Van Gogh (133 page)

Even as Vincent’s behavior made Gauguin’s stay in Arles increasingly intolerable, Theo’s efforts in Paris made it increasingly unnecessary. In mid-November, when Gauguin’s canvases finally arrived from Pont-Aven, Theo exhibited them on the
entresol
and diligently promoted them to collectors and critics. Sales of both paintings and pottery mounted; admirers multiplied. A fresh wave of money and praise washed over the Yellow House. Gauguin began keeping lists of his buyers. He boasted to Bernard of his distinguished “flatterers,” especially Degas, and plotted to ensure that his disapproving family “got wind of my success.” Theo sent letters enclosing hundreds of francs, elaborate plans for framing, and requests for Gauguin to approve pending sales. Other letters arrived filled with sycophantic praise (“the richness and abundance of your production astound me … You are a giant”) and plans for exhibitions. He was invited to show his work with Les Vingt (The Twenty), an artists’ society in Brussels that, through its connection with the influential review
L’Art Moderne
, had become a leading venue for avant-garde art.

Like Vincent, he declined an invitation to exhibit at the
Revue Indépendante
show in January, convinced that his enemies had laid a trap for him. Instead, he
began planning his own independent show—“a serious exhibition in opposition to the
petit point.”
Swollen with new confidence, he wrote to his wife, “My business affairs are heading in the right direction [and] my reputation is becoming firmly established.” He sent friends a new photograph of himself showing off his “savage countenance,” as if to announce his triumphant—and imminent—return from the wilderness.

Soon thereafter, the message reached Theo: “It is absolutely necessary that I leave.”

VINCENT HAD SEEN
the end coming. As early as mid-November, fear of it had begun to creep into his letters. “We are having wind and rain,” he reported, “and I am very glad not to be alone.” When Gauguin received the invitation to show with Les Vingt in Brussels, Vincent was seized by a paranoid suspicion that his housemate intended to move there. “Gauguin is already thinking of settling in Brussels,” he imagined, “so he can see his Danish wife again.” Perhaps to hide his anxieties from Theo, he wrote fewer and shorter letters, even as the nights grew longer and lonelier. He blamed the frictions in the Yellow House on weather and wind, or Gauguin’s obligations to his family, or the usual strains of creative life. The truth was simply unacceptable. As soon as Gauguin announced his decision to leave, Vincent launched a furious campaign to reverse it, pretending to Theo that the decision had not been made. “I think myself that Gauguin was a little out of sorts,” he explained. In a delusion of denial, he rented two additional rooms in the Yellow House.

Like Theo’s refusal to come to Drenthe, or Rappard’s criticism of
The Potato Eaters
, Gauguin’s decision to leave Arles had to be undone—unsaid. Vincent would force him to “take it back.” He told Gauguin: “Before doing anything … think it over and reckon things up again.” Seeing doubt where there was none, he reopened all the arguments of the spring and summer—the “good reasons” why Gauguin’s destiny lay in Arles—pressing them with fresh vehemence and an edge of desperation.

Despite the proof of his own eyes, he insisted that Gauguin had arrived there “in pain and seriously ill” and would fall sick again if he left the reparative embrace of the Yellow House. He warned that the success of Gauguin’s art, too, depended on the magical Midi. He heaped praise on recent works like
The Grape Harvest
and
The Pigs
, calling them “thirty times better” than Gauguin’s paintings from Pont-Aven. Turning against the plan for Martinique, he offered his own “calculations” to show that Gauguin needed far more money for his voyage than Gauguin himself had figured. Only if he stayed longer in the frugal South—with Theo looking after his pictures and Vincent looking after his
health—could he amass the funds he truly needed. Surely he owed that duty of caution to his wife and children, Vincent pleaded.

After exhausting all these arguments, he turned to the oldest argument of all: solidarity. He revealed to Gauguin his deepest secrets of failure—in family, in religion, in love—and drew from them a lesson that projected his own last hope for happiness onto his guest. “Gauguin is very powerful and strongly creative,” he wrote Theo, “but just because of that he must have peace. Will he find it anywhere if he does not find it here?”

Inevitably, the pleadings found their way into paint. With tremendous care, he filled a large canvas with a scene that he and Gauguin had shared only a few weeks before: the ball at the Folies Arlésiennes. Vincent had always been drawn to crowds. From the fervent masses at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London to the rowdy sailors’ dances in Antwerp, the anonymity of large gatherings had made it possible for him to enjoy the human warmth that always eluded him in more intimate encounters. The annual winter ball at the Folies Arlésiennes, a huge theater that also hosted Christmas pageants and traveling zoos, outdid any celebration Vincent had seen in its naïve splendor and earnest high spirits. By the time he and Gauguin arrived on the night of December 1, the balconied theater was so packed that there was no room left for dancing. The festive chaos and infectious good cheer dispelled the claustrophobia of the Yellow House and the increasingly tense relations within it.

