Oyster

by Rebecca Stott

  At length some ashes fell with a tiny crash into the grate and awoke us from our reveries. This time it was Tom who extended his hand. ‘Come’ he cried. ‘Let us seal the bond of eternal friendship with an oyster carnival! Come!’8

  Sixty years later oysters were censored by Universal Studios from the famous bathroom scene between Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. Universal Studios felt that this scene, in which Crassus attempts to seduce Antonius by telling him that he likes both snails and oysters, was too sexually explicit. The scene was only restored in 1990.

  One of the most interesting uses of the oyster is in accounts of sexual rites of passage, in which a pubescent child passes through a sexual or sexually charged encounter, to become an adult. In a poem by Anne Sexton, for instance, called ‘Death of the Fathers, 1. Oysters’, published in The Book of Folly in 1972, the speaker records her metamorphosis from girl to woman in a restaurant in which her father watches her eat oysters:

  Oysters we ate,

  sweet blue babies,

  twelve eyes looked up at me,

  running with lemon and Tabasco.

  I was afraid to eat this father-food

  and Father laughed and drank down his martini,

  clear as tears.

  It was a soft medicine

  that came from the sea into my mouth,

  moist and plump.

  I swallowed.

  It went down like a large pudding.

  Then I ate one o’clock and two o’clock.

  Then I laughed and then we laughed

  and let me take note –

  there was a death,

  the death of childhood

  there at the Union Oyster House

  for I was fifteen

  and eating oysters

  and the child was defeated.

  The woman won.

  In Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain tells a similar story to that of Anne Sexton and to that of Hector Bolitho in The Glorious Oyster. He too performs this act of eating raw flesh in the sight of his parents as an act of defiance, a ‘death’: ‘Now, this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity – and in many ways, more fondly.’ Bourdain was staying in a tiny oyster village on the Bassin d’Arcachon in south-west France. When the local oyster fisherman took Bourdain’s American family out to see the oyster-beds, he asked if any of them would like to try an oyster:

  My parents hesitated. I doubt they’d realised they might actually have to eat one of the raw, slimy things we were currently floating over. My little brother recoiled in horror.

  Osias Beert the Elder, Still-life with Oysters, 1610, oil on copper.

  But I, in the proudest moment of my young life, stood up smartly, grinning with defiance, and volunteered to be the first.

  And in that unforgettably sweet moment in my personal history, that one moment still more alive for me than so many of the other ‘firsts’ that followed – first pussy, first joint, first day in high school, first published book, or any other thing – I attained glory . . . With a snubby, rust-covered knife [Monsieur Saint-Jour] popped the thing open and handed it to me, everyone watching now, my little brother shrinking away from this glistening, vaguely sexual-looking object, still dripping and nearly alive.

  I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back to my mouth as instructed by the now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour, and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of seawater . . . of brine and flesh… and somehow . . . of the future.

  Everything was different now. Everything.

  . . . I’d learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually – even in some small, precursive way, sexually – and there was no turning back. The genie was out of the bottle. My life as a cook and as a chef, had begun.

  Food had power.9

  Oysters when sexualized, in the hands of writers, photographers, artists and film-makers swing all ways. Oysters themselves swing all ways – male and female by turns, sexually fluid, hugely fertile. To humankind they have spoken – and continue to speak – of desire and unappeasable hunger and of flesh to be consumed. Do oysters enhance sexual prowess? Well, if they don’t do so chemically, they certainly do so by their age-old cultural associations with flesh, hunger and intimacy. Think of oysters, try not to think of sex.

  9 Pearl

  In Jan Vermeer’s haunting oil painting of 1665, Girl with a Pearl Earring, a beautiful young woman turns towards us, her wet mouth slightly open as if she has been hailed in the act of daydreaming or as if she is about to speak. For a moment time has stopped, yet the veil from her turban appears to be still moving in that unseen turn towards us, and the pearl suspended from her ear seems to sway still. Her gaze is unnerving, disturbingly intimate, but she looks at the same time vulnerable, poised and very young. The light catches her pearl earring, the whites of her eyes, the sheen of her skin and the glow of her white linen collar, all the more iridescent for the painting’s midnight-black background.

