Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  For the rest of the winter, Vincent reveled in this vision of reconciliation. He took up again his father’s love of birds and exchanged sightings with him. Dorus saw the first starling; Vincent, the first stork. They watched together for the first lark of spring. He echoed his father’s interest in plants—especially the ivy vines that had always been Dorus’s responsibility at the Zundert parsonage. He reread his father’s favorite poetry and added to the prints on his wall a copy of Paul Delaroche’s Mater Dolorosa, an image that had always hung in his father’s study in Zundert. In his consoling letters to Theo, he adopted his father’s warm, patronizing tone—“Let us not have any secrets”—and instructed him solemnly that a father’s love “is fine gold”: “For who is dearer than the father, In the kingdom of God or on Earth.”

  To celebrate their new shared identity, he gave his father a copy of Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life for his birthday—and arranged for Theo to give him Adam Bede, another clergyman’s story. When Dirk Braat dared to criticize the Reverend van Gogh as a country parson who would never advance beyond small-town parishes like Etten, Vincent flared with indignation. “This was the only time I ever saw Van Gogh angry,” Braat recalled. “His father was absolutely in the right place; a true shepherd.” It may have been in Dordrecht that Vincent began wearing a long clergyman’s coat that had belonged to Dorus.

  By the time he met with Uncle Cor in Amsterdam, Vincent’s determination to become his father bordered on delusion. “As far as one can remember in our family,” he wrote Theo, “which is a Christian family in every sense, there has always been, from generation to generation, one who preached the Gospel.” Now he was being “called to that service,” he said, so that “my life may resemble more and more” Father’s life. Despite the clear contrary signals from Etten, he declared that his father wanted him to be a preacher. “I know his heart is yearning that something may happen to enable me to follow his profession,” Vincent insisted to Theo, and no doubt to his uncles; “Father always expected it of me.” Almost at the same moment, however, Dorus wrote to Theo: “I wish he would stay with his present work; it worries us.”

  To the outside world, and certainly to his parents, Vincent’s defiance of reality, his determination to persist in the face of overwhelming opposition, smacked of sheer contrariness—a willful, often self-destructive perversity. The more firmly his parents pushed him toward the art business, it seemed, the more firmly he planted his feet in his father’s footsteps. Even when a prominent Dordrecht preacher tried to redirect his zeal back into missionary work, Vincent refused, insisting, “I want to be a shepherd like my father.” What no one understood, except perhaps Theo, was how high the stakes had risen. “Oh! Theo, Theo boy, if I might only succeed in this,” Vincent wrote from the throes of his new obsession. “I hope and believe that my life will be changed somehow, and that this longing for Him will be satisfied.” If he could “persevere in this course,” he imagined, the “heavy depression” of his past failures would be lifted from his shoulders and the reproaches that burned in his ear could finally stop. For that, he said, “[both] my father and I would thank the Lord so fervently.”

  While Vincent could be gallingly contentious and even dangerously confrontational at times, the contrariness that others saw was really just the persistence of longings too important to let go of: images in his head kept alive by a fierce imagination that overruled an increasingly contrary world.

  Just how fierce soon became clear. In early April, Vincent returned to Zundert.

  THE TRIP WAS SPARKED by a letter from home with news that Dorus had gone to visit an old farmer in Zundert, a former parishioner, who was on his deathbed. “He asked for me,” Dorus wrote. “We drove across the heather to him. The poor man is truly in pain. I wish he could be released from his suffering!” As soon as he read the letter, Vincent flew out of the bookstore, pausing only long enough to borrow money from Görlitz. “I love that man so much,” he told Görlitz breathlessly about the dying farmer, “I would like so much to see him one more time. I want to close his eyes.”

  In truth, the trip to Zundert had been planned for years—played out repeatedly in Vincent’s imagination every time nostalgia overwhelmed him. “O Zundert!” he cried out from England. “Memories of you are sometimes almost overpowering.” He had planned a pilgrimage there at Christmas—the perfect time—only to be thwarted by the reproaches of his family and the search for a job. Since then, the proximity to home and the unprecedented intimacy with his father had brought these persistent longings to a boil. In complex reveries layered with vivid memories and newly minted hopes, he summoned up the Zundert of his imagination:

  The memory of old times came back to me … how we used to walk with Father … and heard the lark above the black fields with young green corn, beheld the sparkling blue sky with the white clouds above, and then the paved path with the beech trees. O, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Or rather, O, Zundert! O, Zundert!

