One morning in early March of 1886, Theo van Gogh, the twenty-eight-year-old manager of the Montmartre branch of Boussod, Valadon & Co., a leading European art dealership, received a note written in black crayon:
My dear Theo,
Don’t be angry with me for arriving out of the blue. I’ve given it so much thought and I’m sure we’ll gain time this way. Shall be at the Louvre from midday onwards, or earlier if you like.
Please let me know what time you can get to the Salle Carrée. As far as expenses are concerned, I repeat that it won’t make much difference. I still have some money left, of course, and I want to talk to you before spending any of it. We’ll sort everything out, you’ll see.
So come as soon as you can. I shake your hand.
Ever yours,
Vincent
Theo must have read the hastily scrawled message with apprehension. Each sentence in the seemingly innocuous note had a subtext. Don’t be angry with me for arriving out of the blue. Ever since 1880, when Vincent had given up work as an evangelist to become an artist, Theo had periodically suggested that his brother come to Paris, the epicenter of the art world, but Vincent had insisted that he wasn’t ready. He had spent most of that time in remote corners of Holland and Belgium, drawing and painting peasants, coal miners, birds’ nests, and potatoes. During the last year, however, Vincent had started pestering Theo for the go-ahead; now it was Theo who had been putting Vincent off. Although he was devoted to Vincent, Theo realized that he wasn’t quite ready to have his irascible older brother in the same city, much less in the same cramped apartment. It was hard enough getting along with him at a distance. Theo wanted Vincent to wait, at least until June, when he could rent larger quarters. But Vincent was unwilling to postpone his move any longer. Being in Paris, he told Theo, would accelerate his education and give him a better chance of selling his work. I’m sure we’ll gain time this way. And so Vincent had taken the night train from Antwerp, where he had spent the last three months, to Paris.
As far as expenses are concerned, I repeat that it won’t make much difference. For six years, Theo had been his brother’s sole support, sending him more than a quarter of his modest salary each month. Theo could ill afford the money—he also supported his widowed mother and two of his sisters—but he knew his brother had nowhere else to turn. Over the years, Vincent had burned his bridges with teachers, friends, and family—everyone except Theo. I still have some money left, of course, and I want to talk to you before spending any of it. Vincent, who felt a corrosive shame at being a financial burden to his brother, was attempting to impress Theo with his thriftiness. What he neglected to tell Theo was that he had the money only because he had left Antwerp without paying his bills.
We’ll sort everything out, you’ll see. Vincent was trying to reassure his younger brother—and perhaps himself, as well. Both brothers suffered from depression, a condition Vincent was convinced ran in the Van Gogh family. But Vincent, despite a life of grinding poverty, had an optimistic, idealistic, almost childlike outlook. Practical, cautious Theo was less hopeful. He was a shy man, eager to please and willing to make accommodations, but his relationship with Vincent had been conducted largely by mail. They hadn’t spent more than a weekend or a Christmas vacation in the same house since childhood, and at one point had gone over a year without seeing each other. Theo knew from his parents, with whom Vincent moved in from time to time to save money, how impossible Vincent was to live with. He worried that his quiet, well-ordered life—long days at work, evenings of billiards and conversation at the Holland Club—would be turned upside down. But he knew he had no choice. Theo was his brother’s keeper, but no one could keep Vincent; as a former classmate put it, “He did not know what submission was.” In the end, it was always Vincent who acted and Theo who sorted everything out. Yet even Theo could not have guessed how difficult the upcoming months would be. Long after both men were dead, Theo’s widow would observe, “of all that Theo did for his brother, there was perhaps nothing that entailed a greater sacrifice than his having endured living with him for two years.” And yet if Theo had not met Vincent in the Salle Carrée, if he had not put him up—and put up with him—in Paris, there would have been no Arles, no Sunflowers, no Starry Night.
* * *
It seems ironic that we owe the phrase “brother’s keeper” to an incident in which someone refused responsibility for his brother. Yet ever since Cain, when asked the whereabouts of the murdered Abel, cried out “Am I my brother’s keeper?” the phrase has been shorthand for the assumption that we have a fraternal duty to look after our siblings. That duty may last a lifetime, as it would for Theo van Gogh. It may consist of rising to the occasion during a time of need: John Keats nursing his tubercular younger brother Tom until Tom’s death (and, in the process, likely catching the disease that would kill the poet himself three years later); Mathieu Dreyfus petitioning officials, hiring private detectives, and consulting clairvoyants for five years until his younger brother, Alfred, a French army captain falsely convicted of treason, was pardoned; Michael Marrocco leaving his home and job in New York City to live at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington with his younger brother, Brendan, a twenty-two-year-old infantryman who had lost his arms and legs to a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2009. It may be a short-term intervention: twenty-three-year-old Ronald Herrick donating a kidney to his dying twin, Richard, in the first successful organ transplant, in 1954. It may be a spur-of-the-moment decision: Hector stepping in for feckless Paris to fight Achilles (the classical version of the older brother fighting the playground bully on a younger brother’s behalf); the future naturalist John Muir seeing a man stick a needle into his infant brother’s arm and, never having heard of vaccinations, biting the doctor on his arm.
It may consist of a simple act of kindness. When Booker T. Washington, born into slavery on a Virginia plantation, was a child, his clothing was made from flax, a coarse material that chafed his skin raw. As he recalled in his autobiography:
I can scarcely imagine any torture, except, perhaps, the pulling of a tooth, that is equal to that caused by putting on a new flax shirt for the first time. It is almost equal to the feeling that one would experience if he had a dozen or more chestnut burrs, or a hundred small pin-points, in contact with his flesh. Even to this day I can recall accurately the tortures that I underwent when putting on one of these garments. . . . In connection with the flax shirt, my brother John, who is several years older than I am, performed one of the most generous acts that I ever heard of one slave relative doing for another. On several occasions when I was being forced to wear a new flax shirt, he generously agreed to put it on in my stead and wear it for several days, till it was “broken in.”
* * *
Theo hadn’t always been Vincent’s keeper. Growing up, it had been Vincent who, in his own quixotic fashion, looked out for his younger brother. That the balance of their relationship would change was, in some measure, due to a third brother neither of them ever met.
On March 30, 1852, Anna van Gogh, a minister’s wife in the village of Zundert in the southern Netherlands, gave birth to a stillborn child, a son named Vincent Willem. The parents, who had married late in life, were still mourning the loss when, a year later to the day, a second son was born. They gave him his older brother’s name. The second Vincent spent his early years in a house in which his mother was preoccupied with her grief, his father with his congregation. Each Sunday when the boy went to church, he saw his own name on his brother’s gravestone. Years afterward Vincent remembered his childhood as “gloomy and cold and sterile,” and went on to observe, “The germinating seed must not be exposed to a frosty wind—that was the case with me in the beginning.”
But if Vincent would accuse his parents of pushing him away with their rigidity, his parents would accuse Vincent of pushing them away with his erratic behavior. Vincent was an unusually silent, serious child who preferred to be alone, reading books and collecting beetles he pinned in a box lined with white paper and neatly labeled with their Dutch and Latin names. He liked to draw flowers and animals, but disliked the attention his efforts brought him. When he was eight he destroyed a small clay elephant he’d sculpted because his parents made such a fuss over it. When his mother praised his drawing of a cat climbing an apple tree, he ripped it up. “There was something strange about him,” recalled a maid who worked for the Van Goghs. “He did not seem like a child and was different from the others. Besides, he had queer manners and was often punished.” Theodorus and Anna van Gogh had high expectations of their six children, particularly of their eldest, but the more they tried to steer their son, the more resistant he became. Worried that the rough-edged village children were a bad influence, they sent eleven-year-old Vincent to boarding school nineteen miles away. On visits home, he took long solitary walks across the marshy flats and pine forests outside Zundert, collecting fallen birds’ nests, strengthening tree-bound nests he thought might not survive a storm. It would be the paradox of Vincent’s life that he longed for family, for friendship, for community, but was temperamentally unable to get along with people.
Born four years after Vincent, Theo gave Vincent a second chance at brotherhood. Living in the shadow of the brother who died, Vincent would forge a lifelong bond with the brother who lived. (A fourth brother, born ten years after Theo, was so much younger that he grew up, in essence, as an only child.) They made an unusual pair. Theo had the blond hair and delicate features of the father for whom he had been named, while Vincent had his mother’s copper hair, sturdy build, and homely face. Vincent was a broad-shouldered fellow of great strength and energy; Theo was slender, frail, and frequently ill. Both boys were unusually sensitive, but Vincent could be brusque and quick-tempered, while Theo was always unassuming and agreeable. Their sister Lies noted that Theo had inherited his father’s “warm-heartedness”; their sister Anna believed he had been “a friendly soul” from birth. Perhaps in part to compensate for Vincent’s obstinacy, Theo rarely gave his parents cause for worry. Pastor van Gogh liked to compare his two elder sons to Jacob and Esau. There was never any doubt which he considered the rough, uncouth Esau, and which the practical, presentable Jacob.
Unlike the biblical brothers, Vincent and Theo got along well. Theo, alone in the family, enjoyed Vincent’s company. In later life, his sisters recalled young Vincent as prickly, teasing, and aloof; Theo remembered him as imaginative and clever. Vincent built sandcastles with Theo, took him fishing and ice skating, taught him how to shoot marbles, invented games for him to play, and talked with him into the night in the attic room they shared. His sisters learned to give Vincent a wide berth, but from the beginning, Theo worshiped his older brother. “I adored him more than anything imaginable,” Theo recalled. Years later, when Vincent would quarrel bitterly with his father and look back on his early years with resentment, his letters to Theo cited fond memories of their shared childhood: the walks they took, the starlings that perched on the church, the look of the clouds in the blue sky, the road lined with beech trees. Toward the end of his life, when he lay in a hospital in Arles after cutting off part of his ear, and Theo laid his head in sorrow on the pillow beside him, Vincent, recalling the days when they had shared a bed, would whisper: “Just like Zundert.”
* * *
When Vincent was sixteen, his godfather, Uncle Cent, a well-known art dealer, secured him a job as an apprentice clerk in The Hague with his firm, Goupil. Vincent was a tireless worker who was fascinated by the lithographs and etchings he spent his days packing and unpacking. His parents were heartened when they received a letter from Vincent’s boss, telling them that everyone at the gallery liked dealing with Vincent and that he had a bright future in the profession. In August 1872, fifteen-year-old Theo spent two days with his brother in The Hague. One afternoon, they strolled out of town along a canal path to the mill at Rijswijk. There, over glasses of milk, they promised that no matter what happened, they would stand by each other for the rest of their lives. It was a day both brothers would long remember, and at times of strain in their relationship, each found reason to remind the other of it. A year later, Vincent sent Theo a reproduction of Jan Weissenbruch’s painting of the mill, writing, “That Rijswijk road holds memories for me which are perhaps the most beautiful I have.”
* * *
It seemed inevitable that Theo would follow his older brother into the art business. On January 1, 1873, several months after their walk to the Rijswijk mill, Theo began work in the Brussels branch of Goupil. “I am so glad that we shall both be in the same profession and in the same firm,” wrote Vincent from The Hague. “We must be sure to write to each other regularly.” They did. None of Theo’s letters to Vincent from those early years have survived (though Theo carefully saved his brother’s correspondence, Vincent rarely saved Theo’s), but Vincent’s letters give a heady sense of two young men from the provinces sharing their excitement at their expanding worlds—the epistolary equivalent of wide-eyed college freshmen staying up all night to discuss life’s eternal questions. Vincent played the role of mentor, shaping the tastes of his eager acolyte. “Here are the names of a few painters I particularly like,” he wrote. “Scheffer, Delaroche, Hébert, Hamon . . .” (“A few,” to the enthusiastic Vincent, turned out to mean sixty-one.) Vincent’s reading lists for Theo were only slightly less extensive: Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, Michelet, Zola, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among dozens of others. (“With the money I gave you, you must buy Alphonse Karr’s Voyage autour de mon jardin. Be sure to do that—I want you to read it.”) Vincent copied out verses by his favorite Romantic poets; passed along quotations from thinkers he admired; and sent art prints, some of them duplicates of ones he owned so that he and his brother, a hundred miles apart, could gaze at the same pictures on their bedroom walls. He gave Theo encouragement and advice. Indeed, there seemed to be no subject on which the elder brother did not counsel the younger: what to do (“Try to take as many walks as you can and keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art”); what to feel (“Admire as much as you can, most people don’t admire enough”); how to act (“be as patient and kind as you can”); how to lift one’s spirits (“I strongly advise you to smoke a pipe; it is a good remedy for the blues”); and how to deal with the opposite sex, a subject about which the advisor himself was clueless but opinionated (“you are quite right about those priggish girls . . . but watch your heart, boy”). Theo soaked up his brother’s counsel; he took long walks, he read Michelet, he smoked a pipe.
Their relationship began to shift with an incident that, like a fault line, would expose deeper rifts in Vincent’s equilibrium. In 1873, after four years in The Hague, Vincent had been promoted to a position at Goupil’s London gallery. (Theo sent him a wreath of oak leaves he’d gathered from the heath near the parsonage to remind Vincent of home.) For almost a year, Vincent nursed a secret infatuation for his landlady’s daughter. One afternoon, finding himself alone with her, the awkward twenty-one-year-old declared his love. The shocked young woman told him she was secretly engaged. With characteristic persistence, Vincent hounded the girl, urging her to break off her engagement, to no avail. He came home that summer almost catatonic with depression. Hoping a change of scene might lift his godson’s spirits, Uncle Cent arranged for Vincent to work in Goupil’s main office in Paris. (Vincent unsuccessfully petitioned his uncle to transfer Theo there to keep him company.) But Vincent was no less morose. At work he argued with his employers and insulted his customers. If a client wanted to buy a painting Vincent considered inferior, he tried to steer him toward work he considered worthy; if a client chose to disregard his advice, Vincent couldn’t hide his disgust. When his superiors complained about his sales technique, Vincent insisted he couldn’t keep quiet when a customer showed poor taste—didn’t they want him to tell the truth? Not surprisingly, two days after his twenty-third birthday, seven years after he first came to Goupil, Vincent was asked to leave the company.
Vincent’s intensity had found a new focus. In his letters to Theo, reports on museums were replaced by reports on church services; critiques of paintings by critiques of scripture; swatches of romantic poetry by lyrics to hymns; quotes from Zola and Michelet by quotes from the Old Testament and The Pilgrim’s Progress. In October 1876, after preaching for the first time, Vincent copied out the entire sermon and sent it to his brother. Any gratification his parents felt when their son turned to religion curdled as Vincent, who never did anything halfway, became increasingly fanatic. He fell asleep each night reading the Bible, he attended as many as seven services each Sunday. One Sunday he threw his monogrammed silver watch into the collection plate, another Sunday his gloves—the initial symptoms of an obsession with sacrifice and suffering that would end with him wearing rags. His advice to Theo turned rigidly pious: go to church as often as possible; learn to distinguish between good and evil; eat only plain food; throw out every book but the Bible. “Do not be afraid to sing a hymn in the evening when you are out for a walk and nobody is about,” he urged, a suggestion his self-conscious brother was unlikely to follow. It was a measure of Theo’s growing confidence that he didn’t succumb to his brother’s proselytizing; as he watched his brother slip into zealotry, Theo became less enamored of organized religion and eventually renounced the church.
Confused, lonely, and consumed by religious fervor, Vincent bounced from job to job: boarding-school teacher (given the end-of-term task of collecting overdue tuition, Vincent couldn’t bring himself to put the squeeze on impoverished families and was dismissed); lay preacher (like his father, he was an awkward speaker and was seldom invited to the pulpit); bookseller’s clerk (he spent much of his time translating the Bible into French, German, and English, or making what the boss’s son described as “silly pen-and-ink drawings”); theological scholar (he quit less than a year into his studies, insisting one didn’t need to know Latin and Greek to relieve human suffering); probationary evangelist (he was so obstinate—asked whether a certain word was dative or accusative, he replied, “I really don’t care, sir”—that after his three-month trial period, the mission-school elders refused to appoint him). In December 1878, the evangelical-school dropout went off to serve anyway, “to preach the Gospel to the poor and to all those who needed it,” as he put it, in the coal fields of Belgium.
