Van Gogh (81 page)

To this bleak background, Vincent added all his own unseasonal woes. Estranged from Theo, alienated within the parsonage, and ostracized everywhere else, he saw only loneliness ahead. Distant friends like Kerssemakers never visited. By Christmas, the liaison with Hermans had already ended in a fight and the friendship with Rappard had slipped into yet another
froideur
. On Christmas Eve, Vincent closed himself up in the cold studio to work rather than join his brother Cor skating. “[Vincent] asks no advice and seeks no intimacy,” Dorus lamented. In his dealings with Theo, Vincent faced humiliation. A year of pleading, demanding, wheedling, and thundering had brought him not a single step closer to independence. He spent the entire month of December begging his brother
for a mere twenty extra francs—an effort that left him feeling “wretched” and “handicapped,” he said. Worst of all, the future seemed to hold nothing better. “I have hardly ever begun a year with a gloomier aspect, in a gloomier mood,” he wrote as he emerged from the holidays, “and I do not expect any future of success.” As the failures mounted, he felt his courage “oozing away,” he said, and the year of family turmoil taking its toll. “I cannot endure life without more peace and cordiality,” he wrote on Saint Nicholas Day.

In the Kerkstraat studio, short days and bitter cold combined to deprive Vincent of his one escape and only solace: work. “I would wish for Vincent that the winter would be over,” Dorus wrote fretfully. “Painting outside is of course not possible. And the long evenings do not help his work either.” Whether or not Vincent was warming the darkness with alcohol, as Dorus suspected, his art remained frozen in the past. In his letters to Theo, he resurrected the heroes of the Schenkweg—Daumier and Gavarni, De Groux and Matthijs Maris—and resumed his mania for magazine illustrations, types, and figure drawing. “Perhaps it would be wise to concentrate more exclusively on the figure,” he wrote, specifically citing his Hague work as his best. “By constantly studying the model, I shall keep a straight course.”

In the short bursts of work that he could manage, he continued to produce dark, caricatured portrait heads, heedlessly pursuing his goal of fifty heads by February. “It will help me with the figure in general,” he insisted, brushing aside his brother’s repeated pleas for landscape and light. When the weather permitted, he painted from the model; when it didn’t, he made drawings of his studies (he had sent a dozen to Theo at Christmas). In the winter half-light, his palette turned darker and darker as he argued furiously, in both images and words, on behalf of a world drained of color. “It will be proved beyond a doubt,” he declared, hinting at the tsunami of justification to come, “that, exactly in the matter of color, I have achieved something.”

Surrounded by the broken promises of home and family and Christmas, Vincent began to doubt the delusions that had brought him to Nuenen in the first place. “I have always had the impression that in Zundert there was generally a better atmosphere in the house,” he wrote. “What I don’t know is whether the feeling that things were better in Zundert is only my imagination. That may easily be the case.”

For a man who had always coped with failure by clinging to illusions of future success and former happiness, such a frank look in the mirror held grave dangers. Vincent had approached the subject of mental illness before, but always warily and unwillingly. “I am terribly sensitive,” he allowed in The Hague, “physically as well as morally.” He confessed only to “nervousness” and blamed it on the “miserable years” in the black country. When people called him crazy, or treated him like a madman, as they did in Drenthe, he claimed ultimate control
of the “tricks nerves play”—an inner “serenity” that kept the demons at bay. “I felt my own disease very deep within me,” he wrote from the peat moors,

But the repeated disasters of the fall had shaken his confidence in “reaching a normal point of view again.” Instead, they had opened up a bleak vista on an infinity of failures, a permanent winter of “empty stupidity and pointless torture,” as Zola described it in a passage Vincent copied out. And only his work prevented him from plunging into the abyss. “I think that painting can prevent worse things,” he wrote, “and that otherwise it would be even worse.” Steeped in Zola’s world of degenerate seeds and inherited fates, Vincent imagined a Van Gogh “family failing” that had stained his soul indelibly. “I am a black sheep,” he cried out in December, “a
mauvais coucheur
[ill-natured malingerer].”

