“Not walled facts, their essence”: Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound and Camille Pissarro

Life writing — a genre which goes beyond traditional biography, includes both fact and fiction, and is concerned with either entire lives or days-in-the-lives of individuals, communities, objects, or institutions — has always played an important role in Derek Walcott’s work. This body of work reaches from Another Life (1973),Walcott’s autobiography in verse, to his last play O Starry Starry Night (2014), where he re-imagines Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh’s (often tempestuous) cohabitation in the so-called “Yellow House” in 1888 Arles. In Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), Walcott’s life rhymes with that of the Impressionist painter Jacob Camille Pissarro, who was born in the Caribbean island of St Thomas in 1830. In this work, biographical and autobiographical impulses, fact and fiction, are productively combined, as “creation” (what “might have happened”) shapes Walcott’s life writing as much as “recreation” (what “actually” happened). Walcott’s Pissarro is an individual immersed in a set of historical networks. He is also a figure at the centre of a web of imagined relations which illuminate the predicament of present and past artists in the Caribbean region and the ways in which they articulate their vision vis-à-vis the metropolitan centre, their relationship with their social and natural environment, and their individual and collective identity. Tiepolo’s Hound is enriched by the inclusion of 26 of Walcott’s own paintings which engage in conversation with the poet’s words and add complexity to his meditation on the nature and purpose of (re)writing and (re)creating lives. Extending the catholicity of life writing to animals, in this case dogs and, in particular, mongrels, Tiepolo’s Hound also entails a careful, if counterintuitive, evaluation of anonymity.