Vincent’s parents despaired. Proper Calvinists who had envisioned Vincent as a respectable country minister, they were embarrassed by their brooding, unpredictable son and did their best to keep news of his failures from their neighbors. Vincent’s sisters worried that their peculiar brother would ruin their chances for marriage. “His religion makes him absolutely dull and unsociable,” one of them wrote. Alone in the family, Theo still believed in his brother, telling his parents that Vincent’s quirks were marks of his special character, assuring them that Vincent would eventually find his way. Lies scoffed. “You think that he is something more than an ordinary human being,” she wrote Theo, “but I think it would be much better if he thought himself just an ordinary being.”
When Theo was a child, his parents had urged him to follow in his older brother’s footsteps. Now they were terrified that he might do so. But their conscientious younger son was succeeding in the very job at which Vincent had failed. Within eight months at Goupil, Theo had gone from filling orders in the stockroom to standing in for the manager when he was away on business; after only a year, the sixteen-year-old was given Vincent’s old salesman’s position at the company’s more prestigious branch in The Hague. Vincent’s troubles made it even more vital to his parents that Theo do well. “Now the oldest has rocked the boat, we hope all the more that the second will steer a steady course,” wrote Pastor van Gogh to Theo. The second, who wrote his parents regularly and sent money home to help pay for his sisters’ education, rarely disappointed: “The crowning glory of our old age,” his doting parents called him, “our most prized possession.” While Vincent was failing theology school, Theo was in Paris working for Goupil at the 1878 Exposition Universelle, where he sold a painting, listened to Edison’s phonograph, and met the French president, who stopped by the Goupil booth and asked the young Dutchman a few questions. When, in a rare misstep, Theo took a mistress from an inferior social class (the kind of embarrassing behavior his parents had come to expect from Vincent), his parents pressured him into giving her up. “You shall and must be our joy and honour!” his father reminded him. “We cannot do without it.” As if trying to expunge evidence of their elder son’s failures, the van Gogh parents saved none of Vincent’s letters. They kept every one of Theo’s.
Pastor van Gogh and his wife confided their worries about their ne’er-do-well elder son to his prematurely responsible younger brother. In October 1874, when they hadn’t heard from Vincent in three weeks, they urged seventeen-year-old Theo to keep writing to him, hoping he would be a steadying influence, and asked him to report back on his brother’s state of mind. “I’m afraid that something awful will happen, my dear Theo,” wrote his father. “I say this to you as your confidante—if you run across something that might be useful, let us know. I believe there must be some kind of illness, whether physical or mental.” At times, Theo and his father sounded like anxious parents fretting over a recalcitrant teenager. In 1877, on the eve of Vincent’s departure for Amsterdam to study theology, Pastor van Gogh bought new clothes for his chronically disheveled son. “We have improved his appearance a little bit with the help of the best tailor from Breda,” he wrote to Theo, imploring him to perform “another work of mercy” and persuade Vincent to visit “a clever hairdresser” who might be able to tame his unruly orange mop. When Vincent dropped out of the seven-year theology program, his father helped him enroll in evangelical school. But he had little hope that things would improve. “It grieves us so to see that he literally knows no joy of life, but always walks with bent head, whilst we did all in our power to bring him to an honorable position!” he wrote Theo. “It seems as if he deliberately chooses the most difficult path.”
Theo found himself in the position of intermediary between the parents he revered and the brother he adored, trying to explain each to the other. His aging parents increasingly relied on him to look after the son to whom they referred as “the lost sheep.” Unbeknown to Vincent, Theo began sending sixty francs a month to his parents for them to pass along to his brother. A few years later, when Vincent was considering where to live, his father wrote: “Just write to Theo, and arrange with him what is best, and what will be the cheapest way.” As Vincent became ever more estranged from his parents, he became ever more dependent on Theo. Eventually, Theo was Vincent’s link to the family he yearned to connect with but with which he couldn’t stop quarreling. It was in letters and visits with Theo that Vincent kept the idea of home, family, and childhood alive. Each time he moved—and in his brief adulthood he would move more than two dozen times—Vincent never failed to describe his lodgings to Theo: the view from the window, the postcards (many of them supplied by Theo) he had nailed on the walls. It was as if by describing his rented room to his brother, he might make it a home. Vincent treasured the rare times Theo could get off work long enough to visit him in his far-flung retreats, when they’d take long walks and talk about art and family. As soon as Theo left, Vincent would write him a letter, picking up the thread of their conversation. “What a pleasant day we spent in Amsterdam,” he wrote after one 1877 visit. “I stood watching your train until it was out of sight. We are such old friends already.” Theo’s visits buoyed Vincent as he resumed his solitary life. “I still keep thinking of the day you came to Brussels and of our visit to the museum,” he wrote in 1878. “And I often wish you were a bit nearer and that we could be together more often. Do reply soon.”
* * *
Theo van Gogh was part of a long tradition of brothers stepping in for ailing or absent parents. In 1695, after his mother and father died within a year of each other, twenty-three-year-old Johann Christoph Bach took in his thirteen-year-old brother, Johann Jacob, and his nine-year-old brother, Johann Sebastian. Although his modest income as church organist was hardly enough to provide for his own children, Cristoph not only fed and clothed his younger brothers, but taught Johann Sebastian to play the clavier and introduced him to the works of Pachelbel, under whom Cristoph had studied, and other great composers of the day. He would look after Johann Sebastian until the musical prodigy went away to school shortly before his fourteenth birthday. Nearly a century later, sixteen-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven, the eldest of three brothers, traveled to Vienna in hopes of studying with Mozart. In March 1787, two weeks after he arrived, Beethoven learned that his mother was ill with consumption. He rushed home to Bonn, but his mother died not long thereafter, pushing his father deeper into alcoholism. The adolescent Beethoven spent the next five years at home, taking care of his two younger brothers, helping pay for their upkeep by playing viola in the court orchestra. He would be twenty-one before he was able to get away again; by then, Mozart was dead.
Sydney Chaplin spent much of his childhood in late-Victorian London looking after his half-brother, Charlie, as they were shuttled through workhouses and charity institutions while their mother was intermittently confined to mental asylums. Years later, he would serve as Charlie’s business manager. “It has always been my unfortunate predicament or should I say fortunate predicament? to concern myself with your protection,” wrote Sydney. “This is the result of my fraternal or rather paternal instinct.” In 1942, instructed by his dying father to make sure his frail, artistic younger brother went to college, John Warhola, a machine shop worker, not only helped pay Andy’s way through the Carnegie Institute, but after his brother left for New York City and became Andy Warhol, he called him every Sunday until the artist’s death in 1987. In 1992, following the deaths of his parents within several months of each other, twenty-one-year-old college student Dave Eggers assumed responsibility for his eight-year-old brother (cooking his meals, taking him to Little League practice, attending parent-teacher conferences), an experience he would recount in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Sometimes a brother must protect a sibling from a parent. When the author Richard Rhodes was ten, his widowed father married a disturbed, sadistic woman who all but starved Richard and his brother, Stanley; permitted them to bathe only once a month; and beat them with belt buckles, broom handles, and stiletto heels, among other weapons. Their cowed father didn’t intervene, but twelve-year-old, eighty-pound Stanley protected his younger brother as well as he could: scouring trash cans at drive-ins for half-eaten hamburgers, comforting him after beatings, standing up to their tormentor. When Richard, forbidden to use the bathroom at night, resorted to surreptitiously peeing into a bottle, Stanley smuggled the brimming vessel past their sleeping stepmother to the bathroom each morning and poured its contents into the toilet, muffling the splash with the sound of his own urination. After two years of escalating abuse, Stanley, worried that their stepmother might kill one or both of them, persuaded the police to place the brothers in a boys’ home. “Stanley saved us,” wrote Rhodes in A Hole in the World, his account of the ordeal.
The roles of keeper and kept are not fixed. Following Emancipation in 1863, John Washington, breaker-in of Booker’s flax shirts, worked in a coal mine so that his younger brother could attend the Hampton Institute. When Booker graduated, he returned the favor, teaching school to help pay for John to study at Hampton himself. (Years later, as president of the Tuskegee Institute, Booker would employ his brother as superintendent of industries.) In 1968, Chuck Hagel, the future Nebraska senator, and his younger brother, Tom, were on patrol in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War when someone in their unit stumbled on a trip wire, setting off mines the enemy had hung in the trees. Seeing that Chuck was bleeding profusely from his chest, Tom, who had taken shrapnel in the arms and shoulders, tore open his brother’s shirt and bandaged the wound, saving his life. Less than a month later, the Hagels’ armored personnel carrier hit a land mine, triggering a barrage of Vietcong machine-gun fire. Badly burned from the initial blast but knowing the ammunition-laden vehicle would soon ignite, Chuck dragged his unconscious brother from the APC just before it exploded.
With a moody, alcoholic father, a doting but hypochondriacal mother, and a bright but unstable older brother who went off to sea, the young Walt Whitman was more parent than brother to his six younger siblings: teaching them how to spell, helping build a succession of family houses, and paying the lion’s share of the family expenses as soon as he was old enough to work. It was “as if he had us in his charge . . . ” said his brother George. “He was like us—yet he was different from us, too.” Whenever there was a family crisis (and there were many; the Whitmans were a prodigiously troubled brood, touched by alcoholism, insanity, prostitution, and early death), it was to Walt his siblings turned. And though he felt close to only one of them—Jeff, an engineer who shared his love of opera and long walks, was, he said, his one “real brother” and only “understander”—Walt was always willing to foot a bill or extricate someone from a jam. When George’s name appeared on the list of casualties after the Battle of Fredericksburg, Walt set out at once for the front, searching camps and hospitals, undergoing “the greatest suffering I ever experienced in my life,” until he found his wounded brother. Two years later, when George was starving in a Confederate prison, it was Walt who pushed General Grant to negotiate the special prisoner exchange that freed him. That same year, when the eldest brother, Jesse, turned violent and threatened their mother with a chair, it was Walt who reluctantly had him committed to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum. And it was Walt who provided for Eddy, his epileptic, mentally disabled youngest brother, to whom he would leave the majority of his modest estate.
But in 1873, when fifty-four-year-old Walt was crippled by a stroke and immobilized by depression after the death of his beloved mother, George took Walt and Eddy into his Camden home. A stolid, practical man who worked as an inspector in a pipe foundry, George didn’t understand his poetry-writing brother—of Leaves of Grass, he commented, “didn’t think it worth reading—fingered it a little”—yet for eleven years he looked after Walt, who slept late, cared little for schedules, and could be, said George, “stubborner . . . than a load of bricks.” (One can only imagine what George thought when a long-haired, velvet-coated, foppish young man who announced himself as Oscar Wilde showed up at his door to pay homage to Walt.) George and his wife named their first child for Walt, who, after the infant died at eight months, visited his grave every few days. In 1884, when George and his wife moved to a farm, they built a room for Walt, but he preferred the city and stayed in Camden, where, despite a series of strokes, he managed the last eight years of his life on his own. Walt never lost his sense of responsibility for his dwindling family. As he would tell an interviewer, a year before he died, “Tho’ always unmarried I have had six children.”
* * *
In the summer of 1879, Theo visited Vincent in the Borinage, the coal-mining region of southwest Belgium where Vincent served as a combination preacher-cum-teacher-cum-social-worker-cum-nurse to the miners and their families. (To the shock of the miners’ wives, he even helped with the laundry.) In an area of abject poverty, Vincent was determined to be as wretched as his congregation. He abandoned his boardinghouse for a miner’s hut; gave up his mattress for a bed of straw; redistributed most of the few shabby clothes he possessed; tore up his own underwear to bandage the miners’ wounds; went barefoot even in winter; shared all but a few francs of what little money his father was able to send; lived on dry crusts of bread, frostbitten potatoes, and water; and stopped using soap. (Vincent’s masochism may have been inspired by his desire to imitate the early Christian martyrs, but it surely stemmed as much from lifelong feelings of unworthiness and, perhaps, an unacknowledged desire to outsacrifice his pastor father.) When the Evangelization Council, which had eventually agreed to sponsor him, accused him of “an excess of zeal bordering on the scandalous” and refused to reappoint him, Vincent continued ministering on his own. Alarmed by Vincent’s behavior, his father threatened to have him committed to the asylum at Gheel. As Vincent described it years later: “My father assembled the family council to have me locked up like a madman; thanks to my oldest brother, that good Theodore, they left me alone.” In what would become a sure sign of trouble, Vincent’s letters to Theo grew less frequent. At night—cold, hungry, and unbearably lonely—Vincent could be heard weeping in his hut.
Vincent had hinted at his spartan life, but Theo was shocked by his brother’s condition. The young man who three years ago had strode around London in a top hat—“you cannot be in London without one,” he had airily written his mother—was dressed in what looked more like rags than clothes, his once-sturdy frame emaciated, his face as black with coal dust as any miner’s. The contrast with his brother could hardly have been greater. Twenty-two-year-old Theo, attired in the black coat, vest, and tie of a respectable young businessman, had just been promoted to the Goupil office in Paris. Theo was on his way up in the world; Vincent seemed close to the bottom. As the brothers walked past slag heaps, dung hills, and abandoned mineshafts, Theo, who had been commissioned by his father to talk sense into his older brother, reminded Vincent of the walk they had taken seven years earlier to the mill at Rijswijk, when Vincent had been a promising young art dealer and Theo his eager disciple. Vincent had changed, Theo said. He talked about the pain Vincent’s behavior was causing the family. He urged Vincent to try harder to get along with their aging father. Even Theo couldn’t understand why Vincent was living like this. Wouldn’t it be better, he suggested, to learn a trade—to become a printer, carpenter, baker, barber, or librarian—than to be an “idler” living at his parents’ expense?
Vincent was devastated. Theo, alone in the family, alone in the world, had seemed to understand him. Now, like his parents and sisters, Theo saw him as the family problem. At the time, Vincent said little, and when he wrote Theo shortly afterward, he thanked him for the visit and called him his “compagnon de voyage.” But Vincent insisted he wasn’t willing to get a conventional job just to please his family. As for Theo’s charge of “idleness,” he observed that his backbreaking work as an evangelist was “a rather strange sort of ‘idleness.’” In any case, he was determined to follow his own path. “It would indeed be a decisive answer (always supposing that it were possible to assume, quick as lightning, the form of a baker, a barber or a librarian); but at the same time it would be a foolish answer, more or less like the action of the man who, when reproached with cruelty for riding a donkey, immediately dismounted and continued his way with the donkey on his shoulders.” Vincent closed with his customary sign-off—“a handshake in my thoughts”—but there was no mistaking his sense of betrayal.
Since Vincent didn’t save his brother’s letters, we don’t know how Theo responded, or whether he responded at all. We do know that Vincent didn’t write to his brother for nine months, the longest he ever went without writing him. But when Theo sent his brother fifty francs the following July, Vincent, like a prideful child who has been waiting for an excuse to make up with his best friend, grudgingly accepted the money—and the olive branch. “I am writing to you rather reluctantly because, for a good many reasons, I have kept silent for such a long time. To some extent you have become a stranger to me, and I to you perhaps more than you think. It is probably better for us not to go on like that.” Vincent readdressed the charges Theo had made at their last visit, with an eloquence and forcefulness that suggest he had spent much of the intervening time thinking about them. It was the longest letter Vincent had ever written—a painstaking, scrupulous document, in which his need to be understood by Theo seems almost palpable, as if by explaining his life to his brother, he could explain it to himself. He acknowledged that their positions had changed. “If I have come down in the world, you have in a different way come up in it. . . . I am glad of that, I say that in all sincerity, and it will always give me pleasure.” But he insisted that, in essentials, he hadn’t changed since that day at the Rijswijk mill. “What has changed is that my life then was less difficult and my future seemingly less gloomy, but as far as my inner self, my way of looking at things and of thinking is concerned, that has not changed. But if there has indeed been a change, then it is that I think, believe and love more seriously now what I thought, believed and loved even then.” As for getting a conventional job, he explained that though his journey seemed aimless to his family, there was purpose in it. “But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the draft turns into the sketch and the sketch into the painting through the serious work done on it.” Vincent compared himself to a caged bird in spring, which knows it should be out building nests and hatching young but can only bang its head against the bars. “Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force.” Reflecting on his ordeal in the Borinage, Vincent extended the ornithological metaphor. “What the moulting season is for birds—the time when they lose their feathers—setbacks, misfortune and hard times are for us human beings. You can cling on to the moulting season, you can also emerge from it reborn, but it must not be done in public.”
