Van Gogh (137 page)

In a desperate bid to head off a collision, Rey wrote Theo to propose a different path forward. “Would you like to have your brother in an asylum near Paris?” he inquired. “Do you have resources? If so, you can send for him.”

BUT THEO HAD
other matters on his mind. “Now tell me what we have to do according to Dutch custom,” he wrote Jo Bonger the day Rey’s letter arrived. “We could start sending the announcements, couldn’t we?”

He had returned to Paris on the day after Christmas determined to recapture the perfect happiness interrupted by Arles. “I think of you and long so to be with you,” he wrote Jo, who had left for Amsterdam only hours before his return. The thought of their future together carried him through the long days at the gallery during its busiest season and the long nights in the empty rue Lepic apartment. “I too often look at the corner of my room where we enjoyed such peace together,” he wrote her. “When shall I be able to call you my little wife?”

The outpouring of congratulations from friends and family resumed immediately, separating Theo even further from the brief, otherworldly detour to Arles. “Bless your future life together,” sister Lies wrote the day after his return. “For Ma it is like a ray of sunshine to know that your life won’t be lonely anymore.” Only the uncertainty of Vincent’s fate (which hung over the holiday season like a “haze,” he said) prevented him from racing to Holland to join his beloved, as they had planned before Christmas. “I shall not postpone it for a single day unless I absolutely
must,”
he assured her. “I so long to be with you.” In the meantime, he busied himself with preparations for his new life: printing the engagement announcements, planning a round of visits to friends, and looking for a new apartment—“the place where we shall build our nest.”

As much as longing for Jo distracted him from his brother’s fate, news from Arles confused him about it. “I’ve been wavering between hope and fear,” he wrote. Rey’s initial reports summarized Vincent’s condition well enough, but with a clinical dispassion and professional caution that hardly captured the tempests of emotion Theo knew his brother was suffering. At one point, Rey, an aspiring gentleman, wandered far from the case by delicately suggesting that Theo introduce him into Paris society after he completed his medical degree. Through the fog of propriety and uncertainty (“it is very difficult to respond categorically to all of the questions that you ask of me,” Rey demurred), Theo probably overlooked the hints that the young intern had already begun to earn Vincent’s trust, and that Vincent had already begun to control the information Rey shared with him.

While in Arles, Theo had accepted Joseph Roulin’s offer to look in on Vincent and report on his condition. In his letters and his art, Vincent had portrayed Roulin not just as a model but as a friend and a community leader of
some distinction. Theo apparently met the imposing postman at the hospital on Christmas Day and heard (probably from Roulin himself) of Roulin’s role in rescuing Vincent from his blood-soaked bed the day before. His very presence in the hospital spoke of his concern for Vincent’s welfare. When Roulin offered his services as
rapporteur
to the distinguished
gérant
from Paris (whose fine stationery and frequent money orders Roulin knew well), Theo gladly accepted, no doubt promising some form of compensation for his trouble.

But when Theo returned to Paris, Roulin’s reports only compounded the distortions of distance. His penchant for tale-telling, dramatic overstatement, self-promotion, and florid language led Theo on a tortuous path. “I should have liked to have the honor of announcing an improvement in your brother’s health,” his first letter began. “Unfortunately I am not able to do so.” Roulin reported Vincent near death one day and “quite recovered” the next; victimized by “terrible attacks” one day, “completely recovered” the next. In the space of a week, he endorsed the proposal to commit Vincent to an asylum as a sad necessity and condemned it as an unthinkable outrage.

By the end of December, after only a few days of Roulin’s Tartarin reportage, Theo turned in frustration to a complete stranger for news of his brother. Frédéric Salles, a local pastor, served as unofficial chaplain to the hospital’s occasional Protestant patients. Probably at the recommendation of Rey, Theo arranged for the forty-seven-year-old Salles to pay regular visits to Vincent’s bedside and report on his progress. Worldly and energetic—requirements for an outpost preacher in lusty, Catholic Provence—Salles showed himself a diligent correspondent and conscientious caretaker. “I will do all I can to make your brother’s life as bearable as possible,” he assured Theo.