Now, when his imagination ranged over the miseries of the past, it fixed on an image not of rebirth, but of damnation. Instead of the Christlike Dante, crossing the Styx to witness the torments and suffering of
Inferno
—“a sober, severe figure full of indignation … sad and melancholy”—Vincent imagined himself as a permanent inhabitant of that netherworld of pain: the Waternix. This demon of Scandinavian folklore lurked in lakes and rivers and tempted unwary travelers to a watery death. Vincent called it “an evil spirit luring people into the abyss.” The Waternix did not just suffer eternal torment, Vincent pointed out, it dragged others down to share its terrible fate. And unlike Dante, who “went to Hell and came back,” the Waternix always returned there.

Theo watched with mounting alarm as Vincent’s despair played out in ever-angrier cycles of abuse. No doubt he had come to discount the periodic outbursts—one in January and another in February—when Vincent demanded an immediate, definitive separation, then added, often in the same letter, a plea for additional funds. But he must have noticed a different tone in the letters after New Year’s 1885. “If it gives you any satisfaction to know that what you call ‘my plans for the future’ have practically fallen through,” he responded acidly to Theo’s New Year’s greeting,
“thrive
on the thought.” He talked of death—“If I should drop dead … you would be standing on a skeleton”—striking a note of glib fatalism unusual for Theo’s eternally earnest and combative brother. Out of concern for Vincent’s reaction, Theo withheld the news in January that Goupil had recorded a good sales year in 1884, an unexpected boost to his end-of-year
bonus. He also kept secret from his brother a job offer from a client who was prepared to pay him the astronomical sum of a thousand francs per month—almost ten times his father’s wage. (He refused the offer after Dorus weighed in against it.)

When Vincent found out anyway, as predicted, he subjected Theo to a storm of protest and a drama of penury. Recalling Theo’s recent appearance at the Nuenen parsonage, in August, wearing the latest must-have accessories for a “plush gentleman” from the big city, Vincent summoned up a bitter image of his brother. “I cannot help seeing you in my mind’s eye wearing a pince-nez with sunglasses,” he wrote, circling back on the accusation that rankled most. “In a sense other than the literal one, in your actions and thoughts, you are looking through dark glasses—suspiciousness for instance.” His frustration at Theo for not doing more to sell his art hardened from shrill protests into bitter sarcasm. He recommended that they “leave the matter of mutual sympathy out of the question,” and just “try to be
inoffensive
to each other.”

On the subject of his art, especially, Vincent’s tone changed. After years of accepting his brother’s bland encouragements to “go on painting,” Vincent posed the question to which he had always before avoided the answer: What did Theo think of his chances as an artist? “If I do
better
work later on, I certainly shall not work
differently
than now,” he wrote, cutting off Theo’s usual escape, baring his own doubts, and risking everything. “I mean it will be the same apple, though riper … If I am no good now, I shall be no good later on either. But if later on, then now too. Corn is corn.”

Under different circumstances, Theo might have braved his brother’s wrath and urged him to accept the inevitable—to embrace art as an ennobling pastime, not as a path to self-sufficiency. After four years of thankless sacrifice and unceasing abuse, he had finally begun to lose patience with Vincent and his contrary art. Just in the previous few months, he had finally complained about his brother’s “particularly unpleasant” letters, his excesses of rhetoric, his manipulative threats, and his stubborn nostalgia for passé art. “You make me think of old people who are always saying that in their young days everything was better,” Theo wrote in early 1885, after years of vainly pushing Vincent toward more modern painters, “meanwhile forgetting that they themselves have changed.”

But now, more than ever, Theo dared not abandon his volatile brother. Every time a letter arrived from his parents, he heard the reticent plaints of a parsonage in turmoil. “His quick temper prevents any conversation,” Dorus wrote in February. “It certainly is not easy for me to be passive.” Father and son had fought over Margot Begemann and over the proposed move to Helvoirt. Dorus complained of Vincent’s “unpleasant tone” (“you really cannot have a discussion with him”); Vincent, of his father’s arrogance (“the man really thought he
was in the right”). Dorus compared his son’s strangeness to his wife’s injury, calling Vincent “the other pain I carry”; Vincent denounced his father as “my worst enemy” and angrily regretted that he had not rebelled against him sooner.

