Vincent had staked his new life, his return from the black country, on Kee Vos. By marrying her, he imagined, he could wipe away the sins of the past and catapult his fledgling career into the comfortable world of friends like Anthon van Rappard. By not supporting his suit, however quixotic, his parents betrayed that vision and consigned him to the judgments of the past. “They think me a weak character, a man of butter,” he wrote Theo bitterly. “I have become little more than a half strange, half tiresome person to Father and Mother … When I’m at home, I have a lonesome, empty feeling.”
Even when his parents tried to distance themselves (“Father and Mother have promised not to oppose this if only I leave them out of the matter”), Vincent refused to release them. He expressed astonishment at their claim that the matter didn’t “concern” them. Their approval was, after all, the real goal; their “never, no, never,” the real obstacle. If they had actively backed his cause, Kee’s refusal would hardly have mattered. It was their cold hearts, not hers, that needed to thaw and “aimer encore”—love again.
By mid-November, Vincent had come to see his pursuit of Kee as nothing less than a fight for his “right to exist.” He had spent too long underground, he argued, and refused to “go back into the abyss.” All he was asking, he said sadly, was “to love and to be lovable—to live.” Driven increasingly by paranoia and memories of the effort to commit him to Gheel, he accused his parents of plotting to get rid of him. When they warned him against severing family ties by his perverse persistence, he took it as a threat, and retaliated by pretending to be invisible—not speaking and not responding when spoken to. “For a few days I said not a word and took no notice at all of Father and Mother,” he reported to an aghast Theo. “I wanted them to see what it would be like if ties really had been severed.”
Day by day, he spun deeper and deeper into delusion. He proudly claimed the title of “sublime fool” and came to see his blind, mad bid for Kee’s affection as a spiritual statement. “All in exchange for all is the real true thing,” he declared. “That is it.” In a fever of invention, he imagined Kee’s heart softening toward him. “She is beginning to understand that I am neither a thief nor a criminal,” he asserted, “but, on the contrary, am inwardly more quiet and sensible than I appear outwardly.” He pictured their future together—“I count on her joining in many artistic campaigns with me”—and polished the delusion with the most hopeful image he knew: “While the sky becomes clouded and overcast with quarrels and curses, a light rises on her side.”
Finally, surrendering in full to the illusion he had created, he resolved to go to Amsterdam and “rescue” his beloved. “I must do it someday quite unexpectedly,” he decided, “and take her unawares.”
To go to Amsterdam, however, he needed money. And for that, he needed Theo. Through the hurricane of words, Theo had struggled to remain neutral. Always the peacemaker, he had advised caution from the very start. “Take care not to build too many castles in the air before you are sure the work is not in vain,” he wrote. His equivocation prompted a predictable take-no-prisoners response from Vincent: “From the very beginning of this love, I have felt that unless I threw myself into it sans arrière pensée [without second thoughts], committing myself totally and with all my heart, utterly and forever, I had absolutely no chance.” As if trying to slow the speed of his brother’s spinning, Theo delayed his replies to each urgent missive, causing Vincent no end of frustration and even suspicion. “You will not betray me, brother?” he inquired after a letter for his parents arrived from Theo, but not one for him.
Despite this uncertain reception, Vincent began lobbying his brother for money almost as soon as he informed him of the “affair.” He insisted that his love for Kee actually made him a better artist, and he sent Theo drawings with the reassurance that “since I really love, there is more reality in [them].” When Theo still criticized the drawings as harsh and severe, Vincent argued that only Kee could soften them. He promised his brother to “make lots of drawings …whatever you want,” and assured him that “aimer encore is also the best recipe for dessiner encore [to go on drawing].” But when Theo still resisted, Vincent was forced to resort to dark threats of family disruption. “If I do not [go] soon, something will happen … which would perhaps do me great harm. Don’t ask me to go into it.”
