Blue Arabesque

A Search for the Sublime

Patricia Hampl

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780547350837
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

These meditations inspired by a Matisse painting are "a paean to the act of seeing, celebrating our capacity to be transformed by the truths art holds." — The New York Times Book Review Named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Nonfiction of the Year Just out of college, Patricia Hampl was mesmerized by a Matisse painting in the Art Institute of Chicago: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl, a Moroccan screen behind her. In Blue Arabesque, Hampl explores the allure of this lounging woman, immersed in leisure, so at odds with the rush of the modern era. Hampl's meditation takes us to the Cote d'Azur and to North Africa, from cloister to harem, pondering figures as diverse as Eugene Delacroix, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield. Returning always to Matisse's portraits of languid women, she discovers they were not decorative indulgences but something much more. Moving with the life force that Matisse sought in his work, Blue Arabesque is Hampl's dazzling and critically acclaimed tour de force.

FIVE

Les Bains Turcs

In 1683 the Turkish army of Mustafa the Black (also the Terrible—the Europeans piled on the scary adjectives) surged west, threatening the easternmost imperial capital of Christendom on September 12 at the Battle of Vienna. The successful European repulsion of the invaders is directly credited to Georg Franz Kolschitzky, a Turkish-speaking Pole (or Armenian—the sources vary) working for a trader in oriental wares, who made his way through enemy lines to give Charles of Lorraine (or King Sobiesky—more scholarly dispute) the intelligence he needed to outwit the rampaging armies of the Ottoman Empire.

In their flight, the retreating Turks left behind five hundred sacks of “dry black fodder”—coffee. With the award (or theft?) of this war bounty, Kolschitzky opened Vienna’s first coffeehouse, Zur Blauen Flasche, the Blue Bottle.

So goes the tale, the moral being that the Turks, by means of this dark elixir, conquered the Europeans after all, initiating the Continent into the comforts of the coffeehouse and layabout society. A stealth victory for the oriental pleasure culture and its ideology of leisure.

Beyond coffee drinking, the epitome of the pleasure culture, East or West, is embodied in the time-wasting luxury of the bath. The Romans had considered the baths essential to their otium cum dignitate, the dignified leisure, the absence from business activity, at the root of their conception of a civilized society. The Central European lands of early modern times carried forward this theme with their own medicinal variation—the spa. The most renowned spa, Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) in Bohemia, was founded in 1350 near warm mineral springs by Charles IV, the Holy Roman Emperor. During the eighteenth century it became the spa of choice for the European elite, most famously Goethe and Peter the Great. J. S. Bach took the waters there, as did Casanova and Schiller, Gogol and Liszt.

But the European spa was not le bain turc. It was hygienic and improving, a genteel retreat of several weeks combining a course of treatment with edifying cultural events (concerts, lectures), everyone dressed to the nines. It was not an Ingres painting, not a vision of soporific pleasure. In fact, the spa culture catered to dispirit and the narcissism of self-improvement. It was useful to possess a complaint—a poor liver was ideal—to indulge in this AWOL behavior.

What le bain turc and the spa had in common was not sensuality (the East) or hygiene (the West), but a dream of ease, a brush with the Golden Age: days passed amid the leisurely contemplation of passing details, drawing a lazy finger across the surface of scented water in a warm pool of peachy marble, reaching for a sugared date, gazing at white birds warbling in a silver cage, watching, like the thoughtful subject of Woman Before an Aquarium in Chicago, fish glinting in a bowl. In fact, the idea was to become something of a fish oneself, floating in a watery social medium, free of the usual associations, the routine social circle.

But the Turkish bath embodied the Golden Age ideal with a splendor and indulgence that the uptight grandeur of the Central European spas could not allow themselves to imagine. And the baths represented a golden age of female society, the sweets and gossip of sorority girls lolling about, dishing about lipstick and boys.

No wonder that arch journal-keeper Anaïs Nin, ardent would-be sensualist and self-imaginer, made her way to Morocco in the thirties and “fell in love with Fez,” taking tea with rock sugar and accepting from her hosts little almond cakes covered with a silk handkerchief set on a copper tray, noting as she walked in the market streets “an Arab asleep over his bag of saffron, another praying with his beads while selling herbs.” She had found, she thought, a world of perfect indulgence and unbroken leisure.

