Ruth’s Perfect Boy

Only two months from death, Patrick White finished reading the manuscript of David Marr’s quite brilliant account of his life with the observation, “I think this book should be called ‘The Monster of All Time’.” It says much of the subject, the biographer and the life, that out of the 650 pages he identified twenty-five errors of detail and otherwise left it untouched. That monster would have been 100 on May 28.

He has been labelled a High Modernist equivalent of Henry Lawson; even Australia’s Henry James. He was certainly influenced by those he read—D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce among them—but he was a one-off. Our first Nobel laureate for literature and one of the most complex, combustible, fascinating, flawed figures to have put pen to paper, the life and work of Patrick White is a colossal subject and any appreciation can only skate and dip.

Patrick Victor Martindale White was the elder child and only son of Victor Martindale White (always “Dick”) and Ruth Withycombe. His…