Watching Lust, Part Two

In my last entry, I discussed some of my reactions to the 1956 movie Lust for Life, an adaptation of the 1934 Irving Stone novel of the same name. I ended on a note about the film's bloodless interpretation of Theo, Vincent's brother. How the film depicts Paul Gauguin is far more interesting and far more successful. Played with a fierce, commanding self-composure by Anthony Quinn, Quinn's Gauguin is arrogant, commanding, and clear-eyed, an obvious foil to Kirk Douglas's more emotional and, toward the end of film, even raging Vincent. The different depictions of the two men certainly do point to real differences in their personalities. Vincent indeed was a far more emotionally based individual than Paul Gauguin, who could fairly be called calculating, even scheming. Gauguin should also be called a liar and a weasel, an aspect of his personality that the movie doesn't quite explore. Arguably, in the standoff between the two Yellow House roommates, in the vortex of their deteriorating relationship, the film suggests that Gauguin is the sane and reliable, even if he is also rather cold personally. (The film also suggests that Van Gogh was the much heavier drinker of the two men. Nothing factual points to that conclusion. Nothing factual even points to a great fondness for absinthe on Vincent's part, despite his reputation to the contrary. And Gauguin was the more frequent visitor to brothels--an aspect of 19th century male life, and Van Gogh's life too, that the movie simply declines to explore.)

The real Gauguin certainly was sane and cold, but never reliable. There's every indication that his famous account of Vincent's 1888 breakdown--when Vincent cut his ear off--is a network of self-serving lies, none of them verified by any other source. Unfortunately, the movie seems to rely on Gauguin's account for its lurid depiction of the event. The myth of the Tragically Mad Vincent, something I've complained about in other posts, is fully on display. But it gets only worse when the movie moves on to Vincent's last months in the quiet northern village of Auvers-sur-Oise. Without question, these were not happy months in Vincent's life. He had come to the realization that he would never be truly cured. The power of his painting had self-evidently diminished. The predicted friendship with Paul Gachet--a physician in the village who was both an art lover and had an interest in mental illness--a friendship Theo was counting on to provide support and counsel for Vincent in Auvers, turned sour rather quickly. So it is no great surprise, really, that Vincent would have decided his life and energy was all but spent, that there was no reason for him to continue on. All that said, the movie tries to portray him as not depressed but deranged. In one striking scene, a band plays in the street outside of a bar where Vincent sits desperately clinging to a drink. The music literally drives Vincent crazy as he winces and wiggles and clutches his ears trying to keep out the sound. It is the kind of scene that was likely deeply affecting to audiences when the film was released but which seems pathetically overdone now.

There is more of this Tragically Mad mythmaking in the movie's final minutes. Vincent is painting in a field, at work on what is widely--and erroneously--called his "final painting": Wheat Field with Crows. While Wheat Field with Crows is one of his last paintings, by no means was it his absolute last. In fact, art historians date it as having been completed weeks before Van Gogh died. Viewers of the painting simply would like to believe it was his last because of the strong note of foreboding in it: the threatening blue-black sky and the low-hanging bodies of crows that look like harbingers of death. Of course, people think, just before he died he painted a painting about death. It's too poetically perfect not to believe; but it's also simply wrong. The movie goes one step further. In the movie, this isn't merely Vincent's last painting but Vincent kills himself while painting it. He tries to work, but is struck by another fit similar to what is shown in the bar scene. In the anxiety of the moment, he pulls out a gun and shoots himself. "Now where would he have gotten the gun?" my sister smartly commented. Well, in fact, plenty of frenchmen owned guns in the 19th century, but Vincent was not in the habit of carrying one when he went painting. If, as is commonly held, Vincent shot himself in a field on July 27, 1890--a new biography disputes this notion and claims he was accidentally shot by someone else--he surely took the gun out with him just for this purpose. And by no means was he in the middle of painting Wheat Field with Crows, a controlled and striking painting. This shooting scene is nothing more than melodramatic Hollywood blather.

But to be fair, it's no less blather than most films of the day would have shown you. Or that most films show you now. Is Lust for Life worth watching? Yes, it still is. But please don't think that it transmits an accurate, or even sensitive, interpretation of the life of the artist. The real Van Gogh was far more complicated than the writhing, raging, movie cut up. The real Van Gogh was both more lucid and, for those who knew him best, more maddening a man.

