Van Gogh (138 page)

No vow was too broad, no pretense too improbable, no prevarication too extreme, so long as it helped erase the past. He pretended that he and Gauguin were still friends, reporting brightly to Theo (who certainly knew better) that Gauguin “on the whole, got himself rested here.” He imagined other painters coming to stay with him, now that he and Gauguin had worked out the kinks of joint housekeeping.

Fearing that Theo might force him to return to Paris—a prospect perhaps divulged by Rey—he argued with renewed fervor on behalf of his Midi dream, claiming a newfound kinship with the people of Arles, who in fact still mocked and spurned him. “Everyone here is kind to me,” he protested, “kind and attentive as if I were at home.” He compared himself to Voltaire’s Candide, settled happily in the best of all possible worlds. He wrote glowing reports to friends in Holland with only joking references to “something the matter with my brains” before resuming the campaign for Tersteeg’s favor. Unaware that Theo (and Roulin) had already shared the real story with his mother and sisters, Vincent sent them a letter that portrayed his hospital stay as a spa-like interlude (“not worth troubling to inform you about”) that both refreshed his spirits and “provided the opportunity for getting acquainted with quite a number of people.”

Gauguin, too, felt the onslaught of Vincent’s unreality. Vincent had emerged from the hospital with his feelings toward his fellow painter in a haze of forgetfulness and regret. “Now, let’s talk about our friend Gauguin,” he inquired of Theo on January 2; “have I terrified him? Why hasn’t he given me any sign of life?” But within days, Gauguin, too, was pressed into the project of reassurance and denial. “Look here,” Vincent wrote him sternly from Rey’s office two days later, “was my brother Theo’s journey really necessary, old man?” In the same letter, he instructed Gauguin to “completely reassure everyone”—especially Theo—and warned him against “speaking ill of our poor little yellow house.”

Upon his release from the hospital, Vincent immersed himself in the duties of a good host, arranging to send the studies and other belongings (including fencing equipment) that Gauguin had left behind in his unseemly haste. He wrote chatty letters addressed to “My dear friend Gauguin” inquiring about Paris, his work, and his plans for the future. To Theo, Vincent expressed benign admiration for Gauguin’s paintings (even his mocking portrait of Vincent) and
“hearty approval” of his return to Martinique. “Naturally I regret it,” he added good-naturedly, “but you understand that provided all goes well with him, that is all I want.”

When Gauguin responded to Vincent’s strange outreach by complimenting his sunflower paintings—two of which Gauguin had taken with him when he left Arles—Vincent seized on the evasive accolade (“it is a style essentially yours”) to prove that his project in the South yet lived—if not in the Yellow House, at least in the hearts of those who had shared it. “I should very much like to give Gauguin a real pleasure,” he wrote Theo. “And after all I should like to go on exchanging my things with [him].”

By the end of January, this delusion of reconciliation had overtaken Vincent’s imagination. “One thing is certain,” he wrote, toying with the unthinkable. “I dare say that basically Gauguin and I are by nature fond enough of each other to be able to begin again together if necessary.” To Gauguin, he admitted that “perhaps I insisted too much that you stay on here,” and “perhaps it was I who was the cause of your departure.” Finally, he invited his former housemate to join him in rewriting the past. “Be that as it may,” he ventured, “I hope we still like each other enough to be able, if need be, to start afresh.”

To bolster this fiction of recovery and renewal, Vincent summoned all the story-making powers of his brush. The portrait of Dr. Rey, which he began virtually the moment he returned to the Yellow House, took up again the great
Bel-Ami
mandate—abandoned by Gauguin—to “do in portraiture what
Claude Monet does in landscape,”
He painted the goateed, pomaded intern in an orange-trimmed blue coat set against a decorative Provençal wallpaper of red-flecked green—a lesson in complementaries as well as a proof of his steady hand and collected mind.

To document his mental and physical recuperation, he painted a still life showing the remedies that made it possible. On a sun-washed drawing board (itself a pledge of productivity), he placed a copy of his new bible, F. V. Raspail’s
Manuelle annuaire de la santé
(
Health Annual
), a popular manual of first aid, hygiene, and home remedies. Next to the thick, pocket-sized book, he set a plate of sprouting onion bulbs, one of the many healthful foods Raspail recommended (along with garlic, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg). To represent Raspail’s most famous panacea, camphor (his prescription for everything from tuberculosis to masturbation), Vincent included a candle, probably camphor-scented, and a pot of camphor oil. (The bandage over Vincent’s ear, which was changed every day at the hospital, was doused with camphor, too, thanks to Raspail’s advocacy of the oil’s antiseptic properties.) To complete this inventory of his new, healthy life, Vincent also placed on the table his pipe and tobacco pouch—a promise of serenity—and a letter from Theo—his
lifeline to the past. At the edge of the canvas, a drained wine bottle makes a pledge of moderation for the future.

