Nobel Prize in Literature 1973 - Press Release Press Release The Nobel Prize in Literature 1973 Patrick White The Nobel Prize in Literature 1973 Patrick White The Australian Patrick White has been awarded the 1973 Nobel Literature Prize "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature", as it says in the Swedish Academy's citation. White's growing fame is based chiefly on seven novels of which the earliest masterly work is The Aunt's Story, a portrayal imbued with remarkable feeling of a lonely, unmarried, Australian woman's life during experiences that extend also to Europe and America. The book with which White really made his name, however, was The Tree of Man, an epically broad and psychologically discerning account of a part of Australian social development in the form of two people's long life together, and struggle against outward and inward difficulties. Another aspect of Australia is shown in Voss, in which a fanatical explorer in the country's interior meets his fate: an intensive character study against the background of the fascinating Australian wilds.

The writer displays yet another kind of art in Riders in the Chariot, with special emphasis on his cystic and symbolic tendencies: a sacrificial drama, tense, yet with an everyday setting, in the midst of current Australian reality. From contrasting viewpoints, The Solid Mandala gives a double portrait of two brothers, in which the sterilely rational brother is set against the fertilely intuitive one, who is almost a fool in the eyes of the world. White's last two books are among his greatest feats, both as to size and to frenzied building up of tension. The Vivisector is the imaginary biography of an artist, in which a whole life is disclosed in a relentless scrutiny of motives and springs of action: an artist's untiring battle to express the utmost while sacrificing both himself and his fellow-beings in the attempt. The Eye of the Storm places an old, dying woman in the centre of a narrative which revolves round, and encloses, the whole of her environment, past and present, until we have come to share an entire life panorama, in which everyone is on a decisive dramatic footing with the old lady.

Particularly, these latest books show White's unbroken creative power, an ever deeper restlessness and seeking urge, an onslaught against vital problems that have never ceased to engage him, and a wrestling with the language in order to extract all its power and all its nuances, to the verge of the unattainable. White's literary production has failings that belong to great and bold writing, exceeding, as it does, different kinds of conventional limits. He is the one who, for the first time, has given the continent of Australia an authentic voice that carries across the world, at the same time as his achievement contributes to the development, both artistic and, as regards ideas, of contemporary literature. Share this: To cite this page MLA style: "Nobel Prize in Literature 1973 - Press Release". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 20 Jan 2017. < Patrcik White nobel prize - Australian Geographic Tweet Patrick White was the ultimate quiet achiever – even when he became the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

ON 10 DECEMBER 1973, instead of being in Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden, Patrick White, then 61, was at home in Sydney. Patrick had been in poor health and, worried that his asthma would flare up in the northern winter, he sent a friend – renowned painter Sidney Nolan – to accept the coveted medallion on his behalf. "Patrick wasn't a great speech giver and he wasn't a glory seeker. He didn't need any of that," says friend and former literary agent Barbara Mobbs. "He'd had enough travel by then." Patrick had turned down a number of awards before this one, but the Nobel Prize proved too big an honour to refuse. It was the prize that put him on the map – not on the world stage, as he was already celebrated internationally, but in the minds of many Australians. Soon after the award was announced, The Canberra Times reported: "The most important effect of Patrick White's Nobel Prize [in] Literature will be to convince Australians that he is a novelist of world stature." Australia's greatest writers The truth was that most of his novels, particularly his earliest, had been less enthusiastically received at home than abroad.

Patrick didn't celebrate the traditional values that readers had grown to expect from Australian literature. Instead, he explored high-brow existential and psychological matters, and many Australians found it difficult to warm to the cerebral author. Indeed, after Patrick finally settled in Sydney with lifetime partner Manoly Lascaris, he commented that he felt like a stranger even within his own family: "Here [Manoly and I] had each other for support, he an exiled Greek, I not so much an Australian as a fake Pom and writer nobody had heard about, posing as a member of my own family," Patrick wrote in his autobiography Flaws in the Glass. Born in London in 1912 to Australian parents, Patrick had spent his early childhood in Australia, but was sent back to England for what he later called a "four-year prison sentence" at a public school. After graduating from Cambridge and publishing his first novel in 1939, he had started to gain moderate success when the outbreak of World War II interrupted. During the war Patrick served as an operational intelligence officer, and thought of his role in the war as insignificant.

"I was unable to write, and this finally became the explanation of my state of mind: my flawed self has only ever felt intensely alive in the fictions I create," he later wrote. After the war he returned to Australia. Life of Patrick White While Patrick had friends in the steadily growing Australian arts scene, he didn't seek these relationships. "People sought him out because he was good company, fun to be around and very bright," says Barbara. The writer shied away from public attention and loathed journalists. "He would never seek out the press, he found the attention a bit uncomfortable." Patrick actively sought out the simple life. He wrote in the essay The Prodigal Son in 1959: "Possibly all art flowers more readily in silence. Certainly the state of simplicity and humility is the only desirable one for artist or for man. While to reach it may be impossible, to attempt to do so is imperative." In his later years Patrick declined several literary awards. As Barbara notes, "he felt he had his lot and now he drew out of the running to give other people a chance.

As a rare person in the sense that he didn't need a job to support himself, Patrick recognised that award money can be of great financial benefit to some authors." Patrick used the Nobel Prize money to establish the Patrick White Award, for distinguished older Australian writers whose writing has not received adequate recognition.

Text by Signe Cane Patrick Victor Martindale White, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1973 (1912 - 1990) - Genealogy Patrick Victor Martindale White, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1973 Birthdate: City of London, Greater London, UK Death: Cause of death: Asthma - Sep 30 1990 - Sydney Parents: Victor Martindale White, Ruth White Wife: May 28 1912 - London, England Death: Sep 30 1990 - Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Parents: RUTH WITHYCOMBE, VICTOR MARTINDALE WHITE Sister: mother About Patrick White, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1973 Patrick Victor Martindale White (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990), an Australian author, is widely regarded as an important English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays.

