White Sands by Geoff Dyer

Even now, after this spectacular renaissance, the Spiral Jetty is not always visible. If there is exceptionally heavy snowfall, then the thaw does for the lake what the globally heated polar ice pack threatens to do to the oceans. Once the snowmelt ends up in the lake, it can take months of drought and scorch to boil off the excess and leave the Jetty high and dry again. Was it worth traveling all this way to see something we might not be able to see? Well, pilgrims continued to turn up even during the long years when there was definitely nothing to see, so it seemed feeble not to give it a chance. (There is probably a sect of art-world extremists who maintain that the best time to have visited the Spiral Jetty was during the years of its invisible submergence, when the experience became a pure manifestation of faith.)

The first thing Geoff Dyer does when he arrives in Tahiti is lose his biography of Gauguin. This cataclysm comes to stand in for the whole excursion, which is defined for Dyer by its absences, the holes in the experience, as huge and gaping as the absence of Gauguin's massive Where Do We Come From?, which turns out not to be on display when Dyer arrives at the Louvre. Gauguin's Tahiti has become a Disneyland, expensive and crass, and though a fellow traveler encourages him, "Look out there... Look at that amazing sea," the view is lost on him. Traveling further to a remote island where Gauguin spent his days, Dyer writes, "[T]he question 'Where are we going?' was turning into its vexed opposite, 'Where are we not going?'--to which the answer was: all the places I really wanted to go. Other people thought Hiva Oa was paradise, but if this was the case it was a paradise from which I was becoming impatient to be expelled."

Is this working for you? Or do you feel, like I feel, supreme annoyance at the display of a guy traveling to somewhere I'll never be able to go, on a trip underwritten entirely by Tahiti's tourism board, telling me that it's not all it's cracked up to be? Dyer's disappointment is not any ordinary disappointment, it's a contemplative disappointment, that's supposed to tell us something about the gap between our mental scheme of a place and the actual experience of being there. Thank god for guys like this, who can go somewhere and tell us, and in such articulate language, that it's all so dull. Dyer's primary interest in Tahiti is the women, who are "total babes in a babelicious paradise of unashamed babedom," until "almost overnight, they get incredibly fat." (There are about two pages describing how fat Polynesian people get.) In the next essay, Dyer writes about how his lukewarm interest in Beijing's Forbidden City was supplanted by his interest in his female tour guide, and how he spent the rest of his trip hoping to bring her back to his hotel room.

Of course, it's not really Dyer in these essays. A note preceding the collection warns us that they are fictionalized, that the "I" is not really an "I." We are safe, then, to feel a little creeped out by the narrator's prurient interest in the women of Tahiti and China, or his lamentation for Polynesian obesity, because that's just a character. Presumably it's also a character who spends a trip to Svalbard in the middle of winter, hoping to see the Northern Lights, quibbling with his wife Jessica. The pair have a miserable time, but that's not really Dyer's wife. His wife isn't even Jessica; her real name is Rebecca. But it's hard to ignore the feeling that there's some sleight-of-hand going on, that Dyer really does think the Tahiti is a "babelicious paradise," and wants to say it without being perceived as truly having said it. Is there a Dyer underneath all this, somewhere, that had a pleasant morning in Tahiti, or enjoyed an afternoon in Svalbard? Or are the real Dyer and the fake Dyer in unison that travel often proves to be a joyless disappointment?

Let me be fair: it's not all like that. I was really grateful for Dyer's essay about traveling to Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field, an installation in the New Mexico desert made of hundreds of lightning rods. The Lightning Field seems primed to be a disappointment. Access is strictly controlled; you have to enter a lottery, and when you're given a date, you are picked up and driven to a remote cabin by the installation for a day and night. But lightning only strikes sixty or so days out of the year; most people who are lucky enough to visit The Lightning Field see no lightning. And Dyer doesn't. But he's captivated by the way the light unfolds on the installation itself--it's a work of time as much as art. "Part of the experience of coming here is the attempt to understand and articulate," Dyer writes, "one's responses to the experiences." So he has a sense of wonder after all.

Dyer is at his best writing about large-scale artworks like The Lightning Field. Another essay focuses on Spiral Jetty (which I too have seen), the seminal earthwork by Robert Smithson that has been at times invisible beneath the Great Salt Lake. (Though it was written only in 2016, it seems strange to write about Spiral Jetty without talking about the lake as a victim of climate change; someone who visits the jetty now will not have to entertain the possibility of not seeing it because the lake has shrunk well past the jetty and shows little sign of recovery.) Another essay about the Watts Towers of L.A., built single-handedly by an Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia, captures the sense of baffling human achievement that such works inspire. Dyer is at his best when he finds a way to care about these place--the Watts Towers are deeply connected to the world of jazz, and intersect in fascinating ways with another essay about exploring the L.A. of German emigres Theodore Adorno and Thomas Mann. If only Adorno or Ornette Colman had spent a few years in Tahiti or Svalbard.

