Van Gogh (123 page)

O
NLY THE ANTICIPATION OF GAUGUIN’S ARRIVAL HELD VINCENT’S
loneliness in check. When the Zouave lieutenant Milliet went on leave in August, Vincent missed their trips to the brothels, but he imagined that Gauguin would attract even more attention among the beautiful Arlésiennes on the rue des Récollets. After Eugène Boch’s departure in early September, Vincent clung to their friendship with a chain of letters, a second portrait from memory, a push for Boch and Theo to meet in Paris, and even a fantasy scheme for Boch to marry his sister Wil. (“I always hoped that Wil would marry an artist,” he wrote. “And besides, he isn’t exactly penniless.”) He passed the lonely nights by telling himself that Gauguin’s presence in the Yellow House would inevitably lure other artists, like Boch, to his door. Indeed, Boch himself was “certain to return,” he reassured Theo, once Gauguin settled in.

As his few acquaintances fled, only the prospect of Gauguin’s companionship could protect him from the increasing hostility of his neighbors—a problem made worse when Vincent finally abandoned the Café de la Gare in mid-September and began sleeping in his new home. “The isolation of this place is pretty serious,” he wrote Theo. He complained bitterly about being “treated like a madman” and “paralyzed” because “nobody likes [me] personally.” He imagined that Gauguin would somehow both share his isolation and reverse it. When a gang of “hooligans” assaulted him on the street, squeezing his tubes onto the pavement as he tried to paint, Vincent laughed off the incident as a perverse comic prelude to the “fame” that he and Gauguin would enjoy in Arles.

He reached for the same consolation when models balked, refused to show up, haggled over terms, or took advances and never returned. Even the models he liked, Milliet among them, posed badly. The postman Roulin refused to let him paint the infant Marcelle. “Difficulties with models continue with exactly the
same tenacity as the mistral here,” he wrote. “It is almost enough to make you lose heart.” But Gauguin, the tamer of Martinique natives and Brittany peasants, would change all that. He would charm the reluctant models of the Midi into the Yellow House. He would stop the locals from laughing at Vincent’s portraits or being “ashamed to let themselves be painted.” He would win the “poor little souls” of Arles to the wonders of the new art.

Whenever the scorn of the Arlesians made Vincent “downhearted,” whenever he lost faith in his own work (as he did when Theo asked him to exhibit at the
Revue Indépendante
show), whenever he “struggled to be something more than a mediocrity,” Vincent thought of “the other fellows in Brittany, who are certainly busy doing better work than I,” and of the “beautiful things still to be done” in the South. Whenever he worried that age and illness had taken an irreparable toll on his body, his mind, or his art, he thought of Gauguin and the coming opportunity to “make the most” of his remaining strength. “We may have the power to work today,” he warned Theo, “but we do not know if it will hold out till tomorrow.”

Gauguin held the key to his waning sex life, too. By September, Vincent had trouble luring to his bed (or his studio) even the “2-franc” whores that the Zouaves passed over. The problem wasn’t money (he could always find a few coins for sex), or his strange art, or his assaultive personality. The problem was his desire—or, more precisely, his performance. Years of “running after the game,” he revealed to Theo, had left him impotent—often unable to achieve erection. Unaware of the deeper mental and physical processes at work (chiefly syphilis), the thirty-five-year-old Vincent attributed his dysfunction to aging—“I am getting older and uglier than my interest demands”—or simple exhaustion.

To Bernard and Gauguin, however, he presented his chastity not as a sad fate, but as a bold choice, and urged them to follow suit. “If we want to be really potent males in our work,” he insisted, “we must sometimes resign ourselves to not fuck much.” To support this unexpected call, Vincent cited a pantheon of virile but abstemious artists: from the “well regulated” Dutchmen of the Golden Age, to the mighty Delacroix, who “did not fuck much, and only had easy love affairs so as not to curtail the time devoted to his work.” Among the moderns, he cited the Impressionist Degas, who “does not like women because he knows that if he loved them and fucked them often, he would become an insipid painter,” as well as the Cloisonnist favorite Cézanne, in whose work Vincent found “plenty of male potency.”

He invoked the brothers’ earliest tutor in love, Michelet, and their latest, Zola; as well as “that great and powerful” Balzac, who had famously emerged from an assignation complaining, “I lost a book this morning!” Vincent argued that “painting and fucking a lot don’t go together, it softens the brain.” Like the disciplined
bonzes
, he might visit a brothel every two weeks for “hygienic” reasons,
he told Bernard, but otherwise he, and they, should “pour out all our sap” into the creation of art, not waste it on common whores for whom “professional pimps and ordinary fools do better in the matter of satisfying the genital organs.” Instead, they should make Art their mistress and Painting their sex, creating “spermatic” works in “headlong spurts.” “Ah! My dear friends,” he rallied them, “let us crazy ones feel orgasm all the same, through our eyes, no?”

Vincent renounced not just sex, but wife and family as well, in order to conserve all his “sap” for the coming artistic union with Gauguin. The less he felt a procreative drive, the more urgently he proclaimed this creative one. “The enjoyment of a beautiful thing is like coitus,” he explained to Bernard, “a moment of infinity.” Together, he and Gauguin would propagate a generation of new art. Fate had “defrauded [him] of the power to create physically,” he conceded, but with Gauguin’s help he would make paintings “in place of children.”

Vincent had long argued for the power of sympathetic minds to beget great art. Almost from the beginning of his career, he had spoken of his own paintings as the progeny of just such a higher union: his brotherhood with Theo. “I swear that you will have created them as much as I,” he reaffirmed in September. “We are making them together.” But increasingly the vision of Gauguin as artistic spouse superseded all the images of partnership and pairing that had long obsessed his imagination.

