'My mss are destroyed'

Marie-Louise Ayres

I can’t let you have my ‘papers’ because I don’t keep any. My mss are destroyed as soon as the books are printed.
I put very little into notebooks, don’t keep my friends’ letters … and anything unfinished when I die is to be burnt. The final versions of my books are what I want people to see …

It seems certain that by 1977 White had burnt many priceless documents, including manuscript and typescript versions of his great novels The Aunt’s Story (1948), The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961), The Solid Mandala (1966) and The Eye of the Storm (1973). There are no manuscripts for his first two novels, nor for The Twyborn Affair, which was in preparation at the time of George Chandler’s letter, and which was published in 1979. We have no manuscripts of plays written before 1981.

But this does not mean White left no prepublication record of these or other works. In his reply to Chandler’s letter enquiring whether he would consider placing his personal papers with the National Library of Australia, White was certainly being disingenuous about his notebooks. The ten notebooks contained in this collection are treasure troves. Full of observations, first paragraphs, timelines, character descriptions, research notes, most of White’s novels first appear in these notebooks, along with many of his plays, short stories and a surprising number of poems, most never published. It is clear that White himself valued these, and mined them – sometimes after many years – for his creative work. Writing in the Sudan around 1941, for example, White observes:

Forty years later, White handwrites a full draft of his memoir in his favourite folded paper bundles, using his favourite fountain pen and correcting in blue and red biro, then drafts and corrects in no fewer than four typescript drafts (all present in this collection, in Series 3, Folders 1–4). At the end of the process, this:

I like to think of White thumbing through those note-books from long ago, reacquainting himself with his younger self. Perhaps he admired the immediacy, the energy of the writing – a boy ‘seizing’ a ewe and ‘whirling’ a lamb out of her – before cropping and taming the passage a little for publication: the shepherd ‘whips’ a lamb from this ewe.

Other pre-1977 material does survive. Typescript versions of some early plays were circulated to friends and directors, and a small number of these made their way to the Mitchell Library (State Library of New South Wales), the Fryer Library (University of Queensland) and the National Library of Australia during the 1980s and 1990s. These earlier acquisitions are now joined by several manuscripts and typescripts dating from this period, and contained within the new White archive. A partial typescript of The Vivisector (1970), and a full typescript of A Fringe of Leaves (1976) were spared the flames, as were typescripts of three early 1960s screenplays: Willy Wagtail, Clay and Down at the Dump. His 1977 short story, ‘Fête Galante’, survives in manuscript form; indeed, in two quite distinct versions.

And then there are the unpublished novels and novella, perhaps one of the most exciting parts of this collection. ‘The Binoculars and Helen Nell’ – which we know from White’s letters was started in 1965, abandoned in 1967 as a ‘miscarriage’, reconsidered in 1968 and then evidently laid aside forever – runs to more than 160,000 words. Showing only the corrections White made as he was actually writing – in the same blue fountain pen as the rest of the text – White clearly never returned with his characteristic blue and red correcting biros to prepare it for its next ‘stage’ as a typescript. His novella ‘Dolly Formosa and the Happy Few’, running to perhaps 25,000 words, was also kept. Like ‘The Binoculars’, it was written in 1965 – the year in which The Solid Mandala was completed, and Manoly Lascaris was seriously ill – and laid aside. Dolly, at least, lived again and, with delicious irony, in White’s playful last novel, Memoirs of Many in One (1986):

Despite these exceptions, White was not stretching the truth too far when he said he kept no personal papers. Perhaps Chandler’s letter itself influenced White’s thoughts on keeping his manuscripts? We will never know for sure, but certainly there is a great change in his keeping habits from around the date of their correspondence. From destroying most of his working documents, he moves to keeping most of them. The creative work of his last thirteen years is richly represented in manuscripts, typescripts and corres-pondence. The three short stories published together as Three Uneasy Pieces (1987) all appear here in manuscript and typescript forms. The results of the second flowering of his dramatic work – Signal Driver (1982), Netherwood (1983) and Shepherd on the Rocks (1987) – are all present in magnificent manuscript form, including stage plans, character lists and changes of names and titles (perhaps well advised for Shepherd on the Rocks, which started life as ‘The Budgewank Experiment’).

