Vincent van Gogh’s self-assessment has a generic quality bordering on
glibness: “I, for one, am a man of passions, capable of and liable to do
rather foolish things for which I sometimes feel rather sorry.”
In light of the one thing that every man, woman and child on the planet knows
about Van Gogh — that he hacked off a portion of his own ear in a fit of
madness — such an assertion is both prophetic and inadequate. Written a
decade before his suicide (Van Gogh shot himself in the chest) and three
months after his father first considered committing him to an asylum, his
apologia falls oddly short of the sort of soul-searching we expect of
tortured artistic types. Surely you can do better than that, Vincent?
As this heavyweight edition of more than 800 of his letters demonstrates, Van
Gogh was no Sylvia Plath. God and Zola pack more powerful punches here than
any persecution complex. George Eliot, too. The young Van Gogh was a big
fan, especially of Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life. One story,
in particular, gripped him. Janet’s Repentance, Van Gogh told
his brother Theo, describes “the life of a curate who lives chiefly among
the inhabitants of the dirty streets of a town”. At the age of 34 the curate
dies — close to poverty, his talents mostly unacknowledged. When Van Gogh
died of self-inflicted chest wounds, he was 37 and firmly outside the ranks
of fashionable, saleable artists. He left behind, in addition to his
paintings, a large cache of letters.
It was W. H. Auden who wrote: “There is scarcely one letter by Van Gogh which
I ... do not find fascinating.” Letters by the artist were first published
within years of his death; editions have proliferated ever since. The
current six-volume edition stakes its claim to “completeness” on its
inclusion of every known surviving letter from and to Van Gogh — 902
in total, of which 819 are by the artist. There are gaps. No letters survive
to or from Kee Vos, the cousin whom van Gogh decided — unsuccessfully and
much against her will — to marry. Nor are the whereabouts known of Van
Gogh’s correspondence with his cousin by marriage and one-time artistic
mentor Anton Mauve. Unable to plug these holes in the dyke, the current
edition, an impressive 15 years in preparation, retranslates every letter
(Van Gogh wrote in Dutch, French and English), reinstates previous
expurgations, and, for the first time, illustrates each painting, sketch or
lithograph referred to by Van Gogh or others. Pages from some letters are
reproduced in facsimile alongside the transcript. Van Gogh’s regular,
forward-sloping script, with scratchings-out and insertions, and his
sketches — often of paintings in progress — cover the cheap paper, yellowed
by time. The result is a remarkably comprehensive portrait of the artist as
a young man. It is also powerful and intermittently disturbing stuff.
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, the eldest of six children
of the Rev Theodorus van Gogh and his wife, Anna Cornelia. Van Gogh père was
a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church; his parishes lay in peasant
villages of the province of North Brabant in southern Holland. Mother and
father imbued their children with a strong sense of family: “The feeling of
our origins and of one another is so strong that the heart is at times
uplifted,” Vincent once wrote to his brother and favourite correspondent,
Theo. But it’s hard not to doubt the parenting skills of Theodorus and Anna
Cornelia. Two of their three sons committed suicide in their thirties, while
two more of their children fell early victims to dementia. Their youngest
daughter Willemien spent four decades in a psychiatric hospital.
The Van Goghs were of middle-class stock, with a handful of useful
connections. One such was Uncle “Cent” (another Vincent), who was a partner
in the Paris-based art dealers Goupil & Cie. The company had branches in
Brussels, London and The Hague. Starting in 1869, Vincent would spend seven
years in three Goupil branches, before leaving with few regrets and a
contempt for the commercial art world. His earliest surviving letter dates
from his time at Goupil’s Hague branch.
From the outset, Vincent addressed himself chiefly to Theo, four years his
junior and the brother closest to him in age. Theo also worked for Goupil,
joining the Brussels branch in January 1873. At first Vincent’s letters to
his younger brother were those of a big brother, avuncular and benignly
patronising. The passage of time and Vincent’s changing circumstances
reversed those roles. Throughout Vincent’s ten-year career as an artist it
was Theo who supported him — both in terms of encouragement and via a
monthly allowance which, while moderate, accounted for the only money
Vincent possessed. Frequently Vincent wrote to Theo twice a week — long,
discursive letters, which constituted his most consistent and most
successful approach to human intercourse. Theo’s replies provided Vincent
with the reassurance he could not have found in diary writing. “Familiar
handwriting makes one feel firm ground beneath one’s feet again,” Vincent
confided to his brother, a statement which, with hindsight, ought to have
set alarm bells ringing.
