Van Gogh (27 page)

By the time Vincent reached Isleworth, hymns had become his heart’s chief solace. He sang them every morning and evening with his students in Bible study. Walking through the halls of Holme Court, he would hear a boy “hum a snatch of some hymn,” he said, and feel “the old faith” well up inside him. In his
room at night, he heard hymns drifting up from the piano in the school below and felt a rush of sublime comfort
that could move him to inexplicable tears. On his endless journeys that fall, through gaslit city streets and empty country roads, he would sing them softly to himself, he confessed, when “nobody is about.”

Over and over, verse after verse, mile after mile, hymn after hymn. “There are so many beautiful ones,” he wrote.

He loved their words: by turns touching and stoic, tender and ecstatic, imploring and serene, sorrowful and rejoicing. Taking his cue from the hymnbooks of the era, which printed only words, not music, he treated their lyrics as poetry, copying out verses in letters and albums. But it was music that gave them their hypnotic power. With melodies tailored to untrained voices and harmonies easy enough for street-corner bands, they cast their spell through simplicity and
familiarity. “Especially when heard often,” Vincent wrote, “one grows so fond of them.” Many of them spoke in the same pleading, imperative voice as Vincent himself. His favorite, “Tell me the old, old story,” pleads like a persistent child for the ultimate comfort of a bedtime tale:

When Vincent wrote, more than ten years later, that he wanted his paintings “to say something comforting as music is comforting … something of the eternal,” this is what he meant. One can search Vincent’s childhood and youth for the first signs of the new art that would soon burst on the world, but nowhere is the future clearer than here in the deep feelings, simple means, and immortal longings of the hymns that drifted upward
from the third-floor room at Holme Court.

IN OCTOBER, VINCENT’S PARENTS
wrote that Theo had fallen seriously ill. Dorus rushed to his son’s bedside in The Hague; Anna followed close behind and settled in for a long convalescence. Vincent responded at first with an avalanche of consoling words and images. “How I long to see you again,” he wrote his feverish, prostrate brother. “Oh! my longing is sometimes so strong.” Overcome
with nostalgia, he begged Reverend Slade-Jones for a three-day leave so he could return to Holland. “Besides longing to sit at Theo’s bedside,” he said, “I should like so much to see my mother again and, if possible, also go to Etten to see Father and speak with him.”

Vincent had suffered many such swoons of homesickness since leaving Etten in April. The sea crossing in 1876 brought back painful memories of his ill-fated return to England with Anna in 1874. The view from the school’s bay window in Ramsgate made him think of his homeland across the water. From the same window, he watched the students wave good-bye to their parents and his heart ached with theirs. To share his pain, he made a drawing of the
“melancholy” scene and sent it home with a sad note: “None of us will ever forget the view from that window.”

In the schools in Ramsgate and Isleworth, every student reminded him of Theo. Whenever he walked with them, made sand castles with them, showed them prints, or put them to bed, “I would have preferred to have you with me,” he wrote his brother. On a trip to the beach, he saved two sprigs of beach moss and sent them to Theo as a memento. On a visit to Hampton Court in June, he retrieved a feather from a rook’s nest and enclosed it in his next letter.
In July, he briefly entertained a fantasy of joining his brother in The Hague, and even asked Theo to help him find a job there “in connection with the church.”

He showered letters on other family members including sister Anna in Welwyn, on family friends (even Tersteeg), and on old acquaintances like Frans Soek and Harry Gladwell in Paris. On his frequent trips into London, he sought out the people and places that evoked his previous life there: his boss Obach and former Goupil colleagues like Elbert Jan van Wisselingh, George Reid, and Henry Wallis. He tried particularly hard to cultivate a new family in the Gladwells, who
still grieved over the loss of their daughter. “I love those people,” he proclaimed. “I can sympathize with them.” When in London, he never missed a chance to visit Harry’s father at his store, or walk the extra miles out of his way to see the family in Lee. He may even have transcribed an album for them, the ultimate token of familial bonding.

