Derek Walcott’s Painters: A Life with Pictures 9781399512152

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Derek Walcott’s Painters

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures Series Editors: Laura Doyle, Colleen Glenney Boggs and Maria Cristina Fumagalli Available titles Sensational Internationalism: The Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century J. Michelle Coghlan American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–1862 Brigitte Bailey American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition Emily Coit Scottish Colonial Literature: Writing the Atlantic, 1603–1707 Kirsten Sandrock Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture Stefanie Schäfer Reverberations of Revolution: Transnational Perspectives, 1770–1850 Edited by Elizabeth Amann and Michael Boyden Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865–1930 Heather Diane Wayne Derek Walcott’s Painters: A Life with Pictures Maria Cristina Fumagalli Forthcoming titles Emily Dickinson and Her British Contemporaries: Victorian Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America Páraic Finnerty Literature, Art and Slavery: Ekphrastic Visions Carl Plasa The Atlantic Dilemma: Reform or Revolution Across the Long Nineteenth Century Kelvin Black Visit the series website at: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ECSALC

Derek Walcott’s Painters A Life with Pictures

Maria Cristina Fumagalli

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund. © Maria Cristina Fumagalli 2023 Cover image: Derek Walcott at Work, 2005, Peter Walcott, acrylic on canvas, 51×61cm (painted from a photograph taken by Sigrid Nama). Copyright © 2005 by Peter Walcott. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of Peter Walcott. All Rights Reserved. Cover design: Stuart Dalziel Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13pt Adobe Sabon by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 1213 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 1215 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 1216 9 (epub)

The right of Maria Cristina Fumagalli to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

List of Figures Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements Introduction You Could Tell He Would Mention a Painter … The Quest for that Paradoxical Flash of an Instant: The Spatial   and the Temporal, the Verbal and the Visual Collages, Visual Notes and Letting the Imagination Range   Wherever its Correspondences Take It Towards an Art History of which the Caribbean Too is Capable Derek Walcott’s Painters: From Warwick Walcott’s Heirlooms to   Morning, Paramin 1. A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects When Formidable Things Happen and Shocks and Revelations   Come: Warwick Walcott’s Absent Presence A Moonlight Scene Backcloth, Notebooks of Verses, Sketchbooks A Fine Sketch of a Cow, Albrecht Dürer’s Hare and Family  Portraiture Learning to See One’s Seeing: Warwick Walcott, Jean-François   Millet and John Everett Millais The Lyrical, Light Precision of the English Topographical   Draughtsmen and Mapping One’s World in Watercolour Warwick Walcott’s The Coconut Walk, Meindert Hobbema   and Postcards Warwick Walcott’s Riders of the Storm and Henry Moore’s   A Silvery Day, West of The Needles, Isle of Wight (Whose?) The Fighting Temeraire Rat Island, Walcott Place, Derek Walcott Library and The Derek   Walcott Estate: The Legacy

viii xi xii 1 1 6 16 22 28 40 40 43 44 46 54 57 65 67 70

vi    Derek Walcott’s Painters

2. Atelier des Tropiques: The Local Scene Tracing Sociological Contours: Harold Simmons The Light of the World and Ideal Heads: Dunstan St. Omer,   Harold Simmons, Eugène Delacroix and Paul Gauguin Adam’s Task of Giving Things Their Names: Uncompromising   Belief à la Vincent Van Gogh A Perfection to West Indian Things and Dunstan St. Omer’s   Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, St Lucia 3. Voyages to Cythera and the European Legacy The Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Thomas Craven’s A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the   Present Day and Other Sources Pilgrimages, Embarkations and Jean-Antoine Watteau Walcott’s Un Voyage à Cythère: Trinidad/Cythera as a Sad and   Dark Isle Carnival, Fêtes Galantes, Self-fashioning and Revolutions: From   In A Fine Castle to The Last Carnival The Last Carnival: Beyond Stillness, to See Things as They Are The Last Carnival: Not to Settle on One Style and the Aesthetic   of the Unfinished 4. American Visions I – Frescoes of the New World and Black America New World Rebels: From Diego Rivera and the Epic of One’s   People to Ti-Jean, Folklore, and Alfred Codallo New York 1958: What was in the Air? You Gotta Like Collage! Romare Bearden and the Art of Cut-outs Deep in the American Grain: Thomas Hart Benton’s Mule, Man  and Plough, and Romare Bearden, Bear our Burden, Horace Pippin, Paint our Pain, Keep our Innocence, Jacob Lawrence 5.

American Visions II – Black Odysseys Which Africa? Whose Africa? From Hokusai to Romare Bearden The Obeah’s Dawn: Conjur Women and Circes Barometric Sensitivities: Winslow Homer and Jackie Hinkson Smiling Sharks: Winslow Homer and J. M. W. Turner

6. Painting (and) the Caribbean: The Awe of the Ordinary and the Search for Anonymity The Tropic Bug in Paris: Paul Gauguin and Charles Laval in  Martinique ‘Quiet as Drawings’: Jacob Camille Pissarro and Fritz Melbye   Sketching the Caribbean

79 80 96 110 115 138 138 143 147 156 169 182 192 192 209 215 220 251 251 258 265 276 290 290 302

Contents    vii

About Pissarro, Too, Principally about Pissarro, Almost:  Giovanbattista Tiepolo, Paolo Veronese and the Cerberus of Accuracy306 Ordinary Miracles: Derek Walcott’s Paintings 318 Audubon: Another Vision 340 7. Poems ‘Out Of’ Paintings: Towards an Ekphrasis of Relation First Steps: Immortalisation, Delight, and Homage – From  Rembrandt Van Rijn’s The Polish Rider to Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa and Romare Bearden’s The Obeah’s Dawn The Real Faces of Angels: Rethinking Beauty and Truth with   Dunstan St. Omer Stencilled Off the Real: Walker Evans’s Photographic Portraits, of   Allie Mae Burroughs and Segregationary Practices Ekphrasis in Reverse and Collaboration: The Caribbean Poetry of   Derek Walcott & the Art of Romare Bearden Bigger Than I Remembered: Underdogs and Dark Secrets from  Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream to Rembrandt Van Rijn’s The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild Little Figures: They Too Have Lives – After Diego Velázquez’s   The Surrender of Breda Morning, Paramin: Derek Walcott and Peter Doig

371

Farewell

439

371 380 384 395 398 404 408

Bibliography 442 General Index 467 Index to Derek Walcott’s Archival Material483

Figures

1.1 Jean-François Millet, Des glaneuses (The Gleaners) (1857) 47 1.2 ‘St. Lucia; There is a continuous stream of these women’ (1899), photograph47 1.3 John Everett Millais, The Blind Girl (1856) 49 1.4 Derek Walcott, Vendors at Choc Bay, St Lucia (1983) 51 1.5 Warwick Walcott, The Coconut Walk (n.d.) 60 1.6 Meindert Hobbema, The Avenue at Middelharnis (1689) 60 1.7 Vigie, Cocoanut Walk, St. Lucia, postcard (c. 1908) 62 1.8 Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838 (1839) 68 2.1 Harold Simmons, Lavoutte Bay – Bach Fugue in G Minor (1936)92 2.2 Harold Simmons, Boy and Market Lady (1960) 92 2.3 Harold Simmons, Albertina (c. 1940) 97 2.4 Eugène Delacroix, La Liberté guidant le peuple, 28 juillet 1830 (Liberty Leading the People, 28 July 1830) (1830) 99 2.5 Dunstan St. Omer, Towards Independence – Black Marianne (1979)99 2.6 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait (1889) 108 2.7 Dunstan St. Omer, Holy Family (1973) 119 3.1 Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni), Journey of the Magi (c. 1433–5) 140 3.2 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère, dit L’embarquement pour Cythère (Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, or The Embarkation for the Island of Cythera) (1717)144 3.3 Jean-Antoine Watteau, L’accordée du village (The Village Bride) (c. 1710–15) 161 3.4 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Les charmes de la vie (The Music Party) (c. 1718–19)165 3.5 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Two Studies of a Seated Woman (1709–21)171 3.6 Derek Walcott, sketch for In A Fine Castle/The Last Carnival (1982)171

Figures    ix

4.1 Diego Rivera, mural at Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (1929–35), Epic of the Mexican people – portion of the west wall – From the Conquest to 1930 200 4.2 John Everett Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870) 204 4.3 Derek Walcott, Ti-Jean (2008) 209 4.4 Romare Bearden, The Sea Nymph (1977) 218 4.5 Thomas Hart Benton, Ploughing It Under (1934 – reworked 1964)230 4.6 Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, panel no. 3: from every southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north (1940–1)240 4.7 Horace Pippin, John Brown Going to His Hanging (1942) 240 5.1 Romare Bearden, Conjur Woman (1975) 261 5.2 Romare Bearden, The Obeah’s Dawn (L’Aube de la Sorcière, Douvan Jou Manmbo-A) (1984) 261 5.3 Winslow Homer, Sea Garden, Bahamas (1885) 272 5.4 Winslow Homer, The Conch Divers (1885) 272 5.5 Winslow Homer, The Water Fan (1898–9) 274 5.6 Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899) 278 5.7 Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840) 281 6.1 Paul Gauguin, Martinique Landscape (1887) 295 6.2 Derek Walcott, Gauguin’s Studio (1986) 299 6.3 Derek Walcott, Gauguin in Martinique (1991) 299 6.4 Paul Gauguin, Coming and Going, Martinique (1887) 301 6.5 Jacob Camille Pissarro, Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St Thomas (1856) 301 6.6 Jacob Camille Pissarro, S. Thomas 8 Juin 1852 (1852) 305 6.7  Market Scene, attributed to Jacob Camille Pissarro (n.d.) 305 6.8 Jacob Camille Pissarro, Boy with Jug (n.d.) 310 6.9 Seated Artist, attributed to Jacob Camille Pissarro (n.d.) 310 6.10 Derek Walcott, Savannah, Early Morning (c. 1982) 324 6.11 Derek Walcott, Gros Islet Church I (1998) 324 6.12 Derek Walcott, Gros Islet Church II (1999) 330 6.13 Derek Walcott, Headland in Drought (1997) 330 6.14 Derek Walcott, Boy on a Wall, Rat Island (1989) 338 6.15 Derek Walcott, Breakers, Becune Point (1995) 338 6.16 John James Audubon, Snowy Heron or White Egret (1835); White Heron (1837); Great White Heron (1835) 345 7.1 Hokusai Katsushika, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (1829–33) 377 7.2 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Polish Rider (c. 1655) 377 7.3 Walker Evans, Allie Mae Burroughs, wife of cotton sharecropper. Hale County, Alabama (1936), photograph 393

x    Derek Walcott’s Painters

7.4 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662) 406 7.5 Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, The Surrender of Breda (c. 1635)406 7.6 Peter Doig, Cricket Painting (Paragrand) (2006–12) 411 8.1 Peter Doig, Untitled (Paramin) (2004) 441

Series Editors’ Preface

Modern global culture makes it clear that literary study can no longer operate on nation-based or exceptionalist models. In practice, American literatures have always been understood and defined in relation to the literatures of Europe and Asia. The books in this series work within a broad comparative framework to question place-based identities and monocular visions, in historical contexts from the earliest European settlements to contemporary affairs, and across all literary genres. They explore the multiple ways in which ideas, texts, objects and bodies travel across spatial and temporal borders, generating powerful forms of contrast and affinity. The Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures series fosters new paradigms of exchange, circulation and transformation for Atlantic literary studies, expanding the critical and theoretical work of this rapidly developing field. Laura Doyle, Colleen Glenney Boggs and Maria Cristina Fumagalli

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been a unique and enriching experience which would not have been possible without the support of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (MRF-2015-057) and the study leave provisions and research funds made available from the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies and the University of Essex. To the Leverhulme Trust, the University of Essex and all my colleagues goes my deepest gratitude for this opportunity. During the years in which I have researched and written this book, many people have helped in different ways: it is impossible to be comprehensive. A big thank you goes to Sigrid Nama who has always been very welcoming and encouraging during my many trips to St Lucia and who has provided some of the images included here. Peter Walcott, the author of the cover for this volume, deserves a special mention, as do Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and Anna Walcott-Hardy for their kind support when I visited Trinidad and for giving me permission to reproduce Warwick Walcott’s The Coconut Walk. The debt of gratitude I have to Derek Walcott himself is deeper than words can express. Alison Donnell, George Handley, Peter Hulme, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, Sue Thomas, Penny Woollard and Leanne Haynes believed in this project when it was no more than an idea (and a grant proposal) and I am immensely grateful for this. Over the years, Bénédicte Ledent, James Procter, Camila Valdés León and Alejandro Amaro Seguí, Tobias Döring, José Antonio Gurpegui and Esperanza Cerda, Kerry-Jane Wallart and Alexis Tadie, Roberta Cimarosti, Dominique Legendre, John Robert Lee and Dame Pearlette Louisy have invited me to events in Liège, Newcastle, Havana, Munich, Madrid, Paris, Venice, the Knowledge Centre-British Library and St Lucia. Each of these events gave me the opportunity to present and discuss my ideas with other experts on Walcott, scholars of Caribbean and American studies and members of the public. I would really like to thank all of them and all the people who came to my talks for their input and for the engaging conversations we had. Research trips for archival and field research in the UK, Europe, Canada, the US and the Caribbean allowed me to meet more people who generously found the time to discuss and assist me in my research in libraries and archives.

Acknowledgements    xiii

The list is far too long but I could not leave unmentioned Giselle Rampaul, fondly remembered and greatly missed, who welcomed me in Trinidad with open arms and who, together with Prof Maarit Forde, Dr Glenroy Taitt (Head Librarian) and the extremely helpful team at West Indiana & Special Collections and Derek Walcott Collection at the Alma Jordan Library, St Augustine Campus, contributed to make my stay there both pleasant and productive. In Toronto, Natalya Rattan kindly facilitated access to the Derek Walcott Papers in the Manuscript Collection at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and in Peebles Island State Park, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, I was warmly welcomed by Travis Bowman, Michele Phillips, Amanda Massie and Christopher Flagg. At the Western Art Print Room, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, I could rely on the support of the Print Room Supervisor Katherine Wodehouse. I would also like to thank the staff in the British Library, National Art Library, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library and Sloman Library for their support. I am also extremely grateful to Kate Snodgrass (Professor of the Practice of Playwriting and Artistic Director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre) and Richard Chambers (Set Designer for the 2001 production of Walker at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre) for all their wise words, and for showing me a replica of the set design and photos of the 2001 production of Walker during my visit to Boston in April 2018. Many thanks also go to Frances Salmon, Head of West Indies and Special Collections, Main Library, University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston and to Daisy St Rose at the Library of the Open Campus of the University of the West Indies in St Lucia, for providing access to Derek Walcott’s notebooks for Another Life and other essential material held in their Special Collections. I am also deeply indebted to John Robert Lee and Msgr Patrick Anthony, whose assistance in St Lucia has been invaluable, to the staff of the St Lucia Folk Research Centre and National Archive for their help, and to Kendel Hippolyte, McDonald Dixon, the late Gandolph St Clair for their encouragement and input. I am extremely grateful to Brenda Simmons, Cynthia St. Omer and the St. Omer family, Chester Boswell, Calixte George, Adrian Augier, and Hazell Simmons-McDonald, who have generously shared information on paintings by Harold Simmons and Dunstan St. Omer and given me permission to reproduce some of them here. To ‘friends in Walcott’ (you know who you are …) goes a special shout out for our many cherished memories of St Lucia: I miss you all and I miss ‘all that’ … As ever, my beloved friends in Italy, and dear Antonella in London, have helped more than they will ever know: grazie mille. I am forever indebted to Michelle Houston, Emily Sharp, Laura Doyle, Colleen Boggs and Edinburgh University Press for their generous and unflinching support and to all the anonymous readers who enthusiastically recommended this book for publication.

xiv    Derek Walcott’s Painters

To Caz and Glyn goes all my heartfelt gratitude for accepting to be ‘custodians’ of the manuscript for many months: they were right there when I needed them and knowing that the manuscript was with them, that they knew it existed, really kept me going. To just say thank you is not enough for what you did for me. This book is for Jon and Ernesto for their immense patience and for understanding how important this project was to me. I gratefully acknowledge the Walcott Estate and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for granting permission to reprint all extracts from Walcott’s published and unpublished works and to reproduce his visual works: Paintings and excerpts from poetry from Tiepolo’s Hound by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 2000 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved. Derek Walcott published material reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved. Derek Walcott unpublished material printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Walcott Estate. All Rights Reserved. Painting Derek Walcott at Work, 2005, Peter Walcott, acrylic on canvas, 51 × 61 cm (painted from a photograph taken by Sigrid Nama). Copyright © 2005 by Peter Walcott. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of Peter Walcott. All Rights Reserved. Warwick Walcott, The Coconut Walk. Private Collection of Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw. Courtesy of Walcott Estate. Some of the material in this book first appeared in articles and book chapters. I wish to acknowledge and thank Rosemarijn Hoefte and the New West Indian Guide, Bénédicte Ledent, Daria Tunca and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Susheila Nasta and Wasafiri, Camila Valdés León, Nancy Morejón and Anales del Caribe, for their permission to reprint portions of: ‘Audubon, Another Vision: Derek Walcott’s “White Egrets” and Adam’s Task of Giving Things Their Names’, New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe WestIndische Gids, 89, no. 3–4 (2015): 231–57. https://brill.com/view/journals/ nwig/89/3-4/article-p231_1.xml?language=en ‘Morning, Paramin: Derek Walcott, Peter Doig, and an Ekphrasis of Relation’, New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 92, no. 3–4 (2018): 245–73. https://brill.com/view/journals/nwig/92/3-4/article-p245_2. xml?language=en ‘Every Brightening Minute: Morning, Paramin’, by Derek Walcott and Peter Doig, Wasafiri, 32, no. 4 (December 2017): 53–8; copyright Wasafiri, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/. Article DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2017.1350383. ‘Formidable Things, Shocks, and Revelations: Derek Walcott and Warwick Walcott Landscaping St Lucia’, Anales del Caribe (2018): 133–50. ‘“Not walled facts, their essence”: Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound and Camille Pissarro’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 55, no. 3

Acknowledgements    xv

(2020): 421–32. Article first published online: 31 October 2018. https://doi. org/10.1177/0021989418803656 I gratefully acknowledge Helen Goethals, Eric Doumerc and Cambridge Scholars Publishing for disseminating, in a condensed form, some of the ideas contained in this book in ‘Ways of Seeing: Derek Walcott and the Visual Arts’, in Helen Goethals and Eric Doumerc (eds), Tributes to Derek Walcott, 1930–2017: In Various Light (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022), 88–102.

For Jon and Ernesto, my rocks and joy

Introduction

You Could Tell He Would Mention a Painter … In the first part of the long poem The Prodigal, Walcott writes: ‘here it comes, the light / out of pearl, out of Piero della Francesca, / (you could tell he would mention a painter)’.1 He was right: his readers would definitely expect him to mention a painter. Walcott’s poems, plays and essays, in fact, are punctuated with references to artists as diverse as Giotto and Vincent Van Gogh or Rembrandt van Rijn and Romare Bearden; characterised by exact chromatism and a careful composition of scenes and arrangements of images, they often establish a creative dialogue with a particular painting or evoke a painter’s use of the colour palette, perspective, tonal quality, light and shadows. Likewise, it is not uncommon for Walcott’s unpublished papers, notebooks and sketchbooks to contain allusions to or actual cut-outs from reproductions of past masterpieces; even in Walcott’s creative writing classes and workshops, references to painters, paintings and painting techniques were not at all unusual.2 This recurrence of visual references is not altogether surprising if we consider that Walcott began his career as a painter or, at least, as a young man moved by a keen desire to become one. In Another Life, his 1973 autobiography in verse, Walcott wrote at length about his apprenticeship as a painter with his friend Dunstan St. Omer in the workshop of the St Lucian artist Harold Simmons and explained that, unlike St. Omer who became a distinguished painter and muralist, he decided to focus on writing. Yet, Walcott never stopped painting as testified by reproductions of his own works on the jacket covers of some of his books or the inclusion, in the hardbound edition of the long poem Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), of twenty-six of his watercolours, oils, gouaches and pastels. Over the years, and particularly after the 1990s, Walcott’s paintings were also exhibited in solo and collective exhibitions in the Caribbean and the United States; in 1993 one of his paintings was reproduced in a St Lucian stamp, and in 1994 he completed a calendar for Colonial Life Insurance (Clico) with sketches

2    Derek Walcott’s Painters

and watercolours accompanied by extracts from his poems and plays.3 At the same time, Walcott’s artwork also began to appear in books devoted to writers/painters like The Dual Muse: The Writer as Artist, The Artist as Writer, the catalogue (1997) and collection of essays (1999) for an exhibition held at the Writers Center of Washington University, St. Louis, and organised by William Gass where Walcott read from Tiepolo’s Hound which was still a work in progress, or Donald Friedman’s The Writer’s Brush: Painting Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers (2007), an impressive compilation of more than 200 writers/artists, from the eighteenth-century Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Jonathan Lethem who was born in 1964.4 In October 2011– April 2012, the Thomas Fischer Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, organised the exhibition How Beautiful My Brethren and Sistren: Derek Walcott, Life and Work curated by Jennifer Toews and complemented by a catalogue: amongst other things, it showcased sketches, watercolours, storyboard pages, and drawings by Walcott held by the Thomas Fischer Rare Book Library.5 Working as a playwright, Walcott always put his technical skills to good use and designed innumerable costumes, sets, storyboards, programmes or posters; he also readily admitted that he often drew scenes before writing them and that the settings, costumes and characters’ interactions he envisaged were often inspired by the composition of masterpieces of the past.6 In some of his plays, paintings are physically present on stage, performing an important role in the ongoing drama: in The Last Carnival (1986), for example, Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (1717) (Fig. 3.2) is projected on a wall in Act One and forms the backcloth of Act Two while in Walker (1993), Walcott’s stage directions indicate that the audience should be able to see ‘projections’ of the works of Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin. The 2011 productions of Moon-Child (2012) at the American Academy in Rome and the Lakeside Theatre at the University of Essex were complemented by original artwork by Walcott and his artist son Peter Walcott. A huge copy of Van Gogh’s The Church at Auvers (1890) formed the backcloth of Walcott’s last play O Starry Starry Night (2013) which dramatises Paul Gauguin’s visit to Vincent Van Gogh in Arles in 1888 (and was dedicated to Peter and Walcott’s companion Sigrid, a former art dealer), and where stage props included copies of Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s works by the St Lucian painters Gary Butte and Peter Walcott.7 In 2019, as part of The Walcott Festival: Ti-Jean and His Brothers, Walcott’s storyboards for the play were exhibited at the Medulla Art Gallery of Port of Spain.8 Walcott also worked as arts critic and reviewer for the Trinidad Guardian for seven years (1960–7) and, before that, he had contributed art-related articles to Public Opinion in Jamaica and The Voice of St Lucia. Walcott’s Trinidad Guardian reviews of Trinidad art exhibitions, his profiles of painters, and his articles on the visual arts in general, constitute the ‘second largest category’ and over ‘eighteen percent’ of Walcott’s vast journalistic

Introduction    3

production,9 and enabled him to form a clear sense of the evolving art scene in the Caribbean region as he reviewed with passion and commitment the work of local artists such as, among many others, Ralph Campbell, Albert Huie, Althea McNish, Gloria Escoffery, Dunstan St. Omer, Harold Simmons, Alfred Codallo, Hugh Stollmeyer, Geoffrey Holder, Nina Lamming, Sybil Atteck, Boscoe Holder, Carlisle Chang, Peter Minshall, Pat Chu Foon, LeRoy Clarke, Henri Telfer and Jackie Donald Hinkson. Walcott’s writing on the arts, as Gordon Collier has observed, is characterised by ‘great incisiveness, authority, and descriptive immediacy’: he ‘showed himself immensely knowledgeable’ of the ‘Euro-American’10 tradition and, serious about the importance of the arts, he could be tremendously supportive but also extremely dismissive of the works he assessed, particularly if he believed that they were, as he put it in a 1964 review of the National Art Exhibition to celebrate Trinidad’s Independence, ‘acts of patriotism’ which, ‘as paintings, [were] pathetically incompetent’.11 When he stopped reviewing and reporting for the Trinidad Guardian, Walcott continued to remain involved in the art world by supporting artists he admired: for example, he wrote in praise of the Trinidadian painter Jackie Hinkson for the exhibition Hinkson in Dominica in 1991. An abridged version of this paper was included in Island Light, the catalogue for a 1998 joint exhibition of Walcott’s and Hinkson’s artworks hosted by the University Art Museum at Albany, New York State.12 Outside his Caribbean context, in 2009 Walcott contributed the text for Francesco Clemente’s catalogue for A History of the Heart in Three Rainbows (2009) – reprinted in 2011 in Clemente’s Palimpsest alongside texts by other poets like Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.13 Walcott also engaged in ‘collaborative’ projects based on the juxtaposition and interplay of words and images like the volume The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott & The Art of Romare Bearden (1983) and, in 1984, he accepted an invitation to write a poem in response to Bearden’s series Rituals of Obeah to be included in the catalogue which accompanied the artists’ exhibition.14 In 2010, he was commissioned to ‘verbalise’ a minute of silence as a tribute to those who had died in the Iraq war between 2003 and 2008 for Steve McQueen’s book/catalogue Queen and Country: here, Walcott’s poem, entitled ‘Requiem’, prefaces a collection of more than 150 facsimile postage stamp sheets with photographs provided by the families of the deceased.15 In Walcott’s last collection of poems, Morning, Paramin (2016), each poem corresponds and creatively responds to a painting by the contemporary artist Peter Doig. Walcott’s relationship with painters and paintings, therefore, was a lifelong concern but, despite this impressive engagement, no monographs have been devoted to this topic. Over the years, scholars have noted the recurrence of visual references in Walcott’s writing, particularly after the publication of Another Life in 1973 which encouraged critics to delve into this aspect of Walcott’s work, starting from Victor Questel whose 1979 unpublished PhD

4    Derek Walcott’s Painters

thesis included a meticulous catalogue of the painters Walcott had mentioned or alluded to in his works up to that point. Edward Baugh’s 1980 pioneering article ‘Painters and Paintings in Another Life’ posited painting as ‘an important aspect of [the poem’s] style and texture’ and, focusing on art imagery, Baugh equated Walcott’s minute and exact descriptions to visual compositions.16 Following Walcott who, in Another Life, mentions different artists without engaging in a sustained way with any of them (perhaps with the exception of Van Gogh), Baugh usefully inventoried and offered his insight on many of the implicit and explicit references to artists contained in the poem, from the Italian medieval and Renaissance tradition to Sir Thomas Lawrence, from Johannes Vermeer to Mexican Muralism.17 Baugh’s initial remarks on the topic were further expanded upon in the 2009 fully annotated edition of Another Life that he prepared with Colbert Nepaulsingh. In 1981, Marian Stewart devoted her attention to Walcott’s In A Green Night: 1948–1960 (1962), The Castaway and Other Poems (1965), The Gulf (1969) and Sea Grapes (1976) and concluded her article by celebrating Another Life as the culmination of Walcott’s exploration and articulation of his artistic frame of reference. Stewart discussed the ‘markedly visual’ quality of Walcott’s writing either by underlining and elaborating on his conscious and direct references to artists and masterpieces of the past or by emphasising how the poet proceeded by what she called ‘implication’, that is through the redeployment of details or technical aspects like the use of light, colour, tone or perspective in specific works and by specific artists.18 Stewart’s article zoomed in on six poems (‘Choc Bay’, ‘Ruins of a Great House’, ‘A Map of Europe’, ‘A City’s Death by Fire’, ‘The Bridge’ and ‘Vigil in the Desert’) which she associated with, respectively, Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1486), Jacob van Ruysdael’s The Jewish Cemetery (1654 or 1655), Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (c. 1658), J. M. W. Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834 (c. 1834), James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (c.1872–5) and Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy (1897).19 Stewart’s pairings are creative and stimulating and can be instructive and illuminating but some are more persuasive than others. Some of the works singled out by Stewart are not actually mentioned in the corresponding poem but this is not necessarily a problem since it is not unusual for Walcott not to be straightforward in terms of his references. In Walcott’s writing, in fact, a sustained engagement with a particular work or painter does not automatically translate into explicit or multiple citations; on the other hand, single and brief, but sharp and exact, evocations of artists, paintings, or even of a minute detail in a given work, are often distillations of long and elaborate processes. As Stewart herself rightly noted, moreover, the fact that a work or an artist are explicitly named does not always signpost a consuming interest in, detailed knowledge of, or a thoughtful involvement with them.20 What is more problematic is that Stewart, who relies entirely

Introduction    5

on ‘visual’ correspondences between poems and paintings (for example, the translucency of colour and the allusive mode; the graveyard motif and a focus on gloom and decay; a pervasive light and realistic depictions of mundane objects; a fire extending in water and alliterations; blurred impressionistic style and loose transactions between subject and object; the interplay of foreground and background and a mood of silence, space and solitude), never broadens her argument to include a thorough discussion of Walcott’s or the artists’ personal, (art) historical, literary or local context. Taking Walcott’s familiarity with the paintings in her pairings for granted, she proceeds on a ‘speculative and tentative level’21 neither looking for extra-textual evidence that Walcott was indeed inspired by the works in question nor presenting us with an investigation of the kind of framing which might have played a role in his appreciation of them. Baugh, instead, was attentive to Walcott’s sources already in his 1980 article, foregrounding Thomas Craven’s A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the Present Day (1939) in particular, and for good reasons. The influence that Craven’s volume had on Walcott in terms of the specific selection it made available and the way in which the accompanying text ‘framed’ the works he included in his book continued to reverberate with Walcott throughout his life: as we will see, he was still returning to and contending with this legacy well into the 2000s. In 2009 Baugh and Nepaulsingh revisited the question of Walcott’s sources and, whilst recognising the impossibility to locate all of them with certainty, they reiterated the importance to consider at least possible sources in informed discussions of the topic. With the assistance of Yale Center for British Art, they convincingly identified the volume that, in Another Life, Walcott calls The English Topographical Draughtsmen with Alexander Joseph Finberg’s English Water Colour Painters (1906) which contains a chapter with that title.22 Discussing different editions of Craven’s A Treasury, they rightly pointed out that, unlike The English Topographical Draughtsmen, this volume could not have belonged to Walcott’s father Warwick who had died nine years before its publication; they also argued, albeit less persuasively, that Walcott’s tutor Simmons might not have owned Craven’s book because in one of his newspaper articles he did not refer to it when he mentioned Titian.23 Simmons, in fact, might have had Craven at his disposal alongside other texts which discussed Titian: he had a very diverse collection of books24 and it is clear from Walcott’s writing, and from the range of references deployed by those in his immediate milieu (including his twin brother Roderick), that Craven’s was not the only book of reproductions they were consulting in St Lucia and that his textualisations were not the only art-historical interventions they might have been aware of at the time. All of Walcott’s, Simmons’s and St. Omer’s sources are no longer identifiable with assurance but, using Simmons’s and Walcott’s writing as guidance, it is safe to assume that Craven might have worked as a springboard in terms of drawing their attention to

6    Derek Walcott’s Painters

artists they then proceeded to look for and find more information on. From what we can gather, in fact, their collective ‘library’ or ‘portable’ museum comprised artbooks on, or reproductions of, a variety of artists, movements or epochs. Among them were the old black and white prints and the frail, well-thumbed artbooks25 Walcott inherited from his father – volumes on the English topographical draughtsmen and watercolourists, on French Rococo painters, Albrecht Dürer, Jean-François Millet, Sir John Everett Millais or J. M. W. Turner – and works devoted to masterpieces from the Italian Renaissance or to crucial figures as different as Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Vincent Van Gogh, Eugène Delacroix, the Mexican Muralists, Paul Gauguin or Pablo Picasso, to mention just a few of the names which return with more frequency in their writing. In an autobiographical essay, Walcott also recalls, en passant, ‘the brown covered Penguin Series of Modern Painters: Stanley Spencer, Frances Hodgkins, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson’26 and in the unpublished manuscripts for ‘Outside the Cathedral’ he mentions Nicholson’s ‘geometric reductions of Braque’, ‘Matthew Smith’s elan at being an English Matisse’ and ‘the selfrestricting qualities of the prose and paint of Sickert, the decent consolations of the second rate … in comparison with Degas’.27 There is little evidence, however, that Walcott entered in meaningful conversations with these painters’ works. It is not impossible, instead, as we will see, that Simmons, Walcott and St. Omer, committed as they were to the arts and to produce positive representations of the local, might also have been familiar with at least the core arguments of seminal volumes like Anita Brenner’s Idols Behind Altars: Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots (1929) and Alain Locke’s The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art (1940).

The Quest for that Paradoxical Flash of an Instant: The Spatial and the Temporal, the Verbal and the Visual Unsurprisingly, even if both Stewart and Baugh implicitly recognise that Walcott mostly responded to specific artists or paintings rather than engaging abstractly with the ‘visual arts’, they also offer their views on the much-quoted passage from Another Life where Walcott elaborates on his relationship with poetry and painting. The majority of Walcott scholars have, at some stage, returned to these lines, offering differently nuanced interpretations. Broadly speaking, however, most of them seem to agree that they encapsulate Walcott’s explanation or, as Baugh would put it, his ‘rationalization’ for his choice to become a poet rather than a painter.28 This important passage begins with Walcott wondering ‘where’ he failed despite being competent at drawing: he was ‘disciplined’ and ‘humble’, he recalls, and ‘rendered / the visible world that [he] saw / exactly’; ‘yet’, he continues, ‘it hindered [him],

Introduction    7

for / in every surface [he] sought / the paradoxical flash of an instant / in which every facet was caught / in a crystal of ambiguities’.29 According to Stewart, these lines unequivocally show that Walcott considered the medium of paint as a ‘hindrance’ lacking ‘the verbal flexibilities of poetry’.30 Likewise, Pamela Mordecai, in a 1987 article whose title, ‘A Crystal of Ambiguities’, is a quotation from Walcott’s very lines, concluded that this passage illustrates how Walcott decided to escape the ‘linear (planar) prison’ of the canvas because only ‘language, the elasticity of word, would provide access to every facet of the whole of experience’.31 Mordecai’s starting point was her outright rejection of Baugh’s suggestion that Walcott’s decision to turn to poetry was a ‘temperamental’ one32 or a resolution triggered by his realisation that his strengths lay elsewhere, namely in his use of words: to her it was a deliberate ‘choice’ because ‘paint and the exigencies of interpreting reality in that medium [could not] express the range and complexity of the insight of [Walcott’s] heightened imagination ... Walcott’s medium [had] to be the word, itself a product of historical and cultural contact, reflecting and containing history’s meanings.’33 The fact that ‘paint’ and the ‘visual arts’ are cast as a ‘hindering’ homogenous monolith facilitates their (alleged) estrangement from history and cultural contact. Stewart and Mordecai also blur Walcott’s assessment of his own paintings and St. Omer’s with what they assumed would have been the poet’s views on the art of painting itself (a recurring misinterpretation in Walcott scholarship). In Another Life, in fact, ‘paint’ is not limited to ‘one muscle in one thought’, as Stewart argues,34 but it is St. Omer – whom Walcott identified as a more vigorous and independent painter than himself – who, abandoning apprenticeship and being neither distracted nor overwhelmed by the example of previous masters, was able to resolutely articulate his own vision ‘with the linear elation of an eel / one muscle in one thought’ (AL59). As a matter of fact, when Walcott declared, in an interview, that what he had tried to say in Another Life was that ‘the act of painting [wa]s not an intellectual act dictated by reason but [one] that is swept very physically by the sensuality of a brushstroke’, he was not implying that he considered painting an inferior medium but rather explaining (or, indeed, rationalising) why he felt he ‘failed’ at it. As a matter of fact, he immediately requalified his statement as personal experience: ‘I have always felt that some kind of intellect, some kind of preordering, some kind of criticism of the thing before is done has always interfered with my ability to do a painting.’35 Painters at work, Walcott wrote, do ‘not move to the next stroke with an impatient view of the whole’ and ‘it is this combination of making every stroke resolute without knowing what resolution lies ahead’ which is at the core of their activity; his brushstrokes, instead, were ‘the visual equivalent of a written phrase’ and his attempts at painting ‘merely writing in another texture’ (OTC21, 10). In Another Life, Walcott lamented that his painting hand used to proceed (or ‘crawl[ed]’) ‘sidewise’ – as in writing – impatiently

8    Derek Walcott’s Painters

trying to stay focused on a ‘view of the whole’ and ‘crabbed’ by the urge to be consistent in following a specific model (AL59). In Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), casting his mind back to his beginnings almost thirty years after the publication of Another Life, Walcott declared ‘my pen replaced a brush’ in between lines where he recalled how he tried to ‘frame’ – in more ways than one – his native St Lucia in Cézanne’s cubic renditions of Aix-en-Provence, or force it to equate and keep pace with Stendhal’s fictional town of Verrière in The Red and the Black (1830) (TH19).36 In a volume where Walcott conjugated poetry and painting more obviously than anywhere else by including his own artworks in the hardbound version – implicitly denying that his pen did in fact ‘replace’ his brush – the ‘replacement’ in question might have had more to do with the way in which he used to handle a(ny) brush as if it were his pen than with a choice that, in fact, was never really as categoric as this line might otherwise suggest. Religious and linguistic affiliation, Walcott intimated, might also have played a part in his ‘failure’ at painting and in the definition of his artistic trajectory: ‘I think there is something missing in me as painter … I may approach painting too meticulously. The joke that we share between my friend [St. Omer] and me is that I paint like a Methodist. He paints like a Catholic.’37 Growing up as a Methodist on a predominantly Catholic island Walcott was exposed to the ‘utterly unadorned’ chapel where there was ‘no theatre’: a painting, he ponders, ‘would have violated its simplicity’ (OTC21, 13; OTC18). Unlike St. Omer who was a devout Catholic, Walcott was excluded from the complex choreography of Marian adoration, visions of Hell and damnation, incense burning and the Catholic Mass in Latin, and used to find ‘ecstasy [in the English] language’, in the poetry of the Jacobean Bible, and in ‘memorised hymns, rigid quatrains that did not have the sinuous shape of Latin incantations’ (OTC18). In ‘Outside the Cathedral’ Walcott’s ‘allegiance’ to the English language, reinforced in and by his Methodist chapel, also mirrors his decision to privilege the tradition of representational art and his interest in established forms, a propensity he shared, at the time, with St. Omer: ‘I could no more remove the metres of English poetry from my verse’, Walcott wrote, ‘than St. Omer could draw like an Haitian’ (OTC21, 22). At a time when art historians comparing the ‘naivete of the Haitian painter to Pre-Renaissance painting’ were hailing Haitian art as a new ‘Renaissance’, Walcott remembers that he and St. Omer were ‘suspicious’ of its ‘innocence’, which they considered an ‘artifice’ engineered and ‘organised’ by ‘white Americans’ ‘De Witt Peters and Selden Rodman’; they were interested, instead, in the central tenets of the European Renaissance, ‘its drawing, its perspective, its three-dimensional blending into depth and in the weather in light’, even if that meant being disparaged as ‘black Europeans’ ‘corrupted by Western modes’ (OTC21, 21–2). The Methodist hymns Walcott grew up with also contributed to his understanding of art as craftmanship: he considered ‘the best ones’, those by Watts

Introduction    9

and Wesley, as ‘good poems’ as ‘simple as carpentry, with set-square stanza’: ‘their craftsmanship’, to him, was ‘the work of artisans’ (OTC21, 14) and he often compared his work as wordsmith to a carpenter’s – one example out of many is in the poem ‘Cul de Sac Valley’, where he wished his ‘hand’ to be ‘as honest as [the] carpenter’s’ and his consonants to ‘scroll / off [his] shaving plane’.38 Walcott’s formulation of a notion of poetry as craft and as the product of hard work, not of ‘divine inspiration’, however, was also modulated by his exposure to and experience of painting: ‘no seasoned artist’, he argued, ‘ever expects trumpets and a visionary light saying, “Go now to the studio.” You just get up and you do your work as if you are a mason or a carpenter.’39 In Another Life, the hard labour of painting is brought into sharp relief when Walcott details how, working en plein air, he was not only tormented by nagging doubts about his abilities but blinded by light, besieged by insects, tickled by razor grass, exposed to sunstroke, starving, not taking breaks in order not to lose concentration, sweating profusely, and, finally, succumbing to frustration: looking at his canvas, in fact, he eventually complained: ‘I have toiled … for this failure’ (AL55–8). Baugh, alert to Walcott’s admission of his own technical and procedural weaknesses as a visual artist, argued that the lines in Another Life where Walcott ‘rationalizes’ his decision to choose poetry also acknowledge the ‘otherness’ of painting, contrast the two media, and indicate that Walcott turned to the verbal because he recognised that writing in itself is more conducive to exploring ambiguities and paradoxes and could empower him to make the most of the ‘gift’ he felt he was endowed with, that is a talent to create ‘metaphors’ (AL59).40 In a 2005 interview, Walcott did declare that he believed that one could not be ‘ambiguous’ in a ‘fine’ painting in the way in which one could be ambiguous in a ‘fine’ poem: ‘a painting is a painting … ultimately, it is not ambiguous’.41 Arguably, however, both his and Baugh’s pronouncement sound more conclusive than they are: as Walcott himself admitted in the same interview, in fact, not only would not everyone agree with his statement, but a painting could in fact ‘contain ambiguity visually’.42 After all, ambiguities, paradoxes, metaphors and ‘figuration’ are not alien to the visual arts and to the works of those artists whom, as Another Life reveals, Walcott was learning to love and respect as a youth. Walcott was certainly aware, for instance, that ‘the yellow flame of [Fra Lippo] Lippi’s “Annunciation”’ (1450–3) stood for the Holy Spirit, or that the vase of lilies in the middle of the painting represented the purity of the Virgin Mary; likewise, we must assume that he knew that Dürer’s hare was a flat image fixed in time and place: yet he wrote that to him it was ‘quivering / to leap across [his] wrist’ (AL55, 60). Similarly, Walcott must have appreciated that the immensity of the miracle of divine creation is expressed in the simplest of gestures by Michelangelo who, as he puts it, has God ‘floating’ in air; it is likely, moreover, that ‘St Greco’, as Walcott calls El Greco, owed his ‘canonisation’ to his propensity to paint spirituality but also to his ability to

10    Derek Walcott’s Painters

navigate ambiguity as in his subtly sinister and menacing portrait of a ‘holy’ and powerful figure like Cardinal Niño de Guevara – a disturbing depiction included in Craven’s volume as a colour plate43 – which, incidentally, would have deeply resonated with the young Walcott’s antipathy towards the Roman Catholic clergy of St Lucia (AL44, 125). Following directly from pages in which the poet registers his frustration with his own canvases, rather than representing an assessment of the art of painting as a less sophisticated (even inferior) medium of expression, Walcott is probably referring again to his own paintings when he mentions ‘surface[s]’ in which he ‘sought’ paradoxes and ambiguities but was unable to find them (AL55–8, 58). Being disciplined and rendering the ‘visible world … exactly’ (AL58, emphasis mine), he adds, was not enough: as Walcott had already regretted in one of his early poems, despite being a zealous and keen painter, what he lacked was the ability to be ‘explicit’ when it came to his surfaces/ canvases, or, to put it another way, since the adjective ‘explicit’ comes from the Latin verb ex-plicare – ex ‘out’ and plicare ‘to fold’ – he was unable to ‘unfold’ that visible world, to open it up and spread it out, to reveal it, visually, in all its different dimensions, ambiguities, and paradoxes.44 In a 2001 interview, in fact, he admitted that as a young painter he ‘felt that [his] work did not go … perhaps, deeply enough into what is the meaning of [the] physical beauty’ of the Caribbean so he might ‘have tried to write more to compensate for that’.45 Walcott’s awareness of his ‘failure’ of execution, of his inability to be both ‘exact’ and ‘explicit’ in his paintings, should not be too hastily delinked from what he considered an even greater problem, namely the shortcomings of his perception. In his early years, as Walcott laments in Another Life, his ‘hand was crabbed’ by the different styles, epochs and schools he was becoming familiar with and inspired by (AL59); yet, he was also painfully conscious that familiarity and enthusiasm for certain models could affect one’s ‘eye’. Walcott openly admits that, at the beginning of his apprenticeship, he was still learning to see his own world and to emancipate himself from a condition that affected his entire generation which had learnt to ‘look at life with black skins and blue eyes’: only by engaging in what he calls ‘the learning of looking’ could he and his fellow artists and writers ‘find meaning in the life around [them] … And without comparisons.’46 Painting the world ‘as he saw it’, therefore, ‘hindered’ him because the world that Walcott saw at that point was not easily separable from the world he wanted to see or was socialised into thinking was worth seeing. Another Life, as I will highlight in the following chapters, fully dramatises precisely Walcott’s realisation that he needed to stop superimposing foreign models, standards and parameters on his world or ‘measure’ it, unfavourably, against them. Walcott’s ‘learning of looking’, in fact, entails a reprogramming of his way of seeing whereby to look does not mean to overlook what is around him and, at the same time, it signals a profound understanding that seeing is an ‘act of choice’ which is shaped by

Introduction    11

and shapes the way we understand the world and appreciate and establish our place in it.47 Nevertheless, if Walcott locates his ‘failure’ as a painter not only in a certain clumsiness with the brush but also in his inability to emancipate himself from disabling received templates, when he states ‘it hindered me, for I sought’, he might be hinting that what ‘hindered’ him was also the very nature of the ‘search’ he had embarked upon (AL58, emphasis mine). The quest for the ‘paradoxical flash of an instant / in which every facet was caught / in a crystal of ambiguities’, is in fact a challenging one because it aims to bring together the categories of spatial and temporal form which the eighteenth-century philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing famously applied to painting and poetry respectively in order to mark their difference.48 Painting, Lessing argued, ‘can use but a single moment of an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow’ while poetry ‘can use but a single attribute of bodies and must choose that one which gives the most vivid picture’.49 Walcott seems to refute this division since he contravenes Lessing’s principles but also complicates his categories with paradoxes and a keen desire to be simultaneously ‘exact’ and ‘explicit’. The poet/painter, in fact, indicates that he was looking for the temporal, namely the exact, momentous or ‘pregnant’ instant ‘frozen’ as in a ‘still’ painting but which, even in its short-lived flash, still took and required the beholders’ time to reveal the narrative(s) inherent in all its ambiguous facets. At the same time, he was also searching for the spatial in the form of a multifaceted crystal as solid and seemingly as self-sufficient as an artefact or a verbal icon whose ‘single attribute’, however, inherently denies singularity and which is concomitantly a transparent ‘object’ or ‘body’ which is traversed by and reflects time and history. In other words, at the very moment in which he confronts his inability to be the ‘exact’ and ‘explicit’ painter he would have liked to be, Walcott embarks upon a search that, far from being aimed at establishing (let alone celebrating) the superiority or autonomy of the verbal and his separation from (or even containment of) the visual, is directed at exploring the possibilities of some form of partnership between the two. This search for verbal exactness and explicitness generated and was generated by a process of self-discovery which continued into the time of writing Another Life (roughly twenty years later) – and, as we will see, well beyond the 1970s – and during which received ‘foundational’ differences between the two arts were to be endlessly rethought and questioned while the notion of artistic coherence was being constantly revisited, interrogated and complicated. Walcott believed that being a painter could help with writing and used as ‘evidence’ the first page of Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms (1929) which he calls ‘a pure Cézanne’ because ‘the single stroke blue, in “the river was quickly moving and blue in the channels” startl[es] us like one of those small blocks in a Cézanne’s surface’ (OTC21, 11, underlining in the original).

12    Derek Walcott’s Painters

Nonetheless, he was adamant that, the compelling visual texture of his poems notwithstanding, he ‘did not want to be a poet-painter’ (OTC21, 11), he did not just want ‘to paint poems’, or do ‘the mimetic thing of making words behave as if they were paint strokes’.50 His much-quoted pronouncement in Another Life is therefore to be seen less as a crystallisation of the moment in which he unequivocally chose a specific path but more as an expression of the after-the-fact realisation that what he was really longing to become was not a poet-painter who ‘just painted poems’ or a painter-poet – he did not believe that ‘great painter poets’ actually existed (OTC21, 11) – but a poet, playwright, thinker and painter for whom painters, paintings and the act of painting itself, had played and were going to play a pivotal role in his ‘way of seeing’ and in the formulation of his vision, or, in other words, an artist keen to find productive ways to synergise the verbal and the visual. When he first embarked upon this search, Walcott felt that he was ‘hindered’ not only because of the dynamic complexities of what he was seeking: if he ‘hoped’, at the time, ‘that both disciplines might / by painful accretion cohere / and finally ignite’ (AL58–9), in retrospect he found that a painfully accretive method was not conducive to his quest, probably because, at that point, it felt too troublingly close to the disabling ‘comparative’ (colonial) outlook he was seeking to supersede and did not fully reflect his thought processes. When he announces, ‘but I lived in a different gift, / its element metaphor’ (AL59), he must have sensed that he would have been better served by an approach whereby coherence –understood as a unity whose different components, rather than being subsumed, mutually ‘ignite’ by asserting their individuality – was to be acquired less via a logic of juxtaposition (or, indeed, comparison) and more through creative ways which would complicate and enrich literariness and literalness. Notably, for Walcott, entire poems and entire plays were, ultimately, ‘one metaphor with many components’; suitably, his understanding of the relationship between these different components can also shed some light on the way in which he conceived, more broadly, the relationship between the verbal and the visual: as Walcott explained, a metaphor is ‘basically a contradiction … since two textures are fused … but the moment of metaphor is not a moment of contradiction, even if the two elements are apparently opposite’.51 Fully determined to find effective ways to put in dialogue his immediate world and his artistic sensibility, forged by his exposure to European but also, as we will see, local artists, Walcott concentrated on discovering how ‘apparently opposite’ (visual and verbal) textures could be combined and recombined not to just ‘paint poems’ but to create novel vistas which would be both exact and explicit, would challenge constraining templates or received perceptions, and would enable him to see himself and his world in new, enabling ways. According to Patricia Ismond, Walcott’s ‘metaphorical enterprise’, which she locates at the core of his poetics, relies on an understanding of metaphor as ‘figuration in the widest sense’.52 Metaphors and all figurative language might

Introduction    13

be essentially linguistic but they mobilise imagination, bring into the picture a cluster of conceptual and sensory connotations derived from lived experience and different frames of reference, and frequently include, stimulate and rely on the visual sense. Unsurprisingly, Walcott, who never really renounced painting and for whom ‘every metaphor [could] be drawn, graphically’,53 often maximised the role played by this ‘sense’ when he activated his metaphors and dynamised the transaction between what I. A. Richards would have called ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ by making the latter a painting or a detail from a painting.54 In one of the above-mentioned examples from Another Life, the ‘yellow flame’ of Fra Lippo Lippi’s Annunciation ‘is’ ‘the leaf of a kneeling sapling’ in St Lucia (AL55): here the metaphorical transaction between ‘vehicle’ (Lippi’s Annunciation55 where a kneeling Angel and Mary bow their head in acceptance towards the golden light that, emanating from a gap in her dress, represents the divine intervention in her immaculate conception) and ‘tenor’ (St Lucia’s flora ignited in April) is far from being merely illustrative or decorative. Through a mutual energising of visual and verbal, Walcott’s metaphor reveals the poet’s reverential approach to the St Lucian landscape and his instinctual recognition that it encapsulates the same potential for renewal conveyed by Lippi’s image – which, incidentally, also renders the moment in which two dimensions regarded as disparate (here the divine and the human) can ‘cohere’ and become perfectly conjoined. Artistic references and lived experience are conjugated through this metaphor in the economy of a passage where, as we have seen, Walcott registers his dissatisfaction at his own pictorial attempts which, not being exact or explicit enough, fail to represent the complexity and fullness of the St Lucian landscape which remains, frustratingly, ‘on the tip of [his] tongue’ (AL55). After describing how the landscape itself scowls at the inadequacy of his picture, Walcott brings readers back to his initial metaphor (the leaf of a kneeling sapling as the yellow flame of Lippi’s Annunciation) when he wonders if what he failed to capture was something which ‘lies / in the light of that leaf’ (AL55, 57). Walcott patently plays on the ambiguity or double meaning of ‘lies’ here: does the light of the leaf ‘lie’ because he superimposes on the local either what he wanted to see in it or a revered artistic model ostensibly alien to it? Or is he simply recording his realisation that ‘that’ leaf he just painted ‘lies’ because it fails to reveal what ‘lies’ or inherently ‘resides’ in the actual leaf (namely the hope for ‘renewal’ Lippi renders in his work and the ‘holiness’ of St Lucia) and, as a result, does not do justice to its counterpart? The initial metaphor – which, characteristically, simultaneously does and does not mean what it says (the St Lucian sapling’s leaf plainly is not, but, on a deeper level, clearly is, Lippi’s Annunciation’s yellow flame) – is in itself a (exact and explicit but illuminating or adulterating?) ‘lie’ that treads the fine line between inscapes and landscapes. Walcott returned to contend with the ambiguities inherent in these kinds of ‘metaphors’ by alternatively

14    Derek Walcott’s Painters

questioning, championing, dismissing and reformulating them all his life as he continued to self-critically interrogate the limits of representation, his ability to render his ‘reversible world’,56 his own perception and the ways in which the latter was inflected by his exposure not only to literature, as it is widely acknowledged, but also to visual artists: ‘have I looked at life’, he was to exclaim, for example, more than thirty years later, ‘through some inoperable cataract?’ (P61). A cataract clouds one’s vision while the paradoxical instant in which every facet is caught in a crystal of ambiguities at the core of Walcott’s quest is a ‘flash’ of light (AL58). For Walcott ‘all art has to do with light’, every art aspires to the ‘representation’ of light and light, he insists, ‘has to be there as much as air has to be there’.57 He also equates the poetic principle of naming with the process of capturing or rendering ‘light’: it is ‘not [a matter of] render[ing] things as they are exactly, but to somehow illuminate them … it takes a particular instant of illumination that might make … words have a clarity and a validity and a presence that they didn’t have before’.58 Light, therefore, both illuminates and irradiates from elusive ‘epiphanic detail[s]’ (TH8) or moments like the ones which bring into bold relief and ignite ‘the leaf of a kneeling sapling’ in Another Life (AL55) or rivet Walcott to the arresting and ‘exact lucency’ of the ‘inner thigh’ of a painted dog in Tiepolo’s Hound (7). Endlessly fascinated by the physical phenomenon of light itself, particularly the bright light of the Caribbean traditionally accused of being ‘unsophisticated’ (as it was the case for its people) for its lack of gradation, Walcott is also attracted to the light that ‘comes off’ a page or a canvas: this, he explains, might not be, necessarily, the light represented in the works but the light that comes from ‘inside’ the painters or writers themselves.59 In the first poem of Midsummer, for instance, Walcott alludes, at the same time, to well-known derogatory colonial attitudes towards his region’s (sun)light, to the light which illuminates other places, and the ‘light’ illuminating from within and without the work of a dear friend. The ‘sunlight’ of a Caribbean island ‘known / to the traveller[s] Trollope, … Froude, / for making nothing’, in fact, is simultaneously ‘shared by Rome / and [Joseph Brodsky’s] white paper’.60 In Another Life too Walcott sounds equally intrigued by the light inherent in a landscape which had not yet been translated into a painting and by the light which illuminated, from inside, intoxicated and passionate young painters/poets excited by their own self-appointed task to translate, ‘name’, or ‘put down, in paint, in words’ that very same light and landscape (AL3–4, 78, 152, 52). Most certainly an ubiquitous term in Walcott’s writing, ‘light’, in its different manifestations, triggers elation, in both familiar and unfamiliar surroundings: ‘the light before sunrise [in St Lucia]’, Walcott notes in ‘Outside the Cathedral’, ‘was the light’ both he and St. Omer ‘liked best’ (OTC21, 18) while in The Prodigal he exclaims: ‘if they asked / what country I was from I’d say, “The light / of that tree-lined sunrise down the Via Veneto”’ in

Introduction    15

Rome (P29). In his native Caribbean, light presides over daily renewal as ‘the bounty [which] returns each daybreak’61 but it is ‘the wide benediction’ that, for local artists, can also turn into a calamity (TH24) if they are denied the possibility to work. His long poem Tiepolo’s Hound, for example, as Walcott himself put it, is about the ‘change of light’ – and the implications and repercussions of this change – experienced by Jacob Camille Pissarro when he moved from the Caribbean island of St Thomas to France.62 Light can be a symbol of transcendence as at the end of The Prodigal, where it ‘shines from the other shore’ (P105) namely, the land of dead loved ones, or it can stand for an interior clarity of vision where the transformative power of seeing on the seer is made manifest: ‘I was seeing / the light of St Lucia at last through her own eyes, / her blindness, her inward vision … revealing … // I felt every wound pass’ (O282). In The Arkansas Testament, as we will see, Walcott identifies the ‘light of the world’ not with the well-known allegorical painting of the same title by William Hunt – or with any other work by the Old Masters – but with a local, self-sufficient St Lucian woman whose attitude forces him to ‘see’ more clearly, reconsider his self-positioning vis-à-vis his island and his people, and to rethink, concomitantly, his strategies of representation (AT48). Invisible in itself, in fact, light is invaluable for its ability to delicately and precisely define what surrounds us (TH148), enabling us to perceive the world and our position in it: a ‘misunderstanding of light’ is a fatal mistake, one that, in his unpublished notebooks for Another Life, Walcott locates at the core of his failure as a visual artist when he confesses that he decided not to focus on painting because he realised that, when he rendered the world around him with his brush, he was too keen to ‘change’ its ‘colour’, ‘nature’ and ‘light’ to make it fit imported models.63 Over the years, Walcott was determined not to make the same mistake and to understand instead, with enhanced ‘lucidity’, those realities that ‘light’, in all its different manifestations, either illuminated or emanated from, not only in his world but also in the paintings he was fascinated by. In Walcott’s writing, in line with the St Lucian motto (‘The Land, The People, The Light’), in fact, light is often inseparable from what it defines, brightens and elucidates: for instance, the ‘lucency’ of the inner thigh of a dog relegated to the edge of a feast in Tiepolo or Veronese encapsulates for him all underdogs’ possibility of emancipation from subalterneity (TH7); the light inherent in simple, everyday objects quietly asserting their presence as in Jean-BaptisteSiméon Chardin or Johannes Vermeer is a powerful reminder to commit the time to let these objects become themselves and patiently learn to ‘see’ them in all their complexities as well as in their in-placeness (CA42). The ‘American light’ that Walcott finds and praises in those works by Edward Hopper – which, as it happens, share with his own Caribbean landscapes the same sun-drenched stillness – is a light that irradiates from and illuminates paintings which the poet praises for their refusal to ‘abandon’ ‘headland[s]’ and ‘dark house[s]’ (P8) deserted by everyone else. In so doing, they reveal

16    Derek Walcott’s Painters

the discreet, sad radiance of the solitude, possibly even neglect, experienced also by those living in close proximity to the centre, but who are not in it or of it. It is no surprise, therefore, that in Omeros, whilst thinking of a local fisherman ‘sitting near the reek / of drying fishnet, listening to the shallows’ noise’, Walcott/the narrator ponders on Homeric and Vergilian echoes in every day rural North America with an observation, ‘Homer and Virg are New England farmers, / and the winged horse guards their gas-station’, which compellingly resonates with Hopper’s iconic Gas (1940), its Mobilgas winged horse, and its almost spectral quality (O14).

Collages, Visual Notes and Letting the Imagination Range Wherever its Correspondences Take It Critical attention to Walcott’s relationship with the visual arts intensified with the publication of Midsummer in 1986, a collection where, according to John Figueroa, thirteen years after the publication of Another Life, the poet ‘returned to the role of painter, and painting, in his confrontation with, and presentation of, an intricate world’.64 ‘Return’ is perhaps not an entirely appropriate word here if one considers, by way of example, that in the interim between the publication of the two volumes, one of the protagonists of Walcott’s play The Last Carnival, first performed in 1982 and a revisitation of In a Fine Castle (1970), is in fact a painter who faces (or, more correctly, does not face) his troubled world by modelling himself upon Watteau (or, rather, his own interpretation of Watteau), an artist with whom, as I will highlight in Chapter 3, Walcott seriously engaged for many years but whose role in Walcott’s articulation of his own vision has never been acknowledged. Similarly, the aesthetic choices, cultural interventions and the overall vision of Romare Bearden were beginning to be a crucial source of inspiration for Walcott already in the 1970s and early 1980s. Walcott’s choice of Bearden’s collage The Sea Nymph (1977) (Fig. 4.4) as a jacket-cover for The Star-Apple Kingdom in 1979 is a clear indication of his interest in the African American artist’s seminal A Black Odyssey (1977) which included The Sea Nymph and which has been repeatedly credited (including by Walcott himself) as an important visual model for Omeros and The Odyssey: A Stage Version, both published in the 1990s. Yet, as I will discuss in Chapters 4, 5 and 7, the impact of Bearden on Walcott is broader and deeper and not at all reducible to Walcott’s admiration for A Black Odyssey. For the cover of Midsummer, Walcott selected, as he had done for his Collected Poems, one of his own paintings (in this case, a luxuriant seaalmond tree), a choice which seems to signpost that, when he wrote the poems comprised in the collection, he really wanted to concentrate on developing his painting rather than on writing. Nevertheless, since lines still came into his head as he was using paint and brush, Midsummer began to emerge

Introduction    17

gradually as ‘an arbitrary collage’ of lines and poems.65 At that point, visual and verbal sources in the form of details from a painting’s reproduction, cutouts from magazine photographs glued next to cut-and-pasted typescript of his or others’ texts, handwritten notes or lines, drafted scenes, and his own sketches or small watercolours had been brought together and allowed to synergise in Walcott’s notebooks and sketchbooks for many years. These sketches and cut-outs, which contribute to enhance the strong pictorial quality of Walcott’s plays, generally work as private reminders for an author keen to meticulously finesse the complexities of a given situation or character in order to create rich and multifaceted textures. In a 1981 interview with Vic Questel, Walcott admitted that some of his scenes ‘are almost reworkings of significant paintings’: ‘whenever there has been an echo, I have used that echo –like in Drums and Colours [and] “The Boyhood of Raleigh”’ (Fig. 4.2); ‘very often’, Walcott added, ‘I would paint a scene before I write it and … the dialogue might come out because of the envisioning of the scene’.66 Occasionally, Walcott also shared his ‘visual notes’ with the audience by making them available and visible on stage. In a handwritten entry at the beginning of a 1970 notebook entitled Doctor Faustus-Christopher Marlowe, for example, Walcott reveals that he wanted the audience to ‘see both the director’s mind and the work’ (emphasis mine).67 In order to achieve this, he carefully orchestrated visual references (some to be made explicit to viewers, others kept from their sight but made ‘palpable’ in other ways) as he creatively revisited literary ‘borrowings’ (DF). The cover of this notebook is a photograph of one of two miniature panels attributed to Jan van Eyck, namely the one entitled the Last Judgement (1440–1). The hellscape in the lower part of the painting provides a visual correlative of Faustus’s damnation; the resurrected souls awaiting judgement who appear in the middle, and, in the upper part of the work, Christ, the saints, the apostles, the clergy, the virgins and nobility, gesture instead towards the alternative destiny hinted by Marlowe for his protagonist (‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight’) who, at the end of the play, tries to belatedly repent: ‘Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer! / I’ll burn my books!’68 Walcott’s notes for this production are incomplete (it appears that it never took place) so, while it is possible that he intended to use the lower part of van Eyck’s painting as a background for the last scene in the play, there is no clear indication of this in the manuscript. Jan van Eyck’s panel, however, definitely works well at least as a ‘private’ visual prompt which had the purpose to enable Walcott to keep alive the tension harboured in Marlowe’s play vis-à-vis the doctrine of predestination and Faustus’s ability to repent and redeem himself.69 The opening page of Walcott’s notes is entirely occupied by a detail from another painting, namely the central panel of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490) which, like the reproduction on the cover by Van Eyck, looks like a cut-out from an artbook or art magazine. Stage directions for

18    Derek Walcott’s Painters

the opening scene stipulate that ‘a painting, Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights’ should actually be visible on stage (DF). Before the first line of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (‘Not marching now in fields of Thrasymene’) is delivered by the Chorus, Walcott includes two typescript pages which function as a prologue to the Elizabethan play and which feature a ‘naked, serpentine woman crawl[ing] around’ and ‘slither[ing] on’ (DF). As ‘a slow, cold, serpentine voice whispers into the theatre, or, on stage’ the snake/woman ‘moves among the audience, counselling … Dilige Deum, et fac quod vis’ (DF). These words are repeated numerous times and clearly (mis)interpreted as an utterly permissive pronouncement while St Augustine, who coined this injunction, was restricting the believer’s ability to do what s/he willed by the fact that loving God should make one love only what God would approve of. Evidently, Walcott’s idea was for the production to begin by turning the space of the theatre into Bosch’s dreamlike garden and the audience into the naked mysterious figures who, in the artist’s vision, indulge in endless sexual and carnal bliss. Walcott’s inclusion of the lines ‘fac quod vis / what the fuck you want’, whilst playing with the assonance between the Latin word ‘fac’ (from facere, ‘to do, to make’) and the sexually connotated English colloquialism for ‘whatever’, creates an aural and contemporary counterpart to Bosch’s visual ‘blasphemies’ (DF). In Bosch’s triptych the central panel is followed by a representation of hell detailing, like Van Eyck’s miniature, incredible suffering and torments in graphic details: for those familiar with The Garden of Earthly Delights, therefore, the presence on stage and the reenactment of the central panel also act as subtle reminders of the terrifying destiny of those who, like Faustus, succumb to temptation and sin. Overall, the manuscript of the play is mostly made of cuttings from pages of printed editions of Marlowe’s play on which Walcott’s handwriting intervenes by deleting lines, adding asides, giving instructions to actors on how to deliver a certain speech, or inserting stage directions. After the ‘serpentine voice’, another ‘voice embodied in the person of the STAGE MANAGER or Chorus, dressed in black, black wide dashiki with cabalistic markings’ enters the scene (DF, capitalisation in the original). The West African dashiki gives a different, ‘local’ edge to Faustus’s foray into necromancy and ‘black’ magic – presumably this was a production imagined for the Trinidad Theatre Workshop – and creates a further visual connection with The Garden of Earthly Delights since the detail from the lower-right corner chosen by Walcott includes one of the only two Black figures in the image (DF). This new Voice/Stage Manager/Chorus mounts the stage and ‘disembodied into air and light of visual medium, it recites softly’ the ‘Ballad of Chidiock Tichborne’ to a ‘lute-like guitar’ (DF). Tichborne’s elegy was written in the Tower of London when the young man was awaiting his execution for taking part in the Babington Plot to murder Queen Elizabeth: he was only twentyfour at the time and, in his elegy, he movingly laments the tragedy of a life cut short. Walcott includes the poem in its entirety with stage directions which

Introduction    19

suggest how it should be ‘played’ (rock, calypso, slower tempo, heightened voice). As it is delivered, the Voice/Stage Manager/Chorus changes into a ‘richly figured robe dressing’ which seems inspired by the one Faustus himself dons in the famous 1620 frontispiece for a printing of The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus and which is also evoked in Walcott’s text (DF). Wearing this elaborate robe, in fact, the Voice/Stage Manager/Chorus announces ‘The Tragicall Story of Doctor Faustus’ whilst straddling different temporalities, different locations and different varieties of English: the present of the ‘rock’ rendition of Tichborne’s poem and the past of the 1620 costume, the Africa of the dashiki, the Trinidad of the calypso in which Tichborne’s ballad is sung, presumably with a Trinidadian accent, Marlowe’s and Tichborne’s Elizabethan England and their early modern English. The actor playing Faustus then enters the stage also wearing a dashiki (another nod to ‘black’ magic), and then changes into a ‘red robe’ and ‘beard’, gesturing again towards the 1620 frontispiece which features a bearded Faustus, in full magic gear, conjuring Mephistophilis (DF). As he recites the third stanza of Tichborne’s poem (‘And now I die, and now I am but made’), stage directions stipulate that the Voice/Stage Manager/Chorus should ‘open his arms in a crucifixion pose, an actor’s gesture’ (DF). Tichborne’s execution was particularly cruel: like his fellow traitors, he was eviscerated, hanged, drawn and quartered but, importantly, not crucified. This ‘actor’s gesture’, however, powerfully evokes the subject of the accompanying panel to The Last Judgement in Jan van Eyck’s diptych which is entitled The Crucifixion. Like the frontispiece of Marlowe’s 1620 Doctor Faustus, Van Eyck’s The Crucifixion is not included in the notes as a cut-out but these two images seem to have been in the forefront of Walcott’s mind as he was writing a prologue which contained multiple visual reminders of their subjects. The prospective audience, therefore, would have been able to ‘see both the director’s mind and the work’ through a selection of aptly ‘rearranged’ cut-outs from Marlowe’s text prefaced by Tichborne’s elegy – copied verbatim but duly ‘remixed’ – and explicit and implicit, embodied and enacted, visual references – namely, Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (on stage), Van Eyck’s The Last Judgement (which might or might not have been visible to the audience) and Van Eyck’s The Crucifixion which, like the 1620 frontispiece of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, is never openly mentioned but whose influence can be traced in Walcott’s play’s texture and ambiance, and in his actors’ costumes and gestures (DF). On the front page of another notebook, one which contains various sketches and drawings for the film Vangelo Nero which Walcott prepared in 1972 for Dino De Laurentiis (but which was never filmed), Walcott glued a picture of Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1601) which depicts the moment when the resurrected but incognito Jesus reveals himself to two of his disciples in the town of Emmaus.70 I will briefly return to Vangelo Nero

20    Derek Walcott’s Painters

in Chapter 5: what is of interest here in terms of Walcott’s collagist practices and his determination to make his plays ‘absorb’, almost by osmosis, the suggestive, shaping power of specific cut-out reproductions, is that none of his drafts for this filmscript contains either a counterpart to the scene at Emmaus depicted by Caravaggio or the resurrection of Christ for which the momentous encounter at the core of the Italian master’s work provides the ‘proof’. A draft of forty typescript pages, in fact, ends with the crucifixion causing an ‘eclipse’ in ‘Africa, the earthly paradise’ which, in accordance with an ancient legend, reduces all the animals to tears.71 In the darkest hour, however, Walcott’s conclusive speech – delivered by a village elder – tries to replicate the moment immortalised in Caravaggio’s painting when despair suddenly becomes jubilation: as he mourns the death of Jesus, in fact, the elder simultaneously praises God and life; as he laments that the elephant ‘sinks to his knees / because God is dying’, he also asserts that ‘we do not die’ but are simply ‘passing / as our image enters a mirror’ (VN6.9, 40). It is possible that Walcott might have been inspired to write Vangelo Nero by the success of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, which opened on Broadway in October 1971: the presence of Caravaggio’s painting on the cover of his notebook, however, can be seen as a visual prompting which supported Walcott in his decision to include in his film at least an allusion to the resurrection, that is to the final affirmation of life over death which was famously missing in the Broadway production. As we will see in the following chapters, and particularly in Chapter 3 where the focus is on Walcott’s engagement with Jean-Antoine Watteau, this process of relying on disparate fragments, dismantling preexisting verbal and visual forms and reassembling and reorganising them in new compositions, amounts to a kind of ‘collaging’ practice which, incidentally, intensified in the 1970s, when Walcott was familiarising himself with Bearden’s work. This praxis assisted Walcott in his rethinking not only of the parameters but also of the concept of artistic ‘coherence’ itself, and resulted in notebooks that share the density, complexity and multi-layered nature of Bearden’s collagist compositions. Taking into account the role that juxtaposition plays in collage, and bearing in mind that Walcott’s Midsummer was composed with ‘anti-poetic vehemence’, ‘against the imagination’, ‘against the idea of writing poems’, with a ‘wish not to write’, almost ‘destructing’ his poems as they ‘kept happening’,72 it is perhaps not surprising that, in this collection, when he mobilises his visual references, Walcott seems prone to rediscover the value of similes – generally considered more ‘explanatory’, prosaic, or ‘accretive’ than poetical metaphors. He recalls, for example, that morning in Port of Spain used to be ‘like a granite corner in Piero della Francesca’s / “Resurrection”’ and he would like his lines to ‘ripen with peace, like a gold-framed meadow / in Brueghel or Pissarro’; while a ‘breadfruit’s foliage, [is] rustedged like van Ruysdael’, the alleys of Brixton and the ‘empire’ during urban riots are ‘burning like Turner’s ships’ (M13, 18, 27, 34, emphases mine).

Introduction    21

Walcott here was not finally succumbing to the rhetorical colonial and imperial mode where similes and comparisons were utilised to render the unfamiliar familiar while underscoring its inferiority; rather, he was self-critically reassessing his right to imagine and create ‘correspondences’ how and when he saw fit by dramatising the process itself. The Piero della Francesca’s ‘morning’ and the ‘rust-edged’ foliage à la van Ruysdael signpost, in fact, not only his attraction to detail but also past and present modalities of perception from which the more confident Walcott does not seem to feel an immediate need to distance himself (M13, 27). The attempt to deliberately ‘arrange’ lines so that they would ‘ripen’ like the ‘gold-framed meadow[s]’ of Brueghel and Pissarro, instead, is simultaneously acknowledged, rejected and reconsidered. Reflecting on the thought processes which govern his metaphors and similes and, more broadly, his way of seeing, Walcott recognises the importance of letting his imagination – shaped by the experience of the ‘radiant’ and ‘fierce[ly]’ hot ‘Midsummer burst[ing] / out of its body’ and, simultaneously, by artistic and literary references – roam totally free rather than being constrained by predetermined trajectories: ‘No, let the imagination range wherever / its correspondences take it’, he writes (M18). Walcott’s expectation, however, is that, after ranging without restrictions, his imagination would come back ‘tired to say that summer is the same / everywhere’ and he hopes to be able to ‘let’ his imagination ‘say’ this without fearing that it would dissolve and dissipate the urgencies of the local or flatten its manifestations into cultural icons (M18). The reference to ‘Turner’s [burning] ships’ in relation to the Brixton riots can be seen to, temporarily at least, fulfil this hope: far from merely aestheticising or neutering the upheaval, in fact, the image conjured up by the poem, exact in its inexactness, evokes a cluster of references that indicate (or render explicit) that the acts of the protesters should be put in a broader context in order to be fully understood. Many of Turner’s most famous works ‘play’ with fire but do not, strictly speaking, represent ‘burning ships’. For example, in The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838 (1839) (Fig. 1.8), one of the paintings Walcott frequently mentions in his writing, it is what is around the old warship (the sky and the river Thames at sunset) that appear to be ‘on fire’, not the Temeraire itself; the same is true for The Slave Ship – Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon coming on (1840) (Fig. 5.7) where, in the middle of a deep-red sunset with blood-red sky and copper waters, a centred white form bursts forth with a raised arm to condemn the massacre of the enslaved who are drowning and devoured by sea creatures.73 If the image of the Temeraire going to its last berth does reinforce the poem’s hope that readers are actually glimpsing the end of a nefarious era (‘empire / … is ending / in the alleys of Brixton, burning like Turner’s ships’), the evocation of The Slave Ship invites them to formulate a connection between past and present forms of oppression and encourages them to attribute the riotous collapse of order to

22    Derek Walcott’s Painters

politics (historically) thwarted by racism (M34). Furthermore, if ‘ships’ are not really burning in Turner’s paintings, the Houses of Parliament famously are, and the artist’s multiple representations of the 1834 fire which ravaged what was, at the time, the political heart of Empire, is one of his best-known investigations of the pictorial possibilities of fire.74 In the context of Walcott’s poem, therefore, the conjuring up of the conflagration of what now and then was supposed to be the bulwark of democracy, rights and liberties, provides a powerful visualisation not simply of the possible material damage inflected by Walcott’s contemporary protesters but, most importantly, of the broken promises that fuelled their rage.

Towards an Art History of which the Caribbean Too is Capable Representing a year, from summer to summer, the poems in Midsummer, which, to Bruce King are ‘like watercolours blurred at the edge’ and to Robert Bensen ‘verbal paintings –portraits, landscapes, seascapes, studies, and sketches’,75 are all numbered rather than titled with the exception of three, two of which, sustained meditations on two artists Walcott had been engaging with for many years, bear the name of Gauguin and Watteau. Poems which contain lines focusing on a painting’s details or on painters’ techniques are complemented by others which ponder instead on the alignment or misalignment of the verbal, the visual and the world they strive to represent. In Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry (1992), Rei Terada – who is also reluctant to accept that Another Life records Walcott’s neat separation of painting from poetry – aptly observed that even if the poems in Midsummer ‘argue with themselves over the arts’ relations, they quietly merge the verbal and the visual, highlighting their own physical substantiality and the spatial quality of figuration’.76 In other words, the search for a ‘paradoxical flash of an instant / in which every facet was caught / in a crystal of ambiguities’ at the core of Another Life was still ongoing as was Walcott’s determination to situate the two arts not in opposition but along a continuum, or what Terada calls a ‘spectrum’.77 In Abandoning Dead Metaphors, a valiant effort to illuminate what the subtitle of the book defines as ‘the Caribbean phase of Derek Walcott’s poetry’ – from Walcott’s juvenilia to the end of the 1970s – Ismond criticises Terada for privileging ‘textuality at the expense of context’.78 Also the chapter devoted to Walcott and the ‘visual arts’, where Terada discusses Walcott’s preoccupation with perception, art as representation, figuration, and its relationship with the material world, does tend to remain on abstract, or as Ismond laments, ‘textual’, terms. Reading all the poems she selects for this chapter as ‘rhetorical excuse[s] for meditations upon representations’,79 Terada bypasses the need to bring context into her (and others’) picture(s) or analyse the aesthetic and/or political contexts or choices of artists whom

Introduction    23

Walcott enters into conversation with at specific moments in his life and career. Derek Walcott’s Painters: A Life with Pictures, as we will see, goes instead in the opposite direction and insists that careful evaluations of contexts can further our understanding of Walcott’s development of his own vision vis-à-vis the one of painters he admired. Terada’s chapter is one of the critical interventions on Walcott’s work that, in the 1990s, began to fully recognise that the poet’s interest in the visual arts deserved to be addressed. This trend was also manifest in the fact that the 1986 article where Robert Bensen describes the poems in Midsummer as ‘verbal paintings’ became one of two chapters focused on poetry and painting that were reprinted in Robert Hamner’s 1996 edited collection Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott – the other was Baugh’s ‘Painters and Paintings in Another Life’ from 1980. Stewart Brown too, five years earlier, had acknowledged the importance of this aspect when he included Clara Rosa de Lima’s article on Walcott’s employment of painterly techniques in his poetry and on the impact that Van Gogh had on him, Simmons and St. Omer, particularly in terms of absolute commitment to art. De Lima also foregrounded Walcott’s simultaneous engagement with words and images by informing us that the watercolour on the cover of Brown’s edited collection, The Death of Gauguin, was painted by Walcott as part of his ‘process of getting ‘inside’ the character’ when he was writing his poem on Gauguin for Midsummer.80 Brown’s decision to use one of Walcott’s watercolours for his book’s cover signposts that, starting from the 1980s, Walcott’s paintings were also beginning to circulate more widely and were exhibited, bought and sold – incidentally, as Bruce King remarked, the first decisive steps in this direction were taken in a Trinidadian art gallery belonging to Stella Beaubrun and Clara Rosa de Lima herself.81 In his 2000 biography of Walcott, King, who acknowledges, mostly anecdotally but on multiple occasions, the importance of painting and painters in Walcott’s life, includes some photos of the poet/painter working on his canvases, his cover for his friend Hunter Francois’s First and Last Poems (1950), and a few of his sketches, storyboards, posters and watercolours – one, representing Papa Sam from Walcott’s play Marie Laveau, is on the back cover of the volume. Reproductions of some ink drawings and watercolours Walcott prepared for Omeros were also included in Hamner’s Epic of the Dispossessed (1997), albeit mostly as ‘illustrations’ rather than as accompanying texts deserving of critical engagement in themselves.82 In his important book on Omeros, instead, Hamner both noted and commented on Walcott’s references to other painters and their works: for instance, he saw Walcott’s decision to write about Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors (1915–23) as his way of signalling ‘the anti-art self-consciousness of his own work’ and argued that, when he looked at Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899) (Fig. 5.6), Walcott registered his realisation that he ‘was discovering the artistic potential in his most

24    Derek Walcott’s Painters

familiar reality’.83 In contrast with Hamner, in her seminal Derek Walcott: Poetry and Poetics, Paula Burnett paid no mind to the Duchamp connection but described Winslow Homer as a ‘key figure of Western hegemony’, his painting as ‘essentially an act of voyeurism, with the artist constructing an image of an exotic other who confirms the dominance of the voyeur’: she concluded that Walcott had brought The Gulf Stream into his poem to ‘challenge the center’s reading of the world’.84 It is not surprising that critics and scholars who discuss references to paintings and painters in Walcott’s works might choose different examples or that, even when they focus on the same one, they should reach dissimilar conclusions. In this case, however, if Burnett’s reading fails to take into account the obvious enthusiasm with which Walcott greets Homer’s painting in Omeros, or the admiration he professes to have felt for the artist in published and unpublished essays, Hamner’s observation could be better qualified since, arguably, Walcott had ‘discovered’ the artistic potential of the Caribbean well before the late 1980s encounter with Homer’s work he describes in the poem. The nature of my agreement or disagreement with Burnett’s and Hamner’s assessments of Walcott’s engagement with Homer will become clearer in the following chapters, but here I have resorted to these two examples to simply point out that in the impressive scholarship on Walcott, where his preoccupations with great poets of the past have been studied in depth, even over-scrutinised, his creative engagement with visual artists has not received the same meticulous critical scrutiny or contextual analysis, not even in major authoritative studies such as Hamner’s or Burnett’s monographs. Another surge in scholarly interest in Walcott’s visual frame of reference was triggered by the publication of Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), a long poem in which Walcott’s autobiographical musings are intermeshed with a biography in verse of the Caribbean-born Jacob Camille Pissarro and Walcott’s quest for a precise and illuminated detail in an elusive painting, namely ‘a slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound’ (TH7). Walcott’s biographical approach to Pissarro (covering some important milestones and events of his life like the Salon controversy, the Affaire Dreyfus, the Franco-Prussian War, his collaboration with and mentoring of other artists like Gauguin or Paul Cézanne, or family troubles) encouraged critics and scholars to take into consideration and draw at least some connections between the two artists’ contextual realities and aesthetic strategies: some responded to this implicit invitation, albeit with varying degrees of engagement,85 but references to Pissarro’s life, career and works often tend to scratch the surface and remain peripheral to the general scope of the studies in which they appear. The fact that, in Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott adamantly refuses to attribute the ‘epiphanic detail [which] illuminates an entire epoch’ (TH8) to either Veronese or Tiepolo might have made scholars feel justified to restrain themselves from taking into account the two Venetian artists’ contextual realities or their modes of representation; for the same reason, the fact that Walcott

Introduction    25

ultimately privileges Tiepolo over Veronese for his title has been entirely overlooked. A full appreciation of what Walcott saw in the ‘exact lucency’ (TH7) of the dog’s thigh, however, is harder to achieve without, for example, an understanding of the ways in which the two Venetian artists represented dogs in their paintings. If Tiepolo borrowed his dogs from Veronese, in fact, he freed them from the subordinate role his predecessor gave them. As I have also argued elsewhere, Walcott’s foregrounding of Tiepolo in the poem’s title reveals his preference for an artist intent on restoring agency to normally marginalised and disempowered subjects, and whose priorities and tactics deserve consideration because they chime with Walcott’s own and with the structure and remit of the poem itself.86 Overall, therefore, despite the rich and extensive scholarship on Walcott which comprises numerous excellent studies covering a wide a variety of perspectives, the ways in which Walcott’s poems, plays, essays, paintings and, more broadly, his vision, were shaped by his exposure to visual artists and their works, seem to both necessitate and deserve further investigation: Derek Walcott’s Painters: A Life with Pictures is the first monograph that puts this crucial aspect of Walcott’s writing at the centre of its remit. The objective of this book was never to provide a painstaking list of all the painters, paintings and artistic movements Walcott mentioned in his career, but to contribute to redress the balance and fill this obvious gap in the scholarship by contextualising and putting in dialogue Walcott’s poems, plays, essays or canvases with specific artists and/or paintings who/which significantly contributed, over the years, to Walcott’s articulation of his own politics and poetics. Far from being just a meticulous study of how the imagery, language, mood or shape of certain poems might mirror the pictorial qualities of a given painting, Derek Walcott’s Painters: A Life with Pictures appreciates instead that if, in his complex responses to particular artists and works, Walcott was generally attentive and receptive to the technical handling of colour, composition, or light and darkness, he also displayed a keen interest in the multiple narratives that the works he was confronting not only explicitly revealed but also implicitly suggested. Walcott’s interest in the narratives contained in a single image finds its roots, at least in part, in his love for the comic books he avidly read as a young boy and credited as a crucial inspiration for the preparation of his own storyboards and as works which transmitted to him the gusto for encapsulating stories and ‘drama’ through the use of specific angles, perspectives and compositions.87 As we will see, for example, Walcott’s sensitiveness to the delicate drama of simple but attentive renditions of the weather as in Pissarro’s Four Seasons (c. 1872), or of the colour of Caribbean waters in Winslow Homer’s watercolours and oils, prompted him to be even more alert to the troubled history that could be found in that sea, to further ponder the role that the weather could play in a place’s understanding of itself or in discursive determinations of a given locality’s status in the eyes of its inhabitants and visitors.

26    Derek Walcott’s Painters

Mindful that, like all viewers, he also confronted himself when he was looking at a painting, and that the times and places of these confrontations were part of, and shaped, his experience, Walcott repeatedly offers, in his writing, explicit or implicit clues regarding the ‘location’ and circumstances in which he comes across an original painting or its reproduction, either for the first time or on significant successive occasions. We know that initially he became familiar with some of the great masterpieces of the world whilst in St Lucia where he opened his first artbooks damaged by intense use and soiled with brush cleaners (AL50–1). As we will see, Walcott himself repeatedly insisted on the distinct value of experiencing the European literary or artistic canon whilst being immersed in a place characterised by a daily sense of renewal which can foster ‘fresh’ perspectives.88 Walcott’s ‘freshness’ of perspective is also evident in his decision to approach the great masterpieces of the past as if they were contemporary works – he believed that ‘to divide painting chronologically was an error’89 – and in the fact that he never fetishised the paintings he admired, not only because he was dealing with reproductions but also because he wanted to locate their meaning in what they showed and not in what they ‘were’. The influence of his Caribbean outlook did not cease to play a part when Walcott began to travel extensively abroad or to work and live for a substantial part of the year in the United States: in a way, he could always re-inhabit a ‘Caribbean of the mind’ from where he could look at a painting with fresh eyes, even in metropolitan museums which, like artbooks, he approximated with a mixture of excitement and diffidence. Walcott, in fact, at times appended to his references to paintings or painters a description of himself walking around a museum – not only leafing through a book – at a precise juncture of his life, in search of something that he could not find, found only by approaching a given work ‘against the grain’ or by focusing on details that had been generally neglected, often responding, openly or covertly, to the curatorial and editorial textual framing and concomitant narratives that accompanied the work in question. Walcott, in fact, was conscious that our individual response to works of art can be informed by discourses circulating at their time of production, throughout the history of their reception, and evident in the modalities of their canonisation and institutionalisation. I have analysed Walcott’s scenes of mediated encounter and his readings of particular works by addressing editorial/curatorial decisions and received interpretations which might have contributed to his understanding of, or triggered his response to, certain artists and their works. As we will see, moreover, when museums are brought into the picture, explicitly or implicitly, there are occasions when even the organisation of their different rooms appears to have had some influence on Walcott. The idiosyncratic layout of The Frick Museum in New York, where paintings from different epochs and other artefacts are exhibited side by side and where Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider (c. 1655) (Fig. 7.2) is on display,

Introduction    27

for instance, seems to have inspired (or at least reinforced) Walcott’s decision to juxtapose this particular oil on canvas with Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Knight, Death and the Devil (1503) in a poem that shares the name with Rembrandt’s painting. Similarly, from the room where Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899) (Fig. 5.6) is exhibited in The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, one can glimpse paintings and statues in contiguous rooms that are devoted to the nineteenth-century North American frontier and the predicament of Native American tribes. It is unsurprising, therefore, that, in Omeros, Walcott refers to and draws parallels between Homer’s famous oil on canvas, the African American/Afro-Caribbean experience of dislocation, and the Trail of Tears, the Ghost Dance, and the overall nefarious effects of Manifest Destiny. Yet, far from following curators’ or critics’ leads blindly, Walcott often negotiates a space for his own interpretation precisely in the fissures of received (con)textualisations, rejecting their marginalising rhetoric or reshuffling their strategic prioritisations by complicating simplistic antagonistic perspectives. In so doing, he creates, for himself and his readers, alternative and empowering re-textualisations for the works of art he creatively engages with. In Chapter 3 I will discuss how in In a Fine Castle and The Last Carnival Walcott exposes the shortfalls of his characters’ disabling alignments with the traditional interpretation of Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera as a representation of (ostensibly) universal and eternal ‘beauty’. Similarly, we will see that, in Another Life, far from following Craven’s analysis of Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire (1839) (Fig. 1.8), where this complex painting is flattened as ‘an emblem of destruction’,90 Walcott identifies in it the potential for a new beginning. This continues to be the case for the poem in Midsummer when, as shown above, Walcott reimagines Turner’s ‘burning … ships’ as visual counterparts of the ‘burning’ alleys of the Brixton riots and the ‘ending [of] empire’ (M34). Given the problematic history of the Caribbean, for Walcott it was always ‘better’ to name ‘a painter than a general’,91 a statement that, nonetheless, gestures towards the potential collusion of art and (colonial) history. More often than not, in fact, Walcott’s responses to paintings from Europe are characterised by an urge to rethink received readings complicit with that history. History, Walcott announces in Another Life was his ‘madness’ (AL66) and, in ‘The Schooner Flight’, his alter ego Shabine meets this ‘History’ embodied in his grandfather, a ‘parchment Creole’ who had illegitimate children with Shabine’s Black grandmother but refuses to ‘recognize’ his descendant.92 Over the years, Walcott’s interventions on the relationship between Caribbean and colonial ‘History’ have been thoroughly analysed, deconstructed, contested, celebrated or dismissed. Arguably, however, paraphrasing a line in Omeros voiced by Walcott/the narrator who condemns the decrees of a centre which arrogates for itself the right to create self-serving, exclusionary and selfabsolving narratives and establish parameters to which the rest of the world

28    Derek Walcott’s Painters

should submit, Walcott was keen to address and rewrite not only a ‘history’ but also an art history ‘of which’ the Caribbean ‘too’ was/is ‘capable’ (O197). The art history retraced here in Walcott’s poetry, plays, essays, journalism, and in his notebooks, sketches, watercolours and canvases, brings together the verbal, visual, local, Atlantic and global dimensions, and builds on carefully investigated and compounded reactions to painters and paintings who/which, like Walter Benjamin’s past ‘flash[ing] up [as an image] at the instant in which it can be recognized’,93 emerge as prominent at different junctures in Walcott’s life and career and whose reverberations inform his writing and visual works. Retracing this utterly neglected but empowering art history, therefore, also contributes to the delineation of a sui generis ‘visual’ biography which sheds new light on the ways in which Walcott envisaged and conjugated his engagement with the European, American and African American traditions, providing new vistas on his lifelong concern with their relationship with Caribbean culture and the role he believed the latter should and could play on a global scale. Furthermore, approaching the interaction between Walcott’s politics and aesthetics from this untested and refreshing perspective, Derek Walcott’s Painters: A Life with Pictures recalibrates and sharpens our understanding of both whilst foregrounding the importance of interdisciplinary dialogues in the Atlantic world and in decolonising discourses and processes.

Derek Walcott’s Painters: From Warwick Walcott’s Heirlooms to Morning, Paramin Derek Walcott’s Painters: A Life with Pictures is sustained by the belief that, as Baugh and Nepaulsingh asserted in 2009, ‘Walcott’s “imitation” of great painters is as rich, as complex, and as demanding of careful scholarship as is his imitation of great writers.’94 Bearing in mind that ‘imitatio’, for Walcott, is not a subservient act but a crucial step towards the forging of his own path to creativity and invention, Baugh and Nepaulsingh focus on the European legacy and to the role played by Craven’s A Treasury and other artbooks in Walcott’s formative years. I would argue, however, that in order to better understand his artistic trajectory, it is crucial to remember that the young Walcott was not introduced to art exclusively via the reproductions of ‘masterpieces’ of the past he diligently copied. On his native island, in fact, Walcott had direct access to ‘originals’ by local artists like his late father Warwick whose oils, watercolours and sketches were carefully preserved or hanging in the Walcott house, by his tutor Harold Simmons (whom, in Another Life, Walcott calls, repeatedly, ‘master’), and by his fellow apprentice Dunstan St. Omer, who went on to become St Lucia’s most prominent painter. Their individual and collective aesthetic choices had a decisive influence on the development of Walcott’s poetics but, so far, if their presence

Introduction    29

and importance has been noted, they have not received sustained attention. The first two chapters of this book are devoted to the vital task of broadening the scope of the investigation of Walcott’s initial engagement with visual artists by shifting the focus from ‘great painters’ of the past to the lessons that Walcott learnt from painters closer to home, under the tutelage of Simmons, in the collaborative atmosphere of his workshop, or indeed, as in the case of Warwick, in his own home. Derek Walcott’s Painters: A Life with Pictures, therefore, begins by focusing on Walcott’s domestic environment with a chapter entitled ‘A Brief History of a Vocation in (About) Fifteen Objects’. Using Neil MacGregor’s The History of the World in 100 Objects (2012) as a blueprint, this chapter recounts the history of Walcott’s vocation through objects/paintings (some lost, some still existing) which surrounded him when he was growing up in St Lucia. Most of these objects (original watercolours, copies from European masters, family portraits, sketches) were heirlooms from Walcott’s father Warwick who had died when Walcott was only one year old. Walcott’s exposure to his father’s notebooks, sketchbooks, self-portraits, portraits, landscapes, seascapes, copies and originals, as we will see, revealed to the young Walcott the possibilities inherent in a fruitful combination of verbal and visual and, countering disparaging or ‘postcard’ representations of the local while gently promoting social and political commitment, they also paved the way for Walcott’s engagement with the island’s geography and its social reality. Warwick’s predilection for watercolours, which Walcott considered less ‘rhetorical’, ‘pretentious’ and ‘egotistical’ than oil paintings,95 affected Walcott in terms of his choice of medium – his production of oils intensified only in the 1990s – but watercolour painting also modulated Walcott’s expression and mediated his perception. Compared with oil paintings, watercolours not only make painted figures and objects more elusive (or ‘poetic’ rather than ‘prosaic’) and establish a more intimate (‘tonal’) connection with viewers, but, if they want to become ‘awesome witness[es] of time’, great watercolourists, who ‘concentrat[e] on the instant’, must readily ‘adapt to the speed and betrayal of changing clouds’ to avoid mistakes which cannot be easily amended.96 Alive to ‘the present tense [which] exists continually in art’,97 Walcott saw ‘Time’ not as a predictable, predetermined linear process but as an unforeseeable series of ‘epiphanic’ moments predicated on simultaneity. The competence to render the world and the ‘flash’ of such complex instants both exactly and explicitly with a brush (or a pen) could be more soundly acquired through a painstaking finessing of the (watercolourist’s) ability to carefully negotiate change and mutability than by embarking on a (unavailing) quest for the (allegedly) eternal and universal. In his early artistic explorations, Walcott was not alone: Chapter 2, ‘Atelier des Tropiques: The Local Scene’, zooms in on Walcott’s apprenticeship years in Simmons’s workshop with St. Omer when the three were

30    Derek Walcott’s Painters

striving to establish new collective and individual coordinates to arrive at what Simmons called ‘a perfection to West Indian things’.98 Simmons’s and St. Omer’s works are approached in the context of the concomitant decolonising and affirmative processes they were shaped by and contributed to shape. Putting some of their works in dialogue with Walcott’s own poetry and paintings, from his first books privately published in the late 1940s to works of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and produced after 2000, this chapter highlights how Walcott’s early years as a painter had long-lasting effects on his vision. We will see, by way of example, how Walcott’s 1987 poem ‘The Light of the World’ and his watercolours Gauguin in Martinique (1991) (Fig. 6.3) and Ideal Head: Helen/Omeros (1998) are in conversation with Harold Simmons’s Albertina (c. 1940) (Fig. 2.3), the first portrait of a local Black woman Walcott and St. Omer remember to have seen, and St. Omer’s oil of a Black Marianne inspired by Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) (Figs 2.5 and 2.4) which was commissioned to the St Lucian artist to celebrate his island’s independence in 1979. In Chapter 3, entitled ‘Voyages to Cythera and the European Legacy’, the focus is on the so far unexplored but prominent role played by the French eighteenth-century painter Jean-Antoine Watteau in three related texts, Un Voyage à Cythère, In a Fine Castle and The Last Carnival, which could be seen as a work in progress covering more than two decades. Watteau, an artist who saw and illustrated the decline of the French aristocracy and its accompanying delusions, self-delusions, self-fashioning and self-­mythologisation, encapsulated in his paintings some of the tensions and renegotiations of roles which culminated in the French Revolution. Watteau’s works, which Walcott had studied in detail as witnessed by the numerous cut-outs and repeated references contained in his notebooks and sketchbooks, provided a useful springboard for investigations of the place of the European legacy in Caribbean culture in a period that covered the process of decolonisation and the twilight of the British Empire, the creation and dissolution of the West Indian Federation, the decadence of a retrogressive self-mythologising elite, the Trinidad Black Power Revolution of 1970, and their concomitant questioning of privilege, class, race and gender structures. Walcott’s own unfinished reproduction of Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (1717) as the stage’s backcloth for his two plays signposts Walcott’s attitude to a European legacy which should not be paraded as an overpowering and monolithic depository of (ostensibly) universal standards but which, revisited taking into account the artist’s and viewers’ historical junctures, can be profitably appropriated, adapted and transformed to serve the now and the local. Walcott’s interest in masters and masterpieces of the past and his debt to Craven have recurrently been framed in terms of European art but Walcott’s poetry, plays, essays and art criticism also establish rich and complex conversations with visions of ‘America’ by white North American and African American artists and Mexican or Caribbean painters, conversations that

Introduction    31

have been seriously neglected by the current scholarship. ‘American Visions I – Frescoes of the New World and Black America’, the fourth chapter of this book, argues, for the first time, that the young Walcott looked at the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera for inspiration when writing his epic drama Drums and Colours (1958), commissioned to him to celebrate the West Indian Federation. The same chapter also retraces Walcott’s relationship with the United States from his first visits in the late 1950s, and it concludes with a study of Walcott’s play Walker (2002), written in the 1990s and focused on the nineteenth-century abolitionist David Walker. Here Walcott excoriates the ‘Black Fear’ hampering development for Black people and artists in 1980s Boston whilst foregrounding the African American visual tradition (with a particular focus on Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin and Romare Bearden) which had been routinely marginalised in American art history. Chapter 5, ‘American Visions II – Black Odysseys’, investigates the poet’s crucial relationship with the African American painter Romare Bearden whose artistic example facilitated Walcott’s arrival at an artistic vision that comprised the European legacy, the African roots and the New World routes. Walcott’s admiration for Winslow Homer is discussed in this chapter alongside Walcott’s enthusiasm for the Trinidadian Jackie Hinkson. He highly valued these two artists’ ability to render the Caribbean weather with what, in the partly unpublished prose memoir American, without America,99 he described as ‘barometric’ precision, but it is evident that his appreciation went well beyond simple respect and regard for technical mastery. This chapter also highlights how, in Omeros, Walcott subtly conflated the troubled waters of Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899) with those of J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840) (Figs 5.6 and 5.7) in a move that, bringing life, art and politics together, provided a scathing commentary on present repercussions of transatlantic slavery on its victims, perpetrators and, most importantly, on those Michael Rothberg has recently called ‘implicated subjects’.100 Chapter 6, ‘Painting (and) the Caribbean: The Awe of the Ordinary and the Search for Anonymity’, reveals a Walcott keen to foreground Caribbean responses to traditional strategies of representation as well as the role played by the Caribbean in the development of the arts in the metropole. Focusing on Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), where Walcott brings together the products of his brush and pen for a visual and verbal exploration of different ways in which he could establish a rewarding conversation with a Caribbean-born artist who had challenged the European tradition and contributed to change its course (Pissarro), with Old Masters whose representational strategies he was keen to redeploy to his own advantage (Tiepolo in particular), and with a body of work by artists who have painted the Caribbean (including Pissarro, Fritz Melbye, Gauguin, Charles Laval, Bearden, Simmons, Homer and, more recently, St. Omer and Hinkson), this chapter pays particular attention also to Walcott’s engagement with Pissarro’s early drawings, which are largely ignored by the existing scholarship on the poem.

32    Derek Walcott’s Painters

Walcott’s inclusion of his own paintings in the volume has been rightly identified as a move that goes beyond illustration: they are there ‘in their own right, interfacing with the poem’ as Baugh aptly suggests.101 Overall, however, rather than as works deserving of being seriously analysed, Walcott’s paintings have been more often regarded as works which, ‘as long as one does not demand that they be on the same level as [Walcott’s] poems or challenge comparison with Pissarro, Veronese, and Tiepolo, can evoke only pleasure and admiration’.102 In Chapter 6, I will devote my attention to the paintings themselves while investigating the nature of their interplay with poetic lines, particularly in the context of the wide-ranging ‘catalogue’ of the Caribbean ‘ordinary’ they jointly offer (TH53). In Walcott’s paintings one might discern the effects of Walcott’s engagement with previous masters, but they also bring into sharp relief, most importantly, the crucial role of creative reappropriation in Walcott’s continuous refining of an aesthetic focused on the local and of the coordinates of what, in Another Life, he calls ‘Adam’s task of giving things their names’ (AL152). Using Pissarro as primary exemplification, in Tiepolo’s Hound Walcott mobilises both pen and brush to redefine his ‘adamic task’ as a pursuit in which the painter or writer has to become ‘invisible’ and – relinquishing egotism, self-centredness and the ‘vanity of subject that corrupts amateurs’ (OTC21, 9) – arrives at producing works ‘without a cloud of identity’.103 Chapter 6 ends with a study of ‘White Egrets’ where, ten years after Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott continued to revisit and reconfigure the kind of relationship painters or poets – particularly Caribbean ones responding to their own human and natural environment – should establish with the ‘things’ they are supposed to ‘name’ in paint or words. Engaging with the work of another Caribbean-born artist, the iconic ornithologist John James Audubon, the poem talks, simultaneously, to Audubon’s drawings, to the production of ‘ways of seeing’ increasingly shaped by what Laurence Buell has called the ‘environmental imagination’, and to what many perceive as an urgent need to reconsider and resituate the species boundary at the centre of one’s enquiry.104 In the context of his response to Audubon’s work, as I will show, Walcott insists on the fact that the poet/painter cannot really give ‘things’ their names without a thorough understanding and rethinking of their ‘thinginess’, without renouncing the urge to dominate, control or transform his subjects as he pleases, and without acknowledging their ability to intervene and play an active role in the creative process. The last chapter, ‘Poems ‘Out Of’ Paintings’, focuses on Walcott’s most significant and representative ekphrastic efforts throughout his career and acts as an apt conclusion to the book since, amongst other works, it also revisits from this perspective some of the paintings already discussed in previous chapters. Walcott’s ekphrastic endeavour has been overlooked by scholars focused on the aesthetics of ekphrasis who do not tend to engage with Caribbean culture.105 Walcott scholars, instead, have described

Introduction    33

Walcott’s ekphrasis as illustrative of issues as different as intertextuality, postcolonial rewriting and aesthetics, double visions,106 the poet’s interest in the inextricability of life and art,107 his exploration of ‘his own inscription, as a man of African descent, in the modern aesthetics that require Blackness as a constitutive Other’,108 or as his way of ‘breaking down spatial and temporal binaries that … bind Caribbean landscapes in hierarchical relations to European art’.109 A more comprehensive account of Walcott’s ekphrastic practices like the one on offer here, however, had never been attempted before. Starting from early poems like ‘The Hurricane’, or ‘The Polish Rider’ (both in In a Green Night, 1962), this chapter investigates Walcott’s approach to ekphrasis using as stepping stones texts addressing visual works as different as Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa (1829–33) (Fig. 7.1), Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda (c. 1635) (Fig. 7.5), Bearden’s The Obeah’s Dawn (1984) (Fig. 5.2), or Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider or The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662) (Figs 7.2 and 7.4). This chapter shows how, over the years, Walcott resorted to ekphrasis, mostly in idiosyncratic ways and not exclusively in his poems: for instance, a scene in Drums and Colours (1958) which shares its title with and is modelled on John Everett Millais’s ‘world-making’110 painting The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870) (Fig. 4.2), can be seen as an experiment with ekphrasis understood, acted out and expanded on as embodied performance. Walcott’s poem ‘American Muse’,111 his response to Walker Evans’s photographic portrait(s) of ‘the Mona Lisa of the Depression’,112 is given serious consideration in this chapter and not only because Walcott recognised that ‘photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are’.113 One of Evans’s portraits of the Muse, in fact, was later included in a volume which orchestrates a ‘mutually independent … fully collaborative’114 but, ultimately, segregationist relationship between images and words that Walcott decisively rejected on both aesthetic and political grounds. Favouring cooperation rather than separation or competition between different media, or between painter and writer, Walcott’s ekphrasis, I argue, challenges the predominant template which casts the relationship between literature and the visual as ‘essentially paragonal’, or as ‘a struggle for dominance between the image and the word’.115 Walcott’s ekphrastic efforts, in fact, resonate less with paragonal antagonism than with Bearden’s collaborative ethos or the process at the core of creolisation and the Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant’s poetics of Relation, where ‘each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the other’.116 This chapter ends with a detailed study of Morning, Paramin (2016), where every poem by Walcott enters in a mutually transformative dialogue with a painting by Peter Doig and where the ‘collaborative’ nature of the volume allowed Walcott to come full circle and relive and replicate the excitement and delight of his early years in St Lucia when, inspired by

34    Derek Walcott’s Painters

his father’s sketchbooks and watercolours and at work in Simmons’s workshop, he began to shape his vision, bouncing ideas with his eclectic tutor and Dunstan St. Omer, his ‘soul companion’ (OTC21, 12). Creating new composite verbal and visual works of art, each of the pairings in Morning, Paramin contributes to a collection which is, in more than one way, a fit conclusion to a career that was always sustained by the aim to forge a vision where paint and words would ‘cohere / and finally ignite’ (AL58–9). Walcott’s very final verbal and visual heirlooms are also pondered in a short epilogue/farewell which brings the book to a close.

Notes 1. Walcott, The Prodigal (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 28. From now on, I will be referring to this volume as P followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 2. See, for example, Terada, Derek Walcott’s Poetry, 120, 125, 133; Loreto, Crowning, 121, 123, 124, 137. The same happened in his creative writings seminars at the University of Essex (2010–13). 3. King, Derek Walcott, 571. Copies of this calendar can be found in the Derek Walcott Collection, Alma Jordan Library, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad, Box 35, folder 7. From now on I will be referring to material from this archive as UWI-AJL, followed by the Box and folder number when applicable. 4. In the 1997 catalogue The Dual Muse, one finds three undated watercolours by Walcott, two untitled and one titled Man on the Wall under Palm Tree Looking Out at the Sea to which I will briefly return in Chapter 6. Friedman’s The Writer’s Brush includes two of Walcott’s watercolours: Seascape of St Lucia (1983) and Boats in St Lucia (1983). 5. For highlights of the exhibition How Beautiful My Brethren and Sistren: Derek Walcott, Life and Work see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3IiigZC-F8. 6. Walcott in Questel, ‘I Have Moved Away’, 12. 7. For O Starry Starry Night at the Lakeside Theatre, University of Essex, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_mLtq3zWzg (part 1) and https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=dJTIhjr5yw0 (part 2). 8. See Derek Walcott Official Website: https://www.derekwalcott.com/. 9. Collier, ‘Introduction: Walcott’s Guardian Aesthetic’, xviii. 10. Collier, ‘Introduction: Walcott’s Guardian Aesthetic’, xviii, xvii. 11. Walcott, ‘Bewildered and Betwixt’, 423. 12. Walcott, ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 36–7; Island Light. 13. Walcott, ‘A Conversion’, pages unnumbered; Walcott ‘Eine Bekehrung/A Conversion’, 42–51. 14. Walcott, ‘To Romare Bearden’, 3. 15. Walcott in McQueen, Queen and Country, pages unnumbered. 16. Baugh, ‘Painters and Paintings’, 239. 17. Baugh, ‘Painters and Paintings’, 239–50.

Introduction    35 18. Stewart, ‘Walcott and Painting’, 56. 19. Stewart, ‘Walcott and Painting’, 60–5. Stewart’s title for Vermeer’s The Milkmaid is The Kitchen Maid and she shortens Whistler’s to Old Battersea Bridge but there is no doubt that she was referring to these paintings because she includes illustrations in her article (The Milkmaid, however, appears as if flipped horizontally in the reproduction). There are no images for Turner’s oil and Stewart uses the title The Burning of the Houses of Parliament (c. 1834–5) but she must have referred to The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834 (1835) instead because the ‘wide expanse of the sea’ and the ‘smoking sea’ – the River Thames in fact – that Stewart describes on p. 63 do not feature in the first painting where the view is north over Old Palace Yard from the Abingdon Street end. There are two versions of Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, one which shows the Houses of Parliament from the upstream side of Westminster Bridge (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and the other from downriver (Cleveland Museum of Art): in both cases the waters of the Thames reflect the fire as the flames and smoke blow over Parliament. 20. Stewart, ‘Walcott and Painting’, 57. 21. Stewart, ‘Walcott and Painting’, 56. 22. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘Annotations’, 266–7. 23. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘What the Poem’, 213. 24. Brenda Simmons, personal communication, 28 February 2020. 25. See Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 13. 26. Walcott, ‘Leaving School’, 31. From now on, I will be referring to this essay as LS followed by the page number in parentheses in the text 27. ‘Outside the Cathedral’ – also under the alternative title ‘Inside the Cathedral’ – exists in various drafts, with some overlapping, in the Derek Walcott Papers at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto (MsColl 00136, Box 2, folders 17–23). From now on I will be referring to this archive as TFRBL followed by references to the relevant MSColl, Box and folder when applicable. For ‘Outside the Cathedral’ I will be referring to the versions in folder 18 – whose pages are unnumbered – and in folder 21 – which has numbered pages – as, respectively, OTC18, and OTC21 followed by a page number. This quotation is from OTC21, 8. 28. Baugh, ‘Painters and Paintings’, 249. 29. Walcott originally published Another Life in 1973; it was reprinted with introductory material in Derek Walcott: Another Life: Fully Annotated, edited by Edward Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009): pp. 1–152. This quotation is from p. 58 of the 2009 edition and, from now on, I will be referring to this edition as AL followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 30. Stewart, ‘Walcott and Painting’, 68. 31. Mordecai, ‘Crystal of Ambiguities’, 97. 32. Baugh ‘Painters and Paintings’, 249. 33. Mordecai, ‘Crystal of Ambiguities’, 100. 34. Stewart, ‘Walcott and Painting’, 68. 35. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 102, emphasis mine.

36    Derek Walcott’s Painters 36. Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound, 19. From now on, I will be referring to this edition as TH followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 37. Walcott in Friedman, Writer’s Brush, 382. 38. Walcott, The Arkansas Testament (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 9. From now on, I will be referring to this text as AT followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 39. Walcott in Friedman, Writer’s Brush, 382. 40. Baugh, ‘Painters and Paintings’, 249. 41. Walcott in Handley, ‘Interview’, 103–4. 42. Walcott in Handley, ‘Interview’, 104. 43. Craven, Treasury, 327, Craven’s book exists in different editions. Here I will be referring to the 1939 edition unless otherwise specified. Most of the colour plates for the 1939 edition are available on Wikimedia Commons: https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_Treasury_of_Art_Masterpieces. 44. Walcott, 25 Poems (Bridgetown: Advocate Co., 1949), 5. From now on, I will be referring to this volume as 25P followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 45. Walcott in Sajé and Handley, ‘Sharing’, 134. 46. Derek Walcott, ‘What the Twilight Says’, in What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1998): 3–35, 9 (originally printed in 1970). From now on, I will be referring to the 1998 edition as WTS followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 47. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 8. 48. Lessing, Laocoon, 90–2. 49. Lessing, Laocoon, 92. 50. Walcott in Dual Muse, 1999, 40. 51. Walcott in Ciccarelli, ‘Reflections’, 299. 52. Ismond, Abandoning Dead Metaphors, 3. 53. Walcott in Burnett, Derek Walcott, 161. 54. Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric. 55. It is in fact possible that Walcott had in mind Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (c.1440–5) which, unlike Lippi’s, was included in Craven’s 1939 volume as a colour plate (55) because in ‘Outside the Cathedral’ he explained that he ‘saw Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in the yellow of an almond leaf on a thin tree’ (OTC21, 5). This fresco appears bathed in yellow sunlight as it was originally meant to be seen under low light. There is another version of the Annunciation by Fra Angelico (c. 1426), currently in the Museo del Prado, which features a very bright ray of golden light which connects God’s hands, in the top lefthand corner, with Mary’s face and breast. Here Fra Angelico also included a depiction of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and the lushness and brightness of the vegetation under the sunlight might have resonated with Walcott’s Caribbean environment. Precise attribution, however, given the identical subject of the works, is not crucial for the line of my argument. 56. Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber and Faber, [1990] 2000), 207. From now on, I will be referring to this volume as O followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 57. Walcott in Friedman, ‘Derek Walcott’; Walcott in Dual Muse, 1999, 40.

Introduction    37 58. Walcott in Handley, ‘Interview’, 100. 59. Walcott in Friedman, ‘Derek Walcott’. 60. Walcott, Midsummer (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 11. From now on, I will be referring to this volume as M followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 61. Walcott, The Bounty (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 4. From now on, I will be referring to this volume as B followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 62. Walcott in Dual Muse, 1999, 20. 63. The two unpublished notebooks of Another Life are in the Derek Walcott Collection, one of the Special Collections of University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica (UWI-MJ). They consist of two handwritten notebooks completed between April 1965–November 1965 (notebook one) and November 1965–December 1966 (notebook two). The manuscript began as a prose memoir but starts to break into poetry in January 1966. Most of the pages of the notebooks are numbered by hand. Here I will be referring to the manuscript notebooks as: ALms1 and ALms2, followed by their page number when given. This quotation is from ALms1, 1. 64. Figueroa, ‘Sea Memories’, 129. 65. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 120. 66. Walcott in Questel, ‘I Have Moved Away’, 12. 67. This workbook is at UWI-AJL Box 10, folder 14. It mostly consists of notes and extracts of Marlowe’s play; the pages are unnumbered and will be referred to from now on as DF in parentheses in the text. 68. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, in Complete Plays and Poems, 326. 69. Walcott seems to respond here to this tension which is well encapsulated in the famous small but significant variation between the 1604 and the 1616 versions of the play: ‘Never too late, if Faustus can repent’ (1604A – Marlowe Dr Faustus (A Text), 36) and ‘Never too late, if Faustus will repent’ (1616B – Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, in Complete Plays and Poems, 291). 70. Different drafts and drawings related to Vangelo Nero can be found at UWIAJL. A red notebook dated 1972 with the cut-out from Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus on the cover and various sketches/drawings is in Box 39, folder 1 which also contains a signed letter/agreement between Walcott and Produzioni De Laurentiis for the production of Vangelo Nero. 71. A draft of the filmscript also dated 1972 is at UWI-AJL, Box 6, folder 9: these forty typescript pages are numbered by hand and will be referred to as VN6.9 followed by their page number in parentheses in the text. 72. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 120. 73. Livesley, ‘Later Life’, 29. 74. Smiles, ‘Turner’, 150–3. See note 19 in this chapter for Turner’s different paintings of this event. 75. King, Derek Walcott, 429; Bensen, ‘Poet as Painter’, 338. 76. Terada, Derek Walcott’s Poetry, 119–20. 77. Terada, Derek Walcott’s Poetry, 127. 78. Ismond, Abandoning Dead Metaphors, 9. 79. Terada, Derek Walcott’s Poetry, 120.

38    Derek Walcott’s Painters 80. De Lima, ‘Painting’, 188. 81. King, Derek Walcott, 384. 82. Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed, 38, 39, 50, 68, 145. 83. Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed, 119–20, 100–1. 84. Burnett, Derek Walcott, 172, 173. 85. See for example, Breslin, Nobody’s Nation; Fulford, ‘Painting the Sublime’; Erickson, ‘Artists’ Self-Portraiture’; Baugh Derek Walcott; Emery, Modernism; Casteel, Second Arrivals; Handley, New World Poetics; Fumagalli, Caribbean Perspectives; Neumann, ‘Postcolonial Ekphrasis’; Seeger, Nonlinear Temporality, and, more recently, Neumann and Rippl, ‘Derek Walcott’s “Twin Heads”’. 86. Fumagalli, Caribbean Perspectives, 105–9, 112–21. 87. Walcott, personal communication, 29 October 2016. 88. Walcott in Brown and Johnson, ‘Thinking Poetry’, 182. 89. Walcott in Loreto, Crowning, 203. 90. Craven, Treasury, 434. 91. Walcott, ‘Where I Live’, 32. 92. Walcott, The Star-Apple Kingdom (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), 8–9. From now on, I will be referring to this volume as SAK followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 93. Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 247. 94. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘What the Poem’, 215. 95. Walcott in Montenegro, ‘Interview’, 136. 96. Walcott, ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 37. 97. Walcott in Loreto, Crowning, 202. 98. Simmons, ‘Critique’, 8. 99. Manuscript and typescript copies of American, without America which include titled and untitled, typed and handwritten, unnumbered chapters, sometimes in multiple drafts, can be found at UWI-AJL Box 9, folder 13, at TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 1, folders 2–6. Quotations from and references to American, without America will be indicated as AWA in parentheses in the text. In the late 1970s, Walcott had envisaged the publication of American, without America as a collection of essays (he had planned to send it to Jonathan Cape because one of the draft contains a title page which mentions this particular publisher) which was to include ‘Leaving School’, ‘The Muse of History’, ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry’ and ‘On Choosing Port of Spain’, essays which had been already published separately in 1965, 1974 (both ‘The Muse of History’ and ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry’) and 1975. Other parts of American, without America were revised and published as ‘“Islands in the Stream”, Hemingway, Winslow Homer, and the Light of the Caribbean’ (1990) and ‘On Hemingway’ (1998), and as ‘Isla Incognita’ (2005). 100. Rothberg, Implicated Subject. 101. Baugh, Derek Walcott, 211. 102. Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, 285. 103. Walcott in Friedman, Writer’s Brush, 382. 104. Buell, Environmental Imagination; Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial Criticism, 6.

Introduction    39 105. Hollander, for example, has included an extract from a poem by Walcott devoted to Watteau (M31) – which I will analyse at the beginning of Chapter 6 – in his monumental anthology The Gazer’s Spirit (1995) but simply to support his reading of David Ferry’s response to The Embarkation for Cythera (Fig. 3.2) on p. 323. This is the only mention of Walcott (or indeed of a Caribbean writer) contained in the volume despite the fact that numerous poems by Walcott could have been easily used as primary exemplifications for the different categories of ekphrasis (capriccio, notional, actual and others) that Hollander outlines in his introduction. 106. Döring, Caribbean-English Passages; Neumann ‘Postcolonial Ekphrasis’; Neumann and Rippl, ‘Derek Walcott’s “Twin Heads”’. 107. Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed, 119. 108. Emery, Modernism, 186. 109. Handley, New World Poetics, 322. 110. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want, xv, emphasis in the text. 111. Walcott, The Fortunate Traveller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 7–8. From now on, I will be referring to this volume as FT followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 112. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 294. 113. Sontag, On Photography, 6–7. 114. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (London: Penguin, 2006), xix. From now on I will be referring to this book as PFM followed by page numbers (when available) in parentheses in the text. 115. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 1. 116. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11.

Chapter 1

A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects

When Formidable Things Happen and Shocks and Revelations Come: Warwick Walcott’s Absent Presence Formative years are crucial in a writer’s career: as Graham Greene put it in The Lost Childhood, ‘the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share’.1 In 1987, in conversation with Charles H. Rowell, Derek Walcott referred precisely to Greene’s remarks to underline his belief that writers ‘mine their childhood or their boyhood up to about eighteen or twenty, when the formidable things happen and the shocks and revelations come’.2 Walcott’s early years in St Lucia, from his birth in 1930 to 1950, when he moved to Jamaica to attend university, are described in the autobiographical poem Another Life (1973) which was triggered by a request by Alan Ross to contribute a short piece for the London Magazine: the article, focused on Walcott’s youth and native place, was published in 1965 under the title ‘Leaving School’. After producing the article, Walcott continued to reminisce about his childhood, collecting his memories in two notebooks where the prose memoir gradually metamorphosed into the long poem which was completed in 1972 and published a year later. At that point Walcott was establishing himself as a major figure in the literary world: he already had eight collections of poems in print which had attracted praise on both sides of the Atlantic, more than ten of his plays had been performed in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and the United States and, in 1971, Dream on Monkey Mountain had received an Obie Award for Off-Broadway productions. Walcott’s activities are to be seen in the context of what, in his 1992 Nobel lecture, he calls the ‘delight’ and ‘privilege’ of witnessing Caribbean literature (in all the languages of the region) establishing itself as part of ‘the early morning of a culture’, a ‘flowering’ that, he insists, ‘had to come’.3

A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects    41

The importance that painting played in Walcott’s boyhood and future career is made immediately obvious by the fact that, in the first page of the first unpublished notebook of Another Life, Walcott describes his beginnings as ‘those mornings … when [he] imagined [himself] a painter’ (ALms1, 1). In 1942, in fact, Walcott became an apprentice painter in the workshop of Harold Simmons with other talented adolescents: among them was Dunstan St. Omer who was going to become St Lucia’s leading artist. Walcott’s interest in the arts, particularly the visual arts, had been triggered earlier by his exposure to his father’s artworks hanging in the house or available to him in old sketchbooks and notebooks; one can only wonder which of Warwick’s paintings was the one that, suddenly breaking into pieces after falling accidentally from the wall where it had hung for many years, inspired Walcott’s meditation on love, inconstancy and, crucially, impermanence, in ‘The Rusty Season Colours The Leaves’, one of the poems in his first collection dedicated to the memory of his father (25P26).4 Warwick had died of a mastoiditis in 1931 when Walcott and his twin brother Roderick were only one year and three months old: they grew up with their mother Alix and their older sister Pam. Warwick Walcott, a civil servant who, on the very day of his death, was due to be promoted from Clerk to Acting Deputy Registrar of the First District Court of St Lucia, had a profound passion for the arts and, as Methodists on a Catholic island, the Walcotts belonged to a minority fully committed to education. Warwick and his friends, for instance, used to stage concerts and scenes from plays at the Methodist school where his wife Alix worked.5 Alix Walcott, who later became head teacher at the Methodist Primary School, shared her husband’s keen interest in the arts and always encouraged her children to pursue their artistic inclinations; she also made sure that, posthumously, Warwick remained a powerful presence in the Walcott house. Seventeen years after the death of his father, the young Walcott, resigned to having become an orphan at such an early age, argues, in the poem ‘In My Eighteenth Year’, that ‘death’s gift’ is to focus the minds of the living on the ‘price’ or value of what has been lost (25P18). Warwick’s premature demise was considered a grave loss not only by the Walcott family but by the entire community; always engaged and committed, he was a founder of the Star Literary Club of St Lucia, had encouraged those who were to become leading painters of the next generation to embrace their vocations (Harold Simmons, who was to become his son’s mentor, was one of them) and had organised concerts to fund the construction of Castries Athletic Club’s pavilion.6 As his son Roderick insists, he was remembered by everyone as ‘a good man’ and his obituary in The Voice of St Lucia was entitled ‘Nature’s Gentleman’;7 in Walcott’s poem ‘A Letter from Brooklyn’, the words of an acquaintance that reached the poet twenty-eight years after his father’s death are proudly reported by the son: ‘“your father was a dutiful, honest / faithful, and useful person / … He used to sit around the table and paint pictures”.’8

42    Derek Walcott’s Painters

The first chapter of Another Life is famously prefaced by a quotation from André Malraux’s Psychology of Art where the French critic recounts how the painter Cimabue was ‘struck with admiration’ when he saw the ‘shepherd boy’ Giotto sketching sheep (AL1).9 Malraux, however, insists on the fact that Giotto was less inspired by the sheep than by the work of artists like Cimabue, adding that ‘what makes an artist is the circumstance that in his youth he was more deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of things which they portray’ (AL1). Baugh and Nepaulsingh read this correctly as a moving tribute to Warwick10 whose writing and paintings (originals, copies, sketches, watercolours, oils) were the first ones Walcott had been inspired by and contributed to determine the main coordinates along which he was going to articulate his vision. Warwick’s paintings and his notebooks of verse and sketches, in fact, were preserved with devotion by Alix and highly valued by his children. It was his father’s interest in the visual arts and his drawings and paintings that made a more lasting impression on the young Walcott: in his unpublished notes for Another Life, Walcott writes that his father’s drawings ‘still felt warm from his palm’, while his watercolours ‘for all their delicacy, sparkled freshly’ (ALms1, 65). In October 2016, in conversation with me, Walcott spoke with affection and admiration about Warwick’s watercolours and mentioned again most of the works by him he had listed in his 1965 autobiographical essay ‘Leaving School’ (9), in Another Life (in both the notebooks and the published version of the poem), in a long interview with Edward Hirsch in 1985,11 and in Tiepolo’s Hound (12–13). Amongst Warwick’s paintings, Walcott remembered his father’s selfportrait in watercolour; a miniature oil portrait of Walcott’s mother, ‘an oil that was very good for an amateur painter’;12 an original watercolour entitled The Coconut Walk (Fig. 1.5); another watercolour, ‘a romantic original of sea-birds and pluming breakers [Warwick] had called Riders of the Storm’; a ‘sketchbook of excellent pencil studies’ (LS27–8); a watercolour copy of Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) (Fig. 1.1) hanging in the living room. The fact that in ‘Leaving School’ Walcott declares, in no uncertain terms, ‘these objects had established my vocation’, indicates that they deserve more attention than has been afforded to them so far (LS28). Most of these foundational objects are now lost; sadly, they did not survive the ravages of time and are no longer tangibly available to us. Nonetheless, even long after their physical disappearance they continued to live concretely in Walcott’s memory and to shape his imagination. Time and time again, they are powerfully conjured up and turned into compelling material presences by the evocative powers of the poet’s descriptions which, more often than not, contain details of their appearance and properties (their size, colour, medium or material). If things, as Christopher Tilley has argued, ‘create people as much as people make them’,13 these objects are crucial to better understand how Walcott began to perceive the world around him, explore how he could make

A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects    43

sense of his perceptions, and then find his own way to share them with others or with Greene’s ‘great public world’. In his introduction to The History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor insists that ‘a history through things is impossible without poets’ and highlights the role played by poetic imagination in recreating the dialogue that the things we inherit from the past establish with their world and ours.14 Walcott’s imaginative and poetic renditions of his relationship with the things or objects that established his vocation reminds us that, without these ‘things’ which acquire a ‘voice’ through reinterpretation, it might be equally arduous to retrace the history of a poet’s vocation. In this chapter, I will focus on the things or objects that fostered the young Walcott’s curiosity and ambition. These objects, which contain refractions of the outer world with all its colonial and social complexities, enable us to catch a glimpse of how the inner world of Walcott’s imagination developed and was shaped by his interactions with them. As it is the case for much of what is inherited from the past, these remembered objects contain messages which are sometimes explicit and immediately decipherable; most of the time, however, conjectural work is required to tease out the stories they seem to implicitly contain.

A Moonlight Scene Backcloth, Notebooks of Verses, Sketchbooks Warwick’s notebooks and sketchbooks impressed upon the young Walcott that the cultivation of artistic and literary abilities entailed both discipline and commitment and constituted an important precedent for Walcott who began, at a very early age, to collect his writings or his drawings in exercise books. This routine was firmly encouraged by Alix and, throughout his career, Walcott filled hundreds of them. Warwick’s notebooks and sketchbooks also enabled his son to create a connection with his late father and come to terms with his absent presence. In the unpublished notes for Another Life, Walcott remembers that he used to ‘“me[e]t his [father’s] absence” daily’ through the ‘relics’ and objects he had left behind (ALms1, 15); as a matter of fact, he adds, his father’s absence felt ‘companionable’ and ‘sometimes [he] felt [he] would suddenly meet him around a corner for a quick report on [the son’s] progress’ (ALms1, 65). In Epitaph for the Young Walcott actually dramatises a meeting with his father’s ghost, who encourages him to follow in his steps and become an artist: ‘“If Thou observe the Star that guides the mariner / Beyond the dubious heaven of the promontory, you will please our Father … // … live His will”’ (EY37).15 Warwick also addresses his son, posthumously, in Omeros, where, in an imagined conversation, the poet reveals that his father’s notebooks actually triggered his writing career and interest in painting and Warwick, rejoicing in the fact that they share the same interests, celebrates his son’s success also as a fulfilment of his own artistic calling (O68).

44    Derek Walcott’s Painters

We know, however, that Walcott found only what he calls ‘evidence of a polite gracile talent’ in his father’s poems (LS28). In the notes for Another Life, Walcott recalls ‘a poem, straightforward in late Rossetti fashion’ and ‘a comic poem in dialect … probably Barbadian but more likely Southern’ (ALms1, 65). In a 1985 interview he confirmed that he could not recall any ‘poems of a serious nature’ but only ‘a couple of funny lyrics that were done in a Southern American dialect for some show [Warwick] was probably presenting’.16 Warwick’s work for local theatrical productions included both writing scripts and painting backcloths: amongst Warwick’s heirlooms, in fact, Walcott mentioned ‘a backcloth of a very ordinary kind of moonlight scene’, which had been used by the group of amateur actors Warwick and Alix performed with.17 Warwick’s experimentation with non-standard English and his simultaneous engagement with verse, theatre, drawing and painting revealed to his artist/writer-in-the-making son that one could productively combine one’s passion for the verbal and the visual. Walcott’s use of Caribbean vernaculars in his plays and in some of his poems, his work as poet, playwright and director, his innumerable sketches, storyboards or watercolours for the settings of his plays, his characters’ costumes, the advertising material for his productions, and his decision to illustrate the covers of some of his books with his own paintings, all testify to the sense of possibilities transmitted to him through his simultaneous exposure to his father’s moonlight scene backcloth, his notebooks of verses and his sketchbooks.

A Fine Sketch of a Cow, Albrecht Dürer’s Hare and Family Portraiture If Walcott found Warwick’s poems ‘gracile’ he was impressed by his drawings and sketches. Aptly, as we have seen, the first chapter of Another Life begins by foregrounding how seeing an older artist’s ‘sketching’ was instrumental in establishing a younger one’s vocation (AL1). Warwick’s sketchbooks are now lost; yet it is perhaps possible to speculate on the nature of what Walcott calls Warwick’s ‘excellent pencil studies’ (LS28) with hindsight, putting to good use the evidence supplied by Walcott’s own commentaries. In Tiepolo’s Hound Walcott singles out ‘a fine sketch of a cow’ by his father (TH11) for which the unpublished notes of Another Life provide more detail: ‘in profile … the cow’s hide silken and delicately shaded’ (ALms1, 64). We do not know if Warwick executed this study from life or if it was a copy of another artist’s work; in the notes for Another Life, however, amongst his father’s possessions, Walcott mentions a reproduction of Dürer’s Young Hare (1502) with its ‘finely drawn fur’ which, in the poem itself, Walcott refers to as a ‘fine-drawn hare’ (ALms1, 15; AL60).18 It is plausible, therefore, that Dürer’s watercolour might have shaped the way in which Warwick executed his cow and therefore elicited Walcott’s equally positive

A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects    45

assessment of both. Dürer’s hare, the work of one of the earliest exponents of watercolour painting, has been widely celebrated for its painstaking accuracy: the animal’s fur is mottled with light and dark patches and in the hare’s eye one can even catch the reflection of a window frame. In the notes for Another Life, Walcott speaks admiringly of Dürer’s ‘overpowering’ ability to render ‘detail’ and of the fact that, in his painting, the hare is ‘quivering, set to leap from its clutch of reed’ (ALms1, 15). In the final version of the poem, Walcott focuses entirely on the fact that the old master powerfully conveys the animal’s will and intentions in a way that made it look alive, even capable of interacting with the viewer: Walcott, in fact, remembers Dürer’s hare ‘quivering / to leap across [his] wrist’ (AL60). One can only wonder if the same kind of sensitivity to one’s subject’s psychological characteristics, feelings, individual qualities and purposes could also be found in Warwick’s ‘fine sketch of a cow’: after all, in Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott explains that Warwick’s self-portrait revealed to him not only his dead father’s lineaments but some of the spiritual qualities he had heard (or imagined) Warwick had. As Walcott blurs the lines which separate medium (watercolour) and subject (father), and subject and object (the physical portrait), Warwick’s image becomes an embodiment of ‘the tenderness’ and elating frailty of his favourite artistic medium which Walcott equates to ‘English reticence’ and which, to the orphaned artist-in-the making, looked like a forewarning of his father’s premature death (TH12). Warwick’s personal collection of watercolours, sketches, and paintings, therefore, played a crucial role in shaping Walcott’s imagined interactions with him and in giving the poet posthumous ‘access’ to his father. In his notes for Another Life, when Walcott remembers a sort of supernatural encounter with Warwick, significantly, he describes his late father as if he were a figure in a painting: I have a distinct memory of encountering my father, who was dead, at the bottom of the stairs. No features and no voice, but a dulled blur. This may have been a posture, as ordinary scenes sometimes automatically seek a frame, some real gesture that was so dramatic, so symmetrical, that it could be buried in the mind of a year old infant. (ALms1, 15)19

This imagined painting – or, rather, watercolour, if we consider its evanescent, impermanent feel – did not exist in reality but those that were hanging in the house, or that were otherwise available to the Walcott children and epitomised Warwick’s aesthetic concerns and moral values, deserve attention both in terms of content and medium because they became cornerstones around which Walcott began to build his own vision. Warwick’s self-portrait in watercolour was one of three portraits that Walcott could see every day on the walls of his drawing room. In the St Lucia of the 1940s not many ordinary people had paintings in their homes and

46    Derek Walcott’s Painters

owning portraits of members of the family was even rarer.20 The Walcotts were not amongst the poorest of the island but they were not wealthy, especially after Warwick’s premature death: yet, being surrounded by the portraits of his mother, the self-portrait of his father and, according to the notes for Another Life, also a ‘water-colour miniature of [his] sister in late impressionistic style’ (ALms1, 65), must have impressed upon Walcott that his next of kin were deserving of artistic representation as subjects in their own right at a time when, in the pictorial and photographic tradition of the region, local subjects tended to be represented as marginal ‘extras’ in the landscape.21 This realisation must have both transmitted to him a deep sense of pride despite the modesty of his family’s condition and fed his determination not to shun his local reality and people.

Learning to See One’s Seeing: Warwick Walcott, Jean-François Millet and John Everett Millais Arguably, Warwick’s copies and originals quietly paved the way for Walcott’s engagement with the island’s geography and its social reality. In Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott reveals that he had access to Warwick’s copy of Millet’s The Sower, a painting unmentioned in Another Life and ‘Leaving School’. Walcott probably recalled the 1850 version of many paintings on the same theme produced by the French artist and one of the works which, in the nineteenth century, contributed to the complex process that gave ordinary, even indigent people, the dignity of historical subjects: placing in bold relief the hardship of the French peasantry, Millet treated his central figure heroically, imparting on him both dignity and status. In his description of the original and copy which blur in his memory, Walcott describes the sower’s well-delineated and exact movements and his sabots trampling the furrows; he also highlights the inherent pessimism of an image where the isolation of the poor plays a crucial role as they are even unable to hear the good tidings brought by a nearby songbird (TH13). During our conversation in October 2016, Walcott did not mention The Sower but still remembered, both vividly and fondly, his father’s copy of Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) positioned in the living room. In this painting, destitute and hard-working women belonging to the lowest ranks of rural society collect leftover crops from a harvested field. The subject of Millet’s paintings must have contributed to spark Walcott’s interest in the life of the poor of St Lucia and to shape his commitment to represent respectfully those who, in Another Life, he calls the ‘derelicts’ of the island (AL22). Walcott acknowledges Warwick’s guidance in this respect when, in Omeros, he imagines a conversation with his father during which the two walk together to Castries wharf: here Warwick speaks to his son about the hard-working women who used to carry on their heads heavy baskets full of the coal which,

A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects    47

Figure 1.1  Des glaneuses (The Gleaners), 1857, Jean-François Millet, oil on canvas, 83.5 × 110 cm. Musée d’Orsay. Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/ Patrice Schmidt.

Figure 1.2  ‘St. Lucia; There is a continuous stream of these women’, 1899, photograph. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed 4 August 2022. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/ items/510d47dd-e6af-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

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arriving from Britain or the United States, was stored in Castries in order to be sold to passing steam ships as fuel (O74–6).22 Walcott’s mother or grandmother were not coal-carriers but the presence of these labouring women must have affected the young Walcott deeply as he had previously described their toiling also in Another Life (AL29). In colonial St Lucia, these women were often filmed and photographed to provide evidence for prospective tourists and white settlers of the docile and hard-working nature of locals.23 The imagined scene in Omeros, instead, suggests that his father’s paintings and drawings contributed to establish Walcott’s vocation in terms of social and political commitment since it is the ‘shadow’ of Warwick that forcefully exhorts Walcott ‘to give those [women’s] feet a voice’ and restore, albeit by proxy, their agency to them (O76).24 Commitment and social responsibility cannot be separated from individual awareness of how one’s position and status in society can affect one’s perspective. In Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott also recalls a copy of John Everett Millais’s The Blind Girl (1856) (Fig. 1.3), probably made from a photographic reproduction that the family also owned and where colours were perhaps heightened for effect: Walcott, in fact, refers to a glistening light in Millais which would have been hard to reproduce in watercolour (TH12). The Blind Girl famously depicts a blind girl accompanied by her sighted sister: for Walcott’s mother, this image symbolised faith in the possibility of conquering hardship (TH12). Yet, there are other lessons the young Walcott learnt from this copy by Warwick. The act of seeing and the (in)ability to do so, in fact, play important roles in Millais’s work, which insists on demonstrating how the blind girl and her sister access and inhabit the world in different ways: while one can easily see the double rainbow in the background and the world around her, her blind sibling can only feel the intensity of the sun’s warmth on her face while she touches the grass still wet after the storm. Foregrounding blindness and, simultaneously, the difference between blindness and sight, the painting demands that one reflects on the way in which one ‘sees’ – both in terms of perceiving and understanding – the world. Capitalising on the fact that oil paintings can render, almost tangibly, the solidity and texture of what they represent, The Blind Girl forces one to be conscious of the fact that one is able to ‘see’ with one’s eyes: in other words, it ‘makes you see your own seeing’25 and, in so doing, it also brings into focus more sharply the distance between beholder/artist and the two sisters. It has been argued that Millais’s two girls must be vagrants and that, despite its lurid colours, this primary visual example of Victorian sentimentality is a strong indictment of the social dynamics of marginalisation the most vulnerable members of society were subjected to at the time. The contrast between different perspectives and experiences which forms part of the painting’s drama, therefore, implicitly reveals that the (sighted) beholders cannot really understand fully the blindness but also, when class and gender differences intervene in the narrative, the destitution and difficult predicament of

A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects    49

Figure 1.3  The Blind Girl, 1856, John Everett Millais, Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries, oil on canvas, 80.8 × 53.4 cm. Presented by the Right Honourable William Kenrick, 1892. Photo credit: Birmingham Museum Trust, CCO.

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the vagrant girl(s). Walcott often recognised that, despite sharing the same condition of coloniality, he could not claim to have experienced the same hardship of the St Lucian poor. In a 1984 article entitled ‘Native Women under Sea-Almond Trees’, he refers to St Lucian women selling trinkets to the tourists to make ends meet as the granddaughters of those he used to watch carrying coal in his youth from his grandmother’s house (Fig. 1.2).26 What his contemporaries have in common with their progenitors, Walcott argues, is their knowledge of the hardship of life, what Walcott calls, using an expression in St Lucian (French-based) Creole or Kweyol, la vie à raide. In the rest of the article, Walcott meditates on how his distance from local working women further widened when his career turned him into a transient presence on his island, someone who lived abroad most of the time and, like a tourist, stayed in hotels when he was back in St Lucia. At some point, the article recounts how, regardless of the poet’s credentials as a native, a group of women washing clothes by the river refused to have their image taken by the photographer who accompanied Walcott in his retour au pays natal. Like the coal girls, washerwomen had often been exploited by the tourist industry as exemplary labourers, compliant, and, crucially, clean, ‘non-diseased’ locals, and picturesque markers of the tropical and (racially) different – but fully tamed – nature of their locale, happy to be photographed for advertisement purposes. Mindful of the legacy of such representations, Walcott declines to provide verbal assurance of place domestication in his description of the site in which the washerwomen are found: ‘behind them the bush is impenetrable, and dangerous because of snakes’ and acknowledges that there is no future in his island and his people being ‘remorselessly photographed’ for quick consumption (NW161). These St Lucian women, Walcott writes, are more than entitled to doubt that a photograph can ‘save’ them from their dire straits, since it financially benefits only its taker. At the same time, Walcott also reminds readers (and himself) that the idealisation of poverty which can come with literary or artistic endeavours is the last thing the poor actually need (NW162). Walcott’s foregrounding of these women’s resistance – the photographer is never allowed to use his camera to capture their image – pays homage instead to the tradition of locals refusing to have their picture taken and recasts them as historical subjects rather than picturesque extras (NW161). In ‘Native Women’ Walcott also concedes that, at that point in his career, his ‘hope of being a great painter [was] gone’ (NW115), but he still includes in the article two of his watercolours, Boats on St Lucia (1983) and Vendors at Choc Bay, St Lucia (1983) (Fig 1.4). The latter, whose subject (namely, St Lucian women) gives Walcott’s article its title, has at its core a group of women vendors – another ‘tourist icon’ and favourite subject in ‘typical’ representations of the region27 – working under an almond tree with a view of St Lucia’s Rat Island in the background. The multi-coloured clothes the women sell are right behind them, and their vibrancy attracts viewers’

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Figure 1.4  Vendors at Choc Bay, St Lucia, 1983, Derek Walcott, watercolour. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Walcott Estate. All rights reserved.

attention, gesturing towards the fact that, despite being ostensibly the subject of the paintings in which they feature, women vendors/market women were often utilised as props in humanised landscapes aimed at the creation of a suitably tropical, ‘colourful’ and exotic place or ‘place image’ fit to contribute to the delineation of what Shields calls a broader ‘place-myth’.28 The inclusion of this watercolour in the context of the article, however, fulfils Walcott’s purpose to revisit traditional representations and reveals some of their underlying tensions since his female figures are endowed with a compelling presence which makes it difficult to reduce them to mere props. Two of the women vendors seem to be interacting with one another, while a third is squatting, in silence, right next to them; one of the standing women and the squatting, powerful, silent figure, are looking towards us and at the painter, as if posing for him; yet, the exchange of gazes and the intimacy between beholders/painter and figures is subtly questioned in and by the watercolour since we cannot really discern the women’s lineaments nor their eyes. A ridge at the bottom of the painting that signals the end of the pavement on which the women are standing, moreover, clearly signposts the artist’s (and our) separation from them and their predicament. In his article, Walcott highlights how ‘a thing so clear and bland as a simple watercolour can … come to mean both distance and time’

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(NW162): aptly, his own watercolour with the women vendors which gives us access to what the painter could ‘see’ by looking at them (both in terms of perception and understanding) also acknowledges, at the same time, the (privileged) perspective (or distance) from which he saw what he saw. Time, moreover, is simultaneously marked and subtly evaporated: if the women vendors are Walcott’s contemporary versions of the coal carriers of the past described in the article – a connection which is also created visually by the fact that the women’s hats remind one of the cloth used by the labourers to carry their loads on their heads (Fig. 1.2) – they are located in a historical time rather than in the seasonless, timeless Caribbean promoted by tourist boards, a ‘destination image’29 from which, to satisfy the perceived needs of tourists/buyers, (hard) labour had to be saccharined or even erased. At the same time, however, the ‘now’ of the painting makes it both obvious and lamentable that, despite the time lapse, the living conditions of the poor had not dramatically improved. The suggestion of a distressing continuity across, and simultaneous presence of, different historical periods in both article and watercolour is made even more poignant if we consider that in the notes for Another Life, Walcott had compared the women carrying coal of his youth to ‘slaves building a pyramid’ (ALms2, 97). There are, however, other considerations to make in terms of the interaction between the medium and subject of Warwick’s copy of Millet’s The Gleaners (Fig. 1.1) and Walcott’s own self-positioning in St Lucia. Like Walcott’s own rendition of the women vendors, Warwick’s copy – where the women took centre stage – was a watercolour, while the original is an oil on canvas. In his recollection of his father’s copy, Walcott indicates that one of the things which made a lasting impression on him was specifically the medium used by Warwick: ‘Even now’, Walcott said in 1985, ‘I am aware of the delicacy of that copy. He had a delicate sense of watercolour.’30 Due to the more impermanent feel of watercolours, Warwick’s delicate copy could not have replicated fully the solidity of presence or the illusion of three-dimensionality that Millet had imparted on his figures and which even encouraged some critics to identify the statues of the Parthenon as the gleaners’ models.31 Arguably, Warwick’s delicate, less three-dimensionally ‘solid’, watercolour copy of The Gleaners (or The Sower) offered his son a template for representation which reflected, and through which he could make sense of, his complex modalities of perception of, and relation with, his own surroundings. In his notes for Another Life, in fact, Walcott registers a disconnection between his own ‘academically privileged’ world and the reality of St Lucia – and of destitute St Lucians in particular – which dated back to his boyhood; for example, he remembers that ‘when he looked up from his writing or reading across to the shocking brightness of the street he felt that it had nothing to do with him’ (ALms1, 62). In his unpublished notes, Walcott’s assessment of his perceived distance from his locality directly follows a reference to his own ‘drawing and painting [of the] moonlit castles and corn haired princesses of his reading’

A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects    53

and to books by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley (ALms1, 62). In the final version of Another Life, Walcott returns precisely to his night readings of Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales and Kingsley’s The Heroes (AL16) before launching himself into what he calls his ‘alphabet of the emaciated’, a gallery of evocatively sketched St Lucian ‘derelicts’, from Ajax – a debased and bored horse – to Zandoli – the pest-exterminator (AL16–22). Walcott’s interest in these island’s disenfranchised – who were all dead at the time of writing but also perceived as weirdly ‘unreal’ when they were still alive – might have been partly spurred by the subject of Millet’s painting. Yet, the quality of this recreation of a world which, at the time of writing, existed only in memory, and Walcott’s conjuration of figures who, when he encountered them in the streets of Castries, felt both substantial and incorporeal, tangible and intangible, immediate and remote, does retain something of the ‘delicacy’, evanescence and translucency of Warwick’s watercolour. Significantly, it is exactly with the section which was to become the ‘alphabet of the emaciated’ that Walcott’s prose manuscript for Another Life begins to break into poetry where minute description ‘softens’ into powerful evocation, and meticulous cataloguing into a record of epiphanies. That Walcott’s ‘alphabet’ is also an occasion to ponder ‘ways of seeing’ can be further evinced by the fact that the letter D stands for Darnley, a blind man led by his half-brother Russell along the streets of Castries. Russel’s and Darnley’s condition recalls the vagrant girls in Millais’s painting and, romanticising Darnley’s ‘great affliction’ as a sign of deeper insight (he mentions Milton and Homer), Walcott remembers to have endeavoured, unsuccessfully, to ‘practise blindness’ (AL18). The flavour of impermanence, evanescence and dissolution of lines that must have permeated Warwick’s watercolour rendition of Millet’s gleaners reverberates also in Walcott’s decision to preface his alphabet of St Lucian derelicts with intimations of a magic lantern show (AL16) and obliquely confront strategies of representations aimed at promoting the island as a tourist destination. As the Empire fostered the colonials’ identification with ‘white’ heroes through the dissemination of literary texts (Walcott mentions both Hawthorne and Kingsley), the tourist industry also took advantage of media innovations to promote politically expedient and financially profitable images of the Caribbean.32 It was precisely through the use of magic lanterns that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Caribbean was advertised in Britain as a tourist destination with flashing images which, like the old ‘tinted engravings’ of the Antilles that Walcott excoriates in his Nobel lecture, were the products of greed ‘look[ing] over the shoulder of the engraver and, later, the photographer … alter[ing] the eye’ (A75). In his teenage years Walcott was already critical of the damage caused to his own island by a tourist industry fully invested in what Clare Gunn has called ‘image building’, a process which, turning the ‘organic image’ of

54    Derek Walcott’s Painters

a given place (derived from non-touristic-directed communication) into an ‘induced image’ by means of promotional and publicity efforts, results in the creation of a desirable and profitable ‘vacationscape’.33 In Epitaph for the Young, Castries is ‘ravaged’ by the ‘desirers of a banal eldorado’ (EY31) and, in ‘I With Legs Crossed Along The Daylight Watch’ (subsequently published as ‘Prelude’), Walcott laments the fact that his island and the Caribbean as a whole was only to be ‘found’ in ‘tourist booklets’ and deemed a ‘happy’ place by those who did not care to go beyond enticing photographs or advertising slides in order to find out what its reality actually was (25P25). As Krista Thompson has pointed out, lantern slides (as well as all other forms of advertising and colonial representation) had been particularly effective in shaping and defining ‘what was characteristic or representative’ of the islands by distorting reality and misrepresenting people while, at the same time, creating ‘a tactile sense of being [in loco]’ that made the tantalising fantasy which was being sold to the public look more concrete.34 In Another Life, Walcott’s explicit reference to a ‘magic lantern show’ in the lines immediately preceding his St Lucian ‘alphabet’ inspired by his father’s watercolour copies of Millet, posits the St Lucian ‘alphabet of the emaciated’ as a sort of counter lantern lecture that illustrates the human geography and sociological make-up of the island by exploiting and recreating the dynamism between the tangible and the intangible, and the imagined and the real characteristic of the two media which informed it (watercolour and lantern lecture). As different figures are flashed in front of us in sequence (each one, in a way, its own ‘slide’), the careful fusion of actual people and Greek myth orchestrated by Walcott ‘ennobles the common and the unnamed’, as the poet puts it in the notebooks for Another Life (ALms2, 83) and as Millet had done with The Sower and The Gleaners (Fig 1.1). The ‘hard-edged’ social reality, or what Walcott calls the ‘ordinariness of truth’ (ALms2, 83) routinely edited out by tourist boards, is revisited and rendered, paradoxically but effectively, with the subtlety of a watercolour’s melting line which counters the unsophisticated luridness of advertising and its denial of history and its darkest reverberations whilst bearing witness to Walcott’s familiarity with, and appreciation of, Warwick’s watercolour renditions of his immediate world.

