The Vivisector by Patrick White

So far he had conceived in paint no more than fragments of a whole. If he were only free of women who wished to hold somebody else responsible for their self-destruction; more difficult still: if he could ignore the tremors of his own balls, then he might reach his resisted objective, whether through mottled sausage skins, or golden chrysalides and splinters of multi-coloured glass perhaps purposefully strewn on a tessellated floor, or the human face drained to its dregs, or the many mirrors in which his sister Rhoda was reflected, or all of these and more fused into one--not to be avoided--vision of G O D.

Art novels are always a challenge, primarily because words are not images, as much as we like to think of them that way. Novels about art that insist on giving detailed ecphrasis--that old Greek word for when Homer lingers on the reliefs on a shield for eighty lines--always fall flat, because the effectiveness of the art lies outside the capability of words to capture it. Better to leave it to someone like Patrick White, who writes about a successful and tortured Australian painter named Hurtle Duffield in his novel The Vivisector. White always has one foot in the world of vision and the world of the physical, even bodily and gross; an artist, of course, being tasked with bridging these two worlds and putting vision on the page. (In a way Hurtle is an extended riff on the Aboriginal artist Alf Dubbo of Riders in the Chariot, who struggles to paint the vision he shares with three others--except Hurtle's vision isolates him and leaves him alone.) And White is elliptical enough, too, never quite giving us a glimpse at what Duffield's paintings look like.

Hurtle is born to a poor washerwoman and her family; as a child he insinuate his way into the mansion of the Courtney family for whom she works. He's captivated by the aesthetic fineness of their life, symbolized by the grand prism of the chandelier and the rich aromas of Alfreda Courtney's wardrobe, into which she shoves his face. As it happens, the rich woman is so taken with the precocious Hurtle that she essentially buys him from his tearful mother for $500. This section is pointedly borrowed from Great Expectations; at one point, Hurtle's new sister Rhoda even looks at him and says, "You're common." But Rhoda is no Estella, designed to entice and torture; she's a sickly and disfigured hunchback who haunts Hurtle's life. A stolen glimpse at Rhoda without her clothes becomes a subject that Hurtle will attempt to paint for the rest of his life.

It's cruel, being an artist: you see what others wish, in many cases, that you didn't. An artist is the vivisector, opening up the guts of his subject and portraying them to the world. (Alfreda, who makes Hurtle pretentiously call her Maman, literalizes her own repression and hypocrisy by bankrolling anti-vivisection activism.) Hurtle vivisects Rhoda in his paintings as surely as he does when he paints the suicide of his pathetic tutor on the walls of his room. As Hurtle ages, the novel offers up a parade of women who become Hurtle's lovers and confidants, and in many cases, subjects: Nance Lightfoot, a genial prostitute who dies in a horrible accident near Hurtle's bushland cabin; Olivia Boo Davenport, a childhood crush who becomes Hurtle's lover and benefactor; Hero Pavloussi, a beautiful and doomed Greek woman who leaves her husband for Hurtle; Kathy Volkov, a piano prodigy who becomes Hurtle's "spiritual prodigy." (The aging Hurtle does indeed have sex with a thirteen-year old Kathy, which is in keeping with White's belief that all love is a kind of incest, and which means the YA book Twitter people can never find out about White.) Even, ultimately, Rhoda, who moves into Hurtle's home toward the end of both their lives after a long absence.

An artist, in White's telling, is cruel, but the cruelties are compelled: Hurtle is no more able to control the urge to paint something than he can control his sexual urges. Yet, the vivisection can be hurtful and even destructive. There's something voyeuristic about an artist; at one point Nance tells Hurtle that his landscape paintings even show him "pervin' on rocks." But God, too, according to Hurtle, is an artist and a vivisector, and life--vulnerable, painful, and strange--is God's art, God's vivisection. After a stroke, Hurtle finds himself struggling physical to paint, but still he hacks away at enormous boards with mangled hands, trying to paint his ultimate vision. At a retrospective of his work at Sydney's National Gallery--a chorus of priggish and philistine patrons whose conversations rank among White's funniest scenes--a rumor begins to spread that Hurtle Duffield is trying to paint God. For White, that's what painting is: not just an attempt to pin God to the canvas and make him visible, but to emulate God through the process of translating vision into the realm of the physical.