Van Gogh (117 page)

Vincent painted the approach to Montmajour, with its sentinel trees clinging to bare rock (taking up again the old hopeful theme of life springing miraculously from blight), and made elaborate drawings of the abbey
donjon
with its vertiginous view. But a fierce spell of mistral prevented him from painting or drawing in the garden where he and Milliet frolicked. To express these exquisite intimations of happiness on paper and canvas, he searched the side streets and surrounds of Arles for vignettes of nature’s exuberance that he could incorporate into the vision of
Paradou
in his head. In image after image, in paintings
and drawings, he lavished his brush and pen on gardens in riotous bloom. So extravagantly fertile are these visions of liberated nature that their opulent verdure pushes the horizon almost out of view and overwhelms the enclosures that try to restrain it. Even in the sandy peninsula created by a looping path to the public bathhouse, Vincent saw a vision of nature unchained: an explosion of “lusty flowers of the brightest orange”—oleanders, just coming into bloom.

Wheat Harvest at Arles
, 1888,
INK ON PAPER, 12¼ × 9½ IN
. (
Illustration credit 31.6
)

BUT PAUL GAUGUIN
had his own ideas about paradise. And mostly they involved money. As a former stockbroker with a family of six to support, a censorious wife to appease, and serious material ambitions for his artistic career, Gauguin could not afford the luxury of Vincent’s utopian dreams. In response to the invitation to Arles (which he described as “touching”), Gauguin offered a colorful image of artistic camaraderie that thrilled Vincent to the core: “He says that when sailors have to move a heavy load, or weigh anchor,” Vincent told Theo, “they all sing together to keep them up to the mark and give them vim. That is just what artists lack!”

But this tantalizing conceit came accompanied by a dizzyingly ambitious scheme that dwarfed even Vincent’s grand plans for the Van Gogh brothers’
entresol
enterprise. Gauguin proposed that Theo lead an effort to raise the astounding sum of six hundred thousand francs “to set up as a dealer in impressionist pictures.” Vincent was so dumbfounded by the amount that he refused even to discuss the details of Gauguin’s plan with his brother. Instead, he dismissed it as a
“fata morgana”
—a mirage of hope—and attributed it to Gauguin’s debilitated condition. “The more destitute you are—especially if you are ill,” he wrote, without a hint of irony, “the more you think of such possibilities. To me this scheme simply looks like another proof of his breaking down, and it would be better to get him away as quickly as possible.”

The unexpected reply cast a cloud over Vincent’s sunny plans for the Yellow House. In a fit of ire that combined vexation, indignation, and sibling rivalry, he denounced Gauguin’s counterproposal as “nothing but a freak” and demanded its immediate retraction. He girded Theo against the Frenchman’s blandishments, and suggested that Gauguin should butt out of the brothers’ business affairs. “The most solid asset Gauguin has now is his painting,” Vincent wrote, “and the best business he could do [is] his own pictures.” Indeed, he turned Gauguin’s experience at the Bourse into fodder for dark speculation about a possible conspiracy with “Jewish bankers” to undo the brothers. In a huff, he threatened to withdraw his invitation and find another, more grateful artist to share his studio in the South. In desperate straits, Gauguin finally backpedaled from his grand scheme and wrote Theo “replying categorically and affirmatively to the proposition you made me concerning going to Arles.”

Vincent’s spirits soared. “Your letter brings great news,” he cheered. “Gauguin agrees to our plan. Certainly the best thing would be for him to come rushing here at once.” But the elation lasted only a week before Gauguin delayed his departure yet again with more claims of financial distress (he needed travel money), more complaints of illness, and more punishing silences between letters. By mid-July, Vincent felt the need to mount yet another campaign to convince Theo that the combination with Gauguin made financial sense. Against his own better judgment, he pushed harder for Russell to buy a Gauguin painting; he sent his Montmajour drawings to the dealer Thomas and offered the proceeds from their sale to offset Gauguin’s expenses; and he proposed to organize an exhibition for Gauguin in Marseille. In a stunning reversal, when Theo suggested that he might quit Goupil, Vincent not only pleaded with him to
stay
, for fear that quitting might jeopardize the plan for Gauguin, he even offered to go back to work for the firm himself. Finally, in an unprecedented gesture, he returned some of the money that Theo sent him.

