Patrick White: A Life

by David Marr

The life story of the Nobel Prize-winning author tells of his influential relationship with his Australian homeland and describes how his creative moods were often accompanied by savage fits of temper and a passion for privacy.

Genres: Biography, Australia, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, LGBT, 20th Century

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Eminent Australian journalist, author, and progressive political and social commentator. David Marr is the multi-award-winning author of Patrick White: A Life, Panic and The High Price of Heaven, and co- author with Marian Wilkinson of Dark Victory. He has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, The Saturday Paper, The Guardian Australia and the Monthly. He has been editor of the National Times, a reporter for Four Corners and presenter of ABC TV’s Media Watch. He is also the author of two previous bestselling biographical Quarterly Essays: Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd and Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott. His areas of expertise include Australian politics, law, censorship, the media and the arts. David Marr began his career in 1973 and is the recipient of four Walkley awards for journalism. He also appears as a semi-regular panellist on the ABC television programs Q&A and Insiders.

Reviews

[George Ilsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

If a person is a tiny bit obsessed with Nobel Prize winning author Patrick White, and that perfectly normal person happens to be me, then this lengthy biography is a treat. Long and detailed and absolutely thrilling. Even White's stern visage, scowling at me from my dresser, is encouraging. He glares at me every day—my eyes can't help but search him out, to see what he wants. Just do it, he says, just be yourself.

I love reading about writers — they are so friggin' pompous and annoying. Plus, somehow, they manage to write. They get it done.

Patrick White had a fifty year relationship with a Greek officer whom he met in Alexandria during World War II when they were both 29. Manoly Lascaris was sweet and reserved; Patrick was sour and cranky. They were a team, and Patrick says his novels were produced as a result of their partnership.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

God, I loved this book.
I've only read two or three of Patrick White's novels, but even 'The Tree of Man' alone would have been enough to draw me to the life of the genius who created it. I rarely read non-fiction, and even more rarely biography (obviously). It could be that this is only the second literary biography I've read - the other that I can recall being Edmund White's 'Genet'. The commonality between the two is that they are about great writers written by great writers. Both books are impeccably written, and exhaustive. the difference being that 'Genet' was exhausting, whereas 'Patrick White: A Life' is simply riveting. That's as much to do with me and my interests as it is to do with the quality of either of the books.
It's not surprising that Patrick White is such a genuinely complex man, but it is very satisfying to come across a character who is as fascinating as any that leaped from his pen. The thing that excited me the most was his evolution as a man, both politically and spiritually. The idea of someone so clearly blessed with brilliance learning and adapting and changing over a lifetime is exceedingly exciting. That the art, but not the artist, can be fully formed at any given time. I found the great questions of my life reflected in Patrick White's, and this is not to say that I am comparing myself to him in any way other than that greatness does not endow one with all the answers, and that life remains a beautiful mystery to us all, and in that we are equal.

[Paul Adkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been written with an incredible eye to detail in which the greatness of the great author is unveiled slowly through the anecdotal. It is a portrait of an artist painted on a backdrop of mundane ordinariness in which the greyness of its routines is shattered by the bright spotlights of White's genius and achievements, and made dramatic by the vociferation of those who seemed to resent and loath that genius, or wanted to spoon off the cream of his success for themselves. Or the screeching of those who quite simply were unable to see the genius when he stood before them.
Of course the genius of Patrick White is in the text he wrote rather than his life. Nevertheless, David Marr's description is of a great and generous humanist, with a strong character. A writer who hated writing. An Australian who hated all nationalisms.
Quoting White on this:
"It all starts with the question of identity. In recent years we have been served up a lot of clap trap about the need for the national identity. We have been urged to sing imbecile jingles, flex our muscles like the sportsmen from telly commercials, and display hearty optimism totally unconvincing because so superficial and unnatural. Those who preach this doctrine are usually the kind of chauvinist who is preparing this country, not to avert war, but to engage in it. Anyhow, this is not the way to cultivate an Australian identity. For one thing, we are still in the melting pot, a rich but not yet blended stew of disparate nationalities. And most of us who were transplanted here generations ago, either willingly or unwillingly, the white overlords and their slave whites, are still uncertain in ourselves. Australia will never acquire a national identity until enough individual Australians acquire identities of their own."
David Marr's biography is so detailed and complex that it has to be a classic: the kind of book that readers will want to reread, and that when they do reread it it will seem like a new book each time.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patrick White is one of my favorite authors. This lengthy biography does complete justice to him as an author and a man, in all his grumpy, difficult, heroic and creative ways.

