Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  There is of course something absurd at the core of the entire enterprise of embodying a metaphysical vision in a series of paintings whose sole mode of being is as words on the page. If the vision belonged to a poet rather than a visual artist the problem would not arise. To get us to believe in his hero Yuri Zhivago, Boris Pasternak has merely to write authentic poetry and attribute it to Zhivago. Why did White set himself an impossible task?

  The answer to this question must have something to do with White’s sense of himself as a painter manqué, a man with a painterly vision of the world though none of the painter’s skills. At a deeper level, it must have had something to do with the particularity of painting, with the simple fact that a painting must always exceed any translation of it into words. If we could achieve in words all that we can achieve with paint, we would not need painting.

  Like Alf Dubbo, the Aboriginal painter in Riders in the Chariot, Duffield is not a man of ideas. When he tries to express himself in words, the words feel inauthentic, as though forced out of him by a ventriloquist. White’s visionaries in general think intuitively rather than abstractly; if his painters can be said to think at all, they think in paint. In the kind of painting that Duffield does, figurative expressionism tending more and more toward the abstract, the movement of the hand is the way in which the painter thinks.

  In a letter written in 1968, while he was still working on The Vivisector, White mentions, not entirely seriously, that he fears the book will be received by the public as ‘Sex Life of Famous Painter’.4 Hurtle Duffield does not have an extensive sex life – his main sexual activity is masturbation – but it is extreme, the sex life of a man who uses women as a stimulus to epiphany. The two women with whom he has extended relationships both die, and the accusation made by an old friend that he is responsible is not without foundation. He has, so to speak, ridden them to death in an effort to transmute into artistic truth the transports of ecstasy he has shared with them, transports that, as he looks back, strike him as sometimes depraved.

  The unexpected turn to lyricism in the paintings of the next-to-last phase of Duffield’s career – a lyricism that some of Sydney’s cognoscenti find cloying – is largely an after-effect of the affair he has with a thirteen-year-old girl, Kathy Volkov, for whom White draws – a little too closely at times – on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. By a strange kind of incestuous autogenesis, their intercourse, rather than getting Kathy pregnant, turns her into the child he has not had, his masterpiece and (in the medium of music) heir, in contrast to the two dead women, his failures. And Kathy is not ungrateful: ‘It was you who taught me how to see, to be, to know instinctively,’ she will write, looking back on their liaison. (p. 539)

  As for Duffield’s very last phase, in which, semi-paralysed, past sex, he is tended by a faithful boy (shades of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich), this is dominated by the unfinished painting in which he comes closest to realizing his vision of God: a simple painting in indigo, the word INDIGO itself an anagram swollen with cryptic meaning.

  The Vivisector has many failings. There are stretches where White writes at less than white heat (one thinks here of the entire Kathy Volkov episode). The repeated assaults on the hypocrisy and pretentiousness of Sydney high society can grow wearisome. But the weaknesses of the book pale by comparison with what it achieves. In Hurtle Duffield, White found a way of giving body to a conception of the artist – and therefore of himself – as megalomaniac, certainly, but also as Luciferian hero, as – to quote his own epigraph from Rimbaud – ‘the great Accursed One’, and of doing so with just enough mockery, just enough exposure of the chaos in which the artist lives, inner and outer, to make the portrait compelling.

  In her study of Patrick White and his place in the Australian art scene, Helen Verity Hewitt observes that, at just the time when White was writing The Vivisector, the kind of painting that Hurtle Duffield does was becoming passé. The watershed date was 1967, when the work of a new generation of American artists was put on display in Sydney and Melbourne in an exhibition seen by huge numbers of people. The revolution in sensibility represented by this new work was enthusiastically endorsed by younger Australian practitioners. ‘Human feeling, expressionism and spiritual quests were seen by the new “internationalists” as embarrassing and gauche … Hard-edge, minimal and colour-field painting stressed the autonomy of the art object and its divorce from any notions of self-expression’.5

