Van Gogh (7 page)

Vincent’s reading would eventually range far beyond the books approved by his parents. But these early exposures set the trajectory. He read with demonic speed, consuming books at a breakneck pace that hardly let up until the day he died. He would start with one book by an author and then devour the entire oeuvre in a few weeks. He must have loved his early training in poetry, for he went on to commit volumes of it to memory, sprinkled it throughout his letters, and spent days transcribing it into neat, error-free albums. He kept his love of Hans Christian Andersen, too. Andersen’s vividly imagined world of anthropomorphic plants and personified abstractions, of exaggerated sentiment and epigrammatic imagery, left a clear watermark on Vincent’s imagination. Decades later, he called Andersen’s tales “glorious … so beautiful and real.”

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HOLIDAYS AT THE PARSONAGE
offered a special opportunity to display family solidarity in the face of isolation and adversity. Celebrations crowded the calendar of Zundert’s model Protestant household: church holidays, national holidays, birthdays (including those of aunts, uncles, and servants), anniversaries, and “name days” (days set aside to celebrate common first names). Anna, who organized all the festivities at the parsonage, lavished all her nervous energy and anticipatory nostalgia on these set pieces of family unity. Ropes of greenery, flags, and bouquets of seasonal flowers festooned the dark rooms. Special cakes and cookies were laid out on a table decorated with bunches of fruits and branches of flowers. In later years, Anna’s children would brave the hardships of travel, sometimes coming great distances, to attend these celebrations. When they couldn’t, letters would fly to everyone, not just the honoree, congratulating all on the happy occasion—a Dutch custom that turned every holiday into a celebration of family.

In the long calendar of celebrations, nothing compared to Christmas. From Saint Nicholas Eve, December 5, when a visiting uncle dressed as Sinterklaas distributed candy and presents, to Boxing Day on the twenty-sixth, the Van Goghs celebrated the mystical union of the Holy Family and their family. For weeks, the front room of the parsonage rang with Bible readings, carols, and the clatter of coffee cups as the members of the tiny congregation gathered around the garlanded fireplace. Under Anna’s direction, her children decorated a huge Christmas tree with gold and silver paper cutouts, balloons, fruit, nuts, candy, and dozens of candles. Presents for all the parsonage children, not just the parson’s, were piled around the tree. “Christmas is the most beautiful time at home,” Anna decreed. On Christmas Day, Dorus took Vincent and his brothers on holiday visits to sick congregants—“to bring St. Nicholas” to them.

Every Christmas, by the warmth of the back-room stove, the family concluded the annual reading of one of Dickens’s five Christmas books. Two of them stayed in Vincent’s imagination for the rest of his life:
A Christmas Carol
and
The Haunted Man
. Almost every year, he reread these stories, with their vivid images of Faustian visitations, children in jeopardy, and the magical reparative power of domesticity and the Christmas spirit. “They are new to me again every time,” he said. By the end of his life, Dickens’s tale of a man hounded by memories and “an alien from his mother’s heart” would unsettle Vincent in ways he could never have imagined as a boy by the stove in Zundert. What he did feel then, and would feel more and more acutely in the years to come, was the indissoluble union of Christmas and family. “It seems to me,” says Redlaw, the tormented Scrooge of
The Haunted Man
, “as if the birth-time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I have ever had affection for, or mourned for, or delighted in.”

No celebration was complete without gift giving. From the earliest age, the Van Gogh children were expected to find or make their own presents for birthdays and anniversaries. All learned how to arrange bouquets of flowers and baskets of food. Eventually, every one of Anna’s children developed a repertoire of crafts to satisfy the demand for holiday tokens. The girls learned embroidery, crochet, macramé, and knitting; the boys learned pottery and woodworking.

And everybody learned to draw. Under their mother’s tutelage, all the Van Gogh children mastered the parlor arts of collage, sketching, and painting, in order to decorate and personalize the gifts and notes they relentlessly exchanged. A simple box might come adorned with a bouquet of painted flowers; a transcribed poem, with a cutout wreath. They illustrated favorite stories, marrying words to images in the manner of the emblem books widely used to teach children moral lessons. Although prints and other store-bought goods would eventually replace collage and embroidery at Van Gogh celebrations, handmade gifts would always be honored as the most authentic offering on the altar of family.