But Salles’s sympathy and optimism proved no more helpful to Theo than Roulin’s bluster. His reports, too, bounced from dark insinuations of “insanity” to sunny predictions of an imminent return to health. Salles offered prayers when Theo needed insights; scolding when he needed guidance; and faith when Vincent’s fate hung on the finest balance of science and intuition. On the subject of committing Vincent to an asylum, Salles dutifully reported the doctors’ indecision and conveyed Vincent’s forceful objections, but ventured no opinion based on his own observations: a paralyzing reticence that paralleled Theo’s own.

The absence of hard information and authoritative advice left Theo’s heart free to despair. “There is little hope,” he wrote Jo. “If he must pass away, so be it.” Days after Rey had assured him of Vincent’s improvement, he still dreaded the imminent arrival of a telegram from Arles summoning him to a deathbed, and talked as if Vincent were already gone. “I would have wanted him, whether near or far, to remain that same advisor and brother to both of us,” he told Jo. “That hope has now vanished and we are both the poorer for it … We shall honor his memory.”

In response to Theo’s persistent, gloomy fatalism, Jo issued a stern rebuke. “Don’t go thinking the worst.” But she joined in the eulogizing all the same. “I’d have been delighted and very proud,” she wrote, “if Vincent had wanted to be a brother to me as well.” Other family members and friends responded with either conspicuous indifference or open relief. Most shared his mother’s view that Vincent’s death was both foretold and for the best. “I believe he has always been insane,” Anna summed up coldly, “and that his suffering and ours was a result of it.” Even Theo, for all his lamentation, could not disagree. “I almost dare not hope for his complete recovery,” he confided to Jo, “because the attack was the culmination of a variety of things that had been pushing him in that direction over a long period of time. All one can hope for is that his suffering is brief.”

But as the news from Arles brightened, as Roulin’s fraught tales yielded to Salles’s message of hope, Theo swung from despair to denial. “There is a chance that everything will come right again,” he wrote to Jo on January 3. Vincent’s “outbursts” might prove a blessing if they caused him to “stop making such extraordinary demands on himself.” Turning from resignation to optimism, Theo adopted Rey’s benign diagnosis of “hyperexcitement.” Describing Vincent as “driven by his kindness and always full of good intentions,” he dismissed the whole episode as “just blowing off steam.” Perhaps all his brother needed was some time in the country, Theo suggested. “Once spring comes he will be able to work outdoors again and I hope that will give him some peace of mind. Nature is so invigorating.”

The fixed star in this sudden reversal was Amsterdam. Whether through tragedy or denial, Theo would find his way to Jo. “Let’s hope for the best,” he wrote, blithely concluding one chapter and opening another. “There’s no reason now to postpone my arrival any longer and I shall be overjoyed to be with you again.”

Nothing was allowed to interrupt this narrative of new life. Through the long, dark nights of late December, Theo wrote letter after letter to Jo, but none to his brother. On New Year’s Eve, Salles reported Vincent’s “astonishment” that Theo had not written to him since their brief, dreamlike reunion on Christmas Day. “He even wanted me to send you a telegram to make you do it,” Salles scolded. When Theo finally sent the obligatory New Year’s greeting, he talked only of Jo and put to rest any hope of a return to the past. Not even Rey’s urgent letter about sending Vincent to an asylum could break the hold of the future. Theo had told Jo that the final decision lay in the doctors’ hands, not his. And he never told her about the letter suggesting that Theo take him back and place him discreetly in a Paris asylum. The day after Rey’s letter arrived, he wrote Jo, “I keep thinking of you and what our life will be like.” The day after that, with Rey’s letter still unanswered, he boarded the overnight train for Amsterdam.

—

ON JANUARY
7, one day after Theo arrived in Holland, Vincent returned to the Yellow House. In less than a week, the momentum of commitment had been reversed. Efforts to “free” him had come from both the solicitous Salles, who believed Vincent had been miraculously cured, and from the amiable blowhard Roulin. The latter, of course, claimed the lion’s share of the credit for the doctors’ about-face. “I went to see the head of the hospital who is a friend of mine,” he reported to Theo. “He replied that he would do as I wished.” But the person truly responsible for Vincent’s freedom was Vincent himself, who had finally joined the debate over his release on January 2. “My dear Theo,” his letter began.

