White claims that The Vivisector was not about Sidney Nolan, others say it is more likely autobiographical. They did give him the prize three years later though. They didn’t like the big question in it of whether one could be a human being and artist at the same time. Adams says that his painting is inspired by Nolan.Īpparently White was being considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but this novel put the judges off. Looking him up, I find he is particularly famous for his series of paintings featuring Ned Kelly… pictured right is The Death of Sergeant Kennedy at Stringybark Creek.

The novel is about a painter, and is dedicated to great Australian artist Sidney Nolan, whom I must admit I don’t know. It’s by renowned cover artist Tom Adams (whose website you can see here and shows his fascinating range of styles). It reminds me of Francis Bacon with those jagged-toothed gaping maws in the sky. It’s a challenging cover, isn’t it – of course not having read the book, I don’t really understand it apart from its Australian landscape. All were ex-library copies, well-used, covered in stamps and flyleafs cut out, so once I decided I would never get around to reading them (they look challenging reads), out they went – but I saved the dustjacket of his 1970 novel The Vivisector to show you, particularly as it was the first edition. But his relationships are only tangential as from his early austere rock paintings in the bush he goes onward and upward to his God paintings, ''God the Vivisector, God the Artist, God.'' True, much of this has a savage and single-minded obsession which overrides the rank and disfigured aspects of existence but in the end the artist has isolated himself from the world and the book has collaterally immolated itself in its own grand conception.My late Mum had several books by English-born Australian author Patrick White in her collection which I later inherited.

Sexuality occasionally distracts and drives him-the worn prostitute Nance who recognizes he's not '''uman''-equally briefly the self-denigrating Hero. He's adopted at an early age by the wealthy Courtneys and his hunchbacked, birthmarked half-sister repulses him although she will return at the close of his life. Persevere if you will with his larger than life sized portrait of an artist, Hurtle, scourged by an inner and ascendant vision which removes him from worldly concerns and rewards (fame, and later a knighthood rejected).

Symbolic abstractions lurk beneath a highly recalcitrant reality, or in the word of one of his commoner creatures, ''hidjus'' with a sour, purulent, flyblown ugliness. For almost twenty years Patrick White, the Australian novelist, has been respectfully considered as perhaps his country's most important contemporary although none of his books are either very inviting or very accessible.

The vivisector by patrick white