Patrick White

[drumorama0]

Anybody read him? I've read his first book, Happy Valley, and I thought the several uses of stream-of-consciousness in it were pretty good. Too bad Happy Valley isn't currently in print, and almost all his books are available only in the UK, if at all. Even though I've only read one book by him, I think he deserves more modern recognition. Course he did receive the Nobel ;) Anyone feel the same way, or have any comments on his other writings?

[sixsmith]

White must be one of the most under-read English language novelists. Indeed, despite considerable critical acclaim, he is largely out of print even in his native Australia. To be fair, he is not what one might call reader friendly. I've read The Solid Mandala and The Vivisector and they are both incredibly dense, though undeniably rich, explorations of the human psyche. The former concerns two twins who represent, rather crudely at times, the rational and spiritual elements of human nature. The latter, his longest novel, deals with the life of the artist, and more pointedly, how the artist's quest for greatness impacts upon his 'real' life and relationships with others. From what I understand, much of White's work deals with the duality and the divided nature of human psychology. In any event, you might like to check out the following site:

http://www.abc.net.au/arts/white/default.htm

[Gladys]

Anybody read him? I've read his first book, Happy Valley, and I thought the several uses of stream-of-consciousness in it were pretty good.

In the last few years I've read all but Happy Valley and The Living and the Dead, two early works considered inferior to the rest of his output. I adore those I've read, except for The tree of Man which I still don't get, and The Vivisector which I find distasteful, probably because Hurtle Duffield is less than likeable.

Patrick White novels are characterised by marvellous twists in the endings. I don't really have favourite but I could mention the ingenious Biblical allusions in Voss and Riders in the Chariot, the glass half-full heroes of The Solid Mandala, the veneer of polite society exposed in A Fringe of Leaves, an astonishing safe harbour in The Eye of the Storm, alienation within the family in The Twyborn Affair, and an amazing short story, The Cockatoos .

[Ron Price]

I found the words of A.D. Hope(1907-2000), a famous Australian poet and essayist, in describing his reaction to novels, described mine. Hope was writing about the novels of Australia’s only noble prize winner in literature, Patrick White. “It is very tedious to have to read a prose lyric of five hundred pages,” wrote Hope, “in which the sharp edge of poetic phrase, the flicker of verbal fancy demands one’s constant and exquisite awareness.” I, too, have experienced this tedium for the last half century.

As a now retired student and teacher of English literature, I found Hope’s words described the experience I have had with novels all my adolescent and adult life. The novels of Thomas Hardy which I had to read as far back as 1961 when I was in grade 11 and 17 years old were tortuous and tedious.

I had just joined the Baha’i Faith and was finishing my teenage career in sport as well as controlling the embryonic forces of my libido. I would not have read these novels if I did not have to first study them, and in the years ahead, teach them in classrooms in my role as a lecturer.

“However delightful at first,” Hope continues, White’s novels “produce in time irritation, then torture and finally a numbness of the brain.” Mr White cannot describe a character drinking a cup of tea without making a poetic image out of it. "Down through him wound the long ribbon of warm tea. He felt glad." He cannot simply say that a man was thirsty. It has to be: "his ordinary moist and thoughtful mouth, fixed in the white scales of thirst".

White, in writing about his own novels, says: “everything I write has to be dredged-up from the unconscious. It is this which makes it an exhausting and perhaps, finally, destructive process.”-Ron Price with thanks to the website “Why Bother with Patrick White?” 26 May 2012.

You had your self-loathing
and your sensitivity, your
immense creativity…your
sociability, exhaustion and
your self-destruction. I have
never really known you and
I still don’t…Occasionally I
dip into your life to see what
is and was there. I must say
that I admire much that you
were and I trust that now in
those ample fields of light,
you have found some peace.

If so, it is a peace that was
denied you in your earthly
life….I thank you, Patrick,
for the inspiration you have
been. I, too, travel the road
with my own load, and with
life’s slings and arrows that
send me to bed for a rest that
allows me1 to write what I must
write in these my years of late
adulthood and old age, 80+, if I
last that long!!!

