Historic Van Gogh-Gauguin Letter Estimated $470,000 - $670,000 At Christie's

by Stephen J. Gertz

An astounding autograph letter co-written and signed by Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin to a third party discussing each other, their work together, paintings in progress, thoughts on a painter's association, and, amusingly, their exploration of the brothels of Arles, is being offered by Christie's-Paris in their Pierre Berès A Livre Ouvert sale on December 12, 2012.

It is estimated to sell for $470,000 - $670,000.

Van Gogh was a prolific letter writer; this is no. 716, found in the definitive, six-volume Vincent Van Gogh - The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition, a massive project begun in 1994 under the aegis of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and published in 2009.

Though undated and without location, internal evidence points to it being written on Thursday the 1st or Friday the 2d of November 1888 and posted from Arles.

Van Gogh fled Paris in early 1888 and sought refuge in Arles. After repeated requests, Gauguin joined him on October 23d; they shared the four rooms that Van Gogh had rented at 2, Place Lamartine, the Yellow House. The letter was written a week after Gauguin's arrival.

Written to French painter and writer Emile  Bernard (1868-1941), in English translation it reads in full:

My dear old Bernard,

We’ve done a great deal of work these past few days, and in the meantime I’ve read Zola’s Le rêve,1 so I’ve hardly had time to write.

Gauguin interests me greatly as a man — greatly. For a long time it has seemed to me that in our filthy job as painters we have the greatest need of people with the hands and stomach of a labourer. More natural tastes — more amorous and benevolent temperaments — than the decadent and exhausted Parisian man-about-town.

Now here, without the slightest doubt, we’re in the presence of an unspoiled creature with the instincts of a wild beast. With Gauguin, blood and sex have the edge over ambition. But enough of that, you’ve seen him close at hand longer than I have, just wanted to tell you first impressions in a few words.

Next, I don’t think it will astonish you greatly if I tell you that our discussions are tending to deal with the terrific subject of an association of certain painters. Ought or may this association have a commercial character, yes or no? We haven’t reached any result yet, and haven’t so much as set foot on a new continent yet. Now I, who have a presentiment of a new world, who certainly believe in the possibility of a great renaissance of art. Who believe that this new art will have the tropics for its homeland.

It seems to me that we ourselves are serving only as intermediaries. And that it will only be a subsequent generation that will succeed in living in peace. Anyway, all that, our duties and our possibilities for action could become clearer to us only through actual experience.

I was a little surprised not yet to have received the studies that you promised in exchange for mine. Now something that will interest you — we’ve made some excursions in the brothels, and it’s likely that we’ll eventually go there often to work. At the moment Gauguin has a canvas in progress of the same  night café that I also painted, but with figures seen in the brothels. It promises to become a beautiful thing.

I’ve made two studies of falling leaves in an avenue of poplars, and a third study of the whole of this avenue, entirely yellow.

I declare I don’t understand why I don’t do figure studies,6 while theoretically it’s sometimes so difficult for me to imagine the painting of the future as anything other than a new series of powerful portraitists, simple and comprehensible to the whole of the general public. Anyway, perhaps I’ll soon get down to doing brothels.

I’ll leave a page for Gauguin, who will probably also write to you, and I shake your hand firmly in thought.

Ever yours,
Vincent

Milliet the 2nd lieut. Zouaves has left for Africa, and would be very glad if you were to write to him one of these days.

[Continued by Gauguin]

You will indeed do well to write him what your intentions are, so that he could take steps beforehand to  prepare the way for you.

Mr Milliet, second lieutenant of Zouaves, Guelma, Africa.

Don’t listen to Vincent; as you know, he’s prone to admire and ditto to be indulgent. His idea about the future of a new generation in the tropics seems absolutely right to me as a painter, and I still intend going back there when I find the funds. A little bit of luck, who knows?

Vincent has done two studies of falling leaves in an avenue, which are in my room and which you would like very much. On very coarse, but very good sacking.

Send news of yourself and of all the pals.

Yours,

Paul Gauguin

The late Pierre Berès (1913-2008) was more than a collector. He was "The King of  French booksellers," as the New York Times' obituary noted, towering over the rare and antiquarian book trade in Europe for seventy-five years until his death at age ninety-five. He was also a legendary figure in the world of art. He began as an autograph collector but soon shifted his attention  to books. His meteoric rise in the world of rare bookselling was fueled by acquiring collections of financially unstable French aristocrats and American millionaires during the Depression.

He was "a man renowned for his taste and connoisseurship, his vast financial resources and his ruthlessness in the pursuit of the rare and the beautiful" (NY Times obit). “I do not seek, I find,” he once cryptically declared about his preternatural ability to ferret-out scarce and desirable rare books from their hiding places.

