Van Gogh (39 page)

From the hewn “hall” at the bottom of the shaft, galleries radiated out in every direction in search of the elusive coal seams, some only inches thick, folded like loose drapery throughout the rocky underworld. As Vincent stumbled down one of these dark alleys toward the distant din of picks, the timbered roof and plank walls lowered and narrowed—he compared the tunnels to “big chimneys.” Puddles of water on the floor spread into a seamless pool. The temperature quickly rose from the freezing hurricane at the shaft, where ventilation was best, to the warmer, windless air of the galleries. Eventually, he was walking bent over through ankle-deep water in “suffocating heat, as heavy as lead.”

Now and then he heard a dull roar in the tunnel ahead “like the rumbling of a storm.” Seconds later an apparition would materialize in the darkness: a horse pulling a train of full tubs. He had to flatten himself against the jagged, slippery walls to let it pass. The miners envied the well-fed horses, who lived their entire lives underground in comfortable warmth and the “good smell of fresh straw kept clean.” Deeper still, where the horses couldn’t go, pit-boys and haulage girls dragged the tubs: the boys shouting foul language as loudly as they could, the girls “snorting and steaming like overloaded mares,” as Zola described them.

Finally, he came to the miners. The gallery did not end so much as fray—dissolving into an ambiguity of tiny chimneys and impossibly narrow tunnels that “seemed to go on forever,” he said. At the end of each one, a miner toiled alone in the darkness. Vincent called these tiny niches
“des caches”:
“hiding places, places where men search.” He compared them to cells in “an underground prison,” or “partitions in a crypt.” “In each of those cells,” he explained to Theo, “a miner in a coarse linen suit, filthy and black as a chimney sweep, is busy hewing coal by the pale light of a small lamp.”

Vincent’s trip into the Marcasse mine in January 1879 represented the high point of his two years in the Borinage. He would descend into the earth at least once more during his stay (in March of that year), but by then he had begun a much more perilous descent: a descent into depths that he would not visit again until ten years later when he was confined in a hospital in Arles for insanity: a descent into the blackest country of all.

THE DROP BEGAN
almost immediately. “We are beginning to worry about him again,” Dorus wrote only weeks after Vincent began his ministry at the Bébé; “troubles show on the horizon.” The Borins did not take to their new preacher, nor he to them. Vincent’s geography-book vision of devout miners confronting darkness and death with a “happy disposition” quickly foundered on the reality of a reticent, clannish people. When he first arrived, he described them to
Theo as “simple and good-natured.” Before long, they had become “ignorant and untaught”—“nervous,” “sensitive,” and “mistrustful.”

He puzzled over their strange regional dialect “which comes out with amazing speed,” he complained. He tried to keep up by speaking his Parisian French as fast as possible—a strategy that only resulted in more misunderstandings and at least one angry altercation. He seemed surprised to discover that most of his congregation could not read, and soon lamented that, as “a man of culture and decency,” he could not find “companionship” in such “uncivilized surroundings.” The miners, too, recognized their new preacher for a stranger. Attendance at his sermons, which he gave in French, started “haphazardly” and soon fell off. Lacking “a miner’s character and temperament,” Vincent lamented, he would “never get along with them or gain their confidence.”

As he always did when reality threatened, Vincent withdrew deeper and deeper into delusion. He stoutly defended the “picturesqueness” of the blighted landscape and the “charm” of the Borins. He compared the black slagheaps to the lovely dunes of Scheveningen. “One has a homelike feeling here,” he maintained, “like on the heath.” Even his trip into the mine could not break his hold on the vision of
it
that had summoned him to the Borinage. He called his six-hour visit to the hellish Marcasse mine “a very interesting expedition.” His account of it reads like a naturalist’s report on the habitat of bugs or birds: filled with technical terms (
maintenages, gredins, accrochage, tailles à droit, tailles à plat
), but not a word of outrage or empathy. While acknowledging the mine’s “bad reputation”—“because many perish in it, either going down or coming up, or through poisoned air, firedamp explosion, water seepage, cave-ins, etc.”—he insisted that life in the mines was better than life in the desolate villages above; and that the miners preferred the permanent night of their work to the “dead and forsaken life” of the upper world, “[just] as mariners ashore are homesick for the sea, notwithstanding all the dangers and hardships which threaten them.”

