The Night Cafés of Van Gogh

                                                  by Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

How could I have survived in this business without Vincent? When the last customer steps into the damp night, the fog rising from the river on the other side of the street, I lock the door—even here in Regensburg one must take the small precautions—and pour myself a bit of Cointreau. Amber in the lamplight; I never tire of that swirl of colors, the subtle shifts in tone from an almost radiant gold through amber to a somber brown. The way the liquid shapes and unshapes itself in the clear glass. I’ll run the numbers, see how we did—although I already have a pretty good idea of that simply by watching the ebb and flow of food and drink, the exchange of money and words. Simona or Malik will finish the clean up and wipe down the last tables. Often they will turn the radio to the jazz station in town. We’ll wish each other Gute Nacht and they will step back into their other lives, the ones I know nothing about and care to know nothing. They, like everyone else, do the best they can, search out things and people to love, to hate, believe themselves to be unique, which in fact they are but not in the way they think. But they are young and they are barkeeps. There is hope for them.

Two Van Gogh’s have the pride of place in my office. They are both framed with old wooden frames, quite simple really, that I had Anoretti do in exchange for a few bottles. He is not particular about the content of those bottles, as long as fermentation has occurred. He is, as far as I know, the oldest resident on the street, with a small apartment above a small shop full of knick-knacks and bric-a-brac. Ack, ack, ack. Nice sounds.

Frames, long-silent music boxes, snuff boxes—how odd those old habits now seem to us—combs with the teeth-broken, a dilapidated chair. He collects whatever passes his way, is willing to sell anything for a small price—although there are rumors that he has made immense sums from the sale of a few old masters that passed through his hands shortly after the war—and he is always ready for a hand of cards or a tip of the bottle. His shop is always dim and dusky, but welcoming. I stop in there often on the way to work, just to browse, shake his hand, which is still covered with thick hair, in greeting.

 The Night Café and the Café de la Terrasse—what else? I love them all, naturally, moving from the earth browns of the northern paintings to the explosion of those southern colors about which everyone raves in unison. But, given my own history, the café paintings are particularly dear to me. I have visited the gallery at Yale, the Metropolitan, the National Gallery in Washington, to the glass and steel modernism of the Van Gogh in Amsterdam, the Kröller-Otterlo in the cool greenness of the park, and others, simply to look at his painting on canvas. But here in my little hole in the wall at the back end of the Orphée that abuts the alley, I keep copies of only the two, as well as the collected letters. I’m not sure, really, why I keep them here instead of at home; they just seem to belong here in the nightworld of the café chimerique.

September 8, 1888. The Night Café. This is the café where, as he said, we could go mad or commit a crime. This is the one so different than the Café de la Terrasse, with its charm and serene appeal to the life of the night. This is the other night, the night of night from which no light escapes. Rape, murder, suicide. The one painted on the other side of the canvas, as it were. This is the madness within us all, the hand that keeps a loaded gun under the pillow and the silent voice that never stops crying.

Not the warmth of the appealing radiance of the Terrasse, with the people darkly but richly shadowed, drinking together under the awning so as to be simultaneously outside and inside, to feel the breeze make its way down the street to settle in the cypress branches. Those patrons enjoying themselves under the awning—and I know them well, for they gather here in the Orphée every night—wait with an enthusiastic hope, tinged to be sure with the light resignation of melancholy, but their loss is still yet to come. They believe in love, seduction, and that most hilarious of all words, happiness.

But in the other café—and I no longer even have to look at it, since it is emblazoned in every detail on the backs of my retinas—all is already lost. It always has been. This is the place of absolute despair, where the clock has stopped forever, the hands broken. Time is a wastrel, a whore, and this café is a dilapidated absinthe bar where the dead women are exchanged, for the hard coldness of coin, between one dead man and another. These patrons, too, I also know well. Sometimes alone, sometimes with loud and raucous groups of revelers, they come here as well, night after night. They are polite. Sometimes they chat or even, now and again, sing the old songs with their mates. But their eyes are always sober. Occasionally, we look at each other with a slight nod of recognition.