Vincent appears to have tried the same sleight of heart with the family of his employer, the Reverend Thomas Slade-Jones, and his wife, Annie. With their six children and parson’s lifestyle, the Slade-Joneses seemed perfectly suited to fill the void in Vincent’s life. Like the Zundert parsonage, Holme Court was a self-sustaining island, with great trees shading its courtyard, vines overgrowing its walls, and a contingent of barnyard animals. Vincent did
his best to make a place for himself there, just as he had at the Loyer house on Hackford Road. He worked in the garden, gave lessons to the Slade-Jones children, and read to them at bedtime. In a nostalgic ritual, he decorated the house with greenery for the holidays. He poured days of painstaking labor into the visitors’ book that Annie
maintained. Filling page after page from edge to edge with tiny script, he transcribed his favorite hymns, Bible verses,
poetry and prose—in French, German, and Dutch as well as English—in a manic bid for belonging.

His search for family even took him back to the Loyers. In November, braving certain awkwardness and a long walk in a bitter London winter, he returned to the house on Hackford Road to wish Ursula a happy birthday.

In the end, however, neither the Gladwells nor the Slade-Joneses nor the Loyers could fill the void. Only one family could do that. In October, the news of Theo’s illness and the coming of Christmas combined to create a fresh surge of nostalgia and homesickness. “O Zundert!” he cried. “Memories of you are sometimes almost overpowering.” Everywhere he went, he saw images of home. On visits to London galleries, he lingered with
“intense delight” over paintings of Holland. He told his students stories about “the land without hills,” where “houses and streets were as clean and spotless as the play-toys of the giants in
Gulliver’s Travels
.” He rehearsed the journey again and again in his imagination: “How delightful it will be to sail down the Thames and across the sea,” he wrote, “to see those friendly Dutch shores and church
spires in the distance.” He reread the poetry of his childhood and copied out old favorites, like Longfellow, bathed in memory and longing:

It was visions like these that led Vincent to beg Reverend Slade-Jones for time off to visit his sick brother in The Hague. His first request was rejected, but Vincent pleaded and cajoled so pitifully that Slade-Jones finally relented. “Write to your mother,” he said. “If she approves, I will too.”

But she did not approve. In a devastating blow, Anna van Gogh wrote back that Vincent should wait until Christmas to come home—“and may God give us a happy meeting then.” Vincent said nothing in his letters to Theo (which he knew his mother read), but poured his heartbreak into the sermon he preached a week later: “The journey of our life goes from the loving breast of our Mother on earth to the arms of our Father in
heaven … Has any one of us forgotten the golden hours of our early days at home, and since we left that home—for many of us have had to leave that home.”

Once his mother rejected his bid to return, Vincent lost enthusiasm for everything else. His round-robin of duties between Holme Court, Petersham chapel, and the iron church in Turnham Green now seemed nothing but a burden. Even his beloved walks became cause for complaint in his letters home. Instead of a
pilgrim, he described himself as Slade-Jones’s “walking boy,” trekking about the countryside on senseless “superhuman
journeys.” It didn’t help that the schoolmaster had assigned Vincent the miserable task of collecting unpaid tuition bills on his visits to students’ parents, many of them poor. (Slade-Jones himself was slow to pay Vincent’s meager wages, serenely maintaining that “God takes care of those who work for Him.”)

For Vincent, obsessed with the coming of Christmas and the prospect of reuniting with his family, the crowded days could not pass fast enough. “How I am longing for Christmas and for you all,” he wrote Theo; “it seems to me I have grown years older in these few months.” In the evenings, he sat exhausted in his room, stared at photographs of his parents pinned on the wall, and relived fond memories of Christmases past: especially his
last-minute return to Helvoirt two years earlier (before the disgrace in Paris), when the moon shone on snow-covered poplars and the lights of the village twinkled in the darkness.

Images like this—drawn from literature, scripture, art, and hymns as well as from his own past—increasingly provided Vincent with his only true comfort. Spurned by his family and haunted by regrets, he withdrew into the tumultuous solitude of his own imagination, where all these images were “breathed on variously by multitudinous forces,” as Eliot wrote in
Silas Marner
, “forever moving and crossing each other with incalculable
results.”