White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative vantage points and a stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature—and was the only Australian citizen to have been awarded the Literature prize until J. M. Coetzee became an Australian citizen in 2006. The Vivisector, a novel about the life and times of a successful modernist painter, was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. White was born in Knightsbridge, London, to an English-Australian father and an English mother. His family later moved to Sydney, Australia when he was six months old. As a child he lived in one flat with his sister, nanny and a maid; while his parents lived in an adjoining flat. At the age of four White developed asthma, a condition that had taken the life of his maternal grandfather. White's health was fragile throughout his childhood which, while it precluded his participation in many childhood activities, stimulated his imagination. He would perform private rites in the garden and would dance for his mother’s friends. He loved the theatre which he first visited at an early age.

At the age of ten White was sent to Tudor House School, a boarding school in the New South Wales southern highlands, in an attempt to abate his asthma. It took him some time to adjust to the presence of other children. At boarding school he started to write plays. Even at this early age White wrote about noticeably adult themes. In 1924, the boarding school ran into financial trouble and the headmaster suggested that White be sent to public school in England; a suggestion which his parents accepted. White struggled to adjust to his new surroundings at Cheltenham College. He later described it as "a four-year prison sentence". White withdrew socially and had a limited circle of acquaintances. Occasionally, he would holiday with his parents at European locations, but their relationship remained distant. While in London White did make one close friend, Ronald Waterall, an older boy who shared similar interests. White’s biographer, David Marr, wrote that the two men would walk, arm-in-arm, to London shows; and stand around stage doors crumbing for a glimpse of their favourite stars, giving a practical demonstration of a chorus girl's high kick ... with appropriate vocal accompaniment. When Waterall left school, White withdrew again.

He asked his parents if he could leave school to become an actor. The parents compromised and allowed him to finish school early on the condition that he came home to Australia to try life on the land. Travelling the world White spent two years working as a stockman at Bolaro, a 73-square-kilometre (28 sq mi) station near Adaminaby on the edge of the Snowy Mountains in south-eastern Australia. His parents felt that he should work on the land rather than become a writer and hoped that his work as a jackaroo would cause his artistic ambitions to fade. Although White grew to respect the land and his health improved, it was clear that he was not cut out for this life. From 1932 to 1935, White lived in England, studying French and German literature at King's College within Cambridge University. White's homosexuality took a toll on his first term academic performance, in part because he developed a romantic attraction to a young man who had come to King's College to become an Anglican priest. White dared not speak of his feelings for fear of losing the friendship and, like many homosexual men of that period, feared that his sexuality would doom him to a lonely life.

Then one night, the student priest, after an awkward liaison with two women, admitted to White that women meant nothing to him sexually. This became White’s first love affair. During White's time at Cambridge he published a collection of poetry entitled The Ploughman and Other Poems, and wrote a play named Bread and Butter Women, which was later performed by an amateur group (which included his sister Suzanne) at the tiny Bryant's Playhouse in Sydney. After being admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1935, White briefly settled in London where he lived in an area that was frequented by artists. Here, the young author thrived creatively for a time, writing several unpublished works and reworking Happy Valley, a novel that he had written while jackarooing. In 1937, White’s father died, leaving him ten thousand pounds in inheritance. The fortune enabled him to write full-time in relative comfort. Two more plays followed before he succeeded in finding a publisher for Happy Valley. The novel was received well in London, but poorly in Australia. He began writing another novel, Nightside, but abandoned it before its completion after receiving negative comments—a decision that he later admitted regretting.

In 1936 White met the painter Roy de Maistre, 18 years his senior, who became an important influence in his life and work. The two men never became lovers, but remained firm friends. In Patrick White's own words "He became what I most needed, an intellectual and aesthetic mentor". They had many similarities. They were both homosexual; they both felt like outsiders in their own families; as a result they both had ambivalent feelings about their families and backgrounds, yet both maintained close and life-long links with their families, particularly their mothers. They also both appreciated the benefits of social standing and connections; and Christian symbolism and biblical themes are common in both artists' work. Patrick White dedicated his first novel 'Happy Valley' (1939) to de Maistre, and acknowledged de Maistre's influence on his writing. In 1947 de Maistre's painting Figure in a Garden (The Aunt) was used as the cover for the first edition of White's The Aunt's Story. White also bought many of de Maistre's paintings for himself. In 1974 White gave all his paintings by de Maistre to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Towards the end of the 1930s, White spent time in the United States, including Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and New York City, where he wrote The Living and the Dead. By the time World War II broke out, he had returned to London and joined the Royal Air Force. He was accepted as an intelligence officer, and was posted to the Middle East. He served in Egypt, Palestine, and Greece before the war was over. While in the Middle East, he had an affair with a Greek army officer, Manoly Lascaris, who was to become his life partner. The growth of White's writing career After the war White once again returned to Australia, buying an old house in Castle Hill, now a Sydney suburb but then semi-rural. Here he settled down with Lascaris, the Greek he had met during the war. They lived there for 18 years, selling flowers, vegetables, milk, and cream, as well as pedigreed puppies. During these years he started to make a reputation for himself as a writer, publishing The Aunt's Story and The Tree of Man in the US in 1955 and shortly after in the UK.

The Tree of Man was released to rave reviews in the US, but, in what was to become a typical pattern, was panned in Australia. White had doubts about whether to continue writing after his books were largely dismissed in Australia (three of them having been called ‘un-Australian’ by critics), but, in the end, decided to persevere. His first breakthrough in Australia came when his next novel, Voss, won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award. In 1961, White published Riders in the Chariot. This was to become both a bestseller and a prize-winner, garnering him a second Miles Franklin Award. In 1963, White and Lascaris decided to sell the house at Castle Hill that they had named "Dogwoods". A number of White's works from the 1960s depict the fictional town of Sarsaparilla, including his collection of short stories, The Burnt Ones, and the play, The Season at Sarsaparilla. By now, he had clearly established his reputation as one of the world's great authors, but remained an essentially private person, resisting opportunities for interviews and public appearances, although his circle of friends had widened significantly.

