Van Gogh (36 page)

Vincent began preaching the apotheosis of “the simple people” (as he called them) in the winter of 1878. But the idea already had deep roots in his imagination. In his childhood, of course, real peasants were rarely seen and never discussed. Vincent had little contact with the yeoman farmers that his father supervised; even less contact with the invisible and often landless peasants who stood at the bottom of Anna van Gogh’s social ladder; and no contact whatsoever with the emerging class of workers in sparsely industrialized Brabant. He lacked any actual experience to contradict either his parents’ view of peasants as “rough, uncivilized, sensual, churlish, and aggressive,” or the new, romanticized Victorian view scornfully summarized by George Eliot: “Idyllic ploughmen … jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds mak[ing] bashful love under the hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers danc[ing] in the chequered shade.” Like most sons of the bourgeoisie, Vincent often conflated these conflicting narratives—noble farmer, beast of burden, libertine fantasy—so that his imagination could be equally engaged by reverential portrayals of peasants at prayer and by leering depictions of country girls in come-hither poses, while remaining indifferent to the horrifying plight of actual peasants.

Vincent had been fired by evangelical ardor toward the underclasses once
before, in England, largely on the basis of reading Eliot’s
Silas Marner
and
Adam Bede
. But that zeal had since faded in the white heat of his identification with his father. As recently as the previous summer, his only requirement for a future parish was that it should be “picturesque.” But the vision that suddenly seized him in Amsterdam that winter went far beyond the romantic idealization of the prints on his wall, or the homesteading mandate of his father’s ministry, or even Eliot’s empathetic rustic realism. Now he imagined peasants and workers not just as icons of Romantic sentiment or paragons of religious piety, but as objects of emulation. “It is right to try to become
like
[them],” he said: they hold fast to their faith despite unending toil and utter hopelessness; they bear their labors with patience and dignity; and they die, like the old farmer in Zundert, serene in their ultimate redemption. In short, they had
it
.

Vincent’s new vision of blessed labor was accompanied by a blaze of new imagery. Dressmakers, coopers, woodcutters, and diggers crowded baptisms and benedictions off his walls. Works by the patron saint of peasant painters, Jean-François Millet, returned to their “Holy Ground” in the pantheon of his imagination. These images had “soul,” he argued. Their subjects’ hard work and humble appearance proved them “richer in spirit,” and therefore “more beautiful.”
“Dat is het,”
he declared.

This was a definition of
it
that went far beyond the merits of a painting, beyond the synthesis of artistic perfection and divine inspiration, beyond the “cheer and feeding of the inner life.” In Vincent’s flailing imagination,
it
had become a way of life—a calling higher than his father’s piety or his brother’s aesthetics—a summons to apply himself without reservation or compromise to the creation of “truthful work.” “It must be good to die in the knowledge that one has done some truthful work,” he wrote, “and to know that, as a result, one will live on in the memory of at least a few and leave a good example for those who come after.”

It was, of course, an impossibly demanding standard for an awkward, alienated young man who confessed to feeling “like Robinson Crusoe.” Nevertheless, Vincent embraced the new calling with all his singular intensity. After hearing the French preacher at the Waalse Kerk, he sought out the church’s regular minister, Ferdinand Henri Gagnebin. Considered a “radical” in Amsterdam’s staid clerical community, the Swiss Gagnebin encouraged Vincent to pursue his new calling. “Forget yourself completely and throw yourself into your work without reservation,” he advised. Vincent found similar encouragement at the cloistered English Church, where he spent more and more of his Sundays as his devotion to his lessons and to his own church waned. The minister there, William Macfarlane, introduced him to another in Amsterdam’s circle of evangelical preachers, an Englishman named August Charles Adler. His mission was converting Jews to Christianity.

A converted Jew himself, the forty-two-year-old Adler had recently come to Amsterdam under the auspices of the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews, a radical offshoot of the Church of England. With its large and mostly impoverished Jewish population, Amsterdam had long been one of the continental centers for “the fight with Jewish ignorance and darkness,” as one account referred to it. Despite fierce and sometimes violent resistance from the local rabbinate, the Society had built a mission church on Barndesteeg, at the edge of the Jewish Quarter.

