Van Gogh (112 page)

Soon enough, Vincent found himself making the same excuses for excessive consumption and promises of imminent success that had haunted him on the heaths of his homeland. “I must reach the point where my pictures will cover my expenses,” he vowed in April, “and even more than that, taking into account how much was spent in the past. Well, it will come. I don’t make a success of everything, I admit, but I’m getting on.” The return to old habits of pleading and promising drained his confidence. After weeks of effervescing over his work in the orchards, he confessed to “not being so keen as all that on my pictures,” and offered to relocate from Arles to Marseille in order to put more effort into dealing
and less into painting. He even bought new shoes and clothes in anticipation of the move, assuring Theo: “In view of the business I count on doing, I want to be well turned out.”

The offer to leave also revealed the growing strains in Vincent’s relations with his neighbors. In fact, mutual suspicion had already degenerated into outright antagonism. Gripped by paranoia, Vincent blamed the Arlesians for plotting to thwart and exploit him at every opportunity. “They consider it a duty to get whatever they can,” he groused. He accused merchants of overcharging him, cooks of spiting him, clerks of cheating him, and officials of misleading him. When he challenged them (“It would be feeble of me to let myself be exploited”), he found them impervious to his complaints. “The indifference, the lazy happy-go-lucky ways of the people here are beyond belief,” he fumed. Nothing enraged him more than being ignored, of course, and he admitted saying “foolish and vicious” things in the heat of argument. In letters to Theo, he denounced the locals in increasingly acid rants as “bores,” “loungers,” “loafers,” and “swine.” Even the prostitutes of Arles lost their allure, threatening Vincent’s most reliable source of companionship and consolation, other than alcohol. He called them “worn-out” and “stupefied,” and, like the city itself, “in their decadence.” With every sou he paid out, whether to a whore or a shopkeeper, he complained bitterly about money “going into the hands of people whom one loathes.”

By the end of spring, as surely as the flowers fell from the trees, his life in Arles had withered to a series of angry confrontations. He fought with booksellers and brothel keepers, with the grocer who supplied him paint and canvas, and with postal clerks over his awkward packages to Paris and their proper postage. He fought with restaurateurs over their refusal to make the foods his delicate stomach demanded and with the local teenagers who taunted him (“street arabs,” he called them).

But mostly he fought with his landlord. As in every place he ever lived, Vincent waged a war of attrition against his keeper. In Arles, his fury was directed at Albert Carrel, owner of the hotel where he stayed. He complained about the terrible food and “regular poison” of wine that Carrel served in the restaurant downstairs and about the lack of heat and the “nest of microbes” in the toilet upstairs. He accused Carrel of playing “tricks” on him. “They’re ruinous and they make me wretched,” he wrote Theo. Despite the drumbeat of grievances, Carrel made a covered terrace available for Vincent to dry his paintings and to use as a fair-weather studio. But when Carrel tried to charge extra rent for the additional space, Vincent protested and counted one more reason to seek accommodations elsewhere.

Rejected and besieged at every turn, Vincent could feel his great enterprise in the sunny South spiraling toward yet another failure only two months after it
began. “I see [the future] bristling with difficulties,” he wrote, “and sometimes I ask myself if they won’t be too much for me.” As in the past, he brooded on his misfortunes. He looked in the mirror and painted an aging thirty-five-year-old man with wrinkles and “ash-colored” hair—“stiff and wooden … considerably neglected and mournful.” Vexed by an exchange with Bernard about Christian imagery, distressed by news from Paris that Theo had fallen ill again, and haunted by the continuing rebuff from Tersteeg, his thoughts turned in the darkest direction: to “death and immortality.”

It was a path that led only to melancholy. “Loneliness, worries, difficulties, the unsatisfied need for kindness and sympathy—that is what is hard to bear,” he wrote Theo, spilling out his despair in the effort to bolster his sick brother’s spirits. “The mental suffering of sadness or disappointment undermines us more than dissipation—us, I say, who find ourselves the happy possessors of disordered hearts.”

Having long since given up the “infectious foolishness” of religion, Vincent had only one place to seek consolation. As he had so often in the past, especially at times of crisis, he seized on the possibility of rebirth—redemption—through art. Only art, he said, “can lead us to the creation of a more exalting and consoling nature.” Echoing Zola’s messianic mandate in
L’oeuvre
, as well as his own early formulations of the sublime
“it,”
he summoned up a new vision of art’s future—a vision that, like his evangelical Christianity, promised to transform his troubles into sacrifices and his torments into martyrdom. He preached to all his correspondents a coming “revolution” in art, and declared himself and the other painters of the
entresol
its avant-garde. “And so, if we believe in the new art and in the artists of the future,” he wrote Theo,

Combining the comforting promise of the old faith and the thrilling promise of the new art, it was a model of redemption and resurgence uniquely Vincent’s—a Michelet-like conception of apocalyptic reincarnation that simultaneously exalted the painters of the Petit Boulevard and vindicated his burning nostalgia for a bygone Eden in art and in his own life. The past would return—but purged and perfected by a new understanding of color and a deeper vision of “very truth.”

