Big Bad Wolf

MY FATHER PAUL GAUGUIN--Pola Gauguin--Knopf ($3-75) When Paul Gauguin died of syphilis in 1903, few were really sorry. He had always been a lone wolf: as stockbroker, family man, runaway painter he had always pursued his own proud, peculiar way, and his enemies were thicker than his friends. When he died alone in his hut in the Marquesas Islands, his wife and their five children, long strangers to him, were half the world away in Denmark. Since 1903 many a critic has climbed over the fence and given Gauguin's painting nearly as high marks as he gave it himself, but few champions have been found for Gauguin's behavior as a man. Author Somerset Maugham's fictional version of Gauguin's life (The Moon and Sixpence) is still the popular one.

Last week Gauguin's youngest son Pola gave a more authoritative and respectable version of his lone-wolf father's career. His narrative lacked Maugham's melodrama, also its moonshine, showed his absentee father as partly heroic, partly lupine, wholly credible. Born in Paris in the stormy year 1848, Paul Gauguin had a stormy mixture in his veins. His father W'as a French radical, his mother half-Peruvian. After Louis Napoleon's coiup d'etat in 1851, the Gauguins had to flee the country. On the long voyage to Peru, Father Gauguin died. His widow and her two children stayed in Peru four years before returning to France. After he had finished school, young Paul shipped as a sailor. Six years of the sea and the army whipped him into a tough physical specimen.

Then he got a job as bank clerk in Paris.

He was smart, got ahead fast, was soon doing a brokerage business on the side. When he met Mette Gad, a Danish girl on a visit to Paris, her strapping body, naturalness and intelligence appealed to him. They married, settled down to raise a family. Paul was making good money, Mette was social and a good spender. Shortly before the birth of their first child, Paul took up drawing as a hobby. Gradually he became more & more interested in it, took to painting. But Mette never suspected how serious he was, even when he sent a picture to the Salon and got it accepted. His wife laughed about "Paul's painting mania" with her friends. When he got their nurse to pose for him in the nude, Mette was a little disconcerted.

Contrary to the Maugham legend.

Gauguin did not suddenly abandon his family and go off to seek his painting fortune. But his art became more & more demanding of his time and interest, until one day, when he was 33, he informed Mette he had left the bank for good. She was thunderstruck. They had to move out of Paris to save money. After eight restless months in Rouen, Mette suggested they go to Denmark while they still had enough for the trip. Gauguin agreed. In Denmark his in-laws received him coldly, looked down on him still further when Mette had to start giving French lessons to support them. Gauguin and his painting materials were relegated to a little back room. Finally he decided to leave. He and Mette parted calmly. Neither of them thought it was forever.

Gauguin went back to France, painted like a madman, had a bad time. At one point he took a job as a billposter. He made a first trip to the tropics, to Martinique, but it was a disappointment. Then Vincent van Gogh, a lone wolf like himself, invited him to come and work with him at Aries. Their queer partnership broke up when van Gogh went crazy and cut off his ear with a razor. Meanwhile Gauguin and Mette wrote to each other, in a fairly friendly fashion. He tried to explain to her why he was acting as he did: "My business is art, it is my capital, it is the future of my children, it is the honour of the name I have given them--all things which will serve them one day. Therefore I work at my art, which is nothing (in money) for the moment (times are bad), but which will take shape in the future. That is a long time to wait, you will say, but what do you expect me to do about it, is it my fault?" One day he went back to Denmark to see them all, spent three weeks there. That was the last time they saw each other.

At 43, Gauguin scraped together enough money to take him to Tahiti. Before he left he wrote a loving letter to Mette, said they would be married again when he came back. His Parisian mistress, who was about to have a baby, was sorry to see him go. In Tahiti Gauguin found himself. He lived like a native, worked like a man whose days were numbered. In a letter to Mette he said: "You are right; I am an artist. There is nothing stupid about you I am a great artist and I know it." He returned to France after two years with 66 canvases which he expected to make his reputation if not his fortune. And as usual he left a girl behind him who was about to have a baby.

But the French critics still fought shy of him. His exhibition was a financial failure. In a brawl with some sailors his leg was badly broken. His Javanese mistress decamped with his money. In towering disgust Gauguin auctioned off his pictures, went back to the South Seas for good & all. Night before he left he spent with a casual prostitute. Her good-by present was the syphilis that killed him. By now even Tahiti disgusted him--the corrupted natives, the venal officials, the whites who stood him drinks to laugh at his diatribes. He left Tahiti for the Marquesas. Though his disease was growing on him fast he would not go to the hospital, lived alone in a native hut, drank more & more. For siding with the natives against government officials he was tried, sentenced to three months' imprisonment. But before the sentence could be carried out, death took Gauguin.

The Author's real name is Paul; he was named for his late great father, but his mother always called him by the Danish diminutive. Half-Danish, half-French with a dash of Peruvian, Pola Gauguin was born in Paris, brought up in Copenhagen, lives now in Oslo, Norway. An architect, art critic, painter in his own right, 54-year-old Pola Gauguin has five canvases in the National Gallery at Oslo, but has never attempted to set either the Seine or the South Seas on fire.

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