Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  One woman, a dressmaker, complained of being “grabbed by the waist and lifted into the air.” Others reported more generally that they had seen Vincent “indulging in touching women who live in the neighborhood” and “permitting himself to fondle them.” One accused him of “making obscene remarks in the presence” of women. The grocer who shared the Yellow House, François Crevoulin, described how Vincent would “come into my store, insult my clients and touch women.” More than one witness reported that Vincent had followed women home—even entered their houses—so that they felt “no longer safe.” Mostly, they filled their affidavits with the verdict of the mob: cries of “lunatic” and “madman,” diagnoses of “derangement,” declarations of “public danger,” and demands that he be “confined in a special institution,” or simply “locked up.”

  From the familiar confines of the Hôtel Dieu, Vincent lashed out at his accusers in a letter to Theo. “What a staggering blow between the eyes it was to find so many people here cowardly enough to band themselves together against one man,” he stormed, “and a sick one at that.” He called them “meddlesome idiots” and “poisonous idlers”—a “pack of skunks and cowards” bent only on his undoing. He demanded, and may have received, a hearing before the mayor or other official in which he could make all the arguments that swirled in his head—a lifetime of arguments against the prejudices and conspiracies that forever thwarted him. He insisted that the events of December had been exaggerated, and mocked those who suggested that he posed a danger to anyone but himself.

  I answered roundly that I was quite prepared, for instance, to chuck myself into the water if that would please these good folk once and for all, but that in any case if I had in fact inflicted a wound on myself, I had done nothing of the sort to them.

  As for the strange behavior detailed in the petition, he claimed that he had been provoked by his accusers. “I would have remained more calm,” he argued, “if the police had protected my liberty by preventing the children and even grown-ups from collecting round my lodgings and climbing up to my window as they have done (as if I were a strange animal).” Any other man would have taken a pistol and shot the “gawking idiots” dead, he cried. Turning the tables on his tormenters, he demanded reparations for the troubles they had caused him. “If these fellows here protest against me, I protest against them,” he countered, “and all they have to do is to give me damages and interest … to pay me back what I have lost through their blunders and ignorance.”

  Claiming the mantle of martyrdom, he compared himself to heroes like Victor Hugo, condemned by a “mischievous opposition” to suffer calumny, imprisonment, or worse, as an “eternal example” to future generations. Whatever he had done, he said, he had done for the new art, which he called “the first and last cause of my aberration.” And if that brought him pain or indignity at the hands of fools and cowards, so be it. “An artist is a man at work,” he declared defiantly, “and it is not for the first idler who comes along to crush him for good.” Besides, he added, “All this stir will ultimately be good for ‘impressionism.’ ”

  Vincent’s feelings of betrayal and martyrdom were only sharpened when his doctors refused to come to his defense. From the beginning, he had agreed with Pastor Salles that “it should be the doctors and not the superintendent of police who ought to be the judges in a case like this.” But Vincent’s sudden, violent relapses had left all the doctors at the Hôtel Dieu confused and cautious. They could not agree on a diagnosis—they talked of cancer one minute, epilepsy the next—and dared not predict when or if his attacks would return. One of them, a Doctor Delon, had already provided the police with a report attesting to Vincent’s “mental alienation” and supporting the petition to have him removed from the community. Not even Rey, who considered it “an act of cruelty to permanently lock up a man who has done nobody any harm,” according to Salles, would contradict the official finding that Vincent constituted a potential “public danger.” In any event, there was little the young intern could do against a determined police chief, an angry landlord, a pusillanimous mayor, and a fearful citizenry.

  Over his enraged objections, Vincent spent the next month, from February 25 to March 23, in the Hôtel Dieu—almost all of that time “under lock and key,” alone in an observation chamber. If anything, his indignation proved his undoing. The more furiously he raged against the injustice of his confinement, the more he confirmed the verdict of “dangerous lunatic.” He learned the hard way that even in isolation his jailers could punish him. They took away not just his flask, but his pipe and tobacco, too. He was not allowed even a book or a breath of fresh air. Salles brought him some paints and brushes from the Yellow House, but these “made him wild,” the pastor reported, and were quickly removed. “I miss the work,” he noted bleakly. “The work takes my mind off things, or rather keeps me in order.” For weeks, he wrote no one, and no one wrote him. Except for Salles’s rare visits, he had no company other than the doctors who “gnawed at” him like “wasps on a fruit,” he said. Yet he had no privacy, either. Day and night, he was always watched.

