Van Gogh (29 page)

He spent his spare daylight hours on long walks—“always alone,” according to Braat—and his long nights reading. His landlord, Rijken, a grain merchant, arose at three every morning to check the grain loft and often noticed “spooky business” in Vincent’s room: shuffling and a light under the door. When Rijken refused to pay for the extra oil he needed for his lucubrations, Vincent bought candles—a fire hazard that terrified the nervous Rijken. During the day, a different sound coming from Vincent’s room alarmed the landlord: the hammering of nails. “I could not stand this Van Gogh covering the walls with those [prints],”
Rijken told an interviewer decades later, “driving nails ruthlessly into the good wallpaper.”

Among his coworkers and fellow boarders, Vincent was both shunning and shunned. Like all clerks, he worked standing at his desk, typically from eight in the morning until midnight (with two hours off for lunch). But much of that time was spent “puttering,” according to Braat, or “drowsy” from his short, sleepless nights. Braat quickly realized that Vincent was only there because his family “did not really know what to do with the boy.” As in Paris, Vincent could not be trusted with customers. “When he had to give ladies and other customers information about the prints,” a bookstore coworker recalled, “he paid no attention to his employer’s interests, but said explicitly and unreservedly what he thought of their artistic value.” Eventually, he was only allowed to sell halfpenny prints to children and blank paper to adults. “He was really next to useless,” said Braat. “For he had not the slightest knowledge of the book trade, and he did not make any attempt to learn.” Despite six years of experience at Goupil, he struck his coworkers as “a novice in business.”

Only once, when the town flooded in the middle of the night and everyone rushed in timeless Dutch fashion to rescue what they could from the rising waters, did Vincent feel connected to the people around him. “There was no little noise and bustle,” he reported excitedly to Theo: “on all the ground floors people were busy carrying things upstairs, and a little boat came floating through the street.” The next day, at the store, he lugged load after load of soaked books and records to higher ground, earning the admiration of coworkers for his diligence and physical stamina. “Working with one’s hands for a day is a rather agreeable diversion,” he wrote in a rare flash of contentment; “if only it had been for another reason.”

To outsiders who, unlike his family, had not followed his slow unwinding from the real world, or who could not dismiss his strangeness as merely foreign, or who did not speak his language of religious fervor, Vincent’s eccentric inwardness could be disturbing. They found his looks odd and off-putting. Years later, they recalled his “homely, freckled face,” his “crooked” mouth, his “narrowed, peering eyes,” and his vivid hair cropped so close that it “stood up on end.” “No, he was not an attractive boy,” said Dirk Braat. It didn’t help that Vincent insisted on wearing a frayed top hat—a sad relic of former days as a young cosmopolite in London. “Such a hat!” Braat exclaimed. “You were afraid you might tear its brim off if you took hold of it.”

With his strange appearance and moody, solitary ways, Vincent invited scorn. His housemates mocked his serious manner and made noises to disturb his interminable reading, driving him off into the night in search of quiet. They called him a “queer fish,” a “queer chap,” and “cracked.” The torments came not just from the group of rowdy young gentlemen who boarded with him, but
also from the landlord’s wife, who berated him for his strange habits, and from Rijken himself, who later summed up Vincent’s behavior: “It was as if the fellow was out of his mind.”

Only one person, his roommate, Paulus Görlitz, offered Vincent friendship. A teaching assistant (as Vincent had been in England) who also worked part-time at the bookstore, Görlitz could not have known what he was getting into when he agreed to share his room with the newcomer. Fortunately for both, Görlitz, who was studying to earn a teaching certificate, shared Vincent’s bookish, insular ways. “In the evening, when [Vincent] came home,” Görlitz recalled, “he used to find me studying … and then, after an encouraging word to me, he would start working, too.” They took occasional walks together, and Vincent shared with Görlitz, who was teaching in a school for the poor, his own “poignant stories” of the Reverend Thomas Slade-Jones and his “boys from the London slums.” But mostly Görlitz listened to his roommate’s relentless monologues. When Vincent talked, said Görlitz, “he warmed into enthusiasm,” and his face “changed and brightened wonderfully.”

More and more, Vincent talked about religion.