Thus it was no surprise, two weeks later, when Vincent summoned up this raucous evening of wine, women, and camaraderie to dissuade Gauguin from leaving Arles. Working in Gauguin’s way,
de tête
, he captured the roiling sea of celebrants: women in Sunday hats and native bonnets, Zouave soldiers in their red regimental caps, both sexes bareheaded—an audacity of rustic esprit. Shoulder to shoulder, they surge across the ballroom floor and spill from the distant balconies under a galaxy of luminous Chinese paper lanterns.

The vast mosaic of figures and faces bursts with decorative motifs and patterns, some borrowed directly from Gauguin’s Brittany work and from a Bernard painting that Gauguin had brought with him from Pont-Aven. The elaborate, geishalike hairdos of the Arlésiennes, seen from behind, fill the foreground with their sensuous curves of ribbons and curls. Beyond them, faces dissolve into featureless masks—rank after rank of Gauguin’s mysterious phantoms, like revelers at a masquerade. Only the face of Madame Roulin stands out as a real person. In homage to the
maître
, Vincent also abjured the bright color contrasts of his own work and filled the heavily outlined elements with Gauguin’s subtle
crépon
palette applied in judicious strokes. This was not the Folies ball they had witnessed; it was an
idée
of a ball.

The outing to the Folies proved successful enough that Gauguin proposed
a more extended day trip. The destination: Montpellier, a picturesque medieval city sixty miles southwest of Arles, not far from the Mediterranean coast. Gauguin chose the spot not for its rocky shoreline or its antique streets, but for its most famous treasure: the Musée Fabre. He had visited the museum years before, and he lured Vincent on the long train ride (a five-hour round-trip) with descriptions of the magnificent Delacroixs and Courbets that hung there as part of a collection given by Alfred Bruyas, a famous benefactor of the arts and friend to artists. In the lofty, skylighted Bruyas Gallery, the two painters passionately debated the paintings that crowded the walls. While Gauguin championed the muted tones of Delacroix, Vincent pleaded for his beloved portraiture—even defending the dozens of portraits of himself that Bruyas, a relentless narcissist, had commissioned from various artists.

After the trip, a tense peace descended on the Yellow House. In response to discussions like the one in the Bruyas Gallery, Gauguin painted a portrait of an old man leaning on a cane—a nod of approval to Vincent’s Daumier-inspired country saint, Patience Escalier. Around the same time, he agreed to participate in another round of portraits of Madame Roulin, the postman’s wife, a model of motherhood that had begun to obsess Vincent’s imagination. The pair of portraits not only signaled an entente on the subject of portraiture, but also announced that the two artists had begun working together again in the front room. Gauguin even obliged Vincent’s request that they exchange self-portraits—the ultimate pledge of artistic brotherhood. Like the Rashomon views of Augustine Roulin, the reciprocal self-portraits matched perfectly in size, orientation, and palette. For the background, Vincent adopted Gauguin’s meticulous brushstrokes; Gauguin borrowed Vincent’s
bonze
green.

Only days after returning from Montpellier, Gauguin withdrew his plan to leave Arles. “Please consider my journey to Paris as imaginary,” he wrote Theo mysteriously, “and in consequence the letter I wrote you as a bad dream.” Was Gauguin persuaded by Vincent’s pleas to stay? Was he moved by the passion for art that Vincent showed in Montpellier? Did he take pity on Vincent’s troubled past? Or did he simply fear that his housemate might come unhinged if he left?

Undoubtedly, Theo had intervened in the meantime. Knowing his brother’s frantic needs and fragile spirits, he had surely begged in his careful way for Gauguin to reconsider and, if at all possible, remain. The combination of pity and pressure—whatever it was—proved persuasive even to the pirate Gauguin. “I owe a lot to Van Gogh and Vincent,” he wrote his friend Émile Schuffenecker. “In spite of some discord, I am unable to hold it against a man with such a good heart who is ill, suffering, and calls for me.” Indicating the threat he felt, he compared Vincent to Edgar Allan Poe, “who became an alcoholic as a result of his sorrows and neurotic state”; and he hinted at a darker cause: “I’ll explain in detail later.”

