Blue Arabesque

by Patricia Hampl

  Like all true memoirists, Hill is drawn more to shards than to stories, images rather than narrative. He notes his recollection of first sounds (chimes of a clock: “the fact that it told time only interested me much later”), early sensations of light. His first “moving picture,” re-created in Film Portrait, is a series of drawings on the corners of pages of the dictionary that could be flipped to show the Titanic going down. An innate fascination with illusion, magic tricks, and mystery pervades all his games. “Where,” he asks, “do children’s games lead?”

  The question draws him to an early memory of napping on a chaise longue in his mother’s room, the very room, I felt certain, where I had sat with the poetry-writing Mother Superior with the good pearls. Hill’s memory is presented in Film Portrait in a sequence of water-colors he painted directly on the negatives, as if he couldn’t keep his hands off the film. In these drawings, a boy is put to bed near a window by a woman in a long Edwardian gown. The figures are manipulated slowly, like stately paper dolls: the child lies in bed and the woman tenderly (if rather stiffly, given the purposely crude animation) draws a coverlet up to his chin.

  The paper-doll mother pulls down the window’s dark outer shade and then an inner white shade. Outside, the sound of horses’ hooves can be heard—the sounds of a dying era, pre-movie-era sounds. (Hill paints bright jumping animated cars in front of the photograph of the mansion with its horse-drawn carriage pulled up to the porte cochere.) The boy is drawn to a hole (“like an eye”) in the shade. Pulling the inner shade closer, away from the darker outer shade, the child discovers the principle of camera obscura, his Empire Builder grandfather’s castle appearing suddenly tiny and complete, upside down on the “screen” of the shade. A profound intimacy radiates from this sequence. Children’s games lead, it seems, directly to the adult imagination and in a Möbius strip of relation loops back to the family from which he has sprung.

  In a fortunate coincidence of wealth and hobby, Hill’s father was a camera buff. Very early he became a movie buff, too. Films were brought to the house for private showings—to avoid the “microbes” of the public movie house. The reels of these early emulsion films could not be rented; they had to be bought. “What a privilege,” Hill says, “to learn pieces of film by heart, as if they were music.” The humble reverence of his voice is a reminder of how far in the cultural past 1971 is: his is the world before Blockbuster Video, before the VCR and DVD player.

  Hill includes in Film Portrait some very early clips by Georges Méliès and other early filmmakers. He includes, as well, snippets of professional-quality home movies, shot by a Pathé cameraman who “frequently came to film us kids.” And there they are, young people on horses at the North Oaks Farm, the Pathé cameraman displaying his revolutionary technique, the traveling shot. It was an advance in filmmaking that appeared in the Hill home movies before most people saw it in feature films in a movie house.

  This display of family moments has a homely charm, everyone mugging for the camera, tumbling around in a Buster Keatonish way. And then, disrupting the high jinks, the voice again: “These people to whom I belonged curiously did not belong to me,” Hill says—as usual with an easy neutrality. “Of everything they did so well, I was incapable.” It is not clear what they did “so well”—ride horses? Anyway, he goes on to make his point: “I was living a life apart.” It is one of the film’s rare personal revelations.

  The film’s only extended narrative sequence concerns a trip the Hill family took across his grandfather’s rails into Indian country. The trip was a diplomatic mission of sorts to the Blackfoot Indians, to gain access across their lands. The voice remains detached, capable of remorseless statement: The railroad—his family—had “no scruples about moving in and disrupting the lives of these people,” he says. The voice is degrees cooler than the rest of his urbane narration.

  As for himself, a boy of twelve, he absorbed “the beauty of this aboriginal world.” He learned the complicated Blackfoot sign language and played games with the children. At the end of the summer he was accepted into the tribe by an ancient blind woman. “I had become a Blackfoot,” he says. “At last I had a name I didn’t share with anyone else. Here ends my childhood.”

