Five favorite books by artist and author Carlton Davis

Five Favorite Books is a special feature at the LA Books Examiner in which our favorite authors share and discuss their five favorite books within a category. In this edition, Carlton Davis, artist and author of the award-winning memoir Bipolar Bare, discusses his five favorite non-fiction works and a novel.

Five..Six Favorite Books: Five non-fiction works and a novel by Carlton Davis

I am very eclectic. I read a lot in different book genres. My usual are mysteries, and I thought I might write about my five favorites, but after seeing that most of the 5 book other authors choose were novels I thought I would go to non-fiction and discuss five books that have had a big effect on me. These are recent readings and represent books, which have influenced my thinking or whose prose I found particularly striking.

I have added one novel as an addition to this mix because my reading of the book was hampered by life's peculiarities, and it was such a good book that I did a drawing based on an image described in its pages.

1. The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles, Martin Gayford (2006)
Vincent Van Gogh and Gauguin shared a little yellow house in Arles for nine weeks, where the two painters shared ideas, painted together and created some of their most important work. For Van Gogh this was the period that immediately preceded his stay in the insane asylum at St. Remy and, from this book, we can see his descent into insanity. For Gauguin it was the time before he left for the South Seas.

This is an engaging and suspenseful book that I picked-up from Daedalus Books, my favorite source of cheap but good reading. I learned a lot from it about some of Gauguin's and Van Gogh's most famous paintings and about them as individuals through these works. Madam Ginoux, the wife of the owner of a rough café was painted by both artists, by Van Gogh as the “Arlesienne”, a soulful portrait, and by Gauguin in the “Night Café” with a sidelong glance and a leer. Madame Roulin, matriarch of the family Roulin was also painted by both artists. Van Gogh painted her many times, the final portrait is the astoundingly colorful “La Berceuse” painted just before his collapse. Gaylord states that "Vincent wanted the picture to be equivalent to a holy image of the early Christian era, yet modern." Gauguin’s portrait of Madame Roulin takes fewer liberties with the facts in front of him and does not fantasize. As Gaylord states "His painting shows a stolid dumpy woman." Gauguin was the less frightening of the two painters, once a bank executive he was more fastidious and organized. Facts that later proved to be sources of major irritation between the two artists.

The book gives much insight into cross-pollination of ideas shared by the two artists and also their extreme differences of view point and temperament. Gauguin cooked and organized the expenses of the two artists. They painted in the fields, visited prostitutes and drank at the local bars. The book shows how Van Gogh was an alcoholic as well as suffering mental problems. He could not hold his liquor. Gaylord graphically describes the night when he threatened Gauguin with a knife. Gauguin decided to leave and Vincent carved up his ear in a melancholy rage. He gives the bloody knife to a prostitute. This is more realism than we got from the old pot boiler, Lust for Life.

There are numerous images throughout the book, unfortunately they are in black and white (which seems a drawback in contemporary mass publishing) and good quotes from Van Gogh’s and Paul Gauguin's letters. Gauguin wrote this about the incident of a glass throw, "Suddenly he flung the glass and its contents at my head. I avoided the blow and taking him bodily in my arms went out of the café' across Place Hugo. Not many minutes later Vincent found himself in his bed, where in a few seconds, he was asleep, not waking until morning. When he awoke he said to me calmly, "My dear Gauguin I have a vague memory that I offended you last evening."

If you are looking for a book about the art of Van Gogh and Gauguin, this is an excellent document about the pictures -- the who, the what, and the why they painted what they did. The story is not dry art history. It is an animated account of a prolific nine weeks. I never knew that this time the two artists spent together was so short or so important to the history of art.

2. Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, V.S. Naipaul (1981)
I am an ardent lover of the prose of V.S. Naipaul. There are not many who write as well as he does in English and with so much insight. This book was written almost thirty years ago and most of its observations to me still ring true. I found this book on a table at a book sale around the corner from my house at the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena. It cost me a dollar.

Today we face the same foe in an implacable Islamic Fundamentalism, which Naipaul observed emerging in Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia. As he saw it, "The late 20th Century Islam appeared to raise political issues, but it has the flaw of its origins – the flaw that ran right through Islamic History; to the political issues it raised, it offered no political or practical solution. It offered only faith. It offered only the prophet, who would settle everything -- but who had ceased to exist. This political Islam was rage and anarchy."

Naipaul’s book is as much a travelogue as it is a critique of Islam. He watches the events in Iran at the time, student demonstrations at the university in Tehran. He travels by taxi to the holy city of Qum, crossing dried up lakes and observing the dust and image of Tehran in the distance. He rides across the Iranian landscape to the far eastern edges of the country meeting local inhabitants and making wonderful observations about important Islamic shrines. In Pakistan he meets university students to whom the old faith comes easily. In Indonesia he seeks out the Christians amidst the Islamic dominant culture, and takes us on a trip to their schools to see how they are surviving. This is a book rich in characterization mixed with political and religious observations that have not been altered by the passage of time.

