Just as language exacerbated his isolation, money exacerbated his guilt—as it would for the rest of his life. Even though his salary had almost doubled when he moved to London, it still barely covered his expenses. “To save on pennies,” he stopped taking the steamer into the city and instead walked the whole way, crossing the Thames on one of the madhouse bridges. He vowed to find a cheaper boardinghouse. His letters home were filled with promises to economize and exaggerated mea culpas over minor expenditures that betray a deeper, more implacable guilt. Meanwhile, his parents sent increasingly dire reports of financial hardship in Helvoirt and brave pledges of further sacrifice for their children. “We will try to live economically,” Anna wrote, “and be happy when the money we invest in you proves to be well spent; that’s the best interest rate one can hope for.”
By August, homesickness, isolation, and self-reproach had deepened into melancholy. For months Vincent had tried to reassure his parents that he was “content,” “doing fine,” and “experiencing delightful satisfaction” in his new job. With Theo, he could be more open, though still stoic. In June, he wrote: “Considering the circumstances, I am doing pretty well.” In July: “I shall probably get used to it.” In August: “I shall bear with it a little longer.”
Searching for an escape from the despondency that threatened to overtake him, Vincent opened an intimate correspondence with the now-married Caroline Haanebeek. In his manic way, he flooded her with flattering, suggestive images (some in poetry, some in prints) of blond young ladies and country maidens in coquettish poses. He copied out a poem by John Keats about a “maiden fair” with “bright drooping hair,” and directed her to another, longer Keats poem ripe with erotic imagery. He sent her an extract from the popular French love manual L’amour by Jules Michelet, describing a man haunted by the portrait of a woman “who took my heart, so ingenuous, so honest … This woman has remained in my mind.” He invoked their past relationship in language more appropriate to separated lovers than distant friends, and recommended that she read Longfellow’s Evangeline, the story of a young Acadian torn from his true love.
What did Vincent expect to gain from this seduction by words and images of the happily married Caroline? It was, in fact, the first in a lifetime of hopeless campaigns to remold hearts by persuasion. It shows his capacity for illusory attachments and the extremes to which such illusions could carry him. It also reveals the extent to which he had already begun to find consolation—that is, mediation between a hostile reality and aspirations to happiness—in literature and art. He told Caroline of his search for “a homeland … a small spot in the world where we are sent to stay.” “[I] have not got there yet,” he wrote, “though I am straining after it, and perhaps may yet grasp it.”
In the fall of 1873, Vincent’s parents heard a new voice coming from their eldest son in London. “We are getting cheerful letters,” Dorus reported with some surprise. But the reason was not Caroline Haanebeek, who had rejected his strange suit.
Vincent had found a new family.
OVER THE SEVENTEEN YEARS of life remaining to him, Vincent would try repeatedly to attach himself to other families as he grew increasingly estranged from his own. He had already tried at least once in The Hague, assiduously cultivating the devotion of little Betsy Tersteeg in the hope of making a place for himself in his boss’s close-knit young family. He may have tried again in London with his new boss, Obach, whose wife and children Vincent visited at home. Over the coming years, he would be especially drawn to inchoate families: families that had lost a father-husband, or never had one, leaving a void that he could readily fill; families in which he could feel, for a change, welcome.
To Vincent, Ursula Loyer and her daughter Eugenie must have looked like such a family. He came as a boarder to the house at 87 Hackford Road in Brixton, where mother and daughter ran a small day-school for boys. The rent was cheaper and the walk to work shorter (less than an hour). From early on, Vincent must have seen the fifty-eight-year-old widow Ursula and the nineteen-year-old Eugenie as kindred spirits: wounded, errant, in search of a “homeland.” Even the name, Loyer, seemed uprooted—a lovely French word (“loy-yay”) displaced by a sour English pronunciation: “lawyer.”
URSULA AND EUGENIE LOYER (Illustration credit 6.1)
Born to a ship’s captain, Ursula had the seen-it-all stoicism of sailors’ women. “Her name is written in the book of life,” Vincent observed. Small and bony, with oversized features, Ursula had been battered by life but not beaten. A grandchild later described her as “a kindly old soul” with “not one hint of misery.” Eugenie, on the other hand, was already a formidable woman. With her large head, broad features, and stocky frame, she could have been Vincent’s sister (favoring his mother), right down to the shock of red hair that she wore pulled up in a flaming tousle. As a girl who had spent most of her life without father or siblings, she carried herself more like a man than a woman: willful, withholding, “domineering [and] difficult,” according to her daughter, with a “sharp wit” and an explosive temper.
