Et tu, Adam?

Last time I began responding to Adam Gopnik's well-written and provocative, but I think problematic, essay in the New Yorker titled "Van Gogh's Ear." A number of

speculations--regarding the reasons why Vincent moved to Arles, regarding the "Christmas Crisis" between he and Gauguin, regarding how the esteemed place Van Gogh occupies in art history was essentially determined by this crisis--are presented as facts. I responded to some of these in my last post. But none of the above represents the most serious weakness in Gopnik's essay. The worst fallacy in the essay is Gopnik's acceptance, indeed his propagation, of the notion that Van Gogh turned "mad" during the Christmas crisis and remained so the rest of his life. In point of fact, Van Gogh's "madness" was never that. Like the manic-depressives and epileptics of today, he suffered from a physical ailment that had psychological consequences. His "attacks" came on only semi-regularly, every few months or so; in between them he was more than lucid. In between attacks he was not, and did not act, crazy in any recognizable way. The letters he wrote at Saint-Remy testify to the essential soundness of his mind. While generally more despondent than his earlier letters, they are in no way irrational, manic, or delusional. In fact, because of his steadiness, relative to other patients, he was granted significant and unusual privileges--such as the right to paint at all, and a separate room to use as a studio, and the freedom to walk the outside grounds in search of subjects, even to travel unaccompanied to Arles! If one did not know of his earlier attacks one would have wondered what in the world this man was doing at a mental hospital. (Btw, Gopnik misrepresents St. Paul's when he calls it "an insane asylum," which suggests raving lunatics locked up for life. While the hospital was often proved ineffectual in doing so, the point of anyone being admitted to St. Paul's was to be treated, cured, and released. Its raison d'etre, if you will, was therapeutic not punitive or merely restrictive.) Theo Van Gogh's wife Joanna was surprised to see how healthy Vincent looked when he visited in May, 1890, after withdrawing himself from St. Paul's. Vincent, she thought, looked healthier and stronger than Theo did! (Click here to read a memoir of Joanna by her son.)

But here's the thing that really chews me up about the Mad Artist myth. Van Gogh never saw his illness as anything but debilitating, because that's what it was. During an attack he was completely taken outside of himself. He had no control. He had to be restrained. It was not as if he was enjoying a beautiful, ecstatic experience that he then transferred to canvas. In fact, when the attacks finally passed he couldn't remember what he did or felt or thought or witnessed during them. And the attacks left him completely enervated, useless to do anything. For weeks on end he could do nothing but rest and recover; certainly, he could not paint. And when he finally found himself feeling reasonable normal again and able to start working anew, he did not set down on canvas any brilliant insights or perspectives from his "madness," he merely went back to work painting the world around him, as he had his whole life. The few truly immortal pictures he did create in Saint-Remy were managed in spite of not because.

Van Gogh was so soul-sickened by this illness that he began to resent ever having gone to the south in the first place, because he suspected that there might be something in the southern air that led certain individuals astray. (In an era when the treatment of mental patients was a pitifully no-nothing enterprise, baseless theories like this one circulated frequently.) As productive as his years in Provence were, he almost wished they had never happened. Not the kind of talk you'd expect if his illness had finally allowed him to be the great painter he always wanted to be. No. Because he'd already become that: in Arles, in the spring, summer, and fall of 1888. (See my previous post.) After the Christmas crisis, Van Gogh was only so much treading water: hoping just to get better, hoping to simply be able to work, less concerned about making masterpieces than returning to the same level of life energy he'd enjoyed before the onset of his attacks. Sadly, this last hope was never to be realized.

Et tu, New Yorker?

A friend of mine at UCA, Robin Becker, kindly passed on to me a recent New Yorker article about Van Gogh and Gauguin: "Van Gogh's Ear" by Adam Gopnik. As literary people, dear readers of this blog, you've probably already scanned the article yourself. (My wife and I subscribe to the New Yorker in an off again/on again fashion, depending on how well we can bear up under the frustration of seeing issue after issue come without time to read it. Currently, we're in an "off again" phase.) If so, so much the better. You know the gist of it already. Before I say anything, I should tell you that Adam Gopnik is one of our favorite journalists. His books Paris to the Moon and Through the Children's Gate hold prominent places in our private library. And his memoir essay "Last of the Metrozoids" may well be my wife's all time favorite.

That said, Gopnik got a lot wrong in his Van Gogh article. In fact, it's a glaring and rather frustrating example of a thoughtful writer unwittingly perpetuating the Mad Artist myth. (See my earlier post, "The Real Van Gogh, Part One.") Gopnik's key point, as he argues for the "decisive break [in Van Gogh's painting]marked by the Christmas crisis," is basically this: if Van Gogh had not gone crazy in Christmas 1888, cutting off his left ear, he would never have become the artist we know and revere, and the history of modern art would have been substantially different. Gopnik emphasizes that it was Van Gogh's "madness"--he tolls at this word repeatedly--that led him to new directions, that enabled him to create his most idiosyncratic and influential pictures.

