The Vivisector

by Patrick White

Hurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him - all are used as fodder for his art. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Classics, Art, Literature, 20th Century, Novels

567 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

There is more than one author by this name on Goodreads. For the Canadian Poet Laureate see "Patrick^^^^^White".

Patrick Victor Martindale White was an Australian author widely regarded as one of the major English-language novelists of the 20th century, and winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Born in England while his Australian parents were visiting family, White grew up in Sydney before studying at Cambridge. Publishing his first two novels to critical acclaim in the UK, White then enlisted to serve in World War II, where he met his lifelong partner, the Greek Manoly Lascaris. The pair returned to Australia after the war.

Home again, White published a total of twelve novels, two short story collections, eight plays, as well as a miscellany of non-fiction. His fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantages and the stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature."

From 1947 to 1964, White and Lascaris lived a retired life on the outer fringes of Sydney. However after their subsequent move to the inner suburb of Centennial Park, White experienced an increased passion for activism. He became known as an outspoken champion for the disadvantaged, for Indigenous rights, and for the teaching and promotion of art, in a culture he deemed often backward and conservative. In their personal life, White and Lascaris' home became a regular haunt for noted figures from all levels of society.

Although he achieved a great deal of critical applause, and was hailed as a national hero after his Nobel win, White retained a challenged relationship with the Australian public and ordinary readers. In his final decades the books sold well in paperback, but he retained a reputation as difficult, dense, and sometimes inscrutable.

Following White's death in 1990, his reputation was briefly buoyed by David Marr's well-received biography, although he disappeared off most university and school syllabuses, with his novels mostly out of print, by the end of the century. Interest in White's books was revived around 2012, the year of his centenary, with all now available again.

Sources: Wikipedia, David Marr's biography, The Patrick White Catalogue

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are two great and psychologically deep novels about painters I enjoyed best: The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary and The Vivisector by Patrick White and I can’t tell which one is grander – they are so different.

Birds rose and fell in the air, like the notes of music out of the piano shops in Surrey Hills.

 
A true talent ought to dissect reality and reconstruct the bleeding fragments into something new – something dreadfully beautiful or beautifully dreadful capable to shock any pharisaic imagination.

Again the long sad picture had got possession of her. That was what she wanted: to be slowly and sadly possessed by a lost marquise in crushed organdie. And what he wanted was not the common possessive pross he loved by needful spasms, but to shoot at an enormous naked canvas a whole radiant chandelier waiting in his mind and balls.

To portray the world an artist’s consciousness must penetrate into the nature of things and to portray the artist, a writer must penetrate into the artist’s consciousness.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my third Patrick White book, and easily my favourite. It will also likely be the best Australian novel I ever get to read. He's a worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature for sure, and it's certainly one of great novels about painters. At over 600 pages, The Vivisector was a book to relish over weeks rather than days, and for as much as I thought this novel was superb, it did contain one of the most unlikeable central characters I have come across recently. Although as the book progresses, you start to see him in a different light. That character is Hurtle Duffield, the vivisector by nature, the painter by profession. The novel looks at his life from childhood to old age.

This is novel of great dense complexity and deserves to be approached in a way that sees the reader becomes the vivisectionist. Hurtle is complex, and it's easy to simply despise him as an adult, but his redemption comes with the recognition that, perhaps, for his entire life he has been truly misunderstood. Hurtle feels a confused and endless discord between the physical and metaphysical world, and as a child he is convinced that only his thoughts are real. He doesn't get along with his siblings, and withdraws into his own world by scribbling on the walls. An early indication of what lies ahead for him. For someone so young his confidence is scary, believing creatively he is way away of other pupils at school. After travelling around Europe and being in the trenches of the First World War, he commits himself to art ahead of other people. He eventually becomes comfortably rich, but he never seems to take any consolation in his success. In fact, he seems almost embarrassed by his accomplishments, as if it’s something shameful to hide away from. He is burdened with the responsibility of extracting some form of truth from the world, with cruelty merely being a by-product. White’s novel is an introspective profile of the conflict within the artist, the physical beast who creates with mind and hand in equal measure.

The best part of the novel for me was when his sister, who he hasn't seen for years, comes to live with him. You start to see Hurtle act a little more with his heart, and this is all down to a child he meets. His outlook on life and others takes a slow turn, after spending most of the novel up to this point treating his human subjects with brutal menace. Those in his life, particularly the women he courts, become the victims of his demonic ego, he was a cannibal of the mind. The novel takes on some huge themes: family, love, sex, responsibility, identity, and looks at how difficult it can be to strike the right balance, creatively, and in one's personal life. A quite brilliant piece of writing.

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant novel. The first hundred pages is a masterpiece. Another attempt and a magnificent one, to answer who is an artist in relation to his/her art and how art is get created.

"You cannot expect more than their art from artists. If you did, you might forget about the art, and die of shame for what they’ve shown you of mankind."

Patrick White recalled: "when Roy de Maistre introduced me to abstract painting . . . As far as I was concerned it was like jumping into space, and finding nothing there at first . . . Then gradually one saw that it was possible to weave about freely on different levels at one and the same time.’ . I think he has brilliantly succeeded to apply this method to his writing in this novel. The of each layers this writing are infinite.

I need to think about this review, but this theme and its reflection in fiction (another art) fascinates me a lot. In meantime, this is a very comprehensive review of the book I've found on line. It might be too detailed on the plot for those who want to read the book a fresh. But it contains the section about the relevant paintings. This I found very helpful and enriching my experience post-reading:

https://www.rob-tomlinson.com/a-good-...

