Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  As Christmas 1870 approached, after a year and a half in The Hague, Vincent was still miserable. The house where he lived, not far from the store, was crowded with members of the owner’s family, the Rooses, along with several boarders Vincent’s age (including his coworker, Iterson). But none, apparently, offered companionship. He retreated into old habits of solitude, preferring lonely walks in the nearby countryside to skating parties with his housemates. Both Vincent’s parents and his uncle Cent complained bitterly that Vincent “failed to seek out good company” during his years in The Hague, despite multiple opportunities and relentless encouragements. But socializing required money, and Vincent’s meager salary did not even cover the cost of his room and board at the Rooses’; his father had to supplement his wages. “Real poverty” is how he later described his condition. As for Christmas, the train trip to Zundert was expensive, and there was always a chance that Tersteeg would cancel his Christmas leave—as in fact he did—because the holiday season was the store’s busiest.

  Then, in November 1870, truly devastating news arrived from home: the family was leaving Zundert. After twenty-two years, Dorus had taken a position in Helvoirt, about twenty-five miles east of Breda, where another declining Brabant congregation needed the persistent sower. The Van Gogh family celebrated its last Zundert Christmas that year. By February 1871, they had left the parsonage, the garden, the creek, and the heath forever.

  In a wave of nostalgia precipitated by the move, Vincent reached out to his only parsonage ally: Theo.

  At first, his efforts to reconnect with the brother who once adored him met with failure. Theo’s friends in Helvoirt, sons of the junker family that had persuaded Dorus and Anna to leave Zundert, saw in Vincent only what everyone else saw: a strange and “difficult” young man—“good for nothing,” in their estimation. When he came to visit, they made fun of him behind his back. Years later, they remembered that Theo shared their low opinion of his visiting brother—“and he spoke it out loud,” one of them recalled. “There was not much closeness between them.”

  Then, in August 1872, probably after intense lobbying by Vincent, Theo came to visit him in The Hague. He was fifteen now, almost the same age as Vincent was when he left home. He stayed for some time—long enough for Vincent to grow accustomed to his companionship. They visited the Mauritshuis, where Vincent could show off his astonishing new knowledge. But mostly they just walked. One day, they struck out for the beach at Scheveningen. Vincent chose a route not along the fashionable, villa-lined boulevard but via a secret path through the woods. (He called them “my woods.”) Another day, they headed in the opposite direction: east, toward Rijswijk, probably to attend a family celebration.

  The two brothers walked the towpath that ran atop the dike beside the Rijswijk canal. Occasionally, a barge glided by under sail. On windless days, horses (and people) still used the towpath to pull their waterborne loads. They stopped at a seventeenth-century mill built to drain the meadows beyond the dike. A twenty-foot water wheel still carried on the Sisyphean labor. From a window at the base of the mill, the miller sold baked eel and milk from a cow on the premises for a penny a glass. They drank and walked on to the party at a house on the banks of the canal. They stood next to each other in the back as the assembled guests posed for a picture: Theo obediently still for the long exposure, Vincent almost as restless as the blur of children in the front row.

  The walk to Rijswijk that day, like the rainy farewell in Zevenbergen, soon assumed mythic significance for Vincent. Years later, he would recall with aching nostalgia “that time long ago when … we walked together along the Rijswijk road and drank milk at the mill.” He called the memory of that day “perhaps the most beautiful I have,” and lamented that “it would have been impossible for me to put what I saw and felt on paper.” For the rest of his life, he spoke of that day as a lost Eden of “sympathy” and sharing between two brothers “bound up in one … feeling, thinking and believing the same.” Whether it was true—whether Theo had put aside his friends’ mockery and low opinions of his brother—didn’t matter. Lonely at work, estranged from his parents, evicted from his childhood home, Vincent needed to believe that he had found a companion at last.

  Rijswijk set the pattern; and it would not change for the rest of his life: nostalgia as antidote for loneliness; the past as remedy for the present. Immediately after Theo’s departure, Vincent began writing him: “Waarde Theo” (Dear Theo), “I missed you the first few days; it felt strange not to find you there when I came home in the afternoons.” It was the beginning of a correspondence that would grow into one of the great documents of the human experience.

