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Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait
This memoir covers the Nobel laureate's lifetime from his early childhood to his sixties and from Sydney, through English public school, service in the North African campaign of World War II, and permanent return to Australia
272 pages, Paperback
First published February 18, 1982
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195 people want to read
About the author
Patrick White
84 books369 followers There is more than one author by this name on Goodreads. For the Canadian Poet Laureate see "Patrick^^^^^White".
Patrick Victor Martindale White was an Australian author widely regarded as one of the major English-language novelists of the 20th century, and winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Born in England while his Australian parents were visiting family, White grew up in Sydney before studying at Cambridge. Publishing his first two novels to critical acclaim in the UK, White then enlisted to serve in World War II, where he met his lifelong partner, the Greek Manoly Lascaris. The pair returned to Australia after the war.
Home again, White published a total of twelve novels, two short story collections, eight plays, as well as a miscellany of non-fiction. His fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantages and the stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature."
From 1947 to 1964, White and Lascaris lived a retired life on the outer fringes of Sydney. However after their subsequent move to the inner suburb of Centennial Park, White experienced an increased passion for activism. He became known as an outspoken champion for the disadvantaged, for Indigenous rights, and for the teaching and promotion of art, in a culture he deemed often backward and conservative. In their personal life, White and Lascaris' home became a regular haunt for noted figures from all levels of society.
Although he achieved a great deal of critical applause, and was hailed as a national hero after his Nobel win, White retained a challenged relationship with the Australian public and ordinary readers. In his final decades the books sold well in paperback, but he retained a reputation as difficult, dense, and sometimes inscrutable.
Following White's death in 1990, his reputation was briefly buoyed by David Marr's well-received biography, although he disappeared off most university and school syllabuses, with his novels mostly out of print, by the end of the century. Interest in White's books was revived around 2012, the year of his centenary, with all now available again.
Sources: Wikipedia, David Marr's biography, The Patrick White Catalogue
Patrick Victor Martindale White was an Australian author widely regarded as one of the major English-language novelists of the 20th century, and winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Born in England while his Australian parents were visiting family, White grew up in Sydney before studying at Cambridge. Publishing his first two novels to critical acclaim in the UK, White then enlisted to serve in World War II, where he met his lifelong partner, the Greek Manoly Lascaris. The pair returned to Australia after the war.
Home again, White published a total of twelve novels, two short story collections, eight plays, as well as a miscellany of non-fiction. His fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantages and the stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature."
From 1947 to 1964, White and Lascaris lived a retired life on the outer fringes of Sydney. However after their subsequent move to the inner suburb of Centennial Park, White experienced an increased passion for activism. He became known as an outspoken champion for the disadvantaged, for Indigenous rights, and for the teaching and promotion of art, in a culture he deemed often backward and conservative. In their personal life, White and Lascaris' home became a regular haunt for noted figures from all levels of society.
Although he achieved a great deal of critical applause, and was hailed as a national hero after his Nobel win, White retained a challenged relationship with the Australian public and ordinary readers. In his final decades the books sold well in paperback, but he retained a reputation as difficult, dense, and sometimes inscrutable.
Following White's death in 1990, his reputation was briefly buoyed by David Marr's well-received biography, although he disappeared off most university and school syllabuses, with his novels mostly out of print, by the end of the century. Interest in White's books was revived around 2012, the year of his centenary, with all now available again.
Sources: Wikipedia, David Marr's biography, The Patrick White Catalogue
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 3, 2023
"Patrick White can do no wrong" is almost always true, in my opinion. This closeted memoir, true to his times, has to be read between the lines to extract the most meaning, but is still extremely interesting as a literary memoir.
Still it’s a shame White didn’t feel free to write about his life partner: the man who shared his life for decades. Decades! An "open secret" that was never mentioned. However, fans of Patrick White will find much to admire.
Still it’s a shame White didn’t feel free to write about his life partner: the man who shared his life for decades. Decades! An "open secret" that was never mentioned. However, fans of Patrick White will find much to admire.
December 10, 2018
“If you are pure, innocent, or noble - qualities I don't lay claim to - perhaps you never develop passionate antipathies".
