Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  No one, of course, needed the balm of religion more than Vincent. From childhood, he fixed on the image of Christ as both sorrowing and comforter of sorrows. This was the image enshrined forever in his imagination by an engraving of Ary Scheffer’s Christus Consolator that hung in the Zundert parsonage. Illustrating a passage from the Bible (“I have come to heal those who are of a broken heart”), it became one of the favorite religious images of a century fixated on images of innocent suffering: a radiant but sad Christ sits surrounded by supplicants prostrated by pain, sadness, oppression, and despair. He opens his hand to reveal the stigmata, a reminder of his own suffering. The message was clear: suffering brings one closer to God. “Sadness does no harm,” Dorus wrote, “but makes us see things with a holier eye.” Melancholy, said Vincent, is “fine gold.”

  His reading of the Romantics added new layers of imagery and meaning to Scheffer’s icon, introducing Vincent to new forms of suffering, new myths of salvation, new paradoxes of hope, and new windows on the sublime—all of which filled his albums and papered his walls. Long before he preached the Gospel, Vincent preached the “quiet melancholy” of nature and consoled himself with its images in poetry and pictures. He followed Christ’s shadow through the writings of Carlyle and Eliot, who transposed the theme of redemption through suffering into a modern, internalized world. “Deep, unspeakable suffering,” wrote Eliot in Adam Bede, “may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.”

  ARY SCHEFFER, Christus Consolator, 1836–37, OIL ON CANVAS, 72¼ X 97⅝ IN. (Illustration credit 8.1)

  When an exiled Vincent rediscovered Jesus in 1875 in his little room on Kennington Road, he turned first to the comforting Christ of his childhood. Renan described Him as “the great consoler of life,” who “filled souls with joy in the midst of this vale of tears.” Kempis’s Christ promised, “Your acts of penance will be transformed into joy.” A fragment of scripture from Corinthians quickly became Vincent’s mantra of consolation: “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” In these four words, Vincent discovered a perfect expression of the alchemy of happiness that he always expected from religion (and would later expect from art). “I’ve found a joy in sorrow,” he wrote. “Sorrow is better than laughter.”

  This new vision of a life spinning heartbreak into happiness so excited him that he bought a new pair of boots—“to get myself ready for new wanderings”—and persuaded his employer, Reverend Slade-Jones, to let him assist at the Methodist church in Richmond, just across the Thames from Isleworth. At the weekly prayer meeting that Slade-Jones conducted there, Vincent began “visiting the people [and] talking with them.” Before long, he was invited to “speak a few words” to the group. At school, Slade-Jones agreed to let Vincent spend more of his time on religious devotions and less on academic instruction. Vincent led the twenty-one boys in their Bible study and prayed with them every morning and evening. At night, he sat between their beds in the dark dormitories and told inspirational stories from the Bible and literature.

  Impressed by Vincent’s ardor, Slade-Jones invited him to assist at the Congregational church in Turnham Green, a small community three miles downriver from Isleworth, where he preached. Vincent prepared the little iron church for meetings and services, and taught Sunday school. The other teachers welcomed the strange young Dutchman as a coworker, although they continued to mangle his name (“Mr. van Gof”) until Vincent persuaded them to call him by his first name: “Mr. Vincent.” In addition to Sunday classes, he organized a Thursday evening service for youths and was given responsibility for visiting sick and absent students. Soon afterward, Slade-Jones sent his eager young assistant to yet another church, a tiny Methodist chapel in Petersham, two miles upriver from Isleworth, to lead a Sunday evening service.

  Churches at Petersham and Turnham Green, LETTER SKETCH, NOVEMBER 1876, INK ON PAPER, 1⅝ × 3⅞ IN. (Illustration credit 8.2)

  At some point in this shuttle of pious activity, Vincent won Slade-Jones’s consent to preach a sermon of his own. Elated at the prospect, he began feverish preparations. He practiced his delivery at the weekly prayer meetings in Richmond and with the boys in his Bible study class. (They sometimes fell asleep in the middle of a story, he admitted.) He made lists of his favorite verses, stories, hymns, and poetry and transcribed them into a “sermon book.” Judging by the long letters he wrote to Theo that fall, which undoubtedly drew from it, the book must have been a frenetic fantasia of consolation, far exceeding any of his previous albums—a perfect reflection of his frenzied imagination as he prepared for his new life as a preacher. “Whoever wants to preach the Gospel must carry it in his own heart first,” he said. “Oh! May I find it.” At the end of each day, he would climb to his room on the third floor of Holme Court and fall asleep with a Bible still gripped in his hands and a print of Christus Consolator looking down from the wall.

