Patrick White

[Lleir]

Well, thank you. Though when I say it's declining, it's certainly not reached it's bottom yet. Just a decade of funding cuts has hit a little hard even if it's still the same old faculty....

'tis a shame that there's not many of us Antipodeans but I'll gladly fill that gap as best I can (though I'm a bit hopeless with the literature of my cousins across the Tasman unfortunately). I've actually come here from pastures that I'd say are just as green, though little more anarchic and limited in reading and discussion length (not to mention somewhat seedier) which can get a bit tiresome.

Besides, I thought I ought to actually contribute here since I've been using this place on and off as a little bit of a farm for recommendations outside of the usual box (everybody knows that box: the Anglo-American "greats" and boring expat lit + Joyce + 19th Century French and Russians and some Existentialists/Bulgakov + Latin-American Magical Realists + Murakami and Mishima holding up the Asian end. Maybe Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" though that's sitting firmly on the edge of the box).

Admittedly there's nothing wrong with the box itself, and I do - do a lot of reading in the box, but I've gotten to that stage that I want something a little different and not just to bolster my ego or as a weak bit of cultural anthropology "oh look at these quaint Estonians" but because I'm genuinely interested in what is going on in other literatures (ignored literatures?) as well as my own country's, given the dominance of British and American culture in general making it almost feel like an "other" literature at times - which obviously leads me to White who if my limited reading is anything to go by, is a bit of an "other" himself within that literature. Although that might be because Australians didn't seem to take to literary modernism that much (architectural modernism on the other hand...) though a lot of that is really in regards to poetry - thanks to the controversial, and amusing, Ern Malley affair.

Or maybe I signed up just to eventually troll Eric?


Anyways, enough about that and more about Patrick White: I'm tossing up whether to actually try to read through the rest of White's work in publication order from Happy Valley as - if my adventures with Jane Austen and Ian "Macabre to Boring Establishment Fiction" McEwan are to go by - is always interesting from a writer's development view (or "rise and fall" in McEwan's case), and I'll be sure to post about it if I do go about reading White in that fashion. Admittedly that might be a bit of a flawed approach with White as I think he had finished The Aunt's Story way before anything else he wrote and that novel just happened to be published third, though I'm not sure.

I should check my copy of that Marr's book to see to be honest. It's actually kind of strange I have that book considering I've only read two of his novels, but I just happened to express vague interest in it and the bookshop guy insisted I rescue it for half price because it took up so much space of his biography section and he'd had doubts he'd ever sell it to anyone else. Let's face it - who can argue with such logic?

[Mise Eire]

I had forgotten until someone mentioned it in this thread that White was born 100 years ago this year - surprised that there's not much more buzz about that (well he is competing with Alan Turing for the centenary accolades and AT was just sheer genius and whose life was the stuff of high fiction). There's some rare footage on YouTube of White "granting" an interview to Australian TV a day after winning the Nobel Prize in 1973. Yes he does come off as quite patrician, sardonic and guarded in his clever way. He speaks of the role of the artist/writer in a very uninspiring way too - you can tell he is not much used to live media interviews. I was very surprised to hear him voice divided loyalties between Australia and England. I had no idea England meant so much to him - you never get that sense from his books. I've read it in Flaws in The Glass but again here he states his favorite own book is The Solid Mandala which is fine by me but I know others would place Voss, Riders in The Chariot, maybe The Tree of Man at the top of the White heap.
Also there's a movie out soon with Geoffrey Rush & Charlotte Rampling - a film version of The Eye of the Storm. Again YouTube has trailers of it.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02E06UFOcg

[Liam]

The Hanging Garden will be out soon in the UK and Australia; you can take a closer look here.

[Liam]

His great early novel Voss is getting republished by Everyman's Library and with an introduction by Nicholas Shakespeare:

[Gladys]

Having read all the major White novels, Voss is the most integrated and cohesive. Unlike A Fringe of Leaves, The Eye of the Storm or The Vivisector, where the endings are brilliant but somewhat peripheral, the ending of Voss is an almighty tour de force, albeit understated. I particularly liked The Solid Mandala and The Twyborn Affair.

[Stiffelio]

What White novel would you recommend starting with, if I haven't read any yet?

[Hamlet]

~a few snippets from an article published by the Sunday Times book review.

concerning Refuge fiction, White and Golding compared and contrasted.

THE HANGING GARDEN by Patrict White is published by Cape.

White was writing at 70, eyesight failing, and this unfinished manuscript was his last work, better known for Voss (1957) and Riders in the Chariot (1961) it promised to deliever another significant work, had it been finished.

It has been quoted as being 'an old man writing tenderly about youth', a refugee novel, in the vein of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, but unlike Golding's novel, it is tender in those depictions.

Set in the 'garden' of the title above Sydney habour in contrast to that other garden in Flies.

Mystical experience for White was not an unreachable ideal, but vividly and commonly real, manifesting in the fall of lght, the dissolving material surfaces of the world and the strange instinctual knowings that configure our imaginations. To describe such fugitive experience he developed a style that refused the comforts of recognisable syntax. Words are often acquitted of their usual obligations, left to pivot like compass needles looking for their lost norths. To White's admirers, this was his chief genius, to his detractors it as his chief failure.

The Australian poet AD Hope notoriously castigated him for writing 'pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge' But sludge was a perfect descriptor of White's stlye, he was fascnated by the epistemological ooziness of the world and the blurs and smudges that characterize our perceptions.

