The Vivisector

First UK edition. Crown 8vo. 642pp. Terracotta coloured cloth boards, titled in gilt to spine, black top-stain; off-white endpapers. Wrap-around jacket design by Tom Adams (priced 40s/£2.00 to front flap). 1/12,000 copies published on 22nd of October 1970. With Cape making the publication a literary event, the first issue sold out quickly, despite mixed reviews, with another 10,000 copies flying off the shelves in the author's native Australia a few weeks later.

Shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize, an award belatedly conferred in 2010 in place of the 'missed' year of 1970, when eligibility criteria were changed. A great painter ruthlessly dissects the lives of his immediate circle with both clarity and cruelty. Largely autobiographical and the longest of White's novels, the book was dedicated to Sidney Nolan and his wife Cynthia, but its creator always denied any connection between its central character and the painter. Its genesis seems to have been the receipt of a sad letter from the aging artist Roy de Maistre (1894–1968). Sharing patrician backgrounds, sexual proclivities, and both immersed in the arts, De Maistre became a mentor to the young White in 1930's London, and was the dedicatee of his first novel, The Happy Valley (1939).

In serious contention for the Nobel Prize in the year of its publication, the Swedish Academy reconsidered following members' objections to the central theme of the novel, which posed the question of whether it was possible to be both a human being and an artist. White eventually won it in 1973. "One of the great magicians of fiction... White's scope is vast and his invention endless." –The Observer

[Hubber & Smith L2]