Born on May 28, 1912, Patrick White became one of the most formidable figures in twentieth-century Australian literature, creating novels filled with outsiders, mystics, eccentrics, failed explorers, artists, suburban families, lonely visionaries, and people searching for spiritual meaning beneath the ordinary surfaces of life. His prose could be difficult, comic, lyrical, cruel, visionary, and intensely psychological, often within the same book.
White’s relationship with Australia was equally complicated. He spent much of his youth between Australia and England, frequently complained about Australian conformity and materialism, and sometimes regarded himself as an outsider in the country that became the central landscape of his fiction. Yet he returned to Australia permanently after World War II and spent the rest of his life transforming its farms, suburbs, deserts, cities, social rituals, and uncomfortable silences into literature.
That achievement received international recognition in 1973, when White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Swedish Academy described as his epic and psychological narrative art. He became the first Australian writer to receive the literature prize, placing Australian fiction more prominently before an international readership.
Yet White himself was suspicious of literary celebrity. He disliked prizes, distrusted institutions, quarreled with critics, rejected honors, participated in political causes, and often seemed happiest when attacking some form of complacency. The writer who became Australia’s most internationally celebrated novelist remained one of its most persistent critics.
🎂 Born in London, Raised in Australia
Patrick Victor Martindale White was born on May 28, 1912, in Knightsbridge, London, to Australian parents Victor Martindale White and Ruth Withycombe White. His family belonged to a prosperous pastoral background in New South Wales, and when Patrick was still an infant, his parents returned with him to Australia.
He grew up primarily in Sydney, where the family eventually lived in Elizabeth Bay. Materially, White’s childhood was privileged, but privilege did not guarantee comfort. He suffered severely from asthma, an illness that followed him throughout his life and frequently left him isolated from other children.
Illness gave White long stretches of time alone.
He read.
Observed.
Imagined.
The outsider position that would later dominate his fiction may have developed partly from those early experiences of watching rather than fully participating.
White frequently wrote about people who exist slightly apart from the communities surrounding them. They may be socially awkward, physically unusual, sexually unconventional, spiritually intense, or simply incapable of accepting the assumptions everyone else seems to find natural.
Again and again, his novels ask what outsiders can see that comfortable insiders cannot.
🏫 England & Cheltenham College
At thirteen, White was sent to England to attend Cheltenham College.
He disliked the experience intensely.
As an Australian boy arriving within the highly structured environment of an English public school, he felt alienated and unhappy. His asthma and lack of enthusiasm for the sporting culture around him increased the sense that he did not belong.
Yet England also offered another world.
Theater fascinated him.
London fascinated him.
Literature provided an escape from school life.
White began imagining himself as a writer, initially particularly attracted to drama.
This early division between England and Australia would remain important throughout his life. He could feel Australian while criticizing Australia, European while never entirely belonging to Europe.
Home was never completely simple.
That instability eventually became artistically productive.
🐎 Working as a Jackaroo
After leaving school, White returned to Australia and spent roughly two years working as a jackaroo on rural properties in New South Wales.
For someone from a wealthy pastoral family, the experience was partly intended as preparation for the kind of life his family might have expected him to enter.
Instead, it confirmed that White was not destined for the pastoral business.
But the landscape stayed with him.
The physical isolation of rural Australia, the enormous skies, drought, animals, dust, labor, distance, and lives shaped by the land later entered his fiction repeatedly.
His first novel, Happy Valley, would draw heavily upon these experiences.
So would The Tree of Man.
White might reject the pastoral future prepared for him.
He did not reject the landscape.
🎓 Cambridge & European Literature
In 1932, White returned to England and entered King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied French and German literature.
Cambridge gave him access to European literary traditions that helped shape his ambitions as a novelist.
He read modernist writers and absorbed approaches to fiction that differed sharply from the straightforward realism dominating much contemporary Australian writing.