The ghostly Joseph Ginoux, a fellow proprietor, floats behind the slanted pool table. The radiant orbs, like the stars come inside, too large for the room. Used glasses and empty bottles on the tables. Everything pointing to the mysterious illumination of the back room. It is a catastrophe of love. Up for three nights running to paint, Vincent panted in the delirium brought about by sleeplessness. The picture is one of the ugliest I have done, he confessed. No argument there. It is ugliness personified, the absence of any trace of the harmony of beauty. Insomniac: giving up everything to paint, to make sure the fatal vision was transferred to paint. Emerged from paint. The nightmare was indeed painted, but not transferred. No doubt. No doubt it was an attempt, as all expression must be at some level, to make an escape, to free the self from itself, from the demons of the self. Munch’s scream and the torn viscera of Bacon are both born in Van Gogh’s canvas. All of these attempts are of necessity failures. There is no escape. No way out of the claustrophobic infinity of painting. But the failure is the success.    

I have tried, he said. I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. He succeeded, insofar as any such attempt can succeed. These are not the passions of desire, the lust for life. These are the colors of death, the reds and greens—two colors with the possibility of magnificence—of despair. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figure of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The room is seasickness. Putrescence.

Alien. That’s the exact word. Alien: the disgusting foreignness of reds and greens. How is it possible, that those cozy tones of the apples and pears from our backyard gardens become signs of the utterly loathsome? The alien itself: that which cannot be incorporated and therefore keeps Vincent up all night, three days running. He tries to sleep during the day. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, on vigil in a corner of this furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green. The nosegay tells us about the true stench of the place and of the painting, of all bodies. The ruins of humanity, the moment—sometimes as long as a lifetime and longer—during which everything is skewed and terribly discolored. Violently bruised.

But in an unexpected and inexplicable way, this wreckage of a bar becomes a seed for the future. Vincent connects the Night Café with both The Potato Eaters—that  early depiction, the colors of dirt, of the poor at their parsimonious table—and with The Sower, that very late canvas, overflowing with brightness, of the man sowing seed in the golden fields. Or is it this one? I’m not really sure, for Vincent was painting sowers almost constantly, from the beginning to the end. Maybe it’s the one in which the golden orbicular sun is rising from the dark head of the sower, the dark tree bent diagonally across the canvas. I don’t know; I’m not sure.

In a way, all he ever did was sow painting and paint sowing. Some on rocky ground, some on fertile. He has certainly bloomed, like an almond tree, since his death, but one can look and look and still be blind. The paintings, of course, both do and do not explain themselves. They speak and do not speak, although it is—sequestered away in my office, after midnight, blurry-eyed and full of drink—never a speech of explanation, never philosophy or science. Art presents itself, nothing more. But I can speculate; I can make a wager.

Both are, after all, pictures of the earth. Vincent wrote to Theo: You need a certain dash of inspiration, a ray from on high, things not in ourselves, in order to do beautiful things. When I had done those sunflowers, I looked for the opposite and yet the equivalent, and I said—it is the cypresses. Life is closing down for him, but he connects, without transition, the inspiration from heaven—a dash from somewhere beyond ourselves needed to create beauty—with his effort to take the next step after the sunflowers (which now adorn the offices of dentists and insurance agents). He moves to the cypress, the wavestruck tree of death, but what’s most interesting here is his method: he looks for the opposite yet the equivalent.

This is madness itself. Another sip of Cointreau, just another whiff of that evanescent perfume that so intoxicates the mind. Nothing can be, can it, simultaneously both the opposite and the equivalent? One or the other, A or B. But not both. Not at the same time. Consider the implications. But that’s what he said; that’s what he was looking for. That’s what he painted. Sunflowers are the same as, although simultaneously the opposite of, the cypress. The latter is easy to see: the yellow of ripe life and the mixing of black, blue, and green that is death. But equivalence?  How can life equal death and vice versa? How can yellow be black? If there is no distinction, there is no painting. There is no story, no life. Everything depends upon making distinctions. Blessed Lady of Cointreau, save me. Bless me with your sweetness, the slow fire of forgetfulness.