The missing member, who marked the family with its mongrel name, had been dead for more than a decade. Jean-Baptiste Loyer was also a man without a home. A native of Provence, Loyer had been driven into exile by family problems. He arrived in London as a stranger, married Ursula, and fathered only one child, Eugenie, before falling mortally ill from “consumption.” According to family legend, Loyer’s last wish was to die in his homeland. With his wife and young daughter, he returned to France and took a cabin by the sea, where every evening friends carried him to the shore to watch the sun set. When the moment of death arrived, he made his confession, and “all who were present wept when they heard of his pure and righteous life.” A document recounting these events eventually found its way into Vincent’s hands. True or not, the story of exile and homecoming so moved him that for years afterward he kept a copy, which he transcribed and sent to family members. “He loved nature and he saw God,” the account concluded, “this stranger on the earth.”
Inevitably, Vincent saw Ursula and Eugenie through the gauze of this sentimental tale. Instead of a wizened landlady and her headstrong daughter (he never wrote a word about either of them to Theo), Vincent saw a brave little family carrying on in the wake of great sorrow. “I never heard or dreamed of anything like the love between [them],” he wrote his sister Anna. From the moment he settled into his tiny third-floor room, Vincent saw this broken but loving family as the perfect fit to his broken-off fragment. “I now have a bedroom such as I always longed for,” he wrote, comparing his new accommodations to his attic room in Zundert. To complete the reverie, he summoned Theo to join him: “Oh! Old man, I so want you to come here.”
He found reprises of his childhood everywhere: in the garden where the Loyers grew flowers and vegetables; in the collections of butterflies and birds’ eggs that filled the house; in the daily bustle of children coming and going to class. He made drawings of his new home and presented them to both his new family and his old one. At Christmastime 1873, he helped decorate the house with holly and celebrated “in the English way,” with pudding and carols. His first Christmas away from home passed without the pangs of homesickness that crippled him in later life. “I hope you had as happy a Christmas as I had,” he bragged to Theo.
Emboldened by this newfound sense of belonging, Vincent began the new year determined to reclaim his place in his true family. He wrote home faithfully, always in a cheerful voice. He applied himself to the drudgery of work with a diligence that brought commendations all the way up to Paris (and thence to Helvoirt). Flush with a New Year’s raise, he sent so much money home that his parents worried he was “denying himself.” He even reached out to his former boss and family favorite, H. G. Tersteeg.
The centerpiece of this new campaign of rehabilitation was a plan to bring his sister Anna to England. By finding her a paying position as a governess in an English family, he could relieve the financial pressures on the parsonage and earn his
way back into favor. In January, he began his two-pronged campaign. To his parents, he relentlessly argued the practicalities of the venture: Anna could interview in person, more offers would be open to her, and she could practice her English. He placed advertisements in newspapers, sought out suitable positions, and drafted letters of inquiry. He even offered to come home and accompany his sister on the trip across the North Sea. “Such a dear [Vincent],” his mother wrote, “so willing to help.”
To Anna, however, Vincent wove a different narrative, one designed to appeal to her lonely teenage heart. He emphasized the warmth and welcome of the Loyers—so different from the cold formality of her boarding school. They would be for her, as they were for him, a second family, he promised. Eugenie and Vincent had agreed to be “like brother and sister to each other,” Vincent wrote; and Anna “should consider her a sister, too.” “Be kind to her for my sake,” he summed up. Ursula wrote Anna a warm letter urging her to think of the house on Hackford Road “as her own home,” and inviting her to come join the celebration of Eugenie’s engagement “to a good-natured youth who will know how to appreciate her.”
Weighed down by continuing money woes, Vincent’s parents reluctantly agreed to his plan. In June, he would come to Helvoirt and escort Anna to England, where he would help her find work (and support her in the meantime). Vincent was ecstatic. “Our Anna will come here,” he wrote Theo. “How wonderful that will be for me. It is almost too good to be true.”
