Born: 7 November, 1925, in Philadelphia.
Died: 29 October, 2008, in California, aged 82.
WILLIAM Wharton was a successful impressionist painter who at 53 published his first novel, Birdy. The book won a nat
ional award in the United States, became a critically acclaimed movie and led to a dozen more books.
Wharton, who painted under his original name, Albert du Aime, led a vivid life which would feed his autobiographical novels, none more so than Birdy, which was published in 1979 and delved into the madness of a character obsessed with canaries. Wharton himself kept 250 canaries when he was 17 and never stopped keeping them.
The drama and distinctiveness of Wharton's life at least match the three Hollywood films made of his books. He was badly wounded in the Second World War and, after being returned the United States to recover and return to civilian life, he resolved to return to Europe to make art.
After earning a doctorate in psychology, he moved to Paris to paint in the streets and live on a houseboat. He invited passers-by who admired his work home for dinner and to ponder a purchase.
All the while he mined memories and dreams to write three novels in which no publisher seemed interested. The manuscript of Birdy found a circuitous route to publishing house Knopf, which loved it, and soon Avon paid $525,000 for paperback rights. But painting remained as important as writing to him.
"Not thinking of myself as a writer gives me the freedom to be one," he said in an interview in 1986.
Critics suggested that only great literary talent could make believable a plot in which a man believes he is a canary – complete with avian sexual fantasies – while another man tries to talk him back to sanity.
"Only the most rigorous imagination can make a story of this sort work for a reader who is generally indifferent to birds," Newsweek magazine wrote.
For bird-lovers, Wharton's discussion of canaries seemed as voluminously delicious as that of Melville's whale treatises in Moby Dick. Who knew that a canary's eyes weighed more than its brain?
Birdy won the US National Book Award for best first novel in 1980 and was a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among Wharton's subsequent books were Dad (1981), about a middle-aged painter living in France, and Pride (1985), an allegorical story set in the Depression. A Midnight Clear (1982) tells the poignant tale of how American and German soldiers try in vain to use a Christmas tree, a snowman and a scarecrow to make peace. Each of these three novels was made into a film, in 1984, 1989 and 1992, respectively.
Wharton later became wildly popular in Poland, writing at least three books in English that were translated into Polish.
Albert William du Aime was born in Philadelphia. Interviewed by the Guardian, he said he infuriated his mother by keeping canaries in a huge cage under his elevated bed. But his father blessed the flock after realising Albert's revenues from selling the birds exceeded his carpenter's wages.
Albert volunteered for the army and was assigned to a unit of exceptionally intelligent young men who were to be trained as engineers. He ended up in the infantry in the Battle of the Bulge, in which he was severely wounded. After his discharge, he earned a degree in art from the University of California, Los Angeles, and stayed to earn a doctorate in psychology. He taught art in Los Angeles public schools.
IN 1958, with his wife, Rosemary, and three children in tow, he moved to Europe and travelled between Paris, Bavaria and the south of Spain. The family settled in Paris in 1968, supporting themselves on their wits, his paintings and Rosemary's income as a kindergarten teacher. They twice ran out of money and temporarily retreated to the US.
Interviewed in 1992, Wharton said he used a pseudonym because he had "a unique family name" and "didn't want to wash it out in public". William was his middle name and Wharton his mother's maiden name. He used his birth name to sign his paintings, many of which are displayed in a museum he set up in an old hotel in Burgundy.
In 1988, his oldest daughter, Kate, her husband and two of her children died in a car crash. Wharton described the tragedy in Ever After: A Father's True Story (1995).
When Kate met the man she would marry, the Guardian reported that she had called her father to ask him: "What is love?"
Wharton was paying for the call, so he kept it short. "As far as I can tell," he said, "it is passion, admiration and respect. If you have two, you have enough. If you have all three, you don't have to die to go to heaven."
William Wharton is survived by Rosemary (née Henry) his wife of 53 years, a son, a daughter, five grandchildren and one great grandson
