Van Gogh (22 page)

Like Vincent, Renan’s Jesus was a “provincial,” a Galilean, with “an exquisite sympathy” for nature, in which he often sought solace. The eldest of many brothers and sisters, but never married, Renan’s Jesus shunned his family and came to value “the bond of thought” more than “ties of blood.” Like Vincent, Renan’s Jesus was a man of volatile moods: alternately rent by anger, possessed by rapturous enthusiasms, and paralyzed by melancholy. He was a deeply flawed
man
. Obstacles irritated him. He argued incessantly, and saw his life increasingly as a battle with the forces of hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness. Isolated and ostracized, he disdained convention and delighted in flouting the social niceties of his day. “Contact with the world pained and revolted him,” according to Renan. By the end, he had altogether “forgotten the pleasure of living, of loving, of seeing, and of feeling.”

Yet these torments and trials were merely the necessary passage to ultimate
redemption: not in a literal resurrection (Vincent never showed any interest in Christ’s Passion), but in pointing the way to a new life, a journey’s end. For humanity, that destination was the promised utopia, the consummation of Michelet’s apocalyptic revolutions. For Jesus’ fellow outcasts, like Vincent, it was a place in the soul where they could finally find comfort and belonging.

THROUGHOUT THE WINTER
and spring of 1874–75, these ideas simmered in the solitude of the little room on Kennington Road. Vincent’s parents heard only hints of them in his rare, brief letters. At Christmas, his sister Lies admired Vincent’s “pure ideas.” In February, even Dorus noticed some “good thoughts” in his son’s birthday greeting. Vincent almost certainly poured out these “thoughts” to Theo in the six months of missing letters. He eagerly added passages from his readings in Taine, Carlyle, and Renan to the poetry albums he was preparing for his brother, creating an incongruous pastiche of swooning love poetry and ponderous philosophizing that perfectly reflected his manic mind. Equally comfortable with the deepest ideas and the shallowest sentimental notions (a versatility later critical to his art) he was moved by Spurgeon’s avuncular exhortations to simple faith even as he embraced Carlyle’s abstruse “divine infinite” and Renan’s controversial Christ.

By the time Vincent arrived in Paris, however, his search for answers had resolved into a single mandate: “Fear God and keep his commandments,” he enjoined his brother in the summer of 1875, “for this is the whole duty of man.”

The triumph of evangelical ardor over existential angst—of Spurgeon over Carlyle—in Vincent’s flailing thoughts may have been the result of a pilgrimage he made that spring to Brighton, the resort town on the south coast where, in May and June, evangelicals from across Europe gathered for one of the great “conventions” that marked the spiritual revival of the 1870s. Although he missed the convention itself, Vincent later recalled how “moving” it always was to see “the thousands of people now flocking to hear the evangelists.”

Whatever the cause, the transformation was complete. In Paris, he launched into a paroxysm of piety. He read the Bible fervently every night and filled his letters with its wisdom. He imposed monastic self-discipline on his routine: rising at dawn and going to bed early (in contravention of long habit). He summarized his day to Theo with the ancient monastic motto
ora et labora
(prayer and work). He eschewed the pleasures of the flesh and took a new, sacramental interest in bread (“the staff of life”)—both ominous portents of the self-punishments to come. Writing at a furious pace, he deluged his family and friends with exhortatory letters: letters fat with scripture, hymns, inspirational verses, and homiletic aphorisms. So overwhelming was the outpouring that even the pious Dorus expressed unease. “[Vincent] is always in such a serious mood,” he complained
to Theo. Ever distrustful of excess, Dorus may have recognized in his son’s newfound passion not the ardor of a man embracing new angels, but the desperation of a man fleeing old demons. “This morning I heard a beautiful sermon,” Vincent reported to Theo in September. “ ‘Forget what is behind you,’ the preacher said. ‘Have more hope than memories.’ ”

In his rush to put the past behind him, Vincent renounced almost everything that he had once held precious—in some cases only months before. After years of encouraging his brother’s romantic adventures, he warned Theo to “keep your heart against all attention.” After years of lurching toward success as an art dealer, he disavowed the whole notion of worldly success and now wished only to become “rich in God.” He came close to renouncing art itself. “You need not exaggerate … the feeling for art,” he cautioned Theo. “Don’t give yourself
utterly
to that.” After a winter of wrestling with the brave new ideas of Carlyle and Taine, he now dismissed them all as “deviations” and discouraged Theo from thinking “too deeply” lest his intellect imperil his faith. Repudiating a childhood of defiant noncomformity, he repeatedly enjoined his brother to aim always for “the narrow road” (a phrase he borrowed from his father). And after years of desultory attendance, he sternly instructed Theo in imperative terms to “go to church every Sunday; even if the preaching is not good.”

