Patrick White: Under the Skin He came from a family where "to become any kind of artist would have been unthinkable." His parents were second cousins, descended on both sides from Somerset yeoman farmers who had sailed to New South Wales in the early 19th century and received generous land grants. The Whites were not literary: his father Dick read the stud book, the Sydney Morning Herald and detective stories. From Dick White he inherited his pale blue eyes and an income that permitted him the freedom to write his "peculiar" books that none of the White cousins could ever quite finish; from his ambitious, gritty mother, Ruth Withycombe - a lover of theatre, hats and terriers, who was prone to admonishing him with a horse whip - his prickliness and violent temper. Tickled by a legend that a Withycombe might have been a fool to Edward II, White assumed for himself the licence to pen the unsayable. Anything I may have certainly comes from the Withycombe side. This included the weak lungs which had brought the Withycombes out to Australia in the first place. Asthma would be the curse and defining force of a life which, from early childhood, "nobody would insure." Not only asthma and basilisk looks set him apart. There was his Australianness, "the deformity I carried around"; there was his vocation as an artist in a land which cherished swimmers and athletes; and there was his homosexuality. As a homosexual I have always known what it is to be an outsider. It has given me added insight into the plight of the immigrant - the hate and contempt with which he is often received. That White was also "the greatest pessimist on earth" he ascribed to a bush fire that he witnessed in the Southern Highlands, barely three months after his arrival in Australia, which destroyed the hotel he was staying in and from which he was rescued, in the nick of time, by his nanny. He came to look back on this close encounter with death as a germinating flash in which, like any healthy native gum tree or bottlebrush, was contained the regenerative seed of future life. It is the scorching kernel of The Aunt's Story, perhaps White's favourite of his novels (perhaps because he felt it to be the most ignored). It lies also at the core of Voss, arguably the greatest of his novels: "To make yourself, it is also necessary to destroy yourself." He would like to have been a visual artist. In London during the Blitz, the artist Roy de Maistre had taught him "to look at paintings and get beneath the surface." De Maistre, one of White's first lovers, became his "intellectual and aesthetic mentor." I began to write from the inside out when Roy de Maistre introduced me to abstract painting... As far as I was concerned it was like jumping into space, and finding nothing there at first... Then gradually one saw that it was possible to weave about freely on different levels at one and the same time. Getting below the surface, writing from the inside out, weaving about freely: this was White's ambition. What he called "my peculiar style" - "the fragmentation by which I convey reality" - owed a lot to de Maistre; Voss and Laura, too, when they ride out together, side by side, writing their legend in the dust. ""You will not leave me then?" he asked. ""Not for a moment," she said. "Never, never."" Music was another influence. Always something of a frustrated painter, and a composer manqué, I wanted to give my book the textures of music, the sensuousness of paint, to convey through the theme and characters of Voss what Delacroix and Blake might have seen, what Mahler and Liszt might have heard. White played over and over again the violin concerto of Alban Berg, another asthmatic, while writing his way through Laura Trevelyan's "brain fever." I get quite drunk with music and play it a lot to lead me up to my work. He chose Bartók for Voss's end. I couldn't get the death of Voss right, and I was in bed with bronchitis feeling like death. I suddenly got out and put on the Bartók Violin Concerto, and everything began to come right. He had begun writing Voss early in 1955, in bed. After such a lengthy gestation, it came rapidly. He wrote on lined foolscap paper with a fountain pen. He had almost finished the first draft by the end of October. Am pleased with it only but in fits. I am never pleased with anything really," he wrote to his publisher, Ben Huebsch. He finished the second draft the following June. As usual I have no idea what it is like, but perhaps it will turn into something. After typing out a third draft in December 1956, he dedicated the novel to Marie d'Estournelles de Constant, a French translator who had persuaded Gallimard to buy White's first three books. At the time I felt I was getting nowhere and that there was not much point in my continuing to write. Nobody read what I had to say... when I wrote Voss I felt that although we had never met, I owed her a book. On December 17 he posted the typescript to Huebsch in New York. White had been crossing the same desert with his characters for more than 16 years. He felt scoured out and fluey while he waited for a reaction. I am always on tenterhooks until I know that my books are not just private illusions. Voss was published in New York in August 1957 and sold 9,000 copies. At first largely ignored, its fate tracked White's reputation. Nowhere was this truer than in Australia. "Here," White wrote, " the dingoes are howling unmercifully." White lost no time in telling Huebsch that the novel had received "the worst reviews anyone has had since [Katharine] Hepburn was here in Shakespeare." For Australian critics, White's prose remained as difficult and exasperating as his character - "pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge" in the lacerating phrase of the poet A D Hope; for Alan Nicholls of The Age, the novel was (according to White) "the most terrible thing that has ever happened." But the novel found its readers, exactly as Huebsch had predicted, and "in time I was forgiven, Voss canonised" - until it became White's turn to resent the way in which "the explorer novel came to be revered almost to the point of tedium." Few revered his achievement more intelligently than the critic James Stern: "Almost all novels are transients, very few remain on, permanent residents of the mind. Of those that do, some cease to be books and become part of the reader's past, of an experience felt so deeply it is sometimes difficult to believe that the illusion has not been lived. From these rare works of literature characters emerge better known than our most intimate friends, for every human being has a secret life, one unknown to all but himself and which he takes with him to his grave. To reveal in a novel this life (which is that of the soul) in such a way that by the time the last page is reached all questions have been answered, while all the glory and mystery of the world remains, is not only the prime function of the novelist but the artist's greatest ambition - and surely his rarest achievement. Stern was reviewing The Tree of Man, but his words apply equally to each of White's great novels, and out of these, I would argue, most especially to Voss. Because those who venture for the first time into White's desert are in for a bracing treat. He is not particularly difficult or tricksy, like his peers Nabokov or Beckett. His fiction is rooted in, and nourished by, the epic dramas of the great 19th and early 20th-century authors, such as Thomas Hardy and D H Lawrence. But a "historical" novel is the last thing Voss is. "Half those professing to admire Voss," it amused him to observe, "did so because they saw no connection between themselves and the 19th-century society portrayed." It is the work of a writer who is contemporary, exciting, heart-wrinkling, who understands women better than virtually any other male novelist I can think of, and who addresses universal themes in a prose that is entirely and compellingly his own. As with Laxness, to read Patrick White is to discover an extra taste bud. As with Faulkner, he plunges us into a dense, peaty world comparable to no other. But White has the ability, for the reader who stays with him, to penetrate one step further into their interior. I side with Tom Keneally, who owes him no favours, when he says: "On his day, White is better than Faulkner." He towers over the Australian literary landscape as does Goethe (whom he detested) over German literature. He is solitary, unique and ultimately imperishable, like one of those colossal eucalypts on which the prickly Leichhardt carved his initials. In the confident and affirming words of Laura Trevelyan: "Voss did not die... He is there still, it is said, in the country, and always will be." Patrick White's Voss is available in a new edition, with a version of this piece as its introduction, from Everyman