Mas Ballot

One of the pleasures of researching and writing a novel, historical or not, is getting to know other places and people. In writing my first novel, set in a Trappist monastery, I developed a relationship with a specific Trappist community in South Carolina. I ended up visiting the monastery four times, and for several Christmas's running sent them a donation. My Van Gogh novel has taken me even farther afield: all the way across the ocean. Since I've started working on this project, I've visited Paris twice and Provence three times. (My longest stay, five weeks, came last summer.) I've walked the streets of Montmartre, shuffled around the Louvre, and strolled the Boulevard Montmartre--where Theo Van Gogh's gallery was located. In Provence, I've spent many hours in the city of Arles and other parts of the Camargue; I've driven out to the Abbaye de Montmajour, where Van Gogh often went to paint for its views of Arles and La Crau; I've taken a day trip to Montpellier, scene of an uncomfortable visit by Van Gogh and Gauguin to the Musée Fabre (see an earlier post); and three times I've visted the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy where Vincent voluntarily committed himself for over a year. These were wonderful, memorable, and extremely useful tours. But the single greatest benefit of my trips to France has been finding and experiencing Mas Ballot.

No, there's no direct Van Gogh connection (although the owner has an abiding interest in Van Gogh's rendering of constellations). Mas Ballot is a beautifully maintained house in the quiet village of Raphele-les-Arles, and it's where I've stayed during each of my three visits to Provence. I happened to find it on the internet five years ago, and boy was I lucky. Not only is the house surberly decorated in French country style--which my wife appreciates--with a sweet back garden, but it's large enough for a family to spread out in it, and it's a comfortable distance from Arles: close enough to drive to quickly, and far enough away that it can act as an oasis of countrified silence. You can sit on the upper balcony at night with a glass of wine and take in a huge sky of stars with only the sounds of an occasional car passing on the road nearby to disturb your communion. My wife and I have enjoyed many many glasses of wine on that balcony as our two sons slept in the bedroom just inside. (In fact, my profile photo--click on the Sidebar--was taken on balcony at Mas Ballot.)

I don't know if Van Gogh ever passed through Raphele-les-Arles, but he was famously a walker, and when I stay at Mas Ballot--whether enjoying the broad night sky, or running the next morning along a country road, passing farm houses and fields of crops--I sense that I am taking in the provencal landscape much as Vincent did, a landscape that has changed remarkably little in the last 100 years. And when I'm overheated from a day of exploring I can always jump in the pool, a luxury--I admit--not available to Vincent.

I love my home in Arkansas and my friends here, but I really can't think of any other place I'd rather be than Mas Ballot, especially in the summer: walking to the bakery, listening to the cicadas, reading and sunning myself on the patio, attempting a watercolor portrait of my sons, cooking up a dinner from the groceries we just bought from the Geant store up the road. Enjoying that glass of wine. I can't know if when I finally finish my novel I will have occasion to experience Mas Ballot, or Provence, again. But I'm certainly hoping so. And I keep trying to improve my French.

A Paris party

One of the interesting features for me in writing this book is that certain chapters are from other points of view. Even if the book is Vincent's life story, I don't always remain in his point of view. This isn't unusual, although perhaps a bit counterintuitive. Colum McCann, for example, did the same in his book Dancer, a fictional take on the life of Rudolf Nureyev. As with McCann's book, a reader of mine may not pick up on the logic of why certain chapters are presented from other points of view. All I can say is that the chapters had to be written that way. The other points of view were present from the first moments I imagined those scenes. I was working on one yesterday that featured a party in Monmartre attended by many people Vincent knew there. The point of view character is Suzanne Valadon (there she is on the right, as portrayed by Renoir, and on the left as she portrayed herself) , a painter who ran with the Neoimpressionist crowd, modeled for some of them, and eventually earned well-deserved esteem for her work. In this case, there's a very specific reason why I presented the scene from Valadon's point of view. She did attend a party that Van Gogh went to and, years later, documented her observations about him. Anyone who looks into Van Gogh's biography will probably come across Valadon's recollection of that party. In doing the party scene it was Valadon's recollection that guided me from the start.

But here's something I've noticed, both in my own chapters and in real life research. Those who offered first person recollections of Van Gogh often remembered a man who is much more quirky, temperamental, and even anti-social than the Van Gogh I see in his own letters. So both in my book and in historical data, pictures of a canny and empathetic man butt up against pictures of a driven, self-involved, bewildering crank. Am I muddling the picture of my protagonist to a dangerous degree? Or am I presenting an interesting, real worldly complexity. After all, how we think of ourselves, how person X thinks of us, how person Y thinks of us, and how person Z thinks of us can be wildly divergent notions. The phenomenon I'm noting with Van Gogh is probably no different than it would be for most people, if others (years later) took the time to write down recollections of them. And in Van Gogh's case, the reputation of a man who cut off his own ear and eventually shot himself had to have embedded itself in people's minds. I think it may be true that in retrospect people remember a Van Gogh that was more erratic than the real man. Or maybe that's an excuse, an apology. But I think it makes sense. But too finally it's irrelevant to my dilemma, which is: should I keep these different pictures of my protagonist together, sometimes side-by-side? Will that help or hinder my novel? For now, they're in. Complexity is normally a good thing for main characters. It's not bad if mine demonstrates some. But with that said, I'm a long way from being done and from having made final decisions.