Book Review: Van Gogh: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

This article was first published at Blogcritics.

Contumacious is not too strong a word to describe biographers who subtitle their tome, eight hundred and fifty plus pages though it may be, "The Life" as do authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith: Van Gogh: The Life.  "The Life" suggests that here the readers finally have the definitive version, the last word—everything we ever wanted to know about what was surely one of the most tortured of lives.  Clearly that is not the case.  For all its length and detail, it postulates a controversial theory of the artist's death which is sure to raise at least some hackles and generate some biographical blowback.  "Van Gogh: A Life" might have been a more appropriate title.

Viewers of 60 Minutes are most likely acquainted with the authors' theory about Van Gogh's death.  Long thought to have been a suicide,  Naifeh and Smith treat that idea as little more than a tall tale made legend by Irving Stone's novelization and the film that followed, Lust for Life, and a legend  filled  with holes.  While their arguments are presented with conviction, they are arguments, even though they have been around for some time, by no means accepted by all Van Gogh scholars.

Based primarily on a prior scholar's 1956 interviews with Rene Secretan, an octogenarian who came forward near the end of his life to explain his own role in the painter's 1890 death in what he claimed was an attempt to correct some of the romantic liberties taken in the film.  Although Secretan doesn't seem to have confessed to anything other than harassing the painter whom he and his young friends considered nothing short of a crazy man, he did have access to the kind of gun that people thought must have been the weapon Van Gogh used, a weapon that was never found.  Add to this a lot of circumstantial evidence including the facts that none of the painter's equipment was found at the site where he supposedly shot himself, the peculiarity of trying to commit suicide by shooting yourself in the stomach, Van Gogh's somewhat less than adequate statements about what he did, as well as a number of other tidbits, and you've got the makings of a case. 

A case at least for an accident—Secretan was hassling the painter and the gun went off.  He was frightened and ran off.  The authors never really accuse the young man of actually murdering the painter, but they are clearly of the opinion that however it happened, it was Secretan and his gun that were involved.  Their theory may convince some, it may not others; one thing for sure, it will sell books.

In general, the picture they paint of the artist is not very flattering.  For most of his life he is shown as demanding and self absorbed to the point that he was completely unable to get along with anyone, be it family, friends or fellow artists.  Even his brother Theo who supported him for most of his adult life was unable to deal effectively with his extravagant demands both financially as well as emotionally.  Certainly though many of his problems were the result of his mental state, the Van Gogh pictured in this book would have tested the patience of a saint, let alone a normal human being. 

Strange behavior is often tolerated in great artists.  It is the price you have to pay for genius.  Van Gogh's problem was that not until the last few months of his life that his greatness was even begun to be recognized.  For most of his life, he was considered little more than a mad man.  His work was ridiculed.  His impassioned ideas were derided.  His behavior was outlandish.  Naifeh and Smith are meticulous in documenting the disasters that followed him from his early career working in art sales, his flirtation with religion, and his eventual devotion to art, but through it all Van Gogh is presented as such a head case that one has to wonder how it was he ever managed to create any of the masterworks for which he has become so loved.  Not only does one have to tolerate genius; one has to tolerate all those crazies who may turn out to be not so crazy after all.  If anything, the reader comes away from this life, recognizing that often there may be very little difference between genius and madness.

Book Review: Koestler by Michael Scammell

This article was first published at Blogcritics

While back in the middle of the last century, Arthur Koestler was considered one of the leading literary lights of the period—a journalist and novelist, an intellectual whose work not only captured the current zeitgeist but might well be the recognized voice of the era for ages to come, today it would seem that light has somewhat dimmed. Koestler's work, other than Darkness at Noon, the novel that made him famous, is little read and gathers, as the author himself was wont to forecast, dust. Michael Scammell's new biography, Koestler: The literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, will do much to rehabilitate the man and his work for this new century's readers.

Koestler's problem is that he doesn't fit nicely into any of the standard literary or political niches. Early on, he embraced a kind of utopian Communism which he found embodied in Russia, only to reject it as totalitarian dictatorship as a result of Stalin's pact with Hitler during WWII and the show trials of party members in various iron curtain countries after the war. He was unable to join with other European intellectuals, like Sartre, in supporting Russian actions as necessary means to a greater end, and turned with some reservation to American democracy instead. Indeed Darkness at Noon is his impassioned attack on the degeneration of the Communist ideal under Stalin. Still even here, he was uncomfortable with the right wing passions of the McCarthyites as indeed they were with him. He found himself in the middle of two extreme political points of view, neither of which he could accept, nor they him.

As a young man he supported Zionism, even managing a permit to travel to Palestine to join a kibbutz, only once there to discover that pioneer life was a bit rough for him. Moreover, here too he was caught between two conflicting ideologies—those who looked for political solutions to get the British to stand behind the Balfour Declaration and those revisionist who espoused terrorist action as the only way to pressure the Brits. Unlike his attitude to Soviet expediency Koestler saw in the revisionist ideas and actions a legitimate example of ends justifying means. His novel, Thieves in the Night uses his experiences in Palestine to develop his political position, and again put him in the position of alienating not only the conventional Zionists, but the British as well. Later in life his ideas about race and assimilation placed him outside the mainstream of Israel and its supporters.
There is even a question about where to place him as a literary figure. He was born in Hungary, but when he wrote, it was in German and then in English. He became a British citizen, but he lived much of the time in France and the United States. He began as a journalist, and continued writing for periodicals throughout his career. His greatest work was in the novel, and though he wrote several more works of fiction, he never managed another as good. It was not until he turned to autobiography, according to Scammell, that he once again produced work of similar quality. Finally in the last stage of his life he turned to writing about science and then to the paranormal. There are so many variants to his life and work that it becomes difficult to find a cubby hole in which to place him.

Scammell paints a picture of the man that is not always very flattering. Fond of intellectual debate, Koestler was often contentious and overbearing in argument, sometimes resorting to violent behavior in the heat of the moment. His belligerence is traced at times to feelings of inadequacy because of his short stature, at times to embarrassment about his heavy accent, at times to his ego, plain and simple. He drank too much. His womanizing was legendary; he liked to keep score of his conquests in his diary. He felt that an element of force added spice to love making, and he wasn't beyond physical abuse. There was even an accusation of rape by one of his lady friends (an accusation Scammell denies). In a time before the feminist revolution, he treated his women like servants.

Nonetheless, he was a familiar of many of the most important figures of the twentieth century, and Scammell offers nice little character touches of many of them. Simone de Beauvoir complains about Koestler's poor performance after insisting on getting her in bed. Camus makes a pass at Koestler's wife to be while dancing at a night club and writes romantic letters to her signing himself, Tinkie. Whittaker Chambers spends half a day working on his farm, half a day working on his writing. Bertrand Russell reacts to his wife's accusation that she was raped. Edmund Wilson proposes to Koestler's lover, Mamaine. Erwin Schrodinger is afraid of wasps and Koestler makes him a gift of a fly swatter to defend himself. Walter Benjamin shares the morphine he is hoarding to commit suicide with Koestler in case he is caught by the Fascists.

Koestler is a book that captures the man, his significance to his own time and his importance for ours. It is well documented and eminently readable. It’s the kind of biography that will have you at the local library looking for a copy of Darkness at Noon or either of Koestler's two autobiographical works, Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing, the books that most recognize as the author at his best.