Manoly Lascaris

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Emmanuel George "Manoly" Lascaris (August 1912 - 13 November 2003) was the lover of the Australian novelist and dramatist Patrick White.^[1] Lascaris was born in Cairo, the son of a wealthy Greco-Egyptian father from Smyrna in Asia Minor and an American mother. He was raised in Athens and Alexandria. In 1941 he joined the Greek Army in exile in Egypt, and soon after he met White, then serving with the Royal Australian Air Force.

White and Lascaris lived together in Cairo for six years, before moving to a small farm on the outskirts of Sydney in 1948. When White's mother died, they moved to a home in Centennial Park, in inner Sydney, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Although it was widely known that they were lovers, such matters were not publicly discussed in Australia at that time. Lascaris was sometimes referred to as White's "housekeeper." The relationship was not openly discussed until White published his memoirs, Flaws in the Glass, in 1981.

White's biographer, David Marr, credits Lascaris with being the driving force who kept White to his literary labours, including the string of novels that won White the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. White referred to Lascaris as "the small Greek of immense moral strength who became the central mandala in my life's hitherto messy design".

Marr wrote in an obituary for Lascaris: "Everyone loved Manoly. He was courtly, intuitive and gentle. He protected people from White's outbursts of fury while remaining, at heart, absolutely loyal to his lover. 'There must be one person in the world Patrick can trust absolutely'."

After White's death in 1990, Lascaris lived alone in the Centennial Park house until his health failed in 2003. He then moved into a nursing home, Lulworth, which had been White's childhood home. Marr wrote: "Patrick White believed coincidences were signs of divine order. Certainly they prove life always has more surprises to spring than art. A few months ago, when it was time for Manoly to move to hospital, he was taken to Lulworth, the old mansion at the back of Kings Cross that was once Patrick's childhood home. It was the closing of a circle that embraced Scone and Smyrna, London and Alexandria, the Whites and the Lascaris."