The Lyrical, Light Precision of the English Topographical Draughtsmen and Mapping One’s World in Watercolour Warwick’s sustained engagement with watercolour painting, as we have seen, was nurtured by his admiration not only for an early practitioner like Dürer but also for the work of nineteenth-century English watercolour painters and topographical draughtsmen. Amongst his father’s possessions, Walcott remembers a ‘small blue-covered volume […] on The English Topographical Draughtsmen’ (LS28) and, in Tiepolo’s Hound, he suggests that his father

A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects    55

particularly appreciated the ‘lyrical, light precision’ of the draughtsmen’s pencil studies and their mastery of watercolour techniques (TH11). Since it has proven impossible to locate a book entitled The English Topographical Draughtsmen, it has been suggested that Walcott might have confused the title of a 1906 book by A. J. Finberg called The English Water Colour Painters with the title of its second chapter which was in fact ‘The English Topographical Draughtsmen’.35 Finberg’s small book, in fact, offers detailed studies of, amongst others, the work of Thomas Girtin, Peter De Wint, Paul Sandby and John Sell Cotman whom, in Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott identifies as his father’s precursors (TH11). Finberg’s English Water Colour Painters contains forty-two small illustrations (7 × 10 cm), the vast majority of which are British ‘views’: despite individual differences, in fact, the showcased artists had in common the desire to represent the world around them, particularly since the repercussions of the rapid industrialisation of the country were becoming increasingly obvious, Scotland was still seen as uncharted territory, and travel, travel writing and landscaping were increasingly becoming political activities.36 In his discussion of the topographical draughtsmen, with which both Warwick and Walcott are likely to have been familiar, Finberg refutes the notion that watercolour is a ‘peculiarly English art’ but highlights that the topographical draughtsmen were crucial in changing the lamentable tendency that, in the seventeenth century and for most of the eighteenth century, privileged foreign subjects. At that time, Finberg explains, there was ‘a fairly large demand for landscapes, provided they were not of English scenery’.37 In contrast, Sandby – the oldest of his father’s predecessors mentioned by Walcott – has been described as ‘one of the first English artists who thought for himself’ because instead of looking at the example of the Dutch, French or Italians for ‘ideas of beautiful scenery’, he ‘considered the prospect that are presented in [his] provinces’, directing his attention towards England, Scotland and Wales.38 As Finberg pointed out, in eighteenth-century England the task which had befallen on the topographical draughtsmen was precisely to ‘educate a section of the British public to take an interest in the appearance of their own country’: such a task, he continued, was indispensable to the development of ‘a national school of landscape painters’.39 Unsurprisingly, Finberg ignores (or occludes) the fact that the line which separates documenting and shaping landscapes is often a blurred one: as Lowenthal and Prince have persuasively argued, ‘landscapes are formed by landscape tastes’ and the English landscape, as much as any other, ‘mirrors a long succession of … idealized images and visual prejudices … representative of that minority who have been most active in creating English landscape taste and in moulding the landscape itself’.40 In other words, if ‘landscape’ should really be regarded as a verb rather than a noun,41 one could argue that Warwick’s landscaping of St Lucia softly but firmly countered the traditional vistas and ‘visual prejudices’ which were ‘moulding’ the St Lucian ‘landscape’. In early twentieth-century

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St Lucia, to promote interest in the island’s geography was in fact a crucial stepping stone towards cultural (but also political) decolonization, and Warwick, who took on board the example of the topographical draughtsmen and English ­watercolour painters, fully engaged in (re)landscaping his local reality, as testified by the two original paintings repeatedly mentioned by Walcott, The Coconut Walk (Fig. 1.5) and Riders of the Storm. According to Roderick Walcott, the latter painting had ‘heavy hurricane clouds, swelling waves and sea-gulls’,42 details which appear to confirm Warwick’s commitment to (re)discover and represent the world around him. In a first draft of Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott indicated that while his father’s The Gleaners was after Millet, the model of Riders of the Storm – if indeed there was one – was ‘unknown’ and that, The Coconut Walk, instead, was definitely about ‘his own earth’.43 Walcott shared his father’s urge to document the reality of the island from a very early age, an urge magnified by the fact that during Walcott’s boyhood his native St Lucia, and the West Indies in general, were reconsidering and rejecting their colonial condition and exploring the possibility of a political federation: in the unpublished notes for Another Life, talking about his generation of West Indian writers and artists, he explains that their ‘maturity [and] self-discovery coincided with the externals of independence, in the self-liberation of the colonial world’ (ALms1, 4). In Another Life, Walcott famously declares that, before leaving for Jamaica in 1950, he had sworn to painstakingly record or ‘put down in paint, in words, / as palmists learn the network of a hand, / all of [St Lucia’s] sunken, leaf-choked ravines, / every neglected, self-pitying inlet / muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves / each ochre track’ and, to strengthen his bond with his island, he concludes his list with four names of local trees and tropical fruits in St Lucian Kweyol (AL52). It is well known, however, that, as a poet, Walcott did not adopt St Lucian Kweyol as his primary means of expression. We will return to this in more detail in the next chapters but here it is important to highlight that he chose instead to convey his attachment to his St Lucian roots through a careful modulation of tone. What Walcott considered important, in fact, ‘was not the language but the tone of the language [so] that speaking in English with the right tone would [be] the same as speaking in creole’: ‘I feel’, he declared in 1996, ‘that I have never gone away from the sound of my own language – I am not saying the vocabulary but the sound, the tone’.44 One could argue that Warwick’s preferred modality of representation (watercolour) sustained Walcott’s choice for the linguistic modulations of his verbal landscaping. Walcott’s understanding of the importance of tone and his focus on it, rather than syntax or vocabulary, in establishing the ‘vernacularity’ of a given text might also find their origin in his early exposure to the immediacy and unpretentiousness of his father’s watercolours and, possibly, in Finberg’s assessment of the technique itself. In his introductory remarks on the work of the topographical draughtsmen, in fact, Finberg begins by

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opposing ‘the scope of a large audience’ required by oils to the ‘modest’, ‘intimate, conversational’ style of watercolour painting.45 We cannot determine if Warwick’s choice of watercolour was dictated by a desired intimacy with viewers, a propensity towards immediate recording of impressions, financial constraints, or simply a consequence of the fact that, as a colonial apprentice, he was socialised into accepting that, despite the difficulties in adapting this technique to the ‘hard-edged vision’ triggered by the ‘yearlong sun’ in the Caribbean, ‘the most graceful and subtlest technique of painting was the English watercolour, with its framed climate of evanescence, dissolution, the melting line’.46 Warwick’s small-size watercolours, however, encouraged Walcott to regard watercolour not exclusively as a (colonial) imposition, enabling him to appreciate, from a very early age, the fact that, irrespective of the subject of a painting, its style or the colour scheme used, the very choice of a particular medium could facilitate an intimate and conversational connection between artists and beholders. In 1987, Walcott reiterated that he still preferred to paint watercolours rather than oils precisely because oils could be ‘very rhetorical … very pretentious’ and more ‘egotistical’.47

Warwick Walcott’s The Coconut Walk, Meindert Hobbema and Postcards Walcott’s enterprise to ‘put down in paint, in words’ St Lucia’s reality, was informed by a painstaking attention to routinely neglected details whose significance he enhanced and brought to the fore. In his unpublished notes for Another Life he explains that the artists who taught him ‘concentration of detail, an intensity of focus, through telescope or magnifying glass’,  ‘that  abnormality of scale [of] the process of traditional landscape painting [where] a mountain is no bigger than a leaf [and] the texture, light, veins distend to an equal importance’ were in fact the topographers (i.e. Girtin, De Wint, Sandby, Cotman) his father so greatly admired (ALms1, 66). Scholars have recently demonstrated that the accurate ‘recording’ which characterises topographical works, far from being what Fuseli, in 1831, disparagingly dismissed as mere ‘map-work’, also conveyed social and political commentary that transformed the rendition of local realities into more sophisticated forms of geographical knowledge.48 Arguably, the only original painting by Warwick still in the possession of the Walcott family, The Coconut Walk, also reveals some of the cultural and social tensions of his time (Fig 1.5). Coconut palms – and the sea Warwick immortalised in Riders of the Storm – have in fact been pervasive ‘signifiers of tropical environment’ for a long time,49 but Warwick’s approach to his subjects dramatically differs from the one of the tourist industry and other pictorial representations of the

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region. Walcott still remembered Warwick’s The Coconut Walk very vividly in 201650 and it is clear that this painting had a lasting influence on him. In ‘Leaving School’, where it is listed as one of the objects which established his vocation, Walcott also declares that, despite the inescapable reality of the rainy season in St Lucia, when he thought of the headland of Vigie (where the Coconut Walk was located), ‘it [was] never in rain’ but ‘in the colour of burnt seagrape leaves, and roofs rusting in drought’, that is, in colours approximating those in his father’s painting of that particular spot (LS24). Walcott also tried to replicate Warwick’s palette by using ‘Brown ink’ when he copied in his notebook a quotation from Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss which reminded him of Vigie and his feelings for it (LS24).51 Vigie and the Coconut Walk – and Warwick’s landscaping of them – are provided with a broader context in Walcott’s notes for Another Life, where the poet laments: ‘the landscape we loved did not belong to us. Two thirds of the island was owned by two or three intermarrying white families. The white people were two per-cent of the population’ (ALms1, 8). The Coconut Walk and the Vigie promontory, in fact, have their own peculiar history of colonial appropriation, racist segregation, capitalistic exploitation, abuse, militarisation, neglect and elitism. In the early nineteenth century, the Coconut Walk was the main street of the Vigie peninsula, where Europeans had established a small village, military headquarters, forts and the Governor’s residence. In the 1880s, when Castries harbour was transformed into a defended coaling and naval station, three new soldiers’ barracks were built in Vigie and, in order to accommodate them, some of the people who resided in the area were ordered to vacate the land, which was expropriated. Despite this huge investment, at the very beginning of the twentieth century the empire’s priorities changed, all planned military works on the island were cancelled, and it was ordered that the newly-built military complex should be abandoned.52 Walcott explains that, during his childhood, the Coconut Walk and the Vigie promontory were almost exclusively enjoyed by the members of the Vigie Country Club who owned ‘cars and vast estates in the interior of the island’ – even the clubhouse beach was ‘for rich and poor whites’ (ALms1, 2). Nonetheless, Walcott and his friends, who would have been viewed by the white elite as ‘little trespassing monkeys’ (ALms1, 2), used to play amongst the banyan trees of the headland. During the Second World War, the area around the Coconut Walk was turned into an airstrip, which eventually reached the nearby cemetery from which some buried bodies had to be moved ‘for this progress’ (ALms1, 2). After the Great Fire of Castries which, in 1948, destroyed four-fifths of the city, the old military barracks were reconverted ‘to bivouac hundreds of our black refugees’ (ALms1, 2). The fire also triggered a breakdown of social barriers: members of the elite who had lost everything found themselves obliged, for the first time, to live next to, and rely on, those who, up to that point, had been their servants; as a result, St Lucians learnt how to live together in a new way and some were

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forced to overcome their prejudices.53 Soon, however, what Walcott calls the ‘besieged villas’ were abandoned, the headland was eventually reallocated to ‘a new class of native Civil Servants and lawyers’ and remained ‘an area of privilege’ (ALms1, 2).54 In the first pages of Another Life, Walcott compares the actual Vigie Coconut Walk (not his father’s watercolour) with Meindert Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis (1689) and its lines of poplars (AL6) (Fig. 1.6). Baugh and Nepaulsingh suggest that Warwick’s The Coconut Walk might also have been inspired by Hobbema’s painting.55 This is not outside the realm of possibilities considering Warwick’s interest in European masters, but it is worth noting that, apart from both being depictions of tree-lined roads, the two works are very different in many respects. Hobbema’s is a fairly large panoramic oil (103.5 × 141 cm), which emphasises the man-made nature of the landscape in front of us, the fact that the place it portrays is a local reality connected to the world through well-established networks (roads, ships), and its human geography. The oil includes people, animals, buildings, a side road departing from the main one, cultivated fields, other types of trees apart from the poplars, canals running alongside the main avenue, big ships in the distance and a typical low horizon. In other words, Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis gives us a snapshot of European (or more precisely, Dutch) ‘civilisation’, its buildings, religion, trade, agriculture, its people – a ‘civilisation’, incidentally, which could flourish because it was supported, financially, by access to the slave trade. Warwick’s The Coconut Walk is a much smaller and simpler watercolour depicting a path considerably shorter and narrower than Hobbema’s avenue and focused entirely on coconut trees which, despite being one of the most disseminated symbols of the Caribbean landscape, are not native to the area: their presence, in fact, silently marks what Jill Casid has called its ‘violent relandscaping’.56 Palm trees and coconut trees are also visual markers of the process of ‘tropicalization’ which Thompson defines as ‘the complex visual systems through which [Caribbean] islands were imagined for tourist consumption’, a process which delineates the mechanisms through which ‘certain ideals and expectations of the tropics informed the creation of place-images’.57 Walcott was both aware and critical of these mechanisms, but growing up in St Lucia he did not see palm trees and all the other colonial transplants brought to the Caribbean from abroad only as exotic and exoticising impositions on the land: to him they were local plants which defined his own landscape and which, like all the Empire’s subjects, he had been socialised into considering ‘ignobler than imagined elms’ (AL6). His father’s The Coconut Walk must have represented a constant visual corrective to such disparaging attitudes, and, as such, an important inspiration for Walcott’s lifelong commitment to counteract the relentless debasement or dismissal of Caribbean local reality, the way in which it has always been approached with ‘the wrong eye’ (A75). In ‘Letter to a Painter in England’, an early poem Walcott dedicated to the

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Figure 1.5  The Coconut Walk, n.d., Warwick Walcott, watercolour. Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw Collection. Courtesy of Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw.

Figure 1.6  The Avenue at Middelharnis, 1689, Meindert Hobbema, oil on canvas, 103.5 cm × 141 cm. The National Gallery London © The National Gallery, London.

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St Lucian painter Harold Simmons who was temporarily living in England, Walcott refers to ‘palms’ when he renews his commitment to St Lucian reality and its landscape (25P558) and in ‘Royal Palms … An Absence of Ruins’, he identifies the titular trees as ‘the columns of [Caribbean people’s] racial labyrinth’.59 In Warwick’s compressed view, the Coconut Walk is presented from a less centralised perspective than Hobbema’s: through the two lines of palms flanking it we can see more coconut trees on the left and, on the right, land covered in wild shrubs and a mountain in the distance. In the Caribbean, palm trees, especially royal palms, were used to mark the boundaries of sugar plantations: representations of the imperial picturesque, in fact, often featured a path framed by palm trees and leading to a sugar mill.60 Warwick’s subject, instead, is neither a ‘picturesque’ estate or plantation nor a traditional visual celebration of ownership, efficient management and domestication of people and territory or, in other words, of colonial history. Walcott’s father’s rendition of what seems to be a public space as completely devoid of humans, confirms instead that, as his son observed years later, the enjoyment of this place was still the prerogative of a ‘happy few’: Warwick’s landscaping of it, therefore, could almost be considered as an act of appropriation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Coconut Walk became an attractive landmark reproduced in postcards marketing St Lucia as a tourist destination. It is not unusual for contemporary Caribbean artists to directly confront postcard ‘tropicalized’61 representations of their region in their work and Walcott, who declared to have carefully avoided painting the Caribbean ‘in the postcard way or as a phony pastoral vision’,62 was always keen to provide his own corrective (verbal or visual) rendition of the reality around him, often addressing and directly criticising the tourist industry and its cheap mystifications. There is no indication that Warwick was deliberately engaging with postcards when he painted the Coconut Walk but, as an amateur artist and keen painter of his island, it is likely that he might have taken an interest in this ‘poor man’s art form’ and joined the ranks of the local unintended audience of postcard representations.63 It is instructive, in fact, to compare his rendition of Coconut Walk (Fig. 1.7) with a handpainted postcard of the same spot which was circulating at the time.64 In the postcard, the sky gradually goes from white to a uniform blue but, through a mixture of blue and light yellow, Warwick’s painting tries to capture what Walcott was later to describe as ‘the heat’ of the blue of the tropics.65 Warwick’s attempt to render the different hues of the St Lucian sky in watercolour must have made a lasting impression on Walcott: talking about the transposition of pictorial techniques into poetry in the same interview in which he remarked that watercolour is an ‘extremely difficult medium in the tropics’, particularly because of the ‘immense variety of tones’ in the landscape, Walcott affirms that to capture the reality of the region on paper, ‘just to put down “blue” … is not enough, because that’s a postcard’:

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Figure 1.7  Vigie, Cocoanut Walk, St. Lucia, c. 1908, postcard.

one has to try to ‘get into that blue whatever other variations and subtleties and orchestrations … so that one can feel the sensuality, the presence, and texture’ of what one is depicting.66 The postcard’s ‘simplification’ of the landscape’s chromatic complexities is both instrumental to and indicative of its overall representation of the Coconut Walk. We are presented with a very well-maintained and reasonably large pathway next to which, but at a distance from, there are tall shrubs and more coconuts; the walk is animated by male passers-by impeccably dressed in white, the favourite colour of Black civil servants, as Walcott points out in his notes for Another Life: ‘Didn’t black Civil Servants all wear white, / white cotton, white drill, linen, white “bughouse” helmets?’ (ALms2, 95). In the postcard, a man seen from behind, walking along the path, and wearing a white suit seems to be proceeding with a sense of purpose rather than just strolling idly along; another man, also in white but with what looks like a more casual attire, seems intent on managing dead leaves. One can also spot what seems to be a carriage in the distance next to which another cohort of people (also dressed in white) seems to have congregated.67 As ‘Blackness’ is carefully edited out of the picture, the ‘threat’ of the wild tropical landscape and its inhabitants is minimised: as in Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis, we are presented with what looks like a trafficked road constantly kept in good working order which binds working people and places together, signalling busy entrepreneurship. In the postcard’s almost ‘urbanised’ view of the Vigie peninsula, trees and shrubs are domesticated and visibly managed in order to harmonise with and support the image of a colonial ‘modern’ society on the move. The few palm

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trees which are not perfectly aligned with the rest and the slightly outgrown shrubs which, however, do not interfere directly with the path and recede towards the back, add a picturesque rather than ‘destabilising’ flavour. In his Nobel lecture, Walcott argues that these kinds of representation of the Caribbean landscape are characterised by a ‘civilizing decency’, which he equates to the establishment of botanical gardens, where ‘a colonized vegetation is arranged for quiet walks and carriage rides’ (A75). Aptly, in a contemporaneous postcard of the Botanical Station of Castries, the Central Walk appears to be very similar to the Coconut Walk: the wider path is clear and perfectly clean while the palms are all neatly regimented; two disciplined Black workers are posing next to the tools needed to attend to the perfectly mown lawn which is ready to welcome the visitors.68 Warwick’s representation of the Coconut Walk differs from the postcard in important ways. Unlike the postcard, which forcefully tries to convey the message that St Lucia offered an experience that tourists might feel comfortable with, recognise and validate, Warwick’s watercolour presents us with a narrow and dusty path which is reasonably clear but does not appear to be as perfectly maintained as the one represented in the postcard and does not claim to be part of a busy network; in fact, as we have seen, there is nobody around. Warwick’s high coconuts flanking the road are mostly regimented (with some very minor variations on the theme), but the clump of coconut trees on one side impinges on the path, disrupting the slender lines of palms and preventing us from seeing where the road is leading. This occlusion denies the beholders of the watercolour the ‘master-of-all-I-survey’ experience afforded by the postcard where both shrubs and coconuts are far enough from the path to offer a more open and panoramic view and where, if anything, one has the feeling that they are slated for removal because the road is destined to widen. Warwick’s The Coconut Walk, moreover, also quietly disrupts the identification of the island with the colonial ‘civilised decency’ promoted by the tourist board as well as the notion of a neat distinction between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘wild’: the thick bushes just behind the line of palms on the right which seem to be growing free and unconstrained signpost that Caribbean ‘wilderness’ has not been erased but remains contiguous to the ‘civilizing decency’ of the slender (and fairly rough) path. In Another Life, implicitly denouncing the demonisation of local geography and culture and simultaneously acknowledging resistance to assimilation and annihilation, Walcott pays homage to the resilience of Caribbean ‘wilderness’ – a space traditionally discredited as the ill-reputed territory of Obeah men and women (and, as such, edited out of postcards and marketing campaigns) – by stating that, despite all efforts to deracinate and denaturalise them, ‘One step beyond the city was the bush. / One step behind the church door was the devil’ (AL25). Significantly, the physical ‘step’ one needs to take to exit the path and enter the ‘wild’ is remarkably shorter (in fact, almost imperceptible) in his father’s watercolour than in the postcard.

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Warwick’s The Coconut Walk must have been particularly compelling for Walcott because it also immortalised a reality that had disappeared by the time he became thirteen. In 1943, as we have seen, the walk had been razed to the ground in order to build the landing that was to develop into Vigie Airport; in ‘Leaving School’ Walcott declares that he ‘could only vaguely remember’ it (LS27). Walcott’s juxtaposition, in Another Life, of Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis and what used to be the ‘avenue of palms’ of the Coconut Walk (AL6), therefore, might have been triggered more by the fact that both paintings indirectly represent precariousness and vulnerability than by the mere comparability of their subject (a tree-lined avenue). It is well known that a large portion of the Dutch landscape is below sea level and vulnerable to flooding: the canal running alongside Hobbema’s road and the vicinity of the sea (masts of large ships can be discerned in the upperleft corner) are visual reminders of the fact that fifty years or so before the time of painting, land reclamation had considerably increased the size of Hobbema’s country. As Walcott knew very well, part of Castries is also built on reclaimed land: at the end of the nineteenth century, in fact, as the harbour was deepened and the northern wharf widened, low lying areas were filled with coral and silt. Chaussée Road itself, where the Walcotts lived, owes its name to the fact that it was built on what in the eighteenth century must have been a swampy area: ‘chaussée’, in fact, means ‘embankment’, ‘causeway’ or ‘raised road’.69 Impermanence, landscape transformation, and the anxieties engendered by them, must have always been in the forefront of Walcott’s mind since he witnessed rapid and considerable changes when growing up in St Lucia. The island was being heavily deforested in order to make space for banana fields and for a new paved road connecting Micoud and Soufrière and, in 1938, due to the soil erosion caused by these activities, the northern ridge of Ravine Poisson collapsed after three weeks of heavy rain. Causing the death of 100 people and making another 700 homeless, this was a very traumatic event for the island as a whole,70 and Walcott, who was only eight at the time, still remembered this tragedy in 1965 when, commenting on a series of St Lucian locations, he identified Ravine Poisson as the place ‘where the village was buried’ (LS26). Ten years after this avalanche, in 1948, another terrible disaster hit the island, namely the Great Fire of Castries: even if Walcott’s house was spared, it caused the loss of most of Warwick’s works71 and was a great collective ‘shock’ also because, in its aftermath, ‘the smug repetitive lives of … Civil Servants, merchants and Creole professional men … disappeared in smoke’ and became ‘unimaginable’ (LS27). During the reconstruction of Castries, the urban landscape underwent massive changes as most of the ‘rambling wooden houses with verandahs and mansards’ (LS27) had been destroyed and were substituted by multi-storied concrete apartment blocks which gave their inhabitants ‘their first experience of modern anonymity [and] divided

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their temperament in half’ (ALms1, 55). Most of these apartment blocks were built by North American cement companies that were already on the island due to the military presence of the United States in St Lucia during the Second World War.72 In the first half of the 1940s, in fact, St Lucia experienced what is called locally An tan Méwitjen, or ‘the time of the Americans’73 because, in 1941, given the troubled situation in neighbouring Martinique (which, until 1943, was officially pro-Vichy), and as part of the Destroyers for Bases Agreement between the US and Britain, the United States established their first military bases in St Lucia. The airbase was built at Vieux Fort (in the South) while Reduit Bay (in the North) was selected for a naval base from which the US navy could oversee the blockade of Martinique.74 The transformation of the Coconut Walk into an airstrip was in fact another consequence of the An tan Méwitjen. The Second World War, however, also dissolved some imperial boundaries as hundreds of refugees started to arrive from Martinique, some in makeshift rafts (ALms1, 31), further reminding ordinary St Lucians that they belonged, tangibly, to the extended Caribbean and not only to the British Empire. In both the manuscripts for Another Life and in the unpublished sections of the prose memoir American, without America – which Walcott began in 1973, continued to write and revise for about ten years and was meant to be a continuation of Another Life – Walcott revisits what he called the US ‘Occupation’ of his island during the Second World War. Observing that, at that point – which marked ‘the beginning of the night club era’ – St Lucians ‘were getting sophisticated, Americanised’ but, regrettably, were also ‘leaving one kind of colonialism for another’ (ALms1, 56), Walcott laments that his compatriots made their ‘usual error of trust’ when they began to believe that they could consider themselves ‘Americans’ and ‘equals’ (AWA). Arguably, therefore, Walcott’s protracted exposure, in his early years, to substantial and shocking changes in the landscape, in the appearance of his native city, in the global political world order, and in the way in which his fellow St Lucians were figuring and refiguring their identity vis-à-vis two powerful Empires (one growing and one decreasing in importance), recast his appreciation of the ‘delicacy’ of his father’s watercolour rendition of the ‘lost’ Coconut Walk as a response to the fragility of medium and subject alike, and made the painstaking recording of every facet of the island an even more urgent task.

Warwick Walcott’s Riders of the Storm and Henry Moore’s A Silvery Day, West of the Needles, Isle of Wight In Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott refers to another original watercolour by his father which represented the drama of a tropical storm picking up momentum, complete with seagulls hurled about by the wind (TH11); in ‘Leaving School’ this painting is identified as Riders of the Storm (LS28) and like

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Warwick’s copy of The Gleaners it is now lost. In terms of subject, Riders of the Storm was not painted in response to an exploitative representational tradition since, as Thompson has pointed out, before 1930, the year Warwick died, sea and ocean, somewhat surprisingly, had not yet been foregrounded in the visual language of tourism.75 Finberg’s English Water Colour Painters features only landscapes and only one depiction of a storm (yet not a sea storm) by David Cox whose The Challenge: A Storm on the Moor (c. 1850) presents us with a solitary bull facing the fierceness of the elements. Finberg observed that Cox, who often depicted scenes of rain and strong winds, was less interested in ‘draughtsmanship’ than in ‘effects’76 and it is well known that in The Challenge, in order to heighten pathos and achieve a threatening effect, the artist went as far as attacking the sheet with his brush.77 The choice of subject for Riders of the Storm indicates that Warwick too might have had an interest in recording effects, atmosphere and intensity. Cox’s propensity was certainly not unique: in the course of the nineteenth century, just as photography was establishing itself, topography and landscape art were soon ‘cast as opposed and incompatible’: topography was redefined as the chronological precursor to landscape painting and the latter as a superior art that would also include ‘effects’ to register the sentiments aroused in the painter by his exposure to real or imagined landscapes.78 It has been often argued, for example, that topographical draughtsmen like Sandby, with their ‘prosaic’ views, represented the first step towards the development of vision which characterises a ‘real artista’ like Turner.79 This line of argument is being forcefully refuted,80 but Warwick’s desire to experiment with the rendition of effects might have been shaped by Finberg’s belief that ‘some of the greatest triumphs of the English water colour painters have been won with subjects which depended for their interest rather upon the sentiments immediately suggested than upon their topographical interest’; he might have felt encouraged, moreover, by the critic’s praise for Turner’s ability to transform ‘his earlier topographical work into a style suitable for the highest kind of imaginative expression’.81 In ‘In Good Company’, Roderick Walcott celebrates his father’s ‘proficiency in cloud-painting’, reveals that Riders of the Storm had dramatic ‘heavy hurricane clouds, swelling waves and sea gulls’ and identifies it as the origin of his brother’s interest in verbal and visual seascapes.82 Lack of a more detailed description makes it impossible to establish if Warwick had also been inspired by another painting of a sea storm by, for example, Turner, an artist he admired and might also have copied. In Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott remembers another seascape on display in the window of Castries’s library, namely A Silvery Day near the Needles (TH13) by Henry Moore, a fine English colourist and one of the most able marine painters of his day,83 which, due to its subject matter, might have blurred with Warwick’s in Walcott’s memory. Moore’s full title, A Silvery Day, West of The Needles, Isle of Wight, refers to three stacks of chalk which rise about 30 metres out of the sea off the west of the

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Isle of Wight; yet Moore’s titular Needles are minute and located in the very background of his oil of canvas which, like Warwick’s Riders of the Storm, focuses instead on wind, wave-forms and cloud formations.84 Walcott was fascinated by Moore’s decision to make the Needles barely discernible: ‘its salt, fast clouds, sharp rocks were “the Needles”’ (TH13, emphasis mine), he writes, suggesting that, to him, all these elements combined were the point and core of the painting itself. Moore’s decision to consider the sea as a subject sufficient in itself, rather than simply the background of a battle, shipwreck or even landscape,85 his careful observation of the sea in all weathers, and his use of rich, deep blues and greens, exhibit qualities Walcott was to praise in other painters (for example Winslow Homer, Jackie Hinkson, Paul Gauguin). At the time, however, Moore’s A Silvery Day, West of The Needles, Isle of Wight triggered in Walcott’s young self a strong desire ‘to do’ the painting – presumably copy it or produce a comparable work; as we will see in Chapter 6, in Tiepolo’s Hound Walcott gives pride of place to one of his Caribbean seascapes which recalls both Moore’s and Warwick’s works in terms of its focus on natural elements, the weather and the absence of human figures.

(Whose?) The Fighting Temeraire On the same page in which Walcott recalls Moore’s A Silvery Day, West of The Needles, Isle of Wight (TH13), he also suggests that his father might have copied J. M. W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire86 (1839) (Fig. 1.8) and, on both the South Bank Show and in conversation with me, he mentioned The Fighting Temeraire amongst the works by his father he grew up surrounded by.87 In his notes for Another Life, however, Walcott does not list a copy of Turner’s painting amongst his father’s watercolours or oils but declares instead that he had copied The Fighting Temeraire in watercolours from Thomas Craven’s A Treasury ‘as [his] father had once copied Millet’s The Gleaners’ (ALms1, 59). Warwick had died nine years before the first edition of Craven’s ‘big black book’ was published (ALms1, 59) – which in any case, does not include Millet amongst its painters – so, if Warwick had copied Turner’s canvas, he must have used a different source from his son’s. Warwick’s copy of The Fighting Temeraire, however, might have been a product of Walcott’s imagination or a misattribution whereby his own work was conflated with his father’s: as such, it takes us even further into rarefied territory. Yet, imagined or misremembered things can have a certain materiality of presence, particularly for Walcott for whom the world of the imagination was at times even more ‘tangible’ than what surrounded him. In ‘The Muse of History’, for example, he declares that, when he was a young St Lucian learning English literature, ‘snow’ and ‘daffodils’ were more ‘real’ to him ‘than the heat and oleander … because they lived on the page, in ­imagination, and therefore in memory’.88

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Figure 1.8  The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838, 1839, Joseph Mallord William Turner, oil on canvas, 91 cm × 122 cm. Turner Bequest, 1856, National Gallery, London © The National Gallery, London.

At the beginning of Another Life, as we will see, Walcott explains that he sketched the Vigie promontory at twilight with ‘the fever of some draughtsman’s clerk’ (AL4), clearly casting his apprenticeship as an artist as a continuation of the work started by his father, a clerk in the First District Court of St Lucia. The choice of ‘twilight’ as the time of the day for the sketch and the opening of Another Life, shows that the young Walcott too, perhaps, cared for ‘effect’ as much as for ‘draughtsmanship’. The twilight on the promontory has been read as an allegory of the end of the British Empire and, at the same time, as a chance to start again. Baugh and Nepaulsingh point at both Claude Lévi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques, 1955) and T. S. Eliot (Four Quartets, 1943) as models Walcott might have followed in his recasting of twilight as a beginning89 but the same fertile contradiction can be found in The Fighting Temeraire itself. The drawing scene in Tiepolo’s Hound where Warwick is imagined reproducing Turner’s work reinforces the connection between Turner – whom Walcott actually calls ‘twilight’s Turner’ (TH76) – The Fighting Temeraire and the fading of Empire evoked in the opening of Another Life; as he imagines his father (or himself?) full of admiration for the painting he is trying

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to copy, Walcott highlights the way in which the three-master seems to be sinking into a hellish empire ‘turning more [and more] spectral’ (TH76). The British Empire was actually ‘turning more spectral’ in Warwick’s time (and even more so when Walcott might have painted his own copy in the late 1940s, or in 1965, when he remembers his effort in the notes for Another Life) than when Turner first exhibited the Temeraire in 1839. Queen Victoria had ascended to the throne just two years before Turner produced this work and at that point the sun was still said to never set on the Empire. However, Turner’s careful wording of the full title, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth, to be broken up, 1838, conveys deep feelings of loss, waste, mortality or the end of an era; some, in fact, have taken the painting to represent the transition between sailing – the past – and steam – the future, or ‘man-made modernity’ represented by the tug boat.90 Others instead felt encouraged to consider it the visualisation of a moment when ‘heroes’ were no longer honoured as they should have been because, when he exhibited his picture in 1839, Turner added to the title two lines – ‘The flag which braved the battle and the breeze, / No longer owns her’ – which criticised the Admiralty Board’s decision to sell the glorious vessel that had played such an important role at Trafalgar.91 After being sold by the Admiralty Board to a ship breaker, the three partly rigged lower masts that Turner paints would have been removed before the Temeraire was tugged away: its presence in the oil is only one of the many reasons why we cannot consider Turner’s painting as an eyewitness account of the last journey of the warship but a work of the imagination and a poetic rendition thriving on apparent contradictions, ambiguities and ­inaccuracies.92 It is implausible, for example, and for very practical reasons, that the transportation of the Temeraire down the Thames, then an extremely busy and crowded commercial river, would have taken place at sunset, and, in 1877, a commentator highlighted what he called a ‘glaring error’ in Turner’s positioning of the sun which, according to the author’s reconstruction of the actual location portrayed in the painting, is made to set in the east – where the sun rises – rather than in the west, inadvertently converting the whole scene into a sunrise.93 It has been established, moreover, that when the Temeraire was taken to her last berth (5 and 6 September 1838), the moon would have been nearly full while the crescent moon in Turner’s depiction is more suggestive of a process of renewal rather than a definitive ending. Walcott’s recasting of twilight as beginning in Another Life, therefore, might have been inflected by a straightforward reaction to the contradictions inherent in Turner’s painting and highlighted in the history of its reception, by the artist’s own handling of light and shadow, or by the way in which Warwick’s (half-remembered, half-imagined?) watercolour or Walcott’s own copy might have reproduced Turner’s experimentation with light. Turner was never afraid, as he put it in a letter to a young painter, to position his ‘brightest light next to [his] deepest shadow’94 and, in Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott describes the Temeraire’s last

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journey as ‘radiant doom’ (TH76), a choice of words which indicates that, to him, the sombreness for the demise of the warship was somehow counteracted by the prominence and luminosity of the sun and its reflection on the water.

Rat Island, Walcott Place, Derek Walcott Library and The Derek Walcott Estate: The Legacy According to Roderick Walcott, Warwick was also the author of a very delicate miniature pen and ink with watercolour of Rat Island, a small island located north-west of St Lucia.95 Walcott never mentions this particular work, but it is possible that it might have ‘lived’ in his memory and that he paid homage to it (consciously or unconsciously) in one of his own watercolours. In Boy on a Wall, Rat Island (1989) (Fig. 6.14), in fact, Walcott inserts in the St Lucian landscape a boy who, giving his back to those looking at the picture, keeps his eyes firmly on Rat Island, visible in the distance. I will return to this painting in Chapter 6 since it is one of those Walcott included in Tiepolo’s Hound, but here it is useful to point out that the mood of the painting is nostalgic as the boy sits on a wall, seemingly resigned to his separation from the object of his gaze. His longing can be interpreted as a visualisation of Walcott’s own longing for his dead father, for an intimacy and closeness he never experienced but knew he could only approximate by studying his father’s works, following in his path, and becoming an artist himself, particularly as Walcott painted it roughly at the same time in which he was imagining his meeting with the ghost of his father in Omeros (O67–76). Warwick’s drawing of the islet, moreover, might have contributed not only ‘to establish Walcott’s vocation’ as the other objects he listed in ‘Leaving School’, but also to inspire him to formulate concrete plans for the cultural regeneration of the island itself. In the nineteenth century, Rat Island was used as a colony for lepers and later as a site to quarantine those afflicted with pox.96 Once these diseases were eradicated, the island was rented to families for their holidays, while in August it was always used as a spiritual retreat for the Catholic nuns from St Joseph’s convent in Castries. Once the tourist industry started to establish itself in St Lucia, Rat Island lost its attractiveness as a tourist destination because it is difficult to supply and, as a result, it was left abandoned for a long time. In 1994, when John Compton, Prime Minister of St Lucia, asked Walcott what the government could do to honour him and celebrate the fact that two years before he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Walcott proposed resurrecting Rat Island and transforming it into a cultural activity centre where artists and writers could meet and work in groups or individually. The establishment of Rat Island would have been not only a recognition for Walcott’s outstanding contribution to local and world culture but also a natural development of his father’s activities as cultural

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promoter in St Lucia. Sadly, the ‘cherished vow [Walcott] had taken in his dead father’s name’ and his determination to spend his life ‘honor[ing] that vow’97 did not find a concrete, physical counterpart in the transformation of the islet they both painted: The Rat Island Foundation was set up to develop Walcott’s idea but despite initial enthusiasm the project never received any concrete investment and the islet has remained in a state of degradation. Walcott’s house in Chaussée Road, instead, has been recently restored and, on 24 January 2016, was opened to the public as Walcott Place, a museum which celebrates the legacy of the Walcott brothers since Walcott’s twin Roderick also became an accomplished and award-winning playwright, screenwriter, painter, theatre director, lyricist, literary editor, and costume and set designer, as well as one of the most committed promoters and developers of Caribbean theatre.98 In Another Life, Walcott remembers that their native home was characterised by ‘the rightness of placed things’ which could not be moved from their ‘true alignment’ like ‘objects in paintings’ (AL15); it is precisely in this domestic environment which had the flavour of a painted interior that all the objects that established Walcott’s vocation occupied their own specific place. Currently, in the house/museum one does not find on display the notebooks, oils and watercolours by Warwick which had pride of place when Walcott was growing up but a small collection of Walcott’s own paintings and copies of Derek’s and Roderick’s books, notebooks and playscripts. The material presence of these texts and pictures testifies to the Walcott children’s determination to devote their lives to continue their father’s work whilst honouring Warwick’s contribution to the establishment of the main coordinates along which both Derek and Roderick forged their own path and found their ways to illustrate their private world for the great public world. In a similar vein, in January 2021, as part of the Nobel Laureate Festival which is held every year in St Lucia to celebrate Derek Walcott and the St Lucian Noble Prize winner for Economic Sciences Sir Arthur Lewis, the Derek Walcott Library officially opened its doors to local and international students and scholars, and to the general public. Situated in the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, Morne Fortune, Castries, close to where Walcott is buried, the Derek Walcott Library contains a collection of books previously owned by him and handed over, in accordance with Walcott’s own wishes, by his partner Sigrid, who is committed to promoting and preserving his cultural heritage and who remains active on the local cultural scene. Derek Walcott’s legacy is kept alive by Walcott’s children Peter, Elizabeth and Anna and The Derek Walcott Estate, which, with the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and in partnership with Arrowsmith Press, supports The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, The Derek Walcott Festival in Trinidad, and other cultural and educational events advertised via a dedicated official website.99 Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is Professor of French Literature and Creative Writing at the University of the West Indies; she has published

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academic books on the Haitian Revolution and Caribbean Woman writers and her first collection of short stories, Four Taxis Facing North, was regarded by the Caribbean Review of Books as one of the best works of 2007. Her first novel, Mrs. B, was shortlisted for ‘Best Book of Fiction’ for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2014, and Stick no Bills, her more recent collection of short stories won the Caribbean Readers’ Award in 2020. Anna Walcott-Hardy, who lives and works in Trinidad like Elizabeth, is a successful magazine editor and cultural promoter – she has been Editor in Chief, Artistic Director and contributing writer of The UWI St. Augustine News Magazine for over ten years and is editor of Ins and Outs Magazine, Trinidad and Tobago as well as Managing Director of Walcott Consulting which, amongst other things, edits, researches and writes publications as well as producing documentaries. Peter Walcott was trained as an architect at Boston University and now lives in St Lucia where he works as a painter; his acrylics are characterised by architectural precision, vivid colours and the exactness of photo-realism. Walcott encouraged his son to become a full-time artist and, distancing him from the category of those who could just ‘paint pretty well’ (where he relegated himself), he described Peter as a real ‘painter’, as someone endowed with the necessary ‘burst and confidence’ to move paint along ‘recklessly, without any caution’.100 Readily recognising that ‘designing was always in the family bloodline’ and that he was encouraged by a domestic environment permeated by ‘theatre, art, music and architecture’, Peter is now honouring his father’s commitment to St Lucia by producing paintings of ‘historical buildings and national landmarks, as well as the beautiful landscapes and lifestyles of the St. Lucian people’.101 Peter Walcott’s Central Library, Castries (2002), which represents the Carnegie Free Library of Castries built in 1924 with funds donated by the philanthropist and businessman Andrew Carnegie, creatively acknowledges, bringing them together, his father’s interest in the visual and the verbal and his commitment to the local. This impressively exact visual rendition of the library and its surroundings – which clearly demonstrates how Peter can bring to fruition his training as an architect – explicitly refers to the world of words Derek Walcott inhabited as reader and writer and celebrates his literary achievements. The library, in fact, overlooks what, since 1993, has been rechristened as ‘Derek Walcott Square’ (formerly it was ‘Columbus Square’) in order to celebrate the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. In the park at the centre of the square and in the foreground of the canvas are the two busts dedicated to Derek Walcott and his fellow St Lucian Sir Arthur Lewis. Peter, instead, portrays and pays tribute to his father as a visual artist in Derek Walcott at Work (2005) (cover image): giving his back to us, Walcott-the-painter is not immediately identifiable and, as he achieves, literally, that anonymity ‘without a cloud of identity’ which, as we will see in Chapter 6, he considered so fundamental to his ‘adamic task’,102 the portrait

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he is busy painting becomes, in Peter’s canvas, teamwork to which both father and son contribute, gesturing towards their numerous collaborations for theatre productions. For Walcott’s last play O Starry Starry Night (2014), in fact, Peter produced, amongst others, copies of Gauguin’s The Mango Trees (1887), Les Alyscamps (1888), Self-Portrait with Portrait of Emile Bernard (Les misérables) (1888), Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) and The Potato Eaters (1885), which appeared on the stage and, with his father, he contributed paintings to be projected as a backcloth for Moon-Child (2012). O Starry Starry Night and Moon-Child, however, were not the first plays on which father and son collaborated: Peter, who started painting when he was six years old, began to help with ‘props and huge backdrops [and] to design sets’ from an early age, since Walcott’s home in Trinidad was also a ‘production site’ for the Trinidad Theatre Workshop that Walcott founded in 1959 and was involved with until the 1970s.103 This collaborative spirit did not end with Walcott’s death; in June 2018, Peter Walcott completed Little Blue House in Gros Islet, a painting his father had started but, sadly, was never able to finish and which is a testament to the two artists’ shared ‘awe of the [Caribbean] ordinary’ (TH8) to which I will return in the penultimate chapter.

Notes 1. Greene, Lost Childhood, 54. 2. Walcott in Rowell, ‘Interview’, 132–3. 3. Derek Walcott, ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’, in What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), pp. 65–84, 73. From now on, I will be referring to this essay as A followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 4. 25 Poems was privately printed in 1948 with financial support from Walcott’s mother Alix. The dedication reads: ‘This book is for A.W. and the memory of my father’: the initials A.W. refer to his mother Alix but also to both Alix and Warwick at the same time. Walcott paid his mother what at the time was an enormous sum for a widowed teacher by selling copies of his books to friends. 5. King, Derek Walcott, 9. 6. Roderick Walcott, ‘In Good Company’, 28. Roderick Walcott published ‘In Good Company’ in the Trinidad and Tobago Review in April 1993 and the draft copy of his address entitled ‘In Good Company: Address by Mr Roderick Walcott … on the Occasion of Nobel Laureate Week 1993’ is in the Roderick Walcott Collection, one of the Special Collections held by the Library of the Open Campus of the University of the West Indies in St Lucia. 7. Roderick Walcott, ‘In Good Company’, 28. 8. Walcott, In A Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), 53. From now on, I will be referring to this volume as GN followed by the page number in parentheses in the text.

74    Derek Walcott’s Painters 9. Walcott’s attribution in Another Life is ‘Malraux, Psychology of Art’ (AL1) but since in his notebooks Walcott adds: ‘quoted in: Stuart Gilbert “James Joyce’s Ulysses”’ (ALms2, 124), it is possible that he was very interested in this specific observation but had not actually read Malraux’s book at that point. Gilbert’s book on Joyce was published in 1930 and he is also the translator of Malraux’s Psychology of Art in English. The Psychology of Art by André Malraux and translated by Stuart Gilbert was published by Princeton University Press (1949–1950) in three volumes for the Bollingen Series XXIV. Princeton issued an abridged paperback edition in 1978 (after the publication of Another Life) under the title The Voices of Silence: the quotation Walcott refers to is to be found on p. 281 of this edition. 10. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘Annotations’, 221. 11. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 97–8. 12. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 97. 13. Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture, 76. 14. MacGregor, History of the World, xix, xvii–xviii. 15. Walcott originally published Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos in 1949; it was reprinted with introductory material in ‘Special Issue on Derek Walcott’, edited by Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Agenda 39, nos 1 –3 (2002–3): 15–50. This quotation is from p. 37 of this edition and, from now on, I will be referring to the 2002–3 edition as EY followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 16. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 98. 17. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 97–8. 18. In ‘Outside the Cathedral’, Walcott explained that as a young boy he built his ‘own tradition’ on his father’s possessions and mentions ‘two little blue books, one of Durer’s drawings and engravings, the other of the English Topographical Draughtsmen’ (OTC21, 13). 19. This ‘memory’ must have been very vivid: Walcott also mentions it at the beginning of his interview with Melvyn Bragg for the South Bank Show (Walcott in Bragg, Derek Walcott). 20. In 1950 Simmons explained that in St Lucia, much like elsewhere, portraits were commissioned by those who could afford to pay for them or, alternatively, they were painted for free to seek the patronage of the wealthy and powerful (Simmons, ‘Critique’, 8). 21. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 57. 22. Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux have researched the plight of women working for the coaling industry in Castries since the 1860s and explain that it was only in the 1950s that women porters stopped existing (History, 293). 23. See, for example, the short film The Coal Girls:1930, British Pathé and the Reuters Historical Collection (27 November 1930) in which the women are depicted as hard working and disciplined (but also almost ‘picturesque’) members of colonial society. 24. In his screenplays/storyboards for Omeros, Walcott dates this imagined moment at around 1938: see TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 65, folders 1–36. 25. Jones, ‘Mawkish Masterpieces’. 26. Walcott, ‘Native Women under Sea-Almond Trees: Musings on Art, Life and the Island of St Lucia’, House & Garden, 156, no. 8 (August 1984): 114–15

A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects    75 and 161–3. The reference to St Lucian women vendors and those who used to carry coal is on p. 161 and from now on I will be referring to this article as NW with the page number in parentheses in the text. 27. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 141. 28. Shields, Places, 61. 29. Chon, ‘Role of Destination Image’, 3–5. 30. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 98. 31. Herbert, ‘Dossier des “Glaneuses”’, 143. 32. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 32–4. 33. Gunn, Vacationscape, 111. 34. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 32–4. 35. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘Annotations’, 266–7; Finberg, English Water Colour Painters, 12–35. 36. Bonehill, Daniels and Alfrey, ‘Paul Sandby’, 13–14, 16. 37. Finberg, English Water Colour Painters, 14. 38. Morning Chronicle, 17 May 1792, 3. 39. Finberg, English Water Colour Painters, 15. 40. Lowenthal and Prince, ‘English Landscape Tastes’, 186. 41. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 1. 42. Roderick Walcott, ‘In Good Company’, 28. 43. Walcott in Dual Muse, 1999, 30. 44. Walcott in Fumagalli, ‘Permanent Immediacy’, 281. 45. Finberg, English Water Colour Painters, 2. 46. Walcott, ‘Isla Incognita’, 56. 47. Walcott in Montenegro, ‘Interview’, 136. 48. Knowles, Life and Writing, v. 2, 217; Craske, ‘Court Art Reviewed’, 49. 49. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 194. 50. Walcott, personal communication, 29 October 2016. 51. This quotation is the epigraph to ‘Leaving School’ and reads: ‘Sometimes an ancient and infinitesimal detail will come away like a whole headland; and sometimes a complete layer of my past will vanish without a trace’ (LS24; LéviStrauss, Tristes Tropiques, 45). 52. Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, 166, 244–7. In 1915, however, when Canadian troops came to defend Castries during the First World War some were stationed in Vigie (Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, 246–7). 53. Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, 293. 54. It is possible that, had Warwick not died on the day of his promotion, the Walcotts might have relocated to this area eventually. 55. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘Annotations’, 228. 56. Casid, Sowing Empire, 9. 57. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 5. 58. Simmons repeatedly painted palms fully integrated in the local landscape: see, for example, Lavoutte Bay (1936) (Fig. 2.1), a painting of the Grace Anglican Church at River Dorée, Fishing Boats (c. 1939), paintings in possession of Roy Augier (1960) and Adrian Augier (1960); they also regularly appear in St. Omer’s works, from murals like The Holy Family for Jacmel Church (1973) (Fig. 2.7) to canvases like Petit Piton, Jalousie (1992).

76    Derek Walcott’s Painters 59. Significantly, Walcott’s ‘Royal Palms … an absence of ruins’, first published in The London Magazine in February 1962, was also selected by in Anselm Hollo for his 1964 anthology Negro Verse which showcased poems ‘openly conscious of, and committed to, [their] racial and cultural origins’ and was inspired by, and keen to support, works aimed at advancing the ‘“new beauty” of America’ (7). The quotation from ‘Royal Palms … an absence of ruins’ is from p. 17 of Hollo’s volume. 60. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 11. In the 1920s, sugar cane was still being cultivated in St Lucia despite the 1884 sharp drop in prices, which caused the abandonment of four-fifths of all large plantations; in the twentieth century the crisis continued but, even if export earnings fell more than 40 per cent between 1924 and 1931, it was very hard to break away from plantation economy (Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, 236, 252). 61. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 252–96. 62. Walcott in Bragg, Derek Walcott. 63. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 259. Harold Simmons, for example, seems to have used postcards for inspiration: his painting of the Grace Anglican Church at River Dorée (undated) is a copy of an old postcard of the same subject (Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux’s History, fig. 47, Courtesy of Robert Devaux collection). 64. In Historical Photographs & Stamps of St Lucia (Saint Lucia News), the postcard of the Coconut Walk under scrutiny (Fig. 1.7) here is dated 1908. https:// www.damajority.com/historical-photographs-stamps-of-st-lucia-st-lucia-news/ (accessed 17 June 2021). 65. Walcott in Montenegro, ‘Interview’, 136. 66. Walcott in Montenegro, ‘Interview’, 136–7. 67. Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux give 1913 as a date for the arrival of the first motorcar in St Lucia and provide a photograph of its owner, George Barnard, stuck in the mud in one of its first outings (Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, fig. 77): if they are right, the date of 1908 given to the postcard Vigie, Cocoanut Walk, St Lucia, on Historical Photographs & Stamps of St Lucia, is either inaccurate or reveals a ‘forgery’ whereby a car is preposterously (etymologically speaking) inscribed into the landscape in order to emphasise St Lucia’s modernisation and reassure tourists. 68. In Historical Photographs & Stamps of St Lucia (Saint Lucia News) this photo is dated 1910. https://www.damajority.com/historical-photographs-stamps-of-stlucia-st-lucia-news/ (accessed 17 June 2021). Representing ‘civilizing decency’ seems to have been the primary function of St Lucia’s botanical garden under colonial rule since, after the failure of the St Lucia’s sugar industry in 1884, the local botanical garden was supposed to support alternative crops like ginger, nutmeg and kola trees by raising and distributing seedlings around the island but its only curator was given no travel allowance nor other means to promote good farming practices (Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, 238–241). 69. Jesse, St Lucia, 23; Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, 244. 70. Harmsen, Ellis, and Devaux, History, 254. 71. Roderick Walcott, ‘In Good Company’, 1993, 31. 72. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘Annotations’, 300.

A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects    77 73. Harmsen, Ellis, and Devaux, History, 269. 74. Harmsen, Ellis, and Devaux, History, 271–2. 75. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 141. 76. Finberg, English Water Colour Painters, 143. 77. Caption. David Cox. The Challenge: A Storm on the Moor (1850s). Victoria and Albert Museum. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O16381/the-challengea-bull-in-watercolour-cox-david-the/ (accessed 18 June 2021). 78. Myrone, ‘Monarch’, 58–9. 79. Bonehill, Daniels and Alfrey, ‘Paul Sandby’, 27. 80. Bonehill, Daniels and Alfrey, ‘Paul Sandby’, 27; Myrone, ‘Monarch’, 57–63; Barrell, ‘Paul Sandby’, 9–12. 81. Finberg, English Water Colour Painters, 18, 86. 82. Roderick Walcott, ‘In Good Company’, 28. 83. Dodgson and Pottle ‘Moore, Henry’, 2. Born in 1831 Henry Moore learnt how to paint from his father with his brothers Edwin, William, John and Albert. Initially a landscape painter, in 1858 he began to switch his attention to seascapes (Afloat and Ashore, 4). From 1860 until 1873 Moore painted landscapes as well as coastal scenes and sea pieces and, in the last twenty years of his life (he died in 1895), his major works were almost all seascapes. His works are characterised by precise ‘observation of atmosphere and wave form’ (Maclean qtd in Dodgson and Pottle, ‘Moore, Henry’, 1) and he always made careful pencil studies of the movement of waves and ships: his search for accuracy led him to a strong realism but some objected to what they regarded as a crude and violent use of brilliant blues and greens and lack of imagination (Dodgson and Pottle, ‘Moore, Henry’, 1–2). 84. Moore’s A Silvery Day, West of The Needles, Isle of Wight has been at the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Wirrall, UK, since 1948 when it was gifted by the industralist Frederick Nettleford. The painting is not dated. In 1887 the London Fine Art Society hosted an exhibition entitled Afloat and Ashore, Ninety Pictures and Drawings by Henry Moore but since A Silvery Day, West of The Needles, Isle of Wight is not listed, one might assume that it might have been painted after that date. In 1888 Moore also painted Nearing the Needles (1888), now at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool – where the titular stacks of chalk are actually visible: it is possible, therefore, that he might have painted both oils in the same year. 85. Maclean qtd in Dodgson and Pottle, ‘Moore, Henry’, 2. 86. Judy Egerton has pointed out that the ship which had inspired Turner was called Temeraire, with no accents (Egerton, Turner, 13). 87. Walcott in Bragg, Derek Walcott; Walcott, personal communication, 29 October 2016. 88. Walcott, ‘The Muse of History’, in Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 36–64, 62 (originally published in 1974). From now on, I will be referring to this essay as MH followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 89. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘Annotations’, 223. 90. Brown, ‘Born Again’, 34. 91. Egerton, Turner, 11, 12, 80.

78    Derek Walcott’s Painters 92. Egerton surveys different ‘legends’ which provided accounts of how Turner came across his subject (75–7). 93. Egerton, Turner, 92–3. The Temeraire (Fig. 1.8) is shown travelling east, away from the sunset, even though Rotherhithe (where the Temeraire was broken up) is west of Sheerness, a fact that also supports a reading of the painting as a work representing a beginning or a sunrise rather than a sunset (Morgan, ‘J.M.W. Turner’). 94. Livesley, ‘Later Life’, 29. 95. Roderick Walcott, ‘In Good Company’, 28. 96. Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, 215. 97. Walcott in Sjöberg, ‘Interview’, 85. 98. Walcott Place, however, was closed in June 2017 for lack of funds and reopened for the Nobel Laureate Festival in January 2018: there are new plans to develop its potential as a cultural hub for the island. 99. See Derek Walcott official website: https://www.derekwalcott.com/. 100. Walcott in Bragg, Derek Walcott. 101. Peter Walcott in Haynes, ‘Interview’. 102. Walcott in Friedman, Writer’s Brush, 382; Walcott in Handley, ‘Interview’, 105. 103. Peter Walcott in Haynes, ‘Interview’.

Chapter 2

Atelier des Tropiques: The Local Scene

As his copies of Millais’s The Blind Girl and Millet’s The Gleaners testify, Warwick was a self-taught artist who, in order to learn how to paint, carefully copied and reproduced masterpieces of the past. Warwick took inspiration from English (the topographical draughtsmen, Turner or Millais), French (Millet) and German (Dürer) masters alike and Walcott’s own apprenticeship as a painter but also, crucially, as a poet, developed along similar lines: ‘The whole course of imitations and adaptations was simply a method of apprenticeship’, he declared in a 1977 interview: ‘I knew I was copying and imitating and learning ... I knew I had to absorb everything’.1 This ‘everything’ created a complex cluster of often contradictory interests, passions and affiliations. Falling in love with ‘English’ as the colonial empire was fading and at a time of cultural decolonisation, the young Walcott learnt English and American poetry but also the Classics and French literature at school at the same time in which he was exposed to St Lucia’s multi-layered colonial (French and English) and linguistic heritage (Kweyol and the English continuum). In ‘Outside the Cathedral’, Walcott recalls that, growing up as a Methodist on a Catholic island, he was socialised into thinking that both the local French-based Creole or Kweyol everyone spoke in the streets and the Latin used for the Mass by the Catholic majority were ‘languages of superstition’, ‘resignation’ or ‘unquestioning acceptance’ (OTC18). Nevertheless, he insists, if his Methodist chapel ‘was a little fort that defended the English language’, Latin and Kweyol always remained ‘potently seductive’ for him (OTC18). Walcott also proclaims that if he used to revere the topographical draughtsmen his father admired, he considered ‘contemptible’ ‘almost every English painter, except Turner and Constable’ (OTC21, 23) and he might have felt encouraged, as a St Lucian watercolourist, by the introductory chapter of Finberg’s English Water Colour Painters which Warwick is likely to have owned and father and son to have read. Finberg begins by highlighting that, despite being prepared to accept that the ‘English school

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of painters in water colour deserves to be studied as a valuable expression of national character’, he thoroughly rejected the ‘patriotic’ notion – supported, for example, by Samuel Redgrave – that watercolour painting is a ‘peculiarly English art’.2 In Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), we hear an echo of this remark, albeit transposed and adapted to a (post)colonial reality. Walcott, in fact, takes Finberg’s position further, and, with an ironic move that, rather than uncritically supporting a colonialist notion of mimicry, subtly interrogates essentialist alignments, he endows his Barbadian/St Lucian father with the ‘English reticence’ of watercolour (TH12), a reticence which, in the manuscript for Another Life, he describes as ‘neo-English’ (ALms2, 117). These concomitant processes of questioning, broadening, ­de-essentialising and relativising English cultural supremacy were also encouraged by Walcott’s familiarity with the artbook he repeatedly had recourse to in his apprenticeship years, namely Thomas Craven’s A Treasury, published for the first time in 1939 (reprinted twice) and then enlarged for a 1952 and 1958 edition. Craven’s book, a volume crucial to Walcott’s composite portable museum, introduced the young Walcott to less than a dozen English painters out of a total of around 100 artists, mostly Italian, French, Flemish and Dutch, as well as to a sizable number of artists from the Americas. Together with the Caribbean-born John James Audubon, painters like Gilbert Stuart, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Albert Pinkham Ryder, George Bellows, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, John Sloan, Charles Burchfield, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Grant Wood exemplified for Walcott the contribution of the ‘New World’ to the creation of ‘art masterpieces’ and enabled him to better appreciate the cultural agenda of St Lucian artists and intellectuals undertaking a thorough reassessment and rescaling of the centrality of European ­metropolitan culture whilst enthusiastically championing the local.

Tracing Sociological Contours: Harold Simmons In Another Life, where Walcott mentions with admiration different European masters, from Giotto to Andrea del Verrocchio, from Michelangelo to Vincent Van Gogh, from Raphael to Paul Gauguin (incidentally, all artists featured in Craven’s book), he also repeatedly calls ‘master’ a contemporary St Lucian artist he felt deeply indebted to. At the beginning of Another Life, for example, the young Walcott remembers striving an entire afternoon for a sketch of the Vigie promontory which he eventually submitted to this ‘master’, the half-bald and bespectacled Harold Simmons (AL3, 5). Born in St Lucia in 1914, Simmons came from a prominent family. His father was a pharmacist and the son of an emigrant Barbadian engineer who had arrived in Saint Lucia in the late 1800s; his younger brother, Ira Simmons, became the second native Governor of Saint Lucia from 1973 to 1974. One

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of the island’s foremost intellectual figures, Simmons was, according to some, a real ‘renaissance man’.3 A painter, botanist, sociologist, linguist, local ethnographer, historian, and a tireless promoter of St Lucian culture, both within and without the perimeter of the island, Simmons was also a journalist who contributed to The Voice of St Lucia since the early 1940s, became editor of this newspaper between 1957 and 1959, and worked as a correspondent for both the Trinidad Guardian and Reuters. Simmons carefully studied and wrote articles on Henry Hegart Breen’s 1844 St Lucia: Historical, Statistical, and Descriptive, the works of the eighteenth-century land surveyor M. Lefort de Latour, and of the ‘Geographer of the King’ Thomas Jefferys, capitalising upon their findings in order to develop and disseminate an understanding of the history of the island also aimed at the development of a new agricultural system.4 Attentive to the needs of his fellow islanders, in fact, Simmons did not hesitate to denounce the Government’s ‘neglect’, lack of appropriate planning and ‘mal-administration’ of the agricultural sector; he called for more investments to develop new skills and know-how to harness St Lucia’s natural resources, to ensure that the country could ‘take her place with pride alongside of the more developed units of the Federation’, and to offer valid opportunities to its citizens who, sadly, felt obliged to emigrate to find a better life.5 Simmons, moreover, meticulously researched, took seriously and brought to the fore local cultural history (for example he was instrumental in reviving the flower festival of La Rose and La Magrit) and became a staunch supporter of Creole culture.6 Simmons was also a close friend of Sesenne Descartes, a Saint Lucian singer and cultural icon who, for many, including Walcott, fully embodied the local Creole tradition and the spirit of the island: in his 1997 collection The Bounty, in a section entitled ‘Homecoming’, Walcott exclaims: ‘My country heart, I am not home till Sesenne sings’ (B31). From a more personal perspective, for the young Walcott, Simmons represented a direct link to his late father Warwick who had actually encouraged Simmons to become a painter. When Walcott began to show some interest in the visual arts, Simmons took him on as a pupil together with a few other talented St Lucian boys whom he welcomed in his studio and provided with painting equipment and access to his books, music and paintings. Walcott remembers fondly Simmons’s generous support for his and his companions’ artistic ambitions, support which ‘in a very small, poor country like St Lucia … was extraordinary’.7 Simmons taught Walcott essential skills: ‘how to do a good sky, how to water the paper, how to circle it, how to draw properly and concentrate on it’;8 most of all, he impressed upon him the centrality of drawing which, as he still recalled in 2016, Simmons used to describe as ‘the probity of all art’.9 Walcott’s lifelong insistence on the importance of (verbal) form and ‘design’ and his hundreds of detailed and minutely drawn storyboards might find their roots, therefore, in Simmons’s teachings. Moreover, if Walcott did not think he had the ‘confident flourish’ of artists who manipulate the weight of the paint to ‘slash and mount and increase the

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surface of the canvas by stroke’, he was proud of the attention he paid to drawing and design: he describes himself as a ‘pretty competent’ draughtsman and watercolourist, an artist who could ‘layer and build’10 and who could discern the need for and properly execute what he called ‘emphatic or silhouette-like’ pencil lines as well as ‘evocative’ ones.11 Arguably, however, Walcott learnt from Simmons a lot more than how to draw in order to pass the externally administered University of Cambridge examinations in painting: as Walcott recalls in an interview, Simmons’s influence ‘was not so much technical … mostly, it was the model of the man as a professional artist that was the example’.12 At the very beginning of the Second World War, in fact, Simmons left his job in a firm specialised in the exportation of local produce to devote himself entirely to painting and, as we will see, he helped Walcott become more aware of the artist’s role in society and more conscious of the class- and race-related trappings and colonial prejudices which hampered the cultural and political development of St Lucia and the region. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Simmons plays such a pivotal role in Another Life, a poem which retraces, as Walcott puts it, ‘those mornings of [his] life when [he] imagined [him]self a painter [and when] the spiritual history of [his] region begins’ (ALms1, 1). Crucially, in the poem, this spiritual history begins with the act of (re)landscaping. At the beginning of Another Life, as we have seen, Walcott revisits an early attempt at sketching the Vigie promontory at twilight with ‘the fever of a draughtsman’s clerk’ in a line which implicitly acknowledges his apprenticeship as an artist (‘clerk’) as a continuation of the work started by his father, a clerk in the First District Court of St Lucia whose artistic predecessors were the topographical draughtsmen (AL4). In the process, Walcott-theapprentice-painter became deeply frustrated because ‘in its dimension’ his drawing ‘could not trace / [the promontory’s] sociological contours’ (AL6): his initial sketch, we are told, was later changed and, seemingly, improved, by Simmons’s ‘slow strokes’ (AL5). Walcott’s self-criticism suggests that he felt he had precipitated his complex milieu into a singular ‘dimension’ which lacked depth and poignancy, and, as such, offered a deficient insight in the social dynamics simultaneously revealed and concealed by the scene unfolding in front of him. In other words, Walcott here fully discloses his vexation at his own inability to capture in paint ‘the paradoxical flash of an instant / in which every facet was caught / in a crystal of ambiguities’ (AL58). Simultaneously, however, the poem fully exhibits Walcott’s competency to render this ‘paradoxical flash’ in verse. As the amber twilight ‘lock[s]’ the landscape, the poet declares to have found his ‘heaven’ (AL3). The allure of the scene described is arresting and, notably, Walcott reframes it as a painting: amber resin in fact has been used for centuries to varnish paintings in order to heighten colours and protect their surfaces. Notably, Craven praised highly Vermeer’s ability to render objects which appeared so ‘precious’ that they should have been

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‘framed in pure gold and displayed in a cabinet of sealed glass’: his surfaces and textures were so rich that ‘all evidence of human touch [disappeared] as if nature herself … had crystallized her colours in glazed patterns’ and rather than being perceived as ‘painted illusions’, they looked like ‘actual materials preserved in amber glaze’ (emphasis mine).13 In Another Life, the adjective ‘locked’ generates a first ambiguity as it indicates that, if the amber embrace which glazes, preserves and contains the promontory can create a perfect impermeable view in vivid colours, it might also end up stifling the landscape, not only fixing but perhaps even distorting (or distorting by fixing), what is being portrayed. Walcott’s elation, in fact, is tempered by a couple of details which question – or at least disturb – the notion of ‘heaven’: the declining sun is ‘tired of empire’ but the colonial grip, signposted by the British fort, still holds the peninsula in check and presides over a racist and prejudiced society where the young Walcott is regarded as a ‘monster: / a prodigy of the wrong age and colour’ (AL3). As the twilight itself becomes a painter who illuminates even more contradictions inherent in the landscape (hotels and jungles, the Government House and the shacks of the morne), the ‘view’ is once again recast as a painting, ‘transfigured sheerly’ into ‘a cinquecento fragment in gilt frame’ by the ‘student’s will’ (AL4). This transfiguration is therefore precipitated by the young painter’s unmitigated (‘sheer’) will to elevate reality and ‘fix’ his vision according to received aesthetic coordinates that taint perception like a diaphanous yet disguising ‘sheer’. The metaphoric transference of the actual St Lucian landscape into a cinquecento fragment whose preciousness is sanctioned by its gilded frame14 is seen as a ‘sheer’ or sudden, reckless, vertiginous act in itself. Such deliberate framing of the Vigie promontory along the lines of a received tradition, in fact, can be provocatively daring, inasmuch as it asserts that the St Lucian landscape is given equal standing with those portrayed in the works of the Old Masters, but also utterly disempowering, if we take it to mean that valorisation of the local can only be undertaken according to imported parameters. The first drafts of the opening of the poem reveal, even more explicitly, the nature of Walcott’s approach: we are told that a ‘tide of saffron light rose till the whole / hillside was varnished with it and became / what I wanted: the print / of some old Master in its gilded frame’; Walcott then continues by saying that he ‘had made [his] own heaven / “A Treasury of Art”, by Thomas Craven. / That clear serene light of the world, landscapes, / locked in immortal amber, their rare gleam, / Giotto, Fra Angelico, Crivelli’ (ALms2). Another draft of the first lines further clarifies that immediate reality was being adulterated and with negative results: ‘a hand was altering hill, / panelled sky, the raw, unpainted shacks / to a late masterpiece, until, / there was no heaven!’ (ALms2). Significantly, when he tried to turn what was in front of him into what he wanted to see by identifying ‘the light of the world’ with Old Masters’ paintings, Walcott declares that he ‘felt nothing’ (ALms2). In the first page of the manuscript of Another Life,

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Walcott explains that it was this ‘misunderstanding of light [that] made [him] abandon art because, at that early age, [he] saw what [he] wanted, changing the colour of things, and eventually their nature. [He] saw palms and imagined elms’ (ALms1, 1). As an apprentice, therefore, Walcott needed first and foremost to learn how to look at his world – what Walcott calls ‘the learning of looking’ (WTS9) – whilst keeping at bay the pernicious desire to disregard its dynamic reality, turn it into something else, and crystallise his misunderstanding into a canvas. In the opening pages of Another Life, as darkness falls, the young Walcott’s disabling and deceptive rendition of the promontory as an already ‘framed’ cinquecento fragment, fades away and we are confronted with a new, darker metaphor (‘black hills’ as ‘hunks of coal’) which underscores the social and colonial reality of Castries as a loading harbour teeming with hard-working and exploited (mostly female) labourers (AL4). In ‘Leaving School’, Walcott explains that the ‘topographical changes of [Vigie’s] headland chart[ed] the social evolution of the island’ (LS27) so the reference to coal works well as an introduction to the poem’s zooming in on Vigie’s palm-flanked avenue turned into airstrip, on the colonial distortions which inculcated in local people the habit to consider palms less noble than elms, on the racist discourses which engendered in Black or brown subjects like Walcott a yearning for whiteness, and on the promontory’s class stratification, from busy whelk pickers to dutiful civil servants, from Black schoolboys hanging from trees after school to retired colonels trying to catch the green light (AL6). The darkness engulfing the promontory, however, is not absolute – the reduction of the black hills to hunks of coal, for Walcott, is in fact an inaccurate simplification: one light remains visible in the night, a light that comes from the kitchen of a local girl who blows the embers of a fire (AL4). The girl’s domestic, mundane act chimes with what, in ‘The Figure of Crusoe’, Walcott identifies as the daily ritual action of artists creating new work by refining in fire what is inherited from the past, feeding the flame of creation using as combustible what is immediately available to them.15 If the amber glare (and the default received tradition it evoked) locked and asphyxiated his landscape, the embers that the girl blows in her kitchen represent instead a goldmine of breathing possibilities waiting to be nurtured and developed. Appositely, the image of a kitchen fire is also an oblique tribute to Simmons’s art and his devotion to the local: in his obituary for his tutor, in fact, amongst Simmons’s favourite subjects for his watercolours, Walcott mentions precisely ‘the firelight of kitchens’.16 The necessity to ‘see’, appreciate, embrace and endorse the ordinary and dynamic local is therefore at the core of the opening of Another Life where Simmons’s setting right of Walcott’s drawing is not to be understood merely as the intervention of a more experienced painter who could better handle the brush. Given the layered complexity of the scene described in the poem, Simmons’s ‘slow strokes’ exemplify an alternative way of seeing and interpreting what one is

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seeing which guides the apprentice in his effort to better understand, confront and, crucially, remap and re-landscape his surroundings. The unlocking of potentialities inherent in blowing embers finds a counterpart in the opening paragraph of ‘What the Twilight Says’, published in 1970 and written while Walcott was working on Another Life: here the twilight is recast as a metaphor for a new beginning. It is in fact while going to rehearsals at twilight in Port of Spain that Walcott starts to confront his ‘doubt[s]’ and the fear that any attempt to build on ‘rotting shacks’ and ‘barefooted backyards’ is a futile enterprise. Arguing for the necessity to transcend ‘gilded hallucinations of poverty’, Walcott warns against casting destitution, perceived in the warm ‘amber’ light of the sunset, as an ‘art’ and not as a ‘condition’. At the same time, however, he also rejects self-defeatism and reasserts determination, hope and commitment to his local reality: ‘if there was nothing, there was everything to be made. With this prodigious ambition one began’ (WTS3–4). Yet, rather than starting from ‘nothing’, Walcott had to begin by contending with powerful and distorting representations of his locality, as we have seen in the previous chapter, and by engaging with what, in one of his early poems, he calls the ‘machinery of class and colour’ which overdetermined human relations and established privilege in his native St Lucia (25P28). In Epitaph for the Young, a long poem privately published in 1949 while he was still Simmons’s protégé, addressing Andreuille Alcée, the light-skinned girl he was in love with – who was also the young woman blowing the embers in her kitchen and the character of Anna to whom Book Three of Another Life, entitled ‘A Simple Flame’, is dedicated – Walcott laments that ‘complexion’ kept them apart: ‘you in the castle of your skin, I the swineherd’ (EY21). The very first poem in 25 Poems – Walcott’s first collection, also privately published – is entitled ‘Inspire Modesty by Means of Nightly Verses’ and is a prayer containing the line ‘strengthen the fraud that white and black are brothers’, an indication that the young poet acknowledged that racial equality still had to be fought for despite hypocritical stances which might deny the island’s harsh reality (25P1). Other poems in the same collection highlight how the belief in ‘the rule by complexion’ was still very strong in St Lucia (25P7), recall the day when someone (Walcott himself?) ‘suddenly realized that / [he was] black, and that meant / Quite a few things’ (25P32), and explain that, due to external pressure, the poet’s ‘skin’ sometimes felt like a ‘prison’ to him (25P39). In this colonial racist context, Simmons staunchly supported Walcott and other talented St Lucian children of the ‘wrong colour’ (AL3) and enabled them to develop their own skills: in Epitaph for the Young Walcott explains that in Simmons’s villa they felt ‘secure / … in the smell of oil and paint’ (EY19). After the publication of 25 Poems ‘the privately prejudiced’, Walcott writes, ‘pretended to be tamed’ (EY42) but it was always clear that they believed that Walcott had ‘entered the house of literature as a

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houseboy’ (AL77) whose only hope to fulfil his potential was to move to England (AL106). Simmons, on the other hand, always encouraged Walcott to commit himself to the island. Walcott was receptive to Simmons’s (and, implicitly, Warwick’s) invitation to stay focused on the local: in ‘Call for Breakers and Builders’, also published in 25 Poems, Walcott dismisses ‘the distant love for / England’ as ‘impossible and absurd’ but argues instead: ‘love is here [in St Lucia], and luck, under [his and other St Lucians’] / feet’ (25P19). The pun with ‘metrical feet’ seems to incite poets to become builders of a new future, but this task is equally shared between poets and visual artists because, Walcott continues, ‘it is never … too late for / [a] painting’ which can help ‘recreate’ (in the poem Walcott indicates that the verb is to be understood in the sense of ‘building anew’) a ‘better / island’ (25P19). In a colonial society in transition where the arts and the artists were given neither space nor importance, Simmons accepted the challenge of ensuring that their contribution as shapers of a new order and society would be taken seriously, and taught his pupil the value of a local art rooted in local experience, an ‘art by the people for the people’.17 In 1944 Simmons was enrolled as a member of the Trinidad Art Society (the first non-resident to become one) and delivered a lecture on the neighbouring island to mark the first exhibition of the society for which he was invited as a guest artist. Perhaps inspired by what he saw in Trinidad, a year later, in 1945, Simmons became one of the founders of the St Lucia Arts and Craft Society which aimed at fostering local talent and had the ambition, in Simmons’s words, to ‘spread its influences to St Lucia, the West Indies, and further afield’.18 Simmons was aware that the artistic development in the eastern Caribbean was hampered by lack of patronage, a point he felt very strongly about and was hoping to address with the creation of the St Lucia Arts and Craft Society: for him, in fact, art was not to be considered a luxury for a few but ‘part of every day life and a social responsibility’.19 When Simmons visited England in 1948 to study at the Cooperative College in Leicester in order to learn and pave the way for the work of cooperatives in St Lucia, he found the ‘simple unpretentious rooms’ of London’s ‘little galleries’ a suitable alternative to large national museums which, in any case, as he lamented at the time, central government or municipal authorities in the West Indies could not afford to build.20 According to Simmons, little galleries were ‘the nurseries from which new influences emanate[d]’ and he insisted that comparable spaces should be organised ‘in each of the towns and large villages [of the West Indies using] part of the store or warehouse’ for the benefit of workers and shoppers.21 Simmons’s championing of London’s little galleries brings forward both his approach to the metropole, which he was discerning enough not to treat as an overpowering monolithic entity, and his ability to discover, at its core, alternative and peripheral spaces that could be, as he says, ‘pregnant with significance to the Caribbean’.22 His overall observations on this cultural phenomenon are shaped by a sustained effort

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to question and blur the categories of centre and periphery in order to give centre stage to the (allegedly) marginal: for instance, we are reminded, en passant, that Camille Pissarro was from the Virgin Islands, a point Walcott made very forcefully, more than fifty years later, in Tiepolo’s Hound, a long poem which contains an idiosyncratic biography in verse of the Impressionist painter which foregrounds his Caribbean roots. Simmons, who was interested in modern art, also underlined that European ‘sculptors and painters [were] exploiting to the full the forms of expression of people of non-industrialised countries … follow[ing] Picasso who’, he added, ‘rightfully said that the art of Europe was sick and decadent’.23 West Indian art, he concluded, could not ‘be rooted in European art … in forms that served [their] purpose fifty years ago or more’ but should be nurtured by ‘encourag[ing] the spontaneity, the primitiveness in creations that bear the imprimatur of the people’.24 For Simmons, in the London art scene, ‘primitiveness’ or ‘primitivism’ were to be traced in paintings bearing ‘strong influences of Polynesian, Ancient Mexican and African art’25 and, having studied both the Amerindian heritage and the African origins of music, folktales and rituals of St Lucia, he considered West Indian artists to be in an extraordinarily favourable position to disassociate ‘primitivism’ from its problematic colonial underpinnings, expedient reappropriations and disparaging undertones, because their rich and varied heritage could provide inspiration for new modes of expression and counter the notion that ‘primitive’ was not ‘real’ art. In ‘The Language of the Rocks’, published in The Voice of St Lucia on 3 September 1953, looking at one of the petroglyphs left by the Amerindians on the island, Simmons rechristened it ‘“Portrait of a Girl with a Mirror” by a Primitive Picasso’.26 Exploring St Lucia’s neglected historical layers and spotlighting and championing its (suppressed) folkloric manifestations, Simmons’s work as a painter, historian and ethnographer, relandscaped the island for younger generations. In the manuscript for Another Life – which he wrote roughly at the same time in which he was working on Dream on Monkey Mountain, first produced in 1967 – Walcott includes quotations from Simmons’s broadcast talks and articles on St Lucian folklore and its African roots which were to play centre stage in Walcott’s plays like Ti-Jean and His Brothers (written in 1958), Dream on Monkey Mountain, or the long poem Omeros (1990) (ALms1, 27, 35, 36). The Amerindian past of the island is evoked, for example, in Another Life, where the poet refers to Arawak petroglyphs hidden in the thick forest of St Lucia, or in the opening lines of Omeros and, later in the poem, where one of the characters disturbs an indigenous grave (AL54; O163–4). Simmons’s rediscovery of an inspiring multi-layered tradition, his vision for the role of art in society, his desire to break through traditional stifling conventions, and his appetite for cultural decolonisation are further articulated in ‘The Need for an Art and Crafts Society’ where he also insisted that ‘Art in itself could not be called Art unless it springs from the people, unless

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it records the experiences felt and experienced. Unless we are honest with ourselves the desire to express will be repressed by the fear that unless we paint swans and landscapes or carve Chippendales or Louis Quinze whathave-yous we contribute nothing.’27 Importantly, Simmons’s ‘we’ comprised all West Indians, not just St Lucians. The 1940s, in fact, marked the beginning of the establishment of a West Indian cultural and literary community: before then, the British Empire had traditionally kept the West Indian islands ‘unnaturally apart’ and communication was only encouraged between individual islands and London.28 When Walcott began to go to Simmons’s studio in 1942, his time with his master overlapped with the formation of an artistic and literary community through the development of art societies and the founding of the journals BIM, the major literary magazine of the region which started in Barbados in 1941, and Kyk-over-al, produced in Guyana from 1945. Simmons strongly believed that, in the West Indies, the recognition of the value of local culture could play a crucial role in the process of national and regional identification: in 1943, for example, in an article on calypso published in the Trinidad Guardian, he insisted that, in order to achieve ‘a true conception’ of themselves, West Indian people had to better understand their distinctive musical tradition.29 A lecture he delivered in 1944 at the Trinidad Art Society entitled ‘The Technique of Oil Painting’ – further expanded as an article published in The Voice of St Lucia under the title ‘West Indian Artists Need Better Colour Combination’ – exemplifies not only the author’s belief in cultural emancipation from European models but also his desire for better communication and more intense cultural exchanges amongst the different islands and for a commitment to make West Indian culture known abroad in all its richness and specificity: ‘very little is known of the West Indian way of life in the outside world, in fact little is known in the islands of each other’s neighbouring isles. The artists of this part can do a great deal to remedy this if greater endeavour is made to portray those things that they know and understand and which inspire them.’30 Walcott’s formative years in St Lucia, therefore, were marked by his master’s enthusiasm for regional unity: in his obituary for Simmons, Walcott describes his former mentor as ‘a Federalist before the politicians made it an issue and the idea of the federation became widespread’.31 The influence of Simmons’s federalist beliefs and his understanding of St Lucia as part of an archipelago which went beyond the British West Indies32 is evident in Walcott’s play Drums and Colours, commissioned to celebrate the inauguration of the West Indian Federation in 1958 – a work I will return to in Chapter 4 – but also in his early poems. In ‘Travelogue’, after evoking characteristics common to all the Caribbean islands ‘under broad North America’ and/or ‘offshoots of the South Continent’ (namely, seasonlessness, mild winter, hurricanes, windy cliffs, lost red and black tribes), the poet exhorts

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his fellow islanders to build a ‘federated archipelago’ which he identifies as a collective ‘dream’ of all West Indians, regardless of their colour (25P16–17). The Federation of the West Indies, which was eventually created ten years after the publication of this poem, did not last long (3 January 1958 to 31 May 1962) and the political betrayal of this ‘dream’ was still mourned by Walcott in ‘The Lost Federation’, published in his 1976 collection Sea Grapes.33 Walcott, however, never abandoned the idea, first formulated in Simmons’s workshop, that art and culture could play a pivotal role in the decolonising process and in the West Indies ‘becoming unified and having its own strength’.34 The epigraph of canto IV of the Epitaph for the Young reads ‘There is not a West Indian Literature’ (EY22, italics in the text) and the whole poem is an exploration of the possibility and necessity of founding/ finding one, while in 1970 – twenty-two years later and eight years after the West Indian Federation had dissolved – Walcott still insisted: ‘the future of West Indian militancy lies in art’ (WTS16). Simmons’s commitment to a West Indian ideal was further reinforced when he visited England in 1948, at a time when all West Indians were beginning to come together in the metropole and the BBC programme Caribbean Voices had already been broadcasting a wide range of West Indian writers since 1943. During his stay in England, Simmons pre-recorded with the BBC a broadcast for a shorter version of ‘Little Galleries’ for Calling the West Indies in West Indian Diary, a weekly slot within that programme, where, as we have seen, he reviewed the London art scene and, in particular, discussed the role played by small galleries in fostering talent.35 Simmons’s stay in England was short: he had decided very early that, in order to instil in his fellow West Indians and St Lucians the sense of pride in their surroundings which was key to decolonise their minds, he had to remain at home, serve St Lucian reality and the St Lucian people, reconfigure what and who could be considered as an appropriate artistic subject, and investigate different modalities with which such subjects should be represented. Walcott, however, indicates that Simmons’s work was eventually perceived as ‘old-fashioned’, even ‘colonial’ by a ‘new generation of abstractionists’ (ALms2, 103). As a matter of fact, even Walcott’s fellow apprentice painter Dunstan St. Omer, who had also been tutored by Simmons, did not always like what he took to be the ‘“picturesque safety” of Simmons’s works like “Boat Under Trees”, fishermen hauling, almond and sea-grape groves’ (ALms1, 15). Nonetheless, Simmons, who painted landscapes but also still lifes and portraits, was always keen to produce affirmative paintings focused on his immediate reality: in a 1942 view of a tranquil village at the foot of St Lucia’s mountains, for example, houses are painted in a way that reminds one of volumetric masses à la Cézanne but the geometry of the picture is softened by the foliage which is often superimposed on the houses and by the curved lines of the overpowering mountains at the back which exalt the power of the natural environment. Simmons’s peaceful depiction of the Grace

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Anglican Church at River Dorée is based on a postcard36 which was probably chosen because it highlighted how the church was quietly embraced by local vegetation in a juxtaposition of nature and architecture which indicated an organic exchange between the world inside and outside the church. Simmons also identified the places he was portraying by painting their names directly on the canvas (for example, From the Bannanes, 1936, Lavoutte Bay 1936) (Fig. 2.1), a habit that might further explain why, in Another Life, Walcott appears keen to consider ‘Adam’s task of giving things their names’ – a phrase taken from the Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps (AL47) – as an activity or, rather, a duty, to be carried out simultaneously through writing and painting. Sometimes Simmons appended to his visual works some verbal commentary where he would explain what a specific beach, bay or road meant to him: through this practice, he did not just share his celebration of what he saw in front of him but also directed the viewers’ gaze towards a specific kind of appreciation. A view of Choc Bay, for example, is complemented by the caption When Mountain, Sea and Sky Chant an Immortal Melody! (c. 1936) inscribed onto the frame of the painting while at the bottom right-hand side of a view of Lavoutte Bay (1936), Simmons wrote/painted not only the name of the location but also Bach Fugue in G Minor. In this painting, a dusty path flanked by palms and various shrubs curves left, folds back to the right, and then vanishes in the distance; its further course is not visible (there might be a cliff or it might be descending progressively to the sea) but we are offered a deep view of a tranquil bay and promontory. Simmons often used local trees to frame a specific view37 but here a low branch cuts through the view horizontally and its offshoots, overlapping with the outline of the path, take centre stage. The evoked rhythm of the fugue is made visible in the repetition of these shapes/lines but also in the winding trajectory of the path which seems to invite beholders to enter the picture and walk down the trail, step by step, in order to experience the progressive alterations of the scene afforded by concomitant changes of perspective. Many of Simmons’s landscapes of St Lucia document a simple and often hard life in ways that would have instilled in ordinary St Lucians a sense of pride. In a representation of fishermen’s boats on a beach with a view of the fishing village behind (c. 1939), the boats are given centre stage to underline their importance for the inhabitants of the village who, far from being the idle beggars of post-emancipation colonial discourse, are hard-working people who take responsibility for their own welfare and whose dignity is signposted by the cleanliness and good working order of their boats. In Simmons’s humanised landscapes, in fact, the beauty of the scenery is often evident, but the people press on with their immediate, urgent tasks. In Sunday Morning (1942), a scene bathed in a golden light, the fishermen’s longing for home is emphasised by the fact that they give their back to the spectacle we are admiring, keeping their eyes firmly on the beach. In other seascapes

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featuring fishermen (Cas-en-Bas and Pigeon Island, both from 1961, and an untitled painting owned by Roy Augier dated 1960), pulling the net in is a job fishermen share with their women and children: they all work as a team, animated by a common purpose and relying on a strong community spirit, but each figure is individualised by his/her own unique posture or distinctive clothes. In Cas-en-Bas and Pigeon Island, the line they form pulling the net creates an imaginary umbilical cord which highlights the strong relationship between local people and the sea as their source of livelihood while in the painting owned by Roy Augier they are all focused on the boat and the produce it is bringing. Other paintings, featuring the male Black body at leisure, enhancing both its beauty and deep connections with the natural environment, or portraying strong and proud St Lucian women, make different, subtle but important, political statements. In a watercolour dated 1960, we find a naked Black youth, captured from behind while standing on a rock by the sea with his buttocks thrust out (Fig. 2.2a) in what looks like a standard bodily pose from ancient Rome or Greece, remindful of (possibly even modelled on) Donatello’s David (1430–40) or the only upright figure in Thomas Eakins’s oil Swimming (The Swimming Hole) (1885). Simmons is careful in his rendition of human anatomy and the overall image powerfully works against colonial and post-emancipation representations of Black degradation.38 Similarly, Simmons’s portrait entitled Albertina (c. 1940) (Fig. 2.3) confers both the status and individuality inherent in portraiture (the subject is named rather than being anonymous) to an ordinary St Lucian woman who is neither sexualised nor infantilised (she is a mature female figure rather than a ‘girl’) and does not conform to exoticising stereotypes. I will return to Albertina later in this chapter but here it is crucial to remember that, in 1989, when Walcott and St. Omer were discussing the role Simmons had played in their lives and careers in a documentary for the South Bank Show, they both pinpointed the fact that their teacher’s Albertina was the first portrait of a Black local woman they had ever seen.39 In the same interview for the South Bank Show, Walcott explains that he and St. Omer also felt particularly excited by Simmons’s paintings of remote villages which had never been painted before.40 Simmons, who had travelled around St Lucia extensively, always encouraged the young Walcott and other members of what we could call the urban brown middle class of St Lucia not only to ‘love, paint and write of [the island] always’ (ALms2,103) but also to visit it, explore its countryside, and get to know its often destitute inhabitants. In the early poem ‘Solo’, where the title refers to a St Lucian dance in which two people face each other but never touch,41 Walcott recalls the many mornings spent in Simmons’s villa nurturing his talent but also records his realisation that the sense of security and solidity offered by Simmons’s tutelage could not result in the creation of an ivory tower. Looking at some of his old drawings, in fact, Walcott is startled by the thought that the villa

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Figure 2.1  Lavoutte Bay – Bach Fugue in G Minor, 1936, Harold Simmons, watercolour on paper, 25.4 cm × 20.3 cm approx. Donated to Folk Research Centre’s Simmons Academy, St Lucia, by Brenda Simmons, burnt in the fire which destroyed the Folk Research Centre on 25 March 2018. Courtesy of Brenda Simmons.

Figure 2.2  Boy and Market Lady, 1960, Harold Simmons, ­watercolour, 32 cm × 14 cm (each). The Boswell Williams Collection. Courtesy of Chester Williams.

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where he worked so hard and learnt so much looked ‘hurt with leaves’: these ‘leaves’ seem to represent the demands of the world outside to be acknowledged, regardless of how painful a journey into the surrounding reality might be (25P31). ‘The unguessed edge of the razor’, mentioned earlier in the poem as a point of arrival for the young artist and his companion, might signpost precisely their understanding of the need to negotiate, in their work, the sharp social reality of the island (25P31). Furthermore, Simmons, who often developed bonds of affection and mutual trust with the fellow islanders he painted,42 made Walcott understand that, in order to paint human subjects, one had ‘to try to be with them’ (NW162, emphasis mine). Following Simmons’s advice, therefore, Walcott was soon to realise that to place oneself in the human and natural environment he purported to paint also required ‘an immense amount of work and time, in drawing, in fighting off sandflies, in measuring the fury of the heat’: to turn ‘a name on a map’ into a landscape was a task which presupposed a connection with one’s subjects and environment that went beyond the aesthetic necessity of painting en plein air and facilitated the forging of a shared experience where the final product would be shaped not only by the painter but also by its subjects’ responses and the meteorological elements (NW163, 164). St. Omer recalled that Simmons to him was ‘the first hero [he] ever had’ and that the most recurrent advice of the master to his apprentices was: ‘Paint your own experiences. Paint what you see.’43 Perhaps inevitably, what his pupils ‘saw’, and what they looked for and experienced in a landscape was also ‘framed’ by Simmons’s paintings, his teachings, his ideas and his attitude. In Another Life, for example, Walcott recalls that at the age of fourteen, when he had already been a pupil of Simmons’s for two years, he got lost in the countryside near D’Aubaignan where he used to spend part of his vacation in an estate belonging to a friend of his parents and where, suddenly, he ‘dissolved into a trance’ in front of a sun-bathed valley (AL42–3). This was an epiphanic moment which cemented his deep bond with the island and made him realise that ‘something … fasten[ed him] forever to the poor’: we are told, in fact that he began to weep for ‘the grass, the pebbles’ but also for the ‘cooking smoke’ ascending from the labourer’s houses punctuating the valley (AL43). The description of this moment in the manuscript notes for Another Life ends with the above realisation (Alms1, 79–80) but the poem continues by highlighting how nature and culture (that is Simmons’s – but also Warwick’s – example) probably contributed in equal measure to Walcott’s revelatory experience. The poor to whom Walcott feels forever fastened, in fact, are visible only behind their ‘tinted scrim[s]’ (AL43): these distant shapes and colours remind one of Walcott’s evocatively outlined characters in the ‘alphabet of the emaciated’ discussed in the previous chapter and also of figures/shapes on a canvas that, due to its subject, could have been sketched by Simmons. We are further reminded of the way in which, in Walcott’s mind, local life and local art, immediate reality and (Simmons’s)

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rendition of it, could blur into one when the place where Simmons lived the final years of his life is described in the manuscript as ‘an old house’ with ‘a clean unpainted wooden floor … in a thicket of breadfruit … as if the penalty for his pursuit of truth was to inhabit a typical painting’; here, ‘humbled, reduced, [Simmons’s] ambition found its frame / with fatal symmetry … He had entered a landscape he could draw / so easily you searched a corner for his name’ (Alms2, 105, 115). In his autobiographical essay ‘In Good Company’, Roderick Walcott, who did not attend Simmons’s painting workshop in the early 1940s but certainly absorbed his influence by osmosis, declares that ‘if knowing the island as much as you can proved your love for the island, no one loved St Lucia more than Harry Simmons’.44 Simmons’s desire to know as much as possible about St Lucia extended also to the lived experience of the capital Castries and its dwellers. On 30 November 1940, for example, he published an article in The Voice of St Lucia entitled ‘Talking Shops’ which contained what Horace Walpole would have called ‘minuting’ of a topographical nature applied to the urban landscape of Castries. Curious to find out exactly how many shops there were in the municipal confines of St Lucia’s capital, Simmons set out to count them one by one on his way to and back from work, focusing his attention to two main streets of the city at a time. The speed with which shops appeared and disappeared every day made it clear to him that, in order to arrive at a number which would at least have a validity of twenty-four hours, he needed to count them all in one day. The list of shops finally produced is kaleidoscopic: from fishmongers to millers, from painters to chemists, from tailors to electric supply shops, from novelty shops to bread and cake shops. Simmons, however, was not just moved by topographical curiosity: he was also interested in the sociological reality of the shopkeepers of Castries and, as Finberg would have put it, in ‘the sentiments immediately suggested’ by what he was seeing and reporting on.45 Simmons, in fact, describes a general sense of depression and economic crisis, sympathises with the anxious human beings behind the counters, and celebrates St Lucian resilience in the face of difficulties. His very last words, moreover, contain a polemic punch line, delivered with elegance and irony since, meditating on the huge numbers of shops of the capital, Simmons proudly concludes: ‘not only the English are a nation of shopkeepers’.46 Simmons was also keen to use the visual arts – not just words or ­journalism – to provide a visual record of momentous contemporary events. In December 1944, the anonymous reviewer of Simmons’s second one-man show for The Voice of St Lucia noted that, amongst other things, the versatile artist exhibited a painting entitled U-Boat Attack in Castries Harbour, 1942 inspired by a German U-boat torpedoing the Lady Nelson and the Umtata in the Castries harbour in March 1942.47 The torpedoing caused both apprehension and some resentment towards the US presence which had de facto transformed the island into a military target; moreover, since, in the immediate

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aftermath of the attack, a looter was killed by a ricochet bullet fired by a US Marine blocking access to the two damaged ships, St Lucia also suffered her first ‘war victims on home soil’.48 Fuelled by his own and the city’s shock, fear and anxiety, Simmons produced the canvas that was included in his exhibition a couple of years later. We do not know what Simmons’s U-Boat Attack in Castries Harbour, 1942 looked like as the review does not provide descriptions and the painting itself has proved impossible to locate; Walcott, however, must have seen it at the time and it might even have inspired his graphic descriptions of German attacks (or the ‘blitz’) on St Lucia and of the effects the Second World War on the island in Another Life, where he refers to ‘mouths’ beginning ‘to bleed’ (AL70). Most importantly, however, Walcott absorbed Simmons’s conviction that what happened on the island was worth recording and immortalising in art as much as, for example, the burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons painted by Turner in 1834 or the battle of Waterloo which Walcott saw represented, in a suitably glamourising and sanitised reproduction hanging in one of the wealthy houses of St Lucia, when running sewing errands for his mother (AL68).49 In 25 Poems, for instance, Walcott repeatedly shows his pride in the local and his urge to demystify the existence of a rigid dichotomy between centre and periphery. More specifically, in ‘Elegies’, he insists that artistic sensitivity has no nationality and declares, in the face of a prejudiced colonial and racist elite, that the ‘beautiful and young [who] are always dead’ (his primary examples were Thomas Chatterton and the Second World War poet Sidney Keys) could be found in metropolitan London or Rome, but also in his native Castries (25P11).50 When, on 19 June 1948, a fire destroyed the city of Castries, therefore, it is not surprising that both Walcott and St. Omer produced paintings and, in Walcott’s case, also lines of poetry which, like Simmons’s U-Boat Attack in Castries Harbour, 1942, were triggered by this tragic and traumatic local event even if only one of them, Walcott, had experienced it in person.51 In both ‘A City’s Death by Fire’ and Epitaph for the Young, the ravaged city provides the wasteland on which the young Walcott projects his own personal discontent and tries to rearticulate hope (25P24; EY31, 33–5). Some of the paintings the two young artists dedicated to the fire of Castries were also on display at an exhibition at the temporary Education Office in Castries in which Walcott and St. Omer presented for their first time their works to the general public in September 1950. Overall, according to Simmons who reviewed the exhibition, despite a certain ‘lack of finish’ St. Omer dominated the show both in terms of quantity and ‘stimulating versatility’; Walcott instead, Simmons continued, ‘lack[ed] the medium’.52 Nevertheless, Simmons’s review reveals important similarities between the two artists who shared a keen desire to experiment and a mutual interest in each other’s work and in the same subject matter: Simmons, actually, goes as far saying that two of the paintings concerned with the ruins of post-fire Castries could have been painted by either artist. St. Omer’s painting

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of the fire, entitled The Rape of Castries, was harshly criticised by Simmons for its reliance on what he called ‘vulgar classicism’ and, as he berated St. Omer in his review, Simmons quoted, approvingly, the first line of Walcott’s ‘A City’s Death by Fire’ from 25 Poems, a collection he had very favourably reviewed for the Jamaican Sunday Gleaner a year earlier.53

The Light of the World and Ideal Heads: Dunstan St. Omer, Harold Simmons, Eugène Delacroix and Paul Gauguin Simmons’s review of the 1950 exhibition is widely cited because he accurately predicted the destiny of his two protegés: ‘words and imagery are Derek’s forte’, he wrote, ‘the brush with discipline will be Dunstan’s citadel’.54 As Simmons foresaw, Dunstan St. Omer, who was born in St Lucia in 1927, went on to become St Lucia’s best regarded painter and a National Cultural Hero: in 1967, when the island became an Associated State with full control over domestic matters after the dissolution of the West Indian Federation, he designed the St Lucian flag, and was later awarded a Papal Medal by the Catholic Church, a St Lucia Cross by the St Lucia government, and a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II for his contributions to the arts in St Lucia, the Caribbean and the world at large. Unlike Walcott, his ‘soul companion’ St. Omer (OTC21, 12) was a staunch Catholic and his ‘citadel’ and legacy consist not only of numerous landscapes, seascapes, portraits or his famous Madonnas, but also of a number of murals he painted for local Catholic churches, including the Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of Castries.55 In ‘Outside the Cathedral’, Walcott remembers how proud they both felt when St. Omer was invited to carry out the restoration of the Cathedral for the 1986 visit of Pope John Paul II to St Lucia, a pride he describes as ‘bliss’ and ‘exhilaration’ which brought him back to the time when, in the late 1940s, the two were ‘walking the broken roads’ of Castries and felt like ‘a movement’ (OTC21, 26, 27). St. Omer carried out this commission with the help of his son Giovanni and by juxtaposing icons of Black saints to the European saints painted by a French artist in 1904: amongst St. Omer’s figures one finds saints and martyrs St Lucians could identify with, like St Martin de Porres, the first Black saint, or the martyrs of Uganda. St. Omer’s commitment to racial assertion and his attention to the local went hand in hand and were both encouraged by Simmons: Walcott and St. Omer distinctly recalled that Simmons’s studio was the place where they saw, ‘for the first time … black people in art’; ‘we saw’, St. Omer continues, ‘portraits of black people, landscapes of St Lucia, coconut trees and ladies in local head gear, fishermen – as opposed to the European thing. It was there that we realised that to be of any significance, you have to be yourself.’56 In the manuscript of Another Life, Walcott too acknowledges that it was in Simmons’s studio that he realised, for the first time, that ‘black women could

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be beautiful as art’ (ALms1, 38). In the studio, in fact, Walcott remembers, ‘a statuette of the Venus of Milo above a book case [and] on one wall … the head of a negress, in half-light. “Albertina”, that was like that head by Delacroix. The head was heroically treated, but its costume was honest: a madras head kerchief, a striped blouse and a golden earring, but it ennobled the subject’ (ALms1, 38). Simmons painted slightly different versions of Albertina, the best-known of which, dating back to the 1940s, differs from the one remembered by Walcott only in a couple of minor details which, however, might have been simply misremembered by the poet a few years later: in the painting, her shirt is not striped, and she wears two golden earrings as well as a necklace instead of one earring as Walcott suggests. Walcott firmly criticised exoticising and demeaning depictions of Caribbean women with ‘prototypical foulard, madras, and gilded earring’57 but it is evident that in Simmons’s portrait he saw something very different from a (metropolitan) debasing cliché. Simmons’s Albertina’s calm solidity of presence, in fact, is characterised by a certain boldness; her gaze is firmly directed at the viewer/painter and she looks both strong and proud.58 Baugh and Nepaulsingh venture that the ‘head’ by Delacroix mentioned by Walcott in relation to Simmons’s Albertina could have been one of the

Figure 2.3  Albertina, c. 1940, Harold Simmons, oil on hardboard. Courtesy of Brenda Simmons.

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kerchiefed heads, Black and white, in Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826).59 The Black head in profile at the back of the painting, however, might belong to a man as much as a woman and the white female figure – representing Greece defeated by the Turks – wears a Phrygian cap, symbol of freedom and the pursuit of liberty, and is portrayed as a young woman on her knees suffering a terrible defeat. Delacroix’s Greece’s posture and attitude, therefore, recall religious images of the Virgin weeping over the body of Christ60 and are very different from Albertina’s. If the head by Delacroix Walcott had in mind belonged to a Black woman, he might have been thinking instead of Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Turban (c. 1827) where a woman of colour occupies, on her own, the entire space of the canvas. The identity of the sitter is unknown, but she also appears in another painting by Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus (1827). The turban, brooch and shawl she is sporting are considered to be props (the brooch in fact appears in another painting), probably included to highlight the ‘exotic’ nature of the subject, and she exudes a quiet, rather solemn dignity. Delacroix was a very important artist for the group at the time: in ‘Outside the Cathedral’, for example, Walcott reveals that Delacroix was an influential model for himself and St. Omer when they were learning how to paint, particularly his observation (not to be found in Craven’s book) that ‘all shadows are purple at noon’, a ‘formula’ they applied, with mixed results, to their own works (OTC21, 24) and that Walcott still recalled very vividly during our 2016 conversation. This ‘head by Delacroix’, therefore, might have reached the three artists through other texts. Incidentally, it was also one of the plates included in Alain Locke’s The Negro in Art (1940) under the title of Aline, the Mulatress and with a different date of execution (1824).61 The ‘first portraits of black people’ the young St. Omer and Walcott saw in Simmons’s workshop, in fact, might not have been only Simmons’s own but also those collected in Locke’s ground-breaking volume: there is no further evidence that Simmons owned this book but it is not outside the realm of possibilities that he might have been familiar with The Negro in Art’s existence and might have discussed it with his protegés. The most likely candidate for Walcott’s comparison, however, is the head of the white woman at the core of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) (Fig. 2.4), an oil on canvas triggered by the insurrection which, in July 1830, put an end to the reign of Charles X of France and features as a colour plate in Craven’s A Treasury.62 Craven describes Delacroix’s work as ‘one of the few pictures in history in which a symbolical figure is successfully incorporated with realistic action’63 and, inspired by this image, St. Omer – who also treasured and owned a copy of Craven’s book and considered it his personal museum64 (AL78) – used Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People as the model for a painting commissioned at the time of St Lucian independence (1979) by the eminent St Lucian and Caribbean agriculturist, member of Cabinet and Minister, Calixte George (Fig. 2.5).

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Figure 2.4  La Liberté guidant le peuple (28 juillet 1830) (Liberty Leading the People, 1830), 1830, Eugène Delacroix, oil on canvas, 260 × 325 cm. Musée du Louvre. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Angèle Dequier.

Figure 2.5  Towards Independence – Black Marianne, 1979, Dunstan St. Omer, oil, 100 cm × 150 cm. Private collection of Calixte George, St Lucia. Courtesy of Calixte George and Cynthia St. Omer on behalf of the St. Omer family.

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The French painter’s Marianne is half-allegorical and half-realistic: barefooted and bare-breasted, she looks like a strong and determined woman of the people; similarly, St. Omer’s Liberty, who is both Delacroix’s Marianne and Simmons’s Albertina, sports a madras head kerchief fashioned like a Phrygian cap, is barefooted (but not bare-breasted), wears a white loose and lacy corset and an ankle length skirt trimmed with lace covered by a madras shorter outer skirt – that is, clothes which, in some elements, gesture towards the St Lucian traditional costume. Like her French counterpart, St. Omer’s Black Marianne carries the national flag – in her case the flag of independent St Lucia designed by St. Omer himself65 – and, in this powerful fusion of classic/canonical tradition and local reality that finds its roots in Simmons’s studio, she is both freedom and nation. St Lucia’s independence was not the result of a violent insurrection and this might explain why, instead of the rifle brandished by Delacroix’s heroine, St. Omer’s Liberty carries a shovel, a tool which identifies her with the rural sector of the population and gives prominence to St Lucia’s agriculture to reflect the interest of the person who commissioned the painting.66 Notably, Walcott had toyed with a similar visual metaphor to identify the whole country with this particular sector as he prepared his manuscript for the publication of Another Life since he had considered the possibility of including the illustration of a hard-working St Lucian peasant with a shovel on his shoulder.67 The figures in St. Omer’s painting are all Black and, as in Delacroix’s work, they seem intended to represent people from different classes, religions and walks of life. On the right of Liberty/St Lucia, for example, we find a nineteenth-century-looking ‘bourgeois’ (in top hat and carrying a rifle) who comes straight from Delacroix. The two young revolutionaries in the French painting, instead, have been transformed into St Lucian ‘rebels’: one, a Rasta, is located at Liberty/St Lucia’s feet pleading to be accepted in the new nation, while the one on her left, instead of a pistol carries a rose, the symbol of one of the two St Lucian societies (la Rose and la Marguerite) which has as its patron Rose de Lima, the first saint born in the New World; in his other hand, this figure brandishes a new tool for farming and agricultural practices (an artificial inseminator for cows) to underline how they should evolve with time, embrace technology, and remain at the heart of St Lucia’s economy and society.68 Most of St. Omer’s figures have maintained the posture and position of their 1830 counterparts, including the Black Marianne who, like her French progenitor, is looking backwards to incite those behind her as she is running towards us on dead bodies, representing, in St. Omer’s case, Black freedom fighters and the victims of slavery, colonialism and the so-called Brigand War (1795–7). At the back of St. Omer’s Liberty, instead of the smoke engulfing the city of Paris because of the widespread revolt, we find a sky on fire (perhaps a visual reference to the Brigand War and the Great Fire of Castries) while a sailing ship coming towards us in the background signposts the history of slavery and colonialism that St Lucia/Marianne is

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emancipating herself from. In this celebration of St Lucia’s independence which openly references an historical painting considered to be one of the masterpieces of European art, moreover, the Black and strongly localised Liberty is recast by St. Omer as a figure reminiscent of the legendary St Lucian female freedom fighter Flore Bois Gaillard, whose name suggests bravery and who led the insurgents against slaveholders in the 1795 Battle of Rabot.69 Resonating with Simmons’s Albertina (Fig. 2.3), St. Omer’s oil highlights not only that St Lucia is the only country in the world named after a woman but how, following his and Walcott’s ‘master’, he believed that political decolonisation went hand in hand with cultural decolonisation: his duty as an artist, as he had learnt from Simmons, was to confront head on received notions of ‘who’ and ‘whose history’ were worthy of representation and to encourage his fellow St Lucians to see themselves as historical agents and eligible artistic subjects.70 If Simmons’s Albertina presided over and guided St. Omer’s rendition of Delacroix’s Marianne, the portrait also found pride of place in the poem Another Life. Walcott mentions it just after admitting his failure to portray the Vigie peninsula in all its complexities and just before Simmons intervenes to correct the poet/draughtsman clerk’s drawing and, most importantly, his vision (AL5). In the economy of the poem, therefore, Albertina is posited as an important stepping stone which enabled the young Walcott to transcend the impulse to render (and distort) his world as a ‘cinquecento fragment’ (AL4). Furthermore, Simmons’s Albertina, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, St. Omer’s St Lucian rendition of it which Walcott greatly admired71 and, perhaps, also Delacroix’s Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Turban – with which Walcott might have become familiar over the years if it was not in Simmons’s studio – seem to have inflected, in different ways, Walcott’s account of the fleeting encounter with the beautiful St Lucian woman at the core of the poem ‘The Light of the World’, published in his 1987 collection The Arkansas Testament. In 1987 Simmons had been dead for over twenty years and, unlike St. Omer, Walcott had not resided in St Lucia for almost thirty years: nonetheless, this poem still exemplifies how those formative years spent in Simmons’s workshop and in St. Omer’s company moulded the two apprentices shared concerns and aspirations and forged a creative dialogue between the two which was to continue well after they took separate paths in life. ‘The Light of the World’ begins with the poet zooming in on the woman he sees while waiting for his ‘transport’ to leave the capital Castries. The line between reality, projection and fantasy is immediately blurred as she is quickly transformed into (or reduced to) a (rather oversaturated cliché) embodiment of exoticism, eroticism and male desire. In the lines that follow, we are told that the poet imagines ‘a powerful and sweet / odour coming from her, as from a still panther’; he also fantasises that ‘if this [his poem] were a portrait’, he would leave ‘for last’ the ‘highlights’ which would silken her ‘black skin’, and arrogates for himself the right to alter her appearance by

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‘put[ting] in’ a gold ‘earring’ for ‘contrast’72 (AT48). ‘If this were a portrait’, therefore, it would be one of those portraits where the sitter has very little say in the way in which she is represented. The anonymity of the woman and the fact that, at the end of the stanza, she is called, generically, ‘Beauty’, indicate that the kind of portrait the poet/painter might have had in mind could have resembled one of those which, in the sixteenth century, put forward an ideal of beauty rather than the likeness of any individual woman. A well-known example of these is La Bella (literally ‘Beauty’) by Titian (1536–8), which was commissioned by the Duke of Urbino as part of a series of pictures of beautiful women.73 The line ‘if this were a portrait’ clearly opens the door to conjectures on the paintings which might have shaped Walcott’s perception and description of the woman: prima facie, the reference to an earring evokes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) but we are made aware that the poet/painter is not in a position to produce a portrait characterised by the intimate sensuality of Vermeer’s work, where the young woman who seems to have just turned her head to look at him with her parted mouth does establish a personal relationship with the painter (and the viewers).74 The poem further disallows such comparison by progressively revealing the wide gap between Walcott’s fantasy and the reality of this encounter: the poet is quickly forced to face both the fact that the woman does not conform to his projections – ‘but she / wore no jewelry’ – and the painful realisation that the attraction does not appear to be mutual as she signals to the persistent Walcott that she is not welcoming his interest: ‘she looked at me, then away from me politely / because any staring at strangers is impolite’ (AT48). If Walcott wanted to conjure up Vermeer’s painting in his readers’ minds, then, it was probably to further highlight the (painful to him) distance, estrangement and lack of intimacy he felt between himself and the woman in the poem. All in all, the ‘polite’ woman’s attitude is closer to Delacroix’s sitter’s in Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Turban (1927) who, set at a slight angle to the painter and viewer, quietly, but firmly, averts her gaze from them: if one could argue that, in the poem, the woman’s ‘politeness’ could be seen as the poet’s way of reducing her to an embodiment of chastity and modesty – virtues which have conventionally been associated with idealised female beauty – it is important not to forget that – like Delacroix’s model whose expression appears to suggest a quiet lack of interest in the painter and his undertaking – she does not seem to actively engage in seduction and that the poet/painter feels undermined, not empowered, by her distance and lack of response. By the same token also the parallel with Titian’s La Bella who seems to be discreetly but self-consciously displaying her sensuality for the viewer’s benefit (her long tress of hair on her shoulder, her rather low décolleté) becomes less relevant: the ‘if’ in the poem’s ‘if this were a portrait’ (AT48, emphasis mine), in fact, ultimately suggests that this is not a portrait, or at least not one which follows the established tradition of model/female’s disempowerment.

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Leaving European masters aside, the ‘polite silence’ with which the St Lucian woman responds to Walcott is the one with which, as Walcott explains, St Lucians greet ‘visitors’: ‘foreigners’, he continues, consider this silence ‘sarcastic’ but to him this is ‘a quality of the island’ he had ‘learned to recognize and love … early from the days when [he was] shown its origins by a painter who was [his] mentor’.75 The impress of Simmons on the poem is also evident in the gold earring that Walcott would have liked the woman to wear for ‘contrast’ which, in fact, evokes Albertina’s golden earring(s) while the woman’s ‘heraldic’ head in the poem resonates with what Walcott describes, in his notes for Another Life, as Albertina’s ‘heroically treated’ head (ALms1, 38) (Fig. 2.3). Walcott, moreover, goes as far as declaring that the St Lucian woman he is so fascinated by is as statuesque and powerful as ‘a black Delacroix’s / Liberty Leading the People’ (AT48, emphasis mine): in so doing, he references a painting which is the collective portrait of a society in turmoil rather than of a single person and a work that, almost ten years before his poem was published, had inspired St. Omer’s collective portrait of an independent St Lucia led by a Black Liberty. Unlike Delacroix, St. Omer is not openly mentioned in ‘The Light of the World’ but his ‘presence’ in the poem is subtly signposted in its title. In Another Life, in fact, Walcott eventually equates the ‘light of the world’ with younger versions of himself and St. Omer (AL78, 152) whose juvenile dream, shaped by Warwick’s and Simmons’s example, was to reveal to the world, in poems and paintings, the reality of their beloved St Lucia: addressing St. Omer directly, at the end of the poem, Walcott exclaims ‘we were the light of the world!’ (AL152, emphasis mine). Walcott formulates this ‘equation’ or metaphor at the very end of Another Life, but in one of its first unpublished drafts, as we have seen, he laments that his habit to associate the ‘light of the world’ exclusively with paintings by the Old Masters triggered his decision to abandon the visual arts and become a poet because he wanted to avoid this mistake and was keen to begin to look properly at his world (ALms1, 1). Significantly, in an incomplete line in a draft of the opening of Another Life where he surveys the Vigie promontory, Walcott declares: ‘I felt now I had never looked / into’ (ALms2). In ‘The Light of the World’, Walcott reiterates that his ‘great love’ for St Lucia which, almost thirty years earlier, had inspired his decision to devote his life and career to a celebration of the island and its people, ‘could [still] bring him to tears’ (AT50), but this declaration is inscribed in a complex and painful meditation on rejection and attraction, love and estrangement, abandonment and belonging. In 1987, back on his native soil for a short visit, Walcott realised that, after he had left home in 1950 to pursue his academic and writing career, the island and its people continued to live without him and did not seem to need him or his poetry to carry on. Trying to come to terms with the uncomfortable feeling that he is perceived as a ‘visitor’ or ‘foreigner’ in his own island, he is determined to prove that he does not misinterpret the silent

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politeness of St Lucians for ‘sarcasm’ and is no longer prone to ‘misunderstand’ the island’s light. In ‘The Light of the World’, the uninterested, self-possessed and selfsufficient local woman Walcott is drawn to, but who ultimately eludes him, represents a self-determining and independent St Lucia, albeit in a less literal way than in St. Omer’s rendition of Delacroix’s painting (Fig. 2.5). All in all, she resists being turned into inert (or sexualised) subject matter depending on the writer for self-validation, and successfully claims her role as a subject who, interacting, or, rather, refusing to collaborate with the artist/poet, exacerbates his fears and plays her own part in the creation of the poem. Put it another way, if we are faced with a silent Mother of the nation, her silence is not a sign of submission to the male poet/painter’s vision: her polite (but reproachful) rebuttal is instead a marker of her self-reliance and of a refusal to be reduced to a cliché or a ‘portrait’ in which her input would be non-existent. The poem’s title is intriguing for many reasons and is of interest here because ‘the Light of the World’ is a phrase Walcott would have become familiar with through his childhood exposure to the Gospels in his St Lucia Methodist chapel (for example, John 8:12; 9:5 and Matthew 5:14). The Light of the World, however, is also the title of an allegorical painting by William Hunt, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Hunt’s The Light of the World (1851–3) illustrates Revelation 3:20: ‘“Behold”, says Jesus, ‘I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me’, and, in the painting, the door has no handle and can only be opened from inside to signpost that Jesus/the-light-of-the-world can only be let in if those locked inside are willing to welcome him. A replica of Hunt’s oil, significantly, was sent, at the beginning of the twentieth century, on a ‘sermonising’ and triumphal tour of the British Empire to support the Imperial mission, encourage conformity to religious doctrine and, implicitly, to European artistic values: after the tour, the painting was exhibited in St Paul’s Cathedral to hang there in perpetuity.76 Walcott’s poem, a recollection of a personal actual and illuminating experience, also seems to lend itself to be read allegorically, particularly in conjunction with Another Life where, as we have seen, Walcott identifies himself and St. Omer with the light of the world. In his later poem, the titular evocation of Hunt’s work could be understood as an indication that the poet felt like the locked-out Jesus, knocking on the door to bring the light and be admitted: as a matter of fact, ‘The Light of the World’ ends with Walcott saying ‘there was nothing they [his fellow Saint Lucians] wanted, nothing I could give them / but this thing I have called “The Light of the World”’ (AT51, emphasis mine). Yet, if Walcott offers his poem – ‘The Light of the World’, in inverted commas in the text, is the title of the poem we are reading – and, more broadly, his poetry as a whole, as a gift to a people he knew might not even be able to read it and might not even want his gift, he also seems to have overcome the hubristic

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association between ‘the light of the world’ and his own and St. Omer’s younger selves articulated in Another Life. In his 1987 poem, in fact, he makes it perfectly clear that ‘the light of the world’ is not him (nor his painter friend) but the beautiful woman in front of him and, by extension, the island and people she represents: ‘O Beauty’, he says, addressing the woman who refuses to engage with him on his terms, ‘you are the light of the world!’ (AT48, emphasis mine). If the woman/St Lucia (the name Lucia comes from the Latin lux which means ‘light’ and Saint Lucia of Syracuse is the patron saint of eye illnesses) becomes the counterpart of the light/Jesus figure locked outside in the painting by Hunt evoked by the title, the poet becomes the figure ‘locked’ inside who knows that he has to open the door to let the light of the world in, be receptive to it, and accept the fact that this light which exists without him, will alter and shape his vision. Resolutely repositioning the ‘light’ into the landscape and people of St Lucia rather than exclusively in individual artists like himself or St. Omer (or in the European tradition of painting, as he had done as a misguided apprentice), Walcott concludes by referring to his work as ‘this thing I have called “The Light of the World”’ (AT51, emphasis mine) but it is clear that, if he had called the poem (or ‘portrait’) in this way, the ‘light’ that shaped it is in fact the woman/St Lucia. The lasting effects of Simmons’s proud Albertina – and his representations of women in general – are also traceable in many female figures who punctuate Walcott’s visual and verbal works. In the 1940s, when Albertina was originally painted, St Lucian women (as Walcott knew only too well since his mother was one of them) were often the breadwinners of the home: the poorest, as we have seen, still carried coal or stones used for the construction industry in wooden trays over their head.77 In one of Simmons’s watercolours, a market woman stands on the beach next to a tray full of fruit, visibly tired of carrying it around (Fig. 2.2b). This female figure was painted in 1960, the same year of the other watercolour with which it has been framed and which presents us with a naked Black boy who, as I have pointed out, is observing the sea, absorbed in his own moment of leisure, perhaps considering whether or not to go for a swim: unlike him, the market woman is fully dressed and obviously taking only a temporary break from work.78 In other canvases which have fishermen as subjects, as we have seen, Simmons’s women help their men to pull the net in. Generally, in these paintings, produced throughout Simmons’s career, working women do not tend to look back at viewers: the woman with the wooden tray, for example, is presented in profile while the others are too busy working to notice us – perhaps Simmons was registering, albeit more indirectly, the same (class) distance that in Walcott’s Vendors at Choc Bay, St Lucia (1983) (Fig. 1.4) is reinforced by the inclusion of a ridge between the women/subjects and painter/viewers.79 In Walcott’s paintings, female figures are also, more often than not, hardworking women: in Lunch on the Beach (c. 2006), one of the two sellers of fish is in profile, ignoring the artist but serving food to customers, while

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the other, seen frontally, smiles at the painter while her hands are still busy preparing food. In the watercolour Braiding (1998), the focus is on the woman’s face and hands braiding a tourist’s hair and the appearance of a pareo or towel which bears the inscription ‘St Lucia’ amongst the colourful items for sale right behind her, implicitly invites viewers to identify this labouring woman with the island itself. Gesturing towards and reinterpreting traditional representations of Black cleanliness featuring local women which were disseminated to reassure tourists, Walcott’s Black woman is grooming not a fellow countrywoman but a white tourist (tacitly, the one in need of being ‘managed’) but, far from looking subservient, she towers over her customer: the tourist’s face, cut in two by the edge of the painting, is not even fully visible. The blond tourist’s alignment with the island’s hairstyle, its shallowness notwithstanding, complicates the naturalisation of her transitory presence as some sort of ‘assimilation’ in reverse and casts the transaction we witness as one in which, if it is clear who is financially dominant, it is also evident who has the desired knowledge and skills. In the gouache and watercolour Ideal Head: Helen/Omeros (1998), as the title suggests, we are confronted with an ‘ideal’ female figure identified in the subtitle as the fictional character Helen from Walcott’s Omeros. Walcott’s Helen is not posing for the painter: one has the impression that she has just entered the frame and is about to exit it, after only casually glancing at the artist (and us). Turning Froude’s infamous remarks about West Indians on their head, one could argue that she proudly signals that she belongs to a people and a gender ‘with a character and purpose of their own’.80 Like St. Omer’s Black Liberty and the woman in ‘The Light of the World’, Walcott’s Helen in Omeros is also conflated with the island and the nation (St Lucia is often referred to as the Helen of the West Indies because the island was at the centre of years of warfare between the French and English empires) but her feisty behaviour supports one of the characters’ view that Helen’s beauty ‘no man can claim’ (O288). As Rhona Hammond has observed in an article that cautions readers not to consider Walcott’s treatment of women as invariably sexist, Helen is a character who ‘prefers action to talk’81 and constantly rejects the subordinate role she is expected to be locked in to due to her condition of a poor Black woman whose only option of making a living is through servitude or an exploitative tourist industry (O33–4). In both Omeros and the screenplays with storyboards Walcott prepared for it, Helen is repeatedly described as the direct descendant of the coal carriers of Castries wharf (Fig. 1.2)82 – as are the women vendors in the article ‘Native Women’ and its accompanying watercolour (NW116). In the poem, Helen’s ‘head’, also sporting a madras head kerchief like Albertina’s (Fig. 2.3), is ‘proud’ even when she is ‘looking for work’ (O73, 23). When her partner treats her unfairly, she leaves him, and, despite being pregnant and unemployed, Helen refuses to accept money from those who judge her or to take ‘shit / from white people and some of them tourist’ (O33).

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In Walcott’s Ideal Head: Helen/Omeros, Helen is also wearing the yellow dress which, in the poem, works as a powerful visual signifier of her unclaimable beauty (O288), her individual pride (O29) and her disdainful response to those who criminalise her: one of the characters (the wife of a retired English soldier living on the island for whom Helen has worked as a maid) insists that she stole the dress while Helen, who parades it around defiantly, is adamant that it was given to her as a well-deserved ‘gift’ or belated symbolic payback (O29, 64).83 In a 1990 interview, Walcott revealed a connection between the Helen of Omeros and the ‘Black woman’ he describes in ‘The Light of the World’,84 but if, prima facie, one might be tempted to argue that, after the frustrating experience with the young woman in ‘The Light of the World’, Walcott finally manages to have it his way because, in the ‘portrait’ Ideal Head: Helen/Omeros, Helen does wear earrings in ‘good gold’ for ‘contrast’, one should note that she retains the pride, strength and independence of spirit of Simmons’s Albertina, of St. Omer’s Black Liberty/St Lucia – whose shovel associates her with the (rural) female workers of the island – and of the local elusive woman in the 1987 poem, whose attitude is prefigured by the two paintings in question. According to Baugh and Nepaulsingh, Simmons’s Albertina was probably inspired by the female figures depicted by Gauguin during his stay in Tahiti,85 a suggestion informed by the fact that Walcott himself had repeatedly associated the two artists. In ‘A Letter to a Painter in England’, for example, the young poet imagines his master ‘rot[ting]’ in the fog of big cities during his 1948 visit to England and reminds him of their own island which he compares to those for which ‘Gauguins’ ‘sicken[ed]’ whilst in the metropole (25P4). In Another Life, Gauguin and Simmons are artists who deliberately removed themselves from urban environment and ‘civilisation’: while Gauguin famously chose the tropics (where he died in 1903), Simmons, disillusioned by society’s lack of support for his work and for the arts and artists in general, moved away from the capital Castries and built his home up in the hills of Babonneau, in the north of the island, where he took his own life on 6 May 1966. Walcott elevated Simmons to a martyred artist after his suicide, an event central to ‘The Estranging Sea’, Book Four of Another Life, where he also canonised Gauguin who is referred to as ‘St. Paul’ (AL119–20, 125) in a verbal reference to Gauguin’s Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake (1889) (Fig. 2.6). Simmons’s Albertina and Gauguin’s Tahitian women do seem to share a certain impenetrability and lineaments which could be seen as androgynous, but Simmons’s portrait is not characterised by the nudity or eroticism that animate many of Gauguin’s Tahitian works and, most importantly, Albertina’s boldness is much harder to detect in Gauguin’s works, partly because his models in Tahiti were often his underage lovers.86 In the watercolour Gauguin in Martinique (1991) (Fig. 6.3), Walcott presents us with a female figure who, like Albertina, wears a madras head kerchief and golden

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Figure 2.6  Self-Portrait, 1889, Paul Gauguin, oil on wood, 79.2 × 51.3 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Chester Dale Collection. Photo: National Gallery of Art, licensed under CC0.

earrings. In Chapter 6, I will return to Walcott’s decision to anchor this image – both with his title and with visual clues like the woman’s head gear and her golden earrings – specifically to Martinique and to Gauguin’s experience on the Caribbean island in 1887: here it is important to observe that she is not his model but a presence who guides and sustains the painter’s artistic vision and that she looks straight at us as if she knew it. In Gauguin’s Studio (1986), a pastel on paper (Fig. 6.2), Walcott had already (visually) confronted the issue of (Gauguin’s) colonial and sexual abuse by engaging directly with Gauguin’s stay in Tahiti and Manao Tupapau/Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), a painting Craven included as a colour plate in his book87 and described as a work ‘steeped in unintelligible mythology’ or, quoting a (disingenuous) remark by Gauguin himself, as ‘“only a study of a nude in Oceania”’.88 Manao Tupapau, however, has often been interpreted as a representation of female exploitation, subservience and availability: Jean-François Staszak, for example, identifies it as a primary exemplification of Gauguin’s violence towards and violations of indigenous women when he invites us to wonder if the female figure prone with the back of her naked body exposed to our gaze is afraid of the spirit of the dead next to her bed or of ‘the painter, behind his easel, who is about to jump on her’.89 Disturbingly, in Noa-Noa, his own account of his first visit to Tahiti,

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Gauguin confesses that looking at the ‘calm-eyed young women’ of the island he wanted them to be willing to submit to what he calls ‘crude capture’ or ‘a longing to rape’.90 These comments, however, also reveal Gauguin’s deep insecurity since they come in the context of one of his models’ initial refusal to pose for him, his admission of his own inability to act on the invitation of one of the elders to ‘take’ one of the young women, and the decision of one of his lovers to abandon him.91 It is not negligible, perhaps, that in Manao Tupapau/Spirit of the Dead Watching, the young female model seen from the back is covering her private parts from the viewer’s eye rather than being totally at his disposal and mercy, and, in so doing, denies the painter/ viewer the monopoly of sexual power (or at least reduces it).92 In Walcott’s Gauguin’s Studio, the woman’s naked body and her prone posture remind us of the female figure in Manao Tupapau, but her body is only partly revealed to us and, most importantly, she raises her torso on her elbows and, like the figure in Walcott’s Gauguin in Martinique and, ultimately, Simmons’s Albertina, she defiantly returns our gaze rather than surrendering to it.93 Walcott therefore seems to distance his own artistic endeavours from Gauguin’s by showing that he is not interested in painting female capitulation, something he appears to have decided to avoid even as a young man when, following Simmons’s steps, he was beginning to paint local subjects. In ‘Native Women’, Walcott mentions a young woman he and a friend and fellow painter (presumably St. Omer) once employed as a model and who was nicknamed Miss Gauguin because she looked ‘Tahitian’ (NW162). Notably, Walcott remembers that his drawing of this young woman came out badly because he was ‘overwhelmed by her surrender’ (NW162).94 In the same article Walcott identifies a similarity in posture and demeanour between some St Lucian women and the two Tahitian women in Gauguin’s oils Tahitian Women on the Beach (Femmes de Tahiti) and Parau api, (Two Women of Tahiti) (1891 and 1892 respectively) who, silent, doing nothing, ‘saying nothing for stretches between spurts of gossip’, are just sitting on a beach, seemingly in suspended animation and in an almost meditative pause (NW161). Walcott explains that, as a young man, he had tried to paint local women adopting a similar posture on a beach in Gros Islet – significantly, in oils (like Gauguin), a medium that imparts depth and solidity to shapes and figures – but he includes in his article a recent watercolour with women vendors instead. If we put in conversation Walcott’s watercolour, his early failed attempts in oil, and Gauguin’s paintings, as Walcott seemingly instructs us to do when he adds that his women vendors are the ‘sisters’ of ‘Tahitianesque’ women of Gros Islet he attempted to immortalise in his youth (NW161), the discontinuities between these works are more revealing that their continuities and give us a better sense of how Walcott’s engagement with Gauguin’s Tahitian women was inflected by his St Lucian experiences and mediated by the work of Simmons. Gauguin’s Tahitian female figures in oil tend to resemble carved

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or cast sculptures and their motionlessness and statuesque rigidity seems to place them outside time as ‘primitive’, melancholic icons.95 Walcott’s article and watercolour insist instead that the St Lucian women he is describing and painted are historical subjects, products of their socio-politico-economic conditions who simultaneously signpost the long history of exploitation suffered by the island and its people. Walcott’s choice of watercolour – with its melting lines, the women’s barely sketched lineaments and their slightly incorporeal presence – enabled him to offer a visual counterpart to the fact that to him the vendors simultaneously represent themselves, the ghosts of their coal-loading progenitors, and the enslaved foremothers with whom Walcott associates them in the article and in his notes for Another Life. Concerned with both lack of social mobility and social inequality, Walcott’s watercolour distances itself from Gauguin’s Tahitian statuesque oil paintings not just because of the medium’s softer and dissolving lines but by giving individual mobility a greater role: one of the women’s arms, in fact, reaches for her companion, seemingly to attract her attention or to engage her in a conversation we are too distant, in many ways, to take part in, follow or even understand. In Gauguin’s Tahitian Women on the Beach and Two Women of Tahiti, moreover, the women are at rest on a beach, and the alternative title of Two Women of Tahiti, Parau api – meaning ‘What new?’ – suggests that the two are able to enjoy a leisurely companionship where no labour appears to be involved. Conversely, Walcott’s vendors might seem ‘at rest’ but are at work and, like Simmons’s Albertina and Walcott’s Helen, they are native women who have to work hard to make ends meet: two of them direct their gaze at us as if to remind us of this, like Simmons’s Albertina who is proud of her contribution to society, and the female figure supporting Gauguin in Gauguin in Martinique, who is emboldened by her contribution to the development of Gauguin’s artistic career. Given the way in which Simmons and Gauguin often overlap in Walcott’s mind, in fact, in Gauguin in Martinique one is also tempted to see the ‘shadow’ of the St Lucian Simmons and Albertina in Gauguin and his Martinican muse, and to appreciate Walcott’s acknowledgement of the centrality of these female figures and, more broadly, of what they represented, for the two artists in question.

Adam’s Task of Giving Things Their Names: Uncompromising Belief à la Vincent Van Gogh In Another Life, St Paul (Gauguin) is often paired with St Vincent (Van Gogh), ‘saint of all sunstrokes’, and amongst Simmons’s last few possessions in his self-inflicted exile at Babonneau Walcott mentions Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo alongside Gauguin’s Noa-Noa.96 At a time when, for Simmons and the young but determined Walcott and St. Omer, art was becoming a shared ‘religion’, an absolute commitment and a way of life,

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the ex-priest Van Gogh represented an important model of total abnegation and inspiring rebellion against social constraints and the colonial machinery they found so oppressive. In Epitaph for the Young, references to Van Gogh and Gauguin, provocatively branded with the simplistic epithets a frowning boorish bourgeoisie would have used to disparage them and their artistic contribution (one is ‘mad at Arles’, the other ‘perverse at Tahiti’97), are followed by lines describing Walcott’s alienation from his own racist, colonial, philistine and elitist society (EY42–3). In ‘Outside the Cathedral’, Walcott refers to Van Gogh as a key model for St. Omer who, like his predecessor who had only sold one painting in his lifetime, was afflicted by the torment that his pictures would not sell. Walcott laments that, in order to survive as a professional painter in St Lucia, St. Omer had to humour prospective buyers, satisfy their silly requests and, ‘making himself a factory’, paint innumerable beaches, Pitons or canoes with fishermen. He concludes by saying that ‘if only Philistines had vision as well as money, a great deal of the suffering of art would be reduced’ (OTC18), a comment that, of course, would also be entirely appropriate in relation to Van Gogh’s predicament. St. Omer’s attempted suicide for lack of support and recognition recalled in Book Four of Another Life (AL130), prefigures Simmons’s but also strengthens St. Omer’s and Walcott’s identification with Van Gogh as a committed artist suffering to express his personal vision in a society driven by materialism and disdainful of artistic values. Perhaps to signpost, visually, his own, Simmons’s and St. Omer’s admiration for/­ identification with Van Gogh, Walcott was tempted to include a miniature portrait of the Dutch master in Another Life, and Clara Rosa de Lima has argued that a 1980 poem by Walcott entitled ‘Self-Portrait’ whilst being, prima facie, about one of Van Gogh’s self-portraits (either Self-Portrait with Mutilated Ear or Self-Portrait with Pipe and Bandaged Ear, both painted in 1889), is in fact one of the many examples of Walcott’s identification with the Dutch painter, the torments inflicted on him by a society that did not respect artists, and his uncompromising stance towards the value of art.98 This identification was perhaps encouraged also by the fact that while Warwick was ‘a perfect English Barbadian’,99 Walcott’s mother Alix was born in Dutch St Marrten, making Walcott someone with not only ‘English’ but, as his alter ego Shabine puts it in ‘The Schooner Flight’, also ‘Dutch’ in him (SAK4). In 25 Poems, both pain and self-discipline, or, as Walcott put it, learning how to express one’s suffering in ‘accurate iambics’ (25P25), are considered central to the poet’s apprenticeship and it is precisely in his beginnings as a painter that we can find the origin of Walcott’s understanding of poetry as craftsmanship and hard work and his decision not to subscribe to the fantasy of a Muse coming to the rescue of the poet: ‘painters rarely talk about the joy that they get in painting, because they know it’s work. It’s not holy inspiration. Sometimes poets tend to talk as if it were.’100 Another Life, in fact, also contains a passage, previously entitled ‘The Art of Painting’, which outlines

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how the poet struggling to produce ‘accurate iambics’ was also a painter simultaneously learning how to ‘suffer’ in accurate colours and brushstrokes: ‘Blue, on the tip of the tongue, / and this cloud can go no further’; ‘zinc white seizes the wall’; ‘Like the scrape of a struck match, cadmium orange’ (AL55). Revolving around Walcott’s evocation of a number of Van Gogh’s paintings – like, for example, Wheatfield with Crows (1890) or those from his series of Irises (1890) or Sunflowers (1887 and 1888) – these lines record the fact that the young Walcott was not only learning how to write but also, in many ways, how to write with the visual and chromatic sensitivity of a painter: ‘The sun explodes into irises / The shadows are crossing like crows’; ‘Yellow is screaming’ (AL57). Van Gogh’s, Simmons’s and St. Omer’s religious commitment to art, which in the case of the St Lucian artists was also a commitment to represent the local, often blur in Walcott’s mind and writing. Van Gogh’s unacknowledged but powerful presence, for example, is palpable in Walcott’s ‘A City’s Death by Fire’ (25P24), a poem that echoes Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, and has been compared to Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1834) or his seascapes,101 but clearly chimes also with Simmons’s and St. Omer’s determination to paint their immediate reality and local history. The sky where ‘all the clouds are bales / torn open by looting and white’ (25P24) visually resonates with Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889) and the tree in the foreground of Van Gogh’s painting reminds one the wooden buildings consumed by the Castries fire which, according to Walcott, ‘stood on the street like … liar[s]’ (25P24). Since Van Gogh’s Starry Night (like his other paintings mentioned above) did not feature in Craven’s volume where the colour plate of choice was L’Arlésienne (1888),102 it is obvious that, given his interest in the painter, Walcott must have had other sources. In ‘A City’s Death by Fire’, Van Gogh’s substitution of religious faith with an uncompromising belief in the value of art is complemented by Walcott with a renewed commitment to his island as these verbal evocations of the Dutch artist’s painting do not overwhelm the local scene but are put to its service. As the poem gives voice to Walcott’s urge to creatively overcome darkness, death and destruction, ‘rebuilding a love [he] thought was dead’ and ‘blessing the death and the baptism by fire’ become possible only when he looks at St Lucia’s hills, ‘a flock of faiths’ which recall the background of Starry Night but are rooted in his native island (25P24). Walcott never indicates explicitly that he had in mind Starry Night at the time in which he composed ‘A City’s Death by Fire’ but in ‘The Yellow Cemetery’, which in 25 Poems precedes the poem devoted to the fire of Castries, he proclaims that paintings could be powerful antidotes to wreckages and desolation. In a suggestive poem which, as the title indicates, relies on colours and images to meditate on the condition of the dead, the predicament of the living and the power of love, Walcott lists ‘the painting’ amongst

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those ‘gifts’ that he could ‘pray’ for and were ‘enough, and may be all’, to confront the ravages of death (25P22). Despite using a definite article (‘the painting’), Walcott does not seem to have had in mind a specific painting/ gift/talisman with the power to reinstate hope: yellow is a colour that brings Van Gogh to mind (in Another Life Walcott pays tribute to the ‘screaming’ yellow of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, AL55), but one could argue that, given the local focus of the poem (the setting is a St Lucian cemetery by the sea), it is likely that he was locating the salvific power of painting less in canvases by Van Gogh or another European master than in the works of a local artist like himself, his father (who is repeatedly mentioned in the poem), Simmons, since seascapes were amongst Simmons’s ‘chief scenes’ (25P4), or St. Omer; in Another Life Walcott recalls that, due to Dunstan’s precocious talent, every landscape in St Lucia ‘was already signed with his name’ (AL59). ‘Homage to Gregorias’, the chapter of Another Life dedicated to St. Omer – or, as he is called in the poem, Apilo or Gregorias – is prefaced by a quotation from Carpentier’s The Lost Steps which highlights that Walcott, also encouraged by Simmons’s habit to ‘paint’ the title of his work directly on canvas, recognised ‘Adam’s task of giving things their names’ (AL152) as his own and St. Omer’s mission and as the culmination of their suffering in brush strokes and/or iambics. Their love for the island, fuelled by Simmons’s teachings, pushed the two young men to swear, ‘drunkenly, or secretly’, never to leave until they had ‘put down, in paint, in words’ all of St Lucia (AL52). Walcott and St. Omer worked passionately and incessantly (often intoxicated by a mixture of alcohol and artistic obsession AL51) in order to achieve their goal. Gregorias’s absorbing commitment to painting is described as a kind of ‘madness’ as he even painted underwater and was constantly focused on reproducing his surroundings, framing seascapes in a chair when in conversation with his friend, or taking long walks towards the Atlantic Ocean with an easel on his shoulder in search of motifs (AL51, 64, 52). In ‘Outside the Cathedral’ Walcott recognises that, unlike him, St. Omer – who privileged oils103 and did not use to glaze or varnish his works when they were dry (OTC18) – was never hampered by the ‘terror of [his] own inadequacy’ nor by ‘a sense of inadequacy in the landscape itself’ and did not share Walcott’s (Methodist) fear of elementary colours, his ‘horror of being too loud’ (OTC21, 20). St. Omer, he recalls, ‘did not so much paint tree trunks but strangled them with his brush strokes … wrestled canvas to the ground, pinned them under his knees, and roared like an animal with triumph when “it came out” right’ (OTC18). Walcott’s paintings, instead, ‘clouded by [his] own fear[s]’, were ‘doomed to adequacy’ (OTC21, 11): ‘they came out right, but they did so properly’ (OTC18). Likewise, as we have seen, in a muchquoted passage of Another Life, Walcott remembers that, unlike St. Omer, he was not bold enough to leave behind his influences in order to follow his impulse, and describes his own works as affected by a ‘condition of servitude’ and ‘crabbed by that style, / this epoch, that school’ (AL59). St. Omer’s

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exuberance, enthusiasm and confidence, on the other hand, enabled him to produce ‘grotesque’, perhaps even ‘bad’, but nevertheless powerful, ‘whole’ and original artwork which was never ‘phony’ (AL59; Alms1, 48). Painting with St. Omer, or ‘pacing him’ (‘I was his runner’, he says in Another Life, 59), Walcott became painfully aware that his friend’s attitude made him an ‘adventurer’ while his own made him a ‘map-maker’ (OTC18). His admiration for his friend’s strength to abandon his training and embrace ‘the errors of his own soul’ (AL59), was concomitant to Walcott’s coming to the conclusion that he felt more at home with poetry than painting: when the two friends swore to minutely record, like local topographical draughtsmen, each and every corner of the island ‘in paint, in words’, it seems that, while Walcott leaves open for himself the possibility of using pen and brush, they had already chosen their preferred medium (AL52). It has often been highlighted that Walcott’s 25 Poems and Epitaph for the Young – the poetry he was writing at the time he revisited and reconstructed in Another Life – are ‘crabbed’ by different schools and that it was only from In A Green Night onwards – published in 1962 and therefore after Walcott had left St Lucia in 1950 – that he was able to ‘emancipate’ himself from his influences. Walcott too openly admitted that at that point in his apprenticeship as a poet he was immersing himself in ‘everything in order to be able to discover what [he] was eventually trying to sound like’.104 Nevertheless, it is important to note that, like St. Omer, Walcott-the-poet was already much more confident than Walcott-the-painter and that, even in those early days, he was absorbing masters like Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Gerald Manley Hopkins or T. S. Eliot without being fully absorbed by them. Keith Alleyne, who reviewed Epitaph for the Young in 1949, observed that the influence of Eliot on the young Walcott was ‘a complete formula’.105 Yet, Walcott’s parodies of the circuitousness of Eliot’s Four Quartets – for example ‘I say this, with my mouth, you listen not with these ears, / Because they are mine’ (EY36) – indicate that he also had the confidence somehow to critically distance himself from the Modernist master. According to Paul Breslin, in the opening lines of the poem ‘Prelude’ which, in 25 Poems appears under the title ‘I, With Legs Crossed Along the Daylight, Watch’ (25P25), Walcott was already able to dramatise his internal debate and his poetic influences by switching from the ‘sensuous’, ‘oblique’ and ‘irrational’ world of Thomas to the ‘lyrical’ but ‘more transparent, discursive’ writing of Auden.106 Early critics like Frank Collymore and Simmons, despite fully acknowledging the (omni)presence of literary echoes, insisted that Walcott had already reached his potential: according to Collymore, 25 Poems was the work of an ‘accomplished poet’ able to create ‘his own compound’ with all the sources at his disposal while the title of Simmons’s review of the same volume, ‘A West Indian Poet Fulfills his Promise’, is self-explanatory.107 Collymore and Simmons might have been over-enthusiastic but it is a fact that many of these early poems (‘The Fishermen Rowing Homeward …’; ‘I

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With Legs Crossed Along The Daylight Watch’; ‘Patmos’) already contain some of the main features of Walcott’s poetry108 and a considerable number of them have continued to be anthologised and included in Walcott’s selected and collected works many years after being composed. Walcott-the-poet, therefore, was beginning to move beyond what some might regard as ventriloquism – but he considered apprenticeship – at the same time as St. Omer-the-painter who, as the manuscript of Another Life explains, also took ‘pleasure in parodying masters’: before putting his favourite record of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at full blast, for example, St. Omer used to shout ‘Music boy! Beef-oven!’ in a ritual which ‘gave him the raw energy he needed’ to paint his ‘fresh’ subjects (Alms1, 18). Each of the two young men, therefore, was an inspiring model for the other in terms of boldness of vision as they were both experimenting at finding their own distinct voices in their respective medium at a time of cultural decolonisation. In this they were fully supported by Simmons, a master who valued hard work, training and self-control – he warned St. Omer that to be a painter he had to improve his craftsmanship and learn how to handle the brush ‘with ­discipline’ – but who also exhorted them to leave the past behind, ‘cease to pander to pinkish imitations, and prefer a perfection to West Indian things’.109

A Perfection to West Indian Things and Dunstan St. Omer’s Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, St Lucia To arrive at this kind of perfection was not an easy task: 25 Poems betrays, time and again, Walcott’s deep anxiety about the possibility to succeed as a poet in St Lucia where one could see one’s ‘gifts rotting’ (25P4). Far from being just a personal goal, however, achieving ‘a perfection to West Indian things’ was also a great responsibility, particularly because, in those years when the political Federation of the West Indies was being incubated, what had to be ‘perfected’ was also an understanding of West Indianness itself. Simmons, Walcott and St. Omer were aware that, as artists and writers, they had to imagine, shape and create the very society that would host the debates from which new identity parameters could be envisioned and established. In his 1949 introduction to the collection First and Last Poems by his fellow St Lucian poet Hunter Francois, for which he provided one of his drawings for the cover, Walcott writes that when ‘independence’ is mentioned ‘people think of buildings and paved streets … it is time’, he argues, giving primacy to poetry, ‘to hear the voice of the West Indies’.110 It is not surprising, therefore, that Walcott decided to rely primarily on the medium (poetry) which he felt enabled him to best serve this purpose when he realised that he could keep at bay and transform the influence of ‘masters’ to his own advantage more easily in his poems than in his ‘crabbed’ canvases (AL59). The difference between being ‘someone who can paint pretty well [like him] and somebody

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who’s a painter’, he explained in 1988, is the ‘bursting confidence’ of those who feel they can ‘recklessly … slosh the paint around’: ‘I just don’t slosh, I pull’, he concluded.111 During his formative years in St Lucia, following the example of Warwick and Simmons and sharing this experience with St. Omer, Walcott was learning what it meant to be West Indian while he was learning how to paint and write at the same time. The crucial role played by his fellow St Lucian painters, whose subject matter was their immediate reality, is better understood if one considers that Walcott believed that, at the beginning of his career, ‘there weren’t any West Indian poets to influence [him]’.112 It is significant that in an early 1950s study of the aesthetics and preoccupations of West Indian poetry, Walcott, who was in his twenties, became ‘the senior poet and the standing example’.113 Looking back at his beginnings in 1997, Walcott lamented that ‘the bulk of West Indian poetry was very bad’ and proceeded to express the measure of this ‘badness’ by resorting to a cluster of visual conventions which he believed had to be urgently subverted: ‘there were so many easy references to bright blue seas, so many colourful depictions of peasant life; it was postcard poetry’.114 Postcard poetry must have been particularly difficult to stomach for someone who had grown up being exposed, daily, to Warwick’s The Coconut Walk (Fig. 1.5) and its (conscious or unconscious) reconfiguration of ‘postcard’ images of the island, and who was intimately familiar with Simmons’s attempts to represent a way of life local people could recognise and take pride in. The rejection of ‘postcard’ representation is implicit in Walcott’s early musing on tourists, tourism and its mystification: in ‘Travelogues’ tourists are ‘brassy visitor[s] … / in coloured shirts’, and in ‘I With Legs Crossed Along The Daylight Watch’, as we have seen, the horizon is disturbed by steamers which ‘prove’ (to themselves) that islanders like him are ‘lost’ and can be ‘found only / in tourist booklets, behind ardent binoculars’, and by tourists who, from their safe distance, ‘think’ the islanders ‘happy’, but have no idea what life in the islands actually entails (25P25). In the same interview in which he excoriates postcard poetry, however, Walcott does name a possible literary precursor in the Jamaican poet George Campbell. Walcott attributes the sense of elation he felt when reading Campbell for the first time to the fact that Campbell was ‘a poet … ­mentioning things [Walcott] knew’115 and, in so doing, provided inspiration for someone who was becoming aware of the ‘privilege’ and ‘responsibility’ to be ‘the first one’ (or amongst the first ones) to write about his own landscape and people. ‘My generation of writers’, he adds, ‘will be known as people who had to go through a very anguished kind of identity crisis … if we have set down West Indian roots, if we’ve used the language we heard around us and described the things we saw and the experiences we went through as a people, it has been to lay the foundation for whatever masterpieces would later come out of that part of the world’.116 In this respect, Walcott underlines again the primacy of visual artists as ‘pioneers in depicting the world around

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[him]. For it is the visual arts which immediately bring that shock of recognition that heightens the familiar into art, and on which a new way of seeing can develop’: artists like Harold Simmons, the Jamaican Albert Huie, or Edna Manley and her school, Walcott continues, were ‘pointing the way for poets and novelists. To paint a breadfruit tree so that it was a breadfruit tree and not a majestic oak was as daring then as to write the word “mangoes” in a West Indian poem.’117 Campbell’s First Poems resonated with Simmons’s work because of their decolonising spirit, their attention to their immediate social and natural surroundings, and their focus on hard-working Black men or women. In 1946, Simmons enthusiastically reviewed First Poems in The Voice of St Lucia and praised Campbell for his ‘original style with a local signature’, for celebrating (as he did in his own still lifes) ‘poinsettia[s]’ or ‘cassia flowers’ instead of bowing to the colonial ‘artificiality of Jingles’ featuring ‘snow’ or ‘tulips’, for showing that ‘the West Indies cannot be enclosed in imported forms’, and for the ‘social significance’ of his work.118 Campbell, moreover, redefined the role that artists could play to both ‘dream’ and bring about a ‘splendid dawn’ for all West Indians119 also by engaging with the arts. Campbell’s poem ‘Negro Aroused’, in fact, offered an uplifting ekphrastic reading of his patroness Edna Manley’s sculpture Negro Aroused (1935) and he joined forces with this icon of Jamaican nationalism in order to assert racial identity through a racially specific title.120 In his 1946 review, however, Simmons praised Campbell for his ‘understanding of race’ which transcended ‘bitter hatred’ and ‘segregation’ and spearheaded inclusivity; he also mentioned, in particular, the poem ‘Holy’ which expressed simultaneously ‘the beauty of Negro, European, Indian, Chinese, all ethnic groups who have fallen into the various melting-pots’: in so doing, Simmons wrote, Campbell ‘spoke for all West Indians’.121 Walcott too always valued the multiracial and multicultural fabric of West Indian societies but in Another Life his description of Simmons reciting aloud, in his studio, Campbell’s poem ‘Holy’ only includes the first two verses in which Campbell declares ‘holy’ ‘… the white head of a Negro’ and ‘the black flax of a black child’.122 This choice gives us the measure of the impact that these particular lines must have had on a young Walcott vexed by the racism which permeated colonial St Lucia and who, suffering from what Frantz Fanon called epidermalisation, used to pray, every night, for his skin to be turned white by the moon (AL6–7). The manuscript of Another Life, in fact, explains how Campbell’s lines were ‘shocking to all … then. Even to the black child’ (Alms1, 7) and discloses that it was precisely as a consequence of his hearing Simmons reciting Campbell’s ‘black’ poems that Walcott had become aware that it was his colonial ‘yearning for whiteness’ that had pushed him to transform the St Lucian landscape into a painting ‘locked’ (and stifled) in amber and modelled on those by the Old Masters, triggering in him, at the same time, a keen desire to remedy the situation.

