Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  Madame Ginoux, L’Arlésienne, was a hooker or his name wasn’t Miller, Miller thought.

  “It was good of you to stop by,” he told the doctor. “Gee,” he said, “my time here’s passed by so quickly. I hadn’t realized. You think you’ve all the time in the world. That’s always a mistake. First thing you know you’re trying to pack so you can get some sleep and still get up and make an early train that will get you to Marseilles in time to check your bags through to America and clear Douane and get to the duty-free before your plane takes off without you and leaves you all high and dry in a foreign country with nothing to do but hang around the airport for another twenty- four hours looking at the newspapers and trying to figure out from the photograph what the story is about. So thanks for helping me out when I passed out that time, and for the postcard, and for introducing me to your friends. Goodnight, Dr. Rey. Goodnight and goodbye. It was a pleasure to meet you, Madame Ginoux. The doctor has spoke.”

  He had practically pushed them out of the room. He didn’t know what this was all about. He didn’t at all understand Félix Rey’s motives or the meaning of all their disguises, the complicated costume party and tableaux vivants of their shutdown lives, but whatever it was he knew it could not be wholesome, Yet whose life is, Miller wondered, and where do I get off? And without knowing what he was up to quite suddenly relented. He would hear the man out. He would promise nothing but he would hear him out. That was the least he could do.

  “What?” Miller asked. “What do you want?”

  “To have the lend of your key,” Félix Rey said.

  “My key? What key?”

  “To here,” said Rey, “the key to here.” He waved his arm about.

  “But it isn’t my key,” Miller said. “It belongs to the Foundation. I have to return it.”

  “The lend,” Rey said, “the lend. I will have it duplicated. Before the sun has arose I will bring it back. You shall have it in your hand before you start back for Indy. I will guarantee for this, Monsieur Sir.” He looked closely at Miller. “I shall leave—ooh la la—L’Arlésienne behind as my pledge. Is this agreeable, Madame Ginoux?”

  “Très agreeable.”

  “But why?” Miller asked.

  “Have I not said you of our little group? Have I not very here speak of the Club of the Portraits of the Descendants of the People Painted by Vincent Van Gogh? You have seen for your eyes on the group photograph. On there is the peasant, Patience Escalier. On there are the Roulins—— Joseph, Berceuse, Armand, and Camille. On there is the Zouave whom you have know. And the incomparable Madame Ginoux. As well as your humble servant, myself, Félix Rey. Here is the venue of the portraitees. For this is the key needed.”

  “Nonsense,” Miller said, “go to the public garden, why don’t you?”

  “In winter in the public garden the mistral blows through. It could kill the peasant, old Patience Escalier.”

  “Go in summer to Les Alyscamps,” Miller said. “Meet by the Trinquetaille Bridge.”

  “Monsieur, here is only the proper venue. You know it, I know it,” the doctor said with some dignity. And then, with none at all, he said once again that he’d leave Madame Ginoux as his pledge.

  “I’m sorry,” said Miller and, to his surprise, he genuinely was. “Come,” he said, “I’ll go downstairs with you.”

  That night he couldn’t sleep. He laid out his clothes for the morning, stripped down, and got into the bed, but within minutes, realizing that he didn’t even desire sleep, he got out of bed again and put on the clothes in which he’d be traveling back to America. It wasn’t that he was not drowsy—— nor so very wide awake. It was rather a question of how interesting it had all been, how very interesting it still was. It wasn’t a question of happiness. Happiness (or unhappiness either) was not part of the equation. A lot of it had to do with being abroad, but he still didn’t mean geography. He’d been abroad in the sense of some surrounding or enveloping substance, abroad, he meant, in conditions. The way men were abroad, say, in airplanes, or in submarines fathoms, leagues, beneath the surface of the sea. On this last night in Arles he was just too interested to sleep.

  He made the bed he had so briefly untidied. He fluffed the yellow pillow slips, turned down the yellow top sheet over the red blanket, and then tucked the blanket tight about the mattress. He brought his parcels and PC, suitcase, and garment bag over by the piano bench in front of the fourth wall and sat down to study the room from the very place where Van Gogh must have been when he painted it. He’d done this before, of course. He remembered telling Hartshine about it: But he’d never studied it at night before, in the light given off by the room’s puny overhead bulb. The color values were so very different. It was not at all like looking at a bad reproduction. It was more like looking at an entirely different painting, a work of genius, and immensely interesting.

  Then, toward dawn, but while it was still dark out—if anything he was more wide awake than ever—Miller decided to turn off the light. Low as the light had been, his eyes still had to adjust to this new black dark. What he saw now, the almost colorless configuration of shapes and masses, made a different and still stranger picture and, as dawn came and the light turned milky, and then, as the sun rose higher and the room experienced its gradual yellowing, it seemed almost to go through a process of queer simultaneity, of aging and renewal at once.