Before Theo could respond, events in Etten derailed Vincent’s plan for a final confrontation. On November 18, after a furious argument, Dorus threatened to throw his unrulable son out of the house. The immediate provocation, apparently, was Vincent’s bizarre effort to make himself “invisible.” (“They were amazed at my behavior,” he reported proudly.) But, in fact, the explosion had been building for some time. Despite Dorus’s early reluctance to take sides, he had been thrust into the thick of the battle by both parties. Once engaged, father and son quickly remounted the barricades of antagonism built up during the long struggle over Vincent’s schooling and the Gheel episode. Dorus accused Vincent of intentionally “embittering” his parents’ lives, and decried his unconventional behavior and immoral French ideas. Vincent responded by waving the “infected” works of Michelet in his father’s face and taunting him, “I attach more value to Michelet’s advice than to [yours].” He decried his father’s “infuriating” obstinacy and hinted menacingly that if his parents continued to obstruct love’s course, “I should not be able to contain myself.” Dorus told his son, “You’re killing me.”
In this war of escalating injuries, it was inevitable that Vincent would denounce his father’s religion. The real God, he argued, “urges us toward aimer encore with irresistible force.” Religion would “ring hollow,” he declared, “if one had to hide one’s love and were not allowed to follow the dictates of one’s heart.” He sweepingly condemned those like his father who opposed aimer encore as “bégueules dévotes collet monté” (bigoted, genteel prudes) and dismissed their ideas on morality and virtue as “nonsense.” In an astounding about-face clearly pitched to elicit maximum outrage, he repudiated the special authority of the Bible. “I too read the Bible occasionally,” he said, “just as I sometimes read Michelet or Balzac or Eliot.… But I really don’t care for all that twaddle about good and evil, morality and immorality.”
With provocations like these filling the air, the parsonage was primed for an explosion. In an enormous rage that evoked memories of the Borinage and Gheel, Dorus lashed out at his son’s intolerable persistence in pursuing Kee Vos and “making trouble between us.” But Vincent refused to back down. “There are things a man simply cannot let pass,” he told Theo, things that “anyone with a heart in his body will protest with all his might.” The mutual tirade ended only when Dorus hurled the ultimate curse—“God damn you”—and ordered Vincent to “move away somewhere else.”
The prospect of leaving Etten and finding a new home and new studio on his own threw Vincent into a panic. “No, no, it is not the way!” he wrote Theo the same day, begging him to intervene with their father. “If I were suddenly taken out of these surroundings, I should have to start anew on something else.” “This must not be!” he protested. “No, no, no, it cannot be right that they want to put me out of the house just at this moment.” But not even the threat of banishment could dislodge the delusion on which he had staked everything. “I would rather give up the work just begun and all the comforts of this home,” he declared, “than resign myself to not writing her or her parents.” He pleaded again for Theo to send him money for the trip to Amsterdam so “I can at least see her face once more.”
Within days, Theo met both of his brother’s demands: he wrote their parents a letter defusing the crisis and sent Vincent money for the trip. Vincent immediately sent the Strickers a furious letter designed, he said, to elicit from the Reverend “a certain expletive which he certainly would not use in a sermon.” Then he rushed off to Amsterdam “plus vite que ça” (quicker than that) for the confrontation he had no doubt played out a thousand times in his imagination.
When Vincent demanded to see Kee, Reverend Stricker told him she was out. “She left the house the moment she heard you were here,” he said. But Vincent refused to believe it. He immediately “squared up” to the Reverend and launched into the fiery arguments he had been rehearsing for weeks. “I got a bit steamed up,” he admitted to Theo. “I did not pull my punches.” Stricker, too, had been storing up his anger for this moment. “He did not pull his punches either,” Vincent recounted, “going as far as a clergyman could. And although he did not exactly say ‘God damn you,’ anyone other than a clergyman in Uncle Stricker’s mood would have expressed himself thus.”
