Van Gogh (153 page)

By the week before Christmas, Vincent had worked himself into a fever of dread. “It is exactly a year ago that I had that attack,” he wrote as the day approached. “It is to be feared that it will come back from time to time. And this leaves the head in a latent state of sensitivity.” As if testing that sensitivity, letters
flew back and forth between Paris, Holland, even South Africa, as the Van Gogh family erupted in holiday rituals of greetings and gifts and professions of unity. Sister Wil fondly described her new home and announced plans to go to Paris in January to help Theo and Jo with the new baby. Mother Anna wrote unthinkingly of the joy she found in being surrounded by family, and promised to visit her sick sister in Breda. But nobody made plans to come south. Instead, they celebrated the blessed event due in Paris in a month—the perfect union of family and faith at Christmastime. “We received quite a batch of little things for the baby,” Theo wrote cheerfully. “You will do its portrait as soon as you are here.”

J
O WITH SON
V
INCENT,
1890 (
Illustration credit 40.4
)

Sitting alone in his barred bedroom, Vincent did his best to join in the holiday cheer. For Wil, he promised to paint a picture of the new house in Leiden and offered to arrange a match between her and his young painter friend Bernard—“a nice boy, very Parisian, very elegant.” It would have been a family
Christmas present to rival Theo’s gift of new life. To his mother, he inquired plaintively after his brother Cor, who had reported on the Transvaal to others, but not to him. But all his sorties of sympathy ended in bitterness (“I suppose your thoughts are often with Theo and Jo,” he added). In the studio, meanwhile, he toiled over a melancholic holiday image of skeletal pine trees silhouetted against a setting sun.

Ever since his visit to Arles in November, Vincent had been laying delusional plans for a holiday return and, especially, a reunion with Marie Ginoux. To Theo, he spoke about her only in code, recalling a portrait by Puvis de Chavannes that they had seen together in Paris, which he dreamingly connected to a favorite passage from Michelet’s
L’amour
, once both brothers’ gospel of love: “There is no such thing as an old woman.” As in the past, he spun a comment Marie had made—“When you are friends, you are friends for a long time”—into a motto as powerful as “she, and no other” or
“aimer encore”
(both also from Michelet). Madame Ginoux had “taken ill” at Christmastime the previous year, just when Vincent did, and he clung to that coincidence as a sign of fated togetherness. As the next holiday approached, he compared the alluring Arlésienne to Augustine Roulin, his icon of maternal love, and, months later, he confessed to seeing her often in his dreams.

To celebrate in paint his own Christmas story of fearful memories, frustrated love, and confused longings, Vincent returned to the olive groves. Whether he braved the punishing cold and loneliness and fixed his easel outdoors, or just worked from previous studies in his studio, it was a perilous imagery at a perilous time. Painting ceaselessly in the short advent days, he filled one big canvas after another with images of the “holy trees” being picked by women—one of them always portrayed with the distinctive black ringlets of the Arlésienne.

To please Theo, he eschewed all the affectations and exaggerations of the past, brushing each image in short, thoughtful strokes with a lightly loaded brush. (“I shall not do any more things in impasto,” he pledged. “I am not so violent as all that.”) He conjured up the softest color contrasts he could—silver-green leaves against a pink or citron sky—convinced that only such “mild,” caressing hues could win a woman’s heart or a family’s favor. Instead of the savage complementaries and primitive subjects of the Yellow House, he talked of “discreet color” arranged in “exquisite lace.” To his sister, he described the new work as “the most delicate thing I have painted yet.” To Theo, he promised it would lend itself, like Monticelli’s scenes, to color lithography—and, ultimately, to profit. Even harder hearts might be won, he imagined. Only days before Christmas, he wrote his mother, “I started still another big picture for you, of women gathering olives.”

Like the
Berceuse
, this consoling image, painted again and again, showed Vincent the way out of the darkness: the way forward and the way back. “You
tell me not to worry
too much
and that better days will yet come for me,” he wrote Theo as he began the copy for his mother and sister. “Those better days begin for me when I glimpse the possibility of completing my work and giving you a series of really sympathetic Provençal studies, which will somehow be linked, I hope, with our distant memories of our youth in Holland.”

But the consolation of images and memories was never enough. On the day before Christmas Eve, Vincent sat down and wrote his mother. In a letter that alternately cried out with guilt, begged for forgiveness, and rhapsodized his maternal longing, he plunged toward his own undoing:

He blamed himself not only for his illness, but for not seeking treatment sooner and not recovering faster. He confessed to mistreating his father in Nuenen, leading his brother astray in Paris, and disappointing his mother by not producing a child. He tried one last time to convince her to like his art, but admitted being “powerless” to paint any other way. For all the sins of the past, he offered only a single, humble defense: “to err is human.”

On the same day—exactly one year after the terrible events in the Yellow House—he was struck down again. The panic of the approaching anniversary no doubt played a self-fulfilling role in the Christmas attack of 1889. Vincent was painting yet another olive grove when the darkness descended. “I was working perfectly calmly,” he recounted in January, “and suddenly, without any reason, the aberration seized me again.”

After a week of “exaltation and delirium,” of violence and disorientation, the cycle began again. Just as in the past, Vincent emerged from the shadows shaken, paranoid, and “overcome with discouragement.” He woke to find his paints taken from him, after he had made another attempt to eat them. Of the whole week, he recalled only one moment; and even that might have been a dream. “While I was ill there was a fall of damp and melting snow,” he wrote. “I got up in the night to look at the country. Oh, never, never had nature seemed to me so touching and so full of feeling.”

