Who Was Patrick White?
Patrick White: A Biographical Note
Patrick Victor Martindale White was born in London on May 28, 1912, of Australian parents. He was brought up and educated in Sydney, Australia, until he was 13, when he returned to England to attend Cheltenham College. Back in Australia after his schooling, he worked for two years on sheep stations in New South Wales. During this time he made his first attempts at writing a novel. He returned to England to study modern languages at Cambridge University and graduated in 1935 with the degree of Bachelor of Arts. After Cambridge, White travelled in Europe and the United States and wrote poems, plays and novels. Some of the poems were published in England.
His first published novel, Happy Valley, appeared in 1939 and his second, The Living and the Dead, in 1941. During the Second World War, White served with the British Royal Air Force, mostly as an intelligence officer in Africa, the Middle East, and the Western Desert and then for a year in Greece.
After he was demobilized from the R.A.F., White returned to Australia and bought a farm near Castle Hills, 40 kilometres out of Sydney where he settled to grow flowers and vegetables and to breed dogs and goats. For some time he wrote nothing. Then he scored an enormous success with his novel The Tree of Man, published in the United States in 1955 and in England in 1956. His succeeding novels, Voss, Riders In the Chariot, The Solid Mandala, The Vivisector, The Eye of the Storm, The Fringe of Leaves, and The Twyborn Affair, reinforced his international reputation.
An extremely painstaking writer, White used to make his first draft of work in longhand, then after a delay, type a second draft. After another delay he made the final draft. White’s recreations were cooking, gardening, listening to music and keeping dogs. He had been described as a man of somewhat stern manner, but a man of gentleness, kindness and unexpected humour with a warm concern for the lonely and awkward members of society. He died in the year 1990.
A Brief Description of his Works
Patrick White has been described as the most gifted and serious novelist Australia has yet produced and the first whose work can be judged in an international rather than a national context. White’s first published work was a small collection of verse, The Ploughman and other Poems, were written in the 1930s. Of it, one critic wrote later: “Mild and sweet and bitter, these poems are of no importance except in so far as they demonstrate that an original mind does not necessarily come of age quickly.”
White’s first published novel, Happy Valley (1939), tells of a married doctor’s love affair with a music teacher. He portrays suffering in human relationships intensified by life in a small Australian mountain town.
Set in England in the early part of the 20th century, the novel The Living and the Dead (1941) is based on the theme of how emotional death is communicated from one generation to another.
The Aunt’s Story, regarded by some as the finest of White’s early novels, was published in 1948. It narrates the story of a spinster—Theodora Goodman—in subordination to her mother. She was brought up in an Australian country town but moved to Sydney after her father’s death. Her mother’s domination has a shriveling effect on her being, though it cannot shut out those rare moments of passing affection and vision through which “the opaque world will become transparent.” At the end of the novel, we find that she has lost her faculty of reason.
Patrick White became internationally famous with his two novels, The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957) works which earned him a comparison with Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. The Tree of Man deals with a farmer and his wife who struggle to build a future against the hazards of flood, fire and drought. They share the daily burdens of life but cannot communicate with each other. The novel then is “the loneliness of the human soul that unsuccessfully aspires to self-realisation. Man has the potentiality to create new life—the tree of man has many branches each growing towards the light—but suffering and loneliness come from his inability to communicate with others despite common experience.” The life that Stan Parker shares with his wife, Amy, is simple. Like Voss the novel is set in Australia but it uses a universal theme—the hidden poetry that secretly wells up in humdrum lives. Stan and Amy are themselves inarticulate but they strive for some kind of realization that always eludes them—the kind of realisation that Theodora Goodman could partially achieve only at the cost of her sanity. Amy’s efforts make her petulant and possessive but her husband feels liberate in the moments when he can concentrate on objects in the external world. It has been suggested that, for all the insistence in The Tree of Man on immersing oneself in the ordinariness of living, the novel itself shows that fulfillment lies in liberation from that condition—in transcendence.
White’s psychological study of the urge to self-realisation is carried further in Voss, the story of a man who set out in 1845 with a small group to cross the Australian continent for the first time. White analyses brilliantly the compulsive drive of Voss, a figure of almost megalomaniac proportions, who wanted to win fame as an explorer and to identify himself with God. The theme was suggested to White by the true record of the explorer, Ludwig Lichardt who died in the Australian desert in 1848.
