David says on 22 December 2013,
"The source of [Patrick] White's simplicity was his writing, which brought all his contradictions into a single focus. He embraced whatever he needed for his work. Nothing in himself or the world around him was off limits: people, ideas, gossip, rows were all grist to his mill. Behind many faces White lived one writer's life. He spoke of living his real life inside his skull; he wrote that artists only experience pure being in their art. 'My flawed self has only ever felt intensely alive in the fictions I write.'
"This sounds like Larry [Durrell] except for the fact that the world saw an highly edited version of the author for whom many aspects of self were off limits."
So White was a much more honest writer than Durrell? I think this view is correct. Durrell, I suspect, hid a lot about himself from his public and quite possibly to himself. He didn't talked about a "flawed self." He spoke of "multiple selves" and "unstable egos" as a kind of cover-up. White seems far more courageous when confronting his own deficiencies.
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