Patrick White’s dark influence on Elizabeth Harrower could have deprived us of a great female novelist
Patrick White is the only Australian to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature – but did the controlling and bullying behaviour of this literary giant deprive us all of a great female novelist?
Every Sunday morning for decades, Patrick White picked up the phone in his Centennial Park mansion, dialled a number across Sydney Harbour and settled in for a chat. Australia’s greatest living novelist was happy to talk food and swap recipes with the woman on the end of the line, but he had another message for Elizabeth Harrower – and he was relentless in its delivery.
Why, he wanted to know, was Harrower not writing? Why had she turned her back on her career after the great critical success of her 1966 novel The Watch Tower? Why had she dumped her next novel, In Certain Circles, on the eve of its publication in 1971? Why had she allowed herself to be distracted by the demands of friends?
The Nobel prize-winner was Harrower’s greatest advocate but over a 30-year friendship, White berated and abused Harrower, indeed “hated” her for her failure to continue writing. None of it worked. The woman whom critics rated alongside White in the list of 20th-century Australian authors did not write again after the writer’s block that engulfed her in her forties.
Now, 50 years later, there is evidence White was at least partly to blame for Harrower’s literary paralysis. In an unpublished memoir, revealed for the first time in my new biography of her, Harrower offers an intimate look at her relationship with the man whose “attacks and counter attacks went on for years”.
She loved White, some 16 years her senior ; she treasured his gifts and their conversations, and was proud he singled her out for support. Yet the memoir’s 33 foolscap pages, written in 1991-92 but until now buried in her personal files, reveal her confusion over White’s behaviour and his “bullying”, and raise the question: Did Patrick White rob Australians of the novels Elizabeth Harrower should have written?
The mystery of why Harrower stopped writing in the 1970s, at the peak of her powers, bewildered friends and supporters at the time and intrigued readers and critics when her novels were republished decades later. Her books – Down in the City (1957), The Long Prospect (1958), The Catherine Wheel (1960) and The Watch Tower (1966) – attracted a new generation of fans when Text Publishing re-released them between 2012 and 2014.
In 2015, when Harrower agreed that the “lost novel” – In Certain Circles – could be published for the first time, it was a literary sensation. By then in her mid-eighties, she was delighted by the attention and media interest. But questioned about why she pulled up stumps in the 1970s, she could not offer a satisfactory explanation. Sometimes she told interviewers she was miffed when The Watch Tower missed out on the 1966 Miles Franklin Award for the best Australian novel of the year. Sometimes she hinted that friends had demanded too much of her time 50 years earlier. Sometimes she confessed she didn’t really know. And sometimes she said simply that “Patrick would have been disappointed” at the quality of the work she was producing at that stage.
Elizabeth Harrower knew a great deal about White well before her friend, writer Kylie Tennant, introduced them in Australia in 1964. In those years, in the tight, almost claustrophobic literary circles in Sydney, it was impossible not to feel the influence of White, who had returned with his partner, Manoly Lascaris, after several years in London. White was changing Australian writing – away from the dominant social realism form to a more lyrical prose style. He was controversial, and his reworking of the traditional stories of a pioneering culture was being noticed by an international audience.
Harrower had been a fan since reading his 1955 novel The Tree of Man. She was living in London at the time – determined to be a writer, despite having just qualified to study psychology at the University of London. In Sydney, her devoted mother Margaret joined the queue and got White’s signature on a copy of the novel for her daughter. When it arrived in Harrower’s Lancaster Gate flat, the young woman considered it “marvellous” and was thrilled that an Australian writer was praised in the British press.
It was a public recognition that Harrower herself missed out on in London.
The expat who left Australia in 1951 had written three excellent novels by the time she was 31, but by 1959 she was back in Sydney hoping for more support in a smaller pool. It proved a good move. Harrower reviewed books for the Sydney Morning Herald, joined the local branch of the international writers’ association PEN, and met some of the leading writers and artists of the day: Sidney and Cynthia Nolan, Tennant, Judah Waten, Max Harris and, of course, Patrick White.
By January 2, 1965, Harrower was seated at White’s table in the home he shared with Lascaris in Martin Road, Centennial Park. We know that precise date because she recorded it repeatedly in her calendar diaries over decades – a mark of how highly she valued the start of an enduring friendship. It was the first of many shared lunches and dinners, often at Harrower’s homes on Sydney’s north shore.
“During the ’60s we had regular dinners to and fro, meeting friends, acquaintances, overseas visitors … He [Patrick] and Manoly were good guests and arrived sometimes, it seemed to me, spruce and brushed and curious and eager to know more about everyone who was there,” Harrower noted in the memoir.
