Leaving Van Gogh Read online

  “Like his father. A familiar way of life, perhaps,” I suggested, trying to make the decision seem rational.

  But Theo could not quite accept my reasoning. “Yes and no. He went to the Borinage as a missionary to the coal miners. I don’t know if you know anything about that part of the country—perhaps you’ve read Zola’s Germinal?” I nodded, recalling the bleak account of unremitting labor, poverty, and violence. “Zola spares nothing. It is as he portrays it, a terribly harsh way of life. Vincent became ill. He gave away all of his food, all of his furniture.”

  I thought of the women at the Salpêtrière. The wards had been full of monomaniacs, patients fixed on one dominating fantasy. Many of them refused food for one reason or another. “Yes. I see,” I said. “Did he know who he was? Was he emulating Christ? Or did he believe he was Christ?” Such a delusion was common among the mad.

  “He knew at all times who he was,” Theo answered. “He had by then lost his faith. I brought him to our parents’ house to recover. That was when he decided to be an artist.” There was another pause. “You must understand, Dr. Gachet, that Vincent’s goal is to help people. He thinks that somehow, with his art, he can express important truths about the nature of life. He believes that it is his absolute duty to do so. At any cost.”

  We were silent for a moment. Theo’s last words seemed to echo in the suddenly hushed room. One had to wonder, then: was it the art itself that had attracted Van Gogh? Or was it the chance for self-sacrifice? Monomaniacs are capable of harming themselves in the most preposterous ways. When you question them, however, their thinking—you could not call it reasoning—has a certain coherence. Apparently this Vincent saw himself as some kind of savior. Theo did not appear to grasp how grandiose the delusion was.

  “And why was he in the asylum?”

  Theo did not answer right away. He looked down at his knees. I waited.

  “It was a complex incident.” He paused again, then raised his head and made as if to rise. “I realize that these are your consulting hours, Monsieur le docteur, and I don’t want to trespass on them.”

  I gestured to the empty chairs. “Do you see any other patients?” I asked. “I am at your disposal. And if I am to be of any help to your brother, I really must know his whole history. Surely you understand.”

  “Yes, of course,” Theo said and folded his hands somewhat formally in his lap. He looked unseeing at the wall for a moment, clearly seeking to frame his tale. “Vincent lived at home in the Netherlands for a while, teaching himself how to paint. It was difficult for our parents. In a big city like Paris, it might not matter so much if the pastor’s son roams around bareheaded in near rags. But in a Dutch village, I assure you, such behavior prompts talk. My mother loves Vincent very much, but the neighbors were cruel.” He stopped, apparently lost in the painful memory for a moment, before flapping his hand dismissively. “In any event—I need not go into detail. Vincent came to Paris. He lived with me. He made great strides in his painting, great strides. But he is … a very difficult person to live with. His energy is frightening. He needs little sleep. He can be very argumentative. Intense. And he paints so quickly! The paintings, Doctor—they piled up. It’s not a large flat I live in. There are paintings everywhere: under beds, rolled into wardrobes. My wife is remarkably tolerant.” He took a deep breath, as if to calm himself. “We were not yet married when Vincent lived with me, and she has not yet met him, but she lives with his work.”

  He abruptly changed the subject. “Do you know Gauguin?” I wanted to ask more about this ferocious energy. I saw that, too, sometimes in the hospital wards. We call it “mania,” and it is sometimes found in combination with another form of derangement. Yet I decided to follow Theo’s lead for the moment.

  “I’ve heard the name. Somewhat farouche, I understand? Bold, swashbuckling?”

  “Yes. Enormously talented. As impossible as—no, actually more impossible than my brother. Vincent, at least, is full of gentleness and loving-kindness. His intentions are pure. Gauguin is ambitious and guileful. I think he’s quite capable of malice, but Vincent admires him very much. My brother conceived an idea that he wanted to go paint in the South. Paris was too crowded, too busy. He felt he could live cheaply and simply somewhere in Provence, and he found a house in Arles. He was going to form a ‘Studio of the South,’ and he wanted Gauguin to join him.” Theo fell silent again, now staring at his thumbs. Then he looked up at me.