Every draft of Flaws in the Glass (1981) is kept. The single manuscript of Memoirs of Many in One (1986), purchased by the National Library of Australia and the Mitchell Library in 1991, is fleshed out with typescript versions in this collection, and even some very late corrections to page proofs. Another unfinished, unpublished but retained novel, ‘The Hanging Garden’ (undated, but probably from this later period) intrigues simply because it is different from the others. It is clearly unfinished – the manuscript concludes with an obvious ‘note to self’ about fixing part of the text – yet it has been corrected in blue and red biro through-out, unlike other works which we can see were completed as a full first draft before correction began.

This change to ‘keeping’ seems to hold true for more personal papers. Notwithstanding White’s protestation that he kept no letters, and his well-known admonitions to others to burn his correspondence, he kept a few letters precious to him from his very early years, and many more as he grew older. He started to keep drafts of difficult to write letters to foes. He kept the many drafts of the public speeches he began making in the 1980s. He kept a couple of pocket diaries and a 1988 affirmation succinctly stating his mission to use the written and spoken word to advance human under-standing and peace. From the last of these pocket diaries, we can see that he had intended to meet Elizabeth Riddell on 30 September 1990, the day he died at his Centennial Park home.

Who can disagree with Patrick White when he says that the ‘final versions’ of his books, plays, short stories and poems are what matter most? They are, indeed, his final word on the subject and should always stand as the pinnacle of his achievements. But this archive adds so much to our knowledge of how White worked. We can see how he wrote, what he struggled with, what he abandoned.
Years ago, I consoled a student who was strangely disappointed when she worked on the manuscripts of one of her favourite authors. Unlike most such scholars, she felt that her sense of wonder at the perfection of his final texts had somehow been tarnished by seeing how much perspiration was applied to realise his inspiration. She would not have felt this same disappointment if she had been working on White’s manuscripts. We can and should be astonished at the absolute assurance with which he puts pen to paper when writing a novel, how little changes from the first paragraphs scrawled in notebooks, through the successive manuscripts written in fountain pen in completely distinctive ‘bundles’ of folded lined paper, through successive typescript drafts to the final product.

We can also see how consistent his approach to writing was. In 2003 Paul Brunton – a Senior Curator at the Mitchell Library – argued that the single manuscript copy of Memoirs of Many in One (jointly owned by the Mitchell and the National Library of Australia) was a ‘constructed artifice’. He noted that the main draft was ‘all in the same blue pen, with relatively few crossings out and no discernible change of hand pressure … all the revisions were neatly added in red’, and that this manuscript was unlike any literary manuscript he had seen (‘How Patrick White Laughed Last’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 April 2003). With only a single manuscript in hand, Brunton’s was a defensible proposition. Now, with so many manuscripts open to examination, we can see that the Memoirs manuscript is completely consistent with all others in the collection. White used a favourite cream lined writing paper – an unusual and presumably British stock, slightly smaller than foolscap oblong folio, folded to form bundles (mostly of fifty-two pages). He ruled his own margins. He wrote the title on the front page of each of his bundles and numbered them using Roman numerals (fifteen bundles for ‘The Binoculars’, only two for ‘Dolly Formosa’). He almost always used blue fountain pen (occasional first drafts are in blue biro) and corrected as he went in the same pen. His manuscripts are undated and have a continuous flow; there are no obvious breaks between one writing session and another, pen pressure is consistent, and there are few ‘blank’ lines. First corrections are generally made with blue biro and second corrections with red. There are almost no structural changes, and even decisions to insert paragraph breaks other than where they occurred in that first sweeping draft are rare. White’s typescripts show the same consistency, even if they convey less immediately an absolutely distinctive manuscript ‘signature’. Viewing these manuscripts, the sense of White’s inspiration, his forward impetus, and the sheer flow of his writing is awe-inspiring. For me at least, this collection shows that there is such a thing as literary genius, and that White possessed it.

When we contrast manuscripts for his novels with those for his plays, we can also see that White struggled much more with the latter, and surmise that prose really was his ‘natural’ form. Unlike his novels – where character names are decided early and kept, and where little changes from first jotting to final novel – the manuscripts for his plays show him changing titles and character names, adding and subtracting characters, and not infrequently slipping from dialogue to prose in early drafts as he struggles with what is to come next.

