Park’s Transnational Catholic Reception
Serpent’s Delight has attracted very little criticism. The AustLit database, for instance, lists only reviews (including one by Nancy Keesing) published in 1962 on the book’s appearance. The history of the novel’s title bears analysis and is indicative. It was originally published in England and Australia as The Good Looking Women (1961). Still, the American edition appeared as Serpent’s Delight in 1962 and retained that title everywhere except in England. Though the title was different the content of the book remained the same. The title change was a marketing device designed to sell the book in the American market. These were the same factors that led the Riverside imprint of the Boston-based firm Houghton Mifflin to retitle Park’s 1949 novel Poor Man’s Orange as 12 ½ Plymouth Street in 1951, as the colloquialism ‘poor man’s orange’ was not a phrase familiar to US readers. The intent was not to change any aspect of the content of the book; it was the purchase of the book by the reader, not the eventual consumption, that was meant to be affected. In the case of Serpent’s Delight, the retitling emphasises the book’s religious and Catholic aspects, whereas the alternate title positioned the novel much more as a family saga: two valences which, as we shall see, are more or less equally operative within the text. Therefore, although this essay integrates the transnational manifestation of this novel as part of its cultural meaning, it does not analyse Serpent’s Delight as a literary object ontologically or textually distinct from any edition of The Good Looking Women.
As if the divergence in titles is not confusing enough, an erroneous assertion has been introduced into the archive that the novel was originally published in 1953. The 1953 date, seen at least as early as in Joy Hooton’s 1996 collection is in error, as Jill Greaves’s 1998 dissertation demonstrates. This error might have originated because Park’s A Power of Roses was published in 1953. The multiplying power of the internet means that the 1953 date has been established in all sorts of sources. So, it is necessary to refute this here, especially, as we shall see, that the divergent dating could seriously impact our sense of the milieu in which the book’s religious themes were received. Similarly, the alternate titles, The Good Looking Women and Serpent’s Delight give two very different senses of the books’ themes and concerns. The second title comes from the book’s epigraph, ‘The serpent’s delight is a woman who wants her own way’, from the Jesuit Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez’s (the novel’s spelling is ‘Roderiguez’) practice of Christian Perception. Whereas previous novels by Park published in the United States, such as The Harp in the South and the retitled 12 ½ Plymouth Street, had been published by the respectable Boston-based Houghton Mifflin (in its Riverside imprint), Serpent’s Delight was published by Doubleday, based in suburban Long Island just outside of New York City and arguably the United States’s leading publisher, which had just had a massive success publishing the memoirs of former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Serpent’s Delight was thus at least reasonably well-positioned to circulate prominently. Anne Fremantle, the well-known New York-based liberal Catholic commentator, wrote in December 1962 in Commonweal magazine (a prominent US liberal Catholic periodical) of Serpent’s Delight: ‘Here, at last, is a first-class new novelist who is a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic’ (288). It placed Park securely in the centre of a US Catholic dynamic that at once possessed a newfound cultural centrality but still sensed that there needed to be a Catholic culture equal to the prominence of this new role. Jean Holzhauer, a frequent reviewer for Commonweal, described Serpent’s Delight as ‘a compact, unpretentious, and very effective novel about an ordinary Catholic family under extraordinary circumstances by an author who, most refreshingly, does not consider illicit sex the only capital sin.’(Holzhauer 575).
Interestingly, Holzhauer preferred Park’s novel to J. F. Powers’s Morte D’Urban (1962), one of the most prominent novels of post-war US Catholicism and eventual winner of the 1963 US National Book Award, which she reviewed in brief just before her short commentary on Park. Both of these mentions by Holzhauer were in the context of Critics’ Choices for Catholic Book Week (575). They placed Park’s novel in a wide network of both fiction and nonfiction, theology and texts with little less explicit connections to Catholic doctrine. Though Serpent’s Delight received very respectful and comprehending notices from well-placed people in a lively literary-Catholic milieu, it also has to be said that the acclaim of Commonweal reviewers did not extend to more widely read outlets such as Time, or Newsweek. It was reviewed positively and perceptively by Martin Levin in The New York Times Book Review but only in brief among a welter of other novels by people with more established US reputations.