Born in England to Australian parents he spent his youth and early years living between both countries before settling in Australia with his partner Manoly whom he met during World War 2. A couple of early novels before the war promised great things to come, as they eventually did in the form of 10 more novels and numerous plays and short stories, earning him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. He was not one for prizes or fuss, however, and when he was asked by a somewhat thoughtless journalist who he believed was the greatest living Australian writer, this notably fractious author replied unhesitatingly 'Christina Stead'. He used his prize money to set up a fund for 'older Australian writers who had not received due recognition for their work.' A good bloke after all.

White used situations and people he knew as the basis for many of his novels, although he claimed that most of his characters were aspects of himself. This in itself makes me want to go back and re-read many of the books, along with the couple I haven't got around to yet. Something to look forward to indeed (along with some Christina Stead I think).

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably the definitive Patrick White biography. David Marr has done such a thorough job i really don't think there is anywhere to go from here.
From his background in the New South Wales country growing up in pastoral classes through his grim education at an English school, his war time experiences, his early struggles and his eventual world fame, everything is covered here in brilliant detail.
If you're interested in Patrick White or Australian writers in general this is probably the best book on the subject.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent biography that gives the reader some understanding of White the man, what made him become a writer and where his writing came from. Marr gives the reader a very good idea of who White was without any trace of flattery, adulation or exaggeration. He does this by quoting White, via the 2,500 letters Marr reviewed, via White's recorded spoken word, via passages his White's novels and via interviews with the people White had dealings. Marr's description is of a great and generous humanist, with a strong character. A writer who hated writing but understood writing to be his calling. (On Goodreads his average rating is 4.37 with 134 ratings). It's 644 pages.

Patrick White is the only Australian who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (1973). The novels that were influential in White gaining the prize include The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957) and The Eye of the Storm (1973). White's father and grandfather were Australian sheep farmers. Whilst White was born in London, he lived his childhood and early teenage years in Australia. He studied in England, was a jackeroo in Australia in his early 20s, spent years in the 1940s in Egypt as a British intelligence officer where he meet the love of his life, Manoly Lascaris, a Greek man. They lived in Australia, just outside Sydney, from 1947 to 1996 and then in suburban Sydney until White's death in 1990.

Coming from a well to do family, White lived off his inheritance prior to his success from his books. White enjoyed company and had many people he communicated with over the years. He was a good cook and invited people over for dinner most Sundays. He had a terrible temper, was opinionated, spoke his mind saying horrible things to all his friends on a consistent basis, yet was an honest, trustworthy, very generous, supportive person to know and be with. A complex man. The book does an extremely good job of allowing the reader to know something of the mind of White.

White's novels are character based. I have always enjoyed his well fleshed out characters, the dialogue and descriptions of the Australian landscape and way of life. My favourite novels include The Tree of Man, Vivisector and The Riders in the Chariot. Many readers find White 'unreadable'. The Tree of Man or Happy Valley are amongst his easier reads and a good starting point for readers new to White.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was exhilarating reading this David Marr's biography of Australia's Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White (1912-1990).  I have had it on the TBR for a good while, but I'm glad now that I left reading it until I'd read all but one of the novels, and one of his plays.  (I have just one left to source: I want a first edition of his second novel, The Living and the Dead from 1941).  Part of the great pleasure in reading this literary biography is Marr's sly juxtaposition of quotations from the novels with his portraits of the real people in White's life.