In retrospect, Vincent’s year in the Borinage may have been something like an alcoholic “hitting bottom,” and Theo’s visit may have carried the kind of galvanizing shock of a family “intervention,” forcing Vincent, who had been struggling to reconcile his great obsessions—art and religion—into realizing what he really wanted to do. With this letter, he was serving notice that he had made his choice: he was determined to become an artist. And he was expressing, as plainly as his pride allowed, that Theo, his “compagnon de voyage,” was a vital part of his new path.
* * *
The brothers entered into an unspoken partnership. Over the following several years, with the singlemindedness with which he had thrown himself into religion, Vincent worked at copy-book exercises into the night; studied anatomy texts and perspective manuals; visited museums; apprenticed himself to painters (and antagonized them until they broke with him); and filled sketchbook after sketchbook. “If I can only continue to work, somehow or other it will set me right again,” he wrote Theo. Theo dedicated himself to supporting his brother. From his annual salary of 4,000 francs (excluding commissions), he sent Vincent 100 francs a month: 30 percent of his salary, about twice what a weaver earned at the time and, for a man who was also helping to support his parents and sisters, a considerable sacrifice. (When Theo got a raise, he boosted Vincent’s allowance to 150 francs.) Theo also served as a one-man art warehouse, supplying Vincent with sketch pads, drawing paper, pencils, quill pens, sepia ink, art books, draftsmanship guides, prints, engravings, and anatomical illustrations of horses, cows, and sheep. Over the years, at Vincent’s behest, Theo brokered introductions to other artists; forwarded letters; delivered drawings to friends; bought Vincent furniture; settled his brother’s debts; put up struggling young artists in his apartment; researched painters in whom his brother expressed interest; passed along information on how to make lithographs or how to draw from engravings; aired out, varnished, or brushed with egg-white the paintings Vincent sent him; gave him feedback on his work; and sent him his old clothes—a rare instance in which an older brother got the hand-me-downs. In addition to his work at Goupil, Theo had what amounted to a second full-time job: his brother.
The brothers carried out their partnership largely by mail, as Vincent continued his peripatetic ways (during the ten post-Borinage years that remained to him he would live in eleven different places), while Theo, the still point in Vincent’s turning world, spent the rest of his life in Paris. Some biographers have suggested that Vincent maintained close epistolary contact with Theo not to communicate with his beloved brother but to stay on good terms with his financial lifeline. In almost every letter Vincent dropped not-so-subtle hints (“I am still passing through a fairly difficult period right now. The cost of model, studio, drawing and painting materials keeps going up”), referred to his costs (“Of course I have to pay the people who pose. Not much, but because it happens every day it is one expense more”), or made direct requests (“Here we are at the beginning of another month, and although it’s not yet a month since you sent me something, I would ask you to be kind enough to send me some more soon”). He assured Theo that the money fueled his art, not his stomach (“when I receive the money my greatest craving will not be for food, though I shall have been fasting, but even more so for painting—and I shall immediately go on a hunt for models and continue until all the money is gone”). He made frequent references to the privations he endured for his art (to pay for canvas and paint, he lived on bread and coffee for days at a time), and pointed out examples of his thrift (in Arles, he would make do with less expensive prostitutes, “the kind of 2-franc women who were originally intended for the Zouaves”). He asked for advances but complained if his monthly payment was a day late (“Am I less than your creditors? Who must wait, they or I???”).
Yet money seemed less a motivation for writing his brother than an excuse to talk about art. In the same letter in which he pointedly mentioned being too weak to get food down, he had enough energy to go on for another six pages, rhapsodizing about his favorite hues. “Cobalt is a divine color, and there is nothing so beautiful for bringing atmosphere around things. Carmine is the red of wine, and it is warm and spirited like wine.” Each letter brimmed with accounts of current projects, embellished with pen-and-ink illustrations (“I’ve been plodding away the last few days at a woman whom I saw pulling carrots in the snow last winter”) and descriptions of scenes he wanted to sketch (“I see pictures and drawings in the most squalid little corners. I am irresistibly impelled to study them”). When, in 1882, partly at his brother’s urging, Vincent began oil painting, his letters became even richer and more colorful, as if composed with the same thick brushstrokes he applied to his canvases. He told Theo what shade every inch of a painting would be. (For a model’s head, he described “a flesh colour full of tonal values, with more bronze in the neck, jet-black hair—black which I had to do with carmine and Prussian blue—off-white for the little jacket, light yellow, much lighter than the white, for the background. A touch of flame red in the jet-black hair and again a flame-coloured bow in the off-white.”) He discussed technical problems, evaluated artists of the past, and tested his theories about art on Theo as he had once tested his ideas about religion. “What I want to express, in both figure and landscape, isn’t anything sentimental or melancholy, but deep anguish.” (His postscript, asking for more drawing paper, was more prosaic: “Please remember the thick Ingres if you can, enclosed is another sample. I still have a supply of the thin kind. I can do watercolour washes on the thick Ingres, but on the sans fin, for instance, it always goes blurry, which isn’t entirely my fault.”) His letters to Theo seemed as necessary a part of his creative process as the paintings themselves. If he didn’t describe a painting to his brother, it wasn’t yet complete.
Vincent needed Theo not just as an audience for his art, but as a witness to his life. All his other relationships—with his parents, his sisters, his teachers, and his few friends—ended in misunderstanding and estrangement. Theo alone still put up with him, and it was to Theo that he detailed each twist in his melodramatic path: falling in unrequited love with Kee Vos, his widowed cousin; breaking with his mentors H. G. Tersteeg and Anton Mauve; setting up house with Sien Hoornik, a pregnant, alcoholic prostitute he planned to marry despite, or perhaps because of, the fierce opposition of his family. (In the end, he succumbed to Theo’s arguments and left her.) From his brother, Vincent needed understanding, if not absolution. He felt compelled to tell Theo “all the thoughts that come into my head, without being afraid of rambling on now and then, without censoring my thoughts or holding them back.” His letters to Theo constituted not only his artistic manifesto but also his confession. “If I couldn’t give vent to my feelings now and then,” he wrote, “I think the boiler would burst.” After painting from dawn to dark, he stayed up almost every night to write. (“Dear brother, It is already late, but I want to write you once more. You are not here, but I wish you were, and sometimes it seems to me we are not far away from each other.”) After he signed off (“a handshake in my thoughts, your loving brother Vincent”), he almost always wrote more—page after page—until his postscripts were longer than the letter proper. In writing, as in painting, Vincent couldn’t stop. When he finally came to an end, he pleaded with Theo to write back soon. If he didn’t receive a reply promptly, Vincent confessed, he felt “absolutely cut off from the outer world.”
Dealing with Vincent was such an all-consuming task that it was easy to forget—for Vincent, at least—that Theo worked six days a week at Goupil, often till late at night, frequently going on the road to inspect potential acquisitions or show paintings to prospective clients. In 1881, after little more than a year in Paris, Theo had been put in charge of the firm’s annex on Boulevard Montmartre, where he developed a reputation for being a sensitive, honorable young dealer. Theo even persuaded his bosses to let him show some of the Impressionists, a controversial new group of painters scorned by the art establishment as childish amateurs. In 1884, Theo sold a landscape by Pissarro; the following year he would show Sisley, Monet, and Renoir. Although not an aggressive salesman, Theo was quietly passionate about the artists he believed in. “He was pale, blond and so melancholy that he seemed to hold canvases the way beggars hold their wooden bowls,” recalled the Symbolist poet Gustave Kahn. “His profound conviction of the value of the new art was stated without vigor, and thus without great success. He did not have a barker’s gift. But this salesman was an excellent critic and engaged in discussions with painters and writers as the discriminating art lover he was.” The Impressionists respected Theo not just because he was one of the few dealers willing to handle their work, or because he was one of the few dealers they trusted to dry and frame their paintings properly, but because, in a notoriously cutthroat business, he was interested in them as people as much as in how much their canvases sold for. (“At times I have my doubts about which I like most, the painter himself or his work,” Theo confessed.) When Albert Besnard was in sudden need of 200 francs, he came to Theo—“You are the only person I can turn to,” he wrote—and Theo obliged. When the elderly Pissarro couldn’t pay his rent, Theo advanced him money against future sales, sales he knew might never take place. It frustrated Theo that the work he most admired was so little appreciated. A friend observed that whenever Theo sold a canvas by an established artist for ten or twenty thousand francs “but tried in vain to obtain 400 francs for a fine painting by Pissarro, his heart was invaded by hate, an inevitable and ferocious irritation.” (It was an irritation no doubt fueled by his frustration on his brother’s behalf.) Like Vincent, he despaired at the foolishness of certain clients. “What can I do,” he wrote his sister, “when some one demands a picture, as happened the other day, where the sun and moon must appear simultaneously?” Unlike his brother, Theo was willing to compromise: “I let it be painted.”
Biographers emphasize the differences between the brothers—Vincent the ornery, unpredictable artist, Theo the practical, tenderhearted man of business. But the brothers, as Vincent liked to point out, had much in common: their tendency to melancholy, their thriftiness, their love of reading, their appetite for work, their eye for color, their fondness for long walks in “gray weather,” their loneliness, their inclination to “analyze things.” “How curious it is that you and I often seem to have the same thoughts,” Vincent wrote. One senses that “respectable” Theo would have liked to be a little less respectable, a little more like Vincent. Although it occasioned him no end of aggravation, he admired his brother’s unyielding nature and fretted that he himself was too pliable. In his letters, one can hear him trying on Vincent’s persona. When he wrote his sister Lies in October 1885, it could have been Vincent speaking: “The more people one meets, the more one sees that they are hiding behind the accepted language of convention; what they really mean when they say they are sincere is so often trivial and malicious.” If Theo wished he had a bit more Vincent in him, so, too, did Vincent. Though he liked to chaff Theo about playing the “lucky dog” to his “mauvais coucheur,” Vincent was delighted whenever Theo shed his buttoned-down self. It made Vincent feel less alone. In 1883, after visiting Vincent and Sien in The Hague, respectable Theo confessed that he, too, had taken in a woman from the streets, a girl from Brittany who had a tumor in her foot and couldn’t work. Vincent was ecstatic. “To you and me there appeared on a cold, pitiless pavement the downcast, sorrowful figure of a woman,” he wrote, with the brio of a romance novelist, “and neither you nor I passed her by, but both of us stopped and followed the dictates of our human heart.” He prodded his brother for details (“I’m eager to hear how well up your woman is in artistic matters”), recommended books (“I think the works of Michelet would be something to soothe and strengthen her mind”), and urged Theo to bring her home to Holland, perhaps hoping their father would see that his Jacob could be just as embarrassing as his Esau (“Who knows whether it might not help to set right certain things concerning my own woman”). Theo did not introduce her to his parents. When he told them he was thinking of marrying the woman, Pastor van Gogh and his wife, worried that their worst fear—that Theo was taking after Vincent—was coming true, told Theo the relationship was not in keeping with “the dignity of his calling.” (Perhaps not coincidentally, once he had broken with Sien Hoornik, Vincent—who, without ever having met Theo’s woman, had urged Theo to marry her and have a child—began to question the woman’s suitability, worried that she had a craving for “greatness,” and likened her to Lady Macbeth.) The problem was solved when Theo’s “patient,” as he called her, having been restored to health at his expense, ran away one night and never returned.
It has been suggested that Vincent saw Theo as his alter ego. Indeed, Vincent seems to have had difficulty seeing Theo as a separate person with a life of his own. In 1883, Theo, beset by depression and anxiety, confessed he was thinking of emigrating to New York, a city said to be receptive to artistic innovation, and opening his own gallery. Blaming Theo’s malaise on his profession (“it seems to me that the whole art business is rotten”), Vincent suggested a career change. “Come and paint with me on the heath, in the potato field, come and walk with me behind the plough and the shepherd, come and sit with me, looking into the fire—let the storm that blows across the heath blow through you,” he wrote from Drenthe, in the northeast Netherlands, a dreary region of peat bogs and incessant rain. He urged Theo to admit to himself: “I don’t want the city any longer, I want the country. I don’t want an office, I want to paint.” Ignoring the fact that Theo had never completed so much as a sketch, Vincent insisted that being an artist was not a matter of talent but an act of will. He pointed to fraternal precedent. “Throughout the history of art one repeatedly finds the phenomenon of two brothers being painters,” he wrote, citing the Ostades, the Van Eycks, the Bretons. He even chose a specialty for his brother (“there is a famous paysagiste inside you”), offered to give him lessons, and calculated how much money the pair might save if they lived together as artists. “In my view it would be an erreur de point de vue were you to continue in business in Paris,” Vincent declared. “The conclusion then: two brother painters.”
It is hard to tell how serious Vincent was. He knew that if Theo gave up his job it would mean the end of his monthly stipend. (At the close of one hortatory missive he added, sheepishly, “If you could send me some money towards the end of this month. . . . I would risk buying a few shirts and drawers which I need very, very badly.”) He may have been trying to shock Theo into staying at Goupil. He may just have wanted the company; he was even more lonely than usual in the moors of Drenthe, and admitted that in addition to his desire to see Theo tap his hidden talents, he could use a “comrade.” There is no evidence that Theo took Vincent’s career advice any more seriously than Vincent had taken Theo’s advice, four years earlier, to become a baker. When his sales figures took an upturn, Theo’s spirits did too, and talk of emigration ceased.
Vincent’s desire for Theo to become an artist was part of his lifelong battle with the father he both scorned and wanted to please. If Theo became a painter, he would be choosing Vincent and the artistic life. If Theo stayed with Goupil, he would be choosing their father and bourgeois respectability. (That Theo, with his well-cut suits and neatly trimmed mustache, bore an uncanny resemblance to Pastor van Gogh cannot have helped.) “Are you a ‘Van Gogh’ too?” pointedly asked Vincent, for whom the family surname had become a kind of shorthand for his father’s cautious conformism, and part of the reason he signed his paintings, simply, Vincent.
Van Gogh or not, Vincent moved home from time to time to save money, but he and his aging father quarreled bitterly—three or four hours at a stretch, Vincent attacking all the values his father held dear. “You’re poisoning my life,” Pastor van Gogh would finally say. “You’ll be the death of me.” Though Vincent’s biographers tend to paint Theo as a virtuous milquetoast who reflexively kowtowed to his intransigent brother, Theo was one of the few people who dared criticize Vincent’s boorish behavior, especially when directed at their parents. On Christmas Day 1881, when Vincent refused to attend church with his family and was ordered from the house by his exasperated father, Theo was furious. “That you could not bear it there any longer is possible, and that you differ in opinion with people who have lived all their lives in the country and have not come into contact with modern life is not unnatural,” he wrote. “But, confound it, what made you so childish and impudent as to embitter and spoil Father’s and Mother’s life in that way?” Vincent annotated the letter, answering his brother’s charges point by point, and mailed it back to Theo. (“Please don’t think I’m sending your letter back to offend you, I simply believe this is the quickest way of answering it clearly.”) During their momentous walk in the Borinage, Theo had accused Vincent of changing. Now Vincent accused Theo of the same thing. Theo, he said, was becoming more and more like their father, determined to “maintain a certain social position—a certain affluence,” while he, Vincent, was becoming less and less like him, “uglier and rougher still.” But, said Vincent, “I shall be a painter, in short a creature with feeling.” He invoked the memory of their walk to the Rijswijk mill. “And I see those same two brothers in earlier years—when you had just entered the art world, had just begun to read . . . Feeling, thinking and believing the same to such an extent—that I wonder: can those be the same two? Wonder: what will the outcome be—will they separate for ever or will they take the same path once and for all?” Vincent repeatedly, vexingly, referred to Theo as “Father II.”
