Van Gogh (69 page)

By the third week of September, his paint box was nearly empty. For the first time since the Borinage, he faced the terrifying prospect of idleness. “I feel inexpressibly melancholy without my work to distract me,” he warned. “I
must
work and work hard, I must
forget myself in my work
, otherwise it will crush me.”

He lashed out at his uncle Cor for not responding to the raft of drawings he had sent from The Hague. Into that silence, Vincent read all the slights and
betrayals of the past. “He seems to have certain unshakable opinions about me,” he wrote of the only family member other than Theo who had actually supported his art. “I certainly need not put up with insults, and it
is
a decided insult that he did not even acknowledge that he had received the last packet of studies. Not a syllable.” In an explosion of bile, he threatened to “attack” his fifty-nine-year-old uncle, “have it out with His Honor,” and “get satisfaction.”

Eventually, Vincent turned the painful memories of the Borinage on the real target of his anger: Theo. He accused his brother of cruelly giving him only enough money to perpetuate his misery, and insisted that not only his career but his relationship with Sien, too, would have succeeded if only Theo had been more generous. “I would rather have stayed with the woman,” he wrote, “[but] I did not have the means to act toward her as I should have wished.” He blamed his brother for the “dark future” that lay ahead, for his “bleeding heart,” for the “feeling of disappointment and melancholy” that haunted him, and for the “void” at the center of his life.

Recalling the self-punishing hardships of the winter of 1880 (“wandering forever like a tramp”), Vincent warned that he was once again nearing his limits. “You remember, perhaps, how it was with me in the Borinage,” he wrote. “Well, I am rather afraid it might be the same thing here all over again.” The only way to avoid that terrible fate, he argued, was for Theo to provide “proof of sincerity”: first by sending enough cash immediately for Vincent to lay in a fresh stock of materials; second, by giving an ironclad guarantee (a “definite fixed arrangement”) that he would continue sending one hundred and fifty francs a month
no matter what
. At a time when he knew his brother to be financially distressed, Vincent threw down the gauntlet: without more money, he threatened, “I must be prepared for anything,” including “madness.”

THE BARGAIN VINCENT
had struck in The Hague was unraveling. In choosing Theo over Sien, he had given up too much and gotten too little. The thought of his mistake pushed him deeper and deeper into depression—“discouragement and despair greater than I can describe”—even as he squeezed his paint tubes harder and harder to eke out another day’s work. Without money, materials,
models, companionship, or comfort—without “confidence and warmth”—he confessed miserably, “I am absolutely at a loss … I cannot shake off a feeling of deep melancholy.”

Only two weeks after it began, the expedition to Drenthe seemed on the verge of collapse.
“Everything is prose,”
he lamented, “which, after all, has poetry for its end.” He saw the bleak moors with new eyes, describing them as monotonous and aggravating—a “perpetually rotting” carrion of landscape that yielded only mold as crop. Everywhere he looked, he found death and dying: in a local graveyard where he painted and sketched; in the figure of a mourning woman wrapped in crepe; in the decayed remains of old tree stumps exhumed after centuries under the bog. He sent Theo a detailed description of a funeral barge gliding mysteriously across the heath, the women mourners seated in the boat while the men pulled from the canal bank.

Landscape with Bog-Oak Trunks
, O
CTOBER
1883,
PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 12⅛ × 14⅞ IN.
(
Illustration credit 20.1
)

Reminders of mortality dragged Vincent into a “morass of thoughts and insoluble problems.” Describing himself as “absolutely beaten,” he spent his idle days grinding the failures of the past yet again through the millstones of guilt and self-reproach. Yet again he imagined solving his problems by escaping
them. He laid elaborate plans for “pushing on deeper into the country, notwithstanding the bad season,” or perhaps finding a new home “even farther out on the heath.” But without his brother’s money, these were nothing more than fantasies. “I see more clearly how I have got stuck here,” he admitted, “and how handicapped I am.”

Just when the future seemed too gloomy and hopeless to bear, the rains came. Dark clouds filled the sky over the moors and it poured incessantly. As bogs filled up, canals topped their banks, and roads returned to swamp, Vincent sat in his dark garret turning over and over in his mind a poem by Longfellow:

He quoted only the last two lines in a letter to Theo, then added bleakly, “Isn’t the number of dark and dreary days sometimes too great?”

On one dreary day in late September, Vincent finally reached his breaking point. It did not take a new calamity to trigger what may have been his first recorded psychotic episode. After the crisis of conscience in The Hague and the unfolding disaster in Drenthe, his mental state was so precarious that it took only the humblest of provocations to bring on the storm. Returning to his room, he looked across the gloomy attic space and saw his paint box illuminated in the darkness by a spot of light from a single pane of glass. The sight of the empty box, the dry palette, the discarded curls of paint tubes, the “bundle of worn-out brushes,” spoke to him in a way only metaphors could.

“Everything is too miserable, too insufficient, too worn out,” he cried on behalf of himself as well as his pitiful kit. The great gap between his endless plans and his pathetic reality opened before him and he saw “how hopeless everything is.” A wave of dread, long kept at bay by furious work, threatened to drown him. “I have been overwhelmed by forebodings about the future,” he reported to Theo in a letter he called “a cry for more breath.” Choking on guilt and regret, he contemplated surrendering to failure, even to self-extinction. “Leave me to my fate,”
he begged his brother. “There is no help for it; it is too much for one person, and there is no chance of getting help from any other side. Isn’t that proof enough that we must give it up?”