TO SURVIVE THE RIGORS
of outpost life, Anna’s children had to be as disciplined as frontier soldiers. All eyes were on them, both friendly and unfriendly. Behavior in the parsonage was governed by a single word: duty. “Duty above all other things,” Anna declared.

Such exhortations carried the weight of centuries of both Calvinist doctrine and Dutch necessity. Calvin’s cry, “Whatever is not a duty is a sin,” had a particular resonance for inhabitants of a flood-threatened land. In the early days, if the seawalls were breached, everyone’s duty was clear enough: they rushed to the break with spade in hand. Feuds were suspended, a “dike peace” was declared. Doubters and shirkers were driven into exile; violators, put to death. If a house caught fire, the owner had a duty to pull it down immediately to prevent the flames from spreading to his neighbors. The duty of cleanliness protected all from the spread of contagion. By the time of Anna’s generation, duty had achieved the status of a religion, and Dutch families like the Van Goghs worshipped a domestic “holy trinity” of Duty, Decency, and Solidity.

First and foremost, duty meant upholding the family’s position in society.

When Anna Carbentus traded her upper-middle-class maidenhood in The Hague for life as a parson’s wife in Zundert, there was, according to a prominent historian of the period, “no country in Europe … where people [were] more class-conscious as to their manner of living, the circles to which they belong[ed] and the social category in which they [were] placed” than Holland. Upward mobility was virtually impossible—and viewed with deep disapproval. Downward mobility was the terror of all but those at the bottom. And at a time when deep
class divisions ran between city and country, a permanent move to a rural area like Zundert threatened just such a slide.

The parson and his wife stood at the apex of Zundert’s tiny elite. For centuries, clergymen like Dorus van Gogh had been setting the country’s moral and intellectual agenda, and entering the ministry was still one of only two ways to rise up the social ladder (going to sea was the other). Dorus earned only a modest salary, but the church provided the family with the perquisites of status—a house, a maid, two cooks, a gardener, a carriage, and a horse—that made them feel and appear richer than they were. The family’s midday strolls enhanced the illusion: Dorus in his top hat and the children with their governess. Such emblems of status cushioned the fall from social grace that Zundert represented to Anna, and she clung to them with more than the usual worried tenacity. “We have no money,” she summed up, “but we still have a good name.”

To protect that good name, Anna instilled in her children a duty to associate only in “civilized good circles.” Virtually all success and happiness in life, she believed, flowed from mixing in good company; all failure and sin, from falling into bad company. Throughout their lives, she relentlessly encouraged them to “mingle with the well-to-do” and warned them against the dangers of associating with those “not of our own class.” She clucked with pleasure whenever one of them was invited to the home of a “distinguished family” and issued detailed instructions on cultivating such connections.

In Zundert, the “good circle” included only a few distinguished families who summered in the area and a handful of Protestant professionals. Beyond or beneath that tiny circle, Anna did not let her children venture. Beyond lay only Catholic families; beneath lay the working people of Zundert—those who filled the Markt (and the dreaded festivals) and whose company, Protestant or Catholic, Anna considered an invitation to every form of base behavior. “It is better to be around upper-class people,” she advised, “for one is more easily exposed to temptations when dealing with the lower classes.”

Even farther outside the circle, and absolutely untouchable, lay the unwashed mass of faceless, nameless, landless laborers and peasants that drifted by at the very periphery of polite consciousness. These were the cattle of humanity in the eyes of Anna’s class, not only obstinately ignorant and immoral, but lacking the “heart’s luxuries” (sensitivity and imagination), and indifferent to death. “[They] love and sorrow like people who are exhausted and live only on potatoes,” instructed a parenting handbook that the Van Goghs read. “Their hearts are like their intellects; they have not progressed beyond primary school.”

To ensure that they did not violate these social boundaries, the Van Gogh children were forbidden to play in the street. As a result, they spent most of their time isolated inside the parsonage or in the garden, as if on an island, with only each other for company.

