Van Gogh (71 page)

Landscape in Drenthe
, S
EPTEMBER-OCTOBER
1883,
PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 12⅛ × 16½ IN.
(
Illustration credit 20.2
)

Man Pulling a Harrow
, O
CTOBER
1883,
LETTER SKETCH, PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 3½ × 5¼ IN.
(
Illustration credit 20.3
)

—

AT FIRST THEO
dismissed his brother’s pleas with breezy objections (the family depended on him) and polite demurrals (painters are born, not made). But resistance only stoked the fire. Before long, Vincent’s furious attacks on Goupil and art dealing jolted Theo out of his disillusionment. Choosing duty over solidarity, as he always did, he chided his brother as a dreamer, and confessed that his heart was still in the art business. “I will have to stick it out for all our sakes,” he wrote in a refusal that only Vincent could have taken as equivocal. “All that [is] rubbish,” Vincent retorted, dismissing his brother’s arguments. Pleading letter followed pleading letter. But the longer and more baroque Vincent’s missives, the shorter and more summary Theo’s eventual replies; the more sweeping and passionate Vincent’s arguments, the more immovable Theo’s refusals.

Vincent eventually placed much of the blame for his predicament on Theo’s mistress, Marie. Early on, Vincent had encouraged his brother to enter into a formal engagement with his companion of a year, imagining her to be an ally in the campaign to lure Theo away from Paris. Overcome by the vision of a family of painters on the heath, Vincent had even recommended that Theo bring Marie with him to Drenthe. “The more the merrier,” he exclaimed, adding, “If the woman came, of course she would have to paint, too.” But Theo’s silence changed all that. As he would five years later when Theo proposed marriage to another woman, Vincent turned against the intruder. “This woman of yours, is she good? Is she honest?” he probed. Perhaps Marie had “bewitched” him, Vincent suggested, planting doubts with words like “poison” and “enchantment.” He compared Marie to Lady Macbeth—a wicked woman with a “dangerous craving for ‘greatness’ ”—and warned Theo that he, like that lady’s infamous husband, risked losing his “sense of right and wrong.”

In this contest of escalating rhetoric and contrary motion, it was inevitable that Vincent would turn to darker threats. Defying Theo’s repeated objections, he reiterated his plan to flee to Brabant and impose himself on their aging parents if Theo chose to stay at Goupil. He even threatened to renew his ties to Sien. “I should not stop seeing her to please anybody,” he warned pointedly. “Let people think and say what they like.” Theo parried every provocation with a combination of delay and courtesy and cleverly invited Vincent to come to Paris instead, dangling the possibility of a role for him in a future business venture. The unexpected counterinvitation briefly threw Vincent off his fiery stride (“there are things for me to learn in Paris as well as here on the moor,” he conceded), but he quickly recovered, dismissing the plan as “too much in the air for my taste” and discouraging his brother from any new ventures other than painting in Drenthe.

In early November, Theo tried yet again to cut off the exchange with an especially curt note. “For the present,” he wrote, “things will remain as they are.” It had exactly the opposite effect. Enraged, Vincent shot back an ultimatum that exposed the raw need beneath his exhausted arguments. If Theo did not quit Goupil, he warned, “it is my intention to refuse your financial help.” As hard as Vincent tried to portray this threat of self-destruction as an offer of self-sacrifice (“I don’t want my needs to be a reason for your staying [at Goupil]”), he could not hide its dark, coercive heart. He vowed to throw himself headlong into “the tempest,” sternly setting a deadline for Theo’s final decision, and solemnly granting his brother permission “to have nothing more to do with me.” He promised to look for work, any work, to support himself, but despaired of finding it, and warned of “enervation” if he did. He enclosed some studies “as a small sign of life,” but added miserably, “Of course I do not suppose they will be considered saleable.”

Even before he posted it, Vincent regretted the letter’s threatening message and petulant tone. He added two postscripts of qualifiers and mollifiers (“Please don’t take what I tell you amiss”), but sent the letter nevertheless. When Theo failed to respond, or to send the next fifty-franc payment when it was due, Vincent panicked, fearing that his brother had accepted the apocalyptic offer.
“It made me crazy when your letter did not come,”
he confessed, as he flooded Theo with explanations and equivocations.

Theo eventually sent more money, as he always did, but Vincent’s arguments had so incensed him, apparently, that he refused to make up the missing payment. In a stinging rebuke, he insisted that he took “renewed pleasure” in his work at Goupil, and compared Vincent to the wild-eyed, peasant-loving Nihilists who had recently assassinated the Russian czar—icons of ruinous fanaticism and contempt for civilized norms.

It was enough, finally, to snuff out the last traces of hope—“the last straw,” Vincent called it. “Differences of opinion are
no
reason to overlook the fact that we are brothers,” he wrote dejectedly. “One must not blame the other or become hostile, or spiteful, or throw obstacles in each other’s way.”

