Patrick White: A Life - Hardcover

Marr, David

4.46

223 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394574354 ISBN 13: 9780394574356

Publisher: Knopf, 1992

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The life story of the Nobel Prize-winning author tells of his influential relationship with his Australian homeland and describes how his creative moods were often accompanied by savage fits of temper and a passion for privacy.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

The sleeper biography of this and recent years, Australian journalist Marr's book has more than amplitude and its subject's blessing (White actually got to read most of the book before his death in 1990) going for it: It is an unusually calm, unstraining, unjaded, and even curious work, fascinated with Patrick White but never fawning over or using him (he'd have been hard to use this way anyway) as an illustration of an artistic or psychological conclusion the biographer has come to. Like many of the best Nobel winners of recent decades, White- -who wrote some of the most extraordinary prose of the century--is more known by name than read. But rather than academically reintroducing us to White's great achievement, novel by novel, Marr wisely sticks to using the books as clues to White's life. It's a procedure that can mislead yet here doesn't--for White himself was never false, played no games with his life and art, made no toying distinctions or feints. Wealthy, homosexual, asthmatic, brutally candid, White looked to follow or start no circle; he was traumatically educated in England, served in the African campaign in WW II, and then--with his lover and companion of what would be 40-some years, the beautifully named Greek, Manoly Lascaris--he returned to a puritanical, philistine Australia to do his major work. His love/hate affair with Australia is the book's undertheme- -but it merely contributes to what is most unmistakable about White as seen by Marr: the incomparably high fidelity of the man-- artistic, personal, social. Generous yet monastic by temperament, White struggled with doubt and pride in a refreshingly premodern way--all of which Marr captures. And as the best literary biography ought to do, this one sends us hungrily back to the novels--to see what they encompassed but also, too, to relish how the complexity of the author's own character boosted their art. Superb. (Thirty-pages of photographs.) -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

An admirably readable biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author of Voss , The Tree of Man , and many other books, this work is full of detail on White's family and prosperous background, the events and people in his life, his writing habits, his religious beliefs, his cantankerousness and temper, his causes and doubts, his attraction to the theater, and much more. White helped Marr gain access to people and material, even authorizing him to collect his letters, "the backbone of this book." Marr deals intelligently with important issues (among them, White's rootedness in and dissatisfaction with Australia, his sense of himself as an outsider, his relation to his mother, and, in particular his homosexuality, which White considered central to his novelistic and theatrical ability), avoiding psychoanalytical speculations and other intrusions. White reviewed the book shortly before he died, finding it "so painful he often found himself reading through tears. He did not ask Marr to change a line."--Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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