Van Gogh (110 page)

But no matter how loudly Vincent protested his shared bravado to the young rebel Bernard, he still cared dearly about the opinions of “those people who have preconceived ideas about technique”—one of them in particular. His letters to Theo that spring brimmed with arguments for the salability of his orchard paintings and affirmations of his intent to please. “You know this kind of subject delights everybody,” he wrote. He imagined that his sunny orchards would “really break the ice in Holland” and finally win over the recalcitrant Tersteeg. He made repeated claims for their “enormous gaiety”—a code for all the changes in his art that Theo had urged for years. He traced his paintings’ lineage to
entresol
bestsellers like Monticelli and Impressionist luminaries like Renoir in support of their colorful palette and commercial appeal.

To bolster his argument, he laid plans for an ambitious “scheme of decoration” to rival Monet’s series of images from Belle-Île and the vast canvases of Seurat that the brothers had seen in the artist’s studio in February. Vincent would paint not just individual images of orchards, but groups of related images. Calling upon a lifetime of cataloguing and ordering, he imagined creating
a series of triptychs: threesomes of “matching” orchard views, each consisting of one vertical image between two horizontal images, a scheme he illustrated in a letter to Theo.

Convinced that these groupings would prove more decorative and therefore more salable, he began “touching up” the paintings he had already done in order to “give them a certain unity,” and laying plans for “a final scheme of decoration a great deal bigger”: a series of nine canvases organized in threes. Under the spell of yet another vision of success, Vincent made extravagant promises to his partner in Paris. “Take these three for your own collection,” he urged Theo concerning one of his triptychs, “and do not sell them, for they will each be worth 500 later on.” “If we had fifty like these put aside,” he wrote, the numbers inflating as his hopes spiraled upward, “then I should breathe more freely.”

But his illusions were short-lived. No sooner had the last petals from the fruit trees fallen to the ground, idling his brush, than the demons of the past rushed into the void. Unrejuvenated by the southern clime, his health continued to deteriorate. Stomach disorders, fevers, and general weakness plagued him. Between mouth sores, toothaches, and digestive problems, he found eating “a real ordeal,” he admitted, and he flirted yet again with self-starvation. He complained of absentmindedness and spells of mental fogginess that sent sparks of panic through his letters as he contemplated the fates of other painters, like De Braekeleer and Monticelli, reduced to “hopeless wrecks” by “diseases of the brain”—a code for the brothers’ shared affliction, syphilis.

At first, he blamed the persistence of these “curses” on the “damnable winter” and the bad wine in Paris. When spring finally arrived, he had cut back on tobacco and alcohol, convinced that his blood no longer needed “stimulants” in the heady Mediterranean air. But that had produced disastrous results. “When I stopped drinking and smoking so much,” he wrote, “I began to
think
again instead of trying not to think. Good Lord, the depression and the prostration of it!” For a while, he took to his bed over the Restaurant Carrel and demanded better food and, especially, better wine. “I was so exhausted and so ill,” he wrote, “that I did not feel strong enough to live alone.”

He missed Theo. Almost from the moment he stepped onto the train in Paris, he regretted leaving his brother, and consoled himself with visions of their happy reunion. “During my journey I thought of you at least as much as I did of the new country I was seeing,” he wrote Theo the day after his arrival in Arles. “Only I said to myself that perhaps later on you will often be coming here yourself.” Even as the snow fell outside the door of his hotel, he advertised Provence, as he had Drenthe, as the perfect place for a busy
gérant
to “recuperate and get one’s tranquility and poise back.” Once the snow cleared, the thrill of spring and his frenzy of work kept the emptiness at bay. But as soon as the blossoms began
to disappear, it returned. “Oh! It seems to me more and more that people are the root of everything,” he wrote longingly in April. A month later, he added: “The appearance of things has changed and become much harsher.”

