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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 2 Dec 2006 07:30 am |
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I am looking at the cover of a book by Patrick White.
It is Riders in the Chariot, and the cover illustration is by Australia and New Zealand's greatest artist.
Yes, it is a painting by Sidney Nolan, of course. You knew that as soon as I said he was the greatest Australasian artist of them all, but did you know that the National Gallery has a simply superb Nolan, dating as I remember from about 1949? White cliffs and a dazzling blue sea under a summer sky.
No, I guess you didn't, because since the National Gallery was engorged by Te Papa (shudder) this lovely painting has been hidden in the vaults.
But how wonderful it is to see united in this one cheap paperback an artist like Nolan and a novelist like White.
My favourite White novel is Voss, his fictionalised account of the Leichardt Expedition in the 1840s, but reading each of the novels is a remarkable experience. Here is a brief biography of White:
PATRICK WHITE (1912–1990) was born in London and traveled to Sydney with his Australian parents six months later. White was a solitary, precocious, asthmatic child and at thirteen was sent to an English boarding school, a miserable experience. At eighteen he returned to Australia and worked as a jackaroo on an isolated sheep station. Two years later, he went up to Cambridge, settling afterwards in London, where he published his first two books. White joined the RAF in 1940 and served as an intelligence officer in the Middle East. At war’s end, he and his partner, Manoly Lascaris, bought an old house in a Sydney suburb, where they lived with their four Schnauzers. For the next eighteen years, the two men farmed their six acres while White worked on some of his finest novels, including The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957), and Riders in the Chariot (1961). When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973, he did not attend the ceremony but, with his takings and some of his own money, created an award to help older writers who hadn’t received their due: the first recipient was Christina Stead. Late in life, when asked for a list of his loves, White responded: "Silence, the company of friends, unexpected honesty, reading, going to the pictures, dreams, uncluttered landscapes, city streets, faces, good food, cooking small meals, whisky, sex, pugs, the thought of an Australian republic, my ashes floating off at last."
What this doesn't mention is that White was a writer who went for many years without recognition in Australia. When his Nobel Prize for Literature was announced in 1973, Australians were perplexed. They simply could not understand what White was on about.
The Wikipedia entry on White is excellent. It must be toe-curlingly embarrassing for many Australians (and, if it isn't, it ought to be). Here's the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_White
Do, please, read it. Here is an extract:
...During these years, he started to make a reputation for himself as a writer, publishing The Aunt's Story and The Tree of Man, which was published in the United States in 1955 and shortly after in England. The Tree of Man was released to rave reviews in the US, but, in what was to become a typical pattern, was panned by Australian critics. White had doubts about whether to continue writing, after his books were largely ignored in Australia (three of them having been called ‘un-Australian’ by critics), but decided to keep going. His first breakthrough in Australia came when his next novel, Voss, won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award...
I was living in Melbourne when David Marr's biography of White was published in 1991. This book was an extraordinary success. It became a best seller, and was read by everyone, it seemed. I was at a dinner party a few months after its publication, and the conversation turned to the Marr biography (which I had not read, and still haven't: I have no curiosity about Patrick White's life). As the conversation continued it suddenly struck me that none of the other seven people present seemed to know anything about the novels. I interrupted the conversation to ask whether anyone had a favourite White novel. And then it emerged that I - the only non-Australian present - was the only one of us who had ever read any of them. As Matthew 13:57 has it:
...Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.
Someone remarked in the Times Literary Supplement a couple of years ago:
It continues to scandalise me that cultivated English-language readers exist, in Britain and America, who have never read White and who don't realize that those who have taken the trouble to do so are inclined to rank him with Nabokov or Beckett -- or indeed Faulkner.
White's novels seem to be virtually unknown here in New Zealand. I can only assume that this is because in the New Zealand mind he is subsumed in that mass of repellent assertive obviousness which manifests itself in so many Australian political, cultural and sporting achievements.