The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham

Strickland perplexed me.  I could not understand his motives.  When I had asked him what first gave him the idea of being a painter, he was unable or unwilling to tell me.  I could make nothing of it.  I tried to persuade myself that an obscure feeling of revolt had been gradually coming to a head in his slow mind, but to challenge this was the undoubted fact that he had never shown any impatience with the monotony of his life.  If, seized by an intolerable boredom, he had determined to be a painter merely to break with irksome ties, it would have been comprehensible, and commonplace; but commonplace is precisely what I felt he was not.  at last, because i was romantic, I devised an explanation which I acknowledged to be far-fetched, but which was the only one that in any way satisfied me.  It was this: I asked myself whether was not in his soul some deep-rooted instinct of creation, which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues, till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced him irresistibly to action.  The cuckoo lays its eggs in the strange birds  nest, and when the young one is hatched it shoulders its foster-brothers out and breaks at last the nest that has sheltered it.

Charles Strickland leaves his job as a stockbroker and his wife and children in London to become a painter in Paris, eventually escaping to the isolation of Tahiti.  His life is based not-so-roughly on that of Paul Gaugin, who also abandoned his family to paint, and who lived the last years of his life in Tahiti, and who was, by all accounts, an enormous asshole.  Maugham stretches his characterization of Gaugin to the extreme, making him a callous, perhaps psychopathic narcissist devoid entirely of empathy.  He makes it clear to the narrator, who travels to Paris to interrogate him on behalf of his wife, that he cares very little whether she misses him, or whether she can survive.  One gets the impression from reading The Moon and Sixpence that the only reason Maugham gave the Gaugin-figure the slight disguise of a fictional name is because he didn't want to get sued out of existence for libel.

One question that The Moon and Sixpence is mercifully not very interested in is, how do we approach the art of obviously bad people?  I feel like we have this conversation all the time, whether it's Cosby or Polanski or Tolstoy.  Strickland is very bad; the main crisis of the novel occurs when he casually pries an associate's wife away from him, and then looks the other way as she kills herself by swallowing acid because he failed to love her.  But Maugham introduces the question with a brief accounting of the fame that Strickland has received since his death, and dismisses the question with a wave of the hand: his critics obsess over the personal details of Strickland's sordid life, but nothing Strickland has done can obviate the vitality and innovation of his paintings.

The Moon and Sixpence asks what I think is a much more interesting question: What if the capacity for genius in art precludes things like basic decency, humanity, and empathy?  We praise artists who are sui generis, who can see past the limitations of genre and history to a new kind of art.  What if that is only by possible by rejecting the burdens placed on us by friendship, family, and love?  Strickland doesn't even want fame--his last great act is to paint a masterpiece on the walls of his Tahitian hut while becoming blind from leprosy, and then make his Tahitian wife promise that she will burn it down when he dies.  That's what we want, after all, a devotion to art for art's sake, but there is much that can be sacrificed to that ideal.

The most interesting thing about The Moon and Sixpence is that, it seems to me, Maugham envies the narcissism of his central character.  Let me show you what I mean.  First of all, Maugham cannily makes us wait for most of the novel to "see" one of Strickland's paintings, which for the narrator turns out to be disorienting and disappointing:

I knew nothing of the simplicity at which he aimed.  I remembered a still-life of oranges on a plate, and  I was bothered because the plate was not round and the oranges were lop-sided.  The portraits were a little larger than life-size, and this gave them an ungainly look.  To my eyes the faces looked like caricatures.  They were painted in a way that was entirely new to me.  The landscape puzzled me even more.  There were two or three pictures of the forest and Fontainebleau and several of streets in Paris: my first feeling was that they might have been painted by a drunken cab-driver.  I was perfectly bewildered.  It passed through my mind that the whole thing was a stupendous, incomprehensible farce.  Now that I look back I am more than ever impressed by Stroeve's acuteness.  He saw from the first that here was a revolution in art, and he recognized in its beginnings the genius which now all the world allows.

The narrator tells us that Strickland "did not hesitate to simplify or distort if he could get nearer to that unknown thing he sought."  The narrator himself distorts Strickland's story, by his own admission, but the distortions are not the kind to get us nearer to any sort of unknown truth.  Rather, they do things like "clean up" Strickland's language and cajole his story into the neat, linear "unreality of fiction."  The plot about Strickland and the artist's wife seems wholly manufactured, perhaps imported from a melodramatic film.  Maugham's prose is tame and unadventurous; he aligns himself with his narrator, who is a moderately successful novelist who by his own admission "will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets."  Books about art are always about the books themselves, in a way, and it's hard to ignore the disconnect between Strickland's/Gaugin's way of painting and the narrator's/Maugham's way of writing.  The richest and saddest way of reading The Moon and Sixpence is to believe that Maugham has a great sympathy for Strickland's genius, and a melancholy regret that he cannot share it.  The best he can do is appreciate it:

But one fact was made clear to me: people talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty they cannot recognize it.