  It was time to go. He had to cross the square to Number 30, drop off his key (without, he hoped, having to see Rita, or Hartshine, or, for that matter, anyone he knew), and then wait out in front of the inn for the taxi he’d arranged to pick him up to take him to the train station. He looked around Van Gogh’s room at Arles one last time and took up his things to bring them down with him.

  There, in the hallway, he was able to see the still unpainted rooms and, just for a second, rendering them with his own poor unrendering eyes, Miller imagined he could see paintings on all the blank, colorless walls of Van Gogh’s yellow house—— the gorgeous asparagus he’d eaten in Cannes topped with their two, perfectly made eggs, his marvelous iced coffee the brown-black color of roots and bears. But rendering, too, the canceled flowers and the unsold fruit; the men and women dancing in the hotel, Inga Basset’s thigh insinuated between Jesus Hans’s legs; the brother-in-law with his carton of spoiling produce. Rendering everything unrendered, all the still lifes and unpainted masterpieces of Cannes—what shot by his all-but-shut eyelids on the bus and, spilling over onto the unpainted fourth wall of Van Gogh’s room at Arles, the ghost Rey, and the ghost Zouave, and the ghost Ginoux, and all the other ghosts, the beautiful ruin of the world he couldn’t quite catch, like everything else he couldn’t quite catch, everything untranslated and left unsyntaxed in his inadequate French, the guts, the soul, the brains and eyes, all the inner extremities and other moving parts of vision, of vision.

  A Biography of Stanley Elkin

  Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.

  Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The community provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including The Rabbi of Lud (1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.

  Elkin attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1952 and his PhD in 1961. His dissertation centered around William Faulkner, whose writing style Elkin admitted echoing unintentionally until the 1961 completion of his short story “On a Field, Rampant,” which was included in the book Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (1966). Elkin would later say that story marked the creation of his personal writing style. While in school, Elkin participated in radio dramas on the campus radio
station, a hobby that would later inform his novel The Dick Gibson Show (1971), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972.

  In 1953, he married Joan Jacobson, with whom he would have three children. Elkin’s postgraduate studies were interrupted in 1955 when he was drafted to the U.S. Army. He served at Fort Lee in Virginia until 1957 and then returned to Illinois to resume his education. In 1960, Elkin began teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

  Elkin’s novels were universally hailed by critics. His second novel, A Bad Man (1967), established Elkin as “one of the flashiest and most exciting comic talents in view,” according to the New York Times Book Review. Despite his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 1972, Elkin continued to write regularly, even incorporating the disease into his novel The Franchiser (1976), which was released to great acclaim. Elkin won his first National Book Critics Circle Award with George Mills (1982), an achievement he repeated with Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995). His string of critical successes continued throughout his career. He was a National Book Award finalist two more times with Searches and Seizures (1974) and The MacGuffin (1991), and a PEN Faulkner finalist with Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (1994). Elkin was also the recipient of the Longview Foundation Award, the Paris Review Humor Prize, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  Even though he was confined to a wheelchair toward the end of his life, Elkin continued teaching classes at Washington University until his passing in 1995 from congestive heart failure.

  A one-year-old Elkin in 1931. His father was born in Russia and his mother was a native New Yorker, though the couple raised Stanley largely in Chicago.

  Elkin in Oakland, New Jersey, around 1940. His parents, Philip and Zelda, originally met in this camp in Oakland, which lies at the foot of the Catskills.

  Elkin as a teenager in Oakland, New Jersey. Throughout his childhood, Elkin and his family retreated to Oakland for the hot summer months, spending July and August with a group of family friends. His time there would later inform much of his writing, including the novella “The Condominium” from Searches & Seizures.

  Elkin at a typewriter during college. Throughout his time as an undergraduate, Elkin was routinely praised by his English professors for the intelligence and wit of his work.

  Stanley and Joan on their wedding day in 1953. The county clerk who signed their marriage license was Richard J. Daley, who would go on to become the mayor of Chicago as well as one of the most notorious figures in American politics during the 1960s.

  Elkin with his son Philip in Urbana, Illinois, in August of 1959. Philip, who was named after Elkin’s father, was adopted in 1958.

  The first page of Elkin’s debut novel, Boswell, marked with editorial notes. The book was published in 1964 while Elkin was an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

  Elkin in 1964, the year he published his first novel, Boswell. He went on to write nine more novels, as well as two novella collections and two short-story collections, during his tenure at Washington University.

  Stanley and Joan Elkin pose with their children in front of an oil painting of Elkin at the Olin Library at Washington University in 1992. The painting was completed and installed in 1991.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1993 by Stanley Elkin

  cover design by Milan Bozic

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-0456-6

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com