David Malouf has written a fairly straightforward, although not entirely uninteresting, article on Patrick White’s life titled “Patrick White reappraised”. Originally published in The Time Literary Supplement, the article is now available on The Age’s website.
While Malouf’s interpretation of White’s life follows closely that of David Marr’s biography, it is nevertheless interesting how Malouf evaluates White’s novels in his piece. Considering that I have never been quite able to enjoy Malouf’s own writing (which I believe to be a fault in me rather than in the writer), it is perhaps not entirely surprising that our views of White’s novels seem to differ as well.
While I personally go for the grandiose, sometimes over-worked symbolism and style that White was so good at producing, Malouf takes a more conservative view and appreciates less of the extremes, and more of the conventional in White. Of what is perhaps my favourite novel by White, The Vivisector, and the novel that immediately followed it, The Eye of the Storm, Malouf writes:
The Vivisector and The Eye of the Storm are overwrought, excessive, unlikeable books, full of larger-than-life (theatrical) characters and grotesques, lurid situations, and an oddly old-fashioned view of the artist as sacred monster; a march of folly in which the traditional decencies have given way to rank opportunism and cannibalistic greed.
In some sense this is interesting coming from Malouf, who wrote the 1986 operatic adaptation of White’s Voss, a novel that I personally feel to similarly tip into the realms of “overwrought” theatricality and the mystique of the artist no less than any other novel by White. While I have unfortunately not been able to see the opera version, I seem to remember reading that White was considerably pleased with the production, which would suggest to me that these themes were also retained.
