Leaving Van Gogh

Ten





MADAME VAN GOGH may have been surprised to see me on her doorstep, but she expressed only pleasure. The apartment was very appealing, bright and clean and cheerful, but the air of orderly Dutch housekeeping made Vincent’s pictures look especially remarkable. I might even say they appeared ferocious. My hostess saw my eyes rest on a strange, dark canvas of a group of peasants in a shadowy hut, sitting around a table. A platter of potatoes lay on the table, and the oldest woman in the picture was pouring coffee. Her hands were twisted with arthritis. The colors were mostly browns and umbers, as if it had been painted with earth. I could barely recognize it as Vincent’s, though in places I could see his characteristic heavy application of paint. “That was one of Vincent’s first ambitious pictures,” Jo told me. “He painted it in Holland, before he came here to live with Theo. Let me show you my favorite, the almond blossoms he sent after the baby was born.”

She led me into the little alcove where the baby’s crib was set underneath what I think might be the loveliest picture Vincent ever painted. In format it was like the painting of chestnut blossoms that I still possess, but the colors were lighter and the brushwork more serene. Theo had described it as “tender,” which was right. The pink and white blossoms sprayed across a sky of an exquisite blue. “Vincent can be very difficult,” his sister-in-law said, “but this is part of him, too. He can be so gentle and sweet.” She guided me into the dining room and stood by a little cabinet beneath the window. “Theo’s note says you would like to read some of Vincent’s letters. Will that help you? Can you help him, I mean?” She opened a drawer and lifted out a loose sheaf of envelopes and folded pages. Her frank, open face seemed very hopeful.

“Madame, I do not know,” I confessed, shaking my head. “Like you, I want very much to do so. I was explaining to Monsieur van Gogh that mental maladies are difficult to diagnose, especially since I do not know Monsieur Vincent very well. Your husband thought that these letters might help.”

“Well, perhaps they may,” she said, shrugging. “Will you sit—at the table here, perhaps? Would you be comfortable there? You could lay the letters out, and I will bring you some coffee.”

“Yes, of course, thank you,” I said, feeling somewhat helpless. Theo’s description of his wife’s quarrel with Vincent seemed less puzzling now that I saw her as mistress of her own home, with the effortless authority of the virtuous housewife.

Settled at the polished table, with a gleaming blue and white coffeepot and a platter of bread and cheese to go with the coffee, I could not help thinking of Theo. This home, so cheerful and serene, seemed like an embodiment of all that was wholesome. Yet the man of the house was suffering from a malady that was born in shame. Many of the patients at both Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière were syphilitic, so I was all too familiar with its outward signs. They were astoundingly varied: tumors and joint pains, gastric troubles and deafness, jaundice and paralysis could all be caused by syphilis. The timetable for the development of the illness was also variable. Every doctor knew that it began with a sore on the patient’s genitals, and that the secondary infection, which occurred a few months later, could include rashes, fevers, and loss of hair. Then came a period of calm, which might last years, or even decades. Many patients considered themselves cured at this point. I could not believe Theo van Gogh would have married Johanna knowing that he was syphilitic, for fear of passing along the disease. But he might have thought the disease had been vanquished. Syphilis and consumption were the two secret scourges—familiar to everyone but never mentioned, advancing and retreating, deadly but mysterious. I felt a moment of deep discouragement. I had been powerless to save my wife from consumption. What made me think that I could help the Van Gogh brothers?

Yet I must make an effort. They were all counting on me. I turned my attention to the letters and was quickly absorbed. I became oblivious to the life of the apartment occurring around me. A maid was dusting in the sitting room. Madame van Gogh went out, with the baby in a carriage, and came back with a bunch of flowers. A delivery from the fishmonger was received angrily by the maid—the wrong fish, not enough fish, a bad fish.

