Van Gogh (31 page)

But once Vincent agreed to his parents’ conditions about preparatory study, they had no choice but to support him. The rest of the family responded in much the same way—doubtful but dutiful—when Dorus called on them for help. Uncle Stricker, who knew the least about Vincent’s past, stepped forward with the most enthusiasm, not only identifying the best tutor to prepare Vincent for the exams (especially in Latin and Greek), but also volunteering to monitor his progress and guide his religious study. A learned, influential preacher, Stricker could also introduce Vincent to the mostly liberal clerical world of Amsterdam, in which he was highly respected, despite his comparatively conservative views.

Having himself failed his own ordination exam, Stricker was prepared to
give Vincent’s ambitions the benefit of the doubt. “Our good Lord loves surprises,” he said cheerfully. Uncle Jan, the rear admiral, offered Vincent a room in his commodious house in a large complex of military buildings overlooking the Amsterdam harbor. Widowed and with no children at home, Jan could offer not only meals and accommodations (with servants), but also entrée to society—a prospect that truly excited Anna. “If Vincent wants to become a vicar,” she wrote, “he has to be able to deal with people from the higher society as well as with those who live a simple life.” Although he refused to assume any kind of supervisory role over his troublesome nephew, Jan did manage to find Vincent “a decent job” to help defray his expenses. “At least that’s a ray of hope in this matter,” Anna wrote. Uncle Cor, the print dealer, offered money to help pay for Vincent’s lessons, and a bundle of good paper to write them on, but little else.

Of all the relatives, only Uncle Cent, who knew the most about the past, refused to help. In a brutally businesslike rejection sent both to Vincent and to his parents, Cent “did not agree with Vincent’s views,” Anna reported to Theo. “Uncle doesn’t think his plans will lead to good prospects and
that
is what he believes Vincent really needs.” He also cut off any further discussion, virtually washing his hands of his feckless namesake. “He did not think that carrying on the correspondence served any purpose,” Vincent told Theo, “because in this case he could not be of any assistance to me at all.” Theo offered a benign view of Cent’s refusal to his parents—“Uncle can’t see that Vincent really means well”—but his sympathy for his brother triggered an alarmed response from Etten: “[Uncle] knows very well that Vincent is a good man,” Anna insisted, “he just doesn’t agree; and I expect he has been frank about it to Vincent.” Then she added, in a moment of glum candor, “Neither we nor you are feeling comfortable about it either.”

In the end, however, the family struck a familiar pose of guarded hopefulness, preferring to imagine—once again—that Vincent had finally come in from the heath. “How wonderful it will be,” wrote Lies, “if he can see his illusion turn into reality.” Anna did what she had done many times before: she put the matter in God’s hands. “We would be so happy if we could see all of you reach your destiny and become good people,” she wrote Theo, “starting with the eldest.” Dorus, like his son, consoled himself by preaching a sermon. His subject: “Man is born to suffer”—“how troubles and worries form the heart and make it susceptible to comfort and hope.” As a going-away present, they gave Vincent the ultimate symbol of their persistent hope: a new suit.

Vincent plunged ahead, seemingly unbothered by the doubts lapping around him. He began studying his catechisms immediately, furiously copying out page after page to occupy his thoughts and keep his own doubts at bay. Years later, he confessed to deep skepticism about the plan on which he was about to embark. But now, carried on a swift tide of obsession and identification, he only offered
more prayers (“Lord, I long so much to be earnest”), scribbled more reassuring texts in the margins of his prints, and redoubled his sermon-going. He consoled himself with one last trip to see the
Christus Consolator
, as well as with paintings of his own creation: word pictures featuring churchyards, meadow paths, and evening light. He fought second thoughts with anesthetizing repetitions of scripture and aphorisms. “I am striving for favor in the eyes of some I love,” he explained to Theo in a moment of heartbreaking clarity. “If God wills it, I shall find it.”

After leaving Dordrecht on May 2, Vincent lingered in Etten for a week in a last reverie of family. On his way to Amsterdam, he stopped in The Hague, where Theo, at his parents’ insistence, took his brother for a haircut. (“Do a deed of mercy,” Dorus instructed. “I would think that a barber in the Hague might make something of it yet.”) Then Vincent left for Amsterdam, vowing to “put my hand to the plow.”

IMAGES OF SOWING
and reaping haunted Vincent’s imagination as he began his new life. In one of his last letters from Dordrecht, he told Theo that he hoped to become a “sower of the Word”—“as one that sows wheat in the fields.” On the Sunday before his son’s departure, Dorus, who preached his life just as Vincent would later paint his, had chosen for his text the passage from Galatians that was his favorite: “For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” “God’s work,” he said, “so closely connected to that of mankind, brings about solutions, unexpected and blessed. We sow and we reap, [but] it is not just us who are doing our best; God supports and blesses and opens up ways for our help and happiness.”

For the persistent sower Dorus van Gogh, this was the most consoling message he could give his son as he put his hand to the plow yet again. And surely it was no coincidence that it echoed a passage from one of Vincent’s favorite books, Eliot’s
Scenes of Clerical Life
, which both father and son had recently read:

D
AY AFTER DAY, FROM HIS UNCLE’S HOUSE OVERLOOKING THE AMSTERDAM
harbor, Vincent saw the great labor unfold. Every morning, an army of workers poured through the gate of the naval dockyards—so many that the report of their boots on the pavement sounded “like the roaring of the sea,” Vincent wrote. They worked from first light (as early as five in the summer) until the lamplighters started their rounds. Some went to the boatyards, building everything from ironclad warships to high-masted schooners. But most reported to the dockworks, where steam shovels, wooden cranes, and bare backs fought a grinding battle against the intractable sea bottom and the relentless sea.

