Van Gogh (101 page)

Vincent read Edmond de Goncourt’s
The Zemganno Brothers
, as he read so many novels, like a self-portrait. In his endless search for brother pairs who merged their lives, he seized early on the story of the “twin spirits” Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. “They had such a splendid idea, working and thinking together,” he wrote Theo from Antwerp, sending along a summary of the Goncourts’ accomplishments and noting pointedly how “joining hands” had allowed them to face the future “with the simplicity of grown-up children.”

Vincent undoubtedly knew—everyone knew—that Edmond had written his tale of gypsy acrobats as a loosely autobiographical tribute to his dead younger brother, Jules, a vision of artist-brothers feeling and creating as one—“the effusion of a single ego, of a single I.” It was the same vision Vincent had brought to Paris from the lonely heaths and docksides. “I wish that we too might work together somewhere at the end of our lives,” he wrote Theo on the eve of his arrival.
“If we have the wish and the courage to do that, won’t we have something to talk about then?”

But it didn’t work out that way. The euphoria of reunion soon succumbed to the reality of cohabitation. It had been twenty years since Vincent lived with his brother in the attic of the Zundert parsonage. Since then, he had shared a room only once, briefly, with the prostitute Sien Hoornik. He treated the whole rue Lepic apartment as if it were the Kerkstraat studio: spreading his paints and apparatus everywhere until “it began to look more like a paint shop than an apartment,” according to one visitor. “Everything was topsy turvy,” another recalled. “[Vincent] spread his taste for disorder into every room.”

He freely mixed discarded clothes and wet canvases (even using Theo’s socks to clean his brushes) and cleared away swaths of domesticity to make room for a still life (or, on rare occasions, a model). An overnight guest recalled “stepping out of bed in the morning into a pot of color Vincent had left lying around.” After the debacle at Cormon’s, Vincent immediately reverted to the personal habits of the heath as well, neglecting both bathing and clothing. “He always looks so dirty and unappetizing,” Theo complained to their sister Wil. Within a month or two of moving into the new apartment, Theo fell sick with an unidentified illness, and Lucie, the housekeeper-cook, fled.

Vincent had a similar influence on Theo’s social life. Prior to his brother’s arrival in March, Theo had enjoyed a glittering circuit of boat trips on the Seine, promenades in the Tuileries, official receptions, evenings at the theater, nights at the opera, weekends in the country, and splendid candlelight soirées in white tie, with celebrity performances, dancing, and suppers at 2:00 A.m. Although often lonely in a crowd, Theo made an attractive, amusing guest, and his reticent charms earned him more than a few invitations to his clients’ houses.

Vincent’s arrival changed all that. Social outings, an important part of Theo’s work, were no longer possible unless he left his unpredictable brother behind—an option increasingly foreclosed by Vincent’s demanding notions of fraternal solidarity. Nor, apparently, did Theo trust his brother’s behavior enough to introduce him to many of the prominent artists, collectors, and dealers whose names filled his address book. For the same reasons, he had to take care what guests he invited to the rue Lepic apartment (where, he confessed, “the situation is anything but attractive”). Only a select few, mostly fellow Dutchmen, could be trusted not to take offense at Vincent’s unconventional ways.

Even then, friends often refused his invitations. “Nobody wants to come to our home anymore,” he complained. “Because it always results in arguments.” Those who did come suffered the gauntlet of Vincent’s attentions. “That man has no manners whatsoever,” Andries Bonger summed up the newcomer who had robbed him of his closest companion. “He is always quarreling with everybody.” Another visitor found Vincent “troublesome” and filled with strange,
fervent talk. Even Theo himself, in a letter to Andries’s sister Johanna, later admitted that Vincent was “impossible to get along with … since he spares nothing and nobody.” The judgment of the past had followed Vincent to Paris, Theo revealed: “Everyone who sees him has said:
‘C’est un fou’
[he’s a madman].”