  More than the illness of a farmer he had barely known (and who had been sick for more than a year), it was this vision of Zundert, this imagined promise of returning to an imagined home, that brought Vincent racing in the darkness back to the site of his original exile. “My heart was drawn so strongly towards Zundert,” he explained to Theo, “that I longed to go there also.”

  He took the train, but walked the last twelve miles. “It was so beautiful on the heath,” he reported to Theo the next day; “though it was dark, one could distinguish the heath and the pine woods and moors extending far and wide.” He burnished that image with a hopeful Romantic flourish in anticipation of his new life about to begin: “The sky was overcast, but the evening star was shining through the clouds, and now and then more stars appeared.” He was returning not just to the heaths of his childhood, but to the roads that his father had walked, the hamlets his father had visited, the farmers he had consoled, and, finally, the church where he had preached. “It was very early when I arrived at the churchyard in Zundert,” he recorded; “everything was so quiet. I went over all the dear old spots.” Then he sat down in the graveyard next to the church and waited for the sun to rise.

  Later that morning, he learned that the sick man had died during the night.

  But Vincent had come to console the living. He had come to do what he had seen his father do hundreds of times—in this town, for these people. “They were so grieved, and their hearts were so full,” he recounted, “I was glad to be with them, and I shared their feelings.” No longer the reticent novice he had been at Susannah Gladwell’s funeral, he prayed with them and read to them from the Bible—just as his father would have done. He visited the dead man’s family and viewed the body.

  Vincent was never more alive than in the presence of death. “Oh! It was so beautiful,” he recalled the scene. “I shall never forget that noble head lying on the pillow: the face showed signs of suffering, but wore an expression of peace and a certain holiness.” Later he commented on how “the calmness and dignity and solemn silence of death contrasted with us, who still live.” Filling out his reverie of the past, he visited the servants who had attended his childhood in the parsonage: a gardener and a maid. “The memories of all we have loved stay and come back to us,” he wrote soon after this visit. “They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them.”

  The same day, Vincent continued on to the parsonage in Etten, a final four miles, completing the backward journey he had begun exactly one year before. He had banished himself on a Good Friday. He returned only a week after Easter; nine days after his twenty-fourth birthday. Vincent clearly saw his trip to Zundert as a new beginning. In the account he sent to Theo the same day, he had already layered onto it the most compelling image of rebirth he knew. “You know the story of the Resurrection,” he wrote; “everything reminded me of it that morning in the quiet graveyard.”

  —

  VINCENT EMERGED FROM his trip to Zundert infatuated with the image of himself as a pastor like his father. In t
he heat of this newest passion, all remaining obstacles melted away. The most intractable of these was his parents’ long-standing insistence that he devote seven or eight years to theological studies, as his father and grandfather had done. Vincent had always resisted—partly out of self-righteous impatience and partly out of horror at the expense it would impose on his family’s ever-strained finances. Only a few weeks earlier he had restated his resistance in the most vivid terms. “I have such a fervent longing for it,” he wrote Theo about his new ambition, “but how can I reach it? If only I could be through with this long and difficult study to become a preacher of the Gospel.”

  Now, however, in the afterglow of Zundert, the prospect of years of study became a point of stubborn pride. A clergyman in Dordrecht tried to persuade him that “the preliminary study [was] too hard for him,” Dirk Braat later reported, “[because] he had never been to a grammar school.” But Vincent was determined to endure the same trials his father had endured, his roommate Görlitz recalled. It had become “an obsession with him.”

