Vincent Van Gogh Page 2

  How rich art is. If one can only remember what one has seen,

  one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.

  —LETTER TO THEO, NOVEMBER 1878

  VINCENT, HOMESICK BUT TRYING to make the best of it, sketched the view looking out the window of a small school in Ramsgate, England. The scratchy picture—a lamppost, a curving driveway, the corner of a building, and beyond it the ocean—was for Theo. “Enclosed is a little drawing of the view from the school window where the boys wave good-by to their parents when they are going back to the station after a visit. No one of us will ever forget the view from the window,” Vincent wrote.

  After many letters and inquiries, he finally had found a position at a small boarding school for poor English boys between the ages of ten and fourteen. He received no salary. Mr. Stokes, who ran the school, said he could attract all the teachers he needed in return for food and lodging.

  Although Mr. Stokes played marbles with his students and took them for walks on the beach, Vincent reported that Stokes sometimes lost his temper. “When the boys make more noise than he likes, they occasionally have to go without their supper. I wish you could see them looking from the window then, it is rather melancholy; they have so little else except their meals to look forward to and help them pass their days.”

  The school resembled something out of Vincent's favorite English author, Charles Dickens. Roaches crawled all over the old building. The room where the boys washed had rotten floorboards and broken windowpanes through which the wind whistled, but the view of the ocean almost compensated for the discomfort. Ramsgate was a charming seaside village of about six thousand people almost eighty miles from London. Vincent's letters describing the area to Theo display an eloquence that his drawings had yet to achieve. “The ground we walk on was all covered with big gray stones, chalk and shells. To the right lay the sea as calm as a pond, reflecting the light of the transparent gray sky where the sun was setting.”

  Scenic vistas, however, were not enough to sustain him. When Mr. Stokes moved his school from Ramsgate to Isle-worth, closer to London, Vincent began to look for other work. He had turned his back on the art business and now announced that “there were no professions in the world other than those of schoolmaster and clergyman, with all that lies between these two—such as missionary, especially a London missionary.”

  He accepted a new job at a school in Isle worth with the Reverend Mr. Slade-Jones, who at least paid him a meager salary. More exciting was the opportunity Mr. Slade-Jones offered him to preach. Vincent read Bible stories with the boys and taught Bible history. His letters home, crammed with religious meditations, caused his parents to worry about his lack of balance. If their son wanted to be an evangelist, his father fretted, he should start the necessary studies, not go on and on in this unpractical way.

  In October 1876 Vincent preached his first real sermon: “Sorrow is better than joy—and even in mirth the heart is sad—and it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasts, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.” It wasn't a crowd pleaser. The gloomy message aside, he was not a good speaker. Like his father, he lacked the gift of inspiring his listeners, and certainly his heavy accent didn't help.

  Even without preaching, the schedule at Mr. Slade-Jones's school was grueling, and Vincent labored nonstop. He taught languages, lectured on the Bible, weeded the garden, tutored, and acted as the school's bill collector. Exhausted, he returned home for the Christmas holidays. His younger sister Elizabeth, who looked forward to having fun with him, instead found her brother “groggy with piety.” Vincent informed his family that his experience in Isleworth had revealed his true mission in life. Following the van Gogh tradition of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he would become a clergyman.

  His family doubted Vincent's chances for success in this vocation. It was clear, however, that for now he was better off in the Netherlands, and Vincent wrote a long letter to Slade-Jones and his wife explaining why he wouldn't be coming back.

  Uncle Cent found him a temporary job working in a bookstore, where Vincent spent most of his time in the back room, polishing his language skills by translating the Bible from Dutch into English, French, and German. At the boarding-house where he stayed, his roommate reported that Vincent lived like a saint, refusing meat and existing on a Spartan diet of bread and boiled vegetables. His only luxury was a little to-bacco for the pipe he had started smoking, and on at least one occasion he gave that up to buy food for a hungry stray dog. On Sundays Vincent amused himself by attending services at four or five different churches. He had made up his mind about his calling. Unfortunately, it took more than desire to be a pastor.

  For ordination in the Dutch Reformed Church, he would need to pass state entrance examinations, then train for six expensive years at the theological seminary in Amsterdam. Vincent spoke four languages but not the required Greek and Latin. He knew a great deal about art and literature, but didn't have a high-school degree. Preparing for the exams might take as much as two years of tutoring.

  His parents suspected that at age twenty-four their son was unlikely to develop academic discipline, but without a degree, they knew, he wouldn't be eligible for a meaningful job in the church. The whole extended family organized themselves to help Vincent out—all except Uncle Cent, who called Vincent's latest ambition ridiculous. Uncle Jan, the commandant of the naval shipyard in Amsterdam, offered Vincent room and board in his large house. Uncle Cor gave him paper and other supplies. And Uncle Strieker, a successful pastor and published author, supervised his studies and found him tutors.

