Van Gogh (72 page)

Now he had come to break free of his long imprisonment.

But not through forgiveness. For the first time, Vincent’s homeward footsteps were not accompanied by images of prodigal sons or family reconciliation. Instead, each step brought a fresh surge of defiance—the defiance of a condemned man led to the gallows: a wronged innocent seeking vindication not in acquittal or forgiveness, but in martyrdom. Like Gérôme’s prisoner being ferried to his oriental Golgotha, Vincent came home seeking victory in victimhood. “To my way of thinking,” he explained Gérôme’s painting, “the man lying fettered is in a better position than the fellow who has the upper hand and is taunting him.” Why? Because “it is better to provoke a blow,” he declared, “even if it is a hard blow, than to be indebted to the world for
sparing
you.”

LESS THAN AN HOUR
after he arrived, Vincent provoked the first blow. He demanded that his father admit that banishing him at Christmastime two years earlier had been a grievous error. Blaming all of his troubles since then on this single offense, Vincent shouted the litany of injuries at his sixty-year-old father, who had grown hard of hearing: how it had brought him financial trouble; how it had driven him to extremes of behavior; how it had forced him into “a much more stubborn attitude than I would have adopted of my own free will”; how it “made things ten times more difficult—almost impossible,” and doomed all his efforts to failure. When Dorus refused to take back anything he had said or done, Vincent exploded into accusations no doubt rehearsed a thousand times in the loneliness of the heath, calling his father “unjust … arbitrary … reprehensible … implacable … blind … ignorant.” His father’s self-righteousness
was an insurmountable barrier that continued to separate them, he said—and would inevitably prove “fatal” for them both.

When Dorus responded scornfully, “Do you expect me to kneel before you?” Vincent stormed out of the room, vowing “not to waste my breath on the subject any longer.”

But, of course, he immediately seized pen and paper and wrote Theo a furious letter, heaping blame on his father for his “narrow-mindedness” and “clergyman’s vanity.” He was always “carrying things to extremes” and “causing disasters,” Vincent charged, just as he had two years before in Etten. “Basically there has been no change whatever, not the slightest, he sputtered. “In Father’s mind there was not then, there is not now, the faintest shadow of a doubt that what he did was the right thing.”

Throughout a sleepless night, the accusations hurtled back and forth in Vincent’s head. Now and then he sprang from the bed to add the latest to his letter, or scrawl an indignant marginal note: “They think they did no harm at the time, this is too bad.” He railed against his father’s “hardness, like iron”; “icy coldness”; and dryness like “sand or glass or tinplate.” “Father does not know remorse like you or me,” he wrote, “or any man who is human.” He also recorded his own desperate state, simultaneously agitated and captive:

Declaring himself and his father “irreconcilable down to the depths of our souls,” Vincent surrendered to despair after only one day. He had come to Nuenen, he said, searching for clearer insight and found only the torment of false cordiality and good intentions. He had spent two years, “every day of which was a day of distress to me,” only to find that, for his parents, it had been two years of “everyday life—as if nothing had happened.” To live with them again would be impossible, he told Theo; they remained as obstinate and stupid as ever. Nothing had changed—“Nothing, nothing at all.” As the Zundert parsonage seemed to slip away forever, he cried out in exasperation, “I am
not
a ‘Van Gogh.’ ” Rejecting any possibility of compromise as unutterably hopeless, he laid plans to leave immediately—for The Hague, for Utrecht (where Rappard lived happily with
his
parents), wherever. Even the barren heaths of Drenthe seemed preferable to the bound hearts and strangling indifference of Nuenen. “Old fellow,” he begged his brother, “help me get away from here if you can.”

Yet he stayed.

He stayed for almost two years.

Day after day, he returned to his father’s study to refight the battle. Dorus always began by calmly insisting he had nothing to regret. But Vincent’s relentless accusations of “hypocrite” and “Jesuit” almost invariably incited him to “violent passions.” They fought about Vincent’s past failures and dismal prospects. They fought about his duty to Sien and the cruelty of his father’s disapproval. They fought about the family’s lack of support for his art, with Vincent repeatedly citing the example of his gentleman friend Anthon van Rappard, whose parents paid all his bills so he could “face the world in a dignified manner.”

T
HE PARSONAGE IN
N
UENEN
(
Illustration credit 21.2
)

Vincent launched attack after attack on his father’s closed mind, while rejecting any resolution short of complete capitulation. “I am
not content
with a
sham
or a too
half-hearted
reconciliation,” he said. “Bah! It just won’t do.” Dorus steadfastly refused to acknowledge any fault, while torturing his son with fresh claims of innocence. “We have always been good to you,” he insisted. (To Theo, he complained: “I don’t think [Vincent] ever feels any self-reproach, only spite against others.”) Between the father’s well-meaning self-righteousness and the son’s paralyzed vulnerability, there could be no common ground.

On both sides, loftier causes intensified the stalemate. Vincent saw himself battling not just a single old man, but a vast, corrupt system of repression and conformity at the center of which stood a God as “capricious and despotic” as
his father. He railed against the religion that had once hypnotized him, calling it “grim” and “dreary” and “damnably icy cold.” He condemned his father and all the forces of darkness he represented as the
“rayon noir”
(black light), a phrase taken from Hugo, because “the light within them is black and spreads darkness, obscurity around them.” To help him fight the epic battle playing out almost daily in his father’s study, Vincent recruited all the heroes of his imaginative world: a pantheon of writers and painters, almost all of them French—an obvious incitement to the Francophobe Dorus. To complete his Manichean vision, Vincent claimed for these advocates, and for himself, the label
“rayon blanc”
(white light).

