Van Gogh (136 page)

Twenty-four hours before Christmas on a rainy night, there were only a few places Gauguin could be. Vincent probably tried the brothels first. Gauguin’s favorite, on the rue du Bout d’Arles, was only a few minutes’ walk from the Yellow House. Vincent asked to see “Gaby,” the
nom de théâtre
of a woman named Rachel, Gauguin’s particular favorite. But the brothel keeper would not let him pass. Convinced, perhaps, that Gauguin was within, he surrendered his package to the “sentry” and asked him to convey it with a message: “Remember me.”

He returned to the Yellow House, staggered up to his bloody bedroom, lay down dizzily on the scarlet blanket and closed his eyes, expecting—even welcoming—the worst.

T
HEO COULDN’T BELIEVE HIS GOOD FORTUNE. JO HAD FINALLY SAID
yes. Eighteen months after rejecting his marriage proposal, she had miraculously reentered his life and, in a whirlwind two weeks, transformed it. On December 21, Theo announced the “great news” to his mother, giving her the best possible Christmas present. “We have seen one another a great deal these last few days,” he wrote. “She has told me she loves me too and that she will take me the way I am.… O Mother I am so inexpressibly happy.”

His family celebrated the news in a chorus of holiday endorsements. “What good news, we are so happy with it!” sister Wil responded. “I’m so thankful that you won’t be alone anymore because you’re not that type of person.” “We have been wishing it for you for such a long time,” Lies added. His mother thanked “the good Lord for hearing my prayer.” On Christmas Eve, Theo laid plans with Jo to travel to Holland and formally announce their engagement to both families. “This will be a turning point in my life,” he predicted. “I am on cloud nine.”

Later the same day, a courier arrived at the gallery with a telegram from Arles. Vincent had fallen “gravely ill.” Theo needed to come at once. Gauguin offered few details. Theo imagined the worst. “Oh, may the suffering I dread be staved off,” he scrawled in a note to Jo as he hurried out the door. “I shall keep my spirits up by thinking of you.” At 7:15 that evening, as Christmas Eve candles, lamps, and electric lights were lit across Paris, he boarded a train for the 450-mile trip to Arles—a trip he had long avoided. Jo bid him farewell at the station.

On Christmas morning, the hospital in Arles was unusually empty. Staff and visitors and any patients who could walk filled the churches of Catholic Provence—one of them attached directly to the hospital—or joined family at home. Built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when any illness was a deadly, demonic business, the hospital looked like a prison, with high stone
walls pierced by small windows and few entries. Its builders had given it a name, carved over the main door, at once hopeful and helpless: Hôtel Dieu—God’s house. Reminders of its spiritual license—crucifixes, plaques, inscriptions—filled the cavernous halls as Theo searched for his brother. He may have stopped first at the Yellow House, near the station, and asked Gauguin to be his guide. If he did, Gauguin refused. (Vincent had called out for his housemate many times after he regained consciousness, hoping to dissuade him from doing what he had already done: summon Theo.)

With so few staff and so many beds, finding Vincent could not have been easy. Since arriving twenty-four hours earlier, he may have already been removed from the “fever ward”—a huge, high-ceilinged room with dozens of beds separated by muslin curtains. The police had left him there, bleeding and unconscious, the previous morning. But when he regained consciousness, he cried out incomprehensibly in a tumble of Dutch and French that unnerved both patients and staff. Eventually, they moved him to an isolation cell—a tiny room with padded walls, barred windows, and a bed fitted with shackles.

By the time Theo found him, he had calmed down again and may have been returned to the ward—a round-trip he would make many times. “He seemed to be all right at first,” Theo reported to Jo. At one point, he lay down in the bed beside his brother and they reminisced about their childhood together in the attic of the Zundert parsonage. “How poignant,” their mother wrote when Theo related the scene to her, “together on a pillow.” Theo asked if Vincent approved of his plan to marry Jo. Vincent replied elusively: “marriage ought not to be regarded as the main object in life.” But before long the demons descended again. “He lapsed into brooding about philosophy and theology,” Theo reported. “It was terribly sad … From time to time all his grief would well up inside and he would try to weep, but couldn’t.”

