Examining the Creative Impulse
BOLGER, EUGENIE
Examining the Creative Impulse The Vivisector By Patrick White Viking. 567 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Eugenie Bolger Although bom and educated in Britain, Patrick White again reminds us that he is...
...Real life is inside the skull...
...He has a succession of mistresses—among them a prostitute, a society notable and a gifted nymphet—is drawn into some strange entanglements, rediscovers Rhoda, and becomes famous...
...Yet beneath the surface something resonates...
...There is an eerie Pinteresque ambience here...
...Smooth and accessible on the surface, his novels deal with events and people that are immediately recognizable, even familiar...
...Reviewed by Eugenie Bolger Although bom and educated in Britain, Patrick White again reminds us that he is very much an Australian writer with The Vivisector, his eighth novel...
...Duffield exchanges his real father, a collector of empty bottles, for a handsome and well-to-do property owner, and his true mother with her frowzy affections for the semi-incestuous attentions of the beautiful and brittle Alfreda...
...But Duffield no more belongs to his adopted family than he did to the teeming clan that Mumma bore...
...Since humor is the ultimate deterrent to romantic puffery, both books are also filled with farcical situations and raffish characters...
...For a while at least, no one who has read The Vivisector will view a painting without recalling the agony of Hurtle Duffield...
...every object assumes an air of mystery and silence speaks...
...The Vivisector is an exploration of a painter's creativity, a rather worn subject handled by writers no less diverse in their approaches than Irving Stone, Somerset Maugham and Joyce Cary...
...And yet this stubborn novel casts its spell...
...At other levels the novel is less engaging...
...characters and situations evoke suggestions of Biblical and mythic themes that tap like ghosts at corners of the mind...
...Details that lend individuality and coherence are lost, leaving only the rough lines of caricature...
...White and Cary knew the pitfalls awaiting any investigation of the creative impulse, and tried to avoid them by inventing protagonists with no known counterparts in life...
...Upstairs Duffield paints and sleeps, ignoring distinctions of day and night...
...Still, something is sacrificed in Cary's headlong comic pursuit...
...Collecting his experiences as Pa collected empties, Duffield vivisects them and transforms his perceptions into paintings...
...It is an eccentric household...
...A profound sense of the silence in which the artist spends "half a lifetime begetting and giving birth" pervades its pages...
...Of the two main characters, Duffield and Jimson, Duffield eventually emerges as the more serious creation...
...The Vivisector picks up Duf-field's story when he is a child of six, and follows him until the moment of his death...
...Such novels as The Moon and Sixpence or The Agony and the Ecstasy examine the artistic quest of a celebrated historical figure...
...And will sound different...
...He is sold by his impoverished parents to Harry and Alfreda Courtney, who had employed his mother as a laundress...
...The respect with which his life and values are examined endows him with a dignity and dimension Jimson never attains...
...The most vividly realized and significant events of the novel have to do with this process of transformation, and with Duffield's days in the decaying house he shares with Rhoda...
...But where Cary was selective and single-minded in his detail, White's work is cluttered and less sure of touch...
...The ironic voice is disturbingly uneven...
...He has observed that in the previous seven (of which Voss and The Tree of Man were well received in this country) "the influences and impressions of this strange, dead landscape of Australia predominate...
...The house is a dust-clogged paradise where Duffield is a shuffling god, creating writhing colors and distorted figures from the raw material of his vision...
...These, however, are only the externals of Duffield's life...
...words vibrate with an awe of nature and the unknowable...
...He works in one room or another, sleeps on one mattress or another, depending upon where he thinks the light is best and where the need to rest overcomes him...
...Call me 'Maman.' That's the French...
...It's so pretty...
...White seems comfortable with the stately rhythms of the poetic voice, employed by him in other works, and it is appropriate to revealing the qualities of an original and imaginative mind...
...And his writing is indeed a kind of remote island, separated by vast oceans from the mainland of contemporary literature...
...He is a craggy individualist who creates his own terrain...
...Downstairs, Rhoda ministers to a horde of cats, rattling dishes and crooning to herself...
...Recognizing this, he severs all ties and commits himself to painting...
...Too many scenes arc drained of conviction by the conflict between the two modes of seeing and approaching character...
...But too many characters suffer from the ironic glare...
...White, though, has chosen to create in Hurtle Duffield the kind of original and striking character Cary made of Gulley Jimson in The Horse's Mouth...
...In place of a houseful of brothers and sisters he is given the hunchbacked Rhoda, the Courtney's unloved and only natural child...
...Several fashionable parties are described with wicked wit, occasional bursts of dialogue are precisely on target, and the not-so-innocent conversation about boys carried on by some young girls in a summerhouse has an accuracy that makes us laugh with recognition...
...The resulting damage to the narrative line cannot be repaired...
...One wonders how and where to place White in a geography whose major features are outcroppings of pop-porno-violence and esoteric experimentation...
...The straggling araucaria, the ruined conservatory, a broken drainpipe, a tufted sofa—all seem to be conveying messages...
...The story is told in two distinct voices, a strong poetic tone reserved for Duffield's private moments, and a coolly acid one used almost everywhere else...
Vol. 53 • September 1970 • No. 17
