The reputation of Patrick White has been with us some time now. A lot of us grew up with those Penguin modem classics, with their Nolan line drawings on the covers, and then graduated to the hardbacks as the later books appeared. And the blurbs of those editions of the 1960s and 1970s quoted the likes of Alvarez – the man who had introduced Lowell and Plath to an international audience, who had written the brilliant book about Donne and the Metaphysicals and who was the hugely influential poetry editor of Penguin – saying that White’s fiction was of a quality that should make most contemporary novelists ashamed.

I first heard Patrick White lectured on, at a university, in 1968, at Monash. The lecturer was Patrick McCaughey, who can’t have been more than twenty-five at the time and who was swathed, with some elegance, in silk scarf and stammer.

‘There are some people,’ he said, ‘who are interested in all that Jane Austen-like social comedy in the Adelaide scenes in Voss. That’s fair enough too but I’m not especially interested in that though you can read them for your edification. There are also learned Jesuits who will be able to tell you all about the influence of Schopenhauer on the characterisation of Voss. Now I don’t want to talk about that either …’

With the passage of the years I completely fail to recall what Patrick did tell us about Voss, though it seems to me now that we were happy to let Schopenhauer and Austen go hang. But reading Simon During the other day this preamble to a forgotten lecture, this leaf from the book of an all but obsolete style of lecturing, came back to me, as I sat reading in disbelief, and I thought where is the Schopenhauer, where is the Austen, where is the Patrick McCaughey who might have had something equally valid to say about a notable Australian novel.

Not anywhere within cooee of Professor During’s account of the Great Author we had to have. Just in case you’ve missed the promotion (Simon During was interviewed on page four of The Weekend Australian on March 2) this is the revisionist book about White. During said in that interview, ‘He got to be a great writer not so much because of what he wrote but because Australia needed a great writer.’ The man his colleagues sometimes call Simon Complex went on to say that surveyed readers found White ‘difficult’, ‘boring’ and ‘hard to understand’, as if market research was the natural yardstick for the man who now holds the chair S.L. Goldberg once held. It’s true that Professor During spent some of his pre-academic days as an advertising executive but one would have thought his love of Henry James would save him from the sillier forms of populism. He went on:

A great writer is by definition supposed to be for all times but I don’t think Patrick White is for all times. He is Australia’s genius figure who presented himself as this crusty rock of value yet in many ways he was so anti-Australian.

(Odd that. Clearly the Robert Wallace Professor of English at Melbourne thinks that this country should have taken the normal course and spurned such a detester of his birthplace in the way Dante and James Joyce have been denied the laurels by Florence and Ireland, because of the ferocity of their criticism.)

I was sufficiently taken aback by Simon During’s remarks to reply to them in my Australian column even though, as I made clear, I had not read his book at that stage. Patrick White, it seemed to me, was the peer of all but the greatest twentieth century writers: he belonged with Nabokov and Beckett and Faulkner. Arguments from difficulty (or boredom) were abject ones for a literary critic to use and I expressed doubts as to whether a New Zealander like During would be so willing to consign White to a predictive historical oblivion if he had been even more widely acclaimed elsewhere so that his canonical status was beyond dispute and only the interpretative rhetoric would need to be adjusted.

Simon During was appalled that he should be criticised in this way and dismayed (or so he claimed) that the reporter in The Australian had taken his remarks to be critical of White (though he did not dispute their detail.) He was also taken aback that I had responded to the interview rather than the book which occasioned it. Simon During and I are exact contemporaries and we began our critical careers (he was an untenured lecturer, I as a fledgling literary editor) within shouting distance of each other – in fact in adjoining rooms of the same corridor almost a decade and a half ago. It would be wrong not give his Patrick White monograph a very thorough look.

Funny things happen to writers’ reputations when they die. Commonly their stocks fall, more particularly if they have been king of the cats for long enough. It may be that this did not happen to White because he was in a small country, so manifestly better than anyone else (only Stead, at her rare best in The Man Who Loved Children is his equal) but it also clearly helped David Marr’s biography of White, prepared with the subject’s cooperation, was published only a year after his death?