* * * *
Mr White certainly developed his share of passionate antipathies, and didn’t hesitate to make them clear. That, naturally, did not make him popular in the country he only returned to because “blood is a river that cannot be crossed”. Detesting, he claimed, Australia for his its philistinism, inbred conservatism and vulgarity, nonetheless he could not escape the lure of boyhood impressions of its unique natural beauty and the kindness and good-humour of its simpler outcasts so perfectly captured in The Tree of Man, his first notable novel that propelled him rather grudgingly to international recognition.
The only two writers who I could say have really influenced me because they are both superb anatomists of the human soul are Marcel Proust and Patrick White. Proust, in kid gloves, manipulates almost too delicate a scalpel; White (The Vivisector) uses a blunter though no less probing technique, which is why the former to those who don’t admire him is seen as merely an over-wordy bore even though a hundred years after his birth his remaining admirers, ancient female relics, at a celebratory exhibition in Paris - where I barely more than a youth, could just possibly have crossed paths with the writer older than my father - were still bickering over which them had been the models for Odette de Crécy, while anyone within White’s orbit increasingly sought to distance themselves as far away as possible. This book is not an auto-biography nor even exactly a ‘memoir’, more a seemingly random compilation of jottings and observations, most interestingly to do with his war-time experiences in North Africa and later travels in Greece, a country also subject to antipathies as well as a quasi-religious adoration. In that respect it starts off very well. Almost the last thing he wrote, in failing health, by then winner of the Nobel Prize when it still meant something, his reputation solidly established, having nothing to lose, he pursued to the limit what he maintained was always his only purpose: not just to tell the truth as he saw it but to hack it away from protesting rock like a literary Michelangelo. No novel of his had ever sold so quickly or so well. Always reticent about himself, he put this down to the curiosity of “smut-seekers”, and it could be said they got their money’s worth, though not in the way they might have been expecting. The whole thing trails off, as if he’d just got bored with it, into little more than rancorousness and what might sound suspiciously like spiteful jealousy.
According to David Marr, still finishing his long and excellent ‘official’ biography (Patrick White, a Life), Flaws was soon being referred to in publishing circles as Claws in the Arse. Sidney Nolan, who warrants a section to himself and who believed he and White were great friends, was so cross at being described as an adult-baby philanderer who’d sold out integrity to fame and as good as driven his wife to suicide that he had to be dissuaded from taking legal action. Mrs Victor White’s remaining friends protested that her son’s version of her as a domineering snob and social climber was grossly unfair. White’s faithful companion of forty years read of his father as a cad and of his beloved aunts as half-crazed left-over Byzantine would-be saints in understandably stony silence. Joan Sutherland, with as much claim to be the voice of Australia, pretended not to have heard herself dismissed as a woman who’d never read anything but pulp fiction. After only a brief meeting, Iris Murdoch – at least White’s equal as a giant of twentieth-century literature – is recorded only as a drab figure in brown serge. Goethe and Tolstoy were “old abominations”. No other novelists get any recognition at all, except a couple of obscure Australians who’ve never been heard of since. In spite of his self-professed reticence and refusal to court publicity, the author kept a hawk’s eye on his royalties and took it is a personal affront if anyone had not read any of his books. That probably accounted for his sneers at the young Queen Elizabeth and her “Glücksberg consort”, for which a former equerry publicly rebuked him for “ungentlemanliness”: a copy of Voss had been left as a formality in the private suite on the yacht that had taken the royal couple to Sydney and was never seen again, so the author leapt to the conclusion, quite without evidence, that it had been “chucked out a porthole window by the Jokey Juke”. White’s rejection of rationality, his insistence that his own art derived entirely from intuition, sometimes got the better not just of common sense but of ordinary tact; his temper was notorious and he never forgave what he considered a slight. Gossip may be all very amusing if it’s private; it may equally be uncalled for or just downright rude when personal aversions are broadcast to a public eager for scurrilous tittle-tattle about persons who are only names. There are as many versions of truth as there are people to relate it. For all that there are surprising generosities. Chief amongst the antipathies were the suburban Australian middle classes, especially those with pretensions, and they’re savaged mercilessly. The upper classes generally escape, because “they can get away with murder”; so do faithful servants, the rejects from propriety, the failures, the derelicts, the disreputable or just eccentrics, whose failings act as an heroic foil to the hypocrisies of the rest. Although despising the Australian pastoral class from which he came, no relative or ancestors but his mother were ever targeted, nor his boyhood nanny or the ordinary hard-working denizens of the bush.
