Ever Yours

by Vincent Van Gogh

  And we talked about all kinds of things, about her life, about her cares, about her destitution, about her health, and I had a livelier conversation with her than with my learned professorial cousin Jan Stricker, for instance.

  I’ve actually told you these things because I hope you’ll see that even though I perhaps have some feeling, I don’t want to be sentimental in a senseless way. That, no matter what, I want to preserve some warmth of life and keep my mind clear and my body healthy in order to work. And that I understand my love for K.V. to be such that for her sake I don’t want to set about my work despondently or let myself get upset.

  You’ll understand that, you who wrote in your letter something about the matter of health. You talk of having been not quite healthy a while back, it’s very good you’re trying to get yourself straightened out.

  Clergymen call us sinners, conceived and born in sin. Bah! I think that damned nonsense. Is it a sin to love, to need love, not to be able to do without love? I consider a life without love a sinful condition and an immoral condition. If there’s anything I regret, it’s that for a time I let mystical and theological profundities seduce me into withdrawing too much inside myself. I’ve gradually stopped doing that. If you wake up in the morning and you’re not alone and you see in the twilight a fellow human being, it makes the world so much more agreeable. Much more agreeable than the edifying journals and whitewashed church walls the clergymen are in love with. It was a sober, simple little room she lived in, with a subdued, grey tone because of the plain wallpaper and yet as warm as a painting by Chardin, a wooden floor with a mat and an old piece of dark-red carpet, an ordinary kitchen stove, a chest of drawers, a large, perfectly simple bed, in short, a real working woman’s interior. She had to do the washing the next day. Just right, very good, I would have found her just as charming in a purple jacket and a black skirt as now in a brown or red-grey frock. And she was no longer young, perhaps the same age as K.V., and she had a child, yes, life had given her a drubbing and her youth was gone. Gone? — there is no such thing as an old woman. Ah, and she was strong and healthy — and yet not rough, not common. Those who value distinction so very highly, can they always tell what is distinguished? Heavens! People sometimes look for it high and low when it’s close by, as I do too now and then.

  I’m glad that I did what I did, because I think that nothing in the world should keep me from my work or cause me to lose my good spirits.

  When I think of K.V., I still say ‘she and no other’, and I think exactly the same as I did last summer about ‘meanwhile looking for another lass’. But it’s not only recently that I’ve grown fond of those women who are condemned and despised and cursed by clergymen, my love for them is even somewhat older than my love for Kee Vos. Whenever I walked down the street — often all alone and at loose ends, half sick and destitute, with no money in my pocket — I looked at them and envied the people who could go off with her, and I felt as though those poor girls were my sisters, as far as our circumstances and experience of life were concerned. And, you see, that feeling is old and deeply rooted in me. Even as a boy I sometimes looked up with endless sympathy and respect into a half-withered female face on which it was written, as it were: life and reality have given me a drubbing. But my feelings for K.V. are completely new and something entirely different. Without knowing it, she’s in a kind of prison. She’s also poor and can’t do everything she wants, and you see, she has a kind of resignation and I think that the Jesuitisms of clergymen and devout ladies often make more of an impression on her than on me, Jesuitisms that no longer impress me for the very reason that I’ve learned a few tricks. But she adheres to them and couldn’t bear it if the system of resignation and sin and God and whatnot appeared to be a conceit. And I don’t think it occurs to her that perhaps God only actually begins when we say those words with which Multatuli closes his prayer of an unbeliever: ‘O God, there is no God’. Look, I find the clergymen’s God as dead as a doornail. But does that make me an atheist? The clergymen think me one — be that as it may — but look, I love, and how could I feel love if I myself weren’t alive and others weren’t alive? And if we live, there’s something wondrous about it. Call it God or human nature or what you will, but there’s a certain something that I can’t define in a system, even though it’s very much alive and real, and you see, for me it’s God or just as good as God. Look, if I must die in due course in one way or another, fine, what would there be to keep me alive? Wouldn’t it be the thought of love (moral or immoral love, what do I know about it?). And heavens, I love Kee Vos for a thousand reasons, but precisely because I believe in life and in something real I no longer become distracted as I used to when I had thoughts about God and religion that were more or less similar to those Kee Vos now appears to have. I won’t give her up, but that inner crisis she’s perhaps going through will take time, and I have the patience for it, and nothing she says or does makes me angry. But as long as she goes on being attached to the past and clinging to it, I must work and keep my mind clear for painting and drawing and business. So I did what I did, from a need for warmth of life and with an eye to health. I’m also telling you these things so that you don’t get the idea again that I’m in a melancholy or distracted, pensive mood. On the contrary, I’m usually pottering about with and thinking about paint, making watercolours, looking for a studio &c. &c. Old chap, if only I could find a suitable studio.

