The Matisse Stories - A. S. Byatt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Matisse Stories

by A. S. Byatt

 

In this little book are collected three short stories by A. S. Byatt, each of which relates directly or indirectly to the art of Henri Matisse. These aren't, however, in the vein of recent books that dramatize the life of a painter or even of a painting. Rather, these stories are contemporary tales in which the art of Matisse takes up a supporting role.

 

In the opening story, Medusa's Ankles, we meet a middle-aged woman going into her favorite hair salon where a Matisse print is on display in the window and whose colors are echoed throughout the salon. Any change in that somehow reflects the woman's aging, and she takes it out, violently, on the offending flat grey colors.

 

 

 

 

 

In the second story, Art Work, we enter the lives of an artist's family and their quirky housekeeper. The story relates the differences between friendship and merely the appearance of friendship between employer and employee. Byatt captures the feeling of a frustrated artist, and the broken edges of his life.

 

 

 

 

 

In the final story, The Chinese Lobster, an art history professor is confronted by an unhinged student who has dark theories about Matisse and his vision of women. The story unexpectedly twists into the minds of the professor and the dean of women students. Through all three stories, Byatt has an acute perception of the mood and color of Matisse's work. She applies this perception to the stories themselves, casting the feeling in a light of vivid color. Her language has a British sensibility, and these stories are like nugget fragments of her longer work.

 

 

 

 

 

by John Q McDonald

 

         

A. S. Byatt

Biography

Dame A(ntonia) S(usan) Byatt was born on 24 August 1936 in Yorkshire. She was educated at a Quaker school in York and at Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied as a postgraduate. She taught in the Extra-Mural Department of London University and the Central School of Art and Design, and in 1972 became full-time Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London (Senior Lecturer, 1981). She left in 1983 to concentrate on writing full-time. She has travelled widely overseas to lecture and talk about her work, often with the British Council, and was Chairman of the Society of Authors between 1986 and 1988. She was a member of the Literature Advisory Panel for the British Council between 1990 and 1998. She has served on the judging panels for a number of literary prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction, and is recognised as a distinguished critic, contributing regularly to journals and newspapers including the Times Literary Supplement, The Independent and the Sunday Times, as well as to BBC radio and television programmes. She was also a member of the Kingman Commitee on the Teaching of English Language (1987-8).

A. S. Byatt's first novel, Shadow of a Sun, the story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, was published in 1964 and was followed by The Game (1967), a study of the relationship between two sisters. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) is the first book in a quartet about the members of a Yorkshire family. The story continues in Still Life (1985), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and Babel Tower (1996). The fourth (and final) novel in the quartet is A Whistling Woman (2002).

Her most successful book, Possession: A Romance (1990), won the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and continues to enjoy enormous critical and popular success. Part romance, part literary thriller, the story involves two contemporary academics, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, whose research into the lives of two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, reveal inextricably linked destinies, like those of their researchers. Angels & Insects (1992) consists of two novellas, The Conjugal Angel, an exploration of Victorian attitudes toward death and mourning, and Morpho Eugenia, the story of a young Victorian explorer and naturalist, William Adamson, and his relationship with the daughter of his employer, adapted as a film in 1996. Her novel The Biographer's Tale was published in 2000.

A. S. Byatt's collections of short stories and fictions include Sugar and Other Stories (1987); The Matisse Stories (1993), three stories each with a connection to a particular Matisse painting; The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), a collection of fairy tales; and Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998).

Her published criticism includes two books about Iris Murdoch: Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976), as well as Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970). In A. S. Byatt's last book, Portraits in Fiction (2001), she writes about instances of painting in novels, with examples from work by Zola, Proust and Iris Murdoch, a subject she first explored in a lecture given at London's National Portrait Gallery in 2000. She was awarded a CBE in 1990 and a DBE in 1999, and in 2002 was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in recognition of her contribution to British culture. Her latest book, Little Black Book of Short Stories (2003), is a new collection of short stories.

A. S. Byatt lives in London. Her sister is the novelist Margaret Drabble.

 

 

Bibliography

Shadow of a Sun   Chatto & Windus, 1964

Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch   Chatto & Windus, 1965

The Game   Chatto & Windus, 1967

Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time   Nelson, 1970

Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study   Longman, 1976

The Virgin in the Garden   Chatto & Windus, 1978

Still Life   Chatto & Windus, 1985

Sugar and Other Stories   Chatto & Windus, 1987

Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poetry and Life   Hogarth Press, 1989

George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings   (editor with Nicholas Warren)   Penguin, 1990

Possession: A Romance   Chatto & Windus, 1990

Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings   Chatto & Windus, 1991

Angels & Insects   Chatto & Windus, 1992

The Matisse Stories   Chatto & Windus, 1993

The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye   Chatto & Windus, 1994

Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers   (with Ignes Sodre)   Chatto & Windus, 1995

New Writing Volume 4   (editor with Alan Hollinghurst)   Vintage, 1995

Babel Tower   Chatto & Windus, 1996

New Writing Volume 6   (editor with Peter Porter)   Vintage, 1997

Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice   Chatto & Windus, 1998

Oxford Book of English Short Stories   (editor)   Oxford University Press, 1998

On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays   Chatto & Windus, 2000

The Biographer's Tale   Chatto & Windus, 2000

Portraits in Fiction   Chatto & Windus, 2001

The Bird Hand Book   (with photographs by Victor Schrager)   Graphis (New York), 2001

A Whistling Woman   Chatto & Windus, 2002

Little Black Book of Stories   Chatto & Windus, 2003

 

 

Prizes and awards

1986   PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award   Still Life

1990   Booker Prize for Fiction   Possession: A Romance

1990   CBE

1990   Irish Times International Fiction Prize   Possession: A Romance

1991   Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book)   Possession: A Romance

1995   Premio Malaparte (Italy)

1998   Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature   The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye

1999   DBE

2002   Shakespeare Prize (Germany)

 

 

Critical Perspective

A. S. Byatt is a major British writer with an international reputation. Many of her novels are constructed on a grand scale, both literally and in terms of their vast range and ambitious subject matter. Byatt writes learned novels, which contain a multitude of allusions: to literary theory, to the fairy-tale traditions of many countries, and to the literature of periods as diverse as the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. Although Byatt's work is steeped in literature and literary allusions, she can integrate these concerns with a metaphorical use of scientific disciplines of various kinds, including the lives of ants, the classification of butterflies and moths, and the Darwinian theory of evolution. She draws in her writing on traditions of the fabulous and the fantastic, but counterbalances these with a strong element of social realism. At the heart of much of her writing is a scholarly and literary consciousness, which often manifests itself in the academic preoccupations of her central characters.

A number of Byatt's novels (Possession (1990), Angels and Insects (1993), The Biographer's Tale (2001)) deal with the concerns, thinkers and writers of the nineteenth century, an era which itself tackled large intellectual and scientific problems and produced substantial bodies of major poetry and fiction. Byatt mixes the historically real and the fictional in such a way that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between them. Possession, Angels and Insects, and The Biographer's Tale are peopled with genuine historical figures who mingle with invented personae. These four texts (Angels and Insects is made up of two novellas) contain narrative strands which identify parallels and contrasts between nineteenth and twentieth century lives. In Possession, two 20th-century academics uncover a love affair between two imaginary poets of the nineteenth century. These fictional poets are created through an abundance of apparently documentary detail; and are embedded in the lives of historical 19th-century figures. Byatt demonstrates her ventriloquial abilities as she composes not only their letters but also their poems. Her versions of Victorian poetry are astonishingly successful, most notably in their imitation of Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti. The two narrative strands of the novel converge as the twentieth-century academics find themselves re-creating and mirroring in their own relationship the romance of the 19th-century poets. As an antidote to the post-modern cult of theories and Saussurean signs they re-create for themselves the structure of the 19th-century novel. They read the poets' love letters in a house of genteel decaying poverty owned by Lord Bailey, a comically bluff and shotgun-wielding landowner, and his romantically long-suffering wife, who is confined to a wheelchair after a riding accident. Their reading uncovers tales of hidden kinship and illegitimacy, and the various strands of the novel are brought together in a denouement that undermines traditional expectations of closure and coherence. Through its parodically symmetrical and at times comically extravagant plot, Possession offers oblique comments not only on the "realism" of Victorian fiction but also on the more universal human desire for coherent narrative.

Byatt is an effective mimic of different styles and genres, and her work contains a multitude of voices. Possession, after its kaleidoscope of poetry, letters and contemporary literary criticism, is brought to a conventional resolution by an old-fashioned omniscient narrator. Byatt demonstrates an ironic sensitivity not only to the excesses of twentieth-century literary jargon but also to the distinctive verse and prose styles of the nineteenth century.

