Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  The mania of remembrance tore at his sense of identity. Like Vincent in Arles, Theo seemed pursued by an “ill-starred brother, clad in gloom / As though arisen from the tomb.” By September, he was railing against his employers at Goupil, rallying the art world to a utopian “association of artists,” and planning an exhibition at the café Le Tambourin, the long-defunct site of Vincent’s first show in 1887, when the brothers lived together on the rue Lepic. In wild displays of defiance and rage—some of them directed at his wife and child—in attacks of paranoia, in spells of denial and magical thinking, in neglecting his health, his sleep, even his clothes, Theo mourned his brother by becoming his brother.

  The transference came to a disastrous head in early October when Theo summarily quit Goupil—just as Vincent had always urged him to do—unleashing decades of accumulated grievances with a great Vincent-like show of shouting and slamming of doors. Virtually his last act as he left the firm where he had worked since adolescence was a defiant, delusional telegram to Gauguin: “Departure to tropics assured, money follows, Théo, Director.”

  Within days, the breakdown was complete. On October 12, 1890, Theo was admitted to a hospital in Paris. Two days later, he was transferred to a private asylum in Passy, the leafy suburb where he had vacationed the previous summer. After that, his path mostly followed Vincent’s. There were some differences. Theo was physically far sicker than his brother when he surrendered his freedom. By now, the paralysis afflicted his whole body. At times, he could not walk at all. Far more frail than Vincent, in mind as well as in body, he suffered wilder and more dangerous bouts of delirium. He threw furniture and tore at his clothes so violently that he had to be chloroformed into passivity. Instead of young interns like Félix Rey, the best doctors in France attended his case. The private asylum of Dr. Antoine Blanche was the spa that Vincent had imagined Saint Paul to be; and Passy, the glamorous resort that Glanum had once been. The alienist Blanche was not only the father of a prominent artist but also a colleague of Jean-Martin Charcot, the giant of French neurology and Freud’s teacher.

  Unlike Vincent’s solitude in Arles and Saint-Rémy, Theo’s confinement brought a flock of family and friends to his bedside. Wil traveled from Leiden, bearing their mother’s unspeakable concern for her “crown and joy.” H. G. Tersteeg, Vincent’s implacable nemesis, rushed from The Hague. Only Gauguin remained aloof—fearing that the madness of both Van Gogh brothers would infect his own reputation and that of the movement he was still struggling to found. He complained to Bernard that Theo’s insanity “is a rotten break for me,” and began looking elsewhere for money to fund his latest idea for a triumph in the tropics: Tahiti.

  But Bernard saw his fortune in the opposite direction—as Theo’s grieving confrère, Vincent’s champion, and both brothers’ chief hagiographer. His plan to organize a retrospective of Vincent’s work in Theo’s memory drew a sharp rebuke from Le Pouldu (“What blundering!”), setting off a contest for credit that would preoccupy the rest of both artists’ careers. Others in the avant-garde community who knew Theo shared Camille Pissarro’s stunned lament: “No one can replace this poor van Gogh … It is quite a great loss for us all.”

  In addition to sympathizers, Theo had something else Vincent never had: an attentive, steadfast partner. Jo Bonger fought harder and longer than anyone else for her husband’s health and reputation—a fight she would take far beyond his grave. She refused to believe the doctors at Blanche’s asylum when they told her that both Theo’s paralysis and his dementia were products of the same root disease: syphilis. She rejected the doctors’ treatments, as well as their diagnosis. “[Jo] cannot accept what is being done,” her brother Andries reported in distress, “and she constantly wants something else because she thinks she knows Theo better and knows what he needs most.” She fought counsels of resignation and hopelessness from every side. Clinging to Theo’s claim that sensitive “nerves” and grief over a lost brother were the source of all his woes, she imagined that hypnosis might help him. She enlisted the Dutch writer and psychologist Frederik van Eeden to visit him at the asylum. The young, charismatic Van Eeden preached a mystical gospel of brotherly love that gave hope in a faithless world. Vincent, too, had been drawn to it as the end approached.