"Rivals found him unscrupulous. In one celebrated instance he advertised in his own catalog some choice specimens that happened to belong to a competitor. When a client expressed interest, Mr. Berès told him to wait while he fetched the required volumes from his warehouse. Instead he raced to his competitor’s shop, bought the books and resold them" (Op cit, NY Times). If he was, at times, a scoundrel, he was the most elegant, charming, polished and sophisticated rascal to ever grace the rare book trade, in which scamps and scalawags can still be found but none with such savoir faire and cultivation. He was a consummate gentleman who seduced everyone he came into contact with and knew how to entertain them, routinely inviting buyers and sellers to his apartment on the Avenue de Foch for lunches and dinners after leaving them goggle-eyed at the literary and art treasures he displayed in glass cases and on the walls of his living room.

"Pierre Berès was a living legend on an international scale [and] also a character from a detective story: firstly because of his detective's flair and daring, secondly because of the mystery in which he liked to shroud his own persona, and lastly because of the subtlety of his business strategies that led him to store some of his finds and acquisitions...in his cellars to mature - sometimes as long as a half-century - like one would store fine wine" (Françoise Choay).

This letter was one of his prize possessions, marrying his two great loves, art and manuscripts. It is, arguably, Van Gogh's most significant letter, written at a key point in his career and about his most significant - certainly his most famous - relationship beyond that with his brother, Theo.

In an article, Les isolés: Vincent van Gogh, which appeared in the January 1890 issue of the Mercure de France and incorporated a passage from this letter, French writer and art critic, Gabriel-Albert Aurier (1865-1892), wrote of Van Gogh, "[he is] a dreamer, an exalted believer, a devourer of beautiful Utopias, who lives on ideas and illusions. For a long time he has taken delight in imagining a renovation of art made possible through a displacement of civilization: an art of tropical regions."

The two living side-by-side with incompatible temperaments, the atmosphere at chez Van Gogh soon turned tropical and Van Gogh and Gauguin's relationship began to wilt, Gauguin's domineering arrogance pushing Van Gogh over the edge. On December 23 1888 - less than two months after this letter was written -  a frustrated Van Gogh confronted Gauguin with a razor but in panic fled to a local brothel. While there, he cut off his left ear, wrapped it in newspaper and presented it to Rachel, one of the brothel's prostitutes, asking her to "keep this object carefully." He staggered home, where Gauguin later found him lying unconscious with his head covered in blood.

On January 2, 1889, a week after the incident, Van Gogh wrote to Theo from the Civil Hospital in Arles, letter no. 728:

My dear Theo,

In order to reassure you completely on my account I’m writing you these few words in the office of Mr Rey, the house physician, whom you saw yourself. I’ll stay here at the hospital for another few days — then I dare plan to return home very calmly.1 Now I ask just one thing of you, not to worry, for that would cause me one worry too many.

Now let’s talk about our friend Gauguin, did I terrify him? In short, why doesn’t he give me a sign of life? He must have left with you.

Besides, he needed to see Paris again, and perhaps he’ll feel more at home in Paris than here. Tell Gauguin to write to me, and that I’m still thinking of him.

Good handshake, I’ve read and re-read your letter about the meeting with the Bongers. It’s perfect. As for me, I’m content to remain as I am. Once again, good handshake to you and Gauguin.

Ever yours,

Vincent

Bygones be bygones...

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The Van Gogh-Gauguin letter, in the original French and English translation with footnotes, can be found here.

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Images courtesy of Christie's, with our thanks.

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Scarce Emily Dickinson Letter Comes To Auction

by Stephen J. Gertz

A rare three-page autograph letter by Emily Dickinson, written in pencil and signed  “Emily," is being offered by Profiles In History in its Property of a Distinguished American Private Collector sale December 18, 2012. 

It is estimated to sell for $20,000 - $30,000.

Written in Amherst during Autumn 1884 to Mrs. Samuel E. Mack, the reclusive American poetess expresses her pleasure in Mrs. Mack's recent visit and quotes from Last Lines, a poem by Emily Brontë.

Dickinson writes in full:

It was very dear to see Mrs. Mack. A friend is a solemnity and after the great intrusion of Death, each one that remains has a special pricelessness besides the mortal worth --- I hope you may live while we live, and then with loving selfishness consent that you should go ---

Said the Marvellous Emily Bronte

Though Earth and Man were gone And suns and Universe ceased to be And thou wert left alone,
Every Existence would Exist in thee--

Tenderly, Emily

Letters by Dickinson are extremely rare. This missive - oddly addressing her correspondent  in the first sentence in the third person  -  was published in the Letters of Emily Dickinson  edited by T.H. Johnson, no. 940, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), noting that Dickinson quoted the same poem of Emily Bronte in a letter to another friend, Maria Whitney.

