THE DOG OF THE WORK

Should I see him in the spirit-haunted shade of Aliscamps as, among graves that stand open like the graves of those who have risen from the dead, his eyes pursue a dragon-fly?
Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke had gone to Arles in the footsteps of Vincent. But when, as Malte Laurids Brigge in his Notebook, he wondered if he would see him, it wasn’t Vincent he meant, but the Prodigal Son – the one who did not want to be loved and who had his, Malte’s, face. Yet Vincent too was a Prodigal Son, one who did want to be loved, who could never go home again, or take root here or anywhere.

Malte remarked also on the faces of those who wait with a small talent for being loved, as with a lamp gone cold. Was his such a face? Was Vincent’s? In December 1906 Rilke was reading Vincent’s letters, newly published in German, and writing letters home. He had seen some of the paintings along with Gauguin’s in Paris that summer: Something of extreme significance is there, an inner compulsion which borders on madness. Soon he would see more van Goghs, among them his Night Café – late, bare, as if you were seeing it with bleary eyes... you grow really old, shabby and hopelessly sleepy as you look at it – and note the ferocious effort to make paint do something beyond paint: Van Gogh, he wrote, is something different, something inexorable, obsessed by expression, and this forces his painting.

But back in the winter of 1906, in the company of the Letters, Rilke was roaming the alleyways of Naples with new eyes: Posts, roof and backcloth of his little booth were blue (the thrilling blue of certain Turkish and Persian amulets, shading off into green); it was evening, and the lamps placed opposite the back wall of the booth made everything else shew up very distinctly in front of this colour: the burnt sienna of an earthenware jug continually running over with a thin trickle of water, the yellow of single lemons and finally the smooth, glassified, ever-changing scarlet in some big and little goldfish bowls... Van Gogh would have turned back to it. Maybe I can see all these things because I have been reading his letters...

The letters are unutterably sincere, unutterably moving; their author one who might very well be loved (as true of Rilke as of Vincent). And yet, somehow, in person, dogged, voluble, fervent – maybe even on paper he was too much for Rilke, like Rodin, in whose presence one spoke, thought, only of Rodin, saw through his eyes, hung on his every word – Rilke’s letters on Rodin gasp for breath.

Or, maybe, for a man whose field was words, it was simply that the flood of raw words came between him and the seeing.

Our responses to people, after all, depend so much on unconscious affinities, on matters as basic as body heat. Maybe van Gogh was just too much like that dog in the twilight – the hour entre chien et loup, ‘between dog and wolf’– in the story Rilke wrote that winter, where a dog appears like a sudden idea to greet a stranger, running now in front, now behind, its whole being afire with the urge to be this man’s dog. But the man will have none of it. He refuses, he orders it to go away and still it tags along at his unrelenting heels. In the end, looking back, the man sees that night has fallen and there is no one to be seen.

There is a subliminal wrench, all the same, in the story, in the man who, the dog knows, as does the reader, is enormously fond of dogs. The Prodigal Son is in retreat from love. He is the self-outcast who will never give in and let himself be owned even – especially – by love. In October 1907 the Salon d’Automne commemorated Cézanne’s death with a retrospective and Rilke fell deeply under his spell, writing to his wife Clara, from whom he lived scrupulously apart, a luminous stream of letters that achieve in words an abstraction comparable to that of the images he is describing in washes and ebbs of colour, of space, of light. In those October days at the Salon the young poet opens himself up leaf by leaf to the mind in visible form of the master. He recognises in Cézanne the simplicity that costs not less than everything. The friend who accompanies him, an artist who knew Cézanne, says: ‘He sat there in front of it like a dog, just looking, without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive.’ There is a submission so complete that it is beyond submission, as in love, whether of a person or of God, a state beyond self. The life of art came down in the end to this old man in his work... like an old dog, the dog of this work that is calling him again and that beats him and lets him starve.

For van Gogh Rilke has a grave comprehension and the kind of love that is half pained exasperation. Vincent wanted so much. Here was another northern soul, who lived for the work, that much is clear from the Letters: but whose work seems so often outweighed by something importunate in the man, some need, a hot eagerness of embrace. Neither man nor work was self-contained. Vincent was one of those who painted ‘I love this’ instead of painting ‘Here it is’. He was a writing painter, not a real one, that is, who spilled out in words what should have been saved up for the canvas.

It always seems to me that poetry is more terrible than painting, though painting is dirtier and altogether more galling. And the painter on the whole says nothing, he keeps quiet, and I like that better still. Whose voice is this, Rilke’s? Well, no, Vincent’s! – in a letter. Letters, even such letters as Rilke’s on Cézanne, are not open, not meant for the world’s eyes, but intimate; and Vincent’s to Theo, baring at once his soul and the soul of the work, were written out of his need for this brother who was his other self, the good son, pride of the family, the one who was on his side no matter what, the loyal collaborator, even, sharing the burden of his pictures as he would one day share the credit, once Vincent hit his straps: we are making them together, he wrote, nous les fabriquons à deux. The outpourings of words and sketches he mailed to Paris were work notes wet from the studio, thinkings-aloud, takings of stock, high hopes and a handshake in thought.

It’s only in comparison to Cézanne, of course, that Rilke found him wanting. What is it that Cézanne had and Vincent lacked? Time, is what it comes down to: ripeness, simply age, old age. Derailed by turmoil, Vincent would die long before he reached the age where such a path as Cézanne’s was open to him.

Besides, what if when he, Vincent, is painting ‘I love this’, what he means is what Rilke means by praising? Rühmen, das ists! Vincent the lover of paint was also a lover of words, and people, who craved warmth. He knew of nothing more truly artistic than loving people. Far from being self-sufficient, he was too poor to feed and clothe himself or buy his materials or have so much as a dog for company. And he, unlike Cézanne, was accountable. The letters and sketches were accounts rendered, thrown off between bouts of work and late at night out of whatever was left over. He sat at the feet of the work as doggedly as Cézanne ever did, but his was an unruly stray with a heart of fire – a red dog, eager and still new to the game, the métier.

Rilke was a man after Cézanne’s own heart. He would follow him into retreat. I must try gradually to grow a cloister about myself and take up my stand in the world, with walls around me... Bound to no one – and no dog, not even the most self-sufficient of dogs – he would be the dog and own himself, the dog of the work, and take himself for walks sur le motif. As for Gauguin, he was the lean wolf of Aesop’s fable, no collar for him. Children stoned Vincent in the streets of Arles when he went mad, just as they stoned Cézanne in Aix when he was old.

For all his resistances, a quality he had sensed in the man could still melt Rilke months later: the hangdog, down-to-earth dedication of this

dear zealot, in whom something of the spirit of Saint Francis was coming back to life... His self-portrait in the portfolio looks shabby and tormented, almost desperate, but not devastated: the way a dog looks when it’s in a bad way. He holds out his face and you take note of the fact: he’s in a bad way, day and night. But in his paintings (the arbre fleuri) poverty has already become rich: a great splendor from within.

BEVERLEY FARMER’s next book, The Bone House, will be published by Giramondo in 2005.

SOURCES:

Linton, John, trans., The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, London, OUP, 1984. Hull, R F C, trans., Selected Letters 1902 - 1926, London, Quartet Books Ltd, 1988. Houston, G Craig, trans., ‘An Encounter’, in Where Silence Reigns: Selected Prose by Rainer Maria Rilke, New York, New Directions, 1978. Agee, Joel, trans., Letters on Cézanne, New York, Fromm International, 1985.