Summary
Some time has passed. Mr. Cutbush, a local grocer, meets the painter Duffield out at the park one night. Duffield talks about his house, which is modest but perfect for what he needs. Cutbush is delighted, having never met a real artist before, and asks if he is able to make a living off it. Duffield confirms that his work is being sold; a few years prior, buyers in London and New York were taking notice of him, which vindicated the now deceased Caldicott, who it turns out had been in love with Duffield all along. The two talk for a while longer about creation and God and then Cutbush says Duffield will probably go home and paint a picture of them, two men sitting on the bench in the moonlight. Duffield says goodnight; when he turns back, he is not surprised to see Cutbush masturbating before the lantana plants.
Duffield continues to consider the interaction with the grocer. He receives a letter from his patroness, Olivia Davenport, requesting a meeting with him now that she is back in Sydney. Duffield had always suspected that Davenport was simply an alias through which Caldicott supported him, but as he died a few years prior, Olivia must be someone else. He debates whether to go to the meeting; on the morning he is meant to, he is caught up working on a painting of Rhoda. He ends up going and discovers that his patroness Olivia Davenport is Boo Hollingrake, the childhood friend of Rhoda whom he once fancied.
Boo tours Duffield around her house to show him the paintings she has acquired over the years. She asks after Rhoda and Duffield tells her he lost track of her and lost touch during the war. They argue over some of the placement of the paintings and Boo expresses that she sometimes feels she understands his work better than he does. While this at first offends Duffield, he ultimately suspects she might be right. She insists on coming to his house to see the rest of his work and he relents, but is bothered when she comes over and tells him about her former husbands and life in Peru.
Boo argues with Duffield about the tone of his Cutbush painting. She breaks away into the bedroom, where Duffield has been keeping his Rhoda painting. Boo is horrified when she sees it, exclaiming that he is terrible for being so cruel to poor innocent Rhoda. She goes on to scold him for not being in touch with her, and then admonishes herself for not having tried to find her either. Boo continues to invite Duffield over and occasionally visits him at home, where they have erotic encounters driven by Boo’s desire to see and discuss his paintings. She continues to say that they make an effort to find Rhoda, insisting that she had always been wise and would do them both good.
Boo throws a party with her Greek friends, Hero and Cosma, wanting to set up Hero and Duffield; when Duffield asks why he must meet Hero, Boo says that she wants to contribute to either his happiness or his work. The night of the dinner, Boo introduces them to each other as two halves forming a whole, and declares that Hero is his for the duration of the dinner. While Hurtle has prior knowledge of the set-up, Hero appears to be unaware.
Hero and Hurtle walk around Boo’s house before the dinner is ready. When they encounter the early version of Duffield’s Rhoda painting, Hero comments that it looks more like an octopus than a girl, unaware that Hurtle is the artist. Rather than upset him, this comment thrills Hurtle, rendering the painting a new life that he did not know was possible. Hurtle says the girl is his sister; still, Hero does not understand that he is the painter. She asks after his sister, then questions why painters must be so cruel.
Over the course of the night, Hurtle senses that he is falling in love with Hero – not in a romantic way, but in an aesthetic way, overwhelmed by her beauty and form. Hero takes Duffield aside and tells him the story of how she came to marry her husband Cosma, whom she clearly does not love. She reveals that she married him for money, and has subsequently grown to love him. She tells him of the island Perialos where some kind of miracle happened to her, and decides that Hurtle must come.
Hero and Hurtle begin a romantic relationship, the dynamics of which are constantly shifting. Hurtle learns about Hero’s husband Cosma putting cats in bags and drowning them and becomes fixated on this image; Hero continues to talk about how gentle a person her husband is. When Cosma eventually writes Hero a letter stating that he knows she and Duffield are having an affair, Hero attempts to take her own life.
Duffield goes to Hero’s house ahead of their trip to Greece and meets her quasi-adopted daughter, Soso, who is sent back to her biological mother when the trip commences. At Perialos, Hero is eager to bring Duffield to the convent of an abbess known for her regenerative powers. When she does not deliver, Hero claims she was always skeptical of her and switches her attention to a hermit who will plead for them. Duffield grows tired of Hero’s roving devotion and decides to cut his trip short, returning to Sydney.
Analysis
Chapter Five gives readers the first and only sustained point of view switch in the whole novel. Cecil Cutbush, perverted grocer and former councilman, sits on a bench and encounters Duffield the painter, nagging him into conversation. Having privileged Duffield’s perceptions for hundreds of pages, the switch allows us to see, for once, how he is being perceived by those around him. Cutbush thinks he is strange, and aloof: “He didn’t understand why the stranger hadn’t completed the exchange of names like any other decent friendly bloke” (252). Now from the outside world, we see a confirmation of Duffield’s otherness, the behaviors that have kept him at a remove from the rest of society, just close enough to observe them and render them in painting.
This chapter also explicitly invokes the concept of creation, the relationship between artistic formation and the making of life, in the religious sense and in the personal, biological sense, via the shared word. Creation has always been a guiding impulse and interest of Duffield’s and in this chapter that interest becomes more articulated; we see it clearly in the scene where Cutbush, a non-artist, is so excited by the conversation that he has worked himself up into an erotic frenzy and ultimately masturbates by the plants in the park, “watching the seed he was scattering in vain by moonlight on barren ground” (258). That White should select the word “seed” underscores the idea that that impulse – the impulse to make something – is intrinsically linked to the idea of God.
This middle section of the novel begins what will become White’s ongoing pattern of bringing back old, lost characters from earlier in the novel. Boo Hollingrake returns as the person responsible for all of the support Duffield has been receiving for his work. Boo is a reminder of his old life as a Courtney, a reminder that he did in fact come from somewhere, even if he would prefer to forget it. She admits that she had always been fond of him, and knew when they met as children that he would go on to be a great painter, furthering the idea throughout the novel that Hurtle has always had exceptional promise.
Like Nance Lightfoot, Boo falls in line with the women who give something to Duffield without which he would otherwise not be able to work. This literally comes in the form of her money and patronage, which has bought him a kind of freedom. And while they do dabble in a sexual relationship, that is not the primary source of their intimacy; it comes instead from a shared love of the art itself, a desire to be near it and to talk about it. Boo believes that she understands Duffield’s paintings better than he does, which rather than offending him comes as an enormous relief, to be able to be seen in that way by another. She challenges him on his work, causing him to think of things in different ways, which ultimately broadens his aesthetic mind. In this way Boo is a departure from the Nance Lightfoot archetype: while Nance did not care about Duffield’s art, and therefore gained very little from the relationship, Boo wants to be in the world of art and aesthetics in her own right.
Hero Pavlossi is the next woman in the pattern. With Hero, Duffield feels that same artistic impulse just from looking at her form, as he once did with Rhoda and then Nance. Like Boo, Hero can also see things in Duffield’s paintings that he cannot see, as when she sees the form of an octopus in the painting of Rhoda. He is fascinated by her boring, gentle husband, particularly when he learns about the cats he has drowned – one of the many images in the novel that can be classified in the vivisection category. But there are imperfections in Hero, as we now come to expect, knowing that Duffield cannot form lasting relationships that would interrupt his art: the unsettling fact of her quasi-adopted daughter, Soso, for one thing, who makes a kind of double with the young Hurtle, “adopted” by the Courtneys to fulfill their own desire; her husband, who finds out about their affair and quite literally nearly kills Hero with his kindness; and above all, her false worshipping, her devotion to religious figures which Duffield ultimately finds juvenile, and wrong.