If only Vincent had someone like Jo, Theo thought. “Poor fighter and poor, poor sufferer,” he wrote her after his visit. “Had he just once found someone to whom he could pour his heart out, it might never have come to this.”

And then he left.

After no more than a few hours at the hospital, with only a brief visit to the Yellow House, he returned to the station and took a train that left Arles at 7:30 that evening—only nine hours after he arrived. He was probably accompanied on the long ride back to Paris by Gauguin, who carried a load of Vincent’s paintings as trophies of his two months in Arles. Struggling to explain his hasty flight from Vincent’s bedside, Theo wrote Jo: “His suffering is deep and hard for him to bear,” but “nothing can be done to relieve his anguish now.”

In his brief time at the hospital, Theo managed to speak to one doctor: a twenty-three-year-old intern named Félix Rey. As the most junior member of the medical staff, Rey had drawn the short straw of holiday duty. An affable Midi
native, Rey had yet to earn his medical degree, but he could report to Theo the strange circumstances of Vincent’s “accident” and the agony of his long first day in the hospital. All of the doctors at the Hôtel Dieu were astonished and perplexed by Vincent’s case: the violence of his attack on himself, the vehemence of his agitation, the strangeness of his behavior. Not one of them had yet dared to propose a diagnosis. Clearly, his mind was unmoored. Anyone could see that. His wound and his fever they could treat, but some were already declaring him insane and urging his transfer to a lunatic asylum where he could receive more expert attention.

Rey, who was just completing his doctoral thesis on urinary tract infections, knew little about mental illness, but he brightly ventured his own reassuring prognosis to the patient’s distraught brother. Vincent was merely suffering from “overexcitement,” he said—the natural product of an “extremely hypersensitive personality.” The symptoms would soon abate, he predicted confidently. “He will be himself again in a few days.”

If Theo had stayed in Arles another day, he might have met the hospital’s medical director or administrator and heard other, more dire opinions. But formal interviews would have entailed wrenching inquiries into family health secrets, both physical and mental: a routine part of the admitting process that both brothers dreaded. (Vincent’s hospital records contained none of the background information that Theo could have provided.) Rey’s opinion may have been hasty, inexperienced, or inexpert, but it gave Theo what he wanted most: permission to return to Paris. Just as his old life threatened to end, a new one beckoned. “The prospect of losing my brother,” he wrote Jo, “made me realize what a terrible emptiness I would feel if he were no longer there. And then I imagined you before me.”

It was a pattern that would be repeated again and again over the next five months as Vincent shuttled in and out of the hospital, in and out of padded cells, in and out of coherence: one brother suffering in silence and self-reproach, the other retreating into optimism and indecision; one haunted by the past, the other looking to the future; both grasping at every straw of hope, minimizing every dread, moving in contrary spirals of denial that pushed them further and further apart with each revolution. “Let’s not exhaust ourselves in futile attempts at mutual generosity,” Vincent wrote in a moment of grim clarity and resignation after Theo left. “You do your duty and I will do mine … and at the end of the road perhaps we will meet again.”

AS SOON AS NEWS
of Theo’s departure pierced his consciousness, Vincent plunged into darkness again.

Vincent remembered little about his attacks (“I don’t know anything about
what I said, what I wanted, or what I did,” he wrote), but he remembered the darkness. It descended without warning. In an instant, “the veil of time and the fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart,” he said—as if he had suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the world. A witness at the hospital who saw him during an attack described him as “lost.” In the darkness, nameless fears overwhelmed him. He felt waves of “anguish and terror” and “horrible fits of anxiety.” He lashed out violently at the threats he saw everywhere, raging incoherently at doctors and chasing away anyone who approached his bed. When his rage was spent, he retreated to a corner or under the covers and cowered in fevers of “indescribable mental anguish.” He trusted no one, recognized no one, doubted everything he heard or saw, took no food, could not sleep, would not write, and refused to talk.