  “Before he went to the asylum, I made Vincent an allowance of 150 francs a month, and I have always supplied him with painting materials. I expect to do the same once he leaves St.-Rémy, where he is now. It’s not much, but I can’t afford more; my wife will have a baby soon. I agreed to send money to Gauguin as well if he joined Vincent in Arles. Gauguin was there for only two months. I did not hear this directly from either of them, but the visit was not a success. Their temperaments … Vincent gets so set on an idea, but nothing lives up to his visions.” He took a deep breath and smiled at me. “You are very patient, Doctor, I am almost at the end.”

  “Not at all. In fact, you have mentioned …” I looked down at what I had written: Mania? Argumentative. “Studio of the South”—delusions? Delusions about women. “You have mentioned several characteristics that are familiar to me from other patients. Do go on.”

  “Well, Gauguin and Vincent quarreled. To this day I do not know exactly what happened. Gauguin says Vincent threatened him with a knife. After their argument, my brother appeared at the local brothel, covered in blood. He gave one of the whores …” Theo visibly gathered himself for the effort. “He gave her a section of his ear.” His left hand flew to his own ear and touched the lobe, as if to ensure that it was still there. “He had cut it off.”

  “So he was put under a doctor’s care?” I interjected. This was familiar territory, unfortunately. A patient’s family could often tolerate delusions or melancholy without calling upon a physician’s expertise. Self-mutilation, however, was going too far.

  “Yes. Taken to the asylum in Arles. And then released back to his little house. But the townsfolk had turned against him. Vincent is, I must tell you, a spectacle. The boys of the town took to chasing after him. He threatened them. He was considered a menace to public safety. They put him in the asylum again.” He stopped again and took a deep breath. “And then, because he did not feel safe alone, he went to the asylum at St.-Rémy. His doctor in Arles recommended it. They have been good to him there. He paints. They allow him to leave with an attendant. He says it is quite beautiful. From what his letters say, they are fond of him.”

  “Yet he wishes to leave,” I prompted.

  “Yes. He is finding it more and more difficult to be around the other patients. He feels they make him worse.”

  “This is a good sign,” I pointed out. “It is not unlike the fever patient who becomes contentious and difficult once he is on the mend. If Vincent chafes at his surroundings, that is progress.”

  It is a strange kind of comfort to offer. In fact, I suppose it is a paradox of sorts: that those patients who are sufficiently in command of themselves to be unhappy are better off than those whose minds have simply taken flight from the world. Theo stood up, apparently unaware of what he was doing, and went to the window. He peered out, unseeing. “Vincent is afraid that staying at St.-Rémy will have a bad effect on him. He is insistent about this.”

  “Does he say what it is that he fears?” I asked. “Has he ever mentioned visions or hallucinations? Many patients find these terrifying.”

  “I think he feels he cannot paint as he would like,” Theo answered, still looking out the window. “With Vincent, that is always the concern.”

  “And he is at the asylum voluntarily? He was not committed?”

  “No,” Theo confirmed, turning back to face me. “I believe he signed something to that effect.”

  “Then there will be no problem with his leaving,” I stated.

  “But—he cannot be completely alone,” Theo said.
“This is what I have come to ask, Doctor. Pissarro indicated that you were open to the idea. Would you be willing to supervise Vincent? He knows that he is too fragile to live in complete independence. If you were willing to meet with him, keep track of him, warn him …” He was now looking at me directly. “He is a difficult man, Doctor, but a good man. He is kind. He wants so much to be of some service to the world. His art is everything to him.” He gestured at the walls of the salon. “I can see that you are sensitive to artists, Doctor. You have known all of the Impressionists. Pissarro cannot praise you enough, as a doctor and as a connoisseur—”

  I cut him off. “Monsieur van Gogh, there is no need to go on. I would be happy to supervise your brother, as you put it. I think Auvers would be a very good place for him. I have a great deal of experience with mental maladies. I will know what to watch for, and how to help your brother. Very often, a patient’s circumstances contribute significantly to his illness. Auvers is a peaceful village. We will find your brother an inexpensive inn, where he can have a room and his meals. As you may know, I myself paint and etch. There is a studio in the house, and I am always delighted to have company. I have a son and daughter, and we share a quiet family existence, regular and modest. Does your brother neglect his meals?”

