The mounting antagonism cut Vincent off from the only intimacy he had known in The Hague: his models. He had come to Drenthe with high hopes for more and cheaper models, convinced that he could impress the local peasants just as he had in Etten. But Vincent was no longer the aspiring gentleman artist of that summer two years earlier. The battles with Mauve and Tersteeg, the insulation of the Schenkweg studio, the fevers of both body and mind, had changed him. Sharper, more brittle, more bitter, quicker to anger, closer to panic, Vincent now lived at the limit of his tolerances. Nor were the peat laborers and bargemen of Hoogeveen the naïve peasants of Brabant. As rumors about his strange behavior spread, the people were emboldened in their rejection. “They laughed at me, and made fun of me,” he reported dismally to Theo less than two weeks after arriving. “I could not finish some studies of the figure I had started because of the unwillingness of the models.”
He blamed his humiliations on the lack of a decent studio or unfavorable light and assailed the locals for not “listening to reasonable, rational demands.” As in The Hague, he burned with frustration over “the people whom one would love to have as models, but cannot get.” That frustration led him to the only other form of paid intimacy he knew: prostitutes. In a long and plaintive letter, he extolled the virtues of these “sisters of charity” and defended his persistent need for their companionship. “I see nothing wrong in them,” he explained; “I feel something human in them.”
He missed Sien and the boy. The second thoughts that had dogged his departure from The Hague followed him to Drenthe like Furies. The memory of her “cuts right through me,” he confessed only days after arriving. “I think of her with such tender regret.” He saw her everywhere, like a “phantom.” At the sight of a poor woman on the heath, or a mother and child traveling by barge, or an empty cradle at an inn, his “heart melted” and his “eyes grew moist.” He wrestled yet again with his justifications for leaving and the possibility of her salvation. “Women of her kind are infinitely—oh, infinitely—more to be pitied than censured,” he wrote. “Poor, poor, poor creature.” He longed for her company on the companionless moors and bitterly regretted that he had not pressed harder to marry her. “It might have saved her,” he imagined, “and also put an end to my own great mental anguish, which has now unfortunately been doubled.” He waited each day for a letter from her, until the anxiety almost crushed him. “The fate of the woman and the fate of my poor little boy and the other child cuts my heart to shreds,” he wailed. “There must be something wrong.” In a panic of guilt and dread, he sent her money.
Vincent never told Theo how much money he gave Sien when he left (and afterward). But all of it was money he could not afford. As a result, less than a week after his arrival in Drenthe, a familiar lament arose: “My money is almost gone … I don’t know how I shall manage.” The rent was due; the locals refused to extend credit. He couldn’t repay a loan from Rappard—an embarrassment that stymied his plan for a reunion in the far north. As his money ran out, so did his supplies. He had left The Hague provisioned for only a week or two of painting, even though he knew nothing would be available in Drenthe and any replacements would have to be ordered from The Hague. But he had left the city with many bills unpaid, and no one there would extend him credit either. In the meantime, the approaching winter drained the landscape of color, foreclosing important subjects. “I have found so much beauty here,” he cried out in frustration. “Losing time is the greatest expense.” Without sufficient supplies, he had to put off his deeper excursions into the moorlands—the arduous forays that had preoccupied his first days in this alien country. “It would be too reckless to undertake [them] if one did so without a stock of materials,” he conceded bitterly.
By the third week of September, his paint box was nearly empty. For the first time since the Borinage, he faced the terrifying prospect of idleness. “I feel inexpressibly melancholy without my work to distract me,” he warned. “I must work and work hard, I must forget myself in my work, otherwise it will crush me.”
He lashed out at his uncle Cor for not responding to the raft of drawings he had sent from The Hague. Into that silence, Vincent read all the slights and betrayals of the past. “He seems to have certain unshakable opinions about me,” he wrote of the only family member other than Theo who had actually supported his art. “I certainly need not put up with insults, and it is a decided insult that he did not even acknowledge that he had received the last packet of studies. Not a syllable.” In an explosion of bile, he threatened to “attack” his fifty-nine-year-old uncle, “have it out with His Honor,” and “get satisfaction.”
