Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  But the verdict of rumor had long since been rendered. In the 1930s, when the great art historian John Rewald visited Auvers and interviewed the surviving witnesses of that midsummer night in 1890, he heard people say that some “young boys” had shot Vincent accidentally. The boys never came forward, he was told, because they feared being accused of murder; and Vincent chose to protect them as a final act of martyrdom.

  THEO ARRIVED BY MIDDAY on the twenty-eighth, only hours after Hirschig appeared at the gallery. Even after all the thunderbolts of the past, the news from Auvers came as a shock. He had spent the previous week assaying the ground-floor apartment in his building, dreaming about his reunion in August with his wife and child in Holland, and planning, in the meantime, a weekend excursion to Passy—a summer watering spot outside Paris, not unlike Auvers. When he allowed himself to worry, it wasn’t about Vincent, it was about his job. Since his aborted ultimatum, he had heard rumors that two of the firm’s branches in Paris had been marked for closing—one of them, his.

  Gachet’s letter interrupted all that. On the train to Auvers, the old dread crashed in on him. Only a week before, he had dismissed such worries in words that must have haunted him as the train left Paris. “As long as he’s not melancholic and heading for another crisis,” he reassured Jo on July 20, “it was all going so well.” Gachet’s letter said that Vincent had “wounded himself.” The last time Theo was summoned by news like that, he had arrived in Arles to find his brother lying mutilated and unmoored in a hospital bed. What new horror awaited him in Auvers? Hirschig may have mentioned the possibility of a suicide attempt—a scandalous charge that Gachet had discreetly omitted from his letter—raising yet another specter to torment the endless hour-long ride.

  By the time he arrived at the Ravoux Inn, his face was “distorted by grief,” Adeline Ravoux recalled. He rushed upstairs to Vincent’s room. But instead of the deathbed scene he feared, he found Vincent sitting up in bed, smoking. “I found him better than I had expected,” he wrote Jo later that day, “although he is indeed very ill.” The brothers embraced, according to Adeline (who had followed Theo and her father to the room), and immediately fell into deep conversation in Dutch. The Ravouxs withdrew.

  For the rest of the day and into the evening, they talked: Vincent on his low-slung iron bed, Theo in the lone straw chair that he drew up next to it. Alternately agitated and enervated, taking short breaths and wincing with pain, Vincent thanked his brother for coming and giving them this opportunity to “be together constantly.” He asked about Jo and the baby. How sweet for them, he said, to “have no inkling of all life’s sadness.” If Vincent claimed a suicide attempt—as he had to Ravoux and others—Theo surely raised questions. Why had he given no warning? His most recent letter had been filled with buoyant spirits (“good luck in business … handshakes in thought”) and boisterous sketches of country life—even an order for more paint. Looking around the room Theo could see no signs of preparation for death—no tidying up, no farewell note. Discarded drafts and torn fragments of letters that Vincent clearly never intended to be read lay on his desk.

  VINCENT’S BEDROOM AT THE RAVOUX INN (Illustration credit 43.1)

  During one of their few breaks—perhaps while Vincent tried to sleep or take food, or lapsed into unconsciousness—Theo wrote Jo. He gave no hint of suicide, only surrender. “Poor fellow, he wasn’t granted a lavish share of happiness,” he wrote, “and he no longer harbors any illusions. He was lonely, and sometimes it was more than he could bear.” He reassured Jo, and himself, with memories of Vincent’s previous injuries and recoveries. “It was just as desperate before,” he noted hopefully, “and the physicians were surprised by his strong constitution.” He promised to return to Paris the next day “if he’s better tonight.”

  But Vincent’s wound would never heal, and there was only one treatment. He had lost “faith in life,” Theo concluded. Fate had given him this chance—whether by his own hand or another’s—and he was choosing death. “I would not expressly seek death,” Vincent had written in Nuenen, “but I would not try to evade it if it happened.”

