Biography 06

Eric John Smith, Sydney Harbour Bridge, late 1950s

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

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“Behind the lenses of his sunglasses Farrell’s face was as unreadable as a Patrick White novel.”

Shane Maloney, The Big Ask

The mid-1960s was an immensely fertile period for Patrick White – socially, culturally, artistically. Although he had abandoned the theatre after the failure of Night on Bald Mountain, he was filled with ideas for projects, many of which would remain forever unpublished or incomplete. Among them were multiple novels and an opera, as well as a film adapted from three of his short stories. However, as he and Lascaris settled into life in Sydney’s inner suburb of Centennial Park, White was completing a novel which would see the light of day: The Solid Mandala. Published in 1966, this tale of twin brothers yoked together despite vastly different personalities was as dense and layered as any of his work but seemed less intimidating to readers, lacking the epic nature or overtly symbolist style of his previous works. The Solid Mandala was received by mostly respectful reviews, and sold moderately well for a work deemed “literary” (13,000 copies in the UK and Australia) but the novel did not earn its advance back in the US. The Solid Mandala‘s importance to the canon lies in its role as the final of White’s suburban pieces. With his move to the inner city, and his role as a two-time winner of the Miles Franklin Award, the author was in a different stage of life. He would turn his eyes now to social satires and dramas.

White’s writing process was meticulous and often tempestuous. For a novel, White would write four hours a day, usually in the morning, before spending the afternoon and evening in the kitchen or entertaining. He would indulge in revisions late at night. The first draft was often illegible to the untrained eye, exacerbated perhaps by his tendency to drink or to lose himself in violent moods. As David Marr notes, White always felt that no-one would want to read what he had to say. Once he and Lascaris got through the fights that often accompanied this period, White would commence on the second draft. Dr Mary-Louise Ayres of the NLA has noted that these were written “on cream lined writing paper with Roman numerals for numbering, in bundles, using his favourite blue fountain pen with a continuous flow and correcting along the way, blue biro and then red biro for further corrections after the first.” The second draft would enter a bank vault for a few months, allowing White to travel or indulge in short stories or play scripts. He would return to it, this time typing the third-draft on his trusty typewriter. Despite publishers’ preferences, White would type the manuscript single-spaced to save money on posting overseas. Over the years, White came to believe that if he did not cry on completing the novel, he had not succeeded. Short stories and plays were less stressful, as they often emerged out of a particular skein of thought that needed to be seen to its logical conclusion. Dr Ayres says that the play manuscripts are a lot messier than the novels, and White would often slip into prose in his first draft to get the shell of an idea worked out.

Although he would always bemoan his financial status, White seems to have been very comfortable by 1966. With his mother’s death a couple of years earlier he had received his inheritance, and David Marr notes he was earning around 40,000 pounds (prior to the decimalisation of currency) from the hardback sales of a new novel (before tax). Paperback sales were growing, and would continue to do so. He would earn perhaps $4,000 every second year for his novels. Interested parties were also circling to film The Tree of Man or Voss, although neither of these would ever eventuate, at least as of 2023. Whereas Australian literature had been non-existent on school and university syllabuses only a couple of decades earlier, it was now blossoming, and White’s stories and novels would be approached by more adventurous teachers. Still, it came as a shock to his UK publishers, Eyre & Spottiswoode, when White turned down two awards for The Solid Mandala, including the Miles. Although privately he believed E&S were not advertising his books enough, the publishing house was equally as bewildered by his recalcitrance in the face of increased public interest. The reality was, White wanted his novels to succeed or fail on their own terms – rather naively believing that his profile and marketing were unnecessary fillips. When he visited the UK in 1968, White found himself the subject of a bidding war from other publishers who clearly did not mind his defiant stance, ultimately signing with Jonathan Cape. Meanwhile his beloved US editor, Ben Huebsch, had recently passed away, and – although White would remain with Viking in the States – his relationship was never the same with editors who sought to challenge his works rather than merely praise his genius. (White’s wealth, incidentally, should not be confused with meanness: he donated anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 to charity each year during his last decades, prioritising Aboriginal services and students, and charities like the Smith Family which aimed to help the disadvantaged.)

