Vincent tried to salvage what he could from the wreckage. In a letter to his father the same day, he finally admitted the unauthorized leave, but described his summary dismissal as if it had been a dignified resignation. To Theo, he compared himself poetically to a “ripe apple,” which even “a soft breeze will make fall from the tree.” For the rest of his life, Vincent would replay this humiliating episode in his head, regretting his Christlike “passivity,” and insisting that he could have defended himself against Boussod’s accusations but chose not to. “I could have said a lot of things in reply if I had cared to,” he explained to Theo, unprompted, years later, “such things as I believe would have made it possible for me to stay.”
But nothing Vincent might have said or done, then or ever, could mitigate the shame. “What a mess he has made!” Dorus wailed. “What a scandal and shame!…It hurts us so much.” “It is so terribly sad,” Anna lamented, “who would have expected this ending?…We don’t see any light … it is so very dark.” Abandoning all reticence, his parents poured out their “bitter disappointment” and “indescribable sorrow” in letter after letter to Theo. They called Vincent’s humiliation “a cross put upon us by our Heavenly Father,” and hoped only that word of the scandal might not reach Etten.
Any sympathy they felt for Vincent was snuffed out by the conviction that he had brought this catastrophe on himself—and on his family. Dorus blamed Vincent’s lack of ambition, his inability to “take charge of himself,” and his “sick outlook on life.” Anna, whose brother Johannus had committed suicide only a few months before (over some unmentionable miscreance), located Vincent’s fate in his rejection of class and family duties. “Such a pity that Vincent did not get involved more in the family life according to our station in society,” she wrote. “Without that, one cannot become a normal person.” Even Theo agreed, offering his parents the cold comfort that Vincent “will find his troubles wherever he goes.” The family chronicler summed up the consensus view: “[Vincent] was always strange.”
The parson and his wife did everything they could to contain the damage. They instructed Theo, and no doubt others, not to talk about the events in Paris. Everyone should “act as if nothing has happened,” they wrote. If asked, he should say only that “Vincent wants to change jobs.” In the meantime, Dorus asked his brother Cor to arrange a position at Cor’s bookstore in Amsterdam. If Vincent transferred from one Van Gogh enterprise to another before his final termination date (Boussod had given him until April 1), the worst humiliation might still be avoided. For a while, Dorus even thought he might overturn the sentence of the “gentlemen” in Paris. In a series of tortured letters, he urged Vincent in the strongest terms to go back to Boussod, apologize, regret his error, and ask for his job back.
But it was no use. Boussod stood firm. Uncle Cor expressed sympathy for the family’s dilemma but would not offer a job to his troublesome nephew. And not a word of condolence or mitigation was heard from Uncle Cent—although his feelings eventually found their way into the family chronicle. “Great disappointment for Uncle,” the chronicler, Aunt Mietje, wrote, “who had hoped for a good future for [Vincent] for the sake of the name.”
In Etten, Dorus mourned as if his son had died. He retreated into his study and wrote a sermon for the next Sunday: “Blessed are those who mourn, they will be consoled.”
Desperate to preserve their one remaining tie to Cent’s favor, Dorus and Anna launched a campaign to insulate Theo from the shame of his brother’s scandalous fall. They urged him to maintain his own good relations at Goupil (especially with Tersteeg). “Remember that Vincent neglected to do that,” they cautioned. Anna sent pointed advice that sounded nothing at all like the mother of the Zundert parsonage: “Let us all be independent and not depend too much on each other.” If Theo showed any sign of fraternal sympathy, they moved quickly to dispel it. Vincent should have learned his lessons, they wrote, “never mind how solid and good he is.” And lest Theo forget the damage his brother had wrought, they signed their letters, “your sad Pa and Ma.”