Vincent barricaded his delusion with images. Everything from the desolate landscape to the sight of injured miners reminded him of a favorite print. The deadly fog created “a fantastic chiaroscuro effect” like “pictures by Rembrandt.” He thought Matthijs Maris might make a “wonderful picture” of the “emaciated, weather-beaten” miners. And if any artist could paint the miners at work in their Stygian cells, he imagined, “[that] would be something new and unheard of.”

Rather than recognize the pandemic of real suffering all around him, he returned to the images of suffering in his favorite books. “There is still so much slavery in the world,” he wrote about
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, “and in this remarkably wonderful book that important question is treated with so much wisdom, so much love, and such zeal and interest in the true welfare of the poor oppressed.” Although he never recorded a disapproving word about the treatment of the
miners in the Borinage—a region notorious even in an insensitive era for its horrendous working conditions—he hailed Dickens’s
Hard Times
as “a masterpiece,” for its “moving and sympathetic portrait of a working man.” At one point, he seemed to admit preferring the facsimile of the poor and oppressed that he found in prints and books to the reality outside his window. “A picture by Mauve or Maris or Israëls,” he insisted, “says more and says it more clearly, than nature herself.”

He preached his delusion. Vincent had come to a region boiling with labor unrest. In the thirty years since Marx and Engels wrote
The Communist Manifesto
in nearby Brussels, the coal miners of the Borinage had spearheaded a socialist workers’ movement that would eventually sweep across the Continent. Wave after wave of bloody strikes and brutal suppressions had spawned a militant union movement supported in communities like Wasmes by a network of clubs, cooperatives, and
mutualités
, all determined to redress the cruelty and injustice of the new capitalist order.

But Vincent’s vision of the miners as Christian heroes did not admit of victimhood. Their misery, like his own, brought them closer to God. They needed Thomas à Kempis, not Karl Marx. Rather than rebel, he exhorted them to celebrate their suffering—rejoice in their sorrow. “God wills that in imitation of Christ, man should live and walk humbly on earth,” he preached, “not reaching for the sky, but bowing to humble things, learning from the Gospel to be meek and humble of heart.” He had come expecting the miners, as the people who “walked in darkness,” to embrace this Kempian message of serene resignation—for him, the ultimate comfort for the wretched and oppressed, just as it was for the ash-cart horse.

Through strikes and work stoppages and “rebellious speeches,” some of which he attended, Vincent clung to that vision. “Child of God, exiled on the earth,” he underlined in the dog-eared psalmbook that he used at the Bébé, “raise your eyes, a little patience, and you will be consoled, going toward God.” But in a community seething with grievances, where wages had fallen by a third in the previous three years and people died by the hundreds in explosions and cave-ins and unchecked epidemics, Vincent’s message only separated him further from the “poor creatures” that he longed to comfort.

Only one path to consolation remained to him: ministering to the sick. The mines of the Borinage discarded hundreds of broken workers every year, burned and crushed, poisoned by gas or cinders or horrific hygiene. The diseased and the dying did not question Vincent’s delusions or parse his sermons. They welcomed the strange Dutchman for the help he offered when so few others did. “There have been many cases of typhoid and malignant fever,” he reported to Theo. “In one house they are all ill with fever and have little or no help, so that the patients have to nurse the patients.”

Vincent threw himself into this tide of suffering with selfless abandon. He visited households quarantined for typhus, offered to do chores, and sat vigil for days. After mine accidents and explosions, he rushed to help care for the injured, including one man who was “burnt from head to toe.” He ripped linen bandages and applied them with wax and olive oil that he sometimes paid for himself. He worked “day and night,” according to one account, sitting beside sickbeds praying and evangelizing, and “fell to his knees with fatigue and joy” when patients recovered.

But it wasn’t enough. Before long, Vincent returned to the familiar dark spiral of self-blame and self-abuse. He refused all food except for bread—no butter—and a gruel of rice and sugar water. He neglected his clothes, washed infrequently, and often walked in the bitter winter weather without a coat. As in Amsterdam and Brussels, he found his accommodations “too luxurious,” and soon moved from the Denis house in Petit Wasmes to a tiny abandoned thatch-roofed hut nearby. He rejected the comfort of a bed and sought out “the hardest wood” from which to make a plank for sleeping. He hung his prints on the hut walls and withdrew deeper and deeper into his private world: tending the sick and injured by day; reading, smoking, studying the Bible, and underlining his psalmbook by night. He lost weight until Denis’s wife feared that in his weakened condition, exposed in his little hut, he would fall victim to the typhoid epidemic that raged all around.

