A polished fragment

One evening nearly 40 years ago the world’s press descended on Patrick White in Sydney: they rampaged outside his house, pounded its doors, shouted through windows, camped on the lawn. The reason for this hullabaloo was that White had beaten Saul Bellow in the race for the Nobel Prize for Literature of 1973. Yet in contrast to Bellow, there is scant recognition of White’s name nowadays. His books are seldom read. There is no bodyguard of loyal emulators, as Bellow has with Martin Amis.

The publication — in the year of White’s centenary — of an austerely precise slice of his literary remains provides a moment to recall and appraise him. White had patrician Australian parents who sent him for an expensive education in England. Like Proust, he was debilitated by asthma, and was a man of disproportionate enthusiasms and hates. He began trying to write novels while working as a jackaroo in Australia.  He spent the war years as an air force intelligence officer in the Middle East: Manoly Lascaris, a Greek whom he met in Alexandria in 1941, remained his lover and companion until White’s death.  

They settled together in Australia in 1948. There White wrote novels — boldly ambitious, inventive, sensual, eloquent — which for years were decried in Australia as wild, unmannerly and over-rhetorical. He took stylistic risks, celebrated the harsh beauties of Australia with a painter’s eye or Wordsworth’s joy, had an unfashionable sense of awe and mystery. Certainly The Aunt’s Story, The Tree of Man and Voss are as rash and ebullient as Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog.  

Personally White was irritable and vituperative: every close friendship ended in scorching conflagration. His spiteful bestseller Flaws in the Glass must rank as the most inadvertently self-diminishing memoir since Somerset Maugham’s.