The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  The great challenge that faces White in The Vivisector is, of course, to get the reader to believe that Duffield’s paintings are as disturbing, and even overwhelming, as people in the book find them to be. To an extent he can achieve this by making Duffield’s most perceptive collector, the socialite Olivia Davenport, and beyond her the Sydney art establishment, believable. This is a procedure fraught with ambivalence, however, since it is precisely the Sydney art establishment and the collecting habits of the Sydney nouveaux riches that is the main target of his satire. For the rest, he can pour his very considerable resources as a writer into translating the paintings into words. But ultimately we are required to take it on trust: the lengthy, exhausting struggle of Duffield to turn his vision into marks on the canvas, mirrored in prose that itself bears the marks of struggle, is the sole warranty we have of the power of his work.

  There is of course something absurd at the heart of the enterprise of embodying a metaphysical vision in a series of paintings that exist solely in the medium of words. If Duffield were a poet, say, the problem would not exist. To get us to believe that his hero Yuri Zhivago is a true poet, Boris Pasternak has merely to make Zhivago write, and record on the page, some patently true poems. So why does White’s hero have to be what he is, a painter?

  Put in such a form, this is not a question that White addressed directly, as far as I know. But the answer must have something to do with White’s sense of himself as a painter manqué—that is to say, as a man with a painterly vision of the world but none of the painter’s skills—and even more to do with the particularity of painting, with the simple fact that if we could achieve in words everything we can achieve with paint, we would not need painting, or would need it only as decoration. Like Alf Dubbo, the Aboriginal painter in Riders in the Chariot, Duffield is not a man of ideas. When he tries to express himself in words, the words feel inauthentic, as though forced out of him by “some devilish ventriloquist.” White’s visionaries in general think intuitively rather than abstractly; if his painters can be said to think at all, they think in paint. In the kind of painting that Duffield does, figurative expressionism tending more and more toward the abstract, the movement of the hand is the way in which the painter thinks.

  In a letter written in 1968, while he was still working on The Vivisector, White mentions, not entirely seriously, that he fears the book will be received by the public as “Sex Life of Famous Painter.” Hurtle Duffield does not have an extensive sex life—his main sexual activity is masturbation—but it is extreme, the sex life of a man who uses women as a stimulus to epiphany. The two women with whom he has extended affairs, Nance Lightfoot and Hero Pavloussi, both die, and Olivia Davenport’s accusation that Duffield has killed them is not wholly baseless: He has, so to speak, ridden them to death in an effort to transmute the sometimes “hideous and depraved” ecstatic transports they share into artistic truth.

  The unexpected lyricism of the paintings of the next-to-last phase of Duffield’s career—a lyricism that some of Sydney’s cognoscenti find cloying—is largely the aftereffect of the affair he has with the thirteen-year-old Kathy Volkov, for whom White draws—a little too closely at times—on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. By a strange kind of incestuous autogenesis, their intercourse, rather than getting Kathy pregnant, turns her into the child he has not had, his masterpiece and his artistic heir, in contrast with Nance and Hero, his failures. And Kathy is not ungrateful: “It was you who taught me how to see, to be, to know instinctively,” she will write, looking back on their liaison.

  As for Duffield’s very last phase, in which, semi-paralyzed, past sex, he is tended by a faithful boy, this is dominated by the unfinished painting in which he comes closest to realizing his vision of God: a simple painting in indigo, the word indigo itself an anagram swelling with cryptic meanings.

  In her study of Patrick White in the context of the Australian art scene, Helen Verity Hewitt observes that at just the time when White was writing The Vivisector, the kind of painting that Hurtle Duffield does was becoming passé in Australia. The watershed date was 1967, when the work of a new generation of American artists was introduced to Sydney and Melbourne in an exhibition seen by huge numbers of people. The revolution represented by this new work was enthusiastically endorsed by younger Australian practitioners. “Human feeling, expressionism and spiritual quests were seen by the new ‘internationalists’ as embarrassing and gauche . . . Hard-edge, minimal and colour-field painting stressed the autonomy of the art object and its divorce from any notions of self-expression.”1

  Nineteen sixty-seven was also the year when the Art Gallery of New South Wales held a major retrospective of the work of Sidney Nolan. White was overwhelmed by the sweep of Nolan’s achievement as revealed in the exhibition, which seemed to him “the greatest event—not just in painting—in Australia in my lifetime.” He drew on it for the retrospective of Duffield’s work near the end of The Vivisector. He also sent Nolan the novel in draft, asking him to report candidly “how close or remote I am from the workings of a painter’s mind.” Nolan thus had good grounds for believing that Duffield was modeled on him.

