Van Gogh (18 page)

Even as Vincent reached for reconciliation, his estrangement deepened. Everything reminded him of home. A Sunday walk made him think “with nostalgia” of Sunday walks in The Hague. His boardinghouse made him long for his former life at the Rooses’. “I do not forget [them],” he wrote, “and should very, very much like to spend an evening [there].” He hung the walls of his new room with exactly the same prints that had hung
in the old. He ached for news from home, and marked every family holiday with plaintive requests for reports. A simple spell of good weather triggered waves of homesickness. “You must have had pleasant days at home,” he wrote; “how I should like to see them all again.”

All his initial attempts at socializing foundered. His early companions, even
gérant
Obach, quickly vanished from his correspondence. Language was partly to blame: by his own admission, Vincent understood English far better than he spoke it. When he first arrived, he joked that his landlady’s parrot spoke better English than he did. Yet his better German did not stop his German housemates from abandoning him, too. To his parents, who always
worried about his introversion, Vincent cast himself as shunning, not shunned. “[They] spent too much money” he explained the break to his parents.

But clearly other forces were at work. Old habits of isolation were reasserting themselves. “I never felt in my element there,” Vincent later wrote about his time in London. As in The Hague, he avoided crowds (thus missing the usual tourist sights like the Tower of London and Madame Tussaud’s). Instead, he spent more and more time in solitary pursuits—“taking walks, reading, and letter-writing.” A former coworker from The Hague
who visited him in August found Vincent filled with “world weariness” (
Weltschmerz
) and suffering from
“enormous loneliness.” Years later, Vincent recalled his mood in London as “stony, arid … hardened instead of sensitive … toward people.” His parents worried at his “pensive” letters. The word “strange” reappeared in their expressions of
concern.

Rather than breaking down the walls of isolation and otherness, Vincent’s job only raised them higher. The work—filling wholesale orders from print dealers—made him long for his more varied work in The Hague. “The house here is not so interesting as the one [there],” he complained to Theo. The London branch had no gallery, no window displays, no celebratory banners or holiday greenery. Its only customers were dealers and their minions
on their hurried way in a hurried city. They had no time to talk about art. Nor was there a paint supply store where artists could browse, trade tips, and gossip. The stockroom was busy enough (processing more than a hundred prints a day), but the stock was limited, and Vincent had little affection for most of the images that flashed across his desk. “Good pictures [are] quite difficult to find,” he grumbled to Theo. Everything reminded him of his removal from the vital
art world on the Continent. “Tell me especially what pictures you have seen lately,” he begged his brother, “or if any new etchings or lithographs have been published. Tell me all you can about these things, for I do not see much of them here.”

Every day of this deadening tedium (“grubbing,” he called it) was a reproach—a reminder of roads not taken, opportunities squandered. “Everything is not so beautiful as it seemed to me in the beginning,” he wrote, in the first of many flashes of self-awareness. “Perhaps it is my own fault.” He ventured a wistful hope that sometime—“later on”—“I shall perhaps be of use,” but he
must have known by now that his place in line was lost. His encounters in London hint at a faltering self-confidence and a rising sense of shame. He was so “overawed” by his new hero George Boughton that he “dared not speak” to him when they encountered each other. When the Dutch painter Matthijs Maris visited the Goupil office, Vincent was “too bashful to speak out.”

Just as language exacerbated his isolation, money exacerbated his guilt—as it would for the rest of his life. Even though his salary had almost doubled when he moved to London, it still barely covered his expenses. “To save on pennies,” he stopped taking the steamer into the city and instead walked the whole way, crossing the Thames on one of the madhouse bridges. He vowed to find a cheaper boardinghouse. His letters home were filled with promises
to economize and exaggerated mea culpas over minor expenditures that betray a deeper, more implacable guilt. Meanwhile, his parents sent increasingly dire reports of financial hardship in Helvoirt and brave pledges of further sacrifice for their children. “We will try to live economically,” Anna wrote, “and be happy when the money we invest in you proves to be well spent; that’s the best interest rate one can hope for.”

By August, homesickness, isolation, and self-reproach had deepened into melancholy. For months Vincent had tried to reassure his parents that he was “content,” “doing fine,” and “experiencing delightful satisfaction” in his new job. With Theo, he could be more open, though still stoic. In June, he wrote: “Considering the circumstances, I am doing pretty well.” In July: “I shall probably
get used to it.” In August: “I shall bear with it a little longer.”

Searching for an escape from the despondency that threatened to overtake him, Vincent opened an intimate correspondence with the now-married Caroline Haanebeek. In his manic way, he flooded her with flattering, suggestive images (some in poetry, some in prints) of blond young ladies and country maidens in coquettish poses. He copied out a poem by John Keats about a “maiden fair” with “bright drooping hair,” and directed her to another, longer
Keats poem ripe with erotic imagery. He sent her an extract from the popular French love manual
L’amour
by Jules Michelet, describing a man haunted by the portrait of a woman “who took my heart, so ingenuous, so honest … This woman has remained in my mind.” He invoked their past relationship in language more appropriate to separated lovers than distant friends, and recommended that she read Longfellow’s
Evangeline
,
the story of a young Acadian torn from his true love.

What did Vincent expect to gain from this seduction by words and images of the happily married Caroline? It was, in fact, the first in a lifetime of hopeless campaigns to remold hearts by persuasion. It shows his capacity for illusory attachments and the extremes to which such illusions could carry him. It also reveals the extent to which he had already begun to find consolation—that is, mediation between a hostile reality and aspirations to happiness—in
literature and art. He told Caroline of his search for “a homeland … a small spot in the world where we are sent to stay.” “[I] have not got there yet,” he wrote, “though I am straining after it, and perhaps may yet grasp it.”

