The Vivisector (2 page)

In the complex music of his prose and the mystical bent of his thought, White was entirely out of step with postwar British fiction, which tended toward a modest domestic realism. Only with the publication of
Voss
did the London critics begin to accept him as a major writer. Success in the metropolis normally guaranteed celebrity in the colonies, but in the case of White even the imprimatur of London did not at once melt the studied coolness with which he was received at home.

This state of affairs changed in the 1960s as Australians began to look to the wider world with more confidence and openness, and to pour money into prestige cultural projects like the new Opera House in Sydney.
Riders in the Chariot
sold well; from then on, White would be grudgingly admired at home if not loved. Though he never publicly came out of the closet in the American manner, he no longer pretended, after the death of his mother in 1963, to be straight. He called his sexual makeup “ambivalent,” and claimed that his in-between status allowed him insights into human nature not accessible to “those who are unequivocally male or female.” Advances in medicine relieved attacks of asthma so devastating that they had sometimes landed him in hospital. He and Lascaris sold their smallholding and moved closer to the city. White began to take a more active role in political life, joining protests against conscription for the Vietnam War, against uranium mining, and later, in 1988, against the celebration of two hundred years of British settlement in Australia. When Penguin Books, upon publishing Philip Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint,
was prosecuted for disseminating pornography, White appeared as a witness for the defense.

The Nobel Prize, which White won in 1973 ahead of a strong field that included Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and V. S. Naipaul, made him famous. Yet even as he became a national figure—Australian of the Year in 1973—influential critics, particularly within the academy, were losing interest in him. To Marxists he stood for elitist high art; to cultural materialists he was too much of an idealist; feminists felt he was a misogynist; to postcolonialists he was too wedded to European canons and too little concerned with the advancement of Australia’s Aboriginal minority; to postmodernists he was simply a belated Modernist. In schools and universities he began to drop off the reading lists. By the end of the century, ten years after his death, his name had faded from the national consciousness.

White never took a strong role in the affairs of the Australian literary community. He did not write for reviews or for the press, gave few interviews, did no publicity for his books (“I find it all nauseating; and in any case my life is not the least bit spectacular”), did not fraternize with fellow writers. He and Lascaris tended to favour the company of painters and actors; he became a connoisseur of Australian painting, and toward the end of his life a generous donor to public art collections.

White’s art education had begun in London in the 1930s, at the hands of the expatriate Australian painter Roy de Maistre, through whom White met Francis Bacon. In Australia his circle included Sidney Nolan. All three of these painters, and others too, went into the making of Hurtle Duffield, the artist hero of
The Vivisector
(1970).

Duffield, as White revealed in his memoir
Flaws in the Glass
(1981), is “a composite of several [painters] I have known, welded together by the one I have in me but never became.” Born (unlike his creator) into a poor working-class family, the young Hurtle is in effect sold by his father to a wealthy Sydney family, the Courtneys, who have no son and no prospect of one, to be brought up (like his creator) in affluence.

The Courtneys take in Hurtle, and later legally adopt him, because they detect something exceptional in him. They are not mistaken. Hurtle Duffield, later Hurtle Courtney, later Hurtle Duffield again, is a genius of the archetypal Romantic type: a loner, driven to create by an inner demon, a maker of his own morality, who will sacrifice everything and everyone to his art.

Born at the turn of the century, Hurtle at the age of sixteen flees the threatening embrace of Mrs. Courtney, enlists in the army, and goes off to the Western front. After the war he spends a hand-to-mouth year in Paris steeping himself in the new European art, then returns to Australia: The option of expatriation seems not to occur to him. With the proceeds of his first sales he buys a block of land on the fringes of Sydney, where he lives in seclusion, devoting himself to his art. Gradually he wins a reputation among the Sydney cognoscenti, and is able to move to a large old house in the city.

Though rendered in the fullest detail, the life of Duffield up to this point is really only a preliminary to the phase of his life that truly concerns White: the phase from his mid-fifties until his death, when all the options on offer have been explored, the pattern of his life has been established, and the true struggle can begin between himself and God. White belonged to no church, but as he grew older was ready to profess an uncertain belief in a universe presided over by a creator God, and in an urge inborn in the human breast to reach out toward God—an urge stifled by too much comfort and too much civilization. Duffield’s vision of God is a bleak one: God is the great Vivisector, who for his own inscrutable purposes flays us and tortures us while we are still living.

White’s plots tend to be rudimentary.
The Vivisector
is held together not by plot—its plot consists in just one thing after another—but by the growth of Duffield as an artist and a man, by the power of White’s idiosyncratic verbal style, and by a set of thematic motifs that are enunciated and then repeatedly returned to, in the process accreting meaning, much as a sketch is gradually reworked into a painting. Vivisection is one such motif. For God turns out to be not the only vivisector at work; as his lover, the prostitute Nance Lightfoot, comes to see, Duffield himself uses the women who enter his life for experimental purposes. “The only brand of truth [Duffield] recognizes is ’is own it is inside ’im ’e reckons and as ’e digs inter poor fucker
you
’e hopes you’ll help ’im let it out. . . . By turnun yer into a shambles . . . Out of the shambles ’e paints what ’e calls ’is bloody work of art!” [p. 244] Street argot here enables Nance to make key connections between sex and evisceration, painting and disfigurement.

Early in his career Duffield meets a young man, Col Forster, whose ambition is to write the Great Australian Novel. Without reading a word Col has written, Duffield knows he will fail. Col has “a thick-looking skin . . . blunt teeth . . . kind fingers”: to be a great artist you need a thin skin, cruel hands, and teeth like a tiger. Working on a self-portrait, Duffield feels as if he is slashing at the canvas, and at his own face, with a razor.

Another motif on which
The Vivisector
dwells is disfigurement, in particular the hump on the back of Rhoda Courtney, which makes her a figure of both horror and fascination to her brother. From a single remembered glimpse of her naked, he paints her in the posture of a priestess, and returns to the painting at intervals to consult it and find new meaning in it. Duffield and Rhoda end up living together, held together by a force of love indistinguishable from exasperation and hatred, both suffering, as Rhoda recognizes, from “something incurable” that goes deeper than her deformity or Duffield’s solitariness, some special vision of the darkness at the end of the tunnel that renders them unfit for ordinary life.

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.