Van Gogh (70 page)

As if to illustrate his arguments with actual experience, Vincent left Hoogeveen and headed deeper into peat country. Flush with a payment from Theo, a loan from his father, and a fresh supply of painting materials wangled on credit from The Hague, he took a slow barge sixteen miles due east to the little town of Veenoord—“the remotest corner of Drenthe,” he called it. Along with its twin settlement, Nieuw-Amsterdam, Veenoord sat at the heart of the peat country. Throughout the summer, thousands of cutters and dredgers swarmed across the treeless expanses in every direction, throwing up huge mounds of peat alongside their temporary shelters. By the time Vincent arrived in early October, most of the piles had been hauled away and the laborers had settled into their wretched winter lives, cooped in the same stinking hovels with their animals, bound like serfs by the hated “truck system.” The peat bosses who paid their subsistence wage all summer now began taking it back through inflated prices at the company-owned stores all winter, so that most laborers emerged in the spring shackled to the land by debt. So great was the hardship inflicted by this vicious circle of exploitation that the peat workers had already resorted to the unthinkable
boljagen
—going on strike.

As in the Borinage, however, Vincent’s vision of a rustic paradise overruled the reality of injustice and anger that surrounded him. From the balcony of his room overlooking the canal, he saw only “fantastic silhouettes of Don Quixote–like mills” and “curious monsters of drawbridges profiled against the vibrant evening sky.” The surrounding villages looked “wonderfully cozy,” he reported; the peat workers’ hovels, “peaceful and naïve.”

In late October, Vincent mounted the most ambitious of all his expeditions-as-arguments, a trip to the ancient village of Zweeloo, ten miles northwest of Veenoord. Just as he did three years earlier when he traveled from the Borinage to Jules Breton’s studio in Courrières, Vincent claimed an artistic inspiration for this latest punishing trek (“Imagine a trip across the heath at three o’clock in the morning in a small open cart”). Based on nothing more than an approving comment from Theo, he set out in pursuit of the Alsatian artist Max Liebermann,
who had visited Zweeloo some months earlier and, according to Vincent, was rumored to still be there. Upon his return, he wrote Theo an account of his trip that is among the most elaborate and poetic word paintings in all his letters.

He describes a journey into a landscape by Corot (“a stillness, a mystery, a peace as only he has painted it”), under Ruisdaelean skies (“nothing but that infinite earth [and] infinite sky”), suffused with Mauve’s “misty atmosphere,” and filled with Millet plowmen, “shaggy” Jacque shepherds, and old Israëls spinsters. In a trance of invention, he piled image on image, transforming the drab, inhospitable Drenthe winter into a beckoning fantasy of the Garden of Eden. “Now you can see what it is like here,” he concluded his pictorial brief. “What does one bring back from such a day? Merely a number of rough sketches. Yet there is something else one brings back—a quiet delight in one’s work.”

If Drenthe was paradise, Goupil was the serpent that invaded it. Vincent had often taken advantage of Theo’s chronic disenchantment to criticize his employer, but never in language this harsh and uncompromising. “Odious, wanton, capricious, and reckless,” he called it, an institution that had “outlived its fame” and was headed for “deserved ruin.” It had turned the honorable profession of art dealing, as their uncles had once practiced it, into “nothing more than gambling,” he said. As for the gentlemen of Goupil who had made Theo’s situation impossible, Vincent accused them of “insupportable arrogance,” “horrible unfairness,” and “doing mean things.” He brushed aside any possibility of compromise (“do not flatter yourself with the belief in reconciliation”) and urged his brother to follow in his own defiant footsteps—“stand your ground … don’t give in.” To dissuade Theo from jumping to another dealer or setting up a gallery on his own, Vincent expanded his denunciations beyond Goupil and railed against all dealers everywhere. “It is Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” he argued; “the whole art business is rotten.” He hurled at the whole enterprise Zola’s ringing denunciation of bourgeois taste: “a triumph of mediocrity, nullity, and absurdity.”

But that still left one question unanswered. If Theo quit his job, what would the brothers do for money? Vincent made all the usual arguments about life being cheaper in Drenthe and two being able to live for the price of one. Painters didn’t need much to live on, he reminded Theo; “money leaves us cold.” Besides, any deprivations would be short-lived because “my work will probably yield
some
profit soon,” he added. And in any case, God would provide. Yet again claiming the entitlements of a higher calling, he reassured his brother that “an infinitely powerful force” would protect them in their new mission of perfect brotherhood. “If one will only set about things with love, with a certain understanding of each other and cooperation and mutual helpfulness,” he wrote, “many things which would otherwise be insupportable would be made supportable.”

Vincent “calculated” that the two of them would need two hundred francs
a month for a period of two years before they could support themselves entirely on their painting. He suggested that Theo raise the necessary stake from one of their rich uncles, solemnly pledging his own work as collateral. Such guarantees proved that “we do not build castles in the air,” he said. He sent Theo elaborate projected budgets (“I do not know where and how to get the money, [but] I will work out for you how we should use it”). Yet even as he steadfastly defended the rationality of his arguments, he asked for more money and proposed a fallback plan—both brothers could return home to live with their parents—that must have struck Theo dumb with disbelief.

