Van Gogh (108 page)

Vincent couldn’t help his vehemence. Every idea he ever seized, he seized to its furthest margin; every enthusiasm, wrung to its extremity. In his effort to capture “a sense of life’s intensity,” Bernard wrote of Vincent’s painting, “he tortures the paint … He denies all wisdom, all striving for perfection or harmony.” Whether making his arguments in paint or in person, whether at the rue Lepic or in another artist’s studio, Vincent had to “tear off his clothes and fall on his knees.” “When one has fire within oneself,” he wrote his sister Wil at the end of 1887, “one cannot keep bottling [it] up—better to burn than to burst. What is in will out.”

If anything, the foothold in reality he had finally gained in Paris—the long-sought joint enterprise with Theo, amity on the rue Lepic, the grudging deference of fellow artists, Bernard’s fawning fraternity—only excited him to greater and greater exertions of advocacy, more and more vehement expressions, as if he had finally found the ministry to which he had always felt called.

And then, suddenly, he left.

NO ONE KNOWS
why Vincent left Paris in February 1888. The real reasons are hidden, like so much else about his two years in Paris, behind the curtain of silence drawn over the brothers’ relationship when cohabitation ended their correspondence in February 1886. When the letters resumed, Vincent claimed “a thousand reasons” for his sudden departure: from the most poetic (“looking for a different light [and] a brighter sky”) to the most prosaic (“this terrible winter, which has lasted an eternity”).

Sometimes, he laid the blame at the city’s feet: the cold, the noise, the “damned foul wine” and “greasy steaks,” all made life there “unbearable,” he said. He complained about official harassment (“You can’t sit down wherever you want”) as well as the mist and smog that obscured the true colors of things.
He blamed the Parisians themselves—“changeable and faithless as the sea.” In particular, he faulted the fickleness of his fellow artists and attributed his departure to exasperation with their endless rivalries and factional infighting.

At other times, he cast his leaving as an advance, not a retreat: an artistic quest for new subjects that would put “some youth and freshness” into his paintings—or at least give buyers “what they want in pictures nowadays.” Or sometimes he explained it as a business venture: a bold sales trip to the provinces in search of unrecognized bargains (in particular, Monticellis in Marseille). Indeed, Vincent portrayed himself in a race with other dealers to be “first on the ground” in Monticelli’s Mediterranean homeland.

The cloud of explanations that Vincent offered for his departure—shape-shifting with every gust of enthusiasm or self-justification—only confirms the fundamental inexplicability of it. After years of pining for a perfect union with his brother, after bewailing his loneliness and bitterly demanding companionship from the coal fields of the Borinage or the heaths of Drenthe, Vincent abandoned Theo at the very moment when his dream finally seemed fulfilled—abandoned him and returned to a life of loneliness in a remote, unfamiliar, and friendless region.

Of course, artists often left Paris for extended trips to picturesque, faraway places, in winter as well as summer. Cormon had traveled as far as Africa, as had Maupassant’s
Bel-Ami
, Georges Duroy. Monet had profitably spent the fall of 1886 in Belle Île, and, by the time of Vincent’s departure in February, had already embarked on a new expedition to Antibes. Bernard fled the city every summer to Normandy or Brittany, as did Signac and Pissarro. Anquetin had spent the previous winter (1886–87) on the Mediterranean coast. Gauguin had bested them all, traveling to Brittany in the summer of 1886, then to Panama the following spring, thence to Martinique for the summer and fall of 1887. The same month Vincent left Paris, Gauguin returned to Brittany, where Bernard planned to join him in April.

But this was different. This was not a fashionable winter flight to sunnier climes like Signac’s or Pissarro’s. Nor was it Monet’s months-long sojourn to picturesque provinces like Normandy or the Riviera. And it certainly wasn’t Gauguin’s globe-spanning voyage in search of extreme experience and exotic imagery. Unlike Vincent, all these artists returned. Whether they stayed away for two months or six, they always intended to come back to the families, homes, studios, and friends they left behind.