I am on record saying that Marr’s is a grand biography and that in bringing the cantankerous and noble novelist to life – White was both Good Man and something like King Lear at his most difficult – it rivalled the greatest biographies of the age. It is, in its way, not least in the spellbinding quality of its narrative, a book to place with Ellmann’s life of Joyce and Painter’s life of Proust. As the coherent story of how a man who was also a great novelist suffered and strived for the good, raged and alienated himself from so many of his loyal friends, biography doesn’t get any better than this. But Patrick White is, in one crucial respect, a peculiar subject for literary biography. He was a writer who believed that, having studied the masters, a writer should get on with his life. As a writerly subject he is more like Byron than Keats. He did not have a great deal to say about the process of writing even though he would talk forever about the preoccupations that fed into the writing. Indeed when he happened to look at one of his books – he made no habit of rereading them – it would read to him as though it had been written by somebody else. And David Marr is nowhere more empathic with his subject than in concentrating on the struggles and serenities of the life as a human drama (the love hate for his mother Ruth, the coming of age with the War and settling down with Manoly, the earlier lovers, the world of the theatre) but he is not as Ellmann was, however secondarily, a literary scholar as well. Not only does Marr’s Patrick White differ from a parallel work like Brian Boyd’s life of Nabokov by not promising critical discussion of the novels but he is not, in the fullest sense, a literary historian at all. This scarcely matters because his method is suited to White but it does leave the way open to misprision on the part of whoever follows in his wake, more particularly if they do not wish to do too much research or critical backgrounding for themselves.

Simon During has written a reductionist account of White, riding on the back of Marr’s account of him (which During believes is hagiography) in order to present the work as the monument of the man’s self-image in the most limiting sense. During’s White is a drama queen eaten up with the delusive dream of being a genius which has been fed to him by his mother. He plays off his obsessions with theatricality and with spirituality, never taking either seriously but using both as curses against both self and others. He is a man in thrall to the spectacle of himself. And he is quite capable of achieving this by virtue of his own bad writing.

Something of the prim literalism that underlies During’s parasitic psychobiography is conveyed by the language with which he makes the latter point. Writing, he says, was to White ‘a curse, a constant effort and something that, at the level of style and sentence-formation, he did not do very well, as critics and publishers often pointed out.’ The mystery by which White (in this respect like Christina Stead) sometimes had to write badly in order to write well is one into which During has never been initiated. But it is inept to say that writing was something ‘he did not do very well’. A.D. Hope in the toughest (and also the most unfair) critique to which White was ever subjected nevertheless acknowledged that he was ‘a born writer’. And although it is certainly true that White can let rip with all manner of purple and lugubriousness his prose and what he does with it, is extraordinary. Besides he never writes as badly as his master, D.H. Lawrence. What is boggling about During, however, is that he does not realise that if White’s ‘gift’ – to use a term beloved of John Berryman – was not as great as Lawrence’s (hardly anyone’s was) it was nevertheless considerable.

If a critic cannot understand the sheer level of talent at work in White’s novels (and such a realisation would not predetermine any particular evaluation) he is especially likely to get the career wrong, more particularly if he is making Marr’ sin some ways extra-literary life coterminous with the significance of the work, Just as he has no automatic apprehension of the way in which White’s talent was exceptional so he is overly eager to play the Zeitgeist card.

At one level he became ‘Patrick White’, the great writer inside a set of literary institutions … at … another level it was his luck and/ate to write just when Australia needed a great writer and there was a transnational cultural infrastructure through which it could produce one for world consumption.

And again, ‘Patrick White was acclaimed as Australia’s greatest novelist partly for reasons that bore little direct relation to what he actually wrote.’

It should be said baldly at the outset that the reputation Patrick White established in Australia and internationally had everything to do with ‘what he actually wrote’ and only a pitiable ignorance of publishing in Australia (and the remoteness of the London and New York houses) could interpret his achievement as merely lucky, fated or the consequence of some historical inevitability. Nor were the forces of cultural production particularly benign. Patrick White quite simply did not establish himself with the kind of structural back-up that allowed Mel Gibson, say, to become a big-time Hollywood star. The Booker Prize-winning Peter Carey, published by UQP in Australia and Faber in London, may be advantaged by ‘a transnational cultural infrastructure’ rather more benign than the one under which White operated and he would be a salutary contrast for During to contemplate.

