Van Gogh (143 page)

In his letter to Theo announcing his decision, Vincent begged to be excused from explaining it. “Talking about it would be mental torture,” he said. Yet, in the days that followed, he sent a sprint of letters filled with reasons for his sudden reversal: from the most prosaic (“I am absent-minded and could not direct
my own life just now”) to the most heartrending: “I have been ‘in a hole’ all my life, and my mental condition is not only vague now, but has always been so, so that whatever is done for me, I cannot think things out so as to balance my life.”

But the real reason was clear enough. He was doing it for Theo. “I wish to remain shut up as much for my own peace of mind as for other people’s,” he informed his brother. “I am sorry to give trouble to M. Salles, and Rey, and above all to you.” But Salles reported to Theo a much more turbulent reality as the wedding day approached. “You would hardly believe how much your brother is preoccupied and worried by the thought that he is causing you inconvenience,” the pastor wrote. Vincent worried especially about “scenes in public” if another attack struck after his release. What would Theo be forced to do? “My brother,” he cried out to Salles, “who has always done so much for me and now to cause him more trouble!”

DESPITE MONTHS OF
waiting for Vincent to choose his own fate, Theo balked when he finally did. The “repulsive” prospect of his brother entering a lunatic asylum, even for a few months, shattered his delusion of a hospital-based “convalescence,” spoiled his narrative of Byron and Don Quixote, and cast a shadow over his family seed just as he began planning a family of his own. Nothing else but shame could explain Theo’s frantic efforts to talk Vincent out of a decision over which he had agonized for so long. Theo not only repeated the reluctant invitation to Paris, where he and Jo had just arrived (having put off their honeymoon); he even suggested that Vincent might want to rejoin Gauguin in Pont-Aven for the summer—a notion of breathtaking folly.

He questioned Vincent’s choice of asylum, too. At Salles’s recommendation, Vincent had already picked out a small church-affiliated asylum in Saint-Rémy, a little town about fifteen miles northeast of Arles in the foothills of the Alpilles, the rocky ramparts of the Alps just visible on the horizon of the Crau. The choice of a small, private, and expensive institution came as a surprise to Theo after months of correspondence that focused solely on the larger, public (and less costly) asylums in Aix and Marseille. He belatedly suggested that Vincent further investigate conditions at those asylums and, in any event, that he wait for more information before making a final decision. And whether his destination was Saint-Rémy or some other place, he urged Vincent to shorten his stay there—from three months to one—and continued to speak of it more as a camp-like retreat than a psychiatric confinement.

Even in the midst of his calls for reconsideration and further delay, Theo confirmed all the fears that had driven Vincent to his sudden reversal. He sent cheerful reports of the wedding ceremony and rapturously proclaimed the connubial bliss he had found with Jo. “We thoroughly understand each other, so we
feel such a complete mutual satisfaction,” he wrote, inflicting the wound over and over with each unthinking exclamation. “All goes better than I have ever been able to imagine, and I never dared hope for so much happiness.”

Theo’s resistance and insensitivity only pushed Vincent into more extreme threats of withdrawal. “I could get out of this mess by joining the Foreign Legion for five years,” he wrote at the end of April. “I think I should prefer that.” Distraught by higher than expected fees at Saint-Rémy and initial reports that he might not be allowed to paint outside the asylum, Vincent imagined an escape to the
extreme
South: the deserts of Arabia. There he could find “supervision” for free, and perhaps be allowed to continue his work in the Legion barracks. There he could find the order and serenity of a hospital ward and, after five years, “might recover and be more the master of myself.” There, most important, he could escape the guilt. “The money painting costs crushes me with a feeling of debt and worthlessness,” he exclaimed in an outburst that jolted Theo to attention, “and it would be a good thing if it were possible that this should stop.”

As horrified as Theo was by his brother’s threat to join the Foreign Legion (“It is meant as an act of despair, isn’t it?” he replied accusingly), he saw even darker threats in a newspaper article that Vincent sent him about an unknown Marseille artist who had committed suicide. “One catches a glimpse of Monticelli in it,” Vincent hinted, invoking the Midi master whose ignominious death (and rumored suicide) haunted him even more since the failure of the Yellow House. “Alas, it’s yet another deplorable story.” If he himself had not failed so miserably, Vincent wondered, could he have saved this anonymous comrade? “For it was precisely to painters such as the poor wretch in the enclosed article that the studio could have been of use.” All that remained of that dream now was “deep remorse,” more expenses, and the faithful Theo. “If I were without your friendship,” he cautioned his recalcitrant brother, “they would drive me remorselessly to suicide, and coward that I am, I should end by committing it.”

In the end, Theo had no choice. He agreed to pay the extra money and wrote the required admission letter to Saint-Rémy (requesting the cheapest “third class” accommodations). But in a last gasp of denial, he reassured the asylum director that his brother’s confinement was “required more to prevent a recurrence of previous attacks than because his mental condition is at present affected.” For Vincent, he could find no better comfort than this: “From one point of view you are not to be pitied, though it may not seem so.… Be of good heart; your disasters will surely come to an end.”