As always, he sought solace in his imagination, taking up Guy de Maupassant’s
Pierre et Jean
, the story of two half brothers. But if he was looking for the “lightheartedness” he so much admired in Maupassant, the author of his only laughter in Paris, or for the touching fraternity of
The Zemganno Brothers
, he must have been confounded by
Pierre et Jean
’s dark tone and unhappy ending. He did find consolation, however, in the book’s preface, where Maupassant laid out a theory of art that defended Vincent’s new exile as ringingly as Zola had defended the last one. In describing his artistic ideal, Maupassant claimed for every artist a right—indeed, a mandate—to see the world his own way: to create a personal “illusion of the world … according to his own nature,” and then to “impose [his] particular illusion upon humanity.” Vincent described Maupassant’s ideas to his distant brother (“He explains the artist’s liberty to exaggerate, to create in his novel a world more beautiful, more simple, more consoling than ours”), and then used those ideas to draw Theo, and all his former circle, into his own “illusion of the world”—a more consoling world of shared insurgency, shared sacrifice, and, most important, shared isolation. “You feel that you’re alive when you remember that you have friends who are outside real life as much as you,” he wrote.

Throughout the spring, he denied the reality of his solitude by clinging to this ghost of brotherhood and belonging on the rue Lepic. Less than a month after arriving, in a rare unguarded moment, he gave the illusion away. “I would rather fool myself than feel alone,” he admitted. “I think I should feel depressed if I did not fool myself about everything.”

CAUGHT UP IN
his mercenary zeal and bound in every thought to his former home, Vincent closed himself off to the new one. He wrote almost nothing about the city of Arles, or its inhabitants, in his first months there. When the weather permitted, he plodded directly into the countryside from his hotel near the train station. Other days, he holed up in the Restaurant Carrel, or took his meals in his room. He made a few trips to the city’s bullfighting arena (where he reported seeing “a toreador crush a testicle jumping the barricade”) and, of course, he visited the local brothels (conveniently located just a block from his hotel). But even on these rare excursions, the brothers’ enterprise on the
entresol
guided his eye. The injured toreador, “dressed in sky blue and gold,” reminded him of a figure out of “our Monticelli”; and his description of one brothel offered up exactly the gay avant-garde palette that he had promised to find in the Midi:

Too tied to the city he left behind, Vincent never registered the extraordinary city to which he had come. Continuously occupied since before the time of Alexander the Great, Arles had felt the footsteps of all the great civilizations whose progress Vincent had limned a hundred times in his studies and on his maps: Greek settlers, Phoenician traders, Roman legionnaires, Visigoth invaders, Byzantine governors, Saracen conquerors, Crusader armies. The Carthaginian Hannibal could spy Arles from the heights of the Alpilles, a rocky spur of the Alps less than ten miles to the north. The great Julius Caesar had rededicated Arles as “the Rome of Gaul” in 46
B.C
. Not long afterward, according to legend, a group of Jesus’ family and friends had sailed from Judea to escape the turmoil following his crucifixion, and landed miraculously on the coast nearby.

All of these, and many more, had left their marks on the city’s narrow streets. The Romans, in particular, had bequeathed a legacy in stone. The huge bullfighting arena where Vincent admired “the great colorful multitudes piled up one above the other on two or three galleries” had been built in the first century
A.D
. by the emperor Vespasian. Nearby, the plundered remains of a Roman theater cast a looming shadow of history over the warren of medieval streets where Vincent single-mindedly trooped to work, passing tourists, like Henry James, who came from worlds away to see “the most charming and touching ruins I had ever beheld.”

If Vincent had not been so preoccupied, he might also have seen in Arles’s history just the kind of metaphor he found so consoling. For millennia, Arles had controlled the strategic junction of the Rhône River and the Mediterranean Sea. A virtual island, surrounded by water and marshland on every side, it sat at the apex of the river’s vast, triangular delta, straddling the gateway to one of Europe’s richest regions. But centuries of silt had clogged the estuary channels and filled in the marshes, pushing the sea southward, beyond the horizon. Deprived of its port, Arles had become a city stranded in place and time. Now, instead of overlooking busy quays and sparkling water, the old stones kept watch over a broad, lazy river and a vista of waving sea grass and wild horses.

But Vincent saw only decay. “This is a filthy town,” he wrote Theo. “Everything has a blighted, faded quality about it now.”