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Simmons, Walcott remembers, ‘was reading the verse badly … yet this gave the landscape his voice’ (Alms1, 38). This reading took place in Simmons’s studio which, as Walcott and St. Omer point out in the South Bank Show, was so special for them because there they could see, for the first time, paintings of the St Lucian landscape and of Black and local people.123 The opening of the manuscript of Another Life, ‘So, from a green book held in the hands of an astigmatic master, in those mornings of my life when I imagined myself a painter, the spiritual history of this region begins’ (Alms1, 1), also reveals that both this collective history and Walcott’s individual decision to privilege poetry originated specifically in Simmons’s studio, in his reading of Campbell’s lines, and in Campbell’s ability to be ‘the first to stroke the beauty of ebony’ with both directness and grace, as Walcott acknowledges in the poem that, in 1980, he wrote to mark the publishing of Campbell’s collection in the Caribbean Modern Classics series.124 The desire to find a way to celebrate the beauty of ebony by producing positive representations of Blackness was also a driving force for the young St. Omer. In Another Life, Walcott refers to St. Omer’s Black and brown cherubs (AL61) and the Roman Catholic church at Gros Islet where, in the mid-1950s, St. Omer painted a triptych of the Assumption and St Joseph the Worker with Jesus in the workshop of his father.125 This triptych is modelled on traditional Catholic lithographs and Jesus, the Virgin Mary and St Joseph are all white; St. Omer’s ‘prescient Madonna’ (AL63), however, directs her gaze towards prevalently Black worshippers who reflect the demographic of Gros Islet. Walcott knew that this crowd was also metaphorical, or at least metonymic: St. Omer, who had previously produced a mural with a Black Neptune, had reluctantly restrained from painting a Black Madonna or a Black Jesus because he feared that this would not be deemed acceptable. It was only in 1973, when he was asked to paint the mural of the Holy Family for the Roseau church that, following the 1963 Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Sacred Liturgy which authorised the indigenisation of the Church worldwide, St. Omer felt he could interpret the Bible according to where he lived and therefore paint God, Christ and the Holy Virgin as figures who looked like him and his ancestors (Fig. 2.7).126 Along with taking over from Simmons and making ‘art a universal thing in St Lucia’, St. Omer considered his greatest achievement having introduced the ‘Black Christ [and Madonna] in the churches and for the [Roman Catholic] Church to be so happy about the idea that the Pope gave [him] the Medal of Merit’.127 In the impressive, vividly colourful Roseau mural, St. Omer honours his African heritage by putting at the centre of the composition a Black Madonna whose face is modelled on an African mother-mask while the face of the Black Jesus she holds in her arms is shaped as an antelope’s; on the Virgin’s left is a Black Joseph, his profile apparently taken from Ebony magazine.128 Local reality is celebrated through St. Omer’s substitution of the singing angels of European iconography with a chantwèl in traditional St Lucian

Figure 2.7  Holy Family, 1973, Dunstan St. Omer, mural, Jacmel Church, Roseau, St Lucia. Courtesy of Cynthia St. Omer on behalf of the St. Omer family.

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head gear (tet-an-lè dé bout) and by a conch-blower in the place of the apocalyptic angel with golden trumpet.129 Conch-blowing in the Caribbean has traditionally been used to call people for work or everyday activities – for example, it can be used to signal the arrival of a fisherman from the sea and the sale of fish or other local produce – and, in Walcott’s Omeros, it is the blowing of a conch which signals the beginning of a new day and, simultaneously, launches the poem: ‘O open this day with the conch’s moan, Omeros’ (O12).130 Conch-blowing, importantly, also has a strong symbolic value as conch shells were used to call the enslaved to revolt.131 In St. Omer’s mural, Black divinities and powerful symbols of Afro-Caribbean empowerment confirm both the dignity and sanctity of St Lucian experience while, at the same time, the relevance of the divine to the congregation is reaffirmed and validated by the inclusion of actual, recognisable members of the multiracial and multi-ethnic community for which the mural was painted: from the East Indian mother with son (Elizabeth ‘Cil’ Koodabachus and the little Thomas Koodabachus) to the drummer (Altius St Rose), from the shak shak player (Philippe Cetoute) to the local priest and contractor (Father Maximin Pasquier and Samuel Adjoha) who are portrayed together, carrying a replica of the church.132 Despite being (apparently) due to force majeure rather than design (according to Anthony, St. Omer had run out of paint133), the black hand of the white parish priest in the mural provides a striking visual counterpart to the process of ‘indigenisation’ of the local Catholic church and its acceptance and embrace of the local. St. Omer’s belief that ‘your God must be of you, and you of your God’134 is also reinforced by the presence of other figures illustrative of the way of life of the inhabitants of the Roseau Valley, where the church is situated, further anchoring spirituality to the local, material experience. Notably, in St Lucia, only a small percentage of the population is of Indian descent – the majority is Afro-Caribbean – but St. Omer was keen to acknowledge their presence as Walcott had done in his early play The Sea at Dauphin (first produced in 1954) where one of the St Lucian fishermen at the core of the action is Hounakin, an old East Indian whose different race and ethnicity does not prevent him from bonding with other characters. Banana farmers are incorporated in St. Omer’s mural because, when bananas became St Lucia’s biggest export crop in 1957, most of the estate lands of the Roseau Valley were assigned to banana cultivation135 while fishermen, fishing nets and fishing boats are included given the close proximity of fishing villages and because Roseau used to host an important fish market. Musicians and singers (a drummer, a conch-blower, a shik shak player, and a chantwèl) who have traditionally played an important role in village life are to be found at the four corners of the painting while the left-hand side is entirely devoted to the representation of a woman and a man, whose muscular torso is shaped by hard labour, engaged in one of St Lucia’s typical dances and on whose representation I will return in Chapter 7 where I will be considering the poem in the context of Walcott’s ekphrastic practices.

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St. Omer’s huge altarpiece is located in the central aisle of the church and is shaped like a pentagon with its peak corresponding to the roof top. The top sides slope down from the centre of the roof like two long arms which embrace the congregation, creating a deep sense of inclusion and belonging: since the divine embrace envelops both the figures in the painting and the actual worshippers, the altarpiece marks not only the interconnection between the divine and the human but also between representation and real life. All the human figures are realistically portrayed but the garments of the Holy family are fragmented into geometrical forms which dramatise the effect of light in St. Omer’s own appropriation of Cubism, a style known as Prismism, a term coined by Walcott which highlights the importance of light, not just of shapes and colours, in St. Omer’s work.136 These geometrical forms result from the intersection of the curved horizontal lines of the concentric circles which irradiate from the centre of the mural, with the vertical lines of either the folds of the cloaks of the Madonna and St Joseph or the beams of light emanating from the Holy Family. The gradually enlarged circles reverberating from a single point also chime with the African American artist Aaron Douglas’s concentric circular shapes which often play with a single colour varying its value from light to dark and which create a wave-like visual rhythm evocative of music and spirituality in his murals.137 In St. Omer’s work, in the smallest circle at the core of the altarpiece, is the infant Jesus who holds the consecrated bread of the Eucharist. The baby Jesus is also at the centre of another aureole off-centre which enwraps his little body; the overlapping of the two circles is an effective visual rendering of Christ’s double nature (human and divine) but also of St. Omer’s championing of an incarnational theology where his God ‘looks like him’ and the Virgin is Black.138 A broader circle includes the Holy Family and the Holy Spirit (represented as a dove) but also, significantly, small portions of St Lucian landscape: for St. Omer, in fact, as Walcott explained, ‘nature’ was not a ‘background’ but ‘the belief in itself’ (OTC18). The larger circumference, therefore, replicates the natural environment and way of life outside the church’s windows by including all the other figures, an anonymous hut surrounded by vegetation, palms, banana trees and the famous Pitons of St Lucia. The beholder’s eyes are also drawn to the different circles of light or aureoles enwrapping the Holy Spirit, St Joseph’s face and the faces of Father Maximin Pasquier and Samuel Adjoha, since St. Omer honoured those who actually commissioned and supported his work and the establishment of the church by including them in his fresco as was customary in medieval art. St. Omer himself appears in the mural – in another move which encourages fluidity between reality and representation he is both metteur-en-scène and part of the mise-en-scène – and, as he looks back at us over his shoulder, he is enhanced by a darker, purplish aureole, another sign that he was keen to disrupt the traditional association of darkness and black with evil and white and brightness with good. In this respect, it is important that St. Omer was

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using black as a colour of light and not simply as a darkener: the rays of light emanating from the little Jesus, in fact, are black.139 Painted too late to be mentioned in Another Life, St. Omer’s mural features instead in ‘Sainte Lucie’, included in Walcott’s following collection, Sea Grapes (SG43–55): ‘Sainte Lucie’, whose title is an English-based orthographical transcription of the Kweyol name of the island, is a sequence of five poems the last of which is entirely devoted to St. Omer’s mural. The poems in the sequence can be read as stepping stones for Walcott’s articulation of the coordinates of what one could call ‘a perfection to St Lucian things’, a perfection that St. Omer had also striven for and, Walcott seems to indicate, achieved in his altarpiece. The first poem of the sequence, ‘The Villages’, begins by anchoring itself, the sequence as a whole and the poet in the geography of the island which, and from which, Walcott proceeds to landscape: ‘Laborie, Choiseul, Vieuxfort, Dennery, / from these sun-bleached villages’ (SG43, emphasis mine). This initial sketch only admits minor variations to its grey palette, namely the ‘amethystine sea’ and a touch of rust on a boarded ‘shack’ which, by contrast, enhances the overwhelming greyness of the rest. Walcott had learnt by then that landscaping is a matter of seeing before being a matter of painting (or naming and writing), and, as his ‘I’ enters the poem in its eleventh line, he begins to reflect on what his roving cinematographic ‘eye’ has just surveyed and his pen transcribed, disclosing his disappointing distance (‘I am growing no nearer’) from an unspecified ‘something’ which, he regrets, is ‘being missed’ (SG43). In this (monochrome) sketch of the island, Walcott realises that he has described what is in front of his eyes (a boarded-up shack, a rotting net, crawling crabs) without really ‘seeing’ the full dimensions and complexities harboured by the villages: what is missed, he continues, is to be found instead inside the shack, in the elusive bond between the pelican and its shadow, and in whatever the excited seagulls can see when they cry out loud (SG43). In order to ‘see’, understand and tune in with that all important ‘something’, Walcott is aware that he has to get ‘closer’ to the villages, the villagers and Sainte Lucie as a whole, and that, like a seagull, he has to become part of the landscape. In an interview given only one year after the publication of ‘Sainte Lucie’, Walcott declares that the St Lucian landscape ‘could not be separated from [Kweyol] because the things he saw around [him] were being named by people in a new language’.140 The second part of this poem, so deeply concerned with landscaping, dramatises precisely Walcott’s attempt at reconnecting with what he calls ‘the experience of a whole race renaming something that had been named by someone else’141 – an experience that echoes Warwick’s and Simmons’s (re)landscaping of (postcard) images of St Lucia and, in a way, also St. Omer’s revisitation of European religious iconography or Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People from a St Lucian perspective (Figs 2.4 and 2.5). In the second, untitled poem of the sequence, in fact, Walcott ditches his monochrome palette for a technicolour one and begins again, this time by

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compiling a sort of personal inventory of the Kweyol names of local fruit, flora and fauna, sometimes followed by their English equivalents, whilst invoking: ‘Come back to me / my language’ (SG43–4). What Walcott found revelatory about St Lucian Kweyol –which is not lexically related to standard English because it has its base in French – is its ‘almost calligraphic’ (that is visual) power,142 the way it makes one see what one describes, revealing deep connections between the word and what it stands for, or in the poem’s parlance, revealing the existence of a perhaps elusive but powerful referentiality cable that connects ‘the pelican’ (signified) with its ‘floating shadow’ (signifier): ‘Let’s say you’re looking up at a bird in the sky over St Lucia and somebody says “ciseau la mer”. Now “ciseau la mer” means “scissor of the sea”, and that’s much more startling, much more exciting than saying “martin” or “tern”.’143 In the poem ‘A Latin Primer’, published in 1987 in The Arkansas Testament (the same collection in which ‘The Light of the World’ is included), Walcott remembers how, in his youth, it was the apparition of a ciseau-la-mer in the sky and the poet’s appreciation of the ‘native metaphor’ in the bird’s name that enabled him to ‘sail[…] steadily / beyond’ Classicism and the sterile imitation of European models, find his own voice, and anchor it to St Lucia and the evocative power of its language (AT21–4). Walcott’s excitement vis-à-vis St Lucian Kweyol was transmitted to him by Simmons who always championed its use: he believed that far from being ‘jargon’ or a ‘corrupt’ or ‘broken’ version of French, Kweyol (or ‘French Creole’, as Simmons called it) should have been regarded as ‘an independent and well-integrated tongue’ which expressed ‘the personality or soul of St Lucia’s life’.144 Simmons also pointed out that ‘French Creole’ was widely spoken in Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Dominica and that aeronautical information between St Lucia and Martinique was generally passed in that language.145 In 1958 Simmons also proposed an English-based orthography for St Lucian Kweyol146 and, incidentally, that same year saw the publication of ‘Ballades Creole pour Harry Simmons by Derek Walcott’ in The Voice of St Lucia.147 Simmons’s example encouraged Walcott to use St Lucian Kweyol in his writing and learn about its potentialities but this did not result in his adoption of it as a primary means of expression because Walcott wanted his poetry to be accurate also as far as his ‘academically privileged’ voice was concerned: ‘I could not pretend that my voice was the voice of the St Lucia peasant or fisherman.’148 Walcott’s aim, however, was always to transfer the power of Kweyol to turn names into beings and to bring things to life onto English through an appropriate modulation of tone, an overall strategy that, as we have seen, might have been inspired by the immediacy (even ‘vernacularity’) of Warwick’s watercolours. As Walcott puts it in the ‘Muse of History’, published only two years before ‘Sainte Lucie’, the real challenge he faced was never to lose ‘the tone and strength of the common speech [while using] the hieroglyphs, symbols, or alphabet of the official one’ (MH49), a challenge

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he shared with St. Omer whose mission was to appropriate and revitalise Catholic iconography by revisiting it from a local perspective. In ‘Outside the Cathedral’ Walcott explains that he gradually realised that his paintings were ‘decent, respectable’ but lacked the force and conviction of St. Omer’s partly because, unlike his friend, he still saw ‘the landscape as language, translated into an English without an accent’ (OTC18). Significantly, ‘Sainte Lucie’, where Walcott pays homage to St. Omer both implicitly and explicitly, has been considered a turning point both for Walcott and for West Indian poetry: the poem, Edward Chamberlin argues, brings together a mature poet’s confidence both in his literary inheritance and in his West Indian heritage.149 Fortified by his immersion in Kweyol, in the second untitled poem of ‘Sainte Lucie’, Walcott reverts to landscaping in English but resorts to Kweyol names to define specific local realities: ‘jardins / en montagnes / en haut betassion / … / ti cailles betassion’ (SG44–5). The next step to capture what was missed before is, as Walcott puts it in his opening lines, to enter the shack, not just paint it from outside. St Lucia’s countryside, in fact, is re-approached from a perspective that tries to render not only what the poet sees but also what the inhabitants of St Lucia’s shacks experience every day with all their senses, and to understand what they consider ‘important’: we are introduced, in fact, to their music (‘very important / the red rust drum’), their favourite flavours (‘the morning powerful / important coffee’) and the ‘cool thin water’ which bring them solace and which, since access to pipeborn water had not yet been extended to the entire population of St Lucia, Walcott calls ‘important water’ – or perhaps, the poet wonders, admitting his distance from the reality of his people, ‘imported? / water’ (SG45). In the manuscript for Another Life, Walcott explains that the difference between en ville (the city he was born in and had lived up to that point) and en betassion (the countryside all around him) is ‘like a strong change of climate. All my yearning’, he continues, ‘was to enter that life without actually living it. It smelled strong and true’ (ALms1, 36). Eleven years later, the yearning to enter that life, but also to experience and share it as much as possible, seems to have governed Walcott’s writing of ‘Sainte Lucie’. Walcott’s status of outsider/insider in his native island is further emphasised when he finally positions himself in the rural landscape, namely in a local schoolyard where one of the villagers half-recognises him and asks him to identify himself by confirming his bonds of kinship: ‘Oh, so you is Walcott? / you is Roddy brother? / Teacher Alix son?’ (SG46). The villager’s questions establish Walcott’s presence in, and connection with, St Lucia and also remind us that St Lucian Kweyol and standard English are not the only languages of the island: ‘I have a three language background’, Walcott asserted in 1977, ‘French Creole, English Creole, and English’.150 English Creole, or what some sociolinguists have called the Vernacular English of St Lucia, is a language that has gradually imposed itself primarily due to an increase in the number of people living in a Kweyol-dominated context

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having access to English through education, tourism or other kinds of influences.151 Walcott generally switched between standard English, English Creole and Kweyol more frequently in his plays than in his poetry because he did not want to make St Lucian fishermen, peasants or charcoal burners sound falsely articulate. Before writing ‘Sainte Lucie’, however, he had already explored, for example with ‘Tales of the Island’ (GN26–30), how different languages interweave to form daily speech and exploited the tension between the conventional form of the sonnet and West Indian English, whose different inflections he had become familiar with after moving to Jamaica in 1950 – where he lived in a university campus full of students from all over the region – and then to Trinidad in 1959. Before replying to the villager’s question, however, Walcott renews his bond with the surrounding valley, its flora (‘breadfruit’, ‘frangipani’), the agricultural practices that had transformed the natural environment (‘green slopes of cocoa’, ‘fields of bananas’, ‘the lost, lost valleys / of sugar’) but, above all, with the gens betassion, or rather with the many generations of women he imagines embodied in one ordinary, local woman called ‘Martina, or Eunice / or Lucilla’ (SG46). As she becomes one with the landscape (‘her armpits / a reaping, her arms / sapling’) and her ‘smile’ is ‘like the whole country’, the woman/Sainte Lucie is transformed into a secular counterpart of St. Omer’s altarpiece’s Madonna, a generative and regenerative figure from whom everything irradiates, including – as it is the case for St. Omer’s mural – the work of art (here Walcott’s poem) devoted to her (SG47). The Catholic St. Omer’s devotion to the Virgin – his paintings often include, next to his signature, the letters PLSV, that is Pour la Sainte Vierge or For the Holy Virgin152 – finds its counterpart in Walcott’s commitment to his island and his people, a commitment that shares the same intensity of a religious faith and depends on the same ‘incarnational’ principle. It is ultimately to this woman/ Sainte Lucie or, rather, to all the women and men she ‘contains’, that Walcott directs his reply to the villager’s request to identify himself: ‘O Martinas, Lucillas, / I’m a wild golden apple / that will burst with love, / of you and your men, / … / generations going, / generations gone, / moi c’est gens St Lucie. / C’est la moi sorti; / is there that I born’ (SG47). Content here is as important as the languages in which Walcott pledges his allegiance and, since he had realised that the St Lucian French lexicon Kweyol could impede communication with the rest of the Anglophone West Indies, let alone the Anglophone world at large – some Kweyol expressions in plays set in St Lucia (like The Sea at Dauphin) had to be removed or translated in order to facilitate comprehension153 – he articulates his love for the island and its people in its three languages. At this point, Walcott’s (re)location in situ is complete: he is not just observing Sainte Lucie from a distance, he is not just in Sainte Lucie but also declares himself to be from and of Sainte Lucie. If Kweyol and English Creole play a crucial role in the second untitled poem, they take over completely in the third poem, ‘Iona: Mabouya Valley’,

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which consists of an English-based orthographical transcription of a Kweyol song for which Walcott offers a translation in English Creole in the fourth poem of the sequence (SG48–52). The poet, therefore, becomes a scribe who records in writing the voice of his people and brings together orality and the page-bound tradition. Mixing tragedy with comedy, the song confronts some of the repercussions of the migration of St Lucians to Curaçao in the late 1940s: couples drifting apart, the inability to invest remittance money wisely due to widespread illiteracy and, most of all, the hardship, endurance, strategies and scapegoating of the women who remained at home and had to get by, often supporting a whole family on their own.154 ‘Iona: Mabouya Valley’ also creates a bridge between the second and fifth poems of the sequence and between Walcott’s poem and St. Omer’s mural because it attests to the pervasive presence of music in everyday life, both implicitly, since we are reading a song’s lyrics, and explicitly, because musical instruments (saxophone, guitar, drums and horn) feature in Iona’s story as they do in haut betassion or in St. Omer’s altarpiece. In the fifth and last poem of the sequence, ‘For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, St Lucia’, Walcott engages directly with St. Omer’s work (SG52–5). In the last chapter I will return to this poem as a response to John Keats’s ekphrastic ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820), but here I will read it as Walcott’s version of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Anecdote of the Jar’155 since the church and, ultimately, St. Omer’s altarpiece are described as the ‘pivot’ around which everything else turns (SG52). Like the jar, the mural is a manmade artefact (‘a good man made it’ (SG52) which, as Stevens has it, ‘takes dominion everywhere’:156 the valley’s roads, in fact, ‘radiate like aisles from the altar towards / those acres of bananas, towards / leaf-crowded mountains’ and, in ‘haze’ and ‘iron heat’, they also seem to reach the ‘rain-bellied clouds’ (SG53). Crucially, however, unlike Stevens’s jar which is imposed on the landscape it dominates and bears no resemblance to it, St. Omer’s altarpiece fully reflects and enters into conversation not only with the architectural building in which it is hosted but also with its surroundings which are neither tamed nor domesticated, as in Stevens’s poem, nor ‘locked’ (and smothered) in amber, as was the case for Vigie promontory in the opening lines of Another Life. Walcott’s poem, in fact, expands and builds on the mutual reverberations of St. Omer’s altarpiece and the ‘common life outside’: Walcott begins by describing the man and the woman dancing the botay in the altarpiece and immediately turns his attention to the Roseau Valley which, he explains, is both ‘rich’, because of its fertility, and ‘cursed’ because of the hardship that its people face every day (SG52–3). When the poem invites the readers to ask the inhabitants of the valley who endure this hardship (women, men, children, their animals) to confirm the poet’s words, it also con-fuses reality and visual and verbal representation by inviting us to interrogate the (painted) parish priest and the dancing couple in the mural (SG53). In many of Walcott’s plays God is often described as ‘white’157 and

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in the St Lucia-based The Sea at Dauphin one of Walcott’s characters, the angry, poor, and embittered fisherman Afa, voices his indictment of social inequalities by cursing a ‘white’ God and by attacking white Catholic priests from abroad who take advantage of their indigent parishioners: ‘where they have priest is poverty’.158 In this poem, instead, the white priest who appears in the altarpiece (albeit with a black hand …) is fully attuned to the suffering of his community and St. Omer’s Black Holy Family is organic to the human and natural environment of the Roseau Valley just as much as the EnglishCreole-speaking God of Walcott’s Omeros is to Gros Islet (O134). In the poem, Walcott does not comment on St. Omer’s decision to portray the Holy Family as Black nor on the African motifs included in the mural. This might have been due to the fact that, as we have seen, in 1972 he had already explored the possibility of a Black Jesus with Vangelo Nero, a film script that never became a reality and which I will briefly return to in Chapter 5. More likely, however, Walcott’s silence on this aspect of St. Omer’s work might have been a consequence of the Black Power Revolution in Trinidad which, as we will see, affected him deeply, made him feel both confused and threatened, and is one of the reasons for his vocal and repeated rejections of what, at the time, he came to regard as a facile and hypocritical Afrocentrism. According to Walcott, however, St. Omer steered very firmly away from the ‘dangerous self-deception and provincialism of adapting Black Power or pastoral nationalism to the Church’ because his work was not ‘sentimental’ but ‘too crude’ and ‘too vigorous to pastoralise the reality he knew and smelt working in the open … in rum shops [where he could] hear the filth that could come from the wafer-gulping mouths of the faithful’ (OTC18). For Walcott, St. Omer’s figures ‘were not falsified or made to bend to a fiat. They celebrated naturally, because out in the country, faith and nature and poverty were one’ and his friend’s murals were not ‘in the tone of the academics who had suddenly invested patois with a purpose [and] made a museum of nature’: long before the decree and the introduction of the Creole Mass, ‘the faith’ that St. Omer depicted ‘existed in real air’ and St. Omer was fully attuned to it (OTC18). The poem ‘Sainte Lucie’, placed right at the heart of Sea Grapes, clearly signposts Walcott’s decision to re-anchor himself, spiritually, in his native island whilst distancing himself from the political and racial tension he had experienced in Trinidad. Aptly, this re-grounding in St Lucia took place via verbal landscaping and a reconnection with his beginnings as a painter through the work of his former fellow apprentice St. Omer whose work, Walcott believed, ‘did not need the benediction of an encyclical’ and was ‘inspiration, not translation’ (OTC18). Rather than pondering on (the significance of the representation of) the titular divinities in the altarpiece, in fact, Walcott’s poem focuses on St. Omer’s couple of St Lucian peasants whom, we are told ‘could be Eve and Adam’ or ‘Adam and Eve’, a chiasmus that reflects the way they would change place in a ‘real’ dance while gesturing to

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the shift between reality and biblical myth (SG53). The poem then zooms out of the mural and enters the intimacy of the shack of ‘the real’ Adam and Eve who, between adorations, engage in an alternative (profane) Sunday ritual while, all around them, the valley of Roseau enjoys the tranquillity of the Sabbath. Walcott is cautious to point out that ‘the valley of Roseau is not the Garden of Eden’ and neither him nor St. Omer depict it as such: suffering, as we have seen, is as intrinsic to the ‘cursed’ and ‘rich’ valley and to the making of St. Omer’s altarpiece (‘ST OMER AD GLORIAM DEI FECIT / in whatever year of his suffering’) as are the ‘deaths’ of ‘names’, people, crops which have shaped its history (SG52–5). Walcott believed, in fact, that St. Omer’s stubborn faith, his generosity, altruism and humility had enabled him to provide his people not with a dubious and, ultimately, futile portrait of Eden but with something more valuable, namely a most effective mirror. In the poem Walcott calls this mirror ‘dull’ because it does not attempt to glamourise what it reflects (it has no gilt frame) but simply presents the harsh reality and beauty of its immediate, ordinary, commonplace surroundings (SG52). This is why, Walcott claims, looking in at the windows when the church is empty, one might see ‘the real faces of angels’, a sentence which can be taken to mean that the faces are those of the (Black) figures/angels in the altarpiece but also, more poignantly, the faces of St Lucians who approach their reflection in the window glass with the renewed confidence in themselves and in their local reality afforded by their exposure to St. Omer’s altarpiece/mirror (SG55). The poem, however, suggests that the ability to see the real faces of angels applies to those who are ‘there’, and can see St. Omer’s work with their own eyes, but also to those who are ‘not there’ but, presumably, are reading Walcott’s lines (SG55). In a poem where Walcott tries hard to negotiate and bridge the distance between himself and ordinary St Lucians – a distance widened, given the topic of the poem, also by his being a Methodist on a predominantly Catholic island – he seems to be hoping, against hope, that, by triangulating reality with visual and verbal representation and making them both ‘cohere’ and ‘ignite’ (AL58-9), his poem might achieve the same empowering and self-revelatory effect of St. Omer’s altarpiece on his St Lucian readers. After all, as Walcott points out in ‘Outside the Cathedral’, from boyhood he too used to sign anything he wrote and considered satisfactory with AMGD (Ad Majorem Gloriam Dei), because, leaving their specific denominations aside, both he and St. Omer ‘believ[ed] in the same thing: AMDG’, that is service not only to God and art but to their island and its people (OTC21, 29, 3).159 The moment of hope on which ‘For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, St Lucia’ concludes is both precious and fragile. In the late 1980s Walcott returned to the Roseau Valley and to the church frescoed by St. Omer with ‘Roseau Valley’, a poem included in The Arkansas Testament, the same collection in which we find ‘The Light of the World’. Written at

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a time when Walcott’s commitments in the United States were increasingly keeping him away from the Caribbean, in this collection Walcott expressed his deep concerns with his growing separation from the island, its people and its language. In ‘Roseau Valley’, the poet observes, St. Omer’s mural is still pivotal to the life of the valley dwellers while only ‘few’ fellow St Lucians can actually read the language in which Walcott offers his love (AT17). Walcott knew he could not pretend that he could write poetry ‘for the person in the street’160 and did not want to assume that his people had to be interested in what he had to say or offer, but he always wished that, somehow, they could have access to his work. In ‘Outside the Cathedral’ – written in the same year in which The Arkansas Testament was published – Walcott explains that it was always paramount to him that his ‘nouns [would keep] their native outlines’ (OTC18) and, in ‘Cul de Sac Valley’ – also from The Arkansas Testament – he reconnects once again with ‘those mornings of [his] life when he imagined [him]self a painter’ (ALms1, 1) to reach out to his people by experimenting with the visual dimension of writing. In ‘Cul de Sac Valley’, in fact, he draws the reader’s attention precisely to the outline of the poem whose stanzas are regular squares made of quatrains of short lines of five or six syllables and whose ‘stilted shape’, he insists, replicates the wooden stilted houses of the titular valley and St Lucia in general (AT9).161 In other words, if the English in which he writes is, as the poem puts it, ‘a different tree’, or a ‘tongue’ his people can ‘speak / in, but cannot write’ (AT10), what might provide them with a key to ‘enter’ and relate with his stanzas, Walcott hopes, is the way in which, like St. Omer’s altarpiece, they visually rhyme with the ‘common life outside’, its familiar shapes and its ‘native outlines’.

Notes

1. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 53. 2. Finberg, English Water Colour Painters, 2–3. 3. Neptune, Caliban, 132. 4. Simmons, ‘St Lucia’s Agriculture’ parts 1 and 2; ‘Doomesday Book’; ‘Thomas Jefferys Esq’. 5. Simmons, ‘Spotlight on the Problems of St Lucia’s Agriculture’; ‘Spotlight on Some Thoughts’. 6. For example, Simmons, ‘Roses and Marguerites’; ‘The Flower Festival’; ‘St Lucia’s Agriculture’ part 2; ‘Notes on Folklore’; ‘Notes on French Creole’. 7. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 98. 8. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 99. 9. Walcott, personal communication, 29 October 2016. In an entry dated 8 May 1966 of his unpublished notes for Another Life, Walcott wrote, addressing Simmons posthumously, ‘Repeating Dürer, you believed, though it was probably Ingres, you once wrote across my drawing book “Drawing is the probity

130    Derek Walcott’s Painters of all art”’ (ALms2, 103): the fact that Walcott also recalled this episode in ‘Outside the Cathedral’ (OTC21, 23) and his 2016 conversation with me testifies to the deep impact that Simmons’s teaching had on him. 10. Walcott in Montenegro, ‘Interview’, 136. 11. Walcott, personal communication, 29 October 2016. 12. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 99. 13. Craven, Treasury, 314, 318. 14. Walcott and his artistic entourage in St Lucia were well aware of the importance of frames: in his review of the 1950 exhibition of Walcott’s and St. Omer’s paintings in St Lucia, for instance, Simmons wrote: ‘most pictures were poorly framed and the selection of the right type of frame is most important’ (Simmons, ‘Critique’, 2). One of Simmons’s paintings, for example, a still life with flowers dated 1940, was enhanced by a beautiful St Lucia mahogany frame made by Simmons himself. 15. Walcott, ‘The Figure of Crusoe’, in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. Robert Hamner (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996): 33–40, 34. This was a lecture originally presented in 1965 at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad. From now on I will be referring to this essay as FC with page numbers in parentheses in the text. 16. Walcott, ‘Tribute to a Master’, 480. 17. Simmons, ‘Little Galleries, Voice of St Lucia, 116. 18. Simmons, Speech at the Inauguration, 2. 19. Simmons, ‘Little Galleries’, Voice of St Lucia, 115. 20. Simmons, ‘Little Galleries’, Voice of St Lucia, 114, 115. 21. Simmons, ‘Little Galleries’, Voice of St Lucia, 115. 22. Simmons, ‘Little Galleries’, Voice of St Lucia, 115. 23. Simmons, ‘Little Galleries’, Voice of St Lucia, 115. 24. Simmons, ‘Little Galleries’, Voice of St Lucia, 116. 25. Simmons, ‘Little Galleries’, Voice of St Lucia, 115–16. 26. Simmons, ‘Language of the Rocks’, 2. 27. Simmons, ‘Need for an Arts and Crafts Society’, 2. 28. Lewis, Growth, 18. 29. Simmons, qtd in Neptune, Caliban, 132. 30. Simmons, ‘West Indian Artists’, 3. In the early 1950s, when Walcott moved to Jamaica after being awarded a scholarship to attend the new University College of the West Indies, his articles for The Pelican, one of the student periodicals of which he was editor, frequently insisted on the need for a better coordination between islands and the creation of societies of like-minded people intent on promoting West Indian culture. Walcott’s pronouncements reflected the mood of the mixed community of the campus, where students from the West Indies all came together for the first time, but also resonated with Simmons’s own beliefs. In an article dated 25 February 1951, for example, Walcott wrote: ‘We are boiling over with composite and diverse customs which at time fuse into something rich and strange. And yet how many Jamaican or other students can tell you the exact location of Nevis …? [This society] will try to teach us about our neighbour’s custom, his domestic politics, his island’s history, and less secularly than that to teach us to see the West Indies as not a nation but even more

Atelier des Tropiques    131 exciting as an embryonic nation’ (Walcott qtd in Baugh and Nepaulsing, Derek Walcott: Another Life, 183–4). 31. Walcott, ‘Tribute to a Master’, 479. 32. For example, in ‘Crab and Callalou’, Simmons wrote about the cookery of the Caribbean by providing a survey which goes from Anglophone islands like Trinidad or Barbados to the Spanish Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic) (2); he was also familiar with the cultural scene of Francophone islands like Haiti, particularly as far as the use of Creole was concerned (Simmons, ‘Notes on French Creole’, 105). 33. Walcott, Sea Grapes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), 27–8. From now on, I will be referring to this volume as SG followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 34. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 55. 35. Simmons, ‘Little Galleries’, West Indian Diary. A year later, after Simmons forwarded Walcott’s poems to Frank Collymore, Henry Swanzy, the BBC Caribbean Voices producer, broadcasted Walcott’s work on Collymore’s insistence (King, Derek Walcott, 62). 36. Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, fig. 47. 37. Walcott, ‘Introduction to the work of Dunstan St Omer’, in Derek Walcott, 486. 38. In another undated version of the same subject – but probably painted around the same time as the one from 1960 – the same lonely Black male figure is juxtaposed with bluish foliage which is almost as tall as he is, and the flat horizon of the 1960 image is substituted with a dark promontory with palms, and the rocky foreground on which he is standing is more prominent and more carefully detailed. The result is that in the 1960 version, since nothing else captures the viewer’s eye, Simmons’s study of the male body is more prominent and imposing. 39. Walcott and St. Omer in Bragg, Derek Walcott. Simmons’s paintings are now scattered amongst different private owners and relatives. His daughter Brenda donated part of her collection to The Simmons Academy, Folk Research Centre, St Lucia but these works were lost in the fire that destroyed The Folk Research Centre on 25 March 2018 together with others that the Centre had acquired over the years and many books and documents. Unfortunately, the Folk Research Centre did not have an exhaustive catalogue of Simmons’s paintings complete with photographs, titles, dates, dimensions and, even with the kind assistance of John Robert Lee, Brenda Simmons and Simmons’s niece Hazel Simmons-McDonald, it has not always been possible to retrace relevant information or identify which paintings were in the Centre’s collection and were destroyed by the fire. I visited the Folk Research Centre multiple times before the fire and took photographs of Simmons’s works; on a couple of occasions, I took pictures at exhibitions on local artists hosted by the Centre where their holdings were displayed with other paintings by Simmons loaned by local collectors, and I have benefited from the help of Chester Williams who has inherited a substantial collections of paintings by St Lucian artists from his father, Boswell Williams, and who kindly provided me with some of the images I needed.

132    Derek Walcott’s Painters 40. Walcott in Bragg, Derek Walcott. 41. Simmons, ‘Notes on Folklore’, 48. 42. Walcott in Bragg, Derek Walcott. 43. St. Omer qtd in Charlemagne, ‘Dunstan’s Inner Strokes’, 8. 44. Roderick Walcott, ‘In Good Company’, 30. 45. Finberg, English Water Colour Painters, 18. 46. Simmons, ‘Talking Shops’, 4. 47. ‘The Art Exhibition’, in Voice of St Lucia. 48. Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, 276. 49. In the manuscript for Another Life Walcott clarifies that this was ‘not a painting but a print’ (Walcott ALms1, 31). 50. Simmons’s staunch refusal of the traditional association of the ‘peripheral’ status of St Lucia, its inhabitants and its artists with marginality and lack of importance is best epitomised in the anecdote surrounding his decision to show Augustus John his paintings while the Welsh artist was visiting St Lucia: it has been reported that as John dismissed the works, he declared his admiration for Simmons’s ‘bloody brass’ (Roderick Walcott, ‘In Good Company’, 30). 51. St. Omer was abroad at the time while Simmons served as Secretary and Executive Director of the Castries Fire Relief Fund Committee from 1948 to 1949; since his house was destroyed by the fire he had to move to the old Military Hospital at Vigie which hosted civil servants who had lost their homes (‘Harold Simmons Found Dead’, Voice of St Lucia). 52. Simmons, ‘Critique’, 2. 53. Simmons, ‘Critique’, 2; ‘West Indian Poet’. 54. Simmons, ‘Critique’, 2. 55. The last mural completed by St. Omer was in the St Michel Church of Le Francois, Martinique but it was destroyed by a hurricane. 56. St. Omer qtd in Charlemagne, ‘Dunstan’s Inner Strokes’, 8. 57. Walcott, ‘Letter to Chamoiseau’, 221. 58. It is noteworthy that in the mid-1960s Simmons painted a series of ‘ideal’ elegant Black female types in head/head-and-shoulders profiles which became well known in the 1960s and 1970s because Sydney Bagshaw – who designed St Lucia’s coat of arms in 1967 – made and sold prints of a number of them (John Robert Lee and Hazel Simmons-McDonald, personal communication, 21 February 2020). None of these types, however, shares Albertina’s (Fig. 2.3) defiance and Walcott makes no reference to them here or elsewhere. 59. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘Annotations’, 227. 60. Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi. LACMA-Los Angeles County Museum of Art. https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/delacroixs-greece-ruinsmissolonghi (accessed 19 June 2021). 61. Locke, The Negro in Art, 157. Locke’s reproduction of Aline, the mulatress is courtesy of the Philadephia Museum of Art but currently is to be found, under the title of Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Turban, in the Dallas Museum of Art. The painting has had different titles: in 1827–8 it was presented as Tête d’étude d’une Indienne; after the sale of Delacroix studio in 1864 it became Une tête de femme mulâtre, and, in 1885, it was exhibited at the École des beaux arts in Paris as Aline la Mulâtresse. A different painting (not a ‘head’ but a half figure)

Atelier des Tropiques    133 by Delacroix currently to be found at the Musée Fabre, Montpellier under the title Aspasie, was painted in 1824–6 (1826 is the date Locke attributes to Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Turban) which was also known as Aline, la Mulâtresse, Une Mulâtresse, étude d’après nature, Portrait d’Aline, and Étude d’après une Mulâtresse, figure à mi-corps (Le Modèle Noir de Géricault à Matisse, 356). Derek Walcott’s Portrait of Teshia, a watercolour dated 1991 and now among the National Trust’s holdings, presents us with a woman wearing a blue head gear and golden earrings; like the woman in Delacroix’s painting, she is looking away from the painter but appears less shy and fully anchored in place: the shadows on her white dress, in fact, replicate the shape of the leaves in the background. 62. Craven, Treasury, 479. 63. Craven, Treasury, 478. 64. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘What the Poem’, 213. In his revised edition of 1958, Craven also included black and white reproduction of a detail of the painting, namely the ‘head’ of Liberty (Fig. 2.4), which he describes in his caption as ‘one of the most inspiring heads in modern art – Graeco-French – and the emblem of freedom everywhere’ (180). St. Omer remembered to have brought back a copy of Craven’s 1939 edition from Curaçao but it is possible that he might have seen also the new edition with this detail and caption. 65. The flag (Fig. 2.5) was first designed in 1967 when St Lucia became an Associated State and was maintained, with very minor amendments, when the country became independent in 1979. In St. Omer’s painting the flag is not represented in full as it is the case in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (Fig. 2.4) but, according to Calixte George, also to underline the notion that independence is a long and complex political process that, at the time, was not over yet and is still a work in progress now (personal communication, 17 February 2020). 66. Calixte George had a very clear idea of what he wanted it to represent and was keen to show the role that agricultural workers and activities had played and continued to play in the island’s economy and in securing independence (personal communication, 17 February 2020). 67. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘What the Poem’, 215–16. 68. Calixte George, personal communication, 17 February 2020. 69. Devaux, They called us Brigands, 22, 21–2. 70. Calixte George shares this decolonising and cultural and educational agenda as testified not only by his academic and political career and his work as agricultural scientist and educator but by his 2019 book St Mary’s College, Saint Lucia, West Indies. 71. Calixte George recalls that St. Omer had taken Walcott to see it in the early 1980s and that he responded enthusiastically to it (personal communication, 17 February 2020). 72. Walcott, The Arkansas Testament (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 48. From now on, I will be referring to this volume as AT followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 73. The anonymous model who sat for this portrait, most likely, is the same one that Titian had used, approximately two years earlier, for the Venus of Urbino (1534) but we know nothing about her.

134    Derek Walcott’s Painters 74. Vermeer’s painting was originally titled Girl with a Turban (1665) and was intended as a tronie, not a portrait. Tronies were not commissioned, with figures not intended to be identifiable, and represented an opportunity for artists to show their ability to render exotic garments such as the turban the girl is wearing in Vermeer’s portrait (Janson, ‘Vermeer’s Painting’). The colour of the turban, blue, creates an interesting visual resonance with Delacroix’s Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Turban. 75. Walcott, ‘Where I Live’, 36. 76. Mass, Holman Hunt, 122, ix, 191–210. A smaller replica of the original (painted between 1851 and 1853 and now in Keeble Side Chapel, Keeble College, Oxford) was later produced by (allegedly) Hunt – but more likely by a friend – and is now at Manchester City Art Gallery. Between 1900 and 1904 a third version was painted, mostly by Edward Hughes, as Hunt was getting old and increasingly affected by glaucoma (Mass, Holman Hunt, ix, 102–4, 123–90). This is the version that was sent on tour to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa where it was seen by some seven million people. As Maas writes, ‘not one hint of [the fact that the painting touring the Empire was a copy] was to be vouchsafed to any of the millions who were to stand in front of the picture, rooted to the ground with awe and reverence’ (122). 77. Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, 293. 78. As we have seen in the case of the 1960 Black youth, this market woman was also painted in a different version: unfortunately, this watercolour sent to Carifesta in the 1970s was lost on its way back to its owner in St Lucia. 79. Also in Peter Walcott’s Street Vendors (2009), the ‘distance’ between artist and vendors is highlighted by a stretch of road which extends for the entire width of the painting, a kerb and a number of ‘obstacles’ placed on the pavement (trolleys, fruit and vegetable cases, and customers). 80. Froude, The English in the West Indies, 347. 81. Hammond, ‘Reappraising “Value Judgements”’, 214. 82. See, for example, TFRBL, MSColl 00136, Box 65, folders 1–2. 83. The yellow dress is also instrumental to a collective carnivalesque ritual of resistance, emancipation and self-affirmation when it is borrowed by a male character to perform as a female warrior in the paille-banane traditional Boxing Day dance (O273–7; Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Helen’, 220–38. 84. Walcott in White, ‘Interview’, 174. 85. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘Annotations’, 310. 86. We know that the painter’s relationships with young girls were tolerated and accepted in the colonies but in France he would have been imprisoned for his sexual encounters with minors (Staszak, Gauguin Voyageur, 107). 87. Craven, Treasury, 547. 88. Craven, Treasury, 546. 89. Staszak, Gauguin Voyageur, 107, translation mine. 90. Gauguin, Noa-Noa, 26. 91. Gauguin, Noa-Noa, 25–6. 92. Critics have expressed different views regarding Gauguin’s female nudes. Some have suggested that, in Tahiti, Gauguin might have been interested in nudity to produce exotic/erotic art which he anticipated would sell well; in Géographies,

Atelier des Tropiques    135 Staszak insists that it would be important to at least accept to consider this possibility (148). Peter Brooks argues instead that Gauguin was attempting to expose the artificiality of the neoclassical nude and articulate a positive evocation of the spirituality inscribed in the body itself and adds that, if the woman in Gauguin’s Manao Tupapau is available, her availability is totally unselfconscious and alien to the notion of shame, sin and exposure (Brooks, Body Work, 170–98). 93. Fumagalli, Caribbean Perspectives,127–8. 94. This is also evident in Walcott’s Anna (1995), a portrait in oil of his youngest daughter who is lying on a sofa surrounded by colourful pillows like Goya’s defiant La Maja Desnuda (1795–1800) or Monet’s bold Olympia (1863) – paintings that challenged the conventions of the European female nude. Anna, however, is not only fully dressed like La Maja Vestida (1800–7) but is also sporting a sweatshirt from Boston University where she was studying and forging her own path in life: serious and focused, she does not look straight back at her father/painter, Walcott’s own way to register her independence from him. Walcott’s partner Sigrid too appears completely absorbed in a game of chess in the watercolour The Chess Player (1994) where she does not even acknowledge the painter’s presence. 95. Staszak, Géographies, 158–9. 96. In O Starry Starry Night Gauguin and Van Gogh are repeatedly referred to and refer to one another as ‘saints’ – see Derek Walcott, O Starry Starry Night (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), 29, 106. From now on, I will be referring to this play as SSN followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 97. As we have seen, Walcott’s paintings provide a more complex stance on Gauguin’s ‘perversion’. 98. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘What the Poem’, 216; de Lima, ‘Painting’, 172. 99. King, Derek Walcott, 9. 100. Walcott, in Dual Muse, 1999, 42. 101. Stewart, ‘Walcott and Painting’, 63, 67. 102. Craven, Treasury, 543. 103. Walcott, personal communication, 29 October 2016. 104. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 53. 105. Alleyne, ‘Epitaph for the Young’, 267. 106. Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, 58–9. 107. Collymore, ‘An Introduction’, 87, 89; Simmons, ‘West Indian Poet’, 96. 108. In this respect, Bruce King lists ‘the mastery of the pentameter line, the use of, and experimentation with, traditional forms, the loose connecting of poems throughout a volume by recurring words, phrases, and motifs, the building of poems from phrases of other poets, the obscurity which is often the result of extreme compression and unusual grammar, the leaps between levels of significance, the making of sequences of poems, the revealing yet puzzling autobiographical allusion’ (King, Derek Walcott, 57), a comprehensive list to which we can add a marked concern with the visual arts. 109. Simmons, ‘Critique’, 8. 110. Walcott qtd in King, Derek Walcott, 64. 111. Walcott in Bragg, Derek Walcott, 1989.

136    Derek Walcott’s Painters 12. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 53. 1 113. Dawes, ‘Introduction’, 14. 114. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 53. 115. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 54. 116. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 53–4, 60–1. 117. Walcott, ‘Artist Remains a Lonely Figure’, 436. 118. Simmons, ‘First Poems by George Campbell’, 2–3. 119. Simmons, ‘First Poems by George Campbell’, 3. 120. Poupeye, Caribbean Art, 73; ‘Jamaican Art’, 190. 121. Simmons, ‘First Poems by George Campbell’, 3. 122. Campbell, First Poems, 69. 123. Walcott and St. Omer in Bragg, Derek Walcott. 124. Walcott, ‘George Campbell’, 7. 125. Anthony, Dunstan St Omer, 9. 126. Anthony, Dunstan St Omer, 11. 127. St. Omer qtd in Charlemagne, ‘Dunstan’s Inner Strokes’, 8. 128. St. Omer qtd in Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, 117; Anthony, Dunstan St Omer, 20, 14. 129. Anthony, Dunstan St Omer, 20. 130. In one of Walcott’s original drawings in the programme for the Globe TheatreSam Wanamaker Playhouse’s production of the play Omeros in St Lucia (3–4 May 2016, National Cultural Centre, St Lucia) a local man with naked torso and a hat is blowing the conch. The play was adapted from the poem and directed by Bill Buckhurst and was first performed at the Lakeside Theatre at the University of Essex and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in May and June 2014, starring Joseph Marcell and Jade Anouka and with music by Tayo Akinbode. It was revived in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in October 2015 with Joseph Marcell and Joan Iyiola who also performed in St Lucia in 2016. 131. For example, the iconic bronze statue of Le Marron Inconnu de Saint Domingue or Nèg Mawon unveiled in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince in 1967 commemorates the Saint Domingue rebellion of 1791 and portrays a fugitive who, having just broken his chains, blows his conch to celebrate his freedom and incite others to rebel. 132. Anthony, Dunstan St Omer, 20. 133. Anthony, Dunstan St Omer, 20. 134. St. Omer in Anthony, Dunstan St Omer, 21. 135. Harmsen, Ellis and Devaux, History, 303. 136. Anthony, Dunstan St Omer, 20; King, Derek Walcott, 75. In the review he wrote in 1950 for the joint exhibition of Walcott and St. Omer, Simmons mentions one painting by St. Omer entitled Prismatic Landscape and describes the style as ‘a synthesis of Cezanne’ (Simmons, ‘Critique’, 2). Anthony and King attribute the term ‘prismism’ to Walcott and King quotes from an article in the Voice of St Lucia where Walcott, responding to St. Omer’s experiments with primary colours with no half tones, explains ‘one is tempted to nickname this prismism’ (Walcott, ‘Introduction to the Work of Dunstan St Omer’, 6). Collier reprinted what seems to be exactly the same article in 2013 but he gave as the source the Voice of St Lucia, 28 February 1956 (no page number) and, in what

Atelier des Tropiques    137 could be an error of transcription, referred to St. Omer’s experimentation as ‘pointillisme’ rather than ‘prismism’ (Walcott, ‘Introduction to the work of Dunstan St Omer’, 487). I found no trace of the 1956 article in the National Archives of St Lucia; the 1950 article instead is in their collection and contains the word ‘prismism’. 137. Patton, African-American Art, 119; Bearden and Henderson, History, 130–2. 138. Anthony, Dunstan St Omer, 11–13. 139. Also in St. Omer’s mural Last Supper (c. 1975) for the parish church at Desruisseaux, the beams of light are black; concentric circular shapes of a single colour and diagonal beams of light à la Douglas predominantly play on shades of black and light and dark grey. Black beams of light also emanate from the figure of a Black Christ at the centre of St. Omer’s mural for the Church of Saint Phillip and Saint James, Fonds St Jacques (1978), two of which bear the inscription ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’, and from the Madonna with child in the La Rose mural for the Church of St. Rose de Lima in Monchy (1973) which depicts the La Rose Flower Society. 140. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 58. 141. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 58. 142. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 58. 143. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 58. 144. Simmons, ‘Notes on French Creole’, 106, 107. 145. Simmons, ‘Notes on French Creole’, 105. 146. Simmons, ‘Suggestions’, 6. 147. Walcott, ‘Ballades Creole’, 7. 148. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 58. 149. Chamberlin, Come Back to Me, 99. 150. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Interview’, 58. 151. Garrett, ‘An “English Creole”’, 163. 152. Anthony, Dunstan St Omer, 21. 153. Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, 86. 154. St. Omer himself was one of those who went to work in Curaçao (LS29). 155. Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, 27. 156. Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, 27. 157. In The Sea at Dauphin, ‘God is a white man’ (61) and the same is valid for Dream on Monkey Mountain where one of the characters used to dream of a God which was ‘like a big white man [he] was afraid of’ (290). 158. Walcott, The Sea at Dauphin, 74. 159. For example, the typescript copy of Walcott’s unpublished ‘draft project for a film’ entitled Un Voyage à Cythère which will be under scrutiny in the next chapter is marked AMGD on the top-left corner of the opening page (UWIAJL, Box 6, folder 6). 160. Walcott in Davis, ‘Reflections’, 242. 161. ‘Cul de Sac Valley’ is not the only poem in the ‘Here’ section of The Arkansas Testament which replicates this shape, even if lines tend to be slightly longer in other poems.

Chapter 3

Voyages to Cythera and the European Legacy

The Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Thomas Craven’s A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the Present Day and Other Sources As a young St Lucian living on the outskirts of a fading colonial empire, Walcott had no direct access to metropolitan museums and in order to familiarise himself with the European tradition he admired so much he had no choice but to rely on reproductions and artbooks. The accessibility, portability and transferability of these sources ensured that they continued to remain central to Walcott’s engagement with the visual arts throughout his career; as a result, his relationship with a particular painter or work ended up being mediated and inflected not only by editorial selections (and omissions) but also by the commentaries, art criticism and art-historical annotations that accompanied the reproductions that Walcott carefully studied. All the painters from the Italian tradition that Walcott mentions in Another Life, for example, are those Craven had identified in A Treasury as the cornerstones of Western art and, almost invariably, the visual referent evoked in the lines Walcott devotes to these artists is to be found in Craven’s colour plates: from Giotto’s ‘cherubs’ in The Deposition (1305–6) to Crivelli’s ‘jewelled insect’ in Virgin and Child (c. 1480); from Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1508–10) to Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks (1483–6); from Fra Angelico’s ‘golden plaits’ in The Coronation of the Virgin (1435) to Verrocchio and Leonardo’s John the Baptist’s ‘kneeling angel’ in The Baptism of Christ (1472–5).1 In his analysis of Another Life, Baugh and Nepaulsingh single out Craven’s volume also as a primary example of Walcott’s simultaneous engagement with the verbal and the visual and highlight how the poet quickly absorbed textual interventions and responded to them just as much as he did to the paintings themselves: for example, they observe that when Walcott refers to Andrea del Verrocchio’s The Baptism of Christ in Another

Voyages to Cythera and the European Legacy    139

Life, he not only directly acknowledges Craven’s book but actually builds on the information it provides, namely the fact that Leonardo, still in his boyhood, painted the kneeling angel’s hair (AL23).2 More poignantly, perhaps, one could note that when Walcott recounts the epiphanic moment when ‘he fell in love with art, / and life began’, his ­‘conversion’ – he compares this moment to the unhorsing of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus (AL44) – was triggered by his exposure to works that are to be found amongst Craven’s colour plates and his appreciation was guided by the critic’s commentaries. Walcott’s ‘our father, / who floated in the vaults of Michelangelo’ (AL44) is Craven’s figure of ‘God the Father’ in ‘the vault of heaven … a majestic being, who, in spite of his tremendous bulk, sails lightly through space’ in the Creation of Adam (1512).3 The contrast between the preciousness of gold and the ‘earthly’ sienna in Walcott’s ‘St Raphael / of sienna and gold leaf’ seems to echo Craven’s insistence on Raphael’s ability to combine the ‘immaculate’ and the ‘sensuous’ in his Madonnas, recalls the artist’s La Donna Velata (c. 1515), where the white and grey satin of the woman’s sumptuous dress is enriched by golden decorations, and the rock and lawn in the bottom half of the background of the Madonna of the Goldfinch (1506) in Craven’s 1939 reproductions.4 The third trigger for Walcott’s conversion was a ‘triptych’: here Walcott probably blurred the first panel of Paolo Uccello’s The Rout of San Romano, namely Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano (c. 1438–40) which, as Craven pointed out, is itself part of a ‘triptych’ produced to celebrate the victory of the Florentines over the Sienese at San Romano in 1432,5 with Sassetta’s Journey of the Magi (1433–5) (Fig. 3.1) and, possibly, with Piero della Francesca’s fresco The Battle of Constantine (1464).6 The three works appear in Craven as colour plates: while Walcott explains that his conversion was precipitated by ‘the lances of Uccello [which] shivered him’, the poem’s ‘three stiff horsemen cantering past a rock, / towards jewelled cities on a cracked horizon’ clearly belong to Sassetta’s work which, however, goes unmentioned in the poem (AL44).7 Sassetta, della Francesca and Uccello represent horsemen and horses, albeit on a pious pilgrimage and peacefully cantering in the first case, and at war in the second and third cases, where some of the animals are bellicosely rearing, particularly in Uccello’s painting. Walcott might have conflated them because of Craven’s emphasis on these painters’ privileging of ‘belief’ over the ‘truth’ of realism.8 According to Craven, Sassetta ‘was concerned with a presentation of a truth … so actual … that he could paint it with naïve ­informality’: the Star of Bethlehem in his foreground, the critic argues, ‘is manifestly closer and more real to [the artist] than the line of geese’ in the background.9 Similarly, with The Battle of Constantine, as Craven pointed out, Piero della Francesca, far from being interested in depicting ‘military action or the circumstances of battle’, was keen to ‘create the symbolical statement of a great Christian triumph’.10 Craven also cautioned viewers not

140    Derek Walcott’s Painters

Figure 3.1  Journey of the Magi, c. 1433–5, Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni), tempera and gold on wood, 21.6 × 29.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Maitland F. Griggs Collection. Bequest of Maitland F. Griggs, 1943. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, licensed under CC0.

to suppose that Uccello was ‘intent on painting a realist battle picture’, and located the value of Uccello’s work not in ‘its truth to nature or war – the knights are tin soldiers, the steeds are hobby horses’ – but in the artist’s effort to create a ‘clear-cut design to give movement and rhythm to his fantastic visions’.11 Walcott, keen to show he fully shared the Italian artist’s attitude, describes his younger self as someone who, ‘having no care / for truth, / … could enter’ paintings and (hybrid and imagined) triptychs and, having faith in the power of the imagination and art to conjure up, bridge, and illuminate worlds, fully ‘believed’ that what works of art represented was ‘real’ (AL44). Overall, Craven’s volume is a history of art chronologically and geographically arranged and in which talented individuals – from Giotto to Paul Cézanne, from Hans Holbein to Joshua Reynolds, from Jan Van Eyck to Grant Wood, from El Greco to Picasso – are presented as pioneers of new styles and establishers of new parameters, directions, movements. In his introduction to the volume, Craven underlines that art is intrinsically connected to the place or ‘specific settings’ in which it is produced (‘change the soil and you get a new species’) and scorns as ‘pernicious’ the habit of

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conceiving art ‘as a universal practice independent of time and independent of locality’.12 Nevertheless, the North American critic makes it very clear that what he calls the ‘creative’ perspective is very different from the ‘appreciative’ one. If, for its creators, art is an essentially local occupation reflecting specific settings and experiences, from the point of view of the beholders art is ‘indeed universal’ as the same viewer can equally enjoy paintings of ‘diverse school as the British or the Florentine’.13 Craven’s argument resonated with, and, to a certain extent, might have contributed to confirm for the young Walcott the validity of his search for local intensity and ‘a perfection to West Indian things’; at the same time, it also assisted the poet in his rejection of the notion that all that came from Europe had to be dismissed as irrelevant. In a 1990 interview, however, whilst talking about the legacy of European literature in the Caribbean, Walcott discards (Craven’s) homogenisation of response and draws our attention to the locus in which texts are not only produced but also, crucially, experienced. In the Caribbean, he explains, you’re stepping outside into the streets without monuments, without c­ athedrals, and museums … into nature … Therefore … to read a page of Shakespeare is as fresh … as to look at a mango leaf … There is no difference between the freshness of the day, and the freshness of the poetry that you are reading. In other cities … you read Shakespeare as a product of a continuing chronological process called English literature. But in the Caribbean our experience of history is simultaneous … a place in which what you feel continually is a daily erasure of what was yesterday.14

The same is valid, of course, for art reproductions like those in Craven’s book which had first been available to Walcott within his context and as part of his experience as much as – and simultaneously with – ‘a mango leaf’. For Walcott, therefore, the place viewers originate from or the context in which they first encounter a reproduction can and does inflect the way in which the image itself is perceived, understood, confronted and redeployed at least just as much as received textualisations and contextualisations. In point of fact, he argues, the Caribbean, where daily erasure abolishes stifling chronologies and disabling hierarchies, makes a ‘fresh’ approach to tradition practically inevitable. Walcott, in fact, emancipated himself from Craven’s carefully selected canon and critical parameters relatively early. If it is true that A Treasury repeatedly emerges as a crucial reference point in Walcott’s poetry and prose (it is mentioned, for example in ‘Leaving School’, Another Life and Tiepolo’s Hound), we know that it did not monopolise, single-handedly, Walcott’s engagement with the visual arts since Walcott also mentioned, alluded to and pondered on numerous paintings not included in Craven’s volume. Paintings that Walcott considered masterpieces from his boyhood, for example Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks (1486) or J. M. W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire (1839) (Fig. 1.8),

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are all in Craven’s volume but, in Another Life, as we have seen, Walcott compares immortelles flowering in April to ‘the yellow flame of Lippi’s “Annunciation”’ while Craven’s colour plate for the Tuscan painter is the Virgin Adoring the Child or The Adoration in the Forest (1459c),15 not his ‘Annunciation’ (AL55). Likewise, Hobbema is represented by The Watermill with the Great Red Roof (1665–75)16 and not The Avenue Middelharnis (1689) which Walcott associates to the Coconut Walk and the Vigie peninsula (AL6). Walcott’s reference to ‘gold leaf’ in relation to Raphael was probably inspired by his familiarity with reproductions of Raphael’s works where gold leaf is applied to the plaster as in the fresco Adam and Eve (1509–11) from the Stanza della Segnatura in the Raphael Rooms in the Vatican Palace which, however, goes unmentioned in Craven who never refers to the technique of gilding in his entries on the artist.17 The poem ‘The Polish Rider’ (GN70) – an early example of Walcott’s experimentation with ekphrasis discussed in Chapter 7 – refers, simultaneously, to Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider (1655) (Fig. 7.2) and Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil (1513) and, as we will see, seems to have been triggered by the peculiar layout of the museum in which it is displayed (The Frick Collection in New York) or by an artbook which either juxtaposed the two images or presented them in close proximity, possibly accompanying them with a text which focused on their parallelisms. In any case, Walcott’s pairing could not have been inspired by Craven who does not create a connection between these two artists and does not include reproductions of these two works. The poem ‘Statues’, published in The Castaway and Other Poems (1965), begins with the poet describing a statue so vividly (‘its eyes erupt, bulge in a spasm / of marble’) that one might easily assume he must be in front of it. We soon learn, however, that Walcott is actually looking at reproductions in a book and reading the accompanying text (‘then turn to read / around another statue’18) but there are no statues in Craven’s A Treasury. Sandby and the other draughtsmen Walcott and his father admired so much do not appear in Craven and neither does the Rococo painter François Boucher, excluded presumably because of what Craven calls ‘incautious pornography’.19 The later Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard is featured in A Treasury and his Storming the Citadel (1771–2) is described as a ‘mockheroic conquest’ and ‘a perfect illustration of the affected innocence of the game’.20 Another Life, however, informs us that Walcott had access to a more explicit and titillating ‘blue book’ with both Fragonard’s and Boucher’s more ‘erotic’ works (AL60). Roderick Walcott shared his twin brother’s keen interest in these French artists since he explains that his ‘first awakening of human sensuality [was] from those paintings by Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau’ copies of which, presumably collected in a book, were, he recalls, amongst Warwick’s possessions.21 If the adolescent Walcott was immediately (if perhaps ­unsophisticatedly) responsive to what he saw as Fragonard’s and Boucher’s erotic and

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visual appeal, the mature playwright was going to develop a much more complex relationship with the artist who is considered to be Fragonard’s and Boucher’s most important predecessor, namely Jean-Antoine Watteau. Watteau is included in Craven’s canon which devotes a colour plate to his famous The Embarkation for Cythera (1717)22 (Fig. 3.2) but, if it is true that Walcott capitalises on Craven’s assessment of the eighteenth-century artist who had been mythologised by the romantics as ‘a melancholy, suffering genius devoted to recording fleeting moments of happiness tainted by ineffable sadness’,23 it is equally undeniable that he was to significantly and fundamentally diverge from the critic’s approach. Craven’s entry on Watteau highlights his ‘diseased body and afflicted soul’, informs readers, in the first sentence, that the artist ‘died of consumption at the age of thirty-seven’, and celebrates his unique ability to paint a ‘magical atmosphere’ and ‘fantastic landscapes’ tinted with ‘melancholy’.24 Craven then guides his readers to see and appreciate a Watteau whose main focus was the ‘world of senses’, an artist concerned primarily with ‘men and women whose whole existence is dedicated to love’ but who, restraining from ‘everything gross and uncultivated’, played a game of ‘seductions with the greatest delicacy and charm’.25 Yet, if Watteau was a painter whose brush produced ‘enchanting’ renditions ‘of the Old Parisian spirit’, and who created, with The Embarkation for Cythera, an ‘immaterial’, almost mythical ‘heaven’ where ‘love making is prolonged into eternity’, Craven does concede that he was also an artist ‘thrown between two c­ ivilisations’ who ‘contemplated the dying majesty of the old … and ushered the new’,26 a condition which could not have failed to attract Walcott’s attention.

Pilgrimages, Embarkations and Jean-Antoine Watteau Watteau is never mentioned in Another Life, a surprising omission if we consider that his ‘in-between’ predicament resonated with the young Walcott’s operating at the twilight of Empire. Watteau, however, played a crucial role in Walcott’s investigation of the place of the European legacy in Caribbean culture, particularly from the late 1950s to the 1980s, that is at a time when the British Empire had entered its crepuscular phase, the project of the Federation had become a reality which quickly dissolved (1958–62), the process of decolonisation was well underway (Independence was achieved by Trinidad, where Walcott had relocated, in 1962, and in St Lucia in 1979), and the redefinition of class, race and gender structures was an increasingly prominent issue. Walcott must have recognised in Watteau a fellow artist rooted in a troubled time of transition who witnessed the decline of the monarchy’s power but not its full dissipation, and who lived through a moment when ‘the shifting bases of political and cultural authority were up for grabs’ and the ‘boundaries between social classes were in flux, as were the criteria

Figure 3.2  Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère, dit L’embarquement pour Cythère (Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, or The Embarkation for the Island of Cythera), 1717, Jean-Antoine Watteau, oil on canvas, 129 × 194 cm. Musée du Louvre. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Angèle Dequier.

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for how those boundaries were to be determined and understood’.27 Most importantly, Walcott shared with what Plax calls the ‘historical’28 Watteau a keen desire to understand the forces at play and take part in the redefinition of social and cultural boundaries. In the works where he engages with Watteau, Walcott explores the conflicting and contradictory facets of his problematic historical moment and, as the French artist had done before him, he approaches social and cultural transformation by focusing on self-fashioning. Walcott fully realised that, particularly in his context, self-fashioning hampered by mimicry could only result in empty posturing and self-mythologising and that, far from being energetic and inventive, it was a dangerous attitude which could sabotage the future. In a series of three Watteau-related texts which could be seen as a single work in progress – namely Un Voyage à Cythère, In A Fine Castle and The Last Carnival – Walcott investigates what it meant to look at, appreciate and engage with Watteau’s works specifically from a Caribbean perspective, anatomising self-delusion and its links to the mythologisation of the region as ‘paradise’ while bringing to the fore complex class, gender and race dynamics.29 In all these texts, Walcott associates the fallacies of self-fashioning and mythologisation prevalently but, as we will see, not exclusively, with the descendants of the French Creole in Trinidad, where he moved permanently in 1959 and later married his second wife, Margaret Maillard. In a 1975 essay entitled ‘On Choosing Port of Spain’, in fact, he also warns that this ‘Creole mentality’ which ‘shrivel[s] vision’ and reveals ‘the shrillest kind of hedonism’ when it asserts ‘with almost hysterical self-assurance that Trinidad is a paradise’, could in fact manifest itself in Trinidadians of every race and class.30 A few years earlier, with ‘What the Twilight Says’, published in the same year in which In a Fine Castle premiered in Jamaica and the 1970 Black Power Revolution shook Trinidad, Walcott, pondering racial polarisation and self-fashioning, defined both the ‘wish to be white’ or the ‘longing to become black’ as ‘strenuous attempts to create identity’ or, as he puts it, ‘careers’ (WTS18). Un Voyage à Cythère is an undated draft for a film or play for television31 set in Trinidad and catalogued as a project which began in 1957 and ended in 1980. However, it must have been mostly written after 1959, when Walcott moved to Trinidad, and completed before 1970 since it contains no mention of the Trinidad Black Power Revolution which is so pivotal for In A Fine Castle and The Last Carnival.32 A copy of Watteau’s famous painting The Embarkation for Cythera plays a significant role in all these texts, albeit one that might have initially been inflected by the poet Charles Baudelaire’s response to Watteau’s work. Over the years, Walcott returned to, revised and enriched this initial idea as Un Voyage à Cythère evolved into In a Fine Castle, first performed in Jamaica in 197033 and, later, The Last Carnival, first performed in Port of Spain in 1982 and published in 1986. The evolution of Walcott’s engagement with Watteau, The Embarkation for Cythera, and

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other works by the French artist, can be traced in allusions and open references made by Walcott’s characters or in stage directions, but also in a series of notebooks of Walcott’s own sketches for settings or costumes and in his verbal or visual responses to Watteau reproductions glued on his sketchbook pages. It is likely that Walcott first came across The Embarkation for Cythera in Craven’s A Treasury, where one finds a colour plate of the 1717 version of this painting. Over the years, however, Watteau produced different versions of the island of Cythera: the first one, L’Île de Cythère (The Island of Cythera), was painted in 1706 – or 1709 if one accepts that it was inspired by Florent Dancourt’s play Les trois cousines34 – and, according to Helmut Börsch-Supan, it was discovered only in 1981.35 The version entitled Bon Voyage (c. 1713–17) is known only through an engraving36 while the painting Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère (Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera) was submitted in 1717 as reception piece to the French Royal Academy and initially categorised as ‘history painting’: the academy, however, retitled it L’embarquement pour l’île de Cythère, une fête galante (The Embarkation for the Island of Cythera: a gallant festivity) creating a category for this new genre which refined the pictorial subject of social gatherings in the open air (Fig. 3.2).37 A later variant on the theme was produced in 1719 also entitled L’embarquement pour l’île de Cythère (The Embarkation to the Island of Cythera).38 While the theme remains identical for all the compositions, the 1709 version is rather static as it probably followed closely the actual disposition on stage of the cast in the intermezzo at the end of Act Three of Dancourt’s Les trois cousines, when one of the characters invites her companions to join her on the Isle of Love. The 1717 version included in Craven’s volume – the one Walcott might have had more firmly in mind – has more figures and, unlike those in the previous version, most have already been paired. As a result, the composition is more complex and dynamic: while all the figures in the 1709 version were standing up straight and looking in the same direction, in the 1717 painting some of the lovers are sitting or in the process of getting up, some are looking at one another, absorbed in an intimate moment, others give us their backs or look nostalgically (or regretfully) backwards. In the 1719 painting Watteau further increased the number of characters, and it has been suggested that that the overall image seems to be a celebration of married life rather than love-making, a suggestion corroborated by the fact that it is possible that the later painting was intended as a wedding present for Watteau’s friend Jean de Jullienne.39 Craven explains that Watteau’s figures are about to ‘sail away for the blessed isle, an immaterial region sacred to Venus’40 but currently there is no critical consensus on this interpretation. Some critics agree that Watteau’s ‘pilgrims’ in the 1717 version are getting ready to leave for Cythera like those in the 1709 painting41 while others are persuaded that Watteau’s characters are in fact returning from the island.42 This reading is even more appropriate

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for the 1719 version for which it is easier to argue that the action is taking place on Cythera itself since the statue of Venus is a visually compellingly voluptuous Rococo statue complete with amoretti made of ‘flesh’ and stone rather than a ‘generic’ ancient ruin partly obscured by vegetation.43 One could also take a different route, however, and wonder if Watteau was in fact entertaining the idea of presenting us with an image that thrived in contradiction, multiple potentialities, or ‘elegant chaos’:44 after all, his original title for the 1717 version, Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère (Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera), leaves all possibilities open. Walcott seems to have been inclined to exploit the painting’s many suggestive ambiguities: some of his characters long to go to ‘Cythera’, some do not want to leave it, some feel (or are) stuck on it, and some might be moving on and leaving it behind, either physically or psychologically; their ‘Cythera’, however, is not always the same place (or the same time) and is a complex mixture of illusion, delusion and ­(disavowed) reality.

Walcott’s Un Voyage à Cythère: Trinidad/Cythera as a Sad and Dark Isle Walcott’s Un Voyage à Cythère, particularly as it had been a work in progress since (at least) 1957,45 can be seen as a first attempt to come to terms with and ponder on Watteau’s work and its relevance for the Caribbean while exploiting the connotations and allegorical possibilities of The Embarkation for Cythera. When Watteau produced his painting, in fact, ‘Cythera’ was both a mythical island and a coded way to refer to the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud, a place where people from different classes met and interacted, often in the pursuit of illicit carnal desires.46 As anticipated, in Walcott’s Un Voyage à Cythère, the self-mythologisation of the French Creole elite and the mythologisation of the Caribbean as ‘paradise’ (UVAC14) is investigated alongside class, gender and race dynamics, and the politics of inter-racial and inter-class sexual relations. It should be noted, however, that with Un Voyage à Cythère Walcott had no intention to produce a national (let alone a nationalistic) allegory and not only because his regionalist perspective had never been compatible with nationalism. Unlike Drums and Colours (1958) where, as we will see in Chapter 4, in order to support the Federation and provide a roadmap for the future, Walcott revisited the history of the region and delivered a clear, if cautionary, message regarding its inherent possibilities, Un Voyage à Cythère is not an epic pageant à la Diego Rivera but a more intimate portrayal of a small group of characters caught up in social change and unable and unwilling to adapt. The same can be said for the later Watteau-related plays In a Fine Castle and The Last Carnival. In Un Voyage à Cythère (but also in his other Watteau-related texts), Walcott’s characters, trapped in and by their

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situation and their versions of Cythera, have aborted, or run the risk of aborting, their own development by conflating identity with a performance of roles animated by a disabling nostalgia, a justified but sterile hatred for the old order, or a polemic, self-defeatist lack of belief in the possibility of a new one. Zooming in on a family from the French Creole plantocracy in decline and two members of the Trinidad Black community, Walcott tries to understand and show what happens when the boundaries between fiction and reality, identity and performance, self-revelation and self-delusion, past and present become blurred. The mobilisation of Watteau, therefore, makes perfect sense in this context since the French artist was both a careful observer and a painstaking illustrator of these forms of interplay. Watteau’s insight into his historical moment offers oblique existential vistas on an aristocratic and private milieu but it also sheds a revelatory (if slanting) light on the broader political and social reality of the years leading up to the French Revolution, an event which, less than seventy years after the painter’s premature death in 1721, was going to topple the world of Watteau’s fêtes galantes. Similarly, in Walcott’s Un Voyage à Cythère one has the feeling that the gilded sphere of the elite is crumbling and that some sort of revolution is under way; poignantly, in his later elaborations on the theme, In a Fine Castle and The Last Carnival, Walcott included explicit references to the Trinidad Black Power Revolution. The Revolution and the revolutionaries, however, as Walcott’s critics have lamented, are relegated to the background, treated more as a further signal of the fading of French Creole power than as a force to be reckoned with or seriously analysed.47 The title of Walcott’s first engagement with Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera reveals that Walcott was approaching Watteau through the lens of Baudelaire’s poem ‘Un voyage à Cythère’ (1857), a disturbing individual allegorical journey (the poet persona does use the word ‘allegory’) of revelation and self-revelation.48 Like Baudelaire’s poet persona, Walcott’s characters (and the audience) are made to confront their troubling present and history in a text which also analyses the normalisation of ‘evil’ and its repercussions with a more marked socio-political focus. Baudelaire’s ‘Un voyage à Cythère’ is in fact a tale of two islands, one blessed, the other cursed, one sweet and blooming, the other sad and dark, one a place where the heart can feast, the other a ‘banal Utopia’ or Eldorado and the locus for a macabre, revolting and painful spectacle of physical and psychological torments.49 In the collective imaginary of Watteau’s predecessors, contemporaries and direct successors, in fact, Cythera was not only the mythical Isle of Love but also a perilous place: the didactic novel Les aventures de Télémaque (1699) by François Fénelon, for example, had warned readers against its dangers even before Watteau completed his painting. It has been suggested also that, through a number of symbols and strategic displacements, Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera conveyed not only the appeal but also the dangers

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of sexual desire: the siren’s head on the boat’s prow could actually stand for seduction ending in destruction, and some of Watteau’s putti resonate with those featured in emblems warning of the dire consequences of a life of pleasure.50 Seemingly responsive to Watteau’s coded warnings, Baudelaire intertwined morality with morbidity as other nineteenth-century French writers also pondered in different ways on the ambiguities of Cythera; in his own turn, Walcott appears to have been sensitive to and to have factored in some of their elaborations on the theme. In Walcott’s Un Voyage à Cythère, characters undergo a revelatory journey not in space but in time, through a revisitation of the past; this temporal turn resonates with a chapter of the novella Sylvie (1853) by Baudelaire’s contemporary Gérard de Nerval which shares the title with Baudelaire’s poem and Walcott’s text and is another homage to the power and allure of Watteau’s pictorial intervention.51 In this particular chapter, the narrator remembers attending a feast prepared upon an island on a lake in the French countryside where the sailing journey, he guesses, was probably inspired by Watteau’s painting. On this occasion the (by then Paris-dwelling) narrator recalls that he retreated with his local sweetheart to a quiet spot to share recollections of their childhood. Their idyllic reconstruction of a happy past is interrupted by the practical, prosaic necessity of leaving the island in time to get back to her village at a reasonable hour, one of the numerous reminders, in Nerval’s novella, that dreams and reality do not tend to correspond. Mythical past moments of happiness, moreover, are only retrievable through selective memory or imagination: it is evident that this cherished past can be seen as blissful only when purged of troubling memories. The narrator, in fact, had neglected and ‘betrayed’ his peasant sweetheart from a very early age, either by bestowing his attention on another young girl or by not visiting her after he moved to Paris. The young girl was fully cognizant of these betrayals not just in retrospect but as they happened: before travelling to the island/Cythera with the narrator, moreover, she sounds fully aware that class difference constituted and was always going to constitute a serious, in fact insurmountable, obstacle to their future together. The titles chosen by Nerval and Baudelaire worked as deliberate, open admissions that they were both inspired by Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera. Walcott too pays homage to the French painter both verbally (in its title) and ‘visually’, as testified by the cover of the manuscript for the film/ play draft which marries Watteau’s painting with a Caribbean reality. On the black background of the cover, in fact, one finds a sketched Black figure with an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century costume and, superimposed on it, the drawing of a painting with an elaborate frame which imitates the composition of Watteau’s work: one can discern the thicket on the right which runs all the way up the canvas extending, in the upper part, into the middle of the painting and, on the left, the shape of Watteau’s pyramidal island (UVAC). In Walcott’s Un Voyage à Cythère, in fact, Watteau’s The Embarkation for

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Cythera itself becomes the visual referent for some of the characters’ longing for an elsewhere to which they have no access, an ‘elsewhere’ which, ultimately, as in Nerval’s novella, is located in a mythologised past: Watteau’s ‘blessed isle’, a place where, as Craven put it, there is ‘no death’ and pleasures are ‘prolonged into eternity’,52 becomes, in Walcott’s draft, a saccharined Trinidad of yesteryear recreated, predictably, via strategic occlusions. Un Voyage à Cythère takes place in one of the elaborate houses fringing Port of Spain Savannah, a symbol, simultaneously, of ‘prosperity of bygone days’ and ‘present decline’, a description which alerts us from the outset to the fact that the text will be flavoured with irony, incongruities and multi-layered contradictions (UVAC1). The story begins with a ‘young, poor, half-negro or full negro painter’ or ‘art critic’ who remains unnamed in the script: after Walcott’s initial indecision, however, the young man is consistently referred to as ‘the young negro’ (UVAC1). This young man is writing a series of articles on old life in the West Indies and, in order to do his job conscientiously, he visits the property and interacts with its occupiers, guided by Miss Willett, an English teacher who is allowed to live there as a reward for having taken care of some of the family’s younger members. At the beginning of his tour, the painter/art critic enters the house from the front door – a simple action that immediately prompts him to think that, in a not so remote past, people like him would not have been allowed to do so. The script informs us that the drawing room still contains valuable items but also less tasteful bric-a-brac and badly painted portraits of the old planters surrounded by their Black workers in the fields. When the young man also meets the old and sullen Black caretaker George who still lives in the backyard despite the fact that his employers have now lost both status and wealth, readers sense a subtle but tense confrontation between supporters of the old and new orders. In the initial exchanges between the English teacher, the old loyal servant, and the young man, the visitor soon realises that the polite Miss Willett, despite being reluctant to openly admit her prejudices and fears, is not keen to allow him to roam the house alone, anxious that he might pocket some of its most precious objects. Soon enough, she will be talking nostalgically of a time in which ‘the country was young’ and ‘beautiful’, lecturing the young man about the various generations who inhabited the house and who had always helped Black people: the family had one of the ‘most humane plantations’ on the island, she claims, but ‘a whip concealed’ in their ‘smile’ ‘because they had to, to build [the] country’ (UVAC4–5). This reconstruction of the past patently errs on the side of idealisation but this history teacher from England, who claims to have dutifully researched the family and its history, has no qualms about bending the truth, and firmly believes that she is ‘allowed a little imagination’ (UVAC18). Suddenly, during the guided tour, the young man finds himself threatened by an ‘ornate, ancient single shot pistol’ pointed at his heart by one of the proprietors of the castle/town house, Mr Oswald, who mistakes (or pretends

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to mistake) the visitor for a trespasser (UVAC3). The performative nature of social interactions, one of Watteau’s prominent themes, is echoed in Walcott’s choice of pistol for Mr Oswald who, brandishing this outdated weapon, seems more preoccupied with signalling his status and position than with c­ onstituting an effective threat; he later confesses, in fact, that he does not even know how to use it. Mr Oswald seems to take pride in the fact that the antiquated pistol is ‘decorative’ (UVAC22) because it is its very uselessness that defines his superiority as someone who, like Watteau’s elites, wanted to believe, and wanted the world to believe, that he could afford to live life as if life were a fiction.53 Walcott’s engagement with Watteau is evident here since, in both The Embarkation for Cythera and in his numerous fêtes galantes, the painter depicts a class who cultivated leisure activities precisely to maintain, through the display of symbols and ritualised behaviour, an illusion of superiority in a changing world. Parading and taking pride in their own uselessness and idleness, the aristocrats portrayed by Watteau subtly confirmed their own distinction from the new ambitious service class surrounding Louis XIV.54 Plax suggests that their engagement in fêtes galantes and their masquerading as shepherds or shepherdesses are better understood as ‘a sign of status, not of a role’,55 but Walcott seems to have relied on Watteau’s work as a springboard to investigate the performance of both role and status (or status as role) while further complicating the French artist’s representation of games of pretence by undermining his Trinidadian elite’s sense of entitlement to status. The point of Watteau’s eighteenth-century masqueraders dressed up as shepherds and shepherdesses was to implicitly and ironically reaffirm that, under their disguises, they were the exact opposite of what they were pretending to be. Mr Oswald’s ancient pistol, mobilised to reaffirm his supremacy, is nothing but a prop for his performing a role aimed at concealing rather than revealing his true identity and does not gesture towards an (endangered but) ‘established’ status. If Mr Oswald’s family’s past prosperity and the (albeit diminished) privilege they still enjoy are all too real, their ‘nobility’, we are told, was actually bought and performed rather than ‘duly’ inherited. Similarly, Mr Oswald’s policing of racial boundaries is another empty ritualistic gesture since the purity of (white) lineage he is purporting to defend from the threat posed by a Black ‘intruder’ is later revealed to be another entirely fictional construct (UVAC13–14). The tension between role playing and the (re)claiming of status and the complex interplay of identity and performance comes to a head when the painter/art critic proposes to include in his article a picture of the family members dressed in costumes from the past. It is not clear if the idea of the photograph was formulated by the young man after the performance of Mr Oswald with the outdated pistol or if it was something he had concocted before entering the house; be it as it may, since the photo was taken following his prompting, we should regard it as his way of pushing the family’s

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performance of identity to its limit. The costumes he is asking his hosts to wear are in fact just the visible counterparts of the mental disguises on which they pin a deep-seated need to reaffirm who they think they were and are and how they think they should be perceived: the photo opportunity, therefore, forces them to acknowledge, assess and confront this need. The day in which the photograph is eventually taken offers readers a modern Trinidadian rendition of a Watteauesque fête galante: the photo, never described, becomes the occasion for multiple performances where a large cast, organised in sub-groups distributed in the foreground and the background, provides the opportunity for diversity of composition and psychological insight. Different characters react differently to the photo opportunity and the masquerading that it involves. Miss Willett immediately agrees enthusiastically to the staging of a costumed photograph because she hopes that, through the recreation of a past of ‘ballrooms, music, waltzers, rustling of sea of lace, love’ and ‘graciousness’, this Creole family in decline might escape what she calls ‘the sordidness’ which surrounds them and ‘make a fugitive embarkation to Cythera’ (UVAC18). For Miss Willett, therefore, Cythera is an idealised past that those sitting for the family portrait will be able to (re) experience, at least momentarily; a past as ‘gracious’ and elegant as the one that she likes to imagine, a fragile moment of beauty like the one she sees immortalised in Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera, a cheap reproduction of which, we are told, is hanging in the house. Posing for this photo despite not being a member of the family, moreover, enabled Miss Willett to ‘climb’ the social hierarchy and pretend that she too was part of an elite and a world that Mr Oswald describes as a ‘mausoleum’ of ‘chandeliers’ to which, he insists, the class-obsessed teacher is drawn ‘like a fat, insipid moth’ (UVAC18). Mr Oswald’s vilification of Miss Willett for aspiring to belong to a superior class occurs despite the fact (or, indeed, because of the fact) that she is not the only one who likes to pretend to be someone else in terms of social status: as we have seen, much like their cheap reproduction of Watteau’s painting, the family is just a ‘genuine imitation’ of the aristocracy (UVAC13). Overall, however, most of the characters in Walcott’s draft find the past much more difficult to negotiate than the ‘imaginative’ Miss Willett expected. Indirectly critiquing representations of the Caribbean region as Edenic retreat with social tensions carefully edited out, the recreated Cythera that Walcott’s characters find themselves in on the day of the photograph, far from being a place of eternal beauty, is more akin to Baudelaire’s ‘banal Eldorado’ and a site for the ‘expiation’ of ‘infamous beliefs / and crimes’.56 Historically, in fact, ‘ballrooms’ and the ‘rustling of sea of lace’ used to find their counterparts in cane fields and the cracking of the whip. Caught between the urge to forget the horrors and the need to desperately remember something ‘good’, this imaginary journey into the past obliges the family to (re)live ‘old crimes, diseases, desires, failures’ and to face the uncomfortable fact that the present

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performance is in fact a replica of past performances aimed at disguising both their ‘peasant stock’ and their mixed-race lineage (UVAC18, 13). The roles the costumes impose on the family, laying bare the device, reveal how the past still shapes the present but also the way in which the future is being imagined, not only by the declined plantocracy but also by other Trinidadians: by his own admission, the young painter/art critic who declares that he does not hate history and accepts the past also confesses that he does not expect the future to be any better (UVAC6). On the day on which the photograph is taken, however, Walcott does not allow him to be just director and spectator of this disturbing fête galante: when challenged to do so by Mr Oswald, in fact, the Black man agrees to wear a servant livery to pose with the family. Playing the role of the Black servant/slave, he therefore sets off to Miss Willett’s ‘Cythera’ with the others and, in so doing, forces himself to test his own limits as much as theirs. Watteau too had experimented with the inclusion of the metteur-enscène in a mise-en-scène in Les fêtes vénitiennes (Venetian Entertainments, c. 1718), a painting Walcott was likely to be conversant with since, as we will see, his familiarity with Watteau was far from being confined to The Embarkation for Cythera. In Venetian Entertainments, the bagpiper is alone and, due to his rustic instrument, plain clothes and demeanour, stands out amongst the aristocrats gathered in the open air to enjoy music, dance and each other’s company: critics have identified him with the ‘peasant’ Watteau whose humble origins in Valenciennes made him an outsider among Parisian aristocrats.57 Was Watteau complicating things by pushing the ambiguity to the limit and showing himself masquerading as ‘himself’ rather than representing an aristocrat disguised as shepherd? Is the fact that the artist/ bagpiper is physically marginalised and singled out by his costume a sign that he does not really belong with the group but has been invited along simply to entertain others with his art? The painter, therefore, seems to be revealing (or, rather, deciding not to conceal any more) that he is not just an observer or spectator but an agent aware and keen to share his understanding of the complex dynamics at play in a fête galante, both as a human and social experience and as aesthetic produce. The majority of the revellers in the painting flirt and interact amongst themselves with different levels of intensity and a certain reciprocity is also established between the isolated Watteau/bagpiper and the two figures standing in the foreground. The painter/musician’s head is tilted in the same way as (and chimes with) the head of the fashionably dressed female dancer in the middle of the composition. The artist/bagpiper also exchanges glances with the standing male who, unlike the others, wears a turban and an exotic oriental costume but, due to his corpulence and seeming impassivity, appears to have been ‘miscast as a dainty dancer’.58 The standing couple have been identified as the painter Nicolas Vleughels and the actor Charlotte Desmares: they share centre stage as fellow entertainers supposed to dance as Watteau/

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the bagpiper animates the scene with his music. Yet, if the three should be operating as an ensemble, the two dancers not only do not touch one another but the movements of the couple lack the dynamism one would expect from people dancing to bagpipe music: are we therefore witnessing a complicated and coded representation of a conflicted love affair involving three people,59 or are the three signalling to viewers that to collaborate and perform for the entertainment of others can be, in the long run, a tiring, uninspiring business? Ironically, if this is the case, donning costumes must have played a significant part in their realisation. As it is often the case in Watteau, moreover, a sense of precariousness imbues the scene as one of the male revellers, caught in mid-action as he moves towards the lady sitting next to him, seems to be about to fall. The woman retracts and looks away from him even if her hand seems to caress the man’s lacy sleeve and it is not clear if she is simply jolted by the man’s imminent fall, attracted to him, or disturbed by his advances. As the woman sitting behind her leans forward with her eyes fixed on the man’s hands, one wonders if she is wishing them away from her friend’s body or if she is concerned by the precariousness of the man’s position. Should the suitor topple from his seat, he would land between the two dancers, interrupting what is already a rather awkward moment and turning it into a rather undignified vignette. It is as hard as ever in Watteau to fully understand what is going on: as Levey puts it, ‘the picture is shot through with gleams of irony’, the tension which surrounds the figures is ‘unmistakable and yet impalpable’, and he is right in insisting that Venetian Entertainments is shaped by profound disenchantment.60 Disillusionment, a rarefied sense of impending doom and the feeling of being on the cusp of tragedy and comedy (without ever fulfilling either) also characterise Walcott’s Un Voyage à Cythère. The reasons for the tension created by the masquerade in Walcott’s draft are easier to decipher than those in Watteau’s painting, even if the young man’s decision to join the other ‘pilgrims/sitters’ is not entirely straightforward. Nevertheless, by turning his own metteur-en-scène into an actor, Walcott shows the revelatory power of masquerade and magnifies the ironies and ambiguities derived by the fiction enacted on the day of the picture, testing how far the fiction his characters live every day has gone and can or cannot go. Watteau’s compelling triangulation of characters in Venetian Entertainments is replicated in Walcott’s work through the complicated interactions of the three members of the youngest generation of Trinidadians who take place in the masquerade – the painter/art critic and the niece and nephew of Mr Oswald. Their discomfort with the requirements of the performance is manifest as is their resistance to it, albeit expressed in different degrees: their half-hearted participation, their defiant actions, their decision to withdraw from the show, are staged for everyone else to see (and judge). If Walcott’s young man accepts to wear the costume of a servant/slave, in fact, he firmly refuses to be disciplined, managed, isolated and relegated to a peripheral role as Black subjects routinely were in representations of life on the

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island. When he meets Françoise, Mr Oswald’s young niece, the two engage in exchanges which, if observed from a distance, might resemble the behaviour of Watteau’s couples in Venetian Entertainments, or of those on (or on their way to or from) the isle in The Embarkation for Cythera. However, as their dialogue reveals to us, while their ‘mistress and slave’ disguises confuse and interrogate them about their identities, their confrontational flirting repeatedly bring to the fore the rawness of past and present gender, race and class relations: the roles that come with those costumes, in fact, make characters question who they really are and what they should believe in, want and feel. Walcott, therefore, forces his characters, particularly this young couple, to tread on the disturbing road taken by Baudelaire who turns Watteau’s Cythera into a site where one is forced to face not only one’s dark history but also one’s ‘dark side’. Through the theatricalisation of their ‘false’ positions, in fact, the pair experience a cluster of complex and contradictory feelings, sensations and desires (rage, envy, guilt, sadism, complacency, denial, self-aggrandisement, fear, pride, contempt, self-contempt, disavowal, masochism); they also realise that they – and, by extension, Trinidadian people as a whole – need to acknowledge and negotiate all these feelings, sensations and desires in order to move forward (UVAC15). Disturbed by Françoise’s intimacy with the Black painter/art critic, Mr Oswald challenges her weak, effeminate brother Jules (who is, apparently, also incestuously in love with her) to restore the hierarchical and racial structure undermined by the behaviour of the young couple by playing the part that his costume suggests. To do so, according to Mr Oswald, Jules should (ritualistically) accuse the painter/art critic of having stolen some objets d’art which, in fact, were never stolen in the first place. The racist, misogynist and homophobic Mr Oswald is aware of the ‘darkness’ of the family’s past (UVAC7) but, despite describing their house as a ‘mausoleum’ – and implicitly, their way of life as outdated, dead, out of synchrony with reality – he does not hide the fact that he would like to return to a time where he could fully enjoy the unfair advantages that his class and colour afforded him. Significantly, projecting his own unwillingness to move forward and confront (let alone embrace) change – for all his cynicism, in fact, he has never left Miss Willett’s idealised past/‘Cythera’ – Mr Oswald regards Watteau’s travellers as figures ‘always on the point of departure’ from Cythera who, however, ‘never leave’ (UVAC22). For Jules, instead, Watteau’s pilgrims are not yet on ‘Cythera’ but ‘going on a journey which they will never take because there is no such place’, since this place only ‘lives in the imagination’ (UVAC, 27). Watteau’s Cythera, therefore, comes to signpost, as it had done in Nerval’s Sylvie, the dangerous appeal of a ‘perfect’ past/place that is irretrievable (because it never actually existed) but that is always tantalisingly available as a product of the imagination. At the end of the play, after Jules’s refusal to ‘play his part’, Mr Oswald accuses the young man of being a thief even if there had been no thieving.

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Predictably, this distasteful pantomime is orchestrated to remind everyone of, and to re-establish, the racial and class hierarchy Mr Oswald saw questioned by the presence of the painter/journalist in his house and his (to him) outrageous familiarity with his niece. This is another empty theatrical gesture, like the brandishing of an outdated pistol, but one which is given further poignancy by the costumes (master and slave/servant) that the characters are wearing. The painter/art critic, however, refuses to follow Mr Oswald’s ‘script’: if, in his own way, he was still haunted by the past when he asked the family to pose for a photograph which would recreate a world he hated, he has now realised that he has to leave behind the world of the ‘dark and sad isle’ of Cythera with all its true horrors and its banal and ritualistic pettiness. When he walks away from the false accusations levelled against him, still in costume, but wearing an ordinary jacket on his arm, he seems to be in the process of not only emancipating himself from the past but also of finally being able to imagine a more enabling future. As the painter/art critic leaves, Jules, referring to Watteau’s painting for the last time, explains that the people portrayed by the French artist ‘are dead, their costumes, their way of life … Their beliefs are dead, that’s why they are so beautiful’, and, commenting on a suicidal impulse he has just managed to overcome, he adds: ‘I thought of that, and I wanted to join them’ (UVAC27). The past tense (‘wanted’) however, suggests that, at this point, Jules is no longer interested in joining or reviving a ‘dead’ ideal beauty, way of life and set of beliefs. Unlike the painter/critic who, at the end, leaves the house/mausoleum behind, Jules is still stuck in it with his sister but, since the fetishisation of a concept of ‘beauty’ which fails to interrogate itself and take stock of its troubling roots and its disturbing ramifications into the present and future has become at least questionable, it is possible that he too might have started his own emancipatory journey. As his sister waves good-bye from the window to the painter/art critic on his way out, she concludes that ‘it is time for a new truth’, one that, hopefully, would go beyond rehearsed and disabling historical roles (UVAC27). The play, therefore, ends with intimations of a new ‘journey’, towards a ‘new truth’ or a real, concrete locality which needs to be acknowledged for what it is and demands from everyone a higher level of commitment and a more responsible approach. Yet, no coordinates are provided for this journey, and it is not clear if these ‘pilgrims’ will ever arrive at their destination or even if, ultimately, they will ever really strive with all their might to reach it.

Carnival, Fêtes Galantes, Self-fashioning and Revolutions: From In a Fine Castle to The Last Carnival Spurred by compelling political contingencies and what seems to be an ongoing and ever-growing interest in Watteau, Walcott continues to unpack

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the nodal points and main issues of Un Voyage à Cythère in his plays In a Fine Castle and The Last Carnival. In a Fine Castle, performed in Trinidad for the first time only a year after the Trinidad Black Power Revolution,61 contains multiple references to this socio-political event. In The Last Carnival, direct engagement with Trinidad’s reality is even more sustained – the play spans twenty-two momentous years of the island’s history, from post-Second World War’s decolonisation to Independence and the Black Power Revolution. Walcott’s depiction of political and racial tensions, however, continues to be inflected by his fascination for Watteau’s theatricalisation of contradictory and complicated feelings, his ability to represent and ponder the dynamics of self-fashioning, and, partly, of ‘the impossibility of ever being sure of who you are’.62 Both plays, in fact, further strengthen the connection between Watteau and Trinidad by addressing the Trinidadian Carnival, complicating, with a local twist, Watteau’s fascination for theatrical performance and costume wearing. The history of Carnival in Trinidad and the Caribbean reveals that, despite its increasing commodification, Carnival has never been pure escapism: as Walcott himself had pointed out in the late 1950s, with the play Drums and Colours to which I will return in the next chapter, it has always had a much more profound significance for those willing or able to seize its transformative potential. Walcott’s exploration of the continuity and contiguity of political unrest and Carnival in these two plays finds historical counterpart in the fact that the 1970 Trinidad revolt was sparked by the protest band Pinetoppers whose members, on the first day of Carnival (9 February 1970), portrayed revolutionaries, enslaved people, indentured workers and ‘massas’ in their masquerade.63 Initially, Walcott was both sympathetic to the rebels’ demands and critical of the government: he considered the revolt a rebellion of the descamisados, ‘the unemployed, the restless and the rootless [who] wanted their rightful share of the society’ and he believed it ‘should have continued until it made its effect’.64 Very soon, however, he started to have strong misgivings regarding the upheaval when, as he points out in an interview, it took on the ‘overtones of race … because of the riots in America’.65 In another interview given only a month later, Walcott reiterates that he withdrew his support from an initially valid, ‘genuine and worthwhile’ uprising when it became ‘a blacker than thou’ affair and the insurgents turned into what he describes as costume-wearers imitating their African American counterparts: ‘the Panthers … in their black berets and black jerseys, in the hot sun!’66 In other words, self-fashioning, according to Walcott, was not the exclusive prerogative of the French Creole elite and, in these two Watteau-related plays, he investigates the collision of reality and escapism in a society where denial and disavowal appear as destructive as blind rage. Continuities with Walcott’s initial draft for Un Voyage à Cythère are easy to trace: in a workbook dated 1971 which contains Walcott’s drawing for the setting of In a Fine Castle, for example, a quotation (in French and English) from Baudelaire’s poem

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juxtaposed to Walcott’s sketches confirms that this play should be seen as a development of Un Voyage à Cythère, even if Baudelairean intimations are no longer in the title.67 As it was the case for Un Voyage à Cythère, In a Fine Castle takes place, arguably, in a ‘fine castle’, that is to say in one of the elaborate houses fringing Port of Spain’s Savannah.68 In Un Voyage à Cythère, Walcott mentioned Stollmeyer Castle by way of example (UVAC1) and Judy Stone, writing about In a Fine Castle in 1994, identified the castle of the title with it.69 Stollmeyer Castle belonged to a family of large estate owners Walcott knew in Trinidad. One of them, Hugh, was an artist who had spent more than twenty years in New York in order to learn how to paint: Walcott had often reviewed his work, with a mixture of appreciation and criticism, in the Trinidad Guardian.70 One of Walcott’s notebooks, however, contains a detailed drawing in black and white of what seems to be a different building overlooking the savannah, namely Ambard’s House (or Roomor House).71 While Stollmeyer Castle, also called Killarney, is a Scottish Baronial style residence, Ambard’s House is in French Second Empire style, a style which signposts a time when Rococo art had been appropriated and had become almost an official court art. Walcott must have realised that Ambard’s House provided a more appropriate visual reminder of the French Creole descent of the family at the core of the play and more ‘solidity’ to his transposition of Watteau on Trinidad. It is possible that such ‘reminder’ was for the playwright’s eyes only, a visual note to get into the right ‘mood’ when writing the play or setting the scene. Yet, the fact that the sketch of the house bears as a title ‘In A Fine Castle’ suggests that Walcott might have toyed with the idea of using this drawing as a poster for the play in an attempt to reach more directly his Trinidadian audience by showing them how relevant the play was to their immediate reality while, at the same time, preventing spurious associations of his characters with real people. In In a Fine Castle (and also in The Last Carnival), in fact, one of the members of the French Creole elite is a local painter: disassociating the Stollmeyers from the protagonists of his play was obviously important to Walcott since, on the back cover of a draft programme for the Trinidad Theatre Workshop production of In a Fine Castle, we find a disclaimer that delinks the ‘Castle in this fantasy’ from any existing mansion on the rim of Port of Spain’s Savannah and its ‘owners, living or dead’ from the characters in the play.72 Roughly twenty years later, in a much less sensitive context, the programme for the Swedish production of The Last Carnival (Sista Karnevalen) directed by Walcott in Stockholm in 199273 includes an engraving of Stollmeyer Castle together with a reproduction of a plantation house from the Santa Cruz Valley, and some photographs of the Trinidadian Carnival, to provide the Swedish audience with some visual coordinates for the setting of the play. This programme is enriched by other visual and textual material: Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera occupies the two

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central pages, accompanied by a caption focused on the artist and the painting and, as was the case for the Trinidad Theatre Workshop’s programme for In a Fine Castle, it also contains a quotation from Baudelaire’s poem and other drawings by Watteau. For all their local intensity, in fact, both plays are shaped by Walcott’s increasing engagement with Watteau’s work, as testified by the fact that, for the 1986 cover of the volume Three Plays which contains The Last Carnival, Walcott chose a chalk study by Watteau entitled A Man Reclining and a Woman Seated on the Ground (c. 1716). In a notebook dated 1970, it appears that Walcott might have been planning to feature Watteau’s study of a female figure on a poster for In a Fine Castle or, if envisaging publication, on a book cover.74 The elegantly handwritten words ‘In a Fine Castle’ and ‘A New Play by Derek Walcott’, in fact, are painted above and below a glued-on reproduction of one of Watteau’s Two Studies of a Seated Woman (1709–21) (Fig. 3.5) where the artist sketched the same woman from the front and back: here Walcott chose the frontal view where the model’s profile, her hands and the deep folds of her dress are the main features. It is not surprising that Walcott took an interest in Watteau’s drawings; after all, Walcott had fully absorbed Simmons’s teaching that ‘drawing is the probity of all art’ (ALms2, 103; OTC21, 23) and Watteau was an extraordinarily gifted draughtsman who, as revealed by Edme-François Gersaint, one of his closest friends, was ‘more satisfied with his drawings than with his paintings’.75 Overall, Watteau regarded his drawings both as independent creations and as ‘tools’ he could and would return to for his paintings, a ‘rich gallery of prototypes’ he would combine, recombine and alter as ‘variations on a theme’.76 Walcott’s modus operandi was not entirely dissimilar since, if considered together, Un Voyage à Cythère, In A Fine Castle and The Last Carnival outline a process which relies on the creation and recreation of similar characters and themes which are sketched, revisited, re-rendered as more multi-dimensional, deconstructed, multiplied and reshuffled in new compositions. Each text, for instance, includes characters who can be seen as different facets of the same personality as if they were studies of the same subject from different perspectives: for example, the ‘loyal Black servant’ is always juxtaposed to (one or more) rebellious counterparts, and the ‘crass and profit-driven planter’ always has a feeble, artistically-inclined ‘double’. Yet, over the years, in order to illustrate ever more nuanced feelings, predicaments and positions, Walcott redrew his figures as separate characters or as more complex individuals enriched by new contrasting dimensions. Considering the important role of The Embarkation for Cythera in The Last Carnival and In a Fine Castle – in both plays copies of The Embarkation for Cythera actually appear on stage – the fact that Walcott was considering one of Watteau’s studies instead of the painting itself for a possible poster/cover for In a Fine Castle, and eventually selected one for the cover of Three Plays, indicates that he was deepening his knowledge of the painter’s work and was increasingly

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drawn to Watteau’s rendering of the subtlety and elusiveness of individual human psychology. Furthermore, it is also evident that he was emancipating himself from Craven’s selection since the drawings and paintings Walcott relied on as inspiration are not to be found in Craven’s volume: Craven, in fact, comments only very briefly on Watteau’s sketchbooks.77 The workbook for A Fine Castle with a reproduction of one of Watteau’s Two Studies of a Seated Woman testifies to Watteau’s influence on Walcott’s creation of a setting for his characters. As a director who was also a painter, Walcott conceived the interplay of human figures, backdrops, and dark and light on stage as if it were a picture. He readily admitted that, as we have seen in the Introduction, he often deliberately modelled his scenes on paintings of artists he admired in order to recreate for, and share with, the audience the connotations and echoes that those works contained.78 As another primary exemplification of this process, one could consider how one of Walcott’s sketches for In A Fine Castle, with a superimposed collage of silvery paper lines outlining a light architectural structure, might have worked as a reminder of the colour palette Walcott intended to use on stage. As a matter of fact, the same colour palette is replicated in another sketch detailing the setting which comprises furniture, a woman and a little girl by a piano and, at the centre, a large cut-out from a painting by Watteau whose colours chime with Walcott’s own setting.79 The painting in question, surprisingly, is not The Embarkation for Cythera but L’accordée du village (The Village Bride) (c. 1710–15) (Fig. 3.3) which presents us with a huge cast of lively figures of all ages enjoying a day out.80 Watteau, as we have seen, knew the rural world represented in the painting intimately but he was also drawn to, and often drew inspiration from, the world of theatre. It is likely, in fact, that The Village Bride did share with The Embarkation for Cythera a theatrical source since both paintings might have been suggested to him by two popular comedies by Florent Dancourt: The Village Bride by L’Opéra de village, where the third act intermezzo is a village festival to celebrate a marriage contract, and The Embarkation for Cythera by Les trois cousines, which ended with a boat journey to the island and its Temple of Love.81 The two paintings, however, are rather different in mood and emphasis. If The Embarkation for Cythera thrives on the ambiguity of Watteau’s rendition of figures predominantly caught in what could be trepidant anticipation of future pleasures, or reluctant leave-taking from past ones, most of the cast of The Village Bride (whether they were real peasants or actors or aristocrats in disguise82) seem more engaged with and anchored in their (real or performative) ‘here and now’. The bride, on the other hand, looks rather distant from the general scene, detached from it, as if transfixed by the sudden realisation that a momentous change in her life is awaiting her and that she cannot control this change, or the, ultimately financial, transaction she is the object of.83 The vulnerability of Watteau’s women is patent even in paintings when they appear able to fend off the avances of male revellers – after

Figure 3.3  L’accordée du village (The Village Bride), c. 1710–15, Jean-Antoine Watteau, oil on canvas, 63 × 92 cm. Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Photo credit © Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.

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all, they are always pursued and besieged with sheer relentlessness, at times in different ways in the same work. In The Embarkation for Cythera itself, the couples’ interactions are not always exempt from male to female (micro) aggression – one young woman, for example seems to be urged towards the boat, gently but firmly, by her companion, and her backward gaze could be signposting precisely her disinclination to be pushed along. In The Village Bride the imbalance of gender relations is more sharply revealed by the bride’s demeanour and predicament. Walcott’s inclusion of The Village Bride in his scrapbook for In a Fine Castle reveals that he was intrigued not only by the theatricality of Watteau’s images but also by their subtle rendition of gender politics which, in fact, he was also keen to continue to explore in The Last Carnival, a play in which some of the female characters are particularly dense and complex.84 In The Last Carnival, as we will see, gender imbalance is brought to the fore in the (abusive) relationship between Agatha Willett – an English governess who arrives in Trinidad to look after the De La Fontaine children – and her employer Victor De La Fontaine, a Trinidadian painter of French Creole descent obsessed with Watteau. In Act Two, set more than twenty years after Agatha’s arrival, the same actor who played Agatha in Act One plays the younger Clodia (one of the two De La Fontaine children raised by Agatha) and provocatively declares herself to be sexually available at the same time as she turns herself into a painting by putting an empty frame around her face in a strong indictment not only of the objectification of women but also of art’s complicity in it.85 In a mixed review of the 1982 Port of Spain production, the Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace, despite ignoring Watteau and his presence in the play, seems inadvertently aware of the (Watteauesque) gender power tensions in which the play is imbued. In a play that ‘demonstrates poignantly the island’s loneliness and all our [Trinidadians’] loss’, Lovelace reads Agatha as an exploited female with whom the two De La Fontaine brothers are happy to have sexual relationships but not to commit to in any serious way and compares her to Trinidad which, he laments, ‘all of us … have used … without making that commitment that we owe her’.86 Watteau’s subtle rendition of gender politics was only one of the facets of his ability to capture the predicament and fragility of disempowered subjects, to render individual isolation in the middle of a crowd, and to portray the vulnerability and bewilderment of someone caught between different identities and emotions, like the maid at the moment of transitioning into a bride whom Watteau’s brush depicts as withdrawn, preoccupied, transfixed, bewildered and anxious about her life-changing experience. That Watteau could distil and represent all the complexities and contradictions of these conditions was of great value to Walcott, particularly in plays where he decided to revisit Carnival and the Black Power Revolution, two events he had personally witnessed (repeatedly, as far as Carnival was concerned) and which had triggered (or used to trigger) in him a mixed range of emotions.

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In America, without America, in fact, Walcott’s individual response to these collective undertakings resonates with that of the bewildered and isolated bride in Watteau’s The Village Bride. During Carnival, in fact, he felt marginalised, lonely, anxious about his own identity, puzzled by his own reactions, overwhelmed by his own feelings: ‘I have stood on the whirling or chipping edge of fêtes and felt so shy that I have been near tears … This haunted me so much once that I doubted my identity. I could not be a West Indian’ (AWA). Rejected as ‘an alien, a life-long visitor in [his] adopted country’, for his unwillingness and inability to share what he calls the Trinidadian ‘personal, and national ability to fête’, Walcott understood that being good at ‘jump[ing]-up … made you a Trinidadian’: ‘if you didn’t “jump-up” something was wrong with you. Refusal could produce a nightmarish inferiority … in a contemptuous crowd of feteing Trinidadians’ (AWA). In the manuscript and typed pages of American, without America devoted to the Black Power Revolution in Port of Spain, moreover, Walcott initially revisits the moment when he realised that the Revolution had just started and, as he was coming from San Juan, entering into Port of Spain in the car, he was confronted by ‘orderly marching’ ‘young men, bareback … flaunting their shirts’ at a time when ‘marching was forbidden and martial law had been proclaimed’ (AWA). He recalls that the youths were ‘laughing and seemed happy to die’ as if they were participating in ‘a Carnival with meaning’ and were shouting ‘The Army behind we! The Army behind we!’ (AWA). Being aware of ‘what the official ban on assemblies and marches really meant’, Walcott concluded that ‘the Revolution had really come’ so he got out of the car because ‘he did not want to be a spectator at a massacre’ but ‘at the centre of [the young men’s] defenceless gaiety’ (AWA). His family ‘stopped’ him but he considered this event his ‘first experience of collective bravery in Trinidad’ (AWA). The prevailing contrasting emotions here seem to be excitement and anxiety, a mixture of admiration for the courage of the demonstrators and fear for their lives, the desire to embrace and be part of this ‘collective bravery’, and the realisation that this would be at odds with his personal responsibilities as father and husband. In a different extract, however, the mood changes quite dramatically and is inflected by a combination of bitterness, anger and fear, the realisation of being viewed as an enemy for being of mixed heritage, a sense of guilt for his social advantage, and, above all, a deep sense of isolation. Standing outside Woodford Square, in the centre of Port of Spain, he was able to hear ‘frightening roars of “Power!”’ and a crowd reiterating that ‘only the pure black was going to survive’ (AWA). At that point, feeling ‘excluded’ by his own ‘paleness’, he became concerned that his ‘children […] were not black enough for the Revolution’ (AWA). As he recalls, he ‘realised that [he] felt bitter and angry [and] guilty too at hearing the occasional shout from a sidewalk: “Black is beautiful”’ (AWA). This guilt, he explains, did not derive from the awareness that his ‘race was mixed and white blood had corrupted

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black purity and beauty’ but from the fact that, as he put it, ‘I felt that I had, like all of us, seen the beauty of blackness from a social advantage, and that was the true thing about the shouting in Woodford Square’ (AWA). In light of these experiences, Watteau’s The Village Bride, glued to the pages of the play’s notebook as an emblem of individual isolation, anxiety and bewilderment in the middle of a (festive) crowd, must have worked well as a visual reminder of the kind of psychological condition Walcott was keen to explore in the plays and of the angle he was interested in adopting in his discussions of Carnival and the Revolution. In In a Fine Castle and The Last Carnival, in fact, individuals are sometimes grouped or paired in (problematic) relationships but are often painfully isolated and utterly bewildered by their own and others’ circumstances. In another watercolour Walcott prepared for the set of In a Fine Castle, a frame at the centre of the stage contains a painting which is as black as the rest of the wall on which it hangs. Perhaps Walcott produced this ‘blank’ canvas in order to provide himself with a ‘neutral’ space to further ponder on and take on board crucial aspects of other paintings by the French artist without being ‘distracted’ by the otherwise ubiquitous and overwhelming The Embarkation for Cythera: a detail from a reproduction stuck on the right side of this watercolour, in fact, reveals that, at the time, Walcott was also contending with another oil on canvas by Watteau, namely Les charmes de la vie (The Music Party, 1718–19) (Fig. 3.4).87 The detail chosen by Walcott is focused on a man standing behind a seated woman who is about to play the cello and a little girl sitting on the floor and playing with a spaniel. Walcott’s choice to isolate these characters from the rest of the scene leaves us with three figures in close proximity who do not engage with one another, all seemingly lost in their thoughts. The drama of couples exchanging glances and interacting, so prominent in The Embarkation for Cythera, is substituted here, once again, by a careful consideration of individual solitudes in the middle of a social event. Arguably, the most isolated figure in the painting is the Black boy serving wine who is so distant from the group that he does not appear in Walcott’s cut-out. The boy’s absence, caused by his physical separation from the rest of the figures, is an excellent visual blueprint for these plays focused on a racially divided society. One could also argue that the Black figure’s marginalisation or, indeed, elimination, as far as Walcott’s cut-out is concerned, and his ancillary role in the social event represented by Watteau, are reflected in the play’s lack of in-depth engagement with the Black revolutionaries: advance publicity, in fact, described In a Fine Castle as ‘focused on domestic complexities of a French Creole family’.88 In In a Fine Castle or, for that matter, in The Last Carnival, The Music Party or The Village Bride are never mentioned but, as I have anticipated, while in the draft for Un Voyage à Cythère (a copy of) Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera is only referred to by characters but never fully described or directly referenced, in these two plays The Embarkation for

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Figure 3.4  Les charmes de la vie (The Music Party), c. 1718–19, Jean-Antoine Watteau, oil on canvas 67.3 × 92.5 cm. Wallace Collection, London. Credit: Wallace Collection, London © Wallace Collection/© Wallace Collection, London, UK/Bridgeman Images.

Cythera and other Watteau references are both ‘on stage’ and ‘staged’ by characters in multiple ways. In one of the drawings for In a Fine Castle, for instance, for the scene in the ballroom in Act Two, the costume of one of the ‘pilgrims’ – complete with a ‘satin reddish/brown’ hat, a ‘black velveteen’ cape on a ‘dull red tunic’, ‘breeches with black velvet rosettes’ and ‘grey hose’ – is a very meticulous copy of the one worn by the male character sporting a staff at the centre of Watteau’s work.89 In a draft typescript for the play, the French Creole descendant Clodia, supported by a band called ‘An Embarkation to the Sacred Isle of Venus’, competes for Carnival Queen with an elaborate costume that is described as ‘a fantasy on a Watteau shepherdess’.90 In The Last Carnival some of the characters don costumes inspired by the French artist: Agatha, for instance, wears a shepherdess costume to pose as a model for Victor and, in Act Two, we learn that a delusional Victor ends up taking his own life dressed à la Watteau since, when his mental condition deteriorated, he was persuaded that he was the French painter himself. In The Last Carnival, a reproduction of Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera is projected on a wall in Act One while an unfinished copy of the painting forms the background of the setting in Act Two.91

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Walcott’s drawings for In a Fine Castle also include sketches of the painting which was executed by Walcott himself and presided over the stage as a copy left unfinished by the death of his author.92 One can, in fact, discern the outline of The Embarkation for Cythera at the back one of Walcott’s sketches for the setting: Watteau’s central male and female characters seem to have swapped position, the colour of the female’s costume does not match Watteau’s, and the other figures are rather indistinct, but the composition dutifully reproduces the thicket branching into the middle of the painting on the right and the shape of Cythera on the left. On Walcott’s stage, a tall tree positioned on the right as a prop also seems to branch into the painting/backcloth itself to underline the interplay between indoors and outdoors, past and present, and between performance, painting and reality.93 The presence of trees on stage reminds us that The Embarkation for Cythera, like most of Watteau’s drawings and paintings, is set outdoors and, in line with this, Walcott too indicates that the family photograph at the core of Un Voyage à Cythère was to be taken, preferably, outdoors.94 Walcott’s The Last Carnival takes place, for the most part, indoors, but the world outside always impinges on these interior spaces as characters look out of windows and describe what they see. Noises and voices from beyond walls (slaves’ songs, machine guns, honking cars, failing generators, steel band music), moreover, often interrupt dialogues and affect the mood and the action. Un Voyage à Cythère, as we have seen, ends with Jules and Françoise looking out of their window yearningly as the painter/critic walks away from their home/castle and their decadent world. Similarly, in In A Fine Castle, the younger generation ‘looks out through the railings [of their castle] to the green “pastyah”’ (Creole for ‘pasture’) of the Port of Spain’s Savannah where Carnival takes place, longing to take part and find a sense of belonging.95 Some of Walcott’s sketches for the setting of In A Fine Castle redeploy Watteau’s careful negotiations of indoor and outdoor spaces but also reveal that these depictions interested Walcott also for other reasons. In The Music Party, the men, women and children about to delight and be delighted by music are framed by architecture in the form of three dark columns on the left and one on the right, supposedly supporting roofing which is not visible in the picture. The same ‘stage’ with dark columns and arches, which recall the colonnade of the Tuileries, is also evident in Les plaisirs du bal (The Pleasures of the Ball, c. 1717).96 Behind the figures in The Music Party is an open landscape which gradually loses definition: smaller figures sit and stand on open turf while, further in the distance, is the outline of buildings of what seems to be a tiny town. The resemblance with a theatrical stage is striking: Brookner has described this painting as ‘Watteau’s most successful experimentation with “theatrical space” [since] the spectator occupies a position analogous to the front row of the stalls, and the pavement is equivalent to a ramp of a stage’.97 The Music Party, however, also maintains a compelling tension between the detailed realism of the foreground and the indistinct and

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vaporous background which reminds one of a theatrical backdrop. Despite the fact that The Embarkation for Cythera too can be said to contain, to a certain extent, a similar kind of contrast in terms of inconsistency in the depiction of painted surfaces, at the top of the notebook page with Walcott’s watercolour of three costumes for In a Fine Castle, the playwright glued a detail from Les Champs-Elysées (1719), another painting by Watteau even more notable for thriving on the illusion of realism while, at the same time, revealing itself as artifice.98 In Les Champs-Elysées, the disjuncture between the highly accomplished and realistic details of the foreground figures and the sketchy and unfinished quality of those in the background chimes with the subject of a fête galante where participants often wore costumes to engage in sophisticated theatrics.99 Walcott had often emphasised ‘theatricality’ in his plays which, through his use of verse, fable, Carnival and play-within-a-play structures, ultimately resist and reject the very possibility of a seamless rendition of reality.100 In his Watteau-related works, Walcott seems keen to explore the possibilities offered by the French master’s intriguing balance of metatheatrical elements and realism. This is particularly true of The Last Carnival. The action here is firmly anchored to specific times and places as Act One is focused on Trinidad in 1948, the subsequent years and the island’s Independence Day in 1962, while Act Two takes place in a day during the 1970 Carnival and the Black Power Revolution. Nonetheless, in a move which underlines Walcott’s preoccupation with the problematics of representation, ‘scenes’ from Act One reappear in Act Two as paintings by Victor. Furthermore, even if the celebration for Independence, the Trinidad Carnival and the Black Power Revolution pin the action onto exact historical moments and a particular location, the play denies its audience a comprehensive examination of both place and time(s) by approaching and filtering historical and cultural events almost exclusively from the point of view of an elite both unable and unwilling to appreciate the whole picture and understand and reconsider its position in a changing society. Watteau too, in different ways and via contradictory visual and verbal clues, often leaves viewers unable to place the scene firmly in front of them while triggering the illusion that it should be possible to do so. If Watteau is first and foremost a painter of outdoor scenes, in fact, his landscapes are predominantly the product of fantasy rather than the faithful rendition of an exact place. In the few instances in which real locations can be identified, the productive tension created by the interplay between reality and fantasy, realism and artifice, is crucial to understand the ambiguities Watteau was trying to capture in his work. For example, in The Island of Cythera (1709) the lush setting appears to be a vista of the (equivocal) Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud; yet, creating a disjuncture which concomitantly establishes an alternative ‘juncture’ between image and words, connotations and denotations, the title evokes the mythical Cythera.101 If the colonnade of the Tuileries is that which might have inspired

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the architecture of The Music Party, the landscape in the background is not a rendition of the Tuileries gardens, and if the title Les Champs-Elysées unusually names a real site, the canvas does not provide a recognisable view of the park and gestures simultaneously towards the mythological connotations of the Elysian Fields.102 In Watteau’s Les Champs-Elysées, moreover, the grass and vegetation are sketchily executed while the texture of the fabric of the costumes/­garments of the human figures is exquisitely rendered in a highly detailed and realistic finish and the tension and synergies which shape human interactions are carefully observed and represented. The detail from Les Champs-Elysées (1719) that Walcott glued at the top of a page of one of his watercolours for In a Fine Castle comprises only four of the attentively studied figures from the foreground of the painting. A man and a woman form a couple sitting – or, in his case, lying on the ground – next to one another: they are looking at each other, seemingly fully absorbed in their own world. The other two, also a man and a woman, are instead far from one another – he is standing at one end of the scene while she is sitting at the other. They do not look at each other but both look in the same direction: their commonality of focus, therefore, might bridge, at least in part, their physical distance, or show that one of the two might be sufficiently interested in his/her counterpart to follow the trajectory of his or her gaze. The man, however, stands on (or very close to) the cloak of the reveller lying close to the other female figure: is this a sign of veiled aggression towards a rival or a way to prevent him from breaking the rules of propriety by getting too close to the woman? The standing man seems unaware of trespassing into the other’s territory and looks away from the cloak and the couple: is he stepping over the other man’s cloak by accident or is he studiously trying to look indifferent whilst making his presence felt at the same time? Walcott was interested in Watteau’s studies of temptation, seduction, resistance and male rivalry which constitute the basis for the complex and often problematic interactions of male and female characters in his plays. The suggested and suggestive rivalry between the two men from Les Champs-Elysées, in fact, resonates with all three of Walcott’s Watteau-related works and with one of the watercolours he painted for the Carnival scene at the Santa Rosa Estate in The Last Carnival where Victor, with his Watteau costume, sits on a bench and faces directly, in a stand-offish manner, his brother Oswald dressed as Toulouse Lautrec who is instead sitting on the floor. Agatha, dressed like Jean Avril, stands between the two men: slightly on Victor’s side but looking at Oswald at the same time, Agatha betrays her double allegiance and the fact that she is attracted to both men.103 Yet, if Walcott was intrigued by the artist’s elusive games of gazes and astute deployment of mid-action gestuality, he was also sensitive to the artist’s multiple forms of seduction and to the allure of his handling of what, for the ‘tropical’ Walcott, was an unfamiliar autumnal light: in the watercolour for In a Fine Castle with a cut-out from

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Les Champs-Elysées, in fact, Walcott accompanies Watteau’s detail with an handwritten ‘caption’ which says: ‘Like the light from another country’.104 Years later, in the first scene of The Last Carnival, Walcott might still have had in mind his reaction to Watteau’s image since he dramatised it in reverse: as soon as the English Agatha lands on Trinidad, in fact, she is immediately drawn to its unfamiliar and astounding ‘light’ (LC6). In Walcott’s play, as a matter of fact, Trinidad is also an active seducer: one could argue that we are invited to see how, in Fragonard’s parlance, the English woman’s ‘citadel’ will be eventually ‘stormed’ less by the French Creole Trinidadian brothers she will have liaisons with than by the island itself and its ‘astonishing light’ (LC6). When, responding to Agatha, Victor admits that he finds Trinidad’s light very hard to paint, he does not reveal mere technical incompetence but, ultimately, his inability to engage with his immediate surroundings: as we will see, he is not the only character in the play prone to misrepresent, disengage from, misunderstand, adulterate, even betray, this ‘light’.

The Last Carnival: Beyond Stillness, to See Things as They Are In The Last Carnival Walcott further explores and builds on the ambiguous mobility of Watteau’s figures in The Embarkation for Cythera who might be leaving for or from Cythère. Walcott’s characters, in fact, are seen arriving to, departing from, or being ‘stuck’ on Trinidad in different ways. The Last Carnival begins, as anticipated, in 1948 with the landing of the English governess Agatha Willett, a character who is a ‘re-drawing’ of the English teacher, also named Agatha Willett, in Un Voyage à Cythère. As soon as she sets foot on Trinidad, the Agatha of The Last Carnival swears to remain on the island ‘for good’ (LC8) and does not break her vow even when, during the Black Power Revolution of 1970, the army encourages her to leave for her own safety. At the very end of the play, in fact, it is not Agatha but the young descendant of the French Creole planter family she has been working for, Clodia de La Fontaine, whom we see on the docks of Port of Spain ready to depart from her native island. In the first scene of The Last Carnival, we are also told that little Sydney, the nephew of one of the de La Fontaine’s Black servants, is keen to leave Trinidad as soon as possible (LC12); yet in Act Two – set in 1970, that is, twenty-two years later – he is still there, has joined the rebels, and ends up dying on the island, shot by the police. Sydney plays a marginal role in the first scene of the play which revolves around the arrival of a young Agatha welcomed by Victor whose children, Clodia and Antoine, will be her charge. Watteau is mentioned straight away since, during their conversation at the docks of Port of Spain, Victor compares Agatha to a Watteau ‘shepherdess’ and reveals to her that her resemblance to the French painter’s figures actually secured her the job (LC7). The initial exchange between Victor and Agatha subtly lays bare power relations

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predicated on gender and class and recalls Watteau’s representations of couples and love-play, not only in The Embarkation for Cythera but also in his other paintings where male figures pursue women persistently, and the possibility of male coercion and domination is always intimated if not fully suggested. In the second scene, which takes place seven months later, the flirting between Victor and Agatha intensifies, as do its disturbing undertones. Following Watteau, who kept a collection of costumes he would lend to his models in order to sketch them in attires of his choice,105 Victor persuades Agatha to wear a costume inspired by Watteau’s work and to pose for him while, rather proprietorially, he calls her ‘my own Watteau shepherdess’ (LC14, emphasis mine). A 1982 notebook for In a Fine Castle/The Last Carnival (both titles appear at different times), includes a sketch for this scene where Victor is painting Agatha sitting on the floor (Fig. 3.6) and in the same position of the woman in one of Watteau’s Two Studies of a Seated Woman (Fig. 3.5) Here the same female figure is seen from in front and behind: as we have seen, Walcott had considered the frontal view as a possible advertising image but the position he had envisioned for the characters on the stage was such that, while the audience could see Victor busy reproducing the sitter from the front, they had access to the woman’s back as it is represented in Watteau’s rear view, recreating the double exposure of Watteau’s composite drawing.106 This scene prefigures the future conflictual intimate relationship between Agatha and Victor as well as Victor’s increasingly delusional identification with Watteau; it also resonates with A Man Reclining and a Woman Seated on the Ground (c. 1716), the chalk study by Watteau which appears on the cover of the volume that contains The Last Carnival. Here the male and female figures do not engage with one another (or, for that matter, with the beholder), look distant and appear to be even lonelier than the single woman in Two Studies of a Seated Woman. Yet, they direct their gaze in the same direction outside the frame – insinuating a possible communality of purpose or deep-seated affinity; if one of the two figures were to move, even slightly, the overall harmony of the ensemble would be fatally compromised. Different chromatically, they nonetheless correspond in visually engaging ways. He is mainly drawn in sanguine (red chalk) but the collar of his jacket is white; conversely, while she is wearing a white dress, her head, hands and hair are in sanguine. The scene is cut in two, vertically, by the woman’s head, torso and right arm as she turns her back to her companion; her right hand touches the floor and supports her in her seating position; her legs extend horizontally, making her equilibrium rather precarious. The man is lying down behind her, resting on his right elbow and, caught in mid-action, he might be about to roll forward or backward. Their postures are ambiguous: as she looks away from him, her straight right arm intersects with his curved right arm at a point where each invades the other’s territory; their two hands are very

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Figure 3.5  Two Studies of a Seated Woman, 1709–21, Jean-Antoine Watteau, paper, chalk, 20.2 × 33.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal.

Figure 3.6  Sketch for In A Fine Castle/The Last Carnival, 1982, Derek Walcott, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, MsColl notebook Box 62, item 3. Photo by Natalya Rattan. Courtesy of Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Walcott Estate. All rights reserved.

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close, almost touching, but not quite. She might be secretly inviting him to get closer by extending her arm backwards towards him, or politely discouraging him from doing so; as he circles her from a distance with his arms, there is something tender, but also vaguely menacing, in his demeanour. Similarly, Walcott’s Victor might appear to be charming and vulnerable at times, but he is also abusive and exploitative and Agatha, despite being attracted to him, is nonetheless disturbed by his selfishness and sense of entitlement. In Scene Two, when Agatha poses for Victor as a model, he gives her a book of prints and challenges the young woman to identify the painters/paintings reproduced in it, criticising and patronising her when she fails to be accurate. Victor’s overall behaviour makes Agatha feel inadequate and uncomfortable, particularly when he puts her in what he considers ‘her place’ by saying that she will always have ‘working class hands’ (LC19). Victor’s focus on hands might be a result of Walcott’s engagement with Watteau’s drawings: the eighteenth-century artist was particularly interested in the structure of hands and, in his numerous studies, they are generally rendered with elegance and precision.107 In the frontal view of the Two Studies of a Seated Woman, the one that Walcott had used as visual inspiration for this scene, the ‘lively’108 hands of the woman in question do not appear to be particularly delicate and one could perhaps describe them as ‘working class’. Walcott might still have had in mind this particular drawing when he wrote this scene as he seems keen to engage with some of its other possible subtexts. Like the model in Two Studies of a Seated Woman who is not engaging with the painter but looks away from him, Agatha is not allowed to interfere with or disturb Victor’s vision and performance: to Walcott’s Victor, Agatha is both model and audience and she accuses him of ‘performing for [her] as if [she] were [his] journal’ (LC20). This obliteration of Agatha as a person and agent resonates with Victor’s systematic and strategic obliteration of reality in favour of ‘fiction’. When Agatha sees the estate women working in the cocoa field on a Saturday afternoon – their songs can be heard through one of the windows in the studio – she questions Victor about their predicament. What Agatha calls a ‘treadmill’ (LC16), however, is nonchalantly transformed by Victor into a fête galante of the mind where plantocrats ‘masquerade’ as field labourers like Watteau’s aristocrats/shepherd(esse)s. Victor claims that the women are ‘perfectly happy’ and explains to Agathathe-outsider that singing is a crucial part of how ‘we dance the cocoa’ (LC16, emphasis mine). His ‘we’ seems to deceptively and self-deceptively include Trinidadians like himself even if he is painting in his studio while the women toil in the fields: as he himself admits, however, ‘they press grapes’ – not him or his relatives (LC16, emphasis mine). In the same scene, Victor later observes – or, rather, confesses – that ‘it is very very hard to see things as they are’ (LC19). His words reveal that the play is concerned with perspective, perception and (self-inflicted) blind spots which prevent one from seeing and engaging properly with the world. It is easier ‘to see what we believe’, Victor

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continues, because ‘if you look hard enough it will become that’ (LC19). This incapacity – or, rather, unwillingness – to see ‘things as they are’ is presented as a dangerous self-delusion that afflicts in particular those who can afford to live and perform a life of fiction where what they see, and what they want to see, can be easily collapsed by the simple act of closing a window to silence Black workers’ voices. After shutting reality out of his mind and world, Victor projects a reproduction of Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera onto a wall and, professing his admiration for the French artist who ‘painted his whole culture as if it were a sunset’, he proceeds to explain to Agatha (and the audience) what he ‘sees’ in Watteau’s work: ‘all embarkation’, he continues, ‘is a fantasy. You see those pilgrims in the painting? They can’t move. It is like some paralyzed moment in a carnival’ (LC17). Displaying an absolute belief in his own ability (and, by extension, in the ability of words) to unequivocally read, understand and explain away an image, Victor’s exegesis of Watteau’s picture posits it as a moment where everything crystallises, the action is stopped, and the pilgrims, frozen in perpetual fixity, are perfectly motionless and still. Strictly speaking, Watteau’s figures are not going anywhere, as it is the case for figures in every painting. Yet, one could suggest that Victor too swiftly consigns to p ­ ictorial stasis, immortal fixity, paralysis and ‘atemporal “eternity”’109 an image which in fact loosens temporal unity in subtle ways. In other words, Victor can fix what happens (‘They can’t move’) only by purposefully ignoring any alternative narrative the image might contain and by exerting his authority on it as he does on Agatha and on reality, purposefully neglecting to appreciate their complexities, dimensions, ramifications and entanglements. In contrast with Victor’s reading of Watteau’s figures as still and paralysed, one could argue, in fact, that the structure of The Embarkation for Cythera – with its transitional poses, mid-actions and incomplete ­gestures – thrives instead on the interplay of stasis and movement and is organised around conventions aimed at creating a pictorial narrative. The couples in the foreground of the 1717 version can be seen as representing different stages in a journey/narrative, from the first couple sitting down by the herm of Venus, to the second pair, where the man helps the woman to get up (or is she trying to resist and pull him back down?), to the third, where they are both standing and he pushes her along while she looks back, with either longing or regret, at her previous status. The same can be said for the figures in the background, with five couples forming a line on their way to approach the boat, seemingly exchanging glances and impressions whilst orienting our gaze towards the next (or previous) event in the series, adopting different poses and attitudes which illustrate not only a sequence of moments in the process but also a range of emotions.110 Background and foreground are linked by the staff of the man hurrying his female counterpart along in the middle of the painting and by a seemingly impatient little dog, ready to move

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(the lifted paw suggesting eagerness) but looking back too, to either ensure that everyone else is on the move or indicating that he is in fact keen to run away from the boat. More than ten putti flying upwards or prompting the pilgrims, and the bodies of the two oarsmen caught in the effort of keeping the boat still, add further urgency, energy and excitement to the image. The number of figures increases in the 1719 version which retains and magnifies the dynamism and extends and elaborates on the narrative of the first.111 Victor’s refusal to acknowledge ‘movement’ in the painting at this stage in the play, chimes with his staunch rejection of socio-political change. As Ronald Paulson has noted, while ‘western paintings’ tend to ‘move from left to right’, in Watteau’s work, and in The Embarkation for Cythera as a case in point, ‘the general movement of the serpentine lines connecting foreground and background is back to the left … as if to represent an unwinding or regressing’.112 In other words, if acknowledged, Watteau’s ‘retrogressive curve’,113 is a painful and troubling visual reminder of Victor’s nostalgic and regressive clinging on to a past which has not yet been accepted as such. Victor, therefore, sees only what he wants to see in Watteau’s work; yet his ‘way of seeing’ is betrayed by the paradoxicality of his statement. To match the adjective ‘paralyzed’ with the noun ‘pilgrims’, in fact, creates a sort of contradiction in terms, and Victor’s reference to both titles of Watteau’s work(s) – ‘embarkation’ and ‘pilgrimage’114 – emphasises how movement appears to be intrinsic to the paintings: not only do the two titles indicate a journey or the beginning of one but, figuratively, the French and English verbs embarquer or ‘to embark’ also imply the beginning of a new course of action which, in itself, presupposes, if not necessarily the end of something, at least a radical transformation. Watteau’s narratives, with their elusive and contradictory dynamics, plunge the exact moment(s) captured by his brush in a temporal continuum; we can hope to grasp their multiple meanings only by reading and rereading the image in order to imagine what led to those mid-actions, by anticipating where they will lead, and by rooting the painting in its artistic, historical and cultural context. Watteau, in fact, did not only provide a snapshot of the world which, before the end of his century, was to be shaken by the events of 1789; by encapsulating a shift from autocratic to social art, his work also interrogated the dynamics at the core of that world and was shaped by changes of focus and perspective that eventually paved the way to the French Revolution.115 Yet, as we will see, despite being aware that Watteau’s work responded to a specific historical and cultural juncture, Victor associates Watteau with the mystique of an ‘eternal’ – metropolitan – ‘beauty’ which, (allegedly) transcending any specific context, is ‘meaningful’ in itself; he then collapses stillness with meaning and conflates the flow of the temporal with meaninglessness. Conversely, in his earlier poem ‘A Map of Europe’, Walcott had already pointed out that the ‘gift’ to be able ‘to see things as they are’ even when they

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appear in a ‘light [that] creates its stillness’ and in whose ‘ring / ­everything IS’, depends on one’s ability to acknowledge the flux of time and the changes, decay and, ultimately, mortality it brings, to ‘see’ and accept that, in their transience, things and people are always ‘halved by a darkness / from which they cannot shift’ (CA42, capitalisation in the original). Time and the (social and political) changes that come with it, are instead presented in the play as Victor’s worst enemies: when Agatha first arrives on the island, Victor immediately tries to confiscate her watch and makes her swear not only that she will never leave but also that time, from that moment onwards, will mean nothing to her (LC7–8). Unlike Victor, Walcott appreciated that The Embarkation for Cythera thrives on contradictory pulls of motion/change and stillness/paralysis which, as we will see, he tries to replicate, in different ways, in his The Last Carnival, where historical and social forces and the colonial legacy shape and constrain individual predicaments. Walcott’s characters, however, are also implicated, to different degrees, in the creation and perpetuation of their own condition and in their inability to ‘see’, let alone seize, the transformative potential of their ‘here and now’. Victor’s business-oriented brother Oswald and the obsequious servant George, for instance, seem to have thrown away or stopped their watches: trapped in a past they carefully try to retrogressively revive every day, they are not at all interested in ‘embarking’ on a new course of action which would demand that they question themselves and their position. Stillness, paralysis and, implicitly, regression are endemic to the society Walcott describes. Even the ‘voice’ of the Black Power Revolution, Sydney, sounds more disillusioned than hopeful since he believes that paralysis, not change, is at the heart of Trinidadian society: ‘peoples does think they change’, he observes, ‘but Time can’t change them’ (LC78). Persuaded that it is impossible to alter this reality, Sydney does not even seem to have a concrete plan to do so. The Black journalist Brown, a ‘redrawing’ of the young Black art critic/reporter of Walcott’s Un Voyage à Cythère who arrives at the De La Fontaine’s ‘town house or castle’ (LC52) on a day in February 1970 while the Black Power Revolution and Trinidad Carnival are raging, displays a deeper understanding of the problems that affect Trinidad and of the rebels’ demands than the rest of the cast. Yet, since he is unprepared to commit himself to initiate or support social change, his apathy can be equated to a form of paralysis. The circular trajectory of the play, and the dramatic parallelisms which allow the past to return and haunt both present and future, seem to deny the possibility of meaningful change or transformation. In Act Two, for example, the audience is shown a series of paintings by Victor (LC64–5) which are all scenes from Act One: The Wharf (where Agatha and Victor first met in Scene One), a portrait of Agatha dressed as a Watteau shepherdess for Carnival (Scene Two), A Cricket Match (Act One ends on Independence Day and a cricket match). The stage, as anticipated, is dominated by Walcott’s copy

176    Derek Walcott’s Painters

of Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera, a work which, in Act One, is framed as the epitome of immobility. The overall narrative, moreover, seems to end where it begins, namely on the docks of Port of Spain as, in the last scene, Clodia, ready to leave Trinidad, recalls and reminds the audience of Agatha’s momentous arrival and Victor’s attempt to requisition her watch. This claustrophobic déjà vu effect is magnified by the fact that the same actor who plays the young Agatha in Act One is also meant to play the young Clodia in the second part of The Last Carnival during which, pretending to be her former governess, she mocks Agatha in a dialogue with her brother Tony who, named after Antoine Watteau, impersonates their father Victor and is played by the same actor who played Victor in Act One (LC3). Yet, for all its echoing structural reciprocities, Walcott’s play also relies on the audience’s ability to grasp the mutations and permutations which form its fabric and which forcefully counteract the notion of paralysis or mere circular repetition of the same. I will come back later to the way in which the end of The Last Carnival productively exploits the tension created by what seems to be a mere re-enactement of the same which subtly suggests instead the beginning of something new. Here I will just point out that, in the last scene, the docks of Port of Spain (much like the action they provide the setting for) recall, but are not exactly identical to, the setting in Scene One. The sign ‘H.M. CUSTOMS’ (LC5) is substituted by ‘TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO CUSTOMS’ (LC100), Trinidad is no longer a colony but an independent country in turmoil, sheds full of cocoa beans are replaced by the Holiday Inn hotel, and characters are there to say goodbye, not to meet for the first time. Clodia, moreover, might be impersonated by the same actor who played Agatha in Act One but she firmly distances herself from Agatha when she states that she does not want ‘to end like her’ (LC101). Walcott emphasises the difference between these female figures in a watercolour inspired by the play and illustrative of Act Two, Scene One, where Victor’s canvases are displayed for Brown. While George is showing the painting from Act One, Scene Two, where Victor portrayed the young Agatha sitting on the floor like Watteau’s female model in Two Studies of a Seated Woman, Clodia, at the centre of the scene, is standing in an assertive pose and in full riding gear, complete with boots and whip.116 Arguably, the very fact that Agatha, who refused to surrender her watch to Victor at the beginning of the play, is to be played by two actors of different age in Act One and Act Two signposts very clearly the passing of time and its effects. Critics have claimed that Walcott’s decision to employ two actors to play Agatha, while other characters like Oswald or George, who also appear in both the 1948 and 1970 section of the play, are impersonated by the same actor (LC3), underlines that Agatha is the only main character who undergoes change.117 The ‘quality’ of her change, however, should not be overlooked as Walcott’s casting directions introduce even more contradictions and tensions in his play. If in the first two scenes of Act One Agatha is

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forced by Victor to play the part of a Watteau shepherdess, in Scene Three she is willingly embracing a similar role: like a female member of the eighteenthcentury elite playing the shepherdess at a fête galante, Agatha ‘masquerades’ as a fieldworker and goes to dance the cocoa with the other labourers but, as Oswald points out, when she returns home exhausted she has access to comforts (a bath, for example118) afforded by her privileged position that are unavailable to her co-workers (LC30). Watteau’s fêtes galantes, therefore, provide the blueprint for Agatha’s masquerade but Walcott, once again, adds additional layers of complexity and irony to the situation he describes. In the fêtes galantes experienced or painted by Watteau, the aristocrats who dressed up as peasants did so to reaffirm their elite status, not out of sympathy for the subaltern classes. Walcott’s Agatha is instead a workingclass woman from England momentarily playing the role of a disenfranchised (Black) Trinidadian labourer, partly in solidarity with the workers and partly to conceal another masquerade (or class betrayal), namely the fact that, in Trinidad, she is enjoying the lifestyle of the planter class (LC30). As Agatha later admits, both the passing of time and the very island she set out to change ended up changing her as she became more and more used to privilege (LC91–2). This might explain why Victor’s portrait of Agatha as shepherdess remains unfinished: particularly, we are told, he never managed to sketch Agatha’s working-class hands, a sign, perhaps, that, like her, they too were ‘transitioning’ and therefore impossible to finalise (LC65). When Agatha leaves her initial ‘revolutionary’ ethos behind and turns from agent of change to staunch preserver of the status quo (LC89), she also unwittingly transforms herself into one of Victor’s ‘paralyzed pilgrims’ whom, like Watteau’s, are simply performing a (superseded) role – Watteau’s figures, after all, were not real ‘pilgrims’ undertaking a religious journey but lovers participating in an elegant fête galante. Act One, Scene Six offers us a snapshot of a less ‘refined’ (and less successful) fête or exclusive fancy-dress party in Santa Rosa – a place that Victor calls, clearly displaying the ‘Creole mentality’ Walcott so harshly criticises in ‘On Choosing Port of Spain’, his and Agatha’s ‘paradise’ or Cythera (LC17). As part of the Carnival celebrations, Victor organises a shadow play to be performed at his estate and, wearing a Watteau costume, he invites Oswald to masquerade as Toulouse Lautrec – whom Victor describes as ‘the whorehouse Watteau’ (LC46). Accompanied on stage by Agatha, dressed as the can-can dancer Jane Avril, Oswald/Toulouse Lautrec is supposed to read aloud Baudelaire’s Un Voyage à Cythère. Initially reluctant to interrupt the rambunctious party with Victor’s poem/play, Oswald eventually indulges his brother and Agatha also agrees to go along with the plan (LC42). Their performance turns into disaster when, responding to the laughter of the audience who misunderstand the purpose of the play, Oswald and Agatha, to avoid further humiliation, turn it into the carnivalesque farce that the audience was expecting to see (LC44–5). After abusing his brother and Agatha

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for what he considers an unacceptable betrayal of his aesthetic vision, Victor accuses Oswald of trespassing on and ‘vulgariz[ing]’ Agatha whom he refers to as his ‘property’ (LC44–5). When the two actors leave the stage, Victor performs a monologue during which, explicitly identifying with Watteau, he accuses his guests – ‘cocoa barons’ and ‘salt-fish merchants’ too crass to understand his art – of having spoilt ‘this Paradise, this Cythera’, and announces that this will be their ‘last Carnival’ on his estate. The guests, however, ‘misunderstand’ Victor’s intervention as a joke – or, rather, understand all too well that his mythologisation of the island, Santa Rosa, and their past and present reality, is nothing but a self-serving fiction – and readily clap at his performance with the same enthusiasm with which they had previously laughed away his – to them, farcical – attempt to create a ‘moment of stillness [and] meaning in all the noise’ (LC49, 42). The Last Carnival, however, reveals that Victor’s attempt to impart meaning to life by recreating the ‘stillness’ and fetishising the paralysis that, for him, characterises Watteau’s ‘pilgrims’, is not only based on a partial (in more ways than one) understanding of Watteau’s work and a disavowal of his family’s and Trinidad’s history and reality, it also shapes an aesthetic and political perspective that is condemned to fail. At the end of Act One, significantly on Independence Day, Victor shares with Agatha an important insight: rather than being an artist, he laments, he is a ‘mortician’ because everything he paints ‘is born dead’ (LC50). In a previous draft of the play, at this point Victor had already expressed his dissatisfaction with his own work by saying: ‘all my life I have been painting right-handed in a left-handed light’.119 Victor’s comment distinctly resonates with Walcott’s reflections on his own early ‘misunderstanding of light’ and his tendency to ‘see’ what he ‘wanted’ by changing ‘the nature’ of the ‘things’ he was keen to paint (ALms1, 1), but also with Victor’s admission that ‘seeing’ can easily be a product of what one believes rather than the other way round (LC19). Victor painfully realises that, even if his works represent local reality – ‘the pasture, the mango trees … the cricket field’ – they fail to reproduce the ‘light’ and vitality of the world around him, a vitality perceptible only if one fully engages and synchronises with one’s surroundings, and which is inextricably linked to change and movement (LC50). Victor’s son Tony later explains that his father’s suicide took place in a rare moment of lucidity. Tired of ‘illusions’ and ‘Cythera’, Victor ‘killed’, crucially not himself but, in Tony’s words, ‘Antoine Watteau’ (LC73), namely the artist Victor had ‘seen’ as a painter of paralysis and whose example he believed he was following when he produced his ‘born dead’ or stillborn paintings. Evoking Walcott’s beginnings as a visual artist, when he was hampered by what he called a ‘condition of servitude’ and ‘crabbed by that style, / this epoch, that school’ (AL59), in a previous draft of the play Victor laments: ‘there is a whole empire of influences in my head I cannot get rid of’ and describes himself as ‘stuck imitating a great painter … a slave to his

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style. Condemned. Never to be independent.’120 In Victor’s mind his aesthetic failure is reflected in, and a reflection of, the social and political immobility of his class: in The Last Carnival, in fact, he remarks that, unlike the Blacks who have turned from enslaved to free people, from colonials to citizens of an independent nation, the members of his class never adjust or transform and, therefore, cannot become ‘independent’ but will remain ‘colonials’ forever (LC50). In The Last Carnival, French Creoles like Victor are frozen or ‘paralyzed’ in time not only by their inability and unwillingness to accept change, epitomised by Victor’s narrow understanding of Watteau’s art and his fetishisation of stillness which he equates with ‘meaning’, but also by the reluctance of others to see them as capable of change. In an unequal and increasingly racially polarised society, in fact, those who want a more radical societal change are outraged by the fact that the predicament of certain sectors of the population has not significantly improved after emancipation or independence and, approaching the issue by focusing on race and colour, they see white French Creoles as a part of the problem who can never become part of the solution. In The Last Carnival, as class intermingles with race, we are presented not only with members of the elite who stubbornly strive to maintain the old order in the face of change but also with intransigents who see all whites as opponents and enemies. At the same time, while the often contradictory bundles in which some of the characters’ motives, hopes and aspirations are intertwined are painfully unpacked, their reasons to challenge or support social and racial boundaries are not always ­transparent – not even to themselves. As inconsistencies are laid bare, accusations of role playing are fired across the board: when the white Creole Clodia is rebuked for trying to identify with the Black rebel Sydney, she retorts by accusing the Black journalist Brown of behaving as if he were white (LC83). Brown, in his turn, provocatively suggests that Carnival and revolution both amount to ‘fun’ for privileged people like Agatha or Clodia (LC69). After Independence, Black activists heckle Agatha off political platforms (LC60) and, in 1970, Clodia gets spat upon by a ‘black test in a dashiki and afro and shades’ for dancing at ‘Back to Africa’ with the rest of her Carnival band (LC69). Agatha’s emancipatory politics and Clodia’s ‘back to Africa’ dance, therefore, are condemned as the encroaching performances of exploitative trespassers who can afford to turn real life into fictional fêtes galantes or, in a Trinidadian context, as the equivalent of Carnival masquerades by members of the p ­ lantocracy who, before the abolition of slavery, used to don the costumes of the enslaved and perform Black dances like the bamboula, belair or calinda.121 The attack on Clodia is one of the very few references to Trinidad street Carnival, that all-important post-emancipation symbol for freedom which, as we will see, takes centre stage and is posited as a (at least potentially) powerfully creative and politically transformative time in Walcott’s Drums and Colours.

