The Hanging Garden by Patrick White

Author:Patrick White
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Afterword

A Note on The Hanging Garden

DAVID MARR

Patrick White took one last look at Flaws in the Glass on the Australia Day holiday in January 1981 and posted the ‘self portrait’ to his publishers in London the next day. Hours later he began work on The Hanging Garden. As he had so often before, White would cope with the agony of waiting for his publisher’s verdict by plunging into the next book.

‘I have another novel coming along hot and strong in my head,’ he told the critic James Stern after Christmas. Friends who heard the news in those weeks worried White was working to the point of exhaustion. He had been so ill in December he feared he would die, and there had then been terrible storms in the house on Centennial Park when his partner, Manoly Lascaris, read the scathing portrait of his family in Flaws in the Glass. But White told the stage designer Desmond Digby he had no time to holiday. ‘He’s got to get this other novel off his chest straightaway.’

White wrote steadily through February. By happy accident, Flaws in the Glass was taking a long time to reach Jonathan Cape. On 20 February, Digby noted White was ‘pleased with start of new novel’. There is no sign White was ever anything but pleased with his work on the book. When his writing was going badly, he would moan about it freely to friends and publishers. He had abandoned two novels in the 1960s after tearing them to shreds in his letters. There was none of that with The Hanging Garden. Trouble lay elsewhere.

He was old; his health was failing; he was seized with a missionary zeal to save the world from nuclear catastrophe and Australia from its Tory government – and he was falling once more under the spell of Jim Sharman. The young genius behind The Rocky Horror Picture Show and a string of hit musicals on the international stage had returned to Australia in the 1970s and revived White’s plays to great acclaim. A deeply grateful White dedicated The Twyborn Affair to Sharman. Now Sharman was to direct the Adelaide Festival and asked White for a play. Time was short. White resisted for weeks but by early March he was at work on both the novel and a play. He told the critic Jim Waites: ‘I had an idea for one but had never written it, as I didn’t feel anyone would be interested.’ The play was Signal Driver.

In the crowded weeks that followed, White divided his time between the two projects. A telegram on 10 March delivered Cape’s enthusiastic verdict on his memoirs, but many battles with his publishers followed to defend the sharp edge of his attacks on political and personal enemies. He was intransigent. In that same spirit he broke an old rule and appeared on television to condemn the political stagnation of his country. He was inundated afterwards with letters of support and pleas for help. With pride and exasperation

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