Voss by Patrick White

First published: 1957

Type of work: Historical and philosophical realism

Time of work: The 1840’s

Locale: Australia: Sydney, Newcastle, Jildra, and the desert beyond

Principal Characters:

• Johann Ulrich Voss, a German immigrant to Australia, the leader of an expedition to cross the Australian continent
• Edmund Bonner, a Sydney merchant and principal financial backer for the expedition
• Laura Trevelyen, his niece, who is living with the Bonners
• Rose Portion, their servant
• Mercy, Rose’s illegitimate child, who is adopted by Laura
• Harry Robarts, a simple-minded but strong boy
• Frank Le Mesurier, a poet and dilettante
• Palfreyman, an ornithologist
• Albert Judd, an emancipated convict and farmer
• Ralph Angus, the handsome son of a wealthy landowner
• Turner, a drunkard
• Jackie, and
• Dugald, aboriginal servants’, guides, and interpreters

The Novel

Although based on an actual expedition which attempted to cross the Australian continent in 1845, Voss is by no means a conventional historical novel. The exploration is as much of the psychological and spiritual nature of the characters as it is of the actual terrain, though Patrick White renders the latter most vividly in his concentrated and poetic style. As the novel opens, Johann Ulrich Voss, a German immigrant, calls on Edmund Bonner, the major financial backer of the expedition, and meets Bonner’s niece Laura Trevelyen. The development of their ensuing relationship parallels the fate of the expedition.

In Sydney, Voss recruits four members of the expedition, one of whom, the boy Harry Robarts, attaches himself to Voss, making himself useful and idolizing Voss as benefactor and hero. Palfreyman is a rather sickly young man, an ornithologist commissioned by a titled Englishman to make a collection of flora and fauna. For Frank Le Mesurier who has held a number of jobs but none for very long, the expedition may provide fulfillment and self-knowledge, though he is prophetically uneasy about the undertaking. Turner, a drunkard, forces himself upon Voss, assuring him that he will do his part.

Meanwhile, Edmund Bonner and his wife are preoccupied with their own affairs, to which Voss and the expedition are peripheral. Their daughter Belle is a beautiful but rather empty-headed young woman; her cousin Laura is the quiet, bookish one. The Bonners’ secure, middle-class household is disrupted by the discovery that Rose Portion, their servant, who was transported for the manslaughter of one illegitimate child, is now pregnant again. Rose, an awkward, ungainly young woman with a harelip, thought that she had done what was best for the child. Like Harry Robarts, she is somewhat simple.

Although they have spoken only a few times, at the farewell dinner the Bonners give for the expedition Voss talks for some time with Laura in the garden and requests permission to write to her. Laura agrees. The expedition sails the next day for Newcastle, where they will pick up supplies and the other members of the expedition, staying with the Bonners’ friends the Sandersons. Voss is uneasy about including the former convict Judd but realizes that he has to accept him after Judd cares for Palfreyman, who falls ill at the Sandersons’ house. The Sandersons’ neighbor, Ralph Angus—wealthy, arrogant, and handsome—also joins them. At that time, Voss writes to Bonner and also to Laura, asking her permission to write her uncle requesting her hand in marriage.

From Newcastle, they set out overland. The last stop is Jildra, where Voss receives letters, including one from Laura, who accepts his proposal on condition that they “pray together for salvation.” Voss writes her for the last time from this final outpost of civilization, a scruffy outback town where their last host is Brendan Boyle, his home a filthy shack. In Jildra, Voss takes on the final members of the party, the aborigines Dugald and Jackie. At first, the journey is relatively uncomplicated, but as they penetrate further and further into the interior, the weather, the terrain, and increasingly hostile aborigines menace the expedition. Dugald finally begs to return, and Voss entrusts to him his final letters. Dugald encounters a tribe of his people and destroys the letters.

Laura, in the meantime, composes a number of letters to Voss, whom she begins to think of as her husband, and she becomes greatly attached to and concerned for Rose Portion. Identifying with Rose, she stays up with her during the birth of the child, Mercy, caring for her and adopting her when Rose dies. The child becomes a symbol of her spiritual union with Voss. As the expedition becomes imperiled, Laura becomes withdrawn and ill, almost dying of a fever but recovering at the moment of Voss’s death. Voss, meanwhile, composes letters and holds imaginary conversations with Laura, feeling her presence at his side. Under mounting stress, after an encounter with the aborigines in which Palfreyman is killed, the party separates: Voss, Le Mesurier, Robarts, and Jackie continue; Judd, Angus, and Turner go back. Voss’s party is captured by aborigines in the heart of the desert. Jackie, fearful for his own life, joins with the aborigines. Le Mesurier commits suicide; Robarts and Voss are killed, the latter by Jackie, with the knife Voss had originally given him. Laura is in Voss’s thoughts until the very end.

At the novel’s close, some years later, Laura is a schoolmistress, her adopted daughter Mercy still with her. Judd, presumed lost, has appeared, and Colonel Hebden, who is determined to find the remains of the expedition, wants to talk with Laura. Uneasily, she grants his request. Invited to the unveiling of a monument to the expedition, a statue of Voss, she meets Judd, who gives a garbled account of the explorers’ fate. Hebden has also learned that Jackie survived, though quite mad, becoming a legend to his people but dying before Hebden could talk with him. Laura, realizing that Voss has been accepted and understood in the only way in which society is able, is at last able to talk about him.

