It is hard to feel the force of that italicised and if one is unaware of any mystical meditation except that undertaken by humans. But it is not hard to feel the insidious lameness of the restrictive phrase ‘on this continent’. There is throughout Remembering Patrick White a most irritating use of the demonstrative this and the shifter here to indicate Australia, as though nobody outside Australia would ever be interested in Patrick White or (somewhat less presumptuously) in this volume from that continent. But having been invited to consider the relationship between Voss and Laura in terms of a mystical marriage, a non-Australian reader must ask: why should the possible and universal analogues be relegated to a footnote while the main text limits its focus to that continent which does not – unless among the Indigenous people – have an ancient tradition of mystical marriage? In literary terms, this is not unlike saying that Macbeth has interesting things to tell us about the way murder is done in Scotland, or that Ulysses is a useful source of information about life in Dublin in June 1904. That such themes have wider if not universal application and resonance is presumably why we read literature from all around the world: a topos may name a local habitation but it signifies a universe of meaning.

Here is another example, from another critic in the same volume, Bernadette Brennan: ‘White’s writing helps us understand the absolutely ordinary fears and insecurities of the suburban Australian consciousness;’ – this in an essay that regards Riders in the Chariot (1961)as ‘A Tale for our Times’, a wise and prescient allegory of a multicultural Australia. The cited sentence continues: ‘now we have to find ways to combat those fears, to replace the politics of fear with the politics of recognition.’ Towards the end of his life, White lent his fame and prestige to the service of political protest. Have Australian critics taken that courageous phase as a licence to deploy White’s novels as bromide?

There are one or two more open and welcoming essays in this volume, respectful of the ‘Cross/Cultures’ of the series to which it belongs. Bill Ashcroft hits an appropriate note in observing that, while religion has never been prominent in Australia’s national culture, Australian culture has been prominent for its sense of, and concern with, the sacred. We read White (or Les Murray, or Gerald Murnane), we look at Sidney Nolan or Arthur Boyd to understand the sacred, recognising in their work its Australian location, but not supposing the sacred to have continental limits or limitations. (I do hope that the we in the previous sentence is not taken to mean ‘only non-Australians’). Ashcroft’s fine account of the sacred within the abject, in A Fringe of Leaves (1976), is matched by Elizabeth McMahon’s approach to The Twyborn Affair (1979) in the light of Edward Said’s On Late Style (2006). White’s two last novels have not yet received adequate critical attention – even after thirty years – and these two essays are all the more welcome for taking in, and taking on, the late work. It is pleasing to note also that gay issues share with the sacred an unconfined sense of relevance and application.

If critical provincialism is one consequence of defining White as an Australian writer, the second problem is that it gives rise to an anachronistic sense of his biography. As White himself makes explicit, not only in Flaws in the Glass (1981), his parents looked to England as home and exemplar; his mother chose to spend her widow-hood in London; and White described himself as, finally, a Londoner, loyal to the city of his birth. David Marr’s biography brings out forcefully White’s attachments to England and to London. Yet it has become politically expedient to forget that this was normal among Australians of that time, and of that class. Even White himself, in his old age, seems to have forgotten, or is appealing to the new sense of Australian identity, when, in Flaws, he recounts the horror of his four years at Cheltenham:

No wonder boys are at their cruellest at breakfast in a boarding school. Accents crop up: ‘… me dad from Bradford …’ I was reminded of the deformity I carried around – my Australianness. I hardly dared open my mouth for fear of the toads which might tumble out, and the curled lips, cold eyes waiting to receive renewed evidence of what made me unacceptable to the British ruling class.

That White had acquired an Australian accent before the age of twelve is credible, but one suspects it was shed soon after, for there was little trace of Australian in the voice that spoke up in protest and in public from 1974. For a family of the economic and social status of the Whites, or the Withycombes, there was nothing un-English about living in Australia: one was not less English for living – and making a very good living – far away: when moneyed colonials talked, their accents (if any) would go unremarked. It must be on the basis of White’s recollections of being teased at Cheltenham that Veronica Brady can assert that White, moving to London after Cambridge, would ‘as a young “colonial”’ have had nothing to do with the Bloomsbury set, being as it were thrown instead into the company of fellow colonials such as Roy de Maistre. The idea that in the 1930s White – as a ‘colonial’ – would have felt excluded from the inner circles of either King’s College, Cambridge, or Bloomsbury is a consequence of ‘the Australianist anachronism’.

This is also evident in what is itself a somewhat anachronistic collection of essays by John Beston, many of them first published in the 1970s. Beston’s critical judgements remain unaltered; he is adamant that the three great novels are The Aunt’s Story (1948), The Tree of Man (1955), and Voss (1957), and he declines to address or even countenance The Twyborn Affair. Beston’s view is that White should be seen within the Western tradition, European and American. He ignores the Russians, and is not alone in ignoring White’s familiarity with post-classical Greek literature: the prominent praise in Flaws of the modern Greek novelist Alexandros Papadiamantis has not (I think) been explored by any critic.

The Australianist anachronism is apparent less in the essays than in Beston’s recently composed opening chapter. There we learn that ‘White’s residence in England … exposed him to British literature’ – as though any literate young person who remained in Australia would have been shielded. It is hard to imagine Cambridge being any more Anglocentric than an Australian university in the 1930s. Equally, one can assume that French and German played as prominent a part in the Australian curriculum as in the British. Compounding the anachronisms, Beston speaks of White’s ‘Europeanization of Australian literature’: ‘one finds in White’s novels continual evidence of his exposure to European culture, a culture that he wanted to incorporate into Australian literature.’ The term ‘Australian literature’ here is, as they say, problematic. Beston was born in Australia in 1930, so it must be with some temerity that this reviewer challenges the notion that ‘in the 1930s, ambitious Australians fled to Europe to acquire another, more prestigious identity’. Identity was hardly an issue; it seems that the imperial ideology of ‘Greater Britain’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon values’ has faded all too rapidly from the memory of Australian critics.

Beston is also keen to play down White’s interest in, and familiarity with, English literature. Though not many English writers are mentioned in the Letters (1994), we should not assume that many were left unread. According to David Marr’s biography, when in 1977 White asked his cousin Betty Withycombe to return the letters he had written to her from Bolaro, where, between Cheltenham and Cambridge, he had worked as a jackaroo, it was to help him in writing the Bogong section of The Twyborn Affair. Yet I clearly remember, from numerous conversations in Oxford in the late 1970s, Betty saying that he had contacted her – after many years of silence – because he was writing his memoirs. I was a little disturbed to learn that all his letters to her (Marr tells us that there were about 400) had been sent to Australia without copies having been made. White’s destruction of those letters remains a huge loss, for they would have been by far the richest source of evidence for White’s literary formation. Betty, who never learnt of their destruction, told me that they were letters from Cheltenham, from the two years in Bolaro, and from Cambridge. Ten years older than Paddy, Betty guided his reading and was (her words) like a big sister to him; she grew impatient at my questioning whether he had read this or that, and assured me that he was thoroughly familiar with English literature, canonical and contemporary: ‘Of course he was: through all his years at Cheltenham and Cambridge we would talk about books, and I would tell him what to read.’

The present neglect of Patrick White around the world is a scandal, and it may not be entirely the world’s fault. As reported in ABR’s December 2010–January 2011 issue, the purchase in 2006 by the National Library of Australia of White papers whose survival had been quite unsuspected was a major event, of considerable scholarly consequence; on the evidence of these two books, it has yet to register in the criticism.