Van Gogh (169 page)

• Finally, this reconstruction explains why Vincent’s “confessions” to a suicide attempt, as reported by witnesses at the time, were so hesitant, halfhearted, and oddly
hedged. When the police asked Vincent directly, “Did you want to commit suicide?” he answered with an indecisive “Yes, I believe so.”
⁵³
When they
told him it was a crime to attempt suicide, he appeared more concerned that no one else should be blamed than that he himself might be charged with a crime. “Do not accuse anyone,” he responded; “it is I who wanted to kill myself.”
⁵⁴
Why would Vincent vehemently volunteer that he acted alone when the natural inference in any suicide would have been solitary intention and
execution? Why would he urge the officers not to “accuse anyone” of the shooting and insist on taking sole responsibility? Vincent’s early and inexplicable defensiveness about the participation of others indicates an intent—indeed, a determination—to protect the Secrétan brothers from any implication of involvement in the incident.
⁵⁵

But why would Vincent go to such lengths to protect the Secrétan brothers, especially his tormentor René, from a police inquiry, or perhaps prosecution? Why would he repeatedly “confess” that he had shot himself with the intention of committing suicide when in fact he was the victim of a terrible accident, if not something worse?

The answer, we believe, is that Vincent welcomed death. “Poor fellow, he wasn’t granted a lavish share of happiness,” Theo wrote his wife from Vincent’s bedside in the final hours. “If only we could give him more faith in life.”
⁵⁶
Émile Bernard, who came to Auvers for the funeral, reported that Vincent had expressed his “desire to
die.”
⁵⁷
Dr. Paul Gachet, another witness at Vincent’s deathbed, wrote Theo only two weeks after the funeral expressing his admiration for “the sovereign disdain that [Vincent] felt for life”
⁵⁸
and comparing his end to a martyr’s embrace of death. As Vincent himself had once written (and
boldly underlined): “I
would not expressly seek death … but I would not try to evade it if it happened.”
⁵⁹

In fact, whether by accident or negligence or malice, René Secrétan may have provided Vincent the escape that he longed for but was unable or unwilling to bring upon himself, after a lifetime spent disavowing suicide as “moral cowardice” and “the deed of a dishonest man.”
⁶⁰
Having just returned from a disastrous visit to Paris during which he had been
made painfully aware of the burden he imposed on Theo and his young family, Vincent undoubtedly saw his chance to “withdraw”—just as he had withdrawn from Paris in 1888—and spare his brother further heartache (see
chapter 29
).

With so much to be gained, Vincent must have seen no reason, no benefit, in dragging the Secrétans—even the mischievous, careless René—into the glare of public inquiry and embarrassment simply for having done him this favor.

OUR RECONSTRUCTION RELIES
heavily on the interviews that René Secrétan gave to Victor Doiteau in 1956 and in 1957, the year of his death at the age of eighty-three.
⁶¹
While his artistic older brother Gaston
⁶²
went on to become a cabaret singer of some renown, writing songs
for films in the twenties and thirties
⁶³
and even appearing in a few of them,
⁶⁴
René had lived his life far from the world of art. After his rambunctious adolescence, he settled down to become a rich and respected member of society. He had a long and distinguished career as a banker, businessman, and shooting champion.
⁶⁵

Despite his advanced age, René was an excellent witness. Doiteau, who met and corresponded with him often, described him as in good physical and mental condition until the end of his life.
⁶⁶
Unlike so many witnesses, René gave his first account of Vincent’s last days long after the painter had become famous. He came forward not in order to attach himself to the
painter’s legend or claim a piece of his immortality, but simply to set the record straight. He had seen a story in
Paris Match
about the release of the movie
Lust for
Life
that featured a picture of Kirk Douglas playing Vincent van Gogh. The image of the hale, handsome, wholesome Douglas so violated René’s sense of duty to the truth that he could hold back his story no longer. The picture “bore no resemblance to our
friend who always looked more like a tramp with shoes on his feet,” he told Doiteau.
⁶⁷
René’s account to Doiteau, taken as a whole, not only runs counter to the projections of Stone and Hollywood that dominated the era, but is richly and convincingly detailed, internally consistent, sometimes independently verifiable, and not self-inflating or self-serving. Indeed, it is often
self-indicting, both intentionally and unintentionally.

