The Outsider (17 page)

The prophet is a man of greater spiritual integrity than his neighbours; their laxness revolts him, and he feels impelled to tell them so. In his embryonic form, as the Outsider, he does not know himself well enough to understand the driving force behind his feelings. That is why his chief concern is with thinking, not with doing. In the Outsiders we shall deal with in the rest of this book, we shall watch the emergence of the distinctly prophetic element in the Outsider.

***

Consideration of Hemingway introduced the Outsider
’
s obsession with pain and death. One of the finest passages in his novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls
is the episode of El Sordo
’
s last fight on the hilltop. As the Republicans, led by El Sordo, watch the coming of the planes that will bomb them, the boy Ignacio begins to repeat an aphorism of the Communist heroine Passionaria, then switches into prayer: Hail Mary, full of grace.
...
With the roar of the planes in his ears, he can only remember: Now and at the hour of our death, Amen. A few minutes later, everyone on the hilltop is dead; Hemingway
’
s evocation of the suddenness and brutality of their deaths is oppressively convincing. Dramatically, the episode is perhaps even finer than the end of
A Farewell to Arms.
The two extremes
are swept together: religion, deeper-ingrained in man than any political creeds; and death. It is death that seems to have the last word.

For a certain type of Outsider, this problem is the only real problem. Basically, it is the same problem as Roquentin
’
s
‘
nausea
⁵
; instead of
‘
humanity
versus
naked existence
’
it expresses itself
^‘
as aspiration to life
versus
death
’
. Its effect is the same: negation of the will to live. It goes without saying that no half-way houses will serve instead of an answer, no belief in spiritism or an after-life or reincarnation; it must be the one and only answer, and no
‘
credo ut intelligarrC
involved.

But we have already stated that no amount of thinking can lead to a final answer. It looks as if we have arrived at another impasse; but if we follow the course of the argument backwards, we discover that the impasse occurs when we identify the two concepts
‘
understanding
’
and
‘
reason
’
.
‘
Credo ut intelligam\
to believe in order to understand, does not cut off the Outsider completely from using his reason. But it demands that he use
other means beside reason.
The remainder of this chapter will make this point clear; we must consider the lives of two men who were in no sense philosophers. The first of these Outsiders was a painter, the other a dancer.

* * *

Vincent Van Gogh was born in Holland in 1853, the son of a Protestant pastor. He began to paint when he was twenty-nine. Eight years later, he shot himself in the stomach with a revolver, and died, at Auvers in Provence, in August, 1889. All his life he had lived on the edge of nervous crises, and during the last two years, he was for periods actually insane.

Of all painters, Van Gogh is perhaps the greatest letter-writer; it would not be an exaggeration to say that he owes his universal acclaim since his death to the letters (and popular biographies constructed from them) more than to the paintings themselves. In spite of this, their value as self-revelation is not to be compared with the introspective documents we have studied so far; he was a painter; words gave him no release. His interest for us lies in the incidents of his life, and in his painting. He is the first Outsider to be considered in this book who was not a writer and not an analytical thinker.

Van Gogh was never an easy person to live with; fits of
nervous depression made his temper uncertain. He left home when he was sixteen to work in an art gallery in La Haye, and four years later he came to work in London. There he had an unhappy love affair that increased his tendency to brood. He returned to his father
’
s home, and the atmosphere soon became overcharged with irritation and intolerance. A year later, he again returned to London to make another attempt to persuade the girl to marry him, and again failed. Obviously, he was not one to take life lightly; miseries and disappointments cut deep.

In the following year he was in Paris, and had crises of mysticism. He read and commented on the Bible. But the unsatisfaction refused to let him alone; he gave up his job and returned to London; there he had an experience of the slum quarter that stirred a deep feeling of pity. The religious enthusiasm grew, and he made his decision: to become a pastor, like his father. A year later, he was among the miners of the Borinage, in Belgium, preaching, giving away his money and clothes until he was poorer than the miners. But even this was a failure; the miners were poor, but it was a mistake to suppose that their experience of hardship would make them sympathetic to the voluntary poverty of a saint. Van Gogh was as much a stranger among them as he had been among his bourgeois relations in Holland. Finally, someone notified his superiors of his
‘
eccentricities
’
, and he was recalled.

There exists a painting from the last year of his life called
‘
Memory of the North
’
. A red winter sun sinks behind masses of sludgy green-grey cloud; all the sky is full of dirty, twisted scraps of cloud, tinted with the sun. In the foreground, small grimy houses, trees and bushes, repeat the twisting, red-tinted lines of the sky. The whole picture is overcast with a sulphurous light. We see the North as Van Gogh saw it in the year of his
‘
mission
’
.

He decided to study drawing; for a while, this satisfied him. Then, in the following year, there was another unhappy love affair. This time the defeat was so bitter that he contemplated suicide. From this period we have a typical story of the
‘
wild man
’
aspect of his nature that made people he lived with nervous and suspicious. He had called on the girl
’
s family— she was his cousin—to make a last attempt to persuade her to marry him. He was told that she was not at home, but could
see, at the dinner table, her place still partly laid, as she had left it when his arrival was announced. He held out his hand towards the candle and asked:
^‘
Let me see her for as long as I can hold my hand in this flame.
⁵
Someone snatched the candle away. Eventually he got his own way and was allowed to see his cousin. It came to nothing. That was the last time he saw her.

