Van Gogh (24 page)

But Vincent showed no interest in art. He cared only about the reparative drama playing out in his cabin with Frans Soek and Harry Gladwell, who still came for weekly poetry readings. He felt he had “an inclination for instruction,” he wrote his father vaguely, and hoped that “the enthusiasm would follow.” He had read George Eliot’s
Felix Holt
, in which the hero supports himself and his widowed mother by instructing young boys. He imagined doing the same. With no more consideration than that, Vincent began responding to advertisements in English papers seeking teachers and private tutors. His parents despaired of his chances. “It will take a lot of study and effort to acquire the necessary tact and ability,” they worried, “and it’s not clear that he wants to prepare himself.”

All Vincent’s inquiries were either rejected or went unanswered. As his termination date approached, he grew increasingly anxious. April 1 loomed like Judgment Day. “My hour approaches,” he wrote Theo. Defying his parents, he determined to go to London—with or without a job—as soon as he left Goupil; he would stop in Etten only briefly on his way to England. In the meantime, he struggled to stem the rising tide of anxiety and self-reproach by turning again
to Kempis’s Christ. “You will feel great comfort in time of trial … when men despise you,” Kempis promised. Was not Christ, too, “abandoned by friends and acquaintances”?

But as his departure neared, Vincent turned to older, deeper consolations. Despite his impending poverty, he bought more prints for his growing collection. He spent his final weeks in Paris not bidding farewell to friends or revisiting favorite sites, but filling out the album he had begun for Matthijs Maris. With the art world in upheaval around him and his own life in collapse, he sat alone in his garret feverishly copying entry after entry from the voices of his youth—Andersen, Heine, Uhland, Goethe—summoning up his truest friends with ink and pen; busying his hands with page after page of tight, flawless script; calming his head with mantric repetitions of their familiar images—evening mists and silvery moonlight, dead lovers and lonely wanderers—and comforting his heart with their insistent assurances of a higher love.

ON FRIDAY, MARCH 31
, the day after his twenty-third birthday, Vincent left Paris. It was an uncharacteristically orderly leave-taking for Vincent, who hated good-byes and would spend the rest of his life preempting them with precipitous flights. Gladwell, who saw him off at the train station, took Vincent’s job at Goupil and moved into his room in Montmartre—exactly reprising Theo’s role three years earlier in The Hague. At the last minute, a letter arrived offering a position at a small boys’ school in Ramsgate, a resort community on the English coast. The news gave Vincent’s departure the air of a fresh start rather than an ignominious end. It wasn’t much (the job paid nothing initially), but at least it provided room and board and a place far away to hide his shame.

The brief stay in Etten rekindled old longings. Vincent made a pencil drawing of the family’s new home, the Etten church and parsonage, with every fence picket and window sash lovingly detailed and every contour meticulously emphasized in pen. He took a train trip to Brussels to see his sick Uncle Hein. He may have revisited Zundert. His parents called the days he spent in Etten “good days,” and insisted hopefully, “He
is
a good man.” Vincent seemed to want to linger. A trip originally scheduled for only “a few days” gradually extended to several weeks. On April 8, Theo arrived, detouring to Etten on his spring sales trip.

But Vincent could not stay. Every time the subject of art came up, as it inevitably did, his parents could not hide their disappointment that he was leaving a profession he knew so well for one that he knew not at all. “It’s incredible how much he loves art and how deeply it touches him having to leave it all behind,” Anna lamented. “We hope that he will find a good vocation [but] 24 boys in a boarding school is no small thing.” Theo’s arrival only threw Vincent’s failure into higher relief. Instead of setting off into the unknown, Theo would be returning
to The Hague to help with Goupil’s move to a new and even grander gallery on the Plaats.

Vicarage and Church at Etten
, A
PRIL
1876,
PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER
, 3½ × 6⅞
IN
. (
Illustration credit 7.1
)

Vincent’s train left at four in the afternoon on April 14, two days before Easter, bound for the port at Rotterdam. Not until that moment, alone on the platform, did Vincent seem finally to realize what he had done: he had banished himself. Suddenly overcome with second thoughts, he took a piece of paper and began to scratch a plaintive note. “We have often parted before,” he began, “[but] this time there was more sorrow in it than there used to be.” After he boarded the train, he continued writing, setting out the argument for his return. “But now [there is] also more courage because of the firmer hope, the stronger desire, for God’s blessing.” It was the argument that he would make for the next five years, in words and deeds (and after that, in images): if he loved God enough, his family would have to take him back.

Only a few months before, Vincent had found a poem that perfectly expressed the knot of homesickness, self-reproach, and resentment he felt as the train left behind the meadows and creekbanks of his childhood. He sent it to Theo, saying that “it struck me in particular”:

T
WELVE YEARS LATER IN ARLES, WAITING SLEEPLESSLY FOR THE ARRIVAL
of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh spent many late nights at a café frequented by the homeless and the vagabond—“night prowlers,” he called them. He considered himself one of them—condemned to wander forever in the yellow gaslight of all-night cafés, pursuing a mirage of “family and native
land” that existed only in the yearning imaginations of those without them. “I am a traveler,” he wrote, “going somewhere and to some destination…[only] the somewhere and the destination do not exist.”