  Well, my letter has grown long, but anyway.

  I sometimes wish that the three months between now and going back to M. were already over, but such as they’ll be, they’ll bring some good. Write to me, though, now and then. Are you coming again in the winter?

  And listen, renting a studio &c., I’ll do it or I won’t, depending on what Mauve thinks of it. I’m sending him the floor plan as agreed, and perhaps he’ll come and have a look himself if necessary. But Pa has to stay out of it. Pa isn’t the right man to get mixed up in artistic matters. And the less I have to do with Pa in business matters, the better I’ll get along with Pa. But I have to be free and independent in many things, that goes without saying.

  I sometimes shudder at the thought of K.V., seeing her dwelling on the past and clinging to old, dead notions. There’s something fatal about it, and oh, she’d be none the worse for changing her mind. I think it quite possible that her reaction will come, there’s so much in her that’s healthy and lively. And so in March I’ll go to The Hague again and — and — again to Amsterdam. But when I left Amsterdam this time, I said to myself, under no circumstances should you become melancholy and let yourself be overwhelmed so that your work suffers, especially now that it’s beginning to progress. Eating strawberries in the spring, yes, that’s part of life, but it’s only a short part of the year and it’s still a long way off.

  And you should envy me because of this or that? Oh no, old chap, because what I’m seeking can be found by all, by you perhaps sooner than by me. And oh, I’m so backward and narrow-minded about so many things, if only I knew exactly why and what I should do to improve. But unfortunately we often don’t see the beams in our own eye. Do write to me soon, and you’ll just have to separate the wheat from the chaff in my letters, if sometimes there’s something good in them, something true, so much the better, but of course there’s much in them that’s wrong, more or less, or perhaps exaggerated, without my always being aware of it. I’m truly no scholar and am so extremely ignorant, oh, like many others and even more than others, but I can’t gauge that myself, and I can gauge others even less than I can gauge myself, and am often wide of the mark. But even as we stray we sometimes find the track anyway, and there’s something good in all movement (by the way, I happened to hear Jules Breton say that and have remembered that utterance of his). Tell me, have you ever heard Mauve preach?? I’ve heard him imitate several clergymen — once he gave a sermon on Peter’s barque (the sermon was divided into 3 parts: First, would he have bought it or inherited it? Second, would he have paid for it in instalments or p
arts? Third, did he perhaps (banish the thought) steal it?). Then he went on to preach on ‘the goodness of the Lord’ and on ‘the Tigris and the Euphrates’ and finally he did an imitation of J.P.S., how he had married A. and Lecomte.

  But when I told him that I had once said in a conversation with Pa that I believed that one could say something edifying even in church, even from the pulpit, M. said, Yes. And then he did an imitation of Father Bernhard: God — God — is almighty — he created the sea, he created the earth and the sky and the stars and the sun and the moon, he can do everything — everything — everything — and yet — no, He’s not almighty, there’s one thing He cannot do. What is the one thing that God Almighty cannot do? God Almighty cannot cast away a sinner. Well, adieu, Theo, do write soon, in thought a handshake, believe me

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  The Hague, 29 December 1881–10 September 1883

  194 | The Hague, Thursday, 29 December 1881 | To Theo van Gogh (D)

  The Hague, Thursday evening

  My dear Theo,

  Accept my thanks for your letter and the enclosure. When I received your letter I was back in Etten, following Mauve’s advice, as I wrote to you. But now, as you see, I’m back in The Hague again.

