Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Every Christmas, by the warmth of the back-room stove, the family concluded the annual reading of one of Dickens’s five Christmas books. Two of them stayed in Vincent’s imagination for the rest of his life: A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man. Almost every year, he reread these stories, with their vivid images of Faustian visitations, children in jeopardy, and the magical reparative power of domesticity and the Christmas spirit. “They are new to me again every time,” he said. By the end of his life, Dickens’s tale of a man hounded by memories and “an alien from his mother’s heart” would unsettle Vincent in ways he could never have imagined as a boy by the stove in Zundert. What he did feel then, and would feel more and more acutely in the years to come, was the indissoluble union of Christmas and family. “It seems to me,” says Redlaw, the tormented Scrooge of The Haunted Man, “as if the birth-time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I have ever had affection for, or mourned for, or delighted in.”

  No celebration was complete without gift giving. From the earliest age, the Van Gogh children were expected to find or make their own presents for birthdays and anniversaries. All learned how to arrange bouquets of flowers and baskets of food. Eventually, every one of Anna’s children developed a repertoire of crafts to satisfy the demand for holiday tokens. The girls learned embroidery, crochet, macramé, and knitting; the boys learned pottery and woodworking.

  And everybody learned to draw. Under their mother’s tutelage, all the Van Gogh children mastered the parlor arts of collage, sketching, and painting, in order to decorate and personalize the gifts and notes they relentlessly exchanged. A simple box might come adorned with a bouquet of painted flowers; a transcribed poem, with a cutout wreath. They illustrated favorite stories, marrying words to images in the manner of the emblem books widely used to teach children moral lessons. Although prints and other store-bought goods would eventually replace collage and embroidery at Van Gogh celebrations, handmade gifts would always be honored as the most authentic offering on the altar of family.

  TO SURVIVE THE RIGORS of outpost life, Anna’s children had to be as disciplined as frontier soldiers. All eyes were on them, both friendly and unfriendly. Behavior in the parsonage was governed by a single word: duty. “Duty above all other things,” Anna declared.

  Such exhortations carried the weight of centuries of both Calvinist doctrine and Dutch necessity. Calvin’s cry, “Whatever is not a duty is a sin,” had a particular resonance for inhabitants of a flood-threatened land. In the early days, if the seawalls were breached, everyone’s duty was clear enough: they rushed to the break with spade in hand. Feuds were suspended, a “dike peace” was declared. Doubters and shirkers were driven into exile; violators, put to death. If a house caught fire, the owner had a duty to pull it down immediately to prevent the flames from spreading to his neighbors. The duty of cleanliness protected all from the spread of contagion. By the time of Anna’s generation, duty had achieved the status of a religion, and Dutch families like the Van Goghs worshipped a domestic “holy trinity” of Duty, Decency, and Solidity.

  First and foremost, duty meant upholding the family’s position in society.

  When Anna Carbentus traded her upper-middle-class maidenhood in The Hague for life as a parson’s wife in Zundert, there was, according to a prominent historian of the period, “no country in Europe … where people [were] more class-conscious as to their manner of living, the circles to which they belong[ed] and the social category in which they [were] placed” than Holland. Upward mobility was virtually impossible—and viewed with deep disapproval. Downward mobility was the terror of all but those at the bottom. And at a time when deep class divisions ran between city and country, a permanent move to a rural area like Zundert threatened just such a slide.

  The parson and his wife stood at the apex of Zundert’s tiny elite. For centuries, clergymen like Dorus van Gogh had been setting the country’s moral and intellectual agenda, and entering the ministry was still one of only two ways to rise up the social ladder (going to sea was the other). Dorus earned only a modest salary, but the church provided the family with the perquisites of status—a house, a maid, two cooks, a gardener, a carriage, and a horse—that made them feel and appear richer than they were. The family’s midday strolls enhanced the illusion: Dorus in his top hat and the children with their governess. Such emblems of status cushioned the fall from social grace that Zundert represented to Anna, and she clung to them with more than the usual worried tenacity. “We have no money,” she summed up, “but we still have a good name.”

