Leaving Van Gogh

Twelve





I WAS NOT EAGER to have a conversation about hysteria with Vincent. It was not that I was afraid. I did not fear that he would turn on me. No, my apprehension was more complex. I was awestruck, you might say, the way a novice monk is cowed by his superior. It was as if Vincent had advanced further than I in some special devotion. He was privy to exalted mysteries in the church of mental illness, and this distinction made him fearsome.

According to Ravoux, Vincent was still leaving the inn before eight and coming home around sunset, exhausted. He was sometimes spotted up on the plateau, either sitting in front of a canvas or making his way to another site, carrying his easel and canvas like an ant with an unwieldy burden. I chose to look for him there. The sun had long since slid from the vertical, but it was still hot. The cicadas, which come late to Auvers, were buzzing in the trees, starting and stopping according to some mysterious signal.

The afternoon was quite still. Sun and shadows lapped over the wheat fields, dark gold and bright. The heads of the wheat are mobile and sensitive, bending in the slightest breeze, but there was none that afternoon. My footsteps crackled as I trudged through one of the fields. No human figure emerged from the sea of grain. Vincent must have gone in a different direction. As I traversed the long field to reach the westbound path, I thought I might as well be in one of his paintings. The golden field with its infinite tones of ocher and yellow was set off by the brilliant blue sky, provided by nature to carry out Vincent’s own theory of complementary colors. Each made the other more intense. I merely crept along the seam between them, feeling very small.

I was hot, so I was very relieved when I saw a tiny figure, no more than a nick on the horizon, and recognized it as Vincent. He was perched at the top of a crest a few hundred meters away, almost swallowed by the wheat. From there he would have a magnificent view of the slope down to the Oise.

He faced away from me, but he must have heard me coming from quite a distance. I found it hard to catch my breath as I toiled up the slope. When I reached him, I could only stand behind him, panting. I looked out at what he had chosen to paint, and it was beautiful. The river, furred with willows, lay in a languorous curve. Vincent would have placed that in the bottom third of the canvas. Then, stretching toward the horizon, he would stack up the fields, those fertile lowland plots, each showing a variant green according to the crop: beans, peas, beetroot. He would use a different pattern of brushwork, too, for each. Some would be dotted, some zigzagged, some painted with a basket-weave or chevron pattern. Then he could use broader, looser strokes for the sky, whose blue softened toward the horizon.

But he had done none of these things. The canvas on his easel was perfectly white. Perhaps he had just arrived. Perhaps there was a canvas next to him, already finished.

I stepped to his side. “It is a magnificent prospect,” I said. “The light at this hour is especially lovely.”

“It is, Doctor,” he said.

I glanced down. I saw no finished canvas. His palette lay on his lap. The colors dotted it in slick cushions: lead white, ultramarine, chrome yellow, three different greens. His right hand clasped three brushes, but they were all clean.

“Did you just get here?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “I have been here all day.”

“But,” I protested, gesturing at the paint. “You just set up your palette.”

He took one of the brushes and flipped it around. With the wooden end he poked the dome of white to show me that a heavy skin had formed. The paint had been drying for hours. “By now these are the wrong colors,” he said. “There is too much blue. They would have been right this morning.” He looked up at me. “Then after a few hours, I would have needed more yellow and ocher. A harder blue, probably cobalt. Then some darker green. Now—” He set the palette on the ground and reached into the box by his side. “Geranium lake, perhaps. The sky will show pink soon.” He tossed a tube onto the ground. “I would need to mix up a purple.” Another tube dropped. “And if I sit here long enough, I will need darker blues, and darker.” He kept reaching into the box, scrabbling for tubes of paint and flinging them ever farther away. “No black, though, Doctor,” he said, in a controlled tone. “I have painted night scenes before. I can do it without black. In fact,” he went on, getting up from his folding stool, “I only have a small tube.”

