Patrick White, Walker Percy
Der australische Schriftsteller Patrick White wurde am 28. Mai 1912 in London geboren. Nachdem die Familie 1916 ein großes Anwesen in Sydney gekauft hatte, erkrankte Patrick mit vier Jahren an Asthma, woran bereits sein Großvater mütterlicherseits gestorben war. Die angegriffene Gesundheit, die ihn von sportlichen Aktivitäten und „Jungenspielen“ abhielt, dürfte ihren Beitrag zu eher geistigen Beschäftigungen geleistet haben: Patrick las viel, besuchte mit seiner Mutter das Theater und gab eigene kleine Tanzvorstellungen im Freundeskreis der Mutter.Im Alter von zehn Jahren wurde Patrick auf ein Jungen-Internat in Moss Vale in New South Wales geschickt, wo man sich wegen des Hochland-Klimas Besserung für seine Gesundheit erhoffte. Obwohl er eine Weile brauchte, um sich an das Zusammenleben mit anderen Kindern zu gewöhnen, akklimatisierte er sich schließlich und begann mit dem Schreiben eigener Theaterstücke. Patrick White überredete seine Eltern, das College früher verlassen zu dürfen, um Schauspieler zu werden. Sie willigten unter der Bedingung ein, dass er zunächst nach Hause nach Australien käme, um ein Leben auf dem Land zu versuchen.White arbeitete zwei Jahre als Farmgehilfe, zunächst auf Monaro, einer Farm am Rand der Snowy Mountains in New South Wales, dann auf einem Anwesen eines der Whitycombs bei Walgett im Norden des Landes. Seine Eltern hofften immer noch, dass seine künstlerischen Ambitionen verschwinden würden, wenn er einmal das harte Leben auf der Farm kennengelernt hätte. White entwickelte zwar eine enge Beziehung zur ihn umgebenden Natur, begann jedoch parallel wieder zu schreiben.Noch während Whites Studienzeit in Cambridge erschienen 1934 zwei seiner Gedichte in der Zeitung The London Mercury: Meeting Again und The Ploughman, das 1935 auch in das Jahrbuch The Best Poems of 1935 aufgenommen wurde.Als 1937 sein Vater starb und ihm 10.000 Pfund hinterließ, konnte er sein Schriftstellerleben weiterführen, ohne zu sehr auf materiellen Erfolg Rücksicht nehmen zu müssen. Er schrieb zwei weitere Dramen und fand schließlich 1939 einen Verleger für Happy Valley; der Roman fand wohlwollende Aufnahme in London, so wurde er etwa von Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen and Herbert Read gelobt.Als Großbritannien in den Zweiten Weltkrieg eintrat, kehrte White nach London zurück und wurde als Nachrichtenoffizier in die Royal Air Force aufgenommen. Während des Krieges wurde er im Nahen Osten, in Ägypten, Palästina und Griechenland eingesetzt. In Alexandria lernte er den griechischen Offizier Manoly Lascaris kennen, der sein Lebensgefährte werden sollte.Nach seiner Entlassung aus dem Kriegsdienst zogen White und Lascaris 1946 nach Australien und kauften ein altes Haus in Castle Hill außerhalb von Sydney. Sie verbrachten 18 Jahre auf dem Dogwoods getauften Anwesen, züchteten Blumen, Gemüse und Milchvieh, und White veröffentlichte 1955 The Aunt's Story und The Tree of Man. Ins Deutsche übersetzt wurde The Tree of Man 1957 unter dem Titel Zur Ruhe kam der Baum des Menschen nie von Annemarie und Heinrich Böll. White erhielt 1973 als bislang einziger Schriftsteller seines Kontinents den Nobelpreis für Literatur.
Aus: The Eye Of The Storm
„In the mountains the weatherboard and fibro townships were minding their own business. Chummier shops displaying pragmatic goods had nothing to hide. But doubts set in among the stragglers, towards the fringes, where houses built for permanence had reached the lurching stage, above the rich humus spread by their shrubberies to soften the logical collapse. The shrubberies themselves, planted by their owners as a sober duty, were touched with a cold apocalyptic fire. Here and there at the foot of a tree, old, broken, black umbrellas arranged singly or in clumps, were seen to stir at times, then to move, slowly, sideways asymmetrically. Some of the old umbrella-forms were trundling through an undergrowth of rhododendrons and azaleas assisted by what appeared to be part of their own aluminium frames, which had become conveniently unstuck, and could be used as crutches.
Basil was stopping the car in front of a shop. On a blind wall a square of faded bluebag was advertising some illegible commodity. Without explaining why, Basil was getting out. Nor did Dorothy ask for explanations: she was frantically searching for some face or object with which to identify herself. As Basil was closing the car door, a boy in jeans followed by a high-stepping spotted dog, came jaunting past. Dorothy tried smiling at the boy, but her smile must have looked directionless, or old; anyway the boy was plainly ignoring foreigners. When Basil had gone inside the shop, Dorothy was left with gooseflesh on her arms. The silence around her might have been solid if it had not been for the sound of the boy's departing thongs and the notes of a currawong floating on the mountain air. Something was eluding her; it will be different, she said, when we reach 'Kudjeri'.