In his letters, he took up the subject with an elaborate digression on one of the most famous creative couplings in Western history: Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio. After reading an article about the “friendship well beyond love” shared by these fourteenth-century poets, Vincent seized on their fertile bond as a model for the marriage he envisioned. (The article described it as “a constant devotion, a marvelous delicacy and a touching reciprocal indulgence [that] raised [them] above their time and themselves.”) Even though it was Petrarch who had spent most of his life in Provence, Vincent saw himself as the dutiful helper Boccaccio, author of the sublimely vulgar
Decameron
(“a melancholy, rather resigned, unhappy man … the outsider”) and cast Gauguin as the revered, reclusive master, proclaiming him “the new poet from these parts.” Just as a benighted medieval world had been awakened to Humanism by the light that issued from Petrarch and Boccaccio’s union, the Paris art world would marvel at the art spawned by his “combination” with Gauguin, Vincent imagined. “Art always comes to life again after inevitable periods of decadence,” he wrote, predicting that another renaissance would soon spring from the Midi.

On his easel, he celebrated this sacred, fruitful bond in a rush of landscapes. Just as Petrarch’s country house in Vaucluse (only forty miles northeast of Arles) had a garden retreat where he and Boccaccio could consummate their years of epistolary longing; the Yellow House, too, had a garden: the public park of the place Lamartine. There, among the eternal cypresses and the oleander
bushes that provided nightly cover for coarse doings worthy of the
Decameron
, Vincent set up his easel, squinted his eyes, and saw “a poet’s garden.” “This park has a fantastic character,” he wrote both Theo and Gauguin, “which makes you quite able to imagine the poets of the Renaissance, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, strolling among these bushes and over the flowery grass.” Possessed by this reverie, Vincent painted almost a dozen versions of the disheveled park in the last weeks of September and early October, working from sunrise until after sunset when the gas lights were lit. In some, nature bursts in Paradou-like bounty and seclusion; in others, lovers stroll in the footprints of the dead poets.

Public Garden with Fence
, A
PRIL
1888,
PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 12⅝ × 9⅝ IN.
(
Illustration credit 33.1
)

Conflating the fraternal and the fertile, the sexual and the spiritual, Vincent’s fever for conjoining flooded past the reveries of the unkempt little park into every corner of his imaginative world. While his letters called the roll of creative couples (Rembrandt and Hals, Corot and Daumier, Millet and Diaz, Flaubert and Maupassant), his brush found copulation everywhere. From thistles to coaches, from sand barges to shoes, he saw pairs of objects that “complemented” each other as inevitably as red complemented green. “There are colors that cause each other to shine brilliantly,” he wrote, “which form a
couple
, which complete each other like man and woman.”

In late September, Vincent found a subject that invited him to layer all these intimations of coupling into a single image. The Zouave lieutenant Milliet returned
briefly to Arles on his way to another tour of duty in Africa. Between packing up his barracks home and taking “tender leave” at every brothel in Arles, Milliet barely had time to sit for his former drawing teacher. When Vincent finally lured him into the Yellow House, he sat impatiently, fidgeting and criticizing as Vincent hurried to finish. The painting that emerged married thick paint and bold brushstrokes to some of Vincent’s most careful rendering—not at all the caricature of Roulin, but not a true likeness either (as Vincent ruefully admitted).

Portrait of Milliet, Second Lieutenant of the Zouaves
, S
EPTEMBER
1888,
OIL ON CANVAS, 23⅝ × 19⅜ IN.
(
Illustration credit 33.2
)

The scarlet of the lieutenant’s military cap invoked the legendary carnality of the bullnecked, tiger-eyed Zouave who had posed earlier that summer. But the jade background, as much blue as green, softened the “savage” contrast to express a masculinity more touching than threatening. In Milliet’s handsome face, Vincent saw both the smooth lothario of Maupassant’s
Bel-Ami
and the sentimental naïf of Milliet’s favorite novel,
L’abbé Constantin
(
The Abbot Constantine
)
;
both the calculating ambition of Gauguin and the open heart of his own brother. Like Theo, Milliet “completed” Vincent’s awkward intensity with his “unconcerned and easy-going behavior”; with his youth (“he is only twenty-five, for Christ’s sake”), and especially his potency. “Milliet is lucky,” Vincent wrote, explaining why he and the young Zouave made a pair as perfect as red and green. “He has as many Arlésiennes as he wants, but then, he can’t paint them; and if he were a painter, he wouldn’t have them.”

Vincent hung the portrait, which he called simply
The Lover
, on the wall of his new bedroom alongside the one of Boch, which he had dubbed
The Poet
. Together, they formed a fitting template for the even more perfect pairing to come. “My own bedroom will be extremely simple,” he informed Theo about his decorations for the Yellow House, while Gauguin’s room would be “pretty” and “dainty.” “As much as possible,” he wrote, “I shall try to make it like the boudoir of a really artistic woman.”

Carried on images like these, Vincent’s expectations soared. The combination with Gauguin would not only “complete” him, it would put him at the epicenter of a great new movement in art. The Yellow House would become a mecca for all true “colorists” who drew inspiration from the magical light of the South. He and Gauguin would school them in the new art, then send them out, like Boch, to seed the gospel across the Continent. He bought a dozen chairs to accommodate the “apostles” he expected to answer the call. Eventually, his dreams included a museum and a permanent
école
that would nourish generations of painters. Even the reclusive Seurat might be drawn into such a glittering vision of the future, he suggested, creating an alliance with Gauguin that would finally bring unity to the heirs of Impressionism. “Do you realize,” he wrote Theo portentously, “we are at the beginning of a very great thing, which will open a new era for us.”