Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

Lying Bill had said that Gauguin was a seaman.

“’Is ’ands was as tough an’ rough as mine,” said Captain Pincher. “’E’d been to sea on merchant ships an’ in the French navy. Gauguin was no bloomin’ pimp like most artists. ’E knew every rope in the schooner, an’ could reef an’ steer. ’E looked like a Spaniard, an’ ’e could drink like a Yarmouth bloater. Many a time I brought ’im absinthe to Atuona on my ship. But ’e was a ’ard worker. I used to sit with ’im sometimes when ’e’d play ’is organ. ’E wasn’t bad at it, either. Women didn’t care much for ’im. ’E never made much of them, but ’e ’ad plenty. A bleedin’ queer frog, ’e was.”

“He was a chic type.” said Song of the Nightingale, the prisoner-cook of the palace. Song said chick tippee, but he meant that Gauguin was a good man to know. “When there was a big storm here, and all the land of the man next to him was washed away by the river, Gauguin gave him a piece. Ea! He gave him, too, a paper which made the land his. The family has it to-day, and they are my relatives.”

Pastor Vernier, Father David, Peyral, Flag, Song of the Nightingale, and others had spoken of Gauguin, but his name never came to their lips spontaneously. Being dead ten years, he was as never having been, to the Marquesans. To Vernier his note was of small interest and to the vicar apostolic an annoyance. In these seas when a man was dead he was forgotten unless he had left an estate, or his ghost walked. The Marquesan and the Paumotuan held the dead in great fear at times, but not in reverence. The spirit of the artist had remained with his body, and that was lost in the matted earth of the graveyard on the height. His dust had long ago united with the cocoanut-palms that rose from his burial-place on that lonely hill. The purple blossoms of the pahue vine, which crawled over his unmarked grave and sent its shoots to search the heart of the unhappiest of men, were the only tribute ever laid there. The woman who had vowed to keep its formal outline unbroken and to bedew it with her tears smiled at my recalling it. Gauguin here was a name’s faint echo, but in America and Europe they bartered for Gauguin’s pictures as if they were of gold, schools of imitators and emulators were active, and novelists and critics seized upon his utterances and deeds, his savage ways and maddening canvases, to fit fictional characters to them, or to tell over and over again the mystifying story of his career and his work. Here, among the fascinating scenes nature fashions for those who love its extravagances, he died in poverty. More is paid to-day for one of his pictures than he earned in a lifetime.

The man Gauguin persisted as a legend wherever painting or Polynesia was much discussed. There was in him a seed of anarchism, a harking back to the absolute freedom of the individual, a fierce hatred of the overlordship of money and fixed decency, of comme il faut, which lightened the eye of many conforming people, as a glimpse of light through a distant door in a dark tunnel. In this stark, brooding, wounded insurrecto, this child of France and the ardent tropic of South America, each of us who had suffered, and rebelled, if only in our hearts, gained a vicarious expression, and an outlet for our atavistic and fearful desires. Time that had led man from the anthropoid to the artist had betrayed Gauguin. He had yielded to the impulse we all feel at times, and had tried to escape from the cage formed by heredity, habits, and the thoughts of his countrymen. Space he had conquered, and in these wilds was hidden from the eyes of civilization, but time he could not blot out, for he was of his age, and even its leader in the evolution of painting. The savage in man he let take control of himself, or willed it to be, and was spoiled by the inexorable grasp upon him of his forebears and his decades of Europe. He was saturated with the ennui of the West. He wanted to be primitive, and had to use morphine, absinthe, and organ music to remain in the East. He asserted that he wanted to be “wise and a barbarian.” He was a great artist but no barbarian.

He wrote: “Civilization is falling from me little by little. Under the continual contact with pebbles my feet have become hardened and used to the ground. My body, almost constantly nude, no longer suffers from the sun. I am beginning to think simply, to feel very little hatred for my neighbor—rather, to love him. All the joys, animal and human, are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature. In the certitude of a succession of days like this present one, equally free and beautiful, peace descends on me.”

He never knew peace. His was a tortured soul and body, torn by conflicting desires, and absence of the fame and slight fortune he craved. He had courage and stoicism. In scores of letters to his friend Montfried he complained of his fate, of his desperate poverty, his lack of painting materials, the bourgeois whites about him, and his lack of recognition in Europe. He wanted to return there, and Montfried had to tell him in plain terms that he would destroy by his presence in Paris any sale there was for his pictures. Gauguin realized that, for it carried out his own motto, one that he had put over his door: “Be mysterious and you will be happy!”

Gauguin was like all cultivated whites who go to the South Seas after manhood, like me, unfitted by the poisons of civilization to survive in a simple, semi-savage environment. We demand the toxins of our machine bringing-up and racial ideals, as the addict his drug. Gauguin was already forty-three when he stepped ashore at Tahiti, and fifty-three when he came to the Marquesas, but at least he had put into a proper milieu his portrait of himself made when he said to his opponents, in Paris: “I am a savage. Every human work is a revelation of the individual. All I have learned from others has been an impediment to me. I know little, but what I do know is my own.”

Paul Gauguin was dead at fifty-five. An ancestor was a centenarian. The family was famed in its environment for its vitality, but Paul wasted his energy in bitter blows against the steel shield of society, and spoiled his body with the vices of both savage and civilized.

“He was smiling when I saw him dead,” said Mouth of God, who had served him for the love of him.