Patrick White: The Vivisector

Once he got as far as the landing, and called out, though diffidently: ‘Rhoda? Can I be of any help with all that stuff you’ve got piled up?’ Then a little louder: ‘Rhoda?’

But she didn’t hear; and at once he was glad: not that it relieved his emptiness to know he could keep his shame a secret.

As he continued shuffling, sitting, getting up to look inside drawers, rummaging through junk, turning over derelict drawings, almost everyone was enviable: free to read newspapers, open letters, answer doorbells, waste their lives yarning on the telephone — happy human beings who hadn’t preserved themselves for a final statement of faith they probably wouldn’t be capable of making. Most of them would die in bed, not in desert places.

Rhoda, with her nose for failings, had smelt a rat some way back. ‘If you no longer read the papers, you’ll cut yourself off from life.’

‘I have more important things to think about.’

‘Well — in some ways — I expect it does no harm not to realize what a bonanza you’re missing out on.’

They were able to join in laughing at that one.

When Rhoda said: ‘And this big dishful of letters — aren’t you ever going to open them?’

‘No. Who would be writing to us? Nobody we want to hear from. And rates and income tax — we can recognize those easily enough.’

‘Yes, but there might be just that letter — that moment more delicious than any you’ve experienced yet — from somebody more fatale —more rejuvenating.’

She wasn’t going to tempt him. He swept up the lot and carried them out to the incinerator.

No. Not the lot. There was one: an air letter from the United States.

But it was a time-waster, from a woman asking him to discuss his paintings in connection with an essay she was writing for an intellectual magazine. At the end there was a touch which appealed to him: P.S. After reading this over I feel I should add: I’m not half as dry as I sound.

Rhoda asked at a later date: ‘That American letter, Hurtle — was it from Kathy?’

‘Kathy and I don’t need to write each other letters.’

‘Oh, but they’re nice! She writes such charming, affectionate letters to her mother.’

‘This was a letter from some American bluestocking.’

Rhoda asked in her driest voice: ‘Did you — in your broadminded days — ever try on a bluestocking?’ Immediately she burst into shrieks for her own wit, and he went out so as not to listen to them.

Was he as ludicrous as her outbreak of forced vulgarity seemed to imply? Achievement didn’t help reduce absurdity. Perhaps Rhoda was the only one who recognized this, and now, at the end, he recognized himself in the glass she was holding up to him; to the others he remained reason for admiration, for hate, for shy worship or plain honest indifference.

If he could have chosen, if, rather, he had developed the habit of prayer, he would have prayed to shed his needled flesh, and for his psychopomp to guide him, across the river, into an endlessness of pure being from which memory couldn’t look back.

But how bloody dishonest! As if he could ever wish to renounce his memories of the flesh even when renounced by its pleasures: the human body, unbroken by its own will, leaping and bucking to unseat, but rapturously, the longed-for, the chosen, though finally abstract rider; yellow light licking as voluptuously as tongues; green shade dribbled like saliva on nakedness; all the stickinesses: honey, sap, semen, sweat melting into sweat; the velvets of rose-flesh threatened by teeth; exhausted, ugly, human furniture, bulging with an accumulation of experience acquired in years or by a stroke of lightning.

The morning after the Grand Inquisition into the nature of his heresies, it was the furniture by which he began to rehabilitate himself. In and out of the upper rooms. Groping the no longer barren forms. Clutching when he misjudged his step. Smooth mahogany rocks, split open in places by time, in others by human vagary, disgust or desperation. Arabesques of cobweb, mildew bloom coming to organic life: lichens in their own right. Dust offering paths only taken before by fly or spider; over one unbroken expanse a rat must have dragged its tail.

Of all geographic features the great crater of a bath was by far the most tactile: higher up, the extinct geyser, with its spattering of verdigris and scattering of dead matches. The same bath, brown-stained, the bottom scarred where the enamel had worn off: they had intended to replace it and do the bathroom up; but he didn’t use it all that much, and Rhoda, unwilling to risk the stairs, owned a child’s hip-bath shoved out of sight in the conservatory.

On this significant morning it was not the bathroom which moved him so much as a feeling of floating back through a blur of sensory experience: of warm water bubbling into tender crevices; of rough towels; of the first, shamefully realized, deliriously seeping, orgasm.