It is worth acknowledging that operating outside of a consensus endorsement for a book receiving positive reviews and good word-of-mouth was likely more challenging in the mid-twentieth century than it is today. Yet although the early 1960s did not have the profusion of arenas for discussing and publicising literature that the internet offers us today, there were mediating institutions outside newspapers and magazines that introduced books to potential readers. The Catholic Book Club, founded in 1928, was a major mediator of books to American Catholic readers including both fiction and nonfiction, literary and commercial novels, and books directly concerning Catholic theology or, for example, the liberalising changes in the church introduced in the early 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, as well as what might be called books of Catholic experience, which sampled indirectly and in a more literary way the affects and ramifications of Catholic identity (see Catholic Book Club Archives in Works Cited). As Peter Hebblethwaite has argued, the papacy of John XXIII, which extended from 1958 to 1963, was a convulsive period in which an elderly pope expected to be a caretaker unexpectedly changed the Church through a process of bringing it up-to-date or ‘aggiornamento’ (232). In this context, Catholic identity was manifold and variegated. The Catholic Book Club included several books by Morris West, the bestselling Australian novelist whose fiction often included popes, conclaves, and cardinals, as well as a book such as Serpent’s Delight which, despite its plot centring around Marian apparitions, is in many ways a novel about a family’s psychological dynamics whose Catholic resonances are as much tacit as explicit.
Unlike many other choices of the Catholic Book Club, Serpent's Delight is very much literary fiction and, even had it circulated to its maximum cohort of potential readers, was never going to resonate widely outside the circle of the sorts of publications in which it was reviewed. If the theme of Geraldine Pond’s visions was treated more startlingly, if the reader was given any possible sense that her visions had a real spiritual meaning, it would have been a different sort of novel and might have welcomed a more popular readership (as even a highly literary book such as Ron Hansen’s novel Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) did in the 1990s). Rather, these novels’ social and psychological emphases kept them within a certain literary field of reception. The particulars of this field changed from the Australian to the American context, but its essentials did not.
In turn, cultural moods, in an ideologically charged twentieth-century United States, were vulnerable to changing news headlines and generational turnover. This can be seen in how Catholic visibility in the United States was exemplified not just by the election of Kennedy but also by the earlier McCarthy era. If Serpent’s Delight had indeed had the original 1953 publication date Hooton assigned it, by the early 1960s it would have come into a US atmosphere where Catholicism was still prominent, but with a considerably more politically progressive tincture, a milieu in which Catholicism could be de rigueur, as chronicled in the memoir of Richard Gilman and the intellectual history of Paul Elie and Jonathan McGregor, and be celebrated for different reasons by the Right (for its traditionalism) and the Left (for its pacifism). Robert Lowell’s and Denise Levertov’s Catholic conversions, the Catholic fiction of J. F. Powers and Flannery O’Connor, were all aspects of this climate, as were more minor figures like Jean Holzhuser, Anne Fremantle, and the music critic Barry Ulanov, who was an organiser of the ‘Catholic Renascence Society’ and provided a blurb for the US edition of Serpent’s Delight.
As McGregor and Elie suggest, much of the political torque of post-war Anglophone Catholicism tended toward the left, calling on Catholic ideals of social solidarity and the working-class and migrant identity of many Anglophone Catholics. Yet there was also a right-wing Anglophone Catholicism. This was the Catholicism of McCarthyism and religious conservatism, of pre-Vatican II triumphalism and what Greaves calls the ‘semi-superstitious religious practices’ they entail, as well as Cold War anti-communism (104). William Inboden points out that a new friendliness towards global Catholics and Catholicism was part of the US strategy in the Cold War, which prioritised stigmatising Soviet Communism as godless. As Jessica Chapman points out, the US (and Australian) support of the South Vietnamese government of Ngô Đình Diệm, which signalled the beginning of what the West calls the Vietnam War, had a strong element of Christian solidarity with the declaratively Catholic Diệm. Certainly, as Park wrote the novel, Australia was in the middle of a two-decade-long conservative government that never flinched from an aggressive, anti-Communist posture in the Cold War. The assassination of President Kennedy, America’s first Roman Catholic leader, occurred less than a year after Park’s novel was reviewed in the US press. The escalation of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the change in Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council, and the rise of the counterculture made the world of the mid-1960s a fundamentally different one than the early1960s. As the work of David Carter and Roger Osborne has shown, Australian fiction faced enormous logistical and procedural obstacles in reaching the American market. Australian books were thus likelier than average to be obscured by changes in the public mood. Despite the admiration the novel’s American reviewers felt for it, the reviews were only brief, and they conveyed no sense of the potential social relevance of the book, even though Park is very much concerned with how the possibility of religious belief interacts with the institutions of family and society.