He crouched in front of the paint box and tipped it upside down. Out fell a small avalanche of crumpled lead shapes. He pawed through them, tossing aside one after another while saying their beautiful names like an incantation: “vermilion, viridian, Prussian blue, malachite green. Ah! Here we are. Black. You see? A small tube.” He held it up to me. “I always have to ask Theo for the largest tubes of yellow.” He unscrewed the top and squeezed a thin rope of darkness onto his palette. The coil grew, invading the blue, then the green. With both hands, he pressed the pigment from the bottom of the tube, carefully urging every last smear of black out of the soft metal casing. Then he hurled the tube far into the wheat, so far that I could barely hear the rustle when it landed.

He knelt on the ground now, with his palette before him. I stood just a foot away, silent, appalled. In another individual—if this had been my son, Paul, for example—I would have thought this behavior nothing more than frustration, a showy explosion of anger. Yet anger was absent in Vincent. His voice was little more than a thread, and he moved in a measured way, as if carrying out a ritual. He looked up at me. He met my gaze for a moment, then shifted his eyes to something behind me and very far away. No number of words could have said more clearly that my presence did not matter. He looked down, and put his right hand squarely onto his palette. He pressed down.

The black oozed up between his fingers. The membrane covering the half-dried pigments gave way so that streaks of white and yellow seeped into the black. He twisted his hand, sliding his splayed fingers through the knots of brighter color. Paint crawled across the tops of his fingers and crept up his wrist. Then he held his palm out to me. “You see, Doctor? This is why you have to be so careful with black, it soon overwhelms everything.”

That black hand held toward me seemed like a threat. What was he going to do? Rub it on his face? On the canvas? Smear it onto his other hand, wipe it onto his clothes, suck the paint from his fingers? He sat before me on the ground, unkempt, sunburned, and streaked with paint like the maddest of madmen. Yet he was perfectly aware, completely controlled.

He lowered his hand into his lap, and his face became, if it was possible, even bleaker. “So,” he said. “That is the end of that.” He turned his palm down and drew it across the ground before him, dragging a shadow over the trampled stems of wheat.

“Doctor,” Vincent said. “There should be a rag in the drawer of the paint box. Perhaps it might be useful.” He was twisting handfuls of wheat stems into a makeshift brush and scraping at the spaces between his fingers. I stepped around him and righted the paint box, opening the drawer and finding a wad of grayish linen, crusted with orange and blue. He took it with his left hand and scrubbed his wrist where the tide of oily colors had left the shadow of a glove. Finished, he let the rag drop to the ground. Then he turned back to the magnificent scene before him, glowing more golden now. I had the sense that the episode, whatever it was, had reached its end. I lifted the blank canvas off the easel and set it down, collapsing the easel to rest beside me. I did not want that white rectangle to reproach my friend for a moment longer. Using the tips of my fingers, I maneuvered the palette out of sight. Then I sat on the stool, shoulder to shoulder with Vincent. All of my hesitation and timidity fell away.

“We have not seen you,” I said. “I was worried.”

“I have not been fit for company.”

“Not as a guest, then,” I said. “But as a patient.”

He brushed away my comment with the paint-stained hand. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

“Have you been distressed?” I asked. “Do you feel there is another attack coming on?” But even as I asked my questions, I knew they were futile.

“Doctor,” Vincent said, scratching his eyebrow, “I know you are a sympathetic man. I know that you would like to be able to make me feel better. I would like that myself.” He turned toward me, with a dark streak now shading one of his eyes. “Do you have a potion? Or is it an electrical treatment? Little waves of current jolting through me”—here he jiggled his body slightly—“to set my brain aright?” He kept his eyes on mine, and this time I felt that he was completely engaged. This was the opportunity, I knew. He had come to a crisis of some kind and was ready to acknowledge his state.

“I saw a doctor in Paris,” I began. “He studies hysteria. It sounds in many ways like what troubles you. The attacks sound very similar, with the voices, visual hallucinations, shouting and thrashing. I witnessed an attack while I was at the hospital visiting him. It was dreadful,” I finished. There was a pause. “I would like to spare you from going through that again.”

