The Hanging Garden

Grace Cossington-Smith, The Bridge In-Curve (1930)

“Transcendence is something I am never sure about in Australia.”

Plot: In this unfinished novel, two children are brought to a wild garden on the shores of Sydney Harbour to shelter from the Second World War. The boy’s mother has died in the Blitz. The girl is the daughter of a Sydney woman and a Communist executed in a Greek prison. In wartime Australia, these two children form an extraordinary bond as they negotiate the dangers of life as strangers abandoned on the far side of the world. With the tenderness and rigour of an old, wise novelist, Patrick White explores the world of these children, the city of his childhood and the experience of war. The Hanging Garden ends as the news reaches Sydney of victory in Europe, and the children face their inevitable separation.

Editions:

• Knopf (AU, 2012, 224p)
• Picador (USA, 2013, 240pp)
• Vintage (AU, 2014)
• Bolinda (Audiobook, 2017, read by Humphrey Bower)

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History: PW began working on The Hanging Garden in January 1981. Since his sister’s death more than a decade earlier, PW had begun to fear he would die, and had considered The Twyborn Affair might be his final novel. He had then begun and abandoned another “final novel” in 1979. David Marr reports that PW wrote ferociously through to Anzac Day, April 25, completing the first third of the draft. He then put the novel aside to work on his new play, Signal Driver, returning to this manuscript briefly throughout June and August. But after his memoir, Flaws in the Glass, was released, the ensuing press took him away from the work. When he attempted to return – PW felt that he was no longer up to the challenge of writing another lengthy, complex novel. Instead, PW focused on a couple more plays, and ultimately a short, more structurally daring novel – Memoirs of Many in One. This manuscript of The Hanging Garden remained in his desk upon his death, and was added to his papers.

Two decades later, after Manoly Lascaris had died, PW’s agent literary executor Barbara Mobbs sold the writer’s papers to the National Library of Australia – something PW had explicitly refused, but which Mobbs felt was too important to Australian literary history. The manuscript was immediately noted as by far the most refined of the existing unpublished novels. When David Marr went through all of the unfinished work around 2008 – having previously said that he was done with PW’s story after publishing the Letters in 1994 – he noted that this was “a masterpiece in the making” and that “its abandonment after 50,000 words was a watershed in White’s life”. Marr and Mobbs pondered and pondered, the former keen, the latter more scepctical. Then in 2010 Margaret Harris and Elizabeth Webby used an Australian Research Council grant to have the manuscript transcribed, and it was typed up in January 2011. Finally, in mid-February, Mobbs decided it was suitable for publication. The publishing house was actually not confirmed when Random House jumped the gun, unexpectedly announcing the manuscript’s existence, and its imminent publication, on 28 February.

The manuscript of The Hanging Garden, with essentially no edits, was published in 2012. It is one third of a novel, echoing the tripartite structure PW had used numerous times in his career. Marr notes that it is likely that the remaining two parts would have taken place later in the century, with the final section probably taking place close to the present day (1981).

David Marr: “To be Published at Last, the Novel that Patrick White Left Hanging” (SMH 1/3/2011)

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Reviewed:

Michelle de Kretser, The Monthly, April 2012

A.P. Riemer, “The Last Word”, SMH 24/3/2012

Blanche Clark, Courier-Mail 31/3/2013

Jane Gleeson-White, The Saturday Age 31/3/2012

Peter Pierce, The Canberra Times, 31/3/2012

Peter Conrad, ABR, April 2012

Geordie Williamson, The Weekend Australian, 31/3/2012

Katherine England, The Advertiser, 31/3/2012

James Hopkins, TLS, 15/3/2012

John Sutherland, “Trouble Down Under”, NYT Book Review 26/5/2013

J.M. Coetzee, “Patrick White: Within a Budding Grove”, 7/11/2013, NY Review of Books

R. Davenport-Hines, Spectator 31/3/2012

Robert Macfarlane, Sunday Times 8/4/2012

Paul Dunn, Times 24/3/2012

Kirkus Reviews (28/5/2013):

“Even in context, a fragmented work, primarily of interest to White completists.”

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