Admittedly During’s ‘partly’ is a bit of a cop out but it need not be taken too seriously. Obviously all literary acclaim will depend partly on extrinsic factors (place of publication, publicity etc.) though these factors are trivial and function as mere highlighting of the truth if the work is significant in the first place. During wants to do two things here. He wants to show off the fact that English departments like to study the process of a book’s reception, the so-called business of canon formation, and he also wants to play with historical schema in order to suggest that there are no intrinsic qualities in White’s work, everything is constructed. His latter point is partly a matter of dogma (that, so the theory goes, is how reputation works) and partly a matter of judgment and preference. Because During doesn’t believe the reputation was justified in the first place or, if it was in a fallen world of emergent nationhood, he doesn’t believe that White is destined for (that is deserves) long continuance.

It is also difficult to see what constitutes the ‘transnational cultural infrastructure’ that made White’s construction as a ‘great writer’ possible. We can point to its operation in his own case but this is merely self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of During’s argument. So too with Australia’s supposed need for a great writer. There are certainly arguments that can be amassed in this area but Simon During does not seem to know the ground sufficiently to exploit them. The period between Christesen’s establishment of Meanjin as a quarterly (in 1943, also the year of Ern Malley) and the publication of Riders in the Chariot and the first volume of Clark’s History in 1961 is clearly some kind of watershed in Australian letters. It is characterised by a heightened awareness of culture in Australia and it is not hard to give examples of prominence which may have been historically determined. The exception, however, tends to prove the rule here. Frank Kermode said once that he had the good fortune during the war to mix with the Australian poets (with McAuley and Hope) at a time when Australian poetry was more interesting than English poetry.

It is not hard to point to analogies between the poets who came to prominence in the ‘50s and White. Apart from anything else they too are belated’ in the sense that During thinks White was: Judith Wright was writing poetry influenced by Yeats at the same time that Patrick White was writing novels which were influenced by D.H. Lawrence. But, even at the time, there was a sense of scale about these things. White was, comparatively, a more formidable figure put next to any contemporary novelist in English than McAuley or Hope were in a world that included Auden and Wallace Stevens.

These things should not be overemphasised but they need to be said in the context of During’s sketched odyssey of careerism and megalomania dovetailing with the intellectual imperatives of a new nation. The account of literary history at work in this monograph is bizarre because it is not only lacking in inwardness but constantly being usurped by During’s sense of the psychodynamics of his subjects and the Big Picture which makes up the context. During, touching on the subject of why post-War British fiction was less experimental than its American counterpart, feels obliged to tell us the Poms ‘could not creatively respond to an affluent society flooded with consumer durables and well-paid middle class jobs (for men).’ It is the kind of book that makes you want to tear your hair.

During doesn’t understand how Patrick White writes. David Marr, with other fish to fry, hasn’t explained it to him and he is left with some rudderless apprehension that it has something to do with modernism, a movement about which he is vague. We get talk of White’s ‘highly individuated (if still derivative) art’ but no sharp sense of how he might fit onto a literary map. It’s fair enough to say as he does that White was a more ‘experimental’ writer than Graham Greene (though experimental is scarcely the right word) but a lot less so than Gaddis, Burroughs and Co. in the States. White was an ambitious writer who had nothing anti-modernist about him in the sense that the term could be used of Greene or Waugh or, at a lesser level, Kingsley Amis. He was a writer who had learned from the writers During likes to think of as modernist though the most significant thing here is that Lawrence (who on any strict definition is not really a modernist at all) is an all but overwhelming influence where Joyce simply taught him specific strategies that surface in particular books (The Aunt’s Story, The Vivisector). A significant book could be written about the way in which White adapted the Lawrentian style, with its muscularity and poetic vigour and adapted it to essentially dramatic narratives, modifying it and counterpointing it with drier dictions – most obviously in Voss – only to transform it out of recognition in the later books when he felt that the person he could learn from most was Stendhal. But this is not that kind of book.

