Van Gogh (75 page)

Pollard Birches
, M
ARCH
1883,
PENCIL ON PAPER, 15⅜ × 21¼ IN.
(
Illustration credit 21.5
)

Only once before had Vincent allowed himself to look as long and deeply at a single subject as he looked at the pollard birches. In his fanatical pursuit of the
figure, he had subjected the ever-patient orphan man Zuyderland to his relentless gaze, only to be frustrated by the unique challenges of the human form. Even now, in the spring of 1884, mastery of the figure was a quest that he could neither succeed in nor completely surrender. In another drawing that March, he lavished his pen on a ditchside foursome of pollard trees just outside the garden gate. But beside them he added a man dragging a wheelbarrow—a stiff, faceless straggler from the Schenkweg studio, a time when his loneliness overruled his eyes. He eventually added figures to his drawing of the pollard birches as well—on the right, a shepherd with his flock; on the left, a woman with a rake over her shoulder—but they turn their distant backs and almost disappear beside the great thrusting vitality of the mangled trees.

In the pollard birches, for the first time, Vincent found life beyond figures. He had always had an inexhaustible eye for nature, for the infinite incident and soulful escape of
The Kingfisher
, and all the gardens and wheat fields it adumbrated. But now he added to that intimacy with nature the fanatic eye he had always reserved for his models: the immediacy of purpose, the unity of vision, the boldness of expression. “A row of pollard willows,” he had written, “sometimes resembles a procession of almshouse men.” Freed from their long enslavement to figure drawing, Vincent’s powers of isolation, simplification, and intensification—honed on years of letter sketches—could now explore the latent life in virtually any object: a chair, a pair of shoes, a sunflower.

BUT VINCENT’S ESCAPE
from the past was doomed to failure. The prospect of regaining his rightful place in the family, however dim, put him on a collision course with the person who had assumed that place. By January 1884, his relationship with Theo had already fallen into a stalemate of acrimony. Vincent had arrived in Nuenen bursting with rancor—over Theo’s opposition to Sien, over his refusal to quit Goupil—all of it pent up during the long, fruitless campaign on behalf of Drenthe. Describing himself as “disillusioned” and “disenchanted,” he held Theo accountable for the “bitterly, bitterly sad” end to his dream of perfect brotherhood.

Theo, too, felt betrayed. In going to Nuenen, Vincent had done the very thing Theo had worked hardest to prevent. Up to the last minute, he had tried to persuade Vincent to come to Paris instead of going home. He had even found a job for him at a magazine there,
Le Moniteur Universel
. Vincent’s refusal, postmarked from Nuenen, was filled with yet more jeremiads against the art business (“within relatively few years a number of great art enterprises, like
Le Moniteur Universel…
will dwindle down [and] fall into decadence”) and nose-thumbing expressions of confidence in his ultimate vindication: “I say it is possible that a revulsion of feeling will come about in your mind, either gradually or suddenly,
and that this will force you to adopt a new conception of life, which perhaps will finally result in your becoming a painter.”

Theo’s efforts to defend their father (Vincent boasted of his “savagery” in argument) revived Vincent’s old fears of a conspiracy against him. He accused Theo of joining the laughter he always heard behind his back and demanded that his brother declare his true loyalty: “I ask you point-blank how we stand—are you a ‘Van Gogh,’ or are you the ‘Theo’ I used to know?” Theo’s answer came in the form of a scolding letter that called Vincent a “coward” for bullying their aging father, and insisted that he take back his harsh criticisms. Vincent responded with a fury of defensive letters—bitter, petulant, snide letters that simultaneously lamented the loss of their former closeness and blamed Theo for all his problems. No sooner was the ink dry on that storm of protest than Vincent added a new provocation: the Christmas trip to The Hague. When he returned, he blamed his brother for the wretched state of Sien and her family, and he openly vowed to continue supporting them in flagrant violation of Theo’s demand that he renounce the woman once and for all. “Whatever your financial power,” he wrote, declaring his freedom in bold underlining,
“you will not be able to force me to renounce her.”

