Biography 05

Margaret Preston, The Brown Pot (1940)

Early Life | London| The War | Home Again | Fame | Centennial Park | Nobel Laureate | Final Years | Legacy

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“TRUTH IS GREAT AND SHALL PREVAIL”

Telegram from Ben Huebsch after White won his first Miles Franklin Award

In his early works, Patrick White had aimed to assimilate into the daring school of modernism, the style cherished on either side of the Atlantic. On returning to Australia, he had reached his peak of this fashion with The Aunt’s Story, a novel wherein he eliminated any trace of mimicry and found his own form. In 1955, this unorthodox 43-year-old began the middle phase of his career, with the publication of The Tree of Man. A literary bestseller in the UK, and hotly reviewed in the US, Tree merged realism with symbolist writing, daring to be a novel that was both a literary epic and an Australian foundation myth. The novel was a massive literary statement, although it meant just as much to the author’s personal goals. After the uncertain years of war, and a decade of rediscovering his purpose living on the farm outside Sydney with his partner, Manoly Lascaris, White had committed to a future as a novelist. While sales and awards buzz were proof that his ambitions would pay off, The Tree of Man also confirmed a streak of bitterness that would remain with the author for the rest of his life: Australian reviewers were… puzzled. A.D. Hope’s famous 1956 review stung in a way that would never fully heal:

“When so few Australian novelists can write prose at all, it is a great pity to see Mr. White, who shows on every page some touch of the born writer, deliberately choose as his medium this pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge.”

-A.D. Hope

Nevertheless, with the novel’s publication, a train had been set in motion. His next work, Voss, was written in a whirlwind of inspiration, and published in 1957. His new UK publishers, Eyre & Spottiswoode, were gratified to see the novel sell out and require an immediate second printing. While US sales were not as staggering, Viking remained enamoured of White. Voss was a US Book of the Month Club recommendation, and contributed to White being famous on three continents. When Voss won the inaugural Miles Franklin Award in 1958 – immediately cemented as Australia’s most prestigious literary prize – he met the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, and gave the first public speech of his life. There was still some uncertainty from the general public however; an article in Nation (22/4/1961) noted that the Adelaide Circulating Library rather enthusiastically purchased 22 copies, and then had to dispose of most of them for a couple of shillings.

Both novels were epic tales set in a historical era, which gave them a patina of credibility to popular audiences sometimes uncertain about writing they considered too “artistic” and “modern”. All the same, the novels showcased White’s desire to engage with Australia as a serious theme. In both novels, people combat the infinite expanses of the landscape, suffer isolation from the “motherland”, and attempt connections to others around them despite humankind’s inherent capacity to make things difficult for ourselves. Although he remained reticent to engage in public discourse (beyond a few angry letters to the Sydney Morning Herald about world issues), White accepted a commission for the journal Australian Letters. His piece, The Prodigal Son, engages with the issue of Australian identity in art. White queries why so many Australian writers have emigrated, and on the difficulties of choosing to remain in the country despite limited resources, a narrower literary scene, and ingrained social conservatism. (Into the 1950s, newspapers still ran the Vice-Regal column, profiling the social engagements of the Governor-General, the Queen’s representative.) The piece ends optimistically, however, with PW expressing his hopes for the future of Australian literature. And he had reason to be optimistic. Other writers of his generation were forging new paths – Christina Stead, Kylie Tennant, Eleanor Dark, Gwen Harwood – and the next generation would shortly emerge in all their varied glory, with names like Randolph Stow, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Harrower, Kenneth Cook, and Criena Rohan on the way.

It is popular to follow White’s own narrative about his artistic life, one in which almost no-one noticed the author until Voss had its Miles Franklin Award. Certainly, the average Australian would not have heard of him in those first years, but the narrative is nevertheless false. Critics and the artistic community were well aware of White after the publication of Happy Valley back in 1939. He is acknowledged by Max Harris in the early 1940s as one of the only serious Australian writers – and this before his second novel had even reached our shores! White’s relationship with the Australian writing community is of far greater interest. For the real left, whether Marxist, Leninist, Communist, or in between, White was bourgeois, too obsessed with form and overseas styles to warrant their interest. Australian Realism and the novel as an ideological engagement with the everyday were what the reviewers of Overland were searching for, a path which Dark and Katharine Susannah Prichard gleefully trod. At the universities, as David Malouf has written, White was largely “irrelevant”. 20th century writers remained upstarts, experimenters. Indeed, until the 1930s at Oxford University, the study of English literature ended in the mid-19th century, and not much was different for the disciples of F.R. Leavis who still held many professorial posts. True conservatives could not avoid noting his presence, but his vulgarity and cynicism did not endear him. It was left to the aesthetics, the politically middle-ground writers who valued talent over ideology, to take him to their bosom.

