Sunday, October 21, 2012

Patrick White: Under the Skin


Nicholas Shakespeare hails the peaty novels of Patrick White, the Australian master whose work is as enduring as that of William Faulkner or Thomas Mann.

Patrick White, whose novel Voss is being republished by Everyman.
Patrick White, whose novel Voss is being republished by Everyman. Photo: ROSS

Patrick White is one of the great novelists of the 20th century, on a par with his fellow Nobel laureates William Faulkner, Halldór Laxness and Thomas Mann; and yet, 100 years after his birth, his name seems temporarily and inexplicably lost in the immense desert spaces to which he introduced a new generation of readers, buried like one of those Roman legions of Herodotus, beneath the glare and flies and red Australian sand.
Unsentimental, White predicted as much for himself. In 1981, after yet another project to film Voss had been aborted, he wrote to the director Joseph Losey: “I’m a dated novelist, whom hardly anyone reads, or if they do, most of them don’t understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I’d never written Voss, which is going to be everybody’s albatross. You could have died of him, somewhere in an Australian desert, so it’s fortunate you were frustrated.”

To those who believe in the replenishing powers of fiction to lead you into a region different from any that you have been capable of imagining hitherto, and then to leave you, if for a flicker, with an uplifting sense that you are yourself a slightly different person (while paradoxically someone who understands themselves a little better), the fading of White’s reputation is a stain. It was through works like Voss and his other historical masterpiece, A Fringe of Leaves – plus novels like The Tree of Man, Riders in the Chariot and The Vivisector – that White pioneered a new and absolutely necessary fictional landscape. His best material might be drawn from local watering holes and billabongs, from Faulkner’s native postage stamp of soil, as it were; but his reach is anything but local.

To the singer Van Morrison, in Ireland, White was one of the greatest influences on his life. He was the recipient of the only fan letter that Salman Rushdie has written (after finishing Voss); as well, of an impromptu speech from the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, for whom reading Voss was a searing experience. “It is like using an iron crowbar at minus 65 degrees centigrade in Siberia: when you let go, part of the skin adheres to it. Part of me went to Voss and blood too.” White, he was saying, does more than get under your skin; in his best work, he flays the reader bare.
Full piece at The Telegraph

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