The
Van Gogh
Letter
Has the Mystery of Auvers
Finally Been Solved?
On June 23, 2025, author, journalist and film critic William Arnold presented as “works-in-progress” two manuscripts for the consideration of a committee of readers selected from frequent contributors to this website. The following interview with Arnold was conducted by Mitch Ryder on August 3, 2025, at Arnold’s Seattle home.
Let me begin this interrogation with an observation: I’ve been casually googling through literary history for the last couple of days and I can’t see where anything like this has ever happened before.
Anything like what?
Like you coming up with, at the same time, two ambitious books on the same subject, one fiction, the other nonfiction.
I realize that sounds somewhat counterintuitive.
And while each of these books—a novel and the story behind the novel—can stand independently of the other, they also amplify one another and together are more than the sum of their parts.
That, ultimately, was the idea.
THE TWIG IS BENT: Arnold's First View of a Van Gogh,1987
Let me add that each of these books would seem to have, in my humble opinion, blockbuster potential.
Famous last words.
I can say this so easily because these books add a startling new perspective and a body of numbing new evidence to a subject that has been of intense interest to the world over the last fifteen years, and that is, of course, the same subject that has united us on this website: the death of the most iconic artist of all time, Vincent van Gogh, in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise on July 29, 1890.
The mystery of what really happened that day and why.
What Vanity Fair called on its December 2014 cover “Art’s Greatest Mystery.”
Our favorite tag line.
Your work establishes a profound new dimension of intrigue to this topic, played out over more than a hundred years, leading to a mindboggling conclusion as to who pulled the trigger on Vincent. Is that accurate?
More or less.
Is there any way to talk about this without giving away who that unlikely someone is? I mean, each of these books is, in its own form, a whodunit, a Van Gogh murder mystery. To say the name is an inexcusable spoiler.
Those who follow this site on a regular basis already know the suspect I’ve been chasing. I think we can safely assume that anyone interested enough to read this interview will already know the punchline of the story.
I'm still having a hard time getting it out of my mouth.
Go ahead, say it.
Theo.
Vincent’s beloved brother and the other half of the Van Gogh phenomenon.
You’re saying that art history’s most inspiring parable of brotherly love may have been, in reality, a fratricide.
That’s definitely where the trail leads.
As I say the name, it sounds absolutely crazy, but I have to admit that the case you make is very, very convincing.
I’m sure the kneejerk tendency will be to resist this idea fiercely. I expect that. I think I even want it. It’s a proposition outlandish enough to deserve a high degree of skepticism and resistance.
Let’s pull back a moment to establish that the lure that pulled you along this sinuous trail is a Van Gogh letter from his final week that was hidden away for sixty years after his death but somehow appeared out of the ether in 1955, during the filming of MGM’s biopic Lust for Life, only to disappear again under equally mysterious circumstances.
The novel tells the story of a fictional search for this letter over twenty-one days of April 1955. The memoir tells the story of my search for it over more than thirty years.
The people reading this interview may be familiar with your posts here but most of them will not have read the memoir, so can you briefly relate how you wandered into this labyrinth in the first place?
In 1987, I was in Amsterdam working on a screenplay for the great Dutch filmmaker Fons Rademakers. In the midst of this project—which was on a totally different subject—he asked me if, as a follow-up, I would be interested in writing the script for a new Van Gogh biopic to be released in 1990, the centenary of his death.
You were intrigued?
Intrigued but wary. I didn’t know much about Van Gogh or art history and he needed a totally new angle on Van Gogh’s life different from Lust for Life that he could give in a sentence or two to his financiers. I would have to be quick about it too because they were hot on the idea but their attention spans were short. So there was a terrific time strain involved. I tried to beg off but Fons was very persuasive and I finally agreed that when I got back to Seattle I’d give myself a crash course on Van Gogh’s life and see what I could come up with.
And what did you come up with?
My interest gravitated toward the last summer of his life, those seventy days in the idyllic village of Auvers-sur-Oise before he killed himself. This was partly because the young University of Washington graduate student I’d hired to help me with the research was doing her thesis on that subject and knew so much about it. In any case, and I’m not sure why, but I soon found myself struggling with all those inconsistencies in the suicide that would only years later be corralled by Van Gogh iconoclasts and lead to the various homicide theories. The lack of a suicide note, the missing weapon, the odd position of the wound, the request for painting supplies just days before and all the rest. I asked her: Has anyone ever suggested that maybe he didn’t kill himself? She said, no, why should they? He lived for more than a day after the shooting and he told the world he did it, in fact he was quite emphatic about it.
But that fact didn’t dampen your interest in this angle?
No, I thought to myself, even so, I might be able to do something with this fascinating parade of paradoxes. But what finally hooked me was the information this young woman was able to give me on a period in 1955, around the time of the filming of Lust for Life in France, when several witnesses at the death scene came forward after sixty years of silence with accounts that differed in suspicious ways from the traditional account given by Vincent’s physician in Auvers, Dr. Gachet, who died in 1909, and his son, who lived to 1962. At this same time in 1955, Paris was experiencing a frenzied forgery scandal involving the art collection of this Dr. Gachet that his now-aged son had recently donated to the Louvre—a collection worth about two billion dollars in today’s money. The charges were that Gachet and Gachet Jr. had forged some or all of its Van Goghs in the years shortly after the artist’s death. At the peak of this scandal. a number of voices, some from very prominent intellectuals, even began to suggest that some manner of foul play might have occurred in Auvers relating to Van Gogh and Gachet, and were calling for an official investigation into his death.
Was any of this well-known in your time of 1987?
Not at all. The forgery scandal had never made the jump across the Atlantic. Not one word of any of this had ever appeared in English. And the whole affair vanished from the French press rather abruptly in the spring of 1955. I thought, wow, if I could find some way to link all this forgotten rhubarb and Gachet suspicion to a what-if Van Gogh murder scenario, I might have the basis for a dandy thriller. A Van Gogh movie set entirely in 1955 without the burden of having Van Gogh in it as a character.
Burden? Why burden?
Because it was obvious to me that no one was ever going to make a better movie Van Gogh than Kirk Douglas or a better Van Gogh biopic than Lust for Life. They were lightning in a bottle. And this idea would be a totally new approach to dealing with the Van Gogh story—from a distance of sixty years, halfway to our own time with it. But what totally bonded me to the concept was that I had lived in France in the mid-1950s, the happiest time of my childhood really. I had been looking for some writing vehicle that would allow me to revisit that precious time and place, and this could be it.
How did the letter come into it?
The prime witness who came forward all those years later was a seventy-eight-year-old woman named Adeline Ravoux, who had been the thirteen-year-old daughter of the owners of the inn where Van Gogh lodged and died in Auvers. She’d been a fly on the wall to everything that happened that traumatic week and she claimed the Gachet version of those events was hogwash. She also claimed, without saying how she knew, that there was a letter missing from the final tally of the Van Gogh Brothers’ correspondence that would explain the shooting; and she insinuated that the Gachets—or at least someone with “something to hide”—had lifted it from the historical record.
Why do you think such a claim, from a reliable witness, about the death of the century’s most famous artist was not a frontpage story in 1955? Or used as a premise by the next three generations of mystery writers?
I could only assume it went unnoticed by the larger world. It appeared in an interview she gave to an obscure journal published in Switzerland with a circulation of about ten people and it had never been translated into English. But the minute I read it, I realized this hypothetical letter would make a perfect “McGuffin” for my story.
A what?
McGuffin. That’s Hitchcock’s term for the “thing” in a mystery that everyone is after. The thing that generates the action and often reveals the solution.
What did Fons Rademakers think of all this?
He was surprisingly supportive, considering it was not even close to what he’d asked for, which was a traditional biopic. But he was consumed by problems with the other film, which he was about to shoot in Africa, and in the middle of all this he was nominated for and then won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, which was also consuming. So he was leaving me pretty much on my own.
Were you perhaps the first person to ever use the word “murder” in connection to Van Gogh’s name?
I may have been. Antonin Artaud had famously charged in 1948 that Dr. Gachet had manipulated Van Gogh into suicide, but stopped well short of the word “murder.” And in 1955 Jean Bouret, Georges Charensol and others had publicly demanded that official investigation into Van Gogh’s death I mentioned before. But they were very unspecific about the nature of the foul play they suspected.
Did it occur to you, as you were conceiving this mystery-thriller, that Adeline Ravoux’s theoretical missing letter you were building your story around might be an actual “smoking gun” of a Van Gogh murder?
Not really. I just saw it as a terrific device for my fictional ambitions. But not long after I had a story pretty much in place, Norman Corwin—the screenwriter of Lust for Life—told me that in 1955 someone had actually approached the film company in Paris offering a long-lost Van Gogh letter from the final days for sale.
What became of it?
He didn’t know. But that made me suspect, probably for the first time, that I could conceivably have a tiger by the tail.
What, in your imagination, did the letter say?
My original idea was that it was an unsent letter from Vincent to Theo revealing his love affair with Dr. Gachet’s twenty-year-old daughter Marguerite and expressing his fear that the doctor was about to go to extreme lengths to discourage it.
So how far did you get with the script?
I barely got started before the movie, which was tentatively to be called The Van Gogh Letter, collapsed.
What happened?
Several things, but the big one was it was discovered that four other Van Gogh movie projects were in the works for 1990, each further along than we were. One by Akira Kurosawa, another by Robert Altman. No way was the studio, Cannon, about to get into the ring with either of those critical heavyweights.
