Van Gogh (124 page)

Visions like these not only whetted his anticipation of Gauguin’s arrival, they kept alive the dream of Drenthe: the dream that Theo, too, would join him someday in the Yellow House. “I tell myself that by myself I am not able to do sufficiently important painting to justify your coming South,” he wrote his brother plaintively. “But if Gauguin came and if it was fairly well known that we were staying here and helping artists live and work, I do not see at all why the South should not become another native land to you as well as to me.” References to the Zemganno brothers and their “daring” feats reappeared in his letters. He talked of “making a hit” in Paris and promised Theo to “earn back all the money you have been lending me for several years.” He pictured his old nemesis H. G. Tersteeg hearing of his great Gauguin coup and imagined himself finally loosed from the long grip of the past.

Vincent brought these visions to life in paint. On a big canvas (more than two by three feet), he transformed the humble building at 2, place Lamartine into a monument in yellow. By positioning his little house in the middle of the canvas between two plunging perspectives, he rooted it in the sunny Midi as immovably as the old church tower in Nuenen was rooted in the black soil of the heath. Its “fresh butter” yellow and bright cobalt sky rejected the tower’s monstrous grays and lowering clouds, just as the bustling street life on the avenue de Montmajour—couples with children, café drinkers—mocked the lifeless graves at the tower’s base, including his father’s. Beckoning and eternal, the Yellow House springs from the bright countryside like a shaft of light—a
rayon blanc
to the church tower’s
rayon noir
.

On another big canvas, he painted the one place in the house where he could dream such dreams in peace: his bedroom. Even downstairs, he always found reality intruding: creditors hounded him, models rebuffed him, whores refused him, fellow painters rebuked him. But in his bedroom, he could close the door on all that and read about Tolstoy’s ideas on religion or Wagner’s music. “In the end,” he mused, “we will all want to live more musically.” Whether pondering such thoughts or humming hymns to himself as he did in England, he could lie awake until late at night, floating above the “cynicism, skepticism and humbug” of the world on clouds of pipe smoke and dreams.

To capture that music of serenity, he set his easel in the corner of the tiny room and filled the canvas with his inner sanctum. In the past, he had often drawn records of his living spaces, as well as views from inside them, to give to family members as “souvenirs” or keep as aides-mémoires. But now he had a new means of recording. “Color will do everything here,” he boasted about the painting even before it was finished, “giving by its simplification a grander style to things.” And he also had a new reason to record. Like his painting of the Yellow House,
The Bedroom
, with its oversized furniture and exaggerated perspective, transformed the mundane into the monumental. Simplified forms and saturated colors turned
a domestic vignette into a stained-glass shrine (“painted in free flat tints,” he wrote, claiming the mantle of Cloisonnism)—a celebration in vivid complementaries and cartoon furnishings of the sanctity of inner life. “Looking at this picture ought to rest the brain,” he said, “or rather the imagination.”

In Nuenen, he had painted
The Bible
to vindicate his defiant life on the heath. In
The Bedroom
, he memorialized the limitless possibilities of his dreams in the Midi. The wood-plank floor opens like a book to show not his father’s bleak text, but the
“joie de vivre”
of Zola’s novel: a bed big enough for two, built of yellow-orange pine, as sturdy as a ship; and paired chairs with rush seats. On pegs above the headboard, his turquoise painter’s smock and straw hat. Over the bed, the portraits of the missing Boch and the departing Milliet—whose painted images, he said, made the house “seem more lived-in.” Yellow sunlight peeks through the closed shutters and casts a citron light on the pillowcases and sheets. The defiant streaks of color that he had used on the pages of
The Bible
spring from their prison of gray to fill the canvas with a tumult of contrasts: a blue washbasin on an orange toilet table; pink floorboards laced with green; yellow deal and lilac doors; a mint-green towel against a robin’s-egg wall; and, on the bed, a splash of scarlet coverlet. At the back of the telescoped room, beside the window, a small shaving mirror hangs on the wall, reflecting not an image, but a color—the same serene Veronese green that radiated from the
bonze
’s shaved head and gleamed in his eyes.

