Undoubtedly, the reality was both more prosaic and more profound. Vincent’s patchwork family on Hackford Road could not hold together for long. He barely knew his sister Anna, whom adolescence had transformed into a suspicious and censorious nineteen-year-old. Perhaps more important, she did not know him. After weeks of job hunting without success, Anna’s prospects of employment dimmed. “I think it will be very difficult,” Vincent explained to Theo. “They say everywhere that she is too young.” Having promised to support his sister until she found work, Vincent faced his own financial crisis as the August rent came due—always, for him, a time of special volatility. The combination of his guilty sensitivity, Anna’s demanding impatience, and Eugenie’s quick temper made a falling-out virtually inevitable.
By August 15, Vincent had found new lodgings less than a mile away, bringing an end to his year with the Loyers—the first in a lifetime of intense attachments ending in sudden, traumatic breakups as his surrogate families proved inadequate to his reparative designs. “He has illusions about people,” wrote Anna in her only comment about the month she spent with Vincent and the Loyers. “When they don’t live up to his too-quick judgment, he’s so disappointed that they become like a bouquet of withered flowers to him.”
Whatever the cause, Vincent’s expulsion (or flight) from the Hackford Road house marked the beginning of another of the long depressions that scarred his life. Within days, as fate would have it, Anna found a job in Welwyn, a small town five hours by train from London, and moved out of the new lodgings on Kennington Road. Alone for the first time in a year, Vincent quickly reverted to childhood habits of brooding and solitude. He stopped drawing and sought the old balms of literature and art. He ate poorly and ignored his appearance. He withdrew from social contacts and neglected his duties at work, drawing a sharp rebuke from as far away as Prinsenhage, where Uncle Cent “wished [Vincent] would get out and see people,” his mother reported; “it is necessary for his future.” As if to punish his old family for the failure of his new one, he stopped writing home. “It pains us that he does not write,” Dorus worried to Theo, “and it is proof that he is not in good spirits.”
London had no heath into which Vincent could escape. But it offered distractions and consolations nowhere available on the Grote Beek, with wildlife far more varied and strange. Especially at night, after the long workdays, Vincent “roamed around a lot there in the backstreets,” he later told a friend.
Socially inept, craving human contact, and long since stripped of any compunction, Vincent found himself in the world capital of paid companionship. More than eighty thousand prostitutes, many of them barely teenagers, plied their trade in a city where the age of consent was only twelve. In the parts of London that Vincent frequented, opportunities abounded. “You cannot walk a hundred steps without knocking into twenty streetwalkers,” one visitor complained about a walk along the Strand. The trade was serviced by three thousand official brothels, and half again as many coffee shops, cigar divans, dancing saloons, and “night houses,” all peddling the same wares. In addition, prostitutes gathered in “swarms” at designated locations (Oxford Street, St. James’s Square, Covent Garden), many of them within steps of the Goupil store. They accosted passersby with a fearlessness that unnerved the unwary. They went by many names: drabs, Cyprians, fallen sisters, lorettes, harlots, whores, and “degraded creatures.”
Vincent called them “girls who love so much.”
In a letter to Theo in August, Vincent boldly announced his new life in London: “Virginity of soul and impurity of body can go together.” With that salvo, Vincent launched a furious new campaign to end his exile. If he could not regain his parents’ favor, he could at least reclaim his brother’s allegiance. And what better way to do it than with the lure of sexual license?
As Vincent no doubt knew, Dorus had been waging a battle against Theo’s darker angels since he left home at fifteen. The big city of Brussels held special temptations, but even Theo’s transfer to the relative safety of The Hague (probably engineered by his father) did not curb the distraught admonitions from Helvoirt—“be on your guard,” “steer clear of the rocks,” “don’t be known as a gadabout”—all coded warnings about the dangers of sex. When an unrequited infatuation sent Theo searching for sex in the dark alleys of the Geest, Vincent seized the moment.
While Dorus urged propriety and purity, Vincent preached tolerance and the pleasures of the flesh. “The animal must get out,” he explained. When Dorus advised Theo to buy a biblical almanac and start each morning with an appropriate verse, Vincent countered with Bible lessons of his own: “Ye judge after the flesh; I judge no man,” and “He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her.” He urged Theo to stand firm in defiance of their father (“Keep to your own ideas”), and instead of Christ, quoted Jules Michelet, author of that other gospel of the human heart, L’amour. While Dorus tried to terrify Theo with “ghastly” foreboding dreams of “wild goings-on” in the city, Vincent tempted him with images like Margaret at the Fountain, Goethe’s vision of comely maidenhood helpless before temptation.
In his Faustian battle for Theo’s heart, as in his campaign for Caroline Haanebeek’s, Vincent enlisted every means of persuasion at his command. He sent Theo prints of alluring young peasant girls (the era’s icon of guilt-free sex) and a portrait of Camille Corot (as famous for his mistress as for his paintings) with instructions to “put these up in your room.” He recommended Corot’s painting of voluptuous female woodcutters (Les bûcheronnes) and Jules Breton’s of peasant girls dancing around a fire in a delirium of sensuous innocence (St. John’s Eve). Of all the works in the Royal Academy show that year, he praised only the fashionable, available young women of James Tissot.
