Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  He painted everything from panoramic countryside scenes of cottages under immense skies—in sun and in rain—to simple sheaves of wheat, arranged like the pollard birches of Nuenen, in shaggy ranks like old veterans. He painted haystacks that looked like houses transformed into hay by some rustic magic, and cottages that blended almost invisibly into the mosaic of fields around them. He stared transfixed at the exposed roots of a tree until he could fill one of his huge canvases with just a small corner of the scene: an intimate sous-bois writ as large as a forest. He focused his wide view so tightly on the gnarled old roots, vines, and shoots of new growth—eliminating the sky, the ground, even the tree itself—that the shapes and colors lose connection with reality and, like Vincent, enter a distant, deeper world, abstract and absorbing.

  In this new fever of work, an old fantasy was reborn. The vast, exhortatory images of rural life, the inviting cottages, the echoes of Nuenen and the heaths, the beloved greenery nooks—all hinted at the resurgent hope that Theo might join him in Auvers. Moved by the image of his brother sitting alone in a Paris apartment, Vincent set aside all the rancor and recrimination of their recent exchanges. He abandoned a letter that openly rejected Theo’s version of the events of July 6 (“having seen the weal and woe of it for myself”), and sent instead a proposal that they “start again.” To avoid despairing over Theo’s neglect, he recast his plight as the plight of all artists. “Painters are fighting more and more with their backs to the wall,” he wrote resignedly, and any “union” between artists and dealers was doomed to failure. The implacable marketplace had betrayed all Impressionists, he consoled his brother, and rendered even the sincerest “personal initiatives,” like Theo’s, “powerless.”

  Tree Roots, JULY 1890, OIL ON CANVAS, 19¾ × 39¼ IN. (Illustration credit 42.5)

  He included in his letter an ardor of sketches showing the reborn dream of country life and fraternal reunion. He turned one sheet on its side and drew a vehement sketch of his proudest invitation to this new life: Daubigny’s Garden. Since painting his first view of it in early July, Vincent had probably returned many times to the storied garden only a few blocks from the Ravoux Inn. In the meantime, he had repainted his sumptuous image of the garden on another double-square canvas. Vincent had no doubt heard about the murals that filled the walls inside Daubigny’s other studio in Auvers. All of the painter’s family had contributed to them—an echo of Vincent’s vision in Drenthe of “a family of painters” in a cottage on the heath. Indeed, the broad canvases that burst from Vincent’s imagination in July also could have filled a country house with scenes of sublime rusticity.

  For Vincent, whose eye always gravitated to paintings in groups—the serial “decorations” of Seurat and Monet—these seamless panoramas may have formed just such a chorus of imagery. He wrote Theo as the double squares unfurled from his easel one after another: “I am trying to do as well as certain painters whom I have greatly loved and admired.” There was no painter he loved and admired more than Charles Daubigny. And there was no image more inviting than the one of a garden that Daubigny might have shared with his wife and his comrade Daumier. “Perhaps you will look at this sketch of Daubigny’s garden,” he hinted in the letter that accompanied the drawing. “It is one of my most purposeful canvases.”

  Daubigny’s Garden, JULY 1890, LETTER SKETCH, PEN, 3 × 8⅝ IN. (Illustration credit 42.6)

  In his first draft of that same letter, Vincent called his brother again to the procreative partnership that they had pledged each other on the road to Rijswijk eighteen years before. “I shall always consider you to be something more than a simple dealer,” he wrote, echoing the summons of Drenthe. “Through my mediation you have your part in the actual production of some canvases, which will retain their calm even in catastrophe.” In the draft he actually sent—his last letter to his waarde Theo—he replaced the overt plea with the beckoning image of the miraculous garden. “The truth is,” he explained, “we can only make our pictures speak.”

  —

  FOUR DAYS LATER, on Sunday, July 27, Vincent returned from a morning of painting to have his midday meal at the Ravoux Inn. When he was finished, he slung his bag of paints and brushes over his arm, reshouldered his easel, and returned to his labors, just as he had been doing almost every day for weeks. He could have been headed to Daubigny’s garden nearby, or farther into the countryside with another double-square canvas added to his awkward load.

