Van Gogh (163 page)

But only days later, unable to wait, overcome by dread, and determined to
“unmake” his brother’s disastrous decision, Vincent rushed to Paris. He arrived at Cité Pigalle unannounced and unexpected.

In his effort to undo a disaster, Vincent triggered a catastrophe.

The apartment was already primed for an eruption. In the five days since Theo had sent his troubled letter, the crises had only deepened. He had decided to confront his employers with an ultimatum: either they would give him a raise or he would resign. He had enjoyed some recent successes in selling, and Jo’s brother Andries had agreed to help him find financing for an independent dealership. The combination had made him bold enough to risk everything. The baby’s wails and Jo’s worries had made him desperate enough.

But the implacable Jo worried even more about the brinkmanship of an ultimatum. Would Theo endanger his young family by quitting his job and “recklessly going into the unknown”? How certain could he be of success as an independent dealer? What would they do if they found themselves “without a penny of income”? Vincent arrived to find the couple “distressed” and “overwrought” and locked in a bitter quarrel over a decision with the highest possible stakes—for Vincent as well as for them. “It was no slight thing when we all felt our daily bread was in danger,” he recalled the ongoing dispute, which he quickly joined. “We felt that our means of subsistence were fragile.” With Vincent’s vulnerability and volatility added to the mix, the arguments soon escalated. He later described them as “violent.”

When Andries Bonger arrived, the rancor turned in his direction. Vincent aggressively questioned his support for Theo’s proposed venture, especially in light of his reneging on a similar pledge in the past. He may even have called for Theo to “break” with his brother-in-law there and then. But mostly he zeroed in on what he saw as the greatest threat: Theo’s plan to move to the ground-floor apartment in the same building and share the garden with Andries and his wife. The move rejected all Vincent’s fervent pleas for a house in the country and repair in nature. With a garden outside their door, Theo and his family would have no need for the glories of Auvers that Vincent had argued so ardently in paint. He saw his dream of a reunion on the heath dying.

In the furor that followed, Vincent’s grievances against Jo as a negligent mother (for raising her baby in the city) and Jo’s resentment over the money Theo spent on his idle brother apparently found their way into bitter words. “If only I’d been a bit kinder to him when he was with us!” Jo later wrote. “How sorry I was for being impatient with him.” In one particularly acid exchange, brother and sister-in-law argued fiercely over the placement of a painting.

Vincent left the apartment, and Paris, the same day. He rushed off before a planned visit by an old acquaintance, Guillaumin. “The hours I shared with you were a bit too difficult and trying for us all,” he wrote afterward. He described his brief—and last—visit to Paris with a single word: “agony.”

So furious were the arguments that day that all the letters detailing the events of Sunday, July 6, were subsequently lost or destroyed. In their place, Jo later substituted a happy tale of a summer lunch and a parade of prominent visitors that left Vincent “overtired and excited”—the first (and only) sign of the terrible end three weeks later. But Vincent told a different story. He left Paris that day crushed in a different way. “I feared,” he wrote Theo afterward, “that being a burden to you, you felt me to be rather a thing to be dreaded.”

BACK IN AUVERS
, Vincent’s world changed. Pursued by the “sadness” and “storms” of Paris, he saw threats everywhere. When he climbed the riverbank to the fields above, he found the picturesque vistas of rural life replaced by a dark void of unfeeling wilderness. All trace of consolation had drained from the landscape, along with the promise of second chances and redemption.

He lugged two of his awkward double-width canvases up the hillside to record this new, threatening vision of nature. Where before he had painted a rolling mosaic of countryside, now he painted “vast fields of wheat under troubled skies”—a featureless desert of grain as bare and lonely as the heath. Nothing—not a tree, not a house, not a steeple—breaks the impossibly distant horizon. A slight rise in the middle suggests less a hill than the curve of the earth. Instead of a crystal-blue sky or a radiant sunset, he painted an ominous darkness and a roil of thunderclouds in deeper and deeper shades of blue.