  After only a month in Passy, with Van Eeden’s blessing, Jo arranged for Theo to be moved to an asylum in Utrecht, Holland. The long, sleepless train ride—in a straitjacket, accompanied by guards—completed the return to the North that Vincent had often vowed. Jo rode the same train home, carrying her infant son. Within a few months, she would settle in the little town of Bussum, twenty miles north of Utrecht, where Van Eeden lived and later established a utopian commune. Theo arrived at the asylum on November 18, “in a wretched state”: babbling in a mash of languages, disheveled, incontinent, and barely able to walk. He could not answer questions about who he was, where he was, or what day it was.

  For the next two months, Theo lived the same life of confinement in Utrecht that his brother had lived in Arles and Saint-Rémy. Long days of delusion, delirium, and drug-induced stupor were followed by long nights of restless, haunted sleep, or no sleep at all. He sat for hours in his padded cell conducting fevered, incoherent monologues—arguments with himself—in multiple languages. His mood swung wildly from “cheerful and boisterous” to “dull and drowsy,” according to the asylum reports. At other times, a sudden fury possessed his delicate body. He shook with tremors from head to toe in paralytic attacks indistinguishable from epileptic seizures. The look in his eyes, the timbre of his voice, his whole character, changed—as if commandeered by some other entity. In these transformations, the cultured art dealer of refined sensibilities clawed at his underclothes, ripped up the sheets on his bed, and tore the straw from his mattress. The wardens had to wrestle him into a straitjacket and tranquilize him.

  Speech became increasingly difficult, as did walking, as the tremors invaded every part of his body. The muscles of his face twitched uncontrollably. He had trouble swallowing. Eating was a torment, and he vomited up most of what he ate. His bowels malfunctioned. Urination was painful, and attempts to insert a catheter failed. He couldn’t feed himself or dress himself. After he was found asleep in the bath, he wasn’t allowed to bathe himself for fear he might accidentally drown. He had to be placed in a covered, padded “crib” at night, so he could not harm himself.

  Out of deference to Jo, no doubt, the doctors noted in Theo’s record a benign diagnosis that his agonies were the result of “heredity, chronic illness, excessive exertion, and sadness”—a fitting benediction for either brother. But when Jo demanded to take her husband home, they rose up in unanimous opposition: “His general condition is such that he must be deemed to be absolutely unfit for normal intercourse and private care,” they wrote in his record, describing his state as “appalling,” “deplorable,” and “lamentable in all respects.”

  In the end, even Theo seemed set against her. When she came to see him, he greeted her with either stony silence or eruptions of rage, as if blaming her for some offense his tongue could not name. Instead, he threw chairs and overturned tables. At Christmastime, when she brought him flowers, he seized them and tore them to shreds. He brooded for days after every visit, and eventually her presence was deemed too provocative.

  Having heard the stories about the patient’s artist-brother, one doctor tried to penetrate Theo’s unreachable solitude by reading to him an article about Vincent that had appeared in a Dutch paper. But as he heard the familiar name repeated over and over, his eyes went vacant and his attention wandered to somewhere inside. “Vincent…,” he muttered to himself, “Vincent … Vincent …”

  Like his brother, Theo died in a final haze of mystery. Not even the date of his death is certain. One report puts it on January 25, 1891, but hospital records show the body being removed on January 24. According to one account, he died after yet another visit by Jo. Defying the doctors to the end, she refused to allow an autopsy. Four days later, Theo
was unceremoniously buried in a Utrecht public cemetery, in an ignominy of family silence that spoke louder than all Jo’s protests.

  There he waited for almost twenty-five years while Vincent’s star ascended and the rest of the Van Gogh family disappeared in a vortex of tragedy. Ten months after Theo’s death, in December 1891, sister Lies married her longtime employer, whose wife had died of cancer. In fact, Lies had already borne a child by her new husband, in secret, five years earlier, which she had abandoned to a peasant family in Normandy. The shame of it haunted her to her grave. The surviving brother, Cor, never returned from the Transvaal. After a brief, unhappy marriage, he joined the Boer fight against the British in 1900. Not long after, during a bout of fever, he shot himself and died. He was thirty-two years old. Two years later, sister Wil was committed to an insane asylum. She spent the rest of her life there—almost forty years. During most of that time, she never uttered a word and had to be force-fed. She made several suicide attempts.