Their father’s shadow loomed over another area of fraternal tension: the conflict between artist and dealer. Ever since Vincent left Goupil he had disparaged the art business, and now he accused Theo of bowing down before the “money devil.” Referring to Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting of the 1830 revolution, Liberty on the Barricades, he compared Theo and himself to fighters on opposite sides of the barricade—“you before it as a soldier of the government, I behind it as a revolutionary.” Theo must have found it annoying that at the same time his bosses were carping at him for caring more about artistic innovation than about commerce (for being, in short, a cultural revolutionary), Vincent was accusing him of the exact opposite. But he responded mildly, whereupon Vincent, like a child whose parent won’t rise to the bait, stepped up his attack. Not only was Theo a philistine dealer, he said, he wasn’t even a good one. “You have never yet sold a single thing I have done—whether for a lot or a little—in fact, you haven’t even tried.” (It was true that Theo wasn’t trying hard to sell his brother’s work. He had trouble enough selling the Impressionists, much less Vincent’s powerful but crude drawings of gnarled old peasants uprooting carrots in the snow.) In a postscript longer than the letter itself, Vincent’s fury became more generalized. “What I have had against you this past year is a kind of relapse into cold respectability which seems to me sterile and futile—the diametrical opposite of everything that is active, and of everything that is artistic in particular.” He went on to blame Theo for his breakup with Sien, for his meager social life, and even for his loneliness: “A wife you cannot give me, a child you cannot give me, work you cannot give me. Money, yes—but what good is that to me?” Vincent said that he was speaking frankly so that Theo could see “why I can no longer think of you as a brother and a friend with the same pleasure as before.”
Theo endured Vincent’s baiting with Job-like forbearance. (There was more than one masochist in the Van Gogh family.) No matter how disagreeably Vincent acted, Theo kept the oath they had sworn at the Rijswijk mill. Describing Theo’s love and support for his brother as part of his “every breath, every heartbeat, and every thought,” their sister Lies added that “Never for one moment did he doubt the future of Vincent’s art.” To Lies, Theo observed, “Vincent is one of those who has gone through all the experiences of life and has retired from the world; now we must wait and see if he has genius. I think he has.” At the same time, it must be said that although Vincent frequently threatened to break with Theo and end their financial relationship—a curious bargaining chip, considering it was Theo who was giving him money—Vincent never truly broke with his brother, either. And so Vincent’s rambling, pleading, badgering, soul-searching letters continued to pour into Paris, where Theo read them, addressed his brother’s needs as best he could, then placed them in the bottom drawer of his desk. After his death, his widow would find some 670 of them there.
In March 1885, Pastor van Gogh had a stroke at the front door of his presbytery and died at the age of sixty-three. In April, Vincent painted The Potato Eaters, his first full-scale composition and his first masterpiece. A short time later he started painting in vibrant color. Their father’s death may have liberated Theo as well; in April he bought Boussod & Valadon (as Goupil’s was now known) its first paintings by Monet, and the following year, he got grudging permission to devote two small, low-ceilinged rooms on the mezzanine of his Montmartre annex to the Impressionists, an arrangement tolerated as long as Theo continued to make the company huge profits from the Salon warhorses that covered the ground-floor walls.
Pastor van Gogh’s death had a soothing effect on the brothers’ relationship. Vincent stopped attacking Theo for being a philistine. He compared the two of them with Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the French brothers who collaborated on their popular novels and social histories. In December 1885, Vincent urged Theo to think about “what the de Goncourts went through, and how at the end of their lives they were melancholy, yes, but felt sure of themselves, knowing that they had accomplished something, that their work would remain.” Three months later, in March 1886, Vincent took the train to Paris and met Theo at the Louvre.
* * *
Acting as one’s brother’s keeper is especially complicated when that brother is physically or mentally disabled. In addition to helping care for the disabled sibling, the so-called normal sibling may feel unspoken pressure to make no demands of his own, lest he add to the stress of an already overburdened family. In the words of the psychotherapist Jeanne Safer, who grew up with an emotionally troubled older brother, “The sibling of the child with special needs is not supposed to have any needs.” He may also feel pressure to compensate for a disturbed or disabled sibling by being “perfect.” (“You shall and must be our joy and honour!” Theo van Gogh’s parents pleaded. “We cannot do without it.”) Sensing he is the repository of his parents’ hopes and dreams, he may be driven to overachieve. As he grows, he may have difficulty finding the middle ground: forging an identity of his own without abandoning his sibling, integrating his sibling into his life without letting him consume it.
Theo van Gogh sacrificed his money, time, health, and identity to tend to Vincent. The psychologist Stephen Bank points out that there can be a cost to the kept as well: the risk of becoming weaker, more passive, less competent. Someone who is always provided for may grow comfortable in that role—psychologists call it learned helplessness—and have difficulty becoming a separate individual able to function on his own. (Theo’s all-encompassing support of Vincent was the kind of behavior that, a century later, addiction specialists would call “enabling”—behavior that, however well-intentioned, may further erode the independence of the addict.) The symbiotic relationship between keeper and kept is invariably more complicated than it may appear.
Both Homer Collyer and his younger brother, Langley, were used to being coddled. Although they had degrees from Columbia—Homer in law, Langley in engineering—they rarely worked, living with their doting, overprotective mother well into their forties. (Their father, a wealthy Manhattan gynecologist, had moved out years earlier.) After their mother’s death in 1929, the brothers grew more and more reclusive, holing up in the family’s four-story Harlem brownstone, accumulating possessions at a rate that would make the Collyer name synonymous with pathological hoarding. One by one, their gas, telephone, electricity, and water were turned off for nonpayment, and they lived in their dark house, moving cautiously among ever-growing piles of junk. After Homer went blind in 1934 and, several years later, was immobilized to a near-fetal position by rheumatism, Langley devoted himself to his brother: He cooked his meals; cut up his meat; poured his wine; peeled him a hundred oranges a week (a diet the brothers mistakenly believed would improve Homer’s eyesight); bathed him; read him Shakespeare, Dickens, and out-of-date newspapers; and, because there was no water to flush the toilets, bottled his brother’s urine and excrement in jars he stored on the second floor. At night, Langley ventured outside on foraging expeditions, dragging a cardboard box at the end of a rope, gathering discarded fruit from trash cans as well as scavenging rubbish to add to the mountains that filled their house. Returning home, he’d crawl through tunnels he’d made in twelve-foot walls of bundled newspapers, avoiding booby traps he’d set for prowlers, which, when tripped, released avalanches of detritus, to bring food to his brother. He tried to stay awake all night. “I have a way of relaxing without sleeping so I can be ready to answer my brother whenever he needs anything,” he said.
Did Homer want to be kept or was he a kind of prisoner? Was Langley selfless or selfish? The truth of their entwined lives may never be known. “My brother isn’t well,” Langley told a neighbor. “If he dies I’m going to jump in the river. He’s all I have to live for.”
On March 21, 1947, alerted by neighbors to a strong odor coming from the Collyer home, police forced their way in and bored through the floor-to-ceiling mess till they found Homer’s body, curled up on the floor in a tattered bathrobe. They couldn’t find his brother. As police searched for Langley across the city, workers began carting away two decades’ worth of accumulated debris from the house: umbrellas, bicycles, baby carriages, dressmaker’s dummies, desiccated Christmas trees, toy trains, phonograph records, thousands of empty cans, reams of sheet music, hope chests, 28,000 books, six American flags, eight live cats, a two-headed baby preserved in formaldehyde, a horse’s jawbone, an accordion, two pipe organs, five violins, fourteen pianos, and the canoe in which the Collyers’ father had paddled each day to his job at Bellevue Hospital. In all, 187 tons were hauled away.
Eighteen days after Homer was found, a worker discovered another body, trapped between a mahogany chest and an old sewing machine. It was Langley. He had been crawling through a newspaper tunnel to bring food to his brother when he was smothered by falling debris. The trap he’d built to protect his brother had trapped him. He died ten feet from Homer, who, without Langley to feed him, starved to death a few days later. According to detectives, Langley had been turned toward Homer, his hand stretched out as if reaching for his brother.
* * *
Vincent arrived in Paris in poor condition. Years of neglect had taken their toll: his body was gaunt and his teeth were so rotten he could hardly chew his food. On the verge of turning thirty-three, he looked closer to fifty. Theo sent Vincent to his doctor, who replaced ten of his decayed teeth with a dental plate. He gave up his evenings at the Holland Club to take Vincent to dinner. He paid for Vincent’s art classes under the renowned academic painter Fernand Cormon. He rented a larger apartment so Vincent could have a studio. “We are getting along well in the new flat,” Theo wrote his mother. “You would not recognize Vincent, he has changed so much. . . . If we can keep it up, then I think he has the worst behind him; and he is going to come out on top.”
Theo had always put a good face on things when reporting back to his parents. As roommates, practical, fastidious Theo and sloppy, unpredictable Vincent comprised a nineteenth-century odd couple whose misadventures might have provided raw material for a French farce had they not been so distressing to Theo. Vincent left paints on the floor for visitors to step in; he rarely replaced the caps on his oozing tubes; he propped wet paintings against the walls; he used Theo’s socks to clean his canvases; he left his threadbare underwear strewn about. After a long day at the gallery, Theo would come home to find his painstakingly furnished apartment a mess and Vincent, his perennial need for engagement whetted by years of solitude, eager to deliver the oral equivalent of his letters far into the night. Whenever Theo tried to end the conversation by going to sleep, Vincent would follow him into his bedroom, pull up a chair, and keep talking. Vincent could be tender and considerate one moment, surly and unreasonable the next. Sometimes, no matter what eager-to-please Theo did, Vincent found fault. “There was a time when I loved Vincent dearly and he was my best friend but that is no longer the case,” Theo wrote their youngest sister, Willemina. “He seems to think it is even worse for him because he never misses a chance of showing his contempt for me and telling me that I fill him with loathing. This makes sharing an apartment with him almost unbearable. Nobody wants to come to my house any more because there are always rows and because he is so filthy and untidy the place is an absolute shambles.” Wil advised Theo to “leave Vincent for God’s sake.” But Theo demurred. “It is such a peculiar case. If he only had another profession, I would long ago have done what you advise me. I have often asked myself if I have not been wrong in helping him continually, and have often been on the point of leaving him to his own devices. After receiving your letter I have thought it over again, but I think in this case I must continue in the same way. He is certainly an artist, and if what he makes now is not always beautiful, it will certainly be of use to him later; then his work will perhaps be sublime.”
Vincent liked to refer to Theo as a “lucky dog,” but during their time in Paris, Theo’s life was even more troubled than his brother’s—enough to make one wonder whether Theo felt the need to prove to Vincent that he, too, occasionally needed looking after. Europe was in a depression, the art business was in a slump, and Theo was tired of fighting his bosses to show the Impressionists. Vincent was badgering him to pursue his long-held dream of opening his own gallery, but when Theo asked Uncle Cent for financial backing, he was refused. Theo had always been susceptible to psychosomatic ailments; now that he was beset by problems at work and at home, his chronic cough worsened, his face swelled up (“it has literally disappeared,” wrote Andries Bonger, a close friend of Theo’s who lived with the brothers for a summer), and at one point he had an attack of nerves so severe he was temporarily paralyzed. Theo told his sister Lies that he did not think he would live to see thirty.
Furthermore, Theo’s romantic life made Vincent’s look almost healthy. Like Vincent, Theo tended to become became infatuated with women he barely knew, while his few flesh-and-blood relationships were with prostitutes or other women of a lower social station whom he felt compelled to rescue. Theo was trying to end an affair with a disturbed young woman who had moved in with the brothers, bringing still more chaos to the household. Even an emotional Good Samaritan like Vincent felt the woman was a bad match for Theo. (In a memorable instance of the pot calling the kettle black, he described her as “seriously deranged.”) Nevertheless, he advised Theo not to turn the woman out lest it drive her to suicide. The ideal solution, said Vincent, was for Theo to foist her off on someone else. He volunteered himself for the job. “I am ready to take S. off your hands,” he wrote Theo, while his brother was in Holland on business, “i.e. preferably without having to marry her, but if the worst comes to the worst even agreeing to a mariage de raison.” Theo did not take his brother up on his bizarre offer.
Part of the reason Theo wanted to end his relationship with the young woman was that he wanted to begin one with Andries Bonger’s younger sister, an English teacher for whom he had developed a Vincent-like obsession since being introduced to her the previous year. Vincent, who summed up his romantic philosophy to Theo as “If ever you fall in love, do so without reservation,” urged Theo to express his feelings. After meeting her three times, Theo abruptly proposed; the shocked girl refused him, saying that she was in love with someone else—a situation reminiscent of Vincent’s ill-fated courtship of his London landlady’s daughter.
Theo eventually disentangled himself from the troubled young woman. His health and his sales figures improved. So did his relationship with his roommate. As they walked the avenues of Paris, the brothers made an unusual pair: Theo striding forward in his pressed suit, polished boots, and carefully trimmed brown beard; Vincent bobbing alongside, gesticulating wildly as he pressed a point, wearing worn boots, patched trousers, a mangy rabbit’s fur cap, a scraggly red beard, and a paint-spattered blue smock of the kind favored by Flemish cattle drovers. It was a heady time for the brothers, not unlike those early days when they both worked for Goupil. But their shared excitement was no longer confined to letters. Two years earlier, Vincent had never seen an Impressionist painting. “There is a school—I believe—of impressionists,” he had written Theo. “But I know very little about it.” Now he and Theo were visiting the studios of Monet, Sisley, and Seurat. Now he was discussing color theory and brushstroke technique in Montmartre cafés with Signac, Anquetin, Pissarro, and Guillaumin. Vincent’s own paintings burst into color (“He is trying very hard to put more sunlight into them,” Theo wrote Lies); his gloomy potato fields were replaced by radiant street scenes, his peasants by boulevardiers, his birds’ nests by lilies, chrysanthemums, roses, asters, sunflowers. If his paintings, which he exhibited at a few Montmartre restaurants, made the public “a little disconcerted,” as one observer put it, and failed to make a single sale, they impressed his fellow artists.
Theo was expanding Vincent’s world; Vincent was also expanding Theo’s. He introduced his brother to Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard, whom he’d met at Cormon’s. He took him to Père Tanguy’s paint shop, a gathering place for young artists. Exchanging canvases with other painters, he started a small art collection for himself and Theo. He created a circle of painters and friends of which his shy, modest brother became a part. At Vincent’s urging, Theo entered more fully into the Impressionist market. Almost every evening between 5:00 and 8:00, critics, artists, and collectors gathered at Theo’s mezzanine outpost for spirited discussions that continued into the night at nearby cafés. Living together gave the brothers new respect for each other. Vincent, seeing firsthand all that Theo did for avant-garde artists, would never again deride his brother as a philistine (“he is no ordinary dealer who rarely spares a thought for the painters,” he explained to his sister Wil). Theo saw how other painters admired Vincent’s talent and were drawn to his forceful personality. He grew more convinced than ever of Vincent’s genius. “It is amazing the number of things that he knows and what a clear view he has of the world,” Theo wrote Lies. “This is why I am sure if he still has a few years to live, he will make a name for himself.”