In his Montmartre room, paralyzed with remorse, Vincent surveyed the shipwreck of his life. He later described the events of January as “a calamity”—“the ground gave way under my feet”—“everything that I had built up tumbled down.” Six years of work at Goupil had come to nothing. He had blackened the name he wore so proudly; embarrassed the brother whose admiration he craved; and disgraced the family he longed to rejoin. In a belated effort to check the damage, he sent a flurry of letters and gifts to family and friends, but received back only polite replies—or, in the case of Uncle Cent, no reply at all. Theo wrote so sparingly that Vincent had to plead for news: “I long to hear from you … speak to me of your daily life.” What he did hear about Theo, mostly by other routes, only sharpened the pain: a new promotion, a successful spring sales trip, another volley of praise from Uncle Cent, and a substantial salary increase. Overwhelmed by guilt, Vincent returned forty florins that his father had sent him.
At the end of January, Harry Gladwell moved out of Vincent’s boardinghouse, adding isolation to shame. Vincent clearly suspected the timing, only weeks after the debacle with Boussod. In a flash of the paranoia that would later engulf him, he blamed Gladwell’s abandonment on a conspiracy against him. The Englishman’s occasional visits after that could not prevent him from lapsing into old patterns of solitude and self-pity. “We feel lonely now and then and long for friends,” he wrote Theo (distancing himself from the hurt, as he often did, with the plural pronoun). “We would be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: ‘He is the one.’ ” Within days of Gladwell’s departure, Vincent attached himself to another employee at work, another troubled young Dutchman, Frans Soek. Vincent invited Soek back to his room and read to him from Andersen. He visited Soek’s Paris apartment where he lived with his wife and mother-in-law. Vincent described them as “two sympathetic souls,” and may have briefly imagined making them into his next family.
BUT HE HAD TO LEAVE. The shame was too great for him to remain in Paris. His parents dutifully invited him to stay in Etten, but disgrace no doubt awaited him there as well. For reasons he never revealed, Vincent was “firmly resolved” to return to England. To live on his own, however, he had to have a job. Dorus’s strained finances could never subsidize his wanderings—even if Vincent were willing to take his father’s money. But Vincent could think of nothing he wanted to do. The sudden “uprooting” (his word) from Goupil had left him demoralized, adrift, and deeply mortified at the prospect of hunting for another job. “One is simply ‘someone out of work,’ ” he despaired, “a suspicious character.” His parents suggested that he take up accounting, or perhaps build on his indisputable strength (and only experience) by working in an art museum. Or, if he still had a “love for his profession,” why not set up as an art dealer on his own, just as both his uncles had done?
But Vincent showed no interest in art. He cared only about the reparative drama playing out in his cabin with Frans Soek and Harry Gladwell, who still came for weekly poetry readings. He felt he had “an inclination for instruction,” he wrote his father vaguely, and hoped that “the enthusiasm would follow.” He had read George Eliot’s Felix Holt, in which the hero supports himself and his widowed mother by instructing young boys. He imagined doing the same. With no more consideration than that, Vincent began responding to advertisements in English papers seeking teachers and private tutors. His parents despaired of his chances. “It will take a lot of study and effort to acquire the necessary tact and ability,” they worried, “and it’s not clear that he wants to prepare himself.”
All Vincent’s inquiries were either rejected or went unanswered. As his termination date approached, he grew increasingly anxious. April 1 loomed like Judgment Day. “My hour approaches,” he wrote Theo. Defying his parents, he determined to go to London—with or without a job—as soon as he left Goupil; he would stop in Etten only briefly on his way to England. In the m
eantime, he struggled to stem the rising tide of anxiety and self-reproach by turning again to Kempis’s Christ. “You will feel great comfort in time of trial … when men despise you,” Kempis promised. Was not Christ, too, “abandoned by friends and acquaintances”?