  It was not only in painting that, as the 1960s drew to an end, a changing of the guard took place. Much as the cohort of artists—Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval—who imported German and French expressionism into Australian art in the immediate postwar years and who, along with the more senior William Dobell, would become the public face of Australian painting to the wider world, were now being supplanted by a new generation with new metropolitan models, so White, likewise formed in important respects by European expressionism, and likewise in the 1960s the representative, even the colossus, of Australian literature, was about to be passed over by the reading public in favor of a new wave of writers from Latin America, India, and the Caribbean. The book White was working on in 1967, the book that became The Vivisector, was thus fated to be an elegy not only to the school of painting represented by Duffield but also to the school of writing represented by White himself.

  All of White’s novels from The Aunt’s Story on are fully achieved works by a major writer. There is no weak link in the chain. White himself nominated The Aunt’s Story, The Solid Mandala (1966), and The Twyborn Affair (1979) as his best. Voss was not on his list, perhaps because he had grown heartily sick of being identified as “the author of Voss.” Nor was The Vivisector.

  The Vivisector has its faults. There are sections where White writes at less than white heat (one thinks here of the entire Kathy Volkov episode). His assaults on hypocrisy and pretentiousness can grow wearisome. But these are minor lapses compared with the achievement of the whole. In Hurtle Duffield, White found a way of giving body to a conception of the artist—and therefore of himself—as megalomaniac, certainly, but also as Luciferian hero, as—to quote his own epigraph from Rimbaud—“the great Accursed One,” and of doing so with just enough mockery, just enough exposure of the mess in which he lives, to make the portrait compelling.

  J. M. COETZEE

  MARCH 2008

  1Patrick White, Painter Manqué (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2002), p. 82.

  1

  It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them on the stack. The fowls were fluffing in the dust and sun: that crook-neck white pullet Mumma said she would hit on the head if only she had the courage to; but she hadn’t. (It was Mumma who killed the fowls when any of them got so old you could only eat them.) So the white crook-neck thing, white too about the wattles, stood around grabbing what and whenever it could, but sort of sideways.

  ‘Why’re the others pecking at it, Pa?’

  ‘Because they don’t like the look of it. Because it’s different.’

  Oh the long heavy Sunday with Pa’s old empty bottles. There was an old stove behind the wash-house he had bought, he said, as
a speculation. The rust came off in flakes, which you tasted to see, because there was nothing else to do.

  ‘How long you gunner be, Pa, before we have a look at the box?’

  Pa didn’t answer. He was too taken up with his business of the empty bottles. It was Mumma, anyway, who did the talking. Pa was a quiet man.

  So you could only wait, and kick the rusty old hulking stove, and wait for Pa to take down the box which he almost always did of a Sunday if Mumma and the others weren’t there. When he had done his last sum of empty bottles, and carved the muck out of his pipe, and rammed in a few fresh crumbs of tobacco, and lit up, then, after a draw or two, he was ready to fetch down the box from where he kept it, out of reach, amongst the tins of soft soap, the bottles of liniment and turps and the needles he mended the harness with.

  Of course you knew all about all of what Pa kept in the box, but that made the things more important, and going over them one by one. Not that there wasn’t a lot of uninteresting stuff as well: old family papers, particularly deeds.

  ‘What are deeds, Pa?’

  But Pa didn’t want to explain, only that he had never been the better off for any blooming piece of paper.