Basil returned with the two pies. He was wearing the expression of a man who has laid hands on a symbol of his boyhood: it made him look somewhat ponderous.
'Oh, Basil - you're not going to eat them!' She spoke with the languor of an older girl.
'What else?' The light through a sycamore illuminated his sheepish words.
He handed her the second pie. 'Oh, really!' She couldn't refuse it, and at the same time it was too hot, too greasy: she didn't know what to do with the thing.
Basil was already stuffing his mouth. She doubted whether his boyhood could be recaptured so easily. As a trickle of pale gravy meandered down towards the cleft of his chin, she was reminded, rather, of a boyish, sweaty commercial traveller in a train. Only the dustcoat was missing.
Dorothy sighed. 'Oh, dear!' She bit into her horrid pie.
Flooded with the flavour of hot soggy cardboard and floury gravy, her unwillingness and contempt turned to loathing; worse on discovering something loathsome in herself: she was filled with a guilty voluptuousness as though biting into her own flesh.“
Patrick White (28. Mai 1912 – 30. September 1990)
Porträt von Roy de Maistre, 1939
Der amerikanische Schriftsteller Walker Percy wurde am 28. Mai 1916 in Birmingham, Alabama, geboren. Nach dem Selbstmord seines Vaters und dem Unfalltod seiner Mutter wuchs er mit seinen beiden Brüdern bei seinem Cousin William Alexander Percy in Greenville (Mississippi) auf. Ein weiterer Cousin ist William Armstrong Percy. Er studierte Chemie an der University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Nach seinem Abschluss 1937 studierte er Medizin an der Columbia University in New York, wo er 1941 seine Approbation erhielt. 1942 erkrankte er an Tuberkulose und musste seinen Arztberuf aufgeben. Vor seiner Konversion zum Katholizismus 1947 beschäftigte er sich intensiv mit den Philosophen Sören Kierkegaard und Charles Sanders Peirce. Zu Percys ersten Veröffentlichungen gehören philosophische Fachartikel, vor allem zur Zeichentheorie. Kierkegaards Existenzphilosophie prägt vor allem Percys ersten Roman Kinogeher; die Auseinandersetzung mit Peirce zieht sich vor allem durch seine Essays (gesammelt in Message in the Bottle und Signposts in a Strange Land), sein ironisch-zeitkritisches Buch Lost in the Cosmos, aber auch durch seinen Roman Die Wiederkehr. Deutet er seine religiöse Haltung in seinem Erstling Der Kinogeher kaum an, wird sie in seinen späteren Romanen (v. a. Liebe in Ruinen und Thanatos-Syndrom) klar erkennbar.
Aus: The Second Coming
„Well then, does anything really change in a lifetime, he asked the sly sidelong-looking Andrea del Sarto in the Mercedes mirror? No, you are the same person with whom I struck the pact roaring out old U.S. 66 through the lonesome towns and empty desert. You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.
And what was that?
All I knew for sure then and now was that after what happened to me nothing could ever defeat me, no matter what else happened in this bloody century. If you didn't defeat me, old mole, loving father and death-dealer, nothing can, not wars, not this century, not the Germans. We beat the Germans, nutty as we are, and now drive perfect German cars, we somewhat frazzled it is true, and shaky, but victorious nevertheless.
Ah, but what if the death is not in the century but in your own genes, that you of all men are a child of the century because you are as death-bound by your own hand as the century is you and you of all men should be most at home now, as bred for death as surely as a pointer bitch to point, that death your own death is what you really love and won't be happy till you have, what then?
Then we'll know, won't we?
Grinning and shivering on the back seat thirty years later, teeth clacking, this raddled middle-aged American sat in his German car in the mountains of North Carolina hugging himself and making shoulder movements like a man giving body English to a pinball machine except that he was thinking about J. E. B. Stuart and Baron von Richthofen and World War II and fighting the Germans, which he had not done. Instead, he took two quick drinks from the gold-lined silver jigger and waited until the warmth bloomed under his ribs and the shaking stopped.“
Walker Percy (28. Mai 1916 – 10. Mai 1990)
Aus: The Eye Of The Storm
„In the mountains the weatherboard and fibro townships were minding their own business. Chummier shops displaying pragmatic goods had nothing to hide. But doubts set in among the stragglers, towards the fringes, where houses built for permanence had reached the lurching stage, above the rich humus spread by their shrubberies to soften the logical collapse. The shrubberies themselves, planted by their owners as a sober duty, were touched with a cold apocalyptic fire. Here and there at the foot of a tree, old, broken, black umbrellas arranged singly or in clumps, were seen to stir at times, then to move, slowly, sideways asymmetrically. Some of the old umbrella-forms were trundling through an undergrowth of rhododendrons and azaleas assisted by what appeared to be part of their own aluminium frames, which had become conveniently unstuck, and could be used as crutches.