But nothing had changed. Where Vincent saw entente and rededication, Gauguin saw appeasement and delay. What Vincent took as a change of heart, Gauguin meant only as a recalculation. If he could maintain good relations in Paris and avoid an explosion in Arles by staying, Gauguin reckoned, he could bear life with Vincent a little longer. “I am staying put,” he confided to Schuffenecker, “but my departure is always imminent.”

To Theo, Vincent reported that all had returned to normal in the Yellow House. “This is how things stand,” he wrote cheerfully. “Gauguin was saying to me this morning when I asked him how he felt ‘that he felt his old self coming back,’ which gave me enormous pleasure.” But, in fact, he knew the truth. Even as he boasted of a new rapprochement and claimed Gauguin as “an excellent friend,” he continued to fear the worst. “Up to the last days,” he later confessed, “I saw only one thing, that [Gauguin] was working with his heart divided between the desire to go to Paris to carry out his plans, and the life at Arles.” The uncertainty paralyzed him. Despite his claims of unceasing effort, his work ground to a halt. In a collapse of confidence reminiscent of The Hague, he asked Theo to return canvases from Paris and proposed not sending any more for at least a year. “It would certainly be better if I can refrain from sending them,” he wrote forlornly. “For there is no need to show them at the moment, I know that well enough.” Still, through all the premonitions of catastrophe, he protested his “absolute serenity” and confidence in the future.

As in Drenthe and Antwerp, the contradiction between his averred life and his real life drove Vincent into a spiral of guilt and self-reproach in the weeks before Christmas, his most vulnerable season. Gauguin undoubtedly saw the first cracks of the coming breakdown in Montpellier when, standing before Delacroix’s portrait of Alfred Bruyas, Vincent launched into a bizarre discourse on the family resemblance between the bearded, redheaded Bruyas and himself. In twisted knots of association, he linked both Gauguin and Theo to Rembrandt portraits, creating a delusional brotherhood of look-alikes, and ended with a vision of himself as the brooding, demon-plagued poet Torquato Tasso, as Delacroix famously depicted him, imprisoned in an insane asylum.

As much as he could, Vincent hid from Theo the gathering storm in his head. He talked vaguely about “difficulties [that] are rather within ourselves than outside.” He complained that his discussions with Gauguin left him “as exhausted as an electric battery after it has run down.” Only later did he admit to multiple “nervous crises” and attacks of “delirium” in the last weeks of December. But even at the time, Theo must have noticed how Vincent’s infrequent letters flitted distractedly from subject to subject, from image to image, as restless and disconnected as a ghost. He reported looking at paintings and seeing visions from the past. Delacroix’s portrait of Bruyas triggered a particularly vivid reverie, he told Theo: a phantomlike figure from a favorite poem by Alfred de Musset—“a
wretch clad in black” that followed him silently wherever he went, watching as if from the other side of a mirror:

Religion, the most toxic of all subjects, had returned. From Musset’s resurrected sibling, to the Christlike Tasso, to the “man of God” Delacroix, Vincent saw the ghosts of his own past in apparitions almost indistinguishable from real life. Among the many portraits of his “lost brother” Bruyas that he saw in Montpellier was one depicting the gaunt, redheaded collector posed as Christ with a crown of thorns. Steeling himself against the “siege” of Gauguin’s success, Vincent invoked Saint Paul’s injunction to be “sorrowful yet always rejoicing.” He engaged in heated debates with Gauguin that explored the elusive, fraught boundaries between art, religion, delusion, and the supernatural. According to the latter’s account, Vincent became so animated and emphatic in these arguments that he scribbled on the wall of the studio in yellow chalk
“Je suis Saint-Esprit”
—I am the Holy Spirit.

But no image of alienation or disintegration could have haunted Vincent more than the one in Guy de Maupassant’s story “Le horla”—“The Stranger.” The obscure, gothic term, taken from Norman dialect, perfectly suited Maupassant’s account of a man driven to insanity by hallucinatory visions and paranoid fantasies. Vincent probably read “Le horla” while still in Paris. But his plan for the combination with Gauguin had no place in it for this dark diary of a mind possessed. The bright future and boundless optimism of
Bel-Ami
better suited his dreams for the Midi. When those dreams began to unravel in December, his thoughts turned to Maupassant’s dreadful tale. Gauguin, an admirer of the supernatural, noted the story and its strange title in his sketchbook from Arles—a sign of its influence on their increasingly electrified life in the Yellow House—and Vincent later reported hallucinatory sightings of the
horla
itself.