Derek Walcott. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. [164] pp., 26 color ills. $30.00.

Known as poet, playwright, and essayist, Derek Walcott, the Nobel laureate for literature in 1992, has also painted since boyhood. With his schoolmate Dunstan St. Omer, he roamed their native St. Lucia, painting ordinary West Indian subjects en plein air. St. Omer would become the island’s leading artist, the first to cross Roman Catholic iconography with native strains. But the boys’ mentor Harold Simmons saw that Walcott’s greater gift lay elsewhere. Walcott himself, in his autobiographical poem Another Life, would write of divergent gifts and hail St. Omer as the born painter Gregorias:

The poet-painter abandons hope for a melding of the crafts. Yet a closer look at his language finds a tantalizing convergence. The elements proclaiming difference betray a painter’s eye conniving with the ear of the poet. The emphatic sequence liv-, -iff, -ift, the consolidating -ment with met-, and the reemphasis of the "f’s" in -phor, seem self-contained, definitive. From their midst, however, ele- winks at eel and ela-, which define the other, while -ear and line- in retrospect imply both hand and voice. Through sight as well as sound the letters forge a metaphoric link, where similarity belies the otherness professed. The gift achieves the likeness of poetic craft to painting famously expressed by Horace: ut pictura poesis.

Likewise in Tiepolo’s Hound the eye incites the ear to metaphoric links, as when Walcott recalls a turning point in his pursuit of painting. Devouring reproductions in public library books, he discovered that one master had painted in Martinique, which lies on the horizon to St. Lucia’s north: it was, Gauguin, he says, who

The punning metaphors identify a patron saint for the young island painters.

    Walcott’s gift would propel him abroad, ultimately leading to his epic of exile, return, and paradise to lose or gain--Omeros (1990). The epic moves from elated metaphoric crossings to counter-currents of renewal and retreat. Boldly Walcott mapped Helen of Troy and Homer’s hero Achilles onto life in a St. Lucian village (a fisherman Achille loves a local femme fatale named Helen), mapping, too, the Trojan War onto the island’s colonial past. He extrapolated stirring plots from these metaphoric links but ended by writing them off as a tour de force. He closed with expressed longing for a language beyond metaphor.

    Likewise in Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott moves between metaphoric daring and withdrawal. For one, he seizes on the coincidence that another painter, Camille Pissarro, was born on a Caribbean island and felt constrained to leave. Imagining the formative impact of relentless island light on the Father of Impressionism, Walcott develops parallel yet contrasting plots: Pissarro leaving for the impressive shock of European sights yet haunted by the Caribbean; the poet himself inescapably rooted in the islands but compelled by a European fantasy of his own--the hound that gives the poem its title and becomes the vehicle for a complex and rich dialogue with Venetian painting.

    From his own perspective as a Caribbean poet-painter, Walcott revisits and brilliantly reviews not just Pissarro, but Cézanne, Gauguin, Corot, Goya, Millet, Turner, Claude, Guardi, Giotto, and most intensely Veronese and Tiepolo. His searching prismatic gaze also refracts colonial history, post-colonial culture, the empires of Venice, France, and Rome, and the diasporas of Africans and Jews.

    Establishing motifs that will return and vary through the poem, Walcott shows that he, unlike Pissarro, had the example of a father who painted. Dying Warwick Walcott left his young son the sketchbooks and paintings of a gifted amateur, who drew in the English topographical tradition and even copied Turner’s Fighting Téméraire. The boy absorbed, too, the reproductions in the library, even the "false pastorals" of Puvis de Chavannes. It was against this background that Gauguin appeared like a savior ("martyr...died for our sins"). The religious metaphors give the story a defining role like that played in older epic and in pastoral by etiological narratives: myths of artistic authorization or origin.

    Instead of sketchbooks Pissarro’s family offered their son commercial ledgers. Walcott imagines him restive and coming to feel

            of light, must face in these barren paradises
            where after a while love becomes an affliction.

Reflecting by implication on his own calling, Walcott imagines Pissarro leaving to take up his destiny as a "subject of the Empire of art":

    Meanwhile Walcott has recalled his own engagement with the craft of painting and with major works, which he eloquently represents and appropriates. With bravura he describes painting, landscape, and their interaction, making ecphrasis, that emblematic but occasional feature of older epic, a major feature of Tiepolo’s Hound.

Resuming Pissarro’s story, with an astounding richness of detail that testifies to a wondeful passion for both the art of painting and the city, Walcott develops the idea of the island eye transformed by the impact of Paris, forging the Impressionist esthetic:

From Paris and the emergence of the Impressionist esthetic, Walcott moves to envisage Pissarro’s retreat to

Slyly Walcott works in biographical details: Pissarro as a boy had been sent to school at Passy; later he would depict the part of Pontoise known as L’Hermitage. Walcott also goes on to evoke Pissarro’s reciprocal relations with Cézanne and Gauguin, "both calling him master"; and observes "something uxorious in Pissarro’s landscapes" as "compared to the anger of his friend Cézanne, whose | canvas rants...brush muttering imprecations": one of the many pointed judgments that propel the reading and provoke new looks at familiar art.