The influence of writers including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and European novelists can be felt in White’s interest in consciousness, symbolism, shifting perspective, fractured identity, and spiritual experience.
After graduating, he remained in London and became increasingly involved in artistic circles.
White also traveled through Europe, absorbing visual art, theater, music, architecture, and literature.
Australia remained geographically distant.
Imaginatively, it was becoming increasingly important.
✍️ Happy Valley
White’s first novel, Happy Valley, appeared in 1939.
The book grew partly from his jackaroo experiences and already contained many of the subjects that would preoccupy him throughout his career: isolation, failed relationships, frustrated desire, the Australian landscape, social conformity, and people incapable of communicating fully with one another.
White later regarded some of his earliest fiction as apprenticeship work, but Happy Valley reveals a writer already dissatisfied with conventional representations of Australian life.
He did not want the bush simply to become a setting for national mythology.
He wanted psychological darkness.
Contradiction.
Private obsession.
The landscape could be magnificent.
The people living inside it could be miserable.
Both could be true.
🌍 World War II
The outbreak of World War II interrupted White’s emerging literary career.
He joined the Royal Air Force and served as an intelligence officer in the Middle East, North Africa, and Greece.
The war changed him profoundly.
The landscapes of North Africa also unexpectedly reminded him of Australia. Desert, distance, harsh light, and emptiness renewed his imaginative connection with the country he had previously been uncertain about returning to.
More importantly, the war brought Patrick White into the relationship that would shape the rest of his personal life.
In Alexandria in 1941, he met Manoly Lascaris.
❤️ Manoly Lascaris
Manoly Lascaris was a Greek man preparing to join the Greek army when he met White in Egypt.
The relationship lasted for nearly fifty years.
At a time when same-sex relationships carried serious legal and social consequences, White and Lascaris built a shared life that survived war, relocation, farming, literary success, illness, public controversy, and the difficult temperament White himself freely acknowledged.
Lascaris possessed a steadiness that complemented White’s emotional volatility.
Their partnership became central to White’s life.
White’s sexuality was not always discussed openly during the earlier years of his career, but it became increasingly important to later interpretations of his work. His fiction repeatedly explores divided selves, hidden desire, people living outside conventional social expectations, and the instability of categories through which society defines individuals.
These subjects cannot simply be reduced to autobiography.
But White knew intimately what it meant to live beyond the approved pattern.
🇦🇺 Returning to Australia
After the war, White considered settling in Greece.
Instead, he returned permanently to Australia with Lascaris in 1948.
The decision would transform Australian literature.
The couple bought a small property at Castle Hill, then on the rural outskirts of Sydney. They named the place Dogwoods and attempted a relatively self-sufficient life.
They grew vegetables and flowers.
Kept animals.
Sold produce.
Worked physically demanding days on the property.
White wrote.
This combination of rural labor and literary creation became the setting in which some of his greatest novels emerged.
The famous author had not yet arrived.
There was simply a difficult writer on a farm trying to create books that few Australian critics seemed eager to celebrate.
👩 The Aunt’s Story
Published in 1948, The Aunt’s Story follows Theodora Goodman, an aging unmarried woman whose increasingly unstable perceptions carry her from Australia into Europe.
The novel demonstrated White’s growing willingness to leave conventional realism behind.
Theodora’s inner life matters more than any socially acceptable version of who she is supposed to be.
She is eccentric.
Isolated.
Unsettling.
Possibly visionary.
Possibly mad.
White refuses to make those categories easy.
This ambiguity would become central to his fiction.
The people society dismisses as strange may perceive realities others cannot see.
The apparently respectable may be spiritually empty.
Normality, in White’s world, is never automatically a virtue.
🌳 The Tree of Man
White’s international breakthrough came with The Tree of Man, published in 1955.
The novel follows Stan and Amy Parker as they establish a life in rural Australia, raise a family, endure fire and flood, age, struggle with dissatisfaction, and gradually become part of the land they inhabit.
