Van Gogh (145 page)

When attacks came, they were often accompanied by out-of-body sensations, as if the victim’s psyche were divided or projected into other entities—entities that sometimes spoke with their own voices. Victims would babble gibberish and act “automatically”—without conscious control, or even recognition, of their actions. This marked the beginning of the seizure itself—the most dangerous period, especially for the victim. Its hallmarks were violence and paroxysmal rage. Both homicide and suicide were possible. An attack was almost always followed by loss of consciousness: a deep, troubled sleep from which the victim would awake with no memory of what had happened. The days and weeks that followed were marked by “epileptic stupor”—a twilight state of ill-tempered torpor, aimlessness, and crushing remorse.

For Peyron, the diagnosis was absolutely confirmed when Vincent revealed that there had been other cases of epilepsy in his family. The experts on latent epilepsy disagreed on many things, but on one point they stood unanimous: epilepsy, whatever its form, whatever its origin, could be inherited. Vincent’s stories offered a veritable family tree of mental affliction. His grandfather, Willem Carbentus, had “died of a mental disease,” according to an unusually candid note in the family chronicle. His mother’s sister Clara had suffered epilepsy throughout her reclusive, spinster life. Another maternal uncle committed suicide. A paternal uncle, Hein, suffered his first “epileptic fit” at thirty-five, about Vincent’s age. He retired early after repeated fits left him “half paralyzed,” according to his sister’s account, and died young in a conspiracy of family silence. Another uncle, Jan, the admiral, experienced unexplained “fits” at age forty, according to the same account. Among his many health problems, Uncle Cent had “seizures.” And at least two of Vincent’s cousins were victims of mental illness. One of them, Admiral Jan’s son Hendrik, “suffered some bad epileptic fits,” according
to Vincent’s father, after which he was institutionalized and may have committed suicide. Peyron noted conclusively in Vincent’s asylum record: “What happened to this patient would be only the continuation of what has happened to several members of his family.”

Peyron’s “eureka” echoed his profession’s—and his era’s—conviction that heredity held the key to understanding all human behavior. In 1857, two years before Darwin’s
Origin of Species
, Bénédict Morel, the leading French expert on latent epilepsy, had published a treatise on mental illness that took pre-Darwinian theories of evolution in a much darker direction. He claimed that not just epilepsy but all mental deficiencies, from neurosis to cretinism (as well as physical imperfections and personality deviancies), resulted from gradual genetic deterioration, a process he called “degeneration.” The destiny of a family—or an entire race—could be determined by the cumulative effect of these genetic pollutants, which were powerful enough to alter human anatomy.

In fin-de-siècle France, Morel’s theory crystallized the millennial pessimism. After a century of Pyrrhic revolutions, failed empires, and especially the humiliating defeat of the Franco-Prussian War, Morel’s identification of an enemy within, a cancer of weakness and flaw corroding the nation’s vitality, gripped the public imagination. Peyron, along with most alienists and asylum directors in France, embraced Morel’s theory, both because it enhanced their professional standing (making them protectors of the national genetic patrimony), and because it helped them in the long battle to wrest ultimate authority over the human mind away from priests, phrenologists, and sideshow hypnotists. “Before, I used to care for the eyes of the body,” Peyron, the former ophthalmologist, once said; “now I care for the eyes of the soul; it is still the same job.”

Morel’s theory of degeneration—the final and most sinister expression of his century’s fascination (and Vincent’s) with “types”—would wreak an awful toll in the century that followed: from sterilization campaigns to extermination camps. But for Vincent, it proved a liberation. By giving the storms in his head a medical explanation, Peyron lifted the weight of the past off Vincent’s shoulders. “My life has not been calm enough,” he had written on the eve of his arrival; “all those bitter disappointments, adversities, changes keep me from developing fully and naturally in my artistic career.” Now, in addition to relieving Vincent of the need to shift for himself (a task, he admitted, that “paralyzed” him), Peyron’s diagnosis restored Vincent’s sense of control over his own fate—what he called “my self-command”—something he had not felt since Christmas. “Once you know what it is,” he explained to Theo, “then you can do something to prevent your being taken unawares by the anguish or the terror.”

