Even the light seemed to have been washed: it wore a pronounced, lemon gloss the shadows were a bluer black. As aftermath, a scent of citrus and laid dust invaded the room. There were intimations of thunder besides, followed by a plashing of rain, a sluicing of leaves in the darkened garden. It’s because he writes sentences like these:
Whoever we are, we’re a select bunch, and I’m sure we’ve all asked ourselves at least once, ‘Why do I read Patrick White?’įor me, the question never arose while reading The Tree of Man, a worthy contender for the title of ‘the Great Australian Novel’.īut it did about halfway through A Fringe of Leaves, while its heroine Ellen Roxborough, possessed by what White termed a ‘passive depravity’, was being brutalised by the Australian landscape and its original inhabitants. One of those copies sits on my bookshelf at home, and I often wonder who the other 463 buyers were. The Tree of Man, has sold 464 copies this century.
No doubt some of us did, when journalists camped out at his house on Martin Road in 1973, ready to tell their readers, viewers and listeners that Australia had its first literary Nobel Laureate.īut who reads Patrick White today, in the year we celebrate the centenary of his birth? Almost no one. If it were, we’d read Vicente Aleixandre, Jaroslav Seifert and Wislawa Szymborska. The answer, ‘because he won a Nobel Prize’ is not sufficient in itself.
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