So below is the list of other books I've read that touch upon this. I've written about some of them here:

The Recognitions
The Other Name: Septology I-II
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
Dr. Faustus
Second Place
The Logos
What Ever Happened to Modernism?
Infinity: The Story of a Moment

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.

My own truth is probably more grimy. This novel was published exactly one month before I was born, I am but an amniotic confirmation after the fact. This novel tells a story of an artist but not exactly in Joycean terms. We naturally plumb his childhood and follow him through struggle and success to his dying days. We can't discuss plot with spoiling as the sharp corners of the narrative bruise without question. Instead, we should focus on the protagonist and his beguiling stream of consciousness. Our artist has the improbable name of Hurtle Duffield, a Dickensian flourish which is repeated often most notably in the artist's house, one which recalls to this reader a certain domicile in Great Expectations.

Our artist doesn't think, instead he processes images and assembles them terms which don't acknowledge theory or even the current reality. He thirsts (in all senses) and pursues appetites if only for fodder for his craft. Each event in his depicted life an equal if cruel and unusual response which may sound contrived but established a murky Manichaeism without Augie's music. My reaction to the episodes varied and I admit I did consider skimming but alas the final sections demanded careful reading, and I suspect I have had my fill of Patrick White for the time being.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has been sitting on my to read shelf for over a year - it is the only White novel that was nominated for the Booker, and even that was the retrospective "lost Booker" for the 1970 novels that were not eligible for the 1970 and 1971 prizes.

It is powerful but not always comfortable to read, telling the story of Hurtle, an Australian painter from very humble beginnings before to an old age in which he is successful and respected but doesn't feel able to share his most powerful work.

The story is largely about the way artists exploit and abuse the trust of the people around them, and Hurtle's many flaws (some of which would now be regarded as criminal) are ruthlessly exposed, and in some senses it is a book that shows its age, but for all that Hurtle is a brilliantly drawn caricature, and for the most part I didn't begrudge the length of the book.

[[P] · Rating 4 out of 5]

'What is in a name?' So said some dude with a beard. Well, the answer is quite a lot, as it happens. I once knew a man with the surname Dicker, and it nearly ruined his life. According to the man himself people mercilessly took the piss, girls were embarrassed to date him, he couldn't get a job, etc, and as a result he became so ultra-sensitive about it that he lost all confidence in himself. I think it is fair to say, then, that a name can colour how one sees a particular person or thing. I mention this because Patrick White was a man who clearly had problems with naming his novels; indeed, his chosen titles seem almost designed to put you off, to make them seem as unappealing as possible. The Aunt’s Story? Gawd. Riders in the Chariot? Sounds like some made for TV film. Tree of Man? My favourite, that one. If there’s a title more suggestive of pretentious, worthy and dull I’ve yet to encounter it. No one wants to read a book called Tree of Man, just like no one wants to date a dude called Dicker. It is no surprise, in this regard, that White’s most popular, his most famous works, are Voss and The Vivisector. Great titles, those. On name alone, one anticipates that The Vivisector is either going to be great or fantastically ridiculous, or at least entertainingly bad. In reality, it is a little of all three.

Before I finished this book I was convinced that my reading days might be coming to an end. I mean, reading in meant to be fun, right? I wasn’t having fun, quite the opposite. I’ve always chosen books meticulously, but when you spend longer weighing up the pros and cons of reading a bunch of books than you would actually spend reading them from cover-to-cover you know you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere, mentally. So, as I come to write this review I guess I have to try to understand why I could finish this book and why I liked it, especially as it is not perfect, is not without its flaws. Patrick White could write like a motherfucker, and that helps of course. But, my appreciation is based on more than that, because all of his novels are beautifully written and I’ve given up or abandoned a few over the last couple of weeks. In any case, of the White novels I’ve read or sampled, this one, on a stylistic basis, is the least sophisticated, least like it has come from an alien brain.

The problem with, say, something like Tree of Man, which houses prose to die for, is that it suffers from a lack of [essential] humanity, some deftness/lightness of touch. It is too foreboding, too suffocating, too intense. The Vivisector, however, despite its ominous title, boasts, at least in the opening section, a Dickensian charm. Indeed, the plot is straight out of Dickens’ world: Hurtle Duffield is an extraordinary boy born to ordinary [and poor] parents. His mother starts work as a laundress with a wealthy family to whom she eventually sells the boy; this boy grows up to be a famous, and self-absorbed, painter. It is to White’s great credit that The Vivisector transcends this fairy-tale scenario, that he breathes life into most of the [sometimes pretty rote] characters. Yet even when he doesn’t quite manage to do so, as is the case with Hurtle’s biological mother [who is entirely one-dimensional], they are treated with greater warmth and affection by the author than is usually the case. And this is a novel that needs it – that warmth, that twinkle in the eye – because it had the potential to be too scathing, too dour and in love with itself.

My favourite character in the novel is not Hurtle, but Mrs Courtney, the boy’s adoptive parent. She’s a kind of Woolfian heroine: elegant, eccentric, and quietly losing her mind. She, one assumes, buys Hurtle as a kind of substitute for the hunchbacked daughter she herself produced [and there’s an interesting distinction here, the poor parents producing a genius and the well-to-do ones producing a kind of cripple]. This daughter, Rhoda, is a difficult, largely unaffectionate child and Hurtle is expected to better play the role of dutiful offspring, to be a son that his wealthy parents can be proud of. However, Hurtle’s and Mrs Courtney’s relationship has a more sinister or erotic fragrance. From the beginning there was a sense that they were perhaps too close, or liked each other in a way that wasn’t platonic, or simply parent-child. There is a complex dynamic here: Mrs Courtney, who suspects her husband of infidelity, chooses a boy to perhaps please him [as heir]. Yet from her own perspective, Hurtle isn’t only a substitute child but a substitute husband too. Hurtle, on the other hand, is drawn to Mrs Courtney not as a mother, but sees in her, well, art itself I guess, or something exotic and beautiful like art. All of this is brought together in one of the novel’s most memorable passages, the erotically charged scene when Hurtle is shoved by Mrs Courtney into her wardrobe full of dresses. As Hurtle’s senses are overwhelmed, as he has some sort of sensual reverie, Mrs Courtney likens the boy to a dog which must have its nose rubbed in your scent in order for it to know you as its master.

