Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  But Theo’s thoughts quickly moved on to a more uplifting subject: house hunting. “I spend all my free time looking at all kinds of ugly unattractive apartments in the most impossible houses with endless staircases,” he wrote his sisters in late January while Rey’s letter went unanswered and Vincent languished. After viewing more than a hundred potential homes, Theo reported to Jo at the beginning of February that he had finally found their “cozy nest.” It was “close enough to the gallery to come home for dinner,” he wrote happily, and had a garden view with “a lovely catalpa just under the window that will be beautiful when it’s in bloom.”

  THREE DAYS LATER, the police arrived at 2, place Lamartine and dragged Vincent away from his beloved Yellow House. They took him to the Hôtel Dieu and left him there, shackled to a bed in an isolation cell. His charwoman rushed to Pastor Salles with the terrible news. Salles immediately went to the hospital and found Vincent cowering under his covers, refusing all offers of help, and choking back sobs. “I have just seen your brother,” Salles reported to Theo the same day, “and got a very painful impression of the condition he is in.”

  From the moment Vincent left the hospital a month before, events had begun to spin out of control again. Theo’s demand for a budget in mid-January triggered a paroxysm of guilt. Already distraught over the cost of his medical care (every bandage and bloodstained sheet was billed separately), Vincent came home to an eviction notice from his landlord after missing the January rent payment. Theo may have meant only to put his finances in order as he contemplated the expenses of a new house and family, but Vincent saw in his demand for an accounting a lifetime of chastisement. “What is to be done?” he cried out helplessly. “My pictures are valueless, it is true they cost me an extraordinary amount, perhaps even in blood and brains at times. I won’t harp on it, and what am I to say to you about it?”

  In a reflex of defense, he not only refused to give Theo the budget he requested but mustered all the arguments of the past to justify his expenditures, protest his economies, demand an increase in his stipend, and explain why his paintings didn’t sell—but soon would. “I have set to work again with a nerve like iron,” he wrote, estimating that his sunflowers would be worth as much as a Monticelli someday. “Let me work with all my strength … If I am not mad, the time will come when I shall send you what I have promised you from the beginning.” If he failed, Vincent dared his brother, “[then] shut me up in a madhouse right away—I shan’t oppose it.”

  January proved cruel, as well, to his fantasy of rapprochement with Gauguin. Vincent may or may not have known about Gauguin’s efforts, starting only days after his flight from Arles, to parlay the events of December into self-aggrandizing myth (efforts that would ultimately backfire). But he had never fully trusted Gauguin’s intentions, and he certainly knew by mid-January that his injunction to “refrain from speaking ill of our poor little yellow house” had been ignored. He worried especially about Gauguin’s conversations with Theo, who continued to send Gauguin money and enthusiastically support his work after the debacle in Arles.

  At first, Vincent seconded this outreach, hoping to appease Gauguin into silence. But when Theo hinted that Gauguin had accused the brothers of exploiting him and had demanded that Theo exclude his troubled brother from any further dealings, Vincent erupted in a fury of pent-up grievance. “I have seen him do things which you and I would not let ourselves do,” he wrote acidly, “because we have consciences.” He blamed Gauguin for the “disaster” at Christmastime, accusing him of deliberately sabotaging the Yellow House—betraying not just Theo’s generosity but the cause of Impressionism itself. In scathing terms, he mocked Gauguin’s reputation for physical bravery, describing him alternately as a coward and a buffoon. He ridiculed Gauguin’s fencing gear as “toys” and belittled his bellicosity, calling him “the little Bonaparte tiger of impressionism”—the “Little Corporal” who “always left his armies in the lurch.” He angrily demanded that Gauguin return at least one of the sunflower paintings he had stolen from the studio and urged his brother to break off relations with the ungrateful, perfidious “deserter.” By the end of the month, he had twisted Gauguin’s sailor pretensions into an accusation of abandoning ship and darkly insinuated that the wrong painter had made the trip from the Yellow House to the mad ward in December.