Like a miner too long underground who ventures into the light, Vincent eventually found the hurly-burly of Paris overwhelming. Drinking excessive amounts of red wine and absinthe, he grew increasingly cranky. “The man hasn’t the slightest notion of social behavior,” Andries Bonger wrote his parents. “He has no manners whatsoever. He is at loggerheads with everyone.” Even Vincent’s closest friend, Bernard, admitted that Vincent could be difficult: “He was vehement in speech, interminable in explaining and developing his ideas, but not very ready to argue.” Painting with Vincent was a contact sport. “Close beside me he shouted and gesticulated, brandishing his large, freshly covered canvas,” wrote Signac, “and with it he smeared himself and passersby with all the colors of the rainbow.” Eventually, models refused to pose for him, gendarmes forbade him to paint in the streets, and, Theo wrote tersely, “because of his volatile disposition this repeatedly led to scenes, which upset him so much that he became completely unapproachable.” Worn down, restless, disillusioned with the city (Paris, he said, had the “tainted air of a hospital”), Vincent told his brother that he was moving on again, this time to the south of France. In February 1888, two years after he had met his brother at the Louvre, Theo accompanied Vincent to the Gare de Lyon and said good-bye. Vincent had left almost as suddenly as he’d arrived. The previous evening, he had recruited Bernard to help him cover the walls of his room with his paintings—“so that my brother will think me still here,” he explained. Theo was bereft nonetheless. “When he came here two years ago, I never thought we would become so attached to one another, and now I am alone again in the apartment,” Theo wrote Wil. “If I can, I shall find someone to share my house with, but someone like Vincent is not easy to replace.”
* * *
For all those who step in to protect a brother from a playground bully or nurse a brother on his deathbed, there are those who fade into the background, look the other way, or shrink from the task. Faced with parental loss or neglect, some siblings quarrel and compete, each trying to save his or her own skin. Under stress, some siblings abandon or betray each other. Some simply drift apart. For every Theo van Gogh there is a Herbert Silver. A seventy-two-year-old retiree in Blissford, England, Silver called the police one day in 2004 and told them that his seventy-five-year-old brother, George, with whom he shared a trailer, had died. A postmortem found that George had been dead for as long as eighteen months. Herbert hadn’t noticed. He admitted that he had found it a “bit odd” when his brother failed to emerge from his bedroom day after day, month after month, but noted that “George liked to keep himself to himself, and to be honest so do I.” Furthermore, he pointed out, “I’m not my brother’s keeper.”
How does one weigh his responsibility to his sibling against his responsibility to himself? To society? Years ago, not long after I began dating Anne, we were playing the board game Scruples, in which players are presented with hypothetical moral dilemmas. On her turn, Anne was asked whether, if she were to learn that her brother had killed someone, she would go to the police. Anne, without a moment’s hesitation, said no. I was astonished. Shoplifting, perhaps even armed robbery, but murder? No, she repeated. Quoting E. M. Forster—“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country”—she said she would never turn in her brother, no matter what he had done. She knew he would have had a good reason for killing, and she knew he would never kill again.
For Anne, the question has remained hypothetical. Others have not been so fortunate. When George Atzerodt, a Booth co-conspirator, was on the run after the Lincoln assassination (assigned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson, he lost his nerve and got drunk instead), his older brother, John, with whom he had for several years operated a carriage repair shop, considered it his duty to inform the authorities that George might be found at their cousin’s home in Maryland. Four decades later, a young English soldier in South Africa faced an even more immediate choice. Driving a gun carriage in the Royal Horse Artillery during the Boer War, he saw his brother lying wounded on the ground directly in his path. Having been ordered never to swerve from his line in battle, he closed his eyes and drove the gun carriage over his brother. The London newspaper that reported the story praised him for doing his duty as a soldier. This set off a heated dinner-table argument among the teenage Leonard Woolf and his brothers. Herbert, the eldest, declared that the boy’s loyalty to his brother trumped his duty to his country; Leonard declared the opposite. If Herbert had been lying on the battlefield, Leonard added, he would surely have driven over him, a scenario he went on to describe in such vivid detail that his mother and sister sobbed for hours at the prospect. (It should be noted that Leonard wasn’t particularly close to his five brothers, none of whom were invited to his wedding when he married Virginia Stephen.)
In 1995, when David Kaczynski, a forty-six-year-old youth counselor in Schenectady, New York, read “Industrial Society and Its Future,” a 35,000-word essay published in the Washington Post, he didn’t want to believe that its author, the so-called Unabomber, who had killed three people and maimed twenty-three over the previous seventeen years, might be his fifty-three-year-old brother, Ted. Growing up in a bookish family in a middle-class Chicago suburb, David had idolized his older brother, a math prodigy with an IQ of 167 who skipped two grades and spent hours locked in his room practicing differential equations. Ted was a moody loner so withdrawn that his mother considered enrolling him in a study of autistic children run by the psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim. The only person with whom he seemed able to sustain a connection was David, a bookish but relatively outgoing fellow who admired Ted’s independence, his originality, and his uncompromising intellect. David felt honored when Ted invited him into his room to show him his coin collection, to play recorder duets he had composed, or to hear him read from Edgar Allan Poe. “In high school, I sort of became my brother—or at least tried to,” David later wrote. “I made myself into the class ‘brain,’ concentrating on math just like Ted. Although I had a few friends, all National Honor Society types, I grew more socially aloof and never dated. Once an all-star second baseman in our local Little League, I dropped baseball to concentrate on academics.” David was proud when he finished high school at sixteen, not much older than Ted had been when he had graduated. He was disappointed when, unlike Ted, he was rejected by Harvard. “But by then I already knew that I was no match for my brilliant older brother.”
Ted seemed headed for a distinguished career in theoretical mathematics. But at the age of twenty-seven, after teaching at Berkeley for two years, Ted resigned. When Ted and David were children, their father had taken them hiking, and now Ted talked of living off the land beyond reach of modern technology. In 1969, Ted and David, who was by now an English major at Columbia, spent the summer driving across western Canada, looking for land Ted could homestead. A few years later, they pooled their savings to buy a few acres in Montana, where Ted built a crude one-room cabin. He would spend the next two decades living without electricity, telephone, or running water; foraging for edible plants; tending a vegetable garden; hunting rabbits; reading history, anthropology, and political philosophy; and writing hundreds of letters to his brother and his parents, in which he railed against the encroachment of the outside world on his wilderness life. On occasion, he left the cabin to buy supplies in the nearest town, or to work a menial job for a few months to supplement the money David and his parents sent him on his birthday and at Christmas. Ted approved when David, once again emulating his brother, gave up his job teaching high school English to live alone in a lean-to without electricity or running water in the mountains of West Texas. The brothers wrote each other often from their respective retreats. But Ted’s letters grew increasingly vitriolic, bristling with diatribes against the industrial world.
In 1986, David spent two weeks at Ted’s cabin. It was the first time he had seen his brother in several years. Ted seemed obsessive, angry, a little unbalanced. And yet there were reassuring moments. One day, while David was sawing wood, the worktable collapsed and David fell. His first worry was that Ted would be furious because his table was broken. But Ted put a hand on his shoulder—a moment of intimacy all the more memorable because of its rarity—and asked whether he was okay. David felt a rush of love for his brother. Three years later, however, when David told Ted he intended to marry an old high school friend and move to Schenectady, thereby rejoining the world Ted had rejected, Ted said he wanted nothing more to do with him. Ted, it was clear, felt betrayed. But Ted was not too proud to ask his brother for money, and David, who found a job counseling runaways at a shelter, was concerned enough about his brother to send it.
Although David worried about Ted’s mental state, he didn’t connect his troubled brother to the man who for nearly two decades had been sending bombs through the mail. But in 1995, at his wife’s urging, he read the Unabomber’s manifesto, which argued that the bombs were a necessary extreme to call attention to the ways technology had eroded human freedoms. He found the locutions and epithets in the essay strikingly similar to those in letters Ted had written. Horrified to think that the older brother he’d idolized could be a murderer, and tormented by the knowledge that the money he’d sent him might have financed some of the attacks, David spent several months collecting evidence that might prove his brother’s guilt or innocence, and agonizing over whether and how to turn his brother in, knowing that if Ted were guilty, he’d likely be executed. In February 1996, after consulting with a graphologist, David gave the FBI directions to his brother’s shack. “The thought that another person would die and I was in the position to stop that—I couldn’t live with that,” he said later.
The brothers hadn’t seen each other in almost twelve years when a manacled Ted entered the Sacramento courtroom for his arraignment. David and his mother were sitting in the front row. Ted shuffled past them without a glance. When David left his job at the shelter to assist in his brother’s legal defense, hoping to help him avoid the death penalty, Ted derided his efforts, adding that he preferred death to spending his life in prison. Diagnosed by court-appointed psychiatrists as a paranoid schizophrenic (a diagnosis he vehemently rejected), Ted pled guilty and was sentenced to serve four life terms.
In the months that followed, many people praised David’s decision to turn in his brother as the only ethical choice. Some condemned it as a fraternal betrayal. Ted, calling David another “Judas Iscariot,” suggested that his brother’s decision was less an act of conscience than an expression of sibling rivalry. “It’s quite true that he is troubled by guilt over what he’s done,” Ted wrote, “but I think his sense of guilt is outweighed by his satisfaction at having finally gotten revenge on big brother.” In 2001, David became executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, traveling the state to speak out against capital punishment. A painfully earnest man—the teenagers he counseled had called him Mr. Rogers—David seemed to relive his decision in every speech he gave. “Brothers are supposed to protect each other,” he told audiences, “and here, perhaps, I was sending my brother to his death.” He says he loves his brother. He has continued to write to him, every month at first and then, as the years passed, several times a year. His brother has never written back. “I hope that Ted will someday forgive me,” David says.
* * *
Who is to say which man better serves as his brother’s keeper—the man who turns in his murderous brother, or the man who refuses to turn in his? Almost every Bostonian of a certain age can recite the story of Whitey and Billy Bulger, a story so melodramatic it could provide the lyrics to a contemporary Irish-American ballad. How they grew up sharing a bedroom in the Irish-Catholic enclave of South Boston in the 1940s. How hot-tempered Whitey dropped out of high school to steal cars, boost merchandise off delivery trucks, and rob banks. How Billy, his younger brother by five years, played baseball, collected matchbook covers, served as altar boy, hung out at the library, rode the trolley across town to a private Catholic school, and worked afternoons at a local meat market to pay his tuition. How, after spending nine years at an assortment of federal prisons, including Alcatraz and Leavenworth, Whitey returned to Boston and worked as an enforcer for local mobsters, killing his way up the ranks to become the city’s most powerful organized-crime boss. How, after studying Greek language and English literature at Boston College, Billy considered the priesthood but went to law school and became a politician instead, finessing his way up the ranks to become president of the Massachusetts Senate.
From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, the Bulger brothers were the two most powerful men in Boston. Billy controlled state politics from his wood-paneled chambers under the gold dome of the State House on Beacon Hill; Whitey controlled the city’s organized crime from the dimly lit, low-ceilinged confines of the Triple O’s Lounge in South Boston. Portrayed in the press as a classic good brother/bad brother pair, the Pericles-quoting politician and the gun-toting mobster shared certain traits. Both were intelligent, disciplined, charismatic, and ambitious. Both had a nose for power, both wielded power ruthlessly. Both were said never to forget a slight. Both were known for exacting revenge on those who dared cross them, Billy by having your legislative bill killed, Whitey by having you killed. When I suggested to a biographer of theirs that Whitey and Billy Bulger constituted a contemporary version of Cain and Abel, he quickly corrected me: “Cain and Cain,” he said.
Despite their divergent career paths, the brothers remained fiercely loyal. Billy secured soft government jobs for family members of Whitey’s underlings. Whitey, a lifelong bachelor, was godfather to one of Billy’s nine children and occasionally made an appearance at a nephew’s high school football game. But as Whitey’s lawlessness grew increasingly well known, the brothers found it prudent to minimize public displays of fraternal affection. Serving as brother’s keeper now meant staying out of each other’s way. At their mother’s funeral in 1980, fearing that a newspaper photographer might catch the state senate president and the state’s chief mobster in the same frame, Whitey sat in the balcony behind the organist during the service, watching as his five brothers and sisters walked the casket down the aisle and out the church. On the rare occasions reporters asked about his brother, Billy was circumspect. “There is much to admire,” he told the Boston Globe in 1988. Four years later, sounding like the enlightened modern parent who takes pains to separate his child from his child’s actions (I don’t love what you do but I love you), he told a 60 Minutes reporter, “He’s my brother. I care about him. I encourage him to come by all the time.” There were occasional slips. Billy lived next door to the mother of his brother’s number one hit man, and at least twice Billy walked in on dinners at which Whitey and his hit man were discussing business. But their fraternal pas de deux was successful. There was never a hint that Billy had done anything to benefit his brother directly. (Neither, however, was there any evidence that Billy ever tried to persuade his brother to pursue a less-murderous line of work.) Nor that Whitey had done anything to benefit his brother directly, though in 1970, during Billy’s first campaign for state senate, he tried—by letting it be known he planned to kill the “bum” who dared run against his brother. Billy tracked down Whitey and told him to desist in this “madness.”
In 1994, shortly before being indicted on federal racketeering charges and nineteen counts of murder, Whitey skipped town. He had been tipped off to his impending arrest by the FBI, for whom, it was discovered, Whitey had been working as an informant for twenty years, during which time the agency looked the other way while he consolidated his hold on Boston’s criminal underworld and committed the majority of those nineteen murders.
If Billy knew anything about his brother’s whereabouts, he kept it to himself. “I do have an honest loyalty to my brother, and I care about him, and I know that’s not welcome news, but . . . it’s my hope that I’m never helpful to anyone against him,” Billy, who by then had left the Senate to become president of the University of Massachusetts, told a federal grand jury in 2001, adding, “I don’t feel an obligation to help everyone to catch him.” In 2002, asked by a congressional panel investigating his brother’s disappearance whether he knew where his brother was, Billy invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The following year, he agreed to testify only after he was guaranteed immunity from prosecution. Billy, it seemed, had not helped his brother directly. (The same could not be said for the youngest Bulger brother, Jackie, a retired court clerk who wore a fake mustache and posed for photos to help Whitey obtain falsified identification documents.) But Billy had, indirectly, helped Whitey remain a fugitive. He admitted they’d talked on the phone shortly after his brother had fled and he hadn’t reported the conversation to the authorities. He admitted that in 1997, a London bank had called him about a safe deposit box his brother had rented. Again, he hadn’t told the police. But he insisted that he hadn’t talked to his brother since their initial call, and didn’t know where he was. Citing a faulty memory, he deftly dodged direct responses and professed ignorance of his brother’s profession. “I had the feeling he was in the business of gaming, and whatever,” he said. “It was vague to me.” Asked whether he’d ever discussed with his brother his decision to become an informant, Billy, who had described his contempt for informants in a memoir published a year after his brother disappeared, said no. “My brother is an older brother, Congressman. He didn’t come to me looking for advice.” Billy made it clear that his loyalty lay with his brother, not with his brother’s victims or with the state for which he worked. Some praised his stance as an honorable choice—an act of “brotherly love,” a Globe columnist called it. Others called it an outrage. Governor Mitt Romney, siding with the latter, forced Billy’s resignation from the University of Massachusetts presidency in 2003.
In 2011, after sixteen years as a fugitive, eighty-one-year-old Whitey Bulger was arrested in Santa Monica, California, where he had been living in a rent-controlled apartment three blocks from the beach with his longtime girlfriend, thirty guns, and $822,000 in cash. Escorted into a federal courtroom in South Boston for his arraignment, he spotted Billy in the second row. Nodding slightly, he flashed a grin one reporter described as “cocksure,” and mouthed the word “Hi.” He did not acknowledge anyone on the other side of the aisle, which was filled with relatives and friends of some of the people he was accused of killing. He was charged with nineteen murders and more than twenty counts of money laundering, extortion, loan sharking, and witness tampering. As Whitey left the courtroom, the Bulger brothers exchanged smiles.