In the darkness, shapeless shadows pursued him. Horla-like ghosts—“unbearable hallucinations”—appeared and disappeared like vapor, but as vivid and palpable as his own flesh. “During the crises themselves,” he wrote, “I thought that everything I imagined was real.” They spoke to him. They accused him of terrible crimes. They called him “a deplorable and melancholy failure,” a “weak character,” a “miserable wretch.” He shouted back, desperately defending himself against the thin air. But he could not make himself heard. After a lifetime of arguing and persuading, he was trapped in his worst nightmare: a prisoner at the bar, gagged into silence. “I cried out so much during the attacks,” he recalled; “I wanted to defend myself and couldn’t do it.” The unanswered accusations sent him spiraling into seizures of self-loathing and “atrocious remorse.”

Vincent never identified his phantom accusers. But in his hours of “frightful suffering … when I was so far gone that it was more than a swoon,” he called out names: Degas, whose easy, elegant lines eluded him; Gauguin, whose refusal to stay in Arles confirmed the failure of his great Midi dream; Theo, who came to Arles too late and for all the wrong reasons. And, of course, the damning parson who relentlessly tallied every failure and spied from every crucifix. “During my illness,” Vincent wrote,

In such hallucinatory “eruptions of memory,” as Flaubert called them, Vincent revisited all the injuries of the past. “In my madness,” he recalled, “my thoughts sailed over many seas.” For him, memory had always been the imagination’s sixth sense; nostalgia, a turbulent inland sea of inspiration. His delirium breached the dam between past and present. Flaubert, who suffered similar
mental seizures, described how images flooded in “like torrents of blood … everything in one’s head bursting all at once.”

Where others saw madness, Vincent saw memories. He climbed into bed with fellow patients, just as he had done with Theo in Zundert. He chased after nurses in his nightshirt, just as he had done with Sien in The Hague. He even blackened his face with coal, just as he had done in the Borinage. To Rey it looked like an act of lunacy—“he went to wash himself
in the coal bin,”
the doctor reported incredulously. What Rey couldn’t see, what only Vincent could see, was a past of ridicule and rejection by the wretched Borins and a familiar self-abasing ritual of solidarity with the miners who, like him, “walked in darkness.”

Sometimes the darkness passed quickly—a sudden storm that blotted out the sun for a moment or an hour. Other times, it lingered for days as storm after storm battered his reason and seemed to banish the sun forever.

By December 30, the darkness had lifted. Or so it seemed. “His condition has improved,” Rey wrote Theo that day, exactly a week after Vincent took up his razor. “I don’t believe his life is in danger, at least for the moment.” When he emerged, Vincent found himself imprisoned and alone. “Why do they keep me here like a convict?” he angrily demanded. Stripped of recollection, he felt only guilt. “He hides himself in absolute silence,” one visitor reported, “covers himself with his bedclothes and at times cries without uttering a single word.” Both his anger and his shame threatened to restart the cycle of madness. Another visitor described him as “calm and coherent” but so “amazed and indignant” at his situation (“kept shut up [and] completely deprived of his liberty”) that another attack seemed inevitable. The anger fueled days of protests against his continued confinement. For a time, he refused to cooperate with his captors. “When he saw me enter his room,” Rey wrote, “he told me that he wanted to have nothing to do with me.”

The doctors increasingly saw only one path forward: commitment. During the worst of his attacks they had issued a “certificate of mental alienation” claiming that Vincent suffered “a generalized delirium” and attesting to his need for “special care” in one of the two public asylums in the region, in Aix and Marseille. Even Rey seemed convinced. He wrote Theo expressing his preference for the asylum in Marseille, where he had recently interned. The future seemed set until Vincent’s sudden return from the darkness in late December. Paralyzed at the prospect of burdening Theo further, he argued fiercely for his freedom and recruited the postman Roulin to plead his case to hospital officials. But no display of calmness and coherence, no promises from Roulin to look after his friend, not even the speedy healing of the wound on Vincent’s head, could persuade the doctors to release him. Even Rey, the most optimistic of them, feared the violent consequences of a relapse. Besides, the commitment process had already been set in motion.