A year later, he took up painting seriously. He had also taken in a woman of the streets who was pregnant, thereby scandalizing all his friends, who abandoned him as lost. Even this affair was a failure. But now he had the painting to counterbalance his nervous tensions. As each crisis was overcome, the painting became stronger, more certain. In Paris, he absorbed the influence of the Impressionists, and the canvases became lighter. His brother Theo supplied him with money to live on while he painted; but even Theo, his most constant ally, found the
‘
wild man
’
a strain to live with. Finally, constant nervous tension had its effect on Vincent
’
s health, and he left Paris for the South in 1888. Gauguin joined him there, but, like everyone else, found him too explosive and highly strung to live with; the rupture occurred when Vincent attacked him with a razor and then, later, cut off his own ear and presented it in a matchbox to a prostitute at the local brothel. Periods of insanity followed; he was removed to the hospital, but continued to paint.

His style had developed in these last two years. His canvases were no longer realistic landscapes and interiors influenced by Millet and the Dutch school. The colours and lines are bolder, and in some of them, a strange technique of distortion makes it appear that trees, cornfields, houses are all burning upwards like flames. In contrast to these
‘
brainstorm
’
canvases, others are calm, relaxed, full of light and silence. He painted many portraits in the South—almost anyone he could persuade to sit for him—and many still-lifes. Some of the portraits show an odd feeling for decorative values which brings to mind Japanese prints; the still-lifes, on the contrary, often have a dynamic quality of the sort we find in a Michelangelo drawing. (The best known of these is the
‘
Yellow Chair
’
, of which Gauguin exclaimed delightedly:
‘
No one ever painted a chair like that before!
’
)

Vincent removed from the hospital at Aries to a private
sanatorium kept by a Dr. Gachet, Theo still continuing to send money. But Theo had more responsibilities now; he had married and his wife was expecting a baby. Beside this, he was quarrelling with the proprietors of his art gallery, who disliked Theo
’
s taste in the new
‘
young painters
’
. Vincent began to feel that his life was simply a burden on the world; he was terrified of complete insanity. His last canvas is the
‘
Cornfield with Crows
’
: the sky blue-black with a coming storm; a road that runs in from the left of the canvas, and shoots away through the middle of the ripe corn like a fast stream. There is a curious atmosphere of strain and foreboding. A few days after painting it he returned to the same place and shot himself with a revolver. But he bungled it, missing the heart; he buttoned the coat over the wound and walked back to his room. Two days later he died; his last words to Theo were:
‘
Misery will never end.
’
At the end of his last letter to Theo occur the words:
‘
Well, as to my work, I
’
ve risked my life for it, and my reason has half foundered.
...
’

Van Gogh
’
s life recalls to mind Hesse
’
s words in
Demian:
‘
Everyone
’
s life is a road to himself, to self-realization.
...
’
In Van Gogh
’
s case,
‘
self-realization
’
meant simply self-expression. For us, he is primarily a painter; but we should remember that he lived for nearly four decades, and that it was only in the last eight years of his fife that he thought of himself as a painter. Thirty years is a long time to live without a direction. Most people have a fairly definite idea of what they are and where they belong, before they are twenty. Van Gogh was aware of himself as a dynamo of energy and will-power before he was seventeen; but he had no idea
of what to drive
with his energy. In many ways he reminds us of the young George Fox, with his tormented feeling of having a purpose, yet not being conscious of it.
‘
I was a man of sorrows in those days.
’
(We shall examine Fox
’
s claim to be classed as an Outsider in Chapter VIII of this book.)

The one thing that is certain of the young Van Gogh is the intensity of his religious feeling; and by this, I do not mean intensity of
devotional
feeling, but simply a sense
of purpose.
This is in no way different from the feeling that made Lawrence regard himself as a preacher rather than as a soldier. If carefully analysed, it can only be resolved into the idea that there is a higher power than man in the universe, and man reaches
his highest purpose in serving it. At the same time, it is necessary to bear in mind Hesse
’
s recognition that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as man;
‘
Man is a bourgeois compromise.
’
The primitive religious notion of man
’
s relation to his creator collapses under the Outsider
’
s criticism. The Outsider
’
s wretchedness lies in his inability to find a new faith; he tends to regard his condition of unbelief as the result of a Fall. ^ This is the essential Van Gogh; not a painter, but an Outsider, for whom life is an acute and painful question that demands solution before he begins living. His earliest experiences teach him that life is an eternal Pro and Contra. His sensitivity makes him unusually aware of the Contra, of his own misery and the world
’
s. All his faculties are exerted in a search for the Pro, for instinctive, absolute Yea-saying. Like all artists, he has moments when he seems to be in complete accord with the universe and himself, when, like Meursault, he feels that the universe and himself are of the same nature; then all life seems purposive, and his own miseries purposive. The rest of the time is a struggle to regain that insight.
If
there is an order in the universe, if he can sometimes perceive that order and feel himself completely in accord with it, then it must be seeable, touchable, so that it could be regained by some discipline. Art is only one form of such a discipline.

Unfortunately, the problem is complicated by quite irrelevant human needs that claim the attention: for companionship and understanding, for a feeling of participation in the social life of humanity. And of course, for a roof over one
’
s head, and food and drink. The artist tries to give attention to these, but it is difficult when there are so much more important things to think about; and it is all made more difficult by the hostility of other people who every day arouse the question, Could it be that I
’
m wrong? Sometimes the strain makes the Outsider-artist think of suicide, but before he gets to that point, the universe is suddenly making sense again, and he has a glimpse of purpose. Moreover, that sense of accord is not the warm, vague harmony of a sleeping baby, but a blazing of all the senses, and a realization of a condition of consciousness unknown to the ordinary bourgeois. He realizes that this was what he left out of account in making up his mental balance-sheet of Pro and Contra in the universe. The Christian might call it a sense of the Fatherhood of God; a Hindu would
probably prefer to call it a sense of the Motherhood of God, and his symbolism would be more congenial to the artist, who can only find comparison for the feeling in a child
’
s confidence in its mother. In any case, these are only symbols of a state that is too little known to human beings for their descriptions of it to be accurate.