  Finally, on Sunday, October 29, Vincent stepped into the pulpit of the Richmond Methodist church to give his first sermon. He described the event in rapturous detail in a letter to Theo two days later, painting the scene like the opening of an Eliot novel:

  It was a clear autumn day and a beautiful walk from here to Richmond along the Thames, in which the great chestnut trees with their load of yellow leaves and the clear blue sky were mirrored. Through the tops of the trees one could see that part of Richmond which lies on the hill: the houses with their red roofs, uncurtained windows and green gardens; and the gray spire high above them; and below, the long gray bridge with the tall poplars on either side, over which the people passed like little black figures.

  At the foot of the pulpit, he paused, bowed his head, and prayed: “Abba, Father, in Thy name be our beginning.” As he ascended, he felt as if he were “emerging from a dark cave underground,” he said, and was overcome by a vision of his future “preaching the Gospel wherever I go.”

  He chose his text from Psalms: “I am a stranger on the earth …”

  “It is an old belief,” he began, “and it is a good belief, that our life is a pilgrim’s progress.”

  It is impossible to know what churchgoers thought of the sermon that day, or even how much of it they understood. Vincent spoke English accurately, but with great speed and a heavy accent. Some in the congregation had heard him talk before at prayer meetings, and no doubt had learned to cope with his grapplings in an unfamiliar language. But none could have been prepared for the eruption of fervor they heard that morning.

  But though to be born again to eternal life, to the life of Faith, Hope and Charity—and to an evergreen life—to the life of a Christian and a Christian workman, be a gift of God, a work of God—and of God alone, yet let us put the hand to the plough on the field of our heart, let us cast out our net once more…

  In his fever to console, Vincent piled scripture on scripture, verse on verse, aphorism on aphorism in a deluge of earnest, obscure pieties. He lurched from bold exhortations to muddled exegeses, from bland bromides to odd analogies (“Have we not often felt as a widow and an orphan—in joy and prosperity as well and even more than under grief—because of the thought of Thee”). Metaphors mixed and morphed under the strain of his ardor. Strange confessional pleas burst from the dull rhetoric with an urgency that surely alarmed his listeners: “We want to know that we are Thine and that Thou art ours, we want to be Thine—to be Christians—we want a Father, a Father’s love and a Father’s approval.”

  Vincent had said that his goal was to preach in “simplicity” and “fullness of heart.” No one who heard him could have doubted his heart. But even his father, whose sermons were hardly a model of concision or clarity, criticized Vincent’s convoluted and obscure way with scripture. After receiving one of the long letters that Vincent wrote rehearsing his sermon, Dorus complained to Theo: “If only he learned to remain simple as a child, and not always go on filling his letter with Bible texts in such an exaggerated and overwrought manner.” Whether or not Vincent accepted the criticism, he recognized the problem. �
��I do not speak without difficulty,” he admitted. “How it sounds to English ears, I do not know.” A few weeks later, he felt compelled to warn his congregation: “You are going to hear bad English.”

  But he pressed ahead anyway, haunted by the prospect of yet another setback on his journey. “I shall be unlucky if I cannot preach the Gospel,” he wrote ominously in early November. “If my lot is not to preach … well, misery is truly my lot.”

  THERE WAS ONE PLACE, however, where Vincent found the simple comfort that he sought, but could not give.

