Born May 28: Patrick White

When you count gay Nobel Prize winning novelists, do you get beyond André Gide and Thomas Mann? The Australian writer Patrick White, born in 1912, won the award in 1973. Although White never forgave his parents for shipping him off to a detestable boarding school in England, he inherited their conservatism and did not discuss his sexuality nor did he include openly gay characters in his work until 1979's The Twyborn Affair, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. After winning the inaugural Miles Franklin Award for his enduring Voss, White declined that award a second time for Riders in the Chariot and refused all other prizes, asking the Booker judges to remove his name from their shortlist to give younger writers a chance. Obviously, he made an exception for the Nobel, but he sent his friend the painter Stanley Nolan to Stockholm to accept the prize on his behalf. He lived with a former Greek soldier his same age, Manoly Lascaris, who was his ballast and partner for forty-eight years. White finally came out when he was sixty-nine with the publication of his memoir, Flaws in the Glass. He died at seventy-eight in 1990, Lascaris survived him thirteen years. 

Comments

[Peter Cameron]

A novel that White was working on when he died, The Hanging Garden, was published this year by Picador. It's incomplete but some of the writing is first-rate White, and truly amazing.