As the arranger of the words of these stories already perfectly arranged in French, I have a stake in making claims about the fineness of what follows here, but it’s a borrowed wealth. On the day he wrote me now nearly twenty years ago, Davenport acted as a friend, not yet to me, but to Michon.
Masters and Servants
For as they were unable to distinguish
between that of J.C. and those of the thieves
they placed them in the middle of the town,
awaiting God’s glory to manifest.
The Life of Joseph Roulin
for Jacqueline
Marthe: Is everything worth its price?
Thomas Pollock Nageoire: Never.
ONE OF THEM HAD BEEN stationed there by the Post Office, arbitrarily or perhaps according to his own wishes; the other had gone there because of the books he had read; because it was The South, where he believed that money might go further, that women were more favorable, and that the skies were excessive, Japanese. Because he was running away. Chance dropped them into Aries, in 1888. Different as they were, they enjoyed each other’s company; in any case, the appearance of the one, the elder, pleased the other enough that he painted him four or five times: so we believe we know what he looked like that year, at forty-seven, the way we know how Louis XIV looked throughout his life, or how Innocent X looked in 1650; and in his portraits, he wears his hat as a king wears his crown, he’s seated like a Pope, that’s enough. We also know a few trifles about his life that he would be surprised to see, beneath his very face, in the verbose footnotes of all-knowing books. We know, for example, that at the end of 1888, the Post Office transferred him from Arles to Marseille; whether a promotion due to his zeal or a demotion due to his hangovers, we don’t know; we’re certain that he saw Vincent for the last time at the Aries hospital in February of the following year — this Vincent who was well on his way to being transferred from the bedlam of Aries to the bedlam in Saint-Rémy, before the big transfer to Auvers that in July of ‘90 did him in. We don’t know what they said to each other at the very end. In what little van Gogh wrote about him, it’s clear that Roulin was alcoholic and republican — which is to say that his words and beliefs were republican, and he was, in fact, an alcoholic — with an atheistic deportment that the absinthe encouraged; he was a big talker, voluble and occasionally profane, but a good guy, and his fraternal behavior toward the suffering painter made this clear. He wore a great beard, shaped like an axe, rich to paint, an entire forest; he would sing woeful old songs from his youth, songs sung by topmen, Marseillaises; there was something Russian about him, but van Gogh doesn’t make clear whether it was muzhik or boyar: even the portraits seem undecided on this point. He had three children and a wife gone to wrack and ruin. What can be done with him? I look at his portraits, and while they’re all contradictory, I always notice his blue sleeves, his drowning eye, and his sacred cap. Here one could say he’s some sort of icon, some saint with a complicated name, Nepomucen or Chrysostom, Abbacyr mixing his flowering beard with the flowers of the sky; there he’s more of a sultan with an Asshurian beard, square, brutal, but he’s tired of all the bloodshed, you sense that his wide open eyes yearn to close, his soul to surrender, and his glance to turn inward to all the yellow behind him; elsewhere he comes a bit closer, holding in his laughter like my grandfather, a Chouan, a postman, or perhaps it’s a day when he and the painter took one drink too many; and once he’s even on the brink of the hole that all drunks fall into every evening. But everywhere there’s something defenseless about him, a degree of stubbornness about his destitution, a destitution upon which he had grown cozily dependent; there’s his inspirited, startled gaze, the sort usually given to a minor character in a Russian novel who’s forever hesitating between the Heavenly Father and the nearby bottle, rationalizing their combination by some strange casuistry, leaning toward one and then the Other, interchanging them without a second thought; but always he’s the devoted muzhik, the grumbler, driving his boyar’s sled onward with strong prayers and mild impieties, the sleigh bells jingling: and this pale lord bundled up in back, wearing astrakhan and red beard — it’s van Gogh — rich by chance and quiet by nature, riding beneath the fat sun of a Mother Russia that he doesn’t paint. Sure, postman Roulin could drive a sleigh — but he could also ride in back, a less distinguished boyar, though more robust than the redhead; amongst growling trains in Saint-Charles station, he could open a big bag that swallows up the daily mail and find no letters to him and then grumble about his luck and the trains; or, just as easily, he could be tinkering in a Melvillean foretop, accumulating gripes against his captain’s madness, but sympathetic and understanding underneath it all; and I also see him standing in front of paintings in the yellow house, agape, neither for nor against, tolerant and unconvinced: because he doesn’t know anything about Art, so how could he teach us anything? Beneath his tolerance or his doubt, we don’t know what there is. He’s a character of little help when one is foolish enough to write about painting. But he suits me. He appears exhausted, but he could be as lively as his shape. He’s as empty as a rhythm. This hollow scansion, an inner rhythm of language, inflexible and deaf, that strangles what one is struggling to say, feeds it and fatigues it — I want it to bear his name; so that words and the rhythms of language instantly endorse the great peacoat and hat of the post office; so that words and their rhythms grow old in Marseille and remember Aries; so that words end up sprouting beards; they’ll appear in Prussian blue; they’ll be alcoholic and republican; they won’t make sense of one drop of the paintings; but with some luck, or by kidnapping, perhaps words will once again become a painting; they’ll be muzhik or boyar as the spirit moves me — and completely arbitrary, as usual — but will come visibly to light, manifest, and die.
