Oyster

by Rebecca Stott

  Buttons made from mother-of-pearl, 1940s.

  The Revd Williams then describes how women engravers impress the shapes of rings, stars, foxes, fishes and greyhounds, for instance, on to the pearl buttons and drill either two or four holes in each. The shell dust is then swept up and used for manure on the open fields. Williams meditates on this transformation from oyster-shell to button to shell manure:

  Nature is full of astounding metamorphosis, and assuredly that may be classed among them, when some particles of the little house of a mollusk on the shore of the Indian ocean, after being sown in one of the fields of England, reappear in the loaf of the cottager or the confectionary of a noble.17

  Later in the 1890s a Japanese entrepreneur called Kokichi Mikimoto, known as the Pearl King, discovered how to mass-produce cultured pearls by injecting particles of matter into young oysters; within a few decades his pearls dominated the world cultured-pearl market as well as bringing about a transformation in the market for pearls. If until the nineteenth century strings of pearls and velvet clothes sewn with seed oysters had marked out the conspicuous consumption of the very rich, these developments in the production of cheap pearl buttons or cultured pearls made ironic imitation of extreme wealth newly possible.

  One case of such use of pearls to reverse centuries-old class-specific fashions was established by London costermongers in the 1870s and ’80s, decades in which trade union and workers’ associations were making a substantial public presence for themselves in the streets of London in noisy and placarded marches and demonstrations. Working-class agitation for increased labour rights depended to some extent on the creation and ‘performance’ of mass working-class labour identity. In 1875 a municipal road-sweeper called Henry Croft began to collect the pearl buttons that had fallen to the market floor from the clothes of costermongers (market traders), stitching each by hand onto his own clothing until every inch of cloth had been covered. Dressed in this suit in order to draw attention to himself and to establish his connection with the co-operative and mutually supportive networks of the costermongers, he collected money for hospitals, orphanages and workhouses in the slums of London. When the costermongers joined him, each of these also put together their own suits sown in part or completely with pearl buttons, some weighing as much as 30 kilos. Soon 28 pearly ‘families’ had been established, one for each of the London boroughs, one for the City of Westminster, and one for the City of London. Each of these families has a Pearly Queen and King decked out on ceremonial occasions with suits sown with unique arrangements of pearl buttons.

  London ‘Pearlies’. Pearl buttons are sewn in elaborate patterns on the clothing of Pearly Kings and Queens, a tradition established in the late 19th century.

  Pearly children, East End of London, 1950s.

  As a marker of status, then, the pearl has been used in varied ways to mark out status and wealth. But as humans have found ways to imitate the rare natural pearls that in the fifteenth century were the motivation for so much destruction of indigenous peoples and natural resources, so artificial pearls and pearl buttons have come to be used in artful ways to challenge such cultures of conspicuous consumption.

  And what of Vermeer’s mysterious young woman in the turban? Where might she have acquired the pearl earring that Vermeer captures as an exquisite series of colours, highlights and obscure shadows? Since a pearl this size would have been worth many times the price of the market value of any of Vermeer’s paintings, it is unlikely that the painter would have passed the pair of earrings to his model as one of a series of stage props he stored in his studio. Did he borrow it? Which of Vermeer’s patrons might have trusted him with a pair of earrings – or even a single earring – of such value? Was this a real pearl at all? Did Vermeer, or his model, buy one of the artificial pearls invented by a Parisian rosary-maker called M. Jacquin in Paris around this time, perhaps at a market stall in Delft? In his glass-making studio Jacquin’s assistants blew tiny tear drops of glass that he filled with l’essence d’orient, a preparation made of white wax and the silvery scales of a river fish called ablette. But might not Vermeer have found this pearl simply in his imagination, conjured from the range of whites arrayed on his palette and inspired by desire to make his own essence d’orient in the wide eyes, turbaned head and open-mouthed mystery of the unknown girl?

  Spanish children wearing pearls. Alonso Sanchez Coello, The Princesses Isobel Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaela, 1571, oil on canvas.

