There seems to be a general consensus that no winner of the Nobel Prize for literature does significant work again, and the overseas reviews of this novel seem more intent in revelling in this belief than in assessing the novel for its particular achievement. At least one local review seems to have been even worse, in assessing the novel on the basis of a supposed mystery, which exists only on the dust jacket. The novel is about three people who turn out to be one. This fact is made explicit by the author six pages after he introduces the second manifestation of his hero/heroine. The novel can be read as three novellas – the first about Eudoxia Vatatzes, empress and hetaira of an old Greek who may be, or may merely believe himself to be, the latest reincarnation of a fourth-century Byzantine emperor; the second about Eddie Twyborn, war hero, jackeroo, and lover of his employer’s wife; and the third about Eadeth Trist, madam of a high-class London brothel.

The first of these novellas reads rather like a set-piece on the encounter between sophisticated Greece and vulgar expatriate, or rather tourist Australia; the second like a bitter variation on the Australian rural idyll, and the third like a slightly more vulgar version of The Duchess of Duke Street.

It must be said that there is something distasteful about this book. The emphasis on dirt, sperm, blood, grease on the lips, and the wreckage of the food seems greater than it has been in White’s earlier novels. Yet the quality of the book depends on what the writer does with his materials, not on what these are.

Patrick White

The Twyborn Affair is an account of the attempts of the child of Mr Justice and Mrs Eadie Twyborn of Sydney to find his social and sexual identity. In the first episode, he is a woman and mistress, in the second he seeks to find himself through physical labour on a Monaro sheep station, and in the third he has again taken on the identity of a woman – but is forced out of it at the end after an encounter with his mother. In flashbacks, we also learn that he has deserted bride and family on the eve of his marriage and that he has been a war hero.

The issue behind the quest for identity is that which has preoccupied White throughout his writing career – the problem of creating something, worthwhile or permanent out of the mess of being. This concern explains the emphasis on bodily functions and their byproducts, and on the physical processes of growing old. It is amid these obstacles, or from them, that the human being has to create its existence. In this novel, the characters create themselves through music, through love, through the style of their living, which to an extent replaces the substance. As Eudoxia remarks in the first section, referring to the partner of her ‘marriage’: ‘How can A., by looking at me from beneath those horny eyelids, convince me that we are wearing the purple, standing on the steps at Blachernae or Nicaea? More – that I am no longer a fiction but a real human being …’

In contrast to the wealthy Australian tourists the Golsons, Eudoxia and Angelos exist in a way which Joan Golson recognises when she sees them sitting together creating music at the piano, but to which for herself she can only aspire. On the other hand, from inside, the relationship is mutually restricting. Eudoxia longs to break away, Angelos is frustrated by her limitations, yet at the end they acknowledge their mutual need.

Her name give us something of a clue to her meaning. The first Eudoxia was the antagonist of St John Chrysostom, and the name can be translated as ‘pleasant orthodoxy’ – the ordered style of the timeless Greek church, a style in which Angelo is passionately interested despite his clear atheism. Yet in English doxy is the equivalent of the Greek hetaira – mistress – the other aspect of her importance to Angelos. In her person, therefore, she satisfies the two cravings of his nature while stilling her own.

The first section ends with Angelos’s death; in the second, we find that Eddie Twyborn has cast off his female identity and, having accidentally achieved heroism in the trenches, is returning home with other troops at the end of the Great War.  The action of this section is shared between Sydney and the Monaro, where Eddie tries to sublimate his guilt and uncertainties in physical labor and to discover his identity in the landscape. At first, he find himself at home in this landscape, even if he is unable to come to terms with the human relationships he finds: ‘A relationship was waiting to develop between himself, the huggermugger buildings, even a bitter landscape. If the river appeared at first sight hostile, it was through the transcience of its coursing waters to one who longer for the reality of permanence.’

White superbly renders the quality of both landscape and relationships, but it is the latter which bring this idyll undone. Eddie’s very presence is an affront to the supervisor; he is both raped and rapes, and departs on the same shabby country train that transported him. The whole ambience, finally united by the harsh but healing epiphany of cockcrow, is not able to unite Eddie’s divided self or give him a place in a human community.

It seem to me that this is a failing not merely of Eddie, but of the novel. White’s characters are typically loners, but those who are most successful in terms of the fiction, from the doctor in Happy Valley (1939) – a setting to which he almost returns in the middle part of this novel – to Elizabeth Hunter in The Eye of the Storm (1973), are people who, from the very fact of their inner strength, offer something to those who can understand it. Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith, on the other hand, seems to disintegrate through the novel, to have less to offer at each stage, and her life as madam in the final section is more an evasion than a discovery of herself. For all the novel’s concentration of physical detail, the relationships it shows are matters of sensibility, not matters built out of substance.

Yet, if the novel falls short in the realm of relationships, it succeeds triumphantly in presenting individuals and their physical worlds, whether Greece, Australia, or London. The final section can also be read as a slightly manic comedy of manners, enjoyed for what it shows us of people’s behavior rather than for any light it throws on Eadith’s quest for fulfilment of the ‘pseudo-man … crypto-woman’ she finds in herself. While she may not be a modern everyhuman, the worlds through which she moves contain sufficient interest to blunt for a time the nagging question which White never allows us to forget lies beneath them.