Basil was stopping the car in front of a shop. On a blind wall a square of faded bluebag was advertising some illegible commodity. Without explaining why, Basil was getting out. Nor did Dorothy ask for explanations: she was frantically searching for some face or object with which to identify herself. As Basil was closing the car door, a boy in jeans followed by a high-stepping spotted dog, came jaunting past. Dorothy tried smiling at the boy, but her smile must have looked directionless, or old; anyway the boy was plainly ignoring foreigners. When Basil had gone inside the shop, Dorothy was left with gooseflesh on her arms. The silence around her might have been solid if it had not been for the sound of the boy's departing thongs and the notes of a currawong floating on the mountain air. Something was eluding her; it will be different, she said, when we reach 'Kudjeri'.
Basil returned with the two pies. He was wearing the expression of a man who has laid hands on a symbol of his boyhood: it made him look somewhat ponderous.
'Oh, Basil - you're not going to eat them!' She spoke with the languor of an older girl.
'What else?' The light through a sycamore illuminated his sheepish words.
He handed her the second pie. 'Oh, really!' She couldn't refuse it, and at the same time it was too hot, too greasy: she didn't know what to do with the thing.
Basil was already stuffing his mouth. She doubted whether his boyhood could be recaptured so easily. As a trickle of pale gravy meandered down towards the cleft of his chin, she was reminded, rather, of a boyish, sweaty commercial traveller in a train. Only the dustcoat was missing.
Dorothy sighed. 'Oh, dear!' She bit into her horrid pie.
Flooded with the flavour of hot soggy cardboard and floury gravy, her unwillingness and contempt turned to loathing; worse on discovering something loathsome in herself: she was filled with a guilty voluptuousness as though biting into her own flesh.“
Patrick White (28. Mai 1912 – 30. September 1990)
Porträt von Roy de Maistre, 1939
Der amerikanische Schriftsteller Walker Percy wurde am 28. Mai 1916 in Birmingham, Alabama, geboren. Nach dem Selbstmord seines Vaters und dem Unfalltod seiner Mutter wuchs er mit seinen beiden Brüdern bei seinem Cousin William Alexander Percy in Greenville (Mississippi) auf. Ein weiterer Cousin ist William Armstrong Percy. Er studierte Chemie an der University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Nach seinem Abschluss 1937 studierte er Medizin an der Columbia University in New York, wo er 1941 seine Approbation erhielt. 1942 erkrankte er an Tuberkulose und musste seinen Arztberuf aufgeben. Vor seiner Konversion zum Katholizismus 1947 beschäftigte er sich intensiv mit den Philosophen Sören Kierkegaard und Charles Sanders Peirce. Zu Percys ersten Veröffentlichungen gehören philosophische Fachartikel, vor allem zur Zeichentheorie. Kierkegaards Existenzphilosophie prägt vor allem Percys ersten Roman Kinogeher; die Auseinandersetzung mit Peirce zieht sich vor allem durch seine Essays (gesammelt in Message in the Bottle und Signposts in a Strange Land), sein ironisch-zeitkritisches Buch Lost in the Cosmos, aber auch durch seinen Roman Die Wiederkehr. Deutet er seine religiöse Haltung in seinem Erstling Der Kinogeher kaum an, wird sie in seinen späteren Romanen (v. a. Liebe in Ruinen und Thanatos-Syndrom) klar erkennbar.
Aus: The Second Coming
„Well then, does anything really change in a lifetime, he asked the sly sidelong-looking Andrea del Sarto in the Mercedes mirror? No, you are the same person with whom I struck the pact roaring out old U.S. 66 through the lonesome towns and empty desert. You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.
And what was that?
All I knew for sure then and now was that after what happened to me nothing could ever defeat me, no matter what else happened in this bloody century. If you didn't defeat me, old mole, loving father and death-dealer, nothing can, not wars, not this century, not the Germans. We beat the Germans, nutty as we are, and now drive perfect German cars, we somewhat frazzled it is true, and shaky, but victorious nevertheless.
Ah, but what if the death is not in the century but in your own genes, that you of all men are a child of the century because you are as death-bound by your own hand as the century is you and you of all men should be most at home now, as bred for death as surely as a pointer bitch to point, that death your own death is what you really love and won't be happy till you have, what then?
Then we'll know, won't we?
Grinning and shivering on the back seat thirty years later, teeth clacking, this raddled middle-aged American sat in his German car in the mountains of North Carolina hugging himself and making shoulder movements like a man giving body English to a pinball machine except that he was thinking about J. E. B. Stuart and Baron von Richthofen and World War II and fighting the Germans, which he had not done. Instead, he took two quick drinks from the gold-lined silver jigger and waited until the warmth bloomed under his ribs and the shaking stopped.“
Walker Percy (28. Mai 1916 – 10. Mai 1990)
froumen - 28. Mai, 18:28