  Hours later, after the sun had set, he staggered back to the Ravoux Inn without his bag or his easel or his canvas. The Ravouxs and their other boarders, who had taken dinner outdoors on a hot summer evening, were lingering on the café terrace. They saw him approach on the darkened street. “[He] was holding his belly and seemed to be limping,” one of them later recalled. “His jacket was buttoned up”—odd on such a warm night. He passed them without a word and went straight to his room. Gustave Ravoux, concerned about his guest’s strange behavior, listened from the bottom of the stairs. When he heard moaning, he climbed to Vincent’s attic room. He found Vincent lying on his bed, curled up in pain. He asked what was wrong.

  “Je me suis blessé,” Vincent replied as he lifted his shirt and showed Ravoux the small hole under his ribs—“I wounded myself.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Illusions Fade; the Sublime Remains

  NO ONE KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE FIVE OR SIX HOURS BETWEEN Vincent’s midday meal at the Ravoux Inn on Sunday, July 27, and his return with a bullet in his stomach that night.1 Both at the time and afterward, many theories were offered. The police briefly investigated. But no one ever stepped forward as a witness to any of Vincent’s activities that day. No one could establish his whereabouts when the incident occurred. His easel, canvas, and painting kit disappeared. The gun was never found.

  Fading in and out of consciousness, flashing between pain and shock, Vincent seemed at first confused about what had happened. He called for medical attention as if he had been the victim of an accident. Years later, one witness recalled him saying, “I wounded myself in the fields. I shot myself with a revolver there.” A doctor was summoned. Vincent gave no explanation for why he had a gun or how he had come to shoot himself with it.

  Whether it was an accident or something else remained unclear until the next morning when the police arrived to investigate rumors of a shooting. When they heard that Vincent had wounded himself, they immediately inquired, “Did you want to commit suicide?” Vincent replied vaguely, “Yes, I believe so.” They reminded him that suicide was a crime—both against the state and against God. With strange, unprompted vehemence, Vincent insisted that he had acted alone. “Do not accuse anyone,” he said; “it is I who wanted to kill myself.”

  Within hours, this abrupt claim became a story. “Vincent had gone toward the wheat field where he had painted before,” Adeline Ravoux later told an interviewer, recalling the account that her father had assembled from the bits and pieces he heard at Vincent’s bedside:

  During the afternoon, in the deep path that lies along the wall of the château—as my father understood it—Vincent shot himself and fainted. The coolness of the night revived him. On all fours he looked for the gun to finish himself off, but he could not find it. Then Vincent got up and climbed down the hillside to return to our house.

  The story accounted for some of the oddities of the missing hours, but by no means all. Vincent couldn’t find the gun in the dark to “finish himself off,” but how could it have fallen so far from his grasp? And why could no one else find it the next day—or ever—in the daylight? And what had become of the missing easel and canvas? How could he have lain unconscious for so long and bled so little? In his wounded, semiconscious state, how could he descend the steep, wooded slope that lay between the fields and the Ravoux Inn in the dark? Where and when had he gotten the gun? Why did he try to shoot himself? Why did he aim for his heart, not his head? Why did he miss?

  Not that Vincent hadn’t thought about suicide before. In troughs of
despair as far back as Amsterdam, in 1877, he had mused longingly on the serenity and escape of death—on what it would be like to be “far away from everything.” Occasionally he joked about it (reciting Dickens’s “diet” for suicide). Occasionally, he threatened it. From the depths of the Borinage, he promised Theo he would “cease to be” if ever he felt “a nuisance or a burden to you or those at home—of no use to anyone.”

  But mostly, he inveighed against it. He called it “wicked” and “terrible”—an act of “moral cowardice”—a crime against the beauty of life and the nobility of art, as well as Christ’s example. He cited Millet’s famous dictum that suicide “was the deed of a dishonest man” and boldly insisted, “I really do not think I am a man with such inclinations.” Yes, he had moments of “deep melancholy,” of “emptiness” and “unutterable misery,” he said—just as Theo did. But he disavowed any self-extinguishing intent, and urged his melancholic brother to do likewise. “Look here,” he wrote from Drenthe, “as regards making oneself scarce or disappearing—now or ever—neither you nor I should ever do that, no more than commit suicide.”