180    Derek Walcott’s Painters

In The Last Carnival this kind of Carnival is never staged: overall, in fact, Walcott’s characters do not seem to regard it as a crucial opportunity to reengage with the past in order to understand the present and build a better future. When the former firebrand Agatha rushes to the ‘savannah in full swing’ for Carnival at a time of political emergency, there is no indication that this has any socio-political meaning for her or her protegée and fellow reveller, the former Black maid and now government minister Jean Beauxchamps whose political agenda is entirely dictated by Agatha and whose voice in government is considered as ‘a very British’ one (LC60). In Act One, as we have seen, the Santa Rosa Carnival party, far from being a celebration of emancipation, is just an escapist ritual, a futile moment of hedonism which feels like a re-enactment of those frivolous celebrations first introduced by the French Creoles who arrived on the island in significant numbers at the end of the eighteenth century. As such, it can either be enjoyed to the full or abhorred as a debasing and vulgar practice: Oswald, who maintains that Carnival and ‘art’ should never meet, is more than keen to take active part in the drunken revelry while Victor believes he can ‘redeem’ Carnival (and the history of the island) with his ‘Watteauesque’ recreations (LC42). Alternative approaches to and versions of ‘Carnival’ are paraded in front of the audience, often simultaneously: in Act One, we can briefly glimpse the Trinidad street Carnival, and its political potential, when George arrives at Santa Rosa in a Pierrot costume, ‘spinning and cracking an imaginary whip’ (LC41). When Oswald, in a ‘dialect voice’, exclaims: ‘What a Pierrot!’, George laughingly retorts: ‘No. Watt-eau Pierrot’ (LC41), a significant play on words if one considers that, originally a witty but innocuous Carnival character popular with the propertied classes of Trinidad before the abolition of slavery, the figure of Pierrot underwent significant transformations after emancipation and was (re)shaped by the re-enactment of ex-slaves’ rituals. George’s (imaginary) whip and pun are vestiges of important features related to the loquacious and bellicose Trinidadian Pierrot in both his incarnations as the ‘princely Pierrot … and his satirical alter ego, the Pierrot Grenade’.122 At different times in the history of Trinidad Carnival, these Pierrots delivered speeches which were creative adaptations of the classics of English literature, performed elaborate breaking up of words into syllables which they redeployed as building blocks to construct alternative stories full of irreverent and politically sensitive innuendos, and engaged in verbal duels which were the prelude of violent confrontations with whips or sticks.123 The powerful presence of the Trinidadian Pierrot in the play, however, is countervailed by George/Pierrot’s evocation of Watteau’s Pierrot which results in the verbal erasure and neutralisation of its local counterpart.124 This marginalisation of the local is evident also in a watercolour Walcott prepared for this scene where, while Victor as Watteau, Oswald as Toulouse Lautrec and Agatha as Jane Avril are the focus of the scene, a Black woman in the background continues to work, completely uninvolved in the carnivalesque proceedings.125

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In The Last Carnival, therefore, the Trinidad Carnival which provides the backdrop of the Black Power Revolution takes place off stage but, since the backcloth for Act Two is a copy of Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera produced by Victor, one can argue that another ‘Carnival’ is given pride of place on stage. Walcott’s juxtaposition of the Trinidad Revolution of 1970 and Watteau’s world is not as discordant as it might seem if one considers that rather than providing an in-depth examination of the Black Power Revolution and its causes, the play focuses on the privileged world under attack in 1970 and the confused and anxious reactions that such attack generated in this particular class which considered itself an endangered minority in need of defence (LC60). The revolutionary cause and the revolutionaries themselves, as we have seen, are largely dismissed and/or criminalised by other characters, including the loyal servant George and the Black minister Jean Beauxchamps whose government violently crushes the rebels. Voicing Walcott’s views on the Black Power movement in Trinidad, the Black journalist Brown appreciates the validity of their demands but dismisses the rebellion as nothing more than an ‘imported’ carnivalesque performance: the insurgent ‘use the word “ghettos” for what we called “lanes” or “alleys”’, he explains, adding that ‘what should have been an economic protest, a march of the shirtless against urban injustice, has turned into a Black Power demonstration with berets, leather jackets, another Carnival’ (LC59). When Sydney is killed by the government army, Tony equates his death to his ‘last Carnival’ trivialising his death and reducing, simultaneously, the revolution to role playing, and Carnival to a temporary violent release of anger that brings no significant change (LC97). Likewise, the destruction by fire of Santa Rosa is written off as futile vandalism by the De La Fontaines and nothing is made of its resonance with the canboulay ritual, a performance which inaugurated Carnival until 1884 by re-enacting the practice of gathering all the enslaved people when a fire was devastating an estate, forcing them to work at the crack of the whip. Signposting, simultaneously, the previous condition of bondage of the masqueraders and their acquired freedom, canboulay was aimed at celebrating emancipation and at raising the Black population’s awareness of their status by putting the past and the present in dialogue.126 Yet, as Santa Rosa is burning down, in a sudden flash of clarity and selfrealisation which illuminates past and present at the same time, Victor’s son Tony manages to ‘see’ what his father used to call a ‘moment of [Watteauesque] stillness’ and the paralysis of his family and class, transfixed by their own old-fashioned image, unable and disallowed to move and embrace, let alone initiate, transformation: ‘Now with this light like fire, orange, and silks, the sunset, I see the moment of stillness Victor wanted. Because here we are, we can’t move. Just like these people in the painting. Motionless …’ (LC91). Tony’s realisation, sadly, is just a flashing moment without significant ramifications: after witnessing the destruction of their estate and the backing out from the Carnival marches of members of one of

182    Derek Walcott’s Painters

their own bands who, dressed in Watteau-inspired costumes, were too afraid of the Black people they were supposed to dance with, the De La Fontaines still continue to refuse to engage with reality or even consider to take seriously the rebels’ demands for change (LC91). The De La Fontaines’s only response to the Revolution and the destruction of their estate, in fact, is to reconfirm their contested status and national identity by defiantly taking part in the revelry with their Watteau costumes, displaying a shallow understanding of the overall meaning of Carnival and of what being Trinidadian means. Walcott, it is worth noting, had questioned the fact that it was the ‘ability to fete’ and the capacity to surrender to ‘total hedonistic abandon’ which determined if one could or could not call oneself ‘Trinidadian’ and was always very critical of the commercialisation of Carnival that he equated to ‘the spectacle of a country selling itself’ (AWA). The fact that Tony is a Carnival costume designer might be taken as a sign that he is fully rooted in his island but there is no indication that his Watteau costumes have in any way been adapted, transformed or ‘contextualised’ in order to enter into a dialogue with local reality and collective present and past experiences. One could argue, in fact, that rather than signalling a radical shift from the paralysis which, as Tony observes, prevents his class from ‘mov[ing]’ (on) (LC91), his choice of masquerade reveals instead an intrinsic inability – even resistance – to reinvent oneself and re-imagine one’s place in a future society organised according to a different set of priorities. What puts an end to the De La Fontaines’s plans to join the Carnival is not a deepening of their understanding of their historical juncture but the brutal murder of the rebel Sydney by the army. The sharp contrast between the harsh reality of his death and the De La Fontaines’s hedonism and fantasy of consolatory escapism, brings to the fore, for a moment, the experience of Trinidadians who do not share the sheltered lives of the De La Fontaines, forcing the audience to suddenly adjust their focus as if they were observing one of those Watteau paintings characterised by a vaporous theatrical flatness in the background and painstaking realism in the foreground.

The Last Carnival: Not to Settle on One Style and the Aesthetic of the Unfinished In a play where the aesthetic dimension is strictly linked to politics, also the qualities of the paintings visible on stage deserve not to be entirely neglected. Apart from the reproduction of Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera projected on a wall of Santa Rosa in the first act, the audience is also shown Victor’s own works in the second act of the play. Victor’s art, spotlighted posthumously by Agatha in order, as Brown argues, ‘to contradict things, like a barricade … to make a martyr’ of Victor and, by extension, his (and, now, ‘her’) class, is precisely the reason for Brown’s visit to the De La Fontaines’s

Voyages to Cythera and the European Legacy    183

residence (LC75). Brown notices that some of Victor’s paintings are unfinished, not because Victor died or failed, but because they could not ‘settle on one style’, a remark which prompts Clodia to compare them with Trinidad (LC65) and an attentive audience to formulate a connection with the complex process of creolisation which has Carnival as one of his most important manifestations. If, in American, without America, Walcott sounded perturbed by Trinidad ‘asserting its individuality’ but refusing to give it ‘one characteristic, one name, one national identity’ (AWA), in 1975, with ‘On Choosing Port of Spain’, even as he reiterated some of his misgivings regarding Carnival and the ‘heresy’ of withdrawing from its hedonism, he also happily declared that his ‘fear of finding Trinidad so cosmopolitan that it seemed characterless, had gone’ (CPS22, 17). The fact that many of the works that Victor left behind as a legacy are unfinished and ‘unable [or unwilling] to settle’ turns them into works in progress susceptible to transformation and reveals that, eventually, he might have recognised the futility of his efforts to hold back the tide of change and renounced his disabling fetishisation of stillness. We know that after realising that he was only producing what he called ‘born dead’ paintings – and before killing the ‘Watteau’ he had considered a painter of stillness and paralysis with whom to identify in his most hallucinatory moments – Victor had stopped painting altogether. The inclusion, in his private collection, of a white canvas (LC64), however, rather than being a primary example of artistic failure or withdrawal, might signal, even more dramatically, his newly achieved openness to change and possibilities. In this respect, Victor’s unfinished copy of The Embarkation for Cythera works well as visual commentary on the value and place of the European legacy in Trinidadian and Caribbean culture as a whole. This legacy, which Brown – once again voicing Walcott’s own views on the matter – does not consider to be at odds with Victor’s love for the island (LC70, 61), should not be imposed as a holy relic, approached as a monolithic, immutable, overwhelming, and (allegedly) universal tradition and blindly (and misguidedly) imitated. By contrast, if revisited as a body of work immersed in the flow of the temporal or as a living organism capable to ‘adapt’, to enter in dialogue with local reality, and to be revitalised by reinterpretation, it can instead be productively transformed by and integrated in the region’s culture and contribute to its development. Counteracting the disabling propensity to approach the European tradition with a paralysing reverence, Walcott’s determination to meticulously research and creatively engage with Watteau from what he called a ‘fresh’ Caribbean perspective127 reveals to us a painter/playwright able to appreciate and boldly capitalise upon Watteau’s interest for the subtleties of performance and the metatheatrical, his deployment of strategic sketchy and unfinished sections in canvases, his representations of a fertile tension between stasis and movement, the subtle contrasts which link and delink reality and fantasy,

184    Derek Walcott’s Painters

but also his fondness for playing with the disjunctures of the visual (image) and the verbal (title).128 The play’s title, The Last Carnival, in fact, (almost oxymoronically) associates finality with Carnival while the unfinished nature of the visual representation of ‘Carnival’ the audience is confronted with throughout most of the second act – Walcott’s rendition of Victor’s rendition of Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera – subtly undercuts any idea of finality in the same way in which Watteau’s titles often undermine and are undermined by what his pictures depict. The contradictory dynamics, questioning and complicating the alignment of title and action, remain strong even in the play’s very last scene when the background changes and Clodia is at the Trinidad docks, saying goodbye to Brown and about to leave Trinidad. In his review of the 1982 production, Earl Lovelace took Clodia’s departure as an example of Walcott’s ‘failure to press home, indeed plunge into, those truths that are within the fabric of the play’, to explore the ‘guts of the complexity’ of his characters, most of whom the Trinidadian writer/critic considers unpersuasively sketched and not properly examined.129 Lovelace clearly saw a slightly different version of the play from the one which was finally published – in his review, Clodia is going to France rather than England and she tells Brown ‘I love this island and I am leaving it. You hate it and you are staying’, a line that, to Lovelace (who shared many of Walcott’s reservations regarding the Black Power Revolution), exemplifies Walcott’s unwillingness to deal seriously with the full intricacy and density of the situation but that does not appear in the 1986 version.130 Nonetheless, Lovelace’s dissatisfaction with The Last Carnival might have been less pronounced if he had given Watteau’s presence in the play serious consideration.131 Walcott’s manifold references to a master of elusiveness and ambiguities – whose paintings are often inconsistent in terms of ‘finish’ – and his sustained exploration of ways to express a (Watteauesque) blend of realism, fiction, experience, illusion (even delusion) and (meta)theatricality, makes one wonder, in fact, if it is entirely appropriate to view The Last Carnival as a realist play with an unequivocally clear-cut and definitive ending. Arguably, in fact, the audience can either reinterpret the title as an indication that this was Clodia’s ‘last Carnival’ on the island – as Lovelace does – or as a hint that her planned departure might be a last ‘masquerade’, an ‘embarkment’ for a (metropolitan) Cythera which she might not in fact follow through or might follow through only temporarily. In a set of Walcott’s handwritten notes for the play, in fact, Clodia’s brother Tony openly suggests that her departure should not be permanent: ‘she must go for the change and return when [the Black Power Revolution] it’s blown over’.132 In the typescript of an unpublished version of The Last Carnival (perhaps closer to the performance seen by Lovelace), Clodia’s final monologue directly addresses the troubled political scenario of Trinidad in a paragraph that, like Tony’s suggestion, was later excised from the published version:

Voyages to Cythera and the European Legacy    185 all of us let the revolution down. They shouted and we got frightened. They marched and we hid. Before we could think of answering their questions we suppressed them. They lost. They were quieted. And everything is normal again. And I find that’s death. It’s death worse than Sydney’s. And I can’t live here being a part of it. I’d die. I think I’d die.133

The absence of these comments and the fact that the background noise of a helicopter (an unmistakable reminder of political trouble) is substituted, in the final version, by the ‘cry of pelicans’, a ‘good’ omen which also welcomed Agatha in 1948 (LC13), signposts a shift of focus from immediate reality to a more lyrical, nuanced scenario, better suited perhaps to an open ending. In another draft of the first scene, the ship Agatha had arrived on in 1948 shares its name – The Antilles – with the one on which Clodia is supposed to leave.134 The suggestion of a claustrophobic pattern where arrivals and departures become blurred and mirror one another in endless circular repetition is also evoked in the published version of the play where Agatha’s arrival and experience are referenced by Clodia. Agatha’s ship, however, is not named, diluting the connection and rendering it less forceful. In the published version, in fact, only the ship Clodia is supposed to board is called The Antilles, a fact which, if anything, sheds further doubts on her deracination from the region, partly because the carcass of a popular French cruise ship of the same name had remained physically anchored to the region for many years after sinking near Lansecoy Bay, in the Grenadines, in 1971. It is perhaps no coincidence that also in ‘Watteau’, a poem published in the 1984 collection Midsummer and composed while Walcott was writing The Last Carnival, when he predicts that illusory Cythera(s) can ‘break like the spidery rigging / of [Watteau’s] ribboned barquentines’, Walcott does in fact evoke a shipwreck (M31). In the ending of The Last Carnival, rather than the vain and, potentially ruinous, search for a (similarly illusory) metropolitan Cythera, one might discern instead the rejection of a foregone conclusion and glimpse the desire for a ‘re-drawing’ of this local story, a redrawing which does not have to emerge from and engender polarising self-fashioning and should not depend upon mythologising premises which occlude the past, and, negating the value of change and transformation, obfuscate the present, and compromise the future. After all, ‘Then Victor came’, the play’s closing words, suspend the scene mid-action and ask the audience to carry it through with their imagination – as one often has to do with Watteau’s paintings – and sound more appropriate for a prologue than an epilogue (LC101).

Notes 1. The ‘pairings’ are the following: Giotto: Craven, Treasury, 27 and AL152; Crivelli: Craven, Treasury, 139 and AL23; Giorgione: Craven, Treasury, 159 and AL68; Leonardo: Craven, Treasury, 107 and AL63; Fra Angelico: Craven,

186    Derek Walcott’s Painters Treasury, 51 and AL45; Verrocchio and Leonardo: Craven, Treasury, 99 and AL23. 2. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘What the Poem’, 213; Craven, Treasury, 98. 3. Craven, Treasury, 111, 119. 4. Craven, Treasury, 122, 131, 123. 5. Craven, Treasury, 58. 6. Craven, Treasury, 39, 75. 7. Baugh and Nepaulsingh, following Walcott, do not mention Sassetta (‘Annotations’, 258) but in della Francesca’s fresco there are no visible cities on ‘a cracked horizon’ while we find both in Sassetta’s work (Fig. 3.1). 8. Craven, Treasury, 38, 58. 9. Craven, Treasury, 38. 10. Craven, Treasury, 74. 11. Craven, Treasury, 58. 12. Craven, Treasury, 12, 13. 13. Craven, Treasury, 13. 14. Walcott in Brown and Johnson, ‘Thinking Poetry’, 182, 184. 15. Craven, Treasury, 63. 16. Craven, Treasury, 323. 17. Craven, Treasury, 122, 126, 130. 18. Walcott, The Castaway and Other Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), 40. From now on, I will be referring to this volume as CA followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 19. Craven, Treasury, 382. 20. Craven, Treasury, 383. 21. Roderick Walcott, ‘In Good Company’, 28. 22. Craven, Treasury, 374, 375. 23. Plax, ‘Interpreting Watteau’, 35–6. 24. Craven, Treasury, 374. 25. Craven, Treasury, 374. 26. Craven, Treasury, 374. 27. Plax, Watteau, 1. 28. Plax, Watteau, 1. 29. This constant rewriting – The Last Carnival itself was also revised in 1992 for a production in Birmingham, UK, which is constructed as a series of flashbacks (Burnett, Derek Walcott, 244, 246) – clearly signposts the importance of these topics to Walcott. 30. Derek Walcott, ‘On Choosing Port of Spain’, in David Frost Introduces Trinidad and Tobago, eds Michael Anthony and Andrew Carr (London: André Deutsch, 1975), 14–23, 21. From now on I will be referring to this essay with CPS followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 31. The typescript copy of Un Voyage à Cythère is at UWI-AJL, Box 6, folder 6. The cover of the typescript states that it is ‘A Play for Television’ while the frontispiece calls it is a ‘Draft project for film’. The typescript pages are numbered and from now own will be referred to as UVAC followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 32. In his biography of Walcott, King draws a similar conclusion in terms of dates

Voyages to Cythera and the European Legacy    187 since he refers to Un Voyage à Cythère as a ‘pre-1970’ text (Derek Walcott, 285). 33. In Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama, King refers to the programme for the 1970 production of In a Fine Castle in Jamaica which explained that the idea for the play had come to Walcott from ‘an actor who had worked with Bergman’ and had first taken shape as a ‘television outline’ (143): notably, what Walcott calls, in American, without America, ‘the germ of Bergman cult’ is one of the things he was exposed to during his stay in New York city in 1958 (AWA). 34. Brookner, Watteau, 28–9. 35. Börsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 64. 36. Plax, Watteau,145. 37. Börsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 136; Plax, Watteau, 108–9, 142–3. 38. Levey, Rococo, 62–4; Plax, Watteau, 107–9, 145–6; Brookner, Watteau, 1967, 28–9, 31–2; Börsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 64–74. 39. Börsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 72–5. 40. Craven, Treasury, 374 41. Börsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 64. 42. Brookner, Watteau, 31; Levey, Rococo, 62; Plax, Watteau, 146–7. 43. Börsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 72. 44. Perl, Antoine’s Alphabet, 145. 45. King argues that In A Fine Castle, a play which evolves from Un Voyage à Cythère, had been a work in progress from the late 1940s (King, Derek Walcott, 260). 46. Plax, Watteau, 145–6. 47. Baugh, Derek Walcott, 137. 48. Baudelaire, ‘Un voyage à Cythere/A Voyage to Cythera’, 259. 49. Baudelaire, ‘Un voyage à Cythere/A Voyage to Cythera’, 254–9. 50. Plax, Watteau, 148–53. 51. Walcott was very familiar with French literature: at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, he had studied French alongside English literature so he had all these texts at his fingertips. 52. Craven, Treasury, 374. 53. Plax, Watteau, 129. 54. Plax, Watteau, 115. 55. Plax, Watteau, 128. 56. Baudelaire, ‘Un voyage à Cythere/A Voyage to Cythera’, 254, 257. 57. Levey, Rococo, 71. 58. Plax, Watteau, 128. 59. Caption. Antoine Watteau. Fêtes Vénitiennes (1718–19). The Frick Collection. Past Exhibitions. Masterpieces from the Scottish National Gallery. https:// www.frick.org/exhibitions/scottish/watteau (accessed 19 June 2021). 60. Levey, Rococo, 76. 61. In a Fine Castle had been previously performed in Jamaica in 1970. 62. Perl, Antoine’s Alphabet, 13. 63. Bennett, ‘The Challenge’, 136. 64. Walcott in Pantin, ‘We Are Still Being Betrayed’, 118.

188    Derek Walcott’s Painters 65. Walcott in Pantin, ‘We Are Still Being Betrayed’, 118. 66. Walcott in Pantin, ‘Any Revolution Based on Race’, 108. 67. This workbook is at UWI-AJL, Box 9, folder 38. 68. The title of In a Fine Castle is borrowed from the verse of a slave song metamorphosed into a children’s ring game – ‘In a fine castle / Do you hear, my sissie-o?’ – which is sung by two groups of children who haggle who they want from the other group, offering gifts: before offering precious items, the first group proposes off-putting and often disgusting ones but eventually the chosen child agrees to change group and the ritualistic coaxing starts all over again with a new candidate (King, Derek Walcott, 159; Mama Lisa’s World: In a Fine Castle). Local history, the interactions and intermingling of different classes, races, ethnicities, and the renegotiation of social structures are all evoked by the song which is probably a variant of the French song and ring game Ah! Mon beau château (Mama Lisa’s World: Ah! Mon beau château) where two castle owners engage in a verbal battle to establish the superiority of one over the other: unlike the Caribbean version, however, no negotiation is possible here and nobody changes views or group. The title of the play, therefore, reminds one implicitly of the way in which local culture reworked and creatively transformed European templates adapting them to its reality, a crucial theme of the play itself. 69. Stone, Theatre, 115. 70. For some of Walcott’s (mixed) reviews of Stollmeyer see Walcott, ‘Hugh Stollmeyer’; ‘Blaze of Vision’; ‘Texaco’s Show’; ‘Refreshing Art Show’; ‘His Sense of Design’; ‘Designing Sense’; ‘Lame Tribute’. Notably, amongst the many influences that Walcott traces in Stollmeyer’s work (Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Rufino Tamayo), Watteau is never mentioned. 71. This drawing is at UWI-AJL, Box 9, folder 38. 72. This draft programme is at TFRBL, MSColl 00503, Box 1, folder 2. The programme also features Boucher’s copy of a lost self-portrait by Watteau on which Walcott had glued a long extract from Edmund and Jules de Goncourt’s biography of the painter. 73. This programme is also at TFRBL, MSColl 00503, Box 1, folder 2. 74. This drawing is at UWI-AJL, Box 10, folder 6. 75. Cormack, Drawings, 5. 76. Cormack, Drawings, 5. For example, the woman in Two Studies of a Seated Woman (Fig. 3.5) which Walcott might have wanted to use as a poster or cover for In a Fine Castle also ‘reappears’ in the painting La Gamme d’Amour (The Scale of Love, c. 1715) (Cormack, Drawings, 34). 77. Craven, Treasury, 375. In his 1958 edition Craven was slightly more attentive to this section of Watteau’s production and included one small black and white reproduction of a study in chalk for Figure du Printemps (Flora, c. 1712) – a naked female figure seated and reclining and whose naked body is barely concealed by a transparent veil. He also included a small black and white reproduction of the oil Gilles (1718–20), a variation on the French Pierrot referenced in The Last Carnival (Craven, Treasury, 1958 edition, 173; LC41). 78. Walcott in Questel, ‘I Have Moved Away’, 12.

Voyages to Cythera and the European Legacy    189 79. Both watercolours are at UWI-AJL, Box 10, folder 6. 80. Brookner explains that this painting is stylistically connected with those produced around 1709–10; it was probably produced later than them but ‘the final sophistication ha[d] not yet sink in’ (28). 81. Craven, Treasury, 374; Börsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 64; Brookner, Watteau, 28. 82. Levey insists they were peasants and compares this with Venetian Entertainments (70–1) but we know that Watteau went to fêtes where members of the elite masqueraded as peasants with his patron Pierre Crozat, a wealthy financier (Plax, Watteau, 127). 83. The attitude of the woman in Two Studies of a Seated Woman (Fig. 3.5) that Walcott had selected as a possible poster or cover for In a Fine Castle chimes in many ways with the one of the isolated bride: she is not engaging with us and there is no indication of what she might be looking at; as a matter of fact, she might not even be looking at anything specific: her expression is empty, elusive; she does not look happy or sad, she is just miles away. 84. Notably, Judy Stone, who had played the part of Elizabeth Prince, wife of the radical revolutionary Sydney Prince in In a Fine Castle, has argued that this was an important development in Walcott’s later play (125). 85. Walcott, The Last Carnival, in Three Plays: The Last Carnival, Beef, No Chicken, A Branch of the Blue Nile (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 1–101, 76–7. From now on, I will be referring to this edition of the play as LC followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 86. Lovelace, ‘Review’, 375. It is worth mentioning that not everyone would share Lovelace’s reading of this character, not just because Agatha is not a native Trinidadian – a fact that would make some reject this comparison outright – but because, arguably, she is too complicated a character to be simply reduced to a victim. 87. This watercolour is to be found at UWI-AJL, Box 33, folder 5. 88. King, Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama, 156. 89. This drawing is at UWI-AJL, Box 33, folder 5. Watteau’s drawings of what he called, playfully, his ‘pilgrims’ – both male and female – must have also been an inspiration for Walcott – see, for example, Three Pilgrims (c. 1709). 90. This draft with pasted up typescript text is at UWI-AJL, Box 39, folder 2, page unnumbered. 91. Burnett confirms that also in the Birmingham production of 1992 Watteau’s painting formed the basis for the stage design (258). 92. Stone, Theatre, 116. 93. This sketch is at UWI-AJL, Box 9, folder 38; others with similar characteristics are in Box 33, folder 5. 94. Some of the watercolours Walcott produced for In a Fine Castle and The Last Carnival which can be found at TFRBL are also set outdoors: for The Last Carnival see MsColl 00136, Box 65, folder 67, item 5 and folder 68, item 6 and Box 64, folder 55, item 21; for In a Fine Castle see Box 62, item 3. 95. Stone, Theatre, 116. 96. Brookner, Watteau, 32. 97. Brookner, Watteau, 32.

190    Derek Walcott’s Painters 98. This watercolour is at UWI-AJL, Box 33, folder 5. 99. Plax, Watteau, 136–7. 100. King, Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama, 159; Fiet, ‘Mapping’, 139–40. 101. Börsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 110. 102. Brookner, Watteau, 32. 103. Watercolour at TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 64, folder 55, item 21. In MsColl 00136, Box 62, item 5, a notebook which contains notes and draft of scenes, Agatha explicitly confesses to Clodia that she had sexual relationships with both men simultaneously. 104. UWI-AJL, Box 33, folder 5. 105. Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, French Eighteenth-Century Painters, 25. 106. This sketch is at TFRBL, MsColl 00136 Notebooks, Box 62, item 3. 107. Cormack, Drawings, 31 and plates 55, 56; Börsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 100. We can also find Walcott’s own attentive sketch of a hand in a Strathmore hard-bound sketch pad dated 1982–3 throughout at TFRBL (MsColl 00136, Box 63, item 1) and which covers, roughly, the same period in which Walcott sketched how to stage this scene in spring 1982 (TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 62, item 3). 108. Cormack, Drawings, 106. 109. Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 13. 110. Plax, Watteau, 132; Brookner, Watteau, 31; Börsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 70. 111. Plax, Watteau, 150–3. Watteau’s interest in these conventions is further confirmed in Watteau’s Gathering in the Park (c. 1718) – painted in-between the two versions of The Embarkation for Cythera – which might constitute an even more radical disruption of temporal vraisemblance since a female figure appears to be repeated both in company and in solitude in order to suggest a narrative of loss and unhappy love (Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 26). 112. Paulson qtd in Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit, 323. 113. Paulson qtd in Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit, 323. 114. The original title, chosen by Watteau, was Pèlerinage à l’Île de Cythère (Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera) but the French Royal Academy retitled it L’embarquement pour l’île de Cythère (Embarkation for Cythera) (Fig. 3.2). 115. Levey, Rococo, 13. 116. Watercolour at TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 65, folder 68, item 6. 117. Heim, ‘Unfinished Visions’, 305. 118. Significantly, after a fire destroys the estate of Santa Rosa, Agatha is haunted by the vision of the ‘old white porcelain bathtub charred and blackened in the grass’ (LC90). 119. This draft is to be found at TFRBL, MsColl 00348, Box 5, folders 1–4. Pages are marked according to act, scene and page. The above quotation is in folder 1, act 1, scene 2, page 13. 120. At TFRBL, MsColl 00348, Box 5, folder 2, act 1, scene 7, page 41. 121. Hill, Trinidad Carnival, 11. 122. Hill, Trinidad Carnival, 28–9, 91–2. 123. Hill, Trinidad Carnival, 28–9.

Voyages to Cythera and the European Legacy    191 124. Watteau’s famous painting Pierrot, formerly known as Gilles (c. 1718–19), however, is itself a creative reinterpretation: based on the credulous, dumb and lewd character of the Commedia dell’Arte and French farce, the French artist’s brush turned him into a sad, dreamy, sensitive, melancholic and vulnerable figure. 125. At TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 64, folder 55, item 21. 126. Hill, Trinidad Carnival, 23–5. 127. Walcott in Brown, ‘Born Again’, 182. 128. In some of Walcott’s notebooks the painting on stage seems to have been imagined as life-size as if to further blur the line between reality and fiction: see for example, TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 62, item 3. 129. Lovelace, ‘Review’, 373–5. 130. Lovelace, ‘Review’, 373. 131. As anticipated, Lovelace never mentions Watteau but praises aspects of the play – for example, for ‘saying important things about people and relations’, for its portrayal of gender relations, and for making the members of the audience see the privileged French Creoles of Trinidad and themselves as ‘weak, fallible, foolish, in pain and now and again magnificent and human’ (375) – for which Watteau might have been an important source of inspiration. 132. See notebook with draft scenes at TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 62, item 4. 133. This alternative word-processed draft is at TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 23, folder 19, act 2, scene 4 – but identified as scene 5 in the text – page 40. 134. Unpublished draft at TFRBL, MsColl 00348, Box 5, folder 1, act 1, scene 1, page 2. In one of his handwritten notebooks, Walcott had considered to have Agatha arrive in 1948 on a liner called The Normandie (TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 62, item 3), a name he might have dropped later because The Normandie (considered France’s answer to Britain’s Queen Mary) connected Le Havre to New York (not Trinidad) and had stopped crossing the Atlantic in 1942, but also because he must have been interested in the connotations of the name The Antilles.

Chapter 4

American Visions I – Frescoes of the New World and Black America

New World Rebels: From Diego Rivera and the Epic of One’s People to Ti-Jean, Folklore, and Alfred Codallo Walcott’s interest in masters and masterpieces of the past and his debt to Craven’s A Treasury has recurrently been framed in terms of European art. Yet, in his 1939 introduction to his artbook, the Kansan Craven declared: ‘the hope of painting lies in America’.1 Predictably, Craven’s ‘America’, far from being the entire continent, was circumscribed to the United States, and his belief that ‘American’ art should be an organic manifestation of ‘American’ life governed his inclusion of painters who represented what he considered the most ‘authentic’ part of ‘America’, namely the Midwest. Craven enthusiastically championed Regionalist painters and muralists like Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood or the New Deal muralist John Steuart Curry who, however, were not the only muralists featured in his book: Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, in fact, were also mentioned as artists who gave ‘wall painting on a grand scale its first modern impetus’ and produced art inspired by the ‘turmoil of their own people’ and ‘passionate belief in the regeneration of [their] countrymen’.2 Mexican muralism was the first modern art movement to emerge from the Americas in the twentieth century3 and, as such, it was bound to capture the attention of the young St. Omer and Walcott, and of their tutor Simmons. In ‘Outside the Cathedral’, Walcott explains that the two young apprentices ‘adored’ the Mexican muralists whose ‘anger capsized the laid-out trestle tables of the Academy with the ferocity of [their] New World’ (OTC21, 18). In Another Life, Walcott puts Simmons side by side with artists like Raphael, Orozco and Siqueiros in a constellation of ‘people’s medals’ (AL125) while in his notes for the poem, he remembers that, apart from modelling himself after Van Gogh and Gauguin (‘madness and isolation’ or ‘madness’ and ‘degeneration’), St. Omer ‘wanted to be not only Raphael, [his] “sweet painter” (that was [his] Catholic side) but Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera ([his]

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violent Trinity, the new world rebel in [him])’ (ALms1, 18, 110). Walcott’s repeated juxtaposition of Raphael and the Mexican muralists, staggering in some ways, is in fact easily explained. As Baugh has pointed out, the Italian Renaissance, of which Raphael was a prominent representative, constituted, for Walcott, ‘a supreme example of a great age defined by its art … the idea that it is the art that brings the age to its fullest self awareness’.4 Given that Walcott shared with Simmons and St. Omer the purpose of redefining his age and place through art, it is no coincidence that Another Life contains, as we have seen, multiple references to Italian artists from the Renaissance. The Italian legacy, however, was also strictly connected with the Catholic tradition, a tradition that, unlike the Catholic St. Omer, the Methodist Walcott struggled to claim a close connection to and to which the Mexican muralists could provide a less problematic alternative. In Another Life Walcott describes St. Omer as St Lucia’s ‘new Raphael’ (AL63) and, in ‘Outside the Cathedral’, he explains that when his friend went to church, he imagined that ‘in other pews’ were artists like ‘Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca, Giotto, Masaccio, Mantegna, Rafael, Botticelli’ (OTC21, 14). Walcott was keen to imagine himself ‘a Catholic in art’ by virtue of his love for Italian artists (OTC21, 3) but he never felt welcome in the Catholic Cathedral of Castries: Methodists were excluded from its ‘solemn and mysterious celebrations … as heretics’ (ALms1, 22) and, during the Great Fire of Castries, he ‘would not have sheltered in [it because] it was for the faithful’ (OTC21, 2). When the Cathedral’s bell ‘would clang for vespers [and] that sound and the sight of the sun going down’ would bring him ‘close to tears’, Walcott always knew that that ‘bell did not toll for [him]’ (OTC18). The ‘ugly simplicity of the Cathedral’, moreover, always ‘felt sinister’ rather than ‘natural’ to Walcott because its ‘architecture was not in dialect [and] its visual language, however plain, was exactly that of the metropole’ (OTC21, 5, OTC18). As a matter of fact, he considered the cathedral as more alien and out of place than those ‘walls and towers of an Italian town’ in the reproductions St. Omer had brought back from Curaçao and in which he could somehow retrace Castries’s ‘walls screened by olive and chrome-green trees’ and the ‘gamboge bricks’ and indigo arches’ of its stone buildings (OTC21, 5).5 In ‘Outside the Cathedral’, moreover, Walcott confesses to having experienced ‘a phase of articulate bitterness’ whereby ‘even the great masterpieces of Italy seemed vapid and repetitive … as bigoted as the block-headed’ clergy he felt antagonised by (OTC21, 6). For many years, in fact, as Walcott, his brother Roderick, Simmons and St. Omer were striving to promote local culture and arrive at ‘a perfection to West Indian things’, the St Lucia Catholic Church acted as a powerful and formidable opponent. The first time Walcott was attacked by the St Lucia Catholic clergy he was only fourteen: the occasion was the publication of a poem, ‘1944’,6 which he describes, in the notebooks for Another Life, as a ‘sincere blank verse imitation of the opening book of Paradise Lost’

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(ALms2, 79). In the poem Walcott explained that his love for God derived from his love for nature rather than from the machinery of organised religion: this caused the local priest, an Englishman who was also an amateur anthropologist, historian and poet, to publish a retort in heroic couplets in which he accused the young Walcott of ‘pantheism, or animism, in short, of heresy’ (ALms2, 79). The opposition of the Roman Catholic clergy to any form of art which did not conform to what the clergy regarded as decorum, propriety and religious piety continued to be devastating in St Lucia where the Church’s ‘temporal power’, Walcott laments, ‘was everywhere’ (ALms1, 21). In 1958, for example, when the Arts Guild decided to present Roderick Walcott’s play The Banjo Man and Derek Walcott’s The Sea at Dauphin as the island’s contributions to the 1958 West Indies Arts Festival, the Roman Catholic Church opposed these choices on the grounds of profanity, blasphemy and immorality7 and, since Catholic members of the Arts Guild sided with the Church, on 15 March The Voice of St Lucia announced that the submissions had to be withdrawn. As a result, Simmons resigned from the Arts Guild in protest and wrote an article for The Voice of St Lucia against ‘the erratic censorship of the soi-disant critics, the carping of sentinel of public morality, the crusaders of art and culture … the dictators of the theatre … the screams of the inquisition’.8 The ongoing hostility of the Catholic clergy left deep scars on Walcott who revisited his experiences in the late 1980s in ‘Outside the Cathedral’ where the titular cathedral is in fact the Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of Castries which, to him, for a long time, had become the symbol of an obtuse clergy bent on opposing and frustrating local talent in the name of dogmatism (OTC21, 5–6, 28). Eventually, Walcott writes, he was able to look at the cathedral ‘without anger’ (OTC21, 7) but, despite the great pride and joy he felt in 1985, when St. Omer had been commissioned to restore it, he could not help but feel the same ‘bilious hatred’ of his youth when he entered it to pay homage to his friend who was working there with his son Giovanni (OTC21, 28).9 This commission was the coronation of a long-standing dream for St. Omer yet, even at that juncture, Walcott still saw himself and his friend as young heretics and rebels: originally, the title of the essay which celebrates this momentous achievement was conceived as ‘Inside the Cathedral’ but, in the typescript, the word ‘INSIDE’ is circled and above it Walcott wrote ‘OUTSIDE’ in capital letters (OTC21, 1, capitalisation in the original). St. Omer, a devout Catholic who went to Mass every morning and was able to claim ‘membership in that immense, incense-drugged and thurifer-hypnotised secret society of his cathedral’ (OTC21, 12), in fact, had also had his problems with the Catholic establishment. Unlike the bigoted priests who ‘could not see a landscape without a church in it’, Walcott reminisces, St. Omer regarded his natural environment as ‘belief in itself’, and his exuberance and independence of spirit made him ‘the priest’s natural enemy’ (OTC18). When, after the 1963 Second Vatican Council’s Decree on

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the Sacred Liturgy which authorised indigenisation of the Church, St. Omer painted his divinities Black, some parish priests were still alarmed and disturbed by his decision.10 Unsurprisingly, therefore, if the Italian medieval tradition and Renaissance played an important role for Walcott, Simmons and St. Omer, particularly in terms of ‘intention’ and in relation to the St Lucians artists’ desire to ‘make it new’,11 at a time when Mexican art was being afforded the same serious considerations as European art, the three were also able to find inspiration in another ‘renaissance’, closer to home, free from the complications arising from religious affiliations and dogmatic tampering, and which they did not view as an ‘artifice’ masterminded by ‘white Americans’ as the Haitian Renaissance (OTC21, 21). In A Treasury, acknowledging the fact that Mexican muralism had become the symbol of what Anita Brenner had called the Mexican ‘renascence’,12 Craven singles out Orozco and Rivera as prominent figures of the movement.13 In her influential Idols Behind Altars: Modern Mexican Art and its Cultural Roots (1929), written in collaboration with Jean Charlot, Brenner claimed that those involved in the Mexican resurgence – c­ haracterised by a rediscovery of the beauty of the local landscape and its social and racial reality which had, until then, remained largely unmapped – were creating something new and distinct from the Western tradition.14 Simmons, Walcott and St. Omer’s understanding of and appreciation for the muralists’ work is consistent with Brenner’s argument and, given their admiration for Mexican muralism, they might have been acquainted with her book or, at least, its central tenets. The numerous and repeated references to the Mexican muralists – and to Rivera in particular – in Walcott’s published and unpublished works, and the interest the painter generated in his immediate St Lucian entourage, in fact, suggest that this body of work must have been known to all of them in more depth than Craven’s very cursory entry would have allowed. Walcott, for example, puts Siqueiros side by side with Simmons, Raphael, Orozco, El Greco, Gauguin and Van Gogh (AL125) but this Mexican artist was not included in Craven’s volume, a clear indication that Walcott’s and his associates’ familiarity with the Muralists transcended (the limitations of) A Treasury. In his entry on Orozco, moreover, Craven briefly praises the artist for the way in which he transformed his insight into Mexican reality into new compositional schemes, but the focus is on his work in the United States: the colour plate (Hispano-America, 1932–4) included in the volume is in fact from Dartmouth College.15 For Rivera, Craven concentrates mostly on how the muralist wreaked ‘havoc with the citadels of American culture’ and pays little attention to his creation of a visual language in tune with his Mexican or, as Walcott put it, New World reality:16 the colour plate which represents Rivera is from Man and Machinery (1932–3) from the Detroit Institute of Art.17 The definition of these artists as ‘rebels’, which returns in Walcott’s writing, does not seem to derive from Craven

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where the revolutionary potential of their work is carefully understated. The precise sources which informed Walcott (or Simmons and St. Omer) are impossible to retrace but, during his formative years in St Lucia and later when he moved to Jamaica and Trinidad, books and articles entirely devoted to the Mexican artists available in English were numerous: in her 1929 bibliography for Rivera, Brenner had already listed more than ten articles and two monographs for his Mexican period alone,18 and his work was mentioned in several artbooks and art history publications. In Jamaica, where he moved in 1950 to attend university, Walcott could appreciate how the influence of Mexican Muralism was still palpable in prominent artists like Albert Huie or Parboo Singh19 and in the 1950s, the Mexican muralists, and Rivera in particular, continued to be important points of reference for him. When, keen to nurture and support the flourishing of local culture, Walcott, his brother Roderick, St. Omer and Simmons had to stand firm against the censorship of the Catholic Church, denounce political corruption, or lament the lack of support for artists and the arts, Rivera provided them with inspiration. In the same 1958 article in which he condemned the crippling effects of the clergy’s intervention which resulted in the withdrawal of the Walcott brothers’ plays from the West Indies Arts Festival, Simmons reminded his readers of the ban of steel bands in St Lucia in 1945 which he had vehemently opposed in an article entitled ‘Freedom of Art’ and where he rightly predicted that the demonised and disparaged steel bands ‘will find a place in the World’s art, in the same manner as Diego Rivera rescued what had been considered a primitive and barbaric Mexican Art’.20 On 29 March 1958, Roderick Walcott publicly reacted to the ‘self-righteous hysteria and ecclesiastic hypertension’ which fuelled the withdrawal of his and his brother’s plays and intervened in the St Lucian debate on censorship by publishing an article in The Voice of St Lucia where he insisted that the only cardinal sins artists should be made accountable for are ‘over indulgence, plagiarism, and self-inspired messianic propaganda’.21 Endorsing Michelangelo as an artist who withstood ‘the stifling of his creative urge’ from ecclesiastical forces, in a short inventory of masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel which could have been lost to censorship, Roderick cites Joyce’s Ulysses, Rubens’s Rape of the Sabine Women and Rodin’s The Kiss. Roderick, however, continues by praising ‘the work of Diego Rivera, the Western Hemisphere’s greatest painter’ whose representations of Mexican reality and the Spanish Conquest which, amongst other things, implicated the Catholic Church in the horrors of colonialism and political corruption, ‘could not be retouched by the Pope and all his cardinals to comply with a pastoral letter’.22 In Another Life, Walcott refers to the Mexican muralists in chapter 18 in the context of a tirade against powerful men and politicians – ‘dem big boys’ (AL127) – who do nothing to help poor farmers or support ordinary people, and, in chapter 19, he continues his invective against irresponsible politicians

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in charge of culture and development, hypocritical intellectuals who ‘explain to the peasant why he is African’, and ‘dividers’ who had ‘sentenced’ Simmons to death by not supporting local artists who, like him, ‘felt the centre’ and were at the centre of a ‘mundo nuevo’ (AL127, 128, 126). Chapter 19 bears the same epigraphs as chapter 10 – Frescoes of the New World and Frescoes of the New World II – but, while chapter 10 creates a continuity between the Italy of the Renaissance and the St Lucia of St. Omer, the island’s ‘new Raphael’ (AL63), in chapter 19, Walcott brings together St Lucia’s reality, Italian culture and the Mexican muralists evoked in chapter 18. The parallel Walcott draws between one of the circles of Dante’s Inferno and the bubbling volcanic crater of Soufrière in St Lucia, where he would plunge these traitors of country and the arts, could be seen as an indication that, at this point, he might have had in mind a famous fresco from the Old World, namely the Allegory and Effects of Bad Government (1338–9) by Dante’s contemporary Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Walcott does not mention Lorenzetti in Another Life and his lines do not provide an exact verbal illustration of the Italian artist’s fresco; yet, one could argue that Lorenzetti’s demonic tyrant, complete with horns and long fangs and holding Justice captive at his feet, might constitute an apt visual counterpart to Walcott’s bad governors, ‘those whose promises drip from their mouths like pus / … gnawing their own children’ and in whose ‘hands is the body / of [his] friend’ [Simmons] and ‘the future’ of his island (AL128).23 Probably inspired by Lorenzetti,24 Rivera too had portrayed the effects of bad and good government in his allegorical murals for the Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Mexico (1923–7). Brenner mentions Rivera’s murals in her volume where, however, she cites Michelangelo as an important model and includes small black and white reproductions which are not focused on these particular aspects.25 Conversely, Brenner’s verbal description of Rivera’s indictment of bad government – which includes plundering, destruction of natural resources, injustice and political persecution26 – ­identifies as its main causes and culprits the very same ones Walcott underscores and excoriates in his lines, namely ‘the betrayal of the peasant by the politician, the false priest, and the mercenary’.27 Brenner also highlights the presence of accompanying allegories of intellectuals (‘poets, philosophers and prophets’) Rivera had considered ‘false or bourgeois’28 and, as we have seen, Walcott too attacks similar public figures in his invective. The wall Rivera dedicated to ‘good government’, instead, emphasises stability, progress and prosperity, and foregrounds precisely that patronage for the arts which would have saved Simmons and all local artists crushed and condemned by lack of support (AL128).29 Rivera’s patrons (General Álvaro Obregón, Ramón Denegri, Manuel Ávila Camacho – President of Mexico – and Marte R. Gómez) are all featured in the Chapingo murals and it was not unusual for Rivera to paint himself and those who sponsored him in his compositions: in this respect, St. Omer’s decision to include himself and his patrons in his own

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works – as we have seen, for example, in the altarpiece for the Roseau Valley church (Fig. 2.7) – finds an important precedent also in the ‘rebel’ Rivera, not only in Italian predecessors like Raphael or Giotto. Notably, a year before embarking on Another Life, in one of his reviews for the Trinidad Guardian, Walcott praises Rivera as the ‘best example for the West Indian artist’ because he had ‘abandoned the style and environment of Paris for the delineation – its physical shapes, its people – of his own country’.30 Between 1960 and 1967, Walcott repeatedly encourages West Indian artists to take on board the lesson of Siqueiros, Orozco, Rivera or Rufino Tamayo, another muralist not included in Craven’s volume but often referred to by Walcott.31 His friend St. Omer had been quick to capitalise upon this lesson: in ‘Outside the Cathedral’ Walcott informs us that, from the 1950s, when St. Omer began to receive commissions to paint murals in churches and elsewhere, he ‘drew from the Mexicans all he could of their emblematic strength’ (OTC21, 18). Arguably, when he dispensed his advice to Trinidadian artists in the 1960s, Walcott too had already ‘drawn’ from Rivera’s ‘emblematic strength’: when he was commissioned a play which would cement, culturally, the idea of the West Indian Federation and mark the opening of the West Indian Federal Parliament in 1958, in fact, he seems to have taken on board Rivera’s example like St. Omer had done and was continuing to do for his frescoes. In June 1957, when he was first approached with this commission, Rivera was in the forefront of Walcott’s mind: in a review of the Jamaican artist Ralph Campbell’s mural The Artist’s Paradise, published in Public Opinion on 15 June 1957, Walcott writes that a good mural is often ‘crowd[ed] with a great deal of detail, all the teeth of the machinery fitting neatly, to give a sense of dynamism or energy, as with the Mexicans’ and then explicitly mentions Rivera as a primary exemplification.32 Rivera’s work, therefore, must have presented itself naturally as a model to build on for a play that, much like Rivera’s murals, was meant to be a political public intervention whose main theme, ‘War and Rebellion’,33 was one that Rivera had visually explored for years. We do not know which publications Walcott might have consulted to better familiarise himself with Rivera’s art and which works in particular he took inspiration from, but compelling continuities and arresting resonances between Walcott’s play and some of Rivera’s best-known murals, and, more broadly, his modus operandi, provide the basis for some informed conjectures. The subtitle to the original version of Drums and Colours, ‘An Epic Drama Commissioned for the Opening of the First Federal Parliament of The West Indies, April 23rd 1958’,34 reveals that this is an epic pageant: divided into seventeen scenes (plus a prologue and epilogue), it documents different moments in the history of the region, tracing what Walcott calls the ‘general pattern of discovery, conquest, exploitation, rebellion, and constitutional advancement’ (DC113). Throughout his career, Rivera had produced multiple historical synthetic views of the history of Mexico, from

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its pre-Columbian past to modern times, and Walcott’s Drums and Colours, like Rivera’s murals, outlines both a collective history and the coordinates for a future of communality. Rivera’s huge murals, moreover, are often made up of sequences of episodes which form part of a narrative but could also sometimes stand alone. On the walls of the Palacio Nacional (Parliament Building) of Mexico City where, in the 1940s, Rivera painted ‘the epic of his people’,35 the north wall of the staircase is devoted to ‘Ancient Mexico’, the west wall illustrates the country’s history ‘From the conquest to 1930’, and the south wall depicts ‘Mexico today and tomorrow’ (Fig. 4.1);36 likewise, each of the twenty-one portable murals collectively entitled Portrait of America that Rivera realised for the New Workers’ School in New York in 1933 was devoted to a specific theme, from ‘Colonial America’ to ‘Proletarian unity’.37 Similarly, Walcott’s Drums and Colours, which, if performed in its entirety lasts more than three hours and covers European colonisation, imperialism, slavery, the Haitian Revolution, and Emancipation to Federation, is conceived in a way that allows the excision of ‘shorter, self-contained plays’ (DC113). Paula Burnett attributes this to Bertolt Brecht’s influence on Walcott38 but this of course does not preclude that the voracious painter/playwright Walcott might have drawn inspiration from both Rivera and Brecht. Notably, a ‘mural-related’ procedure seems to have continued to inform Walcott’s compositional strategies even three decades later: in Omeros (1990), as the poet explains, Achille and Helen and Hector is one kind of play or drama or story, and then Major Plunkett and his wife … another story, and Philoctete with his wound … I didn’t have a plot design as such … when it needed to be arranged in a kind of sequence that would build the momentum, I sometimes drafted the chapters in a line and then needed spaces to connect. It would make a mural, in a sense.39

Rivera’s murals make the most of the possibilities offered by the architectural features of their locations but also open dialogues with the natural world outside: for example, in the palace of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Ministry of Public Education), the composition and architecture are fully integrated with painted figures seated above doorways40 and, as Brenner noted in 1929, each portion of the palace is carefully coloured in relation to its exposure to the sun.41 In the Palacio de Cortés at Guernavaca, instead, Rivera had made sure that the central motif of his composition, a pyramid, was designed to correspond with the Pyramid of Teopanzolco that was simultaneously visible, outside the palace, from the corridor where the long mural was painted.42 Walcott’s Drums and Colours was performed on an Elizabethan stage built for the occasion (the first of this kind in the West Indies) where the presence of a main stage and an upper stage allowed Walcott to bring to the fore dance, music and physical movement, and where the steps on which the characters ascend to ‘harsh light’ (DC123) mark the ending of each era.43

Figure 4.1  Mural at Palacio Nacional, Mexico City, 1929–35, Diego Rivera, portion of the west wall – From the Conquest to 1930. katiebordner, CC BY 2.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).

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Since Drums and Colours was commissioned to be presented in Port of Spain for the celebration of the West Indian Federation, in order to create a strong connection with his prospective audience, Walcott anchors it to its immediate surroundings by evoking calypso and the Trinidad Carnival. Walcott, in fact, uses the prologue, epilogue and a few interludes to remind viewers that the action on stage is a carnivalesque re-enactment of history by common people who take up roles as actors. Since history is always (re)written from the contingency of the present, Walcott makes a point of showing that the main characters are selected at the beginning of the play according to the presence, availability and preference of the masqueraders (‘No Horatio Nelson? He ain’t in Mass this year? No Morgan? No Rodney’; DC121). At the same time, as history is approached through the performance of a Carnival procession, one could argue that Walcott also synthesises the history of the region for the stage and through the stage. For his façade of the Teatro de los Insurgentes, moreover, Rivera had reinterpreted the history of his country with a special focus on four Mexican main historical figures: Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, José María Teclo Morelos Pérez y Pavón, Benito Juárez and Emiliano Zapata, leaders of the Independence, the Reform and the revolutionary movement. The history of Mexico, however, is also illustrated through the representation of plays, playwrights and performances from the colonial period to the twentieth century.44 Hidalgo, Morelos, Juárez and Zapata, in fact, share the stage with historical figures like Hernan Cortés or José Maria Morelos y Pavon, representatives of the wealthy and subaltern classes, and indigenous priests in ritual robes but, crucially, also with characters from nativity plays, the playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcon (1581?–1639), folk musicians of the War of Independence, Tlatilco dancers, scenes from the plays El gesticulador (1938) and Corona de sombra (1943) by Rodolfo Usigli, performers of the Tapatío (Mexican Hat Dance), pre-Hispanic musicians, and folk singers of the Revolution. At the centre of the mural stands Mario Moreno Catinflas, a very popular comedian of the time, who, incidentally, for the inauguration of the Teatro de los Insurgentes in 1953, had played the part of Christopher Columbus in a musical entitled Yo, Colón (‘I, Columbus’). The art of theatre is signposted in Rivera’s mural through a gigantic mask, a woman’s hands in silk gloves, and the sun and the moon which symbolise both tragedy and comedy.45 At the beginning of Drums and Colour, Walcott too resorts to masks fixed to a staff on the stage to represent theatricality and ‘tragedy and comedy’ (DC122) in a play with no backdrops and only indispensable props and where, transcending generic conventions, he forges a localised hybrid practice which would also incorporate high style, calypso, dance and folkloric elements.46 In his work for the Palacio de Bellas Artes of Mexico City, Rivera had painted Carnival scenes not just as a record of folk culture but as metaphors for survival and emancipation: Rivera in fact illustrated how Mexican carnivalesque manifestations were devoted to the celebration of cultural and

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religious syncretism, underlined the persistence of pre-Hispanic cults after the establishment of Christianity, and creatively revisited legendary figures of Mexican resistance against foreign invaders.47 Yet, if in his own ‘epics’, Rivera included individual figures familiar to collective imagination, he also foregrounded the humble masses of Mexico: aptly, the ‘four litigious men’ (DC122) and main historical ‘players’ in Drums and Colours – Christopher Columbus, Walter Raleigh, Toussaint L’Ouverture and George William Gordon – are flanked, and often upstaged, by a huge cast of characters who are all played by the Carnival masqueraders. Walcott, in fact, repeatedly reminds viewers that the common people involved in his carnivalesque re-enactment are ‘as good as any hero that pass in history / … the hinge on which great nations revolve’ (DC289). Walcott never mentioned Rivera in relation to Drums and Colours but he did acknowledge that the play had a visual matrix when he declared that it derived from a series of ‘emblematic images from Caribbean history’ (DCvii). The idea of constructing a narrative based on a series of ‘emblematic images’, arranged in a sequence that only extracts and places in bold relief the most representative moments or figures in a given chronological continuum, puts to good use both the ‘emblematic strength’ of the Mexican Muralists and the energetic compression of Rivera’s murals that Walcott so fervently admired. The images in question are, in Walcott’s words, ‘Columbus in chains, Millais’s painting The Boyhood of Raleigh, the coachman of the Breda family Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the martyrdom of George William Gordon for Jamaican independence’ (DCvii).48 Despite packing four and a half centuries in its seventeen scenes, Drums and Colours offers vivid portraits of these four men which complicate and add further dimensions to their emblematic status and resist emblematic ‘reduction’ or reductiveness. Columbus does appear as a victimised and disgraced ‘pious’ dreamer ‘in chains’ (‘What will they make of this world is my wonder / Hypocrites and malefactors have wrecked my work’; ‘I did all for God and the lion of Castile, / I did all for God’; DC145) but, as we will see, Walcott makes it abundantly clear who the primary victims of his ‘discovery’ actually were. Toussaint L’Ouverture is represented as a cunning and victorious General – not just a humble ‘coachman’ – but the play does not simplify him or the other Black Jacobins portraying them as untainted, faultless heroes. In a well-known photographic portrait of George William Gordon, the handwritten caption ‘Hung at Morant Bay 23rd October 1865’49 draws attention to the Jamaican’s emblematic ‘martyrdom’ and magnifies the link between photography and death, presence and absence, which, as Susan Sontag has pointed out, ‘haunts all photographs of people’.50 The haunting of absence implicit in this emblematic source image, the only photograph in Walcott’s list, might explain why Gordon himself appears only very briefly in Walcott’s play and, when he does, redirects its focus from the (mortal) individual to the wider community: ‘the potential of a country’, he declares, ‘is the mass of its people’ (DC259).

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Scene Five instead offers a verbal/dramatic rendition of Millais’s The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870) (Fig. 4.2): I will return to the nature of Walcott’s ekphrastic engagement with this image in Chapter 7, but here it is worth noting that this painting might have interested Walcott because it juggles present, past and future together like the play and Rivera’s murals. In Millais’s work, the young Raleigh and another little boy are portrayed whilst listening carefully to a sailor who, pointing at the sea and its multiple possibilities, seemingly relates tales of adventure, discovery and wonder. One of the sailor’s hands anchors the action to the present of the storytelling moment as it seems to indicate to the young Raleigh and his companion to ‘hang on’ because more stories are on their way. In Walcott’s Drums and Colours, this anchoring gesture finds its counterpart in the present time of the Carnival parade which frames the play. The sailor’s other hand in Millais’s work, instead, points towards a mythologised past, the exotic and faraway place the sailor visited and must be describing to the youths and, simultaneously, towards the future, that is the place we know Raleigh will travel to and try to conquer as an adult. Walcott’s play works around a similar collapse of temporalities, namely the troubled history of the Caribbean Walcott had to study on his own because it was never taught to him as a schoolboy, a past tainted by the mythical overtones of this history with which, thanks to colonial discourse, he was fully familiar with, and the projected political future of the Caribbean inaugurated by the Federation. The title of Millais’s painting instructs us to focus on the young Raleigh and perhaps even pity him for his tragic fate: according to the Tate’s display caption ‘the sharp edge of an anchor on the right may allude to the final words [Raleigh] uttered at his execution: “Strike, man, strike”’.51 The sailor addressing the young Raleigh, instead, goes unnamed, his anonymity highlighted by the fact that we are not shown his face; the vanishing point outside the canvas signifying the New World, signposted, in the image, by the bowl covered in feathers and the dead toucans behind the sailor, also remains unmentioned. Walcott’s Scene Five shares Millais’s title – ‘Boyhood of Raleigh’ – and the setting loosely replicates the image in the painting: a beach in England; an old beggar/sailor; two young boys (DC176). Arguably, however, it gives centre stage not only to the sailor but also, even if they are not on stage as props, to those remnants of conquest relegated to a corner in Millais’s image (the dead toucans and the bowl) which the poet ‘reads’ as a metonymy for the genocide of the indigenous population. In Drums and Colours, in fact, Millais’s sailor becomes Paco, a half-Spanish, halfAmerindian old beggar/former seaman who recounts his painful experience of suffering, loss and dislocation and is the first and last character to speak in the scene. Notably, Millais’s nineteenth-century rendition of the beginning of colonialism, imperialism and the slave trade was inspired by a review article of a new edition of Raleigh’s The Discovery of Guiana by James Anthony Froude entitled ‘England’s Forgotten Worthies’,52 where the same historian

Figure 4.2  The Boyhood of Raleigh, 1870, John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 120.6 × 142 cm. Tate, London. Presented by Amy, Lady Tate in memory of Sir Henry Tate 1900. Photo: Tate.

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who, in 1888, infamously declared that in the West Indies there were ‘no people … in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own’, nostalgically revisited, with a celebratory intent, the Elizabethan pioneers of Empire.53 Clearly, Drums and Colours does not share Froude’s celebratory impulse and Scene Six, entitled ‘1617. The search for Eldorado’, makes it very clear that, when the young day-dreaming Raleigh became an adult, his search for riches turned into a murderous and destructive colonialist drive (DC187). Walcott’s choice of Raleigh as one of the main characters in the play signposts the enduring allure of this (and other) founding figures and, most importantly, the need to confront the problematic repercussions of these mystifying fascinations. Six years after the play, Walcott returned to this subject in a way that signals that he still considered Rivera as an artist who could embody a viable alternative to the damaging colonial mystifications he had denounced in Drums and Colours. In a 1964 art review for the Trinidad Guardian entitled ‘A Dilemma Faces W.I. Artists’, Walcott argued that the colonial intellectuals’ tendency to return to Elizabethan England because of ‘its vigour for exploration’ and ‘the greatness of its writers’ (the same impulse at the heart of Froude’s work which had inspired Millais’s The Boyhood of Raleigh) went hand in hand with their claim that there was ‘no sense of history in the West Indies, that its peoples [were] without that sense of the past which fertilizes art as tough weeds fertilize a ruin’.54 Walcott mentions no names but it is likely that he was also directing his criticism to the contemporary Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipaul, who, in The Middle Passage (1962) – a book Walcott had described as a ‘Grand Tour’ undertaken with ‘Victorian spectacles on’55 – had redeployed Froude’s dismissal of West Indian reality as a motto and drawn the controversial conclusion that ‘history is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies’.56 Walcott insists that this disabling combination of decadent nostalgia and disparaging mentality seriously hampers the New World but also prevents all West Indians from valuing the ‘alternative’ that ‘the new world’ itself could ‘offer’.57 In his effort to counter hasty and (strategically) misguided dismissals of the West Indies and the discourses which sustain them, Walcott singles out Rivera as ‘the best example’ for West Indian artists to draw inspiration from because he focused on and gave shape to his own New World reality.58 The contribution that the new (Caribbean) countries could make, the alternative they could bring to the table, Walcott insists, could ‘never be political, not on a world scale, not technological. Their potential [was] in their people, their races, and in their spiritual expression. In short, in their art.’59 A similar point was made by Rivera in Pan American Unity: The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and South of the Continent (1940) where he meant to show how the artistic tradition of the South had enriched the North while the technological power of the North had benefited the South. Rivera’s aim was not to produce a schematic division between ‘artistic’

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South and ‘technological’ North –according to him the mural was about ‘the marriage of the artistic expression of the north and the south on this continent’60 – but one could argue that panel one, devoted to a celebration of Mexico’s artistic genius with a focus on its indigenous past and its native talent for plastic expression (it features, amongst others, the poet king Netzahualcoyotl and pre-Hispanic gold- and silversmiths), is balanced by panel five, which, amongst other things, underscores the technological genius of the North (including portraits of Henry Ford, Thomas Alva Edison, Samuel Morse and John Fulton). In Drums and Colours, Walcott’s urge and determination to describe, define and celebrate the immense potential of a people and a culture while, at the same time, giving shape to a collective dream of unity, foreground exactly what, in his appreciation of Rivera, he was to call ‘a New World reality’ and a New World alternative. As Ram puts it at the end of the play, ‘we only a poor barefoot nation, small, a sprinkling of islands, with a canoe navy, a John Crow air force … but in the past we was forged’ and in this past, the Chorus reminds us, ‘that web Columbus shuttled took its weave, / Skein over skein to knit this various race, / Though warring elements of the past compounded / To coin our brotherhood in this little place’ (DC291, 292–3). This brotherhood was to comprise the different races and ethnicities of the Caribbean for which the maroon encampment Walcott describes in Scene Seventeen becomes a microcosm: Calico is a mixed-heritage descendant of colonial planters, Ram is East Indian, Yu is of Chinese descent, and Mano descends from an enslaved African but the full name of his ancestor, Mano Emmanuel, signposts the ‘connection’ with the Jew who bought him to save him from slavery. When Mano has to recite a funeral oration for his fellow masquerader Pompey, after asserting that ‘all the nations of this earth is compounded’ in Pompey (DC288), he launches a speech that is both funny and inspiringly ‘ecumenical’: ‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, / In the name of Tamoussi, Siva, Buddha, Mahomet, Abraham, / And the multitude of names for the eternal God, Amen’ (DC288–9). Walcott’s play was commissioned for a specific moment in history, namely the inauguration of the West Indian Federation, but it is incontrovertible that he put his art and the lessons he had learnt from Rivera at the service of a vision that went beyond immediate political circumstances and traditional colonial approaches. Haiti and Santo Domingo, where sections of Drums and Colours take place, in fact, were not part of the Federation and their inclusion reminds one of Simmons’s own brand of cultural and inclusive ‘federalism’ avant-la-lettre. The foregrounding of the Haitian Revolution and the Spanish conquest in the play, in fact, testifies to the fact that, even at this early stage of his career and during this significant political juncture for the British West Indies, Walcott regarded himself and his fellow West Indians as part of a broader entity that went beyond the political federation at the core of the 1958 celebrations: as he put it in Omeros, more than forty years

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later, his ‘wide country’ was in fact ‘the Caribbean Sea’ which stretches from Barbados to (Rivera’s) Mexico. The 1940 mural Pan-American Unity marked the end of Rivera’s career as a muralist in the United States and, when Walcott was in New York for the first time on a short-term Rockefeller Foundation grant in September 1957, Rivera was back in Mexico, where he would die on 24 November of that year. In 1957, Walcott spent only five days in New York during a trip to Stratford, Ontario undertaken with Errol Hill and Noel Vaz in order to seek advice from Tyrone Guthrie for the organisation of the West Indian Arts Festival in Port of Spain and to invite him to direct the play that Walcott was still trying to conceive to celebrate the Federation. Guthrie politely declined but suggested to Walcott to take inspiration from Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, an epic drama of the war with Napoleon divided in three parts, nineteen acts, and one hundred and thirty scenes, a suggestion which, possibly, might have made Walcott feel more overwhelmed than energised and which he probably proceeded to ignore – unlike the four emblematic images we have discussed, Hardy’s monumental play is not mentioned in the foreword to Drums and Colours as a source of inspiration.61 Walcott’s trip to New York, however, was very fruitful for other reasons. The big city frightened Walcott and made him feel an ‘illuminating nostalgia for the untheatrical simplicities of St Lucia’ and, as he was trying to figure out how to write his commissioned ‘epic history’ for the inauguration of the West Indian Federation, ‘under the pressure of sudden loneliness and exile’, the normally ‘self-torturing’, ‘multiple-draft writer’ Walcott produced, astonishingly quickly, Ti-Jean and His Brothers which, in 1970, he called ‘the least forced, the most spontaneous, the least laboured [and] the most West Indian’ of his plays.62 Ti-Jean (which was first performed in 1958) dramatises a tale from the St Lucian folk repertoire where only one of three brothers succeeds in outsmarting the Devil/Planter. In order to overthrow the plantation order, the victorious Ti-Jean does not resort to physical force (as his brother Gros-Jean) or to blind reliance on metropolitan rhetoric (as Mi-Jean) but relies instead on his own ability to imagine an alternative to brute force and cultural assimilation which draws its strength from the folk tradition. Ti-Jean, in a way, emerges as another ‘new world rebel’ like Orozco, Siqueiros, Rivera, Simmons and St. Omer who, with stubborn determination and self-reliance, put forward a viable alternative to backward-looking colonial templates extolling the superiority of metropole. Walcott explains that, while composing Ti-Jean, he ‘wanted, without knowing, to write a softly measured metre whose breathing was formally articulated yet held the lyrical stresses of dialect speech’ and adds that the St Lucia folk mythology (Ti-Jean is a popular folk tale hero in the French Antilles), with its deep African roots rearticulated in Creole storytelling, formed part of an overall structure that was influenced by Lorca’s handling of metre, and, through Brecht, by the Noh Theatre’s ‘mimetic indications of scenery’.63 Rivera is not included in this list of influences but the

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way in which Walcott’s play was created – and he insists on the novelty, at the time, of this combination – honours Simmons’s championing of folklore, resonates with St. Omer’s (at that point still frustrated) desire to ‘indigenise’ his religious works by including Black divinities and elements of St Lucia reality in them, but also chimes with Rivera’s incorporation of Mexican iconographic elements like ‘Saltillo’s sarape, jungle, Mexican wildlife (ocelot and heron), the colours, the oversize hands and feet’ into the European mural tradition, and the ‘pour[ing of] his findings into folk-tale and parable’ which, as Brenner noted, made them more readily understandable.64 Walcott often mobilised Rivera in the context of the urgent debates he was having with contemporary Caribbean writers, intellectuals, and artists – many of whom he had met whilst attending university in Jamaica – who, like him, shared an interest in the muralists and were keen to understand and shape what being ‘West Indian’ actually meant. Given this regional cultural effervescence, it is not surprising that Walcott was to discover that Ti-Jean was ‘confirmed’, as he put it, by the Trinidadian painter Alfred Codallo’s representations of folk mythology, particularly his 1958 watercolour Folklore which, chiming with Rivera’s works and aims, brings together local landscape and a mythological ‘underworld that live[d] in the memory of the diverse peoples’ who, at the time, ‘were agitating for self-government of the island’.65 Codallo was born in Arima in 1913 from a Venezuelan father and an East Indian mother: a self-taught artist and art teacher, Codallo aimed to ‘speak in a language that all should understand’ and the complex, detailed and compressed setting of Folklore – Kenwyn Crichlow calls it ‘a claustrophobic space’ – resonates with what Walcott describes as Rivera’s ‘crowded’ representations.66 Animated by what he called ‘native pride’,67 Codallo was determined to document and preserve the rich heritage of Trinidadian folklore in pictorial form: it has been pointed out, in fact, that he was the first to give a shape to the imaginary figures in the oral tradition of storytellers in Trinidad and Tobago and for Walcott, who often praised him in his art reviews,68 Codallo was one of those ‘individual genius[es]’, or rebels, who ‘create’ a culture.69 Remarkably, the cover of one of Walcott’s 1970 notebooks features a reproduction of Folklore, and Walcott’s own sketches for characters and scenes for a new production of Ti-Jean are intermingled with cut-outs from Codallo’s work. Deconstructing Codallo’s ‘crowded’ composition, Walcott isolated and glued on his notebook pages several folkloric figures (Papa Bois, douens, loup garous) in order to draw inspiration from them.70 One can still find traces of Codallo’s and the Mexican muralists’ works in a 2008 painting by Walcott (Fig. 4.3) which illustrates the story of Ti-Jean through an assemblage of its main characters (Ti-Jean, his mother, Papa Bois right at the centre, Maman de l’eau, the Devil/Planter and other minor figures). The figure of a representative of the church in the bottom-left corner is particularly interesting because there is no such figure in Ti-Jean or in Walcott’s

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Figure 4.3  Ti-Jean, 2008, Derek Walcott, oil on canvas, 112 × 122 cm. Private ­collection, Derek Walcott Studio, St Lucia. Photo: Courtesy of Sigrid Nama. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Walcott Estate. All rights reserved.

revised version of the play entitled Moon-Child, published in 2012 and penned a few years after the mural was being painted.71 One can find instead many visual precedents for such a figure in Rivera’s murals where representatives of the Catholic Church are included as figures of resistance like Miguel Hidalgo or, more often than not, as embodiments of the Catholic Church’s implication in the violent Spanish conquest and colonisation of Mexico and in the destruction of Indian culture: one could refer, amongst many others, to the monumental staircase of the Palacio Nacional (1929), to the west and south walls of Palacio de Cortés (1930–1); to the east and north walls of the second level corridor of the Palacio Nacional (1942–53), the façade of the Teatro de los Insurgentes (1953), or to his Dream of a Sunday afternoon in Alameda Central (1947–8).

New York 1958: What was in the Air? Apart from the Italian, the Haitian and the Mexican, Walcott was certainly aware of another major cultural ‘renaissance’, namely the ‘Harlem’ or ‘Black’ Renaissance,72 as various references to its writers – particularly those of Caribbean origin like Claude McKay or, as we have seen, George Campbell – can be found in his early writing and newspaper articles.73 The same cannot be said of their contemporary visual artists and Walcott’s reluctance to engage with African American painters might be attributable, in part, to the fact that, as it transpires time and time again in his responses to

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the above-mentioned writers, he was always suspicious of any form or suggestion of Black nationalism, of what he considered (quoting John Hearne, a ‘“pathetic nostalgia”’ for a ‘legendary Africa’, and of racial separatism which, he believed, was totally alien to the West Indies whose ‘active truth’, as he contended in 1957, was ‘the acceptance of all racial differences’.74 Arguably, however, Walcott’s lack of familiarity with and detailed knowledge of the African American artistic tradition as a whole must also have played its part. Craven, as we have seen, was keen to promote ‘American’ art but he reductively identified it with rural Midwestern Regionalism, the myth of the frontier, and nativism. The Mexican ‘renascence’ was included in his canon because it represented a ‘powerful American response to the artistic dominance of Europe’,75 but A Treasury contains no mention of African American painters in either his original 1939 edition or in any of its re-editions in 1952, 1958 and 1966. Sadly, Craven’s neglect and exclusion of African American artists from mainstream publications was far from uncommon at the time: in his introduction to A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present, co-written with Romare Bearden, Harry Henderson lamented that, as late as 1993, when their book was finally published, ‘according to some art histories, the first African American ha[d] yet to pick up a brush’.76 If before his brief visit to New York in 1957 and his return to the city for a longer period of time in 1958, all Walcott had at his disposal to familiarise himself with contemporary art were histories of art and artbooks like Craven’s or Samuel Isham’s The History of American Painting (which covered North American art until 1905 and can still be found in Walcott’s library in its 1936 edition), it would not have been easy for him to become knowledgeable, let alone discerning, about the African American tradition. Henderson and Bearden took the decision to write their book in 1965, when Bearden was invited by the Museum of Modern Art to give a talk on the history and development of Black artists in America and realised that he could only ‘put together a few scanty notes on only a dozen artists’.77 According to Henderson, in fact, before 1957, when Walcott arrived in New York for the first time, only E. P. Richardson’s Painting in America (1956) briefly mentioned the nineteenth-century African American painters Henry Ossawa Tanner and Robert S. Duncanson while Milton W. Brown’s American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (1955) totally ignored Aaron Douglas and other artists from the Harlem Renaissance.78 In terms of books that focused specifically on African American Art, Henderson and Bearden credit James Porter’s Modern Negro Art (1943) as the ‘first extended account of the development of African-American artists in the United States’, highlighting, however, that, partly because it was published during the second World War, it was ‘largely ignored outside AfricanAmerican intellectual and art circles’.79 Porter, at the time, was also engaged in a vigorous debate with his Howard colleague Alain Locke whose works, Porter believed, contained ‘a

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narrow racialistic point of view’80 while Porter was keen to show that Black artists did not ‘stand apart in the civilization of the United States, but [had] an inherent share in it’.81 Locke had published, in 1925, The New Negro which included six African-based designed panels by Aaron Douglas and was described by Bearden and Henderson as ‘a landmark’ and ‘the first demonstration of the rich cultural capabilities of African Americans in fields other than music and the theater’.82 In 1936, Locke’s Negro Art: Past and Present highlighted the importance of African art as a source of inspiration and, in 1940, Locke published The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art. The 1940 volume comprised numerous black and white plates including, as we have seen, the painting which might have been that ‘head by Delacroix’ Walcott remembers from Simmons’s studio (ALms1, 38), but also panel five of Rivera’s Portrait of America (1933) which was devoted to slavery and abolitionism, and numerous works by African American artists such as Robert Duncanson, Edward Bannister, Archibald Motley, Palmer Hayden, Malvin Gray Johnson, Aaron Douglas, Horace Pippin, William Johnson, William Edmondson, Norman Lewis, Eldzier Cortor and Jacob Lawrence, amongst many others.83 Porter’s or Locke’s books are not mentioned in Simmons’s or Walcott’s writings and we do not know if Walcott had indeed seen The Negro in Art before 1957, but, in any case, familiarity with this book would not have provided him with a very substantial contextual introduction to African American art. Overall, in fact, the text is minimised and does not focus on any painter or painting in particular: it offers only a short historical outline of the events depicted in Hale Woodruff’s Amistad Mural (the only reproduction in colour), very sketchy biographical information on all the featured painters, and three rather short essays, namely ‘The Negro as Artist’, which provides a cursory survey of African American artists, ‘The Negro in Art’, devoted to representations of Black people in Western art, and ‘The Ancestral Arts’, which is about African art. When Walcott arrived in New York for the first time in 1957, New York City had established itself as an important centre for avant-garde experimentation so, while it was still ‘in the air’ in the Caribbean, Rivera’s muralism and any form of art with explicit political content had become far less popular than abstract art, in particular Abstract Expressionism. In 1958, on his second, much longer visit on a Rockefeller Fellowship to study drama,84 Walcott had the opportunity to be in New York for a sustained period of time when some African American painters like Romare Bearden, Hale A. Woodruff, Charles Alston and Norman Lewis had already experimented with or developed their own abstract style (not always encouraged by the critics) and were beginning to explore new ways of putting their work in dialogue with the civil rights movement. At the same time, a second generation of African American Abstract Expressionists (who, however, still regarded the ‘Mexican painters’ as influential) – artists like Merton Simpson, Vincent

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Smith or Richard Mayhew – used to meet in Greenwich Village where Walcott had moved with a group of friends.85 Despite this effervescence, in American, without America, African American art and artists are not mentioned in Walcott’s long list of what (he felt) was ‘in the air’ in 1958 New York (AWA).86 This might be due to the fact that, by his own account, while his friends used to go to jazz houses and enjoy the counterculture of the time, Walcott, ‘too square for those scenes’ and anxious about his poetry which he felt ‘would be threatened’ by his exposure to New York experimentation, preferred to stay at home (AWA). Yet, he must have ventured outside at least a few times since, in a 1964 review for the Trinidad Guardian, he recalls that, during a visit to the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, he was ‘taken up to a group of painters that included Franz Kline’ – mentioned in Walcott’s list of what was ‘in the air’ in 1958 – and, through him, he gained a closer insight in the ‘visceral explosions’ of Abstract Expressionism and the ‘self-destructive drive’ of action painting.87 It is hard to think that this was an entirely isolated event since a 1973 poem entitled ‘Spring Street in ’58’ – where Walcott revisited his life in Spring Street, Greenwich Village – is dedicated to the poet, action painter and ‘Personist’ Frank O’Hara whom he also met while in New York (SG57–8).88 As if to honour O’Hara, ‘Spring Street in ’58’ reads like a diary entry or quick record of impressions of life in New York, addresses O’Hara directly, and Walcott’s use of metre is looser, less formal, a feature that is true of the entire collection Sea Grapes where the poem is to be found. By 1973, in fact, Walcott had obviously overcome the fear of New York experimentation that he had felt in 1958 and was more open to what he called the ‘casual, colloquial force’ of American poetry.89 In American, without America, Walcott also described a frightening encounter with a group of anti-Semitic and racist thugs in a Greenwich Village bar as well as another momentous night in the Cedar Tavern where he heard Amiri Baraka (then still LeRoi Jones) talk disparagingly about Haiti. ‘I have been all over Hayti in my army boots’, Walcott writes, quoting Baraka, ‘there was nothing there’ (AWA). These two episodes are useful to understand Walcott’s relationship with both the United States and the African American community and culture. In New York, where he was constantly reminded of his race and colour, Walcott fully shared the pain, anger and frustration of those fighting racial discrimination: as he recalled, facing the thugs in the Greenwich Village café, he ‘became [his] race’ with ‘three-centuries of inherited fear’ and pent-up rage (AWA). On the other hand, Walcott was becoming aware that his concerns and priorities were not necessarily identical to those of the African Americans around him: Walcott, in fact, was profoundly upset by Baraka’s dismissal of Haiti and, even if he had never been to Haiti, he had written about the Haitian Revolution and felt that ‘what [he] knew was there … was a legendary dignity despite its poverty’ (AWA). Most importantly, during his 1958 stay, Walcott became progressively convinced

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that the Caribbean islands offered more to him, as an artist, than New York, and decided to return as soon as possible to ‘where [he] hoped there was still something’ (AWA). Since his aim was to form a theatre company in Trinidad, not in the United States, he cut his scholarship short and, after nine months – he was supposed to stay for a year – he went back to Trinidad. During his time in the United States in 1958, in fact, Walcott had come to realise that ‘the plays [he] had written, and the ones [he] knew [he had to] continue to write were about the poor and the black who spoke an incomprehensible dialect, and [he] could not see them being performed, even on the off-Broadway stage’: Walcott’s primary ambition was to write ‘for and about the people [he] knew … for a new theatre … with a new language about people whose ordinary life had never been dramatised’ (AWA). Quoting verbatim from W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Fisherman’, Walcott declares that he could only write, ‘for [his] own race’ (AWA). The word ‘race’ here transcends colour or ethnicity to include all West Indians and, in the same piece, Walcott also asserts his right to ‘absorb any influences that [he] needed’ in his attempt to distil a distinctive West Indian style. For example, to reconnect with his African roots, he adds, he was going to go through the West Indian folk tradition as he had done in Ti-Jean, but also through the woodcuts of the Japanese Hokusai which constituted his own path ‘to Africa and home’ (AWA). Hokusai was definitely ‘in the air’ in 1958 New York: mentioned in Walcott’s list in American, without America, the Japanese artist’s work inspired an early ekphrastic poem entitled ‘The Hurricane’ (GN69) – to which I will return in Chapter 7 – and the painter himself is evoked at the end of ‘Spring Street in ’58’ where Walcott recalls that, at that time, he believed that he and his New York friends would ‘all live as long as Hokusai’ (SG58). Overall, Walcott’s interest in Japanese theatre and cinema is well documented – his play Malcochon, or The Six in the Rain (first performed in 1959), for example, was inspired by Kurosawa’s Rashomon. In American, without America Walcott explains that the ‘wooden pallets … jugs, roughhewn tables, grain sacks’ of oriental theatre were familiar to him. This familiarity was particularly important because the ‘plain weathered style’ he was trying to develop in the theatre was inspired by Brecht but his ‘real sources were the real geography of the rain forests and bamboo groves of St Lucia’ where woodcutters and charcoal burners ‘worked in the steam-veiled, dripping heights, whose belief in ghosts and apparitions was as deep as the peasantry in Rashomon’ and who ‘wore a cloth bandage around their foreheads to keep the sweat from their eyes or pulled it dampened, over their eyes, against the searing smoke from the coal pits’ (AWA). These ‘resonances’ with Hokusai’s woodcuts, Japanese theatre or cinema (but also Chinese poetry), illuminated what Walcott called the ‘universality’ of tradition (AWA). Walcott might not have interrogated enough the category of ‘universal’ at that point and one might remark that he seemed less concerned about including the European than the African tradition in his (West Indian) vision, but

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one should remember that Walcott was much more familiar with the first and might have felt more able to appropriate, revisit and, most importantly, transform it for his own purposes. Its Japanese sources, moreover, allowed him to reconnect to Africa by circumventing both the Africa vs. Europe dichotomy – that he found disabling – and what he considered the equally debilitating nostalgia for an impossible return to an irretrievable past that could hamper his effort to create something new in the West Indies; rather than in ‘Africa’ per se, in fact, Walcott was interested in articulating that ‘perfection to West Indian things’ that Simmons had encouraged him to strive for. A few years later, in a 1964 article written for the visit of Leopold Senghor to Trinidad and Tobago, Walcott praised both Negritude and its ‘assertion of the African personality’ for having ‘restored a purpose and dignity to the descendants of slaves’, but he explained that, for West Indians, this could not be seen as ‘an assertion of [their] complete identity, since that is mixed and shared by other races, [their] writers are East Indian, white, mixed, [their] best painters are Chinese [and] the process of racial assimilation goes on with every other marriage’.90 Walcott’s insistence on this was to become particularly controversial, as we have seen, at the time of the Trinidad Black Power Revolution of the 1970s. In 1959, back in the Caribbean, Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and, for over a decade, despite the fact that the time he had to spend in the United States in order to work gradually increased, he was primarily focused on promoting the Theatre Workshop and West Indian art and culture. In his art reviews for the Trinidad Guardian that he started to write regularly in 1960, still mindful of Simmons’s dictum that ‘drawing is the probity of all art’, Walcott highly praised artists who demonstrated they could draw properly and master their techniques (amongst others, Alfred Codallo, Jackie Donald Hinkson, Gloria Escoffery, Sybil Atteck, Peter Minshall, Nina Lamming, Albert Huie, Henri Telfer, Boscoe Holder). At the same time, he did not restrain from berating local artists for exhibiting too soon, for charging too much but, above all, for painting ‘unfortunately, in the same way as Europeans, Englishmen or Americans’.91 Walcott also lamented that incompetence was valued if it could be reconstructed as ‘patriotism’, that ‘primitivism’ had become an ‘euphemism … for people who [could not] paint and [were] being encouraged to remain poor painters, because they [were] “indigenous” and “charming”’.92 It is fair to say that he never agreed with the notion ‘of giving everyone a break’ because he believed that it reduced art in the West Indies to ‘a pastime’.93 Despite the anxiety he felt in 1958 vis-à-vis the New York avant-garde scene, Walcott-the-art-critic of the 1960s was not averse to Abstract Expressionism per se: ‘Pollock’, he writes, ‘is dominated by a rigidity of composition which an inferior artist cannot achieve simply by dripping paint on canvas’ and, in a separate review, he also celebrates ‘the pioneer work of Kline and Rothko’.94 In an article about Jamaican art he praises Eugene

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Hyde and Milton Harley in whose works he could see the influence of North American Abstract Expressionism as well as a firm commitment to ‘technical severity’ and ‘superb draughtsmanship’.95 What Walcott had no time for, instead, was what he called the ‘parasitic, fancified brushwork of [Trinidad’s] “avant-garde”’96 which, he insisted in 1963, was ‘late’ in its embrace of Abstract Expressionism and displayed a ‘cavalier or carnival quality’.97 The same year Walcott also lamented that ‘Abstract Expressionism and collage’ had become part of ‘art-teaching techniques’ because he believed that ‘the art teacher who abandons drawing denies the gifted child certain disciplines’ to perpetrate ‘the contradictory discipline that “everything goes”’.98 A year later he attacked Trinidadian collagists: if ‘there was a time when a collage meant something’, he writes, ‘the trick [by then had] been learnt’ and, Walcott insists, it was time to move on.99 Walcott, however, was going to change his mind about the fact that collage was a ‘trick’ which had somewhat exhausted all its creative possibilities when he came across the work of the African American artist Romare Bearden in the late 1960s–1970s. In a 2000 interview with Sally and Richard Price, in fact, he admitted: ‘I hate collage, can’t stand collage. But when I look at Romare Bearden’s painting, I say: “Well, you gotta like fucking collage!” Because … it’s painting with a scissors.’100

You Gotta Like Collage! Romare Bearden and the Art of Cut-outs Bearden began to paint with his scissors in the 1960s, that is at a moment when the medium had long passed its heyday. In the late 1930s he had ­illustrated the Depression ‘in a style strongly influenced by the Mexican muralists’101 and, in 1940, as he became more and more involved in Harlem’s artistic and cultural community, Bearden established his first studio at 306 West 125th Street, in the same dilapidated building as his fellow African American artist Jacob Lawrence and the Jamaican poet and novelist Claude McKay. Bearden began ‘navigating between social realism (the primary mode in Harlem) and abstraction (the ascendant mode in the New York avant-garde)’,102 and, by the mid-1940s, he began to experiment more decisively with the abstract figurative image. According to Sharon Patton, at that point his art was considered ‘too “foreign” for popular taste in the United States, and too conservative for the avant-garde in New York and Paris’.103 Disappointed by some devastating criticism, Bearden ceased exhibiting for a while and in the mid-1950s he also suffered a nervous breakdown. In the 1960s, however, his studio in Canal Street became the meeting point for Spiral, a group of Black artists keen to discuss the role they should play in the civil rights movement and the existence of essential racial qualities, and to explore how cultural difference and mainstream art and culture

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intersected.104 The name Spiral was chosen, according to Hale Woodruff, as a symbol of the group’s aim to move ‘outward embracing all directions yet constantly upward’.105 When Spiral decided to organise an exhibition, Bearden, inspired by the Mexican muralists, suggested the creation of a collaborative mural/collage of cut-outs from magazines and art-historical reproductions.106 This collective project never materialised but Bearden produced a series of enlarged photostatic reproductions of smaller montage paintings which confronted stereotypical representation of Black people by establishing new relationships with received images from either the art world or from popular culture, particularly documentary journalism.107 Bearden’s Projections, as he called them, were exhibited for the first time in 1964 in an exhibition which comprised twenty-one photostatic enlargements of his collages: they were very well received and constituted a new departure for the artist whose work became increasingly sought after and appreciated. Walcott and Bearden met for the first time in New York in the early 1970s at the Chelsea Hotel and the dynamic of their first encounter – ­apparently engineered by the concierge of the hotel – suggests that, by then, they had been following and admiring each other’s work for a while.108 At that point Bearden’s works had been on the cover of Fortune, Time and The New York Times, and Walcott was enjoying success in the United States and, consequently, spending more and more time there, while the Trinidad Theatre Workshop was increasingly becoming a source of anxiety and d ­ isappointment. Coincidentally, both painter and writer were beginning to consider the possibility to live partly in the United States and partly in the Caribbean or, to paraphrase Walcott, ‘to change their anchor from putting it down in that base, to putting it over here’.109 After taking a number of cruises to the Caribbean, in fact, Bearden and his wife Nanette had decided to build a house in St Martin, on land owned by Nanette’s family. Construction of the new house began around 1970, took about three years to complete and, when it was ready, the painter and his wife would spend several months a year in St Martin.110 Bearden loved to spend time on the island because, when life in New York began to ‘take its toll’, he felt ‘rejuvenated’ and in touch with a ‘mystical place where the mythology that makes life bearable could still be found’.111 What attracted Bearden to the Caribbean was its energy: ‘I constantly see [energy and vitality] in the island dances, the way men put together a stone wall, in the stride of the island people, in the imaginative use of language … Art will always go where energy is.’112 Bearden’s final years, inspired by Caribbean ‘energy’, were in fact, extremely productive. Walcott was particularly struck by Bearden’s attitude towards the Caribbean because in him he found a painter who was acutely sensitive to what the region had to offer and never approached it with a sense of metropolitan superiority: ‘Romare came here to learn what he could from it’, Walcott pointed out, ‘He didn’t come here to illustrate it!’113 In 2006, Richard and

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Sally Price brought to the fore what they call Bearden’s ‘Caribbean dimension’, observing how, in the 1970s, Bearden began to include tropical flora and fauna and Caribbean blues, greens and yellows in his collages and how even his ‘non-Caribbean’ work became increasingly influenced by his Caribbean experience: by the end, they argue, there was considerable overlap in terms of ‘colour’ but also of ‘technique’.114 The influence of St Martin on Bearden, in fact, can be found also in his increased use of watercolour, a medium he preferred to use in the Caribbean and, incidentally, Walcott’s (and his father’s) preferred medium.115 Richard and Sally Price, however, rightly highlight how Bearden’s ‘Caribbean dimension’ had not always been fully acknowledged by critics and single out Walcott as one of the first to appreciate it.116 In the Foreword to Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, for example, Bridget Moore suggests that Bearden’s visual reinterpretation of The Odyssey followed a visit to his native North Carolina in 1976 which might have prompted him to reinterpret the African American’s search for home in a different way,117 and the short essays by Robert O’Meally which accompany all the collages describe their content mostly in relation to the Black American experience. It is only in his commentary to the last one, Odysseus and Penelope Reunited, that O’Meally explicitly acknowledges the impact of St Martin on Bearden when he observes that Ithaca is depicted like a Caribbean port ‘with its tropical trees and an airy mix of European, African, and Amerindian influences, ancient and modern’.118 Walcott, instead, insists that Bearden’s rediscovery of the Greeks is a direct consequence of his living in St Martin: ‘I think you can’t live in the archipelago – and Bearden lived in the Caribbean – without that great poem [The Odyssey] in the back of your head all the time.’119 For Walcott, in fact, Bearden’s reinterpretation of The Odyssey is about the Caribbean experience at least as much as it is about the Black experience: Bearden’s ‘brilliance’, he writes, was in ‘making black silhouettes [which] come out of Greek vase silhouettes, but [they] are black … and [he made] that silhouette alive in terms of the Caribbean’.120 While O’Meally reads Bearden’s The Sea Nymph (Fig. 4.4) – an illustration of the episode when the sea nymph Ino helps Odysseus – as a ‘parable of Black America’ which celebrates those ‘selfless rescuers – mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, women from the religious communities, neighbourhood leaders, professionals and volunteers alike – all those who have made it their business to dive in after the ones who were sinking down’,121 Walcott anchors the image firmly to his native region: ‘that Odysseus figure going down, that’s a Caribbean guy diving … the color of that green is exactly what you get when you go down. I was there [diving in the sea] this morning’ (emphasis in the text).122 Walcott was so impressed by The Sea Nymph that in 1979 he chose it as a cover for The Star-Apple Kingdom. The Sea Nymph had appeared, together with five other collages from Bearden’s Odyssey cycle, in one of two 1977 issues of Massachusetts Review

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Figure 4.4  The Sea Nymph, 1977, Romare Bearden, collage with mixed media on board, 111.8 × 81.3 cm. Collection of Glen and Lynn Tobias. Photo: Courtesy of the Romare Bearden Foundation © Romare Bearden Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London, 2022.

devoted to African American literature and culture which were later repackaged for one volume edited by Michael Harper and Robert Stepto entitled Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. The same issue of Massachusetts Review also included a first version of Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’, the poem that was to open The Star-Apple-Kingdom and become one of his best-known and most-cited ones. The two versions of ‘The Schooner Flight’ are rather different and some of the changes incorporated by Walcott in the second version seem to have been triggered by his exposure to Bearden’s works. For example, the account of Shabine’s ‘salvage-diving’ or ‘salvage diving’ (SAK7)123 into the Caribbean sea is revised in a way that reads like a more accurate description of Bearden’s collage: original lines like ‘I dived under bright coral water / whose ceiling climbed rippling like a silk green tent’ and ‘I went diving under sun shot water / whose ceiling came rippling like a green silk tent’,124 in fact, change, in the final version, into the more visually stunning ‘I would melt in emerald water, / whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent’ (SAK7). Walcott also included a line at the beginning of the poem, namely ‘the cold sea rippling like galvanize’ (SAK3), which renders very precisely the undulated light blue paper

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Bearden utilised for the sea surface in The Sea Nymph. Given his enthusiasm for The Sea Nymph, Walcott must have delved into The Black Odyssey in its entirety. I will consider the effects that Bearden’s revisitations of Homer had on Walcott’s broader theatrical and poetic production in Chapter 5 but, in connection with ‘The Schooner Flight’, it is worth mentioning that the collage The Sirens’ Song, where Odysseus appears to be hung on a cross in order to resist the alluring but lethal song of the sea creatures, seems to have inspired the image (not included in the first version) of the schooner’s Captain who, in the middle of a raging storm, ‘crucify to his post’ held ‘fast / to that wheel … like the cross held Jesus’ (SAK18).125 The Caribbean connection was of course crucial to Walcott’s and Bearden’s relationship, but they also shared a belief in the value of apprenticeship and both considered André Malraux’s principle ‘art through art’ of fundamental importance. We know, for example, that Bearden spent a remarkable amount of time producing copies and studies from Italian masters, Northern Renaissance painters, Dutch seventeenth-century artists, Edgar Degas or Henri Matisse to compensate for what he perceived as his lack of formal training.126 Apart from copying, systematically, a number of works of art, Bearden also creatively built on the example of old masters in his collages: Sarah Kennel, in fact, convincingly argues that Mother and Child (watercolour, c. 1972), Of the Blues: Showtime (1974), Down Home, Also (1971), Still Life (1970) or Card Players (1982) were inspired (in terms of composition, use of colours, positioning and posture of the figures) by works by Agnolo Bronzino, Degas, Picasso (but also Van Gogh and Millet), Matisse and Cézanne respectively: in all these cases, however, the sources were transformed in order to create an idiom that was ‘at once individually and culturally resonant’.127 In Bearden’s collages, moreover, fragments from reproductions of old masters and modern paintings (but fragmented in such a way that they are barely recognisable) occasionally appear side by side with magazine cuttings.128 Together, they function as springboards for a creative deconstruction of stereotypes, for the production of new forms, for the reconfiguration of the past according to the exigences of the present, and for a thorough rethinking of the very notion of artistic coherence. As we have seen for In a Fine Castle, The Last Carnival, Ti-Jean and His Brothers, Vangelo Nero or Doctor Faustus, a collagist methodology whereby visual (and verbal) sources from the past and present are made to synergise for the creation of innovative works is evident in Walcott’s notebooks where it is not unusual to find reproductions of works of art, items of clothing, faces, full figures, interiors or furniture cut out from popular magazines and glued next to costume designs, casting ideas or sketches of the setting.

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Deep in the American Grain: Thomas Hart Benton’s Mule, Man and Plough, and Romare Barden, Bear our Burden, Horace Pippin, Paint our Pain, Keep our Innocence, Jacob Lawrence Apart from their Caribbean connection and their ‘collagist’ activities, Bearden and Walcott held similar views also on the relation between race, ideology and aesthetics, and their bond helped Walcott establish the coordinates along which he was going to formulate his relationship with the United States where, in the 1970s, he was increasingly finding important work opportunities. Walcott’s and Bearden’s friendship was predicated on important affinities, one of which was that both artists never allowed themselves to be restricted by what Ralph Ellison called ‘sociological notions of race separatism’.129 Like Walcott, who, in the Trinidad Guardian, often discloses his disapproval of the fact that painters he considered ‘pathetically incompetent’ were encouraged to continue to paint badly if their work could be cast as ‘primitive’ or ‘patriotic’,130 Bearden had been critical of the patronising attitudes of organisations like the highly influential Harmon Foundation that, he believed, had a ‘disastrous’ effect on Black artists because it had promoted standards which were ‘both artificial and corrupt’ by privileging racial identity and mediocrity, had ‘established the pattern of segregated exhibits’, and had encouraged some to exhibit long before they had mastered their medium.131 This is not to say that Bearden and Walcott were not concerned about the marginalisation of Afro Caribbean, African American or African writers and artists nor that they were not aware of the fact that many had not been recognised and continued to be neglected because of racial prejudice. In a 1964 article for the Trinidad Guardian, for example, Walcott writes that the mere fact that neither Aimé Césaire nor Léopold Senghor were included in The Concise Encyclopaedia of Modern World Literature ‘illustrate[d] the necessity of “Negritude”’, and laments that ‘language and literature’ were still considered to be ‘white’: this false and pernicious conceptualisation, he continues, still undergirded the vision of many of those who hypocritically claimed ‘that art is universal’ but also ‘divide[d] writers racially’.132 Bearden, who co-organised a number of exhibitions of (and was very encouraging to) younger or less famous African American painters, also collaborated for over fifteen years with Harry Henderson, as I have suggested, to prepare a history of African American art meant as a corrective to what Henderson himself called ‘a great blind spot in American art history, one that is colorsensitive, not color-blind’.133 Bearden and Henderson did not promote separatism and insisted that their book did not only contain ‘the history of African-American artists, but [provided] the basis for a better understanding of all art’ and would serve as ‘a stimulating challenge to American art historians to re-evaluate the participation and contributions to [American]

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culture of African-American artists’.134 Similarly, in ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’, one of those sections of American, without America which were eventually published, Walcott openly denounces conservative and racist forces which prevented African Americans from being recognised for their contributions to the larger American culture, but his words also contain a warning for the African American community not to accept or promote a segregationist agenda predicated on the notion of a ‘Black’ and separate culture which, he believed, was being deployed in order to maintain the fantasy of a mainstream America unaffected by the ‘Black’ presence. Walcott’s interest in the African American experience at this stage can be explained by the fact that, in the late 1960s to early 1970s, new opportunities in the United States, personal circumstances and serious difficulties regarding the management of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop had made him entertain more seriously the possibility to work more, or even reside, in the United States. As he puts it in one of the unpublished parts of the manuscript, American, without America was meant to deal with precisely ‘the seduction and inevitability of becoming an American, and American’: it ‘would end on the edge of decision … would itself be a decision. Or it should clarify that choice’ (AWA). Since ‘American’ here has to be understood not in continental terms but, more narrowly, as a resident or citizen of the United States, it is important to remember that for Walcott deciding to leave the Caribbean behind and embrace the United States was a very difficult choice which also involved confronting and working through both personal and collective ‘baggage’. As the notebooks for Another Life make abundantly clear, in fact, St Lucia’s An tan Méwitjen – what Walcott polemically calls the American ‘Occupation’ of his island during the Second World War (ALms1, 56) – had contributed to create the combination of deep-seated fear and seduction that Walcott was still wrestling with in the 1970s. During his long visit to New York in 1958, he had been terrified of ‘losing [his] identity’ as a West Indian because he knew that for many West Indian migrants relocation in the United States had reinforced the ‘feeling of utter anonymity’ they might have previously felt as ‘islanders’: ‘compare anonymities’, he writes in American, without America, ‘the anonymity of the castaway, the anonymity of the human statistics in cities’ (AWA). ‘You beg[a]n to learn’, Walcott writes addressing his younger self in recollection, ‘that to become [American] you ha[d] to dissolve’ (AWA). Walcott was also alert to and worried about the fact that, as a Black man in the United States, his status would be that of a ‘secondary soul’135 or, as he puts it almost twenty years later, ‘an afterthought of the State’ (AT114). In ‘The Glory Trumpeter’, one of the poems included in The Castaway (1965), Walcott refers to the ‘sallow faces’ of West Indians migrants who, back in St Lucia, recounted what it meant to be a ‘negro in America’, at the same time in which he celebrates the bravura of Eddie, the titular Black trumpeter he had heard playing in a nightclub in the United States, admiring the musician’s ability to give a voice

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to the suffering and endurance of ‘all whom race and exile ha[d] defeated’ (CA25, 26). The An tan Méwitjen, however, had also reminded colonial St Lucians that they belonged to the ‘Americas’, not only to the British Empire, and Walcott reasserts that sense of continental belonging when he declares, in ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’, that he and his people ‘were American even while [they] were British, if only in the geographical sense’.136 Significantly, Walcott was provocatively and ironically echoing Robert Frost’s famous opening line in ‘The Gift Outright’ (‘The land was ours before we were the land’s’), a poem which, as Walcott observes elsewhere, expresses ‘the calm reassurance of American Destiny’ and contains no references to ‘slavery … colonization of Native Americans … the dispossession of others that this destiny demanded’.137 In American, without America, however, the offspring of St Lucian women and US soldiers who grew up fatherless after the army left, are called ‘half-American’ (AWA), a term which is nonsensical if one invokes what Walcott calls ‘the geographical sense’, but which reminds one of the ‘almost but not quite’ status of colonial subjects, shedding further light on the way in which Walcott viewed the overall dynamics of Caribbean-US relations. In ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’, in fact, Walcott returns to, and complicates, the notion of a West Indian ‘geographical birth-right’ to an American identity: ‘now that the shadow of the British Empire has passed through and over us in the Caribbean, we ask ourselves if, in the spiritual or cultural sense, we must become American’ (CCM3). Walcott’s ‘becoming American’ in ‘the spiritual or cultural sense’ is posited here as a deliberate choice which seems to be imposed on him and all West Indians (‘we must’) by a neo-colonial power which ‘because of its size threatens an eclipse of identity’ (CCM3). In the unpublished portions of American, without America, Walcott’s remark that ‘America occupies and does not adapt, it imposes’ is an observation he obviously felt pertinent as far as territorial but also psychological, cultural and spiritual domination were concerned (AWA). ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’ highlights the contribution made by West Indians to American society and, despite the fact that he would not necessarily have fully subscribed to their political vision, Walcott pays homage to Marcus Garvey, George Padmore or Stokely Carmichael as energisers of ‘American’ culture (CCM4). Notably, American without America eventually focused on Walcott’s own personal trajectory but, at least initially, he was keen to explore a collective West Indian diasporic experience: he planned to put, in fact, ‘the migrants and remittance men’ at the core of his project and declares that his aim was to focus on ‘the exodus of migrant West Indians … to the cane fields, farm workers’, ‘the continuing queues at Embassy visa offices’, ‘perhaps a few taped interviews with a cross-section of emigrants. Some statistics. Facts and causes. The large West Indian population in Brooklyn’, ‘[i]mmigration laws, prejudice, the determination to succeed despite prejudices. The old America. What was Harlem?’ (AWA).

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Harlem, to Walcott, was primarily a private memory of something he had never seen first-hand, namely the world of his ‘elegant’ and generous (immigrant) aunt who lived in Edgecombe Avenue, sent the family ‘clothes’ and ‘comics from the papers’ when he and his brother were children, and of whom his mother was very proud: he was shocked when, in the 1970s, he saw a television programme that mentioned precisely Edgecombe Avenue in relation to ‘the decline of the black Harlem elegance of the twenties’ (AWA). One of the many West Indians who moved to Harlem in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Auntie Anna was one of the channels through which Walcott found out about the ‘horror stories of [his] youth. Lynching, humiliations’ (AWA), and it contributed to his awareness that West Indian emigration to the United States had a long history and different faces: if many had moved to the United States to work as farm labourers in tobacco, cane and vegetable farms or as part of organised labour schemes, through his aunt and other relatives he also knew of ‘literate [,] skilled’ and ‘professionals or white-collar’ West Indian workers.138 The ambitions of these ‘thrifty’ migrants ‘with strong business acumen’ and keen to climb ‘the socioeconomic ladder’139 caused some friction between them and the Blacks who had been part of the United States from the time of slavery and, in American, without America, Walcott laments that, in New York, the West Indians ‘were or are still called … “black Jews”’ (AWA). It is not unlikely, therefore, that also a deep-seated anxiety regarding these prejudices contributed to his initial inability to fully connect with the African American experience. Ultimately, however, in ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’, it seems that Walcott finally found a way to reconcile himself with ‘becoming American’ by invoking a shared history and experience: I can accept my dependence on America as a professional writer … because we share this part of the world, and have shared it for centuries now, even as conqueror and victim, as exploiter and exploited. What has happened here has happened to us. In other words that shadow is less malevolent than it appears, and we can absorb it because we know that America is black. (CCM3–4)

He then continues by asserting and celebrating the crucial role of ‘Black’ culture in mainstream American culture: America is black … so much of its labor, its speech, its music, its very style of living is generated by what is now cunningly and carefully isolated as “black” culture … what is most original in [America] has come out of its ghettos, its river-cultures, its plantations. (CCM4)

It is noteworthy, given his interest in the visual arts, that in ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’ Walcott acknowledges the impact of ‘Black’ culture on American speech, music and, more generally, ‘its very style of living’ (CCM4), but does not mention the contribution of visual artists even if, by then, he and

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Bearden had already become good friends. Walcott was more than willing to rectify this omission almost twenty years later, when he embarked on Walker, an opera libretto/play which was to be ‘completely American [that is, related to the United States] in history and setting’.140 In Walker, in fact, Walcott discusses race relations in the United States, migration, African American disenfranchisement, but also self-assertion, self-determination and self-representation, since he chooses Bearden, who had died in 1988, as a sort of spiritual guide, and mobilises a complex net of African American visual references. Walcott believed that Bearden had not been appreciated as he deserved by the US art world because he ‘was genuinely erudite’ and deeply regretted the patronising attitude with which artists like Jacob Lawrence or Horace Pippin were treated and strategically reconfigured: ‘Lawrence is fantastic’ because it shows Black people ‘trying to get to … material heaven’, and Pippin is considered a Black painter who ‘really couldn’t paint very well’ but had the ‘charm’ and ‘quality of the primitive’.141 Unsurprisingly, therefore, Walcott did not only dedicate Walker to Bearden: his name is evoked, recurrently, by the Chorus of the play, in conjunction with those of fellow artists Lawrence and Pippin to foreground the existence of the African American visual tradition championed by Bearden and Henderson, a tradition which had been routinely marginalised, unrecognised or patronised in American art history or, in Walcott’s words, ‘absurd[ly]’ misrepresented by ‘an empire pronouncing its benediction on the very fucking suffering it caused’.142 Walker was commissioned in the early 1990s by the project director of the Boston Athenaeum Donald Kelley who had worked with Walcott on a production of The Last Carnival a few years earlier and was keen to produce an opera on Boston abolitionists. The opera premiered at the Athenaeum in 1993 and, eight years later, in 2001, Walcott revised the libretto and turned it into a play for the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre which was published the following year. The play is named after the nineteenth-century abolitionist David Walker, a free Black born in 1796 in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the author of the incendiary Appeal In Four Articles; Together With A Preamble, To The Coloured Citizens of the World, But In Particular and Very Expressly, To Those of the United States of America in which he decried the unchristian treatment suffered by Blacks, urged them to refuse to submit to slavery, and incited them to resort to violence in order to assert their rights and conquer freedom. Walker published three editions of the Appeal in Boston between the end of 1929 and spring 1930 and Walcott’s Walker takes place in Boston on Thanksgiving Day, collapsing the time of the third publication of the appeal with Walker’s death. Walker moved to Boston in 1825, where he had a used-clothing business, became a close friend of the Methodist antislavery minister Samuel Snowden, and the principal agent for Freedom’s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States.143 On 6 August 1830, Walker died, most likely of consumption, the same disease which had taken the life of his daughter only a few days earlier and was

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rampant in Boston at the time. However, since there were also rumours that he had been the victim of a Southern conspiracy and that he was killed (perhaps poisoned) by a secret agent,144 Walcott decided to exploit these rumours for dramatic purposes. In the play, Walker is flanked by historical figures like his wife Eliza and the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who, unlike Snowden who is only briefly mentioned, apparently never met David Walker in real life. The text of the Appeal Walcott had used, however, Walker’s Appeal and Garnet’s Address to the United States of America, was a reprint from a copy in Howard University’s collection which used to belong to Garrison himself, a fact that might have inspired Walcott to imagine a friendship between the two.145 Fictional characters in Walcott’s play include the Black traitor Barbados, the Irish maid Katherine who works for the Walkers, and the elusive malevolent Figure, representing White Supremacist forces troubled by Walker’s call to arms and willing to put a stop to it. From Katz’s introduction to Walker’s Appeal and Garnet’s Address to the United States of America, Walcott learnt that the slaveholding states of the South reacted promptly to the publication of Walker’s Appeal: more stringent laws were passed in order to prevent Black people from learning how to read and write, the Mayor of Boston was urged to arrest Walker by the Mayor of Savannah, and a reward of ten thousand dollars was offered to anyone who would deliver Walker alive to the South, reduced to one thousand dollars for a dead Walker.146 Walcott capitalises and elaborates on this information: according to Walcott’s plot, the West Indian ‘slave’ Barbados had agreed with the Figure to kill Walker in exchange for ten thousand dollars to buy his freedom but, being illiterate, he had not been able to read the contract he was tricked into signing and discovered far too late that he was entitled only to one thousand dollars for a ‘dead’ Walker while the sum of ten thousand was (allegedly) for capturing him alive. It is only when Barbados poisons Walker and claims his reward from the Figure that he realises that he was duped: since he begs and complains, in order to avoid unnecessary trouble the Figure shoots Barbados and fires at the moribund Walker to finish him off. It was entirely Walcott’s decision to focus on the little-known figure of Walker: Kelley, Joan Bragen (the Athenaeum’s development director), Monica Fairbairn and Marilyn Richardson (who had prepared an exhibition on Boston abolitionists for the Museum of Afro-American History) had provided a lot of material on many possible candidates on whom he could focus his work.147 Given Walcott’s views on revolutionary and racial violence, the insurrectionist Walker might seem an unlikely choice, but the opening statement of Katz’s introduction to the Appeal might have attracted Walcott’s attention, since the nineteenth-century abolitionist is compared to Stokely Carmichael,148 one of those West Indian energisers of American culture Walcott had mentioned in ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’(CCM4). Arguably, however, there are other traits of Walker that

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might have resonated with Walcott: for example, Walker preceded Frederick Douglass in using the Haitian Revolution as a springboard to exhort African Americans not to waver in their resolve to emancipate themselves, thus validating the contribution of the Caribbean experience to the fight for emancipation.149 A substantial part of the Appeal, moreover, is devoted to Walker’s rejection of the racist ideology, premises and aims of the American Colonization Society which urged free American Blacks to return to Africa. Addressing his brothers, Walker proclaims, over and over again, that America was their country – in fact, he added, ‘even more our country than the whites’ since ‘we have enriched it with our blood and tears’ (emphasis in the text)150 – and painstakingly tries to persuade them that they should stay and fight for their rights. Walker’s commitment to remain and contribute to shape America must have struck a chord with Walcott who never believed that a ‘return’ to Africa was a viable or desirable solution for West Indians (or African Americans for that matter) and pressed them instead to anchor themselves in the New World. In his Appeal, Walker does not only address the ‘Coloured’ community but makes his vision manifest to whites, urging them to renounce prejudice, dehumanising practices, the idea of shipping ‘Coloured’ people to Africa, and to fully participate, instead, in the creation of a better communal future: Throw away your fears and prejudices then, and enlighten us and treat us like men, and we will like you more than we do now hate you and tell us now no more about colonization, for America is as much our country, as it is yours. Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together. For we are not like you, hard hearted, unmerciful, and unforgiving. (WAP73)

‘What a happy country this will be’, Walker continues, ‘if the whites will listen … the whole of the past will be sunk into oblivion, and we yet, under God, will become a united and happy people. The whites may say it is impossible’, Walker menacingly and defiantly adds, ‘but remember that nothing is impossible with God’ (WAP73). God is constantly invoked and referred to by Walker who enlists his support for the emancipation cause and presents him, ultimately, as the one who will punish white Americans if they continue to refuse to treat Black people as humans: ‘though they may for a little while escape, God will yet weigh them in a balance, and … he will give them wretchedness to their very heart’s content’ (WAP73). In his idiosyncratic way, therefore, Walker encapsulated well the detribalised African who, as Walcott puts it, ‘converted himself’ rather than being converted by the master and ‘captured from the captor … his God’ (MH47). Walker’s God, in fact, is neither the ‘big white man’ and ‘big fish eating small ones’ of Dream on Monkey Mountain and the Sea at Dauphin, nor the ‘white’ God in Henri Christophe151 but rather a (vengeful and angry) version of St. Omer’s ‘Black’ God, ready and keen to champion the cause of the disenfranchised.

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Both Walker’s deep sense of alienation, isolation and marginalisation – he begins his Appeal by saying ‘we Coloured People of these United States, are the most wretched, degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived’ (WAP3) – and his endurance and capacity to embody hope in the face of despair, resonate with Walcott’s long and complex articulation of his own vision of a Crusoe figure, a creative shape-shifter who, apart from being (amongst others) Adam, Proteus or Odysseus, is a Friday who was also ‘a mixture of [Crusoe’s and Friday’s] imagined progeny’ (FC39), and who had appropriated both Crusoe’s God and his ability to transform himself from a ‘symbol of isolation and breakdown’ to a symbol of the ‘triumph of the will’ (FC40). ‘For I believe’, Walker declared, that ‘it is the will of the Lord that our greatest happiness shall consist in working for the salvation of our whole body. When this is accomplished’, he continued a burst of glory will shine upon you, which will indeed astonish you and the world. Do any of you say this never will be done? I assure you that God will accomplish it – if nothing else will answer, he will hurl tyrants and devils into atoms and make way for his people. But O my brethren! I say unto you again, you must go to work and prepare the way of the Lord. (WAP32)

Crucially, Walcott’s Crusoe figure, which, he admits, might be one that readers are not likely to ‘recognize’ or might even be willing to dismiss as ‘imagination and distortion’ (FC35, 38), derives less from Defoe’s novel than from the lasting impact of two images he was exposed to when he was young. The first image in question was a ‘past despair’ unattributed painting of Robinson Crusoe which is described as ‘dull, smouldering red, more brown than really red’, and whose dullness, perhaps, facilitated Walcott’s imaginative (re)creation of his own version of Crusoe. The second painting which deeply inflected Walcott’s reading of Crusoe as a symbol of hope in despair and of the force of will power, was George Frederic Watts’s ‘mournful symbol of “Hope”’ (FC37). Walcott devotes to Watts’s Hope only a couple of lines where he declares that he was mainly struck by the apparent discrepancy between the image and the title: ‘She sat, blindly playing her lyre, sidesaddle on the turning globe. To me she was the embodiment of “despair” … I remember … its damp grayness, like wet gravecloths’ (FC37). Watts painted different versions of Hope, the most famous of which (1886) is the one in Tate Britain where one can spot a tiny star at the top of the picture which conveys an ambiguous note of optimism – Walcott, who does not mention the star, might have missed it or might have seen an alternative reproduction. In all the versions, however, the titular Hope is always intent on making music with the one cord left on her lyre, implicitly showing that hope and despair are closer than one might expect: according to Watts himself, in fact, ‘Hope need not mean expectancy [but] the music which can come from the remaining chord.’152 Aptly, Watts’s Hope undergirds Walcott’s characterisation of

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Walker: when, capitalising on the fact that his first name is David, Walcott’s protagonist identifies himself as ‘David the harp-player’, his wife is very quick to point out that he is really a harp player whose harp ‘got only one string / and who got to keep harping, harping / that what ain’t right is wrong’ (W18). Like the Biblical David – but also like Walcott’s Ti-Jean153 – Walcott’s Walker is a ‘giant-slayer’ (W18) keen, as his historical counterpart, to take his vision to its limit: ‘I ask you’, wrote Walker in the Appeal addressing Black people at the receiving end of white oppression, ‘had you not rather be killed than to be a slave to a tyrant, who takes the life of your mother, wife, and dear little children? … believe this, that it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty’ (WAP28). These lines from the Appeal appear almost verbatim in the play where Walcott’s Walker declares: ‘The one answer is in slaughter’, the slaughter ‘of white people, as easy as / you drink a glass of water’; he then adds, ‘That’s what God understands, / … that’s what all oppressors / respect; mutual violence’ (W57). Overall, however, the play does not depict Walker as a bloodthirsty and ruthless murderer but as an individual who seems to have chosen the short cut and simplification of essentialism and racial hatred out of frustration with the slow pace at which the Boston abolitionists were proceeding. In an exchange with the terrified Katherine, who asks him if his plan to kill ‘everything that is white’ includes her, he replies that his real targets are not people like her but ‘our oppressors’ (W56–7, emphasis mine). Here the pronoun ‘our’ seems to include the white maid amongst the disenfranchised: ‘we’ll always be friends’ (W57), he concludes, and he admits that her innocence – not his wife’s protestations or Garrison’s practical argument for prudence – might undermine his resolve to print the Appeal. That Walcott’s protagonist is not a ruthless killer is also confirmed by the fact that Walker decides to ignore rather than confront the threatening (white) Figure who begins to hover menacingly around his home and does not kill Garrison in cold blood when he is given the opportunity to do so (W45). In a bitterly ironic turn, which also allows Walcott to expose his dissatisfaction with the notion of a revolution based on race, which, to him, was inevitably bound to become ‘internecine’,154 Walker brings about his own downfall when he decides to trust his ‘brother’ Barbados simply on the basis of their shared race (W100).155 If the Victorian painter Watts is only obliquely alluded to in the play, the twentieth-century African American artists Bearden, Lawrence and Pippin are explicitly and repeatedly mentioned and celebrated. In Scene One, when Eliza and Walker re-enact their departure from North Carolina and its ‘fields of snowy cotton’ in order to move to the ‘city upon a hill’ of Boston (W26–7), the three artists are evoked for the first time by the Chorus: ‘Romare Bearden, bear our burden, / Horace Pippin, paint our pain, / Keep our innocence, Jacob Lawrence / Deep in the American grain’ (W26, italics in the text). Visual/pictorial and literary references are intermingled since one can also

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hear, in the last line, the echo of In the American Grain by William Carlos Williams. In this book, Williams insists on the necessity for Americans to be aware of their history and he revisits it through a number of central heroes, from Red Eric to Abraham Lincoln. In the chapter entitled ‘The Advent of Slaves’ (which, however, has no real central hero), Williams dismisses the Middle Passage, indirectly absolving white America from any responsibility to do with slavery. ‘Nobody’ and ‘Nothing’ are the key words with which Williams describes the African American experience which he reduces to ‘… dancing, singing with the wild abandon of being close, closer, closest together; waggin’, wavin’, weavin’, shakin’; or being alone, in a cabin, at night, in the stillness, in the moonlight – being nothin’ – with gravity, with tenderness’.156 In this context, Walcott’s decision to reiterate the names of Bearden, Lawrence, Pippin and, later, of Frederick Douglass, and to name his play after its protagonist, can be read as an (à la Bearden) attempt to counter anonymisation, annihilation, reductive and homogenising stereotypical representations, and to highlight that the (self)inscription of these figures in American history had taken place, as it were, against the American grain. Artists, writers and activists like Bearden, Lawrence, Pippin, Walker and Douglass, Walcott suggests, are ‘deep in the American grain’ because they are part of it, have been for a long time, and have had a profound impact on it; at the same time, regrettably, they are also ‘deep [down] in the American grain’, as their presence and contribution are still occluded and in need of being spotlighted (W26, 27, italics in the text). The fact that Bearden, Lawrence and Pippin are repeatedly mentioned, and that stage directions indicate that the play should include projections of works by the three artists, reveal that this play is concerned with art and art history and, more broadly, with the representation and self-representation of African American life, as much as it is concerned with the life of David Walker. One of the recurring images in the play, in fact, is that of a mule and/or a Black man ploughing the land and, in one of Walker’s songs, the Black man is in fact as ‘tired as a mule that’s harnessed to a plough’ (W25, italics in the text). The image elicited here is the iconic Thomas Hart Benton’s Ploughing It Under (1934) (Fig. 4.5), where, in its oil on canvas version, a Black man linked to his plough is turning the very same Southern ‘red’ soil that, in the play, Walker’s wife Eliza professes to deeply miss (W20–1). Benton’s title refers to the fact that in 1933, in order to raise farm prices, the government had decided to cut back on the production of goods and paid for millions of acres of cotton to be ploughed under because spring crops had already been planted. According to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Ploughing It Under was conceived as a ‘political statement about the often-selective rewards of New Deal government policies’.157 One of the prominent American muralists of the time, Benton was a Craven favourite but Ploughing It Under was not amongst the works included in A Treasury; it was instead one of the three works selected by Locke for

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Figure 4.5  Ploughing It Under, 1934, reworked 1964, Thomas Hart Benton, oil on canvas, 20 1/4 × 24 1/4 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2006.73. Photography by Edward C. Robison III. © 2021 T. H. and R. P. Benton Trusts/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2021.

The Negro in Art where the critic also praised Benton for ‘revealing [“Negro material”] as unique and typical American subject matter’.158 In his 1939 entry for Benton, Craven did not focus on his depiction of Black people,159 but in the 1958 revised edition of A Treasury, using Roasting Ears (1938–9) and Aaron (1943) as primary exemplifications, he echoed Locke’s assessment and asserted that Benton portrayed African Americans ‘truthfully – not with propaganda or sentimentality but with sympathy, insight, and humour’.160 Benton, however, was not universally popular amongst African American painters or American painters in general and his representations of Blacks were not unanimously appreciated. His rejection of all ‘foreign influences’ alienated those who, like Stuart Davis, were interested in abstract art161 but Davis also attacked Benton for his ‘regional jingoism and racial chauvinism’, for his caricatures ‘of barefoot shuffling negroes’.162 In line with Davis’s criticism, others have argued that Ploughing It Under, far from being a hopeful image, presents the Black man as stereotypically and inextricably linked to the land, perpetually identified with hard labour, and fully at the mercy of external forces.163 In Walcott’s play, in the combination of man, mule and plough, Walker too sees (or foresees) a problematic symbol for Black

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submission. Those who do not rebel against the status quo, he declares, are mules ‘longing for [their] plough’ (W21). Walker’s anachronistic dismissal of those foolish enough to believe ‘that some Yankee would soon come along and give each of them forty acres and a mule’ (W82, italics in the text), connects the image, unmistakably, to the (unkept) promise that was made in 1865 to newly freed African Americans who were told they would be given the land from plantations confiscated during the Civil War as compensation for unpaid labour during slavery as well as a mule to help them work the land. Walker’s insistence that the only way to achieve emancipation for African Americans was to turn themselves ‘loose from the plough’ (W47) calls for both self-determination and the revisitation of damaging stereotypes in a way that resonates with Bearden’s work. Incidentally, in 1946, while discussing the predicament of Black people in the Southern states, Bearden observed that, during the ‘Reconstruction’, ‘forgotten by the majority of Northerners, whose previous concerns over [slavery] had been merely a disguise for their political and social machinations … the Negro stayed on the land with his mule, mortgaged to the vicious system of tenant farming’ while ‘the full energies of the North were directed toward growing industrialization and westward expansion’. Since, he continues, ‘it is a privilege of the oppressor to depict the oppressed … the picture of the Negro that appealed to the South was that of a shiftless, dim-witted buffoon’.164 Notably, almost twenty years after he first conceived of Walker as an opera, Walcott revisited – in order to reclaim it – the image of Black labourer, mule and plough, as well as the phrase ‘forty acres and a mule’, in a poem dedicated to Barack Obama. In line with the Malraux-inspired (and Beardenrevered) tenet that ‘art is made from other art’165 and the French critic’s belief that, although ‘linked up with a past, creative art is given its direction from the future’,166 Walcott’s poem begins with ‘an emblem, an engraving— / a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls’.167 When Walcott read his ‘Forty Acres’ at the 2009 Caribbean American Book & Art Fair, he identified Benton’s work as a source. Ploughing It Under is not just an oil painting but also a lithograph, but neither of these works actually includes crows, owls, or the ‘scarecrow stamping with rage’ mentioned in the poem.168 Recasting Benton’s image as an ‘impossible prophecy’, Walcott’s poem instructs us to view the Black labourer as a prefiguration of the new president as the furrows he ploughs become a crowd dividing in order to let him pass (WE77). These furrows, in Walcott’s mind, also signify the stripes of the American flag,169 a loaded symbolic image, particularly after Jasper Johns’s White Flag (1955) – which can be interpreted as a visual reminder of the discrepancy between the American Dream and the racist reality of the United States – or the momentous 1970 group exhibition the People’s Flag Show, organised by the African American artist Faith Ringgold at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, which featured the work of more than 200 artists. As the Black

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labourer/president in Walcott’s poem inscribes himself ‘deep’ in the American grain, his passage redefines the nation as well as its ultimate symbol; at the same time, it revisits the disabling image of forty acres and a mule which always signposts the unfinished business of the Civil War. When Obama became President of the United States, the majority of African Americans supported him and Walcott’s poem studiously ignores the fact that Obama was not a descendant of Africans brought to the New World at the time of slavery (like Walcott himself) but the son of an African migrant and a white mother. Walcott’s transformation and reappropriation of a well-known ‘emblem’ revisited from the contingency of the present, in fact, was primarily animated by the desire to bring together all those of African descent born or residing in both the United States and the Caribbean in order to celebrate what was considered to be a significant presidential election. As we have seen, in Walker, Bearden, Lawrence and Pippin are invited to bear the burden, paint the pain and keep the innocence of African Americans. Each of the lines in which their names appear seems to be governed by alliteration and (eye)rhyme rather than by the exclusive association of one artist with a specific action since, to a certain extent, they all bore the burden and painted the pain and innocence of African Americans. Stage directions also indicate that the Chorus’s lines should be accompanied by ‘projections: Bearden, Pippin, Lawrence’ (W26, italics in the text) but they do not specify what kind of ‘projections’ directors are supposed to pick from the three artists’ artwork, leaving them free to make their own selection. When the play was performed for the Boston Playwrights’ in November 2001, directed by Wesley Savick with a set designed by Richard Chambers, ‘projections’ from the artists’ works were not part of the production and Walcott never insisted on their inclusion,170 presumably because at that point, as we will see, he was keen for the play to emphasise a different aspect, one which had less to do with art history and more with their contemporary city of Boston’s response to slavery and racism. In the 2001 production, in fact, the voice and ideas of the little-known David Walker were brought to the fore through a selection of type-scripted lines from the Appeal ‘cut and pasted’ on the white walls of the set to be visible to the audience: overall, these lines – some of which are rather provocative questions – make for uncomfortable reading as they denounce the hypocrisy of a Christian society which tolerated slavery and racism, celebrate the unacknowledged contribution of enslaved and Black people to the construction of America, condemn the exploitation of the Blacks for the production of wealth and privileges enjoyed by the whites, and also promise insurrectionist violence and divine retribution.171 Arguably, the modality of the inclusion of the lines from the Appeal into the 2001 set is not only visually reminiscent of Walcott’s habit to glue typescripts or reproductions of others’ works on the pages of his notebooks but is also a collagist practice which constitutes an indirect homage to Bearden who ‘[painted] with scissors’172 and who, together with Pippin and Lawrence, is one of the

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painters whose artwork Walcott’s play celebrates in different (implicit and explicit) ways. The choice of the word ‘projections’ in the stage directions (W26), in fact, gestures decisively towards Bearden’s own 1964 Projections173 which were deeply influenced by Malraux’s ideas. As anticipated, however, Bearden transgressed the boundaries of Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire because, in his simultaneous articulation of art-historical and social historical concerns, he juxtaposed cut-outs from art-historical reproductions and contemporary magazines, bringing artistic and popular images together, as he reworked, re-appropriating them, the spaces and compositional structure of paintings from the past.174 Overall, the Projections documented Bearden’s childhood memories of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and his migration to Pittsburgh and Harlem: as Gail Gelburd explains, ‘in these memories he would find metaphors, myths and rituals to explain the social and political rituals of the day’.175 In Prevalence of Ritual: Conjur Woman, for example, Bearden represented an important figure in the African American communities of the South – but also of Pittsburgh and Harlem – that he intimately knew. A conjur woman, he explained, ‘was called to provide herbs to cure various illnesses and to be consulted regarding vexing personal and family problems. Much of her knowledge had been passed on through the generations from an African past, although a great deal was learned from the American Indians.’176 In Bearden’s collage, the format in which the conjur woman is presented is modelled on Byzantine Madonnas, but her eyes are cut-outs of cat’s eyes while Prevalence of Ritual: Conjur Woman as an Angel is a reworking of traditional Renaissance Annunciations where the bull at the top of the collage is Bearden’s reappropriation of an ox from Bill Brandt’s 1947 photograph Loch Slapin, Isle of Skye.177 The bull is a traditional symbol of potency but Bearden ensures that, in his collage, it is the conjur woman who comes across as the source of power. Bearden represented conjur women repeatedly, evidently attracted to this compelling figure from the margins and on the margins, who, like an artist, is also a living repository for the history and the power of her (disenfranchised) people; as Gelburd has pointed out, the conjur woman is ‘Bearden’s alter ego, a mentor, a hero/heroine, a David confronting Goliath’,178 an observation that, incidentally, makes this figure chime, on a metaphorical level, with Walcott’s Walker and many of his other rebels. In another projection, Mysteries, Bearden engages directly with the alleged ‘invisibility’ of African Americans in mainstream American society (or ‘in the American grain’, as Walcott puts it in Walker), challenging the notion of an African American identity constructed either as ‘absence’ or as too remote, unknowable and different to be comprehended; notably, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, a good friend of Bearden’s, had been published twelve years earlier.179 As Bearden’s Black figures – particularly their faces and eyes – ­dominate the collage and their own space, they direct their gaze,

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confrontationally, to the viewers, asserting their presence and demanding recognition.180 The ‘burden’ that the Chorus in Walcott’s Walker asks Bearden ‘to bear’ for his community, therefore, seems to be the joint burden(s) of erasure and misrepresentation that the artist set out to challenge through his reappropriations and that Walcott was to address in 2010 with ‘Forty Acres and a Mule’. Conspicuously, in an unpublished version of the play, Bearden’s ‘burden’ is explicitly identified with ‘the plough’ (Wms). In 1964, the year in which he created his Projections, Bearden explained that his ‘new work [came] out of a response and need to redefine the image of man in terms of the Negro experience [he] kn[e]w best’:181 thirty years later, Glazer conceded that ‘Bearden’s critique of the canon’ might have sounded ‘insufficient’ and that he did not question enough ‘the transcendent significance of artistic style’ but, at the same time, he argued that one should not underestimate the liberating potential of Bearden’s revision of cultural heritage, a potential Walcott was quick to appreciate and make the most of in his own work.182 The association between Pippin and pain presumably capitalises on both alliteration and Pippin’s personal history as a poor Black and disabled man. Born in 1888 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Pippin moved very soon to Goshen, New York, with his mother. His talent was evident from a very early age but, due to financial restrictions, he never had the opportunity to study art and, initially, drawing was just a private occupation which gave him a lot of joy while he went ‘from job to job’, unloading coal, cutting wood, clearing fields, working in a feed store or as a porter in a hotel.183 Pippin kept drawing even when he was sent to the front in France during the First World War but when he was hit by a bullet in his right shoulder it seemed that he would never be able to continue to draw or paint. At the end of the war, returning Black soldiers who, like Pippin, had bravely fought for their country, did not feel their effort was rewarded by the recognition of their full rights as citizens: as race riots took place in major cities, Pippin too felt a deep sense of alienation. After finding a way to support his right arm by resting it on his knee or by supporting it at the wrist with his left hand, however, he began to produce works inspired by the African American experience which caught the attention of art critics and gallerists: as a result, in his late fifties, Pippin began a new life as a painter and, through constant exercise, he gained more strength and mobility in his injured arm.184 The untrained Pippin became one of ‘America’s great masters of colour and design’: he painted with indifference to perspective, and his realism, as Holger Cahill put it in 1937, was not limited to what he saw but included also what he knew and what he felt.185 One of Pippin’s last paintings, Man on a Bench (1946), epitomises not only Pippin’s personal pain (at that point, he had personal troubles and had lost the sense of peace a stable family life had always given him) but also the loneliness, isolation, marginalisation and despair suffered by many in the African American community and, in Walcott’s play, by Walker himself. Walker’s determination to publish the

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Appeal, in fact, alienates him from his wife and his former friend Garrison, both of whom urge him to take a more prudent route. In the play, Pippin is evoked in different ways: in the same scene where the three African American painters are named, for example, Pippin’s Cabin in the Cotton series (mid1930s to 1944) provides an excellent visual counterpart to Eliza’s longing to turn Boston’s snow into ‘Carolina cotton’ due to the paintings’ nostalgic aura and fluffy cotton fields that occupy a notable part of the backgrounds (W24). These four well-known paintings by Pippin represent life in the South in remarkable detail despite the fact that Pippin had to rely on stories that his mother and other relatives had told him rather than on personal experience: in other words, in an imaginary trajectory that follows the same direction of Eliza’s desire, Pippin had been able to visually ‘turn’ the Northern snow he knew, and depicted in works like Maple Sugar Season (1941), The Getaway (1939), Country Doctor (1935) or The Trapper Returning Home (Snow Scene) (1941), into Southern cotton. The anachronistic insertion of Bearden, Pippin and Lawrence in a play set in 1830 and in a scene in which Walker and his wife re-enact their journey from the South to Boston, allows Walcott to play with temporality. This particular journey in Walker’s life is Walcott’s (re)creation, but the historical Walker does begin his Appeal by foregrounding his experience as a migrant: ‘Having travelled over a considerable portion of these United States’, in fact, is his opening sentence (WAP3). Walker fails to clearly specify where he went: historians consider it possible that, before moving to Boston in 1825, he might have been to Georgia, Alabama and New Orleans; they think that it is very likely that he then headed north to Philadelphia (a centre for Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church that Walker highly respected), New York or Baltimore which had important Black communities.186 By simplifying Walker’s trajectory into a direct journey from North Carolina to the city ‘[up]on a hill’ of Boston (W26), Walcott also gestures towards the migration of the Pilgrim Fathers, underlining that the whole American experience has migration at its core,187 a point reinforced by the inclusion of an Irish and a West Indian character in the plot. Walcott’s Walker and Eliza’s south-to-north trajectory was of course also followed by thousands of fugitive slaves who headed north in search for freedom, but the choir’s invocation of Jacob Lawrence invites the audience to think about the mass migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North which took place between 1900 and 1930, and in which both Lawrence and Bearden had been involved. One of Lawrence’s best-known works is in fact The Migration Series where, in what has been called ‘expressive cubism’ or ‘figural modernism’,188 he illustrated this mass exodus with sixty portable panels of identical size, painted with tempera on masonite which he numbered, sequenced, and for which he also provided captions. Born in Atlantic City in 1917 – where his father, who had moved from North Carolina in search of a better life, had married Lawrence’s mother and

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started a family – Lawrence moved to Pennsylvania as a child and, after his parents’ divorce, to Philadelphia and, later, to Harlem. In Harlem, where he lived with his mother and siblings, Lawrence benefited from the support of the Utopia Neighborhood Center and began creating Harlem street scenes inside cardboard shipping cartons.189 After attending the Work Progress Administration (WPA) art centre at 306 West 141st Street directed by Augusta Savage, Lawrence broadened his knowledge of African and African American history via discussions with scholars like Charles Seifert and Charles Alston and, in the late 1930s, he joined Bearden and McKay –whose Home to Harlem had just become a best-seller – in 33 West 125th Street. Lawrence’s works are characterised by a keen interest to pictorialise and narrativise the history and experience of his community: had he been born a generation earlier he might have become a muralist like Rivera, but when he set out to research and paint the Migration series, which was completed in 1941, he was deemed, as he put it, ‘too young for a wall’,190 and therefore not entrusted with one of the many commissioned murals produced during the Depression by WPA artists. Lawrence’s The Migration Series191 begins and ends in a railway station and, as a whole, it identifies, explores and paints the causes and consequences of the African American migration he had experienced and witnessed. Lawrence begins by highlighting how, for Black people, the South was still a land of ‘bondage’ – as Walker would have put it – despite the abolition of slavery which had occurred thirty-five years after Walker’s death and more than seventy years before Lawrence’s work (panel 21). Lawrence calls ­attention to the Southern Blacks’ extreme poverty, their ruthless exploitation, and the racist discrimination and oppression they constantly suffered. Yet, whilst highlighting the advantages that the migrants enjoyed in the North, namely better housing (panels 46, 47, 48), better schooling, or the right to vote (panels 58, 59), Lawrence does not hide that, even in their new home, Black people suffered segregation (panel 49), crowded accommodation, unhealthy life conditions (panels 46, 47, 48, 55), persecution, exploitation and violence (panels 51, 50, 52). Similarly, if, in Walcott’s dramatisation, it is the Figure – representing the South – who orchestrates Walker’s murder, the play does not restrain from denouncing the North, and Walker’s (but, as we will see, also Walcott’s) Boston for its hypocritical stance against racism; Walker, in fact, questions both the General Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts Bay of 1641 and Garrison’s racialist paternalism – at the end of the play, significantly, the white abolitionist equates himself to the biblical David and Walker to his son Absalom (W53–4, 113). The Chorus’s invocation to Bearden, Pippin and Lawrence is repeated (twice) in a later scene where Eliza and Walker are seen walking in the snow towards the church and an embittered Walker swears he will ask God ‘to deliver [him] towards evil, / ‘cause why should all the evil be theirs / and the goodness ours?’ (W59). This time the name of Frederick Douglass is added

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to those of the three painters, and the statesman, orator and serial autobiographer is urged to ‘lift [his] pen’ (W61), something he at times did, incidentally, to criticise religious belief if it stood in the way of African American emancipation, and to offer an alternative to Garrison’s pacifism and moral suasion, particularly after the execution of John Brown in 1859.192 Douglass is summoned again with the three painters in Scene Four, in conjunction with Eliza’s evocation of a domestic world (W97), tenderly immortalised in, for example, Pippin’s Saturday Night Bath (1941), Sunday Morning Breakfast (1943), Christmas Morning, Breakfast (1945), Interior of Cabin (1944) or The Domino Players (1943) which are all focused on simple home rituals where Black people (mostly women and children) come across as poor but dignified. Walcott, however, seems to respond to another aspect of these images, namely the fact that they indirectly signpost oppression and segregation: these humble interiors, in fact, also look like secluded worlds where African Americans sheltered themselves from the various manifestations of evil that threatened them from outside. In the play, Eliza identifies her home with a ‘fortress’ and a space where Walker should, she hopes, be safe from the Figure and the hostile world around them (W96, italics in the text). Eliza’s ‘lamps in the darkness / against the surrounding night’, and her ‘dark prayer’ for the future (W96, italics in the text), visually remind one of Pippin’s Saying Prayers (1943) and Six O’Clock (Cabin Interior by a Fireside, Waiting), where a dark room is shared by a woman and her small child. A drawing Walcott completed in 1991, when he was beginning to conceive of the opera at the basis of Walker, closely resembles these intimate scenes of African American daily life: here Walker’s wife, sitting next to the bed where her child is sleeping, mourns her husband’s death which, in the lines that accompany the drawing, she describes as ‘a stain on the memory of this country’ which will be forgotten ‘for a fresh white lie’.193 As the woman also prays that her dead husband will be able to ‘walk home under the sea to that country where [his] soul belongs’, mother and child are in a room, safe from external interference; yet, a window behind the woman reminds us that the world, with all its dangers, and what Walcott calls, in the lines of verse juxtaposed to the drawing, its ‘white … hypocrisy’, is out there, impinging on their lives. Similarly, Bearden’s Sunday Morning Breakfast (1967), which was inspired by Pippin’s painting of the same title, other collages like Carolina Interior (1970), Mecklenburg Morning (1978), Mother and Child (c. 1972) or the lithograph The Lamp (1984), where a mother and her child calmly read a book in a room lighted by a candle lamp, are affectionate representations of places where African Americans could take sanctuary and seemingly find peace and safety from external threats. The Lamp, however, was commissioned to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s decision to end officially imposed segregation in public

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education:194 while the image signposts safety and integration, the occasion for which it was produced reminds viewers of how recently their opposites were still considered the norm. Aptly, therefore, in the 2001 production of Walker in Boston, the idea of a ‘safe’ space was suggested and denounced as illusory at the same time: on stage, Eliza’s fortress was a cubical structure made of eight poles which outlined the shape of the house and recalled the strong vertical and horizontal lines that are so prominent in Bearden’s work; however, the ‘porosity’ of the house and the vulnerability of its inhabitants was all too evident in the fact that it had no walls. Lawrence’s depictions of life in the South are also almost exclusively indoor images: when they are not travelling towards the North (panels 1, 3, 6, 12, 18, 21, 23, 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 39, 40, 60; Fig. 4.6), the Blacks are mostly portrayed inside a domestic space (panels 4, 10, 11, 16, 33, 34, 56) and identified with their homes – the image that symbolises their mass departure is in fact an empty wooden shack (panel 25). When they venture outside, they are attacked by racists (panels 15 and 16 are devoted to lynching), segregated (panel 19), bullied by planters (panels 17 and 24, which also portray child labour), exploited by recruiting labour agents to break strikes in the North (panel 28), oppressed by the police (panel 42), unfairly treated by the justice system (panel 14), or put in prison (panels 22, 41). When they read the ‘Negro press’ which ‘frees’ their mind, they do so in very close proximity to their houses (panel 20) and they do not go beyond their fence (in fact they sit on it, both literally and metaphorically) when they try to decide whether to depart or not from the South (panel 26). Likewise, when they leave their overcrowded and dilapidated accommodation in the North, the Black migrants run the risk of suffering segregation (panels 49), becoming involved in race riots (panels 50, 51), or even being discriminated against by the Blacks who had always lived in the North (panels 53). Lawrence, moreover, shows that they were not even safe in their own houses as panel 51 illustrates ‘the bombing of Negro homes’. Bearden, Lawrence and Pippin are invoked again at the very end of the play after Walker and Barbados are both eliminated by the Figure, and Eliza and Garrison mourn the death of Walker. In the 1991 annotated drawing inspired by these three African American artists’ representations of domestic life, Walcott had Walker’s wife grieve for the death of her husband while their son was asleep in front of her. Walker’s son, Edward (or Edwin) Garrison Walker, who was born the same year in which his father died, was to become an attorney and one of the first two Black men to be elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature. Walcott had initially conceived an ending for Walker in which, after his death, Walker ‘r[ose], enter[ed] his store, dust[ed] himself off, dress[ed] in a coat, tie, hat … st[ood] over the bloodstain’ caused by his murder, and confronted the audience as his own son. After describing the circumstances of his own birth and his election to the State Legislature, Edward Walker was to declare that ‘the battle / continue[d]’ in ‘Boston

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[in] Brattle / Street on Beacon Hill’, albeit not in the violent ways his father had advocated (Wms).195 Walker’s ‘resurrection’ as, and ‘reincarnation’ in, his own son was meant to show to the audience that, after Walker’s death, the predicament of African Americans continued to call for action. Walcott, however, felt that this was not only true of Walker’s son’s historical moment but also of his own times and in contemporary Boston so, to further hammer this point home, in the published version of the play the concluding monologue by Walker’s son was substituted by a different one. After Walker’s (double) assassination, in fact, the actor playing Eliza ‘removes bits of costume, makeup, wig, stands bare in ordinary light’, and addresses the audience directly with these words: I played a woman named Eliza Walker. David Walker her husband, in the city we see outside us, and the one we can’t see inside, whatever the city is named; a husband in whom I took pride, and some of you will be ashamed of this violence for which he died, and some will be satisfied. (W114)

The violence ‘for which’ Walker died can be either the violence he advocated, or the violence perpetrated against him in the fictionally reconstructed past of the play or, indeed, both. In whichever way we decide to read the line, however, the actor implicates the audience in this very violence, forcing them to ponder on their reaction (shame or satisfaction). Moreover, addressing the audience while visibly ‘out of character’, she refers to Walker as ‘a husband in whom I took pride’, thus contributing to further blurring past and present, fiction and reality, whilst anchoring the performance to the place and moment in which it is viewed (W114, emphasis mine). The effect achieved by Walcott in this last scene seems to be modelled on Pippin’s John Brown Going to His Hanging (1942) (Fig. 4.7), focused on the moments preceding the execution of another controversial activist who, like Walker, had advocated armed insurrection to abolish slavery. Pippin revealed that this work was based on the memories of his grandmother who was present at Brown’s execution and, in his painting, the artist pays homage to her storytelling powers by showing, amongst those who had gathered to witness the execution, a Black woman turning her back to the scene and looking straight at the viewers, introducing, but also implicating them, in the proceedings, precisely like Walcott’s Eliza/actor does in his play. The implicit reference to Pippin’s John Brown Going to His Hanging, by signposting the presence of a white abolitionist who, like Walker, advocated the use of violence and, like Walcott’s Walker, was killed because of his emancipatory ideas, seems to reject, for the last time, the same disabling binarism and

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Figure 4.6  The Migration Series, panel no. 3: From every southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north, 1940–1, Jacob Lawrence, casein tempera on hardboard, 30.48 × 45.72 cm. Acquired 1942, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Photo: The Phillips Collection © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London, 2021. Any reproduction of this digitised image shall not be made without the written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (http://www.phillipscollection.org).