At least in the first part of the novel, it is the development of an artistic consciousness that is White’s greatest achievement. From a very young age Hurtle is different, precocious; he notices things that one would not expect, and comes to find some outlet for his feelings and observations, his acute interest in the world, in what he calls 'droring.' In the first 150 pages there are numerous clever and wonderful scenes involving his awakening as an artist, like when he covers the walls of his room with paint, or his fascination with the Courtney’s 'shandeleer,' itself a work of art. If you’re ever been artistically or creatively inclined, then these passages will likely touch or interest you a lot.

The second half of book, based on reviews I have read, is where many readers fall out of love with White’s work. Once Hurtle grows up and moves away from the Courtney’s the book is certainly less charming, less likeable [not necessarily less enjoyable]. I’ve used the word pretentious a couple of times, and it’s a word, an accusation, frequently levelled at the book. I don’t quite get that. I think it says more about the reader than White or his characters. Adult Hurtle takes his art seriously, of course, but pretentious he isn’t, quite the opposite: he struggles with his work, criticises it, and often believes that he fails to realise his vision. I think people throw the word pretentious around simply because Hurtle is an artist, and it makes a certain kind of person’s toes curl to read about the artistic process or to read discussion of art. My advice on that score would be for these people to, uh, avoid books about artists in the future.

I would also say that Hurtle’s position as supersized bastard is overstated too. Nearly every review wants to make a point of what a See-You-Next-Tuesday he is, and I don’t really get that either. Cantankerous? Maaaaybe, but, no, not really. I’d say he has a fairly healthy bullshit detector. His greatest character flaw, if it is indeed a flaw, is his inability to emotionally connect with other people. He abandons the Courtney’s without compunction, he fails to respond to his lovers in any way other than artistically, and never appears to be greatly touched or upset by their suffering [suffering they seem to cultivate, it is fair to suggest]. If you wanted to label him, then, I’d say you could possibly call him sociopathic, or even autistic, but I think evil, or horrible or detestable are too strong. I will confess, however, that I saw myself in him at times, so perhaps I’m sticking up for myself here.

Before concluding, I’d like to come back to that title. What is its significance? It refers to Hurtle himself, of course, and how he approaches relationships with other people. The idea, voiced by many of the characters, is that Hurtle uses others, particularly women, for his art. People are inspiration, they are there to be taken apart, understood, and used for your own ends; this is, I guess White is suggesting, what it means to be an artist, and he would have seen himself, as a writer, in the same way. However, I think that the title has a broader significance, certainly in relation to God, who is described as the divine vivisector. I don’t have the patience [and you don’t want to read it, I’m sure!] to explore that fully. It is worth noting that almost everyone in the novel uses other people, not just Hurtle [in fact Hurtle is perhaps the most honest person in the book]. Off the top of my head, there are the Courtney’s who buy a son, and the parents who sell one, there is a couple who collect cats and a child and drown the moggies once they get bored of them and also give back the child to her mother, there is a woman who sets Hurtle up with her married friend in order to enjoy, I dunno, the composition [for her the union is something to look at, to experience, like a work of art], there is a husband who uses his wife as decoration and so on and so on.

To sum up then, The Vivisector isn’t easy to love [certainly beyond the first section], contains characters who are not especially likeable [if you want that sort of thing], and does meander towards a conclusion for the last two hundred pages. However, if you are patient, if you’re interested in art or artists, if you like big books with challenging ideas and themes, if you like serious and sometimes ridiculous literature, or if, like me, you're often accused of being an irascible prick who is at odds with the rest of the human race then you’ll probably get a big kick out of this.

[Emmett · Rating 5 out of 5]

The very few (?) novels available about art and its makers are little indication of the immense curiosity aroused by the tempting unknown interiors of the artistic mind. While it's difficult to put into concise words what exactly about artists fascinate readers, perhaps the kind of questions one would very much like to ask would be easier to phrase: "What goes on in the mind of an artist? How does he/she feel? What is their experience of the world like?" Because artists surely are strange creatures, and in these novels about art and their makers lie the prospect of having them offered up on platter, pinned and wriggling, for our imagination to feast on.

In The Vivisector, White offers for our consideration the painter Hurtle Duffield. The novel mirrors the artist's personality: alternately selfish and altruistic, brilliant and brusque, venomous, tender, coarse, cold, amusing and passionate and without passion. As the novel begins and ends, so does Duffield, followed from birth till death, and his life unfolds in these pages with a hideous, familiar enchantment of a raw wound. For Hurtle is a raw wound, compelled by his nature to feel and remember every impression made upon him from his earliest years, and to feed them to the fire of his art. Art. Even after scores of all manner of relationships (parental, romantic, lustful, brotherly, impermanent), the reader is made to feel that Art is the only thing he has truly loved and lived for.

In this intermittently repulsive and ultimately strangely moving record, White's pen moves from the gristly to the sublime with the same poetry (as evidenced below).

