Van Gogh (142 page)

As the reality of Theo’s marriage sank in, Vincent’s fragile world unraveled. He had spent months denying it. When he returned to consciousness after the attack at Christmastime, he referred to it vaguely not as a marriage at all but as a welcome rapprochement with Andries Bonger. “How glad I am that you have made peace with the Bongers,” he wrote from his hospital bed in January. When he finally came around to the truth, he offered Theo only halfhearted congratulations (“the house will not be empty any more”) and steadfastly avoided using Jo’s name (as he would until just days before the wedding). At one point, he openly advised Theo just to “screw the girl” instead of marrying her. “After all,” he added in a snide reference to Theo’s many mistresses, “that’s normal practice in the North.” Next, he belittled the marriage as merely the proper thing to do—a loveless function of “social position” and filial duty.

But Theo’s endless reports on the new apartment and mooning letters about
Jo soon forced Vincent into the delusion that always overtook him when his brother threatened to marry. “A secure home for you is a great gain for me too,” he wrote, proposing that the three of them live together. As in Drenthe, when he invited Theo’s mistress Marie to join the brothers’ mission on the heath, he imagined Jo as a partner in their work on behalf of the new art: “[She] will join with us in working with the artists.” As in Paris (the first time Theo had planned a life with Jo), he fantasized that the newlyweds would buy a country house that he could fill with paintings. He pictured the imminent blessed union not as a marriage, but as a merger that would ensure the success of the brothers’ joint enterprise far into the future. “In the spring, you and your wife will found a commercial house for several generations,” he wrote. “And that settled, I only ask the position of a painting employee.”

But his month in an isolation cell turned these fantasies to dust. When he emerged from the hospital at the end of March, his attitude toward the marriage had changed. A month of waiting in vain for Theo to rescue him, a month without a single letter from his brother, or Jo, had confirmed his worst fears. Marriage meant only one thing: abandonment. It didn’t help that no one had shared any of the wedding plans with him. He knew neither the place nor even the date of the ceremony. It was as if they feared he might board a train and appear like a ghost at his brother’s wedding, uninvited and unwelcome, to spoil his family’s special day, as he had spoiled so many others.

Nor did it help that when Theo finally did write again, he urged Vincent to share his happiness by finding a wife of his own. He cruelly labeled this state of marital bliss “the
real
South.” The suggestion prompted a paroxysm of despair as Vincent saw his brother disappearing down a path he could never follow. “I rightly leave [marriage] to men who have a more well-balanced mind, more integrity than I,” he wrote. “I could never build an imposing structure on such a moldy, shattered past.”

By the time Signac arrived—a final abdication of fraternal duty—Vincent had sunk into bitterness. He caustically instructed Theo not to bother with such trivial things as his imprisonment until
after
the wedding. “Leave me quietly here,” he said. “Except for liberty … I am not too badly off.” In one of the darkest and most despairing passages in all their correspondence, he abjured not only marriage but any hope that he could love someone without hurting them. “The best thing for me would certainly be not to live alone,” he wrote, “but I would rather live in a cell forever than sacrifice another life to mine.” His bitterness over Theo’s marriage must have filled his conversations with Signac, too, as it certainly did his letter to the young artist immediately afterward:

But Signac’s visit also showed Vincent a new path forward. The company of a fellow artist, the elevated discussions, the studio rituals, gave him another glimpse of the painter’s life he had always longed for, but rarely known. Perhaps he could start again, he dared to imagine—on his own this time. With his health sturdy and his head clear (or so he thought), Vincent made a lunge at normal life. When Signac wrote from Cassis tepidly suggesting that Vincent “come do a study or two in this pretty country,” Vincent briefly entertained the illusion that the two men might “find a place together” and form yet another brotherhood of painters under the southern sun.

He sent a fulsome letter filled with beckoning images—in both words and sketches—of a new home for
japonisme
on the Côte d’Azur. If he could not marry, at least he could have a
true
friend. “My best consolation, if not the best remedy, is to be found in deep friendships,” he wrote Signac in a rebuke of his faithless brother, “even though they have the disadvantage of anchoring us more firmly in life than would seem desirable in the days of our great sufferings.”

When the combination with Signac, like so many other illusions, failed to materialize, Vincent set his sights on a new life in Arles. Persuaded that he could never return to the place Lamartine for fear that the neighbors might provoke him again, he allowed Salles to search for an apartment in another part of town. “I must have my own fixed niche,” he wrote, anticipating his imminent freedom; “then I could certainly make a trip as far as Marseille or further.” But the only willing landlord the pastor could find was Doctor Rey, who agreed to rent Vincent two “very small rooms” in his mother’s house. (“Nothing like as nice as the other studio,” Vincent complained.) While laying plans to move out of the Yellow House by Easter (April 21)—the deadline imposed by his landlord—Vincent also persuaded the good doctor to let him practice his “handicraft” in and around the hospital grounds. At the end of March, he sent Theo an order for paint and went into town himself to buy other supplies.

