Morgue (34 page)

A few days later, Vincent painted the frenzied
Wheatfield with Crows,
which depicts swirling storm clouds over a churning field of amber grain and a flock of blackbirds fleeing the approaching squall.

Was it just a vibrant painting … or something else? I don't know. None of us does. Some have called it a glimpse into Vincent's surging torment; others say it was his suicide note. That seems an overly melodramatic conclusion, but the fact remains, we'll never know.

As a medical examiner, I learned it's important to limit speculation, step back from emotion, and focus on facts.

In Vincent's death, speculation is abundant, emotions run high, and facts are few … unless you know where to look.

*   *   *

What happened between Vincent's hasty noontime lunch and the moment he stumbled back home after dusk?

Nobody knows that either. Stories conflicted right from the start, and Vincent himself was reportedly confused about the details. But here's the customary account that's been told for the past century, much of it the sixty-year-old memory of the late Gustave Ravoux's then-elderly daughter Adeline, only thirteen when it happened. It was 1953 and Adeline was seventy-three when she first recounted what she learned from her father about Vincent's shooting. It went like this:

Vincent hauled his bulky painting gear and a large canvas up a steep, heavily wooded hill to a wheat field beyond the stately Château d'Auvers, more than a mile from Ravoux's inn. There he propped his easel against a haystack and wandered down a road in the shadow of the château wall.

Somewhere along that road Vincent drew a hidden revolver and shot himself in the side, then fainted. Some time after sundown, the night air revived him and he crawled about on all fours, searching for the gun so he could finish the suicide properly. When he couldn't find it in the dark, he staggered back down the slope, through the trees, to the inn.

Adeline said her father lent the gun to Vincent, who, she claimed, had wanted it to scare away crows while he painted in the fields.

No revolver was ever found, nor were Vincent's painting kit and canvas. Nobody saw him in the five or six hours he was gone. The only official investigation was brief and no report was ever written, leaving only inconsistent, foggy memories and local gossip.

And a lot of questions.

The first physician to see Vincent was Dr. Jean Mazery, a country obstetrician in the nearby village of Pontoise. He arrived at the Ravoux inn to find Vincent sitting up in his bed, calmly smoking a pipe.

Mazery described the bullet wound as just below the ribs, on the left side of the abdomen, about the size of a large pea, with a dark red margin and encircled by a purple-blue halo. A thin trickle of blood seeped from it. The doctor probed the wound with a long thin metal rod, an excruciating procedure, and believed the small-caliber bullet had lodged near the back of Vincent's abdominal cavity.

Mazery believed the bullet had traveled on a downward slant into the artist's belly, missing major organs and blood vessels. But without cutting Vincent open, he couldn't see what other damage might have been done.

Summoned from a Sunday fishing outing with his son, Dr. Gachet soon arrived, too. He carried his little black emergency bag and—being a believer in the therapeutic value of electroshock—a small electric coil. In Vincent's cramped little room, he examined the artist's wound by candlelight. Vincent had shot himself too low and too far to his left side to have hit his heart. Gachet, who considered himself a specialist in nervous disorders, was relieved.

The wound was in Vincent's left side, at the bottom of or below the ribs.

Even though Vincent begged the two doctors to cut him open and remove the bullet, they refused. Thoracic surgery was messy and difficult, even for experienced surgeons, which they were not. Although they didn't believe the bullet had pierced any vital organs, they surmised it had passed through Vincent's left lung cavity and lodged somewhere in his back, possibly close to his spine.

They saw neither hemorrhaging nor signs of shock. In fact, Vincent was lucid and calm. Yes, he spoke uncomfortably, but he showed no signs that blood was collecting unseen in his lungs or chest, slowly suffocating him. He'd even sat up in his bed and asked for the tobacco in the pocket of his bloodied blue blouse.

They concluded merely that the wound was caused by a small-caliber bullet that lodged dangerously close to Vincent's spine, and that it had been fired at an unusual angle, at some distance from Vincent.