The Rev Theodorus and Anna Cornelia were both keen letter-writers. What’s
more, they expected their children to share this vanishing 19th-century
habit, interpreting any hitch in the flow of letters between family members
as a sign of something amiss. Both Vincent and Theo accepted the challenge.
Sporadically Vincent jibbed at the letter’s inadequacy as a means of
self-representation or of sustaining relationships: “Writing,” he told Theo,
“is actually an awful way to explain things to each other.” In truth he was
a natural letterwriter, invariably convinced of his own rightness. Letters
written during the time he worked as an artist, and in the preceding three
years, when, in the grip of religious fervour, he struggled to be appointed
to a formal evangelist’s or missionary role, show him exploiting
letter-writing as a form of thinking aloud. “I see more and more that when
one thinks or speaks about something, one by no means arrives at a
satisfactory conclusion. At one moment it seems more possible than at
another.”
Letters featured in the current edition cover the 18 years from 1872 to 1890.
They trace Van Gogh’s progress from apprentice art dealer to artist of
(unrecognised) gen- ius. He talks God with his brother and art with anyone
who’ll listen, from the long-suffering Theo to fellow artist Paul Gauguin.
Letters concerned with Van Gogh’s own art are illustrated with images of the
paintings to which he refers. This enables the reader to chart his
extraordinary progress from the ungainliness of the first sketches, through
tertiary-hued Dutch school still-lifes, to the saturated colourism, replete
with conviction and authority, of the recognisably “Van Gogh” images created
in the South of France at the end of his life.
Vincent’s career changes were far from seamless. They encompassed a number of
false starts, including periods as a teacher at boarding schools in Ramsgate
and Isleworth and as a lay preacher in the Belgian mining region of
Borinage. Although Van Gogh’s chief preoccupation is himself, his
reflections possess a broader universality. Assailed by loneliness, he seeks
to draw Theo into a private egoïsme à deux; his is not the
self-aggrandising martyrdom of the willing outsider. “Loneliness, worries,
vexations, the need for friendship and fellow-feeling not sufficiently met,
that’s what’s very bad, the mental emotions of sadness or disappointments
undermine us more than riotous living; us, that is, who find ourselves
the... owners of troubled hearts.”
The result, extending to about 2,000 handsomely illustrated pages, is not, of
course, a barrel of laughs. Rare flashes of humour lighten the darkness —
“Women around the age of 50 are often somewhat distrusting.” Unconsciously
the letters set up an uneasy internal conflict between a confident
letter-writing persona and the “real” Vincent wrestling with his own
shortcomings and unrelenting poverty. Vincent alternately berates Theo for
not sending him money quickly enough or in sufficient quantities and worries
that Theo will crack under the strain of providing for so erratic a brother.
The letters reveal something else, too. Time after time, Vincent’s
relationships with friends and family break down when he spends any time in
their company. In one respect, at least, the Rev Theodorus and Anna Cornelia
had taught their eldest son well. He understood how the written word could
sustain bonds of affection.
In December 1881, Vincent told Theo: “You’ll just have to separate the wheat
from the chaff in my letters.” In this huge survey, different readers will
find different passages of indigestibility. But I defy anyone not to rise in
revolt at a letter written the following summer: “What am I in the eyes of
most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person ... in short
a little lower than the lowest.” Wrong again, Vincent.
Vincent van Gogh — The Complete Letters edited by Leo Jansen,
Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker
Thames & Hudson, £325; 2164pp Buy
the book
Van Gogh’s Letters: The Artist Speaks, Van Gogh Museum,
Amsterdam, (vangoghmuseum.com) until January 3
The Letterati
Napoleon Bonaparte
Not only a commander of fleets but a committed womaniser, the Little Corporal
wrote countless billets-doux to his first wife Josephine Beauharnais, second
wife Marie Louise of Austria and several mistresses.
John Keats
The fated Romantic poet’s letters to his neighbour, and later his fiancée,
Fanny Brawne are some of the most famous love letters written, although none
of her notes to him survived, on the poet’s insistence that they be
destroyed after his death.
Ronald Reagan
America’s 40th president penned innumerable letters to world leaders,
high-profile celebrities and ordinary citizens, as well as enough notes to
his wife Nancy (or “Dearest Mommie Poo”) to fill her subsequent book I Love
You Ronnie.
Duchess of Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor
When the youngest of the six Mitford sisters invited the writer and war hero
to visit her at Lismore Castle, their blissful time together began a
lifelong exchange of distinguished and entertaining letters.
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