![]() ![]() When he was thirteen, he went to school in England, to Cheltenham, where it was understood, the climate would be temperate and a colonial acceptable. However, Humphrey Bower's reading of the novel, with the myriad voices he assumed, was quite brilliant from beginning to end. Patrick White (1912-1990) was born in England in 1912, when his parents were in Europe for two years at six months he was taken back to Australia, where his father owned a sheep station. White no doubt counts as a genius himself, but my once-high view of his writing has gone way down. He is the vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses with cruel precision: his sisters deformity, a grocers moonlight indiscretion and the passionate illusions of his mistress, Hero. I had a great sense of letdown while reading this novel. The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the victims of his art. His disgust for his sister Rhoda, from the moment he sets eyes on her, is reported as being quite forgiveable, and his attitude to the unfortunate Cutbush is never less than lordly. ![]() And he believes his role and talents (genius, rather) give him the right to sneer constantly at all the 'ordinary' people with their banal lives and boring utterances. Duffield paints as he is 'meant to' - choice and rational processes have nothing to do with it. He sees the artist as almost a godlike figure, to whom ideas and paintings are 'given'. There is little doubt that White enshrined his vision of the artist in the mind of the painter Hurtle Duffield of The Vivisector. ![]() However, nearly 50 years later I find the novel quite distasteful, though full of White's characteristic poetic prose. The Vivisector was the first novel by Patrick White which I really enjoyed, having failed to do so, with Voss and The Tree of Man. ![]()
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