What damn liberties they take! So grumbled this friend of historical order when he happened to end up in front of one of all these biopics, on this occasion with Willem Dafoe as the familiar painter Vincent van Gogh.
Then I learned that the film’s version, in which van Gogh does not take his own life at all, but instead dies of a shotgun blast during a trivial quarrel with two teasing boys, was not at all a figment of a impact-seeking screenwriter.
On the contrary, it was claimed in the last major biography of the unstable Dutchman (†Van Gogh. A life†by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith). Not only that, I discovered a couple of other revisionists (Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans “Van Gogh’s ear†), who believed that van Gogh did not cut off his ear either, but that it was his friend and rival Paul Gauguin.
Does anyone play it role? No one learns to look at van Gogh’s sunflowers in a different way, and if someone does, it must have happened: a cinema’s job is to tell the truth. If it changes the concentrated and romantic image of van Gogh as the demonically self-destructive artist, he who plays the permanent lead role in the film of his own life, it must also be ¤nt.
For my part, I have never understood the question at all. People are interesting in themselves, even if they happen to be artists. And if they now happen to be artists, it is quite natural to think about how their lives and their art are connected. The ascetic view of art as something elevated above ordinary, trivial human life has always struck me as incomprehensibly anemic and humorless, not to mention lacking in human insight.
But if you now have that attitude, it’s easy to have your little cult alone – no one forces anyone to watch a film about van Gogh or to pick up a biography about him.
There are those who believe that the biographer should devote himself to battles and exploits and leave the jokes and wrinkles around the eyes there
yet it is obviously the tolerance is not always mutual. Even Plutarch, the ancient pioneer of the biography genre, felt compelled to defend the business against naysayers who considered the genre trivial and that the heroes of history should only be sculpted in heroic poses:
For what I am writing is not a work of history but sketches of life, nor do a man’s good and bad qualities always come to the fore in the most notorious thing he did, but often an insignificant act or some small word that he said, perhaps jokingly, reveal his true nature more than battles with tens of thousands of dead, yes the biggest field battles and city sieges can do that.
So he wrote in his introduction to the double biography of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and then:
A portrait painter seeks to capture the likeness of the model by working out the face and the characteristic features around the eyes without worrying so much about the rest of the body; so may it also be permitted to me to try to penetrate to the spiritually distinguishing features of each one and, under analysis of these, draw his life, while I Instead, he leaves his battles and exploits to others.
It should be that simple. But after writing three author biographies, I can’t help but notice that there are still those who believe that the biographer should really devote himself to battles and exploits and leave the jokes and the wrinkles around the eyes over there.
When that criticism comes from specialist historians, it is easy to understand. It is the easily understandable self-interest that speaks. When a certain kind of literary scholar claims the privilege of acting as mediator between his subject and the congregation, with his special ceremonial, with his special ritual language, it is in itself the work itself and its role as interpreter of the deity they defend.
But it is possible that there is also a kind of Swedish reluctance to get close to people.
Among all the more or less silly observations in Gustav Sundbärg’s “Det sweden folklynnet†there is also the fact that Swedes are uninterested in people. Just try, says Sundbärg, to analyze an acquaintance’s character at a dinner table! “The result must be unmistakable: general silence. And after a few moments, someone from the company will bring up another topic of conversation.â€
Fifty years later, after some time in Sweden, the American Susan Sontag noted the same thing. If Swedes would talk about people, it would be in an impersonal way, everything else was gossip: field battles and city sieges, not the wrinkles around the eyes.
With experience from my own books, I am convinced that it is not only a peculiarly anxious attitude, but also robs one of a kind of understanding of the subject. When it came to Hjalmar Söderberg, it was obvious that he not only used his life as raw material, but that the author’s relationship to that raw material is a central theme in for example †The serious game†.
Gunnar Ekelöf knew very well that there were plenty of earthworms and house sows at the roots of his own poetry
As for Gunnar Ekelöf, my latest cinema subject in “Memory and Fear†from last year, it was a given fact for people who knew him that his most high-flying poetry had roots in a life that often was anything but high-flying. “I have always considered it self-evident that it is Gunnar himself who is the target of, spitting on,†Olof Lagercrantz wrote, for example, when he took part in the twisted grimaces in “Opus incertum†.