  As the sun set and the attic began to cool, both conversation and rest became more elusive. Vincent’s breathing grew shallower and faster. His heart raced. Color and warmth drained from his skin. He had spells in which he seemed almost to be “suffocating,” Theo recalled. By nightfall, the end seemed near. The spells came more often. They talked less.

  With each panic of breathing, with each fond remembrance and each flush of tears, the subject of death hovered closer. The brothers had said little about suicide over the years—except to disavow it—but death had obsessed Vincent’s letters from the beginning. The thought of death “warmed me and made my heart glow,” he wrote from England in 1876. He lingered in graveyards and longed to draw corpses. He cherished images of funerals and plagues and portrayals of Death. He saw serenity in the faces of the dead and envied their freedom from “the burden of life, which we have to go on bearing.” “Dying is hard,” he had scolded a mourner at his father’s funeral, “but living is harder still.”

  The years of failure, penury, guilt, loneliness, and finally madness had shown him a different face of death. Deprived of the comfort of religion by his father’s death in 1885, he had failed ever since to fill the void it left. He tested everything from Tolstoy’s nihilism to Voltaire’s cosmic laugh, and found them all wanting. In the end, only art consoled. “My aim in life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can,” he wrote; “then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, ‘Oh, the pictures I might have made!’ ”

  But pictures alone were not enough. “Of the future life of artists through their works I do not think much,” he wrote in Arles. “Yes, artists perpetuate themselves by handing on the torch … But is that all?” He could not live without the possibility of a world beyond—a place where he could finally be free from “the empty stupidity and the pointless torture of life.” To keep alive the promise of a second chance, of starting over—for him, the indispensable consolation of religion—he had spent long hours constructing his own versions of an afterlife: glorious visions of distant orbs and “invisible hemispheres”—of trains to the stars and lifetimes as limitless as planets in the universe. Like his paintings, these elaborate conceits drew on the beauties of nature, the allure of science, the “deeply saddening Bible,” and, especially, the transcendent power of art. “Illusions may fade,” he wrote in Antwerp, “but the sublime remains.”

  Of all these consoling visions—some of which no doubt flitted through his thoughts as he felt the end approach—none was more glorious or more hopeful or more comforting than the one he imagined in Arles, in 1888, as he waited in the Yellow House for Gauguin’s arrival:

  I feel more and more that we must not judge of God from this world. It’s just a study that didn’t come off. What can you do with a study that has gone wrong?—if you are fond of the artist, you do not find much to criticize—you hold your tongue. But you have the right to ask for something better. We should have to see other works by the same hand though; this world was evidently slapped together in a hurry on one of his bad days, when the artist didn’t know what he was doing or didn’t have his wits about him. All the same, according to what the legend says, this good old God took a terrible lot of trouble over this world-study of his.…

  I am inclined to think that the legend is right, but then the study is ruined in so many ways. It is only a master who can make such a blunder, and perhaps that is the best consolation we can have out of it, since in that case we have a right to hope that we’ll see the same creative hand get even with itself. And this life of ours, so much criticized, and for good and even exalted reasons, we must not take it for anything but what it is, and go on hoping that in some other life we’ll see something better than this.

  At half past midnight, on July 29, cradled in his brother’s arms and struggling for breath, Vi
ncent uttered his last words to his waarde Theo: “I want to die like this.” He lay there for another half hour, one arm cast over the side of the bed with his hand resting on the floor, his mouth agape and panting for air. A little after one in the morning, with his eyes wide open, his fanatic heart stopped.

  “He has found the rest he was longing for,” Theo wrote his mother. “Life was such a burden to him.… Oh Mother! he was so my own, own brother.”

