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Patrick White
The Vivisector

About the Authors

PATRICK WHITE 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. 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. ” Neither proved true, and after four rather miserable years there he went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he specialized in languages. After leaving the university he settled in London, determined to become a writer. His first novel, Happy Valley, was published in 1939 and his second, The Living and the Dead, in 1941. During the war he was an RAAF intelligence officer in the Middle East and Greece. After the war he returned to Australia.

His novels include The Aunt’s Story (1946), The Tree of Man (1956), Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961), The Solid Mandala (1966), The Eye of the Storm (1973), A Fringe of Leaves (1976), and The Twyborn Affair (1979). He also published two collections of short stories, The Burnt Ones (1964) and The Cockatoos (1974), which incorporates several short novels, a collection of novellas, Three Uneasy Pieces (1987), and his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). He also edited Memoirs of Many in One (1986). In 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Patrick White died in September 1990. In a tribute to him The Times wrote, “Patrick White did more than any other writer to put Australian literature on the international map. . His tormented oeuvre is that of a great and essentially modern writer. ”

J. M. COETZEE born in South Africa in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States.

Among his academic appointments have been professorships at the University of Cape Town and the University of Chicago. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, as well as of memoirs, criticism, and translations. Among the awards he has won are the Booker Prize (twice) and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize in Literature. Since 2002 he has lived in Adelaide, Australia.

The Vivisector

For Cynthia and Sidney Nolan

As I see it, painting and religious experience are the same thing, and what we are all searching for is the understanding and realization of infinity.

BEN NICHOLSON

Cruelty has a Human Heart,

And Jealousy a Human Face;

Terror the Human Form Divine,

And Secrecy the Human Dress.

The Human Dress is forged in Iron,

The Human Form a fiery Forge,

The Human Face a Furnace seal’d,

The Human Heart its hungry Gorge.

WILLIAM BLAKE

They love truth when it reveals itself, and they hate it when it reveals themselves.

SAINT AUGUSTINE

He becomes beyond all others the great Invalid, the great Criminal, the great Accused One — and the Supreme Knower. For he reaches the unknown.

RIMBAUD

Introduction

Patrick White was born in 1912 into a wealthy New South Wales family, owners of hundreds of thousands of acres of prime grazing land. Young Patrick was not an attractive child, withdrawn, unsmiling; he also suffered from chronic asthma. At the age of twelve he was packed off to England to a public (that is, private) school, where he spent five unhappy years. By the time he came home in 1929 a tendency toward self-loathing had become entrenched. He was also a secret homosexual.