Where did that leave you?
With a treatment I fully owned because I hadn’t yet turned it in to Cannon or Fons. They never even read it. And while it had no future as a movie in this crowded environment, I reasoned that I could turn it into a novel, which excited me because I was in love with the story by this time and you can do so much more with a novel than you can with a screenplay. Also, the pressure was off so I could spend whatever time I needed to ground myself in the subject—to read the Van Gogh biographies and absorb the Van Gogh letters and ponder the Van Gogh paintings. I went to France for the first since I was eleven and walked through the time warp of Auvers-sur-Oise and teared up at the twin graves of Vincent & Theo in the little Auvers cemetery and stood defiantly before the Gachet villa. While in France I also had a conversation with a man who was able to tell me something about that supposedly actual letter that had been offered to the Lust for Life people back in 1955.
When was this?
A little more than a year after the movie died. Through two separate veterans of Lust for Life—its associate producer Jud Kinburg and the producer of its French unit Julien Derode—I learned that a man named Edmon Lévy had served as troubleshooter for the film company during its location shoot in France. A colorful character who, back in his day, had connections to both the French underworld and the French secret services, and the man most likely to have handled the letter offer. I tracked him down at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival and he had all kinds of interesting things to say.
Such as?
Such as that, as I suspected, the reason the Gachet forgery scandal disappeared so suddenly in 1955 was because the French government squashed it. The Interior Ministry launched a clandestine mission early that year called “Operation Indigo” that sent agents of its DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire) around to all those nuisances making charges of Van Gogh forgery and told them to shut up or else.
How did he know this?
The DST told him, in so many words. He later picked up the word “Indigo” and the extent of the operation from the grapevine.
Why would they tell him this?
Because the Louvre was loaning the Van Goghs of the Gachet Collection to the Lust for Life company for its Auvers climax scenes. The agent in charge of the Indigo mission—a French-Algerian named “Geray,” who Lévy vaguely remembered from their days in the Resistance—said the government realized MGM was probably worrying about how the burgeoning scandal might play havoc with the public’s acceptance of the film’s ending, but it needn’t because the scandal was about to disappear. And it did, overnight.
You said, “As I suspected.” Was this what you had in the treatment?
It was pretty close. I figured something like that must have happened.
How did the letter fit in?
During this preproduction period in France, the film company placed ads in the French press offering cash for Van Gogh memories and memorabilia. Geray told Lévy that, given those ads, someone might contact them claiming to have a previously unknown Van Gogh letter dated from his final week in Auvers. He said that no matter how “revolutionary” this letter might seem to the facts of Van Gogh’s life, they should disregard it because it was a complete fraud. If a person did appear with such a letter, he, Lévy, should stall him by offering to buy it and then inform him, Geray, at once. Which is exactly what happened.
Did Lévy assume the letter was, as the man said, a hoax?
No. He knew the DST wouldn’t go to so much trouble over some lame con job. He also knew the letter could hardly feed into their main concern, the forgery scandal, because how could a letter written before Van Gogh’s death possibly deal with forgeries purportedly made years after Van Gogh’s death? He had heard some of those veiled charges from Jean Bouret and others about foul play in Auvers and assumed it had to deal with that.
So you now had a pretty good idea your fiction was anchored to a very real, potentially explosive, Van Gogh letter.
I did, and at that point I thought I’d better see what the experts had to say about it. The man who at that time was universally regarded as the world’s foremost authority on the Van Gogh letters was Dr. Jan Hulsker, a Dutchman who was retired by then and living, coincidentally, in Victoria, B.C., just a ferry-boat ride away from me in Seattle. But he was temporarily involved in some research project at the Van Gogh Museum and that’s where I found him. He was quite welcoming and totally enthralled by Lévy’s story, especially what he had to say about the letter.
What did he think about you basing a novel on it?
He was very encouraging. He definitely thought there was enough mystery and intrigue around the suicide and the Gachets to fuel a thriller. He even coined the term “Indigo Letter” for my McGuffin—a melodramatic contrivance that stuck. But, in the end, he didn’t believe this phantom letter could possibly be anything “revolutionary” to our knowledge of Van Gogh’s last days. He thought, if it was real at all, it was probably not a Vincent letter to Theo, but, more likely, a Theo letter to Vincent. Why? Because the letter Geray described to Lévy was dated. Theo always dated his letters and Vincent never did. I argued back that it could be a Vincent letter, and the date Geray was talking about was stamped on the envelope. But this didn’t move him. He took me downstairs in the museum and laid out the actual Auvers letters between the brothers and opened up a blank space on the table where the last Theo letter was known to be missing, reasoning how, by the mundane nature of the Vincent letters before and after it, its content could hardly be revolutionary.
