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 body inside 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 HIMMELBLAUand continues in minute minusculesfrom 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 incoherence.It began with my usual dispirting CRIT with the DVP. He asked me why I had not writen more of the disertation than I had and I said I had not been very well and also preocupied with getting on with my art-work, as you know, in the Joint Honours Course, the creative work and the Art History get equal marks and I had reached a very difficult stage with the Work. But I had writen some notes on Matisse ‘s distortions of the Female Body with respect especially to the spercificaly Female Organs, the Breasts the Cunt the Labia etc etc and also to his ways of acumulating Flesh on certain Parts of the Body which appeal to Men and tend to imobilise Women such as grotesquely swollen Thighs or protruding Stomachs. I mean to conect this in time to the whole tradition of the depiction of Female Slaves and Odalisques but I have not yet done the research I would need to write on this.Also his Women tend to have no features on their faces, they are Blanks, like Dolls, I find this sinister.Anyway I told the DVP what my line on this was going to be even if I had not writen very much and he argued with me and went so far as to say I was hostile and full of hatred to Matisse. I said this was not a relevant criticism of my work and that Matisse was hostile and full of hatred towards women. He said Matisse was full of love and desire towards women (!!!!!) and I said ‘exactly’ but he did not take the point and was realy quite cutting and undermining and dismisive and unhelpful even if no worse had hapened. He even said in his view I ought to fail my degree which is no way for a supervisor to behave as you will agree. I was so tense and upset by his atitude that I began to cry and he pated me on my shoulders and tried to be a bit nicer. So I explained how busy I was with my art-work and how my art-work, which is a series of mixed-media pieces called Erasures and Undistortions was a part of my criticism of Matisse. So he graciously said he would like to see my art-work as it might help him to give me a better grade if it contributed to my ideas on Matisse. He said art students often had dificulty expresing themselves verbally although he himself found language ‘as sensuous as paint’. [It is not my place to say anything about his prose style but I could.] [This sentence is heavily but legibly crossed out.]Anyway he came— kindly—to my studio to see my Work. I could see immediately he did not like it, indeed was repeled by it which I supose was not a surprise. It does not try to be agreable or seductive. He tried to put a good face on it and admired one or two minor pieces and went so far as to say there was a great power of feeling in the room. I tried to explain my project of revising or reviewing or rearranging Matisse. I have a three-dimensional piece in wire and plaster-of-paris and plasticine called The Resistance of Madame Matisse which shows her and her daughter being tortured as they were by the Gestapo in the War whilst he sits like a Buddha cutting up pretty paper with scissors. They wouldn’t tell him they were being tortured in case it disturbed his work. I felt sick when I found out that. The torturers have got identical scissors.Then the DVP got personal. He put his arm about me and hugged me and said I had got too many clothes on. He said they were a depressing colour and he thought I ought to take them all off and let the air get to me. He said he would like to see me in bright colours and that I was really a very pretty girl if I would let myself go. I said my clothes were a statement about myself, and he said they were a sad statement and then he grabed me and began kissing me and fondling me and stroking intimate parts of me—it was disgusting—I will not write it down, but I can describe it clearly, believe me Dr Himmelblau, if it becomes necesary, I can give chapter and verse of every detail, I am still shaking with shock. The more I strugled the more he insisted and pushed at me with his body until I said I would get the police the moment he let go of me, and then he came to his senses and said that in the good old days painters and models felt a bit of human warmth and sensuality towards each other in the studio, and I said, not in my studio, and he said, clearly not, and went off, saying it seemed to him quite likely that I should fail both parts of my Degree.
Gerda Himmelblau folds the photocopy again and puts it back into her handbag. She then reads the personal letter which came with it.
Dear Dr Himmelblau,I am sending you a complaint about a horible experience I have had. Please take it seriously and please help me. I am so unhapy, I have so little confidence in myself, I spend days and days just lying in bed wondering what is the point of geting up. I try to live for my work but I am very easily discouraged and sometimes everything seems so black and pointless it is almost hystericaly funny to think of twisting up bits of wire or modeling plasticine. Why bother I say to myself and realy there isn’t any answer. I realy think I might be better off dead and after such an experience as I have just had I do slip back towards that way of thinking of thinking of puting an end to it all. The doctor at the Health Centre said just try to snap out of it what does he know? He ought to listen to people he can’t realy know what individual people might do if they did snap as he puts it out of it, anyway out of what does he mean, snap out of what? The dead are snaped into black plastic sacks I have seen it on television body bags they are called. I realy think a lot about being a body in a black bag that is what I am good for. Please help me Dr Himmelblau. I frighten myself and the contempt of others is the last straw snap snap snap snap.Yours sort of hopefully,
Peggi Nollett.
Dr Himmelblau sees Peregrine Diss walk past the window with the cheese-plants. He is very tall and very erect— columnar, thinks Gerda Himmelblau—and has a great deal of well-brushed white hair remaining. He is wearing an olive-green cashmere coat with a black velvet collar. He carries a black lacquered walking-stick, with a silver knob, which he does not lean on, but swings. Once inside the door, observed by but not observing Dr Himmelblau, he studies the little god in his green shade, and then stands and looks gravely down on the lobster, the crabs, and the scallops. When he has taken them in he nods to them, in a kind of respectful acknowledgement, and proceeds into the body of the restaurant, where the younger Chinese woman takes his coat and stick and bears them away. He
