Once more to the photo

Several weeks back I posted a little known photograph (there it is again on the right) that some have argued is a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh taken during the time he lived with his brother Theo in Paris.   The strongest proponent of the argument is Joseph Buberger, a photographer and historian of photography, who initiated a series of forensic studies of Van Gogh's painted self-portraits and compared these to the photograph in question.  Joseph and I have emailed a few times.  In Joseph's mind, the man in the painted self-portaits and the man in the photograph are unquestionably the same.  This argument has not been universally accepted, certainly not by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which Joseph complains will not give him the time of day.   I had my own doubts--I expressed them in my earlier post--based partly in discrepancies I noticed between the disputed photograph and one taken of Vincent when he was a teenager (i.e., the one in the next paragraph, on the right).   Obviously aging changes people, but to my eyes the man in the disputed photograph doesn't look like an older version of Vincent but a different person altogether.

Joseph does have an answer to this argument.  He claims that the earlier photograph was misidentified, and is actually a photograph of Vincent's brother Theo.  He can offer no proof of this misidentification; he simply makes the claim because he is convinced that the disputed photograph must be of Vincent.   I'm very happy that Joseph keeps pushing his case.  He should; and if his emails are any indication, he will.    If the disputed photograph is of Vincent, then it certainly needs to be included in the Van Gogh canon.   But it's hard to just readily accept the misidentification theory.  First, one would have to ask why the earlier photograph was misidentified by Vincent's own family and why the error was allowed to stand for so long.  Second, one needs to realize that there is yet another familiar photograph of Van Gogh, this one taken when he was a boy.   (That's it on the left.) In my eyes, the boy in the picture does indeed look like the young man in the photograph that Joseph claims was misidentified.  So, in my mind, if the photograph from Vincent's teenaged years was misidentified then the photograph from his childhood must have been also.  And how likely is that to have happened, by members of his own family?

It certainly is true that Theo Van Gogh bore a strong resemblance to his brother, but there are distinct and identifable differences between the two men.  The pictures that previously have been identified as the young Theo do strike me as legitimate, and they are by no means identical to the pictures that have been identified as the young Vincent.  See here two photographs that have long been accepted as being of Theo, one taken when he was a teenager and the other, years later, after he had became eestablished as an art dealer.  While I can easily say that the "teenager Theo" is the same man as the man in the "professional Theo" picture, I would not say that about the "teenager Vincent" photo, which Joseph argues isn't Vincent at all but really Theo.  Using Occam's razor, I have to conclude that the pictures that have been long established, and reprinted in numerous Van Gogh biographies, were in fact accurately identified.  

But this is only my opinion.  Is it possible that Joseph will, in the long run, be proven correct?  Of course.  For now I hope he keeps pressing his case, at least until the truth is clarified, one way or another.  By the way, another of Joseph's passions is to take photographs of radiant light. Follow this link to his online gallery.

Novel class check-in

We're about a month into Novel Writing Workshop at UCA, and so far I'm impressed and also a little amused.  It's the most unusual class I teach, in that it's structured so differently than the rest of my courses: no full class workshops, a much heavier production goal, and less of an emphasis on reading (even though they are reading three books for me).  Unlike the last time I taught the course, everyone who registered for it knew the deal going in: we weren't just going to talk about novel writing; we were all going to write complete novels.  So I've gotten no pushback about that--and no one has dropped the course.  And they've almost all met the word count goal every week.  What has surprised me is how quickly some of them ran into the mid-book blues, or,  as writer Chris Baty defines it, "the second week doldrums."  Baty is the founder of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and his very entertaining book No Plot? No Problem! serves as kind of a primer and motivational message for those attempting to write a 50,000 word novel in a month.  My students are writing 55,000 word novels in one semester, so we are reading Baty intermittently, applying his First Week-Second Week-Third Week-Fourth Week lessons over broader time spans.  The chapter we discussed last week was all about how and why to defeat the doubts, boredom, and malaise that inevitably infects a novelist after the initial heady, giddy, optimistic starting period of her book has passed.  Well, wouldn't you know it, in the days leading up to last week's class, I starting seeing Facebook messages from my students--they've created a Facebook page for the group--saying how they were utterly stalled or utterly bored or utterly out of ideas or convinced they'd made the wrong choice of novel to work on.   A couple were certain they should start new novels.