This is the kind of book that tells you White stopped writing in the ‘Lawrence-Joyce-Woolf mode’ when the great literary mentor of his career, the ‘modernist’ publisher Ben Huebsch retired. Well, there is no such thing as the ‘Lawrence-Joyce-Woolf mode’ and it is a critic’s job to know these things. It is also grotesquely demeaning to a novelist who was already the peer of any fiction writer in the world to suggest that the black comedy and relaxed diction of The Solid Mandala could possibly be the consequence of the kind of careerist move that is normally reserved for on-the-make lecturers who cease to imitate Professor Y once he has departed the scene. In this respect During may be on safer ground when he suggests that the change in the direction of White’s fiction from the mid 1960s may have had something to do with the death of his mother.

But sub-Freudian, sub-Marxist doodling of the data of Marr is at the heart of During’s monograph. To it he adds the suggestion that White became a great Australian novelist while being ‘anti-Australian’ because he connected to ‘its colonial switching point’, the moment when it was in transit to a nation state. Clearly this is one of the woolly unprovables that are as incapable of historical refutation as they are of substantiation. It’s certainly true that White’s reputation is first established (or at any rate consolidated with the publication in Penguin Modern Classics which During is, admittedly, sharp about) at the same time that Menzies was busily building universities and the Adelaide Festival was getting under way. Yes, nations may have a vested interest in the acquisition of ‘national icons’ and ‘cultural canons’ but it’s just a bit naively literary to think that anybody is conscious of this. Of course they became conscious of it in the ‘70s when Whitlam established the Australia Council and set out to get the Nobel Prize for Patrick White but that is a different moment from the one at which the reputation is established and if Professor During wants to pontificate about Australian history he should learn to tell one moment from another.

He is in any case dubious that the expatriate come home to rage will survive with his reputation intact into the next century. According to During, Patrick White rejected his mother’s rejection of Australia but also internalised it. Australia, with its patent lack of organic connection was the site for White’s transcendental novelistic critique and it was also the place where he could execrate the philistine bourgeoisie. During talks, not uninterestingly, about the myths of sacrificial transcendence White deploys though he refers to the crucifixion of Himmelfarb in Riders in the Chariot as ‘wildly improbable’ in a way which suggests a narrow understanding of realism and deviations from realism.

It’s true, of course, that some readers like the poet Laurie Duggan simply find the novel ‘hysterical’. I did find it slightly disgusting, however, when Simon During declared smugly that he portrait of Alf Dubbo, the Aboriginal painter in Riders and one of the book’s illuminati, was a characterisation in the spirit of the assimilationist policies that prevailed in the treatment of the Aborigines until 1965.It might be thought more remarkable that a Sydney patrician and Australian Briton writing in 1961, should have a leading character who is black; certainly it seems both graceless and ignorant to diminish this fact by invoking the pieties of the 1990s.

Of course Simon During became famous in New Zealand for his theory of post colonialism according to which Patrick White predictably fails to pass muster. The man who is now embarked on a study of magic is equally unsympathetic to White’s character as a seeker for some form of faith. White said that he wanted ‘to give professed unbelievers glimpses of their own unprofessed faith’ but this is all so much role-playing to Simon During. It is possible, he says, ‘to interpret White’s spirited orientations in terms of his ambition and the cultural demands made on him as an Australian “great writer”’. So forget all that moving stuff in Marr’s biography about finding God in the mud, it was all an act. During’s peroration on this subject at the end of his third chapter is such a summation of what is most base in the contemporary academic outlook and so sublimely unconscious of its own servility that it takes on a weird parodic magnificence of its own. The glimpses of salvation, During says, ‘remain fictional’.

They can only establish themselves as more than fictional if society recognises White’s novels and their values as central to its culture, as constitutive myths, we might almost want to say. If this has happened at all, it is at the level of lip-service, and for a tiny sector of the community as a whole. White is officially a genius, but remains more or less unread. Certainly the literal meaning of his texts – their spirituality and transgressive sexuality – have not been incorporated into public discourse. And one important reason why White is under-read is that, in his effort to create himself as a genius and to write culturally revivifying, deeply ‘serious’ fictions, he simplified and scapegoated ordinary life and people, most of all when they were heterosexual, middle class women.

