Paddy's Pictures. "Patrick White, Painter Manqué: Paintings, Painters and the Their Influence on his Writing" by Helen Verity Hewitt. [review]

Abstract

The latest interpretation of Patrick White's work comes from Helen Verity Hewitt, who builds convincingly on her assumption that '[i]n his writing White is constantly attuned to the possibility of borrowing from the visual arts'. Starting out from a suasive account of how Klee and the cubists played their part in the middle section of "The Aunt's Story", Hewitt describes the likeliest filiations from White's fascination with paintings to his building of fiction. Book by book, she moves through White's career, from the early days of Roy de Maistre's influence in London down to the exuberant "The Twyborn Affair", a favourite of Wallace-Crabbe's. Fortunately, or perhaps wisely, she does not touch on "Memoirs of Many in One", nor on the memoir that has become so widely known as "Claws in the Arse".