  LATER THAT MORNING, Theo buried his grief in a new mission: to give Vincent the dignity in death that he never had in life. Working with grim focus and efficiency, he presented himself at the town hall and completed all the official paperwork. He arranged with a printer to have both death notifications and funeral invitations printed within hours. The invitations had to make the post in time for delivery in Paris that same day or early the next morning, July 30—the day of the funeral. He listed train departure times to ensure the largest possible attendance. The ceremony would begin at the Auvers church “precisely” at 2:30 P.M., and would include a “funeral procession, service, and burial.” Meanwhile, he engaged a carpenter to provide a coffin and an undertaker to stabilize the body in the sweltering summer heat.

  While the mortician did his ghoulish work in the back room that Vincent used as a studio, Theo busied himself converting one of the inn’s two public rooms into a mortuary chapel, using flowers and greenery in the Dutch way. Their countryman Hirschig, who knew the custom well, scoured the neighborhood for appropriate material. But Theo wanted art first. With unflinching bravery, he searched the studio and the shed in back where much of Vincent’s recent work was stored, and selected a handful of paintings according to some painful calculus of the heart.

  One by one, he nailed the canvases—some unstretched, some still wet—around the billiard-table bier: the portrait of Adeline Ravoux, the Auvers town hall, the lonely wheat fields, Daubigny’s magical garden. He had barely finished when the undertaker and his minions lugged the casket into the room, hoisted it onto the billiard table, and covered it with a sheet. Ravoux had closed the shutters, and the smell of carbolic acid, an embalming fluid, filled the room. Impervious in his duty, Theo draped the coffin in greens and flowers—especially yellow flowers. He placed candles around the room and, finally, positioned Vincent’s studio easel, palette, and stool at the foot of the casket.

  But even in death, Vincent confounded him. The local curate would not permit a funeral service in the Auvers church. Theo’s invitation had been too hasty. Whether because Vincent was a foreign Protestant or a suspected suicide, the abbot Tessier even forbade the use of the parish hearse. And not all Theo’s Parisian politesse, or Gachet’s influence, could change his mind. The most Tessier would allow was for Theo to purchase a plot in the sparsely populated new cemetery on the plateau above the town, far from the church Vincent had painted. It was a lonely spot—not much more than a bit of bare earth in a barren field. To Jo, and to himself, Theo put the best face he could on this final rejection. He called it “a sunny spot amid the wheat fields.”

  The next morning, July 30, a trickle of guests began. Tanguy, the grizzled old dealer and Communard, arrived early—as he had so often before. Lucien Pissarro came, but not his father Camille, who pleaded age and ill health. Émile Bernard brought Charles Laval, Gauguin’s lackey, as a stand-in for the maître himself, who, despite his many debts to Theo, claimed not to have received his invitation in Brittany in time. (In fact, he later told Bernard that it was “idiotic” to allow himself to be associated with the madman Vincent.) Bernard entered the makeshift mortuary and immediately began rearranging the paintings. Dr. Gachet brought a retinue of locals, including some of the artists who had avoided Vincent in life. Andries Bonger came, too—for his sister and Theo, if not for Vincent. No one from Vincent’s family came, except Theo.

  One by one, the mourners filed past the casket. Some brought flowers. Tanguy wept. Theo played the perfect host. A lunch was served in the Ravoux Inn’s dining room. Around three o’clock, the most able-bodied carried the coffin to a hearse that Hirschig and young Paul Gachet had fetched from a neighboring parish, and the procession set out toward the cemetery under a blazing summer sun. Andries Bonger and Theo led the small group.

  At the graveside, the elder Gachet, at Theo’s request, muttered some vague praise (“an honest man and a great artist”) for a man he barely knew. Dazed by the heat and interrupted by tears, he left most people confused. Choked with emotion, Theo thanked him “with all my heart,” but did not give a speech. The coffin was lowered into the ground. Theo and Bonger cast the first shovelfuls of dirt. The small group began to disperse: the Parisians drifting toward the train station or back to the inn, the locals evaporating into the countryside.

  Theo stood on the heath and sobbed.

  * * *

  1 For a full discussion of our views on what happened the day of the shooting, see “A Note on Vincent’s Fatal Wounding,” p. 869.

