Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Denis and others in the congregation considered the shack unbefitting a preacher and complained angrily about Vincent’s “folie religieuse.” Vincent defended himself by citing Kempis—“the Lord had nowhere to lay his head”—but his accusers took that as blasphemy. The combination of dissatisfaction with his preaching, the bizarre self-abasement of his new home, his stubborn refusal to heed advice, and even his manic ministrations to the sick prompted church members to summon an inspector from the Evangelical Committee in Brussels to review their new preacher’s appointment—a clear threat to dismiss him. Only a month after starting his new life, Vincent once again faced imminent failure.

  The news came as no surprise in Etten. His letters, with their tales of horrible injuries, rampant disease, and journeys into coal mines, had only fueled his parents’ anxieties. Dorus feared that “being so absorbed in taking care of and watching over the sick and wounded” might distract Vincent from his religious duties. Anna fretted over his appearance because “it must be so dirty there.” They had also received a letter from Madame Denis detailing “the miserable life [Vincent] was leading” in his thatched hovel; as well as one from Vincent himself “confirming our worry that he had no bed, no bedclothes, and no laundry facilities,” Anna reported. In response to the uproar among his congregation, he defied his accusers—“it’s none of their business”—and again defended his actions by invoking Kempis: “Jesus also acted calmly in the storm,” he wrote, “and the tide might turn.”

  But Dorus knew better than to wait. Dodging winter storms, he set out for the Borinage on February 26. By the time he arrived, the inspector, Reverend Rochedieu, had already come and heard the grievances against the new preacher. Rochedieu concluded that Vincent had shown “a regrettable excess of missionary zeal” and delivered a “vigorous lecture” to the wayward young preacher. But apparently it had not been enough to dislodge Vincent from his hut, because that is where his father found him, “lying on a straw-filled sack, and looking appallingly weak and emaciated,” according to an eyewitness account.

  Vincent “suffered himself to be led away like a child,” according to the same account, and the next day Dorus took him on a penance trip through the gray snow to visit the three local clergymen in whose hands his fate now precariously rested. In the spirit of the persistent sower, he talked with Vincent about “plans for improvement and change and generating energy.” He extracted vows that Vincent would look after his appearance, obey his church superiors, and only use the little hut “as a workshop or study.”

  But no one was fooled. “He is too obstinate and stubborn to take any advice,” Anna despaired. To Theo, Vincent painted a delusional picture of his father’s visit: “He will not easily forget the Borinage,” he wrote the next day; “no one who visits this curious, remarkable and picturesque region can.” But soon after Dorus left, Vincent was seen spitting on the Denis house. “Perhaps,” he wrote his parents defiantly, “things should get worse before they can get better.”

  THE EXPLOSION CAME without warning. The invasion of picks, lamps, and air released forces that had been locked in the earth since its formation. Colorless and odorless, the gas built up in the mine with each blow of the pick, each fall of rock, each load of coal. It took only a single spark—from a malfunctioning lamp or friction on the tub rails—to set it off. That is what happened on April 17, 1879, at the Agrappe mine in Frameries, only two miles from Wasmes.

  A flash of methane’s distinctive blue flame began the chain reaction. The explosion sent a wall of pressure down the narrow corridor strong enough to hurl men the length of the gallery and jam them into cracks in the coal face. Veteran miners knew when they heard the rush of gas—“firedamp,” they called it—to dive to the floor, for it was followed instantly by a flame like a blowtorch—the flash—at head height. The wind sucked coal dust from every crevice and suspended it in the air just long enough for the flash to ignite it. Coal dust could turn even a small firedamp flash into a runaway inferno as wind and then fire roared through the mine as if through the barrel of a gun. The pressure wave lifted roof beams off their props, causing new falls; it twisted rails, and hurled empty tubs through the galleries like bullets. The fire raced through the tunnels at a thousand miles an hour, charring everything in its path—tools, horses, men, children—with the ferocity of a blast furnace.