"He loved the feel of a smooth stone, or to take a flower to pieces, to see what there was inside. He loved the pepper tree breaking into light, and the white hens rustling by moonlight in the black branches, and the sleepy sound of the hen shit dropping. He could do nothing about it, though. Not yet. He could only carry all of it in his head. Not talk about it. Because Mumma and Pa would not have understood. They talked about what was 'right' and 'honest', and the price of things, but people looked down at their plates if you said something was 'beautiful'." (10-11)

"If I've learnt anything of importance, it was you who taught me, and I thank you for it. [...] 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 exictement 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." (537-8)

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I've started a project, in which I read a couple of things by everyone who won the Nobel for literature. No, I'm kidding. I'd rather walk two hundred miles into the middle of nowhere, sit under a freeway bridge, knife myself in the stomach and die slowly over five days in excruciating pain than read things written by most Nobel laureates.

No, I'm reading this because a) the cover of this book is freaking amazing and b) I'm 33 now, and apparently that's the age when culture cringe* starts to fade for uppity Australian men, and I realized there were many authors I should really start reading.

I read The Solid Mandala at university, but only because I was going through a phase of only taking courses with 'gender' or 'class' etc in the title, and it happened to be in the course 'Gender in Australian Literature.' SM went completely over my head; 14 years later, I'm in a much better spot to appreciate White's very dense prose.

And for the first 400 or so pages I was blown away. I repeatedly told my wife that this was the best book I'd ever read and so on and so on. It felt like a brutal denunciation of everything, first from the perspective of Hurtle Duffield looking at the rest of the world, and then from the perspective of someone looking at Duffield, who is an horrific human being.

I usually don't like overly descriptive prose, but I was willing to let it slide, because Duffield is meant to be a genius artist; it makes sense that he'd notice the color of things and the way light works etc.

I could see some problems with the book even as I was enjoying it so much--it's much more a composition than a story; people from Duffield's past keep showing up again in utterly ridiculous ways. But again, I let it slide, because everything else was so great.

And then it suddenly turns into Lolita without the shame, White tries to make us sympathize with Duffield, and blah blah blah. For the first two thirds, this is still an amazingly great book. Once the reader's meant to take the overblown Romantic Artist Seeing Into The Truth of Things bullshit seriously, however, I have to tap out.

All of which is to say: White does things with language that stagger me, and I will keep reading his work. But when I re-read this, I'll stop before The Volkov arrives on the scene.



* well known psychological phenomenon in which Australian assume that a work of art/philosophy/etc must be bad simply because it was done by an Australian.

[George Ilsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Patrick White's masterpieces. Here White explores the meaning of art and the process of creation. There might even be some shards of a roman a clef in here as well. Splendid and overwhelming. Like so much of White's best works, one feels the touch of the ineffable.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The God Paintings

This book comes with great peripherals. On the cover of the Penguin Classics edition is a superb painting by Jason Freeman, showing an operation on a human eye; as brilliant as it is horrifying, the image perfectly captures the mind of the protagonist, Australian painter Hurtle Duffield, whose laser gaze sears into the souls of his subjects, even if he must destroy them in the process. You open the cover to find an excellent introduction by fellow-Nobelist J. M. Coetzee, and four pithy epigraphs that suggest the goals of this huge novel, beginning with the painter Ben Nicholson ("As I see it, painting and religious experience are the same thing..."), and ending with Rimbaud: "He becomes beyond all others the great Invalid, the great Criminal, the great Accursed One—and the Supreme Knower. For he reaches the unknown."


Cover painting by Jason Freeman

Australia has produced many authors of extraordinary vision, but few can match the scope and moral intensity of Patrick White at his best (although Richard Flanagan comes close with Gould's Book of Fish ), and it takes a Dostoevsky to turn the heat up much higher. His Voss (1957) is a masterpiece, beautiful both in its containment and its quest to explode conventional boundaries. Riders in the Chariot (1961), by contrast, is a brilliantly unruly study of four very different characters on the fringes of society, linked only by the intensity of their half-crazed visions of God. One of these four is a self-taught, virtually autistic, half-caste painter called Alf Dubbo; although drunken and dissolute in his private life, he has a particular fascination for religious subjects, and White has an uncanny ability to convey the intensity of his vision and the texture and warp of his paint. Now in 1970, he makes such a painter the subject of an entire book.

Although growing up in poor circumstances similar to Dubbo's, Hurtle Duffield is adopted as a child by a rich family and has the benefit of a first-class education. Later, he throws off these bourgeois ties to live in squalor on a patch of waste land, visited occasionally by his mistress, a Sydney prostitute, and a gay gallery owner who becomes his first dealer. Later still, he moves back to Sydney, and though living in a ramshackle house in a poor quarter, begins to find success in selling his paintings and attracting the attention of a number of rich female patrons. The book proceeds in a number of long chapters, jumping from decade to decade in the twentieth century, marked not so much by changes in Hurtle's outer life as by a succession of different lovers and the changing preoccupations of his artistic vision. Towards the end, he meets a young girl who is on the way to becoming an artist in her own right, a concert pianist, and a new tenderness enters the book. But this also brings on a spiritual crisis resulting in the last pictures of all, almost mural-sized daubs of dark tortured paint (one thinks of the "black paintings" of Goya) referred to by rumor as "The God Paintings." Does Duffield find God at the end, come face-to-face with the being he refers to as "The Great Vivisector"? Perhaps. But by this time, White has begun to fracture his language almost abstractly to echo Hurtle's mind, devastated by a series of strokes, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.

