Cirrus@Austlit

In this wide ranging essay, David Marr writes of the final years and the deaths of Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris and the survival of 32 boxes of White's letters, notebooks and manuscripts now held at the National Library of Australia. Marr discusses the White papers including drafts and fragments of unpublished novels in manuscript specifically one known as 'The Hanging Garden'. He recounts White's writing from the early 1980s of 'no more big novels, but speeches, plays and shorter prose works' and also discusses his own writing of White's biography as well as an interesting aside on a collection sent to the National Library by artist and set-designer, Desmond Digby, which includes a series of index cards on which Digby noted his telephone conversations with White.