Book Report: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

35. Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (2001) (7/3/21)

This is a short book, 70 pages, but it is uber-rich with thought and feeling. Doty is a wonderful poet and a meticulous observer of life, perhaps one of the most honest writers I have read. The main theme of the book is arcane: seventeenth-century Dutch still life. But Doty weaves in memories of his East Tennessee Mamaw and her purse full of bright red peppermints, or living in a ramshackle old house with his lover Wally, stuffing it full of precious objects, or visiting Amsterdam with another lover (after Wally's death) on his forty-fifth birthday and being surrounded by still lifes in the Rijksmuseum. In these and other experiences, the careful noticing that he describes in the work of the Dutch artists is reflected in his own attempts to understand how he feels, what he thinks, what is important to him, and why. This book is philosophical, but also very much grounded in lived life.

The best way for me to convey his achievement is simply to quote a few passages.

The most beautiful still lifes are never pristine, and herein lies one of their secrets. The lemon has been half-peeled, the wine tasted, the bread broken; the oysters have been shucked, part of this great wheel of cheese cut away. . . . Someone has left this knife resting on the edge of the plate, its handle jutting toward us; someone plans, in a moment, to pick it up again. These objects are in use, in dialogue, a part of, implicated. They refuse perfection, or rather they assert that this is perfection, this state of being consumed, used up, enjoyed, existing in time. 

*

[That house] is long since sold, perhaps demolished, and nothing that was in it remains now, save perhaps some things gone to my wife's brother or his children, who knows. Our marriage ended twenty years ago. And yet how strangely vivid a few things remain: the chipped white French coffeepot on Bertha's table, her beautiful mottled hand holding mine while she lay back on her single iron bed that afternoon [we met], the little pile of twigs and leaves smoldering in the yard. An elaborate spoon embossed with an antlered stag, and a quiver of arrows, emblems of the huntress Diana. The heart is a repository of vanished things: the rock of Gethsemane, jars of plum brandy, whole fruit turning in their sleep like infants in the womb, a heavenly blue morning glory [all these being details he has mentioned in the book]. When I was a kid I had a toy, a "Magic 8 Ball." It was a hard plastic sphere bigger than a baseball, with a little window at the bottom. The idea was to ask a question, then turn the ball upside down; a message would float into view, suspended in the black liquid which a little jar inside the ball contained (it was difficult to figure this out). "Yes" the ball would answer, or "Perhaps" or "Ask again later." Now I think there is a space in me that is like the dark inside that hollow sphere, and things float up into view, images that are vessels of meaning, the flotsam and detail of any particular moment. Vanished things.
     Or vanished from my life, at least. Who knows where they might be now, to what use they may have been put, what other meanings have been assigned to them.

*

It's a simple painting, really, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, by one Jan Davidsz de Heem, painted in Antwerp some three hundred and fifty years ago. . . . [Here I omit his description of the painting.]
     Simple, and yet so firm in its assertions.
     I'll try to name them.
     That this is the matrix in which we are held, the generous light binding together the fragrant and flavorful productions of vineyard, marsh, and orchard—where has that lemon come from, the Levant?
     That the pleasures of what can be tasted and smelled are to be represented, framed, set apart; that pleasure is to be honored.
     That the world is a dialogue between degrees of transparency—globes of the grapes, the wine in the glass equally penetrated by light but ever so slightly less clear than the vessel itself, degrees of reflectivity.
     That the world of reflection implicates us, as well—there, isn't that the faintest image of the painter in the base of the glass, tilted, distorted, lost in the contemplation of his little realm? Looking through things, as well, through what he's made of them, toward us?
     That there can never be too much of reality; that the attempt to draw nearer to it—which will fail—will not fail entirely, as it will give us not the fact of lemons and oysters but this, which is its own fact, its own brave assay toward what is.
     That description is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.

But of course, like the still lifes themselves, these extracts lack the meaning of context, the flow of Doty's own remembering and relating.

I will certainly revisit this book. I have also pulled out Doty's book in Graywolf Press's "Art of" series, on—fittingly enough—description. I've read it before, but I know I will learn so much reading it again.

The more I read of Doty, whether it's a philosophical gem like this, one of his memoirs, or his poetry, the more I want to read of him. 

(See my previous blog post for a few images of still lifes he considers in this book.)