Even as Vincent’s campaign to regain his place in the family appeared headed for success, however, that place was being taken. In November, only six months after Vincent was removed, Theo was transferred to the Hague branch of Goupil. He moved into Vincent’s boardinghouse and took up most of his brother’s duties at the store. Gérant Tersteeg invited Theo to the apartment upstairs for coffee and enlightenment, just as he had Vincent.
The contrast between the two brothers could not have been starker. With his pleasing looks and mild manner, Theo mixed effortlessly in any company. Clients called him “tactful” and “attentive”—two words never heard about Vincent. Theo not only looked more like his famous uncle than Vincent did, he also had Cent’s famous “golden tongue.” Even at sixteen, Theo “knew how to handle” customers, according to one account: how to “help them to a better discernment,” so that “they always thought it was their own choice.” He soon won praise not only from his demanding boss (“How well suited you are for this business,” Tersteeg marveled), but also from his all-seeing Uncle Cent, who would hear “not a word spoken against” this nephew.
After the disappointment of Vincent, Theo’s successes were celebrated at the parsonage in Helvoirt with joy and relief. Not only had he renewed the family hopes of providing an heir to Uncle Cent, he had already (by age seventeen) achieved a measure of self-sufficiency that had taken Vincent years to reach. “It’s a privilege that you are making so much money already,” Dorus wrote. “That means something!” In The Hague, Theo upheld family obligations that Vincent had often ignored. For setting such an admirable example, his parents showered him with gratitude, encouragement, and undisguised favor. “Be well and always remain our joy and crown!” they wrote to him.
News of Theo’s success, broadcast in letters to all the family, did not go unnoticed in London. Vincent had already heard from Tersteeg at Christmastime about his brother’s quick ascent. He professed to be “pleased” at the news, but did not show it. Despite a busy correspondence with others, his letters to Theo slowed to a grudging crawl. When he did write, the letters were short and perfunctory. Breaking a two-month silence, Vincent explained brusquely, “[I] am very busy.” The insistent inquiries to “tell me what you see” came to an end. Instead, Vincent loftily suggested that Theo “think it over and perhaps you will have some questions [about art] to put to me.” Theo quickly assumed the role of the more desultory correspondent, often waiting weeks to reply to his brother’s letters; unlike Vincent, who typically fired off responses to Theo within a day or two—an asymmetrical embrace in which they would remain locked for the rest of their lives.
By June, when Vincent returned to Helvoirt to escort Anna to London, the relationship between the brothers had cooled. Nor did Vincent receive the warm, grateful welcome he expected. Instead of enthusiasm for his new life and new family, he found only suspicion. The fault may have been Anna’s. Vincent’s attempt to enlist her in his campaign with talk of love had backfired. A relentless matchmaker, Anna began to spin webs of schoolgirl fantasy as soon as she received his first letter about the Loyers. Only days after Vincent cautioned her, “Old girl, you must not think there is anything more to this than what I have written,” Anna speculated to Theo that there was “more than a brother’s love” between Vincent and Eugenie. No matter how many times Vincent denied it and enjoined her “do not mention this at home,” Anna doubtless spread the innuendo of nascent love to her parents just as she did to Theo. Subsequent “corrections” reporting Eugenie’s engagement to another man just added to the puzzlement and concern at the parsonage, where Vincent’s motives were always in doubt and where news of his odd epistolary courtship of Caroline Haanebeek may already have reached.
As usual, the Van Goghs blamed the company Vincent kept. The contradictory stories about Eugenie’s availability cast an unfavorable light on her mother, Ursula, whom Anna referred to disdainfully as “that old lady.” What kind of mother would expose her daughter’s reputation to such damaging ambiguities? The very inchoateness of the Loyer family that so attracted Vincent struck his parents as worrisomely “unnatural.” “They are no family like ordinary people,” Anna warned Theo. Dorus, of course, questioned the moral compass of any enterprise touched by French immorality. The possibility that Eugenie was a fatherless “love child” must have lurked in their darkest fears. They complained of “too many secrets” at the house on Hackford Road, and worried that the Loyers “were not doing [Vincent] any good.”