White was a seriously good cook and Harrower recalled the effort he put into dinner parties, when he would disappear into the kitchen while everyone else was having drinks, then emerge “bearing a tureen, a platter or deep dish”. He would be “concentrated, pale, perspiration in the hollows under his eyes”.
White’s meals were legendary, as were rumours that the conversations at Martin Road could become heated. Harrower, who wrote her memoir partly in response to David Marr’s landmark 1991 biography of White, had different recollections. “Because there is more drama and amusement and shock value in broken friendships, insults and quarrels, [and] dinners where all ended in chaos, these seemed to receive more attention in the biography than might have been warranted by the real life of Patrick,” she wrote. “Out of the scores of dinners and lunches over 25, 26 years, I remember exactly one where a guest cried and went home.”
Sometimes the guest list at Martin Road was long, but at other times Harrower was among a select group. White did not go to Stockholm in 1973 when his Nobel prize for Literature was announced, but the following year in March, when the Swedish ambassador and his wife travelled from Canberra to present the medal and diploma, there was a dinner for eight at the Centennial Park home. Harrower was there – an indication of White’s recognition of her personal and professional importance.
There was much more to their friendship, too. White took Harrower to restaurants and included her in big events. They saw plays and films. In October 1973, they were together at the weekend party celebrating the opening of the Sydney Opera House.
He was solicitous, constantly recommending medical practitioners and health workers (not long before he died in 1990, and ailing himself, he put her in touch with a masseuse). At one time when Harrower was looking for a rental, he mailed her screeds of real-estate ads with suitable flats circled in green pencil. Always they talked books – although not their own – and swapped their latest literary discoveries. She gave him Out of Africa; he told her to read Flannery O’Connor’s extraordinary short stories.
In her memoir she recalled: “We would both hear the old popular songs on [the ABC’s] Sentimental Journey and feel nostalgic and melancholy, and we’d tell each other of performances seen in London or Sydney, wherever, long ago … On a good day, and there were many, we were both very good, even ideal, listeners and ‘responders’.”
There were acts of kindness from the man who had a reputation as somewhat curmudgeonly. On one occasion, when she was unwell, White arrived in a taxi bearing food and the gift of a small antique gold brooch, called “the solid mandala” – a reference to his 1966 novel of that name.
“On a good day,” Harrower wrote, “he was very fond of me.”
Every Christmas morning for years Harrower and her cousin Margaret drove to White’s home to exchange presents: “He gave me a chunk of boulder opal, a heavy blue linen sunshade from Italy, a pottery Chinese teapot, many books, my kitchen table and six stools, a David Rose print of Bateau Bay, and one by Sally McInerney.” Elizabeth gave Patrick and Manoly ties, a cashmere scarf, bath towels and a marble rolling pin, among other gifts.
She treasured a book the writer gave her in 1986 even though the inscription was yet again a reminder of his anger at her writer’s block. “To Elizabeth, luncher & diner extraordinaire,” the author wrote. “Shame you don’t WRITE.”
She told friends he was like a brother, and wrote that he was “like a playmate”.
They had great conversations: “Patrick liked to hear things, stories, idle thoughts that almost no one else would have heard with the right attention. … [He] became to me over time like a relative, a good, close friend, someone who knew most things about me, recent and distant, and someone who was interested in the detail of my life, and who wished me well for my own sake. I confided in him, and he told me how he was thinking and feeling – as we both undoubtedly confided in other close friends.”
He was “a very important figure in my life. Indeed. A lovable man. An infuriating, unreasonable man. An endearing man. A terrible man. A many-faceted man. I am miserable sometimes that he’s not here … It was certainly not a bland friendship, not calm and polite and dead. We sometimes shouted – he would start it of course ... there were days when we bored and irritated each other”.
Harrower’s decision to record her memories was prompted at least in part by her unhappiness at Marr’s depiction of her in his White biography. She thought the work did not entirely capture the texture of her relationship with the man who had welcomed her into his inner circle. She was “mildly fed up” because Marr wrote that she was “devoted” to the novelist, a description she felt downgraded their relationship. It was as if, she wrote, Marr believed “the friendship was all on my side”.
There was undoubtedly a power imbalance between the two writers, but the same could be said of most of White’s friendships. He was an intimidating presence to many. Harrower recalled: “Patrick detested ‘warm’ people, the word ‘warm’ as applied to people ... he was somehow thin, washed, clean, concentrated, even pure.”
