In the end, Theo had no choice. He agreed to pay the extra money and wrote the required admission letter to Saint-Rémy (requesting the cheapest “third class” accommodations). But in a last gasp of denial, he reassured the asylum director that his brother’s confinement was “required more to prevent a recurrence of previous attacks than because his mental condition is at present affected.” For Vincent, he could find no better comfort than this: “From one point of view you are not to be pitied, though it may not seem so.… Be of good heart; your disasters will surely come to an end.”
BY EARLY MAY, Vincent had finished packing up the Yellow House. It was an agonizing job. During his long absence, the heat had been turned off and the nearby river had flooded, bringing the waters of the Rhône almost to his doorstep. In the cold, damp darkness, water and salt oozed from the walls and mold spread luxuriantly. Many drawings and paintings were ruined. “That was a blow,” he admitted, “since not only the studio had come to grief, but even the studies that would have been reminders of it.” Sifting through the wreckage, he salvaged what he could. The furniture, he stored over the Ginouxs’ infernal night café. The paintings took weeks to sort and dry. One by one—the beloved Berceuse, the bedroom, the Sower, the chair, the starry night, the sunflowers—he removed them from their stretchers, interleaved them with newspaper, packed them, crated them, and sent them to Paris with apologetic instructions. “There are lots of daubs among them, which you will have to destroy…[Just] keep what seems passable to you.”
As he packed, waves of remorse washed over him. He spent only a few nights in his new apartment before loneliness and nightmares drove him back to the hospital for his final days in Arles. “Certainly these last days were sad,” he wrote Theo,
but the thing I felt saddest about was that you had given me all these things with such brotherly love, and that for so many years you were always the one who supported me, and then to be obliged to come back and tell you this sorry tale.
He looked around the room and saw not a studio but “a graveyard,” and pronounced a despairing epitaph: “Pictures fade like flowers.” In his farewell letter from Arles, he reviewed his career as if his life were flashing before him. He reclaimed his Millet peasants and the “Dutch palette with its grey tones,” and cautioned his brother, “do not become completely and exclusively impressionist. After all, if there is good in anything, don’t let’s lose sight of it.” He listed artists he loved, but feared would be forgotten. As for himself, he said, “as a painter I shall never amount to anything important, I am absolutely sure of it.”
Even as he considered giving up painting altogether, he managed to paint two more images before leaving. Both depicted roads. In one, a family frolics on a path in a park “splashed with light and shade” under a lush canopy of flowering chestnut trees. In the other, an empty road winds into the distance and disappears behind a wall. Its rutted, lonely route is lined by shaggy clumps of meadow grass and leafless pollarded willows, scarred and misshapen, as far as the eye can see.
CHAPTER 39
Starry Night
THE ASYLUM OF SAINT-PAUL-DE-MAUSOLE LAY IN A MOUNTAIN VALLEY that had enchanted visitors since the Romans. Some compared the hidden glen to the magical Swiss Alpine passes much higher up on the spine of Europe. Others saw in its green fields and olive groves the rolling countryside of Tuscany. “Pure Italy,” composer Charles Gounod called it, “the most beautiful mountain valley that you could see anywhere.” Some saw the Attic hills of ancient Greece—the original Arcadia.
The fearsome Visigoths had preferred the nearby rocky heights of Les Baux—an eagle’s nest of a city carved out of solid rock and perched impossibly at the very edge of the Alps, where the mountains met the delta of the Rhône in a great wall of limestone. But the civilizing Romans found both security and an echo of their hilled homeland in the remote, fertile vale just beyond the rocky crest. So impressed were they by the secret serenity of the place that they built a small resort city, called Glanum, dedicated entirely to health and the restoration of the spirit.