The image that obsessed him most that fall and winter was that of the Prodigal Son. More than once, he preached the story of the wastrel, wandering child who “was no more worthy to be called thy son,” but was welcomed home by his father: “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” The story appeared in Vincent’s autobiographical
levensschets
, and it echoes throughout his first sermon. In his
room, he hung a print of Ary Scheffer’s
L’enfant prodigue
, showing a godlike father embracing a penitent, dewy-eyed youth. He sent a copy of the same image to his mother for her birthday. With his usual monomania, he pursued this icon of reconciliation and redemption through literature and poetry as well as art. He studied it, preached it, and included it in his bedtime lessons.

In his hunger for comforting images, Vincent increasingly blurred the line between real and imagined. His letters filled up with “word paintings”—inspired by Eliot’s brilliant descriptive passages—that transformed the everyday into the eternal. A sunrise seen from a passing train became “a real Easter sun”; a sexton’s house in the rain became a refuge of faith; a quiet riverbank became a promise of redemption:
“The chestnut trees and the clear blue sky and the morning sun mirrored in the water of the Thames; the grass was sparkling green and one heard the sound of church bells all around.” In images like these, Vincent combined observation and imagination to create a better, more consoling reality. He introduced contradictions and impossibilities, compressed
time, embellished with favorite tropes, and freely omitted anything that did not suit his purpose.
His description of a London slum included no mention of poverty, crime, overcrowding, or filth, but only the pious, picturesque poor bustling about in the gaslight on a Saturday evening, eagerly anticipating the Sabbath to come—“which is such a comfort for those poor districts.”

The consoling images that Vincent took from literature and art underwent a similar transformation as he reimagined them—simplified and intensified them—in pursuit of his heart’s elusive comfort. He changed the names of poems and paintings. He disregarded dissonant characters and authorial views. Like the illustrated books of his childhood, he grafted words to images and images to words, insistently reshaping both to his narrative of reassurance. He
paired pictures with poetry, sometimes transcribing lines from literature and scripture directly onto his prints to create collages of consolation. This process of layering words and images so gratified his manic imagination and his search for comfort that it would become his principal way of seeing and coping with the world.

Churchgoers at the Richmond Methodist church got an early, and no doubt disorienting, glimpse of this process at work. To conclude his first sermon, Vincent told them about “a very beautiful picture” he had seen once. It was called
The Pilgrim’s Progress
. But the image he described looked nothing at all like the painting by George Boughton that Vincent had seen at the Royal Academy two years before, in 1874. Vincent’s telling
transformed Boughton’s flat horizon and hazy sky into a dazzling vista of hills and mountains glimpsed in the “splendor” of a Romantic sunset (“the gray clouds with their linings of silver and gold and purple”). Vincent replaced Boughton’s low fortified town with Bunyan’s Celestial City—high atop a mountain “whereon the setting sun casts a glory.” In Boughton’s painting, a girl in a white tunic pours water
for the pilgrims on their dusty journey. In Vincent’s vision, the girl becomes an angel in black, a figure from an Andersen tale.

Onto this mix of art, literature, and scripture, Vincent added one final layer: himself. In his vision, the angel offers consolation not to a group, but to a single lonely pilgrim who “has been walking for a good long while and he is very tired.” They converse in the words of Vincent’s favorite poetry, and the pilgrim goes on his way “sorrowful yet always rejoicing.”

Only by combining the real, the depicted, and the imagined could Vincent approach the true source of his hurt, as well as the only source of true consolation: his family. Just as he cast himself as the pilgrim in Boughton’s painting, he could cast himself as the Prodigal Son repeatedly embraced by his father in Scheffer’s print, in sermons, and in bedtime stories. Layering allowed Vincent to superimpose his family as well as himself onto images in art and
literature, whether it was Theo as a young revolutionary hero, Uncle Cent as a Golden
Age burgher, or his mother and father as the tender, caring parents in a poem by George Eliot. It allowed him to see the Zundert parsonage in every image of happy home life and to see himself as Conscience’s conscript, ripped from the bosom of a loving family, or as Eliot’s flawed but exemplary clergyman in
Felix Holt
, or as Bunyan’s pilgrim
Christian.