Van Gogh (126 page)

But only one man could lead them. “There must be an abbot to keep order,” Vincent insisted. “Gauguin and not I will be the head of the studio.” Theo could serve as “first dealer-apostle,” Vincent allowed; but he, too, owed this single allegiance. “You have committed yourself to Gauguin body and soul,” he solemnly instructed his brother. Only in this way could they achieve the procreative triumph that Vincent had long envisioned. “I can see my own painting coming to life,” he imagined. “And if we stick to it, all this will help to make something more lasting than ourselves.”

But in Paris, Theo read Vincent’s surge of giddy letters with increasing concern. After months of negotiations, he knew all too well Gauguin’s Gallic egotism and fecklessness (his “final” commitment to go to Arles was conditioned on the payment of an additional hundred francs). And he knew even better his brother’s heedless ardor. He had lived through all the great, fiery arcs of Vincent’s passions: bugs and birds, brothels and bordellos, Christ and the benighted miners, Mauve and his magic brush, Herkomer and black-and-white illustrations, Millet and the heroic peasants, Delacroix and color: a succession of gospels and saviors. The self-advancing Gauguin must have seemed a particularly unsteady fulcrum for such a heavy load of expectation.

How heavy a load became clearer with every new expense (another binge of spending followed Gauguin’s letter), every plea for more money, and every promise to pay it all back. (In October, Vincent proposed yet another fantastical plan to reimburse Theo for everything he had spent over the years.) Indeed, Vincent had come to see the combination with Gauguin as balancing the books of a lifetime. When sister Wil sent a recent photograph of their mother, Vincent immediately made a painting based on it, triumphantly rerendering the face of the past in the same “ashen coloring” and vibrant Veronese green as his
bonze
self-portrait.

But what if Gauguin
did
come? Even from a distance, he had found Vincent’s tireless persuasion and endless demands for affirmation “intimidating.” Theo knew better than anyone the trials of living with his brother: the insecurity and defensiveness, the alternating currents of guileless optimism and abyssal depression, the inner war of grand ambition and easy frustration. (“I am afraid of getting discouraged if I do not succeed at once,” Vincent confessed that September.) How would Gauguin, a man of forty with multiple careers and a world of experience, respond to Vincent’s devouring need to reshape the people and things closest to him because he could change so little else about his life? Even now, awaiting “the abbot’s” arrival, Vincent was already lobbying to put off Bernard’s coming and dictating the terms of Gauguin’s happiness as sure-handedly
as he had planned Sien Hoornik’s rehabilitation: “He must eat and go for walks with me in lovely surroundings,” he wrote Theo, “pick up a nice girl now and then, see the house as it is and as we shall make it, and altogether enjoy himself.”

In addition to his own experience, Theo had the reports of Lieutenant Milliet and Eugène Boch, both of whom had visited him recently in Paris with firsthand accounts of Vincent’s embattled life under the southern sun. The Dane Mourier-Petersen (who later called Vincent “mad”) had stayed with Theo briefly after leaving Arles, and Theo undoubtedly knew from both sides the story of Vincent’s rancorous falling-out with Dodge MacKnight, his first candidate for a “combination” in the Yellow House. Vincent himself talked ominously of “madness” and the need to “beware of my nerves.”

As if confirming Theo’s worst fears, Vincent launched a preemptive assault on Gauguin only a week after receiving his final agreement to come. When the self-portrait Gauguin had described so thrillingly arrived in Arles, Vincent found the colors “too dark” and “too sad.” “Not a shadow of gaiety,” he complained. How could the Bel-Ami of the Midi paint such a “despairing” and “dismal” image? “He must not go on like this,” Vincent sputtered. “He absolutely must cheer up. Or else …”

What would happen if this castle in the air collapsed, like so many before it? Theo had already pressured Vincent to move on: a pressure that would only intensify if Gauguin balked again. In a fury of denial, Vincent claimed that he would stay in Arles for ten years, living the unbothered life of a Japanese monk, “studying a single blade of grass” and “drawing the human figure” contentedly. But he had said the same thing in The Hague, before scandal and failure drove him home to Nuenen; and the same thing in Nuenen, before scandal and failure drove him to Theo in Paris.

In his darkest moments, Vincent must have considered returning to Paris; but even that road of shame was fraught with uncertainty. Not only was Theo’s health precarious, but his heart was drawn in other directions. Alone in the rue Lepic apartment, “feeling emptiness everywhere,” Theo complained of “a void” that Vincent could not fill. His thoughts had turned again to love and marriage and a family of his own.

IN HIS DELIRIUM
of anticipation, Vincent ignored the signals from Paris that the net beneath his high wire might be removed. In a celebration of the perfect union to come, he painted another view of the public park outside his door—the “Poet’s Garden” of Petrarch and Boccaccio. An immense fir tree spreads its shade over a winding gravel path and an island of luxuriant grass. Its feathery bulk blocks sun and sky, filling the upper half of the canvas with buoyant, radiating fronds of a deep and wondrous turquoise—a color exquisitely poised between
blue and green: a perfect marriage; unfathomably lovely. In its Persian-fan shade, a couple walk hand in hand.

When it was dry, Vincent hung it in the tiny bedroom he had prepared for Gauguin along with the other paintings of the Poet’s Garden and the sunflowers of summer as a harmonious chorus of welcome. At the same time, in the pots on either side of the front door of the Yellow House, he planted two oleander bushes—reminders of the fecundity of madness, and the toxicity of love.