* * *
When Vincent left Paris, he was, by his own admission, “seriously ill, sick at heart and in body, and nearly an alcoholic.” After several months in Arles, the only ailment Vincent suffered from was overexertion. “I am in a constant fever of work,” he wrote Theo. When he returned from the fields after a day of painting, his eyes were bloodshot, his lips sunburned, his body covered with dust, his stomach empty. He rarely ate—for much of August he lived on milk, ship’s biscuits, and eggs—and went “whole days” without speaking, except to order his coffee. When the mistral, the dry, cold wind that blew down the Rhone valley to the Mediterranean, was particularly fierce, he anchored his easel to the ground with rope and iron pegs so it wouldn’t blow away. When he painted at night, he fastened candles to the top of his easel and the brim of his hat. “How I wish you could see everything I see nowadays!” he wrote Theo. “There is so much beauty before me that I can do nothing but pursue it.” He was painting with unaccustomed confidence. “I am beginning to feel completely different from the way I did when I came here. I no longer have doubts, I no longer hesitate to tackle things, and this feeling could well grow.” Vincent had so much to report that he sometimes wrote Theo twice a day. Meanwhile, the paintings he sent to Paris were stacking up against Theo’s walls, under sofas and beds. Eventually, Theo had to rent space in a back room at Père Tanguy’s shop to accommodate the overflow. (During his fifteen months in Arles, Vincent would finish 185 oil paintings, 100 drawings, and 10 watercolors.) Theo’s faith had been rewarded; the paintings were like nothing he had ever seen, but he knew they were great.
Theo, however, was depressed. His post-Vincent life in Paris seemed colorless. “You may do something for me if you like,” he wrote Vincent plaintively, “that is, go on as in the past, and create an entourage of artists and friends for us, something which I am absolutely incapable of doing by my own self, and which you have been able to do, more or less, ever since you came to France.” At Vincent’s suggestion, Theo rented out his brother’s old room to visiting artists. But it wasn’t the same. Theo was having heart trouble; he suffered from sciatica; he wrote Vincent of the “emptiness” he felt. Vincent tried to buck him up. “Take as much spring air as possible, go to bed very early, because you must have sleep, and as for food, plenty of fresh vegetables, and no bad wine or bad alcohol,” wrote the man who subsisted on bread, coffee, and plenty of bad alcohol. He reminded his brother that, as a dealer, he was a vital part of the creative process. “Now I feel that my pictures are not yet good enough to compensate for the advantages I have enjoyed through you,” wrote Vincent. “But believe me, if one day they should be good enough, you will have been as much their creator as I, because the two of us are making them together.” Theo, clearly, was no longer on the opposite side of the barricade. Vincent increasingly talked of “our paintings” and “our work.” Now more than ever, they were “compagnons de voyage.”
Ever since their father’s death, Vincent’s letters to Theo had been markedly more thoughtful and affectionate. He no longer scolded his brother if his allowance was late. He even offered to cut his expenses: “If there should happen to be a month or a fortnight when you were hard pressed, let me know and I will set to work on some drawings, which will cost us less.” When Theo was asked by his bosses at Boussod & Valadon to do more traveling, even as far as America, Vincent gallantly offered to accompany his overstressed brother—at company expense, of course. “Remember that I would far rather give up painting than see you killing yourself to make money. . . .” he wrote. (It’s hard to believe he really meant this, but it was courteous of him to say it.) “You understand, it would make me wretched to be forcing you to make money. Rather, let’s be together whatever happens.”
Vincent felt so expansive that he began to think Arles could be the setting for an artists’ collective: “some sort of little retreat,” as he put it, “where the poor cab horses of Paris—that is, you and several of our friends, the poor impressionists—could go out to pasture when they get too beat up.” Vincent had first mentioned the idea to Theo in 1882 and had discussed it in Paris with Guillaumin, Pissarro, Seurat, and other “comrades-in-arms.” Vincent’s “Society of Impressionists” sounded like a cross between a medieval craft guild, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and a monastery. Part of the goal was practical—to bring artists together to exchange ideas, pool expenses, negotiate better prices, and share profits. Part of the goal was emotional—to foster cooperation among the members of a notoriously backbiting profession, in the process relieving Vincent’s isolation by providing him with a substitute family. “I want so much that we should create a life in common, a new spirit . . .” he wrote Theo, “each of us free and producing in his separate fashion, but all of us together forming one spring, a unanimous blossoming.” In April, Vincent moved into a derelict two-story house near the railway station on the edge of town. He had it painted yellow, “because I want it to be the house of light for everybody.” In the Yellow House, as he called it, plans for his collective took shape. There would be twelve members. Theo would be the “dealer-apostle” who handled the financial arrangements and presented their work to the public. “I think every day of this artists’ association,” Vincent wrote his brother.
Having shared an apartment with Vincent for two years, Theo was aware that there was hardly a man less fit for communal living than Vincent (who may have been capable of brotherhood only with his biological brother), but he went along with the tide of his brother’s enthusiasm. Unfortunately, if there was anybody less fit for communal living than Vincent, it was Paul Gauguin, the charming, arrogant, self-centered womanizer on whom Vincent fixated as the second member of his association. Vincent had met Gauguin in Paris. He had been taken with his work and, perhaps even more, with his dramatic history. Five years older than Vincent, Gauguin had spent part of his childhood in Peru; had sailed around the world with the French merchant marine; and at thirty-four, in the kind of nose-thumbing defiance of bourgeois respectability sure to impress Vincent, had given up his career as a stockbroker, abandoned his wife and five children, and devoted himself to painting. It was Vincent who had persuaded Theo to show Gauguin’s work, and now he pleaded with his brother to convince Gauguin to come to Arles. “The two of us will be able to live on the same money that I now spend on myself alone,” he reasoned. Once again, Theo was acting as intermediary. As further bait, Vincent offered Gauguin the leading role in his proposed collective. “As there will now be several painters living together,” he explained to Theo, “I think we shall need an abbot to keep order, and naturally it is going to be Gauguin.”
Vincent had envisioned the Yellow House as a retreat for Theo. “From now on you can consider yourself the owner of a country house here in Arles,” he had written. “Because I’m very eager to arrange it so that you’ll be happy in it.” But Theo’s place in the Yellow House gradually became Gauguin’s. (“The room you’ll stay in then, or which will be Gauguin’s if Gauguin comes, will have white walls hung with large yellow sunflowers.”) Whether Theo felt envy or relief, he didn’t say. In any case, he did his best to satisfy his brother, and when he came into a small inheritance from Uncle Cent, he decided to use part of it to subsidize Gauguin. Meanwhile Vincent was preparing the Yellow House with the nervous ardor of a bridegroom awaiting a bride whose arrival was still in doubt. He had gas lights, running water, and a stove installed. He bought beds, mattresses, a mirror, and—looking ahead to a complete “Society of Impressionists”—twelve chairs. He was, he wrote Theo in one of his near-daily updates, giving Gauguin “the prettiest room upstairs, which I shall do my best to turn into something like the boudoir of a really artistic woman.” Vincent’s own room, he told Theo, would be “extremely simple.” Vincent was so “wild to see my pictures in frames” that he overspent his budget and was forced to live for four days on twenty-three cups of coffee and bread purchased on credit. “Well, yes, I am ashamed of it, but I am vain enough to want to make a certain impression on Gauguin with my work, so I cannot help wanting to do as much work as possible alone before he comes.” At Vincent’s suggestion, the two painters exchanged self-portraits. “I have been thinking of you with very great emotion as I prepared your studio . . .” Vincent wrote Gauguin. “Let us be of good heart about the success of our venture, and please keep thinking of this as your home, for I feel very sure that all this will last for a very long time.” For five months the coquettish Gauguin put off the Van Gogh brothers, but, penniless and sick, he finally agreed to the deal. On October 23, 1888, Gauguin arrived in Arles.
Gauguin, who was interested in others only insofar as they could be used for his own gain, had no desire to play “abbot” in Vincent’s brotherhood; he saw Vincent as a burden to be endured in return for his brother’s money. Nevertheless, for a time the two painters managed a reasonable facsimile of communal life. Gauguin, the former sailor, took charge. He bought a chest of drawers and a set of kitchen utensils; he organized their finances; he took over the cooking and delegated the marketing to Vincent. They prepared their canvases and stretchers together, made their own frames together, painted side by side, shared evening strolls, and paid joint visits to brothels on what Gauguin called “nocturnal, hygienic outings.” They even collaborated on a letter to Theo. “Our days pass in working, working all the time,” Vincent wrote, with the enthusiasm of a child telling his parents about a summer camp roommate. “In the evening we are dead beat and go off to the café, and after that, early to bed!” It was an auspicious beginning. “I venture to hope that in six months Gauguin and you and I will all see that we have founded a little studio which will last.” Vincent’s elation allowed him to close one letter with a thought touching in its simplicity and remarkable for his so rarely having expressed it before: “Goodbye again and thank you for all you do for me.”
Vincent’s letters soon turned less sanguine, and, in a sign that something was troubling him, less frequent. Gauguin scorned Vincent’s beloved Arles (he called it, Vincent told Theo, “the dirtiest hole in the south”) and found Vincent naive and uncouth (it annoyed him that Vincent never put the caps back on his tubes of paint). At times the supercilious Gauguin seemed to toy with his needy roommate—a week after his arrival, he still had not commented on many of the canvases with which Vincent had worked so hard to impress him. As winter approached, raw, rainy weather kept them cooped up in the Yellow House, where they had endless, contentious discussions about art, about color, about the painters’ association. “Our arguments are terribly electric, sometimes we come out of them with our heads as exhausted as a used electric battery,” Vincent wrote Theo. Years later, Gauguin observed, “Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling inwardly, some sort of struggle was preparing.” Like quarreling brothers pleading their cases to a parent, each of them complained about the other to Theo, who, once again, played peacemaker. On December 15, after only six weeks in the Yellow House, Gauguin told Theo that he had to leave. “Vincent and I simply cannot live together without trouble, due to the incompatibility of our characters,” he wrote. We don’t know how Theo responded, but Gauguin postponed his departure, although he grew increasingly cool and patronizing. As Vincent saw that he was losing his abbot—and his fledgling collective—he drank more, slept less, and grew progressively erratic. On December 23, Vincent explained to Theo that there were “serious problems,” saying, in something of an understatement, “I think myself that Gauguin was a little out of sorts with the good town of Arles, the little yellow house where we work, and especially with me.”
Theo did not reply immediately. It would have been understandable if he had been unable to give the situation his full attention. A week earlier, he had run into Jo Bonger, the English teacher to whom he had proposed the previous year. Since his rejection, Theo had written her occasionally, trying to keep his suit alive—a genteel version of Vincent’s long-ago pursuit of his London landlady’s daughter. Now, meeting each other again, Theo and Jo agreed to be friends. But Theo soon realized he still wanted more. Jo, who later admitted that she had engineered their “chance” meeting, shared his feelings. Theo reproposed and she accepted. “O Mother I am so inexpressibly happy,” Theo wrote on December 21. “Can it really be true?”
Jo knew that in marrying one Van Gogh she was getting two. When Theo had first written her, four days after she rejected his initial proposal, he had devoted half the letter to a description of his brother, whom she had never met. “Perhaps you’ll think that what I am telling you about him has nothing to do with us, at least when it comes to giving you a glimpse into my heart,” he wrote, with the forthrightness of a man declaring his baggage at the border. “But having been through so much with him and having pondered his views on life, I would feel I were concealing something important were I not to tell you about my relationship with him from the start.” Jo could not have guessed how large a role her future brother-in-law would play in their relationship—and how soon.
On December 24, on the eve of his departure for Holland to meet Jo’s family, Theo received a telegram from Gauguin. Vincent was in the hospital. He had sliced off half his left ear with a razor. After walking to a brothel and handing the severed appendage to a prostitute of his acquaintance, he had returned to the Yellow House, where the police discovered him unconscious on his bed. Theo took the night train seven hundred miles to Arles. He found Vincent locked in a cell at the hospital. He sat with his brother all Christmas Day. “There were moments while I was with him when he was well; but very soon after he fell back into his worries about philosophy and theology,” Theo wrote Jo a few days later, from Paris. “It was painfully sad to witness, for at times all his suffering overwhelmed him and he tried to weep but he could not; poor fighter and poor, poor sufferer; for the moment nobody can do anything to relieve his sorrow, and yet he feels deeply and strongly.” A day later, he wrote, “There is little hope . . . If it must be that he dies, so be it, but my heart breaks when I think of it.”
Shortly before New Year’s, Theo received news of Vincent’s recovery. On January 7, the day after Theo traveled to Holland for his engagement party, Vincent was discharged from the hospital. Vincent and his doctors believed the attack was an isolated incident, “an artist’s fit,” as Vincent put it. A month later, however, Vincent suffered another breakdown and was back in the hospital.
* * *
That Vincent fell apart just as his brother was flourishing was no coincidence. Among the dozens of reasons proposed for Vincent’s breakdown (exhaustion, anxiety, depression, Gauguin’s threatened desertion, the failure of his artist’s collective, and so on), Theo’s impending marriage may have played a role. In 1953, Charles Mauron, a psychoanalytically oriented critic and translator, was the first to point out that Vincent’s psychotic breaks tended to coincide with developments in his brother’s romantic life. Vincent’s first attack immediately followed news of Theo’s engagement; further episodes took place around the time of Theo’s wedding and just before the birth of his child. Emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between the brothers, Mauron suggested that Vincent perceived Theo’s marriage as an abandonment; that Vincent worried that he would no longer have Theo’s undivided attention and that Theo’s financial and emotional resources would go to his new family. This reawakened Vincent’s lifelong feelings of neglect, reinforced his low self-esteem, and triggered his need to punish himself. His self-inflicted wound, in Mauron’s view, was a way of trying to keep his brother close.
Others point out that the dates of Vincent’s attacks don’t align with signal moments in Theo’s domestic life. Indeed, there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that Vincent learned of Theo’s engagement until after he cut off part of his ear. Whenever he found out, Vincent greeted the news favorably. Vincent had pushed Theo into first proposing to Jo, and had encouraged the relationship ever since. (“I do not forget that you insisted on my getting married,” Theo wrote Vincent, “and you were right, for I am much happier.”) In his letters, Vincent seemed genuinely pleased for his brother, and always asked to be remembered to Jo, whom he addressed as “my dear sister.” Any jealousy he felt was convincingly repressed. “Well, do you know what I hope for, once I let myself begin to hope?” Vincent wrote. “It is that a family will be for you what nature, the clods of earth, the grass, the yellow wheat, the peasant, are for me, that is to say, that you may find in your love for people something not only to work for, but to comfort and restore you when there is need for it.” A brother’s marriage, however, inevitably affects the fraternal relationship, especially when the brothers are as close as Vincent and Theo. Although Vincent was happy for Theo and Jo, he worried whether there would be room for him in Theo’s new life.
Over the next few months, Theo wondered about that, too. He was making arrangements for Vincent’s care, but he was also preparing for marriage—choosing fabric for furniture, interviewing prospective maids, hunting for an apartment (one Sunday he looked at fifty). His letters to Jo, who was living with her parents in Amsterdam until the wedding, were filled with practical concerns: how to word the engagement card, whether to be married at home or in church, what kind of wallpaper to put up in the salon. Just as Theo and Vincent had gotten to know each other through their letters, now Theo and Jo tentatively began exploring each other by mail. At times, Theo played the avuncular sage, recommending books and giving minitutorials on painting’s “new movement”—temperate versions of the letters with which Vincent had showered him in the old days. At times he was touchingly shy. (“Will I be able to give you the happiness you have a right to expect and will it be given to us to share our thoughts and grow in each other’s hearts? I hope so, but hardly dare to believe it, because that would make life seem just too beautiful.”) He warned Jo not to expect too much. (“In my relationships with friends, if I may also confess, I can be rude at times and even harsh if I’m trying to make a point.”) His customary reserve gradually gave way. (“I am a fortunate person and sometimes catch myself whistling or humming a tune. It’s your fault. Goodbye my precious.”)