  EPILOGUE

  Ici Repose

  VINCEN’S TORMENT HAD ENDED, BUT THEO’S HAD JUST BEGUN. BATTERED by storms of grief and regret, his frail constitution collapsed. The syphilitic contagion that had congested his lungs and paralyzed his gait for years now leaped into his brain. His weakened mind was possessed by a single idea: “He will not be forgotten.” The world had ignored Vincent’s work—“these masterpieces”—for too long, he said. People must know that he was a great artist; posterity must honor him; the world must “grieve that he was taken from us so soon.” This was Theo’s new mission. “I would hold myself to blame,” he wrote in a paroxysm of belated guilt, “I could never forgive myself if I did not do everything in my power to bring this about.”

  Nothing else gave comfort. The condolences that started arriving almost immediately made him alternately angry and ashamed. Artists and colleagues who had ignored or ridiculed Vincent in life urged on him the consolation of his brother’s work in death. “As often happens,” he wrote bitterly, “everyone is now full of praise.” In note after note, he found the same comfortless message: Theo was better off without his troubled brother. Even his own family greeted the news with unconcealed relief. Words intended only to console, like Wil’s, stabbed him in the heart: “What a strange coincidence,” she wrote, “that he had his wish to be and to live more like ordinary people, and was now so near to you.”

  In the first weeks after the funeral, guilt turned to obsession. “Oh, how empty it is everywhere,” he wrote Jo from Paris. “I miss him so; everything seems to remind me of him.” He talked only about Vincent. On a trip to Holland in early August, he spent whole days with his mother and Wil, deep in conversation about Vincent. In Amsterdam, he reunited with his wife and child, but at night, he admitted, the ghost of Auvers haunted his sleep. When he returned to Paris, he wanted to see only people who had known Vincent. He invited them for dinners and long evenings “where Vincent was almost the only subject of conversation,” he reported proudly. He clung especially to Paul Gachet, the doctor who had known Vincent so briefly at the end. The old man’s teary remembrances of a patient he barely knew watered Theo’s obsession at a time when the whole world seemed set on forgetting.

  THEO VAN GOGH, 1890 (Illustration credit epl.1)

  He spent hours digging through the piles of Vincent’s letters that he had stuffed into a dining room cupboard—often with relief—along with all his other correspondence. Alone with his brother again, he relived the years of trials and tribulations, and a new resolve formed. “I find such interesting things in Vincent’s letters,” he wrote his mother, “and it would be a remarkable book if one could see how much thinking he did and how he remained true to himself.” Calling it “a book that has to be written,” he first solicited Paul Gachet to write it, but then set his sights higher: on the critic Albert Aurier. Angered by the few, terse obituaries that had appeared (especially one that referred to Vincent’s art as the “expression of a sick mind”), he saw in Aurier’s new eminence a chance to immortalize an artist whom
fame had barely glanced. “You were the first to appreciate him,” he wrote the critic, “and by doing so you very clearly saw the man.”

  In this, as in everything, Theo honored his brother’s memory by dreaming only big dreams. After a lifetime of cautious planning and incremental ambitions, he envisioned a panoramic memorial to Vincent: an exhibition at the gallery of the pioneer Impressionist dealer Durand-Ruel, accompanied by a vast illustrated catalogue with lithographs of Vincent’s works and excerpts from his letters. He framed this comprehensive show exactly as Vincent would have—“it is essential for one to see a lot of it together because then one understands it better”—and pushed it with all Vincent’s evangelical zeal. When Durand-Ruel balked at the “large space” Theo demanded (“to do him justice”), Theo reacted exactly as Vincent would have—by redoubling his demands and supporting them with elaborate accountings, extravagant details, and delusional promises. When anyone dared to challenge him, he lashed out—just as Vincent always did. “He is haunted by his brother’s memory,” Andries Bonger reported, “to such an extent that he resents anyone who does not share his views.”