  Vincent’s strange moonlight pilgrimage to Zundert had had exactly the opposite effect on his parents. Over the previous weeks, moved by his ardor, they had begun to set aside their long-held doubts. In late March, Görlitz had visited Etten and given them a sympathetic inside look at their son’s pain. When Anna inquired, “How is Vincent doing? Does he adjust?” Görlitz answered plainly: “Madam, to tell you the truth, Vincent does not do well in his profession. He has only one ardent desire: to become a preacher.” Soon afterward, Dorus asked his brother-in-law, Johannes Stricker, to investigate what Vincent would have to do to prepare for university examinations—the first step to being admitted for theological studies in Amsterdam. But when Vincent showed up at the door a week after Easter, tired and disheveled from his long walk home and solitary night in the Zundert graveyard, all of Dorus’s reservations flooded back. “Theo, what do you say about Vincent’s surprising us again?” he wrote warily. “He ought to be more careful.”

  But once Vincent agreed to his parents’ conditions about preparatory study, they had no choice but to support him. The rest of the family responded in much the same way—doubtful but dutiful—when Dorus called on them for help. Uncle Stricker, who knew the least about Vincent’s past, stepped forward with the most enthusiasm, not only identifying the best tutor to prepare Vincent for the exams (especially in Latin and Greek), but also volunteering to monitor his progress and guide his religious study. A learned, influential preacher, Stricker could also introduce Vincent to the mostly liberal clerical world of Amsterdam, in which he was highly respected, despite his comparatively conservative views.

  Having himself failed his own ordination exam, Stricker was prepared to give Vincent’s ambitions the benefit of the doubt. “Our good Lord loves surprises,” he said cheerfully. Uncle Jan, the rear admiral, offered Vincent a room in his commodious house in a large complex of military buildings overlooking the Amsterdam harbor. Widowed and with no children at home, Jan could offer not only meals and accommodations (with servants), but also entrée to society—a prospect that truly excited Anna. “If Vincent wants to become a vicar,” she wrote, “he has to be able to deal with people from the higher society as well as with those who live a simple life.” Although he refused to assume any kind of supervisory role over his troublesome nephew, Jan did manage to find Vincent “a decent job” to help defray his expenses. “At least that’s a ray of hope in this matter,” Anna wrote. Uncle Cor, the print dealer, offered money to help pay for Vincent’s lessons, and a bundle of good paper to write them on, but little else.

  Of all the relatives, only Uncle Cent, who knew the most about the past, refused to help. In a brutally businesslike rejection sent both to Vincent and to his parents, Cent “did not agree with Vincent’s views,” Anna reported to Theo. “Uncle doesn’t think his plans will lead to good prospects and that is what he believes Vincent really needs.” He also cut off any further discussion, virtually washing his hands of his feckless namesake. “He did not think that carrying on the correspondence served any purpose,” Vincent told Theo, “because in this case he could not be of any assistance to me at all.” Theo offered a benign view of Cent’s refusal to his parents—“Uncle can’t see that Vincent really means well”—but his sympathy for his brother triggered an alarmed response from Etten: “[Uncle] knows very well that Vincent is a good man,” Anna insisted, “he just doesn’t agree; and I expect he has been frank about it to Vincent.” Then she added, in a moment of glum candor, “Neither we nor you are feeling comfortable about it either.”

  In the end, however, the family struck a familiar pose of guarded hopefulness, preferring to imagine—once again—that Vincent had finally come in from the heath. “How wonderful it will be,” wrote Lies, “if he can see his illusion turn into reality.” Anna did what she had done many times before: she put the matter in God’s hands. “We would be so happy if we could see all of you reach your destiny and become good people,” she wrote Theo, “starting with the eldest.” Dorus, like his son, consoled himself by preaching a sermon. His subject: “Man is born to suffer”—“how troubles and worries form the heart and make it susceptible to comfort and hope.” As a going-away present, they gave Vincent the ultimate symbol of their persistent hope: a new suit.