Perhaps the most astonishing reversal—surely the most surprising to Theo—was Vincent’s rejection of his longtime hero Michelet. In September, Theo sent a letter with a favorable mention of
L’amour
, a book that his brother had been pressing on him only the year before. Vincent scrawled an alarmed response onto Theo’s letter—“Do not read Michelet any longer”—and shot it back by return post. A few weeks later, he sent another anxious warning: “I am going to destroy all my books by Michelet, etc. I wish you would do the same.” He followed up a month later: “Did you do what I advised you to do, get rid of the works of Michelet?” And again a week after that: “I advised you to destroy your books, and do so now; yes, do so.”

Why this hounding? In Vincent’s guilt-obsessed mind, Michelet had become synonymous with sexuality. Avoiding the Frenchman’s erotic writings was an essential part of the regimen Vincent proposed to ward off the temptations of sex—temptations that clearly, for Vincent, lurked in every unguarded moment. (His regimen included Bible reading and visiting friends in the evening as often as possible.) Soon Vincent’s moralistic fervor extended to other books as well. With a certitude that could only have reflected his own precarious grip on certainty, he commanded his brother not to read anything at all but the Bible, dismissing everything else as “disgusting.” Romantics like Heine and Uhland were “dangerous traps,” he warned Theo. “Be on guard … do not abandon yourself to them.” As for Renan’s
Vie de Jésus:
“Throw [it] away,” Vincent thundered.

In place of Michelet and Renan and all the other books banished in the fall
of 1875, Vincent pressed a new favorite on his brother: Thomas à Kempis’s
Imitatio Christi
(
Imitation of Christ
). Even more than the Bible, this fifteenth-century spiritual guide for monastic novices brought Christ vividly to life—not as a biographical figure, but as an intimate friend. Unlike the “hero” of Carlyle and Renan—a remote figure on a millenarian mission—Kempis’s Jesus speaks directly to the reader in “the language of the heart”: with sincerity, common sense, and an exquisite sympathy for human weakness. He counsels, exhorts, chides, and cajoles. With its unique combination of classical wisdom and medieval sweetness,
Imitatio
proved the perfect comfort to Vincent’s estranged soul. Kempis’s Jesus reassures his followers that “God loves us as much in our failings as in our successes,” and that loneliness is a badge of devotion, not a curse. All true believers live as “strangers and pilgrims in the world,” he says, and “gladly endure the heart’s interior exile.”

In letter after letter that fall, Vincent tried to play the part of Kempis’s consoling Christ to his eighteen-year-old brother. Melancholic from the deaths of several friends, disgruntled at work, and bedridden by an injury, Theo presented an ideal test for the new, beatific Vincent. Instead of the usual exhortations and incitements, he sent his brother quiet urgings to see the storms of adolescence as “nothing but vanity”; not to take setbacks “too much to heart”; not to put too much stock in the things of the world; even “not to dream” too much. “All things work together for good to them that love God,” he wrote about Theo’s sprained ankle. “Courage, old son,” he concluded philosophically, “rain and good weather alternate on the road that goes uphill all the way—yes to the very end.” For a volatile young man whose life so far had been riven by wild enthusiasms and bitter disappointments, it was a bold leap of imagination—a desperate grab for the serenity that had always eluded him in reality.

Vincent sent copies of
Imitatio
not just to Theo but to his sisters Wil and Anna as well, and everyone reported receiving “good letters” from him. But the person who felt the full force of Vincent’s ardor that fall wasn’t Theo or any other Van Gogh. It was Vincent’s housemate, Harry Gladwell.

Vincent met the young Englishman at the Goupil office on the rue Chaptal where he, like so many Goupil apprentices, had been sent for training by his art dealer father. With his provincial ways, poor French, and jug ears, Gladwell cut an almost comic figure in cosmopolitan Paris. “At first everybody laughed at [him],” Vincent reported, “even I.” But religion brought them together. By October they not only shared a boardinghouse, they shared a joint discipleship. Every night, they read aloud from the Bible, intending to “read it from one end to the other,” Vincent said. Every Sunday, they visited “as many churches as possible,” leaving early in the morning and returning late at night. Vincent ardently preached Kempis’s
Imitatio
to his young companion, chastising the homesick eighteen-year-old for “sighing after” his family too much—a violation of Kempis’s
instruction to withdraw from the world and seek solitude. Gladwell’s close relationship with his father drew an especially sharp rebuke from Vincent, who called it “dangerous” and “unwholesome”—“idolatry, not love.” According to Kempis, parental love should be marked by sadness and regret, Vincent insisted—at least in this life.