  ISOLATION CELL, ARLES HOSPITAL (Illustration credit 38.1)

  The indignity and injustice of it all triggered new storms of “indescribable anguish.” He would emerge each time newly amazed and “revolted” at his plight. Waves of “deep remorse” and “loathing of life” washed over him. For long periods, he plunged into a terrified silence, awaiting the next attack. It was a harrowing cycle that left him all but stripped bare, shackled to his bed, staring into the darkness, holding his head in his hands, rearguing his case “in the secret tribunal of my soul,” recalling the books and people he loved, imagining the art he would have made, and rehearsing all the failures that had brought him to this dark place. “Everything for nothing,” he despaired. “It is a shame … I would rather have died than have caused and suffered such trouble.”

  IN THE MONTH BEFORE his wedding on April 18, Theo’s life was a whirligig of activity. The Monet show on the entresol proved a huge success, especially after the critic Octave Mirbeau unleashed a “torrent of enthusiasm” in Le Figaro. “What a daze I’ve been in,” Theo wrote Jo. “We’re rushed off our feet at work because of the exhibition.” As often as his busy schedule allowed, he visited Jo’s brother Andries and his wife Annie in the leafy, affluent suburb of Passy, where they took relaxing strolls in the woods. With friends in the city he spent long evenings that started with dinner, then a play or concert, then conversation and drinks at a boulevard café until long past midnight.

  For Jo, he heard Beethoven’s “lovely” Seventh Symphony. He saw Lecocq’s Le petit duc (The Little Duke), too, an opéra-bouffe confection of naïve love and juvenile flirtation that reminded him of Jo in a different way. Out-of-town guests were always popping in, along with distant relatives wishing him well on his long-awaited nuptials. No matter how late his evenings, he never came home to an empty house, thanks to his roommate De Haan, who often entertained guests of his own at the rue Lepic apartment.

  Somehow, in this crush of activity, Theo found time to make wedding plans. He picked out a dinner service, bargain-shopped for banquet facilities and tuxedo rentals, allocated cash gifts from relatives, arranged witnesses, and pondered honeymoon possibilities, while closely tracking Jo’s parallel efforts in Holland. (“What does your wedding gown look like?” he inquired.)

  No preparation, of course, was more important than the new apartment, which continued to consume vast efforts and generate frequent crises over furniture, fabric, and wallpaper. “The painters and decorators are finished,” Theo announced on February 25, the day Vincent was seized by police the second time, “but unfortunately it turns out that not all the French have taste.” Even as he began to hang paintings in the new apartment, Theo continued to dither over final arrangements, and samples of wallpaper continued to fly between Paris and Amsterdam. “I’m rather afraid it’s going to be too nice,” he fretted.

  The commotion of daily life played out
against a solid background of letters—sometimes three or four a week—reliving each day’s events in the reality that mattered most: his love for Jo and their future together. “[I] am so grateful that I am no longer alone,” he wrote her on March 7, “that my life is no longer aimless.” On the first day of spring, he threw open the windows of the new apartment and a fresh breeze from the future blew over him. “All of a sudden a street musician started playing the guitar, accompanied by the voice of a girl of about ten,” he described his augury to Jo. “Her soft little voice shimmered in the air, singing words one could not distinguish about printemps, amour, lumière,” “Dearest,” he wrote, “I have you to thank you for that moment.” He called her “my pet,” “sweet-pea,” and “wife-to-be.” She addressed him as “my dearest husband.” Together, they counted down the days until they could be together again. Almost a month in advance—more than six weeks before the wedding day—he set a firm date for his return to Amsterdam.

