No telling what might happen after an absinthe drinking binge. Vargas Llosa tried it, it ain't what it used to be.
JUL 31, 2001
Light in the Shadows of Arles
By MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
ARLES, France -- The famous Maison Jaune, at Arles, which Vincent Van Gogh rented, furnished, painted and filled with his pictures to receive his friend Paul Gauguin in the autumn of 1888, no longer exists. It disappeared in an Allied bombardment in 1945, and where it stood there now functions a small hotel called Terminus Van Gogh. Not long ago, the landlady showed me a photograph of the ruin left by the bomb's impact, an event of which she was a witness.
The surroundings, however, have not changed much. It is easy to recognize the next-door house, which appears in one of Van Gogh's paintings. The Place Lamartine is still there, huge and circular, with its massive plane trees burdened with greenery. Nor can there have been much change in the spectacle of the Rhine, which, a few yards from this terrace, slides slowly and majestically round the flank of the town. But this was, in Van Gogh's day, a poor quarter full of beggars, prostitutes and low-life cafes, and it is now inhabited by a discreet and anodyne middle class.
The two months that Van Gogh and Gauguin spent at Maison Jaune in 1888 are the most mysterious in their biographies. The details of what really happened between the two friends have eluded the determined scrutiny of hundreds of researchers and critics who, starting from the few objective facts, try to throw light on the obscurity of that time. The letters of both men are evasive on the subject of their cohabitation, and when Gauguin referred to it, at the end of his life, 15 years had gone by, syphilis had ruined his memory and he was evidently trying to answer the rumors that made him responsible for the final breakdown and madness of Van Gogh. Together in that house they dreamed, painted and quarreled, and in that time the Dutchman came near to harming the Frenchman whose arrival in Arles he had awaited with all the anxiety and illusion of a lover.
There are no indications of a homosexual relation between them, but there was a powerful passion involved. Van Gogh had met Gauguin some months earlier, in Paris, and was fascinated by the overwhelming personality of this adventurer artist who had just returned from Panama and Martinique with canvases charged with light and primitive life. He asked his brother Theo to convince Gauguin to come and live with him in Provence. There, in that yellow house, he thought they would found a community of artists. New painters would come to join this fraternal commune, where everything would be shared and where they would live for beauty.
Gauguin resisted this dream of utopia and came to Arles reluctantly, for he was quite content in Brittany. In several of the pictures he painted in Arles, his Arlésiennes wear Breton coifs and clogs. However, after the tragedy of Christmas Eve 1888, it would be Gauguin who would spend the rest of his life trying to materialize Van Gogh's dream, and who would leave for Polynesia, the land that had dazzled Van Gogh in writing and dreams.
It is possible that Van Gogh's excessive obsequiousness and tiresome efforts to make Gauguin feel contented in Arles turned Gauguin against him. Gauguin may have been bothered by Van Gogh's disorderliness and by his spending more than the agreed-upon amount on visits to Rachel, a prostitute. One dispute concerned the pointillist George Seurat: Van Gogh, who admired him, wished to invite him to the Studio Sud, as the idealized community was called, while Gauguin refused because he detested the man.
Van Gogh insisted on setting up his easel outdoors, to paint things from life. Gauguin maintained that the creator's real raw material was not reality but memory. This difference, which it seems caused tremendous quarrels at Arles, has resolved itself over time: their paintings now seem to us, though so distinct in style, equally filled with invention and dreams and, at the same time, profoundly anchored in reality.
When the rains came, the two friends had to spend several weeks shut up in the Maison Jaune, a forced confinement that must have created a climate of claustrophobia and tension. It was in these days that Gauguin drew his portrait of his friend painting sunflowers, which left Van Gogh speechless: "Yes, it's me. But gone mad."
Was he mad? There is no doubt that, in the universe of imprecise outlines where madness exists, there is some place that fits Van Gogh in that autumn. Such is the context of the events of the day before Christmas Eve 1888, on which we have only the doubtful testimony of Gauguin.
A quarrel in a cafe, while they were having an absinthe, ended suddenly, Van Gogh throwing his glass at his friend, who just managed to dodge it. In the evening, while crossing the Parc Victor Hugo, Gauguin noted footsteps behind him. He turned and saw Van Gogh, with a razor in his hand, who, on being discovered, fled. Gauguin spent the night in a nearby hotel. At 7 in the morning he returned to the Maison Jaune and found it surrounded by neighbors and police. The previous evening, after the park incident, Van Gogh had cut off part of his left ear and taken it, wrapped in newspaper, to Rachel. Gauguin and the gendarmes took Van Gogh to the public hospital, and Gauguin left for Paris the same night.
They never met again, but in the following months, while Van Gogh was in a sanatorium, the friends of Arles exchanged some letters. On the occasion of Van Gogh's suicide by revolver, a year and a half later, Gauguin made a brusque, curt comment: "It was fortunate for him, the end of his sufferings." Later he avoided mentioning Van Gogh, yet it is obvious he did not forget. Why else would he so insist on planting sunflowers in front of his shack in Tahiti when everyone assured him that this exotic flower could never acclimate to Polynesia? He worked the plot with such perseverance that at last his neighbors enjoyed the sight of the strange yellow flowers that followed the sun.
Visiting Arles, I decided in homage to those two friends to have an absinthe. I had never tried this drink, the drink of Verlaine and Baudelaire, which Van Gogh and Gauguin drank as if it were water. I had imagined an aristocratic liquor of maddening effect; but what they brought me was a nasty beverage tasting of mint and sugar, pharmaceutically based. One more proof that pedestrian reality will never rise to the height of our dreams and fantasies.
Mario Vargas Llosa is the Peruvian novelist. This article, which also appeared in El Pa is, Madrid, was translated by James Brander.
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