Van Gogh (68 page)

Vincent left The Hague in search of Theo. On the moors of Drenthe, he seemed to imagine, the brothers might finally find the mythic union they had pledged each other on the road to Rijswijk. It was a redemption second only to the one that always beckoned him from an even more distant moor. Vincent had sacrificed everything—wife, family, home, art—to this elusive vision of perfect brotherhood. Soon it would be Theo’s turn to do the same.

O
N THE SEVEN-HOUR TRAIN TRIP INTO THE DARKNESS, VINCENT
kept a map of Drenthe at his side. In the weeks leading up to his departure, his imagination had wandered over it many times. He had picked as his destination “a large white space devoid of any village names” where canals and roads came to an end. Near it was a body of water called the Zwarte Meer (Black Lake)—“a name to conjure with,” he sighed. Across it was written only one word:
Veenen
—peat moors.

He awoke the next morning to a landscape of unremitting bleakness. The moors—dense, damp, alluvial—stretched to the horizon in every direction. “What kind of attraction could there be in this land of moors as far as one can see,” wrote another visitor to the area three years earlier. “What else can one expect but exhausting monotony?” These were not the sandy heaths of Zundert or the playful dunes of Scheveningen. On these highland bogs, the only trees that survived were the ones planted along the roads—tall, spindly aliens clinging to the high ground. Little but water-loving mosses, like peat, thrived in the dense, sooty soil—a stew of long-dead vegetation as dark and impervious as its ancient cousin, coal. Like coal, peat could be burned—crucial in a treeless land of long, cold winters—and years of harvesting the precious fuel had robbed the landscape of even its desolate grandeur. Everywhere Vincent looked, the moor had been stripped of its layers of peat and scored with a grid of canals (ditches, really) for transporting the bounty away—a process that flayed the high heaths of Drenthe as surely as coal mining had disemboweled the Borinage.

Both the ditches and the bleakness drained into the little town of Hoogeveen, where Vincent stepped off the train. He picked it because it was marked by a red dot on his map: “[It] is classed as a town on the map,” he wrote, “but in reality it doesn’t even have a tower.” A makeshift frontier town on the edge of a
watery wilderness, Hoogeveen was made up almost entirely of the simple modern brick houses that Vincent loathed. A widening in the main canal, grandly dubbed a “harbor,” had been dug when Hoogeveen was still at the center of the peat industry. But by now the surrounding bogs had been stripped bare and the big extraction operations had moved their armies of impoverished cutters and dredgers farther east. The few residents who remained eked out a living transporting dried peat from moor to market. Barge after barge mounded with the stuff arrived at the harbor every day—some drawn by horses, some by people. Women and children in mud-caked rags waded out to unload them. At the canal’s edge, emaciated cows drank from the foul water, while on the sandy paths above them, old men led delivery carts pulled by even more emaciated dogs.

So extreme was the poverty that Dutch order had begun to lose its grip. Years of economic depression, especially in agricultural goods, brutal working conditions, and official indifference (even the dogs were taxed) had stripped civility nearly to the bone of anarchy. “The people are left to fend for themselves too much,” complained a local evangelist. “They are almost wild.” Drenthe had paid a heavy price for the government’s policy of relocating criminals and paupers to the country’s most inhospitable regions to serve as cheap labor for Amsterdam investors. Barren earth and barren hearts had combined to produce not just a desolate, lonely landscape, but a country within a country: a Siberia of high infant mortality, rampant alcohol abuse, and unrepentant criminality; a wilderness still wild in a country that had been settled for five thousand years.

“The heath is magnificent,” Vincent exclaimed. “Everything is beautiful here, wherever one goes.”

Vincent had promised his brother, and himself, the Drenthe of his dreams: a land of autumnal beauty and moral authenticity, a place as perfect as their shared memories of Brabant. Nothing less than a vision of paradise could justify abandoning the fiction of family in which he had invested so much. Whether or not that was the Drenthe he saw, that was the Drenthe he reported: “splendid” and “inexpressibly lovely” peat fields; weather as “splendid” and “bracing” as Brabant’s; scenery of “so much nobility, so much dignity, so much gravity” it tempted him to stay forever. “I am very glad that I am here,” he wrote, “for, boy, it is very beautiful.”

He looked at the wretched sod houses that peasants shared with their livestock and pronounced them, too, “very beautiful.” He compared the quaint barges loaded with peat to those the brothers had seen on the Rijswijk canal, and the miserable women unloading them to the picturesque farm laborers of Millet. He described the innkeeper at his lodging house near the station as “a real coolie.” He delighted in the creased, careworn faces he saw everywhere among the townspeople, calling them “physiognomies that put one in mind of pigs or crows.” In their plodding sullenness, he saw “melancholy of a healthy kind.”
“The more I walk around here,” he insisted, “the better I like Hoogeveen.… It is more and more beautiful here … it is so beautiful here.”

So beautiful, in fact, that only a day after arriving, he announced plans to take a barge trip into the heart of the great labor, where the peat operations were just winding down for the season. He would traverse the entire breadth of the peat country right up to the Prussian frontier, he declared, because “Further into the country it will be even more beautiful.”