For Manoly Lascaris, meanwhile, life had taken on a calm inevitability. Reflecting on his decision to leave his native land behind to follow Patrick into this antipodean exile, Lascaris said he had felt that “This may be the end of me, but it has to be.” 20 years on and Lascaris – a born aristocrat – had never held a job, living instead as Patrick’s companion and conscience. The men divided the household tasks between them, cared for their pets (they no longer bred dogs, but still had a reliable menagerie), and he remained the quieter, wry half of the couple famous for their dinner parties and cultural events. When White was deep in the process of writing a novel, Lascaris walked on eggshells, and the emotion would sometimes boil into fights that would see White storm to the bus stop across the street, threatening to leave. (On his partner deep into writing, Lascaris once said “he had a look in his eye, and I did not break the thread.”) Once the novel was complete, however, it was Lascaris who held the cards, as he ever-so-slowly read the draft through, refusing to give White the satisfaction of his comments until the entire manuscript had been studied.

Their relationship should never be considered one-sided or power imbalanced, despite how it might have looked to the outside world. In James Waites’ insightful profile of Lascaris for the Independent Monthly in 1990 – one of few profiles on the man – Waites notes how often he would walk White back from a bitter phone call or letter, inserting calm where White only found angst in the moment. They were profoundly in love, remaining intimate until their old age. White viewed sex as a key part of life, but also felt that good sex only came from love. Although social mores were changing, Lascaris was still unable to live openly as part of a homosexual couple (not that the staunchly old-fashioned Greek man would have wanted to) and had no money of his own, relying on his allowance from Patrick – an allowance he had lobbied for on their arrival in Australia, receiving it after a few years of debate. This changed in 1967 when the Dogwoods property was finally sold, and Lascaris was granted half of the profits. Lascaris would return to Greece (now under military junta) in 1968, and be reunited with his mother for the final time in 1971. He had made a choice to give up an independent life in favour of being the “sweet reason” of the genius writer. It was a choice he seems to have questioned and perhaps even regretted over the years, but never one that he doubted.

Australia of the 1960s was a staunchly conservative place, artistically and socially. Robert Menzies finally stepped down as Prime Minister in 1966 but his influence would be felt for years to come. White’s divided feelings about Australia were on show in all of his works of the decade. Publicly, however, he restricted his opinions to the occasional letter to the Sydney Morning Herald championing a particular play or writer. White had not been immune to the appeal of the status quo, voting conservatively throughout the past two decades. reflecting his patrician background. He had felt that art was art and politics was politics, and the two fields could comment on each other but shouldn’t actively intervene. Indeed, White and Lascaris had become friends with Governor-General Lord Casey and his wife in the 1960s; the friendships of the cultivated classes still came naturally to the scion of the White dynasty. Now, a shift began to take place. In 1966, White joined a public protest for the first time, arguing against the dismissal of architect Jørn Utzon from the controversial new Sydney Opera House. The following year, he read the Ramparts Vietnam Primer and his anger about the Vietnam war – coupled with his subsequent visit to protest-ravaged Europe – had a strong impact, leading White to join an illegal protest against the War. In 1969, he went as far as to vote Labour, still sceptical of the progressive Gough Whitlam, but scornful of the election’s winner, John Gorton, for being a tool of the landed gentry. Although he had always argued against the corrupt and the powerful, White began using his platform to argue against war, corruption, and a range of causes such as South African apartheid. His appearance at a 1970 censorship trial, in which police were prosecuting publishers who had printed Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in defiance of draconian laws on importing obscene books, was tabloid fodder, with his willingness to defend the book’s sexual and ethical excesses – vocally and shamelessly! Media interest – which the writer had refused to cultivate only a few years’ earlier – was soon welcomed… as long as they played by his rules. In 1969, White gave his most notable interview yet to Craig McGregor, reflecting on the creative process and elements of his personal life. His passions were further exercised by a plan to build sports stadiums in Centennial Park, and he joined a number of noisy protests alongside construction unions who took on a “green ban”, refusing to work on projects that would take away inner-city parkland. This transition to notoriety lost White some friendships – sometimes because of his unwillingness to separate the personal from political, and sometimes because he simply grew tired of friends whose views did not accord with his.

