Van Gogh (19 page)

Weighed down by continuing money woes, Vincent’s parents reluctantly agreed to his plan. In June, he would come to Helvoirt and escort Anna to England, where he would help her find work (and support her in the meantime). Vincent was ecstatic. “Our Anna will come here,” he wrote Theo. “How wonderful that will be for me. It is almost too good to be true.”

Even as Vincent’s campaign to regain his place in the family appeared headed for success, however, that place was being taken. In November, only six months after Vincent was removed, Theo was transferred to the Hague branch of Goupil. He moved into Vincent’s boardinghouse and took up most of his brother’s duties at the store.
Gérant
Tersteeg invited Theo to the apartment upstairs for coffee and enlightenment, just as he had
Vincent.

The contrast between the two brothers could not have been starker. With his pleasing looks and mild manner, Theo mixed effortlessly in any company. Clients called him “tactful” and “attentive”—two words never heard about Vincent. Theo not only looked more like his famous uncle than Vincent did, he also had Cent’s famous “golden tongue.” Even at sixteen, Theo “knew how to handle” customers, according
to one account: how to “help them to a better discernment,” so that “they always thought it was their own choice.” He soon won praise not only from his demanding boss (“How well suited you are for this business,”
Tersteeg marveled), but also from his all-seeing Uncle Cent, who would hear “not a word spoken against”
this
nephew.

After the disappointment of Vincent, Theo’s successes were celebrated at the parsonage in Helvoirt with joy and relief. Not only had he renewed the family hopes of providing an heir to Uncle Cent, he had already (by age seventeen) achieved a measure of self-sufficiency that had taken Vincent years to reach. “It’s a privilege that you are making so much money already,” Dorus wrote. “That means something!” In The Hague, Theo
upheld family obligations that Vincent had often ignored. For setting such an admirable example, his parents showered him with gratitude, encouragement, and undisguised favor. “Be well and always remain our joy and crown!” they wrote to him.

News of Theo’s success, broadcast in letters to all the family, did not go unnoticed in London. Vincent had already heard from Tersteeg at Christmastime about his brother’s quick ascent. He professed to be “pleased” at the news, but did not show it. Despite a busy correspondence with others, his letters to Theo slowed to a grudging crawl. When he did write, the letters were short and perfunctory. Breaking a two-month silence, Vincent
explained brusquely, “[I] am very busy.” The insistent inquiries to “tell me what you see” came to an end. Instead, Vincent loftily suggested that Theo “think it over and perhaps you will have some questions [about art] to put to me.” Theo quickly assumed the role of the more desultory correspondent, often waiting weeks to reply to his brother’s letters; unlike Vincent, who typically fired off responses to Theo within a day or
two—an asymmetrical embrace in which they would remain locked for the rest of their lives.

By June, when Vincent returned to Helvoirt to escort Anna to London, the relationship between the brothers had cooled. Nor did Vincent receive the warm, grateful welcome he expected. Instead of enthusiasm for his new life and new family, he found only suspicion. The fault may have been Anna’s. Vincent’s attempt to enlist her in his campaign with talk of love had backfired. A relentless matchmaker, Anna began to spin webs of schoolgirl fantasy as soon as
she received his first letter about the Loyers. Only days after Vincent cautioned her, “Old girl, you must not think there is anything more to this than what I have written,” Anna speculated to Theo that there was “more than a brother’s love” between Vincent and Eugenie. No matter how many times Vincent denied it and enjoined her “do not mention this at home,” Anna doubtless spread the innuendo of nascent love to her parents just as
she did to Theo. Subsequent “corrections” reporting Eugenie’s engagement to another man just added to the puzzlement and concern at the parsonage, where Vincent’s motives were always in doubt and where news of his odd epistolary courtship of Caroline Haanebeek may already have reached.

As usual, the Van Goghs blamed the company Vincent kept. The contradictory
stories about Eugenie’s availability cast an unfavorable light on her mother, Ursula, whom Anna referred to disdainfully as “that old lady.” What kind of mother would expose her daughter’s reputation to such damaging ambiguities? The very inchoateness of the Loyer family that so attracted Vincent struck his parents as worrisomely
“unnatural.” “They are no family like ordinary people,” Anna warned Theo. Dorus, of course, questioned the moral compass of any enterprise touched by French immorality. The possibility that Eugenie was a fatherless “love child” must have lurked in their darkest fears. They complained of “too many secrets” at the house on Hackford Road, and worried that the Loyers “were not doing [Vincent] any good.”