But as his departure neared, Vincent turned to older, deeper consolations. Despite his impending poverty, he bought more prints for his growing collection. He spent his final weeks in Paris not bidding farewell to friends or revisiting favorite sites, but filling out the album he had begun for Matthijs Maris. With the art world in upheaval around him and his own life in collapse, he sat alone in his garret feverishly copying entry after entry from the voices of his youth—Andersen, Heine, Uhland, Goethe—summoning up his truest friends with ink and pen; busying his hands with page after page of tight, flawless script; calming his head with mantric repetitions of their familiar images—evening mists and silvery moonlight, dead lovers and lonely wanderers—and comforting his heart with their insistent assurances of a higher love.
ON FRIDAY, MARCH 31, the day after his twenty-third birthday, Vincent left Paris. It was an uncharacteristically orderly leave-taking for Vincent, who hated good-byes and would spend the rest of his life preempting them with precipitous flights. Gladwell, who saw him off at the train station, took Vincent’s job at Goupil and moved into his room in Montmartre—exactly reprising Theo’s role three years earlier in The Hague. At the last minute, a letter arrived offering a position at a small boys’ school in Ramsgate, a resort community on the English coast. The news gave Vincent’s departure the air of a fresh start rather than an ignominious end. It wasn’t much (the job paid nothing initially), but at least it provided room and board and a place far away to hide his shame.
The brief stay in Etten rekindled old longings. Vincent made a pencil drawing of the family’s new home, the Etten church and parsonage, with every fence picket and window sash lovingly detailed and every contour meticulously emphasized in pen. He took a train trip to Brussels to see his sick Uncle Hein. He may have revisited Zundert. His parents called the days he spent in Etten “good days,” and insisted hopefully, “He is a good man.” Vincent seemed to want to linger. A trip originally scheduled for only “a few days” gradually extended to several weeks. On April 8, Theo arrived, detouring to Etten on his spring sales trip.
But Vincent could not stay. Every time the subject of art came up, as it inevitably did, his parents could not hide their disappointment that he was leaving a profession he knew so well for one that he knew not at all. “It’s incredible how much he loves art and how deeply it touches him having to leave it all behind,” Anna lamented. “We hope that he will find a good vocation [but] 24 boys in a boarding school is no small thing.” Theo’s arrival only threw Vincent’s failure into higher relief. Instead of setting off into the unknown, Theo would be returning to The Hague to help with Goupil’s move to a new and even grander gallery on the Plaats.
Vicarage and Church at Etten, APRIL 1876, PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 3½ × 6⅞ IN. (Illustration credit 7.1)
Vincent’s train left at four in the afternoon on April 14, two days before Easter, bound for the port at Rotterdam. Not until that moment, alone on the platform, did Vincent seem finally to realize what he had done: he had banished himself. Suddenly overcome with second thoughts, he took a piece of paper and began to scratch a plaintive note. “We have often parted before,” he began, “[but] this time there was more sorrow in it than there used to be.” After he boarded the train, he continued writing, setting out the argument for his return. “But now [there is] also more courage because of the firmer hope, the stronger desire, for God’s blessing.” It was the argument that he would make for the next five years, in words and deeds (and after that, in images): if he loved God enough, his family would have to take him back.
Only a few months before, Vincent had found a poem that perfectly expressed the knot of homesickness, self-reproach, and resentment he felt as the train left behind the meadows and creekbanks of his childhood. He sent it to Theo, saying that “it struck me in particular”:
How impetuously a wounded heart rushes…
Towards the first refuge where, young and at peace,
He used to listen to himself singing amidst the silence.
With what bitter zeal, my soul, do you revel
In the house where you were born…
And yet, O chimera, you were deceiving us!
For in your beautiful illusion a superb future
Was opening out its rich sheaves like a glorious summer,
Its fluttering ears like real suns.
You lied. But what irresistible charms they have,
These ghosts one sees in the ruby-red distance
Shimmering iridescently through the great prism of one’s tears!
