Australia’s Clenched Soul : PATRICK WHITE: A Life <i> By David Marr</i> , <i> (Alfred A. Knopf: $30; 650 pp.</i> )

In 1973 the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “to Patrick White for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature.”

Australians thought that at last this was their chance to take to their hearts and reexamine the great, austere Modernist of Martin Road, Centennial Park, Sydney. But then as always Patrick White refused to be cozy about his demeanor toward the human race, toward Australians in particular. He refused public appearances; he would not go to Stockholm, and to the thousands of people (including myself) who wrote to him offering congratulations, he replied that the Nobel Prize “was the most destructive thing that could befall any writer.”

Yet as ambiguously as he accepted the prize he had also ambiguously sought it, once complaining at the dinner table in Sydney to Artur Lundkvist of the Swedish Academy about the way the Swedes were dallying with his nomination.

White’s anomalies were all of a piece with his flawed soul and massive talent. His only excuse for his thorny character was his half dozen or so great 20th-Century novels. Though no two White admirers agree on what the best novels are, “Voss,” “The Tree of Man” and “Riders in the Chariot” made his international repute.

People complained that he never seemed to share a lot with ordinary Australians. He came in fact from a background that most of them were unfamiliar with. His clan was the nearest thing to grandees Australia could produce--they owned enormous sheep-grazing acreages in the Hunter Valley, northwest of Sydney. They were Australian mimics of British gentry.

“I am an anachronism,” White, born in 1912, lamented, “something left over from that period when people were no longer English and not yet indigenous.” His mother would not employ Australian servants, since they were likely to be crass. She brought Patrick up to suspect the turbulent, snot-nosed, proletarian Irishdom of Inner and East Sydney. He would later parody her pretensions savagely in a number of fictional clones he made of her.

His father was a genial fellow who bought and raced a number of champion horses. The boy, an austere, asthmatic child, wanted to escape “the sheep world.” No one then or after could understand why he didn’t find it easier to be a friend, a mate, a cobber. He was growing up in the most casual, easeful societies on Earth, and his soul was, in one way, wrong for Australia: “I can never forgive mediocrity in anyone. I’d almost rather have a positive, flashy badness.”

His parents sent him to one of the best British schools, Cheltenham, where his inevitable Australian accent was patronized by the British. He went to Cambridge, pursued homosexual affairs, came home and worked hard as a jackaroo, an unpaid apprentice sheep farmer. He yearned for a man to be his life companion, and he wrote some novels. Jackaroo-ing made him decide he would never want to administer or work on the great White pastures. He went to London and had tentative affairs, one with a Spanish envoy of Franco’s.

From the time his first book, “Happy Valley,” was published in the late 1930s, White was “dogged all his career by the demand he put aside his private vision and write optimistically about decent Australians.”

Then, as on the day he won the Nobel, he would not be chatty and companionable; he refused to be a mate, for he was to be Australia’s Prophet Elijah, and he flayed us with scorpions.

Despite his severe asthma, he served as an intelligence officer in the Royal Air Force for six years through World War II, writing novels on desert air strips, the sweat falling on the page. In Alexandria, in an urban villa, he met his man--a small, tidy, generous-hearted Greek officer called Manoly Lascaris. They would meet as often as their different commands would permit, and were in the same tide of troops that liberated Greece. White had found his only mate, and they decided that they would live together in Australia. What Lascaris knew of that continent until that moment came from the label of the Tasmanian jam that his family used to eat when he was a child.

It was at first sight a strange decision. Australia at the end of World War II was full of bright young actors, writers and artists who had only been waiting for the war’s end and the loosening up of shipping so that they could get back to Europe. White took the other direction, to a small, raw, muscular society that would never come to terms with him. Yet when he neared the coast of Western Australia, he got “the first whiff of a fate that would never be renounced.”

Back in Australia, living at first on a little farm with Lascaris, he began to write his mature works: “No plot, except the only one of living and dying.” He raised schnauzers too, this most private of men, and took them to the Royal Easter Show, standing behind the dogs’ benches and answering the public’s questions. He would never be as forthcoming about his novels as he was about his dogs.

And the Australians wounded him. As Marr writes, Australian critics have always known what they wanted, what the next step in the Australian novel should be: “White’s first three novels had each been declared un-Australian, and the accusation was to haunt him for years. As if writing was a matter of state, like opening up the hinterland or damming the Snowy River.”

The bitterness that derived from having “The Tree of Man” called “pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge” went to the core of his spirit.

Writing with a clenched soul, he generally got superb reviews in America, and had a spiritual home at Viking, where first Ben Huebsch, then Marshall Best, then Alan Williams cherished and applauded him. Like many Australian writers, he had occasional fights with copy editors over the use of an Australian idiom in novels. But they were nothing compared to the acrimony he suffered at home.

In “The Tree of Man,” an Australian farmer, God-beset, one of the chosen, struggles with all the Australian elements, together with his helpmeet Amy. On his deathbed, the farmer has an intimation of God in a jewel of spittle he has just ejected. For White was a Blakean. Flesh and spirit were two parallel streams. When they collided, it caused damage to the mind, but it was the only chance of finding the divine in the debased. And--in White’s view--what was more debased than the Australian populace, sunk in its brutish and shuttered averageness?

Again, Australian critics who admired the national character, and wanted the progressive virtues in the society sung, would never be pleased with White’s work, and are not to this day.

His most successful book in the United States was probably “Voss,” an extraordinary work about a demented German explorer seeking to impose his own myth on what he perceives as Australia’s spiritual and geographic vacancy.

Only toward the end of his life did he become a public man. He took up a number of causes--environmentalism, the anti-nuclear movement. He spoke for them, although public speaking was an ordeal for him. In his private life, however, he became in many ways a vicious old man, making life hard for Lascaris. He split with friends, sometimes over a salad, sometimes over music, sometimes because a writer he admired attended too many seminars, sometimes because an actress he felt paternal toward went to a royal cocktail party--for he ended his life a devout Australian republican, and wanted to see Australia sever its constitutional ties with the monarch of Great Britain.

Once, in his youth, Patrick White said that the hardest literary task was to make a virtuous woman and a boring man both interesting. David Marr does not have the latter task here. White makes a wonderful study. And even though reclusive, he still made astounding contacts with famous people. Sometimes--as in John Gielgud’s case--they wanted to meet him.

But what Marr has had to confront is that White was--though a great figure in literature--an unattractive human being. The great strength of Marr’s work is that it involves us complexly in White, makes us care for his torments and enthusiasms, for the progress of his lifelong fight with critics and respiratory illness. This is a magnificent biography, beautifully paced, comprehensive but never flagging. It does White greater service than his own bitter autobiography, “Flaws in the Glass,” (renamed by wits “Claws in the Ass”) ever did. Because in uniting us with him, it renders his frenzies of malice and grief more intelligible. By doing that, it makes his claims to a great place in literature more credible than ever.