Australian Possibilities and Reductions
Even as Park’s oeuvre, in general, is being revived, Serpent’s Delight / The Good Looking Women has not been frequently discussed. Some of the friction in the novel’s reception, though, and certainly some of the comparative scholarly neglect of it, might be seen as latent in the very fabric of the text itself. Typical of a certain kind of mid-twentieth century short novel, Serpent’s Delight has enough characters and interrelationships in it to have populated a potentially far longer novel and operates as a sort of truncated family saga. Some short novels have a lot of characters because the novels are essentially episodic with the protagonist meeting a new array of characters in each milieu. Other novels – like detective stories that need a lot of suspects – populate themselves with characters to give the reader alternative paths for ramifying misdirection. Serpent’s Delight has more characters than the more social novels of Park’s Harp in the South (1947), more characters than far longer novels like Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm (1973), and as many as Park’s much more overtly ‘social’ sequel to Harp, Poor Man’s Orange (1948).
Serpent’s Delight is centred on the Pond family. Although the central narrative strand involves Geraldine making up a story about the Virgin Mary appearing to her in order to keep herself within the family orbit and near her father, Wally, the novel contains many characters who are important to the work’s overall meaning. Wally Pond is a man in his early sixties. His one recorded sibling is his sister Hannah, ‘Aunt Han’, a querulous woman who plays a surprisingly substantial role in the novel. Aunt Han, as a woman who does not need either good looks or miracles to be charismatic and powerful, is a counterexample, in the older generation, to Geraldine’s implied belief that she either has to be reproductive, involved in the heterosexual economy, or spiritually exceptional in order to matter. Wally is married to Rosa, and his other generational peer is his best friend, Arthur Golding, who in turn has a sister, Charlotte or ‘Char’. The Goldings are important as their being adjacent to, but not organically part of, the Pond family allows a perspective which can open out onto the reader’s own perspective on the Ponds. Wally and Rosa have four daughters: Carrie, who is divorced from Cliff Coleman, a man with whom she has had two children; Elva, who has married Des McNair and had a brood of children (including Bernadette, or ‘Dette’, and Frances); Ivy, who has become a nun under the name of Sister Polycarp; and Geraldine, the youngest daughter and the novel’s central active character.
Geraldine’s visions of the Virgin Mary are the dramatic development around which the many characters and subplots in the novel pivot. Even as we are introduced to the generation of Wally and Rosa’s children, we are reminded that there is another generation emerging into adulthood behind them. Carrie’s daughter Ann is already an older teenager and has an established boyfriend, Brisley. Ann is very aware of her aunt’s hostility to her, saying to Geraldine, ‘you hated me’ because she represented a rising generation when Geraldine herself had not risen (181). Elva and Des’s children are younger but the eldest of the bunch are already becoming individuals with voices of their own. In other words, for the still unmatched and undefined Geraldine, there is another set of people emerging behind her, who are likely to find their destinies while hers is still unresolved.
On one level, the novel is preoccupied with the possibilities of the sacred. Did Geraldine have a vision of Mary? If so, what does it mean? That we are never inside Geraldine’s point of view makes this also an epistemic question. The different reactions to Geraldine’s visionary claims reveal the standpoints assumed by the characters both as embodied individuals and as occupants of ideological positions.
One can read the book as centring around the story of Geraldine, her faking of the miraculous appearances, the pathos of her reasons for faking them, and the sad consequences they have for the family. This interpretation is especially emphasised by the title Serpent’s Delight, with its implication of female perfidy being apt for a narrative that reveals seemingly miraculous appearances by the most sacred of women, the Virgin Mary – appearances that are phantasms conjured by the imagination of the none-too-sacred Geraldine. But there is also another reading, emphasised by the title The Good Looking Women. This title draws attention to the female-dominated Pond family and perhaps the fate of Carrie, in particular, whose life takes an unexpected and decisive turn in the course of the story. There is, in the novel itself, a tension between these two possibilities – a book about Geraldine’s miracles, or a book about the family happiness and unhappiness of the Ponds. The Harp in the South, for instance, contains many moments of strong spiritual feeling. Christmas is seen by the Darcy family as a ‘unique mystery’ Harp in the South (82). Serpent’s Delight exposes the falsity of supernatural miraculous claims but does not rule out the general idea of miracle. This tension could, depending on how the reader responds, be seen as making the novel problematic and undefined, or conversely as rendering it especially rich and replete with possibilities.
