Biography 07 – Patrick White Catalogue

BIOGRAPHY:

Nobel Laureate

(1973 – 1981)

Clarice Beckett, Passing Trams, c. 1931

“I quail myself at the task of conveying why I believe this turgid, crotchety, tortuous, racked, oblique writer is nevertheless great.”
Rosemary Dinnage reviewing The Twyborn Affair, NYRB

White had officially given up accepting awards with the publication of The Solid Mandala. He felt that newer authors should be rewarded in lieu of the old, or that underappreciated colleagues – such as the woman he admired most in Australian letters, Christina Stead – should be given the publicity boost. Additionally, he seems to have wanted to avoid any allegations that he wrote for any reason other than the cause of art. (For a similar reason, he steadfastly refused honourary degrees or commissions as a literary reviewer.) The Nobel Prize, however, was a horse of a different colour. He had been on the longlist for the 1969 prize – a fact not public at the time – and was seriously considered in 1970. In 1972, White reportedly had the support of several members of the panel, however a minority were fierce detractors. The press had been tipped off that White was a likely winner, and even he could not avoid getting his hopes up. So it rankled when the award went to Heinrich Böll, especially as White had not enjoyed the experience when Böll translated his works into German years earlier. In 1973, however, his greatest Swedish champion Artur Lundvkist was far more certain. White made the shortlist alongside Norman Mailer, Chinua Achebe, and four future winners: Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, and Wole Soyinka. David Marr reports that the final decision was hardly cause for celebration. The panel came out at a dead tie, with one member bedridden due to illness. Frantically, with the deadline upon them, the panel called their ailing colleague to seek his tiebreaking vote: he approved White, primarily on the grounds that Australia deserved its first win.

On the evening of October 18, 1973, Australian reporters received the news from the Northern Hemisphere. Descending upon Highbury, they were greeted by a bewildered Lascaris and a rather shocked White. “To Patrick White”, read the Nobel panel’s decision, “for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature.” Despite mainstream Australia’s uncertainty toward this writer, here was our first Nobel Laureate in Literature, and the country turned out to support him. The Prime Minister invited White to receive his congratulations in person on the floor of the House of Representatives, only the second civilian to be offered this honour; White declined, allegedly due to his retiring nature. On the grounds of his health – or so he claimed – he also chose not to go to Stockholm for the award ceremony, instead sending good friend Sir Sidney Nolan with a pre-written speech. The prize came with $81,862. While the newspapers of the 19th were filled with the news of White’s win, the following day’s papers broke another story: White would not keep the prize money, but rather create an endowment. This would become the Patrick White Literary Award, aimed at older writers who have not received due recognition. The award is one of the only Australian literary awards to be tax-free. Its first recipient was Christina Stead, and in White’s lifetime went to a number of his favourite artists: David Campbell, Gwen Harwood, Judah Waten, and Thea Astley among them. (More recent recipients include Amanda Lohrey, Joan London, Gregory Day, and Antigone Kefala.)

Suddenly, Australia had an internationally esteemed writer, and boy, did we embrace it. White was chosen as Australian of the Year for 1973 – a decision the organisers may have regretted when he used the grand ceremony to make a speech criticising corruption and the attitude of white Australians to their Indigenous brethren, while championing notable radicals in the same breath. The federal government initiated a new series of honours, the Order of Australia, to replace the stuffy system of knights and dames. White received the Companion of the Order of Australia in the inaugural batch of candidates, presented to him by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr. To the media, White was now a notable figure, and he began appearing in those newspaper columns which compile short responses from celebrities, for example “things you are most looking forward to in the coming year”. This fame sometimes brought with it unwelcome nosiness, as when Time magazine wrote that White lived with a “male housekeeper”, to which he tersely responded:

“The distinguished, and universally respected man who has given me his friendship and moral support over a period of thirty-four years has never been a housekeeper. I am that, and shall continue playing the role at least till I am paralysed; it keeps me in touch with reality.”

In the US, Viking had reissued most of White’s novels in hardback. (He forbade the printing of his first two novels, Happy Valley and The Living and the Dead, on the grounds that the latter was stylistically imitative and the former might open him up to libel since it was based on real people.) These reprints, combined with the boom in paperback novels over the coming decade, belied White’s bellyaching about his financial situation. His family inheritance was also substantial; his share portfolio would be worth at least $2 million upon his death in 1990.

Politics would not let him be. On 11 November 1975, the Governor-General – the supposedly symbolic Queen’s representative – famously dismissed the Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, an act still seen by many progressive Australians as treacherous. White – by now a committed man of the left – was outraged, returning his Order of Australia in protest and joining several campaign rallies for Whitlam in the lead-up to the subsequent election. Whitlam lost, and White would never forgive members of the newly-elected Liberal (conservative) Party. He would further this cause during Queen Elizabeth II’s tour of the country in 1977, when he joined republican protests, a far cry from his lunching with Her Majesty on her visit fifteen years earlier. It was becoming harder for him to separate his views from his daily life. In 1982, as the curtain was drawn back on an opening night concert in Adelaide, the orchestra played God Save the Queen, still a custom at the time. Most of the audience, including White’s companion that night, the author David Malouf, rose to their feet, as etiquette demanded. White did not rise, and Malouf’s decision to do so almost ended their friendship.