  He had felt the tug of hymns since childhood. Every Sunday, their solemn drone filled the little Zundert church, often accompanied by his mother playing the reedy harmonium. From the moment he arrived in London in 1873, he seemed, according to his sister-in-law, “intoxicated with the sweet, melodious words” of English church music, so different from the penitent hymns of his Calvinist youth. “[He] likes the organ and the singing most of all,” Dorus reported after Vincent had been in England only a month. At Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vincent surely added his voice to the chorus of thousands—an experience that one participant likened to floating on “a huge sea of melody which rises and falls and surges and floods the place.” He asked Theo to send him a Dutch hymn book and sent him in return two English hymnals. He carried a popular hymnal with him everywhere he went, and knew it so well that he referred to his favorites by number.

  By the time Vincent reached Isleworth, hymns had become his heart’s chief solace. He sang them every morning and evening with his students in Bible study. Walking through the halls of Holme Court, he would hear a boy “hum a snatch of some hymn,” he said, and feel “the old faith” well up inside him. In his room at night, he heard hymns drifting up from the piano in the school below and felt a rush of sublime comfort that could move him to inexplicable tears. On his endless journeys that fall, through gaslit city streets and empty country roads, he would sing them softly to himself, he confessed, when “nobody is about.”

  Over and over, verse after verse, mile after mile, hymn after hymn. “There are so many beautiful ones,” he wrote.

  He loved their words: by turns touching and stoic, tender and ecstatic, imploring and serene, sorrowful and rejoicing. Taking his cue from the hymnbooks of the era, which printed only words, not music, he treated their lyrics as poetry, copying out verses in letters and albums. But it was music that gave them their hypnotic power. With melodies tailored to untrained voices and harmonies easy enough for street-corner bands, they cast their spell through simplicity and familiarity. “Especially when heard often,” Vincent wrote, “one grows so fond of them.” Many of them spoke in the same pleading, imperative voice as Vincent himself. His favorite, “Tell me the old, old story,” pleads like a persistent child for the ultimate comfort of a bedtime tale:

  Tell me the story simply, as to a little child,

  For I am weak and weary, and helpless and defiled.

  Tell me the story always, if you would really be,

  In any time of trouble, a comforter to me.

  Tell me the old, old story, tell me the old, old story,

  Tell me the old, old story, of Jesus and His love.

  When Vincent wrote, more than ten years later, that he wanted his paintings “to say something comforting as music is comforting … something of the eternal,” this is what he meant. One can search Vincent’s childhood and youth for the first signs of the new art that would soon burst on the world, but nowhere is the future clearer than here in the deep feelings, simple means, and immortal longings of the hymns that drifted upward from the third-floor room at Holme Court.

  IN OCTOBER, VINCENT’S PARENTS wrote that Theo had fallen seriously ill. Dorus rushed to his son’s bedside in The Hague; Anna followed close behind and settled in for a long convalescence. Vincent responded at first with an avalanche of consoling words and images. “How I long to see you again,” he wrote his feverish, prostrate brother. “Oh! my longing is sometimes so strong.” Overcome with nostalgia, he begged Reverend Slade-Jones for a three-day leave so he could return to Holland. “Besides longing to sit at Theo’s bedside,” he said, “I should like so much to see my mother again and, if possible, also go to Etten to see Father and speak with him.”

  Vincent had suffered many such swoons of homesickness since leaving Etten in April. The sea crossing in 1876 brought back painful memories of his ill-fated return to England with Anna in 1874. The view from the school’s bay window in Ramsgate made him think of his homeland across the water. From the same window, he watched the students wave good-bye to their parents and his heart ached with theirs. To share his pain, he made a drawing of the “melancholy” scene and sent it home with a sad note: “None of us will ever forget the view from that window.”

  In the schools in Ramsgate and Isleworth, every student reminded him of Theo. Whenever he walked with them, made sand castles with them, showed them prints, or put them to bed, “I would have preferred to have you with me,” he wrote his brother. On a trip to the beach, he saved two sprigs of beach moss and sent them to Theo as a memento. On a visit to Hampton Court in June, he retrieved a feather from a rook’s nest and enclosed it in his next letter. In July, he briefly entertained a fantasy of joining his brother in The Hague, and even asked Theo to help him find a job there “in connection with the church.”