  Jan Vermeer loved pearls as Osias Beert loved oyster flesh, but though pearls are produced by oysters, they rarely appear together in Western art. Pearl earrings appear on women in seven of Vermeer’s other canvases all painted from the mid-1660s onwards, the same decade in which Beert was painting his oysters: Woman with a Pearl Necklace, Woman with a Lute, The Concert, A Lady Writing, Girl with a Red Hat, A Study of a Young Woman, Mistress and her Maid and Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid. For Beert and Vermeer the whites of wet oyster flesh, of mother-of-pearl and of pearls were never just ‘white’ – they provided a tonal range and a play of light never to be entirely caught or mastered. And the meanings of oysters and pearls were as multiple and illusive as their whitenesses. If the oyster spoke of both shell-embodied timelessness and fleshly transience, of vanity, desire and intimacy, the pearl too contained multitudes of meanings: it spoke of innocence and of vanity but, more than anything, it spoke of wealth. A year after Vermeer painted Girl with a Pearl Earring, the English diarist Samuel Pepys purchased a single pearl for £80, worth £7,500 today.1 Across the world, pearls were traded, fought over, treasured, painted, set in elaborate necklaces or in the velvet, silk and satin of dresses and shoes. Pearls made fortunes and lost others; they shaped the lines and trade routes of empires. By the time Vermeer painted this exquisite painting, scores of thousands of enslaved pearl-divers had been cruelly worked to their death in the pearl fisheries of the Spanish empire.

  Jan Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665, oil on canvas.

  A pearl in an oyster.

  Pearls for sale in China.

  The pearl is a miracle of evolutionary processes, for it is the only gem produced by a living animal. Long ago certain molluscs evolved a way of protecting their soft flesh from their rough shell by secreting nacre or mother-of-pearl as a perfectly smooth lining to their shells. A smaller group of molluscs then evolved a way of dealing with the tearing caused by grits of sand or the burrowings of parasitic worms – these too could be coated with white nacre. So the iridescent whiteness of pearls is formed deep in mollusc flesh by layered mother-of-pearl secretions – a mixture of calcium carbonate and an animal substance called conchiolin. The finest pearls come from a branch of the oyster family called Meleagrina margaritifera and take about three years to reach full size, layer upon nacreous layer. Pearls are then, in the words of M.F.K. Fisher, ‘gleaming “worm-coffins” . . . built in what may be pain around the bodies that have crept inside the shells’.2 And in the mid-nineteenth century another natural history writer mused: ‘It is a singular reflection that the gem so admired and coveted by man should be the product of disease in a helpless mollusk.’3

  Pearl oysters grow in a remarkable range of habitats. Freshwater species grow in the rivers and lakes of China, Great Britain, Europe and North America. Saltwater species grow on the shorelines of the Pacific islands, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Central America, the Gulf of Mexic
o and the Caribbean, among the islands of the English Channel and in the waters of the Arabian Sea. But although pearl oysters grow almost everywhere, they produce pearls under natural conditions only very rarely. In 1947, for example, only 21 pearls were found in 35,000 Persian Gulf oysters. Most are very small and are called seed pearls. Pearl fishing is thus very labour intensive.

  No two pearls are the same for each is made from the mother-of-pearl lining produced by a particular oyster in a particular place. Mother-of-pearl can be pink, rose, white, yellow, cream, golden, green, blue and black. The finest pink and cream coloured oysters are produced by a small pearl oyster called Margaritifera vulgaris native to the Persian Gulf. Large silver-white pearls called silver-lips are found in the northern waters of Australia. Black pearls come from the South Seas.

