Patrick White - The Vivisector

In the morning the clear light had already begun to destroy his achievement.

That afternoon he walked into Ironstone, for relief, and found Caldicott’s letter:

Dear Hurtle,

I had been hoping for a visit, or for some indication of plans for the future. I don’t want to impose on you; but an artist needs to talk, surely? Or is he nourished solely by self-expression and self? Obviously he is! I am not accusing you, I hope, only suggesting you may not be aware of the effect you have on other people.

You mustn’t think I am trying to possess you: or perhaps I am. I believe that any human being of more than average sensibility is an artist in his life, and particularly in his relationships with other human beings. There the least creative of us cannot resist the impulse to create.

So I am, after all, the guilty one! I should like to hear from you. I should like to see you, at the gallery, or better still at my flat, where I should have an opportunity of showing you the few beautiful objects I have gathered round me, and which make my life excusable.

Several weeks of arthritic aches and neuralgic pains have left me depressed and dull. I made the horrid discovery that white ant has got into my Á Rebours and eaten all but the boards. However, I mustn’t burden you with my megrims.

Are you in need of anything, I wonder? I enclose a small cheque as a sign that I am interested in your future work. I respect your attitude while selfishly wishing to alter it.

Your contrite

maurice c.

P.S. A lady with artistic daughter is nibbling bravely at one of your rocks. Alas, a husband and father must first be enticed.

He tore up Caldicott’s letter as soon as he had read it. To treat letters in this way had become a habit: he felt less obliged to answer them. Never so important to be free as now; for he had painted out the self-portrait, and was working on a fresh version: more austere, essential, more honest, he hoped, than the over-painted, self-indulgent, by now only nauseating, rejected naturalistic trash.

The line of the mouth decided him: the mouth changed on his return from visiting Nance. The straight line which at first appeared to have solved the problems of the whole, had in the end destroyed; its honesty bred dishonesty in the parts.

Recreating his own body he worked quickly, for him, almost as though he knew in detail what he was about. He should have enjoyed a sense of revived assurance. He would have, if it hadn’t been for Caldicott’s love-letter. That was what it amounted to: poor spinsterly Maurice C., his intellect inviting a rape which discretion would not have allowed his body; he was even paying in advance.

The skeleton portrait had already become such a glass the painter turned his back on it. He was too agitated for the moment, too furtive in his glances from one mirror to the other, to put his faith in glass. He hadn’t torn up Caldicott’s cheque. He had kept, and would have to cash, the cheque. He was shamefully in his friend’s debt, for the reason which remained beyond his control: he would never control his desire to paint.

So he returned at last to wrestling with the honest version of his dishonest self.

He had worked all that week, in exhilaration, exhaustion, hunger, black hate, then an orgy of messy uncooked food fished up out of the jagged tins Caldicott’s cheque had bought. If you could prostitute yourself in one way, perhaps you could in another. But he visualized Maurice C.’s blue-white limbs, like those of a plucked and drawn chicken, shot with the tones of invisible giblets. (Sudden, even more awful thought: was Caldicott by any chance Mrs Lopez-Davenport?)

At that point he received the next note from Nance:

Hurtle Duffield you selfish male bastard do you think I am nothing more than a prostitute? If I could paint I could paint a picture of what it is like to be alone at the time when you used to come. My brain my guts would be laid open like at the abatore. That old quilt gives my body prickly heat as I lie and wait. Well, the roses you remember you brought I kept them till they turned brown and even then didn’t throw them out. Oh dear the smell of men and rotting roses, it gives me the heebie jeebies at five o’clock of an afternoon. I wish the tram would go over me.

I wonder whether you will come this arvo? Bet you won’t. So I will go down and knock back a brandy at the old Castle with my friend Iris if she is still around. These is lean times. Val Costello got pinched lifting from one of the fancy counters at Foys, Reen Hislop frisked an alderman’s pockets while he was giving her the quick lunchtime screws. Both Reen and Val are out at the Bay.

I was never so ‘blue’ darl, but will not feel my bluest till I get home and find you have been and gone.

Your sweetheart

NANCE LIGHTFOOT

While he worked they were encroaching on him from all quarters: Nance Lightfoot and Maurice C., Mumma and Pa, Father and Maman, Rhoda and her Hump, all resentful, all demanding. In another calling he might have risked destruction by the polypous love they were heaping on him. In the given circumstances, he had to resist them with his mind when his instincts leched after them.

He painted at times with a grimness which was flashed back and forth between glass and board. This skeleton Doppelgänger, with his armature in greys and blacks, would no doubt have survived outside pressure if it hadn’t been for a conspiracy taking place between the necessary and the unknown: reckless purples begin to stain the premeditated; pools of virulent green brooded.

He suddenly suspected something else might have been planned; as, indeed, it was.

Nance arrived. It was late on an afternoon. He saw her coming down the track, the stones trying her shoes as usual. This time she was dressed in black. The black dress and the late light gave her a coppery tinge.

‘What,’ he said, ‘are you on your way to a funeral?’ He could have hit her if there had been something suitable to do it with.

‘Could be a funeral,’ she hawked. ‘Don’t know why ever else I come to this place. Funerals — or wedduns!’

She made the doorway.

‘I got somethun in me eye, from lookun outer the fuckun train, thinkun I might ’uv been carried on.’

She went straight up to the glass which had served for weeks as his conscience, and began pulling her eye about as though it were set in elastic. The whites were inflamed, and the light made them look worse: hunted out of the gorge, it clung burning along the ironstone ridges, infusing human blemishes with all the ominous tones. Nance looked thinner than usual, leathery too: her arms were in seamy, oiled leather, as she stood pulling at her eye. A dented gold armlet she was wearing round the left biceps drew attention to the sag.

‘You’ve lost weight.’ He had to exert himself to make conversation with the visitor, but she didn’t appear to hear.

‘It’s best to forget about it,’ she was saying, ‘and you’ll find it’s gone when you wake up.’

She was drunk for the occasion: he could tell by the shape of her mouth.

‘I got somethun for yer,’ she said.

This time it wasn’t food. She untied an old draw-neck leather bag embossed with worn waratahs. Age and light had rubbed the leather a metallic green, dull beside the bright heads of foil on the bottles, one of which had already been cracked.

‘You can’t come to the country,’ said Nance, ‘without you fortify yerself.’

She fussed and swaggered over her supplies, at one point thrusting her pelvis dangerously far out from the rest of her. He had never seen her so lit, and possibly, vengeful.

‘Don’t think I don’t —love — the country. ’

She was walking about, collecting breath for declamation; so he went out for a little.