Van Gogh (23 page)

Vincent later dismissively described his job in the salesroom at Goupil as “entertaining visitors,” suggesting both the dreaded social demands of the work and his poor track record of sales. His inborn shortcomings as a salesman—rough appearance, unsettling gaze, awkward manner—must have stood out even more jarringly on the rue Chaptal than they did on the Plaats. The ladies of Paris who came to shop at Goupil’s limestone palace of parlor-art called him
“ce Hollandais rustre”
(that Dutch rube) and stiffened with disdain when he waited on them. He treated them not as customers to be wooed, but as novices to be educated—recruited to his latest enthusiasm—or sometimes as philistines to be chastened. The “stupidity” of some customers “exasperated” him, according to one account. And when someone defended a purchase by saying
“C’est la mode”
(That’s the fashion), he would recoil in astonishment and anger. The customers responded in kind, indignant that this strange clerk “dared to question their taste.” In such confrontations, Kempis’s call to honesty in word and deed could only have emboldened Vincent’s natural obstinacy. On more than one occasion, his
impolitesse
so alarmed his superiors that they were forced to take disciplinary action against him for setting a “bad example” to his coworkers.

To make matters worse, Kempis’s call to embrace the “simple and humble”
sent Vincent’s taste in art wandering in ever more contrarian and idiosyncratic directions. He developed a special obsession for the strange, somber works of the Dutch artist Matthijs Maris, a former Communard who lived not far from Vincent’s boardinghouse in Montmartre. Maris was another fallen son of the bourgeoisie. He had once worked for Goupil and painted in the same conventional style as his successful artist brothers, Jacob and Willem. But he had turned his back on all that. Dismissing his previous works as nothing but “potboilers,” he began painting in an eerie symbolist style and took up the life of an exile and recluse. When Vincent championed Maris’s “genius” to his parents, they responded warily: “[He] is so enthused about the bleakly-colored paintings of Maris,” Dorus lamented. “I wish that his tastes would prefer the expressions of a more energetic life, something done in strong and bright color.”

Despite their proximity, Vincent never reported visiting the misanthropic Maris. But in every way that mattered, he had found a kindred spirit. They shared the same otherworldly concerns; the same history of family alienation and revolutionary ardor; the same trajectory of eccentricity, rejection, and withdrawal. Sometime that fall, Vincent began preparing a poetry album for the older man. He invoked Kempis in the very first entry: “When you are a stranger everywhere,” he wrote, “how fortunate it is to have the truest friend in your heart.”

The combination of Kempis’s lessons, Maris’s example, and the continuing troubles at Goupil gradually reshaped Vincent’s world. Old attitudes were swept away—not just toward his uncle’s profession, but toward wealth and privilege in general. He developed a lifelong antipathy to the class he had once aspired to join—the class that, like his family, would not have him. According to his sister Lies, he came to see bargaining as nothing more than “seeking to get the better of another,” and art dealing as “simply legitimate stealing.” “Everything, everything,” Vincent later wrote, “is in the clutches of the moneychangers.” Angry and adrift, he complained of depression and took up again his cure for the “blues,” pipe smoking. He endlessly wandered the streets of Paris, avoiding museums but lingering over cemeteries. He referred dismissively to his life at Goupil as “that other world” and spurned familial duties to his patron Cent. In perhaps the clearest sign of his inward revolt, he began defying the strict dress code of both family and profession. Godliness, said Kempis, “does not avoid what is shabby, and does not mind wearing clothes old and tattered.”

The one vanity that Vincent could not give up, regardless of Christ’s example, was his longing for family. As always, the approach of Christmas fanned that longing into a blaze of anticipation. Because his father had accepted a new position, the family would celebrate the holiday in Etten, a little town on the outskirts of Breda, only four miles from Zundert. So Christmas would be a double homecoming. As early as August, Vincent started laying holiday plans. In September,
he wrote to Theo, “How I am longing for Christmas,” and instructed his paymaster to withhold something from his salary checks each month because “I shall want a lot of money around Christmas.” December began with a rush of letters and a flurry of shifting plans for his departure from Paris. When a painting arrived at the gallery showing a snow-covered village scene, Vincent imagined it as his own Christmas reunion to come. “It tells us that winter is cold,” he wrote hopefully, “but that human hearts are warm.”