From literature, he recruited not only German Romantics like Goethe and Heine (who famously kept a shopgirl as a mistress), but also Frenchmen like Charles Sainte-Beuve, whose sonnets combined awe before nature with lecherous longing for the feminine ideal; Armand Silvestre, who painted word portraits of peasant women with “souls as deep as the sea” and “blouses molded to their breasts”; Émile Souvestre, novelist laureate of the lovelorn (“This year I shall have a broken heart, for she whom I loved did not love me”); and Alfred de Musset, avatar of romantic angst, well known for his tempestuous love affair with George Sand.
Vincent’s impassioned argument soon escalated into a full-scale, obsessive assault on his younger brother—the first of many in the years to come. The defense of sexual license was only the cutting edge. His exhortations eventually broadened to include love and belonging, melancholy and longing—subjects that clearly haunted him in his deepening alienation. So intense was his passion to persuade that letters alone could not contain it. By early 1875, he had bought an album for Theo and began filling its blank pages with long transcriptions from the works by these and other writers, all in a tiny, neat, error-free script. When he had filled every page of the first album, he bought another one and filled it, too, copying by gaslight late into the night.
How much of this fevered chorus found its way into Vincent’s letters is not known. For the six months between August 1874 and February 1875, no letters from Vincent to Theo are known to survive, despite clear evidence that some were written. All that remains of Vincent’s campaign are two little albums, bound in colored paper. The seventy-three entries, filling more than a hundred pages, testify to the depth and desperation of his pleas during the winter of 1874 to reclaim the special alliance that, in his imagination, had been pledged on the road to Rijswijk—even as he slipped farther and farther away from the rest of the world.
In October, Vincent’s battle with his parents broke into the open. He had not written home for almost two months—an unprecedented breach of family duty. When he failed to write even on his mother’s birthday in September, the hostility of his silence could no longer be denied. “Vincent won’t write, not even on important days,” Anna despaired. “Oh Theo! You don’t know how much pain this
is causing us.” In the absence of any news, his parents imagined the worst. They had a dozen theories about what was wrong: Vincent wasn’t eating properly, he wasn’t getting out enough (he needed to “mingle with the well-to-do” more), he spent too much time alone, the London air had “adverse effects.” They even suggested, improbably, that he needed to read more (“it turns the mind to other things”). They worried that he had stopped going to church, leading Anna to accuse him of “not cooperating” in God’s plan for his happiness.
As the silence dragged into October, their worried speculations grew darker as they confronted, for the first time on record, the possibility that the problem went deeper. “Poor boy,” they wrote, “he doesn’t make things easy on himself …We experience unhappy times when we cannot be satisfied with who we are.” When Uncle Cent visited Helvoirt sometime in September, Dorus and Anna’s accumulated anxieties spilled out. Soon after that, Vincent received word from “the gentlemen” at Goupil that he was being temporarily transferred to Paris.
Vincent was infuriated by the intrusion. He fired off an angry letter that shattered family conventions of euphemism, repression of negative emotion, and parental infallibility. He accused his father, in particular, of interfering in his life, a charge that Dorus could deny only with a lawyerly quibble (“I didn’t talk to Uncle [about Paris],” he insisted; “Uncle talked to me”). In fact, Dorus had met with Cent and his partner Léon Boussod just two weeks before the transfer was announced, and he had informed Theo about it even before Vincent heard the news. Vincent tried to credit his father’s argument that Uncle Cent “wanted him to work at ‘headquarters’ and become more familiar with everything the Paris store contains.” But he continued to seethe, confirming that older, deeper grievances were at work. Instead of paying a farewell visit to his sister in Welwyn, he sent a curt note demanding the return of his suitcase. He pointedly refused to send his parents his address in Paris, or even the date of his departure, forcing them to beg the information from Theo.
Vincent sailed for France on October 26. In Helvoirt, Dorus and Anna assumed the familiar posture of waiting and hoping. “We don’t want to despair,” they insisted. Instead, they prayed fervently that “God’s involvement in this transfer will lead [Vincent] back to us and to Him and to himself and to become happy again.” In their darker moments, however, as the winter descended and Vincent remained steadfast in his silence, the whole family began to entertain the unthinkable. Sister Lies worried that Vincent might never again be “the way he used to be,” and predicted “it will be a long time before we see him again.” Dorus called his son’s behavior “unnatural” and warned, “it can hardly have positive consequences.” Anna’s judgment was hardest of all: “He has withdrawn himself from the world and society,” she wrote. “He pretends not to know us … He is a stranger.”
