Van Gogh (32 page)

Only once a week did he break from his studies. But not to rest. As in Dordrecht, he set Sundays aside for sermons—as many as he could fit into the day (by one count, as many as “six or seven”). He left the admiral’s house at six to attend an early service at the nearest church, the Oosterkerk (East Church), where Uncle Jan had an assigned seat. From there, he walked a mile along the riverfront to the Oudezijds Chapel, a fifteenth-century church tucked into a warren of streets in the oldest part of the city. With its shiplike lattice of beams and carved pagan faces grimacing down from the rafters, the Oudezijds had been
largely abandoned in favor of new churches in more fashionable neighborhoods. Often Vincent’s only company in the ancient pews were old sailors, sailing cadets, and children from the nearby orphanage. But Uncle Stricker often preached there, and Vincent visited him at his house nearby. Vincent admired the “warmth and true feeling” of his uncle’s sermons, and sometimes walked great distances to hear him preach at other churches as well.

From the Oudezijds, he headed west another mile to the Westerkerk (West Church), one of the largest Reformed churches in the Netherlands, with a looming bell tower that tolled the hour to all of Amsterdam. There Vincent could hear another preacher he admired, Jeremias Posthumus Meyjes. Dorus had given Vincent an introduction to Meyjes’s father, who was also a preacher. When Vincent saw the “tall, noble figure” of the younger Meyjes, he saw his own future: both preacher and preacher’s son. From the Westerkerk, he might head north, just a half mile up the townhouse-lined Prinsengracht, to the Norderkerk (North Church), where both Stricker and the elder Meyjes preached occasionally.

These four churches—East, West, North, and Oudezijds—were the compass points, the stations, of Vincent’s weekly progress. From departure to return, he could cover seven or eight miles in a single Sunday, undeterred by heat or wind or darkness or the punishing rainstorms that swept in, unexpected and unobstructed, from every direction. Even Vincent, not usually one for self-deprecating humor, seemed to mock himself in reporting to Theo “the frightful number of stone thresholds and church floors under my eyes and feet.”

The one person who saw Vincent’s ardor close-up was his tutor, Maurits Benjamin Mendes da Costa. Vincent called him just “Mendes.” A Portuguese Jew, Mendes lived with several dependent relatives on the edge of the old Jewish quarter in eastern Amsterdam, only a half mile from the naval docks. He was twenty-six but looked far younger, a slight figure with soulful Sephardic features and a blur of a mustache. In early May, having been “forewarned” by Stricker about Vincent’s “unusual behavior,” Mendes received him apprehensively in his room overlooking the Jonas Daniel Meyer Square. He found his new student surprisingly “reticent,” given the small difference in their ages. “His appearance was by no means unpleasant,” Mendes wrote in a reminiscence thirty years later. Where others saw a country “roughness” in Vincent’s red hair and freckles, “homely face,” and “nervous hands,” Mendes saw a “charming strangeness.”

Vincent responded to his teacher’s sympathy with extravagant admiration. To Theo, he called Mendes “a very remarkable person,” and added, “one must not talk too lightly about genius, even though one believes there is more of it in the world than many suppose.” He brought gifts of books and prints and flowers to their morning lessons “because you are so good to me,” he told Mendes. He lavished attention on his teacher’s blind brother and retarded aunt. In an apparent
effort to distance himself from the social prejudice that Jews, even in Amsterdam, still suffered, he inscribed on the flyleaf of one book he gave Mendes: “In him there is neither Jew nor Greek, nor servant nor master, nor man nor woman.” He eagerly reported Mendes’s early encouragements to his parents. “Mendes has told [Vincent] that he is pretty confident that he will complete his studies,” Anna reported with relief in July.

The need to vindicate his teacher’s confidence only made Vincent redouble his already fanatic efforts. Mendes vividly recalled watching from his study window as Vincent approached for his lesson with grim determination in every step. “I still see him … without an overcoat … crossing the wide square … with books under his right arm, pressed closely against his body … his head to the wind.”