However, despite his astonishing frankness in revealing his own abusive, belligerent behavior toward Vincent, René never confessed to having any direct role in the painter’s fatal shooting on July 27, 1890. Regarding the events of that day, René told Doiteau that Vincent had stolen the gun from his rucksack and recalled vaguely that both he and Gaston left for the family’s villa in Normandy sometime in July and that he first learned of
Vincent’s death by reading about it in a major Paris daily newspaper,
⁶⁸
although he could not remember which one, and no such article has surfaced since. But his denials lack the consistency and conviction of the rest of his account. As nowhere else in his many recollections, they betray the lawyerly caution of a man who knows he is speaking for the record. For example, he told Doiteau that he
carried his rucksack (containing the heavy pistol) everywhere he went—yet he didn’t notice that the gun was missing before he left for Normandy. Elsewhere, he implied that Vincent had stolen the pistol from him on the very day of the shooting, placing himself still in Auvers at the time.
⁶⁹

In these faltering denials, as much as in his many boisterous confessions, we hear the voice of a man who had kept the truth to himself for a lifetime but could not die without telling it—or at least most of it—to ease his conscience at the end.

THE STORY THAT VINCENT’S DEATH
was the result of a botched suicide attempt took shape over a period of more than seventy years. The earliest accounts of the shooting—those written in the days immediately after the event—do not mention suicide. When Paul Gachet, one of the doctors treating Vincent, wrote Theo on July 28 to summon him to Auvers,
⁷⁰
he said nothing about the circumstances or the nature of Vincent’s injury except that he had “wounded himself.”
⁷¹

In his reports to Jo from Vincent’s bedside, Theo, too, gave no hint that his brother had made a suicide attempt—or that he, Theo, suspected one.
⁷²
He portrayed Vincent as sad (“Poor fellow, he wasn’t granted a lavish share of happiness”)
⁷³
but not suicidal. Nothing in
Vincent’s room or studio indicated an intention to commit suicide. He had left no farewell note. He hadn’t even straightened up.
⁷⁴
His most recent letters had been filled with expressions of buoyant spirits
⁷⁵
and inviting sketches of his new home in Auvers.
⁷⁶
Indeed, only days before, he had placed a large order for new paints and other supplies—hardly the act of a man planning to end his life, especially one so sensitive about spending his brother’s money.

Besides, as Theo knew well, Vincent had always rejected suicide in the most vehement terms. He called it “terrible” and “wicked.”
⁷⁷
He thought it cowardly
⁷⁸
and dishonest.
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Even on the verge of despair in the
Borinage in 1881, he had assured Theo, “I really do not think I am a man with such inclinations.”
⁸⁰
From Drenthe, too, during another period of deep melancholy, he had made his feelings on suicide clear: “As regards making oneself scarce or disappearing—now or ever—neither you nor I should
ever
do that, no more than commit suicide.”
⁸¹
(Emphasis in original.)

Theo also knew his brother well enough to know that if he ever did try to commit
suicide, he would not have used a gun, a device about which he knew virtually nothing.
⁸²
On the other hand, he knew a great deal about poisons, and he could have used that knowledge to see himself off with far less bother and pain.
⁸³
Of the various methods of suicide, drowning was the means Vincent had always considered the most “artistic”
⁸⁴
and the only one he had ever threatened (once, in a moment of pique).
⁸⁵

The first commentator to raise the possibility that Vincent had attempted suicide was neither a witness to the shooting nor present at Vincent’s deathbed. On July 30, Émile Bernard came to Auvers to attend Vincent’s funeral. Two days later, he wrote a letter to the critic Albert Aurier—the same critic to whom Bernard had sent a sensationally fictionalized account of the ear incident in Arles two years earlier.
⁸⁶
This letter contained the first recorded description of the shooting incident and the first suggestion of a suicide attempt: “On Sunday evening [July 27] [Van Gogh] went into the Auvers countryside, placed his easel against a haystack and went behind the château to shoot himself with a revolver.”
⁸⁷

