Free The Matisse Stories by A.S. Byatt

idiosyncratic. Dr Himmelblau’s younger colleagues find him rambling and embarrassing. Dr Himmelblau, personally, is not of this opinion. In her view, Perry Diss is always talking about something, not about nothing, and in her view, which she knows to be the possibly crabbed view of a solitary intellectual, nearing retirement, this is increasingly rare. Many of her colleagues, Gerda Himmelblau believes, do not
like
paintings. Perry Diss does. He loves them, like sound apples to bite into, like fair flesh, like sunlight. She is thinking in his style. It is a professional hazard, of her own generation. She has never had much style of her own, Gerda Himmelblau—only an acerbic accuracy, which is an
easy
style for a very clever woman who looks as though she ought to be dry. Not arid, she would not go so far, but dry. Used as a word of moderate approbation. She has long fine brown hair, caught into a serviceable knot in the nape of her neck. She wears suits in soft dark, not-quite-usual colours—damsons, soots, black tulips, dark mosses—with clean-cut cotton shirts, not masculine, but with no floppy bows or pretty ribbons—also in clear colours, palest lemon, deepest cream, periwinkle, faded flame. The suits are cut soft but the bodyinside them is, she knows, sharp and angular, as is her Roman nose and her judiciously tightened mouth.
    She takes the document out of her handbag. It is not the original, but a photocopy, which does not reproduce all the idiosyncrasies of the original—a grease-stain, maybe butter, here, what looks like a bloodstain, watered-down at the edges, there, a kind of Rorschach stag-beetle made by folding an ink-blot, somewhere else. There are also minute drawings, in the margins and in the text itself. The whole is contained in a border of what appear to be high-arched wishbones, executed with a fine brush, in India ink. It is addressed in large majuscules
TO THE DEAN OF WOMEN STUDENTS
DR GERDA HIMMELBLAU
    and continues in minute minuscules
    from peggi nollett, woman and student.
    It continues:
       I wish to lay a formal complaint against the DISTINGUISHED VISITING PROFESSOR the Department has seen fit to appoint as the supervisor of my disertation on
The Female Body and Matisse.
    In my view, which I have already made plain to anyone who cared to listen, and specificly to Doug Marks, Tracey Avison, Annie Manson, and also to you, Dr Gerda Himmelblau, this person should never have been assigned to direct this work, as he is
completley out of sympathy
with its feminist project. He is a so-called EXPERT on the so-called MASTER of MODERNISM but what does he know about Woman or the internal conduct of the Female Body, which has always until now been MUTE and had no mouth to speak.
    Here followed a series
o(
tiny pencil drawings which, in the original, Dr Himmelblau could make out to be lips, lips ambiguously oral or vaginal, she put it to herself precisely, sometimes parted, sometimes screwed shut, sometimes spattered with what might be hairs.
    His criticisms of what I have written so far have always been null and extremely agressive and destructive. He does not understand that my project is ahistorical and
need not involve
any description of the so-called development of Matisse’s so-called style or approach, since what I wish to state is esentially
critical
, and presented from a
theoretical
viewpoint with insights provided from contemporary critical methods to which the cronology of Matisse ‘s life or the order in which he comitted his ‘paintings’ is
totaly irelevant.
    However although I thought I should begin by stating my theoretical position yet again I wish at the present time to lay a spercific complaint of
sexual harasment
against the DVP. I can and will go into much more detail believe me Dr Himmelblau but I will set out the gist of it so you can see there is something here
you must take up.
    I am writing while still under the effect of the shock I have had so please excuse any