When it came to Harry Gladwell, however, Vincent ignored Kempis’s warning to “shut the door” on emotional ties. Starved of companionship for so long, he found in the awkward outcast Gladwell both a mirror of himself and a new slate to write upon. He quickly expanded their nightly readings to include his favorite poetry (a true familial intimacy). He tutored Gladwell’s eating habits, introduced him to the joys of print collecting, and guided him through museums, pointing out “the pictures that I like the most.” The friendless Gladwell, who was exactly Theo’s age, gladly accepted the role of pliant, attentive younger brother that Theo himself had long since abandoned. He came to Vincent’s room every morning to wake him and make him breakfast. They walked to and from work together, ate dinner together around the little stove in Vincent’s room (“our room,” Vincent called it), and took long soulful treks together through the streets of Paris. “I should like to walk again with [Harry] in the twilight, along the Seine,” Vincent recalled fondly years later. “I’m longing to see his brown eyes, which could sparkle so.”

The unfamiliar passion of friendship, combined with the new passion of piety, crowded out everything else. Even as the Paris art world burned with controversy; even as young artists plotted insurrection in brasseries and traditionalists retaliated in furious editorials; even as Monet’s and Renoir’s riverbank scenes of Argenteuil were scorned and derided—or championed—all around him, Vincent holed up in his little Montmartre “cabin” (his word) with his young acolyte, reading the Bible and following the example of Kempis’s Christ: “Withdraw your heart from the love of things visible, and turn yourself to things invisible.”

But Vincent could not surrender his vicarious life in images any more than he could resist the balm of Gladwell’s companionship. Instead, he enlisted art in the service of his newest obsession. Already in London the previous year, he had begun adding explicitly religious images to his storehouse of favorites. He made a special trip to the British Museum in August 1874 to see one of Rembrandt’s drawings of the life of Christ. Over the winter, as his thought-pilgrimage led from Spurgeon to Michelet to Carlyle to Renan, the gallery of images nailed to his wall tracked its progress. Scenes of provocative women and bourgeois life came down; scenes of Bible readings, christenings, religious heroes, and pious ceremonies went up. Carlyle’s view of divinity in Nature brought a rush of images of serene sunrises, glimmering twilights, turbulent skies, and lowering clouds (especially by the French landscapist Georges Michel)—cementing a bond between nature and religion that would never be broken.

But the divine Nature of Carlyle soon yielded to the triumphant Christ of Renan. From a memorial exhibition of works by the most soulful of all Barbizon landscapists, Camille Corot, Vincent singled out one work,
The Garden of Olives
. From a show of old masters, he picked Rembrandt’s
Descent from the Cross
for praise. From the vast riches of the Louvre and Luxembourg galleries, he recommended that Theo see Rembrandt’s
Supper at Emmaus
, another scene from the life of Jesus. For his mother’s birthday in September, he sent two engravings:
Good Friday
and
St. Augustine
. Within a few months after his arrival in Paris, he had added to the images on his cabin wall a nativity scene, a picture of a monk, and a print entitled
The Imitation of Jesus Christ
.

Vincent’s otherworldly obsessions only compounded his problems at work. The fresh wave of enthusiasm with which he began the job in May was quickly dashed when he learned in June that he would not be returning to London as he had hoped and expected. His devotion to Christ may have consoled his disappointment, but it earned him no friends, other than Gladwell, among his fellow employees on the rue Chaptal. Nothing could have been more ill-suited to Adolphe Goupil’s bastion of cosmopolitan commercialism than Kempis’s
Imitatio
, with its exhortations to disengagement and asceticism. What were Vincent’s fellow apprentices, merchant sons in training, to make of Kempis’s injunction: “Do not flatter the rich, nor desire to be in the presence of those who are important in the eyes of the world”? If Vincent tried to convert them—as he surely did—he no doubt received the same impatient rebuff he did from his Uncle Cent: “I know nothing of supernatural things.”