  And here ends the self-as-camera part of the film, the deep immersion in the mysterious sources of perception that belong to childhood. He leaps over key developmental teenage years without incident or remark, arriving at adulthood from childhood as if by parachute. From then on, the memoir belongs to the movie camera and follows more closely his observation and involvement in its technical coming-of-age. For by the time he is twenty-three, he, the conscious artist—not his hobbyist father and not the hired Pathé cameramen—holds the movie camera.

  In his film autobiography Jerome Hill uses his seaside villa at Cassis and his early experimental films from the thirties (if some of his sillier stuff—a whole short film, for example, with everybody doing everything backward—can be weighed down by the term “experimental”) to return to the idea of the birth of film as an art. As it happens (or maybe it is no coincidence, but a fact integral to Hill’s attachment to Cassis), the very first strip of film ever shown to a paying public (in 1895) was of a train arriving at the La Ciotat platform, the nearest station to Cassis, a film shot by the Lumière brothers.

  That first film clip shows a roaring train engine—the perfect image to speak to the grandson of the Empire Builder. The train approaches the antique figures on the platform, coming right at us in the audience. It must have been an electrifying experience to sit in the black box of a hired hall in 1895 and see that engine charging at you. Hill tucks this historic Lumière train clip into Film Portrait more than once. Then he ends his autobiography with his own contemporary homage shot of the same scene, in color, a sleek new train rolling in on the same platform, at the same angle, though the woman waiting at the side wears a short skirt and does not hold a parasol.

  Why, I wondered, as I sat watching the movie again recently at a library archive in St. Paul, is this man so moving to me—a man who does not display himself, who prefers the gracious surface to the frank revelation, a man—all right—who is finally if not a dilettante, an amateur. A man hidden behind the scrim of his easeful life and obscured identity. Is it because of his essential shyness in the face of the personal genre he has chosen? Because he can’t tell all or even indicate much about himself? And does this reticence convey a greater, more enduring human truth than disclosure ever can?

  Beyond the joy and glory of color that he shared with Matisse, who also had gravitated to the blue coast, Jerome Hill perhaps shared as well Matisse’s belief in “the deep gravity that persists in every human being”: The acknowledgment of privacy, of the unknowable world that beats like a pulse behind the blue fretwork screen that Matisse lugged back from Morocco and used in so many of his harem paintings and in the painting in the Chicago Art Institute that first captivated me. Jerome Hill remains elusive, even as he presents his life in the fragmentary images of his movie memoir.

  Every person’s life, we say, is a story. In fact, when a life becomes story, a person knows he has “a life.” The narrative instinct sorts, orders, represses, highlights, finessing its way to a certain contour—not to “reality,” and certainly not to “the truth,” but to shapeliness. To represent the whole of reality is beyond the capacity of art, even outside its desire. In fact, the inability to limit the flow of reality into the mind is one definition of madness.

  Once entered, the house of memory claims power even over the alchemist, that identity Hill chose for himself in the final frames of his movie. In the end, the magic man with all the tricks up his sleeve is no match for time’s imperial transformations and memory’s botched bookkeeping.

  In Film Portrait Jerome Hill holds up the brightly colored bits of his life and work to the southern sun, along that paradisal strip of seaside France that lured so many others before and after him. There, from the darkened room of the camera, he stalked the light of th
e past that he must have believed held the truth of himself, though he knew that truth to be inexpressible, lost after all in the northern shadows his family had claimed and that he had fled.

  FIVE

  Les Bains Turcs

  In 1683 the Turkish army of Mustafa the Black (also the Terrible—the Europeans piled on the scary adjectives) surged west, threatening the easternmost imperial capital of Christendom on September 12 at the Battle of Vienna. The successful European repulsion of the invaders is directly credited to Georg Franz Kolschitzky, a Turkish-speaking Pole (or Armenian—the sources vary) working for a trader in oriental wares, who made his way through enemy lines to give Charles of Lorraine (or King Sobiesky—more scholarly dispute) the intelligence he needed to outwit the rampaging armies of the Ottoman Empire.

  In their flight, the retreating Turks left behind five hundred sacks of “dry black fodder”—coffee. With the award (or theft?) of this war bounty, Kolschitzky opened Vienna’s first coffeehouse, Zur Blauen Flasche, the Blue Bottle.