In 1958, Patrick and Lascaris embarked on their first overseas trip since the War, taking in Israel, Germany, England, and the USA. Here, Lascaris was reunited for his mother after 40 years apart (she having abandoned the family as a child), and Patrick at last met the artist who had conjured up engaging covers for his latest books. Sidney Nolan and wife Cynthia were in California, and the couples got on famously. White and Nolan developed an intellectual connection, although it was with Cynthia that White became especially attached.

On returning home, life continued in much the same vein for the two men. Already middle-aged, Patrick and Lascaris had given up the social and cultural lives they could have experienced back in Europe. The trip must have made them consider whether to make the change now that Europe had recovered from wartime ravages. Many a time did White bemoan his decision to live so far from the bulk of his readers. He was distraught when the first printing of The Aunt’s Story had listed a “fjord” when he meant a “ford”; a well-meaning editor with no knowledge of Australian geography saw a typo where there was none. In the end, however, they decided it would soon be time to leave the semi-rural life, and instead become city slickers. Before this could take place, there was much work to do.

1961 might be considered the transition year, when quirky, obscure writer Patrick White becomes noted public figure Patrick White. Riders in the Chariot – White’s 6th novel – began life on the typewriter he carted around the world with him, and was completed back at Dogwoods, to the strains of Bach, Berg, and Bruckner. Where once Castle Hill had been a rural outpost of Sydney, the suburbs were now encroaching upon the horizon. Having exorcised the myths of old Australia in his previous two novels, the author for the first time set a work consciously in the Australia of the now. Riders details the lives of four seemingly disconnected souls in the fictional suburb of Sarsaparilla, a place where gossip is currency and conformity is religion, a religion to be enforced by any means necessary. These four outcasts are bonded together by a shared vision, a chariot in the sky which represents different things to each of them. A beguiling tale of the extraordinary lurking among the ordinary, Riders won White his second Miles Franklin Award. The novel sold especially well in Australia and the UK, while receiving stellar reviews. The response from US critics was equally joyous, however the novel sold only modestly there. While the literary establishment exalted his talents, it was becoming clear that White had been pigeonholed as a “literary” author by the American public. (It didn’t help, his publishers felt, that his work was becoming increasingly Australian. On numerous occasions, Viking would send him a list of suggested edits to make cultural references, products, or geographical locations less intimidating to Americans. White responded tersely each time that no such effort was made in American film and novels to cater to Australians, so why should it be so the other way?) During the publication process of Voss, a new copy-editor removed most of the commas; White was appalled, reinstating all of them and cementing his policy that his prose not be touched by others. Yet the need to have solid US and UK sales was certain; not only were literary tastes still decided in those countries, but there had been no writers – at least not until the 1960s – published by Australian houses who had made a global impression.

1961 saw the premiere of another work by White, something old yet something new. The Ham Funeral was a decidedly modernist play White had written in 1947 while saying goodbye to Europe. Told in a vaudevillian style, the play follows a Young Man – a self-conscious writer type – struggling to engage with the real world, represented by his earthy landlady and her bawdy acquaintances as they prepare for her husband’s unexpected funeral. White had dug the play out of mothballs after a passing comment from the actor Keith Michell, and attempted to sell it in both the US and UK. The play’s deliberately alienating tone left producers doubtful it could reach mainstream success, not to mention its stylistic excesses. Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris saw the immediate potential for this play to overhaul Australian theatre, and fought to program it for the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. The Festival board were less keen on a play that seemed vulgar and experimental, and the men found another company in Adelaide, the University Theatre Guild, to stage it. The Guild made the most of the Festival audiences while explicitly standing outside of the Festival itself. The Ham Funeral swept the dust clean away from the inherently conservative Australian theatre scene, earning some rapture and much furore. The play travelled to Sydney and Brisbane the following year.

Adelaide would get little reprieve from White, as he was inspired to write a second play, The Season at Sarsaparilla, which premiered there in 1962, followed by a Melbourne run. Season is a more linear, comprehensible piece, however is equally as outspoken in its judgment of ordinary Australian society. Recreating the fictional Sarsaparilla from Riders (which would appear several times over in White’s work), the play examines three neighbouring houses in suburbia and the repressions and obsessions of the residents therein. Reviews were stronger here, although when the play eventually made it to Sydney (White’s toughest theatre crowd despite being his home town), they were less kind.

White’s profile was reaching new heights. In 1962, a painting of White by the artist Louis Kahan won the Archibald Prize, and the following year he lunched with other dignitaries and the Queen and Prince Phillip during their tour of Australia. He was also entering a period of great fecundity; for the first time since the war, he was inspired to write short stories for magazine publication, with five published for the first time in 1962 alone. By 1964, White had enough for a full collection, and The Burnt Ones was published. Almost as many projects remained unfinished, among them a screenplay and a proposed opera about the story of Eliza Fraser, a shipwreck survivor who washed up on Queensland’s Fraser Island and was taken in by an Aboriginal tribe. All the while, he and Lascaris hosted Australia’s literary, political, and social greats at lavish dinners. White would spend all day cooking, and the conversation was famously unpredictable – as were the author’s moods. Many friendships were formed over these dinners but almost as many were lost! Intriguingly, for Australia at the time, few guests seem to have been deterred by the idea of meeting Patrick’s homosexual life partner. They were a couple, and if you wanted one you got the other. White was not “out” in any sense of the word, and the very private and proper Lascaris would never have countenanced the thought. But to those who knew the men, there was no doubting the intensity and certainty of their love.

