Van Gogh (149 page)

With each escalation, the misery between attacks deepened and the leash of restrictions tightened. He was confined to the asylum; then to his dormitory; then to his room; then to his bed. He spent almost two months deprived of “open air.” His throat swelled up with sores. He barely ate or spoke, and wrote no letters. At times, he longed for death, if only the next attack would be his last. “I hated the idea of regaining my health,” he later recalled, “always living in fear of relapses … I preferred that there be nothing further, that this be the end.”

For a while, he was allowed to work between attacks. He finished the quarry painting that had been blown away by the mistral. But each time, he had to ask for “permission to make pictures”—a humiliating ritual. Then the wardens caught him drinking kerosene from his lamp and eating the paint from his tubes. Fearing he had poisoned himself, they had to forcibly restrain him in order to administer an antidote. The doctors considered it a suicide attempt,
which is how Peyron reported it to Theo. They took his paints and brushes and locked him out of his studio. “Not being able to go to the room they have allotted me to do my painting in is almost unbearable,” he wrote. When, in late August, he finally emerged from the storms of darkness long enough to lodge this grievance with Theo, he wrote it with a piece of chalk; they still did not trust him with sharp objects.

The attacks plunged Vincent into the netherworld of memory. “My mind has been
absolutely distraught,”
he wrote. In hallucinatory visions, he revisited places and images from his past. At least once, he imagined himself back in the Yellow House, pursued by the angry mob. He heard and saw (and may have spoken with) people he had known, read about, or seen in paintings—as in the Rembrandt portraits that forever reminded him of homeland and family. Figures had always crowded and conflated in his imagination—present and past, real and fictional—brought to life by aching nostalgia or the unrequited need for companionship. Now, fellow patients and asylum attendants took on the visages of the dead and the imagined. “During the attacks,” he said, “the people I see are
entirely different
from what they are in reality, so much do I seem to see them in pleasant or unpleasant resemblances to people I knew in other times and places.”

Religious figures, in particular, populated his visions. “The attacks tend to take an absurdly religious turn,” he reported in September. “I get perverted and frightful ideas about religion.” Vincent never described these spiritual apparitions and fits of hysteria, but throughout the summer, two images in particular obsessed his fevered thoughts.

By July, he had taken the print of Delacroix’s Pietà down from his bedroom wall and pinned it close to his easel, as if to pin in his brain the image of a loving mother embracing her son’s return from the dead. In the trials that followed, Delacroix’s maternal icon took the place of the missing Berceuse. Between attacks, he riffled through magazines in search of other consoling images of motherhood, and sang songs from his childhood. At one point, he collected himself enough to write to the Roulins, the Berceuse’s real family, merging memory, imagery, and delusion into a fantasy of redemption.

Before he was locked out of his studio, he tried to make a painted version of Delacroix’s ineffably comforting scene, determined to “do portraits of saints and holy women.” But in an unexplained stroke of “bad luck”—another attack, perhaps—he dropped the precious print, and others, “into some oil and paint,” ruining the lot of them. “I was very sad about it,” he noted grimly.

The other image that fixed itself in his mind that summer was of an angel. Theo had summoned it in June, setting off a tremor of self-accusation and remorse. Then, in late July, as Vincent was battered by wave after wave of attacks, a gift arrived from his brother: a print of Rembrandt’s painting of the archangel
Raphael—a vision of benevolence and light, as radiant as any of Vincent’s Midi suns, announcing not just the miraculous birth to Mary, but the divine consolation of motherhood to all. Unknown to Theo, however, Vincent saw in Rembrandt’s angel not just a welcome messenger of comfort to the “broken-hearted and dejected in spirit,” as he had written a decade earlier, but also the accusing image of his father (who preached with “the countenance of an angel”), warning of the reckoning to come.

In September, when Vincent was allowed to paint again (with a warden watching), among the first images that emerged out of the wreck of his head and his studio were the Delacroix Pietà and the Rembrandt angel—big color versions of the little gray prints that had buoyed and tormented him through the endless storms: the loving mother and the sublime nuncio. When he painted these images, he saw his own features in the face of the levitating Christ, and gave the colorless angel his own sunburnt hair. These two pictures—painted half in darkness, half in light—were as close as he would ever come to documenting the images that ravished and ravaged his mind that summer.

