First of all, I have to confess my (former) utter ignorance about who Don McLean is. I was of course familiar with the song “American Pie,” but for some reason had never actually noticed who its original performer was. (And I’m much more taken with the parody version of it from Weird Al Yankovic.) So when I got the music for a 2017 concert with my own choir and I saw McLean’s name as the author of “Vincent,” I just assumed he was some sort of obscure artsy-jazzy guy who was interested in art and liked Vincent van Gogh. Well, au contraire! One YouTube version of McLean’s performance has had almost ten million views. (“American Pie” has had over 71 million views from one video; I didn’t go through and add up the numbers from them all but would guess it’s close to 100 million.) McLean is still alive and still performing, although none of his songs has ever approached the popularity of these two, both of which were on his second album, also titled American Pie, released in 1971.
Now for the good stuff, about the subject of this song, the painter Vincent van Gogh. I think everyone reading this post has at least a passing knowledge about him, with the one known fact being that he cut off his ear and gave it to a prostitute. Oh man! I could go on for pages about just this one incident from his life, but I’ll confine myself to saying that he apparently cut off all of his ear except for the lobe and that he gave it to a girl named Gabrielle who worked at a brothel but was probably just a cleaner there. Van Gogh carried out this gruesome act on the evening of the day in which he’d gotten two pieces of devastating news. First, Paul Gauguin, the painter who had come to share his house in Arles, France, and who Van Gogh hoped would be the first of a number of artists to come there and form a community, had announced that he was leaving because he couldn’t stand Vincent. (Gauguin was not known for his tact.) Second, Vincent had received a letter from his brother Theo announcing his engagement and upcoming marriage. Vincent feared that Theo would now turn his attention to his new bride and subsequent family instead of focusing on and supporting him. (That last statement makes Vincent sound pretty selfish. In reality, though, Theo was his lifeline, his mainstay, the only person he was close to and who believed in him. Theo had supported Vincent financially all of his adult life; Vincent had shared a home with him in Paris and relied on Theo’s letters to sustain him once he moved to Arles.)
My heart really aches for Vincent—he tried so hard to make friends and to be loved, and he was so unsuccessful! He never seemed to understand how other people saw him, although he did manage to form at least a few relationships with people in Arles. Tellingly, they were people who were concerned about him but with whom he didn’t have any kind of intellectual or artistic communication: the postman, a family who ran a local cafe, a family who let him stay in their house while his was being renovated, a doctor. They were kind to him, and he appreciated their kindness, but they were never going to be a part of his dreamed-of artistic commune. When he got really interested in people he badgered them endlessly without knowing what he was doing; that type of behavior drove Gauguin crazy. Don’t we all know someone like that? You feel sorry for the person and he/she makes you want to tear your hair out, both at the same time.
So what’s the relationship between McLean and Van Gogh? Here’s what McLean had to say in a 2010 interview with a reporter from UK’s The Telegraph:
“In the autumn of 1970 I had a job singing in the school system, playing my guitar in classrooms,” he says. “I was sitting on the veranda one morning, reading a biography of Van Gogh, and suddenly I knew I had to write a song arguing that he wasn’t crazy. He had an illness and so did his brother Theo. This makes it different, in my mind, to the garden variety of ‘crazy’ – because he was rejected by a woman [as was commonly thought]. So I sat down with a print of Starry Night and wrote the lyrics out on a paper bag.”
McClean goes on to say in that interview that he was going through a very dark period in his own life at the time, mainly because of his deteriorating marriage, and that much of his early life was “unbearably blue.” Other sources I’ve read have hinted at the possibility of McLean’s being mildly schizophrenic, and he certainly implies here that he was at least borderline depressive. Both of these mental illnesses have been mentioned as diagnoses for Van Gogh, who was confined to a mental institution when he painted “Starry Night.”
Once you know why McLean wrote what he did the meaning is pretty clear. So he says, “Now I understand what you tried to say to me.” In other words, now McLean understands what van Gogh was trying to say in his paintings, specifically to him. And all of the pronouns such as “them” and “they” refer to the general public, those who didn’t understand or appreciate van Gogh’s art while he was alive, even though van Gogh was trying to “set them free” with his vision of the world. It’s worth noting, by the way, that “Starry Night” is not van Gogh’s last painting; you might assume that it was from reading the lyrics, but in reality his last painting was possibly “Wheatfield with Crows,” painted in July 1890. There may have been a couple of paintings that were done a few days later, but “Wheatfield” has a very ominous tone, with crows flying over a field and a thunderstorm boiling up in the sky, so it fits the bill well as a final work. Van Gogh died at the end of July 1890; McLean says “And when no hope was left in sight/On that starry, starry night,/You took your life, as lovers often do.”
One last intriguing fact: The theory now is that Van Gogh didn’t kill himself after all. It has always puzzled researchers as to why he would have shot himself, as he didn’t own a gun and none was found at the scene. Indeed, there were conflicting reports as to where the shooting actually took place. Van Gogh had written Theo an upbeat letter on the day of the shooting and had ordered new paints only a few days before. There was no suicide note; a letter found on him turned out to be an early draft of his letter to Theo. And the location of the wound was not at all typical of a suicide: van Gogh was shot in the side, through his abdomen, and then dragged himself back to his home where he took two agonizing days to die. So who shot him? It’s very likely that it was an accident by a teenage boy, one of a group of teens who took pleasure in bullying and taunting the odd little man with the red hair. If you’re interested in reading a very thorough account of the theory, be sure to read this fascinating article from Vanity Fair.
In the end, though, McLean’s song stands on its own merits as art, even if the words aren’t completely correct. It’s almost a sadder commentary than suicide on van Gogh’s life that he may have been the victim of a bunch of bullies and that he kept their secret. And he would be utterly amazed at his popularity today. Remember the van Gogh exhibit at the Denver Art Museum several years ago? In order to accommodate the crowds the museum stayed open for 40 hours straight so that as many people as possible could come. Van Gogh at 2:00 AM! What a thought. I’m glad we got our tickets early and were able to go at a civilized time of day. If you’d like to see a dramatization of what Vincent might think of his current popularity, watch this clip from the popular BBC TV series Dr. Who. And take a look at this article from the PBS Newshour, which sums up the current theories about van Gogh’s mental health and includes a clip of McLean singing his song:
And here’s a video of the entire song, with some nice images of Van Gogh’s paintings to accompany it:
© Debi Simons
