Blue Arabesque

by Patricia Hampl

  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 astonishing personal freedom. Take away the jewels and the garden fountains and the diamond-encrusted knives (though she, for one, would prefer to keep them), and you still had domestic independence of a sort Lady Mary could only envy. The harem, the women’s private quarters, provided not a caged life, but a silken chamber, something more akin to what Virginia Woolf two centuries later would memorably call “a room of one’s own.”

  AND WHAT OF the word itself? Odalisque. The definition in the OED, conjuring all the sex slave imagery of the West’s heated imaginings, turns out to be a fabricaton of that very imagining. The root, oda, is simply the Turkish word for “room”—you see it today in Anatolian towns, advertising B&Bs. It is the chambre libre and zimmer frei of low-cost tourist lodging.

  Predictably, the first appearance of the word oda in English, in 1625, came from a “Voyage writer,” as Lady Mary called
them. “They have Roomes,” Samuel Purchas writes in Pilgrims II of his observations in Turkey, “which the Turkes call Oda’s, but we may more properly (in regard of the use they are put unto) call them Schooles.”

  Out of this chaste schoolgirl beginning emerge the sultry beauties of Western art and Western dreaming. Yet, even as late as 1822 Byron still employs the word in Don Juan to mean a chamber or perhaps the aggregate of its inhabitants: “Upstarted all The Oda, in a general commotion.”

  By 1886, deep in Victoria’s reign, Richard Burton in his Arabian Nights (the OED’s final citation for oda) has nudged the word’s meaning firmly from the chamber to its occupants, though like Lady Mary’s bathing companions they lack wanton smiles and immodest gestures: “The women made ready the sweetmeats . . . and distributed them among all the Odahs of the Harem.”

  As for odalisque itself: according to the OED, the word is “corrupt.” Meaning (again the OED speaks) “destroyed in purity, debased; altered from the original or correct condition by ignorance, carelessness, additions, etc; vitiated by errors or alternations.” In this case, presumably, by wanton wishing: Samuel Purchas’s Turkish Schoole Roomes turn by degrees of English (and French) imaginings into bowers of sensuous bliss, furnished with silks and gleaming gold, lovely women scattered about like decorative pillows.

  The first appearance in English of the word odalisque shows up in 1681, in Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (itself worth noting: a dictionary interpreting the “hard words of whatsoever language, now used in our refined English tongue,” compiled by an ardent Roman Catholic whose impolitic religion kept him from his profession—the law—thus causing him to retire to his Worcestershire estate where he turned to amateur lexicography in an effort to while away his own no-doubt sequestered, overleisured days). Blount dispatches the mysterious odalisque in a bold stroke: “a Slave,” he says, and is done.

  The next sightings, over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even straying into the nineteenth, jockey back and forth between the slave definition (“A feast . . . In honor of fair Zoradone prepar’d, Where every odalisc the labour shar’d”—Sotheby’s translation of Wieland’s Oberon in 1798 where the servant girls, and not the love interest, are the odalisques) and the obverse, the unemployed kept-woman/concubine whose only job description is love sweet love (Byron’s “lovely Odalisques” of 1823 in Don Juan).

  The tussle between these two opposing odalisques resolves itself by 1874 when, in an atmospheric piece by A. O’Shaughnessy titled Music and Moonlight, the lounging woman illogically appears by being invisible: “An Odalisc, unseen, Splendidly couched on piled-up cushions green.” Though “unseen,” the voluptuary vanquishes the slave girl.

  Jump to 1903 and Shaw, in a letter to a mature actress, counsels, “What you want is a repertory of plays which you can carry on your own shoulders, and in which you cannot come into competition with the young odalisques of the west end.” Barely a dozen years later the apparently seductive illogic of the invisibility/presence of the harem girl emerges again, this time in Joyce. He remarks of a woman that “she leans back against the pillowed wall: odalisque-featured in the luxurious obscurity.” In yet another odalisque oxymoron echoing O’Shaughnessy’s and Joyce’s confusion (though in a different way), Arnold Bennett in Lord Raingo (1926) maintains that “withal she was no odalisque. She tried to improve herself, to make herself interesting to him”—as if making yourself “interesting” to a man weren’t at least part of the purpose of lounging about half-naked on pillowed divans in the first place.

  Finally, in the OED’s last sighting, in 1967, our girl, now fully modern, riles a contemporary art critic in the March 16 Listener who brings us back where we started—to the visual images that have, more successfully than language, defined the term: “Is the creation of a cubist odalisque ‘of consequence,’” this sour voice asks, employing the imperious quotation marks of critical irritation, “and the devoutly humble production of an ikon not?”

  IN 1932 MATISSE is sixty-two, living in Nice. His wife, Amélie, is a fretful invalid. Even without knowing the backstory, which was quite successfully kept in the biographical shadows until Hilary Spurling’s biographies in this century, the photographs of the period suggest tension: Matisse upright in his burgher’s suit; Mme Matisse with her strong face, the brow set, the mouth stern. Somehow, she has the goods on him. They have lived apart and together, en famille and at a distance, for years maintaining the union, refusing any of the public (or perhaps private) erotic antics of Picasso. Theirs is not a bohemian life.