In 1968, White wrote The Vivisector, a searing character portrait of an artist. Many people drew links to the Sydney painter John Passmore (1904 - 1984) and White's friend, the painter Sidney Nolan, but White denied these connections. Patrick White was an art collector who had, as a young man, been deeply impressed by his friends Roy De Maistre and Francis Bacon, and later said he wished he had been an artist. White's elaborate, idiosyncratic prose was a writer's attempt to emulate painting. By the mid sixties he had also become interested in encouraging dozens of young and less established artists, such as James Clifford, Erica McGilchrist, and Lawrence Daws. White was later friends with Brett Whiteley, the young star of Australian painting, in the 1970s. That friendship ended when White felt that Whiteley, a heroin addict, was deceitful and pushy about selling his paintings. A portait of White by Louis Kahan won the 1962 Archibald Prize.

White decided not to accept any more prizes for his work, and declined both the $10,000 Britannia Award and another Miles Franklin Award. White was approached by Harry M. Miller to work on a screenplay for Voss, but nothing came of it. He became an active opponent of literary censorship and joined a number of other public figures in signing a statement of defiance against Australia’s decision to participate in the Vietnam War. In 1973, White became the first (and to this day the only) Australian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, "for an epic and psychological narrative art, which has introduced a new continent into literature". His cause was said to have been championed by a Scandinavian diplomat resident in Australia [9] White enlisted Sidney Nolan to travel to Stockholm to accept the prize on his behalf. The award had an immediate impact on his career, as his publisher doubled the print run for The Eye of the Storm and gave him a larger advance for his next novel. White used the money from the prize to establish a trust to fund the Patrick White Award, given annually to established creative writers who have received little public recognition.

He was invited by the House of Representatives to be seated on the floor of the House in recognition of his achievement. White declined, explaining that his nature could not easily adapt itself to such a situation. The last time such an invitation had been extended was in 1928, to Bert Hinkler. White was made Australian of the Year for 1974, but in a typically rebellious fashion, his acceptance speech encouraged Australians to spend the day reflecting on the state of the country. Privately, he was less than enthusiastic about it. In a letter to Marshall Best on 27 January 1974, he wrote: "Something terrible happened to me last week. There is an organisation which chooses an Australian of the Year who has to appear at an official lunch in Melbourne Town Hall on Australia Day. This year I was picked on as they had run through all the swimmers, tennis players, yachtsmen". The twilight years White and Lascaris hosted many dinner parties at their Centennial Park home in a leafy part of the affluent Eastern suburbs of Sydney. In Patrick White, A Life, Marr portrays White as a genial host but one who easily fell out with friends.

White supported the conservative, business oriented Liberal Party of Australia until the election of Gough Whitlam's Labor government and, following the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, became particularly anti-royalist, making a rare appearance on national television to broadcast his views on the matter. White also publicly expressed his admiration for the historian Manning Clark, satirist Barry Humphries, and unionist Jack Mundey. During the 1970s, White’s health began to deteriorate—his teeth were crumbling, his eyesight was failing, and he had chronic lung problems. In 1979, his novel The Twyborn Affair was short-listed for the Booker Prize, but White requested that it be removed to give younger writers a chance to win. (The prize was won by Penelope Fitzgerald, who ironically was just four years younger than White.) Soon after, White announced that he had written his last novel, and that in the future, he would write only for radio or the stage. Director Jim Sharman introduced himself to White while walking down a Sydney street, Sharman asking White if he could make a film of The Night the Prowler. White wrote the screenplay for the film.

In 1981, White published his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass: a self-portrait, which explored issues about which he had publicly said little, such as his homosexuality, and his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize personally. On Palm Sunday, 1982, White addressed a crowd of 30,000 people, calling for a ban on uranium mining and for the destruction of nuclear weapons. In 1986 White released one last novel, Memoirs of Many in One, though it was published under the pen name "Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray" and edited by Patrick White. In the same year, Voss was turned into an opera. White refused to see it when it was first performed at the Adelaide Festival, because Queen Elizabeth II had been invited, and chose instead to see it later in Sydney. In 1987, White wrote Three Uneasy Pieces, with his musings on ageing and society's efforts to achieve aesthetic perfection. When David Marr finished his biography of White in July 1990, his subject spent nine days going over the details with him. Patrick White died in Sydney on 30 September 1990.

Legacy Patrick White and Christina Stead continue to be widely recognised as the foremost Australian novelists of the twentieth century. His writing tackles existential questions as well as myriad human flaws, weaknesses and hypocrisies, and it is full of fresh and original metaphor. Admittedly, White's style is also often very condensed and perhaps at first somewhat difficult to approach - such noted writers as Robert Hughes and David Malouf have expressed their difficulties with some of White's writing. Nevertheless, Patrick White's greatness as a novelist remains undoubted. In 2010 White received posthumous recognition for his novel The Vivisector, which was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize for 1970. In 2009, The Sydney Theatre Company staged White's play The Season at Sarsaparilla. In 2011 Fred Schepisi's film of The Eye of the Storm was released with screenplay adaptation by Judy Morris, Geoffrey Rush playing the (White-like?) son Basil, Judy Davis as the daughter Dorothy, and Charlotte Rampling as the dying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter.

This is the first screen realisation of a White novel, fittingly the one which played a key role in the Swedish panel's choice of White as Nobel prize winner. Patrick White, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1973's Timeline 1912 Patrick White - Existential Explorer Patrick White The Nobel Prize in Literature 1973 Patrick White by Karin Hansson * Nobel Prize When Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, the Swedish Academy's commendation referred to the author's epic and psychological narrative art as having introduced a new continent into literature. This standpoint may seem surprising now, but at that time it was a generally valid Swedish (and European) perspective - up to then literary criticism had largely ignored post-colonial writing and other new literatures in English. In many non-European countries, however, Patrick White was a well-known name, and he had already won prestigious prizes. His Nobel Literature Prize was the first to be awarded to an Australian, it is true, but the quality of Australian literature in general and of Patrick White’s writing in particular had long been recognized, not only by Australians, but also outside the country.