VINCENT EMERGED IN
late August shaken, afraid, and alone. The attacks ended abruptly; an “interval” just like any other lengthened into days, then into weeks. But “everything remains in doubt,” he cautioned Theo. “I myself am
counting
on it to return.” The threat of another relapse haunted him. He still suffered spells of dizziness and paralyzing fits of dread. His days were still filled with “solitude and anguish,” he said; his sleep, with “abominable nightmares.” Despite the void of loneliness, he feared seeing anyone or going anywhere. The risks were too great. He clung to the safety of solitary confinement long after the doctors had given him permission to go outside again. Even a trip to his studio was fraught with perils. “I’ve tried to force myself to go downstairs,” he confessed, “but in vain.”

His fellow patients now terrified him. Months of hallucinatory visions and paranoid fantasies had shattered the solidarity he once felt for his “companions in misfortune.” Now the very proximity of so many “queer souls” upset him, and their “vegetative” idleness, he suspected, threatened his recovery. He compared them to the “gawking idiots” who had driven him out of the Yellow House, and accused them, too, of secretly harboring superstitious ideas about painters and causing him “no end of pain.” He vowed to “limit my relations [with them] for fear of falling ill again.” His paranoia extended to staff members as well. He suspected them of cheating on his bills and poisoning his food. He blamed them for spreading false rumors about his bizarre behavior during the attacks that summer, and accused them, too, of bearing an implacable prejudice
against painters. He compared them to money-grubbing landlords—the lowest of the low—who needed to be told regularly to “go to hell.”

Tapping the deep well of antipapism in his own past, Vincent insinuated that Catholic authorities, not Dr. Peyron, actually ran the asylum, and he singled out the handful of nuns on the staff as the agents of this dark, controlling power. “What disturbs me,” he wrote, “is the constant sight of these good women, who both believe in the Virgin of Lourdes and make up that sort of thing.” He began to see himself as a prisoner in an institution devoted to “cultivating unhealthy religious aberrations” rather than curing them. He cited the religious character of the attacks that summer as proof of this nefarious influence. Why else would a man of “modern ideas”—a man who admired Zola and abhorred religious exaggeration—have the “perverted and frightful ideas” of a superstitious peasant? he demanded.

Indeed, he was so “sensitive to [his] surroundings” that the prolonged stay in the old cloisters of Saint Paul (and before, that, the Hôtel Dieu) “would be enough to explain these attacks,” he argued. Eventually, his paranoia embraced not just the asylum’s patients and staff, but the surrounding countryside as well, and indeed the entire region. He saw “a general evil” lurking everywhere, waiting to ensnare him even if he wandered into the garden. When he finally dared a dash to his studio in mid-September, he locked the door behind him.

Escape seemed the only answer. Even in the midst of his attacks that summer, Vincent imagined fleeing Saint Paul. As the weeks passed without a relapse, his thoughts returned again and again to “giving the slip” to his jailers. “We must finish with this place,” he wrote Theo anxiously. “In the long run I shall lose the faculty for work here, and that is where I draw the line.” When Dr. Peyron refused “point-blank” to take him on a trip to Paris (“It was too sudden,” Peyron told him), Vincent began drafting elaborate escape plans.

He seized on Theo’s report about the hard luck suffered by Camille Pissarro, who had gone to live in the countryside near Paris. Vincent imagined moving in with the old man and his shrewish wife. Better that Theo’s money go to “feed painters,” he argued, than to support nuns. When Theo told him “it was not the right moment” to approach Pissarro, Vincent opened up the plan to any comers. Surely, “one or another of the artists who is hard up will agree to keep house with me,” he pressed. As candidates, he listed artists he barely knew and some he knew too well. “What you say about Gauguin interests me very much,” he ventured incredibly. “And I still tell myself that Gauguin and I will perhaps work together again.”

If no one would take him, he threatened, then he would go
anyplace
—a prison, the army, the street—to escape the terrors of the asylum.