“But can you, Doctor?” Vincent asked. “Can this new doctor?”

The question hung there. A troop of cicadas started to thrum in the trees, then stopped. In the silence, I remembered Charcot’s voice saying, “I cannot pretend to you that we have any way to end hysteria.”

“He has found ways …” I found my voice faltering. “Sometimes he is able to reduce the intensity of the attacks, he says. Or the frequency. Or both.” I met Vincent’s gaze.

“I have seen doctors,” he said mildly. “They did not help me.”

“No, but Charcot is an expert. He has seen more cases like yours than anyone in France.”

“And the patient you saw in the hospital, was he getting better?”

I had to admit it. “No.”

“Was Dr. Charcot confident that he could help this man?”

I could not pretend to Vincent that Charcot had been confident. I drew breath to speak. I was going to say, “No, but perhaps he can help you.” I was going to say, “He may be able to find a way. We should at least try this.” I exhaled and shook my head. Charcot himself had warned me how little he could do in cases like Vincent’s. I drew breath again.

“Can you imagine what it is like, Doctor?” Vincent said softly. “If anyone can, it is you. I have felt a kinship between us from the start. You have suffered, I know that. But you suffer other people’s ills as well as your own. That was why I was hopeful when we met. I believe you can guess what it is like. You never know when it’s going to happen. You are going about your business, perhaps in your office seeing a patient. And, suddenly, the world convulses. Your desk, your chair, your curtains writhe in front of you and groan. Or perhaps it is you groaning. Your patient—let us assume she is a lady—draws away as she sees your face. Your face is screwed up, your eyes closed, your teeth like fangs. You are drooling. You drop to the floor because you no longer control your limbs. Your bowels loosen. You flail and shout, knocking over a lamp. Your lady patient has fled the room in terror, and she brings the concierge upstairs. You are still kicking, and the concierge runs away to get help. Her husband drops the coals he is unloading and comes upstairs. He cannot hold you down. There’s shit seeping out of your trousers, the carpet is ruined. You’re sobbing. You’ve broken a chair and torn the feathers from a cushion.” His speech came to a halt.

I could imagine it all. I could imagine it for myself, and for Vincent. For Vincent, this had happened again and again. He had been alone, rolling on the cold stone floor of the asylum at St.-Rémy. He had been held down by warders. He had been tied up in the gilet de force.

“And sometimes it goes on, you know. You come to—it’s like waking up, only you’re sick, your head aches, and you’re bruised, of course, from thrashing around. You have a foul taste in your mouth and your arms are crossed in front of you and you can’t get your hands out and that’s when you know. It happened again. And maybe you are awake for an hour or a day, and then it starts again.” Vincent scrambled to his feet, pushing himself clumsily off the ground. He stood for a moment, facing away from the river, back toward the wheat fields I had crossed to find him.

“And then when it’s over, Doctor, you are so weak. You are terrified. Everything, everything is filled with menace. Especially your sleep. Oh, the nightmares! Monsters, horrors! I thought sometimes that they might be worse for me because I use my eyes, that because I see so keenly, my visions are more full of terror. But I am not sure of this. Everyone has his own terror.” He took three steps away from me. His voice came a little bit more muffled. “Then it fades. The horrors diminish and it’s easier to sleep. You become stronger. Pleasure comes back. The little pleasures first, the sight of a green shoot or the smell of coffee. It’s like spring, in a way.” The footsteps returned and circled around me. I sat slumped on the painting stool, hands dangling between my knees. I could feel tears drying on my face.

“Then you claw your way back into life,” Vincent said, standing beside me. “You put one day behind another, and you try to be brave and useful. That’s all I want, really. I want my life not to be a waste or a burden. So I paint. And I wonder when it is all going to come back.” He sighed deeply, and gestured toward the view before us. There was a greener tinge to the sky now, and the band of shadow cast by the willows on the Oise veiled the water in places. I wondered how Vincent could have painted it without using black. “I have worked furiously here, Doctor. I did not think there was a moment to spare. Look, look at this. Don’t you think this would make a splendid painting? A picture that could, perhaps, bring consolation to someone? The beauty of nature can do that, don’t you think?”