Vincent returned the next night, and again Kee disappeared. Her parents and brother accused Vincent of “trying to coerce her.” They told him again and again, “the matter [is] over and done with” and he should “put it out of [his] mind.” They mocked his pretensions as a suitor, saying that unless his financial prospects improved, “there wasn’t the slightest chance of winning her.” They ridiculed his “she, and no other,” telling him that her answer was “Certainly, not him.” To his pleas of aimer encore, they delivered a devastating rebuff: “Your persistence is disgusting.” He demanded again and again to see her, to have just a few minutes to plead his case directly to her. At one point, he put his hand over a gas-lamp flame and demanded, “Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in this flame.” Someone eventually blew out the lamp, but weeks later his burned flesh was still visible from a distance.
He came again a third day, but again they told him, “You will not see her.” “[She] spirited herself away every time,” he moaned. As he walked out the door for the last time, he wanly vowed, “the present case is not over.” But, of course, it was. “[My] love for her received a death blow,” he admitted later. He left Amsterdam feeling “an inexpressible melancholy … emptiness, [and] unutterable misery within me,” he wrote. The image that had driven him to such self-destructive extremes, the image of a new life, of “a little cottage on the shore with a wife and children around the hearth,” was lost forever, just as the dream of following in his father’s footsteps had died on the black heaths of the Borinage.
As then, he contemplated suicide. “Yes, I can understand people drowning themselves,” he said. But he remembered a line of Millet’s: “Il m’a toujours semblé que le suicide était une action de malhonnête homme” (It has always seemed to me that suicide was the deed of a dishonest man). “I found strength in [this] saying,” he wrote, “and thought it much better to take heart and find a remedy in work.”
VINCENT COULD NEVER go home again. He would try many times, but always with disastrous results. The rejection in Amsterdam had been complete, final, and permanent. In Kee’s “Certainly, not him,” and the Strickers’ “Your persistence is disgusting,” Vincent heard the voices of his entire family and all of his past. After Amsterdam, only two people still inhabited his darkling world: his brother Theo and his cousin Anton Mauve. “Father is not someone for whom I can feel what I feel for, say, you or Mauve,” he wrote Theo as Christmas 1881 approached. “I really do love Father and Mother, but it is quite a different feeling from the one I have for you or Mauve. Father cannot feel for or sympathize with me, and I cannot settle into Father’s and Mother’s system, it is too stifling and would suffocate me.”
As if gasping for air, Vincent arrived unannounced at Mauve’s house in The Hague in late November, straight from the catastrophe in Amsterdam. He did not return home or even tell his parents where he was going. Mauve had promised to visit Etten that winter to initiate Vincent into the “mysteries of the palette.” Now, instead, Vincent had come to Mauve. With his heart “beating quite hard” for fear of another rejection, he begged his cousin to let him stay “for a month or so” and allow Vincent to “occasionally trouble [him] for some help and advice.” By way of explanation, he offered only a cryptic French expression, to convey the urgency of his distress: “J’ai l’épée dans les reins” (literally, I have a sword in my gut).
He stayed at an inn nearby and walked every day to Mauve’s comfortable canalside studio on the city’s east side. Because Vincent insisted on making salable works, Mauve introduced him to watercolor, a lucrative but difficult medium at which Mauve excelled. “What a splendid thing watercolor is,” Vincent exulted after making a portrait of a peasant girl with only a few strokes of muted color. “[It] expresses atmosphere and distance so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe.” Under his cousin’s guidance, Vincent began to sense progress almost immediately—“a glimmering of real light,” he called it. “I wish you could see [my] watercolors,” he wrote Theo in yet another cautious surge of hope. “I reckon that I am now at the beginning of the beginning of doing something serious.”
As Vincent recovered his artistic confidence, his imagination began to repair the damage wrought by the storms of the previous months. To save face with Theo, he said almost nothing about the debacle in Amsterdam except that “Uncle Stricker was rather angry.” He blamed Kee for the failure of his mission. Her silly notions of “mystical love” had proved to him that he needed a real woman, he said—that is, a prostitute.