Professor During refuses to believe that there can be any truth in White’s representations of spirituality unless they are taken up by Australian society at large. This is an argument which could be used against, for instance, to take names at random – St Francis, Karl Marx and Wittgenstein – in terms of the societies which produced them. It is also (though this is hardly During’s intention) an argument that could be used to justify Hitler. But beware of the Cultural Studies man who says to you ‘vox populi, vox dei’. He is, in the precise sense of the word, a demagogue because he is seeking to exploit populism for his own purposes. And he, if no one else, deserves General Sherman’s famous comeback, ‘vox populi, vox bunkum’.

The kind of bunkum Simon During talks in this book is indicated by that doctrinal introduction of those ‘heterosexual, middle class women’. It’s not a subject he can bring much breadth to. He doesn’t once mention Edna Everage and Barry Humphries as the dominant (and popular) archetypes, much admired by White, of the kind of satire – some of it crude and uncontrolled – which bums around the edges of some of the novels, often with an imperfect command of idiom.

Nor does Patrick White get much thanks from During for the way in which he does, despite his personal homosexuality, incorporate a host of sympathetic female characters into the fiction. This is merely the fine fruits of White’s sojourn in the closet. It is bizarrely naive and unusual that a Professor of English, intent on such radically doctrinal truths as still operate in university humanities departments, should fail to acknowledge that White, from the end of the 1940s, lived with a man, openly, in Sydney, Australia and seems to have had a spectacularly successful homosexual relationship which in no way diminished, personally or in his fiction, his sympathy for women. I am not interested in the recovery of homosexual heroes but anyone who is will make short shrift of Professor During.

His notions of the closet do at least lead to one hilariously earnest passage. Voss, he writes,

can be read as an expression of [White’s] internalisation of homophobia as guilt. Yet this community also seems like a community of homosexuals travelling, if this were possible, both away from and further into the closet.

Well, Simon darling, it’s not possible. This one is like nothing so much as the dumb hippie from The Young Ones.

Part of the argument here is that White’s love that dared not speak its name somehow issued into the art that never names its object, that is, symbolism. The only difficulty with this, and it’s true that White – in some respects, like William Golding, the heir of the apocalyptic Dylan Thomasery of the 1940s – does have incidental symbolist effects, is that During hasn’t taken the trouble to get his head around symbolism. He does indulge in symbolic interpretation of the heavy-handed Freudian variety which must engender some frisson (and the odd groan) in Simon During’s tutorials. Thus in Voss we get ‘a kind of miming of a sexual act, when Judd and Harry prod the rumps of their cows’. If I were Simon During I would stick to the middle class heterosexual women.

At the centre of this monograph there is the contention that White’s life and writings were organised to achieve his recognition as a genius. During (hanging on to Marr’ s co?t tails) insists on reading the life and the work together and therefore maintains, in the face of all the evidence, that Patrick White deploys ‘a self-presentational strategy’ in the manner of Joyce which again make him a little dated. To begin with White does no such thing. There is no character in White’s fiction who has the proximity to his creator which Stephen Dedalus has to Joyce, Marcel to Proust or Paul Morel, Birkin and Co. to Lawrence. The only thing which allows Simon During to persist in what is simply an error is that he is bringing nothing to the novels except what he has read in Marr and he therefore makes the very elementary mistake of confusing the allegorical relation between the life and the work for self-presentation. He then talks smugly about Beckett and Nabokov moving further from realism than Joyce. (He means the Joyce of Ulysses: no one has moved further from realism than the Joyce of Finnegans Wake.) In this he fails to realise that Nabokov’s ludic aesthetic had an ethico-religious dimension not unlike White’s. He also, with the pedagogue’s superior disdain for the mere artist, declares that writers like Walter Abish and Thomas Pynchon have had the postmodern good sense to reject the idea of the artist deemed great by virtue of a private vision expressed in books.

Throughout this little book about Patrick White, Simon During is battling with two demons. One is the high romantic German demon of the great artist as godman. The other is the simple truth that a great writer is likely to represent a highly developed form of that talent which the critic (and particularly the careful and not very imaginative critic) possesses m rather small measure. He therefore finds it exceedingly difficult to accept genius in the only common sense of the word these days, exceptional talent.

He wants to condemn Patrick White, the writer, of the heresy of trying as a novelist to be a seer, almost one might say, of imagining that his fiction could, in some Heideggerian sense, speak Being.

