ellauri097.html on line 296: He became a literary icon, but White knew that people rarely actually read his work. He professed not to care what people thought, but he would sometimes check for copies of his novels in local libraries. He would search for dog-ears and stains, to gauge how far in the book they had read. Most people, he deduced, never finished. The Australian reading public never quite warmed to White, and nothing much has changed. My grandmother “couldn’t stand him.” I have seen my mother take up one of his novels—The Solid Mandala—and after a few moments quite literally toss it aside. White’s books are metaphysical, lyrical, high modernist, full of baroque descriptions of landscapes, and unsparing in his examination of the people who live in them. For a country besotted with kitchen-sink realism and plain-speaking larrikins, Patrick White was baffling.
ellauri097.html on line 298: In 2006, the Weekend Australian newspaper conducted an experiment. They submitted chapter three of The Eye of the Storm (1973) to twelve publishers and agents around Australia under an anagram of White’s name, Wraith Picket. Nobody offered to publish the book. One responded, “the sample chapter, while reply (sic) with energy and feeling, does not give evidence that the work is yet of a publishable quality.” Notwithstanding that the chapter was not White’s finest writing, and the unfairness of submitting a chapter out of narrative sequence, the hoax prompted a minor crisis in Australian literature: if the industry couldn’t recognize the greatness of our sole Nobel winner, how unenlightened must the country’s publishing industry be now? Shortly thereafter, the ABC launched an online portal called Why Bother With Patrick White? The portal always struck me as sad. What other major writer would need a website dedicated to convincing his countrymen to give him another go? The link to the website is dead now. It would seem, in the end, that nobody could be bothered with Patrick White.
ellauri097.html on line 302: In some respects this reflects a national pathology. Unlike an American or British child, an Australian student can go through thirteen years of education without reading much of their country’s literature at all (of the more than twenty writers I studied in high school, only two were Australian). This is symptomatic of the country’s famed “cultural cringe,” a term first coined in the 1940s by the critic A.A. Phillips to describe the ways that Australians tend to be prejudiced against home-grown art and ideas in favor of those imported from the UK and America. Australia’s attitude to the arts has, for much of the last two centuries, been moral. “What these idiots didn’t realize about White was that he was the most powerful spruiker for morality that anybody was going to read in an Australian work,” argued David Marr, White’s biographer, during a talk at the Wheeler Centre in 2013. “And here were these petty little would-be moral tyrants whinging about this man whose greatest message about this country in the end was that we are an unprincipled people.”
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