Reading Vincent van Gogh Reading Vincent van Gogh A Thematic Guide to the Letters Patrick Grant Copyright © 2016 Patrick Grant Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, Alberta T5J 3S8 ISBN 978-1-77199-187-2 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-77199-188-9 (pdf ) ISBN 978-1-77199-189-6 (epub) doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771991872.01 Cover design by Martyn Schmoll Interior design by Sergiy Kozakov Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Grant, Patrick, author Reading Vincent van Gogh : a thematic guide to the letters / Patrick Grant. Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. 1. Gogh, Vincent van, 1853-1890—Correspondence—History and criticism. 2. Gogh, Vincent van, 1853-1890--Themes, motives. I. Title. ND653.G7G837 2016 759.9492 C2016-905543-4 C2016-905544-2 We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities. Assistance provided by the Government of Alberta, Alberta Media Fund. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons licence, Attribution– Noncommercial–No Derivative Works 4.0 International: see www. creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons licence, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. For Sue Mitchell The true pain and tension of creating begins at the point where you let go of the description. Vincent VaN GoGh, The Hague, 1882 Contents PrefaCe and AckNowledgements xi Introduction 3 Privacy and the Public Record 4 Biography and Beyond 7 1 Shaping Commitments 13 Religion 16 Morality 28 Art 44 2 Enduring Adversity 59 Suffering 60 Perseverance 70 Imperfection 78 3 What Holds at the Centre 93 Freedom 94 Love 105 Imagination 116 4 The Power of Words 125 Literature 126 Word-Painting 135 ix 5 Matter and Spirit 149 The Law of the Father 151 Nature 161 The Ineffable 170 Appendix 1: Some facts abouT The letterS 179 Appendix 2: Suggestions for furTher reaDing 181 x Preface and Acknowledgements Since the landmark edition of Vincent van Gogh’s collected cor- respondence in 2009, followed by the selected edition by the same editors in 2014, there has been a surge of interest in Van Gogh as a writer. Translations of his letters have been made, or are in preparation, in at least twenty-five languages, and the literary distinction of Van Gogh’s correspondence is now widely acknow- ledged. Yet reading all the way through the 820 extant letters written by Van Gogh is demanding and time consuming—even the selected edition of 265 letters is a hefty 777 pages. With these points in mind, I provide in the following chapters some sugges- tions about the thematic coherence of Van Gogh’s written work, as well as a distillation, in his own words, of the main lines of his conceptual thinking and imagination. To date, no other book offers this combination of elements. The present book is the offspring of two earlier volumes, in which I set out to make the case for Van Gogh as a great writer. When I first undertook this project, the high literary quality of Van Gogh’s collected correspondence had often been recognized, but there was no extended critical assessment of his extraordi- nary writerly achievements. Consequently, I attempted in the two previous volumes to bring the collected correspondence into the domain of modern literary criticism, first by way of a practical-critical analysis and then in a more theoretically based study. While the present book is the most straightforward and xi doi:10.15215/aupress/9781771991872.01 Preface and Acknowledgements accessible of the three, it could not have been written without its predecessors, which supply both the basic understandings enabling my selection of excerpts and a rationale for organizing the anthology and for the interpretations provided by the brief, interconnected essays. Most importantly, my focus on Van Gogh’s literary talents directly influenced the selection of texts that make up the anthology sections of the book. These texts were chosen not only to illustrate the main themes and motifs that provide imaginative and conceptual coherence to the correspondence as a whole but also to exemplify the impressive and captivating quality of Van Gogh’s imagination as a writer. A note on how the book is organized: each chapter begins with a discussion of the broad significance of the topics that it contains. These topics are then dealt with individually, in a series of subsections. Each of these opens with a short introduction that recapitulates the salient points from the opening discussion, expanding on them in a manner pertinent to the topic at hand and making reference (by number) to the excerpts that have been chosen as illustrations. The excerpts themselves then follow, with the letter from which each excerpt was drawn identified by the letter number in brackets. The book is thus designed to bring an increasing intensity of focus to bear on the central themes and motifs of Van Gogh’s writing, while at the same time pointing readers to relevant letters. Readers can also consult the anthology selectively, if so desired, without losing touch with the overall design—whether mine or, much more importantly, Van Gogh’s. All quotations from the correspondence are from the six- volume Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009). I refer to the letters by letter number, followed by a slash and then the volume and page number: (155/1:247), for example. In transcrib- ing the letters, the editors of the 2009 edition made every effort to xii doi:10.15215/aupress/9781771991872.01 Preface and Acknowledgements preserve distinctive features of Van Gogh’s handwritten originals, including the use of suspension points (in varying numbers) and of underlining. Van Gogh sometimes underlined a word more than once, and the editors chose to capture the additional emphasis by using small capitals for words underlined twice and full capitals for words underlined three times or more (while using italic for words underlined only once, as is common practice). In quoting from the translations, I have taken care to reproduce them exactly as they appear in that edition. Excerpts from the letters are used here with the permis- sion of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and I gratefully acknowledge help and support received from the staff of the Van Gogh Museum Library. I am, again, very much indebted to Hans Luijten, who read the typescript with great care and, as ever, made numerous insightful comments and useful sugges- tions. Many thanks to Sue Mitchell, Pater Stoepker, and Henry Summerfield, who have supported and encouraged my work on Van Gogh’s letters from the beginning. xiii doi:10.15215/aupress/9781771991872.01 Reading Vincent van Gogh Introduction The aim of this book is to provide a distillation of the central mo- tifs and patterns of imagery in Vincent van Gogh’s extraordinary, voluminous correspondence. Readers setting out to read all the way through the vast collection of his letters soon encounter the formidable challenge of its sheer mass and complexity. Also, al- though the impact of Van Gogh’s writing can be felt immediately in his most interesting letters, it is difficult to discern the imagina- tive and conceptual designs that transform his correspondence as a whole into something that is widely recognized as a literary achievement of a very high order. In two earlier books, I provided a critical analysis of the col- lected correspondence considered specifically as literature and negotiated the complexities of the texts in some detail, while also offering a broad assessment of Van Gogh’s achievements as a writer. The present book builds on that work, seeking to present in an accessible form what I take to be the core elements of Van Gogh’s writerly vision. As it happens, the letters are often especially arresting and insightful in brief passages that stand out from the more ephemeral discourse of which these passages are a part, and the correspondence thus lends itself well to the kind of anthologizing offered in the following pages. Consequently, the present book can be read both as a synthesis of Van Gogh’s leading ideas and as a series of observations exemplifying the riches of his imagination as a writer—riches that a fuller engagement with the collected letters will certainly continue to disclose. 3 doi:10.15215/aupress/9781771991872.01 Introduction But first, let me say a little about the part played by the letters in the shaping of Van Gogh’s reputation. Privacy and the Public Record After his death, Van Gogh’s fame developed with the same as- tonishing rapidity as had his career as a painter, which lasted only a brief ten years. Towards the end of his life (he died at age thirty-seven), his paintings were beginning to win recognition among a few avant-garde critics and artists. But he had made only one significant sale and was reconciled to disappointment, which, combined with his serious mental illness, helps to explain his suicide. During the last decade of Vincent’s life, his brother Theo had supported him financially and, in return, had received a steady supply of Vincent’s paintings as part of an agreement between the two brothers.