Van Gogh (58 page)

He bought linens for the beds, cutlery for the kitchen, and flowers for the window, curtly dismissing Theo’s concerns about the expense: “It cost what it cost.” He bought a new mattress for the attic bedroom that he would share with Sien and carefully stuffed it himself. He decorated his big north-facing studio “like a comfortable barge” (“I love my studio the way a sailor loves his ship,” he said), then papered it with his own studies and a selection of his most precious prints: Scheffer’s
Christ
, Holl’s
Foundling
, and Millet’s
Sower
. Over the crib, he hung Rembrandt’s
Reading the Bible
.

“Now, thank God,” he announced, “this little nest is ready.”

Alone in a new home, anxiously awaiting Sien’s return, Vincent’s imagination finally slipped its strained moorings. On a stormy night in early July, he looked around the empty apartment and the image of domesticity overwhelmed him. The sight of the empty iron cradle, especially, “gripped” him in a reverie of family feeling. “I cannot look at it without emotion,” he wrote Theo later that night. He pictured himself “sitting down next to the woman I love with a baby in the cradle beside us,” and that vision triggered a rush of treasured images of motherhood and the “eternal poetry” of Christmas. In all of them, he saw hope—“a light in the darkness, a brightness in the middle of a dark night.”

He ended his letter to Theo that night with a question: “Do you think that Father would go on being cold and finding fault—beside a cradle?”

Cradle
, J
ULY
1882,
LETTER SKETCH, CHALK ON PAPER
(
Illustration credit 17.3
)

—

THROUGHOUT THE SPRING
and summer, in a fury of letter writing, Vincent fought to make Theo share his vision of domestic bliss.

Theo had telegraphed his displeasure early on by refusing to make any comment on the centerpiece of Vincent’s argument, the drawing
Sorrow
, despite his brother’s repeated promptings. A letter in mid-May with fifty francs enclosed—enough for Vincent to avoid eviction for a few more weeks—signaled at least that Theo had not deserted him. In the accompanying note, however, Theo unequivocally rejected Vincent’s illusion of family. He accused Sien of duplicity and Vincent of gullibility: she had “tricked him” and he had “allowed himself to be taken in,” Theo said. Vincent had no choice but to “give her up.” Putting aside what must have been a deep sense of betrayal (all those plaintive letters and cries of desperate need—all deceptions), Theo urged a simple solution: “Pay her off.” If Vincent wanted to save Sien from returning to the street, he could give her money or set her up in his will, Theo advised, but under no circumstances should he marry her. He warned his brother against “obstinacy” in this matter. “[Do not] wantonly insist on having your own way.”

But Vincent’s vision would not be denied. “It is my decided intention to marry her as soon as possible,” he wrote back defiantly the same day. One long letter followed another, sometimes two in a single day, as he fought furiously to reverse his brother’s judgment. He piled argument on argument in a constantly shifting mix of honesty and deception, confession and manipulation, passion and polemic.

Expressions of tenderness and devotion (“I feel a great calm and brightness and cheerfulness at the thought of her”) were followed by sober pledges of economy and pragmatism (“I can’t tell you how useful she is to me”). In one letter, he boldly seized the moral high ground (“First and foremost for me is this:
I will not deceive or forsake a woman”
) and loftily dismissed
“l’opinion publique.”
But in another letter the same day, he argued that marrying Sien was “the only means of stopping the world talking,” and worried instead about being “reproached with an illicit relationship.” He claimed a religious mandate to marry Sien (“It is God’s will that man does not live alone but with a wife and child”) but also defended marriage as the obvious solution to the need for safe, dependable sex.

He fought fiercely on behalf of the images in his head. He painted in increasingly vivid strokes the cartoon of fallen womanhood and rescue by love that he so cherished. “She would die if she had to walk the streets again,” he pleaded. By marrying her he could “save Sien’s life” and prevent her from “falling back into that terrible state of illness and misery in which I found her.” He bolstered that image with reports from her doctors detailing how delicate her health remained, and warned darkly that Theo’s rejection could trigger “a prolapse of the
womb that might be incurable.” At one point, he even claimed that the doctor had
prescribed
marriage: “Her first remedy, the most important medicine, was to have a home of her own; that is what he kept insisting on.” To refuse her that now, Vincent pronounced, “would be murder.”

He invoked both the heartbreaking tableau of Sien and her baby (“so quiet, so delicate, so touching, just like an etching”), and his prerogatives as The Artist (“My profession allows me to undertake this marriage”). He and Sien would live together “like real Bohemians,” Vincent imagined; and because of her, he would “become a better artist.” Revealing new details of the cold reception he received at the Stricker house in Amsterdam (“I felt that my love—so true, so honest and strong—had literally been
beaten to death”
), he claimed a Christlike martyrdom for love: “After death there is resurrection.
Resurgam
[I will rise again].”

In support of these images, Vincent recruited a new and formidable ally, Émile Zola. He had only recently been introduced to the novels of the great French writer, probably by his brief friend Breitner. Originally impressed by Zola’s vivid descriptions of Paris as if seen from a high window, Vincent was quickly drawn into the alternate reality of Zola’s multivolume Rougon-Macquart saga: a world of thwarted ambition, falls from grace, and impossible loves; a world in which, again and again, typology is fate. “This Émile Zola is a glorious artist,” he wrote Theo in July, as he devoured one novel after another. “Read as much of [him] as you can.”

