Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Books held dangers, too. Science may have pointed the accusing finger at his family, but in literature Vincent found that finger everywhere pointing back at him. Despite continuing to profess “boundless admiration” for the works of Naturalist writers like Zola and the Goncourts, he conspicuously abstained from reading them during his time at Saint Paul, fearing no doubt that their too-real temptations and look-in-the-mirror recriminations might bring on another attack. Instead, he turned to the philosophical melodrama of Ernest Renan’s L’abbesse de Jouarre, a play about doomed lovers, stolid suffering, and a dutiful but loveless marriage. What could be less troubling than a stilted play about a defrocked nun making her way through the Terror?

  Yet even here, provocations waited. Like Rod’s anodyne morality tale of bourgeois conventionality and happy marriage, Renan’s drama sanctified motherhood and portrayed loneliness as a fate worse than death. “The author finds consolation in the companionship of his wife,” Vincent wrote ruefully, summing up both the Rod book and the Renan play. “It certainly is not very cheering…[and] it teaches me nothing about the ‘meaning of life,’ whatever is meant by that.”

  As in the Borinage, he sought escape in the distant world of Shakespeare, abstracted both by time and by language. He focused on the history plays—the only genre of the Bard’s work that he had not yet explored—and no doubt found brave solace against adversity in Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI, all of which he reported reading. But he also found tales of bad seeds and family degeneration, fraternal rivalry and filial betrayal, stolen or squandered birthrights, and heroes undone by immutable flaws.

  Vincent defended himself against this gauntlet of unintended accusations and inadvertent provocations with a frantic mix of anger and denial. “With the number of precautions I am now taking,” he assured his brother, “I am not likely to relapse.” The most important precaution was to avoid the debilitating guilt that threatened to engulf him with each new letter from Paris. He parried Theo’s financial anxieties with renewed pledges of hard work, campaigns of salable imagery (flowers and landscapes, especially), and elaborate schemes to resurrect business relations in England and Holland. He deflected Jo’s hurtful intimacies by dismissing her as a sweet but superficial country girl.

  He answered Theo’s faint praise of his art with similarly tepid appreciations of Jo (“I dare say she will find the means to make life a bit more pleasant”), and filled his letters with private jokes, insider art talk, and paeans to Paris (which he knew Jo disliked), all insisting on his special place in Theo’s life—a place that no wife, especially not the “plucky and brisk” Jo, could ever fill. He fended off his sister Wil’s solicitude with a sharp attack on her naïve taste in reading matter (“good women and books are two different things,” he sneered to Theo) and a bleak counsel of hopelessness. “We have to resign ourselves to the obstinate callousness of the times and to our isolation,” he wrote, predicting for her, as for himself, a life of “poverty, sickness, old age, madness and always exile.”

  He could counter Shakespeare’s unfathomable fatality by reading the “mighty” Voltaire, who “at least gives a glimpse of the possibility that life may have some meaning,” he noted. But nothing could protect him from the damning judgment he heard in his mother’s joy. “I have not seen a letter of Mother’s showing so much inner serenity and calm contentment—not for many years,” he confessed to Theo. “And I am sure that this comes from your marriage. They say that pleasing your parents assures long life.”

  The ghosts of the Zundert parsonage had returned.

  By mid-June, dangerous images were flooding into his imagination from every side. Obsessing about his mother and her delight over Theo’s triumph, his thoughts returned again to the Berceuse, the icon of motherhood that had witnessed all his wretchedness in Arles. From the beloved Berceuse, his thoughts drifted to his long-frustrated love of figures and portraits, and the unfulfilled dream of the Bel-Ami of the Midi. “If I had someone like the woman who posed for ‘La Berceuse,’ ” he wrote, “I’d do something very different yet.” Soon, the familiar cry arose for subjects “with life in them”—human beings “transformed into something luminous and comforting, serene and pure,” figures like those in Daumier’s drawings or Zola’s novels or Shakespeare’s plays. “What has life in it too,” he wrote, circling back to the original injury, “is that Mother is glad that you are married.”