To White's fellow-countrymen, the Nobel Prize confirmed his status as a major novelist whose fiction had, for more than twenty years, been regarded as an important With the prize-money he created the PATRICK WHITE LITERARY AWARD to encourage the development of Australian literature. The committee has been instructed to give precedence to authors whose writing has not yet received due recognition. Among the winners have been Christina Stead, Randolph Stow, Thea Astley, and Gerald Murnane. A fierce disdain of the commonplace. Copyright © Bonnier Archives European or Australian? It is important to recognize White's conflicting loyalties to Europe and Australia. In many respects the European background and influences are obvious in his writing. After spending his first school years at private schools in New South Wales, he was sent at the age of thirteen, very much against his will, to Cheltenham College in England. There he spent a "four-year prison sentence," according to his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). All the same, after a couple of years as a jackeroo on his uncle's sheep station in Australia, he chose to return to England and Cambridge in order to study modern languages.

He also spent some vacations in Germany and developed a lasting interest in German and French literature. After taking his degree, intent on forging a career for himself as a writer, he settled in London to write novels, plays and poetry. His first novel, Happy Valley (1939) was praised by some British critics, but the next, The Living and the Dead (1941), forced out prematurely because of the impending war, was a failure even according to the writer himself. The same year he received his Royal Air Force posting as an Intelligence Officer in the Middle East and Greece. His experiences in the Western Desert led him to the reading of Australian explorers. Eire's Journal of Expeditions into Central Australia evoked in him "the terrible nostalgia for the desert landscapes," a feeling that was to influence his later novels, above all Voss. His first visit to his native country after the war made him decide to settle in Australia. He was then nearly forty years old. Merging external Australian details with abstractions from his European experience.

Copyright © Australian Tourist Commission Even though all the later novels are wholly or mainly set in Australia, they belong to the European epic tradition insofar as they are inspired by and based on Greek mythology, Judeo-Christian mysticism, C.G. Jung's psychology, and the Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique. White has quite often been compared to the greatest among Russian and French novelists. After his return, external Australian conditions and details merged with abstractions from his European experience. In consequence, tensions both between Europe and Australia and between a "real" and a "symbolic" Australia became significant. There is also an obvious love-hate relationship with the country of his childhood. His disappointment in the materialism and shallowness of what he terms the Great Australian Emptiness, is very marked in the essay "The Prodigal Son" (1958), in which he expresses serious misgivings about the country's future. This attitude also comes to the fore in his writing, and caused many critics to accuse him of elitism and intellectual snobbery.

White's "Australianness" and commitment to the continent are nevertheless generally recognized in the sense that his return brought true colours back to his palette and, in The Aunt's Story (1947), introduced a new style into his canon, initiating novels of depth and dedication. The First Phase The Aunt's Story and The Tree of Man For many reasons, the two novels The Aunt's Story and The Tree of Man can be considered as the initial phase of a novel sequence. Unlike the earlier books, they are concerned with the most fundamental issues of humanity, such as the relationship between madness and sanity, reality and illusion, and the problem of communication in existential matters. For the first time, the idea of movement is structurally and consistently combined with the search for ultimate truth, the quest. Here, as in his later books, the characters are divided into two categories from a spiritual point of view: the living and the dead. The true questers are explicitly heading for salvation or damnation in a religious sense, not merely for an intenser form of life. They are opposed to the materialistic characters, who are rooted in social conventions, dreaming of possessions and gentility.

The Aunt's Story presents the quest of Theodora Goodman, a spinster, "dry, leathery and yellow." She is the first in a series of alienated, humble seekers in search of a true reality behind the appearances of social life. Like Theodora, they are all facing the choice "between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality." Increasingly estranged from ordinary life, she passes through a series of heightened moments of insight and awareness, "epiphanies" to use James Joyce’s term, leading up to final illumination. The question is asked whether spiritual illumination is compatible with the retention of selfhood and mental sanity. Theodora Goodman's ending is characteristically ambiguous. To the world, she appears to be mentally deranged when she is finally led away by Doctor Holstius, whose name hints at a sense of ultimate wholeness. Holstius knows that "lucidity isn't necessarily a perpetual ailment," and he summarises the lesson she has learnt: "You cannot reconcile joy and sorrow. Or flesh and marble, or illusion and reality, or life and death.

For this reason, Theodora Goodman, you must accept." Like all the later questers, she experiences that "for the pure abstract pleasure of knowing, there was a price paid." Searching for the ultimate truth. Copyright © Bonnier Archives The changes in setting between the various parts of the novel are related to the mental development of the protagonist to such an extent that it is unclear whether Theodora’s odyssey carries her across oceans and continents in a physical sense, or whether the whole journey takes place in her troubled mind. There is a significant epigraph from Olive Schreiner for the third part of the novel: "When your life is most real, to me you are mad." The Tree of Man was the first novel to win international acclaim. On the narrative level, it deals with the hardships of a farming couple, Stan and Amy Parker, in New South Wales. The frame is that of the conventional pioneering saga, albeit with biblical overtones and associations. Stan is one of White's characteristic seekers, and his spiritual capacity is set off against Amy's conventional attitudes.

Stan "respected and accepted her mysteries, as she could never respect and accept his." The story contains the typical features of Australia's natural trials and disasters, such as bushfires, drought, and floods, but above all it enacts the psychological drama of Stan's desire to understand the purposes of God, which "are made clear to some old women, and nuns and idiots." The background and aim of the novel are indicated in White's essay "The Prodigal Son": It was the exaltation of the "average" that made me panic most, and in this frame of mind, in spite of myself, I began to conceive another novel. Because the void I had to fill was so immense, I wanted to try to suggest in this book every possible aspect of life, through the lives of an ordinary man and woman. But at the same time I wanted to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry, which alone could make bearable the lives of such people, and incidentally, my own life since my return. So I began to write THE TREE OF MAN.

