"I am a stranger / I must veil myself / I must hide me," he wrote in his last year at public school. Glass") stood apart from the cultural milieu into which he was thrown. From his earliest years, however, "this green, sickly boy, who saw and knew too much" (as he described himself in his autobiography, "Flaws in the Ordeals of the Australian outback and the English public school system. The son of a well-to-do Australian farmer, he was trained to inhabit a world of English-Australian gentility by the equally horrific
Patrick White was born in London in 1912, on one of his parents' periodic sojourns in the colonial cultural capital.
White's life, we discover, is thus the ultimate Life of a despicable human being, consumed by self-hatred and ground in the elements of Australian earth, was yet a vessel for extraordinary artistic and spiritual transcendence. Marr tells the story of the prolific and largely ignored Australian writer who produced a dozen novels, two collections of short stories, 10 plays and some verse, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. In an integrated succession of letters, interviews and narratives, The abruptness of this ascent into faith - its counterintuitive logic, its muddiness, its rawness - is the central motor behind this beautifully constructed account of White's life. 'I stood in the rain, the water up to my ankles, and pouring off me, as I proceeded to curse God.' But howĬould he curse what did not exist? As he puzzled at this, he had an inkling of the presence of God. Swearing and laughing he dragged himself to his feet. "Somewhere between the jacaranda and the old piggery he slipped in the mud. At a central moment in "Patrick White: A Life," David Marr March 22, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - FinalĪ FEW days before Christmas in 1951, the novelist Patrick White was carrying bowls of slops to feed his schnauzer pups on his farm in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney in Australia. The New York Times: Book Review Search Article
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