Perhaps it has something to do not with this incomprehensible methodology—but one which was nonetheless effective—but with an altogether other train of thought, with Vincent’s associations about the so-called natural and the so-called artificial world. Yet, I don’t know, he wrote with a certain plaintive tone—not being always a pessimist—I keep thinking that I have it still in my heart to paint some day a bookshop with its frontage yellow and rose, at evening, and black passers-by—it is such an essentially modern subject. Because it seems, imaginatively speaking, such a wellspring of light—I say, there would be a subject that would go well between an olive grove and a cornfield, the seed time of books and prints. I have a great longing to do it, like a light in the midst of darkness. There is, still, the yellow and the black as the evening falls. There is, again, a series of three that involves a frame and an in-between: olives, bookshop, corn.

Sowing. Seed time.                  

The books and prints are the seed time, all the letters and images disseminated and ready, after a season of incubation during the dead time of winter, ready to burst forth and give rise to the silver-green olive trees and to corn, to ways in which we cultivate the earth so that it will sustain us.

            Dark-light-dark: a wellspring.

            Seed, springs. Modern subjects. A great longing.

            The last summer is drawing near for him.

That’s a longing we all know. To make, in the face of absolute darkness, the resonantly glowing life, the work of art that bespeaks the great incessant yearning for something more, for something a little bit more. Potatoes, wheat, the sun. The olives and the corn; the never painted bookshop, the color of rose in the evening light. And then this furnace of the Night Café in which all is burning and being smelted down in order to be transfigured. It’s all paint, brushwork.

I’m exhausted, drunk. I must go, stumble through the silent alleyways—for no one is up at this hour and I will be all alone with all the stray dogs scurrying along the alleyways seeking garbage—back to my flat. He wrote to Bernard, his painting-companion and friend, that my night café is not a brothel: it’s a café where the night prowlers cease to be night prowlers, since they pass the whole night hanging limply over the tables without prowling at all. Only by chance a doxy happens to bring her fellow along. But entering one evening, I did catch sight unawares of a little group of a chap and a doxy making up after a tiff. The woman was playing the superbly indifferent, the man was billing and cooing. I set myself to paint it from memory, for you, on a small canvas of 4 or 6. 

This small canvas is unknown, lost or destroyed. At least that is what the scholars believe. I believe that someone is, at this very moment, savoring its lines in secret.

Gauguin reported that in that beautiful, disastrous autumn of ’88, Vincent turned suddenly to a wall, a subject he knew something about, and painted with a scrawl:

Je suis sain d’esprit,

Je suis Saint-Esprit.

I am of sound spirit; I am the Holy Spirit. Opposites. Equivalents. And which sunflower, exactly, is it? The 1887 examples, dead, withered and laid open like a cadaver on the table? Or the more famous ones of 1888?

I often think that the night is more alive and richly colored, he wrote, than the day. Yes, yes. He knows the night. He is a man of the night. The night enriches the day, mixes an extraordinary palette in preparation for the day, holds the remains of the day.

Time for home, old boy, and bed. I’ll climb the stairs as quietly as possible, sit in the half-dark with a glass of juice. Undress, brush my teeth, and climb under the covers. A new Krimi that I’ve just started, Barbara Krohn’s Weg vom Fenster, awaits me. She’s a local, comes into the café now and again and I’ve listened to her read over at Püstet and the Ostdeutsches Museum. Paul Breitkreuz, a literature professor up at the Uni, has been murdered, shot through an open window in a house on the Wahlenstrasse, the next street over from us.

I love mysteries. I like the atmosphere of noir, like black coffee, and the ways the fragments of the clues are eventually brought together in the plot. They also prove, with the corpse safely locked inside the morgue between the two covers, that I’m still at it on this side, alive and kicking. A few more pages of that to let the taste of things to come sink in and then I’ll drift off to sleep.

I’ll manage, somehow, to crawl out of bed tomorrow, heat up the battered kettle for tea, and be back at work by early afternoon. It’s my job. It is what I do. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Sweet dreams.

A Select Blend

Krohn, Barbara. Weg vom Fenster. Berlin:Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999.

Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Ed. Mark Roskill. New York:             Touchstone, 1997.

The text is a selection from Night Café, a work-in-progress