True Stories (15 page)

Its note attracts me, there is a sweetness in it, and unexpected affection surges out of me to meet it: for the first time in my life I feel the charm of an engine. The dam surface trembles among its weeds, and the pipe gives a series of jerks as water begins to travel through it, heading for the tank on the high stand fifty yards away, near the back gate. I clump up the shaly yellow dam wall alongside the water-carrying pipe, panting and laughing, trying to sense the speed of the water and to keep pace with it. I start to shout, and as I top the rise and my boots strike grass, the sun sails out of a reef of grey and pink clouds, then scatters them in horizontal streaks a mile wide. I am striding towards the tank along the very edge of my land, parallel with the top road, singing and yelling out loud, dancing in my heavy boots to give the water time to catch up with me, when last night's ute comes flying by, scattering orange gravel. The driver, thickly rugged-up and laughing, bangs his flat hand against its door, and beside him two little boys in peaked caps scramble for a look and wave wildly till they are out of sight.

I scamper up the wooden ladder of the tank stand, forgetting the stiffness of my boots, and wait there, clinging to the tank rim and making my voice boom in its cavern, till through the view-slit in its lid I see the reflection of my own head start to shudder and break apart on the churning water surface: the stream from the dam bursts in, invisible and powerful.

I could get down and eat my breakfast while it fills, or saw wood or wash dishes or hunt rats, but instead I cut across the dew-flattened grass to the olive tree, spread my jacket, and take my place on the bench for sitting still.

It takes real discipline to close my eyes, but the frogs are helpful, pedalling away down there, eternally patient, eternally replaceable; and now the magpies, their virtuosos' minds distracted by something higher, let loose their blissful warblings, their variations so casual, so endlessly fresh, their insouciant scrolls and flourishes; while in the house, where I am not, where no fire has been lit, no disorder tidied, no great book read, the little round mirror beside the open door is hung so high that it carries on its cheap and perfect lustre the image of nothing but sky.

1990

PART TWO
Sing for Your Supper

Patrick White:
The Artist as Holy Monster

LET ME SAY
that David Marr's biography of Patrick White is a grand and gorgeous book.
^*
I hated having to maintain a reviewer's posture to it, reminding myself to take notes when I longed for the freedom to accept without reserve the biographer's seductive invitation to plunge into the river of somebody else's life. I read the book on planes, in buses, at meal tables: I became deaf, I laughed, I cried. Marr displays none of the modern biographer's anxiety about theory. He is not self-consciously watching himself perform the act of biography. He takes the gloves off and wades right in. It's a marvellous piece of work: the large sweep of it, how it rolls along, the subtle shape of its narrative, its poised breaths, its stabs and sparks of detail, its graceful syntax and richness of imagery: could a better match of subject and biographer be imagined?

To my warless generation, White's story seems extraordinarily manifold, as if he had lived half a dozen lives: the privileged childhood, broken by what he perceived as his mother's betrayal in consigning him to an English boarding school; the oddly domesticated, timid student years at Cambridge; a poofy, pommy, polo-necked, prewar period around the theatres and artists' studios of London; then the wide, light-filled rush of travelling, sexually freed, in America. The war completed, perhaps, this process of shoehorning him out of his comfy privilege. In the Middle East he learnt to muck in with the world at random. He discovered Greece, always the country of his heart; he met Manoly Lascaris, who was to be his life-long companion, and returned in 1946 to Australia, a ‘familiar and at the same time hostile land', where he was to work out his fate as a man and as an artist.

So powerful and unflinching is Marr's creation that three-quarters of the way through the book my heart began to ache, I became foul-tempered, I snapped at people and said sharp things. I looked with horror and fear at portraits of White: that ‘mineral stare', the shrinking, fastidious mouth. Memories of my own slight contact with White hurt me again: I recalled his gentle kindness to me at our first meeting, when he took me aside, sat me down with him, and questioned me on my reading, matching my tastes (especially in Australian work) against his, and sweetly, as if to establish common ground; but all this was exploded by the dismay of our second meeting when, hunched at a dinner table with his wooden holding-cross swinging round his neck, he excoriated certain people dear to me, savaging their moral characters, and I sat there, silent and trembling with shock, too cowardly (because of his tremendous presence and, I confess, his fame) to stand up for my friends. I cried with shame all the way home, and never saw him again.