It also released him—temporarily, at least—from a lifetime of guilt. If his art failed to sell or he could not support himself, it was not his fault; he was merely the victim of a disease. “Unfortunately, we are subject to the circumstances and
the maladies of our time,” he wrote, echoing Morel, “whether we like it or not.” His was a disease like any other, no more blameworthy than “consumption or syphilis,” he maintained. If there was blame, it rested not on
his
past, but on
generations
past: not on his shoulders—his flaws, his failures—but squarely on the shoulders of his accusing, unforgiving family.

To bolster this new vision of redemption, Vincent began to assemble an
asile imaginaire
—an imaginary asylum of artists who, like him, had suffered not failure or ignominy or madness, but only a “malady of the times.” He summoned up a long list of the unjustly accused—Troyon, Marchal, Méryon, Jundt, Matthijs Maris, and, of course, Monticelli—and assured himself that his creative serenity would inevitably return, as theirs did. “There are so many among the artists who—notwithstanding nervous diseases or epileptic fits from time to time—nevertheless go ahead,” he wrote, “and in a painter’s life it seems to be enough to make paintings.”

Once the weight of guilt was lifted, Vincent could embrace his new life. He had always been drawn to custodial institutions, whether searching for models in the orphanages and almshouses of The Hague or imagining himself founding a monastery of modern art in the Midi. (In 1882, he called the sight of “convalescent people” gathered together in places like these “beautiful, very beautiful.”) He collected prints of hospital scenes, and fondly described his own visits to hospitals, even for the most grueling treatments. He often leaped at the chance to accompany others to the hospital, even virtual strangers, and as recently as Arles had considered becoming a hospital orderly himself. “Perhaps it is from the sick,” he once said, “that one learns how to live.”

He had fiercely opposed the plan to commit him to Gheel, but only because his father proposed it. Now, with the implacable pastor dead, and his ghost banished by medical science, Vincent could finally enjoy the monklike order and spartan simplicity he had always aspired to. His “treatment” consisted of little more than doses of bromide (a sedative), long soaks in a stone tub, regular meals (stingy on meat, which was considered a stimulant), moderate drink (wine only, in rationed amounts), and the soothing routine of daily life in the enchanted valley. Like the heroes and heroines of some of his favorite novels, he found a serenity in the cloistered asylum that he had never found in the world outside, and like them, he increasingly saw that other world as the true madhouse.

After a few days, he began sending Theo regular updates on his rebounding health, “tranquility,” and “peace of mind.” “My stomach is infinitely better,” he announced, “my health is good, and as for my brain, that will be, let us hope, a matter of time and patience.” He buoyed these encouraging reports with a blithe attitude toward his disease and even flashes of humor. He compared the doldrums in the asylum halls on a rainy day to “a third-class waiting room in some stagnant village,” and he commented impishly that the menu of chickpeas,
haricot beans, and lentils created “certain difficulties” with digestion that resulted in patients “filling their days in a way as offensive as it is cheap.” He called this collective gastric distress one of the institution’s primary “daily distractions, along with
boules
and checkers.”

By the end of May, less than a month after arriving, Vincent had decided: “I think my place is here.” He had come imagining that he would stay, at most, three months. Now, as the prospect of a languid summer in the clear air stretched out before him, he could not imagine leaving. “It’s been almost a whole month since I came here,” he wrote Theo; “not once have I had the slightest desire to be elsewhere, only the wish to work is getting stronger.”

INEVITABLY, VINCENT’S NEW
serenity found its way into paint. Within days of arriving, he secured permission to set up a studio in a large room on the ground floor, one of many unused spaces in the half-empty dormitory. Its location next to the entrance gave him easy access to the garden and a place to dry his paintings in sun and air.

In the untended grounds and wandering paths right outside the door, he immediately resumed the series of “garden corners” begun in Arles. Only now his pen and brush could relax. Rather than make a vehement argument for his serenity (and sanity), as the previous works did, now he could just
look
. Drawings and paintings poured out. He filled big sheets of paper with vignettes of greenery seen in a languor of looking. He recorded every detail of ivy climbing up a tree, a bench nestled in tall grass, a lattice of shadow on the ground. A single mangy shrub could occupy a whole sheet in a tireless observation of texture, character, light, and air. Like the proverbial Japanese monk, he found a lone moth worth both pen and paint, and enough beauty in a single lilac bush to spread across a huge canvas.