Curiously, even though it is the Geraldine story that at least potentially involves the numinous and the possibility of spiritual plenitude, the motivations – of Geraldine herself, the family that finds meaning in her claims, and the church that seeks ballast and profit from them – are fairly apparent. In the broader family saga, though, things become more mysterious. There is a sense that something has gone wrong with the Pond family, and that this malady is not just psychological and relationship-defined but stems from larger social developments in Australian cultural space. But what exactly this is meant to signify remains nebulous.
Wally has gone from being an artisan to a furniture removalist, and this might suggest some loss of personal pride in work to the more alienated and mechanised nature of carting around goods for somebody else. But this is not exactly the stuff of social catastrophe, and the novel sketches the economic transition so lightly that it is hard to make it even the basis for a traumatic shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. All that is said is that Aunt Han, a wind-up toy, monstrous’ (81), and Wally are the ‘last representatives’ of a ‘large and vigorous family’ who flourished at ‘the turn of the century’ (79). The early 1900s are defined as a time of ‘great energy and expansion of intense industrialism, strikes, riots, and the rise of the powerful labour unions’ (79). Greaves comments that Wally and his wife Rosa epitomise the ‘inward-looking self-sufficiency of an earlier age’ (103).
There is a sense of a family in decline, even if through no fault of its own and even at a time of general prosperity in Australia and worldwide. Yet the family is still middle-class, and this book cannot fall under the rubric of ‘slum fiction’ that Ronald Paul uses to describe Park’s The Harp in the South. Yet the novel hardly reflects the common image of 1950s Australian Catholicism centred around the power of Catholic-dominated labour unions in Australian Cold War politics, as evidenced by the prominence of B. A. Santamaria, and the critical influence of a Catholic scholar such as Vincent Buckley. Yet one could say this Catholic moment in Cold War Australian culture is tacitly reflected in the way Park’s novel does not seem to be reporting on a ‘minority’ or ‘raced’ community and canvasses the Catholic theme in a way that is socially ‘general’. The early novels of Thomas Keneally, such as Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968), and of Thea Astley as in Girl with a Monkey (1958), and, semi-retrospectively, Gerald Murnane’s Tamarisk Row (1974), sample this climate. The Ponds, though, far from growing in social cachet and feeling more assimilated within Australia, seem adrift. Some sort of setback or trauma has occurred; and although the reader of Park’s later novel Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977) might be tempted to fill in the canvas with some of the Hanna family’s experiences in that novel, there is no warrant for such a move on this particular fictional canvas. The surname Pond has obvious similarities to that of Park, but the novel lacks the detailed and resonant imagery that is usually present in an autobiographical novel. Serpent’s Delight is more of a case study of a socio-behavioural phenomenon than a probing psychological portrait. But there is a definite sense that the Pond family has fallen short of its own former fortunes and its own present aspirations. A secondary motivation of Geraldine in pretending to see visions of Mary may well be to restore the Pond family’s fortunes.
Indeed, one can see the Marian visions in this novel as an inversion of the absence of Thady Darcy in Park’s earlier novels, The Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange. Thady, was ‘stolen off the street’ (12 ½ Plymouth Street, 1) early on in The Harp in the South but remains as a vestigial absence for his mother who compares his loss to ‘the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea after the Resurrection’ (Harp in the South 300). Both Thady’s loss and Geraldine’s spiritual claim mark them out from the other siblings as extraordinary and numinous.
Geraldine’s manifest admission is that she made up the story of the miracle to stay within the family, to not have to move out and find her place in the world, and to keep together her life with her parents for as long as she can. But her false claims have the effect of making her famous and respected, a development that equally dislodges her from a secure place within an idealised family of origin. Because the church has advertised the visions, Geraldine is already taken beyond the family. Yet the experience of acclaim and notoriety is unsatisfying for her as she cannot just crawl back to the womb. Or perhaps Geraldine finds in her pseudo-celebrity an adequate substitute for the protection of the family, but her veneer of the miraculous is shattered so quickly that this is never really put to the test.
Serpent’s Delight does not give the reader access to Geraldine Pond’s point of view, for the obvious tactical reason that we would then know whether the visions are real or not. But this technical choice also makes the novel less about her. Unlike a nonfiction narrative, the novel is under no obligation to decide whether Geraldine’s stories are to be believed or not and can leave the window open to conjecture. But Park chooses to close this window by revealing, through Geraldine’s admission, that her claim of miracles is a scam. While some visionaries might internally believe in their visions even if they are proven false, this is not the case with Geraldine. She is knowingly deceptive, and her visions lack any spiritual content, even as fabrications. Nor do Geraldine’s claims ultimately help even those she alleges she loves. When Geraldine confesses to Wally that her visions have been imaginary, Wally has a second, fatal stroke. Geraldine, in telling the truth, has robbed him of any sense of hope in the reality of divine revelation, which reduces the reality of the world to the disappointing reality of his immediate life. Geraldine has not just revealed herself as a liar but has foreclosed the wider possibilities that, as we shall see in this essay’s last section, have been an important part of Wally’s psychological journey in the novel.
This may not be accidental, as there is some latent hostility in Geraldine’s claims. In a way, Geraldine’s visions are motivated by envy of the potential positive futures of other people in her family. In turn, while her alleged supernatural miracles end up having a positive effect, there are quite non-miraculous developments within the Pond family that, if hardly redemptive, still render their worlds as more positive environments. The lives of Geraldine’s sisters, Carrie, Elva and Ivy (Sister Polycarp), and her niece, show the plural nature of merely routine outcomes (even if Sister Polycarp assumes a religious vocation, she does not claim to witness supernatural events). Frances McNair, Elva’s ‘second girl’ (218) and thereby Geraldine’s niece, says that her great aunt Han ‘smells’ (219). But Han, far from being repelled by this crudity, is impressed by the young girl’s spunk. Han recognises some potential in Frances notwithstanding all her dislike of, and financial jealousy towards, her brother Wally’s prodigious brood. Han, as much of a past-centred, recalcitrant sourpuss as she is, recognises in Frances and to a lesser extent her siblings some sort of opening to the future. Han seems to represent blockage – and indeed does so quite effectively – but she is open to the future in a minute, if not necessarily inspirational, way. Greaves does not mention Aunt Han in her analysis of the novel, but the generational and attitudinal dynamics of Serpent’s Delight are hard to process without her. In her inconspicuous way, Han has a moral breakthrough that, however limited, is more real and lasting than Geraldine’s feigned miracle.
Park’s concern is less with spirituality than with the life of the Pond family and the role Geraldine’s revelation plays in that life. Ann and Brisley have a kind of rivalry with Geraldine and get lost. They injure themselves on a cliff walk because they are trying to compete with Geraldine in not being ordinary. They have each other, though, whereas Geraldine has only herself. That Carrie’s ex-husband, who impresses his ex-wife by rescuing their daughter and her boyfriend from a cliff, is himself named ‘Cliff’ doubles how Ann and Brisley’s cliff adventure is at once a rebellious stunt and a performative instance of compulsory heterosexuality. The heterosexual realisation of Ann and Brisley contrasts with Geraldine’s non-reproductive spirituality, which does not require a male partner or realisation. Even her visions are of Mary, not of Jesus or a masculinised God. Ann reunites Cliff and Carrie in a ‘comedy of remarriage’, to use Stanley Cavell’s term. The same feeling that Rowena Darcy (Roie) and Charlie Rothe have in The Harp in the South of ‘the commencement of an entirely new life’ (282) is experienced by Cliff and Carrie similarly, with the difference that is it is not a new feeling, but a renewed feeling. Indeed, Cliff at first resents being ‘part of Ann’s baggage’ (199), even as he comes to realise that his daughter is the key to his sundered marriage’s regeneration. The Cliff-Carrie and Brisley plot stands as the mundane counterpart to the spiritual renewal presaged by Geraldine’s visions. But the difference is that the remarriage and family continuance actually happen, and it is just the prospect of such mundane regenerative events that spur Geraldine to jealousy and forged miracle.
