Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Throughout the spring, he denied the reality of his solitude by clinging to this ghost of brotherhood and belonging on the rue Lepic. Less than a month after arriving, in a rare unguarded moment, he gave the illusion away. “I would rather fool myself than feel alone,” he admitted. “I think I should feel depressed if I did not fool myself about everything.”

  CAUGHT UP IN his mercenary zeal and bound in every thought to his former home, Vincent closed himself off to the new one. He wrote almost nothing about the city of Arles, or its inhabitants, in his first months there. When the weather permitted, he plodded directly into the countryside from his hotel near the train station. Other days, he holed up in the Restaurant Carrel, or took his meals in his room. He made a few trips to the city’s bullfighting arena (where he reported seeing “a toreador crush a testicle jumping the barricade”) and, of course, he visited the local brothels (conveniently located just a block from his hotel). But even on these rare excursions, the brothers’ enterprise on the entresol guided his eye. The injured toreador, “dressed in sky blue and gold,” reminded him of a figure out of “our Monticelli”; and his description of one brothel offered up exactly the gay avant-garde palette that he had promised to find in the Midi:

  Fifty or more military men in red and civilians in black their faces a magnificent yellow or orange (what hues there are in the faces here), the women in sky blue, in vermilion, as unqualified and garish as possible. The whole in a yellow light.

  Too tied to the city he left behind, Vincent never registered the extraordinary city to which he had come. Continuously occupied since before the time of Alexander the Great, Arles had felt the footsteps of all the great civilizations whose progress Vincent had limned a hundred times in his studies and on his maps: Greek settlers, Phoenician traders, Roman legionnaires, Visigoth invaders, Byzantine governors, Saracen conquerors, Crusader armies. The Carthaginian Hannibal could spy Arles from the heights of the Alpilles, a rocky spur of the Alps less than ten miles to the north. The great Julius Caesar had rededicated Arles as “the Rome of Gaul” in 46 B.C. Not long afterward, according to legend, a group of Jesus’ family and friends had sailed from Judea to escape the turmoil following his crucifixion, and landed miraculously on the coast nearby.

  All of these, and many more, had left their marks on the city’s narrow streets. The Romans, in particular, had bequeathed a legacy in stone. The huge bullfighting arena where Vincent admired “the great colorful multitudes piled up one above the other on two or three galleries” had been built in the first century A.D. by the emperor Vespasian. Nearby, the plundered remains of a Roman theater cast a looming shadow of history over the warren of medieval streets where Vincent single-mindedly trooped to work, passing tourists, like Henry James, who came from worlds away to see “the most charming and touching ruins I had ever beheld.”

  If Vincent had not been so preoccupied, he might also have seen in Arles’s history just the kind of metaphor he found so consoling. For millennia, Arles had controlled the strategic junction of the Rhône River and the Mediterranean Sea. A virtual island, surrounded by water and marshland on every side, it sat at the apex of the river’s vast, triangular delta, straddling the gateway to one of Europe’s richest regions. But centuries of silt had clogged the estuary channels and filled in the marshes, pushing the sea southward, beyond the horizon. Deprived of its port, Arles had become a city stranded in place and time. Now, instead of overlooking busy quays and sparkling water, the old stones kept watch over a broad, lazy river and a vista of waving sea grass and wild horses.

  But Vincent saw only decay. “This is a filthy town,” he wrote Theo. “Everything has a blighted, faded quality about it now.”

  His disdain for the town extended to its citizenry. As on all his forays into the country, Vincent found the natives of Provence as strange and unapproachable as they found him. “[They] all seem to me to be creatures from another world,” he reported a month after his arrival. Like the coal-mining Borins, the Arlesians spoke a patois almost unintelligible to Vincent’s ear, honed for two years on Parisian French. Their medieval customs, mystical Catholicism, and deep superstitions were objects of ridicule even among their own countrymen. By 1872, when Alphonse Daudet published the first in a series of comic novels about a hapless, blowhard Provençal named Tartarin from Tarascon, a real town only ten miles from Arles, the natives of Provence had become a national joke, mocked everywhere for their buffoonery and braggadocio.