I found my voice. “I do. Of course I do. And your paintings are beautiful.”

There was a long silence between us. A hawk appeared over the trees, gliding with still wings, dipping to examine the fields with his sharp eyes. Perhaps some vole or rabbit made a move, for he planed sharply downward. But his prey had vanished, so he climbed upward again with one swift flap. I was grateful. The sound of death, even a rabbit’s, would have undone me.

“Not today,” said Vincent. “I couldn’t paint today.” I looked up at him. His eyes were fixed on the horizon, but he brought them down. “Nothing. All of this in front of me. I knew what it should look like. Knew what colors to use—well, you saw the palette. Had it planned to the last brushstroke. And I could not make my hand pick up the brush.”

“You could not move your hand?” I asked. “Or was it that you didn’t know how you would begin the painting?”

“Doctor,” he said, “don’t ask me these questions. What does it matter? I sat here all day, with my canvas before me, and the paint on my palette hardening, and the sun moving across the sky, and I was not able to paint. That is what I am saying. And I tell you this not as a doctor, for this is not a doctor’s concern. Only you have shown me friendship, and I believe you understand my work. And my work seems to be done.”

I stood up. This was desolation. I moved to Vincent’s side to put an arm across his shoulders, but he turned away. I thought I understood. Sometimes sympathy is impossible to bear.

“It may come back tomorrow.”

“It may,” he said.

“We don’t know why this happened.”

“No, Doctor, but I no longer believe that matters.” He glanced at me, then turned. In a gesture that was remarkable for him, he put both of his hands on my shoulders. Looking me in the eye, he went on, “If I am epileptic, if I suffer from hysteria, if I am simply another madman—can you make me well?”

It is one thing to doubt your métier. We all have doubts, we must. But we do not like to expose them. I am a doctor. I make people feel better, that is what I do and who I am. Yet I could not lie to Vincent. His illness was unlike any other I had ever seen. “No,” I answered him, and looked down.

His hands dropped from my shoulders, but not without a gentle pressure, as if to thank me for my honesty. “Well, then, there we are,” he said. He turned away from me, took a few steps, and looked up at the sky. The horizon was paler now, with a warmer cast over to the west. The surface of the Oise gleamed between the trees. “You will be late for dinner, Doctor. You should go home.”

“Won’t you come and dine with us?” I suggested. “You must keep your strength up.”

“Do you really think so?” he asked, with an unfamiliar note of bitterness. “Why should I strengthen the vessel when the contents are so terribly scrambled? No, thank you, I will go back to the inn.”

I did not know how to answer him, but I knew I could not leave him there alone. He bent down to lift his easel and fold the legs. Without another word, I crouched to pick up a handful of paint tubes. I left the empty black one where it had fallen, far away from us among the tall stalks. We walked home side by side, speechless and unhappy. Where our ways parted, I reached out to touch his shoulder.

When I arrived late for dinner, there was much exclamation. Some of Vincent’s paint had gotten onto my coat and hands. Paul made a joke that I was as bad as Nero, and that my hair would have to be cut if I did not learn my lesson. I managed to smile.

It pained me to see Vincent incapable. All along, I had admired his facility, his bravura. If Vincent’s brush could be stilled by madness—if he could be robbed of what made his life worth living—who was safe? He had seemed immune to the kind of doubt that always plagued me; he knew what he wanted to do and, despite immense difficulties, forged ahead. I wondered—I still do wonder—if I had ever been as confident as Vincent.