But the months of longing and anticipation only added to the burden of failure and guilt that he carried home with him on the overnight train that left Paris on December 23. The news he had to tell his parents would blacken his family’s brightest, most cherished holiday: he could not stay at Goupil.

THE ACCOUNTS OF VINCENT’S
final humiliation are incomplete and confusing, but on one point they agree: he saw the ax coming. In a subsequent letter to Theo, he called his dismissal “not entirely unforeseen” and admitted vaguely to having “done things that in a certain sense have been very wrong.” One of those things surely was his unauthorized trip home for the holidays. In fact, it appears that Vincent’s holiday leave had been canceled, probably at the last minute—not an unusual occurrence during the store’s busiest season. But after months of planning and longing, Vincent defied his bosses and left anyway. It may have been during a confrontation over the last-minute cancellation that Vincent “flew into a rage and walked out,” as he confessed to Theo years later. He told his family none of this at first. Only after the celebrations were finished and Theo had returned to The Hague did Vincent sit down for a “heart-to-heart talk” with his father.

Even then, he never mentioned his unauthorized departure or the dismissal he must have known was coming, but instead portrayed his predicament in more general and sympathetic terms. “He is definitely
not
happy,” Dorus reported to Theo after the conversation. “I believe he is not in the right place there … It may be necessary to change his position.” Even as his train left Breda for Paris on January 3, Vincent had still not told his parents the truth. At their farewell, “[Vincent] was of the opinion that he should stay [at Goupil],” Dorus reported to Theo. Anna recorded her son’s parting words: “I am looking forward to my work.”

As Vincent feared, the dismissal was, in fact, the first item of business when he returned to work on January 4. Léon Boussod, one of Cent’s partners, delivered the news in an encounter that Vincent described as “very unpleasant.” Confronted with his unauthorized leave, coming on top of a litany of customer complaints, disciplinary actions, and admonitory transfers, Vincent retreated into silence. “I never made a big thing to answer back,” he told Theo. He must
have known that he had no choice but to accept a decision that had clearly been approved at the highest level. In January, the Van Gogh family chronicler noted tersely: “Vincent received word that he was no longer employed in the house of Goupil.… The gentlemen had noticed long ago that he was not fit for business, yet they had let him stay as long as possible for Uncle [Cent]’s sake.”

Vincent tried to salvage what he could from the wreckage. In a letter to his father the same day, he finally admitted the unauthorized leave, but described his summary dismissal as if it had been a dignified resignation. To Theo, he compared himself poetically to a “ripe apple,” which even “a soft breeze will make fall from the tree.” For the rest of his life, Vincent would replay this humiliating episode in his head, regretting his Christlike “passivity,” and insisting that he could have defended himself against Boussod’s accusations but chose not to. “I could have said a lot of things in reply if I had cared to,” he explained to Theo, unprompted, years later, “such things as I believe would have made it possible for me to stay.”

But nothing Vincent might have said or done, then or ever, could mitigate the shame. “What a mess he has made!” Dorus wailed. “What a scandal and shame!…It hurts us so much.” “It is so terribly sad,” Anna lamented, “who would have expected this ending?…We don’t see any light … it is so very dark.” Abandoning all reticence, his parents poured out their “bitter disappointment” and “indescribable sorrow” in letter after letter to Theo. They called Vincent’s humiliation “a cross put upon us by our Heavenly Father,” and hoped only that word of the scandal might not reach Etten.

Any sympathy they felt for Vincent was snuffed out by the conviction that he had brought this catastrophe on himself—and on his family. Dorus blamed Vincent’s lack of ambition, his inability to “take charge of himself,” and his “sick outlook on life.” Anna, whose brother Johannus had committed suicide only a few months before (over some unmentionable miscreance), located Vincent’s fate in his rejection of class and family duties. “Such a pity that Vincent did not get involved more in the family life according to our station in society,” she wrote. “Without that, one cannot become a normal person.” Even Theo agreed, offering his parents the cold comfort that Vincent “will find his troubles wherever he goes.” The family chronicler summed up the consensus view: “[Vincent] was always strange.”

