Van Gogh (67 page)

As the day of Theo’s visit neared, Vincent approached the reckoning with such anxiety that he feared putting his head down at night. Instead, he worked straight through past sunrise, smoking his pipe, drawing and redrawing the familiar images in a fury of distraction until he “dropped with exhaustion.” He repeatedly claimed “serenity” in his work, but his letters bristled with defensiveness. When a painting by his friend Van der Weele won a silver medal, he rushed to reassure Theo, “I, too, shall be able to make something of the kind in the
future.” When Theo suggested that Vincent spend a few weeks recuperating in the countryside to improve his health, Vincent immediately suspected a slackening of support and brusquely dismissed the idea: “Taking a rest is out of the question.”

Yet nothing could discourage Vincent’s fantasy of perfect brotherhood. The vision that he and Theo had shared on the Rijswijk road ran in perpetual counterpoint to the rancor and resentment of their quotidian battles. He had only to walk alone in the dunes of Scheveningen, where the brothers had walked together so often in the past, to feel that tug again, and the welling of hope it always brought. “I shouldn’t be surprised if you also remember the spot,” he wrote after one such walk. “I think if we were together on that spot again, it would put you and me into a mood such that we would not hesitate about the work, but feel decisive about what we have to do.”

But Theo’s feelings toward his brother were also subject to wide swings of emotion (Vincent called them “oscillations”). And the years of relentless argument and thankless sacrifice had worn his fraternal feelings to a threadbare duty. In late July, on the eve of a mission he undoubtedly dreaded, Theo sent his brother a cruel preview of the message he would bring: “I can give you little hope for the future,” he wrote. Whether the product of carelessness or impatience or unchecked anger, the words struck Vincent a devastating blow. “They hit me unexpectedly right in the heart,” he wrote back immediately. “I feel my ardor vanishing … It sounds to me as if you yourself have no confidence in me. Is this true?” In a second letter the same day, he poured out all the self-doubt and self-reproach that had been dammed up through the months of defiant posturing:

Only days before Theo’s arrival, he took a solitary walk through the dunes. Thoughts of death crowded into the silence. The lonely beach and “gloomy mood” set him to thinking about a magazine profile of an artist who had died at the age of thirty-eight, he told Theo, and that led inexorably to a series of morbid calculations. “Not only did I start drawing relatively late in life, but it may well be that I shall not be able to count on many more years of life either.” Transforming a frisson of mortality into a plea for sympathy and patience, he carefully drew the lesson for his brother:

Month upon month of tireless arguments had come down to this simple plea: “The only thing I want is to make some good work.”

THEO’S TRAIN ARRIVED
late in the afternoon on Friday, August 17. Nothing that happened in the next few hours played out according to the wishful scenarios Vincent had spun in the preceding months. Instead of staying for the weekend, Theo only stopped between trains. Instead of giving Vincent’s work a detailed review, Theo may not have visited the Schenkweg studio at all (probably to avoid Sien). His only comment about his brother’s art was a vague tribute to its “manliness.” Instead of a trip to Scheveningen for a “nice long walk” in the dunes, the brothers made a circuit of the city streets as the day waned and the lamplighters came out. Instead of Vincent’s fantasy of fraternal solidarity, they fought bitterly.

Throwing aside the careful circumspection of their letters, they reopened every wound inflicted in the year since they had last met, provoking each other to towering rages and fuming silences. This time Theo
insisted
that Vincent find a job and make more efforts to sell his own work. Business at Goupil had fallen off (as it had everywhere in the recession of 1882–83) and Theo’s finances were strained to the breaking point. His salary had to be divided six ways—among parents, siblings, and mistress—and he could not promise to continue sending a hundred and fifty francs each month.

