Patrick White

But it is, again, super interesting.

And I can think of a much more, like, pertinent example of applying that theory to a writer, for instance, in an Australian context, where you can think about someone like Patrick White, who in The Tree of Man is sort of creating an Australian morality and reproducing it, the sort of hard-working farmer on the land, carving out his stake in it.

And that's really interesting.

So I can then look at a book.

By using Leavis, I can look at the Tree of Man and I can find this way of envisioning what it is that Patrick White is trying to do.

And that's sort of where my style of criticism sort of... lands on, which is when I'm feeling really fancy, like I'm a sort of French theorist in the academy and I'm smoking and I'm bold and I'm dying from an obscure form of cancer.

I like to call it parametric criticism, which is like, what are the parameters that a writer is establishing within their text and are they fulfilling them are they fulfilling them and i think the worst thing i found in a lot of modern fiction is that writers will say a certain number they'll imply a certain number of parameters about what they're doing whether it be like the moral or the political content, or it could be form, or it could be, like, theme or characterisation, it could be anything.

... game of mire.

Uh, The Tree of Man by Patrick White was given to me in '94 as the apex of Australian writing [laughs] by my mum before I went to go and live in New York for a while.

And, uh, uh, I enjoyed it.

I read it again recently and it didn't, um, have the same effect on me.

But we used to live near Patrick White as kids out in Castle Hill before, um, he and Manoli moved to the Parklands in, in inner North Sydney, and it was kind of, um...

He was important to our lives anyway, so there was the Stan and Amy Parker and, um, and that's how I first learnt shicked, and I've been following the shicked line ever since.

[laughs]

... glittering prizes of humans.

who knows? Hmm.

Susan, I'm wondering whether after the scathing review of Patrick White's Tree of Man, whether Alec ever attempted any sort of contact with White or reconciliation with him?

Yes.

When he won the Nobel Prize, Alec wrote one of his charming, polite letters to congratulate him.

And there's a letter from Patrick White back to him to say, you know, thank you, that was lovely, da-da-da.

Maybe we should meet sometime.

But according to Alec, they didn't.

Yeah, 'cause, uh, I, I love the point you're making about people who go on about national literatures and a literature of a nation and, and so on.

I remember when Patrick White won the Nobel Prize, they said, uh, it was an award for bringing a nation to literature.

[chuckles] And I thought it's a, it is, as you say, an odd idea.

In fact, it's a, a nonsense idea that there's no really such thing as a national literature.