Figure 4.7  John Brown Going to His Hanging, 1942, Horace Pippin, oil on canvas, 61.3 × 76.8 cm. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. John Lambert Fund, 1943.11. Photography by Barbara Katus.

American Visions I – Frescoes of the New World and Black America    241

essentialism (black good/white evil) which, in the play, provoke Walker’s downfall. The provocative address by Eliza/the actor, however, also gives voice to Walcott’s views on Boston’s ‘Black fear’ and its repercussions on theatre productions. In an interview he gave only three years before Walker was put on stage as an opera, Walcott had remarked: ‘I don’t think they want Black people on stage here [in Boston]. That’s it. I am talking about Anglo-Saxon New England … This is the toughest city in terms of Black fear … there’s a fear of using Blacks in the theatre of this town.’196 When Walcott wrote the opera and later revised it as a play, he knew that it was meant to be performed in Boston and that the Athenaeum which commissioned and produced the opera is not far from Brattle Street, where Walker had his shop. To maximise the impact and ‘actuality’ of the play in a city he considered to be in the grip of ‘Black fear’, Walcott ensured that not only the name of the city but also the name of the street were mentioned (repeatedly) by the ­characters – as it was the case in Walker’s son’s monologue in the discarded version. To create a visual counterpart to Walcott’s references, the 2001 setting was especially designed to highlight a continuity between dramatic fiction and reality: the lamppost at the centre of the stage was one of the old ones which can still be found in the centre of Boston while the window at the top of the set was modelled on the (easily recognisable for the audience) window of the local African American Meeting House since, as Lawrence also highlights with panel 54, ‘for migrants, the church was the center of life’.197 According to Kate Snodgrass, the Artistic Director of the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, who was directly involved in the 2001 production, Walcott was present during the first two days of rehearsal, but then had to leave Boston to honour other commitments. When he returned the night before the play had to open in order to assist to the final rehearsal, he found that, by then, the director had changed the ending. In this new version, some of the cast sat down and ‘sang a sort of melancholy Creole melody that faded into silence’. Snodgrass remembers that the new ending ‘was beautiful and melodic and heart-breaking after the tension of the play’, but Walcott insisted that there should be no music and that the play should end exactly as he wrote it. The cast then reverted to the original script and Snodgrass recalls that at the end of Walker when Eliza left the stage there was ‘no curtain call. Silence. It was a singular moment in the theatre.’198 In the published version of the play, instead, after the actor/Eliza’s exit, the Chorus invokes, for the last time, the African American artistic t­ radition – ‘Romare Bearden, bear our burden, / Horace Pippin, paint our pain, / Jacob Lawrence, paint our innocence’ (W114, italics in the text). The final line of the Chorus, ‘Dyed in the American grain’ (W114, italics in the text), a variation on the line ‘Deep in the American grain’ from Scene One, reiterates the equal importance of the aural and visual dimensions in the play: here the verb ‘dyed’ is a pun on ‘died’ – a reference to Walker’s tragic demise – whose

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ambiguity is enhanced if the line is recited and heard rather than read. At the same time, if ‘died in the American grain’ suggests the high price that Walker and the African American community as a whole had to pay – and their descendants are still forced to pay – to achieve recognition, the homophone ‘dyed’ suggests that, despite the profoundly ingrained racism which continues to marginalise African Americans, and to occlude their contribution to American life and culture, Walker, Douglass, Bearden, Lawrence and Pippin have now inscribed themselves in and irrevocably ‘dyed’, coloured or marked the history and art history of the United States.

Notes 1. Craven, Treasury, 12. 2. Craven, Treasury, 558, 562. 3. Coronel Rivera, ‘Creation’, 10. 4. Baugh, ‘Painters and Paintings’, 240. 5. In 1989, whilst observing Castries harbour with St. Omer, Walcott and his artist friend regretted that the gamboge, brick buildings with red roofs which reminded them of Cézanne or the Italian paintings they used to admire as youths, were no longer there (Walcott and St. Omer in Bragg, Derek Walcott). 6. Walcott, ‘1944’, Voice of St Lucia, 3. 7. Catholicus, ‘Catholicus Says’, 5; Gachet, ‘Statement’, 8. 8. Simmons, ‘Spotlight on the Dungeon of Culture’, 4. 9. As Walcott explains, St. Omer’s sons and daughters always helped him when he painted his altarpieces and murals and he encouraged the older or more talented ‘to paint details under his supervision’, a habit which highlights how he valued the notion of collective effort and of workshop apprenticeship (OTC21, 26). 10. Balfour, ‘On a Field Cerulean’, 88–9. 11. de Lima, ‘Painting’, 182. 12. Brenner, Idols, 314–29. 13. Craven, Treasury, 562. 14. Brenner, Idols, 314, 254–5, 258. 15. Craven, Treasury, 563. 16. Craven, Treasury, 558. 17. Craven, Treasury, 559. 18. Brenner, Idols, 348–9. 19. Poupeye, Caribbean Art, 76; Walcott, ‘Federal Art Exhibition’, 388. 20. Simmons, ‘Spotlight on the Dungeon of Culture’, 4. 21. Roderick Walcott, ‘Candle in the Bushel’, 4. 22. Roderick Walcott, ‘Candle in the Bushel’, 4. In My Art, My Life, Rivera wrote: ‘I chose to do scenes from the history of the region in sixteen consecutive panels, beginning with the Spanish conquest. The episodes included the seizure of Cuernavaca by the Spaniards, the building of the palace by the conqueror, and the establishment of the sugar refineries. The concluding episode was the

American Visions I – Frescoes of the New World and Black America    243 peasant revolt led by Zapata. In the panels depicting the horrors of the Spanish conquest, I portrayed the inhuman model of the old, dictatorial Church. I took care to authenticate every detail by exact research, because I wanted to leave no opening for anyone to try to discredit the murals as a whole by the charge that any detail was a fabrication. In some of the panels my hero was a priest, the brave and incorruptible Miguel Hidalgo, who had not hesitated to defy the Church in his loyalty to the people and to truth’ (101). For some of his works, however, Rivera had to come to terms with the hostility of the Catholic Church and compromise his vision: for example, the Archbishop Luis María Martínez refused to bless the Hotel del Prado where Rivera painted the mural Dream on a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central which contained the words ‘God does not exist’; the inscription created a bitter controversy and Rivera amended the inscription in 1956 to put an end to it (Ugalde Gómez, ‘Metaphorical readings’, 433). 23. Those responsible for bad government are ‘Geryons gnawing their own children’ (AL128) and Walcott here alludes to the monster of Canto XVII of Dante’s Inferno but probably concocted a compound image which might reference Lorenzetti’s tyrant’s fangs and Dante’s Geryon, the personification of fraud with a human (not monstrous) face who, however, does not ‘gnaw’ anything in the Commedia where the act of gnawing is instead generally associated with Count Ugolino (Inferno XXXIII), condemned eternally to ‘gnaw’ the skull of his political enemy, Archbishop Ruggieri (Fumagalli, Flight, 74–5). 24. Lozano, ‘Song’, 136. 25. Brenner, Idols, 283–4. 26. Lozano, ‘Song’, 148–9. 27. Brenner, Idols, 283. 28. Brenner, Idols, 283, 285. 29. Lorenzetti, in the Allegory and Effects of Good Government, depicts a city and a countryside which thrive and where commerce, entrepreneurship – but also arts and culture – flourish. There is no equivalent of this vision of a society in harmony in Walcott’s poem but, when in Another Life and throughout his career Walcott forcefully argued for state support for artists and the arts, he was actually aiming for what both Lorenzetti and Rivera had (visually) celebrated as ‘good government’ (Lozano, ‘Song’, 154–5) and advocating the value of a society like the one described by Brenner who, praising Mexico, explained that it ‘establishe[d] a school for sculpture before thinking of a Juvenile Court, and … painte[d] the walls of its building much sooner than it organize[d] a Federal Bank. Sanitation, jobs, and reliably workable laws [were] attended to literally as a by-product of art’ (314). 30. Walcott, ‘Dilemma Faces’, 70. 31. For more examples of Walcott’s admiration for Mexican art as a productive example for West Indian artists see also Walcott, ‘Reflections on the November Exhibition’, 396–7; ‘Combination of Grace and Vigour’, 460; ‘West Indian Art Today’, 48. Walcott’s familiarity with Tamayo is evident in a number of reviews where he draws comparison between the works he is assessing and those of the Mexican artist (Walcott, ‘Blaze of Vision’, 481; ‘Lent Opens’, 471;

244    Derek Walcott’s Painters ‘Art Makes a Restaurant Come-Back’, 498; ‘Techniques of South’s Artists’, 428). 32. Walcott, ‘Ralph Campbell’, 444. 33. Walcott, Drums and Colours, in The Haitian Trilogy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 109–294, 119. From now on, I will be referring to this text as DC followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 34. Walcott, Drums and Colours, in Caribbean Quarterly 7 (1961): 1–104. 35. Bertram Wolfe, qtd by Coronel Rivera, ‘Visions’, 191. 36. The only title actually by Rivera is the title for the west wall – the other two and the title for the ensemble, Epic of the Mexican people, were concocted by others after the fact (Coronel Rivera, ‘Visions’, 192). 37. Eight of these murals are in private collection and thirteen were destroyed in a 1969 fire, including the one entitled ‘The Conflict over Slavery’ which features in Locke’s The Negro in Art, a book which, as discussed in Chapter 2, Walcott might have seen in Simmons’s studio or been otherwise familiar with and in which Rivera is praised for bringing ‘the Negro subject to the foreground of contemporary American art’ (Locke, Negro in Art, 140). 38. Burnett, Derek Walcott, 235. 39. Walcott in Presson, ‘Man Who Keeps’, 191. 40. Lozano, ‘Song’, 136. 41. Brenner, Idols, 285. 42. Coronel Rivera, ‘Visions’, 194. 43. Stone, Theatre, 103. 44. Ugalde Gómez, ‘Metaphorical readings’, 434. 45. Ugalde Gómez, ‘Metaphorical readings’, 437. 46. Stone, Theatre, 103. 47. Lozano, ‘Fight against Fascism’, 382. 48. I will return to these four emblematic images and Walcott’s sui generis ekphrastic engagement with them in Chapter 7. 49. Original caption: G. A. (sic) Gordon hung at Morant Bay. Photograph of George William Gordon. 23rd October 1865. Photograph probably taken by the London Stereoscopic Company, 1860s. https://graphicarts.princeton. edu/2016/08/18/150-year-ago-london-society-split-in-two/. From a photography album in the Graphic Arts Collection documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865), the Indian Northwest Frontier Hazara Campaign (1867–70), views of Malta, Ireland, Guernsey, Spain, and elsewhere, compiled [attributed to] by Alexander Dudgeon Gulland. http://arks.princeton.edu/ ark:/88435/736664580 (accessed 18 June 2021). 50. Sontag, On Photography, 70. 51. Display caption. John Everett Millais. The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870). Tate Britain. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-the-boyhood-of-raleighn01691 (accessed 18 June 2021). (Fig. 4.2.) 52. Spielmann, Millais, 124. 53. Froude, The English in the West Indies, 347. 54. Walcott, ‘Dilemma Faces’, 69. 55. Walcott, ‘History and Picong’, 304. 56. Naipaul, Middle Passage, 25.

American Visions I – Frescoes of the New World and Black America    245 57. Walcott, ‘Dilemma Faces’, 69. 58. Walcott, ‘Dilemma Faces’, 70. 59. Walcott, ‘Dilemma Faces’, 70. 60. Rivera in Puccinelli, ‘Conversation’, 16. 61. Walcott, ‘Derek’s Most West Indian Play’, 7. 62. Walcott, ‘Derek’s Most West Indian Play’, 7. 63. Walcott, ‘Derek’s Most West Indian Play’, 7. 64. Coronel Rivera, ‘Creation’, 12; Brenner, Idols, 281. 65. Crichlow, ‘Figures’. 66. Crichlow, ‘Figures’; Walcott, ‘Ralph Campbell’, 444. 67. Gayadeen, Selected Works, x. 68. See, for example, Walcott, ‘Almost Everyone’, 407; ‘Review of Art Exhibition’, 433. 69. Crichlow, ‘Figures’; Walcott in Mills, ‘Conversation’, 59. 70. This notebook is at UWI-AJL, Box 10, folder 13. 71. In the published version of Ti-Jean and His Brothers there is only a fleeting reference to the upper echelons of the hierarchy of the Christian Church when the Mother explains that ‘The Devil can hide in several features / A woman, a white gentleman, even a Bishop’ (103). However, a film script by Derek Walcott which formed the basis of a 2008 film by Walcott’s Warwick Production which was never completed, includes a ‘Priest’ amongst his characters: the Priest was played by the poet John Robert Lee who was ordained in 1997 as an Elder of Calvary Baptist Church and has kindly shown me his copy of the script. This priest is on the side of the poor against the Devil/Planter and footage from the film is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zwU2xp6zgbw (accessed 25 February 2020). 72. Bearden and Henderson, History, 116. 73. See, for example, Walcott, ‘West Indian Writing’; ‘Some Jamaican Poets–1’; ‘Some Jamaican Poets–2’; ‘Old Focus Back’; ‘Lame Tribute’; ‘Return to Jamaica’; ‘A New Jamaican Poet’; ‘Fellowships’. 74. Walcott, ‘His is The Pivotal One’, 283; ‘Fellowships’, 185; ‘Some Jamaican Poets–2’, 193. 75. Roberts, Diego Rivera, 6. 76. Bearden and Henderson, History, xii. 77. Henderson, ‘Introduction’, xiii. Bearden had also made this point in a 1968 interview with David Ghent (Bearden in Ghent, ‘Interview’, 73-4). 78. Henderson, ‘Introduction’, xii. 79. Bearden and Henderson, History, 376. 80. Porter, qtd in Bearden and Henderson, History, 376. 81. Walter Pach qtd in Porter, Modern Negro Art, 9. 82. Bearden and Henderson, History, 120, 119. 83. In Locke’s The Negro in Art both the reproduction of Delacroix’s Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Turban (1827) – under the title of Aline, the Mulatress (1824) – and of a panel from Rivera’s Portrait of America (1933) – under the title ‘The Book of Slavery’ – are black and white plates (157; 198). 84. Reconsidering the different times in which Walcott worked and lived in New York during his career, Caryl Phillips has argued that ‘Derek Walcott has

246    Derek Walcott’s Painters many New Yorks … but perhaps the most important … was … a nine-month period between 1958 and 1959 when Walcott lived in the city as a young man’ (Phillips, ‘Walcott in New York’). 85. Patton, African-American Art, 176. 86. Walcott lists: ‘coffee-houses and exotic teas, leatherwork, incense, the poetry of halitosis, Artaud and Brecht, Japanese exotica, zen and poetry to jazz, Blake and madness, itchy scrotums and soiled feet, Indian shawls and loft theatre and going on the road, making it to the Coast, Grove Press paperbacks and yoghurt, Kurosawa film and the germ of Bergman cult, yellow notebooks with the spontaneous obscenities of free and Absurd Theatre, raceless sex, The Limelight Café, Franz Kafka and Franz Klein, spontaneous movies, stinking cat-keeping lofts and dim basements, frantic carpentry and cheap wine and free talk’ (AWA). 87. Walcott appreciated Klein’s experimentation with black structures on a white ground, their almost ideogrammatic simplicity, and the interplay that was created between white forms and black lines and was to positively refer to Klein’s work in his 1964 art review for the Trinidad Guardian (Walcott, ‘American Anguish’, 499–500). 88. O’Hara claimed that on 27 August 1959, after talking to LeRoi Jones, he went back home and wrote a poem for ‘a blond’ he was in love with. When he realised he ‘could use the phone instead of writing the poem … Personism was born.’ Personism ‘puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person’ and O’Hara announced, may be ‘the death of literature as we know it’. The poet explains that Personism ‘does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings toward the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.’ In the same essay/manifesto O’Hara also explains his position on formal structure: ‘I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures … I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve’ (O’Hara, ‘Personism’, 499, 498). 89. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 61–2. 90. Walcott, ‘Necessity of Negritude, 345. 91. Walcott, ‘Federal Art Exhibition’, 387; ‘Reflections on the November Exhibition’, 396. 92. Walcott, ‘Bewildered and Betwixt’, 423. 93. Walcott, ‘Art Exhibition at the National Museum’, 411. 94. Walcott, ‘Painter Leaps’, 461; ‘American Anguish’, 500. 95. Walcott, ‘Return to Jamaica’, 103–4. 96. Walcott, ‘Review of Art Exhibition’, 432. 97. Walcott, ‘Art Exhibition at the National Museum’, 412. 98. Walcott, ‘Keeping Up’, 413. 99. Walcott, ‘Tradition is Upheld’, 421. 100. Walcott in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 35. 101. Ellison, ‘Art of Romare Bearden’, 199. 102. Fine, ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’, 22.

American Visions I – Frescoes of the New World and Black America    247 Patton, African-American Art, 169. Glazer, ‘Signifying Identity’, 413. Woodruff qtd in Coleman, ‘Changing Same’, 148–9. Gelburd, ‘Romare Bearden’, 19. Glazer, ‘Signifying Identity’, 419–420. Walcott in Davis, ‘Reflections’, 231. Walcott in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 54. Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 50–3. Bearden in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 49. Romare Bearden and Derek Walcott, The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott & the Art of Romare Bearden (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1983). From now on I will be referring to this volume as B&W followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 113. Walcott in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 16. 114. Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 15, 84–5. 115. Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 92–3. 116. Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 16 and Price and Price, ‘Bearden’s Caribbean’, 354. 117. Moore, ‘Foreword’, 5. 118. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 104. 119. Walcott in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 94–5. 120. Walcott in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 94–5. 121. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 82–3. 122. Walcott in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 96. 123. Alternative hyphenated spelling is from Walcott, ‘The Schooner Flight’. In Chant of Saints, edited by Michael Harper and Robert Stepto, 168. 124. Walcott, ‘The Schooner Flight’, in Chant of Saints, edited by Michael Harper and Robert Stepto: ‘I dived under bright coral water / whose ceiling climbed rippling like a silk green tent’ (168); ‘I went diving under sun shot water / whose ceiling came rippling like a green silk tent’ (173). 125. In O’Meally’s Romare Bearden the collage for The Sea Nymph (Fig. 4.4) is on page 83 while the one for The Sirens’ Song is on page 63. 126. Fine, ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’, 21. 127. Kennel, ‘Bearden’s Musée Imaginaire’, 145–7. 128. Fine, ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’, 39; Glazer, ‘Signifying Identity’, 411. 129. Ellison, ‘Art of Romare Bearden’, 200. 130. Walcott, ‘Bewildered and Betwixt’, 423. 131. Bearden, ‘Negro Artist’s Dilemma’, 94; ‘Negro Artist and Modern Art’, 89–90. 132. Walcott, ‘Necessity of Negritude’, 342. In the same year, Walcott’s ‘The Royal Palms’, previously published in the London Magazine, had appeared in a section devoted to American and Caribbean writing in the collection Negro Verse for the Pocket Poets Series issued by Studio & Vista Books, London, where Walcott’s poem is featured alongside works by Aimé Césaire, Nicholas Guillen, Langston Hughes, A. B. Spellman, LeRoi Jones and Ted Joans in a selection made by Anselm Hollo. It is perhaps significant, however, that in the Derek Walcott Collection in the Alma Jordan Library, The University of the 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

248    Derek Walcott’s Painters West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad, one finds the letter (dated 17 June 1963) with the request from the Chief Editor of Vista Books to republish ‘The Royal Palms’ to the London Magazine with a handwritten note from The London Magazine notifying Walcott that they had accepted the request to include the poem on Walcott’s behalf (Box 2, folder 4). 133. Henderson, ‘Introduction’, xiii. 134. Henderson, ‘Introduction’, xvii. 135. Walcott, The Gulf (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 29. From now on, I will be referring to this text as G followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 136. Walcott, ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’ Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 16 (1974): 14–23, 3. From now on, I will be referring to this text as CCM followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 137. Walcott, ‘Road Taken’, 93–4. 138. Cullen, ‘Out of the Shadows’, 245. 139. Cullen, ‘Out of the Shadows’, 244. 140. Walcott, Walker, in Walker and The Ghost Dance (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 1–114, vii. From now on, I will be referring to this text as W followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 141. Walcott in Price and Price, ‘Bearden’s Caribbean’, 354. 142. Walcott in Price and Price, ‘Bearden’s Caribbean’, 354. 143. Hinks, ‘Introduction’, xxii–xxiv; Katz, ‘Introduction’, i. 144. Hinks, ‘Introduction’, 63; Katz, ‘Introduction’, iii. 145. Walcott’s research material for Walker is at TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 44, folders 1–3 and includes, amongst other items, Walker’s Appeal and Garnet’s Address to the United States of America with an introduction by William Katz and where Garrison’s son’s signature, which appeared on the original endpapers, is reproduced at the opening of the volume. 146. Katz, ‘Introduction’, iii. 147. Matchan, ‘Making History’. 148. Katz, ‘Introduction’, i. 149. Stauffer, ‘Douglass’s Self-Making’, 22, 23. 150. Peter Hinks, ed. David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 67. [Previously printed as David Walker, Walker’s Appeal In Four Articles; together with a Preamble To The Coloured Citizens of The World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to those of The United States of America. Written in Boston, in the State of Massachusetts, Sept. 28, 1829.] From now on I will be quoting from the 2000 edition as WAP giving the page numbers in parentheses in the text. 151. Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain, 290; The Sea at Dauphin, 61, 73; Henri Christophe, 91. 152. Watts, Hope. 153. Walcott, Ti-Jean, 134. 154. Walcott in Pantin, ‘Any Revolution’, 108. 155. Walcott had expanded on the internal dynamic between Walker and Barbados

American Visions I – Frescoes of the New World and Black America    249 in a poem from Sea Grapes (1976) entitled ‘The Brother’ which was inspired by the Trinidad Revolution of 1970 and which begins with the lines: ‘That smiler next to you who whispers / brother// knife him’ (SG23). 156. Williams, In the American Grain, 208–9. 157. Label text. Thomas Hart Benton. Ploughing It Under (1934, reworked 1964). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. https://collection.crystal​ bridges.org/objects/313/ploughing-it-under?ctx=5cead02c-1130-450d-a9fce1f65d499a68&idx=3 (accessed 19 June 2021). (Fig. 4.5.) 158. Locke, The Negro in Art, 140. 159. Craven, Treasury, 578. 160. Craven, Treasury, 1958 edition, 237. 161. Bearden and Henderson, History, 233. 162. Bearden and Henderson, History, 233. 163. Boylen, ‘From Gilded Age’, 131–2. 164. Bearden, ‘Negro Artist’s Dilemma’, 92. 165. Bearden in Rowell, ‘“Inscription”’, 433. 166. Malraux, The Voices of Silence, 146. 167. Walcott, White Egrets (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 77. From now on, I will be referring to this text as WE followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 168. Philp, ‘Derek Walcott@’. 169. Philp, ‘Derek Walcott@’. 170. Chambers, personal communication, 9 April 2018. 171. ‘The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings’; ‘… they (Americans) have, and do continue, to punish us for nothing else, but for enriching them and their country’ (twice); ‘Is not God a god of justice to all his creatures?’; ‘Every dog must have its day … the American’s is coming to an end’; ‘we, (coloured people of these United States,) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began’; ‘I ask you, O my brethren, are we MEN?’; ‘the day of our redemption from abject wretchedness draweth near’; ‘The whites want slaves but they will curse the day they ever saw us’; ‘… it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty’ (WAP19, 16, 7, 17, 3, 18, 2, 22). 172. Walcott in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 35. 173. In previous versions of the published play at TFRBL, MsColl 00348, Box 27, folders 12–14 and MsColl 00136, Box 44, items 18–22 the word ‘projections’ was absent and stage directions instead envisaged ‘live collages’ which would also signpost a connection with Bearden. These versions are typescripts in multiple copies with unnumbered pages. From now on I will refer to them as Wms in parentheses in the text. 174. Glazer, ‘Signifying Identity’, 411, 419. 175. Gelburd, ‘Romare Bearden’, 20. 176. Bearden, ‘Rectangular Structure’, 129. 177. Glazer, ‘Signifying Identity’, 419; Fine, ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’, 39. 178. Gelburd, ‘Romare Bearden’, 33.

250    Derek Walcott’s Painters 79. 1 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191.

Glazer, ‘Signifying Identity’, 422. Glazer, ‘Signifying Identity’, 423. Glazer, ‘Signifying Identity’, 414. Glazer, ‘Signifying Identity’, 426. Bearden and Henderson, History, 357. Bearden and Henderson, History, 358–9. Cahill qtd in Bearden and Henderson, History, 356. Hinks, ‘Introduction’, xii. Walcott in Davis, ‘Reflections’, 229. Gates, ‘New Negroes’, 17. Bearden and Henderson, History, 294. Hutton Turner, ‘Introduction’, 14. Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, exh. cat., edited by Elizabeth Hutton Turner (Washington: The Phillips Collection, 1993). From now on I will be referring to the panels in this book with the numbers in parentheses in the text. 192. Ernest, ‘Crisis and Faith’, 61; Wallace, ‘Violence, Manhood, and War’, 80. Incidentally, Douglass and Walker never met – Douglass only arrived in Massachusetts in 1838, that is eight years after Walker’s death. 193. This drawing and these lines of verse are at TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 63, item 2. 194. Fine, ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’, 92. 195. In his speech, Walker’s son also explains that he inherited the ‘spirit’ of both his father and William Garrison, after whom he was named. 196. Walcott in White, ‘Interview’, 165–6. 197. Chambers, personal communication, 9 April 2018. 198. Snodgrass, personal communication, 23 March 2018.

Chapter 5

American Visions II – Black Odysseys

Which Africa? Whose Africa? From Hokusai to Romare Bearden In a handwritten prayer Walcott composed for Walker’s widow to accompany an unpublished drawing in which the woman watches over her sleeping child,1 the mother and wife mourning her husband expresses her hope that his soul will travel back to Africa. In the published version of Walker, this prayer is not included, but it finds its visual counterpart in the transformation of the play’s Chorus into a group of African warriors who, in the 2001 production, invaded the stage with colourful costumes, loud music, vigorous dancing and singing in Yoruba (W92–5, 114).2 The inclusion of African rituals in the economy of Walker pays homage to the fact that Walker was proud of his heritage and of the noble history of Africa: ‘When we take a retrospective view of the arts and sciences – the wise legislators – the Pyramids, and other magnificent buildings – the turning of the channel of the river Nile, by the sons of Africa or of Ham, among whom learning originated, and was carried thence into Greece’, he wrote, ‘the children of our great progenitor I am indeed cheered’ (WAP21–2). At the same time, however, Walker was vehemently opposed to the ‘colonizing plan’ which entailed the ‘repatriation’ of free Blacks by the American Colonization Society (WAP47–82), and Walcott had always shared Walker’s rejection of the idea of going back to Africa as an answer for the descendants of the enslaved population. In Dream on Monkey Mountain, where the Chorus, at some point, also becomes the ‘tribes’,3 the ‘dream’ of a return to Africa is initiated by the White Goddess, who represents the white colonial world. Her beheading results in the destruction of the ‘white mask’ which represents the end of the yearning to be white that plagued colonial subjects – ‘this rage for whiteness’4 – but is also an attack to responses to that mask that Walcott considered self-defeatingly separatist. The real home of the protagonist of Dream on Monkey Mountain, the play insists, is not Africa but Monkey Mountain or the Caribbean, and

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Walker seems to make a similar point regarding North America through Walker’s wife Eliza who, when Walker declares that Africa is their ‘true land’, quickly rebuffs him: ‘Which Africa? Whose Africa? / I don’t know no Africa. / I ain’t going and I never been there’, and then reaffirms her bond with North Carolina (W20). When he was writing Ti-Jean and His Brothers in New York in the late 1950s, as discussed in Chapter 4, Walcott resorted to a Japanese ‘detour’ (Hokusai’s works) to reconnect to Africa and avoid the pitfalls of a nostalgic impossible return to an irretrievable origin that he feared would have been paralysing and detrimental to his efforts to create something new in the West Indies. Unsurprisingly, if Walcott’s 1972 filmscript Vangelo Nero is set in contemporary Africa, some of his sketches for the characters – especially the ink sketches for ‘Simeon in the Tent’ and ‘Elders in the Tent’ – still recall, in posture and features, some of the figures from scenes of everyday life in Hokusai’s Manga.5 It is important to stress that Walcott’s Africa in Vangelo Nero is an Africa of the mind which, as he explained in the handwritten ‘Proem’ to the script,6 spans from Ethiopia to South Africa and which he calls one of the ‘earthly paradises of our imagination [which] are being corrupted, destroyed’ (VN3.9). ‘The African situation’ at the core of the text, the poem clarifies, has to be understood more as ‘one metaphor, one concept’ than as a concrete place (VN3.9). Walcott’s protagonist is an African revolutionary ‘who is or may be’ Jesus, and who has a specific ‘spiritual vision’, namely to unite, at least temporarily, the tribes of Africa. Walcott’s African Jesus, the draft anticipates, ‘will be a dissenter, an apparent blasphemer, a revolutionary, and a martyr’ who, in his endeavour, will inevitably clash with ‘the political realities of Empire, race and colonialism’ (VN3.9). Walcott wanted Vangelo Nero to be animated by the belief that ‘anywhere in the world the oppression of black tribes can be reduced to the tragic simplicity of white, or European domination’: ‘the Christ-like figure of our time must be “political”’, because ‘there is no black anywhere in the world today who is not aware of racial [and imperialist] repression’ (VN3.9). Walcott here sounds less worried about adhering to the raciological essentialism he had often rejected but, overall, his Africa of the mind and the ‘African experience’ the script explores, actually stand for a wide-ranging set of references which extend beyond geographical and racial boundaries. Walcott’s ‘African Jesus or Jesus The African’, the script stipulates, will be ‘not Christ but … Christ-like’ since this is what revolutionaries like ‘Lumumba, Malcom X … Selassie … Gandhi, The Irish Martyrs -Pearse+Connolly, and, for the Third World, Che Guevara’ are to their people (VN3.9). The life of this composite African Jesus follows a pattern that begins with ‘baptism (the calling)’, continues with ‘mission (revolutionary service in the name of God the Father and of the people)’, is followed by ‘sedition’, ‘arrest’, ‘trial by Imperial law’, ‘betrayal by one’s brethren’ and, finally, by ‘torture and public execution’: Walcott calls this ‘the standard twentieth century experience’

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(VN3.9). Walcott’s broadening of references – which, as I have highlighted in the introduction, included the reproduction of Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1601) glued to one of his notebooks’ front page – was, once again, his way round the impasse given by the polarisation of Africa and Europe that he found both limiting and draining. In one of his early poems, ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ (written in 1953), Walcott dramatises the impossibility of choosing between his two heritages (European and African) whilst resisting and rejecting the validity and legitimacy of such dualism (GN18). Later, in ‘The Muse of History’, Walcott declares amnesia to be ‘the true history of the New World’ (MH39): in contrast with dreams of impossible ‘returns’ to Africa or Europe, he argues, amnesia is what allows the inhabitants of the New World to create their home in it. Walcott repeatedly and polemically condemned, particularly in the aftermath of the Trinidad Black Power Revolution, those he described as the ‘pastoralists of the African revival’ (MH9) and, if he regarded St. Omer as too attuned to his world to be tempted to ‘pastoralise’ it (OTC18), in ‘For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, St Lucia’, when the poet re-grounds himself in his native island and celebrates the local intensity of St. Omer’s altarpiece, he also restrains from making any reference to his friend’s decision to paint the divinities as Black or to include African motifs in his mural (SG52–5) (Fig. 2.7). In this context, the presence of Yoruba rituals in Walker seems to be illustrative of a shift in Walcott’s own relationship with Africa. It has been observed that it was not until Omeros, completed in 1990 (three years before Walker), that Africa was to be finally acknowledged and explicitly embraced by Walcott as a key player in the West Indian cultural synthesis and, more precisely, in the (individual and collective) healing process at the core of the poem.7 Far from being a sudden or straightforward shift, however, this inclusionary move relied on and gave shape to a number of stepping stones which precede Omeros, and which Walcott produced in the years following the Black Power Revolution. It is crucial to note that these were also the years in which he began to spend more and more time in the United States, further familiarising himself with Bearden and his work. Arguably, these experiences helped Walcott find his way into African American art history, acquire a deeper understanding of the African American condition, and achieve a more balanced articulation of his own position vis-à-vis Africa. It is perhaps not entirely a coincidence that, in 1990, Walcott produced a small watercolour entitled The Holy Family which represents a Black father caressing the head of his baby while the mother, with lighter skin and colourful headgear (as well as golden earrings), observes the scene smiling. Western art, as we have seen, was not the only artistic tradition Bearden concerned himself with: he had carefully studied the tradition and philosophy of Chinese painting8 and had become familiar with the African heritage very early in his career, since he was one of the many young artists who benefited from Charles Seifert’s knowledge of African art and his desire

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to share it in order to make African Americans aware of this important tradition and legacy.9 Due to his interest in abstract art, Bearden was well aware of Picasso’s (problematic) appropriation of African art, but he was nonetheless keen to include it in his own sets of reference to empower the African American community by reaffirming its connection with this creative heritage.10 African motifs, in fact, are often incorporated in the density of Bearden’s structures: alongside ‘Byzantine mosaics, Romanesque frescoes, stained glass from Chartres Cathedral’, or classical Chinese painting,11 the African tradition always had a crucial role to play in Bearden’s ‘museum without walls’ and in his effort to ‘build … on old form and technique – but in a new way’.12 In ‘Bearden’s Musée Imaginaire’, Kennel singles out, as one of the most compelling examples, an undated watercolour by Bearden where African visual motifs are integrated in the compositional structure of a northern Renaissance religious painting.13 Masks and other overt allusions to African art abound in Bearden’s complex compositions which originate from and acknowledge, simultaneously, a constellation of cultures and time periods. For instance, side by side with Renaissance-inspired Corinthian entablature, a Roman triumphal arch, and what could be a Chinese, Japanese or Korean conical woven hood in the middle of the composition of Bearden’s 1964 collage Sermons: The Walls of Jericho, prompted by a powerful sermon on the biblical story of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho that Bearden had heard in church during his early years,14 Nnamdi Elleh lists, amongst African sources, woven beads from Yorubaland, the 500 bc to 200 ad Nok terracotta from the Nigerian central plateau, and the bronzes of Benin.15 Similarly, collages like Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings (1964), Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism (1964) or Expulsion from Paradise (1964), all contain African masks and bring the Christian and African traditions together. The Prevalence of Ritual, initially the title of four 1964 collages/projections (the two mentioned above and Prevalence of Ritual: Conjur Woman as an Angel, Prevalence of Ritual: Conjur Woman), and then of a 1971 Bearden retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,16 was, for Bearden, much more than a title: it encapsulated a way of understanding art and his function which sustained him throughout his career, and which found its articulation in the simultaneous exploration of myth and ordinary life, the local and the universal, past and present, African, Western and Chinese art. In Bearden, therefore, Walcott found an artist who accorded a crucial role to the African legacy without being nostalgic, exclusionary or Afrocentric, and who (like him) refused to reject what came from Europe as irrelevant to the African American experience whilst advocating the need to creatively revisit this tradition. Furthermore, Bearden’s and his view of culture as ‘fundamentally mongrelized’17 deeply resonated with Walcott’s commitment to be true to the ‘mongrelized’ or creolised West Indian culture (A67). In a 1988 interview, Bearden framed his decision to represent as Black all the characters in his reinterpretation of Homer’s Odyssey as a challenge

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to exclusionary universalism: since everyone considers the Odyssey a ‘universal’ story, he declared, he did not see why it could not include African elements – ‘it’s universal to me in this way’, he explained. Moreover, he added, ‘if a child in Benin or Louisiana … sees my painting of Odysseus, he can understand the myth better’ and more easily appreciate its relevance to his life.18 Bearden’s Black ‘cast’, his references to African masks, or his representation of Poseidon as an African deity19 can all be seen as visual counterparts/anticipations of Martin Bernal’s first volume of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece ­1785–1985) which argues that the development of Greek civilisation was heavily influenced by Afroasiatic civilisations. This knowledge, Bernal insisted, had been deliberately obscured since the eighteenth century, mainly on racist grounds.20 Walcott, however, believed that Bearden was not simply making the chronological observation that Greek culture was indebted to Africa – an important point in itself – but, more subtly, that he was approaching art as a culturally blending and blended (or ‘collaged’) practice predicated on a simultaneity that explodes all forms of hierarchy.21 Paraphrasing his well-known pronouncement about Joyce, Walcott was persuaded that, with his Black Odyssey, Bearden established himself as ‘Homer’s contemporary’, a statement which could be equally applied to Walcott himself in relation to his engagement with Homer in Omeros and, three years later in The Odyssey: A Stage Version.22 The Odyssey, which was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and premiered in July 1992, offers multiple occasions to appreciate the way in which Bearden’s Odyssey resonated with Walcott. Walcott, for example, reiterates Bearden’s and Bernal’s point about the relationship between Greece and Egypt through the old Egyptian nurse Euryclea who explains to Telemachus: ‘Is Egypt who cradle Greece till Greece mature.’23 In the Derek Walcott Papers at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, one can find an ink drawing where Walcott sketched African warriors in different poses, engaging in a battle, throwing lances or raising shields. The fact that the sketch is titled ‘ODYSSEY’ (capitalisation in the original) links its warriors both to the Greek epic and Walcott’s play of the same title. A small watercolour of the head of a Black woman in profile with a madras foulard and a golden earring, furthermore, is carefully glued in the middle of the drawing to partly overlap with one of the warriors’ heads, also in profile: the gazes of warrior and woman point in the same direction as she seems to ‘emerge’ from him in a collage à la Bearden that visually creates a continuity between African and Afro Caribbean experience.24 The power of ‘mongrelisation’ of culture championed by Bearden is brought to the fore in Walcott’s Odyssey from the very beginning, when, in the prologue, the character Billie Blue addresses the audience directly by singing in hexameters, like Homer, but juxtaposing African American/ Afro-Caribbean elisions, turns of phrases or colloquialisms (‘Gone’, ‘bout’,

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‘my main man’) to the Homeric compound ‘sea-smart’ and the first line of Homer’s Odyssey in Greek. This line, however, is left incomplete, as Walcott’s reproduction of Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera in The Last Carnival, in order to signpost the transformative possibilities of adaptation (TO1). Billy Blue also appears as a blind vagrant who demands money to prophesy in Scene XIV, set in Walcott’s version of the underworld where Homer’s Odysseus descends among the dead and meets Tiresias. Walcott seems to have drawn inspiration directly from one of Bearden’s collages here: in conversation with Calvin Tomkins, in fact, the artist mentioned, among the people he used to know as a young boy, a blind blues singer and guitarist who would predict people’s future and who might have been the model for the figure (probably Tiresias) who is about to play an instrument in his Realm of the Shades.25 Other characters in Walcott’s play reverberate with Bearden’s visual representations and his concerns; for example, Walcott’s Cyclops is both a ruthless cannibal murderer and a gullible, simple-minded giant who does not know anything about life, does not have the gift of ‘balance’ and ‘proportion’, and does not know how to cry because he has never lost someone he loved (TO68, 67). This ‘infantilisation’ of Polyphemus finds a visual precedent in Bearden’s collage The Cyclops where Polyphemus is presented as a gigantic toddler.26 Both Bearden’s collage and Walcott’s play, moreover, seem to force us to ‘see’ and acknowledge that also ‘monsters’ have weaknesses and complexities: the original epigraph of Walcott’s play, significantly, was ‘Pity the Monsters’ and, in a line which was later erased, Odysseus is warned that the ‘real superiority’ is ‘[t]o pity tyrants’.27 The fact that the Cyclops is also called ‘The Eye’ has obvious Orwellian undertones which fit well with Walcott’s nod to the infamous fascist Regime of the Colonels which ruled Greece for seven years, from 1967 to 1974. Yet, it is also worth noting that, through this synecdoche (the Cyclops becomes its ‘Eye’ and vice versa), Walcott might be paying homage not only to Bearden’s Polyphemus, who is portrayed with his big eye wide open looking straight at, and implicating, us in the processes that have turned him into a ‘monster’, but also to many other figures in Bearden’s collages whose big eyes challenge viewers to acknowledge the presence of African Americans in a society that would prefer to render invisible them and their marginalisation and misrepresentation. This ‘invisibility’, as the main character of Ellison’s Invisible Man puts it, ‘occurs because of … the construction of [the beholders’] inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality’28 (emphasis in the text). It is through these inner eyes that people are ‘disappeared’ or simplified into monsters because, as Walcott’s Odysseus reveals to Penelope in their very last exchange in the play, the ‘monsters’ ‘out there’, ‘we make them ourselves’ (TO159– 60). Walcott’s depiction of the relationship between Penelope and Odysseus seems to echo and magnify Bearden’s interpretation of their encounter

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and rapport. Bearden’s subtitle for The Return of Odysseus, Homage to Pintoricchio & Benin,29 identifies as the artist’s sources a fresco the Italian artist Pintoricchio painted around 1509 and the bronzes of the African Kingdom of Benin, made in the sixteenth century in what is now Nigeria. The composition is modelled on Pintoricchio’s fresco, where Penelope looks a bit pensive and does not look back at the figure who is supposed to be Odysseus as if she were assessing the situation, much like Homer’s Penelope who initially hesitates to believe that the man in front of her is her long-lost husband. Bearden amplifies this intimation of distrust and discomfort and gives it full rein: if we are presented with husband and wife trying to reach for one another, there is no joy or relief in their looks, they look both cautious and nervous, particularly Penelope, who appears apprehensive about the future. The oblique lines of the loom which keep them apart signify, more forcefully than in Pintoricchio, the twenty years of separation that have turned them into mutual strangers and signpost that their relationship needs to be renegotiated. In Homer’s Odyssey, a similarly awkward encounter between Odysseus and Penelope (Book XXIII) follows the carnage of the suitors: in Bearden’s series, instead, it precedes it, adding further poignancy to the scene. According to O’Meally, Bearden recast Odysseus’s and Penelope’s encounter as a ‘tense dance’ or even ‘a wrestling match’.30 Bearden here seems to have been inspired by the stories of abuse and power imbalance encapsulated by his other source, those Benin plaques – made of brass, not bronze – which sometimes document, from the African side, another kind of ‘encounter’, the one between Africans and Europeans, particularly the Portuguese, and which were appropriated as war booty by the British army in 1897. Walcott builds on the connotations and denotations of Bearden’s Homage to Pintoricchio & Benin and of the collage which follows it, The Bow of Odysseus,31 which immortalises the instant that immediately precedes the slaughter of the suitors in Ithaca. In The Bow of Odysseus, Odysseus, in the right-hand lower corner, is getting ready to insert the arrow in his bow; as horizontal lines clearly divide the space in two, Penelope is instead positioned in the upper left-hand corner. Husband and wife are diametrically opposed both physically and in terms of status: Penelope is tended by servants whilst sitting on her ‘throne’ (yet, whilst mimicking the patriarchal structure in which she operates, she is peripheral in the composition), while Odysseus’s inferiority is signalled both by his marginalisation and the fact that he is kneeling (significantly, however, with his bow in his hands, a visual reminder that he is a trickster whose appearance can always be deceptive). From an ethical perspective, Walcott’s Odysseus and Penelope are as polarly opposed as Bearden’s figures: the two, in fact, engage in a ferocious argument (or wrestling match) when Penelope objects to Odysseus’s carnage with these words: ‘IT’S FOR THIS I KEPT MY THIGHS CROSSED FOR TWENTY YEARS?’ (TO153, capitalisation in the original). Walcott’s Penelope, moreover, does retain some of the power

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of Bearden’s queen when she successfully prevents the killing of the maids who, in Book XXII of the Odyssey, are hanged because they sided with the suitors – in fact, she conclusively orders: ‘No! There’ll be no hanging in this house!’ (TO155).

The Obeah’s Dawn: Conjur Women and Circes In Bearden’s The Return of Odysseus, as in the rest of the series, all the characters are Black but the collage’s subtitle, Homage to Pintoricchio & Benin, reiterates Bearden’s desire to bring Africa and the European visual tradition together with the Greek myth and the African American experience, a desire which is amplified throughout the series also by strategic self-referential nods to his other works. We have seen how Polyphemus’s eye recalls other collages/projections, but also Bearden’s representation of Circe offers us a goddess of magic and herb connoisseuse who shares some obvious visual traits with some of his African American conjur women: in Circe Turns a Companion of Odysseus into a Swine,32 in fact, the goddess appears with a golden snake wrapped around her arm like the conjur woman in the 1964, 1971 and 1975 collages Conjur Woman – incidentally, in the 1975 version the colours are much more vivid due to Bearden’s exposure to Caribbean landscape (Fig. 5.1).33 The impact of Bearden’s conjur women is traceable in Walcott’s play Marie Laveau, written between 1977 and 1980 and modelled on the historical Marie Laveau, a New Orleans ‘Voudou Queen’ and conjur woman who lived in Louisiana at the end of the nineteenth century. The protagonist, in fact, keeps a ‘little jeweled serpent / no bigger than [a] bracelet’ locked in a box where she also hides compromising evidence implicating the rich and powerful of the city who utilise her cathouse.34 This serpent is in fact the Voudou snake God Damballa who gives Marie her powers and who ‘stings’ Papa Sam, the conjur king who challenges, and is ultimately defeated by, the Queen (ML31–3). When Papa Sam, who identifies fully with his African origins, accuses his counterpart of being embarrassed by them, Marie retorts that she is ‘proud’ of her African blood but adds that she values, in equal measure, her ‘Cajun’ ancestry and, anchoring herself firmly in her locality, she declares the river Mississippi to be both her ‘father and mother’ (ML103). At the end of the play, Sam is sent back to Africa instead of being sentenced to death for murdering a preacher who wanted him to publicly and symbolically renounce his African Gods in order to persuade the enslaved to embrace Christianity and abandon their desire for revolt (ML105–6, 69–70). Before leaving, Papa Sam makes peace with Marie – who saved his life by threatening to reveal some of the secrets of the city’s oligarchs if Sam was not spared – and participates in a ceremony that restores life to a mixed-heritage character who had stolen Marie’s box and was ‘lethally’ stung by her snake.

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During the ritual, Marie begins to sing with Sam’s voice, signalling that his Africanness is going to live on and thrive in her. When the two characters ‘aurally’ merge into one, the audience witnesses what Walcott calls ‘the moment when the faiths cross’ as African gods, statues of Christian saints, and figures with both African and Christian elements (for example, ‘a black St. George in armour’ and ‘a black Virgin’) appear on stage simultaneously (ML107–11). If Walcott’s Marie Laveau and her bracelet-like serpent recall Bearden’s Circe and conjur women and their snakes, Walcott’s powerful visualisation of the merging of African and Christian faiths resonates with Bearden’s compelling ‘collages’ of cultures, traditions and beliefs. Creolisation is therefore celebrated as a revitalising force (the dead mixedheritage girl comes back to life as a result of the ceremony) and the play, anticipating Walcott’s long poem Omeros, highlights the need to acknowledge the role that African culture plays in the individual and collective identity of those of African and/or mixed heritage living in the New World, like Bearden, and Walcott himself. According to Bruce King, the first paintings that Walcott sold (in a Port of Spain gallery owned by Clara Rosa de Lima and Stella Beaubrun) were sketches and watercolours he had prepared for this play which was conceived as a ‘visual feast’,35 a fact that might offer further indirect evidence of the crucial role that Bearden’s art played in the shaping of Marie Laveau and in the crystallisation of Walcott’s vision as a whole. Counterparts of Marie Laveau’s brothel had been at the core of a series of Bearden’s works executed in the 1970s and devoted to the parlours of the legendary Storyville,36 a district of New Orleans only one block south of the North Rampart Street mentioned in Walcott’s play. In a small painting held by the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Walcott reproduces the dance scene in Marie Laveau for either his own individual inspiration, or, since the title of the play, elaborately written, is also part of the painting, as a possible advertising image. The photograph of a dancing (conjur) woman glued on the canvas creates an ensemble which resonates, in both technique and chromatism (green, brown, white, black and a touch of red), with Bearden’s collages entitled Conjur Woman, particularly the 1964 one.37 Bearden’s conjur women and his Circe also inform Walcott’s description of Helen in Omeros: as a matter of fact, a sensually-charged scene where Major Plunkett – a ‘khaki Ulysses’ (O263) – becomes besotted with the beautiful Helen, visually ‘rhymes’ with Bearden’s depictions of his conjur women and of his Circe as snake-charm seductress. The Major, in fact, is completely under Helen’s spell when, ‘with eyes calm as Circe’, she tries on a coiled bracelet belonging to his wife (O96).38 Walcott openly acknowledges that Bearden’s Odyssey influenced him when he began to write Omeros39 but the fact that he was also familiar with Bearden’s other works has been overlooked. The same can be said for the fact that, in 1984, Walcott was asked to write a poem for the opening page of the catalogue for Bearden’s Rituals of Obeah (1984), a series inspired by this

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particular set of spiritual practices which, developed as a result of cultural contact, enabled the detribalised Africans of the Caribbean to preserve a connection with their origin whilst adapting their belief to their new condition and their new environment. Bearden’s Rituals of Obeah comprises eighteen watercolours cut with benzene to emphasise the strong dream-like quality of the experiences he was recreating: since Obeah represents ‘an irrational set of values’,40 his figures seem ‘enveloped in hypnotic fumes [or] invaded by magical forces’.41 Bearden’s interest in Obeah was fuelled by accounts he had heard from the people of St Martin and conversations he had with the anthropologist Joseph Thomas who, whilst staying in one of the painter’s houses, was researching St Martin’s Haitian community, whose Voudou temples had been destroyed by order of the Prefect in the early 1980s.42 When Bearden produced the Rituals of Obeah watercolours, in fact, he had been living in St Martin, on and off, for over ten years and, proceeding as he had when he prepared the Mecklenburg and Harlem collages, he decided that the time had come for him ‘to penetrate the interior of the lives he portrayed and … connect [St Martin’s] people and events to larger more universal themes’.43 Bearden believed in the universal resonance of the Obeah rituals and considered his paintings on the topic to be representative, simultaneously, of his Caribbean experience, his ties with the US South, and his interest in Greek mythology.44 Walcott accepted the invitation to write for Bearden’s catalogue by responding to Bearden’s watercolour The Obeah’s Dawn (1984) (Fig. 5.2) where a white, yellow and red cockerel occupies the upper-left corner of the painting and, above it, the sun is painted in exactly the same colours. The right side of the watercolour, instead, is much darker and devoted to a shadowy female figure accompanied by a strikingly white crescent moon. Walcott’s poem, to which I will return to as an example of Walcott’s ekphrastic practices in Chapter 7, is entitled ‘To Romare Bearden’ and begins by addressing Bearden directly, praising him for capturing the precise moment where day and night, death and renewal, sacrificial blood and communal belief, become one in the Obeah woman’s act of cutting the cockerel’s throat.45 The first line of the poem ‘How you have gotten it! It’s all here, all right’ enhances the ‘vernacular’ nature of the rites in question and frames what follows as an outright tribute to the visual power of Bearden’s work which, in this case, is, paradoxically, about invisible forces.46 The ‘Loa’s [sacred] ground’ and the ‘chalk-circles and spiked diagrams’ which Walcott mentions in lines 5 to 7 are not immediately discernible in the painting and, strictly speaking, neither is the slicing of the cockerel’s throat: yet, as Walcott insists in the opening line, they are ‘all [t]here’.47 Responding to what the watercolour depicts and, concomitantly, to the invisible forces that govern the Obeah woman’s activity, and find their visual counterpart in the way in which the contours of the human figure dissolve in paint and colour, Walcott argues that Bearden’s canvas both captures and transcends a particular moment – the Obeah’s

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Figure 5.1  Conjur Woman, 1975, Romare Bearden, collage with spray paint on paper, 116.8 × 91.4 cm. Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, R. T. Miller Jr. Fund. Photo: Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College © Romare Bearden Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London, 2022.

Figure 5.2  The Obeah’s Dawn (L’Aube de la sorcière, Douvan Jou Manbo-A), 1984, Romare Bearden, watercolour, 75.2 × 56.8 cm. Photograph: Courtesy of the Romare Bearden Foundation © Romare Bearden Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London, 2022.

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dawn of the title – and reminds us that much-maligned rituals like Obeah share the sacrifice of a scapegoat (Abraham and Isaac are mentioned in line 12) with other ‘legitimised’ religious practices, and are equally borne out of the desire to counter the unavoidability and materiality of death. The strength of Bearden’s inclusive vision, and his urge to connect the particular with the universal, are also acknowledged by the pronoun ‘we’ in the penultimate line of the poem which not only brings poet and painter together, underlining a shared sensibility, but also extends its embrace to the larger collectivity of viewers/readers.48 Bearden’s Rituals of Obeah watercolours are often devoted to one-to-one consultations between an Obeah man or woman and a client:49 one of them, The Green Bath (n.d.), shows an Obeah woman and a young female figure engaging in a ritual bath with special herbs and roots. A ritual bath also plays a crucial part in Walcott’s Omeros, where the Obeah woman Ma Kilman prepares it to heal the wound of her fellow villager, Philoctete. Walcott’s Ma Kilman is, at the same time, an Obeah woman, a ‘sybil’ (in the classics tradition), a St Lucian ‘gardeuse’ (a local figure who looks after and protects her people), but also a devout Catholic who takes Holy Communion, albeit with ‘an old African doubt’ that makes her ‘pause before taking the wafer’s white leaf’ (O58). As such, she embodies powerful connections like those underscored in Bearden’s works, where present and past, myth and reality, the classics and the local, European and African traditions, all come together. In the Caribbean as in Africa, entering a ritual bath (or bush bath) often invokes the healing presence of water spirits, and Walcott’s Omeros can be described, in its entirety, as a healing narrative in which, for characters like Achille, Philoctete and Walcott/the narrator, an imaginary and spiritual journey to Africa plays a crucial role. For Walcott/the narrator, spiritual healing comes from his reconnection with Africa which he re-establishes as he writes and credits his characters’ experiences. For Philoctete, whose wound, the poem instructs us, represents the wound of slavery, healing takes place in a former sugar cauldron in which Ma Kilman prepares an herbal bath with the root of an African plant whose seeds had been carried to St Lucia by a sea-swift, and which had grown strong thanks to the island’s nutrients (O19, 246–7). Like an Obeah ritual, Achille’s spiritual and healing journey also defies rationality involving, as it does, the character’s walking back to the Africa of his ancestors along the bottom of the sea, breathing water like ‘a walking fish in his element’ (O142). An unusual watercolour by Walcott held by the Thomas Fisher Rare Book library which recreates the bottom of the sea – an appropriate visual background to Achille’s walk to Africa – has multi-coloured tropical fish and rock formations whose contours are melting and undefined, and whose colours seem to dissolve and be absorbed into one another: here, as it was the case for Bearden’s Rituals of Obeah, lack of definition signposts the supernatural and dream-like nature of the journey of Achille from St Lucia to Africa.50

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Bearden, it goes without saying, did not introduce Walcott to Obeah, to Greek mythology, or to the notion of a spiritual return to Africa. Yet, while in Omeros, which he wrote after engaging with The Obeah’s Dawn, Walcott approaches positively the ‘irrational set of values’ undergirding Obeah, and gives this spiritual belief a crucial role to play in the healing of his community, in his notebooks for Another Life he was much more ambivalent towards it. If Walcott acknowledged the symbolic value of Obeah’s endurance in the face of condemnation from the colonial administration and the Catholic Church, in fact, he nonetheless believed that it suited ‘colonial Catholicism’ well, since it encouraged ‘the blind belief in miracles’ that allowed ‘French provincial priests’ to keep his people under their thumb (ALms1, 29, 67). Omeros, on the other hand, unambiguously credits, and encourages readers to credit, the power of local and localised ‘miracles’. Obeah practices, the value of a spiritual reconnection with Africa, and Greek mythology, are also mentioned side by side in the early poem ‘Origins’, on which Walcott worked for several years, and which was included in Walcott’s first Selected Poems (1964) and, later, in his 1986 Collected Poems. Originally called ‘Africa Patria Mia’,51 ‘Origins’ begins by highlighting how colonial education introduced the poet to the classics but had nothing positive to offer on the Amerindians.52 As the poet remembers a ‘malarial bush-bath’ and its Egyptian/African origins, he situates himself ‘between the Greek and African pantheon’, but acknowledges that, in their ‘Guinean odyssey’, the islands had ‘drifted from anchorage’ and ‘loosened from Guinea’: the old gods (African and Amerindians) had died while others (Jahveh and Zeus) had taken their place.53 The poet’s mind then withdraws, ‘seeks to take root in itself’ as the need for ‘a new song’ becomes compelling. The poem ends by evoking a collectivity (‘we praise’) which celebrates those who ‘harvest ancestral voices’ and reconnect to Guinea/Africa in a spiritual way (emphasis mine).54 According to Bruce King, who describes ‘Origins’ as one of ‘Walcott’s Odyssey poems’, this seven-part sequence/poem expresses ‘the need to make an imaginative voyage of recovery to Africa as part of the process of healing spiritual wounds, the need to stop wallowing in black self-hate and see that the Caribbean will be multiracial bronze, a place … where Old Testament stories … become applicable to blacks, where life is similar to that of the Ancient Greeks’.55 King’s inventory of Walcott’s ‘intentions’ is accurate as is his observation that the poem outlines a vision Walcott ‘will develop and expand over the decades’56 since ‘Origins’ puts forward more a list of desiderata than an articulated, fully fleshed vision. Arguably, in fact, ‘Origins’ is a difficult poem not only because it might require (as Walcott himself indicated) a knowledge of French Caribbean poets like Aimé Césaire or Saint-John Perse57 or because (as Kamau Brathwaite suggested) it might be ‘speaking away’ from the society the poet should be addressing,58 but also because, as Walcott admits, the poet was still ‘seeking [his] own name’,59 and searching for a better way to understand and put in dialogue all these forgotten,

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learnt and unlearnt multiple ‘origins’ in order to express their simultaneous relevance and collective creative potential. Almost thirty years later, after engaging with Bearden’s vision, Walcott’s Omeros describes an epiphanic moment in which the poet manages to clarify, develop, refine and (at least temporarily) crystallise a vision where the concerns, needs or revelations which formed the backbone of ‘Origins’ could be addressed, fulfilled, acted upon and made to converge in powerful and inspiring combinations. Towards the end of the poem, in fact, the narrator/ Walcott pauses for a moment, laments that his privileged education might prevent him from seeing St Lucia and its reality ‘as they are’, and, in order to ‘enter’ what he calls ‘that light beyond metaphor’, he tries to ‘shake off’ literary or classic echoes ‘like a horse // shaking off a wreath of flies’ (O271). In the following lines, however, after reconsidering his position, he concludes: ‘But it was mine to make what I wanted of [these metaphors or classic references] or / what I thought was wanted’ (O272). What Walcott wanted was, ultimately, what he had always wanted and always thought was wanted, namely to capture the ‘paradoxical flash of an instant / in which every facet was caught / in a crystal of ambiguities’ (AL58), to arrive at what Simmons had called ‘a perfection to West Indian things’, and to achieve what, in 1974, he had described as, ‘maturity’, that is ‘the assimilation of the features of every ancestor’ (MH36, emphasis mine). Exposure to Bearden’s inclusive modus operandi, therefore, provided Walcott with a crucial example of how one could arrive at this ‘mature’ vision which would comprise the ‘real’ light of St Lucia, the metaphorical process, and a frame of references derived from, simultaneously, the European legacy, the African root and the New World routes; a vision that would be finely attuned to his own aesthetic needs, faithful to local reality and local experience, and in open conversation with the world beyond the local. Through its visual immediacy, Bearden’s work showed Walcott a compelling alternative to what he considered a demagogical ‘African phase’ where ‘African carvings, poems, and costumes’ were no longer ‘sacred vessels placed on altars but goods placed on shelves for the tourist’ (WTS8). Bearden’s work, which included Africa but did not discard Western canonical or classic echoes as irrelevant or ‘dead’ metaphors, further confirmed to Walcott that classic and literary ‘echoes’ could illuminate, and be illuminated by, the social and political rituals of his own people. Far from being isolating and alienating – as Walcott suggested was the case for ‘solemn Afro-Greeks’ like his younger self, whose ‘borrowed ancestors’ and ‘posture / seem[ed] a tourist’s’ (G50) – Bearden’s transformative practices had the potential to meaningfully reconnect the artist with his reality and community. Bearden’s oeuvre also reassured Walcott that ‘ritual’ affinities and continuities in time and place did not necessarily presuppose a collapse of specificity or distinctiveness. If Walcott could see, for example, that Bearden’s Of the Blues: Show Time (1974) had, as ‘source image’, Degas’s 1879 pastel Café Singer, he was

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also able to appreciate that the collage was an unmistakable, powerful and specific evocation of Harlem nightclubs and of the African American blues culture. By the same token, the names ‘Philoctete’, ‘Achille’ and ‘Hector’ in Omeros might have Homeric overtones but are in fact common local names which, Walcott insisted, must be pronounced in St Lucian (French-based) Kweyol,60 and his crippled Philoctete is not abandoned to his destiny, as the Greek Philoctetes, but healed by Ma Kilman through an Obeah ceremony that finds its root (both literally and metaphorically) in Africa.

Barometric Sensitivities: Winslow Homer and Jackie Hinkson In Omeros, despite having been an important inspiration for Walcott, Romare Bearden is never mentioned. In the poem, Walcott pays homage instead to Winslow Homer, another North American artist he believed had been able to capture the Caribbean with the same ‘exactness’ with which Bearden reproduced the colour of the Sea in The Sea Nymph (Fig. 4.4), the collage from A Black Odyssey that Walcott selected as a cover for The Star-Apple Kingdom. For the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition of Omeros, instead, Walcott used one of his own watercolours featuring a group of local fishermen at work, which does not only ‘introduce’ readers to the fact that some of the protagonists of the poem are St Lucian fishermen but, one could argue, also gestures towards one of Homer’s most recurrent subjects and to his compelling use of watercolour. Starting in 1884, in fact, Winslow Homer began to travel to and paint the (extended) Caribbean in a series of trips which took him from the Bahamas to Bermuda, from Santiago de Cuba to the Florida Keys. The first trip to the Bahamas introduced Homer to a new landscape which required a new palette of ‘rich aquas, vivid emeralds, deep marine blues … minute flashes of scarlet and hairline delineations of black’.61 Initially, the pictures he painted in the Bahamas did not encounter the favour of critics at home and did not sell very well and, as a result, many are impossible to locate. Nonetheless, Homer continued to return regularly to the Caribbean until 1909 and to produce paintings which became increasingly popular.62 During his trips to the region, he set out to study very carefully, in order to paint them, its flora (palm trees, jungles, lagoons), fauna (birds, sharks, turtles, razorbacks), weather (bright sunlight, hurricanes, tornadoes), coral and rock formations, the sea, the course and flow of the Gulf Stream, and, of course, its people engaged in daily activities (fishermen, market scenes). In an essay included in American, without America entitled ‘An American Paradise: Hemingway’s Caribbean’, Walcott writes at length about Hemingway but also Winslow Homer. The same essay was republished, in abridged form, in What The Twilight Says: Essays (1998)63 with a title, ‘On Hemingway’, that indicates that the focus had shifted even more substantially

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on the writer and explains the omission of some of the passages that had to do with Homer or the art of painting the Caribbean. ‘On Hemingway’ begins by quoting some lines from the novel Islands in the Stream and then proceeds to argue that the painter they evoke is in fact Winslow Homer, as Homer’s art is compared to Hemingway’s Thomas Hudson’s, the artist/main character of the novel whom, in the unpublished version of his essay, Walcott imagines painting ‘in planes of clear washes with delicate but authoritative drawing [and] within the tradition of Winslow Homer’ (AWA). The subjects of the two painters, for Walcott, would have been the same – ‘waterspouts, natives fishing, storms, and beaches’ – and Hudson would have shared Homer’s ‘realistic style’ which reveals both ‘an intimate experience of weather’ and ‘essential observation that achieves authority’.64 Homer’s canvases, in fact, despite having become, perhaps, ‘too literary, too rhetorical, too set-up’ for our taste, and despite having had their rawness and power absorbed or ‘reduced’ by their ‘narrative element’, still carry, for Walcott, the ‘authority’ of an artist who, like Bearden, paints the Caribbean in order to go well ‘beyond mere illustration’ (OH109). In Homer’s works, Walcott adds, ‘nature is the subject’, and he marvels repeatedly at Homer’s ‘selection of detail, and, above all, transparency’, at his use of ‘colour, accuracy of tone, thick rapidity of execution’, and at his ability to ‘never exaggerate nature’ but ‘always [be] astonishingly exact’ (OH108–9, AWA). The waters of the Bahamas that Homer reproduces are particularly difficult to render due to their shallowness and the reflection of the coral seafloor, but what Walcott finds truly remarkable in Homer is that he responded to and painted the Caribbean Sea as if he knew it as a local fisherman whose livelihood depended on such knowledge, as ‘a way of life’, not as a ‘mood of fiction’ or ‘tone of a painting’ (OH110). Homer’s pictures, by making manifest both ‘the weather and the process of its description’, also reveal, for Walcott, ‘the quiet joy of discovery, of knowing nature in detail, of developing a primal awe’ (AWA). ‘Getting the weather right’, which is what, according to Walcott, Homer masterfully does, is difficult in the Tropics, particularly in watercolour painting, because ‘clarity, transparency and truth must come in every flawless sweep of wash’ (AWA). ‘Every Caribbean watercolourist’, Walcott concludes, ‘must admire’ Homer’s ‘exhilarating “rightness”’ evident in all his ‘masterly strokes’ (OH109–10): it did not come as a surprise when, in conversation with me, he referred to Homer as ‘the best’.65 In the same conversation Walcott also praised the Trinidadian artist and watercolourist Jackie Hinkson with whom, in 1998, he had a joint exhibition entitled Island Light: Watercolors and Oil Painting by Derek Walcott and Donald Hinkson; some of the paintings by the two artists are available on the exhibition’s online catalogue/website which also contains an introductory essay by Walcott on Hinkson’s work which is an abridged version of an article (‘Jackie Hinkson’) published by Walcott on Galerie Magazine in 1992–3.66 In this article, Walcott argues that Hinkson’s best paintings are

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close to Homer in terms of ‘getting the light right’ and locates their value in the fact that they bear witness to the precise time of day in which they were depicted.67 Painting en plein air in the Caribbean, as Walcott had learnt in his apprenticeship in St Lucia with Simmons and St. Omer, demands ‘concentration on the instant’ – ‘light cannot be imagined or remembered’, he argues (OTC21, 11) – and a profound awareness of the meteorological conditions, from the ‘already damp atmosphere’ which produces ‘a hue which infiltrates everything’ providing ‘its own basic washes’, to the ‘ever-changing skies where clouds can move at extraordinary speed, constantly change shape and project different shadows’.68 Hinkson, who was born in Port of Spain in 1942 – that is when Walcott was beginning to take his first tentative artistic steps under Simmons’s tutelage – values the practice of drawing as much as Walcott, and began to use watercolours in Trinidad in the 1960s; he immediately felt that the medium served him well in his desire to ‘capture with broad strokes the heat, the light, the wind, the salt air’ and, eventually, watercolour painting became ‘almost second nature’ to him.69 In 1965, when he was about to leave for Canada on a five-year fellowship to study art at the University of Alberta, Sybil Atteck, a prominent Trinidadian painter and founding member of the Trinidad Art Society which had invited Simmons to lecture in 1944, congratulated Hinkson at the same time as she issued a warning: he was going to learn a lot in Canada but he had to remember that, once back in Trinidad, he would ‘have to unlearn much of what [he had] learned’ if he wanted to paint his locality.70 When he came back to his native island in 1970, Hinkson fully understood what Atteck had meant as he began to feel that the attention he had learnt to pay to metropolitan current styles – he mentions Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art – was not going to support him in Trinidad, where he sensed that his Minimalist sculptures were ‘out of place’, and realised that ‘what had seemed inspired and appropriate in Canada seemed to fall flat’ at home.71 The ‘unlearning process’ Atteck had warned him he should undertake72 was inaugurated by Hinkson’s decision to move away from Minimalist sculpture and focus on watercolour painting (mainly seascapes to begin with) and on drawing old buildings. Hinkson recalls that he knew he was ‘taking a risk’ at the time by refusing to be part of a movement which dominated the international scene, but he was determined to create art for his fellow Caribbeans and wanted to reach them in a way that, without compromising the integrity of his vision, would create a relationship characterised by the same immediacy and vernacularity that connected a calypsonian with his public, an intention that resonates with Walcott’s appreciation of the immediacy of ‘tone’ in (Warwick’s) watercolours.73 In 1964, a year before Hinkson was to leave for Canada, and in the article in which he criticised colonial intellectuals for fetishising the Elizabethan past discussed in the previous chapter, Walcott expresses a similar point to the one made by Atteck when he argues that the impulse to pander to international styles or a ‘venerated past’ must be held

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at bay if a West Indian painter wants to develop a style ‘true for his own country’74 – or, in other words, reach that ‘perfection to West Indian things’ Walcott had always striven for. The dilemma facing a local artist, especially one who had studied abroad, Walcott writes, anticipating Hinkson’s predicament, has to do with having become ‘skilful in the style of the mainstream’ whilst having a ‘strong urge to re-create’ the world around him which, ‘in terms of art history [was still] undocumented’: tropical landscapes, Walcott insists, constitute a ‘very small part of world painting’, and he singles out Rivera, Gauguin, but also Homer, as notable precedents.75 Landscaping one’s local reality with both commitment and ‘a sense of community’,76 as Hinkson was determined to do once back on his island and as Walcott had always tried to do, was, in itself, not only a valuable effort but also a way to fulfil that all-important ‘Adam’s task of giving things their names’ by creating a special connection with one’s place and people. In Walcott’s own experience, what had prevented him from becoming, as he puts it in an unpublished essay entitled ‘Influences’,77 ‘a cloistered meticulous imitator of metropolitan poetry’ (I5) was precisely the fact that he also wanted to be a painter and, as such, understood the necessity to situate himself in one’s natural and human environment and paint his subjects whilst trying to be ‘with them’ (NW162). As his career developed and his search for la couleur juste became the search for le mot juste, he never forgot the lessons he had learnt when he had realised that painting a landscape en plein air was a complex affair. Its success depended not only on technical skills or familiarity with the works of other artists, but also on the creation of a close connection with one’s subjects and environment, and on one’s willingness to let subjects and meteorological elements (co)shape the final product. It was ‘hard to subtilize’, he declares, the ‘unarguable blue’ sky, and the ‘prismatic ferocity’ of his environment into ‘the tertiary mixture of the northern palette’ (I6). Walcott’s experience was moulded, as we have seen, by Simmons’s mentoring and the companionship of St. Omer, with whom he used to go out and paint, and with whom he shared his discoveries: Walcott’s appreciation of Hinkson and Homer, therefore, testifies to the lasting value of the fundamental tenets of his formative years. Hinkson’s first solo exhibition after his return was held at Bynoe’s Gallery in Port of Spain and comprised a collection of watercolours of ‘the common sights of the city, the sea, the authentic heat and light and moisture’ of his island.78 His work met with praise but also with some disapproval: he was criticised – in a way that echoes some of the criticism directed at Homer – for producing ‘pretty drawings of broken-down houses and sailing boats and people strolling on beaches’ while the Caribbean was facing serious political issues from exploitation to neo-colonialism, from poverty to racism.79 Hinkson defended the value of his personal vision (‘This is the way I see my world’) but, at the same time, lamented that his critics’ judgement did not go beyond the ‘surface of the subject matter’.80 Walcott’s appreciation

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of Hinkson and Homer, instead, takes fully on board their handling of technique which to him, however, mean a lot more than mere bravura. For Walcott, far from being postcard painting where any blue or yellow can do, Homer’s and Hinkson’s watercolours, produced under ‘the stiff sentence’ of a medium where the possibilities of ‘retouching’ are fairly limited, could only derive from these two artists’ full commitment to, and intimate knowledge of, the location they were depicting, and their ability to know ‘how to load the brush in open-air painting’ in the Caribbean, where ‘the first wash’, he insisted, ‘has to be very accurate’.81 Walcott had followed Hinkson’s career from the very start (he had reviewed favourably some of his paintings prior to the artist’s departure for Canada82) and in the 1990s he praised Hinkson’s works because, as it is the case for Homer’s canvases, nature and the weather do not ‘outdate[…] the painter’ and one cannot spot ‘false shadows and detail’ added at a later stage.83 Homer, whose Caribbean watercolours were produced in one or two sittings,84 claimed that he could easily tell ‘if an outdoor picture with figures ha[d] been painted in a studio. When there is any sunlight in it, the shadows are not sharp enough; and, when it is an overcast day, the shadows are too positive’; he preferred to paint outdoors to preserve the ‘freshness … the subtle, and … finer characteristics of the scene itself’.85 A great watercolour, Walcott declares, can be a ‘awesome witness of time’ if the artist is able to ‘concentrat[e] on the instant’ and ‘adapt to the speed and betrayal of changing clouds’.86 ‘Fixing’ a specific instant in all its freshness, therefore, depends on the ability to be mindful of change and mutability, of the fact that time is an unpredictable mesh of simultaneous ‘nows’ and epiphanies, not a linear, foreseeable ‘narrative’, or a ‘fiction’ with a foreordained sequence, where the beginning of a given story is followed by a middle section and an appropriate wrapping up at the end (TH94). Walcott’s admiration for the sensuous realism and exactness of Hinkson’s and Homer’s brushes is intertwined with his appreciation of their choice of subject matter and the fact that the two artists preserve the Caribbean reality they paint. Walcott appreciated Hinkson’s accurate landscapes and seascapes painted en plein air but, at a time when the ‘colonial architecture’ of Port of Spain – ‘its lace-work baroque, balconies and mansards, its light-washed alleys and rococo mansions’ – was under threat by the city’s ‘impatience to look modern’,87 he believed that Hinkson deserved praise also for painstakingly ‘chronicl[ing]’ it, without nostalgia, but simply as part of a landscape that should not go unrecorded.88 In a way, therefore, he considered Hinkson a ‘conservative’ painter like Homer who, Walcott believed, ‘by recording … nature … as well as he [could], [was] also conserving it’ against the assault of man on the environment (OH111).89 In the early 1990s, Walcott too became actively involved in this ‘conservationist’ mission when the Saint Lucia National Trust commissioned a number of local artists to produce paintings of the island’s natural heritage for Project Helen. The ensuing collection was

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supposed to form the nucleus of St Lucia’s first national art gallery and was aimed at preserving for posterity an island which was rapidly changing due to modernisation and an increasingly exploitative and destructive tourist industry. Represented by twelve paintings, the majority of which were landscapes or seascapes, Walcott was one of the nine artists who took part in the project together with St. Omer, who offered eleven of his works. Unfortunately, however, the St Lucia National Gallery was never built and, currently, the paintings of Project Helen are hanging in the offices of the National Trust. Many of Homer’s Caribbean works, however, are humanised land- and seascapes which try to render not only a natural environment under attack but also the ordinary life of local Black people as it was lived outdoors, in bright sunlight.90 Homer’s attitude to Black and local subjects was considered unusual at the time because of his rejection of what Locke calls ‘weak, insipid stereotypes’, and his decision to present them in ‘their own atmosphere and dignity’.91 As primary examples, Locke included in The Negro in Art three plates from Homer, namely Dressing for the Carnival (1877), After the Hurricane, Bahamas (1899)92 and The Gulf Stream (1899) (Fig 5.6) and credited the painter with being ‘chiefly responsible with the modern revival of interest in the Negro subject’.93 The Gulf Stream is still considered a ‘turning point’ in the representation of Black subjects in US painting94 and, as we will see, Walcott returns to and praises this painting in Omeros. Homer, however, has also been criticised for depicting a ‘tropical paradise’ in ‘idealized watercolours’ and showing ‘no hint of the bleak poverty that plagued most of the inhabitants’ of the Caribbean.95 It is true that Homer did not document the harsh lives of his Caribbean subjects in graphic details, but to romanticise his watercolours as Edenic ‘spectacle[s] of … free life’, as one of his contemporaries put it at the time,96 might not be entirely accurate either, particularly if one considers that they are mainly peopled with hard-working men. Sponge and turtle fishing Bahamians like the ones he represents, for example, were particularly subject to exploitation by the white mercantile class,97 as it is made evident in Homer’s Sponge Fishing, Nassau (1885), where class divide and white privilege are manifest in the fact that while Black fishermen unload a huge cargo of sponges onto the wharf, they are observed, from a distance, by elegantly dressed white men – most likely the buyers. The encroachment of a tourist industry which exploited the locals and encouraged them to destroy their own natural environment, is also not difficult to spot in some of Homer’s watercolours, even if white visitors never appear in his works. As tourists and travellers became increasingly excited about the possibility to see far into the depths of the Caribbean Sea in the 1880s and 1990s, local diving boys retrieving coins tossed on the seafloor by visitors or removing the pieces of coral coveted by them as souvenirs became a common sight. As shown by engravings and photographs of the period, when Homer travelled in the region, early optical devices like ‘water glasses’ and glass-bottom boats which enabled tourists to penetrate, visually, the

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depth of the sea were readily available.98 Homer did record both the presence of these devices and the activities of these divers: in The Water Fan (1898–9) (Fig. 5.5), for example, a local solitary fisherman uses a glass-bottomed bucket to survey the seafloor to search for water fans while, in Sea Garden, Bahamas (1885) (Fig. 5.3), a young boy proudly shows a delicate sea fan to a local little girl who looks with admiration at both. Yet, this charming vignette is disturbed by the presence of stalks of sugar cane which, lying next to the girl, remind one of the region’s troubling history of exploitation. The boy, visible only from the torso upwards, is showing Homer and us his back and cares only for the girl’s approval, while the man with the glass-bottomed bucket is far too absorbed by his task to acknowledge or even notice the painter or us. Crucially, unlike performers trying to charm tourists, the male figures in Sea Garden, Bahamas and The Water Fan do not pose for the painter, and they do not look for his/our validation. During his trips in the Caribbean, in fact, Homer painted several other young divers not as tourist entertainers but as working people caught unawares during their taxing daily working routine. In Sponge Fishing (c. 1885), a sponge is being passed from a diver (again turning his back at us) to a companion on a boat while a woman, looking mesmerised by the blinding light and scorching sun, stares at a distant point with a vacant expression. She is clearly delineated, while those around her are rendered in a blurred fashion, as if to accentuate the effects of the heat; her body and head are fully covered to prevent sunburn and sunstroke, revealing all too clearly the challenges of working unsheltered on the Caribbean Sea. In West India Divers (1899), a boy is kneeling in a small skiff covered with the conches that he has amassed with a friend who is still in the water. Here we can see the friend from the back and the boy frontally, and his serious expression, directed at their daily catch, conveys both concentration and fatigue (the skiff is rather full). Physical exertion is also evident in The Turtle Pound (1898), in which the muscles of the figure carrying a big turtle to the pen are visibly tense with the effort while his companion, inside the pen, looks drained as he hangs on its wooden structure. In The Conch Divers (1885) (Fig. 5.4), three figures in profile on the edge of a boat, one standing, one squatting and one bent in between the two, recreate the slow movement of one single body bending overboard to meet a diving companion approaching from the sea with a new conch which could either be sold to the tourists, or become staple food – the molluscs in the conches, like turtles, were part of the local diet. There is no energetic excitement for this new catch even if the boat looks relatively empty: rather, the scene is pervaded by an overall weary stillness where even the sea is flat. Far from being Edenic ‘spectacles of free life’, therefore, Homer’s watercolours subtly expose the hardship of his subjects whose bodies, often majestic, are sculpted by hard work, debilitated by intense heat and threatened by extreme weather conditions. In another watercolour Lighthouse, Nassau (1899), a

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Figure 5.3  Sea Garden, Bahamas, 1885, Winslow Homer, watercolour over graphite on heavy white wove paper, 22.3 × 38.7 cm. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1943.303.

Figure 5.4  The Conch Divers, 1885, Winslow Homer, watercolour blotting, lifting and scraping, over graphite on ivory paper, 35.1 × 50.8 cm. The William Hood Dunwoody Fund, The Minneapolis Institute of Art. Photo credit: The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Public Domain Mark 1.0.

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diver with a small skiff full of conches sees the labour of the day – and possibly even his own life – potentially jeopardised by the choppy sea and an approaching storm. The consequences of tropical storms are illustrated in After the Hurricane, Bahamas (1899) where a young fisherman lies unconscious on a beach next to his splintered sloop, while the dangers of a life at sea are also highlighted by huge sharks surrounding the small boat of two courageous fishermen in Shark Fishing (1885) or, as we will see, in The Gulf Stream. Homer’s watercolours try to convey the transparency of the sea (in The Turtle Pound we can see the silhouette of the body of the diver continuing underwater), but all of them stop short of showing us what lies under the surface of the shallow and deep waters in which the natives dive. This is even more evident in The Water Fan (1898–9), where we can see part of the bucket underwater, but we cannot see what the fisherman sees as he uses, for work, the same optical instrument that tourists utilised to peer into the Bahamian waters for fun (Fig. 5.5). Homer’s disinclination to ‘map’ the sea in terms of painting the marine life beneath the surface might have been due to the intrinsic difficulties of such enterprise: Thompson, in fact, reports that even after the invention of underwater photography in 1915, artists still ‘camped out’ on the beaches of the Bahamas ‘watching, studying and attempting to record visually the marine life beneath the sea’ but to no avail.99 Homer’s paintings, however, do not present the submarine world as an entirely impenetrable mystery, at least not to the natives he depicts who enter it at their leisure and, to a lesser extent, not to us either, since we are offered multiple – if indirect – glimpses of their riches and perils. Notably, young Bahamians, who were often pushed towards a life at sea by the harsh conditions in what was not a prosperous colony, are not portrayed by Homer as victims at the mercy of political, economic or meteorological forces – even in After the Hurricane, Bahamas, the fisherman swept ashore is not a corpse ravaged by the elements but looks like someone peacefully asleep. Homer’s subjects are strong figures with a detailed, indepth knowledge of the sea and its dynamics who, operating in their element, tend not to re-emerge from it empty-handed. Arguably, in fact, what Homer paints is, ultimately, the knowledge of his subjects for whom the sea is both life-giver and life-taker, but neither the primordial mysterious space teeming with monsters that it was initially purported to be, nor the domesticated and perfectly manicured sea garden (of Eden) it was re-signified as when, thanks to technological advancement, it became more and more ‘transparent’ and more amenable to play its part in vacationscapes.100 Walcott appreciated Homer’s approach to his Caribbean subjects and praised him precisely because, despite being focused on the perspective of ‘the hungry’ living lives ‘of privation and suffering in brilliant scenery’, he never painted ‘degradation’ (OH110, 111). If Walcott was disturbed by exoticising ‘postcard’ depictions of the region, in fact, he was equally displeased with what he considered to be

Figure 5.5  The Water Fan, 1898–9, Winslow Homer, watercolour, with blotting and touches of scraping, over graphite, on thick, rough twill-textured, ivory wove paper, 37.4 × 53.4 cm. Gift of Dorothy A., John A., Jr. and Christopher Holabird in memory of William and Mary Holabird, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago, licensed under CC0.

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voyeuristic and demeaning images which selectively zoomed in on the most disadvantaged people and conditions.101 In his own paintings, as I will discuss in the next chapter, Walcott never portrays ‘degradation’ either, not because he championed depictions of the Caribbean as a ‘tropical Eden’ and a ‘paradise of escape’, as Trinidad/Cythera was to Victor De La Fontaine in The Last Carnival (OH111), but because landscaping his local reality in all its vividness, for Walcott, was an act governed by the ‘deep love’ he felt for a place where ‘nature’ had made him ‘feel [so] good that [he] want[ed] to give something back … not even necessarily to share, just to direct thanks to what [he] had been blessed with seeing or going through’.102 If Walcott regarded the Caribbean as an Edenic space, therefore, he considered it as a paradise ‘of healing’ (OH111), like the island of St Lucia is for Achille, Philoctete and the narrator in Omeros, and, most importantly, as a place where one could regenerate oneself and get inspired to constantly revisit and ‘refresh’ one’s outlook on life, history and the arts. In contrast to preconceptions of the underwater seascape, and in polemic with an exploitative tourist industry which reduced people to performers, in fact, in one of his best-known poems, ‘The Sea is History’ – which he wrote after engaging with Homer’s work in American, without America – Walcott presents us with a local diver who, far from being a subaltern at the mercy of more powerful and affluent others, is an agent who relies on the same expertise of Homer’s subjects to make Caribbean waters ‘transparent’ in his own terms. In a poem which posits the Caribbean Sea – which to Walcott is the Caribbean itself103 – not as a primeval, ahistorical space, or an idyllic, welltended garden, but as ‘history’, the ‘transparency’ of the sea the diver enables us to enjoy under his guidance, introduces us to those unpalatable aspects of the islands’ past and present routinely edited out, or made strategically ‘opaque’ by, tourist boards or (neo-)colonial revisitations of the region’s history. According to Walcott, ‘history, in the archipelago, is subdued, submarine. The colors of the shallows … the maps of coral under the skin of the light on water, conceal a past which is ridden with inhuman misery and superhuman forbearance’104 and, in Walcott’s poem, the ‘monuments … battles, martyrs’ and the ‘tribal memory’ of the region are in ‘The sea. The sea / has locked them up. The sea is history’ (SAK25). Locked up as they are in this ‘gray vault’, and as ‘bone soldered by coral to bone’ (SAK25), this history and tribal memory are both accessible and hidden, visible and invisible, ‘transparent’ and ‘opaque’, and can be retrieved only by following the lead of someone who knows where and how to look in order to ‘see’ the history that is the sea, a skilled connoisseur who intimately knows and ‘owns’ his waters, and whose guidance is more crucial than special optical devices: ‘strop on these goggles’, the diver urges, ‘I’ll guide you there myself. / It’s all subtle and submarine’ (SAK26, emphasis mine). The iconic boy divers must have been on the forefront of Walcott’s mind when he wrote ‘The Sea is History’, both through direct experience and

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because of his familiarity with Homer’s watercolours and Bearden’s collages. As I have already pointed out, the cover of the collection in which ‘The Sea is History’ is to be found – The Star-Apple Kingdom – is Bearden’s The Sea Nymph (Fig. 4.4). Featuring a Black figure plummeting down in the sea, this image also chimes with the description of the protagonist’s attempts at ‘salvage diving’ in the ‘The Schooner Flight’, a poem in the same collection as ‘The Sea is History’. In his own turn, Bearden was fascinated by the vitality of children diving for coins in St Martin as he explained to Walcott during a transcribed but unpublished conversation, and it is likely that The Sea Nymph might have been inspired by them.105 In Walcott’s ‘The Sea is History’, the equally tremendous energy of the local diver is mobilised, not for a few quick bucks, but for a special history lesson aimed at recovering the region’s submerged past and at discerning its future ‘in the salt chuckle of rocks / with their sea pools’ (SAK28). In Omeros, as we are about to see, Walcott similarly invited us to plunge into Homer’s ‘green waters’ to confront history and the repercussions of transatlantic slavery in both his Caribbean and (Homer’s and Bearden’s) North America.

Smiling Sharks: Winslow Homer and J. M. W. Turner Homer’s execution of his en plein air watercolours, for Walcott, is sustained, as we have seen, by a ‘barometric sensitivity to weather’, a desire to paint the knowledge of his subjects rather than their debasement, an urge to preserve not only a vanishing natural heritage – something which can be accurately captured only if one respects a location enough to be determined to find the right colour for both place and time – but also what Homer himself calls the ‘freshness’ of a particular scene (AWA).106 The importance of capturing this ‘freshness’, for Walcott, has to do with reproducing a place ‘exactly’ but also, more subtly, with seizing and making ‘explicit’, and available to viewers, the potential for ‘fresh’ approaches to art, history, literature, politics and life that this ‘fresh’ place can afford. The refreshing potential of the Caribbean and of Homer’s work in the region is underscored in chapter XXXVI, Book Four of Omeros, when Walcott/the narrator reluctantly enters a museum where art too had ‘surrendered / to History with its whiff of formaldehyde’ (O182). This museum has a sculpture garden, concrete benches outside, a classic façade and the ‘waxed air / of a pharaonic feast’ (O182–3): in other words, it could be any metropolitan museum. There were no museums in St Lucia when Walcott was growing up, and he always approached European and North American museums with curiosity and elation but also with a certain hesitancy and unease. In Omeros, the (initial) generic anonymity of the museum in question works well as a platform for the poet’s reflections on how museums in general can make viewers feel their mortality more acutely by presenting

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them with artefacts which have defied time; more specifically, however, they can trigger a sense of inadequacy in visitors if they are experienced as bastions of elitism where ‘high art’ is paraded as the sole possession of those of European descent. Initially, Walcott does not mention any particular artist or exhibited work but refers, vaguely, to portraits and marble statues which, the poem suggests, seem to owe their authority not to their intrinsic value but to the fact that they are ‘institutionalised’ and put on display with other objects locked in glass-cases for ‘reverential’, whispering visitors (O183). In Tiepolo’s Hound, as we will discover in the next chapter, Walcott investigates even more explicitly the feeling of rejection that colonial provincial subjects and artistic innovators can feel in metropolitan museums when he re-imagines Pissarro, who felt excluded from and by the Louvre, as a young arrival from the island of St Thomas and as a ‘refusé’ of the Academy (TH34). In Omeros, as Walcott/the narrator wanders around, nothing catches his eye until, in the stifling ‘dead air’ of the museum, the sudden appearance of Homer’s The Gulf Stream (Fig. 5.6) is a breath of fresh air as it emanates its own self-generated and self-reliant authority regardless, even despite of, the institution in which it is exhibited, an authority that, as the poet insists, depends entirely on the painting’s ‘light on green water as salt’ (O183) in which Walcott immediately ‘recognises’ his own island. The fact that Homer agreed with Courbet who insisted that artists should look at and, crucially, see the world around them rather than focusing on ‘pictures’ in museums, clearly adds further poignancy to Walcott’s choice of Homer and his work in this context.107 In ‘An American Paradise: Hemingway’s Caribbean’, Walcott singles out, in particular, Homer’s skills to render ‘the inimical dark colours of foetid mangroves, or the clear lagoons that contain sting-rays and maverick sharks’, but also ‘the true colour of the chopping water gnawing at the black on the drifting boat in The Gulf Stream’ (AWA). These ‘true colours’, he insists, ‘have the power of the other Homer’ (AWA) and, similarly, in Omeros, the vividness of Walcott’s encounter with Homer’s painting brings to his mind the ‘light that entered another Homer’s hand’,108 implicitly gesturing towards the conversation that Bearden had opened up with the Greek Homer in his own works (O184). As a result, ‘the canvas’ itself is ‘lift[ed] … from the museum’ and enters both the poem and the life experiences that the poem illuminates and is illuminated by: Walcott’s shock of recognition, in fact, is complete when, in the Black fisherman on the rudderless and dismasted fishing boat at the core of the image, he ‘sees’ his character Achille, one of the protagonists of Omeros (O184). The Gulf Stream is not a watercolour but an oil, that is a kind of painting where success depends on ‘the patience of a siege’109 and where ‘depth’ is more readily achieved.110 This medium’s insistence on verisimilitude, on its capacity to render, almost tangibly, what it represents, and the thick and dense nature of the paint, enable Walcott to exploit the tension between ‘transparency’ and ‘opacity’ inherent in both medium and subject, and to explore their

Figure 5.6  The Gulf Stream, 1899, Winslow Homer, oil on canvas, 71.4 × 124.8 cm. Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1906. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, licensed under CC0.

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literal and metaphorical ‘depth’. Homer’s The Gulf Stream was probably his most controversial painting,111 and his contemporaries were disconcerted, even disturbed, by its subject: the painter himself, recognising that ‘no one would expect to have it in a private house’, reckoned that only museums would be interested in buying it.112 Anxious viewers, Homer was informed, repeatedly enquired about the eventual fate of the seemingly doomed fisherman: when his dealer made him aware of viewers’ unease, Homer replied that concerned ‘ladies’ should be reassured that the ‘unfortunate negro … will be rescued and returned to his friends and home, & ever after live happily’.113 The ship which is supposed to rescue the fisherman, apparently, was added at a later stage to introduce hope in what was interpreted as an otherwise excessively bleak scenario.114 It is difficult, however, to be persuaded by this narrative of rescue and ‘happy ending’ – Homer himself was unconvinced, if one considers the highly ironic tone of his reply. After all, Homer knew that, once returned to his ‘friends and home’, the fisherman would have been defenceless in the face of the structural violence which gave him no choice but to put his life at risk at sea in the first place; the artist also realised that, as the tone of his mockingly pacifying answer suggests, the anxiety and guilt which made some viewers enquire about the fisherman’s fate, were limited to the in extremis situation of the picture and shaped by a particular historical juncture. The Gulf Stream, it is worth noting, was produced after the infamous ‘Jim Crow’ laws which legally sanctioned the separation of white and Black cultures in 1896, and Albert Boime has convincingly argued that Homer’s viewers found The Gulf Stream distressing because it provided a ‘realist’ depiction of the impossibly difficult predicament of Black men in the United States, a ‘force whose actual potential [was] thwarted by roadblocks set up everywhere to neutralise it’, even in the aftermath of the legal recognition of their rights.115 Likewise, in the Bahamas, where the painting was set, the momentary prosperity enjoyed during the Civil War, when Nassau was flooded by blockade runners and easy money, had ended with the war and had been substituted by steady deterioration: working and living conditions for the Bahamian Blacks were poor, their right to own land was severely restricted, and they lived in insalubrious settlements apart from the white elite of Nassau, a place where racial division was starker than in other parts of the Caribbean.116 Homer hated the polemic caused by The Gulf Stream – as far as he was concerned, the subject of his painting, he impatiently argued, was simply ‘comprised in its title’.117 In Omeros, Walcott seems to take Homer’s words at face value when he insists on celebrating the artist’s exact rendition of the colour of the Caribbean Sea/Gulf Stream. We must not forget, though, that for Walcott the sea is history and that, for a fisherman like the one p ­ ortrayed in The Gulf Stream and in Homer’s watercolours – and, for Walcott, Homer’s paintings revealed that the artist ‘knew’ the sea in a way that was as intimate and as profound – the Gulf Stream is not merely a current: both feeder and

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killer, it is vital for the marine ecosystem of the area, but it produces hurricanes, tornadoes and waterspouts whose destructive power in the tropics Homer had often been interested in representing.118 Most importantly, the pattern of the Gulf Stream, which dividing itself up in two, crosses to Northern Europe with its northern stream, while its southern one recirculates off West Africa, overlaps with the triangular trade, a fact that allows Walcott to locate the ‘history’ of his people, their ‘tribal memory’ of forced displacement, slavery and survival, not just in the action that the painting depicts, but precisely in the Gulf Stream and Homer’s ‘green’ – but not only green – ‘waters’ (SAK25, O183). Homer’s The Gulf Stream was completed after slavery was abolished in the United Kingdom, in its Caribbean colonies and in the United States, but the sugar cane stalks at the fisherman’s feet remind one of its legacy. In his reading of The Gulf Stream, Walcott ignores the sugar cane but draws our attention to the sharks ominously surrounding the boat which are described as ‘chain-sawing’ despite the fact that there are no visible chains in the painting or in the waters. Walcott’s reference to chains and ‘chain-sawing’ sharks evokes slavery and is better explained as a homage to another representation of sea disaster which has been identified as one of Homer’s visual sources, namely Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840) (Fig. 5.7).119 A large oil on canvas originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On, Turner’s painting was inspired by the Zong incident in 1781, when the captain had ordered 150 slaves to be thrown overboard so that insurance payments could be collected.120 In the foreground of The Slave Ship, one can easily spot the ‘chained’ hands and legs of enslaved subjects about to be eaten, chains and all, by huge fish and monstrous sea creatures. The text Turner placed next to the painting when it was first exhibited in London to coincide with the world Anti-Slavery convention of 1840121 obliquely, but effectively, draws our attention precisely to their chains: ‘Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay; / Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds / Declare the Typhon’s coming. / Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard / The dead and dying–ne’er heed their chains / Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope! / Where is thy market now?’122 The ‘market of (fallacious) hope’ (in the shape of a rescuing ship), as we have seen, did not feature in Homer’s initial version of The Gulf Stream either: the fisherman’s posture, in fact, does not fit with the narrative of rescue concocted by Homer as a response to concerned viewers – as a matter of fact, he does not even look at the ship which could potentially save him, but directs his gaze in the very opposite direction. In his reading of Homer’s painting, Walcott actually highlights how the fisherman/Achille completely ignores the ship: his head, the poet insists, is turned towards Africa, ‘fixed in the tribal dream’ of a return to the land of his ancestors (O184). Omeros requalifies and reconfigures this dream in Book Three, the book that precedes Walcott’s encounter with The Gulf Stream, where Achille’s (spiritual) journey back to

Figure 5.7  Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840, Joseph Mallord William Turner, oil on canvas, 90.8 × 122.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund 99.22 Photograph © 2023 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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ancestral Africa and his experience of the Middle Passage constitute his first steps towards anchoring himself firmly in his healing island (O133–68, 287). Implicitly, therefore, when we are invited by the poem to regard the fisherman in Homer’s painting as Achille, we are also instructed to identify him as a survivor who, like the diver in ‘The Sea is History’, fully knows his history and himself, not as someone doomed to die or in need of external help – as a matter of fact, Walcott never mentions the waterspout of the tornado and emphatically asserts that ‘no redemptive white sail’ is needed (O184). The transatlantic dimension of Walcott’s visual references – which chimes with the transatlantic dimension of slavery – is highlighted by the fact that Turner’s painting has been ‘exiled’ in the United States since 1872, when John Ruskin, its original owner, decided he could no longer live with this disturbing image – notably, after he had vigorously defended Governor John Eyre for his behaviour during the Morant Bay rebellion.123 The Slave Ship was put for sale and initially bought in 1872 by the American John Taylor Johnston – who, incidentally, had also bought some of Homer’s works – and it has been amongst the holdings of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts since 1889, that is ten years before Homer produced The Gulf Stream.124 Homer might have become acquainted with it in the museum in Boston as it has been observed that the suggestive flecks of red in the green waters of The Gulf Stream might well find their precedent precisely in Turner’s troubled waters.125 Walcott too might have seen The Slave Ship in Boston: when he was writing Omeros, in fact, he was Professor at Boston University and, every year, he used to spend a substantial amount of time in the city. Intriguingly, the setting of Walcott’s encounter with The Gulf Stream in Omeros is eventually identified as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts since, exiting the museum, Walcott mentions the State House Dome, Boston Common and the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth African-American Regiment by Augustus Saint Gaudens, all famous landmarks of the city (O184). Yet, Homer’s The Gulf Stream is not in Boston but in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, where it is exhibited in a gallery adjacent to rooms with paintings and statues devoted to representation of the nineteenth-century conquest of the American West which foreground the presence of Native Americans – from the casts of Hermon Atkins Mac Neil’s A Chief of the Multnomah Tribe (1903, 1907) to Frederic Remington’s The Old Dragoons of 1850 (1905, 1907), from Charles Schreyvogel’s oil In Hot Pursuit (after 1900) to Olin Levi Warner’s Seven Portrait Medallions of Columbia River Indians (1891, cast 1906). Contiguity in the Metropolitan Museum’s galleries, therefore, might have suggested the ‘continuity’ that Omeros creates between the predicament of detribalised Africans transported to the New World (like Achille) and the plight of Native American tribes whose disenfranchisement and genocide is presented as another manifestation of white supremacy. The poem, in fact, instructs readers to see the crime perpetrated against Africans and Native Americans

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as two faces of the same coin when the lines which describe the raid on an African village that results in Achille’s ancestors to be captured and enslaved are replicated, almost verbatim, in the description of an attack on a Sioux village. The massacre of Native Americans recalls, because of the overwhelming presence of snow, the famous image of the frozen corpse of Big Foot surrounded by ice in the aftermath of the battle of Wounded Knee as Walcott/ the narrator laments: ‘whiteness is everywhere’ (O145–6, 215–17).126 The inaccurate staging of Walcott’s encounter with Homer’s The Gulf Stream in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts instead of the Metropolitan Museum of New York could be an accidental trick of memory, a Freudian slip or a deliberate choice; whatever it is and however it came about, situating it in Boston in the late 1980s, Omeros adds further intensity and poignancy to this encounter. At that time, as we have seen, Walcott was deeply disturbed by the fact that Boston was in the grip of a deep-seated ‘Black fear’,127 and the lines in Omeros that follow Walcott’s description of The Gulf Stream contain a strong indictment of the city’s long-lasting racism which Walcott set out to expose with Walker. After quoting from Melville’s ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, Walcott offers the distressing account of being purposefully ignored by taxi-drivers when he tries to stop them in order to return home; when he decides to resort to public transport, he describes the anxiety with which a white woman reacts to his stepping out of a streetlight at a bus stop (O184–5). The racism which undergirds the behaviour of the taxi-drivers and the woman is bitterly and ironically juxtaposed to the monument Walcott sees in the background, namely Saint Gaudens’s Memorial, dedicated to one of the first African American regiments of volunteers who fought for the abolition of slavery.128 The white woman’s fear of the ‘Black man’ in Omeros is mirrored by Walcott’s own fear of her and what she represents: coming from a deep-rooted reservoir of conscious and unconscious feelings and prejudices about race, however, her panic is also a source of guilt which she feels she can dispel by bestowing a ‘consoling smile’ on Walcott when she realises that he means no harm. When the woman’s ‘alarmed pale look’ changes into this ‘consoling smile’, Walcott compares the latter to a shark’s grin (O185) in a move that instantly brings readers back to the ‘chain-sawing sharks’ of Homer’s The Gulf Stream – which, incidentally, had been rechristened Smiling Sharks by one of its detractors129 – and, by extension, to the grinning sea monsters of Turner’s The Slave Ship. We are encouraged, therefore, to revisit and put in dialogue what goes on in the streets of Walcott’s Boston with what happens in the disturbed and disturbing waters of these two paintings. In Turner’s oil, the slaves thrown overboard by an unscrupulous and murderous captain are surrounded by sea monsters who benefit from the captain’s action even if they are not accountable for them; likewise, in Homer’s green waters – where the blood of Turner’s dismembered enslaved people suggestively resurfaces – the sharks surrounding the fisherman are not the cause of his shipwreck, are not responsible for his dire

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straits, but will certainly feast on him should the opportunity arise. Pondering on the distressing effects of the racism that the ‘woman-shark’ might display every day in her conscious and unconscious behaviour, therefore, Walcott implicates her also in historical atrocities, refusing to let her off the hook on the grounds of temporal or geographical distance.130 As he unearths compelling continuities between art and life, the inside and the outside of the museum, and past and present, Walcott implicates and interpellates not only the woman of this unfortunate encounter but all his readers in the same way in which, in Walker, he made the actor playing Eliza challenge her audience by replicating the stance of Pippin’s grandmother confronting viewers in John Brown Going to His Hanging (Fig. 4.7), that is by carefully mobilising his pictorial sources and building on his attention to details.

Notes 1. This drawing, mentioned in Chapter 4, is at TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 63, item 2. 2. Chambers, personal communication, 9 April 2018. 3. Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain, 305–17. 4. Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain, 228. 5. See UWI-AJL, Box 6, folder 5. 6. The ‘Proem’ to Vangelo Nero dated May 1972 is at UWI-AJL, Box 3, folder 9. It is handwritten and pages are not numbered: it will be referred to as VN3.9 in parentheses in the text. 7. Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, 40. 8. Murray, ‘Bearden Plays Bearden’, 252. 9. Bearden and Henderson, History, 247; Bearden, ‘The 1930s’, 159–60. 10. Fine, ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’, 13; Aranda-Alvarado and Kennel, ‘Romare Bearden’, 202. 11. Fine, ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’, 22; Gelburd, ‘Romare Bearden’, 29. 12. Bearden qtd in Richardson, ‘Romare Bearden’, 423. 13. Kennel, ‘Bearden’s Musée Imaginaire’, 150. 14. Murray in Gelburd, ‘Bearden in Theory and Ritual’, 58. 15. Elleh, ‘Bearden’s Dialogue with Africa’, 158–61. 16. Fine, ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’, 33. 17. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 15. 18. Bearden in Rowell, ‘Inscription’, 433. 19. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 79–80. 20. Bernal, Black Athena. 21. Davis, ‘Reflections’, 234, 240. 22. Davis, ‘Reflections’, 234, 240. 23. Walcott, The Odyssey: A Stage Version, (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 9. From now on, I will be referring to this play as TO followed by the page number in parentheses in the text.

American Visions II – Black Odysseys    285 24. At TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 65. 25. Tomkins, ‘Putting Something Over’, 50; O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 59–60. 26. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 43. 27. Burnett, Derek Walcott, 285. 28. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. 29. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 97. 30. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 96. 31. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 101. 32. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 51. 33. Fine, ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’, 97. As the Caribbean was slowly beginning to influence the development of both imagery and colour in Bearden’s works, one can notice that, as early as 1971, Byzantine Dimension, a collage produced after a brief visit to Martinique, represents a conjur woman with a snake hanging from her hand situated in a tropical scenario inspired by the rainforest of the northern part of the island (Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 79). 34. Walcott, Marie Laveau: Comédie Musicale/A Musical (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2018), 40. From now on, I will be referring to this play as ML followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 35. King, Derek Walcott, 384, 392. 36. Fine, ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’, 94–5. 37. At TFRBL, MsColl 00772, Box 1. 38. The passage underlines this connection by using the words ‘snake’ (twice), ‘coiled’ (twice) and ‘serpentine’ (O96). 39. Davis, ‘Reflections’, 229, 244. 40. Bearden qtd in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 125. 41. Brenson, ‘Art: Romare Bearden’, 23. 42. Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 121, 126–7. 43. Bearden qtd in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 121. 44. Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 123, 122. 45. Walcott, ‘To Romare Bearden’, 3. 46. Walcott, ‘To Romare Bearden’, 3. Walcott’s poem also opens Ruth Fine’s The Art of Romare Bearden, 1. 47. Walcott, ‘To Romare Bearden’, 3. 48. Walcott, ‘To Romare Bearden’, 3. 49. Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 129. 50. At TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 65. 51. King, Derek Walcott, 180. 52. Walcott, ‘Origins’, in Walcott, Collected Poems, 11. 53. Walcott, ‘Origins’, 12, 14. 54. Walcott, ‘Origins’, 14, 15, 16. 55. Walcott, ‘Origins’, 14, 15, 16. 56. King, Derek Walcott, 201. 57. Walcott qtd in Morris, ‘Walcott and the Audience’, 177. 58. Brathwaite qtd in Morris, ‘Walcott and the Audience’, 177–8. 59. Walcott, ‘Origins’, 14. 60. Walcott in Sampietro, ‘Derek Walcott’, 39.

286    Derek Walcott’s Painters 61. Hannaway, Winslow Homer, 77. 62. Hannaway, Winslow Homer, 80. 63. A similar version had previously been published as ‘“Islands in the Stream”, Hemingway, Winslow Homer, and the Light of the Caribbean’, in Bostonia (May/June 1990): 20–2. 64. Derek Walcott, ‘On Hemingway’ in Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 107–14, 108. From now on I will be referring to this essay as OH followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 65. Walcott, personal communication, 29 October 2016. 66. Walcott’s paintings in the exhibition include some of his storyboards for Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1997, watercolour), Setting the Bait (1997, oil), View of Stockholm (1991, watercolour), Braiding (1998, watercolour), Cove at sunrise (1998, oil), Still Life – The Desk (1998, oil), The Swimmer (1995, watercolour), Ideal Head – Helen/Omeros (1998, gouache and watercolour) and are available in Island Light: Watercolors and Oil Painting by Derek Walcott and Donald Hinkson. Gail Levin and John Van Sickle have observed that Hinkson’s works are characterised by spontaneity while Walcott’s look more ‘deliberately plotted’ (Levin and Van Sickle, ‘Painterly Vision’, 47). 67. Walcott, ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 37. 68. Walcott, ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 37. 69. Hinkson, What Things, 277, 290, 303, 268. Amongst Hinkson’s works watercolours feature prominently as does his interest for painting the weather, often extreme weather: see, for example, After the Hurricane-Dominica (1986), North Coast (1988), Hurricane Louis I-Antigua and Hurricane Louis II-Antigua (1995) or, more recently, Late Afternoon (2003). 70. Hinkson, What Things, 272. 71. Hinkson, What Things, 290, 302. 72. The last chapter of Hinkson’s autobiography which begins with his return to Trinidad in 1970 is in fact entitled ‘Unlearning for Life’ (What Things, 300–6). 73. Hinkson What Things, 303, 304. 74. Walcott, ‘Dilemma Faces’, 70. 75. Walcott, ‘Dilemma Faces’, 70. 76. Walcott, ‘Dilemma Faces’, 70. 77. ‘Influences’ can be found at UWI-AJL, Box 9, folder 19. From now on I will refer to it as I followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 78. Hinkson, What Things, 304. 79. Hinkson, What Things, 304. 80. Hinkson, What Things, 305. 81. Walcott, ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 37; Walcott, personal communication, 29 October 2016. 82. See, for example, Walcott, ‘Farewell Exhibition’; ‘“Cockfight”’; ‘“Young Painters”’; ‘Another “Schol”’. 83. Walcott, ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 37. 84. Griffin, Winslow Homer, 191. 85. Homer qtd in Hannaway, Winslow Homer, 67. 86. Walcott, ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 37.

American Visions II – Black Odysseys    287 87. Walcott, ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 37. 88. See, for example, Hinkson’s Lowland Estate, Tobago (demolished) (1988) or St Ann’s Main Road (1992). 89. Peter Walcott shares a similar ‘conservationist’ attitude: his paintings record historical buildings (as we have seen in the case of the Carnegie Free Library of Castries) but also specific sites of Saint Lucia, both known landmarks and ‘ordinary’ locations in danger of being erased by the development of tourism and modernisation and easily recognisable to local and informed viewers. Peter Walcott also foregrounds nature through the interplay of the visual and the verbal: in Almond Tree (2009), for example, the presence of a man in a yellow vest next to a huge bobbin he uses as a makeshift table is not acknowledged in the title (and neither are the sea, the boats and the other elements which are part of this scene) which focuses our attention on the titular tree. 90. Hannaway, Winslow Homer, 77–8. 91. Locke, The Negro in Art, 139. 92. In Locke’s book Tornado, Bahamas was mistakenly dated 1910; Dressing for the Carnival is titled The Carnival and After the Hurricane, Bahamas is under the title After the Tornado, Bahamas. 93. Locke, The Negro in Art, 205. 94. Fuentes, ‘Crossroads’, 56. 95. Griffin, Winslow Homer, 187. 96. Hannaway, Winslow Homer, 163, 237. 97. Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 38–45. 98. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 25, 157–69, figs 38, 39, 40. 99. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 173. 100. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 169–91. 101. Walcott clearly did not agree with readings of Homer’s works which suggest an approximation of his subjects to the animal world: for example, in The Turtle Pound the fingers of one of the two fishermen are equated to the turtle’s limbs and in After the Hurricane, Bahamas the shipwrecked Black man is seen like a gigantic fish complete with tail because his legs are covered by what is left of his boat’s stern and transom (Cooper, Winslow Homer, 215–16). 102. Burnett, ‘Derek Walcott on Poetry’, 148. 103. Walcott in Hall, ‘Interview’, 1993. 104. Walcott, ‘Where I Live’, 30. 105. See undated, unpublished, transcribed conversation between Walcott and Bearden at TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 2, folder 6, 13–14. 106. Homer qtd in Hannaway, Winslow Homer, 67. 107. Hannaway, Winslow Homer, 39. 108. The reference to ‘another Homer’s hand’ might have to do with the fact that the Greek poet/oral storyteller might have gesticulated, painting scenes with his hands when he recited his poems or with the fact that Samuel Isham, in his The History of American Painting (of which Walcott had a copy of the 1936 edition), suggests that Homer’s figures are ‘Homeric’ and that in Homer’s paintings one could find ‘like surf-beat on a western shore / The surge and thunder of the Odyssey’ (358). 109. Walcott, ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 37.

288    Derek Walcott’s Painters 10. Walcott, personal communication, 29 October 2016. 1 111. Hannaway, Winslow Homer, 134. 112. Homer qtd in Hannaway, Winslow Homer, 169. The painting was finally purchased in 1906 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 113. Homer qtd in Boime, ‘Blacks’, 43–4. 114. Caption. Winslow Homer. The Gulf Stream (1899). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Fig. 5.6.) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11122 (accessed 19 June 2021). In a letter written before the inclusion of the ship, Homer talks about the Black man being rescued ‘by a passing ship which is not shown in the picture’ (Hannaway, Winslow Homer, 133). 115. Boime, ‘Blacks’, 44. 116. Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 22, 58, 101; Johnson, Bahamas, 89–90; Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 126. 117. Homer qtd in Griffin, Winslow Homer, 201. 118. Apart from The Gulf Stream (1889) (Fig. 5.6) and its waterspout see for example Homer’s Tornado, Bahamas (1885), Hurricane, Bahamas (1898), After the Hurricane, Bahamas (1899). 119. Hughes, American Visions, 314. The same is valid for Walcott’s reference to ‘gnawing’ waters in American, without America. 120. Livesley, ‘Later Life’, 28. 121. Livesley, ‘Later Life’, 27. 122. Finberg, Life of J.M.W. Turner, 474. 123. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 14. Ruskin initially liked it so much that he put it at the foot of his bed so that it would be the first thing he would see when he woke up in the morning (Livesley, ‘Later Life’, 28). 124. Provenance. J. M. W. Turner. The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840). Boston Museum of Fine Arts. https://collections.mfa.org/objects/31102/slave-ship-slavers-throw​ ing-overboard-the-dead-and-dying-t?ctx=054b2df5-5a38-4289-9b553f30edc2c6fd&idx=0 (accessed 9 June 2021) (Fig. 5.7). 125. Hughes, American Visions, 314. 126. This photograph is one of the illustrations (fig. 48) of the harrowing Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown which was one of Walcott’s sources for his The Ghost Dance. In Omeros, the destruction of the Native American camp is voiced by the nineteenth-century pro-Indian activist Catherine Weldon who was also an artist who painted four portraits of Sitting Bull (1890). In 1989 Walcott was commissioned by Hartwick College to write the play The Ghost Dance where he revisited the last days of Sitting Bull and where one of the protagonists is Catherine Weldon herself. 127. Walcott in White, ‘Interview’, 166. 128. Incidentally, Saint Gaudens is also the sculptor who was commissioned to make a large-scale bronze likeness of Deacon Samuel Chapin (1595–1675), one of the three founding fathers of Springfield, Massachusetts, which became famous as The Puritan, a bronze reduction of which is in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, currently in the same room where one finds Homer’s The Gulf Stream (Fig. 5.6). Notably, in Walker (which Walcott began just after Omeros was published) Walcott excoriates not only the Southern states but also the

American Visions II – Black Odysseys    289 seventeenth-century lawmakers of Massachusetts Bay for their stance on slavery (W53–4) and the white supremacist Figure in the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre’s 2001 production is a white man in his fifty dressed in a long black cloak and a large hat who closely resembles Saint Gaudens’s Puritan. 129. Griffin, Winslow Homer, 200. 130. Walcott here seems to be anticipating Michael Rothberg’s notion of the ­‘implicated subjects’.

Chapter 6

Painting (and) the Caribbean: The Awe of the Ordinary and the Search for Anonymity

The Tropic Bug in Paris: Paul Gauguin and Charles Laval in Martinique In Omeros, the racism the poet confronts in Boston has deep historical roots and, as discussed in the previous chapter, Walcott experiences it right on the steps of an institution whose ‘leprous columns’, insisting on the value and primacy of chronology, would have eagerly dismissed his poem and its author as ‘derivative’ (O184). As Walcott explains when he addresses the Greek master in the poem, he considered himself instead ‘the freshest of all [his] readers’ because he grew up in a place where the absence of museums and ruins made him feel that reading a line of Homer was ‘as fresh as to look at a mango leaf’.1 In the bleakness of a racist city and the metropolitan museum(s) he reluctantly enters, Walcott unexpectedly finds the fortifying promise of energising renewal in the work of another Homer, a painter he believed had both preserved and reproduced with astonishing exactness the colours, nature, weather and people of his native islands. The Gulf Stream, in fact, acts as a visual reminder not only of the sea-history of his people but also of the ‘fresh’, regenerative approaches to history, art and literature afforded by the Caribbean. Bearden, whose revisitations of the Aegean and Homer’s poem Walcott found particularly striking, and whose example illuminates and reverberates in ‘The Schooner Flight’, Marie Laveau, The Odyssey: A Stage Version and Omeros, especially as far as Walcott’s integration of the African legacy is concerned, also found irresistible the relationship one could establish with ‘the elemental forces of sky and sea’ in the Caribbean. For him too, as highlighted in Chapters 4 and 5, the region secreted an inspiring vitality and a daily sense of elation and renewed vigour (B&W210). Chapter 3, instead, shows how Walcott explores the consequences of some of his characters’ failure to situate themselves fully in this revitalising place, a failure which facilitates and sustains (and was facilitated and sustained by) both

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the pretension that one is inhabiting an imaginary, mythologised TrinidadCythera and a sterile fetishisation of tradition which results in the production of ‘dead’, non-transformative art. Capitalising on his prolonged engagement with Watteau, in fact, Walcott suggests that the European legacy can have a place in Caribbean culture only if approached as a living organism susceptible to change and adaptation and if uncritical (colonial) reverence and exoticisation are ditched for a new and ‘fresh’ approach. At the end of The Last Carnival, the presence of Victor’s unfinished copies (even empty canvases) on stage quietly signals that invention, cross-pollination, adaptation and creativity must take the place of blind mimicry, and that a high regard for tradition has to go hand in hand with attention and respect for local reality. In ‘Watteau’, a poem published in the 1984 collection Midsummer and composed during the drafting and redrafting of The Last Carnival, clarifying the outlines of his relationship with Watteau, Walcott sums up the main points of his sustained conversation with the French artist. The poem begins by focusing on the details of an (imaginary or half-remembered) painting by the eighteenth-century master. Readers acquainted with Watteau can easily recognise some of his recurring motifs and his compelling contrast of meticulous realism and vaporous, suggestive haziness: ‘trees feather-brushed with the dusk’, ‘the ruined cavity of some spectral château’, ‘the groin / of a leering satyr eaten with ivy’ and, ‘in the distance’, ‘the grain / of some unreapable, alchemical harvest’ and ‘tremulous strokes’ (M31). Up to line 3, however, it is hard to identify a precise visual referent for the poem but, in the following lines, what Walcott calls ‘the hollow at / the heart of all embarkations’ constitutes an unmistakable (visual and verbal) pointer to The Embarkation for Cythera (M31) (Fig 3.2). Visually, in fact, the hollow recalls the slope at the bottom of Watteau’s 1717 and – even if more compressed – 1719 versions of the paintings where one finds the pilgrims standing in the background, their boat, the reflecting waters and, in the vague and vanishing distance, the spectral pyramidal shape some have associated with Cythera. Walcott’s Watteau is an artist moved by his own psychological sense of ‘hollowness’ who, in order to respond to a world subject to mutability, change and decline (‘nothing stays green / in that prodigious urging toward twilight’), embarks on the task of depicting ‘fever[ish]’ pilgrims and a ‘far and feverish’ Cythera (M31). In his portrait of the artist as a delirious man, Walcott reimagines Watteau as ‘malaria’s laureate’ (M31) when he most likely died, at the age of thirty-six, of tuberculous laryngitis, described by his host, the Abbé Haranger, as ‘semiconscious and mute … clutching a brush to the end, painting imaginary pictures in the air’.2 This misattributed pathological condition, however, paves the way for the next lines, where the poem explains that Cythera ‘is as much nowhere’ as the ‘broad-leafed islands’ of the Caribbean and the exotic tropical ‘paradises’ of Baudelaire (M31). Yet, reality and fiction seem to intertwine since, in the poem, these Cytheras are also the ‘mirror / of what is’ (M31): in other words, for the Caribbean

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Walcott and the eighteenth-century Watteau, they are concrete and tangible realities (the illicit Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud, Trinidad, St Lucia and the Caribbean archipelago as a whole) and, at the same time, illusory, mythical, blessed and blissful mirror images in direct opposition to (even open contradiction with) reality. The Cytheras lurking in the poem are also ‘elsewheres’ conjured up by the colonial mindset: in The Last Carnival, Tony criticises the French for creating the longing for a tropical paradise – what, in the poem, Walcott calls ‘the tropic bug in … Paris’ (M31) – while fomenting, in their colonial subjects, the ‘longing for the metropole’ and its literature, arts and culture implicit in Victor’s obsession with (his own version of) Watteau. The results of this mindset are the impasse of exoticism on one side and, on the other, a blind reverence for the European legacy. Paying no attention to its permutations, contradictions and multiple, concomitant discourses, this reverence flattens the European legacy into an incomparable monolith, as the elusive and, ultimately, disabling ‘moment of stillness’ Victor pursues in The Last Carnival only too clearly highlights (LC42). In Walcott’s poem, these longed for, but never reachable, ‘paradise[s]’, which can be found only in another (mythologised or imaginary) place/time, are always missing but, at the same time, forever lingering, as ‘the hollow at the heart of all embarkations’ and ‘an empty chair echoing the emptiness’ (M31). Walcott then predicts that all illusory Cythera(s) would dissolve at some stage, but he accepts that the spell of these man-made paradisiacal ‘elsewheres’ is extremely powerful: to break it one needs to transform the ‘empty chair echoing the emptiness’ – a fetish of what is absent or never really was, a vestige (or echo) of ‘another’ (mythical) past/place – into a present and future receptacle of real presences and multiple possibilities linked to one’s locality and time (M31). This yearned for ‘paradise[s]’, the poem underlines, also resides in ‘life repeated spectrally’ (M31). Given the title and content of ‘Watteau’, and the fact that ‘spectrally’ means ‘hauntingly’ but can also refer to the spectrum of colours used by an artist, Walcott here seems to alert us to the power of paintings, and more broadly, of the visual, to fabricate, sustain and disseminate illusions. The power of the visual, however, can be harnessed to serve a different agenda, one which has love and respect for the local at its core. In ‘Native Women’, published in the same year as Midsummer, Walcott declares that, as an old man, he was going to promote this local agenda and ‘finish’ what he had begun more than half a century earlier, that is return to paint (or reproduce chromatically or ‘spectrally’) the reality of St Lucia to serve his people and his native landscape. The plan, Walcott continues, was to ‘have stacks of canvases with variations on one subject, the island and the people of the island’: in order to do this, he concludes, he ‘wouldn’t be setting out for some Pacific island, some Cythère. [He]’d just be coming back home’ (NW162). In ‘Native Women’, therefore, Walcott distances his endeavour from pilgrimages to the mythological blessed island of Love à la Watteau and

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from an attraction for the Tropics tainted with exoticism à la Gauguin. The continuity between the two French artists is also outlined in one of Walcott’s notebooks where Victor, who identifies with Watteau, is sketched while painting and sporting the same moustache and wearing the same striped shirt that Gauguin sports and wears in Walcott’s watercolour Gauguin in Martinique (1991) (Fig. 6.3), where the artist is at work with his brush and easel.3 The poem devoted to Watteau is preceded, in Midsummer, by two poems dedicated to Gauguin in which the artist calls himself ‘Watteau’s wild oats, his illegitimate heir’ (M29). In the second poem, a diseased and embittered Gauguin declares that he ‘plated [Tahiti] in amber’ (M30), a statement which resonates with the adulteration of the reality of the Vigie peninsula ‘locked in amber’ of Another Life (AL3). Walcott’s Gauguin, then, denounces the longing for the metropole of other ex-pats, encourages those who still hesitate to leave Paris, and denies to have considered or depicted the Tropics as a ‘paradise’ (M29–30): if anything, Gauguin explains, he revealed and cautioned others of the dangers of corruption.4 Walcott, however, knew that Gauguin was deeply entangled in the colonial outlook and that the association of the tropics with corruption, in fact, is as problematic and as spurious as their association with paradise because paradise and corruption actually constitute two sides of the same coin, and one cannot debunk one fully while accepting the other. Notably, Walcott’s poem refers specifically to Gauguin’s experience in Tahiti and the Marquesas – there is no acknowledgement here of the four months the painter spent in Martinique in 1887. In ‘Native Women’, when Walcott proceeds to contrast the often harsh reality of past and present St Lucia with the notion of tropical paradises where there is no need to work, he mentions Tahiti and ‘the erotic fragrance of frangipani … which comes off the pages of Gauguin’s journal, Noa Noa’ (NW162), and only limits himself to briefly acknowledge Gauguin’s presence in the neighbouring island in another passage of the article. Walcott engages more directly with Gauguin’s presence and experience in the then French colony of Martinique in his last play O Starry Starry Night (2014), where he re-imagines Gauguin and Van Gogh’s cohabitation in 1888 Arles. To the Gauguin in the play, Martinique is like ‘the happier verses of Baudelaire come true. I can close my eyes now’, he says, ‘and see its blue horizons humming with promise’ (SSN23). Once again, Walcott’s awareness of Gauguin’s exoticism and his romanticisation of the tropics is evident in his evocation of Baudelaire, but in a play which tries to bring to the fore the customarily overlooked impact of Gauguin’s 1887 journey to the Antillean island – which, incidentally, also goes unmentioned in Craven’s A Treasury in 1939 and subsequent editions5 – it is Gauguin’s belief in this Martinican/Caribbean ‘promise’ that Walcott wants to highlight. Gauguin’s stay in Martinique lasted only four months (he disembarked on the island in mid-June and arrived in Paris on 14 November) and was cut short by Gauguin’s health issues: he was afflicted by dysentery and malaria,

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the latter the disease Walcott attributes to Watteau in Midsummer (M29). Yet, despite his weakness, he was very productive: the paintings that Gauguin brought back from Martinique are viewed as his first original masterpieces and are considered novel because they display, for the first time, an original style characterised by the use of framing devices, audacious compositions (mostly inspired by Japanese prints), and new chromatic ranges and contours which enhanced the colours.6 Walcott’s St Lucian master Simmons, in ‘West Indian Artists need a Better Colour Combination’, underlined the need for a different palette for the tropics: the hinge around which revolved the development of West Indian art, he argued, was precisely the emancipation from the academic combination of colours which ‘create an atmosphere that is foreign to the tropics’. For Simmons, colour was ‘the sanctifying element to West Indian life’, and, while it ‘should approximate truth’, the West Indian painter should aim to reach a ‘realism tempered with imagination’.7 Simmons did mention Gauguin in the article, so it is possible that he might have had the artist’s approach in mind when he wrote it and, in O Starry Starry Night, Walcott seems to be thinking along similar lines when his Van Gogh accuses Gauguin, who is still dreaming about Martinique’s light and colours, of (as Simmons would have put it) tempering realism with imagination: ‘Red Grass. Green Sky … Great imagination but totally inaccurate’ (SSN44). In a letter to a friend sent while he was still in Martinique, Gauguin wrote that he had ‘never painted so clearly and so lucidly (a lot of imagination, for example)’8 and in 1888, a year after he returned from Martinique, he famously argued that painters should forget the conventional use of colour they had learnt in the art academy, and paint the colours as they saw them: ‘How do you see that tree? It’s green? Well then, make it green, the best green on your palette. How do you see those trees? They are yellow. Well then, put down yellow. And that shade is rather blue. So render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermillion.’9 If the vivid colours Gauguin used in Martinique were often colours which had nothing to do with reality – for instance, the beach of Anse Turin that he depicts in light yellow in Women Carrying Fruit on the Beach in Anse Turin is in fact a dark grey volcanic beach – their use might nevertheless have been encouraged by Martinican settings and tropical chromatic combinations. For Martinique Landscape (1887) (Fig. 6.1), for instance, Gauguin did have a sketch and a watercolour study which he used for the broad outlines of the view and its chromatism:10 in the final painting – where there are no shadows, another feature of Japanese art but also of the intense brightness of tropical light at noontime – he might have experimented with brilliant colours coming out straight from the tubes, but the red hue of the ground – absent in the watercolour study – does reflect the colour of the clay soil of the island. Walcott too remembers that when he started to paint with St. Omer, they were offered ‘a daily feast’ and a ‘new palette by the unpainted vegetation around the island’ whose colours ‘came purely from the tube’ (OTC21, 18).

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Figure 6.1  Martinique Landscape, 1877, Paul Gauguin, oil on canvas, 117 × 89.8 cm. National Galleries of Scotland, presented by Sir Alexander Maitland in memory of his wife Rosalind 1960. Photo: Creative Commons CC by NC.

296    Derek Walcott’s Painters

In Walcott’s O Starry Starry Night, Gauguin is very keen to return to Martinique (SSN71) and, when Van Gogh tries to persuade his friend that the colours of the spring in Arles might make him forget the island, Gauguin asserts, in no uncertain terms, that ‘the future of art is in the tropics’ ­(SSN32–3). During their cohabitation in Arles in 1888 Van Gogh and Gauguin often discussed Martinique and Gauguin’s desire to return to the island, as witnessed by Van Gogh’s letters to his brother and other fellow painters.11 The idea of a ‘Studio of the Tropics’, an ideal artistic community where artists could live and work free from financial and social constraints, was repeatedly formulated and, in Walcott’s play, Gauguin declares that he dreams of a new ‘heterodoxy’ for which he and Vincent would be the patron saints: ‘Saint Vincent and Saint Paul’ (SSN32–3, 29). In the long poem Tiepolo’s Hound, published fourteen years earlier, Gauguin is also saluted as a saint – as he was in Another Life (AL56) – and as the painter who inspired young Caribbean artists like Walcott not to despise but to look for and paint the local: a reference to Martinique situates Gauguin right in the Francophone Caribbean island as does the fact that he is described as the ‘creole painter of anses, mornes and savannes’ (TH16). The word ‘Creole’ in the Caribbean generally tends to be used in relation to people born in the region12 but Gauguin was born in Paris; he was, however, of Peruvian ancestry, grew up and was educated in Lima, and frequently referred to what, in a 1889 letter to Van Gogh, he called his ‘residual Indian, inca origin’, which he considered ‘the foundation of his personality’.13 Gauguin’s Peruvian blood is evoked in O Starry Starry Night (SSN42) but also in the poem devoted to the painter included in Midsummer, where he (essentialising) declares to be attracted to ‘darker nations’ because of ‘the chain of [his] blood’ (M29). Yet, it is possible that Walcott was calling Gauguin a ‘creole’ to honour his commitment to the tropics since, in his Nobel speech, he redefines a ‘native’ as someone who ‘returns to what he loved in a landscape and stays there … in stasis and concentration’ (A77). In Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott’s reference to the island’s geographical features in French and to tropical fruit and women (TH16–17), reminds us that, while he was in Martinique, Gauguin painted still lifes with local produce and, mostly, humanised landscapes. Amongst his favourite subjects were the Martinican porteuses who carried fruits on their heads to and from the market of the city of Saint-Pierre, near where the painter was staying with his friend and fellow artist Charles Laval. Gauguin declared that he was fascinated by the chatty ‘négresses’ he encountered every day as they were picking fruit to sell at the market: ‘Every day there is a constant coming and going of black women, dressed up in coloured clothes, with graceful movements of infinite variety. At the moment I am limiting myself to making sketch after sketch, in order to absorb their character, and then I will make them pose.’14 Gauguin and Laval were both riveted by the attitudes and gestures of the Martinican Blacks; as Laval put it, they ‘offer the greatest possible picturesqueness that

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we could wish for. [In Martinique] there is enough to observe and produce in an absolutely unexploited way for several artists’ lives.’15 In ‘Native Women’, however, Walcott warns us against the ‘tropical picturesque’ and ‘the metropolitan day dream of an island paradise of the happy native, the noble savage’ (NW162), a criticism echoed in his ‘Letter to Chamoiseau’ where he denounces, more specifically, Doudouisme, an exoticising mystification of (French) Caribbean reality and its women, particularly, as Walcott puts it, ‘the sweet-sweetness ... of the mulatto women of folksong … with their prototypical foulard, madras, and gilded earrings’.16 Laval’s work, poorly catalogued, is far from extensive: overall, his highly expressive pictures tend to emphasise, even exaggerate, the attitudes and gestures of his female figures as exemplified, for example, by their bold, almost oversized, hands.17 It has been observed that Laval’s porteuses are not depicted with their skirts lifted up, exposing their bare feet and fully immersed in their time/place and working routine as it is the case for Gauguin’s,18 but as figures endowed with zoomorphic elements, symbolism and sensuality.19 A painting dated 1893, and seemingly attributed to Laval, can perhaps provide a visual exemplification of an image with at least some overtones of the ‘exotic’ colonial clichés berated by Walcott. This canvas, on which the artist records location (L’anse du Carbet, Martinique) and date under his signature, has blue sea, hills and golden sand as background, and seems to be a view from the place (Le Carbet) where Laval stayed with Gauguin, even if the Anse du Carbet is in fact a black sand beach. It is not clear when Laval returned to France: according to a letter by Gauguin, Laval was already back in France in 1888,20 so, if this is correct, Laval must have painted this oil dated 1893 from memory, with the help of a sketch now lost, or post-dated it when he decided to show it to potential clients. Here Laval seems to experiment with a personal style, as he had set out to do when he left for the island with Gauguin, whilst loosely following the colonial idiom. In the work in question, entitled L’anse du Carbet, martiniquaise à la robe rouge (1893),21 a barefooted Martiniquaise woman in a flamboyant, long red dress (only the tip of one foot is visible), with a madras head kerchief, gilded earrings and a bright yellow shawl/foulard (that is, some of the typical accoutrements of a doudou), is posing for the painter with her hand on her hip. As the model, poignantly not a working woman or porteuse, looks at the artist, her face is askew, suggesting simultaneously engagement and disengagement, and her expression seems at odds with her body language which might suggest flirtation. Walcott, as we have seen in Chapter 2, confronts the issue of Gauguin’s exoticisation and eroticisation of tropical women ‘visually’ in Gauguin’s Studio (1986) (Fig. 6.2) and, less directly but equally forcefully, in Gauguin in Martinique (1991). In his 1986 pastel on paper, a Black female figure’s posture reminds one of Gauguin’s Manao Tupapau/Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892) – an image often interpreted as representation of sexual

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abuse and subjugation – but Walcott’s young woman, rather than surrendering to the viewer’s gaze, defiantly returns it.22 The presence of an assertive Black female also characterises Walcott’s 1991 watercolour set in Martinique: here Gauguin is portrayed in the act of painting surrounded by the tropical fruits and plants he included in Still Life with Sketch by Delacroix and Still Life with Mangoes and Hibiscus Flowers, both completed in Martinique in 1887. Taking a leaf from Still Life with Sketch by Delacroix, where tropical fruit is combined with the reproduction of Delacroix’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (1844) that Gauguin had taken along to Martinique,23 Walcott imagines Gauguin surrounded by small copies of his own and other artists’ paintings (from what seems to be a (self-)portrait of Vincent Van Gogh to a typical impressionist painting of ladies with parapluies) and by a pile of books – we cannot see their titles but they are presumably by authors who might have influenced his decision to travel to the Tropics like Charles Baudelaire, Pierre Loti, Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville, Denis Diderot, Jacques-Antoine Moherenhout.24 Outside the window, a man on a white horse anticipates the Tahitian horses and horsemen Gauguin was going to depict in Le cheval blanc (1898)25 but, behind Gauguin, and represented as a muse and inspiration who looks at us as if to make sure that we are aware of the decisive role she has played in the artist’s attempts to represent Martinique and in the overall development of his vision, is a Black female figure wearing a madras headscarf like the porteuses Gauguin painted on the island. Walcott’s representation of Gauguin and his muse, as discussed in Chapter 2, could also have been an indirect homage not only to Simmons (who is identified with Gauguin in Another Life) but also to his Albertina, a portrait of a local woman (Fig. 2.3) who resembles more Gauguin’s hard-working porteuses than a ‘sweet-sweet’ doudou. In Tropical Conversation, Path under the Palms, Coastal Landscape of Martinique/The Bay of St Pierre, Martinique, The Mango Trees, Women Carrying Fruit on the Beach of Anse Turin, or Coming and Going (Fig. 6.4) – all completed in Martinique in 1887 – the women are not posing for the painter: most of them come straight from sketches Gauguin had quickly made from life and then redeployed in different combinations in his paintings according to his imagination. It has been suggested, in fact, that Gauguin’s intention to make the women pose26 seems to have been limited to three large pastels – Head of a Woman from Martinique, Study of Martinican Women and Martinican Women27 – which he used for some of the figures in The Mango Trees, Martinique and On the Bank of the River. Unlike Laval’s Martiniquaise à la robe rouge or Gauguin’s Tahitian women, who sometimes seem to live in an ideal pre-lapsarian world where there is no labour but only luxe, calme et volupté28 (he even painted some Tahitians ‘Eves’29), Gauguin’s Martinican porteuses are labouring women picking fruit from trees or from the ground and carrying produce in baskets balanced on their heads. Even

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Figure 6.2  Gauguin’s Studio, 1986, Derek Walcott, pastel on paper, 59.6 cm × 90.1 cm. Mr and Mrs Roger Straus. Copyright © 2000 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

Figure 6.3  Gauguin in Martinique, 1991, Derek Walcott, watercolour on paper, 76.2 cm × 55.8 cm. Mr and Mrs Colvin Chen. Copyright © 2000 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

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when they are stopping for a conversation or are portrayed sitting under a tree, we are made aware of the fact that they are only taking a break by the presence of surrounding co-workers.30 In Tropical Conversation (1887), for example, two female figures are caught in what seems to be a casual moment of stillness on their way to or from a nearby market, and engage in an exchange from which the viewer feels cut off, partly because one of the two figures is portrayed at an angle and from her back. Gauguin’s porteuses have been seen as tropical versions of rural motifs which find their precedents in the works of artists like Millet or Jacob Camille Pissarro who focused on French peasants and the countryside: Gauguin, who had already used the motif of female conversation in Breton Shepherdesses (1886) was in fact familiar with Pissarro’s keen interest in the same leitmotif and with his Conversation (1881), where two French female peasants are portrayed talking over a fence. The existence of common themes and motifs between Gauguin and Pissarro is not surprising: before going to Martinique, in fact, Gauguin had been Pissarro’s pupil, friend and colleague. Born in 1830 on the island of St Thomas, at the time a Danish colony, Pissarro left his island in 1852 to paint in Venezuela with the Danish artist Fritz Melbye whom he met in St Thomas, probably as early as 1848 or 1849,31 and with whom he had already visited and worked in Santo Domingo in 1850.32 After two years, he returned home to attend to some family business but, in 1855, Pissarro moved to Paris and, from that date, he never returned to the Caribbean or the Americas. Pissarro might have shared with Gauguin his own experience in and of the Tropics and shown Gauguin some of the works he had either carried out there, or produced from memory in France where, initially, Pissarro continued to paint subjects related to St Thomas.33 Two of Pissarro’s early oils, Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St Thomas (Fig. 6.5) and Landscape, St Thomas, are set on the island but are both dated 1856, when Pissarro had already moved to Paris. In Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St Thomas (1856),34 we can see that Pissarro had already begun to explore the motif of female conversation by portraying two Black women, one carrying freshly laundered clothes or sheet on a washboard on her head, the other with a basket on her arm, who stop for a chat on a path by the seaside. In Landscape, St Thomas (1856), two small Black figures resting for a moment in the shade are dominated by the landscape and the vegetation around them. Amongst the drawings which were still with the Pissarro family in 1950, when they were donated to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, there are a number of sketches35 which were carried out or set in the Americas and which Gauguin might have seen: some represent Afro-Caribbean women carrying baskets or washing on their heads, and one is a careful study of an Afro-Caribbean woman sitting on her washing-board sewing or repairing a garment.36

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Figure 6.4  Coming and Going, Martinique, 1887, Paul Gauguin, oil on canvas, 72.5 × 92 cm. Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on loan at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Inv. no. (CTB.1979.88), Madrid. Photo: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza © Carmen Thyssen Collection, Madrid.

Figure 6.5  Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St Thomas, 1856, Jacob Camille Pissarro, oil on canvas, 27.7 × 41 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon. Photo: National Gallery of Art, licensed under CC0.