—

AT THE END
of April 1888, two events inspired Vincent to transform this desperate illusion into reality—to “impose it on humanity,” as Maupassant preached. The first was a letter from Bernard bragging that he had taken an entire house in Saint-Briac on the Brittany coast. At almost exactly the same time, Vincent’s fight with his landlord finally boiled over, sending him on a search through the hostile town for another room, even as he contemplated escaping to Marseille. Only a few blocks north of the Hotel Carrel, on the far side of a public park that he had passed often on his way to the countryside, he saw a dilapidated house—“shut up and uninhabited for a considerable time.” It was painted yellow.

T
HE FOUR ROOMS THAT VINCENT RENTED HARDLY LOOKED THE STUFF
of dreams. They occupied the two floors in one half of a building at the northeast corner of the place Lamartine, a triangular park on the north side of Arles between the old city walls and the train station. The space had long gone un-rented, despite the bargain rate of fifteen francs a month. Years of neglect had left its yellow stucco exterior bleached to ivory and its green shutters faded to a eucalyptus gray.

It was a strange fragment of a building, squeezed onto a trapezoidal corner lot. Its twin gables facing the park masked two unequal “halves”: a deep and spacious one on the left, occupied by a grocery store, and a shallow, cramped one on the right—the one Vincent rented. The right side also suffered most from the noise and dust of the avenue de Montmajour, a main thoroughfare that ran along the east side of the building. The tortured floor plan allowed just one large room downstairs, with a kitchen in back, and two tiny bedrooms upstairs accessible only via the common hall and stairway. All the rooms but the kitchen faced south, but none had cross-ventilation—a formula for suffocatingly hot summers, especially upstairs, and insufferably close winters. None of the rooms had heat, gas, or electricity. There was no bathroom. The closest facilities were the filthy public toilets in the hotel next door.

The neighborhood discouraged sorties at any hour. The abutting hotel and an all-night café two doors down disgorged revelers, drunks, and transients day and night. Trains arrived and departed from the station, belching and screaming as they passed on elevated tracks less than a hundred feet away. On the park side, a few scrawny trees offered only a lace of shade from the relentless sun, but no relief from the choking dust. At night, dark figures rustled and moaned in the bushes—overflow sexual traffic from the brothel district just on the other
side of the park. The combination of inhospitable rooms, noise and traffic, danger and decadence, had long deterred any sensible vendors or lodgers. To the townspeople who passed by every day to post a letter or buy groceries, or at night to fornicate in the park, the corner apartment at 2, place Lamartine had disappeared already, a victim of vacancy and vandalism, condemned inevitably to the fate that awaited it fifty years later when an Allied bomb exploded it to rubble.

T
HE
Y
ELLOW
H
OUSE
, A
RLES
(
Illustration credit 31.1
)

But to Vincent, it was paradise. Where others saw an interior of peeling whitewash, rough brick floors, and unlivable rooms, Vincent saw a serene, churchlike space. “In this I can live and breathe, meditate and paint,” he wrote. Rather than a seedy transient neighborhood, Vincent saw a garden of Eden where the greenery was always lush and the sky overhead always “intensely blue.” He called the dusty park “delightful” and bragged to sister Wil that his windows “overlook[ed] a very pretty public garden from which one can see the sun rise in the morning.” Instead of decay and depravity, Vincent saw Daumier caricatures, scenes from Flaubert novels, Monet landscapes, and, in the denizens of the all-night café, “absolute Zola.”

Where others saw a blighted eyesore, Vincent saw a home. “I feel that I can make something lasting out of it,” he wrote Theo in a rapture of anticipation. “The ground feels firmer underfoot, so let’s go ahead.” One visitor later remarked that Vincent had found his “dream house.”

Without waiting for Theo’s approval, he signed the lease and launched an extravagant campaign to bring the derelict building back to life. He had the interior
repaired and the exterior repainted—“the yellow color of fresh butter on the outside with glaringly green shutters,” he reported. He fixed the doors and windows, installed gas, and otherwise spent lavishly to make the house habitable, all the time pleading poverty to his brother. (He told Theo that the landlord had agreed to underwrite the renovations.) Eager to move in as soon as possible, he marched his studio from the Hotel Carrel to the downstairs room. But when he demanded a commensurate reduction in his rent at the hotel, Albert Carrel balked, sparking a furious battle (“I’ve been swindled,” he cried). Forced to ransom his remaining possessions from Carrel, who seized them when Vincent refused to pay his bill, Vincent had to rent a room over the all-night café nearby and take his dispute with Carrel to the local magistrate, setting a tone of antagonism that would embitter all his future dealings with his new neighbors.