I can remember swimming my horse through floodwaters to fetch the mail, and enjoying a dish of stewed nettles during a dearth of vegetables. The life in itself was not uncongenial, but the talk was endlessly of wool and weather. Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous particle of the London I already loved.
Each vacation I visited either France or Germany to improve my languages. I wrote fitfully, bad plays, worse poetry. Then, after taking my degree, the decision had to be made: what to do? It was embarrassing to announce that I meant to stay in London and become a writer when I had next to nothing to show. To my surprise, my bewildered father, who read little beyond newspapers and stud-books, and to whom I could never say a word if we found ourselves stranded alone in a room, agreed to let me have a small allowance on which to live while trying to write.
At this period of my life I was in love with the theatre and was in and out of it three or four nights of the week. I tried unsuccessfully to get work behind the scenes. I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
A few sketches and lyrics appeared in topical revues, a few poems were printed in literary magazines. Then, early in , a novel I had managed to finish, called Happy Valley , was published in London, due to the fact that Geoffrey Grigson, the poet, then editor of the magazine New Verse which had accepted one of my poems, was also reader for a publishing firm.
This novel, although derivative and in many ways inconsiderably, was received well enough by the critics to make me feel I had become a writer.
I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on. This exhilarating personal situation was somewhat spoilt by the outbreak of war. During the early, comparatively uneventful months I hovered between London and New York writing too hurriedly a second novel, The Living and the Dead.
In I was commissioned as an air force intelligence officer in spite of complete ignorance of what I was supposed to do. After a few hair-raising weeks amongst the RAF greats at Fighter Command I was sent zigzagging from Greenland to the Azores in a Liverpool cargo boat with a gaggle of equally raw intelligence officers, till finally we landed on the Gold Coast, to be flown by exotic stages to Cairo, in an aeroplane out of Jules Verne.
The part I played in the war was a pretty insignificant one. My work as an operational intelligence officer was at most useful. Much of the time was spent advancing or retreating across deserts, sitting waiting in dust-ridden tents, or again in that other desert, a headquarters.
White conveys this rather dramatic climax to the novel with abundant religious symbolism. The ending of The Vivisector , like that of Voss , is replete with religious symbolism and ambiguity. Both Duffield and Voss suffer in part to their overreaching.
Yet the heroism of their final acts in some measure redeems the two characters. Duffield literally dies for his art and his vision. He could have accepted the knighthood and retired to a dotage of great wealth and fame. Instead, he became a Job-like figure determined to finish his vision of God despite partial paralysis. The truth of his redemption comes only with a painting we cannot see.
Patrick White was born outside London, England in When he was six months old the family relocated to Sydney, Australia. White finished his schooling early and returned to Australia where he worked for two years as a jackeroo in the mountains of New South Wales.
Although his health improved during this time, it became clear to White that he was not suited for a life outdoors. It was then that he began writing plays and poetry in earnest. After taking his degree, he stayed in London and associated with other writers and artists, including the young painter Roy de Maistre.
De Maistre would become an important friend and influence on his career. White dedicated his first novel to de Maistre and used a specially commissioned painting of his for the cover of one of his novels.
When his father died in , White was left an inheritance of 10, pounds, which provided the means to finance a career as a writer. After the war, the two settled down in an old farmhouse outside Sydney, where for the next eighteen years White would publish his most accomplished novels.
Australians finally accorded him recognition and respect by selecting Voss as the winner of the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award. White won the award again in for Riders in the Chariot and again in for The Vivisector. After winning the Britannia Award in , the relatively wealthy author decided that he would not accept any more prizes for his work. He died on September 30, What effect has this device on your reading of the novel?
There are a few superficial connections between The Vivisector and Voss. The explorer Leichhardt is mentioned in a letter from Mr. More important, both novels address the themes of suffering and redemption. Discuss how these themes are handled in each novel. The death of the prostitute Nance Lightfoot is left unexplained. Was Duffield complicit in her death? In his frank self-portrait, Flaws in the Glass , White depicted his life as a writer and a homosexual in Australian society.
Homosexuality was a theme which he had not much dealt before. The book also contained a brief and revealing account of his allegedly 'ungracious' reception of the Nobel Prize. White, who guarded his privacy, did not attend the award ceremonies, but persuade his friend, the artist Sidney Nolan, to accept it in Stockholm on his behalf. After posting Flaws in the Glass to his publishers in London White began to work on The Hanging Garden , about the effects of war on two children.
He put the manuscript aside to finish another time but never returned to it again. In Three Uneasy Pieces White charted the progress of the wart, gave his views about old age and potato peeling, and examined our efforts to achieve aesthetic perfection. White died on September 30, in Sydney, after a long illness. Lascaris, who ignored directions to destroy White's papers, survived his partner by 13 years.
Throughout his career as a writer, White had protected his own privacy. On his own instruction, the news of his death was made public only after the funeral had taken place. White destoyed much of his correspondence and he kept no copies of letters he had sent. A selection of White's letters, edited by his trusted biographer David Marr, came out in It had turned out, that although White had urged his correspondents to burn the letters, only a few had done it. This collection chronicle the author's interest in Jewish culture after an early ignorant anti-Semitism, his idyllic wartime period in West Africa, his anti-royalism sparked by the Australian constitutional crisis, and his belief in the validity of homosexual unions.
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