Vincent awoke from his weeklong nightmare with this single purpose: to reassure his brother. To that end, he bent every fiber of his reemerging reason. Within days after his doctors signed the paperwork certifying him insane, he launched a desperate campaign to prove them wrong—to “take back” the events of the previous week and convince Theo that all had returned to normal.

The campaign started with Félix Rey, on whom Theo had settled such unquestioning trust. Rather than rail against the injustice of his confinement, as he had done in his delirium, Vincent instead wooed the young and impressionable intern—just as he had wooed Rappard, Bernard, and Theo himself—with erudition, flattery, deep discussion, hints of favor, and even flashes of humor. Rey invited Vincent to his office for what he called “entertaining chats.” They took long walks around the hospital courtyard while Vincent talked endlessly and cogently of his artistic ambitions, the magic of complementary colors, the genius of Rembrandt, and the shared mission of artists and physicians to comfort and console. “I told him that I myself should always regret not being a doctor,” Vincent wrote. “What men these modern doctors are!”

Rey described himself as “fond of painting.” Vincent urged Rey to become a collector and offered to inaugurate his collection with a gift of
The Anatomy Lesson
, Rembrandt’s famous paean to doctors. When Rey talked of the challenges he faced starting out in a new profession, Vincent promised him Theo’s help in making connections in Paris.

Vincent befriended the other, more senior doctors as well. He discovered one
doctor in particular, a Parisian, who knew of Delacroix and appeared “very curious about impressionism.” “I think I can hope to become better acquainted with him,” Vincent wrote cheerfully. On January 5, he led a delegation of doctors, including Rey, to the Yellow House to show them his paintings. While there, he promised to do a portrait of the dapper young intern—to prove his mental “equilibrium”—just as soon as he was released. He also solemnly swore that “at the first sign of a serious symptom” he would return to the hospital and submit himself voluntarily to Rey’s care.

It was one thing to transfer a raving madman—a Protestant Dutchman, no less—to a distant asylum. That seemed appropriate enough to Rey. But to condemn a thoughtful, sensitive artist to the company of lunatics because of a single seizure of passion? Once Vincent began to plead on his own behalf, to contest his confinement with calmness and clarity, in passable French, what else could Rey do but release him? “I am happy to tell you,” he wrote Theo on the back of one of Vincent’s letters, “this over-excitement has only been temporary. I strongly feel that he will be himself in a few days.”

To be safe, he arranged for Vincent to take a day trip to the Yellow House on January 4, accompanied by Roulin and preceded by the charwoman who cleaned up the mess left by the crimes of Christmas. Rey’s subsequent visit to the house allowed him not only to see Vincent’s work but to assess personally his living situation—an appropriate precaution in the absence of family members to look after him. He may have had reservations, but with Vincent’s pleadings in one ear and Theo’s conspicuous silence in the other, foreclosing better alternatives, Rey signed the release papers.

Vincent’s campaign to rewrite the past turned next to his brother. “My dear lad,” he wrote Theo on his first day of freedom, “I am so terribly
distressed
at your journey. I should have wished you had been spared that, for after all no harm came to me, and there was no reason why you should put yourself to that trouble.” Week after week, through the rest of a bleak, wintry January, Vincent poured out his guilt in shades of denial and delusion. He dismissed his injury as “such a trifle”—an accident that hardly merited Theo’s attention; his breakdown as a mere indisposition; and his recovery as a foregone conclusion. Such incidents happened all the time “in this part of the world,” he joked. “Everyone in this good Tarascon country is a trifle cracked.” Other times, he explained it as simply an occupational hazard—“an artist’s fit” that could have happened to any painter. Gauguin himself had “caught the very same thing,” in Panama, Vincent insisted, “this excessive sensitivity.”

In flights of fantasy, he claimed that he had checked himself into the hospital and that his stay there “in fact refreshed me considerably.” He sent boasting reports of his hearty appetite, good digestion, and healthy blood—always
accompanied by emphatic instructions to “please quite deliberately forget your unhappy journey and my illness.” He reassured Theo again and again that he had completely recovered and that “serenity returns to my brain day by day.” He withdrew the defiant rhetoric about his own art that had filled his letters before Christmas. “If you want any pictures, certainly I can send you some,” he wrote compliantly. “As to the
Indépendants
[exhibition], do what seems best to you, and what the others do.”