'Poetry is More Terrible than Painting'

Vincent Van Gogh and Poetry: a conversation with Julian Bell

 

The Potato Eaters, 1885 Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation) 

Could you give us a general overview of Van Gogh's literary passions? What did literature in general mean to him? And how did his interests shift as he grew older?

Van Gogh lived in books - that's evident from his early letters onwards, where you find him copying out Keats and the sub-Wordsworthian verses of the Fleming, Jan van Beers, and leaning on the prose of Michelet. This is around 1875, when he's a twenty-two-year-old clerk in London and I guess already trilingual. Reading was a fundamental part of his life. He must have given a considerable percentage of his waking hours to it. As a preacher's son - in fact, as a well educated 19th-century Westerner - the Bible was the great backbone of his verbal world, and biblical cadences, metaphors and parables were his own permanent stock-in-trade as a letter writer, even if he moved away from congregational religion after he turned to painting in 1879, when he was 26. 
Second to the Bible, the book that crops up most often is a life of Millet, that great painter of the peasantry, by a writer named Sensier. I've never seen the book myself, but it was evidently a hagiograph. Van Gogh seems to have used the Millet persona it presented as an inspirational model through much of his own life as a painter.       

Books, from the Bible downwards, were necessary because they opened up to you the spiritual dimensions of life, throwing a critical - a moral - an inspirational - and, very likely, a tragic - light on the immediate, quotidian world. One could almost say that pictures were for van Gogh a kind of subset of books, in this respect - they too were principally there in order to open a window onto the spiritual realities of human existence.    
  

This is the way in which, quite early on, he embraced the moralism and the social criticism with which Dickens, George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe are loaded; and again, in this respect, he was surely in line with the mainstream of the 19th-century Western public. Later, after he'd frenchified his tastes somewhat - giving a lot of time to Balzac, Zola, Daudet and Maupassant - he got to suspect that Uncle Tom's Cabin might be a bit on the unsophisticated side. But I don't feel that his fundamental yearning for spiritual edification changed in its essential nature. 

 

The Sower, 1888  Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation)

If you search the chronology of the new, online edition of Van Gogh's Letters - and it is fuller in certain respects than the print edition and, what is more, it is entirely free to access - you come across a multitude of references to literary works: history, fiction, poetry and much else. Two questions emerge: was his response to poetry different from his response to fiction, and, if so, how? 

Poetry features heavily in his imaginative world when he's a young man, long before he starts painting. He transcribes into his letters, with little comment, tons of verses such as those of Longfellow or of the Jan van Beers I mentioned before, stuff that's knocking around in popular circulation. I feel at this point in his life he's leaning on such poetry for its dependable, doggily friendly company, and for the aural sustenance of its meaning-laden rhythm, in the way that probably lots of us can remember doing ourselves when we were young - it's anything but a critical response. The same response then transfers itself to scripture, homilies and hymns when he turns zealously religious in his mid twenties.       

But he never as far as I know starts composing verse - nor prose fiction. With prose, however - particularly with discursive prose - he's far more ready to intervene and criticise, because he's putatively commenting as one reader on another, as a prose-writer on a fellow in that trade. To hear him arguing through a critical position on Carlyle, for instance (in a letter of 5 March 1883), you realise you are listening to a truly formidable cultural commentator.       

One thing that incidentally rather intrigues me is that while he does get to read a bit of Tolstoy and Turgenev, it's only at secondhand that he gets to hear of a reputedly fascinating writer called Dostoyevsky. And thus he never gets to glimpse into the mirror, and encounter the 19th-century sensibility which most of all matches his own, in terms of overflowing, driving, endlessly fluid and inquisitive spiritual fervour. 


Field with Flowers near Arles, 1888 Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation

And could his reading of poetry be said to have informed his paintings and, if so, how? 

Pretty directly at the outset of his painting career, in an image like 'Sorrow', that 1882 drawing of his mistress Sien, hunched, naked and grieving, the first picture he thought he'd achieved anything with - it's thought of as a poetic emblem, full of heavy-laden import. He transcribes a line from a Michelet essay on the woes of womankind at the foot of his original version of the image. - Comment se fait-il qu'il y ait sur la terre une femme seule? (How does it happen, that a woman should be alone on this earth?)      

