Van Gogh (33 page)

The only break in the gathering clouds came in September when Harry Gladwell visited. “It was a delightful sensation to hear Gladwell’s voice in the hall,” Vincent wrote. It had been only a year since their soulful adieu at the train station outside London. Gladwell was still working at Goupil in Paris. He had come to The Hague on business and, at Theo’s request, extended his trip to Amsterdam to see Vincent. They spent two whirlwind days together visiting churches and meeting preachers. At night, they had soul-baring talks and shared Bible readings (Vincent chose the parable of the sower). Vincent urged his friend to follow him into the clergy: to quit Goupil and choose “the love of Christ and poverty.” But the nineteen-year-old Gladwell ignored his pleadings. Soon after his departure, Gladwell stopped answering Vincent’s letters, and within six months he had disappeared altogether from Vincent’s life.

By winter 1877, loneliness forced Vincent to seek companionship in the only place left to him: the past. When walking his uncle’s dogs along the docks on a starry evening, the smell of tar from the shipworks would remind him of “the pine woods” of home, and memories would overwhelm him. “I see it all again before me,” he wrote in a reverie of nostalgia remarkable for a twenty-four-year-old. “I have loved so many things.” Every place he had ever lived began to look like a lost Eden to him. Not just Zundert (“I shall never forget that last visit there”), but also London and Paris (“I often recall them with tender melancholy”). Even The Hague, site of his first and decisive failure, was transformed by longing into a memory of innocent, carefree youth.

But no place excited his nostalgia more than England. Everything reminded him of it: every rainy day; every patch of ivy; every narrow, medieval street. He read English books and magazines and frequented places where he could hear English spoken. One of those places was the English Church. Tucked away in a hidden courtyard on the far side of the city, this seventeenth-century building had been used as a Catholic redoubt at a time when Amsterdam’s famous tolerance allowed other religions to be practiced but not seen. Set in its secret greensward like a vision out of Eliot, the English Church offered Vincent, too, a perfect retreat—an island of escape as complete and idyllic as a memory. “In the evening it lies so peacefully in that quiet courtyard between the hawthorn hedges,” he wrote. “It seems to say,
‘In loco isto dabo pacem’…
in this place, I will give peace.” Here, in this fragment of another country, in a clandestine church walled off from his homeland, in the company of other outsiders, speaking a language not his own, Vincent found something like belonging. “I love that little church,” he told Theo.

—

AS THE TIME FOR
his second review approached, it took all of Vincent’s imaginative power to escape the inevitability of failure. He somehow recast Gladwell’s rebuff as a triumph of his plan to follow in his father’s footsteps. “Oh, boy, how glorious it must be to have a life behind one like Pa’s,” he wrote Theo soon after Harry left; “may God grant us to be, and to become increasingly, sons after the spirit and his heart.” He read a novel based on Homer’s
Odyssey
and cast himself as the famously wandering king, with his discontents, his rough manners, his agitated thoughts, his history of trials and survival, and his heart “like a deep well.” He pictured himself, like Ulysses, coming to the end of his long journey and “seeing again the place so fervently longed for.”

But the review in late October exploded any such fantasies. Mendes reported to Stricker that his student appeared incapable of mastering Greek. “No matter how I approached it,” Mendes recalled later, “whatever means I invented to make the task less tedious, it was to no avail.” Stricker summoned Vincent for a “long talk” in which Vincent acknowledged that he found the work “very difficult,” but protested that he was trying his best “in every possible way.” Moved once again by Vincent’s earnestness, Stricker and Dorus decided that he “should give it another try.” A final decision would be made at the next review in January.

For Vincent, the stakes were now clear.
“It is a race and a fight for my life,”
¹
he wrote, “no more, no less.”

