Patrick White - The Vivisector

As there was so much he had to paint, the fantasies he was amused to indulge in came no closer to actuality than masturbation to fulfilled love. While the houses the other side of Chubb’s Lane spawned their bawling little sun-tinted, photographic children, he poured out his paintings. Nobody in the neighbourhood had seen them, but they read about him. The Herald, after mentioning ‘two Duffield canvases recently acquired by the Tate Gallery, London, and one by the Museum of Modern Art, New York,’ warned against the evils of success. He was hardly affected by the warning, and only superficially by the sales. He went on living, and spawning, protected by the house and furniture which were never his own.

This evening after he had let himself in, ‘his’ house took on a festive air. He soon had electric pears hanging in different branches of it. For company more than anything else, he liked to turn on all the lights, finishing up with the powerful bulb, still lolling on a long flex, which he would carry from room to room on the upper floor, and finally aim at their focus point: his easel.

Then, after running down, on this evening of some significance, he first fried himself eggs and bacon in the kitchenette Miss Gilderthorp had partitioned off from her father’s original stone kitchen. The little room, with its asbestos walls and unshaded bulb, smelled of congealed fat, and something not unlike urine, the source of which he had never been able to trace.

He loved his eggs and bacon. He liked to fry the eggs till the ruffs stood out, brown-edged and stiff, around the yolks. He never cut the rinds off the rashers: after he had finished eating, he enjoyed sucking the rinds while considering what the night contained.

The world of moonlight and lantana was dragging at him tonight: the big-arsed moon aiming at the dislocated lovers; the cryptoqueer grocer-councillor machine-gunning them from the Council bench. He could see how his composition would be divided.

But what had he said? He tried to remember, but couldn’t hear all the inflections of his voice, or what exactly the grocer might have heard.

Drifting in this vaguely unhappy cloud which had risen on his mental horizon, he neglected the bacon rinds, even the lantana lovers. What he visualized instead was the big tureen: chunks of pork floating in it; the coarse tranches of bubbly bread. Our Father Decent Harry had tucked a corner of his napkin into his collar; it was allowed ‘in foreign parts’.

It was Courtney, not Duffield, who mooned his way back to the upper rooms. The stair rail, polished by hands, was also roughened by resin, wrinkles of paint, smears of the honey which he loved to eat comb-and-all: Alfreda Courtney would have thrown a fit on the stairs.

He wandered for a while around the upper floor, carrying the blinding pear on its flex before adjusting it to meet his easel’s needs.

But diffidently.

He was afraid on almost all nights: more on this propitious one; so much so, he began thinning out the scumble of objects on the chest of drawers, searching for, fumbling at the envelope received the same afternoon, one of the few letters in recent months he had been tempted to open. Was it the texture of the paper? Or scent? Or the handwriting? It could have been the hand of a woman or a man.

For this third reading he held the letter at a distance in the full glare of the naked bulb. In certain circumstances, he knew, his normally hard dry palms became damp spongy ones.

Dear Hurtle Duffield,

If you haven’t yet heard I am again settled in Sydney, it is because I am only now venturing back into circulation. I returned here a year ago, after the death of my husband; since then I have been almost entirely occupied in overcoming the obstinacy of an architect and builders: after all, it is I who must live in the house and my friends who will criticize it.

I hesitate to attempt a relationship in the flesh with any artist whose work I have admired; but surely after years of being on intimate terms with six — no, seven — of your paintings, I should throw off my diffidence?

Would you be free to come here at 6 p.m. on the 7th of this month? By then I hope the last traces of sawdust and smells of paint will have vanished, and we shall be free to talk without unpleasant distractions.

I am most excited, I assure you, to make your acquaintance, or perhaps I should say: confirm a friendship which already exists.

Sincerely

OLIVIA DAVENPORT

‘Olivia.’ He wrinkled up his nose somewhat, and remembered the bacon rinds he had forgotten. Understandably, Caldicott hadn’t thought it necessary to warn him against ladies of means who collect paintings. He had learnt about them by experience, some of it congenial. He had nibbled at Turkish delight while listening to problems of the soul, not to say the marriage bed. More than one husband would have been proud to admit Duffield’s relationship with his wife’s soul.

But ‘Olivia’: and twice widowed.

While he had suspected Caldicott of playing a drag role, poor old Maurice had been cleverly forming a client’s taste. Six or no, seven paintings over the years. What distracted now was the thought of those paintings exposed to the eyes of somebody unknown, even if the messages had remained necessarily obscure.

Olivia Davenport: her name alone had dynamited the solid marble night and his intention of developing the big-arsed moon, the lantana sea, and the gunner-grocer shooting sperm at marked lovers. So when he had dragged at Miss Gilderthorp’s collapsed and almost intractable Venetian blind to shut out the exploded ruins, he sat down at the desk in the corner, and allowed an impulse to take possession.

It was curiously weightless relief: to draw his sister Rhoda Courtney standing beside the bidet on its iron tripod in the hotel bedroom at St Yves de Trégor. If he had betrayed a timid, wizened tenderness by raucously breaking open the door protecting her nakedness, the drawings were at least a kind of formal expiation: Rhoda’s hump sat for moments on his own shoulders. As his resistance of years collapsed, he knew how he should convey the iron in crippled bones; he saw the mesh of light, the drops of moisture in the Thermogene tuft. With few pauses, he made several drawings, each of which contributed something to what he wanted.

He might have waited till morning, but was so convinced every iron line had set, he fetched a board he had prepared that afternoon, and began his ‘Pythoness at Tripod’. He was seething with it. He would hardly need to accept Mrs Thingummy — Davenport’s invitation for the seventh.

In each of the two rooms on the upper floor was a bed: he would sleep on either, according to his mood and the demands of his work. There was in addition a rusty stretcher where he had dossed down once or twice, in the little junk-room, or cupboard, which opened on the upper landing: dreams influenced his choice or rejection of a bed. Now that he was working at this painting, his sleep was always brief and broken. He would wake frowsy, battered, tormented by guilt for something left undone. He could have lain longer, combing out his armpits with fingers sticky from his night of paint, but wasn’t allowed; he had to jump up at once: what if he ever died in his sleep, leaving a skeleton pythoness hung with a rag or two of imperfect flesh? If he thought about death it was usually in terms of work unfinished, and for this reason, he found death terrifying.

While working he ate very little: eggs — sometimes swallowed raw; bacon, because it soothed him to suck the rinds. He drank quantities of coffee, with milk or without. Often he was infuriated to find his mouth full of dregs: he was forced to spit them into the sink, and continue spitting; he couldn’t get rid of the last of the bloody horrible dregs.