Van Gogh (28 page)

Ultimately, this was the consoling power that art shared with religion in Vincent’s imagination: both offered an imagery of reconciliation and redemption with which he could reimagine his own life of failure and remorse. It was an extraordinary power. The imploring intimacy of Vincent’s religious visions must have startled his listeners. “Can a woman forget her sucking child,” he cried out in the words of Isaiah, “that she should not
have compassion on the son of her womb?” The relentless interweaving of Father and father, Son and son, in Vincent’s imagination transformed all of Christianity into a canvas for autobiography. “The nature of every true son,” he wrote, “does indeed bear some resemblance to that of the son who was dead and came back to life.”

The connection between religion and family would hereafter haunt his imagination, his art, and finally his sanity. He took the Bible’s offer of redemption as a promise of forgiveness and reconciliation in his own family. “Those who are above,” he assured Theo, “can make us father’s brothers.” The consolation of that promise formed the emotional core of his experience of the sublime. When Vincent was moved to tears, as he often
was, by religion or literature or art, this, ultimately, was the pedal note of love and longing that sounded beneath all the layers and layers of allusions. “Love of this sort,” wrote Eliot in
Adam Bede
,

The danger, of course, was that Vincent would confuse these pentimenti of love: mistake the imagined for the real. Already at times, both his despair and his enthusiasm approached the delusional, and events he reported as real took on the gloss of fantasy. As Christmas approached, he seemed increasingly unable to distinguish between images in his head and events in his life. He stared at the photographs of his parents on the wall and recited over and over the prayer
from the Zundert parsonage: “Unite us, O Lord, firmly together and may the love for
Thee strengthen that bond more and more.” For one of his last sermons before leaving, he again chose his text from the story of the Prodigal Son: “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion.”

On the eve of Christmas, that image took hold of him—as if it were, in fact, the reception that awaited him in Etten. “We shall be moved when we hear the name of God pronounced,” he intoned, “yea, even as we are moved when we see our father again after having been away from home for a long time.” Compared to such visions, the real world no longer held any interest. He could only think about returning home to become his
“father’s brother.” And he could hear his parents’ voices singing the words of the hymn he carried with him:

T
HE RECEPTION THAT AWAITED VINCENT IN ETTEN DID NOT MATCH
any of the prints on his wall or the verses in his hymnbook. His wanderings had not mitigated his shame, only worsened it. Months of intermittent and uninformative letters had left his parents even less sympathetic than when he fled in April. Every time he moved from one unpaid, “futureless” job to the next, he reopened the wounds. “We are more and more worried with time,” Dorus wrote Theo in September, “and we fear that he will become unfit for practical life. It is bitterly sad.” They tried to talk sense to him. If he really wanted to be a preacher, they said, he should study for it—and find a paying job in the meantime. But their proposals were always met with “woolly” answers or ignored altogether. They took his evasiveness as a lack of conviction—or, worse, cowardice. “He doesn’t seem to have the courage to take up a course of study,” Anna concluded. “I cannot imagine him as a preacher,” Dorus added. “He will never find a living in it.”

In the absence of progress, they brooded over what had gone wrong in Vincent’s life—in Vincent—to bring this trial upon them. As always, they blamed his failure to socialize in the right circles and his neglect of appearances. But mostly they blamed his attitude: his “morbid nature,” his “inclination to melancholy.” “Seriousness is all right,” his father wrote, “but seriousness must ever be linked with freshness and strength.” If only he had “a jolly heart,” Anna lamented, he would not be so prone to “excesses”; he would “become a more normal and practical person.”

Not even their bleakest assessments, however, had prepared them for Vincent’s proposal to sail to South America as a missionary. His father denounced it as “foolhardy” and “sheer folly”—“a very costly undertaking which would certainly come to nothing.” Before, they had questioned Vincent’s dedication; now, they doubted his compass. “One must first and foremost use common sense,”
Dorus said bitterly. “I cannot
begin
to tell you how much we suffer because of this.”

When Vincent arrived in Etten on December 21, he was greeted not with open arms and tears of joy, but with what he later described as a “torrent of reproaches.”

Christmas unfolded exactly according to parsonage ritual: the usual cakes and cookies, red tablecloth and ropes of greenery. Anna played the organ; Dorus visited the sick. But the mood was nothing like that of past Christmases. “How much worry this boy is causing Pa and Ma,” Vincent’s sister Lies wrote. “You can really see it in their faces.” Lies blamed Vincent for his fecklessness, his failure to find a job, and especially his religious fervor (“I believe his piety clouds his brain,” she said). To these accusations, it seems, only Theo offered a defense. He told his siblings that Vincent was not like a “normal man”—to which Lies responded that everyone, including Vincent, would be better off if he were. But Theo’s late arrival and early return to work in The Hague were a form of chastisement, too. And one can only imagine the censure Vincent felt at Uncle Cent’s house in Prinsenhage, where the Van Goghs spent Christmas Day.