  Vincent plunged ahead, seemingly unbothered by the doubts lapping around him. He began studying his catechisms immediately, furiously copying out page after page to occupy his thoughts and keep his own doubts at bay. Years later, he confessed to deep skepticism about the plan on which he was about to embark. But now, carried on a swift tide of obsession and identification, he only offered more prayers (“Lord, I long so much to be earnest”), scribbled more reassuring texts in the margins of his prints, and redoubled his sermon-going. He consoled himself with one last trip to see the Christus Consolator, as well as with paintings of his own creation: word pictures featuring churchyards, meadow paths, and evening light. He fought second thoughts with anesthetizing repetitions of scripture and aphorisms. “I am striving for favor in the eyes of some I love,” he explained to Theo in a moment of heartbreaking clarity. “If God wills it, I shall find it.”

  After leaving Dordrecht on May 2, Vincent lingered in Etten for a week in a last reverie of family. On his way to Amsterdam, he stopped in The Hague, where Theo, at his parents’ insistence, took his brother for a haircut. (“Do a deed of mercy,” Dorus instructed. “I would think that a barber in the Hague might make something of it yet.”) Then Vincent left for Amsterdam, vowing to “put my hand to the plow.”

  IMAGES OF SOWING and reaping haunted Vincent’s imagination as he began his new life. In one of his last letters from Dordrecht, he told Theo that he hoped to become a “sower of the Word”—“as one that sows wheat in the fields.” On the Sunday before his son’s departure, Dorus, who preached his life just as Vincent would later paint his, had chosen for his text the passage from Galatians that was his favorite: “For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” “God’s work,” he said, “so closely connected to that of mankind, brings about solutions, unexpected and blessed. We sow and we reap, [but] it is not just us who are doing our best; God supports and blesses and opens up ways for our help and happiness.”

  For the persistent sower Dorus van Gogh, this was the most consoling message he could give his son as he put his hand to the plow yet again. And surely it was no coincidence that it echoed a passage from one of Vincent’s favorite books, Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, which both father and son had recently read:

  She tried to have hope and trust, though it was hard to believe that the future would be anything else than the harvest of the seed that was being sown before her eyes. But always there is seed being sown silently and unseen, and everywhere there come sweet flowers without our foresight or labour. We reap what we sow, but Nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit that spring from no planting of ours.

  CHAPTER 10 />
  Head to the Wind

  DAY AFTER DAY, FROM HIS UNCLE’S HOUSE OVERLOOKING THE AMSTERDAM harbor, Vincent saw the great labor unfold. Every morning, an army of workers poured through the gate of the naval dockyards—so many that the report of their boots on the pavement sounded “like the roaring of the sea,” Vincent wrote. They worked from first light (as early as five in the summer) until the lamplighters started their rounds. Some went to the boatyards, building everything from ironclad warships to high-masted schooners. But most reported to the dockworks, where steam shovels, wooden cranes, and bare backs fought a grinding battle against the intractable sea bottom and the relentless sea.

  Vincent called their daily struggle “a magnificent spectacle,” and followed keenly the slow drama of their labors. “He who must learn to work must watch the workers,” he wrote. Only with their “patient persistence” and faith in “God’s help,” he said, could any great work be completed. He saw them battle not only the spongy Amsterdam “soil”—more water than dirt, requiring mountains of sand fill—but also the unpredictable elements. With the treacherous North Sea only twenty miles to the west and the surly Zuider Zee just to the east, storms sprang to lethal life without notice, flooding dikeworks, snapping lines, dashing temporary docks, sweeping away the sand, and setting back the work by weeks. But the next day, the workers returned to undo the damage, refill the dikes, re-rope the booms, rebuild the scaffolding, and then, God willing, nudge the sea a little farther back and raise the walls a little higher.

  This was the history of Amsterdam, reenacted before Vincent’s eyes. From the building of the first dam across the Amstel River in the thirteenth century, the civic enterprise called Amsterdam had been a struggle against nature. “The impossible city,” historians called it. In the Golden Age, when it seemed as though no problem could withstand Dutch ingenuity, Amsterdam embarked on a program of canal digging that gave the city its distinctive configuration of waterways in concentric half circles, like nesting bowls. The rich merchants of Amsterdam drove wooden piles into the soft ground to support their grand new townhouses. But no matter how many ditches and canals they dug, the boggy bottomland never truly drained. No matter how much sand and topsoil they dumped behind the dikes, buildings continued to sink: pavement parted, foundations cracked, and façades leaned perilously.