But Australia has produced Patrick White and Sidney Nolan, and Joel Schumacher, and Michael Leunig, and a thousand other great creative souls, and we in these inward-looking islands should be listening and watching. And learning.
Read Voss. It will change your life.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 2 Dec 2006 08:00 am |
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After typing the above I went looking for a picture to illustrate the piece.
No luck yet, but I did find an interesting site called The Complete Review which, among the 1760 books dealt with, rates the novels of Patrick White on a scale of C+ to A+. Those of you who know White's novels may be amused by these ratings:
The Living and the Dead - B+
The Vivisector - B+
The Aunt's Story - A-
The Twyborn Affair - A-
The Solid Mandala - A-
The Eye of the Storm - A
Riders in the Chariot - A
Voss - A+
I am torn between dismay at the crassness of the rating system being used here - shall we give Hamlet an A and Lear an A+? - and admiration for the wisdom of the compilers in arriving at the conclusion that Voss is the greatest of the novels. I must add this site to The Untangled Web and check it out more closely.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 2 Dec 2006 06:00 pm |
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Only one picture so far - Brett Whiteley's painting, used on the cover of Marr's biography - but a good review of Voss from the ABC's website Why Bother With Patrick White?:
Voss was written about ten years after World War 2. In an interview, White recalled two influences: his reading of a book on the German-born nineteenth century Australian explorer, Ludwig Leichhardt; and his own experience of being in the North African desert during the war provoked by the "arch-megalomaniac," Adolf Hitler. The broad outline of the narrative is based on Leichhardt's ill-fated journey of exploration in search of an overland route from Sydney to Darwin. Voss and his party are financially supported by a group of Sydney merchants and Voss develops a strange but compelling relationship with Laura Trevelyan, the step-daughter of one of them. The relationship between these two misfits appears to continue through letters and some kind of psychic and spiritual companionship long after the expedition has left civilisation. The relationship may not be realistic but it is convincing.
Voss’s expedition passes through the magnificent settled lands of the Hunter Valley where they spend time on a station belonging to the cultivated Sandersons and then on to the more primitive farm of Boyle on the outer edge of the Darling Downs. With two Aboriginal guides, the party then strikes out into "unknown" country and confronts not only physical but also psychological and spiritual challenges to their sense of themselves as civilised subjects. There are struggles between the various members of the party: between those who are more practical and those whose motivation for joining is more altruistic, more personal or more concerned with inner understanding. The challenges faced by the expedition are of course both practical, physical ones as well as psychological and spiritual. The ways in which various members of the party deal with suffering is one of the interests of the middle part of the book.
But in Sydney, there are challenges to be faced as well, though not of such an obvious kind. For Laura and for her step sister - the apparently well-adjusted Belle Bonner - there are different needs. The emerging culture of colonial Australia requires both men and women to find new ways of relating to society and to nature. Laura takes on the responsibility of bringing up Mercy, the daughter of the servant, Rose and also opens a school, while Belle becomes the facilitator of social interaction among the increasingly diverse population. At the end of the novel, the citizens of Sydney unveil a statue to celebrate Voss’ probable achievement. The highlight of the ceremony is the appearance of Judd the ex-convict who is the sole surviving member of the expedition. Judd’s memory is possibly faulty, Laura’s understanding of Voss may lack substance, and the citizen's need to memorialise something may have very little to do with the actual achievement of Voss yet there is a clear sense that the community as a whole has grown and developed, that the ways of interpreting experience have been enlarged and increased and that the possibilities for living fully and meaningfully in Australia have expanded.
This is for many readers White’s most demanding and most impressive novel. The language is not always easy and the relationship between Voss and Laura is difficult to accept in realistic terms but the reading experience is powerful, unforgettable, and deeply engaging.
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jaybee2003
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 272 |
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Posted: 2 Dec 2006 10:14 pm |
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Continue to be scandalised...While I have heard of Sidney Nolan of course, I have never heard of or read Patrick White.
Now, being aware, there is no excuse for the ignorance to continue - right?
Voss sounds like one we would both enjoy. So thank you.
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