  At Christmas I had a rather violent argument with Pa, and feelings ran so high that Pa said it would be better if I left home. Well, it was said so decidedly that I actually left the same day.

  Things actually came to a head because I didn’t go to church, and also said that if going to church was something forced and I had to go to church, I’d most certainly never go again, not even out of politeness, as I’ve been doing fairly regularly the whole time I’ve been in Etten. But oh, there’s actually much more to it, including the whole story of what happened this summer between me and K.V.

  I was angrier than I ever remember being in my whole life, and I told Pa plainly that I found the whole system of that religion loathsome, and precisely because I dwelled on those things too much during a miserable time in my life I don’t want anything more to do with it, and have to guard against it as against something fatal.

  Was I too angry, too violent? — so be it, but even supposing that to be the case, then at least now it’s over and done with.

  I went back to M. and said, listen M., I can’t stay in Etten and I have to go and live somewhere else, preferably here.

  Well, M. said, stay here then. And so I’ve rented a studio here, namely a room and alcove which can be made suitable. Inexpensive enough, just outside town in Schenkweg, about 10 minutes from M.

  Pa told me that if I needed money he would lend it to me if necessary, but now that’s impossible, I must remain completely independent of Pa. How? I don’t know yet, but M. is willing to help me if necessary, and you too, I hope and trust, and of course I’ll work and do my utmost to earn a little.

  I’m here now, and the fact is there’s no turning back. At an inconvenient time, but what’s to be done?

  I must have some simple furniture, and my expenses for drawing and painting materials aren’t getting any lower.

  I also have to try and dress better. It’s a daring move, and a question of sink or swim. But some day I’d have set up house on my own, so what else can I do? Now things have gone faster than I expected.

  As far as the relations between Pa and Ma and me are concerned, they can’t be put to rights so very quickly. The difference in our mentality and outlook on life is simply too great.

  And although I spoke in anger, I said things that I also think when I’m in a calmer mood. So I don’t take back what I said, and anyway Pa has now heard it plainly. If I’d been calmer, I’d have said it in other, less extreme colours, but basically I’d have thought the same.

  And I hope that in any case it will lead to something good. I must endure bad times and the waters will rise, possibly as high as the lips and possibly even higher, how can I know beforehand? But I’ll fight my fight and sell my life dearly and try to win and pull through.

  I’ll be moving into the studio around 1 January. Regarding furniture, I’ll take the very simplest, a wooden table, a couple of chairs.

  For a bed, I’d be content with a woollen blanket and the floor. But M. wants me to buy a bed and will lend me the money if necessary. When drawing up an account of the 100 francs, there turned out to be money left over, even though I made two journeys this summer, and once, the last time, for such a long time. It’s true that I ate and slept at home, but Pa himself said at the time that he could spare it.

  You understand that I’m now extremely worried, and foresee much toil and tribulation. But still it’s a relief to me that I’ve gone so far that I can no longer go back, and that even though the path is difficult, my path is now clear enough.

  It goes without saying that I’m asking you, Theo, if you can do it, to send me now and then what you can without going short yourself. And — in the circumstances, send it to me rather than giving it to others. Because if possible we shouldn’t get Mauve mixed up in this, as far as financial matters are concerned. It’s already of inestimable value that he helps me artistically in word and deed. He insists, however, that I buy a bed, for instance, and a couple of pieces of furniture, and says, I’ll lend it to you if necessary. Because according to him I must, no matter what, appear presentable as regards my clothing, and not try to scrimp and save.