When Vincent left the rue Lepic apartment in February 1888, on the other hand, he moved out “for good,” he said. In his letters, at least, he never contemplated returning. Theo’s report to their sister Wil soon after Vincent left rings with finality. “It is not easy to replace someone like Vincent,” he wrote. “It still seems strange that he has gone.” In fact, Vincent’s departure was rooted not in
the endless escapades of his fellow painters, but in his own plan the previous April to return to Antwerp, driven from the brothers’ apartment by rancor and the threat of exile—a break from which there was no going back.

Did they fight again? Had their joint enterprise once again fallen victim to the resentments that always plagued and often wrecked previous
ententes?
The winter of 1887–88 was filled with invitations to argument, no doubt. Money still flowed only one way on the rue Lepic. While Vincent ran up unseen debts at Bing’s and Tanguy’s, the entries in Theo’s marbleized account book continued to document his total dependence. All his maneuverings and even Theo’s Goupil connections had not yet produced a single sale. He had not yet been invited to participate in any of the huge group exhibitions for new art, many of them organized by artists he knew; much less the selective shows mounted by Theo’s counterparts at other galleries.

If Theo objected to Vincent exhibiting his work at untraditional venues like Le Tambourin or the Restaurant du Chalet, Vincent undoubtedly lashed back with accusations about Theo’s misguided refusal to make the
entresol
available for fear of “compromising” himself. Other artists could enjoy the privilege of Goupil’s imprimatur, but not his brother? Even Paul Gauguin, a newcomer to the
frères
Van Gogh circle in December, earned a coveted place on the mezzanine only a few weeks after meeting Theo. Meanwhile, Vincent was left to display several of his unframed pictures in the foyer of a new experimental theater in a hodgepodge display promoted as “decorating with chic.”

Through it all, however, the bonds of brotherhood held fast. If anything, the summer brought them even closer together as they plunged, hand in hand, into the bohemian demimonde of Paris. Haunted alternately by the prospect of early death and the fear of lifelong loneliness, they embraced the
nostalgie de la boue
(nostalgia for sordidness), the hallmark of avant-garde social life. From the cheap taverns of Montmartre to the sexual tourism of the Moulin de la Galette (succeeded the next year by the Moulin Rouge), the city offered endless opportunities to indulge the slumming appetites the brothers had always shared.

Vincent set the pace in drinking: absinthe in the afternoon, wine with dinner, free beer at the cabaret, and his personal favorite, cognac, anytime. He used its sweet “stupefaction” to treat his inevitable winter depression, arguing that it “stimulated blood circulation”—increasingly important as the weather turned bitter cold. By the time he left Paris, he later admitted, he was well on the road to being a “drunkard” and an “alcoholic.”

As for the pleasures of whores and the dangers of syphilis, Vincent offered another license: “Once you’ve caught it,” he said blithely, “you’ll never catch it again.” He effected the
fumistes’
fashionable “disdain for everything”—exactly the kind of soulless self-amusement that Pastor Dorus had so often deplored. “Enjoy yourself too much rather than too little,” he advised his sister Wil that
winter, “and don’t take art or love too seriously.” Andries Bonger accused Vincent of
“Weltverachtung”
—“a morbid contempt of the world.” Second-guessing his doctors, Vincent resisted Rivet’s prescription of potassium iodide (the preferred treatment for tertiary syphilis) and urged Theo to do likewise. They both scoffed at Rivet’s counsel of “sobriety and continence” as well as Gruby’s more direct admonition:
“no
women.”

Far from discouraging his brother’s excesses, as in the past, Theo eagerly mimicked them. Freed temporarily from his fantasy of middle-class married life and lured by his new role as avant-garde tastemaker (a friend described him as “completely caught up in the bohemia of the young painters”), Theo threw off a lifetime of dutiful inhibitions and paternal warnings. He openly repudiated his former ambition to “work hard” and “get ahead.” Dutch friends like Bonger, still on course to be married in March, recoiled in disappointment and sadness. “[Theo] is ruining his health,” he reported, “and has adopted the kind of extreme lifestyle he is bound to regret later on.” When the news reached Jo in Amsterdam, she despaired for Theo’s fate and worried to her diary: “If I only knew whether I did the right thing!”