  ONE OF THE TOPICS almost certainly discussed on the road to Rijswijk was women—in particular, a pretty blond girl named Caroline Haanebeek, who also attended the party that day. Vincent had encountered her among the dense thicket of Van Gogh and Carbentus relatives in The Hague. The connection was close enough for family nicknames, but not too close for romantic aspirations. Caroline’s father, Carl Adolph Haanebeek, ran a prosperous business and lived in a big townhouse just around the corner from the Spuistraat, long home to both Van Goghs and Carbentuses. All of which set Anna van Gogh’s bourgeois heart racing. “Such good and solid people,” she called the Haanebeeks, urging their company on her son. “It is good for your further development to associate yourself with people like that.”

  Vincent did not need his mother’s encouragement to find nineteen-year-old Caroline Haanebeek attractive. Open, lighthearted, and unselfconscious (judging by her later letters), she was everything the dour young apprentice was not. She loved music—not the dreary parlor anthems of cultivated society, but cheerful popular tunes like “Riez, riez, mes jeunes amours” (Laugh, laugh, my young loves)—songs that flouted propriety just by the use of French. She enjoyed entertaining, and treated men with a simple directness that must have seemed flatteringly flirtatious in the corseted world of Hague society. Even Dorus van Gogh registered her charm: “the most delicate flower,” he called her approvingly. In fact, she was wearing wildflowers in her hair at the family gathering that day on the banks of the Rijswijk canal.

  Vincent may have been infatuated with Caroline, from afar, for some time. His later cryptic references to her suggest a first, great, chaste love. He describes his passion as “intellectual,” not “physical.” “One half of me fancied that I was in love,” he wrote, “and with the other half I really was.” If he ever declared that love, it was not a wooing, romantic voice that Caroline heard, but an insistent, contentious one—the voice that Vincent would always use to argue passions (his own and others’) into submission. It was the voice of lonely desperation. “I wanted only to give,” he recalled, “without asking anything in return.” Vincent’s infatuation may or may not have gone unexpressed, but it certainly went unrequited. By the time he and Theo arrived at the celebration that day, he must have known that Caroline Haanebeek was planning to marry their cousin Willem van Stockum. Caroline may even have chosen the party to announce her engagement. In the group photo, she stands next to Van Stockum and playfully flashes her hand to the camera, as if to show off a ring.

  Vincent’s reaction to the announcement was clear enough. “If I cannot get a good woman,” he told Theo, “I shall take a bad one … I would sooner be with a bad whore than be alone.” Driven more by loneliness than libido (“my physical passions were very weak then,” he later confessed), he began seeing prostitutes.

  They were not hard to find in The Hague. Only a few blocks from the Goupil store, in a warren of medieval wooden buildings called the Geest, Vincent could find virtually anything he wanted, short of genuine affection. Despite a wave of reform in the 1860s and 1870s that required brothels to be registered and prostitutes to undergo regular medical exams, the ancient business of sex flourished uninterrupted on the street. For every brothel shuttered by regulatory burdens, a beer house or tobacconist shop “with female service” opened in its place. Later, when Theo moved to The Hag
ue, Vincent warned him not to patronize such places “unless you can’t do otherwise—then there is no harm in it for once.”

  Vincent’s visits to the Geest, which began at least as early as the fall of 1872, when he was nineteen, were the first in a lifetime of trips down dark roads and dockside alleys in search of the intimacy he could not find elsewhere. Brothels were often his first stop in a new city. Sometimes he came merely to sit, to share a drink, to play cards, or to talk—“about life, about worries, about misery, about everything,” he said. If the brothel keeper kicked him out, he would stand outside the entrance and just watch the customers come and go. When admitted, he engaged in the coarse whorehouse humor of his fellow patrons, and could fence in bawdy innuendo with the best of them. But his own interactions with “those women who are so damned and condemned” seemed always to be marked by empathy and the reticence of need. He confessed a “special affection” for them, and sagely advised Theo to see only those prostitutes “you can feel something for.”

