Travels in Vermeer (21 page)

At ease in my mind, this book in my lap, the map of the world in silver fishscale tracery beneath me: here is the end of obsession.

2. A Solution

When Sophia was still an infant, I remember the inexhaustible wonder in her gaze. She'd stare so seekingly into my eyes for hours—first one eye, then the other eye, and then doze off before beginning again … In those first months, the child is on a mission, it seems, to memorize the face of love. How astonishing to see and be seen, to be truly seen for the first time.

What could equal it? There are moments when the terms of one's own life are irrevocably changed by simply looking into a lover's eye, when crazed with love or parting or sorrow—a handful of times, if we're lucky. In such times, I have felt the weight of all I might say, all I might have said—the impossibility of articulating anything out of the crushing welter of emotion—but also the mercy of being released from such a burden because, just then, with nothing between you and the one you love, you both already know. As I told Jackie in her last seconds of consciousness: “you don't have to say anything. I know.” Or even when looking into Sara's eyes through the little window:
I know.

What if a painter painted virtually nothing but such moments? What if he held his immense gifts in reserve, solely for such states of recognition? This is what Vermeer did. In the event of our arrival— that moment when, occupied with their music lesson or holding a glass of wine—his women turn and look and almost exclaim, “It's you.”

It was Arthur Wheelock who called this “the momentary interruption”—the glance out toward the viewer just before the girl returns to her suitor. As if one backward glance, one touch, can reach through a person's entire life. As if, when Eurydice turns, we are there. But almost every Vermeer, every attempt at illumination contains some “momentary interruption” of time—whether anyone looks out at us or not—encoded into the sheen of surfaces that flood the senses and fill the mind with rapture.

My restoration is in that instant. As William Blake wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. / For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narow chinks of his cavern.” This is true for me; the struggle is to see.

What I've experienced in Vermeer isn't quite like the recovery of A. A.—the kind you have to work for—because Vermeer has done most of the work himself, his visions so clear they “cleanse” our human sight. He aspires not simply to paint for a viewer like myself, but also to
become
me—to stand where I stand, feel what I feel, dream what I dream looking into the looking glass. In this way, his self-effacing, chameleon-like power seems an example of what Keats calls man's “negative capability”: “ … when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

The painting stares at us, more powerfully charged the longer we meet its gaze. But the meaning, of course, is inside us; part of the painting's power is its effortless access. There's a sense of space to begin with; and the painting speaks of things, the touch of things, with an optical as well as a lyrical authority. It grants the world its due: “our clouds, our sky.”

No small part of the poignancy of
The Girl with a Pearl Earring
or
Girl with a Red Hat
, for instance, is a result of this urgency, this flash of emotion—seen and felt instantaneously. The painting meets us there—where we are most aware and most ourselves, certain of nothing except that everything is changed. But even the paintings that don't stare out at us—
The Milkmaid
or
Woman Holding a Balance,
for instance—work in a similar way. We still find ourselves confronted with an extraordinarily intimate image, a reflection, with effortless access to our private selves—so that what she feels, we feel the instant we look at her. It's unsettling to remain unacknowledged, even as we stand in the room with her; we hold our breath reflexively, so as not to disturb her. She is the center of this world—the lustrous pearls or bread-crusts incandescing beneath her touch—and by the time she looks around, we'll be gone.

3. Spring

Because this is Swiss Air, the in-flight snack isn't pretzels. I peel off the plastic film covering the tray: there's a small tin of pâté, a wedge of ripe brie, cut fruit in a plastic cup, water crackers, also a biscuit, a pat of foil-wrapped Normandy butter; a dense bar of Swiss chocolate, a cup of chocolate mousse for dessert. Sun slants in from the left.

Five miles up in the brilliant blue, I'm on my way to see Sophia, riding a wave of gratitude that I can't get to the bottom of. There are troughs of turbulence above Iceland and Greenland, jostling and upsetting the drowsy passengers. I have no desire to sleep, to read, to watch the movie, no desire to do anything beyond unwrapping a round of Brie and a water biscuit. I'm soaring in complete contentment over the uninhabitable north. It's mid-May, it's almost June—then summer, and my blessed, uninterrupted four weeks with my daughter, and all the blackberries we can pick.

4. Her Face

I reach for the cup of mousse in its recessed corner of the tray. The image on the peel-off foil lid suddenly catches my eye. Although the two colors—blue and yellow—are exaggerated and garish, it is still “Milkmaid;” she is a popular brand of mousse! “La Laitiére,” it seems, is not only the French translation of the painting's title, but a Nestle Suisse line of chilled desserts, including the “Secret de Mousse” I am holding.

She appears on the top as a bust, about two-thirds of an inch in height. Her face is so small that none of its nuances are conveyed. Not surprisingly, the pitcher and the bowl into which she pours are much too big. There is no room about her, no table, no still-life—only the woman, the pitcher, and the bowl against the yellow and white ground of the logo … Vermeer's color scheme, his maid, gaudily reincarnated as product image.