  To protect that good name, Anna instilled in her children a duty to associate only in “civilized good circles.” Virtually all success and happiness in life, she believed, flowed from mixing in good company; all failure and sin, from falling into bad company. Throughout their lives, she relentlessly encouraged them to “mingle with the well-to-do” and warned them against the dangers of associating with those “not of our own class.” She clucked with pleasure whenever one of them was invited to the home of a “distinguished family” and issued detailed instructions on cultivating such connections.

  In Zundert, the “good circle” included only a few distinguished families who summered in the area and a handful of Protestant professionals. Beyond or beneath that tiny circle, Anna did not let her children venture. Beyond lay only Catholic families; beneath lay the working people of Zundert—those who filled the Markt (and the dreaded festivals) and whose company, Protestant or Catholic, Anna considered an invitation to every form of base behavior. “It is better to be around upper-class people,” she advised, “for one is more easily exposed to temptations when dealing with the lower classes.”

  Even farther outside the circle, and absolutely untouchable, lay the unwashed mass of faceless, nameless, landless laborers and peasants that drifted by at the very periphery of polite consciousness. These were the cattle of humanity in the eyes of Anna’s class, not only obstinately ignorant and immoral, but lacking the “heart’s luxuries” (sensitivity and imagination), and indifferent to death. “[They] love and sorrow like people who are exhausted and live only on potatoes,” instructed a parenting handbook that the Van Goghs read. “Their hearts are like their intellects; they have not progressed beyond primary school.”

  To ensure that they did not violate these social boundaries, the Van Gogh children were forbidden to play in the street. As a result, they spent most of their time isolated inside the parsonage or in the garden, as if on an island, with only each other for company.

  To move in any good circle, even one as small and remote as Zundert’s, one had to dress properly, of course. “To present [one]self pleasantly,” Anna instructed, “is also a duty.” Clothes had long been a peculiar obsession of the Dutch and a stage for the subtle class distinctions that preoccupied them. Gentlemen, like Dorus, wore hats; workers (and children) wore caps. Gentlemen wore long formal coats; workers wore smocks. Only a woman of leisure could be bothered with the awkward crinoline hooped skirts that Anna wore. Clothes, like the daily walks that displayed them to the community, marked Anna’s family as members of the upper middle class.

  Inevitably, clothes acquired talismanic significance among the Van Gogh children, the conferring of the first store-bought cap or grown-up suit or overcoat treated as milestones of family status and pride. In later years, both parents rained questions and advisories on their children in endless variation on the lesson of the midday walks in Zundert: “Always make sure that people see a gentleman when they look at you.” Indeed, good clothes and a neat appearance signaled something even more important than class status: they signaled inner order. “What one wears on the outside,” Anna and Dorus taught, reflects “what goes on in the heart.” A stain on one’s clothing was like a stain on one’s soul; and an expensive hat could ensure that one “made a good impression by his exterior as well as his interior self.”

  This was the other lesson of the family walks in Zundert: clothes were a public covenant of good behavior and moral upri
ghtness. For the rest of their lives, the Van Gogh children would view any walk in public as a kind of fashion parade for the soul. Years later, Anna told her son Theo that a stroll in a smart suit “will show people that you are the son of Reverend van Gogh.” Twenty years after he left home, Vincent emerged from the hospital in Arles (where he had been confined for mental instability after cutting off part of his ear) with one overriding concern: “I have to have something new to go out in the street in.”

  In the Zundert parsonage, even the heart had its duty. The Dutch called it degelijkheid. Anna called it “the basis and source of a happy life.” The last of the holy trinity of social deities, degelijkheid (often rendered inadequately in English as “solidity”) summoned the Dutch heart to protect itself from the tides and storms of emotion that had proved so devastating in the past. History had taught that every triumph was followed by defeat, every plenty by want, every calm by upheaval, every Golden Age by apocalypse. The heart’s only protection from the inexorable righting of fate was to seek the solid middle ground, whether in prosperity or adversity, elation or despair. In eating, in clothing, even in painting, the Dutch aimed for the golden mean: the prudent, sustainable balance between sumptuousness and frugality.