The two doctors could have taken Vincent to the hospital, only six miles away, but they didn't. They merely dressed his wound and nothing more. That night they left him in his airless, sweltering cubby beneath the roof.

Dr. Gachet quietly pronounced Vincent's case hopeless and left. He never came back. The innkeeper Ravoux spent the rest of that restless night beside Vincent's bed as he alternately dozed and smoked his pipe.

The next morning, two gendarmes visited the inn to question Vincent about the shooting, but he was insolent. Where had Vincent gone to shoot himself? they asked. How did he, a former mental patient, get hold of a gun?

They asked Vincent if he had intended to kill himself.

“Yes, I believe so,” he responded ambiguously. Didn't he know if he wanted to kill himself?

The gendarmes pressed further, but Vincent barked at them.

“What I have done is nobody else's business,” he reportedly said. “My body is mine and I am free to do what I want with it.
Do not accuse anybody,
it is I that wished to commit suicide.”

Was Vincent simply startled that police would suspect a crime, or was he deliberately deflecting suspicion away from someone else? The gendarmes left, satisfied there'd been no foul play.

But Vincent's vigor didn't last. A dreadful truth about gutshots in the 1800s is that they were almost always fatal.

That evening, a few hours after Theo arrived at his bedside, infection gripped him. Vincent went downhill fast. By midnight, his breath grew strained. He whispered to his beloved brother Theo, who'd rushed from Paris to be with Vincent, “I wish I could pass away like this … the sadness will last forever.”

Ninety minutes later, about 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, July 29, 1890, Vincent van Gogh was dead. There was no autopsy, no further investigation. The fatal bullet was never recovered, but it might have nicked a bowel, releasing fast-moving bacteria into the abdominal cavity. In the thirty or so hours since he'd been shot, the infection would have halted his normal intestinal activity, and his electrolytes would have been dangerously disrupted. Very quickly, his kidneys, liver, and lungs likely started to shut down as the peritonitis seeped through him.

The tragedy was complete. Vincent's unquiet mind was quiet at last. He died at only thirty-seven years old, never knowing he would become known as the greatest artist of his time.

As it was foretold by Vincent himself, his road had been uphill all the way.

*   *   *

They laid Vincent's corpse in a handmade coffin atop the inn's billiard table. His palette and brushes were arrayed on the floor. Yellow dahlias and sunflowers—because yellow was Vincent's favorite color—surrounded him. His newer, unframed paintings, some still wet, were tacked to the wall for the somber group of mourners to see. Ironically and sadly, Vincent van Gogh's funeral was also his first and only one-man show.

But because the village pastor believed Vincent had committed suicide, he refused him a church service and burial in consecrated ground. So Vincent's body was buried two days later in a tiny public graveyard less than half a mile from the sad, claustrophobic room where he died, beside the field where he'd painted the stormy skies and the fleeing crows several days before. Theo, the Ravoux family, some neighbors, and a handful of Vincent's artist friends attended the humid afternoon graveside rites.

After the burial, Theo returned to the inn to fulfill his brother's final wish: to donate all his recent canvases to neighbors in the village where he'd lived for nine weeks, then died. But while gathering his brother's belongings, Theo found a letter in Vincent's jacket pocket, written to Theo shortly before he'd been shot. It hinted at Vincent's fear that he'd become an unbearable burden to his brother. The last lines read:

Ah well, I risk my life for my own work and my reason has half foundered in it—very well—but you're not one of the dealers in men; as far as I know and can judge I think you really act with humanity, but what can you do

Did it mean anything that Vincent had not placed a question mark—or any other punctuation—after the note's last word, leaving it dangling for eternity? No matter. The art world would come to embrace it as a sad suicide note, even though it contained no obvious threats or good-byes.

It was just one of the many questions Vincent left hanging in the air.

*   *   *

Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting during his life, but in his last ten years, he created more than 2,100 artworks, including 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, sketches, and prints. Today collectors have paid more for his works than for those of any other artist in the history of mankind, and his life has been explored endlessly in books and films.

