pdf download - Westerly Magazine

and feelings of his people or of the meaningof our modern life. With respect, I have tosay that these excursions often remind one ofthe novelette. Consider this passage from Seed:Valerie was aware, as she had been at timesbefore, of the fear she felt Marlene had ofher own nature, as if she saw herself drivenand destroyed by what she desired and couldnot compromise. For Valerie it was no morethan a glimpse into a complexity she did notwholly understand and was glad to feelabsent from her own make-up. Almost shemight have disbelieved the girl's statementof need, dismissing it as some dramatisation,it seemed so far from her own experience.But the intensity of Marlene's feeling, thestrange agony that she had seen possess her,the sense of fear, all of which could sometimesforce her to complete rejection of consequence,were real enough, though she didnot understand them, (p.255)Reading this, an analysis of one schoolgirl'sreactions to another, one feels the women'sm.agazine not far away.When Mr Cowan mounts his hobby horse—the spoliation of our natural environment bythe ugly mass of cities and city-dwellers—theprose is even more self-conscious, so that onefinds oneself (after encountering these ideasmore than once) saying, 'Ah, here comes theLewis Mumford-Rachel Carson bit'. This isdoubtless unfair, but it records the extent towhich the author has not worked his ideas intothe fabric of his narratives or attributed themconvincingly to his characters.This last criticism has a wider application,because it explains why the author often unwittinglyundercuts his carefully contrived realism.The range of characters in Peter Cowan'sstories and novels is not large—indeed, hisrange is in all respects narrow, so that overmany years his work remains remarkably unvaried—andthen tend to exist as recurrenttypes. In each tale there is usually one consciousnesswhich is closest to the author's, understandablyenough, but it often happens thatthe thoughts and expressions attributed to thischaracter are implausible. We know them to becharacteristic of Mr Cowan; they are hardlycredible as typical of the figures in the stories.The chief index to this disparity between acharacter and his putative thoughts and feelingsis the way he or she talks. Mr Cowan'ssense of language is not strong, and so hehas, for instance, a habit of intruding into apassage of flat but credible dialogue a word orphrase which strikes one as highly unlikely forthe character speaking it. In 'Film', a womanwho otherwise uses expressions like 'quite anice room', 'a special night', 'the magic wearsoff', says of herself at the films that she is'living vicariously'. In 'Party' a young farmerwho has studied accountancy but never readsbooks says he is 'just literate'. In Seed, aschoolboy, Nigel, is put in possession of an implausiblerange of sensations and the vocabularyto express them, at least to himself.I said above that Peter Cowan's charactersand stories are credible. This is true of thestories despite their recurrent violence; theauthor does in fact convey to us the sensethat the end result of suburban tidiness andurban industry may be madness, murder anddestruction. The quota of violent action is high,and yet beUevable. Of the characters it mightbe more accurate to say they are 'recognisable'than 'credible', for we hardly know any ofthem deeply.Insofar as we do know them, assent is possibleto much of what is said of the drearinessand pointlessness of their lives. But many ofMr Cowan's attitudes—his automatic criticismof suburbia, fihns, city life—strike me as rathervoulu; like his outcry against the developers,one feels he first got it from a book, that heis merely repeating modish views.If this is so, he is not working with the thewand sinew of Australian life but with the preconceptionsand misunderstandings of the 'intellectuals'.In this respect he does remind oneof Patrick White. Peter Cowan is a gentler soulthan White; his picture of Perth in Seed isseveral degrees less sharp than the savage depictionof Sarsaparilla. But the essential incomprehensionis similar, so that one has to say ofboth novelists that they do not really know thepeople they write of.In the end, then, I believe one values PeterCowan for what he attempts rather than whathe succeeds in. He tries, without mystificationor pomp, to understand and render the quotidianlife of mid-century Austraha; to recreatein fiction the lives of his countrymen honestlyand accurately; to image forth the look of theland, the water, the birds, the animals, thepeople. If it is a dull, monotonous renderingthis is at least partly because in his vision ofAustralia these are the authentic quaUties ofour life: we have deserted the land with itsnatural rhythms, its peace, and its wild Ufe,and immured ourselves in ugly cities. The pricewe pay (he seems to suggest) is a witheringof the spirit.But it is also partly, I am sure, because ofthe incompleteness of his vision and of hisequipment to render it. The savour, vigour andgenuine happiness of our life he does not ade-68 WESTERLY, No. 1 of 1967