Summary
Hurtle moves away, ostensibly to join the army but actually to begin his life as a painter. He receives numerous letters from Maman over the years about how hurt she is that he left her, all of which he ignores. He also receives letters from Rhoda, to whom he feels more of a kinship; he says he must write to her soon, though he never does. Eventually he receives a letter from her saying that their father died of a stroke.
For a year Hurtle lives in Paris working as a dishwasher and hanging around artists of the avant-garde, picking up on new painting techniques. During this time he reverts to his old name of Duffield, feeling no longer a part of the austere Courtney family. He returns to Australia where he lives in squalor and continues dedicating his time to painting. When he enters into an ongoing sexual relationship with Nance Lightfoot, a local prostitute, a new era of his artwork emerges, fueled by the repulsion and eroticism present in their relationship.
When Nance comes to Hurtle’s house, she sees the beginnings of his portrait, “Nance Spreadeagle.” She offers to sit for a nude portrait, which Hurtle ignores, only wanting to paint her in the forms he chooses. Nance scolds him for forgetting that people exist: that while artists have their heads in the clouds considering the mysteries of life, wringing people for material, their subjects are out living through the thick of it.
Hurtle takes up a job cleaning a department store. Nance declares she loves him and begins giving him money so that he can keep painting, thus keeping him beholden to her. When Nance goes away for a bit to spend time with a well-paying client, Hurtle relishes in the quiet, staying in all day and working on his paintings, trying to convey what he sees and feels through the limits of the medium. She returns, hoping that he missed her.
He continues to fluctuate between revulsion and a selfish “love” for Nance, though admits to himself that ultimately she is a means to an end for him in the form of artistic inspiration. Still Hurtle realizes that he is living the life he always dreamed of: spending most of the day painting. A local art dealer called Caldicott takes up an interest in Hurtle’s work and advances him money for a few paintings, telling him of a growing interest in painting among upper class women. Soon after a mysterious Mrs. Lopez, who lives in South America, buys some of his work and drums up interest.
Despite earning some money, Hurtle continues to live in squalor in a ramshackle house on the edge of a gorge. Caldicott comes to the house and says he wants three Duffields for a show he is soon hosting, and advances him more money. After months without seeing Nance, she comes to visit and he discovers that he no longer has any sexual or artistic interest in her.
Hurtle’s paintings at the show are met with negative reviews, but Caldicott does not lose faith in his protege. Mrs. Lopez – now Mrs. Davenport – buys more of his work; despite this, Hurtle is nervous, irritable, and racked with concern over the direction of his work. Only when he shuts out the outer world and recedes into himself can he get to the proper core of the paintings, and this privacy continues to cause conflict with Nance, who wants to love and be loved by him. One night when he and Nance get into a fight, she runs out of the house and into the gorge and dies. In lieu of remorse, Hurtle experiences a kind of inspiration, and goes to the canvas.
Analysis
During this time living in Paris as a vagrant dishwasher, Hurtle refuses his newer given name of Courtney and reverts to his old name, Duffield. He cannot reconcile his identity as a Courtney with his life of squalor and poverty, and so he abandons it, as quickly as he abandoned the family. Duffield feels more fitting of this kind of life, and it is his real name, if any name is a real thing at all. In this way we see an inversion of the earlier move, as it relates to identity and class: if at first he was ashamed to be a Duffield, and longed to be a Courtney, he is now ashamed to be a Courtney, and longs to be associated with his more humble roots.
This idea that one cannot be a person while also being an artist becomes further articulated as Hurtle sets off on his own. Through his actions – leaving the Courtneys, ignoring their letters, not even reaching out when he learns his adopted father dies – we see Hurtle’s almost monastic commitment to being an artist, the way he cannot adhere to any other obligations. This is further explored in his relationship with Nance: while she claims to actually love him in a romantic way, he suspects that what he actually loves – and needs – is her form, which he is always rushing to get down on the canvas. And she is aware of this deception, even accusing him of being perverted, of being “‘not a human being’”(220).
The vivisection motif continues to work as a beating pulse of the novel. Now that we have seen Maman explicitly call attention to the horrors of this kind of work, the concept shifts from the level of concrete action to the realm of the symbolic, and one cannot help reading vivisection into Duffield’s treatments of the various people who come into his life as he grows up. Other than Rhoda, who was a subject in childhood, Nance Lightfoot is the first in what will come to be a line of human subjects for Duffield the painter, Duffield the vivisector.
He says of Nance: “He couldn’t have told her, because he needed her; not the humiliating fivers, not her ‘love’, necessarily; but because on one level he was resuscitated by the breath he breathed, the saliva he drank, out of her mouth, and because on the purer plane, they solved together equations which might have defeated his tentative mind, and which probably never entered Nance’s consciousness” (205). Like the dogs cut open on the table, these people are necessary to Duffield, for without them he would not be able to make sense of ideas and take them to the canvas.
Class struggles continue, and the financial pressures on artists are explicitly explored and addressed once he moves back to Australia. He takes up a menial job to earn money to survive, but then grows angry that the job is taking time and energy from his painting. He accepts the money from Nance, which is in some ways a better alternative than going to work at the department store every night, but also beholds him to her; as he works better alone, when he can stay home and paint for large swaths of time, this is also not totally ideal. Only when Caldicott enters the narrative, taking on Duffield as his young protégé, advancing him money and selling his works to wealthy society ladies, can Duffield earn enough from his art alone. However, Caldicott’s support contains its own pressures, namely the pressure to do good work for him. There is no perfect way; within a capitalist society, the making of art will be necessarily impacted.