The Biographer's Tale, like Possession, combines factual narratives with expository fiction. While Possession emulates the narrative coherence of the Victorian novel, The Biographer's Tale employs an intricate scheme reminiscent of Chinese boxes to expose features of more contemporary narrative. The distinction between fact and fiction, though sharper than in Possession, remains effectively obscure. We read apparently factual accounts of the biologist Carl Linnaeus, the eugenieist Francis Galton, and the dramatist Henrik Ibsen, but these lives of important historical figures are presented by the intensely personal work of the fictional biographer invoked but not identified in the book's title. The narrator, Phineas G. Nanson, is a graduate student disillusioned with post-modern literary theory. He is therefore working on a biography of this fictional biographer, the bizarrely-named Scholes Destry-Scholes. Nanson's interest in Scholes is attributed to another of Scholes' biographies, whose subject is the fictional nineteenth-century polymath and adventurer, Sir Elmer Bole. Nanson's impatience with literary theory arises from his desire for 'things' and facts rather than nebulous theories. Ironically, he finds on turning to biography that he is overwhelmed by 'facts' and impelled to impose a fictional coherence on them. Intertwined with these 19th-century narratives is the story of Nanson's fantastical 'everyday' life; he works in a strange travel agency run by two exotic and mysterious personalities, and conducts romances with two women, of whom one epitomises moonlight and silver, the other sunshine and heat. Byatt often seeks to combine the factual order of the realistic narrative with the mythical and the fantastic. In The Biographer's Tale, she has interwoven the two in a manner which compels us to question the reality of the apparently real and the fictional nature of the apparently fantastic.

The intricacies and diverse traditions of story telling are a recurrent theme in Byatt's work. Possession, The Biographer's Tale, and Babel Tower (1996) offer a collage of different stories and styles. Amongst their diverse fragments of story, both Possession and Babel Tower contain fables of other worlds. The narrative within the narrative is a characteristic feature of Byatt's writing, and the relationship between the different narratives within her novels is often intricate. The book-within-a-book of Babel Tower is entitled Babbletower, a title which testifies to connections with the surrounding narrative, but which also reflects the way in which the fantastic narrative (with its echoes of Tolkien and the Marquis de Sade) transforms and distorts the context of the realistic fiction. The two narratives are connected by their symbolism and their thematic concerns. As the titles indicate, both texts highlight questions of language, and in each the image of the tower takes on a range of connotations. Stylistically they underline multiple conceptions of language, and the power of language to distort. The narrative and apparently matter-of-fact language of Babel Tower contrasts with the lush sensuality of Babbletower, which combines the courtly love settings of Chaucer's romances with an expressive vulgarity reminiscent of 'The Miller's Tale'. Characteristically, Byatt leaves us wondering which of the two offers a more accurate reflection of 'real life'.

Byatt's skill and sophistication as a novelist are no less apparent in those books that pursue the complexities of everyday life. Babel Tower is the third volume of a projected quartet that began with The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and Still Life (1985). The principal characters of this quartet have been through Cambridge together and their conversation is wittily epigrammatic in a manner reminiscent of Iris Murdoch's similar accounts of intellectual groups. At the same time Byatt creates a convincing scenario of the everyday. The sequence is convincingly related to a particular time and place, being inextricably linked with events of the fifties and sixties. The random malice of the ordinary is powerfully demonstrated in the shocking climax of Still Life.

Byatt's collections of short stories, The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), and Elementals (1998), differ in scale and form from her novels, but are familiar in their concerns: issues of the real and fantastic, the power of language, and the complexities of story telling. The title story of The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye tells of a middle-aged English woman who steps into a world of harems, pagan gods and oriental tales. The combination of the fantastic and the banal is epitomised in the depiction of the genie whom she inadvertently frees from his bottle, and who spends his liberated time lounging around in a hotel room watching the tennis player Boris Becker on a cable television channel.

A. S. Byatt is one of the most ambitious and intellectual of contemporary novelists. Her work rarely makes for easy reading, but is always thought provoking. Her imaginative interest in language is reflected in the chameleon nature of her narratives, and her stylistic range is as wide as the range of subjects she tackles.

 

Cora Lindsay, 2001

For an in-depth critical overview see A. S. Byatt by Richard Todd (Northcote House, 1997: Writers and their Work Series).

 

 

 

Author statement

 

'I write novels because I am passionately interested in language. Novels are works of art which are made out of language, and are made in solitude by one person and read in solitude by one person - by many different, single people, it is to be hoped. So I am also interested in what goes on in the minds of readers, and writers, and characters and narrators in books. I like to write about people who think, to whom thinking is as important and exciting (and painful) as sex or eating. This doesn't mean I want my books to be cerebral or simply battles of ideas.

I love formal patterning in novels - I like to discover and make connections between all sorts of different people, things, ways of looking, points in time and space. But I also like the idea that novels can be, as James said, 'loose baggy monsters', a generous form that can take account of almost anything. Temperamentally, and morally, I like novels with large numbers of people and centres of consciousness, not novels that adopt a narrow single point-of-view, author's or character's.

I don't like novels that preach or proselytise. (I fear people with very violent beliefs, though I admire people with thought-out principles.) The novel is an agnostic form - it explores and describes; the novelist and the reader learn more about the world along the length of the book.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.asbyatt.com

http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth20