Van Gogh (128 page)

Not surprisingly, he had stayed in Pont-Aven as long as possible. Only after all the others had left, including Bernard and Madeleine; only after his money had run out entirely; and then only after Theo bought some of his ceramics, offered to show his Pont-Aven pictures on the
entresol
, and paid a final fifty-franc inducement, did Gauguin reluctantly board a train and begin the long journey to Arles. While Vincent waited breathlessly for the consummation of brotherhood to come (alerted by a trunk sent in advance), Gauguin coolly appraised Theo’s—not Vincent’s—plan for the future: “However much Van Gogh may be in love with me, he would not bring himself to feed me in the South for my beautiful eyes,” he wrote a friend on the eve of his departure. “He has surveyed the terrain like a cautious Dutchman and intends to push the matter to the utmost of his powers … This time I really have my foot on solid ground.”

With his sights so firmly fixed on relations in Paris, and ambivalent to the last minute, Gauguin failed to inform Vincent what day or what time he would arrive in Arles. When his train pulled into the station shortly after five in the morning on October 23, 1888, it was still dark—too early to intrude on a man he barely knew. So he stepped into a nearby café that was open, the Café de la Gare, to wait for the sunrise. “It’s you,” the manager called out, startling him. “I recognize you.” In his excitement of anticipation, Vincent had shown Gauguin’s self-portrait to the café owner.

A short time later, Vincent jolted awake at the sound of the long-awaited knock and rushed to the door.

There was more to the mix-up than irresolution or oversight. As an expert fencer and boxer, Gauguin knew the value of keeping an opponent off balance. “Wait for the first forward movement,” he once advised an overmatched student at the fencing school where he taught. When he chose, he planned meticulously and acted decisively. When he sensed a weakness, he did not hesitate to attack. But the venture with Vincent was filled with unknowns, and Gauguin preferred not to put too much weight forward until he knew his opponent better.

Where Vincent saw a brotherhood, Gauguin saw a contest. “I have a need for struggle,” he had announced before arriving, using a French term,
la lutte
, for the competition of wills that Gauguin saw in every exchange, whether with swords, fists, words, or images; “[I] slash away blow by blow.” To underscore this
en garde
, he sent Vincent a drawing of a painting he had made. It showed two Breton youths locked in a tense, wrestlers’ embrace. He described it as an image of primal combat “as seen through the eyes of a Peruvian savage.”

T
HE FIRST BLOW FELL WHEN VINCENT OPENED THE YELLOW HOUSE
door. Gauguin’s months of pleading letters and claims of paralyzing illness had led Vincent to expect a sick and debilitated man. He had seen that image in the self-portrait Gauguin sent ahead: “Gauguin looks ill and tormented!!” he exclaimed when it arrived. But the man who stood in his doorway looked a picture of health and vigor: muscles on his bones, blood in his cheeks, fire in his eyes. “Gauguin has arrived in good condition,” he wrote Theo, unmistakably startled. “He even seems to me better than I am.”

In the days that followed, Vincent marveled at his guest’s resilient stomach and hearty constitution—the two measures by which so many artists, Vincent included, often failed muster. With his ruddy complexion and robust health, Gauguin not only betrayed his self-portrait and belied months of complaints, he disarmed one of Vincent’s most vehement arguments on behalf of the Midi. Again and again, he had promised Theo that the Provençal sun would help Gauguin recover his health, rejuvenate his spirits, and return him to the gaiety and color of his Martinique paintings. But the hale bantam wrestler at his door had no need of rescue. “We are without the slightest doubt in the presence of a virgin creature with savage instincts,” Vincent reported in amazement.

The next blow fell only a few days later. Theo wrote that he had sold Gauguin’s painting of peasant girls dancing,
Les bretonnes
, for a handsome sum. In his subsequent letter, he enclosed a money order for Gauguin in the amount of five hundred francs—more than he had ever sent Vincent. “So for the moment,” he added cheerfully, “he will be quite well off.” Vincent dutifully dubbed the sale “a tremendous stroke of luck” for “all three of us.” But he couldn’t disguise the wound it inflicted. Any congratulations he offered Gauguin were drowned out
in a cry of guilt to Theo. “I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell,” he wrote forlornly in a long mea culpa the same day news of the sale arrived.

Oblivious to his brother’s pain, Theo followed up on the sale of
Les bretonnes
with a quick show of Gauguin’s latest Breton work on the
entresol
. Only weeks after his arrival in Arles, Gauguin was receiving the glowing reports from Paris that Vincent had only dreamed about. “It will undoubtedly please you to learn that your pictures are having a great success,” Theo wrote him in mid-November. “Degas is so enthusiastic about your works that he is speaking about them to a lot of people … Two [more] canvases have now been definitely sold.” Theo used the opportunity to open negotiations with Gauguin about raising Goupil’s commission “once we begin to sell your work more or less regularly.” It was a conversation he had never had with Vincent. Within two months, Theo would sell five of Gauguin’s paintings, plus some pottery, and send him almost fifteen hundred francs, in addition to his monthly stipend.