I tried to respond to my students' worries and ennui with words of encouragement and a few kicks in the butt.  Some of them, I could tell, needed to expand/complicate their plots and points of view; others needed to think harder about the characters they had already invented and the settings they had already established.      They needed to decide on back story, character identities, and physical appearances.  And some of that thinking needed to find its way into their novels as what I call "fill-in work."  Not only would this increase your word count, I told them, but more importantly it would give you a clearer sense of who and what you're writing about, which will allow you to proceed into future chapters with more confidence.  I echoed Baty's sentiments that despite being tempted to, they should not just dump their books: because then they'd just find themselves, a few weeks down the road, wanting to dump the new one.  Self-loathing is part of the novel writing game; there's no magical escape.  I told them about Heather Sellers's concept of the Sexy New Book and exactly how dangerous that Sexy New Book can be.   I told them about Sellers's strategy for dealing with the Sexy New Book.   First, she insists that the Sexy New Book is almost always a siren's call that will only take you away from what you really should be working on; that is, your current book.  Her answer: At all costs, ignore the call of the Sexy New Book.  On the other hand, she admits that sometimes the call of the Sexy New Book is simply too powerful to resist; also sometimes the Sexy New Book idea can actually be a good one.  So solution number two, as Sellers explains it in her book Chapter After Chapter, is to take the Sexy New Book out on a date.  That is, for one day allow yourself to think about it, plan it, do research for it, maybe even start drafting it.  That is, give yourself one full day to find out if this new book really is worth pursuing.  Most of the time, she says, you will realize that it is not.  Occasionally, you might decide that it is.  And then--but only then--you go ahead and give in to the siren call.   (This has worked out for her in practice.  She admits that her bestselling memoir on face blindness, You Don't Look Like Anyone I know, started as a Sexy New Book idea.)    In the case of one student this semester (because I knew I could trust her), I permitted her to follow a Sexy New Book idea, but I insisted she had to be fully up to the week's required work count by the time class time came.  (Amazingly, she pulled it off.)

I could be wrong, but it seems to me this "I-hate-my-novel" reaction came a lot of quicker and a lot harder to this group than to the group I taught last time.  Perhaps this is a function of their earlier, anticipatory, much more hyped-up optimism?  In any case, they are bravely soldiering on, finding ways to make the word count.  And I should clarify that more than a few of them are perfectly happy with the current states of their novels.   This seems especially true of my graduate students.  I guess that's not so surprising.  Their extra years worth of writing experience should give them more pluck and confidence and determination.  Yes, as I mentioned in an earlier post, it's one of the curious aspects of this semester's course that I'm teaching it to both graduate and undergraduate students.  I can't deny there's something of a "grad contingent" and an "undergrad contigent" feeling to the classroom, but for the most part the groups get along; the main difference is how more sanguine the graduate students are with their budding books.  Amazingly, this holds true for three out of the five who do not define themselves as fiction writers and who have never tried to write novels!