As in the past, Theo’s relations with women, in particular, roused Vincent to extremes of fraternal solicitude. In addition to all the other upsets, the new living arrangements had seriously disrupted Theo’s romantic life. His mistress of a year, a woman known only as S, had flown into a spiral of jealous, self-destructive rages at the intrusion into what was, no doubt, a plan to marry the attractive young art dealer. “You have cast a spell on her,” Dries Bonger warned Theo regarding S. “Morally she is seriously ill.” Vincent, too, considered the woman “deranged,” but nevertheless offered to “take her off [Theo’s] hands.” “An amicable arrangement could be reached,” he assured his brother, “by your passing her on to me.” After all, the Goncourt brothers had shared a mistress.

Like Gianni Zemganno, Vincent believed that relationships with women—other than sexual relations—sapped the brothers’ joint creative energy. Inviting a woman into their lives not only betrayed the sacred bond of brotherhood (neither Goncourt brother ever married), it risked even more grievous injury. Hadn’t the Zemganno brothers been undone—and ultimately destroyed—by an interloping woman in love with the handsome young Nello?

But the woman in Theo’s life was not the hapless S—the last in a virtually unbroken chain of mischosen mistresses. She was the distant Jo Bonger. Theo had pined for his friend’s twenty-three-year-old sister since meeting her in Amsterdam the previous summer. The two had not communicated since, but Andries continued to encourage the match on both sides. He himself became engaged that winter, and he urged Theo to follow suit: “It would be so nice if we were both happily married in Paris,” he wrote. Theo’s sister Lies, always eager to bring her brother’s luckless love life to a happy conclusion, took up the cause as well. She maintained an active correspondence with Jo, acting both as Theo’s go-between and as family ambassador. (Contingents of Van Gogh and Bonger womenfolk met in Amsterdam in January.)

The separation only whetted Theo’s ardor. Like Vincent, he found obsession easier to nurture at a distance. All winter, despite the whirl of social events and the attentions of S, he wrote to his sister about the loneliness of Paris (“one feels lonelier than one would in a village”) and the void at the center of his life. The unexpected arrival of his troubled brother at the end of February, far from filling that void, only confirmed it. “There was something in you that I had sought in others, but to no avail,” Theo later wrote Jo, recalling his winter of pining. “I sensed that I was on the threshold of an entirely new life.”

But to enter that new life, Theo needed money. In his world of duty first, an honorable young man would never ask for a young woman’s hand unless
he could be sure of supporting her properly. Before he would even explore an engagement with Jo, he had to have a plan for financial security. Inevitably, the lure of marital bliss combined with the duty of fiscal responsibility to revive an old fantasy: a business of his own. Fitfully discontent, Theo had often imagined setting up as an independent dealer. Only two years before, feeling abused by his bosses, he had developed an elaborate plan to start a “modern business” involving directors and capital and “an apparatus for reproductions.” Like his uncle Cent, he would strike off on his own and find his fortune. Eventually he abandoned that plan, as he did many others over the years, as the risks loomed larger and his melancholy ebbed.

But this time was different. This time his ambitions were fueled by longing (“I envisaged my work and my love going together hand in hand,” he wrote), and his father was no longer there to advise caution. Joining with his friend Andries, now married and eager to build his own nest, Theo prepared yet again to approach his uncle for financial backing. After years of ignoring his brother’s passionate entreaties and suicidal threats, two years after rejecting the desperate pleas from Drenthe, Theo laid plans to leave Goupil—all for a woman he barely knew, and with a partner other than Vincent.

In August 1886, Theo left for Holland on his summer vacation. He had two destinations, but only one goal. In Breda, he would ask Uncle Cent to invest in his future. In Amsterdam, at the Bonger house, he would claim that future.

Vincent sent words of encouragement from the rue Lepic, where he awaited Theo’s return along with Andries (whom Theo had asked to sleep in the apartment for fear of leaving Vincent alone) and S (whom Vincent had rashly invited to join them after Theo’s departure). But how could he genuinely support any plan that brought his brother closer to the uncle who had spurned him—any plan, that is, that didn’t end with Theo’s becoming a painter? In anticipation of the verdict from Breda, Vincent fell ill. When news finally arrived that Cent had refused to back Theo’s proposal (he “fobbed me off,” Theo reported), Vincent responded not with the usual calls for defiance, but with rare counsels of patience and resignation: “In any case the subject is broached,” he wrote, sounding unmistakably relieved.