The letter was last seen at Christie’s New York, 15 December 1995, lot 16, when, along with related material, it sold for $16,000.

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Images courtesy of Profiles In History, woth our thanks.
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Harper Lee Talks About "Mockingbird" in Exceptionally Scarce Letter

by Stephen J. Gertz

Two months after the publication of her modern classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, novelist Harper Lee replied to an inquiry from one Mrs. Hudson. A fellow Alabama resident, Hudson, like many readers, apparently drew parallels between Lee's life and the fictional characters in To Kill a Mockingbird, published in July 1960, and sent Lee questions about the novel's setting.  

The typed letter, signed in Harper Lee's hand and with a autograph drawing by her, is being offered by Nate D. Sanders Auctions today, November 8, 2011. It is an exceptionally scarce bit of correspondence as Harper Lee quickly grew to loathe any commentary whatsoever upon her only novel. The current online bid is $5,417.

The note reads, in full:

Thank you for your kind note. You ask me where Maycomb County is, where the Landing is--the only answer I can give you is that Maycomb County is in my heart and the Landing is in my imagination. If, in To Kill a Mockingbird, I persuaded you that those places are real, that means I have succeeded in my profession, which is writing fiction…

She signs it, "Harper Lee" and provides Hudson with a hand-drawn map of fictional Maycomb County with the inscription, "Here is your map."

Astonishingly, the map directly contradicts Lee's written words as it mirrors in both large and small details Monroe County, Alabama, the county in which Monroeville lies. This letter appears to solve the 20th century mystery of just how much Harper Lee drew upon her own experiences in writing To Kill a Mockingbird. The 7" x 10" single page letter with a return address from Lee's home in Monroeville, Alabama, shows moderate foxing and toning along folds. 

Included with this lot is a single page letter, dated September 20, 1960 from Lee's sister, Alice Lee, to Mrs. Hudson on behalf of the author. She also answers questions about To Kill a Mockingbird:

"…Scout is not Harper Lee; Scout is only the product of the very vivid imagination of the author…"

Also included is an 8.5" x 11" single page letter, dated only "the 4th" from the same Mrs. Hudson to a Mrs. Bentley about her correspondence with Lee, with commentary on the novel. It reads, in part: 

"…the book is very shallow, and gives quite a distorted picture of the South, yet there is something very intriguing about it…" 

Forty-one years and 30,000,000 readers after its initial publication it continues to intrigue.

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Images courtesy of Nate D, Sanders Auctions, with our thanks.

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Hemingway Drinks Snake Wine, Gets Punched Out, And Other News From “Ernesto”

An unpublished letter by Ernest Hemingway recently came to my attention. It's a feast, moveable or otherwise, a highly personal letter that reveals more, I think, than Hemingway intended.

Dated June 9, 1943 and postmarked from Cuba, it is addressed to his boxing trainer and coach and close friend, George Brown, "a very sinister Irishman who owned a gym on 55th Street" (Patrick Hemingway) in Manhattan.

"Dear George:

How's everything?"

But before George Brown has a chance to write back with an answer, Hemingway takes off on a colorful tour of recent events in the Hemingway household and environs.

"Marty [his wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn] has two articles written and only four to go now. She's flown up to Lashio in Burma and back and we had a swell time on the flight across the Pacific. Going up now with the Chinese army for about a month and then out over the Burma Road. Am learning plenty and doing plenty of studying."

Papa discusses a recent cocktail that's strictly chef Anthony Bourdain territory, and seems to get a macho charge from the experience:

"You would go nuts in this place just walking around and seeing things. The other day I had a drink of wine that had real snakes in it. About eight of them coiled up in the jar. By God, would like to have seen the Colonel [Hemingway's buddy and hunting guide, Taylor Williams] face that one. They were snakes too. They had another wine that had dead roosters and cuckoos and all sorts of birds in it but after the snake wine I thought to hell with a chickenshit wine like that..."

I dunno, if drinking snake wine tickles Hemingway's testicles but dead rooster and cuckoo  wine isn't ballsy enough, I feel fairly confident that Bourdain would eat Hemingway under the table in gustatory test of courage. mano a mano, boca a boca. Hemingway believed he could stand toe to toe with any man; he was fiercely competitive. And yes, he could stand toe to toe with any man. Unfortunately,  with anyone other than a writer, not for very long.  I suspect Hemingway would take one look at one of Bourdain's plates of nasty bits - fricasseed scorpion, stir-fried Venus Fly Trap, the usual cornucopia of gag-inducing gourmet treats - and chicken-out but instead of gracefully conceding would instead make a scene.