Elizabeth, too, had been awe-struck when they first met. But over time she came to understand his contrary nature, his reputation for verbal cruelty and argument as well as his kindness. After White’s death, she told the writer Shirley Hazzard: “Of course, he was infuriating and hurtful and said many non-wonderful things about everyone, but equally he was extremely loveable, kind and funny ...”
In the 1970s, she told her friend Cynthia Nolan that she was not at all “afraid” of White. Indeed, he could be encouraging. When Harrower was awarded a Literature Board grant in 1974 but was struggling to write, she told White: “If I’d just written a wonderful book, I’d feel it was justified.” He told her: “You might write a wonderful book.”
At other times, her friend was controlling: “He seemed to want to incarcerate or quarantine me, perhaps misguidedly imagining that a life totally devoid of diversions, company, new experiences would prompt me to write. He should have known better. I was no more responsive to bullying than he was. So, this was a dark strand in our friendship …
“Simultaneously this sometimes (unwisely) perverse and multi-faceted man urged me to write, berated me for not writing, hated me for not writing, was mean to me because I wasn’t writing, abused me because I wasn’t writing, told me I was an artist, not a social worker (when I indeed unwisely spent time helping distressed friends and acquaintances like an unpaid welfare worker), told me he was depressed when he thought I wasn’t writing, told me he’d thought of four books for me to write...”
He was, she wrote, “sometimes simply atrocious – irritating, unreasonable, irrational, damaging, patronising, hurtful, infuriating...”
And at times there was more than just bad temper ; at times White’s behaviour amounted to what we would now call coercive control.
“There were times when unquestionably Patrick was destructive,” she wrote in the memoir. “He seemed to get an unpleasant shock and to want to needle me if my name appeared in print. He was outraged if someone wanted to interview me.
“He was sarcastic about invitations to any literary occasions. Somewhat artlessly, I used to tell him what was happening … It took much repetition, many shouted conversations and on my part, extremely aggrieved and baffled analysis of his behaviour before I could accept what seemed to be the truth of these outbursts.
“He hated me to receive attention. He hated me to praise other people, unless perhaps they were dead artists, or living artists not personally known to either of us.”
Harrower was forgiving – up to a point – because White had had an “indulged and self-indulgent youth”. Even so, “I thought his seeming to grudge me – a person whose life had been far different – was unworthy and incomprehensible … If he cared about me, he was right to mind, right to regret my silence, and at some level I felt grateful for it, but his way of displaying concern was alienating, lowered my spirits ultimately and hurt me.”
But did White stop her writing? Were his expectations too much for her?
The poet and novelist David Malouf thinks not. He knew White and Harrower well over many decades and believed that while White’s opinion mattered a great deal to Harrower, she deliberately drew a line under her novels and stopping writing – and she was comfortable with that decision.
Malouf told me: “In the time that I knew her, she was really quite certain that the books [her first four] she had already published constituted a body of work that was cohesive and original, and very much that the books belonged to one another.
“At that time [the 1970s] she couldn’t see that anything she wrote would amplify them in any way. Of course, she could write ... and if you’re a writer who’s had a lot of practice, as she had, you can always go on writing another book or stories or whatever. But I think it’s up to you to decide whether they would be done at the same level as the books you’ve already published, and if what you wrote would add to what is written, and in some way amplify it. She thought not, and I had huge respect for that.”
White was not the only writer with whom Harrower had complex friendships that were simultaneously enriching and draining in the decades when, arguably, she could have been, should have been, producing more books. Hazzard and Tennant were among those who played a part in Harrower’s complicated relationship with her typewriter, affecting her happiness and eating into time she had for writing.
White’s role in Harrower’s “writer’s block” has until now not been examined – he was always seen as a friend and supporter – and he was advocating for her to win the Miles Franklin in 1966 and constantly encouraging her. Yet the newly discovered memoir Harrower wrote shortly after White’s death reveals a more complex, darker friendship that affected her deeply at times.
Even so, some who saw them over the years felt Harrower had White’s measure and was well able to manage his “bullying”.
David Marr, for example, wrote about her again in his collection Patrick White Letters (1994), saying: “Harrower knew not to be possessive. Her cool intimacy with PW was unclouded to the end.”
Theirs was undoubtedly a strong connection. At the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week in 2017, three years before her death, the 89-year-old Harrower told the audience: “We just liked each other ... I loved him, he loved me. We were really, really true friends.”
Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of Elizabeth Harrower by Helen Trinca (La Trobe University Press) is out on July 15
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