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!)

Is it really a new Van Gogh?

If you read this blog you probably know that there's a new Van Gogh biography out just now, by authors Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh. Not surprisingly for a book with the blunt, comprehensive title Van Gogh: The Life (not "a" life, but "the" life), the volume spans some 900 pages. (And I thought the previous draft of my novel was long!) If nothing else, the publication of yet another Van Gogh biography demonstrates the continuing cultural fascination with this man who during his life was so ignored, suspected, pitied, or detested. While of course one fears an overload of Van Gogh material on the market, I have to think this demonstration of interest in Van Gogh is a promising sign for the eventual appearance and success of my novel Days On Fire.

Smith and Naifeh's book is grabbing headlines for their contention that Van Gogh did not actually commit suicide but was accidentally shot by two gun-toting, playacting kids. This certainly is a provocative argument, although of course one has to wonder why, if true, these facts were not widely known before. Also, as one BBC reporter notes, by insisting on this interpretation of events, the two authors "pay little heed to the one person who was definitely there - Vincent van Gogh - when he quite clearly said: 'Do not accuse anyone... it is I who wanted to kill myself.'" Truth be told, I did not carefully research Van Gogh's death when I consulted secondary sources for my novel, the reason being that I knew I did not want to take my novel all the way to Van Gogh's death. Instead I wanted to focus the ending of my book on Van Gogh's triumph over his own limitations and his subsequent artistic breakthrough in that crucial, singular summer in Arles. The only contrasting opinion I came across about Van Gogh's death was the opinion put forth by one author that while Van Gogh did shoot himself he did so not with suicide in mind but to punish himself for his failures as a man and a brother. Given Van Gogh's melancholic state of mind near the end, after he realized he would never truly be through with his illness, and given his acute awareness of how much he owed Theo, of how great the burden was he placed upon that man, I can almost accept that author's opinion. But, as I said, not one other source--until now--ever suggested his suicide was anything other than what it looked like.

Some of Smith and Naifeh's other claims interest me even more. For instance, that Vincent's family tried repeatedly to have him installed in an insane asylum before he went there voluntarily on his own in 1889. Also that some in his family suspected Vincent of killing his own father. While I am not familiar with the former claim, I suppose it could be credible, although by the time Vincent moved to Arles--really as soon as he moved to Antwerp from Nuenen (where his father, mother, and sister Wil were living at the time of his father's death)--he was well out of his family's hair, and clearly committed to a life as an artist. As I've repeated to many a soul, and a few times on this blog, Van Gogh's famous mental breakdown in Arles came several years after he had devoted himself to the life of the artist and only after he had created many if not most of his greatest pictures. Up until that point there was every reason for his family to continue their patient--or let's say resigned--acceptance of his eccentricities. I'm simply stunned, however, that anyone, much less a family member, could suspect that Vincent killed his father. Smith and Naifeh will truly have to prove this one to me. There is no doubt Vincent's relationship with his father was an emotinally fraught one, but it was also arguably the most important relationship of his life, even more significant than his relationship with Theo, at least until he formed an obsessive and dangerous friendship with Gauguin late in his life. Vincent's frustration with his father was the flip side of his love and respect for the man. After all, he had once wanted to follow his father's steps into the ministry. And in some crucial ways, albeit after severe doubts, his father--in his fashion--finally supported Vincent's call to painting. Of course, Smith and Naifeh don't say that Vincent actually did kill his father, only that some in the family suspected this. Who the "some" are is a key question. Even so, I have my doubts. Unlike the famous/infamous biopic Lust for Life (more on that movie in a later post)--in which Vincent's father appears in exactly one scene--Theodorus Van Gogh the father is one of the central and most interesting characters in my novel. How sad to think that a family member could not appreciate how intertwined Vincent's life was with his father's, even long after Vincent had rejected his father's profession and way of life. In my opinion, Vincent needed his father even more then--as a whipping boy, as a convex mirror, and as a measuring stick. If it's true that some members of his family could think him capable of ending Theodorus's life, or anyone's life besides his own, that only shows how badly they misunderstood their painterly relative.

And that's hardly news at all.