Only a few days later, Vincent left Drenthe. He had intended to stay a year, but debt and despair drove him out after less than three months. He left abruptly, without a word to the innkeeper in Veenoord, or to Theo. In a final humiliation, he had to walk the sixteen miles back to the train station in Hoogeveen. Dressed in tattered clothes, suffering from a rare cold, and reviled by locals as “a murderer and a tramp,” he walked for six hours across the featureless moor, carrying what he could through a storm of freezing rain and snow. By his own telling, he cried most of the way. With every step, he thought of Theo: one minute burning with anger over his brother’s refusal and bitterly rehearsing yet another round of arguments; the next minute staggering under a new weight
of guilt and remorse. Later, he summed up the arduous journey with the most consoling of all images: “a sowing of tears.”

He was headed home, of course: partly in order to save money, partly in defiance of Theo, partly in imitation of Rappard (who had left Drenthe to live with his parents), partly because he had no place else to go. But mostly because all his roads led that way. He brought with him an impossible burden of old grievances and fresh injuries, borne with the resignation of a prisoner returning to his jailer. “We must live on until our hearts break within us,” he wrote Theo. “We are what we are.” He came pursuing yet another vision of rebirth—“the gnarled old apple tree that bears the most delicate and virginal blossoms under the sun”—and packing, in his paint box, a new means of expressing that vision.

He arrived just in time for Christmas.

T
HE SUN BEATS DOWN ON A MUDDY NILE. HEAT RISES FROM THE SURFACE
in sulfurous fumes. On the distant riverbank, barely visible through the haze, minarets and lotus-column ruins drift past. The boat cuts through the still water leaving barely a ripple. The air is so windless and heavy with heat that the boat’s forward motion barely stirs the muslin blouses of the five men on board. The two oarsmen—one brown, one black—grope forward to the next stroke. At the prow, a man in a tall fez, with a dagger slung across his chest, watches their labor, grimly impervious to the heat. At the stern, a man with a pistol tucked in his tunic strums a
buzuq
. Grinning in mockery, he sings a poem of ridicule to the defeated enemy at his feet. Crammed crosswise in the narrow boat, tightly bound and gagged, the captive clenches his jaw in frustration and struggles to free himself, but he can only watch helplessly as the oarsmen beat him to his dreadful fate and the singer tortures his final hours, trapped in a drama he is powerless to alter, carried on a river he cannot see.

Gérôme’s
The Prisoner
enchanted the nineteenth century. With its deliciously exotic imagery and mysterious narrative spiced with oriental intrigue, it became one of the most popular images of a popular artist working in the era’s most popular genre. Even if Vincent never saw the painting when he lived in Paris, he saw the image again and again in the stockrooms of Goupil, where thousands of copies were packed and mailed to a cosseted bourgeoisie hungry for vicarious jeopardy.

To Vincent, however, the image spoke in far more personal terms. He had always seen himself as a prisoner, bound by captors both seen and unseen. The language of bondage and confinement—“cramped,” “thwarted,” “hampered,” “hindered”—fills his letters with jaw-clenching frustration. He described himself as a man “consumed by a great longing for action” who could do nothing
“because his hands are tied … because he is imprisoned somewhere.” In the Borinage, he compared himself to a caged bird, and confided to a housemate: “Since I entered the world, I have felt myself in a prison.” He complained bitterly that the failures of the past bound him more surely than any ropes:

J
EAN-LÉON
G
ÉRÔME
,
The Prisoner
, 1861,
OIL ON CANVAS, 17¾ × 30¾ IN.
(
Illustration credit 21.1
)

After the Christmas expulsion from Etten two years earlier, he lashed out at the captivity of exile: “One feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep, dark well, utterly helpless.” He kept a special place in his inner gallery for images of confinement, starting with the shackled, prostrate figure at Christ’s feet in Scheffer’s
Christus Consolator
. “I am bound in different ways,” he wrote from Isleworth in 1876, “but the words engraved above that image of [Christ] are true to this day, ‘He has come to proclaim liberty to the
captives.’
”

His portfolios overflowed with depictions of imprisonment: from catalogues of famous prisons to scenes of convict life. To his parents’ horror, he celebrated as heroes the criminals he found in literature, from the petty crooks of Zola’s
Pot-Bouille
to the magnificent martyrs of Hugo’s
Histoire d’un crime, Le dernier jour d’un condamné
, and
Les misérables
. Only months before leaving The Hague, he had bragged to Theo that he modeled his defiant behavior on
Ut mine Festungstid
(
During My Incarceration
), Fritz Reuter’s autobiographical account of rebellious prison life in a Prussian fortress.

The train pulled into Eindhoven on December 5 and Vincent trudged the last five miles to Nuenen, just as he had trudged the first sixteen from Drenthe, through bitter winter weather. He bore an intolerable weight of grievances, each one a heavy link in a chain that reached back to the Zundert parsonage. His parents had never “given me freedom,” he wrote, “nor have they ever approved of my desire for freedom.” Everywhere he turned, they had opposed him, obstructed him, thwarted him. Their implacable disapproval had brought him to tears of indignation. “I am no criminal,” he cried. “I don’t deserve to be treated in such an inhuman way.” In his love for Kee Vos, in his artistic ambitions, in his rescue of Sien, they had “closed their ears and eyes” and “hardened their hearts” against him. They had mocked him with their absurd gossip and laughed at his delusions—“thinking me a person who is always dreaming and incapable of action.” He compared himself to Gérôme’s prisoner lying bound and taunted in the bottom of a boat. “I am chained to misfortune and failure,” he cried.