Vincent called their daily struggle “a magnificent spectacle,” and followed keenly the slow drama of their labors. “He who must learn to work must watch the workers,” he wrote. Only with their “patient persistence” and faith in “God’s help,” he said, could any great work be completed. He saw them battle not only the spongy Amsterdam “soil”—more water than dirt, requiring mountains of sand fill—but also the unpredictable elements. With the treacherous North Sea only twenty miles to the west and the surly Zuider Zee just to the east, storms sprang to lethal life without notice, flooding dikeworks, snapping lines, dashing temporary docks, sweeping away the sand, and setting back the work by weeks. But the next day, the workers returned to undo the damage, refill the dikes, re-rope the booms, rebuild the scaffolding, and then, God willing, nudge the sea a little farther back and raise the walls a little higher.

This was the history of Amsterdam, reenacted before Vincent’s eyes. From the building of the first dam across the Amstel River in the thirteenth century, the civic enterprise called Amsterdam had been a struggle against nature. “The impossible city,” historians called it. In the Golden Age, when it seemed as though no problem could withstand Dutch ingenuity, Amsterdam embarked
on a program of canal digging that gave the city its distinctive configuration of waterways in concentric half circles, like nesting bowls. The rich merchants of Amsterdam drove wooden piles into the soft ground to support their grand new townhouses. But no matter how many ditches and canals they dug, the boggy bottomland never truly drained. No matter how much sand and topsoil they dumped behind the dikes, buildings continued to sink: pavement parted, foundations cracked, and façades leaned perilously.

The harbor, too, defied both logic and the elements. Not directly accessible from the sea, it could be approached only through a maze of islands and shallows that quickly filled with silt and debris as land was reclaimed on either side of the channel. Shifting sandbanks and headwinds meant ships often had to lie offshore for days awaiting the right conditions for a dash to the harbor. Amsterdamers seemed to understand the improbability of their city, and the impermanence of its triumphs. Unlike the proud citizens of Europe’s other great cities, they never took the trouble to build monuments: no grand boulevards, no great public spaces, no towering memorials to bygone glories. Critics accused them of lacking faith in symbols, of caring only about the material. But clearly it was neither good business nor good symbolism to build grandly on sand.

But build they did. And when the new canal to the North Sea opened in 1876, Amsterdam experienced yet another explosion of unlikely success. The pharaonic labor that Vincent witnessed from his uncle’s window was only one of hundreds of such projects that had begun to roust the sleepy seventeenth-century city into the new industrial era. The IJ riverbank, Amsterdam’s port, roared with the sounds of iron, steel, and steam engines as the harbor was enlarged, new docks built, and new islands raised. Railroads muscled their way to preeminence with plans for a vast new dockside train station. Canal after canal disappeared and new neighborhoods appeared. Amsterdamers had even begun to think about monuments: a great new museum to celebrate—what else—their Golden Age. Everywhere Vincent walked he saw the telltale mountains of sand—symbols of both impermanence and eternal effort—that accompanied every construction project, each one bearing witness to the power of hope over experience, of imagination over reality.

WITH INSPIRATION ON
virtually every street corner, Vincent launched into his own great new labor. “Sometimes it is right to carry a thing through and to do it with a will,” he declared,
“coûte que coûte”
(whatever it costs). Undistracted by employment (he did not take the job his uncle had arranged), he could devote himself unreservedly to the task ahead. And a formidable task it was. Before he could begin any theological studies, he first had to be admitted to a university. That was a challenge even for high school students with all the necessary preparatory
classes (especially Latin, which was still the language of instruction for all advanced study). Only a small fraction of high school graduates qualified to enter one of the country’s three universities. For Vincent, who had walked away from the Tilburg School as a sophomore nine years earlier, the matriculation examinations presented an almost insuperable barrier. It would take at least two years to prepare for them, he was warned.

Vincent was determined to do it in less. “May God grant me the necessary wisdom to end my studies as early as possible,” he wrote impatiently, “so that I can perform the duties of a clergyman.” He embarked on a relentless study schedule that began at dawn with Latin and Greek and ended after dark with mathematics and algebra. In between, he crammed everything else: literature, history, geography. He studied with a pen in hand, writing out lengthy summaries of the vast tracts that filled his nights and strained his eyes. He copied out great swaths of text, sometimes whole books. “I know no better way to study,” he insisted. Most nights, he worked in the sitting room, scribbling furiously by the gaslight until his uncle (as a sailor, a lifetime early riser) chased him to bed. He tried to continue in his attic room, but found “the temptation to sleep when it is getting late is too strong.”

Religion was not a part of his matriculation exam study, but he could not resist it for long. Soon he was studying the Bible straight through yet again, somehow finding time in his busy schedule to make long lists of parables and miracles and arrange them in chronological order, in English and French as well as Dutch. “After all,” he explained to Theo, “it is the Bible that is essential.”

Vincent pursued all these studies with an intensity that exceeded even his usual fervor for new endeavors, applying himself “with the tenacity of a dog that gnaws a bone,” as he put it. He filled his letters with proud pledges of “steadfastness” and “perseverance,” and promises to “fight the good fight” “with God’s help.” Against his uncle’s curfew, he “stretched” the day at both ends—from before dawn until “deep in the night.” “I must sit up as long as I can keep my eyes open,” he told Theo. On a rare visit to relatives, he stood in a corner reading while the others played cards. He read while walking the maze of Amsterdam’s streets and canals. He never left town, even when Theo sent him money to come to The Hague to see an exhibition of drawings.