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Tuesday 28 August 2012

A Wreath of Roses (1949) by ELIZABETH TAYLOR


Virago Modern Classics UK, 2011


 
 
 
Once the train which had left them on the platform had drawn out, the man and woman trod separately up and down, read time-tables in turn, were conscious of one another in the way that strangers are, when thrown together without a reason for conversation.  A word or two would have put them at their ease, but there were no words to say.  The heat of the afternoon was beyond comment and could not draw them together as hailstones might have done.  They had nothing to do, but to walk up and down or sit for a moment on the blistering-hot, slatted seat.



 

 

The Novel:  A man and woman, complete strangers to each other, find themselves sharing a deserted railway platform on what appears to be an ordinary summer afternoon.  They are bored, hot and eager for their train to pull in so they can board it and hopefully reach their destination –– the quiet English village of Abingford –– before nightfall.


 

Then an event occurs which binds them to each other in a way that neither could have foreseen prior to their arrival at the station.  Without warning, an unknown man jumps from the overhead rail bridge into the path of an oncoming express train.  Unfortunately he misses the engine, breaking his back and dying a slow painful death outside the station-master's office while a small crowd gathers round to watch.  The woman, whose name is Camilla, is understandably horrified by the incident, while the man –– a war veteran and would-be writer named Richard Elton –– seems curiously unmoved by it, almost dismissive of what might have prompted the man to take his own life in such a gruesomely public fashion.  

 

Nevertheless, Camilla finds herself attracted to Richard as they sit chatting in their now-moving carriage, deliberately and self-consciously striving to put the awful tragedy behind them.  Is this the unexpected beginning, she wonders, of the whirlwind holiday romance she's always dreamed of having with a handsome stranger?  How will her friends Liz and Frances react if she spends the holiday that she's meant to be spending with them being wined and dined by this dashing young ex-Army commando?  Underpinning Camilla's fantasy is the unwelcome knowledge that she's approaching middle-age and this may well be her last chance to find a husband before she becomes the spinster she's always feared she was destined to become. 

 

Camilla arrives in Abingford to find Liz waiting for her at the station with her new baby.  She says goodbye to Richard and soon finds herself drawn into the familiar holiday world of life in Frances' house.  Frances, a painter and Liz's former governess, is her stubborn inscrutable self while Liz seems overly preoccupied with her baby and the difficulties she's having in understanding and communicating with her husband –– a stuffy Anglican clergyman whom she's no longer certain she loves or ever should have married.  Camilla feels excluded from her friends' lives, isolated as much by her fear that her own life is passing her by as she is by their inability to comprehend the significance of what she and Richard experienced on the railway platform together.  Feeling lonely and a little depressed about returning to her everyday life as a teacher at a girl's school, she's only too glad to allow Richard to buy her a drink when they meet by chance in the local pub a few days later.  He charms her with his easy grace and talk of the struggles he's having to start his book, their mutual loneliness suggesting that a more intimate relationship might be on the horizon –– a hope seemingly dashed a few nights later when Camilla spots him squiring another woman round the town and returns alone to Frances' house determined to have nothing more to do with him.

 

The arrival of film director Morland Beddoes – a collector of Frances' work who has always revered her even though they've never met – appears to offer some respite from the ennui that seems to be dominating the lives of the three women.  Liz cannot seem to get through to her husband or accept the role of mother and housewife that's been thrust upon her by agreeing to marry him, while Frances continues to question the value of her art and struggles to deny the effects that old-age and recurring thoughts of death are having on her creativity.  Richard, in the meantime, is gradually revealed to be the liar and dreamer he has secretly been all his life, confessing to his diary all the failures and unfulfilled longings that his charm and good looks have allowed him to keep hidden from the world up till now.  He's attracted to Camilla, it turns out, not because he wants to sleep with her but, on the contrary, because he possesses no sexual desire for her whatsoever.  He's far from being the prospective suitor she still imagines him to be, as a walk they take together – during which he explains that his interest in the other woman was only physical and they are forced to take shelter in an abandoned tea shop during a storm – all too soon reveals.  Nothing is resolved and Camilla remains as uncertain about her future at the end of her holiday as she was when it began. 

 

 

Penguin Books UK, 1984

 

 

In her introduction to the 2011 Virago edition of A Wreath of Roses, Helen Dunmore makes the point that the book is set in a time when 'The aftertaste of World War Two is still on everybody's tongue.'  It's an important statement to consider when reading the novel and one which permeates it in several insidious, albeit far from obvious ways.  