But real freedom proved harder to win. In his campaign to reclaim favor after Anna’s accident, his dependence on Theo continued to thwart him. He tried to escape his reputation as a “ne’er-do-well” by openly embracing the Goupil gospel of salability and making more commercial works like watercolors (borrowing both the subject matter and gauzy tonality of Mauve). He linked his weaver paintings to successful Hague School artists like Jozef Israëls and added dreamy French titles to some of his drawings from December (
Jardin d’hiver, Mélancolie
), as if they were bound directly for the Paris market. But every time he presented himself to his parents’ friends—“the respectable natives of these regions,” he called them now—he opened himself up to a torment of questions: “Why is it that you never sell your work?” “Why do others sell and you don’t?” “How strange that you don’t do any business with your brother or with Goupil.” He catalogued these injuries to Theo in increasingly rueful tones. “Everywhere I go, especially at home, a constant watch is being kept on whether I get anything for my work,” he wrote. “In our society virtually everybody looks out all the time for that sort of thing.”

Inevitably, guilt and paranoia magnified every polite inquiry, every askance look, into a stinging rebuke. “I have to put up with being reproached with idling away my time—or even being
absolutely
looked upon as
‘having NO means of subsistence,’
” he keened. “One hears that drivel day in, day out, and one gets angry with oneself for taking it to heart.” He complained bitterly about the unflattering impression created by his financial dependence on his brother and how it trapped him in a “false position”—a coded reference to the deeper injuries long
inflicted by Theo’s ascendancy. It wasn’t long before he lashed out at his distant but ever-present brother. “On my coming home, I was struck by the fact that the money I was in the habit of receiving from you was looked upon … as charity for a poor fool,” he wrote, betraying the accusations in his own head. “I am feeling more and more cramped.”

In February, inflamed by these accumulating slights, Vincent mailed his brother two parcels of drawings and watercolors, accompanied by a “proposal for the future.” In language that strained to sound businesslike, he offered yet another plan for their troubled relationship: Vincent would occasionally send his work; Theo would choose what he liked. Any money that Theo sent would be considered payment for the selected works (“money I have earned”); any works Theo rejected, Vincent could take to other dealers. As always, he framed his proposal in fond blandishments, calls to fraternal solidarity, and solemn assurances that it would keep their relations on “a straight course.” But nothing could disguise the angry demand at its core. “After March, I will accept no money from you,” he wrote, reviving the deadline he had imposed in Drenthe, “[unless] I give you some work in return.” It was the same threat of self-destruction he had made so often before: if Theo refused to “buy” his work, Vincent would refuse to take his money—casting himself, and his family, into yet another crisis of uncertainty.

He waited weeks for a reply, alternately fretful and fuming, as Theo again punished him with silence. He sent plangent reminders comparing himself to a convict awaiting the judgment that would set him free. He placated his brother with poetry and protests of good faith, as he battled a wave of second thoughts and the pendulum swung back toward fraternal devotion. “Whatever the difference in feelings may be, and the difference over this or that,” he wrote, “we are brothers, and I certainly hope that we shall go on behaving like brothers.”

It wasn’t until early March that Theo responded. In language as unequivocal as Vincent’s was oblique, he told his brother that his work was “not good enough” to sell; that he had “not yet made enough progress” since his first clumsy efforts in Etten. Whether as a dealer or as a patron, Theo said, he could do nothing to advance Vincent’s career until his work “improved a great deal.” If anything, Vincent’s baroque appeasements only seemed to clarify his brother’s rejection. He ridiculed the notion that Vincent could find other dealers for his art, and reminded him that no one else would advance him money on dreams and rhetoric. It would be “a good many years” before his work would have any real commercial value, Theo predicted—and even longer before he could support himself on it. He criticized the crude technique of Vincent’s drawings (the public would “take offense” at their imperfections), the superficiality of his painted studies, and the drabness of his colors. In a slight that amounted almost to a repudiation of their shared past, he accused Vincent of being “too obsessed”
with the French landscapist Georges Michel, the brothers’ lifelong favorite, and in particular dismissed Vincent’s Michel-inspired paintings from Drenthe as simply “no good.”