The very first letter I read made me question what I was doing, for it was dated from Auvers. In the third paragraph Vincent described meeting me: “I have seen Dr. Gachet, who gives me the impression of being quite eccentric, though his medical experience must maintain his equilibrium while he struggles with the nervous troubles that he clearly suffers from as badly as I do.” I scanned the rest of the letter quickly, stung by Vincent’s assessment. On what basis could he make such a judgment? I thought back to what I had said and done on that occasion; surely nothing outside the ordinary? I found it difficult to concentrate, as my memory of our first encounter kept coming between me and the page covered with Vincent’s tidy script.

But as I read I soon forgot my pique and began to notice something peculiar in the way the artist leapt from topic to topic then circled back. Money, his ability to paint, and his impression of me alternated like cards in a game of solitaire.

I put the letter aside and picked up another one. I tried to read quickly. Vincent’s handwriting was quite clear and usually very controlled. Some of the letters included tiny sketches of paintings he described to his brother, like a square drawing of a cypress tree. Two small figures walked along the road next to it, followed by a horse-drawn cart. An enormous moon and a glowing star dominated the sky. Often he mentioned what he was reading as well. Evidently Theo had sent him a collected volume of Shakespeare’s plays, for he commented on reading the plays about the kings: “But what I find touching … is that the voices of these people, which in the instance of Shakespeare reach us from a distance of several centuries, don’t appear strange to us. It is so vivid that one believes one knows them.” Naturally he focused on describing his work to Theo. Painters cannot always put into words what it is that they are doing, but Vincent wrote vividly and informally about his ambitions and how he meant to achieve them.

About half an hour had gone by when Madame van Gogh reappeared and touched the coffeepot to be sure it was still warm. “Do you think this is helpful?” she asked. “We have many more letters, that cabinet is just full of them. Look.”

I turned, and she opened its door to show me a mass of papers, tightly packed. She laughed a little at my expression. “As with the paintings, so also with the letters, Doctor,” she said. “When Vincent is not painting or reading, he is writing letters. Fortunately these take up less room than the canvases. Have you read the ones I gave you? Those were just at the top of the drawer, here.”

“Yes, I have finished these,” I answered, eyes fixed on the paper bursting from the cabinet. “They are in no order at all, then?”

“The most recent ones are together,” she said, “but otherwise, no.”

I raised my hands from the table in a gesture of helplessness.

“Do you think I could be of any help, Doctor?” she asked. “If you told me what you were looking for, could I help you find it?”

“I hardly even know what I am seeking,” I answered. “Monsieur Vincent seems dejected, disillusioned. Yet at the same time, he has been volatile in recent days.” I told her about the episode with the dog, and with the unframed Guillaumin. I wondered if she knew the particulars of his attacks, and the likelihood that he would soon suffer another one.

“And of course there was our argument this weekend,” Madame van Gogh said, touching the corner of one of the letters. “I have written to Vincent to apologize, but I fear I said cruel things.”

“He appears to have taken them to heart,” I said, though I was aware that it might pain her. “Too much so. A man with better nerves would have been able to recover from your disagreement.”

“Yes.” She put several letters together and tapped them into a neat stack without looking at them. “That is just what Vincent does not have. So you are looking for letters that will give you a sense of that imbalance?”

I nodded.

“When I came here,” she went on, “he was in the asylum at St.-Rémy. Theo shared his letters with me. They were heartbreaking, Doctor. He felt completely defeated.”

“Could you find them, do you think?” I asked. “I would like to get a sense of how his mind was working then.”

“Not very well, I assure you,” she replied tartly. I was reminded what a difficult situation this was for her. “I think those letters are in the drawer. Let me look.”

She pulled the entire drawer from the cabinet, spilling letters all over the polished surface of the table. “Here, Doctor. Why don’t you put the ones you’ve read to one side, and we will go through these together?” I obeyed, and in a moment we were sitting side by side, surrounded by folded pages. I had to trust that Madame van Gogh knew what she was looking for. I skimmed over page after page, looking for references to madness, depression, hallucinations—I hardly knew what—but I found a great deal about paintings instead. Paintings Vincent was working on, paintings he was thinking about, paintings he had seen, paintings Theo had seen. There were requests for materials: paints, canvas, brushes. My eyes popped when I saw how much paint Vincent required, but I should not, I suppose, have been surprised, considering how thickly his canvases were covered. Most of these letters seemed to come from the asylum, and there were references to his care there: therapeutic baths, talks with the doctor, the dreadful food.