  1967 was also the year when the Art Gallery of New South Wales held a major retrospective of the work of Sidney Nolan. White was overwhelmed by the sweep of Nolan’s achievement as revealed in the exhibition, which seemed to him ‘the greatest event – not just in painting – in Australia in my lifetime’. He drew on it for the retrospective of Duffield’s work near the end of The Vivisector. He also sent Nolan the novel in draft, asking him to report candidly ‘how close or remote I am from the workings of a painter’s mind’.6 Nolan thus had solid grounds for believing that Duffield was modelled on him.

  It was not only in painting that, as the 1960s drew to an end, a changing of the guard took place. Much as the cohort of artists – Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval – who had imported German and French expressionism into Australian art in the immediate post-war years and, along with the more senior William Dobell, had become the public face of Australian painting, were now being supplanted by a new generation with new metropolitan models, so White, likewise formed in important respects by European expressionism, and likewise in the 1960s the representative, even the colossus, of Australian literature, was about to be relegated to a back shelf by a reading public enthusiastic for new writers from Latin America, India, and the Caribbean. The book White was working on in 1967, the book that became The Vivisector, was thus fated to be an elegy not only for the school of painting represented by Duffield but also for the school of writing represented by White himself.

  Two.

  The Vivisector was the eighth of the eleven big novels that White published between 1939 and 1979. In the remaining years of his life, up to his death in 1990, he produced stories, plays, and memoirs, but no fiction on the previous grand scale. His health was declining; he doubted he had the staying power, or indeed the will, to bring off a substantial new work.

  To an inquiry from the Australian National Library as to his plans for the disposition of his papers, he responded: ‘I can’t let you have my papers because I don’t keep any.’ As for his manuscripts, he said, these were routinely destroyed once the book had appeared in print. ‘Anything [that is] unfinished when I die is to be burnt,’ he concluded.7 And indeed, in his will he instructed his literary executor, his agent Barbara Mobbs, to destroy whatever papers he left behind.

  Mobbs disobeyed that instruction. In 2006 she committed the surviving papers, a surprisingly large cache packed in thirty-two boxes, to the library. Researchers, including White’s biographer David Marr, have been busy with this Nachlass ever since. Among the fruits of Marr’s labours is The Hanging Garden, a 50, 000-word fragment of a novel that White commenced early in 1981 but then, after weeks of intense and productive labour, abandoned.

  Marr has high praise for this resurrected fragment: ‘A masterpiece in the making,’ he calls it. (p. 30) One can see why. Although it is only a draft, the creative intelligence behind the prose is as intense and the characterization as deft as anywhere in White. There is no sign at all of failing powers. The fragment, constituting the first third of the projected novel, is largely self-contained. All that is missing is a sense of where the action is leading, what all the preparation is preparatory to.

  After the initial burst of activity White never returned to The Hanging Garden. It joined two other abandoned novels among the papers that Mobbs was instructed to destroy; it is not inconceivable that these too will be resurrected and offered to the public at some future date.

  The world is a richer place now that we have The Hanging Garden. But what of Patrick White himself, who made it clear that he did
not want the world to see fragments of unachieved works from his hand? What would White say of Mobbs if he could speak from beyond the grave?

  Perhaps the most notorious case of an executor countermanding the instructions of the deceased is provided by Max Brod, executor of the literary estate of his close friend Franz Kafka. Kafka, himself a trained lawyer, could not have spelled out his instructions more clearly:

  Dearest Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of notebooks, manuscripts, letters, my own and other people’s, sketches and so on, is to be burned unread and to the last page, as well as all writings of mine or notes which either you may have or other people, from whom you are to beg them in my name. Letters which are not handed over to you should at least be faithfully burned by those who have them. Yours, Franz Kafka.8

  Had Brod done his duty, we would have neither The Trial nor The Castle. As a result of his betrayal, the world is not just richer but metamorphosed, transfigured. Does the example of Brod and Kafka persuade us that literary executors, and perhaps executors in general, should be granted leeway to reinterpret instructions in the light of the general good?

