“The Twyborn Affair” – Patrick White

To Bitch or not to Bitch? – What is the Question?

	I enjoyed reading this novel immensely. The novel was published in 1979 and, on reading it, it struck me as being very much a Contemporary text as I have defined in it in previous philosophical papers. In one of those papers I talked about this post-Postmodern sense of the Contemporary under four distinctively characteristic headings, namely:

1.	Direct engagement of the virtual audience by the author through the dramatis personae, or their literary equivalent.

2.	A sense of simulation qua simulation, with, more or less, an equivalence set up between these various worlds of simulation, or their literary equivalent.

3.	A use of the vernacular along with the use of direct speech.

3.	The overt representation of an existential sense of the present.

I don’t wish to dwell too long on these four headings other than to note quickly the following points.

	In this novel I get the feeling Patrick White is talking to us, at the same time as he unfolds the action of this novel, through his somewhat ‘bitchy’ commentary seemingly supplied by the thinking and dialogue of the main characters. For someone who sees themself as an Australian, and even more for they who are of a generation contemporaneous with the author, this text must find a greater resonance in this regard. He, also, by proxy, seems to be speaking on the behalf of those Australians who were gay and decided to flee that country’s cultural homogeneity and relative intolerance in the general time frame encompassed by this book. In this regard the reader can refer to page 228 where, at the end of a speech on lesbianism and homosexuality, Marcia Lushington says, ‘most of them go to Europe. They’re too ashamed.’ But what, we might well ask, is Patrick White telling us about himself here between the lines? His comments are also undercut, ironically, by the fact that although she herself does not want to ‘associate with abnormality’, and couldn’t ‘bear to touch one’ in many ways she is surrounded intimately by this type of phenomenon. Witness her sexual congress with the main character of Eddie, her manager Prowse and even her husband whose poetical efforts are not to be ‘flaunted’ in the face of other people and who loves ‘to vamp it’ us at the piano, and, who, like a bogon moth, likes to spend a lot of his time elsewhere overseas without the company of his wife. On page 234 we might like to refer to Patrick White’s witty comments on poetry, in the Australian context, which are an absolute delight to read.

	On the subject of ‘simulation’ we have a surfeit of dream sequences. The whole novel catches us aware about the ‘true sex’ of Eudoxia in the beginning third and even her centrality in this novel is disguised from us. To make retrospective sense of this novel we have to realize that the main character is a chameleon who progresses through a number of distinctly separate reincarnations – characters, who, for practical purposes, are temporally isolated one from the other. For a start, in their proper order, we have:

	Male 1 (M1):	The boy at home and sent off to boarding school – hardly discussed by this novel.

	Female 1 (F1): The female character Eudoxia masquerading as the ‘wife’ of a mad Greek called Angelos Vatatzes.

	M2: His enlistment in the First World War, ending it as a decorated Lieutenant. 

	M3: His fleeing Sydney and working as a ‘masculine’ farm hand.

	F2: His assuming the identity of a Miss Trist, the successful madame of a high class whorehouse. 

	M4: The re-assumption of a male persona immediate prior to his death.

	What are to make of this bewildering array of simulated transmutations? Just who is the real Eddie Twyburn? Or is identity, for each and everyone of us, just as evasive to find? Or, merely, a mis-construction of our misunderstood desire on a restricting stage of public conventions?

	Under my third heading let me remark that Patrick White has a wonderful ear for dialect. Let me read out a short passage which I read for a second time, and a third time, when I was reading this novel, finding it so humorous I was stopped in my tracks. A number of times I found my self re-reading segments of text where this type of ‘bitchy’ humour was given a quintessential expression by the author. Let me refer to the rock-kecks incident. Throughout this novel, I found myself carefully reading every line with great delight as this style permeates the entire text!

	A sense of the immediate present is also invoked through this text, or maybe, more provoked through the clashing of personalities, conventions, the baggage people carry around with them, and, through the rich use and juxtaposition of imagery, sometimes quiet shocking even by the standards of this emerging twenty-first century.

	In my title “To Bitch or not to Bitch” I allude to the fact that I want to discuss the nature of Patrick White’s humour, more specifically, his humorous, bitchy like commentary densely overlaying much of this text. 

I am reluctant to use this term ‘bitch’ because it does seem to invoke an anti-women, anti-feminist type of sentiment along with some stereotypical gay allusions and connotations when this type of comment is uttered by one male about some other. But, to date, I have not been able to find an expression that would non-offensively substitute for this term and at the same time do adequate justice to this phenomenon ‘of being a bitch.’ Moreover, although my first reaction is to judge this type of comment by Patrick White as ‘bitchy’ my intuition tells me that this epithet conceals much more than it reveals when used to describe this author’s very stylish, exquisitely polished manner of writing. Let me elaborate….

	On page 44 we have Patrick White saying, to the effect that, when Mrs E. Boyd Golson is accused by her husband of having an affair she is more upset by the fact that she replies with the nominative ‘who’ rather than the accusative ‘whom.’ What does this tell us about this woman? And what does it tells us about the author? My first reaction was to feel that this type of comment was being bitchy in some fashion or other. That both the wife and the author were ‘being a bitch.’

	Let us briefly look at this phenomenon of ‘being a bitch.’