Like Theodora, just before he dies Stan is granted a moment of illumination and universal harmony, finally understanding that "One, and no other figure is the answer to all sums." The Second Phase Voss, Riders in the Chariot, and The Solid Mandala If the novels of the first phase focus on one single protagonist, those of the second are built up around more than one central character; two, four, and two respectively. All of them are presented as being exceptional, different, puzzling, or even repulsive. In this respect, White's theme is the reverse, namely to show the ordinariness in which man's divinity is contained behind outward exceptionality. The characters are also conscious of their otherness in a way Theodora and Stan were not, and they seem to accept it to the extent that they even seem to take a pride in it. All three books have a dimension of religious mysticism and contain celestial images related to different myths and archetypes: the Comet, the Chariot, the Sun and the Moon. The mandala belongs to the same sphere. In this structural system we find symmetrically grouped principal figures such as the circle, the square, and the cross.

In all three novels, there is a general movement towards a centre representing wholeness, psychological and religious. We also find elements from the mythological beliefs of the Australian aborigines. Voss is based on the story of the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. Like him, Voss intends to cross the Australian continent from east to west with a group of men. The three stages of his quest are represented by coast/city, bush, and interior/desert, respectively. Voss, dominated by willpower, megalomania and egocentricity, has been compared both to Faust and Hitler. The desert, he thinks, will prove a worthy opponent when he wants to demonstrate his superhuman status. Before he sets out he meets Laura Trevelyan, a spinster who makes a strong impression on him. During his journey into the desert he becomes transformed through her telepathic influence as they communicate in dreams and delirious visions. In the end, he is humbled through Christ-like suffering and death. Laura believes that his union with the desert of the interior implies a different kind of victory: "Voss did not die." He is still there, it is said, in the country, and always will be.

"His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who have been troubled by it." Through their shared experience, she too has learnt that "Knowledge was never a matter of geography. Quite the reverse, it overflows all maps that exist. Perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind." A union with the desert of the interior. Copyright © Australian Tourist Commission The epigraph of Riders in the Chariot is taken from William Blake and suggests connections with Ezekiel and Isaiah, the Chariot itself representing God as divine grace as well as destructive terror and judgement. The corresponding Christ-figure in Riders in the Chariot is Himmelfarb, a Jewish refugee from Germany. Like Voss, he is associated with the element of fire. The other illuminati are equally insignificant from a social point of view: Mary Hare, an elderly spinster; Ruth Godbold, a poor and hard-working housewife; and Alf Dubbo, a part-Aboriginal painter. Himmelfarb's death by crucifixion on Good Friday suggests that the capacity for evil in Australian suburbia is comparable to its realisation in Nazi Germany as well as in the Bible.

Alf Dubbo expresses the unity of the four illuminati in his last painting, which represents the chariot of fire. "Their hands, which he painted open, had surrendered their suffering, but not yet received beatitude." The central characters in The Solid Mandala are the elderly twins Arthur and Waldo Brown. Just like Voss and Laura, they are contrary beings, or rather contrasting aspects of the same being, contending but wholly interdependent. In Flaws in the Glass, White claims that the Brown brothers represent his two halves: "Waldo is myself at my coldest and worst." Mentally retarded Arthur, a Christ-figure like Himmelfarb, assumes the burden of suffering, responsibility and guilt to rescue that other part of himself, and when Waldo dies, Arthur proclaims himself guilty and ends up in an asylum. The mystery of failure is a common denominator in the novels of the second, religious, phase. As stated in Voss: "The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming".

Similarly, Riders in the Chariot suggests that "atonement is possible perhaps only where there has been failure." The Third Phase The Vivisector and The Eye of the Storm The fact that almost five years elapsed between The Solid Mandala and The Vivisector indicates a change of emphasis. A single protagonist is at the centre of both novels in the third phase, and they are dominated by the image of the Eye, which is given a multidimensional function. The central character in The Vivisector is Hurtle Duffield, a painter whose artist's eye indicates his special instinct, enabling him to discern truth behind appearances. As the title suggests, the eye is also a knife, an instrument of torture. The artist's fellow-beings must try to protect themselves from "his third eye," used ruthlessly to vivisect vulgarity, pretentiousness and falsity. One of his paintings represents the Mad Eye, signifying God as artist, vivisector and opponent. The dual aspect, creation and destruction, the artist as torturer and victim, divine truth as the goal of human will, and human will as subordinate to inevitability, pervades the whole novel.

Causing his victims to suffer through his vivisecting eye, the artist must also suffer, but to an even greater extent. Before he reaches illumination, typically through humiliation, his partiality to comparing the artist to God corresponds to Voss's blasphemous belief in his own divine capacity. Like the explorer, the artist approaches divinity only by becoming human. Patrick White at his home in Centennial Park, Sydney. The house figures in "The Eye of the Storm". Photo: Ingmar Björkstén, 1973 In The Eye of the Storm, the central character is Elizabeth Hunter, a dying old woman who is almost blind. She is greedy and cruel, and all her life she has consumed others. The title refers to a climactic moment in her life when she was left alone on an island and was caught in a tropical cyclone. The experience implied suffering and humiliation, closeness to death, but also a moment of incredible grace and stillness. Her dying implies a renewed search for that moment of grace, and her deathbed becomes the still centre in all the emotional storms that surround her.

