White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

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Next to my primary and junior schools, in the small town where I grew up (Cheltenham, Gloucestershire) was a large recreation park. During term time we played there at lunchtimes; in the summer holidays, we spent whole afternoons playing football. At one corner of the rec was something we called the Hump: a hump of compacted dirt with trees growing out of it—all that was left, presumably, of the land that had been cleared and flattened to form the rec; either that or—unlikely given the size of the trees—a place where some of the detritus from this process had been heaped up. The Hump was the focal point of all games except football and cricket. It was the first place in my personal landscape that had special significance. It was the place we made for during all sorts of games: the fortress to be stormed, the beachhead to be established (all games, back then, were war games). It was more than what it was, more than what it was called. If we had decided to take peyote or set fire to one of our schoolmates, this is where we would have done it.

Where? What? Where?

In the course of changing planes at LAX, in the midst of the double long-haul from London to French Polynesia, where I was travelling to write about Gauguin and the lure of the exotic in commemoration of the centenary of his death, I lost my most important source of information and reference: David Sweetman’s biography of the artist. The panic into which I was plunged by this ill-omened, irreparable and inexplicable loss gradually subsided, giving way to a mood of humid resignation that threatened to dampen the entire trip. Robbed of this essential work—and sometimes loss is a form of robbery, even when it is purely the fault of the loser—I spent much of my free time in Tahiti trying to make good that loss, writing down what I remembered of Gauguin’s life and work from my reading of Sweetman and other art-historical sources.

Gauguin was nothing if not a character, I wrote, but he was an artist first and foremost. His life was every bit as colourful as his paintings, which influenced all the artists who came after him, including the great colourist Matisse, who was inspired to travel to Tahiti ‘to see its light,’ to see if the colours in Gauguin’s paintings were for real (they were and weren’t). Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848 but thought of himself as ‘a savage from Peru,’ where he had spent his early childhood. The fact that he was a savage did not prevent him becoming a stockbroker with a wife and family he left behind when he went to Tahiti. Part of the reason for going to Tahiti was to get in touch with his savage roots and shuffle off the veneer of civilization while being able to enjoy all the perks of a French protectorate. The name gives away the colonial game: in classic gangster style, the French offered protection in the full knowledge that what the Tahitians needed protection from was the French. Before Gauguin went to Tahiti he lived for a while in Arles with the tormented genius Vincent van Gogh, and they pretty well drove each other nuts, but of the two Gauguin drove Van Gogh more nuts than Van Gogh drove him nuts, but that is not saying much, because Van Gogh was so highly strung he had it in him to go nuts anyway, was partially nuts even before he went totally nuts. The inherently volatile situation of two artists—as immortalised by Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn—living in such close proximity was not helped by their always getting loaded on absinthe, and although it took everyone by surprise it was probably no surprise when Van Gogh cut off his ear to spite his face. Another problem was that Gauguin was a real egotist. He really had a big ego and he was always having to prove himself and eventually he decided that the only way to prove himself was to go to Tahiti to live among savages, of whom he liked to think he was one. He was forty-three when he got there.

La vai taamu noa to outou hatua

‘Where do you come from?’ asked the immigration official at Papeete. ‘Where are you going?’ Had he been briefed to ask these questions—the questions posed by Gauguin in his epic painting of 1897, the questions I had come to Tahiti to answer—as part of the centenary celebrations?

When Gauguin waded ashore in 1891, the local women had all gathered round to laugh at this proto-hippie with his Buffalo Bill hat and shoulder-length hair. When I passed through immigration, they were not laughing but smiling sweetly in the humid, pre-dawn darkness, and they welcomed me and the other tourists with necklaces of flowers that smelled as fresh as they had on the first day of creation. It is always nice to be greeted with a necklace of sweet-smelling tropical flowers but, at the same time, there is often something soul-destroying about it. A lovely tradition of welcome had been so thoroughly commodified and packaged that even though the flowers were fresh and wild and lovely they might as well have been plastic. There was also something soul-sapping about the men driving the tour buses, waiting to ‘transfer’ the tourists to the barbaric luxury of their hotels: built like prop-forwards, biologically programmed to crush the English at rugby, they were reduced to the role of super-polite baggage handlers.