I think that, after that, the broad answer would be: for him, paintings become generally invested with much of the weight of intention a writer might otherwise bring to poetry. For perhaps that very reason, he actually devotes less attention to poetry than to prose in his later years - he spends his time reading novels, rather than volumes of poetry. 

       

Small Pear Tree in Blossom, 1888 Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation)

But listen to the way he describes a painting done of the trees in the garden of the asylum at St Rémy, seen on an autumn evening in 1889: 'The first tree is an enormous trunk, but struck by lightning and sawn off. A side branch thrusts up very high, however, and falls down again in an avalanche of green twigs. This dark giant - like a proud man brought low - contrasts, when seen as the character of a living being, with the pale smile of the last rose on the bush, which is fading in front of him. Under the trees, empty stone benches, dark box. The sky is reflected yellow in a puddle after the rain. A ray of sun - the last glimmer - exalts the dark ochre to orange - small dark figures prowl here and there between the trunks. You'll understand that this combination of red ochre, of green saddened with grey, of black lines that define the outlines, this gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety from which some of my companions in misfortune suffer, and which is called "seeing red".' 

He's spelling out - to Emile Bernard - the tragic significance of every component of his pictorial language. He's demonstrating, in a sense, that poetry pervades all he's achieving, at this very high point in his work. (The canvas, 'The Garden of the Asylum', is in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.) 

Some of the poems by Victor Hugo and Walt Whitman that he quotes from reveal his abiding preoccupation with the idea of the night, for example - that was a subject which he explored, quite obsessively, in his paintings... Is it possible to stand back and ask what exactly poetry meant to him, and whether it was essentially different from what fiction - Zola, the Goncourts, Flaubert, for example - meant to him?

Exactitude?! Vincent writes in one of the letters which dates from his exuberant period in Arles - he's just been reading an article on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio - 'It always seems to me that poetry is more terrible than painting, although painting is dirtier and more damned annoying, in fact. And after all, the painter says nothing; he keeps quiet, and I like that even better.' He's thinking, as far as I can see, that Giotto (about the only Italian painter who concerns him) has the capacity, silently, to touch the heart's deepest places, whereas Dante may send the mind's eye on a giddy ride with all the shock and awe and sublimity of his Inferno, but he never quite achieves the same intimate physical affect. (Which is true, isn't it?) 

   

The Bedroom, 1888 Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation)

We might seem to be drawing a bit of a blank here, in trying to chase correspondences between particular poets and van Gogh's painting, but... I think what did mean everything to him was the idea of the poetic - a certain plane, or zone, where metaphor and spiritual illumination might stand and declare themselves in the sensible world. (I'm not saying he calls it by that name, though.)

Did he not have friends who were poets? I seem to remember that he calls his portrait of the Belgian artist Eugene Boch, which was painted in 1888, 'Eugene Boch (The Poet). Was he a poet?   

Yes, that's true, he did give it that title. I must say I've no strong impressions of him fraternizing with poets in any part of his correspondence. Every now and then he's trying to dissuade - or tell Theo to dissuade - his kid sister Willemien (of whom he's very fond) from attempting to compose literary effusions, because he finds them embarrassing - he thinks she's falling flat on her face into sentimentality. 
 


Sketch sent with a Letter to Vincent Van Gogh to Eugene Boch,Arles, 2 October 1888  Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation)

As to Boch, he was in fact another painter, a Belgian come to Arles. But with his gaunt 'Dante-like face', he looked every inch like a poet ought to look - 'someone who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because that's his nature.' (18 August and 3 September 1888.) You see, poetry is a value here, rather than a substantive auditory or textual experience - and it's a value which van Gogh in his painting intends to pursue. 
He was very fond of Keats' 'Ode to Autumn', wasn't he?  Did their respective views of nature rhyme? 

Yes, he copies out Keats's 'Ode to Autumn' when he's a young man in London. This reminds us that Romanticism, broadly speaking, is the mainstream of 19th-century sensibilities from the century's beginning to its end. We hear no more about Keats from him after that, however. 