In the fall of 1873, Vincent’s parents heard a new voice coming from their eldest son in London. “We are getting cheerful letters,” Dorus reported with some surprise. But the reason was not Caroline Haanebeek, who had rejected his strange suit.

Vincent had found a new family.

OVER THE SEVENTEEN YEARS
of life remaining to him, Vincent would try repeatedly to attach himself to other families as he grew increasingly estranged from his own. He had already tried at least once in The Hague, assiduously cultivating the devotion of little Betsy Tersteeg in the hope of making a place for himself in his boss’s close-knit young family. He may have tried again in London with his new boss, Obach, whose wife and
children Vincent visited at home. Over the coming years, he would be especially drawn to inchoate families: families
that had lost a father-husband, or never had one, leaving a void that he could readily fill; families in which he could feel, for a change, welcome.

To Vincent, Ursula Loyer and her daughter Eugenie must have looked like such a family. He came as a boarder to the house at 87 Hackford Road in Brixton, where mother and daughter ran a small day-school for boys. The rent was cheaper and the walk to work shorter (less than an hour). From early on, Vincent must have seen the fifty-eight-year-old widow Ursula and the nineteen-year-old Eugenie as kindred spirits: wounded, errant, in search of a “homeland.”
Even the name, Loyer, seemed uprooted—a lovely French word (“loy-yay”) displaced by a sour English pronunciation: “lawyer.”

U
RSULA AND
E
UGENIE
L
OYER
(
Illustration credit 6.1
)

Born to a ship’s captain, Ursula had the seen-it-all stoicism of sailors’ women. “Her name is written in the book of life,” Vincent observed. Small and bony, with oversized features, Ursula had been battered by life but not beaten. A grandchild later described her as “a kindly old soul” with “not one hint of misery.” Eugenie, on the other hand, was already a formidable woman. With her large head, broad features,
and stocky frame, she could have been Vincent’s sister (favoring his mother), right down to the shock of red hair that she wore
pulled up in a flaming tousle. As a girl who had spent most of her life without father or siblings, she carried herself more like a man than a woman: willful, withholding, “domineering [and] difficult,” according to her daughter, with a “sharp wit” and an explosive temper.

The missing member, who marked the family with its mongrel name, had been dead for more than a decade. Jean-Baptiste Loyer was also a man without a home. A native of Provence, Loyer had been driven into exile by family problems. He arrived in London as a stranger, married Ursula, and fathered only one child, Eugenie, before falling mortally ill from “consumption.” According to family legend, Loyer’s last wish was to die in his homeland. With his
wife and young daughter, he returned to France and took a cabin by the sea, where every evening friends carried him to the shore to watch the sun set. When the moment of death arrived, he made his confession, and “all who were present wept when they heard of his pure and righteous life.” A document recounting these events eventually found its way into Vincent’s hands. True or not, the story of exile and homecoming so moved him that for years afterward he kept a
copy, which he transcribed and sent to family members. “He loved nature and he saw God,” the account concluded, “this stranger on the earth.”

Inevitably, Vincent saw Ursula and Eugenie through the gauze of this sentimental tale. Instead of a wizened landlady and her headstrong daughter (he never wrote a word about either of them to Theo), Vincent saw a brave little family carrying on in the wake of great sorrow. “I never heard or dreamed of anything like the love between [them],” he wrote his sister Anna. From the moment he settled into his tiny third-floor room, Vincent saw this broken but
loving family as the perfect fit to his broken-off fragment. “I now have a bedroom such as I always longed for,” he wrote, comparing his new accommodations to his attic room in Zundert. To complete the reverie, he summoned Theo to join him: “Oh! Old man, I so want you to come here.”

He found reprises of his childhood everywhere: in the garden where the Loyers grew flowers and vegetables; in the collections of butterflies and birds’ eggs that filled the house; in the daily bustle of children coming and going to class. He made drawings of his new home and presented them to both his new family and his old one. At Christmastime 1873, he helped decorate the house with holly and celebrated “in the English way,” with pudding and
carols. His first Christmas away from home passed without the pangs of homesickness that crippled him in later life. “I hope you had as happy a Christmas as I had,” he bragged to Theo.

Emboldened by this newfound sense of belonging, Vincent began the new year determined to reclaim his place in his true family. He wrote home faithfully, always in a cheerful voice. He applied himself to the drudgery of work with a diligence that brought commendations all the way up to Paris (and thence to Helvoirt). Flush with a New Year’s raise, he sent so much money home that his
parents worried he was “denying himself.” He even
reached out to his former boss and family favorite, H. G. Tersteeg.

The centerpiece of this new campaign of rehabilitation was a plan to bring his sister Anna to England. By finding her a paying position as a governess in an English family, he could relieve the financial pressures on the parsonage and earn his way back into favor. In January, he began his two-pronged campaign. To his parents, he relentlessly argued the practicalities of the venture: Anna could interview in person, more offers would be open to her, and she could practice
her English. He placed advertisements in newspapers, sought out suitable positions, and drafted letters of inquiry. He even offered to come home and accompany his sister on the trip across the North Sea. “Such a dear [Vincent],” his mother wrote, “so willing to help.”

To Anna, however, Vincent wove a different narrative, one designed to appeal to her lonely teenage heart. He emphasized the warmth and welcome of the Loyers—so different from the cold formality of her boarding school. They would be for her, as they were for him, a second family, he promised. Eugenie and Vincent had agreed to be “like brother and sister to each other,” Vincent wrote; and Anna “should consider her a sister, too.”
“Be kind to her for my sake,” he summed up. Ursula wrote Anna a warm letter urging her to think of the house on Hackford Road “as her own home,” and inviting her to come join the celebration of Eugenie’s engagement “to a good-natured youth who will know how to appreciate her.”