That must have been an experience.
I hope to tell you. The one found on Vincent’s body was among them, with his bloodstains. I actually touched them.
You touched his blood?
And for a time there, the stark reality of its texture jarred me right out of my fantasy world. I decided I better take a step to the side and deal with the reality of the letter. I thought, if the government grabbed it in 1955, it might even be lying in some dusty archive, forgotten in the fall of the Fourth Republic and other massive convulsions of the ‘50s and ‘60s. But this quickly got me nowhere. The secret service records of the Algerian War years—1954 to 1962—were sealed until well into the next century, and no one I spoke to in the Interior Ministry had ever heard of any Operation Indigo.
Did that make you doubt Lévy’s story?
No, because they acknowledged that the kind of clandestine DST mission in that era I described would have been extremely hush-hush and leave no paper trail. They thought my best option for learning more about it was to find one of the agents who took part, and the best way to do that was through one of the Algerian War veterans groups because, after 1955, those agents would surely have been involved in that national catastrophe.
I assume this too led nowhere.
So I had no choice but to leave reality behind and finally sit down to write the novel, the title of which had moved from The Van Gogh Letter to Exile in the Light.
Was this a matter of just expanding the movie treatment?
Yes, but the treatment was pretty bare bones and now I had to create a whole world of ‘50s Paris inhabited by a tapestry of characters who each had a financial or psychological investment in the art or mythology of Vincent van Gogh.
And into this world you drop the specter of a previously unknown Van Gogh letter that, by potentially proving he was murdered and naming his murderer, would—sixty years after the fact—threaten the interests of each of these characters.
That was the basic idea.
Did you have some formula in your head as to how far you would stretch Van Gogh history in the service of your fictional plot?
The operating principal was that it would not be stretched at all. The rule Fons Rademakers insisted upon from the moment we started talking about this was that, while the thriller story was fictional, absolutely nothing about Van Gogh, the events in 1890 Auvers or the facts of the 1955 forgery scandal would be made up. I stayed with that.
Then you couldn’t concoct a fictional content to the letter because the letter was a real Van Gogh thing and you didn’t know its content.
Which meant the letter would have to be destroyed in the climax without being revealed. It would remain a phantom. But I still had to come up with a murderer and a murder scenario that, while my hero couldn’t prove it by the letter, was still convincing and satisfying enough to resolve the novel.
Was that scenario still Dr. Gachet and the romance?
This romance was a possibility that several Van Gogh authorities had suggested in that postwar period. It had some modest weight of scholarship behind it and still seemed the best motive for a Gachet scenario.
Did you have a publisher lined up?
Random House had published my last novel and had an option to match any offer on this one. I pitched it to them and they loved the idea.
How did the writing go?
At first blissfully. Being the god of my own private Paris in the ‘50s was about as much fun as I’d ever had. But things started to get rough in the second half. By the time I pushed my way to the conclusion the ecstasy had turned into agony. Somehow, it just wasn’t working for me.
What was the problem?
The problem was that the deeper I got into the story the less I found myself believing in the romance as a motive for homicide. Characters kept bringing up facts I hadn’t considered that spoke against it. Dr. Gachet still seemed the likely murderer—his was the only name actually historically associated with foul play—but, in writing the draft, I came to believe he had to have had a larger, more profound motive.
Did it really matter? You were, after all, writing fiction.
It mattered. A novel may be make-believe but it has to contain a core of truth that its author believes or the book is a lie. I couldn’t go on with it.
That must have been inconvenient.
It was. My agent had hyped it all over New York. I had hyped it all over the movie industry. People were waiting to read it.
What did you do with it.
I put it in a drawer.
What prompted you to take it out again?
A meeting three years later with a man named Andre Souard, who had been one of the agents who took part in Operation Indigo.
Before we get to Souard, we should mention that things were happening in those three years regarding Auvers and Van Gogh. One of the movies of the death centenary of 1990 actually dealt in a small way with the malpractice of Dr. Gachet and the inconsistencies of the suicide.
That was the French movie Van Gogh. I had a conversation with its writer-director Maurice Pialat and found he didn’t know all the much about Auvers. He was just dramatizing some of the contentions of Antonin Artaud. But his movie did put a certain question mark around the suicide and it inspired a French art historian named Pierre Cabanne to write a pamphlet titled Qui a tué Vincent van Gogh? (Who Killed Vincent van Gogh?) that questioned our knowledge of the suicide. So the idea of foul play was slowly beginning to seep out again.
Also in this period was the auction of The Portrait of Dr. Gachet for $82.5 million, which was a record for the most money paid for a single work of art in the twentieth century and a landmark event in the phenomenon of Van Gogh’s ever-escalating posthumous fame.
It also made the name and face of Dr. Gachet as instantaneously recognizable as the Mona Lisa. He was suddenly the Mona Lisa of the modern era.
