The Vivisector Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  THE VIVISECTOR

  PATRICK WHITE was born in England in 1912, when his parents were in Europe for two years; at six months he was taken back to Australia, where his father owned a sheep station. When he was thirteen, he went to school in England, to Cheltenham, “where it was understood, the climate would be temperate and a colonial acceptable.” Neither proved true, and after four rather miserable years there he went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he specialized in languages. After leaving the university he settled in London, determined to become a writer. His first novel, Happy Valley, was published in 1939 and his second, The Living and the Dead, in 1941. During the war he was an RAAF intelligence officer in the Middle East and Greece. After the war he returned to Australia.

  His novels include The Aunt’s Story (1946), The Tree of Man (1956), Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961), The Solid Mandala (1966), The Eye of the Storm (1973), A Fringe of Leaves (1976), and The Twyborn Affair (1979). He also published two collections of short stories, The Burnt Ones (1964) and The Cockatoos (1974), which incorporates several short novels, a collection of novellas, Three Uneasy Pieces (1987), and his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). He also edited Memoirs of Many in One (1986). In 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  Patrick White died in September 1990. In a tribute to him The Times wrote, “Patrick White did more than any other writer to put Australian literature on the international map. . . . His tormented oeuvre is that of a great and essentially modern writer.”

  J. M. COETZEE born in South Africa in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States. Among his academic appointments have been professorships at the University of Cape Town and the University of Chicago. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, as well as of memoirs, criticism, and translations. Among the awards he has won are the Booker Prize (twice) and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize in Literature. Since 2002 he has lived in Adelaide, Australia.

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  First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1970

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1970

  Published in Penguin Books (UK) 1973

  Published in Penguin Books (USA) 1986

  This edition with an introduction by J. M. Coetzee published 2008

  Copyright © Patrick White, 1970

  Introduction copyright © J. M. Coetzee, 2008

  All rights reserved

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION Data

  White, Patrick, 1912-1990.

  The vivesector / Patrick White ; introduction by J. M. Coetzee.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  eISBN: 9781101374023

  1. Painters—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.3.W5V58 2008

  823’.912—dc22 2008028577

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For Cynthia and Sidney Nolan

  As I see it, painting and religious experience are the same thing, and what we are all searching for is the understanding and realization of infinity.

  BEN NICHOLSON

  Cruelty has a Human Heart,

  And Jealousy a Human Face;

  Terror the Human Form Divine,

  And Secrecy the Human Dress.

  The Human Dress is forged in Iron,

  The Human Form a fiery Forge,

  The Human Face a Furnace seal’d,

  The Human Heart its hungry Gorge.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  They love truth when it reveals itself, and they hate it when it reveals themselves.

  SAINT AUGUSTINE

  He becomes beyond all others the great Invalid, the great Criminal, the great Accused One—and the Supreme Knower. For he reaches the unknown.

  RIMBAUD

  Introduction

  Patrick White was born in 1912 into a wealthy New South Wales family, owners of hundreds of thousands of acres of prime grazing land. Young Patrick was not an attractive child, withdrawn, unsmiling; he also suffered from chronic asthma. At the age of twelve he was packed off to England to a public (that is, private) school, where he spent five unhappy years. By the time he came home in 1929 a tendency toward self-loathing had become entrenched. He was also a secret homosexual.

  Back in Australia, he worked for a while as a farmhand on the estate of family friends, and discovered in himself an unexpected love of the wilder reaches of the landscape. In his leisure time he wrote busily.

  Hoping that he might make a career for himself in the diplomatic corps, his parents sent him to Cambridge University, whence he emerged in 1935 with a solid if undistinguished degree in French and German literature. A collection of his poems came out in Sydney, the printer’s bill paid by his mother, who also subsidized performances of a play he had written.

  After Cambridge, White declared he was going to be a writer and on an allowance of four hundred pounds a year took up residence in London. His situation became even more comfortable on the death of his father in 1937, when a substantial legacy came to him (he would have to wait until the death of his mother, however, before receiving the bulk of his inheritance). Never in his life would he find it necessary to take paid employment.

  White was not the first Australian intellectual who, seeing no future for himself at home, took the route of expatriation. His first novel, Happy Valley, appeared in London in 1939, with endorsements by Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, and Herbert Read, and won praise from the critics. In Australia it had a more guarded reception: it misrepresented country life, said reviewers, and its style was unnec
essarily difficult. His second novel, The Living and the Dead (1941), came out first in the United States, and was ignored in Australia.

  In 1940 White enlisted in the Royal Air Force and was sent to North Africa as an intelligence officer. There he met a Cairene Greek named Manoly Lascaris, who became his lover and with whom he would live for the rest of his life. After the war he embarked with Lascaris on what was intended to be no more than a visit to old Australian haunts—their long-term plan was to settle in Greece and run an export-import business—but instead turned into permanent residence. Some twenty-five miles from the centre of Sydney they bought a smallholding, where they grew flowers and raised thoroughbred dogs for sale. The indifference with which his third novel, The Aunt’s Story (1947), was received plunged White into gloom, and for years he gave up writing. Then, after what seems to have been a mystical illumination, he began work on a book that became The Tree of Man.

  The feeling he had rediscovered in himself for the Australian landscape, which reduced him to “silence, simplicity and humility . . . the only proper state for the artist as for the human being,” did not extend to Australian society. He was dismayed by the pressure toward conformity, as well as by the immersion of the middle class in the single-minded pursuit of money. A spirit of prudishness reigned, expressed in a tight censorship system and a general policing of morals: In a notorious case, the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was arrested after a trip abroad for having girlie magazines in his briefcase and had to flee the country under threat of prosecution for the crime of “scandalous conduct.” White’s sense of isolation grew as he watched the land around the smallholding being gobbled up for housing developments. Riders in the Chariot, in which a small company of artists and visionaries is subjected to the (as he saw it) malevolent small-mindedness and xenophobia of the suburbs, expressed in extreme form his alienation from the social world.

  The loneliness and suffering of the artist—of the sexual deviant too—reviled or persecuted or expelled or ostracized for telling truths that the multitude cannot bear, is a recurrent theme in White’s work. Though its hero is not an artist, Voss (1957), the novel for which he became best known, embodies the late Romantic myth by which White lived and from which he drew sustenance. Johann Ulrich Voss, explorer by vocation, ventures into the forbidding interior of the Australian continent; in the course of suffering and dying there, he gains visionary insight into the mysteries not only of the land but also of human existence, and of the human heart.

  It was hardly to be expected that a writer who saw himself as marked out for a special, higher destiny would be taken to the bosom of democratic Australia. White made his first real mark not at home, nor indeed in England, but in the United States, where as early as 1939 Ben Huebsch of Viking Press recognized him as the kind of ambitious, experimental modernist he wanted to foster, and became his devoted publisher. The Tree of Man (1955) was a critical success in New York; together with Voss and Riders in the Chariot (1961), it secured his position among the leaders of the new generation of modernist novelists.

  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 to
ward 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.