Vincent later described the next few months as “the worst time I have ever lived through.” Alternately terrified of failing and desperate to succeed, he spiraled into despair and delusion. Somehow, he redoubled his efforts—staying up all night in defiance of his uncle’s curfew, turning the gas down low, drinking endless amounts of coffee, and spending so much on pipe tobacco that Theo had to send him money for the Sunday collection plates. He redoubled his prayers, too, more convinced than ever that only God could give him “the wisdom I need.” He fortified himself with a frantic campaign of poetry, scripture, and nostrums (“When I am weak, then I am strong”; “Set your face as a flint”; “What cannot be cured must be endured”)—all addressed to Theo, but directed at the storm in his own head. “I never despair,” he repeated again and again—even though, many years later, Mendes remembered Vincent walking into his lessons with a look of “indescribable sad despair.”

His past failures hounded him like Furies. He confessed to bringing “sorrow and misery on myself and others.” He regretted both the shame of his fall from
Goupil and his flailing indecision since. “If I had only given all my strength to it before,” he lamented, “yes, I should have been further now.” The prospect, now imminent, of yet another failure overwhelmed him with guilt. His parents had stretched their meager budget to help pay for his lessons and board, adding hundreds more guilders to a lifetime of expenditures. Failure would mean it had all been wasted. “Money does not grow on trees,” Dorus pointed out. “The education of our children has been expensive—one more than the others.” On one of Vincent’s Sunday pilgrimages, in what may have been a desperate act of penance, he placed his silver watch in the collection plate. “When I think of all this,” he wrote, “of the sorrow, the disappointment, the disgrace … I wish I were far away from everything!” He begged God to “let me complete one significant work in my life.”

His letters reveal a mind suddenly gone dark with remorse and self-reproach. “There is much evil in the world,” he warned, “and in ourselves, terrible things.” He talked of “the dark side of life,” and of his own “evil self” that shirked work and yielded to temptation. He chastised himself for mysterious “days of darkness.” He insisted that “to know oneself [is] to despise oneself”—a doctrine of self-loathing that he attributed to both Christ and Kempis. When Mendes disputed this interpretation as too harsh, Vincent argued back vehemently: “When we look at others who have done more than we, and are better than we, we very soon begin to hate our own life because it is not as good as others.”

So much guilt could not go unpunished. During the day, he returned to the self-mortifications of his earliest ardor. He ate only bread—a “crust of black rye bread”—invoking the example of Elijah and Christ’s instruction in the Sermon on the Mount: “Take no thought, saying, what shall we eat, or what shall we drink.” In rain and cold, he went without an overcoat. At night, he deprived himself of sleep with abusive amounts of tobacco and coffee (“it is a good thing to soak oneself in coffee,” he said), then tortured his short rests by sleeping on his walking stick.

Some nights, he slipped out of the house before the doors were locked and slept on the ground in a nearby shed “without bed or blanket,” according to Mendes, to whom Vincent confessed this ritual of self-abuse, because “he felt that he had forfeited the privilege of spending that night in bed.” The winter of 1877–78 was filled with storms and bitter weather, but “he preferred to do it in the winter,” according to Mendes, “so that the punishment … would be more severe.” When an even harsher penance was called for, Mendes recalled, Vincent would take his walking stick to bed and beat himself across the back with it.

The combination of pressure and deprivation took a terrible toll. According to one family account, Vincent suffered a “mental breakdown” that winter. His parents and siblings watched in horror as the handwriting in his letters deteriorated along with his mind. “It became mere pen-strokes without rhyme or
reason,” one of them recalled, “nothing more.” His letters to Theo ranted and raved and wandered incoherently—a sign, perhaps, that he had already begun drinking, or the early eruptions of a deeper, as yet undiagnosed illness. His headaches grew worse as the inner voices of self-doubt and self-damning grew stronger. “When one has many things to think of and to do,” he complained, “one sometimes gets the feeling, ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Where am I going?’ And one’s brain reels.”

For the first time on record, he flirted with suicide. “I breakfasted on a piece of dry bread and a glass of beer,” he joked darkly in August; “that is what Dickens advises for those who are on the point of committing suicide, as being a good way to keep them from their purpose, at least for a while.” By December, black humor gave way to an obsession with graveyards and an intense longing for the day when “God shall wipe away all tears.” Throughout the winter, he kept a book of funeral orations in his pocket, and read from it so often that he wore it out. He spoke enviously of the dead farmer in Zundert: “He is freed from the burden of life, which we have to go on bearing.”

