Biography

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• This month, his grandson, John Dos Passos Coggin , announced the launch of his Kickstarter campaign to raise seed money for a new feature film project he wrote, Son of Portugal.
• Son of Portugal is a drama/thriller feature film project set in 1964 in the United States and Portugal.
• John Dos Passos Coggin , an American writer, wrote the script for Son of Portugal.
• He co-manages the John Dos Passos literary estate and serves on the advisory board of the John Dos Passos Society .

• The Liverpool-born director extended the formal possibilities of film, and had a unique capacity for depicting memory and personal history.
• Here are four films that show the director dealing directly with this history, while also charting the development of his distinctive, very personal style.

1. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)

• The director’s breakthrough came in 1988 with the release of Distant Voices, Still Lives, which tells the story of one working class family’s life in post-war Liverpool.
• The film was originally two short pieces made two years apart, which were later combined.
• Distant Voices, Still Lives is not only an excellent example of the formal styling that would come to characterise Davies’ work, but also the key role that music plays throughout his films.

2. The Long Day Closes (1992)

• The film also reflects on Bud’s developing sense of his own homosexuality and the shame that accompanies this realisation.
• The Long Day Closes is a companion piece to Distant Voices, Still Lives in its focus on family life in Liverpool.

3. The Neon Bible (1995)

• In this way, The Neon Bible can be understood as an act of deflected autobiography.
• Davies dismissed The Neon Bible after its release as a creative failure.

4. Of Time and the City (2009)

• Arguably Davies crowning work, Of Time and the City marked a late career resurgence for the director.
• Thanks to the film’s critical success, he continued to produce work steadily in the final decade of his life.
• The film looks back on the Liverpool in which he grew up, and is made from a tapestry of different sounds and images.

• Did you know that 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Patrick White winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Australian writer to be so honoured?
• Until last week, neither did I.
• As a lover of White’s writing, I was shocked by my own lack of awareness, which was quickly overshadowed by the realisation that seemingly everyone had overlooked it.

Cultural cringe

• There should have been conferences and celebrations – a festival that would leave the Opera House in the dust!
• The 50th anniversary of White’s best-known novel Voss in 2007 was marked with a two-day symposium.
• The cringe, Phillips wrote,
  mainly appears in an inability to escape needless comparisons.
• The Australian reader, more or less consciously, hedges and hesitates, asking himself ‘Yes, but what would a cultivated Englishman think of this?’ When it comes to White’s reception, especially post-Nobel, the cringe is everywhere apparent.
• Here were signs, at last, that Australians could produce real literature – at least, according to Europe and Britain.

A writer unread?

• He infamously chastised mainstream Australian writing as little more than the “dreary dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism”.
• A.D. Hope’s similarly infamous review of The Tree of Man judged the novel to be “pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge”.
• White’s uneven reception reflected an anxiety about what Australian literature actually was.
• The preeminent questions asked in undergraduate Australian literature units are still: What is Australian literature?
• That Watts and Tsiolkas are both novelists themselves might explain their fervour for White, a writer who fits well under the moniker a “writer’s writer”.

Reputation

• The question that is asked of White is not just “should we read him”, but should we study him.
• White’s reputation as a canonical writer, and more specifically as a “difficult” modernist author and a “writer’s writer”, is a disaster when it comes to getting people, including students, to actually read him.
• He is not only the kind of writer one would expect to study at school and university; many people assume he can only be read in those contexts.
• Of course, White is a difficult writer, though it is often overlooked that he can also be funny, especially in his depictions of suburbia.
• She had noticed seed at Woolworths and Coles; it was only a matter of choosing.
• So far departed from the rational level to which she had determined to adhere, her own thoughts were grown obscure, even natural.
• Vain or not, it would seem, maybe until now, that the award has been the crowning achievement.