  The shape of the pearl, which also affects its price, depends on how it grows inside the shell. Pearls that grow without pressure assume a pear shape; those that grow within muscular tissue will assume an irregular shape; those that grow attached to the shell will grow into a half-sphere and be flattened on one side. These are called blister, mabe or button pearls. And pearls can be shaped too by human hand. Mary Fisher describes seeing pearl talismans on the markets of Soochow in China that had been made by the insertion of small moulded objects such as phalluses and Buddhas into pearl oysters.

  Pearl fishers from a manuscript of 1338, Marco Polo’s Les Livres du Graut Caam.

  As pearls appear in Indian culture very early, they were probably first discovered by the Dravidian fishermen of southern India when they were fishing for oysters. Pearl necklaces are described in the great Hindu religious poem, the Ramayana, written about 500 BC. When Marco Polo visited these coasts on his return voyage from China in 1293, he described a long-established and elaborate pearl fishing trade: ‘pearls are fished in great quantities, for thence come the pearls which are spread all over the world’.4 Phoenician traders from the eastern Mediterranean carried pearls back from India to ancient Greece. When the Romans conquered Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia, pearls became one of the most important gems in the Roman currency system. The pearl trade had begun and its story would be one of decimation, enslavement and exploitation as well as flamboyant sartorial beauty.

  PEARL ORIGINS

  The pearl oyster has kept its evolutionary secret for millions of years. Davidian, Persian, Bahrainian and Chinese fishermen may have had their own understandings of pearl formation, but the naturalists and mythologists of ancient India, Greece and Rome believed that pearls were formed when oysters rose to the surface of the sea, opened their valves to capture drops of rain or dew and then returned to the sea bed to transform dew into pearls. The ancient Chinese held that pearls were the tears of dragons, sharks or mermaids. In his Natural History completed in AD 77, Pliny the Elder wrote confidently that oysters,

  when stimulated by the generative season of the year gape open as it were and are filled with dewy pregnancy, and subsequently when heavy are delivered, and the off-spring of the shells are pearls that correspond to the quality of the dew received; if it was a pure inflow, their brilliance is conspicuous, but if it was turbid, the product becomes dirty in colour.5

  As a consequence of these myths, tears and lamentation have come to be entangled with the cultural meanings of pearls. When John Webster’s persecuted duchess, for instance, in The Duchess of Malfi (written 1612–13; published 1623) tells her husband Antonio about her strange dream, she says: ‘Methought I wore my coronet of state, And on a sudden all the diamonds Were chang’d to pearls’; Antonio replies: ‘My interpretation Is, you’ll weep shortly; for to me the pearls Do signify your tears.’ (Act III, scene V). The duchess’s pearl dream-tears are poignantly prophetic – she and her young children are imprisoned and then strangled only a few days later.

  This theory of the pearl’s dewy origin persisted until the eighteenth century, when scientists began to study the formation of pearls with the use of microscopes. In the eighteenth century the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus experimented with the artificial production of pearls by inserting foreign bodies into their shells. In a letter to the Swiss anatomist, Von Haller, dated 13 September 1748, he wrote: ‘At length I have ascertained the manner in which pearls originate and grow in shells; and in the course of five or six years I am able to produce, in my mother-of-pearl shell the size of one’s hand, a pearl as large as the seed of the common vetch.’6 By the nineteenth century most scientists had come to agree that pearls formed in response to the presence of an irritant, but the pearl’s cultural association with tears and dew-drops persisted. Sir Edward Arnold, English poet and translator of Sanskrit texts, for instance, wrote about pearls in the late nineteenth century as an emblem of stoicism:

  Know you, perchance how that poor formless wretch –

  The oyster – gems his shallow moonlit chalice?

  Where the shell irks him, or the sea-sand frets,

  He sheds this lovely lustre on his grief.

  But the pearl has also signified transformation from a lowly state to a holy one – the exquisite pearl formed within lowly oyster flesh. Early Christians used the pearl as a metaphor for the virgin birth of Christ or for the divine soul housed within the earthly body. As early as the thirteenth century a Persian poet, Sa’di, wrote in his Bustan (‘Fruit Garden’) an exquisite parable of transmigration:

  James Herbert Draper, A Water Baby, 1900, oil on canvas.