Unfortunately, the novel does not quite live up to its promise. The seventy-year story of a life is too loose a form to achieve the jangling juxtaposition of the other books, thrusting flint against steel. As Coetzee says, too much is prelude to what most matters, and too little is written at white heat (his pun, but an apt one). I also find that the double strands of sexual history and artistic exploration detract from one another. There are striking moments of fusion, as when Duffield's accidental sight of his hunchbacked sister naked by a bidet becomes the subject for a series of paintings that one is not only told but believes to be great. But towards the end, in the episodes with the young pianist, I found the various strands pulling against one another just when one might want them to interweave. All the same, one does get some feeling for the work of this artist (a little Sidney Nolan, but mostly Francis Bacon), and an even stronger sense of what it is to be the victim-possessor of an unrelenting, searing vision. And that is no small achievement.


Self-portraits by Sidney Nolan (L) and Francis Bacon (R)

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did a bit of research on the internet and found out from Wikipedia that this book was dedicated to the painter Sidney Nolan. Patrick White denied that the main character Hurtle Duffield was supposed to be Sidney Nolan (or any painter for that matter). I had never heard of Sidney Nolan (I love when books let me discover something new), so for me, the whole time I was reading this book, I kept feeling like Hurtle Duffield was like the painter, Francis Bacon. I have done some research on the internet on who Sidney Nolan was, and I must admit I quite like his Ned Kelly series. (For those of you who don’t know who Ned Kelly was, Edward “Ned” Kelly was a famous Australian bushranger (outlaw) who has/had reached folkloric heroic proportions to many Australians as a Robin Hood type, there is a decent Wikipedia article on him for those who are interested) I suppose I can see Duffield as Sidney Nolan but really while I was reading this my mind’s eye saw him as a more romantic, less sharp but still dissecting Francis Bacon. (Francis Bacon was an Irish born British painter and not Australian at all and this book takes place in Australia but I never got a real sense of place from this book only of all the people) Anyway, as I mentioned before the author claimed that Duffield had no connections to any painters that actually existed, so I suppose it is okay for the reader to associate Duffield with whatever artist they would like.

This remarkable book is about getting into the mind’s eye of the visual artist. It is smartly written, and I loved all of the descriptions, even when Hurtle is being mean and insensitive, which he tends to be a lot. He is pretty selfish and mainly only concerned with his work, preserving his solitude, and his own outlook on life but also has moments of giving and caring especially as he ages.

I ended up liking Hurtle Duffield despite some of his flaws. I enjoyed some of the other characters in this as well. I liked his deformed sister Rhoda. I enjoyed the friendly, and sometimes not very friendly banter between Hurtle and Rhoda. I enjoyed all the weird details that the author includes about everything. I liked knowing all of Duffield’s thoughts and all the details of his life from when he is a child, to when he is an old man. I enjoyed the language employed by the author. (It was a bit mean and sharp at times and brutally honest, I almost felt like it was something John Waters would have recommended, maybe he has recommended this book to someone.) After reading this, I have decided that Patrick White was a brilliant writer. I am very glad I have not been put under his dissecting microscope. This gets 5 stars and best reads pile.

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, God, White ... This book has been a vexing affair. I dreamed about it, repeatedly, and almost always dreadfully. Hurtle Duffield, crusty old bugger, gets awfully under one's skin. As did Voss at the time. And the four endearing misfits in Riders. White always seems to mould that same book. A relentless journey, from our fallen state, through the grime of flesh-bound human life, into a searing light. Through White's prose poetry we are vicariously suffused with the precariousness of that move, its suffocating uncertainty, and its transcendent beauty. I always feel humbled, cleansed, elevated after a White novel.

[bajwa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would have given this book ten stars out of five if possible but then I wouldn't have been able to write this.

This book is mainly about creative process (if you can can call it a process) of a forever perplexed painter, Hurtle Duffield/Courtney. Calling himself a freak, he is closer in touch with reality than most. Indifferent towards this world and its affairs, his loyalty clings only with his artistic expression. In painting he has found solace, an escape from the shallow and mundane nature of this world and its bland reality. His whole life is just a flowing subject for his paintings which includes everything; even his closest relations. Its just his way of surviving which he will never be sure is the right one.

"It was Sunday, and Mamma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back : the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them on the stack."

The magical poetry in prose starts from the very beginning, the same magical "epic and psychological narrative.." for which Patrick White was awarded Nobel Prize in 1973. His interview after winning the award is quite interesting. A sort of curmudgeon, who on the day of announcement took a sleeping pill and went to sleep - while the press kept irritating him by "pastoring at his door" - because he has had a very long tiring day.

The story begins with protagonist's childhood in an impoverished yet lively household though his father is an eccentric fellow who probably had an influence on the sensitive son. His household is changed somehow and Hurtle finds himself in a lavish home with an affectionate mother and humped sister, Rhoda. You feel a similarity with Great Expectations but its different, you start to discover White's power of shifting perspectives and carving ironic and delightful sentences. In his second home, entranced by a chandelier, Hurtle discovers the one inside him which makes him "...at times jangle and want to explode into smithereens". Missing his previous home, he thinks:

"And suddenly something of the same fear got into him. He would have liked to find himself running with the mob of kids down Cox Street, away from everything to do with Courtneys'. In the street where he belonged. If he belonged. He didn't belong anywhere : that was what frightened; although he had wanted it that way"

Time passes and he finds himself without a home and means; in the company of a peculiar prostitute, Nance Lightfoot. She takes a sudden sympathetic interest in this quaint personality and an uncanny relationship flourishes. He has been painting since childhood but now he starts his demented career with sponsorship and links provided by Nance. She introduces him to an art dealer, Caldicott. With the abrupt flight of artistic career, there is a creeping skepticism growing about his abilities to convey what he really experiences. The plot gets even more interesting and quality of prose remains intact.

"(Nance)'What is it then? Explain to me. All this about modern art.'
(Hurtle)'If you could put it in words, I wouldn't have to paint.'"

