Chasing Gauguin's Ghost by John Borthwick
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'What are you here for? Looking for the lost Loti Lotus Land or the Gauguin ghosts?’ demands a melancholic barfly, a European drifter in The Grapes of Paradise, an H.E. Bates story set in Tahiti. The Loti to whom the drifter refers is French novelist Pierre Loti, one of the ‘ghosts’ I’m hunting on a literary trawl around Tahiti Island. I start my sleuthing on Papeete’s waterfront corniche at 417 Boulevard Pomare.
‘Too beautiful, ferociously beautiful,’ lamented painter Henri Matisse 70 years ago at this spot as he struggled in vain to capture the Tahitian light. Matisse — who spent three months in Tahiti in 1930 — was sketching from his window in room 14 at the Hotel Stuart. The Stuart is long gone but I’m standing outside its successor, the modern Hotel Tiare Tahiti. ‘The sea so blue, so blue it made the sky seem pale,’ Matisse enthused when he arrived — and his observation is as true today as it was then — but after three months of Tahiti’s steam bath heat he lamented that he had done no paintings and few sketches.
He was but one in a parade of creative visitors to do time on this seductive rock. Coincidentally many of them had stayed in the original Hotel Tiare, a legendary inn a block away from its near-namesake, today’s Hotel Tiare Tahiti. As James A. Michener wrote of the old hotel, ‘It had served wastrels and wanderers for almost a hundred years, and in that time Rupert Brooke, Stevenson, Henry Adams and Gauguin had lounged upon its dirty veranda, staring at the pantomime of Papeete.’
The first of these artistic ‘wastrels and wanderers’ on Tahiti was Herman Melville. I don’t have to go far to find him. In 1842 the future author of Moby Dick was gaoled for six weeks just a few paces along the Papeete quay from where Matisse had sketched. Twenty-two year old Melville had jumped ship at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands and after living there for several months among its supposed cannibals was picked up by a whaling ship, the Lucy Ann. Soon after, a rebellion against the ship’s appalling conditions broke out and when they reached Papeete the entire crew was gaoled for mutiny. ‘Gaol’ amounted to being confined at night with their ankles pinned in a communal stock. By day Melville and his mates were free to loiter in the clearing known then as Calabooza Beretanee (the British Gaol) and today as Bougainville Park, on Boulevard Pomare. On his release Melville returned to the US where he penned versions of his Marquesan adventures (Typee) and the Lucy Ann mutiny (Omoo). Their evocative mix of fact and exaggeration helped spread both his own fame and that of Tahiti.
Fellow American Jack London (author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang), fascinated by Melville’s Typee, sailed his yacht Snark to French Polynesia in 1906 but was disappointed by what he encountered, describing its European residents as little better than ‘human vermin’. Anchoring amid Papeete’s collection of scows from the seven seas — a similar fleet is still there today — he disputed with anyone who crossed him, but nevertheless produced a stirring account of his voyage, The Cruise of the Snark. The real drama was yet to come. His next collection, South Sea Tales, contained an undisguised depiction of a scurrilous Tahitian pearl trader, Emile Levy who later all but sued the ink out of London’s pen for his libellous portrait.
Pierre Loti was the nom de plume of Julian Viaud, a young French midshipman who, in 1872, came upon a beauty named Rarahu bathing in a sylvan pool behind Papeete. Her eyes, he wrote, ‘were of a tawny black, full of exotic languor and coaxing softness’. One might guess the rest, but Viaud/Loti spelled it out. His enormously popular autobiographical novel, Le Mariage de Loti, was full of South Seas romance and fanned the flames of Europe’s new-found passion for ‘the primitive’.. Among his readers was a disgruntled Parisian stockbroker named Paul Gauguin. Hidden in the Fautaua Valley behind the trash-strewn industrial zone of Papeete I find the little that now remains of Pierre and Rarahu’s affair — a tranquil but much-diminished pool known as Bain Loti and a weathered bust of the novelist looking appallingly foppish. Well below him on the plinth is a fading bas-relief of Rarahu.
