The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  The picture did indeed have an impact on younger artists—unknown to Vincent—such as Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, but it was a formal not a spiritual one. Their responses were to that amazing expanse of crazily exuberant wallpaper. La Berceuse was a daring step into a previously unexplored art: space and mood were created by color and pattern, which made a whole world of its own.

  There had been a hard frost on Wednesday, followed by three days of heavy rain. L’Intransigeant reported on Saturday the twenty-second of December that the murderer Prado, so defiant and insouciant at his trial, had been reduced to a state of terror haunted by nightmares while in his prison cell awaiting execution. The day of his death was drawing near.

  On that evening, Gauguin sat down to write a long letter to Schuffenecker—the longest communication he had sent to anybody since he arrived in Arles. Its copiousness suggested that he no longer had anyone to talk to closer to hand. Communications had broken down completely in the Yellow House.

  Schuffenecker had offered Gauguin hospitality in Paris, but Gauguin still wasn’t quite ready to leave Arles. Gauguin thanked him for his offer; he wasn’t coming straight away, but he might on an instant:

  My situation here is painful; I owe much to Van Gogh and Vincent and despite some discord I can’t bear a grudge against a good heart who is ill and suffers and wants to see me. Do you remember the life of Edgar Poe in which, as a result of sorrows, a nervous temperament became alcoholic? One day I’ll explain it all to you thoroughly.

  I’m staying here for now, but I’m poised to leave at any moment.

  His comparison was drawn from the biographical essay on Poe by the poet Charles Baudelaire that served as a preface to his translation of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination—which themselves contained plenty of Horla-like insanity and haunting. But Gauguin was not saying Vincent was actually insane.

  Baudelaire presented Poe as a heroic, almost saintly victim. It was “sorrows” that had driven the American writer to the bottle. Gauguin’s implication was that Vincent was not only a boozer but also a creative spirit of rare quality.

  To Baudelaire, Poe was a:

  man who had climbed the most arduous heights of aesthetics, and had plunged into the least explored abysses of the human mind, he who, in the course of a life which seemed like a storm without respite, had found new means, unknown techniques, to make an impact on man’s imagination, to enchant all minds athirst for beauty.

  That described Vincent’s achievement exactly.

  If Gauguin implied that Vincent was a problem drinker, there was no reason to doubt him. He had been spending virtually every moment of every day with Vincent for two months. Gauguin might have been vague about facts, but not that vague. Vincent’s neighbors in Arles also complained that he behaved oddly when he had been drinking.

  At the close of December, Vincent might have been drinking more heavily than usual, as he had been working flat out for several weeks. In the previous month, he had painted twenty-five pictures, several of them among the finest he ever produced.

  Furthermore, the painting on which he was currently engaged, La Berceuse, was a complex chromatic combination—“the reds moving through to pure orange, building up again in the flesh tones to the chromes, passing through the pinks and blending with the olive and malachite greens.” He was extremely pleased with it: “As an impressionist arrangement of colors I have never devised anything better.” But working out such combinations was precisely what led Vincent to “stun” himself with alcohol. Added to this was the worry that Gauguin was about to leave.

  Two considerations still restrained Gauguin from going. One was that he felt guilty about deserting Vincent. The other was that he was concerned about how Theo might react if he did. “I need Van Gogh,” he confided to Schuffenecker. Gauguin wanted to leave Arles, when he did, in such a way that Theo would be “bound” to him even more rather than feel able to withdraw from their agreement. Gauguin swore Schuffenecker to secrecy about the whole matter and also asked him to make enquiries about the possibility of Gauguin doing some casual work in the pottery workshop where he had worked before—in case the worst should come to the worst.

  The letter went on and on, quite unlike the brief notes Gauguin had sent Schuffenecker earlier in his stay. He was concerned that his sales through Theo had dried up. This was because the financial outlook was grim. The Human Miseries, which had not been sold, meant a lot to him; he would like Schuffenecker, who had a private income, to buy it (as he eventually did). He described the frame it should have: black with a yellow line on the inside edge.

