Van Gogh (5 page)

T
O THE EYE OF A NEWCOMER, ESPECIALLY ONE FROM SO PRINCELY A CITY
as The Hague, the township of Zundert must have looked a wasteland. And, indeed, most of it was. More than half of the township—which stretched for miles in every direction from the small cluster of buildings that was the town of Groot Zundert (“Big Zundert,” to distinguish it from nearby Klein Zundert, “Little Zundert”)—consisted of swamp and heath: windswept, virtually treeless expanses of wild grass and scrub untouched by tilling or tending hand. Except for an occasional shepherd driving a flock of sheep, or peasants cutting peat or gathering heather for brushes, nothing broke the enormous silence that hung over the empty horizon. Contemporary chroniclers referred to the region as the “untouched territory.”

Only the great highway built by Napoleon, the Napoleonsweg, tethered the town of Groot Zundert to the outside world. With its parade-straight double row of oak and beech trees leading to infinity, the road brought all the overland trade from Belgium and points south through the dusty little village. Inns, taverns, stables, and tradesmen’s shops lined the famous road (the emperor himself had passed this way), almost outnumbering the 126 houses that sheltered the town’s twelve hundred inhabitants.

The mêlée of commerce made Zundert a disproportionately dirty, disorderly place. Especially at festival time, when the newlywed Van Goghs arrived, the many inns and taverns around the town square, the Markt, were filled with raucous young men drinking, singing, dancing, and often brawling. Brueghelesque public debaucheries were common at these “fun fairs” (Brueghel had been born nearby), where alcoholic license, boorishness, and especially disregard of social rank and sexual mores, confirmed all the low stereotypes of the rustic Dutch character that polite society in urbane centers like Amsterdam and The Hague abhorred.

Off the main road, however, Groot Zundert remained virtually untouched by the comings and goings of commerce. When Anna arrived in 1851, almost four decades after Waterloo, the Napoleonsweg was still the town’s only paved road, and tiny, home-based breweries and tanneries still its only industries. Most farmers still produced barely enough food to feed their own families—potatoes, mostly—and still used bullocks to pull their plows. Zundert’s most profitable “crop” was still the fine white sand that was scooped from its infertile fields and used all over Holland to sand furniture and floors to a milky smoothness. Most families still shared their one-room houses with their livestock and dressed in the same clothes year-round. Only a tiny percentage of Zundert’s citizens were rich enough to pay the poll tax and vote, while a quarter of its schoolchildren were poor enough to receive free education. In general, people from the rich cities of the north, like The Hague, came to Zundert only to exploit its most plentiful resource other than sand: cheap labor.

To proper Dutch townsfolk like Anna van Gogh, Zundert wasn’t just a coarse, impoverished country village; it wasn’t really Dutch. For centuries, Zundert and all of the townships around it had looked not north to the city-states of the Dutch Republic, but south—to Brussels and Rome—for leadership and identity. Together with most of northern Belgium, the townships of southern Holland belonged to Brabant, a medieval duchy that had enjoyed its own brief golden age in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries before its power waned and its borders were submerged in the shifting empires of its neighbors. By 1581, when the Dutch declared their independence from Spanish rule, Brabant found itself separated from its northern neighbor by an economic, political, and, especially, religious gulf that would never be bridged. Overwhelmingly Catholic and monarchical, it remained on the opposite side of that gulf through all the bloody formative events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Even after Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815 and all of Belgium was joined with the old Dutch provinces to form the Kingdom of the United Netherlands, animosities festered. Brabanters resented the political and economic hegemony of the north and resisted its cultural dominance, even its language; northerners looked down on the Brabanters as stupid, superstitious, and untrustworthy. In 1830, when the Belgians broke with the United Netherlands and declared Belgium an independent country, these mutual enmities boiled into the open. Brabanters on the Dutch side of the border allied with those on the Belgian side, and for almost a decade, it seemed to many in Holland that the whole lower third of the country might slide into rebellion.

A treaty in 1839 that split Brabant down the middle had devastating effects in border areas like Zundert. Farms and families were divided, roads were closed, congregations cut off from their churches. The Dutch government in The Hague treated Zundert and its fellow townships along the new border like occupied
enemy territory. A single crossing point served the whole trackless sweep of wasteland around the town. Farmers had to travel for miles to bring peat, their only source of fuel, home from the heath, and border guards imposed crushing tolls on all goods crossing the line. Military police monitored the new border and roamed the roads to prevent illegal migration. The Brabanters responded with a campaign of audacious smuggling greatly abetted by the wild landscape and desperate poverty.

The Belgian revolt and “occupation” that followed only deepened the bitter split between Catholics and Protestants. For two centuries, armies had swept back and forth over the sandy heaths of Zundert, installing one religion and chasing away the other. When Catholic forces approached from the south, or Protestant from the north, whole congregations would pull up stakes and flee. Churches were vandalized and appropriated. Then the political winds would shift: new authorities marched in, and old churches were reclaimed, scores settled, and new oppressive measures imposed on the unbelievers.

In the latest round, during the Belgian Revolt, after Catholics smashed the windows of the little church in Groot Zundert, Protestants had been slow to return. When the Van Goghs arrived twenty years later, the congregation stood at only fifty-six, a mere handful of families, outnumbered thirty to one in an outpost of true faith on the papist heath. Protestants nursed dark suspicions of Catholic intentions and trod lightly to avoid conflicts with Catholic authorities. Catholics boycotted Protestant businesses and cursed Protestantism as “the faith of the invader.”

T
HE
M
ARKT IN
Z
UNDERT; THE PARSONAGE WHERE
V
INCENT WAS BORN IS AT CENTER
(
Illustration credit 2.1
)

Anna’s new home, the Zundert parsonage, sat facing the Markt, right in the middle of this threatening frontier.