‘Great were the feelings of emotion as I stood with my mother by my side and we looked upon the edifice designed by my father when I was 16 and worked in his office during the summer of 1866,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. At Point Venus, 10 km northwest of Papeete, I pick up the trail of the famed Scottish novelist who visited here in 1888 — the ‘edifice’ he was contemplating is the handsome stone lighthouse designed by his engineer father and erected here in 1868.
More importantly for Pacific history than for letters or lighthouses, it was at Point Venus on the black sand shores of Matavai Bay that Samuel Wallis set foot on Tahiti in 1767, the first European navigator to do so. Not possessing metal objects, the Tahitians were eager to trade for them. A supply-and-demand economy rapidly established itself between Willis’ sailors and the pragmatic women of Tahiti: ship’s nails swapped for sex. A screw for a screw, so to speak, until Wallis, fearing his vessel would fall apart if it lost any more metal, was obliged to set sail. It was not, however, such amorous interludes that gave Venus, Roman Goddess of Love, naming rights to the point.
In April 1769 Lieutenant James Cook anchored at Matavai Bay to observe the transit of the planet Venus. The Endeavour received an enthusiastic welcome and its crew — following the custom established by Wallis’s men and Frenchman Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s — entered into a familiar congress with the local vahines. Cook was shocked that Tahitians of ‘both sexes express the most indecent ideas in conversation with least emotion’ and that ‘they very readily offer the Young Women to Strangers .... and think it very strange if you refuse them.’ He also found that Tahitians were suffering from venereal disease. He blamed the French — who of course blamed the English — then sailed off, chasing the rumour that became Australia.
Two decades later William Bligh sailed into Matavai Bay. The subsequent events on Bligh’s ship, Bounty in 1789 — when its first mate Fletcher Christian, ‘torn ‘twixt love and duty’, mounted the most celebrated mutiny in British naval history. The numerous retellings have remained highly profitable for literature, film and Tahitian tourism. Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy (1933) was probably the most famous maritime tale of the 20th century. Tahiti-based Americans Hall and Nordhoff realised that no account of the Bounty story had been published since 1831 and so they undertook five years of research, producing three gripping novels: Mutiny on the Bounty (about the mutiny), Men Against the Sea (the story of Bligh’s voyage to Timor) and Pitcairn Island (the ultimate fate of Fletcher Christian and his mutineers). Hall is buried near Matavai Bay and his house, a comfortable green bungalow beside the main road at Arue, is now open to visitors as the James Norman Hall Museum — except of course on the day that I visit.
I continue my clockwise drive around the island’s sinuous coast road to Tautira on the southeast shore, some 70 km from the capital. In this sheltered bay the ailing Robert Louis Stevenson had moored his yacht Casco for two months in 1888 and in the midst of Arcadian bliss (‘the most beautiful spot and its people, the most amiable, I have ever found’) he penned — of all things — a Scottish horror story, The Master of Ballantrae. The sunny layover did the trick for his health, with Stevenson noting, ‘I am browner than the berry; only my trunk and the aristocratic spot on which I sit retain the vile whiteness of the north.’
In recent years this rugged southern peninsula of Tahiti has achieved fame as the home of one of the world’s most spectacular surf breaks, the savage, shallow reef tubes of Teahupoo. From 1928 to 1930 the nearby village of Vairao was the place for water sport of a more tranquil nature. Here Zane Grey, the American author of some 60 pulp Westerns such as Riders of the Purple Sage, built a deep-sea fishing camp with six cabins and a jetty. Where the camp stood at sleepy Flower Point today I find nothing but a fenced-off jetty — not the old frontiersman’s one, I suspect. Tahiti exerted its lyric charms on even the hidebound Grey, who celebrated it in two books, Tales of Tahitian Waters and the (for him) uncharacteristically erotic novel, Reef Girl.
‘It’s not such a bad life at present. Every night frenzied young girls invade my bed …’ It sounds like a self-portrait of the artist as an old dog, but despite these dubious boasts the author, post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, almost invented our idea of Tahiti.
