Van Gogh (164 page)

For Vincent, whose eye always gravitated to paintings in groups—the serial
“decorations” of Seurat and Monet—these seamless panoramas may have formed just such a chorus of imagery. He wrote Theo as the double squares unfurled from his easel one after another: “I am trying to do as well as certain painters whom I have greatly loved and admired.” There was no painter he loved and admired more than Charles Daubigny. And there was no image more inviting than the one of a garden that Daubigny might have shared with his wife and his comrade Daumier. “Perhaps you will look at this sketch of Daubigny’s garden,” he hinted in the letter that accompanied the drawing. “It is one of my most purposeful canvases.”

Daubigny’s Garden
, J
ULY
1890,
LETTER SKETCH, PEN, 3 × 8⅝ IN
. (
Illustration credit 42.6
)

In his first draft of that same letter, Vincent called his brother again to the procreative partnership that they had pledged each other on the road to Rijswijk eighteen years before. “I shall always consider you to be something more than a simple dealer,” he wrote, echoing the summons of Drenthe. “Through my mediation you have your part in the actual production of some canvases, which will retain their calm even in catastrophe.” In the draft he actually sent—his last letter to his
waarde
Theo—he replaced the overt plea with the beckoning image of the miraculous garden. “The truth is,” he explained, “we can only make our pictures speak.”

—

FOUR DAYS LATER
, on Sunday, July 27, Vincent returned from a morning of painting to have his midday meal at the Ravoux Inn. When he was finished, he slung his bag of paints and brushes over his arm, reshouldered his easel, and returned to his labors, just as he had been doing almost every day for weeks. He could have been headed to Daubigny’s garden nearby, or farther into the countryside with another double-square canvas added to his awkward load.

Hours later, after the sun had set, he staggered back to the Ravoux Inn without his bag or his easel or his canvas. The Ravouxs and their other boarders, who had taken dinner outdoors on a hot summer evening, were lingering on the café terrace. They saw him approach on the darkened street. “[He] was holding his belly and seemed to be limping,” one of them later recalled. “His jacket was buttoned up”—odd on such a warm night. He passed them without a word and went straight to his room. Gustave Ravoux, concerned about his guest’s strange behavior, listened from the bottom of the stairs. When he heard moaning, he climbed to Vincent’s attic room. He found Vincent lying on his bed, curled up in pain. He asked what was wrong.

“Je me suis blessé,”
Vincent replied as he lifted his shirt and showed Ravoux the small hole under his ribs—“I wounded myself.”

N
O ONE KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE FIVE OR SIX HOURS BETWEEN
Vincent’s midday meal at the Ravoux Inn on Sunday, July 27, and his return with a bullet in his stomach that night.
¹
Both at the time and afterward, many theories were offered. The police briefly investigated. But no one ever stepped forward as a witness to any of Vincent’s activities that day. No one could establish his whereabouts when the incident occurred. His easel, canvas, and painting kit disappeared. The gun was never found.

Fading in and out of consciousness, flashing between pain and shock, Vincent seemed at first confused about what had happened. He called for medical attention as if he had been the victim of an accident. Years later, one witness recalled him saying, “I wounded myself in the fields. I shot myself with a revolver there.” A doctor was summoned. Vincent gave no explanation for why he had a gun or how he had come to shoot himself with it.

Whether it was an accident or something else remained unclear until the next morning when the police arrived to investigate rumors of a shooting. When they heard that Vincent had wounded himself, they immediately inquired, “Did you want to commit suicide?” Vincent replied vaguely, “Yes, I believe so.” They reminded him that suicide was a crime—both against the state and against God. With strange, unprompted vehemence, Vincent insisted that he had acted alone. “Do not accuse anyone,” he said; “it is I who wanted to kill myself.”

Within hours, this abrupt claim became a story. “Vincent had gone toward the wheat field where he had painted before,” Adeline Ravoux later told an interviewer,
recalling the account that her father had assembled from the bits and pieces he heard at Vincent’s bedside:

The story accounted for some of the oddities of the missing hours, but by no means all. Vincent couldn’t find the gun in the dark to “finish himself off,” but how could it have fallen so far from his grasp? And why could no one else find it the next day—or ever—in the daylight? And what had become of the missing easel and canvas? How could he have lain unconscious for so long and bled so little? In his wounded, semiconscious state, how could he descend the steep, wooded slope that lay between the fields and the Ravoux Inn in the dark? Where and when had he gotten the gun? Why did he try to shoot himself? Why did he aim for his heart, not his head? Why did he miss?

Not that Vincent hadn’t thought about suicide before. In troughs of despair as far back as Amsterdam, in 1877, he had mused longingly on the serenity and escape of death—on what it would be like to be “far away from everything.” Occasionally he joked about it (reciting Dickens’s “diet” for suicide). Occasionally, he threatened it. From the depths of the Borinage, he promised Theo he would “cease to be” if ever he felt “a nuisance or a burden to you or those at home—of no use to anyone.”

But mostly, he inveighed against it. He called it “wicked” and “terrible”—an act of “moral cowardice”—a crime against the beauty of life and the nobility of art, as well as Christ’s example. He cited Millet’s famous dictum that suicide “was the deed of a dishonest man” and boldly insisted, “I really do not think I am a man with such inclinations.” Yes, he had moments of “deep melancholy,” of “emptiness” and “unutterable misery,” he said—just as Theo did. But he disavowed any self-extinguishing intent, and urged his melancholic brother to do likewise. “Look here,” he wrote from Drenthe, “as regards making oneself scarce or disappearing—now or ever—neither you nor I should
ever
do that, no more than commit suicide.”