Later on, in one of those televised ‘literary discussions’ which White abhorred (along with intellectuals, academics and critics), David Marr observed that the writer’s aversions derived from his belief that Australia hadn’t developed any “principles” and had to be forced to learn some through mockery. Well, we can agree that by and large the country is relatively unsophisticated because it’s never had to be otherwise, but if it comes to the bourgeoisie they’ve always been the subject of satire and ridicule everywhere, that’s easy. White, I think, reveals a particular complexity – that he himself was a principled if initially diffident rebel chiefly against his own up-bringing, which Freudians may interpret in their own limited way. For those analytically inclined his individual demons had to do, perhaps, with an early sense of isolation, of being ‘different’, not ‘fitting in’, never able to forget that his mother in a fit of irritation had reputedly said “I never thought I’d have a freak for a child”, so that secretly he sought almost to the point of making it a vice for recognition or even revenge through the medium of an extraordinary and unique talent – which he saw as both a source of salvatory exhilaration and despair, a curse more than a blessing - while preserving an inherited front of a highly conservative correctness of manner. He would have dismissed that sort of quack psychology with the scorn it deserves as irrelevant, proclaiming that all that was necessary for anyone else to know was to read the ‘fiction’ he invented with such ingenuity and insight. To take one example, in an early short story called Dead Roses, two of his best friends were somewhat put out at finding themselves all too evidently caricatured as a comfortably free-living couple of ample resources with a rough island retreat where they could dispense with the formalities of well-to-do Adelaide, carefully got up in the assured “tatters of the rich”. They decided to ‘forgive’ him, because that was “the way he was”; others were less understanding. In fact the portrait is entirely convincing, but perhaps they were flattering themselves, since they’re only subsidiary characters to the main one, a very proper young woman under the thumb of an awful mother. Poor Anthea arrives with a carefully packed wardrobe of unsuitable garments, causing titters amongst her hosts at her fear of getting a spot on her silk. Shyly and barely consciously she wishes to be as untrammelled and ‘bohemian’ as them, to throw caution to the winds, except that - yet, too imprisoned in her own upbringing - she doesn’t know how to be, or hasn’t the self-confidence to try. That, I would imagine, is White himself as a young man, who also had to learn by hard knocks in the rough and tumble of ‘real life’, by which time he wasn’t diffident at all. But his passions, like hers, were not physical, they were directed towards an almost mystical ideal of devotion which only one companion could ever satisfy. Sex is always a rather sordid, tentative if not drunken, business, often a betrayal and at best “more considerate than sensual”. Is that why he refers to himself as a ‘masochist’? Elsewhere, many characters in the novels do have principles, mistaken or otherwise, it’s just that they can’t articulate them except through the words provided for them by writers of this calibre. That, really, should be enough. Genius has its flaws no less than do the hordes of the insignificants when White said his only purpose in writing Flaws in the Glass with all its acerbities, wit and wisdom was to set the record straight because he was fed up hearing the rubbish written about himself by others, and if they didn’t like it, too bad. It’s just that perhaps he could have been a little more gracious about it.
* * * * *
“Truth ends where words begin”
* * * *
Mr White certainly developed his share of passionate antipathies, and didn’t hesitate to make them clear. That, naturally, did not make him popular in the country he only returned to because “blood is a river that cannot be crossed”. Detesting, he claimed, Australia for his its philistinism, inbred conservatism and vulgarity, nonetheless he could not escape the lure of boyhood impressions of its unique natural beauty and the kindness and good-humour of its simpler outcasts so perfectly captured in The Tree of Man, his first notable novel that propelled him rather grudgingly to international recognition.
