Biography 09 – Patrick White Catalogue

BIOGRAPHY:

The Legacy

1990 – present

Bernard Hall, Marble staircase, Public Library [State Library of Victoria], 1925

“A country is only remembered for its art. Rome is remembered for Virgil, Greece for Homer, and Australia may be remembered for Patrick White.” –
Anthony Burgess, Adelaide Festival, 1970

The Forgotten Stranger

In the immediate aftermath of Patrick White’s death on 30 September 1990, there was the expected festival of hagiography. The first years of the 1990s saw multiple collections of essays on his work, a festschrift compiled by Clayton Joyce, all eight of the surviving plays collected by Currency Press, a collection of his miscellaneous writings edited by Alan Lawson, a photographic compilation by William Yang, and David Marr’s landmark biography, shortly followed by a thick volume of White’s letters, also edited by Marr. White was also one of the authors receiving a plaque along Sydney Harbour as part of the Sydney Writers’ Walk, installed in 1991. Jim Sharman’s documentary film, The Burning Piano, premiered in 1993 on ABC Television, although it is impossible to find now. White’s plays, too, had a reasonable afterlife throughout the 1990s, staged by numerous major theatre companies across the state capitals, although the frequency died down after the turn of the century. The idea of Patrick White the old master, of Patrick White the outspoken public citizen, still garnered interest.

The same, alas, could not be said for the novels, the works allegedly sitting at the centre of White’s legacy. In Andrew Riemer’s insightful obituary of White, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, he notes that for several years before his death White was no longer viewed as a voice of contemporary Australia by “the custodians of literature”. It was very likely, Riemer said, that the same number of people read his works, but he no longer appealed to the gatekeepers of literary journals and writers’ festivals. He was seen as elitist, high culture, Eurocentric and, of course, an old (and now dead) white man. More than that, however, and far less maliciously, his approach and style were simply no longer of the moment. The rise of a new generation in the 1970s and 1980s – a generation more diverse in terms of gender, open sexuality, ethnic background, and class – had widened the field. A stronger interest was instilled in novels dictated by lived experience, exemplified by the Miles Franklin Award win for The Hand That Signed the Paper, a novel purportedly written by a Ukranian-Australian woman based on her family’s horrific experiences, only to be revealed – after the award win – as a hoax. Narratives of everyday Australians, drawn with scythe-like realism by artists such as Helen Garner and Tim Winton, were attractive to readers, while novelists like Kim Scott and Alex Miller delved into contemporary issues of race, culture, and belonging. Stylistically, the vogue was for realism or, if one had to be self-consciously arty, for the high postmodernism of David Foster Wallace. Patrick White’s “narrative-driven psychological modernism”, as Richard Rayner has called it, was passé, to say the least!

This is in no way to criticise the stellar output of Australian authors of the last 30 years. My suggested readings page includes plenty of exquisite contemporary writers: Gail Jones, Richard Flanagan, Carrie Tiffany, Melissa Lucashenko, Robbie Arnott. These are the award-winners of our time and each one is remarkable, but they also demonstrate how different our literary landscape is to the world in which Patrick White won two Miles Franklins. So perhaps it was no surprise that Andrew Riemer’s predictions all came true. White’s books disappeared from schools and universities. (The author of this website saw no trace of him during my education throughout the 1990s and 2000s.) He fell off bookshelves too, essentially out of print by the year 2000. In 2007, just over 2,000 copies of his novels were sold in Australia, no doubt largely restricted to Voss and The Eye of the Storm, with the occasional student trying to get through The Tree of Man.

This challenge was not limited to White. In the mid-2000s, David Marr stated that a publishing house’s backlist, which had once been its asset, was now often a burden. Unlike how Brits may approach Virginia Woolf, or Americans Hemingway, Australians do not tend to see our older works as “classics”; rather, we view them as relics. So much so that the launch, in 2012, of Text Publishing’s Classics range, was viewed as a landmark in Australian literary history. What happened here? Well, to an extent, we were already behind the eight-ball. Walt Whitman or George Eliot emerged after generations of embryonic writers created a national art for their respective countries. Australian literary history is a century younger than that of the Americans, and substantially further behind the British. As a result, our early- and mid-20th century works often require more patience or forgiveness than their Anglo brethren, representing as they do a style still in the birthing process. Additionally, though, I would argue our culture has changed more at a base level over the past three generations than those of our Western cousins. Until WWII, Australia was almost exclusively Anglo. Until the late 1970s, we were almost exclusively white. The comparatively small population size, still in thrall to British culture and kept in aspic by heavy censorship and government protectionism, was amplified by a general provincial mindset. This was the status quo which White and his contemporaries were engaging with, or rebelling against. Then, in the final 25 years of White’s life, the upheaval was accomplished: the Holt and Whitlam governments dismantled the White Australia policy while their successors, Fraser and Hawke, opened their arms to globalism and the neoliberal mindset. While all countries evolve continuously, and the soaring social changes effected by the internet and the equal rights movements have had profound impact on how we view ourselves, the values and very ways of being of an Australian seem to have utterly metamorphosed in just two generations. To a city-dwelling Australian of the 2020s, there are fewer connection points to grasp when we interact with works of art from our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ generation. Or so I would argue.