  So goes the tale, the moral being that the Turks, by means of this dark elixir, conquered the Europeans after all, initiating the Continent into the comforts of the coffeehouse and layabout society. A stealth victory for the oriental pleasure culture and its ideology of leisure.

  Beyond coffee drinking, the epitome of the pleasure culture, East or West, is embodied in the time-wasting luxury of the bath. The Romans had considered the baths essential to their otium cum dignitate, the dignified leisure, the absence from business activity, at the root of their conception of a civilized society. The Central European lands of early modern times carried forward this theme with their own medicinal variation—the spa. The most renowned spa, Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) in Bohemia, was founded in 1350 near warm mineral springs by Charles IV, the Holy Roman Emperor. During the eighteenth century it became the spa of choice for the European elite, most famously Goethe and Peter the Great. J. S. Bach took the waters there, as did Casanova and Schiller, Gogol and Liszt.

  But the European spa was not le bain turc. It was hygienic and improving, a genteel retreat of several weeks combining a course of treatment with edifying cultural events (concerts, lectures), everyone dressed to the nines. It was not an Ingres painting, not a vision of soporific pleasure. In fact, the spa culture catered to dispirit and the narcissism of self-improvement. It was useful to possess a complaint—a poor liver was ideal—to indulge in this AWOL behavior.

  What le bain turc and the spa had in common was not sensuality (the East) or hygiene (the West), but a dream of ease, a brush with the Golden Age: days passed amid the leisurely contemplation of passing details, drawing a lazy finger across the surface of scented water in a warm pool of peachy marble, reaching for a sugared date, gazing at white birds warbling in a silver cage, watching, like the thoughtful subject of Woman Before an Aquarium in Chicago, fish glinting in a bowl. In fact, the idea was to become something of a fish oneself, floating in a watery social medium, free of the usual associations, the routine social circle.

  But the Turkish bath embodied the Golden Age ideal with a splendor and indulgence that the uptight grandeur of the Central European spas could not allow themselves to imagine. And the baths represented a golden age of female society, the sweets and gossip of sorority girls lolling about, dishing about lipstick and boys.

  No wonder that arch journal-keeper Anaïs Nin, ardent would-be sensualist and self-imaginer, made her way to Morocco in the thirties and “fell in love with Fez,” taking tea with rock sugar and accepting from her hosts little almond cakes covered with a silk handkerchief set on a copper tray, noting as she walked in the market streets “an Arab asleep over his bag of saffron, another praying with his beads while selling herbs.” She had found, she thought, a world of perfect indulgence and unbroken leisure.

  She was invited here, invited there, visiting the lovely shadowy homes of elegant people for whom “it is a mortal insult . . . to seem hurried.” The whole nature of relations between people “does not depend so much on conversation or exchange as in the creation of a propitious, dreamy, meditative, contemplative atmosphere, a mood.” She was invited to a harem. “Seven wives of various ages but all of them fat,” she records, “sat around a low table eating candy and dates. We discussed nail polish.” Intelligence Delacroix and Matisse could not have been expected to tease out of the corners of the harem.

  Eventually, Nin followed a group of women to the baths. She went by way of “complex streets. Anonymous walls. Secret luxury.” Before she even got there she was living in fiction, the dream of her imagining. She joined the women in disrobing without a murmur. They, however, took forever to emerge from their many skirts and several blouses “which looked like bandages . . . so much white muslin linen, cotton to unroll, unfold and fold again on the bench.”

  In the steam room, all the women sat on the floor, filling pails of water from fountains, pouring the water over their heads, soaping themselves, steam filling the room. Nin, tiny as a dancer and proud of it, was agog at the sheer bulk of these women. “All of them were enormous,” she writes. “The flesh billowed, curved, folded in tremendous heavy waves. They seemed to be sitting on pillows of flesh of all colors from the pale Northern Arab skin to the African.” As the water they sat in darkened with filth and the debris from the depilatories they used, she could not bring herself to wash her face with the soap they handed her, which had scrubbed their feet, their armpits.

