Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Rey, who was just completing his doctoral thesis on urinary tract infections, knew little about mental illness, but he brightly ventured his own reassuring prognosis to the patient’s distraught brother. Vincent was merely suffering from “overexcitement,” he said—the natural product of an “extremely hypersensitive personality.” The symptoms would soon abate, he predicted confidently. “He will be himself again in a few days.”

  If Theo had stayed in Arles another day, he might have met the hospital’s medical director or administrator and heard other, more dire opinions. But formal interviews would have entailed wrenching inquiries into family health secrets, both physical and mental: a routine part of the admitting process that both brothers dreaded. (Vincent’s hospital records contained none of the background information that Theo could have provided.) Rey’s opinion may have been hasty, inexperienced, or inexpert, but it gave Theo what he wanted most: permission to return to Paris. Just as his old life threatened to end, a new one beckoned. “The prospect of losing my brother,” he wrote Jo, “made me realize what a terrible emptiness I would feel if he were no longer there. And then I imagined you before me.”

  It was a pattern that would be repeated again and again over the next five months as Vincent shuttled in and out of the hospital, in and out of padded cells, in and out of coherence: one brother suffering in silence and self-reproach, the other retreating into optimism and indecision; one haunted by the past, the other looking to the future; both grasping at every straw of hope, minimizing every dread, moving in contrary spirals of denial that pushed them further and further apart with each revolution. “Let’s not exhaust ourselves in futile attempts at mutual generosity,” Vincent wrote in a moment of grim clarity and resignation after Theo left. “You do your duty and I will do mine … and at the end of the road perhaps we will meet again.”

  AS SOON AS NEWS of Theo’s departure pierced his consciousness, Vincent plunged into darkness again.

  Vincent remembered little about his attacks (“I don’t know anything about what I said, what I wanted, or what I did,” he wrote), but he remembered the darkness. It descended without warning. In an instant, “the veil of time and the fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart,” he said—as if he had suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the world. A witness at the hospital who saw him during an attack described him as “lost.” In the darkness, nameless fears overwhelmed him. He felt waves of “anguish and terror” and “horrible fits of anxiety.” He lashed out violently at the threats he saw everywhere, raging incoherently at doctors and chasing away anyone who approached his bed. When his rage was spent, he retreated to a corner or under the covers and cowered in fevers of “indescribable mental anguish.” He trusted no one, recognized no one, doubted everything he heard or saw, took no food, could not sleep, would not write, and refused to talk.

  In the darkness, shapeless shadows pursued him. Horla-like ghosts—“unbearable hallucinations”—appeared and disappeared like vapor, but as vivid and palpable as his own flesh. “During the crises themselves,” he wrote, “I thought that everything I imagined was real.” They spoke to him. They accused him of terrible crimes. They called him “a deplorable and melancholy failure,” a “weak character,” a “miserable wretch.” He shouted back, desperately defending himself against the thin air. But he could not make himself heard. After a lifetime of arguing and persuading, he was trapped in his worst nightmare: a prisoner at the bar, gagged into silence. “I cried out so much during the attacks,” he recalled; “I wanted to defend myself and couldn’t do it.” The unanswered accusations sent him spiraling into seizures of self-loathing and “atrocious remorse.”

  Vincent never identified his phantom accusers. But in his hours of “frightful suffering … when I was so far gone that it was more than a swoon,” he called out names: Degas, whose easy, elegant lines eluded him; Gauguin, whose refusal to stay in Arles confirmed the failure of his great Midi dream; Theo, who came to Arles too late and for all the wrong reasons. And, of course, the damning parson who relentlessly tallied every failure and spied from every crucifix. “During my illness,” Vincent wrote,

  I saw again every room of the house at Zundert, every path, every plant in the garden, the views from the fields round about, the neighbors, the graveyard, the church, our kitchen garden behind—down to the magpie’s nest in a tall acacia in the graveyard.

