Patrick White's Enduring Lesson
His 1976 Novel A Fringe of Leaves Does Everything Movies Can't
When it comes to portraying Native Peoples, the world of cinema has gone through a series of stages in its attempt to atone for the sins, for instance, of old Westerns, and many would say that it’s still a work in progress. Kevin Costner’s 1991 Dances With Wolves seemed at the time to finally give us a realistic picture of Native Americans, but now it’s often labeled overly romantic, too much of a figment of Costner’s seemingly limited knowledge and imagination. Terrence Malick’s immensely beautiful, yet gritty, 2005 film, The New World, does wonders to correct the notion that romance and credibility can’t mix, but doesn’t fully eliminate the question of how thick the smokescreen is between art and reality.
The world of literature has had its problems in this regard as well, going all the way back to James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, but perhaps because writing is a non-visual medium, the chances for success are raised. Case in point: The 1973 Australian Nobel Prize winner Patrick White’s sorely neglected 1976 novel, A Fringe of Leaves.
Ripped From History
The novel is based on the real-life story of the shipwreck of the Stirling Castle off the coast of Australia in 1836. Captain James Fraser and his wife, Eliza, along with 18 crew members, took refuge on what is now known as Fraser Island, and were captured by Aborigines and forced to adapt to their way of life. The Captain did not survive the experience, but Eliza did, and published a sensationalized account of her ordeal.
White’s fictional version of Eliza is Ellen, who, in typical 19th century fashion, marries a man she respects more than loves, and becomes Mrs. Ellen Roxburgh. Their meeting takes place in England, and on their return there after a visit to Australia (where Ellen has a romantic encounter with her husband’s less genteel brother), their ship, the Bristol Maid, goes down in a storm, and along with several crew members, they end up stranded on a nameless island. After her husband is speared to death by one of a local tribe of Aborigines, Ellen is deemed useful to the tribe and taken prisoner. Eventually, she encounters an escaped convict, and with his help makes it back to “civilization.”
Supreme Craft
Flush with success after winning the Nobel Prize (though, according to his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, completely dismayed by the sudden overwhelming attention), White poured into A Fringe of Leaves everything he learned about the craft of writing from his previous masterpieces, from the 1948 The Aunt’s Story to his other historical novel of Australia, Voss, to the 1973 The Eye of the Storm, and others. The first few chapters of A Fringe of Leaves have the artfully deceptive tone of a typical 19th-century novel. Many details in flashbacks of Ellen’s past before her marriage show her mind to possess an inherent sensuality that goes against the grain of the world she inhabits, and insinuate an alternative destiny for her.
Then White’s brilliant descriptions of the shipwreck and the first few bewildering days on the island before another human culture storms in, are increasingly removed from the established 19th-century tone. Though White’s style is never plain, the language is infused with a fresh richness (though distinctly unsentimental and almost terrifying) as it seems to grow out of the newly acquired primal sensibilities of the characters, especially Ellen.
Even More Supreme Craft
Then the 100-page second-to-last chapter, before Ellen is back in the world she was torn from and attempting to readjust, is a tour de force of evocative realism. White faithfully and starkly renders details of Aboriginal life, including cannibalism, at the same time that his rigorous attention to language captures and explores important underlying connections between the “savage” and the “civilized.” Gorgeously constructed images and phrases, never far from their empirical sources, but raised to a level of imaginative awe, succeed in building an almost impossible bridge between two worlds, and seem to leave the capabilities of film in the dust.
Fraser Island, Australia
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