It would be cowardly to let the matter rest. I shall and must demand an explanation … If he should refuse, then I shall tell him to give me—and I have a right to tell him so—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and then in my turn I shall insult him without restraint, quite cold-bloodedly … I cannot endure being treated as a reprobate, being judged or accused of things without being heard myself.
Eventually, Vincent turned the painful memories of the Borinage on the real target of his anger: Theo. He accused his brother of cruelly giving him only enough money to perpetuate his misery, and insisted that not only his career but his relationship with Sien, too, would have succeeded if only Theo had been more generous. “I would rather have stayed with the woman,” he wrote, “[but] I did not have the means to act toward her as I should have wished.” He blamed his brother for the “dark future” that lay ahead, for his “bleeding heart,” for the “feeling of disappointment and melancholy” that haunted him, and for the “void” at the center of his life.
Recalling the self-punishing hardships of the winter of 1880 (“wandering forever like a tramp”), Vincent warned that he was once again nearing his limits. “You remember, perhaps, how it was with me in the Borinage,” he wrote. “Well, I am rather afraid it might be the same thing here all over again.” The only way to avoid that terrible fate, he argued, was for Theo to provide “proof of sincerity”: first by sending enough cash immediately for Vincent to lay in a fresh stock of materials; second, by giving an ironclad guarantee (a “definite fixed arrangement”) that he would continue sending one hundred and fifty francs a month no matter what. At a time when he knew his brother to be financially distressed, Vincent threw down the gauntlet: without more money, he threatened, “I must be prepared for anything,” including “madness.”
THE BARGAIN VINCENT had struck in The Hague was unraveling. In choosing Theo over Sien, he had given up too much and gotten too little. The thought of his mistake pushed him deeper and deeper into depression—“discouragement and despair greater than I can describe”—even as he squeezed his paint tubes harder and harder to eke out another day’s work. Without money, materials, models, companionship, or comfort—without “confidence and warmth”—he confessed miserably, “I am absolutely at a loss … I cannot shake off a feeling of deep melancholy.”
Only two weeks after it began, the expedition to Drenthe seemed on the verge of collapse. “Everything is prose,” he lamented, “which, after all, has poetry for its end.” He saw the bleak moors with new eyes, describing them as monotonous and aggravating—a “perpetually rotting” carrion of landscape that yielded only mold as crop. Everywhere he looked, he found death and dying: in a local graveyard where he painted and sketched; in the figure of a mourning woman wrapped in crepe; in the decayed remains of old tree stumps exhumed after centuries under the bog. He sent Theo a detailed description of a funeral barge gliding mysteriously across the heath, the women mourners seated in the boat while the men pulled from the canal bank.
Landscape with Bog-Oak Trunks, OCTOBER 1883, PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 12⅛ × 14⅞ IN. (Illustration credit 20.1)
Reminders of mortality dragged Vincent into a “morass of thoughts and insoluble problems.” Describing himself as “absolutely beaten,” he spent his idle days grinding the failures of the past yet again through the millstones of guilt and self-reproach. Y
et again he imagined solving his problems by escaping them. He laid elaborate plans for “pushing on deeper into the country, notwithstanding the bad season,” or perhaps finding a new home “even farther out on the heath.” But without his brother’s money, these were nothing more than fantasies. “I see more clearly how I have got stuck here,” he admitted, “and how handicapped I am.”
Just when the future seemed too gloomy and hopeless to bear, the rains came. Dark clouds filled the sky over the moors and it poured incessantly. As bogs filled up, canals topped their banks, and roads returned to swamp, Vincent sat in his dark garret turning over and over in his mind a poem by Longfellow:
My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
He quoted only the last two lines in a letter to Theo, then added bleakly, “Isn’t the number of dark and dreary days sometimes too great?”