We can now see what he abandoned, and ask ourselves why he did so. Why did he abandon his complete first drafts of ‘The Binoculars and Helen Nell’ and ‘Dolly Formosa and the Happy Few’ without so much as a blue or red biro correction? Why did he correct ‘The Hanging Garden’ when it was clearly so far from being complete? Why did he publish so little poetry when his notebooks are full of poems? Why did he so treasure his 1930s notebook, filled with his then-favourite French poems?

Asking these questions – and all the questions that inventive researchers will inevitably ask – matters. Archives in themselves never fully answer these questions, but archival documentation – whether in personal papers, photographs or oral history – is the lifeblood of scholarly research, and enriches the public record, deepening our understanding of people, events and societies. The hundreds of photographs in this collection – White was always a keeper of photographs – give us so many new insights into White the man. He was photographed many times (including by great portraitists such as Cecil Beaton and Axel Poignant) and made many photographs available to David Marr and other writers. But there are hundreds more, with a remarkable number featuring dogs, Schnauzers or otherwise. Domestic and family scenes abound, documenting the full sweep of White’s long life: from his childhood to his ‘dandy’ years at Cambridge, through to old age, sitting alongside Manoly.
In this archive, we can see some of what White treasured and, in the condolence letters sent to Manoly, how much he was treasured. These last letters are perhaps the best answer as to why it matters that this archive survives. So many speak in the most direct way possible of the influence that White’s work had on Australia’s artists and readers. Letters from Shirley Hazzard, David Malouf and Sumner Locke Eliot acknowledge White’s greatness, and a sense of the ‘colossus’ that White was in Australia’s literary psyche. Those from the dramatic world – Ruth Cracknell, Kate Fitzpatrick, Jim Sharman and Neil Armfield – convey grief beyond words at the loss of this major spirit of Aus-tralian theatre. Many letters, of course, are from family and friends – Betty Withycombe, Peggy Garland, Jean Scott Rogers, Gwen and David Moore – and speak of purely personal losses. Neighbours and even White’s plumber write in ways that make clear that he was an integral part of their Centennial Park neighbourhood, and that it was White the man – not White the writer – that they would miss.

Other writers of these letters never met Patrick White, or perhaps met him only once. But they write to Manoly to express their profound sense of his influence on their lives and thinking, and an equally profound sense of loss at his death. In one especially poignant letter, a couple tell Manoly that they read White’s works in their early twenties and that they felt he had always been part of their ‘family’ – so much so that they named their son Patrick Manoly ‘for his writing and his love’.

In a ‘second wave’ of these expressions of significance, influence and gratitude, national and international media response to news of the archive’s survival exceeded all expectations. Whoever would have expected that Australian literature would make front-page news? Visitors to the Library’s recent exhibition of selected items expressed their sense of wonder at its survival, and an extraordinary feeling of personal connection with the writer and the man. Some visitors wrote of the existence of the collection itself: ‘Of all the days to be in Canberra, this one fills my heart with joy and satisfaction.’ Others spoke as if directly to Patrick (‘Patrick, your novel The Tree of Man changed the way I look at people. I thank you for the life you endowed it and every other novel with …’), and of their sense of longing for another such interpreter of the Australian heart and mind (‘Oh for some voice today Patrick. Oh for a voice’). Youthful equivalents (‘Patrick White Rox!’ and ‘Nice beanie Paddy!’) suggested that a new generation may be galvanised to read White for the first time, just as many of us will be picking him up to reread in the light of the new knowledge this archive brings.

None of these, perhaps, is as eloquent as Salman Rushdie, writing to express his admiration for Voss; but many would agree with his sentiments:

Despite ample opportunities to destroy his entire per-sonal archive, Patrick White did not do so. Australia must be grateful that he did not, that his loyal literary agent and executor disobeyed his instructions to destroy his papers, and that they are now held safely in one of Australia’s great research libraries, where they are available – forever – for scholars and the curious alike to wonder at.

Papers of Patrick White, National Library of Australia, MS 9982.
http://nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms9982

Marie-Louise Ayres is Curator of Manuscripts at the National Library of Australia.

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