In the years since Vincent was part of our lives, I have considered this question. Few men succeed without that assurance, but where does it come from? It seems to have little connection with actual achievement. Paul is a very confident painter. In fact, he shows considerable certainty in everything he does. When he left the university with his degree in agricultural engineering, he announced to me (with none of the deference that one might expect from a son to a father) that he intended to be an artist. He was willing to spend a little time selling artists’ supplies in the towns near Paris, but he made it clear to me that this would be a brief episode. It was as if I had no authority over him. Indeed, I doubt that I did. He has lived in Auvers ever since, working with me in the studio, using the Paris flat more often than I do, apparently selling enough paintings to buy his own paints and canvases. He has friends in Paris, I suppose. He must also see women there, and I appreciate his discretion. I have ascertained that he will remain in this house after I die, taking care of Marguerite and painting.

And selling my pictures. He will have to sell my collection in order to live. Despite his assurance with the canvas and brushes, he does not earn his keep. Nor, it seems, does he intend to. Instead, he helps me with the catalog of my paintings. It is an important collection, worthy of documentation. The implicit bargain seems to be that he will take on my task when I die, and his compensation will be the ability to do whatever he likes with the pictures. He has tried, several times, to persuade me to sell one or two. He informs me of the prices for Cézanne, who now exhibits with Ambroise Vollard. He urges me to put a canvas or two on the market, just to see what we might get.

As I have said, Paul is a painter of facility. He easily mimics the styles of Cézanne and Van Gogh. His own style, to the extent that it exists, is decorative. He is influenced by Art Nouveau, for instance. I readily admit that he is more talented than I am, and I would like to believe that I do not mind being outstripped by my son. Yet I am troubled by what I believe Paul intends to do with his talent.

I taught him to paint. He has never had formal lessons: I merely instructed him, as I was instructed long ago, in the fundamentals of drawing, modeling, perspective. After that, he learned by copying. He spent some time in the Louvre, as artists have done for hundreds of years, but his primary sources of inspiration have been the canvases I am lucky enough to own. It is not every fledgling painter who lives with two dozen Van Goghs, two dozen Cézannes, a Sisley, a Monet, a Renoir, and so on. It was Paul who suggested that the catalog include illustrations of our canvases. We began at first by etching copies, but Vincent’s work is not best represented by fine black lines. By then our neighbor’s daughter Blanche Derousse was taking lessons from me, and she turned out to be dexterous with watercolor. So our volume will in all likelihood be a single precious example, perhaps to be lodged in a museum, and Vincent’s luminous canvases will be represented by Blanche’s watercolor copies.

Paul is also a good copyist. He is especially skilled with oils. He has made a few uncanny versions of paintings I own, using canvases of precisely the same size, practicing signatures over and over—Cézanne signed some of his things with a red scribble that Paul has made his own. I have always insisted that Paul’s copies be clearly marked on the back of the canvas or even on the front. I have done the same with my copies, though, sadly, they would deceive no one.

None of this worried me until a recent episode. I had gone to Paris that day, but it was unusually warm for May. My feet began to hurt, as I was wearing new boots. I took an earlier train home than I had planned, and sat for a while in the garden with the dreadful boots by my side. Marguerite and Madame Chevalier—who is now quite stout and wheezy—were washing the landing on the second floor, making a racket with their brooms and mops and buckets, so I tiptoed past them and up to the studio. The door was open; Paul had no warning of my presence.

On the table where we set up still life subjects, he had arranged an assemblage of objects: a length of patterned fabric, a Delft vase, a small stoneware pitcher, and an ordinary table knife. These were all items that Cézanne had painted in my house, and I kept them, with some care, in a small locked cabinet. Paul knew where to find the key, and there was no reason why he should not, but these objects had taken on something of the quality of relics.

When Cézanne was in Auvers in 1872, he sometimes painted on pieces of cardboard. They were much cheaper than canvas, though of course more fragile. These were not paintings intended for collectors but Cézanne’s way of working out pictorial problems. We have several such paintings, and I must admit that they are not his most accomplished, nor our most prized. Yet Paul was painting such a still life on cardboard. It was not a direct copy—it was an entirely new composition, in the style of Cézanne, using articles that Cézanne had already painted in our house.