Art mattered, too. His mother had nurtured a healthy interest in art, especially painting, and a belief that one’s interests in art are both an outward and inward show of oneself. During his two decades at Dogwoods, White collected numerous artworks and, by the late 1960s, would have a veritable art gallery in his new Sydney home. As he gradually accumulated wealth, White determined to champion newer painters and underappreciated artists. Several times, indeed, he bought a new work at a substantial sum only to donate it to the State Art Gallery – received sometimes with excitement and sometimes, where White’s taste was idiosyncratic, mere politeness.

Playwriting fascinated White more and more. Ever since seeing Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll – the most famous Australian play of the era and indeed to this day – White was dismissive of his attempt to “reproduce banality… The reproduction has not the faintest tinge of great. It remains a rather boring version of the real.” (White would like the play more when he later read it.) Every one of his 1960s plays is a formal experiment, and here was an artform that invited collaboration, an immediate audience reaction, and a satisfying rush. Another play, A Cheery Soul, soon materialised, and was the first time a White play would premiere in Melbourne, the city which continued to vie with Sydney for the title of Australia’s cultural capital. (Adelaide had rejected this script outright.) A bleakly funny fable about a busybody old woman, A Cheery Soul should have lured in the Melbourne audiences but instead was an outright box office failure for the Union Theatre Rep (future Melbourne Theatre Company), with reports that some houses were only 20% full. Reviewers were enraptured by Nita Pannell’s performance in the lead role – and justifiably so, for White had envisioned her from the moment he wrote the short story on which he based his play – but were uncertain about the script and production. A Cheery Soul became the first White play not to tour to another location.

The author had doggedly carried on, writing yet another play – Night on Bald Mountain – before the previous one had even seen an audience. This time, amusingly enough, the Adelaide Festival was determined to get their hands on it. Out of spite, White ensured that the Guild was able to stage the premiere in Adelaide instead, with his favourite director of the era, Jim Tasker. A grand tragedy set at the mountain retreat of a querulous professor and his alcoholic wife, Night attracted reasonable audiences (a “Patrick White play” was becoming the stuff of legend) but received dismissive critical reviews, and no interstate company showed interest in another production. Late in his life, White was asked by Neil Armfield whether the play should be revived; he responded; “No. It’s a dishonest play”. The failure saw White and Tasker’s friendship shattered over their approaches to the work, and severed the former’s interest in playwriting. Australian theatre continued on in the more traditional direction. While some argue that White’s decision to give up writing plays was a loss, there was one person who didn’t think so: Manoly Lascaris. Fully aware that White’s genius was for prose, Lascaris largely held his tongue, but disliked what he saw as the easy high White gained from writing these works that came far easier to him, and the concomitant weeks or months of rehearsal, socialising, and publicity that followed – months that could have been used to write great novels.

In 1963, amongst all of this, Patrick and Manoly found six months to again travel to Europe. Part of the reason was to see White’s mother, Ruth, who was ill. Shortly after returning home, the news came that Mrs White had died. Their relationship had always been challenging; Ruth was troublesome and socially ambitious, yet her drive and interest in culture had undoubtedly helped White become the man he was. Ruth would linger in some of White’s later works, but for now there was a more important outcome: at age 51, he had come into his full inheritance.

The time had come, therefore, for Patrick and Manoly to leave Dogwoods behind. It was a decision of great pain. Neither of the men were the wandering types, and their partial isolation had allowed them to control their relationship with the outside world. Still, their life was not what it had been in the hazy days after the war. After months of preparation, the pair sold their furniture, rounded up the dogs and cats, and prepared for a new life. White conducted a monumental bonfire in the backyard where he destroyed countless papers and letters, including some he had requested from close family and friends, promising he would return them. Many of White’s early letters, papers and manuscripts were lost forever here, as well as the last-known copies of several early works and a suitcase full of copies of The Ploughman, his youthful poetry collection, which he had been recouping via a major Sydney bookseller for years. Through his relative Eleanor Arrighi, Patrick had found a new house at 20 Martin Road, Centennial Park. The house, which would become known as Highbury, had been built in 1912, the same year as both men were born, and cost them £17,500. Highbury is situated in a small block in the very centre of the large Centennial Park, only a 15 minute drive from the centre of Sydney yet with the easy ability to avoid the urban centre whenever required. A beautiful grand structure, the house would still allow the men their cosy enjoyment of cooking and cleaning without the required yardwork of which they had grown tired.

A new chapter was about to begin.

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