	The term probably comes from the fact that the female of an animal specie, e.g., the dog, is called a bitch. When in heat sex by this gender is sought and accepted indiscriminately. Transference of this term to a human arena preserves these female connotations even if a male refers to another male through the use of this expression and no overt sexual references are implied. In this sense being called ‘a bitch,’ rightly or wrongly, is regarded as a feminine type of phenomenon regardless of the gender of the person who utters that type of comment and the person to whom it is meant to apply. But this application of this epithet also reflects on the person who applies it. We might like to say that they are ‘being bitchy’ in calling someone else a ‘bitch.’

	In a one off ‘act of bitchiness’ when we call ‘someone a bitch,’ we might like to say that the ‘bitched about,’ the so call ‘bitch’ is really, more often than not, in truth, not the ‘real bitch’ in this type of scenario. More likely, consensus would regard the ‘bitch’ as the ‘bitchy person’ who cast that type of comment into the public domain in the first place. Although an ‘act of bitchiness’ can occur between two people, having an audience seems to make the ascription so much more effective. What is happening here?

	It would seem that to call someone a ‘bitch’ seems to imply, if only by connotation, that that person is permissive, promiscuous and indiscriminate in the direction of their affections, acts of reciprocity, etc.

	But the ‘bitchy person’ does not have to call someone a ‘bitch’ to be a ‘bitch.’ It would seem that to insightfully detect some defect in the other person and to bring it to their attention, giving it some form of prominence through exaggeration, is to treat that person to ‘an act of bitchiness.’ The truth of the accusation hurts even though the truth of the matter is probably not as prominent a matter of fact for that person as highlighted by the other person who was ‘being a bitch.’ Placing such ‘information’ before the public only accentuates that sense of hurt. In the process the ‘true bitch’ re-writes the nature of their relationship with that criticized person by ‘putting them down’ and in the process relatively empowering themselves at that other person’s expense.

	In this light a ‘professional bitch’ or ‘super bitch’ (in the genre of the sitcom role so superbly played out by Joan Collins) is a person who is committed to ‘being a bitch on a more permanent basis.’

	In this novel characters are often putting each other down, ‘hurting’ each other in the process (as discussed by various characters from time to time). I do not think Patrick White is being a bitch in this sense! To some extent you must pay the other person some attention in order to observe their defects. Better to have some form of love for them in order to more deeply observe their foibles, that they imagined to exist in the other person correctly or incorrectly. Patrick White seems to love his characters and those characters often, in their own way, try to help each other. But, through these comments, is he just simply putting them down? I don’t think so!

	A simple bitch sees a ‘defect’ in someone else and brings it to their attention, preferably publicly. A professional bitch does this on a more permanent basis. But, in reality, these advertisements invoke a surplus of meaning that, in turn, washes back over the purveyor of such an insult. In the end they tell us more about that person expressing such a comment than the person that comment was directed to. This surplus also washes over the author of this text and appears to reveal or simulate the intentions and attitudes of that author himself, correctly or incorrectly? So through these characters we get a feel for what Australians once felt about Australia, in all its ‘mono-cultural diversity,’ and in turn what the author appears to feel in this regard? In a sense the author is ‘the third man’ in this text, the covert witness and revealer of himself through these characters ‘speaking and thinking bitchy things about each other.’ But, in my estimation, this author does not ‘put down’ these characters for all their faults, and lovingly depicts them as ‘comic actors struggling in their own tragedies’ and who despite that struggle persevere with a sense of nobility regardless of their socio-economic class. We have only to read the descriptions of the characters in this brothel, in the third section of the novel, to realize this point (the author even referring, not unkindly, that upper class parties are not that far removed from the goings on in such a type of establishment). In this light can we still use this term of ‘bitchiness’ to describe this author’s continual commentary on his characters through those characters speeches and thoughts? Under these terms of reference I am inclined to think not!

	There is also a ‘fourth man’ in this text and that is the reader. How do we react to this ‘superficially bitchy, author mediated, commentary’ overlaying this text. I believe in the same paradoxical fashion as experienced by myself? On one level these repetitive comments strike a discordant note whilst on a deeper level, through forms of comic self-identification and tragic self-identification, can only hurt and heal at the same time. We simultaneously laugh and suffer, and, through such a balance find ourselves privy to these characters as if we had met them, and God forbid, recognize in them parts of our own self at the same time! ‘Scraping the bone so close to home’ is also an uncomfortable phenomenon.

	Lastly, I would like to note two more things. First, that every character in this book seems to be fleeing. Even the more permanent ‘farm workers’ flee to the nearby town with ‘six pubs’ and a ‘cottage hospital.’ The fulfillment of dreams and desires all seem to be searched for elsewhere. The inability of the characters to face who they are and find happiness where they are is a constant theme of this book. In this light everything is deferred even when the moment is grasped its growth can never be sustained. So one male character rapes another male character. And a few days later the latter male then rapes the former. But this conflict is never resolved and so one character must leave… Are there any passages in this book where the characters are actually mutually engaged in dialogue? Mother and ‘daughter’ perhaps at the end of the novel, when Eadie accepts Eddie’s redefinition of ‘himself’ as Eadith? 

	Secondly, and finally, why is the title called “The Twyborn Affair?” Although a number of incidents depicted therein could be called a ‘twyborn affair,’ I guess the real affair is outside the temporal framework of the novel when the body of Eddie in his fourth masculine reincarnation, complete with unwashed cosmetics on his face, is discovered dead on the pavement with his arms, minus their hands, enmeshed with a friendly soldier, equally dispatched, trying to shield him from the blasts of bombs, and, from the metaphorical bits and pieces when his various lives are traced out in the newspapers?

							       Noël Tointon, Sydney, 15.4.00.