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PATRICK WHITE A Life. By David Marr. Illustrated. 727 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
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A FEW days before Christmas in 1951, the novelist Patrick White was carrying bowls of slops to feed his schnauzer pups on his farm in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney in Australia. At a central moment in "Patrick White: A Life," David Marr describes the scene:

"Somewhere between the jacaranda and the old piggery he slipped in the mud. Swearing and laughing he dragged himself to his feet. 'I stood in the rain, the water up to my ankles, and pouring off me, as I proceeded to curse God.' But how could he curse what did not exist? As he puzzled at this, he had an inkling of the presence of God. 'Faith began to come to me.' "

The abruptness of this ascent into faith -- its counterintuitive logic, its muddiness, its rawness -- is the central motor behind this beautifully constructed account of White's life. In an integrated succession of letters, interviews and narratives, Mr. Marr tells the story of the prolific and largely ignore

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Patrick White: A Life

December 22, 2020

It was exhilarating reading this David Marr's biography of Australia's Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White (1912-1990). I have had it on the TBR for a good while, but I'm glad now that I left reading it until I'd read all but one of the novels, and one of his plays. (I have just one left to source: I want a first edition of his second novel, The Living and the Dead from 1941). Part of the great pleasure in reading this literary biography is Marr's sly juxtaposition of quotations from the novels with his portraits of the real people in White's life.

The table was set with the Georgian family silver Ruth and her fellow collector Mrs Eadie Twyborn 'lovingly acquired at auction'. The Whites' china, stored in tall cupboards in the pantry, was white with a broad green rim and a big gold W in the centre of each plate. (p.34)

Ruth (neé Withycombe) was Patrick White's mother, and — paired here with the pretentious Mrs Eadie Twyborn from The Twyborn Affair — she was extremely conscious of the White side of the family's more impressive

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The Two Worlds of Patrick White

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As bombs fell in the first months of the Blitz, an Australian sat in his London apartment drinking Calvados, reading accounts of early expeditions into his homeland, and likely experiencing for the first time an immensity of emptiness and a longing for the land of his childhood. Though still young at age twenty-eight, he had already published two novels and was poised to enjoy the life of a London intellectual. Yet amid the desolation and shrapnel, he considered his achievements as nothing and was gripped by despair for the superficiality of his life.

By that point, Patrick White, arguably Australia’s greatest novelist, had spent much of his life in England. Born into a family of wealthy farmers, he passed a sickly childhood at home under the care of a beloved nurse and distant parents before being sent to an English boarding school at thirteen, a place he repeatedly likens in his autobiography to a prison. After a brief stint back in Australia working as a farmhan