Flaws in the Glass

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For one interested in exploring Australian expatriate experiences, the famous essay by Patrick White ‘A Prodigal Son’ (1958) provides a good “in” to this memoir. In the essay, White asks “was there anything to prevent me packing my bag and leaving like Alister Kershaw and so many other artists?” His answer is that as a writer, Australia helped the colours to come flooding back to his palette, and in a Romantic touch, writing became “a struggle to create fresh forms out of the rocks and stones of trees”. Flaws in the Glass could be said to extend these key themes, but in a more personal way. He writes, or publishes the memoir, in 1981, and by now he is a Nobel Prize winning author, aged nearly 70, open about his long-standing partnership with Manoly Lascaris in a manner which in the year of 2016 sounds very contemporary.


Like Tim Winton’s Island Home, White lets us know that it is the land that draws him back home and inspires him to write. Although Winton doesn’t say it in the same words, one imagines he might feel some sympathy to White’s sentiments: “The ideal Australia I visualised during any exile and which drew me back, was always … a landscape without figures” (p.49). As in the Prodigal Son essay, White seems to be showing us in his book that while ‘culture’ could be said to exist elsewhere (at least in the 1950s) – the very emptiness of the (Western) cultural landscape allows him to explore something in a way that is more direct, more natural than he had been able to find in his twenty years in Europe. Nor is he very sympathetic to the expatriate artists like Sidney Nolan who live in London and only visit occasionally; in an echo of 'The Prodigal Son'  phrase about the mother country, White complains that Nolan needs a “mother more than a wife” and that Australia is “the great maternal bub on which he sucks” (p.232).

There is much more to Flaws in the Glass for the reader than this, of course. There are pictures of his childhood memories of Sydney, and before that, the Upper Hunter. We see his boyhood extend to England and his treatment as a ‘colonial’ while in an establishment British boarding school. He writes about London in the 1930s and his war in Egypt. Religion plays a big part in the memoir, as does White’s sexuality (never explicit but certainly clear), loyalties and growing understanding of writing, art and culture. White tells us he isn’t an intellectual, but a sensualist and intuitionist – and this may all well be true. But apart from an overly-long Greek journeys digression, I felt I had learnt a lot by reading this book, like listening to the informed gossip and political and artistic views of my much-missed Australian grandmother, to whom this hardcopy edition was inscribed, by my now-dead aunt. Writing like this sounds just like an aged yet vital voice – and it haunts in the way a found-cassette recording of someone dear and departed might. It speaks of an era now quite behind us – particularly the 1930s to the 1950s – but still relevant, I think, for anyone with a wish to have a slightly longer cultural memory than the passionate musings of our current greats, like Winton, Carey and Flanagan. And there's modesty here, too - a memoir may be the greatest work of fiction of them all, but White isn't afraid of showing us his flaws in the glass, as well as hinting at his greatness too.


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