On February 17, 1878, Vincent began teaching Sunday school in the basement of the Zionskapel. The extent to which he participated in the church’s larger evangelizing mission—as measured every year by an announcement of the number of Jews baptized—is not known, as his letters to Theo slowed to a concealing trickle. He may have accompanied Adler on his frequent evangelizing trips into Jewish neighborhoods, or joined the church’s crew of colporteurs who delivered the Gospels door to door in the warrenlike Quarter. Adler shared Vincent’s love of George Eliot and recommended that he read
Romola
, Eliot’s novel based on the great firebrand preacher Savonarola. Vincent admired the bald, bearlike Englishman and no doubt confided in him his new dream of a life serving the needy, of which he considered the Sunday school class the first “small light.” “Adler is not the man to let [that light] go out,” he told Theo.

The weeks following Vincent’s start at the Zionskapel saw a burst of missionary activity and enthusiasm. He proselytized to distant relatives and even at Roman Catholic churches. By the beginning of March, flush with new zeal, he seemed poised to shake loose from his studies and embrace his new mission as a catechist: a simple teacher of the Bible. He would spend his life as a bringer of comfort, an annotator of prints, a maker of maps—as a disciple of
it
.

But Vincent’s parents did not share his vision. “A Catechist!” Dorus wailed. “That does not put bread on the table.” This was the final indignity. Catechists occupied the lowest rung on the ladder of religious work; they were low-status, low-paid readers of rote and reciters of syllogisms to children. Years of effort and worry, thousands of guilders, sleepless nights, wearying travel, appeals for family support, for what? For a
catechist?
Not that the news was unexpected. Dorus had returned from the February review discouraged about his son’s prospects for success. Soon afterward, Vincent wrote a “strange, contradictory letter” complaining about his studies and probably mentioning the dreaded word “catechist” for the first time. That was followed by a letter from Uncle Jan “concerned about [Vincent’s] study,” At some point, Uncle Stricker, who met with Vincent regularly, added his voice to the rising chorus of worry.

“It is a torment for our souls,” Dorus wrote Theo. Anna compared it to a death in the family. “He wants a job in the church but without studying,” she wrote in horror; “what a prospect for his honor—and ours!” They blamed this latest
catastrophe on the new company Vincent was keeping—“ultra-orthodox” ministers like Adler, Gagnebin, and Macfarlane—whose radical ideas had led him into “an even higher number of mistakes in his work,” according to Dorus. But mostly they blamed Vincent. “There is such a close connection between human errors and sad results,” Dorus wrote. “He knows no joy of living.” They wrung their hands in exasperation. “We did all we could to set him on an honorable course!” they said. “It is as if he chooses on purpose what leads to difficulties.”

Vincent’s failure to write on his birthday (March 30) was the last straw. In a stern letter, Dorus demanded that he quit his job at Adler’s Sunday school. Vincent objected in a long plaintive reply, but Dorus stood firm, citing “the danger that [Vincent] would give his heart to the lesser thing and that the main thing would be neglected because of it.” The dispute seemed headed inexorably toward open defiance.
“Enfin
, we just sit and wait,” Dorus wrote with weary resignation. “It is like the stillness that comes before the storm.”

In early April, trying one last time to broker a family peace, Theo traveled to Amsterdam to see his brother. Dorus and Anna had kept him vividly informed of their ordeal. But the relationship between brothers no longer had the reparative power it once did. The events of the previous summer had left a bitter aftertaste. Despite continuing protestations of fraternal devotion, Vincent never fully forgave Theo for abandoning his plan to quit Goupil and join Vincent in the pursuit of
it
. Nor did it help that Theo and Dorus had visited each other frequently during the intervening months. Inevitably, Vincent began to question his brother’s ultimate loyalty.

In mid-March, his most paranoid suspicions seemed confirmed by the news that Theo would be transferred to Goupil in Paris. After his rebellious episode the previous year, Theo had applied to work in one of Goupil’s other branches. He had even learned English in case he was sent to London. But Paris was still the capital of the Goupil empire, and was now also the site of the 1878 Exposition Universelle, an extravaganza of art, science, and technology from five continents. “It is truly an extraordinary chance to cast your eye over that colossal world around you,” Dorus wrote proudly. To Vincent, however, Paris was the site of his most painful failure, the family disgrace from which he seemed unable to escape. Now Theo would go to Paris to take Vincent’s job—and his legacy—in a devastating rejection not just of Vincent’s relentless advice and of their perfect brotherhood, but also of
it
.