  Epilogue: Tonguing Oysters

  For me oysters come accompanied by memory-shards of Grand Central Station in New York, where I ate oysters with my teenage son in the very early hours of an April morning, on arriving in a city whitened by a late spring snowstorm. From the taxi window, through the snow, Grand Central glowed like a stage set. Sitting on high stools at the subterranean brick-vaulted bar studded with fairy lights, we ordered Pacific oysters from a blue-painted board, oysters that had been shunted in by train from all over America with names that conjured maps and fragments of half-forgotten American history: Asharoken, Bluepoint, Buzzard Bay, Chincoteague, Fire Island, Matinecock, Mohegan, Moonstone, Westcott Bay. We played at putting oyster tastes into words as food writers do: ‘briny, notes of mineral, grass and fruit . . . notes of citrus with a touch of metal . . . like licking a copper pipe’.

  I began this book by claiming that the oyster’s relationship to man is one of seemingly simultaneous intimacy and distance and that oysters are always frustratingly beyond words: both on the tongue and beyond the power of the tongue. Appropriately, the word ‘tonguing’ is used to describe what dredgers do with the tonguing tool, scraping oysters from the sea-bed as writers scrape words from memory. Oysters have been the food of the writer as well as the bohemian. Ernest Hemingway, for instance, wrote about the emptiness finishing a story made him feel, a sadness (‘as though I had made love’) that only oysters could appease: ‘As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.’1 A cartoon drawn in the 1970s shows a sleepless writer mocked by his teenage daughter as he struggles to put oysters into words through a long night.

  Oysters on ice in Grand Central Station New York.

  Oysters on the menu at the oyster bar at Grand Central Station in New York, April 2003.

  Given the thousands of lines that oysters and pearls have inspired in writers, several poets have used oysters as a way of writing about the struggle with language itself – the problem of ‘tonguing’ oysters. The finest of all such poems is by Seamus Heaney and called, of course, simply ‘Oysters’:

  Claire Bretecher, ‘Nitty Gritty’, a cartoon from Agrippina (London, 1991).

  Our shells clacked on the plates.

  My tongue was a filling estuary,

  My palate hung with starlight:

  As I tasted the salty Pleiades

  Orion dipped his foot into the water.

  Alive and violated

  They lay on their beds of ice:

  Bivalves: the split bulb

  And philandering sigh of the ocean.

  Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

  We had driven to that coast through flowers and limestone

  And there we were, toasting friendship,

  Laying down a perfect memory

  In the cool of thatch and crockery.

  Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,

  The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:

  I saw damp panniers disgorge

  The frond-lipped, brine-strung

  Glut of privilege

  An American oyster farmer with a tonguing tool, used to scrape oysters from the sea-bed.

  And I was angry that my trust could not repose

  In the clear light, like poetry or fr
eedom

  Leaning in from the sea. I ate the day

  Deliberately, that its tang

  Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.2

  In post-war France, Francis Ponge (1899–1988) published Le partipris des choses (Siding with Things), a collection of prose poems on ordinary overlooked objects including cigarettes, oranges, nails, bread, each bearing simple descriptive titles such as ‘The Pleasures of the Door’, ‘The Mollusc’, ‘The Candle’, ‘The Crate’, ‘The Shrimp’, ‘Notes Towards a Shellfish’ and ‘Seashores’. The existentialist writer Albert Camus, who served with Ponge in the trenches in the First World War, called these prose poems ‘an unformulated theory of absurdism’ and Jean-Paul Sartre described them as an unconscious ‘phenomenology’. Here is Ponge’s phenomenology of the oyster:

  The oyster is about as large as a medium-sized pebble, but rougher looking and less uniform in colour, brilliantly whitish. An obstinately closed world, which, however, can be opened: grasp it in the hollow of a dishcloth, use a chipped, not too sharp knife, then give it a few tries. Prying fingers cut themselves on it, and break their nails: crude work. Blows mark its envelope with white circles, sorts of halos. Inside, a whole world, both food and drink: under a firmament (strictly speaking) of mother-of-pearl, the heavens above sinking onto the heavens below form a mere puddle, a viscous, greenish sack fringed with blackish lace that ebbs and flows in your eyes and nostrils. Sometimes, though rarely, a formula purls from its nacreous throat, which is immediately used as a personal ornament.3

