![]() England-the mother country to colonial ones-proved as little of a mother surrogate to run to her earth alien. He seems to feel he inhabited her, that is all, for a time-like any other lodging left behind. White refers to his actual mother always as “Ruth” she is a character rather than the closest relative in the kinship of blood. In Australia, White could not “come to terms with the inhabitants” away from Australia, the “consolation of the landscape” always drew him back: but-it was a “landscape without figures.” Intermittent self-exile, in England, America, and during the war in Africa and the Middle East, represents the split in being that is the initial stage in life’s painful pull toward art.Īustralia was mother-land, father-land, in an extraordinary sense. In late-nineteenth-century South Africa, Olive Schreiner felt “stifled” (significant metaphor for the asthma sufferer she was, as White himself is) in drawing-room pockets of colonial culture, and went to England to breathe. That is the pilgrimage of the colonial artist of the Twenties and Thirties-and before. Going to England for a university education, he stayed on after Cambridge to become a writer in a London bedsitter. (I myself wonder whether his own infant snobbery-suppressed dislike of being a colonial, shame of his own people’s apparent crassness in comparison with the nasty genteel indifference of assured ancestry-doesn’t make him exaggerate this paradoxical phenomenon of empire.) As a young adult, he came back to try living on the Australian land-the Monaro region that has continued working through its relationship with his consciousness, and is magnificently recreated fifty years later in The Twyborn Affair. ![]() He had imported English nannies, and later fulfilled colonial parental ambitions by being sent “home”-away-to Cheltenham, where he suffered traditional miseries endured by embryonic writers in English public schools-and then some, if we are to believe that anticolonial jeers were as bad as racialism, at that time. Patrick White was born in England in 1912 of Australian parents and brought back to Australia about the time he was able to sit up. On reading cat-scratch anecdotes, wry incidents, and a brilliantly elliptical telephone conversation, one realizes all these are the geneses of unwritten short stories-a condition that offers addenda to the existence of the unknown man. The scrappy third section at first appears to be a filler the book could have done without. It is read by glares of Australian sun and flares of European war, in the first, main section, a broken narrative that carries perfectly the philosophical proposition of its title, “‘Flaws in the Glass,” and in the second section, “Journeys,” by a kind of reflection cast up in sea-crossings that are also connections, of a nonnarrative nature. In his own books, White finds something of the “unknown-man” thesis that writers expect to find when they visit the author, and that he is “unable to produce.” That unknown man is the writer of this autobiography neither White the novelist nor White the man, but of their dark union: he has produced the revelation. Is autobiography the story of a personality or the work that has made the subject an object of sufficient public interest to merit writing about him/herself? If the subject is an artist, and in particular a writer, for whom the act is performed in the medium of his own art, what one wants, expects, is a revelation of the mysterious incest between life and art. I, personally, should have been disappointed if he had written more about being a homosexual than about becoming and being a writer. A review I read in an English literary magazine sulked because Patrick White had not written enough about being a homosexual. Too much of what? There’s another decision. Yet he has insisted that his publishers misrepresent and undervalue his book by stating on the jacket that it is “merely” a self-portrait in the form of sketches.Īll these cautionary riders to the form: biography, well yes auto-don’t ask too much. The Australian novelist Patrick White has written one of the two key autobiographies by contemporary writers (my other nomination is Milosz’s) that fit the lock of the creative process. ![]() Czeslaw Milosz subtitled his a search for self-definition Sartre, endowed by nature with the physical possibility of never looking anyone in the eye, stressed that his autobiographies was nothing but words. ![]() They don’t even use the term, any longer. ![]() What do you expect from an autobiography? Those who write them are as uncertain as those who publish them. ![]()
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