PATRICK WHITE, the Australian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, has never been especially popular, commercial or comfortable to read, even for his fans. So I was surprised but pleased to see that he is one of six finalists in the ‘lost’ Man Book Prize with The Vivisector (1970).
My introduction to him was very odd. When I was in my ‘O’ level year someone in my class who was as equally bottom-stream as myself, presented me with White’s novel Voss. He explained that a customer in his Dad’s pub had abandoned it unread among empty beer glasses. Rather than throw it away my friend thought maybe I should have it since, ‘you read books’.
In fact, until that moment, I had never read an adult novel in my life. Feeling complimented but obligated by this unexpected gift, I glanced at the book on the train journey home that afternoon. I was immediately captivated by the far-off alien world White made real and by the occasionally strange use of grammar and language; and by something else I shall explain in a moment.
‘There is a man here, miss, asking for your uncle,’ said Rose. And stood breathing. ‘What man?’ asked the young woman, who was engaged upon some embroidery of a difficult nature, at which she was now forced to look more closely, holding the little frame to the light. ‘Or is it perhaps a gentleman?’ . ‘I do not know,’ said the servant. ‘It is a kind of foreign man.’….. Something had made this woman monotonous. Her big breasts moved dully as she spoke, or she would stand, and the weight of her silences impressed itself on strangers. If the more sensitive amongst those she served or addressed failed to look at Rose, it was because her manner seemed to accuse the conscience, or it could have been, more simply, that they were embarrassed by her harelip.
‘A foreigner?’ said her mistress, and her Sunday dress sighed. ‘It can only be the German.’
It was this last of several narrative hooks, the German, that pulled me into the story and kept me there. For I had been to school in Germany, a fact curiously ignored by my grammar school, leaving me feeling as alien in my own country as ‘the German’, the Voss of the title, felt in Australia.
I read all of White’s novels in the years afterwards including The Vivisector when it was published in 1970, a first Christmas present from my first wife. It was a shock. A story of an artist, Hurtle Duffield, dedicated to the Australian artist Sidney Nolan on whose life it is based. A bitter portrait of an unloving man whose engagement with women and men is about ruthlessly dissecting them as subjects of his work. The language is wonderful, the characters riveting but the work itself bleak and without pleasure. It left me disturbed and I read no more of his work, moving on to new and more cheerful authors.
Years later, by then an author myself, I came across White’s autobiography Flaws in the Glass. The moment I began reading his bitter and cynical self portrait I recognized Hurtle Duffield – and, it must be said, that same tendency many young novelists (including myself then, I fear!) who cut their creative teeth with a detached, slightly smug and unengaged view of things. My rejection of White was complete.
Then, last year, I saw the original hard back of Voss in an Oxford bookshop and bought it at once. Again, its brilliance and empathy captured me.
Now I find that The Vivisector is the potential ‘lost’ Man Booker Prize winner. Which puts me in a quandary because I rate the author very highly but this particular book still leaves me (I have just re-read it) feeling low. Unlike, say, J G Farrell’s wonderfully funny and warm Troubles (also short-listed for this prize) which for now gets my first vote. But time to read all the contenders I think… with reviews to follow.
LINKS: The full list is: Patrick White The Vivisector (Vintage); Nina Bawden The Birds in the Trees (Virago); Shirley Hazzard The Bay of Noon (Virago); Mary Renault Fire from Heaven (Arrow); & Muriel Spark The Driver’s Seat (Penguin); J G Farrell Troubles (Phoenix). Full details of the Lost Man Booker Prize and how you can vote here: http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1412 There is a good Wikipedia entry on Patrick White at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_White and the Nobel Prizes website has an excellent critique of all his books, including The Vivisector, at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/articles/hansson/index.html