  Just as he had relied on a guidebook to learn about the Borins, Vincent took Daudet’s caricature as a textbook on the “simple and artless folk” of Arles. He seemed both bemused and disconcerted that his only source for painting supplies was an amateur artist who doubled as the local grocer (who had access to an ample supply of egg yolks for sizing the canvas he sold). After a visit to the city’s museum, Vincent assumed the airs of a condescending Parisian, dismissing it as “a horror and a humbug [that] ought to be in Tarascon.”

  The locals sensed his contempt and returned it. They recalled him as “méfiant” (mistrustful) and “frileux” (aloof). One of the townspeople later remembered that Vincent “always looked as if he were rushing away, without deigning to look at anyone.” Like the miners of the Borinage and the peasants of Nuenen, they deplored his strange manner and bizarre dress. An eyewitness recalled Vincent years later as “vraiment la laideur personnifiée”—truly ugliness personified. As in those other places, he attracted the unwanted attentions of teenagers who “shouted abuse at [him] when he went past,” one of them recounted, “[with] his pipe between his teeth, his big body a bit hunched, a mad look in his eye.” In a sad confession, Vincent acknowledged his latest failure to find a home. “Up to the present I haven’t made the least progress in people’s affection,” he wrote that summer. “Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone, except to ask for dinner or coffee. And it has been like that from the beginning.”

  Vincent did, however, occasionally see other artists working in the area. Christian Mourier-Petersen, a twenty-nine-year-old Dane living outside Arles, was the next in a succession of younger artists whom Vincent attempted to tyrannize with instruction. “His work is dry, correct, and timid,” he reported to Theo. “I talked to him a lot about the impressionists.” As always, Vincent sent glowing accounts of social evenings and painting excursions with his pedigreed young companion. But after Mourier-Petersen left in May, Vincent’s happy account dissolved into the usual wounded recriminations (“that idiot”), elliptical confessions of discord, and belated complaints about his student’s resistance to reason.

  Just as Mourier-Petersen was leaving, Vincent made the acquaintance of Dodge MacKnight, a twenty-seven-year-old American artist who had rented a studio in the nearby village of Fontvielle. Vincent never liked Americans, whom he considered boorish, and MacKnight confirmed his bias at their first encounter. “As an art critic, his views are so narrow that they make me smile,” Vincent summed up their conversation. Only because MacKnight was a friend of John Peter Russell—the object of Vincent’s commercial ambitions—did he hold his fire, putting off the inevitable dénouement at least for a few months.

  The combination of unrequited longing for Theo and unrelieved loneliness triggered a wave of nostalgia. Vincent was often gripped by debilitating seizures of memory and remorse, especially when prevented from working by lack of materials or subjects. As the color drained from the orchards, he complained of “inward suffering” and vowed, “I must go and look for a new subject.” Remembrances of things past rushed into the void, flooding his thoughts, his letters, his pen, and his brush.

  The countryside around Arles was filled with reminders of his childhood and homeland: from the network of canals that crisscrossed the marshy boglands, to the mills that drained them. Tree-lined roads vanished at the horizon and grasslands stretched heathlike to the sea. Even the sky, arching over the chessboard of groves, grazing pastures, and stubbled fields, evoked the great Golden Age vistas of Ruisdael and Philips Koninc
k. But whether on the delta of the Rhône or the banks of the Thames, Vincent’s imagination needed no prompting to drift back to the past. Indeed, like London, Provence reminded him of Holland both in its differences and its similarities. That they followed the same cycle of seasons, or fell under the same sun, was enough to return him to the plain of the Maas. “I keep thinking of Holland,” he wrote, “and across the twofold remoteness of distance and time gone by, these memories have a kind of heartbreak in them.”

