Tale follows poet’s chase of Matisse
By Margaret Quamme
Blue Arabesque by Patricia Hampl, Harcourt, $22
Blue
Arabesque will probably be placed on memoir shelves in bookstores. But it won’t fit comfortably there — or anywhere else. This pleasingly compact book is part autobiography, part art history, part philosophy, part biography, part literary critique and part travelogue. In essence, it’s a long personal essay of the sort that has almost died out: one in which the reader gets to watch the writer’s mind at work, with all its quirky detours onto unfamiliar bypaths.
The volume takes off from Patricia Hampl’s 1972 encounter with Matisse’s Woman Before an Aquarium. Just out of college, "an English major on the loose at last," Hampl was late for a lunch date in the cafeteria of the Chicago Art Institute when she found herself blindsided by Matisse’s painting, "hammered by the image" and unable to move.
It’s not "one of the more important Matisses," Hampl’s more artistically trained friends tell her. But she finds its power irresistible.
She carries a dog-eared postcard of the painting with her, tacking it up in front of desk after desk as she moves from place to place, and begins to make pilgrimages to other museums to see other Matisses, adding postcards to her collection, riffling through it "like a boy’s deck of baseball cards."
Year after year, she tries to discover why the painting has such an effect on her. She travels to Turkey — and after a long, strange bath and massage — feels herself "an odalisque at last, all fish, all float." She visits the convent in France where Matisse’s last model, long since turned nun, lives. She examines the chapel where the artist did his last painting.
She also travels through books, musing over Matisse’s life story, tracing his connection to the earlier artist Delacroix, searching for the origin of the word odalisque (a female slave or concubine in a harem) or exploring the letters of 18 thcentury traveler Lady Mary Montagu for her insights on the harems she enters.
Sometimes she goes off track so gradually that it’s hard to trace the point where she left her central subject: She spends pages on her fascination with the "cool talent and desperado life" of writer Katherine Mansfield. Taking off from a girlhood retreat, she traces the lives of three generations of St. Paul, Minn., millionaires, the youngest of whom, Jerome Hill, recorded his memories on film.
"Like all true memoirists, Hill is drawn more to shards than to stories, images rather than narrative," she writes of him, but she might as well be writing about herself. Blue Arabesque loops and weaves into an intricate depiction of a staunchly individual mind making meaning out of the world.