"Occasionally he made drawings, little more than notes, which couldn't relieve his cynicism, nor his rage for physical exertion. He belched sour, and often wondered what had ever persuaded him he might become a painter."

He departs from the life of city to live in a hilly hideout to continue his artistic pursuits: living a shredded existence, irritated by ennui, eating bare minimum and cursing himself most of the time. At this stage you feel a similarity with Hunger by Knut Hamsun which persists with rest of the story. Nance visits him sometimes and their encounter is always interesting than before. Apart from outstanding stream of consciousness, White's mastery at building characters is praiseworthy. Especially the approach used to make characters victims of vivisection by Hurtle.

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

"Now he was appalled by his own dirty, horny feet. In the snapshot they look deformed. Or was it distorted? Just as you distort appearances to arrive at truth"

While alive he never cared much about Caldicott and treated him with his arrogant artistic attitude, but later describing him to Cutbush (a character of another era (and reality)) he retains:

"'My friend Caldicott died a couple of years ago, after what they call 'a long illness' - in agony. In the last days of his vivisection he told me he had never held my unkindness against me, because he considered anybody in any way creative needs a source of irritation. He was happy to think he had provided me with just that.'"

With Cutbush, the grocer whom he meets sitting somewhere on a remote place facing the river or sea, Hurtle concocts the ideas of The Grand Vivisector and Moon; they experience it together in the sky, as a giant ass sitting on the swimming lovers in the flowing water. There's more to this vision and you realize how many boundaries White has crossed in this book. It was enough for his new acquaintance: Cec Cutbush is intrigued for forever by this bizarre artist, though he is far away from normal himself.

"(Hurtle)'I have been accused of loving myself. How could I? When I've always known too much about myself?'"

"Most of the day he now spent steadily painting, still destroying, but sometimes amazed at a detail which mightn't have been his, yet didn't seem to be anybody's else's. There were one or two canvases he had dared keep, in which dreams and facts had locked in an architecture which did not appear alterable."

Finally he settles at Flint Street, a slummy area near the sea, where he drags his existence for rest of his life. In the dunny of the house bought from an old lady, he writes
" God the Vivisector
God the Artist
God the "
He hopes to complete the third line during his lifetime but he never did. I was really looking forwarded to that third line. In this house he plays with different variations presented by the light: of reality which he vivisects. Ultimately he achieves international fame but maintains his bohemian lifestyle. Boo Holingrake, a childhood encounter and now a rich widow, is one of his chief buyers. A period of dalliance between them and thanks to Boo, he meets Hero, a Greek woman, in a prearranged party. Its another turn in Hurtle's artistic career. He visits Greece for a supposedly transcendental and healing expedition which it never turns out to be.

Throughout the book, White never fails to surprise you with his strikingly subtle humor. His last consequential encounter is with Kathy, a teenager from his area striving to be musician. He imagines to conceive Kathy as a child inside himself but suffers abortion, though together they nourish the artist in each of them. Each episode of Hurtle's interaction with an important character can be a book in itself.

In the end, Hurtle's life is a sum of unwanted undirected obsessions, with living objects or otherwise, he experiences for the sake of his paintings. This book can be an axe for a suitable blow seeker. Makes you want to choose the road as Robert Frost propounds in his famous poem because some roads are doomed for destruction (it may have an aesthetic side). Its almost perfect how this whole story flows, with magical words and sentences. It was a thoroughly enjoyable journey for me.

"Almost everybody carries a hump, no always visible, and not always the same shape."


Note: Brackets in the quotes are not part of quotes. Its a brief summary with what I thought added in between the lines

[Steve R]

I read this 1970 novel sometime in the early 1990s. In a manner which many readers and critics found to be autobiographical, the author describes the life of a famous painter through his many attachments, principally with women, but also with society at large. His developing success seems to be somewhat anathema to him as he maintains the customs of a relative reclusive although he does latch on to a relationship with the hunchbacked daughter of his adoptive family.

Almost half a century later, I have no significant memories of this book at all. As one of my reading schedules involves working my way through works of all Nobel Prize winners, of which White is one, I’ll read it again should I live that long.

[Nell Grey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A monumental novel which sets out to chronicle the life of fictional artist Hurtle Duffield from childhood to death.

Sold by his poor parents into a wealthy family, the driving force throughout his life is to realize his inner vision by whatever means he can. His ruthlessness in dissecting and exposing the passions and weaknesses of those around him in order to serve his art leaves him cut off from those warmer human emotions which could so easily be his until a musical child, whom he recognises as a kindred spirit, awakens something like love in the by now aging artist.

This is an extraordinary novel, a psychological study of a difficult man that is handled with consummate skill, and the brilliantly expressive writing never falters throughout the six-hundred-plus pages. Artists and writers may recognise the Hurtle Duffield in themselves – that creative impetus that can so easily become obsession and endanger the lives and happiness of others, if not themselves.

I’d written the above when I realized that something was wrong. Like all great literature there’s a deeper level to this novel that has not been mentioned in any of the reviews I’ve read, including the blurb on the back cover. Read no further if, like me, you prefer to make your own discoveries. From the moment he draws the Mad Eye when a child, his paintings are an attempt to answer the ultimate question – the question implied in the writing on the dunny wall.

God the Vivisector
God the Artist
God

The seminal paintings throughout his career are all the result of coming close to what he perceives as the truth.

Chance meetings play an important part at moments of exhaustion in his art. After a period of painting furniture he takes a ferry and finds himself sitting next to a printer. Duffield seems able only to open up to strangers, and they have a revealing conversation in which the artist questions his culpability in the lives of those he has used.

