After White’s death, his literary executor, Barbara Mobbs, defied his wishes by preserving the manuscript, which she eventually sold to the National Library. With her blessing, it is now ejected into the world, billed as an ‘unpublished novel’, not the broken-off beginning of one.

It is easy to see why White chose to trace the involuntary migration of young Gilbert Horsfall and Eirene Sklavos: repatriation was for him a primal drama, almost a lifelong trauma. White was born in London, brought to Australia by his parents, then sent away again to be educated in England. Only after World War II, having met Manoly Lascaris in Greece, did he commit himself to living in his native land. Gilbert and Eirene, dispatched to the care of a publican’s widow in a house with an unkempt garden on a cliff beside Sydney Harbour, are surrogates for White and his exotic other half. The Hanging Garden is best when describing the sensory shock of their encounter with a new continent, a place where the glaring light is an almost physical burden, the wind slashes like a razor, and the earth is druggily aromatic.

The children have already lost one parent each, and Eirene subsequently loses the other; they are then bereaved all over again when their guardian dies. Bad luck – to paraphrase Lady Bracknell’s enquiry in The Importance of Being Earnest – or carelessness? The misfortunes accumulate in order to dramatise White’s conviction that the Australians of his era were cultural orphans, with no mother country or fatherland to belong to.

The youthful vision recovered here is haunted, often disgusted. White’s metaphors defamiliarise Australia, and ensure that Gil and Irene or Reenie – as they are called once the oppressive process of Australianising them begins – remain alienated from it. Bizarre trees drip ‘blood from their armpit-hair’, and raucous birds ‘pick at an Australian silence without tearing it apart’. Seen from below, as if through the wide eyes of Dickensian innocents, grown-ups look like monsters. Women in Sydney can choose to be either ‘steamed’ or ‘baked’ by the torrid climate, while the hirsute local males have skin that is compared with ‘horsehair in some old burst mattress’. Antique female undergarments, always a preoccupation of White’s, hint at perverse and painful mysteries, best kept under wraps: stockings are held up by fasteners that resemble pimples, and when a suspender belt snaps it sounds ‘like the crack of a whip’.

Childhood, as re-experienced by this genius, is a terrified condition. Sometimes White writes as a surrealist, aghast to see furniture turning organic: drawers ‘slither out, lolling like wooden tongues’, as if imitating the Dali giraffe that has gaping drawers where its chest ought to be. On other occasions his style is expressionistic, recoiling from the discharges that are pressed out from inside fermenting human bodies. A man on a train releases gas, and a repellent aunt sports a shiny blackhead on her breast. Psychological secrets are equated with physical secretions: Eirene, investigating Gilbert’s possessions, seizes on a handkerchief with a ‘snotty string’ adhering to it. As puberty arrives, strange rivulets emerge inside the girl and boy – red in her case, white and viscous in his. Back in Greece, she has seen a volcano which is allegedly extinct, though she suspects it is biding its time; when she begins to write, she connects self-expression, as White did, with the eruptive lancing of boils or squeezing of pimples. ‘Keep your hands off that diary,’ she warns any illicit reader. ‘Better to explode in a shower of pus.’ Rather more positively, she and Gilbert collaborate on the construction of an inaccessible hideout balanced in a tree in the hanging garden: it is their imaginary defence against reality, a homemade version of what Henry James called ‘the house of fiction’, and it makes them both juvenile avatars of White.

Otherwise they are surely projections of White and Lascaris, who came from such different worlds – the Anglo-Australian gentry and the Greek-Egyptian diaspora; Protestant starchiness and pagan mystery – and found common ground in Centennial Park. Describing the servants who pampered Eirene in Greece, White puns on her surname: ‘Without slaves, Eirene Sklavos pricked her finger.’ My guess is that he was speculating between the lines on the significance of Manoly’s family name: was his partner a lascar, which means, according to the Arabic etymology, a humble trooper or an army servant? David Marr’s brief afterword to The Hanging Garden mentions that, immediately before White began to draft the new novel, there had been furious rows with Lascaris about ‘the scathing portrait of his family in Flaws in the Glass’.