But wedding plans almost always turned to worries about his brother. “You see, this afternoon I received bad news about Vincent again,” Theo wrote on February 9. “Dr. Salles wrote to say he had been in hospital again since last Thursday and asked me what should be done. He was evidently under the impression that someone wanted to poison him. They put him on his own in hospital and he hasn’t uttered another word since. He weeps from time to time. Poor poor fellow, how hard his life is.” A week later, in a letter largely devoted to his excitement over finding some painted cloth from the Dutch East Indies that would make “the most divine curtains for the dining room,” Theo closed by confessing that he still hadn’t heard from his brother. “Were I not wondering about Vincent all the time, I’d be happy with the present, but he is constantly on my mind. He still hasn’t written and I’ve heard nothing since the letter from [Dr.] Rey.” February 27: “I’ve received another letter from Arles saying that Vincent is back in hospital, this time at the request of the neighbours, who were probably afraid of him. This time a decision has to be taken about him being committed to an asylum . . . I know you are concerned about him and about his care, so I would simply ask if I may think of you in times of sorrow and turn to you for comfort.”
On April 18, 1889, Theo and Jo were married in Amsterdam’s town hall. After a one-day honeymoon in Brussels, they moved into the Montmartre apartment Theo had so carefully prepared. A few weeks later, Vincent began packing and moving out of the Yellow House, whose contents were damp and mildewed after a recent flood. “I felt it deeply,” he wrote Theo, “especially because you had given me all that stuff with such brotherly generosity and yet it was you alone who continued to support me for so many years till in the end I could only report this miserable outcome of it all.”
* * *
In the century since his death, Theo van Gogh has been portrayed as a saint who sacrificed his own life to minister to his brother. Serving as one’s brother’s keeper, however, may not be an entirely selfless act. Evolutionary biologists point out that acting altruistically on a relative’s behalf increases the chances that familial genes will be passed to future generations. The closer the degree of relatedness, the better the odds. (The biologist J. B. S. Haldane, calculating the number of relatives he would have to save to “break even,” genetically speaking, quipped that he would lay down his life for no fewer than two brothers or eight cousins.)
There are other, more immediate benefits. In the case of Theo van Gogh, William Rossetti, and other “martyred siblings of literary history” (as the biographer Leon Edel called them) who take on the care and feeding of an artist with little aptitude or taste for the practical details of navigating the real world, those benefits may seem self-evident. But even when the kept brother is not a genius, the keeper may profit. Knowing that someone is dependent on him may boost the keeper’s self-esteem. Making himself indispensable may allow the keeper to feel he has triumphed in an ongoing sibling rivalry, or even that he has trumped a parent; the psychologist Stephen Bank points out that someone who serves as brother’s keeper may be satisfying an unconscious desire to display his competence by “outparenting” a mother or father. Caring for a disabled sibling, too, can have its rewards. Research suggests that children with disabled siblings tend to be more sensitive, tolerant, empathic, compassionate, mature, and self-sufficient. A disproportionate number grow up to become professional caretakers: doctors, nurses, social workers, therapists.
Serving as brother’s keeper may provide the keeper with an identity he might otherwise lack. It has often been said that without Theo, there might have been no Vincent. It may be equally true that without Vincent, there might have been no Theo. Who would the keeper be without someone to keep?
* * *
From an early age, James Joyce’s nine brothers and sisters were conditioned to meet his needs. The eldest, the favorite of both parents, and the handsome, precocious boy upon whom the impoverished family’s hopes rested, James was the only Joyce to be given a college education; his siblings occasionally went hungry so their father could buy James the books he needed. Of all the Joyce children, it was Stanislaus, three years younger than James, who took the job most to heart. Young Stannie fetched his older brother books from the library, carried messages to his friends, borrowed money on his behalf, lent him his hat and raincoat, and bowled to him in the back garden for hours at a time so James could perfect his cricket swing. Stannie worshiped James; the diary he kept was more about his brother than about himself. James, in turn, treated Stannie with a contempt that made Vincent’s treatment of Theo seem generous. He read Stannie’s diary without permission and used incidents from it in his work. He recycled Stannie’s observations, passing them off as his own in conversation with his friends. He tried out story ideas and literary theories on Stannie. “He said frankly that he used me as a butcher uses his steel,” Stannie recalled. (In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus refers to his brother as “my whetstone.”)
Stannie was a willing partner in his own bondage. Like his brother, he wanted to be a writer, and though James offered him no encouragement—there was room for only one writer in the house—Stannie got an education by osmosis. He followed his brother to meetings of the University Literary and Historical Society, read his brother’s English and French books instead of his own schoolwork, discussed his brother’s essays with him, and walked miles across Dublin with his brother just to listen to him talk. “Everywhere my brother went I was sure to go like a not too amiable little lamb.” He studied his brother with a mix of admiration and jealousy. “My life has been modelled on Jim’s example,” he wrote at eighteen. Years later, he’d admit, “Whenever I struck out for myself, I always felt a little guilty, as if I were indulging an inferior taste.” Stolid, plodding Stannie, whose seriousness was a family joke, confessed to his diary that he agreed with James’s assessment of him as “quite commonplace and uninteresting,” and hoped some of his brother’s charisma might rub off on him. Their father called him James’s “jackal,” and observed with contempt that Stannie shone “with borrowed light like the moon.”
When James left Dublin for Paris with Nora Barnacle in 1902, one might have expected the fraternal errands to subside. But James took even greater advantage of his brother. “Tell Stannie to go to Eason’s in Abbey St where I ordered and paid for a certain quantity of paper, and tell them to forward it to me,” James wrote his mother. “Tell Stannie to send me the December no of S. Stephen’s and to write to the Unicorn Press and to be careful of the books in my room.” “Tell Stannie to send me at once (so that I may have it by Thursday night) my copy of Wagner’s operas and if he can to enclose with it a copy of Grant Allen’s ‘Paris.’” Stannie was working as an unpaid clerk in an accountant’s office, but spent most of his time as James’s long-distance gofer. Among James’s demands: send the key to his trunk; forward various addresses; pay his debts; borrow money from James’s friends and send it to him; correspond with literary magazines; comment on James’s work; fact-check his stories (“Can a priest be buried in a habit?” “Would an accident at Sydney Parade be treated at Vincent’s Hospital?”); deliver his manuscripts to literary magazines; send him issues in which his poems appeared; distribute copies of his work to friends; send excerpts from his diary so he could use them as an aide-memoire; write up a summary of the state of “modern English literature”; go to the hotel where Nora had worked and learn what people were saying about her; find out how Nora could obtain her birth certificate; send a copy of Nora’s grandmother’s will; read up on “some midwifery and embryology and send me the results of your study.” (James didn’t bother to explain that Nora was pregnant with their first child.) And be quick about it. “Do not delay so long executing my requests,” James wrote his brother, “as I waste a lot of ink.”
Stannie proved so indispensable that in 1905, James, overwhelmed by the duties of fatherhood, summoned—the word was James’s—his brother to Trieste, where he served as “a kind of extra draught horse,” as Stannie put it, in the chaotic Joyce household. For the next ten years, while joining James as an English teacher, Stannie kept the household afloat financially, made sure the bills were paid, fended off creditors, babysat Nora and the children when James was away, hectored James to keep at his writing, and tried to slow his brother’s heavy drinking—often hunting down and extracting him from cafés (and occasionally administering a pummeling when they got home). Stannie was filling a role traditionally held by the spouses of artists, but Nora didn’t care “a rambling damn about art,” according to James, and even if she had, she was unwilling to perform all the tasks Stannie was. James could be a callous, condescending master (“If God Almighty came down to earth, you’d have a job for him,” Nora told him). Stannie could be an overbearing, pious nag (“He was twenty but acted forty-five,” observed the biographer Richard Ellmann). The brothers often quarreled—when they were on speaking terms—over James’s profligate drinking and spending. James treated his younger brother like a servant, a servant who not only doesn’t get paid but is forced to support his master. (Stephen Dedalus: “a brother is as easy to lose as an umbrella.”) When James and his family returned, penniless, to Trieste after a sojourn in Rome, Stannie asked his brother how he planned to live with no money, no home, and no prospect of work. “Well, then,” James replied, “I have you.”
James was using Stannie—abusing may be the more accurate word—but Stannie was also using James. Without the brother around whom his adolescence had revolved, Stannie had been floundering in Dublin. In coming to Trieste, and his first paying job, “he allowed himself to rescue and be rescued,” as Ellmann points out. Yet Stannie got something else from his brother. He was one of the earliest to recognize James’s genius, and, lacking the confidence to strike out on his own, he had invested in that genius. He may have been basking in his brother’s reflected light, but it was a bright light. Though he would never get the kind of acknowledgment that Vincent accorded Theo, he was part of his brother’s work. Years later he would write with satisfaction that during the ten years he had kept his brother relatively sober in Trieste, James had written Chamber Music and most of Dubliners, rewritten the story “A Portrait of the Artist” into the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and begun Ulysses. Stannie served not only as his brother’s errand boy but as his de facto first reader, agent, and editor. He was proud that he had given titles to Chamber Music and A Portrait of the Artist, and that he had, however unwittingly, served as a partial model for characters in Dubliners and Ulysses, even if those characters were wishy-washy sorts. There were other rewards. Stannie’s father adored James and loathed Stannie; Stannie may have taken pride in being able to provide for James in ways—financial and intellectual—that his alcoholic, ne’er-do-well father couldn’t. James may have “cannibalized” Stannie, as one biographer puts it, but Stannie also cannibalized James.
Things might have gone on like this forever had it not been for World War I. In January 1915, Stannie was arrested and interned for four years in an Austrian castle. (From James’s perspective, Stannie’s stay was apparently more inconvenient than horrific; one of the few details James reported about his brother’s confinement was that he had sprained his wrist playing tennis.) All that Stannie had done for James, now safely ensconced in Zurich, was taken on by a support team of admirers, with Frank Budgen, the English painter, and Harriet Weaver, the American patroness, playing major roles, and Yeats, Pound, and Eliot playing cameos. Now that Stannie, behind barbed wire, could do nothing for him, James wrote his brother only an occasional short note. By the time the war was over, James was famous and Stannie, having had plenty of time for reflection, was determined to live a life of his own. “I had not the energy to tackle him again,” he wrote. When James pressed thirty-year-old Stannie for a favor, Stannie balked. “I have just emerged from four years of hunger and squalor, and am trying to get on my feet again,” he wrote. “Do you think you can give me a rest?”
Over the next twenty years, the brothers would meet only three times. James, who had his own money and an ever-widening circle of sycophants, no longer needed Stannie; Stannie, who cultivated a group of friends who liked him for his own merits, no longer needed James. Without his brother to look after, Stannie married at the age of forty-three and became a revered professor of English at the University of Trieste. Without his brother looking over his shoulder, James drank more than ever, but was able to make the artistic breakthrough that led to Finnegans Wake. (After reading an early installment, Stannie told James it was “drivelling rigmarole.”) Yet the last person James wrote to, six days before his death in 1941, was Stannie. An outspoken detractor of Mussolini, Stannie had been placed in semi-internment in Florence as an enemy alien; now James sent his brother a postcard from neutral Switzerland with the names of some people who might be able to help him. He was, at last, doing something for the brother who had done so much for him.
It was only after James’s death that Stannie felt safe to resume his custodial role: assisting his brother’s biographers, interpreting his life, defending his reputation. He named his only child, born two years after his brother’s death, for James. He became a writer, as he’d always wanted. But, as in his teenage, diary-keeping days, he was a writer with a single subject: his brother. By the time he died on June 16, 1955 (Bloomsday), in Trieste, the city to which James had summoned him a half-century earlier, he had, in a sense, reunited with his brother so completely that, in the end, though Stannie called his memoir My Brother’s Keeper, one might well ask which brother was the keeper and which the kept.
* * *
On May 8, 1889, Vincent was taken to Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a sanitarium housed in a former twelfth-century monastery in Saint-Rémy, twelve miles northeast of Arles. “With the consent of the person in question, who is my brother,” Theo had written, “I request the admission to your institution of Vincent Willem van Gogh, painter, 36 years old. . . . In view of the fact that his internment is desired mainly to prevent the recurrence of previous attacks and not because his mental condition is unsound, I hope that you will find it possible to permit him to do some painting outside of your establishment. . . . I beg you to be kind enough to allow him at least a half liter of wine with his meals.” Once again, Vincent described his new home to his brother: “I have a small room with greenish-grey paper and two sea-green curtains with a design of very pale roses, brightened with touches of blood red. These curtains, probably the legacy of some deceased and ruined rich person, are very pretty in design. . . . Through the iron-barred window I can see an enclosed square of wheat, a prospect like a Van Goyen, above which, in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all its glory.”
At Saint-Rémy, the attacks—psychotic episodes in which Vincent was assaulted by hallucinations and waves of paranoia—were more frequent and more severe. They were followed by periods of depression, in which he went for days and sometimes weeks without speaking or writing. Vincent was terrified “beyond measure” by the attacks themselves, during which, at various times, he tried to poison himself by eating dirt, swallowing paint, and drinking turpentine. But he was even more terrified that they would destroy his ability to paint. After each one, Vincent urged Theo to persuade the doctor to let him go back to work. He was determined to get as much done as possible before the next attack, the way “a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.” The newlywed Theo did what he could from Paris: he paid Vincent’s fees at the asylum and provided him with a steady stream of paints, canvas, stretchers, brushes, books, art reproductions, tobacco, chocolate, newspapers, and news (Pissarro had had an eye operation; Gauguin had sent Theo some new paintings; Tanguy’s mother had died). At Vincent’s request, Theo sent him a one-volume edition of Shakespeare, which Vincent read and reread. But Theo agonized over what he couldn’t do for Vincent. “Poor fellow, how dearly I should like to know what to do to put a stop to this nightmare . . . ,” he wrote in August 1889, after another attack. “In your last letter you wrote me that we were brothers for more than one reason. This is what I feel too, and though my heart is not as sensitive as yours, I can enter at times into your feeling of being smothered by so many thoughts that cannot be resolved. Never lose courage, and remember how much I want you.” Each Sunday, on his only day off from Boussod & Valadon, Theo spent the morning rearranging his brother’s paintings on the walls of his apartment.
Theo had good news for Vincent about his own work. In September 1889, Vincent had two paintings at the fifth Salon des Indépendants; six months later, at the sixth Salon he had ten. “Monet said that your pictures were the best of all in the exhibition,” Theo wrote. In January 1890, at an exhibition in Brussels, a Van Gogh canvas sold for the first time. “I think we can wait patiently for success to come; you will surely live to see it,” wrote Theo. That same month a young art critic, Albert Aurier, published a glowing review of Vincent’s work. Vincent believed it was no coincidence that not long afterward, he suffered another attack. “As soon as I heard that my work was having some success, and read the article in question,” he wrote his mother after he had recovered, “I feared at once that I should be punished for it; this is how things nearly always go in a painter’s life: success is about the worst thing that can happen.” (Three decades after eight-year-old Vincent had destroyed his clay elephant, he was still leery of praise.) Again, Vincent’s and Theo’s fortunes were dramatically juxtaposed. On January 31, 1890, not long after Vincent’s attack, Jo gave birth to a baby boy. Not knowing whether his brother would be well enough to read his letter, Theo wrote Vincent to announce his son’s birth. “As we told you at the time, we are going to name him after you, and I devoutly hope that he will be able to be as persevering and as courageous as you.” In keeping with his feelings of unworthiness—and, perhaps, of guilt—Vincent unsuccessfully petitioned them to name the boy Theo, after their father.
Vincent’s spirits increasingly faltered under threat of the attacks. “I have become timid and hesitant, and live, as it were, mechanically,” he wrote. He described himself as “overwhelmed with boredom and grief.” More than ever, Vincent relied on his brother. “If I were without your friendship,” Vincent wrote, “they would drive me remorselessly to suicide, and coward that I am, I should end by committing it.” Theo was crushed to hear his bull-headed brother sounding so meek. As winter turned to spring, Vincent grew determined to leave Saint-Rémy. “My surroundings here begin to weigh on me more than I can say,” he wrote Theo. His thoughts turned to his parents, to his childhood, to Holland. “I’m haunted by a longing to see my old friends and the northern countryside again,” he wrote Theo. In another letter: “What consoles me is the great, very great desire I have to see you again, you and your wife and child.” Vincent’s yearning for home may have seemed like a second wind. In retrospect, of course, it signified the beginning of the end.
