Van Gogh (11 page)

FOR THE NEXT
sixteen months, Vincent clung to his recovered life in the island parsonage, a reparative fantasy enhanced by a new baby brother in the house, one-year-old Cor. Defying the guilt that accumulated with each passing month of idleness, he resisted all suggestions for his future, preferring to spend his days at the Grote Beek, on the heath, and in his attic sanctuary. His rich uncle, an art dealer in The Hague, probably offered him a job. If he did, Vincent refused it, preferring his solitary pursuits.

He must have known that questions about his future, or the self-reproach they undoubtedly aroused, could not be put off forever. No matter how determinedly he trekked through the heath or lost himself in a book, or mounted his collections, sooner or later he would have to confront his family’s frustrated expectations. Especially his father’s.

E
VERY SUNDAY, THE VAN GOGH FAMILY, DRESSED IN BLACK, WALKED
solemnly from the Zundert parsonage to the nearby church. There they took their place in a special pew at the front of the tall, spare little sanctuary. From his vantage point at the foot of the pulpit, Vincent could watch the ceremony unfold. The reedy chords of a harmonium summoned the forty or fifty worshippers to their feet. The music called forth the deacons, in their long dark coats and grim faces, measuring their steps as they came. Finally, the pastor emerged into view.

He was a short, slight man; hardly remarkable in most crowds. But here, the ceremony singled him out. The light reflected off his silver-sandy hair. His face shone against his full black robes, the inverted V of his starched collar singling him out like an arrow.

Then he ascended into the pulpit.

Thrust high into the air and overhung by a heavily carved sounding board, its tall parapets enclosing barely enough room for one man, the pulpit looked like a richly appointed box, just opening up to reveal its precious contents. Every Sunday, Dorus van Gogh ceremoniously climbed the steep stairs to the sacred enclosure and stepped inside. Vincent sat so close that he had to crane his neck to watch his father’s ascent.

From this lofty position, Dorus directed the service: announcing each hymn, summoning music with a wave of his hand, leading the congregation in prayer and psalm. In his sermons—the soul of the service—he used High Dutch, a language rarely heard in the provincial depths of Brabant. If he followed the homiletic conventions of the era, the little church must have reverberated with the histrionic extremes of Victorian rhetoric: the ringing declamations, the exaggerated variations in speed and volume, the melodramatic cadences, the accelerating
repetitions, the thundering climaxes. His body, too, spoke in broad, larger-than-life gestures: every sweep of his arm or thrust of his finger dramatically elaborated by his billowing sleeves.

Dorus van Gogh was not only God’s interlocutor to the Protestants of Zundert, he was their leader. Unlike parsons in other parts of the country, Dorus acted as both spiritual and temporal shepherd to his tiny band of Protestant pioneers in their outpost on the heath. Cut off from all but essential contact with the Catholic community around them, congregation members used the parsonage as both spiritual center and social club, filling the Van Goghs’ front room almost every day of the week with readings, classes, or informal visits.

T
HEODORUS (DORUS) VAN
G
OGH
(
Illustration credit 4.1
)

Dorus acted not only as the leader of his own community but also as ambassador to the larger Catholic community. His mission there was not to convert the papists of Zundert, but to deny them hegemony in this disputed region. At all public celebrations, Vincent would have seen his father among the town notables gathered on the dais, standing next to elected officials, as well as his Catholic counterpart. In public fund-raising drives, like a major one for flood victims,
Dorus always took a conspicuous leading role, matching the mayor’s contributions guilder for guilder. These public acts, like his daily walks through town in his top hat with his family in tow, served notice to the Catholics of Zundert that the Protestants were there to stay.

For those parishioners who lived on isolated farms and in tiny hamlets spread throughout the vast township, Dorus played an even more critical role. Forbidden by custom to interact with their Catholic neighbors, these religious pioneers relied on the pastor’s weekly visits for reassurance of God’s favor, but also for something even more important: money. Successive waves of crop failure and blight had devastated the area’s rural families. Farmers already living at subsistence level were thrown onto the church dole. As dispenser of these scarce funds, Dorus van Gogh held the power of life and death over his far-flung flock. When Vincent accompanied his father on trips into the countryside, he saw him greeted not just with reverence, but with kneeling gratitude.

With survival itself at stake, Dorus largely ignored the finer points of religious doctrine. Especially in an outpost like Zundert, what mattered was a man’s mettle and a woman’s fertility, not doctrinal purity. “We know that talking about religion and morality is of minor importance,” Anna van Gogh wrote. The parsonage membership roll, which included Lutherans, Mennonites, and Remonstrants, testified to the parson’s pragmatic ecumenism. But while dogma mattered little to Dorus, discipline meant everything. An unexplained absence from Sunday service invariably brought an angry visit from the parson that very week. He dealt with errant parishioners severely—“a real little Protestant Pope,” one witness called him—and lashed out at those “scum” who challenged his authority. He hotly defended the prerogatives of his position, complaining bitterly to his church superiors when his meager salary made it difficult for him “to support his family in accordance with his rank.”