The events in Arles and the onset of his disease had tested this brave resolve, but not broken it. Through all the torments of both body and spirit—the isolation and confinement, the nightmares and hallucinations—he had kept his pledge to Theo. Dr. Peyron thought he saw a suicide attempt in Vincent’s sucking his brushes, and once, when he felt his brother’s love slipping away, Vincent lashed out with a desperate threat. “If I were without your friendship, they
would drive me remorselessly to suicide,” he wrote in April 1889, “and coward that I am, I should end by committing it.”

There were times when he welcomed death—even devoutly wished for it: times when the
“horror”
and “loathing of life” so overwhelmed him that he would gladly have embraced it. “I would rather have died,” he wrote from his hospital cell in Arles, “than have caused and suffered such trouble.” In Saint-Rémy, he painted a Reaper as radiant and “beautiful” as a rescuing angel, and instructed Theo: “There is no sadness in death.” The trials had made him riper, readier to be reaped—even eager for the scythe. Battered by wave after wave of attacks and “always living in fear of relapses,” he confessed, “I often said to myself that I preferred that there be nothing further, that this be the end.” But as welcome as death would have been, he dared not deliver it himself. In all the haunted nights in the Yellow House, all the lonely walks around Saint-Rémy, Vincent had kept his pledge. He had not drowned himself in the Rhône, or leaped off an Alpilles cliff, or thrown himself under a Paris-bound train.

Indeed, he described himself as a man who had come too close to the heinous, cowardly deed ever to approach it again. “I am trying to recover,” he wrote, “like someone who has meant to commit suicide, but then makes for the bank because he finds the water too cold.”

Whether in the mountain valley of Saint-Rémy or the black country of the Borinage, whether in the Yellow House or the Schenkweg studio, whenever thoughts of suicide cleared the hurdles of conscience and entered Vincent’s imagination, they came in one form only: drowning. When Kee Vos refused his pleas of love in 1882, he considered “jumping into the water” in despair. Later, he toyed with an exception to Millet’s rule against self-slaughter: “I can understand people drowning themselves.” A year after that, he warned Theo that Sien Hoornik might drown herself if he abandoned her. In Antwerp, he expressed sympathy for an anonymous consumptive “who will perhaps drown herself before she dies of any illness”; and in Arles he roundly declared to the mayor and his assembled accusers that he was “quite prepared to chuck myself into the water if that would please these good folk once and for all.”

In Vincent’s imagination, both artists and women always committed suicide by drowning because they shared the same intelligence, “delicacy,” and “sensitivity to their own suffering.” Artists “die the way women die,” he wrote in Antwerp, “like women who have loved much, and been hurt by life.” Margot Begemann had taken strychnine, and he knew others, both in life and in fiction, who had poisoned themselves. (Indeed, he knew a good deal about poison and could have used it effectively on himself.) But such people did not enjoy the same “consciousness of themselves” as artists did. Unlike him, they held life in contempt.

He had read Balzac’s
Illusions perdues
(
Lost Illusions
) and heard Lucien Chardon,
the book’s discouraged poet, musing on the gravity and method of suicide. “As a poet he wanted to make a poetic end,” Balzac wrote, so he picked a “pretty spot” along the river and planned to fill his pockets with stones. Of course, Vincent had also read about jumping from heights as long ago as Michelet’s
Jeanne d’Arc
and as recently as the Goncourts’
Germinie Lacerteux
. Flaubert’s misbegotten heroes Bouvard and Pécuchet plotted to hang themselves—together, of course—but failed. Zola’s Claude Lantier succeeded: “[He] hanged himself from the big ladder in front of his unfinished, unfinishable masterpiece.” A character in Zola’s
Au Bonheur des Dames
threw himself under an omnibus. Daudet’s Evangelist chose a train.

In Vincent’s reading, resort to firearms always ended badly—and often unsuccessfully. In Zola’s
Pot-Bouille
, the dissolute lawyer Duveyrier tried to shoot himself with a small revolver but succeeded only in disfiguring himself for life. In Maupassant’s
Pierre et Jean
, an accidental discharge produced a “frightful” stomach wound “through which the intestines protruded.” In Vincent’s own life, guns were exotic, alien devices, confined to wilderness adventures and calls to battle. When his brother Cor arrived in the Transvaal in 1889, Theo conveyed the “wildness” of the country by reporting that “one has to go about with a revolver all day long.”

No one in Auvers (at the time) remembered seeing Vincent with a gun, and no one admitted to giving or selling or lending him one. Who, after all, would trust the
fou
Dutchman with a revolver—still a novelty in rural France. And what had become of it? In subsequent years, the mystery of Vincent’s missing weapon invited a host of baseless claims: that he had borrowed it from the innkeeper Ravoux to “scare away the crows” in the fields; that he had threatened others with the same gun; that he had brandished a similar weapon earlier in his life.

But the doctor who arrived first on the scene, a Dr. Mazery, did not need to see the weapon to know that it was a small-caliber pistol. The wound just below Vincent’s ribs was “about the size of a large pea” and bled only a trickle. Around the little circle of dark red, a purple halo had formed. Mazery concluded that the bullet had missed all the major organs and blood vessels. By probing Vincent’s body, a painful process, he thought he located the bullet toward the back of the abdominal cavity. That meant it might have punctured a lung, grazed an artery, or lodged near the spinal cord—all mortal threats.