page 15

Books

O. Gager

Patrick White:

The Vivisector

Cape, London, 1970 $4.75.

Ten years ago White was almost unknown in New Zealand. Now here, as elsewhere, recognition has finally come, and to compare a New Zealand novel with Voss has become the final accolade. White's new novel, The Vivisectors, has shocked local booksellers by selling outrageously well. Even great novelists are not supposed to be so popular.

The sceptic about literary reputations will find, in this novel as in its predecessors, very much that is dubious. Where Voss and Riders in the Chariot upended the conventional novels of Australian exploration and Australian suburbia, The Vivisector works out in its 642 pages the accepted romantic view of the artist as the man who sees the bitter and destroying truths those who surround him cannot see. The artist is rejected because of his insight; his imagination makes him a pariah. Choosing between those he loves and his art. White's hero, the painter Hurtle Duffield, always sacrifices, in the most literal, Old Testament religious sense, those he loves to his work. The recital of this theme would under ordinary circumstances, make any publisher call in his office bouncer. At the climax of the novel, Duffield dies, his last act the brush-stroke which completes his final painting. He has, to use the cliche the novel demands, died as he lived. The romantic myth of the artist dictates the limits of life and death rather than, more soberly, accepting that the novel dare not trespass too far outside the broken fences of probability. Either this is tremendous literary daring, or it is melodrama.

The Australian critics who have always challenged White's reputation will find in Duffield's unconvincing death the same dangerous elements of the miraculous they noted and condemned in Voss and Riders in the Chariot. Here there are, it is true, no direct supernatural interventions. The laws of physiology have only been relaxed too long in Hurtle Duffield's benefit. But this is enough to damn most authors.

What is there, if anything, which would tell against this view of The Vivisector? The echoes of his past novels must be heard by any sensitive listener in this book, and, depending on how much you trust echoes, they either transform the book or give the illusion of shape to one of White's lesser novels. It is, though, in the insistent link between the romantic ideal of the painter and that earlier preoccupation of White's, the vindication of the religious humble, the riders in the chariot, the holy mad, that this book escapes the stereotype the barest description of its subject would impose on it. Hurtle's childhood, a dangerous story of a boy purchased from his parents by squatters, recalls intentionally every adolescent's repudiation of parents without his creative gift. The artist must always be a bastard, or, if not, must forswear allegiance to his family at as early an age as possible. There is no similarity between the child Hurtle Duffield and the Godbold children in Riders in the Chariot. Hurtle chooses the protectors in his childhood whom Laura Trevelyan, in Voss disdains. As a child. Hurtle, for all his precocious painting on bedroom walls, voluntarily lives in houses whose walls are barred to painters. It is in Hurtle's adulthood that White shows that in this novel as elsewhere he intends to put down the mighty from their seats and exalt the humble. Hurtle's sexual experience with a prostitute, and a Greek millionaire's wife is again hideously unlikely - Nance Lightfoot, White's prostitute, at her worst moments has one of her feet in Baudelaire's Fleurs de Mal and the other in the Gospel descriptions of Mary Magdalene, while a millionairess as the antipode of a prostitute sounds like Father McKay's unwritten novel. But the part played in Riders in the Chariot by the riders' eccentricity, poverty, or race, in The Aunts Story by madness, in Voss by spiritual awareness is here played by evil. Duffield, with his perception of the imminence of personal disaster, drives Nance Lightfoot to suicide and destroys Hero Pavloussi's marriage for a pitiful few weeks that end in pain. Duffield's desperate physical love for the child prodigy Kathy Volkov is as degrading as it is somehow at the same time sublime. White is here again being true to the romantic myth that is his model: the artist betrays his closest friends, but, because of his work, this evil becomes good. The theme of The Vivisector, as of Riders in the Chariot and The solid Mandala is the supersession of evil, but here the acts of evil are transformed into their opposite in their very commission. Duffield is ashamed of his love for Kathy Volkov: he is also proud that she is his spiritual child, in the same way as Theodora finds spiritual children in The Aunts Story. Hurtle Duffield and Cecil Cutbush are the polar antipodes of good and evil forced together by kinship of The Solid Mandala but what in Cutbush is the romantic myth without the element of art as redemption is for Duffield the romantic myth of the artist redeemed by his own art. To see Duffield's life suspended until his last painting is completed is wrong: it is the last stroke of paint which carries out his own sentence of self-execution for which every previous brush-stroke has been a preparation. But because Duffield in painting is both executioner and criminal he is finally just: the redemption his art provides for him is not arbitrary.