  Vincent later recorded that, after the first miserable years, his time in The Hague became “much happier” around 1872. But the combination of a vulnerable heart and limited resources inevitably led to trouble. The exact nature of the trouble can only be inferred, but it was serious enough that Vincent reported being “frightened” of his parents’ reaction, and “seized by a kind of panic.” In desperation, he sought the advice of his young boss. Tersteeg responded in the bluntest terms: Vincent would have to abandon the forbidden activity—almost certainly a liaison or series of liaisons. To carry on would violate his “obligations towards [his] family.” If he did not, Tersteeg apparently warned, the family could institute proceedings to place him under legal guardianship. Even a decade later, Vincent recalled Tersteeg’s response as a bitter betrayal, writing “I have regretted ever since that I broached the matter with him.”

  By Christmas, “the matter” had reached Van Gogh ears. Vincent always suspected Tersteeg was responsible. “I am now almost certain,” he wrote years later, “that long ago he said things about me which contributed not a little toward putting me in a bad light.” Whether or not Tersteeg reported it, the ugly news had immediate and devastating consequences. Questions about Vincent’s job performance had already been raised at the highest level. In October 1872, the family chronicler, Uncle Cent’s sister, noted doubts about their nephew Vincent—doubts that could only have come from Cent himself: “Sometimes one thinks he can become very suitable,” she wrote, “then the other way around.”

  When those doubts reached the parsonage in Helvoirt, alarms sounded. Money was tighter than ever. The prospect that they might once again have to assume the financial burden of Vincent, plus the dread that his return might trigger another round of embarrassment in the eyes of their new community, made saving Vincent’s job their highest priority. “You can imagine,” Dorus wrote a family member, “that [Vincent’s] case is keeping us very occupied.”

  Meanwhile, their exchanges with Vincent were increasingly marked by “unpleasant things,” he later recalled. Dorus deluged his wayward son with admonitory and inspirational letters, poems, and pamphlets, urging him to “fight against [him]self,” “confess [his] weakness,” and “tear [his] heart away from the service of sin.” Perhaps at Dorus’s insistence, Vincent took Bible lessons, but made a show of indifference to them. To his fellow boarders at the Rooses’ he presented himself as an atheist. Defying his father’s urgings to guilt and repentance, he turned instead for consolation to the burgeoning secular literature of self-improvement books. He sat glumly for a photograph that even his mother couldn’t like (she called his expression “sour”).

  The battle lines were drawn. It must have been a bitter, contentious Christmas—the first of many—as Vincent and his parents rehearsed their already-old antagonisms. By New Year’s Eve, he was back at the Roos house in The Hague, where a fellow boarder saw him sitting by the open fireplace “calmly throwing the pages of a religious booklet his father had given him into the fire, one by one.”

  THE FIRST VICTIM of the turmoil in Vincent’s life was his brother Theo. The financial pressures in Helvoirt were approaching a crisis. Not only was it increasingly likely that Vincent would be thrown back on the family dole, but he also risked drawing a low number in the draft lottery when he turned twenty in March 1873. Dorus would either have to let him sail off to fight a colonial uprising in Sumatra—an unspeakable shame and a virtual surrender of his future—or buy him out of service, an unspeakable expense. The family needed another source of income, and only Theo could provide it. After much discussion, Dorus and Cent found him an apprentice position—like Vincent’s—at the Goupil branch in Brussels. Theo resisted at first. Unlike his older brother, he enjoyed school, and he hated to leave his friends in Helvoirt. But duty came first. “God called you to this job,” Dorus told him. In early January, 1873, still only fifteen, Theo took the train to Brussels and started work.

  Anna and Dorus encouraged the new Goupil employee to “become really smart like Vincent.” But behind the scenes they worked furiously to ensure that he did not follow his wayward brother’s example in other ways. They boarded him with a pastor, who also gave him confirmation classes, and enrolled him in a “youth club” to fill his free time with the right kind of people (as a “safeguard against bad influences”). They inundated him with encouragements to attend church, obey his boss, dress well, and eat meat (“to become strong”). The direst warnings targeted sexual misadventures and religious laxity, the two traps into which Vincent had fallen. “Always stick to your principles,” Dorus wrote. “Happiness is only to be found along the path of propriety and true piousness.”