  The disaster underground announced itself to the world when the wind and fire found the shaft and exploded out of the pit-head with a stupendous roar—“like the report of a gigantic cannon,” according to one account. The hoist man who operated the cages was incinerated instantly. Soon afterward, a huge bubble of unignited gas rushed up the ventilation shaft nearby and burst into a great ball of flame in the middle of the mine complex. Young girls working in the sorting shed were burned beyond recognition. The pit-head exploded again and again, hurling hundreds of tons of coal and rock into the air. One explosion threw up clothes that the updraft had stripped from dead miners.

  An immense “column of fire,” visible for miles, and huge clouds of black smoke soon signaled to the surrounding countryside the cataclysm under way deep in the earth. Women and children streamed onto the roads, hurrying toward the spreading black stain in the sky. As the first of them neared the mine, they could hear the terrifying sound of the muffled explosions still going on, hours later, and feel the ground shake. They quickly filled the mine courtyard, where they watched with “gasping hope” as survivors stumbled out with black, puffed faces and stretcher after stretcher was borne either to the infirmary or to the chapel. Shouts of anger and curses soon mixed with wails of grief as the charred bodies piled up and the magnitude of the tragedy became clear. (One hundred and twenty-one miners died.) The police eventually had to close the gates to prevent a riot of anguish and outrage.

  It is impossible to imagine that Vincent van Gogh did not participate in the panorama of suffering and solace that filled the courtyard of the Agrappe mine that day and in the following days. While fatherless children and childless mothers wept inconsolably, others waited in an agony of uncertainty to hear the fate of family members still unaccounted for (it took five days to bring the last survivors up). Word spread that almost a hundred miners were trapped behind a rock fall. Rescuers could hear the howls of the injured. Every mining family knew the horror of “afterdamp,” unexploded gas still in the mine that could suffocate a man in minutes. Trapped miners sang to keep themselves from “falling into the gas.” Vincent had to be moved by the image of the imprisoned miners, fearing death at any moment, raising a hymn of hope from the total darkness.

  Soon after the disaster, the funeral processions began. Part mourning, part protest, they wound through the shrouded landscape in black trains by the score, a grim multiple of the icon from Vincent’s childhood, Funeral Procession Through the Cornfields. The grieving extended beyond the Borinage to all of Belgium, where the worst mine accident in a decade ignited labor protests and stirred a moribund government to demand improvements in mine safety. It extended even to Etten. “It is awful, that terrible accident,” Dorus wrote Theo. “What a situation for those people—buried alive and almost no hope of being saved in time.” But Dorus also saw the potential danger for his sensitive, unstable son. “I hope it will not cause difficulties for Vincent,” he added. “With all his strange quirks, he shows true interest in those miserable people. And God will surely notice that. Oh, if things would only go well for him!”

  But they did not go well. Almost as soon as his father left the Borinage, Vincent returned to his defiant, delusional mission. In what one witness called a “frenzy of self-sacrifice,” he gave away almost all his clothes as well as the little money he made; even the silver watch that he had tried once before to disown. He tore up his underclothes for bandages. In March, he returned the money his father sent for his board, an indication that he had moved back into the hut. In response to Rochedieu’s demands that he curb his excessive zeal, Vincent pursued his medieval vision of piety even more inte
ntly, denying himself the pleasures of food, warmth, and bed. He went barefoot in the winter and donned the sackcloth garments the miners wore. He stopped bathing altogether, dismissing soap as a “sinful luxury.” He spent more and more time with the sick and injured and declared himself “prepared to make any sacrifice to ease their suffering.”

  After the mine explosion in April, Dorus and Anna briefly entertained a hope that Vincent might make himself “useful” in the recovery efforts, about which he kept them suspensefully informed. But if anything, the disaster at Frameries only accelerated the downward spiral.