Unlike previous reviewers I cannot see Duffield as the Vivisector. His treatment of the people in his life, although careless, is not entirely cold-blooded. There are glimpses of warmer feelings at certain points, although he can never be possessed by those who care for him. From his natural parents who sold him (and one feels that his mother glimpsed his future, and realized the only way she could help him to achieve it would be to sell him to the wealthy Courtneys), to the Courtneys themselves. Nance; Boo Hollingrake, his first wealthy patroness; Hero, his Greek mistress; Cutbush and Duffield’s deformed sister Rhoda are all used to further his art without giving of himself. For Duffield is possessed only by his art. The musical child Kathy Volkov, in whom he recognises a kindred spirit and who becomes closest to him and shows him something akin to love, does not attempt to possess his spirit, and he knows that he cannot possess hers, for she too is possessed by her art. He sees in her the possibility of giving birth to his inner child. Perhaps a truth revealed here is that love will not attempt to own the beloved, but will allow them to fly.

Duffield’s question, the one that all of us neither blessed nor afflicted with blind faith spend our lives wondering about is the unanswered one on the dunny wall.

The truth for which Duffield has spent his life seeking can be revealed not through art, but only by death, and at the inevitable end, when we lose Duffield to the Great Vivisector, we can only hope that the words on his lips, the revelation that he seems to glimpse, is the truth that he has spent his life seeking.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. An interesting character based novel about the creative journey of fictional Australian artist/painter Hurtle Duffield, from boyhood to old age. Hurtle in his paintings, dissects the weaknesses of all the people who enter his life. His sister Rhoda, his adoptive mother, Maman, the prostitute, Nancy, his first real love, the wealthy heiress and his early patron, Olivia Davenport, his Greek mistress, Hero Pavloussi and finally the child pianist prodigy, Kathy Volkov.

This book was first published in 1970. The author won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1973.

[Mili Legge]

This book was one of my first books that I have read ,when I arrived to Australia 44 years ago. Patrick White showed me the life in Australia, that was new
and different to anything I've ever imagined. I've just read the book again and I was pleasantly surprised , that my understanding of English language 44 years ago, was much better then I thought. I loved the book , Patrick introduced me to a country ,that I've learned to love and enjoy.

[Arthur Ivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unnecessarily lengthy and slow. The premise is interesting, an unlikeable character and how a painter sees his subjects but it failed to hold my attention.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Vivisector has its moments: undeniable, succinct moments of clarity and of honesty, moments that shine out from the page and that can make you look at a certain subject in a different way - and it is these moments that make this book a worthwhile read, despite its length and its absence of likeable characters. Just like Hurtle Duffield has to toil for his art, you may feel yourself wading through endless description, occasionally pretentious art-posturing and repetition; but there are diamonds in that rough. Someone asks Duffield what his art means; he says 'If I could write it in words, I wouldn't want to paint'.

The novel is written in long chapters, each meticulously described, which tend to amalgamate around certain flash-points of Duffield's life. In one chapter he may be a young lad of 20 who lives in a wooden shed, the next he is a successful artist who buys a mansion, with no intervening description. This tends to make certain passages of the book jump seemingly out of nowhere - and, as is notable during the latter half of the book, Duffield himself is wilfully ignorant of the passages of time - wilfully perhaps because of the spectre of death which approaches. Personally I found it quite jarring, but entirely within context.

It has to be said that the book is probably too long; there are moments (especially in the chapter featuring the entirely unconvincing Hero Pavloussi) where reading becomes a real chore, and you suspect that White drew out the work intentionally to make it that little bit more 'literary'. But as I mentioned before, there are finds to be had; Duffield awkward relationship with his foster sister Rhoda is a highlight, as is the vivid section about his intense and tragic affair with the prostitute Nance Lightfoot.

On the whole The Vivisector is worth the read for the nuggets of truth and art that lie in what unmistakably is a mire of mud.

***

[Kayla · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were parts of this book that I enjoyed, but overwhelmingly I found it drawn out, boring, pretentious, and a little bit ridiculous.

The novel is about Hurtle Duffield, a boy essentially bought from his parents for a wealthy couple's amusement at his charm and cleverness. An initially sensitive and bright little lad, the act of being sold seems to bring out something darker in the boy, and his push towards becoming an artists reveals a brutal, crueler side of him that he ends up exploring more.

I read that the author knew many artists and longed to paint, and I understand the book a bit better now. It felt like someone writing like a - caricature of an eccentric artist. It's like a cartoon version of one, all gloom and drama and grief and ego and its' a bit melodramatic. It's like what a certain kind of artist wants and pretends to be, but written as a genuine thought and process. It's so -- over the top, it's a bit silly? I'm an artist personally and have a lot of experience with people of all ages and all backgrounds who also are, and this just felt like a guy wearing a beret, handlebar mustache, and having a striped shirt sort of artist. Like, a cut out of one.

I wouldn't say I hated the book because I really liked bits of it - his early life and him being adopted, when he moves in with his sister, etc. I read White said he wanted to try and paint a story, and it falls victim to flowery language, dramatic padding out and grittiness, and I just didn't find it overhwelmingly enjoyable.

In terms of quality, it's probably like a 3.5/5. In practice? It's a 2/4 'it was okay' for just not being an enjoyable endeavor.