In particular, he cited
Le ventre de Paris
(
The Belly of Paris
), Zola’s celebration of the triumph of bohemian humanity over bourgeois orthodoxy. Vincent cast himself not as Claude Lantier, the book’s ne’er-do-well artist, but as Madame François, a kindly woman who rescues the book’s forlorn hero, Florent. It was an image of salvation that reverberated past differences of class and sex to the core of Vincent’s relationship with both Sien and his brother—as both rescuer and rescued. “What do you think of Mme. François, who lifted poor Florent into her cart and took him home when he was lying unconscious in the middle of the road?” he asked Theo pointedly. “I think Mme. François is truly humane; and I have done, and will do, for Sien what I think someone like Mme. François would have done for Florent.”

In Paris, this torrent of hyperventilating rhetoric and delusional imagery backfired. Instead of winning approval for the marriage, Vincent’s arguments prompted Theo to question his brother’s sanity. Raising the ghost of Gheel, he warned Vincent that their parents might again seek guardianship over him when they heard about the proposed marriage. At this, Vincent erupted in a fury of indignation that spilled over weeks of letters. Coming at a time when Mauve and Tersteeg were already attacking him, and the threat of eviction left him open to charges of “incompetence in financial affairs” (another basis for guardianship), talk of committal only deepened his paranoia. If his parents had
the “will and the temerity” to try to commit him, he warned Theo, he would subject them to the high costs and “public disgrace” of a protracted court fight. Or worse. He menacingly reported the case of a man who had been unjustly placed in guardianship by his parents, “then bashed his guardian’s brains in with a poker.” According to Vincent, the killer was acquitted on a claim of “self-defense.”

Vincent’s dire warnings and desperate pleadings did succeed in wresting from his brother a raise in his stipend: from one hundred to one hundred and fifty francs a month. (Ever skeptical of Vincent’s budgeting, Theo insisted on sending the money in three installments, on the first, tenth, and twentieth of each month.) But on the crucial issue, Theo remained resolute: he would not condone the marriage to Sien. Nor would he agree to continue supporting Vincent if he chose to marry her anyway. He did, however, agree to come and visit his brother’s new “household” in early August. For Vincent, with his unshakable faith in the power of images, this was enough to keep hope alive. “I wonder what you will say about the new house,” he wrote anxiously, “and also what you will think of Sien when you see her and the new little baby. I hope with all my heart that you will feel some sympathy.”

With his entire fantasy of house, wife, and family now dependent on Theo’s sympathy, Vincent’s letters underwent a radical shift in tone: from self-destructive defiance to flattery, affection, and appeasement. “Brother, I think of you a very great deal these days,” he wrote in early July, “because everything that I have is really from you: my lust for life and my energy, too.” He reaffirmed his oft-broken promise to “save and economize in all respects,” renounced his melancholic disposition, and repledged himself to “dogged work” despite continuing ill health.

In his sketchpad and on his easel, too, Vincent tried to make amends for his winter of defiance. After months of angrily championing figure drawing to the exclusion of all else, he embraced the landscape imagery that Theo had long urged on him. He quietly dropped his plans for a summer of drawing from the nude and instead undertook sketching trips to Scheveningen and made images of pollard willows, meadowed vistas, and bleaching grounds “[with] a real Dutch character and sentiment.” “I am quite taken up by landscape,” he assured his brother.

In an even more dramatic reversal, he relaxed his draftsman’s fist and returned to the delicate challenges of watercolor, long pressed on him in vain by Mauve and Tersteeg, as well as Theo. “I have a great urge to start
painting
again,” he announced, implausibly attributing the sudden volte-face to his larger studio, better light, and a cupboard to store his paints “so they will not make too much dirt and mess.” As if apologizing for the past, he revisited earlier images and reworked them in color, then informed Theo: “I think you will like them now.”

Knowing that no truce would please Theo more than a family truce, Vincent even reached out to his parents, setting aside weeks of bitter denunciations over guardianship and Gheel to reopen a cordial correspondence (without a word about Sien). He laid plans to invite his father to The Hague so that he, too, could see Vincent’s new home and feel the power of its imagery. “I shall beg Father to make another trip here,” he reported his plan to Theo.

Only two weeks before Theo’s visit, this image of reconciliation was put to the test. On the morning of July 18, H. G. Tersteeg appeared in the doorway of Schenkweg no. 136. There he encountered the magical tableau that Vincent hoped would change hearts: Sien with the baby at her breast.

“What is the meaning of that woman and that child?” Tersteeg demanded. “Is this your model or is she something else?” Vincent, caught by surprise, stammered a defense, but Tersteeg dismissed his claims of family as “ridiculous.” “Have you gone mad?” he exclaimed. “This is certainly the product of an unsound mind and temperament.” He threatened to write Vincent’s parents to inform them of the new travesty and humiliation their son had visited on his family. He called Vincent “as foolish as a man who wants to drown himself.” But he saved the cruelest cut for last. On his way out, as he passed Sien, he told Vincent, “You will make that woman unhappy.”

As soon as he left, Vincent seized pen and paper and wrote Theo a letter bursting with belated indignation. He called Tersteeg “unsympathetic, domineering, indelicate, indiscreet,” and railed against his “meddling in my most intimate affairs” and his “policeman-like mood.” “I believe he would look on quite cold-bloodedly while Sien was drowning,” Vincent wrote acidly, “not lifting a finger, and call it a boon to society.” Tersteeg’s accusation that Vincent must have gone mad to take a wife and children triggered an especially fierce paroxysm of denial: