Wednesday, September 13th, 2006
Week 2 with Patrick White
September’s The Monthly features an article by academic Judith Brett on writing her new book (with Anthony Moran) “Ordinary People’s Politics”. In it she says:
“Intellectuals’ autobiographies are full of stories about how ill at ease they felt with the people among whom they were born, the trials of solitude and how they never feel quite at home in the world. Sometimes, the tale is one where the intellectual or artist does eventually find people with whom to feel at home, socially or geographically far away from the place of their birth. Sometimes, the restlessness and alienation is endemic. Much twentieth-centrury intellectual history was driven by a critical and avant-gardist energy which pushed many intellectuals to explore the margins of social worlds and the dark side of human existence,and to expose the costs and repressions of particular socieites and moral systems.”
And what with it being September, and the month for reading The Vivisector with the Patrick White Reading Group, my mind immediately leapt to consider Mr Hurtle Duffield/Courtney and his aloneness. It’s come up in several discussions (check Laura’s round-up and in particular her post about Hurtle’s “self-enfoldness” – and isn’t that just a beautiful phrase?).
At first I thought of the obvious example of the Germaine Greer/Clive James/Barry Humphries expatriate crowd who had to leave Australia to live the lives they needed too. But I was also reminded of the the sense of self observation that people learning Buddhist meditation techniques are encouraged to develop.
I don’t think Hurtle’s manner is at it’s heart cruelty, as some have suggested. Rather, I see it as a lack of sentimentality and attachment. I think the perception of cruelty can arise when people around us are unsentimental and detached, because those modes of interacting are not socially or personally reassuring. We are supposed to be attached to our families.
It’s possible too, that his manner of dealing with his families is based in anxiety rather than rejection. He wants to write to father Courtney “and tell him he loved and understood him, better even than before his fall from omnipotence”. But doesn’t. Or can’t. And why, after Rhoda writes to tell him that his father is dead does he carry around for days a piece of paper, a pen that won’t work and a pencil (which he breaks) – unable to write a word, but able to overcome his muteness with a drawing. [SPOILER, I THINK, AS I HAVE LOST TRACK SOMEWHAT, BEG PARDON] Why does he later rip up his letters – every letter – immediately?[/SPOILER]
Hurtle doesn’t have enough energy to properly play the social games that ease our lives and to be an artist. And in one sense, it’s understandable – the child was sold, for money. And that kind of real social grace is in itself an accomplishment.
It’s easy to forget that while his manner is difficult for those around him, the art part is hard work for him. Artists first have to be able to look, and it’s hard to turn off that critical scrutiny. And poor Hurtle cannot function without an avenue of creative expression:
“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. Later on he realised he had been expressing himself in his house: a wood-carving of necessity.”
It’s a necessity not only to have somewhere to live, but to be making.
And going a bit meta here, one thing I’ve found a bit tricky is whether we’re supposed to have read or be reading the nominated section at the time we’re discussing it (not that there’s some hard and fast rule). I’ve tried to get a bit ahead, and I think it makes things slightly awkward, although the additional context does make reading everyone’s comments more interesting. Next time, I think I’ll try and wing it a bit more.