Patrick White

Despite the historical setting, White also seems to be glancing sideways at the state of Australia during the early 1980s, execrating the mentally listless and politically subservient Lucky Country. Eirene’s mother, an expatriate Australian who marries a Greek communist, calls Australia ‘a country which has always been causeless’. Eirene brings with her to bright, bland Sydney the predestining guilt and gloom of the tragedies she has precociously read, and reflects that ‘Greeks are fated to die’, whereas ‘Australians are only born to live’. The arrival of GIs on leave from the war in the Pacific provokes White to a little paragraph of bluster about the United States as Australia’s ‘universal provider’: ‘the Yanks are here the Americans will save us.’ Less rebarbitatively, he remembers how compulsory it was back then for Australians to pretend that they were semi-articulate. Eirene, sympathising with a schoolfriend whose father has disappeared, says ‘I think I understand – sort of’. She adds the unnecessary, untruthful disclaimer ‘to appease the part of herself which had learnt to be Australian’.

Always engaging and intermittently brilliant, The Hanging Garden falters as its characters age into acceptance and conventionality. The genius of childhood is that it is inchoate, like an unfinished novel. Everything is molten, malleable, alarmingly provisional, so that when Gilbert hits another boy, his victim’s face begins ‘to jigger and blink as if standing on a fixed spring’. Travelling across America on his way to Australia, Gilbert acquires a taste for soft-shell crabs; that detail suggests the defencelessness of the young, their lack of the armour that hardens around us as we grow up and learn how to appear opaque. When the book breaks off, Gilbert is driving a Rolls Royce around Vaucluse, while Eirene is riding pillion on a motorbike and frequenting a milk bar. White’s loss of interest is palpable: teenage experience is something no genius wants to recover at will.

Given the author’s misgivings, was it right to publish The Hanging Garden? I don’t disapprove in principle. White may have defamed researchers who rifle through suppressed manuscripts as ‘ferrets’, but he knew that novelists also need to have a ferret’s nose for burrowing prey if they are to wriggle into the private cerebral retreats of their characters. As Eirene explores Neutral Bay, he happily invokes the nasty snuffling of that albino mammal. She is ‘this ferreting girl’, who is ‘ferreting out the smells’ in the garden and must additionally ‘ferret out’ the boy who threatens to invade her territory.

Those three phrases, which occur within five pages of each other, point to my worry about the undertaking, which isn’t ethical but stylistic. The repetition is over-deliberate, and if White had revised the manuscript he would been subtler. The Hanging Garden is presented to us half-cooked, with a piously respectful note attesting that ‘in the absence of a living author to consult’ there have been no editorial interventions. One or two phrases that could not be deciphered might easily have been omitted; instead a pseudo-scholarly note informs us that they are illegible. A parenthesis in which White reminds himself to find out more about mangrove swamps is included, though other marginal quibbles, one of which is quoted by Marr, have been suppressed. Errors of punctuation or uncertainties about spelling (‘doily’ and doiley’ fight it out on one page) remain to distract us, as do a few irritatingly recurrent adjectives (‘ricketty’ is a particular favourite). No writer, however grand, would object to being saved from such small lapses. More damagingly, a few scraps of first-draft dialogue sound awkwardly inauthentic. ‘The war was in the mountains,’ says Eirene when telling Gilbert about the Greek partisans. ‘It was at the time still … heroic.’ White inserts the ellipsis to underline her ‘slow and special emphasis’, though it only makes her delivery sound more unlikely.

Even though The Hanging Garden is not the ‘masterpiece in the making’ about which the publisher boasts, I am pleased to have read it. But I felt slightly shifty about peeping over White’s shoulder, and I wonder what qualms lurk behind that prefatory phrase about ‘the absence of a living author’. Can the disobedient Mobbs be worried by the ectoplasmic presence of a dead author? Shakespeare put a curse on ‘he who moves my bones’, but I doubt that this hex extends to him (or her) who flouts the stipulations of a writer’s will. Cantankerous as White was, his ghost might have been pleased to see the manuscript from his bottom drawer tidied up before it was shared with strangers.