Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Editor’s note. For reasons of space, we are not including the analysis of the years spent in the United States. In these years, according to Vargas Llosa, the world depicted in Grosz’s art, showed ‘good sense, intelligence and reason, and perhaps even goodness and generosity’.

  A dogmatic vision has tragic consequences in politics, because dogmas restrict and distort human reality, which is always more subtle and complex than ideological schemata and Manichean world views. But such a vision can be a marvellous stimulus for creating a work of art, which is always a fiction, that is, a condensation of reality. When a schematic view of humanity – and here we think of Grosz in art and Brecht in literature – is expressed with great technical and formal skill, then it can become a powerful and persuasive reality, an alternative world to lived experience. And although it is a fraud, it can often impose itself on reality and become that reality. Grosz produced his best work when he hated and wounded without compunction, when he dreamed of crimes and the apocalypse, when he divided the world into devils – soldiers, priests, prostitutes, bureaucrats and capitalists – and saints – revolutionaries and workers – and expressed all this in seductive and deceitful images.

  In the worlds of art and literature – the worlds of fiction – people sometimes discover that their own secret utopias have been expressed, their deepest cravings have to some degree been satisfied. I find this with Grosz, above all the Grosz of the Berlin years. To admire his work, I do not have to burden it with ethical and political considerations, or psychological readings, because although these aspects might well be important, they do not address the central issue: that Grosz used all of this material to construct his own world, based on his own creative egotism.

  Great artistic works are always mysterious and complex, so it is always risky to gauge them in ideological, moral or political terms, although not to do so would be to avoid something that is also undeniable: that a work is not created and does not resonate in a void, but rather within history. Some works can be understood quite easily and thus lend themselves to different interpretations. Other works, like those of Grosz, are much less easy to read, which is why critics often seem uneasy with him. Some critics analyse his work purely in artistic terms, talking about form and colour and composition, ignoring the ferocious distortions and violence of his world. And those that merely explore the content are often loathe to accept that his images are contradictory, at once a violent attack on, but also a celebration of, a world with which – doubtless despite himself – he closely identified.

  Grosz was not a ‘social artist’. He was a maudit. In today’s shifting and superficial definitions of art, all original works must be described as maudit, eccentric and marginal, and so the term seems rather meaningless. But this was certainly not the case when Baudelaire used the word. What I mean is that Grosz’s work is absolutely authentic, and expresses an unrestrained freedom. His fantasies stirred the bilge of society and the human heart, and his invention of reality has, over time, become more powerful and truthful than reality itself. When we talk of the ‘Berlin years’ today, we are not thinking of the years that Germany suffered and enjoyed, but rather the years that Grosz invented.

  Berlin, March 1992

  Two Friends

  The famous Yellow House in Arles that Vincent Van Gogh hired, furnished and filled with his own paintings to receive his friend Paul Gauguin in the autumn of 1888, no longer exists. It disappeared in an Allied bombing raid on 25 June 1945, and on the site now is a modest hotel called the Terminus Van Gogh. The owner, an alert little old lady of eighty-four, has a photograph of the bombed house. She had witnessed the bombing raid, which almost cost her her life. The surrounding area has not changed much, however, and you can recognise straight away the house next door that appears in one of the Dutchman’s paintings.

  The large, circular Place Lamartine is still there, as are the massive green plane trees by the Cavalry Gate, set into the wall of the old city. The Rhône probably hasn’t changed much either as it flows slowly and majestically a few yards from this terrace, flanking the Roman town. What has disappeared is the small police station – replaced by a Monoprix store – along with the brothel of Madame Virginie, known then as the Number One House of Tolerance, which, in those two months that they lived together, the friends visited two or three times a week, Van Gogh always to sleep with a girl called Rachel. The shabby street where the brothel was located has been dug up and replaced by a wide avenue. This was then a very poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of town, with beggars, prostitutes and cafés full of the dregs of humanity, but in the century or more that has gone by, the area has become gentrified and it is now the home of discreet and anodyne middle-class people.

  The two months that Van Gogh and Gauguin spent here, between October and December 1888, are the most mysterious in their lives. The details of what really happened between the two friends in those eight weeks have escaped the stubborn investigation of hundreds of researchers and critics who, from the few objective facts, try to clarify the unknown, sometimes with rather wild hypotheses and fantasies. The letters of the two men are evasive about their time together, and when at the end of his life Gauguin referred to this period, in Avant et Après, some fifteen years had gone by, syphilis had wreaked havoc with his memory, and his testimony was suspect because he was trying at all costs to counter the rumours, which were then widespread in France, that he had been responsible for Van Gogh’s final collapse into madness. What we do know is that in this now phantom house, the two men dreamed, painted, argued and fought, and that the Dutchman was on the point of killing the Frenchman, whose trip to Arles he had waited for with the impatience and the hopes of a lover.