… through his fictions White claimed to tell deeper, less stereotypical truths than those circulated, for instance, within popular media … White’s narrative voice – the narrator who tells the stories – expresses wisdom the implied reader is asked to believe is Patrick White’s own.

The critic is off chasing a rabbit of his own imagining with this one. Some of us think that Patrick White sometimes created deep and true images of life and that in the process the narrative voice evinces a wisdom. But this relates to the biographical person Patrick White only by force of deduction because he was the exceptionally talented individual who wrote the books in the first place. It certainly does not compel us to the belief that Patrick White was a consistently wise man nor could anything but a curdled reading of David Marr – the reading of a critic who had no fix on his subject except what his predecessor had given him –convince us that he was interested in being seen as one. He would certainly have liked to achieve wisdom but he knew enough about the game to know that being hailed as a great novelist had no connection with that.

There are times in his limp little essay when Simon During sounds positively in thrall to the thing he wants to deny in White and on such occasions his writing takes on a strange power as if a bank clerk suddenly found that his money box contained a genie. Thus he can write of Patrick White, ‘He became his characters, or rather, shaman-like they revealed themselves, inside him, so that he could write them down.’ So they have written of Dostoyevsky. But During seems appalled at the apparitional quality of his own reflection and adds, a minute later, ‘the trouble is that many of White’s characters are stereotypes: they are cut and pasted from widely disseminated discursive practices.’ The truly terrible lumpy bureaucratic/ academic phrase – terrible by whatever standard of semiobabble you might care to invoke – is the giveaway here. It is one of those indicators of bad faith that really makes you think of lie detectors.

So too with During’s argument about Patrick White’s assault on the ordinariness and suburbanism of Australian life. It is not only an argument so feeble that it does not merit detailed rebutting, it is one which one suspects During would never dare mount if his subject were by full international consensus and therefore with some certainty of continuance a great writer rather than that paltry sub-division, a great Australian writer.

During’s defence of Australia in the face of White’s supposed anti-Australianism (as if there was some national essence that could somehow have war made upon it) is itself patronising. He admits that ‘ordinariness’ was itself a myth that required correction (in favour of ‘ethnicity, gender, sexuality, generation’ you name it) but he refuses to concede the relevance of anything but the triteness of what he sees in a dialectical relation to White.

His conclusion is as negative (and as unsatisfactory) as the journalist at The Australian imagined it to be. The only thing which mitigates it is During’s qualifying tendency to have a bob each way even as he is trailing his cloak in the hope of being on the side that comes out winning.

This book is not likely to command much of an audience nor does it deserve one, but the conclusion is worth quoting in order to exhibit that curious monstrosity the academic mind, in very middling form, at an unfortunate moment.

My feeling is that given this, White’s critique of Australian ordinariness is no longer especially vital or useful. I think his reputation as Australia’s genius loci means that it is more important to criticise than to join him … After all, it is hard to tolerate the White that I have criticised: the elitist White, the White who fictionalised contemporary Aboriginal life away, the misogynist White, the White who affirmed incest, even the White who thought of himself as a genius because he was psychically sick and damaged and the (intimately related) White who considered art and literature as too profound to be simply available as an administrative and educational resource.

To be simply available as an administrative and educational resource. This is how the Professor of English at our second oldest university thinks of literature these days. No writer starting out, or in mid-career, can expect to encounter anything like the interest or the respect which people in universities once gave Patrick White from the likes of Simon During. During concludes with a sidestep insinuating that it is just possible that Patrick White’s repellent heterodoxy will ‘disprove’ his ‘confidence that White’s writings will not be valued as highly in the future as they have been in the past’.

A few years ago I had some influence in persuading Oxford to initiate this critical series, an endeavour they have recently decided to stop. The publication of a monograph on White as negligent and undernourished, as full of condescension to its betters, as lacking in critical sense or generosity of spirit, fills me with rage and shame.

The Kingdom of Correct Usage will always be elsewhere for the Durings of this world. Hence their contempt for an Australia which is hypocritically defended in the face of its greatest writer. The only Republic they can envisage is one from which the writer is banished as anything but an ‘educational resource’.

But all of this is immoderate talk. Professor During’s monograph is merely a very poor example of the minor form it represents. It will look like a period piece long before David Marr’s Patrick White, let alone the novels of the man himself, have gone through too many more editions.