28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990
Even today, more than thirty years after his death, Patrick White remains a writer whose work has a tendency to polarize readers. Many consider him to be an authentic literary genius, the first Australian novelist qualified to take his place beside the earlier generation of Modernist writers that included James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. And then there are those — and, trust me, I've met my share of them — who blithely dismiss White's work as turgid, obscure, over-praised and basically unreadable, not only unrepresentative but also unfairly scornful of the country he stated many times he was 'fated' to live in despite his frequent criticisms of its people, politics and, in his day, its almost complete absence of anything resembling a unique cultural identity.
None of that, of course, would surprise White who, even after winning the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature, continued to be treated as something of a prophet without honour in his native land, an artist whose life in many ways reflected Australia's development from an isolated colonial outpost into a wealthy, post-industrial society complete with all the cultural advantages, and the many moral compromises, that typically drive such development. He remains, to my mind, the first and most adventurous explorer of what constitutes the 'Australian soul' and the literary export of whom we should arguably feel proudest.
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Random House Australia 1991
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Patrick White: A Life (1991) by DAVID MARR
David Marr was a young Sydney-based journalist, holder of a law degree and a former reporter for The Bulletin, when he began researching this biography of Australia's greatest living novelist in 1985. It was an immense project, spanning almost all of the nation's post-Federation history, that took him six years to complete even with the unstinting cooperation of his subject, a notoriously prickly individual who was nevertheless determined to ensure that the story of his life would be told as truthfully as possible.
Patrick White: A Life was published in 1991, a year after White's death on 30 September 1990, and remains both a remarkable feat of scholarship and of contemporary social history, a biography that tells the reader as much about the times its subject lived through as it does about his life, beliefs, loves, travels and sometimes bitter personal and political battles. What makes it all the more extraordinary is that White told his friend Desmond Digby that he disliked Marr when their paths first crossed in 1982, blaming the younger man for a bad review of his play Big Toys that appeared in The National Times, a newspaper Marr had been editing since 1980. What earned Marr the job of biographer was his open homosexuality — White did not believe his own homosexuality was the central issue of his life and wisely distrusted a heterosexual biographer not to exaggerate its importance — and his controversial 1980 biography of Australian Chief Justice Garfield Barwick. White liked the book, although as he confided to his friend Digby there were, in his view, 'obviously lots of mistakes in it.'
This was not to be the case with White's own biography. While the novelist was not offered the option to veto any part of the text he didn't like, he was granted the right to check the text for errors which he duly did in July 1990 two months before his death, going through the final draft with Marr sentence by sentence to ensure he was satisfied with it. 'He confessed he found the book so painful,' Marr later wrote, 'that he often found himself reading through tears. He did not ask me to cut or change a line.' While it's easy to understand why White may have found reading the book a painful experience — he had a lifelong habit of abruptly terminating friendships, including those with the poet and critic Geoffrey Dutton and the painter Sidney Nolan, whom he felt had betrayed their principles and begun to live in ways he could never approve of — it is the opposite of painful for the interested reader seeking insights into what made White's work so unusually compelling.
Marr takes us on a fascinating journey through the writer's long and complex life, beginning with his birth in London in 1912 to his return to the family property in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales to his enforced exile in an English boarding school and his beginnings as a novelist to his war service in the RAF and first encounter with Manoly Lascaris, the man he called 'my sweet reason,' whom he would live with for forty-nine not always harmonious years. Along the way we're introduced to his many friends and numerous enemies, a virtual 'who's who' of Australian culture from the late 1940s — when he returned to live in what was then the outer Sydney suburb of Castle Hill with Lascaris after abandoning an earlier plan to move to Greece — up till 1990. The text is well supported by hundreds of quotations from White's extensive collection of personal and business-related letters, the collecting of which was an arduous task in itself given his often stated wish that all his correspondence should be burned after his death.
The result is one of the truly great literary biographies, worthy of comparison with Richard Ellman's masterful 1959 (updated 1982) life of James Joyce, and arguably the best biography, along with Nadia Wheatley's 2001 examination of the life of writer and journalist Charmian Clift (someone, along with her husband the novelist George Johnston, whom White disliked despite never having met her), we're ever likely to see of an Australian author. The miracle, of course, is that White allowed the book to be written in the first place. 'Towards the end,' Marr tells us in his concluding note, 'I asked White why he had allowed anyone to write his life after saying so often and so vehemently that biographers should wait until he was dead. He replied that he was sick of the books academics had written about him and hoped a biographer might show him as a "real" person.' In that aim Marr admirably succeeded, offering us a portrait of a human being whose prodigious talent did not mask his many flaws and whose hatreds were just as important to the comprehension of his personality as his many fiercely guarded passions.