Vincent was a complex welter of his insanity, his upbringing, his station, and his intensity. His paintings were not the paintings of a madman, but merely paintings by a man who happened to be mad. Somebody less intense might not have painted with such genius. But we can look at his work and wonder if he would have been such a genius if he were not also mad.

So when authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith—winners of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for their biography of American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and both Harvard-educated lawyers—set out to write van Gogh's consummate life story, they didn't expect to unearth too many surprises.

Naifeh and Smith delved deeper and further than any van Gogh scholar ever had. They employed a brigade of translators, researchers, and computer specialists over a ten-year period, and in the end, they would deliver a 960-page book, plus 28,000 footnotes posted online. They left no stone unturned as they searched for the mind and heart behind the canvas.

They found a man far more complex than his legend. Vincent was an indifferent student but spoke four languages fluently and was an insatiable reader. He desperately sought to please his parents but was an utter disappointment to his severe father and disliked by his mother. He yearned for human connections but was so abrasive and disagreeable that even his adoring brother Theo didn't like to spend much time with him. And in the depths of his occasional depressions and breakdowns he often wished for death … but in various letters he also called suicide wicked, terrible, cowardly, immoral, and dishonest.

The true source of Vincent's madness is not known with certainty, but the most likely root cause according to many experts—including the doctors who treated him after he sliced his ear and in the asylum—was temporal-lobe epilepsy triggered in the last two years of his life by drinking absinthe, which at the time contained very small amounts of a convulsant in addition to its high alcohol content. His epilepsy was likely related to a strenuous birth that left Vincent with an asymmetrical face and head, and likely brain damage that went haywire with absinthe. Many accounts describe Vincent lapsing into delusional spells and seizures, followed by long periods of amnesia and confusion.

But apart from his presumed lifelong epilepsy, Vincent also had at least two clear major depressions and a series of manic-depressive episodes, often precipitated by losses of lovers, friends, and emotional equilibrium. “Van Gogh had earlier suffered two distinct episodes of reactive depression, and there are clearly bipolar aspects to his history,” the
American Journal of Psychiatry
noted. “Both episodes of depression were followed by sustained periods of increasingly high energy and enthusiasm, first as an evangelist and then as an artist.”

“I believe he has always been insane,” his own mother once wrote about Vincent, “and that his suffering and ours was a result of it.”

In short, his mind stormed violently for most of his life. As grim as it might be, nobody could be surprised that Vincent would commit suicide.

But the deeper Naifeh and Smith dug, the more questions arose about Vincent's botched suicide attempt. Most had no easy answers. For the two lawyers, much seemed illogical.

For example, Vincent claimed he'd tried to find the gun in the dark after shooting himself, but couldn't. How could it have fallen so far from his grasp, Naifeh and Smith asked, that Vincent couldn't find it? More intriguingly, why could nobody find it the next day in daylight? In fact, why has no such gun ever been found?

What became of the easel, palette, brushes and canvas Vincent took to the fields? They have never been found. Had someone hidden the evidence?

How had this former mental patient gotten hold of a small-caliber revolver, which wasn't a common item in rural France at the time? Vincent had no experience with guns, and nobody would have entrusted him with a revolver if it were known he'd been institutionalized.

How did the dazed Vincent navigate the steep, wooded hill in the dark and totter as much as a mile home, mortally gutshot?

What had triggered his suicidal impulse?

Why didn't this obsessive writer write a suicide note, or at least leave some clear indication of his intent?

Why would a suicidal Vincent have chosen to shoot himself in the side at such an awkward angle? Why not the head or directly at the heart? And maybe more important, how and why did he miss so miserably?

Naifeh and Smith learned that almost immediately after the shooting, townsfolk in Auvers were whispering about how the
fou
artist had been shot accidentally by a couple of teenagers playing with a gun. That story was reported publicly for the first time in the 1930s by an art scholar, but the romantic notion of a brilliant, misunderstood artist committing suicide had taken root and the shooting “rumor” was dismissed.