Patrick White winner of the Nobel Prize and author of more than a dozen novels and plays - left behind him a reputation for intense privacy and sometimes savage temper. He was better-known for long-held grudges and strained loyalties than for lasting friendships.
Marr had White’s help throughout the six years the biography took to write. White asked for no right of veto and in the weeks before his death read the final manuscript which, for richness of detail, authority and balance is stunning.
Patrick White lived an extraordinary life. He was born into a family of rich Hunter River graziers and Marr wonderfully evokes this largely vanished society of grand Sydney houses and kingdoms in the bush. Lonely years followed as an expatriate schoolboy and university student in England, White returned to jackaroo on the edge of the bleak Snowy Mountains, an experience that laid the groundwork for his first fiction, as much horror as love, for the landscape of Australia.
We see White in pre-war London, writing plays with little success. There are travels and love affairs in Europe and America. We see him as an unlikely RAF intelligence officer in the North African desert. In Alexandria he meets Manoly Lascaris and forms the fifty year relationship at the the centre of his often troubled emotional life. Inevitably, he is drawn back to Australia to write his great novels and engage in political and aesthetic battles with practically everybody.