The only two writers who I could say have really influenced me because they are both superb anatomists of the human soul are Marcel Proust and Patrick White. Proust, in kid gloves, manipulates almost too delicate a scalpel; White (The Vivisector) uses a blunter though no less probing technique, which is why the former to those who don’t admire him is seen as merely an over-wordy bore even though a hundred years after his birth his remaining admirers, ancient female relics, at a celebratory exhibition in Paris - where I barely more than a youth, could just possibly have crossed paths with the writer older than my father - were still bickering over which them had been the models for Odette de Crécy, while anyone within White’s orbit increasingly sought to distance themselves as far away as possible. This book is not an auto-biography nor even exactly a ‘memoir’, more a seemingly random compilation of jottings and observations, most interestingly to do with his war-time experiences in North Africa and later travels in Greece, a country also subject to antipathies as well as a quasi-religious adoration. In that respect it starts off very well. Almost the last thing he wrote, in failing health, by then winner of the Nobel Prize when it still meant something, his reputation solidly established, having nothing to lose, he pursued to the limit what he maintained was always his only purpose: not just to tell the truth as he saw it but to hack it away from protesting rock like a literary Michelangelo. No novel of his had ever sold so quickly or so well. Always reticent about himself, he put this down to the curiosity of “smut-seekers”, and it could be said they got their money’s worth, though not in the way they might have been expecting. The whole thing trails off, as if he’d just got bored with it, into little more than rancorousness and what might sound suspiciously like spiteful jealousy.
According to David Marr, still finishing his long and excellent ‘official’ biography (Patrick White, a Life), Flaws was soon being referred to in publishing circles as Claws in the Arse. Sidney Nolan, who warrants a section to himself and who believed he and White were great friends, was so cross at being described as an adult-baby philanderer who’d sold out integrity to fame and as good as driven his wife to suicide that he had to be dissuaded from taking legal action. Mrs Victor White’s remaining friends protested that her son’s version of her as a domineering snob and social climber was grossly unfair. White’s faithful companion of forty years read of his father as a cad and of his beloved aunts as half-crazed left-over Byzantine would-be saints in understandably stony silence. Joan Sutherland, with as much claim to be the voice of Australia, pretended not to have heard herself dismissed as a woman who’d never read anything but pulp fiction. After only a brief meeting, Iris Murdoch – at least White’s equal as a giant of twentieth-century literature – is recorded only as a drab figure in brown serge. Goethe and Tolstoy were “old abominations”. No other novelists get any recognition at all, except a couple of obscure Australians who’ve never been heard of since. In spite of his self-professed reticence and refusal to court publicity, the author kept a hawk’s eye on his royalties and took it is a personal affront if anyone had not read any of his books. That probably accounted for his sneers at the young Queen Elizabeth and her “Glücksberg consort”, for which a former equerry publicly rebuked him for “ungentlemanliness”: a copy of Voss had been left as a formality in the private suite on the yacht that had taken the royal couple to Sydney and was never seen again, so the author leapt to the conclusion, quite without evidence, that it had been “chucked out a porthole window by the Jokey Juke”. White’s rejection of rationality, his insistence that his own art derived entirely from intuition, sometimes got the better not just of common sense but of ordinary tact; his temper was notorious and he never forgave what he considered a slight. Gossip may be all very amusing if it’s private; it may equally be uncalled for or just downright rude when personal aversions are broadcast to a public eager for scurrilous tittle-tattle about persons who are only names. There are as many versions of truth as there are people to relate it. For all that there are surprising generosities. Chief amongst the antipathies were the suburban Australian middle classes, especially those with pretensions, and they’re savaged mercilessly. The upper classes generally escape, because “they can get away with murder”; so do faithful servants, the rejects from propriety, the failures, the derelicts, the disreputable or just eccentrics, whose failings act as an heroic foil to the hypocrisies of the rest. Although despising the Australian pastoral class from which he came, no relative or ancestors but his mother were ever targeted, nor his boyhood nanny or the ordinary hard-working denizens of the bush.
