PATRICK WHITE: A GREAT BIOGRAPHY OF A DIFFICULT MAN

Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, April 7, 1992
Page: 59
Section: LIVING

Patrick White was a difficult man who wrote difficult novels that won him the Nobel Prize in 1973. He was an Australian and a homosexual, both circumstances that contributed to a sense of isolation that is one of the major subjects of his fiction.

His life was eventful because of the worlds he lived in. He was born into a prominent and wealthy Australian family; an independent income is what made his writing possible, because during long years before the Nobel, he never made more than $15,000 a year from his work, and often quite a bit less. He was educated in England, traveled extensively in America and served during World War II in North Africa, where he met his life's companion, Manoly Lascaris, a Greek. After the war, he returned to Australia, where for many years he raised dogs and ran a farm; it was there that he wrote most of the books that won him the prize -- "The Tree of Man," "Voss," "Riders in the Chariot," "The Solid Mandala," "The Vivisector." Later came "The Eye of the Storm," "A Fringe of Leaves," "The Twyborn Affair" and the memoir ''Flaws in the Glass."

To outsiders, and even to his friends, he was an austere and forbidding figure; he complicated the task of biography by keeping many of the compartments and people of his life quite separate. He was quick to anger, never forgiving; one of his closest friendships ended when the friend declined to try a new cauliflower salad. His raging dinners were famous for his cooking, his alcoholic temper, his delight in creating a combative atmosphere. Visitors said it was like dining at Wuthering Heights.

For most of his life White fiercely protected his own privacy; he refused to grant interviews, tour or appear on television to promote his books; he ordered his relatives and friends to destroy his letters. In his last years he became publicly involved in political and ecological issues. It was nevertheless surprising that he should write "Flaws in the Glass," with its candid and dignified acknowledgment of his homosexuality, a subject that was seldom mentioned in his presence, and that he should later cooperate with a biographer, but he did. It is characteristic that he should want David Marr to write with complete honesty. Marr spent six years working on his book, and then White spent nine days going through it with him, line by line, correcting spelling in four languages and making a handful of factual corrections. Often he read in tears; he did not ask Marr to change anything.

Marr has produced a great literary biography. He has assembled a vast amount of information -- it is difficult to imagine that he has overlooked anything. He does not recoil from any of the complexities of White's behavior or achievement; he writes not to bury, or to praise, but in the hope of creating sympathetic understanding. He can't explain Patrick White; for that you have to turn to the fathomless and mysterious depths of the great novels.

White did give Marr permission to collect all his undestroyed letters, and they contribute both detail and texture. Of his life in Sandwich, Mass., White wrote, "There is surely nothing more disgusting, more reminiscent of a bad drain than a baked clam." Marr has marshaled all that information in a shapely and elegant way, and he is himself a witty writer. Describing the Sydney neighborhood of White's childhood, Marr can say, "He came to know Darlinghurst and the Cross best, the scruffy territory that lay behind his house like a ratty fox on Lulworth's respectable shoulders."

Marr has also sorted out the great themes of White's fiction and of his life -- his charged and changing relationships with his family and with religion; his lifelong and unsuccessful preoccupation with the theater; his complex love-hate relationship with Australia, which made his work possible. Without attempting to penetrate into the mysteries of the creative process, Marr also unobtrusively illustrates just how much of White's life got into his novels, and in what ways, along the way opening up many areas of inquiry. White wrote his novels to music, for example; it helps to know that he was obsessively listening to the Berg Violin Concerto when he was writing ''Voss."

Presumably it was also Marr's intention to draw readers back to White's permanent achievement, his novels. Another paradox: This enthralling biography is prominently displayed in all of Boston's bookstores, but just try to find more than two or three of Patrick White's novels in those same stores. You can't.

DYER ;04/06 NKELLY;04/07,11:56 BOOK07