Just as in the past, he immediately launched a campaign to reassure his brother that the storm had passed and left his little boat intact. “As for me, don’t worry too much,” he wrote as soon as he could be trusted with a pen. “Let’s go
on working then as much as possible as if nothing had happened.” He vowed a quick return to “my normal condition.” Laying paranoid blame for the relapse on the “superstitious ideas” of those around him and the plight of painters in general, he rededicated himself to his work even before his paints were returned to him, and soothed his brother with a fantasy of the day when his illness would “pass away completely.”

As in the past, he felt suddenly imprisoned and laid plans to escape—at least to an asylum where the patients could work in the fields and might pose for him. Or perhaps to Brittany to join Gauguin. Or perhaps to Paris. As in the past, a tide of guilt lapped at his feet as he fretted over new expenses and vainly imagined himself “doing a bit of business” as a dealer or “finding some other job.” “Let’s take the terrible realities for what they are,” he wrote in mid-January, “and if it should be necessary for me to give up painting, I think I should do so.”

Theo, too, played his familiar part. The news of Vincent’s Christmas seizure caught him, again, by surprise. After months of laggard correspondence, he rushed letter after letter filled with fraternal concern, cautious advice, cheerful reports, and parsed praise. (“There is more atmosphere in these last works … due to your not laying on your paint so thickly everywhere.”) He issued vague, hasty invitations to Paris (“we shall always be happy to have you with us”), then, on deeper reflection, withdrew or qualified them. When Vincent proposed moving to an asylum where he could work more freely, Theo unwittingly suggested Gheel, the communal asylum in Belgium where their father had tried to commit Vincent a decade earlier.

In the weeks after the Christmas attacks, the director of the Saint Paul asylum reprised his role, too. When Vincent was first struck down, Peyron wrote an alarmed letter to Theo describing his brother’s latest attempt to poison himself by eating paint. On his way out the door for the New Year’s holiday, the doctor hastily replied to Vincent’s mail and banned any further painting. For almost a week, he disappeared from view—either sick, on vacation, or just inaccessible. When he reappeared, he found Vincent largely recovered and eager to “undo” the events of the previous week.

Negligent and distracted as always, and overly susceptible to his patient’s persuasion, Peyron immediately withdrew the dire prognosis he had shared with Theo and returned to the usual treatment of bromide and nostrums. “He said to me, ‘Let’s hope that there will be no recurrence,’ ” Vincent reported, “exactly the same thing as ever.” Peyron’s vacillation and lax supervision (Vincent began painting long before the doctor lifted his ban) left Theo alone in urging his brother to avoid the “dangers” of color, at least for a while, and make drawings instead. Vincent, as always, rejected the warning. “Why should I change my means of expression?” he rejoined. “I want to go on as usual.”

Soon after he returned to his studio, only a few weeks after the storms of
Christmas had passed, Vincent’s imagination began building toward the next crisis of loneliness and longing. Confined to his studio by weather now too cold even for him, he began work on another Millet copy. Theo had praised
Evening
, the scene of new parents hovering over a cradle, and Vincent’s thoughts were drawn yet again to the child due in Paris. “These are the things without which life would not be life,” he responded to Theo’s nervous reports on Jo’s pregnancy, “and it makes one serious.” Meanwhile, in the studio, he carefully squared up and transferred onto another big canvas Millet’s image of a young peasant couple urging their child to take its first steps. Working in nothing but blues and greens—a reverie of muted tones and soothing harmonies—he dreamed “of Holland, of our youth in the past,” and even imagined coming to Paris for the blessed event.

But those same thoughts led through Arles. Vincent had emerged from the attacks in the first days of 1890 already eager to return to his dark-eyed Arlésienne. At first, he did not expect he could make the trip until February. He wrote Theo obliquely about needing “to see my friends again, which always refreshes me.” He devised elaborate plans involving the furniture he had stored at the Café de la Gare, all of which required his presence in Arles. As before, he hinted at his yearning in an urgent call for models. He proposed the trip as merely a “test” to see “whether I am capable of risking the journey to Paris.” But as the image of happy parenthood took shape on his easel and the coming events in Paris transfixed his imagination, he could not wait any longer. On January 19, after buying a new suit, he set out again on the perilous trip over the cliffs to Arles.

He did not find the welcome he longed for. Madame Ginoux had fallen ill again—a foreboding sign. She may have been too sick to see him at all. He returned to the asylum after only a short stay, much of it probably spent elsewhere than at the Ginouxs’, seeking other forms of solace. The furniture remained where it was. He had just enough time after his return to write two long and plaintive letters: one to the Ginouxs and one to his sister Wil. In the first, he poured out his feelings in the guise of solicitude. Endlessly conflating Marie Ginoux’s flu with his own, darker illness, he summoned her to “rise up from her sickbed completely renewed.” Like the sight of the pregnant Sien in The Hague or of his crippled mother in Nuenen, the image of his sick Dulcinea roused him to flights of consolation. “Diseases exist to remind us that we are not made of wood,” he wrote, comforting himself as well as her, “and it seems to me this is the bright side of it all.”

But in the letter to his sister—which he knew his mother would read—Vincent found no comfort and saw no bright side at all. He wrote of “life passing by more rapidly” and the urgency of “making up for lost time.” “The future is more mysterious,” he said, “and, dear me, a little more gloomy.” Out of thin air, he conjured the image of his healthy mother dying, and the thought of that
irreversible foreclosure elicited a cry of despair: “I often think with a deep sigh that I ought to have been better than I am.” He tried to arrest the thought—“Let me stop talking of it at once, or else it might discourage me”—but could not. “One cannot retrace one’s steps,” he concluded bleakly.