  Uncle Jan's house overlooked the huge shipyard, and Vincent delighted in the hustle and bustle of the wharves. He compared the sound of footsteps of three thousand workmen on their way home to.the roaring of the sea. He found his studies less enjoyable. All too soon the reality of what he had undertaken began to worry him. It proved to be “much difficult work which I do not like—which I, or rather my evil self, would like to shirk.”

  Vincent began to feel constantly anxious. In his uneasy dreams solid, well-meaning relatives stared at him reproachfully. After all their help, how could he fail them? He tried to keep his letters to Theo cheerful, filled with news of his studies and visits to family members and their friends, but sometimes the effort was beyond him. He wrote that he had breakfasted on a piece of dry bread and a glass of beer—that being the remedy Charles Dickens advised for those who are on the point of committing suicide.

  Mendes da Costa, a young rabbi not much older than Vincent, tutored him in Latin and Greek. Da Costa liked his freckle-faced student, who might be homely but whose appearance had a “charming quaintness.” He was particularly impressed by Vincent's gentle manner with the da Costa family's aunt. While many people mocked the old woman for her twisted body and slow wits, Vincent always treated her kindly. She eagerly hurried to answer the door when he came for his lessons, and Vincent told da Costa that she was a good soul—even if she did mispronounce his name.

  Perhaps because they were close in age, Vincent confessed to da Costa what the pressures had driven him to do. For failures, real or imagined, he punished himself by beating his back with a rope or else locking himself out of his uncle's house and sleeping in a cold shed without a blanket.

  This extreme behavior did nothing to help his concentration—or his growing negative feelings toward the whole academic enterprise. Vincent excelled at languages and didn't mind Latin, but Greek he found a waste of time. “Mendes,” he said, “do you seriously believe that such horrors are indispensable to a man who wants to do what I want to do: give peace to poor creatures and reconcile them to their existence here on earth.” After a year of struggling, Vincent asked Mendes to tell his uncle Strieker that it was useless. He would not be able to pass his entrance examinations.

  Instead of looking for a profession better suited to his talents, Vincent went to Brussels, Belgium, with his father and his fri
end Slade-Jones, who traveled from Isleworth to help him. The English clergyman knew of an evangelical course there that took three years instead of six. Vincent was accepted on a trial basis.

  If he knew what trial meant, it didn't make any impression on him. When asked during a grammar lesson whether a word was in the nominative or the dative case, he replied, “Oh, sir, I really don't care.” His father received alarming reports that Vincent starved himself and slept on the floor instead of the bed. He visited his son and tried to put him back on track, but without success. At the end of his trial period Vincent was told he could stay, but not on the same inexpensive terms as the students from Belgium.

  Vincent refused to ask his parents to pay for more schooling. He wangled a six-month assignment as an evangelist and once more set out on a journey, this time to the Borinage, a grim mining district in southwestern Belgium, “far from the land of pictures.”

  There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to

  warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke

  coming through the chimney.

  —LETTER TO THEO, JULY 1880

  ONE COLD SPRING morning in 1879, twenty-six-year-old Vincent climbed into a basket and was lowered “like a bucket in a well” into the Marcasse, one of the oldest, deepest, and most dangerous coal mines in the Borinage district. Accidents happened there in a dozen different ways. Baskets often tipped or fell. At the bottom, fifteen hundred feet down, daylight dwindled to a point the size of a star in the sky. The miners faced poisoned air, firedamp explosions, water seepage, and cave-ins. Vincent said they got used to it but never lost their horror and fear.

  With his vivid visual memory he recalled for Theo the strange subterranean world of the mining tunnels. The lamps of the miners gleamed eerily off the wet stone walls as they worked in chambers extending from the main corridor, some in spaces so tight that they had to use their picks lying down-Young children of both sexes loaded coal into the carts that ran down a rail in a main corridor. Seven old horses stabled at the bottom of the mine pulled the carts to the place where the coal was raised to the surface.

  Vincent didn't visit the Marcasse for a tourist thrill He thought the trip was a necessary part of understanding the desperately poor people of the region, to whom he was supposed to minister: “One might live here for years and never know the real state of things unless one went down in the mines.”

  He had arrived at his Borinage assignment reasonably well dressed, looking like a “clean Dutchman.” He boarded with a local baker and began his duties of teaching and preaching. The miners, “worthy of our respect and sympathy,” fascinated him. They lived in small houses—scarcely more than huts—scattered through the woods and along the narrow, twisting old roads. Large chimneys and towering mountains of coal loomed at the mine entrances, which were everywhere.

  In his effort to identify with the miners, Vincent moved out of the baker's comfortable house and into a hovel, where he slept on a straw mattress. He gave his warm clothes to the needy, dressed in an old army jacket, and stopped washing the coal dust from his face. One day the baker's wife saw him walking down the street wearing the shabby coat and hat and asked why he had given away all his clothing—“you who are descended from such a noble family of Dutch pastors!”

  He answered, “I am a friend of the poor like Jesus was.”

  She replied bluntly, “You're no longer normal.”

  Many shared her opinion. Vincent's determination to follow Christ's teachings and give up all he had made people uncomfortable. They regarded him as a kind of holy fool, a man to be respected but not followed. When a mine fire wounded many workers, Vincent tore up his own shirts, soaked them in olive oil, and tended the burns of a man the doctors had given up for dead. The head of the mission criticized his excessive behavior, but Vincent was his usual obstinate self. If he believed he was doing the right thing, other people's opinions didn't matter.

  After the trial period, the mission sponsors refused to renew his appointment. They stated that he lacked the gift of oratory; unofficially, Vincent's behavior was judged “too extreme.” Desperate and humiliated, he moved to the next town, living on small amounts of money from his father and, when that ran out, on charity.

  In early October 1879, Theo, once more enrolled as the family's messenger of reason, visited his down-and-out brother with some practical suggestions. Why didn't Vincent become an engraver of letterheads and cards, or a carpenter's apprentice, a librarian, or even a baker?

  Vincent thanked Theo for his advice and reminded him, a little sarcastically, of his attempt to attend theological school. All the wise family discussions and the months of effort had resulted only in failure. It had been the worst, most miserable time of his life. He still shuddered when he thought of the whole absurd undertaking. But at least he had learned something important from the experience—he would have to depend on himself.

  After that came silence. For more than nine months Vincent ceased writing to his brother. At one point Mr. van Gogh, convinced his eldest son was crazy, tried to have him committed to an insane asylum. No one knew how he survived the winter without money or a job, Vincent later blamed his lined face and rough manner on having too often slept outdoors, cold, hungry, and fevered.

  What he didn't tell Theo was that he had settled on a new ambition. During the summer of 1879 he wrote to Mr, Ter-steeg, his first boss at Goupil, requesting some watercolors, a sketchbook, and two manuals on learning to draw. He claimed to be sketching the miners as a souvenir of his experiences. How could he risk disclosing another plan that might fail?

  No one looking at his stiff, lumpy drawings would have predicted success, but Vincent excelled at persistence. He copied all the lessons on anatomy and the human figure in the how-to-draw manuals and tried to apply them to his own sketches of miners and peasants.

  With only his books to guide him, Vincent made slow progress. In the winter of 1879-80 he grew depressed. Impulsively he decided to visit the studio of one of his art heroes—the French painter and poet of peasant life Jules Breton. He hoped to meet his idol and even ask for work. That Breton lived in the town of Courrières, a forty-five-mile round trip, was an unimportant detail. Vincent set out on the train but soon found himself on foot. The train didn't go all the way to Courrières, and even if it had, he had only ten francs, too little for a ticket. At least he was a great walker. Walking was free.

  When he ran out of money, he exchanged some drawings for crusts of bread. He slept in the open air, in an abandoned wagon that was white with frost in the morning, in a pile of wood, and in a haystack—the most comfortable of his sleeping places, he said, until it began to rain.

  When he got to Courrières he never saw the artist. He lacked the nerve to knock on the door and introduce himself, let alone ask for a job. He looked at Breton's new studio, a substantial brick building that seemed alarmingly middle-class to Vincent, who believed a painter of poor people should live like one. He looked in the inn, also built of “repellant” brick, with a mural “of inferior quality” painted on the wall. He looked in the church, where he saw a copy of Burial of Christ by Titian that he said had a wonderful tone. And that was all.

  He started home again, footsore and weary. The countryside around Courrières comforted him: farms with mossy thatched roofs, peasants driving horses, woodcutters, and women wearing the white caps traditional to that region. From that trip he drew mysterious encouragement. “I said to myself, in spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing. From that moment everything has seemed transformed for me; and now I have started and my pencil has become somewhat docile, becoming more so every day.”

  Theo sent fifty francs by way of their parents, which broke the long silence between the two brothers. Vincent wrote reluctantly to thank him. He referred to his solitude in the Bori-nage as his molting time, comparing it to the time when a bird goe
s out of sight to change its feathers and emerges renewed. He denied the family's assumption that he simply had been idle. “Such a man does not always know what he could do but he instinctively feels, I am good for something, my life has a purpose after all… How could I be useful, of what service can I be?”

  Vincent had his own answer to this question. He was no longer religious, if religious meant that one participated in what happened in church, but he believed in God. Through his art he aspired to convey that belief and the passionate feeling for humanity that had led him into missionary work, “1 always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something—whatever you like—you will be on your way to knowing more about Him.”

  While he didn't exactly announce his ambition to be an artist, his drawing was no secret. In one of his first letters to Theo, he begged him for prints, including anything by Jean-Francis Millet, a French artist of peasant life he revered almost above all others. He said he had been copying several of Millet's works, including The Sower, painted in 1850. “Send me what you can and do not fear for me. If I can only continue to work, somehow or other it will set me right again.”

  The Borinage had been the place where Vincent hit bottom and finally realized what his life's work would be. Now he had practical problems. Another cold winter approached, when the weather would make it impossible to work outdoors. But the miner's hut where he boarded was too cramped and dank to serve as a studio. So without any discussion he packed up his few belongings and moved again—this time back to Brussels.