  Before long, these old yearnings made the leap to canvas in a painting of the enclosed field below his bedroom window showing the lone figure of a reaper harvesting the golden wheat under a blazing yellow sky. He framed the luminous figure in a Shakespearean meditation that revealed the darker thoughts and deeper perils now loosed in his imagination:

  Aren’t we, who live on bread, to a considerable extent like wheat, at least aren’t we forced to submit to growing like a plant without the power to move, by which I mean in what way our imagination impels us, and to being reaped when we are ripe, like the same wheat?

  Vincent had arrived in Saint-Rémy making light of religion (calling it “the rear end of some sort of Buddhism”), determined to avoid the obsessions that had upended his emotional world so often and with such catastrophic consequences in Arles. But both his letters and his art remained haunted by the quest to “prove that something very different exists as well,” and he continued to muse vaguely about “the other side of life.” Increasingly, he talked of art in the messianic terminology of a previous gospel. Artists, he said, exist “to give consolation or to prepare the way for a painting that will give even greater consolation.” He vainly protested that such thoughts represented “not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas, no.” But his eye and his imagination said otherwise.

  When Theo unthinkingly praised a Rembrandt drawing of an angel, Vincent began to see religious imagery everywhere: from the Delacroix “Pietà” on his wall to the other Rembrandt Bible scenes in his memory. Whether in Renan’s stagy melodrama or Rod’s sentimental claptrap, whether in Rembrandt’s mysterious holy figures or Shakespeare’s flawed heroes, he found “that heartbroken tenderness, that glimpse of a super-human infinitude” that led inexorably to thoughts of mortality and beyond. When Theo slipped again and mentioned Delacroix’s Education of the Virgin, Vincent’s thoughts returned to his own faïence virgin, the Berceuse, bringing the longing for family and the search for meaning together into a vortex of despair that could lead to only one place. Advising Wil in her moment of crisis, Vincent revealed where his had taken him: “I think it very brave of you, Sister, not to shrink from this Gethsemane.” As if testing that sacred ground, he ventured into the olive groves around the asylum and painted the empty scene again and again, even as he admitted it was “too beautiful to dare to paint or be able to imagine.”

  Finally, in mid-June, he averted his eyes from the impossible, perilous figures in the grove by looking up and painting the starry night sky overhead. To do otherwise, he warned Theo, and himself, would “risk vertigo,” and, with it, “a hopeless deluge of pain.”

  VINCENT’S FRAGILE DEFENSES (the “precautions” he bragged about to Theo) could barely withstand the threats that lurked everywhere in his own thoughts. Against the insults and indifference of the real world, they stood no chance at all. On his first excursion into the town of Saint-Rémy in early June, the old terror followed him as closely as his asylum escort. “The mere sight of people and things had such an effect on me that I thought I was going to faint and I felt very ill,” he had reported to Theo after the trip. “There must have been within me some too powerful emotion to upset me like that, and I have no idea what can have caused it.”

  Peyron and his staff saw nothing of this dread as they watched Vincent puttering about his ground floor studio or bustling toward the asylum gates loaded with equipment on his daytime hikes into the countryside. Thus, when Vincent came to Peyron on July 6 and asked for permission to make a trip to Arles the next day, the doctor saw no reason to object, as long as an atten
dant accompanied him. Vincent talked about bringing his furniture back to the asylum and settling more permanently into his new home—apparently acquiescing to Peyron’s recommendation that he extend his stay. “I must wait a year before thinking myself cured,” he wrote Theo, “since the least little thing might bring on another attack.”

  Unknown to Peyron, that “little thing” had already happened. The very same day that Vincent asked to go to Arles, he received a letter from Paris with electrifying news: Jo was pregnant. “My dear brother,” she wrote (in French for the first time), “I am now going to tell you a great piece of news … We’re expecting a baby, a pretty little boy—whom we are going to call Vincent, if you will consent to be his godfather.”

