“Vincent, no wonder you can’t paint. Look at the disorder of this studio. Look at the mess in this colour box. My God, if your Dutch brain wasn’t so fired with Daudet and Monticelli, maybe you could clean it out and get a little order into your life.”
“That’s nothing to you, Gauguin. This is my studio. You keep your studio any way you like.”
“While we’re on the subject, I may as well tell you that your mind is just as chaotic as your colour box. You admire every postage stamp painter in Europe, and yet you can’t see that Degas . . .”
“Degas! What has he ever painted that can be held up alongside of a Millet?”
“Millet! That sentimentalist! That . . .!”
Vincent worked himself into a frenzy at this slur at Millet, whom he considered his master and spiritual father. He stormed after Gauguin from room to room. Gauguin fled. The house was small. Vincent shouted at him, harangued him, waved his fists in Gauguin’s powerful face. Far into the tropical, oppressive night they kept up their bruising, battering conflict.
They both worked like fiends to catch themselves and nature at the point of fructification. Day after day they battled with their flaming palettes, night after night with each other’s strident egos. When they were not quarrelling viciously, their friendly arguments were so explosive that it was impossible to summon sleep. Money came from Theo. They spent it immediately for tobacco and absinthe. It was too hot to eat. They thought absinthe would quiet their nerves. It only excited them the more.
A nasty, lashing mistral came up. It confined the men to the house. Gauguin could not work. He spent his time scourging Vincent into a continuous ebullition. He had never seen anyone grow so violent over mere ideas.
Vincent was the only sport Gauguin had. He made the most of it.
“Better quiet down, Vincent,” he said after the fifth day of the mistral. He had baited his friend until the storm within the yellow house had made the howling mistral seem like a mild and gentle breeze.
“What about yourself, Gauguin?”
“It so happens, Vincent, that several men who have been a good deal in my company, and in the habit of discussing things with me, have gone mad.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, I’m warning you.”
“Then keep your warnings to yourself.”
“All right, but don’t blame me if anything happens.”
“Oh, Paul, Paul, let’s stop this eternal quarrelling. I know that you’re a better painter than I am. I know that you can teach me a great deal. But I won’t have you despising me, do you hear. I’ve slaved nine long years, and by Christ, I have something to say with this beastly paint! Now admit it, haven’t I? Speak up, Gauguin.”
The mistral died down. The Arlesians dared go out in the streets again. The blistering sun came back. An uncontainable fever settled over Aries. The police had to cope with crimes of violence. People walked about with a smouldering excitement in their eyes. No one ever laughed. No one talked. The stone roofs broiled under the sun. There were fights and knife flashes in the Place Lamartine. There was the smell of catastrophe in the air. Arles was too engorged to stand the strain any longer. The valley of the Rhône was about to burst into a million fragments.
Vincent thought of the Parisian journalist.
“Which will it be?” he asked himself. “An earthquake or a revolution.”
In spite of it all, he still painted in the fields without a hat. He needed the white, blinding heat to make fluid within him the terrific passions he felt. His brain was a burning crucible, turning out red-hot canvas after canvas.
With each succeeding canvas he felt more keenly that all his nine years of labour were converging in these few surcharged weeks to make him, for one brief instant, the complete and perfect artist. He was by far surpassing his last summer’s work. Never again would he produce paintings that so utterly expressed the essence of nature and the essence of himself.
He painted from four in the morning until night stole the scene from him. He created two, and sometimes even three complete pictures a day. He was spilling out a year of his life blood with every convulsive painting that he tore from his vitals. It was not the length of his stay on earth that mattered to him; it was what he did with the days of his life. For him time would have to be measured by the paintings he poured out, not by the fluttering leaves of a calendar.
He sensed that his art had reached a climax; that this was the high spot of his life, the moment toward which he had been striving all these years. He did not know how long it would last. He knew only that he had to paint pictures, and more pictures . . . and still more and more pictures. This climax of his life, this tiny point of infinity, had to be held, sustained, pushed out until he had created all those pictures that were gestating in his soul.
