Marr - Patrick White

I think this book should be called The Monster of All Time. But I am a monster Patrick White

Patrick White, winner of the Nobel Prize and author of more than a dozen novels and plays - including Voss, The Vivisector and The Twyborn Affair -lived an extraordinary life. David Marrs brilliant biography draws not only on a wide range of original research but also on the single most difficult and important source of all: the man himself. In the weeks before his death, White read the final manuscript, which for richness of detail, authority and balance is stunning.

Throughout his exciting narrative, Marr explores the roots of Whites writing and unearths the raw material of his remarkable art. He makes plain the central fact of Whites life as an artist: the homosexuality that formed his view of himself as an outcast and stranger able to penetrate the hearts of both men and women. Gracefully written and exhaustively researched, Patrick White: A Life is a biography of classic excellence - sympathetic, objective, penetrating and as blunt, when necessary, as White himself.

P. Where are you from?

E. From here.

The Twyborn Affair

T HE BRIDE WAS a plain woman in a big hat. She stood at the altar of St Philips, Church Hill in Sydney a few days before Easter 1910 dressed for a voyage that would carry her across the world to Europe. She was thirty-two and this was a late and magnificent match for a woman on the threshold of spinster-hood. Great prospects lay before her, yet as Ruth swore to take her husband for better for worse, for richer for poorer the crease of her mouth across that Withycombe jaw gave her the look of a woman who was faintly aggrieved. She carried that look for life.

Autumn, according to the calendar of Sydney society, always arrives in time for the Easter races. The salty, tropical winds that smother the city after Christmas are supposed to give way to crisp and brilliant weather for the Carnival and the Royal Easter Show. This old rule took no account of those abstruse calculations that decide when Easter falls, and 1910 was a year when the bush came to town for its holidays while the city still sweltered in damp summer heat. But they danced on Bellevue Hill, shopped at Horderns, and made their annual rounds of shirtmakers, tailors and milliners. Mothers rescued children from boarding schools for a few days while husbands and fathers retreated in heavy tweed to the Members Bar at the Show.

The Easter call of the horse is being answered by thousands of humans, reported the Bulletin that year. Sydney that section which takes paying guests and lets apartments is wishing it were elastic. The money it has to turn away makes it cry. Most of the Pure Wools are in town already and the racehorse owner is large in the vestibule of his hotel. Easter, when this crowd of graziers and horse breeders assembled every year in Sydney, was a practical time for bush families to marry. The small congregation at the ceremony on Church Hill was drawn from all over New South Wales, but most of the couples relatives and friends were in town from the Hunter Valley and the cool Highlands south of the city.

The man at Ruth Withycombes side topped the Bulletin s list of Pure Wools. Victor Martindale White was known by everyone as Dick. He stood half a head shorter than his bride and looked about him with the milky-blue eyes of the Whites. He was a cheerful little figure, chubby, vague and ten years older than Ruth, whom he vowed in his nasal, high-pitched voice to love and to cherish until death. By the standards of families not known for impulsive or passionate marriages, this was a romantic match. Bride and groom were second cousins, yet between them were many differences. As Mrs Victor White, Ruth would lead a life she had so far observed only from its edge. To the rich existence that lay before her she would bring ambition, energy, imagination and a trace of Withycombe wariness. Above all, Ruth was determined never to be bored.

After a brief celebration the Victor Whites took a train to Adelaide, where they boarded the Otranto and sailed to the Middle East. Their honeymoon took them up the Nile, through the Aegean and across Europe, where they skied in the Swiss Alps, punted on the Thames, watched the shooting at Bisley and went to the races everywhere. Horses were the focus of Dicks life but he showed his wife other surprising, half-stifled enthusiasms: he loved the fjords and took her north to explore them. Ruth bought furniture, took Dick to the theatre, which was her passion, and augmented the collection of hats that became Mrs Victor Whites trademark in society.

London was their base. In a Knightsbridge flat overlooking Hyde Park, their son was born at 11am on 28 May 1912. The baby had his mothers grey-green eyes. He was circumcised and Ruth was prescribed a nauseating diet of raw beef and celery sandwiches to bring on her milk. Her breasts would not fill as the child sucked first at one unresponsive teat then the other.

In Patrick Whites world there are no accidents of birth. We are what we are born to be, free only to shape the lives fate has given us. What we inherit can never entirely be denied. Escape is impossible. In middle age he once remarked expansively, I feel more and more, as far as creative writing is concerned, everything important happens to one before one is born. He believed in blood and ancestors. He was delighted by the legend that a Withycombe was fool to Edward II.

By the time of Ruths birth the Withycombes had been farmers for as long as anyone could remember. Withycombes are tall, hot-tempered, lithe, possessive and bronchial. Paradoxes define them: they are independent but love routine, gossips who are deaf to gossip, sceptics with a vivid streak of religious enthusiasm.

The family came to Australia from Somerset, where there is a village called Withycombe in the hills looking out over the Bristol Channel. Withycombe families were scattered along the coast for a dozen miles from Watchet to Porlock, the village from which a man on business rode to interrupt Coleridge in an opium haze at Ash Farm. Dunster was the centre of the familys operations. In the early years of last century they owned small farms around the town, a general store, butchery, brewery and mill. Robert Withycombe ran the pub under the walls of Dunster Castle, franked the local mail and supplied staging horses. In 1827 he married Ann White and twenty years later their son James, an asthmatic, left for New South Wales to escape the damp air of the Bristol Channel and the epidemics of tuberculosis which were sweeping through the West Country in the 1850s.

James Withycombe never settled anywhere for long in his new country, but moved from station to station, managing properties and trading in land. He may have worked for a time for his cousins the Whites, who were already prospering in the Hunter Valley, but he soon moved north on to the New England tablelands. He had his familys great skill with horses and was extraordinarily strong: it was said that James Withycombe could tighten the girth of a saddle with his teeth. He had the Withycombe temper, and in business was reckoned rather unreasonable in his demands. He dealt in a number of stations in the north-west of the state before taking up Gnoolooma, a run of about 200 square miles north of the border on the upper reaches of the Barwon River. At the age of thirty-seven, after only two or three years in that remote expanse of Queensland, he came south to marry.