Which would have been a terrific selling point for that manuscript sitting in your drawer naming him as Van Gogh’s killer.
Believe me, that thought occurred to me.
And even more bizarre, in this same period, the actual long-missing last Theo letter to Vincent that Jan Hulsker suggested might be the Indigo Letter was found and revealed to the world in a blaze of publicity.
It had been, for some unknown reason, hidden in the files of the Van Gogh Museum for a hundred years and forgotten by its staff until it was discovered by some whistleblowing employee who passed a copy to the German magazine Der Spiegel. The Museum was quite pissed about it.
Its content was mundane.
Seemingly. It was clear that there was nothing obviously “revolutionary” about it so it could hardly be the Indigo Letter. I say “seemingly” because, years later, one of its mundane sentences would become very important in the efforts to determine the changing relationship of Vincent and Dr. Gachet in the final month—whether they saw each other or not in that period—and a factor in several of the emerging murder scenarios.
Did you talk to Jan Hulsker about it at the time?
I did. I called to tell him I-told-you-so and argue that, with this letter eliminated, the Indigo Letter must indeed be a last Vincent letter no one knew about. This time, I found him much more amenable to the idea that something was rotten in Auvers. The circumstances of the Der Spiegel letter—why it was hidden away so long that it was forgotten—bothered him a great deal and set his mind working in that direction.
All right, tell me about Andre Souard. How did you find him?
Actually, he found me. Years before, I had left word with numerous Algerian War veteran groups and Algerian War historians that I was writing a novel dealing with an obscure DST mission at the start of the war called Operation Indigo. I wanted to talk to anyone who knew anything about it. But I never had a bite before this.
He came to you in Seattle?
Amazingly, he was living close by in Oregon. He’d been chased out of France by De Gaulle and had been in the States since 1962. He took part in Indigo and knew a great deal about it. Who was behind it, who was silenced, how it was carried out.
Who was behind it?
According to Souard, it was Gachet fils. Souard believed he bestowed the Gachet Collection to the Louvre in exchange for protection of the Gachet name. That’s what Indigo was all about, and it began with the assassination of Antonin Artaud in 1948. When the Gachet forgery scandal with its associated suspicions of foul play in Auvers broke out a few years later, the operation was basically already in place to contain it.
What about the letter?
Junior somehow knew of the letter’s existence and its significance, and, while he’d not felt that much urgency about it before, he was suddenly terrified it might be lured out of its hiding place by MGM’s public offer of American dollars for Van Gogh memorabilia. So each of the Indigo agents was briefed about it and impressed with the importance of finding it before it fell into the hands of anyone who might expose it.
What did they tell him about it?
As Hulsker had speculated, the Indigo Letter was not a Vincent letter. It was a letter from Theo to Vincent. So I had been wrong about that. But it was not the Der Spiegel-outed Theo letter. It was another, even later, and truly last Theo letter to Vincent in Auvers, dated the day before the shooting.
But nothing about its nature?
Only that its content would appear shocking to anyone who knew anything about Van Gogh. That’s all he could tell me about it for sure, but he confirmed Lévy’s story of how the DST agent Serge Geray acquired it through the Lust for Life people. After that, he assumed it had passed on up the chain of command in the Interior Ministry.
What was his theory about the letter’s content?
He believed it revealed not only the murder of Vincent but an even larger and more sensational series of crimes.
You better explain that.
Let me preface by saying that, after Indigo and his Algerian War years, Souard devoted his life to Van Gogh studies. He knew more about Van Gogh than most of the experts I had or would ever interview on the subject. He’d actually memorized the letters. Name a date and he could quote it for you. And over three decades of personal research he’d channeled that knowledge and energy into building a case that Dr. Gachet had been, for over half a century, a serial killer of great French artists. A mercy-killer at first, but finally a demented sociopath who built his fabulous art collection by poisoning a veritable who’s who of the most celebrated artists of the late-nineteenth century.
Stop the presses!
Yeah, what a story. Earthshaking.
Did you believe it?
I did, at least to a certain extent. His case was very well presented, quite convincing. He’d gathered a pile of evidence that spoke to Gachet’s sociopathic tendencies and put him at the deathbed of an awesome parade of great artists. Manet, Courbet, Corot, Sisley, Toulouse-Lautrec, many more, including Victor Hugo.
But Van Gogh was hardly a great artist at the time.
But Gachet knew he would be—he was, in fact, the first person to truly recognize Vincent’s genius. He was also on record as saying how, after a violent outburst at the doctor that July, he believed Van Gogh was on the verge of a total mental breakdown that would see him institutionalized for the rest of his life. Thus, by Gachet’s demented reasoning, he was desperately in need of a mercy-killing.
What exactly did Souard think the Indigo Letter said?
