The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  His style had developed in these last two years. His canvases were no longer realistic landscapes and interiors influenced by Millet and the Dutch school. The colours and lines are bolder, and in some of them, a strange technique of distortion makes it appear that trees, cornfields, houses are all burning upwards like flames. In contrast to these ‘brainstorm’ canvases, others are calm, relaxed, full of light and silence. He painted many portraits in the South—almost anyone he could persuade to sit for him—and many still-lifes. Some of the portraits show an odd feeling for decorative values which brings to mind Japanese prints; the still-lifes, on the contrary, often have a dynamic quality of the sort we find in a Michelangelo drawing. (The best known of these is the ‘Yellow Chair’, of which Gauguin exclaimed delightedly: ‘No one ever painted a chair like that before!’)

  Vincent removed from the hospital at Aries to a private sanatorium kept by a Dr. Gachet, Theo still continuing to send money. But Theo had more responsibilities now; he had married and his wife was expecting a baby. Beside this, he was quarrelling with the proprietors of his art gallery, who disliked Theo’s taste in the new ‘young painters’. Vincent began to feel that his life was simply a burden on the world; he was terrified of complete insanity. His last canvas is the ‘Cornfield with Crows’: the sky blue-black with a coming storm; a road that runs in from the left of the canvas, and shoots away through the middle of the ripe corn like a fast stream. There is a curious atmosphere of strain and foreboding. A few days after painting it he returned to the same place and shot himself with a revolver. But he bungled it, missing the heart; he buttoned the coat over the wound and walked back to his room. Two days later he died; his last words to Theo were: ‘Misery will never end.’ At the end of his last letter to Theo occur the words: ‘Well, as to my work, I’ve risked my life for it, and my reason has half foundered....’

  Van Gogh’s life recalls to mind Hesse’s words in Demian: ‘Everyone’s life is a road to himself, to self-realization....’ In Van Gogh’s case, ‘self-realization’ meant simply self-expression. For us, he is primarily a painter; but we should remember that he lived for nearly four decades, and that it was only in the last eight years of his fife that he thought of himself as a painter. Thirty years is a long time to live without a direction. Most people have a fairly definite idea of what they are and where they belong, before they are twenty. Van Gogh was aware of himself as a dynamo of energy and will-power before he was seventeen; but he had no idea of what to drive with his energy. In many ways he reminds us of the young George Fox, with his tormented feeling of having a purpose, yet not being conscious of it. ‘I was a man of sorrows in those days.’ (We shall examine Fox’s claim to be classed as an Outsider in Chapter VIII of this book.)

  The one thing that is certain of the young Van Gogh is the intensity of his religious feeling; and by this, I do not mean intensity of devotional feeling, but simply a sense of purpose. This is in no way different from the feeling that made Lawrence regard himself as a preacher rather than as a soldier. If carefully analysed, it can only be resolved into the idea that there is a higher power than man in the universe, and man reaches his highest purpose in serving it. At the same time, it is necessary to bear in mind Hesse’s recognition that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as man; ‘Man is a bourgeois compromise.’ The primitive religious notion of man’s relation to his creator collapses under the Outsider’s criticism. The Outsider’s wretchedness lies in his inability to find a new faith; he tends to regard his condition of unbelief as the result of a Fall. ^ This is the essential Van Gogh; not a painter, but an Outsider, for whom life is an acute and painful question that demands solution before he begins living. His earliest experiences teach him that life is an eternal Pro and Contra. His sensitivity makes him unusually aware of the Contra, of his own misery and the world’s. All his faculties are exerted in a search for the Pro, for instinctive, absolute Yea-saying. Like all artists, he has moments when he seems to be in complete accord with the universe and himself, when, like Meursault, he feels that the universe and himself are of the same nature; then all life seems purposive, and his own miseries purposive. The rest of the time is a struggle to regain that insight. If there is an order in the universe, if he can sometimes perceive that order and feel himself completely in accord with it, then it must be seeable, touchable, so that it could be regained by some discipline. Art is only one form of such a discipline.