He had come home seeking redemption, like the Prodigal Son, but found only reproaches. “All one does is wrong,” he wailed. An acquaintance who saw him after Christmas recalled that “he looked as if he were suffering from a sense of injury—there was something lonely about him.” He complained of feeling “weary” and “tired of everything.” In the unmistakable code of gospel verse, he confessed to “weeping” at night. A long, long walk in the snow, despite the harsh weather and a rare cold, hinted at the self-punishments to come. In a moment of heartrending honesty, he admitted to Theo feeling “heavy depression because everything I undertook failed.”

Only the pain of guilt can explain Vincent’s agreement in late December to give up his religious calling. With uncharacteristic meekness, he accepted the arguments his parents had been making throughout his months of exile: he needed to “stop following [his] own desires” and put himself “back on the road to a normal existence.” He agreed to find a job and find it nearby—in his own country. He might still pursue a religious life sometime in the future, Dorus allowed, but only if he were “really serious about it” and willing to spend “at least eight years of study” preparing for it. But Dorus did not encourage such hopes. Instead, he reminded Vincent that he could lead a “useful and virtuous” life no matter what profession he entered, because “religion is not separate from real life.”

In fact, Dorus had already arranged a job for him. Probably at the behest of Uncle Cent, a bookseller in Dordrecht, less than twenty miles from Etten, had offered Vincent a position as a bookkeeper and sales clerk. Only a few days after agreeing to his father’s plan, Vincent took the train to Dordrecht and was interviewed
by Pieter Braat, a longtime Goupil customer. On his return, Dorus dispatched him to Prinsenhage to perform a final act of penance: reassuring Uncle Cent of his gratitude for this new opportunity. On the trip to his uncle’s house, Vincent projected his own feelings onto nature’s canvas: “It was a stormy night,” he recalled, “with the dark clouds and their silver linings.”

In a wave of dutifulness, Vincent—now twenty-four—threw himself into his new job at Blussé and Van Braam Booksellers on the market square in Dordrecht. He started work immediately after the new year, and virtually ignored the end of a one-week “trial period” that, theoretically, would have allowed him to reconsider. Even before his trunk arrived from England, he moved into a boardinghouse just across the square from the store. After only a few weeks of “wistful” letters, he seemed to put his previous life behind him. He wrote a long letter to the Slade-Joneses to tell them he would not be returning. “I wished them to remember me,” he told Theo, “and asked them to wrap my recollection in the cloak of charity.”

S
CHEFFERSPLEIN, THE MARKET SQUARE IN
D
ORDRECHT; THE BOOKSTORE
B
LUSSÉ AND
V
AN
B
RAAM WHERE
V
INCENT WORKED IS AT CENTER
(
Illustration credit 9.1
)

Coming out of its busiest sales season, the store generated a vast amount of bookkeeping work that kept him busy until late at night. “But I like it that way,” he wrote. “The feeling of duty sanctifies and unifies everything, making one large duty out of the many little ones.” He seemed to accept the logic of his new course, telling his parents “how much he enjoyed being back in his own country,” and explaining to Theo how “duty” demanded that he choose a book-keeper’s
salary over a preacher’s “because later in life a man needs more.” He told a coworker that he was “so glad not to be a burden to his parents anymore.”

FOR A JOB THAT
constituted a hopeful step backward in time, Vincent could not have found a town better suited than Dordrecht. The oldest city in Holland, it sat at the confluence of four rivers. Since the great flood of 1421, it had been completely surrounded by water. From that tollhouse position, it had reaped centuries of fabulous wealth by taxing the materials and merchandise that flowed to and from the sea. Merchants built gilded, top-heavy houses along its canals and around its perimeter where they fêted royalty and incubated Dutch independence. Golden Age artists like Cuyp, Van Goyen, Maes, and Ruisdael flocked to its “delicious landscape”—its forested quays, glittering shoreline, and magical rivers.

By the time Vincent arrived, however, Dordt (as everyone called it) had declined into picturesque poverty, its former splendors preserved in the amber of neglect and nostalgia. But the golden images from a previous era and the quirky glories of its faded remnants had earned Dordt a special place in the Dutch imagination. So when Vincent walked the winding streets and saw everywhere vignettes of rickety staircases, black balustrades, red roofs, and silvery water—images that had brought tears of homesickness in Paris and London—he must have felt at home: at home in a way he could never feel in the unfamiliar Etten; at home in a way only one other place, another island out of time, could make him feel: Zundert.

But it wasn’t enough. A homecoming in imagery, even in Vincent’s powerful imagination, was not a real homecoming; and simply doing his father’s bidding could never satisfy his yearning for a Prodigal Son embrace. He soon reverted to old habits of brooding and reclusiveness. After a few desultory attempts at socializing, he withdrew into an almost absolute solitude. “He had no intercourse with anybody,” recalled Dirk Braat, the storeowner’s son. “He hardly spoke a word.… I do not believe there is anybody in Dordrecht who knew him.” At his boardinghouse, he was “singularly silent,” according to his landlord, and “always wanted to be alone.”