  Mme Matisse has given long loyalty to the great man’s demanding enterprise; she is a woman who was courted with the warning she chose not to heed: “Mademoiselle, I love you dearly, but I shall always love painting more.” But this has been a marriage of many paintings, many models spread supine upon the studio’s patterned divan. She becomes an odalisque in her own way: a mysterious invalid, unable to do much, this capable woman who kept the family bravely together with her hat shop and her faith in her man during the long lean years before there was a whiff of success. The same woman who, some few years in the future, will rise to be a heroine again, working dangerously for the Resistance, arrested and imprisoned. But now during the interwar years—taken to her bed, requiring a companion.

  Into this tense matrimonial hothouse arrives Lydia Delectorskaya, still a girl, bearing her delectable name. She is hired to help scrape paintings, set up the studio—and attend to Mme Matisse. And then, “after several months or perhaps a year, Matisse’s grim and penetrating stare began focusing on me.”

  Lydia had come to Nice, a Russian émigré with no French, burdened with the legal problems that often beset refugees. She turned to modeling, before being hired by Matisse, because it didn’t require the usual work permits and language skills.

  But she had hoped never again to work as a model. The job with Matisse was an answer to her prayers. “From the time I had work as a companion on a steady basis,” she writes, “I wanted to think I was forever through with modeling, which I had found detestable. . . . Besides, there was this: I was not ‘his type.’” She was blonde, “very blonde,” whereas with the exception of his daughter Marguerite, “most of the models who had inspired him were southern types.”

  But the “grim and penetrating stare” had fixed on her. Soon Mme Matisse lost her girl, and Matisse found his. Lydia stayed with him (always “Mme Delectorskaya,” Matisse’s manners demanding this formality) until the end of his life, always his assistant, never his wife, his companion but not a mistress in the Picasso way. There may have been passion, but a celibate rectitude seemed to reign, a labor-intensive companionship where Lydia does the heavy lifting for the old, now-weakened Matisse, and he gives her pride of place in the creative process, the abstract lovemaking of art making.

  In any case, she came with nothing and years later, immediately after his death, Delectorskaya left with nothing—this was no gold digger. Upon Matisse’s death, she decamped with the valise she had kept packed. But during her long tenancy, Mme Matisse was outraged by her presence and driven to extremes. Mme Matisse finally stormed away from the Nice apartment. “No one who creates,” Matisse said cryptically acknowledging his wife’s right to feel betrayed, “is blameless.” Henri and Amélie Matisse never again met in person.

  Matisse felt his models were “never just ‘extras’ in an interior.” In fact, he said, “I depend absolutely on my model, whom I observe at liberty, and then I decide on the pose which best suits her nature. When I take a new model, it is from the unselfconscious attitudes she takes when she rests that I intuit the pose that will best suit her, and then I become the slave of that pose.” Strange bondage language. Stranger still, his cold discarding: ”I often keep those girls several years, until my interest is exhausted. My plastic signs probably express their souls (a word I dislike), which interests me subconsciously, but what else is there?”

  Lydia recognized that Matisse “needed the exaltation with which he responde
d to the sight and proximity of flowers, brightly colored materials, juicy fruit and the female body which he was going to attempt to sublimate.” His manner of working, from the model’s point of view, was in-your-face: “His easel almost on top of his subject, he generally painted seated within two meters of the latter as if to be immersed in its atmosphere.”

  On one occasion a visitor, M. A. Courturier, suggested that Matisse appeared to be “upset” as he approached the canvas. Matisse retorted, “I’m not upset, I’m scared.” The studio, according to Courturier, had “an operating room atmosphere, Lydia holding the instruments, a bottle of India ink, the papers, arranging the adjustable table. And Matisse: not a word, drawing, without the slightest sign of agitation, but in this immobility an extreme tension.”

  “This line of work which demands an air of self-confidence,” Lydia writes in her brief memoir essay that accompanies her book With Apparent Ease . . . Henri Matisse, “was true drudgery for me.” Her book, thanks to photographs Matisse gave her and comments he allowed her to record, documents the painting of herself as Large Reclining Nude, in 1935.

  Known more familiarly as The Pink Nude, it was purchased by the Baltimore collectors Claribel and Etta Cone, the maiden sisters who were arguably the greatest collectors of Matisse, preserving his long history along with several generations of collectors in Europe and America. The Pink Nude hangs in the Baltimore Museum of Art, and is Matisse’s culminating odalisque.

  It wasn’t the final lounging woman he ever painted. But in this sculptural figure, cast upon the simple lattice of a royal blue and white checked background, Matisse embodied the fullness he had looked for in the intricacy of Persian carpets, in the woven mysteries of silk and the spun patterns of cobweb lawn. All his “patterns,” the arabesques he saw as the fluid, living rhythm art captures on canvas are finally released into the female body.