Patrick White: A Life
By David Marr
Knopf, 727 pages, $30
Thanks to David Marr, aspiring biographers can forget about using Australian novelist Patrick White as a subject for the next 20 or 25 years. Serious without being solemn, Marr brings White surehandedly into focus.
Marr sets forth facts intriguingly, responding to the different dramas that made up White`s life. He spells out the customs and geography of Sydney`s gay subculture in the 1920s. Then he turns to the judgmental insecurity of upper-Bohemian gay London between the wars. Then, with balance and
fairmindedness, he shows the funny side as well as the squalor and the terror of London during the Blitz.
No chunks of history, reminiscence or undigested research slow the book`s pace. To portray White, Marr shows incidents and people from his life merging, combining and recombining in the fiction that won White the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The fiction inspires Marr. Though not a literary critic, he analyzes, interprets and evaluates White`s dark, disturbing books while citing real-life influences. He also shows White putting parts of himself into his characters, sometimes unlikely ones, like an asthmatic schoolteacher who kills his wife in White`s first novel, ”Happy Valley” (1939).
Bolstering his sense of purpose with a storyteller`s instinct, Marr begins where he should, with White`s energetic, driving mother, Ruth: ”the bride was a plain woman in a big hat. . . She was 32 and this was a late and magnificent match for a woman on the threshold of spinsterhood.” Ruth`s elegant salon in Sydney reflected her cosmopolitan tastes in music, painting and furniture, along with her social ambitions. Besides affecting an English accent, she hired only English servants. She was, above all, fanatically ambitious for her only son, whom she wanted to raise above local standards of manhood, embodied by her vague, amiable husband, Dick, who stood half a head shorter than Ruth and cared for little beside horses and the track.
She started taking Patrick to the theater and had him learn French before he was 10. She sent him to Cheltenham school in England in order to help him develop the right social connections. She financed the publication of his early poetry. Finally, she commended his decision to study French and German at Cambridge University because of the boost those languages would give the career she envisioned for him as a foreign diplomat.
But her hopes had already been dashed. White never overcame the feeling that Ruth both exiled and betrayed him by sending him to Cheltenham, a place of misery for him. His schoolwork suffered; he was homesick. Scorned by his fellow students as a crude colonial, he withdrew into himself. Aggravating all this was his discovery that he was homosexual and thus, so he felt, inferior and unworthy. His discovery heightened his fears of being enslaved by his headstrong mother.
”Cutting free from Ruth took stubborn courage,” says Marr of White.
”It was one of the great internal dramas of his life, and one he explored again and again in his writing.”
The drama persisted, one may add, because it was never resolved. It couldn`t have been. Driven by an obligation to his own uniqueness, White felt himself blocked by Ruth, whom he also recognized as his greatest supporter and alter ego. ”I am every bit of my mother,” he said in 1958, ”which is one of the reasons why we have never been able to get on together.” So closely was his nature bound up with hers that he probably put more of himself into his greatest character, Elizabeth Hunter, the dying matriarch of ”The Eve of the Storm,” (1973), than he did of Ruth.
The mother who helped him as an artist while wounding him as a man conveys an ambivalence central to White`s psyche. Wisely, Marr calls self-division the mainspring of this Gemini`s character. ”Worldly and naive, cruel and beguiling . . . complex yet essentially simple,” White railed against ”deadly reactionary” Australia but felt bound to it for life. He wrote fiction that was dazzling and earthy, mystical and raw. He shied from the company of others, yet he came to fear and hate the privacy he needed for his writing.
The ambiguities thicken. The solitary bent that fostered his writing career was given a dark turn by his homosexuality. Being gay incited in him a self-loathing he never quite shed. But he also credited his homosexuality with sharpening his intuition, teaching him the value of gentleness, and awakening in him a sympathy for other outsiders, like Aboriginals, immigrants and the disabled.
What is more, being gay attuned him to the value of the irrational and the painful, one of the most striking aspects of his art. White thought that Christianity had gone wrong in downgrading the shocking and sordid. ”Voss,” the 1957 bestseller that won him comparisons with Tolstoy and Faulkner, features ”an unpleasant, mad, basically unattractive hero.” The religious fervor Voss injects into his trek across Australia turns this stretch of dry, rocky terrain into the Promised Land. ”The Vivisector” (1970) teems with sticky, viscous matter. Only by accepting it does Hurtle Duffield become an artist and experience a rebirth into an eternity. Patrick Victor Martingale White (1912-90) is not just an important Australian writer; he is also a major international figure.
The daytime logic that invokes moral judgments casts little light on White. He flirted with fascism in the 1930s because a lover was one of Franco`s aides. Vain, priggish and cruel, he held grudges for years. He would accuse his detractors of ignorance, malice and collusion. Nor did his friends escape his wrath. Though he enjoyed cooking and hosting dinner parties, he would sometimes insult his guests so brutally that they would leave the table mid-meal. Marr quotes White calling himself ”a failure as a human being.”
Was White too harsh on himself? He did cast off friends, sometimes coldly and abruptly. But his amazing capacity for self-renewal included social bonding. In the 1970s, when his interest in the stage reawakened, he befriended a host of actors, directors and set designers, believing that, despite a 40-year age gap in most cases, they understood him better than his contemporaries did.
His last years drew him more and more into the public sphere, but without smirching his convictions or beliefs. He gave money to feed and clothe Sydney`s poor; he contributed to Aboriginal causes; he used his $80,000 Nobel Prize money to help struggling Australian writers. And though he refused to campaign for gay rights, he marched through Sydney`s rain in 1982 and then spoke to some 30,000 people on the need for nuclear disarmament. He addressed the same subject in Melbourne in 1988. Then, despite being afflicted by age, osteoporosis and a lifelong battle with asthma, he stood at his lectern signing copies of his books for another half an hour.
Such kindliness bespeaks an important issue-that of serving others with dignity and grace. White`s life clamored with noise-the gunfire of World War II, in which he served in the RAF; the year-long celebration of Australia`s Bicentennial in 1988, which he hated; the snarling rages he flew into at home. At the center of this furor stood Manoly Lascaris, ”that small Greek of immense moral strength” who shared White`s life for 47 years. Manoly`s patience, humility and quiet simplicity brought him much closer to White`s ideal of selflessness than White ever came himself. Though the main target of White`s anger, Manoly never wavered in his love for the writer. The opening words of Marr`s acknowledgments section, ”I owe the greatest debt to Manoly Lascaris” would have pleased White. Without Manoly`s nurture and support, White couldn`t have written his books. And he knew it.
Marr`s ”Life” has minor shortcomings-a fondness for the word
”triggered” as a transitive verb, a tendency to mention people in the text without picking them up later in the index, the odd misreading. But they are outweighed by the variety of resources he musters to portray the baroque richness of Australia`s greatest writer.