  The events in Arles and the onset of his disease had tested this brave resolve, but not broken it. Through all the torments of both body and spirit—the isolation and confinement, the nightmares and hallucinations—he had kept his pledge to Theo. Dr. Peyron thought he saw a suicide attempt in Vincent’s sucking his brushes, and once, when he felt his brother’s love slipping away, Vincent lashed out with a desperate threat. “If I were without your friendship, they would drive me remorselessly to suicide,” he wrote in April 1889, “and coward that I am, I should end by committing it.”

  There were times when he welcomed death—even devoutly wished for it: times when the “horror” and “loathing of life” so overwhelmed him that he would gladly have embraced it. “I would rather have died,” he wrote from his hospital cell in Arles, “than have caused and suffered such trouble.” In Saint-Rémy, he painted a Reaper as radiant and “beautiful” as a rescuing angel, and instructed Theo: “There is no sadness in death.” The trials had made him riper, readier to be reaped—even eager for the scythe. Battered by wave after wave of attacks and “always living in fear of relapses,” he confessed, “I often said to myself that I preferred that there be nothing further, that this be the end.” But as welcome as death would have been, he dared not deliver it himself. In all the haunted nights in the Yellow House, all the lonely walks around Saint-Rémy, Vincent had kept his pledge. He had not drowned himself in the Rhône, or leaped off an Alpilles cliff, or thrown himself under a Paris-bound train.

  Indeed, he described himself as a man who had come too close to the heinous, cowardly deed ever to approach it again. “I am trying to recover,” he wrote, “like someone who has meant to commit suicide, but then makes for the bank because he finds the water too cold.”

  Whether in the mountain valley of Saint-Rémy or the black country of the Borinage, whether in the Yellow House or the Schenkweg studio, whenever thoughts of suicide cleared the hurdles of conscience and entered Vincent’s imagination, they came in one form only: drowning. When Kee Vos refused his pleas of love in 1882, he considered “jumping into the water” in despair. Later, he toyed with an exception to Millet’s rule against self-slaughter: “I can understand people drowning themselves.” A year after that, he warned Theo that Sien Hoornik might drown herself if he abandoned her. In Antwerp, he expressed sympathy for an anonymous consumptive “who will perhaps drown herself before she dies of any illness”; and in Arles he roundly declared to the mayor and his assembled accusers that he was “quite prepared to chuck myself into the water if that would please these good folk once and for all.”

  In Vincent’s imagination, both artists and women always committed suicide by drowning because they shared the same intelligence, “delicacy,” and “sensitivity to their own suffering.” Artists “die the way women die,” he wrote in Antwerp, “like women who have loved much, and been hurt by life.” Margot Begemann had taken strychnine, and he knew others, both in life and in fiction, who had poisoned themselves. (Indeed, he knew a good deal about poison and could have used it effectively on himself.) But such people did not enjoy the same “consciousness of themselves” as artists did. Unlike him, they held life in contempt.

  He had read Balzac’s Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions) and heard Lucien Chardon, the book’s discouraged poet, musing on the gravity and method of suicide. “As a poet he wanted to make a poetic end,” Balzac wrote, so he picked a “pretty spot” along the river and planned to fill his pockets with stones. Of course, Vincent had also read about jumping from heights as long ago as Michelet’s Jeanne d’Arc and as recently as the Goncourts’ Germinie Lacerteux. Flaubert’s misbegotten heroes Bouvard and Pécuchet plotted to hang themselves—together, of course—but failed. Zola’s Claude Lantier succeeded: “[He] hanged himself from the big ladder in front of his unfinished, unfinishable masterpiece.” A character in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames threw himself under an omnibus. Daudet’s Evangelist chose a train.

  In Vincent’s reading, resort to firearms always ended badly—and often unsuccessfully. In Zola’s Pot-Bouille, the dissolute lawyer Duveyrier tried to shoot himself with a small revolver but succeeded only in disfiguring himself for life. In Maupassant’s Pierre et Jean, an accidental discharge produced a “frightful” stomach wound “through which the intestines protruded.” In Vincent’s own life, guns were exotic, alien devices, confined to wilderness adventures and calls to battle. When his brother Cor arrived in the Transvaal in 1889, Theo conveyed the “wildness” of the country by reporting that “one has to go about with a revolver all day long.”