What was the basis of this account? Bernard claimed that he had heard the details from townspeople, especially Gustave Ravoux, the owner of the inn where Vincent died. But Bernard was a prolific and inventive fabricator,
⁸⁸
Ravoux left no account of his own, and Auvers was abuzz with baseless rumors by the time of the funeral. The police had already begun investigating the shooting and
interviewing witnesses. People who knew of Vincent’s stay in an asylum and had seen his deformed ear were quick to assume a connection between self-mutilation and suicide—a connection debunked by later research.
⁸⁹
Suspicion of suicide ran so high that the local abbot refused to allow Vincent’s body to be carried by the parish hearse or buried near the church.
⁹⁰

A week later (August 7), a brief article in
L’Écho Pontoisien
, a local paper, rejected the sensational rumors of suicide and reported the incident in straightforward terms, leaving the possibility of an accident conspicuously open:

In fact, the gendarmes investigating the incident must have assumed at first that they were dealing with an accidental shooting.
⁹²
They would quickly have learned from interviews that Vincent was not accustomed to firearms (he had never been seen with a gun),
⁹³
that he drank heavily at times, that he took liquor
with him on painting expeditions, and that he was clumsy and reckless in his manner and therefore prone to accidents.
⁹⁴

They surely knew from experience what subsequent studies have shown: that an overwhelming majority (98 percent) of suicides using guns involve a shot to the head, not to the chest or abdomen.
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The fact that Vincent immediately sought medical care also pointed to an accidental shooting. A man truly bent on suicide would have finished himself off with a second shot rather than make the steep,
difficult descent to the Ravoux Inn with a bullet in his belly.
⁹⁶
Pulling the trigger again would have taken far less energy and caused far less pain. Also, Vincent’s attending doctors had probably already told the officers that the fatal shot was fired from an odd angle and from “too far out,”
⁹⁷
the first
suggesting that it was an accidental discharge and the second that someone else might have pulled the trigger.

Indeed, the primary question for the police would have been not whether the shooting
was a suicide or an accident, but whether others were involved in it—a possibility made more likely by the disappearance of the pistol and all of Vincent’s painting equipment. When a thorough daylight search of the area failed to produce a single missing item (and nothing was turned in by locals), the inevitable assumption was that somebody had hidden
or disposed of the evidence, either at the time of the shooting or immediately afterward.

But Bernard’s dramatic tale of an artist driven to suicide had planted a seed in the Van Gogh legend that could not be uprooted by logic or lack of evidence. Even those with firsthand knowledge of the events of July 27, 1890, were subject to its allure. Anton Hirschig was a twenty-three-year-old Dutch artist who happened to be lodging at the Ravoux Inn the day Vincent was wounded. In 1912, twenty-two years later, when Hirschig first set down his recollections of
the events he witnessed that night in 1890, he did not mention suicide. He recalled Vincent saying only, “Go and get me the doctor … I wounded myself in the fields … I shot myself with a revolver there”
⁹⁸
—a statement that, like Gachet’s, is as consistent with a careless accident as with an attempted suicide.

It was not until 1934—the same year that Irving Stone immortalized Bernard’s sad version in
Lust for Life
—that Hirschig testified to Vincent’s suicidal
intent
that day in July 1890, forty-four years earlier. “I can see him in his little bed in his little attic, in the grip of terrible pain,” Hirschig told an interviewer. “ ‘I couldn’t stick it any longer, so I shot myself,’ he
said.”
⁹⁹

The story that began with Bernard’s letter—the story of a suicide attempt in the wheat field—was not fully fleshed out until the 1950s, when the centenary of Vincent’s birth touched off a decade-long celebration of the painter’s life and work. The person chiefly responsible for turning Bernard’s slender tale into the definitive account of Vincent’s final days was Adeline Ravoux, the daughter of the innkeeper Gustave
Ravoux, a girl of thirteen at the time of the shooting. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Adeline gave repeated interviews regarding Vincent’s death, adding fresh details and heightening the drama with each telling.
¹⁰⁰