  By now, Vincent’s name came up at least once in every letter: in a worried complaint from Theo (“no news from Arles”), or a polite inquiry from Jo (“No news from Vincent yet?”). Occasionally a black cloud obscured their shared sunlight, as when news arrived that Vincent had been taken to the hospital again in late February—“this time at the request of the neighbors,” Theo wrote, “who were probably afraid of him.” But by mid-March, the distant brother had been reduced to a shorthand—“And Arles?” “What a wretched flaw in an otherwise cloudless sky,” Theo lamented.

  Meanwhile, Salles’s plea had become a clamor. “A decision must be taken,” the pastor demanded as he informed Theo about Vincent’s third involuntary hospitalization. “Is it your intention to have your brother come to you or do you intend to put him into an institution of your own choice or would you prefer to leave it in the hands of the police? On this point we should have a categorical reply.”

  For two months, Theo had successfully maneuvered around the repeated calls for Vincent to be moved to an asylum in Aix or Marseille where he could receive specialized care. Loath to impose a solution on his contrary brother (“It is not permissible for anyone, not even you or a doctor, to take such a step without consulting me,” Vincent warned) and ever hopeful of a cure, Theo had returned again and again to a strategy of delay. Through downturn after downturn, his innate caution had found common cause with Salles’s pious optimism, Rey’s deferential indecision, and his brother’s denial. (“Let me go quietly on with my work,” Vincent shrugged; “if it is that of a madman, well, so much the worse.”) The sudden oscillations of Vincent’s affliction, whatever it was, had beaten back every sortie of resolve, casting Theo back and forth from hopefulness to hopelessness, sometimes in the same letter.

  But if consigning his brother to a lunatic asylum was difficult, bringing him home was unthinkable. From the beginning, Theo had successfully stonewalled Rey and Salles on the subject, to the consternation of both. He had also beaten back a suggestion from his sister Wil that Vincent be brought to Breda, where Wil already tended their aging mother. “I wish Vincent could be home,” she wrote. “It is so unnatural that others are taking care of him and that we don’t do anything for him.” Mother Anna opposed the idea, too. “[Vincent] is decidedly a poor wretch,” she wrote as the fourth anniversary of her husband’s untimely death approached and forgiveness eluded her.

  But around the same time, Jo, who visited the Van Gogh women in February, took up the cause. “Theo dear,” she inquired sweetly, “couldn’t [Vincent] go home, like any ordinary person who was ill?” Taking to heart Theo’s defense of his brother as “a noble, lofty spirit,” Jo reasoned that Vincent might fare better in a “quiet, friendly environment” than in a hospital or on his own. “Wouldn’t that calm his nerves, whereas solitude to my mind would cause him to lapse back into worrying again.” And if not Breda, why not Paris? “If he were in Paris now,” she ventured, “you could simply go and see him. As things are, he is all alone and so very far away.”

  Theo frantically listed reasons why, in this case, the obvious was unworkable. “If you knew him, you would appreciate twice as much how hard it is to solve the problem of what must and what can be done,” he wrote. “From his style of dress and his demeanor you can see at once that he is different and for years everyone who sees him has said C’est un fou [he’s a madman].” In an artist, such behavior might be understandable, Theo allowed, even advantageous (“many painters have gone insane yet nevertheless started to produce true art”), “but at home,” he insisted, “it is not acceptable.”

  He retold the fiasco of Vincent’s years in Paris, when models refused to pose for him, passersby harassed him, and the police ran him off the street when he tried to work. “By the end of it all he’d had more than enough of Paris,” he said; and Paris, more than enough of him. “Even those with whom he is the best of friends find him difficult to get along with,” Theo struggled to explain. “There’s something in the way he talks that makes people either love him very dearly, or find him intolerable.” He hinted at Vincent’s pariah status among his fellow artists (referring enigmatically to “lots of enemies”) and gently contradicted Jo’s vision of recuperation in the quiet, welcoming bosom of family: “There’s no such thing as a peaceful environment for him … He spares nothing and no one.”

