As Patrick White's centenary approaches, why is no one reading him?
ForumNobel Laureates in Literature
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1Davidattheshelf
The time has come to speak of Patrick White, whose centenary on May 28th, is fast upon us. As an unabashed idolator, I must say that, for me, he ranks along side Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Saul Bellow as one of the greatest novelists to write in English in the twentieth century. Hyperbole? You decide:
"The woman winding wool held all this enclosed in her face, which had begun to look sunken. It was late, of course, late for the kind of lives they led. Sometimes the wool caught in the cracks of the woman's coarse hands. She was without mystery now. She was moving round the winding chairs on flat feet, for she had taken off her shoes for comfort, and her breasts were rather large inside her plain blouse. Self-pity and a feeling of exhaustion made her tell herself her husband was avoiding her, whereas he was probably just waiting for a storm. This would break soon, freeing them from their bodies. But the woman did not think of this. She continued to be obsessed by the hot night, and insects that were filling the porcelain shade of the lamp, and the eyes of her husband, that were at best kind, at worst cold, but always closed to her. If she could have held his head in her hands and looked into the skull at his secret life, whatever it was, then, she felt, she might have been placated. But as the possibility was so remote, she gave such a twist to the wool that she broke the strand."
---The Tree of Man
Whole chapters could be written plucking the riches from the limbs of this passage. And, in a fictional output comprised of some six thousand pages of such passages, this one is more or less garden variety, making the oeuvre of Patrick White one of the most valuable gardens in modern literature.
Which begs the question, why is no one reading him? Have you? If so, I’d love to hear from you. If not, consider what it would be like to have never seen a mountain or an ocean. Your discovery will match such as this.
(This is adapted from a post on my blog, The Stockholm Shelf (http://thestockholmshelf.com/2012/05/as-patrick-white-turns-100-why-is-no-one-reading-him/) in which I write about this passage, and examine some explanations for his enduring obscurity. Hope to hear from you, both here, and there. But, whether or not you respond in either place, don't let your life slip past without reading this great novelist's work!)
"The woman winding wool held all this enclosed in her face, which had begun to look sunken. It was late, of course, late for the kind of lives they led. Sometimes the wool caught in the cracks of the woman's coarse hands. She was without mystery now. She was moving round the winding chairs on flat feet, for she had taken off her shoes for comfort, and her breasts were rather large inside her plain blouse. Self-pity and a feeling of exhaustion made her tell herself her husband was avoiding her, whereas he was probably just waiting for a storm. This would break soon, freeing them from their bodies. But the woman did not think of this. She continued to be obsessed by the hot night, and insects that were filling the porcelain shade of the lamp, and the eyes of her husband, that were at best kind, at worst cold, but always closed to her. If she could have held his head in her hands and looked into the skull at his secret life, whatever it was, then, she felt, she might have been placated. But as the possibility was so remote, she gave such a twist to the wool that she broke the strand."
---The Tree of Man
Whole chapters could be written plucking the riches from the limbs of this passage. And, in a fictional output comprised of some six thousand pages of such passages, this one is more or less garden variety, making the oeuvre of Patrick White one of the most valuable gardens in modern literature.
Which begs the question, why is no one reading him? Have you? If so, I’d love to hear from you. If not, consider what it would be like to have never seen a mountain or an ocean. Your discovery will match such as this.
(This is adapted from a post on my blog, The Stockholm Shelf (http://thestockholmshelf.com/2012/05/as-patrick-white-turns-100-why-is-no-one-reading-him/) in which I write about this passage, and examine some explanations for his enduring obscurity. Hope to hear from you, both here, and there. But, whether or not you respond in either place, don't let your life slip past without reading this great novelist's work!)