But the higher Vincent flew, the harder he fell. In mid-September, after a long silence, Gauguin wrote another brief, cryptic note. One line stood out above all the others: “Every day I go deeper into debt, and the journey becomes more and more out of the question.”

The letter sent Vincent into a tailspin of fury and hurt. He accused Gauguin of betraying the brothers’ generosity, and he urged Theo to issue an ultimatum—“Ask Gauguin bluntly…‘Are you coming or not?’ ” If he continued to waver or delay, Vincent fumed, Theo should cut him off—withdraw his offer of assistance at once. “We must behave like the mother of a family,” he scolded, displaying a sternness he never tolerated in his brother. “If one listened to him, one would go on hoping for something vague in the future … and go on living in a hell with no way out.”

Seized by paranoia, he imagined that Gauguin had found a better “combination” with his friend Charles Laval, a young painter with family money who had accompanied Gauguin to Martinique the year before, and had recently joined him once again in Pont-Aven. “Laval’s arrival has temporarily opened a new resource to him,” Vincent concluded. “I think that he is hesitating between Laval and us.” When a letter arrived from Bernard suggesting that
he
would come to Arles for the winter, Vincent immediately suspected a plot to wring yet more
money from his generous brother. “Gauguin is sending him as a substitute,” Vincent wrote, warning Theo not to tolerate such treachery. “No arrangement of any sort with [Bernard],” he snapped; “he is too fickle.”

Vincent tried everything to keep his hopes for the Yellow House alive. He flooded Theo with long, manic letters whiplashing between cynicism (“I feel instinctively that Gauguin is a schemer”) and reassurance (“our friendship with him will endure,” “we are on the right road”). He summoned Theo to ever grander visions of a studio in the Midi even as he advised Gauguin on the finer points of evading creditors (he suggested either suing his landlord or leaving the back rent unpaid). He thrust himself into the details of the stalled negotiations in an effort to break the impasse. Placating Theo one minute, Gauguin the next, he alternated sides at the table: now pushing his brother to accede to Gauguin’s conditions (pay all his debts
and
travel expenses); now demanding new, impossibly onerous concessions from Gauguin (give Theo all his pictures
and
pay his own expenses). He vehemently pressed the commercial advantages of the combination even as he clung to the mandate of destiny. “All true colorists
must
come here,” he insisted; “Impressionism
will
last.” He bought more furniture for Gauguin’s bedroom. In the same letter, he assured Theo of his readiness to go forward alone if the deal broke down (“solitude does not worry me,” he said), and boldly proposed bringing
both
Gauguin and Laval to the Yellow House. “It is only fair since Laval is his pupil and they have already kept house together,” he reasoned. “We could find some way of putting them both up.”

In late September, when Theo gently urged him to move on from his plan for Gauguin, and even move out of the Yellow House, Vincent’s confidence collapsed. He bravely parried his brother’s calls to concentrate more on selling and less on decorating, to quit his quaint dream of a utopia where artists didn’t have to pay their own way, and to abandon his grandiose plans for an institute of Impressionism in the hinterlands. He protested his ultimate commercial intent—“It is absolutely my duty to try to make money by my work”—and pledged himself yet again to “make progress.” He retreated from any immediate intention to provide a soup-kitchen refuge to other artists, while wanly defending “the right to wish for a state of things in which money would not be necessary in order to live.”

But the prospect of another catastrophic failure pushed him closer and closer to breakdown. Without his dreams of the combination to hold it back, a wave of guilt and self-reproach swept over him. The old defenses of the Schenkweg studio sprang into place: the extravagant promises of future success, the claims of turning a new leaf, the bids for brotherly solidarity. As in The Hague, contrite confessions were followed by pleas for more money in a spiral of guilt and offense.

Just when the burden of apology seemed too heavy to bear, news arrived from Paris that Theo had fallen ill again, as syphilis took its inevitable toll on his frail constitution. “Thinking and thinking these days how all these expenses of painting are weighing on you,” Vincent wrote in a panic of remorse; “you cannot imagine how disquieted I am … horribly and continually tormented by this uneasiness.” Answering old sins with old penance, he punished himself with unceasing labor, strict fasting, neglected ailments, and abusive drinking. He reimagined the extremes of Arlesian weather—the sulfurous sun and lashing mistral especially—as a kind of self-mortification. And when a letter arrived from Eugène Boch in the Borinage, Vincent immediately laid plans to return to the black country himself. “I love that dismal land so much,” he wrote Boch the same day, eagerly embracing the torments of the past. “It will always remain unforgettable to me.”

