Van Gogh (162 page)

The same resignation marked his personal life as well. He was too old not just for Madagascar, he said, but for wife and children, too. “I am—at least I feel—too old to retrace my steps or to desire anything different,” he confessed. “That desire has left me, though the mental suffering of it remains.” More and more, he complained about the limits on his time, on his work, on his energy; and brooded on the precariousness of both sanity and life. He imagined how differently he would have spent the previous decade—his entire artistic career—“knowing what I know now.” He mourned the ebbing of his ambition as well as his manhood, and cried out like a man twice his age against the “desperately swift passing away of things in modern life.” He looked in the mirror and saw a
“melancholy expression,” which he called “the heart-broken expression of our time,” and compared it to the face of Christ in the Garden.

In June, his mother sent another thunderbolt from the past. She had just returned from Nuenen, where she marked the fifth anniversary of her husband’s death with a visit to his grave. She sent Vincent a devastating account of her pilgrimage (“I saw everything again with gratitude that once it was mine”) that left him babbling with guilt and remorse. In a letter he wrote to console her, he reached out to a biblical passage that spoke more directly to his own feelings of inexplicable suffering and irreversible fate. “As through a glass, darkly,” he wrote, invoking the passage from 1 Corinthians in which all burdens are made bearable by the promise of ultimate purpose, “so it has remained; life, the why or wherefore of parting, passing away, the permanence of turmoil—one grasps no more of it than that.” “For me,” he confessed, “life may well continue in solitude. I have never perceived those to whom I have been most attached other than as through a glass, darkly.”

This sentence of solitude, the judgment of the past, had followed him even to the garden valley of Auvers. The ranks of beautiful places and happy faces that lined his studio walls could not hide the fact that he had no friends at all. By July, his relationship with Dr. Gachet had fallen into the familiar spiral of alienation and rancor. Vincent’s unceasing demands and Gachet’s high-strung detachment set the two on a collision course. The doctor’s frequent absences from Auvers confirmed Vincent’s fear that he could not be counted on in a crisis. Vincent’s strange behavior and vehement views on art (and possibly his attentions to Marguerite Gachet) threw the doctor’s household into an uproar. Gachet imposed prohibitions on painting in the house; Vincent hurled his napkin down and stalked away from the dinner table. The final break came in an argument over Gachet’s refusal to frame a Guillaumin painting.

As an eccentric neurotic himself, Gachet showed some sympathy for Vincent’s oddities of manner and dress. Others were less tolerant. Young Paul Gachet later described Vincent’s “comic way of painting”: “It was very odd to watch him,” he recalled. “Every time he put his little strokes of paint on the canvas he would first lean his head back to look up with half-closed eyes … I had never seen anyone paint like that.” Marguerite Gachet put off for a month Vincent’s request to pose, and finally consented only to let him watch her while she played the piano. His request for a second sitting went unanswered. Vincent’s intense exertions behind the easel bewildered and menaced Adeline Ravoux as well. “The violence of his painting frightened me,” she later told an interviewer, and she described the portrait that resulted as “a disappointment, for I did not find it true to life.” She, too, declined to grant a second sitting.

Indeed, the year in the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole had left an indelible mark on Vincent’s demeanor—an anxious alertness to the possibility of
imminent collapse, visible in his vacant expression and fugitive gaze—that unnerved grown men, not just adolescent girls. “When you sat opposite him and talked face-to-face,” a witness in Auvers recalled,

Anton Hirschig, a young Dutch painter, arrived at the Ravoux Inn in mid-June, sent by Theo, like a draft replacement, to provide his brother with the companionship of a fellow artist and the comfort of a countryman. The twenty-three-year-old Hirschig found Vincent a nervous, twitching, frightened man—“a bad dream,” “a dangerous fool”—with a mind ominously unmoored. “I still see him sitting on the bench in front of the window of the little café,” Hirschig later wrote, “with his cut-off ear and his wild eyes in which there was a crazed expression into which I did not dare to look.”

Vincent had no better luck with the Spanish artist who took his meals at the Ravoux Inn (“Who is the pig that did that?” he said when he first saw Vincent’s paintings); or another Dutch artist who worked in Auvers; or the family of English-speaking artists who lived next door, “painting away, day in and day out”; or the French artist who visited Auvers but successfully avoided any contact at all. Even the brothers’ old comrade from the rue Lepic, Pissarro, who lived only six miles away, never came to see him. Vincent did briefly befriend one of the neighbors, an artist named Walpole Brooke, but Brooke quickly disappeared down the same hole of mutual hostility as Hirschig, of whom Vincent wrote, “He still has quite a few illusions about the originality of his way of seeing things … He won’t come to much, I think.”

Locals had even less tolerance for the visitor’s bizarre ways. They avoided him in the cafés and fled when he accosted them in the street with entreaties to pose. One of them heard Vincent muttering to himself, “It’s impossible, impossible!” as he stalked away from one such rejection. Most of the townspeople knew nothing of the events in Arles or the asylum of Saint Paul, but they could see the mutilated ear easily enough. “It was the first thing you noticed when you saw him,” one of them said, “and it was very ugly.” Some compared it to “a gorilla’s ear.” The residents of Auvers may not have shared the Arlesians’ superstitions or prejudices against painters, but they were still repulsed by Vincent’s tramplike appearance, unkempt beard, self-trimmed hair, and indeterminate accent—they guessed German or English—that spoke of rootlessness and rough living. As in Arles—and everywhere else he went—Vincent attracted the attention of
teenage boys. Dressed in his peasant’s rags and toting his strange bag of painting gear, he looked “like a scarecrow,” one of them later told an interviewer. Local ruffians chased him through the streets shouting a familiar chant:
“fou”
—crazy. But some of the boys of Auvers were more sophisticated than the “street arabs” of Arles. Many were summer idlers from Paris schools, sons of the vacationing bourgeoisie. Their games with the strange vagabond were more inventive than throwing rotten vegetables; but no less cruel.

They pretended to befriend him—bought him drinks, invited him on outings—only to make him the butt of pranks. They put salt in his coffee and a snake in his paint box. (He nearly fainted when he found the snake.) When they noticed his habit of sucking on a dry paintbrush, they distracted him long enough to rub the brush with hot red pepper, then watched with glee as his mouth exploded. “How we used to drive poor Toto wild,” one boy later boasted, using their patois pet name for the strange painter-man—yet another way of saying “crazy.”

The leader of the summer boys was René Secrétan, the sixteen-year-old son of a rich pharmacist from Paris. The Secrétans had a holiday house in the area and arrived every June at the start of the fishing season. An avid outdoorsman who would readily skip class at his prestigious
lycée
for a chance to go hunting or fishing, and who admired paintings only if they depicted naked women, René Secrétan might never have crossed Vincent van Gogh’s path if it had not been for his older brother Gaston, an aspiring artist. Nineteen-year-old Gaston—the sensitive, poetic polar opposite of his brother—found Vincent’s stories of the new art and the Paris art world engaging in a way unfathomable to René, who kept expecting the authorities to haul Vincent away any day “because of his hare-brained ideas and the way he lived.”

In his loneliness, Vincent accepted the abuse of the younger brother as the price of the older’s companionship. He nicknamed René “Buffalo Bill,” both for his strutting cowboy bravado and for the costume he had bought at Bill Cody’s “Wild West Show” at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, complete with boots, fringed coat, and cowboy hat. But Vincent mispronounced the name—he called him “Puffalo Pill”—a mistake that only incited René to more aggressive taunts and greater extremes of ridicule. For an extra touch of authenticity and menace, he added a revolver to his ensemble, an antiquated .380-caliber “peashooter” that “went off when it felt like it,” René recalled.

Although he agreed to pose at least once (fishing on the riverbank), René used his “chummy” proximity to Vincent primarily as a cover for more elaborate forms of mischief and provocation. “Our favorite game,” said René, “was making him angry, which was easy.” It was René, an athletic drinker, who bought the painter round after round of Pernod at the local poacher’s bar. It was René who, after discovering Vincent’s taste for the pornography that he and his
friends traded in, paraded his Parisian girlfriends in the painter’s presence, fondling and kissing them to torment poor Toto, and encouraging the girls (some of them dancers from the Moulin Rouge) to tease and torment him by pretending to show amorous interest in him.

Head of a Boy with Broad-Brimmed Hat
(probably René Secrétan), J
UNE-JULY
1890,
CHALK ON PAPER, 5⅜ × 3⅜ IN
. (
Illustration credit 42.4
)

But no adolescent prank or sexual humiliation could wound Vincent as deeply as the letter that arrived from Paris at the beginning of July. In a cri de coeur unlike anything else in their long correspondence, Theo described the hell his life had become. The baby was sick—“continuously crying, day and night.” “We don’t know what to do,” he wrote, “and everything we do seems to aggravate his sufferings.” Jo was sick, too—sick with worry: so terrified that her child might die that she “moaned in her sleep.”

In all these woes, Theo saw one single cause: not enough money. “I work all day long but do not earn enough to protect that good Jo from worries over money matters,” he confessed. He blamed his employers of seventeen years—“those rats”—for paying him so little and treating him “as though I just entered
their business.” But mostly he blamed himself. In the ultimate test of manhood—providing for his wife and child—he had failed miserably. The shame of it drove him, yet again, to the thought of quitting: of “taking the plunge” by setting up as an independent dealer. For the risk-averse Theo, it was tantamount to a threat of suicide.

In every cry of anguish, Vincent heard an accusation. When Theo listed Vincent among the mouths he had to feed, or portrayed himself as an exhausted draft horse pulling a heavy cart in which Vincent
rode
, or predicted “going through the world like a down-and-out beggar,” the Furies of guilt swept back into Vincent’s life with a vengeance. The entire letter cried out against the injustice of duty, familial and fraternal (“I spend nothing on extras and yet am short of money”). Theo even touched the most sensitive subject of all, his deteriorating health, with a teary wish that he might live to see his son “grow up to be Somebody”—unlike his failed father and dissolute uncle.

In this paroxysm of bitterness and despair, Theo could not let his brother’s pitiful delusions of family stand. “I hope from the bottom of my heart that you too will someday have a wife,” he wrote. Only by that route would Vincent ever truly “become a man” and know the crushing burdens, and joys, of fatherhood. Dismissing any claim of a higher, transcendent bond from the past (“the daisies and the lumps of earth freshly cast up by the plow,” he parodied), Theo affirmed his love for Jo as the sine qua non of
his
happiness and the true seed from which
his
family sprang. The message was clear enough: if Vincent wanted a family, he would have to make one of his own.

In Auvers, the letter struck a devastating blow. Both its substance and its tone filled Vincent with alarm. Jo may not have known the true nature of Theo’s illness, but Vincent certainly did, and he knew better than anyone the terrible toll it took on one’s wits and compass. He also saw how the plan to leave Goupil threatened his dream of a life together in Auvers. Without his job, without the
entresol
, Theo would need all the capital he could muster for his new venture as an independent dealer. There would be no money for a country retreat—no leisurely weekends, no long holidays.

At first, Vincent fought his instinct to catch the next train for Paris. “I should greatly like to come and see you,” he wrote Theo the day the letter arrived, “[but] I am afraid of increasing the confusion by coming immediately.” Instead, he sent another pleading invitation to the country—his most desperate yet—demanding “a full month at least” for the fresh air to have its full effect. He included sketches of his most alluring paintings and a delusional offer to trade places with Jo and the baby. They could have Vincent’s room at the Ravoux Inn and he would come to Paris, he assured Theo, “so that you should not be too much alone.”