Van Gogh (147 page)

Starry Night
, J
UNE 1889
,
INK ON PAPER, 18½ × 24
⅝
IN
. (
Illustration credit 39.5
)

In his reading, in his thinking, in his seeing, Vincent had long looked past the “real” night sky—the tiny, static specks and sallow light of the night paintings he detested—in search of something truer to the vision of limitless possibility and inextinguishable light—the ultimate serenity—that he found in Zola’s blossoming, showering, glittering night.

To record this vision, he summoned his new palette of violet and ocher, the unstudied curves of his mountaintops, the swirling spirals of his cypress branches, and the odd, wondering brushstroke with which he could “add whatever serenity and happiness” he felt. Guided only by “feeling and instinct,” like the ancient Egyptians, he painted a night sky unlike any the world had ever seen with ordinary eyes: a kaleidoscope of pulsating beacons, whirlpools of stars, radiant clouds, and a moon that shone as brightly as any sun—a fireworks of cosmic light and energy visible only in Vincent’s head.

IN THE CENTURY
after
Starry Night
was painted, scientists would discover that “latent” epileptic fits resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain. William James called them “nerve storms”—“explosions” of abnormal neural discharges that could be triggered by just a few “epileptic neurons” in a brain made up of billions of neurons. These cascading surges of errant sparks often originated in, or took their heaviest toll on, the most sensitive areas of the brain, especially the temporal lobe and the limbic system: the seats of perception, attention, comprehension, personality, expression, cognition, emotion, and memory. The “bombardment” of an epileptic shower could shake any of these foundations of consciousness and identity.

The brain could weather these storms, researchers discovered, but it could never fully recover from them. Each attack lowered the threshold for the next attack and permanently altered the functions that had been shaken. The combination of fear (of another attack) and underlying neurological changes in the affected area of the brain created a pattern of behavior—a syndrome—associated with what came to be known as “temporal lobe epilepsy.”

Seizures were usually followed by periods of extreme passivity—an apathetic haze in which victims showed little interest in the outside world, or in their own circumstances. Sexual appetite waned. To the untutored eye, and even to the victim, this passivity was often mistaken for serenity. Gradually, however, apathy yielded to its opposite: a state of heightened excitability. Obsessively alert to the outside world, the victim would be seized by intense feelings, deepened emotions (whether elation and euphoria or depression and paranoia), and towering
enthusiasms. This state of heightened reality—easily exacerbated by alcohol—led in many cases to cosmic visions and religious raptures. As the mind grew increasingly excited, irritability, impulsiveness, and aggressiveness—the hallmarks of latent epilepsy—reappeared. Emotional disturbances led, inexorably, to violent ones—the “paroxystic violence” of a seizure—and the cycle would begin again.

As for the ultimate cause—the origin of dysfunctional “epileptic” neurons in the brain—the answer remained a mystery. Some scientists, even as early as Vincent’s time, thought brain injuries, tumors, or birth defects might be responsible. Heredity continued to be suspected. Research did succeed in identifying the immediate causes of attacks—the triggers that could push a sufferer from passivity to euphoria, to paranoia, to agitation, to violent seizure, sometimes in the space of a year, sometimes within a month, sometimes within a day of the previous attack.

Stress, alcohol, poor diet, vitamin deficiencies, emotional shocks, all could increase the brain’s susceptibility to electrical storms. The intense enthusiasms that filled the epileptic mind could also paralyze it with
idées fixes
—parasitic ideas that bored into a victim’s consciousness to the exclusion of all else, distorting perception and memory and alienating those around him to the point where friction and aggravation, the precursors of an attack, became inevitable. Any overstimulation of the affected areas of the brain—that is, disruptions of perception, cognition, or emotion—could open a pathway for bolts of neuronal “lightning.” Seizures could be triggered by visual stimuli as varied as sunlight dappling through leaves, fluttering of the eyelids, even images summoned up by passages in a book. Vivid dreams, unexpected events, rejection by loved ones, derogation by strangers, ambushes of memory, eruptions of “intense meaningfulness” (whether from religious thoughts or metaphysical musings)—any or all could provoke the troubled brain to another attack.

Vincent’s euphoric image of a swirling, unhinged cosmos signaled that his defenses had been breached.

EVEN LOCKED INSIDE
his serene mountain retreat, Vincent could not escape the provocations that lurked everywhere—not least inside his own head. Letters arrived regularly from Paris and Holland, filled with his family’s equivocal embrace. Theo wrote sweetly of art and artists for which the brothers had always shared affection, and solicitously of Vincent’s hardships (“It can hardly be pleasant to be near so many lunatics”). But the pressures of married life both reduced the frequency of his letters and heightened his anxiety over the extra cost of the Saint Paul asylum.

Meanwhile, he remained steadfastly lukewarm about Vincent’s works from
Arles. “In the course of time they will become very beautiful,” he wrote evasively, “and they will undoubtedly be appreciated someday.” He dubbed paintings like
La berceuse
“very curious” and could find only words like “vigorous” and “glaring” to describe their brushwork and color. As Vincent’s strange, exaggerated landscapes began arriving from Saint-Rémy in June, Theo could not refrain from openly wondering why they “tortured the form” so, and seeing the answer in his brother’s mental affliction. “Your last pictures have given me much food for thought on the state of your mind at the time you did them,” he wrote. “How your brain must have labored, and how you have risked everything to the very limit, where vertigo is inevitable!”

Jo wrote, too, sometimes happily chiming into Theo’s letters, sometimes venturing on her own into the darkness of Vincent’s vulnerability. “Dear Brother,” she began her first outreach in early May, “It is high time at last that your new little sister had a chat with you herself … now that we are really and truly brother and sister.” She could have no idea of the wounds she inflicted with her portrait of her new role as “Madame van Gogh” and the domestic bliss she shared with Theo. “It’s as if we had always been together,” she wrote. “He always comes home at twelve o’clock for lunch and at half-past seven for dinner.” Company, including family members, often joined them in the evenings, she reported. On Sundays—“so pleasant and cozy”—they spent the whole day together, just the two of them, sometimes visiting galleries, but sometimes staying home to “enjoy ourselves in our own way.” Her schoolgirl hints of conjugal intimacies (“In general we are very tired at night, and we go to bed early”) shook the foundations of Vincent’s brotherhood and his manhood, just as her report that “hardly a day ever passes without our speaking of you” set off tremors of anxiety and guilt.

Vincent’s sister Wil also flooded her brother with unthinking concern. Of all his siblings, his youngest sister had followed most closely in his tortured path. With no history of suitors and no prospects of any, Wil, like Vincent, seemed destined for a life of loneliness and introspection. His stay at the Saint Paul asylum licensed her to inquire about their shared lot. “Why are so many other people who try to make their way in life making more progress than I?” she wondered. Was she, like Vincent, the victim of some “fatal malady” that prevented her from enjoying a “regular life”? Talk of failed love and elusive happiness led inevitably to thoughts of Theo and his new life as husband and father. To frame her queries, Wil sent Vincent a copy of
Le sens de la vie
(
The Meaning of Life
), Edouard Rod’s sentimental tale of a bourgeois lost soul who finds contentment and meaning in the arms of “a sweet and very devoted wife and his child” (as Vincent derisively summarized it). His mother wrote, too, celebrating Theo’s latest triumph with an obtuse exuberance bordering on cruelty.

Books held dangers, too. Science may have pointed the accusing finger at his family, but in literature Vincent found that finger everywhere pointing back at him. Despite continuing to profess “boundless admiration” for the works of Naturalist writers like Zola and the Goncourts, he conspicuously abstained from reading them during his time at Saint Paul, fearing no doubt that their too-real temptations and look-in-the-mirror recriminations might bring on another attack. Instead, he turned to the philosophical melodrama of Ernest Renan’s
L’abbesse de Jouarre
, a play about doomed lovers, stolid suffering, and a dutiful but loveless marriage. What could be less troubling than a stilted play about a defrocked nun making her way through the Terror?

