Van Gogh (41 page)

He found no work and no comfort from Frank (whom he never mentioned again). No church in Cuesmes would give him duties, paid or voluntary; his reputation had followed him from the Bébé. His father apparently sent small amounts of money, but Vincent gave whatever he received to the poor, or spent it on Bibles that he distributed, or sent it back. When he went to the mines to evangelize, the miners insulted and mocked him. They denounced his strange behavior as “outrageous” and “shocking.” For longer and longer periods, he avoided people altogether, or they avoided him. “Everyone considers me worthless,” one villager remembered him muttering.

Vincent’s imagination followed him into the darkness. He “cast aside” not only his letter-writing pen but also the pencil he used for sketching. He must have denied himself the pleasure of his print collection, for which there was hardly a place in his bare, beggarly existence. His imaginative life was reduced to the little pocket-sized books that he apparently carried with him everywhere. But even these seemed chosen for the pall they cast. From Dickens’s dystopian
Hard Times
to Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, Vincent revisited the bleakest visions from his past. A year before, he had read Michelet’s sweeping account of the French Revolution. Now, he turned to Hugo’s
The Last Day of a Condemned Man
, a claustrophobic tale of injustice and indiscriminate death during the Terror. “[We] are all condemned to death,” Hugo concludes, “though the stay of execution varies.” Vincent found an even bleaker vision in Aeschylus’
Oresteia
, tracing the terrible fate of the victors at Troy. In this blackest and most barbaric of Greek tragedies, the world is defined by family crimes—infanticide, patricide, matricide—and a guilty son flees his home pursued by the Furies of remorse.

Finally, Vincent ventured down into the comfortless, nihilistic depths of Shakespeare’s
King Lear
. “My God, how beautiful Shakespeare is,” he exclaimed in the first letter after his long silence; “who else is as mysterious as he is?”

For a reader like Vincent who shared his era’s addiction to stories of suffering redeemed and love triumphant,
Lear
represented an unendurable mortification of hope. The death of Cordelia, especially, violated every convention of the Victorian heart, and productions of the play often substituted a happy ending for Shakespeare’s unbearable one. Vincent must have found some strange consolation in this dark tale of a father brought to grief by his own mistakes and the defiant suffering of a man “more sinn’d against than sinning.” He expressed special admiration for the “noble and distinguished” character of Kent, the duke who disguises himself as a servant and is punished for his plainspokenness.
But as the winter wore on, he began to resemble more and more the play’s self-negating protagonist, Edgar, the betrayed eldest son. Banished by Lear, invisible to his blinded father, living in a cave on the heath disguised as a madman, a “poor naked wretch … houseless … unfed … loop’d and window’d [in] raggedness,” Edgar runs in terror from unseen tormenters and, like the rag and bone man, “drinks the green mantle of the standing pool.”

Vincent was seen that winter with his face blackened, barefoot and clothed in rags, wandering the bleak landscape through snow and thunderstorms. Former acquaintances, including Denis, warned him, “You are not in a normal frame of mind.” Peasants who encountered him on the heath called him simply “mad.” “The Lord Jesus was also crazy,” he would answer—a defense that some took as proof of his fevered mind. He rubbed his hands together incessantly, as if trying to remove an indelible stain, and neighbors who passed the barn where he slept often heard the sounds of weeping. According to one account, he “subjected himself to the ultimate indignity” by stripping off his clothes and, like Edgar, “answering with [his] uncovered body the extremity of the skies.” “Thou art the thing itself,” Lear tells Edgar: “unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forked animal as thou art.” In his own moment of Lear-like compassion, Vincent saw a workman who had made a shirt out of a sack with the word “Fragile” stenciled across it. “He did not laugh,” recalled a villager, “but spoke of it for days afterwards in tones of pity.” In his psalmbook, he underlined in short, exclamatory strokes:

Dark thoughts of suicide threaded through the months of self-torment. After seeing his mother off at the train station in July, Vincent had been overcome by “melancholy,” he reported to her afterward, “as if he were saying goodbye for the last time.” Only a month later, when the Committee finally formalized his failure in Petit Wasmes, he wrote Theo even more abjectly: “My life has gradually become less precious, much less important and more a matter of indifference to me.”

Vincent may not have attempted suicide, but before the winter was over, he set out on a punishing journey that amounted to the same thing. Around the beginning of March, malnourished, weak, and inadequately clothed, he once again left the Borinage and headed west. He rode the train as far as the few francs
in his pocket would take him. When he reached the French border, he started to walk. He may have been headed for Calais, one hundred miles northwest, where the England of his memory lay only twenty miles across the Channel. Earlier, in his desperation, he had written Reverend Slade-Jones in Isleworth, site of his only mission that had not failed. Slade-Jones had responded with rare encouragement, proposing to build a series of “little wooden churches” in the Borinage. Vincent’s great ambition to preach the Gospel had faded to this delusive glimmer.

Whether or not this was the star he followed out of the black country, the trip soon proved beyond even Vincent’s capacity for self-punishment. Whipped by freezing rain and wind, with no money for food or lodging, he “wandered and wandered forever like a tramp,” he later recalled, “without finding either rest or food or covering anywhere.” He slept in abandoned wagons, woodpiles, and haystacks, and awoke covered with frost. He looked for work—“I would have accepted anything,” he said—but no one would hire the strange vagabond. “I was abroad without friends or help,” he recalled, “suffering great misery.” He persevered until he reached Lens, only forty miles from his starting point, before turning around. On the return trip, he stopped briefly in the town of Courrières, near Lens, where Jules Breton had a studio. Vincent had long loved Breton’s poetry and paintings. During his Goupil days, he had even met the artist. But that was a previous life. Now, he just stood outside the studio, too paralyzed with self-loathing to knock.

