Lust for Lifelikeness

Art in America—and above all movie art—tends to be the profession of champions, so it is of the first aptness that Kirk Douglas, whose dull performance as Van Gogh in Lust for Life may well gain him the industry’s annual “Oscar,” also took the lead in a prizefight film called Champion. The idiom of slang—and above all American slang—is studiously avoided in the speaking script of Lust for Life as adapted from Irving Stone’s novel: a fictionization of the artist’s life that attained, worthless as it was, a certain sensational fame a couple of decades ago. The film is, in a word, flat: as though it were a family album edited (though it isn’t) by a vigilant relative of the artist’s. Yet so impressed are literate Americans by anything like conspicuous respect for genuine art that even a bonafide art critic, Aline B. Saarinen of the New York Times, has been lured into a benevolent attitude toward M-G-M’s heroically unvulgar version of the life of this hero—excuse me!—this champion of painting, Vincent Van Gogh.

Aesthetic colloquialism really means aesthetic fashions. Ernest Hemingway’s style was a literary-type vulgarization of Gertrude Stein’s discovery of an occult simplicity, which in the pages of Scott Fitzgerald reached a more authentically indigenous quality: Fitzgerald was discovered for his Americanism, Hemingway for his internationalism. Life as a fight with fame or a bull has an embarrassing monolithism when these two authors are regarded in the same perspective with the movies, not so alien to them at their best as many have supposed. Fitzgerald went through his last hectic Gethsemane in Hollywood, where he ended laid out on a cold stone slab with Dorothy Parker by him to articulate an all too brief and slangy elegy (familiar enough not to be repeated here).