  Mother van Gogh absorbed every blow with invincible faith. “Trust in God who sees everything and knows everything,” she maintained until her own death in 1907, “though His solution may be deeply sad.” At least one of those sad solutions never rose to her notice. In 1904, Sien Hoornik, Vincent’s prostitute lover and substitute wife in The Hague, threw herself into a canal and drowned, fulfilling the vow she had made to Vincent in 1883: “Yes, it’s true I’m a whore, and the only end for me will be to drown myself.”

  BY 1914, JO BONGER had remarried and been widowed a second time. The first publication of Vincent’s letters and the prominent sale of his works had brought her the attention of the world. To share that vindication with her dead husband, and, no doubt, to wipe away the horrible events in Paris and Holland during the six months between the brothers’ deaths, Jo had Theo’s body brought from Utrecht. She buried him next to Vincent, overlooking the wheat fields above Auvers. She placed matching stones on the side-by-side graves, with matching inscriptions: ici REPOSE (here rests) VINCENT VAN GOGH and ici REPOSE THEODORE VAN GOGH.

  GRAVES OF VINCENT AND THEO VAN GOGH, AUVERS (Illustration credit epl.2)

  Finally, Vincent had his reunion on the heath.

  Appendix: A Note on Vincent’s Fatal Wounding

  FOR AN ACT OF SUCH FAR-REACHING SIGNIFICANCE AND SUBSEQUENT NOTORIETY, surprisingly little is known about the incident that led to Vincent van Gogh’s death at the age of thirty-seven.

  All that can be said with certainty is that he died of a gunshot wound that he sustained in or near the town of Auvers, about twenty miles north of Paris, on July 27, 1890. The injury occurred sometime after he had lunch at the inn where he was staying and then left on a painting excursion loaded down with equipment. He returned to the Ravoux Inn just after suppertime with a bullet hole in his upper abdomen. He called for medical assistance but the injury was fatally severe. He died approximately thirty hours later.

  The two doctors who attended him during that time examined the wound and manually probed his midsection. They concluded: first, the bullet had not exited the body but had come to rest near the spinal column; second, the gun that inflicted the wound was a small-caliber pistol; third, the bullet had entered the body from an unusual, oblique angle (not straight on); and fourth, the gun had been fired at some distance from the body, not close up.1

  No physical evidence of the shooting was ever produced. No gun was ever found. None of the painting equipment that Vincent took with him from the Ravoux Inn—easel, canvas, paints, brushes, sketchbooks—was ever recovered. The location of the shooting was never conclusively identified. No autopsy was performed. The bullet that killed him was not removed. No eyewitnesses to the shooting could be located. Indeed, no one stepped forward who could verify Vincent’s whereabouts at any time during the roughly five-hour period during which the shooting occurred.

  Within hours of Vincent’s return to the Ravoux Inn, rumors had begun to circulate about the circumstances that had led to his fatal wounding. Those rumors quickly coalesced into a narrative about the events of July 27. According to this narrative, which was taken up in virtually all subsequent accounts, Vincent borrowed a revolver from Gustave Ravoux, the owner of the inn where he was staying, and took it with him on his regular afternoon painting expedition that day. He then climbed up the riverbank and walked some distance into the wheat fields that lay above and outside the town. There he put down his load and shot himself. The blow did not kill him (it missed his heart), but it did knock him out. By the time he regained consciousness, darkness had fallen and he could not find the gun. So he staggered back down the steep riverbank and returned to the Ravoux Inn seeking medical attention.

  It was, and is, a satisfying narrative. It provides a suitably tragic end to an undeniably tragic life: a troubled, unappreciated artist seeks escape from the neglect of the world by taking his own life. The story not only appeared early, it caught on quickly, and it played an important role in the meteoric ascent of Vincent’s celebrity in the decades immediately after his death. By 1934, when it was immortalized in Irving Stone’s bestselling novelization, Lust for Life, the story of Vincent’s suicide in the wheat field had become firmly lodged in the artist’s legend. Two decades later, in the 1950s, when the celebrity of Vincent van Gogh reached new heights with the centenary of his birth in 1953,2 it was sealed in the mythology permanently with the release three years later of the Academy Award–winning movie adaptation of Lust for Life.