  In such hallucinatory “eruptions of memory,” as Flaubert called them, Vincent revisited all the injuries of the past. “In my madness,” he recalled, “my thoughts sailed over many seas.” For him, memory had always been the imagination’s sixth sense; nostalgia, a turbulent inland sea of inspiration. His delirium breached the dam between past and present. Flaubert, who suffered similar mental seizures, described how images flooded in “like torrents of blood … everything in one’s head bursting all at once.”

  Where others saw madness, Vincent saw memories. He climbed into bed with fellow patients, just as he had done with Theo in Zundert. He chased after nurses in his nightshirt, just as he had done with Sien in The Hague. He even blackened his face with coal, just as he had done in the Borinage. To Rey it looked like an act of lunacy—“he went to wash himself in the coal bin,” the doctor reported incredulously. What Rey couldn’t see, what only Vincent could see, was a past of ridicule and rejection by the wretched Borins and a familiar self-abasing ritual of solidarity with the miners who, like him, “walked in darkness.”

  Sometimes the darkness passed quickly—a sudden storm that blotted out the sun for a moment or an hour. Other times, it lingered for days as storm after storm battered his reason and seemed to banish the sun forever.

  By December 30, the darkness had lifted. Or so it seemed. “His condition has improved,” Rey wrote Theo that day, exactly a week after Vincent took up his razor. “I don’t believe his life is in danger, at least for the moment.” When he emerged, Vincent found himself imprisoned and alone. “Why do they keep me here like a convict?” he angrily demanded. Stripped of recollection, he felt only guilt. “He hides himself in absolute silence,” one visitor reported, “covers himself with his bedclothes and at times cries without uttering a single word.” Both his anger and his shame threatened to restart the cycle of madness. Another visitor described him as “calm and coherent” but so “amazed and indignant” at his situation (“kept shut up [and] completely deprived of his liberty”) that another attack seemed inevitable. The anger fueled days of protests against his continued confinement. For a time, he refused to cooperate with his captors. “When he saw me enter his room,” Rey wrote, “he told me that he wanted to have nothing to do with me.”

  The doctors increasingly saw only one path forward: commitment. During the worst of his attacks they had issued a “certificate of mental alienation” claiming that Vincent suffered “a generalized delirium” and attesting to his need for “special care” in one of the two public asylums in the region, in Aix and Marseille. Even Rey seemed convinced. He wrote Theo expressing his preference for the asylum in Marseille, where he had recently interned. The future seemed set until Vincent’s sudden return from the darkness in late December. Paralyzed at the prospect of burdening Theo further, he argued fiercely for his freedom and recruited the postman Roulin to plead his case to hospital officials. But no display of calmness and coherence, no promises from Roulin to look after his friend, not even the speedy healing of the wound on Vincent’s head, could persuade the doctors to release him. Even Rey, the most optimistic of them, feared the violent consequences of a relapse. Besides, the commitment process had already been set in motion.

  In a desperate bid to head off a collision, Rey wrote Theo to propose a different path forward. “Would you like to have your brother in an asylum near Paris?” he inquired. “Do you have resources? If so, you can send for him.”

  BUT THEO HAD other matters on his mind. “Now tell me what we have to do according to Dutch custom,” he wrote Jo Bonger the day Rey’s letter arrived. “We could star
t sending the announcements, couldn’t we?”

  He had returned to Paris on the day after Christmas determined to recapture the perfect happiness interrupted by Arles. “I think of you and long so to be with you,” he wrote Jo, who had left for Amsterdam only hours before his return. The thought of their future together carried him through the long days at the gallery during its busiest season and the long nights in the empty rue Lepic apartment. “I too often look at the corner of my room where we enjoyed such peace together,” he wrote her. “When shall I be able to call you my little wife?”

  The outpouring of congratulations from friends and family resumed immediately, separating Theo even further from the brief, otherworldly detour to Arles. “Bless your future life together,” sister Lies wrote the day after his return. “For Ma it is like a ray of sunshine to know that your life won’t be lonely anymore.” Only the uncertainty of Vincent’s fate (which hung over the holiday season like a “haze,” he said) prevented him from racing to Holland to join his beloved, as they had planned before Christmas. “I shall not postpone it for a single day unless I absolutely must,” he assured her. “I so long to be with you.” In the meantime, he busied himself with preparations for his new life: printing the engagement announcements, planning a round of visits to friends, and looking for a new apartment—“the place where we shall build our nest.”