On one dreary day in late September, Vincent finally reached his breaking point. It did not take a new calamity to trigger what may have been his first recorded psychotic episode. After the crisis of conscience in The Hague and the unfolding disaster in Drenthe, his mental state was so precarious that it took only the humblest of provocations to bring on the storm. Returning to his room, he looked across the gloomy attic space and saw his paint box illuminated in the darkness by a spot of light from a single pane of glass. The sight of the empty box, the dry palette, the discarded curls of paint tubes, the “bundle of worn-out brushes,” spoke to him in a way only metaphors could.
“Everything is too miserable, too insufficient, too worn out,” he cried on behalf of himself as well as his pitiful kit. The great gap between his endless plans and his pathetic reality opened before him and he saw “how hopeless everything is.” A wave of dread, long kept at bay by furious work, threatened to drown him. “I have been overwhelmed by forebodings about the future,” he reported to Theo in a letter he called “a cry for more breath.” Choking on guilt and regret, he contemplated surrendering to failure, even to self-extinction. “Leave me to my fate,” he begged his brother. “There is no help for it; it is too much for one person, and there is no chance of getting help from any other side. Isn’t that proof enough that we must give it up?”
To escape the demons let loose in his garret room that day, Vincent fled into his imagination—as he always did. The obsession that emerged only days later would outstrip all the great obsessions of his life.
“COME, BROTHER, COME and paint with me on the heath.”
This was the cry that arose from the desolate moors of Drenthe in early October 1883. For the next two months, Vincent strained every fiber of his intelligence, passion, and imagination in an effort to persuade his brother to quit Goupil, abandon Paris, and join him on the heath. “Come and walk with me behind the plow and the shepherd,” he pleaded. “Let the storm that blows across the heath blow through you.”
In a hail of letters, he argued Theo insensate over this latest in a lifetime of desperate, delusional schemes for happiness. “I cannot help imagining a future when I no longer work alone,” he wrote in an ecstasy of longing, “but instead you and I, painters, working together as comrades here in this moorland.” Not his ministry in the Borinage, not his pursuit of Kee Vos, not even his rescue of Sien Hoornik had inspired Vincent to more manic fantasies of logic or more incandescent flights of yearning. Like all of those past campaigns, this new one set an unreachable goal and marshaled all his powers of self-delusion to achieve it. Even as he insisted defensively, “I am not living in a dream … or in a castle in the air,” he knew that Theo had rejected this same invitation many times already. As recently as the previous summer (1883), he had turned a deaf ear to Vincent’s pleas that he should “move to the country” and “Be a painter.”
Why did Vincent revive so soon a proposal that his brother had rejected so often and so recently? Especially a proposal so preposterous on its face? Only the money Theo sent each month stood between Vincent and utter destitution. The same Goupil salary also helped support his brother, sister, and parents. All would be subjected to hardship, not to say humiliation, if the family’s most dutiful son abandoned its most distinguished enterprise to join its most disreputable slacker in the country’s most desolate region. But Vincent’s needs outran rationality. Alone on the moors of Drenthe, just as in the Borinage, he simply had no place else to turn. The events of late September had filled him with fears he could neither acknowledge to himself nor admit to his brother. At almost exactly the same moment, Theo began to complain moodily about his situation in Paris and talked loosely of leaving Goupil. These periodic fits of melancholy and discontent always drew Vincent into raptures of solidarity, as he saw in them confirmation of his own errant path. But this time, Theo went further than he had ever gone before—literally. He threatened not just to quit Goupil, but to leave Europe altogether and sail for America.
Faced with absolute abandonment at a time of overwhelming need, Vincent launched his desperate, impossible campaign. Not until five years later, when he lured Paul Gauguin to Provence, would it be equaled.
