Excerpt
Leaving Van Gogh
Prologue
1905
I HELD VINCENT’S SKULL in my hands yesterday. It was a strange and melancholy moment. As I examined the yellowed cranium, my imagination clothed it with flesh; I could see the strong ridge over his eyebrows and the steep ledges of his cheekbones, which were the foundations of his face.
The doctor in me could not help looking for something else as well. Phrenology is out of fashion now, but I am an old man. When I began my medical training, there were doctors who believed the shape of a skull betrayed or predicted a man’s mental state. What should this skull have told me then? Should I have detected from it that Vincent was mad? Or that he was a genius? Perhaps that he was both?
I had been hoping … Well, it was foolish. I suppose I had been hoping that Vincent would speak to me again. Nonsense, of course. I did not really imagine that a voice would issue from between his few, ruined teeth, but I thought the sight of his skull might prompt a new memory, something I had forgotten—a phrase, a glance, a gesture that would provide me with new insight into his mental predicament.
Of course I could not wait as long as I would have liked for some ghostly trace. We were reinterring the man. It was no time for investigation.
The ceremony was moving but peculiar. At nearly eighty, I often feel that I have done everything in life, but until yesterday I had never re-buried anyone. We would not have had to disturb Vincent’s grave if there had been an empty plot alongside it for Theo’s remains. Now, in a new plot, the modest headstones rise side by side, each engraved plainly with one of the brothers’ names. Theo’s body still lies in Utrecht, but his widow promises to bring it to Auvers when she can, because she feels their fraternal bond should be honored, even in death. Not many widows—certainly not those who had remarried, as Madame van Gogh Grosschalk did—are so self-effacing. I am certain, though, that she is right.
The new grave site is better. It lies on the north side of the cemetery, against the wall. Vincent would have liked this spot, surrounded as it is by the wheat fields he painted with such bravura and devotion. I transplanted some sunflowers from his first grave; they gave poor Theo pleasure and consolation back then. I am glad to think that something I did might have been a source of comfort to that poor man.
We all waited until the gravedigger had shoveled the last handful of earth onto the coffin. It was a warm afternoon; not as hot as that searing July day fifteen years ago when we last buried Vincent, but hot enough for the gravedigger’s task to seem interminable. Yet we stood there, Van Gogh’s survivors if you like, watching the casket vanish beneath the crumbly soil and thinking about him. He told his brother that I was sicker than he, yet there he is, a pile of bones, and here I am, still trying to grasp what he was to me and I to him.
I have known many artists. Vincent was something different. Everyone who knew him well understood this, so I have not been surprised at Theo’s wife’s unremitting efforts to foster his reputation. Of course she does so because she possesses most of his paintings. That is natural. But she must also feel, as I do, that her life was briefly illuminated by the presence of a remarkable person. I have children, but I will have no grandchildren. Marguerite is most emphatically an old maid, and Paul is no family man. If anyone knows my name a hundred years from now, it will be in connection with Vincent van Gogh. His portrait may make me immortal. If it does, I will also be known as the doctor who let him die. Vincent wrote once in a letter that a man who commits suicide turns his friends into murderers. What does that make me?
Many rumors have grown up about his death. So much could not be explained: where the gun had come from, where the gun vanished to, why he shot himself so clumsily. It has been said that the gun was for shooting crows, and that Vincent had borrowed it from Ravoux. It was a rifle, some said, or it was a shotgun, and he tripped over it while trying to shoot rabbits. There is even a tale—rather more durable than the rabbit nonsense—that Vincent was murdered. He was killed, it is said, by the farmer whose wife he had painted. Some say they had been caught together beneath a haystack. The Parisian version (for some of these stories had even reached as far as the city) mentions an unnamed painter whom Vincent had insulted in a brothel. I don’t imagine anyone believed that for very long.
I never respond to the gossip, of course. Why should I tell what I know? It was a secret I shared with Vincent alone. And he took it to the grave.