  Gauguin was only the first to reject Vincent’s phantom of recovery. In late January, the postman Joseph Roulin moved to Marseille (“for a microscopic increase in pay,” Vincent noted ruefully), leaving his family temporarily behind. He returned briefly at the end of the month, resplendent in his new uniform, and visited the Yellow House to hold forth on politics in the big city. But only a short time later, Augustine Roulin, the sitter for La berceuse, took her children and retreated to her mother’s house in the country, later admitting that being around Vincent frightened her. Bereft of his facsimile of family, Vincent returned to the brothel on the rue du Bout d’Arles where he had left his gift of flesh on Christmas Eve. “Yesterday I went to see the girl to whom I had gone when I was off my head,” he reported in early February. But even the prostitute Rachel, apparently, refused to see him.

  At almost exactly the same time, a letter arrived from Theo. In yet another misbegotten attempt to set his financial affairs in order, he responded to Vincent’s defiant demand for more money with an unblinking look into the future. In dire terms, he reported on the state of his own illness, which had apparently taken another turn for the worse (as it did every winter). He confirmed Vincent’s fear that ill health would probably prevent him from ever coming to Arles again. The prospect of his own deterioration, its implications for his soon-to-be family, and Vincent’s continuing plight had forced Theo to a grim reckoning. With a calmness and clarity that sent shock waves through Vincent’s unreal world, he laid out the consequences if he should die. He reassured Vincent that his will, unlike Uncle Cent’s, made “generous” provisions for Vincent’s continued support, even apparently promising his brother a share in his business interests—just as Vincent had always given him a share in his painting enterprise.

  Theo no doubt intended his sober, unvarnished talk to reassure his brother—a show of fraternal solidarity on the eve of his wedding. But it had just the opposite effect. Following so soon upon Gauguin’s betrayal, Roulin’s transfer, his wife’s flight, and Rachel’s rebuff, Theo’s talk of debt and death dealt Vincent a crushing blow. “Why are you thinking about your marriage contract and the possibility of dying just now?” he wrote, horrified. In a long letter, he poured out his objections in a frantic mix of consolation and despair. He rejected his brother’s dire speculations (“It’ll all come all right in the end, believe me”), recanted his previous demands, and dismissed all talk of sickness and death as the rantings of a disordered mind—not unlike his own—and therefore not to be trusted. “When I am in a delirium and everything I love so much is in turmoil,” he wrote, “then I don’t mistake that for reality, and I don’t play the false prophet.”

  Any threat of abandonment—whether by death or by marriage—raised the specter of mortality, and its eternal companion, religion. “Illness or death holds no terror for me,” Vincent declared, signaling by disavowal that the storms of Christmas had returned. “Ambition is not compatible with the callings we follow.” In the first week of February, the nightmares—which had never stopped tormenting his sleep—leaped back into real life. He saw visions, ranted gibberish in the street, and followed strangers into their homes. “I have moments when I am twisted with enthusiasm or madness or prophecy,” he admitted to Theo. He neglected to eat and drank to excess. Swaths of time disappeared from his memory.

  To Theo, he continued to claim that the people of Arles treated him “kindly.” “Everyone here is suffering either from fever, or hallucinations, or madness,” he wrote, veiling his confession in humor. “We understand each other like members of the same family.” But in reality, rumors about the events of December had turned his neighbors into gawkin
g spectators or fearful spies. His increasingly rancorous relations in Arles, combined with his suspicion that Gauguin was spreading disparaging rumors about him, especially to Theo, spawned a paranoid fantasy that someone was trying to poison him. “He believes that he is being poisoned and is everywhere seeing nothing but poisoners and poisoned people,” Vincent’s terrified charwoman reported to Pastor Salles.

  Battered by waves of failure, loneliness, and paranoia, Vincent clung like Loti’s storm-wracked sailors to his lifeline of imagery: the faïence Virgin he called La berceuse. He painted her again and again, carefully copying every detail of her porcelain hair and frozen glare. Working “furiously … from morning till night,” he traced and retraced the tracery of flowered wallpaper that filled the canvas behind her—a celebration of both the Midi (famous for its floral wallpaper) and the Cloisonnist gospel that he shared with the departed Bel-Ami. Every storm or setback, whether in his head or in life, sent him scurrying back to this icon of consolation.