He had often bragged to his brother about the “manliness” of an artist’s work. Now he redoubled his charge of effeminacy against dealers and “men who live on their income.” “As a painter,” he promised, “one feels more a man among other men.” Not to become a painter, he warned, could only lead Theo to “deterioration as a man”; while, as an artist, he could “roam about freely” among Zola’s libidinous natives. He urged on Theo the virile kinship between artists and other “craftsmen”—like blacksmiths—who “can make something with their own hands.” Taking an argument that Theo had first made to him in the Borinage, he extolled the simplicity and honesty of art as a “handicraft,” calling it “a delightful thing” that would make Theo “a better and deeper human being.” He invoked the Spirit of 1793 to call for a revolution in Theo’s life and cited a print from his portfolio that showed, he claimed, a physical resemblance between Theo and the heroes of an earlier revolution, the Puritans. His brother had “exactly, exactly the same physiognomy” as the Mayflower pilgrims, he concluded triumphantly, the same “reddish-hair” and “square forehead.” What more convincing proof could there be that he was destined to follow in the footsteps of these “men of action” who struck out for a brave new world in search of “simple lives” and the “straightforward path”?
But not for America. In a blur of conflicting signals, Vincent attacked his brother’s plan to cross the ocean (the only truly “revolutionary” ambition Theo ever expressed). Without a glimmer of irony, he dismissed it as the figment of overwrought nerves—the product of a “miserable, gloomy moment, when one is overwhelmed by things.” He compared it to a suicide wish and chastened his brother for even considering such an “unbecoming” notion. “Look here,” he exclaimed, “making oneself scarce or disappearing, neither you nor I should ever do that, no more than commit suicide.” He answered Theo’s threat with a threat of his own—a hint of the extremes to which he would go to prevent being abandoned by his brother: “Those moments when you think of going to America,” he warned, “I think of enlisting for the East Indies.”
In Vincent’s fevered summons, no place on earth compared to the moors of Drenthe. Only days after seeing death everywhere, he rediscovered the vision of paradise in his head—“my little kingdom,” he called it. “It is so absolutely and entirely what I think beautiful … The heath speaks to you … the still voice of nature … beautiful and calm.” Other times, the heath reverberated with a symphony of “heart-rending music
” and the days passed “like dreams.” Scenery so “unutterably beautiful” could not only dazzle, Vincent promised; it could also heal. Citing his own calmness as proof, he wooed his sickly, nervous brother with the heath’s reparative powers. Only its serenity could save Theo from nervous exhaustion—“your constant enemy and mine”—or even breakdown. After several years of furiously denouncing all religion, Vincent beckoned his brother to a spiritual renewal on the heath, summoning him to something higher than nature, higher than art, something “inconceivable” and “unnamable.” “Put your trust in the same thing I put my trust in,” he wrote, resurrecting the brothers’ code name for the unnamable: “It.”
As if to illustrate his arguments with actual experience, Vincent left Hoogeveen and headed deeper into peat country. Flush with a payment from Theo, a loan from his father, and a fresh supply of painting materials wangled on credit from The Hague, he took a slow barge sixteen miles due east to the little town of Veenoord—“the remotest corner of Drenthe,” he called it. Along with its twin settlement, Nieuw-Amsterdam, Veenoord sat at the heart of the peat country. Throughout the summer, thousands of cutters and dredgers swarmed across the treeless expanses in every direction, throwing up huge mounds of peat alongside their temporary shelters. By the time Vincent arrived in early October, most of the piles had been hauled away and the laborers had settled into their wretched winter lives, cooped in the same stinking hovels with their animals, bound like serfs by the hated “truck system.” The peat bosses who paid their subsistence wage all summer now began taking it back through inflated prices at the company-owned stores all winter, so that most laborers emerged in the spring shackled to the land by debt. So great was the hardship inflicted by this vicious circle of exploitation that the peat workers had already resorted to the unthinkable boljagen—going on strike.
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