 

The post-war era was a time of great deprivation and even greater uncertainty for most people, particularly if they were British or European and especially if they happened to be women.  Many men – husbands, fathers, lovers, brothers –– had perished in the war and the role women would be allowed (the word 'allowed' is a deliberately chosen one in this context) to play in the building of the new, allegedly better peacetime society had yet to be defined or even intelligently discussed.  Marriage and motherhood had suddenly become luxuries, akin to the butter, meat and eggs that were still being rationed by the newly elected Labour government to help repay Britain's economy-crippling war loans.  

 

Add to this the myriad of social and psychological difficulties faced by thousands of returning soldiers – men for whom violence had become an everyday occurrence and whose inability to cope with the sudden wrench back to civilian life frequently expressed itself in what would nowadays be called dysfunctional or even sociopathic behaviour –– and the prospects of a middle-aged woman finding a man to love and marry were grim to say the least, a fact which assumes a more sinister significance given that the character of Richard was allegedly based on real-life British con man and murderer Neville Heath who charmed his two victims by pretending to be a decorated soldier before sexually torturing and brutally murdering them.  Heath was executed for his crimes in 1946 but the memory of what he did, and the psychopathic narcissism which drove him to commit such vicious crimes, would remain firmly fixed in the public consciousness for decades to come.

 

Taylor's gifts as a novelist were so immense, her eye for the subtle yet telling detail so unerringly accurate, that it seems impossible her work could have been so unjustly overlooked for so long.  In addition to writing beautifully and very movingly about nature –– so much so that the natural world becomes a kind of unnamed extra character in A Wreath of Roses, adding another dimension to its never quite specified yet palpable sense of menace – she also possessed a rare power to lead the reader deeply into the lives, fears and thwarted desires of her characters, all of whom she drew with an idiosyncratic and uncannily successful mixture of compassion, humour and relentless honesty.  While A Wreath of Roses is perhaps not her best-known novel, it ranks alongside Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and Sherwood Anderson's 1919 masterpiece Winesburg, Ohio as one of the most valuable studies of human isolation ever committed to print, a novel as memorable for its masterful blending of ambivalence and duplicity as it is for its probing social realism.

 

 



ELIZABETH TAYLOR, c 1965

 

 

 

The Writer:  In her 2002 memoir Slipstream, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard recalls her first meeting with Elizabeth Taylor, whom she had been given the task of interviewing live-to-camera for a 1960s television program called Something To Read.  

 

'Elizabeth sat quietly opposite me,' Howard wrote, 'her large, extremely beautiful hazel eyes fixed attentively on me each time I asked her a question, to which she answered either yes or no.  In less than a minute I had none left Later we sat under fluorescent lighting at a Formica table with cups of rotten grey instant coffee and her shyness remained impenetrable.  After that I read everything she'd written and, much later, got to know and love her, but then it was all courtesy and embarrassment.'  When asked, years later, to write Taylor's biography by her husband, Howard refused, explaining that like Jane Austen – the novelist to whom she has been most frequently compared – her friend had 'led a life that contained very little incident.'

 

Elizabeth Taylor (née Coles) was born in Reading on 3 July 1912, the daughter of an insurance inspector and a housewife.  She was educated at the Abbey School in Reading and worked as a governess and then as a librarian before meeting her businessman husband, John Taylor, and marrying him in 1936.  Soon after their marriage they moved to the town of Penn, in Buckinghamshire, where they would stay for the rest of their lives.  Unusually for someone who lived in such a parochial, upper middle class community, Taylor became a member of the Communist Party and remained an unapologetic Labour supporter for the rest of her life.  It was during her time as a Communist that she met and fell in love with a man named Ray Russell –– an affair which endured, despite his imprisonment in a German POW camp and other separations, for twelve years.  The letters she and Russell wrote to each other, which miraculously survived Taylor's edict that all her correspondence should be burned after her death, were quoted by Nicola Beauman in her 2009 biography with the full consent of Taylor's husband, who knew of the affair and apparently gave Ms Beauman his permission to use them.  Taylor's children, however, thought this a shocking betrayal of their mother's wish to protect her private life and angrily disassociated themselves from the project, delaying publication of the book by several years.