In one letter there were sketches on several pages: a path in a garden, and a magnificent drawing of a death’s-head moth with Vincent’s writing all around it, as if the moth had fallen onto the page and stayed there. My eye was caught by a sentence about artists who had been mentally ill: “Previously I felt some disgust for these creatures and it was distressing to me to have to think about how many men of our métier … had ended up like that.” Vincent, it seemed, was beginning to classify himself among them. He was even coming to value the fellowship among his fellow patients, maniacs and hysterics among them. “If someone falls into a kind of attack the others watch over him and step in so he does himself no harm.” A few pages along—it was a very, very long letter—he wrote even more clearly about the nature of his attacks, and this, I thought, might be useful to me: “I am still—speaking of my circumstances—so grateful for another thing. I notice about others that they, too, in their attacks, have heard noises and weird voices as I have, and that things seemed to change forms as well. And this reduces the terror that I still felt about the attack that I had.… For enduring that agony is no joke.… Nothing would have pleased me more than never to wake up again. At the moment this dread of life is already diminished, and the melancholy milder.” I put the letter down quickly. There was something frightening yet familiar about the matter-of-fact way Vincent spoke of death. If you once allowed yourself to think so coolly about abandoning life, it was like crossing a border. At the next crisis, death would beckon, crooking a bony finger. Each time you saw him, he would look more familiar, less appalling.

“Here, Doctor,” Madame van Gogh was saying. “Here is one of the letters where he talks about being a soldier. It is so sad! He has lost all of his confidence, you will see. Thank goodness he was able to recover from this state.”

In the letter Vincent wrote that he saw himself as a burden, and he thought the army might accept him—feed him and clothe him in return for his services. It would have been a laughable notion if it had not been so pathetic: what use could an army possibly make of Vincent van Gogh? Yet even as he made his argument, he had enough sense to see that Theo might think this was another crazy idea. It was as if the tide of madness had begun to recede and currents of sanity occupied his thoughts from time to time. He found the routine in the hospital reassuring; he knew that the army was an organization that allowed its members no choice; therefore, he should be in the army. There was a certain logic to it.

Beside me, Johanna suddenly put down the letter she was reading. “But I am forgetting: we received a letter from Vincent only yesterday! It was …” Her eyes shifted as she tried to remember what was in the letter, and she blushed. “Oh, dear, perhaps I should not have mentioned it. I don’t know if I should show it to you.”

“Madame,” I said quickly, “if it is a matter of Monsieur Vincent’s opinion of me, you need hide nothing. I have already encountered evidence of his skepticism.” I patted a pile of the letters I had read so that she would understand. “I would very much like to read his most recent letter. I have been disturbed about him. It would be helpful to know what he is thinking.”

Without another word she got up and left the room, returning with a letter in its envelope. I heard the baby begin to cry in the kitchen, and with a murmur Jo excused herself.

Vincent, it appeared from the letter, was dejected. He was worried about money: would Theo continue to send him his stipend? He was worried about the baby: bringing the child up in the city was such a threat to his health. He was concerned about his brother’s health, and I wondered if he suspected that Theo were seriously ill. Then my name caught my eye: “I don’t think we should rely on Dr. Gachet in any way. First, it appears to me he is more ill than I: or let’s say as ill, so there you are. Now, when a blind man leads another blind man, won’t they both fall in the ditch?”

I will not deny that these words stung, and I wondered again what it was that I had said or done to convince Vincent I was “more ill” than he. He might resent me, I supposed, for failing to stabilize his mental state, but that did not mean I was mad.

I let the letter drop and looked across the room. In the alcove above the baby’s crib gleamed the celestial blue of the almond-blossom painting. I wondered if Vincent could paint a canvas like that now. I thought not.

