Patrick White

Patrick White was born in London on 28 May 1912 into a wealthy Australian grazing family. He received his school education partly in Australia, partly at Cheltenham College, England. He then lived a few years in Australia, working as a jackaroo. At King's College, Cambridge, he studied French and German languages and literatures (1932-1935) and spent considerable time in France and Germany (particularly Hannover, which would become the fictional Heimat of Voss). The experience of the Australian landscape on the one hand, and European literature and thought on the other were to become two major sources of influence on White's writing.

White had realised early in life that he was not cut out for a grazier's life but rather for that of an artist and writer. A holiday with his parents in Scandinavia led to the discovery of Ibsen and Strindberg in his early teens - a taste his English housemaster deplored: 'You have a morbid kink I mean to stamp out'. According to White, it only stamped it ‘deeper in’. He wrote his first poems at Cheltenham, later privately printed in Sydney as Thirteen Poems in 1930 under the pseudonym Patrick Victor Martindale. After graduating from Cambridge he went to London where he moved in artists' circles, making friends with painters, musicians and writers. His first novel Happy Valley was published in 1939. While on a visit to the United States he wrote his second novel The Living and the Dead (1941).

During what he used to call 'Hitler's war' White joined the RAF and worked as an intelligence officer in the Middle East. In Egypt, White met Manoly Lascaris, who he describes in Flaws in the Glass (1981) as a ‘small Greek of immense moral strength’ who was ‘the central mandala in [his] life's hitherto messy design.' After some years in dreary post-war London White and Lascaris moved to Australia. They first settled on a farm at Castle Hill, on the outskirts of Sydney, but in 1964 moved to inner-city Centennial Park. White explained his reasons for returning to Australia - and his ambivalent response to this country - in his famous essay 'The Prodigal Son' (1958).

The national and international success of his novels The Aunt's Story (1948) and The Tree of Man (1955) mark the beginning of an extremely intense and productive writer's career. White's many novels, short stories and plays explore the nature of good and evil, love and hate, life and death, the material and the spiritual world, suffering and solitude. Among his many eccentric characters it is often the seemingly miserable 'outsider' figures who succeed in integrating life's ambivalences and in coming to terms with themselves, God and the universe.

After receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, White became a celebrity in Australia, a role he did not cherish. With his Nobel Prize money he established the Patrick White Award for Australian writers who have been creative over an extended period, but who have been inadequately recognised. Plagued with asthma and ill health all his life, White admitted to a 'bitter nature'. With his sometimes harsh criticism of people and issues he made a number of enemies. In 1976 he returned his OA in protest against some of the Australian government's policies. But his social commitment in speaking out on public matters and his generous support of various charitable causes were remarkable, and he had many friends and admirers.

1. ‘Why bother with Patrick White?’ website – includes timeline, bibliography, excerpts and opinions (ABC and New Media Productions): http://arts.abc.net.au/white/
2. Patrick White on the Nobel Prize Website – includes biography, bibliography and Banquet Speech: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1973/
3. David Marr, ‘Patrick White: The Final Chapter’, The Monthly, April 2008: http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-david-marr-patrick-white-final-chapter-873
4. Patrick White at the Complete Review: http://www.complete-review.com/authors/whitep.htm

Biographical summary derived from

AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource (www.austlit.edu.au). AustLit is freely available at many libraries, universities and schools. For further details see: www.austlit.edu.au/subscription