  There is an unstated prolegomenon to Kafka’s letter, as there is in most testamentary instructions of this kind: ‘By the time I am on my deathbed, and have to confront the fact that I will never be able to resume work on the fragments in my desk drawer, I will no longer be in a position to destroy them. Therefore I see no recourse but to ask you act on my behalf. Unable to compel you, I can only trust you to honour my request.’

  In justifying his failure to ‘commit the incendiary act’, Brod named two grounds. The first was that Kafka’s standards for permitting his handiwork to see the light of day were unnaturally high: ‘the highest religious standards’, he called them. The second was more down to earth: though he had clearly informed Kafka that he would not carry out his instructions, Kafka had not dismissed him as executor, therefore (he reasoned) in his heart Kafka must have known the manuscripts would not be destroyed. (pp. 173, 174)

  In law, the words of a will are meant to express the full and final intention of the testator. If the will is well constructed – that is to say, properly worded, in accordance with the formulaic language of testamentary tradition – then it will be a fairly mechanical task to interpret the will: we need nothing more than a handbook of testamentary formulas to gain unambiguous access to the intention of the testator. In the Anglo-American legal system, the handbook of formulas is known as the rules of construction, and the tradition of interpretation based on them as the plain-meaning doctrine.

  However, for quite a while now the plain-meaning doctrine has been under siege. The essence of the critique was set forth over a century ago by the legal scholar John H. Wigmore:

  The fallacy consists in assuming that there is or ever can be some one real or absolute meaning. In truth, there can only be some person’s meaning; and that person, whose meaning the law is seeking, is the writer of the document.9

  The unique difficulty posed by wills is that the writer of the document, the person whose meaning the law is seeking, is absent, inaccessible.

  The relativistic approach to meaning enunciated by Wigmore has the upper hand in many jurisdictions today. According to this approach, our energies ought to be directed in the first place to grasping the anterior intentions of the testator, and only secondarily to interpreting the written expression of those intentions in the light of precedent. Thus rules of construction can no longer be relied on to provide the last word; a more open attitude has come to prevail toward admitting extrinsic evidence of the testator’s intentions. In 1999 the American Law Institute, in its Restatement of Property, Wills and Other Donative Transfers, went so far as to declare that the language of a document (such as a will) is ‘so colored by the circumstances surrounding its formulation that [other] evidence regarding the donor’s intention is always [my emphasis] relevant’.10 In this respect the ALI registers a shift of emphasis not only in United States law but in the entire legal tradition founded on English law.

  If the language of the testamentary document is always conditioned by, and may always be supplemented by, the circumstances surrounding its formulation, what circumstances can we imagine, surrounding instructions from a writer that his papers be destroyed, that might justify ignoring those instructions?

  In the case of Brod and Kafka, aside from the circumstances adduced by Brod himself (that the testator set unrealistic standards for publication of his work; that the testator was aware that his executor could not be relied on), there is a third and more compelling one: that the testator was not in a position to understand the broader significance of his life’s work.

  Public opinion is, I would guess, solidly behind executors like Brod and Mobbs who refuse to carry out their testamentary instructions on the twofold grounds that they are in a better position than the deceased to understand the broader significance of the work, and that considerations of the public good should trump the expressed wishes of the deceased. What then should a writer do if he truly, finally, and absolutely wants his papers to be destroyed? In the reigning legal climate, the best answer would seem to be: Do the job yourself. Furthermore, do it early, before you are physically incapable. If you delay too long, you will have to ask someone else to act on your behalf, and that person may decide that you do not truly, finally, and absolutely mean what you say.