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‘Quiet as Drawings’: Jacob Camille Pissarro and Fritz Melbye Sketching the Caribbean The life and experience of Pissarro are at the core of Walcott’s long poem Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) which recreates the life and career of a Caribbeanborn artist who, adopting a trajectory opposite to Gauguin’s, moved from the Tropics to France. Tiepolo’s Hound includes a copy of Gauguin’s Studio (1986) and Gauguin in Martinique (1991) alongside other paintings by Walcott, an inclusion which testifies to the fact that, in the late 1980s–1990s, Walcott was not only keen to find a way to honour the African legacy – his relationship with Bearden, as we have seen, was crucial to this – and continue to investigate, as he had done through his protracted engagement with Watteau, if and how the European tradition could be productively claimed in the Caribbean, but also determined to foreground the role played by the Caribbean in the development of the arts of the metropole. These two latter concerns are central to Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) where, focusing on Pissarro, Walcott takes the opportunity to ponder once again the basis for his own (and Pissarro’s and the Caribbean’s) claim on the European legacy, questions the notion that embracing it has to necessarily entail a betrayal of Caribbean reality, devises strategies to put it to good use, and, last but not least, challenges the problematic assertion that there is in fact a homogenous European legacy. In Tiepolo’s Hound, Pissarro is ‘reconstructed’ as a figure immersed in a set of historical networks but also engaged in complex, imagined relations which resonate with Walcott’s own life, his aesthetic choices and his political concerns. The opening lines of the poem swiftly take us from Pissarro’s native St Thomas to Walcott’s Trinidad. The narrative, in fact, cuts from a scene/picture set on a nineteenth-century Sunday afternoon during which the Pissarro family is strolling along Dronningens Street in Charlotte Amalie, to one which has as its subject the torpor of a sunny Sunday in Woodford Square, Port of Spain, observed by Walcott from his window. The Pissarros are followed by a black dog, and the presence of another black mongrel crossing into the square in Trinidad’s capital reinforces the continuity between the two moments (TH4). Walcott captures the young Pissarro back in St Thomas after spending six years in France in order to perfect his education: walking by the busy free port of the island’s capital, he carefully examined its schooners not because, as it would have been the case for his business-oriented family, he is interested in the mercantile value of their cargo, but because he is keen to use them as subjects for his own artistic work. Unlike his Danish friend and fellow artist Fritz Melbye, who (like his brothers Anton and Vilhelm) painted marines, Pissarro preferred to focus on ships in harbour.37 A few pages later, Walcott too is portrayed in the poem as someone strolling along the wharf, meticulously examining and describing his surrounding with a painter’s eye

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(TH10).38 Walcott here might be referring to the very wharfs of Pissarro’s island since, in the late 1970s he spent time and worked in St Thomas and St Croix which, by then, had become part of the US Virgin Islands: by his own admission, the young Walcott never tried to retrace Pissarro’s steps when in St Thomas but, in retrospect, he realised that on his way to the college where he used to teach, he must have seen versions of the fences or yards that Pissarro practised drawing during his apprenticeship years (TH140). Walcott’s familiarity with the important facts of Pissarro’s life, as they are set out in the painter’s numerous biographies, is evident throughout the poem, substantial sections of which are in fact devoted to historical events and well-documented moments of the painter’s life, such as his involvement with the Salon des refusés, the Affaire Dreyfus, the death of his daughter Jeanne, the Franco-Prussian War, or Pissarro’s collaboration with Paul Cézanne and Gauguin.39 Book One of Tiepolo’s Hound, for example, explains that the Pissarros were Sephardic Jews, originally from the ghetto of the Portuguese city of Braganza, who had arrived in St Thomas to flee the Inquisition. We are told that, together with the shops and the bank of Charlotte Amalie, they form an ensemble which is as ‘quiet as drawings’ (TH3). Walcott, therefore, must have been familiar with Pissarro’s early drawings which are not difficult to access in reproductions: in 1980, Richard Brettell and Christopher Lloyd published a catalogue of the collection that Pissarro’s family had presented to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1950 and that also included some drawings he carried out when he was still in the Americas (BLL1–34). In the late 1990s, that is when Walcott had published his post-Nobel collection The Bounty (1997) and was beginning to focus on what was to become Tiepolo’s Hound, a set of drawings and oil sketches made by Melbye and Pissarro between 1850 and 1855 in the Caribbean and Venezuela were exhibited for the first time in St Thomas and at the Jewish Museum of New York, and a catalogue of these works was published in 1996, edited by Richard Brettell and Karen Zukowski.40 In Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott seems to be referring to this very ‘catalogue / of early Pissarro’s [with] harbours hazed with love’ (TH11041), and some of the early works which have St Thomas, its people, its landscapes and seascapes at their core became inspirational visual documents for his reconstruction of Pissarro’s early years, contributing to the shaping of various scenes in the poem. At the very start of Tiepolo’s Hound, for example, the Pissarro family passes by shops and archways which provide respite from the heat but which also chime, visually, with Pissarro’s sketches of what could have been a large commercial building in Christiansted (then the largest town in St Croix) where, what Walcott calls the ‘repetitions of the oval shade’ (TH3, 4), is evident in the two perpendicular rows of arches Pissarro reproduced in graphite and watercolour in Christiansted (n.d., attributed to Pissarro, BZ22). Another scene captured just outside a shop in St Thomas where customers and passers-by congregate, a few children play under the watchful

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eye of what seems to be an older sister, and a small dog wanders around undisturbed, affords but a glimpse of the interior of a local shop since, as in the previous sketch, the inside of the Danish arch is carefully shaded by Pissarro, mostly in his characteristic diagonal hatching (S. Thomas 8 juin 1852, Pissarro, BZ58) (Fig. 6.6).42 Black people were amongst the favourite subjects of Pissarro’s early sketches and the first pages of Tiepolo’s Hound also create a sense of cohesion between Walcott’s verbal and Pissarro’s visual dimensions by underlining an ‘aural’ continuity between St Thomas and Trinidad, namely the chants of the Mission slaves and those of a Black congregation in Port of Spain, both celebrating Sunday (TH3–5). Later in the poem, Walcott imagines himself in nineteenth-century Dronningens Gade, and feels his own body filling Pissarro’s hand-drawn outline of a figure in a straw hat and trousers hitched up to just below the knee, as (allegedly) nameless, faceless and disposable as one of his forefathers (TH137–8). In Market Scene (n.d., attributed to Pissarro, BZ21) (Fig. 6.7) – the sketch of a market scene of St Thomas or St Croix – almost at the centre, we find a seated local man whose trousers might be rolled up and who sports a broad straw hat: his ‘anonymity’ is enhanced by the fact that he gives his back to the viewers and we cannot see his face. There are more than fifty figures in this crowded and lively scene, but it is clear that the Afro-Caribbean population ‘own[s] the space’43 of this work. Walcott/the model tips his hat in ‘acknowledgement’ of Pissarro and, despite its implicit power imbalance, this polite, almost friendly, exchange recalls the sentiment which must have governed Pissarro’s sketching of those Afro-Caribbean boys who served as models for the young artist. In Portrait and Figural Study (n.d., Pissarro, BZ48) or Boy with Jug (n.d., Pissarro BZ45) (Fig. 6.8) young dark-skinned or Black boys pose for the artist and boldly return his gaze with the amusing and amused expression of someone who is intrigued, but not at all intimidated, by the process. The same can be said of a whole length study of a Black boy inscribed Frederick David and dated 12 April 1852, now in the Ashmolean Museum collection (BLL3 verso): here the youth in a torn straw hat and oversized coat looks at the painter and viewers with ‘curiosity’ whilst ‘engaging in a straightforward dialogue with an artist who listens to him visually’.44 On the verso of the same sheet, another whole-length study of a bare-chested, bare-footed boy wearing ragged clothes and carrying a wooden bucket on his head, appears next to a seated figure whose body is barely defined while his head is carefully sketched (BLL3 recto). The roads punctuated by trees, yards and fences that Walcott remembers walking on in St Thomas, and imagines Pissarro drawing with Melbye (TH140), echo a Pissarro sketch of his island which constitutes an important precedent for the recurring compositions centred around a ‘road’ the painter developed in a later period, particularly in works produced in Louvenciennes

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Figure 6.6  S. Thomas 8 Juin 1852, 1852, Jacob Camille Pissarro, graphite cool white medium weight wove paper. Accession: OL.1982.263. Olana State Historic Collection NYS Office Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Bureau of Historic Site and Park Services, Waterford, NY.

Figure 6.7  Market Scene, n.d., attributed to Jacob Camille Pissarro, ink washes over traces of graphite off-white heavy weight wove paper. Accession: OL.1982.294. Olana State Historic Collection NYS Office Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Bureau of Historic Site and Park Services, Waterford, NY.

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between 1869 and 1873 (BLL96). Entitled Landscape with a Road (BLL5, n.d.), this drawing is a humanised landscape with shacks in the distance, lush vegetation offering a shady respite to peasants on foot, or riding a donkey, and Black women carrying produce or washing on their heads. A few lines later, as we have seen, while retracing, in his memory, his way to the college in St Thomas where he used to teach, Walcott imagines Pissarro and Melbye at work on the same road. At that point, Walcott becomes once again one of the subjects of the artists’ sketches: he feels their pencil-lines encircle his features as the two friends are busy cross-hatching the desolate and dusty yard with farming tools and trees which surrounds him (TH140). Another Pissarro study for a humanised landscape with fields, a tree, a shack and an empty cart (Study for a Landscape, BZ1145) bears the handwritten inscription Saint Thomas gris-gris (literally ‘grey-grey’) which might allude to the intensity with which he used the hatching technique in this particular work. Joachim Pissarro, Camille’s great-grandson, however, has suggested a more localised reading of the inscription, one which, he believed, had to do with a ‘voodoo practice’46 called gris-gris entailing spells and counterspells. It is not clear what the connection might have been between Pissarro’s image and this possible innuendo, but Walcott would have been able to ‘hear’ it in the title. Supernatural practices, as a matter of fact, do resurface in the poem when, trying to understand the reason behind his lack of success, Walcott’s Pissarro observes that in St Thomas slaves were still resorting to Obeah, and wonders if they had put a curse on him (TH80). Poignantly, even the experience of Walcott/the model is described in preternatural terms. Being ‘immortalised’ in a sketch, in fact, is equated to being under a paralysing spell which totally overpowers one’s will: as his stance is ‘frozen’ into the posture chosen by the artist, he is fully aware that the sketch will actually survive him (TH140). In this context, the ‘superstitious’ belief that a portrait could capture its subject’s soul provides additional and localised meaning to the traditional aphorism ars longa, vita brevis which contrasts the mortality of the individual subject/model to the immortality of the image/art.47

About Pissarro, Too, Principally about Pissarro, Almost: Giovanbattista Tiepolo, Paolo Veronese and the Cerberus of Accuracy The visual texture of Tiepolo’s Hound is enriched by Walcott’s numerous evocations not only of Pissarro’s early drawings but also of the artist’s betterknown representations of Paris. Walcott, who had never visited the French capital when he wrote Tiepolo’s Hound, indicates that the Paris in the poem – the hustle and bustle of boulevards with their crows and carriages or the barges on the Seine – comes directly out of Pissarro’s canvases (TH42, 155,

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156). The same is valid for the busy markets, street corners, kitchen gardens and narrow lanes (TH53–4, 61, 65), the allure of snowscapes (TH62), or the poplars, cypresses and aspens in the countryside which form part of Walcott’s verbal landscaping of Pissarro’s rural France (TH158, 65, 67). Tiepolo’s Hound, however, is neither a poetic catalogue raisonné nor a biography of Pissarro. Walcott often hijacks the narrative in order to examine his fictionalisation of the nineteenth-century painter’s life, or to ponder his own life and experience as a Caribbean artist and writer vis-à-vis Pissarro’s: as a result, the Impressionist master ends up being simultaneously at the centre and at the edge of this complex poem. In a 2005 interview, Walcott explained that Tiepolo’s Hound ‘is about Pissarro, too, principally about Pissarro, almost’.48 Walcott’s tentativeness is more than justified if we consider that the poem includes biography, autobiography and collective biography, and that its title, after all, refers to both the eighteenth-century painter Giovanbattista Tiepolo and a remembered hound from a painting that Walcott, at least in the title, attributes to this Venetian master. Substantial sections of the poem are dedicated to Walcott’s (vain) ‘search’ – in artbooks, catalogues, museum or prints – for a ‘slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound … / so exact in its lucency’ that, when he first saw it, his heart skipped a beat (TH7). The title associates this image, which in the poem relentlessly ‘hounds’ the poet, to Tiepolo, an attribution which, nonetheless, is questioned only a few pages into the poem. Walcott, in fact, first states that he remembers to have seen this transfixing detail during a visit to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art while standing in front of Veronese’s The Feast of Levi (1573) (TH7). In its turn, this assertion is later undermined by Walcott’s admission that this must have been a false memory because The Feast of Levi is in fact at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice (TH7–8, 135). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, however, holds numerous works by Veronese and Tiepolo and, in 1997, on the three-hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth and while Walcott was writing Tiepolo’s Hound, it even hosted (January to April) an exhibition entitled Gianbattista Tiepolo, 1697–1770. In 1997, therefore, Tiepolo was ‘in the air’ in New York just as much as Pissarro, whose exhibition of early drawings from the Caribbean and Venezuela at the Jewish Museum (which is only a few steps away from The Met) was on show later that year (August to November). Walcott’s momentous (imaginary) encounter with The Feast of Levi, however, is backdated and described in the context of a grand tour undertaken while Walcott was in the United States for the first time in 1958, when he finally gained direct access to the masterpieces he had, up to that point, only seen in artbooks and reproductions.49 In Walcott’s memory his first visit to (presumably) the New York Museum of Modern Art where he says he admired one of Cézanne’s works, blurs with his first exposure to the ‘marble authority’ of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (TH7) – which also holds Cézanne’s paintings – and with his subsequent trips to this museum and, later, to the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice.

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In Book Four, the last book in the poem, Walcott tries to trace the elusive hound further in his memory and back to Craven’s A Treasury (TH117), which includes a colour plate of The Feast of Levi50 (which, nonetheless, Walcott clarifies is not the image he was looking for), as well as a plate of Tiepolo’s Rinaldo Taking Leave of Armida (1742–5) where, however, there are no dogs.51 In point of fact, in Tiepolo’s Hound, the hound and the painting in which it appears are never located nor identified and, at the end of an exhausting search, Walcott decides that both (not simply either) artists had painted the thigh fixed in his memory (TH133). More precisely, one could argue that the ultimate hound/thigh ends up being the product of three artists: Tiepolo, Veronese, but also Walcott himself who, combining and recombining the works of his predecessors, contributes his own vision in an act of creative syncretism. Attribution to one or the other Venetian artist is dismissed as a distraction from the truth because, Walcott insists, what really matters is not to locate the original but to nurture, and continue to be nurtured by, the power of a compelling image, by the astonishment and admiration he feels for an ‘epiphanic detail’ (TH8). Once appropriated and transformed by his imagination into something new, in fact, this momentous detail triggers (or, rather, confirms) his desire to devote his life to acquire and perfect artistic – and, by extension, poetic – skills which could be put at the service of his vision. Yet, in the poem’s title, Walcott ultimately decided to associate the hound with Tiepolo and not Veronese: this does not mean that he was capitulating to (transmuting an arresting image in the poem) the ‘Cerberus’ of ‘Accuracy’ (TH134) or defaulting on his syncretic and collaborative approach. In the context of a poem which aims to investigate how the Caribbean can relate to, and take advantage of, the European legacy, it cannot be negligible that, as I have suggested elsewhere, dogs are represented differently by the two artists. The role played by dogs in Veronese’s work is often a subaltern one – for example, they might symbolise fidelity or signpost the wealth of their owners – but Tiepolo seems inclined to let his hounds reject total subordination, since they often divert our attention from the narrative focus of the paintings in which they are featured.52 Tiepolo’s subtle re-centring of these traditionally marginalised subjects is particularly poignant because, as Walcott himself points out, dogs and Black people tended to share the same peripheral status in representations of aristocratic households or lifestyle.53 A case in point, as we have seen in Chapter 3, is Watteau’s The Music Party (1718) (Fig. 3.4), from which Walcott drew inspiration for the setting of In A Fine Castle: here a dog performing his daily toilette and a little Black servant boy are carefully separated (and entirely ignored) by the main group of white figures who are about to sample the pleasures of music. In Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott’s painstaking attempt to localise the hound proceeds hand in hand with his search for himself (in the shape of other Black figures) in paintings of the past until, eventually, he finds ‘himself’ in a ‘grey Moor clutching a wolfhound’ (TH124).

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Vis-à-vis a European artistic legacy which, in Tiepolo’s Hound, comes across, at the same time, as inspiring, overwhelming and often transparently racist, Walcott describes himself as ‘vessel, apprentice’ but also, crucially, as ‘interpreter’ (TH132). These three definitions are not synonyms but signpost instead a spectrum where total passivity turns into an uncompromising rearticulation of agency. If a ‘vessel’ is a hollow container in which anything can be poured, and an ‘apprentice’ is bound to follow his/her master’s instructions, ‘interpreters’ are freer agents who re-imagine and redefine the work of others according to their own understanding of what they believe is its meaning. Tiepolo’s Hound reveals that Walcott was able not only to appreciate but also to learn from Tiepolo’s strategies of representation, and to ‘interpret’ them in a verbal performance. Walcott’s attention, in fact, is captured by another painting where an attendant Moor observes Tiepolo’s Apelles painting Campaspe. The little dog in Apelles Painting Campaspe (1726), instead, is not looking at the beautiful model – like Apelles – or at the painting – like Alexander, Campaspe herself and the houseboy – but directly at the viewers, distracting them from the central narrative. Unlocking, as it were, the viewers’ gaze, this distraction facilitates Walcott’s re-centring of the peripheral Black figure with whom he identifies: readers are then invited to ‘presume’ with the poet that the Moor (and, by extension, Walcott himself), far from being a powerless, marginal subaltern, is silently ‘learning / … skill[s]’ that he might later redeploy for his own purposes (TH129).54 Elusive painted hounds are not the only dogs in Tiepolo’s Hound: the recurrent appearances of ‘real’ mongrels contribute to create a convergence for the poem’s diverging narratives (those revolving around Walcott, Pissarro or Tiepolo) and their different locations (Charlotte Amalie, Trinidad, St Lucia, Paris, Venice, New York). Mongrels are a constant feature in the Caribbean, like open gutters, rusty galvanised roofing and, appropriately, its ‘mongrel streets’ (TH16). It is in fact because of a black dog crossing the road that a homesick Pissarro manages to feel at home in Paris (TH38). Dogs feature in a few early drawings by Pissarro included in Camille Pissarro and the Caribbean and Brettell and Lloyd’s catalogue55 even if, overall, he seems to have been more interested in donkeys, cows or goats. In Seated Artist (n.d., attributed to Pissarro, BZ46) (Fig. 6.9), a curled-up dog, possibly slumbering from exhaustion under the scorching sun of the tropics, appears next to an artist intent on working under a barely outlined tree. The artist’s gaze is directed elsewhere and the dog, most likely, is not the subject the artist is intent on representing: the two subjects, in fact, are drawn in different media (graphite for the man; ink for the dog) and it is likely that they might have been produced separately, even if they share the space of the same sheet of lightweight wove paper. The fur of the dog is carefully rendered – the dog, not the man, is the more detailed figure here – and its presence on the sheet provides an extra focal point, changing the dynamic of the overall page. In Tiepolo’s Hound, possibly inspired by this composite sketch, Walcott

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Figure 6.8  Boy with Jug, n.d., Jacob Camille Pissarro, graphite off-white medium weight wove paper. Accession: OL.1982.260. Olana State Historic Collection NYS Office Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Bureau of Historic Site and Park Services, Waterford, NY.

Figure 6.9  Seated Artist, n.d., attributed to Jacob Camille Pissarro, ink and graphite off-white light weight wove paper. Accession: OL.1982.262. Olana State Historic Collection NYS Office Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Bureau of Historic Site and Park Services, Waterford, NY.

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imagines Pissarro studying a black mongrel in St Thomas. In his recreated scene – focused on the dog – he illuminates the predicament of the dog in question who is ‘out of range, assessing its tormentor’, fully ‘resigned to its limits, the doors it could not enter’ (TH27) and who utterly encapsulates the ‘mongrel condition’ of other characters in the poem. Once in Paris, in fact, Pissarro too had to confront doors he could not enter: the French Academy of Fine Arts, the poem explains, rejected his works over and over again and, as a result, he was plagued by doubt and debt. Walcott is careful to contextualise Pissarro’s experience by quickly summarising important changes in artistic production, like the eclipse of the Barbizon School (TH53), en plein air painting, the sidelining of classical and idealised depictions, or the establishment of forms of representation that reveal technique rather than concealing it (TH43). Walcott also foregrounds the heterogeneity of a French tradition (and, by extension, of a European artistic legacy) which includes artists as different as the Rococo Boucher, the Romantic (malgré lui) Delacroix, the Realist Courbet (TH39, 75, 43), the Academicians Pierre Puvis de Chavannes or Ernest Meissonier (TH16, 75), and innovators ostracised by the Academy such as Édouard Manet, George Seurat or Paul Cézanne (TH43, 44, 56). Pissarro’s predicament, Walcott continues, was due to the fact that he was at the forefront of an artistic movement which broke with the Academy and its rules, and whose exponents were ridiculed and disparaged – the poem even includes references and quotations from derogatory reviews of their works and illustrates how the name of the movement (Impressionism) was initially coined by detractors to denigrate the artists (TH45–6). Readers are reminded that, scorned by the official Salon, Pissarro and his fellow refusés, described by Walcott as ‘the Academy’s outcasts, its niggers’ (TH45), resorted to organising their own exhibition, the famous Salon des refusés. The official Salon, however, is not the only space Walcott’s Pissarro feels banished from: the artist, in fact, laments that the doors of the Louvre were going to be forever barred to him (TH61).56 As was the case for Walcott, who found his first experience at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art both exciting and intimidating due to ‘its marble authority’, the island youth Pissarro feels overwhelmed and belittled by the Louvre (TH7, 34). Walcott’s unease with metropolitan museums and, most importantly, with art compromised by a colonialist outlook which validates, rejects or recontextualises artists and works according to chronological and geographical parochialism, is evident in both Omeros and Tiepolo’s Hound, as is his distress vis-à-vis the paucity of positive representations of Black subjects and their reality. For similar reasons, Walcott’s encounters with the Phaidon series of artbooks are classified as the opening of ‘the gates of an empire’ for humbled talented apprentices who, like him and Pissarro, came from remote islands, colonies and provinces (TH57). Speaking in the name of these apprentices, however, Walcott ultimately rejects ‘the old argument

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that the great works we admire / civilise and colonise us’ and ‘chain our hands // invisibly’, as an unhelpful and self-defeating generalisation (TH57). The overall poem, in fact, praises those who, refusing to be crushed by ‘the weight of history’s shadow’ (TH36), are creative enough to absorb and reinterpret the Old Masters in order to develop and establish their own aesthetic, like the attendant Moor Walcott identifies with in Tiepolo’s Apelles Painting Campaspe, or his father Warwick, whose copies of European draughtsmen and artists like Sandby, Millet or Millais allowed him to acquire the necessary skills to paint his local reality. The ‘antidotal’ presence of Warwick is conjured up in different books of Tiepolo Hound: in Book One, as we have seen in the first chapter, Walcott retraces Warwick’s delight in learning from his favourite artists (TH11) and, at the beginning of Book Three, Walcott describes Warwick copying Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire in colonial St Lucia as an act simultaneous to Pissarro’s and Monet’s appraisal of the painting in the National Gallery in London in 1870–1. These associations enable Walcott to stress once again the importance of approaching art through simultaneity rather than chronology. Brought together across space and time in the poet’s imagination, the two nineteenth-century painters and the St Lucian artist share the same admiration for the English Turner and carefully study his work to absorb what, for them, are its most valuable lessons, demonstrating that copying from past masters and learning from them does not entail a betrayal of roots, ‘race’, origins or national tradition (TH76, 13).57 The notion of a possible betrayal of (Caribbean) ‘roots’ is also at the core of Walcott’s investigation of Pissarro’s decision to abandon the New World. In the first book of the poem, Walcott imagines how, while in St Thomas, the young Pissarro felt the need to move to Paris because he knew that it was a metropolitan centre where he would have the opportunity to acquire new skills and develop his career (TH23, 24). Pissarro, Walcott argues, had no real choice: he was, ultimately ‘Art’s subject’ and, as such, he must have been affected by the same dilemma experienced by many artists from the archipelago whose love for the Caribbean could soon become a liability due to lack of opportunities (TH29, 24). As the poem presents us with a colonial artist longing for the metropolitan centre in order to learn how to perfect and build on his talents, the line between biography, collective biography and autobiography becomes blurred. Walcott, who refused to relocate permanently outside the Caribbean and always identified the archipelago – and, in particular, St Lucia and Trinidad – as his source of inspiration, often criticised the lack of opportunity that the Caribbean offered to writers and artists of his generation. In Another Life, as we have seen, Walcott explains that, as a teenager, he swore allegiance to his island (AL52) but, ironically, the poem was written while Walcott’s life was increasingly becoming that of a traveller who had to leave the Caribbean regularly to be able to work. In a late 1970s interview he explained this condition in these terms: ‘one cannot

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make a living as an artist [in the Caribbean], yet, one is aware of the vitality that comes from living in certain root areas’.58 Thirty years later, in the same 2005 interview where he described Tiepolo’s Hound as a poem ‘about Pissarro, too, principally about Pissarro, almost’, Walcott welcomed the fact that things appeared to be changing: ‘there is another generation of Caribbean writer and artist now’, he added, ‘who feel that they can be where they are from’.59 He admitted the existence of ‘practicalities, like you have to get published, you have to be in a gallery’ but, he continued, some of the most respected artists and writers have often gone through ‘hell’.60 Pissarro’s experience was of course a case in point and, as if to encourage and support the new generations, in Tiepolo’s Hound Walcott recreates Pissarro’s difficult life in France and debunks the myth of the metropolitan centre as an artist/writer’s Eden. Pissarro’s name, we are told, is ‘hidden in the word Paris’ (TH36, emphasis mine): the choice of the word ‘hidden’ can be taken to indicate that, before emerging as one of the most revered and celebrated ‘French’ artists, Pissarro lived most of his life in precarious financial conditions, was not granted the fame or recognition he deserved, and felt alienated and marginalised as a dissident artist. Turning the cards on the table, however, the poem also insists that the surname Pissarro contains the name of the city while his first name, Camille, could be heard in the sounds of the waves of the Seine (TH46, 36). Far from being an outsider or counterfeiter, therefore, the young Pissarro from his (allegedly) barbaric colonial island (TH34, 45) is recast as a constitutive element of Paris as the cradle of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism – the Caribbean Pissarro, after all, was the only artist who, from 1874 to 1886, exhibited his paintings at all eight Impressionist exhibitions.61 Pissarro’s bond with the Old World, however, was ancestral, recent and contemporaneous. Not only did his family originate from Portugal but his mother was born in St Thomas, the descendant of a French-Jewish family, and his father was born in Bordeaux, where the family had relocated after Portugal. Pissarro had spent his formative years (1841 to 1847) in a boarding school in the outskirts of Paris and, when he moved permanently to France in 1855, his mother had already relocated to the French capital to live near Pissarro’s step-sisters, Emma and Delphine.62 Walcott, therefore, frames Pissarro’s decision to go back to Paris as the return of a ‘prodigal son’ (TH51), but this idiosyncratic ‘homecoming’ is not reimagined as a straightforward journey. Ridiculed by mainstream critics, plagued by doubt and anxiety about the quality of his work, aware that, unlike his fellow French refusés, he was not a ‘native’, and that his Jewish roots set him apart from the rest of society, Walcott’s Pissarro feels like a stray dog who cannot ‘enter’ not only the doors of the Academy or of the Louvre but also the intimate connection his friends had with France: he frequently questions his right to claim and serve the French landscape, and, during the Dreyfus affair, Pissarro even compares his works to fakes (TH46, 102).

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Overall, in his biography of Pissarro, Walcott refuses to settle the related questions of betrayal, allegiances or belonging and, instead, fully embraces their complexity. We know that until 1958 Pissarro signed his works with the Spanish version of his name (‘C. Pizarro’) and that, on his calling card, he had included St Thomas between his name and his local address, perhaps, as Shikes and Harper highlight, ‘to stress his authenticity as a tropical painter’,63 or perhaps because he was still processing the loss of his native island and the complex mixed feelings that always come with uprooting and re-rooting. Throughout Pissarro’s career, critics have found a clear continuity in terms of concerns – ‘the homogeneity of the visual problems he chose to tackle’, his interest in ‘ordinary people going about their daily chores’, his representation of ‘class’ – which found their origins in his life and experience in St Thomas.64 Similarly, in Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott’s Pissarro’s move to France, at least initially, does not entail a complete severance from his native Caribbean as both the painter and his paintings, we are told, are haunted by St Thomas: the leaves of Pissarro’s poplars, for example, carry his islander’s ‘accent’, the Paris he paints has the cosiness and familiar feel of a small island, and, at some point, he even has to exhort himself to erase St Thomas from his memory (TH53, 65, 80). Towards the end of the poem, however, in a self-reflective moment, Walcott explains that, eventually, he reached the point when he was able to accept that Pissarro’s love for his island and its people might have faded over the years if, indeed, it was ever as strong as the poem at times suggests. In his assessment of Pissarro’s work in St Thomas, Walcott also confronts the possibility that it might not have been exempt from some of the problematic attitudes prevalent at the time in which it was completed. As a matter of fact, the first time the poem explicitly refers to Pissarro’s St Thomas drawings, they are mentioned in conjunction with old prints which portray a Caribbean both familiar and unfamiliar to Walcott because their attention to the locality is tainted by romanticisation, exoticism and mystification – he refers, for instance, to plumed palms and genial plantation owners. Pissarro’s early sketches, Walcott observes, can be equally problematic because they seem to render suffering as ‘quaint / as a Danish harbour with its wooden waves’ (TH16). Walcott, therefore, seems ready to concede that Pissarro’s interest in the Afro-Caribbean population and the tropical landscape might have been dictated more by his desire to prosper as an artist who could (profitably) provide Europe with sanitised images of its distant colonies, than with a genuine commitment to the local.65 Later in the poem, Walcott also entertains the possibility that Pissarro’s commitment to his art might have been stronger than his commitment to his native place: when Walcott mentions the catalogue of early Pissarro with ‘harbours hazed with love’ (TH110), in fact, he leaves it open to interpretation if Pissarro’s love was for what/whom he was painting (the harbours or his Caribbean subjects as a whole) or simply for the technique he used to depict them.

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When the poem transforms Walcott into one of Pissarro’s models, it specifies that he had turned into a young and mixed-race subject who had recently benefited from manumission (TH141). This description reminds readers that Pissarro was back in St Thomas in 1847 and witnessed both the initial violent repercussions to slave revolts on his island (which included ruthless public whippings) and the Danish government’s acceleration of its gradual plans for the abolition of slavery following the 1848 violent slave rebellion in St Croix.66 Pissarro’s family had owned slaves and was attended by an Afro-Caribbean maid also in France – the artist repeatedly sketched her and used her as an unpaid model67 – but we know that Pissarro was to develop political views at odds with his bourgeois family and incompatible with the disregards of human rights underpinning slavery and discrimination. If it is possible that the dire conditions of the enslaved deeply disturbed the young artist, as some critics insist,68 one has to acknowledge that Pissarro’s early drawings are neither visual documents of the suffering of the Afro-Caribbean population nor illustrations of what might have been his views on slavery and emancipation. Walcott, however, highlights that Pissarro’s work as a whole is characterised by lack of ‘narrative pathos’ and rejection of rhetoric or sentimentality (TH68, 65), and acknowledges also that his representations of collective and collaborative work in the French countryside do not foreground injustice or physical exhaustion69 but the fertility and fruitfulness of the earth (TH64) and harmonious cooperation amongst the peasants. Pissarro’s images of St Thomas have been categorised as nothing more than ‘visual records of the global dominance of colonial culture’70 and, in a way, it is to be expected that a young artist keen to establish himself in the metropole would have pandered to its requirements. Nevertheless, it has also been pointed out that Pissarro only very rarely complied with the conventions of the picturesque and of exoticism: some critics have even suggested that he often displayed a ‘natural, almost indigenous attitude’ towards his models.71 Power relations are laid bare when Walcott imagines himself as one of Pissarro’s figures frozen in a posture chosen by the artist, but the poet also tries to reflect the respectful attitude Pissarro had towards his models and that was to characterise his artistic production over the years.72 In Tiepolo’s Hound, in fact, the interactions between model and painter are not described solely as exchanges in which the model is completely deprived of agency: as his figure ‘emerg[es]’, he questions the artist directly about his priorities: ‘yours may just be love of your own calling / and not for us … // … we seem painless … // placid adornments, models of the race … // … here for your practice’ (TH141, emphasis mine). The use of the modal ‘may’ does not settle the question and, overall, it is arguable that for Walcott all these contrasting interpretations of Pissarro’s relationship to Caribbean landscapes and people retained some validity: readers are therefore invited to return to the works themselves, interpret them, and draw their own conclusions,

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or, indeed, decide if there can really be a straightforward conclusion to be drawn. Walcott’s investigation of Pissarro’s pictorial production is part of his search for a suitable way to read and interpret now images of the Caribbean from a colonial era in which exoticism and misrepresentation were rife; as such, it complements and informs Walcott’s own quest for viable modalities of representation of the region and its people in both words and paint. Over the years, Walcott often displayed a certain anxiety vis-à-vis his own verbal representation and, in Tiepolo’s Hound, when Walcott/the model addresses Pissarro with the words ‘your drawing / is edged with a kindness my own lines contain’ (TH141), he is clearly meditating on the painter’s work but, simultaneously, on his own. As the poet/model’s ‘lines’ blur with his ‘lineaments’ (TH140), it is hard to establish if the ‘kindness’ which ‘edges’ the drawing resides in the drawing itself, in its subject, in the poem which attributes it to the drawing, or in the attitude of the artist who generates the imagined sketch. Moreover, does the poem ‘contain’ this kindness in the sense that it is equally imbued with it, or in the sense that certain expectations do not allow it to be fully revealed? These lines come only a few pages after Walcott’s confession that he felt the urge to exaggerate, even ‘falsify’, both the ‘plea from former slaves’ to be represented fairly and Pissarro’s willingness and ability to respond to it and become the Giotto of St Thomas (TH28): ‘They were never his people’, the poem explains, ‘we were there to draw. // They, and everything else’ (TH136). The shift of pronouns (‘they/we/they’) reveals once again that Walcott sees himself as one of Pissarro’s local/Black models and, concomitantly, as a mixed-heritage and educated painter/poet aware of his privileges and of the fact that, for example, he did not share the hardship of those who still lived in the shacks of his island or region.73 On the other hand, however, the ability to paint what is ‘there’ without eulogising, and to represent ‘the ordinary / for what it was’ (TH53) is precisely what Walcott most appreciated in Pissarro. Significantly, the poet’s ‘awe of the ordinary’ (TH8) is also what launches his hunt for the arresting detail of a hound’s (ordinary) thigh. In the poem, Walcott’s stubborn search for the hound of his memory in catalogues and museums is fruitless: it leads him instead to the ‘bellowing Minotaur’ of ‘History’ (TH127) which embodies the painful realisation that ‘every [painted] hound’ shares its marginalisation with ‘its attendant Moor’ (TH125). Walcott’s investigation, however, does not end with this discovery and does not result in failure: as we have seen, the elusive hound is ‘found’ a first time when Walcott recasts his vision as a collaborative effort where not only Tiepolo and Veronese but Walcott himself equally contribute to the new creation. The hound is also ‘found’ again, only a few pages later, on a St Lucian beach, when Walcott rescues a (ordinary) starving mongrel pup shaking ‘with local terror’ (TH138). As he brings the malnourished dog to the nearby village where he expects it would find the love, compassion and

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protection that he needs to live on like his ancestors, Walcott suddenly realises that what he initially regarded as a ‘parody of Tiepolo’s hound’ is in fact the real thing: ‘The hound was here’, he triumphantly concludes (TH138–9). The trajectory of the pup from ‘parody’ to ‘the hound’ (TH138–9, emphasis mine) resonates with those traced by Caribbean cultural expressions like Carnival, steel band and calypso which ‘originated in imitation [and] ended in invention’ (CCM9). Appropriation, interpretation and imagination play a central role in this process which affects one’s attitude to tradition (or the ‘weight of history’s shadow’ TH36) and to one’s surroundings, but also restore agency to those who have the ability to transform the ‘nothing new’ that is generally associated with imitation into something valuable. Contending that ‘mimicry is an act of the imagination’ (CCM10), Walcott reformulates imitation as ‘open assimilation of what is … most useful’ and as ‘design’, ‘defense’, ‘lure’, a ‘cunning’ strategy available to the Caribbean, a part of the world where ‘invention’ is a ‘necessity’ (CCM5, 6, 10). At the same time, Walcott rejected the notion that the New World could only be a ‘parody’ of the Old World and of the past, arguing that if the Americas and American art forms were ‘fated to unoriginality’, they were so no more than any other place or any art form from anywhere else because, ultimately, all creation involves imitation (CCM8). The tension between imitation and invention, the reality of the New World and the Old World traditions, and the necessity to free oneself from the traps of imported and superimposed conceptualisations through creativity and imagination are also palpable in the fact that the remembered hound in the painting is white, the mongrels are black, but the colour of the little pup is not specified. These colour lines mirror (or imitate) the hierarchical divisions underpinned by racism and colonialism redeployed in some of the paintings Walcott scrutinises in the poem. Yet, if Tiepolo’s Hound does acknowledge the nefarious historical and current relevance of racism and colourism and their pernicious and subtle shaping of perceptions and expectations – as Walcott observes, a white dog can be taken for granted in a painting while the discovery of a Black face is met with surprise (TH122) – in his reading of Tiepolo’s Apelles Painting Campaspe Walcott challenges the alignment of colour and marginalisation and re-centres the Black figure as an astute agent absorbing crucial skills. In the case of the Caribbean pup, colour lines are left unmentioned in an effort to foreground something different and ‘fresh’ which can transcend their crippling effect: all we know about the little mongrel is his status, not his colour, but, at the same time, it is the simple fact that he is ‘there’ – like the dog asleep in Pissarro’s own sketch – that makes the pup, in all his anonymity and ordinariness, deserving of attention and representation. One of the underlying causes of Walcott’s protracted engagement with the ‘humble and colossal’ Pissarro,74 and one of the driving forces of Tiepolo’s Hound, in fact, is Walcott’s desire to suitably articulate what we can call the miraculous ordinariness of the Caribbean, not its (alleged)

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‘Edenic’ or corrupted status. Implicitly responding to critics who dismiss Pissarro’s canvases as ‘ordinary’, Walcott insists that ‘the ordinary is the miracle’ (TH155) and aligns himself with those who believe that Pissarro’s work, despite not having an overt social commentary or message, is political, even ‘revolutionary’.75

Ordinary Miracles: Derek Walcott’s Paintings In chapter XXII of Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott writes that, after feeling an ‘ordinary / width of enlightenment’ (TH137, emphasis mine) while, pen in hand and with his shoulders hunched and his eyes focused on his poem ‘about Pissarro, too, principally about Pissarro, almost’, he imagines Pissarro, also hunched over one of his sketchbooks, busy immortalising St Thomas and its people or, more precisely, Walcott himself as one of his anonymous models. Walcott, therefore, reimagines himself and Pissarro as each other’s subject but also as two artists involved in the creation of Pissarro’s drawing and Walcott’s poem; as their verbal and visual sketches become one, they are ‘both bent’ on the page on which Walcott is writing, the very one we are reading (TH137–8). Walcott’s insistence on this close cooperation between the two is better understood if one bears in mind the words of the biographer Michael Holroyd, according to whom writing about other writers means offering one’s subject ‘the opportunity to write one more book, posthumously … and in collaboration with you’.76 Walcott, as we have seen, sympathises with Pissarro and does not consider his decision to move to France, serve the French landscape and claim it as his own as a betrayal of the Caribbean; nonetheless, he still regrets that, as a result, St Thomas, remained ‘unpainted’ and its villages never became a recurring subject in Pissarro’s works as was the case, for example, for Pontoise or Louveciennes (TH143). According to Walcott, had he stayed in the Caribbean Pissarro would ‘inevitably’ have produced ‘masterpieces … of the Caribbean landscape which [Caribbean people] would have been eager to claim as something belonging to [them]. And’, Walcott wondered, ‘what might [these masterpieces] have looked like if they were painted in the Caribbean?’77 One could argue, therefore, that, in recreating Pissarro’s life, the poet and painter Walcott was offering the deceased master the opportunity to ‘collaborate’ in order to ‘put down, in paint, in words’ (AL52) the Caribbean he regretted Pissarro never had a chance to record, and engage with at length, with his brush. Having praised Pissarro for ‘paint[ing] the ordinary / for what it was’, singling out, as an example, the rust-coloured, rough and narrow roads of rural France (TH53), Walcott exhorts himself to focus on equally commonplace details, like the tiny, scorching streets and sun-bleached shacks covered in galvanise of St Lucia (TH156). In order to strengthen the connection with

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Pissarro and making the most of the fact that, due to its colonial history, many toponyms in St Lucia are in French or Kweyol, in Book One of Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott decides to ‘put down in words’ Dennery, a small town on the windward coast of St Lucia whose name recalls Ennery, a commune in the Val-d’Oise in northern France, near Pontoise, which repeatedly features in Pissarro’s paintings. In Pissarro’s Route d’Ennery (1874), for example, a winding road takes centre stage, as roads often do in Pissarro’s work, and Walcott’s landscaping of Dennery also foregrounds a dizzying coastal road (TH18). In another version of the same locality, La vieille route d’Ennery à Pontoise (1887), Pissarro included a large haystack which dominates one side of the painting while another appears farther into the background (on the opposite side), with some trees providing horizontal continuity. In his poem, Walcott describes two small, jagged isles visible from the coastal road at Dennery which are covered in trees and bushes, and which, visually, remind one of Pissarro’s haystacks and trees (TH18). Looking at the St Lucian landscape through his own and Pissarro’s eyes simultaneously, therefore, Walcott reimagines and verbally paints this St Lucian small town not as a Caribbean copy (or ‘parody’) of a French original, not simply as an echo from a ‘map of France’ (TH18) or (French) art history, but as an original we might have had, had Pissarro painted the St Lucian village rather than the French commune. When Walcott lists the kind of places left unpainted following Pissarro’s decision to leave St Thomas for Paris, he explicitly mentions savannahs (TH143). It may not be entirely a coincidence, then, that the watercolour Savannah, Early Morning (c. 1982) (Fig. 6.10), a depiction of the Queen’s Park Savannah of Port of Spain, is the first painting by Walcott that readers encounter in the volume. Tiepolo’s Hound, in fact, comprises twenty-six reproductions of Walcott’s own works, a wide selection of landscapes, seascapes, a self-portrait, indoor scenes or outdoor groupings. The paintings, as a matter of fact, were initially supposed to be collected in a special edition of Walcott’s artworks to be accompanied by an introduction by his companion Sigrid Nama who used to be an art dealer and to whom the poem is dedicated.78 This initial project, however, somehow evolved in the poemcum-paintings Tiepolo’s Hound whose ‘seed’ Walcott located in the 1997 invitation by William Gass to participate in a symposium about poetry and painting at the Writers Center of Washington University, St Louis, where he also exhibited some of his watercolours.79 The invitation and then Tiepolo’s Hound as a whole, therefore, became an occasion for Walcott to explore ‘as quietly as possible, [his] feeling about painting, through poetry’80 but also, arguably, through painting itself. The inclusion of so many of his visual works in the volume was a bold move even for a poet/artist who had already used some of them for the covers of his books: this long poem where painters, paintings and the art of painting itself play such a crucial role, however, provided Walcott with an unmissable opportunity to bring together and put to good use the products of his pen and

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brush.81 Walcott never claimed that his watercolours and oils (plus one pastel and one gouache) were the Caribbean ‘masterpieces’ that Pissarro had not managed to paint, let alone masterpieces in their own right – in Book Three he actually calls them ‘failures’ (TH98). Walcott’s paintings, however, have their own important (hi)stories to tell – (hi)stories which have received very little critical attention so far. As his paintings intersect the different narratives of the poem, Tiepolo’s Hound becomes a vehicle for a simultaneous verbal and visual exploration of different ways in which Walcott’s poem and his artwork could enter into productive conversations with the life and oeuvre of a Caribbean-born artist conversant with the ‘European legacy’ but daring enough to break with tradition, of past masters whose representational strategies Walcott believed could put to good use, and with the work of painters who had engaged and are engaged in representing the Caribbean. In Tiepolo’s Hound the relationship between the verbal (the poem itself) and the visual (Walcott’s own but also Pissarro’s, and, as we will see, other artists’ works) is complex and conjugates itself in multiple ways. Only less than half of the works selected by Walcott were painted after the 1997 collection The Bounty and, therefore, roughly when he was writing the poem with which he puts them in dialogue: all the others were produced before, some almost twenty years before, the publication of Tiepolo’s Hound. There is no evidence that previous canvases influenced and shaped Walcott’s writing while, at the same time, the more contemporaneous canvases are not mere illustrations of the poem which in fact, never refers explicitly to any of the paintings and does not rely or depend on them in any way. As a matter of fact, the paperback edition does not even include the reproductions, offering, as a result, a much-diminished version of Tiepolo’s Hound. Arguably, however, the decision of what to include, and where every canvas was to be located in relation to the poetic lines, does appear to have been the product of careful deliberation: the paintings often serve the purpose of complicating or expanding on the verbal, either by refracting the narrative or by adding extra layers of signification; alternatively (or concomitantly) Walcott’s oils and watercolours signpost illuminating correspondences, or telling discrepancies, between his own and other artists’ modalities of representation of the Caribbean, or their treatment of, and approach to, certain themes and motifs. Savannah, Early Morning, produced in the early 1980s, is the earliest of the paintings included in Tiepolo’s Hound and it shows how Walcott had already developed strategies of representation akin to Pissarro’s well before his protracted engagement with the painter in the mid-to-late 1990s.82 Reader/viewers, therefore, are encouraged, from the very start of the volume, not to regard the visual element as ancillary illustration of the verbal but as an independent vehicle for intellectual elaboration. The relationship between the two artists is not framed as a one-way influence (Pissarro-on-Walcott) but as a matter of affinity, dialogue, ongoing development, translation and refining of attitudes, poetics and aesthetics, particularly in relation to the way in

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which both artists understood and (re)defined ‘ordinariness’. In 1975, in ‘On Choosing Port of Spain’, a verbal landscaping where he expresses his love for and commitment to the city, Walcott argued that, even if he were to paint Port of Spain in ways that might have reminded his viewers of Gauguin’s and Pissarro’s work, ‘the truth’, or specificity of the place, would have made Walcott’s work ‘different’ (CPS16). Similarly, Savannah, Early Morning visually announces that the reproductions included in Tiepolo’s Hound provide readers with a varied ‘catalogue’ of images of Caribbean ‘ordinary’ places and people which might bear traces of Walcott’s engagement with previous masters, but where appropriation, interpretation and imagination play a pivotal role for the delineation of an aesthetic centred on the local. In a way, this painting testifies to Walcott’s belief that the ‘weight of history’s’ and, most importantly, of art history’s ‘shadow’ (TH36) can cease to be a weight only if local artists cease to be simply ‘vessels’ and become creative ‘interpreters’ of metropolitan tradition, reclaim their agency and, with it, the right to adapt and transform established parameters and dare to envisage alternative, home-grown, ones (TH132). Savannah, Early Morning focuses in particular on the savannah’s horse race track which Walcott did not choose to depict during the ‘extraordinary’ leisure event of a horse race but during the quiet everyday monotony of training.83 The training of horses is a team effort which requires synchronisation between human and animal and the utmost dedication of different people who often belong to different classes, as Walcott emphasises in The Last Carnival, where references to horse grooming and horse racing highlight race and class tensions.84 Conversely, there is no indication of class or racial conflict amongst the figures in Walcott’s watercolour – although one might argue that Walcott’s position as spectator, located in a hotel overlooking the Savannah, registers, implicitly, a difference between those who are working in the fields and those who can afford to observe their activity from a distance. Walcott displays a keen – or ‘barometric’, like Homer’s or Hinkson’s – interest in capturing the early morning light but also in ‘monumentalising’ aspects of quotidian life, the communal work of those ‘fellers to whom horses is a religion’ (CPS15), and the human cooperation in harmony with the natural world at the core of paintings of St Lucia by Simmons or St. Omer or, indeed, rural France by Pissarro. Small buildings are hardly visible amongst the trees which dominate the savannah and amongst the vegetation on the hills in the background; all the figures in the picture, concentrated in the immediate foreground of the canvas, occupy a very small portion of the painting, the wide majority of which is devoted to the sky, vegetation and surrounding hills. The verticalities of the standing man and of the trainer on his horse – seen frontally – replicate that of the tree trunks next to them, while the horizontality of the trainer and horse in profile chimes with the horizontal expanse of the foliage: as a result, all the figures appear fully ­integrated in the landscape.

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Savannah, Early Morning is complemented in the poem by a prolonged description of Port of Spain which takes readers for a tour of the city centre from Woodford Square to the Savannah, passing by streets punctuated by deserted yards and elegant verandahs like those painted and ‘preserved’ by Hinkson (TH5–6).85 We are then offered a glimpse of the sumptuous Presidential Palace and of the hills overlooking the city until Walcott’s roaming eye and pen zoom out of Port of Spain to take in the sea, the Five Islands to the west, and the cane fields of Trinidad (TH4–7). The poem creates an explicit link to Pissarro’s work when it compares the cypresses of Port of Spain’s Rock Garden to one of his canvases (TH6), and the connection with the nineteenth-century artist is reinforced when we are informed that Walcott’s cityscape of Port of Spain is framed by a window (TH4), a detail which signals that the poet might have had in mind those Pissarro late views of Paris painted from the elevation of hotel rooms. The viewpoint from which Savannah, Early Morning is painted, in fact, also suggests an elevated position, probably a window or balcony of the Queen’s Park Hotel overlooking the savannah – a small angular portion of another balcony is actually visible in the painting itself. The collection Midsummer, in fact, included a poem (‘III’) where, from this very hotel, Walcott painted with words a quick sketch of the Savannah where, early in the morning, he could see ‘grooms’ and ‘delicate-ankled racehorses exercise’ (M13). Savannah, Early Morning zooms in on the Savannah race tracks, which, in the poem, is the place where all those involved in what Walcott calls the ‘civilising // culture of horses’ congregate (TH6). The reference to this particular culture, remindful of ‘the fin de siècle spokes of trotting carriages’ so prevalent in Pissarro’s views of Paris, offers Walcott a chance to reaffirm the continuity between his world and Pissarro’s – Charlotte Amalie and the nineteenth century, in fact, are mentioned only a few lines earlier (TH6). Walcott’s painting, however, resonates with Pissarro’s panoramic cityscapes but also with his landscaping of ordinary coins (or ‘corners’) of Pontoise,86 his rejection of conventional motifs, his decision not to admit narrative or excesses, and to paint neither destitute areas – like the fishermen’s quarter or the cave dwellings of the poorest peasants – nor the local chateaux belonging to the extremely affluent and Paris-based upper classes.87 Similarly, in Savannah, Early Morning Walcott paints his view from an angle which affords the exclusion of the Presidential Palace and the famous Magnificent Seven Houses on the northern and western fringe of the Savannah (one of them, as we have seen, takes centre stage in his Watteau-related works) and from which Laventille, the most impoverished and crime-ridden area of Port of Spain, signposted by the tower with the statue of Our Lady of Fatima Church and Shrine at the top of the hill in the background, is only visible from a distance.88 Like Homer and Hinkson, in fact, Walcott never painted what he called ‘degradation’ and like Gauguin, who tended to eliminate St Pierre from his views of Martinique because, to him, it represented the

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urban modernity he was so keen to leave behind,89 Walcott never produced canvases of what he considered a disfigurement on the local landscape – for instance, the post-1948 Castries multi-storied apartment blocks of cement he thoroughly disliked are not amongst his subjects. Taking readers/viewers into Port of Spain through an unconventional point of entrance, an unusual corner, a specific time of day and a carefully chosen perspective, with Savannah, Early Morning Walcott asserts himself as an artist who paints the ordinary not by adhering to every facet of reality but through a process in which he is transparent about what he chooses to prioritise and how. In Tiepolo’s Hound, a ‘collaborative’ (auto)biography and concerted effort to pay homage to the ordinary Caribbean with both pen and brush, Walcott declares himself aware that Pissarro’s ‘ordinary’ was also the product of careful selection or, as Brettell put it, of ‘admissions’ and ‘omissions’,90 when he reserves the right to stick ‘not [to] walled facts’ but to ‘their essence’ just as much as Pissarro did in his canvases (TH70). In Book Three, for example, Walcott describes the St Lucian village of Gros Islet seen from the village bank as a landscape by Pissarro and then lists some of the main features of this landscape, namely, the bare walls, the red-roofed buildings, the lush vegetation and the plumes of smoke coming from dwellings in the searing midday heat (TH96). This description is consistent with the details enumerated in Walcott’s self-exhortation to paint the ordinary Caribbean as Pissarro painted ordinary Louveciennes or Pontoise (TH156), but this particular ‘frame’ leaves out the main building of Gros Islet, namely the Catholic Church of St Joseph the Worker, even if ‘the cathedral’s solace’ is one of the elements Walcott includes in his own list of desiderata – perhaps surprisingly, given his conflictual relationship with the Catholic churches/cathedral of St Lucia (TH156). The young Walcott, as we have seen, always felt rejected by and had little sympathy for the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of Castries or the small churches that represented the Catholic Church of St Lucia on the territory – in fact, he used to hate them ‘with Lutheran ferocity’ (OTC21, 1). If, later in his life, he learnt to subdue his anger, he never managed to free himself completely from a certain animosity or, at least, ambivalence towards them (OTC21, 7).91 Just a few pages after omitting it from his verbal landscaping, however, Walcott presents us with two different views of Gros Islet’s church, namely, Gros Islet Church I and Gros Islet Church II (Figs 6.11 and 6.12) dated 1998 and 1999 respectively. As the titles suggest, the church is the heart of the two paintings but almost everything else in the composition conspires to minimise its importance or direct our gaze away from it. Gros Islet Church I offers a view of the bulky grandiloquence of the Catholic church where Dunstan St. Omer painted the early fresco described by Walcott in Another Life (AL63). Gros Islet’s church is sizable and can host large crowds of worshippers during Mass, but this is a completely ordinary day: there is no Mass or special event and there is no indication that the

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Figure 6.10  Savannah, Early Morning, c. 1982, Derek Walcott, watercolour on paper, 15.8 × 26 cm. Margaret Walcott. Copyright © 2000 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

Figure 6.11  Gros Islet Church I, 1998, Derek Walcott, oil on canvas, 45.7 × 60.9 cm. Copyright © 2000 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

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church is providing ‘solace’ to anyone. Clearly a very impressive, rock-solid presence in the village, it towers over the rest of the buildings and the trees around it; yet the tall telegraph pole which divides both canvas and church in two points upwards to the cloudy sky that occupies more than one third of the picture and engulfs the grey and white church, flanked, but also partially concealed, by different kinds of trees. The importance and special status of the church is also relativised by the fact that its orange roof tiles chime with the galvanised roof of a small house nearby, situated on the opposite side of another, bigger white house whose whiteness recalls the lower part of the church itself. We are separated from the church by what appears to be an unattended space with scorched grass, a cock, a goat and its kid, and a boy who gives his back to the church. Pictorial penetration is possible through the gap between the goat and the boy which takes us straight to the church’s low wall which renders the entrance door behind it less immediately accessible. The boy sitting on a broken, lop-sided table seems to dare more than invite us to enter the painting, the open space and the church, while a woman with a straw hat walks away from the entrance of the church, directing our gaze away from it. In Gros Islet Church II (Fig. 6.12), painted a year later, Walcott’s ambivalence towards the same Catholic church is even more obvious. Viewed from the side, St Joseph the Worker is less immediately identifiable as a church: its long main roof is painted bright red, like some patches of the lower galvanised roof on the side of the building or on what might be an adjacent shack, diluting once again its outstandingness. The slender palm trees which cross the canvas are much higher than the church, and their verticalities interrupt and fragment its horizontal mass, signposting, repeatedly, that they tower over it. Once again, the church is the main building, yet it is not placed in the foreground which is occupied instead by the side of a house made of unpainted breeze blocks overlooking another large unattended green space or backyard. Interspersed with abandoned junk (possibly an old car seat and car tire), a rusty oil barrel, and trees and bushes in various shades of green and yellow which screen the church walls, the open space/yard also features a boy walking away from the house – but also from the painter and the viewers. His presence further distracts from and decentres the church which, seen from a distance, does not appear much taller than the oil barrel or the boy. The painting can be entered only up to the black wall which surrounds the house’s yard and separates it from the church’s backyard. This low but sturdy black wall has only one tiny opening at the very edge of the painting, and the boy seems to be aiming for it: his trajectory, however, suggests that he is about to exit the frame altogether rather than directing himself (and our gaze) towards the church. In a third related painting, Priory at Gros Islet (1999), a long telegraph pole divides the canvas vertically into two unequal parts: on one side, a tree with bright red flowers completely covers the yellow and red priory behind

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it which is visible only in the background of the first half of the other side. The priory is surrounded by palm trees which are higher than its roof, red flower bushes and a low concrete wall; in the foreground, a lonely passer-by on a grey tarmac road looks at painter and viewers, keeping them away. The second half of the left side is as big as the portion occupied by the priory and opens the view on the scorched hills in the background. Again, nothing suggests that this is a special day. One can sense the subtle imprint of Hopper in these sun-drenched views which bring to the fore an almost spectral village and the ‘solitudes’ of its inhabitants – as was the case for certain passages of Omeros that are in fact set in Gros Islet itself. Walcott’s treatment of St Joseph the Worker and the Priory in his paintings, however, resoundingly chimes with Pissarro’s approach to the churches of Pontoise, a fact that renders more captivating the suggestion that Walcott’s canvases could be seen as the fruit of a ‘collaboration’ by the two artists. Walcott knew that he shared with Pissarro the status of ‘outsider’ in a Catholic country: the veneration of the Virgin Mary was not part of his Methodist upbringing and, even less, as Walcott underlines, of the Sephardic Jew Pissarro (TH130), whose churches, the poem highlights, are bathed in ‘secular sunlight’ (TH46, emphasis mine). Pissarro’s anti-clericalism and anti-Catholicism, in fact, did shape the way in which he treated churches visually in his landscapes. Traditionally, French landscapes almost invariably had a church at their core and ecclesiastic buildings had always played a central role in the iconography of Pontoise, an important provincial French Catholic centre. In a move that art critics have labelled ‘radical’, Pissarro refused to have churches as central motifs but reduced them in size and significance by magnifying the natural element, by relegating them into corners, or by letting their environment partially conceal and overwhelm them.92 Walcott’s simultaneous acceptance and rejection of the church (and the priory) as a central motif on which to anchor his paintings of Gros Islet also reflects his commitment to continue in his effort to locate ‘the light of the world’ not in established sites of worship (or, for that matter, masterpieces of the past or museums93) but in the Caribbean landscape and in the everyday life and reality of local people. In the build-up to the epiphanic moment on a St Lucian beach when he realises that the hound he was desperately looking for was in fact a local starved pup that was ‘[t]here’ all along (TH139), Walcott compares the ‘watery light pearled on the Virgin’s sleeves’ in one of Tiepolo’s paintings for the ceiling of the Scuola dei Carmini in Venice, to a brushstroke of sunlight on the thigh of a mongrel scavenging in St Lucia’s village of Canaries (TH131). As Walcott catches this detail, the dog transfigures into a masterwork which is not the oeuvre of an Old Master but a creation whose coordinates are dictated by local light and reality and which is firmly anchored on Walcott’s mundane immediate surroundings. Therefore, as Walcott puts it in the next chapter of the poem, his Old Masters are, ­ultimately, the sunlight, the pastures and the sea all around him (TH137).

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Gros Islet Church I, Gros Islet Church II and Priory at Gros Islet seem to have been painted at noon (no shadows); they are bathed in blinding tropical light and characterised by a bold, vividly colourful, bright palette whose richness is enhanced by the fact that they are oils on canvas. In the lines opposite Gros Islet Church I, Walcott describes himself assessing the canvases in his studio: he could well be referring to these ones – which, in fact, were painted when he was writing the poem – when he admits that he might have ‘pitched … tints to a rhetorical excess’ in order to ‘touch the sublime, // to heighten the commonplace into the sacredness / of objects made radiant by the slow glaze of time’ (TH98). The use of a ‘heightened’ palette to bring out the radiance of ordinary objects here is conducive to Walcott’s effort to locate ‘the light of the world’ in everyday reality and designify the church as its only repository. The ‘glaze’ which renders objects radiant, however, is not applied onto painted shapes by an artist, as it was the case for those landscapes ‘locked in amber’ that Walcott ultimately rejected in Another Life, but by time and light onto the objects themselves. The commonplace rusty oil barrel in a corner of Gros Islet Church II, for example, has suffered the ravages of time and weather but seems to be endowed with a radiant presence and compelling history: as a matter of fact, like Tiepolo’s dogs, it commands our attention more than the bold, bright red roof of the church. The gouache on paper entitled Domino Players (1999), positioned between Gros Islet Church I and Gros Islet Church II, offers us a secular alternative to a religious ritual, namely a group of men – both players and spectators – intensely focused on a game of dominos. The action is suspended in the crucial and highly dramatic silent instant when one of the players is about to put down (or, probably, slap down) his tile on the table, a move which is customarily followed by an explosion of self-aggrandising comments or loud curses by the players and taunting or encouragement from bystanders. The setting is a bright, colourful room, with windows and doors opened on the world outside; it reminds one of those Dutch paintings (especially Pieter de Hooch’s) where archways, courtyards, passages, recesses, windows and open doors afford alternative vistas and tell parallel stories, and which had also inspired, in different ways, Bearden’s complex rendition of Harlem’s courtyards.94 The subject reminds one of Cézanne’s iconic series of The Card Players (1890–5), where a commonplace game of cards is transformed in a contemplative ritual and the peasants engaged in it assume monumental stature. Walcott’s Domino Players is a gouache, a medium whose matt finish boldens colours, giving extra solidity and gravitas to the figures and, as such, it allows Walcott to pay homage to Cezanne’s shape-based compositions – which he also celebrates in the poem (TH56–7) – whilst anchoring the image firmly to the Caribbean, where dominos is played throughout the region with impassioned fanatism.95 Cézanne’s series, Joachim Pissarro suggests, might have been inspired by Pissarro’s own take on this secular ritual,96 namely a pencil drawing

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entitled Cardplayers in Galipán (1854) that he completed during his trip to Venezuela.97 Pissarro’s Cardplayers in Galipán might have been interesting to Walcott because it captures not only the concentration of the players and the spectators but also their ambience: both Pissarro and Walcott, in fact, provide us with a sense of context for the players; in Pissarro’s case a busy, noisy and smoky venue. Nonetheless, while Pissarro’s image is centripetal – our eyes are focused on the cards at the centre of the table while the bystanders gradually lose definition and dissolve in the hatching – Walcott’s composition is less claustrophobic and more centrifugal and viewers’ active participation in the image (and the construction of their own narrative) is encouraged by the fact that – unlike Cézanne’s series of The Card Players and Pissarro’s Cardplayers in Galipán, where the visible edge of the players’ table distances players from viewers – the table surface draws us into the image, making us feel that we are sitting at the table with the players whose tiles we are also able to glimpse. Walcott here seems to be in conversation with two of Cézanne’s five versions of The Card Players in particular. There is controversy regarding the order in which Cézanne produced his five canvases,98 but the series includes two works where the three card players are accompanied by one or two spectators. In the version at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the figure of a young boy sitting behind the players in the Barnes Foundation canvas is absent, but both paintings include a standing man who quietly observes the players’ every move. Man and boy do not appear in the other three versions – now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and in a private collection – which instead focus uniquely on the players.99 In his gouache, Walcott, faithful to the spirit of Cézanne’s less centralising works (one of which he had certainly seen in New York on different occasions) and of de Hooch’s carefully split scenes (where women often play a crucial role), readily includes female figures ‘peripheral’ to the main action, relativising the main (male) narrative of the game. While three men observe the two domino players, two women outside the room in the left of the painting, and a pair of women framed by two windows at the back, engage in conversation. Importantly, they do not only tell, but are their own separate stories, as Walcott asserts is the case for the attendant Moor in Tiepolo’s Apelles Painting Campaspe. Completed as Walcott was writing the poem, this gouache, that one could describe, paraphrasing Walcott’s comments on Pissarro and Tiepolo’s Hound, as a work ‘about domino players, too, principally about domino players, almost’, is therefore shaped by those decentring strategies at the core of the structure of the poem itself.100 Like Domino Players (1999), Gros Islet Church I (1998), Gros Islet Church II (1999) and Priory at Gros Islet (1999), the oils on canvas Headland in Drought (1997) (Fig. 6.13), Pasture, Dry Season (1998) and Preparing the Net (1999) are concomitant to the time in which Walcott was writing Tiepolo’s Hound. These three oils present us with the harshness and rawness of weather (TH69), like some of the Caribbean works by Homer and

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Hinkson that Walcott was so fond of, and, of course, French landscapes by Pissarro himself. Walcott reminisces about Pissarro’s ones in the pages next to Preparing the Net, where he describes the ‘subtler’ light of France and Pissarro’s Pontoise in October and, on the page that follows this painting, he suggests that, sometimes, Caribbean colours can duplicate the colours of France (TH68–9), an observation he already made in Another Life where the hills of St Lucia are speckled with violet as in a Pissarro landscape (AL74). One could argue, therefore, that the palettes Walcott used for the hills in the background of Preparing the Net, and, above all, in Headland in Drought (1997) and Pasture, Dry Season, seem to have equally ‘seen’ Pissarro’s palette for Summer and Autumn in his Four Seasons cycle (c. 1872). Yet, this seems to be entirely beside the point. First of all, after winning the Nobel Prize in 1990 Walcott moved to Cap Estate, in the north of the island and, in response to the colours of the landscape in that part of St Lucia, Walcott’s palette changed from ‘viridian green, scarlet and cobalt to the ochers, siennas and umbers … the hues of a semidesert, the greens those of spiky agave and heraldic cactus’.101 Most importantly, however, in ‘Isla Incognita’ Walcott specifies that ‘the answer’ to those who consider the absence of the four seasons in the Caribbean as a mark of lack of sophistication ‘is not to boast “We could be as subtle as you”’ but to proclaim instead that ‘the old processes cannot work for us’.102 Headland in Drought and Pasture, Dry Season fully articulate Walcott’s proclamation as they delineate ‘new processes’ of engagement with a landscape different from the one immortalised by Pissarro in canvases where, Walcott wrote, ‘there is no history … only the weather’ and the changing of seasons (TH71). History as the simple recording of human presence, however, is not absent from Pissarro’s Summer and Autumn which, like Spring, are peopled by workers, architecture or agricultural activities. In Winter there are no human figures, and we are confronted by a village covered in snow: the promise of indoor warmth draws us towards the village houses (which imply the presence of men and women) and are rendered accessible, on the left, by a small alleyway. In Spring, Summer and Autumn, Pissarro’s human figures might be tiny in relation to their surroundings but they have definitely left their mark on the cultivated fields in which they feature: we can enter these vast landscapes and join these men and women through the designated paths that guide our gaze towards them. In Walcott’s paintings, instead, human beings are completely absent, and viewers are kept cautiously at a distance. The lack of people, particularly of people at work, rather than suggesting a pre-lapsarian, Edenic and out of history scene where everything is luxe, calme et volupté – incidentally, the titles of the paintings themselves remind us of the challenges of tropical weather – addresses instead the colonial (and neo-colonial) history of the region by inviting viewers to question their right to enter this landscape and claim it.

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Figure 6.12  Gros Islet Church II, 1999, Derek Walcott, oil on canvas, 40.6 × 50.8 cm. Copyright © 2000 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

Figure 6.13  Headland in Drought, 1997, Derek Walcott, oil on canvas, 60.9 × c. 76 cm. Copyright © 2000 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

Painting (and) the Caribbean    331

In Headland in Drought, in fact, even if there are no imponent foreground forms, we are prevented from accessing the headland by a low but steep cliff, a choppy sea and spiky agave plants which bar the way. We are allowed to contemplate the view but, in the absence of a detectable path, we are precluded from penetrating it, let alone commandeering it. Tellingly, Walcott always refused to build a fence around his property, disinclined to fulfil the ‘role’ of someone who ‘defined territory’ because ‘so much of that action is a part of the Caribbean’s history’.103 In ‘Isla Incognita’, in fact, he argues that to ‘rediscover’ a landscape which was previously appropriated, violated and misrepresented, one has to do away with old processes shaped by egotistical arrogations, the ‘impatience, vast, cynical [of] the explorer, his every step a noun, a town’, and the mapping and cataloguing urge of those who inappropriately superimpose on new realities their knowledge of what they previously mapped and catalogued.104 One should adopt instead ‘the opposite method to the explorer’s’ and proceed carefully, sensitively, ‘by hints. Contradictions. Terrors’ and by ‘a great deal of principled doubt’ or, even by ‘not mov[ing] at all’ – or at least not until one has carefully assessed and reassessed one’s position, attitude, motivations and expectations.105 Headland in Drought, therefore, shows us, both epistemologically and ethically, how we should attend to the reality the painting represents. Arguably, the same cautionary advice is implicit in Pasture, Dry Season, where the reduction in size further distances viewers from the landscape and facilitates the thoughtful pause we should give ourselves before proceeding any further. The foreground is devoid of powerful forms posing physical barriers, but a darker horizontal line, covering the full width of the painting to mark an area where soil is no longer covered by dry grass, interrupts pictorial penetration and further separates us from the cows on the pasture. Entirely comfortable in their own environment, the cows completely ignore us and seem to suggest that, if this landscape belongs to anyone, right now, it belongs to them: it might be possible to be admitted by committing to move unobtrusively, and by scrupulously advancing by adhering to the landscape’s (not our) terms, but just taking an extra step to stamp on it would be an unwelcome, violent intrusion. Preparing the Net (1999) features instead a small fishing boat parked in a beach corner, a frequent motif in Walcott’s paintings – but also, unsurprisingly, in Hinkson’s and Simmons’s works.106 A group of ‘West Indian Boats’ on a beach also illustrates the title page of the article ‘Native Women’ (NW114), and boats and canoes brought ashore appear in the poetic ‘list’ that the poet compiles in his self-exhortation to select and repeat ordinary themes and motifs à la Pissarro (TH156). One of these canoes constitutes the core of Walcott’s watercolour Canoe Under Trees (1998), completed a year before Preparing the Net, an image which has no horizon, no human figures, just trees and a boat. It was perhaps selected by Walcott to convey the sense of emptiness, imprisonment and isolation which, in the opposite page of the

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poem, are attributed to a young Pissarro wishing to be in Paris whilst still in St Thomas (TH24). At the same time, Canoe Under Trees and Preparing the Net display the Caribbean reality, light and colours that Pissarro might have missed once in France, as the poem implies in the pages juxtaposed to the latter oil on canvas. In Preparing the Net, a solitary fisherman, slightly decentred – as he is in the title that focuses on his actions rather than on him – is quietly tending his net on a beach in full tropical sunlight. Walcott invites viewers to appreciate how fishing (culture) can become part of the natural environment. There is a sense of harmony between the figure and the landscape which dominates the picture without overwhelming the fisherman surrounded by trees and seaweed, nets and seines, sail boats and fishing boats, and various buildings of different sizes; behind him, on the other side of the bay, separated by a stretch of sea, is a view of hills and, in the distance, one may discern one of St Lucia’s Pitons, a landmark of the island. The fact that Preparing the Net is also the painting Walcott chose as a cover for Tiepolo’s Hound underlines his ongoing commitment to foreground and celebrate the hard work and daily activities of ordinary St Lucians, and their close relationship to the environment in which they are fully immersed. Caribbean fishermen, in fact, are important representatives of that ‘new people’ living in a different landscape (TH70) that Walcott regretted Pissarro did not have a chance to focus on in his work, and Homer was so attracted to. As we have seen, fishermen are also featured on the cover of Omeros in a watercolour which was perhaps an indirect nod and homage to the North American painter while, in Tiepolo’s Hound, fishing activities are represented in a very delicate watercolour entitled St Lucian Fishermen (1991), which also resonates with Homer’s works. Walcott’s painting is situated in a chapter which describes Turner’s depiction of the warship Temeraire’s last journey, the devastation brought to France by the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, and the artist’s desperate search for peace (TH75). Walcott’s fishermen bringing to the shore their daily catch for subsistence creates a striking contrast with the senseless butchery of war107 as they work in accord with one another, as it is often the case in Homer’s and Simmons’s Caribbean and Pissarro’s Caribbean and French works.108 In Book One, the fishermen of St Thomas remonstrate directly to the young Pissarro when they address him with these lines: ‘We know you going. / We is your roots. Without us you weak’ (TH25). The poem, then, makes their words resonate in Pissarro’s canvases which are painted ‘in dialect’; later, the importance of these local sounds is reinforced when we are told that Pissarro used to hear the ‘voices’ of the ‘slaves’ of St Thomas when in France (TH53, 80). Next to the lines in which the slaves’ voices are evoked, is Walcott’s watercolour Musicians (1992), where the players of a St Lucian chak-chak band perform with their violin, guitar, banjo, local drums and the rattling chak-chak. The music played by these bands contains both African and European elements, and the sepia palette used by Walcott reminds one of old photographs, further stressing the notion

Painting (and) the Caribbean    333

that the fishermen’s voices scolding Pissarro, reverberating in his works and ‘visually’ embodied in the St Lucian musicians, have their roots in the past. The connection between fishermen, enslaved subjects and musicians created by this narrative is strengthened by the fact that the watercolour preceding Musicians is in fact St Lucian Fishermen. Walcott was also interested in other figures in the Caribbean landscape. With Baiting the Hook (c. 1984) and The Swimmer (1985) we are offered the opportunity to focus on people enjoying local beaches: in the first painting, an oil which transfers Cézanne’s geometric brutality and ‘visible syntax’ (TH57) onto the Caribbean landscape, the two Black people getting ready to fish (presumably locals) are situated at the centre of the image and colourkeyed to the rocks on the beach, their solid presence underlining a firm rootedness in their surroundings that is enhanced, in the context of Tiepolo’s Hound, by the fact that next to them we can also glimpse the spectral silhouette of a mongrel. If the Black people in Baiting the Hook are at ease in, and seem to belong to and ‘own’, their place, and to be in harmony with it, the white figure in The Swimmer is less sure-footed. The titular figure tentatively entering the waters only appears at the edge of the painting: he could be easily missed, at first glance, if the title (The Swimmer) did not instruct us to look for it. On the opposite side of the swimmer, who could be a white local (the pages juxtaposed to the painting are focused on the young Pissarro), or a tourist, is the wreckage of what appears to have been a fence with its vertical and horizontal poles covered in metal wires. The fence signposts that control over the territory that was and still is a troubling part of Caribbean’s history and reality, from colonialism to the relentless attack of a tourist industry that appropriates land and beaches. In Walcott’s watercolour, however, the fence is reduced to a skeleton of four slim planks and poles totally ineffective in terms of cordoning off that part of rocky beach, while the white figure is marginalised, his presence rendered more evanescent by the medium in which it is painted. What is at the centre of the image, instead, is the sea, whose power has conquered the fence and whose beauty ultimately ‘dissolves’ ‘the sigh of History’ (A68). Beach at Vieux Fort (1994) presents us with a group of people enjoying a day out on the beach.109 It provides a Caribbean visual counterpart to Seurat’s famous pointilliste painting A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte (1884), evoked in lines which immediately precede the image, where the poet also refers to the festive gathering of Veronese’s The Feast of Levi (TH44–5). However, while in The Feast of Levi a few turbaned figures110 are relegated to the margins of the feast – some can be seen even hanging from the ceiling – in Walcott’s watercolour, white and Black people – some might be locals and some might be tourists – seem to share a public beach in the south of St Lucia without restrictions and with no visible tension, albeit with no interaction, something that is still true in those public beaches of the island that have not yet been reserved and closed off by the quickly multiplying all-inclusives.

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The encroachment of tourism and the battle over who ‘owns’ the Caribbean is evident also in Doctrine (1991), which depicts an interaction between local men and what seems to be a group of female tourists sitting on their loungers. Human figures here dominate the summarily rendered landscape as the two men, looking like Rastafarians, are entreating and trying to argue with two white women who, however, seem to be doing their best to ignore them. Another white woman/tourist is sitting on a lounger close to them but not directly involved in the exchange, another lies in the foreground, seemingly asleep on her beach towel, and another is standing on the shore alone, far from the group and in the background. The fact that there seem to be more tourists than locals in this watercolour, and the fact that one has the distinct impression that, unlike the tourists, the men are just passing through rather than being able to ‘settle’ on the beach, provides a scathing commentary on the way in which locals are turned into ‘trespassers’ by the segregationist policy of all-inclusives. We arrive at this image after a series of references to ‘the empire of naming’ which also condemn the fact that Afro-Caribbean people, whose hearts were torn apart ‘by baptism’, were reduced to be ‘the same, yet not the same’ (TH92–3). Placed here, therefore, Walcott’s watercolour invites us to ponder the colonial legacy of tourism and the role played by the missionaries who imposed their own system of belief on the enslaved Africans. The title of the watercolour, Doctrine, suggests some form of evangelisation in reverse. There is a zealous urgency in the way in which Walcott’s dreadlocked locals try to interact with the tourists and, towering over them, endeavour to win them over: they are gesticulating eagerly and one is almost charging headlong at them. It is up to the viewers to decide if the men are remonstrating against the increasing privatisation of beaches, attempting to share their Rastafarian beliefs, enticing the tourists into a different lifestyle, trying to sell them something, harassing them, or offering their services for free or for a fee. The theatricality of this encounter where two different worldviews, predicaments and realities are coming to a head reminds one of those staged battles Walcott used to love as a young apprentice painter. The woman asleep on her towel in the foreground, in fact, looks like an ironic counterpart of the dead soldier lying on the battlefield of the first panel of Paolo Uccello’s The Rout at San Romano – Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano (c.  1438–40) which, in Another Life, precipitated the young poet/ painter’s ‘conversion’ to art (AL44). The angles of the backs of the loungers replicate those of the lances in the Italian painting, the triangular shape formed by the angled joints of the white horse rearing in the right of Uccello’s panel returns in the bent knees of the white woman on the lounger on the right of Walcott’s watercolour, and the diagonal line of the arm and sword of Niccolò da Tolentino leading the charge at the centre of Uccello’s image is adopted by Walcott to depict the arm of the gesticulating and more forthright Rastafarian. The shape of the turban on Niccolò da Tolentino’s head

Painting (and) the Caribbean    335

is inverted in the white female’s dress in the background which is as distinctively patterned and just as eye-catching. Positioned in the left of the watercolour where there are no other figures, it is so prominent that it imparts dynamism to this otherwise rather empty part of the image and creates a balance, single-handedly, with the overcrowded right-hand side. As was the case for Uccello’s first panel of the triptych,111 we are suspended at a moment where the outcome of the ‘battle’ is not decided yet, but Walcott here seems more keen to ‘trace / the sociological contours’ (AL6) of what appear to be rather commonplace exchanges, and to highlight what actually lurks behind and is at stake in them, rather than provide a commentary on the efficacy or validity of the counter-offensive that the men might be mounting against a power structure which has penalised, and is still penalising, them, their people and their region. A chance to consider more closely the relation between locals, landscape and landscaping is offered in Boy on a Wall, Rat Island (1989) (Fig. 6.14). This is a seascape featuring a small uninhabited island visible from the northern coast of St Lucia and a boy looking at it as if it were a painting whilst sitting on a white/light grey wall which reminds one of a white canvas and of the act of painting itself. Three lush palm trees – the same palm trees Melbye insisted Pissarro should learn how to render properly, and Gauguin, Laval and Homer repeatedly painted during their trips to the region112 – divide the canvas vertically, two at the sides and one in the middle; they are brought into bold relief, together with the islet and the human figure, because of the white/ light grey sea, sky and wall next to which they appear. Homer too experiments with, and capitalises upon, the contrast provided by a (prevalently) white/light grey wall and the colourful landscape and vegetation surrounding it in A Wall, Nassau (1898) where he demonstrates and draws attention to his command of watercolour painting. Walcott is likely to have looked at Homer’s walls for inspiration, since the boy’s white shirt is colour-keyed to the wall on which he is sitting, to the sea and the sky around him in the same way in which, in Homer’s On the Way to the Market, Bahamas (1885) and Rest (1885), the walls that take up a substantial portion of the paintings (one light beige and white, the other light grey, white and light blue) are colour-keyed to the sky, skirt and dress of the two local women that are juxtaposed to them. One could argue that Homer’s colour-keying reduces these women to props merely conducive to his exploration of tropical colour and light.113 Walcott would not have fully agreed with this reading but, in any case, his substitution of market women – iconic figures with their complex history of appropriation and resistance114 – with an entirely ordinary boy colour-keyed to the wall and landscape (one of his legs follows the bending of the central palm tree trunk and chimes with its colour) contributes to re-signify palms and sea(scape) as emblems of Caribbean commonplaceness rather than of tropicalisation, perhaps in a nod to Warwick’s The Coconut Walk (Fig. 1.5) and Riders of the Storm.

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Aptly, given its painterly nature, Boy on a Wall, Rat Island, as pointed out in Chapter 1, might have been a homage to a sketch by Warwick focused on the same islet and a way for Walcott to express his longing for the artist father he never knew. In Tiepolo’s Hound, however, this solitary St Lucian boy who, having reached the edge of his island, is staring melancholically at the islet of the title, must have appealed to Walcott, in retrospect, as a fitting emblem for a young person considering all his options as the word ‘Abroad’ resonates in Pissarro’s head (TH30). It is in fact a very good visual counterpart to lines describing Pissarro’s search for new opportunities and new horizons in the pages following the painting (TH29, 30). At the same time, however, the painting and its title force us to acknowledge the fact that the boy’s focus on Rat Island centres him, his desire and his claim, on the (ordinary) Caribbean: words and image therefore concur to further illuminate the inner conflict and turmoil of Walcott’s young Pissarro.115 The reproduction following Boy on a Wall, Rat Island is English Garden, Stratford on Avon (1991). Here the English garden, the global fame of Shakespeare’s birthplace (in striking opposition to the anonymity of Rat Island), and the marble statue at the centre of the garden are put in dialogue with lines that describe Pissarro’s arrival in France and his visit to Versailles, where he feels as alienated and overwhelmed as in the Louvre. The image, however, offers a considerably downsized – almost parodic – version of Versailles seemingly inviting us to reassess the importance of metropolitan centres.116 English Garden, Stratford on Avon, and the watercolour which immediately follows, St Malo (1993), are also the only two representations of non-Caribbean places in Tiepolo’s Hound. St Malo is a view of the French port on a cloudy day with passers-by and the fortuitous presence – it was painted in 1993, seven years before the publication of the poem – of a small black dog on a leash. Arguably, this reproduction offers a subtle visual allusion to the moment, described only a page before readers encounter St Malo, at which a black mongrel in Paris made Pissarro feel at home in France. Concomitantly, as the text describes Paris in autumn and ends with Pissarro walking through the ‘miracle’ of snow (TH40), we are treated to an image where the colour white is predominant: St Malo in fact is particularly distinctive in terms of palette – unsurprisingly it recalls the one used by Pissarro in Winter – since it completely lacks the vivid Caribbean colours that characterise works like Gros Islet Church I and II (Figs 6.11 and 6.12), Preparing the Net or Beach at Vieux Fort. Gauguin’s Studio and Gauguin in Martinique (Figs. 6.2 and 6.3) the second and third paintings in the volume, are positioned, as anticipated, next to lines in which Walcott remembers his apprenticeship years in St Lucia and praises Gauguin for his commitment to the Tropics. Nonetheless, the French word savannes, used when the poem calls Gauguin a ‘creole’ painter of Caribbean landscapes (TH16), also looks forward to the ‘unpainted’ savannahs of St Thomas (TH143) whilst creating a continuity with Walcott’s

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first painting, Savannah, Early Morning (Fig. 6.10), and the description of Port of Spain which accompanies it in the text. The horse and trainers117 of Savannah, Early Morning also appear in another watercolour inserted between the end of chapter XX and the beginning of chapter XXI in Book Four of Tiepolo’s Hound, where Walcott laments that his search for the elusive hound led him straight to the ‘Minotaur’ of History and concludes that it is futile to look for satisfactory representations of Black people in the paintings he is studying (TH127). If he was misguided enough to believe that external recognition was what he needed to dignify and ‘ennoble’ his race, Walcott adds, then he was both ‘slain and slayer’ (TH128) or, in other words, an accomplice and a victim of the discriminatory and racist discourses that underpin these representations. The inclusion of Walcott’s Savannah Gallop: Port of Spain (1985) at this specific point seems to undergird Walcott’s need to (re)centre himself in his every-day Caribbean and his insistence on the importance of Caribbean individual and collective self-recognition, evident in his creative reading of Tiepolo’s Moor as a figure intent on absorbing useful and transferrable skills that follows this painting. Walcott’s re-centring here relies on an image that visually resonates with the opening of the poem focused on Port of Spain, a city Walcott considered ‘a writer’s heaven’, ‘mongrelized’, polyglot and ‘satisfied with its own scale’, regardless of external validation (A71, 67, 76). In contrast with Veronese’s and Tiepolo’s paradisi, complete with saffron skies, putti and other figures pirouetting in the sky (TH126), Port of Spain is a ‘heaven’ of down-to-earth horses and horse-riders who go about their business on an ordinary day. In Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott’s re-centring on his own island, a move predicted in ‘Native Women’, entails a return to ‘sacred villages’ (TH161), the very same ones Simmons had urged him to visit, know and paint, and those which often feature in his verbal and visual works. As we have seen, he listed some of them (‘Laborie, Choiseul, Vieuxfort, Dennery’), almost as a prayer, at the very beginning of ‘The Villages’, the section which opens the long poem ‘Sainte Lucie’, where he sings the praises of St. Omer’s altarpiece for the Roseau Valley Church (SG43). Aged sixty-nine, Walcott sets out to revisit them in those lines of Tiepolo’s Hound where he also celebrates Gauguin (TH161). In the pages which separate Gauguin’s Studio from Gauguin in Martinique, in fact, Walcott undertakes a ‘reconnaissance’ of St Lucia from the windward coast of St Lucia (Micoud, Dennery) to the leeward villages of Anse La Raye, Canaries and Soufrière and, more to the south, to Choiseul and Vieux Fort. If paintings like Gros Islet Church I, Gros Islet Church II, Priory at Gros Islet or, to a certain extent, Preparing the Net, Beach at Vieux Fort, Musicians, St Lucian Fishermen or Domino Players give us a snapshot of these villages and of village life, St Lucia is also represented by Walcott in non-humanised landscapes like Pasture, Dry Season or Headland in Drought, which, like Horses by the Sea (1994), focus on the flora, fauna and

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Figure 6.14  Boy on a Wall, Rat Island, 1989, Derek Walcott, watercolour on paper, 19 × 25.4 cm. Mrs Judy Chastanet. Copyright © 2000 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. all rights reserved.

Figure 6.15  Breakers, Becune Point, 1995, Derek Walcott, oil on canvas board, 35.5 × 45.7 cm. Copyright © 2000 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

Painting (and) the Caribbean    339

natural elements of the island. Most poignantly, the last painting included in the poem, Breakers, Becune Point (1995) (Fig. 6.15), features, as a focal point, an ordinary and anonymous rock emerging from the waves in front of Walcott’s own garden. At the beginning of Tiepolo’s Hound, as anticipated in Chapter 1, Walcott recalls his admiration for Henry Moore’s A Silvery Day, West of The Needles, Isle of Wight and remembers how he was inspired to copy or produce something similar to its dramatic and dazzling ensemble of wind, clouds, waves and spiky rocks (TH13). In this respect, Breakers, Becune Point, coming as it does at the end of the volume, seems also to bring full circle Walcott’s trajectory as a marine painter. The choice of concluding Tiepolo’s Hound with a painting deprived of human figures is better understood if we consider that Breakers, Becune Point is immediately preceded by Walcott’s own self-portrait. In Walcott’s Self-Portrait (1998), produced while Walcott was writing Tiepolo’s Hound, the poet paints himself wearing a baseball cap and painting in front of a mirror, as Pissarro had done in Self Portrait (c. 1898), when he had a chronic eye infection and was recovering from the death of one of his sons. In the pages which follow, Walcott accurately imagines an old Pissarro afflicted by an eye condition, painting his own portrait indoors, and wearing a beret as he did in the 1898 portrait (TH155).118 Once again, the two artists are mutually involved in the creation of Pissarro’s self-portrait and, by extension, of Walcott’s own, and of the poem itself. As the French master paints, Walcott addresses himself and reveals that Pissarro’s gaze is also his own (TH159). After describing Pissarro’s death in 1903, Walcott predicts that the end of his own life will occur in an ordinary and anonymous Caribbean place, ‘whose only power / is the exploding spray along its coast’ (TH161–2): these lines are on the page opposite Breakers, Becune Point, and image and words provide the perfect counterpart for each other. The order in which we encounter Self-Portrait and Breakers, Becune Point is crucial because, while writing Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott became increasingly impressed by the modesty and humility with which Pissarro painted the ordinary and approached the landscape without trying to turn it into something different to satisfy an ‘egotistical’ nature: ‘the category you would have to put him’, Walcott explains, ‘is a search not for the true thing or for an expression of identity, but … an absolute search for anonymity … the annihilation of the “I” that is there in the presence of nature’.119 Visually, Walcott’s elation, his awe of the ordinary, his desire to arrive at a profound articulation of anonymity, and his final surrender of the ‘I’ in the presence of Caribbean nature are perfectly encapsulated in Breakers, Becune Point (1995) and in the lines where he envisages his own death precisely as an embrace of the ordinary and anonymity that he so admired in Pissarro’s work. Walcott’s description of Tiepolo’s Hound as a poem ‘about Pissarro, too, principally about Pissarro, almost’120 is ultimately a celebration of the artist’s ability to relinquish egotism – a feature Walcott had also valued in his father’s choice

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of the watercolour technique – and his surrender of the ‘I’ in humility and modesty in front of the natural landscape. In the poem, Pissarro’s search for anonymity resonates with Walcott’s foregrounding of (anonymous, ordinary) mongrels and with the fact that, ultimately, one could argue that the entire poem seems to adopt their perspective. In the opening lines, in fact, Walcottthe-poet-and-(auto)biographer conflates himself with a mongrel following the shadow of Pissarro in Charlotte Amalie (TH4). After Walcott’s (auto) biography culminates with the renewal of his commitment to his St Lucian landscape, his acceptance of old age and mortality, and his own surrender of the ‘I’, the closing sections of the poem are introduced by a woofing local dog, as anonymous as its nineteenth-century counterpart and the other mongrels that, in Tiepolo’s Hound, have followed poet and painter in various places and times, perhaps to signpost to both his unaltered community and the readers that his job as (auto)biographer is coming to an end (TH162).

Audubon: Another Vision Mongrels are not the only animals which are given prominence in Tiepolo’s Hound: the multiple narratives and paintings in the volume also single out horses, cows and different kinds of birds, from Parisian swallows to the storks in Alcalà, from the seagulls of St Lucia to Venetian pigeons (TH51, 148, 12, 116). In chapter XIV, when Walcott decides to counteract the insulting presence of ‘History’ embodied by the wreck of a rusty cargo ship in the lagoon of Roseau in St Lucia, he chooses an egret to represent the ‘energy’ and ‘intellect’ necessary to rise above pain and anger and arrive at ‘grace’ (TH90–1). Egrets return to play a central role in Walcott’s poem ‘White Egrets’ which gives the title to his 2010 collection and where Walcott opens a conversation with another Caribbean-born artist, John James Audubon, North America’s iconic naturalist and ornithologist: it is ‘for Audubon’, in fact, that the titular egrets in front of Walcott ‘keep modelling’ (WE8). Audubon’s work is the fruit of complex negotiations between life and death, destruction and creation, brutality and beauty, humans and the animal world, the outdoors experience of the wilderness and the indoors reality of the studio, real presences and emblems. Walcott’s close examination of the nature of these negotiations provides him with an opportunity not only to reconsider Audubon’s politics and poetics of representation but also to rearticulate his own, and, reappraising the ramifications of Pissarro’s search for anonymity, further finessing his (re)casting of the creative process as interaction rather than subjugation. The previous chapters show how the roots of this particular ‘way of seeing’ are to be found in Walcott’s formative years in St Lucia, and demonstrate that his engagements with local, European, American (in the hemispheric sense) and African American artists constitute a series of stepping stones in Walcott’s journey to arrive at what

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Simmons had called a ‘perfection to West Indian things’, or the fulfilment of what, at the end of Another Life, the poet calls ‘Adam’s task of giving things their names’. The visual and the verbal are strictly intertwined in this quest: Simmons’s formulation is to be found at the end of his review of the 1950 art exhibition of St. Omer’s and Walcott’s paintings in St Lucia while, in Another Life, Walcott is addressing the painter St. Omer when he compares himself and his friend’s task to Adam’s. It is not surprising, therefore, that, in ‘White Egrets’, where Walcott explores closely the very nature of the ‘things’ he is supposed to name, he also returns to investigate carefully the kind of relationship that a painter or a poet – particularly a Caribbean artist responding to his own human and natural environment – should establish with them. Walcott’s statement about the ‘naming’ prerogative of artists might be taken to suggest a domineering and exploitative perspective and/or an anthropocentric approach which disregards the need to treat ethically artistic subjects as well as non-humans. Arguably, the opposite is true in Walcott’s poetics, or in what George Handley, using the lowercase purposefully, has called Walcott’s ‘adamic imagination’ which, as Handley has compellingly argued, is neither a neo-colonial claim for possession of the land nor, by extension, an artist’s claim for possession of his subjects.121 Walcott had learnt very early in his career (Simmons had been instrumental to this) that in order to paint his reality he had to learn to ‘see’, understand and tune in with landscape, weather and people. In ‘The Light of the World’, as I have highlighted, the woman at the core of Walcott’s verbal portrait – which, in its turn, is in dialogue with a number of portraits/paintings from St Lucian and European artists in a compelling ‘rethinking’ of the tradition of portraiture – resists Walcott’s initial urge to alter or make use of her as he pleases. In so doing, she plays a central role in shaping the poem he writes, ‘names’ (‘this thing I have called the ‘Light of the World’’), and finally offers to her and his people (AT51). Similarly, in ‘White Egrets’, rather than presenting the titular birds as inert, dispensable and, ultimately, at the disposal of his artistic vision, Walcott restates his commitment to a poetry, poetics and aesthetics which reflect, respect and enter into an interactive dialogue with his locality, and not only with the human but also with the non-human world. Naming and renaming the world, Walcott reminds us, can only be a truly significant and regenerative activity if the subjects or ‘things’ to be ‘named’, rather than being tamed, reified, silenced, exploited, mastered and, ultimately, forced to lose their own ‘nature’, are instead allowed to play their own part in the creative process. Walcott’s engagement with Audubon’s drawings calls into question what shaped Audubon’s artistic endeavour both in terms of methodology and experience, and entails a reassessment of the ethics which underpins all forms of representation. Anthropocentrism and speciesism are unsurprisingly central to Audubon’s vision and they can also be seen as different manifestations of the discourses which, in Walcott’s Caribbean, sustained colonialism

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and the practice of slavery, and sustain the destruction of the environment and, more broadly, as Val Plumwood insists, the obliteration or occlusion of alternative modes of understanding the interplay between humans and non-humans.122 Elaine Savory brilliantly investigates the role played by flora in Walcott’s environmental consciousness and aesthetic decisions123 but here Walcott also challenges the ‘natural’ prioritisation of human interests and attempts to readdress this power imbalance by acknowledging the ability of the animal world to contribute to the shaping of human-animal interactions and to affect and mould aesthetic choices. In the opening poem of the ‘White Egrets’ sequence, the egrets ‘wriggle their beaks and swallow’ while the poet contemplates a future when ‘the morning shadows [will] lengthen across the lawn’ and when ‘you, not they, or you and they, are gone’ (WE6). The pronoun ‘you’ refers to the poet who is addressing himself (‘the quiet ravages of diabetes’ the ‘you’ suffers from troubled Walcott for years) but, implicitly, it also forces readers to share, at least momentarily, the poet’s own sense of impermanence and precariousness. The word ‘gone’, in fact, can be interpreted in different ways: first of all, the poem explains that the lawn in question is in the Santa Cruz Valley in Trinidad. However, the reference to a time when his ‘shadow passes with all its sins / into a green thicket of oblivion’ (WE7) suggests that Walcott might also have been thinking of a form of absence which had more to do with his own demise than with the fact that he used to visit Trinidad regularly but did not live there anymore. As for the egrets, we are told that they tend to appear on the lawn intermittently: ‘I hadn’t seen them for half of the Christmas week, / … but they are back’ (WE9). When the poem predicts a time when the egrets might be ‘gone’, therefore, it might be alluding to their migratory pattern, to the natural death of the specific flock Walcott is observing or, since the poet was alert to the degradation of Caribbean biodiversity, even to the possible disappearance of that particular species. According to Caribbean Birding Trail, there are currently seventeen critically endangered or endangered bird species in the area.124 Egrets are not currently listed amongst these disappearing birds – in White Egrets we are told that they ‘speckle [all] the islands’ (WE8) – but in the late nineteenth century they were on the verge of extinction in the United States because the plumes of some subspecies like the Snowy Egret or the Great Egret were in great demand for decorative purposes.125 The National Associations of Audubon Societies – founded in 1905 to safeguard North American birds – played a crucial role at the time in the protection of egrets and other birds from plume hunting and other forms of threat. The nineteenth-century onslaught of egrets and herons is not directly discussed in ‘White Egrets’ but, as we have seen, the birds in front of Walcott ‘keep modelling for Audubon’ (WE8), namesake of the Audubon societies: his 1821 and 1832 drawings of egrets, ‘the most delicate and ethereal of American herons’, were considered particularly poignant in the late nineteenth

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and early twentieth century precisely because the species was on the verge of extinction.126 Audubon’s drawings appear in The Birds of America, described at the time as ‘the most magnificent monument … yet … raised to ornithology’127 and which consists of a collection of 435 images engraved, between 1827 and 1838, in aquatint on huge sheets of paper measuring 75 × 77.5 cm called double elephant folio sheets. The plates of The Birds of America are complemented by Ornithological Biography, a five-volume series of essays published between 1831 and 1839 and considered by some to be ‘the single most influential work of natural history and art in the nineteenth century’.128 Walcott was familiar with Audubon’s work since he was a teenager: Craven’s A Treasury, in fact, does contain a reproduction of Audubon’s work, namely the Snowy Heron or White Egret (Fig. 6.16a).129 Baugh and Nepaulsingh observed that this particular colour plate from Craven’s book might have inspired some of the lines of the long autobiographical poem Another Life even though Audubon is not directly mentioned in it; they also pointed out that the young Walcott might have been struck by Craven’s evaluation of Audubon as someone who ‘brought to his birds the imagination of a poet and the hand of an artist’.130 This interplay of visual and verbal probably intrigued Walcott, but I will argue that this nineteenth-century artist came to represent to him more than just a felicitous fusion of poetry and painting. Many features of Audubon’s drawings are naturally appealing to Walcottthe-poet but also to Walcott-the-painter and Walcott-the-man-of-theatre: for instance, they are impressively dynamic and deeply dramatic in essence, movement is always perfectly balanced, space composition is carefully calibrated and both group arrangements and representations of a single specimen are skillfully staged.131 Audubon’s drawings are also characterised by a very distinctive rendition of light: he believed that his representation of birds ‘ought to be entirely devoid of shades in all their parts’132 and it has been noted that his egrets in particular appear as if immersed in a tropical light at noontime where the intense brightness illuminates each detail equally.133 In his Introductory Address for his Ornithological Biography, Audubon declares: ‘I received light and life in the New World’ (emphasis mine134), and in his writing he repeatedly refers to the United States as his ‘native land’ (for example, OBv2, 1; v4, 8, 37; v5, 11). Audubon, however, had been exposed to the distinctive light of the tropics in the first six years of his life when he lived in the French colony of Saint Domingue where he was born as Jean Rabin in 1785, the illegitimate son of Jean Audubon, a French plantation owner, and Jeanne Rabin, a Creole woman who died shortly after his birth. As a little boy Jean Rabin moved to France after the first stirring of the slave rebellion of 1791 to join his father who had left the colony four years earlier. His father’s French wife promptly adopted him and he was rechristened Jean Jacques or Fougère Audubon. In 1803, Jean Jacques Anglicised his name to John James to avoid being drafted into Napoleon’s army and relocated to the United States to look after his father’s property in Mill Grove, near Philadelphia.135

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The reference to Audubon in ‘White Egrets’, therefore, also allowed Walcott to continue his engagement with artists whose Caribbean origins tend to be forgotten as it was the case for the St Thomas-born Pissarro. Audubon’s immensely ambitious task of illustrating all the birds of North America was carried out with remarkable stubbornness. His project, unprecedented both in scope and detail, remains unique to this day and both his unflinching commitment and his remarkable achievement resonate with Walcott’s urge to record every minute detail of his native island, a decision that, as we have seen, he took very early in his life with St. Omer, under the guidance of Simmons and inspired by his father’s example. Mostly, St Lucia’s geographical sites, its flora, its fauna and its people are not systematically catalogued in Walcott’s writing or paintings as mere illustrative entries but represented in accordance with, and as a result of, his personal engagement with each particular place, group or individual at specific moments of his life. A similar autobiographical impulse also governs Audubon’s The Birds of America: it is worth noting, in fact, that his birds are not listed according to any particular order or status but in relation to Audubon’s own fieldwork journeys. The Ornithological Biography, the textual counterpart of what is represented in the drawings of The Birds of America and which has been described as Audubon’s own diary or as ‘a kind of autobiography written in birds’136 also follows Audubon’s own movements and is interspersed with references to his travels and peculiar experiences (‘The Ohio’, ‘The Prairie’, ‘Improvement in the Navigation of the Mississippi’, ‘Kentucky Sports’, ‘A Flood’, ‘The Earthquake’, ‘The Hurricane’). If Audubon’s ambitions do chime with those of the young Walcott, however, the immediate contexts in which Audubon and Walcott operate are dramatically dissimilar. Audubon’s nineteenth-century North America, which was mythologising ‘the wilderness’ whilst also affirming its triumph over nature, differs in important ways from a contemporary Caribbean increasingly vociferous about the many threats posed to its environment. In ‘White Egrets’ Walcott remembers seeing Audubon’s egret ‘in a book / that, in [his] youth, would open like a lawn’ (WE8). The analogy between ‘book’ and ‘lawn’ can be explained if one considers the size of Craven’s 1939 edition of A Treasury which, as Walcott points out in Another Life, was a ‘large black book’ (approximately 33 × 25 × 5 cm). However, it is possible, indeed likely, that Walcott’s memories of Craven’s book might have blended with those of the images contained in the even more oversized The Birds of America. In ‘White Egrets’, in fact, Walcott, mentions directly only Audubon’s ‘Snowy Egret or White Heron’ (WE8) but he swaps Audubon’s (and Craven’s) nomenclature: in The Birds of America, in fact, the bird was catalogued as Snowy Heron or White Egret (plate 242137) (Fig. 6.16a). This (conscious or unconscious) chiasmus seems to suggest that Walcott’s visual referents were in fact all the three plates of white egrets/herons included in The Birds of America, namely, plate 242 Snowy Heron or White Egret, plate 386

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Figure 6.16  Snowy Heron or White Egret, 1835 (a, left); White Heron, 1837 (b, top right); Great White Heron, 1835 (c, bottom right), Robert Havell after John James Audubon, The Birds of America: plate CCXLII, hand-coloured engraving and aquatint on Whatman wove paper, 100 × 68 cm (sheet); plate CCCLXXXVI, hand-coloured engraving and ­aquatint on Whatman wove paper; plate CCLXXXI, hand-coloured engraving and aquatint on Whatman wove paper (sheet) 67.4 × 101 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mrs Walter B. James. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, licensed under CC0.

White Heron, plate 281 Great White Heron (Figs 6.16a, 6.16b and 6.16c). Notably, in the title of the poem and the collection Walcott follows the nineteenth-century ornithologist’s nomenclature: Snowy Heron or White Egret. We know that Audubon found egrets a very challenging subject to ‘imitate’ and that he produced three different drawings for the White Heron (Fig. 6.16b): in the one which was finally engraved as plate 386, he worked very hard to render in great detail the bird’s breeding plumage which, at the time, was becoming increasingly sought after for ornamental purposes.138 In both Audubon’s Snowy Heron or White Egret and White Heron some of these feathers are shown in all their beauty and have an almost threedimensional quality because of the white heavy impasto which was applied in narrow and dense lines to reproduce them.139 The bird’s tail in White Heron, for example, as Audubon himself observed, looks like a ‘cascade of plumes … sufficiently translucent to reveal the dark marsh grasses behind them’,140 a depiction that Walcott might have been familiar with and which,

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together with the astounding image it refers to, might have triggered the line, in Walcott’s poem, ‘the egrets are the colour of waterfalls’ (WE9). Audubon was largely self-taught as a painter – in Ornithological Biography he refers to Jacques-Louis David as his master (OBv1, viii), but this connection has been repeatedly disputed.141 He began his career by drawing birds motionless and in profile following the conventions of natural history illustrations. However, he always restrained from portraying more than one species in a single image, as was customary at the time, opting instead, from the very start, to individualise his specimen and their actions. In many ways, in fact, Audubon was a man of his time, a time when individualism and selfreliance were emerging as cornerstones of the American way of life and the scope of opportunity represented by the open frontier.142 Audubon, who was not a university-trained naturalist, considered himself legitimised (and vindicated) as a ‘student of nature’ by his intensive fieldwork and his first-hand experience in the woods.143 In his introductory address to Ornithological Biography, in fact, he openly identifies himself as an ‘American Woodsman’ (OBv1, v) and the subtitle of the book clearly specifies that it is An Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States which he personally observed and studied before drawing (my underlining). The life-size drawings reproduced in the engravings for Birds of America are also testament to his centring of fieldwork experience as they revolutionised the traditional format for zoological books: rather than showing animals on a blank page and removed from their natural habitat, Audubon often portrays his birds surrounded by carefully selected and appropriate branches, flowers, fruit and insects and engaged in some of the activities he had been able to examine during his numerous travels. In order to complete The Birds of America, Audubon explains that he had to leave both the comfort of his home and the warmth of his family behind and ‘t[ake] to the woods’.144 Wilderness and the human world, instead, are not as dramatically separated in ‘White Egrets’ where Walcott does not have to move from the settlement in which he finds himself in order to admire the birds. The egrets, in fact, come to visit him on a ‘bright lawn’ (WE6) in the Santa Cruz Valley, at the edge of Port of Spain, Walcott’s ‘ideal city’ because it is surrounded by ‘accessible countryside … spacious plains’, ‘mountains’ and ‘the sea’, and where animals – he mentions birds and horses – still live in close proximity to humans (A74). ‘White Egrets’ is shaped by this sense of continuity between ‘home’ and ‘the wild’, by ‘an understanding of place-making as a culturally inflected process in which nature and culture must be seen as a mutuality rather than as separable domains’,145 and by an environmental imagination which depends on and celebrates this reciprocity between nature and culture. In ‘White Egrets’, in fact, Walcott appears transformed by his encounter with the titular birds that co-shape the poem with him just as much as his transformative art turns them into a poem. Echoing Audubon, Walcott depicts his egrets – mostly referred to as

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a collectivity rather than as self-reliant individuals – as immersed in, and as constituent parts of, their complex and hybrid environment. The birds appear on a lawn near the house in which the poet is staying but also next to olive trees or cedars, on river banks, in mangrove marshes, in cattle pastures, flying over ponds, fleeing from hurricanes or as part of ensembles which also feature other animals such as parrots, hawks, ibises, heifers, worms and grubs (WE6–10). As noted above, the focal point of both Audubon’s descriptions and his drawings is the birds’ behaviour rather than their appearance. Aptly, the continuity between what Walcott sees on the lawn in the Santa Cruz Valley – namely, egrets that seem aware of ‘how well they look, strutting / perfection’ (WE8) – and what he remembers of the book/lawn of his youth – that is the elegant egrets immortalised by Audubon – is underlined by the recurrent adjective ‘stalking’, which describes Walcott’s egrets when they first enter the scene in poem i and then again in poem ii, vi and viii. In Audubon’s plate, the ‘Snowy Egret or White Heron’ remembered by Walcott is slow pacing by a marsh in order to take its prey by surprise. Audubon was fascinated by the great white heron or great egret’s stalking style, ‘its steps measured, its long neck gracefully retracted and curved’ (OBv4, 601) (Fig. 6.16a). In his 1832 drawing of the White Heron (plate 386) (Fig. 6.16b), he depicts the bird bending and pulling its neck back in order to quickly lunge it at one of its preys, possibly one of the shrimps, fish or frogs hidden in the pond at the edge of which it is stalking. Audubon’s drawing chimes with Walcott’s description of his egrets that, in poem vii, are ‘dip[ping] their necks undulant, bending, / stabbing at worms’, and have ‘darting necks’ (WE9–10). Audubon’s Great White Heron (plate 281) (Fig. 6.16c) goes further than his other drawings in showing these birds’ predatory nature. The plate, in fact, does not match the initial description of the Great White Heron as a ‘newly finished statue of the purest alabaster’ that we find in Ornithological Biography (OBv3, 546), but presents us with a bird intent in capturing its meal, an activity during which they ‘wait until [their prey] comes near [then] strike it or swallow it alive or, when large beat it on the water, or shake it violently, biting it severely all the while’ (OBv3, 547). Great White Heron is only one of Audubon’s numerous drawings of hawks, eagles and various birds of prey caught in the act of capturing or eating defenceless animals: the Fish Hawk (plate 81), for example, is portrayed in flight whilst holding a fish firmly in its claws, the Winter Hawk (plate 71) is carrying a bleeding frog in its talons, the Golden Eagle (plate 181) is clutching a white rabbit with one of its nails stuck in its prey’s eye, the Great-footed Hawks (plate 16) are devouring a green-winged teal and a gadwall, and the American Sparrow Hawk (plate 142) is immortalised whilst it is about to eat a dead sparrow. Sometimes, birds which appear as predators in one plate return as prey in another, and, in his works, Audubon records also various examples of violent intraspecial competition.146 In Ornithological Biography too, narratives of

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predatory behaviour like the one which describes the Great White Heron’s fishing habits are not difficult to find: for example, the Red-tailed Hawk is described whilst ‘fall[ing] upon [a squirrel], [it] seizes it near the head, transfixes and strangles it, devours it on the spot, or ascends exultingly to a branch with the yet palpitating victim in its talons, and there feasts at leisure’ (OBv1, 266). Overall, therefore, it is fair to say that Audubon did not restrain from revealing the fragility of life in the natural world or what has been called the ‘pitilessness of nature’.147 When Audubon commented on birds’ habits, however, human and social relations were never far from his mind. Critics have observed that he often anthropomorphises his birds, turning them into emblems of human behaviour much like the allegorical fables of Lafontaine which he deeply admired; many believe that, in his work, he was ‘rarely able to move beyond the structure of the moral tale’ and find, in both his drawings and in their textual counterparts, ‘the cad, the ardent lover, the bully, the faithful spouse, the good parent, the buffoon, and even the gout-ridden old gentleman’.148 Audubon’s explanation for his interest in the avian world also seems to be coloured by the consequences of the political and social unrest that he and his family had witnessed both in Saint Domingue and in France. In the autobiographical ‘Myself’ (which, it has to be said, is not an altogether reliable account of his life and origins), Audubon recalls a bizarre ‘incident’ which apparently happened when, as a child in France, he was attended by ‘one or two black servants’ who had followed his father from Saint Domingue, and which he identifies as ‘one of the curious things which perhaps did lead [him] in after times to love birds’: My mother had several beautiful parrots and some monkeys; one of the latter was a full-grown male of a very large species. One morning … ‘Pretty Polly’ asking for her breakfast as usual, ‘Du pain au lait pour le perroquet Mignonne’, the man of the woods probably thought the bird presuming upon his rights in the scale of nature; be it as it may, he certainly showed his supremacy in strength over the denizen of the air, for … he at once killed it with unnatural composure. The sensations of my infant heart at this cruel sight were agony to me. I prayed the servant to beat the monkey, but he, who for some reason preferred the monkey to the parrot, refused. I uttered long and piercing cries, my mother rushed into the room, I was tranquillized, the monkey was forever afterward chained, and Mignonne buried with all the pomp of a cherished lost one. (Italics in the text)149

The circumstances of Polly’s death are (suspiciously) similar to many of the accounts of the behaviour of white and Black rebels during the French and Haitian Revolution as well as of the actions of the Jacobins during the Terror. Audubon’s sympathy for the brutalised aristocracy (represented by Polly and the other ‘denizens of the air’) is not surprising, given his father’s position in Saint Domingue and France and for someone who, for decades, actively

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encouraged the rumour that he was the lost son of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.150 The killer monkey, however, is called ‘man of the woods’, an appellative that follows the way in which orangutans were named in popular natural history books of the time,151 but also reminds one of Audubon’s selffashioning as a ‘woodsman’ (OBv1, v). Arguably, this disallows easy identifications and self-identifications and also represents an admission (perhaps unconscious) that, later in life, the little child crying inconsolably for the dead parrot actually turned into a birds’ killer, a change of role which Audubon did ultimately embrace, but not entirely without deep anxieties. In the drawing mentioned (but mis-entitled) by Walcott in ‘White Egrets’, namely Snowy Heron or White Egret (Fig. 6.16a), the relation between the stalking bird and its prey is in fact further complicated by the figure of a hunter in the background who, rifle in his hands, seems to be stalking the bird in order to shoot it. In the Ornithological Biography, Audubon informs us that in 1832, when the drawing for the Snowy Heron or White Egret was made, egrets were often hunted for their meat: ‘when in good condition its flesh is excellent eating, especially in early autumn when it is generally very fat. Some may be seen for sale in the markets of New Orleans and other southern cities’ (OBv3, 320). Great Egrets and White Herons, as I anticipated, were also ‘shot in great numbers’ for their plumes. In order to give an idea of the number of specimens which were killed for what he calls, somewhat disparagingly, ‘ornamental purposes’, Audubon recounts the story ‘of a person who, on offering a double-barrelled gun to a gentleman near Charleston, for one hundred White Herons fresh killed, received that number and more the next day’, and reports the words of one of his friends who, in one day, killed fortysix Great Egrets for stuffing and to provide ‘the ladies’ with ‘feathers for their fans’. Many more were killed during that expedition, Audubon’s informant continues, but the hunters did not retrieve them because they fell too far: apparently indifferent to this gratuitous waste, he also adds that ‘many more might have been killed’, but he and his companions simply ‘became tired of shooting them’ (OBv4, 603–4). The hunters’ ‘tiredness’ might have derived from the fact that Great Egrets were not very difficult to capture during their breeding season when they became ‘more careless of themselves’; as Audubon explains, at that particular time they ‘allow themselves to be approached, so as often to fall victims to the rapacity of man, who, boasting of reason and benevolence, ought at such a time to respect their devotion’ (OBv4, 602). It is not unusual for Audubon to represent humans less favourably than birds, but it would be wrong to take his condemnation of ‘the rapacity of man’ as an indictment of what we would now call speciesism and as a reevaluation of the placing of humans and human priorities in relation to other species. One should remember, in fact, that if James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, published in 1823 – when Audubon was beginning to realise his dream to draw all the birds of America – does contain a harsh criticism of indiscriminate slaughter of pigeons, the first laws for the protection of game

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were introduced in parts of the United States in the late 1830s–early 1840s.152 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, shooting birds was still common practice for bird painters as it was not easy otherwise to study them close-up: telescopes were not entirely accurate and photography had not been invented yet.153 All in all, however, Audubon was an enthusiastic hunter: he did very occasionally capture birds to sketch them while he kept them in captivity but for the most part he killed them, and, most disturbingly, he killed them in great quantities, very often, by his own admission, in far greater numbers than was necessary.154 The hunter (or woodsman, or, indeed, ‘man of the woods’) with his shotgun in Snowy Heron or White Egret (Fig. 6.16a), therefore, might well be him: after all, Audubon has been immortalised often by others as a hunter clutching his rifle.155 In Ornithological Biography, in fact, only a few lines after his disapproval of man’s ‘rapacity’, Audubon readily admits to have taken advantage of the egrets’ imprudent tendency to allow humans to come near them during the breeding season, and even provides some tips (as he does repeatedly in his books) for those who, for whatever reasons, are ‘intent on procuring’ them: Make for some tree, and desire your friend to start the bird. If you are well concealed, you may almost depend on obtaining one in a few minutes for the Egrets will perhaps alight within twenty yards or less of you. Once, when I was desirous of making a new drawing of this bird, my friend John Bachman followed this method, and between us we carried home several superb specimens. (OBv4, 603)

Evidently, hunting birds for Audubon was both a pleasure and a duty: some might have been part of his diet when he was out in the wilderness, but he mostly killed to be able to carefully measure, weigh and examine birds, and to acquire a better understanding of their appearance and diet. In Ornithological Biography he explains that many of the Snowy Egrets he had ‘opened contained nothing else [but shrimps] in their stomachs’ (OBv3, 319) and concludes his description of the Great Egrets with a detailed drawing of their oesophagus and stomach (OBv4, 606). The importance of his task, he believed, required him to put aside any feelings he might have had for his prey: ‘We shot a Spruce Partridge leading her young. On seeing us she ruffled her feathers … and rounded within a few feet of us to defend her brood; her very looks claimed forbearance and clemency, but the enthusiastic desire to study nature prompted us to destroy her, and she was shot, and her brood secured in a few moments.’156 Predictably, Audubon has been seen as someone who represents ‘in a particularly acute way, the paradox of early-nineteenth-century Americans in the face of nature’ because, as a naturalist and a hunter, ‘he assume[d] the pitilessness of nature, but this d[id] not diminish his respect, even his love, for his prey’.157 In the poem Audubon: A Vision, Robert Penn Warren presents us

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with an Audubon who was as ‘merciless’ as his birds when he ‘slew them … with his gun’.158 Like them, the poem reveals, he lacked ‘compassion’ (30), yet, Warren insists, Audubon was also motivated by an intense ‘passion’ (3), which not only implicitly distinguishes him from the animal world – ‘what / Is man but his passion?’(3, emphasis mine), but is also a specific form of ‘love’: ‘What is love?’, Warren explains, ‘Our name for it is knowledge’ (30). In ‘White Egrets’, Walcott explores this ethical paradox but also complicates it by triangulating Audubon-the-hunter and Audubon-the-naturalist more immediately with Audubon-the-artist. The sequence, in fact, includes Walcott’s own description of a typical violent encounter between predator and prey. All of a sudden, in poem v, a ‘thought’ surprises both poet and reader: ‘a hawk on the wrist / of a branch, soundlessly, like a falcon, / shoots into heaven, circling above praise or blame, / with the same high indifference as yours, / now dropping to tear a field mouse with its claws’ (WE8–9). It is evident that Walcott’s hawk-and-mouse vignette is not something the poet witnesses on the Santa Cruz lawn but a ‘thought’, probably shaped by some half-remembered plates and descriptions from Audubon’s books and from the works of writers who had engaged with them before him. In point of fact, if Walcott’s choice of words (‘thought’) does rhyme with Audubon’s account of a Red-tailed Hawk moving as ‘quick as thought’ in order to seize a squirrel (OB266, emphasis mine), there are no drawings of a hawk feasting on a mouse in Birds of America. Warren’s Audubon, however, is repeatedly presented as a thinking being whose thoughts shape, transform and classify the world around him and establish his position in it: ‘Thought: “On that sky it is black”. / Thought: “In my mind it is white”. / Thinking: “Ardea occidentalis, heron, the great one”. / … / He leans on his gun. Thinks / How thin is the membrane between himself and the world’ (3). Whilst playing fast and loose with his cultural references, Walcott’s hawk-and-mouse ‘thought’ offers him and his readers the opportunity to rethink the ‘thin membrane’ that in Warren’s poem separates man from the animal world he preys upon whilst confronting a situation that, indirectly but accurately, reassesses Audubon’s activities as a hunter and, ultimately, his artistic practices and attitude to his subjects. In Ornithological Biography, Audubon explicitly and unproblematically collapses important differences between himself and some of his birds when he equates the delight he felt from securing his specimens to the satisfaction of birds of prey when they capture their dinner: I prepared my double-barrelled piece [and] went slowly towards [the Bird of Washington] … I fired and he fell. With what delight did I survey the magnificent bird! Had the finest salmon ever pleased him as he did me? – Never. I ran and presented him to my friend, with a pride which they alone feel, who, like me, have devoted themselves from their earliest childhood to such pursuits and who have derived from them their first pleasures. (OBv1, 60)

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In ‘White Egrets’, significantly, the aim of the hawk is ‘dropping’ to ‘tear’ the mouse ‘with its claws’, not to eat it (WE9): the bird, in fact, is never portrayed while devouring its prey. Arguably, therefore, the dismemberment of the mouse that Walcott includes in his poem casts the death of the little rodent more as an unnecessary waste than as a particular level in the food chain, disallowing readers from dismissing it simply as another example of nature’s feral but survival-driven ‘mercilessness’. The hawk-and-mouse vignette in ‘White Egrets’, moreover, ends with the prey being turned into ‘a dead thing’ (WE9) and is further complicated by the use of the pronoun ‘yours’ in relation to ‘high indifference’ (WE8). In other words, both poet and readers are forced to ponder whether their ‘high indifference’ towards what is conjured up in front of their eyes, namely the (seemingly unnecessary) capture, mangling and reification of the mouse, is, in any way, defensible or even acceptable. Walcott’s use of the pronoun ‘yours’ duplicates – but with a fundamental difference – a technique used by Audubon himself in many of his drawings where the focal point is a violent interchange between predator and prey, and where viewers are also implicated in the killing. In Great White Heron (plate 281) (Fig. 6.16c), for example, the bird’s neck appears still contorted by the effort while the bird triumphantly holds in its beak a fish it has just captured. The composition is dominated by the arch formed by a diagonal line which goes from the claw of the bird’s longest toe in the lower middle area of the painting to the tip of the beak, the highest point in the painting. This straight diagonal line works as a counterpoint of the curved trajectory traced by the rhyming vertices of the progressively acute angles formed by the backward pointing heels of the egret, the bend of its neck and the junction of the upper and lower mandibles of its beak. While the bird’s dynamism and energy are fully captured, the fish looks inert; its small, lifeless yellow eye creates a formidable contrast with the bird’s bigger, fierce and sharp yellow eye, which is directed at, and implicates, the viewers. Clearly, Audubon presents the act of capturing the fish as, literally and metaphorically, the crux of the painting. Both the straight diagonal line and the curved trajectory point upward and culminate in the dead fish, while the body of the fish traces a much shorter diagonal which goes in the opposite direction of the one which climaxes in the bird’s beak. The encounter of the two diagonals forms an X or crux, rendered even more compelling by the fact of being off-centre. While the prey is presented as unimportant and expendable, one could argue that this crux signposts the predator’s triumph which, according to Audubon, is supposed to bring delight and pride to the captor and, by extension, to the hunter/naturalist who identifies with him, and, ultimately, to the implicated viewer. In some of the textual descriptions that accompany his drawings, Audubon involves (and implicates) his readers by resorting to the secondperson pronoun. For instance, he opens his ‘Introductory Address’ to

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Ornithological Biography by addressing his readers directly: ‘Kind Reader’, he begins, ‘Should you derive from the perusal of the following pages … a portion of the pleasure which I have felt in collecting the materials for their composition, my gratification will be ample’ (OBv1, v). Audubon’s aim, however, is profoundly different from Walcott’s as, in ‘White Egrets’, the poet seems to encourage us to reject, or at least to question, our acquiescence to the expendability and reification of another being. Audubon’s effort to reduce the distance between viewers/readers and birds, instead, is aimed, as noted above, towards a validation of his unique and extensive experience as a fieldworker; after conflating the pleasure that (according to him) birds take in capturing their prey with the delight he takes in procuring his specimens, he further conflates with both gratifications the enjoyment viewers might derive from his drawings. Audubon’s collapsing of perspectives, therefore, works hand in hand with his endorsement of a specific aesthetics and narrative which have at their core the painter/hunter’s decision to assume the ‘pitilessness’ of nature as its own and to naturalise his actions by occluding the crucial fact that, unlike those of the birds he depicts, they are not directly dictated by survival instinct. In ‘White Egrets’, not only does the hawk-and-mouse interaction indirectly expose this fundamental slippage in Audubon’s deceptive comparison between himself and his birds of prey, but it also challenges simplistic, let alone triumphalistic, readings of the predator-prey exchange, and foregrounds the pitfalls of an aesthetic predicated on subjugation. Audubon did cast his work as a whole as ‘the love-tale of a naturalist’ (OBv1, x) who, despite feeling occasionally sorry for his prey, felt perfectly entitled to sacrifice them to his urge to collect, classify, arrange, draw or, ultimately, to his ‘long[ing] to’, as he puts it, ‘possess’ his birds.159 In Audubon: A Vision, Warren does not object to Audubon’s sense of entitlement: according to him, ‘our name’ for this longing or ‘love’ is ‘knowledge’ (30) – the possessive ‘our’ clearly includes and implicates only the human readers – and, in an interview, he insouciantly referred to Audubon as someone ‘who destroyed beauty to create beauty and whet his understanding’.160 After inviting readers to question the ‘high indifference’ towards the prey that Audubon seems to encourage in Great White Heron, Walcott’s poem posits instead the violent and gratuitous end of the mouse as the consequence of ‘a love’ which fosters nothing positive and that he equates solely with ‘pure punishment’ (WE9). This ‘pure punishment’, intriguingly, does not only affect the mouse; arguably, Walcott’s predator, his hawk ‘caw[ing] / over a dead thing’, is more forlorn than triumphant (WE9). Walcott, therefore, illuminates some of the contradictions at the core of Audubon’s enterprise as well as the nineteenth-century artist’s own painful awareness of these contradictions. In Snowy Heron or White Egret (Fig. 6.16a), in fact, the human predator (who, as we have seen, could well be Audubon the ‘woodsman’ or ‘man of the woods’ himself) appears minuscule, vulnerable and on the margin of

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the composition. The bird (his potential prey) is instead a majestic creature which dominates both landscape and painting and seems almost impossible to ‘capture’ for the tiny human figure. As a matter of fact, if, as a naturalist and as a hunter, Audubon paradoxically assumed the ‘high indifference’ of nature whilst still ‘loving’ his prey, Audubon-the-artist uncomfortably struggled with another paradox. As he ‘wished for the entire possession of all [he] saw’, he also realised that ‘the moment a bird was dead, however beautiful it had been when in life, the pleasure arising from the possession of it became blunted’ (OBv1, vii). ‘Possession’ is obviously a crucial term, conjugating, as it does, the relationship between hunter and prey, man and animal – but also between the artist and his/her subject – in terms of domination, ownership and, ultimately, reification. Audubon’s words, however, also alert us to the disappointment that this possession brings: arguably, the artist who ‘possesses’ the (dead) birds sounds as miserable, frustrated and disappointed as Walcott’s hawk ‘caw[ing] on a dead thing’ (WE9). Walcott was not the first one to investigate Audubon’s frustration. In a short story entitled ‘A Still Moment’, Eudora Welty imagines the young Audubon holding in his hands a beautiful and defenceless snowy heron or egret that he has just shot. In so doing, he meditates on the way in which his drawings, albeit beautiful, invariably fail to turn ‘a dead thing’ –incidentally, the same words used by Walcott to describe the mouse killed by the hawk – into a ‘live thing’.161 Audubon, we know, desperately wanted his dead birds to be ‘alive’ – he insisted that he ‘wished life with them’ (OBv1, vii) – and added that what blunted the pleasure of ownership also triggered his desire to draw birds, a desire that further frustrated him because he was painfully aware that shooting (and possessing) specimens did not immediately translate into fully ‘capturing’ them with his pencil: he admitted, in fact, that for a long time, he was ‘giv[ing] birth to a family of cripples’ (OBv1, vii–viii). Audubon’s ground-breaking decision to portray life-size birds engaging in daily activities with ‘every portion’ of each bird in its ‘natural size’ (OBv1, xii), therefore, might have been governed by his desire to depict nature ‘in her own Way, alive and Moving!’162 Yet, it can also be seen as a strenuous attempt to restore life into those creatures his ‘love’ and urge to ‘possess’ had both killed and reified – incidentally, the full title of Ornithological Biography refers to his subject matter as ‘the Objects Represented in the work Entitled The Birds of America’ (emphasis mine). In order to counteract death and reinstate movement and vitality in his works, Audubon experimented with ‘grotesque’ ‘mankins’ made of wood cork and wires; he also tried positioning dead birds in specific attitudes on a table where, unfortunately, they remained ‘dead to all intense and neither Wing, leg or tail could [he] place according to the intention of [his] Wishes’.163 Audubon eventually created a new and unique method which rendered his specimens more responsive to his needs but, arguably, also further reified them: he arranged the freshly killed birds in his possession on

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a wooden board, and fixed these numb and inert things with wires and pins in various postures and activities that he had observed and was interested in portraying. Here is how he describes his first attempt at this macabre avian death ballet: I pierced the body of the Fishing bird and fixed it on the board – another Wire passed above his upper Mandible was made to hold the head in a pretty fair attitude, Smaller Skewers fixed the feet according to my notions, and even common pins came to my assistance in the placing the legs and feet -the last wire proved a delightful elevator to the bird’s tail, and at Last there Stood before me the real Mankin of a King Fisher … Reader this was what I shall call my first attempt at Drawing actually from Nature, for even the eye of the King fisher was as if full of Life before me whenever I pressed its Lids aside with my finger.164

Ironically, death, which Audubon so passionately wanted to conquer (and occlude), continued to dictate the very modalities in which his work could be carried out: his new method of representation, in fact, obliged Audubon to finish his work very quickly, often in one sitting which could last as long as fourteen hours, in order to limit as much as possible his own exposure to the stench of decomposition which emanated from his dead specimens.165 The American woodsman’s reconstruction of the wilderness and the wildness of birds in the domesticised space of a studio reduced formerly living birds to lifeless ‘mankins’ soon to be surrounded by various props such as trees, shrubs, flowers, reptiles, insects.166 Yet, Audubon’s tone is as triumphal as his Great White Heron’s demeanour after the capture of the fish: in the above-quoted passage, it is evident how Audubon tried to manipulate his readers/viewers to regard his experiment as a complete and unquestionable success. In his ‘Introductory Address’, however, with what sounds like boastful false modesty, Audubon invited his readers to ‘judge’ for themselves how successful his drawings were at preserving what he called ‘the appearance of nature’ (OBv1, viii–ix, vii, emphasis mine). It is telling, in this respect, that he admitted that the eye of what he called the ‘real Mankin’ of a Kingfisher was not ‘full of life’ but ‘as if full of life’.167 It has been noted how ‘drawn from nature’ – the label Audubon appended to his watercolours – is an appropriately ambiguous definition: if ‘drawn’ means ‘sketched’, in fact, it can also mean ‘withdrawn’ or ‘removed’ from its natural context.168 Audubon’s crucified and carefully staged (dead) birds, fixed in ‘real-life’ postures, chosen by the artist because scientifically informative and pleasing to the eye, are strategically disconnected from the immediate circumstances of their capture (they hunt but, apart from very few exceptions, they are not hunted by men) and as removed from life and nature as they could conceivably be: they are representations of representations, ultimate emblems of an unbalanced power relation between man and animal, and between artist and subject matter, which refuse to lay bare the device.

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In section v of ‘White Egrets’, the deadly ‘thought’ of the rapacious hawk is counterbalanced by what appears to be the actual sighting of a living egret ‘sailing into the frame then teetering to rest / with its gawky stride, erect’ (WE8). Walcott calls this egret ‘egret-emblem’, a compound that deserves attention (WE8). The word ‘frame’ signposts that Walcott is aware that his egret is a composite literary and artistic creation both of his own and of others – not only Audubon but also, presumably, Welty and Warren. More surprisingly, however, in Walcott’s dramatisation of the encounter between himself and the egret, the bird is presented as a being which participates in the creation of this network of references and in its representation, a fact that significantly alters the power relations underpinning Audubon’s work. Throughout the poem, in fact, Walcott’s egrets not only have freedom of movement – they come and go as they please and their arrivals and departures impart rhythm to the poem and affect the poet’s mood – but they are also creatively re-imagined as having some form of control on the way in which they are represented. As we have seen, they seem to be self-consciously ‘modelling for Audubon’ and are described, not as ‘dead things’ or as ‘mankins’ arranged in postures chosen by the artist, but as living agents, willingly striking poses in order to actively participate in their immortalisation – or counter it, if we take it to mean turning a living being into a ‘dead thing’. The egrets’ demeanour, moreover, is capitalised upon also to broaden, in significant ways, the framework of the cultural references which the birds’ presence might evoke, an inclusive move which, subtly, decentres Audubon, Welty and Warren as well as the haunting of death that their works contain. Walcott’s egrets, in fact, are beings absorbed in the ‘mythical conceit / that they have beat across the sea from Egypt’ (WE8) where, in ancient times, primeval herons with long feathers growing from the back of their head were representative of creator sun-gods and were considered symbols of anticipated rebirth in the Underworld.169 Clearly, Walcott here was projecting on the birds purposes and intentions which could not be objectively verified as being their own, especially if one reads the reference to Egypt (plausibly) as an attempt to signpost the importance of African cultures in the Caribbean make-up. Walcott’s anthropomorphism, however, is not necessarily anthropocentric since it is mobilised to question the right of humans to be the only ones who can establish the parameters of their relationships with animals and to undermine the assumption that this is ‘naturally’ the way things are. In Walcott’s sequence, in fact, the human and the animal world, culture and nature, are not posited as completely separate; consequently, his egret-emblem is not only a complex cultural echo but, simultaneously, also a living creature strutting around the poet as the landscape in which the bird moves – ‘cool green lawn’, ‘forest / on the hill’ (WE8) – situates it firmly in the Santa Cruz Valley’s lawn with him. Walcott’s ‘egret-emblem’, therefore, emblematises an energising bond between the animal world and the poet’s world and a fertile exchange between artist and subject matter in which both participate in the creation

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of a poem that, amongst other things, is in conversation with Audubon’s representations, honours the continuities and reciprocity, but also the discontinuities and differences, between the ‘wild’ and the ‘domesticised’, the verbal and the visual. Always in poem v of the sequence, in fact, an egret ‘astonishes’ both the ‘open page’ of the book that the readers are holding in their hands and, simultaneously, ‘the page of the lawn’ in the Santa Cruz Valley (WE8–9). For Walcott, ‘astonishment’ is ‘the perpetual ideal’: what is promoted and celebrated here is the ability to be ‘astonished’ by the world rather than the urge to ‘possess’ and master it and, at the same time, the necessity to stay faithful to the ‘nature’ of what astonishes when the poet engages in the ‘naming’ process. ‘Genuine people’, Walcott pointed out, must not be ‘patronize[d] … by making them anthropological specimens’,170 and he always warned himself and others against the ‘risk of submitting to the arrogance, to the spiritual vanity of transforming … people into “emblems” … the danger [is] to presume that it is [the poet’s] duty to make emblems or epitaphs out of people’.171 This sensitivity to human reality here clearly also extended to the animal world. In section vi of ‘White Egrets’, the focus shifts, once again, from a single individual to the flock or species. After a short absence, the egrets are back on the Santa Cruz lawn where they continue to ‘stalk through the rain / as if nothing mortal can affect them’ (WE9). Once again, Walcott does not set out ‘to hunt’ the egrets, they come to him and, while he welcomes their return, he accepts and celebrates their independence and freedom of movement as they enter and exit the lawn as they please. Walcott’s egrets appear unaffected by mortality, not because the poem itself renders them immortal, but because they seem to live according to their own rhythms, as if death itself did not exist. While Walcott carefully observes their behaviour like a keen naturalist, the interplay between the human and the animal world (and between artist and subject) becomes rather complex. As we have seen, in Warren’s poem, the ‘membrane’ which separates man from the animal world is inextricably linked with Audubon’s ability to think its existence. In ‘White Egrets’, instead, Walcott recasts Warren’s thin membrane (the poet’s ability to think and, by extension, to establish similarities and to create metaphors) as a connector rather than as a separator. Lack of a common language between animal and humans has been identified as what guarantees distance, distinctness and exclusion from and of animals,172 but Walcott seems determined to at least try to bridge this distance and keen to learn and treasure the lesson that these birds, unbeknownst to themselves, might silently and freely impart to him with their ‘language beyond speech’ (WE10). ‘We share one instinct’, he writes, ‘that ravenous feeding / my pen’s beak, plucking up wriggling insects / like nouns’ as ‘the nib reading / as it writes, shak[es] off angrily what its beak rejects’: ‘selection’, he concludes, ‘is what the egrets teach’ (WE10). The line on which Walcott walks is a very fine one, but the verb ‘to share’ rethinks Warren’s membrane by underlining continuities between humans

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and animals; arguably, rather than anthropomorphising the egrets, Walcott animalises himself and his pen (an extension of his body) to the point that he becomes part of the flock (‘we share’). If, like Audubon, Walcott assumes the ‘pitilessness’ of nature (the birds’ killing and eating of worms), the poet’s alleged mercilessness does not affect his subject matter – the egrets carry on unmolested – but is directed towards his own creative process as he discards inappropriate ‘nouns’ whilst refining the expression of his vision. The emphasis here is not on individualism and self-reliance but on the poet’s longing to operate as part of a collectivity which could teach him how to find adequate words, images and rhymes to portray his experience and enhance his individuality (‘my pen’s beak’), an individuality which, crucially, is not synonymous with individualism, egotism and anthropocentrism. In lines that almost present us with a concentrated version of his ars poetica, Walcott expresses gratefulness to the egrets for teaching ‘selection’ rather than destruction, and the patient, painstaking, slow process of ‘excavation and … self-discovery’ at the basis of poetry which is ‘perfection’s sweat’ (A70, 69). Later in the collection, it is precisely the principle of selection embodied by the egrets that undergirds the association between a bunch of ‘torn poems’ and a flock of white egrets ‘sail[ing]’ from the poet ‘in a long last sigh of relief’ (WE65). The closing poem of the ‘White Egrets’ sequence presents us with another egret or heron which Walcott remembers seeing in the Caribbean island of St. Croix with the poet Joseph Brodsky. Walcott and Brodsky became friends in New York in 1977, after the death of Robert Lowell who was a mutual friend. Ten years younger than Walcott, Brodsky had open-heart surgery in 1979, followed by two bypass operations, and, as a consequence, his health was frail for many years: he died in 1996. Walcott and Brodsky’s awareness of the latter’s fragility turned ‘death’ into the ‘unutterable word’ which always haunted them like ‘a third companion’ (WE10). In Walcott’s poem, when a huge egret appears in the vicinity of the two friends, Brodsky immediately identifies it as a sepulchral harbinger of death whose arrival signposts the irruption of the unutterable into what would have otherwise been an idyllic afternoon by the pool. The huge egret in question is ‘not still or ­stalking / but fixed in [a] great fruit tree’ (WE10). The verb ‘fixed’ reminds one of Audubon’s ‘dead things’ fixed (or crucified) on wooden boards in suspended animation while the difference in size between the bird and the humans recalls Audubon’s Snowy Heron or White Egret (plate 242) (Fig. 6.16a) – the image mentioned by Walcott in section iv – which presents us with an enormous bird and a minuscule man. It is significant, however, that for Brodsky the visual referent is not Audubon: in fact, he describes the ‘huge bird’ as ‘out of Bosch’ (WE10). Like Audubon, Hieronymus Bosch believed in the importance of showing reality in the most convincing and detailed way, but one could argue that, if Audubon offers us a shadowless world where terror and cruelty are presented as ‘natural’, Bosch instead parades in front of us an often shadowy world

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where the supernatural power of evil is often visible (if not immediately decipherable) in all its might. Bosch’s subjects belong to a visionary, and often diabolical and nightmarish, reality and have been ‘interpreted’ resorting to different explanations: Rosicrucianism, alchemy, astrology, Jewish gnosticism, utopianism, avant-la-lettre surrealism, the Adamites’s system of belief, as the expression of moralising proverbs or songs, and as visual translations of well-known verbal puns and metaphors circulating at his time.173 Birds, either natural or imaginary, often feature in Bosch’s paintings: it has been estimated that his bird scenario surpasses his contemporaries tenfold and that he had an extraordinary knowledge of bird species.174 Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights which comprises The Garden of Eden, Hell and The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490) – and which, as shown in the introduction, Walcott intended to put on stage for a production of Dr Faustus – is the work which contains the greatest number of birds.175 In the central panel, Bosch includes various gigantic birds: a robin, a goldfinch, a hoopoe, a mallard, a kingfisher, an owl and a woodpecker, but no egrets. However, at the back of the same panel, on the top of the mid-left tower – which, following traditional iconography, probably marks one of the rivers flowing from the central fountain of life – one can spot a white bird much bigger than the humans it is portrayed with. A flock of egrets is also seen perching on the sharp, menacing and bulbous poles extending from the blue tower in the front right. No specific symbolic value has yet been attached to these birds which are however associated with two of the four towers that have been interpreted as ‘forebodings of dark things to come’.176 Crucially, the egret which suddenly appears to the two friends on the St. Croix lawn and is read by Brodsky as a ‘sepulchral’ messenger of mortality à la Bosch, is not a complex and composite egret-emblem like the ‘astonishing’ one described by Walcott, but rather a mere emblem which had ceased to be a living creature in its own right in order to become a stand-in for the much-feared third companion (death): it is significant, in this respect, that it is described as ‘something’ out of Bosch (WE10, emphasis mine). In other words, that day in St. Croix ‘the book of the lawn’ was resolutely shut and, as a consequence, the garden and the pool could turn into a version of Bosch’s reinterpretation of the allegorical love garden in the central panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights: here, oversized birds and fruits are portrayed similarly to – and anticipate the presence of – the everyday objects which, in the third panel of the triptych, assume gigantic proportions and turn into instruments of torture in Bosch’s ‘most exalted vision of Hell’.177 What prevents the power of darkness and death evoked by this reference to Bosch to overcome and dominate the end of Walcott’s ‘White Egrets’ is, crucially, a flock of living egrets which forcefully reclaim their right not to be mere symbols but themselves. Their presence causes a dramatic change in the poet’s mood and urges him to reposition himself in the here and now. Recovering from his flashback, Walcott observes the egrets while ‘now’ they

360    Derek Walcott’s Painters

soar together in ‘noiseless flight’ from the very lawn where the sequence started or ‘tack, like a regatta, the sea-green grass’ (WE10). As a result, Bosch-based dark forebodings are substituted by a vision in which both the late Russian poet and the birds themselves are described as ‘seraphic souls’ (WE10) and their benevolent influence on the poet’s mood is acknowledged and celebrated. The ‘paradise lost’ of St. Croix is replaced by the (healing) ‘paradise regained’ of the Santa Cruz Valley, where egrets are not just mere emblems but self-standing actors able to deeply affect humans and cause important changes in the way they feel and rethink the thin membranes that might (or might not) separate the animal from the human world, but also the natural dimension from the spiritual one. Once again, ‘White Egrets’ highlights the shortcomings of an aesthetics which considers the artist’s vision as something for which living creatures are to be ‘naturally’ sacrificed, either by being slaughtered or, more subtly, by being transformed into stand-ins for something other than themselves. The poem offers instead an alternative approach which repositions man and animals together in the world in a relation that does not depend exclusively on the domination of humans, is not shaped to fit only their needs or to take into account solely their position, and does not consider the poet/artist as the only agent capable of influencing the process of representation. If poetry and painting are ‘Adam’s task to give things their names’, the (usually neglected) possessive ‘their’ in ‘their names’ does not only highlight the importance of accuracy but, arguably, limits the absolute power and arbitrariness of the ‘namers’, challenges the fact that they are to be perceived as the sole agents responsible for, and in charge of, ‘naming’, and questions and further complicates the ethical position of those who still consider the extra-human world, and their subject matter, merely as silent, disposable ‘possessions’. Arguably, with ‘White Egrets’, Walcott demonstrates that poets cannot really give ‘things’ their names if they are not prepared to rethink, interrogate and reconfigure their ‘thinginess’: the act of naming here relies on the namers’ ability to tune in to the ‘language beyond speech’ of these ‘things’ and be affected (or, indeed, ‘astonished’) by the very presence and vitality of what they are about to name or paint. As Walcott himself puts it: ‘No one is Adam. A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is.’178 The verb ‘to watch’ here acts as a powerful reminder that the verbal and the visual are always intertwined in Walcott’s mind. The full statement, moreover, also reveals something about his attitude towards painting and paintings: ‘watching’ one’s subjects (human or otherwise) and (one’s or others’) paintings ‘becoming themselves’ requires patience and the willingness to tune in with subjects and images in their own terms rather than to overpower them. This modus operandi is evident in Walcott’s poetry and in his canvases – as we have just seen, for example, in ‘White Egrets’ or Headland in Drought (Fig. 6.13) and Pasture,

Painting (and) the Caribbean    361

Dry Season – and also in his sustained engagements with a specific painting or image in the ekphrastic efforts that will be the subject of the next chapter.

Notes

1. Walcott in Brown and Johnson, ‘Thinking Poetry’, 18. 2. Dormandy, White Death, 11. 3. This drawing is at TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 62, item 6. 4. For more on Gauguin’s ‘aesthetic of ambiguity’ vis-à-vis his conceptualisation of ‘paradise’ see Brettell, ‘Gauguin y la idea de paraíso’, 23–31. 5. Craven, Treasury, 546; Craven, Treasury, 1958 edition, 289. 6. Staszak, Géographies, 40. 7. Simmons, ‘West Indian Artists’, 3. 8. Gauguin qtd in van der Hoeven, ‘Martinique/Visualized’, 92. 9. Gauguin qtd in Leval, ‘Gauguin’, 74. 10. Crussard, ‘Martinican Sketchbooks’, fig. 102 verso, 122, fig. 111. 11. See, for example: ‘What Gauguin has to say about the tropics seems wonderful to me. There, certainly is the future of a great renaissance of painting’ (Van Gogh, Letters, letter 714); ‘[Gauguin]’ll even be able to put some money aside, the more he sells. Which, in a year, let’s say, he can use to settle in Martinique’ (letter 715); ‘discussions [with Gauguin] are tending to deal with the terrific subject of an association of certain painters. Ought or may this association have a commercial character, yes or no? We haven’t reached any result yet, and haven’t so much as set foot on a new continent yet. Now I, who have a presentiment of a new world, who certainly believe in the possibility of a great renaissance of art. Who believe that this new art will have the tropics for its homeland’ (letter 716); ‘[Gauguin] intends to put some money aside when he sells. Up to the moment (let’s say in a year) when he’ll have enough to risk a second trip to Martinique … while he works hard here, [Gauguin] always has a nostalgic longing for hot countries’ (letter 717); ‘If in a year’s time [Gauguin] could have made enough to carry out his plan of going and setting himself up in Martinique, I’d think that his fortune would be made. Only, to my mind he shouldn’t risk going back there before he has 5 thousand put aside, according to him he would need 2,000. But then to my mind he wouldn’t leave alone but with one other or several others, and would found a lasting studio there’ (letter 722). 12. For a list of the different meanings of the word according to time and place see Knight, ‘Pluralism’, 271–2. 13. Gauguin qtd in Staszak, Géographies, 58, translation mine. Gauguin’s grandmother was Flora Tristan, feminist and socialist writer and niece of don Pio de Tristán y Moscoso, the last viceroy of Peru. 14. Gauguin qtd in van der Hoeven, ‘Martinique/Visualized’, 76–7. Simmons too, whom Walcott often associates with Gauguin, made coloured sketches of local women in pastel. Brenda Simmons used to have one which was lost in the 2018 fire at the Folk Research Centre.