I picked up the letter and read it again. As in the first letter I’d read, he leapt from topic to topic, from my shortcomings to his artistic output back to my shortcomings and thence to the asylum at St.-Rémy, which he now termed a “prison.” Compared to the earlier letters that I had just read, this one was disjointed in the extreme. There was a confusing passage in which he laid out plans to rent three small rooms—where? In Paris? In Auvers? He referred to paintings that were stored at Tanguy’s, and how they were assets going to ruin. It was not the communication of a man whose mind was clear.

I thought back to the days a month earlier when Vincent had painted my portrait. It was a diagnosis of sorts. He had created an image, using my features, of a melancholy man. I could summon it in my mind, the unseeing gaze at the viewer and the skin at the temple wrinkled where the fist pressed against it, as it did now. That was how Vincent saw me.

Perhaps the difficulty was that my view of Vincent had been incomplete. For Vincent, merely seeing was enough. His eyes told him everything he needed to know about a person or, for that matter, a flower or a vineyard. His genius—part of his genius—was that he could absorb so much about the very nature of a subject from appearance alone. It seemed, then, that I was not as good a doctor as Vincent van Gogh was a painter. But perhaps I had known that all along. I heard myself sigh deeply, as if Vincent’s own gloom inhabited me. I knew my shortcomings. I had no need of a painter to point them out to me. After all, I was the doctor who had not saved his wife. No one knew this. No living person knew how I had failed Blanche. Yet Vincent’s uncanny eyes had discerned my grief.

Madame van Gogh emerged from the kitchen holding the baby. She moved gently, gliding to the crib and setting the child down. He stirred as she placed him in his bed, wriggling into greater comfort.

“Is the baby’s health recovered?” I asked her, keeping my voice low.

“Yes, thank you, Doctor. You know how one worries when they are this small.”

“I do,” I said, getting up. “I fear you have a great deal to worry about, Madame van Gogh.”

She did not deny it, but smiled slightly. “I do my best to take care of them. That is all I can do. Did Vincent’s letter help you? I am sorry you had to read the cruel things he said about you. I am sure you realize that these are not Theo’s opinions.”

I smiled at her. “Thank you. I appreciate Monsieur Theo’s confidence. I will not trouble you anymore, but I thank you for your hospitality. And for your company. We will do our best for Vincent, as you say.” I paused. It was not really my affair, but the most recent letter somehow made it seem so. “I am glad you are taking little Vincent to Holland,” I said. “It will be good for Theo to show his baby to his mother, whatever brother Vincent may say about it.”

“I am pleased you see it that way,” she answered, walking with me to her front door. “It is for Theo’s sake that we are going.” She paused with her hand on the doorknob. “What will you do, Doctor? Is there some way you can help Vincent?’

“I do not know, madame,” I had to answer her. “All I can say is that I will try to find it.”

I was anything but cheerful as I walked home, exchanging the quiet of the Van Goghs’ secluded building for the merciless tumult of the Gare du Nord and the surrounding commercial streets. Nor was I able to raise my spirits as I met with my patients that afternoon.

Madame Duval, with her endless rheumatic aches, struck me as a spoiled and fretful creature. She had always pretended to be younger than her fifty-odd years, but she must have known that a doctor, of all men, cannot be fooled. On this afternoon I flexed her knee, feeling the unmistakable friction of bone rubbing bone. “Of course as we get on in years,” I began to say. Fortunately I caught sight of her face before I could finish the sentence. I was less careful with the notary Japrisot, who had poor digestion yet insisted on eating six-course dinners. His self-satisfaction prevented him from accepting any advice, and I often wondered why he even troubled to visit me. On this afternoon I informed him that I could not help him if he did not follow my instructions. Normally, I try to offer some consolation. Sympathy has value, but I had none to spare that day.