  She wanted “to see the Arab women clothed again, concealed in yards of white cotton.” She wanted to see their faces but not their bodies: “Such beautiful heads had risen out of these mountains of flesh, heads of incredible perfection, dazzling eyes, heavily fringed, sensual features. . . . But these heads rose from formless masses of flesh, heaving like plants in the sea, swelling, swaying, falling, the breasts like sea anemones, floating, the stomachs of perpetually pregnant women, the legs like pillows, the backs like cushions, the hips with furrows like a mattress.”

  The Moroccan women were equally dismayed by her meager body: “They asked was I adolescent. I had no fat on me. I must be a girl.” In this assessment another misapprehension emerges, this time on the part of the East looking at the West: The thin, slight woman must be a girl. She is the adolescent goddess, the eternal ingenue. The fountain of youth turns out not to be a gushing elixir but its opposite—the willingness to take in nothing, to starve and eliminate, to attenuate. No Turkish delight on this menu.

  Extreme thinness—anorexia and its various cousins—possesses a purely lyric power, flexing the paradoxical might of innocence (“I had no fat on me. I must be a girl”). Because what is weak (what is thin) can do no wrong, can enforce no demand, it must be blameless. It can be a victim (more weakness), but it cannot be a perpetrator (no strength). With only a negligible body, it remains pure spirit. Being spirit, it can believe itself harmless—as flesh and body can never claim to be. It is a virgin. Because these sylphs tend to be women, the identity they project is that of the ingenue. Inviolate—but intriguing, tantalizing.

  As Thackeray remarks about his wild-thing heroine in Vanity Fair, “When attacked sometimes, Becky had a knack of adopting a demure ingénue air, under which she was most dangerous.” Fat is frank. It has indulged itself. It cannot deny the body and its sins. And what is more treacherous than a person, lean and hungry, who believes herself to be without fault, without the capacity to wound?

  The journal-writing voyeur, vain of her wand-thin body and her soulfulness, gazes at the goddesses of leisure, of indulgence. And reports on the shameful fat of living, the dirt, the debris.

  DELACROIX HAD EXPERIENCED an “exaltation” that even “sherbets and fruits could barely appease” in 1832 when he was allowed to pass through a door, along “a dark corridor” to sketch, in the spirit of stealth, a harem in Algiers. Flaubert, on the other hand, traveled to Egypt with his randy pal Maxime Du Camp in 1849 on a trip that combined mosque sightings with sex tourism. They managed to gain access to exoticism mainly by freque
nting Cairo prostitutes. “Tomorrow we are to have a party on the river,” he wrote to a friend at home, “with several whores dancing to the sound of darabukehs and castanets, their hair spangled with gold piastres.”

  This tendency toward the exotic was even stronger, it seemed, than his lust: “Oh, how willingly I would give up all the women in the world to possess the mummy of Cleopatra,” he had written as a Byron-besotted youth, burning for the shimmering East.

  During his 1849 trip, on December 1, a Saturday night at ten o’clock (he meticulously notes all this), Flaubert writes to his best friend Louis Bouilhet of his sexual high jinks in Cairo. He and Du Camp (later a writer of travel books) had gone to a brothel, a place “dilapidated and open to all the winds and lit by a night-light.” They could see a palm tree through the windowless window. The Turkish women wore silk robes embroidered with gold. The usual set design, the requisite exotic costumes. It was, he wrote, “a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.”

  Then the report: “I performed on a mat that a family of cats had to be shooed off—a strange coitus, looking at each other without being able to exchange a word, and the exchange of looks is all the deeper for the curiosity and the surprise. My brain was too stimulated for me to enjoy it much otherwise. These shaved cunts make a strange effect—the flesh is hard as bronze.”

  Next morning, December 2, it’s time to write Maman: “Here we are in Cairo, my darling, where we shall probably stay the entire month of December, until the return of the pilgrims from Mecca.” And so on and so forth, finally offering an Eagle Scout’s inventory of “what I wear these days . . . flannel body-belt, flannel shirt, flannel drawers, thick trousers, warm vest, thick neck-cloth, with an overcoat besides morning and evening.”