 

Despite this whiff of scandal, Taylor seemed to exemplify Gustave Flaubert's maxim that a writer should be 'regular and orderly' in their lives so they could be 'violent and original' in their work.  She published her first novel, titled At Mrs Lippincote's, in 1945, by which time she had given birth to her children and settled in to what must have seemed to many of her 'literary' friends – who would eventually include fellow novelists Elizabeth Bowen and Ivy Compton-Burnett (who once described her as 'a young woman who looks as if she never had to wash her gloves!') and the critic Robert Liddell – a life of bland, even stifling domesticity.  She wrote, she said, 'slowly and without enjoyment' and liked to plan out her novels 'while doing the ironing.'  She disliked 'much travel or change' and said that she preferred the days 'to come round all the same week after week.'  Yet she created a body of work – twelve perfectly crafted novels, five story collections and the children's book Mossy Trotter –– that are as artful, evocative and original as anything published in the English-speaking world between the end of the World War Two and the mid-1970s. 

 

 

Perspehone Press UK, 2009

 

 

Taylor's failure to reach a wider public was a combination of her almost pathological shyness, her decision to consciously shun all but the most basic publicity and the widely-held misconception that her novels were 'too domestic' to merit serious critical attention.  Nor did it help that she had a much more famous namesake who happened to be the most headline-grabbing, extravagantly paid movie star of her era.  But Taylor had her revenge of a sort, describing the star, funnily and a little cattily, as 'the blowsy Mrs Burton' in her penultimate 1971 novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.

 

Taylor was diagnosed with breast cancer in the early 1970s and agreed to undergo a mastectomy in the hope the operation might prolong her life.  Unfortunately, the procedure failed to permanently halt the spread of the disease and she died in Penn, at the age of sixty-three, on 19 November 1975.  Her final novel, Blaming, was published in 1976.  Several film adaptations of her work have appeared in recent years, including Angel (2007) directed by François Ozon and featuring Romola Garai in the title role and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (2005) starring Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend.


 

 

 

The work of ELIZABETH TAYLOR has undergone a long overdue revival in recent years, with the UK publishing house Virago reissuing all twelve of her novels and the first-ever collection of her complete short stories (published in June 2012 to mark the hundredth anniversary of her birth) in handsome new editions featuring specially-commissioned introductions written by her friends and admirers (or, in the case of the story collection, by her daughter JOANNA KINGHAM).  

 
 
 
Use the link below to read the 2007 article by BENJAMIN SCHWARZ in The Atlantic which began the revival of interest in her work:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The controversial 2009 biography –– The Other Elizabeth Taylor by NICOLA BEAUMAN –– may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider.


 
 
 
Use the links below to watch a 1987 BBC TV adaptation (posted on YouTube in very low quality) of A Wreath of Roses, starring JOANNA McCALLUM as Camilla, TREVOR EVE as Richard and ELIZABETH RICHARDSON as Liz and read a thought-provoking review of A Wreath of Roses written by SIMON THOMAS and posted on his excellent literature blog Stuck in a Book:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 

 
 
 
 
Those interested in such things can use this link to read more about the life and crimes of 1940s British murderer NEVILLE HEATH, who was also the inspiration for the character of Ernest Ralph Gorse, the protagonist of a trilogy of remarkable novels by PATRICK HAMILTON –– including The West Pier (1951), Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) and Unknown Assailant (1955) –– collectively known as The Gorse Trilogy.
 
 
 



 

 

 

 

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Last updated 23 September 2021 §
 

Tuesday 21 August 2012

The Write Advice 018: KEITH RIDGWAY


I love hearing from people who have no time for fiction.  Who read only biographies and popular science.  I love hearing about the death of the novel.  I love getting lectures about the triviality of fiction, the triviality of making things up.  As if that wasn’t what all of us do, all day long, all life long.  Fiction gives us everything.  It gives us our memories, our understanding, our insight, our lives.  We use it to invent ourselves and others.  We use it to feel change and sadness and hope and love and to tell each other about ourselves. And we all, it turns out, know how to do it.