The table was set with the Georgian family silver Ruth and her fellow collector Mrs Eadie Twyborn 'lovingly acquired at auction'.  The Whites' china, stored in tall cupboards in the pantry, was white with a broad green rim and a big gold W in the centre of each plate. (p.34)

Ruth (neé Withycombe) was Patrick White's mother, and — paired here with the pretentious Mrs Eadie Twyborn from The Twyborn Affair — she was extremely conscious of the White side of the family's more impressive wealth.  Yet Marr's portrait of her includes fine qualities as well as her faults:

Ruth's problem was simple.  She was a woman of drive, ideas, taste, courage of a kind and eccentric generosity.  For all these remarkable qualities, she lacked intuition.  Ruth was very funny, especially about the foibles and vulgarity of those beyond her circle; her acid descriptions were remembered and quoted for years; but she never really understood people, and had little grasp of why they were as they were, or perhaps more to the point, why they were not as she was.  What she could not grasp she mocked.  Without an easy understanding of people she was uncertain of how to win their trust, so she set out instead to dominate.  Ruth grew into one of those generous but overbearing women who can hardly help enslaving people.  She gathered a coterie of stylish young men to keep her amused and one or two poor relations as attendants.  (p.41)

Anyone who's ever read White's novels recognises highly quotable acid descriptions in his prose as well.  (Not to mention Marr's, though the source of his style is not under discussion.)

The biography tells the story of White's antecedents and family, his privileged childhood in the Hunter Valley and Sydney, his awful experience at boarding school in England, his emergence into adulthood at Cambridge where he failed to make an impression, and his war in British intelligence.  We learn about his early love affairs, and his enduring relationship with Manoly Lascaris. (Though Manoly, who played a crucial role in supporting White's career, does not emerge in as much detail as one might expect.)  We also learn about his love-hate relationship with Australia, and his extraordinary capacity for quarrels and grudges coupled with an intransigent refusal to reconcile.  We discover his awkwardness about the Nobel Prize, his generosity towards various causes including other authors, and also his political activities in his latter years.

There are also wonderful photographs, revealing a different White to the one commonly portrayed.

But what makes this biography so interesting is the way it traces the trajectory of White's novels, from his first conception of a theme and its gestation over long periods of time, to the biographical sources of characters, events and landscapes, through to publication and critical reception. If you love reading White's novels, as I do, then this biography is a treasure trove.  I know that I will be referring to it again and again each time I think about one of the novels.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/12/11/p...

[Pascal Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I think this book should be called The Monster of All Time. But I am a monster …’

Patrick White

(Laurence Olivier) "Thus far, I find you rather detestable. May I say that without hurting your feelings?"
(William Devane) "Praise from Caesar."

Praise from Caesar is praise indeed

“He had begun to claim the prerogative of knowing who would be at the tables to which he was invited. ‘Can you come to dinner on Thursday week?’ Sue Du Val asked him one night. They were face to face over Hugh Paget’s table during a British Council bash.

‘Who’s coming?’

‘What does that matter?’

‘Oh, you old cunt,’ he snapped. They did not speak again.”

Excerpt from
Patrick White
David Marr

[Sally Edsall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found the biog hard to put down, unlike White's fiction which I find easy to put down! Marr has written a scholarly yet entertaining biography, and you really feel you come to know something about an Australian icon - our only Nobel laureate in literature.

In everything i have read (including White's own portrait of himself, Flaws In The Glass) he comes across as a horrible man - a misogynist, but with some political principles with which I might agree.
Nevertheless, that is not the point of literature, or art, to be loved by one and all. White's voice certainly added immensely to the cultural life of this country, and it is worth getting to know something about his life and works. Marr's book is an excellent place to start.

[David Sweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has sat on my shelves since it came out and I bought it on the strength of the reviews and scholarship, as I am no avid White fan, having only read Voss.
The true measure of a good biography, or any non-fiction for that matter, is that whether or not you are interested in the subject you are completely engrossed. This comes via thorough research, the author being mostly objective, and the writing so clear, that it is a joy to read. This can only be described as a comprehensive biography and the very clever way Marr weaves in exceprts from White's novels is brilliantly done.
It turns out White was a brilliant cook, and a vry generous entertainer, but I got to the end thinking I would turn down any invitation to lunch or dinner.
Highly recommended to those who appreciate good biography, and of course White. Will it make me read more White? No.