  As much as longing for Jo distracted him from his brother’s fate, news from Arles confused him about it. “I’ve been wavering between hope and fear,” he wrote. Rey’s initial reports summarized Vincent’s condition well enough, but with a clinical dispassion and professional caution that hardly captured the tempests of emotion Theo knew his brother was suffering. At one point, Rey, an aspiring gentleman, wandered far from the case by delicately suggesting that Theo introduce him into Paris society after he completed his medical degree. Through the fog of propriety and uncertainty (“it is very difficult to respond categorically to all of the questions that you ask of me,” Rey demurred), Theo probably overlooked the hints that the young intern had already begun to earn Vincent’s trust, and that Vincent had already begun to control the information Rey shared with him.

  While in Arles, Theo had accepted Joseph Roulin’s offer to look in on Vincent and report on his condition. In his letters and his art, Vincent had portrayed Roulin not just as a model but as a friend and a community leader of some distinction. Theo apparently met the imposing postman at the hospital on Christmas Day and heard (probably from Roulin himself) of Roulin’s role in rescuing Vincent from his blood-soaked bed the day before. His very presence in the hospital spoke of his concern for Vincent’s welfare. When Roulin offered his services as rapporteur to the distinguished gérant from Paris (whose fine stationery and frequent money orders Roulin knew well), Theo gladly accepted, no doubt promising some form of compensation for his trouble.

  But when Theo returned to Paris, Roulin’s reports only compounded the distortions of distance. His penchant for tale-telling, dramatic overstatement, self-promotion, and florid language led Theo on a tortuous path. “I should have liked to have the honor of announcing an improvement in your brother’s health,” his first letter began. “Unfortunately I am not able to do so.” Roulin reported Vincent near death one day and “quite recovered” the next; victimized by “terrible attacks” one day, “completely recovered” the next. In the space of a week, he endorsed the proposal to commit Vincent to an asylum as a sad necessity and condemned it as an unthinkable outrage.

  By the end of December, after only a few days of Roulin’s Tartarin reportage, Theo turned in frustration to a complete stranger for news of his brother. Frédéric Salles, a local pastor, served as unofficial chaplain to the hospital’s occasional Protestant patients. Probably at the recommendation of Rey, Theo arranged for the forty-seven-year-old Salles to pay regular visits to Vincent’s bedside and report on his progress. Worldly and energetic—requirements for an outpost preacher in lusty, Catholic Provence—Salles showed himself a diligent correspondent and conscientious caretaker. “I will do all I can to make your brother’s life as bearable as possible,” he assured Theo.

  But Salles’s sympathy and optimism proved no more helpful to Theo than Roulin’s bluster. His reports, too, bounced from dark insinuations of “insanity” to sunny predictions of an imminent return to health. Salles offered prayers when Theo needed insights; scolding when he needed guidance; and faith when Vincent’s fate hung on the finest balance of science and intuition. On the subject of committing Vincent to an asylum, Salles dutifully reported the doctors’ indecision and conveyed Vincent’s forceful objections, but ventured no opinion based on his own observations: a paralyzing reticence that paralleled Theo’s own.

  The absence of hard information and authoritative advice left Theo’s heart free to despair. “There is little hope,” he wrote Jo. “If he must pass away, so be it.” Days after Rey had assured him of Vincent’s improvement, he still dreaded the imminent arrival of a telegram from Arles summoning him to a deathbed, and talked as if Vincent were already gone. “I would have wanted him, whether near or far, to remain that same advisor and brother to both of us,” he told Jo. “That hope has now vanished and we are both the poorer for it … We shall honor his memory.”

  In response to Theo’s persistent, gloomy fatalism, Jo issued a stern rebuke. “Don’t go thinking the worst.” But she joined in the eulogizing all the same. “I’d have been delighted and very proud,” she wrote, “if Vincent had wanted to be a brother to me as well.” Other family members and friends responded with either conspicuous indifference or open relief. Most shared his mother’s view that Vincent’s death was both foretold and for the best. “I believe he has always been insane,” Anna summed up coldly, “and that his suffering and ours was a result of it.” Even Theo, for all his lamentation, could not disagree. “I almost dare not hope for his complete recovery,” he confided to Jo, “because the attack was the culmination of a variety of things that had been pushing him in that direction over a long period of time. All one can hope for is that his suffering is brief.”

