Van Gogh (127 page)

Meanwhile, Gauguin’s art bounded from Impressionism to Symbolism. He drafted ambitious manifestos for a new kind of imagery—“spiritual, enigmatic, mysterious, and suggestive”—and took up a new champion, Cézanne. But before he could create an art to match this L’oeuvre-like mandate, the ground beneath him shifted again. In 1886, Seurat’s
Grande Jatte
swept all before it. Gauguin’s canvases were lost in the wake of the latest
succès de scandale
, his rhetoric drowned out by the deafening buzz over the “new” Impressionism. Almost immediately, he laid elaborate plans to ingratiate himself with the new hero Seurat, to whose banner many of Gauguin’s former comrades, especially Pissarro, had rallied. But an unexplained “contretemps” with the ill-tempered Seurat in June 1886 brought that initiative to an abrupt end. Before long, he and his longtime sponsor Pissarro were trading insults. Gauguin denounced the Neo-Impressionists as makers of “petit-point tapestries” and cursed “those damn dots.” Pissarro accused Gauguin of “bad manners” and dismissed his art as “a sailor’s art, picked up here and there.” “At bottom his character is anti-artistic,” Pissarro sized up his former friend, “he is a maker of odds and ends.” Degas called him “a pirate.”

But Gauguin rebounded again. By the time Laval met him a few months later at the Gloanec Inn, he had found a new mentor, Félix Bracquemond; moved on to a new medium, ceramics; and assumed a new shape: a “savage from Peru.” Advertising his “Indian” heritage, he fashioned clay figures that combined pre-Columbian forms and Symbolist suggestion into sexually freighted images: menacing snakes and swans with phallic goosenecks. He signed them “PGo”—French slang for “prick.” He also refashioned himself as a brooding, volatile, alien “beast,” trapped in the parlors and studios of France. Banishing his past as a bourgeois Sunday painter, stockbroker, and Impressionist hanger-on, he grew his hair long and dressed in operatic costumery (extreme dishevelment one day, swaggering capes the next, often bedecked in ostentatious jewelry). Friends worried about his strange appearance and theatrical moods. Some thought that he had slipped into megalomania. He cultivated rumors (started by the altercation with Seurat) about his quick temper and feral belligerence, even as he continued to woo and charm. “You must remember that two natures dwell within me,” he explained ominously, “the Indian and the sensitive man. The sensitive being has disappeared and the Indian now goes straight ahead.”

This was the Gauguin that Laval met and loved and devoted his life to: a man unconstrained by convention or good repute; a man of both enlightenment and mystery, cultivation and danger; a man, as Gauguin himself put it, “outside the limits that society imposes.” He could be affable and gregarious one
minute, bullying and bellicose the next; now sardonic, now morose. In his limpid green eyes, some saw “gentleness and warmth”; others, “scoffing” disdain; others, “heavy-lidded sensuality.”

In a profession defined by effeteness, in an era of irony and languor, Gauguin boxed and fenced and did not flinch from physical confrontation—a reputation that delighted his admirers and intimidated his adversaries. Although short even by the standards of the period (five feet four), he was strong and solidly built. To some, he radiated a “menacing power that seemed just barely held in check.” They called him
“malin”
—cunning. “Most people were rather afraid of him,” wrote an English painter in Pont-Aven in 1886, “and the most reckless took no liberties with his person.… He was treated as a person to be placated rather than aroused.” Those he could not intimidate, he seduced. By Gauguin’s telling, men as well as women could taste the honey of his charms, and Laval was by no means the only proof of such claims. Gauguin himself, despite his many tales of amorous conquest, seemed to live beyond sex. He demanded chastity of acolytes like Laval with the exhortation
“pas de femmes”
(no women) and exalted androgyny above all other forms of sexual allure. By such various and variable means, Gauguin won hearts like Laval’s. “All the artists fear me and love me,” he boasted from Pont-Aven. “None can hold out against my theories…[They] ask my advice, fear my critiques, and never challenge anything I do.”

Paris, on the other hand, continued to resist him. By the time he returned there in the fall of 1886, the break with Pissarro and Seurat had widened into a chasm of mistrust and recrimination. No one would buy or sell or even show his work. Estrangement, obscurity, poverty, a long hospitalization, and a full turn from painting to pottery, combined to erase him from the avant-garde scene. By January 1887, Pissarro could write with some relief, “Gauguin is gone … completely disappeared.” One winter night, in his freezing apartment, warmed only by his kiln, his frustration, and the stubborn adulation of a few Pont-Aven acolytes like Laval, Gauguin presented his thrilling plan to thrust himself back into the public eye: he would “rebaptize” himself in the tropics. “I am going to Panama,” he announced, “to live like a savage.”