I remove the lid and place it at the side of the tray. The mousse itself is about what I'd expect: dissolves like sea foam on the tongue. When I'm finished, I carefully clean the inside of the lid with a white paper napkin. I fold it in half, wrap it in the cellophane the napkin came in, and pocket it safely in my denim shirt. I won't look at it again until I write the last page of this manuscript.

It's simply a keepsake, here at the end of my travels. But it feels like a sign, a note of grace—this face that called from across the room, delivered into my hands at the end.

I close the shade against the glare of Greenland beneath. Then I close my eyes. Drifting off, I pat the wrapper safe in my pocket.

Not to make too much of it. Such sentimentality, I think.

Reason says: just a random occurrence. Reason says: just one of those things.

But not this time. Not for me. I know a gift when I see it.

Bailey, Anthony.
A Web of Social History
(Princeton University Press, 1989).

Bailey, Anthony.
Vermeer: A View of Delft
(Henry Holt and Company, 2001).

Gowing, Lawrence.
Vermeer
(University of California Press, 1955).

Liedtke, Walter.
A View of Delft: Vermeer and his Contemporaries
(Yale University Press, 2001)

Liedtke, Walter.
Vermeer: The Complete Paintings
(Abrams, 2008).

Montias, John.
Vermeer and His Milieu
(Princeton University Press, 1991).

Snow, Edward.
A Study of Vermeer
(University of California Press, 1994).

Steadman, Philip.
Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces
(Oxford University Press, 2001).

Wheelock, Arthur.
Vermeer: The Complete Works
(Abrams, 1997).

T
WO BOOKS ON
V
ERMEER
were ideal traveling companions. Lawrence Gowing's classic
Vermeer
is the first book of art criticism I've ever devoured as avidly as a mystery and as obsessively as poetry. Edward Snow's ravishing
A Study of Vermeer
helped map out the subterranean threads that run through Vermeer's oeuvre.

Dr. Kees Kaldenbach's command of art and history continues to shape my thinking on Vermeer in unexpected and gracious ways.

Jonathan Janson, a central figure in contemporary Vermeer studies, has helped me immeasurably. As a working painter, Janson writes with intimacy and authority about Vermeer and about the art of painting in general. His website,
The Essential Vermeer
, is one of the great art troves of the internet, visited daily not only by experts in the field, but also by countless students, travelers, and amateur Vermeer lovers like myself.

Brooke Hopkins, a beloved former professor of mine at the University of Utah, read and wisely reflected on these pages as they were first written. Brooke continued to guide my project even after a bike accident in 2008 left him paralyzed. He passed away on July 31, 2013.

I also received generous critiques from Bob Reiss, Dana Sachs, and Sarah Messer. Thanks to each from the bottom of my heart, and to all my friends at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Love to Bekki and Wendy and Clyde and Peter and especially to my daughter, Sophia.

I'm grateful to the Ucross Foundation, in Ucross, Wyoming; to the Djerassi Foundation, in Woodale, California; and to the Anderson Center, in Red Wing, Minnesota, for blissful residencies where I wrote this book.

The last debt is perhaps the greatest: to Karen Braziller, whose tireless and masterful editing polished each of these sentences over and over again.

M
ICHAEL
W
HITE
is Professor of Creative Writing at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He was educated at the University of Missouri and the University of Utah, where he received his doctorate in English and Creative Writing. His poetry collections are
The Island, Palma Cathedral
(winner of the Colorado Prize),
Re-entry
(winner of the Vassar Miller Prize), and
Vermeer in Hell
(winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award). His work has appeared in
The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Poetry,
and many other magazines and anthologies.

ALSO BY MICHAEL WHITE

Vermeer in Hell
(2014)

Re-entry
(2006)

Palma Cathedral
(1998)

The Island
(1993)

Copyright © 2015 by Michael White

The author wishes to thank the editors of the following periodicals in which pieces from
Travels in Vermeer
have appeared, sometimes in slightly different versions:
The Journal
(“Prelude” and “Amsterdam”),
The Florida Review
(“View of Delft”), and
Image: Art, Faith, Mystery
(“Woman Holding a Balance”).

Lines quoted by Elizabeth Bishop are from “The Moose” in
The Complete Poems 1927–1979
by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983). Used by permission of the publisher.

Lines quoted by Donald Justice are from “Men at Forty,” in
Collected Poems
by Donald Justice, copyright © 2004 by Donald Justice. Used by permission of Alfred A Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an means, electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopy, recording, digital, electronic, mixed media, or any information storage and retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reprint or to make copies and for any other information should be addressed to the publisher:

Persea Books, Inc.
277 Broadway New York,
New York 10007

The Library of Congress has catalogued the printed edition as follows:
White, Michael, 1956–
Travels in Vermeer : a memoir / Michael White.

pages cm

“A Karen and Michael Braziller Book.”
ISBN 978-0-89255-437-9 (alk. paper)
1. White, Michael, 1956–2. Vermeer, Johannes, 1632–1675—Miscellanea. I. Title.
PS3573.H47445Z46 2015
811'.54–dc23
[B]

014016180

ISBN 978-0-89255-440-9 (e-book)

Designed by Rita Lascaro.
First Edition