The Books: “The Matisse Stories” – ‘Art Work’ (A.S. Byatt)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

The next book on the shelf is another short story collection by AS Byatt, and this one is called The Matisse Stories. “Art Work” is the second story in this collection – and it’s a weird experience reading it. I felt it dragged in the beginning – it was a SURFACE, a highly detailed surface – and I kind of got lost in all of the descriptions of things, which sometimes went on for pages. But it worked on me in a subliminal way, because at the end – when the revelation comes – I literally gasped out loud. I am sure that Byatt, in all her talent, did this deliberately – it didn’t quite work for me – but the story itself, taken as a whole, packs a huge punch. I could see this being a successful film. It has all the elements.

Debbie and Robin are a married couple and they have a couple of young kids. Debbie used to be an artist – her favorite thing to make was woodcuts … but she gave that up (and it grieves her, haunts her – the art she used to make) in order to be practical and make money. She works for a women’s magazine, writing copy for photo shoots about kitchen redecorating. She struggles to find the perfect word for the color of that linoleum, etc. There is something horrible in this for her, yet she does it anyway. Because of her husband – Robin. Who really IS an artist, and works all day long upstairs in his attic studio, tormented, weird, obsessive, paranoid. She sacrificed her work for his. Their life is insanely busy – and Robin is a difficult man – so keeping a housekeeper and nanny has not been easy. But Debbie finally found one who works – a Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown is the grease in the wheels – without her, the whole house of cards would come down. She is flexible, easygoing, and she understands the family dynamic. Debbie lives in terror that Mrs. Brown will one day quit – over some tirade of Robin’s … she cannot imagine what she would do without Mrs. Brown. It’s almost like the servant is the head of the family. But Mrs. Brown is a humble unprepossessing individual – except for her clothes – which are colorful mismatched castoffs, so she always looks quite bizarre. A blaze of color, oranges and pinks and greens. Mrs. Brown ends up being extremely important to the story. GREAT character.

Here’s an excerpt.

Excerpt from The Matisse Stories. “Art Work”

Left to himself, Robin Dennison walks agitated up and down his studio. He is over forty. He thinks, I am over forty. He prevents himself, all the time now, from seeing his enterprise, his work, his life, as absurd. He is not suited to the artistic life, in most ways. By upbringing and temperament, he should have been a solicitor or an accountant, he should have worn a suit and fished for trout and played cricket. He has no great self-confidence, no braggadocio, no real or absolute disposition to the sort of self-centred isolation he practises. He does it out of a stubborn faithfulness to a vision he had, a long time ago now, a vision which has never expanded or diminished or taken its teeth out of him. He was given a set of gouache paints by an aunt when he was a boy, and painted a geranium, and then a fish-tank. He can still remember the illicit, it seemed to him, burst out of sensuous delight with which he saw the wet carmine trail of his first flick of the brush, the slow circling of the wet hairs in a cobalt pool, the dashes of yellow ochre and orange, as he conjured up, on matt white, wet and sinuous fish-tails and fins. He was not much good at anything else, which muted any familial conflict over his choice of future. With his brushes in his hand he could see, he told himself, through art school. Without them, he was grey fog in a world of grey fog. He painted small bright things in large expanses of grey and buff and beige. Everyone said, ‘He’s got something,’ or more dubiously, ‘He’s got something.’ Probably not enough, they qualified this, silently to themselves, but Robin heard them well enough, for all that.

He could talk to Debbie. Debbie knew about his vision of colour, he had told her, and she had listened. He talked to her agitatedly at night about Matisse, about the paradoxical way in which the pure sensuousness of Luxe, calme et volupte could be a religious experience of the nature of things. Not softness, he said to Debbie, power, calm power.

Debbie said yes, she understood, and they went to the South of France for a holiday, to be in the strong light, la-bas. This was a disaster. He tried putting great washes of strong colour on the canvas, a la Matisse, a la Van Gogh, and it came out watery and feeble and absurd, there was nothing he could do. His only successful picture of that time was a kind of red beetle or bug and a large shining green-black scarab and a sulphurous butterfly on a seat of pebbles, grey and pinkish and sandy and buff and white and terracotta, you can imagine the kind of thing, it is everywhere in all countries, a variegated expanse of muted pebbles. Extending to all the four corners of the world of the canvas, a stony desert, with a dead leaf or two, and some random straws, and the baleful insects. He sold that one to a gallery and had hopes, but heard no more, his career did not take off, and they never went back to the strong light, they take their holdiays in the Cotswolds.

Robin has ritualised his life dangerously, but this is not, as he thinks it is, entirely because of his precarious vocation. His father, a Borough Surveyor, behaved in much the same way, particularly with regard to his distinction between his own untouchable ‘things’ and other people’s, especially the cleaning-lady’s ‘filth’. Mr. Dennison, Mr. Rodney Dennison, used to shout at and about the ‘charwoman’ if pipe-dottle was thrown away, or soap-fragments amalgamated, or scattered bills tidily gathered. He, like Robin with Mrs. Brown, used to feel a kind of panic of constriction, like the pain of sinus-fluid thickening in the skull-pockets, when threatened by tidy touches. He, like Robin, used to see Mrs. Briggs’ progress like a snail-trail across his private spaces. Robin puts it all down to Art. He does not ask himself if his hatred of Mrs. Brown is a deflected resentment of his helplessness in the capable hands of his wife, breadwinner and life-manager. He knows it is not so: Debbie is beautiful and clean and represents order. Mrs. Brown is chaotic and wild to olok at and a secret smoker and represents – even while dispersing or re-distributing it – ‘filth’.