  “If I am able to leave,” he announced, “in May, with life assured in Martinique for 18 months, I will almost be a happy mortal.” He hoped to be followed there by his disciples, “all those who have loved and understood me.” Gauguin elaborated his ideas of a better world in which men would live happily together under the tropical sun. But simultaneously he foresaw that his path in life would be lonely. In doing so he revealed how completely he had now absorbed Vincent’s mental landscape. “Vincent,” he noted, “sometimes calls me ‘the man who has come from far away and will go far.’”

  “You remember Manfred”—as usual, Gauguin got the name wrong: he meant de Musset—“Wherever I go to settle down in some corner of the earth I see a man dressed in black who looks at me like a brother.”

  Gauguin wrote on, for nine pages. Eventually, he closed his letter, even though, that “rainy evening,” he could have gone on until morning. Under his signature, he did a little drawing of a memorial plaque he had invented for himself, presumably as a joke about his new status as a great artist. It was a cartouche, bearing the date and the initials PGo, once again spelling out “pego,” or “the prick.”

  Gauguin wrote Schuffenecker’s address with a flourish, and then walked out into the rain to mail the letter. He had missed the last collection of Saturday the twenty-second, which went at 10 o’clock, but his letter was in time for one of the first express trains on the following day, Sunday the twenty-third. That was the day on which the catastrophe, so long impending, finally occurred.

  Vincent continued to paint La Berceuse. In an attempt to lure Gauguin into staying at the Yellow House, he reminded him that the great Degas had said he was “saving himself up for the Arlésiennes.” If the women of Arles were good enough for Degas, surely the place had enough interest for Gauguin?

  At some point he asked Gauguin point-blank if he was about to go. Gauguin described the encounter to Emile Bernard a few days later:

  I had to leave Arles, he was so bizarre I couldn’t take it. He even said to me, “Are you going to leave?” And when I said “Yes” he tore this sentence from a newspaper and put it in my hand: “the murderer took flight.”

  These words were printed at the end of a small news item in the day’s edition of L’Intransigeant. An unfortunate young man, one Albert Kalis, had been stabbed from behind while walking home at night. He had been taken to Bicêtre hospital in a desperate condition. “The murderer took flight.”

  The painters—according to Gauguin’s much later recollection—proceeded to have their supper, cooked by Gauguin, as usual. Gauguin “bolted” his and went out to walk in Place Lamartine. He gave two quite different accounts of what happened next, and he was the only witness, because Vincent’s memory of that night was very vague. He told the following story to Bernard, who narrated it to the critic Albert Aurier:

  Vincent ran after me—he was going out; it was night—I turned around because for some time he had been acting strangely. I mistrusted him. Then he told me, “You are silent, but I will also be silent.”

  Fifteen years later, Gauguin gave a more sensational version of the encounter:

  I felt I must go out alone and take the air along some paths that were bordered by flowering laurels. I had almost crossed the Place Victor Hugo [sic] when I heard behind me a well-known step, short, quick, irregular. I turned about on the instant as Vincent rushed towa
rds me, an open razor in hand. My look at that moment must have had great power in it, for he stopped and, lowering his head, set off running towards the house.

  This was vivid, but there were several indications that it was also partly imaginary. Not only did Gauguin again muddle Place Lamartine with Place Victor Hugo, he also confused its vegetation. He wrote of lauriers—laurels—in flower. There are certain varieties of laurel which bloom in winter, but what he probably meant was Laurier-rose, or oleander, the flower “that speaks of love,” which Vincent had painted in September. When he wrote this passage, in his mind Gauguin was walking through Vincent’s paintings of these gardens which had hung in his bedroom.