Despite their "second week doldurms," I really am impressed by my students' output this semester.  Thinking back to my own experiences in creative writing classrooms--both undergraduate and graduate--I can swear to you that no one ever asked anything of me like a 55,000 word draft in one semester.  Not even close.  And yet my students have more or less happily accepted my word count goals as a matter of course.  I think this represents a sea change in the landscape of creative writing instruction.  Without doubt, NaNoWriMo--which several UCA undergraduates do every year, in addition to their course work--has made longer projects seem like not the impossible dreams they once were.  This is a real and powerful contribution.   And of course it doesn't hurt that more and more creative writing programs, grad and undergrad, are offering novel writing courses.  That is, my students are not isolated lab rats suffering through an experiment of my own design.  They know they are part of a nationwide phenomenon, and they are reveling in it, even when they are stuck in the doldrums.  I was inspired to teach the course this way after attending an AWP session several years ago on the subject of "allowing novels in fiction workshops."  Of the three people who spoke, only one actually taught a specific  Novel Writing Workshop, and her students were all graduate students.  I asked a question to the panel about teaching such a course to undergraduates.  I remember the ascerbic look one of the panelists gave me when he said, "What do think your undergrads would say when you tell them they have to write a novel in one semester?"  Well, so far, both times I've taught the course, they've been more grateful than anything else.  And now, given that they all keep meeting it, I'm thinking that 55,000 might be too tepid a word count goal.  While there are several examples of good, successful, and even famous short novels--we're reading a couple this semester--the average length for a novel published in this country is 80,000-100,000 words.  It's what agents, and the marketplace, seem to expect.   I'm wondering if I should have them aiming for something closer to that goal.  So, maybe 75,000 words next time?

 Don't worry, students!  Just kidding!  Or am I?


(FYI, I'm writing along with my students, and my budding novel is at 32,000 words.  I'm certainly ahead of schedule, but that's good, given all the looms for me later in the semester.)

Creating Van Gogh does the Next Big Thing

I was recently included in an email chain letter to writers who also have blogs.  The idea for the chain, launched by Cathy Day and her blog The Next Big Thing, is to answer ten questions about a project you are currently working on, or one you have already completed, while at the same time linking to other writers' blogs where they answer these same questions.  In this post you'll find my answers to the questions.  Unfortunately, most of the writers I sent the letter on to were either already involved or declined to participate.  But I encourage you to follow the link below to my wife's blog Wordamour (this is her personal one, not the one she maintains for the Huffington Post) where you can find her answers to the questions.  She has recently finished a World War Two novel called The Lost Son.  It features brothers who are separated early in life and wind up fighitng on different sides during the war.  It was inspired by a real life story in her own family--although her novel leaves behind family history to go its own way in some important aspects.  Read all about the novel and the story that inspired it by clicking here.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I am once again teaching Novel Writing Workshop at UCA.  This means I'm making my students compose a short novel over the course of one semester.  And for the sake of esprit de corps--this class follows the idea of the "writeshop," a term Cathy Day coined--I am taking up my own challenge; that is, I'm composing a short novel right along with them.   I'll give a full update next week on how the class is going.  I mention it now only to say that the novel I'm writing for the class is so much in the process of formation that I can't possibly apply the ten questions to that book.  Not yet.  So instead I'll apply the questions to my Van Gogh novel, which I anticipate will soon finally see the light of day.  (Pieces of it have already been published or are forthcoming.)

Okay, on to the questions.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

What is your working title of your book (or story)?  After an agent strongly pressed me to come up with a more compelling title for the project, I changed the name from Yellow to Days on Fire.  The color yellow is still suggested by the latter title but in a more active fashion.  The agent seemed to like the new title, and I've decided to keep it.

Where did the idea come from for the book?  I was teaching in Holland one summer and during a short trip to Amsterdam I visited the Van Gogh Museum (along with other prominent museums). Prior to that visit, I might have seen one or two Van Gogh paintings in the flesh at the National Gallery in Art in Washington, near where I grew up, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer stunning light that came off the paintings I saw in the Van Gogh museum.  Now I knew what all the hubbub was about.  My fascination with the paintings made me more curious about the man, and that set me thinking.


What genre does your book fall under?  That one is easy: historical fiction.  Although, as I've mentioned on this blog, I don't play absolute, strict adherence to what some would view as the "rules" of historical fiction.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?  As sexy and fun as it is, this is one question I'm going to have to decline to answer.  (Sorry.)  After all, if the book were ever to be made into a movie I would be the last person allowed to choose actors for it--there are people called casting directors--and, besides, I just don't know if I follow the movies and television as intensely as I  need to to effectively give an answer here.  I suppose what I really would like is a surprise choice, someone no one would expect to do the role, and then have that person do a smash up job.  Actors surprise you all the time, after all.  Think of the truly powerful performance by Bradley Cooper in Silvers Linings Playbook, for instance.  (For what it's worth, while Jennifer Lawerence has been garnering awards for her performance in that film, I think Cooper's was far more impressive, demonstrated a wider and more supple emotional range, the whole of which he carried off convincingly.)