  There are no hints of a homosexual relationship between the two, but the relationship was certainly passionate and very highly charged. Van Gogh had met Gauguin a few months earlier, in Paris, and was fascinated by the overwhelming personality of this artist-adventurer who had just returned from Panama and Martinique, with some paintings that were full of light and primitive life, like the life that he himself looked to lead so as to counterbalance ‘the decadence of the West’. So he asked his brother Theo to help him convince Gauguin to come with him to Provence. There, in that yellow house, they would establish a community of artists, and they would be the pioneers. Gauguin would be the director and new painters would come to join this brotherhood or commune, where everything would be shared, where they would live for beauty, and where private property and money would not exist. This utopia obsessed Van Gogh. At first, Gauguin was opposed to it and came to Arles reluctantly, lured by the economic incentives offered by Theo, because the truth was that he was very happy in Pont-Aven, in Brittany. This can be seen in the fact that in several of the sixteen paintings that he completed in Arles, his Arles inhabitants are wearing Breton clogs and caps. However, after the tragedy of Christmas Eve, 1888, it would be Gauguin and not Van Gogh who would dedicate the rest of his life to try to bring to fruition the Dutchman’s utopian dream, and would set off for Polynesia, a land that had fascinated Van Gogh when he read about it in a novel by Pierre Loti, Le Mariage de Loti, a novel that he made Gauguin read during his stay in Arles.

  Was it his excessive obsequiousness and the extraordinary lengths to which Van Gogh went to make him feel comfortable and happy in Arles that turned Gauguin against his companion? It is quite possible that the rather hysterical effusiveness of the Dutchman began to get on his nerves and made him feel imprisoned. But he was also irritated by his messiness, and by the fact that he took more money than had been agreed out of the common kitty for his ‘hygienic activities’ (which is what he called his visits to Rachel). They had divided up the tasks. Gauguin cooked and Van Gogh did the shopping, but the cleaning, that they shared, always left much to be desired. There was one definite argument over the pointilliste Seurat; Van Gogh, who admired him, wanted to invite him to the Studio of the South, the name given to the utopian community, and Gauguin refused, because he hated the art
ist.

  Their aesthetic differences were more theoretical than practical. Van Gogh declared himself an out-and-out realist and looked to set up his easel in the open air, so that he could paint natural scenes. Gauguin maintained that the true raw material of a creator was not reality but memory, and that one should look for inspiration not in the world outside but rather from within. This dispute, which apparently provoked tremendous arguments between the two friends, has been resolved over time: neither of them illustrated their theories in their paintings, which now appear to us, despite being so different, equally full of invention and imagination as well as being firmly rooted in reality. In the first few weeks that they lived together in Arles, the good weather allowed them to put into practice Van Gogh’s theories. They both installed themselves outside to paint the same topics: the Alyscamps countryside, the great Roman and palaeo-Christian necropolis, the gardens of the Hôtel-Dieu, the public hospital. But then torrential rains set in and they had to stay cooped up in the Yellow House, painting mainly with their imagination and from memory. Being cooped up like this because of the inclement weather – it was the windiest and wettest autumn in half a century – must have created an atmosphere of claustrophobia and extreme tension, which often translated into violent arguments. That was the time that Gauguin sketched the portrait of his friend painting sunflowers that left the Dutchman dumbfounded: ‘Yes, that’s me. But already mad.’

  Was he? There’s no doubt that in the hazy world that we call madness, there is a place that cannot be precisely defined which corresponds to Van Gogh’s mental state that autumn, although the diagnoses of ‘epilepsy’ that doctors treating him first in Arles and later in Saint-Rémy came up with leave us somewhat perplexed and sceptical about the true nature of his illness. But it is a fact that when living with Gauguin, something that he had invested so much in, turned sour, this brought on a crisis that he would never get out of. It is a fact that the idea that his friend would leave before the date he had promised (a year) was unbearable for him. He moved heaven and earth to keep him in Arles, but this had the opposite effect on Gauguin, convincing him to leave as soon as possible. This is the context for the episode on the night before Christmas Eve, 1888, for which we have only the improbable testimony of Gauguin to rely on. An argument in the Café de la Gare, while they were having an absinthe, ended abruptly: the Dutchman threw his glass at his friend, who only just managed to take evasive action. The next day, Gauguin tells him that he is going to move into a hotel because, he says, if a similar incident happened again, he would be likely to react with equal violence and wring his neck. At nightfall, when he was walking through Victor Hugo Park, he heard footsteps behind him. He turned, and saw Van Gogh with an open razor in his hand. When Van Gogh saw that he had been discovered, he ran away. Gauguin spent the night in a neighbouring guest house. At seven in the morning, he went back to the Yellow House and found it surrounded by neighbours and police. The previous evening, after the incident in the park, Van Gogh had cut off part of his left ear and had taken it, wrapped in a newspaper, to Rachel at Madame Virginie’s. Then he returned to his room and fell asleep, in a pool of blood. Gauguin and the police took him to the Hôtel-Dieu, and Gauguin left for Paris that same night.