Moving along, we learn that Cuba, apparently, was a magnet for a particular population of interest to Ernest.

"There are about 100,000 more or less beautiful Chinese whoors [sic] and not even Zoomo [?] could save the Colonel here."

Diet has become a major issue for Hemingway, now forty-five and thickening around the middle.

"Have been going out on the road [jogging] but get fat just the same. The food is so good and am hungry all the time. Drink milk for breakfast and have been drinking those vodkas and tomato juices the rest of the time. We will have to work like hell to get the fat off when we get home. Have about two and a half inches of fat across the bottom of my lower belly. Hard fat. You'll have to beat it off with a hammer. Weigh 223 stripped. Otherwise in o.k. shape."

Forget the hammer. All he had to do was lay off the Bloody Marys as standard, post-breakfast liquid refreshment during the day; the weight would have fallen right off.

Hemingway warms to a subject close to his heart yet so far from his abilities, boxing. As I have written previously, he was an awful boxer with a grossly over-inflated sense of his skill level, at best a rank amateur. He considered himself of semi-pro ability. Remember, he's forty-five years old at the time he wrote this letter.

"Have only boxed twice. Guy didn't know much but was 190 and only 26. Cut my lips with a good left jab when I came crowding in my new imitation of your old pal Harry but when I got in I kept on punching and it worked out just like you said. In the 2d round I kept left handing him and then when I quit and let him come to me I worked my left way out wide and set and hooked him with it and he sat down. Then we got friendly after that and I didn't do nothing wrong except backhand him a couple of times (My mistake. How could it have happened. I wouldn't know). But the second time we boxed the twirp cut my mouth again with the first punch and I went around for about a week with crusts on my kisser. But I punched him silly. I didn't make him sit down anymore because of us being such friends by then but I could have. He brought the gloves and they were little ones and hard as bricks. That was what made my mouth cut. The second time we were boxing outdoors on a cement floor in the garden behind the hotel. I was afraid to try to dump him because of the cement. To hear me tell it I must have been terrific."

I strongly suspect that if anybody else told it,  he wouldn't have been so terrific. Let's parse that 'graph:

He immediately gets cut by what must have been a very stiff jab. Hemingway doesn't like getting cut; when he and novelist Morley Callaghan sparred in Paris during the 20s, Hemingway spat blood in Callaghan's face after Callaghan bloodied his mouth but good. Hemingway's sense of his masculinity was pretty fragile; Callaghan had humiliated him in front of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Hemingway easily looses control; he gets mad and typically begins to try to bull-charge his way in. That's how the mouths of blind, unschooled and undisciplined amateurs get bloodied. "I worked my left way out wide and set and hooked him with it." Amateur Hour. Work your left "way out wide" and say hello to a straight, inside right that greets your chin first. Only a tyro, an idiot or no-nothing would extend such an invitation.

 When things get tough, he fights dirty. "I didn't do nothing wrong except backhand him a couple of times (My mistake. How could it have happened. I wouldn't know)." Yeah, right. But he gets lucky and puts the kid on his fanny. Forty-five year old man exults over his apparent "win" over a twenty-six year old.

When I was young, dumb, and made of rubber, I toiled in the amateurs for a few years during my early twenties. Once, I sparred with a forty-three year old guy. I figured, gramps better have medical insurance.

Gramps made me look silly. He knew what I was going to do before I did it, I'd throw a punch and he'd be in another state by the time it would have landed. He'd take a half-step one way and tie me in knots the other way.

But though he was a former pro and could have easily hospitalized me, he didn't. I recall that I actually landed a single, solid shot. What did gramps do? He nodded in appreciation. Later on, he shook me up real good. What did he then do? Nothing. He backed off; he had nothing to prove by taking advantage of my relative inexperience.

Hemingway had to prove to the kid and himself that he was boss.

Next time they spar, the kid, now derided as a "twirp," once again tattoos Hem's phiz and spills his blood. This time, Hemingway can't sit the kid down despite "punching him silly." Excuse? They were now friends. Baloney. Friendship never stopped Ernest Hemingway from screwing with his friends. Reality: Hemingway wore the same "hard as bricks" gloves that the kid wore and bloodied him with (it couldn't possibly have been the power behind them. It was the magic gloves!). If Hemingway had indeed "punched him silly" with the "cement gloves" (they were probably regulation 8 oz. gloves used by pros with little actual padding), the kid would have been thoroughly beaten up.