The more his eyes meditated on these scenes of “nature in undress,” the more Vincent’s imagination returned to its earliest roots. He thought of Alphonse Karr’s
A Tour Round My Garden
, his childhood guide to the mysteries of flowers and gardens, and especially of the Barbizon masters who had first shown him the magic to be found in the humblest shrub. “All those lovely canvases,” he sighed; “it seems hardly probable that anyone will do better than that, and unnecessary besides.” He reminded Theo how painters like Daubigny and Rousseau had “expressed all of nature’s intimacy,” as well as “all its vast peace and majesty,” and, at the same time, “added a feeling so individual, so heart-breaking.”

Compared to the worlds of imagery he saw in the shaggy garden of Saint Paul, the battles of Paris now seemed distant and absurd. “We shall always keep a sort of passion for impressionism,” he wrote, “but I feel that I return more and more
to the ideas that I already had before I came to Paris.” He neither heard from nor inquired about Gauguin or Bernard. When news reached him of an insurgent exhibition that Gauguin planned at the Exposition Universelle in Paris that summer, he could barely conceal his lack of interest. “So I am inclined to think that a new sect has again been formed,” he sighed, “no less infallible than those already existing.… What storms in teacups.” Later, he admitted that he spent the summer “doing little things after nature, without giving a thought to impressionism or whatever else.”

One of those “little things” was a bed of irises. Nestled beside the much larger lilac bush, the little cluster of purple flowers barely rose to Vincent’s knee. He must have prostrated himself in some way to see them as he did: filling the canvas from left to right in a procession of pointed leaves and towering blossoms. With no sky, little background, and only a corner of foreground, the big canvas compacts and monumentalizes all the exuberance and bounty of spring into a dozen out-of-step stalks, a blaze of leaves, and two bulbous clouds of blossoms. The looming little stand of flowers partakes of all the ardors of the past—a bit of Impressionist brushstroke, the outlined forms of Cloisonnism, a dash of contrasting marigolds—but argues none. “I have no ideas,” Vincent professed. Rather than argue or think too much, he preferred “to go out and look at a blade of grass, the branch of a fir tree, an ear of wheat, in order to calm down.”

The irises also announced the color of Vincent’s new serenity: violet. As if his life were a painting, he picked the complementary of the yellow that had so dominated his sunburnt days in Arles to depict his monastic new life at Saint Paul. What better contrast to the strife and despair of the Yellow House than the calm and contentment of his mountain valley hideaway depicted in violet, lavender, lilac, or purple?

Those variations and dozens of others filled the first paintings that Vincent set in the doorway to dry. Depicting the view from his bedroom window, he saw nothing but a lavender sky, lavender hills, and a field of spring-green wheat—another
ton rompu
(broken tone) of blue. He himself told Theo that the painting’s open vistas and cool harmonies made a perfect pendant to the inward-looking and intensely colored portrait of his previous home,
The Bedroom
in Arles. “What I dream of in my best moments,” he wrote in a complete reversal, “is not so much striking color effects as once more the half tones.” Whether staring into the deepest underbrush or directly into the sky, he saw shades of the same soothing mix of red and blue. In his letters, he struggled to differentiate them: “violet,” “purplish blue,” “lilac,” “pale lilac,” “tender lilac,” “broken lilac,” “plain lilac,” “gray rose,” “yellowish rose,” “greenish rose,” “violet rose.”

To accompany these exquisitely poised half tones, Vincent found the perfect complement in images from the past. “I feel tempted to begin again with the simpler colors,” he wrote Theo, “the ochres for instance.” Leaping back decades and
centuries, he cited the sepia landscapes of the Golden Age giant Jan van Goyen and the maizy, fawnish hues of his longtime favorite Georges Michel, both of whom had transformed “delicate lilac skies” and ocher highlights into works of sublime serenity. He practiced it himself in a view of a garden path leading beside the ocher asylum façade under a canopy of ocher leaves against a deep lavender sky. When Peyron gave permission for him to venture beyond the garden (but not yet beyond the asylum walls), he set up his easel in the enclosed field outside his bedroom window, just in time to catch the green wheat turning golden. In a letter to his sister, he lovingly described how the ocher of the ripe grain, with “the warm tones of a bread crust,” stood out against the “far-off violet hills and a sky the color of forget-me-nots.”