The parson and his wife did everything they could to contain the damage. They instructed Theo, and no doubt others, not to talk about the events in Paris. Everyone should “act as if nothing has happened,” they wrote. If asked, he should say only that “Vincent wants to change jobs.” In the meantime, Dorus asked his brother Cor to arrange a position at Cor’s bookstore in Amsterdam. If Vincent transferred from one Van Gogh enterprise to another before his final termination date (Boussod had given him until April 1), the worst humiliation
might still be avoided. For a while, Dorus even thought he might overturn the sentence of the “gentlemen” in Paris. In a series of tortured letters, he urged Vincent in the strongest terms to go back to Boussod, apologize, regret his error, and ask for his job back.

But it was no use. Boussod stood firm. Uncle Cor expressed sympathy for the family’s dilemma but would not offer a job to his troublesome nephew. And not a word of condolence or mitigation was heard from Uncle Cent—although his feelings eventually found their way into the family chronicle. “Great disappointment for Uncle,” the chronicler, Aunt Mietje, wrote, “who had hoped for a good future for [Vincent] for the sake of the name.”

In Etten, Dorus mourned as if his son had died. He retreated into his study and wrote a sermon for the next Sunday: “Blessed are those who mourn, they will be consoled.”

Desperate to preserve their one remaining tie to Cent’s favor, Dorus and Anna launched a campaign to insulate Theo from the shame of his brother’s scandalous fall. They urged him to maintain his own good relations at Goupil (especially with Tersteeg). “Remember that Vincent neglected to do that,” they cautioned. Anna sent pointed advice that sounded nothing at all like the mother of the Zundert parsonage: “Let us all be independent and not depend too much on each other.” If Theo showed any sign of fraternal sympathy, they moved quickly to dispel it. Vincent should have learned his lessons, they wrote, “never mind how solid and good he is.” And lest Theo forget the damage his brother had wrought, they signed their letters, “your sad Pa and Ma.”

In his Montmartre room, paralyzed with remorse, Vincent surveyed the shipwreck of his life. He later described the events of January as “a calamity”—“the ground gave way under my feet”—“everything that I had built up tumbled down.” Six years of work at Goupil had come to nothing. He had blackened the name he wore so proudly; embarrassed the brother whose admiration he craved; and disgraced the family he longed to rejoin. In a belated effort to check the damage, he sent a flurry of letters and gifts to family and friends, but received back only polite replies—or, in the case of Uncle Cent, no reply at all. Theo wrote so sparingly that Vincent had to plead for news: “I long to hear from you … speak to me of your daily life.” What he did hear about Theo, mostly by other routes, only sharpened the pain: a new promotion, a successful spring sales trip, another volley of praise from Uncle Cent, and a substantial salary increase. Overwhelmed by guilt, Vincent returned forty florins that his father had sent him.

At the end of January, Harry Gladwell moved out of Vincent’s boardinghouse, adding isolation to shame. Vincent clearly suspected the timing, only weeks after the debacle with Boussod. In a flash of the paranoia that would later engulf him, he blamed Gladwell’s abandonment on a conspiracy against him.
The Englishman’s occasional visits after that could not prevent him from lapsing into old patterns of solitude and self-pity. “We feel lonely now and then and long for friends,” he wrote Theo (distancing himself from the hurt, as he often did, with the plural pronoun). “We would be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: ‘He is the one.’ ” Within days of Gladwell’s departure, Vincent attached himself to another employee at work, another troubled young Dutchman, Frans Soek. Vincent invited Soek back to his room and read to him from Andersen. He visited Soek’s Paris apartment where he lived with his wife and mother-in-law. Vincent described them as “two sympathetic souls,” and may have briefly imagined making them into his next family.

BUT HE HAD TO LEAVE
. The shame was too great for him to remain in Paris. His parents dutifully invited him to stay in Etten, but disgrace no doubt awaited him there as well. For reasons he never revealed, Vincent was “firmly resolved” to return to England. To live on his own, however, he had to have a job. Dorus’s strained finances could never subsidize his wanderings—even if Vincent were willing to take his father’s money. But Vincent could think of nothing he wanted to do. The sudden “uprooting” (his word) from Goupil had left him demoralized, adrift, and deeply mortified at the prospect of hunting for another job. “One is simply ‘someone out of work,’ ” he despaired, “a suspicious character.” His parents suggested that he take up accounting, or perhaps build on his indisputable strength (and only experience) by working in an art museum. Or, if he still had a “love for his profession,” why not set up as an art dealer on his own, just as both his uncles had done?