In fact, this seemingly offhand suggestion betrayed the fantasy at the core of Vincent’s furious campaign. Merging his vision of perfect brotherhood with yet another reverie of family reconciliation, he imagined a reunion of the Zundert parsonage. He, Vincent, would lead the family in rallying around his younger brother. Together, they would support Theo’s quest to be a painter—in all the ways they had never supported Vincent’s. They would bravely bear the hardships of poverty and the storms of disrepute. They would cooperate in the great new artistic “phenomenon of two brothers being painters.” In Vincent’s dream of a parsonage, he and Theo would no longer have to “obey.” Their father would have to subordinate his authority to the
“force majeur”
of Theo’s calling—as he had never done for Vincent’s—and treat
both
of his sons with “cordiality and love.”

Seized by this new fantasy of redemption, Vincent demanded that Theo reverse his opposition to Vincent’s returning to Brabant, and wrote their father in a tone that both invited him to join this new incarnation of family and warned him against yet again spoiling it: “If I should have to live at home for a while, I hope, for myself as much as for you, that we shall possess the wisdom
not
to make a mess of things by discord, and that, ignoring the past, we shall resign ourselves to what the new circumstances may bring.” Convinced that the realization of his dream now rested entirely on Theo’s coming, Vincent raised his entreaties to a giddy fever of longing. “Living together … how delightful it would be. So delightful that I hardly dare to think of it, yet cannot help doing so, though that happiness seems too great.” He imagined the two of them renting a peasant’s cottage and decorating it together. Increasingly, his pleas strained with the ardor of a marriage proposal:

Argument gave way to mindless exhortation (“[We] must, must, must go forward and win”), yet more salvoes of French (“
la patience d’un boeuf”
[the patience of an ox]), and mottoes drawn from his reading (Dickens’s “How-not-to-do-it system”). In pleas as repetitious as a drunkard’s, he insisted that Theo had the soul and stuff of a true painter. He predicted that Theo would find painting far easier and make faster progress than he had. “You will be an artist as soon as you take up a brush or a piece of crayon,” he boldly promised. “
You can do it
if only you want to.” He even told Theo exactly what kind of art he should make. Holding out the brothers’ great favorite, Michel, as a model within Theo’s grasp, he urged his brother to “try your hand at landscape at once.” The vast moorlands and dramatic skies of Drenthe presented endless vistas virtually authored by the French master. “It is absolutely Michel,” he wrote,
“that
is absolutely what it is here.” “These are the kinds of studies which I should like you to try at once.… I have thought it over so long.”

“One becomes a painter by painting,” he declared, mixing self-justification with inspiration. “If one wants to become a painter, if one delights in it,…one can do it.”

Indeed, in Vincent’s desperate pleadings, he and Theo had already merged. Claiming a special insight into his brother’s heart, Vincent saw only his own reflection. Oscillating between first and second person, he both coached Theo and consoled himself:

At every opportunity, he urged on Theo his own gospel of recklessness (“My plan is always to risk too much rather than too little”) and defiance (“If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter,’
then by all means paint
, boy, and that voice will be silenced”). “My aim in life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can,” he both explained and entreated; “then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, ‘Oh, the pictures I might have made!’…Do you object to this, either for me or for yourself?”

All of these arguments, and more, found their ultimate expression in images. In the letter that launched his campaign, Vincent enclosed a sheet of
drawings on which he had labored heroically: a half dozen vignettes of Drenthe life—peasants in the fields, canal banks, village roads—all carefully arranged in a montage exactly like those he had seen in
The Graphic
introducing readers to quaint industries or picturesque locales. When he summoned Theo to paint the moorland skies just as Michel had painted the Montmartre skies, he accompanied the summons with drawings and paintings “in the spirit of Michel”: vistas of brown earth and slate-gray sky. He translated his cries of delight—“What tranquility, what expanse, what calmness in this landscape”—into swirling strokes of clouds and boldly brushed furrows of earth. With nothing more than a pencil, pen, and ink, he showed his brother the serenity that awaited him in a way words never could: a long canal, a barge under sail, a vast pearly dusk.

His straining invitations to a life of simplicity on the heath—“Come and sit with me, looking into the fire”—took their tenderest, most plaintive form in image after image of lone cottages under twilight skies brushed in broad strokes of translucent gray. And to enact the noble labor he beckoned Theo to join—“something good, an honest enterprise”—Vincent conjured a procession of Millet peasants: a shepherd driving his flock past a village church; a plowman silhouetted against a sky as big as the American West; two women stooped in unison on a stormy moor; a broad-shouldered farmer pulling a harrow behind him, leaning against the drag with the patience of an ox, his gaze fixed on an infinite horizon.

In Drenthe, Vincent finally, fully recruited his art to the service of his larger quest. Since the Borinage, art had been the fixed star around which his arguments swirled: an eye of Victorian convention in a vast storm of angst and pain. The dream of merging with Theo, furious and insuppressible, uprooted all that. It wrenched him from the great unifying passion of The Hague—figure drawing—and left the defiant preoccupations of the last three years scattered behind. He would return to figure drawing from time to time, both for love of the work of its greatest masters, and for the warmth and control that he found only with models. But he would no longer be bound by it.

His single-minded devotion to pencil and pen and ink and the black-and-white images they produced was another victim of the storms of October and November 1883. He discovered in Drenthe how persuasive paint could be; and color and brushstroke. “Painting comes more easily to me,” he wrote Theo from Veenoord, in a turning point for Vincent and for Western art. “I am eager to try all kinds of things which I have left undone till now.” And this time he meant it. In Drenthe, painting became not just a defensive posture, an appeasement to his brother, but his most eloquent argument—a new and powerful language of persuasion that he could recruit to the great missionary zeals that ruled his life. In Drenthe, Vincent discovered that he could do more than just dream or argue these castles in the air—he could paint them.