The Franco-Prussian war makes Pissarro escape "to London | along with Monet," where the two admire Constable and Turner. Back in Pontoise, "Scuttering spectres--debt, fear, discontent-- | crouched in each corner of his stifling house." Pissarro portrays his little daughter; and her subsequent death becomes the occasion for moving meditation.

In the manner of cinema the point of view breaks to Walcott in St. Lucia, at mid-point in the poem, but also mid-way between "Time measured in ruins, the empires of Europe" and "the still pond and the egrets beating home." He reflects on the insult of history as opposed to the island "egret’s ewer of light"; and he embroiders on the imprint of European names and patterns, his own fear of painting, and why he perseveres. In punning metaphors he crosses writing with painting and a military campaign:

For readers who have been remarking how freely the poet adapts biography and art to his designs, Walcott now provides a retrospective manifesto. He imagines Pissarro beseiged by rumors of the Dreyfus case, then draws powerful and paradoxical analogies:

Walcott goes on to contrast the "Synagogue of Peace and Loving Deeds" known by Pissarro in St. Thomas with Europe, "where the seeds | are sown in shattered crystal of slow slaughter," alluding to Kristalnacht and the Holocaust. Book Three winds down retrospectively in a chapter that moves between Spain, "the quarry where they shot Lorca: | vine sticks like rifles, the clot of ruby grapes," and memories of lost Caribbean friends, which Walcott mingles with the image of Pissarro by Gauguin, "flesh becoming paint."

Book Four at last brings the poet to Venice looking for the source of the white hound that has lured and driven him throughout:

                I would discover in some flaking church,

In Venice he feels "imagination’s envy," gives

The book unfolds, then, by alternately pressing, doubting, renouncing, and reaffirming the recurrent yet elusive vision of the hound, a process that recalls his lingering farewell to founding metaphors in Omeros.

These rich revisions of the hound in closure send us back to look more closely at its arrival on the scene. In Book One the first chapter set down themes for the whole work in four swift movements. First came Pissarro’s roots in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas (then Danish Virgin islands), and the force of island nature and light. Walcott focused on the Sephardic origins of Pissarro’s Jewish family, "who fled the white hoods of the Inquisition." Typically he picked a detail that could link diverse domains and multiply significance: "white hoods" mapping the Inquisition to the Ku Klux Klan in the American South, evoked also in Omeros. He also imagined young Camille, while strolling with his family, dogged by a black mongrel.

With cinematic abruptness the second movement shifted to Walcott himself peering at a black dog crossing Woodford Square. He went on with metaphoric mappings to introduce a public park as "the Savannah, not the Tuileries, but | still the Rock Gardens’ brush-point cypresses || like a Pissarro canvas"; and he mapped other points of local color onto elements from world art that would return as leitmotifs: "the saffron of Tiepolo sunsets" and "the croton hues of the Impressionists." Gradually, looking back from later hints (and a bit of biographical research) it became clear that the scene here was Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, where Walcott spent his middle years and built his literary career.

Shifting again, in the third movement Walcott depicted a defining point in his own development as a painter: on his "first trip to the Modern" he fixed on the "ridged linen of a Cézanne" seen as a "first lesson." He extended the narrative of initiation to the Metropolitan, calling himself "stunned" at the sight "of a Renaissance feast":

                I felt my heart halt....

Calling the sight a "miracle" and the "epiphanic detail" that "illuminates an epoch," he sees the hound as his link to Venice. Yet he adds at once:

And he further warns that after the epiphany, "Everything blurs," even whether the painter was Veronese or Tiepolo.

The poet asks, then, in the chapter’s fourth and closing movement: "But isn’t that the exact perspective of loss, | that the loved one’s features blur...?" With this he begins to weave the memory of his first love (the blond Anna of Another Life) into his stunning Renaissance banquet, writing that "her wrist || in my forced memory caresses an arched hound." These are the elements, then, that he would elaborate in various returns until Book Four, where he forges a further metaphor, mapping his beloved onto "bejeweled Venice...a radiant whore...stretching her hand to feed an arching hound," which he then evokes "looking over her emerald sleeve with parted lips | the white wolf, eyes slits, nudging her knees."

The layering of metaphors astonishes, exalts the mind, brings tears. That will be enough for readers satisfied to note the recurrent references to Venice, its painting and its power. In the poetic fabric, the white hound becomes a symbolic catalyst, evoking European dimensions in the poet’s life and art. It stands in counterpoint to the recurrent black mongrel, which acts as a reminder of his Caribbean roots. Moreover, the duality of black and white shaped Walcott’s imagination already in Omeros, where an alien white liner intrudes, suggesting lofty urban fame against native St. Lucian values. When the liner slips away "the black waves settle down to their level."

Yet Walcott also seems be thinking of a specific painting by Veronese, "Christ in the House of Levi." Such references open the door to scholarly and critical inquiry, whether fashionable intertextualism or its more pedestrian congener, Quellenforschungen. Indeed Tiepolo’s Hound merits and will reward industrious dissertations, if they are guided by literary, art historical, and artistic discipline. Interpretation will have to navigate by careful attention to the whole structure and program as they frame the myriad details. A poem so interdisciplinary in its craft seems the perfect candidate, too, for teaching in the new classrooms where diverse images and texts converge like genies summoned from the World-wide Web through the interdisciplinary vision and collaborative investment of instructors. Finally, as an investigation of metaphoric process, especially the cross-mapping of verbal and visual domains, Tiepolo’s Hound should become a guide and goldmine for cognitive studies.

Meanwhile, anyone reasonably versed in art history on reading the above report of Walcott’s founding feast may have felt the sensations usually provoked by allusions or appropriations in visual or verbal arts. We locate Veronese’s great canvas at home in Venice, recall the proper title, "Christ in the House of Levi," and the story why its original name, "Last Supper," had to be changed. Scrutinizing, we note that Veronese’s hound is piebald, somewhat forlorn, and hunched in the foreground at a discreet distance from a draped table, behind which Christ appears engaged in talk with no thought of flinging scraps. The canine figure posed an intertextual scandal in its day. That position in a proper Last Supper should have featured Mary Magdalene, not a dog, the Inquisition ruled. They ordered it replaced. Veronese merely changed to a title fraught with less ideological freight. We are left to infer that Walcott’s innovations underline his imaginative agenda and produce meaning. His hound is white, svelte but gashed, insinuated under a undraped table that reveals the diners’ legs, and intimate with a woman in emerald sleeves.

Multiplying the referents for his text, Walcott includes a selection of his paintings, he has shown, and which have long adorned the jackets of his books, but here for the first time come inside the covers. He includes images of the Savannah, illustrating the great park in Port-of-Spain, as well as scenes from St. Lucia, an English garden with a marble Venus dissolved in light, and view of a beach in St. Malo, where someone walks a small black dog. Perhaps most intriguing are two images of Gauguin. The earlier, a pastel entitled Gauguin’s Studio (1986), offers a nearly cinematic montage of multiple views of the painter, his models, and other still-life and landscape subjects. Some evoke Gauguin’s tropics, while other motifs suggest allusions to the work of Renoir, Cézanne, and even Matisse. As in Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott compresses various moments of time into the one frame.

In the watercolor, Gauguin in Martinque (1991), Walcott depicts his patron-saint painting. The same dark-haired, mustached visage now sports a slender but distinct halo. An attractive, dark-skinned woman rests one hand on Gauguin’s shoulder and gazes enigmatically towards the viewer.

Emulating Gauguin and Pissarro, Walcott, too, works in oil on canvas. Of the latter medium he writes:

Yet devotion to the lines of drawing already characterized the works on paper, especially in watercolor, where the style shows a delicacy and precision of detail that recall the early Winslow Homer, a painter Walcott admires as well as the English topographical heritage from Walcott’s father. Indeed one senses the hand of the skilled watercolorist crossing over to a different medium in the execution of the oils, where even the clouds emulate the washes of watercolor.

The depth of Walcott’s passion for painting, and for his island roots, emerges one more time towards the close. He draws together and recombines favorite leitmotifs in a prayer that recalls a classical poet’s apostrophe to a Muse:

Faithfulness to form is Walcott’s hallmark and his salvation. No wonder that in Omeros he imagines Dante pulling him back from the poetasters’ pit. A mind so energetic, intelligent, far-ranging, richly stocked, and associative might well lapse from poetic grace into a seething and merely promiscuous slough of puns, which only the regularities of form can discipline and exploit to further plots. In form Tiepolo’s Hound challenges and revises most immediately Omeros, but behind it the tradition of epic back to Homer, with its divisions into books. In verse form, Omeros echoed the regular tercets of Dante, but with far more liberties in rhyme. Here the lines form couplets that are distinguished visually on the page by double spacing (and described metaphorically as steps of stairs). The couplets also fall into pairs linked by endings that look or sound alike (..A|..B||..A’|..B’), as in "...seek | ...skins || ...Martinique. | ...sins." The apt surprises in the cross-linked line-ends give the whole metaphoric project its basic quickening charge. Walcott’s gift to us through ear and eye stirs the mind and entertains the heart.

The highest homage paid Omeros by the world of literature is that it has changed forever how we see Homer and his tradition. Walcott’s metaphoric take on epic is so powerfully originative as to put the whole genre in a new light. Now the literature and the art worlds both face an equally originative take on landscape, ecphrasis, Impressionism, Venice and the whole matter of crossings between verbal and visual craft. The art world comprises an expected and privileged audience for Tiepolo’s Hound. The responses whether in images or words should yield new yrounds in the age-old conversation between poetry and painting.

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