Virtually everything that happened in Zundert happened on the Markt: servants jostled and gossiped at the town water well, officials conducted public business surrounded by rowdy crowds, the stagecoaches and mail wagons rode in and changed teams at the big stables nearby. On Sundays, the news was read out in a booming voice from the steps of the town hall directly opposite the parsonage. So many carts or wagons passed through the Markt that residents had to keep their windows closed against the clouds of dust they kicked up. When it rained, unpaved sections of the square turned into impassable quagmires.

Spare and inconspicuous, the parsonage dated back to the early 1600s. In the two and a half centuries since, it had seen a long line of parsons’ families and a few enlargements, but hardly any improvements. Hemmed in by larger neighbors on both sides, only its narrow brick façade enjoyed a view of the square. The door opened into a long, dark, narrow hall connecting a formal room at the front, used for church functions, to a single dark room at the back where the family actually lived. The hall ended at a small kitchen. Beyond that lay a washroom and a barn—all in one continuous, virtually lightless progression. The sole privy could be found behind a door in the corner of the barn. Unlike most people in Zundert, Anna did not have to venture outdoors to use the loo.

Putting the best face on the sudden change in her circumstances, Anna described the parsonage to her family back in The Hague as a “country place” where one could enjoy the pastoral simplicity of rural life. But pleasantries could not disguise the truth: After a prolonged maidenhood in the fine and proper world of The Hague, she had landed in a beleaguered religious outpost, in a wild and unfamiliar land, surrounded by townspeople who mostly resented her presence, whom she mostly distrusted, and whose dialect she could hardly understand. There was no disguising her loneliness, either. Unable to walk the streets of town unaccompanied, she hosted a succession of family visitors, and then, at the end of the summer, returned to The Hague for an extended stay.

As all the other distinctions of Anna’s previous life fell away, one became increasingly important to her: respectability. She had always lived her life by the rules of convention. But now, under the battlefield discipline imposed by isolation and hostility, those rules took on a new significance. First and foremost, the rules demanded that parsons’ wives, all wives, produce children—lots of children. Families of ten or more were not uncommon. It was a strategic and religious imperative to ensure the outpost’s survival into the next generation—and Anna van Gogh was starting late. When she returned to The Hague at the end of the summer, she proudly announced “the future arrival of a little addition to the family, for which God had given us hope.”

On March 30, 1852, Anna gave birth to a stillborn son.
“Levenloos”—
lifeless—the town registrar noted in the margin of his book next to the nameless birth entry, “No. 29.” Hardly a family in Zundert—or anywhere in Holland—rich or poor, was untouched by this most mysterious of all God’s workings. The Carbentus family was typical, its chronicle littered with infant deaths and nameless stillborns.

In previous generations, the death of a child often passed without a funeral; the “birth” of a stillborn, without any mention at all. For the new bourgeoisie, however, no opportunity for self-affirmation and display went unseized. Mourning for an innocent child, in particular, caught the public imagination. One Dutch writer dubbed it “the most violent and profound of all sorrows.” Sales of poetry albums devoted exclusively to the subject soared. Novels like Dickens’s
The Old Curiosity Shop
, with its deathbed scene of Little Nell, transfixed a generation. When it came time for Anna to bury her son, she demanded all the trappings of the new fashion. A grave was dug in Zundert’s little Protestant cemetery next to the church (the first for a stillborn) and covered with a handsome stone marker large enough for a biblical inscription, a favorite of the era’s poetry albums: “Suffer little children to come unto me …” The marker bore only the year, 1852; and instead of the bereaved parents, it named the stillborn: Vincent van Gogh.

For Anna, naming children was only remotely a matter of personal preference. Like everything else in her life, it was governed by rules. Thus it was predetermined, when Anna gave birth to another son on March 30, 1853, exactly one year after the death of her first, that he would take the names of his grandfathers: Vincent and Willem.

The coincidence that Vincent Willem van Gogh was born a year to the day after the stillborn buried under a marker inscribed “Vincent van Gogh” would prove of far greater interest to later commentators than to the Van Goghs. Anna proceeded to produce a large family with clockwork discipline. In 1855, almost exactly two years after Vincent Willem’s birth, a girl was born, Anna Cornelia. Two years after that (1857), another son, Theodorus. Two years after that (1859), another daughter, Elisabeth. In 1862, a third daughter, Willemina. Finally, five years later (1867), at forty-seven, Anna bore her last child, another son, Cornelis Vincent. So tightly did Anna control the process that six of her seven children had birthdays between mid-March and mid-May; three were born in May, and two were born one day apart (in addition to the two Vincents born on the same date).

This was Anna van Gogh’s family. For the rest of the twenty years she lived in Zundert, Anna would pour most of her energy and all of her manic orderliness and fearful conformity into raising these six children. “We are shaped first by family,” she wrote, “then by the world.”

In concentrating so single-mindedly on home life, Anna not only fulfilled
her duty as a wife and a Protestant, she upheld the conventions of her class. What historians would call “the era of the triumphant family” had dawned. Children were no longer just adults-in-waiting. Childhood had become a distinct and precious state of being—“holy youth,” it was called—and parenthood a sacred calling. “One must make sure that [youth] shares as little as possible in the disasters of society,” warned one of the most popular parenting instruction books of the era. “An entire following life cannot make up for a repressed youth.” Hundreds of such books, and even more novels, embraced and instructed the new middle-class obsession. The message of such books was all too familiar to Anna: the outside world was a turbulent and dangerous place; family, the ultimate refuge.