Gopnik also passes on a newfangled argument by two German art historians that is getting a lot of press recently; namely, that it was Gauguin who actually cut off Van Gogh's ear (with a sword). The evidence for this, which Gopnik calls "arresting," seems awfully thin, and reeks of conspiracy thinking: private codes, enforced secrets, interpretations of latin phrases. But I'm far less concerned about his endorsing this peculiar version of what happened on December 23, 1888 then I am the above mentioned fallacy. First, most of the art historians I consulted when researching my novel agreed that Van Gogh's powers were at their peak in the summer and early fall of 1888. To me, looking at the paintings, this is self-evidently true. In fact, in letters from the hospital in Saint-Remy Van Gogh referred nostalgically to the "high yellow note" he previously worked in, explaining that since the sharp decline in his health it was not a style he could aspire to again. Indeed, the colors in his Saint Remy pictures are far muted, less striking; they do not scream off the canvas in quite the same way as the colors in his Arles pictures. This is not to say that Gogh did not paint impressives pictures at Saint-Remy and Auvers-sur-Oise; Gopnik names some of them; but it is to say that most of the pictures we know the man for, that we look at as breakthroughs--"The Sower," "The Sower with the Setting Sun," "Vincent's Bedroom," the "Sunflower" series, "The Night Cafe," "The Cafe at Night," "Starry Night Over the Rhone," his portraits of the postman Roulin and of the peasant farmer and of a zouave and of the Belgian Eugene Boch--were all completed prior to the arrival of Paul Gauguin in Arles in October of 1888. If he had simply stopped painting after the "Christmas Crisis" his place in art history would have bee more than secure, his influence already established.

[Next time, because I've already kept you for too long: What Gopnik got most wrong.]

The Real Van Gogh, Part One

I'm trying to accomplish several things with my Van Gogh novel. First, I'm hoping to conquer the challenging, painstaking genre of literary historical fiction. This is my first foray into the historical novel, and I want to create something of which I can be proud. Second, I'm simply trying to make a good read. The cardinal rule of all writing, a grad school teacher once told me, is Thou Shalt Not Be Boring. (While he was a terrible teacher in nearly every aspect, I agreed, and still do agree, with him on that point.) I'm hoping readers are drawn into the world of my novel and do not want to be pulled out of it. Third, and just as important, I'm trying to create what I think is a more true Vincent Van Gogh.

While there may not be a better known painter in the last two hundred years than Van Gogh, there is also no painter who has been more mythologized in the popular imagination. The only painter who might rival him in this regard is Jackson Pollock, and even Pollack comes up short. It's no doubt true that in the case of both Van Gogh and Pollock the work they created is central to our interest; their radical breaking through to new ground and new techniques, their battles against the conventions of painting in their times. (Click here to watch a short documentary made in 1951 in which Pollock discusses his technique.) But we all know that is not the only reason for our interest in these painters. That cannot be the only reason why we write poems and pop songs about them, why we make documentaries about them, why we plaster their pictures on neckties and baby bowls and t-shirts, why we name brands of liqueurs after them and travel to visit their hometowns like worshippers on religious pilgrimages. In Van Gogh's case, our mythologizing stems from an obvious source: our fascination with madness. Everyone seems to know and love the image of the Mad Artist. To some, usually people who have done no artistic work in their lives, it's an axiom that artists must be deranged or alcoholics or sexual perverts, or all of the above. So that Van Gogh "went crazy" and cut off his own ear is simply accepted as a natural byproduct of his artistic greatness. And it makes us love him all the more. And finally it explains our unrelenting interest in him.

But it's also a myth. As with many alluring stories, it's simply wrong. Or at best half a truth. Yes, Van Gogh did indeed experiences attacks in which his normal sense of self disappeared; and during the first of these he famously cut off his left ear. But he was never simply "crazy." The attacks were the physical result of a physical ailment. (Today's current best estimate is that he suffered from a rare form of epilepsy.) More to the point, in between attacks he was as lucid as the next man. In fact, if you consider his whole life he was more lucid than the next man. His extraordinary letters bear this out. Even more to the point, the attacks didn't even begin until after he had passed his artistic highpoint. It's a commonly held idea--I've actually heard people say this--that Van Gogh couldn't have created the great paintings he did if he were not crazy. Well, my answer is that not only was he never "crazy," but his physical ailment actually diluated his well of creativity and brought an end to the period of his life when he could work with sustained brilliance. In short, my novel is not the life story of a crazy man, but the story of a unique and extremely driven man, one who milked every once of talent in his bones to make the paintings he did. I'm hoping to debunk the myth of the madman--cut off its ear, if you will--and put in its place the picture of a canny, empathetic, and even prophetic person who at the same time could be short-sighted, quick to anger, and fantastically self-centered. Do these qualities make Van Gogh crazy? No! But they make him richly complicated as a fictional character, and much more real to me--way more real than poor Vincent, the Suffering Insane Genius.