The Hanging Garden is rich with evidence of White's experimentation.

Both Golding and White were mystics, Golding was obsessed by making what he sometimes called 'the darkness within' visible, whereas White acknowledged the mysticism of objects.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Hanging-Ga...5&sr=8-1-spell

[Liam]

Stiffy, I would recommend starting with Voss or The Tree of Man, then proceeding to A Fringe of Leaves and The Twyborn Affair, and concluding with "heavies" such as Riders in the Chariot and The Eye of the Storm.

[Stiffelio]

Thanks

[Gladys]

My recommendation, Stiffelio, would be to avoid The Tree of Man which I found long and intractable, and only tackle Voss if you have a strong Biblical background.

I found A Fringe of Leaves by far the easiest read with its straightforward plot and, with relatively few Biblical overtones and a not too obtuse ending, it's arguably the kindest introduction to Patrick White. The Eye of the Storm, a rather grim novel with a quirky but simple ending, is also a possibility. The Solid Mandala is not a bad starting point either, but is a little more challenging to understand.

The Twyborn Affair is not so easy because, like The Riders in the Chariot (Biblical allusions aplenty) and The Aunt's Story (French helps), the plot shifts monumentally in places. The Vivisector, which I least like, is also on the grim side and best read by a budding artist.

[Stiffelio]

In which was is White 'intractable', difficult or challenging to read? Is it the subject matter that requires some previous erudition to benefit most from it? Are his novels too long and too plotty? Or is White's style complicated to read as such (e.g. Woolf, Faulkner, McCarthy, Gordimer, James)?

[Aldawen]

The Tree of Man is White's only novel I've read so far, but I wouldn't call it "intractable". It includes many elements I usually like in novels: a family history over several decades starting in a pioneer situation, fast changing external conditions and some calamities. But why didn't White let his characters simply TALK to each other every now and then? I had the impression all these people weren't really part of their own lives: Existing, working, remaining silent. Not much and definitely not enough for a novel of this size. And in addition I wasn't especially happy with the "arty style" like strange (for me: inappropriate) combinations of adjectives and nouns like "unreasonable wrists" or "soapy with honesty" for instance. There's no guarantee that I caught the original expressions in these examples as I've read the German edition. Therefore this impression on the style might be, at least partly, a translation problem but I doubt that this will explain it all.

[Gladys]

I view The Tree of man intractable only in the sense that the ending delivered none of the dazzling brilliancy that is so characteristic of all the novels of Patrick White. I'm sure the fault lies in my lack of insight rather than in the text itself. After all, The Aunt Story which proceeded the novel and Voss, Riders in the Chariot and The Solid Mandala which followed have electrifying endings!

Normally, hours or days after finishing a White novel, all the pieces magically fall into place like a jigsaw. Not so for me with The Tree of Man. I simply don't understand the dying Stan and his behaviour at the end. And how does the fervent, young evangelist fit in? If someone can enlighten me, I'm all ears.

[matt.todd]

White's first novel, Happy Valley, is finally back in print!

He refused to let it be republished in his lifetime, for fear of being sued by people on whom certain characters were based. Fortunately, his estate's executor is ignoring everything he ever said about having stuff republished, and Text have published it in their (very pretty) Classics line. Publisher's info here.

Head of Publishing at Text, Michael Heyward, wrote a piece in the Herald this weekend about it:

...there are now two Patrick Whites. There is the mercurial novelist who changed the possibilities of fiction in this country, who influenced everybody from Tom Keneally to Randolph Stow to Kate Grenville. And there is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Great Writer of the Great Australian Novel.

This second Patrick White, with his shrinking readership and oppressive reputation, looms like a spectre above his novels. We know him by his photographs. Who is this savage old man, gazing beyond us into the emptiness? How could he ever have been young?

The eclipse of the writer by his or her posthumous reputation is a transitory thing if the work is any good. Eventually the memory of Patrick White the man will be subsumed by the living tradition of his books. White's fiction will be rediscovered by people who were not born when he died. I am curious about how this could happen. Perhaps we need to understand how White's reputation was formed.

[Liam]

very pretty

Yes, very. Any idea where I can buy this? Does the Book Depository carry it?

[Liam]

^I owe every Patrick White book except the short stories, the autobiography/letters, and the new Hanging Garden (?) book.

This would be a welcome addition to my Paddy White collection, .

[matt.todd]

BD doesn't have it. You can buy it direct from Text - I assume they ship overseas, though don't quote me on that.

I recently discovered that White wrote 12 novels. I'm thinking of reading one a month next year. This may be optimistic.

[Gladys]

I read The Hanging Garden recently, but part one of three is necessarily less than satisfying. For me the ending is everything, and Patrick White never disappoints.

Young Eirene's intuitive and searing sense of herself and others unsettles in much the same way as White's account of Theodora Goodman's forsaken consciousness in The Aunt's Story.

[Eric]

Like Aldawen, the only one I've read is "The Tree of Man". But it was a set book at the time, and I read it a little too quickly and carelessly, so I can remember hardly anything about it. But I did know that he'd written more than ten novels and that he won the Nobel back in 1973. I don't aspire to read all of them, as Gladys has done, but maybe two or three more, when I find the time.

[Liam]

American cover of The Hanging Garden is in. Click to enlarge.