The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [42]
Before Marguerite returned to the United States and married Zorach, she invited me to rejoin her in the spring and summer of 1911, and we painted together in Avignon, Saint-Rémy, Aries, Les Baux, Martigues, and Marseilles. She and I shared a great love for the work of Vincent van Gogh and wished we had known him, and we tried to find the places he had painted in Arles, and we each painted our own versions of a little café in Arles that van Gogh had loved; neither of us imitated van Gogh, but we were inspired by him and felt a little of his passion. In those days not much was yet known or written about the life of van Gogh, who is very famous now, but I knew that he had been a very religious man who had remained a complete skeptic, and I knew that he had danced on the edge of insanity for a long time. I also knew that he had sold only one painting during his whole life, and although he had received slightly more for it than I had received for the portrait of Pablo, he had lived in wretched neglect and poverty. The painting I am proudest of having done during that period, which now hangs in the offices of the Gazette, is called Olive Trees in Arles, and it shows a quartet of low, twisting trees writhing and chanting in the southern sunshine against a background of mountains more like Cézanne’s than van Gogh’s. I did not use olive green in the picture but several shades of green that give the total effect of being olive: there are patterns of apple green, pea green, sea green, beryl, reseda, Kendal and Dartmouth greens, choiring together. The picture is suffused with a sense of hope, joy, and youth, although I wept the entire time I was painting it. Marguerite could not understand why I was crying my heart out while painting such a happy picture.
In October, Marguerite and her aunt and another friend prepared to sail on a voyage that would last seven months and take them to San Francisco by way of the Orient. Marguerite invited me to come, and assured me that I could make a good rail connection from Fresno to Little Rock—after, she hoped, serving as a bridesmaid at her wedding. I was homesick, and I said yes. We sailed from Venice, and I began to write for Tom Fletcher articles entitled “An Arkansawyer in Cairo,” “An Arkansawyer in Alexandria,” “An Arkansawyer in Palestine,” “An Arkansawyer in Port Said,” “An Arkansawyer in Calcutta,” “An Arkansawyer in Mandalay,” “An Arkansawyer in Hong Kong,” and “An Arkansawyer in Yokohama.” Needless to add, Tom Fletcher insisted each time on transforming me into an “Arkansan” before the columns saw print, but otherwise he ran most of them as I’d written them. He personally met my train when it arrived in Little Rock, because he alone had been wired from Fresno that I was coming home.
My father did not know, until he looked up from his desk in his private office at the bank one day and said, “Well, lookee who’s here! You sure have gone all the way around the world, haven’t you? Are you home to stay?”
From my purse I took a snub-nosed derringer I had been given by an art dealer in Los Angeles, and I let my father look into the barrel of it, and I said, “I’m home to stay, Daddy, but if you ever try to fuck me again, I’ll kill you.”
On
He did not know what to say. His eyes filled with tears. There was no mistaking the singing of the trees as their green boughs swayed, their limbs danced, their leaves rustled and trembled