Later on, in one of those televised ‘literary discussions’ which White abhorred (along with intellectuals, academics and critics), David Marr observed that the writer’s aversions derived from his belief that Australia hadn’t developed any “principles” and had to be forced to learn some through mockery. Well, we can agree that by and large the country is relatively unsophisticated because it’s never had to be otherwise, but if it comes to the bourgeoisie they’ve always been the subject of satire and ridicule everywhere, that’s easy. White, I think, reveals a particular complexity – that he himself was a principled if initially diffident rebel chiefly against his own up-bringing, which Freudians may interpret in their own limited way. For those analytically inclined his individual demons had to do, perhaps, with an early sense of isolation, of being ‘different’, not ‘fitting in’, never able to forget that his mother in a fit of irritation had reputedly said “I never thought I’d have a freak for a child”, so that secretly he sought almost to the point of making it a vice for recognition or even revenge through the medium of an extraordinary and unique talent – which he saw as both a source of salvatory exhilaration and despair, a curse more than a blessing - while preserving an inherited front of a highly conservative correctness of manner. He would have dismissed that sort of quack psychology with the scorn it deserves as irrelevant, proclaiming that all that was necessary for anyone else to know was to read the ‘fiction’ he invented with such ingenuity and insight. To take one example, in an early short story called Dead Roses, two of his best friends were somewhat put out at finding themselves all too evidently caricatured as a comfortably free-living couple of ample resources with a rough island retreat where they could dispense with the formalities of well-to-do Adelaide, carefully got up in the assured “tatters of the rich”. They decided to ‘forgive’ him, because that was “the way he was”; others were less understanding. In fact the portrait is entirely convincing, but perhaps they were flattering themselves, since they’re only subsidiary characters to the main one, a very proper young woman under the thumb of an awful mother. Poor Anthea arrives with a carefully packed wardrobe of unsuitable garments, causing titters amongst her hosts at her fear of getting a spot on her silk. Shyly and barely consciously she wishes to be as untrammelled and ‘bohemian’ as them, to throw caution to the winds, except that - yet, too imprisoned in her own upbringing - she doesn’t know how to be, or hasn’t the self-confidence to try. That, I would imagine, is White himself as a young man, who also had to learn by hard knocks in the rough and tumble of ‘real life’, by which time he wasn’t diffident at all. But his passions, like hers, were not physical, they were directed towards an almost mystical ideal of devotion which only one companion could ever satisfy. Sex is always a rather sordid, tentative if not drunken, business, often a betrayal and at best “more considerate than sensual”. Is that why he refers to himself as a ‘masochist’? Elsewhere, many characters in the novels do have principles, mistaken or otherwise, it’s just that they can’t articulate them except through the words provided for them by writers of this calibre. That, really, should be enough. Genius has its flaws no less than do the hordes of the insignificants when White said his only purpose in writing Flaws in the Glass with all its acerbities, wit and wisdom was to set the record straight because he was fed up hearing the rubbish written about himself by others, and if they didn’t like it, too bad. It’s just that perhaps he could have been a little more gracious about it.
* * * * *
“Truth ends where words begin”
April 19, 2018
My encounter with this book is a classical example of ‘it’s not you, it’s me…’ scenario. There is no doubt White is a superb artist, with a wonderfully idiosyncratic vision and style. Almost every line in the book contains a wonder. And yet… I have little interest in reading about people’s childhoods and by the time White grew up in this book, it was almost the time to end. The ‘adult’ section was rushed and without much emotional urgency. Then, to ‘pad’ this tiny memoir, publishers added White’s travel sketches that contained zero emotional urgency as far as I could tell from whatever I could be bothered to read. The last section, various social sketches, was again interesting but rushed. And yet I closed the last page with the feeling I was now a somewhat richer person for having read/skimmed-in-parts this little book.
May 8, 2017
This is now my third foray into the writings of Patrick White. Unlike the first two of his books I read which were novels, this book Flaws in the Glass is biographical in nature. He talks of his family, his life in Australia and the U.K., his wartime experiences, travels abroad, friends and his love and appreciation for his life partner Manoly. I enjoyed this book as much if not more than his fiction. I cannot now believe that I once considered Patrick White's writing as snobby and inaccessible. I think he writes honestly and directly and has no pretensions about having all the answers. My appreciation of this man and his writing only grows with each new encounter.
October 3, 2009
I tried to read this 10 years ago, and gave up. After hearing it read aloud on The Book Show was inspired to try again. This time I really enjoyed this autobiog of a curmudgeonly, grumpy and self confessed stubborn old man, who is however a beautiful writer. I'm lining up David Marr's books "Letters" and "Patrick White A Life", now that I think I understand him better.
January 7, 2014
‘I can’t divest myself of memories; they cling like cobwebs, while blood is the river which cannot be crossed.’