JOSEPH ROULIN OUTLIVED VAN GOGH by quite some time.
I assume he received several letters from Saint-Rémy. And as usual their writer — as when writing to the brother, Théo, who had money, or to Gauguin, or Guillaumin and Bernard, all of whom had a knack for painting, something he did not have — said not that things were improving but that things would improve; not that he was painting well but that he would: the great despair, the cockroaches floating like black ideas in his soup, the unconditional surrender to the benign and ferocious hands of Charcot’s disciples — these things were simply the fault of wind and circumstance, of the poorly supplied paint-seller, of Delacroix’s yellow that was so hard to get right, of nerves; but never due to the fact that one is, uncompromisingly, Vincent van Gogh. How would Roulin have read them? Certainly not as I read them, not this conniving and inaccurate reading that we’re all guilty of, so very interpretive, as if each phrase were meant as a final polite gesture to destiny, as if, without any illusions, they were written to Hope herself: “It’s a difficult time,” they read; “It’s wind and circumstance”; and we don’t want to believe them, to take their word for it; we know that beneath their words they’re spinning out of control, beyond salvation; we’ve become arrogant since we learned that all language lies. We’ve learned the worst and have gotten used to it. For Roulin, it wasn’t quite so simple: the letters made him think; think as when one doesn’t read between the lines, but reads the lines themselves; when one simply wants to believe what is written; when you work for the post office at the end of the last century. Therefore, idyllically, I imagine him handling van Gogh’s letters in his kitchen, opening them; reading them word by word, attempting to envision the things and events described clearly before his eyes: the Saint Paul Hospice in Saint-Rémy; the little room with pale gray-green wallpaper and two sea green curtains; the madness, a sickness like any other (why not, we say the same of the clap, odd as that might seem); and outside, the fields of wheat. When the other frolicked in metaphor, he frowned a little, lifting his head, looking at the portraits of Gambetta or Blanqui (or why not someone a little more radical, younger, or even someone executed, like Rossel or Rigault — none of them would have been absent from a wall in his kitchen): once again he thought that the beaux arts and politics were complicated things; but then he would smile, starting over, with a satisfied little laugh that made Mother Roulin raise her head from her corner and, making the most of this attention, say: “It seems to be going better, he’s gotten back his taste for living”; or: “Anyway, he did two paintings the day before yesterday. But the mistral is really bothering him.” This was when he wasn’t drunk. Because when he had been drinking, one duke or another — Tonkin or Grevy — was suddenly to blame for having sunk both Riviere’s gunboats and Vincent’s sanity in the same great hole government malfeasance always seems to dig; and he cried while thinking about the road on the outskirts of Aries where they would settle beneath the plane trees in the morning, one to paint and the other to chat, when life was less dear and people were of better spirits, when one was elsewhere. So he received letters from Saint-Rémy. But none from Auvers, because his boyar got too carried away toward the end, his sleigh, sans muzhik, flying toward the polders of his youth, the tombs of Zundert; Vincent made too recklessly for the black within the golden trumpets, too recklessly to dare or to deign to pretend any hope for himself by corresponding. So no letters from Auvers. After about a year, Roulin began to worry about this silence; after two or five, he wrote to Théo, whom he called Monsieur Gogh, as is borne out by the letters he sent him: he didn’t know that the two brothers, after having dueled for years with toy swords, were to end up felled by the same blow, and that Théo, the charitable brother, guilty and tyrannical, had waited barely three years to follow the cracked brother who, in a way, was his boyar as well; so he too filled himself with lead and was laid to rest beside Vincent, whence no letters would come; maybe next he wrote to Monsieur Paul, the topman, le casseur d’assiettes whom he had also known in Aries, but the address had changed; le casseur d’assiettes had been broken like the rest. Paul Gauguin went softly to sleep in the Marquesas, where neither our tongues nor our letters can follow. Finally, one day, his letters to Vincent were returned with a note that I’d like to believe was signed by Adeline Ravoux, the daughter of a hotel owner from Auvers whom Vincent had painted in the flower of her youth, also in blue, but in cobalt, not in the Prussian blue of Roulin; this little Adeline whom he’d perhaps desired at the end simply because she had been around, whose blue dress was perhaps the vision he took with him, as they say, for certainly it was she who had taken care of him in the smoke-filled attic during the most lamentable two days of agony the world has ever known, as he burned pipe after pipe without stopping until his death, as the witnesses confirm, while above this morbid smoking room the sun beat down upon Auvers. In this letter she said: “Monsieur Vincent killed himself while he was lodging with us”; she didn’t say: “In the wheat fields”; she didn’t say: sur le motif. She didn’t know how to write this novel that has been written too often ever since. She added that he had been buried there, in Auvers, and that gentlemen from Paris had come.