Theo began looking for a place for his brother. The asylums in Holland were full. He invited Vincent to live with him and Jo, but Vincent didn’t feel up to the hubbub of Paris. Pissarro suggested Vincent go to Auvers, a small town an hour northwest of Paris, where he could be under the care of Paul Gachet, a homeopathic doctor, psychiatrist, and amateur painter who had written a thesis on neurosis in artists. Vincent agreed to the plan; he would stop in Paris to see Theo and his new family en route. Theo’s insistence that Vincent be accompanied on the train, in case he had another attack, triggered a brief fraternal contretemps. “Up till now I have done no one any harm; is it fair to have me accompanied like a dangerous beast?” Vincent complained. As always, Theo relented, knowing there was little he could do. But, like an anxious parent, Theo couldn’t sleep the night before he met his brother at the Gare de Lyon. The brothers hadn’t seen each other since Theo had visited Vincent at the hospital in Arles. Jo, looking out the window of the apartment, saw their carriage arrive from the station: “Two merry faces nodded to me, two hands waved—a moment later Vincent stood before me.”
It was the first time Jo had met her brother-in-law. “I had expected a sick man, but here was a sturdy, broad-shouldered man, with a healthy color, a smile on his face, and a very resolute appearance . . .” she recalled. “‘He seems perfectly well; he looks much stronger than Theo,’ was my first thought.” The brothers went right in to see Vincent’s namesake. Both had tears in their eyes as they stood side by side over the baby’s cradle. Vincent had brought a gift for his nephew: a painting of almond blossoms against a blue sky. Theo and Jo hung it above the piano. Vincent could see his work everywhere: The Potato Eaters over the dining room mantelpiece, Orchards in Bloom in the bedroom, Landscape from Arles and Night View on the Rhône in the sitting room. Piles of unframed canvases lay in every corner. The next morning, Vincent was up early, spreading his canvases on the floor for him and Theo to examine. Over the next few days, Pissarro, Tanguy, and Toulouse-Lautrec called on Vincent; he, in turn, called on other old Paris friends. He and Theo visited the annual Salon. He went out to buy olives, for which he had developed a taste while painting olive trees in Saint-Rémy, and insisted Theo and Jo try them. He announced plans to return in a few weeks to paint portraits of Theo, Jo, and baby Vincent. In a letter to Wil, he wrote of his visit: “It gave me great joy to see Theo again, and to make the acquaintance of Jo and the little one. Theo’s cough was worse than when I last saw him more than 2 years ago, but in talking to him and seeing him close at hand, I certainly found him, all things considered, changed somewhat for the better, and Jo is full of good sense and good will.” But the bustle of Paris made Vincent uneasy, and after three days he took the train to Auvers.
There he rented an attic room at the inn, and put himself under the care of Gachet, who was nearly a match for Vincent in eccentricity. (He kept a collection of death masks of guillotined murderers in his attic.) “I have found a perfect friend in Dr. Gachet, something like another brother,” Vincent wrote Wil, “so alike are we physically, and mentally, too.” By all accounts, he lived quietly, simply, and productively (seventy paintings in seventy days). “When I heard much later he had been interned in a lunatic asylum in the Midi, I was much surprised,” wrote the innkeeper’s daughter, “as he had always appeared calm and sweet to me.” Gachet, meeting Theo at his gallery on June 4, said that he believed Vincent was completely cured. Theo may have believed it, too, when he and his family visited the following Sunday. Vincent met them at the station, presenting his four-month-old nephew with a bird’s nest. They lunched outdoors at Gachet’s, where Vincent, carrying his namesake in his arms, introduced him to the doctor’s barnyard menagerie of cats, dogs, chickens, rabbits, ducks, and pigeons. Later, they took a long walk. Vincent told Theo he hoped that this would be the first of many visits; indeed, he tried to persuade him to move his family to the country, for the sake of their health. They discussed renting a small house nearby where Vincent could spend weekends with Theo and his family. Afterward, Vincent wrote to Theo and Jo: “Sunday has left me a very pleasant memory; in this way we feel that we are not so far from one another, and I hope that we shall often see each other again.” In a letter to his mother describing the visit, he added, “it is a very reassuring feeling for me to live so much closer to them.”
Indeed, Vincent seemed far healthier than Theo. It had been a difficult spring. Theo’s sales had been disappointing, his bosses were pressuring him, and with a new baby at home, he got little sleep. His chronic cough grew explosive, his limbs trembled, he had difficulty eating. Ever since giving birth, Jo had been in and out of bed because of postpartum blood loss. Most upsetting of all, the baby fell seriously ill—Theo blamed contaminated cow’s milk—and Theo and Jo were terrified they might lose him. By late June, Theo was so exhausted and anxious that he did something highly unusual: he poured out his worries to his brother in a letter that began, points out biographer Jan Hulsker, not with Theo’s usual salutation “Mon cher Vincent” but the more emotional “Mon très cher frère Vincent.” After describing the child’s condition, the normally circumspect Theo confessed his other worries, with a force that suggests he had been bottling them up for some time: Jo’s health (each night he could hear her moaning in her sleep); their living situation (should they move to a larger apartment on the first floor? to Auvers, to be near Vincent? to Holland, to be near the family home?); his work (should he leave “those rats” Boussod and Valadon and open his own gallery at last?); his finances (he was now the sole support of his wife, child, mother, two of his sisters, and Vincent; whatever happened, they would all have to tighten their belts). In this catalogue of woes, Theo identified one comfort: Vincent was in good health. “You have found your way, dear brother, your carriage is already nearing its destination and can stand up to a good many knocks.” It was an unusually long, rambling, emotional letter for Theo. Indeed, it resembled one of Vincent’s, by turns worried, self-pitying, and sentimental. After unleashing a torrent of self-doubt, Theo turned to his brother. “What do you think, old fellow?”
The old fellow was taken aback. Theo’s sudden fragility shook him. After so many years of leaning on Theo, Vincent wasn’t prepared to resume the role of elder brother. His response was uncharacteristically cautious. He expressed concern about the child (“I feel how exhausting it must be and I wish I could help you a little bit”). Though he had pressed Theo for years to leave his job, he now vacillated (“What do you want me to say about the future, which perhaps, perhaps, will be without the Boussods? That will be as it will be”). Of one thing he was certain: he wasn’t in such rosy shape as Theo suggested. “I dare not count on my health never letting me down again. And don’t hold it against me if my illness should return.” It was as if Vincent, witnessing Theo’s breakdown, felt he had a rival for the role of needy brother; he required Theo to remain the pillar of the family, the “lucky dog.” After all, if Theo couldn’t take care of himself, how could he take care of Vincent?
Nevertheless, concerned for his brother, Vincent traveled to Paris, where he and Theo visited Tanguy’s paint shop and had lunch with Toulouse-Lautrec. But the visit did not go well. Vincent wasn’t pleased with the way his paintings were stored at Tanguy’s, and he complained that there wasn’t enough space to display his work at Theo’s apartment. Jo was recovering from her illness, Theo was coughing worse than ever, and, though out of danger, little Vincent was still sick, wailing through the night. The brothers discussed the idea of Theo quitting the business. Jo, worried about expenses, argued against it. But their discussions were interrupted by old friends wanting to see Vincent, and Vincent, tense and exhausted, cut short his visit and returned to Auvers. There, he wrote his brother and sister-in-law a brief, agitated letter, acknowledging that “we are all rather distressed and a little overwrought.” He suggested that any decision about leaving Boussod be postponed. “You rather surprise me by seeming to wish to force the situation,” he wrote. (Coming from a man who always forced the situation, the observation must have struck Theo as peculiar.) In a subsequent letter, Vincent wanted to make it clear that they couldn’t count on him. “I generally try to be fairly cheerful, but my life too is menaced at its very root, and my steps also are wavering. I feared—not so much, but a little just the same—that being a burden to you, you felt me rather a thing to be dreaded.”
In Paris, Theo had told Vincent that he planned to give his employers an ultimatum, allowing them eight days to respond to his demand for higher pay. It was an uncharacteristically reckless step for Theo, just the kind of thing Vincent would have done. The deadline passed without a response. On July 21, more than two weeks after issuing the ultimatum, Theo, convinced he had made a horrible mistake, terrified he’d be jobless just when he’d started a family, told his employers he wanted to stay. The news would have relieved Vincent, but though Theo wrote his mother about his decision on July 22, he neglected to tell his brother. Might he have been embarrassed to explain to Vincent that he had caved in? That he had tried to be like his uncompromising brother but had lacked the nerve? That he was, in the end, his father’s son? In any case, Vincent was preoccupied by the possibility that Theo’s crisis of confidence might mean an end to his financial and, perhaps, emotional support. Vincent had always seen a vital connection between Theo and his own very existence. Over the years he had written that were Theo to withdraw his support it would be as if he were to “cut off my head”; that “I’ll pay you back or die in the attempt”; that “my life or death depends on your help”; that “whatever you can spare is as absolutely necessary to me as the air I breathe.” A kind of syllogism may have taken root in Vincent’s unconscious: without Theo, there could be no painting; without painting, there could be no life; therefore, without Theo, there could be no life.
* * *
On the morning of July 28, Theo received a message from Dr. Gachet: “With the greatest regret I must disturb your repose. Yet I think it my duty to write to you immediately. At nine o’clock of today, Sunday, I was sent for by your brother Vincent, who wanted to see me at once. I went there and found him very ill. He has wounded himself.” Theo rushed to Auvers, where he was told that on the previous evening Vincent had borrowed a revolver from his innkeeper, saying he wanted to scare away the crows that often bothered him as he worked. Instead, he had walked to a nearby farmyard and shot himself in the abdomen. Clutching his stomach, he staggered back to his room. “I shot myself,” he told the innkeeper. “I only hope I haven’t botched it.” When Theo arrived, he lay down next to his brother on the bed, unable to stop weeping. “Do not cry,” said Vincent, “I did it for the good of us all.”
Although Dr. Gachet hadn’t been able to remove the bullet, Vincent was well enough to talk to Theo for most of the day. “He was glad that I came and we are together all the time . . .” Theo wrote Jo that evening. “Poor fellow, very little happiness fell to his share, and no illusions are left him. The burden grows too heavy at times, he feels so alone. He often asks after you and the baby, and said that you could not have imagined there was so much sorrow in life.” Late that night, Theo, sitting at Vincent’s bedside, told him that he would do everything he could to help him get better and that he hoped he would be spared further attacks. “The sadness will last forever,” Vincent replied. Not long afterward, Vincent had trouble breathing. He closed his eyes. Theo got on the bed beside him and cradled his brother’s head in his arm. “I wish I could pass away like this,” murmured Vincent. Half an hour later, at one in morning on July 29, at the age of thirty-seven, he did.
The following afternoon, Theo was part of a small group of friends and admirers that climbed the hill to the cemetery, overlooking the wheat fields, where the coffin, covered with sunflowers and yellow dahlias, was lowered into the grave. “In the assembly some people cry,” wrote Émile Bernard, recalling the scene in a letter to Albert Aurier. “Theodore Van Gogh, who adored his brother, who had always supported him in his struggle for art and independence, did not stop sobbing painfully.” Dr. Gachet made some remarks. Theo spoke a few words of thanks through his tears. At one point during the service, Theo fainted. “It was as if the brother called his brother from the grave,” wrote Bernard. Shortly after returning to Paris, Theo wrote to his mother. “One cannot write how grieved one is nor find any comfort. It is a grief that will last and which I certainly shall never forget as long as I live; the only thing one might say is that he himself has the rest he was longing for. . . . Oh Mother! he was so my own, own brother.”
* * *
For years, Theo had tried to keep his brother alive; now he tried to keep his brother’s memory alive. He asked Aurier to write Vincent’s biography, but Aurier was finishing a novel. (Two years later, when he was ready to begin, Aurier died suddenly of typhoid fever.) He asked Durand-Ruel to lend one of his gallery rooms for an exhibition of Vincent’s paintings, but the art dealer declined, deciding the public might find them disturbing. So Theo asked Émile Bernard to help him put up Vincent’s paintings—“as many as possible”—in Theo’s apartment as a kind of informal memorial exhibition. Two years earlier, on the eve of Vincent’s departure for Arles, Bernard had helped Vincent decorate his bedroom with Vincent’s work to make Theo feel that his brother was still there in spirit. Now Bernard helped Theo hang Vincent’s canvases all over Theo and Jo’s apartment. It was a way of letting people get to know Vincent’s work; it may also have been a way of helping Theo feel that his brother was still there. “I wish you could see it,” Theo wrote to his sister Wil. Referring to a critic who had recently disparaged Vincent’s paintings, he added, “You would get something out of it, and you would see that, unlike what Monsieur Beauborg said in his article, these canvases are not the work of a sick mind, but of the ardor and humanity of a great man.”
In the months following his brother’s death it became clear that Theo had needed Vincent as much as Vincent had needed Theo. Without his brother, Theo fell apart. His health went downhill with astonishing speed. His chronic cough degenerated into bronchitis; his doctor prescribed medicine to help him sleep, but the side effects made his life a misery. “They gave me hallucinations and nightmares night and day to the extent that I would have jumped out of the window or would have killed myself in one way or another if I should not have stopped taking them,” he wrote Wil on September 27. “I was literally crazy.” Without the medicine, the cough came back worse than ever, accompanied by hoarseness, a bad cold, episodes of paralysis, and inflammation of the kidneys so severe he went eight days without urinating. Theo’s behavior became increasingly erratic, increasingly like Vincent’s. Discussing a minor matter with his bosses (a painting by a French Orientalist Vincent had admired), Theo grew agitated and belligerent, then abruptly resigned, determined at last to establish himself as an independent dealer, as Vincent had pressed him to do. (Realizing that Theo wasn’t himself, his bosses agreed to save Theo’s job until he was well again.) He seemed capable of talking only about Vincent, of seeing only people who had known Vincent. He pored over the drawerful of his brother’s letters. He grew obsessed with carrying out his brother’s projects. He attempted to rent the Café du Tambourin, where he and Vincent had often wined and dined, in order to establish a society of painters. Out of the blue he sent a telegram to Gauguin: “Departure to tropics assured, money follows—Theo, Director.” He consulted his brother’s doctor. “I have a feeling that my head is spinning and whatever I write gives me a feeling of dizziness,” he wrote Gachet. “It’s again the nerves that have got the upper hand.” Like his brother, he went mad. Five days after Jo’s birthday on October 4, he suffered a complete mental and physical collapse. “He then became violent,” wrote Camille Pissarro to his son Lucien. “He who loved his wife and his son so dearly, he wanted to kill them.” On October 12, Theo was hospitalized. According to Andries Bonger, writing to his parents, “Rivet [Theo’s doctor] said that his case is far worse than Vincent’s, and that there is not a spark of hope.”
A month later, when he was well enough to travel—albeit in a straitjacket—Theo was transferred to the Institution for the Mentally Ill in Utrecht, where he retreated into the kind of wordless stupor Vincent had experienced after his attacks, punctuated by psychotic episodes in which he tore at his clothing and had to be placed in isolation. When his wife visited, Theo did not recognize her; perturbed and incoherent, he knocked over a table and chairs and the visit was ended. One day, his doctor, trying to rouse Theo from his torpor, read aloud a newspaper article about his brother. “The only interest he had was for the name Vincent,” the doctor recalled. Theo died on January 25, 1891, six months after his older brother, at the age of thirty-three. Doctors in Paris had diagnosed Theo as suffering from dementia paralytica, the terminal stage of syphilis (probably contracted during his premarital visits to prostitutes). But in his final medical records, the “cause of disease” was listed, perhaps no less accurately, as “chronic illness, excessive exertion and sorrow.”