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?  Van Gogh fails and fails and fails, costing his health, his happiness, his family, and a portion of his sanity, but in the end he succeeds where it matters to him the most.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?  At this writing, while I'm still waiting to hear from a publisher in France that was recommended to me from someone over there, I anticipate self-publishing the novel.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?  The whole process of writing, revising, cutting, shaping, adding, reshaping, and editing the book took so long, was spread out across so many years, that I'm not sure I can accurately answer this question.  But certainly it took me at least a year to finish a handwritten first draft.  (Believe it or not, that's how I like to compose first drafts, although this semester, for the novel I'm composing in class, I'm drafting straight to the computer.)  Probably it was more like a year and a half.


What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?  Painters have not infrequently been the subjects of novels; both novels generally and historical novels in particular.  There's just something about the exquisite physical torture of trying to turn messy colored fluid into a seemingly concrete reality.  A well known painter novel is The Agony and The Ecstasy by Irving Stone, his "biographical novel" about Michelangelo.  (I think I like that term, because it certainly applies to my book.)   More recently, there was John Updike's Seek My Face and Harriet Scott Chessman's Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper.  The latter novel depicts the sad tension in the Cassatt household due to Lydia's illness.  It can be compared to mine in the sense that it is set in a similar time period and country (France) and tries to make real the world of those post-Impressionist painters who are only glittery names to most of us now.  But maybe most like mine in its humanizing of a famous but not quite understood figure (i.e. Vermeer) is Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring.  My novel is broader in scope than either Chessman's or Chevalier's but I think, like Girl, brings a new and sympathetic sensibilty to a subject who has been codified by history and popular opinion.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?  As I stated in my answer to question 2, it all started with that visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?  Well, Van Gogh wasn't nearly the nut case he is commonly understood to have been, but he did have the courage or stubborness or lack of temperance, if you will, to pursue his passions with almost blind servitude.  This is to say there were extreme elements to his personality.  I show those elements in the novel, along with his softer side; I think the combination makes for a compelling read.  It should also interest readers to see Van Gogh interact with well known artists like Signac, Bernard, and Gauguin.  The latter plays quite a large and important role in the last third of the novel.   

Mason goes historical--again

As so many others did, I first became familiar with the work of Bobbie Ann Mason through her books Shiloh and Other Stories and In Country.  Back then she was counted, fairly or unfairly, as part of a new wave of North American writers, the so-called "Dirty Realist" school that included authors like Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Jayne Ann Phillips, and Larry Brown.  Both books were bestsellers and received critical praise.  I know they were also eagerly lapped up by budding young fiction writers of the time.  In Country was later made into a movie starring Bruce Willis, and the title story of Shiloh has become something of a contemporary American classic, anthologized repeatedly in a stream of fiction volumes.  But I lost track of Bobbie Ann Mason after that.  She seemed to fall out of favor--as did the minimalistic idiosyncracies of the Dirty Realist school.  (The death of Raymond Carver probably hastened along this inevitable development.)  Mason kept writing, however.  Among other things, she has pubished several more story collections, the memoir Clear Springs (nominated for a Pulitzer in 1999) and, in 2003, a biography of Elvis Presley for the Penguin Lives biography series.   She has also been a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine.

In 2011, she published The Girl in the Blue Beret,  her second historical novel and one of her rare fictional forays outside of the state of  Kentucky.  Well, actually, Girl is one of those books that makes you question the definition historical fiction.  Technically, it's a contemporary novel, one that follows the actions of its protagonist--a retired airline pilot--as he travels through Belgium and France to retrace his experiences there during World War II.  (The "present" of the novel is 1980.)  While what happens in the present certainly matters to the protagonist, what makes up the meat of the novel is the terrible weight of World War II history, specifically the history of the French resistance and the risks the résistants took to save and hide--and later return to England--American aviators who had been shot down over Belgium and France.   It is this history--told through memory, dialogue, and the occasional flashback--that most engrosses the reader and, in the end, impacts the retired pilot in ways he could not have imagined before he began his journeys.  The book is so informed by history--so completely a creature of it--that I can't think of any other label to apply but that of historical.

