Van Gogh (166 page)

While the mortician did his ghoulish work in the back room that Vincent used as a studio, Theo busied himself converting one of the inn’s two public rooms into a mortuary chapel, using flowers and greenery in the Dutch way. Their countryman Hirschig, who knew the custom well, scoured the neighborhood for appropriate material. But Theo wanted art first. With unflinching bravery, he searched the studio and the shed in back where much of Vincent’s recent work was stored, and selected a handful of paintings according to some painful calculus of the heart.

One by one, he nailed the canvases—some unstretched, some still wet—around the billiard-table bier: the portrait of Adeline Ravoux, the Auvers town hall, the lonely wheat fields, Daubigny’s magical garden. He had barely finished when the undertaker and his minions lugged the casket into the room, hoisted it onto the billiard table, and covered it with a sheet. Ravoux had closed the shutters, and the smell of carbolic acid, an embalming fluid, filled the room. Impervious in his duty, Theo draped the coffin in greens and flowers—especially yellow flowers. He placed candles around the room and, finally, positioned Vincent’s studio easel, palette, and stool at the foot of the casket.

But even in death, Vincent confounded him. The local curate would not permit a funeral service in the Auvers church. Theo’s invitation had been too hasty. Whether because Vincent was a foreign Protestant or a suspected suicide, the abbot Tessier even forbade the use of the parish hearse. And not all Theo’s Parisian politesse, or Gachet’s influence, could change his mind. The most Tessier would allow was for Theo to purchase a plot in the sparsely populated new cemetery on the plateau above the town, far from the church Vincent had painted. It was a lonely spot—not much more than a bit of bare earth in a barren field. To Jo, and to himself, Theo put the best face he could on this final rejection. He called it “a sunny spot amid the wheat fields.”

The next morning, July 30, a trickle of guests began. Tanguy, the grizzled old dealer and Communard, arrived early—as he had so often before. Lucien Pissarro came, but not his father Camille, who pleaded age and ill health. Émile Bernard brought Charles Laval, Gauguin’s lackey, as a stand-in for the
maître
himself, who, despite his many debts to Theo, claimed not to have received his invitation in Brittany in time. (In fact, he later told Bernard that it was “idiotic” to allow himself to be associated with the madman Vincent.) Bernard entered the makeshift mortuary and immediately began rearranging the paintings. Dr. Gachet brought a retinue of locals, including some of the artists who had avoided Vincent in life. Andries Bonger came, too—for his sister and Theo, if not for Vincent. No one from Vincent’s family came, except Theo.

One by one, the mourners filed past the casket. Some brought flowers. Tanguy
wept. Theo played the perfect host. A lunch was served in the Ravoux Inn’s dining room. Around three o’clock, the most able-bodied carried the coffin to a hearse that Hirschig and young Paul Gachet had fetched from a neighboring parish, and the procession set out toward the cemetery under a blazing summer sun. Andries Bonger and Theo led the small group.

At the graveside, the elder Gachet, at Theo’s request, muttered some vague praise (“an honest man and a great artist”) for a man he barely knew. Dazed by the heat and interrupted by tears, he left most people confused. Choked with emotion, Theo thanked him “with all my heart,” but did not give a speech. The coffin was lowered into the ground. Theo and Bonger cast the first shovelfuls of dirt. The small group began to disperse: the Parisians drifting toward the train station or back to the inn, the locals evaporating into the countryside.

Theo stood on the heath and sobbed.

V
INCEN’S TORMENT HAD ENDED, BUT THEO’S HAD JUST BEGUN. BATTERED
by storms of grief and regret, his frail constitution collapsed. The syphilitic contagion that had congested his lungs and paralyzed his gait for years now leaped into his brain. His weakened mind was possessed by a single idea: “He will not be forgotten.” The world had ignored Vincent’s work—“these masterpieces”—for too long, he said. People must know that he was a great artist; posterity must honor him; the world must “grieve that he was taken from us so soon.” This was Theo’s new mission. “I would hold myself to blame,” he wrote in a paroxysm of belated guilt, “I could never forgive myself if I did not do everything in my power to bring this about.”

Nothing else gave comfort. The condolences that started arriving almost immediately made him alternately angry and ashamed. Artists and colleagues who had ignored or ridiculed Vincent in life urged on him the consolation of his brother’s work in death. “As often happens,” he wrote bitterly, “everyone is now full of praise.” In note after note, he found the same comfortless message: Theo was better off without his troubled brother. Even his own family greeted the news with unconcealed relief. Words intended only to console, like Wil’s, stabbed him in the heart: “What a strange coincidence,” she wrote, “that he had his wish to be and to live more like ordinary people, and was now so near to you.”

In the first weeks after the funeral, guilt turned to obsession. “Oh, how empty it is everywhere,” he wrote Jo from Paris. “I miss him so; everything seems to remind me of him.” He talked only about Vincent. On a trip to Holland in early August, he spent whole days with his mother and Wil, deep in conversation about Vincent. In Amsterdam, he reunited with his wife and child, but at night, he admitted, the ghost of Auvers haunted his sleep. When he returned to Paris,
he wanted to see only people who had known Vincent. He invited them for dinners and long evenings “where Vincent was almost the only subject of conversation,” he reported proudly. He clung especially to Paul Gachet, the doctor who had known Vincent so briefly at the end. The old man’s teary remembrances of a patient he barely knew watered Theo’s obsession at a time when the whole world seemed set on forgetting.