  Most of Ponge’s prose poems for his Siding with Things collection were written between 1932 and 1937, when he was working in a clerical job he called ‘the penal colony’ and overwhelmed by the inertia of the words used around him. He claimed he conceived a desire to reinvent language by a return to things, initiated by ‘a mute supplication, mute demands’ of the things themselves. Ponge’s ‘The oyster’, like the Dutch genre paintings of the seventeenth century, appears at first glance to be simply an attempt to capture the appearance of oysters, but – also like the Dutch paintings – these words are loaded with innuendo and creative elisions and conflicts between words and metaphors which make the oyster both a creature of the vast and measureless heavens (‘firmament’; ‘upper and lower heavens’; ‘halos’; ‘a whole world’) and a creature of low slime (‘mere puddle’; ‘greenish sack’). And there is violence here too – the cut fingers, broken nails and hammer blows.

  In this ‘siding with things’ Ponge captures something of the borderline creature which man has made of the oyster. Over the centuries since its entry into human language the oyster has accrued multiple meanings, many of them straddling the border between seeming opposites. The oyster has spoken to man of both heavens and slime, of open and closed, of sea and land, of the microscopic and the telescopic; and in its most precious pearl, it has enshrined something of the most spectacular histories of human beauty and violence. In its resistance to language and its fascinating, closed-off yet longed-for difference, the oyster has provoked poets to produce exquisite new tonguings – frond-lipped, and brine-strung – in order to draw it into words.

  References

  PROLOGUE

  1 Hector Bolitho, The Glorious Oyster (London and New York, 1929), p. 4.

  1 OYSTER BIOGRAPHIES

  1 G. G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New York, 1949), p. 192.

  2 C. M. Yonge, Oysters (London, 1960), p. 8.

  3 See Zdenek, V. Spinar, Life Before Man (London, 1972), pp. 13–32.

  4 Revd Charles Williams, Silver-Shell; or, The Adventures of an Oyster (London, 1856), p. 63.

  5 M.F.K. Fisher, Consider the Oyster (New York, 1951), p. 4.

  6 These objects were described and illustrated in the Illustrated London News, 11 August 1855.

  7 Yonge, Oysters, p. 10.

  8 Fisher, Consider the Oyster, p. 5.

  9 Oyster sex-changes were not fully documented until 1927, when the biologist J. H. Orton conducted research, published in 1936 as ‘Observations and Experiments in Sex-Change in the European Oyster (O. edulis), Memoires du Musée Royale d’Histoire Naturelle de Belgique, series 2, 3, pp. 997–1056.

  10 Fisher, Consider the Oyster, p. 7

  2 OYSTER CULTURE

  1 Nicky Milner, ‘Oysters, Cockles and Kitchen Middens: Changing Practices in the Mesolithic / Neolithic Transition’, in Consuming Passions and Patterns of Consumption, ed. Preston Miracle and Nicky Milner (Cambridge, 2002) pp. 87–96.

  2 Michael P. Richards, Paul B. Pettitt, Mary C. Stiner and Erik Trinkaus, ‘Stable Isotope Evidence for Increasing Dietary Breadth in the European Mid-Upper Paleolithic’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, [[AQ: OK?] XCVIII/11 (22 May 2001), pp. 6528–32.

  3 M. L. Wilson, ‘Shell Middens and “Strandlopers”’, Sagittarius, IV/1 (2001), pp. 1–6.

  4 Cited in Hector Bolitho, The Glorious Oyster (London and New York, 1929), p. 17.

  5 Cited in Bolitho, Glorious Oyster, p. 19.

  6 Bolitho, Glorious Oyster, p. 20.

  7 Bolitho, Glorious Oyster, p. 24.

  8 Bolitho, Glorious Oyster, p. 26.

  9 Cited in Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer (London, 1965), p. 41.

  10 See Robert Nield, The English, the French and the Oyster (London, 1995), p. 90.

  11 Anon., Lucullus; or, Palatable Essays (London, 1878), vol. I, p. 14.

  12 Richard Pinney, Smoked Salmon and Oysters: A Feast of Suffolk Memories (Orford, 1984), p. 47.

  13 Pinney, Smoked Salmon and Oysters, p. 53.

  14 David G. Gordon, Nancy E. Blanton and Terry Y. Nosho, Heaven on the Half Shell: The Story of the NorthWest’s Love Affair with the Oyster (Washington, DC, 2001), pp. 85–7.