Note that in his entire narrative only one person's blood is being spilled yet Hemingway gives himself the decision.

Does it sound to you like Ernie "the Oak Park Pretender" Hemingway is writing in Brooklynese? Hemingway is jumping through hoops to bond with and impress his trainer. But George Brown was no fool; he surely knew the reality:

"When [ George Brown] boxed with my father he would always warn him once that he was crowding too close and if the warning was not heeded, then knock him on his ass with the deftness of a striking cobra" (Patrick Hemingway, op cit).

The reality was that anyone who had even the slightest idea of what they were doing in the ring could take Hemingway, who was notorious for foolishly trying to actually fight trained boxers. It was the reason why Jack Dempsey avoided him in Paris - he knew Hemingway would try to get cute and Dempsey would have to seriously hurt him to keep him away. Hemingway was a danger to himself in the ring and no one else.

Having told all, Hemingway closes the letter with:

"I'll tell you about everything when we get back.

"Ernesto"

Poor George Brown probably never did get a chance to tell Hemingway, "How's everything?" Ernesto was too preoccupied with his own wonderfulness.

George Brown remained with Ernest Hemingway for the rest of the novelist's life as trainer, coach,  friend, and factotum. Brown reinforced and flattered Hemingway's sense of himself. But if Hemingway got cute and crowded him, he'd knock him on his ass. George kept it real without being a threat. Hemingway so wanted some of George to rub off on him, boxer by association.

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Letter courtesy of James Cummins.

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Writers Helping Writers. Or Not. Cheever, Bradbury, Salinger and Vonnegut

In 2004, Nicola Nikolov, an émigré to the U.S. in 1976 from communist Bulgaria, walked into William Dailey Rare Books in Los Angeles with a small archive of letters.

Briefly recounting a dark biography past and reduced, if freer, circumstances present, he told of his life as a published Bulgarian author and his difficulty establishing a writing career for himself in the United States. It was extremely important to him that his writing be accepted.

In August of 1978, he wrote, heart in hand, two-page long, well-written, typed letters to a small number of American novelists, with full, dire biographical details, limning his struggles to get read by the New York publishing establishment, and sincerely requesting that the novelists read and evaluate a few stories that he had enclosed. He saved their responses.

John Cheever replied with a firm, self-effacing dodge. Returning a manuscript unread seemed “like abominable hypocrisy… [but] as an Academician, my reading schedule is crowded until next Spring and that…I consider my judgment on anything but my own work to be worthless.”


Ray Bradbury bemoaned his lack of time but said he’d try to get around to reading them. “If, a month from now, I return them unread, you will understand, won’t you? I am a complete loner, do everything myself, no secretary ever, do all my typing, letter-writing, revisions, which means my days are full, too full.” Later, after offering pointed, practical advice on developing “friendships CLOSE AT HAND, to encourage you,” he suggested that Nikola submit his work to an agent of Bradbury’s acquaintance, with Bradbury’s blessing. ”I hope I will not fail you, but, if I do, it will not be because I am a [publishing] bureaucrat but an overworked and semi-mad author.”


J.D. Salinger did not deign to write a separate reply. At the top-right of Nikolov’s letter Salinger typed an ink-initialed rebuff stating his long-held conviction that “a writer makes a grave and often grievously consequential error in judgment if he so much as glances at another writer’s unpublished manuscript, let alone agrees to read and pass some sort of esthetic judgment on it...,” etc. He did not respond to Nikola's report that Catcher in the Rye was popular in Bulgaria and the U.S.S.R.


The 1978 writers' best friend/humanitarian prize is awarded to Kurt Vonnegut.


In an extraordinary, lengthy typed letter Vonnegut discussed the plight of the immigrant to the U.S. (“I would never urge anyone to come here, unless he were a world figure or multi-millionaire like Sozhenitzen”) and the fiction writer in contemporary America: “the best books earn nothing, usually. There are supposedly, at any given time, no more than 300 people in this whole country who make their livings as self-employed writers. America has more admirals on active duty than that.” Then, miraculously, Vonnegut agreed to read the proffered short stories. Further, in an act of profound kindness, Vonnegut enclosed an unsolicited check for the poverty-stricken Bulgarian with the “hope that you and your wife will spend it on a good supper and a bottle of wine. The America you find yourselves in is the America I have tried to describe in my books. It makes no sense. Nobody knows what it is. Anything can happen. Cheers, Kurt Vonnegut.”

Nikola Nikolov never did get published in the U.S.

So it goes...

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The Salinger letter remains available from William Dailey Rare Books via the ABAA website.