(This is not to deny, incidentally, that White can be a tough cookie. Although to be fair, while some Nobel Laureates – Hemingway, Lessing – offer complex themes in straightforward prose, most, like José Saramago and Derek Walcott demand the reader’s full attention at the level of their very prose construction, and our boy Patrick is no different.)

It didn’t help that White was no longer of value to many arbiters of taste. Of course his novels had never been water-cooler conversation, but now they were obscure even to those in the know. Robin Wallace-Crabbe wrote in the 1990s that White was viewed by the right as a class traitor, as someone who wrote – often obscenely – about the kind of issues which the landed gentry weren’t supposed to acknowledge; meanwhile the left felt that his class disqualified him from being an activist, that his public image contrasted with an inherent disdain for ordinary people. The novelist Geraldine Brooks has described this as White’s “patrician contempt” for the average Australian. (Such a view, I would argue, represents a superficial reading of the texts.) Contemporary adulation is for readable language – poetic, perhaps; polysyllabic, sure; but accessible. White, instead, is routinely spoken of as writing in convoluted, dense, baroque, even inscrutable paragraphs. Finally, one might say that White’s very identity foundered on the rocks of the current identity-based zetigeist. Glancing down the list of nominees for the Booker Prize or the Miles Franklin, one is struck by how many of the novels are “autofiction”, or at least relate directly to the author’s own ancestors or life situation. White’s texts are not merely imagination, of course; he has a complex relationship to them. Yet they are in no small part the works of an author conjuring up characters and situations far beyond his ken, and that is not considered noteworthy at present. Alan Lawson has written that literary figures “of this magnitude… are not demolished or forgotten, but they do become sites of struggle which are fought over precisely because they are… icons of cultural value and power.” White continued to appear intermittently in the rarefied spheres of academe, although such writings don’t attempt to appeal to ordinary readers. The titles alone are proof of that; for every Patrick White and the Aesthetics of Death there is an Is Prowse’s Rectum a Grave?: Jouissance, Reparative Transnationalism, and Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair.

The nadir of White’s reputation may have been the mid 2000s, when several Australian publishers received an in-progress manuscript from a first-time novelist named Wraith Picket. Some returned it unread; some felt it needed the kind of detailed editing publishers no longer provide to new novelists; some clearly hated it. It wasn’t long before truth was revealed by a scornful media: Wraith Picket did not exist; he was an anagram of someone named Patrick White. The manuscript was in fact the third chapter of The Eye of the Storm. Here, it seemed, was proof positive. Either literary history was irrelevant to the modern crop of editors and publishers, who couldn’t even identify one of the most famous novels of our most famous author, in which case they were the fools. Or culture itself was relative, and White only successful in his time by a combination of chance, connections, and privilege, in which case we all were the fools. Neither outcome was particularly edifying.

Mr Lascaris

Yet White had known what truly mattered. Manoly Lascaris, his “sweet reason”, the one thing that made the author “as happy as one who is not made for happiness can be”, was first and foremost. “Nothing”, White said, “is of importance beside that”.

After White’s death, Lascaris was left in the big house in Centennial Park, in the presence of the two surviving dogs and a small coterie of friends. A naturally quiet and retiring soul who had long accepted that his place in history would be as Patrick’s muse and comfort. White only left Lascaris the house in trust until the latter’s death, to ensure that it was not turned into any kind of museum. So Lascaris carried on, rarely leaving the suburb of Centennial Park, for another 12 years in the home he had shared with the love of his life. During this time he befriended a Greek translator, Vrasidas Karalis, who would provide penetrating insights in a 2008 book called Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris. Lascaris is described here, as one reviewer put it, as a figure of “old-world melancholia”, a snob perhaps, an immensely learned man who sometimes regretted the “life of sheltered insignificance” he chose in Australia. He felt bitterly the pain of being deprived a legacy, that a relationship of almost five decades should end without him being left the very walls around them. (“Patrick left me nothing”, Marr quotes the old man as bemoaning on numerous occasions. He had in fact left Lascaris much of his financial wealth.) He felt divided, too, about White’s wishes; of course he respected Patrick but he also knew that legacies are built, not made, and that once the house was gone, it would be that much harder. Lascaris never sought publicity, although was occasionally profiled in print as a reticent, mournful figure. Yet he had also been the charming co-host of a home which saw many of Australia’s most luminary figures pass through its doors, and had been the often unacknowledged presence following in the wake of the passionate author.