  15 Pinney, Smoked Salmon and Oysters, p. 87.

  3 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE OYSTER

  1 Martial, Epigrams, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, vol. I, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1993), vol. III, p. 60. This translation comes from a website on Roman poetry: http://www.svtc.org.uk/LatinOnline/sc3/unit3/poetry1.htm

  2 Cited in David Gordon, Nancy Blanton and Terry Nosho, Heaven on the Half Shell: The Story of the Northwest’s Love Affair with the Oyster (Washington, DC, and Portland, or, 2001), p. 17.

  3 Cited in J. R. Philpotts, Oysters and All about Them (London, 1890), p. 59.

  4 Piero Camporesi, Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. Christopher Woodall (London, 1994), p. 36.

  5 Camporesi, Exotic Brew, pp. 38–9.

  6 Camporesi, Exotic Brew, p. 39.

  7 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1851), p. 62.

  8 John J. McCusker, ‘Comparing the Purchasing Power of Money in Great Britain from 1284 to any other Year including the Present’, Economic History Services, (2001), URL: http://www.eh.net/hmit/ppowerbp/

  9 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, p. 65.

  10 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, p. 78.

  11 Cited in Joseph J. Cook, The Changeable World of the Oyster (New York, 1974), p. 48.

  12 Cook, Changeable World of the Oyster, p. 48.

  13 James Cook, Captain Cook’s Journal during his First Voyage around the World, chapter 8. Online e-text: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/c77j/chapter8.html

  14 The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Humphrey House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, 1974), vol. III, p. 244.

  15 D. Cannadine ‘Civic Ritual and the Colchester Oyster Feast’, Past & Present, XCV (1982), pp. 107–30.

  16 Gurney Benham, Colchester Oyster Feast (Colchester, 1902), p. 14.

  17 Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer (London, 1965), p. 178.

  18 George Augustus Sala, Twice around the Clock; or, The Hours of the Day and Night in London (London, 1859), p. 319.

  19 Sala, Twice around the Clock, p. 327.

  20 Robert Nield, The English, the French and the Oyster (London, 995), p. 151.

  21 Michael Peppiatt, Fr
ancis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (New York, 1996), p. 47.

  4 OYSTERS AND GLUTTONY

  1 Norman B. Spector, trans., The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine (Chicago, 1999), p. 54.

  2 Samuel Bowden, Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1754), pp. 8–9.

  3 The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Humphrey House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, 1974), vol. III, pp. 291–2.

  4 Punch, 11 January 1868.

  5 J. R. Philpotts, Oysters and All about Them (London, 1890), pp. 781–2.

  6 Geoffrey Pike, John Cann and Roger Lambert, Oysters and Dredgermen (London, 1992), p. 14.

  7 See Rebecca Stott, Darwin and the Barnacle (London, 2003), chapters 2 and 3.

  8 Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Oyster Fisheries (6 April 1876), p. 114: Mr F. Pennell.

  9 I am indebted to the scrupulous research of Matthew Demakos, who has explored the origins of and sources for ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ in an unpublished text called The Annotated Walrus.

  10 Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice (London, 1970), p. 237.

  5 OYSTER FLESH

  1 A. Fishe Shelly Esq. [James Watson Gerard], Ostrea; or, The Loves of the Oysters (New York, 1857), p. 17.

  2 Guillaume Figuier, The Ocean World (London, 1868), p. 379.

  3 See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (New York and London, 1986), and William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York, 1979).

  4 Translated into English in 1603.

  5 Robert Boyle, ‘Reflection III: Upon the Eating of Oysters’, in Occasional Reflections, vol. V of The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis (London, 1999), pp. 169–72.

  6 Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford, 1781), p. 311.