Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘This time it’ll be a real visit — now that I know what the conditions are. I’m not a fool, you know, though I dare say you won’t admit it. Anyway, this time I’ll come, and you can paint me — as I am, I mean.’

She looked very serious, religious. He could have begun to paint her then and there, linking the necklaces of Venus round her throat to the bluish, shaven mount.

‘Well,’ she asked, ‘for fuck’s sake, what’s the matter? What are you starun at?’

That recurring question desolated, as the bottle on the dressing-table suddenly riveted him.

‘The bottle—’ his tongue managed, though thickly—‘what is it?’ The half-swallowed cake was choking him.

She followed the direction of his glance. ‘Oh, it’s an old-fashioned scent bottle. Some old thing I picked up cheap from a junk dealer who began to have tickets on me.’

The air was so languid she was fanning herself with a hand on which the crumbs trembled; while he continued staring at the scent bottle on the dressing-table. Shaded from mauve to smoky grey, and sheathed in silver irises, the bottle was a version of those which used to stand on Alfreda Courtney’s high altar.

‘I suppose I’m sentimental,’ said Nance. ‘I love the old things.’

She might have learnt it from Maman herself, who rose like a genie of the scent bottle, accusing him of faithlessness: to a class which had adopted him; to the education invested in him; to a love not so very different, which smelled of melting chocolate and illicit brandy, instead of musty poundcake and a whore’s powder. Maman was sniffing, though.

Soon after that he got up, buttoning his coat, saying he ought to catch his train.

It hadn’t occurred to Nance till now that she was naked. She looked down and discovered her breasts were apparitions, her navel almost an operation.

‘You do love me?’ she whimpered, holding herself in her arms.

His lips tried to reassure her through a flavour of moist dates.

He left her at the crack of the door, just as on the first occasion, her landlady Mrs Lovejoy had stood at the crack, showing the orange bristles on her chin.

Those first days after his visit to Nance in Sydney he did several little studies of her which he would elaborate later on when the inclination took him. The ideas in his head were still too hectic and fragmented. He either saw in colours, and the architecture eluded him, or else he was obsessed by forms: Nance’s yellow cheeses; suddenly out of the past Rhoda’s Cranach figure standing beside the iron-legged bidet. In desperation he almost settled for the self-portrait he had been for some time considering. But did he, any more than the others, see himself as he truly was? His doubts drove him to scramble down to the bottom of the gorge, slashed by swords, whipped by wires, trampling on the board-walk of fallen wood, sinking in the mattresses of rotting leaves. Reaching his nadir he lay full length and buried his face in brown water, gulping at it, watching it lap round the pictures of his distorted features.

Obviously he didn’t know himself.

Caldicott sent him the review from the Herald:

. . that this country has been evolving an art of its own immediately recognizable for its honesty and truth, which Hurtle Duffield attempts to explode. In his three canvases here on view he reveals a pretentious predilection for sensuous exercises in egotism. He doesn’t convince us in either of his two manners: the meticulous dissection and abstraction of nature, or the sloppy, self-indulgent, anthropomorphic forms executed in bestial colour. Is he trying to pull somebody’s leg? If so, he doesn’t succeed. Let us at least hope that Duffield is rewarded by the sight of himself on display. .

Caldicott added palliative words, hardly more than a blur after what had gone before:

. . know you are not one to be rattled by tastelessness of this kind. . It is important to remember there are others who understand and value. .

About the same time a note came from Nance:

How did the show go, Hurt? Didn’t see a thing about it. But I almost never get down to a read of the papers. I am too busy.

That night Duffield stood on the edge of the gorge and let out his anguish. It came up out of his chest, his throat, in increasing waves. He was fortunate to enjoy such an immense privacy, for the waves of rage and anguish broke loud enough to reach the indifferent public and the poisonous press. Then he shut up. If his roar had suggested a wounded lion, its echo returned in little protesting driblets of sound, as if from a soul still haunted by the self-pity of which its earthliness had died.

He went into the house, stubbing his toe for good measure.

He had practically decided on a portrait of the self he had not yet explored to its bestial depths, when he received a letter from Caldicott:

My dear Hurtle,

I am happy to be able to report that Mrs Lopez, or Mrs Davenport as she is now, has bought your ‘Animal Rock Forms’; so you see, her interest in your work has not only continued, it has increased. As she is at present living overseas (at Kingston Bagpuize, Berkshire) Mrs Davenport had commissioned a competent representative to choose a painting from the present exhibition. Needless to say, I am delighted for you. .

Duffield got drunk on a bottle of crème de menthe which he bought partly because it nauseated most. Afterwards he slept with the faceless Mrs Davenport on an iron bed he had found at a dump.

The following morning he remembered to finish Caldicott’s letter: poor Maurice never deserved the treatment he got.

. . on the third of next month I am planning a small dinner party — intimate friends only — at which I shall hope to see you. Everybody is interested. You will only help yourself by responding to their interest — if you can forgive the vulgarism.

He didn’t reply to Caldicott: his clothes alone would have prevented him going to the dinner party. The shade of Harry Courtney goggled at the dreadful suit, not to mention his un-scrubbed body; his armpits stank, and he almost didn’t care.

In fact he cared enough to drag the easel into relationship with the glass, and prepare for the portrait: the self-portrait.

If he saw others too clearly, if he smote them, not with the tent-peg but the paintbrush, it was only fair that he too should come in for it. His larrikin self might have ducked, but decent Harry Courtney’s son had been doled out a sense of honour on speech days. He might have inherited from Harry and Maman one or two of the virtues to which they had vaguely addressed themselves; their influence was otherwise in no more evidence than the collar-boxes and English tweed, the right accent and the right names they had urged him to put his faith in. Atavistically he was at their mercy of a laundress and a clergyman, an aristocratic, no-hope drunk who had died of a stroke on the Parramatta Road, and poor scrawny, normally T-T Pa, counting other people’s empties under the pepper tree, before going in to get kids with Mumma on the squeaky bed. All of these he had in his fingertips. The razors were probably his own, not inherited, nor consciously acquired.

As he worked at what was becoming the portrait, the razors took over: they couldn’t resist the quick nick. He remembered the two cut-throats in the long black monogrammed box, with which Harry Courtney improved the sculpture of his beard, or in later years, exposed his face. See, Hurtle, they’re too dangerous even to touch, never to touch Father’s razors. He couldn’t resist just a flick: a fly with the razor. His down shivered to feel the steel. How simply awfully the blade carved through the leather strop easy as warm chocolate. What did I tell you it isn’t the damage it’s the dishonesty of doing things behind my back the risk of cutting yourself or someone — Rhoda — injure somebody for life. Decent Harry grew so steamy with imagination you watched the blood not running it was too fascinated to run arrested on severed fingers. Father had not made you promise never to do it again, which was honest of Father. You hadn’t done it again in fact because it was frightening the ease with which the blade had carved through the strop.