  Jo’s happy announcement did not summon up the lightning right away. Vincent collected himself and responded the same day with an effusive letter addressed to his “Dear brother and sister.” “I congratulate you,” he wrote. “I am very glad to hear it [and] I was much touched by your thought.” But everywhere amid the cheery reassurances and hearty congratulations, black, charged clouds threatened. He complained of his “feeble health,” crippling indebtedness, and feelings of remorse—all unchanged from the past; of his longings for alcohol, lack of companionship, and fears of mortality. Jo’s news not only drove him to reverse his plan for a short stay in the asylum—agreeing with Peyron to another year at least—it also transformed his trip to Arles from a housekeeping chore (to retrieve some paintings for Theo) into a desperate lunge at a new life—a bid to undo the abandonment that now seemed sealed.

  But he had no time and had laid no plans. At the end of the vertiginous train ride over the gorges, he found Arles virtually deserted of friends. He went to Pastor Salles’s house but was told the parson had gone on a long vacation. He braved a visit to the Hôtel Dieu, where he had spent so many stormy nights, hoping to find Dr. Rey; but he, too, was gone. Someone said he had passed his examination and moved on to Paris; but the hospital porter, who undoubtedly recognized Vincent, would tell him nothing. He ended up spending most of the day in a café or brothel with a group that he described only vaguely as “former neighbors,” suggesting that he did not see the Ginouxs either (his furniture remained in Arles), and that the only people who would sit with him were prostitutes and drinking companions that he had never dared name to Theo. With the asylum attendant looking on, apparently, he deadened his loneliness in the long-missed bliss of alcohol.

  Even the detached Peyron noticed the change in Vincent after he returned from Arles. His agitated state and reports of his excesses while away may have prompted the director to cut Vincent’s ration of both meat and wine in an effort to calm him. Even more ominous were the warning signs Peyron couldn’t see: the waves of longing, regret, and self-reproach that poured from Vincent’s pen in the days after his failed trip to Arles. Jo’s announcement had plunged him deeper into the swoon of maternal feeling that began with his mother’s letter in early July, beaming over Theo’s marriage. In his congratulations, Vincent struggled to console Jo’s worries that Theo’s persistent ill health portended a child with a weak constitution. He reminded her that the Roulins’ baby Marcelle (whose portrait hung in Theo’s new apartment) “came to them smiling and very healthy when the parents were in straits.”

  Talk of babies and images of motherhood, especially Madame Roulin, the model for La berceuse, wound Vincent ever more tightly into an obsession of maternal longing and identification. He compared parenthood to the “caressing but purifying” trials of the mistral that he knew so well, and predicted that becoming an uncle would help him “get back my interest in life.” For the first time in years, he wrote his own mother a long and intimate letter (“I cannot tell you how happy I am with that letter!” Anna reported to Theo)—a letter burning with nostalgia for a homeland and a childhood that he had imagined, not lived. In a reverie of remembrance, he talked of Holland’s moss-covered cottages, oak copses, beech hedges, and “the beautiful Nuenen birches” that he knew his mother loved. Under the guise of consoling her over the imminent departure of her youngest son, Cor, to the gold fields of the Transvaal in southern Africa, Vincent explored the most sensitive subject of all, their long estrangement, and even entertained fantasies of reconciliation. The “sorrow” of “separation and loss,” he reminded her achingly, “helps us to recognize and find each other again later.”

  But everywhere he turned, he heard only the ghostly horla’s accusations: in Jo’s reports of Theo’s dire health and fears of the degeneracy he might pass on to their progeny; in his mother’s even graver worries about Theo’s frail constitution and the relentless demands placed on it, both past and future. Vincent defended himself with Panglossian nostrums (“illness sometimes heals us”) and exhortations to patience and serenity: “A sickly condition is only the result of nature’s efforts to right herself.” But no words could comfort him; no arguments acquit him. In his mother’s concern for Theo, he heard a defense of his old nemesis, Goupil; in his brother’s bid for fatherhood, he saw the final victory of the unforgiving parson. When, in early July, news arrived that a Millet painting had sold in Paris for the astounding sum of half a million francs, Vincent felt not a vindication but an indictment. In the face of his own continued poverty and obscurity, he admitted, the sale caused him to suffer more, not less, from “the black need that always tortured Millet.”