  So you didn’t bother. They were less interesting than the hair of dead people. There was the locket with the hair of Pa’s sister Clara, who died on the voyage out, and was buried at sea. There were the photographs. There was the photograph of Grannie Duffield in a cap: her hands spread out against her skirt showed off the rings she was wearing. Her hollow eyes had never known you.

  ‘When did she die?’ As if you didn’t know; but this was the Sunday game you played.

  ‘Six months after landing at Sydney. She died of the consumption, ’ Pa said, sucking on his pipe.

  ‘And you were left with Granpa.’

  Pa didn’t answer, but sucked his pipe.

  ‘Did you like her?’

  ‘Course I liked ’er. Wasn’t she me mother?’

  ‘She looks funny.’

  ‘How funny?’

  ‘Sort of different.’

  ‘Your grandmother was a lady. A clergyman’s daughter,’ Pa added, sucking on his pipe: peugh, it smelled!

  ‘Is Mumma a lady? And Mrs Burt?’

  ‘Course they’re ladies! What else would they be?’ Pa sucked so hard his Adam’s apple grew red and angry.

  Granpa Duffield was a more, perhaps the most, interesting subject. He had a big nose, sharp along the edge, like a chopper. (Mumma used to say: ‘You can tell by yer grandfather’s nose he was born a haristercrat.’) And large, rather shiny eyes. His hair was beautifully arranged, at least for the photograph, in an old fashion. On the back of the photograph someone had written in brown ink: ‘Hertel Vivian Warboys Duffield’.

  ‘That’s my name’—dreamily—as though they both didn’t know. ‘Why amn’t I “Vivian Warboys” as well?’

  Pa puffed. Then he said: ‘One name’s enough for a boy to carry around in Australia.’

  It was a good enough explanation. Of course everybody knew by now, everybody in Cox Street, but any stranger who didn’t, laughed. ‘“Hurtle”? What sort of a name is that?’ And it made you start what Mumma called sulking, because you couldn’t go on for ever explaining to every stranger that came: ‘“Hurtle” was the name of a foreign woman that married into my granpa’s family. Only it was “H-e-r-t-e-l”, not “H-u-r-t-l-e”. When I was christened the parson got the spelling wrong.’

  All these mysteries were contained in the box. And the ring. The ring had a sort of bird on it, sticking out its tongue. The bird was cut off short, below the neck. What was left, looked as though it was resting on a dish.

  ‘That was your grandfather’s ring. The police sergeant gave it to me when I went out to Ashfield to identify the body.’

  ‘After Granpa fell off the mule.’

  ‘Yairs. He died of a seizure on the Parramatta Road.’

  ‘What’s a seizure?’

  Pa didn’t answer at first. ‘Yer blood gets seized.’

  Grandpa Duffield looked more awful than before, with his arranged hair and watery eyes. You couldn’t look long enough.

  ‘What was he doing on the mule?’

  ‘Cor, Hurt, I told yer often enough! ’E borrowed the mule ter ride to the center of Australia. It was ’is dream.’ After that Pa’s pipe didn’t stop spitting.

  ‘What happened to the mule?’

  ‘I told yer! It disappeared. An’ I never stopped payin’ it off to the owner for a long time after.’

  They sat sharing the mysteries of their family. There wasn’t much else to do of a Sunday. Except slip the ring with the tongued bird on and off your biggest finger. Pa smoking, and pretending not to look.

  But as soon as Mumma squeezed through the gap in the fence, with Lena, Edgar, Will, Winnie and Flo, Pa closed the box. Secrets weren’t for everyone. Mumma started telling all she had heard next door, with the kids stuffing on Mrs Burt’s cold puftaloons; Mumma used to say Mrs B. was a good soul who never ever would believe other people had enough to eat.

  Although they told you you must love others, you couldn’t always, not when they were all smeary. Mumma was Mumma. And Will was different, who shared the bed; Will was hopeless.

  Mumma said: ‘I could flop down, but have everything to do. Can’t you kids make yourselves scarce?’

  Pa had gone into the harness room to replace the box. Bonnie was whinnying from her stall. All the fowls, the cats, had scattered on seeing the kids return.

