Van Gogh (30 page)

The next day, in a move that seems to have caught everyone by surprise, Vincent hastily arranged to visit his uncle by marriage, the prominent preacher Johannes Stricker, apparently hoping to plead his case to a more sympathetic ear. Despite another round of discouragements, Vincent left Amsterdam on March 19 in a buoyant, if delusional, mood of eager anticipation. Rather than setting him more securely on a path to a normal life, the visit had crystallized his resolve to return to God’s service.

Only this time, his ambition took a new form. “It is my fervent prayer and desire,” he announced to Theo only days after his departure from Amsterdam, “that the spirit of my father and grandfather may rest upon me.”

Vincent had decided he wanted to be a parson like his father. “If I one day have the joy to become a pastor and to acquit my task like our father,” he wrote, “I will thank God.”

—

VINCENT HAD COME
a long way from the lonely room on Kennington Road; a long way from the swelling masses at the Metropolitan Tabernacle and the born-again fervor in Brighton; a long way from the apocalyptic ardor of Michelet and the shadow Christianity of Carlyle. Nothing in
Imitatio Christi
—for so long Vincent’s other Bible—pointed the way to a parsonage in the Dutch countryside. Kempis urged disengagement from the world—just the opposite of Dorus’s political, social, and financial interventions in the lives of his parishioners. What would Kempis’s Jesus have thought of evicting widows for failure to make lease payments? What place was there in his father’s church for the evangelism of the Methodists in Richmond or the Congregationalists in Turnham Green? What place for the kind of messianic zeal that sent missionaries to South America or into coal mines in search of souls to save? Vincent’s road had led him to churches that valued the heart over the head, ardor over education; churches where a young foreigner with an unpronounceable name and a passion, but not much else, could speak his heart—a long way from his father’s church, where centuries of bloodshed had bred a calmer, more measured piety.

In fact, despite the detours and setbacks, Vincent’s pilgrim path had always led this way. From the moment he burned his father’s inspirational pamphlets in the wake of his first disgrace in The Hague, Vincent ensured that religion would be the only route to reconciliation. Even in his early fanaticism, even as he renounced Michelet’s
L’amour
and condemned Gladwell for his “idolatrous” paternal fondness, Vincent filled his letters with aching professions of love and admiration for his own father. “We would have to strive and hope to become men like our father,” he wrote Theo soon after arriving in Paris. He prayed that he might one day have his father’s “wings” of faith, so he, too, could “glide above life, above the grave and death!” Even as he horrified his parents with plans for a mission to the far side of the world, he sat in his little room in Holme Court and prayed that God might “make me my father’s brother.”

Dordrecht brought Vincent closer to his father than he had been since childhood; perhaps ever. Dorus had promoted the bookselling job in Dordrecht by promising Vincent that he could make frequent Sunday trips to nearby Etten. Only days after moving, Vincent was already planning his first visit. “He spent such an enjoyable Sunday at home,” Anna reported afterward, “very cozy.” Only a few days later, his father stopped in Dordrecht on a trip to The Hague. Crowding years of longing into four breathless hours on a “glorious” winter day, Vincent walked with his father, drank beer with him, showed him his room, and took him to see Scheffer’s
Christus Consolator
. Dorus marveled at Vincent’s knowledge of art (“he was so much in his element at the museum”) and probably urged him again toward a job with Uncle Cor and away from a religious
career. “He better not immerse himself too deeply in that,” he wrote Theo. But Vincent could hear only the longed-for words of paternal approval: “He is such a fine fellow,” Dorus said of him after the visit.

For the rest of the winter, Vincent reveled in this vision of reconciliation. He took up again his father’s love of birds and exchanged sightings with him. Dorus saw the first starling; Vincent, the first stork. They watched together for the first lark of spring. He echoed his father’s interest in plants—especially the ivy vines that had always been Dorus’s responsibility at the Zundert parsonage. He reread his father’s favorite poetry and added to the prints on his wall a copy of Paul Delaroche’s
Mater Dolorosa
, an image that had always hung in his father’s study in Zundert. In his consoling letters to Theo, he adopted his father’s warm, patronizing tone—“Let us not have any secrets”—and instructed him solemnly that a father’s love “is fine gold”: “For who is dearer than the father, In the kingdom of God or on Earth.”

