Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh (1937)

van Gogh, Vincent. Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh. Edited by Irving Stone, Plume, 1995.

There are few artists who have exceptional skills in multiple artistic media. Were it not for van Gogh's intimate and poignant letters to his brother Theo, we would not be able to group the sublime painter with such personalities as Blake (who illuminated his own poetry) and Michelangelo (whose poetry is lesser known but no less profound and emotionally striking). I first heard of Irving Stone's compendium of van Gogh's letters in Henry Miller's The Books in My Life (Miller also happened to be an obsessive water colorist in addition to original and raw novelist). We owe a lot to Irving Stone, who in this palatable volume distills the exorbitant contents of some 1,670 pages of letters to present an autobiography that is at once human-all-too-human and deeply moving. We see that can Gogh was not only well versed in art history, but also well read: in the first two letters alone he talks of Michelet, Heine, George Eliot, Dickens, Thomas à Kempis, and to a manic degree the Bible. In one letter he claims, "I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?" In the next letter, however, he admits that "Man is not easily content: now he finds things too easy and then again he is not contented enough." We find that van Gogh heeded Socrates' advice to know thyself, as his letters exhibit a keen introspective psychoanalyst's eye. And yet the pages also shimmer with aphorisms beyond the self: "If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere"; "...a woman is not old as long as she loves and is loved." It remains to be seen whether the book can sustain an invigorating experience for the casual reader. As with James Ramsey Ullman's The Day on Fire (a novel based on the life of Arthur Rimbaud), the reader may need to bring a special reverence for the artist in question to reap the full benefits of the book's breadth.