After the “bitter disappointment” in Breda, Theo’s mission to Amsterdam brought only more frustration. Without a plan for financial security, he withheld the declaration of love he had prepared. He returned to Paris at the end of August without having asked even for permission to write, but with his infatuation redoubled.

In Jo Bonger, still only twenty-four, Theo saw everything he thought his own life had lost. In her girlish manner and guileless enthusiasm he found a refuge of cheerful innocence far from the vulgarity and mendacity of Paris. (On first meeting Jo, one of Theo’s sisters described her as “smart and tender, not knowing
anything about the everyday, narrow-minded, annoying, prosaic world full of worries and misery.”) The fifth of ten children, Johanna Gezina Bonger shared with Theodorus van Gogh the dutifulness and passivity of a middle child. Like him, she read and listened with exquisite sensitivity, eager to be moved by the passions of others in lieu of surrendering to her own.

J
OHANNA
B
ONGER,
1888 (
Illustration credit 28.1
)

Jo’s intellectual ambitions reached far beyond the limited schooling afforded to women in the Bonger family. She had acquired a formidable command of English (having already translated at least two novels by the time she and Theo met), and used it to support herself as a teacher—a mark of the Dutch steadiness that set her so much apart from histrionic French girls like S. Her sentimental earnestness and romantic delusions about the real world (she loved Shelley and dismissed French novels as “silly”) promised Theo exactly the untroubled domestic escape he had always imagined. Convinced that she and she alone could give him the “love and understanding my heart thirsted for,” he later wrote, he returned to the rue Lepic apartment buoyant with hope, possessed by the thought—“call it a dream,” he said—“that sooner or later our lives would be joined together.”

The more Theo dreamed of a future with Jo Bonger, the more his life with Vincent descended into nightmare. As if punishing his brother for his long absence
and wandering heart, Vincent turned their rue Lepic aerie into a hell of argument and recrimination. They fought about money—the inevitable surrogate for deeper conflicts—as Theo saw his brother’s spendthrift ways close-up and Vincent saw the actual account book where Theo tracked every franc that went unrepaid, documenting his intolerable dependence. They fought about family (Vincent was invited to join Theo on the trip to Breda, but didn’t), and about Vincent’s antisocial behavior, which Theo called “unbearable.” Vincent not only wreaked havoc on their private lives, he showered Theo with contempt in public. “Vincent always tries to dominate his brother,” reported Andries Bonger, who often accompanied them to cafés and restaurants, “blaming him for all kinds of things of which he is quite innocent.” Theo himself described his tyrannical brother as “selfish,” “heartless,” and “reproachful.” In short, he concluded, “[Vincent] is his old self again, and you can’t reason with him.”

But mostly they argued about art—a subject that avoided the forbidden paths of fraternal resentment and provided Vincent with his most potent weapon: a brush. The great wave of defensive contrariness that swept through his studio in the summer, fall, and winter of 1886 was accompanied by an equal wave of words—a storm of arguments as fierce and relentless as any from the heath. Only these could not be put aside in a drawer to be read another day. “When [Theo] came home tired out in the evening, he found no rest,” Jo Bonger recounted; “the impetuous, violent Vincent would begin to expound his own theories about art and art dealing … This lasted till far into the night; indeed, sometimes he sat down on a chair beside Theo’s bed to spin out his last arguments.”

When Theo defended his proposal to sell some work by new artists, including Impressionists, as an independent dealer, Vincent assailed their plein air frillery. “It will never amount to much,” he scoffed. But when Theo retreated from that plan and recommitted to Goupil, Vincent ridiculed him as a wage slave and rehearsed the arguments that had embittered their letters for years. In his unreasoning vehemence, he often ended up arguing both sides of an issue, as if the fight were all that mattered. “One hears him talk first in one way, then in the other,” Theo exclaimed in exasperation, “with arguments which are now all for, now all against the same point.”