She was invited here, invited there, visiting the lovely shadowy homes of elegant people for whom “it is a mortal insult . . . to seem hurried.” The whole nature of relations between people “does not depend so much on conversation or exchange as in the creation of a propitious, dreamy, meditative, contemplative atmosphere, a mood.” She was invited to a harem. “Seven wives of various ages but all of them fat,” she records, “sat around a low table eating candy and dates. We discussed nail polish.” Intelligence Delacroix and Matisse could not have been expected to tease out of the corners of the harem.

Eventually, Nin followed a group of women to the baths. She went by way of “complex streets. Anonymous walls. Secret luxury.” Before she even got there she was living in fiction, the dream of her imagining. She joined the women in disrobing without a murmur. They, however, took forever to emerge from their many skirts and several blouses “which looked like bandages . . . so much white muslin linen, cotton to unroll, unfold and fold again on the bench.”

In the steam room, all the women sat on the floor, filling pails of water from fountains, pouring the water over their heads, soaping themselves, steam filling the room. Nin, tiny as a dancer and proud of it, was agog at the sheer bulk of these women. “All of them were enormous,” she writes. “The flesh billowed, curved, folded in tremendous heavy waves. They seemed to be sitting on pillows of flesh of all colors from the pale Northern Arab skin to the African.” As the water they sat in darkened with filth and the debris from the depilatories they used, she could not bring herself to wash her face with the soap they handed her, which had scrubbed their feet, their armpits.

She wanted “to see the Arab women clothed again, concealed in yards of white cotton.” She wanted to see their faces but not their bodies: “Such beautiful heads had risen out of these mountains of flesh, heads of incredible perfection, dazzling eyes, heavily fringed, sensual features. . . . But these heads rose from formless masses of flesh, heaving like plants in the sea, swelling, swaying, falling, the breasts like sea anemones, floating, the stomachs of perpetually pregnant women, the legs like pillows, the backs like cushions, the hips with furrows like a mattress.”

The Moroccan women were equally dismayed by her meager body: “They asked was I adolescent. I had no fat on me. I must be a girl.” In this assessment another misapprehension emerges, this time on the part of the East looking at the West: The thin, slight woman must be a girl. She is the adolescent goddess, the eternal ingenue. The fountain of youth turns out not to be a gushing elixir but its opposite—the willingness to take in nothing, to starve and eliminate, to attenuate. No Turkish delight on this menu.

Extreme thinness—anorexia and its various cousins—possesses a purely lyric power, flexing the paradoxical might of innocence (“I had no fat on me. I must be a girl”). Because what is weak (what is thin) can do no wrong, can enforce no demand, it must be blameless. It can be a victim (more weakness), but it cannot be a perpetrator (no strength). With only a negligible body, it remains pure spirit. Being spirit, it can believe itself harmless—as flesh and body can never claim to be. It is a virgin. Because these sylphs tend to be women, the identity they project is that of the ingenue. Inviolate—but intriguing, tantalizing.

As Thackeray remarks about his wild-thing heroine in Vanity Fair, “When attacked sometimes, Becky had a knack of adopting a demure ingénue air, under which she was most dangerous.” Fat is frank. It has indulged itself. It cannot deny the body and its sins. And what is more treacherous than a person, lean and hungry, who believes herself to be without fault, without the capacity to wound?

The journal-writing voyeur, vain of her wand-thin body and her soulfulness, gazes at the goddesses of leisure, of indulgence. And reports on the shameful fat of living, the dirt, the debris.

DELACROIX HAD EXPERIENCED an “exaltation” that even “sherbets and fruits could barely appease” in 1832 when he was allowed to pass through a door, along “a dark corridor” to sketch, in the spirit of stealth, a harem in Algiers. Flaubert, on the other hand, traveled to Egypt with his randy pal Maxime Du Camp in 1849 on a trip that combined mosque sightings with sex tourism. They managed to gain access to exoticism mainly by frequenting Cairo prostitutes. “Tomorrow we are to have a party on the river,” he wrote to a friend at home, “with several whores dancing to the sound of darabukehs and castanets, their hair spangled with gold piastres.”