  Theo nodded. “I’m afraid so. Ever since the terrible episode in the Borinage, he has seen food as an interruption. Even when I tell him that he must eat to keep his strength up, he gobbles a few mouthfuls and then forgets.” He seemed to have finished but drew a breath and spoke again. “I should mention that in Arles he drank a great deal of absinthe. He used it as a way to … I think he said ‘stun’ himself. To quiet his agitation. But since he has been at St.-Rémy, he has not been drinking. He even says he feels better for it.”

  “You see, he is already on the path to better health,” I answered. “If we can persuade Monsieur Vincent to lead a wholesome life, with plenty of work to distract him from his troubles, I think he will do very well. And I would certainly be glad to help him, in any way I can. You do understand, I hope, that I am not the doctor for the town of Auvers. I practice here in Paris, so I will not be able to offer him official medical care.”

  “But what kind of medical care is there for cases like my brother’s?” Theo asked, standing again. There was bitterness in his voice. He slipped his watch from his pocket and frowned at it. “I am sorry, Doctor, to have taken up so much of your time. I must get back to the gallery.” He stepped forward and held out his hand. “I am very grateful. I will write to Vincent immediately. We will let you know when to expect him.”

  I had no doubt at all that I could help this Vincent van Gogh. I could not—and to this day I cannot—imagine who would be better suited to the task. There were not so many physicians in those days who had studied and practiced mental medicine. Of those, the “mad doctors,” how many were acquainted with the new painting and those who produced it? I knew all too well that artists put a great strain on their nerves. Their perception of the world is as important as their touch with a brush or their color sense, and it is very easy to overtax this faculty. At the same time, many of them live in terrible conditions, as Vincent had evidently done. Vincent van Gogh felt he could help the world with his painting. That seemed unlikely. It was probably this very conviction that was driving him mad. I had written my doctoral thesis on the topic of melancholy, and I knew how closely linked it was with the artistic temperament.

  If you are a doctor—indeed, if you are a man of science—another man’s suffering may become your project. I cannot deny that, as Theo van Gogh trotted down my stairs, I felt a surge of excitement. This Vincent, this mad artist, sounded fascinating, like a case study of my keenest interests. It was a fortunate thing for both of us that Pissarro had sent Theo van Gogh to me. I still believe that. I do.

  Two

  I THOUGHT OCCASIONALLY about Vincent van Gogh in the subsequent weeks. Theo’s visit had piqued my curiosity. I was convinced that Vincent’s state would improve once he was settled in Auvers. We are all affected by our surroundings—surely a painter, with his artist’s sensitivity, would be especially susceptible to the peace and beauty of our village.

  And then, before I knew it, spring came. As I get older, I find myself more astonished every year when the gray tones of winter give way to the gentle tide of green that creeps across our landscape. That spring, it seems to me, I was already anticipating Vincent’s presence, seeing the village with the eyes of an artist seeking subjects to paint.

  Auvers nestles along the bank of the Oise, northwest of Paris. The town fits into a narrow band between the river and a high chalk plateau. Although the railroad came out from Paris before 1850, it brought very little change: there are neither factories nor suburban villas in Auvers. It is still farming country. The plateau is planted with wheat, and the fields along the river are a patchwork of peas, asparagus, and grapevines. Old chestnut trees line the main street, known simply as la grande Rue, which runs east to west through the village.

  It was the beauty of this landscape that brought Daubigny here in the 1850s. Daumier came too, though of course orchards and peasants made quite a contrast to his usual urban subjects. Then Pissarro moved to neighboring Pontoise. This was in the late 1860s, just before the years when many of the other painters—Monet and Caillebotte, for instance—were working in the industrialized suburb Argenteuil, with its strange and alluring contrasts. But while Argenteuil offered smokestacks and laundry boats alongside the Seine, Auvers and Pontoise had an old-fashioned charm that Pissarro preferred. Its highlights were simply the everyday sights of trees and fields and the weather that acted on them.