By July 22, Vincent felt compelled to repeat a startling proposal he had first made in late June, the last time negotiations threatened to collapse. Setting aside all his dreams for the Yellow House and a studio in the Midi, he offered to go to Pont-Aven. “If Gauguin cannot pay his debts or his fare,” he wrote Theo, “why shouldn’t I go to him if we want to help him?…I lay aside all preference, either for the North or the South. Whatever plans one makes, there’s always a root of difficulty somewhere.” Only a few days later, however, his spirits rebounded when a letter arrived from Pont-Aven reporting Gauguin’s improved health and closing on an optimistic note: “While waiting to be reunited affectionately, I offer you my hand.” Vincent responded immediately, enclosing a sketch of his latest calling card for the Midi,
La mousmé
. But when weeks passed without another word—a form of torment by silence that Vincent knew well—his spirits sank again.

And so it went. Every surge of hope was followed by new obstacles, as Gauguin weighed his options and maneuvered to gain maximum advantage from the brothers’ invitation. To Vincent, he sent complaints about his isolation in Brittany. “The band of boors who are here find me completely insane,” he wrote, echoing back Vincent’s defiant alienation, “and that pleases me because it proves that I am not.” To Theo (whom he addressed with a mispelling, “Monsieur Van Gog”), he bewailed his “pestering creditors” and dangled promises of imminent sales, even as he solemnly pledged to Arles: “I am a man ready for sacrifices.”

The mixed messages coming out of Pont-Aven were matched by doubts in Paris. Reading Vincent’s urgent, exhortatory missives alongside Gauguin’s cool, tactical communiqués, Theo began to have second thoughts. The Frenchman was already taken aback by Vincent’s “intimidating” letters and lavish praise.
Were his brother’s expectations too high? Would these two very different artists prove incompatible? Would his brother’s overweening ardor collide with Gauguin’s subtle self-advancement?

When these concerns inevitably leaked to Arles, Vincent reversed course completely. After months of mercenary frenzy, he disavowed any expectations of commercial success for the combination with Gauguin and offered up extravagant sermons on the folly of ambition and the perils of fame. The “treacherous public” would never warm to the “austere talent” of painters like Gauguin and himself, Vincent wrote, “[for] it likes only easy, pretty things.” To expect more from his art than
“eternal
poverty,” “social isolation,” and a “siege of failure” would only be to invite misery, he professed. “I neither care about success for myself nor about happiness,” he assured Theo, recanting his earlier excitement over Geffroy’s expression of interest in his work. “What I do care about is the permanence of this vigorous attempt by the impressionists.”

In mid-August, Vincent’s worst fears seemed realized when Gauguin, ever vigilant for advantage, signaled that he might go to Paris instead of coming south. “Gauguin is hoping for success and cannot do without Paris,” Vincent wrote despairingly. “He would feel that he was doing nothing if he were [here].” Only a few days later, a letter arrived from Bernard reporting on his visit with Gauguin in Pont-Aven. The letter included “not one syllable about Gauguin intending to join me,” Vincent wrote in anguish, “and not a syllable either about wanting me to come there.”

The ups and downs of these triangle negotiations cast Vincent into a perdition of anxiety. With every delay from Pont-Aven and every reservation from Paris, he felt his dreams of an artistic
Paradou
slip further from his grasp. Always one to see conspiracy instead of confusion, he sank deeper and deeper into rancor and depression—a state compounded by continued silence from Russell; perceived slights from MacKnight; more frustrations over models; another round of guilty spending; the resurfacing of old debts in Paris; and his reading of
L’année terrible
(
The Terrible Year
), Hugo’s pitilessly depressing account of the Paris Commune. He quieted his fears with long, arduous days in the blazing summer sun; endless cups of coffee, sometimes laced with rum; and dreamy evenings of absinthe—even more popular in Arles than in Paris. “If I thought about, if I dwelled on the disastrous possibilities,” he wrote, “I could do nothing, [so] I throw myself headlong into my work with abandon … If the storm within roars too loudly, I take a glass too many to stun myself.” He punished himself with the usual exertion and starvation. He cut off his beard and shaved his head.