Patrick Victor Martindale White, AC (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990) is the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1973). Between 1939 and 1990, Patrick White published twelve novels:
Happy Valley (1939); The Living and the Dead (1941); The Aunt's Story (1948)
The Tree of Man (1955); Voss (1957); Riders in the Chariot (1961)
The Solid Mandala (1966); The Vivisector (1970); The Eye of the Storm (1973)
A Fringe of Leaves (1976); The Twyborn Affair (1979); Memoirs of Many in One (1986)
His unfinished novel The Hanging Garden was published posthumously in 2012.
Patrick White also published three short story collections:
The Burnt Ones (1964); The Cockatoos (1974); Three Uneasy Pieces (1987)
Additionally, Patrick White wrote some poetry, eleven plays (not all have been published), and a screenplay: The Night the Prowler (1978).
Flaws in the Glass – a self-portrait was published in 1981, which consists of three sections totalling 260 pages.
The first 156 pages are Patrick White’s self-portrait, describing aspects of his life, his discovery both of self and of his creativity. In Patrick White’s largely detached account, full of perceptive observation and description, there is no self-congratulation. He writes of his fiction:
‘In my own opinion my three best novels are The Solid Mandala, The Aunt’s Story, and The Twyborn Affair.’ And tells us that:
‘All the houses I have lived in have been renovated and refurnished to accommodate fictions.’
The second section of the book, ‘Journeys’ consists of 62 pages of accounts of Patrick White’s travels with his partner Manoly Lascaris around the mainland and islands of Greece. Little of the commentary is flattering about the impact of man on the landscape:
‘In travel anywhere I have discovered you arrive almost always at the wrong moment: too hot, too cold, the opera, theatre, museum, is closed for the day, the season or indefinitely for repairs, or else there is a strike, or an epidemic, or tanks are taking part in a political coup.’
The final section, entitled ‘Episodes and Epitaphs’ is an amusing 40 pages of comments on topics as diverse as having lunch on the royal yacht Brittania in 1963; Sir John Kerr seen as Judas for his role in the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1974; his thoughts about the Nobel Prize (it may be all right for scientists); and then finally thoughts about what is left:
‘You reach a point where you have had everything, and everything amounts to nothing.’
Reading Patrick White’s account of his life reminds me that it is time – past time – for me to reread the novels and short stories. To see whether, after 40 years of calling ‘Voss’ my favourite White novel, this is still true.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Patrick Victor Martindale White, AC (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990) is the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1973). Between 1939 and 1990, Patrick White published twelve novels:
Happy Valley (1939); The Living and the Dead (1941); The Aunt's Story (1948)
The Tree of Man (1955); Voss (1957); Riders in the Chariot (1961)
The Solid Mandala (1966); The Vivisector (1970); The Eye of the Storm (1973)
A Fringe of Leaves (1976); The Twyborn Affair (1979); Memoirs of Many in One (1986)
His unfinished novel The Hanging Garden was published posthumously in 2012.
Patrick White also published three short story collections:
The Burnt Ones (1964); The Cockatoos (1974); Three Uneasy Pieces (1987)
Additionally, Patrick White wrote some poetry, eleven plays (not all have been published), and a screenplay: The Night the Prowler (1978).
Flaws in the Glass – a self-portrait was published in 1981, which consists of three sections totalling 260 pages.
The first 156 pages are Patrick White’s self-portrait, describing aspects of his life, his discovery both of self and of his creativity. In Patrick White’s largely detached account, full of perceptive observation and description, there is no self-congratulation. He writes of his fiction:
‘In my own opinion my three best novels are The Solid Mandala, The Aunt’s Story, and The Twyborn Affair.’ And tells us that:
‘All the houses I have lived in have been renovated and refurnished to accommodate fictions.’
The second section of the book, ‘Journeys’ consists of 62 pages of accounts of Patrick White’s travels with his partner Manoly Lascaris around the mainland and islands of Greece. Little of the commentary is flattering about the impact of man on the landscape:
‘In travel anywhere I have discovered you arrive almost always at the wrong moment: too hot, too cold, the opera, theatre, museum, is closed for the day, the season or indefinitely for repairs, or else there is a strike, or an epidemic, or tanks are taking part in a political coup.’