But there were signs of trouble right from the start. The work did not yield readily to Vincent’s ardor. “It does not come to me so easily and quickly as I could wish,” he admitted. He tried to reassure himself that “one should get used to it,” and that “practice makes perfect.” He searched for excuses. “To persevere in simple regular study after all those emotional years is not always easy,” he explained to Theo. But within a few weeks of starting, his reports shifted from the language of optimism to the language of obligation. Doubts began to cloud his determination. He prayed for a lightning bolt to restore his conviction. “After a period of disappointment and pain,” he imagined, “one gets to a time of life where our fervent desires and wishes are fulfilled
at a stroke
.” Without that lightning, however, Vincent saw less and less hope of success. “Humanly speaking,” he conceded, “one would say it cannot happen.” He compared himself to the prophet Elijah, waiting for the “small, still voice” of God to speak from the cave. “What is impossible to man,” he reassured Theo, and himself, “is possible to Him.”

But months passed and lightning did not strike. No voice spoke. With his low threshold for frustration and his peripatetic mind, Vincent found distractions increasingly irresistible. His trips to Mendes for lessons turned into meandering excursions through the picturesque Jewish Quarter. His walks grew longer and took him farther and farther afield. He walked to the sea at Zeeburg, to the Jewish cemeteries at the fringes of the city, to the “farms and meadows” farther still. His visits to booksellers offered shopping opportunities for books not on any reading list. “I invent some errand to go there whenever possible,” he admitted, because bookshops “always remind me that there are good things in the world.” In a startling hint of disaffection, he complained to Theo about his nightly Bible reading: “When that is finished I will move on to something worthwhile.” His letters, both to Theo and to his parents, grew longer and more frequent (sometimes two a day) and betray a restive mind held in check only by increasingly defensive vows of dedication and self-discipline.

By midsummer, with a heat wave scorching the city and bringing its canals to a stinking boil, Vincent’s great enthusiasm had been rendered down to a series of growling complaints. What could be more “oppressive,” he wrote bitterly, than “Greek lessons in the heart of Amsterdam, in the heart of the Jewish quarter, on a hot and stifling summer afternoon, with the feeling that many difficult examinations await you, arranged by very learned and shrewd professors.” He complained that his “continuous plodding” produced only “meager satisfaction” and “no results.” He began to blame others for his misery and pronounced a bold judgment on his work: “I do not like it.” For the first time, he even allowed himself to imagine failure. “When I think the eyes of so many are fixed on me,” he wrote,

Now when he asked himself why he should go on, “notwithstanding everything that seems against me,” the answer came back filled with desperation: “so that I shall know what to answer to those reproaches that threaten me.”

Nevertheless, when the time came in August for Vincent’s first review by Uncle Stricker, it was agreed that he should be allowed to continue. As Vincent put it, with something less than his former enthusiasm, Stricker and Mendes “did not seem to be dissatisfied.”

Dorus had only one complaint about Vincent’s new life in Amsterdam: his son’s persistent habits of brooding and withdrawal. “I wish that he would find a little more cheerfulness,” Dorus wrote, “that he would not remain on the outside of everyday life so much.” Within mere weeks of beginning his studies, Vincent complained of “despondent moods.” “The soul sometimes sinks within us and is fearful,” he confessed. Thoughts of the struggle ahead filled him with such “weariness” that his head ached. “My head is sometimes heavy and often it burns and my thoughts are confused,” he wrote, recording the first ominous signs of the maelstrom to come in the years ahead.

In the house that he shared with his uncle, Vincent felt increasingly a stranger. Rear Admiral Johannes van Gogh was an erect, square-jawed man with long gray hair and “an inordinate love for order,” according to one family member. “His public as well as his private life was lived with military precision.” A veteran of wars on the far side of the world, the hardships of long voyages, and separations from his family that lasted as long as five years, Uncle Jan had little patience for the tempest in his nephew’s head. He had commanded men and ships in war; he had navigated unknown seas; he had sailed the navy’s first
steamships at a time when steam was still a wild and fickle force. Renowned as a dead-on navigator in the worst of storms, and “calm and brave” in adversity, he had earned the admiration of his men, the respect of his superiors, and the honor of his country.