It's a joy to rediscover Mason's fiction after many years, and an even bigger joy to see her engaged with material that would have been outside the range of her earlier self.  She hasn't just kept writing, but she has grown as an artist.  Her research is impeccable.  Inspired by the true life story of her father-in-law and his own crash landing in Belgium, Mason read widely--through both published and unpublished memoirs--into the experiences of Allied flyers who were shot down during the war and into the experiences of the members of the French resistance who quietly helped them.  She also interviewed a woman who had been held in the same Koenigsberg prison camp that comes to play such an important, if disturbing, part in the novel.  I did not know--as Mason's protagonist Marshall doesn't--that résistants, after being arrested, were sometimes tortured and sent to concentration camps.  Finding this out makes for a crucial, moving turn in Marshall's present life.  



By all means, anyone who has enjoyed Mason's work in the past should "catch up" with this novel.  Or anyone interested in historical fiction generally--or World War II fiction in particular.  It will not disappoint you.  My only real criticism is that in the second half of the book a great deal of crucial history is transmitted by means of conversation between Marshall and Annette, the now older "Girl in the Blue Beret."  Literally page after page and chapter after chapter is mostly conversation about the past.  If a student in my novel writing class had tried that I would have felt compelled to correct him or her.  It would be more dramatically satisfying, I would tell them, to show at least some of this history via scene, after first establishing that the frame of the conversation between Marshall and Annette.  I think this is a fair complaint, but on the other hand I hate to complain about a book that so effectively brings to light this under-realized aspect of World War II history; and I hate to complain too when I'm so glad to see Mason return to the art of the novel.

Novel writing class returns

After a break of two-and-a-half years, Novel Writing Workshop returns to my university this semester.  In the interim period, dozens of students have asked me about the class and scores of oral histories have been told; a few students lobbied my department's Chair hard for its return; and, not insignificantly, our first collection of graduate students matriculated.  In some ways, it's a very different pedagogical landscape now than when I taught the course a couple years ago.  Then, novel writing workshops were still relatively rare and excitingly new, certainly on the undergraduate level, and the idea that the students would not just start but finish a novel in one semester struck me as potentially hazardous: to GPAs; to other course work; to jobs; to relationships; most of all, to sleep schedules. Yet that's what I asked the students to do.  And nearly all of them succeeded.  Now, novel writing workshops are a considerably less unusual phenomenon.  Indeed, sometimes I think they are everywhere.   Still more typical on the graduate as opposed to the undergraduate level--although one of our graduate students, who was an undergrad a year ago, informs that he took a novel writing course in college--they are, in any case, far more characteristic of creative writing degree programs than in the past.  It can't be coincidental that at the AWP conference in Boston this year, a panel will be held on not just on promoting the idea of the novel writing workshop but on the fact of it; that is, the nuts and bolts of how different experienced instructors of the course have taught it.  I think it's even fair to say that novel writing workshops are becoming the cornerstone of progressive fiction writing programs.  And in part this is because in the last three years those who teach the course have been talking to each other about it--Cathy Day's blog The Big Thing has been especially instructive--pushing each other, motivating each other, spreading the gospel.

