Biography 02 – Patrick White Catalogue

BIOGRAPHY:

London

(1932 – 1939)

Wallace Thornton, Studio in Florence (1955)

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“People are writing in short sentences now.”
An agent’s response to White’s attempts to sell his first novel, 1937

Paddy’s return to the UK was part of a complex cultural interchange felt by Australians during this era. Very much British citizens, indeed the King’s subjects, Australians felt a great social pull towards European cultural values and art. Ever since Queen Victoria’s death, Australians had celebrated Empire Day on her birthday, and the prevailing wisdom was that Australian culture – much like Australian literature – simply did not exist independent of Mother Britain. For Ruth White, there was a long-held desire to move “home”, as the UK was called by many Australians (even those who had never lived there). Yet at the same time a nascent Australian nationalist movement was growing among the working class and the socialists. This move was given ample fuel by World War I, whose brutal Australian sacrifices were seen by some as a sacrifice made for a distant continent far away. These Australian nationalists took issue with an Empire that – they felt – saw them as invariably lesser. Among the great wide working classes, Australians who elevated themselves too much in terms of culture or class were considered snobs, yet even the most cultivated Australians were inevitably regarded as provincials and colonial arrivistes in the “motherland”. (For some Aussies, it must be said, the motives for nationalism were less pure; many white Australians took issue with the British Empire for being multi-racial, and they were proud that their own governments – whether left or right – adhered to the 1901 “White Australia Policy”, which prevented all non-Anglo people from immigrating… unless they were Islanders to be used as near-slave labour, of course.)

When Ruth realised her son would not be a doctor or a landowner, she decided he would be diplomat; after all, the boy was studying both French and German at Cambridge. But across the seas, in the England of the 1930s, Patrick White had much else on his mind. At Cambridge, he could devote his rapacious mind to literature – both the classics and the newest, cutting-edge works – and theatre. White veered from reading Lawrence or Joyce to gushing over Flaubert’s craftsmanship, to attending dozens of theatrical opening nights with friends. This hectic social existence was also a time of self-discovery, with White entering into several short-lived relationships, including with the older painter Roy de Maistre. In country Australia, homosexuality was not spoken of and rarely accepted, indeed seemed positively deviant. (White later said he left Australia in part because there was little chance of finding sex or love.) In central London, by contrast, as in many urbane cities of the time, homosexuality was a known quantity, often an accepted one provided privacy was maintained. With White’s connections, he had access to the high-society homosexual set of London. Here he could find wit, intellect, sex, and an understanding of the demi-monde which would characterise his fiction. Like most worlds inhabited by twentysomethings, it was also often an empty one – spiritually and emotionally – which he would come to realise in time.

And, of course, there was his writing. White had been scribbling poems and plays since childhood and, by 1932, he had several failed and fragmentary novels up his sleeve. Much of his writing during this era is that of the sponge, the mimic, the keen-eyed flâneur. On travelling through the USA, White’s writing takes on another tone: the true outsider, responding to the landscape and people he discovered along the way. His first publication took place back in Australia, where Ruth proudly (even aggressively) had her son’s early poems printed and his early plays performed in Sydney. This was an era when newspapers spilled ink detailing which hotels members of good society were staying in during their holidays, or which young women from the country were visiting the city that week. Suzanne White’s trip to the UK to visit her brother made the newspaper, including a headshot – not because he was a famous writer (he wasn’t yet) but simply because they were the Whites. “Mrs. Victor White”, as Ruth was called, knew how to use this to her advantage. Dick, meanwhile, seems to have been glad his son was achieving things, but was fighting his own battle: an aggressive asthma which was turning him into an invalid, and eventually end his life in December 1937.

Primarily living off his parents’ generosity, and subsequently an allowance from his father’s will, White had his first professional short story published in 1937, The Twitching Colonel. Around this time, he also made a minor success with short pieces written for theatrical revues which, in those days, were major parts of London popular culture; individual revues could do the rounds for months or even years with minor amendments to keep them fresh. Being the man who wrote Peter Plover’s Party allowed White access to parties and friendship networks across high society. In 1938, White completed Happy Valley, a novel set in the Monaro region of Australia, based in part on the figures he had known while working there in 1930 and 1931. The novel is modernist, showing strong influences of James Joyce and other stylists of the era, detailing the lives of a number of lonely figures failing to connect with one another in a small town. White struggled to find a publisher until a distant relative convinced publisher George Harrap to take it on. Published in the UK in early 1939, the book garnered restrained reviews, most of which noted the obvious flaws of imitation and overambition common in a young person’s novel, but also championed the potential in this debut novelist. It was a response that any 26-year-old writer could be content with, although was accompanied by two challenges. First, the Australian reviewers were far less keen, even when they saw his promise, disappointed that this writer should choose to be so negative about their country (family and friends of the author were also confused by the book’s idiosyncratic style). Second, the novel’s publication in 1939 was rather outshone by world events.

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