The Characters

In Voss, White has two distinct styles. A poetic, elliptical, allusive, and somewhat cryptic style is associated with the expedition, the landscape, and Voss and Laura’s relationship. The style in which White portrays Sydney society is more conventional, though with a similar accuracy and originality of description and a sardonic and illuminating wit, both mirroring and satirizing the limited perspectives, worldliness, lack of imagination, and conventionality of that society. In his treatment of the many minor characters, White has been compared to both Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevski.

In depicting Voss and Laura, White uses this range of style to great effect. Voss is first shown as Sydney society perceives him: an ugly, ill-mannered, ungainly foreigner who does not fit in at all. Language is part of the barrier between Voss and others. Demonstrating this lack of communication, White gives him some dialogue in German, even at key points. The blacks’ incomprehension of any of the white man’s languages is emphasized when Voss speaks to them in German.

Voss’s arrogance extends to God; a Moravian missionary at Moreton Bay has told him, “You have a contempt for God, because He is not in your own image.” Though aware of his egoism and the way it has estranged him from people and from worldly comfort, Voss sees religion as “an occupation for women” and finds Laura’s condition for accepting him difficult. He knows that he must have humility for salvation. As the party ventures deeper into the desert, into the aborigines’ territory, discovering burial places and cave paintings, Voss’s God-defying assurance weakens, as he senses a spiritual force of which he has previously been unaware. In the end, because of Laura’s influence and his own acceptance of humility, he admits his own fears and inadequacies, and “reduced to the bones of manhood,” he realizes that even at the height of his self-confidence and contempt for others, he has been “a frail god upon a rickety throne.” Between Laura and the desert, Voss achieves a muted salvation.

Laura at the outset seems much more assured, self-possessed, and cool than Voss. She, however, needs the strength his love gives her to persist in her own destiny without being engulfed in and obliterated by conventional Sydney society. Their four meetings, for the most part surrounded by that society, seem scarcely to prepare for the intensity of the relationship which follows. Laura, however, not only understands Voss but also is quite unconventionally outspoken to him. “Everyone is offended by truth, and you will not be an exception,” she tells him. Voss, even though he laughs, agrees with Laura’s observation that his expedition is “pure will.” He accepts her comparison of him to a desert which is “vast and ugly” with “rocks of prejudice. . . even hatred,” a person “isolated . . . fascinated by. . . desert places,” which reflect or even exalt his own condition. Voss asks only if this means that she hates him. No, she responds, she is fascinated by him: “You are my desert.” Only Laura can see Voss both as a heroic, Christlike figure and as a fallible, ugly, and in many ways unlovable, human being. As Voss explores the continent, himself, and Laura, she reflects his experience, even though confined to Sydney. Both are seekers, and it is in part the intensity of their search for spiritual redemption that leaves a vague sense of incompleteness at the novel’s end. White himself much later observed, “the ultimate spiritual union is probably as impossible to achieve as the perfect work of art or the unflawed human relationship.”

Perhaps the most striking characterizations, after those of Voss and Laura, are those of the aborigines, both the groups in the desert and Dugald and Jackie. Described in their relationship to the land and to one another and as the whites perceive them, the “blackfellows,” as they are called, must give themselves completely to their desert in order to survive. To do so, Dugald must surrender “the conscience he had worn in the days of the whites” as well as his swallowtail coat. Though he voluntarily destroys the white man’s letters for his fellows, he is “sad and still” as the torn pieces “fluttered round him and settled on the grass, like a mob of cockatoos.”

Critical Context

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, the first Australian to be so honored, White is unquestionably a major literary figure. As he observed, an artist was always an outsider in Australia. Indeed, White’s first novel was published in the United States by the Viking Press. White’s works, in theme, style, and content most unlike the conventional Australian novel (which White called “the dreary, dun-colored offspring of journalistic realism”), were at first not at all well received. In 1941, however, Happy Valley (1939), his first novel, received the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal, as did his fourth novel, The Tree of Man (1955) in 1956. Though his international reputation grew steadily—Voss was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in the United States—it was not until he received the Nobel Prize that White achieved international fame.

If there has been any adverse criticism of White’s work, it has been of his style. Described as a “frustrated painter and musician,” White strains the language to the utmost in order to render sight, sound, and sense. He seems to undertake an almost Platonic search for the reality beyond the reality. It is not so much the poetic imagery and symbolism which present difficulties to the reader but the resulting density and compression of the style. Voss, in particular, demands attention to every word, and must be read with the sort of concentrated attention one brings to the more complex forms of poetry, an attention which must be sustained through almost 450 pages.

Voss was based on an actual expedition, a similarly ill-fated one led by a German emigre, Ludwig Leichardt, in 1845. White read accounts of the expedition in A. H. Chisholm’s Strange New World: The Adventures of John Gilbert and Ludwig Leichardt (1941) and also the journal of Australian explorer Edward John Eyre. White first conceived the idea of the novel during the Blitz in London, and saw Leichardt’s—and Voss’s—megalomania and extreme assertion of will exemplified in Adolf Hitler. Voss, however, is a much more complex and redeemed character.

The Nobel citation read, in part, “for an epic and psychological art which has introduced a new continent into literature.” White depicts the unspoiled continent, not as a soulless entity to conquer or by which to be defeated but as a natural or even a supernatural force, a force commanding humankind’s awe and ultimately requiring its humility.

Bibliography

Colmer, John. Patrick White, 1984.

McCulloch, A. M. A Tragic Vision: The Novels of Patrick White, 1983.

Walsh, William. Patrick White: Voss, 1976.

Walsh, William. Patrick White’s Fiction, 1977.

Weigel, John A. Patrick White, 1983.