Riders in the Chariot (1961) draws together a woman living in her parents’ faded mansion, a refugee from Nazi Germany, a laundress married to a drunkard and an Aboriginal painter—all of them failures in life, rejected by others and trying to find refuge within themselves. The theme of the struggle between good and evil permeates the whole action of the novel.
The Solid Mandala (1966) has special interest for Indian readers. Mandala,a Sanskrit word, meaning ‘circle’ is often used in Eastern esoteric and religious literature—in Oriental art it signifies a schematised representation of the cosmos, chiefly characterised by a concentric organization of geometric shapes, each of which contains an image or attribute of a deity.
In the complex novel The Vivisector (1970), White portrays the isolation and loneliness of an artist who is sold as a child to a rich grazier. The artist faces the dilemma that he must accept loneliness to bring out his talents, but that he needs people, as a vivisector needs animals to achieve his ambitions. The book brings to life the whole spectrum of Australian society from the turn of the century to the present.
The Eye of the Storm (1973) is built around Elizabeth Hunter, old, bed-ridden and practically blind, dying in her magnificent house in Sydney. Around her are three nurses and a Jewish housekeeper, a refugee from Berlin, as well as her knighted actor son Basil and daughter Dorothy, a princes by marriage who have arrived from Europe concerned about their inheritance. Elizabeth Hunter’s past and present are interwoven, her life recalled through memories and thoughts and through the eyes of those around this strong-willed and loveless woman. In the novel, The Eye of the Storm, Elizabeth Hunter once survived on an island off the coast of Queensland. She then experienced, as a state of mind, a calmness which she tries to reach once again.
New readers of White might best begin with the more recent works: his style has mellowed. A Fringe of Leaves (1976) and that beautifully designed fable to identity, The Twyborn Affair (1979) are fine examples of a writer at ease with his craft and his material.
A Fringe of Leaves draws from its version of the shipwreck of Eliza Fraser a wonderful fable of the contact of Europeans with, successively, convictism, the Aborigines, the land, and the mercantile society. It explores each of those encounters with intergrity and with delightful wit and fluency. Above all, it is a novel about survival, about how to take the full knowledge of one’s humanity back into ordinary society. The idea of initiation, with its accompanying situations and incidents, plays an important role in the structure and meaning of A Fringe of Leaves. The book succeeds in telling us that we carry with us not only our own past but the past of our entire race. We cannot escape it, nor can we deny it.
White’s latest novel, The Twyborn Affair, returns to earlier modes: to the eccentric quest and to implicit rejection of social norms. John Colmer and David Blamires have drawn our attention to the unusual title which contains not only an obvious reference to the dual sexual identity of the protagonist but also to the medieval Greek epic, Digenees Akrites (Twyborn the Borderer”), a tale of a hero who combines Greek and Arab ancestry, a bringer of peace who guards the frontier between the two races. The title also recalls Ford Madox. Ford’s use of the term “Affair” to refer to a well-chosen episode that contains within it the potential to mirror a whole society, as the episode on which Ford’s The Good Soldier, mirrors the disintegration of Europe at the outbreak of the First World War. The major concern of the book is the understanding of the artist, and this concern becomes more significant if the novel is read in conjunction with his two earlier works; first his drama, The Ham Funeral, and then his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass. While the portrait of the artist is sketched broadly in The Ham Funeral, Flaws provides the commentary for the more complete portrait drawn minutely in The Twyborn Affair, which shows a single character in three guises, all parts of the fragmented artist: Eudoxia, a sexually ambiguous, charming young woman, Edward, a young hero of the Fist World War striving to achieve normal masculine heterosexual identity as a jackaroo, and the protagonist’s final transformation into the colourful Mrs. Eadith Trist, the madame of a fashionable West End brothel in London. Towards the end of the novel Eadith appears giving up the brothel, putting on male clothes, and telling her mother at the outbreak of the Second World War that her “frivolous self will now go in search of some occupation in keeping with times” a finale suggestive of White’s own commitment to policies in Australia of that time much more discernible in Big Toys.