On the other canvas, he plunged directly into the churning wheat, following a rutted reaper’s lane to a fork in the middle of a field. Wind whips the ripe grain into heaving whirlpools of color and stroke—a lashing so violent that it frightens a coven of crows from their hiding place. They swoop and rise in a panic of escape from the remorselessness of nature. In both these ravishingly bleak vistas, he banished any view of rustic domesticity; not a person or a dwelling is visible for miles. Instead of advertising the consolations of country life, now he was using his brush, he said, “to express sadness and extreme loneliness.” “My life is threatened at the very root,” he wrote only days after returning to his former paradise. “My steps are wavering.”

On July 15, Theo took his family directly from Paris to Holland. Only the true country air of home, he decided, could revive his wife and child. They did not stop in Auvers on the way, as Theo had once offered to do. Jo and the baby would stay in Holland for a month. Theo left after a few days and returned to Paris by a roundabout route, stopping to do business in The Hague, Antwerp, and Brussels on his way; but not in Auvers. Vincent sent a wounded letter of protest, raising yet another alarm about the terrible events of July 6. In a mix of anguish and supplication (“Have I done something wrong?”), he unburdened his heart of its darkest fears: about his role in Theo’s “falling out” with Jo, about his continuing
need for money at such a difficult time, about the “grave danger” that he saw everywhere.

Theo announced his departure for Holland on July 14, Bastille Day. Only days before, Vincent had received a letter from his mother and sister, delighted at the prospect of Theo’s imminent arrival with his wife and child. There would be a reunion on the heath after all. “I often think of you both,” he replied forlornly, “and should very much like to see you once again.” In response to his mother’s recommendation that, for his health’s sake, he should spend some time in a garden (“to see the flowers growing”), Vincent offered his darker, contrary view of nature: “I myself am quite absorbed in the immense plain with wheat fields against the hills, boundless as a sea.”

Theo could help his mother in the garden; Vincent was fated to wander the lonely heath. “Good-bye for today,” he wrote in his last words to his mother and sister. “I have to go out to work.”

He only had to step outside the door of the Ravoux Inn to find an image of loneliness and abandonment. Directly across the street, the Auvers town hall, the Mairie, was bedecked with flags and garlands and Chinese lanterns, ready for the annual Fête Nationale of fireworks and celebration that night. But until then the square was deserted; the bleachers empty. Vincent painted it that way—with no throngs, no brass band, no fireworks, no dancing. The town hall—a stone cube—sits stolidly alone, in shrubless isolation, hung mirthlessly for festivities in which it, and he, will not participate. It bears an unmistakable, ghostly resemblance to the town hall on the Zundert Markt, directly across from the parsonage of his childhood.

When Theo returned to his Paris apartment on July 18, he did not invite his brother to join him, as Vincent had once offered to do. For more than a week, he did not even write. When he finally did, it was only to dismiss Vincent’s worries with exclamations of incomprehension (“Where did you see these violent domestic quarrels?”), and dismiss as “a trifling matter” the stuff of his brother’s nightmares.

Vincent dared not ask—and Theo did not share—the predictable outcome of his confrontation at work. His bosses had ignored his ultimatum, refused his demand for a raise, and treated his threat to quit with indifference. Desperately lonely for his family (he wrote to Jo daily) and desolate over his own future—his career, his health—Theo considered cutting the cord with his inconsolable brother. But, as always, duty restrained him. “One cannot drop him when he’s working so hard and so well,” he wrote Jo with a cry of exasperation. “When will a happy time come for him?”

Vincent sent an order for paints, hoping no doubt that Theo would bring them himself to Auvers, a mere twenty miles away. Theo breezily advised his
brother that if “there is something troubling you or not going right … drop in to see Dr. Gachet; he will give you something to make you feel better.” Vincent pleaded in hints for more information (“I hope you have found those worthy gentlemen well disposed toward you”) and left more drafts of letters unfinished and unsent. “There are many things I should like to write you about,” he wrote in one of them, “but I feel it useless.” Theo maintained his stony silence. It must have seemed to Vincent as if a continent separated them.