Vincent reeled under his guest’s onslaught of success. Just as Gauguin’s hearty condition foiled Vincent’s argument that all true artists suffered for their art, Gauguin’s successes on the
entresol
undermined years of excuses for why his own art had failed to sell. Forced by events to justify his work “from the financial point of view,” Vincent could offer only a single, pathetic defense: “It is better that [the paint] should be on my canvas than in the tubes.”

Reversing years of pleadings, he urged his brother to abandon any effort to sell his paintings and advised him instead to “keep my pictures for yourself.” That way, he said, he could tell Gauguin and others that Theo treasured his works too much to sell them. “Besides,” he added, “if what I am doing should be good, then we shall lose no money; for it will mature quietly, like wine in the cellar.” He bolstered this wisp of hope with two familiar images. On his first trip into the countryside with Gauguin, he painted the scarified trunk of an old yew tree, an image that spoke in deep fraternal code of new life springing from the wreckage of the past. He immediately sent a sketch of the painting to Theo, rallying
him to their shared mission of a “great renaissance” of Impressionism in the Midi—a mission that transcended any single artist.

On the same trip, he began yet another version of the Sower. More than any other image, Millet’s striding figure, making his rhythmic way through a vast field of turned earth in blues and yellows under a thin stripe of sea-blue sky, sounded the consoling notes of adversity overcome and persistence rewarded that Vincent most needed in this new trial by contrast.

Another blow fell when Gauguin picked the destination for their next painting excursion. Rejecting the barren fields and dusty barnyards of Vincent’s beloved Crau, Gauguin led them instead into the romantic heart of Arles: the Alyscamps. In Roman times, a necropolis lay to the south and east of the city walls—named, like the great avenue in Paris, after the
Campi Elysii
, the Elysian Fields. Christianity had added a gloss of sanctity to the old pagan burial ground. Chapels were built, saints gave blessings, legends of miraculous doings went out, Christ appeared in a vision. By medieval times, relatives eager to assure a place at the Last Judgment could float their dead down the Rhône to Arles, confident that Christian duty would safeguard them to a favored spot in the Alyscamps.

L
ES
A
LYSCAMPS
, A
RLES
(
Illustration credit 35.1
)

Over the centuries, a ramshackle city of the dead grew up. Thousands of sarcophagi, arranged as randomly as death, spread across the alluvial plain, each one making claims on eternity, both in stone and in words. But neither
antiquity nor sanctity stood in the way of industrial progress. By the time Vincent arrived, the railroad had blasted through the hallowed ground, churning up grave sites and discarding the marble detritus of death with furious disregard for the claims of
pacem
and
aeternam
. Belatedly, the city fathers collected some of the plundered discards and arranged them in a long alley connecting one of the cemetery’s antique gates to the Romanesque chapel of Saint Honorat. They lined this facsimile of history with benches and poplars, and solemnly dubbed it the
“allée des tombeaux.”

The trees were still young and flaming with fall color when Gauguin led Vincent to the famous Alyscamps in late October 1888. He came partly as tourist (guidebooks devoted chapters to the “ancient” graveyard), but mostly as voyeur. For time had delivered one final insult to the displaced souls of the Alyscamps. In the allée’s cul-de-sac privacy and shady interstices, young lovers had found a perfect haven. Generations of Arlésiennes had turned the old site of reckoning into a parade-ground of vanities: a lovers’ lane limned in death. Here they could stroll in their exotic Sunday costumes for the gratification of tourists and the bid of bachelors, or even walk arm in arm with a beau, without causing scandal.

Because of their reputation for beauty (they were widely viewed as direct descendants of the “Roman virgins” that adorned the vases of antiquity), the Arlésiennes’ perambulations among the tombs had achieved a romantic fame that reached far beyond Provence. Through popular stories and images, the Alyscamps had become the most celebrated lovers’ lane in France, a collective Venusian fantasy of noble beauty, coquettish charm, and chaste love. When one local lovely threw her unwanted baby into a nearby canal, the fantasy showed its darker side: a busy nightlife of trysting among the sarcophagi and lovemaking among the shades.

Vincent had probably explored the Alyscamps sometime in his seven months in Arles, but he had never mentioned it, drawn it, or painted it. In general, he gave all the city’s ruins a wide berth, avoiding both the tourists and the taunting immortality of the old stones. For feminine entertainments, he preferred the whorehouses of the rue des Récollets, near the Yellow House, where money was all that mattered. Egged on by Bernard, who sent both drawings and poems about brothels, Vincent took Gauguin on a tour of all his favorite spots, retracing his nightly rounds with the Zouave lieutenant Milliet (who left for Africa soon after Gauguin arrived), ostensibly for both recreation and “study.”

Gauguin tolerated these early excursions to the charmless, heavily regulated
maisons de tolérance
(which, according to one account, catered primarily to “the proletariat of ugliness and infirmity”), but he preferred the more elusive prey and challenging game of the Alyscamps—the contest of wit and glance that Vincent had long since abandoned as futile. (“My body is not attractive enough
to women to get them to pose for me free for nothing,” he lamented.) In these fabled precincts, Gauguin, on the other hand, flourished. With his hypnotic sensuality and menacing physicality, he seduced the beautiful and aloof Arlésiennes with an audacity—and lack of conscience—that left Vincent breathless with envy.