The rain that had dampened me in the morning began to come down in earnest, and the light of the long summer evening dimmed. I had a dinner that night, a meeting of the Société des Éclectiques, a group of congenial souls from different professions who met monthly to discuss art or poetry or theater. As I pushed my cuff links into the starch-stiffened sleeves of my shirt, I stood at the window looking down at the traffic and considered staying at home. I am usually eager for company at the end of a day, but I felt so gruff and out of sorts that I could not imagine enjoying this gathering.

Directly below where I stood, the wheel had come off an omnibus. Furious passengers gathered around, some shouting, some waiting miserably under inadequate umbrellas for the repair to be finished. Everything was brown or gray, like the ugly painting of the peasants eating potatoes in the Van Goghs’ apartment. All around, drivers yelled vulgarities as they passed the disabled vehicle. The noise was intolerable. I went to my dinner rather than hear the cacophony for a minute more. The first name I heard as I sat down at the table was Charcot’s.

Charcot was famous, of course. His name was probably uttered at dozens of dinners every night in Paris. The man who mentioned him, a young journalist, had attended one of Charcot’s famous biweekly lectures at the Salpêtrière on the previous Friday. We had all read about these by now, but none of us had ever attended one, so we let the boy talk. He described the amphitheater packed with students, the bright lights, the mounted photographs and informative placards, and the colored backdrops to set off the subjects’ poses: it sounded as if medicine came very close to theater in these events. At this particular lecture Charcot had hypnotized a man, it seemed, and brought on a hysterical fit in a woman. It did not actually sound very different from the art students gathering at the bal des folles of so many years ago, if hundreds of spectators packed into the Salpêtrière to gape at the antics of the mad.

But though Charcot was inclined to drama, he was nevertheless an excellent physician. The popular newspapers might write about the Friday lectures, but the medical press was where Charcot and his students published their findings on illnesses of the nervous system. I found his diagnostic skills admirable. He had been an intern at the Salpêtrière ahead of me, but as a medical doctor, treating lungs and hearts and gastric complaints rather than mental maladies. The two groups of interns rarely mixed, but even then I had heard his name. He had published constantly in the decades since returning to the hospital in 1862 as the chief of a division. In fact, I realized, a collection of his informal diagnostic lectures had appeared not long before this evening, and was reviewed in a journal I received.

I was suddenly very anxious to be at home, and to read the article about Charcot. I made my farewells amid much teasing, for I am rarely the first to leave a gathering. Nothing could keep me there, however, while I was so preoccupied.

When I got back to my apartment, a new frustration arose. I was quite certain I had been reading the medical journal in bed. There is an ottoman between the bed and the window where my reading material accumulates. As I took off my cravat, I began to leaf through the pile: newspapers, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Maupassant’s latest volume of stories, more newspapers, a folder of prints. That was disheartening; I try to keep at least my engravings and etchings in portfolios. I put the folder on the bed. Beneath the bed, by the most comfortable chair, on the little table in the salon, I found much fascinating material but not Le Progrès médical. When it finally came to light, I had found two more folders of prints, a letter from a relative of Blanche’s, and a solicitation for a soldiers’ charity. This is normally how things come to my attention. My life was much more orderly while my wife was alive.

The review of Charcot’s book was quite long. The volume under consideration was a compilation of clinical lessons the great doctor had given at the Salpêtrière. He would examine patient after patient for the benefit of his students and other interested medical personnel. Diagnoses ranged from epilepsy through paralysis and syphilis to hysteria, with endless combinations of these and other ailments. What startled me was the inclusion of men. Charcot had added a section of male patients to the population at the hospital, as well as an outpatient service. These sufferers were naturally less acutely ill, giving the doctor a greater range of subjects on whom to hone his diagnostic skills.

The conclusion seemed perfectly clear: Jean-Martin Charcot was a brilliant diagnostician. I should enlist his help in Van Gogh’s case. It was said that physicians were welcomed at the informal clinical lessons held on Tuesdays, so I resolved to go to the Salpêtrière the following week. Perhaps I would be able to persuade Charcot, an art lover, to see Vincent as a private patient. If not, one of his students might help us. They might be able to make up for my own shortcomings. I felt much relieved as I prepared to go to sleep.