On the surface, the material resembles the familiar pioneer story.
White turns it into something larger.
The Parkers are not national heroes.
They are ordinary people whose lives contain failures, desires, disappointments, moments of beauty, spiritual longing, and experiences that cannot easily be expressed.
White wanted to find grandeur inside the supposedly ordinary Australian life.
A farm could become the setting for an epic.
A marriage could contain mystery.
A human being who appears unremarkable to the outside world could possess an inner existence no less profound than that of a traditional tragic hero.
🏜️ Voss
Published in 1957, Voss became perhaps Patrick White’s most celebrated novel.
The central figure is Johann Ulrich Voss, a German explorer determined to cross the Australian continent. White drew partly upon the history of explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, but transformed historical inspiration into something much stranger and more psychological.
Voss is driven by ambition.
Pride.
Spiritual hunger.
The desire to conquer both landscape and self.
Before departing Sydney, he develops an intense connection with Laura Trevelyan, and their relationship continues across physical distance in ways that move beyond ordinary realism.
The expedition becomes increasingly disastrous.
The Australian interior refuses to become merely an obstacle awaiting European conquest.
It overwhelms the explorer’s confidence.
White turns the traditional exploration narrative inside out.
Instead of celebrating conquest, Voss becomes a story about the destruction of certainty.
🏆 The Miles Franklin Award
Voss received the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1957.
White won the prize again for Riders in the Chariot in 1961.
Eventually, however, he refused to allow his novels to continue competing for literary prizes.
This response was characteristic.
White wanted recognition.
He also distrusted it.
He could be wounded by criticism yet contemptuous of literary institutions.
He desired readers while sometimes attacking the society those readers belonged to.
Contradiction followed him everywhere.
It also gave his public personality much of its fascination.
🛒 Sarsaparilla & Australian Suburbia
White invented a fictional Australian suburb called Sarsaparilla, inspired partly by Castle Hill.
The name became a setting through which he could examine one of his favorite targets: suburban conformity.
Sarsaparilla looks ordinary.
That is precisely why White found it interesting.
Behind fences and respectable houses exist jealousy, sexuality, frustration, resentment, cruelty, loneliness, longing, and spiritual hunger.
White distrusted surfaces.
A neat house could contain desperation.
A socially awkward person might possess moral insight.
A supposedly cheerful neighbor could destroy everyone around her.
Sarsaparilla became the perfect landscape for exposing the strange emotional worlds hidden behind Australian respectability.
🕎 Riders in the Chariot
Published in 1961, Riders in the Chariot brought together four outsiders living around suburban Sydney.
Mary Hare is an eccentric woman living amid the decay of a once-grand property.
Mordecai Himmelfarb is a Jewish refugee who survived Nazi persecution.
Ruth Godbold is a working-class woman of deep compassion.
Alf Dubbo is an Aboriginal artist.
Each is marginalized differently.
Together, they form a kind of spiritual community invisible to the ordinary society surrounding them.
The novel demonstrates White’s fascination with people excluded from mainstream Australia.
Society often sees them as failures.
White treats them as visionaries.
The reversal is central to his work.
Respectability conceals emptiness.
Marginality may contain revelation.
🎭 Patrick White the Playwright
White had wanted to write plays since youth, and theater remained important throughout his career.
Among his major dramatic works were The Ham Funeral, The Season at Sarsaparilla, A Cheery Soul, Night on Bald Mountain, Big Toys, Netherwood, and Shepherd on the Rocks.
His early theatrical career was frustrating.
Australian institutions sometimes rejected his plays as too strange or confronting.
That rejection only sharpened his determination.
The Season at Sarsaparilla became one of his most frequently revived plays, turning suburban life into a satire of repression, sexuality, hypocrisy, and social conformity.
White’s theater resembles his fiction in an essential way.
People say one thing.
Their bodies and desires reveal another.
The performance of respectability begins to crack.