  Lena called: ‘Come on, Hurt, what do you say if we have a game of hoppy down at Abrams’s entrance?’ That was where the ground was level; there were no ruts like in the middle of the street.

  He couldn’t stand Lena in particular. She was four years older. There were the three miscarriages between, Mumma told Mrs Burt.

  ‘I don’t wanner play any hopscotch.’ He didn’t either. ‘Not with you. You’re not even lean. You’re the scrag end.’

  Lena burst. She came up and donged him one with her skinny hand: Granma Duffield’s without the rings; it had the string of a leather strap.

  He didn’t care, though. He kicked her thin shins, and she went off pretending not to cry because she was an older girl.

  Oh the Sunday evenings.

  Mumma said she ought to get the tea, but was going to sit for a few minutes at least. Which she did. In that old unravelled cane chair. On the veranda looking over Cox Street.

  All the while the kids were screaming playing ball skipping Florrie had dropped the rest of her puftaloon in the dust the voice of their niminy-piminy Lena had united with Elsie Abrams’s on the hopscotch court on the hard level ground at the livery stables entrance.

  He hung around Mumma, waiting for her to settle, and she didn’t roust on him. In fact he could feel she liked it, in the heavy evening light, with the three or four big leaning sunflowers, their petals gone floppy from the day’s heat.

  Several of the houses in Cox Street had neat pretty gardens, the houses themselves painted up. Not like our old place, he once complained to Mumma. With its once painted, now weather-beaten, weatherboard, and straggly self-sown sunflowers. But Mumma said they were lucky to find a place at that rental, and who would paint a rented home, even if they had the time, which she and Pa didn’t, for the laundries she took in, and the empty bottles Pa went round collecting to sell. So that was that, and it didn’t matter really, not with the two yellows of the sun and the sunflowers playing together, and the sticky green of the wilted leaves.

  He began to smoodge around Mumma. ‘Oh I’m exhausted, Hurt dear!’ She sighed, but laughed, and took him on her lap in spite of the next baby inside. ‘You’re too big.’ She wasn’t complaining.

  She liked him best, he hoped. But he wasn’t a sook. He could run, shout, play, fight, had scabs on his knees and twice split Billy Abrams’s lip, who was two years older and a few months.

  Now when he had arranged himself, and it was the time of dreamy, smoodging questions, he asked of Mumma:
‘What did Granpa Duffield do that was wrong?’

  ‘I dunno as you could say he did anything wrong. ’E was too much a gentleman.’

  ‘Is Pa a gentleman?’

  ‘Pa is different. Pa is a gentleman inside. Oh yes, Pa’s a gentleman! ’

  ‘Then he can’t be so different from Granpa Duffield.’

  ‘Well—Pa had no edgercation. Poor Pa was put to lumping bags of potatoes and onions for Cartwrights down in Sussex Street, to earn a crust for ’is own dad. Granpa liked to talk. He was so pleasant. He had a beautiful handwritin’. ’E could copy real lovely. And did earn a shillun here and there. But blew ’is cash as quick as ’e got it. And the remittance too.’

  The remittance was one of the mysteries you shared with Mumma. You would have liked to ask more about it, and how Granpa blew it, but you didn’t dare.

  Mumma was the one who dared, on a heavy Sunday evening. ‘Granpa loved ’is spirits. That was ’is downfall. That is why yer father never touched a drop.’

  She hung her head. Because of the laundries she was always doing, her skin stayed white and sort of steamy.

  ‘Stop, Hurtle! Oh, my neck! You’re hurting, dear!’ Then when they had rearranged themselves: ‘Your grandfather was a handsome man.’ She sighed.

  ‘Was Pa handsome?’

  After a pause, she said: ‘No.’

  ‘Were you pretty?’

  He could feel Mumma and the next baby kicking together. ‘Oh dear, I’m not the one to answer that!’ When they had settled down she said: ‘No. I think yer father married me because of a pair of earrins. They was corneelun. Mrs Apps give them to me when I worked a dress for her little boy. The staff used to say: “’Ere comes that young feller. Better put on your earrins, Bessie.” I lost one after we married.’