By the time I checked into my deluxe room it was getting light in that prompt tropical way, so I threw open the French windows, stepped out on to the balcony and took in the pristine view. The dream island of Moorea was backdropped against the half-awake sky. It was a magnificent view as long as you didn’t turn your head to the right and see the other balconies geometrically gawping and Gurskying out to sea. I was in a huge and luxurious hotel, and even though the view was fantastic the ocean itself seemed manicured, as if it were actually part of an aquatic golf course to which hotel guests enjoyed exclusive access.

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Before everything went pear-shaped between them, Gauguin and Van Gogh had a plan to set up ‘the Studio of the Tropics’ in Tahiti. These days Papeete, the capital, looks like the kind of place Eric Rohmer might have come if he’d decided to make a film in the tropics: a film where nothing happens, set in a place that resembles a small town in France where you would never dream of taking a holiday, which exists primarily in order to make other places seem alluring—especially if you have the misfortune to arrive on a Sunday, when everywhere is shut. There’s not much to see anyway, and on Sunday ‘not much’ becomes nothing. It would have been wonderful to be here at the tail end of the nineteenth century, when Gauguin first arrived—or so we think. But Gauguin himself arrived too late. By the time he got here it was ‘notorious among all the South Sea Islands as the one most wretchedly debased by Civilization ’: an emblem, I remembered some art historian writing, ‘of paradise and of paradise lost.’ Only in Gauguin’s art would it become paradise regained and reinvented.

When Captain Cook came here it was amazing: a premonition of a picture in a brochure. I went to the spot where Cook—and the Bounty and God knows who else—had landed, a place called Venus Point. It is the most famous beach in Tahiti (which, like Bali, has no great beaches even though it is famed for its beaches) and there were a few people sun-bathing and paddling. The sand was black, which made it look like the opposite of paradise, a negative from which an ideal holiday image would subsequently be printed. Or perhaps I was just turned around by the jet lag.

‘Are we ten hours behind London or ten hours ahead?’ I asked my guide, Joel.

‘Behind,’ he said. ‘New Zealand, on the other hand, is only an hour behind—but it’s also a day ahead.’ In its intense, near-contradictory concision this was an extremely confusing piece of information to try to compute. That is almost certainly why Joel’s next, ostensibly simple remark—‘On Sunday this beach is full of people’—struck me as strange, even though, for several seconds, I was not sure why. Then, after an interlude of intense calculation, it came to me: this was Sunday—and the beach was almost deserted. It may not have been full of people but it was full of historical significance, and, for a hopeful moment, I had a sense of what it might be like to be a highly regarded species of English novelist: the sort who comes to a place like this and finds inspiration for a sprawling epic, a historical pastiche with a huge cast of characters who contrive to do everything they can to waste the reader’s time with what is basically a yarn in which the ‘r’ might more honestly be printed as a ‘w.’ Simply by having this thought, it seemed to me, I had effectively written such a novel—all seven hundred pages of it—in a split-second.

From Venus Point we continued our circumnavigation of the island until we came to Teahupoo.

‘Do you like surfing?’ asked Joel.

‘Watching it, yes,’ I said.

‘That’s good, because they hold international surfing championships at this place.’

‘Great. You mean they’re on now?’

‘Almost.’ It was a subtle answer, potentially meaning that the championships were either starting tomorrow, had just finished yesterday or even—though this was the least likely option—might actually be in progress by the time we got there. The net result of these permutations was that there were no surfers. Nor for that matter was there any surf, except in so far as the word is contained in the larger term ‘surface’ (as in ‘surface unbroken by waves’). The sea was flat, like a watery pancake. I sensed the emergence of a pattern—of thwarted expectations and disappointed hopes—which had first manifested itself in Boston a month previously.

