Unlike many travelers, Honor Moore didn’t visit the ancient island because of the food, the mafia or the sea. it was the memory of her grandmother, a Boston artist, that led her there—and she found what her grandmother had been searching for
My wish to go to Sicily began with an image from my grandmother. She described an ancient Greek temple built of pink stone, at the edge of the Mediterranean, set in the midst of “wild stretches of earth . . . dappled & dimpled with small sweet things—valerian—muscari & small sultry poppies—all stridently in bloom.” She was an artist from Boston who painted under her maiden name, Margarett Sargent, and she wrote those words from Sicily in a letter I found while researching The White Blackbird, the book I wrote about her life. She went to Sicily in the spring of 1954; now, 55 years later, Margarett was sending me. I’d embark on a nine-day trip that would start in Palermo, then take me through the temples and ruins of Segesta, Selinunte, Agrigento and Taormina.
My grandmother was always a force in my creative life, but the message was decidedly mixed. A gifted sculptor who became a modernist painter, Margarett had nine much-praised one-woman shows in six years, only to stop painting in her early forties. As a young writer I often found myself blocked, and of course my grandmother’s fate came to mind. I needed to know what had happened to her, and one day when she was in her eighties, I got up my nerve. “Why did you stop?” I asked. “It got too intense,” she answered. You can see intensity in her highly colored, angular paintings, but she was also referring to something else, an undertow of manic-depressive illness for which she was first hospitalized in her fifties. No one would have predicted a tragic life for the brilliant young woman who at 17 escaped the suffocation of a Boston Brahmin childhood by persuading her par-ents to send her to finishing school in Florence. She came back “crazy for Donatello” and set about becoming an artist. By the 1920s, she was a young mother of four, exhibiting her sculpture and paintings in New York and traveling several weeks a year in Europe with my grandfather.
When I was a child, the grandmother I knew was often hospitalized for depression, but when she emerged she wrote me wonderful letters on brown butcher paper in odd-colored inks. And every birthday present was unusual: at eight, a red jacket from France; at 13, a green satin evening bag.