There was still work to do, meanwhile. 1974 saw the publication of White’s second short story collection, The Cockatoos and he followed this with a trip to Fraser Island to research his next project. A Fringe of Leaves (1976) had evolved from White’s interest in the story of shipwrecked 19th century woman Eliza Fraser, which he had attempted to dramatise as an opera in the 1960s. His 10th novel, Fringe was heavily reviewed around the English-speaking world and had a sizeable UK print run of 25,000, reflecting his growing stature in light of the Nobel win. In the USA, Fringe represents the end of White’s literary notoriety; he had become pigeon-holed as an eccentric literary type, receiving many reviews but making little dent in Viking’s profits. The author felt that Anglo and American cultures had diverged too far, not to mention their different uses of the English language, for writers from Australia to make any impact there. Nowhere was this clearer than in Viking’s jacket design for the novel. Much of the story takes place among an Indigenous Australian tribe yet the Americans used a generic image of African tribespeople and huts.

As he aged, White was aware of the increased toll a novel took on his mental and physical strength. Perhaps this is part of what attracted him to write a film. The Night the Prowler was adapted by White from his short story of the same name. A dark comedy, satirising contemporary mores, the film details the life of a young woman who is allegedly raped in a home invasion. To the concern of her conventional suburban parents and fiancé, she begins enacting a double-life, stalking the streets of Sydney at night, leather-clad, to gain vengeance on the world. The film opened at the 1978 Sydney Film Festival with a box office release the following year. It was not a success, although White greatly enjoyed the experience. Working with actors gave him an immediate family, a world in which he was revered by younger artists, such as the film’s director Jim Sharman and lead actress Kerry Walker. The film also felt very Sydney, White’s home city being often his toughest audience. Christina Stead once said she could create in Sydney because it had a “rocky basis”, unlike Melbourne, built on mud. Although White felt comfortable in Adelaide, where he was highly regarded in artistic circles, he could never have left Sydney. Even if he came to despise its social elite, White was Sydney down to his bones.

The theatre audiences of Australia’s largest city had been more hostile to White’s plays during the 1960s, contributing to his desire to abandon that medium. In 1976, Sharman chose to revive The Season at Sarsaparilla with the Old Tote Theatre Company. The first Australian professional production of a White play in 12 years, Season was a hit. With a cast that included Robyn Nevin, Max Cullen, Bill Hunter, and Kate Fitzpatrick, the play – White’s least formally experimental of the 1960s batch – revealed the biting insight and dark vision of Australian culture which audiences had shied away from a decade earlier. The fact that this hit took place in Sydney must have been especially heartwarming. The plays had not completely disappeared; they were occasionally performed in American universities and small European productions. But the commercial and comparative critical failure of the four 1960s plays had weighed heavily on White. He had never lost his belief in the works, even attempting to sell them to Broadway, but he had taken the very public dismissal to heart. Now there was hope for White’s playwriting career. His response came in 1977, in the form of the small-scale Big Toys, a social satire about a wealthy, venal couple and the ambitious trade union boss who interrupts their marriage. The play – directed by Sharman and starring Fitzpatrick and Cullen alongside Arthur Dignam- opened in Sydney, travelling to Melbourne and Canberra. White’s most naturalistic play, the show sold well although critical reaction was lukewarm. Ironically, White’s decision to deliver a less formally daring piece was what alienated the literati this time around. The play would see another production in Brisbane and be taped for TV broadcast on the ABC, but largely disappeared from view after 1980.

White was still seen as something of a mystery, focusing as he did on public causes rather than allowing his private life to dictate the narrative. A major National Times profile was titled “The Enigma of Patrick White”, and he was happy to keep it this way. Still, it was not always an option to avoid the personal touch. In 1976, White was asked to give an interview for a newspaper series on gay couples – a touchy subject in the Australia of the time, but one of interest in light of the growing gay rights movement. While he had never seen his sexuality as a flaw, or as something to be cured, he was not of the younger generation’s view. He hated “queens flinging their handbags in front of television cameras” and steadily avoided any association with the broader gay community or the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, a protest movement that would develop into Australia’s biggest LGBTQ festival over the coming decades. When he thought about his sexuality, White seems to have seen it as a burden and a gift in equal measure. It was a marker of inevitable difference, something that would never allow him to assimilate fully into the lives of the ordinary Australian worshipping at the altar of conformity. At the same time, especially in his later novels, White felt that his sexuality allowed him to exist outside of standard patterns of thought, seeing more clearly, especially when it came to his insights into female characters.