T
HEO VAN
G
OGH,
1890 (
Illustration credit epl.1
)

He spent hours digging through the piles of Vincent’s letters that he had stuffed into a dining room cupboard—often with relief—along with all his other correspondence. Alone with his brother again, he relived the years of trials and tribulations, and a new resolve formed. “I find such interesting things in Vincent’s letters,” he wrote his mother, “and it would be a remarkable book if one could see how much thinking he did and how he remained true to himself.” Calling it “a book that
has
to be written,” he first solicited Paul Gachet to write it, but then set his sights higher: on the critic Albert Aurier. Angered by the few, terse obituaries that had appeared (especially one that referred to Vincent’s art as the “expression of a sick mind”), he saw in Aurier’s new eminence a chance
to immortalize an artist whom fame had barely glanced. “You were the first to appreciate him,” he wrote the critic, “and by doing so you very clearly saw the man.”

In this, as in everything, Theo honored his brother’s memory by dreaming only big dreams. After a lifetime of cautious planning and incremental ambitions, he envisioned a panoramic memorial to Vincent: an exhibition at the gallery of the pioneer Impressionist dealer Durand-Ruel, accompanied by a vast illustrated catalogue with lithographs of Vincent’s works and excerpts from his letters. He framed this comprehensive show exactly as Vincent would have—“it is essential for one to see a lot of it together because then one understands it better”—and pushed it with all Vincent’s evangelical zeal. When Durand-Ruel balked at the “large space” Theo demanded (“to do him justice”), Theo reacted exactly as Vincent would have—by redoubling his demands and supporting them with elaborate accountings, extravagant details, and delusional promises. When anyone dared to challenge him, he lashed out—just as Vincent always did. “He is haunted by his brother’s memory,” Andries Bonger reported, “to such an extent that he resents anyone who does not share his views.”

The mania of remembrance tore at his sense of identity. Like Vincent in Arles, Theo seemed pursued by an “ill-starred brother, clad in gloom / As though arisen from the tomb.” By September, he was railing against his employers at Goupil, rallying the art world to a utopian “association of artists,” and planning an exhibition at the café Le Tambourin, the long-defunct site of Vincent’s first show in 1887, when the brothers lived together on the rue Lepic. In wild displays of defiance and rage—some of them directed at his wife and child—in attacks of paranoia, in spells of denial and magical thinking, in neglecting his health, his sleep, even his clothes, Theo mourned his brother by becoming his brother.

The transference came to a disastrous head in early October when Theo summarily quit Goupil—just as Vincent had always urged him to do—unleashing decades of accumulated grievances with a great Vincent-like show of shouting and slamming of doors. Virtually his last act as he left the firm where he had worked since adolescence was a defiant, delusional telegram to Gauguin: “Departure to tropics assured, money follows, Théo, Director.”

Within days, the breakdown was complete. On October 12, 1890, Theo was admitted to a hospital in Paris. Two days later, he was transferred to a private asylum in Passy, the leafy suburb where he had vacationed the previous summer. After that, his path mostly followed Vincent’s. There were some differences. Theo was physically far sicker than his brother when he surrendered his freedom. By now, the paralysis afflicted his whole body. At times, he could not walk at all. Far more frail than Vincent, in mind as well as in body, he suffered wilder and more dangerous bouts of delirium. He threw furniture and tore at
his clothes so violently that he had to be chloroformed into passivity. Instead of young interns like Félix Rey, the best doctors in France attended his case. The private asylum of Dr. Antoine Blanche
was
the spa that Vincent had imagined Saint Paul to be; and Passy, the glamorous resort that Glanum had once been. The alienist Blanche was not only the father of a prominent artist but also a colleague of Jean-Martin Charcot, the giant of French neurology and Freud’s teacher.

Unlike Vincent’s solitude in Arles and Saint-Rémy, Theo’s confinement brought a flock of family and friends to his bedside. Wil traveled from Leiden, bearing their mother’s unspeakable concern for her “crown and joy.” H. G. Tersteeg, Vincent’s implacable nemesis, rushed from The Hague. Only Gauguin remained aloof—fearing that the madness of both Van Gogh brothers would infect his own reputation and that of the movement he was still struggling to found. He complained to Bernard that Theo’s insanity “is a rotten break for me,” and began looking elsewhere for money to fund his latest idea for a triumph in the tropics: Tahiti.

But Bernard saw his fortune in the opposite direction—as Theo’s grieving confrère, Vincent’s champion, and both brothers’ chief hagiographer. His plan to organize a retrospective of Vincent’s work in Theo’s memory drew a sharp rebuke from Le Pouldu (“What blundering!”), setting off a contest for credit that would preoccupy the rest of both artists’ careers. Others in the avant-garde community who knew Theo shared Camille Pissarro’s stunned lament: “No one can replace this poor van Gogh … It is quite a great loss for us all.”

In addition to sympathizers, Theo had something else Vincent never had: an attentive, steadfast partner. Jo Bonger fought harder and longer than anyone else for her husband’s health and reputation—a fight she would take far beyond his grave. She refused to believe the doctors at Blanche’s asylum when they told her that both Theo’s paralysis and his dementia were products of the same root disease: syphilis. She rejected the doctors’ treatments, as well as their diagnosis. “[Jo] cannot accept what is being done,” her brother Andries reported in distress, “and she constantly wants something else because she thinks she knows Theo better and knows what he needs most.” She fought counsels of resignation and hopelessness from every side. Clinging to Theo’s claim that sensitive “nerves” and grief over a lost brother were the source of all his woes, she imagined that hypnosis might help him. She enlisted the Dutch writer and psychologist Frederik van Eeden to visit him at the asylum. The young, charismatic Van Eeden preached a mystical gospel of brotherly love that gave hope in a faithless world. Vincent, too, had been drawn to it as the end approached.