Yet I learnt from this. Whatever his intention (and probably he had none: they were random, bitchy swipes) he showed me that although I have been vain about my ‘honesty', I am in fact a coward; that under pressure I will kowtow to someone with a name and will slink away leaving my friends betrayed. This is something worth knowing.

To bear with, to bear a man like Patrick White one needs a steady belief in the idea—so out of favour in the universities— of the artist as holy monster. As a small child, White overheard a lady wondering whether the Victor Whites' strange little boy was ‘a changeling'. This remark stuck in his mind, as comfort, all his life. ‘He saw writing as a cruel business,' says Marr, ‘but the changeling/artist is free of those loyalties and obligations of kindness that make difficult truths hard to tell…He is
sans
famille.
'

White's periodic cullings of even his closest friends, using tiny slights or hesitations as pretexts for a ferocious slashing away of their links with him, make dreadful reading. Marr does not spare White in his accounts of these episodes, but clearly he can only countenance them because he believes them justified, when the chips are down, by the quality of White's work, and the urgency of his needs as an artist. One is astonished, repeatedly, by the generosity that some discarded friends have displayed in their reports of the breaks. Others, like the painter Sidney Nolan, responded in kind and thus lifelong feuds came about.

Couple White's desire to be ‘free of loyalties and obligations' with his terrible fear of loneliness, his belief (based on his own wretched adolescence and early manhood) that
anything
is better than loneliness, and the stage is set for a partner, a wife, someone with superhuman powers of endurance.

The personality of Manoly Lascaris, White's companion or (as Thomas Bernhard would say)
life-person
, lies subtly at the core of the biography. Lascaris is the marrow in its bones. Quietly present, quietly stable behind the monstrous foreground performances of White, he glows, and grows in stature, in sweetness and dignity as the story unfolds. In his modesty he is able to make reverberating statements which are innocent of the posturing they might, from someone less highly evolved, imply: ‘it is the pleasure of the disciple,' he says to Jim Sharman, ‘to serve Christ.'

He is not, of course, meaning to liken White to Christ— how could he, on the evidence this book provides?—but is making a statement about the dignity and the satisfaction of service, about an acceptance he has made of the proposition that some people have the nature to serve, while others, particularly those with a driven sense of mission, demand and desperately need to be served.

It's a measure of Marr's seriousness, and of Lascaris's depth and beauty of personality, that one does not brush aside the proposition here with a feminist's or a leftist's curse, but stashes it for further consideration. Which would we, in the end, rather have? Good manners, or great art? Are the two mutually exclusive? Women and men who serve the creators, as Lascaris did, gamble their whole lives on their instincts about their partners' abilities: a tremendous, dizzying bet.

The matter of religion—or
faith
is a better word, since White, though he was a great fan of nuns and took Anglican communion for many years, never settled into an established niche, and remarked that ‘churches destroy the mystery of God'—is a strong strand of the biography. Marr points out that the most reliable love White experienced, as a child of the landed and socially ambitious rich, was that offered by devoted servants, and this equation of love with service deeply marks Marr's story, as it does White's work.

But whom did White himself serve, we might justifiably ask? It could be said, despite current fashions of thought, that he served art, as did the famous actress in Cilea's opera who sings ‘Io son' l'umil' ancella' (I am the humble serving maid)—if one believes in art as a duty laid down. White certainly found art a hard master, and experienced the duty as an anguished (and sometimes exhilarating) slog. He returned after the war, with mixed emotions, to a culture which was not ready for what he had to offer it: but he shouldered the job, and dragged it some way out of its provincial bog, lashing and reviling as he laboured, fuelled by contempt for its fearful small-mindedness. Marr notes astutely that Martin Boyd was the kind of writer White might have become, had he chosen a life of exile in Europe.

