EILEEN BATTERSBYponders novelist Patrick White to artist Sidney Nolan
HUMANS WAGE WARS but few arguments are as vicious as the ones that occur between friends; the more intense the bond, the uglier the conflict. The acrimony into which former pals, writer Patrick White and his banished friend, artist Sidney Nolan descended acquired notoriety, doubtless because they had been so close. And while the naturally sociable Nolan, was by nature approachable – if only because his wife Cynthia stage-managed their lives so well, keeping everyone at a distance so discreet most barely noticed – White, a sickly child stricken by the asthma that would dominate his life, disliked most people, especially himself.
The two men, aside from being Australian and artists, were utterly dissimilar. The dog-loving White had been born into a wealthy family that moved between England and Australia; his dazzling, snobbish mother always indulging her pretensions. Ruth White was so rich that she dared openly express that she “badly wanted a genius for a son.”
She got one who would deftly lampoon her as the glamorously grotesque Elizabeth Hunter in his novel The Eye of the Storm (1973). White had been educated in England so that when he returned home to Australia after 14 years away he felt a complete outsider. Yet he would later admit to having made the disturbing discovery of realising how Australian he actually was.
His first love was the theatre. Luckily for literature he couldn’t act. White’s imagination was highly theatrical and the best of his characters are not only intriguing creations, they gave great performances. He also loved art, and as a collector frequented galleries. This interest drew him to the two exhibitions of Sidney Nolan’s great Outback paintings; the first show in March 1949, the second exactly a year later.
Nolan had physically probed the heart of the Australian desert; he had read the diaries of the doomed explorers and had travelled to the goldmines and sheep stations. White had seen none of this, but he experienced it through Nolan’s art and approached him about doing the cover for one of his early masterpieces, Voss (1957). Their amity lasted two decades.
Nolan, five years younger, was the son of a tram driver and illegal bookmaker. He grew up in a rough Melbourne suburb of football and minor crime. People liked him. He had resilience and in Cynthia, the ideal wife. Patrick White, who always believed that his homosexuality provided him with the insights vital to a great writer, took to the couple and also asked Nolan to create a jacket for Riders in the Chariot (1961). The fellowship flourished to the extent that when White was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973 – the first Australian to be honoured – the Nolans were despatched to Stockholm to collect it.
Three years earlier White had published a magnificently brutal novel about the human price of artistic genius, The Vivisector. Cynthia’s suicide in 1976 turned White against Nolan.
The feud remained bitter. White died, aged 78, in 1990. Monday, May 28th, marks the centenary of a singular, if tormented writer.