  In our review of the available evidence, however, we could find little reliable, verifiable support for the narrative summarized above. The purpose of this note is to put forward an account of the events of July 27 that better fits the known facts about the incident and about the man; to examine the origins of the traditional account; and to explain why, in our opinion, that account falls short.3

  IN THE SAME YEAR that the movie Lust for Life was released—1956—an eighty-two-year-old Frenchman named René Secrétan stepped forward to give his account of the strange painter he had known in Auvers in the summer of 1890. The son of a prosperous pharmacist who grew up in an exclusive Paris suburb, René was sixteen at the time of Vincent’s death.4 He was a student at Paris’s famous Lycée Condorcet, the same school where Paul Verlaine and Marcel Proust studied and Stéphane Mallarmé and Jean-Paul Sartre taught.5

  René and his brother Gaston came to Auvers every summer to fish and hunt at their father’s villa on the bank of the Oise River.6 René was a rambunctious, adventurous teenager who liked the outdoors far more than his prestigious school (where he often skipped classes). In this, he was completely unlike Gaston, a sensitive eighteen-year-old7 who preferred art and music to fishing and shooting. It was through Gaston that René met Vincent van Gogh. René told Victor Doiteau, a French writer, during a series of interviews Doiteau conducted in 1956, that Gaston and Vincent had many conversations about art and that Vincent eventually sought out Gaston’s company for these discussions.8

  A self-proclaimed philistine,9 René disdained their talk of art, but in his brother’s company, he spent many hours observing the strange Dutchman. In his interviews with Doiteau, René painted an intimate portrait of Vincent with details that bespeak close and repeated contact, conform to descriptions from other sources that he would not have known, and bear no resemblance whatsoever to the hagiographic image of the artist then being propagated by Lust for Life. (“He compared Vincent’s mangled ear to that of an angry cat, as well as a gorilla’s.”10) René described Vincent’s clothes, his eyes,11 his voice,12 his gait, his taste in liqueurs,13 and what it was like to share a café booth with him.14

  Despite all this, René did not claim to be friends with the famous painter. Indeed, just the opposite. When he was not tagging along with his brother, René led a rowdy group of other boys: most of them, like the Secrétans, Parisian students vacationing in Auvers for the summer. With his natural bravado, adventurous spirit, and puckish sense of mischief, René was the one they all wanted to follow. A crack marksman, he took
them on hunting expeditions for squirrels or rabbits or whatever else they could find in the woods and fields. He guided them to the richest fishing areas along the Oise. He also led them on amorous adventures.15 Through his connections with the director’s son, he regularly imported girls from the Moulin Rouge (René called them “our cantinières [canteen women]”) and organized boating parties and picnics for the amusement of his fellows and their girlfriends.16

  René also brought something else from Paris: a cowboy costume that he had bought when he saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at the Universal Exposition the year before (1889).17 It consisted of a fringed buckskin tunic, boots, and a rodeo hat with the front brim turned up. Its rakish outlaw look perfectly suited René’s bumptious spirit, taste for risk, and love of high jinks.18 To lend this outfit more authenticity (and, no doubt, an edge of genuine menace), he added to it a real gun. To Doiteau, René described the gun as an old .380 caliber pistol that was falling apart and worked only erratically.19 But it worked well enough. When not playing Buffalo Bill fighting off an Indian attack, René used it to shoot squirrels and birds and any fish that came too close to his boat. With or without the cowboy getup, he kept it always close at hand in his rucksack. So it was not a toy, however much he may have treated it as one.

  According to René, the gun was sold (or lent) to him by Gustave Ravoux, the innkeeper.20

  When in town, René led his followers in another favorite pastime: playing pranks on Gaston’s friend, the strange Dutchman named Vincent.21 They put salt in his coffee and watched from a distance as he spat it out and cursed with anger. They put a grass snake in his paint box; when he discovered it, he almost blacked out, René recalled. René noticed that Vincent would sometimes suck on a dry paintbrush when he was thinking, so they rubbed the brush with chili pepper when he wasn’t looking. It was all part of a campaign to “drive [Vincent] wild,” René admitted.22