Ekelöf himself liked to apply the view to colleagues, such as when he claimed that Karin Boye’s poetry was “a slender tree on top of the great root system KB†and that the one who wanted to know something about this tree must be turned upside down: “You can’t shy away from touching earthworms, grasshoppers or snake fry.â€
Ekelöf knew very well that there were plenty of earthworms and sows at the roots of his own poetry, but as he was elevated to seer and prophet, and became the object of literary scholar whose career was based on the exegesis of his professedly esoteric creation, all such parallels between life and personality were forbidden.
It is a condescension that hides a kind of pathetic hero worship, refusing to see the alcoholic poet’s impotent self-loathing and helpless dependence on the environment behind the defiant tirades about outsiderness. It is also an oddly reverent attitude towards such a fundamentally unworthy figure as Ekelöf.
But so is also this view of literature is closely connected with the view of the artist as solitary and genius, elevated above ordinary frivolous morality.
It was evident in some of the reactions to the publication of Jan Myrdal’s revealing letter to his parents in the fall, “The secret letters†. Would the brilliant writer Myrdal be judged by the same banal standards as any wretched mask? Would it be blamed on him that he lied about his loved ones and treated them in a shabby and inconsiderate way? Was it not, on the contrary, a special quality in his books that they demonstrate their disdain for the tacky everyday morality and the petty-bourgeois concept of truth?
It is a hero worship that is not so far from the one that led Alexander the Great’s followers to criticize Plutarch for daring to write about anything other than the Battle of Granikos.
When it comes to “popular culture†personal gossip belongs to the mythology which in turn is part of the music
With all that said one must of course avoid naive overinterpretation. The Englishman Jonathan Gould has an apt phrase in “Can’t buy me love†, his brilliant book about The Beatles: “the revisionary power of suppressed information†, or “the revisionist power of suppressed information†.
Gould uses it to refer to Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ ill-fated manager, whose homosexuality was kept a secret from the public eye until after his untimely death in 1967. Once revealed, it is believed by many to provide the key to why the sophisticated Jewish middle-class boy Epstein was drawn to the four leather-clad working-class heroes at the Cavern Club. In addition, it gave rise to one of the great questions of Beatles literature, whether Epstein really slept with John Lennon on their joint holiday in Spain in 1964.
Strangely, no one has felt compelled to point out that the question is completely irrelevant to those who simply think that “Anytime at all†is an underrated song or are fascinated by the technology behind the recording of †€ Tomorrow never knows†.
When it applies “Popular culture” personal gossip belongs to the mythology which in turn is part of the music, and the lines in John and Paul’s banter during the recording of “Let it be” are an equally obvious part of The world of Beatles lovers as the influences from Lewis Carroll in “I am the walrus†.
It can be done contemptuously and snidely, as in Albert Goldman’s books, but even “serious” Beatles critics like Jonathan Gould or Ian McDonald see no reason to deny themselves personal anecdotes. They are fun! The fact is that the funniest Beatles book in existence, Craig Brown’s “One, two, three, four†, consists almost entirely of anecdotes and side tracks. This is how one expresses love to one’s object, not through any priestly reverence.
But if you now see the mythology and the anecdotes as their own value, it is of course interesting to speculate how much and how little Epstein’s homosexuality played into the big story, and how much the fact that it had to be forged contributed to its †revisionary power†.
The risk of giving the biographical details a disproportionate explanatory power is the same as the earlier tendency to suppress them
A more high culture English case is this year’s great jubilee Lord Byron, whose homosexuality was an unmentionable fact until it was portrayed with all imaginable force in Fiona MacCarthy’s biography “Byron. Life and legend†from 2002.
Another is Philip Larkin, the wonderful poet who had a Nazi concubine for a father and in Andrew Motion’s great biography “Philip Larkin. A writer’s life†from 1993 turned out to be a lust-reactionary racist with a taste for hardcore porn. Does it take away the value, can it somehow ‘explain’, grand poems like ‘High windows’ and ‘The Whitsun weddings’? No, but it highlights the atmosphere of a poet who said “lack is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth†and lived his life in the same poor spirit.
The risk of giving the biographical details a disproportionate explanatory power is the same as the previous tendency to suppress them. The logic is the same as Freud discovered about sexuality in bourgeois Vienna: it gained its enormous power precisely by being denied. It is, of course, in the nature of things that the deniers accused Freud of making too big a deal of the phenomenon he was trying to normalize.
Maybe it’s the same with van Gogh’s ear. However it is cut off, it remains an ear. Not more, but not less either.
Read more:
Review: Jesper Högström nuances the myth-making about Gunnar Ekelöf
Jesper Högström: Swedish biography suffers from an academic drought