He sent his brother a detailed report of his encounter with just such a woman immediately after leaving the Stricker house in Amsterdam. In a narrative as “realistic” as any of the French novels his father rejected, he described her “modest, little room” and her “perfectly simple bed.” She was “coarse, not common,” he said, and “no longer young, perhaps the same age as Kee Vos.” Like Kee, she had a child, and “life had left its mark on her.” But unlike Kee, “she was strong and healthy”—not imprisoned by “frozen” devotion to a dead husband.
To revenge himself on his father, Vincent renounced religion as well as romantic love. “There is no God!’ ” he proclaimed. “For me, the God of the clergymen is as dead as a doornail.” He boasted to Theo that his father and Uncle Stricker “consider me an atheist,” and blithely dismissed their accusations with Sarah Bernhardt’s famous quip: “Que soit” (so what). In religion, as in love, Vincent imagined himself as spurning, not spurned. He compared his long enthrallment to Kee to “leaning too long against a cold, hard whitewashed church wall,” and now declared himself liberated from the debilitating detentions of both heart and soul.
In these sweeping renunciations, Vincent imagined reversing all the bitter defeats of the winter in a single stroke—and escaping the judgments of the past a little longer. “You cannot imagine the feeling of liberation I am beginning to have,” he wrote. Through the first weeks of December, he bolstered this new myth of redemption through “realism” with pledges to “become more realistic in everything,” and with page after page of “realistic” images of Dutch peasants and vignettes of country life.
Donkey and Cart, OCTOBER 1881, CHARCOAL AND CHALK ON PAPER, 16⅜ × 23¾ IN. (Illustration credit 15.3)
No doubt sensing the delusiveness of this resolution, he mightily resisted returning to Etten, where it would be tested against reality. “I should like to stay here longer,” he wrote from The Hague, “even renting a room here … for a few months (and perhaps even longer).” He pleaded with Theo to send more money and defended his heavy expenses for models and materials with one simple explanation: “It is a little risky to remain a realist.”
A week before Christmas, alarmed by Vincent’s prodigal spending
, Dorus came to The Hague to retrieve his troublesome son yet again. Vincent appealed in vain to Mauve, who appeased him with a promise to visit Etten and a vague commitment to continue his apprenticeship in the spring. With Mauve’s support, Vincent extracted from his father a promise that he could rent a separate studio in Etten and an agreement not to interfere with his artistic project. “Father must stay out of it,” he wrote Theo. “I must be free and independent, that goes without saying.”
But it was no use. The end was determined from the moment Vincent set foot back in the parsonage. For a few days he tried the usual tonics of enthusiasm and work to distract him from the inevitability of what followed. He even located a possible studio, a shed in nearby Heike, where he had often sketched and recruited models. But on Christmas Day, less than a week after his return, the whole precarious delusion came crashing down.
It started when Vincent refused to attend holiday church services. “I naturally told them that it was completely out of the question,” he told Theo, “that I thought their whole system of religion horrible.” The flames quickly spread from God to Kee Vos to Gheel and beyond, until the entire landscape of the previous four years was engulfed in a firestorm of guilt and recrimination. “I do not remember ever having been in such a rage in my life,” Vincent admitted.
In the “violent scene” that followed, Vincent unleashed all his pent-up frustration in a fury of righteous indignation and profane curses. He had spared his father’s feelings and weathered his intolerable insults for too long, he said. “I could no longer contain my anger.”
It ended only when Dorus cried “Enough!” He ordered his son to leave the parsonage and not to return. “Get out of my house,” he thundered, “the sooner the better, in half an hour rather than an hour.” This time there would be no delay and no appeal. It was the banishment that Vincent had long feared. As he left, he heard the door lock behind him.
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