By the tenth century, Glanum had been plundered to rubble to build the nearby town of Saint-Rémy, but the valley’s regenerative powers found new expression in reports of a miracle (a staff, plunged into the ground, had burst into bloom) and the inevitable establishment of a monastery. In a merger of appreciation that reached across a millennium, the founders named it after the most prominent relic left by the Romans, a towering funerary monument. For the next eight hundred years, the cloister church of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole (of the mausoleum) welcomed thousands of pilgrims, especially those who sought succor for troubled minds and infirm spirits. Secure in its mountain redoubt, it survived all the waves of plague and destruction that brought so many of its lowland cousins to ruin. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the salubrious climate, serene vistas, and legends of healing power brought the old monastery, by now a sprawling complex of buildings, to its final incarnation: an asylum for the insane.
ASYLUM OF SAINT-PAUL-DE-MAUSOLE, SAINT-RÉMY (Illustration credit 39.1)
The Catholic heritage of Saint Paul must have given both Vincent and Theo pause. But the asylum’s brochure (which both brothers read) hardly mentioned religion, emphasizing instead the older salvation, the pagan cure, of tree and grove and mountain air beneath a “jewel-enameled sky”:
Air, light, space, large and beautiful trees, drinkable waters—fresh, abundant, of good quality, originating from the mountains—and sufficient remoteness from all large population centers: such are the principal justifications for the learned founder’s choice of location.
Of the monastic orders that had prayed under Saint Paul’s Romanesque arches (Augustinian, Benedictine, Franciscan), all that remained were a small clutch of nuns who supplemented the staff; a routine as orderly as matins and vespers; and a pervasive, otherworldly calm. Indeed, after the tortuous two-hour train trip from Arles, climbing through the terrifying gorges known since Dante’s time as Hell’s Gate, Vincent must have seen the low-lying asylum, with its tree-lined entrance, tended gardens, and verdant fields, exactly as so many previous pilgrims had seen it: an island of serenity in a craggy, perilous world.
In the restorative spirit of Glanum, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole operated more like a resort than an asylum. Other than the monastic routine of shared mealtimes and bathing hours, residents were generally left on their own, under distant but watchful supervision. No longer supported by the church, Saint Paul lured the moneyed middle class—eager to keep relatives out of crowded and repugnant public asylums—with promises of hygienic conditions, healthy food (“abundant, varied, and even rare”), frequent outings, scenic views, radiator heat, and modern medical treatment, which consisted of management by “gentleness and benevolence” (that is, without resort to shackles or straitjackets) and a program of “manual work and amusements.”
Accommodations varied, of course, “according to the class of boarder,” but the institution’s Swiss cows provided “plentiful natural dairy foods” to all equally. Rooms were set aside for the manual work of women (sewing) and the amusement of men (billiards). A library provided access to “illustrated journals, books, and various games fit for recreation.” Facilities allowed patients so inclined to play music, write, or draw. A parlor was available for visiting with family members. Boarders of “higher social rank” had secluded apartments of their own, attended by “domestics dedicated to their service.”
Patients were encouraged to spend as much time as possible out-of-doors, strolling the long allées of tall, knotty pines, bent by the wind into graceful apostrophes, or the pathways bordered by a profusion of iris and laurel; or just to sit on one of the many stone benches that lined the arcaded courtyards and listen to the plashing of a fountain, or watch the swallows nesting beneath the ancient arches.
Even with these amenities, Saint Paul could not fill all the beds it had inherited from a previous era when charity alone paid the bills and mental afflictions called for the ministra
tions of a priest, not a doctor. Fewer than half the rooms were occupied. When Vincent arrived on May 8, he joined a cadre of ten male patients and about twice that number of women (madness being still seen as primarily a female affliction). Dwindling revenues had taken their toll on the “first-quality foods” and “well-planted gardens” described in the brochure. Vincent found the daily fare served in the refectory “a bit musty”—short on meat and heavy on beans—“as in a cockroach-infested restaurant in Paris, or in a boarding-house.” The “neglected gardens” went for months without pruning or weeding, lending to the old stone buildings an air of decline hardly befitting a retreat dedicated to spiritual renewal.