  To bolster his case for turning his brother away, Theo finally sought the advice of Louis Rivet, the doctor who had treated Vincent in Paris and who continued to treat Theo for the “nervous condition” that masked his worsening syphilis. “Rivet says, and I agree with him, that [Vincent] would be better off in the worst hospital than looking after himself, even if he were well,” Theo reported in early March. “He strongly advised me not to have him come here for the time being as he could be a danger to himself and others.” And why not move him to a private asylum in or near Paris, where, as Jo pointed out, “you could simply go and see him”? Rivet had an answer for that, too, according to Theo: “As a rule, the institutions [in France] are excellently equipped and … patients who are looked after free of charge get the same nursing and treatment as those who pay.”

  Of course, Theo never mentioned money to Vincent, whose letters coursed with guilt for every franc spent on medical care and every day deprived of the opportunity to work and repay his mounting debt. “If it is not absolutely necessary to shut me up in a cell,” he wrote in January, “then I am still good for paying, at least in goods, what I am considered to owe.” Theo touched on the subject in a letter to Jo, acknowledging the investment that both brothers had at stake. “Though he has no idea about money,” Theo wrote (protecting the fiction, invented for Jo, of Vincent as a selfless free spirit), “he would be upset if all we have put into it were lost.”

  But money was never far from Theo’s mind. As a man who considered marriage the ultimate fiscal responsibility, money informed every decision, or indecision. When his sisters Wil and Lies sent a part of their father’s legacy to help pay for Vincent’s care, Theo put the money in the bank instead, telling them, “There is no reason to make a change in his current treatment, which is free.” If his sisters spent their legacy, Theo would be called on someday to replace it, either as a dowry in marriage or as a stipend in spinsterhood.

  Guilt, no doubt, explains Vincent’s rejection of the lukewarm invitation to Paris that Theo issued in late February, finally shamed into acting by Jo’s guileless sympathy. He must have been relieved, but not surprised, when Vincent waved the offer away. “You are very kind to say I could come to Paris,” he wrote only days before the police seized him a second time, “but I think the excitement of a big town would never do for me.” To assuage his own guilt—and, again, to appease Jo, who had urged him to go to Arles if Vincent would not come to Paris—Theo proposed a different plan. He would send another artist to Arles to reignite Vincent’s missionary zeal for the Midi. “That’s the only thing I can think of that would really give him peace of mind,” Theo explained.

  At first he had considered only c
ountrymen like Arnold Koning or Meijer de Haan, whose discretion he trusted. But Vincent recoiled at the idea in a fit of guilt and shame. “I do not dare persuade painters to come here after what has happened to me,” he wrote; “they run the risk of losing their wits like me.” The plan languished for a month, while the silence from Arles grew deeper and the details of the petition against Vincent became clearer. Finally, in mid-March, Theo prevailed on Paul Signac, who was about to embark on his annual summer holiday in Cassis, a picturesque seaside village about seventy-five miles from Arles. “Signac, an acquaintance of mine, is going to Arles next week and I hope he’ll be able to do something,” he informed Jo vaguely. “I’m almost inclined to go back there myself,” he added, in another feint of appeasement, “but it would serve no purpose.”

  Instead, he left for Holland, exactly on schedule. He took the overnight train that departed on March 30—Vincent’s thirty-sixth birthday.

  —

  SIGNAC AND VINCENT had to break down the door. To discourage intruders, the authorities had not only shuttered and sealed the Yellow House, they had jammed the lock. Some hostile neighbors tried to prevent the mad painter’s return to the scene of the crime, causing a row that brought the police once again to Vincent’s door. But Signac placated them—as persuasive in housebreaking as in art making. “He was so good and straightforward,” Vincent wrote admiringly. “They began by refusing to let us do it, but all the same we finally got in.”

  The two artists had not seen each other or corresponded since their passing encounters on the banks of the Seine two summers before. Vincent wrote about their day together as if he were meeting the twenty-five-year-old Signac for the first time. “I found Signac very quiet, though he is said to be so violent … he strikes me as someone who has balance and poise.” They met at the hospital, where Dr. Rey gave his blessing to their outing—Vincent’s first in a month. Once inside the Yellow House, Vincent showed off his paintings, and gave one to the younger artist. They talked about everything—art, impressionism, literature, politics—as the month-long monologue of Vincent’s solitude poured out.