🌀 The Solid Mandala
Published in 1966, The Solid Mandala centers on twin brothers whose personalities seem almost completely opposed.
Waldo is intellectual, self-conscious, bitter, and concerned with how he appears to others.
Arthur seems simpler but possesses an intuitive spiritual understanding that Waldo cannot comprehend.
White uses the brothers to question conventional definitions of intelligence.
Who actually understands life?
The person capable of explaining everything?
Or the person capable of experiencing wonder?
White repeatedly distrusted intellectual pride when it became separated from compassion.
Knowledge alone does not guarantee wisdom.
This theme links The Solid Mandala with Voss, Riders in the Chariot, and much of his other fiction.
The visionary may look foolish.
The supposedly intelligent person may be blind.
🎨 The Vivisector
White’s fascination with artists became the center of The Vivisector, published in 1970.
The novel follows painter Hurtle Duffield through a long career defined by artistic obsession.
The title itself is revealing.
A vivisector cuts open a living organism to study it.
White suggests that artists can behave similarly toward people.
They observe.
Use.
Transform.
Sacrifice relationships to art.
Hurtle’s talent does not make him morally admirable.
That distinction mattered greatly to White.
He believed deeply in art.
He did not believe artists were automatically good human beings.
Creative genius could coexist with selfishness, cruelty, vanity, and emotional destruction.
Perhaps no novelist understood this more personally than Patrick White.
🌪️ The Eye of the Storm
Published in 1973, The Eye of the Storm centers on the dying Elizabeth Hunter, an immensely powerful matriarch surrounded by people whose relationships with her are complicated by resentment, dependence, memory, money, and unresolved emotional wounds.
Her adult children return.
So do old conflicts.
Death approaches.
But surrender does not come easily to Elizabeth Hunter.
The novel explores aging, family, memory, spiritual experience, and the struggle to maintain power when the body is failing.
White drew partly upon memories associated with his own difficult relationship with his mother.
Once again, autobiography entered fiction without becoming simple transcription.
The maternal figure becomes larger, stranger, harsher, and more mythic than any straightforward portrait.
The year the novel appeared would also become the most famous year of White’s career.
🏅 The Nobel Prize in Literature
In 1973, Patrick White received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Swedish Academy praised his epic and psychological narrative art and his role in bringing a distinctively Australian imaginative world into international literature.
White did not travel to Stockholm.
He cited poor health, and his friend, the artist Sidney Nolan, accepted the prize on his behalf.
The award instantly transformed White’s international status.
Australia now possessed a Nobel laureate in literature.
White’s reaction, characteristically, was complicated.
He distrusted celebrity.
He disliked public ceremony.
And he soon found a way to redirect part of the prize toward other writers.
📚 The Patrick White Award
White used his Nobel Prize money, supplemented with his own funds, to establish the Patrick White Award.
The prize was intended particularly for Australian writers whose work deserved recognition but had not received the attention White believed it merited.
The first recipient was novelist Christina Stead.
The decision says a great deal about White.
He could be famously combative and difficult.
He could also be fiercely generous toward writers he admired.
The Patrick White Award recognized precisely the kind of literary outsider White understood well.
A writer might be excellent without becoming fashionable.
Commercial success did not determine value.
Awards should sometimes notice the people everyone else had missed.
🇦🇺 Australian of the Year
White was also named Australian of the Year for 1973.
He accepted the recognition with reservations.
Celebrating Australia never came naturally to him without criticism attached.
White saw patriotism not as automatic praise but as an obligation to examine the country honestly.
This attitude explains much of his public life.
He criticized Australian materialism.
Opposed complacency.
Supported Indigenous causes.
Spoke against nuclear weapons.
Participated in environmental and political campaigns.
White’s prominence increasingly gave him a public platform.
He used it.
🌿 A Fringe of Leaves
Published in 1976, A Fringe of Leaves returned White to nineteenth-century Australian history.
The novel draws loosely upon the story of shipwreck survivor Eliza Fraser.