Van Gogh's view of nature, as I would interpret it - others might disagree - is that it's a helpmeet to the soul: a complement to human emotions. That is his form of pathetic fallacy, whatever one makes of Keats's. The phenomenal power with which van Gogh renders all forms of plant life might easily lend itself to a reading of his art as fired by some sort of vitalism - one can imagine his pictures inspiring that Dylan Thomas line about 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower'... But in fact, I doubt he really gave a damn about botany or the internal organic energies of the flora around him. For him, those plants were principally ready-to-hand metaphors for the stuff of the mind and the heart. As I think is demonstrated by the passage about trees 'in the character of a living being' that I've already quoted. 

As a painter, he appreciated and commented upon his contemporaries. As far as poetry is concerned, there often seems to have been a time lag. He enjoyed the recent past - Keats, Longfellow, Whitman. You could, of course, say that he was not in the same race as the poets. He was absorbing their influences, but he was not striving to be a poet himself… What is more, he had much more time for Longfellow than for Baudelaire. This strikes me as curiously interesting. 

It's natural that there's a bit of a time lag - we can hardly expect him to be in the know about the real poetic innovators of the 1880s such as Laforgue or Mallarmé or Gerard Manley Hopkins (whose lonely, zealous creative originality he has a certain affinity with). But when he's telling Willemien to read Whitman's 'Prayer of Columbus' in 1888, he's referring to an edition of Leaves of Grass published only seven years before, and he comments 'English people are talking a lot about them at the moment.' That shows a fairly lively interest in the current literary scene - I think he devoured cultural reviews. Anyway, he adores Whitman's bright, open, democratic optimism.       

But no, van Gogh doesn't rate Baudelaire in the way his French friends do - 'Let's take Baudelaire for what he is,' he tells Emile Bernard, 'a modern poet just as Musset is another, but let them leave us alone when we're talking painting.' (Baudelaire had said something he disagreed with about Rembrandt.) I think that the 'spleen', the will to alienation and artifice, all that side of Baudelaire that heads into French Symbolism, might not have been that much on his wavelength - despite the fact that he liked Huysmans, and that the junior French Symbolist Albert Aurier became his first critical admirer. 

Van Gogh's notional intended constituency, even as he pushed towards an extremely innovatory facture and approach to colour, remained the people, the masses of spiritually needy humanity. Longfellow was the kind of instinctually populist writer of recitable verse who could on some level service the needs of those masses. 

Did he anywhere make remarks to that effect - that he favoured a kind of poetry which was likely to appeal to a popular audience, and that the likes of Baudelaire, by contrast, were too rarefied and self-regarding? Which means that he favoured the more popular - and much less great - poet because he was, in some respects, of service to humanity in a way that Baudelaire never could have been?

That's an inference which, yes, I'd tend to support. Can I cite chapter and verse for it? Not exactly. As far as possible, I think van Gogh wanted all artists to make common cause, from the Baudelaires to the Longfellows, from the dernier cri avant-gardists to the popular press illustrators turning out steel engravings. Because he vaguely dreamt of the 'possibility of a great renaissance of art' to which all might contribute. 'It seems to me', he goes on in the same letter (to Emile Bernard, 2 November 1888), 'that we ourselves are only serving as intermediaries. And that it will only be a subsequent generation that will succeed in living at peace.' (Whatever kind of peace that might be...) 

But then it turns out that some ways of doing art really don't help the cause, and these include some of the most seemingly 'radical'. And so he rounds on Bernard, a year later, for pursuing 'abstraction' - 1889 style, i.e. what we'd now probably call 'hieratic' Symbolism, rather than cleaving to the socially grounded values of the Realists.

Take one of the massively popular peasant prints of Millet, he tells his younger colleague, a picture 'so powerful it makes you tremble. [...] People have felt that from France to America. After that, would you go back to renewing medieval tapestries for us? Truly, is this a sincere conviction? NO, you can do better than that, and you know that one has to look for the possible, the logical, the true, even if to some extent you had to forget Parisian things a la Baudelaire. How I prefer Daumier to that gentleman!' 

This whole letter, which is in fact the same one I quoted earlier about the garden in St Remy, strikes me as one of the most bracing expressions ever of the need to choose what you're doing in art. Reading it reminds me why Realism matters to me, myself, as a painter - however paradoxical an objective it may be, however elusive in contemporary conditions. 

But in principle, at all events, van Gogh hoped for an art that would sustain and console everyone. And that - after a time lag, a tragic time lag - is what he actually delivered to the century to come.