His thoughts turned inevitably to death and, worse, madness. For the first time, he recognized himself in Claude Lantier, the hero of Zola’s
L’oeuvre
, a painter driven to suicide by crazed, self-annihilating ambition. He looked in the mirror and saw again the icon of artistic dementia, Émile Wauters’s portrait of the mad painter-monk Hugo van der Goes. “I am again pretty nearly reduced to the madness of [that] picture,” he confessed in October.

More and more, though, Vincent’s darkest fears took the face and form of one man: Adolphe Monticelli.

Vincent had appointed the Marseille artist as spiritual godfather to the brotherhood of colorists he envisioned springing up in the Midi. It was Monticelli, after all, who had first spun great art (as well as commercial gold) from the southern sun. It was Monticelli who denied “local color or even local truth” in order to achieve “something passionate and eternal.” The more Vincent’s dreams for the Yellow House slipped toward failure, the more fiercely he clung to the lifeline of Monticelli’s example. In flights of rhetoric increasingly unhinged, he claimed a virtual identity with the dead artist. He did not merely follow Monticelli, he said, he “resurrected” him. “I am continuing his work here,” Vincent declared, “as if I were his son or his brother.” He compared his sunflowers to Monticelli’s paintings of the South—“all in yellow, all in orange, all in sulfur.” He laid delusional plans for a joint exhibition to vindicate both himself and his predecessor in the eyes of a skeptical world, and elaborately imagined his triumphant “return” to Marseille. “It is my firm intention to go saunter in the Cannebière there,” he wrote in a reverie of reincarnation, “dressed exactly like him … with an enormous yellow hat, a black velvet jacket, white trousers, yellow gloves, a bamboo cane, and with a grand southern air.”

But Monticelli had died in a stupor of madness and drink, slumped over a café table, according to the stories circulating in the art world. While Vincent
acknowledged his hero’s troubled mind—“a little cracked,” he conceded, “or rather very much so”—he blamed it on the “harassment of poverty” and the hostility of a scorning public. “They call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirs,” he scoffed. If this was madness, it was the madness that comes from being “blasted” too much by the sun, Vincent argued—a madness of inspiration and fecundity. It was the madness of the plants in Zola’s
Paradou
, or of the “raving mad” oleander bushes in the public garden outside his door, “flowering so riotously they may well catch locomotor ataxia.” If this was madness, it was
his
madness—an admission he celebrated in paint with a still life of a vase of blooming oleander sitting on a table next to a copy of
La joie de vivre
.

But mad or not, the image of Monticelli’s ignominious end haunted him. “My mind dwells on the stories going around about his death,” he confessed. It was a mystery that both puzzled and frightened him. He tried to see his efforts in the Midi as redeeming his fallen hero. “We shall try to prove to the good people that Monticelli did not die slumped across the café tables of the Cannebière,” he vowed, “but that the little fellow is still alive.” But what if those efforts failed? What then? Who would redeem Monticelli’s glorious legacy of color and light if not Vincent? And who would redeem Vincent?

With questions like these, his thoughts slipped back into the quicksand of religion. “When in a state of excitement,” he confessed, “my feelings lead me to the contemplation of eternity and eternal life.” He searched for answers in an article about Tolstoy’s views on the future of faith, but found no comfort in the Russian’s impossible call for a return to the simple belief of “common folk” and his bracing rejection of the afterlife. “He admits neither the resurrection of the body, nor even that of the soul,” Vincent reported bleakly, “but says, like the nihilists, that after death there is nothing else.” Unpersuaded by Tolstoy’s prediction of “an inner and hidden revolution” that would “have the same consoling effect … as the Christian religion used to,” Vincent lashed out at the failure of modern thinkers to answer the ultimate question, raising a cry that combined furious rebuke, anguished confession, and existential panic: