Patrick White—Fragments of a Swedish Correspondence

Abstract

Patrick White received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. Persistent rumours that he was a candidate for the prize had circulated since 1969, the year when it went to Samuel Beckett. It seems that these rumours filled White with divided feelings. In a letter to Ingmar Björkstn, in 1970, he wrote that he had heard of the dreadful rumours and had to make plans in great haste of where he could hide himself if any of them should be true. Of course, they were not true, and he was left feeling pained and humbled. He stated that he saw a photograph of poor Beckett who looked thoroughly depressed as he fled to Tunisia.

In a Christmas greeting, written to Magnus Kison Lindberg in 1972, after the choice for the prize had fallen at the last moment on Heinrich Boll, White wrote that he no longer believed in the Nobel Prize—it should be discontinued; the money from it should benefit the hungry. It seems that The Vivisector, published in 1970, might have gained him the Prize but in the Swedish Academy it was reputedly said that this would have been a faulty decision, as it would have honoured an author whose latest work rested on the unsympathetic conclusion that the artist in the course of following his vision must step over corpses and use people as raw material for his art.