, that Patrick White finds his voice as a consequence of the war and after discovering the love of his life in Manoly Lascaris; and that the first in the long line of his masterpieces is The Aunt’s Story which he brings back to Australia with him in 1946, the token of his love/hate for the country which provides the enduring matter of his great works, the intimately suffered homeland which he cannot separate from the compulsions of his own heart.
In fact Happy Valley is as self-consciously Australian a book as any cultural nationalist could hope for and it’s not for nothing that the novel, published in London in 1939, was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society in 1941, the year when A. A. Phillips, the future propounder of the Australian Cultural Cringe syndrome, was one of the judges.
Happy Valley is, in fact, a panoramic novel of Australian life which reflects White’s own experience in the Monaro as a jackaroo, and the fact that it is situated in a country town and distributes the narrative interest fairly evenly among a group of characters gives the book a peculiar novelty and freshness — not least because White apparently forbade the book’s republication, perhaps because of the way it reflects some unflattering details about a local Australian Chinese family, perhaps because Happy Valley is so manifestly the work of a young writer who is finding his feet.
But the latter point is easily misunderstood. The White of The Aunt’s Story is fully formed, even though that drama of dreams and madness and spinsterly isolation is in some ways the dragon at the gates of White’s work.
Certainly from
The Aunt’s Story in the mid-1940s through to
The Twyborn Affair in 1979 there is a consistent maturity and confidence in every page White writes and there is also — which is both a giveaway and a signature feature — an effortless sense of drama. You don’t have to know precisely where you are in those dislocated and deranged sections of
The Aunt’s Story to know that you are in the hands of a great writer (which is not to say that White did not retain his unevenness throughout his career).
But the fact that Happy Valley is a rawer effort does not stop it from being a consistently engrossing novel. It confronts the reader with the pulsation and sheer narrative momentum which is one of the characteristics of Australia’s always rather old-fashioned master of the novel form. This — together with the fact that the book has been out of circulation virtually from the outset — is likely to trick readers who think they know the early work (and that it is not worth revisiting), as indeed it tricked me. Hardly anyone has read Happy Valley, and if they have it is likely to be under the shadow of the later work.