  Unfortunately, the problem is complicated by quite irrelevant human needs that claim the attention: for companionship and understanding, for a feeling of participation in the social life of humanity. And of course, for a roof over one’s head, and food and drink. The artist tries to give attention to these, but it is difficult when there are so much more important things to think about; and it is all made more difficult by the hostility of other people who every day arouse the question, Could it be that I’m wrong? Sometimes the strain makes the Outsider-artist think of suicide, but before he gets to that point, the universe is suddenly making sense again, and he has a glimpse of purpose. Moreover, that sense of accord is not the warm, vague harmony of a sleeping baby, but a blazing of all the senses, and a realization of a condition of consciousness unknown to the ordinary bourgeois. He realizes that this was what he left out of account in making up his mental balance-sheet of Pro and Contra in the universe. The Christian might call it a sense of the Fatherhood of God; a Hindu would probably prefer to call it a sense of the Motherhood of God, and his symbolism would be more congenial to the artist, who can only find comparison for the feeling in a child’s confidence in its mother. In any case, these are only symbols of a state that is too little known to human beings for their descriptions of it to be accurate.

  When we turn to Van Gogh’s canvases, we find attempts to express this sense in another medium than language. Writers on mysticism may sneer at such attempts as completely inadequate, but this is to miss the really important point that, inadequate as it is, these attempts completely transcend most of their critics’ knowledge of reality, and express an insight that very few human beings catch a glimpse of once in a lifetime. In approaching the work of such a man as Van Gogh, an attitude of completely uncritical acceptance (such as most of us feel towards the dogmas of higher mathematics) may be more rewarding than the intellectual-critical approach. What we are most aware of in Van Gogh is that the ‘thought-riddled nature’ has been very decisively kicked-out, and the result achieved is Lawrence’s ‘immediacy of sense perception’. The Pro and Contra have disappeared; with the senses awakened, it becomes nonsense to talk about human misery. Certainly there is misery, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters that any human being ever thought; only this. The canvases try to express it with light and form: fields of corn with colour that almost hurts the eyes, a starry night with the sky looking like water full of cross-currents, and the stars no longer pinpoints, but rings and circles of light; cypresses like green flames. This interior vision transfigured a chair, an old boot, a few onions as El Greco’s illuminated the Virgin.

  For Vincent the battle was never conclusively won; the day after he had painted a chair ‘as no one else ever painted it’, he bickered with Gauguin and wrote an irritable letter to Theo; at other times it was simply that there was no hope of his painting ever contributing to his support, and the painting suddenly seemed hopeless and bad. His last words to Theo are the words of a man who feels that defeat is inevitable, that life is a baited trap; who kills himself to escape the necessity of taking the bait again. The last canvas is more than a landscape tinged by a mood of depression and fatigue; it is a summary of life as he knew it; his judgement is: No.

  But other canvases are more direct affirmations than any other painter has ever achieved (El Greco perhaps excepted), expressions of spirit for which the words ‘nature mysticism* are completely inadequate. Wordsworth was a nature mystic, and the rather complacent rationalism of The Excursion* is his natural mode of expression: Jehovah and the heavenly hosts ‘he passes un
alarmed’, but nature, delightful nature, etc...· (William Blake, who was a nature mystic in a pro-founder sense, made one of his explosively irritable notes beside this passage in his copy of ‘The Excursion5.) The real nature mystic, Jacob Boehme, Thomas Traherne, is as concerned with ‘God in the souP as with God in nature: consequently, no one ever speaks of them as nature mystics. This is also true of Van Gogh.