Not even Christmas could break the downward spiral. In his embattled state, Vincent longed for it more vividly than ever. To Theo he described it as “the kindly light from the houses” on a stormy night: “The dark days before Christmas are as a long procession at the end of which shines such a light.” He had not been home since his studies began, and he had not seen his father since before the unfavorable review in October. With the third and decisive review less than a month away, he clearly hoped the magic of the season might soften hearts in his favor. “I cannot tell you how I long for Christmas,” he told Theo. “I do hope Father will be satisfied with what I have done.”

To Theo and his other siblings, he pretended all was well. On the eve of his return, he reassured them: “I am now over the beginnings of Latin and Greek,” and claimed his studies had been “on the whole, [a] good thing.” He came early to Etten and lingered for weeks after Christmas, enacting the role of pious, dutiful son. He took long walks with his parents and went sledding with ten-year-old Cor. He visited his mother’s sewing class (“it is really lovely,” he said, “one would like to have a painting of it”), and shadowed his father on his busy holiday rounds. As a final act of atonement, he made a pilgrimage to Prinsenhage to visit his ailing Uncle Cent.

But his parents were neither fooled nor appeased. “If only I had some reason to be somewhat at ease about Vincent’s future,” Dorus lamented after Vincent finally left in January. Anna offered a despairing New Year’s prayer for her ever-wayward son: “May he become more and more normal.… The worry about him is still with us: He has been and continues to be strange.” As for Vincent’s brave pretensions to fill his father’s shoes, it was left to his plainspoken sister Lies to deliver the family’s unforgiving verdict. She called him “daffy with
piety,” and dismissed his religious ambitions with a single word,
kerkdraver
, a Dutch term for a fanatic churchgoer of showy but shallow faith. “Now that he is so heavenly,” she wrote scornfully after the holidays, “I hope not to become like that.”

The Christmas debacle could have left no doubt in Vincent’s mind what message his father brought when he arrived in Amsterdam in early February for the third and final review. In addition to chastising him for his continuing antisocial habits and “unhealthy existence,” Dorus accused his son of lacking true commitment to his work. To underscore the point, he sat with Vincent in his little study and corrected some of his papers, scolding him for their “manifold mistakes.” After he left, he reported to Theo, “I am afraid that [Vincent] is not of a mind to study.”

There was only one solution. In order to avoid bringing dishonor, yet again, on himself and his family, Vincent would have to work harder. He was “no longer a child,” Dorus said sternly: he had set the goal; now it was his duty to reach it. Dorus laid down a new, stricter regimen for Vincent’s studies; and to ensure compliance, he arranged for Uncle Stricker to supervise his lessons twice a week. Finally, he touched Vincent’s most sensitive nerve. Money had become a “terrible problem,” Dorus said, and from now on Vincent would have to contribute to his own support. He would have to get a job.

Before leaving, Dorus took Vincent around to all the people whom he had disappointed or alienated in his short eight months in Amsterdam: Mendes, Stricker, Uncle Cor, Reverend Meyjes. Then, four days after arriving, still “uneasy” about the future, he left. Vincent, who always dreaded departures, watched as his father’s train pulled out of the station. He stood on the platform, paralyzed, until the last wisp of smoke disappeared from view. When he returned to his uncle’s house, he went to his study and surveyed the books and papers still on his desk where his father had been reviewing them. He looked at the empty chair where his father had sat and burst into tears. “I cried like a child,” he admitted to Theo.

LESS THAN TWO WEEKS
after his father left Amsterdam, Vincent van Gogh exhibited his first work of art. Drawn “with red chalk on heavy brown paper,” it hung in a basement Sunday school classroom so dark that it needed gaslight to be seen, even at midday. “I want to do such things now and then,” Vincent wrote, “for it certainly is very doubtful that I shall ever succeed.… [And] if I fail, I want to leave my mark here and there behind me.”