  When Theo talked about marriage and a new family, Vincent’s thoughts retreated to his own childhood. He imagined “singing a lullaby of colors” to his infant brother in the attic room they shared in Zundert, and immediately made a “fresh start” on the Berceuse of Christmas. When Theo demanded a reckoning of his Midi project, Vincent saw in his unending Provençal wallpaper, which Monticelli had painted, new proof that “indeed, indeed we are following Monticelli’s track,” and began another Berceuse. When Vincent returned to the Folies Arlésiennes, retracing his steps with Gauguin, he saw a pastorale that moved him to tears with its Rembrandt-like tableau of the “mystic crib” and an old peasant woman who sang to the child “with the voice of an angel”; and immediately went home to begin another Berceuse. When the Roulins briefly visited the studio for the last time at the end of January, Vincent gave them their choice of all the Berceuses he had made, then promptly began work on a copy of the one they chose, as if he could not bear to part with even one of the nearly identical images.

  On February 7, all of Vincent’s faïence Virgins watched serenely from their vivid floral otherworld as the police entered the Yellow House and wrestled Vincent away. (Alerted by neighbors who feared for their safety, gendarmes had been watching the house for days.) The same image stayed in his head for more than a week as Rey and the other doctors tried, unsuccessfully, to fathom the mystery of his illness. He didn’t recognize them at first and for days refused to utter a single word. When he finally began to talk, the words came out in an incoherent babble. While in his cell at the hospital, he received a letter from his mother describing a snowstorm in Holland followed by a quick thaw and wishing that the “Lord of Nature” might work the same miracle in Vincent’s life. When his condition improved enough to permit day trips, he returned to the Yellow House and set to work on yet another version, his fourth, of his maternal talisman, his Belle Dame of the Midi, enthroned in her wallpaper Paradou.

  AT ALMOST THE same time, four hundred miles to the north, Theo had wallpaper on his mind, too. “I am enclosing a few samples of the wallpaper they’re putting up for us,” he reported to Jo as the hectic redecoration of their new apartment progressed, “although you do need to see it all in order to judge whether it’s suitable.” Only a few days before, he had sent samples of the “divine curtains” he had planned for the dining room. “People who like plush and satin would think them vulgar,” he warned, “but anyone with a sense of color would find them gorgeous.”

  After a month of welcoming Vincent’s delusional reassurances and ignoring the many unspoken signals of his brother’s deterioration, Theo was startled by the latest news from Arles. That Vincent had been seized by police and forcibly confined horrified him especially. He omitted that part of Salles’s report in his letter to Jo the same day. “Poor poor fellow, how hard his life is,” he wrote. “What a sorry state of affairs, don’t you agree, dearest. I know you will also be very concerned and that’s a comfort to me.” He shared with Jo the question (raised by Salles) whether Vincent should be sent to an asylum in Provence or Paris, but used it only as a prelude to a full-throated defense of his brother as a misunderstood Byronic hero:

  That mind has for so long been preoccupied with things our society today has made impossible to solve and which he, with his kind heart and tremendous energy, nevertheless fought against.… He holds such sweeping ideas on questions of what is humane and how we should regard the world, that one first has to relinquish all one’s conventional ideas in order to grasp what he means.

  The letter soon wandered off into the beauties of art, especially Monet (whose show had just opened on the entresol), and a strange rumination on death, triggered by a Rodin sculpture, also in the show, depicting the head of John the Baptist on a platter. The saint’s head, Theo said, “bears a striking resemblance to Vincent.… That furrowed and contorted brow betraying a life of reflection and asceticism.” Like Vincent contemplating a portrait of his look-alike, Bruyas, Theo saw both his brother and himself in Rodin’s image of mortality. “Death has left no sign of anguish on that face nor an aura of eternal peace,” he wrote. “It has retained an air of tranquility and also an energetic concern with the future.”