To move in any good circle, even one as small and remote as Zundert’s, one had to dress properly, of course. “To present [one]self pleasantly,” Anna instructed, “is also a duty.” Clothes had long been a peculiar obsession of the Dutch and a stage for the subtle class distinctions that preoccupied them. Gentlemen, like Dorus, wore hats; workers (and children) wore caps. Gentlemen wore long formal coats; workers wore smocks. Only a woman of leisure could be bothered with the awkward crinoline hooped skirts that Anna wore. Clothes, like the daily walks that displayed them to the community, marked Anna’s family as members of the upper middle class.

Inevitably, clothes acquired talismanic significance among the Van Gogh children, the conferring of the first store-bought cap or grown-up suit or overcoat treated as milestones of family status and pride. In later years, both parents rained questions and advisories on their children in endless variation on the lesson of the midday walks in Zundert: “Always make sure that people see a gentleman when they look at you.” Indeed, good clothes and a neat appearance signaled something even more important than class status: they signaled inner order. “What one wears on the outside,” Anna and Dorus taught, reflects “what goes on in the heart.” A stain on one’s clothing was like a stain on one’s soul; and an expensive hat could ensure that one “made a good impression by his exterior as well as his interior self.”

This was the other lesson of the family walks in Zundert: clothes were a public covenant of good behavior and moral uprightness. For the rest of their lives, the Van Gogh children would view any walk in public as a kind of fashion parade for the soul. Years later, Anna told her son Theo that a stroll in a smart suit “will show people that you are the son of Reverend van Gogh.” Twenty years after he left home, Vincent emerged from the hospital in Arles (where he had been confined for mental instability after cutting off part of his ear) with one overriding concern: “I have to have something new to go out in the street in.”

In the Zundert parsonage, even the heart had its duty. The Dutch called it
degelijkheid
. Anna called it “the basis and source of a happy life.” The last of the holy trinity of social deities,
degelijkheid
(often rendered inadequately in English as “solidity”) summoned the Dutch heart to protect itself from the tides and storms of emotion that had proved so devastating in the past. History had taught that every triumph was followed by defeat, every plenty by want, every calm by upheaval, every Golden Age by apocalypse. The heart’s only protection from the inexorable righting of fate was to seek the solid middle ground, whether in prosperity or adversity, elation or despair. In eating, in clothing, even in painting, the Dutch aimed for the golden mean: the prudent, sustainable balance between sumptuousness and frugality.

Degelijkheid
fit perfectly with Victorian calls to repress unseemly emotions, as well as with the new Protestantism’s rejection of Calvinist zeal. Once again,
Anna’s fretful, defensive nature aligned with the zeitgeist. As an inveterate balancer of positives with negatives in her own gloomy calculations, Anna saw her role as keeping the ship of the parsonage on an even emotional keel. Good times would always be followed by “misfortune,” she reminded her children; “troubles and worries,” by “comfort and hope.” Not a moment of joy passed in the Van Gogh household without Anna’s calling attention to its inevitable cost—its “shadow side.” But melancholy, too, was forbidden. “He who denies himself and is self-possessed,” Anna summarized, “is a happy man.”

The Van Gogh children grew up in a world drained of emotion as if of color; a world in which excesses on all sides—pride and passion on the one hand, self-reproach and indifference on the other—were leveled and centered in the service of
degelijkheid;
a world in which every positive had to be balanced by a negative; a world in which praise was always tempered with expectation, encouragement with foreboding, enthusiasm with caution. After leaving the island parsonage, all of Anna’s children were buffeted by extremes of emotion with which they had no experience and for which they had no defense. All showed astonishing insensitivity or obtuseness in dealing with emotional crises—in some cases, with catastrophic results.

Duty, Decency, Solidity. These were the conventions of a happy life—the compasses of a moral life—without which “one cannot become a normal person,” Anna warned. Failure to uphold them offended religion, class, and social order. Failure brought shame to the family. Or worse. The literature of the period bristled with cautionary tales of a “bad life” leading to a tumble down the social ladder. Closer to home, Dorus had a nephew whose shameful conduct had forced his widowed mother into exile, where she “died of a lot of misery,” according to the family chronicler, “and cast a shadow on our house.”