  In July, the Evangelical Committee decided to terminate Vincent’s ministry. The Committee’s formal report cited only his poor preaching as the reason for his dismissal. “A talent for speaking [is] indispensable to anyone placed at the head of a congregation,” it read. “The absence of that quality renders the exercise of an evangelist’s principal function wholly impossible.” But his parents—and probably Vincent himself—knew the real reason. “He does not yield to the wishes of the Committee,” Dorus wrote. “Nothing will change him. It is a bitter trial.”

  The Committee gave him three months to find another situation, but continuing his ministry in Wasmes until then was unthinkable. The constant warnings and rebukes from his superiors, and his own increasingly eccentric behavior, had turned his congregation against him. In meetings, they insulted him and openly mocked his strange ways. The children in his beloved catechism class rebelled against him. No doubt echoing their parents, they called him “fou”—crazy—the first time that that word appears in the record. Nor could he go home; the prospect of another early return from a failed mission clearly overwhelmed him with guilt and shame. “We invite him to come home,” Dorus wrote, “but he does not want that at all.”

  In a last-ditch effort to salvage his Belgian mission, Vincent went in search of Abraham Pieterszen, the preacher who had helped Dorus arrange Vincent’s admission to the evangelical school in Brussels. While a student there, Vincent had assisted several times at Pieterszen’s church in Mechelen. On August 1, dressed in miner’s sackcloth, he set out on another of the long, wandering, self-punishing journeys that often accompanied crises in his life. After two nights of sleeping in the open, he arrived with bleeding feet at the house in Brussels where Pieterszen was staying. The girl who answered the door shrieked and ran when she saw him because “he looked so neglected and dangerous.” Pieterszen urged Vincent to return to his parents’ home in Etten, but he adamantly refused. “He was determined,” Pieterszen reported to Dorus. “He is his own worst enemy.”

  Unable to dissuade him, Pieterszen reluctantly gave Vincent a letter of introduction to a preacher in the Borinage who went by the single name of Frank. He lived in Cuesmes, a mining town only four miles from Wasmes. As an “independent evangelist,” Frank had no church, no congregation, and no way of paying Vincent a salary. He was little more than a lonely man in the wilderness preaching the word of God to anyone who would listen. Vincent would serve as Frank’s “assistant.” It was an ignominious end to his great ambition. The next day, he returned to the black country and reported to the house of “Frank the Evangelist,” whose address he gave only as “au Marais”—in the swamp.

  Vincent had only one person left to ask for help. Immediately after arriving in Cuesmes, he scribbled a short letter begging Theo to visit.

  THE MORE DEEPLY Vincent fell into delusion and despair, the more he longed for his brother. “[I] am not made of stone or iron like a pump or a lamppost,” he wrote. “Like everyone else, I need friendly or affectionate relationships or intimate companionship … I cannot do without these things and not feel a void.” He compared himself to a prisoner in solitary confinement and called Theo his “compagnon de voyage”—his sole “reason for living.” Only their brotherhood made him feel that his life was “perhaps good for something,” he said, and not “utterly worthless and expendable.”

  But Vincent’s longing could not bridge the growing gap between them. They had not seen each other since Theo’s triumphant return from Paris the previous November—almost at the same moment Vincent fled Brussels in desperation. For the first time in six years, they had missed each other at Christmas, as Vincent stayed at his post in Petit Wasmes. Their correspondence had faded to an erratic formality, with months passing between letters that gave no hint of the upheavals in the Borinage—except for the repeated calls for Theo to visit. To his brother, Vincent continued to portray himself as a missionary of it, and the black country as a “peculiar” and “picturesque” land filled with sentiment and character.

  But Theo knew the true story. He had heard his parents’ worried cries as Vincent dragged them deeper and deeper into disappointment and shame. By the time Vincent was dismissed from his position in Petit Wasmes, Theo’s sympathy, too, had been largely exhausted. “[Vincent] has made his own choice,” he told his mother coldly.

