Patrick White

Paperback reprint in the 'Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics' series of a novel first published in 1970. It traces the life of a painter from his birth at the turn of the century until his death in the 60s. He dissects his experiences and relationships for the sake of his art. The Australian author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973.

The Vivisector

Hurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him-all are used as fodder for his art. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience.

Emmett

The very few (?) novels available about art and its makers are little indication of the immense curiosity aroused by the tempting unknown interiors of the artistic mind. While it's difficult to put into concise words what exactly about artists fascinate readers, perhaps the kind of questions one would very much like to ask would be easier to phrase: "What goes on in the mind of an artist? How does he/she feel? What is their experience of the world like?" Because artists surely are strange creatures, and in these novels about art and their makers lie the prospect of having them offered up on platter, pinned and wriggling, for our imagination to feast on.

In The Vivisector, White offers for our consideration the painter Hurtle Duffield. The novel mirrors the artist's personality: alternately selfish and altruistic, brilliant and brusque, venomous, tender, coarse, cold, amusing and passionate and without passion. As the novel begins and ends, so does Duffield, followed from birth till death, and his life unfolds in these pages with a hideous, familiar enchantment of a raw wound. For Hurtle is a raw wound, compelled by his nature to feel and remember every impression made upon him from his earliest years, and to feed them to the fire of his art. Art. Even after scores of all manner of relationships (parental, romantic, lustful, brotherly, impermanent), the reader is made to feel that Art is the only thing he has truly loved and lived for.

In this intermittently repulsive and ultimately strangely moving record, White's pen moves from the gristly to the sublime with the same poetry (as evidenced below).

"He loved the feel of a smooth stone, or to take a flower to pieces, to see what there was inside. He loved the pepper tree breaking into light, and the white hens rustling by moonlight in the black branches, and the sleepy sound of the hen shit dropping. He could do nothing about it, though. Not yet. He could only carry all of it in his head. Not talk about it. Because Mumma and Pa would not have understood. They talked about what was 'right' and 'honest', and the price of things, but people looked down at their plates if you said something was 'beautiful'." (10-11)

"If I've learnt anything of importance, it was you who taught me, and I thank you for it. [...] It was you who taught me how to see, to be, to know instinctively. When I used to come to your house in Flint Street, melting with exictement and terror, wondering whether I would dare go through with it again, or whether I would turn to wood, or dough, or say something so stupid and tactless you would chuck me out into the street, it wasn't simply thought of the delicious kisses and all the other lovely play which forced the courage in me. It was the paintings I used to look at sideways whenever I got a chance. I wouldn't have let on, because I was afraid you might have been amused, and made me talk about them, and been even more amused when I couldn't discuss them at your level. But I was drinking them in through the pores of my skin. There was an occasion when I even dared touch one or two of the paintings as I left, because I had to know what they felt like, and however close and exciting it had been to embrace with our bodies, it was a more truly consummating love-shock to touch those stony surfaces and suddenly glide with my straying fingers into what seemed like endless still water." (537-8)

Melody Izard

A little Lolita and a whole lot of thinking about dissecting a living animal. Australian artists are not my specialty, but the book was still interesting.

The Vivisector

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