Van Gogh (63 page)

But the words struck at his sole remaining hope. “It makes me sad, it takes
away my pleasure, it upsets me, and personally I am absolutely at a loss about what to do,” he wrote in a moment of utter candor. “When I started, I used to think, ‘If only I make such and such progress … I shall be on a straight road and find my way through life.’ ”

MEANWHILE, ALL WAS NOT
well in the apartment off the Schenkweg.

The storms of summer had given way to a bitter winter. The effects of hospitalization followed Vincent deep into the fall. He complained of feeling “indescribably weak,” “faint,” and “thoroughly miserable.” He tired easily, caught cold frequently, and slept fitfully. He was tortured by severe toothaches that migrated to his eyes and ears. Sometimes his eyes hurt so much “that even simply looking at things bothered me,” he wrote. Every affliction, compounded by too little food and probably too much alcohol, took a visible toll. Acquaintances who encountered him on the icy streets saw his bloodshot eyes and sunken cheeks and thought he looked “as if [he] had been on a bender … obviously on the road to dissipation.”

No sooner had the euphoria of the baby’s birth in August passed than Vincent began sending hints of trouble with his new family—distress signals from behind his vow of silence. Life on the Schenkweg had lost its “light-heartedness,” he said. It was becoming more and more difficult “to preserve some freshness.” He wrote of his disillusionment in carefully coded abstractions: “Even though things should turn out differently from what one originally intended, one must rally and take courage again.” He quietly withdrew his plan to “draw the little cradle another hundred times.”

With unconvincing vows to push on, he fought off increasingly serious attacks of depression—days when “life is the color of dishwater.” “My heart gets heavy when I think of the way things are going,” he admitted. At times, he seemed to lose interest in his own work, bemoaning the incessant drudgery of it. He looked at his piles of studies and complained: “They don’t interest me … I find them all bad.” Even his precious collection of illustrations lost its consoling power. After painstakingly mounting a batch of new prints, he reported being overcome by “a rather melancholy feeling of ‘what’s the use?’ ”

The coming of Christmas brought a fresh wave of determination to make his new family fill the void left by the old, an effort made plausible by his fondness for the infant Willem. He thought he saw “something deep, infinite, and eternal … in the expression in the child’s eyes.” He recruited Sien and her baby for a matching series of sketches in an effort to draw them into the fantasy of redemption that was for Vincent, as for Dickens, the heart and soul of the Christmas story. He posed the orphan man Zuyderland reading a Bible and saying
grace. His intention in these drawings, he said, was “to express the peculiar sentiment of Christmas.” He sat by the “cozy Christmas fire” and read Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
.

But Dickens wrote another Christmas story that Vincent also reread that year:
The Haunted Man
. As the first anniversary of the fight with his father and the expulsion from Etten approached, Vincent resembled more and more that book’s lonely protagonist, craving forgetfulness from the “sorrow, wrong, and trouble” of his past.

The disgrace of repeated failures haunted him. “One gets a feeling of guilt, of shortcoming, of not keeping one’s promises,” he wrote. “One has a feeling that one may strike a rock at any moment.” When his defenses slipped, he saw in the mirror a “leper” of incompetence and misfortune. “One would like to call from afar to the people: ‘Don’t come too near me, for intercourse with me brings you sorrow and loss.’ ” As the year ended, he surveyed the wreckage of his artistic project and offered Theo a humbling apology: “I am sorry that I have not succeeded in making a saleable drawing this year. I really do not know where the fault lies.”

On New Year’s Day 1883, an unexpected revelation from Paris threw back the curtain on Vincent’s private struggle to fashion a family on the Schenkweg. Theo had taken a mistress. In a thrill of solidarity, Vincent wrote of their shared dilemma: “To you and me there appeared on the cold cruel pavement a sad pitiful woman’s figure, and neither you nor I passed it by.” Seizing on the news to reassert his older-brother prerogatives, he lectured Theo on the challenges, and especially the changeability, of love: on the cycles of “withering and budding … ebbing and flowing … exhaustion and impotence” that he knew so well. But wisdom soon bled into confession as Theo’s plight licensed Vincent to reveal all the grievances he had held back for so long.