Indeed, Gauguin’s iconography is now so ubiquitous across Tahiti’s tourism industry that if he hadn’t existed its PR machine would have had to invent him, then re-invent him — his reality was, of course, somewhat grubbier than the coffee-table books tell. Generations of romantic males have fixated upon Paul Gauguin as the prototype yuppie drop-out genius: ditch the wife and kids and pointless success in the city, hop a freighter to the South Seas and storm Paradise with a paintbrush. They have fixated equally upon the steamy sub-text of this Romantic parable: all those dusky mistresses in the lush Islands of Amour — Islands that, as Paul Theroux put it rather more bluntly, are now seen as a ‘paradise of fruit trees, brown tits and kiddie porn’.
Arriving here at age 43, Gauguin lived at numerous spots around Tahiti Island from 1891 to 1893 and then from 1895 to 1901. Tracking his locations and inspirations is like mapping a myth. At the sunny southwest coast village of Mataiea (46 km from Papeete), local historian Michael Brillat points out the narrow Vaihiria River beside which Gauguin’s bamboo house once stood — a contemporary described it as ‘a house with a tall roof of pandanus leaves which he shared with a quantity of lizards.’ He lived here in brief contentment with his 14-year old vahine (by Polynesian standards of the day, a mature woman), Teha’amana, whose face, he wrote, ‘flooded the interior of our hut and the landscape round with joy and light.’
In two happy years, from 1891 to 1893, he produced 60 major works. Now in the world’s major museums, they still stun from ten paces. To see an original Gauguin is like having a cup of tea with a vision. In his epiphanies there are no preening colonials, grim missionaries or poxy painters. Instead, his Tahitians, particularly women, are suspended in an oneiric landscape of colour shifts and distant reefs, asking ontological gobsmackers of themselves and us, as in the title of one late masterpiece: ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’
In the century since Gauguin fretted and painted his way around Tahiti, any remains of his dwellings have vanished — usually to be replaced by suburban bungalows. At Mataiea in 1892 he repaid a native landlord’s kindness by painting a large ‘Eve’ on the glass door panels of his house. In 1917 author W. Somerset Maugham, in Tahiti to research The Moon and Sixpence — a novel based on Gauguin’s life — discovered a surviving panel and purchased it from the landlord, reputedly for the replacement price of the glass. In 1962 Maugham turned his 200-franc bargain to a fine profit, selling the painting for some $37,000.
Gauguin’s second sojourn on this west coast, principally at Punaauia (now an outer suburb of Papeete) during 1897—8 was nowhere near as happy as his first. (As he wrote, upon returning to Papeete from France, ‘A profound sadness took possession of me. The dream which had brought me to Tahiti was brutally disappointed by the reality.’) Brillat indicates the nearby Punaruu Valley, a cleft that runs up into the wild volcanic slopes of Mt Marau, where the painter attempted suicide by taking arsenic. He took so much that he vomited the lot back up, thus defeating his own plan.
A decade after Gauguin died in 1903 (in the Marquesas), a young Englishman, soon to be recognised as the great soldier-poet of his generation, arrived at Mataiea ‘to hunt for lost Gauguins’, to write and, inevitably, to fall in love. Rupert Brooke’s three-month idyll with Mamua, daughter of the village chief, gave rise to his finest poems including The Great Lover and Retrospect, as well as Tiare Tahiti, which celebrated his muse, Mamua. Tearing himself away in 1914, he returned to an England at war where he was commissioned as an officer, but died a year later of blood poisoning.
I take a few pictures of Mataiea’s neat white chapel, Eglise Jean-Baptiste, built in 1931, in whose predecessor Brooke had prayed, then conclude my round-island cruise back in the capital. Along the Papeete quay I notice that I’m standing on the corner of Rue Paul Gauguin. A small monument indeed, since no Gauguin oil painting remains in these islands of his inspiration, even in the museum dedicated to him at Papeari on the southwest coast. The hibiscus blooms and Matisse’s ‘high fronds of the coconut trees lifting in the breeze’ give way to traffic lights and squalling Renaults. I stroll past the site of the old Tiare Hotel — now replaced by a shopping mall — and imagine the wily Somerset Maugham and his companion Gerald Haxton ensconced on its veranda at dusk, savouring good gin and wicked gossip. Sometimes the lagoon waters over which they once gazed can still seem, as Matisse observed, ‘as green as absinthe’.