Babbits and more babbits

Last spring in one of my creative writing classes, a student wrote a curious short story in which she made reference to "babbitry." When the story was workshopped, many of her classmates asked about the phrase, an allusion that none of them caught, and not surprisingly. Prior to this class, I don't think that Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel--or the book's title character--had come up in any discussion I've ever had in a ficiton writing class. The novel, as famous as it was in its day, simply isn't taught or read anymore. Even I, who caught the reference and explained it to the class, knew the book only by its reputation. I'd read and enjoyed Main Street (1920) a long long time ago; and for several years I've intended to read Arrowsmith (1925), which is actually on my book shelf. But I'd never gotten around to reading Babbitt. Well, as you know if you've followed this blog, I'm a fan of the audiobook. I "read" a lot of things that way, during my morning run. So recently I went to Audible.com to find and download Babbitt. Turns out I had several different audio versions of the novel to choose from. Even more interesting, many of the versions were released only recently. This surprised me--such new life from an old book--but then I realized it made perfect sense. What better statement about our current political doldrums, and what better dunderhead to represent them than George F. Babbit?

I'm about three-quarters of the way through right now, and the book still seems to be an elongated, satiric character sketch. Lewis is not completely without sympathy for his title character, and it's not as if nothing of interest ever happens to the man, but the clear point of the novel is to hold up the Babbitt type for critical scrutiny. And what exactly is the Babbitt type? In short, someone who assumes that any place or anything not American must necessarily be inferior, who sticks doggedly to a low/middlebrow notion of what art means and sees little use for art outside of generating ad copy and cowboy movies, who believes that only businessmen are doing America's business, that fundamentally no one else contributes, who believes that any idea of shared community needs and community interests is akin to socialism, who walks around determined to see himself as kind, civic, progressive in spirit, and even moral while all the while acting dishonestly in his real estate business, attending church purely for appearance's sake, looking to cheat on his wife, and despising every public-concerned political initiative. In short, someone with no self-awareness. An obvious hypocrite, and--as the book goes on to show--a very sad case.

And I wonder why the novel might be ready for a comeback? Indeed, as I listen to it, what strikes me over and over is how relevant the ninety year old story is. Sometimes scarily so. Nothing depresses and infuriates me more than those who see any and all government investment as simply a matter of taking from the deserving and giving to the nondeserving. That idea is so trite, so mean spirited, and so factually wrong that I almost can't believe it survives. Oh, but how it does. In all this Tea Party zealotry about lowering taxes for the rich, and cutting government services to the bone, what gets utterly overlooked is how mutual so many of the concerns are that lie behind the threatened programs. We all benefit from an educated public; we all benefit from a good health care system; we all benefit from a sustainable environment; we all benefit from an active arts culture; we all benefit from a solid infrastructure and a well-supported military and the opportunity for our children to go to college and accurate scientific data on how our planet is changing. How is any of that a matter of taking from the deserving and giving to the none deserving? So many Babbitts flourish today, trying to convince the public, as they've managed to convince themselves, by masking their motivations in civic and/or religious language, that cutting their taxes is all that should matter to anyone, despite the inevitable resulting fallout to our government, our economy, and our society. Despite all that we could lose. (If you doubt my word, just take a gander at the vital federal programs that have already been cut or are likely to be cut soon--and in several cases with only a microscopic effect to the budget deficit. Meanwhile, the one thing that would significantly lower the deficit--a serious tax hike--seems impossible to pass.)

I used to think that we as a people thought greed was a sin; I used to think that our houses of religion preached against it and our systems of government worked against it. I used to be sure of a lot of things, but with the Babbitts in control of the discourse, nothing--certainly not our economy--is certain anymore.

Factually Fanatic, a Followup

I ran into technical difficulties yesterday. Blogger was refusing to let me respond to a comment posted on my own blog! Apparently, my account "did not have access" to that blog. Oh yeah?

Anyway, in the comment a reader named Shannon raised some hard questions about what amounts to "going over the line" when one departs from known fact. (Check yesterday's post for Shannon's comment.) As I would have told Shannon if Blogger let me, my own opinion is that one can and should depart from fact when it's necessary to do so to tell one's story. But finally what's "over the line" is in the eye of the beholder.