'Everything is Fiction' [The New Yorker, 8 August 2012]



Use the link below to read an excerpt from the 2012 article by KEITH RIDGWAY:

 

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/everything-is-fiction

 

 

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The Write Advice 033: TAMA JANOWITZ

  
The Write Advice 038: NICK HORNBY

 
The Write Advice 048: HILARY MANTEL

  

Monday 13 August 2012

Voss (1957) by PATRICK WHITE


Knopf/Random House Centenary Edition, 2012


 

 

As the evening was approaching, he resolved to camp there in the elbow of the river, and sent the natives back to convey his intention to the other members of the party.  In consequence the leader was left alone for some little time, and then the immensity of his presumption did accuse him.  The dome of silence was devoid of all furniture, even of a throne.  So he began pulling logs together, smashing sticks, crumbling scrub, and was building their first fire.  Sympathy, brilliance, warmth did not, however, immediately leap forth, only a rather disappointing flame.  It was a very human fire.  Walking up and down, its maker was overcome by the distance between aspiration and human nature.  The latter, it appeared, was almost inescapable, like those men whose dust he could already see.  Fidgeting in a similar dust, his spurs accused him of his own failures. 
     Of which we must make the most, Laura Trevelyan implied.

 



 

The NovelAn arrogant German-born explorer, Johann Ulrich Voss, decides, almost arbitrarily, to lead an expedition consisting of half a dozen untrained men into the unexplored heart of arid nineteenth century Australia.  The expedition is only weeks away from departing when Voss finds himself inexplicably drawn to an unmarried English woman named Laura Trevelyan –– an orphan who lives with her prosperous merchant uncle, scatterbrained aunt and pretty younger cousin in what was then (and still is) the genteel Sydney suburb of Potts Point.  

 

Voss sets off for the bush without bothering to propose to Laura but soon regrets his mistake and writes to her, offering to marry her in the unlikely event that he and his party return alive from their courageous if foolhardy exploratory journey.  His letter eventually finds its way to Laura, who struggles at first to know what to make of his unprecedented and wholly unexpected proposal.  She hardly knew this strange haughty German fellow, who seemed to despise her and everything she stood for on the few socially awkward occasions when politeness required her to endure his far from sparkling company.  Nevertheless, she finds herself agreeing to marry him, recognising in her fiancée's haughtiness and God-defying arrogance a spirit as proud, indomitable and difficult to fathom as her own.  

 

From that moment on, even though the harsh realities encountered by Voss on his expedition make it impossible for him to communicate with Laura again, their lives become inextricably linked in a way that goes beyond ordinary human affection and even, at times, that of ordinary human emotion.  As Voss and his men endure disillusion, illness, deprivation and starvation during their arduous and increasingly futile journey towards the never-sighted west coast of Australia, the bond between the explorer and his fiancée grows ever stronger until she becomes a genuine living presence in his life, their uncanny spiritual connection never waning for an instant even though time and distance continually conspire to sever it.

 

 

Vintage Books UK, 1994

 

 

From what, on the surface, appears to be a relatively simple tale of love and colonial exploration, White created a novel of incredible spiritual depth and occasionally challenging complexity.  Johann Ulrich Voss is anything but the stereotypical nineteenth century explorer, setting off to conquer the Great Unknown for scientific, commercial, patriotic or even cartographic purposes.  His journey is as much an inward-looking spiritual one as it is an outward-looking physical one, an attempt, as he describes it, to 'discard the inessential and to attempt the infinite' and thereby discover his own unique 'genius.'  As White himself put it in a letter to his US publisher Ben Huebsch:  'I wanted to write the story of a grand passionIt is different from other grand passions in that it grows in the minds of the two people concerned more through the stimulus of their surroundings and through almost irrelevant incidents.  Voss and Lauraeven find each other partly antipathetic.  Yet, Voss writes proposing to the girl on one of the early stages of the journey, partly out of vanity, and partly because he realises he is already lost; she accepts, partly out of a desire to save him from his delusions of divinity; partly out of a longing for religious faith, to which she feels she can only return to through love'  The novel explores the nature and meaning of love on many different levels – love between an eccentric man and an equally eccentric woman, love between a leader and the otherwise incompatible travelling companions whom fate and his own rampant egotism have bound together in a punishing test of mutual adversity, the love a human being may or may not feel for God even as he or she resents His omnipotence and seeks in vain for concrete proof of His existence.   

 

Voss is also a remarkably vivid examination of the mindset of colonial Australia –– a place where true men of vision were in very short supply but were seldom welcomed and appreciated when they appeared.  Laura's struggles –– to gain the acceptance and respect of her acquaintances and her straitlaced aunt and uncle, to overcome the restrictions placed upon women by rigid codes of behaviour which seek to reduce them to no more than subservient breeders of future generations –– are as taxing in their way as Voss's misguided attempts to explore a country whose vastness he cannot begin to fathom but is nevertheless determined to press on and 'conquer' even if doing so results in the annihilation of himself and all his men.