[Roger Norman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magnificent book about a difficult, objectionable and not easily liked man who wrote not easily liked books, in a country that could never quite accept him, nor he it. What makes the books difficult is a scrupulous, demanding, idiosyncratic approach to character and scenery that makes no concession to the ordinary reader – you must follow the writer through the dense jungle of his perceptions, and if you cotton to them, or trust him enough to persevere, you might get to like it very much. The story of his literary life was that of the support of a few notable people, above all the American publisher Ben Huebsch, who loved all his books, and a handful of reviewers who always gave him a favourable press. When Penguin published him in the Modern Classics and the schools put him on the syllabuses, he was renowned, and then (197*) came the Nobel Prize and he was celebrated, even in his reluctant homeland.
Why was his homeland reluctant? Because of his sharp eye for the frailties and hypocrisies and bigotries that exist in every land and because although himself from a wealthy old family of Hunter Valley farmers, he had no truck with convention and scandalised polite Australian society by setting up house with a Greek man (from a wealthy old family of Greek aristocrats). He never ‘came out’, never admitted, denied or discussed the issue. His private life was saved from becoming a cause celèbre by his keeping it private. All the visitors to his house – over the years there were very many – loved Manoly Lascaris, the faithful friend and helpmate, and a few of them loved Patrick too, but feelings of admiration, respect and devotion were more common. He was a genius, they thought, and a genius must be forgiven his excesses, his rages, his outbursts of spite.
He also knew himself to be possessed of a rare talent. He was a modest man, disliking fans and fanfares but his sense of what art was – in music, painting or literature – was very acute. Not rigid – for he changed his mind over the years – but a matter of strong conviction for which he argued fiercely. In his writing, there was certainly the sense of being driven, against his will. It was the worst profession, he would say, solitary, exhausting, selfish – but there were half-a-dozen books that he had to write. Once written, they could not be changed. His publishers wanted different titles for Eye of the Storm and Fringe of Leaves. The title was the book, he told them. They complained about his grammar and punctuation. He knew both to be unconventional but it was how he wrote, and that was that.
The literary brigades rifled his works for symbolic values, clues, hidden meanings. He pooh-poohed ‘the symbol-searchers’. Whatever it was that he wanted to say, it was not primarily cerebral, certainly not in an academic sense. It was trawled from the depths, but the depths were emotional, not intellectual. He said on several occasions that his homosexuality had taught him everything. It had made him an outsider is what he meant – he was a foreigner everywhere, in Australia, which he sharply criticised, in Greece, which he loved, at school in Cheltenham, which he hated, even in London, which was his favourite city on earth. This foreignness seems to have given him his clear-eyed, acerbic, witty perception of human beings, of landscapes, love-affairs, of death itself.
After the Nobel Prize, he allowed himself to become a more public figure. Still he never gave interviews, avoided literary functions, refused prizes and honours. When he was invited as guest of honour to a official celebration of Australia Day, everyone was in a dinner jacket and bow tie. He wore his usual shapeless jersey and baggy trousers. He became more political, hating and fearing nuclear weapons, despising and condemning the rule of money and greed. As Australia’s leading writer, his word carried weight in spite of his reputation for eccentricity and in the last decade of his life he spoke out strongly on the side of the ordinary man against the ranks of the exploiters and aggressors.
He was still a difficult man, insulting old friends and cutting off people who offended him, on the slightest of pretexts. His last book was autobiographical, taking no prisoners. His publishers, Cape in the UK, Viking in the US, kept faith with him to the end and his literary standing in the English-speaking nations was virtually unrivalled. He was thought more significant than Graham Greene, more complex than Saul Bellow, deeper than Norman Mailer, more literary than any of them. Such judgements seem invidious, but there must be something in them. Is it that he was more difficult to read? One wonders how many people actually read the books, from cover to cover, or how many people read them now. There was something embittered about his view of life, something intricate and dissatisfied, as if he were all the time looking for something that was not there.
The triumph of Marr’s book is that he makes this sour, driven, uncomfortable writer seem admirable, even heroic. He does it without a trace of adulation, flattery or exaggeration. He gives us a whole, live, raw, proud, dedicated, unusual person and we feel somehow privileged to be allowed inside his life and, to an extent, his mind.

