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    On Patrick White: Writers on Writers
    On Patrick White: Writers on Writers
    On Patrick White: Writers on Writers
    Ebook64 pages43 minutes

    On Patrick White: Writers on Writers

    By Christos Tsiolkas

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    About this ebook

    ‘Patrick White, the un-Australian writer who did more than any other writer in the twentieth century to create an imaginative language that we can call Australian, who unshackled us from the demand that we write as the English do, who recognised, through his own alienation and also through his profound love for his partner, that we were a migrant and mongrel nation forging our own culture and our own language.’

    Christos Tsiolkas spent a year of ‘discovery and rediscovery’ reading Patrick White. In this passionate and original book, he shows how the Nobel Prize winner’s work still speaks to us.

    In the Writers on Writers series, leading writers reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.

    Also in the Writers on Writers series

    Alice Pung on John Marsden
    Erik Jensen on Kate Jennings
    Ceridwen Dovey on J. M. Coetzee (forthcoming)
    Nam Le on David Malouf (forthcoming)
    Michelle de Kretser on Shirley Hazzard (forthcoming)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateApr 30, 2018
    ISBN9781743820483
    On Patrick White: Writers on Writers
    Author

    Christos Tsiolkas

    CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS is the author of four previous novels: Loaded, which was made into the feature film Head On; The Jesus Man; Dead Europe, which won the Age Fiction Award and the Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award; and The Slap, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (South East Asia and South Pacific), the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year. The Slap was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Tsiolkas is also a playwright, essayist and screenwriter. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

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      Book preview

      On Patrick White - Christos Tsiolkas

      White

      A QUESTION

      It is 2015 and I am on a panel at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in England alongside two other Australian writers, Bill Granger and Kathy Lette. The theme of our conversation is Australia itself, our culture and our writing, and, as so often happens when antipodeans try to make sense of down under for a British audience, the discussion is halting, superficial. I am sweating, uncomfortable onstage, aware that although there are so many things I want to say that are critical of my country – of our complacency, our parochialism, our immaturity in addressing the legacies of racism, our sordid and degrading contemporary politics – I am finding myself defensive, even antagonistic.

      Not ten minutes ago, while trying to relax in the green room and getting to know my fellow panellists, I had been reciting silently to myself the list of negatives that I felt duty-bound to convey to the audience. But now, in front of the crowd, I am struggling to make myself understood. I am happy to rant against my nation, but I don’t want these Europeans to lord it over us, me, we Australians on the stage. I want their continent to take responsibility for the colonial history that spawned us. But I hear myself sounding petulant and feel guilty that I am undermining the good humour of my fellow panellists. I can almost pick up the murmur from the crowd: That Aussie sure has a chip on his shoulder.

      It’s during question time that a member of the audience throws me a lifeline. Christos, what do Australians think of Patrick White these days? he asks. And now my response is immediate and sure. I have only just finished reading White’s The Tree of Man and the writing remains vivid, as if grafted to my memory. I express as best as I can how deeply affected I have been by the novel, that it accomplishes so much of what we writers wish to do and so seldom achieve: the power and intensity of timelessness. It is, I say, one of the great novels, and my statement doesn’t require the qualification of that lousy adjective Australian. It is one of the great works of literature. And although I disavow the need for the qualifier, the scents and sounds, the speech and syntax, the brutality and beauty of my continent permeates the writing. I can’t answer for all Australians, I conclude by saying, but I do feel a certain shame that it has taken me so long to come to this book.

      I don’t think my answer satisfied him.

      Months after returning home, I find myself going back to the man’s question, to puzzle over it and try to make sense of it. By now I am completely immersed in White’s writing. On New Year’s Eve I had made a resolution to spend all of 2016 reading the man’s work. Before this, I had tried to read Voss in high school, and as a young man had read The Twyborn Affair. I had seen a production of White’s play The Ham Funeral and I had read his short stories. Also while in high school, I had watched the film The Night the Prowler, scripted by White and directed by Jim Sharman. (I maintain that the film is criminally neglected to this day.)

      So it wasn’t that White was unknown to me, nor that I bore him any particular resentment or suspicion. But by the end of 2016 I knew that the man had written three of the greatest novels of the twentieth century: The Tree of Man, The Solid Mandala and The Eye of the Storm. In saying this, I don’t mean to diminish the strengths and ravishing literary eloquence of Voss, Riders in the Chariot, The Vivisector and The Twyborn Affair, which I also believe to be great works. But there are novels that in the reading enact a transformation that sees their characters and language become part of oneself, that literally change the way you look upon the world. If you are both a reader and a writer, then this transformation initiates the alchemy of inspiration; the structure that a great writer employs – their discipline, their control – and their fierce will to tell a story and create an imaginary world that resonates with the reality the reader inhabits, will inevitably become part of the way you wish to tell your own stories and will influence the way you conjure your own imaginary worlds. Reading a great writer is a challenge because it always makes you want to better yourself.

      I wish I had it in

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