It was inevitable that Vincent’s loneliness and longing would soon retake a religious shape. For a while after he arrived in Dordrecht, he seemed to forswear his evangelical ardor and accept his father’s argument that one could do “religious work” without necessarily pursuing a religious calling. But that middle course could not long withstand Vincent’s eccentric habits and his tendency to steer for the horizon. Eventually, according to everyone who lived with him or worked with him in Dordrecht, he reverted to the religious fanaticism that had defined his pilgrimage in England. “Strict piety was the core of his being,” wrote Görlitz. “He was excessively interested in religion,” recalled Dirk Braat. As in Paris, Vincent dedicated himself to the Bible, this time with even more feverish single-mindedness. “The Bible is my solace, my support in life,” he told Görlitz. “It is the most beautiful book I know.” He reaffirmed the vow he had made in Montmartre: to “read it daily [until] I know it by heart.”

At work, he copied out long passages of scripture in Dutch, then translated them into French, German, and English, separated into four neat columns like accounting entries. “If a beautiful text or a pious thought came to him,” Görlitz recalled, “he wrote it down; he could not resist doing so.” The sight of Vincent in a reverie of transcription became a regular irritant to Braat senior, the owner. “Good heavens!” he complained, “that boy’s standing there translating the Bible again.” At home, Vincent read his big Bible late into the night, copying out passages and memorizing them. Many nights he read himself to sleep, and Görlitz found him “on his bed in the morning with his ‘life-book’ on the pillow.” He hung biblical illustrations on every wall, image after image, mostly of Jesus, until “the whole room was decorated with biblical images and
ecce homo
’s,” Görlitz recalled.
On each image he wrote the same inscription: “Sorrowful yet always rejoicing.” At Easter, he framed every print of Christ in palm branches. “I was not a pious person,” said Görlitz, “but I was moved when I observed
his
piety.”

The surge of religious feeling brought a return to the monastic lifestyle Vincent had shared with Harry Gladwell in Montmartre. According to Görlitz, Vincent “lived like a saint,” was “frugal like a hermit,” and “ate like a penitent friar.” He took meat only on Sundays, and then only in small amounts, telling his mocking housemates: “To men the physical life should be a small secondary matter; food from plants is sufficient, the rest is luxury.” When the landlord complained about his unhealthful habits, he replied with Kempian indifference, “I don’t want food, I don’t want a night’s rest.” He mended his own clothes, and sometimes skipped meals so he could buy food for stray dogs. He allowed himself only one luxury: his pipe, which he smoked almost incessantly while working over his Bible in the hours before dawn.

As in Paris, Vincent spent every Sunday going from church to church in a marathon of devotion, ignoring differences between Lutheran and Reformed, Dutch and French, even between Catholic and Protestant, sometimes logging three or four sermons in a day. When Görlitz expressed surprise at his ecumenism, Vincent replied, “I see God in each church … the dogma is not important, but the spirit of the Gospel is, and I find that spirit in all churches.” For Vincent, only the preaching mattered. In letters to Theo, he described how the Catholic priest lifted up the poor, cheerless peasants in his flock, while the Protestant preacher used “fire and enthusiasm” to sober the smug burghers in his.

Inevitably, these Sunday tours rekindled Vincent’s ambition to preach. At home, he began studying the works of the most inspiring preacher he had ever heard, Charles Spurgeon, and drafting sermons during his late-night study sessions. He regaled his scornful fellow boarders with impromptu inspirational readings, even as they laughed and made faces at him. He tested everyone’s patience, even Görlitz’s, with interminable dinnertime prayers. When Görlitz urged him not to waste his time on his housemates’ souls, Vincent snapped, “Let them laugh … someday they will learn to appreciate it.”

Only one congregation received Vincent’s ministrations warmly that winter—but it was the most important congregation of all.

THEO HAD BEEN
brought to grief by a woman. He had fallen in love with “a girl from a lower class” (as Vincent later described her). He may have gotten her pregnant. Dutiful both to the woman and to his family, Theo reported his predicament to his parents and proposed to marry the girl. The prospect of yet another family shame was devastating in Etten, where the stain of Vincent’s dishonor had yet to be erased. But Anna and Dorus responded differently than
they had with their eldest son. Calmly dismissing Theo’s love for the girl as an “illusion,” they offered only a gentle rebuke (“Our sweet Lord doesn’t condemn, but forgives mildly”) and extracted a promise that he would stop seeing her.