  He showered letters on other family members including sister Anna in Welwyn, on family friends (even Tersteeg), and on old acquaintances like Frans Soek and Harry Gladwell in Paris. On his frequent trips into London, he sought out the people and places that evoked his previous life there: his boss Obach and former Goupil colleagues like Elbert Jan van Wisselingh, George Reid, and Henry Wallis. He tried particularly hard to cultivate a new family in the Gladwells, who still grieved over the loss of their daughter. “I love those people,” he proclaimed. “I can sympathize with them.” When in London, he never missed a chance to visit Harry’s father at his store, or walk the extra miles out of his way to see the family in Lee. He may even have transcribed an album for them, the ultimate token of familial bonding.

  Vincent appears to have tried the same sleight of heart with the family of his employer, the Reverend Thomas Slade-Jones, and his wife, Annie. With their six children and parson’s lifestyle, the Slade-Joneses seemed perfectly suited to fill the void in Vincent’s life. Like the Zundert parsonage, Holme Court was a self-sustaining island, with great trees shading its courtyard, vines overgrowing its walls, and a contingent of barnyard animals. Vincent did his best to make a place for himself there, just as he had at the Loyer house on Hackford Road. He worked in the garden, gave lessons to the Slade-Jones children, and read to them at bedtime. In a nostalgic ritual, he decorated the house with greenery for the holidays. He poured days of painstaking labor into the visitors’ book that Annie maintained. Filling page after page from edge to edge with tiny script, he transcribed his favorite hymns, Bible verses, poetry and prose—in French, German, and Dutch as well as English—in a manic bid for belonging.

  His search for family even took him back to the Loyers. In November, braving certain awkwardness and a long walk in a bitter London winter, he returned to the house on Hackford Road to wish Ursula a happy birthday.

  In the end, however, neither the Gladwells nor the Slade-Joneses nor the Loyers could fill the void. Only one family could do that. In October, the news of Theo’s illness and the coming of Christmas combined to create a fresh surge of nostalgia and homesickness. “O Zundert!” he cried. “Memories of you are sometimes almost overpowering.” Everywhere he went, he saw images of home. On visits to London galleries, he lingered with “intense delight” over paintings of Holland. He told his students stories about “the land without hills,” where “houses and streets were as clean and spotless as the play-toys of the giants in Gulliver’s Travels.” He rehearsed the journey again and again in his imagination: “How delightful it will be to sail down the Thames and across the sea,” he wrote, “to see those friendly
Dutch shores and church spires in the distance.” He reread the poetry of his childhood and copied out old favorites, like Longfellow, bathed in memory and longing:

  I see the lights of the village,

  Gleam through the rain and the mist,

  And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me,

  That my soul cannot resist.

  It was visions like these that led Vincent to beg Reverend Slade-Jones for time off to visit his sick brother in The Hague. His first request was rejected, but Vincent pleaded and cajoled so pitifully that Slade-Jones finally relented. “Write to your mother,” he said. “If she approves, I will too.”

  But she did not approve. In a devastating blow, Anna van Gogh wrote back that Vincent should wait until Christmas to come home—“and may God give us a happy meeting then.” Vincent said nothing in his letters to Theo (which he knew his mother read), but poured his heartbreak into the sermon he preached a week later: “The journey of our life goes from the loving breast of our Mother on earth to the arms of our Father in heaven … Has any one of us forgotten the golden hours of our early days at home, and since we left that home—for many of us have had to leave that home.”

  Once his mother rejected his bid to return, Vincent lost enthusiasm for everything else. His round-robin of duties between Holme Court, Petersham chapel, and the iron church in Turnham Green now seemed nothing but a burden. Even his beloved walks became cause for complaint in his letters home. Instead of a pilgrim, he described himself as Slade-Jones’s “walking boy,” trekking about the countryside on senseless “superhuman journeys.” It didn’t help that the schoolmaster had assigned Vincent the miserable task of collecting unpaid tuition bills on his visits to students’ parents, many of them poor. (Slade-Jones himself was slow to pay Vincent’s meager wages, serenely maintaining that “God takes care of those who work for Him.”)