By the time Vincent departed, the brothers had achieved a euphoria of unity unseen since the Zundert parsonage. They celebrated the nostalgic rituals of Christmas together, and Vincent welcomed the new year with a big self-portrait: a bold assertion of his new life as a
frère
Van Gogh, complete with all the accoutrements of an avant-garde artist, confidently detailed down to the stained-glass mosaic of paint on his palette.

He described his last days with Theo in Paris as “unforgettable,” and left the rue Lepic on February 19 not in anger or defeat, but in sadness. The day before, he hung some of his beloved
crépons
around the apartment “so that my brother will feel that I am still with him,” he told Bernard. On the way to the train station, the brothers paid a visit to the studio of the remote
célèbre
Georges Seurat—an affirmation of their “joint enterprise” even as it uncoupled. Despondent after their parting, Theo wrote Wil: “When [Vincent] came here two years ago I had not expected that we would become so much attached to each other, for now that I am alone in the apartment there is a decided emptiness about me.… He has lately meant so much to me.”

Only one force could have sundered this perfect union. Vincent would never have let go at his brother’s demand—as Theo knew well—nor could any improvement in climate or scenery have pried him away from such a consummation of longing; he cared too little for comfort, or even for his own health. But Theo’s health was a different matter. By February 1888, the afflictions of the previous winter had returned with a vengeance: frozen joints, disfiguring swelling, inexplicable exhaustion. The progressions of Theo’s disease, the waves of relapsing symptoms and torments of treatment, were inexorable. But to Vincent,
and probably Theo, too, they seemed to come as punishment. In his later reports, Vincent blamed his brother’s misery on
“notre névrose”
(“our neurosis”) and claimed a shared fraternal destiny of illness and degeneration. Relentlessly romantic, he imagined that Theo suffered a
“maladie de coeur”
over the loss of Jo Bonger, just as he himself had suffered over Kee Vos.

But the ghost of the dead parson pointed the finger of blame in a different direction. It was Vincent’s reckless pursuit of pleasure, his heedless surrender to temptation, and his encouragements for Theo to follow that had wreaked havoc on Theo’s fragile constitution. He was killing his brother—just as he had killed his father.

The previous winter, at the lowest point in their relationship, Theo had told Vincent, “I only ask one thing: do me no harm.” In a letter to Wil, Vincent explained his departure from Paris this way: “I thought I should do nobody harm if I went someplace.” Isn’t that what Gianni Zemganno did when his unthinking encouragements resulted in the terrible fall that brought his younger brother Nello to the edge of death? Like Gianni, who renounced the life of an acrobat and abandoned their high-flying partnership rather than bring his brother to ruin, Vincent left Theo for his own good, as a final act of brotherhood. It was the first in a succession of “withdrawals” (his word)—from Paris, from Arles, from life—that Vincent hoped might save his ailing brother. “If I come to grief myself in the attempt,” he wrote after he left, specifically citing the Zemganno brothers’ story as a warning, “it will hurt only me.”

Two years later, only months before his death and with the clarity of madness, Vincent admitted the truth about his leaving:

W
HY DID VINCENT CHOOSE TO BEGIN HIS SELF-IMPOSED EXILE FROM
Paris in Arles, an ancient Provençal town of twenty thousand people twenty miles from the Mediterranean Sea? If he had come to the legendary South of France—the Midi—in search of warmer weather, surely he would have stayed on the train and continued farther south. (He had considered traveling as far as Tangier.) Instead, he stepped off into snow deep enough to cover his shoes, and trudged through the coldest winter in Arles in a decade, searching for a room to rent.