CHAPTER 8
Pilgrim’s Progress
TWELVE YEARS LATER IN ARLES, WAITING SLEEPLESSLY FOR THE ARRIVAL of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh spent many late nights at a café frequented by the homeless and the vagabond—“night prowlers,” he called them. He considered himself one of them—condemned to wander forever in the yellow gaslight of all-night cafés, pursuing a mirage of “family and native land” that existed only in the yearning imaginations of those without them. “I am a traveler,” he wrote, “going somewhere and to some destination…[only] the somewhere and the destination do not exist.”
When he left for England in April 1876, Vincent set out on that journey.
For the next eight months, he hardly stopped. Ricocheting from place to place, from job to job, he traveled hundreds of miles back and forth across the English countryside, “going somewhere.” He took boats and trains and buses and carts and even a subway. But mostly he walked. At a time when rail travel was so cheap that even shopgirls could afford third-class tickets, Vincent walked. He walked in all weathers, at all times of day and night, sleeping in the open, foraging in the fields, eating in public houses or not at all. He walked until his face was sunburned, his clothes tattered, and his shoes worn thin. He walked at a deliberate pace—three miles an hour by his own reckoning—as if the destination didn’t matter; as if walking itself—the sheer accumulation of miles, the wearing down of shoe leather, the fraying of laces, the raising of blisters—was the measure of a man’s devotion.
In Ramsgate, he walked the beaches dotted with “bathing machines.” He walked the dockside and the huge jetties that reached out toward his homeland. He walked the paths along the tops of the chalk cliffs with their “gnarled hawthorn bushes” and brave wind-bent trees. He walked the fields of corn that floated above the sea right up to the cliff edge, as inviting as the Zundert heath and only minutes from the school where he taught. He walked to coves and inlets up and down the coast.
Only two months later, when his school moved from Ramsgate to London, he followed on foot—a trek of fifty miles in the punishing summer heat, the longest single journey of his time in England. “That is quite a stroll,” he bragged to Theo. A steamboat up the Thames could have taken him as far in a few hours for only a handful of pennies. He slept one night on the steps of a church, and stayed for only two restless days before setting off again to see his sister Anna in Welwyn, thirty miles farther on. The next day he walked the final twenty-five miles to Isleworth, the small town on the far side of London where his school had relocated.
Picturesquely sited on a bend in the Thames, Isleworth would have been the ideal place for Vincent to settle. Instead, he used it as a base from which to launch repeated expeditions into the city, ten miles downriver. Largely ignoring the frequent trains, he walked the route again and again, in all weathers, day and night, leaving early and returning late, sometimes two or three times in a single day. Every trip to London justified a dozen lesser trips: endless walks crisscrossing the city’s mad traffic and labyrinthine streets to see his old workplace, visit a former associate, investigate a job prospect, even view a landmark church—anything, it seemed, to keep moving.
In July,
he changed jobs. The new position, at another school in Isleworth, required him to travel to London and elsewhere to visit sick students and parents who had fallen behind in their school fees—duties that took him to some of the city’s remotest neighborhoods. In September, he considered going to Liverpool or Hull—to find another job, he said. At other times, he talked of sailing to South America. “One sometimes asks, ‘how shall I ever reach my destination?’ ” he wrote Theo.
What was propelling Vincent down these rough country roads and busy city streets, pushing him perhaps even to the far side of the world? Partly, it was the same urge to escape that had rushed him out of Paris and Etten. During the summer and fall, his letters spoke about breaking chains and flying to “safety,” about escaping from the sin and “deceitful tranquility” of his previous life. He read books about criminals on the run and consoled himself with daydreams about the ultimate escape of death.
No doubt he was striking back at his parents as well. His letters alternately kept them elaborately informed of his grueling travels or lapsed into ominous silence—a combination perfectly designed, if not intended, to punish them with worry. “He keeps making hours-long treks,” Dorus wrote Theo, “which I fear will affect his appearance, so that he will become even less presentable … those are excesses that aren’t right … We suffer because of this.”
Van Gogh Page 17