His brush seconded the outreach to Gauguin as well. On the same day he returned from the hospital, he started a series of still lifes showing pairs of fishes and crabs that resumed the obsession with pairings and partnerships that had marked the months leading up to Gauguin’s arrival. Clinging to the compliment he imagined in Gauguin’s letter, he also launched on a vast new project of sunflower paintings, beginning with exact replicas of the two images that hung in “Gauguin’s room.” “You know, Gauguin likes them extraordinarily,” he boasted. “[He] is completely infatuated with my sunflowers.” Embracing Gauguin’s mocking portrait of him as “The Painter of Sunflowers,” he claimed the summer flower as his signature image. “The sunflower
is
somewhat my own,” he agreed. “[It] takes on a richness the longer you look at it.” He changed the subject, but not the palette, in a still life of oranges and lemons that he painted around the same time. To Theo, he boasted that the electric-yellow image had “a certain chic”—code for the kind of painting he knew Gauguin approved.

Portrait of Doctor Félix Rey
, J
ANUARY
1889,
OIL ON CANVAS, 25⅛ × 20⅞ IN
. (
Illustration credit 37.1
)

Inevitably, the grail of Gauguin’s favor led Vincent back to the image that sat on his easel at Christmastime: the unfinished
Berceuse
, Inspired by yet another
ambiguous compliment from his former housemate, he imagined completing his Loti-inspired maternal icon, the most conspicuous relic of their time together, by placing it between two sunflower paintings, creating a devotional triptych that combined his own Daumier vision of the South with Gauguin’s chic bouquets of color. In flights of rhetoric touched by the missionary fire of the past (“we have a light before our feet and a lamp upon our path”), he imagined this marriage of imagery ultimately redeeming not just the failed combination with Gauguin but all his Midi suffering and sacrifice. “We have gone all out for the impressionists,” he wrote Theo as he laid plans for a whole series of Berceuse-and-sunflower decorations, “and now as far as it’s in my power I am trying to finish canvases which will undoubtedly secure me the little corner that I have claimed.”

For his doctors, Vincent painted two self-portraits, both displaying his bandaged left ear and neat hospital dressing. In both, he showed himself bundled against the January chill in a deep-green coat and furry new hat: a pointed assurance to Rey and the others that he was following instructions (both theirs and Raspail’s) to take walks and get plenty of fresh air. In both paintings, he stares out from the canvas with focus and calm. In one, he serenely smokes his pipe. In the other, he stands before his easel—a promise of hard work—and a Japanese print on the wall, laying claims to both artistic legitimacy and avant-garde bona fides for the benefit of his art-loving provincial doctors.

Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
, J
ANUARY
1889,
OIL ON CANVAS, 23⅝ × 19⅜ IN
. (
Illustration credit 37.2
)

For Theo, however, Vincent saw a very different image in his mirror (and never mentioned the damaged, bandaged one). Done in the same small size and sunny palette as the many he painted in Paris when they lived together, the self-portrait for his brother shows Vincent from the other side—the healthy, youthful side (clean-shaven in the hospital), hiding completely the bandages and wounds that he displayed to his doctors. For Theo, he relegated recent events to the airy realm of humor. “As for me, being in this little country of mine, I have no need at all to go to the tropics,” he wrote. “Personally I am too old and (especially if I have a
papier mâché
ear put on) too jerry-built to go there.”

IN A LETTER TO
Jo Bonger, Theo jokingly compared himself to “an oyster in its shell” and invited his now fiancée to pry him open. He had returned from his trip to Holland in a bliss of expectation. His week with Jo only perfected the desperate infatuation that had upended his staid existence in the weeks before Christmas. “You have no idea how you have changed my life,” he wrote her immediately after his return. They had spent their “wonderful week” (as Jo called it) meeting families and friends, but mostly discovering each other. They talked of Shakespeare and Goethe, Heine, Zola, and Degas. She played Beethoven for him. He took her to galleries. They confessed their many flaws and protested their mutual unworthiness. “You bring sunshine into my life,” he told her. “Am I truly your sunshine?” she blushingly replied.

The light Theo brought back from Holland changed his “somber world” in Paris from night to day. He found new pleasures in society: from intimate dinners with Jo’s brother Andries to “grand soirées” with glittering strangers. (Jo playfully chided him for his “disgraceful gadding about.”) At home, he enjoyed the companionship of the Dutch painter Meijer de Haan, who had taken Vincent’s place in the rue Lepic apartment and listened every night as Theo unwound his love. Even being alone no longer frightened him. “[I] sometimes catch myself whistling or humming a tune,” he told Jo. “It’s your fault.”

Whether late at night or during breaks in his workday, he found time to write letters—a Vincent-like flood of affirmation and affection (“I should like to lay my head in your lap and bask in your love”). Despite his busy schedule and preparations for another Monet show in February, a day rarely passed without a letter, sometimes two. He sent books (Michelet, the patron saint of lovers), photographs of himself, and even a portrait of him that De Haan had drawn. He wished he were a painter, he said, because “I can picture you so clearly that I would be able to paint you if I knew how.” He longed to give Jo “the best and innermost part” of himself, and agreed with her that “softly and imperceptibly the ties that bound me to my old life are loosening, and I mostly live in the future.”