  Degelijkheid fit perfectly with Victorian calls to repress unseemly emotions, as well as with the new Protestantism’s rejection of Calvinist zeal. Once again, Anna’s fretful, defensive nature aligned with the zeitgeist. As an inveterate balancer of positives with negatives in her own gloomy calculations, Anna saw her role as keeping the ship of the parsonage on an even emotional keel. Good times would always be followed by “misfortune,” she reminded her children; “troubles and worries,” by “comfort and hope.” Not a moment of joy passed in the Van Gogh household without Anna’s calling attention to its inevitable cost—its “shadow side.” But melancholy, too, was forbidden. “He who denies himself and is self-possessed,” Anna summarized, “is a happy man.”

  The Van Gogh children grew up in a world drained of emotion as if of color; a world in which excesses on all sides—pride and passion on the one hand, self-reproach and indifference on the other—were leveled and centered in the service of degelijkheid; a world in which every positive had to be balanced by a negative; a world in which praise was always tempered with expectation, encouragement with foreboding, enthusiasm with caution. After leaving the island parsonage, all of Anna’s children were buffeted by extremes of emotion with which they had no experience and for which they had no defense. All showed astonishing insensitivity or obtuseness in dealing with emotional crises—in some cases, with catastrophic results.

  Duty, Decency, Solidity. These were the conventions of a happy life—the compasses of a moral life—without which “one cannot become a normal person,” Anna warned. Failure to uphold them offended religion, class, and social order. Failure brought shame to the family. Or worse. The literature of the period bristled with cautionary tales of a “bad life” leading to a tumble down the social ladder. Closer to home, Dorus had a nephew whose shameful conduct had forced his widowed mother into exile, where she “died of a lot of misery,” according to the family chronicler, “and cast a shadow on our house.”

  With nightmares like these in their thoughts, Anna and Dorus raised their children in an atmosphere of constant jeopardy and contingent love. A single wrong step could put one on “the slippery path,” as Dorus called it, with devastating consequences for all. Inevitably, the Van Gogh children grew up deeply afraid of “falling short.” The fear of failure “hung over [them] like a cloud,” according to one account, instilling in all a sense of anticipatory self-reproach that would linger long after they left the parsonage. “How much do we have to love Pa and Ma?” one of them wrote another plaintively. “I am not nearly good enough for them.”

  Every New Year’s Eve the Van Gogh children gathered and prayed together: “Preserve us from too much self-reproach.” None prayed more fervently than the eldest, Vincent.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Strange Boy

  A VISITOR APPROACHING THE ZUNDERT PARSONAGE IN THE 1850S might have seen a small face in one of the second-story windows, eyeing the activity in the Markt. It would have been hard to miss the hair—a head full of thick, curly red locks. The face was odd: oblong, with a high brow and prominent chin, puffy cheeks, shallow-set eyes, and a wide nose. The lower lip protruded in a perpetual pout. Most visitors, if they saw him at all, would only have caught this fleeting glimpse of the parson’s reclusive son Vincent.

  Those who met him noticed immediately how much he favored his mother: the same red hair, the same broad features, the same compact frame. He had dense freckles, and small eyes of a pale, changeable blue-green color. They could seem piercing one minute, vacant the next. In meeting strangers, he was reticent and self-conscious. He tended to hang his head and shift in nervous unease. As his mother bustled about the visitor with tea and cookies and talk of the latest royal doings in The Hague, Vincent would slip awkwardly out of the room to return to his post at the attic window or resume some other solitary activity. The impression he left in many visitors’ minds was “een oarige”—a strange boy.

