painters and paintings in 'another life

PAINTERS AND PAINTINGS IN 'ANOTHER LIFE'Author(s): EDWARD BAUGHSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (March - June 1980), pp. 83-93Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653402 .

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DEREK WALCOTT



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PAINTERS AND PAINTINGS IN 'ANOTHER LIFE9

In recreating the St Lucia of his memory in Another life, Walcott draws heavily on images from painting and related arts, especially photography. Sculpture, etching, pottery, dance also contribute, and music provides a major 'cluster' of images and allusions. This deliberate and extensive use of imagery from the arts is appropriate to the recall of the youthful dream of a society dedicated not to power but to art. As he says at the end of the essay 'What the Twilight Says': 'When twenty years ago we imagined cities devoted neither to power nor to money but to art, one had the true vision.'1 So the art imagery in Another life helps to convey the poem's meaning partly by being counterpoised against the martial imagery (soldiers, bugles, cannon smoke and battle-charges), connotative of power, of history as a saga of great battles, of victors and vanquished.

It is particularly appropriate that imagery of painting, including allusions to actual painters and paintings, should figure as prominently as it does in Another life, since the lost life which the poem celebrates was a life of very active involvement in painting, one dominated by two painters, Harold Simmons and Dunstan St Omer, the Harry and Gregorias of the poem.2 By using painting so much as part of the poem's technique, Walcott pays homage, over and above anything he says in the poem, to that life and those painters. The poem not only recounts that period of his life when he saw his future to be that of a painter; it not only fits that period into the shape of meaning which he sees his life as having taken; it also uses that life (painting) as a major factor or vehicle in the poem's way of expressing meaning. To put it another way, painting is not only a subject of the poem, but also an important aspect of its style and texture. Walcott's poetry has always shown a marked interest in and influence from painting. Another life is likely to remain the most profound and elaborate expression of this feature.

Throughout the poem Walcott describes with a painter's and draughtman's eye:

the frieze of coal-black carriers, charbonniers, erect, repetitive as hieroglyphs (p 29)3

A peel of lemon sand curled like a rind across the bay's blue dish, (pp 65-66)

... the hills stippled with violet as if they had seen Pisarro. (p 74)



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... the framed yellow jungle of the groyned mangroves meeting the groyned mangroves repeating their unbroken water-line, (p 149)

Every view is composed and coloured and framed as for a painting. We read of 'every view/assembling itself to say farewell' (pill), and Ά landscape of burnt stones and broken arches/arranged itself with a baroque panache.' (p 84). At the beginning of the poem we are taken into the mind of the young Walcott straining to record his beloved Vigie landscape in line and colour; in chapter 9 he achieves a remarkable evocation of the act of painting; and one of the controlling images of the poem is that of the island seen as a painting, particularly a Renaissance painting, 'a Cinquecento fragment in gilt frame' (p 4).

Many of the painterly images and the references to famous paintings derive from one book which greatly influenced Walcott in his youth, Thomas Craven's A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the Present Day (New York, 1939). He mentions it twice in the poem: once at the beginning of chapter 4 ('Thin water glazed/the pebbled knuckles of the Baptist's feet. In Craven's book.' (p 23); and again in chapter 12, when he asks his remembered young self, 'Starved, burning child,/ remember "The Hay Wain"/in your museum, Thomas Craven's book?' (p 78). In the unpublished first version of Another life, Walcott refers to it as

a book that I used as my imaginary museum and where I had learnt all I now knew about the old masters and the great painters ... a large black book from which I copied, in water-colour, a number of great paintings: Turner's The Fighting Téméraire Towed To Her Last Berth', Goya's 'Night Execution' as my father had once copied Millet's 'The Gleaners.

