Volume 29, Number 6 · April 15, 1982
Mysterious Incest
By Nadine Gordimer
Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait
by Patrick White
Viking, 260 pp., $14.95
What do you expect from an autobiography? Those who write them are as uncertain as those who publish them. They don't even use the term, any longer. Czeslaw Milosz subtitled his a search for self-definition; Sartre, endowed by nature with the physical possibility of never looking anyone in the eye, stressed that his autobiographies was nothing but words. The Australian novelist Patrick White has written one of the two key autobiographies by contemporary writers (my other nomination is Milosz's) that fit the lock of the creative process. Yet he has insisted that his publishers misrepresent and undervalue his book by stating on the jacket that it is 'merely' a self-portrait in the form of sketches.
Review, 2226 words
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