Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  For Vincent, obsessed with the coming of Christmas and the prospect of reuniting with his family, the crowded days could not pass fast enough. “How I am longing for Christmas and for you all,” he wrote Theo; “it seems to me I have grown years older in these few months.” In the evenings, he sat exhausted in his room, stared at photographs of his parents pinned on the wall, and relived fond memories of Christmases past: especially his last-minute return to Helvoirt two years earlier (before the disgrace in Paris), when the moon shone on snow-covered poplars and the lights of the village twinkled in the darkness.

  Images like this—drawn from literature, scripture, art, and hymns as well as from his own past—increasingly provided Vincent with his only true comfort. Spurned by his family and haunted by regrets, he withdrew into the tumultuous solitude of his own imagination, where all these images were “breathed on variously by multitudinous forces,” as Eliot wrote in Silas Marner, “forever moving and crossing each other with incalculable results.”

  The image that obsessed him most that fall and winter was that of the Prodigal Son. More than once, he preached the story of the wastrel, wandering child who “was no more worthy to be called thy son,” but was welcomed home by his father: “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” The story appeared in Vincent’s autobiographical levensschets, and it echoes throughout his first sermon. In his room, he hung a print of Ary Scheffer’s L’enfant prodigue, showing a godlike father embracing a penitent, dewy-eyed youth. He sent a copy of the same image to his mother for her birthday. With his usual monomania, he pursued this icon of reconciliation and redemption through literature and poetry as well as art. He studied it, preached it, and included it in his bedtime lessons.

  In his hunger for comforting images, Vincent increasingly blurred the line between real and imagined. His letters filled up with “word paintings”—inspired by Eliot’s brilliant descriptive passages—that transformed the everyday into the eternal. A sunrise seen from a passing train became “a real Easter sun”; a sexton’s house in the rain became a refuge of faith; a quiet riverbank became a promise of redemption: “The chestnut trees and the clear blue sky and the morning sun mirrored in the water of the Thames; the grass was sparkling green and one heard the sound of church bells all around.” In images like these, Vincent combined observation and imagination to create a better, more consoling reality. He introduced contradictions and impossibilities, compressed time, embellished with favorite tropes, and freely omitted anything that did not suit his purpose. His description of a London slum included no mention of poverty, crime, overcrowding, or filth, but only the pious, picturesque poor bustling about in the gaslight on a Saturday evening, eagerly anticipating the Sabbath to come—“which is such a comfort for those poor districts.”

  The consoling images that Vincent took from literature and art underwent a similar transformation as he reimagined them—simplified and intensified them—in pursuit of his heart’s elusive comfort. He changed the names of poems and paintings. He disregarded dissonant characters and authorial views. Like the illustrated books of his childhood, he grafted words to images and images to words, insistently reshaping both to his narrative of reassurance. He paired pictures with poetry, sometimes transcribing lines from literature and scripture directly onto his prints to create collages of consolation. This process of layering words and images so gratified his manic imagination and his search for comfort that it would become his principal way of seeing and coping with the world.

  Churchgoers at the Richmond Methodist church got an early, and no doubt disorienting, glimpse of this process at work. To conclude his first sermon, Vincent told them about “a very beautiful picture” he had seen once. It was called The Pilgrim’s Progress. But the image he described looked nothing at all like the painting by George Boughton that Vincent had seen at the Royal Academy two years before, in 1874. Vincent’s telling transformed Boughton’s flat horizon and hazy sky into a dazzling vista of hills and mountains glimpsed in the “splendor” of a Romantic sunset (“the gray clouds with their linings of silver and gold and purple”). Vincent replaced Boughton’s low fortified town with Bunyan’s Celestial City—high atop a mountain “whereon the setting sun casts a glory.” In Boughton’s painting, a girl in a white tunic pours water for the pilgrims on their dusty journey. In Vincent’s vision, the girl becomes an angel in black, a figure from an Andersen tale.

  Onto this mix of art, literature, and scripture, Vincent added one final layer: himself. In his vision, the angel offers consolation not to a group, but to a single lonely pilgrim who “has been walking for a good long while and he is very tired.” They converse in the words of Vincent’s favorite poetry, and the pilgrim goes on his way “sorrowful yet always rejoicing.”

  Only by combining the real, the depicted, and the imagined could Vincent approach the true source of his hurt, as well as the only source of true consolation: his family. Just as he cast himself as the pilgrim in Boughton’s painting, he could cast himself as the Prodigal Son repeatedly embraced by his father in Scheffer’s print, in sermons, and in bedtime stories. Layering allowed Vincent to superimpose his family as well as himself onto images in art and literature, whether it was Theo as a young revolutionary hero, Uncle Cent as a Golden Age burgher, or his mother and father as the tender, caring parents in a poem by George Eliot. It allowed him to see the Zundert parsonage in every image of happy home life and to see himself as Conscience’s conscript, ripped from the bosom of a loving family, or as Eliot’s flawed but exemplary clergyman in Felix Holt, or as Bunyan’s pilgrim Christian.