 

White's novel was also unusual for its time in its portrayals of Aboriginal people and Aboriginal culture, both of which are depicted without the slightest hint of disrespect or patronage.  The young blackfeller Jackie, who accompanies Voss on his expedition and becomes a kind of Judas figure to his shabby colonial Christ (the character of Voss was very loosely based on the Prussian-born explorer Ludwig Leichhardt who is believed to have perished some time after April 1848 while attempting to cross Australia's Great Sandy Desert), is possibly the most important and vividly drawn character in the book after Laura and the explorer himself.  White realised, at a time when such realisations were far from common in everyday Australia, that the country is and always will be the property of its traditional indigenous owners –– arguably the only people truly capable of understanding it in the way that an 'outsider' like Voss so eagerly yet hopelessly yearns to do.  Few novels, before or since, have succeeded in capturing the eeriness and desolation of the Australian outback in quite the way that White captures it in Voss.  His greatest novel is as vast, mysterious and powerful as the uncharted territories of land and soul it so hauntingly describes.

 



PATRICK WHITE, c 1950

 

 

The WriterPatrick Victor Martindale White was born on 28 May 1912 in London, where his English-born Australian parents Dick and Ruth were holidaying at the time.  Home for them, however, was not England, but 'Bolaro' a sheep station located not far from the small town of Adaminaby in the picturesque Southern Highlands region of New South Wales.

 

The family returned to Sydney when White was six months old, where they lived on Philip Street in the heart of the city in separate but adjoining flats – one occupied by Dick and Ruth and the other occupied by young 'Paddy,' his strict Irish nanny Lizzie Galloway and, in time, his younger sister Suzanne.  White was a sickly child who spent much of his time in bed recovering from the chronic asthma attacks which prevented him from making friends with other children but gave him plenty of time to discover the absorbing world of books.  His favourite story was The Swiss Family Robinson and the affection it inspired in him as a boy was something he would retain all his life.  'One seems to pass over,' he later wrote, 'and go on living in them [ie. the beloved books of childhood] for ever after.  I think possibly it is because they give one glimpses of a heartbreaking perfection one will never achieve, whether it is the rather comic, homespun achievements of the Swiss Family, the perfect refuge of The Secret Garden, the interiors and scenes of family life in Tolstoy.'

 

At ten White was sent to boarding school, where he struggled to fit in with his less precocious classmates.  When financial trouble caused the school to close, its headmaster suggested that he be sent to England to complete his education –– a suggestion his loyal, Empire-supporting parents were happy to accept.  White described the time he spent as a boarder at Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire as 'a four year prison sentence.'  Nevertheless, he would remain in England until the age of seventeen, forming few close friendships but developing a love for the theatre which, until the composition of fiction took over as the guiding passion of his life, led to him seriously considering the idea of pursuing a career on the stage.

 

His parents, worried that his artistic ambitions would interfere with their plans for him to return to Australia and play his appointed role in the family business, agreed that he could give acting a try on the understanding that he returned to Bolaro and worked there as a stockman, or jackaroo, for two years.  White consented to this arrangement, writing three unpublished novels in secret when he wasn't busy herding sheep, and did not return to England until 1932, when he entered King's College, Cambridge to read for a degree in Modern Languages.  It was during his time at Cambridge that he fell deeply in love for the first time with a divinity student who, like him, had made several unsuccessful attempts to deny his homosexuality.  

 

 Portrait by ROY DE MAISTRE, 1939

 

 

After gaining his Bachelor of Arts degree, White went to live in London, where in 1936 he met and began an affair with the painter Roy de Maistre – a man eighteen years his senior who became his artistic mentor and encouraged him to rewrite one of the manuscripts, originally written while sheep farming at Bolaro, that in 1939 would become his first published novel Happy Valley.  During his stay in London, White also wrote poetry and several unproduced plays, living a comfortable life on the £10,000 inheritance he received following his father's death in 1937.  

 

White's inheritance enabled him to visit New York in April 1939 and to cross the continent by train, a journey that included a pilgrimage to DH Lawrence's last home in New Mexico and, thanks to his new lover Walter 'Spud' Johnson, a meeting with Lawrence's widow Frieda.  White later travelled, alone, to Cape Cod, where he immediately resumed work on his second novel The Living and the DeadHe could quite easily have stayed in the United States and was urged by many of his friends to do precisely that.  But he eventually decided that he must return to England to play some role, however small, in the war.  'I am doing this,' he wrote to Johnson in July 1940, 'from no personal desire — my life here has been too happy and in every way satisfactory — but just because I don't feel I can ignore the war altogether.  I've got to go through some of that,' he concluded, 'before I can enjoy something else — I hope — as a permanent state.'  By September of that year he was once again in London, working for Foreign Relations Department of the Red Cross, where he was tasked with the difficult job of trying to track down '…the missing in the various dead countries of Europe.'  In the meantime, he did all he could to obtain a commission in the Royal Air Force.