This is not to say that the novel favours the reproductive over the non-reproductive. Instead, Geraldine has sought to fetishise her non-reproductivity into being a spiritual message. This is, though, achieved in a non-institutional way. It is different from the obvious and rather immured celibate path assumed by Sister Polycarp, whose agency cannot be reintroduced into the family from the convent where she most likely exercises such agency. Geraldine behaves as she does precisely because she feels in danger of being outflanked by her siblings’ reproductivity and the proliferation of their families. Geraldine’s rivalry and her necessary assertion of non-reproductivity take a strictly spiritual form. After all, a miracle is inherently reproductive because it beckons to the future and acts as a portent, a kind of prophecy, as seen in the most famous Catholic miracle of the twentieth century, the 1917 visions at Fatima.. As Greaves comments, during the first half of the twentieth century, ‘the cult of the Virgin Mary was very strong within the Catholic Church’ (106). Although, as Carole Cusack comments, Australian Marian apparitions can have their own local valence and are not merely reproductions of global Catholic phenomena, the resonance of Fatima with its ‘passionately anti-Communist’ message (118) remains the preeminent Marian apparition of the first half of the twentieth century. Geraldine is surely mimicking the Fatima event in her claims for her own distinction. Geraldine’s forged miracle is an attempt to escape the future designed for her, which involves working in a hospital in Wollongong. This miracle-fakery lacks a clear future objective. Des and Elva, though hardly blissfully happy, have produced eight children, and their adoption of contraception – a key backdrop of the novel, as Greaves points out – will at least prevent further enlargement of their family (109). Cliff and Carrie repair or strengthen their marriage, Sister Polycarp remains in the church, while Geraldine is alone and futile (although not necessarily condemned for that). Geraldine’s response may even be the justified ressentiment of someone occluded by the hegemony of the heteronormative, yet it does mean that any positive family developments in her sisters’ lives further accentuate her unmarried state. As Levin, the New York Times reviewer, noted, family ‘alignments’ do see ‘change’ in the novel (Levin 190). In particular, Cliff rediscovers the wife and daughter from whom the divorce had sundered him. Cliff should know Ann already because she is his daughter. But he has to rediscover her presence and get over his annoyance at Carrie for having had an abortion, which was the primary cause of their divorce. That Cliff and Carrie’s marriage is reconstituted, and that Ann and Brisley rescued from danger on the cliff seem poised to become another positive heterosexual couple, bears some measure of not just personal but social hope. It is a needed and structurally vital counterpoint to the tragedy of Wally and Geraldine. In a Pond family that, in general, does not seem able to square their fortunes with those of Australia or even Australian Catholicism as a whole, this betokens at least a mildly social portent, even though any spirituality is left very implicit.
Modern Hopes and Realities
Geraldine’s visions, though, claim potential significance beyond her family circle, her local parish, or even Australian Catholicism. They are meant to, and for a brief time resound within the disillusion and alienation of the modern world. If Park had allowed the reader ever to entertain Geraldine’s visions seriously as being genuine, or even if Geraldine herself had felt them to be, Park could have inquired into the possibility of belief in an alienated and disillusioned world in ways that would have made Serpent’s Delight resonate more in a post-war transnational Catholic context than it did. As it is, the novel is less concerned with belief or unbelief than with the dangers of epistemic reduction. A mechanistic sense of guilt occasions Geraldine’s confession. Geraldine supposes, in a very reductive and punitive way, that God will make her father better if she admits culpability. All this admission does, though, is end up killing her father, indicating that Geraldine would have been better off, even if not maintaining the charade, at least letting her father’s hopes down more gently and less bluntly. This sad dénouement indicates that both religious and secular modes of reduction are dangerous. While recovering from his first stroke Wally muses on the visit he had made to the City Refuge. Seeing the poor people there awakened him to life’s injustices. It revealed a dark and tingling river flowing just beneath the notice of ordinary life, a secret tide of solitariness: ‘Until that night, the worse things, the dereliction and loneliness of mankind, the innate injustice of life, had been only words to him, but now he knew’ (202). In another situation, this might disclose a socially redemptive epiphany, an urge, or a mission to do good for or to help others. But Wally is ‘alone with his knowledge’ and cannot share it with his family; it is simultaneously social, solitary and spiritual. Wally Pond experiences a deeper spiritual breakthrough by reaching out to the poor than anyone else in the family. A secret tide of solitariness may seem both isolated and impersonal. However, the sheer force of this tide draws Wally into solidarity with others who are also solitary, yet potentially united in their solitariness. They are, at least potentially, bonded by their mutual awareness of something, whether spiritual or social, that exists beyond themselves.
If Geraldine Pond is the protagonist of Serpent’s Delight as the central figure of the action, then it is her father, Wally, who undergoes the most significant transformation in the book. Typically, in mid-century novels, it is the younger generation, those who matured during the Second World War, who bear the burden of understanding and embodying ‘modernity.’ However, in Serpent’s Delight, it is Wally – despite the book focusing on his death and bodily decline – who achieves the greatest psychological insight and attains a more expansive and implicitly modern sense of the world than he had at the story’s beginning. Although the book’s alternate titles, The Good Looking Women and Serpent’s Delight, refer to femininity and despite the novel being dominated by female characters, including the four Pond daughters and prominent granddaughters, the ultimate crisis is one of masculinity. Wally Pond is initially described as a vigorous sixty-two-year-old, still engaged in physically demanding work and capable of emitting a ‘gust of masculinity’ when he enters a room (16). However, this vitality does not last forever, and Geraldine’s efforts to preserve it ultimately accelerate his decline, partially causing his two strokes. With the seemingly robust Wally perched on the cliff of vulnerability (the novel’s dominant image), Geraldine’s ‘visions’ protest not only against her unmarried state and impending ‘exile’ to Wollongong but also against the inevitability of her father’s deterioration. Her idealisation of her father’s masculine potency hinders her emotional growth and serves as a restraint against the modernity that intermittently and asymmetrically affects the lives of her sisters, Elva and Carrie.