If Theo’s announcement did not open the floodgates of self-reproach and resentment, the jubilation in Etten surely did. “Dear Theo, remain the pride and joy of the parents who are being shaken so often,” they wrote. “It’s a ray of sunshine in these uneasy days.”

Barely two weeks later, Theo came to Vincent on his peacemaking mission. By all indications, the brothers fought bitterly. The arguments spilled into Vincent’s
letters in the weeks that followed, as he tried to have the last word against the seemingly irrefutable argument of his brother’s success. He lashed out at Theo’s easy, superficial life. He mocked his “polite circles” and “fine surroundings.” He called him “narrow-minded and over-cautious,” and accused him of “straying from all that is natural” and thereby losing his “real and inner life.” He contrasted his brother’s smooth road to success with his own rocky path, and he dismissed Theo’s coming adventure in Paris with an ominous warning: “Though there may be a bright dawn, there is also a dark midnight and a burning, oppressive heat at noon.”

As for his career, he had no choice but to go forward as a catechist, Vincent insisted; anything else would be “backsliding.” Just turned twenty-five, he needed to “become accomplished” in something: to establish a “way of thinking and acting” independent of his father and his past. He defended Adler and his Sunday-school work with dewy-eyed passion. In response to the inevitable question “What will you do for money?” Vincent turned to a higher authority. “Happy is he who has faith in God,” he declared, making an argument that he would spend the rest of his life trying to prove, “for he will in the end be tided over all life’s difficulties, albeit not without trouble and sorrow.”

If anything, Theo’s opposition, like his father’s, only stiffened Vincent’s resolve. Through page after page of convoluted argument and frantic self-encouragement, he reaffirmed his commitment to
it
in an ecstasy of fervor. “The need is for nothing less than the infinite and the miraculous,” he declared, “and a man does well to be satisfied with nothing less.” He marshaled long lists of books and poetry and images, in addition to the Bible, to which he intended to dedicate his life as
“un homme intérieur et spirituel.”
He would join the ranks of authors, poets, and artists who had “thought a little more deeply and searched and worked and loved a little more than the rest, who [had] plumbed the depths of the sea of life.”

When Theo spoke of Vincent’s duty to family, Vincent proclaimed a higher duty to
it
—“that divine spark,” that “fire in one’s soul”—a duty to “keep loving faithfully what is truly worth loving.” Of course, he would “encounter genuine sadness and real disappointments,” he said, but for love to be true, it must be tested by life—“as gold is tested by fire.”

Propelled by this vision of the
“rayon d’en haut”
(light from above), Vincent finally broke openly with his father. In early June, after Dorus’s deadline for quitting the Zionskapel had passed, Vincent wrote that he intended to remain a catechist and put off his studies until some later date. Dorus immediately offered a compromise: if Vincent would continue his lessons for at least three months (“to become more enlightened and to give him the patience for reflection”), Dorus would try to find a position for him somewhere. Vincent summarily rejected the
offer. He would not return to his studies, but instead would look for missionary work on his own.

By summer, a battle that began with the feints and retreats typical of Van Gogh family disputes had turned into a bitter confrontation—the “explosion” that Dorus had long anticipated. Vincent later described the break and its aftermath in the bitterest terms: “miserable,” “ridiculous,” and “utterly foolish. I still shudder when I think of it,” he wrote.
“Everybody
I had formerly relied upon changed completely, and left me high and dry.” Years later, he would recall ruefully that “a lasting, deep-rooted misunderstanding between Father and myself” began “when I declared that I would not continue with my study in Amsterdam.”

And then, suddenly, on July 5, he came home.

AFTER MONTHS OF DECLARING
his independence in sweeping, defiant terms, and only a little more than a year after embarking on a seven-year program of study, Vincent’s return to Etten marked an abject admission of failure. In later years, he would maintain that he had been railroaded into university study (“I was very skeptical about the plan,” he said). He even claimed that he had purposely failed in his language lessons “so that the shame of giving it up fell on me, and on nobody else.”