1970
Patrick White’s typewriter
Defying the cultural cringe
This portable Optima typewriter was among the items bequeathed to the State Library of New South Wales by Patrick White. The bequest also included the author’s desk, chair, cushion, desk lamp, a ceramic ashtray and a couple of pens. White destroyed the majority of his manuscripts and most of his correspondence. He handwrote the early drafts of his work before producing a typewritten version, with further corrections made by hand.
White winning the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature was a delightful torture all around. Australians liked the international attention but the Nobel Prize for Literature wasn’t really on the radar, and nobody in Australia read White. What many knew of him they didn’t much care for. The author, for his part, deplored awards and gongs – except the Nobel. Most of all, he deplored publicity, interviews with television reporters and being a public figure.
White was born in London in 1912 to Australian parents and was rarely comfortable in either England or Australia. His parents came from the squattocracy and he lived his early years in Australia before going to an English boarding school. After school finished, there were stints as a jackaroo and at Cambridge. His patrician English side disdained Australian crudity but his Australian streak felt the same way about English pretensions.
White had an acute, wicked sense of humour. He said of his education: ‘My English housemaster deplored [my writing]: “You have a morbid kink I mean to stamp out”; and he then proceeded to stamp it deeper in.’
During World War II, White met his life partner, Manoly Lascaris. After the war they settled on a small farm on the outskirts of Sydney and White applied himself to writing. He was quoted by the New York Times as saying: ‘It’s the country of my origins – that, I think, is what matters in the end, whether one likes it or not. Certainly, I had to experience the outside world and would have felt deprived if I didn’t have that behind me. But it’s from the Australian earth, Australian air, that I derive my literary, my spiritual, sustenance. Even at its most hateful, Australia is necessary to me.’
His postwar novels, including The Aunt’s Story (1948), The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961) and The Solid Mandala (1966), were ambitious, complex books that addressed the Australian condition with a seriousness and a surgical eye for getting to the guts of the matter.
White wrote that during the war he had missed the Australian landscape, and there’s a sense that one of the things that attracted him to Australia was its emptiness: he seemed to find that emptiness a significant part of the human condition. His work – especially a book like Voss, which was based on the life of doomed explorer Ludwig Leichhardt – put figures in the Australian landscape. But more importantly, White was an Australian artist who dared to ask the big questions.
He beat a field that included Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov and André Malraux to win the Nobel. According to the committee, ‘White’s literary production has failings that belong to great and bold writing, exceeding, as it does, different kinds of conventional limits. He is the one who, for the first time, has given the continent of Australia an authentic voice that carries across the world, at the same time as his achievement contributes to the development, both artistic and, as regards ideas, of contemporary literature.’
White’s front lawn was full to overflowing with TV crews who had the week previously not heard of him or known where he lived. The author presented himself to the cameras and did his duty.
Over the ensuing months, White relaxed into his role as a public intellectual. There were so few that he had the field almost to himself, and Australians quite liked the cranky novelist with the deep-set eyes. They respected his craft even if they didn’t understand it. ‘I am amazed at the way Australians have reacted, in a way they usually behave only for swimmers and athletes,’ he is quoted as saying by his biographer, David Marr. ‘I am very touched, and have been feeling guilty for some of the things I have said in the past.’
There was much to be said. Australia in 1973 was in turmoil. The Whitlam government was halfway through its term and a great many issues were being discussed at fever pitch. Disarmament, the arts, the environment: White, the Nobel laureate, could and did add his weight to all these issues. He regularly appeared at demonstrations and was outspoken about the green bans – an initiative of the Builders Labourers Federation to preserve Sydney’s built and natural heritage.
An important part of the Whitlam era was an embrace of the arts and high culture. At the time Australians wore their abhorrence of culture almost as a badge of honour or authenticity: in 1973 there were genuine howls of indignation when Gough Whitlam authorised the purchase of American artist Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles for $3 million. The controversy ran for months (the painting is now worth over $100 million). The Australia Council for the Arts was, meanwhile, seen to be handing out large cheques to socialists with drinking problems.
Underneath the complaints there lurked a deep feeling of cultural insecurity – the idea that Australians could not produce profound works of art. White’s Nobel demonstrated the opposite. The award was important for him, but it was even more important for chipping away at Australia’s cultural cringe.