Returning to the front room, making his way from object to object, still opening and closing drawers, he was trying to relate what he saw to what he knew. The desert was beginning to flower: not that he had any illusions about its flowering. The sensory gardens of the past were no substitute for what he had to do in the present. He would not be allowed to find permanent rest on a bed of shivery-grass, only enjoy it a moment or two, as lyrical sensation and silvery image, before the wrestling match.

As he climbed up once more on to the scaffold, arranging on the little adjustable table the archangel had made according to instructions, the tortured tubes, the prepared brushes, the peanut-butter glasses filled with clear, shuddering water (never cared for peanut butter except for the uses to which you can put the glasses) he renounced the temporary delights — or those which couldn’t be squeezed out in proliferating colour, and compressed into a vision which, by its compression, would convey the whole.

So he was beginning again. In his altered technique. With what Rhoda and he referred to as his ‘good’ hand, but which perhaps only he knew was about as crook as you could come by: if the violence of blood throbbing and prickling in his still functional veins hadn’t seemed to add a vibrancy to what he needed to convey. As he niggled and stickled with brush after brush, none of which was the right one. While all the whirligigs of memory, aureoles and chandeliers, dandelions and tadpoles, pulsed and revolved. He almost lost his balance once, trying to coerce the crimson arteries, or life-bearing rivers, across the vast steppes of his still only partly cultivated hardboard. He would build at one point a city fortified against assault by art lovers, music critics, besotted grocers, psychic seamstresses, vivisectors and any others possessed by doubtful intentions: a citadel to protect those whose love was of such an identical nature it became interchangeable. (Send a P.C. with details of hermaphroditic pudenda so that his psychopomp could precede him through whatever hades of Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov holding it in her hand as a passport to truth and Mozart.)

When Don Lethbridge came (why? had Rhoda sent for him?) the light was long past its best.

‘Going for the colour again, aren’t you?’

This was not criticism, nor — more odious — encouragement. Each realized it was communication pure and simple, which required no answer. And after Don had helped him down from the block, words might have stumbled. Important to conserve strength: it was going to be a long trudge to the Elysian Fields.

In spite of the continued whispering overheard through walls and from distances, he worked for weeks on this same painting. It wasn’t by any means his last testament, but might grow eventually into what he saw as his compendium of life. Sometimes memory fed him, more often, intuition: insights of such intensity he felt he should have been able to relate them to actual experience; but in this he failed mostly. For instance: the blood horses wallowing in sea shallows at dawn, milky water filling the satin troughs between belly and thighs as they shimmy on their lovely backs, before lunging to their feet, to shake their barrels, all feathered with light and motion, flinging into the used sea the beads of water from their stringy manes. Where had he seen these bathers? He must convey something of the horses, not themselves, their spirit. In the same way the girl in the crushed pink hat and cotton frock strumming out of an old banjo all the remembered songs: fingers, nails blunted by the strumming sanded texture of the arms, tremors of the breasts inside the gritty dress. As the girl entered the trees, her skin brindled by light and shade, the old banjo made a papery thump thump trailing behind her through the tussocks. Because of course this was a self-indulgent work, not what he intended or what he was intended to paint once he had mastered himself, he was also this girl with whom he might or might not have slept. Lying under the paperbarks, he identified the shammy-leather skin, the goose-pimples growing in it, the sand tasted on interchangeable mouths. Now it was himself alone watching the great pantechnicon driving for what reason through the shallows. And the essence of smoky cat slipping through long grass at dusk looking for a kill, at the same time to curl her tail around some something in the name of love. Everything private perfect reduced to a kill if not by time the super-cat by the khaki klan of killers. Tear off a hand or leg it doesn’t belong to you anyway for ever and blood is made to bleed. Like letters. My dear Cat. He composed letters just as he painted pictures in his mind and lost them before he could get them down. Everything comes back though, like the homing pigeons pensioned men keep in their yards. Stalagmites of white droppings, lacy scribbles in pigeon shit, a coral scratching over worm-eaten boards. My husband my God took me by the windpipe and shook it to buggery after the spaghetti on toast. From where did he know the horses, the shammy-skinned singer, the pigeon-loft held together by the rusty ends of kero tins? He didn’t know. But he knew. Where and when doesn’t in the end matter.