  Those who looked more closely, or knew them better, might have noticed other similarities between the proper mother and the strange son—similarities that ran deeper than red hair or blue eyes. He shared her fretful view of life, as well as her suspicious gaze. He shared her taste for creature comforts and the finer things—in flower arrangements, fabrics, and home décor (and, later in life, in brushes, pens, paper, and paint). He absorbed her obsession with the prerogatives of rank and status as well as her rigid expectations, of herself and of others, based on stereotypes of class and origin. Despite his restless, antisocial ways, he was as capable of pleasantries and indirections as she; and, already, a bit of a snob. Like her, he often felt lonely and worried relentlessly, which made him a serious and anxious child—hardly a child at all.

  He shared his mother’s need for frantic, forward motion. From the time she taught him to write, his hands, like hers, never stopped. He learned to move a pencil over paper long before he understood the marks he was copying. For him, writing never lost that pure, calligraphic joy. Like his mother, he wrote with feverish speed—as if the greatest enemy was idleness (“Doing nothing is doing wrong,” he warned), and the greatest fear, emptiness. What could be more “miserable” than “a life of inactivity?” he demanded. “Do a great deal or drop dead.”

  His busy hands followed hers into art. Anna wanted her children to have the same refined upbringing she did—a challenge in an outpost like Zundert. An indispensible part of that upbringing was exposure to the fine arts. Her daughters learned to play the piano, just as she had. Everyone took singing lessons. And, starting with Vincent, Anna introduced them all to drawing—not as a childhood craft, but as an artistic endeavor. For a while, she may have kept up her own amateur artwork, setting an example for her son as well as instructing him. At some point, the two Bakhuyzen sisters, Anna’s artist friends from The Hague, visited Zundert, and the three went sketching in the town together.

  Barn and Farmhouse, FEBRUARY 1864, PENCIL ON PAPER, 7⅞ × 10⅝ IN. (Illustration credit 3.1)

  Vincent may or may not have tagged along that day, but in every other way he followed in his mother’s artistic footsteps. As with poetry, he started by copying. Using instructional drawing books and prints, he painstakingly created his first images, including a farm scene that he made for his father’s birthday in February 1864. Anna gave Vincent her own works to trace and color: flowers, mostly, in the decorative nosegays she favored. On a few occasions, he took pencil and sketchpad outside and attempted to render his own world. One of his earliest models was the family’s black cat, which he drew scurrying up a leafless apple tree. But he turned out to be such a poor draftsman that he destroyed the sketch in frustration soon after making it, and, according to his mother, never made another freehand sketch as long as he lived at the parsonage. Later, Vincent would dismiss
all of his childhood work with two words—“little scratches”—and argued, “It is really and truly not until later that the artistic sensibility develops and ripens.”

  Vincent’s attachment to his mother was profound. Later in life, the sight of any mother and child could cause his eyes to “grow moist” and his “heart to melt,” he confessed. Activities and imagery that he associated with motherhood—arranging flowers, sewing, rocking a cradle, even just sitting by the fire—preoccupied him both in life and in art. He clung to a childlike maternal affection, and its tokens, well into his twenties. He was periodically overtaken (stricken, really) by the need to win, or win back, his mother’s favor. He felt intense affection for maternal figures and an equally intense desire to play a maternal role in others’ lives. Two years before he died, when he painted a portrait of his mother “as I see her in my memory,” he simultaneously painted a portrait of himself using exactly the same palette of colors.

  Despite this special attachment, or perhaps because of its inevitable disappointment, Vincent hardened into an obstreperous, ill-tempered child. The process began early with fits of anger so remarkable that they merited a special mention in the family history. Driven to distraction by one such “insufferable” outburst, Vincent’s paternal grandmother (who had raised eleven children of her own) summarily boxed his ears and threw him out of the room. Years later, Anna herself complained: “I never was busier than when we only had Vincent.” A barrage of similar criticism found its way into family recollections that are otherwise bastions of circumspection. They call him “obstinate,” “unruly,” “self-willed,” and “hard to deal with”; “a queer one” with “strange manners” and “a difficult temper.” Sixty years later, even the family maid recalled vividly how “troublesome” and “contrary” Vincent had been, and branded him “the least pleasant” of the Van Gogh children.