Patrick White - The Vivisector

Now it was Rhoda who brought him the letter when it came. She carried it impersonally on her flat palm, as Edith might have offered it on a salver with the Courtney monogram. Rhoda didn’t comment, perhaps because she didn’t recognize what was certainly a changed writing: large and dashing.

The envelope was tough, because expensive; he waited till Rhoda had gone before starting the struggle with it.

My dear friend. .

(not the expected suburban clanger ‘Dear Mr Duffield’, though a stiff translation from the German was no more appropriate.)

… our trouble is you intimidate me still. I’m as nervous as a little girl wondering whether she will find the words to express herself, or a thought in her head worth expressing. And that is how I was changed into a lump of suet as you were leaving the concert, why I started stupidly kissing when I hadn’t meant to, only it is what they do on such occasions — people of Hal Shuard’s kind!

I had planned to embrace you with my eyes, in gratitude. Or would that have given a wrong impression — too much like a prostitute’s invitation? Oh, I am that too, I know! I must experience all there is to experience. I’m a glutton of the senses. I shall end up fat, perhaps bloated, probably destroyed, but I hope that on the way I shall contribute something of value. That is possible, even out of the worst. I am too pliable, not only physically. I say things they want to hear, because it’s easy after what had been hellishly difficult. After trying to praise great men in their own accents, adulation from the nongs (for what they think they love but don’t really) is like mutual seduction under a warm shower. Then I promise them I’ll come back some day and play them Chopin and Gershwin and the lot, and that their Little Kathy from Paddo will always love them. If I were a polio victim as well, I’d be seven times more their idol, but I hope they will never get the chance to take advantage of me to that extent.

I didn’t mean to bitch when I started. This was to have been a letter about us, full of the things we haven’t said. I realize the dangers I may run into, but because I was brought up close to the gutter I’ll take the risk.

If I’ve learnt anything of importance, it was you who taught me, and I thank you for it. Yes, I know there was Khrapovitsky whipping me along to perfect my technique — important certainly — but I’ve come across several machines put together by Khrap alone — impressive except that they were never anything more than machines. 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 excitement 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.

Of course my approach and reactions were childish, personal, egotistical — let’s face it, aren’t we appalling egotists? — but I think this was how I began to feel I could reach the truth, if I filtered these sensations through my true self, however limited that area might be. And that is how I have always gone about it, my darling — I can’t call you ‘lover’, although I suppose that, technically, is what you have been — or ‘dirty seducer’! If I hadn’t wanted, had to be seduced —still I prefer to think of you as the father of anything praiseworthy that will ever come out of me.

We are approaching London, everywhere a dirty yellow, just before dark. Although it is summer below, it is icy in the air. I am shivering. My lovely sables ought to keep me warm and safe, I paid for them myself. It’s so important to feel materially safe when you are the bastard of a runaway Russian seaman and my sainted Scottish mother. But I’m always cold and frightened in the beginning. And now we’re coming down. I am so afraid. I have never been here before. I might never have performed anywhere. It will be flat, pallid, airless, till I can rise above it — if I am ever again given the strength. Pray for me if you know how.

Love — k

Because he didn’t know where to direct his prayers, and would never have the courage to answer her letter, he began priming a board on which, probably tomorrow, he would start to paint, when his idea had descended out of the clouds, into the more practical extensions of space.

He had set out on some mission to the city, but got off the bus at the cathedral, and for no very clear reason was making for the State Gallery. Sick-witted ever since the bus began jolting his head apart. The women wouldn’t let him open a window; the draught might have blown their hair about. Ought to have exploited his gloom: felt numb ever since my daughter my little girlie left to further her overseas career; if it mightn’t have sounded as though he had committed a murder instead of creating life. Anyway, he disliked people who tell their life stories in buses. Anyway, they always left the murders out, because nobody would have believed.

At least his thoughts made him laugh while walking under the Moreton Bay figs in the heat of the day. He might have gone up in the furnace if the trees and his own cold limbs hadn’t prevented it: curiously cold for such a shadowless hour, in which only those of wide-open face strolled laughing and talking exchanging their unexceptionable ideas streaming with sweat and fellowship up the gallery steps some of them down into the little unrefreshment pavilion.

He was the black stroke in the landscape, though they didn’t recognize it.

Probably this was the reason he had left the bus: he had felt the need for recognition, and the most puritanical artist is unable to resist loving himself a little in the mirrors offered by his own paintings.

Cynicism revived him as he went up the steps to the gallery. There was no actual cause for gloom. He felt as physically fit as the other man always appears as he looks smiling at you, or at what he believes he sees. At least the attendants recognized, and could hardly fail to behave with kindness towards an old, three-legged, milky-eyed, stump-toothed dog which had hung around the place so long. The soppy expressions on the attendant faces made him feel he ought to wag his tail.

Nobody else at that hour could possibly know him, and he was glad of it now, stalking through the courts past the schoolgirls, earnest or giggly, young men in shorts showing their all, nondescript middle-aged sexless couples, that skinny old biddy and her scabby-handed relic of a husband. It was the humility of the old couple, looking as though they were about to apologize for something, which made him shoot into a side court. Why should old people wear humble expressions when probably they had copped the lot? He swore nothing would ever make him look humble, not if he was brought to the gutter.

So far he had managed to behave very discreetly walking past other men’s works, carefully avoiding the room in which he would most likely come across his own. Storing up the pleasure, or ekeing out his impatience. None of these parties of smudged schoolgirls, skin-tight young men, or the almost allegorical pair of Ancients, would notice how his heart was bumping, any more than identify his face. He must be looking greedy, though. He not exactly ran, but tripped a step or two, before he thought to restrain himself. And found none of his. Nothing yet. Not one.