The many references to Renaissance painting and painters whose acquaintance he made or maintained through this book, not only attest to the hold which Renaissance art had on Walcott's imagination, but are also very apt for delineating the vision of Another life. In the Renaissance he found a supreme example of a great age defined

by its art, so to speak, the idea that it is the art that brings the age to fullest self

awareness, that 'signs' the epoch. So, 'as conquerors who had discovered home', (p 53), he and St Omer, Walcott tells us,

. . . swore, disciples of that astigmatic saint, that [they] would never leave the island until [they] had put down, in paint, in words, as psalmists learn the network of a hand, all if its sunken, leaf-choked ravines, every neglected, self-pitying inlet . . . (p 52).

In the early poem 'Roots', Walcott, wishing himself to be the Homer of his own people, had prayed that his poetry would



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. . . make without pomp, without stone acanthus, in our time, in the time of this phrase, a 'flowering

of islands,'

Make the rice fields and guinea-corn waving, The creak of the bullock-cart, make The fields with bent Indians in the rice marsh.5

Walcott keeps the idea of the Renaissance alive in the reader's mind through imagery, as when he thinks of Pinkie, the dead child, as having '(g)one to her harvest of flax-headed angels, /of seraphs blowing pink-palated conchs' (p 9). These angels and

seraphs are details from Renaissance painting, as, for example, is the 'chiton-fluted sea' (p 5)6. And his account of his 'conversion', the epiphanic moment of dedication to Art, which was at the same time a dedication of himself to his country, is expressed through allusions to Renaissance art:

Our father, who floated in the vaults of Michelangelo,

Saint Raphael, of sienna and gold leaf . . . (p 44).

A passage such as this also illustrates the fact that Renaissance art, by virtue of its

religious connections, was most helpful to Walcott in conveying the notion of the identification between art and religion in his remembered life, as well as his transference of much of his religious feeling to art. So, for instance, chapter 4, which recalls some

aspects of the religious life of St Lucia, begins by way of reference to one of the Renaissance paintings reproduced by Craven:

Thin water glazed the pebbled knuckles of the Baptist's feet.

In Craven's book. Their haloes shone like the tin guards of lamps. Verrocchio. Leonardo painted the kneeling angel's hair. Kneeling in our plain chapel, I envied them their frescoes. Italy flung round my shoulders like a robe, I ran among dry rocks, howling, 'Repent!' (p 23).

The painting is 'The Baptism of Christ' by Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci. Walcott no doubt got his information about the painting of it from a comment by Craven:

The picture is memorable for the vaporous landscape in the distance, and for the

kneeling angel at the left, whose carefully drawn hair and delicate features touched with radiance were not of Verrocchio's fibre. These additions were painted by an

apprentice, a boy of seventeen named Leonardo da Vinci.



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In the comparison of the haloes to 'tin guards of lamps', the reflectors on the kerosene lamps which were common in his childhood, we see Walcott relating art, and foreign art, to his day-to-day experience of life. So too with the 'seraphs blowing pink-palated conchs', the conchs, replacing the more usual trumpets in the religious paintings, being commonplace in the West Indies and used in St Lucia to border graves. These details, like his general 'envy' of Renaissance art, underscore how much Walcott's view of life and religion was coloured by his experience of art. Furthermore, they contribute to the exploration of one of the main themes of the poem, the relationship between art, life and reality- the idea, for example, that we are driven by a desire to make life over into art. The centrality of this area of interest is indicated by the quotation from Malraux's Psychology of Art which forms the epigraph to Book One of Another Life. Also of special significance in this connection are those instances in the poem in which a scene or a person fixes itself/himself in the poet's mind in terms of some scene or character from a painting or a book. An outstanding example is the case of the child Pinkie mentioned above-the girl whom Walcott knew being confused with/made more real by Sir Thomas Lawrence's famous portrait.

The connotative identification of art and religion extends into many specific details of the poem and enhances the impression of a richly integrated whole. For example, our first glimpse of Simmons is of the scholar-artist-priest, with intimations of sainthood about him, yet another image out of Renaissance painting and one to which Simmons' baldness lent itself:

Within the door, a bulb haloed the tonsure of a reader crouched in its pale tissue . . . (p 5).