Denis and others in the congregation considered the shack unbefitting a preacher and complained angrily about Vincent’s
“folie religieuse.”
Vincent defended himself by citing Kempis—“the Lord had nowhere to lay
his
head”—but his accusers took that as blasphemy. The combination of dissatisfaction with his preaching, the bizarre self-abasement of his new home, his stubborn refusal to heed advice, and even his manic ministrations to the sick prompted church members to summon an inspector from the Evangelical Committee in Brussels to review their new preacher’s appointment—a clear threat to dismiss him. Only a month after starting his new life, Vincent once again faced imminent failure.

The news came as no surprise in Etten. His letters, with their tales of horrible injuries, rampant disease, and journeys into coal mines, had only fueled his parents’ anxieties. Dorus feared that “being so absorbed in taking care of and watching over the sick and wounded” might distract Vincent from his religious duties. Anna fretted over his appearance because “it must be so dirty there.” They had also received a letter from Madame Denis detailing “the miserable life [Vincent] was leading” in his thatched hovel; as well as one from Vincent himself “confirming our worry that he had no bed, no bedclothes, and no laundry facilities,” Anna reported. In response to the uproar among his congregation, he defied his accusers—“it’s none of their business”—and again defended his
actions by invoking Kempis: “Jesus also acted calmly in the storm,” he wrote, “and the tide might turn.”

But Dorus knew better than to wait. Dodging winter storms, he set out for the Borinage on February 26. By the time he arrived, the inspector, Reverend Rochedieu, had already come and heard the grievances against the new preacher. Rochedieu concluded that Vincent had shown “a regrettable excess of missionary zeal” and delivered a “vigorous lecture” to the wayward young preacher. But apparently it had not been enough to dislodge Vincent from his hut, because that is where his father found him, “lying on a straw-filled sack, and looking appallingly weak and emaciated,” according to an eyewitness account.

Vincent “suffered himself to be led away like a child,” according to the same account, and the next day Dorus took him on a penance trip through the gray snow to visit the three local clergymen in whose hands his fate now precariously rested. In the spirit of the persistent sower, he talked with Vincent about “plans for improvement and change and generating energy.” He extracted vows that Vincent would look after his appearance, obey his church superiors, and only use the little hut “as a workshop or study.”

But no one was fooled. “He is too obstinate and stubborn to take any advice,” Anna despaired. To Theo, Vincent painted a delusional picture of his father’s visit: “He will not easily forget the Borinage,” he wrote the next day; “no one who visits this curious, remarkable and picturesque region can.” But soon after Dorus left, Vincent was seen spitting on the Denis house. “Perhaps,” he wrote his parents defiantly, “things should get worse before they can get better.”

THE EXPLOSION CAME
without warning. The invasion of picks, lamps, and air released forces that had been locked in the earth since its formation. Colorless and odorless, the gas built up in the mine with each blow of the pick, each fall of rock, each load of coal. It took only a single spark—from a malfunctioning lamp or friction on the tub rails—to set it off. That is what happened on April 17, 1879, at the Agrappe mine in Frameries, only two miles from Wasmes.

A flash of methane’s distinctive blue flame began the chain reaction. The explosion sent a wall of pressure down the narrow corridor strong enough to hurl men the length of the gallery and jam them into cracks in the coal face. Veteran miners knew when they heard the rush of gas—“firedamp,” they called it—to dive to the floor, for it was followed instantly by a flame like a blowtorch—the flash—at head height. The wind sucked coal dust from every crevice and suspended it in the air just long enough for the flash to ignite it. Coal dust could turn even a small firedamp flash into a runaway inferno as wind and then fire roared through the mine as if through the barrel of a gun. The pressure wave lifted roof beams off their props, causing new falls; it twisted rails, and hurled
empty tubs through the galleries like bullets. The fire raced through the tunnels at a thousand miles an hour, charring everything in its path—tools, horses, men, children—with the ferocity of a blast furnace.