  But as the news from Arles brightened, as Roulin’s fraught tales yielded to Salles’s message of hope, Theo swung from despair to denial. “There is a chance that everything will come right again,” he wrote to Jo on January 3. Vincent’s “outbursts” might prove a blessing if they caused him to “stop making such extraordinary demands on himself.” Turning from resignation to optimism, Theo adopted Rey’s benign diagnosis of “hyperexcitement.” Describing Vincent as “driven by his kindness and always full of good intentions,” he dismissed the whole episode as “just blowing off steam.” Perhaps all his brother needed was some time in the country, Theo suggested. “Once spring comes he will be able to work outdoors again and I hope that will give him some peace of mind. Nature is so invigorating.”

  The fixed star in this sudden reversal was Amsterdam. Whether through tragedy or denial, Theo would find his way to Jo. “Let’s hope for the best,” he wrote, blithely concluding one chapter and opening another. “There’s no reason now to postpone my arrival any longer and I shall be overjoyed to be with you again.”

  Nothing was allowed to interrupt this narrative of new life. Through the long, dark nights of late December, Theo wrote letter after letter to Jo, but none to his brother. On New Year’s Eve, Salles reported Vincent’s “astonishment” that Theo had not written to him since their brief, dreamlike reunion on Christmas Day. “He even wanted me to send you a telegram to make you do it,” Salles scolded. When Theo finally sent the obligatory New Year’s greeting, he talked only of Jo and put to rest any hope of a return to the past. Not even Rey’s urgent letter about sending Vincent to an asylum could break the hold of the future. Theo had told Jo that the final decision lay in the doctors’ hands, not his. And he never told her about the letter suggesting that Theo take him back and place him discreetly in a Paris asylum. The day after Rey’s letter arrived, he wrote Jo, “I keep thinking of you and what our life wil
l be like.” The day after that, with Rey’s letter still unanswered, he boarded the overnight train for Amsterdam.

  —

  ON JANUARY 7, one day after Theo arrived in Holland, Vincent returned to the Yellow House. In less than a week, the momentum of commitment had been reversed. Efforts to “free” him had come from both the solicitous Salles, who believed Vincent had been miraculously cured, and from the amiable blowhard Roulin. The latter, of course, claimed the lion’s share of the credit for the doctors’ about-face. “I went to see the head of the hospital who is a friend of mine,” he reported to Theo. “He replied that he would do as I wished.” But the person truly responsible for Vincent’s freedom was Vincent himself, who had finally joined the debate over his release on January 2. “My dear Theo,” his letter began.

  So as to reassure you completely on my account, I write to you these few lines … I shall stay here at the hospital for a few more days, then I think I can count on quietly returning to the house. Now I only beg of you one thing, not to worry, because that would cause me too much of a worry.

  Vincent awoke from his weeklong nightmare with this single purpose: to reassure his brother. To that end, he bent every fiber of his reemerging reason. Within days after his doctors signed the paperwork certifying him insane, he launched a desperate campaign to prove them wrong—to “take back” the events of the previous week and convince Theo that all had returned to normal.

  The campaign started with Félix Rey, on whom Theo had settled such unquestioning trust. Rather than rail against the injustice of his confinement, as he had done in his delirium, Vincent instead wooed the young and impressionable intern—just as he had wooed Rappard, Bernard, and Theo himself—with erudition, flattery, deep discussion, hints of favor, and even flashes of humor. Rey invited Vincent to his office for what he called “entertaining chats.” They took long walks around the hospital courtyard while Vincent talked endlessly and cogently of his artistic ambitions, the magic of complementary colors, the genius of Rembrandt, and the shared mission of artists and physicians to comfort and console. “I told him that I myself should always regret not being a doctor,” Vincent wrote. “What men these modern doctors are!”