When he left for England in April 1876, Vincent set out on that journey.

For the next eight months, he hardly stopped. Ricocheting from place to place, from job to job, he traveled hundreds of miles back and forth across the English countryside, “going somewhere.” He took boats and trains and buses and carts and even a subway. But mostly he walked. At a time when rail travel was so cheap that even shopgirls could afford third-class tickets, Vincent walked. He walked in all weathers, at all times of day and night, sleeping in
the open, foraging in the fields, eating in public houses or not at all. He walked until his face was sunburned, his clothes tattered, and his shoes worn thin. He walked at a deliberate pace—three miles an hour by his own reckoning—as if the destination didn’t matter; as if walking itself—the sheer accumulation of miles, the wearing down of shoe leather, the fraying of laces, the raising of blisters—was the measure of a man’s devotion.

In Ramsgate, he walked the beaches dotted with “bathing machines.” He walked the dockside and the huge jetties that reached out toward his homeland. He walked the paths along the tops of the chalk cliffs with their “gnarled hawthorn bushes” and brave wind-bent trees. He walked the fields of corn that floated above the sea right up to the cliff edge, as inviting as the Zundert heath
and only minutes from the school where he
taught. He walked to coves and inlets up and down the coast.

Only two months later, when his school moved from Ramsgate to London, he followed on foot—a trek of fifty miles in the punishing summer heat, the longest single journey of his time in England. “That is quite a stroll,” he bragged to Theo. A steamboat up the Thames could have taken him as far in a few hours for only a handful of pennies. He slept one night on the steps of a church, and stayed for only two restless days before setting off again to see
his sister Anna in Welwyn, thirty miles farther on. The next day he walked the final twenty-five miles to Isleworth, the small town on the far side of London where his school had relocated.

Picturesquely sited on a bend in the Thames, Isleworth would have been the ideal place for Vincent to settle. Instead, he used it as a base from which to launch repeated expeditions into the city, ten miles downriver. Largely ignoring the frequent trains, he walked the route again and again, in all weathers, day and night, leaving early and returning late, sometimes two or three times in a single day. Every trip to London justified a dozen lesser trips: endless walks
crisscrossing the city’s mad traffic and labyrinthine streets to see his old workplace, visit a former associate, investigate a job prospect, even view a landmark church—anything, it seemed, to keep moving.

In July, he changed jobs. The new position, at another school in Isleworth,
required
him to travel to London and elsewhere to visit sick students and parents who had fallen behind in their school fees—duties that took him to some of the city’s remotest neighborhoods. In September, he considered going to Liverpool or Hull—to find another job, he said. At other times, he talked of sailing to South America. “One sometimes asks,
‘how shall I ever reach my destination?’ ” he wrote Theo.

What was propelling Vincent down these rough country roads and busy city streets, pushing him perhaps even to the far side of the world? Partly, it was the same urge to escape that had rushed him out of Paris and Etten. During the summer and fall, his letters spoke about breaking chains and flying to “safety,” about escaping from the sin and “deceitful tranquility” of his previous life. He read books about criminals on the run and consoled
himself with daydreams about the ultimate escape of death.

No doubt he was striking back at his parents as well. His letters alternately kept them elaborately informed of his grueling travels or lapsed into ominous silence—a combination perfectly designed, if not intended, to punish them with worry. “He keeps making hours-long treks,” Dorus wrote Theo, “which I fear will affect his appearance, so that he will become even less presentable … those are excesses that aren’t
right … We suffer because of this.”

But no one suffered more on account of Vincent’s “excesses” than Vincent
himself. “In those years,” he wrote later, “I was abroad without friends or help, suffering great misery.” Indeed, self-punishment may have been the true purpose of his ordeal. Clearly, a huge burden of guilt weighed on every step. “Keep me from being a son that maketh ashamed,” he wrote soon after his arrival in
England. In letter after letter, he confessed to feelings of “great inadequacy,” “imperfection,” and “unworthiness.” He admitted to “hating his own life,” and longed for the day when he could “forget the sins of my youth.” “Who shall deliver me completely and forever from the body of this deed,” he asked plaintively, “and how long shall I have to fight against myself?”

The months of self-punishing flight were accompanied by a flood of reparative imagery. Images of travelers and traveling, leave-takings and homecomings, lovesick wanderings and moral questings, had always excited Vincent’s imagination. Now they became his lifeline. He returned to old favorites like Longfellow’s
Evangeline
and
The Courtship of Miles Standish
, both tales of transformative exile, and took up the same author’s
Hyperion
, the story of a melancholy young poet wandering the apocalyptic landscape of post-Napoleonic Europe in search of himself. Longfellow’s
Tales of a Wayside Inn
, a wanderer’s storybook, became his new gospel. The homeless heroine of Elizabeth Wetherell’s sentimental blockbuster
The Wide, Wide World
touched him so deeply that he read the book to his students and sent a copy to Theo.