I'll always remember a story a teacher of mine in graduate school told. A friend of his had a fictional story accepted by a major national glossy, one wealthy enough to employ a horde of "fact checkers." In the short story, the writer made mention of a "kidney shaped pool" in a backyard in the town where the story was set. The magazine's fact checkers told the writer that they could not publish her story unless she could prove that a kidney shaped pool actually existed in the town in question in the year in which the story was set. Can you believe that? If the writer had submitted her story as nonfiction, then sure go ahead and do the fact checking; insist on the literal pool. But for a short story? I'm afraid some people need to be reminded as to why fiction is called fiction.

What's alternative?

Recently I finished You Remind Me of Me (2004), Dan Chaon's terrific first novel. (In 2009 he published his second novel, Await Your Reply). When I read novels and story collections I like to browse the acknowledgements pages for curious pieces of information, e.g., where a certain quotation comes from or where a piece first appeared in print or to whom in the author feels particularly indebted. And of course also included in every book of fiction is a reminder to the reader that the book is made up, that the reader should not assume the characters are based on real people or the plot drawn from real world situations. Sometimes this claim is more accurate than others, but it's an unavoidable legal necessity. No author or publisher wants to get sued by a private individual who believes he or she was unjustly represented in the author's novel. And most of the time the statement follows a standard, canned, legalistc pattern. In fact, in many books the statement is exactly the same. But some fiction writers actually compose the statement themselves and take care with it. I was delighted and intrigued when I read the following statement on Chaon's acknowledgements page: "No characters in this novel are based on real people, and I have taken some poetic license with the facts of law, history, medicine, geography, and weather. While there is, in reality, a city named Chicago, the Chicago of this novel, as well as the towns of St. Bonaventure, Nebraksa, Little Bow, South Dakota, and others, exist wholly in an alternate universe of the author's imagination."

Fascinating! That's the first time I've ever seen an author apologize for his treatment of the weather. And of course I ask myself what Chaon means. The novel jumps in time rather energetically, with a total span of four decades. Is it possible that Chaon knows the weather conditions in a given month and year in Nebraska thirty years ago, say, or Chicago, and felt he had to admit that he broke from literal fact? If he actually does know, I admire how carefully he researched his novel. But I also wonder who in the world would criticize him if he took small liberties with recorded weather data. Similarly I wonder what exactly the liberties were that he took with medicine and law and geography. I must say that nothing seems unusual about the geography of the book; nor do the various legal entanglements his characters get themselves into strike me as implausible. Whatever liberties Chaon took, the book is a resoundingly believable work of realistic fiction. Whatever liberties he took, and despite his note on the acknowledgements page, no one would--or should--label You Remind Me of Me as an alternate history.

That label is usually applied to science fiction or historical fiction books in which history has been dramatically and obviously altered. But Chaon's note makes me wonder: Isn't all fiction, given its nature as fiction, an alternate history? Even if one is writing a novel set in the present day, even if the novel is set in one's own home town, when one is writing what one sees inside one's head is the hometown as it exists in one's imagination. That is what's transferred to the page. Of course this remains true--not truer, but equally true--if one's novel is set 30 years ago or 50 or 400. And if all novel writing is a form of alternate history, why then is historical fiction held under such a factually driven microscope? Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of historical fictionists carrying out as much research as possible and using the facts of history to dramatic advantage in their works. Or simply as useful, necessary imagery. I am bothered as much as anyone when a writer makes glaring errors, or employs anachronisms, especially if those errors or anachronisms aren't dramatically necessary but the result of writerly sloppiness. But finally we all need to be reminded that the historical novel is a subset not of history writing but of novel writing.

This seems obvious when you set it down--by the way, if you want to get a historian upset, tell him that historical fiction is the same thing as history--but in point of fact many readers and writers expect historical novels to function as history not as storytelling. These readers and writers do not reserve the lable alternate history only for those books that alter history dramatically. I've heard it opined in various conference sessions and blogs that if a historical novel knowingly departs, even a little, from the historical record, the writer can't call it a historical novel but must call it an alternate history. (And clearly this is understood to be the the lesser distinction.) As if the writer doesn't really understand history, or hasn't done her homework or is guilty of being selfish or less than rigorous. This attitude strikes me not only as a little dumb but also unfair. The writer may know her history perfectly well. She may be deeply indebted to that history for not only originating but sustaining and girding her book. She may stick to the "known facts" substantially if incompletely. Just because she departs from known history a bit does not automatically move her novel into some other category. It just means she's writing a novel. It just means she's doing what all fiction writers do: writing from the world of her imagination. Get real, folks. If it's understood that writers of realistic novels set in the present day often need to adjust details of the real world in order for their novels to work structurally and dramatically, there's no reason why we can't allow the same leeway for historical fiction writers.