362    Derek Walcott’s Painters 15. Laval’s letter to Fernand Loyen du Puigaudeau qtd in Siberchicot, Exposition Volpini, 131 and translated in van der Hoeven, ‘Martinique/Experienced’, 64. 16. Walcott, ‘Letter to Chamoiseau’, 221. 17. Van Dijk makes a similar point about the paucity of information on Laval’s work (‘Martinique/Continued’, 163, n.14). For examples of his works, see Women on the Seashore, Sketch (1887–9), Two Women Carrying Baskets on Martinique (1889), Women on the Seashore (1889) and Women Carrying Fruit (1887) in Gauguin and Laval in Martinique, figs 74, 118, 119, 40. 18. Pope, Gauguin, 228. 19. Siberchicot, L’Exposition Volpini, 133–4. 20. Van der Hoeven, ‘Martinique/Experienced’, 74. 21. L’anse du Carbet, martiniquaise à la robe rouge (1893) (oil and wax on cardboard; signed, dated and located) is not to be found in the catalogue for the exhibition Gauguin and Laval in Martinique and is not amongst those mentioned in Jaworska’s Gauguin, Pope’s Gauguin and Siberchicot’s L’Exposition Volpini which include references to Laval. However, according to Invaluable. com it was sold at auction in 2014 and its authenticity was confirmed by Siberchicot. https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/charles-laval-1862-1894lanse-du-carbet-martiniqu-86-c-cac29bd5c5 (accessed 10 August 2022). 22. Fumagalli, Caribbean Perspectives, 12. 23. Van der Hoeven, ‘Martinique/Visualized’, 92. 24. Almarcegui, ‘Literatura’, 63. 25. Apropos of ‘realism tempered with imagination’ (Simmons, ‘West Indian Artists’, 3), Gauguin’s horse is not white and the client refused the painting precisely because the horse was ‘too green’ (Staszak, Gauguin Voyageur, 154). 26. Van der Hoeven, ‘Martinique/Visualized’, 76–8. 27. Crussard, ‘Martinican Sketchbooks’, 104, fig. 77, fig. 78; Van der Hoeven ‘Martinique/Visualized, 99, fig. 68. 28. Bougainville and James Cook, for example, described Tahiti as a place of astonishing beauty, richness and harmony whose inhabitants lived naked, totally free and happy (Staszak, Géographies, 97–8). 29. See example, Gauguin’s Te nave nave fenua (Delightful Land) (1892) or Exotique Eve (1890). 30. Lafcadio Hearn, who travelled to the Lesser Antilles in the same year as Gauguin, was also fascinated by the Martinican ‘Porteuses’ to whom he devoted an entire chapter of his Martinique Sketches in Two Years in the French West Indies (77–92). 31. Brettell, ‘Camille Pissarro’, 13. 32. Vega, Camille Pissarro, 11. 33. Van Dijk, ‘Martinique/Imagined’, 40. 34. The location, however, was not initially indicated in the title of the painting (Brettell, Pissarro’s People, 79). 35. As we have seen, Gauguin too found sketching an important tool to come to terms with the landscape and people of Martinique (Van der Hoeven, ‘Martinique/Visualized’, 78). 36. Richard Brettell and Christopher Lloyd, Catalogue of Drawings by Camille Pissarro in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980),

Painting (and) the Caribbean    363 4 recto, 5, 1 recto. From now on I will be referring to images in this volume as BLL followed by the catalogue number in parentheses in the text. 37. See, for example, the drawings Harbor Scene; ciel plurieux (n.d.) but also Loading/unloading a Ship (n.d.) and Ship in Harbor (n.d.) which have all been attributed to Pissarro. These are held in Peebles Island State Park, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation but also appear in Camille Pissarro and the Caribbean, 1850–1855: Drawings from the Collection at Olana, exh. cat., ed. Richard Brettell and Karen Zukowski (US Virgin Islands: Hebrew Congregation of St Thomas, St Thomas, 1996), 35, 36, 37). From now on I will be referring to images from this catalogue as BZ with page numbers in parentheses in the text. 38. In the catalogue Dual Muse (1997), one of the three undated watercolours by Walcott represents a harbour scene with quietly moored sailing yachts which resonates with some of Pissarro’s drawings. 39. In his private library Walcott owned numerous artbooks and catalogues from exhibitions on Pissarro which could have inspired him and provided him with information. Walcott acquired these books over the years, as he learnt to value Pissarro’s work and example because Pissarro was not amongst the first painters he admired: ‘Pissarro came later’, he explained to me, ‘one had to be “educated” in order to appreciate his wide-ranging and stippled palette’ (Walcott, personal communication, 29 October 2016). 40. After Pissarro moved to Paris in 1855, Melbye kept some of Pissarro’s drawings in his studio in New York and when Melbye left for the Far East he left them with his friend and fellow painter Frederick Church. When Melbye died in China in 1869 the drawings/paintings were still with Church and were discovered in the Frederick Church collection at Olana State Historic Site in the 1980s by Richard Brettell and Barbara Stern Shapiro. Attribution has been complicated by the fact that what initially appeared to be Melbye’s signature was probably Church’s attempt to identify the material as belonging to his friend Melbye and to distinguish it from works by others also at Olana. Now these drawings/paintings are to be found in Peebles Island. 41. Camille Pissarro in the Caribbean, 1850–1855 has numerous harbour scenes and seascapes while the catalogue from the Ashmolean collection tends to focus more on flora, fauna and landscapes. Walcott also owned Bernando Vega’s Camille Pissarro en Santo Domingo 1850 which contains drawings and watercolours carried out on the island of Hispaniola. Published in 2000 like Tiepolo’s Hound, Vega’s booklet could not have informed the poem but testifies to Walcott keen and long-lasting interest in Pissarro’s Caribbean works. 42. Once in Paris, Pissarro remembers the Caribbean as a place where, to protect themselves from the rain, people used to stand in archways (TH38). 43. Brettell, Pissarro’s People, 76. 44. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, 22. 45. Pissarro also includes this drawing, which he calls Saint Thomas gris-gris (1854–5), in his Camille Pissarro (29). 46. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, 27. 47. There are other references to this in Tiepolo’s Hound: when describing the death of his daughter Jeanne, Walcott’s Pissarro laments that, painting her

364    Derek Walcott’s Painters portrait, he had somehow stolen her soul and spirit and become, simultaneously, her maker or creator and her assassin (TH85). 48. Walcott in Handley, ‘Interview’, 104. 49. Walcott in Dual Muse, 1999, 19–20. 50. Craven, Treasury, 1939, 179. 51. Craven, Treasury, 1939, 195. Tiepolo, incidentally, is no longer featured in Craven’s 1958 edition; if Walcott consulted this edition with the 1939 original selection in mind, the removal of Tiepolo as a featured artist might have magnified his feeling that he was looking for something that had in fact ‘disappeared’. 52. Fumagalli, Caribbean Perspectives, 117–18. 53. Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Black; Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’. 54. Fumagalli, Caribbean Perspectives, 119–20. 55. See, for example, the dogs in S. Thomas 8 juin 1852 (BZ58) (Fig. 6.6) and Compositional Study of a Peasant Family with a Donkey in a Landscape (BLL31, recto). 56. In 1903, however, Pissarro sold two canvases to the Louvre (Shikes and Harper, Pissarro, 315). Currently there are two paintings by Pissarro in Room 903 of the Louvre, namely: Landscape at Pontoise (n.d.) and The Watering Place, Éragny (n.d.). 57. Pissarro and Monet did go to London where they admired Turner’s works (Shikes and Harper, Pissarro, 91–2) but, as we have seen in Chapter 1, it is not entirely clear if Warwick ever copied Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire (Fig. 1.8). 58. Walcott in Ciccarelli, ‘Reflections’, 300. 59. Walcott in Handley, ‘Interview’, 104. 60. Walcott in Handley, ‘Interview’, 104. 61. Writing Pissarro’s life, therefore, Walcott complicates the notion of ‘centre’ and its relation to the ‘periphery’, and questions received accounts of who is entitled to claim as his or her own what the so-called ‘centre’ has to offer as legacy while rethinking the very basis of this claim (for more on this see Fumagalli, Caribbean Perspectives, in particular 105–34). 62. Shikes and Harper, Pissarro, 18–19, 21–3, 35. 63. Shikes and Harper, Pissarro, 41. 64. Pissarro, ‘Introduction’, 6; Brettell, Pissarro’s People, 70. 65. Brettell, ‘Camille Pissarro’, 15. 66. Adler, Camille Pissarro, 14–15, 17. 67. Adler, Camille Pissarro, 31; Brettell, Pissarro’s People, 69, 75. 68. Adler, Camille Pissarro, 14. 69. Nord, Impressionists, 84. 70. Brettell, ‘Camille Pissarro’, 15. 71. Rewald, Camille Pissarro, 23. 72. Brettell, ‘Camille Pissarro’, 12. 73. ‘Kind’ and ‘kindness’ are etymologically related to the Icelandic kyn meaning ‘genus’, ‘race’ (allied to the Latin ‘genus’), so, as I have pointed out elsewhere, Walcott’s choice of word also signposts a firm disruption of essentialism (Fumagalli, Caribbean Perspectives, 121–2, 168). 74. Cézanne, letter to Emile Bernard (1905), in Correspondance, 314.

Painting (and) the Caribbean    365 75. Shikes and Harper, Pissarro, 67; Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, 13. 76. Holroyd in Cohen, ‘Art of Biography’. 77. Walcott in Handley, ‘Interview’, 104. 78. King, Derek Walcott, 627. 79. Walcott in Dual Muse, 1999, 19. At the symposium Walcott read a first draft of sections from Tiepolo’s Hound which was still a work in progress at the time, preceded by a short introduction (19–38). 80. Walcott in Dual Muse, 1999, 19. 81. Walcott seems to have wanted to include his visual works in his poems also on previous occasions: in one set of galley proofs for Another Life housed at the library of the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies are included three drawings by Walcott: a tanker passing in front of a view of St Lucia’s Pitons, a peasant with a shovel on his shoulder, and a portrait of Van Gogh (Baugh and Nepaulsing, Derek Walcott: Another Life, 215–17). In the Derek Walcott Papers, TFRBL, one can find a draft of opening pages marked ‘BOOK I’ and ‘BOOK THREE’ of Omeros with, respectively, an unfinished ­watercolour of a beach in St Lucia and an ink drawing of a fisherman in a boat (MsColl 00136, Box 64, folder 13, item 47 and Box 64, folder 13, item 1). In the same box (folder 18, item 29) there is another ink drawing of a group of fishermen ready to cut trees in order to make canoes, dated 31 December 1989, which would have been an appropriate illustration for the opening of the poem. 82. Pissarro was not amongst Walcott’s preferred artists when he was a young apprentice but was an artist he learnt to appreciate later in life (Walcott, personal communication, 29 October 2016). In the 1990s, in fact, he tried to learn directly from Pissarro as witnessed by a watercolour ‘entitled’ After Pissarro (dated 22 December 1990) where he carefully tested his washes (TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 64, item 3). 83. In his mural for Piarco Airport entitled Savannah Life, Hinkson also includes a scene from one of these ordinary training days in order to capture the atmosphere around and in the Queen’s Park Savannah. 84. In The Last Carnival, the French Creole Clodia and the Black groom Sydney share a deep love of horses but their roles, expectations and access to horses are defined by the race and class hierarchical division of the society in which they operate. 85. Primary exemplifications are drawings in Conté crayon like Woodbrook House (1977), John John (1982), Old Roxborough (parts demolished) (1986) or Perseverance Estate (demolished) (1977). 86. Coins were prevalent in Pissarro’s approach to landscape and Walcott here seems to share the French master’s preference for specific, ordinary spots rather than for panoramic sweeps. 87. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise, 39–45. 88. In the poem ‘Laventille’, Walcott had described the titular neighbourhood as ‘the height of poverty / for the desperate and black’ where ‘lives revolve round prison, graveyard, church’ and are ‘fixed in the unalterable groove / of grinding poverty’. It is a poem shaped by Walcott’s rage (a word he uses twice in the poem) towards the effects of the Middle Passage: however, if ‘degrading’

366    Derek Walcott’s Painters conditions (‘the inheritors of the middle passage stewed / five to a room, still clamped below their hatch’) are effectively described – but not lingered on – the courage of those ‘who suffered, who were killed, // and who survive’ is equally brought to the fore (CA32–5). 89. In Martinique Landscape (1887), for example, we are presented with an uninhabited landscape made up of tropical vegetation alone from which Gauguin deliberately edits out all traces of the city of Saint-Pierre (and, with it, ‘European civilisation’) which would have been visible from his standpoint. Saint-Pierre, at the time, was the cultural capital of the island (nicknamed the ‘Paris of the West Indies’) and the main port of transit for the construction of the Panama Canal (Fig. 6.1). 90. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise, 37. 91. A notable exception might be the Church of the Holy Family in Jacmel, Roseau Valley (Fig. 2.7), where St. Omer’s altarpiece facilitates a conversation between architectural building and its surroundings (see Chapters 2 and 7). 92. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise, 49, 45–51. 93. As Erickson has astutely noted, Pissarro’s inclusion of the Louvre in his Parisian landscape was also characterised by notable reluctance and ambivalence (‘Artists’ Self-Portraiture’, 232–3). 94. Bearden, ‘Rectangular Structure’, 129. 95. Walcott had been fascinated by domino players for a long time: on 15 July 1988, for example, he quickly sketched in pencil a group of men playing the game (TFRBL, McColl 00136, Box 64, item 5). 96. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, 30. 97. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, 36, fig. 27. 98. Clark, ‘House of Cards’, 15. 99. Other details which appear in the Barnes Foundation painting are also absent in The Metropolitan Museum of Art version, namely, the hanging cloth on the right, the lower half of a picture frame in the middle of the back wall, and the shelf with a small vase to the left. While The Metropolitan Museum of Art version still includes four pipes hanging on the back wall, those at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and in a private collection contain no background details. 100. I have observed elsewhere how Walcott’s decentring strategies also resonate with other works by Tiepolo like the Treppenhaus ceiling at Würzburg (1753), John the Baptist Beheaded (1733–4), The Finding of Moses (late 1730s), The Meeting of Anthony and Cleopatra (c. 1745–7) and The Banquet of Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1743–4) – the last two mentioned in the poem itself (Fumagalli, Caribbean Perspectives, 105–9, 118; TH124). 101. Walcott, ‘Where I Live’, 30. 102. Walcott, ‘Isla Incognita’, 56, 57. 103. Walcott, ‘Where I Live’, 36. 104. Walcott ‘Isla Incognita’, 51–2. 105. Walcott ‘Isla Incognita’, 52. 106. See for example, Simmons’s Fishboats (1940) and Boat on the beach (c. 1940) and Hinkson’s Boat Belly (2004), Two Pirogues (2003), Sinking Pirogue (2003), Barbados Ice Boats (1979) and Buccoo Boats (1998).

Painting (and) the Caribbean    367 107. These different worlds were also contrasted in Omeros where Walcott explains that ‘the only slaughter / that brought … delight’ to his Achille was the ‘slaughter’ of fish which, as a fisherman, he conducted ‘from necessity’ (O320), thus showing the profound difference between the world of his ‘heroes’ and the Greek poet’s since these lines respond directly to the beginning of the Iliad which is focused on the homicidal ‘anger’ of Achilles who ‘hurled down to Hades many mighty souls of heroes, making their bodies the prey to dogs and birds’ feasting’ (Homer, The Odyssey, 3). 108. We have seen some examples from Simmons’s works in Chapter 2; for Homer see, for instance, Sloop Nassau (1899), Nassau (1899), Shark Fishing (1885), The Conch Divers (1885) (Fig. 5.4), Sponge Fishing (1885), The Turtle Pound (1898), Rum Cay (1898–9). 109. Hinkson too has shown an interest in this subject: St Lucia Coast (1985), Bathers, Tobago (2004) and Bathing in Mt Irvine (2003), and Late Afternoon (2003). 110. The white turbans were a prerogative of the Turks while the Jews were supposed to wear yellow ones: see Belon qtd in Braudel, Mediterranean, v. 2, 806. 111. In the first panel, Niccolò da Tolentino is leading the Florentine cavalry, but he has just dispatched two messengers (depicted at centre at the top of the painting whilst galloping away) to ask his allies to hurry as he is confronting a superior army. In the second panel, Niccolò da Tolentino unseats his enemy Bernardino della Carda (c. 1435–40), while the third part of the triptych shows us the counter-attack of Michelotto da Cotignola (1435–40?). 112. See, amongst many others, Homer’s Cuban Hillside (1885), Royal Palms, Cuba (1885), Palm Trees, Bahamas (c. 1888–9), The Palm Tree (1890), Palm Tree, Nassau (1898); Gauguin’s Sketch of Figures and Foliage (recto) and Profile of Charles Laval with Palm Tree and Other Sketches (verso) (1887), Martinique Landscape (1887) (Fig. 6.1), Palm Trees and Calabash Trees (1887), Path under the Palms (1887), Laval’s Martinique Landscape (1887), Pissarro’s Landscape, St Thomas (1856), Buildings amidst Tropical Vegetation (n.d.), Palm Tree Tops (n.d.), Coconut Tree (n.d.), Palm Tree (n.d.) (Pissarro or Melbye – u ­ nattributed), Fritz Melbye’s The Plantation ‘Mary’s Fancy’ at Saint Croix (c. 1852), Encampment in a Forest (n.d.), but also Simmons’s Lavoutte Bay (1936) (Fig. 2.1), and many other paintings where palms feature prominently. 113. Cooper, Winslow Homer, 141. 114. Thompson, ‘Black Skin’; Eye for the Tropics, 103, 141. 115. In the catalogue Dual Muse (1997), one of the three watercolours by Walcott, Man on the Wall under Palm Tree Looking Out at the Sea, is in fact the same painting that in Tiepolo’s Hound appears under the title Boy on a Wall, Rat Island (Fig. 6.14). The original title might convey even more clearly the longing for ‘abroad’ of the young Pissarro and other young Caribbean artists, but the second title illuminates Walcott’s intention to show how the inner turmoil of his character chimed with his own as it re-anchors the figure on his island and links him explicitly to the (for Walcott) hugely symbolic location of Rat Island. 116. A different take on what seems to be the same location is included in the catalogue Dual Muse (1997), where one of the two untitled watercolours by Walcott (also dated 1991), represents an English garden with, on the left,

368    Derek Walcott’s Painters the corner of a wooden sun-house, on the right a low brick wall, and slightly ­off-centre, to the left, a flowerbed with red flowers with a white classical statue with broken arms. In the foreground lies what appears to be a slightly deflated leather football which contributes to deflate the pomposity of the image. 117. The two paintings in question were completed in 1982 and 1985: until the early 1990s, horse races were frequently held in the savannah. 118. This was not Pissarro’s last self-portrait: in the Tate Gallery one can find one dated 1903. 119. Walcott in Handley, ‘Interview’, 105. 120. Walcott in Handley, ‘Interview’, 104. 121. Handley, New World Poetics. 122. Plumwood, Environmental Culture. 123. Savory, ‘Toward a Caribbean Ecopoetics’. 124. Caribbean Birding Trail. http://www.caribbeanbirdingtrail.org/caribbeanbirds/birdlife/ (accessed 8 June 2021). 125. It has been reported, for example, that in 1902, ‘about a ton and a half of Great Egret plumes were sold in London to decorate women’s hats, a quantity that would have required the slaughter of close to 200,000 adult Great Egrets and thus the destruction of two or three times that number of eggs and young to which the adults were devoting themselves during that season’ (Slatkin, ‘Catalog entries’, 210). 126. Slatkin, ‘Catalog entries’, 208. 127. Irmscher, Poetics, 189. 128. Tyler, Audubon, 2. 129. Craven, Treasury, 451. 130. Craven, Treasury, 450; Baugh and Nepaulsingh, ‘What the Poem’, 213–14. 131. It is no surprise that George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, for a long time, entertained plans for creating a ballet based on Audubon’s life and work. 132. Audubon, ‘Account of the Method of Drawing’, 756. 133. Gopnik, ‘Critic at Large’, 96. 134. John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography or An Account of the Habits of The Birds of the United States of America; Accompanied by Descriptions of the Objects Represented in the work Entitled The Birds of America, And Interspersed with Delineations of American Scenery and Manners, 5 vols (Edinburgh: Adam Black, 1831–9), vol. 1, v. From now on references to this text will be given as OB followed by the volume and page number in parentheses in the text. 135. Rhodes, John James Audubon, 3–4. 136. Gopnik, ‘Critic at Large’, 102. 137. All the plates for The Birds of America have been made available online by the University of Pittsburgh as part of the Darlington Digital Library (http://digital. library.pitt.edu/a/audubon/plates.html (accessed 8 October 2019)) and are accompanied by the text of Audubon’s Ornithological Biography from which I quote in this chapter. From now on I will be referring to these plate numbers in parentheses in the text. Audubon appears as sole author, but it is useful to bear in mind that the Scottish naturalist William MacGillivray edited the text,

Painting (and) the Caribbean    369 corrected the grammar and helped to write the scientific descriptions (Rhodes, John James Audubon, 345). 138. Stebbins, ‘Audubon’s Drawings’, 19–20; Slatkin, ‘Catalog entries’, 210. 139. Audubon, ‘My Style’, 763; Fishman Snyder, ‘Complexity’, 60–1. 140. Slatkin, ‘Catalog entries’, 214. 141. Irmscher, Poetics, 198, 313, n.19; Stebbins, ‘Audubon’s Drawings’, 3. 142. Irmscher, Poetics, 195; Rhodes, John James Audubon, 57. 143. It is worth mentioning, however, that he was proud to include an impressive list of fellowships and memberships to learned societies on the title page of both Birds of America and Ornithological Biography. 144. Audubon, ‘Mississippi River Journal’, 3–4. 145. Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 67. 146. Irmscher explains that this aspect is particularly emphasised in the Royal Octavo edition of Birds of America where the plates were rearranged in a different order (Poetics of Natural History, 223–5). 147. Hughes, American Visions, 153. 148. Meyers, ‘Observations’, 53, 50. 149. Audubon, ‘Myself’, 765–6. 150. Gopnik, ‘Critic at Large’, 97. 151. Irmscher, Poetics, 206. 152. Irmscher, Poetics, 214. 153. Hughes, American Visions, 153. 154. Irmscher, Poetics, 227–31, 207–8. 155. See, for example John Syme’s portrait (1826), George Peter Alexander Healy’s portrait (1838), John Woodhouse Audubon’s portraits (c. 1841 – with Victor Audubon 1843), and Thomas Waterman Wood’s portrait (1893). It is possible that the hunter in the background in Snowy Heron or White Egret (plate 242; Fig. 6.16a) might have been drawn by Audubon’s assistant George Lehman whose work, however, was rarely credited by Audubon (Stebbins, ‘Audubon’s Drawings’, 19). Incidentally, the ‘wild’ protagonist of Cooper’s The Pioneers, much like Daniel Boone, the settler of Kentucky, was an inspiration for Audubon (Irmscher, Poetics, 214). 156. Audubon, Labrador Journal, 415. 157. Hughes, American Visions, 153. 158. Warren, Audubon, a Vision (New York: Random House, 1969), 30. From now on references to this poem will be given in parentheses in the text. 159. Audubon, ‘Account of the Method of Drawing’, 753. 160. Warren in Sitt, ‘Interview’, 475. 161. Welty, ‘A Still Moment’, 92. 162. Audubon, ‘My Style’, 760. 163. Audubon, ‘My Style’, 760. 164. Audubon, ‘My Style’, 761. 165. Irmscher, Poetics, 218. 166. Audubon, ‘My Style’, 753–4, 757. 167. Audubon, ‘My Style’, 761. 168. Irmscher, Poetics, 206–7. 169. Hart, Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods, 48.

370    Derek Walcott’s Painters 70. Walcott, ‘Animals, Elemental Tales’, 271. 1 171. Walcott in Fumagalli, ‘Permanent Immediacy’, 282. Walcott’s (self-)warning against a writer/artist’s ‘arrogance’, or ‘spiritual vanity’ is further complicated by the fact that, in the collection, the word ‘egrets’ often rhymes with ‘regrets’. 172. Berger, About Looking, 6. 173. Bosing, Complete Paintings–Bosch, 7–9. 174. Cuttler, Hieronymus Bosch, 183. 175. Cuttler, Hieronymus Bosch, 183. 176. Falkenburg, Land of Unlikeness, 152–3. 177. Bosing, Complete Paintings–Bosch, 57. 178. Walcott in Bruckner, ‘Poem in Homage’, 397.

Chapter 7

Poems ‘Out Of’ Paintings: Towards an Ekphrasis of Relation

First Steps: Immortalisation, Delight and Homage – From Rembrandt Van Rijn’s The Polish Rider to Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa and Romare Bearden’s The Obeah’s Dawn In 1984, when Walcott was asked to write a poem for the opening page of the catalogue for Bearden’s exhibition Rituals of Obeah, he declared that he had never ‘written poems out of a painting’ before,1 a remark which might sound surprising if one considers Walcott’s lifelong preoccupation with the visual arts. Nonetheless, when he wrote ‘To Romare Bearden’, if Walcott had often commented on distinctive qualities of an artist’s general performance – Hollander calls this mode ekphrastic ‘capriccio’2 – he had not written many poems entirely focused on one painting and had seldom engaged in a specific and sustained ekphrastic effort. The Oxford Classical Dictionary defines ekphrasis as ‘the rhetorical description of a work of art’ but ‘description’ is a rather vague term: practically speaking, for example, when does description end and narrative or interpretation begin? Does ‘description’ refer only to the subject of the painting, or does it extend to the technique of a painting, its handling of shapes and colours, the discourses and counter-discourses that it promotes or challenges, or the reactions it might trigger in viewers? Is the subject of a painting only what we see? What if a poem is more concerned with what is left out of the picture’s frame? And what shall we make of Walcott’s choice of prepositions in his reference to ‘To Romare Bearden’: does ‘out of a painting’ suggest a relationship between the visual and the verbal where the emphasis is placed on continuity rather than simply on reference? At the same time, does the very effort implicit in wrestling a poem ‘out of’ a painting indicate that this continuity does not presuppose full translatability and transparency between the visual and the verbal, and demands respect for their individual differences? As we have seen, when dealing with paintings, Walcott was interested in the narratives that emerged from the relation between painting and viewers

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but also in those that the image might have contained, conveyed or hidden. Walcott was well aware that when one looks at a painting, ‘watching’ it becoming itself, one also confronts oneself in relation to that painting in the moment and place in which the encounter takes place and in the context of one’s individual and collective past and present. As a poet/painter, Walcott often paid attention to the handling of technique in his response to works of art, but he also reflected on the image’s status, on the narratives it might have harboured or inspired, on what one might have been conditioned to see and not see when looking at it, and on its reception. Walcott’s engagement with the visual arts, in other words, always went well beyond simple ‘description’, broadening the scope of the dialogue between images and words. It is reasonable, therefore, to expect his relationship with ekphrasis to be predicated along similar lines. Scholars agree that the first example of ekphrasis is to be found in Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad: this has been defined as ‘notional’ ekphrasis since the shield was never a real object in the first place but the fruit of Homer’s (whoever he was) imagination.3 Despite the fact that its origins go back so far in time, ekphrasis really owes its popularity to the much more recent creation of galleries and museums and to what Walter Benjamin has named ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’,4 all of which have made paintings and works of art accessible to the public and played a crucial part in Walcott’s own relationship to the visual arts. Currently, one of the most widely accepted definitions of ekphrasis is the one offered by James Heffernan in Museum of Words, namely, ‘verbal representation of visual representation’,5 a formulation which implies the ‘otherness’ of the visual vis-à-vis the verbal while assuming the representational aspect of the visual work and taking for granted, for its verbal counterpart, verisimilitude, similarity, mimesis and translatability. Heffernan’s suggestive title refers to the museum of words ‘about’ real or imaginary paintings that practitioners of ekphrasis have created over the years. Walcott’s work is never mentioned amongst Heffernan’s primary exemplifications but, during his career, Walcott made his own distinctive contributions to this ‘museum of words’. As a matter of fact, if for Murray Krieger ekphrasis is a ‘miracle … because a sequence of actions filled with befores and afters such as language alone can trace seems frozen into an instant’s vision’ and, at the same time, ‘a mirage because only the illusion of such an impossible picture can be suggested by the poem’s words’,6 one could argue that Walcott’s search for ‘the paradoxical flash of an instant / in which every facet was caught / in a crystal of ambiguities’ (AL58) reveals a predisposition to credit the ‘miracle’, while his writing about paintings harbours and is sustained by a desire to concretise the ‘mirage’ by painstakingly unpacking it, unfolding it, making it ‘explicit’ in words. After all, for Walcott ‘one epiphanic detail’ could ‘illuminate an entire epoch’ (TH8) and he was ‘deeply convinced of the reality of poetry’ which he considered ‘greater than … the “real” reality’.7

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Over time there has been no actual consensus on how ekphrasis conjugates the relationship between the visual and the verbal. Positing the existence of a ‘sisterly’ bond linking the two arts, some have argued that ekphrastic poems make the ‘silent’ works of visual art ‘speak out’,8 while W. T. J. Mitchell has categorised three different attitudes one can assume vis-à-vis the relationship between the visual and the verbal: ‘ekphrastic hope’, or the hope to substitute the visual with the verbal; ‘ekphrastic indifference’, namely the acceptance that establishing such reciprocity is an enterprise doomed to failure; and ‘ekphrastic fear’, which, instead, reframes any suggestion of reciprocity between the visual and the verbal as ‘dangerous promiscuity’ that should be prevented or at least policed.9 Following Mitchell’s argument in Iconology (1986), Heffernan opens Museum of Words by casting the relationship between literature and the visual arts as ‘essentially paragonal’, that is as a ‘struggle for dominance between the image and the word’10 modelled on the tradition of ‘paragone’ (from the Italian paragone, ‘comparison’), a rhetorical debate aimed at establishing the superiority of a form of art over the others,11 and argues that ekphrasis ambivalently tries to contain the appeal of the image with the authority of the word at the same time in which it testifies to, and celebrates, the power of the visual. Walcott’s response to Bearden’s The Obeah’s Dawn (Fig. 5.2) does celebrate the power of (Bearden’s) visual and seems to be neither hampered by the fear of promoting an unhealthy promiscuity between words and images nor tainted by a defeatism that would deem futile any attempt to produce a reading of this particular work or, one can surmise, of images as a whole. Walcott here does not try to contain the appeal of the visual but builds on it by putting poem and image in conversation both verbally (it refers to Bearden’s painting directly) and visually. In Bearden’s watercolour, for example, the white of the paper is allowed to become part of the composition and the same happens in Walcott’s poem where, as the lines at the centre of the poem contract, the white of the page becomes part of the poem’s drama and enhances its foregrounding of the role of silence in the ritual – the shortest line is ‘Dawn bleeds without a sound’.12 The irregular pattern of rhyme following the first rhyming couplet echoes the dissolution of the obeah woman into a trance rendered ‘visible’ in the dissolution of forms in Bearden’s watercolour. Walcott does say that the poem ‘came … right out of Romare’s work’,13 yet he is not interested in simply mimicking the painting – he believed that ‘any poem that mimetically tries to paint, fails’14 – but, rather, in bridging the gap between the verbal and visual by drawing our attention to the visual dimension and appeal of printed pages. Walcott’s ‘To Romare Bearden’, furthermore, is not shaped by the poet’s ‘hope’ to reassert the verbal’s authority over the visual by substituting the latter with the former as, strictly speaking, should happen with ekphrasis, where words and image are not meant to appear side by side and the visual should be conjured up by the power of words that must make us see the

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image with our mind’s eye. The publication for which the poem was commissioned, the catalogue of Bearden’s exhibition Rituals of Obeah, features in fact eighteen of Bearden’s watercolours, including The Obeah’s Dawn, the painting ‘out of’ which Walcott’s poem originates. Walcott knew very well, therefore, that readers would have had access to poem and painting(s) simultaneously. ‘To Romare Bearden’, in this sense, might not even be considered an ekphrastic poem or, rather, it should be viewed as one which questions and challenges some of the ‘established’ rules and central tenets of ekphrasis, particularly the paragonal principle and its correlations. After all, the poem begins by praising the painter for the exactness with which he renders the titular fleeting moment and ends by arguing for a better understanding of Obeah, showing that Walcott was much less interested in entering an imaginary agon in which to conduct a struggle for mastery on the side of the verbal than with developing a dialogue between image and words aimed at honouring Bearden (as the poem’s title itself suggests), and at celebrating the shared values of a poet and painter determined to recognise the significance of a practice all too often dismissed (even demonised) as marginal, dangerous and worthless.15 Prior to ‘To Romare Bearden’, one could argue that Walcott experimented with ekphrasis also in 1958, when he gave Scene Five of Drums and Colours the same title as Millais’s The Boyhood of Raleigh (Fig. 4.2), the only specific image he identified as one of the four emblematic visual sources of his play (DC176). For a writer keen to acknowledge – but also to contain – the allure of the visual in order to celebrate the irresistible power, even the superiority, of the verbal, The Boyhood of Raleigh can offer an excellent springboard. At least at first sight, in fact, it seems to be an image which, paradoxically, captures and reveals the seductive force of words. As the sailor emphatically points towards the horizon in the backdrop, the two boys do not direct their gaze accordingly but continue to look straight at the sailor storyteller who holds their attention thanks to his evocative and enthralling account. A playwright like Walcott, however, could not miss the performative gesticulation of the sailor and the presence of ‘props’ in the foreground (for example, the model ship, anchor, dead toucans, and bowl covered in feathers). Similarly, he could not fail to notice that the wall which separates the ‘action’ from the generic backdrop of the background creates the illusion of a staged representation with costumed actors that relies on the magic of theatrical makebelieve to ensnare not just the young boys but also the viewers. Acutely aware that, imbricated as it was in colonial discourse, Millais’s The Boyhood of Raleigh is, as Mitchell would put it, using Nelson Goodman as a springboard, a ‘worldmaking’16 (emphasis in the text) image rather than simply a world-mirroring one, Walcott engages with it to bring to light precisely the ‘worlds’ it occluded. He then proceeds to counter the image’s authority, not by subverting it just with the force of the verbal but by fully mobilising the power of the spoken word, stage action, settings and costumes

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that it evoked and so successfully exploited. In this sense, therefore, the scene in Drums and Colours which shares its title with the painting can be seen as an experiment with ekphrasis understood, acted out and expanded on as embodied performance rather than solely as verbal ‘description’. The struggle which sustains and shapes this experiment is not a paragonal competition between media but, first and foremost, a clash of Old World’s colonial and New World’s anti-colonial perspectives. As we have seen, in the ‘staged World(re)making’ of Scene Five, marginalised realities and people (from the New World) are given both voice and embodied presence (Paco) and allowed to bring forward their story of grief, dispossession and displacement which were formerly silenced by (an Old-World-centred) mystifying perspective (DC176–87). A few years later, Walcott tried his hand at a more traditional form of ekphrasis with two poems, ‘The Hurricane’ and ‘The Polish Rider’, both published in In a Green Night (1962). In ‘The Hurricane’, subtitled ‘After Hokusai’, Walcott gives shape to his desire to build on the ‘resonances’ between Japanese art and cinema and the reality of St Lucia since, as we have seen, he found the Japanese ‘rain forests’, ‘bamboo groves’, ‘woodcutters and charcoal burners’ both inspirational and expedient for his representations of local reality and Afro-Caribbean culture (AWA). The exact image the poem engages with (or is ‘after’) is not explicitly specified and never directly referenced, but both title and subject matter indicate that, most likely, it was Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa (1829–33) (Fig. 7.1) where, famously, three express cargo boats crossing the bay from the fishing ground of Awa Province to deliver fresh fish to the city of Edo are dwarfed and threatened by an enormous wave that is about to break. Despite the clear and present danger in which they found themselves, the fishermen appear calm, confident and focused on rowing as they attempt to dodge the perilous wave. The lack of rain and the presence of Mount Fuji beyond the curve of the wave renew the hope that the storm will soon end, and the fishermen will reach the shore safely. Walcott’s poem takes us instead to a Caribbean shore battered by a hurricane complete with ‘spume and fury’ and ‘wild waves’: as the poet observes the fury of the elements, his attention is caught by an ‘old fisherman dancing on his barge’ who defies them (GN69). The poem ends by reassuring us that the man will not be hurt, but also by claiming that he will feel a ‘strange sorrow when all storms are ended’ (GN69). Walcott’s switch from ‘storm’ (line 8) to ‘all storms’ in the last line transcends the specific moment, turning the poem into a celebration of life, in spite of all its troubles (or even because of them). What Walcott was really ‘after’ when writing this poem was Hokusai’s ability to appropriately represent the fortitude, courage, resilience and endurance that characterise the fishermen in Under the Wave off Kanagawa, traits he also considered crucial as far the fishermen of St Lucia and Caribbean people as a whole are concerned. The poem, however, can

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also be seen as Walcott’s way to reflect on his decision to write a poem ‘after’ a painting, particularly, in this case, a painting so famous it did not even need to be directly named to be conjured up in his readers’ minds. Arguably, if the preposition ‘after’ in the subtitle could be initially taken to signpost the poem’s derivative status, Walcott’s ‘The Hurricane’ subtly requalifies the relationship between words and image (what is going after what and to what effect?) by capitalising on the dynamic tensions at the core of Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa. Unidirectionality, in fact, is carefully disrupted in both image and poem: if wave and hurricane seem to be ‘after’ the men on their tiny boats or barge, the fishermen too, moving towards rather than away from the elements they are determined to withstand, are ‘after’ the wave and the storm’s ‘hollow boasts of cataclysmic sound’ (GN69). The fact that ‘Come’ is the first word of the poem signals that Walcott, addressing us directly, wants us to take part in and feel this tension while sharing his point of view and experience both as hurricane witness and ekphrastic poet. Aptly, the other two imperatives directed to us – ‘Find’ and ‘Study’ – underscore the progressive refinement of a way of seeing and understanding (GN69). Arguably, in fact, if Walcott’s anxiety (or in Mitchell’s parlance, ‘fear’) that his words might be ‘dwarfed’ by an overpowering and popular image is encapsulated in the threat posed by the titular wave and hurricane, and inherent in the subject matter of the image and the poem it inspired, the poem also reveals that the main emotion experienced by the fisherman who faces the stormy sea is ‘delight’, leaving us to assume (and inviting us to appreciate) that, at least on this occasion, this is the main feeling Walcott has (or was ‘after’) whilst practicing ekphrasis. ‘The Hurricane – After Hokusai’, therefore, reminds us that fear, hope or indifference are not the only emotions triggered by the ekphrastic challenge: as Walcott insists here, but also, as we will see, elsewhere, ‘delight’ or excitement also play a crucial part. With ‘The Polish Rider’ which follows directly from ‘The Hurricane’ in the 1962 collection – testifying to the fact that Walcott was particularly keen to investigate the potential of ekphrastic poetry at the time – Walcott addresses the famous Rembrandt painting with which the poem shares its title (GN70). In this case, Walcott’s ekphrastic response is enriched by considerations on the relationship between artist, subject, model and beholders, and between human mortality, the immortality of the arts, and the complex, deeply ambivalent, process of ‘immortalisation’. Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider (1655) (Fig. 7.2) is to be found amongst the holdings of The Frick Collection in New York, where it is possible that Walcott might have seen it during his first visit to the city.17 The Frick Collection, assembled by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, was opened to the general public in 1935: it is unique in its arrangement because the works of art it contains are still displayed as Frick enjoyed them and not according national origin, historical period, specific movements or themes. Rembrandt’s oil on canvas, in fact, hangs in the West Gallery,

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Figure 7.1  Under the Wave off Kanagawa, 1829–33, Hokusai Katsushika, colour woodcut, print, 25.4 × 37.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal.

Figure 7.2  The Polish Rider, c. 1655, Rembrandt van Rijn, oil on canvas, 116.8 × 134.9 cm. The Frick Collection, New York, Henry Clay Frick Bequest. Photo: The Frick Collection.

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sharing the space with paintings by Turner, Veronese, El Greco, Francisco Goya, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot or Diego Velázquez, but also with Italian chairs, centre tables and cassoni from the sixteenth or nineteenth centuries, bronzes by Benvenuto Cellini, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Willem Van Tetrode and others. Walcott, therefore, might have been inspired by the museum’s ‘free’ association of artefacts when he wrote his poem, or he might have been consulting artbooks like Arthur Mayger Hind’s Rembrandt18 which argues, as his poem does, that Rembrandt’s rider is redolent of Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil, an engraving which, however, is not at The Frick Collection (GN70). Other possible sources, since Walcott identifies the figure in Rembrandt’s painting as the ‘young Titus’ (Rembrandt’s son), could be works like James Howard Bridge’s Portraits and Personalities in the Frick Galleries (1929) – which also plays fast and loose with ekphrasis – and where the author imagines that it is Rembrandt himself who, in ‘conversation’ with other artists and their portrayed subjects, declares that his mysterious Polish rider was in fact his ‘dear lad Titus, who survived his marriage only a few short months’.19 It is not unusual for ekphrastic poems, in fact, to respond not only to images but also to the titles, captions, curatorial commentary, art criticism and arthistorical annotations which accompany them in museums, galleries and artbooks, and, as such, inform (and frame) viewers’ and poets’ understanding and experience of paintings: in John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, for example, scholars and critics are explicitly referred to.20 Walcott’s ‘The Polish Rider’ proposes that the father/painter is a ‘murderer’ because the rider is destined to die once he enters the nearby ‘dark woods’ or the ‘symbolical forest’ which has been the grave of so many knights before (GN70). Walcott must have been building on the information he had found in previous textualisations (albeit without acknowledging these sources) since, in the seemingly unfinished background of Rembrandt’s canvas, one only perceives a bare mountainous landscape with buildings or ruins towards which the rider appears to be directed; forest and Death, who is also riding a horse, are instead clearly featured in Dürer’s work. The poem’s drama, therefore, depends on Walcott’s ability to create a narrative by blurring and elaborating on the two images. The ‘sure gaze’ of the youth – remindful of the solidity and resolute demeanour of Dürer’s knight, who has left the devil behind and refuses to be distracted by Death – might suggest that he believes that, frozen in the moment, he will never enter the fatal forest (GN70). In Bridge’s fictional exchanges, it is worth noting, a similar point was made by Ottaviano Canevari, whose portrait by Anthony van Dick is also amongst the holdings of The Frick Collection. To comfort the artist mourning his son, in fact, Canevari declares that Titus will be ‘living forever in this great painting’ and, to prove to the baffled Rembrandt that his previously neglected painting is now held in great esteem by Bridge’s contemporaries, Canevari also recites an ekphrastic poem devoted to it.21 Entitled ‘The

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Polish Rider (by Rembrandt)’ this poem had been published in the ‘Poetry’ section of The Spectator on 23 July 1910 and signed F. Warre Cornish (presumably the scholar and writer Francis Warre Warre-Cornish): its author speculates on the rider’s destination (‘Does he ride to a bridal, a triumph, a dance or a fray’), describes the rider’s demeanour (‘he goes so alert, yet so careless, so stern and so gay?’), anticipates his possible romantic adventures (‘Heart conqueror, surely – his own is not given awhile / Till she comes who shall win for herself that inscrutable smile’) and laments the fact that nobody knows who he really is anymore (‘forgotten’).22 The poem also assumes a tragic ending (‘For he rides into darkness’) and, whilst trying to guess the circumstances of the knight’s death (‘Did he … fall in a splendid campaign? / Did he fly … and perish, ingloriously slain?’), it accepts the mystery that envelops him (‘the story shall never be told’).23 The verses declaimed by Canevari have very little in common with Walcott’s poem, and there is no hard proof that Bridge’s book was one of the sources Walcott had consulted when writing the poem. Yet, it is possible that, had he been familiar with it, Bridge’s juxtaposition of words and image – in Portraits and Personalities in the Frick Galleries a reproduction of Rembrandt’s painting can be found in the page preceding Warre-Cornish’s poems – might have encouraged Walcott to produce his own textualisation of ‘The Polish Rider’. Walcott’s poem echoes Bridge’s Canevari’s (cliché) celebration of art’s power to render its subjects immortal when it describes Titus looking back, with ‘assurance’, not only at his father/(alleged)murderer/creator, who is plagued by ‘worn vision’ (and therefore subject to decay and mortality), but also at the beholder/ekphrastic poet who verbalises what Walcott insists is the painting’s (plus engraving’s) narrative. Walcott’ lines, however, insist that we do not disregard the trajectory and mobility implicit in the painting which complicate any by-default alignment of images with stillness, eternity and immortality. Prepositions like ‘to’ and ‘towards’ and verbs like ‘heads’ or ‘beckon’, in fact, imply directionality and recast the moment as transitionary rather than fixed. Additionally, the identification of the rider with Titus reminds viewers that the immortality imparted on the youth by the painting is a mere illusion: like his father, the poet and the viewers, Titus was not spared by time and death – his demise actually preceded his father’s. ‘Skill’ and ‘despair’, therefore are presented as two kinds of ‘assurance’ jockeying for position. Even if we concede that Titus was painted by Rembrandt so skilfully that he has the last word and the last gaze, and ‘delightfully’ escapes Death by being suspended forever just outside the ‘symbolical forest’, ‘despair’, embodied by ‘the grey horse, Death’ on which Titus is astride, troubles the scene and ‘disturbs [viewers] more than the youth delights’: the ‘cadaverous steed’, in fact, not Titus, is what mortal beholders, for whom eternity is less compelling than mortality, ultimately will concern themselves with, and will be concerned by (GN70). One could argue that this virtuoso performance which addresses two images simultaneously might be animated by the desire to demonstrate the

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primacy of the verbal which can tease out these contrasting narratives. Yet, the poem seems to push a different agenda: through a triangulation of perspectives (father/painter’s, subject/model’s, and poet/beholders’), the poem discovers and, simultaneously, uncovers, that the painting’s (allegedly) eternally young Polish Rider, fundamentally, only exists in the flux of time because he only exists in the gaze of the mortals who, in different ages, ‘read’ the painting in an attempt to tease out its meaning, or, rather, their own. If ‘the present tense exists continually in art’24 and a figure, an object, an ‘epiphanic detail’ can last forever while beholders, hostages to mortality, ebb away (TH8, 119), works of art are nonetheless subjected to change and mutability because ‘failures’ or ‘disasters’ can become masterpieces or vice versa. As Walcott himself puts it, ‘as to what survives, time is the editor … time is the museum that sorts these things out … it may take a long time for a particular artist to be recognized. What is famous can also easily fade.’25 Acknowledging that, ultimately, rather than by the ‘immortal’ art of Rembrandt and, by extension, of Walcott’s poetry, the rider is kept ‘alive’ or ‘murder[ed]’ by future viewers’ continuous engagement with it, the poem does not claim victory on Rembrandt’s image but concludes by delivering the painting to the ‘next age’, which will ‘read’ it from its own perspective, putting future readers and interpreters at the centre of this process, and implicitly acknowledging the transience of Walcott’s own interpretation and verbalisation (GN70).

The Real Faces of Angels: Rethinking Beauty and Truth with Dunstan St. Omer ‘For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, St Lucia’ (Fig. 2.7), discussed in Chapter 2, represents another foray into ekphrastic territory. Here a significant proportion of its lines are devoted to a detail of the titular altar, namely the two figures caught by St. Omer in the middle of a dynamic botay dance (SG52). This detail enabled Walcott to evoke and, at the same time highlight, the differences between, on the one hand, his interpretation and evaluation of St. Omer’s work, and, on the other, the best-known example of ekphrasis in the English language, namely Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820) and its relationship with the ineffable urn it is concerned with. St. Omer’s ‘two earth-brown labourers’ (SG52), in fact, could be seen as figures of eternal anticipation and counterparts to Keats’s ‘forever’ lovers who will never ‘fade’ but cannot ‘kiss’.26 Unlike its predecessor, however, Walcott’s poem proceeds to free them from the fixity of their halted action and reimagines them in a moment that follows the natural fulfilment of desire signposted by their dance, that is in post-climax relaxation on a Sunday afternoon. The precision with which Walcott underlines the physicality of their experience (‘his sweat on her still breasts, / her sweat on his panelled torso’), situates the couple in their specific place (the man has ‘killed snakes’

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and lifted heavy crates of the Roseau Valley’s bananas27), restores the couple to the flux of the temporal (‘Sunday at three o’clock’ is repeated twice in eleven lines, complemented with ‘Sunday afternoon’), and chimes with the way in which St. Omer’s mural opens up a dialogue with the valley in which it is placed (SG53, 54). Walcott’s visual referent, as we have seen, is not a ubiquitous reproduction but an actual altarpiece in a St Lucian church representing local worshippers and their simple life. St. Omer’s mural, in fact, ‘comes from’ the local reality it simultaneously reorders and ‘draws’ to itself, but it also forms an integral part of the building for which it was painted. The altarpiece’s uniqueness, purpose and function are evident to artist, poet and beholders/worshippers, who identify with it and are actually identified in it, an identification reverberated by the other sections of the poem’s foregrounding of St Lucian Frenchand English-based Creoles (SG54, 52, 43–52). Keats’s urn, instead, seems to have been an imaginary object, probably the result of the poet’s collapsing of different Grecian artefacts removed from the place and time in which and for which they were produced, encountered either at the British Museum or via a book of illustrations. In his ode, Keats reveals that he does not know exactly what this decontextualised ‘bride of quietness’ and the ‘unheard melodies’ it contains might have meant to the people for whom it was made, and struggles to understand what it might signify for him: its significance, ultimately, seems to reside solely in its ‘beauty’.28 For most of the ode, the urn remains in absolute silence, a silence the poet repeatedly fails to pierce with ten questions which are left unanswered. When Keats’s urn famously breaks its own silence, it addresses the poet/readers with enigmatic words which have been interpreted in a myriad of different ways. Whatever significance one decides to attach to the urn’s pronouncement and Keats’s decision to end the poem with them, it is clear that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’29 invites us to ponder on the power of ‘beauty’ and its ability to be inherently meaningful regardless of context. The fact that this urn from ancient Greece ‘speaks’ English implicitly reinforces the notion of the unproblematic translatability of the message it contains. St. Omer’s mural is also animated by the interplay of silence and music, or rather silent music and the music of silence: ‘signed with music’, it presides over a valley where ‘nothing can break th[e] silence’ which ‘comes from the wall of the altar-piece’ (SG53–5). As it is the case for Keats’s urn, however, St. Omer’s altarpiece breaks its own silence in the poem: it does so with a declaration of intent and purpose in Latin – ‘ST OMER ME FECIT AETAT … / GLORIA DEI’ – which Walcott reports verbatim and is repeated thirtyeight lines later, further qualified with a comment on the reality of St. Omer’s life as St Lucian artist: ‘ST OMER AD GLORIAM DEI FECIT / in whatever year of his suffering’ (SG53, 55, capitalised in the original). Similarly, the poem explains that the silence that ‘nothing’ but the mural itself ‘can break’ (by making manifest its dimensions and their sources) emanates from its

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walls but also ‘comes from the depth of the world, / from whatever one man believes he knows of God / and the suffering of his kind’ (SG54). This (ostensibly) ‘unbreakable’ silence, moreover, is requalified by the fact that it is neither ‘absolute’ nor ‘Adamic’: if it engulfs the valley where the mural stands, it can also absorb the noise and music produced by gnats and mosquitoes, ‘a boy banging a tin by the river’, and also the St Lucian Creole spoken and sung by the people, as highlighted in the rest of the poem (SG54). Like Walcott’s poem, also a violator of this silence, all these background sounds are reminders that ‘the valley of Roseau is not the Garden of Eden’ but an historical site immersed in the here and now which requires and deserves an art that addresses the here and now (SG54). If Keats’s ekphrasis investigates if and how a single (imaginary) object can encapsulate ‘beauty’ by transcending any specific context and being eternally and universally graspable, Walcott’s lines take a different path. They underscore how art can give both form and purpose to collective and individual experience and ground the aesthetic experience in local reality rather than in a (allegedly) ‘universal’ notion of beauty. It is likely that Walcott was guided to this particular path by Simmons, who believed that West Indians had to reject ‘certain standards of culture’ which would disqualify local artistic expression as valueless and focus instead on producing an art which ‘record[ed]’ their reality and their ‘experiences felt and experienced’.30 Simmons concluded his argument by quoting Keats: ‘the whole can be summed up in the words of Keats: “Beauty is Truth and Truth is Beauty”. A picture of the dirty squalor of the house or room in the slums is beautiful because it is truth.’31 As a matter of fact, neither Walcott nor Simmons ever painted ‘dirty squalor’ – Walcott in fact would not have subscribed fully to Simmons’s pronouncement – but they were nonetheless both fully committed to find a visual and verbal language which would appropriately reflect the ordinary lives of their fellow islanders. The dialogue which Walcott’s lines open up with Keats’s ekphrastic poem reiterates the main concerns of the entire poem and highlights that, like St. Omer himself, the poet was not concerned with atemporal, transhistorical ‘beauty’ but with the beauty embodied in ‘the real faces of angels’ (SG55). These ‘angels’ are the people of the Roseau valley who could and still can recognise themselves in the mural when they attend mass: they are a specific group of viewers enjoying the work in the context for which, in which and from which it was made, not a generic spectatorship who would have access to it everywhere, and at any time, through reproductions. Walcott’s painstaking foregrounding of contextual information in the poem of which ‘For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, St Lucia’ is just a section further illuminates his desire to transmit to his extended readership the importance of this immediate experience. The only ‘truth’ that mattered to Walcott in this poem, therefore, was the commitment with which the mural was painted and the fact that it enabled both painter and congregation to confront their personal and communal suffering and celebrate their resilience in the face

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of it. In ‘For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, St Lucia’, in fact, the verbal is not upheld as a medium which can reveal something the silent artwork it addresses could not or did not want to express. The relationship between the visual and the verbal, which in this case also includes non-­ semantic sounds (the banging on a tin, the buzzing of insects, music), is understood not in abstract terms but as something which depends on the kind of images one confronts and the purpose of such confrontation. Walcott’s poem, much like the one devoted to Bearden, was aimed at commending wholeheartedly the artist’s efforts at honouring his reality, even if this celebration took place in the context of the poet’s sorrowful acceptance that, in St Lucia, his friend’s visual art enjoyed (and still enjoys) an immediacy that his poetry could not easily attain. ‘Beauty’ understood as an eternal, atemporal, ahistorical ideal is also at the core of Walcott’s Watteau-related plays, where the pitfalls of self-­fashioning, (self)mythologising, and ‘world-making’ are thoroughly scrutinised, and where Walcott deploys ‘staged/embodied’ ekphrasis once again in order to investigate the processes that govern the act of ‘seeing’ itself. Whether they situate the figures in Watteau’s The Embarkation (Fig. 3.2) on the island of Cythera or on their way there, Walcott’s characters sound absolutely adamant that Watteau’s figures are frozen in perpetual immobility and ‘atemporal “eternity”’32 and equate stasis with a metropolitan, imported, unalterable ideal of ‘beauty’ which must be longed for, should be imitated, but, ultimately, can never be fully attained. These characters/ekphrastic readers are shown to privilege the narrative of pictorial stasis over any other narrative at the same time in which they confidently assert their power over the image which, they believe, can be easily explained verbally in one (their) way only. Walcott sabotages their approach: he shows that their readings of Watteau’s The Embarkation are the product of a specific way of seeing which betrays an understanding of the relation between present and past informed by a deeply entrenched colonial mentality. Opening up other interpretative (even, as we have seen, open-ended) possibilities, Walcott does not only highlight the encroachment of discursive practices and the importance of perspective but he also indirectly undermines the notion that the verbal can always explain an image comprehensively, univocally, indisputably and definitively. In The Last Carnival, as I have already pointed out in Chapter 3, Victor De La Fontaine’s description of Watteau’s figures as ‘pilgrims’ in a ‘paralyzed moment’ almost amounts to a contradiction in terms which, surreptitiously restoring the tension between stillness and mobility inherent in the picture, subtly challenges this character’s arbitrary decision to emphasise the stasis of paralysis over the movement of pilgrimage (LC17). Victor himself, in fact, undercuts the authority of his own reading when he admits that ‘seeing’ is affected by choice or by a previous (‘world-making’) narrative one tries to reject or, as in this case, adhere to: it is all too easy ‘to see what we believe’, Victor argues, because ‘if you look hard enough it will become that’ (LC19).

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Stencilled Off the Real: Walker Evans’s Photographic Portraits of Allie Mae Burroughs and Segregationary Practices The Last Carnival was first produced in 1982 and its genesis covers the period of time in which Walcott published The Fortunate Traveller (1981), a collection uncharacteristically bereft of references to paintings. The Metropolitan Museum of New York, for example, is mentioned twice in ‘Piano Practice’, a poem dedicated to the poet Mark Strand, but it is only described from outside and its holdings are only vaguely evoked in the ‘avenues hazy as Impressionist clichés’ (FT9). At the end of a grey day punctuated by rain, rejection motivated by racism, and deep nostalgia, what lifts the poet’s spirit (and the poem) is a steel tenor pan near the museum, not the contents of the museum in which, in fact, the poet never enters (FT10). Notably, as Walcott gained access to European and North American museums, these institutions were fiercely contested as cultural bastions of colonial empires, elitism and/or American capital, and for severing artworks from the context for which they were originally produced, creating new strategic (con)textualisations. As Walcott was becoming one of those ‘fortunate travelers’ who, as Craven argued, could visit world museums and, as such, were less dependent on books like his to become acquainted with world masterpieces,33 the title of his 1981 collection, The Fortunate Traveller (generally considered as a tribute to Thomas Nashe’s 1594 picaresque The Unfortunate Traveller), could also be read as a reference to Craven’s words on art’s accessibility by a poet and painter who was becoming more and more sensitive to the danger of losing his faith in the role that art could play in society. The titular poem, dedicated to the theorist and political activist Susan Sontag, is in fact a long and bitter meditation on colonialism, neocolonialism, corruption, the Holocaust and, more broadly, man’s inhumanity to man (FT88–97). If The Fortunate Traveller does not engage with paintings, with the poem ‘American Muse’ Walcott submits an ekphrastic reading of one of Walker Evans’s photographic portraits of Allie Mae Burroughs, a member of one of the three white sharecropping families Evans photographed during the summer of 1936 in Alabama (FT7–8). As it was the case for Drums and Colours and the Caribbean, in ‘American Muse’ ekphrasis is mobilised to acknowledge, build on and counteract the power of another ‘emblematic image’, in this case originating from a different context, namely the United States. There are different versions of this photographic portrait: for example, in the original albums created in 1936 as a first draft for the project which was to become, in 1941, the collaborative book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, a portrait with the caption ‘Allie Mae Burroughs’ is positioned after a series of pictures of the family barn, tool house, chicken house, home (front porch, corners of the kitchen and

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bedroom, fireplaces), and the portrait of Floyd Burroughs, Allie Mae’s husband (Fig. 7.3).34 In the 1941 Houghton Mifflin edition of James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, however, the third photo we encounter in the section devoted to Evans’s photographs is a different version of this portrait where the sitter has a more concentrated, discontented and defiant expression (PFM unnumbered page). This photo has no caption and Agee’s ‘Persons and Places’, which lists the names of the people he interacted with in Alabama, contains this caveat: ‘since none of the characters or incidents of this volume are fictitious, the names of most persons, and nearly all names of places, are altered’ (PFM unnumbered page). Agee’s pseudonym for the Burroughs is Gudgers, and Allie Mae has been identified as Annie Mae (Woods) Gudger.35 As for The Polish Rider (Fig. 7.2), both portraits of Allie Mae Burroughs return the viewer’s gaze, but, as I will discuss later, the different facial expressions of the sitter captured by the photographer can alter the nature of the relationship and interaction between viewer and sitter. Walcott’s ‘American Muse’, which revolves around the poet’s ekphrastic response to the portrait in the published version of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, underlines this reciprocity of vision. Making Walcott (and us) simultaneously beholder and ‘beheld’, the exchange of gazes further clarifies for Walcott that he is looking not only at an image but at himself confronting this image and at the relationship that he is establishing with it and vice versa. Walcott’s decision to engage with this portrait, one could argue, is motivated by a deeply felt political urgency and by a desire to explore continuities and discontinuities between aesthetic choices, ethical stances and broader political scenarios. The political significance of Walcott’s intervention is further amplified by the fact that he was dealing with documentary photography which, by its nature, claims a privileged relationship with reality predicated on authenticity and transparency. Walcott’s approach to photographic portraits, however, is similar to Sontag’s, who observed that ‘although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are’.36 Arguably, political urgency also governs Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which is the final product of a project that, as anticipated, began as a photographic essay commissioned in 1936 to Evans and the journalist James Agee, became a 400-page book, and was finally published in 1941. Orchestrating a complex sui generis relationship between images and words, the book tries to both provide and prevent access to its human subjects. The volume opens with a series of black and white photographs which, as I have pointed out in relation to Allie Mae Burroughs’s portrait, are offered to us without any supporting text: no captions, no names, no indication of the time and place in which they were taken. In his preface to his section of the book, Agee, author of the written portion of the volume, explains that Evans’s photographs ‘are

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not illustrative. They and the text are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative’ (PFMxix). ‘Collaboration’ between images and text in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, therefore, relies on their structural disjuncture as Evans’s photographs and the words of Agee interrogate, in different ways, the act of seeing, visual and verbal representation, the aestheticisation of poverty, the problematic relationship between writer, photographer, their subjects, the magazine which commissioned this work, and its distinguished readership. Agee, in fact, describes himself and the photographer Evans respectively as a ‘spy’ and a ‘counterspy’ (PFM unnumbered page) on the ‘obscene’ mission to document the miserable life of white sharecroppers in Alabama for Fortune magazine, a publication whose demographic was the wealthiest section of the population (PFM5).37 Evans’s photographs maintain to be as objective as possible, keep distance, focus on subject matter, and present themselves as images which portray ‘things as they are’ rather than as carefully arranged formal studies, or as a record of things as they were seen by Evans. As Sontag famously put it, photographs (and this is particularly true of documentary photographs, of course) always give the impression of being ‘directly stenciled off the real’.38 Bearden had often questioned the veracity of this impression by utilising cutouts of photos from popular magazines in his collages where, fragmented, blown up and recombined, they were reconfigured and, at the same time, reconfigured the reality they represented, ‘revealing’, as Ralph Ellison put it, ‘that which had been concealed by time, custom, [by] our trained incapacity to perceive the truth’ (emphasis in the original).39 Bearden’s desire to ‘learn to see otherwise’,40 and share this experience with viewers/readers, also informs Walcott’s ekphrastic response to Evans’s portrait(s) of Allie Mae Burroughs. Evans’s ‘objectivity’ in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is counteracted and simultaneously counter-checked by his (counter) ‘spy’ Agee who offers us his subjective response to the ‘appallingly damaged group of human beings’ he reports on, his reservations vis-à-vis the nature of the project itself, and his explicit indictment of the notion of an impartial and ‘honest journalism’ which, he believed, actually colluded with power and the preservation of the status quo (PFM5–6). Mitchell has located the root of the orchestrated disjuncture between text and image in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men precisely in the authors’ ethical refusal to facilitate the appropriation of the photographic essay by a propaganda apparatus which reduced human subjects to objects of study for political advantage.41 Seemingly inscribing itself in the gap between text and photographs created by the very structure of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walcott explodes the segregation of visual and verbal on which the 1941 volume is predicated and identifies and openly refers to a specific image, taking on board tactical (con)textualisations which (re)qualify this image. As the poem’s title testifies, in fact, Walcott’s ‘collaboration’ with Evans’s portrait begins with the tacit acknowledgement that the image in question is probably

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the most famous and iconic of those in the book. Significantly, reflecting on the ‘unavoidabl[e]’ transformation of this elusive, evocative and ‘beautiful’ image into an ‘aesthetic object’, Mitchell has labelled it ‘the Mona Lisa of the Depression’.42 As we have seen, according to Mitchell, the absence of a ‘suturing narrative’ which would connect images and text was a ‘“purist” strateg[y]’ adopted by Agee and Evans to register their discomfort for the ‘compromised and impure representational practice’ in which they were participating and to articulate their refusal to collude with power.43 Arguably, however, reconnecting the referentiality wire between the verbal and the visual, Walcott creates a ‘suturing narrative’44 whose purpose, far from being collusion, is not only to counter aestheticisation, explore the link between aestheticisation, icon-making processes, and their concomitant inclusionary and exclusionary discourses, but also to reveal the existence of an open – ‘un-sutured’ – personal and collective wound festering away at the heart of society without abandoning hope for alternative outlooks. ‘American Muse’, in fact, creates a synergy which puts Walcott’s poem, Evans’s portrait and Agee’s text in dialogue with the reality from which the photographic essay emerged and the world in which the poet is reassessing it, simultaneously addressing the repercussions of the ‘world-making’ power inherent in the transformation of one of Evans’s portraits into a national ‘icon’. It is worth pointing out, in this respect, that if it is true that the Great Depression affected everyone, in 1930, according to the federal government, 17 per cent of the white population was unable to support itself without assistance against 38 per cent of the Black population, and that those figures were going to worsen considerably as African Americans had to struggle, simultaneously, against economic devastation, racism and segregation.45 The iconic status and emblematic potential of the photograph from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men signposted by Walcott’s title are questioned in the poem’s opening line (‘No billboard model’) which prepares us well for what follows in its subtle conflation of ‘person’ and ‘image’. We are informed that the subject is in fact ‘a woman, gaunt, / in a freckled print’ (FT7). Walcott here seems to play with the word ‘print’ and the fact that it can refer to the dress the woman is wearing but also to the gelatin silver or black and white ‘print’ he might be looking at. The distinction between woman and ‘print’ is emphasised by the preposition ‘in’ but blurred by the adjective ‘freckled’. Drawing our attention to the way in which the pattern on the woman’s dress chimes, visually, with the woman’s freckled white skin and with the weathered grain of the hut’s boards in front of which she poses, Walcott alerts us to the image’s formal beauty whilst conferring a certain gravitas to it by identifying it as something from the past, ‘freckled’ by the passing of time. Overall, therefore, Walcott’s ‘American Muse’ presents itself as a poem simultaneously about a real person in difficult circumstances, a print/photograph from erstwhile which has acquired a certain status, ‘Walker Evans’s Muse’, and the titular American Muse (FT7).

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The mention of Evans conjures up the iconic photographic essay/book in which the woman/print appears, the oblique, reluctant, contextualisation provided by its accompanying text, the ethical reservations which informed the project, and the strategies writer and photographer adopted to confront them. The ‘gaunt woman/Muse/freckled print’, however, is also distanced from the photographic essay and her/its own immediate context by the subsequent lack of references to 1936, Alabama or the Depression. Firmly anchored in the ‘present’ moment in which the poet ‘encounters’ her/it, she/it is never described in the past tense but with all the immediacy of the present continuous, present indefinite, present perfect, or the past unreal conditional of hypothetical situations (FT7). The suggestion of distressing continuities between the time in which the photo was taken and the now in which Walcott confronts the photo, however, points towards the need to find effective tactics to ‘discontinue’ them. In ‘American Muse’, the ‘gaunt woman/Muse/freckled print’ is initially presented as a representative figure of white defencelessness and hardship and, as such, she/it triggers Walcott’s sympathy, possibly also because he detects in her predicament the discomfort of his people routinely photographed for the benefit and consumption of others. The lines ‘I pity her. I guess / I would like her well’ (FT7) seem to echo Agee’s foregrounding of both his own subjectivity and his attachment to the tenants he lived with for a period of time whilst working on his assignment. Walcott’s sympathetic response, however, is complicated by other factors as the poem focuses on the woman’s ‘mouth’ which ‘winces, / thin as a stick fence, / quiet as cancer’ (FT7), a detail which, being the only part of Evans’s image to which Walcott devotes three descriptive lines, is isolated, almost ‘blown out’ à la Bearden, and recalibrates the image we are invited to revisit from a different perspective. Eliciting pathos and radiating vulnerability, the unhealthy ‘quiet[ness]’ of the woman/mouth also bares a stubborn refusal to talk and engage, a defiant determination to keep viewers at bay, to concede nothing. Walcott, in fact, is left to ‘guess’ the nature of his feelings towards the composite woman/Muse/print, precisely because he realises that he will not be given access to her world: ‘she wouldn’t let you in, / she’d soon be phoning / the State Police’ (FT7). The poet here anticipates a reaction which might be due to her diffidence towards strangers – if ‘you’ has to be understood as a pronoun addressed to a generalised reader – or, more distressingly, to Walcott’s race and colour, if the poet is addressing himself almost twenty years after segregation was abolished, de jure, in the United States (implicitly signposting that it has not been eliminated de facto). As the ‘wound’ at the core of the poem begins to reveal itself, one cannot but notice how the conversion of ‘Evans’s Muse’, as she is referred to in the poem (FT7), to the ‘national’ or ‘American Muse’ of the title is deliberately left uninterrogated as is the notion that such Muse is white by default. Presenting this transition as entirely seamless, Walcott’s ‘narrative suturing’ invites us to reflect on what the apparent seamlessness of

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this process has left ‘un-sutured’ and uncovers the extent and long-lastingness of the wound. The poem, moreover, also describes the woman/Muse/print as the ‘Muse of the emigrants’ (FT7), a definition which gestures towards the promise of welcome implicit in the traditional characterisation of America as a ‘nation of immigrants’. The equation between the titular American Muse and ‘the Muse of emigrants’ in the corpus of the poem, however, is another seamless transformation which restricts the field to those (Caucasian) immigrants who look like the ‘Muse’, excludes the descendants of those who, like Walcott’s ancestors, were forcefully brought to the Americas via slavery, and, arguably, erases the presence of Native Americans. Once again, Walcott is concerned with what both the image in question and the discourses it shapes, and is shaped by, might conceal rather than reveal, with the ways in which images can influence what we see when we look at the world and engage in (verbal or visual) world-making (or, in this case, nation-making and national identification), and, ultimately, with what/who remains excluded in the process. Poignantly, Walcott’s overturning of the segregationist structure of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men brings the verbal and visual together to explode the notion of a naturally ‘white’ America, a move that becomes even more significant if one considers that racism is only cursorily referred to in the 1941 volume. Admittedly, Agee’s and Evans’s assignment was to document the life of white sharecroppers, not Black ones, and Agee states that, in his professional capacity, Black tenants ‘were no use to [him]’ (PFM24). Yet, it is still rather disturbing, for example, that while Agee denounces in detail the structural violence which locked white tenants like the Gudgers or the Ricketts in perpetual poverty through an unbreakable cycle of debts, interest and repayments, he uses only a short, distressing paragraph to report the fact that, during the cold winter of 1935–6, ‘the negroes … were dying off in great and not seriously counted numbers’ (PFM105). When Agee is confronted with Southern segregation and unrepentant racism, moreover, he mostly tends to simply register its existence: the fact that the Gudgers named their half-grown black cat ‘Nigger’, for example, is just mentioned in passing and the disparaging nature of the term is only obliquely acknowledged in a footnote (PFM188). On another occasion, Agee explains that, one night, having arrived late at the Gudgers’ and having disturbed the family already in bed, he was faced with one of the men who was ‘ready for trouble’ because he thought Agee was a Black intruder (identified, again, with a racist slur): the man’s voice, Agee adds, continued to be full of ‘antagonism and fear … toward the negro’ he had thought Agee might have been even after he had recognised the journalist (PFM363). In a similar vein, in the context of a short chapter almost entirely concerned with him expressing his own personal discomfort in an awkward situation which involved a Black couple he realised he had inadvertently startled, Agee briefly reports that, at that time, in Alabama ‘no negro safely walk[ed] away from a white man, or even appear[ed] not to listen while he [wa]s talking’ (PFM39).

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Walcott’s revisiting of Evans’s image (and implicitly, Agee’s text) reverberates with the interconnected poems (‘Old New England’, ‘Upstate’, ‘Piano Practice’, ‘North and South’) which form ‘North’ – the first section of Fortunate Traveller. Here racism surfaces repeatedly, complicating Walcott’s desire to relate to and feel a sense of belonging in the United States and his need to negotiate his feelings for ‘America’ and, more precisely, the (surprising) fact that he was ‘falling in love’ with it (FT3–16). In a 1985 interview Walcott explains that, as he was writing The Fortunate Traveller, he felt he was ‘falling in love with America’ because he was ‘travelling on a bus from one place to another, on a long ride looking at the American landscape’46 which was revealed to him as a series of pictures (or, indeed, ‘portraits’) framed by bus windows. Notably, Walcott’s interest in the American landscape coincided with a renewed collective interest in photographic ‘portraits’ of America which was very much ‘in the air’ in the late 1970s. It is noteworthy that in 1976, that is only four years before the publication of The Fortunate Traveller, Hank O’Neal had published his defining A Vision Shared: A Classic Portrait of America and its People 1935–1946, a compelling collection of hundreds of photographs produced by eleven photographers (including Evans) under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration between 1935 and 1946. O’Neal’s project began in 1971 when, intrigued by a Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition devoted to Evans, he discovered that, amongst the holdings of the Library of Congress, there were a staggering 80,000 photographs on file which had been largely forgotten.47 A Vision Shared offers (mostly – but not exclusively – humanised) landscapes or ‘portraits’ of America, from Pennsylvania to Florida, from Vermont to New Mexico, from Illinois to Puerto Rico: they carefully capture streets and shop signs, deserted mining towns, billboards and frame houses, highways during snowstorms or blizzard-battered and dust-stormed prairies, abandoned farm homes, churches, schools, stores and shacks, as well as a vast array of people. Extremely popular and successful, A Vision Shared received more than 100 reviews (three in The New York Times alone), was the subject of numerous broadcasts, and, amongst other things, triggered a momentous show at the Witkin Gallery, a symposium at the Brooklyn Museum, inspired other books concerned with the Farm Security Administration files, and, most importantly, gave great visibility to the work of these photographers.48 A Vision Shared does not include Evans’s portrait(s) of Allie Mae Burroughs because O’Neal was determined to disseminate unpublished material as he was aware that, up to that point, only 300 or so photographs from the files had been circulated (again and again), reducing the range of viewpoints and the diversity of vistas made available to the public: O’Neal recalls that Dorothea Lange, one of the photographers involved in project, used to call these images ‘cookie cutters’.49 This renewed expansive interest in photographic ‘portraits’ of America, therefore, might have mediated Walcott’s

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relationship with the landscape and played a part in his decision to engage with documentary photography and Evans’s work.50 In ‘Upstate’, the poem that precedes ‘American Muse’, Walcott begins by focusing on people, namely, ‘a stale-drunk or stoned woman in torn jeans’, ‘a Spanish-American salesman’ and ‘a black woman folded in an overcoat’ who are on the bus with him. Representatives of a diverse America, these three figures would not have been out of place in an updated version of A Vision Shared (FT5): the original, in fact, included mostly white people but featured also Blacks and some Puerto Ricans and New Mexicans. Incidentally, the ‘repetitive’ Northern landscape of highways, ‘iron fields’, ‘mines’, ‘old machinery’ and ‘emptiness’ (FT5) chimes with some of the vistas from the 1930s and 1940s America included in O’Neal’s collection.51 Walcott then laments that ‘the Muse is leaving America’ (FT5). The Muse in ‘Upstate’ is ‘a chalk-thin miner’s wife with knobbled elbows’ and ‘neck tendons taut as banjo strings’ (FT5) and does not seem to correspond to Evans’s Allie Mae Burroughs. This departing Muse might have been inspired by someone Walcott saw from his bus window or, one could argue, by one of Ben Shahn’s 1935 images from Arkansas featured in A Vision Shared (or by a combination of the two). In Shahn’s photograph – which does not share the same iconic status as Evans’s portrait – a thin, almost emaciated, white woman dressed in a white, flowery dress stands (out) in front of a darkened doorway, not unlike a piece of chalk in front of a blackboard: as she looks away from the camera with her bowed head, her face is partly covered by her left hand which is stroking her forehead while her right hand rests on her upper left arm. Her elbows are foregrounded and enhance the angularity of her body: her bent right arm forms an acute angle whose vertex is her bony elbow and her left forearm and hand hide her upper arm and stands out like a stick. Her overall expression suggests exhaustion and preoccupation, and her posture exposes the tension in her neck.52 Walcott’s ‘tired’ Muse, he explains, used to be a picture of freedom and vitality, ‘a freckled palomino […] galloping blue pastures’ (FT5), but she has now lost all her liveliness, strength and energy, and has become a withered and much diminished version of herself. After this dispiriting start, in the third stanza, Walcott declares to find again ‘the vigor of [America’s] dream’ in the ‘chaste white barns’, the ‘sunfreckled’ hills and ‘quarrelling brook[s]’ of the Catskills that he can see from the window of his bus (FT6). Walcott insists that he is looking at things as they are (‘Clear images! Direct as your daughters’, FT6) but, at the same time, we are reminded that he is in fact responding to, and presenting us with, ‘images’ ordered in a succession of (bus window’s) frames as if they were a series of ‘portraits’ of America à la A Vision Shared, ‘traditional’ landscape paintings (the Catskills clearly evoke the Hudson River School and have been the interest of many visual artists), or the pages of one of the illustrated ‘corny calendars’ which, in the previous stanzas, he had dismissed as no

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longer representative of America, as no longer ‘true’ (FT5, 6). As he leaves behind the disheartening landscape of the first two stanzas and rhapsodises about the inspiring landscape of the third stanza – perhaps carefully selecting what to look at or leave out of the picture – Walcott, who at this point declares himself to be ‘falling in love with America’, inscribes himself in this landscape and imagines being welcomed by a woman living in one of the small villages he passes by (FT6). ‘Upstate’ closes on this positive note and the fulfilment brought by requited love. Aptly, in the same interview in which he elaborated on his relationship and love affair with the American landscape, Walcott added: ‘If you fall in love with the landscape of a place the next thing that comes is the people, right?’53 Yet, readers cannot help but wonder if Walcott’s verbal landscaping in the third stanza of ‘Upstate’ is in fact the product of his careful exclusion of those elements, figures, realities and experiences he zoomed in on in the second stanza and, most importantly, if this aestheticising distance is precisely what made possible the (imagined) warm reception he describes in the fourth stanza (FT6). On the other hand, the repetition of the words ‘Muse’, ‘white’ and ‘freckles’ in ‘Upstate’ and ‘American Muse’, and the fact that the woman who welcomes him in ‘Upstate’ is ‘holding her arms at the broken elbows’ (FT6, 7) like Allie Mae Burroughs does (albeit outside the frame), allow Walcott to connect not only the two poems but both poems with Walker Evans’s Muse. The foregrounding of the American Muse’s ‘knobbled elbows’ (FT5) in ‘Upstate’, recalling the woman’s posture in Ben Shahn’s photograph, seems to simultaneously signpost a desire to de-centre Evans’s iconic image by gesturing to possible alternatives. It is worth noting that, as anticipated, the 1936 ‘print’ of Allie Mae Burroughs which appears in the preparatory album, but not in the published version of Let Us Know Praise Famous Men, presents us with a slightly different ‘American Muse’: her mouth is still thin and firmly closed but her ‘wince’ is much less marked and, as a result, her expression is less concentrated, diffident, displeased, defiant and hostile than in the iconic version included in the book. If an exchange of gazes with this less-known version of Evans’s Muse might not unequivocally promise the warm reception Walcott imagines and hopes to receive in ‘Upstate’ (‘she will admit me like a broad meadow’, FT6), one could argue that it might nonetheless allow the beholder to at least imagine and entertain the possibility of an alternative, less unwelcoming, encounter than the one described in ‘American Muse’. The same can be said about the woman in Shahn’s photograph which has not acquired the iconic status of one of Evans’s portraits but might be Walcott’s visual counterpart of the ‘chalk-thin’ Muse with ‘knobbled elbows’ in ‘Upstate’: both look ‘tired’ (FT5), strained, worried, but they do not exude hostility. We do not know if the two portraits by Evans and the different possibilities they harbour were simultaneously present in Walcott’s mind when he was writing his poems but, if they were, their quadrangulation with ‘Upstate’,

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Figure 7.3  Allie Mae Burroughs, wife of cotton sharecropper. Hale County, Alabama, 1936. [Summer] Photograph. Walker Evans, photographer. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. https://www.loc.gov/ item/2017762301/ (accessed 4 August 2022).

‘American Muse’ – and possibly even Shahn’s photograph – might have inspired, and further illuminates, the way in which the two poems present us with two differently accented versions of the encounter (mediated by visual representations) between Walcott and (white) America. Urging us to further ponder the complex ways in which the politics of selection, inclusion, exclusion and iconisation of (world-making) images shape our understanding and relationship with the world, the well-orchestrated continuities and discontinuities which link the two poems together underline that, if documentary photographs like Evans’s (and Shahn’s) are meant to claim a closer relationship with the ‘real world’ than landscapes from the Hudson River School, or ‘corny calendars’ (FT5), also the choices made in selecting the ‘version’ of reality these photographs are supposed to be representative of have crucial repercussions on our understanding and relationship with the world: the disregard of alternative realities and potentialities, in fact, can hamper our vital ability to see, think and imagine ‘otherwise’. As if to reassert the necessity of alternative outlooks on reality which can help heal or, at least cope with, the deep wounds it inflicts, at the end of ‘American Muse’, after engaging with Evans’s wincing and hostile ‘Muse’ in

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Let Us Praise Famous Men – or perhaps, precisely, because he has confronted her – Walcott admits that, despite everything, he is still a ‘dreamer’ and ‘trailways fantasist’ who confuses reality with reverie and hitch-hikers with ‘apparition[s] of wingless angels’ (FT8). Sadly, the dream of an alternative scenario, namely a prospective warm welcoming for Walcott in the United States – evoked in ‘Upstate’, denied in ‘American Muse’, and whose odds of coming true vary depending on which portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs one might be looking at – further dissipates when, in ‘North and South’, the poet ‘blows up’, à la Bearden, another (related) detail. Taking readers back to the iconic portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs in Let Us Praise Famous Men for the last time, in fact, Walcott describes how the fingertips of a cashier in a small-town pharmacy in Virginia ‘wince from [his] hand / as if it would singe hers’ (FT16). In the context of the field of force established by the poems that ‘North and South’ is in dialogue with and the images they evoke, the woman’s ‘wincing’ registers a reaction which, however, is not supposed to be inevitable but just one possibility in a constellation of different visual and verbalised alternatives that allow readers to glimpse, or at least ‘dream’ of, alternative outcomes: as a result, these lines become an even more devastating example of (micro)racism and their indictment of racist and segregationist practices acquires further intensity. Sustained by the belief that, basically, there is very little difference between what the visual and the verbal can do in terms of aligning with, or dis-aligning from, dominant discourses, creating a narrative, articulating an argument, producing affects, or conjuring up dreams, with ‘America Muse’, Walcott, as we have seen, overturns the segregationist structure of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, where images and words were kept entirely separate, to sabotage the notion of a ‘naturally’ white America. Committed to denounce and reject the divisive politics of race in the United States, however, Walcott also presents us with an ekphrastic poem which is not animated by a masterand-servant logic intent on establishing which medium has the upper hand on the other. The presupposition of the ‘otherness’ of visual representation from the standpoint of textuality fuels both Mitchell’s ‘ekphrastic hope’ and ‘ekphrastic fear’ but also undergirds, as Mitchell himself argues, wider power relations predicated on, for example, race, colour, class, coloniality or gender which tend to conjugate the ‘self’ as ‘an active, speaking seeing subject’ and the ‘other’ as ‘a passive, seen and (usually) silent object’.54 Walcott’s ‘American Muse’ is articulated from the perspective of someone who has routinely experienced racism and discrimination and comes from a people, culture and place which have been traditionally ‘othered’, silenced and marginalised by dominant discourses which also, more often than not, control their representation and theorise their agency away. That the same can be said about St. Omer and Bearden can perhaps partly explain why, instead of competing for dominance, Walcott concentrated on celebrating a shared vision when he wrote about or, indeed, ‘out of’, their works.

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More broadly, the Caribbean, as Walcott’s friend and Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant reminds us, is a place of (often violent) encounter, contact, exchange, ‘Relation’ or, according to purists, a site of dangerous promiscuity. Glissant’s Relation ‘informs not simply what is relayed but also the relative and the related’, and ‘can be summed up in the word creolization’, where the opposition between ‘Same and the Other’ is rendered ‘obsolete’ because ‘the Other’, as Glissant writes, ‘is within us and affects how we evolve’.55 Aptly, Walcott’s engagement with ekphrasis tends to resonate less with what Heffernan calls paragonal struggle56 than with the process at the core of both creolisation and Glissant’s poetics of Relation, where ‘each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the other’57 – an ‘extension’ which is also implicit in Walcott’s choice of ‘out of’ to explain how one of his poems related to a painting by Bearden.

Ekphrasis in Reverse and Collaboration: The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott & the Art of Romare Bearden Two years after the publication of The Fortunate Traveller, Walcott and Bearden released The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott & the Art of Romare Bearden, a volume in which words and images establish a mutually enhancing relationship without diluting each other’s specificity but which, arguably, follows the opposite trajectory to ekphrasis. Walcott’s and Bearden’s volume consists of a collection of poems by Walcott selected by Bearden and accompanied by eight of the artist’s monoprints, one at the beginning, one at the end of the volume, and six which preface each of the collections from which the poems are taken.58 Chronologically, in The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott & the Art of Romare Bearden it is the verbal (a selection of Walcott’s poems) that precedes and informs the visual (a series of Bearden’s monoprints) but, while the visual does not attempt to substitute or overpower the verbal, it does not limit itself to illustrate the poems either. Walcott’s poems and Bearden’s monoprints, in fact, are in dialogue but mutually independent; there is no direct, one-to-one correlation between the two but, as the ampersand in the title indicates, visual and verbal are not ‘segregated’ as was the case in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Bearden’s monoprints resonate with what Bearden described as the core of Walcott’s ‘sense of being’, namely the ‘Caribbean locale’ (B&W209) and, as Walcott put it, Bearden responded to them by ‘trying to do a feeling that was inside him’.59 The front cloth cover, with its beaming sun and blue-green sea, is a tribute to Caribbean brightness and colours, and the first and last monoprints offer some of what Bearden, in his concluding ‘Artist’s Note’, calls ‘traceries’ of the palimpsestic nature of the Caribbean islands. Amongst these traceries, he mentions the ‘mango and papaya trees’ (B&W209), one of which was brought on the islands from South Asia while the other signposts,

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with its name, the Carib presence on the territory. The first monoprint, opposite the handwritten title, is predominantly in the bright yellow to orange hue of ripe mango or papaya fruit and, in the upper-left corner, it is possible to detect a human head with a rounded headgear. The body of this figure might be identified in some of the vertical undulated lines in the left side which, however, blur with what seems to be the long, unbranched brown stem of a plant, possibly a papaya. The curvaceous movement of this slim dark stem is replicated in another parallel, thicker and primarily white stem on the righthand side. Slightly to the left of the centre of the monoprint is what could be seen as an elongated papaya fruit whose shape also recalls a human heart. The vivid colours and the intricate and curved lines of the image render visible the rhythmical pulse of the phenomenal ‘energy’ and rejuvenating ‘vitality’ that Bearden firmly associated with the Caribbean (B&W209–10). The book is closed by a representation of another ‘palimpsestic tracery’ enumerated by Bearden, namely one of those ‘ancient Caribbean faces almost obscured’ that he had become so fond of in Saint Martin: the final monoprint, in fact, is a colourful portrait of a Black man with pipe who, significantly, is visible only in profile (B&W209). Bearden’s personal selection of the poems to be included in the book highlights the two artists’ shared interest in art history, represents the daily life and struggles of ordinary Caribbean people, foregrounds folk belief and local tradition, and depicts landscapes which harbour energy and possibilities. The selection from Selected Poems and The Gulf are both preceded by images of fishermen at work: in both cases the human figures almost melt with and become part of a landscape (and vice versa) which is the only other powerful presence. Another Life is prefaced instead by the view of a beach at night which renders, effectively, the wetness (and fecundity) of the island: the sky, in fact, contains a huge cloud, created by the colours melting on the surface of the work and where the paint’s stains remind one of rain drops. This rain effect returns in the illustration for Sea Grapes, where the dark sea and sky are still powerful elements but a white land mass occupies more than half the space: it seems that Bearden wanted to underline that, after all these years in St Martin, he had learnt, as Walcott put it in ‘Dark August’, ‘to love black days like bright ones / the black rain, the white hills’ (B&W142) whilst responding, as ‘barometrically’ as Homer or Hinkson, to its weather. The landscape which precedes The Star-Apple-Kingdom (1979) focuses on rural areas and seems to provide a visual response to the imagined ‘Cuyplike’ painting entitled ‘Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye’ which, in the opening lines of Walcott’s ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’, is presented as the template after which the Jamaican landscape was supposed to model itself in the heyday of colonialism (B&W163, 164). Here Walcott is alluding to the fact that colonial powers always reduced the Caribbean landscape to an inferior copy of the European one: for an English Professor Walcott had encountered in his youth, the scenic valley of Bog Walk in Jamaica was just

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‘like a meaner sort of Wye valley’.60 Walcott mentions the Dutchman Aelbert Cuyp as the painter of reference but he manages to implicate both sides of his Dutch and English heritage (his mother was born in Dutch St Maarten) since the river Wye is more readily associated with Reverend William Gilpin whose first tour book entitled Observations on the River Wye (1782) encouraged readers to view and represent the English countryside through the lens of the ‘picturesque’. According to Gilpin, for example, sites with evident signs of agricultural activity or people actively engaged in labour were not fit for purpose.61 In the Caribbean, however, some of the rules of the picturesque were adapted in order to promote a notion of landscape in tune with colonial and imperialistic ideals of a land which had to be appropriately ‘tropicalised’ by ad hoc transplants and kept in careful and meticulous order. Plantations and estates, therefore, became appropriate picturesque sites: using Gilpin’s work as a springboard, in fact, William Beckford published A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica: with remarks upon the Cultivation of SUGAR-CANE … and chiefly considered in a Picturesque Point of View (1790), and invited the artist George Robertson to paint some of his holdings. He was soon followed by other planters and slaveholders.62 Walcott’s poem mentions ‘tea-coloured / daguerreotypes’ which transformed the colonial and colonised space of the plantation into ‘ancient pastoral’ dreams of ‘orderly life’. In these representations, he continues, while the Great House of slavery time took centre stage, what remained excluded from the frame were ‘the groom, the cattle boy, the housemaid, the gardeners, / the tenants, the good Negroes down in the village, / their mouths in the locked jaw of a silent scream’ (B&W163, 164). The poem’s silent scream à la Munch is audible/visible in the monoprint’s lush, vibrant, dynamic, spontaneous and energetic Caribbean vegetation which totally overwhelms the houses it surrounds. In their stylisation, the houses recall classic temples, perhaps a nod to the disjecta membra of the Great House which, in ‘Ruins of a Great House’ – the first poem in Bearden’s selection – are ‘marble as Greece, like Faulkner’s [and Bearden’s] South’ (B&W5–6). The monoprint for The Fortunate Traveller presents us instead with the silhouette of a woman sketched in green and white brushstrokes walking in (and dissolving into) a green sea whose waves seem to be lapping a beach. The blue sky and white clouds are in the background and the woman is carrying something on her back while her head appears to be wrapped in a cloth. Since she is moving from sea to land, this ‘fortunate traveller’, who might be arriving from Africa, might be wondering, as the speaker in Walcott’s ‘A Sea-Change’, ‘Can this be the right place?’ (B&W181). The volume closes with Walcott’s ‘The Season of Phantasmal Peace’, a poem which encapsulates the sense of peace and renewal that Bearden sought and found in St Martin and where birds, which are amongst Bearden’s and Walcott’s most recurrent motifs, play a key role (B&W206–7). This collaborative volume with Walcott was not the first one in which Bearden had engaged creatively with literary source material. The Odyssey

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cycle discussed previously is, of course, a case in point, but Bearden had also created artwork based on the Passion of Christ and the writing of Federico García Lorca and François Rabelais. As O’Meally has pointed out, Bearden’s works are shaped by a spirit which is ‘collaborative in the jazz musician’s sense of the word’ where ‘dedicated and mutually creative … artists … swing together like members of the same band’ (emphasis in the text).63 Brent Hayes Edwards has recently underlined the political significance of Bearden’s ‘devotion to working with others’64 which, as O’Meally insists, ‘involve[s] more than mere decoration or even translation – more than carrying the prior work’s message into a new medium’.65 ‘Bearden’s job’, O’Meally rightly points out, was ‘to bring enough of his own artistic vision to bear so that his new works shed light on the [other] ones (and, in the magic of these exchanges, vice-versa) with no question of subordination on either side’.66 Arguably, Bearden’s approach, particularly his rejection of subordination in favour of collaboration between different media or between painter and writer, chimed with – and perhaps helped further clarify – Walcott’s modality of engagement with ekphrasis.

Bigger Than I Remembered: Underdogs and Dark Secrets from Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream to Rembrandt Van Rijn’s The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild As already discussed in Chapter 5, seven years after the release of The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott & the Art of Romare Bearden, Walcott describes, in Omeros, a visit to a museum where visitors enjoyed art in reverential silence. Despite feeling belittled by the ‘immortal’ works on display, which make him feel ‘at a loss for words’, he remains eloquent enough to offer a short ekphrastic reading of Homer’s The Gulf Stream (O182–3). Walcott’s very first reaction to The Gulf Stream (Fig. 5.6) is not to the content of the image but to the size of the painting itself: he is in fact struck by the fact the Black fisherman in the original is ‘bigger than [he] remembered’ (O183). The discrepancy between memory and actual painting might be due to Walcott mentally comparing the canvas in front of him with small reproductions of the actual oil (which is 71.4 × 124.8 cm) that he must have been familiar with. In this case, Walcott’s memory could not have gone back to Craven’s 1939 edition of A Treasury because it does not include The Gulf Stream as a colour plate. Craven had chosen instead The Herring Net (1885) and, in his entry on Homer, he refers only casually to ‘an occasional visit to the islands in the Gulf Stream’.67 In his revised editions, Craven did substitute the colour plate of The Herring Net (1885) with The Gulf Stream and modified his entry slightly to give more prominence to Homer’s trip to the Bahamas in 1899. However, he did not comment on Homer’s decision to paint the Caribbean and its people, or on the effect that working in

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that particular part of the world had on his palette and on his watercolour technique.68 Despite his decision to include the picture in his volume, Craven considered The Gulf Stream as ‘less heroic, perhaps, than [Homer’s] pictures of the Maine coast line’, a judgement which might not have been unrelated to the presence of a Black protagonist. The Black figure, which Craven describes as ‘calmly resigned to his fate of sunburn and starvation’, is in fact dismissed as a mere prop in what the critic describes as Homer’s ‘most effective exposition of the sea as an element of destruction’.69 Walcott might or might not have had Craven’s comments in mind when he wrote Omeros, but they are typical enough to allow us to assume that ‘bigger than I remembered’, rather than being a mere observation about size, was a general comment directed at the effects of the diminishing agendas of representational practices and art-­ historical approaches to paintings with Black subjects and ‘alter/native’ landscapes. If it is true that, as Tobias Döring has argued, Omeros is ekphrastic ‘at heart’ because it ‘turns the shield of Achilles’, which for Döring is the ‘visual matrix’ of the poem, into a map of the New World,70 Walcott’s engagement with The Gulf Stream contributes to the drawing of this map in more ways than one. As it was the case for his previous ekphrastic engagements, the reading of Homer’s painting that Walcott offers in Omeros is more the product of a keen desire to counteract pernicious cultural and socio-political agendas than the fulfilment of a need to assert the superiority of words over images (or images over words). Walcott’s ekphrastic reading of Homer’s oil is informed by the poet’s admiration of the artist’s exact rendition of the light on the green (and red) waters of the Caribbean Sea. Attention to technique, however, is not targeted at underscoring a discrepancy between the visual medium and its referent, as it is sometimes the case in ekphrastic poems intent on parading the superiority of their medium. Likewise, if the ‘bigger than [Walcott] remembered’ fisherman at the core of The Gulf Stream is ‘forever’ positioned between Africa and the Caribbean, and ‘fixed’ in this tribal dream of (spiritual) return, the word ‘fixed’, is not introduced to demonstrate the power of the verbal to overcome, through narrative, the limitations of pictorial stasis. There is no boasting about the fact that, elsewhere in Omeros, Walcott’s character Achille – whom the poet identifies with Homer’s figure – is enabled, through verbal narrative, to give form to the fisherman’s ‘dream’, go back in time, visit ancestral Africa and return, ‘healed’, to his native island (O183–4). Walcott’s lines, moreover, contain no mention of paint or canvases to highlight the distance between the painting and its referent, and they convey no intention to break the powerful spell created by Homer’s oil, in front of which the poet feels (and makes us feel) that he is looking at the Caribbean Sea itself and not at a reproduction of it (O183). On the contrary, Walcott indicates that the ability of the artist to paint Caribbean waters with astonishing exactitude awakens his memory and puts poet and painter (and viewers/readers) in touch with the Caribbean

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itself, a place where visual surprise is a ‘natural’ daily occurrence but, most importantly, a site where ‘the sigh of History dissolves’ (A68) and ‘fresh’ approaches to tradition are possible.71 This opening up of ­possibilities – inherent in creolisation – is what enables Walcott to counter received textualisations of the painting which, like Craven’s, completely ignore the place and the people it depicts. The reconnection to his native sea/soil triggered by his encounter with Homer’s work fortifies Walcott when, as we have seen, he confronts Boston’s long-lasting racism. Similarly, the ‘freshness’ of approach afforded by his reconnection assists him as he assembles a cluster of verbal and visual – implicit and explicit – references (from Winslow Homer to ‘the other Homer’; from Turner’s Slave Ship to Bearden’s rendition of the Odyssey) on which he builds in a ‘collaborative’ spirit, free from the urge to make one overpower the other in order to create his own poem. In Tiepolo’s Hound Walcott further expands on the collaborative potential of visual and verbal by including in the volume twenty-six of his own paintings which keep a reciprocally independent relationship with the poem. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Walcott’s watercolours, oils, pastel and gouache – many produced before the poem – do not have a mere illustrative function but contribute to create a composite work which is more than the simple aggregate of its components. In a way, Tiepolo’s Hound’s subtitle could be The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott & The Caribbean Art of Derek Walcott where, as it was the case for the volume published in 1983 with Bearden, the ampersand which links ‘poetry’ with ‘art’ visually indicates an even closer collaboration than a simple ‘and’. Experimentation with ekphrasis in Tiepolo’s Hound conjugates itself in different ways. Ekphrasis presupposes the (concomitant) absence of the visual entity that the verbal addresses and conjures up in the reader’s mind, but Walcott here pushes things to the limit and tantalisingly denies his readers any (imaginary or otherwise) access to the painting, which is the object of the prolonged, meandering and frustratingly unsuccessful search he embarks on and describes in the poem. The actual visual trigger for this search, as we have seen, is, rather characteristically for Walcott, not exactly a painting but a particular detail/ brushstroke – ‘a slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound entering the cave of a table, // … exact in its lucency’ (TH7). Once again, Walcott’s attention to technique (‘a slash of pink’) is not aimed at emphasising the gap which separates visual artefact from referent – as a matter of fact, in the poem, the distinction between painted hounds and ‘real’ (under)dogs progressively blurs. Walcott refuses to attribute the ‘epiphanic’ brushstroke in his memory to any paintings but, at the same time, he never indicates that the painting does not actually exist and that, as it happens in notional ekphrasis, it is simply a visual work of the imagination which, ultimately, only the power of his poetry can conjure up. On the contrary, the description provided is exact as far as the detail is concerned but far too fragmentary, scant and generic (a white hound’s thigh, a table, a feast) to summon an

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entire painting in his readers’ minds. During his search for the elusive ‘thigh’ in a series of reproductions, Walcott considers, and then quickly discards, a series of works but, for one of them, Tiepolo’s Apelles Painting Campaspe, he does put forward an ekphrastic reading where he traces in the image an alternative narrative, one which does not have the customary marginalisation and disenfranchisement of underdogs – the black page and the little dog – at its core. This counternarrative concomitantly explodes the paradigm according to which images are the silent and dumb ‘others’ of an articulate verbal ‘self’.72 If, prima facie, the attendant boy observing the master completing his work in admiring quietness appears to be the embodiment, par excellence, of the silent (or dumb) and passive image, he is in fact recast in the poem as a cunning agent absorbing useful skills that he will later be able to use to his own advantage (TH129). Silence, in other words, is precisely what allows the boy to learn: it does not indicate submission because it does not inhibit but, rather, enables his agency. Walcott, therefore, perceives no passivity in the boy’s stance and reconfigures the exchange between painter and attendant (and poet and painting) as one where the opposition between active speaking ‘self’ and passive silent ‘other’ is troubled at its very core, as it is the case in Glissant’s Relation.73 Sagaciously, Walcott insists that this counternarrative is not a product of his own eloquence but is in the painting itself and derives directly ‘from the African’s posture’ (TH129). As a matter of fact, in his ekphrastic reading of Tiepolo’s painting – but this is true of his overall attitude to paintings – Walcott does not try to speak for it (making it redundant), to it (simply to illustrate it), at it (to dismiss it); he does not assume that he can speak from it (because he knows better); rather, he insists on speaking not only out of it (anchoring his words to it to underline continuities and/or discontinuities) but with it, in order to discover and uncover how visual and verbal can contribute, together, to transformative agendas. Walcott’s main drive, in the case of Apelles Painting Campaspe, is to reassess and redress history and art history by reviewing homogenising practices which give primacy, either approvingly or disapprovingly, to the creation, subalternisation and silencing of ‘others’ and, in the process, refuse or neglect to acknowledge all existing traces of the fact that these ‘others’ always had and still have ‘a character and a purpose of their own’.74 Mitchell argues that, by ‘thematizing “the visual” as other to language, “a threat to be reduced” (ekphrastic fear), “a potential same-to-be” (ekphrastic hope), or “a yet-not-same” (ekphrastic indifference)’, ekphrasis grounds itself in our ‘ambivalence’ about the other.75 Walcott’s modus operandi appears to veer from this ‘othering’ template which reproduces and reinforces disabling parameters: by recasting ekphrasis as a collaborative, non-paragonal relation between the visual and the verbal, Walcott mobilises it as a (re)thinking tool to plunge deep into this ambivalence and ‘work through’76 conventional ideological stances, in order to remap and redescribe the world.

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In The Prodigal, ekphrastic readings of Rembrandt’s The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662) (Fig. 7.4) and Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda (c. 1635) (Fig. 7.5) are informed by the same urge: in fact, they assist Walcott’s coming to terms with the historical roots of his sense of alienation in Europe, and the dichotomies which have shaped it (centre vs. periphery; victors vs. vanquished; self vs. other). In a collection in which Walcott confronts the disturbing experience of feeling like ‘a black stroke / on a primed canvas’ (P9) whilst travelling in the Old World, his engagements with paintings function as stepping stones towards a better understanding of his position and the need to overcome simplistic self-positioning. In Part I, Walcott finds himself at a formal dinner in Lausanne with a group of (white) elegantly dressed old gentlemen who, to him, become an ‘update of Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild’ (P16), one of the paintings which constitute Craven’s 1939 canon.77 As painting and reality overlap, rather than being remembered as a group of figures who, in Craven’s words, display ‘the full force of … humanity’,78 The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild flashes up in Walcott’s mind as an image which clarifies for him his present situation, the causes of his ‘white’ ‘fear’, and an occluded history of inhumanity (P9). In what he calls his ‘translation’ of the men’s ‘pink’ faces to ‘dark-panelled and polished ancestry’ (P16) Walcott weaves words and image together in compelling and unexpected ways. On an immediate, denotative level, ‘dark-panelled’ evokes the background of the room in which Rembrandt’s syndics are portrayed, while ‘polished’ refers to the surface of the painting; yet, connotatively, this choice of adjectives intimates a ‘dark’, inherited secret which is being embellished or disguised. The five figures wearing hats in Rembrandt’s group portrait are serious, accountable and practical men in charge of evaluating and certifying the quality of samples of cloth submitted to them: their social standing is revealed by the fact that they wear hats even indoors, while the figure in the background wearing a calotte is an attendant, lower in the hierarchical scale. These men’s work was crucial to an industry which, at the time, generated a lot of revenue for a country that was establishing itself as a major player in the Atlantic and global economy. Aware of their status, they had both the wealth and the desire to celebrate and publicly state their importance: the painting was in fact commissioned by the very guild whose members Rembrandt represented. Rembrandt’s syndics are all looking at viewers from an elevated position and their attitude suggests urgency – one of them is even in the process of standing up; they look startled, even disturbed, by the viewers’ unexpected (seemingly unwelcome) arrival. Whilst he recreates the painting in his mind, Walcott tries to put ‘himself’ in the scene by seeking to ‘identify’, unsuccessfully, one of his Dutch ancestors amongst the members of the syndicate. Significantly, Walcott looks for him not in one of the figures in the foreground, but in a much less prominent ‘far back’ and ‘negligible’ one, like the

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attendant wearing the calotte (P16).79 In a hopeful revisitation of his character/alter ego Shabine’s frustrating face-off with ‘History’, embodied in his white Creole grandfather who had ‘illegitimate’ children with his Black cook and refused to ‘recognize’ Shabine as his own progeny (SAK8–9), Walcott here imagines his forefather ‘greeting [him] / a product of his empire’s miscegenation / in Old Saint Martin’ (P16). This wished-for encounter, however, cannot take place because, as history and art history collude in erasure and omissions, Walcott’s attempt to ‘see’ himself, or, rather, a ‘trace’ of himself, in the The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, ends in failure: ‘I could find no trace’ (P16). The ‘dark’ secret that Walcott’s ekphrastic reading begins by alluding to is therefore linked to miscegenation and, more broadly, slavery, the slave trade and slave labour, all practices which greatly contributed to Dutch affluence, benefiting also those who, like the drapers, might not have traded specifically in slaves. Walcott’s inability to ‘trace’ himself in the painting reflects the fact that the presence of Blacks in Europe, the history, causes and effects of their arrival, their suffering and their achievements, have been historically neglected, minimised or erased. We have seen that Walcott had long been familiar with the seventeenth-century genre of paintings where Black figures (infantilised and in a subservient attitude) were represented alongside aristocratic men and, more often, women, in order to exalt their status; he was also acquainted with the refusal of ‘mainstream’ art critics to acknowledge the Black presence. To take another example from Craven’s book which was one of Walcott’s formative influences, the entry on the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dick has, as accompanying colour plate, The Marchesa Grimaldi (1623): here the titular noblewoman is portrayed with an (infantilised) Blackamoor holding a parasol to shelter her from the light.80 In the same way in which, in the 1958 edition of A Treasury, Craven was going to disregard the presence of the Black fisherman in Homer’s The Gulf Stream (Fig. 5.6), in his 1939 description of The Marchesa Grimaldi, he pays no mind to the Black figure in the painting and offers no criticism of the fact that the ‘blackamoor slave’ is reduced to a prop utilised by the artist to create ‘an atmosphere of elegance’.81 In his ekphrastic reading of Rembrandt’s oil which, in both content and technique, foregrounds mercantilism, wealth, commodities and private property and, most importantly, was produced at a time when some of Walcott’s forefathers could have been considered as ‘private property’ by his other ancestors, the poet is moved by an urge to confront his ‘white fear’, to reveal, to begin with, what the society that the painting represents, and the one he is interacting with during his journey, are keen to hide, and, ultimately, to overturn the marginalisation and obliteration of Black people. A few pages later, in a dense set of lines, Walcott acknowledges the absent, invisible presence of ‘a young blackamoor’ brought, in his white ‘ancestor’s head’, to the Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild: he is ‘carried on a black charger of starched lace’, as if he were another commodity served on a plate to be consumed, or a sacrificial

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victim à la John the Baptist (P33). At the beginning of his ekphrastic reading of Rembrandt’s painting, Walcott compares the syndics’ heads, severed from their bodies by white collars, to John the Baptist’s head, but there is no indication that these methodical, austere professionals share either the saint’s prophetic vision or his sacrificial status (P16). Combined with Walcott’s reference to miscegenation (and, implicitly, slavery), this comparison has another purpose: utilising as a springboard the reciprocal nature of this image where figures and viewers are simultaneously beholders and ‘beholdens’ (both in the sense of being ‘seen’ and of owing something to their counterpart), Walcott re-establishes the terms of their relation. Coming before Jesus, John was the ‘messenger’ who prepared the path and bore witness to ‘the light’, a light which, in Walcott’s analogy, is equated not with the self-centred and self-centring empire (the perturbed syndics who look down on him) but with its ‘illegitimate’ and disavowed progeny, come to claim their place. As the poem insists on rejecting the derivative and diminished status customarily attached to descendants and, concomitantly, on asserting the necessity to see as part of the picture also what and who is not represented directly, ‘working through’ the image, Walcott locates both the potential for, and the denial of, filiation and kinship in the awkward exchange of glances between syndics and himself as viewer. Separation between ‘self’ and ‘other’ (and implicitly, poem and painting) is both dramatised and undermined while, at the same time, estrangement is subtly exploded through the unmasking of dynamics which disavow filiation and kinship – or relation and relevance – by arbitrarily labelling them as ‘illegitimate’ or unauthorised, misbegotten and ­spurious (P33).

Little Figures: They Too Have Lives – After Diego Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda In The Prodigal, as Walcott travels in and out of Europe, his stance continues to be clouded by contradictory impulses: is he there to demand what is owed to him, to ‘surrender’ Europe, or to ‘let it claim … half’ of himself? (P33). His insecurity, the nightmare of rejection, and the fear of betraying the Caribbean if he capitulates to Europe’s allure, consign him to a whirl of uncertainty regarding his position and to a profound sense of ‘emptiness’ (P33). Walcott’s personal, agonising trajectory culminates, and resolves itself, in Part III of the collection, with the double realisation that, on the one hand, his ‘centre’ is the Caribbean and he could not ‘be happier’ than when he is there, and, on the other, that ‘there is no betrayal, / there is no contradiction in [his] surrender’ to ‘delight’ when looking at ‘the knuckles of a Mantegna / or abounding Botticellian locks … that housefly / in the corner of Crivelli’ (P84, 92, 93). Declining to mention famous paintings as primary exemplifications, Walcott revels, once again, in characterising or revelatory details, disclosing that, as

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for the ‘servant boy’ in Tiepolo’s Apelles Painting Campaspe, his admiration still goes hand in hand with the refinement of a ‘way of seeing’ which privileges what unfolds at the ‘edge’ of the central narrative of a given painting, and with an insatiable hunger for ‘learning’ transferrable skills like those that have to do with the exact reproduction of challenging features. Prior to this positive reframing of his predicament, Walcott describes a visit to yet another metropolitan museum, this time the Prado in Madrid, where he carefully observes Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda (Fig. 7.5), another painting which was included as a colour plate in Craven’s 1939 edition of A Treasury,82 and commemorates the dramatic moment during the Eighty Years’ War when, after a lengthy siege, the Dutch governor Justinus van Nassau relinquished the keys of his city to general Ambrosio Spinola and the Spanish army (P33–4). For Craven, The Surrender of Breda is notable for Velázquez’s decision not to select a dramatic moment but ‘the peaceful conclusion where the vanquished Dutch commander … submissively offers the keys of Breda to Spinola, the gentleman leader of the Spanish lancers’.83 In other words, Craven intimates, but does not emphasise, that this ground-breaking oil is credited with revolutionising the genre of military painting by shifting the focus from glory in the submission of an enemy, to fairness in war. Velázquez’s composition, in fact, is designed to foreground, both literally and metaphorically, the victorious general’s affectionate and gracious attitude towards his vanquished enemy, who is treated with respect and whose humanity is not denied; the smokey sky of the background functions instead as a reminder of the death and destruction of war. Walcott’s ekphrasis capitalises on Velázquez’s revolutionary approach to the topic and on his erosion of ‘othering’ discourses predicated on the dehumanisation and debasement of one’s opponent. Paying no mind to the successful Spinola, the poet initially concentrates on the defeated governor, recognising, in his gaze, ‘the deeper truth of failure’, a sense of ‘emptiness’ echoing his own, and a profound ‘compassion for the victor’, a compassion which is perhaps hard to fathom and account for, but for whose mystery the poem affords space and commands respect (P34). In Walcott’s reading, with a ‘chiasmatic slip’ which blurs their individual identities without obliterating their distinctiveness, the defeated governor van Nassau becomes a ‘general’, like his opponent Spinola, as the poet, consciously or unconsciously, disaligns himself from the notion of (paragonal) struggles where contestants (or the verbal and visual of ekphrasis) are posited as inherently and essentially different or ‘other’ (P34). If Velázquez emphasises the magnanimity of the winner, in fact, Walcott highlights the ‘compassion’ of the loser in a move which, questioning the rigid dichotomy of victor/vanquished maintained by Craven, levels the playing field rather than maintaining a hierarchical structure according to which one figure shows, univocally, mercy towards its diminished other.

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Figure 7.4  The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild, Known as ‘The Syndics’, 1662, Rembrandt van Rijn, oil on canvas, 191.5 × 279 cm. On loan from the City of Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal.

Figure 7.5  The Surrender of Breda, c. 1635, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, oil on canvas, 307.3 × 371.5 cm. Copyright © Museo Nacional del Prado.

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Walcott’s poem completely ignores the historical moment portrayed by Velázquez and, instead of focusing on what Craven calls the ‘peaceful conclusion’ of the siege of Breda,84 it is informed by another battle, one that dramatises instead a personal struggle which has nothing to do with the verbal disputing the dominance of images or vice versa (P34). As it was the case for The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (Fig. 7.4), a painting which, like Benjamin’s past ‘flash[ing] up [as an image] at the instant when it can be recognized’,85 flared up in Walcott’s mind as he was trying to situate himself in his here and now – a seemingly awkward dinner in Lausanne, a city where he felt like ‘a chocolate stick for the voracious fog’(P16) – during his encounter with The Surrender of Breda, Walcott blurs localities and temporalities. Velázquez’s painting too demands to be re-cognised at a time of intense and apprehensive self-scrutiny, and one could argue that The Surrender of Breda is ‘experienced’ both in the Prado, where the poet is standing, and in Walcott’s studio in the Caribbean, where he travels back in his memory. Despite identifying the locus of this encounter in the Prado, Walcott calls The Surrender of Breda a ‘fresco’ when it is in fact a large oil on canvas (307.3 × 371.5 cm). This misnomer suggests that perhaps he was trying to (re)experience (and/or make readers ‘experience’) Velázquez’s painting as a work more directly in tune with the world outside its ‘frame’ than a decontextualised holding in a museum. As he studies the Spanish master’s work, in fact, Walcott thinks about one of his own paintings and ponders both his own battle with the brush and his own defeat. In front of Velázquez’s work, he is on the brink of acquiescing to the (alleged) inferiority not only of his art but also of the world(s) he represents (a renowned military victory vs. a ‘country fete’; History vs. history; victors vs. vanquished; Europe vs. the Caribbean) (P34). Walcott, however, pushes things even further than Velázquez did in The Surrender of Breda. Quickly steering away from the trap of a simplifying and binary rhetoric on victors and vanquished, Walcott exalts instead the value of alternative, neglected narratives, namely those Craven had instructed his readers to ignore when he argued that, unlike Dutch painters ‘so thoroughly in love with little things that they cluttered their canvas with trifles’, Velázquez had ‘arranged all his figures in the foreground in order to reveal them as forcefully as possible’ (emphasis mine).86 Below the smoke in the background of Velázquez’s work, in fact, Walcott discerns and focuses on a ‘tiny’ battle, neglected, but still raging, in which, he assumes, are engaged ‘little figures’ (P34, emphasis mine). At that point, he exhorts himself to return to his own painting and ‘work on those minuscule extra figures’ and ‘their separate narrative’ (P34). Walcott’s own original picture, therefore, will ultimately come ‘out of’ Velázquez’s canvas as much as his poem, where his reading of the master’s work is inflected by his own experience as a painter from the (allegedly) marginal Caribbean. The ‘extras’ in The Surrender of Breda, busy conducting their own war, are inspiring to him because they do not surrender

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to the dominant narrative and are, in Walcott’s words, ‘away but parallel to’ a ‘monumental’ centre in ‘hieratic stasis’ (P34). Once again, by emphasising the tension between background movement (the ‘separate narrative’ of the small, raging battle), and centre/foreground stillness, Walcott questions, indirectly, the rigid identification between paintings and ‘stasis’. He also instructs himself, and readers/viewers, to go beyond the foreground, to look for something else, something ‘unfinished’ and in-progress which both enriches and disturbs a ‘centre’ which, stuck in its apotheosis, cannot move, change, evolve, transform itself or be transformed. ‘They too have lives’ (P34), Walcott declares when he forces himself to reconsider the ostensibly negligible figures in the two paintings (Velázquez’s and his own) that his mind juxtaposes at the Prado. This simple but profound observation is also at the heart of the sustained exploration of the ethics and praxis of representation Walcott conducts in ‘White Egrets’, where he makes the ‘lives’ of the titular birds his main concern. Unlike Audubon, who considered the birds he depicted to be expendable and at the disposal of his artistic vision, Walcott, as I emphasised in Chapter 6, tunes in to their ‘language beyond speech’, inviting poets and painters to be open and receptive to their subjects’ presence, vitality and contribution to the final product (WE10). The anthropocentrism and speciesism crucial to Audubon’s vision are variations on the ‘othering’ discourses which sustain colonialism, slavery and the devastation of natural habitats, or which, in the context of ekphrasis, rely on the presupposition of an irreducible ‘otherness’ of the visual vis-à-vis the verbal, and sustain the drive to cast images as menaces to be contained. In ‘White Egrets’ Walcott shows that a relation between humans and animals which does not depend on exploitation, subjugation or on the neutering of difference – he acknowledges that their ‘language’ is articulated otherwise – is indeed achievable. Walcott’s conclusions chime with his investigations of the relation between images and words which, going beyond paragonal struggle, promotes instead a collaborative effort where each element plays its part whilst keeping its distinctiveness. The ‘language beyond speech’ of the titular white egrets (WE10), in a way, was to find its counterpart, six years later, in what Walcott calls, in Morning, Paramin (2016) – his first collection in which every single poem ‘responds’ to a painting – ‘the beauty without speech’ of the visual arts.87

Morning, Paramin: Derek Walcott and Peter Doig In Morning, Paramin, Walcott orchestrates a sustained dialogue between fifty-one new poems (printed on the verso pages of the collection) and fiftyone paintings by the contemporary artist Peter Doig (positioned on the recto page). This dialogue, where the visual and the verbal appear together, chimes with Bearden’s collaborative approach, rejects the segregationism of Evans

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and Agee, and epitomises several key features of Glissant’s Relation. The lack of passivity presupposed in Glissant’s formulation,88 which undergirds Walcott’s reading of Apelles Painting Campaspe in Tiepolo’s Hound, also shapes Morning, Paramin where words and images are brought together as two agencies which actively participate in the creation of composite texts that are visual and verbal at the same time. As Walcott continues to question the notion of the visual as a ‘pure other’ to the verbal, he does not dilute the difference between the two in the name of a ‘transparency’ which reduces rather than enhance identity. In Morning, Paramin, in fact, each component’s right not to be reduced to an equally artificially constructed ‘same’ but to maintain one’s individuality – even ‘opacity’ – is valued and respected. ‘Opacities’, Glissant continues, ‘can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics’, and, giving advice that we could profitably follow in our reading of the collection, he exhorts us to ‘focus on the texture of the weave’, here the poem/painting ensemble, and ‘not on the nature of its components’.89 Walcott and Doig met in Trinidad a few years before the collection was composed, where the Edinburgh-born painter resided and the St Lucian poet was visiting family. Walcott had direct access to Doig’s studio and also owned many publications on Doig’s work; even if he never openly refers to editors and critics, one could argue that sometimes Walcott builds on their selections and the background information they provide, indirectly engaging with their views, endorsing, inflecting or contrasting them. During the December 2016 book launch for Morning, Paramin at Doig’s studio in Port of Spain, Doig explained that Walcott had also joined him at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for the No Foreign Lands exhibition (25 January to 8 June 2014). No Foreign Lands displayed paintings reflecting Doig’s peripatetic and cosmopolitan life and interests, from Canadian snowscapes and suburban houses to Trinidadian landscapes, seascapes and urban scenes. It was shaped by the belief that, as one of the curators puts it in the opening essay of the catalogue, ‘no land’ is ‘foreign to painting’,90 a belief which problematises the notion of geographical and cultural ‘otherness’ in a way that fully resonates with Morning, Paramin. Walcott must have found the Montreal experience inspiring: most of the works by Doig which appear in Morning, Paramin, in fact, were exhibited there, alongside others in which he returned, time and time again, to the same motif or subject. Sometimes, galvanised by Doig’s intensity of purpose, Walcott’s poems speak to the paintings actually included in the collection as much as they do to the different variations of the same painting on display in the museum and/or grouped together in the exhibition’s catalogue. The catalogue of the Montreal exhibition repeatedly points out that many of Doig’s paintings derive from postcards or photographs found or taken by the artist and collected over the years. Given the one-to-one relationship established by the volume, therefore, one might be tempted to refer to some of the poems in Morning, Paramin as ‘verbal representations of visual

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representations of visual representations’, as ‘verbal representations of visual representation “directly stenciled from the real”,’ or, in some cases, as both at the same time.91 Most of Walcott’s poems, in fact, stage the dramatisation of a ‘double consciousness’92 in the poet’s approach to paintings. For example, looking at Doig’s Girl in White with Trees (2001–2), a painting based on a photograph where a little girl in white appears, almost spectrally, amongst tree branches,93 Walcott underlines the similarities between the girl up in the trees and the isolated woman far from home depicted in yet another representation, namely Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948), openly acknowledging that Doig’s picture is ‘nothing more / than a painting’ (MP39). Yet, as he seems both conscious of, and more than ready to admit, the difference between painted figures and real people, Walcott also describes Wyeth’s Christina as an autonomous breathing being in control of ‘her breath’, and salutes the girl in Doig’s painting as a powerful and, ultimately, benign, presence, or ‘angel’ (MP39).94 In other words, whilst being aware that he is dealing with pictures of people or objects, representations and signs, Walcott still reserves the right to behave as if the colours and lines on the canvas were not only the very thing or person they are representing. For him they are also living, energetic, vital presences or ‘vital signs’ in themselves, what Mitchell calls ‘signs as living things, not merely signs for living things’ (emphasis in the text).95 In so doing, he also acknowledges their right to be agents. Walcott is not unsophisticated or naïve: his decision to treat Doig’s paintings as complex, living presences which he interrogates, and which, in their turn, interrogate, ambush, seduce, challenge or comfort him, is as deliberate as is his choice to include Doig’s paintings in the collection. This inclusion, in itself, revisits the notion that ekphrastic poems do away with the presence of the images they are concerned with and which, as we have seen, sustains and is sustained by the idea that ekphrasis is ‘essentially paragonal’.96 The title of one of Walcott’s poems, ‘Paragon’, seems to indicate that he wanted to revisit the idea of paragone. The poem is juxtaposed to Doig’s Cricket Painting (Paragrand) (2006–12) (Fig. 7.6), which testifies to the popularity of cricket in Trinidad, a sport that has been strongly associated with the fight for independence. One could assume, prima facie, that Walcott might capitalise on Doig’s choice of subject to further elaborate on the notion of a struggle for dominance. Doig’s painting, however, does not represent a cricket match but a group of friends playing beach cricket in Paragrand Bay, a location on the north coast of Trinidad which is also known as Paragon – earlier versions of the same painting (including one on display in Montreal and featured, alongside others, in the exhibition catalogue) are in fact entitled Paragon.97 Walcott’s substitution of the toponym Paragrand with Paragon, therefore, can be seen as an attempt to focus readers’ minds on the ‘paragonal paradigm’. In Doig’s painting, the bowler (in the foreground) is trying very hard, but his effort does not seem to constitute a threat to the batsman, as testified by

Poems ‘Out Of’ Paintings    411

Figure 7.6  Cricket Painting (Paragrand), 2006–12, Peter Doig, oil on canvas, 300 × 200 cm. © Peter Doig. All rights reserved. DACS/Artimage. Photo: Richard Ivey, 2022.

the relaxed demeanour of the fielder, who seems resigned to the fact that the ball thrown by the bowler will be intercepted by the batsman. Walcott ostensibly adheres to the ekphrastic mode of describing a painting acknowledging, at the same time, Doig’s Gauguinesque departure from realism (‘the sand turns red’). The hinge around which Walcott’s poem revolves is the abstract noun ‘vehemence’, a word which opens the poem, is the subject of its first verb (‘draws’) and is then equated to ‘love’. The vehemence which ‘draws a wedge’ down the bowler’s back describes the way in which the strenuous effort marks the body of the player. Yet, it can also refer, simultaneously, to the vehemence with which the painter draws or renders this effort on the canvas: all-over design, in fact, is very visible in some parts of Doig’s work. Likewise, the serpentine line of the waves that advance and retract on Doig’s beach, trying ‘to catch / the calm joy of [the] figures’ (MP45, emphasis mine), can be seen as a representation of the artist’s love for his subject, the way in which he is drawn towards what he is drawing, catching or trying to catch what is going on between the players with his pen/brush. The recurrence of the word ‘vehemence’ – which returns five times in thirteen lines – and the position that the word occupies in these lines (from the beginning to the middle and then back to the beginning and the middle again) reminds one of the movement of the ‘wave[s]’ (both visually and aurally, through repetition).

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This repetition also conveys the intensity of Walcott’s love for his subject or the ‘drawing’ power of Doig’s painting, which influences the way in which Walcott, orchestrating verbal, aural and visual, creates a new composite work which relies on a reciprocal relation between words and image as well as on their reclaiming of reciprocal agency (MP45). Stephen Cheeke pointed out in 2008 that it is not always true that a poet necessarily ‘harbours a wish to control or dominate the image-as-other or to overcome the differences between poem and painting’.98 Three years later, Anne Keefe argued that theoretical templates which take for granted a ‘fundamentally oppositional confrontation between verbal and visual’ do not necessarily reflect the way in which contemporary poets practice ekphrasis: following the poet Sharon Dolin, Keefe reformulates ekphrasis as an ‘ecstatic embrace of verbal and visual’ which also highlights their ‘mutual agency’ rather than the ‘verbal taking on agency over the visual’.99 Walcott had aspired to this kind of ‘embrace’ throughout his career, so it is no surprise that, in ‘Paragon’, he should counter once again the paragonal paradigm. Walcott’s poem, in fact, does not sing the praises of a winner: significantly, he highlights that none of the players is a ‘paragon’ of skills – one appears to be a disastrous bowler, the batsman thrives on the weakness of his opponent, the fielder ‘does not move’ – but celebrates instead the dedication of the players and the ‘calm joy’ that playing brings to all of them. Unconcerned with establishing the superiority of one player or, more broadly, of one art or artist over the other, Walcott highlights instead the importance of one’s commitment to one’s art and (once again) the delight that can come from engaging with the verbal and visual at the same time, a delight that, as playwright, director and designer, as well as painter and poet, he had repeatedly experienced, was feeling whilst responding to Doig’s painting, had glimpsed in his father’s work, and had first tasted in the collaborative atmosphere of Simmons’s workshop, bouncing ideas with St. Omer and their mentor.100 That Walcott’s poem shares its title, ‘Paragon’, with other versions of the painting the poet juxtaposes to it, alerts us to the fact that Morning, Paramin questions the neat separation between the verbal (poem) and the visual (painting) by highlighting and making the most of the possibilities offered by Doig’s own ambivalence towards (but also delight with) the interplay of images and words. Doig has declared that he considers his painting as ‘totally non-linguistic’, and that ‘there is no textual support’ to what one ‘is seeing’; he has also argued that with his painting he is trying to create ‘something that it is difficult, if not impossible to put into words’.101 At the same time, however, he has admitted that he ‘always wanted to make paintings that told stories and suggested things’,102 and his stories are sometimes generated by the interaction of the image he paints and his choice of title. In Doig’s HitchHiker, for example, a truck travels through a gloomy, fairly abstract, and basic evening landscape with an empty field in the foreground, woods in the distance, mountains on the horizon, a sky full of clouds and rain. The truck is

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detailed but the titular hitch-hiker is nowhere to be seen.103 As there seems to be no connection between what we see (the landscape with truck) and what the title urges us to look for (the hitch-hiker), it is plausible that breaking the chain of referentiality was part of Doig’s aim to create a narrative open to interpretation, particularly by extending the picture, as he puts it, ‘away from and beyond the edges of the canvas’.104 The poem Walcott juxtaposes to Hitch-Hiker (and which shares its title with it) takes up that challenge as its narrative continues outside the boundaries of what is reproduced in the painting and into discourse, stretching it not only in a geographical but also in a geopolitical sense: it details an imagined journey during which a truck passes multiple towns, fields, farms, creeks and ‘Indian Nations’ that are in the process of being erased by (metaphorical?) clouds (MP15). Echoing the drama created by the disconnection of image and title in the painting, the poem comes full circle with the title only with its last line, when it suddenly mentions the hitch-hiker who will be asleep all night on the freight of the truck. The hitch-hiker’s irruption in the poem reconnects the referentiality cable between title and work, but only at the last minute. Reproducing the effect that the title of Doig’s painting has on us, we are invited to ponder on the hitch-hiker’s relationship to the landscape, to reinterpret the poem by going back to it and beyond the limits of what is on the page, and to imagine new stories with the hitch-hiker at their core which might interrogate the very conditions of freedom and dispossession, mobility and erasure, inscribed in Walcott’s landscaping (MP15). Walcott was clearly fascinated by the possibilities afforded by Doig’s open narratives: as Doig himself has explained, Walcott’s ‘way of looking at’ his paintings ‘was very much about looking for narrative – but not necessarily the narrative the painter may have put there’.105 Once a narrative was ‘found’, Walcott built on it, making the most of Doig’s blending of figuration and abstraction and orchestrating, sometimes in unexpected ways, the verbal and visual. For example, in Doig’s Night Palm (North Coast) (2008), the green leaves of the titular palm are only sketched, some areas of the canvas are left bare, the background is dark and light blue. Walcott’s poem juxtaposed to this image is entitled ‘Santa Cruz I’ and contains no mention of palms or night-time (MP53). Walcott here reinterpreted Doig’s abstract wilderness as a battered landscape, undone by the destructive power of a tropical storm. Countering both romanticisation and ‘tropicalization’106 of the Caribbean landscape, in describing a reality which is intensely local, the poem brings to the fore the social tensions and political responsibilities that exoticism tends to leave out of the frame. Flooding is in fact the most prevalent and persistent natural hazard affecting Trinidad, particularly its urban areas, mainly due to unplanned housing development, deforestation and irresponsible agricultural practices.107 The reference to the razing to the ground of the city of Carthage by the Roman Army adds further complexity, blurring the distinction between devastation caused by ‘natural’ disasters or ‘unnatural’ ones,

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those where human negligence or disregard for human lives and ecosystems play a pivotal role.108 Walcott’s ‘verbal representation’ and its narrative, in this case, appear to be inspired more by the kinetic energy of Doig’s painting and the way in which colour is applied (or not) on the canvas rather than by what it represents (a palm in the night), challenging the presumed centrality of the representational aspect of the visual work. Doig’s partly figurative and partly abstract landscapes, or his choice of saturated colours, often create almost hallucinatory images or, as he himself has put it, ‘something that is somehow in between the actuality of a scene and something that is in your head’.109 In J. M. at Paragon (2004), the first painting we encounter in Morning, Paramin, the sky is bright red, the line of the horizon is yellow, the sea is brown where the sand can be seen in transparency, and greyish/greenish, with white and purple brushstrokes, where the water is deeper. Intricate tropical foliage and flowers on the top of the painting are superimposed on the red sky and recall the purple, green and brown of the sea and beach. A tiny, bearded figure is plunged, up to his waist, in the foaming waters of Paragon Bay. Once this small white figure, slightly off-centre, enters our gaze, it becomes impossible to disregard it, despite the fact that his identity is concealed/revealed to us by the title which, while anchoring him in the landscape, only offers the initials J. M.110 In Walcott’s poem, ‘Dedication to S.H.’, Doig is present in the poem: Walcott addresses the painter directly as if he were in front of him and invites him to ‘share’, for the first time, his St Lucian home and the St Lucian landscape (MP3). Walcott does not describe (or refer to) Doig’s painting, suggesting, from the very beginning, that, in his ekphrastic efforts, he does not necessarily have to ‘represent’ the paintings his poems are in dialogue with; at the same time, it is evident that the poem has been moulded by Doig’s visual – but also, as we will see, verbal – choices. Walcott’s own hallucinatory landscaping moves between geographical locations (the toponym Blanchisseuse is the name of a location in both Walcott’s St Lucia and in Doig’s Trinidad) but also between present and past in its simultaneous inventory of the actual view from his balcony to the evocation of the remembered landscape of Walcott’s youth, ‘those scenes’ he ‘knew in [his] green years’ (MP3). The past, however, is also made present in Walcott’s title, ‘Dedication to S.H.’, which capitalises on Doig’s use of initials in his own title. It is easy to guess that Walcott’s initials S. H. stand for Walcott’s late friend and fellow poet Seamus Heaney, who used to be a regular guest at Walcott’s house in St Lucia even if, unlike Doig, Heaney is never mentioned in this poem. The corresponding use of initials in the two titles, however, invites us to look for (and find) Heaney in Doig’s painting, his visual counterpart the small, ghostly-white but impossible-to-ignore figure in the painter’s half-actual, half-remembered landscape, highlighting, once again, that painting and poem are not locked in a paragonal struggle (the toponym Paragon actually figures also in Doig’s title) but participate in a ­collaborative relation.

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Similarly, in the painting which is juxtaposed to the poem ‘In the Heart of Old San Juan’, we are invited to ponder on the role of titles in Walcott’s ekphrasis of relation and, at the same time, to look for the lingering presence of Walcott’s ex-wife Margaret, who died in 2014. In this poem, Walcott remembers that on the day of Margaret’s funeral in Port of Spain, even if she ‘was gone … all the streets were hers’ (MP33). The painting by Doig with which the poem is in dialogue, The Heart of Old San Juan (1999), seems, at first, a rather odd choice as it portrays an empty basketball field drawn from a photograph taken in San Juan de Puerto Rico.111 Doig has added a crucial detail to this photo, a big painted board with a huge red heart situated on the roof of a small side building. This mysterious heart, peripheral in the visual composition but central in Doig’s title, is therefore posited (literally) as the very heart of the place, much in the same way in which, in the poem, the late Margaret becomes the ‘heart’ of Port of Spain for the bereaved Walcott who feels as desolated as Doig’s basketball field. The connection between Margaret, the basketball field, the poem and the heart can be better accounted for by the fact that, in Montreal, Walcott was able to see Doig’s Study for the Heart of Old San Juan (1999) – which also appears in the catalogue with The Heart of Old San Juan (1999) – and another version of the painting. This version and the study both include a female presence, namely the elusive silhouette of a woman with skates.112 Furthermore, in the context of a collection where Trinidad plays a crucial role, Walcott’s ‘Old San Juan’ is less likely to be the capital of Puerto Rico of Doig’s photograph than the San Juan on the outskirts of Port of Spain, where Walcott set part of The Joker of Seville (1978), his adaptation of Tirso de Molina El Burlador de Sevilla (c. 1630). The geographical dislocation from Doig’s San Juan de Puerto Rico to Walcott’s Trinidad’s San Juan recorded in the poem is not based simply on the fact that they share the same name but is supported by visual correspondences which deepen the connection between poem and painting through a triangulation with Walcott’s play. Walcott’s drawings and watercolours for the setting and his stage directions for The Joker of Seville, in fact, specify that the stage should be round to make it identifiable, equally, with Spanish bullfight and Trinidadian stickfight or cockfight arenas, while the only large unit required is ‘a mobile ornamented box’.113 The circles and rectangles so prominent in Doig’s basketball court, therefore, find a compelling visual counterpart in the circular shape and rectangular cuboid of Walcott’s stage. As the visual and the verbal illuminate one another in unexpected ways they also elucidate the otherwise unclear connection between title and poem and the small, but all-important, alteration that Walcott includes in his title, namely the preposition ‘in’ which turns Doig’s ‘The Heart of Old San Juan’ into Walcott’s ‘In the Heart of Old San Juan’ (MP33). Since there is no ‘San Juan’ in Tirso de Molina’s original play, the village of San Juan might have been chosen by Walcott as a setting for the The Joker of Seville precisely

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because the toponym chimes with Don Juan, the name of the protagonist. If one substitutes San Juan with Don Juan in the poem’s title, ‘In the Heart of Old Don Juan’ might sound like a self-referential comment. It was in fact during the 1974 production of The Joker, which premiered at the Little Carib Theatre of Port of Spain (which is actually mentioned in the poem), that Walcott first met Norline Metivier, listed in the cast in the published version of the play,114 and the person who was going to become the catalyst of his estrangement from Margaret. It seems very clear, therefore, that, at the time of writing this poem, in the heart of this, now elderly, Don Juan (Walcott) there was a lot of ‘regret’ – a word which in the poem rhymes with ‘Margaret’ – for the pain caused by his actions (MP33). Once again, therefore, if considered together, poem and painting generate another new composite work where the visual and the verbal illuminate one another, reclaim mutual agency, and open up an interactive space in which the viewer can enter (‘in’ is a crucial preposition in the poem’s title) and can fill in for himself/herself. This (at first sight improbable) combination also turns on its head the traditional understanding of ekphrasis as an ‘obstetrical’ verbal description of a painting which ‘delivers’ the story that the painting contains but cannot fully represent.115 Creative processes are always extremely complex – often chaotic – affairs and, as such, are very hard to pinpoint in an exact fashion, but here things seem to be going in the opposite direction as it is only by taking on board Doig’s painting that we might make explicit the story that Walcott’s poem might implicitly contain, reaching beyond what is in front of our eyes into what might have been going on behind Walcott’s eyes (or, indeed, in his ‘heart’). Morning, Paramin is interested in creative processes. With ‘Ski Jacket’, while describing a snowscape, Walcott simultaneously illustrates the process of bringing into focus a vision and developing a narrative. Initially ‘direction is hard to find’ on a snowy-white page or canvas but slowly ‘things … take definition’ (MP5). Aptly, in the 1994 painting by Doig with which the poem is paired – and with which it shares the same title – if one looks carefully, one can see tiny skiers trying to find their feet on a mountain slope. At least initially, therefore, the correspondence between poem and painting relies both on the winter landscape and the tentativeness they depict. The poem, however, departs from this shared subject to develop its own different (but related) narrative and, most importantly, it does so in a way that is remindful of how Doig’s painting came about, a fact that reaffirms the agency of the visual and its influence on the verbal rather than establishing a relation where the verbal always takes over. Ski Jacket was inspired by a photograph of a ski resort and is a split canvas which started out as one panel, the panel on the right; Doig then photographed what he had painted, turned the slides and projected the image, stretching it out and distorting it. As the panel on the left opens the original image out, blowing definition and changing directionality, the two sides rhyme, as do different words in the poem which nevertheless

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correspond in sound; assembled together the two panels create a new image with a strong centre focus out of which everything seems to originate.116 The painting relies on a mirror image which, however, does not reflect exactly what it doubles and also cracks the mirror of natural resemblance, verisimilitude and realism (without breaking it); the poem similarly refuses, in more than one way, to be reduced to an exercise in mirroring, verbally, what the painting represents. Walcott acknowledges Doig’s source as a ‘square and banal’ postcard, or a postcard-like cliché (even kitsch) image. Nonetheless, he praises the painter for the way in which he transcends banality to arrive at the ‘simplicity’ where, Walcott insists, ‘home is’. This ‘simplicity’ is defined, in the last line of the poem as ‘a leaf-flecked boulder, a leaf-chocked canal’ (MP5) creating a deep, if unexpected, connection between Doig’s snowscape and Walcott’s own ‘home’, the St Lucia which, as a youth, he swore never to leave until he and St. Omer had catalogued and accounted for, with pen and brush, ‘all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines’ (AL52). As the poem establishes itself as a work of art in its own right, as open to interpretation as the painting it is (obliquely) addressing, the way in which poem and painting relate to one another gives rise, once again, to a new composite work (both verbal and visual) where correspondences and differences are concomitantly enhanced and which does not attempt to close, but actually thrives on, the gap between language and image, and between geographical locations, opened up by the combination. Ultimately, all the paintings and poems in Morning, Paramin are circumscribed by the whiteness of the page on which they are printed and out of which they take definition, both individually and as an ensemble. For Walcott, the space surrounding the images of Bearden’s collages was more important than the figures themselves117 so it is not surprising that it is precisely on this space, which sets poems and paintings apart, but also brings them together in the book, that creative negotiations between the sayable and the seeable, and the interaction between two mutually shaping agencies (poem/poet and painting/painter), take place. Unlike illustrated books which aim to demonstrate that ‘it is possible to say “this is that”’118 or to unproblematically, exhaustively and definitively designate and describe an image or a painting, Morning, Paramin choreographs a collaborative ekphrasis of Relation in which, as it was the case for The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott & the Art of Romare Bearden and Tiepolo’s Hound, poems do not simply ‘translate’ paintings (or vice versa) but productively combine with them in mutually transformative ways. The fact that often paintings and poems share the same title, as we have seen for ‘Ski Jacket’/Ski Jacket, even as it encourages us to see them as ‘one’, does not imply the erasure of their own or their author’s individuality. As Walcott establishes the coordinates of the world that poet and painter share, in fact, he also reaffirms the boundaries behind which he is not prepared to follow the visual artist. In ‘Mal d’Estomac’, humourously building on the connotations of the title of Doig’s Mal d’Estomac (2008),

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a rather abstract rendition of the homonymous bay in northern Trinidad, Walcott openly declares himself not to be particularly fond of this work: the poet in fact makes it clear that Doig’s interest in ‘difficult’ modern abstract paintings makes him ‘nauseous’ and that he does not share his admiration for Philip Guston (MP75). At the same time, when poems and paintings have different titles, they are not completely dissociated from one another. As we have seen with J. M. at Paragon/‘Dedication to S.H’., The Heart of Old San Juan/‘In the Heart of Old San Juan’, and in Night Palm/‘Santa Cruz I’, the synergy between poem and painting creates a powerful new work which highlights and thrives on a fruitful tension between words and images that are not immediately explained by, or reduced to, one another. A change of title, moreover, often signposts that Walcott’s interest does not reside in the painting’s motifs or subject but in the painting’s creative process or in the mood or memories evoked, for example, by a certain colour combination or the placement of visual elements. In the poem ‘The Tanker’, Walcott’s words are juxtaposed to an untitled painting by Doig (Untitled, 2008) featuring a bottle of beer, a nineteenth-century locomotive, and a boat, partly hidden behind the bottle and seemingly springing out from it. In his poem, Walcott makes no direct reference to the painting but describes instead a scene engulfed in silence with two different focal points: a tanker, ‘motionless’ on the ‘horizon’, and a heron, perfectly ‘still’ on the bough of a tree on a beach at midday (MP81). Yet, the way in which the painting organises space works as a blueprint for the poem. If the painting were to be simplified to three main lines (one horizontal and one vertical with a shorter line springing up from it), the horizontal line would be the locomotive which would correspond, in the poem, to the tanker; the vertical and shorter lines would represent instead the bottle and boat which would find their counterpart in the poem’s tree with heron. The fact that the painting is untitled facilitates the poet’s decision to focus on shape and composition, a consideration which highlights, indirectly, how words can affect our understanding of paintings. The poem, however, investigates the relationship between visual and verbal, image and words, by foregrounding the importance of silence for both arts and by recasting it as an empowering tool. Walcott describes his standpoint (the balcony from which he observes tanker, heron and tree) as the ‘perfect place’ to share with his painter friend, going as far as offering this view to him as a potential subject for a painting because of Doig’s ability to ‘hallow silence’ (MP81). ‘Great painting’, the poem goes on to explain, is ‘beauty without speech’ (MP81). The definition of ‘painting as dumb poetry’, attributed to Simonides of Keos – who, congruently, also defined poetry as a ‘speaking picture’ – was later deployed, in conjunction with the well-known Horatian simile ut pictura poesis (‘as is poetry so is painting’) and the pronouncements of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian,119 to lay the ground for the presupposition of a close similarity, even identity, between painting and poetry that became prevalent between the

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sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Walcott’s poem, however, rejects simplistic formulations of identity and assumptions of unproblematic, immediate transposition between the so-called ‘sister arts’,120 often disguised attempts to uphold the superiority of poetry. As we have seen, it neither offers a description of the painting nor, for instance, resorts to the rhetorical technique of prosopopeia which, envoicing ‘silent’ paintings, often sustains ekphrastic efforts. While the arrangements of the visual elements in Walcott’s poem (tanker, tree and heron) closely reproduce Doig’s positioning of locomotive, bottle and boat, restoring agency to Doig’s ‘silent’ painting, Walcott’s ‘The Tanker’ stages instead a compelling triangulation between painting, beauty and the absence of speech. The beauty Walcott celebrates in ‘The Tanker’ also defines what, for him, is the nature of ‘great’ painting: ‘beauty’ here is not an abstract, above-nature ideal that might require the mediation of declamation or (a) ‘speech’ in order to become intelligible but is to be found in the specific but, crucially, ordinary Caribbean natural landscape that Walcott can see from his balcony. This landscape, the poem suggests, should be engaged with in silence and with a receptive mind, not overwhelmed, overdetermined or distorted by the often disparaging, ‘tropicalising’ or exoticising rhetoric that has shaped and been shaped by what Walcott identifies as the ‘wrong eye’ with which the Caribbean landscape (but not only its landscape) has been traditionally approached (A75). In order not to accost the Caribbean with the ‘wrong eye’, Walcott here promotes what we can call the ‘right ear’: in other words, if one needs to learn how to look at the Caribbean with fresh eyes, one needs to create the necessary silence to be able to tune in with what Seamus Heaney called ‘the music of what happens’.121 This ‘silence’ is instrumental to overcome a tradition of painting (or otherwise representing) the Caribbean governed by mishapprehension and/or disfigurement, and to counter what we can call a paradigm of ut pictura commentatio which would presuppose an identity between painting and dominant discourses, often predicated on disabling ‘othering’ practices. Walcott always considered as fundamental the act of creating this inner silence in order to properly attend to Caribbean soundscapes: in ‘The Castaway’, he had declared that to be able to ‘hear the polyp build’ and the ‘silence thwanged by two waves of the sea’ is an important stepping stone for revolutionising thinking and abandoning disabling ‘dead metaphors’ (CA9–10). In Another Life, the child who puts a shell to his ear can hear what historians, distracted by imperial rhetoric and other dominant discourses, ‘cannot hear’, namely, ‘the howls / of all the races that crossed the water’ (AL143). As we have seen, the ability to be attuned to the ‘language beyond speech’ of the titular birds of ‘White Egrets’ is fundamental to an artistic vision that does not exploit, silence and annihilate its subjects. With ‘For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, St Lucia’, moreover, Walcott celebrates the way in which St. Omer’s mural (Fig. 2.7) is attuned

420    Derek Walcott’s Painters

to both the ‘music’ and the silence of the valley it presides over. In Morning, Paramin, Walcott reiterates his points on different occasions: in the poem ‘Baked’, paired with a red and golden ‘weather’ painting by Doig (Baked, 1990) which was inspired by the astonishingly and distressingly beautiful sunsets generated by the airborne toxic event in Don De Lillo’s 1985 novel White Noise,122 our attention is drawn to the way in which, when the sun goes down in the Caribbean, one can still hear how ‘the frog dictates, the cricket starts to type’ (MP37). In other words, Walcott’s poem wants us to ‘hear’ how frog and cricket stand for a place (and a way of life) where such animals are still part of a sunset drama. In the context of Doig’s painting and De Lillo’s novel, this place and way of life can be posited as an alternative to the self-destroying, profit-led (so-called) First World which has historically depleted Walcott’s Caribbean of natural resources, enslaved and indentured a great part of his population, and continues to deface its natural beauty, exploit the locals, stifle its culture and endanger its ecosystems: due to habitat loss, for example, a staggering 84 per cent of amphibians in the Caribbean are threatened with extinction.123 ‘Abstraction’ makes a related point. ‘Abstraction’ is in dialogue with Portrait (Under Water) (2007), a self-portrait where Doig appears isolated (or, indeed, ab-stracted) from the sounds which travel through the air but fully exposed to the sounds travelling through the sea which, according to Walcott, as anticipated in Chapter 5, is both where Caribbean history is to be found and the Caribbean itself. Looking at their paintings, Walcott argues, ‘we can hear what certain painters / heard as they worked’ and, Walcott insists, Doig’s ears are firmly attuned to the ‘brooding, breeding silence’ of Trinidad’s ‘deep bush’ (MP77). Taken together, therefore, ‘Abstraction’ and Portrait (Under Water) establish a continuity between Caribbean/ Trinidadian seascapes, landscapes and soundscapes. The pairing of Walcott’s poem ‘Milky Way’ and Doig’s Milky Way (1989–90), instead, connects starscapes and soundscapes. A Canadian starscape by Doig, in fact, becomes a springboard for Walcott to create a Trinidadian soundscape which also celebrates the island’s musical tradition: ‘maracas stars’ provide the link between the musical instrument, Maracas (a location on the north coast of the island), and the stars of the Milky Way depicted by Doig (MP21). In Trinidad, as Walcott suggests elsewhere in Morning, Paramin, some ‘people think that pain or pan is good for the soul’ (MP79): to really ‘hear’ Trinidadian music, therefore, also means to be able to attend to the pain of the people whilst appreciating the way in which they have turned that pain into a healing instrument and an empowering tool of resistance. Aptly, also the connection between great painting, beauty and no speech put forward in ‘The Tanker’, rather than promoting a disabling subordination of beauty to silence or a reinforcement of the traditional notion of pictures as ‘dumb poetry’,124 seems to sustain an effort to tune in with the painting in order to celebrate local Caribbean reality and its counter-discourses. Doig’s

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painting, in fact, might be untitled but it is not, strictly speaking, dumb: it does contain, in fact, the words ‘Stag’ and ‘Lager Beer’ on the beer bottle’s label. Stag is the brand name of a Trinidadian beer, a reference that, once acknowledged, allows us to revisit the other objects in the painting by anchoring them, as the poem does for heron, tree and tanker, to a Caribbean or, more precisely, Trinidadian reality. The friends in a boat are easily relatable to island life but the same goes, perhaps surprisingly, for the nineteenthcentury locomotive. Trinidad, in fact, does not currently have a railway but between 1876 and 1968 the Trinidad Government Railway developed a number of train lines which connected Port of Spain to the south and east of the island. Old locomotives of the Trinidad Government Railway similar to the one painted by Doig can be found immortalised in paintings, photographs and stamps, and two are on display in Port of Spain and San Fernando.125 Arguably, as Walcott’s poem and Doig’s painting become one, they bring to the fore the importance, for an artist, to anchor him/herself into one’s environment, to absorb and be absorbed by its natural landscape, its silences, its sounds, its culture, its society and its history. Trinidad, the island where Peter Doig and Walcott met for the first time, features prominently in the collection due to their shared strong and longlasting bond with it. When he returned to Trinidad in 2000, Doig felt very welcomed and realised that he had arrived in a very stimulating site for a painter: its sights, sounds and smells (which he recognised from his childhood), its light and clashing colours, its contradictions, all contributed to his decision to relocate to what he called ‘a very special place’.126 Walcott too always considered Trinidad inspirational: in his Nobel lecture, paying homage to the island’s multiculturality – and upholding lack of ‘purity’ as a desirable advantage – he famously asserted: ‘I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad’ (A69). In ‘Peter, I’m Glad You Asked Me Along’, Walcott argues that Trinidad’s ‘immense variety of racial choice’, its many languages, its music, noise and ‘craziness’ are what make it dear to him and Doig: addressing the painter directly, Walcott concludes that Trinidad ‘is just where we belong’ (MP85). The painting by Doig which seemingly informs Walcott’s conclusion, House of Flowers (See You There) (2007–9), encapsulates Doig’s attraction to Trinidad’s natural beauty and culture and the ‘craziness’ Walcott talks about. Doig highlights contrasts and continuities, assonances and dissonances in the rhythm of the composition which sets aside and, simultaneously, brings together the two sides of the painting. On the right, straight green lines on a yellow wall make up differently sized bricks which form a repeated geometrical pattern on which, in the lower section of the painting, are superimposed black bricks with red contours while, on the left, the same black bricks are overlaid on a blue background. In the upper part of the painting, we see the curved irregular lines of a black tree’s branches, falling petals differently

422    Derek Walcott’s Painters

sized and shaped as white and pink dots. Green curvaceous lines of hanging leaves cover and disrupt the straight lines of the yellow wall whose regularity is being disturbed by petals blowing in the wind. The human figure in the middle, almost blending with the background, plays a decisive part in creating continuity between right and left and upper and lower sections. One can perceive black bricks under the thinly applied paint which shapes his body, which is also covered by the petals falling from the tree, and his chequered trousers recall the colours (black, grey and red) and shapes of the wall. The semi-transparency of this chameleon-like figure provides a visual counterpart of what, in another poem, Walcott’s calls Doig’s ‘clarity of moving with an open mind’ (MP99), an openness which allows one to absorb the world with enrichment and not dilution of one’s identity – the figure retains his silhouette – and also embodies the poet’s suggestion that, living in Trinidad, Doig might ‘pick up an accent’ (MP85) or, following Glissant, ‘extend’ his identity.127 This ‘clarity of moving with an open mind’ also reverberates with what is promoted in the orchestrated dialogue between Walcott’s ‘The Tanker’ and Doig’s untitled painting of a boat, a bottle of Stag and a nineteenth-century locomotive, namely, the value of silence and a receptive attitude vis-à-vis Caribbean landscape and Caribbean reality. The juxtaposition of House of Flowers and ‘Peter, I’m Glad You Asked Me Along’ – a poem which, as we have seen, celebrates collaborative companionship and creolised and creolising Trinidad – also exemplifies the nature of the collection’s ekphrastic effort. This continuous process of creolisation, according to Glissant, is what has made the Caribbean region ‘one of the places in the world where Relation presents itself most visibly’ and where the ‘real foundation of Relation’, namely the ‘right to opacity’, is not erased.128 Analogously, in a collection where many of the poems do not even attempt to ‘describe’ the paintings, Walcott fosters instead an alter/native form of collaboration and connectivity which embraces heterogeneity and mutual transformation: in so doing, one could argue, with Morning, Paramin, Walcott creolises ekphrasis. In Walcott’s eyes, Doig’s open-mindedness, his ability to hear and see the island with the right ear and eye, his deep love for the place, and his decision to return to Trinidad to live, all contribute to make the painter ‘native’ rather than ‘foreign’ (or, indeed, ‘other’) to the world he is trying to depict: a ‘native’ is someone who, as Walcott put it in his Nobel speech ‘returns to what he loved in a landscape and stays there’ (A77). In the poem ‘A Lion is in the Streets III’, Walcott argues that Doig has earned the right to ‘belong’ because he paints Trinidadian ‘bareback’ streets – but, by extension, all Trinidadian subjects – with ‘a skill / achieved by love and mental membership’ (MP99). ‘Mental membership’ requires a deliberate effort to become part of a landscape instead of simply being someone who depicts it from outside. In Figure in Mountain Landscape (1997–8), a painting based on a photograph of the Canadian painter Franklin Carmichael at work en plein air, Doig presents

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us precisely with an artist who becomes part of the (snowy) landscape he is painting as the landscape becomes part of him. As Doig celebrates Carmichael’s deep love for the Ontarian wilderness, the poem by Walcott that accompanies the painting, and shares its title with it, identifies Doig as someone who keeps a ‘double climate’ inside and whose brush has whitened both ocean foam and snowfall (MP9). In The Prodigal, Walcott famously declared that ‘if they asked / what country [he] was from [he]’d say, “The light / of that three-lined sunrise down the Via Veneto”’ (P29), an assertion which chimes with the title and cosmopolitan spirit of Doig’s exhibition No Foreign Lands. In Morning, Paramin, Walcott recognises Doig as a kindred spirit when, in ‘Night Studio (Studiofilm & Racquet Club)’ he asserts that the only authority that Doig ‘obey[s]’ is ‘light’ (MP65). The painting by Doig which gives Walcott’s poem its title, a 2015 self-portrait of the artist in his Port of Spain studio, can also be seen as a variation on the theme of belonging and cosmopolitanism. Here Doig superimposes his own figure on one of his own paintings, namely Stag (2002–5), also included in the collection and paired with Walcott’s poem ‘Metropolitain’ (MP47). Based on a black and white photograph of a clochard leaning on a pole, Stag relocates the Parisian scene firmly in Trinidad as the title, the name of a local beer, clearly suggests. As ‘real’ and painted people become indistinguishable, Doig’s superimposition of his portrait on the composite figure behind (the photographed Parisian clochard turned into a Port of Spain ‘drunkard’) seems to ponder the translatability of experience whilst interrogating one’s sense of belonging. The title of the collection, Morning, Paramin, further confirms that Trinidad is the trait d’union between poet and painter as both their names appear on the cover next to the word ‘Paramin’, the name of one of the highest points of the Trinidad Northern Range and one of its most striking landmarks. As a title, Morning, Paramin does not derive from the title of any of Doig’s works but evokes a landscape painting and, bringing together time and space – two dimensions often crudely associated exclusively with writing and painting respectively – reminds us that a place is much more than a name on a map or a geographical location. Walcott knew that the challenge for a poet and painter was to be able to ‘see’ and then find a way to represent the cluster of individual and collective experiences, layers, affects, memories, literary and artistic references, narratives, perspectives and ongoing processes that shape each particular place. One could argue that the collection can also be viewed as a collaborative, complex and multifocal landscape of Trinidad to the creation of which Walcott and Doig contribute, each in his own way. Their collaboration is predicated on trust and admiration: the opening poem in which, as we have seen, Walcott offers Doig the view from his balcony in St Lucia (and the island’s scenery as a whole) is a mark of his confidence in the painter’s ability to paint the Caribbean with a sensitivity that makes no concessions to the idealisation, exoticism or insulting condescension that have often characterised misrepresentations of the region. To appropriately

424    Derek Walcott’s Painters

represent the Caribbean has been a crucial and lifelong purpose for Walcott: in The Prodigal, when he was fearing that he was running out of time, he exhorted himself, once more, to ‘make each place / as if it had just been made, already old, / but new again from naming it’ (P99). In Morning, Paramin, Walcott’s poems, the work of a Caribbean poet and painter with a deep understanding and profound knowledge of both art history and painting techniques, often highlight how truly impressed Walcott was by Doig’s skills but also by his commitment to and love for the island. A deeply felt love for the landscape, as we have seen, is fundamental to Walcott because paying homage to the natural beauty of the region means celebrating something which had a profound and salvific effect on those who had been transported to the Caribbean either as detribalised Africans or indentured Indian workers. According to Walcott, in fact, the never-ending promise of renewal and the daily sense of elation inherent in the region’s geography – which both Homer and Bearden appreciated and responded to in their works – played a crucial part in enabling enslaved and indentured subjects to transcend the degrading condition in which they had been forced to descend. Morning, Paramin elaborates on the enduring healing power of the Caribbean landscape with the pairing of Doig’s Music of the Future (2002–7) with Walcott’s poem of the same title. In Doig’s landscape painting, sky and sea reflect and mirror one another, taking up two-thirds of the work, while a small central strip is allocated to a human settlement. Walcott’s poem is both starscape and soundscape: as darkness falls, we are told, more and more stars become visible and, while ‘constellation[s]’ slowly fill up the sky, the sound of ‘breaker[s]’ becomes increasingly intense until it turns into an ‘ovation’ (MP23). Here, the combination of poem, painting and their shared title invites us to identify the breakers’ ovation as the titular ‘music of the future’ which has sustained and inspired (and continues to do so) the people of the Caribbean, who have witnessed, and continue to witness, astonishing natural spectacles like the one described by Walcott. In other words, taken together, Music of the Future/‘Music of the Future’ exemplify ‘survival’, which Walcott considered to be ‘the visible poetry of the Antilles’ (A75). The poetry of survival is also visible/readable/audible in ‘A Lion is in the Streets III’, one of the four poems in Morning, Paramin which face paintings by Doig in which lions are presiding over the streets of Port of Spain and the one where Walcott praises the artist for his ‘love’ for the island, his ‘clarity of moving with an open mind’ and his ‘mental membership’ (MP99). Lions, representing Haile Selassie, the returned Messiah and ‘Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah’ of the Rastafari Movement, are a recurrent motif on the walls, billboards and galvanised fences of Port of Spain. In the poem ‘A Lion is in the Streets I’, Walcott pays tribute to Haile Selassie’s dignity and courage by remembering the moving and forceful speech with which, in 1936, Selassie denounced the Italian invasion, Italy’s use of lethal chemical weapons and, ultimately, the League of Nations’ inability or unwillingness to

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protect his country and his people. Walcott’s poem, however, begins with a Salvation Army choir singing about the Lion of Judah breaking every chain and leading to victory, a recollection from the time when Walcott was living with his late mother and siblings in Castries after his father’s death. Praising the ‘triumphant spirit’ of the Salvation Army cornet, Walcott also remembers his widowed mother’s faith and determination: ‘for my mother, sewing, there was no defeat’ (MP95). Walcott’s poem, a hymn to fortitude, perseverance and tenacity, is put in dialogue with Doig’s Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak) (2015), where a lion circulates freely in front of a yellow brick wall. This yellow wall, with its small green barred window and thin door, is a composite of the walls of the Trinidad’s Emperor Valley Zoo and of the prison of Frederick Street, in the centre of Port of Spain.129 An inmate, whose face is barely perceivable from behind the barred window, observes the lion from inside. The painting as a whole offers a powerful display of pent-up energy, might and endurance, a mixture of fierceness, resilience and survival which characterises those who (like Selassie and Walcott’s mother, but also Caribbean people as a whole) are locked in an unfavourable predicament but do not give up or give in. Doig, who held art workshops for the inmates of one of the island’s jails, has explained that he was struck by the fact that, given the central location of the prison of Frederick Street in Port of Spain, those locked inside could actually hear the Carnival raging outside. This observation explains his choice of a title and parenthetical subtitle which are evocations of Trinidad’s Carnival: White Oak is the brand name of the official rum that sponsors the Carnival and is advertised by the slogan: ‘When it [White Oak rum] pours, you reign.’130 In the following painting in the collection, Young Lion (2015) – another reference to the biblical Judah and Haile Selassie – the titular lion appears to be trapped in the corner of a room of which we can see only two yellow walls and in front of a shut green door. Since the colours of walls and door are those of Port of Spain’s prison and zoo, the adjective ‘young’ might be gesturing to the fact that, distressingly, many of those in Port of Spain’s jails and Youth Training Centres are young men between eighteen and twenty-five years of age. For a viewer familiar with the Trinidadian capital city and its streets, however, Doig’s painting stages a subtle inside-out (rather than upside-down) Carnivalesque re-imagining of the world. The green door behind the lion is in fact one of the entrances to the prison seen from the outside where the yellow wall recedes and turns a corner, and the costume the young lion wears (a black hat with a turquoise feather) identifies him as a solitary but ‘free’ carouser. Doig’s paintings, therefore, seem to suggest that, despite being confined in a disadvantaged situation, unlike Walcott’s characters in The Last Carnival but like those in Drums and Colours, inmates of Port of Spain can draw on the Carnival tradition, its questioning of social hierarchy, and its energising strategies in order to trigger inner ­transformation and re-envisage their own individual and collective position.