Any writer in Australia who feels hard done by should take note of White's struggle. ‘He deserved a VC for it,' one well-known novelist here has claimed.
The Tree of Man
was rejected by twenty English publishers. ‘What is it about?' asked his London agent. ‘It is about life,' he helplessly replied. Attacks on White by Australian critics have entered legend, of course; but it's easy for us, a luckier generation, to forget how painful his disappointments were. When
The Aunt
'
s Story
, his third novel, was coldly received—dismissed, in fact—in Australia, Marr says that ‘a fissure of bitterness opened in him'. His impulse to write was dying.

But he learnt—or was it already in his nature? he relished a fight—to use hostile critics as spurs and Marr shows us, above all, how absolutely White was a natural writer: blessed (or cursed, as White often said) by characters and stories that were not willed but ‘boiled up in him'. Marr reveals brilliantly, and with the lightest touch, how each novel, as White slaved over it, provided him with a clue to the next, as if his work were an immense chain composed of linked and constantly developing obsessions.

Illness (asthma and its eternal complications) was always intimately entwined with his work. In reveries of fever and medication his characters would haunt him, talking themselves into life, and White would return to himself from these hallucinatory episodes armed with fresh material to labour on. (I laughed out loud to read that Brett Whiteley refused to believe, on meeting White after reading his work with delight, that White had never done acid.) He loved and needed music and painting: he envied painters especially, for being able to work direct with colour ‘instead of grinding out novels greyly'.

Unlike many Australian artists, White went on producing powerfully original work till late in his life. He was nearly seventy when he published that audacious and weirdly beautiful novel
The Twyborn Affair.
Perhaps its clarified style was possible because White could now vent his spleen in public statements, the fierce political preaching that made him famous to people who had not read any of his books and which drew off and redirected his itching savageries, allowing him, in his last great novel, to reach a more dignified resolution of conflicts: in particular, as Marr points out, to produce something ‘unprecedented in (his) writing: the entire acceptance by a mother of her child'.

Marr is scrupulous in documenting the decencies of White's domineering mother Ruth: ‘like Patrick,' according to Lascaris, ‘but with pearls'. She was the one who sponsored Lascaris as a migrant to Australia. She gave money to Inky Stephensen's tottering firm so he could publish Patrick's first book (of poems, which White later abominated, as he did his first novel
Happy
Valley
)
.
White battled Ruth all her life. It was apparently a fruitful struggle. Not a week passed without his writing to her. If I have one bone to pick with the biography, though, it is to do with Ruth. For all Marr says about her, for me she remained a puzzling presence: I did not really understand her, and I was never sure of what this often-mentioned mutual love between them consisted. They laughed together, it seems, at people who picked up the wrong fork at dinner, and when she was dying he entertained her with long recallings of all the servants who had ever worked for their family: but I have a much sharper picture of White's ineffectual father, who hardly plays a part in the story at all, except as a provider of money and, on one electrifying occasion, an object of suppressed desire.

White was, as he said himself, a monster: unbearable at times, and of merciless cruelty. But there are countless tales, some documented in the biography, others with word-of-mouth currency, of his generosities grand and small. When he was old and terribly recognisable, he would go into a bookshop and ringingly buy a dozen copies of some young struggler's latest novel. He bought a typewriter for someone too shy to show anyone what he had written. He gave away immense sums of his money to charity. He staggered along to hospitals to visit people who were hardly iller than he was. He used his Nobel Prize money to set up an annual award for writers who he considered had not received the recognition they deserved.

Marr's detailed account of the Nobel Prize workings gave me cold shudders. The matter of public recognition is a vexed one, bad enough within a writer's own culture, but when it reaches international proportions it becomes a nightmare of committees, hints, rival factions, baits dangled tantalisingly and then snatched back. There is a pathos in the human compulsion to rank, something scrambling and undignified which makes a mockery of the labour and meaning of art. I kept thinking of Thomas Bernhard's slashing attack on state prizes in
Wittgenstein
'
s Nephew
; but I also thought of the painful fact that all our lives, in vain, we go on laying tributes at our parents' feet.