The final section, entitled ‘Episodes and Epitaphs’ is an amusing 40 pages of comments on topics as diverse as having lunch on the royal yacht Brittania in 1963; Sir John Kerr seen as Judas for his role in the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1974; his thoughts about the Nobel Prize (it may be all right for scientists); and then finally thoughts about what is left:
‘You reach a point where you have had everything, and everything amounts to nothing.’
Reading Patrick White’s account of his life reminds me that it is time – past time – for me to reread the novels and short stories. To see whether, after 40 years of calling ‘Voss’ my favourite White novel, this is still true.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
September 2, 2017
Lonely Planet describes Greeks as "pessimist extroverts", and I'd say this book is "A pessimist introvert in the land of pessimist extroverts".
I hesitate to put his book on my "best of Greece" shelf because his descriptions of their travels there (PW and his partner, Manoly, an Alexandrian Greek) are jaundiced and sour. It's worth noting that
-his descriptions of his native Australia and other places are just as bleakly bitter
-apart from some time spend there during the war, he was traveling in Greece during the 60s to 80s, so during periods of political upheaval (including the dictatorship) and poverty/reconstruction
-he suffered from asthma (and alcoholism?) and it must have been very physically demanding, and endlessly irritating and painful to travel by rickety busses, boats and taxis to the distant places they went to!
E.g.
"Greece is the greatest love-hate for anybody genuinely hooked.....if you are pure, innocent, or noble--qualities I don't lay claim to--perhaps you never develop passionate antipathies. But Greece is one long despairing rage in those who understand her, worse for Manoly because she is his, as Australia is worse for me because of my responsibility."
"Greece is mindless enough, unless when it comes to politics and there confusion abounds. The Greeks are all for chatter, and political chatter is the most seductive means of wasting time. Few Greeks read anything byt newspapers, though literary coteries abound, usually revolving around the poets....The chatter is amusing, stimulating, till you begin to see it as another kind of drug abuse. Then you long to escape its clutches."
So, although White's general crabbiness is a damper on things (esp amusing compared to the other Patrick, the ultimate Greek romanticiser, Leigh Fermor, whom White has no desire to meet and is crabby about when he is taken to PLF's house by an insistent and adoring fan of "Paddy") he does point out some uncomfortable truths, like the eternal plastic bits of garbage all over the countryside, the refineries "sprouting like a cancerous growth" on 'the most sublime imaginable" landscape, one occasionally gets an inkling of what the "love" part of his 'love-hate" is, most compellingly, though understatedly, his devotion to his partner Manoly.
It was an interesting book to read (skim), also re his mid-Eastern war experience "Alexandria during those war years must have been at its most frivolous, its most corrupt. The glitter of its diamonds was betrayed by its values, which were never more than paste....Most of us loved this eclectic whore of the Near East, her pseudo-French and Breetish pretensions, her Jewish warmth, her Greek loyalty and realism. Silken, boring Alexandria, pinned between the desert and the sea, with no outlet but adultery and bridge."
I hesitate to put his book on my "best of Greece" shelf because his descriptions of their travels there (PW and his partner, Manoly, an Alexandrian Greek) are jaundiced and sour. It's worth noting that
-his descriptions of his native Australia and other places are just as bleakly bitter
-apart from some time spend there during the war, he was traveling in Greece during the 60s to 80s, so during periods of political upheaval (including the dictatorship) and poverty/reconstruction
-he suffered from asthma (and alcoholism?) and it must have been very physically demanding, and endlessly irritating and painful to travel by rickety busses, boats and taxis to the distant places they went to!
E.g.
"Greece is the greatest love-hate for anybody genuinely hooked.....if you are pure, innocent, or noble--qualities I don't lay claim to--perhaps you never develop passionate antipathies. But Greece is one long despairing rage in those who understand her, worse for Manoly because she is his, as Australia is worse for me because of my responsibility."
"Greece is mindless enough, unless when it comes to politics and there confusion abounds. The Greeks are all for chatter, and political chatter is the most seductive means of wasting time. Few Greeks read anything byt newspapers, though literary coteries abound, usually revolving around the poets....The chatter is amusing, stimulating, till you begin to see it as another kind of drug abuse. Then you long to escape its clutches."
