The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh Cultural Dialectics Series Editor: Raphael Foshay

The Letters of VincenT Van GoGh culturaL diaLecTics Series editor: Raphael Foshay The difference between subject and object slices through subject as well as through object. Theodor W. Adorno Cultural Dialectics provides an open arena in which to debate questions of culture and dialectic — their practices, their theoretical forms, and their rela- tions to one another and to other spheres and modes of inquiry. Approaches that draw on any of the following are especially encouraged: continental phil- osophy, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools of cultural theory, deconstruction, gender theory, postcoloniality, and interdisciplinarity. series titles Northern Love: An Exploration of Canadian Masculinity Paul Nonnekes Making Game: An Essay on Hunting, Familiar Things, and the Strangeness of Being Who One Is Peter L. Atkinson Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice Edited by Raphael Foshay Imperfection Patrick Grant The Undiscovered Country: Essays in Canadian Intellectual Culture Ian Angus The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study Patrick Grant The Letters of Vincent van Gogh A Critical Study PaTrick GranT Copyright © 2014 Patrick Grant Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB t5J 3s8 A volume in Cultural Dialectics 1915-836X (print) 1915-8378 (electronic) Cover and interior design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers doi: 10.15215 / aupress / 9781927356746.01 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Grant, Patrick, author The letters of Vincent van Gogh : a critical study / Patrick Grant. (Cultural dialectics) Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-927356-74-6 (pbk.). — ISBN 978-1-927356-75-3 (pdf). — ISBN 978- 1-927356-76-0 (epub). 1. Gogh, Vincent van, 1853–1890 — Correspondence — History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Cultural dialectics ND653.G7G83 2014759.9492 C2014-900937-2 C2014-900938-0 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publica- tions Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 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 Multimedia Develop- ment Fund. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons licence, Attribution– Noncommercial–No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada: 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 Hans Luijten I find such interesting things in Vincent’s letters and it would really be a remarkable book if one could see how much thinking he did and how he remained true to himself. theo vaN GoGh, 8 September 1890 conTenTs Preface and Acknowledgements xi Introduction: Letters as Literature 3 Part I Vincent Agonistes: Religion, Morality, Art 1 Religious Convictions, Moral Imperatives 23 2 The Artistic Life and Its Limits 51 Part II Thinking in Images 3 Birds’ Nests: Art and Nature, Exile and Return 73 4 The Mistral: Creativity and Adversity 91 5 Cab Horses: Despair and Optimism 107 Part III Exploring with Ideas 6 By Heart: The Creative Unconscious 133 7 A Handshake Till Your Fingers Hurt: Autonomy and Dependency 159 8 Something New Without a Name: Beyond Religion, Morality, Art 185 Conclusion: “My Own Portrait in Writing” 209 Notes 221 Index 235 Preface and acknowLedGemenTs Commentators frequently remark on the exceptional literary quality of Vincent van Gogh’s collected letters, but no one has yet produced an extended critical assessment of this aspect of his writing. In the present study, I offer such an assessment, focusing on key constella- tions of metaphors and ideas, as well as a variety of rhetorical strategies through which a compellingly imagined, powerfully humanizing vision emerges from the formidable complexity of Van Gogh’s collected correspondence. In the following pages, I am, for the most part, not interested in the letters as biography or as a way of accessing the paintings, nor do I deal with Van Gogh’s many letter-sketches. I realize that the artist would probably be dismayed at the thought of his private correspondence being made public, never mind being subjected to the attentions of a reader bent on discovering a special literary distinction in the eclectic, tangled, and bristling variety of this daunting, often uneven body of writing. As I point out in the introduction, many problems do indeed attend the kind of critical exercise I have undertaken. Still, I am satisfied that the letters as a whole offer such a captivating and authentically imagined set of reflections on our shared human pre- dicament that it is worthwhile attempting some assessment of how and why this is so. My first encounter with Van Gogh’s letters occurred on a rainy winter day in Belfast, Northern Ireland, when I was sixteen. I had ducked into the Belfast Central Library to take refuge from the mis- erable weather, and I selected a book at random to pass the time. The book was a biography of Van Gogh — I have no idea which one — with extensive excerpts from the letters as well as reproductions of the xi paintings. Some two hours later, I left the library, still clutching the book, realizing that my personal kaleidoscope, as it were, had shifted: the world was not looking quite the same as before. When I finished the book some days later, I recall telling myself that by and by, I would return to Van Gogh and invest whatever effort I could in attempting to understand more adequately the extraordinary achievements of this unusual man. As it happens, it took me almost exactly a half-century to return to the letters in earnest, half a world away from Belfast and at the end of an academic career during which I had written a good deal about literature and various allied topics and concerns. As a sort of recapitulation of that career, I considered writing a collection of essays to address matters I had been especially concerned about or held to be formative during the previous decades. I wanted one of these essays to be on Van Gogh, so I read The Complete Letters (2000), finding myself again as thoroughly engaged as I had been in the Belfast Central Library. This time, how- ever, I also visited the Van Gogh Museum Library in Amsterdam to consult the secondary literature, and by and by, I fell into conversation with Hans Luijten, from whom I learned, among other things, that the magnificent 2009 edition of the complete correspondence would soon be published. The more I talked with Hans and the more I learned about the current state of scholarship on the letters, the more clearly I came to realize that despite repeated genuflections by commentators acknow- ledging the quality of Van Gogh’s writing, no one had attempted an extended critical account of the remarkable imaginative power of the correspondence as a whole. The coincidence of interests and opportun- ities was too persuasive to be resisted, so, after writing my collection of essays (one of them on Van Gogh, as planned), I set about the present project, returning to my early promise in a more thoroughgoing man- ner than I might ever have anticipated. Because the following book is addressed primarily to those who will be reading Van Gogh’s correspondence in translation, I quote throughout from Vincent van Gogh: The Letters (2009). Like other distin- guished renditions into English (Sir Thomas Hoby’s Courtyer, Pope’s Iliad, FitzGerald ’s Rubaiyat, MacKenna’s Enneads, among others), the xii Preface and Acknowledgements 2009 translation is remarkable for its inherent interest and high quality. Certainly, in its own right it is captivating and powerful enough to sustain the kind of critical assessment that I offer in the following pages. Still, not least because of Van Gogh’s scarcely translatable idiosyn- crasies, grammatical irregularities, and textual markings, it would be unwise to insist on a complete independence of the English version from the source texts in Dutch and French. Consequently, in the following pages my main strategies are, first, to ensure that my readings are sufficiently broad not to depend on nuances that the translation does not catch and, second, to check that, in specific instances, the original languages will sustain the kind of interpretation I am making based on the English. For instance, in Chapter 6, I discuss Van Gogh’s opinions about “memory” and “imagination.” In some cases, the Dutch says “uit het hoofd” and the French “composer de tête,” both using the word for “head” (“hoofd,” “tête” ), which is sometimes translated as “memory” and sometimes as “imagination.” In my analy- sis, the main point is that Van Gogh is concerned with what goes on inside one’s mind as distinct from the outside, material world, and, despite the above-mentioned differences, the translation conveys this idea very adequately. But if I were to explain every such difference between the translation and its source, my book would rapidly sink under the weight of it all. Although there are indeed limits to working from any translated version, I take heart from the words of Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten, the editors of Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, who comment that “thanks to the English translation,” their edition “will be the first truly inte- gral and updated compilation of Van Gogh’s correspondence available to an international readership” (“How to Do It and How Not to Do It: Problems in the Translation of Vincent van Gogh’s Letters,” Edi- tio: Internationales Jahrbuch für Editionswissenschaft 15 [2001]: 53).

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