“I have had some unpleasant experiences,” he wrote of his life with the Hoornik clan, “some of them very nasty indeed.” Little Willem’s incessant wailing roiled his already troubled sleep. Sien’s daughter roamed the house like the street urchin she was: anxious and suspicious, a lightning rod for angry confrontations. Sien’s sister ranked as “an unbearable, stupid, vicious creature.” Together they “eat me out of house and home,” he complained. Sien herself had grown fatter and lazier in her long convalescence. Even after she returned to posing, she would do so only for short periods. She insisted on being paid in cash and still left the chores to Vincent. Her recalcitrance may have extended to other wifely duties as well: Vincent confessed that he no longer felt “passion” for her, only “fathomless pity.”

He assailed her humorlessness and indelicacy of manners—the same badges of victimhood he had celebrated six months before. He criticized her narrow-mindedness and her lack of appreciation for books or art—a failing that
only grew more acute as the rest of the world fell away. “If I did not look for art in reality,” he said in a moment of brutal clarity, “I should probably find her stupid.” He referred darkly to something he had learned about her past that did cruel injury to his love—even killed it. “When Love is dead,” he wondered, “is it impossible for Charity to be alive and awake still?” And he hinted pathetically at the gulf he had discovered between them: “There is not a soul here in whom I can confide.”

In the midst of this melodrama, Anthon van Rappard began to slip out of Vincent’s grip. It began with yet another squabble over the faulty drawing in Vincent’s lithographs. Desperate to maintain his friend’s involvement in his album project as proof of its viability, Vincent held his fire through the Christmas season. If anything, his increasing isolation in The Hague only exacerbated the adhesiveness he brought to every friendship. He sent Rappard books and poetry, drawing tips, effusive flattery, and fervent pledges of brotherhood. In the most urgent terms, he proposed reciprocal studio visits and planned joint sketching trips to the countryside, even to the Borinage. “I regard love—as I do friendship—not only as a feeling,” he wrote, challenging Rappard to match his fervor, “but chiefly as an
action
.”

Grandly invoking their “spiritual unity,” he imagined a bond that went beyond mere friendship. “Whenever different people love the same thing and work at it together,” he said, “their union makes strength … a whole is formed.” It was the bond to which he had summoned Theo again and again—the vision of the Rijswijk Road—two brothers “bound up in one: feeling, thinking and believing the same”—an artistic marriage of “two good people … with the same intentions and object in life, actuated by the same serious purpose.” Even as his dream of a noble combination of artists—a reincarnation of the
The Graphic—
withered in the winter of his disrepute, Vincent imagined a perfect pairing of “human hearts who search for and feel the same things.” “What couldn’t they accomplish!” he exclaimed.

It was the same vision that he would fix on Paul Gauguin six years later, with disastrous results.

Vincent’s utopian visions, whether of family or friendship, left no room for compromise. In his tyrannical mirror, Rappard could not differ from or surpass him in any way. “We are both on just about the same level,” he told Theo. “I don’t try to compete with him as a painter, but I won’t let him beat me in drawing.” “I would despise a friendship which did not call for some exertion on both sides to maintain the same level,” he said—but only in a perfect and eternal marriage of equals.

No friendship could bear such a burden for long. In March 1883, when Rappard announced his intention to submit a painting to an exhibition in Amsterdam, the inevitable unraveling began. Vincent responded with a storm of
protest. He lashed out with the fury of a betrayed lover at the very concept of exhibiting. Claiming an insider’s knowledge from his days at Goupil, he denounced exhibitions as nothing but fakery—a sham of unity and cooperation at a time when artists desperately needed
real
“mutual sympathy, warm friendship and loyalty.”

Rappard responded to this tirade in the most cutting way of all—he ignored it. His painting,
Tile Painters
, appeared in the International Exhibition that opened in Amsterdam two months later. Vincent, of course, immediately set to work to try to repair the breach he had opened between them. In May, he finally succeeded in arranging the reciprocal visits he had pined for. But the damage had been done. Vincent would have other chances, but within two years it would be over completely. After that, he and Van Rappard would never speak to each other again.

As Rappard balked, Vincent turned to other, more pliable companions like Herman van der Weele, the son-in-law of the manager of a paint store where Vincent often ran up debts. As a teacher at the local secondary school, Van der Weele had mastered the classroom art of encouraging without approving—an absence of criticism that Vincent eagerly construed as praise. “In looking over my studies,” he reported after one of Van der Weele’s visits to his studio, “he wasn’t so quick to say, ‘This or that isn’t right.’ ” That spring, after months of encouragement from Van der Weele, Vincent finally abandoned the austere, single figures and “heads of the people” that had obsessed him all winter long.