He surmised Theo had finally gotten wind of Gachet’s penchant for euthanasia—probably from Cézanne, who had once been a friend of the doctor but had fallen out with him. Theo was writing Vincent at this final moment to stay away from the doctor. But Vincent, with his uncanny artist’s intuition, had already decided this on his own. He stayed away from Gachet for the last month before the shooting. That’s why Gachet couldn’t poison him. That’s why he had to send his seventeen-year-old son up to the wheatfield to do the job for him.
So, to Souard, Gachet fils was the active villain of the Van Gogh case. Both as a teenager in 1890 and an octogenarian in the 1950s.
That’s what he believed.
If he’d worked this out so convincingly, and had some evidence to back it up, why didn’t he write his own book, or go to The New York Times. Why you?
Fear. He was afraid of incurring the wrath of La Main Rouge.
Which is?
The brotherhood of French secret service agents that had its hand in every clandestine right-wing operation carried out in France between WWII and the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985. He’d taken its oath of silence and firmly believed they would kill him if he went public with any inside information on one of its missions. What attracted him to me was that I had let it be known I was writing a novel, not history or journalism. The understanding was that whatever he told me was to be used as background for fiction. He didn’t want his name associated with anything I wrote and he wouldn’t talk to me at all until I swore up and down that I had no intention of writing a news story.
What did Dr. Jan Hulsker have to say about this?
Again, he was utterly intrigued. He thought it was ultimately unprovable, historically, but a fascinating thesis that could be made to fit the facts of Gachet’s life. He said to me, “Well, you have your novel.”
You took the manuscript out of the drawer.
I did another draft.
How long did that take?
About six months, maybe a bit longer.
And what happened with it?
Basically the same thing. Ecstasy and agony. After three years, there was so much good new stuff I could bring to the characters and the story that it was exhilarating: I was able to improve them, to my mind, exponentially. But when I got to the end I found I didn’t, deep down, believe in this conclusion any more than I had the last one.
That must have been supremely frustrating.
It was, and it sent me into a real tailspin. For months I couldn’t sleep or stop thinking about it. The worst part was that I had lost all my sustaining faith in the Gachets’ direct involvement in the shooting. Even if the doctor was a serial poisoner of great artists I didn’t believe he would change his method of operation in his old age to pick up a gun, and I didn’t believe he would send his only begotten son to do the job for him, or that the son would do it if he had. On one of those sleepless nights, my characters staged an intervention to tell me there simply had to be a better solution to the Mystery of Auvers, a culprit and a motive and a death scenario that was unrelated to anything we’d ever considered before.
Which led you to Theo.
The truth was that Theo’s actions around his brother’s death had never made any sense. This was explained by the fact that he was drowning in family and business problems at the time, and very ill. He would die just six months after Vincent—of grief, the legend says. But yes, at the bottom of this season of defeat something whispered “Theo” in my ear. Through late-1993, I began gathering up everything I could find about him, no matter how obscure, and finally I stumbled upon something in Hulsker’s work that stopped my heart.
Hulsker never seems to get very far away from your story.
Besides being the world’s leading expert on the Van Gogh letters, he was also the foremost authority on the fraternal relationship of the Van Gogh brothers and the author of Vincent & Theo: A Dual Biography. This book—heralded in the Van Gogh world as the definitive take on the brothers—was published in 1985 in Dutch but not translated into English until just before this moment. Buried about six hundred pages into it, very casually referenced, is a letter from the Impressionist master Camille Pissarro to his son Lucien, also a painter and a friend of Vincent & Theo. It was written at the time of Theo’s own mental and physical collapse several months after Vincent’s death and was apparently unknown to previous Van Gogh biographers. In it, Pissarro reveals how, a matter of weeks after Vincent’s death, Theo had to be straitjacketed and taken to a lunatic asylum after an incident in which he attempted to kill his wife and infant son.
How could anything so dramatic and horrific possibly go unnoticed by the Van Gogh industry?
The letter was not found by Pissarro researchers until 1940, and stayed in their orbit until Hulsker got wind of it in the 1980s. There was no mention of it anywhere in the vast library of Van Gogh scholarship. Hulsker did not give it any special importance—it was well known that Theo was going out of his mind in this period—but the letter was a revelation to me. I mean, if, within mere weeks of Vincent’s shooting, Theo had been in such a murderous frame of mind as to want to kill his beloved wife and child, how large a stretch was it to imagine he might want to rid himself of the demanding brother who was a Gibraltar-sized millstone around his neck and might continue to be for the next fifty years. The death of Vincent would have solved all his problems. A Theo murder scenario instantly leaped to my mind.
And the Indigo Letter?
Vincent, something has come up. Meet me in the wheatfield this Sunday at such-and-such a time around dusk. Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone about this. Something like that. Now wouldn’t that be a true smoking gun?
