Although I never met either of them, I once received a postcard from Patrick White and his partner Manoly Lascaris. I keep it in a small wooden inlay box in the hall closet with a few other treasures.
The card has a botanical drawing of fringed Australian violets on the front and on the back is written the date, 28.8.82, and Thank you for the honour, signed first Patrick and then, underneath, Manoly. It arrived after I sent a note to White telling him that we had named our new baby son Patrick Manoly — to 'honour both the inspiration of your writing and your long and loving relationship'.
Our Patrick Manoly is now a beautiful young man who occasionally wonders in a good-natured fashion if he is the only bloke in Australia to be named after a gay couple. (He's not the only one to question it; recently at the Sydney Writers Festival, a young man, on hearing I had named my son Patrick for Patrick White, remarked, 'At least you didn't call him 'Manoly'. 'Oh but I did,' I responded gleefully.)
But for us, my partner Anthony and I, there was no question. White was part of our daily life, our conversations, our meals, even our relationship; you could say it was a kind of literary ménage à trois.
I found White first, when I was a teenager, so I had a prior claim. I studied The Tree of Man at school and fell into White's harsh arms without question. Stan's transcendence, seeing God in a line of ants and finally in a gob of spit, delighted my romantic mind, ever hungry for the glowing moment when the ordinary skin of the world split open and revealed its true nature.
But the real moment of no return arrived soon after when I read Voss. I came to an image, which, at 18, I recognised and adopted immediately as the central motif of my life.
I still have the original dusty copy with my name and 1972 written inside and, today, when I started flicking through the pages trying to find the image, I found a red circle around page 99. There it was: 'Then sometimes it seems that all these faults and hesitations, all the worst evil in me