Passionate Painter
VINCENT VAN GOGH--Julius Meier-Graefe--Harcourt, Brace ($3).
Critics, the sacred geese whose panicky cackling rouses the citadel of plain men against the night attack of some threateningly new idea, are sometimes better than that. In Science, such men as J. W. N. Sullivan (TIME, Sept. 5, 1932; Oct. 23), in Art and Literature, Julius Meier-Graefe, are not so much sentries as interpreters. Bilingual, they can read the barbaric ensigns of these seeming foreigners and translate them into symbols that will not frighten the commonest sense. Interpreter Meier-Graefe's biography of crazy Painter van Gogh is known already to a few U. S. readers (the Medici Society, London, first published it in a limited de luxe edition, 1922). Significant of the increased interest in left-wing artists and writers is this revised translation, sponsored by the Literary Guild. An artist in his own right, Biographer Meier-Graefe has fused van Gogh's letters into a narrative that reads at times like a Dostoyevsky novel, that has the advantage over other novels-about-artists in that it can show (in 61 plates at the end) at least a black-&-white image of its hero's wildly colored achievement.
Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) was a Dutch parson's son. An unattractive, awkward, violent young man, he wanted to go into the Church, but was too modest. Instead he carried with him, first into the polite world of the art business, then into garrets, brothels and studios, the wild religious longings that never left him. His only friend was his younger brother Theo. Together, before they went out into the world, they swore "to strive all their lives only for good." Vincent's family was connected with the Dutch branch of Goupil et Cie., famous Paris art dealers, and both Vincent and Theo got jobs in the business. Theo did well from the start, but Vincent took it, like everything else, too hard. Fired from his job, he plucked up enough conceit to enter the Church as a lay-reader, got himself sent to a squalid hole in Belgium as a missionary. There too he went too far, scandalized the churchly authorities by giving away his money, his clothes, his bed. Fired again, he stayed on with his poor people, began to draw them and send his sketches to Brother Theo. A draughtsman in a Brussels garret taught him the laws of perspective; the rest he learned for himself.
His affairs with women were invariably unhappy. For one thing, his appearance was against him. His first inamorata turned out to be otherwise engaged. The second could not stand the sight of him. Then he took up with a pregnant prostitute. But he learned to do without love; he had a presentiment that his time was short, and he had the long road of art to travel. He went to Paris, where he lived with Theo, painted furiously and tried to become like the Impressionists, whom he reverenced. But it was against his grain. Suddenly he left Paris, went off to Aries to work by himself. Eight months later Gauguin joined him.
In spite of their dissimilarity the two got along fairly well till one day van Gogh suggested in all seriousness that they paint pictures together, each contributing the thing he was best at. Gauguin laughed all the way to the town brothel. There one of the girls told van Gogh that if he could not give her a five-franc piece for a Christmas present he might at least make her a gift of one of his big lop-ears. Next day, with no apparent provocation, van Gogh hurled an absinthe glass at Gauguin. The day following, he left a parcel at the brothel. It was his right ear, which he had cut off, wrapped up with clumsy neatness. Gauguin left, and soon after the Mayor ordered van Gogh locked up in the insane ward of the hospital. After that there was no telling when the mad fit would seize him, and he would scream till his throat was inflamed. At the asylum at Saint-Remy they let him paint, off & on, eventually released him in care of a doctor, nearer Paris and Theo. But the doctor, an art connoisseur, enraged van Gogh by his cavalier treatment of artists whom his patient revered. One day he terrified the doctor by appearing with a revolver in his hand. But van Gogh only laughed awkwardly, went to his room and shot himself in the stomach. As he lay dying he said to Theo: "Did you ever know such an awkward and helpless fellow as me? I can't even manage to use a revolver properly."
The Author, who takes a deep view of artists, thinks van Gogh was less gifted with imagination and talent than the average man. "But if the word artist . . . is a synonym for a man of such moral tenor that he only sets a further goal to his aspiration as his consciousness gains in the deepening perception of Nature and her laws, then Vincent was an artist and the greatest of our time."
As tireless a traveler as Keyserling, "the travel-philosopher," Julius Meier-Graefe, 66, has nearly finished his journey. Along the road he has seen and called attention to many an overgrown but inspiring ruin. He wrote the first history of painting of the 19th Century, started an arts & crafts shop, founded a literary journal (Pan), made European collectors aware of Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne. He went to Spain to bend the knee to Velazquez, returned a blazing disciple of El Greco. Though he is a frequent contributor to International Studio and Cahier d'Art, few of his more than 40 books have been translated. Some of them: Spanish Journey, Pyramid and Temple, Degas, Cezanne, Dostoevsky.
Soap-Box
UPSURGE--Robert Gessner--Farrar & Rinehart ($1).
One by-product of the industrial revolution, the soapbox, has left its mark on all consciously "proletarian" writing. Curbstone oratory, more effective in the open air than in the echoing covers of a book, is drawing bigger crowds than once it did, and publishers, their anxious fingers on the public pulse, are beginning to prescribe this form of mild dynamite. Though alert Publisher Farrar finds Upsurge "impossible to describe," he admits that this manifesto-poem is "frankly a message."
A threatening oratorical paean to the youthful proletariat of the world, Author Gessner's vociferous but blank lines hymn the young hobos of the U. S., the mutineers of the British, Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon, the Anti-War Congress at Amsterdam, a Communist prison-camp in Nazi Germany, the glories of Soviet Russia. Soap-box Poet Gessner's nearest approach to poetry is in a description of the lines of abandoned ships in Southampton:
These subdued prows, beaten, facing the opposite row between which our tender hurries like a girl in a graveyard. . . .