C
HARLES LAVAL LOVED PAUL GAUGUIN SO MUCH THAT HE WOULD
have followed him through Hell. And in April 1887, he did just that. Lying feverish and delusional on a seaweed-stuffed mattress in a hut built for negro slaves, shivering uncontrollably in a swamp of his own sweat, Laval never questioned his decision to come to Martinique with his friend and
maître
Paul Gauguin.

They had met the previous summer on the cool, rocky coast of Brittany—the same summer Vincent spent closeted in the rue Lepic apartment painting flowers. Gauguin had blown into the little artists’ resort of Pont-Aven like a gust of tropical wind off the nearby Gulf Stream. The community of young painters—mostly British, American, and Scandinavian—hungry to make sense of the upheavals in Paris, flocked around him. Here was a man who had painted alongside the heroes of Impressionism, from Manet to Renoir, who had shown with them as early as the
refusé
days and as recently as the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in May, only months before. In that show, Gauguin’s work had shared the walls with Seurat’s
Grande Jatte
—an image of electrifying newness. With his flamboyant dress, exotic background, and mysterious reserve, the thirty-eight-year-old Gauguin seemed to hold the key that would unlock all the art world’s secrets. In a fever to win his favor, the young artists of Pont-Aven paid for his lodgings, attended him at table, and sat spellbound at his nightly audiences at the Gloanec Inn.

None competed more ardently or listened more enthralled than Charles Laval. Wearing the pince-nez of an aesthete and the wispy beard of an ascetic, the twenty-five-year-old Laval combined the refined sensibilities of his father, a Parisian architect, and the soulful yearnings of his Russian mother. He had come of age on the fringes of Impressionism, studied with Toulouse-Lautrec, and exhibited at the Salon while still a teenager. Financially secure but spiritually
thirsting, Laval, who had lost his real father at age eight, distinguished himself among all the young painters of Pont-Aven as Gauguin’s most devoted acolyte.

Thus, it was no surprise when, the following winter, Laval accepted his master’s invitation to join an expedition to the Caribbean in search of the erotic license and artistic truths known only to primitive cultures. Gauguin painted an irresistible picture of a “free and fertile” land where “the climate is excellent and one can live on fish and fruit which are to be had for the taking.” It was an image ripped directly from the pages of Pierre Loti’s fabulist account of his trip to Tahiti,
The Marriage of Loti
. Charles Laval, besotted like so many aimless sons of the bourgeoisie by Loti’s vision of paradise on earth, could hardly refuse.

P
AUL
G
AUGUIN,
1891 (
Illustration credit 34.1
)

In fact, Laval had every reason to believe in Gauguin’s seductive vision of a paradise in the Americas. As everyone at the Gloanec Inn knew, Gauguin traced his ancestry to the colonial Spanish rulers of Peru, where the young Paul had spent his early years. Sometimes he hinted at an even earlier, more primitive and noble lineage among the great native rulers of the New World, including perhaps the Aztec emperor Montezuma—a notion to which his dark skin and sharp features seemed to bear witness. He talked of wealthy family connections still in Lima, where he had lived a childhood pampered by tropical breezes and Chinese servants.

With stories like these, Gauguin cast their trip to the Caribbean more as a triumphal return than a careless adventure. Indeed, he had chosen their destination—a tiny island called Taboga—because of its proximity to his brother-in-law, a successful merchant who had recently returned to his native Colombia. In the northern part of that country, on a narrow isthmus called Panama, French companies had undertaken a massive construction project: a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In the flood of money and matériel being poured into this remote region, his brother-in-law would make a fortune, Gauguin assured his young disciple, and could well afford to stake them to their piece of paradise in Taboga.

Laval, too, had a relative among the scores of companies that had rushed to Panama, but he knew nothing of money or business. On these matters, especially, he trusted Gauguin. After all, Gauguin had worked at the Paris stock exchange, the Bourse, for years before becoming an artist. As a broker and “liquidator,” he had parlayed a respectable inheritance from a mysterious benefactor into a haut-bourgeois lifestyle of hired carriages and Sunday outings. He had acquired a family along the way as well, including a wife and five children, although its workings must have been deeply obscure to the conventional Laval. The one son who lived with Gauguin in Paris, Clovis, had been safely set aside in boarding school, seemingly no impediment at all to his father’s long absences; the others remained with his Danish wife, Mette, in distant Copenhagen. Gauguin said little about any of them, and Laval dared not inquire. Like his unusual accent (Spanish was his first language), murky finances, and uncertain pedigree, such questions were all subsumed in the enigma that was Paul Gauguin.

His art only added to the mystery. From his grandmother’s friendship with Delacroix to his own flirtation with Symbolism, Gauguin’s art seemed always on the move, drawing from everywhere, promising everything, flinging itself from one latitude of the art world to another as freely as his ancestors (and Gauguin himself) traversed the tropics. As a stockbroker, he had bought the art and indulgence of the Impressionists. On his Sunday outings, he took up their brush and, under the tutelage of Pissarro, mastered their feathery style. By 1882, when his Bourse job vanished in the great stock crash that year, Gauguin felt sufficiently confident to turn his avocation for art into a full-time pursuit. To the horror of his status-conscious wife, who promptly left him and returned to Denmark, he took up the “vagabond life” of an artist and threw himself on the mercy of the art market. Unable to win critical attention or patronage (he admitted to offering himself “like a whore to the market and finding no takers”), Gauguin was soon forced to accept a sales job with a tarpaulin maker and rejoin his family in Copenhagen. After only six months, however, he abandoned them and returned to Paris, more determined than ever to make his mark in the art world. He took
only his son Clovis, Mette’s favorite, with him—out of spite, some thought. In a tiny garret with little food and less heat, the six-year-old immediately fell sick with smallpox.