I’ve have always felt underdone on the earlier Aussie authors, and maybe it’s just that point in life where I have the time and mood to fill out some literary gaps, but I’m starting to get through them, with some big names to come.. Last month it was David Ireland and this month it was reading David Marr’s massive Patrick White: A Life. I always knew White was our only Nobel prize winning author, and that he was difficult, but this biography really laid him bare. What a miserable, cruel prick he was! Most interesting for me was the way his politics changed quite radically over the years, the insistence on regular extended trips to Europe for real culture, and on his chronic asthmatic condition and hospitalisation over 50 years. Not a great deal was said about partner Manoly, however given White’s famous self-hatred and the uneasy dinner parties squabbles he seemed to relish, the man can only be regarded as a masochist for sticking around. He certainly didn’t have much of a voice in the book.
I thought it was fantastic that White refused to accept pretty much every prize or award offered him, except the Nobel prize, sending friend Sidney Nolan instead to Stockholm to accept it in his place. Other prizes sent to him, he binned. He could not abide other artists bathing in the intellectual or monetary glory of their fame, and would viciously cut them down for doing so. Also a surprise to me was his love of theatre, and the number of plays he would work on seemingly as ligh relief, as he found writing novels more torturous and became an even more difficult human being to be around during them. I thought it was a magnificent character study of White, if a little harsh, though White himself was said to be harsher on himself than anyone. He had literary agents buy back copies of his early works from shops and refused requests to reprint them as he considered them substandard. A long book which achieves it’s aim. 4.5 stars.
Out of curiousity I tried another from Halldor Laxness- Under the Glacier, and was again a little underwhelmed, You know you’re perhaps not quite on track when one reviewer labels it as the funniest book they’d read in a long time, and I’d barely done more than smirk occasionally. I was aware I was reading the book at quite a superficial level, but I ploughed on, and I’m not even sure what happened at the end really! 3 stars.
Also finished A Pint of Plain by American Bill Barich who had the luxury of spending years gallivanting around Ireland looking for authenticity in the local pubs, and getting fooled by old props and memorabilia. Still, it was hard to put down and made me want to meet some of the fiercely independent proprietors who, usually to their disadvantage, had held out against the blaring digital widescreen TVs and video-games invading other pubs. His quest for the real craic – gifted musicians drifting in to hotels and playing spontaneous tunes, or for the literary Ireland of Joyce and Yeats left me disinterested, but this was still a great read. 4 stars.