Patrick White published four plays in 1965: The Ham Funeral, a metaphysical treatment of life in a London lodging house. The Season at Sarsaparilla, a vital and caustic commentary on Australian suburban life. A Cherry Soul, the portrayal of a virtuous spinster driven to destroy herself and others by her compulsion to do good. Night on Bold Mountain, a play dealing with frustration and the destructive power of intellectual pride, the central characters in which are a professor of the English language and his alcoholic wife who are victims of their inability to communicate with each other. In each of these plays, White shows a great gift for comedy, from the macabre to the bawdy which fuses passion and suffering with high-spirited theatricality.
In 1964 White published a collection of eleven short stories under the title The Burnt Ones. The settings range from Greece to Sydney suburbia and, as the title implies, the characters are the unfortunate ones, those burnt by life.
White’s reputation as a difficult writer is, in my view, often overstated. His style, though not always smooth, is accessible enough if we actually listen to it. White himself has said of his approach: “I say what I have tried to say through the juxtaposition of images and situations and the emotional exchanges of human beings.” His novels are not crossword puzzles nor displays of dazzling social irony; one reads them, staying open to the emotional experience of all the elements of the writing, and meaning gradually unfolds itself.
Those who view White’s novels solely in terms of pessimism, futility, scorn of the human predicament, his bleak and perverse determination to penetrate the mystery of human identity and depiction of the tragic force of life, fail to discern the element of wit and humour so central to his vision of humanity. That vision is essentially a comic one: it is concerned with reconciliation and with the persistence of the human spirit. “So that is the end, there was no end” is the last sentence of The Tree of Man and it also express the ultimate vision of, for instance, the great Shakespearean comedies.
One of White’s favourite humorous devices is the pun. Pun expresses doubleness—they say two things at once—and doubleness is a central feature of White’s world-view. The quality is sometimes identified by terms such as flesh and spirit, or outer and inner worlds. White’s work shows that these two worlds are part of the same human wholeness. Physical experience and spiritual experience are both essential, and one does no good by trying to rise above the physical or reject the spiritual. This also helps to explain why White is so concerned to depict the grosser aspects of the humans physically—to emphasize that they are part of the wholeness.
And in a colonial or post-colonial society such as ours, images of the unity of the real world of the spirit and the real world of material world are overwhelmingly present. the spiritual realities seem far away; they seem to be embodied in another land, another culture—in our case the Indian / Australian one. We need artists like White to persuade us that a full life can be lived here. White is an Australian wrier in a most important sense. He wrote about the special problems of being fully human in his place, Australia.
Many years before his death, two small but noisy groups claimed that White was not really an Australian writer at all. For one group his non-working class upbringing, his years abroad, and his metaphysical interests disqualified him; he was neither a socialist nor a realist enough for those who required Australian literature to be both. For the second group White was universal (whatever that might mean) and thus somehow above and ultra Australian literature. Nobody who knows and cares about Australian literature and about White’s writing and public activity could take either of these claims seriously now. But because the echoes of those old misguided arguments have become part of a myth that will not quite go away, the extent of this great writer’s relation to his country needs to be stated again. From his pen we have had 11 novels, six plays (as well as three lost early plays and some review sketches), two volumes of short fiction, a film script, and a really remarkable self-portrait, Flaws in the Glass.
He won the Nobel Prize, three Miles Franklin awards, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and the W.H. Smith award. With the Nobel prize-money he established a generous prize for Australian writers. He enthusiastically supported and stimulated the work of many Australian artists, writers, playwrights and actors.
He was also actively involved in many public issues during his life. He signed the Statement in Defiance of the National Service Act, marched in Sydney streets with Jack Mundey in a demonstration against the proposed Centennial Park-Sports Stadium, spoke at the Whitlam Opera House rally, and was vocal on republican, conservation and uranium issues. His criticism is a sign of the intensity of his caring about the place. White was actively committed to his country. It is the country his family had lived in since 1826 and which he chose again when he returned to it in 1946 and it is the principal source of his creative energy.
Critics hostile to White point out that, although he has an impressive metaphysical conception of man, his concept of society is superficial and that he is given to ‘overwriting’. Even if we assume that these are genuine limitations, there is no point in unduly emphasising them. We should not use the wrong end of the telescope. That which matters most is what a writer has achieved, and not what he has failed to achieve. Patrick White has taught us to suffer with dignity and to find strength in loneliness.
Category: People