After only three days, crushed in body and in spirit, he returned to the black country. “That trip,” he later admitted, “nearly killed me.”

This was Vincent’s condition when his parents saw him only a week or two later in Etten. He may have limped there on his own (he complained of “crippled feet” after the aborted journey), but it is more likely that Dorus, alerted again by someone in the community, traveled to the Borinage and brought his son home—as he had often threatened to do. After years of “despairing” over Vincent’s fate, lamenting it as “the cross we must bear,” Dorus had finally decided to take matters into his own hands.

He had decided to commit his son to an asylum.

THE TOWN OF GHEEL
lay only forty miles south of Etten, just across the Belgian border. Since the fourteenth century, pilgrims had come to Gheel in search of miraculous cures for mental problems thought to be the work of the devil. Like all pilgrims, they boarded with local families, often staying for years and assuming roles in village life. By 1879, centuries of pilgrims had reshaped the town into a single open-air asylum: “the City of the Simple.” Except for a small clinic, there were no cells, no wards, no walls. One thousand “lunatics”—as they were
invariably called—lived among the ten thousand sane inhabitants, placed in the homes of paid householders, where they undertook chores and even trades “uncontradicted in their caprices [and] unnoticed for their peculiarities,” according to the advertisements Dorus would have read.

In an era of horrific public asylums, where inmates were routinely chained for long periods or humiliated by visitors who paid to mock them, the availability of Gheel made Dorus’s agonizing decision a little easier. It was close enough for regular visits, but safely out of public view. Like all Victorian families, the Van Goghs feared most the unspeakable stigma of insanity—a stigma undiminished by recent advances in the understanding and treatment of mental illness. Everything from Theo’s chances for advancement at Goupil to the marriageability of their two young daughters, even Dorus’s ability to stand unashamed before his congregation, depended on absolute secrecy.

To commit Vincent to any asylum, however, Dorus needed a “certificate of insanity” from a medical expert who had examined the patient. Sometime after Vincent arrived home in March, Dorus made an appointment for him to see Professor Johannes Nicolaas Ramaer, a prominent “alienist” in The Hague and an inspector of lunatic asylums. According to his mother’s much later recollection, Vincent at first agreed to visit Ramaer in order to “ask for medicine.” But at the last minute, perhaps alerted to his father’s intentions, he refused to go. “I resisted with all my might,” he later recalled.

The only way Dorus could commit his son without a certificate, as Vincent probably knew, was to convene a
“conseil de famille”
(family council) to support the petition for commitment—something his father would have been loath to do.

But by now Dorus was determined. “My father called the family together for a meeting,” Vincent told a friend years later, “in order to have me locked away as a madman.” To assert guardianship over his son—who had just turned twenty-seven—Dorus sought to have him declared incompetent “on
physical
grounds”—because of his inability to take care of himself. He called Vincent “deranged” and “dangerous,” and dismissed his Kempian fantasies of “choosing a life of poverty” as proof of his madness.

Sometime that spring, in a bitter rage, Vincent left Etten again. He told his parents he “didn’t want to know [them] any more,” and defiantly returned to the site of his undoing, the Borinage. He may have been escaping the campaign to commit him, or he may have been driven out by his father’s demand that he stay, convinced that Dorus just wanted to keep him out of sight to avoid bringing more shame on the family. As soon as he arrived back in Cuesmes, he sent his parents a copy of
The Last Day of a Condemned Man
, which struck exactly the blow he must have intended. “Hugo is on the side of
criminals
,” his mother wrote in horror. “What would become of the world if bad things were considered to be good? For the love of God, that can’t be right.”

After only a short time alone in the black country, however, Vincent’s anger hardened into despair. All his missions had failed. His congregations had rejected him; their God had betrayed him. His family had renounced him long before he renounced them. The battle over Gheel had dashed even the hope of reconciliation—the hope that had sustained him through all the loneliness and hardship of the previous three years. Homeless, penniless, friendless, faithless, he had reached the bottom of his long descent. Guilt and self-loathing overwhelmed him. He branded himself as “an objectionable and shady sort of character … a bad lot … a ne’er-do-well.” He complained of feeling “dreadful disappointment gnawing” at his spirit, and “a wave of disgust welling up inside.” “How can I be of use to anyone?” he concluded bitterly. “The best and most sensible solution all round would be for me to go away … to cease to be.”

From the depths of this blackest country, after almost a year of silence, he reached out to his
“waarde
Theo.” “I have kept silent for such a long time,” he wrote in July. “[Now] I have reached a sort of impasse, am in trouble, what else can I do?”

It was the beginning of a deluge: a pent-up storm of protest, self-pity, confession, and supplication in the longest letter he had yet written. He staunchly defended his bizarre excesses of behavior, arguing simply, “I am a man of passions.” If he seemed “good for nothing,” a
“fainéant”
(idler), it was because his “hands were tied.” If he appeared angry, it was because he was “maddened by pain”—like a captive bird that “bangs his head against the bars of his cage.” Amid the pages and pages of defensive posturing and convoluted casuistry, however, stood one genuine cri de coeur: “One does not always know what he can do,” Vincent wrote, using the veiled constructions that always guarded his most painful confessions, “but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason!…How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be?”

Theo heard his brother’s plea. The next time Vincent wrote, his question had been answered. “I am busy drawing,” he announced in a brief letter a month later, “and I am in a hurry to go back to it.”