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 Australian
novelist, short story writer and playwright who was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973.
In his work White combines myth, symbols and allegory. His characters
are often separated from society by age, sexuality, race or geography.
White's international breakthrough novel was VOSS, published in
1957. RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT, which contains a powerful indictment
of Australian suburban life, established him as one of the most
important modern writers. In his own country White had to wait a
long time before his depiction of the Australian middle classes
was accepted.
"I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with
age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation,
if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while
the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture
or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are
unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually
mislaying teeth and bifocals."
(from Three Uneasy Pieces, 1987)
Patrick White was born in London of Australian parents. His youth
was spent partly in Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm,
and partly in England. At the age of 13 he was sent to Cheltenham
College, an experience he hated and referred as a 'four-year prison
sentence'. He returned to Australia and worked for two years as
a jackaroo on a remote sheep station before starting to study French
and German literature at Cambridge, receiving his B.A. in 1935.
White settled in London and wrote several unpublished novels. His
first published novel, HAPPY VALLEY, appeared in 1939. The story
is set in New South Wales. The book was followed by THE LIVING AND
THE DEAD (1941), set in pre-war London, and THE AUNT'S STORY (1948),
a comic account of the travels of an independent Australian spinster,
Theodora Goodman.
"Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility
carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players
and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active
service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the
novels for which I am now acclaimed."
(from Three Uneasy Pieces)
During World War II White served in the Royal Air Force Intelligence
unit in Greece and The Middle East. After the war White returned
to Australia with a Greek friend, Manoly Lascaris. They bought an
old house in Castle Hill, a suburb of Sydney. For the next eighteen
years they lived a farmers life, selling flowers, vegetables, milk
and cream. During these years Write wrote his first important work,
THE AUNT'S STORY (1948). In 1955 White's long family saga, THE TREE
OF MAN was published. The novel immediately established his reputation
as a major writer, often compared to Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy,
and D.H. Lawrence.
The epic theme was continued in Voss, which returns to the heroic
Australian past. It depicts the doomed attempt of a Nietzschean
German visionary, Johann Voss, to lead an expedition across the
continent in 1845. He is bound in a form of mystic communion with
Laura Trevelyan, who, at home in Sydney, suffers with him. The true
record of Ludwig Leichardt, who died in the desert in 1848, inspired
the story.
During the 1960s White published several books or plays depicting
Sarsaparilla, a fictitious Australian suburb, among them Riders
in the Chariot, THE BURNT ONES (1964), a collection of short
stories, and plays THE SEASON AT SARSAPARILLA, A CHEERY SOUL, and
the novel THE SOLID MANDALA (1966), which was influenced by thoughts
of Carl Jung.
 THE
EYE OF THE STORM (1973) centres on a wealthy city dweller, Elizabeth
Hunter, who has spent her life seducing men. She remembers the most
significant time of her life, when she was stranded on a tropical
island. In his later years White became vocal on such issues as
Aboriginal rights and the protection of the environment. After the
novel THE TWYBORN AFFAIR (1979), which explores various dualities
in human nature, White indicated it was to be his last novel and
in the future he would write only for radio and the stage. In 1986
he published another novel, MEMOIRS OF MANY IN ONE 'by Alex Xenophon
Demirjan Gray, edited by Patrick White'. In his frank self-portrait,
FLAWS IN THE GLASS (1981), White depicts his life as a writer and
a homosexual in Australian society. The book also contains a brief
and revealing account of his allegedly 'ungracious' reception of
the Nobel Prize. White, who guarded his privacy, did not attend
the award ceremonies, but persuade his friend, the artist Sidney
Nolan, to accept it in Stockholm on his behalf. In THREE UNEASY
PIECES (1987) White charts the progress of a wart, gives his views
on old age and potato peeling, and examines our efforts to achieve
aesthetic perfection.
White died on September 30, 1990 in Sydney after a long illness.
A selection of White's letters, edited by his biographer David Marr,
was published in 1996. They chronicle the author's interest in Jewish
culture after an early ignorant anti-Semitism, his idyllic wartime
period in West Africa, his anti-royalism sparked by the 1975 Australian
constitutional crisis, and his belief in the validity of homosexual
unions.
"The basic theme in Patrick White is mankind's search for
a meaning for, and a value in, existence. The mystery of the human
psyche offers him a challenge which has shown itself to be fruitful.
Nothing in his works would suggest any doubts that this earthly
existence is the only one mankind has been granted, and that we
are dependent on our fellows for its perfection. That White is
aware of forces beyond apparent reality does not mean that he
believes in a life after death. It is in order to make the only
existence of his "elect" meaningful that he sends them out on
the oaths of suffering. "
(Ingmar Björksten in Patrick White: General Introduction, 1976)
THE TREE OF MAN: An epic family saga, depicting an ordinary
couple at the beginning of the 20th century, who establish a farm
in the Australian wilderness. They raise their children, have
grandchildren, and eventually see their land engulfed by suburbia.
Published in the United States in 1955 and subsequently in England.
White started to write the novel in 1955, doubting whether he
should write another word after his works were ignored in Australia.
For further reading: Partick White: A General Introduction
by I. Björksten (1976); Patrick White's Fiction by Carolyn Jane
Bliss (1986); Patrick White: Fiction and the Unconscious by David
J. Tacey (1988); Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White's
Fiction by Laurence Steven (1989); Vision and Style in Patrick
White by Rodney Stenning Edgecombe (1989); Critical Essays on
Patrick White, compiled by Peter Wolfe (1990); Patrick White:
A Life by David Marr (1992); Patrick White and the Religious Imagination
by Michael Giffin (1999)
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