The Books: Passions of the Mind, ‘Van Gogh, Death and Summer,’ by A.S. Byatt

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Passions of the Mind, a collection of essays by A.S. Byatt.

The following gigantic essay (it’s over 15,000 words) was written in 1990, the year of Vincent van Gogh’s centenary. Many books had been published about van Gogh that year, in honor of the anniversary, and Byatt set out to review/discuss them all. Vincent van Gogh is one of her ongoing obsessions, and her 1985 novel Still Life (excerpt here) incorporates into the narrative the amazing letters of Theo and Vincent van Gogh. In Passions of the Mind, there is an essay about her intention in writing Still Life: she wanted to create a book that did not truck in metaphors. She wanted the images to be themselves, not reminiscent of other things. She wanted to use words like a painter paints images. She wanted her novel to be like Vincent van Gogh’s yellow chair.

Byatt is a deep thinker, and goes into what she means by that in depth in that other essay. In Possession, the two modern academic scholars, drowning in inference and reference-points, where everything is post-post-post-modern, seem to be disconnected from the vigorous world where real life happens. They can’t GET to life, they can’t GET to the right words, they can’t GET to each other. Byatt is interested in how language separates us and also brings us closer in.

It’s not just Vincent van Gogh’s paintings that inspire her, but his letters (as evidenced by her heavy use of them throughout the text of Still Life). If you’ve read his letters you will know why they are so extraordinary. He was a painter who could talk about his work, who talked about the struggles with color, the obsession with tone, how yellow and purple went together, and etc. The letters are technical, I suppose, but his use of language is clear, simple, and open. Byatt, who can write very curlicued sentences if she wants … sees in Van Gogh’s writing a reminder: Keep it simple. Don’t say more than what is there for you. Don’t embellish. Let yellow just be yellow. But let it be the deepest most truthful yellow in the world.

Throughout Byatt’s essay, she quotes from Van Gogh’s correspondence, as a way to draw us back into the real issue, which was this man’s remarkable mind and remarkable artistic process. For example, his now-famous painting “The Reaper”, completed while hospitalized in St.-Remy, and this was what he saw through the bars of his window:

Van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother Theo about “The Reaper.” Listen to this prose:

[It is] an image of death as the great book of nature speaks of it – but what I have sought is the ‘almost smiling’. It is all yellow, except a line of hills, a pale, fair yellow. I find it queer that I saw it like this from between the iron bars of a cell … Work is going pretty well – I am struggling with a canvas begun some days before my imposition, a ‘Reaper’; the study is all yellow, terribly thickly painted, but the subject was fine and simple. For I see in this reaper – a vague figure fighting like a devil in the midst of the heat to get to the end of his task – I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaper. So it is – if you like – the opposite of that sower I tried to do before. But there’s nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.

You can see why Byatt is drawn to his writing.

I get the sense that A.S. Byatt could write an entire book about Vincent van Gogh, and honestly I wish she would. I’d read it.

At any rate, this essay amounts to a short book, and in it she quotes extensively from Vincent van Gogh’s correspondence, to his brother Theo, to Gauguin, to others. She devotes a section to Rainer Maria Rilke’s correspondence on the paintings of Cezanne, which acts as a comparison point. She quotes Freud at length and his work on “the pleasure principle.” She brings William Carlos Williams into the mix, because she feels that he is up to something in his poetry that is similar to what Van Gogh was up to in his painting. Like his famous red wheelbarrow.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The red wheelbarrow is not a metaphor for something else. It is a thing, and the thing is itself, and the thing as itself is a valid subject for poetry. This was a new kind of poetic language. People who get frustrated by this kind of work, sniffing, “I could write something like that” miss the point entirely. I’d like to say such people, “I’d like to see you try.” (One of my favorite parts about that red wheelbarrow poem is that it starts with “so much depends upon.” It’s such a mysterious phrase when you think about it. It’s an artistic statement of purpose. I love thinking about it. I love questioning it. “WHAT, though, WHAT depends on a red wheelbarrow?” These are the questions of art.)

She quotes Bataille, and Thomas De Quincey, and Derrida.

Antonin Artaud, the theatre visionary and maniac (said with love and affection – it takes one to know one, in other words), was obsessed with Van Gogh and wrote about him extensively. Of course, I have had to read Artaud throughout my education, because I was a Theatre major and he is required reading. I have a very funny memory attached to reading Artaud for an assignment. That whole post is one long tangent about a crush I don’t even remember having. But I remember laughing so hard with him that we did not speak, we could not speak, for about 15 minutes.

I’m going to excerpt a bit from the section on Artaud. Byatt is big on including lengthy quotations. She doesn’t chop stuff up, she doesn’t believe in it. In the introduction she asks for the reader’s patience, and thinks that it is important to include quotes in full. She wants to engage with whatever text it is on its own terms, and minimize her own interjections.