  When he arrived at the train station in Mons in the second week of August, he came prepared to tell Vincent the hard truths that his father had shrunk from telling him for fear of another explosion. On a long walk, he told Vincent that he had been “going down-hill” for too long; that the time had come for him to “improve his life”; that he needed to stop living off their father’s money and start supporting himself. Perhaps he could return to the bookkeeping work he had done in Dordrecht, Theo suggested, or apprentice himself to a carpenter. He could be a barber, or a librarian. Sister Anna thought he would make a good baker. If he wanted to return to the world of art, he could “become an engraver of invoice headings and visiting cards.” Whatever path he chose, Theo said, his days of idle wandering—his “feeble,” “do-nothing” existence—had to come to an end.

  He rejected Vincent’s claims (citing Kempis) of a mandate to poverty and sacrifice as “impossible religious notions and idiotic scruples” that only prevented Vincent from “seeing things straight.” And when Vincent tried to invoke their pledge of brotherhood on the Rijswijk canal eight years earlier, Theo shot back: “You have changed since then, you are no longer the same.” Finally, clearly speaking for his parents, Theo lodged what was for him the most serious charge against his brother: that he had caused “so much discord, misery and sorrow amongst us and in our house.”

  It was this last accusation, apparently, that struck home. Vincent could parry and dodge the others, as he did immediately after Theo left, in a letter that combined patronizing sophistry, indignant posturing, and fraternal seduction in a tour de force of denial. But the charge that he had brought his parents to grief ignited flames of guilt that not all Vincent’s powers of self-justification and self-pity could extinguish. “It may well be,” he allowed in a flash of confession, “that it was all my own fault.”

  There was only one way to put out that fire. As soon as he had mailed his rebuttal to Theo, he walked to Mons and took the first train north. After more than a year of steadfastly resisting it, the hunger for it having finally overwhelmed the shame of it, Vincent went home.

  “All of a sudden he was at our door,” Anna reported to Theo. “We heard ‘Hi Pa, hi Ma’ and it was him.” They gave him clothes and food, but after that, only skeptical glances and complaining silence. “He looks skinny,” Anna wrote, “[and] his face has a weird expression.” It was not the prodigal-son welcome that Vincent had always longed for. Wounded and wary after so many plans and so many disappointments, his parents kept a careful distance. But Vincent took their caution as indifference, and soon sank into a churlish solitude that must have raised, on both sides, all the darkest memories of the Zundert parsonage. “He’s reading books by Dickens all day long,” Anna reported, “and doesn’t do anything else. He doesn’t talk, he only answers our questions.… He often gives strange answers, too.… He doesn’t say a word about anything else; nothing about his work from the past, nothing about his future work.”

  Determined to break through the silence, Dorus took Vincent for a walk to Prinsenhage to visit his uncle Cent. “May
be [Vincent] will open up then,” Anna said hopefully. But the five-mile journey led only to catastrophe. Dorus brought to the encounter a paternal duty worn thin by years of injury and disappointment. “Tomorrow it will be ten years ago that [Vincent] left our home and I brought him to The Hague to work at Goupil,” he wrote Theo only a week before Vincent’s unexpected arrival in Etten. “We are tired and disheartened.” But Vincent carried a weight of resentment, too, having convinced himself that his religious ambitions had been betrayed by his father’s demands. At almost the same moment that Dorus was bemoaning his son’s intransigence, Vincent was complaining ruefully to Theo: “You know how things were planned and discussed, argued and considered, talked over with wisdom, and yet how miserable the result was … I fear a similar result if I follow wise advice given with the best intentions.”

  It took only a single flash of “hot temper”—whether from Vincent or from his father is not recorded—to spark an explosion so fierce that Vincent had to flee the house.

  After that, he descended into total darkness. He did not write Theo again for a year; or, if he did, the letters disappeared. Virtually all of his family’s letters from the period met the same fate. Whether banished by his father or by his own self-loathing, he returned to the black country. He had entered his worst nightmare. On the eve of his trip to Etten, he had written to Theo,