Relapse

This mounting fear of loneliness probably shook his determination in remaining sober. Van Gogh once grieved to Theo: ‘I only wish that someone could prove to us something calming which comforted us, so that… we could go forward without losing ourselves in the solitude’ (van Gogh 3: 56). As his incessant fear of solitude aggravated, so did his longing for a ‘comfort’ to rescue him from the overwhelming loneliness. Living without company, van Gogh most likely had no choice but to resort to drinking as his source of ‘comfort’. His inner conflict between the comforting alcohol and the lonely sobriety is encapsulated by the interaction among people in The Café Terrace (1888). In the scene, van Gogh stands in the middle of a street, looking at two contrasting worlds lying in front of him. The left half of the street are a group of café drinkers who sit mostly in pairs and rather unusually all face van Gogh, as if they are welcomingly waiting for him to sit down on one of the empty chairs and join them talking and drinking. In juxtaposition to the inviting harmony of café drinkers on the left, the pedestrians on the right of the street appear aloof and isolated from each other. Unaccompanied, they head in different directions and take their own paths, mostly away from the café into the darkness. We can imagine that van Gogh, who very likely stood sandwiched between the two groups, is pondering on which side to line with - should he return to drinking which seemingly could alleviate his solitude?

To van Gogh, the allure of conviviality which alcohol could offer appears to outweigh, if not completely obscure, the mental and physical damage it once inflicted on him. This inclination is discernable from some clues that van Gogh possibly have included in The Café Terrace, as he painted one of the pedestrians slowly approaching the café as well as a café customer leisurely walking towards a table through a door, ready to sit down and order a drink. Such insinuations prefigure van Gogh’s relapse into alcoholism some months later - weakened by his fear of solitude, he eventually succumbed to retreating into his alcoholism for consolation, taking ‘absinthe and brandies in quick succession’ (Conrad 69), entirely abandoning his previous determination in sobriety. Not only did he justified his relapse by claiming that in Arles ‘one spends one’s life… in cafés far more than in the North’ (van Gogh 3: 76), making an excuse to rationalize drinking as part of a daily life in southern France, but he also tried to ignore the harm of drinking by dismissing his admired artist Adolphe Monticelli’s death from alcoholism as mere ‘legend’ (van Gogh 2: 551). Once and for all, his brief determination in sobriety came to a termination.

Image: Van Gogh, Vincent. The Cafe Terrace. 1888. Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, Otterlo, Holland.