  Nature reflects what he sees inside him. When he sees nothing, the canvases are realistic studies that might be curiously brilliant photographs. At other times, they express a vision that is inexpressible in words because it runs in a different direction; words are horizontal; this is vertical. The point of intersection of the two planes can only be called Is-ness (to borrow a phrase from Eckhart). Compare Van Gogh’s copy of the prison yard with Dore’s original; Van Gogh’s is more ‘visionary’, there is more light; at the same time it is more real than Dore’s. Van Gogh’s chair is more than other chairs; his sunflowers are more than other sunflowers. Roquentin’s words, ‘I was like the others.... I didn’t feel it existed’, are fantastically inapplicable to Van Gogh. When he saw a tree full of leaves, it existed so much for him that he could not paint it as a tree (as Constable would) or give the general impression of a tree with colours (as Monet and the Impressionists did); it explodes into life and looks more like a tree burning with Bengal fires. This is no literary trick (any fool could paint a tree to look like a flame); it is a way of seeing; it is built into his vision, and the proof of its sincerity lies in watching the development of the vision through his painting.

  Or compare his canvas called ‘Landscape near Auvers’ with Cezanne’s canvas of the same name (any of them); the difference is more than a difference of technique; it is a completely different way of seeing. Cezanne rendered painstakingly, as Henry James rendered his pictures of European society, with innumerable small brush strokes. The final result has an orderliness that springs out of discipline. From Cezanne’s painting, we learn a great deal about the surface of the object painted and its distance from the eye, and a great deal about the will of the man who was determined to render it fully. We learn nothing of Cezanne’s emotion. This is precisely what we do learn from Van Gogh’s canvases, and the emotion is important; it is not just a sentimental gushing about nature, but an emotion that could only correspond to some recognized awareness of the nature of life itself. Cezanne’s painting is strictly painting, and its value is immense; but Van Gogh’s painting has the Outsider’s characteristic: it is laboratory refuse of a man who treated his own life as an experiment in living; it faithfully records moods and development of vision in the manner of a Bildungsroman.

  To experts on art, this way of treating Van Gogh must seem completely without bearing on his importance as a painter. This is true; for the purposes of this study, he is not a painter; he is an Outsider who happened to choose painting as his medium.

  When we consider him primarily as an Outsider, his importance in defining ‘the Outsider’s problems’ is at once apparent. He has in common with T. E. Lawrence an unfortunate lack of conscious direction where his own unusual powers are concerned. He consistently underestimates himself and overestimates other people. This has its repercussions on his work every time he comes into contact with other people. In old age, Goethe built a mental wall around himself, and other people could not reach him with either praise or blame; if Van Gogh and Lawrence had done the same, their lives might have taken a completely different course.

  This is the negative side of Van Gogh’s contribution; the positive side suggests an important direction of thoiight. Together with Lawrence, he has introduced into the Outsider’s problem the concept of discipline. But with him, it is no longer a discipline of the intellect; his powers of will were directed towards a development of the emotions. Now we have before us the fact that both he and T. E. Lawrence failed, and one of the reasons for this failure has been indicated in the previous paragraph: that failure of self-knowledge that produced something like an inferiority complex. But the sources of this failure are different in the two men, and we can express the difference by saying that Van Gogh felt too much just as Lawrence thought too much. One felt without thinking; the other thought without feeling.

  Before examining the implications of this conclusion and its bearing on the Outsider generally, there is a third element to be considered. Both men began by a purely physical type of discipline: physical hardship, starvation, etc. Their earliest efforts at discipline were attempts to gain control of the body.

  Any attempts to draw general conclusions from the Outsider’s ‘attempt to gain control’ must be only partially satisfying until we can supplement them with the case-history of an Outsider who was primarily concerned with discipline of the body. We must go on to consider such a man before generalizing further about Van Gogh and Lawrence. There are many saints and fakirs who would serve as examples, but these would not conform to the conditions we have observed so far, that the Outsider should ‘start from scratch’ as far as his religion is concerned. The Outsider must not start from religion, he must start from grounds all can understand and accept: the world and human life. This narrows the field considerably; but luckily, there is an example to hand, the case of the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky; and the various books about him, notably his wife’s biography and Anatole Bourman’s Tragedy of Nijinsky (the latter not entirely reliable), supply the necessary facts about his life. And most important, there is the Diary of Nijinsky, published in 1937, that gives us insight into Nijinsky’s state of mind immediately before his mental collapse. These are more than sufficient for our purposes.