In proposing his plan, Vincent had reassured his brother that “if [my work] should not please you and you should not want to have anything to do with it, then I should not be able to say anything about it.”
“I want you to feel free with me,”
he had written in bold underline, “just as I want to feel free with you.” But, of course, there was no such freedom. On either side. Vincent’s rage followed as inevitably as Theo’s scolding. In the most furious letter he ever wrote his brother, he raised the pitch of their dispute to new heights of rawness and ferocity. He blamed Theo for virtually every setback he had ever suffered. If his work didn’t sell, it was because Theo had done nothing to sell it. He had “put it away in a dark corner” and “not lifted a finger” to find buyers. His indifference to Vincent’s art only mirrored his insincerity, even dishonesty, in their relationship. He was a “wretched” brother, who put “feathering his own nest” above love of art or bonds of fraternity. “You couldn’t care less about me,” Vincent raged. A
true
brother would not have held him hostage to need. He would have given freely—without oversight or obligation—instead of “tugging at the purse strings” and forcing him to “knuckle under.” Reopening the freshest wound of all, he decried again the betrayal on the Schenkweg. In opposing Sien, Theo had deprived him of “a
wife … a child…
a home of [his] own.” What a fool he had been to invite Theo to Drenthe. What a vain hope it was that his brother had the heart or spine or spleen to be a painter.

What was left but to break it off? Only cowardice could explain their failure to part company sooner—Theo’s cowardice. Vincent had put up with his meaningless encouragements, his refusal to “soil his hands,” long enough. The only “manly action” was to put an end to the “wretched business” into which their perfect brotherhood had degenerated. The time had come to break free. “It is perfectly natural to kick when one knows for certain that one is being kept dangling, being kept in the dark,” he said. “If one goes from bad to worse … what difference does it make?” It was the ultimatum that had hung over their relationship since The Hague, only this time stripped of its conditions. “I cannot leave matters as they are,” he declared. “I have resolved on a separation.”

He vowed to find a new dealer, flatly rejecting Theo’s verdict that none would treat him any better. Furthermore, he would pursue every opportunity to develop new contacts and to exhibit his work—tasks he had always disdained in the past. He talked of going to Antwerp to find buyers. He and Rappard had discussed it. Perhaps he would even move there. Or perhaps he would return to The Hague. In what could only have been meant as a threat, he proposed returning to the site of his previous disaster and renewing his relations at Goupil. “After all,” he protested, “I have never misbehaved myself toward them.”

To underscore his determination to go his own way, he contracted with a local carpenter to build some frames for his paintings, a requirement for selling them (he thought they looked best in black ones). The first works he planned to frame were some Drenthe studies—just like the ones Theo criticized. He also packed up the best of his recent drawings, including
The Kingfisher
and
Pollard Birches
, and sent them to Rappard with a request that he “show them to people.” To Paris, he sent not landscape drawings—the imagery Theo had long urged on him—but yet another batch of weavers, as if daring his brother to reject them again.

Not even in the midst of this, his greatest fury, could Vincent escape the torment of second thoughts. When Theo wrote reporting the final breakup of his affair with Marie, Vincent scrambled to “unsay” some of his harshest words. (“You see it is not my aim to break off relations with you.”) But when Theo retaliated by delaying his next payment, Vincent sprang back to the attack, his rage redoubled. He accused Theo of not merely failing him in his time of need, but of intentionally sabotaging him. “You commit this negligence
on purpose
in order to make life more difficult for me,” he railed. In the bitter, helpless language of a frustrated child, he lashed out at his brother, summoning all the injuries of the past year—and long before that—in one great explosion of abuse. The “high and mighty”
gérant
had tortured him for too long with his “conceited” condescension, his “dear little Van Goghish tricks,” and his “silly, insipid” criticisms. Vincent could not suffer for another day such “narrow-mindedness” and “self-righteousness.” Theo had become their father, he wrote, hurling his most devastating bolt, and the outrage of it had finally grown absolutely unbearable. “It would be
stupid
to go on
in this way
,” he thundered.
“Stupid!”

BUT THEO WAS
a prisoner, too. In early April, he agreed to all of Vincent’s demands. He would send one hundred and fifty francs every month, as he had been doing. In return, Vincent would send him all his work. Theo could do anything he wanted with it (even “tear it to pieces,” Vincent agreed). Vincent could tell people in Nuenen that his brother had bought his work. The money would be
“earned
,” Vincent emphasized; “that way I have something to justify myself in the eyes of the world.” Theo would impose no conditions on his support. Vincent would make no additional demands on his brother. Theo would tell no one, not even their parents, about the terms of the agreement. Despite his own financial straits, Theo sealed the deal with a special payment of two hundred and fifty francs to placate his implacable brother. Vincent finally had his “definite arrangement.”