Van Gogh (37 page)

But none of that explains his sudden return home. He could have stayed and pursued his new calling in Amsterdam, a city with poverty and oppression of its own, teeming with missions and missionaries. Or he could have carried out his threat to seek a position elsewhere with one of the “ultra-orthodox” churches scorned by his father, like Adler’s, which had missions throughout Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East. Instead, he agreed to come home and wait for his father to find him the “suitable” position he had defiantly rejected. He would abjure radical evangelism and the pursuit of
it
. He would return to a “respectable” path for preaching the Gospel in exchange for one more chance at reconciliation.

The surrender was complete. Even before he came home, all of his independent activity ceased, from teaching Sunday school to writing Theo. When Dorus determined that Belgium was the best place to find a position, Vincent stopped looking anywhere else. The requirements for preaching in Catholic Belgium were far less rigorous than in Holland. “Respectable, clever people should certainly do well there,” Anna reported hopefully, “even without diplomas.” While still in Amsterdam, Vincent dutifully wrote long letters following up on his father’s inquiries and offered to travel to Brussels to plead his case face-to-face. In mid-July, Dorus arranged an interview for Vincent with an evangelical school in
Brussels. Father and son traveled there together, accompanied by the Reverend Thomas Slade-Jones from Isleworth, who mysteriously materialized just in time to give Vincent a good recommendation in person.

While waiting to hear from the school, Vincent did his best to play the good son. He took long walks with his brother Cor, an ebullient eleven-year-old who loved to draw and wanted to be a cavalry officer when he grew up. On a hot summer day, they sat in the shade and drew “a little map of Etten and surroundings,” Vincent reported. He helped with preparations for the big event of the summer: the wedding of his eldest sister Anna to Joan van Houten, a proper, prosperous burgher from Leyden, by making arrangements of flowers and greenery. He followed his father like a shadow, often accompanying him on his parish rounds during the week and his preaching duties on Sundays. When Dorus was away, Vincent sat in his room overlooking the garden and composed sermon after sermon in preparation for his life to come.

In July, Vincent accompanied his father to Zundert, where Dorus preached in the little church and afterward visited the sick. On the way home, Dorus stopped the carriage and they walked the heath together in the evening light. This was as close as Vincent would ever come to the reconciliation he so desperately sought. He recorded the moment in an image fraught with
it:

The days leading up to his departure were filled with public cheer but private turmoil. He fought with the bride (“Vincent is more obstinate than ever,” Anna complained) and shrank from his social duties. “He is more withdrawn than ever,” his mother wrote on the eve of the wedding. The appearance of Uncle Cent and Uncle Stricker at the ceremony on a beautiful August day could only have added to the aura of failure and rejection, as he prepared once again to leave the only life that he truly longed for.

Four days after the wedding, Vincent set out for the evangelical school in Brussels that his father had chosen for him. He would begin with a three-month “trial.” If he successfully completed that, he would be allowed to enroll in the school’s full three-year program. As they saw him off at the train station, his parents’ thoughts were filled with dread. “We see him leave with worry,” Anna wrote Theo. “His ideas about daily life are so unhealthy that I think he will not be able to teach it to people.” (Sister Anna put it more bluntly: “I fear that his pig-headedness [will] be an obstacle in his new position.”) Dorus cloaked his
fears in resignation. “I have no illusions about Vincent,” he wrote; “I cannot escape the fear that we will be disappointed again.”

IN FACT, THE BRUSSELS
“school” was a mirage. Launched only two years earlier, it consisted of one room, five students (three full-time and two part-time), and one teacher. The lessons were taught by Dirk Bokma, a one-legged former elementary school principal, assisted by a handful of like-minded local evangelical preachers who occasionally dropped by and taught for free. Otherwise, the school had no permanent faculty, no administration, and no funding.

Buffeted by fierce sectarian rivalries within Belgium’s tiny evangelical community, the school never found an institutional anchorage and survived only on the passion and energy of its founder, Nicolaas de Jonge, an “unorthodox” young preacher, and the indulgence of a few wealthy sponsors. In a country where evangelism had long been dominated by foreign missionaries—especially Dutch and British—De Jonge preached a radical religious nativism. The only way to reach the people with the Gospel, he insisted, was to speak to them in their language, Flemish, not the “posh Dutch” of Reformed preachers like Dorus van Gogh. “Flemish is for Flanders!” was his rallying cry.

That Dorus sent his son to De Jonge’s crusading, quixotic school, or that Vincent went, is the clearest sign of their mutual desperation. Like any Dutch speaker, Vincent could understand and converse in Flemish. But his father’s formal preaching style marked him as an outsider in a school dedicated to “the dialect of the masses” and opposed to “dutchification.” The unfamiliar idiom, combined with his tendency to overload his talks with allusions and complex rhetoric, forced Vincent to read rather than preach his sermons—a violation of the school’s mandate “to give popular and attractive lectures, more short and interesting than long and learned.” On Sundays when he gave Bible lessons in nearby Mechelen and Lier, he felt “like a cat in unfamiliar surroundings,” Vincent confessed—a long way from the “popular orator” he aspired to be, “[with] the ability to speak to the people with seriousness and feeling, fluency and ease.” The rest of the week, he spent as much as fourteen hours a day in the little classroom laboring yet again through history, Latin, and the Bible, all taught in Flemish.