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Random House Australia 1994
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Patrick White Letters (1994) by DAVID MARR [editor]
It could be asked, and not without reason, why it was necessary to publish a separate collection of White's letters just three years after the appearance of David Marr's comprehensive, meticulously researched biography. Surely even the most avid White fan should have had their curiosity satisfied by that earlier volume? The answer to that question is 'Not necessarily.' While Marr did a fine job of narrating White's life, he was not the man who had lived it. Nor was he capable of describing its many triumphs and disappointments in his subject's own inimitable, richly textured prose.
It's an important distinction and one that explains both the need for and the appeal of this collection. This is White telling his own story as he lived it and, as such, serves as a valuable and never less than fascinating autobiographical document in its own right. It also contains a number of valuable letters — including those from the collections of long time correspondents Jean Scott Rogers, Frederick Glover and Cynthia Nolan and others from his niece Frances Richardson, the film director Joseph Losey and fellow novelists Edna O'Brien, Xavier Herbert and Randolph Stow — that were unavailable to Marr while he was researching his biography.
'These are the letters,' Marr noted in August 1994, 'of a great artist speaking his mind, a wise man who could be stubbornly wrong.' This could be the most accurate description of White's character ever written. White could be wrong — astonishingly so on occasion — but he was never one to second-guess himself once he'd passed judgement on a person or an event, be that judgement well-informed or embarrassingly unjustified or, as the case may have been, entirely appropriate. (See below for another example of his forthrightness and the damage it sometimes did to his reputation as both a writer and, toward the end of his life, as a frequently interviewed and widely quoted public figure.) His letters serve as ample proof of this, showing us a man who could be, by turns, taciturn, generous, ribald, dismissive, gloomy, self-dramatizing, romantic and, on occasion, maddeningly contrary. They also tell us quite a lot about the kind of writer Patrick White was and how he approached his art — a difficult and solitary art he pursued in tandem with his daily domestic duties as chief cook and housekeeper for himself and his partner Manoly Lascaris, first at their property 'Dogswoods' on the outskirts of Sydney — where he wrote the novels The Tree of Man (1956), Voss (1957) and Riders in the Chariot (1961) and the plays The Season at Sarsaparilla (1962), A Cheery Soul (1963) and Night On Bald Mountain (1964) plus the short stories included in the 1964 collection The Burnt Ones — and then in the eastern Sydney suburb of Centennial Park where the city's annual Royal Easter Show became the bane of his existence. At no time did his commitment to either writing or housekeeping waver. After complaints about his health, which was poor thanks to chronic asthma, he most often refers to having to go off to cook something or clean the house — precisely what he was doing when reporters appeared on his doorstep in droves following the announcement that he'd won the Nobel Prize.
The primary appeal of White's letters lies in their sometimes devastating honesty and supreme entertainment value. He was never a man to be niggardly when it came to sharing his opinions and the reader is treated to literally dozens of them, ranging from his judgements on the work of other writers (he was a fan of JD Salinger and Colin MacInnes and Nabokov's Lolita but could not read Laurence Sterne or the novels of his contemporary Frank Hardy), his relationship with his various publishers (he said of Ben Huebsch, his US publisher at the Viking Press since 1939, that he 'became as much a part of my writing as those other necessaries, paper and ink'), his arbitrary ending of what had been sustaining long-term friendships (as in his June 1982 letter to Geoffrey Dutton in which he wrote 'I'm sorry, but I've had enough of Duttonry, and ask you not to ring me when you fly from capital to capital for what I can't see as any good reason') and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, his attitude to his family (as in the many complaints he made about his English born nieces Gillian and Frances, both of whom lived with him in Sydney for a time and whose supposed lack of drive and personal ambition became a consistent source of worry and frustration).
We also get his thoughts on winning the Nobel Prize and what it did to his life, including a telling comment he made to Xavier Herbert in February 1979, six years after that honour had been bestowed upon him by the members of the Swiss Academy: 'The Nobel Prize is another farce to anybody but the innocent. Look down the list of the winners and you will see that half of them have lapsed into nonentity.' Nor was he reluctant to complain that winning such a well-publicized award had made him a target for begging letters from hundreds of total strangers. 'I've had letters,' he wrote to his cousin Peggy Garland in October 1973, 'from the unknown from Saskatchewan to Bengal… They want me to buy them houses, farms, trucks, caravans, from having glaucoma, paralysed husbands (or wives) asthmatic children — it all comes from my having said I wasn't going to keep the money.' But perhaps his most virulent scorn is reserved for politicians and their unwillingness to end the escalating Cold War arms race. In May 1984 he wrote open letters to the leaders of France, the United States and Great Britain, including this particularly striking comment to US President Ronald Reagan: 'My hope is that the women of America, traditional guardians of the crock of beans, will compel you to face reality… Women have to bear the brunt of things. They are far more intuitive. In one sense at least they are more creative: they bear the children who will be sacrificed in the holocaust of a man-made nuclear war.'
