The South Wing

In 2006 an unknown author with the curious name of ‘Wraith Picket’ submitted the third chapter of his novel to twelve Australian editors. Ten publishers rejected him outright, while the remaining two didn’t bother to respond at all. Poor Mr Picket had received the cold judgment of the publisher, his fate one that is all too common amongst hopeful authors. The problem, of course, is that the chapter ‘Wraith Picket’ had submitted was, in fact, from (deceased) Australian novelist and the nation’s only Nobel Laureate for literature, Patrick White’s novel, The Eye of the Storm. None of the editors picked up on this and none, during the fallout as the Weekend Australian revealed their hoax, were willing to apologize for its rejection, or admit that their literary noses weren’t quite up to sniffing out gold.

Wraith Picket’s fortune, or lack of it, was discussed and analyzed over the next few weeks, with the stalwarts of Australian literature suitably outraged that their most treasured talent was treated so poorly, while the publishers, well, they didn’t care all that much. Patrick White was old news, an author dead nearly two decades, and besides, he really had mostly been forgotten by the Australian public. What harm, then, that his novel was rejected so emphatically?

It should be admitted that The Eye of the Storm is, characteristically for White, a difficult, dense, novel. Artur Lundkvist, in his presentation speech awarding the Australian author the Nobel Prize, said, “Patrick White is a rather difficult author not only because of his special ideas and problems but also perhaps no less due to his unusual combination of epic and poetic qualities. In his broad narrative he uses a highly compressed language, a verbal art worked out to the last detail and constantly aiming for a maximum of expressive effect, a relentless intensification or a subtle penetration.” The Eye of the Storm, along with The Vivisector, is particularly singled out as both indicative of his genius, the quality of his work, and the difficulty of his literature. But difficulty should never be a reason to avoid publication and publishers, of all people, should know this.

Patrick White’s career began in earnest in his late twenties, with the publication of The Living and the Dead. Its protagonists are Elyot, a relentlessly scholarly fellow who withdraws into himself as the post-War world encroaches on his home and family, and Eden, his free-living sister, whose laissez-faire lifestyle ends in sadness and brutality. The Living and the Dead is a bleak work, filled with characters who circle their desires but never attain them. It is a quiet, contained study of character, eschewing plot in favour of plumbing the not always fruitful depths of flawed, broken individuals. Even at twenty-nine, the conceits of White’s later years were present, though the scaffolding of his craft were still visible. Time, and several more novels, would smooth out the rough edges and lead him further down into the psyche of Australia’s conflicted middle-class citizens.

Fame in Australia came later than in the United States or the United Kingdom, arriving with the publication of Voss, a colossal masterpiece that carried away the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award, which has gone on to become Australia’s most prestigious literary award. In the late 1950s, 60s, and 70s, a new Patrick White novel became something of an event. “Everyone” read him, and it was expected that a man or woman familiar with Australian literature would, perhaps not understand the full range of White’s talent, but certainly own his novels and be conversant in his work. Voss broke new territory for an Australian novel, coupling the enormity of its inland deserts and vast, terrible expanses, with mythology and madness, the burning intensity of a Captain Ahab or Milton’s Satan. Johann Ulrich Voss is loosely based on Ludwig Leichhardt, one explorer among the many who died attempting to map out the nation’s arid centre. As Voss travel further inland the madness of Australia’s barren land takes hold. White wrote, better than any other Australian author, of the yawning chasm that is at the heart of the nation’s geography and its people’s souls.

After Voss, White’s talent turned him down stranger paths. He experimented wildly with the stream-of-conscious technique, and utilized point-of-view shifts. What kept his work grounded from the incorrigibly avant-garde, however, was his firm understanding of the Australian people, its culture, and history. This grounding would reveal itself most fully in one of his last novels, the complex, experimental work The Twyborn Affair, which had as its central characters Eudoxia, a sophisticated consort to an elderly Greek man; Eddie, a hired hand in outback Australia; and Eadith, an elegant London madam who ruled over her girls with tenderness and an iron fist. These three, however, were all of a piece – a person born a man who chose, at times, to live the outward life of a woman. The backdrop of the period from the First World War to the Second allowed White to move back and forth in time, space, sexuality and gender, all the while retaining a central intellect and personality.

As he aged White became something of a curmudgeon, willfully scorning public attention and spurning an increasingly proud Australian government’s decorations and exhortations to attend social gatherings. He requested that his name be withdrawn from any future or current literary prizes, and with the money that came from his Nobel Prize (which he refused to accept in person), White funded an award designed to recognise older authors who had been neglected by the Australian public and literati – a common fate for authors who dare to tread beyond the pulp of genre fiction. A late autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, admitted the not-so-secret truth of White’s sexuality, though it discusses in greater detail the difficulty of treading the literary path within Australia’s creatively moribund shores. Happily, White has not suffered from the fate of Thomas Mann, who has become relegated to that of ’suppressed homosexual’ writer, which is a handy way of pushing him to one side and dismissing his other talents. Unhappily, his fate has been worse – he is forgotten, neglected, barely published in Australia and mostly out of print everywhere else.

To return to Wraith Picket a moment: Literary hoaxes of this nature are not uncommon. It is fair to say that an American literary editor could remain ignorant of Nabokov’s short fiction, given that there have been so many giants of literature produced in that country. In Britain their have been similar hoaxes with similar results, and again – a nation that produces a large quantity of geniuses can be forgiven for forgetting one at times. But Patrick White, it may be said without hyperbole, is of such magnitude and importance to Australian literature that the oversight of our publishers and editors is breathtaking for what it says about the gatekeepers of our culture. He is, without exaggeration, the most important literary figure we have. If even he is lost, so could we be.download kryptos andreas vollenweider mr destiny divx download

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