  Ultimately, this was the consoling power that art shared with religion in Vincent’s imagination: both offered an imagery of reconciliation and redemption with which he could reimagine his own life of failure and remorse. It was an extraordinary power. The imploring intimacy of Vincent’s religious visions must have startled his listeners. “Can a woman forget her sucking child,” he cried out in the words of Isaiah, “that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?” The relentless interweaving of Father and father, Son and son, in Vincent’s imagination transformed all of Christianity into a canvas for autobiography. “The nature of every true son,” he wrote, “does indeed bear some resemblance to that of the son who was dead and came back to life.”

  The connection between religion and family would hereafter haunt his imagination, his art, and finally his sanity. He took the Bible’s offer of redemption as a promise of forgiveness and reconciliation in his own family. “Those who are above,” he assured Theo, “can make us father’s brothers.” The consolation of that promise formed the emotional core of his experience of the sublime. When Vincent was moved to tears, as he often was, by religion or literature or art, this, ultimately, was the pedal note of love and longing that sounded beneath all the layers and layers of allusions. “Love of this sort,” wrote Eliot in Adam Bede,

  is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so? whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty: our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence; our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.

  The danger, of course, was that Vincent would confuse these pentimenti of love: mistake the imagined for the real. Already at times, both his despair and his enthusiasm approached the delusional, and events he reported as real took on the gloss of fantasy. As Christmas approached, he seemed increasingly unable to distinguish between images in his head and events in his life. He stared at the photographs of his parents on the wall and recited over and over the prayer from the Zundert parsonage: “Unite us, O Lord, firmly together and may the love for Thee strengthen that bond more and mor
e.” For one of his last sermons before leaving, he again chose his text from the story of the Prodigal Son: “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion.”

  On the eve of Christmas, that image took hold of him—as if it were, in fact, the reception that awaited him in Etten. “We shall be moved when we hear the name of God pronounced,” he intoned, “yea, even as we are moved when we see our father again after having been away from home for a long time.” Compared to such visions, the real world no longer held any interest. He could only think about returning home to become his “father’s brother.” And he could hear his parents’ voices singing the words of the hymn he carried with him:

  Come home, come home! You are weary at heart,

  For the way has been dark, and so lonely and wild;

  O prodigal child!

  Come home; oh come home!

  Come home, come home! From the sorrow and blame,

  From the sin and the shame, and the tempter that smiled;

  O prodigal child!

  Come home; oh come home!

  CHAPTER 9

  O Jerusalem, O Zundert

  THE RECEPTION THAT AWAITED VINCENT IN ETTEN DID NOT MATCH any of the prints on his wall or the verses in his hymnbook. His wanderings had not mitigated his shame, only worsened it. Months of intermittent and uninformative letters had left his parents even less sympathetic than when he fled in April. Every time he moved from one unpaid, “futureless” job to the next, he reopened the wounds. “We are more and more worried with time,” Dorus wrote Theo in September, “and we fear that he will become unfit for practical life. It is bitterly sad.” They tried to talk sense to him. If he really wanted to be a preacher, they said, he should study for it—and find a paying job in the meantime. But their proposals were always met with “woolly” answers or ignored altogether. They took his evasiveness as a lack of conviction—or, worse, cowardice. “He doesn’t seem to have the courage to take up a course of study,” Anna concluded. “I cannot imagine him as a preacher,” Dorus added. “He will never find a living in it.”

  In the absence of progress, they brooded over what had gone wrong in Vincent’s life—in Vincent—to bring this trial upon them. As always, they blamed his failure to socialize in the right circles and his neglect of appearances. But mostly they blamed his attitude: his “morbid nature,” his “inclination to melancholy.” “Seriousness is all right,” his father wrote, “but seriousness must ever be linked with freshness and strength.” If only he had “a jolly heart,” Anna lamented, he would not be so prone to “excesses”; he would “become a more normal and practical person.”

  Not even their bleakest assessments, however, had prepared them for Vincent’s proposal to sail to South America as a missionary. His father denounced it as “foolhardy” and “sheer folly”—“a very costly undertaking which would certainly come to nothing.” Before, they had questioned Vincent’s dedication; now, they doubted his compass. “One must first and foremost use common sense,” Dorus said bitterly. “I cannot begin to tell you how much we suffer because of this.”

  When Vincent arrived in Etten on December 21, he was greeted not with open arms and tears of joy, but with what he later described as a “torrent of reproaches.”

  Christmas unfolded exactly according to parsonage ritual: the usual cakes and cookies, red tablecloth and ropes of greenery. Anna played the organ; Dorus visited the sick. But the mood was nothing like that of past Christmases. “How much worry this boy is causing Pa and Ma,” Vincent’s sister Lies wrote. “You can really see it in their faces.” Lies blamed Vincent for his fecklessness, his failure to find a job, and especially his religious fervor (“I believe his piety clouds his brain,” she said). To these accusations, it seems, only Theo offered a defense. He told his siblings that Vincent was not like a “normal man”—to which Lies responded that everyone, including Vincent, would be better off if he were. But Theo’s late arrival and early return to work in The Hague were a form of chastisement, too. And one can only imagine the censure Vincent felt at Uncle Cent’s house in Prinsenhage, where the Van Goghs spent Christmas Day.