The months of uncertainty roiled his sleep, upended his stomach, and jangled his already frail nerves. “It has cost me a carcass pretty well destroyed,” he admitted to Theo in an unguarded moment, and “my mind pretty well cracked.”
His sole occasional companion, the lieutenant Milliet, described Vincent as racked by mood shifts as wild as the mistral: one minute seized by “hotheaded” fits of anger (“when he was mad, he seemed crazy”); the next, by “exaggerated sensitivity” (“sometimes reacting like a woman”). His letters skidded from exuberance to anger to resignation. He continued to wage furious battles against every objection and impediment even as his confidence collapsed in gasps of despair: “All that one hopes for, independence through work, influence on others, all comes to nothing,” he cried, “nothing at all.” He dolefully tallied the amount Theo had sent him over the years (“15,000 francs”) and joked blackly that the money might have been better spent buying other artists’ work. In a feisty moment, he blamed his plight not on Gauguin but on “an ungrateful planet”—“the worm-eaten official tradition” that left all avant-garde artists “isolated, poor, [and] treated like madmen.”

In a spasm of optimism, he tacked up thirty of his canvases in the Yellow House, treating himself to an exhibition of his own work while he waited for the paint to dry so he could send them to Paris. “We have gone too far to turn back,” he cheered his brother unconvincingly. “[I] swear to you that my painting will improve. Because I have nothing left but that.” In bleaker moods, he saw the inescapable hand of fate—“[Perhaps] the hope of doing better is rather a
fata morgana
, too”—and acknowledged the cost of resisting it. “I do not feel I have strength enough left to go on like this for long.… I am going to pieces and killing myself.” Still, he choked on the prospect of yet another failure. “You see that I have found my work,” he wrote his sister and confidante, Wil:

But no act of will could prevent his thoughts from slipping into darker realms. With increasing frequency, he referred to himself as “mad” or “cracked” or “crazy”—sometimes in self-conscious jest, sometimes in deadly earnest. Being treated like a madman, he warned pointedly, can lead to “actually becoming so.” Even after shaving his head, he looked in the mirror and saw the sunken cheeks and “stunned” expression of Hugo van der Goes, the “mad painter” famously depicted by Émile Wauters as hirsute, wild-eyed, and clutching himself—an image of artistic torment that had haunted Vincent’s imagination since before he became an artist.

These demons were already loose in his head when word arrived at the end of July that Uncle Cent had died. At the age of sixty-eight, the venerable dealer had finally succumbed, outlasting all but one of his brothers despite decades of ill health. Although alerted in advance to Cent’s imminent demise, Vincent took the
news like a hammer blow. All the ghosts of Holland descended on the stalemate with Gauguin. His letters filled up with long ruminations on death and mortality—surrogates for past mistakes, lost opportunities, and imminent failure.

Infuriated by Wil’s report that the unyielding Cent had died in “peace and calm,” he dismissed his uncle’s—and his father’s—comforting certainty of an afterlife as nothing more than the vanity of old women. But the possibility of an unforgiving void terrified him. To fill it, he threw up a teetering edifice of speculation on the possibility of other, “invisible” worlds. Combining his call for a rebirth of modern art with his unmet need for personal redemption—now further foreclosed by Cent’s death—he wondered if there might be “another hemisphere” of life where artists were recognized for themselves, not just for their sales; where the burden of guilt was lifted; the sins of the past, forgiven. “It would be so simple,” he imagined, “and would account so much for the terrible things in life, which now amaze and wound us so.”