Vincent's religion, Part Two

Today, I'd like to mention a few of the important connections within my own book that I've been able to develop and explore by dramatizing the near obsessive religious devotion Van Gogh demonstrated as a young man. (After he gave up on art dealing and before he decided to become a painter.) These connections make ignoring Van Gogh's religious inclinations not just cowardly but disabling to the dramatic power of the story. Many connections come to mind, but two in particular.

1) His love/hate relationship with his father. In his letters to Theo, Vincent probably complains about his father more than anyone else, and yet earlier in life he had hoped to follow in his father's footsteps; in fact, he wanted the exact kind of job his father did: ministering to a small town flock. This duality cannot be a coincidence. What most influences you can also be what you most resist and resent. And by drawing so fiery close to his father's faith as a young man, he surely felt even more bitterness, more disillusionment when that faith rejected him as a candidate for ministry. True, Theodorus Van Gogh was never convinced of his son's ambitions as a painter. He supported but did not exactly approve of or understand these ambitions; and he certainly did not approve of Vincent's deportment, his dress, or some of the relationships into which he entered. He even threw Vincent out of the house on Christmas day, 1881. But by dramatizing Vincent's religious faith, I show in the novel that the later break with his father came from a more profound place than "Dad doesn't like me" or "Dad was mean to me." The division between father and son is more painful, more resent-full, more chasmal than that.

2) Peak moments. I'm trying to create an echo effect between Vincent's first sermon--delivered in a London church in October, 1876--and the final scene of my novel in which he paints The Sower (1888). The sermon was clearly a psychologically "peak moment" for Van Gogh, as we can tell from his bragging letter to Theo. He must have felt, after years of struggling to find a new path once he gave up art dealing, that he had finally arrived. If, in only a little way, he was sharing in his father's glory, his father's position. I present the sermon as not just a nervous experience but an ecstatic one, with blooming white light puncturing him. There is a distinct echo of this transcendent moment when in the last scene he works on what I consider the finest painting of his finest period (i.e., Arles). The scene is bathed in yellow, not white, light (if you've seen the painting, you understand) but the ecstatic emotions are similar. My point is to emphasize that the high emotions of sermonizing and the high emotions of painting come from the same psychological place in him. It's just that the former was a rather forced--that is, wrong-- choice of vocation (apparently, no one was particularly turned on by the sermon), selected for doubtful reasons that seem to involve a desire to identify more strongly with, and win the love of, his father; whereas the latter was the truer ecstasy, borne of the truer life choice: to become a painter. As I hope my book will demonstrate, there really was no other choice for him--it just took him a while to make it.

(Pictured above: The Crucifixion of St. Peter by Caravaggio)

Vincent's religion, Part One

I thought it fitting on a Sunday to write about an aspect of Van Gogh's life that is little remarked on, except by those who have studied his biography closely: his religious nature. Anyone writing about Van Gogh, either to fictionalize him, like I am, or to do a straight biography, can't get around the influence of religion in his life. Not only were both his father and grandfather ministers, but for several years he was intent, even fanatic, about finding work as a missionary. During a crucial if crushing period, he was convinced that such was his calling. Of course, things didn't work out that way, and he later wrote with some regret and bewilderment about the religious "mania" that governed his younger self. For me, the writer of historical fiction, the challenge is what to do with that religious mania in my novel. I don't feel I can or should rightly ignore it. In fact, it's not hard to argue that Van Gogh simply transferred his mania for religion into a manic for art, which he always spoke of in sacred, even moralistic, terms. He did not compose religious paintings, at least as we normally think of them, but the impulse to create was a holy one for him, the vocation of painter something like a monastic calling. ("The Studio of the South" that he once hoped to build in Arles would have had a monastic structure, in fact, with Gauguin serving as its "abbot.") And he certainly did believe that art should and could be redemptive. While in later years he no longer attended church or studied the bible, religious language dominates his discussion of individual paintings and of the profession generally. So in writing about Van Gogh, even fictionalizing him, I feel the need to treat his religious impulses with respect rather than patronize them. I need to integrate them into the whole picture of him as a character.

But this does cause me to worry (just a tad). After all, treating religious subjects in fiction is dicey these days. The challenge is an aesthetic one of course but also--maybe even fundamentally--a political one. Earlier in the history of imaginative literature it was not hard to generate profound drama involving religious crises, decisions, even triumphs. The problem in our current age, at least in America, is that religion--or at least Christianity--has been co-opted by the far right. "To be religious" and to think religiously in contemporary America comes with a whole series of automatic political positions, positions that many, including me, find reprehensible, hypocritical, and un-Christian. It's true that plenty of practicing Christians are not right-wingers, but it's also true that many more of them are. The loudest of them are. The most influential of them are. In Arkansas, where I live now, to be religious and at the same time leftward-leaning politically is to be regarded as a servant of the devil. (All right, that's an exaggeration--but not a huge one.) Leftward leaning churches exist here but are few and far between.

So the problem for the writer of fiction is that to treat religion seriously is to run the risk that the literary reader recoils with fright and nausea, suffers flashbacks from the George Bush era. Unfortunately, the right in America has conditioned too many Americans to reject religious subjects automatically. And this is a shame. The religious impulse--be it for Christianity or some other faith--is a human impulse like any other. It is not some mutation in our DNA. It's not going anywhere. And with a figure like Van Gogh, for whom it was truly central in his life, I cannot ignore it. The difference in how I handle it, and how I hope it will work in my book, is that any religious discussions, meditations, activities etc. will be directed to developing a picture of Van Gogh's unique character not trying to sell religion to the non-believer. Sometimes books of fiction do try to act them way: sermons thinly disguised. But I'm not arguing for any religious position, just trying to show a certain committed idealism that fed and sustained him through his difficult years of artistic apprenticeship.

(Next post: more specifics.)