Watching Lust, Part One

Recently, I spent a week at my mother's house in Cobb Island, Maryland helping her out as she recovers from a rather serious surgical procedure. One of my sisters, who also lives on Cobb Island, felt it was about time I watch Lust for Life--the 1956 movie based on Irving Stone's bestselling Van Gogh novel--so she ordered it off Netflix for us. As I've mentioned in a past entry, I purposefully avoided Lust for Life, in both its novel and film versions, when I composed my novel Days on Fire. I firmly believed that a 21st century rendition of Van Gogh's life needed to be imagined and crafted independent of an early 20th century one. (Stone's novel appeared in 1934.) But having more or less completed my project, there seemed no point in hesitating any longer, so I watched the film with my mother and sister, quite curious about what aspects of Van Gogh's life and character the moviemakers--including Kirk Douglas, who plays Van Gogh--would choose to emphasize.

It should come as no surprise that Lust for Life the movie is very much a piece of its time. (This is true of just about any work of art, and is surely true too of my own novel. It's just hard to see that when something is both so new and so close to you.) The movie engages in just the kind of bowdlerization and heroic mythmaking that we've come to expect from the 1950s. And of course it takes several shortcuts in order to tell its story in 122 minutes. It completely ignores Vincent's childhood years in Brabant (a rural region of south Holland) as well as the crucially important, formative years as an art dealer in The Hague and in London. (Arguably, everything that came from his life, both good and bad, was a reaction to the disappointments of that time. Certainly, this is when his sarcastic ideas about the art business were formed.) Instead the movie picks up when Vincent is about to go off to the Borinage, a mining region in southern Belgium, where he tried to make a go as a lay preacher. I suppose this is as good of a place to start as any if you want to introduce tension into a movie. And I certainly understand having to cut something out to get your movie down to size. But, still, I felt the inherent absences caused by the moviemaker's choice. Don't get me wrong. Some aspects of the movie I admired but others I chuckled at. Some I thought were ridiculous. There are undeniably lovely scenic shots of Arles and other locations in southern France. And some of the testy artistic debates with which Gauguin and Vincent (repeatedly) engaged is fairly suggested by the movie, which does an admirable job summarizing the contrasting principles upon which each man based his work.

However, a good deal of what is depicted is terribly contorted and finally plain wrong. Sien, the prostitute who Van Gogh met (probably on a street corner) in The Hague and lived with for over a year, enters the movie not in The Hague but in an Amsterdam bar, the very night after Vincent is rejected by his cousin K and her family. While this makes for an efficient segue from one romantic interest to the next, it's a serious distortion of the facts of Van Gogh's life. He met Sien not only in a different city but after several months had passed, months that gave him necessary time to get over his fierce--and blunted--passion for his cousin. Moreover, in the movie Sien is portrayed as a distraught, underemployed cleaning woman, rather than what she really and infamously was.

While such a tidying up of history is to be expected in a 50s movie--or any movie--I was more surprised by how diminished are the roles of Theo and of Vincent's father. Vincent's father, the Reverend Theodorus Van Gogh, appears in exactly one scene, a drastic diminishment of the man who, in both positive and negative ways, was perhaps the most important influence in Vincent's life, at least until he met Gauguin. Theo appears in many more of the movie's scenes, but it's a fairly bloodless, antiseptic interpretation, as Theo's function seems to be simply to tell Vincent what to do--i.e., where to live, whom to meet--without seeming all that engaged in his brother's existence. In the movie, Theo is always smooth and always right. Vincent does what Theo says and thereafter thanks Theo for his advice. In reality, the brothers disagreed often, especially as to where Vincent should move, and what he should do, next. One of the most fascinating aspects of reading the Collected Letters is to watch the push and pull of their relationship, to see not just the affection Vincent felt for Theo but also the bouts of anger and disillusionment. To see Vincent openly bullying Theo or attempting to manipulate him. At the same time, Theo was Vincent's most reliable and informed sounding board on all things artistic. And Theo was hardly the impeccably cool, uninvolved customer. The nearly two years they lived together in Paris severely tested the young brother's patience and almost exhausted him; yet at the same time he was as dependent on Vincent as Vincent was on him. It is no accident that he died shortly after Vincent did.