Yet even here, provocations waited. Like Rod’s anodyne morality tale of bourgeois conventionality and happy marriage, Renan’s drama sanctified motherhood and portrayed loneliness as a fate worse than death. “The author finds consolation in the companionship of his wife,” Vincent wrote ruefully, summing up both the Rod book and the Renan play. “It certainly is not very cheering…[and] it teaches me nothing about the ‘meaning of life,’ whatever is meant by that.”

As in the Borinage, he sought escape in the distant world of Shakespeare, abstracted both by time and by language. He focused on the history plays—the only genre of the Bard’s work that he had not yet explored—and no doubt found brave solace against adversity in
Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V
, and
Henry VI
, all of which he reported reading. But he also found tales of bad seeds and family degeneration, fraternal rivalry and filial betrayal, stolen or squandered birthrights, and heroes undone by immutable flaws.

Vincent defended himself against this gauntlet of unintended accusations and inadvertent provocations with a frantic mix of anger and denial. “With the number of precautions I am now taking,” he assured his brother, “I am not likely to relapse.” The most important precaution was to avoid the debilitating guilt that threatened to engulf him with each new letter from Paris. He parried Theo’s financial anxieties with renewed pledges of hard work, campaigns of salable imagery (flowers and landscapes, especially), and elaborate schemes to resurrect business relations in England and Holland. He deflected Jo’s hurtful intimacies by dismissing her as a sweet but superficial country girl.

He answered Theo’s faint praise of his art with similarly tepid appreciations of Jo (“I dare say she will find the means to make life a bit more pleasant”), and filled his letters with private jokes, insider art talk, and paeans to Paris (which he knew Jo disliked), all insisting on his special place in Theo’s life—a place that no wife, especially not the “plucky and brisk” Jo, could ever fill. He fended off his sister Wil’s solicitude with a sharp attack on her naïve taste in reading matter (“good women and books are two different things,” he sneered to Theo) and a
bleak counsel of hopelessness. “We have to resign ourselves to the obstinate callousness of the times and to our isolation,” he wrote, predicting for her, as for himself, a life of “poverty, sickness, old age, madness and always exile.”

He could counter Shakespeare’s unfathomable fatality by reading the “mighty” Voltaire, who “at least gives a glimpse of the possibility that life may have some meaning,” he noted. But nothing could protect him from the damning judgment he heard in his mother’s joy. “I have not seen a letter of Mother’s showing so much inner serenity and calm contentment—not for many years,” he confessed to Theo. “And I am sure that this comes from your marriage. They say that pleasing your parents assures long life.”

The ghosts of the Zundert parsonage had returned.

By mid-June, dangerous images were flooding into his imagination from every side. Obsessing about his mother and her delight over Theo’s triumph, his thoughts returned again to the
Berceuse
, the icon of motherhood that had witnessed all his wretchedness in Arles. From the beloved
Berceuse
, his thoughts drifted to his long-frustrated love of figures and portraits, and the unfulfilled dream of the Bel-Ami of the Midi. “If I had someone like the woman who posed for ‘La Berceuse,’ ” he wrote, “I’d do something very different yet.” Soon, the familiar cry arose for subjects “with life in them”—human beings “transformed into something luminous and comforting, serene and pure,” figures like those in Daumier’s drawings or Zola’s novels or Shakespeare’s plays. “What has life in it too,” he wrote, circling back to the original injury, “is that Mother is glad that you are married.”

Before long, these old yearnings made the leap to canvas in a painting of the enclosed field below his bedroom window showing the lone figure of a reaper harvesting the golden wheat under a blazing yellow sky. He framed the luminous figure in a Shakespearean meditation that revealed the darker thoughts and deeper perils now loosed in his imagination:

Vincent had arrived in Saint-Rémy making light of religion (calling it “the rear end of some sort of Buddhism”), determined to avoid the obsessions that had upended his emotional world so often and with such catastrophic consequences in Arles. But both his letters and his art remained haunted by the quest to “prove that something very different exists as well,” and he continued to muse vaguely about “the other side of life.” Increasingly, he talked of art in the messianic terminology of a previous gospel. Artists, he said, exist “to give consolation
or to prepare the way for a painting that will give even greater consolation.” He vainly protested that such thoughts represented “not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas, no.” But his eye and his imagination said otherwise.