So I'm glad it's back at my school, and I know the students are too.  But I admit to being a bit nervous.  In the intervening years since last I taught the course, a mythology has developed around it, a retrospective awe.  Students have told me that for years, ever since they selected our major, they have been eagerly anticipating the chance to experience this one course.  Can this semester possibly meet their high expectations?  Yes, it can.  But, here's the scary part: It's all up to them.  More than any other course I teach, in my novel writing class, the students teach themselves and teach each other.  I offer them a platform through which they can learn about novel writing, but they have to take advantage of it, and they have to encourage each other to take advantage of it.  While I do separate the class into small peer review groups, there will be no full class workshopping.  As I emphasized at our first meeting the other night, the course is about production more than anything else.   The last time I taught the course, again to all undergraduates, the room was fully with unusually mature and unusually talented people.  What the course offered was exactly what most of them were looking for: space, opportunity, deadlines.  Almost entirely seniors, they'd workshopped plenty in their college career.  What they wanted from Novel Writing was something else,  and they were eager to take control of it.  There were certainly bumps along the way that semester, but for the most part--with a notable exception or two--a genuine esprit de corps ruled.

I can only hope my current group has the same experience.  It's a fresh batch, with different backgrounds.  For the first time, graduate students are participating along with undergraduates.  That's a new dynamic for me, and for both of those student populations.  And there's another professor sitting in!  Not even from my own department!  Like last time, we will read Chris Baty's No Plot No Problem (for practical motivation) and a couple of short novels (as models for storytelling over a reasonably short space), and we will periodically break off into peer groups.  But mostly we will be writing.  I'll be writing along with them, which actually is going to be more of a challenge for me this time than last.  Mainly because right now I am in the latter stages of a novel I started early last semester.  I had intended on exploring this novel idea through the Novel Workshop, but when the class was delayed from fall until spring I didn't feel like waiting.  Now I will need to hurry to finish my draft, then immediately start another novel--the subject of which I haven't even clarified for myself yet.   Hard to know what the next few months will bring, but I'm sure it will be an adventure.  There will be exhileration and despair.  There will be careful planning and last second inspiration and a great deal of fatigue.  Some will give up; most, I hope and expect, will soldier on.  Some will get pissed at me and at their peer reviewers.  Some will get pissed at the novels we read.  But if they each individually can hold it together, when the finish line comes they will have learned more than from perhaps any other writing course.  And they will have learned it the best possible way: by doing it themselves.

Publication announcement: I'm happy to report that another chapter from my Van Gogh novel will soon appear in print.  The journal Versal, an international literary magazine based in Amsterdam, is publishing a chapter from the section of the book that details Van Gogh's Paris years.  The point of view character is Suzanne Valadon, a post-Impressionist painter who circulated widely among the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and even modeled for a few of them.  During my research for the novel, I read an account she'd written of seeing Van Gogh at a Paris party.  I used some details from that account to construct the chapter.  The issue of Versal will appear in May, accompanied by a launch party in Amsterdam.  Really sorry to have to miss that one.  While I will be in London in June for the Great Writing Conference, there's simply no way for me to make it to Amsterdam in May.  Ah, well.

One Sunday Morning

A couple years ago this blog put me in contact with Anne Whitehouse, a poet and novelist who had written a poem called "Van Gogh in Arles" detailing Van Gogh's heroic struggles to keep painting outdoors in the face of the infamous mistral of Provence.  Anyone who has ever visited that part of the world knows how real and ferocious a force a mistral can be.  (I keenly remember going running one morning in the middle of a mistral and finding myself barely able to move forward.  Thank heaven it was a sunny late spring day and not the middle of winter.)  I admired Anne's poem then and provided a link to it.  I'm happy to tell you now that the poem is included in Anne's  poetry collection, One Sunday Morning, available from Finishing Line Press.

Just as in her previous volume, Blessings and Cursings, Whitehouse is able to capture the dualistic nature of so many common experiences; the two-sided identity of what might seem to be singularly positive or negative developments; or, viewed through a different lens, the deeply unified nature of what appears on the surface to be a divided, battle-torn life.   With a voice of gorgeous understatement and placid wisdom, she pushes at several tiny but beautiful ironies, ironies that are subtle until she exposes them,  and then they seem perfectly obvious.  An example of this phenomenon is the poem "Meditations in June," a poem of lessons learned in a life honestly spent, a poem that admits--like almost all of Whitehouse's work--to being "ever more certain / Of my uncertainty."  In the poem's final stanza, Whitehouse invokes a visit to a hospital to see a terribly ill friend, and her summary of that experience could stand as the ethos of the entire collection:

                               The world is a terrible place.
                               There's no getting out alive,
                               Said my friend from his hospital bed,
                               Elation disguising his dread--
                               Or the other way around.