To her, as to Hurtle Duffield, the eye comes to stand for the core of reality, the centre of our true existence inside all the layers of appearance. In the end, both protagonists become obedient instruments of the Divine Eye. Their will is wholly concentrated on reaching the eye of truth and infinity, a process that ultimately implies the destruction of that same will. They both make the act of dying a work of art, and the two novels end on a positive note by combining the fundamentally human aspect with the concept of divinity. The eye stands for the core of reality. The Last Phase A Fringe of Leaves and The Twyborn Affair The two books representing the last phase deal with the efforts of the central characters to achieve self-discovery. But neither arrives at the kind of illumination that was typical of the earlier books. The religious dimension is toned down in favour of social and psychological ones, and the imagery is less complex. A Fringe of Leaves is a historical novel in the sense that the story of its heroine, Ellen Roxburgh, is based on that of Eliza Fraser, who in 1836 was shipwrecked on a reef off the Queensland coast.

She was the only survivor and spent six months, totally naked, with the aboriginal tribe that saved her. In the novel, the idea of nakedness suggested by the title is related to the general message. To the very last, Ellen Roxburgh defends her fringe of leaves, her "gesture to propriety." She does not, like Voss, become part of the Australian continent in a dying vision of the Southern Cross. Nor does she experience the blessing of sea, sky and land in the way Elizabeth Hunter did. Her return to England suggests that she is withdrawing, physically and spiritually, that she lacks the strength to go to such extremes as White's true questers do. In the earlier novels the themes of homosexuality and transvestism are touched upon only incidentally. In The Twyborn Affair they come into focus for the first time. The central character, Eddie/Eudoxia/Eadith Twyborn, has a male body and a female consciousness, and in his search for identity he uses various external disguises, which keep even the reader in the dark. In one section he appears as the young wartime hero, in another he/she assumes the part of Mrs. Trist, the keeper of a fashionable London brothel.

He fails to find fulfilment and true sexual identity either as a man or as a woman, but learns to value friendship and the importance of recognising the woman in man and the man in woman. The novel can be read as an enquiry into bisexuality, and sees androgyny as a symbol of wholeness. An Existential Pessimist Taken together, Patrick White's novels express no specific orthodoxy or conviction concerning existential, mystical or psychological matters, even though it is obvious that he has been inspired by Judeo-Christian mysticism and the philosophies of Eckhart, Schopenhauer, Jung, Buber, and Blake among others. In Voss, for instance, there is a fusion between the more traditional Christian and Dantean aspects, the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart, and the mythological beliefs of the Australian aborigines in a way that is typical of White's literary technique. In other books, too, we find layers of significance in which White uses various Australian associations combined with archetypal or literary European ones.

His attitude is pessimistic in the sense that his successful questers are described as innocent simpletons, isolated or alienated, physically or mentally handicapped, whose final insight is achieved only through ordeals and humiliation. As figures like Voss and Hurtle Duffield show, the explorer/artist is necessarily a sufferer who, in his search for truth, causes others to suffer too. White, like his protagonists, asks himself: "Am I a destroyer, this face in the glass, which has spent a lifetime searching for what it believes, but can never prove, the truth? A face consumed by wondering whether truth can be the worst destroyer of all." A face consumed by wondering. Photo: William Yang Australia as the country of the mind exemplifies White's belief that "the state of simplicity and humanity is the only desirable one for artist or for man. While to reach it may be impossible, to attempt to do so is imperative." In his vocabulary "knowledge" is always unintellectual, irrational and intuitive. It refers to things you "do not know, but know", to use a wording which, with slight variations, occurs in all his books.

He is scornful and sarcastic about the complacent attitudes in those who are satisfied with spiritually limited horizons, those who show no interest in "the mystery and poetry" beyond the Great Australian Emptiness. All his novels demonstrate how will-power, permanence, possessions and safety must be sacrificed. A journey of exploration is always a painful and solitary business through "that solitary land of the individual experience, in which no fellow footfall is ever heard", as it says in the first epigraph in The Aunt's Story. In this division into "the living and the dead", we are given to understand that there is no rational explanation of why some are granted the experience of unity and illumination, although it becomes obvious that they have a special relationship with the landscape. Thus the desert is said to belong to Voss merely "by right of vision." In many contexts there is a logical but unresolved tension between the spiritual seeker and the surrounding society. The recurring notions of suffering and loss of self-will indicate that the state in which his questers live is not compatible with an ordinary social existence. Without exception they are described as socially inhibited because of their otherness and the power of their individual vision.

An effect of paradoxical elitism is achieved when their outward inferiority and spiritual superiority is portrayed against the background of mental mediocrity and materialism. Voss's (and White's) Australia is a country of infinite distances, unimaginable age and mystery, and the grandeur of this mental landscape is set off against the complacent mediocrity of the masses huddled in the coastal cities. The reason why Patrick White has frequently been accused of elitism seems to be his fierce disdain of the commonplace, his horror of the average, and his contempt for the materialist attitudes of mundane suburbia that are manifest in all his writing. The desert not only assumes the unexpected and unusual nostalgic quality previously mentioned, but at the same time retains its archetypal apocalyptic and daemonic properties. Traditionally a place where deep truths are revealed, it is at the same time a place of suffering and hardship. The enormous distances are used to illustrate the discrepancies between "aspiration and human nature" or between "earthbound flesh and aspiring spirit." A mental exploration of the wilderness. Copyright © Australian Tourist Commission The desert in the centre of the Australian continent, conveniently shaped like a human heart, becomes the Interior with all its interpretative possibilities.

The notion of mental exploration is linked with geographical imagery, particularly that of the desert/wilderness. Theodora Goodman becomes a timeless explorer in the wake of Odysseus, and the fact that Stan Parker is named after Stanley, the explorer becomes significant in the context.