  I’ll write to you again soon. I don’t want to consider it a misfortune that it’s turned out this way, on the contrary, despite all the emotion I feel a certain calm.

  There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we didn’t dare to take things in hand?

  I ran around everywhere to find that studio, both in the city and in Scheveningen.

  Scheveningen is terribly expensive. This studio costs only 7 guilders a month, but the furniture makes it difficult. Still, if one has one’s own things, they won’t disappear, and one has surer ground beneath one’s feet.

  The light comes from the south, more or less, but the window is large and high, and I have hopes that it will look nice after a time.

  You can imagine how stimulated I feel. What will my work be like in a year? If only I could express what I feel — well, Mauve understands all this and wants to give me as many technical tips as he can — what fills my head and heart must be expressed in drawings or paintings.

  Mauve himself is very busy with a large painting of a pink against the dunes being hauled by horses. I think it’s wonderful to be in The Hague, and I find no end of beautiful things and I must try and depict some of them.

  Adieu, old chap, accept a handshake in thought and write soon, believe me

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  Many regards from M. and Jet.

  I still have a bit of money, but how long will I be able to get by on it? I have to stay at the boarding-house until 1 January.

  Just address your letters to the address A. Mauve. Uilebomen 198, since I go there almost every day.

  196 | The Hague, on or about Tuesday, 3 January 1882 | To Theo van Gogh (D)

  Dear brother,

  I’m just writing to wish you a happy New Year, may it be a good year for you in every way and, I add egoistically, for myself as well.

  Now as to me, it will perhaps not be disagreeable for you to learn that I’m installed in a studio of my own. A room and alcove, the light is bright enough, for the window is large (twice as large as an ordinary window), and it’s more or less facing south. I’ve bought furniture in true ‘village constable style’, as you call it, but I think that mine resembles it much more than yours, although it was you who coined the phrase. (I have real kitchen chairs, for example, and a really sturdy kitchen table.)

  Mauve lent me some money, 100 guilders, to rent it, furnish it and get the window and light fixed up. This is rather a worry, you’ll understand, but anyhow it’s the only sensible way, and in the long run it’s much less expensive having one’s own things than always spending money on y
et another semi-furnished room.

  I’ve had a great deal of difficulty, what with finding it and then arranging the furniture in such a way that I could manage with what I had. But now, old chap, I have a real studio of my own and am terribly pleased with it.

  I hadn’t dared hope that things would go this quickly, but now I think it superb and hope that you do too.

  Listen, you know it all, my expenses will be slightly higher than they were in Etten, but let’s put our shoulders to the wheel. M. gives me much hope that I’ll soon be earning something.

  And now that I’m in my own studio, it will most probably make a not unfavourable impression on some people who until now have thought that I’m merely dabbling, idling or loafing about.

  I hope that you’ll be able to send me something one of these days. If I needed something urgently and asked it of Mauve, he wouldn’t refuse me, but for the time being he’s really done enough. It happens to everyone at some point in life that he has to set himself up in his own house, and although at first I couldn’t face being in debt, I do feel that it’s better this way.

  The plan is that I continue to work regularly from a model. That’s expensive, and yet it’s the cheapest way.

  De Bock ultimately disappoints me, there’s something spineless about him, and he gets angry if one says certain things to him that are actually only the ABCs. He has a feeling for landscape, he sometimes manages to imbue them with a kind of charm (including the large painting he’s now working on), but in himself there’s nothing to get hold of. He’s too vague and too insubstantial — cotton too finely woven. His paintings are a shadow of an impression, and in my opinion that impression is scarcely worth repeating so often.

  I won’t associate very much with the painters. I find Mauve more capable and more solid every day. And what more do I want? Theo, I’ll have to start dressing a bit better now, though. Now I know more or less the direction I must take, and can stand up for it openly, so I won’t avoid contact with people — also not follow them too much. M. and Jet send you their regards, adieu, I still have a lot to do, believe me