 

White received his commission in November and spent the next six years serving as an RAF Intelligence Officer in Egypt, Palestine and Greece.  In July 1941, while stationed in Alexandria, he met a young Greek named Manoly Lascaris – the man he called 'my sweet reason' who would soon become his lover and eventually (although not always happily) his lifelong partner.  White returned to Sydney in late 1946 and Lascaris agreed to join him there, arriving by flying boat in February 1948 after months of separation and uncertainty caused by difficulties in Lascaris obtaining permission to emigrate.  Within days of his arrival the two men bought a property called 'Dogwoods' in what was, at that time, still the semi-rural outer Sydney suburb of Castle Hill.  They would live and work at Dogwoods for the next eighteen years –– growing and selling flowers, vegetables and milk and breeding prize-winning Schnauzers while White wrote the novels –– The Tree of Man (1956), Voss (1957) and Riders in the Chariot (1961) – which established and consolidated his literary reputation both locally and abroad.  Unlike his contemporaries, White refused to flee Australia in search of a more liberal-minded atmosphere in which to live and work.  Australia was in his blood even if he felt, as he stated more than once, more like a Londoner in his heart.

 

 

PATRICK WHITE, c 1970

 

 

White's work was never as highly regarded in his native Australia as it was in North America and, to a lesser extent, Britain.  The Tree of Man, the novel that would secure him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, was panned by many local critics while their more astute North American counterparts found its densely allusive style to be the logical extension of the Modernist tradition established and practiced by an earlier generation of writers including DH Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.  (White has occasionally been called, and not without some justification in terms of regionality and density of style, the antipodean William Faulkner.)  Only with the publication of Voss in 1957, and his winning of the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award that same year, did his work begin to find some measure of acceptance (but not what could really be described as widespread popularity) in his homeland.  

 

One source of the writer's unpopularity was his prickly personality, which could be by turns outspoken, blackly pessimistic, belligerent and taciturn.  Although he and Lascaris had many friends, and made many more after selling their Castle Hill property in 1963 and moving to a new home near Sydney's Centennial Park, he was never an easy man to know, his moodiness, sarcasm and ability to hold a grudge alienating more than one old friend and prompting him to say, after being named the Australian of the Year for 1974:  'Something terrible happened to me last week. There is an organisation which chooses an Australian of the Year who has to appear at an official lunch in Melbourne Town Hall on Australia Day. This year I was picked on as they had run through all the swimmers, tennis players, yachtsmen.'  While he always claimed to love Australia, he never felt at ease with the fame it had begrudgingly bestowed on him as its most famous literary export and its sole recipient (so far) of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

 

In addition to his twelve published novels – which included another, equally brilliant 'colonial novel' A Fringe of Leaves (1976) – White also wrote eleven plays, the screenplay for the 1979 Australian film The Night the Prowler and an autobiography titled Flaws in the Glass which appeared, to the considerable astonishment of friends past and present, in 1981.  In 1986 Voss was adapted into an opera with music by composer Richard Meale and a libretto penned by White's fellow award-winning Australian novelist David Malouf.  

 

White died on 30 September 1990 and was unceremoniously cremated a few days later with no one in attendance as per the instructions left in his will.  A major biography, written with his approval by journalist David Marr, was published by Random House Australia in 1991 with an edited collection of the novelist's letters following it into print three years later.  White's partner Manoly Lascaris died in Sydney in 2003 at the age of ninety-one. 

 

 
2012 marks the centenary of the birth of PATRICK WHITE.  Use the link below to read a long and moving 2008 article about him and MANOLY LASCARIS by his biographer DAVID MARR:
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
Text Publishing reissued Happy Valley, the first novel by PATRICK WHITE, in August 2012 –– the first time the book has been reprinted in English since its original publication in 1939.  Use this link to visit the Text Publishing website and read more about what it calls 'the missing piece in the extraordinary jigsaw of White’s work.
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

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Last updated 22 September 2021 §