White’s fictional Ellen Roxburgh begins within the structures of respectable colonial society but is eventually stripped of many of the conventions that had defined her.
The Australian landscape again becomes transformative.
Civilization and wilderness are not presented as simple opposites.
People carry violence with them.
Respectability does not guarantee morality.
Survival can expose identities hidden beneath social performance.
The novel demonstrates how effectively White could use historical material without becoming a conventional historical novelist.
History becomes psychological territory.
⚧️ The Twyborn Affair
Published in 1979, The Twyborn Affair became one of White’s most daring explorations of identity.
The central character moves through different countries, social roles, sexual relationships, and gendered identities, refusing easy classification.
White wrote decades before contemporary language surrounding gender identity had developed into its present forms, so imposing modern categories too neatly upon the novel can be misleading.
What remains unmistakable is White’s fascination with divided identity.
A person may contain several selves.
The identity visible to society may not exhaust the private person.
Gender, sexuality, nationality, family expectation, and social performance can all become costumes that fit imperfectly.
This concern had existed throughout White’s fiction.
In The Twyborn Affair, it moved directly to the center.
🪞 Flaws in the Glass
White published his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, in 1981.
The title perfectly suits a writer who distrusted polished surfaces.
Autobiography did not mean constructing a heroic version of himself.
White acknowledged his sexuality, his relationship with Lascaris, his friendships, grudges, artistic beliefs, personal contradictions, and complicated emotional history.
The book also helped make his partnership with Lascaris more visible to readers.
For LGBTQ+ literary history, White’s willingness to write openly about his life was significant.
He belonged to a generation in which gay men frequently had to negotiate secrecy, coded language, legal restrictions, and public expectations.
By later life, White had become far less willing to disguise that part of himself.
🏳️🌈 Identity & Outsiders
White’s sexuality should not become the single explanation for his fiction, but it provides important context for his repeated fascination with outsiders.
Many of his characters cannot fit comfortably into their communities.
Some are rejected because of race.
Religion.
Class.
Mental difference.
Sexuality.
Physical appearance.
Artistic obsession.
Spiritual intensity.
White seems instinctively suspicious of any society that calls itself normal.
The crowd is frequently wrong.
The eccentric frequently sees more.
This perspective became one of his most powerful contributions to Australian literature.
The margins are where revelation occurs.
🎨 White & Australian Art
White maintained close relationships with artists and collected Australian art extensively.
Painters such as Sidney Nolan belonged to his circle, and visual art strongly influenced his imagination.
The Vivisector makes this connection obvious, but painterly qualities appear throughout his fiction.
Light matters.
Color matters.
Landscape is composed visually.
Faces become almost grotesque portraits.
Rooms reveal character through objects.
White’s prose can behave like painting, concentrating intensely on surfaces in order to expose what lies underneath them.
His relationship with Australian artists also placed him inside a broader postwar cultural movement determined to create art unmistakably rooted in Australian experience without becoming narrowly provincial.
📢 The Public Dissenter
White increasingly became involved in public causes during the later decades of his life.
He opposed nuclear weapons.
Supported environmental campaigns.
Spoke for Aboriginal rights.
Criticized political decisions.
Protested what he saw as destructive nationalism and cultural complacency.
His political interventions did not always fit comfortably within a single ideological label.
White’s instinct was often simply opposition.
He disliked authority.
Distrusted certainty.
Resented people telling others how to live.
His political voice therefore resembled his fiction.
The independent individual mattered.
Systems that crushed difference deserved suspicion.
🏅 Refusing Honors
White’s difficult relationship with official recognition appeared repeatedly.
He accepted some honors and rejected or later relinquished others.
In 1975, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia, but resigned from the order the following year amid his opposition to changes surrounding the honor system and the political aftermath of the 1975 constitutional crisis.
This was classic Patrick White.
Recognition did not purchase silence.
Prestige did not guarantee loyalty.