When Theo broke that promise three months later, Dorus exploded. He called the relationship “miserable and detestable”—a godless liaison “based only on cupidity and sensual lust” that could only bring Theo to ruin and damnation if he persisted in it. “Open your eyes,” Anna pleaded. “Resist the danger of giving in.… God can help you find a decent girl … a girl we will gladly call our child.” Torn between love and duty, Theo collapsed in despair. He considered leaving the country, convinced that if he stayed he would only continue to bring pain and misery to everyone he loved. “I am so lonely and sad,” he wrote to his brother. “I wish I could go far away from everything. I am the cause of it all, and bring only sorrow to everybody.”

Theo’s cry for help galvanized Vincent’s preaching ambitions and set him again on the journey that had begun in England.

As he did the previous fall when Theo fell sick, Vincent launched a manic campaign of consolation, expending all the coiled-up energy of long obsession on his congregation of one. In passages that evoke, and sometimes exactly echo, his sermon in Richmond, he urged Theo to seek comfort in Christ. Only through Him, he said, could tears of remorse be changed into “grateful tears,” and “vital strength” be made to spring from “the weary heart.” In his breathless rush to comfort Theo, Vincent freely mixed his own guilt and loneliness with his brother’s. In places, it is hard to tell who is the consoler and who is the consoled. “There is a time in life,” he wrote, “when one is tired of everything and feels, perhaps correctly, as if all one does is wrong.”

Vincent sent long letters to his suffering brother filled with poetry, scripture, hymns, catechisms, and exhortations. As in his sermon, with its relentless invocations of Father and Mother and the idyll of youth, Vincent sought to comfort Theo by invoking their shared past. He urged him to read the poets of their childhood like De Génestet and Longfellow. He used the shorthand of imagery—a magazine illustration showing a churchyard at twilight—to summon up the ultimate balm of the Zundert parsonage. And when images created by others proved insufficient, he created his own. Only days after one of Theo’s visits, he reimagined their time together, layering it with all the vivid, sentimental detail he had used to transform a Boughton painting into
The Pilgrim’s Progress:

The resurgence of Vincent’s religious fervor was not welcomed in Etten. Dorus and Anna worried that it presaged another round of “excesses”—more futureless wanderings while the possibility of a normal life slipped further and further out of reach. To them, a religious calling required years of patient, dedicated study. Without that, Vincent would never be qualified for anything but marginal missionary work in a strange land under the banner of some fringe sect, like Methodism. “I truly hope he will not have to go abroad again,” Anna fretted. “I wish he would stay with his present work,” said Dorus, who worried himself sleepless over Vincent’s prospects.

Determined to prevent any further straying from the path of self-sufficiency, and probably alerted to his son’s increasingly eccentric behavior in Dordrecht, Dorus arranged for Vincent to visit his uncle Cor in Amsterdam. If Vincent were working in a family business like Cor’s bookstore, he might become more firmly attached to the trade, and also he could be more closely monitored for signs of trouble. Amsterdam offered a safety net of relatives, including the family’s other distinguished uncle, Jan, a rear admiral and commandant of the naval dockyards there. At his father’s insistence, Vincent wrote to Uncle Cor in advance of his visit, vaguely apologizing for the “relative failures” of the past and discreetly inquiring about a position.

But if Dorus expected the meeting on March 18 to quell Vincent’s religious ambitions, he must have been bitterly disappointed. Vincent went to Amsterdam riding a fresh wave of pious fervor. Theo had just been ordered to abandon the girl he loved, prompting Vincent to an outburst of consolation that capped a winter of clandestine meetings, confessional letters, and earnest pledges of undying brotherhood, all of which had brought his ardor, both fraternal and religious, to a fever pitch. Rather than acquiesce to his father’s plan, Vincent adamantly reasserted his desire “to become a Christian and a Christian laborer.” A contentious meeting with Uncle Cor left the issue unresolved.