  He had come home seeking redemption, like the Prodigal Son, but found only reproaches. “All one does is wrong,” he wailed. An acquaintance who saw him after Christmas recalled that “he looked as if he were suffering from a sense of injury—there was something lonely about him.” He complained of feeling “weary” and “tired of everything.” In the unmistakable code of gospel verse, he confessed to “weeping” at night. A long, long walk in the snow, despite the harsh weather and a rare cold, hinted at the self-punishments to come. In a moment of heartrending honesty, he admitted to Theo feeling “heavy depression because everything I undertook failed.”

  Only the pain of guilt can explain Vincent’s agreement in late December to give up his religious calling. With uncharacteristic meekness, he accepted the arguments his parents had been making throughout his months of exile: he needed to “stop following [his] own desires” and put himself “back on the road to a normal existence.” He agreed to find a job and find it nearby—in his own country. He might still pursue a religious life sometime in the future, Dorus allowed, but only if he were “really serious about it” and willing to spend “at least eight years of study” preparing for it. But Dorus did not encourage such hopes. Instead, he reminded Vincent that he could lead a “useful and virtuous” life no matter what profession he entered, because “religion is not separate from real life.”

  In fact, Dorus had already arranged a job for him. Probably at the behest of Uncle Cent, a bookseller in Dordrecht, less than twenty miles from Etten, had offered Vincent a position as a bookkeeper and sales clerk. Only a few days after agreeing to his father’s plan, Vincent took the train to Dordrecht and was interviewed by Pieter Braat, a longtime Goupil customer. On his return, Dorus dispatched him to Prinsenhage to perform a final act of penance: reassuring Uncle Cent of his gratitude for this new opportunity. On the trip to his uncle’s house, Vincent projected his own feelings onto nature’s canvas: “It was a stormy night,” he recalled, “with the dark clouds and their silver linings.”

  In a wave of dutifulness, Vincent—now twenty-four—threw himself into his new job at Blussé and Van Braam Booksellers on the market square in Dordrecht. He started work immediately after the new year, and virtually ignored the end of a one-week “trial period” that, theoretically, would have allowed him to reconsider. Even before his trunk arrived from England, he moved into a boardinghouse just across the square from the store. After only a few weeks of “wistful” letters, he seemed to put his previous life behind him. He wrote a long letter to the Slade-Joneses to tell them he would not be returning. “I wished them to remember me,” he told Theo, “and asked them to wrap my recollection in the cloak of charity.”

  SCHEFFERSPLEIN, THE MARKET SQUARE IN DORDRECHT; THE BOOKSTORE BLUSSÉ AND VAN BRAAM WHERE VINCENT WORKED IS AT CENTER (Illustration credit 9.1)

  Coming out of its busiest sales season, the store generated a vast amount of bookkeeping work that kept him busy until late at night. “But I like it that way,” he wrote. “The feeling of duty sanctifies and unifies everything, making one large duty out of the many little ones.” He seemed to accept the logic of his new course, telling his parents “how much he enjoyed being back in his own country,” and explaining to Theo how “duty” demanded that he choose a book-keeper’s salary over a preacher’s “because later in life a man needs more.” He told a coworker that he was “so glad not to be a burden to his parents anymore.”

  FOR A JOB THAT constituted a hopeful step backward in time, Vincent could not have found a town better suited than Dordrecht. The oldest city in Holland, it sat at the confluence of four rivers. Since the great flood of 1421, it had been completely surrounded by water. From that tollhouse position, it had reaped centuries of fabulous wealth by taxing the materials and merchandise that flowed to and from the sea. Merchants built gilded, top-heavy houses along its cana
ls and around its perimeter where they fêted royalty and incubated Dutch independence. Golden Age artists like Cuyp, Van Goyen, Maes, and Ruisdael flocked to its “delicious landscape”—its forested quays, glittering shoreline, and magical rivers.

  By the time Vincent arrived, however, Dordt (as everyone called it) had declined into picturesque poverty, its former splendors preserved in the amber of neglect and nostalgia. But the golden images from a previous era and the quirky glories of its faded remnants had earned Dordt a special place in the Dutch imagination. So when Vincent walked the winding streets and saw everywhere vignettes of rickety staircases, black balustrades, red roofs, and silvery water—images that had brought tears of homesickness in Paris and London—he must have felt at home: at home in a way he could never feel in the unfamiliar Etten; at home in a way only one other place, another island out of time, could make him feel: Zundert.

  But it wasn’t enough. A homecoming in imagery, even in Vincent’s powerful imagination, was not a real homecoming; and simply doing his father’s bidding could never satisfy his yearning for a Prodigal Son embrace. He soon reverted to old habits of brooding and reclusiveness. After a few desultory attempts at socializing, he withdrew into an almost absolute solitude. “He had no intercourse with anybody,” recalled Dirk Braat, the storeowner’s son. “He hardly spoke a word.… I do not believe there is anybody in Dordrecht who knew him.” At his boardinghouse, he was “singularly silent,” according to his landlord, and “always wanted to be alone.”