If an institution disappointed him, he was perfectly capable of attacking it even after it had honored him.
That independence contributed to his reputation as one of Australian culture’s great contrarians.
📝 Memoirs of Many in One
White’s final completed novel, Memoirs of Many in One, appeared in 1986.
The book is playful, unstable, and deliberately difficult to classify.
White presents himself as the supposed editor of the memoirs of Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, an elderly woman whose identities and performances continually multiply.
By this stage, White had become increasingly interested in undermining the authority of the novelist himself.
Who is speaking?
Who owns the story?
Can autobiography be trusted?
Is identity ever singular?
The questions echo themes stretching back through his career.
The older White had not become simpler.
He had become stranger.
📚 A Writer Who Nearly Destroyed His Archive
White had long cultivated an image of himself as hostile to literary scholarship and biographical intrusion.
For years, it was believed that he had destroyed most of his manuscripts.
Then, in 2006, the National Library of Australia acquired a substantial collection of surviving papers, including manuscripts, notebooks, drafts, correspondence, and material from an unfinished novel.
The discovery transformed White scholarship.
Readers could suddenly see drafts behind books whose creation had previously been hidden.
The archive revealed how intensely he worked.
Revision mattered.
Characters evolved.
Structure changed.
The fierce, seemingly instinctive prose had required enormous labor.
The papers brought readers closer to the workshop behind the published novels.
🕯️ Final Years
White’s health deteriorated significantly during his later years.
The asthma that had troubled him since childhood had required extensive treatment, and he also suffered from glaucoma, osteoporosis, and increasing physical frailty.
He nevertheless continued writing and speaking publicly.
Even when he could no longer maintain the pace of his earlier career, he remained engaged with political and cultural questions.
Manoly Lascaris remained beside him.
Their relationship had begun during wartime Egypt and survived nearly half a century.
Patrick White died at their home in Centennial Park, Sydney, on September 30, 1990.
He was seventy-eight.
At his request, his ashes were scattered in Centennial Park.
🌏 Changing Australian Literature
White’s importance cannot be measured simply through the Nobel Prize.
He changed expectations surrounding what Australian fiction could attempt.
The Australian landscape no longer needed to appear primarily within straightforward realism, bush adventure, or nationalist mythology.
It could become psychological.
Symbolic.
Mystical.
Grotesque.
Modernist.
An ordinary suburb could contain spiritual catastrophe.
A failed explorer could become a metaphysical figure.
An Aboriginal painter, Jewish refugee, eccentric woman, or tormented artist could stand at the center of a vast novel.
White expanded the imaginative scale of Australian fiction.
Writers after him did not have to imitate him.
They simply inherited a larger territory.
📖 Why Patrick White Still Matters
Patrick White remains worth reading because he distrusted easy categories.
Successful people may be spiritually empty.
Ridiculous people may be wise.
Family love can contain cruelty.
Artists can create beauty while behaving terribly.
National pride can conceal national failure.
Civilization can become barbaric.
Outsiders may understand a society better than the people accepted comfortably inside it.
White rarely offers readers reassuring characters.
He demands more.
His novels ask readers to inhabit uncomfortable minds.
They expose vanity.
Hypocrisy.
Loneliness.
Longing.
Failure.
And beneath all of it, White keeps searching for something difficult to name: a spiritual dimension of life that cannot be reduced to conventional religion or social respectability.
His characters often fail to reach it.
They keep searching anyway.
🎂 Remembering Patrick White on His Birthday
May 28 offers a fitting occasion to return to Patrick White, a writer whose relationship with Australia was defined as much by argument as affection.
Born in London in 1912 to Australian parents, White grew up in Sydney, endured an unhappy English education, worked as a jackaroo, studied European literature at Cambridge, served during World War II, fell in love with Manoly Lascaris in Egypt, and eventually returned to Australia permanently.
There he discovered the great subject he had been resisting.
Australia.