  Despite early pangs of loneliness and dissatisfaction with his reverend landlord, Theo thrived in Brussels. Within a month, the store’s reserved gérant, Tobias Victor Schmidt, was sending reports admiring Theo’s “suitability” to the art trade and predicting his ultimate success. Dorus congratulated his son (“It is wonderful that you have made such a good start”) and called him “plucky”—high praise from the persistent sower. Theo learned bookkeeping and studied French at night. Gérant Schmidt soon grew so fond of his youngest assistant that he invited him to move into his apartment above the store. The comparison to his struggling brother did not escape notice. “You do so well there,” his mother wrote, “compared to Vincent’s life.”

  Vincent had probably encouraged his brother to join him in the art trade, although not so soon and certainly not at such a distance; but the decision to send him to Brussels seemed to catch Vincent by surprise. “What good news I’ve just read in Father’s letter,” he wrote Theo around New Year’s Day 1873. “I wish you luck with all my heart.” Soon, jubilation overtook surprise. “I am very happy that you [now] work in the same firm,” he wrote a couple of weeks later. Eventually, Vincent came to see the move as the consummation of the relationship the brothers had forged in The Hague the previous summer. “We still have a lot to talk about,” he wrote euphorically. In a fierce assertion of fraternal solidarity, he flooded his brother with advice, instruction, and encouragement. He consoled Theo’s early loneliness, hearing in it echoes of his own; congratulated his early successes; and commiserated over an apprentice’s hellishly busy workday. He talked about artists and repeatedly demanded that Theo tell him “what pictures you see and which you like best.”

  For Vincent, Theo’s new role fulfilled the promise of the Rijswijk road: two brothers “bound up in one … feeling, thinking and believing the same.” Energized by that vision, Vincent launched into the new year with a surge of fresh enthusiasm. He traveled on business, visited clients, and never missed a chance to see more paintings. He reconnected with family members and even joined in social events, like boating parties. After each new experience, he would rush to pen and paper to share it with Theo. At times, his newfound zeal for work bordered on exhilaration, as he played both cheerleader and example to his young protégé in Brussels: “[Goupil] is such a splendid house,” he
wrote. “The more one works there, the more ambition it gives you.”

  But the decision had already been made: Vincent would have to leave The Hague.

  Cent and Tersteeg had probably come to that conclusion at Christmas, when they typically conferred and planned for the coming year. Dorus, who never hesitated to intervene with “the gentlemen” when his sons’ interests were at stake, must have been involved in the decision. By the end of January, Tersteeg informed Vincent that he would be transferred “probably very soon” to the Goupil branch in London. No one recorded the reasons for the transfer. Vincent, apparently, either did not know them or did not want to share them with his brother. “It has been decided that I have to go away” was all he said.

  But the connection between his misbehavior and his removal could not be denied. If he continued on his wayward path, he risked discrediting the family, the family’s best name, and even the family business. Other factors may have contributed to the decision. Vincent’s strained relations with his parents could only have reinforced Cent’s doubts about the nephew who bore his name. In the photograph he had taken in December, Vincent appears rumpled and vexed—the opposite of his sprightly, dapper uncle and his gregarious younger brother. Vincent’s sister Lies later recalled that his “awkwardness and shyness were a detriment to him in his business.”

  Dismissing him, however, was not an option. It would not only embarrass the family, it would throw a new burden on Dorus’s strained finances. It would also waste Vincent’s one undisputed asset: his astounding knowledge of Goupil’s vast inventory of images. For both reasons, apparently, the transfer to London presented the perfect solution (and shows the hand of the shrewd Tersteeg): the London branch was wholesale only; it had no gallery. Because it sold only to dealers, not retail customers, Vincent would have only limited contact with the public—and, even then, only the English public. “They were sending him to London,” his sister recalled, “to see [if] it might be easier for him to have dealings with the English.”