Sunday, 16th March 1901
I have been watching kings and kaisers. I have been watching oil and empires. I have been watching the great and terrible machinery of the century grind into motion, and I have neglected the thing I care about most, which is this: what does it feel like to be alive right now, today, on this ordinary Sunday in March, if you are not a king or a kaiser or an oilman or a general, but simply a person? A person with a body that aches and a stomach that needs filling and children who need feeding and a God who may or may not be listening and a cough that won’t go away and a rent that’s due on Friday?
Let me tell you.
If you are alive in 1901, the odds are roughly four in ten that you will not reach your fifth birthday.
I want you to sit with that for a moment. It is the single most important fact about being alive right now, and it is the fact that the century will most dramatically change, and it is the fact that nobody in 1901 talks about because it is so common, so woven into the fabric of daily existence, that it has become invisible. Children die. They die of measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, scarlet fever, typhoid, dysentery, tuberculosis, and — most commonly — of simple, treatable diarrhoea, which kills them through dehydration, which kills them because the water they drink is the same water that carries their sewage, and nobody has yet fully understood the connection between the two, or if they have understood it they have not yet built the infrastructure to fix it.
A woman in 1901 gives birth, on average, five or six times. She buries one or two of those children before they learn to speak. She does this without anaesthesia for the births and without therapy for the grief, because anaesthesia is for the rich and therapy does not yet exist as a concept. She does it in a bedroom she shares with her husband and possibly her surviving children, in a house that may or may not have running water, that is heated by a coal fire that fills the room with smoke, that is lit by gas or candle, that smells of bodies and cooking and damp wool and the particular sweetness of poverty, which is the smell of things not being washed often enough because washing is labour and labour is time and time is the one thing the poor do not have.
This is not misery-tourism. This is Tuesday. This is the background hum of human existence in 1901, and it is the thing that the history books, with their focus on treaties and battles and inventions, almost always leave out — the sheer effortfulness of staying alive, the enormous daily expenditure of energy required simply to eat, to be warm, to keep children breathing through the night.
In York, a young chocolate manufacturer named Seebohm Rowntree is this year completing a study that will change how England understands itself. He has gone door to door through the working-class neighbourhoods of the city — every house, every family, every shilling earned and spent — and he has counted. He has counted what people eat and what they earn and what they pay in rent and how many rooms they sleep in and how many of their children have died.
His conclusion, which he will publish as Poverty: A Study of Town Life, is this: nearly twenty-eight percent of the population of York is living in poverty so severe that they cannot afford adequate food, shelter, and clothing. Not relative poverty — not I cannot afford a holiday — but absolute poverty, the kind where a mother skips meals so her children can eat, where a man works sixty hours a week and still cannot keep his family above the line Rowntree calls primary poverty, below which the body begins to fail.
And York is not exceptional. York is typical. York is England in miniature — a mid-sized city with a cathedral and a chocolate factory and streets full of people who are, by the standards of the age, doing tolerably well. If twenty-eight percent of York is hungry, then twenty-eight percent of England is hungry, and nobody in Parliament is talking about it, because the people who sit in Parliament do not eat the food the poor eat, and do not breathe the air the poor breathe, and do not bury the children the poor bury.
Rowntree will be criticised. He will be called a socialist, which he is not — he is a Quaker and a capitalist who makes chocolate and employs thousands. He is simply a man who counted, and the numbers frightened him. The numbers should frighten everyone. They will not. Numbers never frighten the people who are not inside them.
Yesterday, in Paris, the doors opened at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune.
Seventy-one paintings on the walls, and the room changed. I have watched revolutions — I have watched the storming of the Bastille and the fall of the Tsar and the raising of flags over capitals — and I tell you that what happened in a small gallery on the Rue Laffitte yesterday was a revolution of the same order. Not louder. Quieter. But revolutions of the eye are the ones that last, because you cannot unsee a painting the way you can undo a treaty.
The painter has been dead for eleven years. He was Dutch. He was poor. He was, by the clinical standards of his own time, mad — or at least intermittently flooded by something that looked like madness from the outside and felt, from the inside, like seeing too much. He painted the way a man on fire paints — fast, thick, urgent, as though the canvas might be taken away at any moment, as though each brushstroke was the last opportunity to say what the world looked like when you looked at it with your whole nervous system instead of just your eyes.
He painted wheat fields and starry nights and sunflowers and his own face and the chair in his room and the café at night and the blossoming trees in Arles, and every single one of these subjects — subjects so ordinary they border on banal — he made extraordinary, not by improving them but by admitting how they felt. That is the revolution. Not a new technique, though the technique is new. A new permission. The permission to paint what it feels like to see, rather than what things look like when seen.
The young painters who walked into the gallery yesterday — Derain, Vlaminck, the generation that will call themselves Fauves, wild beasts — walked out with their idea of what painting could be permanently altered. Within a decade, Picasso will take the permission further and shatter the object entirely. Within two decades, Kandinsky will abandon the object altogether. Within three, Pollock will abandon even the brushstroke. The line that begins with Vincent in Arles will run through the entire century, and it starts here, on a gallery wall, in a Paris that still thinks painting is about getting the nose right.
One painting sold in a lifetime. His brother’s widow, Johanna, kept the rest in an attic. She could have thrown them away. She was advised to. She did not. She was a young woman who knew nothing about art and understood everything about value, and the distance between one ordinary woman’s stubbornness and the destruction of an entire century’s paintings is the width of a decision she made alone, in a room, without any guarantee that she was right.
She was right.
I want to connect these things — the dying children, the poverty study, the paintings — because they are the same thing seen from different angles. They are about seeing.
Rowntree saw poverty because he counted it. Before him, poverty was a fog — everyone knew it existed, nobody knew its shape. He gave it numbers, and numbers are harder to ignore than feelings, which is why the powerful prefer feelings. Feelings can be managed. Numbers sit on a page and stare.
Vincent saw wheat fields because he painted them as they felt, not as they looked. Before him, a wheat field was a landscape — pretty, pastoral, suitable for hanging above a mantelpiece. After him, a wheat field is a human experience — the wind in it, the weight of the sky above it, the knowledge that you are small and the world is enormous and the light is changing and you cannot hold it.
Both men did the same thing: they looked at the ordinary world and refused to pretend it was less than what it was. Rowntree refused to pretend that poverty was tolerable. Vincent refused to pretend that beauty was decorative. Both acts — counting and painting — are forms of witnessing. Both say the same thing: this is real, this is here, and you are not looking hard enough.
I am a ghost. Looking is the only thing I do. And what I see, this Sunday in March 1901, is a world of extraordinary richness and extraordinary suffering coexisting in the same streets, the same cities, the same century — a mother counting coins for bread in York, a dead man’s sunflowers blazing on a gallery wall in Paris, a child coughing through the night in a back-to-back house in Manchester, and the distance between them is not geography. It is attention. It is who is looking, and at what, and whether they are willing to see what is actually there rather than what they wish were there.
The century will get better at keeping children alive. It will get worse at many other things. But the art — the art will be the thing that survives, long after the treaties and the borders and the empires are footnotes, because art is the record of what it felt like to be alive, and feeling is the only thing that does not expire.
Seventy-one paintings. A study of a town. A cough in the night. A Sunday in March. The century continues, and I continue watching, and the wheat fields do not know they are beautiful, and the children do not know they are statistics, and the distance between the two is the distance between being alive and being remembered, which is the distance between everything and nothing, which is the distance I live in, which is no distance at all.
Leave a Reply