How did Dr. Hulsker feel about this scenario?
Well, I took it to him. I laid it out in detail. I said to him: Understanding that this is just the premise for a mystery novel, knock it down. Tell me why it’s impossible. He couldn’t. He even admitted it had a certain perverse persuasiveness. But he implored me not to use it. He thought that if it caught on, it would do great harm to the Van Gogh legacy, to what the brothers stood for in the world. He insisted that for me to use it without the proof of the letter itself, even in fiction, would be the height of irresponsibility.
And he’d been supportive of the earlier drafts in which Gachet or his son were behind the trigger?
He’d been okay with the possibility of the Gachets as murderers, maybe because they were French, not Dutch, and their reputations were already tarnished. But this he absolutely loathed, and it hurt because I really respected him and wanted his approval.
But you went ahead and wrote the Theo draft anyway.
I did, and, for the first time, it all came together for me. Nothing I’d ever written gave me such pleasure, seemed so completely right. I immediately sent the manuscript to Hulsker, thinking that if he experienced the Theo scenario in the context of the characters and plot of the novel, he’d feel differently. But I was wrong. He hated it even more. He thought the case against Theo was presented so convincingly that it was bound to be accepted as fact. He said to publish it would be an act of cultural vandalism.
And you didn’t publish it.
But not because of Hulsker. Something else happened in early 1994 that compelled me to abandon it.
That would be Kurt Cobain.
Yes.
I know you don’t like to talk about this. But it’s been written about in many other places and it’s so unlikely, so pertinent to your overall story and so monstrously ironic it can’t be ignored.
I can talk about it.
Okay, in a nutshell, the tragic young rock star Kurt Cobain read your book Shadowland as a teenager and it made a lasting impression on him.
He identified with the subject of the book, the rebellious actress Frances Farmer.
In the weeks before he killed himself in 1994, he made several attempts to meet with you and talk about her. But, for various reasons, you declined to accommodate him. One of the doctors who treated him in this same period later chided you for this and even contended that a certain hypothesis you presented in the book created a longstanding fear in him that was a factor in his decision to take his own life.
That’s about it.
And the effect this had on you was seismic.
Not at first. But over time, as his own death phenomenon ballooned—and showed no signs of going away—it did.
You felt guilty.
Let’s say I felt partly responsible—and flattened by the cosmic irony that while I was busy pursuing secrets in the death of Vincent van Gogh, a boy who would become the Vincent van Gogh of his own generation had been pursuing me, and ultimately killed himself under circumstances to which I may have contributed.
It killed any thoughts you had of publishing the novel.
Among other things, it made me agree with Jan Hulsker. There were God only knew how many impressionable young people out there in the world to whom the sweet parable of Vincent & Theo was a sustaining anchor of their lives. To destroy that myth without any definitive proof, even in the context of speculative fiction, would be as criminal as putting that other toxic thought in Kurt Cobain’s brain without any positive proof of it.
Didn’t you, in fact, quit writing?
Not exactly that. I was still the film critic of the morning daily in Seattle. I was cranking out reviews, interviews and thought pieces at a staggering rate. But I published no more books for twenty-five years. I wrote several in that period but always ended up putting them in a drawer. I developed what a psychiatrist friend of mine smilingly referred to as “a prolific journalist’s book-publishing phobia.”
Curiously, in this same period—the mid-‘90s—your wife emerged as a very successful romance novelist.
Yes, and I was able to help her in her career. That was enough for me.
But this full stop in fictional writing about Auvers was in no way an end to your obsession with the real-life Indigo Letter.
I tried to put that behind me too, but it was no good. It wouldn’t leave me alone. As time passed, and without really trying, I kept getting little bursts of affirmation of my Theo theory or clues to the location of Serge Geray, the man who had acquired the letter in the Indigo mission and who I had reason to believe was still alive and on the run from French authorities for Algerian War crimes. I finally decided around 1996 that I would devote a part, but by no means all, of myself to continuing the hunt. It would be like my hobby.
But you had no intention of writing about it.
None. If I could bring the letter to light, it could speak for itself.
What made you believe it had survived?
That’s hard to explain. I just did. I couldn’t conceive of anyone destroying such a document no matter how threatening it might be to his personal or national interests. It simply had to be somewhere.
How long did this go on?
About twenty-five years.
We’ll get to the story of those twenty-five years, but staying with the novel a minute, when did you finally go back to it?
In late 2019, after—through this website—I was finally able to locate an antique veteran of the French government who was the last official outside of François Mitterrand to have possession of the letter. This was unbelievably fulfilling, because the man had a phenomenal memory and could testify to its precise wording; but also crushing because—despite my certainty that it couldn’t happen—he had personally witnessed its destruction back in 1955. So the letter was not about to, as I had hoped, “speak for itself.” It was gone forever. This seemed the gutted end of the road for me.