At the helm of this listing enterprise stood Dr. Théophile Peyron, a fat, bespectacled widower with a quick temper and a gouty leg. The law required that the asylum be captained by a doctor, not a priest, but did not yet credit the science of “mental alienation” enough to demand that the captain have any special training in it. Peyron, an ophthalmologist by trade and a navy doctor by experience, brought nothing to his retirement sinecure at Saint Paul other than a general knowledge of medicine, an officer’s mania for order, and an accountant’s eye for expenses. He demanded that a rigorous log be kept of all arrivals and departures, and relentlessly squeezed the budget. Outbursts of misbehavior were dealt with swiftly and summarily by sequestration in a secluded courtyard, or, in the worst cases, a distant, briglike ward, far from the rest of the “boarders.”
In this measured, monitored, orderly world apart, Vincent thrived. “I think I have done well to come here,” he wrote only days after his arrival. “I have never been so peaceful as here.” For Theo, he described in loving detail the tidy, well-lighted space that he now called home. “I have a small room with greenish-gray paper with two sea-green curtains with a design of very pale roses,” he wrote; “very pretty.” He admired the old armchair as if it had been chosen especially for him: “[It] is covered in a tapestry speckled like a Diaz or a Monticelli in brown, red, pink, white, cream, black, forget-me-not blue and bottle green.” The window was barred, of course, but it overlooked an enclosed wheat field—“a prospect like a Van Goyen”—and faced east, so that “in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all its glory.”
In the asylum’s cloistered calm, undisturbed by police, creditors, landlords, street boys, or spying neighbors, Vincent found the serenity he had always longed for. “Where I must follow a rule,” he once said, “I feel at peace.” Here he could eat regularly, if not well, and drink in moderation, without facing the temptations of the Café de la Gare. During the day, he could stroll the grounds, enjoying the aromatic plants and the clear air (“one can see so much farther here than at home”), or just sit and study the scenery. “I never get tired of the blue sky,” he wrote.
Twice a week, he took a two-hour bath—a therapeutic ritual that “steadies me a lot,” he said. At night, he could settle into his Monticelli armchair, read a book or newspaper, and smoke in peace. No paintings stared down from the walls—no ghosts from the past. All had been either sent to Theo or left in Arles. The great weights of ambition and expectation had been lifted from his shoulders. “We don’t have to live for great ideas any longer,” he wrote, “but, believe me, for small ones only. And I find that a wonderful relief.” Because the money for his upkeep never passed through his hands, he could escape, temporarily at least, the “grinding daily task of earning a living”—or, worse, the “crushing feeling [of] debt and worthlessness.” Even the mistral no longer tormented him. “Because there are mountains around,” he marveled, “[it] seems much less tiresome than in Arles, where you always got it firsthand.”
Other winds shifted in Vincent’s favor, too. Compared to the people of Arles, the patients at Saint Paul proved a model of civility and sympathy. “They say we must tolerate others so that the others may tolerate us,” Vincent reported, “and we understand each other very well.” For the first time in his career as an artist, he could draw and paint in public unmolested and unmocked. In the princely Hague, they spat on him; in Nuenen, they banished him; in Arles, they threw stones at him. But in the arcaded garden of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, where he spent most of his time, he found the peace he needed to work and recover. Nearby, games of boules and checkers went on undisturbed. Passersby might stop to watch, but always from a respectful distance. Unlike “the good people of Arles,” he observed of his fellow boarders, “they have the discretion and manners to leave me alone.” Indeed, he reveled in their innocent attentions, noting, “It has always been my great desire to paint for those who do not know the artistic aspect of a picture.”
