Van Gogh (167 page)

After only a month in Passy, with Van Eeden’s blessing, Jo arranged for Theo to be moved to an asylum in Utrecht, Holland. The long, sleepless train ride—in
a straitjacket, accompanied by guards—completed the return to the North that Vincent had often vowed. Jo rode the same train home, carrying her infant son. Within a few months, she would settle in the little town of Bussum, twenty miles north of Utrecht, where Van Eeden lived and later established a utopian commune. Theo arrived at the asylum on November 18, “in a wretched state”: babbling in a mash of languages, disheveled, incontinent, and barely able to walk. He could not answer questions about who he was, where he was, or what day it was.

For the next two months, Theo lived the same life of confinement in Utrecht that his brother had lived in Arles and Saint-Rémy. Long days of delusion, delirium, and drug-induced stupor were followed by long nights of restless, haunted sleep, or no sleep at all. He sat for hours in his padded cell conducting fevered, incoherent monologues—arguments with himself—in multiple languages. His mood swung wildly from “cheerful and boisterous” to “dull and drowsy,” according to the asylum reports. At other times, a sudden fury possessed his delicate body. He shook with tremors from head to toe in paralytic attacks indistinguishable from epileptic seizures. The look in his eyes, the timbre of his voice, his whole character, changed—as if commandeered by some other entity. In these transformations, the cultured art dealer of refined sensibilities clawed at his underclothes, ripped up the sheets on his bed, and tore the straw from his mattress. The wardens had to wrestle him into a straitjacket and tranquilize him.

Speech became increasingly difficult, as did walking, as the tremors invaded every part of his body. The muscles of his face twitched uncontrollably. He had trouble swallowing. Eating was a torment, and he vomited up most of what he ate. His bowels malfunctioned. Urination was painful, and attempts to insert a catheter failed. He couldn’t feed himself or dress himself. After he was found asleep in the bath, he wasn’t allowed to bathe himself for fear he might accidentally drown. He had to be placed in a covered, padded “crib” at night, so he could not harm himself.

Out of deference to Jo, no doubt, the doctors noted in Theo’s record a benign diagnosis that his agonies were the result of “heredity, chronic illness, excessive exertion, and sadness”—a fitting benediction for either brother. But when Jo demanded to take her husband home, they rose up in unanimous opposition: “His general condition is such that he must be deemed to be absolutely unfit for normal intercourse and private care,” they wrote in his record, describing his state as “appalling,” “deplorable,” and “lamentable in all respects.”

In the end, even Theo seemed set against her. When she came to see him, he greeted her with either stony silence or eruptions of rage, as if blaming her for some offense his tongue could not name. Instead, he threw chairs and overturned
tables. At Christmastime, when she brought him flowers, he seized them and tore them to shreds. He brooded for days after every visit, and eventually her presence was deemed too provocative.

Having heard the stories about the patient’s artist-brother, one doctor tried to penetrate Theo’s unreachable solitude by reading to him an article about Vincent that had appeared in a Dutch paper. But as he heard the familiar name repeated over and over, his eyes went vacant and his attention wandered to somewhere inside. “Vincent…,” he muttered to himself, “Vincent … Vincent …”

Like his brother, Theo died in a final haze of mystery. Not even the date of his death is certain. One report puts it on January 25, 1891, but hospital records show the body being removed on January 24. According to one account, he died after yet another visit by Jo. Defying the doctors to the end, she refused to allow an autopsy. Four days later, Theo was unceremoniously buried in a Utrecht public cemetery, in an ignominy of family silence that spoke louder than all Jo’s protests.

There he waited for almost twenty-five years while Vincent’s star ascended and the rest of the Van Gogh family disappeared in a vortex of tragedy. Ten months after Theo’s death, in December 1891, sister Lies married her longtime employer, whose wife had died of cancer. In fact, Lies had already borne a child by her new husband, in secret, five years earlier, which she had abandoned to a peasant family in Normandy. The shame of it haunted her to her grave. The surviving brother, Cor, never returned from the Transvaal. After a brief, unhappy marriage, he joined the Boer fight against the British in 1900. Not long after, during a bout of fever, he shot himself and died. He was thirty-two years old. Two years later, sister Wil was committed to an insane asylum. She spent the rest of her life there—almost forty years. During most of that time, she never uttered a word and had to be force-fed. She made several suicide attempts.

Mother van Gogh absorbed every blow with invincible faith. “Trust in God who sees everything and knows everything,” she maintained until her own death in 1907, “though His solution may be deeply sad.” At least one of those sad solutions never rose to her notice. In 1904, Sien Hoornik, Vincent’s prostitute lover and substitute wife in The Hague, threw herself into a canal and drowned, fulfilling the vow she had made to Vincent in 1883: “Yes, it’s true I’m a whore, and the only end for me will be to drown myself.”

BY 1914, JO BONGER
had remarried and been widowed a second time. The first publication of Vincent’s letters and the prominent sale of his works had brought her the attention of the world. To share that vindication with her dead
husband, and, no doubt, to wipe away the horrible events in Paris and Holland during the six months between the brothers’ deaths, Jo had Theo’s body brought from Utrecht. She buried him next to Vincent, overlooking the wheat fields above Auvers. She placed matching stones on the side-by-side graves, with matching inscriptions: ici
REPOSE
(here rests)
VINCENT VAN GOGH
and ici
REPOSE THEODORE VAN GOGH
.

G
RAVES OF
V
INCENT AND
T
HEO VAN
G
OGH
, A
UVERS
(
Illustration credit epl.2
)

Finally, Vincent had his reunion on the heath.

F
OR AN ACT OF SUCH FAR-REACHING SIGNIFICANCE AND SUBSEQUENT NOTORIETY
, surprisingly little is known about the incident that led to Vincent van Gogh’s death at the age of thirty-seven.

All that can be said with certainty is that he died of a gunshot wound that he sustained in or near the town of Auvers, about twenty miles north of Paris, on July 27, 1890. The injury occurred sometime after he had lunch at the inn where he was staying and then left on a painting excursion loaded down with equipment. He returned to the Ravoux Inn just after suppertime with a bullet hole in his upper abdomen. He called for medical assistance but the injury was fatally
severe. He died approximately thirty hours later.

The two doctors who attended him during that time examined the wound and manually probed his midsection. They concluded: first, the bullet had not exited the body but had come to rest near the spinal column; second, the gun that inflicted the wound was a small-caliber pistol; third, the bullet had entered the body from an unusual, oblique angle (not straight on); and fourth, the gun had been fired at some distance from the body, not close up.
¹

No physical evidence of the shooting was ever produced. No gun was ever found. None of the painting equipment that Vincent took with him from the Ravoux Inn—easel, canvas, paints, brushes, sketchbooks—was ever recovered. The location of the shooting was never conclusively identified. No autopsy was performed. The bullet that killed him was not removed. No eyewitnesses to the shooting could be located. Indeed, no one stepped forward who could verify
Vincent’s whereabouts at any time during the roughly five-hour period during which the shooting occurred.

Within hours of Vincent’s return to the Ravoux Inn, rumors had begun to circulate about the circumstances that had led to his fatal wounding. Those rumors quickly coalesced into a narrative about the events of July 27. According to this narrative, which was taken up in virtually all subsequent accounts, Vincent borrowed a revolver from Gustave Ravoux, the owner of the inn where he was staying, and took it with him on his regular afternoon painting expedition that
day. He then climbed up the riverbank and walked some distance into the wheat fields that lay above and outside the town. There he put down his load and shot himself. The blow did not kill him (it missed his heart), but it did knock him out. By the time he regained consciousness, darkness had fallen and he could not find the gun. So he staggered back down the steep riverbank and returned to the Ravoux Inn seeking medical attention.

It was, and is, a satisfying narrative. It provides a suitably tragic end to an undeniably tragic life: a troubled, unappreciated artist seeks escape from the neglect of the world by
taking his own life. The story not only appeared early, it caught on quickly, and it played an important role in the meteoric ascent of Vincent’s celebrity in the decades immediately after his death. By 1934, when it was immortalized in Irving Stone’s
bestselling novelization,
Lust for Life
, the story of Vincent’s suicide in the wheat field had become firmly lodged in the artist’s legend. Two decades later, in the 1950s, when the celebrity of Vincent van Gogh reached new heights with the centenary of his birth in 1953,
²
it was sealed in the mythology permanently with the release three years later of the Academy Award–winning
movie adaptation of
Lust for Life
.

In our review of the available evidence, however, we could find little reliable, verifiable support for the narrative summarized above. The purpose of this note is to put forward an account of the events of July 27 that better fits the known facts about the incident and about the man; to examine the origins of the traditional account; and to explain why, in our opinion, that account falls short.
³

IN THE SAME YEAR
that the movie
Lust for Life
was released—1956—an eighty-two-year-old Frenchman named René Secrétan stepped forward to give his account of the strange painter he had known in Auvers in the summer of 1890. The son of a prosperous pharmacist who grew up in an exclusive Paris suburb, René was sixteen at the time of Vincent’s death.
⁴
He was a student at Paris’s famous Lycée Condorcet, the same school where Paul Verlaine and Marcel Proust studied and Stéphane Mallarmé and Jean-Paul Sartre taught.
⁵

René and his brother Gaston came to Auvers every summer to fish and hunt at their father’s villa on the bank of the Oise River.
⁶
René was a rambunctious, adventurous teenager who liked the outdoors far more than his prestigious school (where he often skipped classes). In this, he was completely unlike Gaston, a sensitive eighteen-year-old
⁷
who preferred art and music to fishing and shooting. It was through Gaston that René met Vincent van Gogh. René told Victor Doiteau, a French writer, during a series of interviews Doiteau conducted in 1956, that Gaston and Vincent had many conversations about art and that Vincent eventually sought out Gaston’s company for these discussions.
⁸

A self-proclaimed philistine,
⁹
René disdained their talk of art, but in his brother’s company, he spent many hours observing the strange Dutchman. In his interviews with Doiteau, René painted an intimate portrait of Vincent with details that bespeak close and repeated contact, conform to descriptions from other sources that he would not have known, and bear no resemblance
whatsoever to the hagiographic image of the artist then being propagated by
Lust for Life
. (“He compared Vincent’s mangled ear to that of an angry cat, as well as a gorilla’s.”
¹⁰
) René described Vincent’s clothes, his eyes,
¹¹
his voice,
¹²
his gait, his taste in liqueurs,
¹³
and what it was like to share a café booth with him.
¹⁴

Despite all this, René did not claim to be friends with the famous painter. Indeed, just the opposite. When he was not tagging along with his brother, René led a rowdy group of other boys: most of them, like the Secrétans, Parisian students vacationing in Auvers for the summer. With his natural bravado, adventurous spirit, and puckish sense of mischief, René was the one they all wanted to follow. A crack marksman, he took them on hunting
expeditions for squirrels or rabbits or whatever else they could find in the woods and fields. He guided them to the richest fishing areas along the Oise. He also led them on amorous adventures.
¹⁵
Through his connections with the director’s son, he regularly imported girls from the Moulin Rouge (René called them “our
cantinières
[canteen women]”) and organized
boating parties and picnics for the amusement of his fellows and their girlfriends.
¹⁶