Nothing posed a greater threat to his stability—his sanity—than Theo’s withdrawal. Since his return from Paris, the events of that day had haunted his thoughts like
horlas
. Other fears beset him as well, especially Theo’s progressing illness—and his own. As the first anniversary of the terrible attack the previous summer in Saint-Rémy approached, another one seemed both inevitable and imminent. “I am risking my life,” he wrote in one of his discarded drafts, “and my reason has half foundered.” He complained of feeling “a certain horror” when he thought about the future. At times, he trembled with fear so violently that he had trouble writing, and could hardly hold a brush in his hand.

To steady his nerves, Vincent always had alcohol (whether Pernod at a poacher’s bar with young René Secrétan, or absinthe at a roadside café with the local gendarme). But to chase the demons from his head, nothing beat the distraction of work. “I apply myself to my canvases with all my mind,” he wrote Theo. Dr. Gachet had recommended the same remedy. “He tells me that in my case work is the best thing to keep my balance … that I ought to throw myself into my work with all my strength.” The more the storms “weighed” on him, the more furiously Vincent applied paint to canvas. By the third week of July, he had begun a whole raft of new paintings, most of them on the vast double squares that had become the shape of his imagination. Only in an image this size could he lose himself—be swallowed up—in raptures of brushwork and eternities of looking.

He painted everything from panoramic countryside scenes of cottages under immense skies—in sun and in rain—to simple sheaves of wheat, arranged like the pollard birches of Nuenen, in shaggy ranks like old veterans. He painted haystacks that looked like houses transformed into hay by some rustic magic, and cottages that blended almost invisibly into the mosaic of fields around them. He stared transfixed at the exposed roots of a tree until he could fill one of his huge canvases with just a small corner of the scene: an intimate
sous-bois
writ as large as a forest. He focused his wide view so tightly on the gnarled old roots, vines, and shoots of new growth—eliminating the sky, the ground, even the tree itself—that the shapes and colors lose connection with reality and, like Vincent, enter a distant, deeper world, abstract and absorbing.

In this new fever of work, an old fantasy was reborn. The vast, exhortatory
images of rural life, the inviting cottages, the echoes of Nuenen and the heaths, the beloved greenery nooks—all hinted at the resurgent hope that Theo might join him in Auvers. Moved by the image of his brother sitting alone in a Paris apartment, Vincent set aside all the rancor and recrimination of their recent exchanges. He abandoned a letter that openly rejected Theo’s version of the events of July 6 (“having seen the weal and woe of it for myself”), and sent instead a proposal that they “start again.” To avoid despairing over Theo’s neglect, he recast his plight as the plight of all artists. “Painters are fighting more and more with their backs to the wall,” he wrote resignedly, and
any
“union” between artists and dealers was doomed to failure. The implacable marketplace had betrayed
all
Impressionists, he consoled his brother, and rendered even the sincerest “personal initiatives,” like Theo’s, “powerless.”

Tree Roots
, J
ULY
1890,
OIL ON CANVAS, 19¾ × 39¼ IN
. (
Illustration credit 42.5
)

He included in his letter an ardor of sketches showing the reborn dream of country life and fraternal reunion. He turned one sheet on its side and drew a vehement sketch of his proudest invitation to this new life:
Daubigny’s Garden
. Since painting his first view of it in early July, Vincent had probably returned many times to the storied garden only a few blocks from the Ravoux Inn. In the meantime, he had repainted his sumptuous image of the garden on another double-square canvas. Vincent had no doubt heard about the murals that filled the walls inside Daubigny’s other studio in Auvers. All of the painter’s family had contributed to them—an echo of Vincent’s vision in Drenthe of “a family of painters” in a cottage on the heath. Indeed, the broad canvases that burst from Vincent’s imagination in July also could have filled a country house with scenes of sublime rusticity.