Starry Night

As this post happens to fall on Thanksgiving, let me take the opportunity to wish you- my dear friends and readers- the happiest and healthiest of holidays.  I am so thankful for your generous support of this endeavor.  It’s so nice to be appreciated.  God bless you one and all.

And speaking of Him, do you ever watch Inside the Actors Studio?  The host, James Lipton, always ends each celebrity interview by asking his guest “If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you enter the Pearly Gates?”

My go-to answer has always been, “Come on in, Ellen.  Most of your husbands- and all of your dogs- are here.”

But lately I find myself recanting.  These days I want God to tell me, “Don’t worry, Ellen. Van Gogh knows.”

You see, on behalf of all the creative people past, present, and future who have gone to their deaths unsung, or worse- vilified or laughed at- to me Heaven is the place where they finally get their due.

In 2002 I came in from Aspen to see the Art Institute’s Van Gogh/Gauguin show.  The two painters had been, by necessity, roommates in Arles, France for a brief time.  Their works-sometimes of the same subject- were hung together in an exhibition called “The Studio of the South.”

It was a transformative artistic experience for me.  I don’t know if it was the power of the glorious paintings themselves- coupled with the tragic back stories- or my own personal demons, but when I saw Vincent’s “The Starry Night,” I was overwhelmed.

It seems a little hokey now and I am embarrassed to admit it, but that painting spoke to me.  (And to Don Mclean, it would seem.)  I found its message almost holy- and ineffably sad.  And somehow, it was an emblem of redemption and hope at the same time.

Come on.  How could one crazy guy do all that with just some paint and a piece of canvas?  It’s not even big.

There’s only one way to account for it.  Genius.  And the same was true for his other paintings in the show.  By now familiar and famous images that are so much a part of the culture, we take their beauty, power and grace for granted.  The fact that he only sold one of these masterpieces in his lifetime has become part of the Van Gogh lore.  Repeated almost as much as the “ear-cutting” bit.

But I can never get past it.  Neither he- nor his devoted and long-suffering art dealer brother Theo- ever knew that he would go down in history as one of the greats.

Difficult, mentally ill and unstable, hard to be around, drunk, unattractive, odd, it was easy to despise the man and dismiss the artist.  If not for the financial and emotional support of his saintly brother, Vincent’s fate would have been sealed long before he took that gun out to that field.

And when he died, his landlord burned his paintings.  He just wanted to get rid of the trash.  (The same thing happened to Toulouse-Lautrec, by the way.  But he’s a different case.  Born rich and noble, he lived just long enough to see his paintings hailed as masterworks and he did sell throughout his lifetime.  The dwarfism and the resultant absinthe addiction did him in.  Not the lack of artistic recognition.)

So sad.  And Van Gogh’s not the only one I worry about.

Do you think Maria Callas knows in what regard she is held today?  Or what about poor, poor, tragic Norma Jean?

Fired from her last picture no less.  Held up to ridicule by her indifferent-to-her-charms studio bosses.  Dismissed as a mere “movie star” by many members of the very same Actor’s Studio that started this post.  Desperately insecure and worried that Elizabeth Taylor was making more bank and getting more ink.

Do you think Marilyn knows what happened to her?  She might be the number one pop icon in the world.  She is worshipped by the likes of Madonna and Mariah Carey.  Her old gowns and out-of-tune piano go for more than she was ever paid in salary.  Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates wrote books about her.  Her ex husband, Arther Miller, cannibalized their marriage for play  She is inimitable.  A  legend.

She left this world alone on a Saturday night thinking she was a bad punchline to a dirty joke.

I’d like to think God told her how it all worked out.  And I bet she’d still have a hard time believing Him.

And then there’s John Kennedy Toole.  Have you read his comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces? It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.  Its author knew nothing about that.  He had committed suicide in 1964.  At the age of thirty-one.

I stumbled on it right after it won the Pulitzer, I guess.  All I knew is that the book was set in New Orleans, and since I had spent some interesting times in the Crescent City myself, I grabbed up a paperback copy on a whim.

What a roller coaster ride.  First there’s the Walker Percy preface, telling the unsuspecting reader that the author of this great piece of literary zaniness never lived to see it in print.  The manuscript had been brought to him by the late author’s mother, Thelma, who insisted that he get it published.

Undone by her persistance- touched with a dash of crazy all her very own- Walker Percy reluctantly read a little bit of it.  Just to humor some dead guy’s poor grieving and obviously over-enthusiastic mother.

Then he read a little more.  Then a little more.  Then… well just buy the book.  Percy tells the story much better than I do, and you can also savor this comic triumph- the picaresque, hysterical saga of misunderstood literary protege, Ignatius J. Reilly and his employment problems, as a lagniappe.

I can think of other gifted people who died thinking of themselves as abject failures.  Judy Garland, Hank Williams, to name a couple.  Mozart was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, for St. Peter’s sake.  I bet you can name a few.  They don’t have to be famous, you know.

I’d like to think that when they get to the Pearly Gates, God takes them aside and shows them their immortal futures.

That’s my idea of Heaven and I’m sticking to it.

Amen.