This imaging of Simmons deepens the significance of the master-apprentice aspect of the Simmons-Walcott relationship, evoking all such situations in Renaissance art, as, for example, the Verrocchio-Leonardo relationship alluded to above. This initial image of Simmons develops easily into that of Simmons as martyr and saint, a kind of soldier-Christ:

I see him bent under the weight of the morning, against its shafts, devout, angelical . . . (p 138).

Eventually, the idea of Simmons as having been 'crucified' by his society, by a world which knew him not, assumes inevitable lightness within the structure of the poem, and is itself instinct with all the meaning of the art-religion nexus. So when Walcott pronounces his curse (chapter 19) on that society for what it did to Simmons, what it does to its artists, he ends with a reassurance against whatever destruction the 'enemy' can perform; he ends with the vision of a 'risen' Simmons/St Omer/Walcott:

their vision blurs, their future is clouded with cataract but out of its mist, one man, whom they will not recognise, emerges and staggers towards his lineaments. (p 128).



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And Gregorias/Simmons is transfigured, translated, lifted up to be one with the paint er-'saints':

Every muscle ached like a rusting hawser to hoist him heavenwards towards his name, pierced with stars of Raphael, Saint Greco ... (p 125).

Walcott's portrait of Anna is also influenced by Renaissance art:

profile of hammered gold, head by Angélico, stars choiring in gold leaf, (p 89)

her golden plaits a simple coronet out of Angélico, a fine sweat on her forehead, hair where the twilight singed and signed an epoch, (p 45).

Even his description of her as Judith with the head of Holofernes (p 89) obviously derives from one or other of the Renaissance paintings on that favourite theme, as much as from Dante's description of the headless trunk of Bert rans, 'that bears for light/Its own head swinging, gripped by the dead hair,/ And like a swinging lamp. . .

The art-inspired descriptions of Anna, as indeed all the allusions to Renaissance art in Another Life, help to convey the sense of epoch 10 which attaches to Walcott's memory of that life, the feeling that he was participant in an epoch-making moment of artistic awakening in St Lucia and the West Indies, the feeling that St Omer and himself, under Simmons' tutelage, were seeing and re-creating their world with new eyes, in the same way that the Renaissance artist had rediscovered the world. Simmons 'had beheld/a community of graceful spirits/irradiating from his own control and centre . . .' (p 120), and Walcott sees St Omer as a St Lucian Giotto or Masaccio, 'his primitive companionable saints' (p 61), since Renaissance art just about began with Giotto and Masaccio, especially the former, who arose almost self-created as it were to create a new world.

Giotto and Masaccio, then, like some other painters mentioned in the poem, are used by Walcott to define Gregorias, just as Gauguin is used in chapter 19 to define Simmons.11 Giotto and Masaccio connote the 'primitive', original force of Gregorias, as Van Gogh, 'saint of all sunstroke' (p 56), connotes his vibrancy and compulsive energy, his 'madness.'

Every muscle ached like a rusting hawser to hoist him heavenward towards his name, pierced with the stars of Raphael, Saint Greco, and later,



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not stars, but the people's medals, with Siquieros, Gauguin, Orozco, Saint Vincent and Saint Paul, (p 125).

In the original version of this passage, Walcott spells out the symbolism in his references to these painters:

You [Gregorias] wanted to be not only Raphael, your 'sweet painter' (that was

your Catholic side) but Orozco, Siquerios [sic] and Rivera as well (your violent Trinity, the new world rebel in you) but Gauguin and Van Gogh (madness and isolation) . . ,12

The Mexican muralists- Orozco, Siquieros and Rivera- represent not only the idea of a revolutionary New World art, to which Walcott and Gregorias dreamed of contributing, but also the idea of art for 'the people.' This idea of community is held in tension

against that of isolation/madness as a major theme of the poem- the artist as man of the people against the artist as outcast and alienated.

Even more essential to the web of the poem than the painterly descriptions and the allusions to particular paintings and painters, is the poet's use of certain images relating to colours and techniques of painting.