This tendency toward the exotic was even stronger, it seemed, than his lust: “Oh, how willingly I would give up all the women in the world to possess the mummy of Cleopatra,” he had written as a Byron-besotted youth, burning for the shimmering East.

During his 1849 trip, on December 1, a Saturday night at ten o’clock (he meticulously notes all this), Flaubert writes to his best friend Louis Bouilhet of his sexual high jinks in Cairo. He and Du Camp (later a writer of travel books) had gone to a brothel, a place “dilapidated and open to all the winds and lit by a night-light.” They could see a palm tree through the windowless window. The Turkish women wore silk robes embroidered with gold. The usual set design, the requisite exotic costumes. It was, he wrote, “a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.”

Then the report: “I performed on a mat that a family of cats had to be shooed off—a strange coitus, looking at each other without being able to exchange a word, and the exchange of looks is all the deeper for the curiosity and the surprise. My brain was too stimulated for me to enjoy it much otherwise. These shaved cunts make a strange effect—the flesh is hard as bronze.”

Next morning, December 2, it’s time to write Maman: “Here we are in Cairo, my darling, where we shall probably stay the entire month of December, until the return of the pilgrims from Mecca.” And so on and so forth, finally offering an Eagle Scout’s inventory of “what I wear these days . . . flannel body-belt, flannel shirt, flannel drawers, thick trousers, warm vest, thick neck-cloth, with an overcoat besides morning and evening.”

A day later, in his private travel notes, the cool sex tourist and the good mama’s boy disappear. The eye steadies, the voice speaks modestly from the echoing chamber of pure description: “The Nile is dotted with white sails; the two large sails, crossed like a fichu, make the boat look like a flying swallow with two immense wings. The sky is completely blue, hawks wheel about us; below, far down, men are small, moving noiselessly. The liquid light seems to penetrate the surface of things and enter into them.”

He has ceased to be a braggart and a smooth talker. He says only what he sees: he has become a painter, washed clean of attitude, of pose, taking his notes, making a pure sketch.

FOR ALL THE FEVERED efforts of traveling artists and writers, the only people who could hope to gain extended access to the forbidden domain of the harem, that tabernacle of perfume and spice, were women. For an eyewitness account of harem life, generations of male English and French travelers or would-be travelers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relied principally on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s dispatches from a journey through the Ottoman Empire, which she undertook when her husband was sent as ambassador to Constantinople. They arrived in 1717 for what was supposed to be a lengthy posting to the Sublime Porte.

Wortley proved to be a dismal failure as a diplomat and was recalled after fifteen months. But it was time enough for Lady Mary to take her notes. Her Embassy Letters were published in 1763, the year after her death, though they were known to a select circle during her lifetime, as Anaïs Nin’s diary was famous long before its sensational publishing success in the 1970s.

The recipients of Lady Mary’s Letters included some of the literary lights of the age, including Alexander Pope who, as a hunchback, betrayed the touching hope to Lady Mary that the taste for the exotic in the Orient might confirm the rumor that cultivated women of the Levant “best like the Ugliest fellows, as the most admirable productions of nature, and look upon Deformities as the Signatures of divine Favour.”

A century after Lady Mary’s travels, stay-at-home exoticist Ingres counted on a brief passage about her visit to a bathhouse to provide the imagery for his famous Le Bain Turc. “There were 200 women,” Lady Mary wrote of her visit to the bath. “The sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets, on which sat the ladies, all being in a state of nudity . . . yet there was not a wanton smile or immodest gesture among them.” The essential elements of the pleasure culture were there—evident leisure, ample flesh, lavish stage set. Ingres faithfully painted the words.

