The Happy Life by David Malouf

Author:David Malouf [Malouf, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-90782-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

His celebration of his mistress’s body is free, happy, entirely without shame or guilt, and expresses itself in language so active and sensual that it not only reproduces, as far as language can, his own energy and excitement, but attempts to transfer that energy, with its kinetic rhythms, to us as we read:

Licence my roving hands, and let them go

Behind, before, above, between, below …

Oh my America, my new found land.

The body has always been a source of joy of the kind Donne is expressing, and if there were those, during the long period when Christianity and its teachings held sway in Europe, for whom it was guilty joy, shameful, even degrading, there must have been many who felt nothing of this: felt, that is, as Donne did and held their tongue about it. Sexual joy is too overwhelmingly physical to be ignored. Such sceptics, or secret heretics, must have decided that the Church Fathers were somehow wrong about the body, and that their parish priests were either equally wrong or liars; or that they themselves were somehow lost but happy about it, or lost and not.

Certainly there were times and places, among the Cathars, for example, in south-western France in the thirteenth century, where sexual energy and the open expression of it could not be contained and broke out as revolt. And of course there were other parts of the world, equally religious, where sexual energy and its joyful expression were not incompatible with a sense of the sacred or the practice of faith. The temples of India, with their exuberant facades where sculptured figures rejoice in voluptuous poses and engagements of every kind, are monuments to the sacredness of the flesh, and to moments of carnal and spiritual union.

The frank expression of sexual happiness in a poem, in words, is one thing. Painting and the depiction of sensual joy in paint—despite Horace’s famous phrase that links poetry and painting as sister arts—is something quite other.

Though flat and two-dimensional, painting tricks the eye into perceiving a third, creating depth and distance where there is none, giving a bare arm or leg a roundness it does not have, but also a softness, since the visual is not the only sense that painting appeals to and plays with. Objects it picks out on the flat surface of a canvas or a plaster wall have textures we feel we could reach out and test between our fingers. Flesh, and the blood that gives it colour, has a palpable warmth, but the shadow it throws is cool. No painter better controls these effects, or deploys them more richly, than the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens.

Almost exactly Donne’s contemporary, Rubens—already, at sixty, by the standards of his time an old man (Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two)—sets out to paint his second wife, Helena Fourment. The painting still has the power, even in our own century, to shock.

Caught bare-footed and naked in a room with a crimson carpet and a crimson cushion at her feet,

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