[James Connolly]

A masterpiece of literary biography that complements and enhances my love of Patrick White. In agreeing to this biography, White ultimately got his wish that he be shown as a 'real' person - both brilliant and flawed.

[Dr G · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book soon after it became available in 1991 but I didn’t read it, storing it away in my shelves until a recent decision to re-read some of White's work, possibly as a result of reading White's contemporary, Graham Greene, and thoroughly enjoying Greene’s novels. I wondered how my decades-old view of White might have travelled, and I suppose I wondered whether I would find any similarities between Greene and White.
I read Marr's biography in tandem with Voss , as well as Greene’s The Quiet American.
The Marr work began disappointingly for me, and remained so for 100-150 pages (The book is 644 pages before acknowledgements, notes, index and so on). We pretty quickly established that Patrick was a most unpleasant child who could not socialise with anyone but the servants. And he was encouraged in his elitist egocentrism by his mother rather than his father (“Dick saw his son as an heir to Bell trees, but Ruth never imagined he would grow up only to crutch sheep. She badly wanted a genius”). In fact some of those early chapters show that Patrick was, and would remain, almost a plaster cast of his mother (“Ruth was very funny, especially about the foibles and vulgarity of those beyond her circle; her acid descriptions were remembered and quoted for years; but she never really understood people, and had little grasp of why they were as they were or, perhaps more to the point, why they were not as she was.” “What she could not grasp she mocked.”)
My disappointment in the early chapters stems partly from Marr’s almost bored reliance on the humdrum (“For a couple of terms he learnt the piano until the chilblains were too much for him. He joined the scouts, learnt to tie knots and got a badge for cooking porridge.” Or “At the Hague they had an excellent meal and saw Juliana come out of the palace. Suzanne said, ‘Oh, Mummy, is that a princess?’”). He also periodically wrote in oddly provocative terms, for example describing William Wentworth with the hostile and surely arcane epithet, ““the orator, ex-democrat and gun-runner”. There was a similar authorial intrusion when Marr recalled that Patrick’s Cambridge tutor was once accused, post mortem, of recruiting Burgess, Philby and McLean as spies; Marr, with surprising fury in relation to a very peripheral matter, denounced the historical claim as “slander”. Wikipedia> soberly claims the role attributed to this individual was actually Anthony Blunt’s. At this stage, I was fearing the worst for this biography. However, once Patrick moved out of the immediate shadow of his mother and other ancestors, Marr seemed to become a little more serious about his task and I ultimately found the book a fascinating and informative work.
I did, however, have one further quibble. Marr clearly read all of White’s work, as well as all the available correspondence and other documentation with great assiduity; in fact, sometimes too much. He particularly delighted in hunting down details from either Patrick White’s own activities or from the family history which he felt were echoed in the novels. So, we are told that “With great discretion, White began an affair with Lillie’s pianist, the gentle American bald-headed Sam Walsh, who became the saxophonist Wally Collins, an unlikely lover for the aged Mrs Standish in The Living and the Dead.” I applaud Marr on his detective skills but cannot see how such connections are of value in understanding Patrick White. And there are a lot of them throughout the study.
I had feared, to begin with, that Marr might engage in a writing a hagiography, but it soon became apparent that he was brutally forthright, both in describing White’s unpleasant personality traits – of which there were many, and in quoting others’ recollections of them. These became apparent from Patrick’s youth, and he seemed only to hone them as time went on. “Miserable and proud, the boy looked about for evidence that the human race was no better than himself. So he reached a bleak but reassuring view that people in the ordinary run of things are as shoddy, greedy, jealous, stubborn and contemptible as he, in despair, thought himself to be. His friends were left to puzzle out how one man could be so worldly and naïve, cruel and beguiling, so much older than his years yet still at times a child, so complex yet essentially simple.”
Katherine Mansfield is quoted as recalling his being “fond of sewing, especially hemming, and of making little copies of pictures. When he is doing these things he is quiet and kind, once you start talking I cannot describe the frenzy that comes over him. He simply raves, roars, beats the table, abuses everybody… It is impossible to be anything to him but a kind of playful acquaintance.”
Marr comments: “His self-hatred was shocking. Terrible as he could be to others, he was worse on himself.”
It is curious that White seems, in fact, to have relished being disliked: when he attended Cheltenham College in England, he was later recalled as being “unobtrusive, had few friends and no enemies.” He claimed he was teased as an Australian but contemporaries later denied that he had been, recalling .that others had indeed been bullied – especially Jewish boys.
When White was considering moving to Adelaide, his long-term partner, Manoly Lascaris, advised him against this plan, warning him that Adelaide would not have enough people for him to quarrel with. He often credited Lascaris with being a very positive influence on him and with showing remarkable tolerance. Yet, when White was once attracted to a Melbourne actor, Lascaris saw this as infidelity, but White claimed the right to infidelity. Lascaris stayed with him because he had sworn to do so, and he considered himself to have a role of providing all that White, as a great writer, needed. When White died, he left nothing to Lascaris, other than allowing him to remain in the home they shared until his own death. Lascaris has subsequently made the point, with obvious disappointment, that White never paid him for his labours. Marr stated that, as a boy, Patrick “absorbed the conviction that service is love, the truest form of love, and the more menial and selfless the service the greater that love. He put out of his mind the complicated consideration of money, that whatever sincere affection grew up between servants and masters they were paid to love him and paid to serve.” One is tempted to see White’s perception of Lascaris in precisely these terms.