At the very beginning of the poem, when he is describing Vigie and Castries at sunset, he uses 'amber' three times in two pages to convey the quality of the light. The

glare, he says,

. . . mesmerised like fire without wind, and as its amber climbed the beer-stein ovals of the British fort above the promontory, the sky grew drunk with light, (p 3)

As the painting completes itself in the boy's mind, the 'silence waited'

... for the tidal amber glare to glaze the last shacks of the Morne till they became transfigured sheerly by the student's will, a Cinquecento fragment in gilt frame, (p 4).

This amber glow glorifies his memory of the island and his young life:

There was your heaven! the clear glaze of another life, a landscape locked in amber, the rare gleam, (p 3)

Like the amber glaze used by the Old Masters, the poet's imaginative memory modifies and enriches the 'colours' of the world which it recreates. In this connection.



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the amber image also comes from the theatre-the amber gel which provides basic stage lighting-and is used by Walcott in the opening sentence of 'What the Twilight Says', a sentence which in mood, meaning and imagery parallels the opening of Another life: 'When dusk heightens, like amber on a stage set, those ramshackle hoardings of wood and rusting iron which circle our cities, a theatrical sorrow rises with it, for the glare, like the aura from an old-fashioned brass lamp is like a childhood signal to come home.'13

The notion of the amber glaze locking', sealing, fixing, preserving the painting is also crucial, and Walcott's language in the lines just quoted from the poem is reminis- cent of a comment by Craven on Vermeer's technique: 'His textures are such perfect replicas that his table covers and stuffs strike the eye, not as painted illusions, but as actual materials preserved in amber glazes.' 14 The amber glaze of the poet's memory/ imagination, therefore, not only transfigures the remembered world but also transfixes the memory and the vision. Paradoxically, it actualises and idealises at the same time. It catches and holds the remembered object in its quiddity. This is a feature of Vermeer's work which Walcott has cherished. Vermeer is explicitly mentioned once in Another Life ('the Vermeer white napery of the altar', ρ 23). In "A Map of Europe", pursuing 'the gift/To see things as they are', Walcott had praised Vermeer's skill in reproducing the very essence of objects in his paintings:

A cracked coffee cup A broken loaf, a dented urn become Themselves, as in Chardin, Or in beer-brigjit Vermeer, Not objects of our pity.15

The desire to catch or fix once arid for all the essential quality of the remembered life is the central point of the epigraph to Another Life, the quotation from Glissant's novel La Lézarde. The sealing effect of the glaze also connotes the poet's attempt to preserve his memories, which are his life, himself, against time and oblivion, against the 'amnesia' (temptation, horror, inevitability) which is mentioned more than once in the poem. The amber signifies the dream of art to be indestructible, to preserve man's finest moments against the flux. (And here we note that amber is also the yellowish, translucent fossil resin which encloses and preserves the bodies of insects of past ages). Hence the motif of the numerous images of perserving, locking, enclosing, holding. These are almost invariably drawn from the arts, mainly the pictorial arts. Indeed, the impulse of the poem to recreate the remembered life as a painting is most apposite to the idea of arresting the moment; for of all the arts, painting, by the very nature of its artifacts, is the one which most suggests in itself the idea of arresting actuality through art. We experience a painting, even a painting which depicts swift movements, as a moment arrested, enclosed within the frame and perceived whole in an instant.

Small wonder, then: that the image of the picture frame, in various permutations, contnDutes much to the poem's unity, from the first reference to the Vigie landscape as 'a Cinquecento fragment in gilt frame', through the memory of the 'white face/ of a dead child [which] stared from its window frame' (p 7), to the picture of the poet and Anna walking 'near the lagoon', where



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dark water's lens made the trees one wood arranged to frame this pair whose pace unknowingly measured loss. (p93)

and the account of his return to St Lucia, when he

. . . would wake every morning surprised by the framed yellow jungle of the groyned mangroves . . . (p 149)