The long and miserable sea voyage, racked by storms and “packed like sheep” in the third-class cabin, hinted at the horrors to come. But Laval saw only his mentor’s steadiness and seamanship on a crossing he had made many times before. In his two years as a merchant seaman, Gauguin had acquired not only steady legs, but also a talent for the shipboard ritual of storytelling. A gifted raconteur (he bragged of being “an astonishing liar”), Gauguin spun yarns more easily than truth. On their ocean journey, Laval may have heard for the first time some of Gauguin’s Candide-like tales: of earthquakes and shipwrecks, of royal ancestors and madmen chained to the roof of his childhood
home; of sexual awakening at the age of six and whores in every port; of action in the Franco-Prussian War and near court-martial for insubordination; of cloak-and-dagger doings in a failed plot to overthrow the Spanish king. In one of his most astonishing stories, Gauguin crossed paths with another prolific fabulist, Julien Viaud—a fellow artistic soul of ambiguous sexuality lost in a midshipman’s uniform. A decade after their encounter, Viaud had become one of the era’s most popular writers, taking the name of a character he had invented for his fantasy account of a voyage to the Pacific: Pierre Loti.

But no sailor’s tale, or even Loti, could have prepared Laval for Panama and what he found in Colón, at the base of the great dig. A huge shantytown stretched as far as the eye could see: twenty thousand people crowded onto a finger of marshland jutting into the sea. Torrential rains, regular floods, and poor drainage had turned the low-lying town, swollen to ten times its original size in just a few years, into a hellhole of mud and misery—a “malarious swamp,” Gauguin called it. Trash and sewage filled the streets, swirling into new patterns of rat-infested effluvia with each downpour or inundation. In the overcrowded, unpoliced town, “a sort of filthy, putrescent anarchy” reigned, according to one account. Convulsions of violence—by the indigenous population against the newcomers and among the workers—cut swaths of ashes and ruin across the shanty rows. Death hovered in the air. Mosquitoes carrying malaria and yellow fever swarmed over the muddy peninsula, infecting half the population. At the canal itself, three out of four diggers—almost all of them blacks recruited from the West Indies—perished in wave after wave of unchecked contagion. At Colón’s only hospital, the death rate climbed even higher.

Gauguin’s plans for work proved as illusory as his promise of paradise. His brother-in-law’s “trading firm” in Panama City, on the Pacific side of the isthmus, turned out to be just a general store, where Gauguin found neither work nor money nor sympathy. He and Laval were forced to return to Colón, where, according to a newspaper account, “the sad spectacle of educated men starving in the streets” was common. Through Laval’s contact, they found jobs as clerks at a construction company office, but only for two weeks. After that, Laval tried to raise money by painting portraits. Gauguin struck off into the countryside looking to buy land from the local Indians using what little money they had left. When that failed, he persuaded Laval to press on to Taboga, their original destination. Instead of an unspoiled Shangri-La, however, they found a tourist trap—a sham of costumed natives, Sunday trippers, and guided tours. The wily islanders demanded exorbitant prices for everything, especially their land. Frustrated, Gauguin immediately laid plans to travel to Martinique, a “genial and gay” French island in the eastern Caribbean where their ship had called briefly on the trip over. “We ought to have gone there,” Gauguin fulminated, “where
living is cheap and easy and people affable.” Trailed by the adoring Laval, he left the fetid isthmus, convinced that an “enchanting life” awaited them at the end of the thousand-mile voyage to Martinique.

They barely had time to find the little slave cabin, in the mountains overlooking the port of Saint-Pierre, before Laval was struck down by yellow fever. The disease pounced on its victims with savage suddenness, reducing healthy men to racking pain, trembling fevers, and convulsive nausea in a single day. The poison spread to every organ, impairing liver, kidneys, and lungs. Drenching sweats, dysentery, and bloody vomiting brought light-headedness, delusion, and delirium. Skin and eyes turned a bilious yellow. In his letters to family and friends, Gauguin made nothing of Laval’s agony (“all’s well that ends well,” he wrote). While Laval lay in his sweat-stained bed, Gauguin explored the mango groves and watched the dark
porteuses
carrying their loads on their heads through the mountain passes. He reported painting “some good pictures … with figures far superior to my Pont-Aven period.” Laval eventually recovered enough to join him on some of these painting excursions, at least around the perimeter of their little hut.