In his arguments, he adopted the uncompromising vehemence of Zola’s attack on bourgeois convention in
Mes haines
, as well as the remorseless anticlericalism of Daudet’s
L’évangéliste
(
The Evangelist
), both of which he read around this time. He demanded his freedom in the militant pieties of Eliot’s
Felix Holt
and denounced his imprisonment in the logical imperatives of Mill’s
On Liberty
. Mill’s mandate to “break the fetters” of conformity and his championing of eccentricity (“one should not complain of the Niagara river for not flowing smoothly between its banks like a Dutch canal”) echo through Vincent’s letters like a call to arms. “I am
entitled
to do anything which does not hurt anyone else,” he declared, “and it is my duty to live up to the liberty which not only I myself but every human being has an unlimited and natural right to.”

For Dorus, such arguments represented far more than just the lashing out of an obstreperous, ungrateful son who had long grieved his parents. In almost forty years as a pastor, Dorus had watched the Dutch Reformed Church retreat under the relentless assault of godless science on one side and bourgeois sentimentality on the other. In the last two decades of the century, the number of Netherlanders who claimed to have no religious affiliation increased tenfold. The French writers that Vincent upbraided him with—and Dutch ones, too—had battered and defiled the once-proud
“dominocratie,”
ending its three-hundred-year monopoly on the Dutch mind and threatening to undo Dorus’s lifetime of labor on the frontiers of his faith. For his son to bring their arguments and accusations into his parsonage, into his study, constituted an offense against God, church, and family.

Their clashes sometimes lasted three or four hours, according to one witness. Even when they ended—when Vincent stormed out—they didn’t end. Every shouting match was followed by long stretches of silence in the parsonage, a darkness of recrimination far more threatening than the fireworks of temper. Just as he had in Etten two years earlier, Vincent spent days pretending to be “invisible”—enacting the very judgment that he protested against. Rather than speak to his parents, he wrote them notes. At meals, he pulled his chair to the corner of the room, placed his plate on his lap, and sat in utter silence.
He ate with one hand, using the other to shield his face, as if hiding. When his behavior attracted reproving stares, he accused his parents of treating him like “a big, rough dog” that “runs into the room with wet paws,” barks too loud, and “gets in everybody’s way.” Possessed by this conceit, he spun it into a long, bitter indictment that hints at an even more bizarre playing-out of the judgments against him.

Trapped in this cycle of abuse and escalating outrages, Dorus and Anna van Gogh coped in the only ways they knew how. They offered the universal panaceas of new clothes and earnest prayers. They offered to lend Vincent money to pay off his debts. They complimented his drawings (“He is doing several that we think are beautiful,” Dorus reported to Theo). They made hopeful excuses. “When he looks back and recalls how he has broken with all former relations,” Dorus explained, “it must be very painful to him.” Whenever possible, they surrendered to the storms of his moods. When he demanded a studio—like Rappard’s—they set aside their objections and cleared a room in the parsonage that had been used for a laundry, spending precious funds to install a stove and a wooden floor “to make it nice and warm and dry.” They offered to put in a window for more light.

In perhaps the hardest concession of all, they capitulated to the immutability of their son’s strangeness. “We are undertaking this experiment with real confidence,” they wrote Theo soon after Vincent’s arrival, “and we intend to leave him perfectly free in his peculiarities of dress, etc.… There is simply no changing the fact that he is eccentric.”

But Vincent could not be satisfied. Every attempt at appeasement was met with greater and greater provocation as he focused the anger of a lifetime on his captive captors. He saw only criticism in their gifts (“my clothes were not good enough”) and condescending indulgence in their courtesies. “Their cordial reception
grieves me,” he complained. “Their indulgence without acknowledging their error is, for me, perhaps worse than the error itself.” He referred to the laundry room dismissively as an “apology of a studio” and almost immediately began demanding a better one. He answered every offer of accommodation with more rigid demands and fiercer rhetoric. “I cannot stand the least appearance of being in agreement with [Father],” he wrote two weeks after arriving. “I am dead against him, absolutely in opposition to him.” When his parents expressed doubts about his remaining in Nuenen, Vincent resolved to stay; when they reaffirmed their welcome, he threatened to leave. The gift of the laundry room studio triggered wails of martyrdom (“you people do not understand me, and I fear you
never
will”) and melodramatic vows to make himself scarce. “I must try to find a way not to
‘bother’
you or Father any longer,” he wrote Theo. “Let me go on my own way.”

Indeed, just as the new studio was being completed in time for Christmas, Vincent retaliated against his parents’ kindness in the most hurtful way possible. On the eve of a trip to see Rappard in Utrecht, in a scene that reenacted the expulsion from Etten two years earlier, he incited yet another argument over Kee Vos. Still unable to force his father to yield (he blamed it on Dorus’s “petty-minded pride”), he fled the parsonage, vowing to extend his trip to include The Hague—the one place his parents had begged him not to go. He spent the Christmas holiday with Sien and her children. When he returned, he announced that he was once again considering marrying the woman, even as he confided to Theo that he and Sien had “decided more definitely than ever to live apart.”