  The Road to Tarascon, JULY 1888, PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 9⅞ × 13¼ IN. (Illustration credit 30.1)

  In April, in a startling reversal, he set aside his paint box and took up his pencil and pen—the first instruments of his art—as if the years in Paris had never happened. He sent Theo two drawings made according to “a method that I had already tried in Holland some time ago,” he announced. Instead of seeing the stony ruins all around him, or the rocky Alpine heights nearby, his eye lighted on scenes he had seen or drawn a hundred times: a pair of pollard willows, a lone farmhouse standing sentry in a wheat field, a single traveler on a tree-lined road to infinity. Toting his heavy perspective frame through the strange but familiar landscape, he made elaborate drawings, then took them back to his room for his pen to obsess over.

  He used the sturdy reeds that he found growing wild on canal banks and roadsides. Cutting their tips at an angle “the way you would a goose quill,” he deployed an astonishing variety of marks—hatchings, dots, and dashes, thin brushlike washes and stark black outlines—closely observing every idiosyncrasy of limb and leaf. In some images he raised the horizon almost to the top of the paper, focusing his gaze not on the Mediterranean sky but on the minute changes in grassy textures of an untended meadow. These were the images that he and Rappard had drawn together on the banks of the Passievaart swamp near Etten; the images that Theo had favored over Vincent’s endless weavers and peasants; the images that had nursed his mother back to health in Nuenen. And they were the only images about which his unforgiving father had ever said a kind word.

  Vincent returned again and again to one of these in particular.

  In March, in his earliest wanderings around the countryside after the snow melted, he had come upon a familiar sight: a drawbridge. Constructed of huge timbers bleached as white as bone by the relentless sun, it spanned the canal connecting the Rhône to the port of Bouc, about thirty miles southeast of Arles. Vincent had seen similar skeletal contraptions everywhere in cities and towns in the watery matrix of his homeland. Indeed, the dozen or more bridges along the length of the same canal had been built by Dutch engineers to Dutch specifications. Known technically as a double-leaf bascule bridge (after the French bascule, for seesaw), it operated as simply as a child’s toy. The timbered trusses, like gateways, on either side of the canal, supported frameworks of heavy beams connected by chains to the roadway “leaves” at one end, and laden with counterweights at the other. So precisely were these weights balanced that a casual heave could throw the whole great lumbered mechanism into motion, opening the way for boats to pass. With a loud creak like a ship docking, the road would split in the middle and rise to perpendicular on each bank, as the long counterweighted arms descended to the ground.

  The Réginelle Bridge, spanning the road south from Arles to Port St. Louis on the coast, attracted him especially, even though getting to it from the Hotel Carrel, on the north side of the city, took some effort. He had first stumbled on the bridge in mid-March, just as the weather warmed enough for local women to start washing their clothes on the weedy canal bank nearby. The scene sent Vincent’s imagination drifting backward. Not just the bridge, but the laboring figures echoed the art of his past—before Paris. The wild reeds and neglected waterline evoked the fields and ponds of Nuenen, not the playgrounds of Asnières. Against a bright blue sky, he rendered the bridge and its stone abutments in broken tones of tan and ocher that harked back to the parsonage garden and his father’s Bible. The bridge itself he painted not in the bold color slashes of the japonaiserie, but in the painstaking detail of the weavers’ looms. Using his cumbersome perspective frame for the first time since Paris, he recorded every complication of its workings: the reinforced pivots, the ropes and pulleys, the squiggles of draw-chains. Thrust upward on its massive abutments, high above the desiccated canal bank, the jostling peasant women, and the sweep of agitated water, it looms over the familiar landscape as indelibly as the tower over the churchyard where his father was buried.

  For the next month, despite the onerous trek, Vincent returned again and again to this landmark of memory, bearing his perspective frame and his draftsman’s pencil. He drew it from both sides of the canal: from the north bank, in front of the house of the pontier (bridgekeeper) Langlois, after whom the locals called the bridge; and from the steeper south bank, where the towpath hugged the waterline. He drew it from the west, looking toward the sea, and from the east, against the sunset; from the side, and from straight on, in dramatic foreshortening. With pencil and ruler, he labored like a schoolboy over precise renderings of the bridge’s mechanism. He sent a bold sketch of it to Bernard, along with a description that hints at the long hours he spent lingering in its shadow. He described the “sailors with their sweethearts going up to the town … profiled against the strange silhouette of the drawbridge.”