To escape the demons let loose in his garret room that day, Vincent fled into his imagination—as he always did. The obsession that emerged only days later would outstrip all the great obsessions of his life.

“COME, BROTHER, COME
and paint with me on the heath.”

This was the cry that arose from the desolate moors of Drenthe in early October 1883. For the next two months, Vincent strained every fiber of his intelligence, passion, and imagination in an effort to persuade his brother to quit Goupil, abandon Paris, and join him on the heath. “Come and walk with me behind the plow and the shepherd,” he pleaded. “Let the storm that blows across the heath blow through you.”

In a hail of letters, he argued Theo insensate over this latest in a lifetime of desperate, delusional schemes for happiness. “I cannot help imagining a future when I no longer work alone,” he wrote in an ecstasy of longing, “but instead you and I, painters, working together as comrades here in this moorland.” Not his ministry in the Borinage, not his pursuit of Kee Vos, not even his rescue of Sien Hoornik had inspired Vincent to more manic fantasies of logic or more incandescent flights of yearning. Like all of those past campaigns, this new one set an unreachable goal and marshaled all his powers of self-delusion to achieve it. Even as he insisted defensively, “I am not living in a dream … or in a castle in the air,” he knew that Theo had rejected this same invitation many times already. As recently as the previous summer (1883), he had turned a deaf ear to Vincent’s pleas that he should “move to the country” and “Be a painter.”

Why did Vincent revive so soon a proposal that his brother had rejected so often and so recently? Especially a proposal so preposterous on its face? Only the money Theo sent each month stood between Vincent and utter destitution. The same Goupil salary also helped support his brother, sister, and parents. All would be subjected to hardship, not to say humiliation, if the family’s most dutiful son abandoned its most distinguished enterprise to join its most disreputable slacker in the country’s most desolate region. But Vincent’s needs outran rationality. Alone on the moors of Drenthe, just as in the Borinage, he simply had no place else to turn. The events of late September had filled him with fears he could neither acknowledge to himself nor admit to his brother. At almost exactly the same moment, Theo began to complain moodily about his situation in Paris and talked loosely of leaving Goupil. These periodic fits of melancholy and discontent always drew Vincent into raptures of solidarity, as he saw in them
confirmation of his own errant path. But this time, Theo went further than he had ever gone before—literally. He threatened not just to quit Goupil, but to leave Europe altogether and sail for America.

Faced with absolute abandonment at a time of overwhelming need, Vincent launched his desperate, impossible campaign. Not until five years later, when he lured Paul Gauguin to Provence, would it be equaled.

He had often bragged to his brother about the “manliness” of an artist’s work. Now he redoubled his charge of effeminacy against dealers and “men who live on their income.” “As a painter,” he promised, “one feels more a man among other men.” Not to become a painter, he warned, could only lead Theo to “deterioration as a man”; while, as an artist, he could “roam about freely” among Zola’s libidinous natives. He urged on Theo the virile kinship between artists and other “craftsmen”—like blacksmiths—who “can make something with their own hands.” Taking an argument that Theo had first made to him in the Borinage, he extolled the simplicity and honesty of art as a “handicraft,” calling it “a delightful thing” that would make Theo “a better and deeper human being.” He invoked the Spirit of 1793 to call for a revolution in Theo’s life and cited a print from his portfolio that showed, he claimed, a physical resemblance between Theo and the heroes of an earlier revolution, the Puritans. His brother had “exactly, exactly the same physiognomy” as the
Mayflower
pilgrims, he concluded triumphantly, the same “reddish-hair” and “square forehead.” What more convincing proof could there be that he was destined to follow in the footsteps of these “men of action” who struck out for a brave new world in search of “simple lives” and the “straightforward path”?

But not for America. In a blur of conflicting signals, Vincent attacked his brother’s plan to cross the ocean (the only truly “revolutionary” ambition Theo ever expressed). Without a glimmer of irony, he dismissed it as the figment of overwrought nerves—the product of a “miserable, gloomy moment, when one is overwhelmed by things.” He compared it to a suicide wish and chastened his brother for even considering such an “unbecoming” notion. “Look here,” he exclaimed, “making oneself scarce or disappearing, neither you nor I should
ever
do that, no more than commit suicide.” He answered Theo’s threat with a threat of his own—a hint of the extremes to which he would go to prevent being abandoned by his brother: “Those moments when you think of going to America,” he warned, “I think of enlisting for the East Indies.”

In Vincent’s fevered summons, no place on earth compared to the moors of Drenthe. Only days after seeing death everywhere, he rediscovered the vision of paradise in his head—“my little kingdom,” he called it. “It is so absolutely and entirely what I think beautiful … The heath speaks to you … the still voice of nature … beautiful and calm.” Other times, the heath reverberated with a
symphony of “heart-rending music” and the days passed “like dreams.” Scenery so “unutterably beautiful” could not only dazzle, Vincent promised; it could also heal. Citing his own calmness as proof, he wooed his sickly, nervous brother with the heath’s reparative powers. Only its serenity could save Theo from nervous exhaustion—“your constant enemy and mine”—or even breakdown. After several years of furiously denouncing all religion, Vincent beckoned his brother to a spiritual renewal on the heath, summoning him to something higher than nature, higher than art, something “inconceivable” and “unnamable.” “Put your trust in the same thing I put my trust in,” he wrote, resurrecting the brothers’ code name for the unnamable:
“It.”