[Tien · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really adore the way Patrick White describes some things. There were just times when he was truly brilliant in some turns of phrases and those were the bits of gems I continued to look for as I listen for this 27 hours long audiobook. But, really, I don't understand his stories... I listen only for those little moments of brilliance because when they came, they really do brighten up my day and those phrases stuck with me all day long. I guess this book is sort of like an epic [in size of this novel] tale of a painter's life. He's not truly hate-able nor like-able; he's flawed yet brilliant in his work or so some people think. Art is subjective to the beholder and so it applies to this novel wherein I can only appreciate 1 small part of it.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

An epic telling of an obsessive artist whose primary connection to the world around him is through his painting. White's a great writer, but his prose can get a little dense. His alternating between a 2nd and 3rd person narrative voice was also confusing. Combine all that with an emotionally icy protagonist and this book took me longer to finish than I expected. Fortunately, the final chapters were more rewarding.

[Sequoyah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel lucky to have read, two years in a row, two novels that I consider the greatest of all time. The first is Memoirs of Hadrian and the second is The Vivisector. Who would have thought that the greatest work of English fiction that I have so far read would come from Australia?

I have read a few other reviews on Goodreads for The Vivisector. They engorge themselves on "the painter," "a great novel about The Artist," and "an odious main character." It makes me sick to my stomach how facile and reductive this perspective is. Hurtle Duffield is not an odiously evil caricature of a painter, he is a deeply flawed human. This is--along with Oe's A Personal Matter--a masterpiece of a character novel--not an artist's novel--following and exploring every facet of a flawed man's life. So flawed, in fact, that one cannot help but relate to its honesty in showing how similar we are to this fictional man. Life is flawed, sometimes nasty, but always so real. Hurtle Duffield is not only flawed but deeply relatable in his struggle through life. This is never more realized in his treating every single interaction with another person as a competition or game, with the fear of some illusive or hidden motive in another character's treatment of the interaction. In fact, all the characters portrayed in the novel are so fully developed, real, and flawed that the reductive perspective of Duffield being odious destroys our reality of not actually knowing real-life individuals as well and as deeply as we know these characters. We do not know anyone as well as we know Hurtle, and you hate him for that?

But, regardless of the character aspect of the novel, it is even more so the greatest expression of the English language in novel form. Here is something I wrote up in the throes of ecstasy of the first hundred or so pages:

----I am having difficulty coming to terms with this novel. It’s masterful. The switching between third and second person brought me into the main character’s mind. It felt like an actual stream of consciousness. No modernist work of fiction I have ever read that tries to imitate this feeling has ever been so close as this. It drew me in and I felt hypnotized by how real this novel felt.

White’s writing—his word choice, his idiomatic (but not really any idiom that I’ve ever seen) turn of phrase—is mystical and unique. It confounds me. I can’t come up with the words to describe his way of so beautifully describing the trivial. The main character thinks and paints what he thinks. White does the same—his writing is a clear linguistic exploration of what is in White’s mind. I particularly love this with anything sexually physical in the novel. It is described in a way that is both new and as if it’s a facade for what is taking place. Kisses are never kisses but a verbose sentence that leaves you questioning whether the characters even kissed or not.

It’s so damn good.-----

Everything I wrote after experiencing the first part of the novel stayed with me throughout and still rings true. Everything Joyce, Faulkner, et al tried to do with their modernist stream-of-consciousness efforts cannot compare to White's piercing understanding of me, you, and us in this single novel. The beauty of White's language is incomparable to anything else I have ever read. It was quite intoxicating and was equally as exhausting... 611 pages of a sea of strings of perfectly chosen words bashing into my soul.

This is another book where I simply cannot express my feelings about it fully. There is, however, one word that I learned from this novel: numinous. It comes close to describing my feelings toward it. It is so subtle and restrained but also so penetrating and expansive. I loved Hurtle Duffield from the very beginning and loved him until the end.

“He still listened, and when he heard the yard gate, it’s loose, unmistakable latch, he began a dry whimpering. There was nobody to listen to the great man he was supposed to be: not even Rhoda his sister.”

[Ka Vee · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5*
Sublieme passages over een bezeten schilder, die leeft om te schilderen en zichzelf te sublimeren, ten koste van alles en iedereen.
Anderzijds overschreven, en de (oude) taal stoorde me toch wel.
Uitdagende lectuur !

[Leonart Maruli · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am really trying hard to get in this novel. I started reading this novel since early December 2020 but this book a truly boredom. Until the page 218, I don't understand what the author want to tell to the reader. The dialog, the description and the narration too dull to be followed. Maybe I'm belonging to small groups of people who don't like this book.

Note: kalau ada teman-teman di Goodreads Indonesia yang tertarik dengan novel ini, saya rela menjualnya dengan harga yang terjangkau. Kirim pesan saja ke inbox saya kalau ada yang berminat.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic book which yet again shows the power of Patrick White's writing. The character studies of all the characters are so wonderfully detailed. He elucidates the process of art through the all-seeing eye.This is worth every page of it's 700 odd pages.

[Dillwynia Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favourite White novels.
The concept is the artist uses individuals as muses, sucking the life figuratively and occasionally literally, in order to produce their work. We aren't supposed to like our protagonist, but he is such an interesting person that you are propelled to the end.

[tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

it keeps happening

i doubt his power every time and every time i am reinvigorated

[Ray Cannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite book in the whole world.

[Stephen Orr · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love reading. if there is a god, on the eighth day he created authors…. and on the ninth day I am pretty sure we would have had our first short story.

this is why I love to read. a book that challenges me. meet hurtle, a character most assuredly original. patrick white quickly eviscerates any idea of a literary hero emerging from his pages. our protagonist is no atticus finch. hurtle is an artist who is both talented and celebrated. he is also odious, immune to social conventions and completely unrepentant. he is rarely reflective and sees a world through a most unusual lens and narrative. this wasn’t an easy read at different times. white deliberately sets out to polarise his readers. from its disturbing title to the final pages this is a book I won’t easily forget. thoroughly enjoyable (for some).