  ***

  The element of tragedy seems to have been present in Nijinsky’s life from the beginning. His family was always poor; his father was a dancer who travelled all over Russia, and seems to have left the support of the family to his wife.

  Vaslav Nijinsky was born in Kiev in 1890. A year before his birth, his mother had received a painful shock to her system when bandits attacked the inn where she was staying; their violence and cruelty horrified her so that she lost the power of speech for three days.18

  Vaslav was a delicate and sensitive child, passionately attached to his mother. While he was very young, his brother Stanislav fell from a third-floor window; as a result of the concussion of the brain, he was an idiot for the rest of his life. Vaslav’s father, who had been unfaithful to his wife for several years, deserted her after the accident, and left her to provide for the family of three children.

  When Vaslav was nine, he was accepted into the Imperial school of dancing in St. Petersburg. This meant that his support was taken over by the Tsar, and he was trained to dance by men who had been famous dancers. His training lasted until he was eighteen, when he automatically became a member of the Mariinsky Theatre. His talent was so well known that he began immediately to dance leading roles opposite the prima ballerina. Before he was twenty, Nijinsky was famous in Petersburg.

  About this time he met Sergei Diaghileff, and the meeting was a turning-point in his life.

  Diaghileff was a rich amateur of art whose energies and organizing ability were so great that he was not content to be merely a patron and onlooker of dancers; he had to organize a ballet company, with his own musicians, choreographers, painters and dancers. With no artistic talent himself, he succeeded in associating his name with most of the major artists of Europe between 1907 and 1930: Stravinsky, Benois, Bakst, Pavlova, Karsavina, Fokine, Debussy, Ravel, Picasso, Chirico, Massine, De Falla, Cocteau... many of whom produced their best work in response to his cheque-book. Personally, Diaghileff was unattractive; his role of hard-headed business-man among artists made him unscrupulous; his belief in his mission as artistic saviour made him self-centred; with these qualities he combined some of the characteristics of the worst type of homosexual—sensuality, vanity and complete lack of intellectual driving force.

  His first interest in Nijinsky was sexual: Nijinsky speaks of their meeting in his Diary: ‘I disliked him
because of his too assured voice but I went with him to seek my luck [to Diaghileff’s hotel room]. ... At once I allowed him to make love to me. ... I hated him, but pretended to like him because I knew that my mother and I would die of starvation otherwise.’19

  The last statement may be an exaggeration, but it is certain that Nijinsky felt the need to contribute to his family’s support; since he had become a member of the Mariinsky, their expenses had rocketed; they had moved into an expensive flat that they could not really afford; Nijinsky’s position required this; to add to this, his brother had become violently insane, and had to be removed to an institution, where the family had to continue to support him. Diaghileff knew that Nijinsky’s wages from the Mariinsky were not enough to support the family; he offered him a position in his own newly formed ballet company. Nijinsky obtained leave from the Mariinsky and opened with the first Russian Ballet season in Paris in the spring of 1910.

  The season made both Diaghileff and Nijinsky world-famous. Critics named Nijinsky ‘le dieu de la danse’; they acclaimed him the greatest male dancer the world has ever seen. The Russian Ballet followed up its success with seasons in all the capitals of Europe. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Nijinsky plotted with Diaghileff to break his contract with the Mariinsky. In 1912 and 1913, Nijinsky produced choreographies for Debussy’s L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune and Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps; in the first the scandal was caused by Nijinsky’s choreography, in the second, by Stravinsky’s score; but both added to the commercial success of the Russian Ballet.

  Nijinsky found the overheated emotional atmosphere of the Diaghileff menage a strain; Nijinsky had a deep-rooted religious tendency that made the unending theatre atmosphere of art and sensuality unsatisfying to him. He quarrelled with Diaghileff several times; he was getting tired of the ‘artist and lover’ business. In these quarrels, Stravinsky always supported Diaghileff; Nijinsky, after all, was only a brainless child-prodigy, while Diaghileff was the Connoisseur, the Artist with a capital A.