Vincent bolstered this idyllic vision with images by all the brothers’ favorite landscape painters, from the Golden Age to the Barbizon School. He described the heath as nothing but “miles and miles” of Jan van Goyen, Philips Koninck, Georges Michel, Jules Dupré, and Théodore Rousseau. Through repeated mentions of Michel, in particular, whose stormy skyscapes had long made him a hero to both Van Gogh brothers, Vincent proclaimed the Romantic allure of his new home. He filled his letters with elaborate word paintings, as poetic as any he ever wrote, depicting everything from the voluptuousness of the women to the austere beauty of the moors:

Then he translated these visions into paint. After a year of resistance, he capitulated completely to Theo’s pleas and took up his oil brushes again. “You know quite well,” he wrote, “that painting must be the main thing as much as possible.” Vowing to paint “a hundred serious studies,” he ventured into the countryside with his easel and paint box in search of picturesque subjects to convince Theo of his Drenthe. He painted peat cutters’ houses (little more than piles of sod held together by sticks) silhouetted against a hazy dusk; red sunsets over birch groves and marshy meadows; vistas of heath and bog with vast, boldly brushed skies, empty horizons, and not a figure in sight. He praised the “serious, sober character” of the country and explained how it demanded the very light, color, and elaboration that Theo had been calling for in his art.

In this Eden of imagery, real or not, Vincent found hope for yet another new beginning. Within a few weeks, he sent some of his paintings to Paris and boldly recommended that Theo show them to dealers. He imagined returning to The Hague in triumph with portfolios full of “characteristic bits of nature” that were sure to “find sympathy” among buyers, especially in England. He compared himself to a character in a Daudet novel, a “simple fellow … absorbed in his
work … careless and shortsighted, wanting little for himself,” who nevertheless finds fortune in the end. On his easel, he crowned this newest vision of redemption with a very old image: a sower striding improbably over the peat bogs of Drenthe, flinging his seeds on the barren moor.

NOT EVEN VINCENT
could sustain this delusion for long. Loneliness—“that particular torture”—soon overwhelmed him. In the immense emptiness of the high heaths, “one could wander for hours without seeing a living soul,” wrote a visitor to Drenthe in 1880, “except perhaps a shepherd, his dog and his sheep, of which the dog is still the most interesting creature.” Mail arrived slowly and intermittently, underscoring the remoteness of the place. “I am so out of everything,” he complained. Nature, no matter how “stimulating and beautiful,” was not enough, he confessed. “There must also be human hearts who search for and feel the same things.” He found no such hearts in Hoogeveen. The clannish townspeople regarded the odd stranger from the west with suspicion, or contempt. On the street, they stopped and stared, taking him for a “poor peddler.” When he knocked on strangers’ doors in search of picturesque subject matter—as he had done in Etten—town gossips began to whisper about the “lunatic” in their midst. Vincent rued his estrangement (“I take it so much to heart that I do not get on better with people”), but responded in kind. He called the town “wretched” and the locals “primitives” who did not behave “as reasonably as, for instance, their pigs.”

The mounting antagonism cut Vincent off from the only intimacy he had known in The Hague: his models. He had come to Drenthe with high hopes for more and cheaper models, convinced that he could impress the local peasants just as he had in Etten. But Vincent was no longer the aspiring gentleman artist of that summer two years earlier. The battles with Mauve and Tersteeg, the insulation of the Schenkweg studio, the fevers of both body and mind, had changed him. Sharper, more brittle, more bitter, quicker to anger, closer to panic, Vincent now lived at the limit of his tolerances. Nor were the peat laborers and bargemen of Hoogeveen the naïve peasants of Brabant. As rumors about his strange behavior spread, the people were emboldened in their rejection. “They laughed at me, and made fun of me,” he reported dismally to Theo less than two weeks after arriving. “I could not finish some studies of the figure I had started because of the unwillingness of the models.”

He blamed his humiliations on the lack of a decent studio or unfavorable light and assailed the locals for not “listening to reasonable, rational demands.” As in The Hague, he burned with frustration over “the people whom one would love to have as models, but cannot get.” That frustration led him to the only other form of paid intimacy he knew: prostitutes. In a long and plaintive letter,
he extolled the virtues of these “sisters of charity” and defended his persistent need for their companionship. “I see nothing wrong in them,” he explained; “I feel something human in them.”

He missed Sien and the boy. The second thoughts that had dogged his departure from The Hague followed him to Drenthe like Furies. The memory of her “cuts right through me,” he confessed only days after arriving. “I think of her with such tender regret.” He saw her everywhere, like a “phantom.” At the sight of a poor woman on the heath, or a mother and child traveling by barge, or an empty cradle at an inn, his “heart melted” and his “eyes grew moist.” He wrestled yet again with his justifications for leaving and the possibility of her salvation. “Women of her kind are infinitely—oh, infinitely—more to be pitied than censured,” he wrote. “Poor, poor, poor creature.” He longed for her company on the companionless moors and bitterly regretted that he had not pressed harder to marry her. “It might have saved her,” he imagined, “and also put an end to my own great mental anguish, which has now unfortunately been doubled.” He waited each day for a letter from her, until the anxiety almost crushed him. “The fate of the woman and the fate of my poor little boy and the other child cuts my heart to shreds,” he wailed. “There must be something wrong.” In a panic of guilt and dread, he sent her money.

Vincent never told Theo how much money he gave Sien when he left (and afterward). But all of it was money he could not afford. As a result, less than a week after his arrival in Drenthe, a familiar lament arose: “My money is almost gone … I don’t know how I shall manage.” The rent was due; the locals refused to extend credit. He couldn’t repay a loan from Rappard—an embarrassment that stymied his plan for a reunion in the far north. As his money ran out, so did his supplies. He had left The Hague provisioned for only a week or two of painting, even though he knew nothing would be available in Drenthe and any replacements would have to be ordered from The Hague. But he had left the city with many bills unpaid, and no one there would extend him credit either. In the meantime, the approaching winter drained the landscape of color, foreclosing important subjects. “I have found so much beauty here,” he cried out in frustration. “Losing time is the greatest expense.” Without sufficient supplies, he had to put off his deeper excursions into the moorlands—the arduous forays that had preoccupied his first days in this alien country. “It would be too reckless to undertake [them] if one did so without a stock of materials,” he conceded bitterly.