The more Vincent insisted on the joys of his new family—“wonderful,” he called it, “an escape from life’s troubles and problems”—the more his parents feared that it was just another of their strange son’s strange “illusions … sure to be disappointed.” The more he detailed the loving embrace he found there, the more they worried about “his life being too lonely and
secluded” in the house on Hackford Road. Anna took umbrage at Vincent’s glowing descriptions of familial love far from home. His ardent claims of new “brother-sister” relationships and calls to treat these distant strangers as family members had no place in Anna’s world, where family ties were unique and inviolable. Dorus shared his wife’s misgivings.

And then Theo appeared.

News of his latest triumph had preceded him to Helvoirt. In mid-June, he had met the queen of the Netherlands, Sophie, when she paid a visit to the store on the Plaats. Not long after that, Uncle Cent had introduced him to royalty of a different kind: Adolphe Goupil. Theo’s time and talents were in such demand that he almost had to cancel his trip to Helvoirt for Vincent’s homecoming. The reunion between the two brothers after a year apart was, at best,
polite. They talked shop but apparently little else. When Theo rushed back to The Hague the next morning, Vincent, in a fit of pique, refused to accompany him.

The more his family distrusted and marginalized him, the more Vincent withdrew. He spent most of his stay in Helvoirt filling a little sketchbook with “snapshots” of his life in London. After Theo left, he continued the work of self-documentation. He made drawings of the Helvoirt parsonage and gave them to his sisters Lies and Wil. For his parents, he made a big drawing of the view from his window on Hackford Road—an image intended either to
reassure them about Anna’s visit there, or to defy them about his future there, or both. In words that Vincent had not heard from home in a long time, his mother roundly approved his turn to drawing as a constructive pastime. “We are all very happy with it,” she wrote Theo. “It is a delightful gift that can be of good use to him.”

Vincent resisted leaving, as he always resisted leaving home. As his departure approached, he grew more irritable and alienated. When the subject of
London came up, he only groused about the fog. “He wasn’t himself,” Anna later complained to Theo. Dorus, physically sick following his father’s death in May, withdrew from parsonage life into the moody seclusion that was his habit. Vincent barely saw him during the last week
of his visit. Despite already having overstayed the ten days originally allotted for the trip, Vincent wrote his boss Obach at the last minute requesting more time. He also canceled a side trip to The Hague to see his brother, using the extra time in a last frantic rush of drawing—as if one more image might soften the hearts that seemed set against him.

But nothing worked. His campaign had failed. By the time Vincent and his sister left from the Helvoirt train station on July 14, his parents had come to see Anna as Vincent’s salvation, not the other way around.

LESS THAN A MONTH
after returning to London, Vincent left the house on Hackford Road. He never explained why. His relationship with the Loyers resumed amicably after he returned from Helvoirt. Ursula and Eugenie embraced Anna. “They are good people,” she reported home. “They try to make things as comfortable as possible for us.” At first, Vincent seemed deliriously happy to have his sister’s company.
“You can imagine how pleasant it is to be here together,” he wrote Theo. Anna accompanied him partway on his walk to work every morning, then practiced the piano in the Loyers’ parlor. She visited his workplace and dined with his boss Obach. On weekends, they toured museums and took picnics in the parks. Vincent learned to swim.

What brought this brief summer idyll to such an abrupt end? In the absence of any explanation, Vincent’s parents saw only vindication of their dark forebodings. “It turns out things weren’t so wonderful at the Loyers’,” Dorus wrote. “I’m glad of it because I had an uneasy feeling about them staying there.” “I’m glad he isn’t there anymore,” Anna agreed. “Real life is different
from what one imagines.” Years later, a family legend of unrequited love grew up around Vincent’s sudden departure. In her early account, Johanna Bonger, Theo’s future wife, speculated that Vincent had fallen in love with Eugenie Loyer—a story that compounded Anna’s schoolgirl romanticism with Bonger’s own and launched scores of biographers into speculative seas. “He tried everything to make her break [her] engagement,” Bonger
wrote, “but he did not succeed.” It was this “first great sorrow,” Bonger maintained, that changed Vincent forever; that made him, in the words of her tale’s most successful retailer, Irving Stone, “sensitive to the pain of others.”

Undoubtedly, the reality was both more prosaic and more profound. Vincent’s patchwork family on Hackford Road could not hold together for long. He barely knew his sister Anna, whom adolescence had transformed into a suspicious and censorious nineteen-year-old. Perhaps more important, she did not
know him. After weeks of job hunting without success, Anna’s prospects of employment dimmed. “I think it will be very difficult,”
Vincent explained to Theo. “They say everywhere that she is too young.” Having promised to support his sister until she found work, Vincent faced his own financial crisis as the August rent came due—always, for him, a time of special volatility. The combination of his guilty sensitivity, Anna’s demanding impatience, and Eugenie’s quick temper made a falling-out virtually inevitable.

By August 15, Vincent had found new lodgings less than a mile away, bringing an end to his year with the Loyers—the first in a lifetime of intense attachments ending in sudden, traumatic breakups as his surrogate families proved inadequate to his reparative designs. “He has illusions about people,” wrote Anna in her only comment about the month she spent with Vincent and the Loyers. “When they don’t live up to his too-quick judgment,
he’s so disappointed that they become like a bouquet of withered flowers to him.”

Whatever the cause, Vincent’s expulsion (or flight) from the Hackford Road house marked the beginning of another of the long depressions that scarred his life. Within days, as fate would have it, Anna found a job in Welwyn, a small town five hours by train from London, and moved out of the new lodgings on Kennington Road. Alone for the first time in a year, Vincent quickly reverted to childhood habits of brooding and solitude. He stopped drawing and sought the
old balms of literature and art. He ate poorly and ignored his appearance. He withdrew from social contacts and neglected his duties at work, drawing a sharp rebuke from as far away as Prinsenhage, where Uncle Cent “wished [Vincent] would get out and see people,” his mother reported; “it is necessary for his future.” As if to punish his old family for the failure of his new one, he stopped writing home. “It pains us that he does not write,”
Dorus worried to Theo, “and it is proof that he is not in good spirits.”

London had no heath into which Vincent could escape. But it offered distractions and consolations nowhere available on the Grote Beek, with wildlife far more varied and strange. Especially at night, after the long workdays, Vincent “roamed around a lot there in the backstreets,” he later told a friend.

Socially inept, craving human contact, and long since stripped of any compunction, Vincent found himself in the world capital of paid companionship. More than eighty thousand prostitutes, many of them barely teenagers, plied their trade in a city where the age of consent was only twelve. In the parts of London that Vincent frequented, opportunities abounded. “You cannot walk a hundred steps without knocking into twenty streetwalkers,” one visitor
complained about a walk along the Strand. The trade was serviced by three thousand official brothels, and half again as many coffee shops, cigar divans, dancing saloons, and “night houses,” all peddling the same wares. In addition, prostitutes gathered in “swarms” at designated locations (Oxford Street, St. James’s Square,
Covent Garden), many of them within steps of the Goupil store. They accosted passersby with a fearlessness
that unnerved the unwary. They went by many names: drabs, Cyprians, fallen sisters,
lorettes
, harlots, whores, and “degraded creatures.”

Vincent called them “girls who love so much.”

In a letter to Theo in August, Vincent boldly announced his new life in London: “Virginity of soul and impurity of body
can
go together.” With that salvo, Vincent launched a furious new campaign to end his exile. If he could not regain his parents’ favor, he could at least reclaim his brother’s allegiance. And what better way to do it than with the lure of sexual license?

As Vincent no doubt knew, Dorus had been waging a battle against Theo’s darker angels since he left home at fifteen. The big city of Brussels held special temptations, but even Theo’s transfer to the relative safety of The Hague (probably engineered by his father) did not curb the distraught admonitions from Helvoirt—“be on your guard,” “steer clear of the rocks,” “don’t be known as a
gadabout”—all coded warnings about the dangers of sex. When an unrequited infatuation sent Theo searching for sex in the dark alleys of the Geest, Vincent seized the moment.