So, although White's general crabbiness is a damper on things (esp amusing compared to the other Patrick, the ultimate Greek romanticiser, Leigh Fermor, whom White has no desire to meet and is crabby about when he is taken to PLF's house by an insistent and adoring fan of "Paddy") he does point out some uncomfortable truths, like the eternal plastic bits of garbage all over the countryside, the refineries "sprouting like a cancerous growth" on 'the most sublime imaginable" landscape, one occasionally gets an inkling of what the "love" part of his 'love-hate" is, most compellingly, though understatedly, his devotion to his partner Manoly.
It was an interesting book to read (skim), also re his mid-Eastern war experience "Alexandria during those war years must have been at its most frivolous, its most corrupt. The glitter of its diamonds was betrayed by its values, which were never more than paste....Most of us loved this eclectic whore of the Near East, her pseudo-French and Breetish pretensions, her Jewish warmth, her Greek loyalty and realism. Silken, boring Alexandria, pinned between the desert and the sea, with no outlet but adultery and bridge."
September 15, 2018
This memoir is fractured, as curmudgeonly as you'd imagine, and provides plenty of insight into what drove White's view of the world; but it's not a patch on Frame's 'An Angel at my Table'.
White possibly left writing his autobiography too late, indeed he seems to admit that in places when he returns to describing the 'looking glass' that he gazes into in order to reflect, but there is a definite sense of memory loss, and things trail off a bit in many places.
The descriptions of his sexual awakening, the manner in which he grasped at creativity in the face of war's widespread destruction, and anecdotes about his relationship as a guiding light, are all compellingly drawn and observed.
But the portals through which we might have glimpsed the creation of his writing style remain firmly closed.
White possibly left writing his autobiography too late, indeed he seems to admit that in places when he returns to describing the 'looking glass' that he gazes into in order to reflect, but there is a definite sense of memory loss, and things trail off a bit in many places.
The descriptions of his sexual awakening, the manner in which he grasped at creativity in the face of war's widespread destruction, and anecdotes about his relationship as a guiding light, are all compellingly drawn and observed.
But the portals through which we might have glimpsed the creation of his writing style remain firmly closed.
October 16, 2017
3.5 stars. A good insight into the person, Patrick White. The first two thirds of the book is quite interesting, reading about his views on incidents he considers important. It is certainly not a tell all memoir and quickly glosses over large periods of his life, notwithstanding that he lived another nine years after writing this book. I did not find the description of his travels, mainly to a number of Greek islands, very interesting or illuminating. I prefer David Marr's biography, Patrick White: A Life. A more detailed account of who Patrick White the individual and writer is, covering his whole life fairly thoroughly.
March 8, 2016
It speaks of an era now quite behind us – particularly the 1930s to the 1950s – but still relevant, I think, for anyone with a wish to have a slightly longer cultural memory than the passionate musings of our current greats, like Winton, Carey and Flanagan. And there's modesty here, too - a memoir may be the greatest work of fiction of them all, but White isn't afraid of showing us his flaws in the glass, as well as hinting at his greatness too.
http://gatesyread.blogspot.com.au/201...
http://gatesyread.blogspot.com.au/201...
April 18, 2015
I really enjoyed the memoir part of this book - he tells it in exactly the grumpy, oblique language you would expect from his novels. The travelogue and Australian gossip which fills the last quarter of the book is less endearing.
December 6, 2022
I enjoyed reading this book, very different to David Marr's autobiography.
December 28, 2020
This book as much more substantial than the slim volume suggests with words and sentences set close together, all the better to fit much in a smaller space. I am sure that Patrick White was a difficult man in many ways but this book makes clear that he is not conceited or self-important. In fact if anything he is a little too modest in the treatment of his own talent. No matter what one thinks of his literature this is a man who didn't shrink from declaring his sexual preference and never hid his life partner from public view and for that alone this is a book worth reading. (Purchased at Bookshop Bivar in Lisbon, Portugal.)
November 25, 2022
An interesting memoir, split roughly in to three sections covering the early part of White’s life, travels with Lascaris, and their later times together.
March 23, 2023
A fascinating memoir that is written in White's colourful style.
Read
September 6, 2023for the first spring glow on the mirror at late afternoon
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