Voss travels into the desert in Leichhardt’s footsteps and Himmelfarb, too, becomes a desert explorer in his last vision of a journey where "whole deserts were crossed." Towards the end of his life Hurtle Duffield, the painter, has to reassess what had up till then been the basis of his credo, and to face "the vastest desert he had ever set out to cross: not the faintest mirage to offer illusory solace." Even the old woman's death-bed in The Eye of the Storm is a symbolic desert in which she spent years "lying on this mattress of warm moist sand." Finally her desert, too, takes on its apocalyptic aspects, and she is granted "some miraculous dispensation to feel sand benign and soft between the toes." At last she herself becomes part of "this endlessness." Himmelfarb's death takes place in Sarsaparilla, White's hellish suburbia, which represents another kind of desert, "the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions", the recurrent target of White's satire. The ultimate paradox is his pessimism as to the possibility of communicating what a single person can perceive.

Photo: Ingmar Björkstén, 1973 To be able to appreciate Patrick White's consistent but complex structures and imagery the reader must be prepared to enter his symbolic Australia with the open-minded attitude of the explorer or the child. He or she must not demand verisimilitude or logical argumentation, as this is a territory that is usually reserved for poetry. The author's methods resemble those of a poet, musician or painter. In spite of the fact that White has an idealistic and passionate belief in the power of art and literature to change the world, he claims that he writes only for himself and has "never thought about readership." The ultimate paradox offered by this paradoxical writer is his pessimism as to the possibility of communicating what any single individual can perceive within his own experience. To thousands of readers, his writing is an entity which consistently explores and communicates his perception of reality. For them, it contradicts the view he expressed above. Publication of this essay has been made possible through the coordination and assistance of Anders Hallengren. * Karin Hansson (b. 1937) taught English and Swedish at secondary school level before starting her doctoral studies at Lund University.

After completing her doctoral thesis, The Warped Universe: A Study of Imagery and Structure in Seven Novels by Patrick White, 1984, she worked as a teacher and researcher at Lund University and since 1991 at Blekinge Institute of Technology. She was appointed professor of English literature in 1998. She has published literary studies and books, particularly in the field of postcolonial literature, for example Sheer Edge: Aspects of Identity in David Malouf's Writing, 1991, and The Unstable Manifold: Janet Frame's Challenge to Determinism, 1996. She has been a member of the board of EASA (European Association for Studies on Australia). In 1997 she organized a conference on Joseph Conrad and edited the proceedings Journeys, Myths and 1998.

First published 29 August 2001 Share this: To cite this page Patrick White - Nobel Prize in Literature, 1973 (15 books) (download torrent) - TPB Get this torrent (Problems with magnets links are fixed by upgrading your torrent client !) PATRICK WHITE (1912-1990) was an English-born Australian novelist, poet and playwright who, in 1973, was the first (and so far only) Australian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature." The author of more than a dozen novels, White was the first writer with Australian roots to be widely read abroad and was vastly more popular in the United States and England than among his countrymen. His fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative vantage points and a stream of consciousness technique. In his often unflattering examination of Australia and its people and history, White addressed something far more universal: modern man's loneliness, isolation and emptiness. He used mystical symbolism and a hypnotic style to convey the suffering of his characters, and various critics compared him to Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway and Melville.

White's earliest notable work is THE AUNT'S STORY (1948), a portrayal imbued with remarkable feeling of a lonely, unmarried, Australian woman's life during experiences that extend also to Europe and America. THE TREE OF MAN (1955), an epically broad and psychologically discerning account of a part of Australian social development in the form of two people's long life together, and struggle against outward and inward difficulties, secured his international literary reputation. Another aspect of Australia is revealed in VOSS (1957), in which a fanatical explorer in the country's interior meets his fate: an intensive character study against the background of the fascinating Australian wilds. RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT (1961) is a sacrificial drama, tense, yet with an everyday setting, in the midst of current Australian reality. From contrasting viewpoints, THE SOLID MANDALA (1966) gives a double portrait of two brothers, in which the sterilely rational brother is set against the fertilely intuitive one, who is almost a fool in the eyes of the world.

THE VIVISECTOR (1970) is the imaginary biography of an artist, in which a whole life is disclosed in a relentless scrutiny of motives and springs of action: an artist's untiring battle to express the utmost while sacrificing both himself and his fellow-beings in the attempt. THE EYE OF THE STORM (1973) places an old, dying woman in the centre of a narrative which revolves round, and encloses, the whole of her environment, past and present, until we have come to share an entire life panorama, in which everyone is on a decisive dramatic footing with the old lady. THE TWYBORN AFFAIR (1979) charts the transmigration of a soul through three different identities and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but White requested that it be removed to make way for the work of younger and more deserving writers. In 1981, White published an autobiography, FLAWS IN THE GLASS, which explored issues about which he had publicly said little, such as his homosexuality, and his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize personally. This torrent includes all but one of White's novels and novellas, plus his autobiography and two collections of short stories.

The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise indicated: == Novels == * THE AUNT'S STORY (Vintage, 1994) * THE EYE OF THE STORM (Vintage, 1995) * A FRINGE OF LEAVES (Vintage, 1997) * THE HANGING GARDEN (Picador, 2012). With an Afterword by David Marr. * HAPPY VALLEY (Text Publishing, 2012) * MEMOIRS OF MANY IN ONE (Viking, 1986) -- PDF * RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT (Vintage, 1996) * THE SOLID MANDALA (Vintage, 1995) * THE TREE OF MAN (Vintage, 1994) * THE TWYBORN AFFAIR (Vintage, 1995) * THE VIVISECTOR (Penguin Classics, 2008). With an Introduction by J. M. Coetzee.

* VOSS (Vintage, 1994) == Short Stories == * CHOICES & CHANCES: Three Short Stories (Amazon, 2012) * THE COCKATOOS: Stories (Viking, 1975) -- PDF == Autobiography == * FLAWS IN THE GLASS: A Self-Portrait (Viking, 1982) -- PDF _____________________________________________________________________________ >> CONTACT ME You may reach me with comments, suggestions, requests, error reports, etc., at TPB's forum, SuprBay (you will need to register an account): >> PLEASE HELP TO SEED! If you like these books and want others to have access to them, please consider seeding for as long as you can. The more you seed, the longer the torrent will live, and the easier it will be for me to upload new content. Thank you!