The prospect of another failure drove Vincent into a spiral of depression and self-abuse. At his boardinghouse in Laeken, north of the city, he refused food and slept on the floor rather than in his bed. Through a cold autumn, he went without adequate clothing on his long walks into the city along the Charleroi canal. At school, he disdained to use his desk, choosing instead to keep his copybook on his knees in a way that reminded his scornful classmates of “a scribe from the Middle Ages.” As in Amsterdam, he sought solace in graveyards and
in long wandering walks to the margins of the city where, he said, “one gets a peculiar pristine feeling like that of homesickness, in which bitter melancholy plays some part.”

Years later, Vincent’s classmates recalled him as a surly, wounded, volatile student who could be defiant and disrespectful one minute—“Och teacher, I really don’t care”—and “furiously indignant” the next. “He did not know what submission was,” one of them said. Once when a fellow student teased him, Vincent struck out at his tormenter with “such a blow that he did not come back for more,” according to a witness. “Oh! that face blazing with indignation and wrath!…I shall never forget it. How deplorable that [a man] so devoted to God could so forget himself.” A visit by Theo on November 15 must only have made failure more intolerable. Returning triumphantly from Paris, where he had manned Goupil’s booth at the Exposition Universelle, Theo had unequivocally assumed the mantle of his uncle’s heir and his family’s pride. He even looked like a new man, with a smart, reddish beard. The contrast with his lost, despondent, and increasingly embittered brother could not have been more stark.

No one could have been surprised when Vincent failed his three-month trial. He would not be allowed to continue in the school’s program. His teacher-ministers found “no signs of [his] being a diligent student.” Out of deference to his father, no doubt, they agreed to allow Vincent to continue attending classes, but they could not support him in any way. To Theo, Vincent explained the setback matter-of-factly: “I cannot attend the school on the same conditions as they allow to the native Flemish pupils,” he wrote. But nothing could conceal the shame in Etten. Dorus and Anna despaired at the latest debacle. “We have not told anybody about this,” they wrote Theo, “don’t you, either … What is going to happen?”

Vincent was devastated. He had failed yet again, this time on the very lowest rung of religious training. Where could he go from here? After the final verdict, he could not eat or sleep. He fell ill and lost weight so precipitously that his landlord felt compelled to write his parents and ask them to “come and take Vincent home.” “He does not sleep and seems to be in a nervous state of mind,” Dorus told Theo at the end of November. “We are very worried.” Without telling Vincent, Dorus laid plans to come to Brussels. In the meantime, however, Vincent resolved to leave. “In order to stay here longer I ought to have more financial means than I have at my disposal,” he wrote Theo, “for they are nil.” In fact, his father had offered to continue paying for his board in Brussels while he looked for other employment. But Vincent rejected the offer.

THE DEEPER VINCENT SANK
, the more tightly he clung to
it
. Only weeks before leaving Etten, he had written Theo,
“It
has been a remarkable feature in
art and will continue to have a great influence on many people.” At least once during his short stay in Brussels he went to the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. His sole surviving letter from Brussels brims with talk of art and artists. He saw
it
everywhere: in an old house covered with vines “like a picture by Thijs Maris”; in a “Gothic” alley of linden trees with the gnarled stumps and twisted roots of a “fantastical Albrecht Dürer print.” When Theo visited, the brothers spent almost all their time looking at paintings and browsing prints. “How rich art is,” Vincent wrote afterward; “if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.”

He continued to search for “whole expressions”—composite images that “speak in their own way, if we only listen to them.” At the evangelical school, he drew pictures on the blackboard to “complete” his answers to teachers’ questions. On his wandering walks through the city’s “Quartier de l’Industrie,” he transformed glimpses of “picturesque” workshops into meditations on mortality (“They say: ‘Work while it is day, the night cometh when no man can work’ ”). The sight of old horses pulling their ash carts “utterly alone and desolate” became for him both a lesson in the meaning of life, and a reflection of his own bleak fate: “The poor horse … standing there patiently and meekly, yet bravely and unflinchingly … awaits its last hour.”

But no image was more complete than the one Vincent created on the eve of his departure from Brussels. He began with a description that he found in “a little handbook of geography” of a region in southern Belgium called the Borinage. Like his beloved prints, the handbook painted a portrait of the region’s inhabitants, the Borins, both endearing and suffused with deeper significance:

Onto this moving description of labor and faith Vincent layered a reverie of scripture: Isaiah’s prophecy that “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” and the Psalms’ promise that “Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness.” To this he added from his own life both a memory of applying for missionary work in the coal mines of England, and a wish for the future: that he, too, might someday find a light in the darkness of failure and shame. “It always strikes me,” he wrote, “that when we see the image of indescribable
and unutterable desolation—of loneliness, of poverty and misery, the end of all things, or their extreme—then rises in our mind the thought of God.”

To complete this image, Vincent made a drawing.

He took as his subject a little café that he saw on one of his frequent walks along the Charleroi canal, the spine of industrial Brussels. The café was attached to a big shed where coal was brought from the mines in the south of the country by canal barge. With the coal came the people who mined it, driven from their homes by unemployment and economic crises in hopes of finding work in the foundries and factories that lined the canal. “One sees here so many people that work in the coal mines,” Vincent reported, “and they are rather a characteristic kind of people.”