  A drop of water fell one day from a cloud into the sea. Ashamed and confounded on finding itself in such an immensity of water, it exclaimed, ‘What am I in comparison with this vast ocean? My existence is less than nothing in this boundless abyss.’ Whilst it thus discoursed of itself, a Pearl-Shell received it into his bosom, and fortune so favoured it, that it became a magnificent and precious pearl, worthy of adorning the diadem of kings. Thus was its humility the cause of its elevation, and by annihilating itself it merited exaltation.7

  In one of Shakespeare’s late plays of transformation and redemption a drowned king’s tears are turned into pearls: in The Tempest (1610–11), Ariel describes Ferdinand’s dead father in a song:

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  In 1839 the Christian poet and hymn writer James Montgomery joined both Sa’di and Shakespearean sources in a poem about the meeting of soul and body through Christ called ‘Transmigrations’:

  A hailstone, from the cloud set free,

  Shot, slanting coastward, o’er the sea,

  And thus, as eastern tales relate,

  Lamented its untimely fate:

  ‘Last moment born, condemned in this,

  The next absorbt in yon abyss;

  ’Twere better ne’re to know the light,

  Than see and perish at first sight.’

  An oyster heard, and, as it fell,

  Welcomed the outcast to her shell,

  Where, meekly suffering that ‘sea-change’

  It grew to ‘something rich and strange’,

  And thence became the brightest gem

  That decks the Sultan’s diadem,

  Turned from a particle of ice

  Into a pearl of priceless price

  Thus can the power that rules o’er all

  Exalt the humble by their fall.8

  So if the myths of pearl origins conjoin suffering and lamentation with great value, so too does the history of man’s use of pearls – a history of wealth made by one group of people through the exploitation and suffering of others.

  PEARLS AND EMPIRE

  Shakespeare’s famous lines from Troilus and Cressida (written c. 1602; first printed 1609) describe Helen of Troy as:

  . . . the pearl

  Whose price hath launched a thousand ships

  And turned crown’d kings to
merchants. (Act II, scene iii)

  Helen, like the pearl, Shakespeare implies, has a beauty that is dangerous in a world dominated by greed and the desire to possess. It is only to be gained at a high price and – at worst – with considerable loss of life, for Helen’s beauty, like that of the pearl, was traded, negotiated and fought over.

  Pearls have drawn the lines and borders of empires. Most of the great ancient civilizations were located near the richest pearl fisheries across Persia, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The Persian Gulf became one of the first trading centres for pearls in the first centuries BC, and, after its assimilation by Islam in the seventh century, the Persian court became one of the most opulent in the world. European tales and myths proliferated concerning the fabulous riches of the East. As trade routes developed outwards from the Persian Gulf, pearls were carried from East to West and, for Western poets, painters and writers became a potent symbol for the presumed mystery, wealth and beauty of the East.

  The Romans developed a passion for pearls as they had for oysters. Because they were rare and beautiful but also extremely costly, the Romans used pearls in jewellery as a visible marker of status and wealth, a show of conspicuous consumption. Seneca, the statesman, philosopher and dramatist, wrote disparagingly of the taste for pearl earrings in Rome: ‘Simply one for each ear? No! The lobes of our ladies have attained a special capacity for supporting a great number . . . they wear the value of an inheritance in each ear’.9

  According to Pliny, Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen who ruled from 51 to 30 BC, performed one of the most spectacular acts of conspicuous consumption in human history. In a dramatic and erotically charged meeting of East and West, she entertained the Roman senator Mark Antony with lavish banquets in order to impress on him the wealth and beauty of Egypt. At one of these she wagered with him that she could consume the wealth of a single country in one meal. Antony accepted the wager, but when he arrived for dinner the following evening he found that the banquet was no more sumptuous than usual. After dinner, Cleopatra removed a large pearl from one of her earrings, crushed it, stirred the powder into her wine and drank it. Pliny estimated the value of that single pearl to have been the equivalent of a million ounces of silver.