  Was there any more reality to that sinister blade, glittering in Vincent’s hand? The indications were that it was also a product of his imagination. The knife had been employed as a weapon by both Jack the Ripper and Prado in recent times, and their crimes had been widely reported. And that powerful gaze with which the crazed Vincent was subdued recalled the authority that the brothers Pianet exercised over their wild beasts at the circus.

  It was true that Vincent was capable of acts of mild violence when deranged—kicking his nurse up the backside, for example. It was also the case—and the only evidence that lends any credence to Gauguin’s story—that Vincent later regretted not using greater violence in defending the Yellow House against the citizens of Arles.

  But, assuming the razor existed only in Gauguin’s mind, why did he make up this grave accusation against his by then dead friend? The next paragraph of Gauguin’s narrative supplies the motive:

  Was I negligent on this occasion? Should I have disarmed him and tried to calm him? I have often questioned my conscience about this, but I have never found anything to reproach myself with. Let him who will cast the first stone at me.

  Obviously, Gauguin felt guilty; and he had examined his conscience.

  By the time he wrote those words Vincent had already been established as a great painter and a saint of art. If Gauguin had not turned on his heel, if he had returned to the Yellow House and soothed his friend, perhaps the disaster would have been averted—although, in the long term, the fate that was overtaking Vincent was probably inexorable. So, Gauguin supplied a very good reason for leaving. Nobody, after all, could blame him for refusing to spend the night under the same roof with an armed madman who had threatened to attack him. As it was, Gauguin had had enough. He spent the night in a hotel.

  Vincent returned to the Yellow House, perhaps after he had completed the mission on which he was going out that night, according to Gauguin’s first account. Possibly he posted his letter to Theo, or he went and had a drink, or both. Later in the evening, around ten-thirty to eleven, he took the razor with which he sometimes shaved his beard and cut off his own left ear—or perhaps just the lower part of it (accounts differ). In this process, his auricular artery was severed, which caused blood to spurt and spray.

  As Gauguin remembered the scene the following day:

  He must have taken some time to stop the flow of blood, for the day after there were a lot of wet towels lying about on the tiles in the lower two rooms. The blood had stained the two rooms and the little staircase that led up to our bedroom.

  This indicated either that Vincent was in the studio, in the presence of his new painting, La Berceuse, when he mutilated himself—or that he had done so in the bedroom and then walked downstairs.

  After he had staunched the gore pumping from his head with the linen which he had bought so proudly for the Yellow House, he put the little amputated fragment of himself—having first washed it carefully, according to Gauguin—in an envelope of newspaper (perhaps that morning’s L’Intransigeant).

  Then he put on a hat, pulled right down on the injured side of his head—Gauguin recalled that it was a beret, perhaps Gauguin’s own, left lying around after his abrupt departure. Vincent went out across Place Lamartine once more, through the gateway in the town wall, turned left and then took the second turning on the left, and walked to the brothel at No. 1 Rue du Bout d’Arles. There he asked the man on the door if he could see a girl named Rachel, and delivered to her his grisly package.

  There are two slightly different accounts of how he did this. The following week the Forum républicain carried this version in its local news section:

  Last Sunday at 11:30 p.m. one Vincent Vaugogh painter, of Dutch origin, presented himself at the maison de tolérance no. 1, asked for one Rachel, and gave her… his ear, saying, “Guard this object very carefully.” Then he disappeared.

  Gauguin told Bernard that Vincent gave a more biblical-sounding instruction when he handed over his nasty package: “You will remember me, verily I tell you this.”

  Not surprisingly, Rachel fainted when she discovered what she had been given. Somehow, Vincent got home. He climbed the blood-spattered stairs, put a light in his window and fell—as he had before during these attacks—into a deep, deep sleep.

  What had been going on in Vincent’s mind that led him to do something at once so horrible and so oddly specific? It was as though he was following a ritual of his own devising. (Though, in the wake of Vincent’s example, more disturbed people were to mutilate their ears in the future.)

  Vincent himself claimed afterwards to have only the vaguest recollection of what had occurred. But perhaps he just preferred not to go into it. When questioned by his doctor, he replied that the reasons were “quite personal.”