In his final years, Lascaris developed Parkinson’s disease. In 2002, he left Highbury for a nursing home in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay. By a strange stroke of coincidence, that nursing home was the former Lulworth, Patrick White’s childhood home. Emmanuel George “Manoly” Lascaris, born in Egypt on 5 August 1912, a descendant of the family which claimed to be the rightful heirs to the Byzantine Empire and thus the lineage of Ancient Rome, died at Lulworth on 13 November 2003, aged 91. His ashes were scattered into the sea off Clovelly.

Lascaris was correct that the house would be lost if it did not become a Patrick White museum. A public campaign was mounted to convince the NSW Government to purchase Highbury for $4 million. Ultimately, the Bob Carr government decided the price was too rich. The house’s contents were auctioned off rather than protected, although a number of smaller items reached collectors or museums. (White’s wastepaper basket ultimately found its way to American filmmaker John Waters, a big fan.) Highbury was successfully listed on the NSW State Heritage Register, preventing any future demolition, but was sold privately, for $3.2 million, to an investment banker. It sold again more recently, in 2016, passing into the hands of another wealthy Sydney couple. There will be no Patrick White museum at 20 Martin Road, Centennial Park.

Rediscovery

Andrew Riemer was a man of vision. He predicted the demise of White’s reputation but also the new ascendancy of his star. And indeed, once the dust settled on the debate over White’s place in the canon, his works began to reappear.

[right: Robyn Nevin as Miss Docker in A Cheery Soul (photo: Branco Gaica)]

The rediscovery took place in three phases. The first was a calculated one. In 1982, White had told a friend that “I hope [friends] will destroy any letters I may have written them… I also have it in my will that all unfinished [manuscripts] be destroyed at my death, though knowing what people are, I hope I shall have time to destroy them myself.” After his death, his beloved agent Barbara Mobbs took carriage of the destruction of twenty-four boxes of papers and memorabilia. Both Lascaris and David Marr assumed they were gone, with Marr never having known some of these papers even existed. With Lascaris’ death, however, Mobbs came forward with a truth she had kept for this moment. She had retained the boxes, believing that ultimately their significance to Australian literary history was too great to permit their destruction. In secret, Mobbs contacted the National Library of Australia, which purchased them for an undisclosed price before announcing the discovery to the nation.

Was this the moral decision or a breach of White’s dying wishes? The author had destroyed the manuscripts of his early plays and novels in 1964, and had betrayed the trust of close friends and family by requesting old letters back temporarily, only to destroy them too. Yet Mobbs argued that White had decades in which to destroy his later material and chose not to. By passing them to his agent, whose respect for his work was well-known, was he not tacitly allowing her control? These twenty-four boxes represented one of the greatest acquisitions in the National Library’s history. The boxes contain manuscripts and letters, drafts of his speeches and memoirs, notebooks with research and character notes, unpublished manuscripts, and a variety of treasures. (The archives also included recipes from White’s diary, some of which were prepared as part of a celebratory launch dinner.) They will offer fascinating reading to scholars for years to come, and aid in ensuring that 20th century Australian literature can be afforded its full worth. High literature made the front page of newspapers for a few days in 2006, and surely that alone is worth any perceived betrayal.

The next phase of the rediscovery was that which happens to almost any author of note. The publicity generated by the Patrick White Papers was augmented by the countdown to the centenary of his birth. 2007 saw the first exhibition of the White archives at the National Library, including his iconic beret and beanie. 2009 saw a celebratory week of events at numerous Australian institutions in honour of Voss. In 2010, White had three novels in the Australian Book Review’s poll of the country’s favourites: The Vivisector at #14, The Tree of Man at #10, and Voss at #3. He was beaten by Henry Handel Richardson (The Fortunes of Richard Mahony) at #2 and Tim Winton’s smash Cloudstreet taking gold. The novels slowly returned to print circulation as centenary interest grew, and appeared as eBooks for the first time. While a small but powerful number of theatre companies – chiefly Sydney Theatre Company and the Malthouse Theatre – kept the plays alive, White was also seen for the first time in adaptation. Theatrical versions of The Aunt’s Story and Down at the Dump appeared, and an opera of The Cockatoos premiered in Melbourne. Director Fred Schepisi assembled a cast of international renown – Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush, Maria Theodorakis and Helen Morse, alongside White regulars John Gaden and Robyn Niven – for a film adaptation of The Eye of the Storm in 2011. It was not all celebratory; the Art Gallery of New South Wales attracted criticism in 2010 for selling some of White’s favourite artworks which he had donated in his final decades. Critics claimed this was a hasty process that denied the importance of these pieces to history; the gallery clearly felt that White’s taste did not always accord with that of the art world, and the significant profits could be used to buy more notable works. (One of the pieces sold, Ian Fairweather’s Gethsemane, made them a cool $960,000; it had hung above White’s desk and been his constant inspiration.)