Stung by the indictment he heard in Theo’s woes, Vincent attacked his brother’s shallow, superficial life in Paris. He flatly refused to take a job on the side and haughtily rejected selling his own work (he likened it to “begging”). “It is so painful for me to speak to other people,” he countered. “The best thing would be to work on till art lovers feel drawn toward my work of their own accord.” Flinging the accusation of laziness back at his brother, he blamed Theo for not doing enough to sell his drawings or to heal the rifts with Tersteeg, Mauve, and their powerful uncles.

Theo revealed that he had, in fact, recently spoken to Uncle Cor in Amsterdam, and he had agreed to commission another set of drawings from Vincent. Uncle was even prepared to pay him a substantial advance. But on one condition: Vincent would have to leave Sien.

That propelled the argument to new heights of rancor on the most sensitive subject of all. Vincent accused his brother and father of cruelty for denying him his one true love, Kee Vos—“a wound that I carry with me”—and forcing
him into the embrace of “a faded whore” and her “bastards.” Theo argued that Sien had driven away the very people Vincent needed most, like Tersteeg. Finally, Theo leveled his most incendiary charge: that Vincent had fathered Sien’s child.

The rage that followed (“I
decidedly
lost my temper,” Vincent confessed) shattered any remaining fragments of fraternal feeling. In his brother’s accusation, true or not, Vincent must have heard again his father’s reproving voice. When Theo’s train pulled away from the station that night, Vincent’s parting thought was that his brother had
become
his father.

BY THE TIME
Theo departed, it was clear that Vincent would leave Sien. He would choose his old family over the new one. The only question was when and how he would justify leaving. “Do not hurry me in the various things we could not settle at once,” he wrote his brother in a fit of regret immediately after returning from the train station, “for I need some time to decide.”

Over the next three weeks, he wrestled with the inevitable through almost a dozen long, agonized letters. Professions of undying fealty and pleas for understanding battled outbursts of self-righteousness and bitter denunciations of Theo’s oversight, as Vincent foundered in crosscurrents of love and resentment, acquiescence and resistance. Chest-beating confessions were freighted with long, defiant postscripts taking back every concession. Vows of cooperation (“I am at your disposal”) vied with demands to “let me go my own way, just as I am”—sometimes in the same paragraph. One day he offered to take a lowly job as a delivery boy “rather than put too heavy a burden” on Theo’s shoulders; but the next day he defiantly declared himself “dead to anything except my work.”

Rather than resolve this conflict, this “struggle in my very depths,” Vincent’s first instinct was to escape it. Only two days after Theo’s visit, he proposed leaving The Hague. “I should like to be alone with nature for a time,” he announced, “far away from the city.”

The idea of traveling to the country had been percolating for more than a year, as Vincent sought to emulate affluent artists who, like Mauve, retreated every year to country houses or, like Anthon van Rappard, took leisurely sketching trips to remote regions. As recently as early August, Theo had suggested that Vincent take a holiday from the heat and closeness of the city by going to the polders, the Dutch lowlands, for a few weeks. But now the pressure of creditors and assessors had given practical urgency to this bourgeois indulgence. Now, Vincent proposed a permanent stay “in that country of heath and moorland,” where, he imagined, “I could do what I want.” He advertised the move to Theo as an economic measure—a cheaper, healthier alternative to city life, a source of both better (more salable) subjects and more affordable models, thus guaranteeing Theo both the landscapes he loved and the economies he demanded.

Vincent’s first choice of destination was, of course, home. Only the month before, he had worked himself into a thrall of nostalgia for the heath and pine trees of Brabant. Yet again he pictured a perfect homecoming, with his father and mother not just welcoming him, but posing for him in the same way as his make-believe family on the Schenkweg. “What I should tremendously like to do is [to draw] the small figure of Father on a path across the heath … In addition, Father and Mother arm in arm, let’s say.” But they would have to pose patiently, Vincent added firmly. “They will have to understand that it is a serious matter … And so they will have to be gently warned that they must adopt the pose I choose and not change it.”

