Biography 04 – Patrick White Catalogue

BIOGRAPHY:

Home Again

(1948 – 1954)

Sidney Nolan, Dimboola Landscape (1942)

“It is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it.”
James Baldwin

The Australia of White’s youth had been little different to the provincial colony of the 19^th century. Australia upon his return was a changing country – although not changing quickly enough for some. The advent of radio and film, of household appliances and modern infrastructure, and the changing social mores due to wartime, were all making their impact known. Life was becoming easier, noisier, more urbanised, and the outside world was encroaching upon Australia for, what felt to many like the first time. All them same, the radical changes seen in some countries after the war – from the US’ scientific innovation to India’s freedom – were not echoed in the culture, which still felt rigorously conservative. From 1949 to 1972, Australia would be under stable leadership, with five successive conservative Prime Ministers in 23 years. (It could have been four, but Harold Holt was lost at sea in a mystery that was never fully solved.)

Patrick and Manoly were returning to a country in which neither Greeks nor homosexuals were commonly accepted, and in which serious literature was nascent at best. As they had done in the 19th century, many talented artists emigrated – usually for life. Two of White’s contenders for greatest Australian novelist of the century – Randolph Stow and Christina Stead – were among the émigrés, as was Martin Boyd, and White’s future friend (and enemy), the artist Sidney Nolan. Much existing Australian writing was defiantly British in flavour. And when writing celebrated Australian nature or culture, it was disarmingly populist and vernacular. The Jindyworobak poets, who had sought to channel an authentic Australian voice in landscape and cultural poetry, had been derided by much of the establishment during their peak in the 1940s. The previous generation had launched some significant writers who stayed, among them Eleanor Dark, Katharine Susannah Pritchard, Marjorie Barnard, Frank Dalby Davison, and Xavier Herbert By 1946 Kylie Tennant had begun her career too. These writers were discovering avenues for new voices, in new literary journals such as Meanjin, and the growing mass media which now included radio and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Still, they existed in a country where arts education typically meant the classics of the USA and Europe, and where modernism was a dirty word – and all of them ultimately wrote in a tone that, however literary-minded, was easily readable by the general public. The idea of Australia nurturing a James Joyce or a Virginia Woolf felt like a lost cause. The challenge that lay ahead – a challenge White recognised and, for now, accepted – was to find the Australian part of his literary voice, and to use it despite the critics and doubters.

White had written minimal fiction during the four years of his service, save a few short stories published in army-related magazines. On the journey back home, he finished a novel, The Aunt’s Story, which made significant strides on his previous work. Chronicling the disintegrating mind of spinster Theodora Goodman, the novel impressed critics while bamboozling readers with its infamously difficult middle sequence, Jardin Exotique, in which Theodora enters a schizophrenic dreamscape populated by figures real, imagined, inhabited, and somewhere in-between. (White was disenchanted when he visited libraries and discovered copies that showed signs of being well-read until they reached this section… at which point many readers had clearly returned the volume to the library.) The novel undeniably announced White as a serious contender when it emerged in early 1948. Yet the following years were White’s most fallow literary period. In his memoir, White claims he considered giving up writing forever; the reaction to The Aunt’s Story hurt him. It wasn’t that the reaction from the reading public was bitter, it was simply bewildered and indifferent. And what place was there for a writer who engendered these reactions?

What did the move home do for White? It removed him from a world where his genius might have been more easily accepted, a life that could have been one of easier victories, a carefree career. And yet he would always have been an outsider, as Australians still were in the Europe of the time. A more cynical interpretation may be that the separation from England protected White from falling back into the empty social life of his pre-war days. Australia was somewhere White could be a big fish in a comparatively small pond. And, although modernity took much longer to reach the Great South Land, the nation only had 150 years of modern history. (The 1938 sesquicentenary was also the first National Day of Mourning, a coordinated statement between the nation’s indigenous people. The conversation about Australia’s bloody origins would be muted and suppressed for some time but would be in full swing 50 years later when White himself refused to take part in the Bicentenary.) For all of the country’s inherent conservatism, it did not have the storied history of Shakespeare or Balzac; there was less “oldness” for the new to push against in the realm of art.

Certainly for Manoly Lascaris, after the horrors of the war and his family’s decades of trauma, he was seeking peace and safety. The pair set up a home at a property in Castle Hill, a green-belt area on the outskirts of Sydney, from where they could raise generations of dogs, tend to their property, grow produce, and live a life connected to society but not always a part of it. Life at Dogwoods farm was a daily slog, especially in the early years. While it wasn’t a farm in the sense of a major agricultural provider, it was an earthy existence. The country was adjusting to post-war life in its own time. Technological innovations were slow to reach many parts of Australia. Even in the outer suburbs of Sydney, indoor plumbing was a dream until the 1960s and 1970s. Patrick and Manoly engaged with neighbours, cooked grand feasts, and bred dogs for sale. White enjoyed encountering authentic Australian personalities and storing up new ideas for future works. Although he still felt that he was spiritually British, the author determined to accept his antipodean exile. At this stage, there’s every indication he saw Australia as his current location, not necessarily a permanent choice. But for now, it was the most practical option given numerous factors. (Perhaps importantly, White’s mother – whose forceful personality did not leave her son much room to be himself – was making preparations to leave the country for good, and wend her way to the loving bosom of England.)

While White was on the farm, however, he had not been forgotten. A few academics and students were beginning to consider his three novels as texts. Ben Huebsch at Viking in New York City was patiently waiting for another manuscript. (English publishers were less rabid.) In December of 1951, White slipped and fell in the rain while working at Dogwoods, and had a moment of spiritual awakening, of belief that there was something beyond himself. Long-term, this moment would lead to a uniquely Whitean religious belief. In the moment, it awakened his desire to write a truly Australian novel, a novel which would explore the extraordinary inside all of us, and the mystery and marvel of the land.

Here in Castle Hill, White had the opportunity to do just that. His first two novels are those of a self-consciously English writer, assimilating the styles of the time, and The Aunt’s Story is an attempt by a developing artist to reckon with the boundaries of the novelistic form. Now, as he entered his 40s, White would look deeper: into the soul of the Australian novel. As he wrote in his self-reflective piece The Prodigal Son, he was keen to eschew the rah-rah nationalism of much populist writing, yet also to shy away from the earnest social realism which drew in most of the first great modern Australian writers. Utilising the everyday personalities in the outer suburb of Castle Hill, White conjured up a brutally mundane Australia, a place where the ordinary is exalted, the individual envied and ultimately destroyed, and conformity a kind of god. He would name this “Sarsaparilla”, and it would be one of the key locales for the works of his middle period.

First, however, White had two epic stories to tell. He began writing again, with Ben Huebsch urging him on in telegrams from New York. In 1954, Huebsch intervened with British publisher Eyre & Spottiswoode to ensure his young client had representation on both sides of the channel. It was just in time, for White had completed something new and entirely different.

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