  Over the next week, while Vincent weathered the storms of darkness in a stupor of isolation, Theo’s thoughts stayed fixed on the “difficult matter” of decorating the apartment. At one point he sent a telegram to Dr. Rey requesting an update, but he left unanswered Salles’s urgent call for Vincent to be removed to Paris. “Your brother should be watched continuously and should have the special attention which he can only receive in a mental hospital or in the family,” the parson had written a week before. “Let me know whether you want him near you.” Salles had even arranged for Vincent’s loyal charwoman to accompany him on the long journey. “In any case, we must make a quick decision,” he pressed; “we will not do anything until we have heard from you.”

  But before Theo had to decide, Rey telegraphed a reprieve of good news: “Vincent much improved, pending recovery we will look after him here, do not worry for the time being.” A few days later, Vincent himself wrote, reporting his provisional (daylight only) return to the Yellow House and dismissing his affliction, yet again, as a mere “fever of the region.” “You must not think too much about me, nor fret yourself,” he wrote. “We cannot change much in our fate.” Theo forwarded Vincent’s reassuring letter to Jo (noting “he’s on the right track”), along with samples of the wallpaper for the dining room.

  CHAPTER 38

  The Real South

  FIVE DAYS LATER, THE POLICE DESCENDED ON THE YELLOW HOUSE AGAIN and dragged Vincent away. He was too drunk to resist. This time, they closed the shutters, padlocked the door, and pasted official seals over it—as if they expected him never to return.

  As Vincent suspected, the neighbors had indeed poisoned him. Not with potions or spells, but with a secret petition to the authorities. “The Dutch subject named Vood,” they wrote, mangling his name, “has for some time and on several occasions furnished proof that he is not in full possession of his mental faculties.… He no longer knows either what he does or what he says.” Because of Vincent’s “excitement” and “instability,” they said, they lived in fear, especially for their women and children. “In the name of public security,” they demanded that Vincent be either “returned to his family as soon as possible,” or committed to a mental asylum, “in order to prevent whatever misfortune which will certainly occur one day if vigorous measures are not taken.”

  Thirty of his neighbors had signed the petition—an overwhelming number. Their extraordinary protest represented the crest of a wave that had been building almost from the day Vincent arrived in Arles. Even before the events of Christmas, children had teased and badgered “the queer painter,” as one of them later called him. After the calamities of December, adults, too, shunned and scorned him. When he passed in the street, they tapped their heads and muttered to each other “fada”—Midi dialect for “crazy.” The brothel
whores dubbed him “fou roux”—the mad redhead. His stalking gait, fluttering eyelashes, tirades of Dutch, and stuttering attempts at the local patois, all began to assume an alarming aspect.

  Derision turned quickly to suspicion and fear in a community that still believed in demonic possession. His second hospitalization in February only corroded civility further. Children threw stones now, not scraps of food. Vincent added fuel to the fire with drunken disdain for his antagonists, dismissing their fears as “absurdities” and them as superstitious provincials. Convinced that their backward prejudices against painters demanded a firm response, he hurled their taunts back at them. They had already done their worst, he said. “Where can I go that’s worse than where I have twice been: the isolation cell?” A simmering dispute with his landlord (who owned other properties in the area) may have galvanized the neighbors into official action. By the end of February, Vincent had to send his charwoman on errands rather than venture into the street himself.

  Once the petition was filed, months of rumor and private rancor boiled into public view. The chief of police, who had no doubt already identified Vincent as a troublemaker after his dispute with the innkeeper Carrel the year before, sent gendarmes door to door collecting testimonies to support the allegations in the petition (in the officialese of the mayor’s order, “to establish the degree of Van Goghe’s [sic] madness”). The witnesses (identified only by age, sex, and trade) poured a heady mix of fact, hearsay, and suspicion into the record. They reported that Vincent chased after children in the street with the intent of “doing them harm,” that he drank too much, and that his speech rambled incoherently.