In May, Vincent agreed to give drawing lessons to the son of another paint-store owner, again probably working off his invariably overdue bills. Twenty-year-old Antoine Furnée, who was studying for an examination in land surveying, caught the brunt of Vincent’s bitterness toward a community of artists that he now denounced as “inveterate liars.” As stern a master as he was a rebellious student, Vincent condemned Furnée’s amateur watercolors as “hideous,” “horrible daubs” and put him on a strict regimen of drawing only. “I made him draw many things which he did not like at all,” Vincent reported proudly to Theo. On their joint sketching trips, according to Furnée, Vincent never stopped talking: filling his student’s captive ears with all the pent-up arguments for which he had no other audience.

But Vincent found no comfort in these occasional contacts. “I should like to find and keep up a
real
friendship,” he lamented, “[but] it is difficult for me … Where it is conventional, bitterness is almost unavoidable.” He called himself a
“sentinelle perdue”
(lost sentinel)—“a poor struggler of a sick painter”—and compared himself to the tattered prints that he pulled from trash bins: “ignored and looked down upon as worthless rubbish, garbage, wastepaper.” He saw in his loneliness a martyrdom for art, succeeding his martyrdom
for love. His imagination poured out images of lonely martyrs to console his solitude, from Christ in the Garden to Andersen’s Ugly Duckling. He cast himself as Quasimodo, Hugo’s despised, bandy-legged hunchback in
Notre Dame de Paris
. From the depths of self-loathing, he rallied himself with the hunchback’s pitiful cry:
“Noble lame, vil fourreau / Dans mon âme je suis beau”
(A noble blade, a vile sheath / Within my soul I am beautiful).

On March 30, Vincent passed his thirtieth birthday alone, rereading Hugo’s tale of hounded exile,
Les misérables
. “Sometimes I cannot believe that I am only thirty years old,” he wrote. “I feel so much older when I think that most people who know me consider me a failure, and how it really might be so.”

To escape such thoughts, Vincent took long walks. Abandoning the troubled Schenkweg apartment, he strolled the familiar alleyways of the Geest, and hiked to the distant sea at Scheveningen, calling the seashore a great antidote “for a man who is downcast and dejected!” He walked in storm and snow. He walked past the lavish house of Jozef Israëls—still the paragon of Millet piety and bourgeois prosperity—and peered longingly in the open door. (“I have never been inside,” he noted ruefully.) His considered going farther—lighting out for the country, for the Borinage, or for England.

To avoid encountering former acquaintances, especially Tersteeg, Vincent walked the cobblestone streets of the city center only at night. In the empty Plaats, he often stopped at Goupil’s gaslit window and stared at the works displayed there. One evening in April, he stood for a long time gazing at a small marine by Jules Dupré. He had given a print of the same or a similar image to his father seven years before, after being fired from Goupil. It was a dark painting—especially in the low, fluttering gaslight—so he came back many evenings in order to truly
see
it. “What an almightily beautiful impression it makes,” he wrote Theo. In moody tones and agitated brushwork, it showed a small sailboat caught between a roiling sea and an angry sky. In the distance, an opening in the clouds defined an island of sunlight where the water was green and smooth. The boat’s fragile prow pointed the way to the distant light. “When my worries become too great,” he wrote, “I feel as if I were a ship in a hurricane.”

There were times, however, when no ray of light appeared in the distance, when life seemed “something like an ash heap,” he said; and it took all his effort to avoid “staring into the unfathomable.” He talked openly of regret (“some things will never return”) and obliquely of suicide—and what might lie beyond. “One begins to see more and more clearly,” he wrote, “that life is only a kind of sowing time, and the harvest is not here.”

ON THE SCHENKWEG
, the only escape was illusion. Pressured by Theo for salable work, cut off from outsiders, and hounded by creditors, Vincent spun
further and further into unreality. In early spring, he launched yet another ambitious plan to create an iconic image like
Chelsea Hospital
—a
manifestation
that would answer Herkomer’s mandate to “attract attention and fix a reputation.” With Van der Weele’s encouragements in his ear and Rappard’s paintings of tile painters in his competitive eye, he returned to an old subject: soup kitchens. He had visited the
établissements de bouillon
in Brussels with Rappard. He had also sketched the municipal kitchen in The Hague with Breitner. The subject had lingered in his imagination throughout the winter, sustained by numerous prints in his collection, surviving even the failed effort at watercolor group scenes in September.