The lens image, in the last quotation but one, is one of many images from photography which extend the fixing/preserving connotations of 'glaze' and 'frame.' Through the images from photography, Walcott is able to complicate the attractive connotations of 'holding' life with the tragic implications. Remembering Anna twenty years after their golden year of love, he catches through imagery the essential tragedy of life and the tragic paradox of art:

your gaze haunts innumerable photographs,

now clear, now indistinct, all that pursuing generality, that vengeful conspiracy with nature,

all that sly informing of objects and behind every line, your laugh frozen into a lifeless photograph, (pp 95-96)

The snapshot holds the moment, preserves the laugh from decay, but the laugh, the girl so preserved is 'frozen', 'dead.' Similarly, the insect preserved in amber is splendidly undecayed, and dead. Amber heightens, makes luminous the life preserved in memory; looked at in another light, what it does is merely embalm that which is dead. Amber is also the colour of the spirits in which pathological specimens are preserved. In 'Origins', Walcott recalling his childhood, had written:

Memory in cerecloth uncoils its odour of rivers, Of Egypt embalmed in an amber childhood.16

These connotations of amber carry over into Another life. Ultimately, any one of the many occurrences of the image evokes all its various and often contradictory associations, and the image itself is an embodiment ofthat ambiguity, that dwelling in contradictions which is of the essence of life. So even the most idyllic or idealised moments of Another life are deepened into that complete vision of life which Walcott sees as a 'tragic joy', 17 the vision which sees art as a 'noble treachery' (p 94). The poet has indeed preserved his paradisal moments, but their sweetness is rendered all the more poignant because the artistic realisation of such moments is deepened by the knowledge that in actuality they cannot last; the artistic preservation is only a 'second best.'



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So when he remembers 'green lagoons/whose fading eye held Eden like a transfer' (p 63), the 'fading' and the 'held' balance each other in ah all-inclusive tension. So do 'Eden', with its connotations of timelessness, and 'transfer', with its connotations of the fragile and ephemeral. The same principle operates in the image which climaxes the re-creation of Walcott's St Lucian life and constitutes a major turning-point in the narrative. It is the image, significantly enough from the arts again, of the model ship assembled in a bottle, which figures the vow that he makes when he decides to leave the island. Incidentally, the passage in question (p 108), which itself images the poem as a whole, is an example of how Walcott sometimes takes up again, and uses with a new depth and urgency, some detail from his earlier poetry, as if that detail, fasci- nating from the first, has to wait, gestating in his mind for a long time, before it can yield up its full potential. The glaze-glass-frame combination had been the basis of a little-remembered early poem, 'Simply Passing Through',18 while the ship in the bottle recalls the 'old French barquentine anchored in glass', which had itself imaged so well 'Cosimo de Chretien, count of curios', in chapter II of Tales of the Islands. The ship in the bottle is a curio, something to be marvelled at; the art by which the poet preserves his memories is a kind of miracle, all the more marvellous for being instinct with the awareness of inevitable loss and separation.

In the alchemy of Walcott's imagination, amber is transmuted easily into gold, another key image in Another Life. (The alloy amber, it may be worth noting, consists of four parts of gold to one part of silver; and 'amber' was in Latin electrum, from Greek elektron, akin to êlektõr, 'bright' or 'gleaming as the sun.') The two colours, sufficiently similar to begin with, merge into each other. In his use of gold in the poem, Walcott takes a hackneyed image and infuses new vigour into it by means of the concreteness of autobiographical fact which informs his use of it. It is not just a random metaphor taken from a ready tray of stock metaphors; rather its appropriate- ness springs naturally from its specific, literal place in the poet's memory. So when he speaks of the year just before he left St Lucia as his 'golden year', (p 50) the trite image is burnished by the memory of all the 'gold leaf, 'golden haloes and gilt frame(s)' which figure in the poem, by the memory of Anna's golden hair and the 'bossed brass' (p 23) on the altar of the Methodist chapel, no less than by the golden vibrancy of Van Gogh and the golden glory of a Vigie sunset. Eventually all this gold is matamorphosed back to its original source so to speak, into the holy, life-giving sun which the poet invokes, and against which he sits in calm fulfilment, the sun itself his golden halo:

I sit in the roar of that sun like a lotus yogi folded on his bed of coals, my head is circled with a ring of fire, (p 146).