The more Vincent insisted on the joys of his new family—“wonderful,” he called it, “an escape from life’s troubles and problems”—the more his parents feared that it was just another of their strange son’s strange “illusions … sure to be disappointed.” The more he detailed the loving embrace he found there, the more they worried about “his life being too lonely and secluded” in the house on Hackford Road. Anna took umbrage at Vincent’s glowing descriptions of familial love far from home. His ardent claims of new “brother-sister” relationships and calls to treat these distant strangers as family members had no place in Anna’s world, where family ties were unique and inviolable. Dorus shared his wife’s misgivings.
And then Theo appeared.
News of his latest triumph had preceded him to Helvoirt. In mid-June, he had met the queen of the Netherlands, Sophie, when she paid a visit to the store on the Plaats. Not long after that, Uncle Cent had introduced him to royalty of a different kind: Adolphe Goupil. Theo’s time and talents were in such demand that he almost had to cancel his trip to Helvoirt for Vincent’s homecoming. The reunion between the two brothers after a year apart was, at best, polite. They talked shop but apparently little else. When Theo rushed back to The Hague the next morning, Vincent, in a fit of pique, refused to accompany him.
The more his family distrusted and marginalized him, the more Vincent withdrew. He spent most of his stay in Helvoirt filling a little sketchbook with “snapshots” of his life in London. After Theo left, he continued the work of self-documentation. He made drawings of the Helvoirt parsonage and gave them to his sisters Lies and Wil. For his parents, he made a big drawing of the view from his window on Hackford Road—an image intended either to reassure them about Anna’s visit there, or to defy them about his future there, or both. In words that Vincent had not heard from home in a long time, his mother roundly approved his turn to drawing as a constructive pastime. “We are all very happy with it,” she wrote Theo. “It is a delightful gift that can be of good use to him.”
Vincent resisted le
aving, as he always resisted leaving home. As his departure approached, he grew more irritable and alienated. When the subject of London came up, he only groused about the fog. “He wasn’t himself,” Anna later complained to Theo. Dorus, physically sick following his father’s death in May, withdrew from parsonage life into the moody seclusion that was his habit. Vincent barely saw him during the last week of his visit. Despite already having overstayed the ten days originally allotted for the trip, Vincent wrote his boss Obach at the last minute requesting more time. He also canceled a side trip to The Hague to see his brother, using the extra time in a last frantic rush of drawing—as if one more image might soften the hearts that seemed set against him.
But nothing worked. His campaign had failed. By the time Vincent and his sister left from the Helvoirt train station on July 14, his parents had come to see Anna as Vincent’s salvation, not the other way around.
LESS THAN A MONTH after returning to London, Vincent left the house on Hackford Road. He never explained why. His relationship with the Loyers resumed amicably after he returned from Helvoirt. Ursula and Eugenie embraced Anna. “They are good people,” she reported home. “They try to make things as comfortable as possible for us.” At first, Vincent seemed deliriously happy to have his sister’s company. “You can imagine how pleasant it is to be here together,” he wrote Theo. Anna accompanied him partway on his walk to work every morning, then practiced the piano in the Loyers’ parlor. She visited his workplace and dined with his boss Obach. On weekends, they toured museums and took picnics in the parks. Vincent learned to swim.
What brought this brief summer idyll to such an abrupt end? In the absence of any explanation, Vincent’s parents saw only vindication of their dark forebodings. “It turns out things weren’t so wonderful at the Loyers’,” Dorus wrote. “I’m glad of it because I had an uneasy feeling about them staying there.” “I’m glad he isn’t there anymore,” Anna agreed. “Real life is different from what one imagines.” Years later, a family legend of unrequited love grew up around Vincent’s sudden departure. In her early account, Johanna Bonger, Theo’s future wife, speculated that Vincent had fallen in love with Eugenie Loyer—a story that compounded Anna’s schoolgirl romanticism with Bonger’s own and launched scores of biographers into speculative seas. “He tried everything to make her break [her] engagement,” Bonger wrote, “but he did not succeed.” It was this “first great sorrow,” Bonger maintained, that changed Vincent forever; that made him, in the words of her tale’s most successful retailer, Irving Stone, “sensitive to the pain of others.”
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