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Now sixty and ending a distinguished career, Jan had taken Vincent into his house “only to please the latter’s parents,” according to sister Lies. Although he occasionally took his nephew on official outings and family visits, the two ate separately, and for the most part, he noticed his nephew only when Vincent’s strange behavior disturbed the commandant’s household. (“I cannot sit up so late in the night any more,” Vincent wrote Theo in October, “Uncle has strictly forbidden it.”) As for Vincent’s growing self-doubts and wavering purpose, nothing could have been more anathema to the stalwart, self-confident Jan, described by the family chronicler as “always sure of what he was doing.” Indeed, the only advice that he apparently ever offered his despondent nephew was a soldierly “Push on.”

Everywhere Vincent turned that fall, he found the same guarded indulgence
and pious exhortations to greater effort. Uncle Stricker took his role as counselor and shepherd seriously. He invited his nephew to dine or to visit with him in his study, where Vincent could enjoy the preacher’s large collection of fine books and a portrait of Calvin by Ary Scheffer. The sixty-year-old Stricker was a witty, amiable man with sad eyes, an under-chin beard like a hairbrush, and an eccentric taste in biblical verses. (He once collected all the passages in which the word “manure,” or “dung,” appeared.) Although known as a popularizer of the “new” theology, his conservative inclinations in matters of both head and heart made him an unreceptive audience for either Vincent’s evangelical enthusiasm or his tortured self-examination. Stricker also held the purse strings: Dorus had deposited with him the money for Vincent’s expenses—a failure of trust that had to rankle Vincent, however justified.

For a while, it seemed that Reverend Meyjes of the Westerkerk might fill the vacuum of sympathy and companionship. Vincent described the forty-six-year-old preacher as “a very gifted man [of] great talent and great faith.… He made a deep impression upon me.” He visited Meyjes’s study, where they talked about England and the older man’s experiences ministering to “workmen and their wives.” At Meyjes’s house near the church, Vincent met the preacher’s family. “They are such nice people,” he reported to Theo. But, for reasons that are not clear, the relationship with Meyjes soon petered out. Alarmed perhaps by the onslaught of attention that always accompanied Vincent’s admiration, Meyjes began to withdraw: first through neglect, then through outright avoidance.

One family came closer than any other to filling the persistent void. Uncle Stricker had a daughter named Cornelia Vos, known to the family as Kee. She lived with her husband and their four-year-old son near the Westerkerk, where Vincent often visited on his Sunday rounds. Homely and bookish, but possessed of a serene disposition, the thirty-one-year-old Kee was fiercely devoted to her sickly husband Cristoffel, who had been forced to abandon his career as a preacher because of a lung disease, and to her son, Jan. Vincent came away from an early visit intoxicated, as he always was, by the image of perfect family life. “They love each other truly,” he wrote. “When one sees them side by side in the evening, in the kindly lamplight of their little living room, quite close to the bedroom of their boy, who wakes up every now and then and asks his mother for something, it is an idyll.”

Like most of the families to which Vincent was drawn, the Voses had been touched—and ennobled—by tragedy. Only two months before Vincent’s arrival, their younger son, a one-year-old, had died. An air of suffering and grief still suffused the family tableau, and Vincent breathed it in. “They have known days of anxiety and sleepless nights and fears and troubles, too,” he wrote, referring both to the ghost of the dead infant and to the father’s illness. But the same drama that attracted Vincent also excluded him. With the onset of winter
weather, Cristoffel’s condition worsened and his wounded family closed around him. Eventually, the Voses, like the Meyjeses, faded out of Vincent’s letters. Unlike the latter, however, the Voses would reappear in his life years later to wreak unimaginable havoc.