Week one - well, the first ten days: (Sep 1-10): chapters 1,2,3

The time has finally arrived (yes, I know I’m posting this a day early. I’m just keen! :-) ).

Please have another read of the FAQ and Reading Schedule particularly the part about spoilers.

I know I am, and so are many others, looking forward to reading your comments and posts on your blog if you decide to do both or either or neither (is that good grammar?). Enjoy the reading however you decide to participate.

Grice of Gricegrocers has already put a post on his blog. Don’t forget to let the group know if you have posted on your blog, if you want to.

Stop press: Vivisector gets written by skin of teeth

And as we count down to the September readathon, here’s a bit of background from David Marr’s great biography of Patrick White.

‘In the New Year, 1968 [when the first draft of The Vivisector was half-written], White and Lascaris flew over to Kangaroo Island to spend a week fishing, swimming, sleeping and reading. These were extrovert, happy days in a house full of children, good food and conversation. “The Duttons’ vitality is unquenched at 45, while Manoly and I, at 55, creep rather sluggishly in and out of boats, nursing our incipient arthritis and too audible wheezes.”

The sea was running strongly one evening when four of them went fishing. Dutton saw a rogue wave approaching, and the four managed to link arms as it swept across the rocks at chest height. The Duttons’ rule was to wear sandshoes on the rocks, but White had insisted on his gumboots. These filled with water and he was swept back into a narrow blowhole. “I will never forget the look in his eyes as he was washed down,” Nin Dutton recalled. “Those eyes are strange enough as it is, but they looked awful.” As the water sucked him down, she threw herself by the hole and grabbed him. Had he gone under he would have been battered to death beneath the rock shelf. She held him for a moment before the others could grab hold and pull him clear. White stood on the rocks, drenched and in shock “like a clown with lead feet”. White was all for going over to Adelaide next day to replace the lost rod, but he was persuaded to wait.’

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You got yourself a copy, so what happens next?

I have noticed that people are beginning to say: “I have my book, now what are we actually going to do?” That’s a fair enough question.

Over there —> in the Sidebar I have added a basic FAQ and reading schedule page. To save you the work of clicking on the link, these are the main bits: the actual reading programme, and some info about what we thought might be fun to do in September.

Reading Schedule

For each of the four weeks in September (beginning on Mondays) we’ve nominated two or three chapters to focus on. The Vivisector has ten chapters and in most editions these vary wildly in length - from eight pages (presumably rather dramatic ones!) to 140. So the reading pattern we’ve settled on gives us a big week of 200+ pages, followed by a lighter week of under 100, times two. If you find you need a chance to catch your breath, you’ll get it in weeks two and four.

  • Week one - well, the first ten days: (Sep 1-10): chapters 1,2,3
  • Week two (Sep 11-17): chapters 4 and 5
  • Week three (Sep 18-24): chapters 6,7,8
  • Week four (Sep 25-30): chapters 9 & 10, and wrap-ups.

What to do during those weeks

Basically, read those pages and discuss ‘em on The Internet. There will be posts here - I’ll write some, other people will write some - use those as discussion starters to launch your own opinions. Or put posts on your own blog, tell us about them, and we’ll do roundups so everyone in the group knows to go read and discuss what you’ve written. If you don’t have a blog or website of your own, you’re very welcome to email a piece to us and we will post it here under your name.

Or if you want to, you can read along in deeply thoughtful silence.

One last bit. At the risk of sounding like an overcoddling mama hen, I do want to emphasise that this shouldn’t become a big-deal production and if you’re new to the book group thing, don’t be worried about what to say. Just take a deep breath, and spit it out.

Readers’ Group link images

I have put together two images advertising our Readers’ Group. You are welcome to put one of these, with a link, on your blog, or elsewhere, if you wish (I would prefer that you locate the image on your own site rather than link to it here, but if you don’t have that option, then please feel free to link). The more readers, the merrier. Personally, I can’t wait for September 1.

 

Patrick White Readers' Group    Patrick White Readers' Group

What’s Wrong With White?

Patrick White seems to be out of favour with Christopher Pearson, a columnist for The Australian.

I suppose it’s unnecessary to be unduly concerned by this, given the often right-wing stance held by the newspaper. But he wrote such a good column for this weekend’s Inquirer section that I wonder if I’m missing something.

The column charts the history of his attraction to the written word, from earliest times. As a primary-school pupil, Pearson recounts, he all at once, one day, got the idea of writing, as he told an interrogator about his abiding interest in books and reading:

My mind raced back to a rainy afternoon in Bellevue Hill primary school in Sydney in 1956, with the smell of wet asphalt drifting into the classroom. The teacher had just joined up show cards ? with a C, an O and a final W and a picture of a cow ? and the penny dropped.

It was a short time later that he started reading The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

About the time of this first brush with the canon, there were a few other, more temperate encounters. I recall hearing one of my great-grandmothers and an aunt reciting by heart tracts of the Oxford Book of Ballads, getting a first taste of The Magic Pudding and Gulliver’s Travels, and being given a bound volume of instalments of one of Charles Dickens’s magazines called Household Words. Owning something that is more than 100 years old at the age of eight is a great stimulus to the imagination.

Later, in his teens, he encountered Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Trollope and the poets: Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne, Herbert, Marlowe, Hopkins and Eliot. “An only child with well-read parents, I soon realised that curling up with a book was the most exciting kind of companionable silence.” “On first reading the novels of Patrick White at 16, it seemed to me as though the two (sacred and profane love and a countervailing sexual ambivalence) had converged, almost for the first time apart from Brideshead Revisited, in a way that wasn’t louche or self-indulgent.” This is all very straightforward reminiscence of good times had with a book in his hands. The problem comes, as in any good column, in the final paragraph:

But while I don’t rate White as highly as before, no longer see him as any kind of role model and can seldom bring myself to reread his books, I don’t begrudge the years spent immersed in them. It was a bracing, intellectually demanding encounter. They taught me a good deal about the vagaries of human nature and much else besides. The best of them, from Voss to The Eye of the Storm, often ran fiercely counter to the prevailing Zeitgeist until, nearing his dotage, the spirit of the age began to enthral White and exacted a terrible, exemplary revenge.

I wonder what he means? Any ideas?

Cross-posted at Happy Antipodean.