But leaving, too, terrified him. The prospect of confronting the real world
again, and the fear of what might happen if the next attack struck him in public, combined to freeze him in place. “To leave now,” he wrote in early September, “would perhaps be too foolhardy.” He begged off all his elaborate plans with pleas for just “another few months,” and warnings of the unbearable dangers that awaited him in the outside world. “All in all,” he concluded, “I
prefer
to be definitely ill like this than be the way I was in Paris when all this was brewing.” As if to document the torment he felt, trapped between the terrors within and terrors without, he started a self-portrait as soon as he returned to his studio. He described it as a “thin and deathly pale” figure with sunken cheeks and haunted eyes. His yellow hair stands out against a radiating darkness, a
rayon noir
, of deep purple, and a ghastly green shadow crosses his face.

It was an image that he could never share with Theo. The child on the way made returning to Paris “impossible,” he acknowledged. His first and only fraternal duty now was not to worry his brother. He had withheld news of his attacks that summer for as long as possible, and may have persuaded Peyron to do the same. His very first report in August, the one in chalk, began with an apology: “I hope it is not complaining too much if I tell you these details.” After that, he tried in every way to minimize his plight. “I have been feeling better since I wrote you,” his next letter began.

Every spontaneous outburst of pain (“I am in a very bad humor, things aren’t going well”) was followed quickly by soothing assurances of improvement (“Day by day my strength is returning”) and even hope for ultimate success (“Perhaps my journey to the south will yet bear fruit”). When he heard that Peyron would visit Theo in Paris, he launched a frantic campaign to discredit the doctor and any distressing news he might bear. “The good M. Peyron will tell you heaps of things,” Vincent warned, “probabilities and possibilities, and involuntary acts. Very good, but if he is more precise than that I shall believe none of it.”

To bolster his message of reassurance, Vincent painted a second self-portrait, this one showing him poised and groomed like a faïence figurine, dressed in a crisp new linen suit of celadon green set against a background of powder-blue swirls as serene as a starry night. “Work is going very well,” he wrote as he painted.

The difference between these two self-depictions—one to be shared, the other hidden—betrayed the gulf opening up between Vincent and his brother. Even before the attacks started in July, Theo had begun slipping away. His letters were always late, often unresponsive, and occasionally hurtful. He talked
of pleasant weekends in the country, interior decoration, and Jo’s morning sickness. Not until weeks after Vincent stopped writing did he notice the silence from Saint-Rémy. Between problems at the gallery (Monet had taken his success to another dealer), the demands of a new wife, and the worries of a family to come, Theo’s attention was focused elsewhere.

Vincent tried to retrieve it with a flood of multipage, diary-like letters in early September, but he had to wait longer and longer for each reply. For weeks, he argued his plan of escape from the asylum, even threatening to come to Paris after all. But Theo blocked every exit. No artist had room or desire to take Vincent in, he reported. Pissarro had rejected the idea outright. Brittany was even more dangerously religious than the Midi, which put Gauguin out of the question. Indeed, no place in the North was suitable because “you know how you suffer from the cold,” Theo reminded him. Vincent could not be trusted to live alone, and any companionship threatened to “enervate” him. Finally, Theo put an end to the conversation with a stark instruction: “Do nothing imprudent … Stay under the supervision of a doctor.”

Other family members, as always, followed Theo’s lead. After months of largely ignoring Vincent’s embarrassing confinement, his mother and sister Wil moved to Leiden from Breda, abandoning the Brabant of his childhood. At almost exactly the same time as Theo began his family in Paris, brother Cor left for Africa (without a word to Vincent), thus dissolving the last vestige of unity from the Zundert parsonage. In a desperate bid to hold it together, Vincent sent paintings and greetings (for his mother’s seventieth birthday) and plaintive affirmations of their unbreakable bond. “I feel a nearly irresistible urge to send something of my work to Holland,” he wrote Wil. “One goes on clinging to the affections of the past.” He carefully allocated his paintings among family members and old friends (including Margot Begemann), yet urged the recipients to “keep them all together,” as if he could bind the past in place with his art. “I certainly have a right,” he said, acknowledging the flight away from him, “yes, a
right
to work from time to time for friends who are so far away that I shall probably never see them again.”