  For days, he lived on a razor’s edge of self-annihilating guilt. He heard accusatory voices even in the screeching cicadas outside his window at night. They spoke to him of a past and a future all now lost because “little emotions are the great captains of our lives, and we obey them without knowing it.” The thought of Theo abandoning him, or dying, raised all the demons of the Yellow House. His mind fixed again on Monticelli, the mad Marseille painter of whom he had proclaimed himself the reincarnation. He discovered that a doctor at the asylum had known Monticelli but considered him merely “an eccentric”—that is, only mad “a little … toward the end.” Vincent found this strangely consoling. “Considering all the misery of his last years,” he wrote, seeing himself and his own inevitable fate, “is there any reason to be surprised that he gave way under too heavy a load?”

  He wrote a letter to Gauguin, the lone witness to his crimes, reaching out again for a pardon of normalcy. For Theo, he painted another of the garden vignettes that he knew his brother loved: an ivy-covered, sun-dappled corner of woodland shade that invoked not only old Barbizon favorites like Diaz, but also, in its luxurious paint and impossible mosaic of color, the madman Monticelli. In the studio, Vincent sorted through the paintings he had brought back from Arles and picked a few to send to Theo, tallying his failures with the grimness of the reaper that he watched from his window. “It is still hard for me to take courage again in spite of faults committed,” he confessed in a letter that accompanied them.

  Finally, beset by accusations on every side, he gave Theo permission to leave him. In a farewell letter so choked with emotion that it barely held his thoughts together, Vincent told his brother: “If you too find yourself faced with heavy responsibilities … honestly, don’t let’s be too much concerned about each other.” Events had carried them “far from our youthful conceptions of an artist’s life,” he added inconsolably, and now Theo had his own family to care for. He ended his heartbroken adieu with a delusion of solidarity as vivid and haunting as any hallucination. Describing Theo as “an exile and stranger and poor man” like himself, Vincent sanctified their shared childhood on the heath (“it still remains with us, inexpressibly dear”) and their brief “happy-go-lucky” partnership in Paris. That was a life they could now live “only in memory,” he conceded. Past was past. The time had come to “meet our destinies.”

  Within days, if not hours, of writing that letter, Vincent was struck down by another attack. The explosion came on one of his painting trips in mid-July. Like all his encounters with nature, these excursions were fraught with peril. “The emotions that come over me in the face of na
ture can be so intense that I lose consciousness,” Vincent later admitted. He had been warned. Only a day or two before, he had painted a view of the craggy Alpilles “with a dark hut at the bottom among some olive trees,” he recorded. As he painted, a scene from Rod’s Le sens de la vie bored into his thoughts: the little mountain cabin where Rod’s hero found happiness with his wife and child—the “enchanted asylum,” Rod called it. Vincent’s imagination veered dangerously toward the image of Theo and Jo with “the child who is to come,” and their tranquil life together—an image, he admitted, “that keeps haunting me.”

  But soon after, perhaps the next day, he found himself again confronting the fearful solitude of nature. He wandered even farther afield in search of “rather wild places, where one has to dig one’s easel in between the stones lest the wind should blow the whole caboodle over.” His search took him to an old quarry, a jagged hole in the earth, abandoned for centuries—a lonely spot even on a bright summer day.

  No sooner had he secured his easel and begun work than a furious gust of wind shot through the hollow like a cannon blast, scattering his canvas, easel, and paints. In a flash of metaphor, the wreckage of his little excursion became the wreckage of his life. Nature’s crushing indifference rose over him; the quarry’s biblical abyss opened beneath him. The consoling nature that “makes one feel more easily the ties that unite us all” suddenly turned cold and cruel as “a horrible feeling of loneliness overwhelmed me,” he recalled. Then came a spell of dizziness. Then the darkness.

  CHAPTER 40

  The Isolated One

  THIS TIME, THE DARKNESS LASTED FOR MORE THAN A MONTH.