The Vivisector

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Patrick White was born in 1912 into a wealthy New South Wales family, owners of hundreds of thousands of acres of prime grazing land. Young Patrick was not an attractive child, withdrawn, unsmiling; he also suffered from chronic asthma. At the age of twelve he was packed off to England to a public (that is, private) school, where he spent five unhappy years. By the time he came home in 1929 a tendency toward self-loathing had become entrenched. He was also a secret homosexual.

Back in Australia, he worked for a while as a farmhand on the estate of family friends, and discovered in himself an unexpected love of the wilder reaches of the landscape. In his leisure time he wrote busily.

Hoping that he might make a career for himself in the diplomatic corps, his parents sent him to Cambridge University, whence he emerged in 1935 with a solid if undistinguished degree in French and German literature. A collection of his poems came out in Sydney, the printer’s bill paid by his mother, who also subsidized performances of a play he had written.

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