I found it ironic that, after reading Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce, a writer to whose style his own had been compared, White observed that Joyce was “fascinating to read about but not to read.” I feel exactly that about Patrick White. Marr’s biography is highly entertaining – which can not be said, in all fairness and whatever their other qualities, to any of its subject’s books or plays. Much of the entertainment derives from White’s extraordinary behaviour, and much of this comes to light through his letters. Yet “ ‘Letters are the devil,’ he wrote to Best. ‘I always hope that any I have written have been destroyed, excepting those which for business reasons have to go on file’”. He protesteth too much, I think. Marr had thousands of letters available to him. When Marr had finished his biography, according to an agreement between the two men, made before the project began, White read through the whole text, although he had no right of censorship. Marr has subsequently reported that, as White read through it (aloud, and in Marr’s presence), he periodically stopped to laugh at sections; he was not laughing at Marr’s writing but at the asperity of his own comments in his letters.
White’s achievements at Cambridge were inauspicious: “By the end of his second year at Cambridge, he knew he did not have a scholar’s mind. His academic performance was solid, and his German tutor Henry Garland encouraged him to believe… he was not going to be one of the great minds in modern languages.” Marr reported that “he was nagged by a sense of intellectual inadequacy until he came to see that he had another kind of intelligence, a ‘magpie mind’ that found ideas as he needed them and seize any image that caught his eye.” Several of those who knew him in those times, particularly noted his uninterest in ideas and his contrasting fascination with gossip.
When he dabbled in ideas, the result was not infrequently farcical. For most of his early life, he retained an inactive connection with his family’s establishment Christianity. Then, one day in the rain, he fell in a puddle and cursed god; supposedly, he realised he was cursing what he did not believe in, and consequently decided to believe! Hmm: I need to insert an emoji of open-mouthed disbelief. At various times, his spiritual searches turned to the occult, to Tarot, and to horoscopes. He was probably better off focusing on gossip.
Despite the fact that Patrck White was supposedly wracked by doubts while writing his works, he was prepared to fight to the death for them when they were released to the public. It is interesting that, in the three spheres where he initially released his novels and plays, New York, London and Sydney/Melbourne, there seems to have been polarised response to the works. In each of London and New York, he relied upon one principal advocate who was convinced of the worth of his writing and proselytised on his behalf. This was less the case in his native Australia, where the response was broadly unenthusiastic for some time (although the Australian Literary Society did award him its 1941 Gold Medal on the basis of Happy Valley. There was some likelihood that an immature Australia in general did not respond well until NY and UK responses showed them it was safe to do so and, of course, the Nobel Prize (also championed by one determined backer) helped. Then the 1960s and 70s were when the younger generation were rebelling and rejecting earlier critical orthodoxies, and when White received broader home acclamation.
Marr reported that AD Hope in the Sydney Morning criticised the “fancy prose”, “praised the work’s memorable characters, mocked the familiar farms and fires and floods and comic Irishmen of Australian novels, and flayed White’s style with memorable ferocity: ‘When so few Australian novelists can write prose at all, it is a great pity to see Mr White who shows on every page some touch of the born writer, deliberately choose as his medium this pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge.’” Marr commented that “No shaft of criticism ever wounded White so deeply. He raged against Hope…”
In reviewing White’s play Night on Bald Mountain, Harry Kippax wrote “ ‘I do wonder whether a philosophy which appears to be distrustful of intellectual communication, and suspicious of emotional and physical relationships between human beings can fruitfully use the drama as a medium of expression.’”
When The Ham Funeral was submitted to a New York publisher, the report-writer was scathing: “ ‘The whole place suffers from an intolerable attitudinising on the part of the author, and its lack of body and substance is frustrating and irritating. Furthermore, this type of impressionistic morality play is extremely tedious, dated and boring even when well done, and certainly the script is not. Absolutely no possibilities’”
For me, those three lucid reviews encompassed the major problems with White’s work. Although they could also have included that, unlike Graham Greene, he was not a particularly good story-teller, and numbers of his characters seem more like ciphers than human beings. His loudly vented fury when anyone failed to appreciate his work borders on bullying. Some hint as to why many readers, to their shame, did not appreciate his writing might be found in one explanation Marr quoted: “‘Always something of a frustrated painter, and a composer manqué, I wanted to give my book the textures of music, the sensuousness of paint, to convey through the theme and characters of Voss what Delacroix and Blake might have seen, what Mahler and Liszt might have heard. Which sounds plausible – in words – but defies close scrutiny.
David Marr seemed to me to be scrupulously fair to White throughout this book; it was his accurate reportage of White’s actions and words that stand to condemn White – as a person, if not as a writer. Marr noted that White appealed – successfully – to the Commonwealth Literary Fund to help another writer, Martin Boyd in Rome . And he apparently provided charitable support to the Smith Family for Sydney poor; aboriginal students, medical services, and various political causes. My cynical nature sees a little of the mediaeval aristocrat dispensing largesse to the peasants.
I wonder how many writers brazenly represent themselves as “great”. “ ‘My homosexuality’, (White) once told Jim McClelland, ‘gives me all the insights that make me a great writer.’