BATHS, ASYLUM OF SAINT-PAUL-DE-MAUSOLE (Illustration credit 39.2)
As Vincent reported, the patients at Saint Paul were, in general, a refined and courteous lot. The person playing boules while he painted, or sitting next to him at the refectory table, was as likely to be the victim of a family quarrel as a mental affliction (a “ruined rich person,” in Vincent’s parlance), or perhaps a misunderstood eccentric who insisted on dressing for travel (with hat, cane, and coat) even when he went to bed. One was a frustrated law student who had “greatly overtired his brain” in preparing for examinations, according to asylum records; another, an accused pedophile. At least one was diagnosed as an “idiot” because he could only grunt and nod. Vincent found him an excellent listener. “I can talk with [him] because he is not afraid of me,” he said. There were shouters, too, of course; and, at night, howlers. And some who, like Vincent, burst suddenly into fits of paranoia and hallucinatory panic. But when they did, other patients would rush to calm them—not flee in fear—even before the wardens arrived. “People get to know each other very well,” Vincent wrote, “and help each other when their attacks come on.”
Not even the worst cases could resist such solicitude, he believed, citing the example of a recent arrival, a young man who “smashes everything and shouts day and night, wildly tears his straitjackets, overturns his food, destroys his bed and everything else in his room.” It was a “very sad” case, Vincent wrote, but he knew that his fellow inmates, especially the veterans, would “intervene to ensure that he does not harm himself” when an attack came on. “They will pull him through,” he predicted confidently.
By the same twist of logic, every outburst, every maniacal fit, every howl in the night, calmed Vincent’s own anxieties about the future. “By seeing the reality of the life of the various madmen and lunatics in this menagerie,” he wrote, “I am losing the vague dread, the fear of the thing.” And every intervention by his fellow patients made him feel part of a community, just as he did a decade earlier in the Borinage when injured miners nursed each other: a community not of idiots and outcasts, but of true fellowship and mutual consolation. “For though there are some who howl or rave a great deal,” he noted, “there is much true friendship here.”
Even as the routine and familiarity of Saint Paul imposed order on Vincent’s daily life, his sessions with Dr. Peyron dispelled the shadows in his head. He had brought from the Arles hospital an official diagnosis of “acute mania with generalized delirium.” It was during an attack of these symptoms in December, his admission report concluded, that Vincent had cut off part of his ear. But Dr. Rey had also passed along to Peyron his belief that Vincent suffered “a kind of epilepsy.” Not the kind, known since antiquity, that caused the limbs to jerk and the body to collapse (“the falling sickness,” as it was sometimes called), but a mental epilepsy—a seizing up of the mind: a collapse of thought, perception, reason, and emotion that manifested itself entirely in the brain and often prompted bizarre, dramatic behavior. Among Vincent’s Arles doctors, only the young intern Rey knew much about this recently defined variant of the ancient and dreaded disease.
—
THE EXISTENCE OF a nonconvulsive epilepsy had been known to doctors in France and elsewhere for fifty years, but its causes and its elusive symptoms had long defeated positive identification. The names they gave it betrayed their frustratio
n with defining it. They called it “latent epilepsy” or “larval epilepsy” for its long periods of dormancy between episodes, during which the sufferer could lead a relatively normal life, unaware that the incubus was forming within. They called it “masked epilepsy” for its hidden causes and various guises. Some doctors refused to consider it epilepsy at all, given its vague symptomology. Some called it the “intellectual disease” for its cruel targeting of higher brain functions, but tried to impose on its invisible seizures the same hierarchy of “grand mal” and “petit mal” applied to visible ones. Some, like Rey, called it simply “a kind of epilepsy” to bridge the conceptual chasm between the most extroverted of mental afflictions and its most introverted expression.
In Arles, Rey had already discussed his diagnosis with Vincent (who worried that the Foreign Legion might not take “an epileptic”), and even given him reassuring statistics on the prevalence and relative benignity of the broader disease. “There are 50,000 epileptics in France,” Vincent cheerfully informed his brother in May, “only 4,000 of whom are confined, so it is not extraordinary.” Rey explained how the mental seizures of latent epilepsy sometimes produced hallucinations—auditory, visual, and olfactory—that drove their victims to desperate acts of self-mutilation such as biting their tongues or cutting off their ears.
Van Gogh Page 104