William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

As for Helga, she said: ”I became alive. It shows in the pictures. I became young overnight. I’ve never done anything more worthwhile.”

As for the artist, he recalled: “And now I meet this girl and can right get up to her crotch and really look at it and draw it. With no feeling of, oh, you can’t do that.”

And again: “She was an image I couldn’t get out of my mind.”

When Helga undressed for “Overflow,” Wyeth “felt the country, the house, Germany, the dreamy, moist, rich female smell — the whole thing.”

What is the whole thing? Just as paper-thin stage panels painted with flowers sometimes retract, revealing Kabuki dancers arrayed as flowers, so my understanding of female grace may at times draw away, with the same stunning rapidity that a Kabuki dancer’s costume can change from green to red or gold before the audience’s eyes, from what I think I understand now. And how much might that be? — As Wyeth said of Helga: “Whoever she is to us, we cannot know her infinite other identities.”

I cannot imagine any of the geishas and Noh actors whom I have interviewed saying of any aspect of their craft what Wyeth once said about drybrush: “If I control it, it’s no good.”

Perhaps that was why her identities were infinite to him.

In the painting called “Braids,” the black background has grown so rich as to be almost blood-red, and Helga, gorgeously imperfect in the manner of G. M. Hopkins’s poem “Pied Beauty,” gazes down and to the left, hollow-cheeked, with creases at the inward corners of her eyes, and a full nose with a knife-sharp bridge. Her reddish-blonde eyelashes are sufficiently delicate to die for; her braids shine reddish and goldish with lights on them as they twist neatly down her high-collared sweater, vanishing as they approach her sweet breasts; and speaking of sweet, the face of Helga is a mixture of sweetness and severity, unlike her counterpart, the fukai mask, which merely dreams down into the darkness; Helga similarly projects herself into someplace beyond us, but her femininity has been embodied, by her own corporeality and by Andrew Wyeth.

He altered “Braids” after Helga related a certain sexual experience. “I’d painted those braids beautifully coming to the fine end, the fluffy blondness of the hair. I thought, fuck it. This is not it.” He sawed off the bottom of the portrait.

There came the year when he was done with Helga, so that it was time to prepare his exhibition to finally show Betsy. “Taking the lids off the boxes… they had the odor of the girl, they had the whole — I knew they were not just pretty pictures.”

What were they then? “Night Shadow,” according to our authorized biographer, “is Wyeth’s memory of his father in the coffin, the moment he bent down to kiss the forehead, feeling the cold waxiness on his lips.” But what we see is Helga, whose face is paler and softer than we usually encounter it in the corpus of Helga Pictures (“Night Shadow” does not belong to this suite, because Betsy Wyeth kept it and two other Helga paintings), and her familiar half-smile is more of a smile than ever, but her eyes are shut as she lies there on her back, her hair barely surviving the darkness around her, hair braids black, white and honey-gold; a weakish shadow bisects her face below the bridge of the nose, so that she is bright — excepting her left shoulder and the narrow dark ribbon around her throat — below her lovely cream-and-peaches breasts, at which point darkness jaggedly breaks her off. I imagine her as Sigrún in Helgi’s howe, with her dead lover bending over her. But that is merely what Helga means to me. If I were writing a book about Noh, I might try to refer to fog, jade, water; to Nara’s ancient camphorwood statues dim in the rainy darkness. And who knows what Helga would say? For these paintings and drawings of her partake of that mysterious effect based on understated description, yugen . What did the ends of her braids look like before Wyeth sawed them off, and what would it have been like to hold them in my hand? If Wyeth’s father could see from beyond the grave, which if any aspect of himself would he perceive in “Night Shadow”? As for the artist’s wife, when the Helga Suite was first revealed to her, her reaction was: “Who the fuck is this woman? Boy, she looks tough as nails in that one — and she’s as soft as velvet in that one, and who is she and what’s going on here?” John Wilmerding, Deputy Director of the National Gallery, emoted in a more consonant spirit: “Now her sturdy features and sober demeanor, reflective of her northern European background, match the somber browns and enduring contours of this Pennsylvania terrain.” Wyeth himself said, specifically regarding “Night Shadow”: “It’s not just anybody lying there. It’s that momentary thing — something you’ll never see again… That’s my relationship with Helga. Timeless.” He continued, and the past tense made his honesty crueler still, for Helga was (so I’ve read) bereft once he finished with her: “She epitomized all my German background — all imaginative things embodied in her. I used her for a stepping-stone.”

GIRL IN A BOX

To repeat the words of Kanze Hisao: “It is highly detrimental to a mask to be treated like a piece of antique art, to be shut up in a box or shown only in a glass case. It is only on the stage that it continues to maintain its vitality.”

But let me mention a reproduction of a certain ko-omote carved for the Kanzes by Deme Yasuhisa — it is a near-perfect copy of one of Tatsuemon’s masterpieces, which was once referred to by Zeami himself — and this mask, whose underside has been inscribed in gold and red, lives in a box additionally inscribed. “And thus, this mask is known as a hako-iri-musume (girl in a box, meaning a girl brought up with tender care).”

The box opens, offering us a girl’s face sleek with baby fat; her U-shaped double chin mimics the curve of her lower lip. As the mask turns rightward it takes on a shy smile of tenderness or perhaps of pride in receiving some compliment from father, husband, suitor, lord; facing left with its chin a trifle higher, its expression becomes bolder, although no less serene; it could be dreaming of an attachment or contemplating the peace which that attachment’s death will bring. Vertical streaks of light now gild its eyelids. On the left cheek and above the upcurving right corner of the upper lips, birthmarks or timemarks live their quiet lives. The left eyebrow is a wider cloud of black than the left. Darkness shines out at us from the half-smile beneath the black teeth.

The description continues: “A copy of the Honmen of Konparu. The nose tilted to the right and the flesh on top of the cheekbones are superb. Blemish, beauty mark, cracks, and even the damage on the tip of her nose is accurately copied. The colors are quite unique. It is made from the Japanese cinnamon tree 1like the Honmen, and on the back, the nose, eyes, vertical lines from the lower lip to the chin, and the double horizontal cut with a round chisel which interrupts them, are all exactly the same as on the Honmen.”

Too old to be represented by a ko-omote , Helga would be better portrayed by a fukai . Time’s damage to her face deserves to be accurately copied; and although I have never met Helga, I believe in her; the flesh is superb; the perfection of her particularity is as fragrant as a cinnamon tree.

Helga is a girl in a box. I keep my book about her pictures carefully on the shelf. When I open it, I turn the pages as gently as I can.

“There’s no general beauty in the world,” Mr. Kanze Hideo had said to me, and Helga’s loveliness is certainly not general. — But what is any ko-omote , even this famous girl in a box, but a stylized, hence at least partially generalized representation? How much of its subtle individuality can an audience see as a difference? — Or is this question as ingenuous as an inquiry into whether all women who possess two eyes are more or less the same?