Is this life the locus of more elation or more dread, the book seems to ask; and, more to the point, is it possible that there's no difference?  Certainly, scattered through its pages are examples of both and either.  Several of the poems seem almost to be gathered out of variant pieces that when brought together resonate with a new, surer power.  They seem less like conscious riffs on a theme than an after-the-fact discovery of connections and oppositions where previously none were suspected.  For example, there is the poem "Consolations," the three parts of which describe, respectively, the poet lusting after fruit she spies at the highest reaches of a tree ("orange-yellow suns glowing / in green shade"), a WWII veterans attempt to escape lingering nightmares from that war through fierce, scientific concentration on nature, and the poet--her voice returned to the poem--describing a dive into the sea.  Each segment details a consolation but also suggest the ways in which the consolation is inescapably bound with an original torment.  The oppositional language of the last stanza brings this home: "the coolness seeped in my skin / and spread all through me / and I relaxed, and I was warm."  There may be no better example of the unity of torment and consolation than the title poem, which describes a wounded stag, "blood stream[ing] from the hole in its rump" after its tail has been ripped off by coyote, who stands nearby, eyeing the poet and worrying the tail "To and fro like a fish in its mouth."  As barbaric as the image is, it is underscored by the stag's unavoidable beauty: "Its antlers . . . fuzz-tipped and green, / Its large eyes liquid and brown." Also by the poet's rising sense of awe at the spectacle of nature at work.  The nature of nature, if you will.  When the stag limps away, "its left foreleg . . . lame / . . . its life helplessly slipping away," the image is of course a sad one, but not necessarily tragic.

While Whitehouse includes no haiku in the volume, every poem demonstrates the directness and elegantly austere language characteristic of that form, not surprising in a poet who, like so many eastern masters, attempts to show through nature what is behind nature and through the individual life what is behind that life, constructing it and maintaining it in a beautiful, tenuous balance of opposites.

Followup to last week: In response to my post last week about a photograph (unearthed only in the 1990s) that some believe to be a photograph of the thirty-something Van Gogh--and thus the only photograph that shows his adult face--reader Shannon sent me a link to a really interesting experiment.  A photographer tries to imitate a famous Van Gogh self-portait to the closest detail possible; as a way, I suppose, of showing us what the man who painted the self-portait "really" looked like while he was painting it.  Of course, self-portaits can be doctored just like any portaits and any paintings can be, but even so it sounded like a fun project.  Follow this link to view the results.  You'll see the familiar self-portait give way, bit by bit, to the photographer's copying rendition.  Cool stuff!  And I must say that the photograph this experiment creates does, in my mind, look much more like Vincent than the supposedly "real" photograph I discussed in last week's post.

A picture of Vincent?

A photo historian named Joseph Buberger recently emailed me a copy of the photograph that you see on the left.  As reported by USA Today, the photograph was discovered several years ago by artist Tom Stanford in an album of cabinet card photographs that he found in an antiques shop in Massachusetts.  It has since been featured in an exhibit titled Discovering Vincent Van Gogh: A Forensic Study of Identification--at the Seton Gallery at the University of New Haven in 2004--and has been widely circulated through the internet.  As soon as he saw the photograph, Stanford felt certain it was Vincent, and Joseph, who assisted with the aforementioned exhibit, agrees.  Joseph also has forwarded to me an email from Pascal Bonafoux, French art historian and curator, who seems to accept that the man in the picture could likely be Van Gogh himself.   Not all experts concur, however, at least not those at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.  The reason why this became a hot topic of conversation is that until the photograph in question surfaced, it was assumed that no adult photographs of Van Gogh existed.  Or rather, no photographs in which his face is visible.  There is one standard photograph of him sitting at a table beside the Siene with Emile Bernard, but in that picture Van Gogh's back is to the camera.   The only photographs that represent his face are from earlier in life, when his identity was still very much in formation: one when he is boy and another late in his teens, after he had worked for a couple years as an art dealer in The Hague.  (See that one below.)  Thus everyone who looks at this "recent" photograph wants to  know: Is this what the famous post-Impressionist actually looked like?