  However, there were some clues. It seemed that Vincent, who did not normally sing, had sung in his madness. He sang “an old nurse’s song,” because he was “dreaming of the song that the woman rocking the cradle sang to rock the sailors to sleep.” That was, he explained to Gauguin, the same subject “for which I was searching in an arrangement of colors before I fell ill.”

  After subsequent attacks, Vincent confessed he was plagued by religious fears, and also by what he dubbed “religious exultation”:

  I am astonished that with the modern ideas that I have, and being so ardent an admirer of Zola and de Goncourt and caring for things of art as I do, that I have attacks such as a superstitious man might have and that I get perverted and frightful ideas about religion such as never came into my head in the North.

  So his wild thoughts that evening seemed intimately bound up with the subject of the picture he was painting: a mother rocking a cradle, who was also, at least in his mind, a Madonna comforting sailors who were afloat on perilous seas. Looking back on this project of painting a holy woman from life, he reflected that the emotions it aroused were “too strong.”

  There were other hints at the thoughts that whirled in his head that night: two narratives that obsessed him, both connected with the previous occasion on which he had had a household and a studio—“a studio with a cradle”—and lost it. Both of these stories involved the cutting off of ears.

  The first story was the drama of Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Foreseeing his arrest, torture and crucifixion, Christ prayed, saying, “If thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” Vincent had seen his decision that he should leave the reformed prostitute Sien Hoornik and her two children in terms of the Agony in the Garden.

  In the New Testament, after Christ accepted his fate, Judas burst into the garden accompanied by armed men, come to arrest him. When the disciples saw what was going to happen, they thought of defending Christ by force, “And one of them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear.”

  The other narrative was Zola’s novel, The Sin of Father Mouret. Vincent read it shortly after the birth of Sien’s baby Willem, in July 1882. A fantasy rather than a realistic novel, this book dealt with a crisis in the life of Serge Mouret, a priest in a small village in Provence. Vincent must have found a remarkable number of parallels to his own life in this book.

  The central character, Father Serge Mouret, was ecstatically pious—just as Vincent had been in the Borinage. Then he suffered
a crisis—as the young Vincent had. He collapsed, “his teeth chattering,” before a statue of the Virgin.

  When Mouret awakes, he is in paradise—or rather in Le Paradou, a huge, overgrown garden to which Doctor Pascal Rougon has taken him to recover. He is nursed by Albine, a wild teenage girl who lives there with her grandfather. Under her care, he recovers, and together they explore the paradise garden. This is described by Zola in paragraph after paragraph of overheated—indeed, hothouse—prose. Great stress is laid on the sexuality of the plants and trees. The effect is of a horticultural Kama Sutra.

  Finally, the inevitable fall occurs: Albine and Serge make love and Serge is driven from the garden by the stern and violent local friar, Brother Archangias (or “Archangel”). He returns to his life as a priest and resists Albine’s entreaties to return to her, the garden and love. Eventually, she kills herself, poisoned—rather improbably—by flowers. The final scene of the book is that of her funeral.

  The characters of the novel gather in the cemetery beside Albine’s grave. Then a new figure appears: Jeanbernat, Albine’s grandfather:

  He stood behind Brother Archangias and seemed for an instant to be gazing intently at the back of his neck. Then, as Father Mouret was finishing the prayers, he calmly pulled a knife from his pocket, opened it, and chopped off the friar’s ear.

  Vincent had this book—and the drama in the Garden of Gethsemane—in his mind when he was making the decision to leave Sien. Then, he wrote that “a Paradou is beautiful, but a Gethsemane is even more beautiful”—the implication being that spiritual struggle was a more compelling subject than an erotic idyll. And he was certainly reminded of Zola’s novel when he saw the rampant vegetation of Provence at Montmajour. Very probably, he also knew that one of the farms there, whose fields he painted, was called Le Paradou.