Gauguin’s epic painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is in the Museum of Fine Arts there, and, by an astonishing bit of serendipity, shortly before flying to Tahiti, I found myself, for the first time ever, in Boston. I had been wanting to see this painting for at least ten years and I was going to see it shortly before following, as the authors of travel books like to say, ‘in the footsteps of’ Gauguin to the South Seas. Although I had done many other things in those ten years I had also been waiting to find myself in Boston. And now I was there, in Boston, wandering through the museum, not even seeking out the painting, hoping just to come across it, to stumble on it as if by destined accident, as if I were not even expecting it to be there even though I knew it was there. After seeing some paintings twice (Turner’s Slave Ship, Degas’s motionless At the Races) and Bierstadt’s Valley of the Yosemite three times, I began to suspect that I had trudged through every room in the exhausting museum, had been walking in my own footsteps for almost an hour, without even glimpsing the one I had come to see. Eventually I asked one of the attendants where Where Do We Come From? had gone. He looked up from the strange limbo of his station: exhausted, bored out of his mind, wanting nothing more than to take the weight off his feet but, at the same time, eager to respond to any enquiry even though he had already heard every question he was ever going to be asked a thousand times before. The painting was not on display at the moment, he said. It was being restored or out on loan, I forget which. Having thanked him, I trudged away in a state of disappointment so all-consuming it felt like he had put a curse on me, a curse by which the force of gravity had suddenly increased threefold. The afternoon would be redeemed—the curse and weight of the world lifted—by an encounter with a painting by a painter I’d never heard of, had never seen in reproduction and had somehow missed during the earlier, pre-letdown trudge through the museum’s extensive holdings, but at that point, with no redemption in sight, the experience of the missing masterpiece, of the thwarted pilgrimage (which is not at all the same as a wasted journey), made me see that the vast questions posed by Gauguin’s painting had to be supplemented with other, more specific ones. Why do we arrive at a museum on the one day of the week—the only day we have free in a given city—when it is shut? On the day after a blockbuster exhibition has finally—after multiple extensions of its initial four-month run—closed? When the painting we want to see is out on loan to a museum in a city visited a year ago, when the featured show was the Paul Klee retrospective already seen in Copenhagen six months previously? An answer of sorts comes in the form of a droll exchange in Volker Schlöndorff’s Voyager, an adaptation of Max Frisch’s novel Homo Faber, in which Faber (Sam Shepard) asks an African guy when the Louvre is open. ‘As far as I know it’s never open,’ he replies with the wisdom of magisterial indifference. All of which leads to another, still more perplexing question: what is the difference between seeing something and not seeing it? More specifically, what is the difference between seeing Tahiti and not seeing it, between going to Tahiti and not going? The answer to that, an answer that is actually an answer to an entirely different question, is that it is possible to go to Tahiti without seeing it.

I was able, at least, to get a sense of the size of Where Do We Come From? at the Gauguin Museum in the Botanical Gardens of Tahiti, where a full-scale copy now hangs. At the very centre of the painting, an androgynous figure reaches up to pluck a fruit from a tree, though exactly what this symbolises is difficult to say, and there are many other symbols as well. Gauguin was a symbolist, which means his art was full of symbols. Even the colours are symbolic of something, even though they often seem symbolic of our inability to interpret them adequately. Not everyone has had the patience to try. For D. H. Lawrence, who stopped briefly in Tahiti en route from Australia to San Francisco, Gauguin was ‘a bit snivelling, and his mythology is pathetic.’ This visual mythology—a magpie fusion of Maori, Javanese and Egyptian, of anything that appealed to his sophisticated idea of the universal primitive—achieved its final and simplest expression in Where Do We Come From? According to the most important mythic element in all of this (the myth, that is, of the artist’s life), once Gauguin had finished it he tried to kill himself but ended up overdosing or underdosing. When he had come back from the dead, he spent some time contemplating his answers, his answers in the form of questions in the form of a painting. Then, as with almost all the other paintings he’d done, it was rolled up and shipped back to France, leaving him with little evidence of the world he’d created. It is quite possible that some days he woke up and thought to himself, ‘Where did that big painting get to?’ and then, as he sat on the edge of the bed, scratching his itchy leg, he would remember that he had sent it off and would have to start another one. In the Gauguin Museum there are little photocopies of all these paintings with captions explaining where in the world they have washed up: the Pushkin in Moscow, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Courtauld in London. As part of the centenary, however, forty works of art were being temporarily returned to the island. Following Pissarro’s bitchy remark that Gauguin ‘is always poaching on someone’s land, nowadays he’s pillaging the savages of Oceania,’ it has been fashionable in recent years to see Gauguin as an embodiment of imperialist adventurism. In this light the return of his works can be read as a gesture of reparation, but it would be a mistake to extrapolate from this, to think that there is a groundswell of support in Polynesia for making the islands independent of France. On the contrary, the fear is that France might one day sever its special connection with Polynesia, thereby staunching the flow of funds on which it is utterly dependent.

After the museum we went to Mataiea and Punaauia (now a featureless suburb of Papeete), where Gauguin lived and where some of his most famous works were painted. I suddenly had the idea that yellow might be a symbol for banana, but apart from that my mind was completely