To celebrate their new shared identity, he gave his father a copy of Eliot’s
Scenes of Clerical Life
for his birthday—and arranged for Theo to give him
Adam Bede
, another clergyman’s story. When Dirk Braat dared to criticize the Reverend van Gogh as a country parson who would never advance beyond small-town parishes like Etten, Vincent flared with indignation. “This was the only time I ever saw Van Gogh angry,” Braat recalled. “His father was absolutely in the right place; a true shepherd.” It may have been in Dordrecht that Vincent began wearing a long clergyman’s coat that had belonged to Dorus.

By the time he met with Uncle Cor in Amsterdam, Vincent’s determination to
become
his father bordered on delusion. “As far as one can remember in our family,” he wrote Theo, “which is a Christian family in every sense, there has always been, from generation to generation, one who preached the Gospel.” Now
he
was being “called to that service,” he said, so that “my life may resemble more and more” Father’s life. Despite the clear contrary signals from Etten, he declared that his father wanted him to be a preacher. “I know his heart is yearning that something may happen to enable me to follow his profession,” Vincent insisted to Theo, and no doubt to his uncles; “Father always expected it of me.” Almost at the same moment, however, Dorus wrote to Theo: “I wish he would stay with his present work; it worries us.”

To the outside world, and certainly to his parents, Vincent’s defiance of reality, his determination to persist in the face of overwhelming opposition, smacked of sheer contrariness—a willful, often self-destructive perversity. The more firmly his parents pushed him toward the art business, it seemed, the more firmly he planted his feet in his father’s footsteps. Even when a prominent Dordrecht preacher tried to redirect his zeal back into missionary work, Vincent refused, insisting, “I want to be a shepherd like my father.” What no one understood, except perhaps Theo, was how high the stakes had risen. “Oh! Theo, Theo
boy, if I might only succeed in this,” Vincent wrote from the throes of his new obsession. “I hope and believe that my life will be changed somehow, and that this longing for Him will be satisfied.” If he could “persevere in this course,” he imagined, the “heavy depression” of his past failures would be lifted from his shoulders and the reproaches that burned in his ear could finally stop. For that, he said, “[both] my father and I would thank the Lord so fervently.”

While Vincent could be gallingly contentious and even dangerously confrontational at times, the contrariness that others saw was really just the persistence of longings too important to let go of: images in his head kept alive by a fierce imagination that overruled an increasingly contrary world.

Just how fierce soon became clear. In early April, Vincent returned to Zundert.

THE TRIP WAS SPARKED
by a letter from home with news that Dorus had gone to visit an old farmer in Zundert, a former parishioner, who was on his deathbed. “He asked for me,” Dorus wrote. “We drove across the heather to him. The poor man is truly in pain. I wish he could be released from his suffering!” As soon as he read the letter, Vincent flew out of the bookstore, pausing only long enough to borrow money from Görlitz. “I love that man so much,” he told Görlitz breathlessly about the dying farmer, “I would like so much to see him one more time. I want to close his eyes.”

In truth, the trip to Zundert had been planned for years—played out repeatedly in Vincent’s imagination every time nostalgia overwhelmed him. “O Zundert!” he cried out from England. “Memories of you are sometimes almost overpowering.” He had planned a pilgrimage there at Christmas—the perfect time—only to be thwarted by the reproaches of his family and the search for a job. Since then, the proximity to home and the unprecedented intimacy with his father had brought these persistent longings to a boil. In complex reveries layered with vivid memories and newly minted hopes, he summoned up the Zundert of his imagination:

More than the illness of a farmer he had barely known (and who had been sick for more than a year), it was this vision of Zundert, this imagined promise of returning to an imagined home, that brought Vincent racing in the darkness
back to the site of his original exile. “My heart was drawn so strongly towards Zundert,” he explained to Theo, “that I longed to go there also.”

