Notebook, including material for Happy Valley (1939), The living and the dead (1941), The aunt's story (1948) and Voss (1957), c.1939-1941

Containers:

Box 4

Component identifier:

Item 2

Content Summary:

Small quarto, upper cover missing, in pencil and ink. Begins as a commonplace book with quotes from Butler, Lawrence, Proust, La Rochefoucauld, Samuel Johnson, Webster, Rene [Crevel?], William James, Tagore, Cervantes, Thomas Browne, Gandhi, Schwietzer, Picasso, Malraux, Montaigne, Katherine Mansfield, Berkeley, Pirandello, Thoreau.

Includes handwritten notes, dialogues, research notes for plays: Miracle (1936), outline and characters; 'Marriages are made in Hell', outline and draft dialogue; 'Man alone', outline and characters; 'The island', outline; '[Pure?] [words?] - a novel'; 'Part 1, Australia'; 'Part 2, Europe'; 'Part 3, A period of hopelessness and chaos'; 'The man touching amber'; The aunt's story, outline; de Maistre family tree; 'It's a pity she is blind', characters and outline - Aunt Margaret, Rodney, Joan, Noella, and many lesser characters in scenes - 'Sunday afternoon at the manor', 'At the riding school...'; 'Kitty Raspaldo', characters - Chervil, Mrs Rogers, Bruno Hinschel; 'How many virgins', plot outline; 'The cosmopolitans', characters and plot outline.

Also includes notes and observations on Hedda Gabler and Emma Bovary; scraps of dialogue, list of names, rehearsals, showing transition from poet and stage writer to the extended observations of the novelist; notes for 'On the train'; quote for The living and the dead - '...you can't neglect the belly to feed the soul'; aphorisms; notes with page references to The living and the dead, (relating to an advanced draft, pp20-366); 'Oliver and Alys'; draft chapter for Happy Valley, summary, outline, numerically listed points 1-33, draft chapter; 'No more love', list of characters, names, draft timeline calculating dates and ages for characters, scene breakdown; 'Leichhardt', notes for Voss.

Immediate source of acquisition:

During White's lifetime, he asserted that he kept no manuscripts or personal papers, burning his drafts on completion of each work. For many years after his death, it was believed that a single manuscript draft of Memoirs of many in one (1986), donated by White to the anti-apartheid Canon Collins Education Trust for Southern Africa in 1988 and subsequently purchased at auction in 1991 by the National Library of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales, was the only surviving record of White's literary manuscripts. While White does appear to have destroyed a considerable portion of his manuscript material, he clearly retained many literary papers and personal papers until his death. The papers in this collection were in the custody of Manoly Lascaris (White's partner) who died in 2003, and of Barbara Mobbs, White's long-term literary agent and Literary Executor, who presented the collection to the National Library of Australia in 2006.

Names:

White, Patrick, 1912-1990

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