Feelings only hardened when some members of Dorus’s congregation in Geldrop openly accused the parson of lax discipline—a charge no doubt illustrated by, if not provoked by, his disruptive son. For a man who prized unity above all else, the combination of defiance in his house and division in his flock sapped both spirit and health, in the depths of a bitterly cold winter. Given Vincent’s erratic, even threatening behavior, his talk of death, his delusions of conspiracy, and his canteen of cognac, what would be the consequences of a real separation? Or even just discouragement?

In a desperate bid to calm his brother, save his aging father from further aggravation, and defuse the looming crisis in the parsonage, Theo made a bold conciliatory gesture. He offered to submit a painting of Vincent’s to the most important annual exhibition in all of Europe: the Paris Salon.

Only a few weeks later, on March 27, 1885, he received a telegram from Nuenen. His father was dead.

DORUS HAD SPENT
the whole day in Geldrop, mending fences. After dinner with friends and a piano recital, he headed back to Nuenen, a five-mile walk across the windswept heath on a freezing night. About 7:30, a passing maid heard the parsonage front door rattle. As she unlatched it, the weight of his body pushed the door open and he sank against her in his heavy overcoat. Except for his hobbled mother, Vincent was the only family member who could have been home. Someone carried the motionless preacher into the living room and laid him on the sofa. Wil rushed back from a neighbor’s house—“oh it was so terrible,” she described the scene she found there. She fell on her father’s body in a futile effort to “restore life to it,” according to one family account. “But it was ended.” Dorus was pronounced dead of a massive stroke.

Four days later, Theodorus van Gogh was buried. The black procession moved from the parsonage to the little Nuenen church where the entire congregation waited with friends, church dignitaries, and fellow preachers from outposts all across Brabant. Mourners followed the black-draped bier to the Oude Toren, the ancient church tower that Vincent had often drawn and painted on his horizons. It was a short trip—only a third of a mile along a rutted road through the green winter wheat. With her bad leg, Anna may have ridden with the casket. Whether she walked or rode, Theo no doubt accompanied her. He had taken the train from Paris the same day the telegram arrived with the incomprehensible news. “He had gotten a letter from his father only the previous day,” recalled the friend who took him to the station, “saying he was in perfect health. [Theo]
himself is not very strong: so you can imagine the state he was in when he left.” The slender twenty-seven-year-old at his mother’s side, the image of his father, was now his family’s sole support.

A grave had been dug among the crooked crosses at the tower’s base. The neglected little graveyard, bound in snow, had been one of Vincent’s first subjects in Nuenen. Above this scene loomed the dark symbolism of the ruined church—only a few months away from scheduled demolition. The mourners at the graveside included Uncle Cor from Amsterdam and Uncle Jan, the admiral. Anna’s sister Willemina Stricker, Kee Vos’s mother, had come from The Hague. Devastated by the news but too sick to leave his hotel, Uncle Cent had locked himself in his room and refused to come out, even to eat.

It may have been the presence of so many witnesses to his past failures that kept Vincent in the shadows on his family’s day of mourning. Funerals, even of strangers, usually moved him to heroic feats of consolation. But not this one. Uncle Jan, hardly a man of demonstrative passions, thought Vincent showed an odd “tendency to cool rationalization” in the midst of so much grief. “[He is] a bit withdrawn,” Jan noted. At the viewing of the body, Vincent admonished one mourner: “Dying is hard, but living is harder still.” Even afterward, in his letters, Vincent never referred to the dramatic events of March 26, nor ever expended a single word of his profligate descriptive powers on the day of his father’s funeral procession through the wheat fields.

That day, March 30, was also Vincent’s birthday: his thirty-second. The awkward coincidence only underscored the connection between the two events—the son’s birth and the father’s death—that weighed on many of the mourners. Most knew something of the pastor’s long, sad struggle with his eldest son. Many had heard, or heard of, the battles in Dorus’s study: the father’s exasperated cries—“I cannot bear it,” “it’s killing me,” “you will be the death of me”; and the son’s unrepentant provocations. “I do not much care for deathbed reconciliations,” Vincent had once said, brushing aside Theo’s pleas for compromise. His last recorded conversation with his father had ended in yet another bitter stalemate. “He seems not to be able to tolerate any hints at all,” the pastor had written afterward, a week before his death, “and that proves again that he is not normal.” That was the judgment Dorus took to his grave unreconciled.