  In the early 1870s, before I had moved to Auvers, I frequently came out from Paris to visit the Pissarro family as a doctor and as a friend. The train ride took only an hour from the Gare du Nord, but one might have been traveling back through time as well, so great was the contrast between the bustle of Paris and the deep peace of the countryside. Cézanne was staying nearby, and he and Pissarro sometimes painted side by side—such beautiful pictures! I still have a number of them. I cannot say I care for the direction Cézanne’s work took after that period; I find his canvases from the South harsh and sometimes unpleasant. But he painted my house several times, and I never fail to wonder at the solidity he managed to convey in those pictures. The house is a white cube, perched on a rock, surrounded by trees, approached by the curving road. In Cézanne’s paintings, it appears quite monumental.

  My house had once been a boarding school. It is on the upper side of the rue Rémy, situated slightly above the town. I must have thought, when I bought it, that higher ground would be better for my wife, Blanche. It was for her sake that we moved from Paris. She needed better air. There were other reasons, of course: we were living in the apartment on the rue du Faubourg St. Denis, which was and still is my office. It was not always easy to see patients there while Blanche and the baby, Marguerite, and our housekeeper were just steps away. Sometimes I administered electrical treatments that startled or pained my patients (temporarily only, I must add). Sometimes the baby cried, which I found distracting. The streets outside were noisy and crowded and dirty.

  But in truth, I hoped the move would improve Blanche’s health. I knew she had consumption. She must have known as well; her mother had died of the disease, and Blanche surely recognized the symptoms. I could not bear to think of her breathing the dirty air of Paris. There was nothing I would not have done for her, or so I thought. And indeed, she loved Auvers. Our tall white house very soon shed any trace of the pensionnat. We planted gardens, in front of the house and behind. Our housekeeper, Madame Chevalier, who was the willing slave of the baby, Marguerite, sat for hours on the grass outside, watching the child explore her new surroundings. One of my prized mementos from that period is an etching I made of the two of them sitting on the grass side by side. They had their backs to me, and they were shaped exactly the same, the stout little woman and the sturdy toddler.

  To
our human household we added animals. I have never been able to resist the plight of a wounded beast, and sometimes villagers would bring me their injured creatures. Blanche never minded that the animals rarely returned to their original owners. She was even patient about the peacocks, which Madame Chevalier despised. It was true that the male’s showy plumes never did grow back after his encounter with a herding dog, and nobody could love the sound a peacock makes. Madame Chevalier often threatened to bake them into a pie.

  Having come to us first in Paris as housekeeping help for Blanche, Madame Chevalier soon revealed her true nature as a benevolent despot. She took over the housekeeping, working with an efficiency that made Blanche’s efforts unnecessary. (“Go play the piano, Madame,” she would say when my wife picked up a duster. “The work will go so quickly if I can listen to you.”) Then when Marguerite was born, she ruled the nursery as well. She was pleased with our move to Auvers, sure that all children should be raised in the country, though she herself was Parisian born and bred.

  And then we had Paul, as lovely a baby as Marguerite had been, and curiously elegant for an infant. To this day he has long, slender hands, an inheritance from his piano-playing mother.

  Blanche’s symptoms went into remission while she was pregnant: tuberculosis often retreats that way. So we were a happy family of four in our tall white house on the hillside. Briefly. Then Blanche died. It was a terrible time.

  Blanche had been gone for fifteen years when Vincent came to Auvers. The children were almost grown by then. That summer Paul was still in the lycée in Paris, coming home on weekends until the term ended in June. He was tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed—a very handsome boy. He had a fastidious quality unusual in a youth of seventeen. Yet he was a feckless student, given to secrecy and a kind of mute stubbornness. Now that we are both grown men, he is something of a confidant and colleague. But in that summer of 1890, I was anxious about him; I could not imagine his course in life. I know that Madame Chevalier shared my concern. She adored the boy, but she wanted to be proud of him. He did not always make that possible.