THIS WAS THE PATTERN of Vincent’s fall from family grace—a pattern that would be repeated again and again in the years to come. His campaign to find employment for Anna was only the first of many bids to regain his rightful place in the lost paradise of the Zundert parsonage—a memory that loomed larger as he drifted farther from it. His lonely withdrawal into London’s nocturnal world was the first of many descents into guilt and self-abusive excess; his exhortations of literature and art, the first of many efforts to reverse his isolation (and strike back at his parents) by wresting Theo away from them; his fury at his father over the temporary transfer to Paris, the first of many explosions of wounded anger that only deepened his estrangement.
The pattern replayed almost immediately.
Overcome once again by family feeling as Christmas approached, Vincent eventually broke his silence. His parents responded in kind, dismissing the recent storm as “that mood,” and eagerly planned for the family’s holiday reunion. Delayed by work and weather, Vincent made a dramatic last-minute dash from Paris to arrive home on a storybook Christmas Eve. “How wonderful Helvoirt looked that evening [with] the lights in the village and the steeple amidst the snow-covered poplars,” he recalled later. His return home on a starry, moonlit night, riding in an open wagon, soon became another of Vincent’s talismanic memories—so quickly had the wheel of family longing come round since his bitter departure from London only a few months before.
Returning to England in January, he rededicated himself to work and duty. His correspondence emerges from its six-month sulk brimming with excitement over the store’s new gallery (opened while he was in Paris) and the prospect of selling paintings, not just prints. “Our gallery is ready now and is very beautiful,” he boasted to Theo; “we have some splendid pictures.” He wrote his parents “good letters,” too, letters “full of ambition.” After seeing Vincent in London, sister Anna reported that he “looked very good” and reassured her parents that he was eating well and tending to his clothes.
He didn’t miss his father’s birthday in February (as he had missed his mother’s), and his birthday congratulations overflowed with “deep emotion,” Dorus noted. As a present, Vincent sent his parents money so they could have their photographs taken and give copies to their children. The plan marked not only the culmination of a running family preoccupation with portrait swapping, but also the first hint of an obsession with portraiture that would eventually carry Vincent to the frontiers of artistic expression.
In March he tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade his bosses at Goupil to transfer Theo from The Hague to London so they could be together. “How I should like to have you here,” he wrote with a glint of determination; “we must manage that someday.”
But neither Vincent nor his family could so easily escape the past. Their perfect Christmas was shadowed by Dorus’s announcement that the final payment for Vincent’s draft replacement was due, casting the family back into financial jeopardy. Sister Lies recalled that her father turned a deaf ear to Vincent’s kind words and “pure thoughts” when he was home. “If, for once, Pa had listened,” Lies lamented, “how differently he would think of [Vincent].” And for all his ardent rededication to family and duty as the new year began, Vincent continued to torment his parents with short letters at erratic intervals.
At work, Vincent’s new enthusiasm could not mask the problems that had plagued him since The Hague: his lack of “social graces” and the temperament for sales. As the new gallery slowly moved toward its inaugural exhibition, these shortcomings must have become increasingly glaring to gérant Obach. The relationship between the two grew so acrimonious that they may have argued openly. (Vincent later angrily derided Obach’s “materialism” and closed-mindedness, calling him “out of his mind.”) Once again, complaints about Vincent’s unsuitability began to circulate around Goupil, complaints that he acknowledged with a preemptive denial: “I am not what many people think I am just now.”
In mid-May, only days before the opening of the new gallery, Vincent received word that he was being transferred to Paris immediately. The transfer was again labeled “temporary,” but this time the message was unmistakable: “the Gentlemen” had lost all confidence in him. He could not be trusted with a position of responsibility. He was being replaced by another apprentice, an Englishman. He would not be returning.
In Helvoirt, his parents braced for the worst. “I hope it will not hurt him too much,” Dorus fretted. Theo worried that “nobody close to [Vincent] has any sympathy for him”; “[nobody] knows what’s going on in his heart”; “nobody trusts him, despite his good intentions.” How would a man with his brother’s “sensitivity” respond to such a crushing reversal?
Finally, a letter arrived from Paris. Dorus described it as a “strange letter,” without explaining why. It may have been the letter in which Vincent enclosed a poem, “L’exile,” translated into Dutch for his parents:
What use is there in banishing him
From one shore and then another…
He is the desolate son
Of a beloved land.
Let us give a homeland
A homeland
After reading the letter, Dorus suggested hopefully that perhaps the “heat and exertions” had “overstimulated” Vincent. But he couldn’t shut out a darker explanation. “Just between us,” he confided to Theo, “I believe it is a sickness, either of the body or of the mind.”
* * *
1 Hereafter, all quotations from Vincent’s letters are contemporaneous (i.e., within a year) of the events being described, unless otherwise noted. A quotation drawn from outside that window of contemporaneity is indicated in the text by the use of “later” or “earlier” or a similar term. Any quotation that is not otherwise attributed is from Vincent’s letters. For more information on sourcing, see “A Note on Sources,” this page.
CHAPTER 7
Imitation of Christ
Van Gogh Page 14