One Vermeer painting, two works of fiction

a book review by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, http://www.samizdat.com/

Two books with the same dust jacket -- the same painting by Vermeer: the head of a young girl, with a turban and a pearl earring.

Girl in a Turban is a collection of stories, delicate stylistic pieces that catch you up with their style, that you read with pleasure, and then soon forget both the plots and the characters. The title piece tells of a family of art dealers. The father, Bernhard, delivers a very precious cargo -- the Vermeer painting -- by ship to a friend and customer, a Danish nobleman. There he meets and is intrigued by, but does not pursue the friend's attractive daughter, Ariadne. He is married. His wife is pregnant with their first child. He needs to hurry home. The son, Jan, grows up, the image of his father, carrying on his business with the same exactitude and devotion. After the death of Bernhard, when Jan is 40 and still unmarried, he receives a letter from Ariadne. Her father too is dead, and she has fallen on hard times and will have to liquidate her property. Before doing so, she wants to give back to Jan the painting that her father and his father had so treasured. As the story ends, he rushes, "promptly," to retrieve it. In this low-key story, the reader keeps expecting romance, but the central characters are singularity self-possessed, involved in and pleased with their quiet, comfortable lives. Bernhard leaves his pregnant wife behind, with few qualms, when he sets out on the long and perhaps perilous voyage to Denmark. Business -- or rather the fate of the painting -- comes first. The Danish nobleman is so content with his life that he boasts he has "never slept a single night under another roof," having spent his entire life on his ancestral property. Jan at 40 is devoted to the family business, and while he promised his father on his deathbed that he would marry, to have an heir, he hasn't gotten around to it yet. All three cherish the painting.

There was a brief moment in Denmark, when, while talking to Ariadne, Bernhard had fleeting thoughts of how comfortable it would be to stay in Denmark. But he brushes those aside -- duty calls.

The expression of the girl in the painting is one of a reluctant good-bye. She is leaving, but looks back, as if wishing to stay, as if wishing that things could be other than what they are. Her mouth is partly open, as if there were something that she wanted to say, and she just needs the slightest prompt to come out with it.

In Greek mythology, Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos. She gave Theseus the clues he needed to find his way through the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur. Theseus took her with him, but then, for no particular reason, simply abandoned her on a island on the way home to Athens. She is a woman abandoned, a woman whose love is not reciprocated.

Girl with a Pearl Earring tells the story of a young girl, who because her father was blinded in an accident at work, is obliged to take a job as a maid, to help support her family. It so happens that her new employer is the artist Vermeer.

In this story, as in Girl with a Turban, emotions are restrained. But here we see a broader context -- we get a sense of what it would be like to be a young girl of little means in the town of Delft in the 1660s. (Rather like Memoirs of a Geisha does for a young girl in Japan in the early twentieth century.)

There's plenty of sexual tension between Griet and Vermeer, and her and Vermeer's patron. Nothing is ever expressed in word or overt deed. But the beauty of the story comes from the degree to which we come to accept the social context as given -- the rules are explained and the game is played out in harmony with them. In this context, the slightest deviation from the accepted norm is a matter of great moment (reminiscent of Jane Austen).

Vermeer is very slow and deliberate in his work -- spending half a year or more on a single canvas. And he needs someone with a careful eye and delicate touch to clean up his studio and put everything back exactly as it was before. Over time, without his wife's knowledge, he trusts Griet with more and more responsibility, even letting her make his paints, while he won't let his own wife so much as enter his studio. He also, under pressure of his patron who likes Griet's looks, agrees to use Griet as a model, while he has never done a painting of his wife, who simply can't stay still long enough.

Griet has an artistic eye and extraordinary insight. She can look at a painting that Vermeer has been working on for months and sense just what is missing -- the one small hint of abandon in the otherwise perfectly controlled picture that gives it its life and significance.

Seeing her own portrait, she knows what is missing -- a pearl earring, in particular an earring that belongs to her mistress. Vermeer realizes that as well. And rather than paint it in from memory, he must have her wear it. She reluctantly puts it on (having to pierce her ear just for that), knowing full well that this would mean good-bye, that the wife, on seeing the painting, would consider it a violation, a breech of trust. Hence the expression on her face -- Griet's wearing of the earring for Vermeer was tantamount to an illicit sexual act with him, it was both a willful expression of passion and an irrevocable public act that would force her departure.

In the epilogue, Griet returns to Vermeer's house. The master has died, and in his will, he bequeathed the pearl earrings to Griet. That's an embarrassment to the widow and to Griet as well, who would prefer that her butcher husband never have suspicions regarding her past. She sells the earrings for a small sum on the way home, little more than what the Vermeer family had owed them from years before. You're left with the feeling that Vermeer's passion was not so much for the girl as for the painting of the girl -- the masterpiece that she inspired. In that sense, the two otherwise quite different stories about the same painting have much in common.

In Turban, the painting is never described, the artist's name is never mentioned, and there is no hint of his life story. Like a black hole, you learn of the painting's power by observing the motions of those around it. And the lives described are all the more lonely and cold because of that deliberate omission. It is a work of darkness, shadow, and absence.

Earring tells about how the painting was created. Descriptions of previous works set the scene for the description of this one. And every detail of the painting relates to the life of Griet, to her relationship with Vermeer, and to Vermeer's relationship to his own work. This is a work of light, a work that gains in significance from the angle of the light, from the perspective, a work that focuses on the essence of the painting's charm -- the earring, not the turban: the earring, with its tear-like reflection, perfectly completing the painting.

Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer

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