In the real world, however, Theo had put Nuenen—indeed, all of Brabant—off-limits as long as Vincent clung to his scandalous “family.” He must have reaffirmed that judgment at the brothers’ meeting, for when Vincent announced his plan for moving to the country soon thereafter, he had chosen a new destination: Drenthe.

A remote province reaching almost to the northernmost border of the Netherlands, Drenthe had long since earned a place in Vincent’s intimate geography of art and family. Mauve had gone there in the fall of 1881 and invited Vincent to join him, before he fell sick and the trip was abandoned. Rappard had traveled there in 1882 and again in 1883, returning with glowing reports of “being on the road,” as well as drawings and paintings that Vincent pored over in his friend’s studio in Utrecht. Based only on these, Vincent had pictured the distant Drenthe as “something like Brabant when I was young.” In fact, it was Rappard’s reappearance in The Hague—on his way to Drenthe again—at exactly this moment that fixed Vincent’s decision. Grasping at the last remaining tie to his family’s favor, he imagined Rappard visiting him more often in Drenthe and counted the ways they “could profit from each other’s company.” He envisioned the two of them founding a kind of colony where other artists could come and “saturate [themselves] in nature’s serenity on the heath.”

And he imagined taking Sien with him. “I should like to live with her someplace in a little village where she could see nothing of the town and could live a more natural life,” he said, incorporating his old vision of rescue into his new vision of escape to the country. In a storm of arguments, he fought to save his fantasy of family from Theo’s cruel logic. “If I deserted the woman, she would perhaps go mad,” he said; and besides, “the little boy really dotes on me.” In a fever of self-justification, he even offered, again, to marry her.

But Vincent had thrown his lot with Theo, and Theo was unyielding. Vincent, of course, put all the blame for their final undoing on Sien: her perfidy, her backsliding, her refusal to sever relations with her scoundrel family. On Sunday, September 2, he sat her down in the living room of the Schenkweg apartment and spoke to her the same hard truths that Theo had spoken to him. “It is impossible
for us to stay together,” he said. “We make each other unhappy.” He urged her to “go straight,” but doubted she would. As to her future, he gave her the same solemn advice that Theo had so often given him: “Find a job.”

Up to the moment that Vincent’s train left The Hague on Sunday, September 11, doubts and regrets tormented him. He entertained fantasies that Sien would join him, or that he might stay, even as he settled his debts with the money from Uncle Cor and arranged to store his possessions in his landlord’s attic. He sped through preparations, convinced that each day of delay “took [him] deeper into the labyrinth” of Sien’s “wretchedness.” In a fever to leave, he dismissed Theo’s suggestion that he learn more about his destination. He took it as all the confirmation he needed that Rappard had written from Drenthe: “The country has a very serious character; the figures often remind me of your studies.” He begged Theo to send extra money so he could set out “as soon as possible … the sooner the better.” If he could not send enough for Drenthe, Vincent offered to go
anywhere
, as long as it was “far, far, away” and he could leave immediately.

When the money finally arrived, he left the next day. He had tried to keep his leaving a secret from Sien until the last minute, but she showed up at the station to see him off carrying one-year-old Willem in her arms, a sight he feared would break his heart. “The little boy was very fond of me,” he wrote Theo of his farewell, “and when I was already on the train, I still had him on my lap. On both sides, I think, we parted with inexpressible sadness.”

Vincent claimed the mantle of “duty” to cover his humiliating exit from The Hague. “My work is my duty,” he wrote on his last night there, “even more immediate than the woman, and the former must not suffer because of the latter.” But the currents that moved him had not changed. The foundering of his adopted family had driven him, yet again, back toward his real one. Yearning for Theo suffuses the last letters from The Hague. He promised to return from Drenthe in time for Theo’s next visit and then to join a society for watercolorists to which both Mauve and Tersteeg belonged, and after that to go to London to find paying work. He imagined his uncles rallying to yet another resurrection of favor. “The main thing now is to paint a great deal,” he declared.
“That
, and nature’s serenity will bring us victory in the end—do not doubt it.”