  With every visit, every view, the past loomed larger and larger in his thoughts as well as on his easel. By the end of March, it took only a newspaper obituary of Mauve, enclosed in a letter from his sister Wil, to trigger tears of guilt and regret. “Something—I don’t know what—took hold of me,” Vincent reported, “and brought a lump to my throat.” He had known of his cousin’s death for two months. Only a month before, he had coldly calculated sending Mauve’s grieving widow a painting in order to secure Tersteeg’s attention. But weeks of loneliness and obsessing over the bridge had reopened all the old wounds. Theo’s plan to visit their mother and sisters in Holland on the eve of his thirty-first birthday in May unleashed yet another wave of corrosive memories. Reverting to the oldest family ritual, Vincent painted a birthday present: an orchard done in “a frenzy of impastos”; and achingly pictured his brother in Holland “seeing the same trees in flower on that very day.”

  Vincent fought the flood of reflection with a desperate new plan for vindication. Staring at the paintings and drawings that filled his little hotel room, he began to conceive an image that would put all the ghosts of Holland to rest and reverse his unending exile: a single image that would crown the brothers’ enterprise on the entresol, seal his comradeship with fellow avant-garde painters, and finally “convince Tersteeg that I really am a true impressionist of the Petit Boulevard.”

  Drawbridge with Lady with Parasol, MAY 1888, INK AND CHALK ON PAPER, 24 × 12⅛ IN. (Illustration credit 30.2)

  That image was the Langlois Bridge.

  In a “continual fever” of determination, he returned to the familiar canal bank. On a large canvas, secured against the spring mistral, he laid on large areas of color: giant pieces in the simplest of jigsaws. “I want to get colors into it like stained glass windows,” he wrote, echoing the new Cloisonnist gospel of Bernard, “and a good, bold design.” He painted a sandy-white path streaking diagonally across the canvas, bejeweled with passersby in crystals of contrasting color. Under a rectangle of cerulean sky, two great lilac abutments shimmered in a triangle of emerald water. Above them, the bridge loomed in a bold calligraphy of timbers. On the horizon behind, a huge golden sun radiates its setting glow in stylized waves of white and yellow.

  No sooner had he put these pieces together and prepared a sketch for Bernard than the wind and rain drove Vincent indoors, where, in the effort to finish the image from memory, he “completely ruined it,” he lamented to Theo. Undeterred, he tried again and again. In April, when the weather failed to cooperate, he holed up in his hotel room and began a copy of the very first version he had done. But instead of the backward-looking broken tones of March, he filled the familia
r outlines with the vivid, prismatic color he had learned on the rue Lepic. He set the canvas ablaze with contrasts: instead of orange-ocher, he painted the earth rusty red. He replaced the rangy canal bank reeds of winter bistre and spring mint with stylized fans of tropical forest green. The rippling water deepened from azure to ultramarine; the stone abutments modulated from gray to lavender; and the bridge itself sprang to life in bright, impossible yellow.

  It was a dazzling summary—an image that finally connected his new art to the emotional wellspring of his imagination: the past. He knew immediately that he had created something new and exceptional—“an odd thing,” he called it, “not like what I generally do.”

  Fueled now by the same redemptive passion that had driven him to the limits of endurance in the black country and to the brink of suicide in Antwerp, Vincent’s mercenary fervor redoubled. He launched a fantastic scheme to rain his paintings on family and associates in Holland: one for sister Wil, one for his old companion George Hendrik Breitner, two for a museum in The Hague, and, of course, one for the implacable Tersteeg. “He will have a picture of mine,” Vincent vowed. And that picture would be the Langlois bridge. “Tersteeg will not refuse that picture,” he promised. “I have made up my mind.” Only that picture could exact “revenge” on the haughty gérant for rejecting all the brothers’ previous approaches. Only that picture could set the past right.