1 “Patrick sometimes reminds me of those unfortunate women writers in the 19th Century who,” wrote Geoffrey Dutton Australian author and historian(1922-1998) “whether its Christine Rosetti or the Brontees or Ada Cambridge in Australia, retired to the sick bed in order to have some peace and to be able to write.”

Since the new medication packages which I have taken for my bipolar disorder beginning in 2007 at the age of 63, I often have to retire to bed. I sleep 8 to 9 hours a day out of the 11 to 12 I am in bed.

Ron Price
26/5/’12

[Gladys]

I've just finished Patrick White's second novel The Living and the Dead, published in 1941. The novel is set in London, where White spent most of his student years, and extends from just before WWI to the Spanish Civil War. The novels of Patrick White always leave you wondering and this early, difficult and dark novel is no exception.

[Eiseabhal]

A fantastic writer. And yes there is a great deal of sadness and some pessimism. But at the very least he gives the lie to the universally held idea that Australians are Philistines and boors.

[ennison]

I agree that he was a great writer. Untypical Aussie but that's because they like The Scots like to act out a parody of their stereotypes. I really need to get back to White as there is quite a lot to read.

[Ron Price]

Belated thanks for your responses folks. I'll say a few more things about this fine writer before moving on.-Ron
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1. In the 1990s I came to find the study of autobiography more interesting that the writing of it. So I continued to read about the process and to write these essays. Today I read an article on autobiography and what follows is the first two lines based on that article. Often I read books and journal articles about autobiography and then write summaries of the relevant parts of the books and articles with the long range aim of drawing these ideas together into some meaningful whole. I also find, like Patrick White, "I live in order that I can write." -Ron Price with thanks to Patrick White in "The Patrick White Enigma," The West Australian, February 23, 1991.
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2.SMALL DOSES

Being able to decisively attach one’s prose to the created rhythm of one’s time and age, to the psycho-historical mood and affective state in its many dispositions and tempers; or being able to detach one’s prose from one’s age in a clean and straightforward way is difficult. In my case, the result is uneven, a little simplistic at times, some might say supercilious and pretentious and, even if it does bear the weight of my preoccupations, the weight is too heavy for many readers. But the weight of much literature in the western intellectual tradition: classical, medieval and modern---is too heavy for many modern readers raised on a diet of the print and electronic media, and its print and image-glut that overwhelms with its sheer quantity.

Perhaps my oeuvre in all its genres is too ambitious in its range and depth; perhaps it tries to diagnose too much over too extensive a field of content. My diagnostic intelligence, if I can call it that, probes, and it does so over many thousands of pages. For some people who read my work the affect, I’m sure, is deadening. For others there is a vitality and for still others there is no affect at all because they never see it. Contemporary culture drowns its population in a burgeoning range of print and image-glut, as I say above.

My writing is remorselessly and, I like to think, glitteringly intent on diagnosis. The glitter of invention is, for me, everywhere and it is linked with and provides a distinctive literary identity, a creative abundance. For some readers I’m sure this is the case, but not for most. For most who chance upon my writing, the affect on them is enervating as it is for me after a long day of writing or even periodically in the course of any single day. I like to think my literary venture is gallant and ambitious, even if it is not really successful in the marketplace. In cyberspace, though, I have acquired literally millions of readers in the last decade: 2003-2013. My unremitting concern for detail, for analysis and for comment is not everybody’s and my advice to many would-be readers is to take my writing in small doses.-Ron Price with thanks to Vincent Buckley, “The Novels of Patrick White,” The Literature of Australia, editor, G. Dutton, Penguin, 1972(1964).

I create a world, too, Patrick;
I want to show extraordinary
things behind the ordinary,
the mystery and the poetry,
to transcend the tensions &
explore my world by words.

No mere surface impressionism
but passages, words, vibrant with
significance growing out of some
profound numbness and pervasive
inarticulateness that covers all the
surfaces of life until I bring them
alive….In the beginning was and
is the word and the word was with,
or so I like to think: with God and
the word was God….The wisdom
of the wise and the learning of the
learned can never comprehend this
unknowable, indescribable essence.

Ron Price
3/3/07 to 7/2/13