“Paul,” I said. “What are you doing?”

He whirled around, eyes wide. One rarely sees Paul at a loss for words, but on this occasion, he turned scarlet and could not speak for a moment. “Father,” he finally said, transferring a loaded brush from his right hand to his left, where he held the palette. “You’re back early. Where are your shoes?”

“Downstairs. They were hurting my feet.” I stepped through the door to look more closely at the painting on the easel. “What is this?”

“Oh, I am just amusing myself. You don’t mind, do you? That I got the Cézanne things out of the cabinet? I had found this piece of cardboard, you see, and it reminded me of some of our little paintings. Then I wondered if I could make a similar one. It’s going well, don’t you think?” He stepped aside slightly, to let me look more closely at his work.

I was watching him carefully. Having recovered his equanimity, he was able to meet my gaze with a candid smile. I looked at the picture. It was an unpleasant image, with murky coloring and clumsy brushwork. Yet Cézanne himself had produced several such paintings in my studio.

“What do you intend to do with this?” I asked.

“Do? Nothing. What do you mean?”

“You weren’t going to …,” I began, then trailed to a halt. I was tired. I felt old. How could I suspect my son? Did I really suspect him? Of forging a painting? It seemed so implausible at that moment. He held my gaze, his blue eyes bright and clear and young. A challenge.

“Well, be sure to sign it with your signature,” I finally finished, shaking my head. Then I tried to smile at him. “It is very like one of Cézanne’s own paintings. We would not want any confusion.”

“Of course I will.” His brow furrowed, as if he were puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I? You don’t think …” He stepped back a bit. He showed first confusion, then comprehension, then anger. “Father! You can’t possibly think I would attempt to deceive anyone! This is merely a painter’s little play. A test of my skill. I’m shocked!”

Suddenly I could bear no more. My head felt light, and I grasped the edge of the doorframe. “I think I will go and rest,” I said. Paul said something behind me, but I did not hear him. He helped me down the stairs. The women were alarmed, and before long I was lying on my bed with a poultice on my feet and whispers outside my door. I let them treat me like an invalid sometimes. It seems to give them pleasure.

But this is what Paul is like. He has plans he does not share with me. Perhaps this is always the way it is between fathers and sons. I feel that I am being elbowed aside, that Paul is marking time until I die. And why should I care? Dead is dead. Yet I find that I do care. I would like to be respected in the future. If my only trace is to be Vincent’s portrait, well, that is more than most people leave. But if there is more, if people were to learn more about what we did in this house in Auvers, I would want them to know that I meant well. That I did my best for Vincent, that I tried to help Cézanne, that I took care of Pissarro’s ailing eyes so that he could keep painting.

If Paul sells my pictures—as he will—I fear he will also sell his own, as someone else’s. Among the glorious canvases by our friends that he sells will also be lesser works, paintings Paul has made that will pass at first as Vincent’s or Cézanne’s but that will be found out. And then what will it look like? Will we any longer be considered thoughtful men who cared deeply for our friends’ art? No. We will be seen as profiteers and worse. Our artist friends will come to be seen as our victims.

Paul works to keep our name linked with that of Vincent van Gogh. He has painted, from a photograph, a portrait of Vincent’s mother, in a style similar to my friend’s. He is sending it to Amsterdam, hoping it will be included in the exhibition that will take place there later in the summer. He sent a bronze medallion of Vincent, his first work in that medium, to the Salon des Indépendants earlier in the spring. He called it Homage to My Master.

His “master”! He makes it sound as if Vincent had taught him, painstakingly correcting his brushstrokes or honing his vision, when instead he was a boy of seventeen, trailing around after Vincent and making a pest of himself! And now he catalogs my pictures and paints in Cézanne’s style, and I do not trust his intentions.

I should not leap ahead. So far, every canvas that Paul has painted in Vincent’s style has been signed as a copy. I do not know what plans he may have for the dingy still life I saw him painting. In any event, I am powerless. He can do whatever he likes after my death.