Patrick White Biography and List of Works

Australian novelist, short story writer and playwright who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. In his work White combines myth, symbols and allegory. His characters are often separated from society by age, sexuality, race or geography. White's international breakthrough novel was VOSS, published in 1957. RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT, which contains a powerful indictment of Australian suburban life, established him as one of the most important modern writers. In his own country White had to wait a long time before his depiction of the Australian middle classes was accepted.

"I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals."
(from Three Uneasy Pieces, 1987)

Patrick White was born in London of Australian parents. His youth was spent partly in Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, and partly in England. At the age of 13 he was sent to Cheltenham College, an experience he hated and referred as a 'four-year prison sentence'. He returned to Australia and worked for two years as a jackaroo on a remote sheep station before starting to study French and German literature at Cambridge, receiving his B.A. in 1935. White settled in London and wrote several unpublished novels. His first published novel, HAPPY VALLEY, appeared in 1939. The story is set in New South Wales. The book was followed by THE LIVING AND THE DEAD (1941), set in pre-war London, and THE AUNT'S STORY (1948), a comic account of the travels of an independent Australian spinster, Theodora Goodman.

"Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed."
(from Three Uneasy Pieces)

During World War II White served in the Royal Air Force Intelligence unit in Greece and The Middle East. After the war White returned to Australia with a Greek friend, Manoly Lascaris. They bought an old house in Castle Hill, a suburb of Sydney. For the next eighteen years they lived a farmers life, selling flowers, vegetables, milk and cream. During these years Write wrote his first important work, THE AUNT'S STORY (1948). In 1955 White's long family saga, THE TREE OF MAN was published. The novel immediately established his reputation as a major writer, often compared to Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, and D.H. Lawrence.

The epic theme was continued in Voss, which returns to the heroic Australian past. It depicts the doomed attempt of a Nietzschean German visionary, Johann Voss, to lead an expedition across the continent in 1845. He is bound in a form of mystic communion with Laura Trevelyan, who, at home in Sydney, suffers with him. The true record of Ludwig Leichardt, who died in the desert in 1848, inspired the story.

During the 1960s White published several books or plays depicting Sarsaparilla, a fictitious Australian suburb, among them Riders in the Chariot, THE BURNT ONES (1964), a collection of short stories, and plays THE SEASON AT SARSAPARILLA, A CHEERY SOUL, and the novel THE SOLID MANDALA (1966), which was influenced by thoughts of Carl Jung.

THE EYE OF THE STORM (1973) centres on a wealthy city dweller, Elizabeth Hunter, who has spent her life seducing men. She remembers the most significant time of her life, when she was stranded on a tropical island. In his later years White became vocal on such issues as Aboriginal rights and the protection of the environment. After the novel THE TWYBORN AFFAIR (1979), which explores various dualities in human nature, White indicated it was to be his last novel and in the future he would write only for radio and the stage. In 1986 he published another novel, MEMOIRS OF MANY IN ONE 'by Alex Xenophon Demirjan Gray, edited by Patrick White'. In his frank self-portrait, FLAWS IN THE GLASS (1981), White depicts his life as a writer and a homosexual in Australian society. The book also contains a brief and revealing account of his allegedly 'ungracious' reception of the Nobel Prize. White, who guarded his privacy, did not attend the award ceremonies, but persuade his friend, the artist Sidney Nolan, to accept it in Stockholm on his behalf. In THREE UNEASY PIECES (1987) White charts the progress of a wart, gives his views on old age and potato peeling, and examines our efforts to achieve aesthetic perfection.

White died on September 30, 1990 in Sydney after a long illness. A selection of White's letters, edited by his biographer David Marr, was published in 1996. They chronicle the author's interest in Jewish culture after an early ignorant anti-Semitism, his idyllic wartime period in West Africa, his anti-royalism sparked by the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, and his belief in the validity of homosexual unions.

"The basic theme in Patrick White is mankind's search for a meaning for, and a value in, existence. The mystery of the human psyche offers him a challenge which has shown itself to be fruitful. Nothing in his works would suggest any doubts that this earthly existence is the only one mankind has been granted, and that we are dependent on our fellows for its perfection. That White is aware of forces beyond apparent reality does not mean that he believes in a life after death. It is in order to make the only existence of his "elect" meaningful that he sends them out on the oaths of suffering. "
(Ingmar Björksten in Patrick White: General Introduction, 1976)

THE TREE OF MAN: An epic family saga, depicting an ordinary couple at the beginning of the 20th century, who establish a farm in the Australian wilderness. They raise their children, have grandchildren, and eventually see their land engulfed by suburbia. Published in the United States in 1955 and subsequently in England. White started to write the novel in 1955, doubting whether he should write another word after his works were ignored in Australia.

For further reading: Partick White: A General Introduction by I. Björksten (1976); Patrick White's Fiction by Carolyn Jane Bliss (1986); Patrick White: Fiction and the Unconscious by David J. Tacey (1988); Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White's Fiction by Laurence Steven (1989); Vision and Style in Patrick White by Rodney Stenning Edgecombe (1989); Critical Essays on Patrick White, compiled by Peter Wolfe (1990); Patrick White: A Life by David Marr (1992); Patrick White and the Religious Imagination by Michael Giffin (1999)

HAPPY VALLEY, (1939)