Patrick White and the Painters.(Book Review)

Patrick White, Painter Manque: Paintings, Painters and Their Influence on His Writing, by Helen Verity Hewitt; Miegunyah Press, 2002, $49.95.

PATRICK WHITE kept a sharp eye on all that was written about him. During my fifteen years as literary editor of Quadrant a number of important studies of his work were published, as well as the usual run of reviews. Talking to him one evening at a dinner at Elizabeth Riddell's, it became clear to me that he had read every one of them. Several items had been noted and appreciated; he was extremely witty and light-hearted about one of his most persistently critical reviewers: "I think she's got a novel of her own hidden away in a top drawer, don't you?"

But the article that had impressed him most was one written by Axel Kruse, a colleague of mine at the University of Sydney. I was a little taken aback by the intensity of his quizzing me about this piece and it was only much later when The Twyborn Affair was published that I realised that the article had touched on concerns in White's work made explicit for the first time in that novel and which White must have been working on at the time.

White was lucky throughout his literary career--lucky in the support he received from his first readers and publishers and later from some of the universities in Australia, lucky in the quality of his biographer and editor of his letters. Of course he had his critics and detractors, and there were people in the literary world at the time who were determined not to be impressed by him or his work. Always outspoken, he said exactly what he thought and believed, and as he got older and became more and more famous as a public figure, he did not hesitate to excoriate contemporary Australia and its icons. Two outstanding features of the writer and the man tend to be overlooked: his sense of humour, and his extraordinary generosity.

Helen Hewitt's scholarly monograph brings this home very clearly. Hewitt takes as her point of departure a statement White first made in his important early article "The Prodigal Son". Written after The Tree of Man and Voss had brought him to the forefront as an Australian novelist of international fame, this charming and reader-friendly article was White's attempt to explain the kind of writer he saw himself as. It was a glimpse into his imaginative world and some of the sources of his creativity. It was also a riposte to some of his Australian critics rather than the reply to Alister Kershaw's article on expatriates it claimed to be.

He said of himself that he was "always something of a frustrated painter, and a composer manqut". He returned to this idea on a number of occasions, later playing variations on the theme and referring to himself as "a painter manqut", and it was, I think, his way of placing himself in the line of writers like ...