  No one in Auvers (at the time) remembered seeing Vincent with a gun, and no one admitted to giving or selling or lending him one. Who, after all, would trust the fou Dutchman with a revolver—still a novelty in rural France. And what had become of it? In subsequent years, the mystery of Vincent’s missing weapon invited a host of baseless claims: that he had borrowed it from the innkeeper Ravoux to “scare away the crows” in the fields; that he had threatened others with the same gun; that he had brandished a similar weapon earlier in his life.

  But the doctor who arrived first on the scene, a Dr. Mazery, did not need to see the weapon to know that it was a small-caliber pistol. The wound just below Vincent’s ribs was “about the size of a large pea” and bled only a trickle. Around the little circle of dark red, a purple halo had formed. Mazery concluded that the bullet had missed all the major organs and blood vessels. By probing Vincent’s body, a painful process, he thought he located the bullet toward the back of the abdominal cavity. That meant it might have punctured a lung, grazed an artery, or lodged near the spinal cord—all mortal threats.

  It had traveled an odd path. If Vincent had meant to hit his heart, his aim was inexplicably wide of the mark. The gun had been held too low and pointed downward, hurling the little bullet into a dangerous position, but far from its intended target. It looked like the crazy angle of an accidental shooting, not the studied straightness of a determined suicide. And another oddity: normally, a bullet fired at such close range, if it didn’t hit bone, would have passed through the soft tissue of the midsection and exited the other side. That it remained in his body indicated not only a small caliber with limited powder, but also that the gun had been fired from farther out—“too far out,” according to the doctor’s report—perhaps farther out than Vincent’s reach.

  At some point, Dr. Gachet arrived. He had gone fishing with his son and heard about the shooting from a passerby—an indication of how quickly the news was spreading. As Vincent’s nominal custodian in Auvers, Gachet had much to answer for. He rushed to the Ravoux Inn, no doubt expecting the worst. He found Vincent surprisingly lucid—smoking his pipe—but demanding that someone remove the bullet from his stomach. “Will nobody cut my belly open for me?” one witness recalled him pleading.

  Gachet examined the wound himself and consulted apart with
Dr. Mazery. Neither dared to attempt surgery. Mazery was a Paris obstetrician on summer holiday; Gachet, an expert on nutrition and neurotics, not gunshot wounds. Moving Vincent to a Paris hospital presented even greater risks. With no symptoms to treat, they applied a dressing and hoped for the best. Undoubtedly over Vincent’s protests, Gachet drafted a letter to Theo saying only that Vincent had “wounded himself.” “I would not presume to tell you what to do,” he wrote cautiously, “but I believe that it is your duty to come, in case of any complications that might occur.”

  To avoid the alarm of a telegram, Gachet planned to post the letter. But when he asked Vincent for Theo’s address, Vincent refused to give it. Gachet decided to dispatch the young Dutch painter Hirschig to Paris the next morning to hand-deliver the letter to Theo at his gallery, where Gachet had visited him. After that, both doctors left the little attic room. Vincent smoked his pipe and waited. Every now and then, his body stiffened and his teeth clenched in pain. That night, Anton Hirschig, who occupied the room next to Vincent’s, heard “loud screaming.”

  By the next morning, Auvers buzzed with rumors about the extraordinary events of the night before. Someone had seen Vincent, around dusk, enter a walled farmyard just off the main thoroughfare—far from the fields above the town. He appeared to be hiding behind a dunghill, as if for a rendezvous, or perhaps detained by unseen companions. It was here, the rumors said, that the fateful shot had been fired. Vincent could have dragged himself wounded over the level ground between the dunghill and the Ravoux Inn—less than half a mile—a far easier route than the steep, tricky slope of the riverbank. His easel and canvas, and the gun, could have been disposed of.

  Revolvers were rare in Auvers, and in the days after the shooting, locals inventoried every one of them. Only one was missing—along with its owner. René Secrétan and his “Puffalo Pill” “peashooter” had left town—spirited away with his brother Gaston after the shooting by their pharmacist father in the middle of the summer. The brothers eventually returned to Auvers, but the pistol was never seen again. Decades later, René Secrétan came forward to offer an explanation. After more than half a century of silence, he told an interviewer that Vincent had stolen it from him. “We used to leave it around with all our fishing gear,” he said, “and that’s where Vincent found it and took it.”