BY EARLY MAY
, Vincent had finished packing up the Yellow House. It was an agonizing job. During his long absence, the heat had been turned off and the nearby river had flooded, bringing the waters of the Rhône almost to his
doorstep. In the cold, damp darkness, water and salt oozed from the walls and mold spread luxuriantly. Many drawings and paintings were ruined. “That was a blow,” he admitted, “since not only the studio had come to grief, but even the studies that would have been reminders of it.” Sifting through the wreckage, he salvaged what he could. The furniture, he stored over the Ginouxs’ infernal night café. The paintings took weeks to sort and dry. One by one—the beloved
Berceuse
, the bedroom, the Sower, the chair, the starry night, the sunflowers—he removed them from their stretchers, interleaved them with newspaper, packed them, crated them, and sent them to Paris with apologetic instructions. “There are lots of daubs among them, which you will have to destroy…[Just] keep what seems passable to you.”

As he packed, waves of remorse washed over him. He spent only a few nights in his new apartment before loneliness and nightmares drove him back to the hospital for his final days in Arles. “Certainly these last days were sad,” he wrote Theo,

He looked around the room and saw not a studio but “a graveyard,” and pronounced a despairing epitaph: “Pictures fade like flowers.” In his farewell letter from Arles, he reviewed his career as if his life were flashing before him. He reclaimed his Millet peasants and the “Dutch palette with its grey tones,” and cautioned his brother, “do not become completely and exclusively impressionist. After all, if there is good in anything, don’t let’s lose sight of it.” He listed artists he loved, but feared would be forgotten. As for himself, he said, “as a painter I shall never amount to anything important, I am absolutely sure of it.”

Even as he considered giving up painting altogether, he managed to paint two more images before leaving. Both depicted roads. In one, a family frolics on a path in a park “splashed with light and shade” under a lush canopy of flowering chestnut trees. In the other, an empty road winds into the distance and disappears behind a wall. Its rutted, lonely route is lined by shaggy clumps of meadow grass and leafless pollarded willows, scarred and misshapen, as far as the eye can see.

T
HE ASYLUM OF SAINT-PAUL-DE-MAUSOLE LAY IN A MOUNTAIN VALLEY
that had enchanted visitors since the Romans. Some compared the hidden glen to the magical Swiss Alpine passes much higher up on the spine of Europe. Others saw in its green fields and olive groves the rolling countryside of Tuscany. “Pure Italy,” composer Charles Gounod called it, “the most beautiful mountain valley that you could see anywhere.” Some saw the Attic hills of ancient Greece—the original Arcadia.

The fearsome Visigoths had preferred the nearby rocky heights of Les Baux—an eagle’s nest of a city carved out of solid rock and perched impossibly at the very edge of the Alps, where the mountains met the delta of the Rhône in a great wall of limestone. But the civilizing Romans found both security and an echo of their hilled homeland in the remote, fertile vale just beyond the rocky crest. So impressed were they by the secret serenity of the place that they built a small resort city, called Glanum, dedicated entirely to health and the restoration of the spirit.

By the tenth century, Glanum had been plundered to rubble to build the nearby town of Saint-Rémy, but the valley’s regenerative powers found new expression in reports of a miracle (a staff, plunged into the ground, had burst into bloom) and the inevitable establishment of a monastery. In a merger of appreciation that reached across a millennium, the founders named it after the most prominent relic left by the Romans, a towering funerary monument. For the next eight hundred years, the cloister church of Saint-Paul
-de-Mausole
(of the mausoleum) welcomed thousands of pilgrims, especially those who sought succor for troubled minds and infirm spirits. Secure in its mountain redoubt, it survived all the waves of plague and destruction that brought so many of its
lowland cousins to ruin. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the salubrious climate, serene vistas, and legends of healing power brought the old monastery, by now a sprawling complex of buildings, to its final incarnation: an asylum for the insane.

A
SYLUM OF
S
AINT-PAUL-DE-MAUSOLE
, S
AINT-RÉMY
(
Illustration credit 39.1
)

The Catholic heritage of Saint Paul must have given both Vincent and Theo pause. But the asylum’s brochure (which both brothers read) hardly mentioned religion, emphasizing instead the older salvation, the pagan cure, of tree and grove and mountain air beneath a “jewel-enameled sky”:

Of the monastic orders that had prayed under Saint Paul’s Romanesque arches (Augustinian, Benedictine, Franciscan), all that remained were a small clutch of nuns who supplemented the staff; a routine as orderly as matins and vespers; and a pervasive, otherworldly calm. Indeed, after the tortuous two-hour train trip from Arles, climbing through the terrifying gorges known since Dante’s time
as Hell’s Gate, Vincent must have seen the low-lying asylum, with its tree-lined entrance, tended gardens, and verdant fields, exactly as so many previous pilgrims had seen it: an island of serenity in a craggy, perilous world.

In the restorative spirit of Glanum, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole operated more like a resort than an asylum. Other than the monastic routine of shared mealtimes and bathing hours, residents were generally left on their own, under distant but watchful supervision. No longer supported by the church, Saint Paul lured the moneyed middle class—eager to keep relatives out of crowded and repugnant public asylums—with promises of hygienic conditions, healthy food (“abundant, varied, and even rare”), frequent outings, scenic views, radiator heat, and modern medical treatment, which consisted of management by “gentleness and benevolence” (that is, without resort to shackles or straitjackets) and a program of “manual work and amusements.”