2012 was the centenary year itself, occasioning a major exhibition, The Life of Patrick White, which was jointly prepared by the National Library and the State Library of NSW. Even more prominent was the publication of two novels few living Australians could have expected to read. White’s first novel, Happy Valley, which he had kept from publication after its initial run in 1939, was reissued by Text Publishing. Mobbs and Marr, having consulted the archives, deemed his unfinished work The Hanging Garden suitable for publication in its current form. It was indeed a banner year for the Nobel Laureate.

And in the end…

[left: actress Kate Fitzpatrick cuts the cake at the National Library’s 2012 launch of the Patrick White exhibition]

Centenaries bring cachet and a media blitz, but inevitably those fade away. There has been a noticeable dearth of newspaper articles and headlines in the years since 2012. Each of his four 1960s plays has received one revival production in the decade since then – Sarsaparilla and Bald Mountain in Melbourne; Ham Funeral and A Cheery Soul in Sydney – but are likely to remain occasional pieces. Voss the opera was revived, but not for a full season – two concert productions were scheduled for 2021, by Victorian Opera in conjunction with State Opera of South Australia; when these were cancelled due to pandemic restrictions, they were replaced with a one-night-only showing in Adelaide in 2022.

Yet the media interest is being replaced with something more significant: an admiration of his novels, his talent as a writer, and his place in the annals of Australian letters. All of his novels and short story collections are readily available in print. Audiobooks cover almost his entire prose oeuvre. Over the last decade White has been the subject of numerous books and essay collections, up to the illustrated Patrick White (2020) by Toni Brisland, aimed at teaching children the story of White’s life and works. There has been a proliferation of studies on White’s work as he returns to university curricula and the pages of literary journals, now being studied not as a slowly decaying piece of history but as a figure who speaks to us still.

Alan Seymour felt that White’s significance “as a writer and a person was that he represented the Other, the unexpected thing, the dissonant voice, the dissident person, and because of that, he was very good for us all”. For those of us who view texts primarily aesthetically, Patrick White remained the supreme master throughout his fallow decades. But for the broad number who locate a text’s worth within the cultural context of the moment, White is now at last being seen for his true self: the perpetual outsider, “the stranger of all time”, as he once put it. If most great writers are in some way outsiders – and for Stead and Astley, for Zola and Proust, for Morrison and Pynchon, for Durrell and Achebe, this rings true – then White is clearly of their number. Where surface readings of the 1980s through 2000s dismissed this “difficult” writer as a self-absorbed patrician, commentators and readers of the present are correcting that error. White is sui generis precisely because he existed outside of the acceptable mainstream. An Australian when such a thing was still politely laughable overseas. A modernist when realism would be preferred, please. A voice of protest in a time when deference to the establishment was the golden ticket. An acolyte of art and culture even as mundane small talk reigned supreme; a gay man in a world that wanted to dismiss such a trait as deviance; a wealthy man dispersing his fortune to charity; and a figure in the Van Gogh mold, who knew his art had worth even if others could not always see it. A writer who believed in the imaginative power of an addled spinster, the epic possibilities available to a rustic couple in a Tom Roberts landscape, who believed that prophecy was a gift not just for the gods but for an ordinary washerwoman or an Indigenous artist in a garret, who gave his highest moments of transcendence and grace to the rejected, the disillusioned, the outcast.

Patrick White’s ultimate legacy will only become clear as the 21st century plods inexorably along. In the immediate present, Australia – like most Western countries – is working through its complicated view of itself, of its people, and of how art and culture were used as part of an elaborate, usually unintentional, system of stratification, separating a variety of ‘haves’ from a far wider variety of ‘have-nots’. We are also engaged in an endless spinning of the wheel of artistic merit, a topsy-turvy experience where works deemed brilliant one day are denied the next, while styles derided by one generation become beloved by the next. The new generation of writers – names like Tara June Winch and Robbie Arnott, and many others whose first novels are still merely ideas – will be the first to have grown up without the spectre of White’s personality looming large. Perhaps by 2062, the Patrick White Sesquicentenary, we will have a clearer picture of his influence, meaning, and longevity. I hope to be there. Here in the 2020s, however, the novels, short stories, and plays remain for us to revel in, rediscover, and contemplate.

For some of us, that is all the legacy we need.

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