His disdain for the town extended to its citizenry. As on all his forays into the country, Vincent found the natives of Provence as strange and unapproachable as they found him. “[They] all seem to me to be creatures from another world,” he reported a month after his arrival. Like the coal-mining Borins, the
Arlesians spoke a patois almost unintelligible to Vincent’s ear, honed for two years on Parisian French. Their medieval customs, mystical Catholicism, and deep superstitions were objects of ridicule even among their own countrymen. By 1872, when Alphonse Daudet published the first in a series of comic novels about a hapless, blowhard Provençal named Tartarin from Tarascon, a real town only ten miles from Arles, the natives of Provence had become a national joke, mocked everywhere for their buffoonery and braggadocio.

Just as he had relied on a guidebook to learn about the Borins, Vincent took Daudet’s caricature as a textbook on the “simple and artless folk” of Arles. He seemed both bemused and disconcerted that his only source for painting supplies was an amateur artist who doubled as the local grocer (who had access to an ample supply of egg yolks for sizing the canvas he sold). After a visit to the city’s museum, Vincent assumed the airs of a condescending Parisian, dismissing it as “a horror and a humbug [that] ought to be in Tarascon.”

The locals sensed his contempt and returned it. They recalled him as
“méfiant”
(mistrustful) and
“frileux”
(aloof). One of the townspeople later remembered that Vincent “always looked as if he were rushing away, without deigning to look at anyone.” Like the miners of the Borinage and the peasants of Nuenen, they deplored his strange manner and bizarre dress. An eyewitness recalled Vincent years later as
“vraiment la laideur personnifiée”
—truly ugliness personified. As in those other places, he attracted the unwanted attentions of teenagers who “shouted abuse at [him] when he went past,” one of them recounted, “[with] his pipe between his teeth, his big body a bit hunched, a mad look in his eye.” In a sad confession, Vincent acknowledged his latest failure to find a home. “Up to the present I haven’t made the least progress in people’s affection,” he wrote that summer. “Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone, except to ask for dinner or coffee. And it has been like that from the beginning.”

Vincent did, however, occasionally see other artists working in the area. Christian Mourier-Petersen, a twenty-nine-year-old Dane living outside Arles, was the next in a succession of younger artists whom Vincent attempted to tyrannize with instruction. “His work is dry, correct, and timid,” he reported to Theo. “I talked to him a lot about the impressionists.” As always, Vincent sent glowing accounts of social evenings and painting excursions with his pedigreed young companion. But after Mourier-Petersen left in May, Vincent’s happy account dissolved into the usual wounded recriminations (“that idiot”), elliptical confessions of discord, and belated complaints about his student’s resistance to reason.

Just as Mourier-Petersen was leaving, Vincent made the acquaintance of Dodge MacKnight, a twenty-seven-year-old American artist who had rented a studio in the nearby village of Fontvielle. Vincent never liked Americans, whom he considered boorish, and MacKnight confirmed his bias at their first encounter.
“As an art critic, his views are so narrow that they make me smile,” Vincent summed up their conversation. Only because MacKnight was a friend of John Peter Russell—the object of Vincent’s commercial ambitions—did he hold his fire, putting off the inevitable dénouement at least for a few months.

The combination of unrequited longing for Theo and unrelieved loneliness triggered a wave of nostalgia. Vincent was often gripped by debilitating seizures of memory and remorse, especially when prevented from working by lack of materials or subjects. As the color drained from the orchards, he complained of “inward suffering” and vowed, “I must go and look for a new subject.” Remembrances of things past rushed into the void, flooding his thoughts, his letters, his pen, and his brush.

The countryside around Arles was filled with reminders of his childhood and homeland: from the network of canals that crisscrossed the marshy boglands, to the mills that drained them. Tree-lined roads vanished at the horizon and grasslands stretched heathlike to the sea. Even the sky, arching over the chessboard of groves, grazing pastures, and stubbled fields, evoked the great Golden Age vistas of Ruisdael and Philips Koninck. But whether on the delta of the Rhône or the banks of the Thames, Vincent’s imagination needed no prompting to drift back to the past. Indeed, like London, Provence reminded him of Holland both in its differences and its similarities. That they followed the same cycle of seasons,
or fell under the same sun, was enough to return him to the plain of the Maas. “I keep thinking of Holland,” he wrote, “and across the twofold remoteness of distance and time gone by, these memories have a kind of heartbreak in them.”