Gold, too, is the allamanda, and the burnished bugles which it evokes. But in the life-giving radiance of the gold image is also its opposite, the darkness and finality of death. The allamandas fall and 'rust', and rust - the 'donkey's rusty winch' (p 85), the 'rusting hawser' (p 125) - is decay and death, the ship's bleeding wash (p 32) and Simmons' bleeding wrists. The variations on the imagery of rust and blood recurring



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throughout the poem inter-connect to form a crucial motif, one that is instinct with the painter's, the water-colourist's vision. So when the poet begins the account of his departure from St Lucia with the line One dawn the sky was warm pink thinning to no colour' (p 114), this seemingly 'straight' piece of painterly description is loaded with intimations of death (specifically Simmons' bleeding wrists), separation, the encroaching blankness of disillusion, the diminishing vitality of faith and purpose which the poem negotiates.

Such examples illustrate how imagery works as an essential, unifying force in Another Life, a force particularly valuable in a poem as long and, in its way, as loose as this. The refractions of images throughout the poem may be appreciated not only in terms of the poem's forward movement in time, but also in terms of its spatial exist- ence. We can see the poem spread out before us in its totality, like a painting or tapestry, presenting a subtle design of intermeshing webs of images and a rich texture of many-layered meaning at any point. But this aspect of the poem, its richness and complexity of metaphor, is at the same time an important part of whatever keeps the poem true to its own medium, as distinct from the medium of paint. Yet another use to which Walcott puts painting in Another Life is that of helping him to define, by contrast with painting, what appeals to him in the medium of poetry. He does this in chapter 9, when, after his recreation of what it feels like to toil at a canvas and to fail, he rationalises his 'failure' as a painter and explains what made him concentrate on poetry:

... I rendered the visible world that I saw exactly, yet it hindered me, for in every surface I sought the paradoxical flash of an instant in which every facet was caught in a crystal of ambiguities, I hoped that both disciplines might by painful accretion cohere and finally ignite, but I lived in a different gift, its element metaphor . . . (pp 58-59)

To acknowledge the otherness of the painter's medium is itself a gesture that enhances the poet's tribute to painters. At the same time, Another Life represents a remarkable attempt, within the one discipline, to make 'both disciplines . . . cohere.'

EDWARD BAUGH



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FOOTNOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Walcott, Dream of Monkey Mountain, New York, 1970, ρ 40.

2. See Baugh, Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision, London, 1978.

3. Al( quotations from Another life are taken from the London and New York editions of 1973, the pagination being the same in both.

4. Walcott, Another Life, MS, in Library, University of the West Indies, Jamaica, ρ 59. Millet's painting is not reproduced by Craven.

5. Walcott, In a Green Night, London, 1962, ρ 60; my emphasis.

6. See, for example, Boticelli's "The Birth of Venus", also reproduced by Craven.

7. Craven, op. cit., ρ 56.

8. Cf. the 'old-fashioned brass lamp', Dream on Monkey Mountain, ρ 3.

9. From Canto 28 of Inferno. This translation is taken from Ezra Pound's 'Near Perigord.'

10. Cf. Another life, ρ 4:

but if the light was dying through the stone of that converted boathouse on the pier, a girl, blowing its embers in her kitchen, could feel its epoch entering her hair.

11. See Baugh, Derek Walcott, pp 63-64.

12. Another Life, MS, ρ 18.

13. Dream on Monkey Mountain, ρ 3.

14. Craven, ρ 166.

15. Walcott, The Castaway, London, 1965, ρ <';.*. In an earlier version of these Unes, Walcott had made the point even more explicitly, though somewhat more heavy-handedly: '. . . become/ More than themselves, their SELVES, as in Chardin . . .' Selected Poems, New York, 1964, ρ 79.

16. Selected Poems, ρ 52.

17. Dream on Monkey Mountain, ρ 25.

18. In a Green Night, ρ 75.

19. Ibid., p 26.



painters and paintings in 'another life

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