  Although they never saw one another again, in the months that followed, while Van Gogh spent an entire year at a clinic in Saint-Rémy, the friends from Arles exchanged several letters, in which the episode of the mutilation of the ear and their time in Arles are conspicuous by their absence. When Van Gogh committed suicide a year and a half later, in Auvers-sur-Oise, putting a bullet into his stomach, Gauguin made a very short and edgy comment, as if the whole matter was something far removed from him (‘It was fortunate for him, in terms of his suffering’). And subsequently, in the years that followed, he would avoid talking about the Dutchman, as if he always felt uneasy about the topic. However, it is clear that he did not forget him, and that his absence was very present in the fifteen remaining years of his life, perhaps in ways that he was not even always conscious of. Why else, if not, did he attempt to sow sunflowers, in front of his cabin in Punaauia, in Tahiti, even when everybody assured him that this exotic flower could never acclimatise to Polynesia? But the ‘savage Peruvian’, as he like to call himself, was stubborn, asked his friend Daniel de Monfreid for seeds, and worked the land so persistently that finally his indigenous neighbours and the missionaries of that remote place, Punaauia, could enjoy those strange yellow flowers that followed the movement of the sun.

  All this happened more than a century ago, sufficient distance for the story to become enriched by the fantasies and lies that all human beings, not just novelists, are prone to. The friendly octogenarian who presides over the small Hôtel Terminus-Van Gogh, in the Place Lamartine, with whom I got on really well in the half an hour that she sat on this sunny terrace, told me, for example, some delightful inaccuracies about the Yellow House, that I pretended to believe completely. Suddenly, as a homage to those two friends who ennobled this piece of land, I decided to drink an absinthe. I had never before tried this drink that has such an illustrious Romantic, symbolist and modernista ancestry, the drink that Verlaine, Baudelaire and Rubén Darío drowned in, and which Van Gogh and Gauguin imbibed like water. I had imagined it as an exotic, aristocratic spirit, a green viscous colour, which would have a dramatic effect on me, but I was brought instead a rather plebeian pastis. The horrible drink smelt of pharmaceutically prepared mint and sugar and, when I rather unwisely forced it down me, I started retching. Yet one further proof that dull reality will never live up to our dreams and fantasies.

  Arles, June 2001

  Traces of Gauguin

  The Marquesas are the most isolated islands – the furthest from a continent – of all the islands floating in the seas of the world. To get to Hiva Oa, you have to fly first to Tahiti (twenty-four hours from Europe and twelve from the American continent) and then, in Papeete, get into a tiny plane that is buffeted for about four hours by stormy clouds, and finally, after a stop in Niku Hiva, you land in Atuona. The landscape is magnificent: soaring mountainsides and peaks covered in green, rising out of a rough sea, with great foaming waves which seem to be battering Hiva Oa, intent on destroying it.

  Atuona, the capital of the island, is now even smaller than in Gauguin’s time. Now it has less than a thousand inhabitants and, in 1901, when he stepped on shore, there were two hundred more people. It is still a single small street that leads from Traitor’s Bay two-thirds of a mile to the slopes of the imperious Mount Temétiu. In some parts you need a lot of imagination to follow Gauguin’s travels in Tahiti: Papeete and Punaauia are now modern and prosperous and overrun by tourists. In Atuona, by contrast, the traces of the last two years of his life that he spent here are everywhere to be seen. The landscape, of course, has barely changed. The town, which has some new houses but has lost a lot of the old buildings, is still a small human settlement engulfed by nature, which seems to have kept it apart from time and the trappings of the modern world. In Atuona, it isn’t the clocks but rather the cock crowing that wakes up the inhabitants, and life still continues in slow motion, in a warm and happy lethargy.

  Mr Maitiki, who gave Gauguin lodgings in his first weeks on the island, is buried in the Make Make cemetery, not far from his grave, and his descendants are still involved in trade, as he was. A great-grandson of Monsieur Frébault, who was there at his death, is the president of the Friends of Gauguin Society, and he acts as my guide. He’s an athletic islander, and his body is covered with the fine tattoos that, from time immemorial, the islands have been famous for, and which was one of the attractions that drew Gauguin here. But Gauguin, alas, could hardly see those delicate tattoos because of the calamitous state of his eyes – as well as lacerating his legs and damaging his heart and brain, syphilis had greatly affected his eyesight in his final years – and because the implacable Bishop Martin, his mortal enemy, who was bent on Westernising the Kanakas and the Maori, had banned them. Now the bones
of Monseigneur Martin and Koke (the name given to Gauguin by the local people) rest a few yards from each other in the heights of Atuona, facing the open seas that brought in whaling ships to press-gang local Indians as crew members, and also terrifying tsunamis that devastated Atuona on several occasions in the nineteenth century.

  There’s no trace left of Ben Varney, the storekeeper, who was a very close friend of Gauguin and possibly went back to die in his homeland, the United States. But the store is still there, almost intact, a two-storey building with wooden railings and a corrugated iron roof, where Koke came to buy the little that he ate and the great deal that he drank, absinthe for him and his friends, and rum for the indigenous people that Monseigneur Martin had forbidden to drink alcohol. Gauguin fought against this prohibition, leaving outside the door of his house – la Maison de Jouir – a small barrel of rum for all the local people to help themselves.