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been on my shelf for some time and some wise advice was given to me years ago and that was that to appreciate reading the works of Patrick White it can be helpful to first understand the person.
David Marr has written a loving, well researched and fascinating story of Patrick White. There is so much in this story, from the personal family stories set within the Australia of the colonial years, war years and beyond this is truly a broad sweep of Australia's white history scattered with the characters that fill Patrick White's writing.
I am very lucky to have had such good advice and such an excellent writer who does honour a worthy Nobel Prize winner.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written (if a bit obscure, for me, at times with australian geography and words). White comes off as unpleasant from day one and keeps this up to the last, and never tried to hide that. Marr navigates White's family relationships, the many deteriorating or abruptly ended relationships, the theatre experiences, the book publishers, and australian politicians with ease, while also supplying synopses of Whte's novels and plays. Everything is laid out well, with judicious use of quotations. I won't say this bio is the last word, but it's certainly a number of good words.

[Guy Cranswick · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exceptional biography and Marr's writing is excellent. his insight into White is deep.

[Albertine67 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even if I didn't love White's work, this is a fascinating book - and I'm not a great lover of biography. Nor I am interested in Australia. But almost against my will (rather like White himself), I was engrossed by the depiction of the culture and society of Australia, which becomes almost a character in itself. This is particularly true once he decides to return to Australia to live; it's clear to me that his story and that of Australia are inseparable. It's impeccably researched and written.