He began with another round of mantric repetitions: his fifth
Berceuse
and one more portrait of the postman Roulin, who visited Arles not long after Signac, rekindling Vincent’s Tartarin fantasies of the Midi as a land of jolly, carefree peasants with “strong constitutions” and irrepressible “high spirits.” Next, he followed through on a pledge he had made in January, when a return to normalcy seemed just around the corner: “Soon the fine weather will be coming and I shall begin again on the orchards in bloom.” First he painted a big
doux-pays
vista of a flowering peach orchard, invoking the magisterial Crau of the previous year; then a close-up view of a single twisted tree afloat in a sea of
emerald grass dotted with dandelions, affirming all his arguments for a Japan of the South.

Next, he reasserted his vision of a
Paradou
in Arles with both a drawing and a painting of the hospital’s courtyard garden, its shaggy boxwood parterres rioting with new growth—“forget-me-nots, Christmas roses, anemones, buttercups, wallflowers, daisies,” he listed them—a secret heart of life and bounty within the prison walls and dreary routine of dying.

The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles
, A
PRIL
1889,
OIL ON CANVAS, 28¾ × 36⅛ IN
. (
Illustration credit 38.2
)

For his new life, Vincent struck a new pose of independence and inner peace. He solemnly informed Theo “I am on the high road to recovery,” and professed to want nothing more than to stay on that road. Afraid that any aggravation might trigger a relapse, and convinced, as ever, that he could quell the storms in his head by sheer force of will, he addressed the future with Japanese serenity and a Voltairean cosmic laugh. “I am recovering a sort of calm in spite of everything,” he told Theo, recalling both Father Pangloss and Flaubert’s sublime clowns, Bouvard and Pécuchet. “The best we can do perhaps is to make fun of our petty griefs and, in a way, of the great griefs of human life too. Take it like a man.” He repudiated the gritty reality of Naturalism and embraced the soothing, sentimental works of his youth:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and Dickens’s
Christmas Stories
. “I read in order to meditate,” he told his sister Wil.

He
painted
to meditate, too. Imitating the Japanese monk who stilled his inner demons by studying “a single blade of grass” for a lifetime, Vincent painted vignettes of flowers and butterflies and swirling clumps of grass—images as close as botanical studies but as transfixed as pure abstraction—intimacies with nature that he had occasionally turned to in the past, especially to please Theo, but that now pointed his mind and his art in a new direction.

For models of serenity, he reached into the future as well as into the past. For the first time in his life, he found solace in science. Seizing on Dr. Rey’s mischievous notion that love was caused by a microbe, Vincent imagined that even his attacks of melancholy and remorse “might possibly be caused by microbes too”—a theory that allowed him to think of his ordeal not as an inexorable martyrdom, but rather as a “simple accident” in an unjudging universe. “I am beginning to consider madness as a disease like any other and accept the thing as such,” he wrote. “Almost everyone we know among our friends has something the matter with him.”

But it didn’t work. The hounds of failure, fault, and abandonment always found him. “Oh, if only nothing had happened to mess up my life!” he interjected abruptly in a description of his orchard paintings. “You see that I have no better luck in the South than in the North. It’s pretty much the same everywhere.” He complained of a “certain undercurrent of vague sadness difficult to define,” and, surveying the future, saw “no prospect of any better luck anywhere.” Apologies for his “weakness of character” and the “deplorable and melancholy failure” of the Yellow House slipped out before he could stop them. (“But we won’t begin again,” he caught himself.) He sent guilty reports of his expenditures, right down to new socks.

Paranoia, privacy, and the need to work drove him out of the hospital, but the prospect of living on his own terrified him. “I shall move out, of course,” he wrote timidly, “as soon as I see how to manage it.” Every time his head had “just about returned to its normal state,” he had confided to Signac, he was hit again by “inner seizures of despair of a pretty large caliber,” and the cycle of dread began again.

The potassium bromide he took to prevent such attacks dulled his enthusiasm and muddled his mind. “Not all my days are clear enough for me to write logically,” he confessed to Theo. If he could not remember what month it was or felt too fatigued to write a letter, how could he live on his own? It didn’t help that he couldn’t resist the self-tranquilization of alcohol during his long outings from the hospital (despite his promise of “a very sober way of living”), or control the lightning in his head when his thoughts turned inevitably to the fateful events unfolding far away in Holland.

When he guessed that the deed was done, he finally wrote and admitted the inadmissible. He wished his brother well, thanked him for all his years of affection
and kindness, apologized one last time for having given him so little in return, and then released him. Henceforth Theo would seek his “kindness” and “comfort” elsewhere, Vincent acknowledged: the time had come to “transfer this affection as much as possible to your wife.”

Ward in the Hospital at Arles
, A
PRIL
1889,
OIL ON CANVAS, 29⅛ × 36⅛ IN
. (
Illustration credit 38.3
)

Only days before, on the eve of the wedding, Vincent had told Salles, “I am unable to look after myself and control myself. I feel quite different from what I used to be.” He asked to go to an asylum “immediately.”

The announcement surprised Salles, who had thought Vincent seemed “infinitely better”—“as if not a trace of the trouble remained.” The doctors had agreed to release him from the hospital; the new apartment was arranged. The two men were on their way to sign the lease when something inside Vincent collapsed. “He suddenly confessed to me that for the time being he lacked the courage to stand on his own feet,” Salles reported, “and that it would be infinitely wiser and very much better for him if he spent two or three months in a mental home.”