Within the walls of the parsonage, Dorus’s role as spiritual leader merged seamlessly with that of father. For the Van Goghs, the Sunday service never really ended; it just moved to the front parlor, where the cupboards were filled with communion plates and chalices, Bibles, hymnals, and psalm books. A statue of Christ stood on top of the chest, and a cross with twining roses hung in the hall. All week long, the Van Gogh children heard their father’s distinctive church voice—preaching, praising, Bible reading—echoing from the parlor sanctuary throughout the narrow parsonage. And every night at the dinner table they heard the same voice praying: “Bind us, O Lord, closely to one another, and let our love for Thee strengthen these bonds ever more.”

When not preaching or praying, Dorus remained aloof from his growing family. Moody and reclusive, he spent long hours in his attic study, reading and preparing his sermons, with only his cat for company. His indulgences complemented his solitude: he smoked pipes and cigars, and nipped a wide variety of
alcohols. His hours of seclusion were punctuated by “brisk, stimulating walks,” which he considered “nourishment for the mind.” When sick, which he often was, he grew even moodier and withdrew even further into seclusion, believing that “by making myself scarce it will end sooner.” During these self-imposed confinements, he became “bored and cranky,” and rejected all food, convinced that fasting would hasten his recovery.

Like most fathers of his generation, Dorus saw himself as “the delegate of God [who] exercised power akin to God” within the home. In his view, neither his outpost nor his family could brook “dissension,” and he enforced unity in his family, just as he enforced it in his congregation, with uncompromising vehemence. He flew into “violent passions” of self-righteous anger when his authority—God’s authority—was challenged. Vincent learned early that to disappoint his father was to disappoint God. “The love that honors the father,” Dorus insisted, was the same love “that blesses the world.” Offending one love offended the other; rejecting one rejected both. Later in life, when Vincent sought absolution for his sins, he hopelessly confused “father” and “Father,” and found forgiveness in neither.

But there was another Dorus van Gogh. Rather than invoking “papal” authority, this Dorus used gentle persuasion and kind entreaties to keep his children on the straight and narrow. This Dorus did not “suspect” or “judge” them, he merely “provided support” and “encouraged them.” This Dorus apologized when he hurt their feelings and rushed to their bedsides when they fell sick. This Dorus declared it his “goal in life … to live with and
for
our children.”

Vincent had two fathers because, at the time, fatherhood itself was in crisis. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the French Revolution’s challenge to all authority, both spiritual and temporal, had penetrated to the heart of the social contract: the family. The traditional patriarchal father figure who ruled his family “like the gods on Mount Olympus” had become just another relic of the ancien régime, according to the era’s most popular instructional book on fathering. The modern family, like the modern state, should embrace “Democracy,” it said, and be based on “respect for the other,” not hierarchy and fear. Fathers should come down from their “thrones”—and pulpits—and get “more involved in their children’s lives,” it advised, “listen more to their opinions.” In short, “a father must be a friend to his son.”

Dorus van Gogh absorbed these lessons. “You know that you have a father who also wants to be like a brother to you,” he wrote to his nineteen-year-old son, Theo.

Torn between the patriarchal father that the Zundert outpost demanded and the modern father that his social class expected, Dorus zigzagged his way through the successive crises of Vincent’s childhood. Fierce criticisms were followed by protestations of love (“We can not breathe freely if there is a somber cloud over the face of one of our children”); thundering condemnations, by
elaborate claims of good intent (“I just point out things that you have to work out for yourself … It would be disloyal if we suppressed thoughts or held back remarks”). He professed deference to his sons’ “freedom” but besieged them relentlessly with accusations of “making messes” and “bringing worry and sadness” into their parents’ lives.

To a lonely, needful child, it was an irresistible trap. Vincent couldn’t help but emulate the remote figure that ascended into the pulpit every Sunday. He adopted the same circuitous way of talking and metaphorical way of seeing. He developed the same emotional diffidence in public, and dissected his feelings with the same misguided rationalism in private. He approached the outside world with the same defensive suspiciousness. He treated those who challenged him with the same self-righteous inflexibility and reacted to perceived slights with the same paranoid anger. The son’s introversion mirrored the father’s reclusiveness; the son’s brooding, his father’s melancholy. Like his father, Vincent fasted to expiate his failings. In his collecting, and later his painting, Vincent mimicked Dorus’s long hours of solitary activity in his attic study. The sight of his father helping the needy and consoling the grief-stricken—being welcomed and loved for the comfort he brought—became the central image of Vincent’s adulthood, the image that drove all his subsequent ambitions in life and art. “How glorious it must be to have a life behind one like Pa’s,” he once said.

But at the end of all of Vincent’s bids to win his father’s blessing lay the other, inflexibly judgmental Dorus. For a man who considered cheerfulness “the fruit of a childlike faith,” a gloomy son like Vincent must have seemed beyond the reach of God’s favor. For a man who believed that “one becomes a person by meeting people,” Vincent’s introversion marked him indelibly as an outcast. For a father who urged his children to “work more and more for togetherness with each other,” Vincent’s contrariness was a continuing insult to family unity. For a man who exhorted his children to “always take an interest in life,” Vincent’s stubborn isolation at school and even within the parsonage must have seemed like a rejection of life itself.

In the end, no matter what the books told him, no matter how sincerely he wanted to help his son, Dorus could never bring himself to accept Vincent on his own terms. Despite his repeated promises to do so, he could never refrain from judging—and condemning—his willful, obdurate, eccentric son. These broken promises only drove father and son deeper into a spiral of provocation, rejection, and self-reproach from which Vincent, despite repeated attempts, could never escape.