What we face today, the rage and anarchy of the Taliban and the Shia against the Sunni in Iraq is the same enemy that Naipaul observed in revolutionary Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This Islam is a mindless submission to a punishing God. It is not the Islam of great culture, art, and intelligence.

3. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron (1992)
I read this book twice -- it's not very long only 84 pages -- the writing is good, clean, and penetrating and it flows from insight to insight in a beautiful layering of words to experiences. He caught me and held me from the very first sentences about his return to Paris and passing by the Hotel Washington and remembers, "Colliding nervously for the first time with the French and their droll kinks" that "virtually defined the chasm between Gallic and Anglo-Saxon cultures." This oblique entry into the story of his depression was warm and accessible without being simple or silly.

Throughout the book I was struck by an amazed sense of knowing -- yes, this is true and I hadn't thought of depression and madness in this way before. Styron writes, "Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression…in its origin. I felt loss at every hand." This is what I felt in my own depression -- loss of mother, career, self-esteem and self-control. Again Styron writes with vivid clarity, "A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self…who is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against disaster," and "…an even more significant factor was the death of my mother when I was thirteen; this disorder and early sorrow…appears repeatedly in the literature on depression as a trauma sometimes likely to create a nearly irreparable emotional havoc." Styron's words are powerful and his description of his descent into severe depression is precise. His recovery is laced with candor -- the will to self destruction -- and recognition of his own frail human nature.

4. The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri J.M. Nouwen (1994)
I saw one of the priests reading this book at All Saints Church in Pasadena, California so I decided to get it. This is after Charles Saquity, a priest at All Saints, mentioned the parable of the Prodigal Son to me when I was in the mental hospital. I have been thinking about this parable ever since Charles stated that God always welcomed back his wayward sons. I said, "How could God accept me who had cursed the deity for decades for my depressions and the ills of the world?” Charles responded that, “God forgives all.”

Henri Nouwen’s book is a meditation on this parable, the famous painting by Rembrandt of the parable, and a look into Nouven’s life and how the parable had an effect on him such that he reclaimed his vocation late in life. We begin with a chance encounter of a poster of Rembrandt's painting. Nouven looks at each of the participants in the painting, the prodigal son kneeling before the father whose hands are placed on both shoulders. A magical illumination lights up both figures. The elder son stands to the side mostly in shadow except for his face. Nouven talks about the illumination as God's love as manifested in the father bestowing grace upon the prodigal son. Nouven discusses the elder son's misgivings and fear as element of the shadow he stands in. The book moves to an engaging dissertation on the meaning of the parable and the role of each person in the parable. The book took on special meaning for me.

Looking back on my own life, I feel like a prodigal son. I wandered away from belief in God and into a lurid life of drugs, sex, and rebellion fueled by my mental disorder. Life beat me up completely. I gained little; recognition, fame, and fortune eluded me. While I have great talent I also have great flaws. The temper and anger made me unreliable and the cycle of mania and depression made me very unstable. I had become completely defeated and resentful at the time Charles Saquity and I met. My body and my spirit had given out, and only anti-depressive and bi-polar medications were keeping me alive.

I was ready to accept forgiveness, but was I ready to let God completely forgive me? Nouven says some interesting things about this. He states, "There is something in us humans that keeps us clinging to our sins and prevents us from letting God erase our past and offer us a completely new beginning. Sometimes it seems as though I want to prove to God that my darkness is too great to overcome."

I found that made a lot of sense to me. It may be simply that I am not worthy enough to be loved. I am too depressed, I am too bad, too crazed, too f*cked up or I have done too many awful things. I came to realize that none of this is true, but I also came to realize as Nouven writes:

"Receiving forgiveness requires a total willingness to let God be God and do all the healing, restoring, and renewing. As long as I want to do even a part of that myself, I end up with a partial solution such as becoming a hired servant. As a hired servant, I can still keep my distance, still revolt, reflect, strike, and run away or complain about my pay."

"The reward of choosing joy is joy itself…There is so much rejection, pain, and woundedness among us, but once you chose to claim the joy hidden in midst of all suffering life becomes celebration. Joy never denies the sadness, but transforms it to a fertile soil for more joy."

6. The Drowning Room, Michael Pye (1997)
Having this book is a saga in itself. Some time ago I took the book with me read while I had the car washed. I put the book on the top of the car as fumbled with my keys trying to get in. I forgot I put the book there and drove off. Only after I returned from my errands and the car wash did I notice I didn't have the book. Confounded, I knew I had it sometime earlier. Suddenly I remembered putting it on the roof of the automobile. Searching the driveway I found nothing. I got it the car and slowly retraced my route. Some five hundred yards down Walnut Street I saw a little pile of debris. It was my book, run over, ripped, the binding broken, and the cover lost. Retrieving this forlorn pile, I discovered all the pages of text were still there. They were a little rumpled, a little torn but still readable. I took what survived home and made a new cover from cardboard, then taped the whole thing together using massive amounts of tape. The artifact is rather interesting. All the tape crumpled, stuck together in ridges and mounds looks a little like the surface of water. I think of it as echoing the title.