Islands in The Stream

By Paul Gray

A minor curiosity of art history: Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), a leading French Impressionist painter, friend and mentor to Cezanne and Gauguin, was born and raised on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. An item of literary history: Derek Walcott (1930- ), who would grow up to win the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born and raised on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia.

What these two isolated facts have to do with each other is made resplendently luminous in Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 164 pages; $30), a long narrative poem with a number of stories on its mind. One is what Walcott modestly calls his "inexact and blurred biography" of the painter Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors were driven out of Portugal, who chose to practice his art in Europe rather than the raw island paradise of his birth. A parallel account involves Walcott: his boyhood fascination with the reproductions of European masterpieces he found in books, his vision, during a later visit to a Manhattan museum, of an "epiphanic detail," a "slash of pink on the inner thigh/of a white hound" in a painting by Paolo Veronese.

This detail initially strikes Walcott as a mystical confirmation of the transcendent powers of art, its superiority to the transiency of life. How frustrating, then, that as he grows older, the poet cannot again find the white wolfhound where he was sure he saw it in Veronese (or maybe Giambattista Tiepolo). How puzzling that his imagination keeps calling up a picture of a black mongrel scavenging along the wharf of a Caribbean harbor town.

Tiepolo's Hound, in other words, is not a novel disguised as verse, with straightforward plot lines and a handy denouement. Its mood is ruminative rather than expository. Its progress is circular, a slow eddy of recurring images and motifs. At the center lie questions about culture and history and race and art that are not answered--no single answers could satisfy such questions--but set in rhythmical equilibrium.

For example, Walcott portrays Pissarro's choice--to abandon St. Thomas for France and high European culture--in different ways. At one point the poet gives his blessing: "There was no treachery if he turned his back/on the sun that plunges fissures in the fronds/of the feathery immortelles, on a dirt track/with a horse cart for an equestrian bronze." But later Walcott wonders whether Pissarro's Impressionist renderings of French scenery did not involve treachery after all: "Are all the paintings then falsifications/of his real origins, was his island betrayed?/Instead of linden walks and railway stations,/ our palms and windmills? Think what he would have made/(but how could he, what color was his Muse,/and what was there to paint except black skins?)."

At one eerie moment Walcott imagines himself actually being sketched, a century or so earlier, by Pissarro: "I felt a line enclose my lineaments/and those of other shapes around me too." The poet sees himself, under Pissarro's watchful eye, "keeping my position as a model does/a young slave mixed and newly manumitted." How, Walcott muses, can he be so swayed by the art of Veronese and Tiepolo when people of his color appear in it, if at all, only on the margins, as servants or attendants, Moors holding the leashes of white wolfhounds?

Walcott's tone throughout these meditations is contemplative rather than aggrieved. Unlike Pissarro, he cannot claim Europe as a birthright: "Our native grace/is still a backward bending, out of fashion/in theatres and galleries; an island race/damned to the provincialities of passion." Yet the poet's eloquent evocations of island beauties undercut such assertions: "The rain walked across the harbour, then, leisurely,/up to the warehouse door; it almost smothered/the sting of cod, of coffee sacks. The sea/disappeared, nails drummed the tin roof of the shed/and the gutters steamed."

There are many such intense, aesthetic moments in Tiepolo's Hound; for all its high seriousness, the poem is overwhelmingly joyful, a celebration of both art and nature. This festive mood is aided by the inclusion of 26 of Walcott's bright, colorful artworks, mostly watercolors, of island scenes. "My pen replaced a brush," he writes, recalling the time he changed his youthful ambitions from painting to poetry. A loss? Readers can only be grateful for the choice he made.