It was quite by chance that Irwing Stone (1903 - 89) — then a young, prolific, but struggling playwright — visited the Rosenberg Galleries in Paris and ‘discovered’ the blazing canvases of Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890).
The visit, he confessed, turned out to be ‘the single most compelling emotional experience’ of his life. He also at once felt compelled to find out more about the Dutch impressionist. “Even though I was far too young and felt I did not have sufficient technique to write a book about Vincent van Gogh, I knew I had to try. If I didn’t, I would never write anything else.”
His elaborate and intense research — based primarily on van Gogh’s prolific and eloquent letters to his brother Theo — spanned six long months, followed by another six months of writing. By early 1931, the manuscript of Lust for Life was ready. Then began the frustrating ordeal of finding a publisher. Over the next three years — one after another — more than 15 publishers rejected Stone’s manuscript.
When he took it to Alfred Knopf, ‘they never opened it — the package with the manuscript got home before I did.’ When he approached Doubleday, they seemed impressed, but the sales department put its foot down and said there was ‘no way to sell a book about an unknown Dutch painter.’
Finally, in 1934, the manuscript was accepted and published by Longmans, Green & Company. Stone received a $250 advance which, according to the author, was “a tremendous amount of money”, especially during the Depression.
Lust for Life became an immediate bestseller. The book (which was dedicated to the author’s mother) sold in millions of copies. It also set in motion Stone’s brilliant writing career. He was hailed as a pioneer of biographical novel in its contemporary form and
indisputably the most successful master of the genre.
Stone described the biographical novel as “a true and documented story of one human being’s journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.”
He penned many other bestselling novels including The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), The Passions of the Mind (1971), The Origin (1980) and Depths of Glory (1985) — based on the lives of Michelangelo, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin and Camille Pissarro, respectively.
“My books are based 98 per cent on documentary evidence,” revealed Stone. “I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and motivation of the person I’m writing about.”
He also said that while he wrote, he actually lived with the character. “I must. And I have to feel myself inside the character’s skin, head, mind, and brain. I live where he lived, eat what he ate, and go among his people. During this time, I don’t do anything else. There is no other way to write a biographical novel.”
On the big screen
Twenty-two years after its publication, Stone’s critically acclaimed, multimillion-copy bestseller, Lust for Life, was adapted for a movie of the same name.
Directed by Vincente Minnelli (1903-86) and starring Kirk Douglas (as van Gogh) and Anthony Quinn (as artist Paul Gauguin), it became one of Hollywood’s most impressive colour films of the 1950s. The world première of the film on September 17, 1956 at the Plaza Theatre, New York raised more than $5,000 for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Student Fellowship fund.
Minnelli regarded Lust for Life as the toughest challenge of his career. For the sake of authenticity, he borrowed nearly 200 of van Gogh’s original paintings from private collections for a brief display in the film. He also mostly shot the film in all the real places where van Gogh lived and worked.
Minnelli was hailed for the manner in which he dealt with the creative impulses and emotional isolation of van Gough as a tormented artist in the film. The way in which he used colour as both a psychological and artistic expressive tool also came in for appreciation.
“Colour dominates the dramatisation of the film,” wrote Boseley Crowther in the New York Times. “The colour of indoor sets and outdoor scenes, the colour of beautifully reproduced van Gogh paintings, even the colours of a man’s tempestuous moods… Both the script and the performance of this picture have a striking integrity in putting forth the salient details and the surface aspects of the life of van Gogh. The tortuous career of the artist is recounted faithfully, from his experiences as an evangelist in a Belgian mining district to his ultimate suicide.”
Playing van Gogh, Kirk Douglas tried to get into the skin of the character and gave his all for the role. It is even alleged that the pain and turmoil of the artist got into the Hollywood star himself and drove him to the brink of madness. It was not uncommon that he often brought the intensity of his role into his own home.
“When he was doing Lust for Life,” Douglas’s wife Anne Buydens recalled, “he came home in that red beard of van Gogh’s, wearing those big boots, stomping around the house — it was frightening.”
The 122-minute film won Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Douglas), Best (adapted) Screenplay (Norman Corwin), Best Supporting Actor (Quinn), and Best Art Direction. Eventually, Quinn won the Academy Award for his eight-minute role.
Douglas, who had given himself a fair chance of winning the Oscar, was personally devastated. For years, he nursed his hurt and disappointment. (The Oscar, incidentally, went to Yul Bryner for his role in The King and I that year.) Douglas, however, won the Golden Globe as also the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor in the movie.
Fifty-five years after its release, Lust for Life enjoys a favourable rating of 7.3 / 10 on IMDb (Internet Movie Database).
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