Art as a permanent passion

YEATS declared it a necessary choice: “Perfection of the life or of the work.” Sophocles had the prodigious archer Philoctetes maimed by a suppurating wound so hideous and stinking that the Greeks shunned him until they required his bowman’s art at Troy.

The notion of a permanently embattled frontier between the life of art and the artistry of living is venerable but easily abused. As, for instance, by resorting to Vincent van Gogh’s severed ear to stand for the distorted sacrifice genius demands of those who exercise it.

Jill Ciment explores the frontier in her partly allegorical “The Tattoo Artist.” There is nothing of cliche; on the contrary, she devises an ingenious and provocative image as the principal strength of a novel that is attractive but somewhat makeshift.

On the eve of World War II, a rich collector dispatches Philip, a vain but untalented painter, to acquire masks and carvings on the South Seas island of Ta’un’uu. Sara, his wife, goes with him. She too is a painter, one whose genuine but undeveloped gifts have won her a soon-to-be exhausted success in the New York art world.

After landing they are marooned, doubly. Philip’s beachside display of trinkets is coldly ignored by the islanders. Nor do they show the slightest interest when, introducing a worm of commercial ambition, he props a book open against a tree to display facing plates of Picasso paintings and primitive masks. (Ciment’s occasional wryness is one of the book’s incidental pleasures.)

Then, after an elder agrees to trade some of his carvings, a lightning bolt kills his daughter. Why did these strangers come to his island? he rages. The villagers confine them in a pigpen; the elder brings needles and colored inks and agonizingly tattoos their faces. “You were so curious to own my art,” he tells them with bitter irony.

It is punishment. But it is also initiation -- into the implications of art, with its demanding transformations of nature, and a spirituality achieved through mortification. Sara will reflect much later:

“The Ta’un’uuans believe that to tattoo and to be tattooed is the deepest form of intimacy ... the puncturing of the skin, the entry into another’s body, the flow of blood, the infliction of pleasure and pain.” Where Westerners locate the core of being as deep inside, “the islanders believe that their true selves are written on their skin, on every point and place where one human being connects to another.”

Philip, the trifler, gets six black bars that in effect obliterate his features. Sara’s face is inscribed with tiny visages expressing such basic emotions as joy and rage. Punishment, therefore, in that it preempts her own expressions. And initiation, in that art supersedes nature.

Initiation is a long ordeal. They are confined, shunned and barely fed. When the ship that dropped them off returns for a rendezvous, the villagers, their facial tattoos indistinguishable from Philip’s and Sara’s, surround the captives and imitate their supplicant signals and gestures. Fooled, the ship’s crew sails off.

In its choking horror, the couple’s plight recalls that of Tony Last, hero of Evelyn Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust,” whose jungle captor convinces would-be rescuers that his prisoner has died, thus condemning Last to read Dickens aloud to him for the rest of Last’s life. For Sara and Philip, though, it will be a beginning of transformation.

Philip’s will be short-lived; he is killed along with other villagers when a Japanese submarine shells the island. Sara begins a 30-year journey into a newfound art; she will tattoo her entire body for it, and become the islanders’ most sought-after practitioner.

“The greatness of the tattoo artist,” she reflects as an old woman, “lies in her ability to gauge the degree to which she can push her art before the art kills the canvas.”

Didactic as it becomes at times, and perhaps initially far-fetched, the writer’s use of her tattoo story as an image for the processes of art is a success. That’s because it is more than an image. The tattooing scenes, along with the contrast of Western and island beliefs, are set out in particulars that are rich and strange.

Less successful are two framing sections. The couple’s previous lives in New York -- hers as a struggler, his as a spoiled rich kid -- are told hastily and with a certain clanking arrangement. (The wryness occasionally helps. When Philip suggests she go in for free love, Sara, who shares a tenement with six others and sleeps on a board over the bathtub, muses: “I couldn’t imagine whom I’d bring home to my tub.”)

The final section, in which Life magazine discovers Sara in the 1970s and brings her back to New York, both races and droops. It is a routine portrayal of disillusionment with contemporary culture, felt by someone who, on her South Seas island, had left it far behind. *