Van Gogh by Steven Naifeh Read Free Book Online Page B

from the tides and storms of emotion that had proved so devastating in the past. History had taught that every triumph was followed by defeat, every plenty by want, every calm by upheaval, every Golden Age by apocalypse. The heart’s only protection from the inexorable righting of fate was to seek the solid middle ground, whether in prosperity or adversity, elation or despair. In eating, in clothing, even in painting, the Dutch aimed for the golden mean: the prudent, sustainable balance between sumptuousness and frugality.
    Degelijkheid
fit perfectly with Victorian calls to repress unseemly emotions, as well as with the new Protestantism’s rejection of Calvinist zeal. Once again,Anna’s fretful, defensive nature aligned with the zeitgeist. As an inveterate balancer of positives with negatives in her own gloomy calculations, Anna saw her role as keeping the ship of the parsonage on an even emotional keel. Good times would always be followed by “misfortune,” she reminded her children; “troubles and worries,” by “comfort and hope.” Not a moment of joy passed in the Van Gogh household without Anna’s calling attention to its inevitable cost—its “shadow side.” But melancholy, too, was forbidden. “He who denies himself and is self-possessed,” Anna summarized, “is a happy man.”
    The Van Gogh children grew up in a world drained of emotion as if of color; a world in which excesses on all sides—pride and passion on the one hand, self-reproach and indifference on the other—were leveled and centered in the service of
degelijkheid;
a world in which every positive had to be balanced by a negative; a world in which praise was always tempered with expectation, encouragement with foreboding, enthusiasm with caution. After leaving the island parsonage, all of Anna’s children were buffeted by extremes of emotion with which they had no experience and for which they had no defense. All showed astonishing insensitivity or obtuseness in dealing with emotional crises—in some cases, with catastrophic results.
    Duty, Decency, Solidity. These were the conventions of a happy life—the compasses of a moral life—without which “one cannot become a normal person,” Anna warned. Failure to uphold them offended religion, class, and social order. Failure brought shame to the family. Or worse. The literature of the period bristled with cautionary tales of a “bad life” leading to a tumble down the social ladder. Closer to home, Dorus had a nephew whose shameful conduct had forced his widowed mother into exile, where she “died of a lot of misery,” according to the family chronicler, “and cast a shadow on our house.”
    With nightmares like these in their thoughts, Anna and Dorus raised their children in an atmosphere of constant jeopardy and contingent love. A single wrong step could put one on “the slippery path,” as Dorus called it, with devastating consequences for all. Inevitably, the Van Gogh children grew up deeply afraid of “falling short.” The fear of failure “hung over [them] like a cloud,” according to one account, instilling in all a sense of anticipatory self-reproach that would linger long after they left the parsonage. “How much do we have to love Pa and Ma?” one of them wrote another plaintively. “I am not nearly good enough for them.”
    Every New Year’s Eve the Van Gogh children gathered and prayed together: “Preserve us from too much self-reproach.” None prayed more fervently than the eldest, Vincent.

CHAPTER 3
A Strange Boy

    A
VISITOR APPROACHING THE ZUNDERT PARSONAGE IN THE 1850S might have seen a small face in one of the second-story windows, eyeing the activity in the Markt. It would have been hard to miss the hair—a head full of thick, curly red locks. The face was odd: oblong, with a high brow and prominent chin, puffy cheeks, shallow-set eyes, and a wide nose. The lower lip protruded in a perpetual pout. Most visitors, if they saw him at all, would only have