ΜΑΝΟΛΗΣ ΛΑΣΚΑΡΗΣ

Manoly Lascaris
Sustaining partner of the novelist Patrick White for 49 years
Emmanuel George Lascaris: born Cairo 5 August 1912; died Sydney, New South Wales 13 November 2003.
The story of Manoly Lascaris can be read in between the lines of the novels, short stories and plays of the Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White, his partner of nearly 50 years to the time of White's death in 1990.
It is not only the story of the man (in this case) behind the great man. For, in the life of this dark-eyed, nuggety Greek gentleman, with elegant manners and a very stubborn streak, we also glimpse the lost world of the diaspora Greeks for whom the sack of Constaninople in 1453 was last month, the 1922 expulsion from Anatolia was last week and the post-war departure from Alexandria just yesterday.
Yet, while one often got the impression from him that the "Turk" held all the real estate between the south coast of Java to the border of Thrace, Lascaris wasn't one to keep the bags packed "just in case". If there were ever to have been one final expulsion, it would have been via one of White's rages in the grim times of the 1950s. But it never came to that because, as White came to learn, Lascaris was the sweet reason always balancing the unsweet unreason, that produced their great enterprise, his novels.
He was born Emmanuel George Lascaris in 1912 in Cairo, into a Smyrna family descended from the Lascari line of Byzantine emperors of Nicea. His father was a cotton trader, his mother an American. When Manoly was about six, the marriage, shaken by his father's philandering, collapsed and his mother returned alone to America where she later remarried. Two maiden aunts, Ely and Despo, were brought over from Smyrna to raise the children.
But just as important in Manoly Lascaris's childhood was the menagerie of servants, from English and French nannies to Austrian governesses and cooks from the Pontus whose best legacy was the French, Italian and German, which, as with his Greek and English, he spoke with beautiful old-fashioned fluency. Their worst was that he grew up under their thumb and was ever a martyr to them.
After the sack of Anatolia and the loss of their estates, for which they personally blamed the Danish parvenu on the Greek throne, the family moved to Athens, surviving on status and connection until Manoly's father reappeared in 1930. There was to be no wasteful going to university to study languages. Instead, it was to be an unpaid job at the Bank of Athens in Alexandria, run by his Uncle Mario.
Pre-war Alexandria, at once cosmopolitan and provincial, was where Manoly Lascaris really grew up. It was the city that captured his imagination, where he had affairs (one serious, with a German "who unfortunately was a Nazi"), went to fabulous parties, visited the hammams, and traded wonderful stories of scandal and espionage. The city's most famous Greek was the poet Cavafy, a customer of the bank, he of the yellow teeth and a smudgy overcoat, against whom Lascaris was warned. But, as he said later, Egypt palled because he became acutely aware "of being a parasite, living on the backs of those poor wretches [the Egyptians]. The country after all belonged to them."
In 1941, at an afternoon party, he met Patrick White who was then in the Royal Australian Air Force. Lascaris joined the Royal Greek Army, serving as a lieutenant in Mesopotamia and Palestine. But, at war's end, his prospects in both Egypt and Greece looked poor. White, who had already decided to return to Australia, persuaded him to follow.
He had a job waiting in a French bank in Sydney but White insisted they live and work on a smallholding they bought in a place away from the city, known in White's novels as "Sarsaparilla". While White wrote, sustained by the income from part of his father's estate, Lascaris cut and carted wood, milked cows and bred Schnauzers for a living. It was tough and grim, especially into the Fifties when "Patrick grew a large heart".
White was quite a stage-door Johnny and had begun an affair with a then fashionable director. This was when Lascaris's stubborn streak really saved White's literary life. It is after this time that in his letters White starts referring more and more to Lascaris's sustaining role. Lascaris was the first to read a new manuscript. His was the verdict that White most needed and heeded. And, although Lascaris found it uncomfortable to see fictionalised versions of him and his family in the books, he never once asked for changes.
In 1964, they moved into Sydney, where the routine that Lascaris continued after White's death was set. Mornings were for the garden and shopping and other chores followed by lunch, prepared by White, and siesta. Then they walked the dogs in the park and took afternoon tea under the wisteria at the back, livened by friends and gossip. When White took flight over something, it was always Lascaris who gently brought him back to earth. Once, after a dear friend had ended a difficult affair, White, believing erroneously that she had been the one dropped, fretted like a mother hen and feared she might die of a broken heart. Lascaris looked over to him and from his centuries of Byzantine gossip and experience said, "Oh no, Patrick, no one dies when they are dropped."
White was a great enthusiast for people, taking them up with passion and then, after some time, dropping them, usually in a furious rage of disappointment. Some departures - a bowl of spaghetti over the head of one offender - have entered Sydney urban mythology. It is true that everyone loved Lascaris but most were there because of White and, once banished, rarely tried to keep up with Lascaris, which caused him some pain.
One of the banished, the painter Sidney Nolan, was so enraged that he painted a caricature of Lascaris, which of course diminished Nolan rather than Lascaris. There were some, like Maie Casey, wife to the then Governor-General, Lord Casey, who went out of their way to spread their friendship beyond the great man. She would come to lunch, talk to White, then, after lunch, pile Lascaris and herself into the vice-regal Rolls and have them driven into Centennial Park, where she would talk with him "while Patrick did the dishes".
White died in 1990 and his biographer David Marr quotes Lascaris as saying, "Soon I will know what was him and what was me." But their joint enterprise had been White's work and life. The chores were still done, the dogs walked, followed by tea under the wisteria with the remaining friends, but it was a long fading away. Some friends who had been banished by White returned, such as the South Australian writer Neene Dutton. White enthusiasts from far and wide knocked on the door and he received them with charm and patience.
Once I encountered a professor of literature from Korea trying to . . . well, "break in" are the words that come to mind. He had no English but just wanted to see the house. A Professor of Greek visited from time to time, bringing students to hear Lascaris's aristocratic Greek, which is no longer spoken under the demotic influences of the thieves who ran post-war Greece.
He continued to live on alone in the house at Martin Road rather in the manner of Elizabeth Hunter in White's The Eye of the Storm, a widow on a grand scale with housekeepers and, as old age confined him, a series of carers. Some were wonderful, others greedy and selfish. But martyred to servants to the end, he found it almost impossible to sack an offender. Finally, in a turn of fate which might have come from one of White's novels, Lascaris spent his last months in Lulworth, White's childhood home behind the King's Cross district of Sydney, and now a care hospital for the aged.
John Lonie (independent.co.uk)