In July, Gauguin, too, fell sick, but not seriously enough to merit a mention in his letters. That changed a month later when word arrived that a collector in Paris had expressed some interest in his pottery. Suddenly, a new El Dorado beckoned. “I must get out of here,” he wrote a friend, “otherwise I shall die like a dog.” In a fury of letters that testified against its own account of debilitating illness, Gauguin pled for money to return home. “I am just a skeleton,” he cried. “My head has become very weak, I have only a little strength in the intervals between delirium. Nervous crises almost every day and horrible shrieks, it is as if my chest were burning. I implore you … do all that is possible to send me 250 or 300 francs immediately.” In a bold lie, he claimed that his work in the trenches of the canal (“break[ing] the earth from half past five in the morning until six in the evening under the tropical sun”) had “poisoned” him. He described his “agonies in the stomach” and “atrocious pains.” “My head is swimming,” he wrote, “my face is covered with perspiration and I have shivers down my back.” Every night he “expected to die,” he said, and only a return to France would save him from death or a lifetime of “disease and fever.”

Was Gauguin ever this sick? Or did he weave this vivid narrative from his friend’s sufferings to bolster his case for funding? Although the course of the disease was mercifully short, recovery (if there was one) often took months. In October, when Gauguin finally succeeded in begging the money for passage back to France, Laval was still too weak to travel. Gauguin, on the other hand, bounded home, leaving his friend to convalesce on his own, no doubt defending his departure in the same terms he had used only six months earlier when he
abandoned his son Clovis in Paris: “I have
just
enough to pay my fare … my heart and mind are steeled against all suffering.”

ALMOST EXACTLY ONE YEAR
after returning from Martinique, Paul Gauguin knocked at the Yellow House door. He had not seen his wife or children once in the intervening year. Nor had the Paris art world fallen prostrate before the artist who now styled himself “a man of the tropics.” True, he had sold three Martinique paintings to the newcomer Theo van Gogh (whose
entresol
gallery, he discovered, had become “the center for the Impressionists” in his absence), but nothing had come of it. He had returned from his exotic adventure expecting a triumph—to “hit everybody in the eye” the way Seurat’s
Grande Jatte
had done. Instead, he found only Theo’s cautious optimism and his strange brother’s suffocating enthusiasm. “All I have brought back from the tropics arouses nothing but admiration,” he wrote acidly in November 1887. “Nevertheless, I do not arrive.”

Rather than suffer obscurity in Paris, Gauguin had returned to the scene of his first and, so far, only
succès
—Pont-Aven—at almost the same moment in February 1888 when Vincent struck out for the South. There, he had worked tirelessly to bolster his new identity as an artist of savage temperament and primitive essence. He talked endlessly of his “decisive” Martinique experiences and instructed his reassembled acolytes: “If one wants to know who I am … one must look for me in the works I brought back from there.” He drew strained parallels between Brittany and Martinique, calling both “dark and primitive” places, whose natives bore the mark of “primitive times.” Borrowing from yet another Loti fantasy,
Mon frère Yves
, he dressed like a Brittany sea captain in sailor’s jersey and beret—a reminder to all of his exotic travels and of “the hidden savage” that Loti saw in every man who “inhabited the primitive world of the sea.”

In this guise, Gauguin had revisited the triumph of two summers before. While currying Theo’s support with humble letters addressed
“Cher Monsieur,”
and repeatedly putting off Vincent’s pleading invitations to Arles with a charade of imminent departure, he circulated among the holiday crowd in Pont-Aven, reprising the role of
chef d’école
to a circle of young painters who, he hoped, would carry the flame of celebrity back to Paris. He even reclaimed the adulation of young Laval, who finally limped home from Martinique in July 1888, eight months after Gauguin left him there. With the help of Émile Bernard, a new addition to this charmed circle, Gauguin had developed an art to accompany his new incarnation—an art of primitive “crudity” and spiritual intensity. The bold forms and colors of Anquetin’s Cloisonnism and Bernard’s reborn mystical Catholicism both perfectly suited Gauguin’s self-portrait as savage. (The
self-portrait that he sent Vincent had a “fierce, blood-glutted face,” he wrote, and “eyes like lava fires.”) Gauguin not only dominated the young challenger Bernard (though the two would soon clash over authorship of the new art), he underscored his primitive primacy by seducing Bernard’s seventeen-year-old sister Madeleine.