To be honest, I have my doubts.  While the man in the photograph does bear a resemblance to some of Van Gogh's painted self-portraits, he seems less akin to others.  (For instance, the self-portrait on the left, painted during his Paris years, bears a stronger resemblance--in my opinion--to the teenager photograph than this new one.)  Besides, portait paintings are by no means a scientifically accurate reflection of what a person looks like.   It would seem to make sense to compare the photograph first to the known photographs of Vincent, especially the one from his late teens.  When I do that, I have a hard time saying that the men in the two pictures are the same person.  The photograph Stanford discovered dates from 1886.  As you can see from the name and address imprinted on the picture, the photographer who took it worked in Paris.  Indeed, in late February of that year Vincent moved to Paris from Antwerp and stayed in the city for two years.  So if the picture does show Vincent, it is Vincent as he was when he shared an apartment with his brother Theo, circulated among the post-Impressionists, and learned a lot about brightening his palette.  However, in 1886 he was only thirty-three years old.  Less than fifteen years had passed from the time when the other photograph was taken.  Is that enough time for a person to change as drastically as Vincent would have had to?  One could easily argue that those were a very hard fifteen years for Van Gogh.  He gave up art dealing and tried to become a minister and then later decided to be painter. He suffered through a series of dispiriting romantic upheavals--I've written about those before--lived for long stretches in dire poverty and on little food, endured bouts of poor health, and worked himself ragged.  At thirty-three, he'd already lived a couple lifetimes.  Too, while his life was never truly stable, it was in some crucial ways more stable when he lived in Paris with Theo than at any other period in his adult life.  He was no longer starving; he started to look after his health, especially his teeth; and he tried to dress more like a professional man than a laborer.  If there was ever a time he would get such a photograph made, it would be during those years.


But even so, I'm still not convinced.  Van Gogh never had--not at any time in his adult life--much money to burn. In fact, what money he had came in the form of handouts from Theo.  That money typically went to paint and other supplies, books, and--at least while in Paris--visits to cafes.   There would not have been much leftover to pay a photographer.  (Of course, maybe Theo wanted the photograph made and paid the fee.)  Nor is there any mention in his letters of him sitting for a photograph.  (Then again, he wrote far fewer letters when he lived in Paris than before or after.)  And I have to ask why, if this is a legitimate photograph of Van Gogh, it only surfaced now and not much earlier?  Would not Theo have held on to it after Vincent left Paris for Arles?  (Theo religiously saved all the letters Vincent wrote him; why not a photograph too?)  Wouldn't some other family member have taken possession of it after Theo died in 1891?  If it is Vincent, why was the photograph included in an album of photographs featuring mostly clergymen?  And, most important, does it really look that much like the man?   It could be Vincent, or it could simply be an anonymous 19th century Parisian who bears a passing resemblance to him.   If it is Vincent, than we can surely say that the man changed a great deal between his late teens and early thirties.  (It's not just that he's older--that's to be expected--but the very structure of his face, and even his nose, looks different to me.) Just as a comparison, look at these two photographs of Paul Gauguin.  The one on the left dates from 1880, when the artist was 32; the one on the right dates from 1891, when Gauguin was 43.  That's an eleven year time span, and yet there's no mistaking either image for anyone but Paul Gauguin.  The man on the left is quite obviously the same man as on the right.  I know it's not fair to compare how one person ages to how another does, but it gets to the heart of the question for me.  Would an even older-than-his-years Vincent looked like the man in the recently discovered photograph, or would he have looked more like his own photograph from fourteen or so years earlier?

Postscript:  Happy New Year!  I hope everyone is enjoying a pleasant start to 2013.