[Tim Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patrick White, one of, if not our greatest author, comes alive in this remarkable life history. David Marr in a vivid, clear and concise account of Whites life divines the depth of individualism required to write two of our Australian literary masterpieces, tree of man and voss.. For Patrick White fans, for Australian literary lovers and for lovers of a good read, put this on the bedside table at the earliest..

[Eli McLean · Rating 4 out of 5]

A behemoth of a biography, and really the only way a biography of White could've been written. Marr's vision of White as a literary figure is ambitious, compelling and expansive, speaking to how our relationships with our partners, our faith, our landscape, are reckoned with in fiction. It's also just really fun watching Marr sift through meticulous, eccentric details about White for page after page.

[Sarah Jones]

5/5 but it did take some work at points (for me) to get through

[Sammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very satisfactory - and satisfactorily comprehensive - biography of the Australian literary giant.

[Jonathan Mayweather · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest books I've read.

[Deon Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Marr is one of Australia's most eloquent journalists and in this book illuminates the extraordinary Australian writer Patrick White - one of this nations most decorated authors and yet sadly when I was studying English at university many years ago his novels were never discussed. I only chanced upon this book for sale at a market stall for $1 and what a treasure! I doubt that I would have relished an audience with Mr White personally due to his acidic tongue. In fact the cover has a quote from White saying 'This book should be called the Monster of all time...and I am the monster'. This makes for a man of great character and interest. As the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland said ... be anything, say anything you like, make something up but don't be boring. No need to make anything up here - he lived large and as he wished. It is a decent sized tome of a book which means all layers of the man are well investigated. I had never understood the inner struggle of Australian artists in the 50's & 60's and the inevitability of expatriates until this book. Australia has been (maybe still) quite montrous towards the artist. Every time White had a book published there were vitriolic negetive Australian reviews whereas in England and USA reviewers generally recognised genius at work. White was also rather brave in living with his partner Manoly Lascaris considering the stultifying and hypocritcal society that was Australia at the time and its obsessions with the perceived 'evils' of gay sexuality! This is a wonderful read.

[Gary Daly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew more about Patrick White from myth, legend and gossip and I recall when this biography was originally released in 1991. At that time I remember thinking that I would never read a Patrick White novel because it wasn't my kind of book. And at the time I couldn't push past the page 3 girl. Anyway I have read 'Tree of Life' and 'Voss' (a favourite). Tree of Life was an excellent but exhausting read. I did enjoy it and the bleakness and the characters who inhabit his morbid cancerous world are in one sense extreme but 'normal' in the sense that they live in their society and perform the rituals and express themselves as to the expected social norm. It's what happens in the minds of these people and Patrick White was everything his characters were and his readers are ,this denotes, you and I, we are mean, ugly, hypocritical, generous, happy et al.
Reading about this man's life was like freebasing exhaustion. White is a real nauseating fucking dickhead who wrote brilliant novels and won the nobel prize for literature he was also intelligent, precise, demanding, forgiving, paranoid, bitter, impulsive, hedonistic, monastic, sane, insane and human just like everyone else. Tough book to read if you have no knowledge of White, though it is not essential to have read any of his books to enjoy his biography.

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can't beat a great writer writing about another great writer. Marr does a superlative job capturing the life of this incredible Australian, warts and all. White is tremendously complex, and definitely not always likeable, right to the end, and Marr has perfectly captured so many aspects of him and his life. A brilliant piece of work.

[Jill Scanlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was enthralled. It was like reading one of those action packed fantasy trilogies, un- put- down-able. I've always struggled to read White's book but I found this biography instantly gratifying. Well done David Marr.

[Vida Carden-coyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gobsmackingly well written. Mr Marr wrote with a sensitivity, insight and respect that is a tribute to he kind of person he must be. Amazing.

[Alistair · Rating 4 out of 5]

You don't have to like White's novels to be entertained by this masterful biography. (I find Patrick almost unreadable), however I really enjoyed this biography.

[Deb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gotcha!

[Gisela]

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/p...