David Marr did another excellent job of editing these letters, condensing well over a thousand separate pieces of correspondence into a taut and readable narrative that serves as the perfect accompaniment to his impressively detailed biography. Like that earlier volume, the Letters are sparingly but revealingly illustrated with black and white photographs of many of White's friends and acquaintances, all of whom are briefly identified in a handy 'Cast of Correspondents' that makes it easy to keep track of them and their particular connections with him, be they friends, theatre colleagues, publishers or, on occasion, enthusiastic foreign fans or outright enemies. The collection even includes what was purportedly White's first-ever letter, written in December 1918 when he was six, in which he asks Santa Claus to bring him 'a pistol, a mouth organ, a violin, a butterfly net, Robinson Cruso [sic], History of Australia, Some Marbles [and] a little mouse what runs across the room' and hopes that venerable gentleman won't think him 'too greedy' for asking for so much.
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Jonathon Cape first UK edition, 1981
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Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait (1981) by PATRICK WHITE
The appearance of this book in 1981 — less an autobiography than a series of impressions (or portraits as the subtitle would have it) split into three sections which sought to explain White's development as a person and a writer — shocked as many of friends as it did his enemies, none of whom had expected such a cantankerously private individual to publicly expose himself in so candid a fashion. It was no wonder the book was widely reviewed all over the world and went on to become White's only bestseller. People love a scandal and White, in his typically outspoken way, gave them all the scandal they could wish for plus a little more.
But to focus too narrowly on the scandalous elements of Flaw in the Glass is to minimize the book's enduring value as a piece of literature. White was never more direct than he was in this slim illustrated volume in which he sought to set the record straight not only about his life but also about his work and his motivations as both a novelist and dramatist. 'Abortive novels are as painful as failed love affairs,' he writes of his time in London following his return to that city from his family's sheep raising property in southern New South Wales, 'but have to be gone through. Living in London, trying to justify an otherwise useless existence by being a "professional" writer, my failures were the more abysmal, my few successes, though exhilarating at the time, no more than false starts.' Nor does he shy away from delivering what are often damning and uncomfortably accurate judgements about the state of modern Australia: 'As we raced through the 'Sixties into the 'Seventies the social climate changed: ladies of a higher social level began cooking for their equals, their inferiors too, if the money was there. Money became everything, vulgarity chic, the crooks got off provided they were rich enough. Knighthoods could be bought more easily than ever as inflation rose and the British Monarchy commuted regularly with an eye on Australia as their remaining bolthole.' These comments, true enough at the time they were written, have only become more so with the passage of the decades. The personalities have changed, certainly, but the problems inherent in Australian society — greed, corruption, a political system that favours both to the detriment of serious problems like climate change and ownership of the national media, the wholesale destruction and marginalization of indigenous people and their culture, a publicly denied but nevertheless persistent streak of racism — haven't changed at all. White was among the first to recognize the gap between intention and reality in Australia and speak openly of it at a time when white Australians were content to sit around congratulating themselves on how 'progressive' and 'successful' they and their 'sunburned country' had become.
The second section Journeys is a record of White's travels in and around Greece — the place he considered his home away from home — with his partner Manoly Lascaris. But no attempt is made to romanticize or sentimentalize the experience. 'Part of me,' he confesses when recounting a side trip made to the island of Naxos in 1958, 'hankers after domesticity and orderliness. There is also that face which looks towards the wild side. During our brief stay on Naxos (we were not washed up, but landed as planned) the one recoiled while the other exulted. Mythic from a distance, the port is a squalid little town, none of the whitewashed glister of so much island architecture, but smudges, smears, shit, and stale food in tepid oil when food is to be found.'
This is not to suggest that all of White's recollections are gloomy or derisive. In the book's final section Episodes and Epitaphs — a section which contains some of the most savagely critical pieces of prose he ever wrote — there's also room for celebrating the friendship he retained with people like theatre director Jim Sharman, the person who, perhaps more than any other, was responsible for earning him overdue recognition as a dramatist of the highest order. Despite the problems associated with staging quality drama in Australia –– and these were numerous throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s — White gained his greatest pleasure from seeing his work performed on-stage and, in time, lauded by audiences and critics alike. 'I've stuck around,' he observes towards the end of the book. 'If I dare come out and say I feel as though these younger people [director, actors, technical crew] are my children I shall probably be laughed at, accused of harbouring delusions, and of hoping to revive spent powers by associating with youth. I don't believe it is altogether that. We shall always have something to give each other, even though age ensures that my contribution to these relationships can only be indirect and passive.'
Flaws in the Glass is not the book to seek out if you're looking for the bare chronological facts of White's life. The Marr biography is infinitely superior when it comes to supplying that information, which is not to imply that this memoir is somehow sub par and therefore not worth reading. Everything that Patrick White wrote is worth reading and this slim self-portrait is no exception. It deepens our understanding of a great writer and that can only be a good thing in a country that is all too often scornful of its artistic community and particularly of those members of it who fail to conform to its narrow minded image of what an artist 'should' be and how they should conduct themselves. White was never mainstream. More importantly, he neither wanted nor ever consciously sought to be.
Use the link below to read Patrick White: The Final Chapter, a fascinating 2008 article by his biographer DAVID MARR:
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