Cavalier Novelist
GLORY -- Francis Stuart -- Macmillan ($2).
Whether or not realism is on the wane, romance is coming back. One of its most determined banner-bearers is the wild young Irish novelist, Francis Stuart. Few present-day writers have a more cavalier disregard for the facts of real life or a more impassioned determination to transmute them into romantic, mystical reality. Prolific, Author Stuart turns out his novels almost as fast as if they were pamphlets. Hence they have pamphleteering faults. Glory is typical. When its little galaxy of eccentrically orbited people first swim into view they seem both delightfully and illuminatingly human. But Author Stuart soon yanks them out into interstellar space where they cease to be anything but misty symbols, hardly visible to the naked eye. In spite of this disregard for verisimilitude, both of fact and grammar, sympathetic readers find him exciting, consider that he has the gist of the matter even though his manner needs mending.
Mairead lived with her puttering old father and a slatternly kitchenmaid on a broken-down Irish farm. She had immortal longings, but her job was to feed the chickens. She greatly admired Frank de Lacey, who had built himself a hut in the woods and went there to meditate, but she was not ready for so conventual a life. When Trans-Continental Aero-Routes bought 50 acres of the farm for an aerodrome, the world opened up for Mairead and her father. They blew in the cash on champagne and a Rolls-Royce. Mairead learned to fly. As pilot for General Porteous, Napoleonic head of the company, she flew him to China. When the General sprang his plot to conquer the world, Mairead became a temporary empress. She took a Chinese war lord as her lover, shot him when he tried to kill her beloved General. The world conquest a failure, she returned to Ireland, was happy to face a firing squad with her old friend de Lacey.
1933 Model
KARL AND THE 20TH CENTURY--Rudolf Brunngraber--Morrow ($2.50).
Mark Sullivan and other panting contemporary historians, including those runners in the ruck who can spare no breath for comment, would do well to mark this book in passing. In 320 pages Author Brunngraber, with painstaking Teutonic methodism, has compressed a significant world-history of the past 51 (1880--1931). An alleged novel, Karl and the 20th Century focuses from time to time on its little hero's helpless struggles to keep his head above the flood; but Author Brunngraber's dogged attempt toall the ground results in a kaleidoscope of fact which sometimes dizzies, sometimes dulls the reader's attention. With more statistics to the squarehead paragraph than are contained in a chapter of John Dos Passos' 42nd Paralled or 1919, Author Brunngraber's complicated sum does not add up to nearly so impressive a human total. Failure though it must be rated, however, Karl and the 20th Century is significant as a 1933 advanced model of what our old horse-drawn novels are coming to.
Real protagonist of the story is the capitalist system. Its "hero" victim, Karl, bandy-legged legitimized bastard of a Viennese trolley conductor and a servant girl, grows up in his city slum to the slow realization that his father is a drunkard, his mother a drudge, and he himself doomed to serfdom unless he can somehow get himself into the white-collar class. He is almost there when the War swallows him. Vomited out after the armistice as an unemployed veteran, complete with scars and medals, he starves, emigrates to Sweden, goes home to more starvation. Down the long scale of disintegration he slips rung by rung. Three newspaper clippings end the book: one from Rochester. Minn, announcing the dollar-valuation of a human body's chemicals; one from Capetown, telling of a holocaust of storks killed in a freak hailstorm; one from Vienna, a sympathetic epitaph on Karl's suicide.
Sample of Karl and the 20th Century's style, method: "In Switzerland that same evening, at Kiental, where a conference of left-wing socialists was being held, Lenin gave a renewed demonstration of the way in which the imperialist war could be transformed into a class war. In the United States there was being founded the Allied Chemical & Dye Company, a combine of the chemical manufacturers of the Land of the Almighty Dollar. At Philadelphia, Frederick W. Taylor died after being ill for nine days with an attack of pneumonia, on his fifty-ninth birthday, and two hours after winding up his watch. His fellow-countrymen had graven on his tombstone : 'Frederick W. Taylor, the Father of Scientific Management.' In France, at Neuve Chapelle, meanwhile, British cannon were spitting out hundreds of thousands of shells which, like the parts of a Ford car, had been manufactured on conveyors. Never, in fact, had the world been so closely interconnected, and never had the individual human being been so powerless as now--a tiny thing amid volcanic mountains. Lieutenant Karl Lakner, however, refused almost indignantly an offer of home-leave, although he could now only endure the world by numbing his senses with liquor. He, too, therefore, was one of the participants in the great front-piercing battle of Gorlice on May 1,1915."
Books of the Week
NOTES ON A CELLAR-BOOK--George Saintsbury--Macmillan ($2.50). A reprinted classic, by the late great nearly-omniscient critic and vinophile, which should be in every right-minded library.
NOW WITH HIS LOVE--John Peale Bishop--Scribner ($2.50). First book of poems by an unprolific author highly thought-of by his college contemporaries (1918).
RABBLE IN ARMS--Kenneth Roberts-- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Historical romance of the Revolution, sequel to the popular Arundel.
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV--Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- translated by Constance Garnett; illustrated by Boardman Robinson--Random House ($3.50). First illustrated edition of one of the world's great novels, in the best English translation.
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