(Next post: More mythmaking--and Vincent dies!)

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 Two

Near the end of the walkway that leads to the visitor's entrance to St. Paul's Hospital in Saint-Remy one finds a bronze statue of Vincent Van Gogh. In his left hand he holds a bouquet of gargantuan, oversized sunflowers; his right hand hangs limp and emptily at his side. His face, meanwhile, is fixed with a far off expression, the look of a man too involved with extraworldly concerns to survive in this unforgiving valley of tears. It's an artfully constructed, and I'm sure for most people affecting, statue, but when I look at it I can only think "Ughh." I griped last time about cliched ideas regarding artists and madness, specifically the idea that Vincent Van Gogh was mad and for that reason--rather than in spite of it--he became a great artist. But there's another, almost equally strong, myth about Van Gogh, one that I see motivating the statue at St. Paul's: the myth of the Artistic Saint. The opposite of the myth of the Mad Artist, this myth insist on seeing Van Gogh as a symbol of almost inhuman purity. Keepers of the myth see him as fundamentally a victim: of his times, of artistic conventions, of poverty, of illness, of anonymity. He was a beautiful soul tortured by ideals too high for this world, creating in the midst of his sufferings those sweet, bright paintings for which he is best known. Listen to Don McLean's cloying "Vincent" (you probably know the song as "Starry Starry Night") to hear the perfect expression of this myth. Like a saint tortured for his belief, Van Gogh suffered for his idealism; and like a saint rewarded for his trials by entering heaven in the afterlife, Van Gogh has gone on to his own eternal reward: artistic immortality.

Yuck.

The Artistic Saint may be an even more aggravating myth than Vincent the Madman, perhaps because it is as impicitly condescending while at the same time pretending sympathy. No doubt Vincent Van Gogh suffered. The path he finally chose for his life--after an extended period of false starts--was not an easy one. But here's the deal: He did choose it. He knew what he was getting into. Anyone who has read Van Gogh's letters knows what a shrewd (in the best sense) and canny man he was. He wanted pity from no one, especially not from his family. In his mind, nothing he did, and none of the physical and emotional trials he went through, deserved pity. They were simply what one could expect when one devotes oneself completely to one's craft. All he ever really wanted from others was the recognition that he knew what he was doing. Which he self-evidently did. Neither was Van Gogh a saint of any kind. He could be short tempered, self-involved, and petty, even toward his brother, whose monthly contributions he literally could not have survived without, and certainly toward his parents. In fact, as I drafted my novel I felt a growing sympathy for Van Gogh's father, who Vincent often potrtayed in letters as a dunderhead and tyrant of respectability. The fact is, Vincent Van Gogh was not an easy person to deal with, even if one loved him and was trying to help him. His whole life he demonstrated an innate fury--he was an Aries, for anyone who cares about such things--that drove him both to extremes and to discoveries. Not until late in his life, physically exhausted and morally depressed by the epileptic attacks that came at regular intervals and clearly would keep coming, did the tone of his correspondence become more despondent and that fury dampen. In their 1955 book Passionate Pilgrim, one of many I've consulted in my research, Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson argue that it wasn't until he was confined in St. Paul's that Van Gogh, his rough edges worn away by illness and defeat, showed the sympathetic personality so commonly associated with him. Now, Passionate Pilgrim is a deeply flawed book, with some grotesque factual errors and an unfortunate carping tone, as the authors go out of their way to say more or less one thing: Vincent Van Gogh was not a pleasant man. Personally, I think the Hansons oversell their case; they overlook a great deal of evidence that suggests Van Gogh was a loyal friend, a cheerful correspondent, an intelligent and determined craftsman, a remarkably astute reader of the contemporary art scene, and--it must be said--a real sap when it came to women he was infatuated with. But they are right about this: Van Gogh was not a saint. If he were, he would not be such an engaging character to fictionalize--and that he surely is proving to be.