All of this would come into play with his next novel. In 1957, White had said that he had five or six novels left in him. This would turn out to be prophetic. The five had now been completed, but another – completely unexpected – idea had struck. This would be an epic novel that would draw its inspiration from White’s sexuality and outsider status, the story of “the stranger of all time”. In 1976, Patrick and Manoly set out on a tour of the past: to Australia’s Southern Highlands, to the UK and Europe. Here, Manoly tied up what he could of his lifelong family strife, while White revisited the sites of his youth and reconnected with Sidney and Cynthia Nolan, whose marriage was beginning to break down. It was part of a downward spiral for Cynthia that would tragically end in her suicide, and White would pen a rare newspaper obituary in her honour. On returning to Australia, he wrote frantically, still certain that death might take him before he finished his canon of works. In 1979 The Twyborn Affair emerged, a three-part novel in which identity is determined rather than assigned, in which love and lust are never in sync, and in which a chameleon searches, perhaps in vain, for an identity that will allow him to exist completely as himself while also finding sympathy with others. This beguiling, baroque novel was a bestseller.

[right: White and Lascaris]

The Patrick White of 1980 must have felt vindicated like never before. His novels were at last flying off the shelves in paperback, and another of his plays – A Cheery Soul – was experiencing a hugely successful revival in Sydney, with a landmark performance by Robyn Nevin in the lead role. Luminary artist Brett Whiteley painted a grand portrait of White which would adorn the walls of the NSW Parliament for many years. The Art Gallery of NSW invited him to curate an exhibition, selecting whatever he desired from the archives. (Some of his choices were pointedly outré!) He was routinely invited to give addresses, ranging from the Grenfell Henry Lawson Festival to the launch of Australian Libraries Week. (Neil Runcie said that White’s speeches were always written and carefully crafted. He was a nervous public speaker in spite of his power, and perhaps had to control his temper on occasion too.) Yet life at home continued in much the same vein. Patrick and Manoly remained consummate hosts, always preferring to host dinner – Patrick cooking all day – rather than go out. Their neighbours liked them and, in spite of friendships being easily dismantled by White’s moods, there were few invitations more prestigious in inner Sydney. If you were lucky enough to receive the phone number to Highbury, which was famously kept secret, there was no greater honour. The menagerie had dwindled. By 1980, the pair cared for White’s two beloved pugs and a Jack Russell named Nellie, who was especially close to Manoly. They swore off any further pets, however could not resist when White found a Labrador cross abandoned in the Park; they named the dog Eureka, in honour of the Eureka Stockade, Australia’s most famous (if doomed) colonialist rebellion.

As he neared 70, White recognised his own limitations… sometimes. In 1981, he wrote the first third of a new novel, The Hanging Garden, before putting it aside, distracted and exhausted. Instead he channeled his energies into becoming a gadfly. In March 1981, White gave an interview to ABC’s Nationwide program in which he criticised conservative Australians, supporters of the monarchy, and indeed the royals themselves. Heavily reported over the following days, the interview garnered fan mail and abuse in equal measure. Newspaper opinion columns saw Australians divided between those who appreciated an honest assessment of the situation, and those who felt White should “pull his head in”.

The interview, it turned out, was a dress rehearsal. The main performance came in October when White’s memoir, Flaws in the Glass, was published. Rather than a chronological tale of his life, Flaws is a “self-portrait”, consisting of vignettes reflecting on his upbringing, his relationship to Australia, the challenges of writing, and his own personality. The memoir caused consternation in just about every quarter. White’s openness about his homosexuality caused great strain for Lascaris, whose conservative Greek relations were – unlike White’s family – still living. White went further, offering his uncensored thoughts on the Lascaris family. But they got off lightly. The final section of Flaws is a series of character assessments of famous figures, few of them sympathetic. Dame Joan Sutherland was taken aback to be depicted as an intellectual simpleton, since she had only met White on rare social occasions. A former equerry to the Queen took the time to write to the Sydney Morning Herald to complain about the book’s portrayal of Her Majesty. White’s publishers actively attempted to excise the withering section about Sir John Kerr prior to publication, fearful he would sue, but to no avail.

The greatest bile was reserved for Nolan. White chose to detail his belief that Nolan did not support Cynthia enough in the months leading up to her suicide. White claimed he had always preferred Cynthia to her husband, and that the latter had moved on far too quickly after his wife’s death. It was a cold, even vindictive portrayal, and the ensuing rift saw Nolan exhibit several paintings and drawings which reflected White (and occasionally Lascaris) in a deeply unpleasant light. The media, of course, were delighted by this cavalcade of savagery. Whereas White’s reputation thus far had been the difficult writer and outspoken critic of the Malcolm Fraser government, he now entered a new phase as the controversial teller-of-truth in all arenas of love. The reticent recluse of the outer suburbs was gone. In his place rose a man who would be the country’s conscience.

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