Honour roll - Australian of the Year Awards Australian of the Year Awards 28 May 1912 — 30 September 1990 State: New South Wales Australian of the Year 1973 Patrick White Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Reclusive Australian author Patrick White was born in Sydney and studied literature at Cambridge University in the early 1930s. He served as an intelligence officer during World War Two and met his life partner Manoly Lascaris in Greece, with whom he returned to Australia after the war. White’s early novels attracted more praise overseas than in Australia, but he persevered and won the Miles Franklin Award for his fifth novel Voss (1957) and again for Ride the Chariot (1961). In 1973 he was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, ‘for an epic and psychological narrative art, which has introduced a new continent into literature.’ White was surprised by the positive Australian reaction to his Nobel Prize, but he was ambivalent about the honour bestowed by the Australia Day Council.

In his acceptance speech he explained that ‘Australia Day is for me a day of self-searching rather than trumpet blowing.’ The Eye of the Storm – review | Film | The Guardian The Eye of the Storm – review Reading on mobile? See the trailer here The cantankerous, complex, gay Patrick White published his lengthy The Eye of the Storm in 1973, the year he became the first (and still the only) Australian to win the Nobel prize for literature. Adapted by Judy Morris, it's the first major film based on a White novel, and clearly a labour of love for Fred Schepisi, whose first Australian movie this is since A Cry in the Dark, his underrated movie about the Lindy Chamberlain case , an event that touched on various themes of place and national identity that are to be found in White. It's the story of a rich, egocentric old matriarch, Elizabeth Hunter (Charlotte Rampling) and her two expatriate children, Sir Basil (Geoffrey Rush), an actor living in London, and daughter Dorothy (Judy Davis), a divorced French princess living in Paris, who returns to inherit her wealth.

Both are in need of money and in thrall to the famous "cultural cringe" that has made all things British and European seem superior to their own culture. Neither will ever get over the way this beautiful, cold, promiscuous woman has denied them her love and constantly humiliated them. Shakespeare's King Lear (one of Sir Basil's key roles) hangs over the film, and in one of the numerous flashbacks Elizabeth has an epiphany that echoes the storm scene in Lear. It's a chilly, cruel film about characters that are difficult to like or warm to, and it obviously means a great deal to a country that for so long rejected its greatest writer. The performances are excellent and it's photographed with great sensitivity by Ian Baker who has lit all but one of Schepisi's films since his debut with The Devil's Playground in 1976. Patrick White, Australian Writer Who Won a Nobel, Is Dead at 78 - NYTimes.com Patrick White, Australian Writer Who Won a Nobel, Is Dead at 78 By ROBERT D.

McFADDEN Published: October 1, 1990 Patrick White, the Australian novelist who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature and international acclaim as a harsh but authentic voice of his homeland, died at his residence near Sydney yesterday after an illness of several weeks. He was 78 years old. The cause of his death was not announced. The author of more than a dozen novels, as well as short stories, poetry, several plays and an autobiography, Mr. White drew unflattering portraits of Australia and was vastly more popular in the United States and England than among his countrymen. But he was the first writer with Australian roots to be widely read abroad and the only Australian writer ever selected for the Nobel Prize. He won it for a range of his work, including, ''The Eye of the Storm,'' a tale of the last days of an elderly dowager whose greedy relatives gather to await her demise. Greene and Nabokov on List The Swedish Academy, selecting Mr.

White from a list that included Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov and Andre Malraux, called his work ''an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature.'' It said he had ''given the continent of Australia an authentic voice that carries across the world.'' The international literary reputation of Mr. White, whose first novel, ''Happy Valley,'' won the Australian Literature Society's gold medal in 1939, was secured in 1955 with the appearance of ''The Tree of Man,'' the story of a farmer and his wife struggling to find a future in Australia's outback. ''The Tree of Man'' and most of Mr. White's other major works have been published in the United States by Penguin. His best-known novels were ''Voss'' (1957), ''Riders in the Chariot'' (1962), ''A Fringe of Leaves'' (1976) and ''The Twyborn Affair'' (1979). His plays included ''Big Toys'' (1977), ''Signal Driver'' (1982) and ''Netherwood'' (1983).

His autobiography, ''Flaws in the Glass,'' was published in 1981. In his examination of Australia and its people and history, Mr. White, many critics said, seemed to be addressing something far more universal: modern man's loneliness, isolation and emptiness. He often used mystical symbolism and a hypnotic style to convey the suffering of his characters, and various critics compared him to James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and Herman Melville. Origins and Burden Referring to his relationship with his homeland in a rare interview a few years ago, Mr. White said: ''It's the country of my origins - that, I think, is what matters in the end, whether one likes it or not. Certainly, I had to experience the outside world and would have felt deprived if I didn't have that behind me. But it's from the Australian earth, Australian air, that I derive my literary, my spiritual, sustenance. Even at its most hateful, Australia is necessary to me.'' A tall, craggy, uncompromising man with deep-set dark eyes, Mr.

White, who once called the British royal family ''goons'' and was a scathing critic of Australia's policies toward its aborigines, was the fourth-generation son of Australian sheep ranchers. Born in London on May 28, 1912, on one of his parents' periodic trips to Britain, he spent most of his boyhood in Australia, but returned to England to study languages at Cambridge University and joined the Royal Air Force in World War II, serving as an intelligence officer in the Middle East. He returned to Sydney after the war and resumed writing. As part of his protest against Australia's treatment of aborigines, Mr. White had no work published or performed in 1988 during Australia's celebrations of the 200th anniversary of white settlement. Mr. White never married. For the last 45 years, he lived with a male companion, Manoly Lascaris. Pearsond(Penguin) Photo: Patrick White (Camera Press, 1973)

Question: In 1973, Patrick White became the first Australian to win a Nobel Prize in what?
Answer: Literature