Not the polished national myth.
The strange Australia.
The lonely Australia.
The spiritually hungry Australia.
The Australia of failed explorers, eccentric women, suburban repression, artists, refugees, Indigenous outsiders, family cruelty, rural endurance, and people staring at apparently ordinary lives while sensing that something enormous remains hidden underneath.
White spent decades digging toward that hidden world.
The work brought him acclaim abroad, argument at home, two Miles Franklin Awards, Australian of the Year recognition, and finally the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Yet perhaps his deepest achievement is simpler.
Patrick White made Australian literature stranger.
Larger.
More psychologically dangerous.
More willing to examine the people standing outside the comfortable center.
And for a writer who spent much of his life feeling like an outsider himself, that seems an especially fitting legacy.
A Day Of Writing
A day of writing, trying to clarify myself
to Alysia, myself, Alysia, to the night rain,
trying to hang the universe on the tip of an eyelash
without blinking, pulling handfuls of the stagnant dimensions
of my apparent magnitude off
like the dead undergrowth
of a plausible star to try as an antidote
to the junkmail perfume samplers
that keep heaping themselves up on my doorstep
like the fake leaves of a tree somewhere on acid,
mini-nirvanas that reek in the dark of enlightened snake-oil.
Tonight I like the windows black, starless,
but keep the company mellow with my rendition
of musical lamps, one lightbulb less everytime
someone asks me what I feel most when I write.
I look at the trinity of faceless wolves on my easel
that accuse me of eyes, and punish myself by taking note
they’ve moved since I last looked at them,
and there’s a poppy of blood on the snow that’s atavistic.
O Nietzsche, how wrong can you be, though
I like the way you sublimated your rage
into the colic of apoplectic, apocalyptic prophecy.
I don’t know if the world’s bad enough to deserve you,
or if chaos has miscarried at the birth of your dancing star,
but blessings on your head and house, anyway, wherever you are.
Alysia, willow, Druidic trees, the French river Alyse in Arles
where Van Gogh sliced off his ear in self-disgust
and gave it to a hooker like a premature embryo
swaddled in a gesture of genuine tenderness
and when has it ever not been this way,
brothels and asylums and expressionist reliquaries
shredding their smiles in the spokes of a cosmic wheel
like a last-minute embassy over-run by the radical passions
of a fashionable artistic solitude, the whole world with a headache
or on the rag, and even the flies that could cover the earth
forty-seven feet deep in flies every breeding day of their lives,
not in the mood for all that generative commotion.
Genius is a different kind of lonely, the third wing on a bird
that doesn’t know what to sing to the dawn or why,
when the other two are getting by just fine
in the usual sky that hurls them into the usual ecstasy,
the esteemed feathers of the coincidence of the contradictories.
The important thing is learning how to rewire your eye
to your heart, not your brain, so when they ask you
what you were writing about before they came
you can hand them a black, tight-lipped envelope
sealed with the impressionable bloodwax of your pain,
captioned by the resident emptiness of a paper airplane
so that they can go away deluded and delighted
that you’re the one that’s insane, not them,
and that for once upon a time as long as life
they’re the ones who aren’t living their death in vain
and yes you can use rhyme in a poem if you want to.
But what a price for such a little kindness;
refusing to endow your wolves with eyes
so they can spot the typos in their blindness.
-Patrick White
🔗 Related Articles
- Doris Lessing’s Most Influential Novels
- Kazuo Ishiguro: A Dose of Literary Brilliance
- The Life and Works of Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka
📚 Sources & Further Reading
- Australian Dictionary of Biography — Patrick Victor (Paddy) White
- National Library of Australia — Patrick White Collection
- Nobel Prize — Patrick White: Facts
- Nobel Prize — The Nobel Prize in Literature 1973
- National Museum of Australia — Patrick White Wins the Nobel Prize
- National Portrait Gallery of Australia — Patrick White
- National Portrait Gallery of Australia — Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris
