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 ungratefuclass="underline" “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.