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 – the creative impetus that can so easily become obsession and endanger the lives and happiness of others, if not themselves. By the time I'd read the last page I thought I was Hurtle Duffield.

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 when, as a child, he draws the Mad Eye, 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 following is from early in the novel, before he goes to live with the wealthy Courtneys.

It was a white night. All their hens were drooping white along the boughs, the boughs whitened by shit and light. Through the shit smells, musty of hen, moist-sweet of horse, he went inside the shed, Bonnie lifting a velvet lip, whinnying and shifting weight. He burned his fingers lighting their candle. Sleep had flattened Will, white too, like uncooked dough, but the yellow light fell across the cracked plaster of the wall, from which you had never succeeded in rubbing the more private thoughts, or ‘drorings’, or in making room for more. There would never be room for everything. Now he stood for a while, drawing on the patch of candlelight, himself only flickering at first then more dreamily flowing, his head at the angle from which he saw and thought best. He was drawing Mumma’s hollow body, with the new baby sprouting in it like one of the Chinese beans the Chow had given them at Christmas. Over all the chandelier. The Eye too: what Mumma called ‘the Mad Eye’ – it looks right through you’. Aiming its arrows the bow-shaped eye was at the same time the target, or bull’s eye. There was so much, everything you knew, to include.

The seminal paintings throughout his career are all the result of coming close to what he perceives as the truth. The Marriage of Light, the result of his physical union with the prostitute Nance; Lantana Lovers under Moonfire, the obscene painting after the meeting with the homosexual Cutbush; the painting of his crippled sister Rhoda as the Pythoness at Tripod are all in their way revelatory. The choice of depicting her as the oracle is not accidental. It is also significant that at their first meeting Duffield asks Cutbush:

‘Do you believe in God, Mr Cutbush?’ ‘Eh? That’s what we were taught, wasn’t it? I’m not going back on that. That is, I wouldn’t be prepared to say I don’t exactly not believe.’ ‘In the Divine Vivisector?’

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. Afterwards:

As for the outsider, he no longer needed his Mothersole. His teeth grated as he regurgitated the nonsense he had talked while in the throes of rebirth: Hero’s death, his own; that of his paintings. (In his right mind, he never let himself be drawn in to talk about his painting, just as he shied away from those who wished to discuss variations on the sexual act.) He remembered another occasion when he had risen from the dead, by seminal dew and the threats of moonlight, in conversation, repulsive, painful, but necessary, with the grocer Cutbush: and now was born again by grace of Mothersole’s warm middle-class womb.

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 that 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 with whom he had an early sexual encounter; Hero, his Greek mistress, who takes him to the depths of sexual depravity; 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 comes closest to him and shows him something like 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. It’s what makes death acceptable. A vision of the truth is glimpsed by Duffield in a brush with death when he suffers a stroke. Partially recovered he begins his last great paintings, assisted in the more mundane difficulties by the art student Don Lethbridge, who is able to give whilst asking for nothing in return but to look at the great artist’s work. Painfully Duffield mounts a platform to work on the huge boards that will be the culmination of a life of seeking.

A retrospective is arranged, and as he leaves to attend:

It was drizzling very slightly: in the street the lamps were shedding long, oily blurs of light. He looked back, and Rhoda was standing, in actual flesh, at one of the lower windows. From street level it looked as though her pointed chin was piercing the sill. Her receded eyes reflected the same blur of night and rain in which he had been plunged. Or was it something less impersonal? He remembered her saying: I don’t believe artists know half the time what they’re creating. Oh yes, all the tralala, the technique – that’s another matter. But like ordinary people who get out of bed, wash their faces, comb their hair, cut the tops off their boiled eggs, they don’t act, they’re instruments which are played on, or vessels which are filled – in many cases only with longing. Was it this? or had he dreamed or imagined, or heard it from another quarter?

And at the exhibition:

As Gill Honeysett led from room to room it was some consolation to be able to touch the surface of paint and take refuge from the immodesty of words. Only Honeysett, in his innocence wouldn’t leave it at that. ‘Aren’t you pleased, Hurtle?’ Determined to draw you when you weren’t going to be drawn. ‘Yes, it’s splendid.’ It was too, as a concrete achievement. ‘Yes, I’m happy about it.’ When a flow of saliva started, and you had to swallow. ‘A bit of a give-away though.’ He cackled, and hoped it sounded dry. ‘How a give-away?’ ‘To see your life hung out – your whole life of dirty washing.’ ‘How can you avoid it? Not if you’re an artist of any account.’ ‘Oh no, you can’t help it. Anyway, the important part isn’t here. Not what matters.’

'Is Duffield painting God?’ he overhears someone ask.

The truth for which Duffield has sacrificed his life and human relationships 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 word on his lips, the revelation that he seems to glimpse, is the one he has spent his life seeking.