Triangle of history

In packing for my recent family excursion to the east coast I packed reading material, of course. (And before I go on, I must congratulate myself on not packing, for perhaps the first time in my adult life, ridiculously too much reading material.) One of the books I read was Katherine Weber's Triangle, a novel that explores--in sort of a mystery novel approach--the long term effects of the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York in 1911. I've been curious about this novel for several years, ever since I heard book reviewer Maureen Corrigan raving about it on NPR's Fresh Air program. I had tried to "read" it via audio book earlier this summer after downloading the title from Audible.com to my iTunes library. Turns out I hadn't downloaded Weber's novel, but a nonfiction account of the fire and its effect on New York and national politics. I was quite disappointed by my mistake, but then I quckly found the book I downloaded--Triangle: The Fire that Changed America (2003) by David Von Drehle--to be engrossing and thoroughly informative.

When I turned to Weber's novel I wondered how different her fictional account of the fire would be fron Von Drehle's nonfiction study. I hoped that what I learned from Von Drehle would not color how I responded to Weber's imaginative recreations. Well, I need not have worried. As I quickly discovered, Weber's novel is almost entirely different from Von Drehle's straightforward narrative account. In fact, it took quite some time for the fire to play a central role in the novel, although increasingly it does, especially after one passes the halfway point. The novel is actually not at all what I expected it to be, but that's my fault more than Weber's. Triangle is fundamentally a contemporary novel rather than an historical one; yet it's a novel that tries to show how a single event in history can still affect individuals decades later, and in completely unexpected ways. The novel's main character is not the fire, nor is it even Esther Gottesfield, a fictional survivor of the Triangle factory tragedy who lives to be over a 100. The main characters are Rebecca Gottesfield, Esther's granddaughter, and George Botkin, Rebecca's significant other and a richly successful musical composer, best known for his musical portraits of famous individuals, compositions derived from studying those individuals' DNA. (A genuinely curious idea but one that Weber explores ad infinitum before she truly lets her novel start.) Over the course of the novel, Esther dies, Rebecca and George discover secrets about Esther's past, and finally they decide that for Esther's "protection" they will not reveal what they know.

I'm not terribly sympathetic with Rebecca and George's urge for, and rationalization of, this secrecy; nor is the "secret" all that difficult to figure out given the hints Weber provides. George, not Rebecca, realizes the truth--many many pages after the reader does. This was a bit disconcerting; also disconcerting was how much of the novel, a great big early chunk of it, Weber gives over to describing George's career as a composer before she finally gets down to the business of telling her story, and highlighting the fire. Weber does, however, show terrific familiarity with the facts of the fire--Weber's grandmother actually worked in the factory for a time--and appears to slip up only once, when she has Esther Gottesfield relate that a fireman helped her onto the roof of the Asch building (the building that housed the Triangle factory) when she made her escape from the fire. As I learned from Von Drehle, back in 1911 there was no way for firemen to get to the roof of a building as tall as the Asch building without climbing up through the inside. And to do that they had to put out the fire. This they did, but not before 146 people lost their lives, many as a result of jumping out of windows. The firemen arrived at the upper floors only minutes too late to help those trapped there, but those minutes meant everything. If they had been able to make it to the roof to help Esther Gottesfield, they also could and would have saved many more people. Now, Esther proves to be an unreliable historian when it comes to the fire, so perhaps this little error is meant by Weber to be a tip off. If true, then I say fair enough. Because I should credit Weber for how carefully she uses known facts about the fire, including real people from history, as well as facts about the trial that followed as a result, and how she uses these facts to help create a mystery that George and Rebecca (or at least George) finally crack. Once history becomes relevant to the novel, it becomes engaging and a very worthwhile read, with an interesting and admirable structure. But boy did it take a while for history to get there.