I was thinking of using my short story, Vincent’s Lost Letter to his Brother, Theo, October 13th, 1873, as my submission piece for my first module, so I drafted up this Critical Essay to submit alongside it. In the end, I submitted another piece, the New Luddites, so I didn’t need this essay. I thought I’d stick it on here, instead.

Vincent’s Lost Letter to his Brother, Theo, October 1873 is not a typical piece for me. I usually base my stories in the villages where I was raised in the foothills of the Pennines. Though I have lived in South London for nearly a quarter century, I’m still making sense of my upbringing in a working/lower middle class household in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

This piece presented me with several challenges about delivering a short story within this specific setting.

Themes

There were points on ingress into the story:

• Vincent Van Gogh lived in South London for three years, before he started to paint, working at an art agency in Holborn, London. I liked the idea that he walked the same streets as me. His first verified drawing is of his boarding house in Kennington.
• He famously only sold one painting in his lifetime. Though this is cited as proof of Vincent’s unrecognised genius, I believe it’s evidence that he was a lousy salesman of his own work. This speaks to the many talented writers and artists I know who are invariably dreadful at self-promotion. (This also speaks to me, too).
• Emile Zola and Pissaro both spent time in London at the end of the 18^th century. I hoped to engineer a meeting between Zola, Pissaro and Van Gogh to build the story around.

I abide by the Ian Rankin school of research, which states you should read around your topic enough to validate your premise and provide themes and plot points to feed into the narrative, but you should save the detailed research for after the first draft, when you understand the specific details you require to provide authenticity. This serves to ensure the story doesn’t operate solely as a vehicle to document your research. The story should come first.

Unfortunately, the first illusion shattered by my research was that Zola, Pissaro and Van Gogh could have met. Their London timelines did not overlap. However, Van Gogh was in London during the fire at Alexandra Palace, which I would become a trigger that precipitated his darkness. The proposed meeting of the authors morphed into a visit to the Bunfields graveyard off Old Street in East London, where Bunyan, Blake and Defoe are buried. Van Gogh was an anglophile, a fan of Bunyan and Dickens, and I enjoyed the thought of him as a fan boy, bewildered by their canon and eager to understand their world.

There were other themes I wanted to feed into the story:

• Van Gogh was an immigrant
• London was technologically advanced for the time
• He enjoyed Victorian culture
• The British reform movement was important to him
• The drawing he did of his lodging can’t have been his first effort. There must have been other attempts. (He only painted in oils in the last ten years of his life)
• People liked him and supported him. He was not alone here
• Vincent was socially minded, triggered by the poverty he saw in London
• His faith, and the imperative for the church to support the poor, was spurred in London
• Art was for the wealthy
• Van Gogh was not born into poverty, his family was comparatively well-off
• Wealth, and the corresponding improvement in diet, would have made Vincent more sturdy than the guttersnipes he saw.

Format

Our understanding of Van Gogh’s time in London comes from his letters to his brother, Theo, among other people. The letters document his working life for the Art Agency, Goupil & Co, and his stay in lodgings, as well as his impressions of London.

Very close to his brother, Theo.

I conceived of a lost letter that he wrote to Theo, where the darkness that shrouded his mind began to become apparent. A letter would let me explore Vincent’s thoughts as he explains his to his most trusted confidante. He becomes the narrator of his own tale. I had to find a gap in the timeline when he could have conceivably written the letter, and a reason why he didn’t send it. I began with a plan to write three letters, over the course of which his problems deepen Ultimately, it seemed unlikely that he would write three letters, all of which he would destroy, rather than just one.

An epistolary would distinguish it from the play, Vincent in Brixton, which focuses on Vincent’s relationship with his landlady, Mrs Loyer, and her daughter.

Though Vincent’s letters to Theo were in Dutch, I thought the narrative would be well served if he wrote this letter in English, or that the translation was in itself clumsy. This would add a naivity to the telling, as he (or the translator) sometimes struggles with the language. I don’t know Dutch, so I brought in the speech patterns of the smattering of German I know. In this way, I hoped to hint at the otherness of his time in London, the young immigrant contending with a big, fast, unforgiving foreign city.

Dropping in reference to his future art, chair, crows, self-portrait, stars

Avoiding clunky painting references like palate and brushstroke in my description

The letters we have do not hint at the darkness that plagued him, and it feels strange when reading them to think of the disconnect between this positive, smart Vincent, and the tortured genius of public perception, contending with poverty and mental instability and his own burgeoning talent. which gave me an excuse to have him destroy this letter out of shame.

A question I asked myself: was it fair to put Van Gogh in situations he might not have been in, and to put words in his mouth? As human beings we still have a duty of care to accurately portray historical figures, to be as fair. For example, though I wanted to reference Van Gogh’s self-mutilation later in his life, (or at least the public perception of it), I didn’t want to make light of what was clearly a symptom of wider mental health issues.