The friendship between Wally and Arthur Gosling, his one-time business partner in the coach-building enterprise, is Arthur’s major connection outside his biological family. That Arthur’s name is Gosling, signifying reproductivity, is notable, as he lives with his sister Char and thus by the very nature of things hatches no goslings. Arthur’s non-reproductivity links him with both Geraldine and Sister Polycarp, and Wally is close to Arthur the way he is to no one else but Geraldine. After Wally has his convulsive epiphany among the poor, Arthur finds him, at once agitated and elevated: ‘It was here that Arthur Gosling found him. Waiting patiently in his own manner, for Wally to join him, and walk to work, he had seen the coachyard gate unlocked, and, after thinking seriously about it for ten minutes, had gone inside and looked around (187). Wally and Arthur do care for each other, within limits. This relationship is an important strand in the novel because it signifies the degree to which individual interpersonal relationships can or cannot sustain a sense of more general societal and spiritual hope.
But this individualised social solidarity is never generalised into an overall message of militancy, or of spiritually inflected sociality. Despite Park’s leftist sympathies, and what T. Inglis Moore called her ‘radical’ point of view (262), evident in her earlier fiction, the Catholicism of Serpent’s Delight is curiously neutral in political terms. There is an undeniable reference to the Cold War when ‘the Russians’ are mentioned as a threat (12), and in the Korean refugees that Des McNair, Elva’s husband, has seen in his military service in the Korean War. As Chris Maunder argued, the ‘Marian cult’ played a key role in the Cold War (131). Importantly, the Cold War injected Australia into transnational space not just as an ally of the United States but as an opponent of the Soviet Union, linking Australian events not just to American transnational contexts but, in an inverse way, to Soviet ones as well. As an example, Morris West’s Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), which novel became a bestseller in the United States, made news not because it was a suspenseful novel about a Pope but because it was a suspenseful novel about a Ukrainian Pope from behind the Iron Curtain. Its success in American cultural space came because it solicited, inversely and negatively, Soviet cultural space. It was in the Cold War that Australia, however, constrained in its freedom of action by the US alliance, found a role to play not just as a British dependency. Park’s US reception as an Australian author who did not have to be processed through or approved by British taste was reflective of this larger situation. Serpent’s Delight thus has a tacit, but tangible, political torque.
There is also a discernible economic torque in the novel and even a very mild sense of class critique. The Ponds have passed their best days financially but are not poor. Irishness, so evident in Park’s earlier fiction with the ‘Brodies and Caseys and Murphys and O’Briens’ as paraded in the first page of The Harp in the South (1) and so strongly associated with neutrality and anti-Britishness (see Wills) by Ireland’s posture in the Second World War, is absent here. Indeed, the Ponds do not seem ethnically marked. There is no sense of the Ponds facing discrimination because they are Catholic. Pond as a name is monosyllabic and reflects the natural world like ‘Park’ does. Furthermore, Mandy Treagus has recently argued, that ponds are linked to identities that transgress national boundaries. This might thus mark Park’s Pond family out as generically Anglo-Celtic, but not specifically Irish or otherwise ethnically anchored. The name ‘Pond’ also seems slightly satiric or derisive, in not being a usual surname and in referring to an entity, a pond, that is unglamorous, near-at-hand, and ‘more beneath notice’ than other features of the landscape (Birns 47). The Pond family seems somewhat in the situation limned by the American sociologist Will Herberg who contended in Protestant, Catholic Jew (1956) – a book published by Doubleday six years before Park’s novel was published by that same firm – that Catholicism could, in a time of anti-Communism, be accepted as a palatable player in a multiple, but decidedly Judeo-Christian and believing religious tableau. Park seems to want to analyse spirituality and the Catholic Church in isolation, and not to mark it by any inflection that would mark it temporally.