Paintings mentioned in the excerpt below:
— the crows over the cornfield (believed by many to be Van Gogh’s final painting.)
— The Night Cafe
— The Garden at Daubigny

Excerpt from Passions of the Mind: ‘Van Gogh, Death and Summer’, by A.S. Byatt

Somewhere between the Christian myth of the origins of nature and our life on the earth and the frenetic modernist-primitivist myth of Van Gogh the sacrificial victim of conspiracy and madness, lies Van Gogh’s sense of the real. It has to do with his craft of representation, as a way of relating to things as they are, as Artaud also sees. He has different ways, more and less frantic, of apprehending Van Gogh’s sense of the real. For instance:

I see, as I write these lines, the blood-red face of the painter coming toward me, in a wall of eviscerated sunflowers,
in a formidable conflagration of cinders of opaque hyacinth and of fields of lapis lazuli.
All this amid a seemingly meteoric bombardment of atoms which would appear a particle at a time, proof that Van Gogh conceived his canvases like a painter, of course, and only like a painter, but one who would be for that very reason
a formidable musician.

The passage is about equally haunted by Artaud’s own frantic metaphors (“eviscerated”) and by a real apprehension of what is going on in the paintings themselves.

Or we could take his description of the cornfield with crows, which like many others he believed to be Van Gogh’s last painting.

It is not usual to see a man, with the shot that killed him already in his belly, crowding black crows onto a canvas, and under them the kind of meadow – perhaps livid, at any rate empty – in which the wine color of the earth is juxtaposed wildly with the dirty y yellow of the wheat.

But no other painter besides Van Gogh would have known how to find, as he did, in order to paint his crows, that truffle black, that ‘rich banquet’ black which is at the same time, as it were, excremental, of the wings of the crows surprised in the fading gleam of the evening.

Here too is a romanticizing of the sinister, the explosive and the violent, though the coloring is good. But at the center of the piece of writing Artaud suddenly quotes three passages from the letters, all of them descriptions of Van Gogh’s way of working, of his choice of colors, with the remark that he was “as great a writer as he was a painter.” I give the quotations in full because without them it is impossible to convey the effect they have on Artaud’s ejaculatory rhapsody.

What is drawing? How does one do it? It is the act of working one’s way through an invisible wall of iron which seems to lie between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through this wall, for it does no good to use force? In my opinion, one must undermine the wall and file one’s way through, slowly and with patience.

8 September 1888
In my painting The Night Cafe I have tried to express that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, commit crimes. I have tried by contrasting pale pink with blood-red and maroon, by contrasting soft Louis XV and Veronese greens with yellow greens and hard pure greens, all this in an atmosphere of an infernal furnace, of pale sulphur, to express, as it were, the evil power of a dive.
And yet in the guise of Japanese gaiety and the good fellowship of Tartarin.

23 July 1890
Perhaps you will see the sketch of the garden of Daubigny – it is one of my most studied paintings – I am enclosing with it a sketch of old stubble and the sketches for two twelve-inch canvases representing vast stretches of wheat after a rain.
Daubigny’s garden, foreground of green and pink grass. To the left a garden and lavender bush and the stump of a plant with whitish foliage. In the middle a bed of roses, a wattle, a wall, and above the wall a hazel tree with violet leaves. Then a hedge of lilacs, a row of rounded yellow linden trees, the house itself in the background, pink, with a roof of bluish tile. A bench and three chairs, a dark figure with a yellow hat, and in the foreground a black cat. Pale green sky.

Artaud comments, “How easy it seems to write like this,” and goes on:

Well, try it then, and tell me whether, not being the creator of a Van Gogh canvas, you could describe it as simply, succinctly, objectively, permanently, validly, solidly, opaquely, massively, authentically, and miraculously as in this little letter of his. (For the distinguishing criterion is not a question of amplitude or crampedness but one of sheer personal strength.)
So I shall not describe a painting of Van Gogh after Van Gogh, but I shall say that Van Gogh is a painter because he recollected nature, because he reperspired it and made it sweat, because he squeezed onto his canvas in clusters in monumental sheaves of color, the grinding of elements that occurs once in a hundred years, the awful elementary pressure of apostrophes, scratches, commas, and dashes, which, after him one can no longer believe that natural appearances are not made of.

There is something very important here. Artaud has understood that truth that what is extraordinary about the letters, in the end, is the description of the paintings, their authority, the way in which they combine things seen and the representation of them. It is not easy to write like that. And the writings, like the painting, do indeed give rise to Artaud’s most important amerce:

I believe that Gauguin thought the artist must look for the symbol, for myth, must enlarge the things of life to the magnitude of myth,
whereas Van Gogh thought that one must know how to deduce myth from the most ordinary things of life.
In which I think he was bloody well right.
For reality is frighteningly superior to all fiction, all fable, all divinity, all surreality.
All you need is the genius to know how to interpret it.