For all her delight in gleefully dressing up in Turkish costume, enjoying the anonymity and privacy of a veiled face (and perhaps glad of the chance to cover her disfiguring smallpox scars), Lady Mary’s view of the harem was exactly the opposite of those of the men who either never saw it (Ingres); who beheld it only briefly—perhaps as a tableau expressly arranged to meet a Western visitor’s expectations (Delacroix); or whose exotic couplings were purchased retail (Flaubert).

Not only was there no “wanton smile or immodest gesture” in the massed odalisques Lady Mary observed at the bath, the harem bondage motif was absent as well. There was a tendency for Western male visitors, artists and writers both, to conflate the bath and the harem, the nudity presumed in the bath slopping over, so to speak, into the luxurious living quarters where the women are shown or described as supine and nude or semiclothed upon divans, as if reclining in a warm tub.

Alexander Pope had teased Lady Mary before her departure, saying he expected her to abandon herself “to extreme Effeminancy, Laziness, and Lewdness of Life.” “Laziness” being the dirty word for leisure and “Lewdness” being the natural twin of either. Turkey, he reminded her with a wink, was known as “the Land of Jealousy, where the unhappy Women converse with none but Eunuchs, and where the very Cucumbers are brought to them Cutt.” A man’s world, in other words, the women displayed like chocolates in a satin box.

That’s not what Lady Mary found. When she arrived dressed in her traveling costume at the hammam, the elite public bath, she was finally persuaded by the gracious entreaties of “the lady that seemed the most considerable among them” to disrobe and join the relaxed atmosphere of the bath. She at last opened her blouse and the women saw with dismay her corset. They now understood her hesitation to disrobe and met it with grave compassion: “they believed I was so locked up in that machine, that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband.”

The reclining odalisque had finally caught a glimpse of the vertical European lady. And what the relaxed Turkish harem dweller saw as she gazed at the corseted European was what the Western observer saw looking at the harem: a bird in a cage, a fish in a bowl. Prisoners “tied up . . . in little boxes of the shape of their bodies” as Lady Mary’s Turkish hostess exclaimed, horrified by the corset, which finally revealed the secret of the Western woman’s ramrod carriage.

From this moment at the bath Lady Mary, according to her biographer Robert Halsband, “began to develop the paradox of Turkish women’s liberty and English women’s slavery.” She loved to go out veiled, free to move about, observing the marketplace and the town from beneath the little roofed room of her silk garments. This, paradoxically, was liberty.

The cloister of the harem, as far as Lady Mary could tell, was a free space for women, a private environment ruled by women’s taste, devoted to women’s ways, where no husband or father or brother could interfere. When Lady Mary dined with the Sultana in 1718 she was served “a dinner of fifty dishes of meat” amid magnificence. “The knives were of gold, the hafts set with diamonds but the piece of luxury that gripped my eyes was the tablecloth and napkins, which were all tiffany, embroidered with silks and gold, in the finest manner, in natural flowers.”

The Sultana herself was dressed in dazzling garments, weighted with jewels of which “no European queen has half the quantity.” The room where Lady Mary was led was large, “with a sofa the whole length of it, adorned with white pillars . . . covered with pale-blue figured velvet on a silver ground, with cushions of the same, where I was desired to repose till the Sultana appeared.”

Lady Mary came to admire Islam as well. After a long theological talk with Achmet Bey, a learned effendi who was her tutor in the ways of his country, she was delighted to reassure her correspondents at home that enlightened Turks, like educated Christians, “put superstition and revelation into their theology only to win the credence of the ignorant; and the Alcoran [Koran] itself contained only the purest morality.”

In fact, Lady Mary airily reported to her at-home correspondents, Islam was best understood as a kind of deism—the very way her Enlightenment soul had settled the vexing religious hash of her own Christian tradition with its embarrassing revelatory nonsense. “I explained to him the difference between the religion of England and Rome,” she says briskly, “and he was pleased to hear there were Christians that did not worship images, or adore the Virgin Mary.”

The wonder of Turkish life was that, on the one hand, it was exotic and on the other . . . it wasn’t. Harem life offered a woman not servitude and imprisonment, but opulence and ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Cell
• Window
• Divan
• Camera Obscura
• Les Bains Turcs
• Balcony
• Chapel
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• About the Author