  The Hanging Garden is the story of two European children evacuated for their safety to Australia during the Second World War. Gilbert is British, sent away to escape the bombing of London. Eirene is the child of a Greek father and an Australian mother. During their first night together the children, whose ages are not given but who must be eleven or twelve, share a bed. In Eirene there begins to grow an obsession with Gilbert in which inchoate sexual stirrings are mixed with an obscure realization that they are not just fellow aliens in a new land but two of a kind, brought together by fate. Of Gilbert’s feelings for Eirene we know less, in part because he is trapped in boyish male disdain for girls, in part (one guesses) because realization of her place in his life was intended to come later, in the body of the book that never got to be written.

  After a year or two in foster care, the children are separated. Though Eirene broods on memories of their time together, they have no further contact. The fragment ends in mid-1945, with victory in Europe and the prospect that the two children will be returned to their native countries.

  Greece and Australia constitute the poles between which Eirene moves. Having just begun to get a feel for Greek politics and her parents’ position in Greek society, she must now navigate the very different Australian system, where she will be looked down on as a ‘reffo’ (refugee) and stigmatized, because of her dark skin, as a ‘black’. At school, her precocious acquaintance with Racine and Goethe will count against her: anti-egalitarian, un-Australian. But spiritual meanness of the Australian variety, though amply exhibited, is not the real focus of White’s concern in The Hanging Garden.

  Several other motifs are sounded in the fragment but then hang in the air with little indication of how he meant to develop them. The most intriguing of these concerns pneuma, a word that Eirene remembers from the island in the Cyclades where she spent a year with her father’s family – an ‘old’ family, anti-monarchist. Pneuma, she informs Gilbert, cannot be explained in English, but obscurely she feels it is a force or spirit watching over the pair of them.

  Pneuma is indeed one of the more mysterious forces in early Greek religion, and then in the religion of the early Christians. Issuing from deep in the earth, pneuma is what the oracle at Delphi inhales to give her the power of prophecy. In the New Testament it is the wind that is also the breath of God.

  The wind [pneuma] blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit [pneuma].11

  Similarly, Jesus breathes on his disciples and says, ‘Receive the Ho
ly Spirit [pneuma].’12

  White clearly intends pneuma to be more than a mere marker of Eirene’s Greek origins. He may well have intended it to fore-shadow the breath or spirit that speaks through the artist, thereby hinting at what the future would hold for his two characters.

  White had a deep attachment to Greece, principally through Manoly Lascaris, whom he met and fell in love with in Alexandria during the war, and with whom he came to share the rest of his life. His 1981 memoir Flaws in the Glass includes a lengthy record of their travels in Greece. For a period, he writes, he was ‘in the grip of a passionate love affair, not so much with Greece as the idea of it’. He and Lascaris even considered buying a house on Patmos. ‘Greece is one long despairing rage in those who understand her, worse for Manoly because she is his, as Australia is worse for me because of my responsibility.’ It is possible that through Gilbert (standing in for himself) and Eirene (standing in for Lascaris) he hoped, in The Hanging Garden, to explore more deeply feelings of despairing rage at a beloved country (Australia on the one hand, Greece on the other) that has fallen into the hands of a brash, greedy, nouveauriche class.13

  To a friend at school, Eirene confides that what she seeks above all in life is love, but more specifically ‘transcendence’. In the flat light of Australia there is no place for the transcendent (‘Australians are only born to live’); but in Greece she had intuitions

  almost in my cradle, anyway from stubbing my toes on Greek stones, from my face whipped by pine branches, from the smell of drying wax candles in old mouldy hillside chapels … Mountain snow stained with Greek blood. And the pneuma floating above, like a blue cloud in a blue sky.14

  Intimations such as these, hinting that she is in the world to show us how to transcend the world, mark Eirene as one of White’s elect, along with Voss and the four Riders in the Chariot and Arthur Brown in The Solid Mandala and Hurtle Duffield in The Vivisector: outsiders mocked by society yet doggedly occupied in their private quests for transcendence, or, as White more often calls it, the truth.