He took the train, but walked the last twelve miles. “It was so beautiful on the heath,” he reported to Theo the next day; “though it was dark, one could distinguish the heath and the pine woods and moors extending far and wide.” He burnished that image with a hopeful Romantic flourish in anticipation of his new life about to begin: “The sky was overcast, but the evening star was shining through the clouds, and now and then more stars appeared.” He was returning not just to the heaths of his childhood, but to the roads that his father had walked, the hamlets his father had visited, the farmers he had consoled, and, finally, the church where he had preached. “It was very early when I arrived at the churchyard in Zundert,” he recorded; “everything was so quiet. I went over all the dear old spots.” Then he sat down in the graveyard next to the church and waited for the sun to rise.

Later that morning, he learned that the sick man had died during the night.

But Vincent had come to console the living. He had come to do what he had seen his father do hundreds of times—in this town, for these people. “They were so grieved, and their hearts were so full,” he recounted, “I was glad to be with them, and I shared their feelings.” No longer the reticent novice he had been at Susannah Gladwell’s funeral, he prayed with them and read to them from the Bible—just as his father would have done. He visited the dead man’s family and viewed the body.

Vincent was never more alive than in the presence of death. “Oh! It was so beautiful,” he recalled the scene. “I shall never forget that noble head lying on the pillow: the face showed signs of suffering, but wore an expression of peace and a certain holiness.” Later he commented on how “the calmness and dignity and solemn silence of death contrasted with us, who still live.” Filling out his reverie of the past, he visited the servants who had attended his childhood in the parsonage: a gardener and a maid. “The memories of all we have loved stay and come back to us,” he wrote soon after this visit. “They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them.”

The same day, Vincent continued on to the parsonage in Etten, a final four miles, completing the backward journey he had begun exactly one year before. He had banished himself on a Good Friday. He returned only a week after Easter; nine days after his twenty-fourth birthday. Vincent clearly saw his trip to Zundert as a new beginning. In the account he sent to Theo the same day, he had already layered onto it the most compelling image of rebirth he knew. “You know the story of the Resurrection,” he wrote; “everything reminded me of it that morning in the quiet graveyard.”

—

VINCENT EMERGED FROM
his trip to Zundert infatuated with the image of himself as a pastor like his father. In the heat of this newest passion, all remaining obstacles melted away. The most intractable of these was his parents’ long-standing insistence that he devote seven or eight years to theological studies, as his father and grandfather had done. Vincent had always resisted—partly out of self-righteous impatience and partly out of horror at the expense it would impose on his family’s ever-strained finances. Only a few weeks earlier he had restated his resistance in the most vivid terms. “I have such a fervent longing for it,” he wrote Theo about his new ambition, “but how can I reach it? If only I could be through with this long and difficult study to become a preacher of the Gospel.”

Now, however, in the afterglow of Zundert, the prospect of years of study became a point of stubborn pride. A clergyman in Dordrecht tried to persuade him that “the preliminary study [was] too hard for him,” Dirk Braat later reported, “[because] he had never been to a grammar school.” But Vincent was determined to endure the same trials his father had endured, his roommate Görlitz recalled. It had become “an obsession with him.”

Vincent’s strange moonlight pilgrimage to Zundert had had exactly the opposite effect on his parents. Over the previous weeks, moved by his ardor, they had begun to set aside their long-held doubts. In late March, Görlitz had visited Etten and given them a sympathetic inside look at their son’s pain. When Anna inquired, “How is Vincent doing? Does he adjust?” Görlitz answered plainly: “Madam, to tell you the truth, Vincent does not do well in his profession. He has only one ardent desire: to become a preacher.” Soon afterward, Dorus asked his brother-in-law, Johannes Stricker, to investigate what Vincent would have to do to prepare for university examinations—the first step to being admitted for theological studies in Amsterdam. But when Vincent showed up at the door a week after Easter, tired and disheveled from his long walk home and solitary night in the Zundert graveyard, all of Dorus’s reservations flooded back. “Theo, what do you say about Vincent’s surprising us again?” he wrote warily. “He ought to be more careful.”