426    Derek Walcott’s Painters

The transformative nature of Carnival performances is also brought to the fore by Walcott in a poem entitled ‘Man Dressed as Bat’ which is paired with Doig’s Man Dressed as Bat (Night) (2008), a painting in conversation with a third artist, the Trinidadian Embah, whose sculpture of a man dressed as a bat inspired Doig’s work.131 Bats, creatures of the night which originally were associated with formidable figures like vampires and devils and have the power to fly and ‘see’ in the dark, are amongst the most ancient Carnival characters in Trinidad and, with his poem, Walcott revisits – re-crossing it in empowering ways – the animal-human boundary questioned in Doig’s Carnival-related lion paintings and once de facto erased by the institution of slavery. Walcott’s ‘Man Dressed as Bat’, in fact, offers a light-hearted dramatisation of an encounter between a Trinidadian mas player (a man dressed as a bat for the Carnival celebration) and a person whose reactions to the man/ bat are voiced directly in the poem. The intense locality of Carnival and the artist Embah’s commitment to his community are echoed in the colloquiality and vernacularity of the language in which the poem is composed: ‘What the arse was that?’ ‘Get a broom and juck it’, shouts the speaker who responds to the man/bat as if it were a threat from which it is impossible to free oneself – the words with which his speech and the poem end are, significantly, ‘wait, he coming back!’ (MP41). The immediate, conversational tone of this poem is orchestrated by Walcott but the speaker’s voice reaches us directly (there are no introductory lines or inverted commas), a rhetorical strategy that reminds us that Walcott was an accomplished playwright. This strategy finds its visual echo in the fact that, towards the edge of Doig’s man/bat’s wings, paint is applied in a way that gives viewers the illusion of transparency without ceasing to be matter. The different ‘layers’ in this complex and composite artwork (mas player, sculpture, painting, poem and, finally, the synergistic combination of words and image) remind one of the ‘complex layeredness’ of Bearden’s collages, ‘their refusal to be only one thing’,132 whilst acknowledging that museums and art galleries are not the only sites that can make art available to the general public. In Trinidad, in fact, important artistic forms like Carnival – its commercialisation notwithstanding – are of the streets and on the streets, and audiences play a crucial role in their production. The influence of Trinidad on Doig is evident in his choice of motifs as well as in the vibrant colours and hues of his palette, as testified by a quick look at his pre-Trinidad paintings which have Canadian mountains and snowscapes as their subjects. Many of the paintings that enter into a dialogue with Walcott’s poems in Morning, Paramin have specific Trinidadian villages, landscapes, seascapes and urban streets at their core, but Doig seems well aware that landscaping Trinidad also requires a sharp understanding of, and an active engagement with, not only its natural landscape but its culture too. It is no coincidence that the site chosen for the title of the collection, Paramin, is not just an astonishingly beautiful location but also a microcosm of the variety of languages, traditions and heritages one can find in Trinidad.

Poems ‘Out Of’ Paintings    427

Many of its inhabitants, in fact, are of French Creole descent (some still speak French Creole) and others are the descendants of Venezuelan cocoa workers who, according to some, introduced Parang, a form of popular music still sung in Spanish, on the island. In the month of December, in fact, Paramin hosts the largest Parang Festival in Trinidad, making it an important site for Trinidad’s musical tradition. The subject of the painting by Doig that we find on the front cover, Untitled (Paramin) (2004) (Fig. 8.1) is a figure which embodies Paramin’s social history and culture, namely a jab molassie or blue devil. Jab molassie is French patois for diable (devil) and mélasse (molasses) and the jab molassie is a devil who, during Carnival, is smeared with a blue dye and threatens to besmear bystanders unless they are prepared to pay him not to do so. Doig’s painting captures very well the threatening aura of the jab but also, more profoundly, the way in which the blue devil is haunted by the legacies of slavery, oppression and exploitation which always lurk behind Carnival performances of resistance and possibilities. Doig’s Untitled (Paramin) also reappears in the collection, paired with a poem by Walcott which shares its title with it and in which Walcott too brings to the fore the importance of local culture. Walcott’s here celebrates those creatures of the Caribbean night like loup garous, diablesses and douen(ne)s (MP43). Despite being neglected in favour of classical mythology and mainstream English literature (the word ‘untitled’ in the title, if seen in this context, seems to signpost this neglect), these creatures are – like Paramin’s blue devils or Carnival’s men/bats – powerful manifestations of local folklore but also metaphysical enigmas and disquieting muses à la De Chirico (who is mentioned in the poem), and crucial stepping stones for artists who want to confront the island’s heritage and its collective memories (MP43). Despite Walcott’s enthusiasm, Doig does not take for granted his entitlement to paint Trinidad: most of his paintings, he has explained, ‘question’ his ‘being there and also why things are as they are’.133 This questioning is sometimes directed at the roots of the status quo, namely the island’s colonial history. In Walcott’s ekphrasis of Relation, his poems are shaped by and, at the same time, amplify Doig’s visual questioning. Doig’s Moruga (2002–8) is based on a photograph from a local newspaper reporting a re-enactement of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in Trinidad in 1498, when he is said to have named the island Trinidad. The newspaper’s photographer captured the moment in which a handful of actors pretending to be Spaniards, one of whom is brandishing a sword, are on a boat with the red-cross-on-white-flag of the Templars and about to land.134 In Doig’s painting, the landing is taking place in a bay framed by green/blue and brown hills and what appears to be elaborate dark brown foliage hanging from above; the sea is purple/brown – apart from a fiery orange/yellow strip – and the golden/white sky is partially obscured by the foliage. As a result, Doig’s painted scene is much darker and more foreboding than the one in the photo, where the sea around is perfectly

428    Derek Walcott’s Painters

calm and the horizon is open. Doig’s image seems to highlight, therefore, that the arrival of Europeans on the Trinidadian coast was the prelude to genocide, colonialism, slavery and indentureship, and to signpost, perhaps, his awareness that Discovery Day was abolished in Trinidad in 1985 to be substituted by Emancipation Day.135 In Walcott’s ‘Moruga’, one of the most straightforward verbal ‘representations’ of a painting to be found in the collection, we are informed that what Doig painted is in fact a re-enactment of the ‘myth’ of discovery, a myth which, like the performance it was inspired by, ‘ha[d] been thoroughly rehearsed’. Going as far as saying that ‘Columbus never set foot’ on Trinidad, Walcott asserts that Doig paints his arrival ‘for what it is: a fable’ (MP19). The poetics of Relation which governs this particular dialogue between poem and painting, therefore, stretches this verbal representation of a visual representation of a visual representation/­ performance (or the poem’s ‘aboutness’ or, rather, ‘out-of-ness’ in relation to the painting) to include and confront, head-on, discourses and counterdiscourses surrounding the ‘discovery’ of America. This ‘fable’, the poem continues, is about the ‘curse’ of colonialism or the ‘virtuous practice’ of the spreading of Christianity, depending on how one decides to (re)write or indeed, perform, history (MP19). Walcott’s ‘100 Years Ago (Carrera)’ is also concerned with seafaring, history, literature and colonialism, as testified to by his references to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner (1797–8) and Ben Gunn from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island (1881–3).136 The poem responds to Doig’s 100 Years Ago (Carrera) (2001) and the implicit invitation to revisit the past inherent in the painting’s title. As a solitary and emaciated man looks at us from an impossibly long canoe which cuts the painting in two horizontally, we are faced with the only prose poem of the collection. The very long lines which mirror the length of Doig’s canoe, draw our attention to the fact that writing itself – in the sense of the words as they are printed on the page – is a visual as well as a verbal reality. Walcott, therefore, invites us to question, once again, the very existence of rigid boundaries between visual and verbal. The source for Doig’s 100 Years Ago (Carrera) is a photograph of the 1970s Allman Brothers Band137 which portrays all the five members of the band, not just the late Berry Oakley who is the one who has inspired the painter. As this iconic figure reminds us of the 1970s, the title of the painting directs us instead to the beginning of the twentieth century which Catherine Grenier identifies with what she calls ‘the primal territories of modern times: Romanticism, Realism, and Symbolism’.138 Yet, by recasting the canoe as a ‘hyphen between centuries, / between generations, between trees’ – highlighting again the continuity between painted shapes (‘canoe’) and graphic signs (‘hyphen’) – the poem invites us to revisit an even more remote past and another moment which has often been saluted as the beginning of modernity, namely the encounter between European powers and the indigenous population in the Caribbean (MP17). The craft of building canoes from trees that

Poems ‘Out Of’ Paintings    429

Walcott also praises in Omeros (O3–5) is in fact a practice which goes back to the indigenous inhabitants of the region massacred as a result of colonialism but who are also the ones who coined the word canoe, and whose lingering presence we can ‘hear’ in the word and ‘see’ in its corresponding image. The poem also draws our attention to the fact that behind the figure in Doig’s painting lurks the island of Carrera, mentioned in the parenthetical title. As Walcott explains, Carrera is one of the islands of the Gulf of Paria which, far from being a ‘treasure’ island, has been used as a prison since 1854. Doig has revealed that he added Carrera to a painting of the man in the canoe after his first visit to Trinidad in the year 2000 when, during a boat trip, he discovered what the island was being used for and felt uncomfortable looking at it, partly because it (deceptively) looks like a very ‘exotic’ villa.139 The title contains no clue as to what the island actually is, but if the inclusion of Carrera alters the painting’s composition by giving us another focal point, it also complicates our relationship with the painting itself as the man’s gaze is directed at, and interrogates, us while we are looking at him and the island. Revealing what Carrera stands for, therefore, the poem forces us to partake of Doig’s discomfort while looking at the painting, urging us to question our assumptions of what constitutes a Caribbean landscape or a Caribbean island, to ponder on the continuities (or ‘hyphens’) which connect slavery and imprisonment, tourism and colonialism, and to reconsider, with the painter, the different ways in which we might be implicated in all this. Carrera returns in another painting in which Doig addresses the issue of landscaping Trinidad more directly, namely House of Pictures (Carrera) (2004) where, on a colourful brick wall hang four paintings of – or four windows on – what might have been the actual view the wall is obstructing: two-thirds of each of these paintings are dark blue (the sea) while the remaining third is light blue (the sky). Carrera sits on the horizon of two of the paintings, cut in two vertically. Above the wall is the sky; under the wall is a grey pavement with some weeds and a broken bottle of Stag Doig decided to include as a ‘random act of violence’.140 Historically, landscaping the Caribbean amounted to leaving (mostly slavery-related) acts of violence and unpleasant views out of the frame: here Doig urges us to rethink these falsifying paradigms by bringing Carrera into the frame of the paintings/ windows and making it rhyme with the broken bottle inside the frame of his own painting, pressing us (and himself) to look again without ‘overlooking the gritty present-day reality of the island’141 or, indeed, its troubled past. Walcott’s ‘House of Pictures (Carrera)’ arrives at a similar conclusion through a different route which further localises poem and painting. Doig’s brick wall, Walcott insists, is the artist’s ‘homage’ to local ‘craftsmen’, more specifically, masons who build walls similar to the one we are facing in the painting. As the poem celebrates the work of all those who humbly and stubbornly ‘fit … [a] cut stone to its wall’, we are invited to see the painter’s decision to include Carrera and the broken bottle in his landscape (unmentioned

430    Derek Walcott’s Painters

in the poem but clearly visible in the painting) as Doig’s way to ‘fit’ his ‘stone/ image’ in the bigger ‘picture/wall’ of Trinidadian past and present (often unpalatable) reality (MP89). In Metropolitain (House of Pictures) (2004) a nineteenth-century figure is caught in the act of looking at a display of paintings in Doig’s adaptation of Honoré Daumier’s The Print Collector (1857–63). Unlike the print collector in Daumier’s work, Doig’s figure is confronted mainly by empty frames but one can still perceive, faintly, one of the versions of a painting by Doig where a man holds a dead pelican by its neck on a beach.142 Initially, all the paintings on display used to be Doig’s own tropical landscapes but they were subsequently scrubbed out by the painter himself. Both this act of self-erasure and the fact that the collector’s backdrop is an abstract rendition of the view out of Doig’s studio window143 signposts Doig questioning, once again, his right and his ability, as a metropolitan outsider, to do justice to the powerful landscape of Trinidad. Walcott’s ‘Metropolitain (House of Pictures)’ acknowledges Doig’s source and describes the collector as Daumier’s flâneur. In the context of Morning, Paramin, however, the melancholic demeanour of the flâneur might also reflect an ekphrastic poet’s anxiety regarding his abilities to respond adequately to the paintings he is drawn to. The flâneur, Walcott writes, is saddened by the fact that he cannot afford to buy one of the works that he is admiring, and the painting depicts the ‘distance of the heart / from what it cannot own’ (MP73). Arguably, it is precisely this desire to own – or fully grasp or explain (away) – a painting – or a person, an egret, or a landscape – that the flâneur, but also the painter and (ekphrastic) poet, need to address and reconfigure. Morning, Paramin, as we have seen, is the last of a long series of works driven by and foregrounding a different impulse, the impulse not only to appropriate and own but also to seriously engage with (and often honour) both the paintings that the poems are engaging with and the people, worlds, realities – in a word, the subjects – they might represent. Discarding the paragonal struggle for dominance or a comparativist approach which presupposes total transparency and translatability between the two arts and reality and representation, the dialogue between poems and paintings (but also between poems and other kinds of subjects) establishes and is shaped by a poetics of Relation which renounces ownership or ‘com-prehension’ in the etymological, appropriative, predatory, repressive way in which Glissant understands the word (from the French comprendre and Latin con ‘with’ and prendere ‘to take’) and upholds instead the transformative generosity of perception and open-mindedness that the Martinican theorist names, with an arresting inversion, donner-avec or give-on-and-with.144 In ‘Grande Riviere I’, Walcott responds to (or gives-on-and-with) Doig’s landscape painting Grande Riviere (2001–2), based on two photographs taken on the northeast side of Trinidad.145 The painting portrays a white horse on a river shore surrounded by black birds; the scene takes place

Poems ‘Out Of’ Paintings    431

at night and the brightness of the stars is reflected in the water’s surface. Bringing words and images together, the poem refers to alternative renderings of ‘exotic’ places. Conjuring up Captain Marryat and Joseph Conrad alongside ‘frontispiece[s]’ of Victorian novels where the ‘green’ of the ‘forest drips to devour the explorer’, Walcott goes to the (imperial) root of what he calls the ‘wrong eye’, Glissant’s com-prehension, and Doig’s self-questioning, showing how cultural lenses can (mis)construe as menacing the ‘lowering green emptiness’ that Walcott loves ‘as hard as Peter Doig’ and finds so admirably portrayed in his work (MP49). In another version of the same painting, Grande Riviere (2002), the horse and the birds occupy centre stage but their shapes are only roughly sketched, as if they were part of a faintly remembered, nightmarish landscape. Walcott’s poem facing this painting, ‘Grande Riviere II The Phantom Steed’, is a monologue by an explorer who recounts a journey down a river during which he saw a white stallion he instantly wanted to appropriate for himself in an example of what he, unembarrassingly, describes as ‘just conquest, just murder, and just greed’ (MP51). In this critique of imperial rhetorical (self-)deception, Walcott shows how the threat posed by the conqueror to the place he is about to conquer is ultimately projected onto the endangered landscape which is rendered as ominous, foreboding, terrifying: despite feeling his ‘claim / to be inevitable’, when he tries to get closer to the steed, the explorer realises, with ‘Terror’, that it ‘was gone’, and that only menacing ‘vultures’ were ‘wait[ing] in the shifting sun’ (MP51).146 It is also possible, of course, to interpret the poem as another meditation on the relationship between paintings, poems and their subjects akin to the one conducted in ‘White Egrets’ in connection with the artist/ornithologist/hunter Audubon, or in ‘The Light of the World’ in relation to the beautiful woman who refuses to engage with the poet. As the explorer is drawn to the horse like a painter or poet might be drawn to his/her subject (or a poet engaging with paintings, to a painting), the explorer’s desire (like that of the collector in the previous example) is distorted by a greed and a will to possess which refuse to acknowledge the (painted) landscape or the horse (or the egrets and the woman) as real, living presences. These presences, instead, demand and deserve to be reckoned with: as Glissant would have it, one needs to tune in, yield to and give-on-and-with rather than grasp, com-prehend, or own them. Significantly, when questioned about the black birds in Grand Riviere and what the interviewer described as their ‘ominous’ relationship with the white horse, Doig refuted any gloomy intimation and underlined instead the need not to erase their presence: ‘where my house is in Trinidad, there are a lot of these birds flying around … I painted them really just because I drew them and I drew them because they were just there’.147 A huge black bird returns in the last painting in the collection, Cave Boat Bird Painting (2010–12), where it flies on top of a fisherman asleep on a boat with a ‘pink hat’ which covers his eyes and nose. In the poem opposite to it, Walcott recounts his (failed) attempts at birdwatching, acknowledging the

432    Derek Walcott’s Painters

elusive nature of birds, their indifference to the beholder, their stubborn ‘open life’ as well as their surprising, sudden deaths, or, in other words, the fact that they live according to their own rhythm (MP103). Walcott also re-imagines Doig’s painting as a self-portrait and pays tribute to the painter-sleepingfisherman who has become part of the Trinidadian seascape, no longer just a ‘native’ who paints the island, but ‘one of those things / that a corbeau passes or the hawk with its gold eye’ (MP103, emphasis on ‘things’ mine). The fact that the painter here becomes the object of the gaze of some of his former subjects underlines, for the last time, the kind of non-domineering relation painters or poets should have with ‘those things’ they paint or give their names to, and illustrates again the Relation poems and paintings establish in the collection: once they are read and looked at together, in fact, it becomes irrelevant to establish which one is the ‘subject’ or ‘object’ of the other. Overall, therefore, Morning, Paramin explores and brings to the fore the many possibilities inherent in a creative collaboration which can only result from the clarity of an open mind. The cover of the volume posits Walcott and Doig as co-authors, even if, chronologically, Doig’s paintings were produced before he met Walcott, and Walcott is ultimately responsible for the orchestration of poems and paintings. Walcott and Doig, however, share the authorship of a collection in which poems and paintings establish a dialogue which is not only mutually transformative but also engenders new composite works of art governed by a non-competitive, non-exploitative, non-predatory approach. Walcott’s last work, therefore, brought him back to his beginnings in St Lucia, and, in particular, to Simmons’s studio where, in a collaborative effort to arrive at ‘a perfection to West Indian things’, the young apprentices and their tutor strove to give these ‘things’ their names, forging their own individual visions in paint and in words.148 In Another Life, Walcott had hoped that poetry and painting would ‘cohere / and finally ignite’ (AL58–9) and, as we have seen, throughout his career, he tried to orchestrate, in different ways, the cohering of the two disciplines. Arguably, in Morning, Paramin he took all his achievements further, since, as each picture and each poem breathes according to its own rhythm, they contribute to a whole which is considerably greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Notes

1. Walcott in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 153. 2. Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit, 43–4. 3. Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit, 4. 4. Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’. 5. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 3. 6. Krieger, Ekphrasis, xvi–xvii. 7. Maxwell, ‘Derek Walcott in Conversation’. 8. Hagstrum, Sister Arts, 158, n.18.

Poems ‘Out Of’ Paintings    433 9. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 152, 154–5. 10. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 1. 11. Hagstrum, Sister Arts, 66–70. 12. Walcott, ‘To Romare Bearden’, 3. 13. Walcott in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 153. 14. Walcott, Dual Muse, 1999, 40. 15. Walcott, ‘To Romare Bearden’, 3. 16. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want, xv. 17. In A Green Night contains poems like ‘Fragments and Epitaphs: Greenwich Village, Winter’, ‘Fragments and Epitaphs: A Statue Overlooking Central Park’ and ‘Bleecker Street, Summer’ (GN50, 52) written in response to Walcott’s stay in New York while ‘The Hurricane – After Hokusai’ reminds us that, as Walcott put it in American, without America, Hokusai was ‘in the air’ in 1958 New York. 18. Hind, Rembrandt, 91. 19. Bridge, Portraits, 31. Bridge had been preceded by Jerzy Mycielski who had declared, in 1904, that the image was that of Rembrandt’s son Titus (Held, ‘Rembrandt’, 254, n.61). 20. Ashbery, ‘Self-Portrait’, 247–61. 21. Bridge, Portraits, 31. 22. Bridge, Portraits, 30–1. 23. Bridge, Portraits, 31. 24. Walcott in Loreto, Crowning, 202. 25. Walcott in Sajé and Handley, ‘Sharing’, 133. 26. Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 234, 233. 27. Presumably the fer-de-lance which still poses a serious threat to humans or the St Lucia grass snake, a species unique to the island. The mention of a snake in relation to two characters who have been described as Adam and Eve has biblical connotations as does the sexual act in which Walcott imagines them to have engaged and which is described in the poem as a moment in which ‘the snake pours itself / into a chalice of leaves’ (SG54). Like St. Omer, therefore, Walcott here inscribes religious belief into ordinary experience. 28. Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 233, 234. 29. Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 234. 30. Simmons, ‘Need for an Arts and Crafts Society’, 3. 31. Simmons, ‘Need for an Arts and Crafts Society’, 3. 32. Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 13. 33. Craven, Treasury, 14. 34. The original albums entitled Photographs of Cotton Sharecroppers’ Families are in the Library of Congress and are available online as digital files. Allie Mae Burroughs’s portrait is image 36 of volume 1. 35. In Picture Theory, Mitchell includes the black and white portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs from Let Us Now under the title Annie Mae Gudger (p. 295). 36. Sontag, On Photography, 6–7. 37. Incidentally, there are some resonances here with Walcott’s own problematic relationship with the photographer, their subjects and the demographic of the magazine (House & Garden) which commissioned ‘Native Women under SeaAlmond Trees’.

434    Derek Walcott’s Painters 38. Sontag, On Photography, 154. 39. Ellison, ‘Art of Romare Bearden’, 197. 40. Edwards, ‘Political Bearden’, 260. 41. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 297–8. 42. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 294. Leaving the political value of Mitchell’s remark aside, which thrives on the contrast between Leonardo’s and Evans’s portraits, one could argue that, incidentally, in the portrait from the original 1936 album (Fig. 7.3), Allie Mae Burroughs has a more enigmatic expression (a bit à la Mona Lisa) than in the 1941 version. 43. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 94. 44. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 94. 45. Greenberg, To Ask for an Equal Chance, 21 and passim. 46. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 116. 47. O’Neal, A Vision Shared, 9–10. 48. O’Neal, A Vision Shared, 374–9. According to O’Neal there was also congressional interest in launching a similar project which, however, never materialised. 49. O’Neal, A Vision Shared, 10, 11. 50. Described by O’Neal as an ‘artist with the camera’ and the ‘only fully mature’ photographer of the group showcased in A Vision Shared (p. 339), Evans might have interested Walcott for his aesthetic vision. It is most likely that Walcott was familiar with Evans’s photographs for Hart Crane’s The Bridge, a poem that Walcott highly admired. In the early 1980s Walcott also produced storyboards for a film script devoted to Hart Crane (King, Derek Walcott, 457). 51. See for example, Ben Shahn’s ‘Scene Outside Deserted Mining Town, Zinc’ and ‘Deserted Mining Town, Zinc’, Walker Evans’s ‘Auto Dump, Easton (Vicinity)’, and many of his photographs of West Virginia and Pennsylvania (1935), and Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia (1936), where people are absent (or at least not prominent) and are all characterised by an eerie sense of emptiness (O’Neal, A Vision Shared, 29, 31, 52, 15, 53–5, 59–61, 63–5, 68–71, 108–9). 52. Ben Shahn, ‘Family of Rehabilitation Clients, Boone County’, Arkansas, October 1925 (O’Neal, A Vision Shared, 28). 53. Walcott in Hirsch, ‘Art of Poetry’, 116. 54. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 157. 55. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 31, 27. 56. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 3. 57. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11. 58. Namely, Selected Poems (1964); The Gulf (1970); Another Life (1973); Sea Grapes (1976); The Star-Apple-Kingdom (1979); and The Fortunate Traveller (1981). 59. Walcott in Price and Price, Romare Bearden, 78. 60. Walcott in Mentus, ‘Walcott Set the Dilemma’, 4. 61. For example, Gilpin explains that ‘wood[s]’ and ‘pasturage’ are ‘of peculiar value in landscape’ while ‘furrowed-lands and waving corn, however charming in pastoral poetry, are ill-accommodated to painting. The painter never desires the hand of art to touch his grounds’ and ‘wishes’ that ‘the uses of

Poems ‘Out Of’ Paintings    435 agriculture … may, as much as possible, be concealed; and that the land they circumscribe, may approach, as nearly as may be, to nature. Pasturage not only presents an agreeable surface: but the cattle, which graze it, add great variety, and animation to the scene’ (Observations, 44). 62. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 37. 63. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 11. 64. Edwards, ‘Political Bearden’, 261. 65. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 11. 66. O’Meally, Romare Bearden, 11–12. 67. Craven, Treasury, 463, 462. 68. Craven, Treasury, 1958, 261, 228. 69. Craven, Treasury, 1958, 228. 70. Döring, Caribbean-English Passages, 173, 202. 71. Walcott in Brown and Johnson, ‘Thinking Poetry’, 182. 72. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 157. 73. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 137. 74. Froude, The English in the West Indies, 347. 75. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 163. 76. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 163. 77. Craven, Treasury, 295. 78. Craven, Treasury, 294. 79. Rembrandt had initially included in the composition figures that he later deleted and are visible only if one X-rays the image (John Walsh, ‘Rembrandt’s Syndics’) so Walcott might even be referring to these self-evidently ‘negligible’ figures (Fig. 7.4). 80. Craven, Treasury, 243. 81. Craven, Treasury, 242. 82. Craven, Treasury, 343. 83. Craven, Treasury, 342. 84. Craven, Treasury, 342. 85. Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 247. 86. Craven, Treasury, 342. 87. Derek Walcott and Peter Doig, Morning, Paramin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 81. From now on I will be referring to this collection as MP followed by the page number in parentheses in the text. 88. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 137. 89. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190. 90. Aquin, ‘No Land Foreign’, 24. 91. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 3; Sontag, On Photography, 154. 92. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want, 7. 93. Searle, Scott and Grenier, Peter Doig, 101. 94. In his poem Walcott acknowledges that he had access to different ‘versions’ of this painting (MP39): in Montreal he could see seven more ‘versions’ of the nine that appear in the catalogue for the Montreal exhibition (Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, 2013, 124–7). This repetition obviously made the image even more haunting and the girl more of a ‘presence’. 95. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want, 6.

436    Derek Walcott’s Painters 96. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 1. 97. Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, 2013, 22–5. 98. Cheeke, Writing for Art, 36. 99. Keefe, ‘Ecstatic Embrace’, 137, 135. 100. Significantly, the interplay between images and words which characterises Morning, Paramin is further signposted in the collection by Walcott’s inclusion of the posters Doig had prepared for the screenings that, after his arrival in Trinidad in 2002, he organised in his studio with Che Lovelace, son of the Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace, for a group of local viewers interested in nonmainstream cinema. Walcott pays homage to Doig’s activities with three poems (‘The Studio Film Club’ I, II, and III, MP59–63) inspired by three of his advertising posters (Xala, 2003; Pure Chutney, 2004; Van Dyke Parks Presents The Esso Trinidad Steel Band, 2004) two of which are for documentaries dedicated to Trinidadian culture (Van Dyke Parks Presents The Esso Trinidad Steel Band and Pure Chutney). Walcott’s poems are affectionate reminiscences of going to the cinema in his youth, vignettes of the enthusiastic but penniless audience who resorted to ‘storm[ing]’ the cinema to avoid paying their tickets to see Hollywood stars like Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Peter Lorre or Jack Palance (MP59, 61, 63). Walcott’s engagement with film has been recently investigated by Jean Antoine-Dunne, Derek Walcott’s Love Affair with Film (2017). 101. Doig in ‘Peter Doig: Twenty Questions’, 124. 102. Doig in Hudson, ‘Peter Doig Interview’. 103. Unless we assume that the figure we barely see through the window is not the driver but the hitch-hiker. 104. Doig, Slade Contemporary Art Lecture Series. 105. Doig qtd in Jelly-Shapiro, ‘A Trinidadian Friendship’. 106. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 5–7. 107. ‘Urban development has occurred at a rate beyond the physical plan ning capacities to mitigate flood impacts. Rapid growth in the absence of adequate physical planning measures has contributed to flood disasters as water blasts off buildings and various surfaces and overwhelms the drainage systems. Yet, inappropriate land use activities such as deforestation, unplanned and improper housing development and inappropriate agricultural practices, persist unchecked, resulting in a failure to mitigate flooding’ (Udika, ‘Flood Management’). 108. Abramovitz, Unnatural Disasters. 109. Doig in ‘Peter Doig: Twenty Questions’, 132. 110. This figure has been identified as the German artist Jonathan Meese (Doig in Scott, ‘Conversation’, 39). 111. Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, 2013, 96. 112. Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, 2013, 96. 113. Walcott, Joker of Seville, 5. At UWI-AJL, there are multiple sketches, drawings and watercolours for the setting of the play, particularly in Box 34, folders 1, 2, 3, 5, 6. 114. Walcott, Joker of Seville, 6. 115. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 5.

Poems ‘Out Of’ Paintings    437 116. Doig, Slade Contemporary Art Lecture Series. 117. Undated, unpublished, transcribed conversation between Walcott and Bearden at TFRBL, MsColl 00136, Box 2, folder 6, 15. 118. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 69–70. 119. Lessing, Laocoon, ix, viii. 120. Hagstrum, Sister Arts. 121. Heaney, ‘Song’, in Field Work, 56. 122. Doig, Slade Contemporary Art Lecture Series. 123. Endangered Species International: Amphibians. 124. Lessing, Laocoon, ix. 125. Beadon, ‘Trinidad Railway History’; Charan, ‘The Real Story’; Kautzor, ‘The Railways of Trinidad’. 126. Doig in Scott, ‘Interview’, 24, 34; Doig, Slade Contemporary Art Lecture Series. 127. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11. 128. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 34, 33, 189–90. 129. Doig, Slade Contemporary Art Lecture Series. 130. Doig, Slade Contemporary Art Lecture Series; Shiff, ‘Painter at Carnival’, 47. 131. Aquin, ‘No Land Foreign’, 38. 132. O’Meally, ‘Pressing On Life’, 23. 133. Doig qtd in Aquin, ‘No Land Foreign’, 30. 134. Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, 2013, 26. 135. Doig, Slade Contemporary Art Lecture Series. 136. Walcott actually mentions Kidnapped (1886), another novel by Stevenson in which adventures at sea play an important part. 137. Grenier, ‘Reconquering’, 107. 138. Grenier, ‘Reconquering’, 113. 139. Doig, Slade Contemporary Art Lecture Series. In the Montreal exhibition Walcott was able to see also a version of this painting without the island called 100 Years Ago (2002) which appears in the catalogue with other versions (Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, 2013, 63–5). 140. Doig, Slade Contemporary Art Lecture Series. 141. Hartley, ‘Visual Intelligence’, 72. 142. Pelican Man (2003) is included in Morning, Paramin juxtaposed to a poem which denounces Caribbean environmental degradation. The painting Pelican Man (2003) was not in Montreal but appears in the catalogue of the exhibition together with Pelican (Night) (2004) (also not exhibited) and many other versions – Pelican (Stag) (2003), Pelican (2003), Pelican (2004), Halterback (2004), Pelican (2002), Fisherman (2002) – which were on display in Montreal (Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, 2013, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123). 143. Scott, ‘Conversation’, 34. 144. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 141–2. 145. Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, 2013, 106, 108. 146. In the Montreal exhibition Walcott could also see another (more ‘ghostly’) version, Grande Riviere (2002), with just a rather abstract silhouette of the horse’s head (Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, 2013, 106). 147. Doig in Cook, ‘Conversation’, 180.

438    Derek Walcott’s Painters 148. Incidentally, the penultimate painting in the collection, Doig’s Painting a Cloud on a Wall (2015), presents us with a figure in white painting a cloud observed by a crowned lion. The scene reminds one of Cimabue observing Giotto at work in the quotation from Malraux’s Psychology of Art which prefaces Another Life and in which Walcott paid tribute to his father and, by extension, Simmons, for instilling in him the desire to become an artist. In Morning, Paramin, the poem next to Doig’s Painting a Cloud on a Wall (‘A Lion is in the Streets IV’, MP101) begins by mentioning the younger poets Stephanos Papadopoulos and Matteo Campagnoli (who are also the dedicatees of Walcott’s White Egrets together with the writers Robert Antoni, Vanni Bianconi, Glyn Maxwell and Caryl Phillips) as if to underline the continuity of a love for poetry passed on from one generation to the next. In terms of visual legacy, as we have seen, Derek Walcott’s son, Peter, was inspired by his father’s work and the ‘casual conversations about art and design’ he had with his father’s artist friends (amongst whom he mentions Jackie Hinkson) and is now honouring his father’s commitment to the island by producing landscapes and seascapes of St Lucia and the everyday life of its people (Peter Walcott in Haynes, ‘Interview’). Peter Doig is continuing his conversation with Walcott: in 2023 he exhibited a series of etchings (Peter Doig: Etchings for Derek Walcott) at The Courtauld Gallery inspired by his friendship with Walcott.

Farewell

Towards the end of The Prodigal (2004), Walcott announced that this collection was going to be his ‘last book’ (P99). We were lucky enough to have four additional ones, White Egrets (2010), Moon-Child (2012), O Starry Starry Night (2013) and Morning, Paramin (2016). All these later books display, in different ways, Walcott’s concern with paintings and the visual arts in theatrical and poetic production, they contain his meditations on mortality, and they reiterate his belief in the inspirational value of the arts. In Walcott’s last book, Morning, Paramin, a collection in which words and images are closely interwoven, the affirmative, hopeful vitalism of daily renewal is often intermeshed with the grief caused by the demise of friends and family members. It is difficult, in fact, not to hear the word ‘mourning’ in the titular ‘morning’: amongst the many loved ones Walcott remembers and mourns are his ex-wife Margaret, the poets Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky and Mark Strand, the playwright Arthur Miller, Robert Devaux, who devoted most of his life to study the history, culture and ecosystem of St Lucia, and the Trinidadian journalist and writer Raoul Pantin, whose name appears in the poem ‘In the Arena’, in which Walcott insists that ‘every day is like a bullfight’ which cruelly claims its victims (MP93). ‘In the Arena’ begins with the words ‘It is five’ (MP93) which resonate with the opening line of Federico García Lorca’s Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías/Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935) which, written to commemorate the death and celebrate the life of Lorca’s friend – a bullfighter killed in the arena or ‘plaza’ of Manzanares by the bull El Granadino – begins by establishing the exact time when life makes space for death. The pairing of Walcott’s lines with Doig’s painting Cyril’s Bay (2009) reinforces the link between the two different places and times mentioned in ‘In the Arena’, namely, Walcott’s contemporary Trinidad and Lorca’s 1930s Spain. Doig’s delicate rendering of Trinidad’s Cyril Bay visually evokes the mist and the steep banks of the river which channels the lament of the men mourning Ignatio in the third movement of Lorca’s elegy

440    Derek Walcott’s Painters

and who find their counterpart in the melancholy ‘Pagnols’ of Walcott’s poem who still ‘think’ of Trinidad’s ‘hills as Venezuela’ (MP93). In ‘In the Arena’, where ‘everything dies from its desire’, and nostalgia and death are powerful presences, salvation and regeneration, once again, come from the landscape which contains all these disparate presences, absences, feelings, memories, desires and realities: every time dusk falls, we are reminded, ‘the sky puts on its suit of lights as a / glowing roar rises from the mountains’ plaza’ (MP93). Importantly, in Lorca’s ultimately life-affirming lament, death is counteracted by creativity and the arts; Walcott shared Lorca’s sentiment and his  belief in and commitment to life are also encapsulated in the poem ‘Purple Jesus (Black Rainbow)’, which begins with the poet saluting the world on a fine, sunny day in a manner that reverberates with the volume’s title/salutation: ‘Good morning, world!’ (MP83). As the recollection of the death of loved ones sinks in, however, the poet finds himself facing a ­potentially soul-destroying, hard-to-believe emptiness (MP83). In the painting by Doig juxtaposed to this poem, Purple Jesus (Black Rainbow) (2006), a huge area of blue is interrupted, only at the very top, by a rather thin horizontal line of light blue; its two focal points (a purple Jesus-like figure and a dark rainbow) are situated at two opposite angles. Since the figure, the rainbow and the thin light-blue line are almost dwarfed by the empty blue expanse, it is up to us to decide what to make of it, or how to fill this void. The poem fills it with an arresting concluding line which, as it melancholically informs us that the ‘day declines with every brightening minute’, still forcefully reaffirms that every declining day is still made up, and full, of brightening minutes (MP83). As Walcott laments, after dear friends pass away, ‘light makes life harder to understand’ (MP83); yet, each combination of poem and painting in Morning, Paramin emerges as one of those ‘brightening’ minutes, or ‘paradoxical flash[es] of an instant / in which every facet [is] caught / in a crystal of ambiguities’, which can sustain us in the face of decline or loss. The poem reveals, in fact, that it was through art and poetry, or more specifically in the very act of writing and orchestrating his words with Doig’s images, that Walcott found the strength to confront the sorrow caused by the loss of loved ones and to contemplate his own mortality. The publication of Morning, Paramin preceded Walcott’s death by only four months but, fortuitously, the cover of his last precious heirloom has left us with an image – Doig’s Untitled (Paramin) (2004) (Fig. 8.1) – in which we can glimpse the poet’s compelling absent presence. Mysteriously emerging from lush vegetation, in fact, Doig’s jab molassie looks eerily suspended at the crossroads between this and other worlds and seems to challenge us to consider the existence of alternative ‘ways of seeing’. Glancing at us from another dimension but firmly anchored to his own locality, haunted by the troubled history of the Caribbean, and embodying,

Farewell    441

literally, the importance of creativity as a fundamental tool for survival and transformation, Walcott/the jab mesmerises us, revels in colour and quietly diffuses his own tenacious light as he stands, once again, in awe of ‘the light of the world’.

Figure 8.1  Untitled (Paramin), 2004, Peter Doig, oil on linen, 58 × 43 cm. © Peter Doig. All rights reserved. DACS/Artimage, 2022.

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Bibliography    445 Brenner Anita. Idols Behind Altars: Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929. Brenson Michael. ‘Art: Romare Bearden, “Rituals of the Obeah”’. The New York Times (30 November 1984): 23. Breslin, Paul. Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Brettell, Richard. ‘Camille Pissarro and St Thomas: The Story of an Exhibitio’. In Camille Pissarro and the Caribbean, 1850–1855: Drawings from the Collection at Olana, exh. cat., edited by Richard Brettell and Karen Zukowski, 8–16. Brettell, Richard. ‘Gauguin y la idea de paraíso’. In Gauguin y el viaje a lo exótico, exh.cat., edited by Paloma Alarcó, 23–31. Brettell, Richard. Pissarro and Pontoise. London: Guild Publishing, 1990. Brettell, Richard. Pissarro’s People, exh. Cat. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco/Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2011. Brettell, Richard and Lloyd, Christopher. Catalogue of Drawings by Camille Pissarro in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Brettell, Richard and Zukowski, Karen, eds. Camille Pissarro and the Caribbean, 1850–1855: Drawings from the Collection at Olana, exh. cat., with introduction by Joachim Pissarro. St Thomas, US Virgin Islands: Hebrew Congregation of St Thomas, 1996. Bridge, J. H. Portraits and Personalities in the Frick Galleries. New York: Aldine Book Company, 1929. Brookner, Anita. Watteau. Twickenham: Hamlyn, 1967. Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Brown, David Blayney. ‘“Born Again”: Old and New in Turner’s Later Work’. In Late Turner: Painting Set Free, exh. cat., edited by David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Sam Smiles, 33–8. Brown, David Blayney, Concannon, Amy and Smiles, Sam, eds. Late Turner: Painting Set Free, exh. cat. London: Tate Publishing, 2014. Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. Brown, Robert and Johnson, Cheryl. ‘Thinking Poetry: An Interview with Derek Walcott’. In Conversations with Derek Walcott, edited by William Baer, 175–88. [Previously printed in The Cream City Review, 14, no. 2 (1990): 209–33.] Brown, Stewart, ed. The Art of Derek Walcott. Bridgend, Wales: Seren Books, 1991. Bruckner, D. J. R. ‘A Poem in Homage to an Unwanted Man’. In Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, edited by Robert Hamner, 396–9. [Previously printed in The New York Times (9 October 1990): 13.] Buck-Morss, Susan. ‘Hegel and Haiti’. Critical Inquiry, 26, no. 4 (2000): 821–65. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

446    Derek Walcott’s Painters Burnett, Paula. ‘Derek Walcott on Poetry, Pity, and Power: An Interview with Derek Walcott’. In Special Issue on Derek Walcott, edited by Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Agenda, 39, nos 1–3 (2002–3): 139–53. Burnett, Paula. Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Campbell, George. First Poems. [1945]. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2012. Caribbean Birding Trail. http://www.caribbeanbirdingtrail.org/caribbean-birds/birdlife/ (accessed 8 June 2021). Casid, Jill. Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Casteel, Sarah Phillips. Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Catholicus. ‘Catholicus Says: Plays Profane’. Voice of Saint Lucia (22 March 1958): 5. Cézanne, Paul. ‘Letter to Emile Bernard’. [1905]. In Correspondance, recueillie, annotée et préfacée par John Rewald. Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1978. Chamberlin, Edward J. Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Charan, Richard. ‘The Real Story of Port of Spain’s Engine D’. Trinidad Daily Express (20 August 2018). https://trinidadexpress.com/features/local/the-real-story-ofport-of-spain-s-engine-d/article_dfbbaa6c-1477-5963-985e-f58639ae4a1a.html (accessed 18 June 2021). Charlemagne, Christine. ‘Dunstan’s Inner Strokes’. St Lucia Star (17 January 2005): 8–9. Cheeke, Stephen. Writing for Art: The Aesthetic of Ekphrasis, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Chon, Kye-Sung. ‘The Role of Destination Image in Tourism’. Tourism ReviewRevue de tourism-Zeitschrift fur Tourismus, 2 (1990): 2–9. Ciccarelli, Sharon. ‘Reflections Before and After Carnival: An Interview with Derek Walcott’. In Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, edited by Michael Harper and Robert Stepto, 296–309. Clark, T. J. ‘A House of Cards’. In Modernist Games: Cézanne and his Card Players, edited by Satish Padiyar. London: The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2013. Clemente, Francesco. A History of the Heart in Three Rainbows, exh. cat. Milano: Edizioni Charta, 2009. Clemente, Francesco. Palimpsest, exh. cat. Frankfurt: Shirn Kunsthalle/Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2011. Cohen, Lisa. ‘The Art of Biography – Michael Holroyd interviewed by Lisa Cohen’, 3. Paris Review, 205 (2013). https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6223/ michael-holroyd-the-art-of-biography-no-3-michael-holroyd (accessed 18 June 2021). Coleman, Floyd. ‘The Changing Same: Spiral, the Sixties, and African-American Art’. In A Shared Heritage: Art by Four African Americans, exh. Cat., edited by William Taylor and Harriet Werkel. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1996. Collier, Gordon, ed. Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years: Occasional Prose ­1957–1974, Vol 1: Culture, Society, Literature, and Art. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013.

Bibliography    447 Collier, Gordon. ‘Introduction: Walcott’s Guardian Aesthetic’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, xi–xliii. Collymore, Frank. ‘An Introduction to the Poetry of Derek Walcott’. In Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, edited by Robert Hamner, 87–95. [Previously published in BIM, 3, no.10 (1949): 125–32.] Cook, Angus. ‘Peter Doig in Conversation with Angus Cook’. In Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, 156–93. Cooper, Helen. Winslow Homer Watercolours, exh. cat. Washington: National Gallery of Art/New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Cormack, Malcom. The Drawings of Watteau. London: Hamlyn, 1970. Coronel Rivera, Juan Rafael. ‘Creation’. In Diego Rivera: The Complete Murals, Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera and Luis-Martín Lozano, 8–25. Coronel Rivera, Juan Rafael. ‘Visions of the History of Mexico’. In Diego Rivera: The Complete Murals, Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera and Luis-Martín Lozano, 190–259. Coronel Rivera, Juan Rafael and Lozano, Luis-Martín. Diego Rivera: The Complete Murals. Edited by Benedikt Taschen. [2007]. Köln: Taschen, 2017. Craske, Matthew. ‘Court Art Reviewed: The Sandby’s Vision of Windsor and Its Environs’. In Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, edited by John Bonehill and Stephen Daniels, 48–55. Craton, Michael and Saunders, Gail. Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People. Vol. 2, From the Ending of Slavery to the Twenty-First Century. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Craven, Thomas. A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the Present Day. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939. Craven, Thomas. A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the Present Day. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958. Crichlow, Kenwyn. ‘Figures Trapped at the Forest’s Edge’. Kaiateur News (6 June 2010). https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2010/06/06/%E2%80%98figurestrapped-at-the-forest%E2%80%99s-edge%E2%80%99/ (accessed 8 June 2021). Crussard, Sylvie. ‘The Martinican Sketchbooks/Gauguin’. In Gauguin and Laval in Martinique, 104–23. Cullen, Deborah. ‘Out of the Shadows: The Harlem Renaissance and New York’s Afro-Caribbean Diaspora’. In Caribbean Art at the Crossroads of the World, exh. cat., edited by Deborah Cullen and Elvis Fuentes, 243–62. Cullen, Deborah and Fuentes, Elvis, eds. Caribbean Art at the Crossroads of the World, exh. cat. New York: Museo del Barrio/New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Cuttler, Charles. Hieronymus Bosch: Late Work. London: The Pindar Press, 2012. Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Black: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art. Mundelstrup: Dangaroo Press, 1985. Davis, Gregson. ‘Reflections on Omeros (Conversation with Derek Walcott)’. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 96, no. 2 (1997): 229–46. Dawes, Kwame. ‘Introduction’. In George Campbell, First Poems, 13–30. [1945]. Leeds: Peepal Press, 2012. de Lima, Clara Rosa. ‘Painting and the Shadow of Van Gogh’. In The Art of Derek Walcott, edited by Stewart Brown, 171–92.

448    Derek Walcott’s Painters Devaux, Robert. They called us Brigands: The Saga of St Lucia’s Freedom Fighters. St Lucia: Optimum Printers, 1997. Dodgson, Campbell and Pottle, Mark. ‘Moore, Henry (1831–1895)’. [1901]. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). https://0-doi-org.serlib0.essex. ac.uk/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.19119 (accessed 8 June 2021). Doig, Peter. ‘Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (an extract)’. In Peter Doig, edited by Adrian Searle, Kitty Scott and Catherine Grenier, 124–41. Doig, Peter. Slade Contemporary Art Lecture Series – Peter Doig (2015–16). https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs8pTMXPAPc (accessed 18 June 2021). Döring, Tobias. Caribbean-English Passages: Intertexuality in a Postcolonial Tradition. London: Routledge, 2002. Dormandy, Thomas. The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis. London: Hambledon Press, 1999. The Dual Muse: The Writer as Artist, the Artist as Writer, exh. cat., edited by Jane Neidhardt and Lorin Cuoco with essays by Johanna Bruckner and William Gass and an Introduction by Cornelia Homburg. St Louis: Washington University Gallery of Art/Washington University in St Louis: International Writer Center/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997. The Dual Muse: The Writer as Artist, the Artist as Writer. Symposium volume with essays by Jennifer Bartlett, Breyten Breytenbach, Tom Phillips and Derek Walcott. Washington University, St Louis: International Writer Center/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. Edwards, Brent Hayes. ‘The Political Bearden’. In The Romare Bearden Reader, edited by Robert O’Meally, 256–69. Egerton, Judy. Turner: The Fighting Temeraire. London: National Gallery Publications/New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Elleh, Nnamdi, ‘Bearden’s Dialogue with Africa and the Avant-Garde’. In The Art of Romare Bearden, exh. cat., edited by Ruth Fine, 156–71. Ellison, Ralph. ‘The Art of Romare Bearden’. In The Romare Bearden Reader, edited by Robert O’Meally, 196–203. [Previously published as ‘Introduction’ in Romare Bearden: Paintings and Projections, exh. cat. Albany: Art Gallery of the State of New York at Albany, 1968.] Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. [1952]. London: Penguin, 2001. Emery, Mary Lou. Modernism, the Visual and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Endangered Species International: Amphibians (2011). http://www.endangeredspe​ cies international. org/amphibians4.html (accessed 18 June 2021). Erickson, Peter. ‘Artists’ Self-Portraiture and Self-Exploration in Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound’. Callaloo, 28, no. 1 (2005): 224–35. Ernest, John. ‘Crisis and Faith in Douglass’s Work’. In The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Maurice Lee, 60–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Falkenburg, Reindert. The Land of Unlikeness: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Zwolle: WBooks, 2011. Fénelon, François. Aventures de Télémaque Suite du quatrième livre de l’Odyssée d’Homère, ou les Avantures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse. Paris: Vve de C. Barbin, 1699.

Bibliography    449 Fiet, Lowel. ‘Mapping a New Nile: Derek Walcott’s Later Plays’. In The Art of Derek Walcott, edited by Stewart Brown, 139–53. Figueroa, John. ‘Sea Memories’. London Magazine (1984–5): 128–30. Finberg, A. J. The English Water Colour Painters. London: Duckworth and New York: Dutton, 1906. Finberg, A. J. The Life of J.M.W. Turner. [1939]. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. Fine, Ruth., ed. The Art of Romare Bearden, exh. cat. Washington: National Gallery of Art/New York: Harry Abrams, 2003. Fine, Ruth. ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’. In The Art of Romare Bearden, exh. cat., edited by Ruth Fine, 2–137. Fishman Snyder, Reba. ‘Complexity in Creation: A Detailed Look at the Watercolors for The Birds of America’. In John James Audubon: The Watercolors for The Birds of America, edited by Annette Blaugrund and Theodore Stebbins, 55–68. Friedman, Donald. ‘Derek Walcott Discusses his Painting and Poetry’. Interview with Donald Friedman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQTbxiEafjs (accessed 18 June 2021). Friedman, Donald. The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers. Minneapolis, MN: Mid-List Press, 2007. Froude, James Anthony. The English in the West Indies or The Bow of Ulysses. London: Longmans Green, 1888. Fuentes, Elvis. ‘Crossroads, Crossing, and the Cross’. In Caribbean Art at the Crossroads of the World, exh. cat., edited by Deborah Cullen and Elvis Fuentes, 35–84. Fulford, Sarah. ‘Painting the Sublime in Visible Syntax: Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound’. The Cambridge Quarterly, 33, no. 1 (2004): 11–27. Fumagalli, Maria Cristina. Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa’s Gaze. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. Fumagalli, Maria Cristina. The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001. Fumagalli, Maria Cristina. ‘Permanent Immediacy: A Conversation about Dante with Derek Walcott’. In Maria Cristina Fumagalli, The Flight of the Vernacular, 275–82. Gachet, Charles. ‘Statement by His Lordship the Bishop of Castries on the Incident of the “Banjo Man” etc.’. Voice of Saint Lucia (22 March 1958): 8. García Lorca, Federico. Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías/Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. [1935]. In Selected Poems. Translated by Merryn Williams, ­188–201. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992. Garrett, Paul. ‘An “English Creole” That Isn’t: On the Sociological Origins and Linguistic Classification of the Vernacular English of St Lucia’. In Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean, edited by Michael Aceto and Jeffrey P. Williams, ­155–210. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. ‘New Negroes, Migration, and Cultural Exchange’. In Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, 17–22. Gauguin and Laval in Martinique, exh. cat., edited by Maite van Dijk and Joost van der Hoeven with contributions by Sylvie Crussard and Karenn Rechnitzer Pope. Bussum: THOTH Publishers/Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2018.

450    Derek Walcott’s Painters Gauguin, Paul Noa-Noa: Voyage to Tahiti. [1901]. Translated by Jonathan Griffin. London: Pallas Athene, 2010. Gayadeen, Holly. Selected Works of Alfredo Antonio Codallo, artist and folklorist (1913–1971). Trinidad and Tobago: H. Gayadeen, 1983. Gelburd, Gail. ‘Bearden in Theory and Ritual: A Conversation with Albert Murray’. In Romare Bearden in Black and White: Photomontage Projections 1964, exh. cat., edited by Gail Gelburd and Thelma Golden, 53–76. Gelburd, Gail. ‘Romare Bearden in Black and White: The Photomontage Projections of 1964’. In Romare Bearden in Black and White: Photomontage Projections 1964, exh. cat., edited by Gail Gelburd and Thelma Golden, 17–38. Gelburd, Gail and Golden, Thelma, eds. Romare Bearden in Black and White: Photomontage Projections 1964, exh. cat. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/New York: Harry Abrams, 1997. George, Calixte. St Mary’s College, Saint Lucia, West Indies – The Caribbean’s Nobel Laureate School: Celebrating 130 Years of Human Development. Castries St Lucia: Passiflora House Publishing Inc., 2019. Ghent, Henry. ‘Interview with Bearden’. In The Romare Bearden Reader, edited by Robert O’Meally, 54–86. [Transcript from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC, 29 June 1968.] Gilpin, William. Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales, etc, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty. [1782]. London: R. Blamire, 1789. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Glazer, Lee Stephen. ‘Signifying Identity: Art and Race in Romare Bearden’s Projections’. Art Bulletin, 56, no. 3 (1994): 411–26. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation [Poétique de la Relation. 1990]. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. De Goncourt, Edmond and De Goncourt, Jules. French Eighteenth-Century Painters. [1859–75]. Oxford: Phaidon, 1948. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978. Gopnik, Adam. ‘A Critic at Large: Audubon’s Passion’. The New Yorker (25 February 1991): 96–104. Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2009. Greene, Graham. The Lost Childhood and Other Essays. New York: The Viking Press, 1952. Grenier, Catherine. ‘Reconquering the World: 100 Years Ago’. In Peter Doig, edited by Adrian Searle, Kitty Scott and Catherine Grenier, 105–13. Griffin, Randall. Winslow Homer: An American Vision. New York: Phaidon, 2006. Gunn, Clare. Vacationscape: Designing Tourist Regions. Austin: University of Texas at Austin, Bureau of Business Research, 1972. Hagstrum, Jean. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Hall, Stuart. ‘Interview with Derek Walcott’. In Derek Walcott: Poet of the Island, Arena, 26 February 1993, London: BBC 2.

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452    Derek Walcott’s Painters Hinks, Peter. ‘Introduction’. In David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, edited by Peter Hinks, xi–xliv. University Park : The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Hinkson, Jackie. What Things Are True: A Memoir of Becoming an Artist. Trinidad and Tobago: Paria, 2012. Hirsch, Edward. ‘The Art of Poetry XXXVII: Derek Walcott’. In Conversations with Derek Walcott, edited by William Baer, 95–121. [Previously printed in The Paris Review, 101 (Winter 1986): 196–230.] Hirsch, Edward. ‘An Interview with Derek Walcott’. In Conversations with Derek Walcott, edited by William Baer, 50–63. [Previously printed in Contemporary Literature, 20, no. 3 (1979): 279–92]. Hollander, John. The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. Hollo, Anselm. ‘Introduction’. In Negro Verse, edited by Anselm Hollo, 7. London: Studio Vista, 1964. Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Anchor Press Doubleday, 1961. How Beautiful My Brethren and Sistren: Derek Walcott, Life and Work, exh. cat., edited by Jennifer Toews Toronto: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, 2011. Hudson, Mark. ‘Peter Doig Interview: The Triumph of Painting’. The Telegraph (2 August 2013). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/10216288/Peter-Doiginterview-the-triumph-of-painting.html (accessed 18 June 2021). Huggan, Graham and Tiffin, Helen. Postcolonial Criticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Oxford: Routledge, 2010. Hughes, Robert. American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. London: The Harvill Press, 1997. Hutton Turner, Elizabeth. ‘Introduction’. In Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, 13–16. Hutton Turner, Elizabeth, ed. Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, exh. cat. Washington: The Phillips Collection, 1993. Irmscher, Christoph, ed. Audubon: Writing and Drawings. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1999. Irmscher, Christoph. The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Isham, Samuel. The History of American Painting. New York and London: The Macmillan Company, 1905. Island Light: Watercolor and Oil Paintings by Derek Walcott and Donald Hinkson, exh. cat. University of Albany: University Art Museum, 1998. https://archive.uni​ versityartmuseum.org/wwwmuseum/island_still/island.html (accessed 16 November 2022). Ismond, Patricia. Abandoning Dead Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry. Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies Press, 2001. Jaggi, Maya. ‘Paradise Fights Back’. The Guardian (13 December 1997): 68. Janson, Jonathan. ‘Vermeer’s Painting in the Context of the Dutch Golden Age of Painting’, Part 3, Essential Vermeer (2001–21). http://www.essentialvermeer. com/dutch-painters/context/context_03.html (accessed 8 June 2021).

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Bibliography    459 Simmons, Harold. ‘Notes on Folklore in St Lucia’. In Iouanaloa: Recent Writing from St Lucia, edited by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, 41–9. Castries, St Lucia: Department of Extra Mural Studies, University of the West Indies, 1963. Simmons, Harold. ‘Notes on French Creole, St Lucia’. In Selected Writings of Harold F.C. Simmons, edited by Didacus Jules, 105–7. Simmons, Harold. ‘Roses and Marguerites’. Voice of St Lucia (31 August 1929); qtd in Patrick Anthony. The Flower Festivals of St Lucia. Castries, St Lucia: Folk Research Centre, Jubilee Trust Fund, 2009. Simmons, Harold. Speech at the Inauguration of the Arts and Crafts Society. In ‘Arts and Crafts Society Inaugurated’. Voice of St Lucia (27 April 1945): 1–4. Simmons, Harold. ‘Spotlight on the Dungeon of Culture: The Banjo Man’. Voice of St Lucia (15 March 1958): 4. Simmons, Harold. ‘Spotlight on the Problems of St Lucia’s Agriculture: Who Will Be The Cat?’ Voice of St Lucia (24 May 1958): 4. Simmons, Harold. ‘Spotlight on Some Thoughts on the Occasion of a Visit of St Lucians Long Abroad: The Return of the Natives’. Voice of St Lucia (19 April 1958): 4. Simmons, Harold. ‘St Lucia’s Agriculture 1650–1950: Part I’. Voice of St Lucia (13 August 1953): 2. Simmons, Harold. ‘St Lucia’s Agriculture 1650–1950: Part II’. Voice of St Lucia (14 August 1953): 2. Simmons, Harold. ‘Suggestions for an English-based Orthography for Creole’. Voice of St Lucia (19 April 1958): 6. Simmons, Harold. ‘Talking Shops’. Voice of St Lucia (30 November 1940): 3–4. Simmons, Harold. ‘Thomas Jefferys Esq: Geographer to the King’. Voice of St Lucia (12 November 1953): 2. Simmons, Harold. ‘West Indian Artists Need Better Colour Combination’. Voice of St Lucia (18 March 1944): 3–4. Simmons, Harold. ‘A West Indian Poet Fulfills His Promise’. In Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, edited by Robert Hamner, 96–7. [Previously printed in Sunday Gleaner (27 February 1949).] Sitt, Peter. ‘An Interview with Robert Penn Warren’. The Sewanee Review, 85, no. 3 (1977): 467–77. Sjöberg, Leif. ‘An Interview with Derek Walcott’. In Conversations with Derek Walcott, edited by William Baer, 79–85. [Previously printed in Artes (Sweden), no. 1 (1983): 23–7.] Slatkin, Carole Anne. ‘Catalog Entries’. In John James Audubon: The Watercolors for The Birds of America, edited by Annette Blaugrund and Theodore Stebbins, 75–300. Smiles, Sam. ‘Turner and Modern History’. In Late Turner: Painting Set Free, exh. cat., edited by David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Sam Smiles, 144–75. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. [1973]. New York: Picador USA, 2001. Spielmann, Marion Harry. Millais and His Works. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1898. Staszak, Jean-François. Gauguin Voyageur: du Perou aux îles Marquises. Paris: Geo/ Solar, 2006. Staszak, Jean-François. Géographies de Gauguin. Rosny-sur-Bois: Bréal, 2003.

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Bibliography    461 Walcott, Derek. ‘1944’. Voice of St Lucia (2 August 1944): 3. Walcott, Derek. 25 Poems. Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate Co., 1949. Walcott, Derek. ‘Almost Everyone Got into the Act … Result: Drop in Standard’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 406–7. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (8 November 1961): 4.] Walcott, Derek. ‘American Anguish, Canadian Calm’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 499–501. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (22 July 1964): 5.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Animals, Elemental Tales, and the Theater’. In Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities, edited by James Arnold. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996. Walcott, Derek. Another Life. In Derek Walcott: Another Life: Fully Annotated, edited by Edward Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh, 1–152. [Published in 1973 by Jonathan Cape (London) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York).] Walcott, Derek. ‘Another “Schol” for Mr Hinkson’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 469–70. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (8 September 1965): 7.] Walcott, Derek. ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’. In What the Twilight Says: Essays, 65–84. Walcott, Derek. The Arkansas Testament. [1987]. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. Walcott, Derek. ‘Art Exhibition at the National Museum: Confusing Bulk With Quality’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 411–12. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (21 April 1963).] Walcott, Derek. ‘Art Makes a Restaurant Come-Back: Nine Foreign Painters’ Works on Show’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 498–9. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (28 June 1961): 5.] Walcott, Derek. ‘The Artist Remains a Lonely Figure’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 435–7. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (27 November 1960): 7.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Ballades Creole por Harry Simmons par Derek Walcott’. Voice of St Lucia (8 February 1958): 7. Walcott, Derek. ‘Bewildered and Betwixt Am I’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 423–4. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (16 September 1964): 5.] Walcott, Derek. ‘The Blaze of Vision That Is Stollmeyer’s’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 480–1. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (15 May 1960).] Walcott, Derek. The Bounty. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Walcott, Derek. ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’ Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 16 (1974): 14–23. Walcott, Derek. The Castaway and Other Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. Walcott, Derek. ‘“Cockfight” at Nina’s Gallery: This Exhibition is Premature’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 408–9. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (23 August 1962): 6.] Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems 1948–1984. [1986]. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

462    Derek Walcott’s Painters Walcott, Derek. ‘A Combination of Grace and Vigour’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 458–60. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (26 July 1963): 5.] Walcott, Derek. ‘A Conversion’. In Francesco Clemente, A History of the Heart in Three Rainbows, page unnumbered, exh. cat. Milano: Edizioni Charta, 2009. Walcott, Derek. ‘Derek’s Most West Indian Play’. Sunday Guardian (21 November 1970): 7. Walcott, Derek. ‘Designing Sense Covers Up for Artist’s Lapses’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 481–2. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (22 October 1961): 7.] Walcott, Derek. ‘A Dilemma Faces W.I. Artists’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 69–70. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (3 January 1964).] Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain. In Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, 207–326. Walcott, Derek. Drums and Colours. Caribbean Quarterly, 7, nos 1–2 (1961): 1–104. Walcott, Derek. Drums and Colours. In The Haitian Trilogy, 109–294. [Previously published in Caribbean Quarterly, 7, nos 1–2 (1961): 1–104.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Eine Bekehrung/A Conversion’. In Francesco Clemente, Palimpsest, 42–51, exh. cat. Frankfurt: Shirn Kunsthalle/NürnbergVerlag für moderne Kunst, 2011. Walcott, Derek. Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos. In ‘Special Issue on Derek Walcott’, edited by Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Agenda, 39 (2002–3): 15–50. [Previously published by Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate Co., 1949.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Farewell Exhibition of Staggering Triviality’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 407–8. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (4 May 1962): 6.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Federal Art Exhibition’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 387–8. [Previously published in Public Opinion (23 March 1957): 7.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Fellowships’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 183–5. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian Magazine (15 January 1967): 9.] Walcott, Derek. ‘The Figure of Crusoe’. In Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, edited by Robert Hamner, 33–40. Walcott, Derek. The Fortunate Traveller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Walcott, Derek. ‘George Campbell’. In George Campbell, First Poems, 6–7. [1945]. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2012. Walcott, Derek. The Ghost Dance. In Walker and The Ghost Dance, 115–246. Walcott, Derek. In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. Walcott, Derek. The Gulf. London, Jonathan Cape, 1969. Walcott, Derek. The Haitian Trilogy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Bibliography    463 Walcott, Derek. Henri Christophe. In The Haitian Trilogy, 1–108. [Previously published as Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes. Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate Co., 1950.] Walcott, Derek. ‘His is The Pivotal One About Race’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 282–3. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (1 December 1963): 23.] Walcott, Derek. ‘His Sense of Design is Still Strong’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 484–5. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (23 January 1962): 5.] Walcott, Derek. ‘History and Picong in the Middle Passage’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 304–6. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (30 September 1962): 9.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Hugh Stollmeyer to Put On One-Man Show’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 482–4. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (17 April 1960): 11.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Introduction to the work of Dunstan St Omer’. Voice of St Lucia (28 July 1950): 5–6. Walcott, Derek. ‘Introduction to the work of Dunstan St Omer’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 485–7. [Previously published in Voice of St Lucia (28 February 1956): 5–6. Possible erroneous attribution as article not found in Voice of St Lucia in National Archive of St Lucia.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Isla Incognita’. In Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, edited by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson and George B. Handley, 51–7. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Walcott, Derek. ‘“Islands in the Stream”, Hemingway, Winslow Homer, and the Light of the Caribbean’. Bostonia (1990): 20–2. Walcott, Derek. ‘Jackie Hinkson’. Galerie Magazine, 1, no. 2 (1992–3): 36–7. Walcott, Derek. The Joker of Seville. In The Joker of Seville & O Babylon!, 3–151. [1978]. London: Jonathan Cape, London, 1979. Walcott, Derek. ‘Keeping Up with the Times’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 413–4. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (21 July 1963): 6.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Lame Tribute From the Arts: Exhibition at Balisier House’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 419–20. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (1 July 1964).] Walcott, Derek. The Last Carnival. In Three Plays: The Last Carnival, Beef, No Chicken, A Branch of the Blue Nile, 1–101. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. Walcott, Derek. ‘Leaving School’. In Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, edited by Robert Hamner, 24–32. [Previously published in London Magazine, 5, no. 6 (1965): 4–14.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Lent Opens with a Muffled Bang for Art Lovers’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 470–1. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (19 February 1961): 7.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Letter to Chamoiseau’. In What the Twilight Says: Essays, 213–32.

464    Derek Walcott’s Painters Walcott, Derek. Malcochon. In Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, 167–206. Walcott, Derek. Marie Laveau: Comédie Musicale/A Musical. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2018. Walcott, Derek. Midsummer. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. Walcott, Derek. Moon-Child. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Walcott, Derek. ‘The Muse of History: An Essay’. In What the Twilight Says: Essays, 36–64. [Previously published in Is Massa Day Dead?, edited by Orde Coombs, 1–28. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Native Women under Sea-Almond Trees: Musings on Art, Life and the Island of St Lucia’. House & Garden, 156, no. 8 (August 1984): 114–15, 161–3. Walcott, Derek. ‘Necessity of Negritude: In Appreciation of the Poet Senghor, Now on a State Visit to Trinidad and Tobago’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 342–5. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (28 September 1964): 8.] Walcott, Derek. ‘A New Jamaican Poet’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 218–20. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (20 June 1965): 6.] Walcott, Derek. O Starry Starry Night. London: Faber and Faber, 2014. Walcott, Derek. The Odyssey: A Stage Version. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. Walcott, Derek. ‘Old Focus Back: This Time With New Blood’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 174–5. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (2 April 1961): 4.] Walcott, Derek. Omeros. [1990]. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Walcott, Derek. ‘Origins’. In Collected Poems 1948–1984, 11–16. Walcott, Derek. ‘On Choosing Port of Spain’. In David Frost Introduces Trinidad and Tobago, edited by Michael Anthony and Andrew Carr, 14–23. London: André Deutsch, 1975. Walcott, Derek. ‘On Hemingway’. In What the Twilight Says: Essays, 107–14. Walcott, Derek. ‘Painter Leaps the Chasm Too Soon’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 461–2. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (25 June 1961): 7.] Walcott, Derek. The Prodigal. [2004]. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Walcott, Derek. ‘Ralph Campbell and The Artist’s Paradise’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 444–5. [Previously published in Public Opinion (15 June 1957): 6.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Reflections on the November Exhibition’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 396–8. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (13 November 1960): 7.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Refreshing Art Show Today: Familiar Artists Take Progress in Stride’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 401–2. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (11 July 1961): 5.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Return to Jamaica: Struggle for a New Outlook in the Arts’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 100–5. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (11 April 1965): 7–8.]

Bibliography    465 Walcott, Derek. ‘Review of Art Exhibition’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 430–3. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (20 November 1966): 6.] Walcott, Derek. ‘The Road Taken’. In Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Homage to Robert Frost, 93–117. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Walcott, Derek. ‘Royal Palms … An Absence of Ruins’. In Negro Verse, edited by Anselm Hollo, 16–17. London: Studio Vista, 1964. Walcott, Derek. ‘The Schooner Flight’. In Chant of Saints: A Gathering of AfroAmerican Literature, Art, and Scholarship, edited by Michael Harper and Robert Stepto, 166–74. Walcott, Derek. The Sea at Dauphin. In Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, 41–80. Walcott, Derek. Sea Grapes. London: Jonathan Cape, 1976. Walcott, Derek. ‘Self-Portrait’. Caribbean Quarterly, 26, nos 1–2 (1980): 94. Walcott, Derek. ‘Some Jamaican Poets–1’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 188–93. [Previously published in Public Opinion (3 August 1957): 7.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Some Jamaican Poets–2’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 191–4. [Previously published in Public Opinion (10 August 1957): 7.] Walcott, Derek. The Star-Apple Kingdom. [1979]. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Walcott, Derek. ‘Techniques of South’s Artists’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 427–9. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (13 June 1965): 6.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Texaco’s Show Paced Fine Year of Art’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 398–400. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (1 January 1961): 10.] Walcott, Derek. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Walcott, Derek. Ti-Jean and His Brothers. In Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, 81–166. Walcott, Derek. ‘To Romare Bearden’. In Rituals of the Obeah: Watercolours, 3. Walcott, Derek. ‘Tradition is Upheld – So the Show Goes On’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 421–2. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (5 August 1964): 5.] Walcott, Derek. ‘Tribute to a Master’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 479–80. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (15 May 1966): 9.] Walcott, Derek. Walker. In Walker and The Ghost Dance, 1–114. Walcott, Derek. Walker and The Ghost Dance. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Walcott, Derek. ‘West Indian Art Today’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 46–9. [Previously published in Sunday Guardian (8 May 1966): 8.] Walcott, Derek. ‘West Indian Writing’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 157–9. [Previously published in Public Opinion (26 January 1957): 7.]

466    Derek Walcott’s Painters Walcott, Derek. ‘What the Twilight Says: An Overture’. In What the Twilight Says: Essays, 3–35. [Previously published in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, 3–40.] Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says: Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Walcott, Derek. ‘Where I Live’. Architectural Digest, 54, no. 1 (1997): 30–6. Walcott, Derek. White Egrets. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Walcott, Derek. ‘“Young Painters” Show Maturity: Exhibition Rests on Solidity of Study’. In Derek Walcott: The Journeyman Years, edited by Gordon Collier, 402–3. [Previously published in Trinidad Guardian (10 August 1961): 5.] Walcott, Derek and Doig, Peter. Morning, Paramin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Walcott, Roderick. ‘The Candle in the Bushel of Art and Immorality’. Voice of St Lucia (29 March 1958): 4, 5. Walcott, Roderick. ‘In Good Company’. Trinidad and Tobago Review (April 1993): 28–31. Walcott, Roderick. ‘In Good Company: Address by Mr Roderick Walcott … on the Occasion of Nobel Laureate Week 1993’. Roderick Walcott Collection, Library of the Open Campus of the University of the West Indies, St Lucia. Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth. Four Taxis Facing North. Hexham: Flambard Press, 2007. Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth. Mrs. B. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2014. Walker, David. Walker’s Appeal In Four Articles; together with a Preamble To The Coloured Citizens of The World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to those of The United States of America. Written in Boston, in the State of Massachusetts, Sept. 28, 1829. [Reprinted as David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, edited by Peter Hinks. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.] Wallace, Maurice. ‘Violence, Manhood, and War in Douglass’. In The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Maurice Lee, 73–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Walsh, John. Rembrandt’s Syndics and His Later Portraits. Lecture Series: Rembrandt Today. Yale University Art Gallery (2 December 2016). https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=a4OhXe6Gkes (accessed 8 June 2021). Warre-Cornish, Francis Warre. ‘The Polish Rider (by Rembrandt)’. The Spectator (23 July 1910): 16. [Reprinted in J. H. Bridge, Portraits and Personalities in the Frick Galleries, 29–3.] Warren, Robert Penn. Audubon, a Vision. New York: Random House, 1969. Watts, George Frederic. Hope 1886. In The Art of the Sublime, edited by Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding. Tate Research Publications (January 2013). https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/george-fredericwatts-hope-r1105604 (accessed 8 June 2021). Welty, Eudora. ‘A Still Moment’. Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, 73–94. New York: Random House, 1936. White, J. P. ‘An Interview with Derek Walcott’. In Conversations with Derek Walcott, edited by William Baer, 14–37. [Previously printed in Green Mountain Review, 4, no. 1 (1990).] Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. [1925]. New York: New Directions, 1956.

General Index

See also Index to Derek Walcott Archival Material Abstract Expressionism, 211, 212, 214–15, 267 Agee, James, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (PFM), 384–90, 408–9; see also Evans, Walker Alleyne, Keith, 114 Atteck, Sybil, 3, 214, 267 Audubon, John James, 343–4, 348–9 The Birds of America (plates): Great White Heron, 345, 347, 352, 353, 355; Snowy Heron or White Egret, 343, 344, 345, 349–50, 353, 358, 369n; White Heron, 345, 347 Ornithological Biography (OB), 343–4, 346–7, 349–351, 353–4 and Walcott, Derek, ‘White Egrets’, 32, 340–58, 408, 431 Bahamas, 265–6, 270–5, 279, 398 Baraka, Amiri, a.k.a. LeRoi Jones, 212 Baudelaire, Charles, 298 ‘Un voyage à Cythère/A Voyage to Cythera’ and Walcott, Derek, In a Fine Castle (IAM), 145, 148, 157–8, 159; The Last Carnival and The Last Carnival (IAM), 145, 148, 157–8, 159, 177, 291; ‘Un voyage à Cythère’ (IAM), 145, 148–9, 152, 155, 158, 159 and Walcott, Derek, O Starry Starry Night, 293 Baugh, Edward, 4, 5, 6–7, 9, 28, 32, 42, 59, 68, 97, 107, 138, 193, 343; see also Nepaulsingh, Colbert Bearden, Romare, 20, 31, 215–65, 266, 276, 302, 327, 386, 388, 394, 408, 417, 424, 426 The Black Odyssey, 16, 217, 254–7, 265; and Walcott, Derek, Marie Laveau,

290; The Odyssey, 16, 255–8, 259, 290; Omeros and Omeros (IAM), 16, 255, 259, 290; ‘The Schooner Flight’, 290 The Bow of Odysseus and Walcott, Derek, The Odyssey, 257–8 The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott & the Art of Romare Bearden, 3, 395–8, 400, 417; and Walcott, Derek, ‘Dark August’, 396; ‘A Sea-Change’, 397; ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’, 396–7 Carolina Interior, 237 Circe Turns a Companion of Odysseus into a Swine and Walcott, Derek, Marie Laveau and Marie Laveau (IAM), 258–9; Omeros, 259 Conjur Woman (1964), 258; and Walcott, Derek, Marie Laveau and Marie Laveau (IAM), 259 Conjur Woman (1971), 258 Conjur Woman (1975), 258, 261; and Walcott, Derek, Marie Laveau and Marie Laveau (IAM) 258–9; Omeros, 259 The Cyclops and Walcott, Derek, The Odyssey, 256 The Green Bath and Walcott, Derek, Omeros, 262 A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present, 210–11, 220–1; see also Henderson, Harry The Lamp (1984), 237–8 Mecklenburg Morning, 237 Mother and Child (c. 1972 collage), 237 Mysteries, and Walcott, 233–4 The Obeah’s Dawn (L’Aube de la Sorcière, Douvan Jou Manmbo-A), 3, 33, 261; and Walcott, Derek, Omeros, 263; ‘To Romare Bearden’, 3, 259–63, 373–4, 397

468    Derek Walcott’s Painters Bearden, Romare (cont.) Odysseus and Penelope Reunited, 217 The Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism, 254 The Prevalence of Ritual: Conjur Woman, 233, 254 The Prevalence of Ritual: Conjur Woman as an Angel, 254 The Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings, 254 Realm of the Shades and Walcott, Derek, The Odyssey, 256 The Return of Odysseus, Homage to Pintoricchio & Benin, 257, 258; and Walcott, Derek, The Odyssey, 256–7 Rituals of Obeah, 259–60, 371, 374, 482 The Sea Nymph, 16, 217, 218, 219, 265, 276; and Walcott, Derek, ‘The Schooner Flight’, 218–19; cover for Walcott, Derek, The Star Apple Kingdom, 217 The Sirens’ Song and Walcott, Derek, ‘The Schooner Flight’, 219 Sermons: The Walls of Jericho, 254 Sunday Morning Breakfast, 237 and Walcott, Derek, Walker and Walker (IAM), 2, 31, 224, 228–9, 231, 233–4, 235, 237 Beckford, William, 397 Benjamin, Walter, 28, 372, 407 Bensen, Robert, 22, 23 Benton, Thomas Hart, 192 Aaron, 230 Ploughing It Under, 230; and Walcott, Derek, ‘Forty Acres’, 231–2, Walker, 229–31; Roasting Ears, 230 Bernal, Martin, 255 Bosch, Hieronymus, The Garden of Earthly Delights and Walcott, Derek, Doctor Faustus-Christopher Marlowe (IAM), 17–19, ‘White Egrets’ 358–60 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 282–3 Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and Walcott, Derek, Walker 71, 224, 232, 241; see also Snodgrass, Kate Botticelli, Sandro, 193, 404 The Birth of Venus, 4 Boucher, François, 142, 142 Braque, Georges, 6 Brenner, Anita, Idols Behind Altars, 6, 195, 196, 197, 199, 208, 243n; see also Mexican Muralism Breslin, Paul, 114 Bridge, James Howard, 378, 379

Brodsky, Joseph, 14, 358, 359, 439 Brown, Dee, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 288n Brown, Stewart, 23 Burnett, Paula, 24, 199 Burroughs, Allie Mae, a.k.a. Gudger, Annie Mae (Woods), 384, 385; see also Agee, James; Evans, Walker Campbell, George, First Poems, 116–17; and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 117–18; ‘George Campbell’, 118 Campbell, Ralph, 198 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, Supper at Emmaus and Walcott, Derek, Vangelo Nero (IAM), 19–20, 253 Carmichael, Stokely, 222, 225 Central Walk, Botanical Station, Castries, St Lucia, postcard, 63 Césaire, Aimé, 220, 263 Cézanne, Paul, 11, 89, 219 Card Players and Walcott, Derek, Domino Players, 327–8 and Walcott, Derek, Baiting the Hook, 333; Tiepolo’s Hound, 8, 24, 303, 307 Cheeke, Stephen, 412; see also ekphrasis Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 15 Chamberlin, Edward, 124 Cimabue, 42, 438n Clemente, Francesco, 3 coal-carriers, St Lucia 84, 105, 110 and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 2 (IAM), 48, 52; ‘Native Women under Sea-Almond Trees’, 50, 110; Omeros and Omeros (IAM), 46–8, 106; Vendors at Choc Bay, St Lucia, 52, 110 see also ‘St. Lucia; There is a continuous stream of these women’ Coconut Walk (Vigie, St Lucia), 61, 64, 65 and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebooks 1 and 2 (IAM) 58–9, 64, 142; ‘Leaving School’ 58–9 see also Walcott, Warwick, The Coconut Walk The Cocoanut Walk, postcard, 61–3, 62; see also Walcott, Warwick, The Coconut Walk Codallo, Alfredo Folklore and Walcott, Derek, Ti-Jean and

General Index    469 His Brothers, Ti-Jean and His Brothers (IAM), Ti-Jean (painting), 208 and Walcott, Derek, newspaper articles, 208, 214, 215 Collier, Gordon, 3, 136n Collymore, Frank, 114 Columbus, Christopher, 201, 427; and Walcott, Derek, Drums and Colours, 202, 206; ‘Moruga’, 428 Constable, John, 79 Cox, David, The Challenge: A Storm on the Moor, 66 Craven, Thomas, A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: from the Renaissance to the Present Day, 5, 10, 27, 28, 30, 36n, 67, 80, 82–3, 98, 108, 112, 133n, 138–43, 146, 150, 160, 188n, 192, 195, 198, 210, 229, 230, 293, 308, 343, 344, 364n, 384, 398–9, 400, 402, 403, 405, 407 Crivelli, Carlo, 83 Virgin and Child, 138, 404 Cuyp, Aelbert and Walcott, Derek, The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott & the Art of Romare Bearden, 396; ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’, 396–7 Daumier, Honoré-Victorin, The Print Collector, 430 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 434n Madonna of the Rocks, 138, 141 The Baptism of Christ, 138–9 Degas, Edgar, 6, 219 Café Singer, 264 Delacroix, Eugène, 211 Aspasie (or Aline La Mulatress) see Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Turban The Death of Sardanapalus, 98 Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, 298 Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, 97–8 Liberty Leading the People, July 28, 1830, 99, 30, 98–101, 122; and Walcott, Derek, ‘The Light of the World’, 30, 101–4, 341; Ideal Head: Helen/Omeros, 30, 106–7; see also Simmons, Harold, Albertina; St. Omer, Dunstan, Towards Independence – Black Marianne Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Turban, 98, 101, 102, 132–33n, 134n, 245n de Lima, Clara Rosa, 23, 111, 259

Devaux, Robert, 439 Doig, Peter No Foreign Lands, 409, 423, 435n, 437n 100 Years Ago (Carrera) 428; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘100 Years Ago (Carrera)’ Baked, 420; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Baked’ Cave Boat Bird Painting, 431, 432; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Cave Boat Bird Painting’ Cricket Painting (Paragrand) 410, 411; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Paragon’ Cyril’s Bay, 439–40; see also Walcott, Derek ‘In the Arena’ Figure in Mountain Landscape, 422–3; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Figure in Mountain Landscape’ Girl in White with Trees, 410, 435n; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Girl in White with Trees’ Grande Riviere (2001–2002), 430; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Grand Riviere I’ Grande Riviere (2002), 431; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Grand Riviere II The Phantom Steed’ The Heart of Old San Juan, 415, 418; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘In the Heart of Old San Juan’; The Joker of Seville and The Joker of Seville (IAM), 415–16 Hitch-Hiker, 412–13; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Hitch-Hiker’ House of Flowers (See You There), 421–2; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Peter I’m Glad You Asked Me Along’ House of Pictures (Carrera), 429–30; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘House of Pictures (Carrera)’ J. M. at Paragon, 414, 418; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Dedication to S. H.’ Lapeyrouse Umbrella, 420; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Lapeyrouse Umbrella’ Lion in the Road see Walcott, Derek, ‘A Lion Is in the Streets III’ Mal d’Estomac, 417–18; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Mal d’Estomac’ Man Dressed as Bat (Night), 426; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Man Dressed as Bat’ Metropolitain (House of Pictures), 430; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Metropolitain (House of Pictures)’

470    Derek Walcott’s Painters Doig, Peter (cont.) Milky Way, 420; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Milky Way’ Moruga, 427–8; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Moruga’ Music of the Future, 424; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Music of the Future’ Night Palm (North Coast), 413–14, 418; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Santa Cruz I’ Night Studio (studiofilm & racquet club), 423; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Night Studio (Studiofilm & Racquet Club)’ Paragon see Walcott, Derek, ‘Paragon’ Painting a Cloud on a Wall, 438n; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘A Lion Is in the Streets IV’ Pelican Man (2003) Portrait (Under Water), 420; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Abstraction’ Pure Chutney, 436n; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘The Studio Film Club II’ Purple Jesus (Black Rainbow), 440–1; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Purple Jesus (Black Rainbow)’ Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak), 425; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘A Lion Is in The Streets I’ Ski Jacket, 416–17; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Ski Jacket’ Stag, 423; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Metropolitain’ Study for the Heart of Old San Juan, 415; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘In the Heart of Old San Juan’; The Joker of Seville and The Joker of Seville (IAM), 415–16 Untitled, 418–20; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘The Tanker’ Untitled (Paramin), 427, 440, 441; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘Untitled (Paramin)’ Van Dyke Parks Presents The Esso Trinidad Steel Band, 436n; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘The Studio Film Club III’ Xala, 436n; see also Walcott, Derek, ‘The Studio Film Club I’ Young Lion 425 and Walcott, Derek, Morning, Paramin, 3, 33–4, 408–32, 439–41 Döring, Tobias, 399

Douglas, Aaron, 121, 137n, 210, 211 Douglass, Frederick and Walcott, Derek, Walker, 226, 229, 236–7, 242, 250n Duchamp, Marcel, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, 23–4 Dürer, Albrecht, 54, 79 Knight, Death and the Devil and Rembrandt, The Polish Rider and Walcott, Derek, ‘The Polish Rider’, 27, 142, 378 Young Hare and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 44–5 Eakins, Thomas, Swimming (The Swimming Hole), 91 Ekphrasis, 32–3, 142, 371–438 and atemporal eternity, 173, 183 and ekphrastic fear/ekphrastic hope/ ekphrastic indifference, 373, 394, 401; see also Mitchell, W. T. J. and miracle and mirage, 372; see also Krieger, Murray and museum of words, 372, 373; see also Heffernan, James, A. W. and notional ekphrasis, 372; see also Hollander, John and paragone/paragonal struggle, 33, 373, 374, 375, 395, 401, 405, 408, 410, 412, 414, 430 and sister arts, 373, 419 and ut pictura poesis, 418–19 and Walcott, Derek and Bearden, Romare, 3, 33, 218–19, 260–3, 261, 373–4, 395–8, 417 and Walcott, Derek and Doig, Peter, 3, 33, 408–41 and Walcott, Derek and Dürer, Albrecht, 9, 27, 45, 378–80 and Walcott, Derek and Evans, Walker 33, 384–95 and Walcott, Derek and Hokusai, Katsushika, 33, 252, 375–6 and Walcott, Derek and Homer, Winslow, 23–4, 27, 31, 277–84, 398–400 and Walcott, Derek and Keats, John, 126, 380–2 and Walcott, Derek and Millais, John Everett, 33, 202–5 and Walcott, Derek and Rembrandt, van Rijn, 26–7, 33, 142, 376–80, 402–4

General Index    471 and Walcott, Derek and St. Omer, Dunstan, 103–5, 121–2, 127–9, 253, 380–3 and Walcott, Derek and Stevens, Wallace, 126 and Walcott, Derek and Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y, 33, 402, 404–8 and Walcott, Derek and Watteau, JeanAntoine, 383 see also Cheeke, Stephen; Keefe, Anne; Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), 9, 195, 378 Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara, 10 Ellison, Ralph, 220, 233, 256, 386 Embah (Emheyo Bahabba), 426 The English Topographical Draughtsmen and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 5, 114; ‘Leaving School’, 54; see also Finberg, Alexander Joseph; Sandby, Paul; topography/topographers; Walcott, Warwick Evans, Walker Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (PFM), 384–9, 394, 408–9 Portraits of Burroughs, Allie Mae in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 33, 384, 385, 386–9, 390, 392–4; in Photographs of Cotton Sharecroppers Families, 333, 384, 385, 392–4, 393; and Walcott, Derek, ‘American Muse’, ‘Upstate’, ‘North and South’, 384–95 see also Agee, James; Burroughs, Allie Mae Fénelon, François, 148 Figueroa, John, 16 Finberg, Alexander Joseph, English Water Colour Painters 5, 55, 56, 66, 79–80; see also The English Topographical Draughtsmen; Sandby, Paul; topography/topographers Fra Angelico, 83 Annunciation, 36n, 55n The Coronation of the Virgin, 138 Fragonard, Jean Honoré de, 142, 143, 169 Storming the Citadel, 142 Fra Lippo Lippi, Annunciation and Walcott, Derek, Another Life, 9, 13, 36n, 142 Francois, Hunter, 23, 115

French Revolution, 30, 148, 174, 348 The Frick Collection, 26, 142 Frost, Robert, 222 Froude, James Anthony, 14, 106, 203, 205 García Lorca, Federico, 207, 398 Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías/ Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías and Walcott, Derek, ‘In the Arena’, 439, 440 Garrison, William Lloyd, 237 and Walcott, Derek, Walker and Walker (IAM), 225, 228, 235, 236, 237, 238 Gauguin, Paul, 67, 107, 108–9, 109–10, 134–5n, 293–4, 296–300, 322–3, 335, 361n Les Alyscamps, 73 Breton Shepherdesses, 300 Le cheval blanc, 298, 362n Coastal Landscape of Martinique/The Bay of St Pierre, Martinique, 298 Coming and Going, Martinique, 298–300, 301 Exotique Eve, 362n Head of a Woman from Martinique, 298 Manao Tupapau / Spirit of the Dead Watching, 108–9, 135n, 297–8 The Mango Trees, 73, 298 Martinican Women, 298 Martinique Landscape, 294, 295, 366n Palm Trees and Calabash Trees, 367n Parau api, (Two Women of Tahiti), 109, 110 Path under the Palms, 298, 367n Profile of Charles Laval with Palm Tree and Other Sketches (verso), 367n Self-Portrait, 107, 108 Sketch of Figures and Foliage (recto), 367n Still Life with Mangoes and Hibiscus Flowers, 298 Still Life with Sketch by Delacroix, 298 Study of Martinican Women, 298 Tahitian Women on the Beach (Femmes de Tahiti), 109, 110 Te nave nave fenua (Delightful Land), 362n Tropical Conversation, 298, 300 Women Carrying Fruit on the Beach of Anse Turin, 298

472    Derek Walcott’s Painters Gauguin, Paul (cont.) and Walcott, Derek, ‘XIX Gauguin / i’, ‘XIX Gauguin / ii’, 22, 23, 293, 296; Another Life and Another Life notebooks 1 and 2 (IAM), 107, 110, 192–3, 195, 296; The Death of Gauguin, 23; ‘Dilemma Faces W. I. Artists’, 268; Epitaph for the Young, 111; Gauguin in Martinique, 107–8, 109, 110, 293, 297, 298, 302, 336, 337; Gauguin’s Studio, 108, 297–8, 302, 336, 337; ‘A Letter to a Painter in England’, 107; ‘Native Women Under Sea-Almond Trees’, 109–10, 293, 297; ‘On Choosing Port of Spain’, 321; O Starry Starry Night, 2, 293, 294, 296; Tiepolo’s Hound, 24, 31, 296, 302, 303, 336, 337 Gilpin, William, 397, 434n Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, 138 Giotto di Bondone, 42, 80, 83, 193, 198, 316, 438n The Deposition, 138 Glissant, Edouard, 33, 395, 401, 409, 422, 430, 431 Gordon, George William, ‘G. A. (sic) Gordon hung at Morant Bay. Photograph of George William Gordon’, 202 photograph and Walcott, Derek, Drums and Colours, 202 Goya, Francisco, 135n, 378 Great Fire of Castries, 58, 64, 95, 100, 112, 193 Greene, Graham, 40, 43 Gudger, Annie Mae (Woods) see Burroughs, Allie Mae Haitian Revolution, 199, 206, 212, 226, 348 Hammond, Rhona, 106 Hamner, Robert, 23, 24 Handley, George, 341 Heaney, Seamus, 414, 419, 439 Heffernan, James A. W., 372, 373, 395; see also ekphrasis and museum of words Hemingway, Ernest and Walcott, Derek, American, without America (IAM), 266; ‘On Hemingway’, 265–6; ‘Outside the Cathedral’ (IAM), 11 Henderson, Harry, A History of African-

American Artists from 1792 to the Present, 210, 211, 220–1; see also Bearden, Romare Hinkson, Jackie, 31, 67, 266, 267, 268, 321, 322, 328–9, 331, 396, 438n After the Hurricane-Dominica, 286n Barbados Ice Boats, 366n Bathers, Tobago 367n Bathing in Mt Irvine, 367n Boat Belly, 366n Buccoo Boats, 366n Hurricane Louis I-Antigua, 286n Hurricane Louis II-Antigua, 286n John John, 365n Late Afternoon, 286n, 367n Lowland Estate, Tobago (demolished), 287n North Coast, 286n Old Roxborough (parts demolished), 365n Perseverance Estate (demolished), 365n St Ann’s Main Road, 287n St Lucia Coast, 367n Savannah Life, 365n Sinking Pirogue, 366n Two Pirogues, 366n Woodbrook House, 365n and Walcott, Derek, ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 3, 29, 266–7, 269, 277, 328–9; newspaper articles, 214, 267–8, 269 see also Island Light: Watercolors and Oil Painting by Derek Walcott and Donald Hinkson Hobbema, Meindert, The Avenue Middelharnis, 59, 60, 61, 62 and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 and 2 (IAM), 59, 64 see also Walcott, Warwick, The Coconut Walk Hodgkins, Frances, 6 Hokusai, Katsushika Manga and Walcott, Derek, Vangelo Nero (IAM), 252 Under the Wave off Kanagawa, 377; and Walcott, Derek, ‘The Hurricane – After Hokusai’, 33, 375–6 and Walcott, Derek, American, without America (IAM), 213 Hollander, John, 39n, 371, 372; see also ekphrasis and notional ekphrasis

General Index    473 Homer, 16, 53, 219, 254, 255, 256, 257, 265, 277, 287n, 290, 367n, 372, 400 Homer, Winslow, 25, 31, 67, 265, 268–9, 270–3, 277, 280, 282, 290, 322, 328, 335, 396, 398–9, 424 After the Hurricane, Bahamas, 270, 273, 287n The Conch Divers, 271, 272 Cuban Hillside, 367n Dressing for the Carnival, 270, 287n The Gulf Stream, 270, 273, 277–84, 278, 290, 398–400, 403; and Walcott, Derek, Omeros, 23–4, 27, 31, 270, 277–84, 398–400 Hurricane, Bahamas, 270, 273, 287n Lighthouse, Nassau, 273 Nassau, 367n On the Way to the Market, Bahamas, 335 The Palm Tree, 367n Palm Tree, Nassau, 367n Palm Trees, Bahamas, 367n Rest, 335 Royal Palms, Cuba, 367n Rum Cay, 367n Sea Garden, Bahamas, 271, 272 Shark Fishing, 273, 367n Sloop Nassau, 367n Sponge Fishing, 271, 367n Sponge Fishing, Nassau, 270 The Turtle Pound, 271, 273, 287n, 367n The Water Fan, 271, 273 A Wall, Nassau, 335 West India Divers, 271 and Walcott, Derek, American, without America (IAM), 265, 266, 276, 277, 321, 396; Boy on a Wall, Rat Island, 335; ‘Dilemma Faces W. I. Artists’, 268; ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 266–7, 268–9; Omeros, 276, 332, 399–400; ‘On Hemingway’, 265, 266, 269, 273; St Lucian Fisherman, 332; Tiepolo’s Hound, 328, 332; ‘The Sea is History’, 275–6, 280, 282 Hopper, Edward Gas and Walcott, Derek, Omeros, 16 and Walcott, Derek, The Prodigal, 15–16 Hunt, William, The Light of the World and Walcott, Derek, ‘The Light of the World’, 15, 104–5, 134n

Isham, Samuel, 210, 287n Island Light: Watercolors and Oil Painting by Derek Walcott and Donald Hinkson, joint exhibition 3, 266, 286n; see also Hinkson, Jackie and Walcott, Derek, Paintings Ismond, Patricia, 12, 22 jab molassie, 427, 441 Johns, Jasper, White Flag, 231 Keats, John, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and Walcott, Derek, ‘For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church’, 126, 380–2 Keefe, Anne, 412; see also ekphrasis King, Bruce, 22, 23, 135n, 136n, 259, 263 Kline, Franz, 212, 214 Krieger, Murray, 372; see also ekphrasis and miracle and mirage Laval, Charles, 31, 296–7, 298, 335 L’anse du carbet, martiniquaise à la robe rouge, 297, 362n Martinique Landscape, 367n Two Women Carrying Baskets on Martinique, 362n Women Carrying Fruit, 362n Women on the Seashore, 362n Women on the Seashore, Sketch, 362n Lawrence, Jacob, 215, 224, 235–6 The Migration Series, 235–6, 238, 241; Panel no. 3: From every southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north, 240 and Walcott, Derek, Walker, 2, 31, 228–9, 232, 241–2 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 11, 418, 420; see also ekphrasis Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 58, 68 Locke, Alain, The Negro in Art, 6, 98, 132–3n, 210–11, 229–30, 244n, 245n, 270 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, Allegory and Effects of Bad Government and Allegory and Effects of Good Government, 197, 243n Lovelace, Earl, 162, 184, 191n McQueen, Steve, 3 magic lantern, 53, 54 Mantegna, Andrea, 193, 404

474    Derek Walcott’s Painters Malraux, André, 42, 74n, 219, 231, 233, 438n Marlowe, Christopher, Dr Faustus and Walcott, Derek, Doctor FaustusChristopher Marlowe (IAM), 17–19, 37n Matisse, Henri, 219 Melbye, Fritz, 31, 300, 302, 335 Encampment in a Forest, 367n Palm Tree (n.d.) (Pissarro or Melbye – unattributed), 367n The Plantation ‘Mary’s Fancy’ at Saint Croix, 367n and Walcott, Derek, Tiepolo’s Hound, 303, 304, 306, 363n The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 27, 282, 283, 288, 307, 311, 384 Mexican Muralism, 192, 193, 195, 196, 215, 216 and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 192–3, 196–7; Drums and Colours, 31, 198, 202; newspaper articles, 195, 196, 198, 208; Omeros, 199, ‘Outside the Cathedral’ (IAM), 192, 198; Ti-Jean (painting), 208 see also Brenner, Anita; Orozco, José Clemente; Rivera, Diego; Siqueiros, David Alfaro; Tamayo, Rufino Michelangelo, Buonarroti, 80, 193, 196, 197 Creation of Adam, 9, 139 Millais, John Everett The Blind Girl, 48–50, 49, 53; and Walcott, Derek, Tiepolo’s Hound 48; and Walcott, Warwick, 48, 79 The Boyhood of Raleigh, 203, 204; and Walcott, Derek, Drums and Colours, 17, 33, 202, 203–5, 374–5; newspaper articles, 205 Millet, Jean-François, 300 The Gleaners, 46, 47, 52, 54 The Sower, 46, 52, 54 and Walcott, Warwick’s copies and Walcott, Derek, ‘Leaving School’; Another Life and Another Life notebooks 1 and 2; interview with Hirsch, Edward (1986), Tiepolo’s Hound; personal communication with Fumagalli, 42, 46, 52, 53, 54, 56, 67, 79, 312 Mitchell, W. T. J., 374, 386, 387, 394, 410

ekphrastic fear/ekphrastic hope/ekphrastic indifference, 373, 394, 401; see also ekphrasis Monet, Edouard, 312 Olympia, 135 Moore, Henry, 77n A Silvery Day, West of The Needles, Isle of Wight, 66–7, 339; and Walcott, Derek, Breakers, Becune Point, 339; Tiepolo’s Hound, 66–7, 339 Mordecai, Pamela, 7 Naipaul, V. S., 205 Nash, Paul, 6 Négritude, 214, 220 Nepaulsingh, Colbert, 4, 5, 28, 42, 59, 68, 97, 107, 138, 343; see also Baugh, Edward Nerval, Gérard de, and Walcott, Derek, Un Voyage à Cythère (IAM), 149–50, 155 Nicholson, Ben, 6 Obama, Barak, 231, 232 O’Hara, Frank and Walcott, Derek, American, without America (IAM), 212; newspaper articles, 212; ‘Spring Street in ’58’, 212, 246n O’Meally, Robert, 217, 398 O’Neal, Hank, A Vision Shared, 390–1, 434n; see also Shahn, Ben Orozco, José Clemente Hispano-America, 195 and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 192–3, 195; newspaper articles, 198; Ti-Jean and His Brothers, 207 see also Brenner, Anita; Mexican Muralism; Rivera, Diego; Siqueiros, David Alfaro; Tamayo, Rufino Pantin, Raoul, 439 Picasso, Pablo, 219 Portrait of a Girl with a Mirror, 87 Piero della Francesca, 1, 21, 186n, 193 The Battle of Constantine, 139 Resurrection, 20 Pintoricchio, Penelope with the Suitors, 257, 258 Pippin, Horace, 224, 234 Cabin in the Cotton series, 235 Christmas Morning, Breakfast, 237

General Index    475

Country Doctor or Night Call, 235 The Domino Players, 237 The Getaway, 235 Interior of Cabin or School Studies, 237 John Brown Going to His Hanging, 240; and Walcott, Derek, Walker, 239–41, 284 Man on a Bench, 234 Maple Sugar Season, 235 Saturday Night Bath or Saturday Night, 237 Saying Prayers, 237 Six O’Clock (Cabin Interior by a Fireside, Waiting), 237 Sunday Morning Breakfast, 237 The Trapper Returning Home or Snow Scene, 235 and Walcott, Derek, Walker and Walker (IAM), 2, 31, 228–9, 232, 234–5, 236, 238, 239–41, 242 Pissarro, Jacob Camille, 300–7, 309–11, 314 Four Seasons – Autumn, Spring, Summer, Winter, 25, 329; and Walcott, Derek, Headland in Drought, 328–9; Pasture, Dry Season, 328–9; Preparing the Net, 328–9; St Malo, 336 Boy with Jug, 304, 310 Buildings amidst Tropical Vegetation, 367n Cardplayers in Galipán, 327–8; and Walcott, Derek, Domino Players, 327–8 Christiansted, 303 Coconut Tree, 367n Compositional Study of a peasant family with a donkey in a landscape, 364n Conversation, 300 Harbor Scene; ciel plurieux, 367n La vieille route d’Ennery à Pontoise (1887), 319 Landscape at Pontoise, 364n Landscape with a Road, 306 Landscape, St Thomas, 300, 367n Loading/unloading a Ship, 363n Market Scene, 304, 305 Palm Tree (Pissarro or Melbye – unattributed) 367n Palm Tree Tops, 367n Portrait and Figural Study (Frederick David), 304 Route d’Ennery, 319 S. Thomas 8 juin 1852, 303–4, 305

Saint Thomas Gris-Gris, 306 Seated Artist, 309–11, 310, 317 Self Portrait (c. 1898), 339; and Walcott, Derek, Self-Portrait, 339 Study of a seated female figure sewing, 300 The Watering Place, Éragny, 364n Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St Thomas, 300, 301 and Walcott, Derek, ‘VIII’, 20–1; Boy on a Wall, Rat Island, 335–6, 367n; Breakers, Becune Point, 339–40; Canoe Under Trees, 331–2; English Garden, 336; Gros Islet Church I, 323–7, 324, 336; Gros Islet Church II, 325–7, 328, 336; Musicians and St Lucian Fishermen, 332–3; Priory at Gros Islet, 325–7, 328; Savannah, Early Morning, 320–3; The Swimmer, 333; Tiepolo’s Hound 15, 24, 31, 32, 87, 277, 302–7, 309–20 Pissarro, Joachim, 306, 327 Plax, Julie Ann, 145, 151 Porter, James, 210, 211 postcard poetry, 116 Prado, Museo del, 405, 407, 408 Price, Richard and Sally, 215, 216–17, 285n Project Helen, collection, National Trust, St Lucia, 269–70; see also Walcott, Derek, Paintings Raleigh, Walter, 202, 203, 205 Raphael, 80, 192, 193, 195, 197, 198 Adam and Eve, 142 La Donna Velata, 139 Madonna of the Goldfinch, 139 Rat Island, 50, 70–1, 335, 336, 367n Rembrandt van Rijn The Polish Rider, 376, 377–9, 377, 433n; and Walcott, Derek, ‘The Polish Rider’, 26–7, 142, 376–80 The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, 33, 402–4, 406, 435n; and Walcott, Derek, The Prodigal, 33, 402–4 Ringgold, Faith, 231 Rivera, Diego, 192, 195–9, 207, 208, 211, 242–3n, 244n Bad Government and Good Government, 197, 243n Dream of a Sunday afternoon in Alameda Central, 209, 242–3n

476    Derek Walcott’s Painters Rivera, Diego (cont.) Man and Machinery, 195 Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (carnival), 201–2 Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (Epic of the Mexican People), 199, 200, 209 Pan American Unity, 205–6, 207 Portrait of America, 211, 245n Teatro de los Insurgentes, 201, 209 and Walcott, Derek, Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 192–3; Drums and Colours, 31, 147, 198, 199, 201, 202, 206; newspaper articles, 196, 198, 205, 206, 208, 268; Ti-Jean and His Brothers, 207; Ti-Jean (painting), 209 see also Brenner, Anita; Orozco, José Clemente; Mexican Muralism; Siqueiros, David Alfaro; Tamayo, Rufino Rothko, Mark, 94 Rousseau, Henri, The Sleeping Gypsy, 4 Rubens, Rape of the Sabine Women, 196 Saint Gaudens, Augustus Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth AfricanAmerican Regiment and Walcott, Derek, Omeros, 282, 283 The Puritan and Walcott, Derek, Walker, 288–9n ‘St. Lucia; There is a continuous stream of these women’, photograph, 47; see also coal-carriers St. Omer, Dunstan, 5–6, 8, 28–30, 31, 41, 89, 91, 93, 95, 96–129, 193–4, 195, 196, 198–9, 207, 208, 226, 267, 268, 270, 321, 380–3, 394, 412 Holy Family, Altarpiece, Roseau Valley Church, St Lucia, 118, 119, 119–21, 366n; and Walcott, Derek, ‘Altarpiece for the Roseau Valley Church’ 118–22, 126–8, 253, 380–3, 419–20; Omeros, 127; ‘Roseau Valley’, 129; ‘St Lucie’, 124–6; ‘The Sea at Dauphin’, 120 Jesus Christ is Lord, mural for the Church of Saint Phillip and Saint James, Fonds St Jacques, St Lucia, 137n La Rose, mural for the Church of St. Rose de Lima, Monchy, St Lucia, 137n Last Supper, mural for the parish church, Desruisseaux, St Lucia, 137n

Mural for Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Castries, St Lucia, 96; and Walcott, Derek, ‘Outside the Cathedral’ (IAM), 96, 194 Mural for St Michel Church, of Le Francois, Martinique, 132n Petit Piton, Jalousie, 75n Prismatic Landscape, 136–7n Towards Independence-Black Mariannne, 30, 98, 99, 99–101, 133n; and Walcott, Derek, ‘In the Light of the World’, 101–3, 104–5, 106, 107; see also, Delacroix, Eugène, Liberty Leading the People, July 28, 1830 Triptych of the Assumption and St Joseph the Worker with Jesus in the workshop of his father, Roman Catholic Church, Gros Islet, St Lucia and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 118 and Prismism, 121, 136–7n and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 1, 7, 103, 104–5, 111, 113–14, 115, 192–3, 197, 323, 341, 417; ‘Introduction to the Work of Dunstan St. Omer’, 90, 121, 136–7n; ‘Outside the Cathedral’ (IAM), 8, 14, 34, 96, 98, 111, 113–14, 121, 124, 127, 128, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 253, 294 Sandby, Paul, 55, 66, 142, 312; see also The English Topographical Draughtsmen: Finberg, Alexander Joseph; topography/ topographers Sassetta, Stefano di Giovanni, Journey of the Magi, 139, 140, 86n Savory, Elaine, 342 Schreyvogel, Charles, In Hot Pursuit, 282 Senghor, Léopold, 214, 220 Sesenne, 81 Seurat, George, A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, 333 Shahn, Ben, ‘Family of rehabilitation clients, Boone County’ and Walcott, Derek, ‘Upstate’, 391, 392–3, 434n; see also O’Neal, Hank, A Vision Shared Sickert, Walter, 6 Simmons, Harold, 1, 5–6, 28–30, 34, 41, 74n, 76n, 80–2, 80–118, 123, 129–30n, 130–1n, 132n, 193–4, 195, 196, 214, 264, 267, 268,

General Index    477 294, 321, 337, 341, 344, 382, 412, 432, 438n Albertina, 91, 97, 101, 105, 107, 109, 110; and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 96–7, 101, 103; Gauguin in Martinique, 30, 107–8, 109, 110, 298; ‘Ideal Head: Helen/Omeros’, 107; ‘The Light of the World’, 30, 100, 101; Vendors at Choc Bay, St Lucia, 110; see also Delacroix, Eugène, Liberty Leading the People, July 28, 1830 Boy, 91, 92 Cas-en-Bas, 90–1 Fishing Boats, 75n From the Bannanes, 90 Lavoutte Bay – Bach Fugue in G Minor, 90, 92; and Walcott, Derek, Another Life, 90 Market Lady, 93, 105 Pigeon Island, 91 Sunday Morning, 90 U-Boat Attack in Castries Harbour, 94–5 When Mountain, Sea and Sky Chant an Immortal Melody!, 90 and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebooks 1 and 2 (IAM), 80, 82, 87, 89, 93–4, 95, 107, 118, 192, 195, 196–7, 298; ‘ Ballades Creole pour Harry Simmons by Derek Walcott’, 123; ‘Call for Breakers and Builders’, 86; Epitaph for the Young, 85; Gauguin in Martinique, 110, 298; ‘A Letter to a Painter in England’, 61, 113; ‘The Lost Federation’, 88–9; ‘Native Women Under Sea-Almond Trees’ 93; ‘Solo’, 91–2; O Starry Starry Night, 294; Preparing the Net, 331; St Lucian Fishermen, 332; Ti-Jean and His Brothers, 207; ‘Travelogue’, 88–9; ‘Tribute to a Master’ 84, 88 Siqueiros, David Alfaro and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 192–3, 195; newspaper articles, 198; Ti-Jean and His Brothers, 207; see also Brenner, Anita; Mexican Muralism; Orozco, José Clemente; Rivera, Diego; Tamayo, Rufino Smith, Matthew, 6 Snodgrass, Kate and Walcott, Derek,

Walker, 241; see also Boston Playwrights’ Theatre Sontag, Susan, 202, 384, 385, 386 Spencer, Stanley, 6 Stevens, Wallace, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, 126; see also ekphrasis Stewart, Marian, 4, 6, 7, 35n Stollmeyer, Hugh, 158, 188n Tamayo, Rufino and Walcott, Derek, newspaper articles, 198; see also Brenner, Anita; Mexican Muralism; Orozco, José Clemente; Rivera, Diego; Siqueiros, David Alfaro Terada, Rei, 22, 23 Thompson, Krista, 54, 59, 66, 273 Tichborne, Chidiock, 18, 19 Tiepolo, Giovanbattista, 307, 308, 327 Apelles Painting Campaspe and Walcott, Derek, Tiepolo’s Hound, 309, 312, 317, 328, 337, 401, 405, 409 The Banquet of Antony and Cleopatra, 366n The Finding of Moses, 366n John the Baptist Beheaded, 366n The Meeting of Anthony and Cleopatra, 366n Rinaldo Taking Leave of Armida, 308 Treppenhaus ceiling, 366n and Walcott, Derek, Tiepolo’s Hound, 15, 24–5, 31, 307, 308, 309, 316, 326, 337, 364n Titian, 5 La Bella and Walcott, Derek, ‘The Light of the World’, 102 Topography/topographers, 66, 79, 82, 84, 94, 114; see also The English Topographical Draughtsmen; Finberg, Alexander Joseph; Sandby, Paul; Walcott, Warwick A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: from the Renaissance to the Present Day see Craven, Thomas Trinidad Black Power Revolution, 30, 127, 145, 148, 157, 162–4, 167, 169, 175, 179, 181–2, 184–5, 214, 253 Trinidad Theatre Workshop, 18, 73, 158, 159, 214, 216, 221 Toussaint L’Ouverture, 202 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 21, 27, 79

478    Derek Walcott’s Painters Turner, Joseph Mallord William (cont.) The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834 (two versions) / The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, 4, 22, 35n, 95; and Walcott, Derek, ‘XXIII’, 20–2, 27; ‘A City’s Death by Fire’, 112 The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838, 21, 27, 67–70, 68, 78n; and Walcott, Derek, ‘XXIII’, 21; Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 67, 68–9; Tiepolo’s Hound, 67–70, 312, 332 The Slave Ship-Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying— Typhoon coming on, 21–2, 280, 281, 282, 283; and Walcott, Derek, ‘XXIII’, 21; Omeros, 31, 280, 282, 283 Uccello, Paolo The Rout of San Romano – Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano and Walcott, Derek, Another Life, 139–40; Doctrine, 334–5 van Eyck, Jan, The Crucifixion; The Last Judgement and Walcott, Derek, Doctor Faustus-Christopher Marlowe (IAM), 17, 18, 19 Van Gogh, Vincent, 4, 23, 110–13, 296, 361n L’Arlésienne, 112 The Church at Auvers, 2 Irises, 112 The Potato Eaters, 73 Self-Portrait with Mutilated Ear, 111 Self-Portrait with Pipe and Bandaged Ear, 111 Starry Night, 112–13; and Walcott, Derek, ‘A City’s Death by Fire’, 112 Sunflowers, 73, 112, 113 Wheatfield with Crows, 112 and Walcott, Derek, Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM) 112, 113, 192, 195, 365n; Epitaph for the Young, 111; O Starry Starry Night, 2, 293–4, 296; ‘Outside the Cathedral’ (IAM), 111; ‘Self-Portrait’, 111 van Ruysdael, 20, 21 The Jewish Cemetery, 4 Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez, de Silva y, The

Surrender of Breda, 406; and Walcott, Derek, The Prodigal, 33, 402, 404–8 Vermeer, Johannes, 15, 82–3 Girl with the Pearl Earring and Walcott, Derek, ‘The Light of the World’, 102, 134n The Milkmaid, 4, 35n Veronese, Paolo The Feast of Levi and Walcott, Derek, Tiepolo’s Hound, 307, 333 and Walcott, Derek, Tiepolo’s Hound, 15, 24–5, 308, 316, 337 Verrocchio, Andrea, The Baptism of Christ, 138–9 Walcott, Derek archival material see Index to Derek Walcott’s Archival Material (IAM) interviews/conversations with: Bragg, Melvyn, 45, 61, 67, 72, 91, 93, 111, 115–16, 118, 193; Brown, Robert and Johnson, Cheryl, 26, 141, 290, 400; Bruckner, D. J. R. 360; Burnett, Paula, 13, 275; Ciccarelli, Sharon L., 12, 312–13; Davis, Gregson, 129, 216, 235, 255, 259; The Dual Muse, 12, 14, 15, 56, 111, 307, 319, 373; Friedman, Donald (2007), 8, 9, 32, 72; Friedman, Donald (2021), 14; Fumagalli, Maria Cristina, 56, 357 and personal communications 25, 58, 67, 81, 82, 113, 266, 269, 277, 363n, 365n; Hall, Stuart, 275; Handley, George, 9, 14, 72, 307, 313, 318, 339; Hirsch, Edward, (1979), 79, 89, 114, 116, 122, 123, 124; Hirsch, Edward, (1986), 7, 16–17, 20, 42, 44, 52, 81, 82, 212, 390, 392; Loreto, Paola, 26, 29, 380; Maxwell, Glyn, 372; Mentus, Ric, 397; Mills, Therese, 208; Montenegro, David, 29, 57, 61, 62, 82; Pantin, Raoul, (July 1973), 157; Pantin, Raoul, (August 1973), 157, 228; Presson, Rebekah, 199; Price, Richard and Price, Sally, (2006) 215, 216, 217, 232, 371, 373, 395; Price, Richard and Price, Sally, (2007) 224; Questel, Victor, 2, 17, 160; Rowell, Charles, 40; Sajé, Natasha and Handley, George, 10, 380; Sampietro, Luigi, 265; Sjöberg, Leif, 71; White, J. P., 107, 241, 283

General Index    479 newspaper articles: 84, 88, 90, 117, 121, 136–7n, 158, 196, 198, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214, 215, 220, 267–8, 269 paintings: Anna, 135n; Baiting the Hook (or Setting the Bait in Island Light), 286n, 333; Beach at Vieux Fort, 333; Boats on St Lucia, 50; Boy on a Wall, Rat Island (or Man on the Wall under Palm Tree Looking Out at the Sea in The Dual Muse), 70, 335–6, 338, 367n; Braiding, 106; Breakers, Becune Point, 338, 339–40; Canoe under Trees, 331–2; The Chess Player, 135n; Cove at sunrise, 286n; The Death of Gauguin, 23; Doctrine, 334–5; Domino Players, 327–8, 337; English Garden, Stratford-on-Avon (and untitled related watercolour in The Dual Muse), 336, 367–8n; Gauguin in Martinique, 30, 107–10, 293, 297, 299, 302, 336, 337; Gauguin’s Studio, 108, 109, 297–8, 299, 302, 336, 337; Gros Islet Church I, 323–5, 324, 327, 328, 336, 337; Gros Islet Church II, 323, 325, 327, 328, 330, 336, 337; Headland in Drought, 328, 329–31, 330, 337–8, 360; The Holy Family, 253; Horses by the Sea, 337–8; Ideal Head – Helen/Omeros, 30, 106–7; Little Blue House in Gros Islet (with Peter Walcott), 73; Lunch on the Beach, 105; Musicians, 332–3, 337; Pasture, Dry Season, 328–9, 329, 331, 337–8; Portrait of Teshia, 133; Preparing the Net, 328–9, 331–2, 337; Priory at Gros Islet, 325–6, 328, 337; St Lucian Fishermen, 332–3, 337; St. Malo, 336; Savannah, Early Morning, 319–23, 324, 337; Savannah Gallop: Port of Spain, 337; Seascape of St Lucia, 34n; Self-Portrait, 339–40; Still Life – The Desk, 286n; The Swimmer, 333; Ti-Jean, 208–9, 209; Vendors at Choc Bay, St Lucia, 50–3, 51, 105; View of Stockholm, 286n; see also Clico Calendar, ‘Derek Walcott…His Poetry and his Paintings’ (IAM); Island Light: Watercolors and Oil Painting by Derek Walcott and Donald Hinkson; Project Helen plays: Dream on Monkey Mountain 40,

87, 157n, 226, 251–2; Drums and Colours (DC), 17, 31, 33, 88, 147, 157, 179, 198–207, 374–5, 384, 425; The Ghost Dance, 288n; Henri Christophe, 226; The Joker of Seville, 415–16; see also The Joker of Seville (IAM); The Last Carnival (LC), 2, 16, 27, 30, 145, 147, 148, 156–85, 186n, 219, 224, 256, 275, 291–2, 321, 365n, 383, 384, 425; see also In a Fine Castle, The Last Carnival, Un Voyage à Cythère (IAM); Malcochon, 213; Marie Laveau (ML), 23, 258–9, 290; see also Marie Laveau (IAM); Moon-Child, 2, 73, 209; The Odyssey: A Stage Version (TO), 16, 255, 256–8, 290; The Sea at Dauphin, 120, 125, 126–7, 137n, 194, 226; O Starry Starry Night (SSN), 2, 73, 135n, 293, 294, 296; Ti-Jean and His Brothers, 2, 87, 207, 219, 245n, 252; see also Ti-Jean and His Brothers (IAM); Walker (W), 2, 31, 224–42, 251–2, 253, 283, 284, 288n; see also Walker (IAM) poetry: 25 Poems (25P): ‘A City’s Death by Fire’, 4, 95, 112; ‘Call for Breakers and Builders’, 86; ‘Carnival for Two Voices’, 85; ‘Elegies’, 95; ‘The Fishermen Rowing Homeward …’, 114–15; ‘I With Legs Crossed Along The Daylight Watch’/’Prelude’, 54, 111, 114, 115–16; ‘In My Eighteenth Year’, 41; ‘Inspire Modesty by Means of Nightly Verses’, 85; ‘Letter to a Painter in England’, 61, 107, 113, 115; ‘A Letter to a Sailor’, 85; ‘The New Jerusalem’, 85; ‘Of Time and The River’, 85; ‘The Rusty Season Colours The Leaves’, 41; ‘Solo’, 91–3; ‘Travelogue’, 88–9; ‘The Yellow Cemetery’, 112–13 Another Life (AL): 1, 3–5, 6–14, 22, 26, 27, 28, 32, 34, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 53–4, 56, 59, 63–4, 68–9, 71, 74n, 80, 82–5, 87, 90, 93, 95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104–5, 107, 110–15, 117–18, 126, 128, 138–42, 178, 192–3, 196–7, 243n, 264, 293, 296, 298, 312, 318, 323, 327, 329, 334–5, 340–41, 343, 344, 365n, 372, 396, 417, 419, 432, 438n; see also Another Life notebooks 1 and 2 (IAM)

480    Derek Walcott’s Painters Walcott, Derek (cont.) The Arkansas Testament (AT), 15: ‘The Arkansas Testament’, 221; ‘Cul de Sac Valley’, 9, 129; ‘A Latin Primer’, 123; ‘The Light of the World’, 15, 30, 101–5, 341; ‘Roseau Valley’, 128–9; The Bounty (B), 303, 320; ‘The Bounty’, 4; ‘Homecoming’, 81 The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott & the Art of Romare Bearden (B&W), 3, 395–8, 400, 417; The Castaway and Other Poems (CA), 4: ‘The Castaway’, 419; ‘The Glory Trumpeter’, 221–2; ‘Laventille’, 365–6n; ‘A Map of Europe’, 4, 15, 174–5; ‘Statues’, 142 Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (EY), 43, 54, 85–6, 89, 95, 111, 114 The Fortunate Traveller (FT), 384, 390, 395, 397: ‘American Muse’, 33, 111, 384–5, 387–9, 392–4; ‘The Fortunate Traveller’ 384; ‘North and South’, 390, 394; ‘Piano Practice’, 384, 390; ‘A Sea-Change’, 397, ‘The Season of Phantasmal Peace’, 397; ‘Upstate’, 390, 391–4 In a Green Night (GN), 4, 114: ‘Choc Bay’, 4; ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ 253; ‘The Hurricane – After Hokusai’, 33, 213, 375–6; ‘A Letter from Brooklyn’, 41; ‘The Polish Rider’, 33, 142, 375, 376–80, 385; ‘Tales of the Island’ 125, The Gulf (G), 4, 396: ‘The Gulf’, 221; ‘Homecoming: Anse La Raye’ 264 Midsummer (M), 16–17, 20, 22, 23, 185, 291; ‘I’, 14; ‘III’, 20, 21, 322; ‘VIII’, 20, 21; ‘XVII’, 20, 21; ‘XIX Gauguin / i’ 23, 293, 294, 296; ‘XIX Gauguin / ii’, 23, 293; ‘XX Watteau’, 185, 291–2, 294; ‘XXIII’, 20, 21–2, 27 Morning, Paramin (MP), 3, 33–4, 408–41; ‘100 Years Ago (Carrera)’, 428–9; ‘Abstraction’, 420, ‘Baked’, 420; ‘Cave Boat Bird Painting’, 431–2; ‘Dedication to S. H.’, 414; ‘Figure in Mountain Landscape’, 422–3; ‘Girl in White with Trees’, 410; ‘Grande Riviere I’, 430–1; ‘Grande Riviere II The Phantom Steed’, 431; ‘Hitch-Hiker’, 412–13; ‘House of Pictures (Carrera)’, 429–30; ‘In the Arena’, 439–40; ‘In the Heart of Old San Juan’, 415–16;

‘Lapeyrouse Umbrella’, 420; ‘A Lion Is in the Streets I’, 424–5; ‘A Lion Is in the Streets III’, 421–2, 424; ‘A Lion Is in the Streets IV’, 438n; ‘Mal d’Estomac’, 417–8; ‘Man Dressed as Bat’, 426; ‘Metropolitain’, 423; ‘Metropolitain (House of Pictures)’, 430; ‘Milky Way’, 420; ‘Moruga’, 428; ‘Music of the Future’, 424; ‘Night Studio (Studiofilm & Racquet Club)’, 423; ‘Paragon’, 410–12; ‘Peter, I’m Glad You Asked Me Along’, 421–2; ‘Purple Jesus (Black Rainbow)’, 440–1; ‘Santa Cruz I’, 413–4, 418; ‘Ski Jacket’, 416–17; ‘The Studio Film Club I’, 436n; ‘The Studio Film Club II’, 436n; ‘The Studio Film Club III’, 436n; ‘The Tanker’, 418–19, 420, 422; ‘Untitled (Paramin)’, 427, 441; see also Doig, Peter and Walcott, Derek, Morning, Paramin Omeros (O), 15–16, 23–4, 27–8, 31, 43, 46–8, 70, 87, 106–7, 120, 127, 136n, 199, 206–7, 253, 255, 259, 262–4, 265, 270, 275, 276–84, 288–9n, 290, 311, 326, 332, 365n, 367n, 398–9, 428–9; see also Omeros (IAM) The Prodigal (P), 1, 14–15, 402–8, 423–4, 439 Sea Grapes (SG), 4: ‘The Bridge’, 4; ‘The Brother’, 248–9n; ‘Dark August’, 396; ‘The Lost Federation’, 89; ‘Sainte Lucie’, 122–6, 212 (‘I –The Villages’, 122–5, 337; ‘II’, 122–5;‘III – Iona: Mabouya Valley’, 125–6; ‘IV – Iona: Mabouya Valley, for Eric Branford’, 125–6; ‘V – ‘For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, St Lucia’, 126–8, 253, 380–3, 419–20, 433n); ‘Spring Street in ‘58’, 212–13; ‘Vigil in the Desert’, 4 Selected Poems (1964): ‘Origins’, 263–4 The Star-Apple Kingdom (SAK), 16, 217–18, 265, 276, 396–7: ‘The Schooner Flight’, 27, 111, 218–19, 276, 290, 403; ‘The Sea is History’, 111, 275–6, 280; ‘The Star Apple Kingdom’, 275–6, 282, 396 Tiepolo’s Hound (TH), 1, 2, 8, 14, 15, 24–5, 31–2, 42, 44–5, 46, 48, 54–5, 56, 65, 66–7, 68–70, 73, 80, 87, 141, 269, 277, 296, 302–40, 363–4n, 372, 380,

General Index    481 400–1, 417; first draft in Dual Muse, 56, 365n White Egrets (WE): ‘32’, 358; ‘Forty Acres’, 231; ‘White Egrets’, 32, 340–2, 344, 346–7, 349, 351–4, 356–60, 408, 419, 431 Occasional/uncollected poems: ‘1944’, 193–4; ‘Ballades Creole pour Harry Simmons par Derek Walcott’, 123; ‘George Campbell’, 118; ‘Royal Palms … an absence of ruins’, 61, 76n; ‘SelfPortrait’, 111; ‘To Romare Bearden’, 3, 260–2, 371, 373–4; ‘The Schooner Flight’ first draft in Chant of Saints, 217–18 Prose: ‘Animals, Elemental Tales, and the Theater’, 357; ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’ (A), 40, 53, 59, 63, 254, 296, 333, 337, 346, 358, 400, 419, 421, 422, 424; ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’ (CCM), 221–5, 317; ‘The Figure of Crusoe’ (FC), 84, 227; ‘Isla Incognita’, 38n, 57, 329, 329–31; ‘‘Islands in the Stream’, Hemingway, Winslow Homer, and the Light of the Caribbean’, 38n; ‘Jackie Hinkson’, 3, 29, 266–7, 269, 277; ‘Leaving School’ (LS), 6, 42, 44, 54, 58, 64–5, 75n, 84; ‘Letter to Chamoiseau’, 97, 297, ‘The Muse of History: An Essay’ (MH), 38n, 67, 123, 226, 253, 264; ‘Native Women under Sea-Almond Trees: Musings on Art, Life and the Island of St Lucia’ (NW), 50–2, 93, 106, 109, 268, 292–3, 297, 331, 337, 433n; ‘On Choosing Port of Spain’ (CPS), 145, 177, 183, 321; ‘On Hemingway’ (OH), 38n, 265–6, 269, 273, 275; ‘The Road Taken’, 222; ‘What the Twilight Says: An Overture’ (WTS), 10, 84, 85, 89, 145, 264; ‘Where I Live’, 27, 103, 275, 329–31, 366 and ekphrasis see ekphrasis Walcott, Alix, 41, 42, 43, 44, 73n, 111, 124 Walcott, Margaret, 145, 415, 416, 439 Walcott, Peter, 2, 71, 72, 73, 438n Almond Tree, 287n Central Library, Castries, 72 Derek Walcott at Work, 72; see cover image

Little Blue House in Gros Islet (with Derek Walcott), 73 Street Vendors, 134n Walcott, Roderick, 5, 41, 56, 66, 70, 71, 94, 142, 193, 194, 196 Walcott, Warwick, 5, 28–9, 41–8, 52–71, 73n, 75n, 79, 81, 93, 103, 111, 122, 123, 142, 267 The Coconut Walk, 56, 57–64, 60, 116, 335; and Walcott, Derek, Another Life, 56, 59, 63; ‘Leaving School’, 42, 56, 58; Tiepolo’s Hound draft in The Dual Muse, 30; see also Coconut Walk (Vigie, St Lucia); The Cocoanut Walk, postcard; Hobbema, Meindert, The Avenue Middelharnis The Fighting Temeraire and Walcott, Derek, Tiepolo’s Hound, 67, 68–9, 312 Riders of the Storm, 42, 56, 57, 65–7, 335; and Walcott, Derek, ‘Leaving School’ 42, 65; Tiepolo’s Hound, 65 and Millais, John Everett, The Blind Girl, 48, 79; see also Millais, John Everett and copies of Millet, Jean-François, The Gleaners and The Sower, 42, 46, 52, 53, 54, 56, 67, 79, 312; see also Millet, Jean-François and topography/topographers, 66, 79, 82; see also The English Topographical Draughtsmen and Walcott, Derek, ‘A Letter from Brooklyn’, 41; Another Life and Another Life notebook 1 (IAM), 42, 44, 45, 46; Boy on a Wall, Rat Island, 70, 336; ‘Call for Breakers and Builders’, 86; Epitaph for the Young, 43; ‘In My Eighteenth Year’, 41; ‘Leaving School’, 42, 44, 54, 58; Omeros, 43, 46, 48, 70; Tiepolo’s Hound, 45, 46, 54–5, 312 Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth, 71–2 Walcott-Hardy, Anna, 72 Walker, David, 31, 224–6, 229, 235, 239, 241, 242, 251 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, (WAP) 224–8, 232, 235, 236, 251 see also Walcott, Derek, Walker and Walker (IAW) Walker, Edward, 238; see also Walcott, Derek, Walker (IAW)

482    Derek Walcott’s Painters Warre-Cornish, F, ‘The Polish Rider (by Rembrandt)’, 378–9 Warren, Robert Penn, Audubon, A Vision, 350–1, 353, 356, 357 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 16, 20, 22, 30, 142–85, 188n, 189n, 191n, 291–4, 302 L’accordée du village (The Village Bride), 160–2, 161, 163–4; and Walcott, Derek In a Fine Castle (IAM), The Last Carnival and The Last Carnival (IAM), 160, 164 Bon Voyage, 146 Les Champs-Elysées, 167–9; and Walcott, Derek, In a Fine Castle (IAM), The Last Carnival and The Last Carnival (IAM), 167–9 Les charmes de la vie (The Music Party), 164, 166–7, 167–8, 165, 308; and Walcott, Derek, In a Fine Castle (IAM), The Last Carnival and The Last Carnival (IAM), Un Voyage a Cythere (IAM), 164, 166 Embarkation for the Island of Cythera see Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère Les fêtes vénitiennes (Venetian Entertainments) 153–5, 189n; and Walcott, Derek, Un Voyage a Cythere (IAM), 153 Gathering in the Park, 190n L’île de Cythère (The Island of Cythera), 146, 167 A Man Reclining and a Woman Seated on the Ground 159; and Walcott, Derek, In a Fine Castle (IAM), The Last Carnival and The Last Carnival (IAM), 159–60, 170 Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère, dit L’embarquement pour Cythère or L’embarquement pour l’île de Cythère, une fête galante) (1717), 2, 27, 143, 144, 145–7, 148–52, 159, 160, 162, 164–6, 169–70, 173–4, 176, 383;

L’embarquement pour l’île de Cythère (The Embarkation to the Island of Cythera) (1719), 146–7, 174, 291; and Walcott, Derek, In a Fine Castle (IAM), 30, 145, 147–8, 159, 164–6, 169, 383; The Last Carnival and The Last Carnival (IAM), 2, 30, 145, 147–8, 158–9, 164–6, 169–70, 173–4, 175–6, 181–4, 256, 383; Un Voyage a Cythere (IAM), 145, 147–52, 164–6, 383; ‘Watteau’, 291 Pierrot, formerly known as Gilles, 191n Les plaisirs du bal (The Pleasures of the Ball) and Walcott, Derek, In a Fine Castle (IAM), The Last Carnival and The Last Carnival (IAM), Un Voyage a Cythere (IAM), 166 Three Pilgrims 189n Two Studies of a Seated Woman, 159, 160, 170–2, 171, 189n; and Walcott, Derek, In a Fine Castle (IAM), 159–60, The Last Carnival and The Last Carnival (IAM), 170–2, 176 see also Walcott, Derek, In a Fine Castle (IAM), The Last Carnival and The Last Carnival (IAM), Un Voyage a Cythere (IAM) Watts, George Frederic, Hope and Walcott, Derek, ‘The Figure of Crusoe’, 227, 228 Welty, Eudora, ‘A Still Moment’, 354, 356 West Indian Federation, 30, 31, 56, 81, 88, 89, 96, 115, 143, 147, 198, 199, 201, 203, 206, 207 Whistler, James McNeill, Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge, 4, 35n Williams, William Carlos, In the American Grain and Walcott, Derek, Walker, 228–9 Woodruff, Hale, Amistad Mural, 211 Wyeth, Andrew, Christina’s World, 410

Index to Derek Walcott’s Archival Material

See also General Index UWI-AJL  Derek Walcott Collection, Alma Jordan Library, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad UWI-MJ  Derek Walcott Collection, The University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica TFRBL  Derek Walcott Papers, Trinidad Theatre Workshop Papers, and Stollmeyer Collection of Derek Walcott, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto After Pissarro, watercolour (22 December 1990), TFRBL: MsColl 00136, Box 64 (item 3), 365n American, without America (AWA), manuscript/typescript copies (1979c), UWI-AJL: Box 9 (folder 13) and/or TFRBL: MsColl00136, Box 1 (folders 2–6), 31, 38–9n, 65, 163–4, 182–3, 212–13, 221–3, 246n, 265–6, 275, 276–7, 375 Another Life manuscripts, handwritten notebook 1 (1965) and 2 (1965–6) UWI MJ: (ALms1), 15, 37n, 41–6, 52–3, 56–9, 64–5, 67, 69, 82, 83–4, 87, 89, 93, 96–7, 103, 113–15, 117, 118, 124, 129, 178, 192–4, 211, 221, 263; (ALms2), 37n, 42, 52–4, 59, 62, 65, 74n, 80, 83, 89, 91, 93–4, 103, 129–30n, 159, 193–4; see also Walcott, Derek, Poetry, Another Life Clico Calendar, ‘Derek Walcott…His Poetry and his Paintings’ (1994) UWI-AJL: Box 35 (folder 7), 1 Doctor Faustus-Christopher Marlowe (DF),

workbook (1970), UWI-AJL: Box 10 (folder 14), 17–19 In a Fine Castle, 16, 27, 30, 145, 147, 148, 157–62, 164–8, 170, 219, 308 UWI-AJL: draft typescript (1970c), Box 39 (folder 2), 165; drawings/ sketches (1963–71), Box 9 (folder 38), 157–8, 166, Box 10 (folder 6), 160; programme ‘dummy’ (1971), Box 10 (folder 6), 158; watercolours/drawings (1972–80), Box 33 (folder 5), 164, 165, 167, 168–9; TFRBL: draft programme for the Trinidad Theatre Workshop production, Mona, Jamaica (1970), MSColl 00503, Box 1 (folder 2), 158–9; handwritten notes, MsColl 00136, Box 62 (item 5), 168; sketch (1982)/ watercolours, MsColl 00136, Box 62 (item 3), 166, 170–2, 171, 191n see also Walcott, Derek, Plays, The Last Carnival ‘Influences’ (I), typescript (1980), UWI-AJL: Box 9 (folder 19), 268 The Joker of Seville, UWI-AJL: sketches (1973–82), Box 34 (folders 1–6), 415; see also Walcott, Derek, Plays, The Joker of Seville The Last Carnival, TFRBL: draft programme for the Swedish production (Sista Karnevalen) directed by Walcott, Stockholm (1992), MSColl 00503, Box 1 (folder 2) 158–9; draft typescript (1986), MsColl 00348, Box 5 (folders 1–4), 178–9, 184–5; drawings/sketches/ watercolours, MsColl 00136, Box 62 (item 3), 166, 170–2, 171, 191n, Box 62 (item 6), 293, Box 65 (folder 67, item 5), 168, Box 65 (folder 68, item 6),

484    Derek Walcott’s Painters The Last Carnival, TFRBL (cont.) 176, Box 64 (folder 55, item 21), 180; notebooks/handwritten notes, MsColl 00136, Box 62 (item 3), 185; Box 62 (item 4), 184, Box 62 (item 5), 168; word-processed text (copy 3), MsColl 00136, Box 23 (folder 19), 184–5; see also Walcott, Derek, Plays, The Last Carnival Marie Laveau, TFRBL: watercolours/ drawings, MsColl 00772, Box 1, 259; see also Walcott, Derek, Plays, Marie Laveau Omeros, TFRBL: screenplays/storyboards, MsColl 00136, Box 65 (folders 1–36), 74n, 106; watercolours, Box 64 (folder 13, items 1, 47), Box 64 (folder 18, item 29), 365n; sketch, Box 65 (folder 1–42), 255, 262; see also Walcott, Derek, Poetry, Omeros ‘Outside the Cathedral’ undated typescripts (OTC18;OTC21), TFRBL: MsColl00136, Box 2 (folders 18 and 21), 6, 7, 8–9, 11–12, 14, 32, 34, 36n, 74n, 79, 96, 98, 111, 113–14, 121, 124, 127, 128, 129, 130n, 192–5, 198, 253, 267, 294, 323 Sketch of a hand (1982–3), TFRBL: MsColl00136, Box 63 (item 1), 190n

Sketch of domino players, TFRBL: McColl 00136, Box 64 (item 5), 366n Ti-Jean and His Brothers, workbook (1970), UWI-AJL: Box 10 (folder 13), 208 Un voyage à Cythère (UVAC), typescript, (1957–80), UWI-AJL: Box 6 (folder 6), 30, 137n, 145, 147–50, 151–6, 158–9, 164, 166, 169, 175, 186n; see also Walcott, Derek, Plays, The Last Carnival Undated, unpublished, transcribed conversation between Walcott and Bearden, TFRBL: MsColl 00136, Box 2 (folder 6), 276, 417 Vangelo Nero, draft of filmscript (VN6.9) (1957–80), UWI-AJL: Box 6 (folder 9), 19–20, 127, 219, 252–3; handwritten ‘Proem’ (VN3.9) (1972–3), Box 3 (folder 9), 252–3; drawings (1957–80), Box 6 (folder 5), 252 Walker (Wms), undated draft typescripts, TFRBL: MsColl 00348, Box 27 (folder 12–14) and MsColl00136, Box 44 (items 18–22), 234, 239, 249n; research material MsColl00136, Box 44 (folders 1–3), 225; drawing/prayer (1991), Box 63 (item 2), 237, 251; see also Walcott, Derek, Plays, Walker