This disinclination concerning the immediate context is thematised within the novel by Geraldine faking the miracle simply because she does not want to leave home, and not wanting to leave simply because she does not want her father to grow old. That her deception causes the aging and death of her father is on the verge of allegory, suggesting that attempts to evade time only serve to tighten its grip. Clock time, biological time, the time moved by, as Kenneth Slessor would say, ‘by little fidget wheels’, would not permit Wally not to age. Clock time will not be swayed by any spiritual factors. But the time of the Church, which presumably would be deeper time, more patient time, again in Slessorian terms ‘the flood that does not flow’, also succumbs to the same mistake. The Church opts for the quick fix of Geraldine’s fake visions rather than seeing the genuine spiritual enlightenment represented by Wally’s epiphany, where the ‘dark river overflowed its banks’ (238). Instead of being properly sceptical of Geraldine’s miracle in the interests of long-term institutional viability, the Church latches onto it because it is desperate to feel relevant in modernity. Indeed, the all-capitalised headline, ‘MIRACLE CLAIMED IN SYDNEY SUBURB’ (124), recalls the publicity generated by the (manufactured) miracle words in the spiderweb in E. B. White’s 1952 children’s novel Charlotte’s Web, suggesting that Park was receptive to influences from the United States even as her work was being published there. Intriguingly, this solicitation of miraculous claims, and concurrent exposure of their falsity, transpires in a Cold War context where, both in the United States and Australia, Catholicism was being welcomed into the mainstream in a way it had not before because of Catholic anti-communism, and the way that, in settler polities increasingly aware of their multiculturalism, European Catholics, in the famous phrase of Noel Ignatiev, ‘became white’. Des McNair, Wally’s son-in-law, is among the least spiritual characters in the book, but he intuits the full sense of the religious dilemma of the novel. Des watches how poor people go to church, and in search of ‘assurance’ and ‘comfort’, hopes that remind Des of faces he has seen of ‘starving Korean refugees’ (159). Des scowls as Rosa Pond shows her rosary beads to a congregant, who gets a momentary thrill on thinking they are Geraldine’s. But Des is immune to such elevation. ‘Towing his mother-in-law, Des barged through, past the dark brothers, who smouldered at him but did not move’ (159). Serpent’s Delight does not mock people who have spiritual hopes. But it insists that these hopes must fully encounter the ‘terse, cold realities’ of Christianity, which the hype around Geraldine’s ‘miracle’ has tried to mask. By inference, the realities of the secular world are no less terse and cold. Two years after Park's novel was published, Herbert Marcuse released his influential book One-Dimensional Man (1964), which worried that modernity, for all its advantages and improvements, had flattened humanity onto a one-dimensional rationality that made people mere cogs in corporate, bureaucratic and conformist machines. With the proviso that a one-dimensional spirituality would be as reductive as a one-dimensional rationalism, for Park the plural possibility of many people possibly having a secret tide of solitariness within them is the only counter to one-dimensional reduction. In other words, the possibility of miracles discloses, on the ontological level, the presence of the divine; but it also discloses, on the level of potentiality. That there is more than one way to conceive existence. The twentieth-century possibility of miracles could be seen as the inverse of the pluralism that the rise of rationalistic and humanistic modes of thought in the early modern period signalled with respect to the hegemony of Christian assumptions. In both cases, a sense of ‘pluralism and mutual fragilization’ could be introduced (Taylor 532), which meant there was more than one possibility.
Serpent’s Delight is in many ways two novels in one – the story of Geraldine’s forged miracle and the story of the decline and possible renewal of an Australian family. Whereas, for all the setbacks and travails that occur in The Harp in the South, the Darcy family, at the end of that book, is seen as ‘lucky’ (Harp in the South 301) in the lucky country (see Horne) at arguably its luckiest moment, the Ponds are at least ambiguously down on their luck. The alternate titles of this novel, Serpent’s Delight and The Good Looking Women, display this duality, which can either be seen as an aesthetic weakness or a complicating thematic strength. Greaves notes that the novel’s approach is ‘not simply realistic, sociological, feminist, historical, or cultural but a combination of all these viewpoints’ (116). Especially given the novel’s brevity and its profusion of characters, this makes for a canvas that is both compressed and laden with potential. Even if there is no Eureka moment, besides Wally’s epiphany, of either spiritual or social meaning, there is still a sense, despite the fiasco of Geraldine’s claims and Wally’s sad fate, that other elements of the family are moving in positive directions. This discursive situation may mirror the condition of the Ponds: straitened in a predictable, routine milieu with few genuine possibilities, but also possessing surprising potential to show how, despite the bogus nature of miracles as depicted, spirituality can still express itself socially in modernity. If there is no collective solution either religious or social, the secret tide of solitariness can meaningfully illuminate individual lives and direct them towards a path of greater realisation.