Amongst all this, one could be forgiven for assuming White had left the art of fiction behind. His output would certainly slow down in the 1970s, but 1970 saw the publication of his eighth novel, The Vivisector. A self-consciously “big” book, The Vivisector is a biography of the fictional Hurtle Duffield, a genius artist whose vulgarity and self-doubt threaten his vision of sublime colour and composition. The Vivisector exemplifies the tendencies of White’s middle period: its prose is layered and individual, yet rarely challenging as text. Hurtle Duffield becomes the fulcrum around which a number of satirical characters, big ideas, and elaborate set pieces wind themselves. No longer is White fascinated purely by what it means to be Australian, but increasingly what it means to be human. He is interrogating broader ways of being, is increasingly self-conscious, and always incredibly assured in his writing. The Vivisector was White’s longest novel and sold more copies in Australia on first printing than any of those that came before. Rumours swirled that White was being considered for the Nobel Prize. Indeed, he was being discussed in those highly confidential Swedish corridors of power, but lost out to Samuel Beckett, and then Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

In December 1972, White voted again for Whitlam’s Labour Party. Although still a reluctant convert, he was delighted when Whitlam won, ending decades of conservative rule in Australia. White felt he had “picked a side” in an ongoing battle, and committed himself to the cause of Australian republicanism. He had been offered a knighthood, which would have been a statement of accepting the Queen’s rule, and thus he turned it down. As he turned 60, however, life was catching up with him. His sister, Suzanne, had died in 1969 from influenza just as she was starting a new phase of her life after having raised children and cared for their dying mother. Her early demise seems to have haunted White, who determined that he would finish the remaining two or three novels he had in mind. White was a man of his generation when it came to health. By 60, he had none of his original teeth, had suffered glaucoma, and still had his recurrent asthma. This, combined with his allergy to mold spores, would hospitalise him at various points, and he took Prednisone to ease the symptoms. When Lascaris contracted diabetes, the couple made a pact. Patrick would give up drink and Manoly would give up cigarettes. One of those promises was kept…

And what of faith? After his fall in the rain at Dogwoods, the fall that had inspired him to write The Tree of Man, White considered himself a Christian. Lascaris was an Orthodox Greek but White was an unorthodox believer at all times. Still, he had sometimes attended church at Castle Hill and felt connected to the broader culture through this faith. During the 1960s, especially as he researched Judaism for Riders in the Chariot, White drifted from organised religion again, identifying as someone who recognised Christ but was not a Christian. After the move to Sydney, he seems to have found in religion the same corruption and hypocrisy that he saw in many other systems. In later life, he also opened himself up to the occult, to Jungian psychology, to the I Ching… like many geniuses, he understood that any answer was only as relevant as the identity of the questioner, never of relevance to the entire world.

1973 brought his next novel, The Eye of the Storm. Centered around the dying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter and her self-absorbed children, who have returned from fulfilling lives in Europe to engage with their former Australian selves, it is a deeply psychological text, probing into its characters and the impact of the past. The Eye of the Storm is the book which bridges his middle and later periods, remaining easily readable but digging into the symbolic and psychological still further. Smarting from the dismissive American response to The Vivisector, White arranged – in a change from the usual procedure – for the novel to be published in the UK first, hoping that the expected positive response there would massage the Americans into submission. (“If there are some good reviews in London, it might give a lead to those incompetent Americans.”) To his surprise, while the novel sold well and received fairly good notices in Australia, it was not appreciated by the British literati. All hope for the international literary esteem he sought seemed lost – although he did receive his largest advance payment yet, at $12,500.

Regardless of the responses to an individual novel, it was clear that Australian literature was thriving, and Patrick White was the acknowledged elder statesman. His decision to remain in the country when many of his contemporaries had fled, or focused their creativity on non-Australian subjects, now saw him celebrated in university theses and academic journals. Then, late one night in 1973, a phone call from Sweden would change everything…

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