One
WHEN THEO VAN GOGH first approached me about caring for his brother, I was in my sixties and I had been practicing medicine for thirty-one years. I was well established. My patients were a varied group, but for years I had specialized in diseases of the nerves and mental maladies. A handful of other men in Paris had similar qualifications, but it was my connection to the art world that brought Theo van Gogh to me in the spring of 1890. In fact, it was Camille Pissarro who sent him.
As a boy in Lille, I had studied painting, and through those lessons I came to know Amand Gautier. He was a little younger than I and significantly more talented, so it was no surprise to me that he was accepted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. I had already spent two years at the Faculté de Médecine when he arrived in Paris in 1852, and my life was much livelier from that day. Gautier was an open, affable man, handsome and eager to make friends. What’s more, his fellow painting students were far more entertaining than my fellow medical students. I cared deeply about medical problems, but what I wanted to talk about was art, so I often went with Gautier to the artists’ cafés. And thus over the years I came to know them all—Courbet and Manet, Pissarro and Cézanne, Monet and Renoir, Sisley and Guillaumin.
In 1855 I was accepted as an extern under Dr. Jean-Pierre Falret at what was officially called the Hospice de la Vieillesse-Femmes at the Salpêtrière. Most of the patients were elderly, as the institution’s name would suggest, but Falret was famous for his innovative treatment of women of all ages who had lost their minds. My wife, Blanche, used to tease me, in the gentlest possible way, that the first women I ever knew were mad, pretending that this was why I found her so delightful. She may have been right. When we finally met, in 1868, I had known plenty of sane ladies, but none seemed to see the world in such a clear light as the woman who became my wife. I always relied on her generous but sensible perception of people and their emotions. It is precisely those points that the mad get wrong. You could even say that the definition of madness is a flawed understanding of the world around you. By that standard, Blanche was the sanest person I ever knew. Perhaps my years working in the asylum had made me especially grateful for her soundness.
Despite its reputation for modernity, the Salpêtrière, which had been built largely in the seventeenth century, looked like an old provincial town. The entire hospital was surrounded by a wall and formally laid out around the domed chapel. Parts of the grounds were beautiful: there were old trees, long, symmetrical walkways, and buildings constructed from the golden stone typical of Paris. But its history came with drawbacks. A warehouse for saltpeter, erected on a damp and isolated tract of riverbank, cannot easily be transformed into a rational, modern hospital building. Nor, when many of its patients are mentally fragile, can it be helpful that one of its most prominent wards is housed in what was once known as La Force, France’s most notorious women’s prison. Fear and grief still lingered in those walls.
Only sixty years before I arrived, the great Dr. Philippe Pinel had released the patients from their chains. This was a revolutionary action, for until that point the mad had been thought to be possessed by malevolent spirits. They could not be treated, it was supposed, but must be restrained. Pinel and others believed that madness was rather a kind of alienation from the true self (which is why we used to refer to the mentally ill as “aliénés”). The new “moral treatment,” by appealing to what was left of the patients’ reason, could bring them back to themselves. As a young doctor, I found Dr. Pinel’s theories thrilling. The merciful and humane attempt to guide a mad person back to his or her senses is not a simple task, and it is not always successful. Even now, in a new century, we do not know what keeps some of us tethered to reality while others go astray. We still do not know exactly how to diagnose the various forms of madness, and we certainly do not know how to cure them. This I have learned to my cost. But in those days, I still believed we could. I thought that kindness and regular hours, good, plain meals, fresh air, and moderate distraction—even work for the most capable—could relieve the mad.
Once I finished my medical training, I began to build an independent practice. I am not a man for committees and meetings. I could never have run a division of a hospital the way Falret did. Instead I worked in the city’s clinics, offered free consultations to the poor, and served as the medical officer of a spa for a few summers. I was even, for a spell, the doctor for a comic theater, soothing sore throats and wrapping twisted ankles so that actors could go back onstage. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, but I was a rich man compared to my artist friends. At least everyone recognizes the need for doctors.