That doesn’t explain why you went back to the novel.
It was about a year after this—during the downtime of Covid—that I happened to stumble on the Draft Three manuscript one day in my basement storeroom. Something compelled me to read it and, to my surprise, I found I rather liked it. Most of my fears and qualms about it had vanished with time and, moreover, I saw how, without too much trouble, I could rewrite it in a way that could incorporate my later search for the letter and other experiences with the mystery over the intervening twenty-five years. So that’s what I did.
How long did this take?
Not too long. It was mostly already there.
I’ve read it twice now and I must confess it’s not at all what I expected.
What did you expect?
I expected a Van Gogh murder mystery, which I got, but not a plot thickened with the Algerian Rebellion, the Suez Crisis, a high-level political assassination and coup attempt, an underworld war, a massive anti-American riot, a strange romance between your hero and the most celebrated woman in France and, of course, a serial murder spree of great French artists—with each of these plot elements linked to a scramble to find and acquire the renegade letter. Given all this, plus the fact that the plot also involves coded messages left by Van Gogh in his art, is it fair to call the novel “The Da Vinci Code of Vincent van Gogh”?
Not fair at all. Nothing against that book, which is terrific. But aside from one minor character’s interpretation of what could be one symbolic message, and the fact that they’re both set in Paris and deal with a mystery involving a famous artist of history, the two stories have nothing in common.
Then the novel had no model.
It didn’t have a model, but it had an inspiration, and that was Josephine Tey’s 1950 mystery, The Daughter of Time. A book that, you may recall, introduced authentic new evidence and a made strong case for exonerating Richard III of most of the historical crimes charged against him. That she was able to do this so well—present an alternative history of such an iconic story within the context of a fictional detective story—made me believe something similar could be done with Van Gogh and the letter.
But while Tey’s novel is a chamber piece—a police detective laid up in his apartment gazing back at Tudor history—your story is a flowing panorama of its time and place. With such diverse real characters as Pablo Picasso, Art Buchwald, John Houseman, John Rewald, Olivia de Havilland, François Truffaut, French President René Coty, U.S. Ambassador C. Douglas Dillion and Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser all taking a significant part in the action.
Let me confess once again that bathing in Midcentury Paris—that world of my lost childhood—was always the most fun I had in writing this thing.
Despite this Ragtime of ‘50s Parisian nostalgia, the novel comes off as seeming amazingly current. With its McCarthy-victim hero in exile from a U.S. that’s lost its principles, as well as a plot that has America stabbing its European allies in the back, it could be addressed to the Age of Trump 2.0. Was a lot of that a last-minute addition to the final draft?
No, it was there from the beginning—the movie treatment even.
It’s so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable the first time I read it, but I also enjoyed the sly way the fraternal bond—and conflict—between your hero Wally and your antagonist Luc so perfectly mirrors that of Vincent and Theo.
That idea was also there from the beginning, but the relationship of the fictional duo had to keep changing to match my changing perception of the historical duo.
Until, finally, you got it right.
As right as I’m ever liable to get it.
You found the truth.
I found my truth. The truth of my own personal experience with the Mystery of Auvers.
Yet, after finishing that fourth and last and finally satisfying draft of the novel, you were compelled to write a non-fiction version of your experience. So there must have been some element of your “truth” that could not be expressed in the fiction.
It was more that I realized the backstory of writing the novel was highly unusual and included many incidents that were worth relating. So I decided to devote a month or so to writing a brief “making-of” feature, which I could post on this website and would be of interest primarily to diehard followers like you.
Could this have been a mechanism of avoidance? Your admitted fear of publishing. Putting off having to do anything with the novel.
Maybe. But mostly it was that I found writing this memoir, saying things that were unsaid in the novel, thinking about the quest in a way I hadn’t thought about it before, was pleasurable, and the project continued to grow over a couple of years until it gradually became its own thing coequal and partner to the novel.
Was it intended to be a pendant to your first book, Shadowland. Both, after all, are first-person accounts of a long search through shadowy territory to find the truth about the demise of a dead artist.
I sure didn’t see it that way as I was writing it. But it sounds obvious as you say it, so maybe I was subconsciously doing just that all along without realizing it.
Even more than that book, this account of how you reconstructed a lost, last, history-rocking Van Gogh letter over a period of more than thirty years strikes me as something totally original in the way of narrative nonfiction.
The book’s ambition was never quite as lofty as that sounds. It’s basically the story of how I came to write a thriller.
But the long artistic process of creating that thriller becomes for you an epic exercise in cold-case detection and an obsessive intellectual and physical adventure that carries you from the haunted mists of Auvers-sur-Oise to the hubristic heights of Van Gogh orthodoxy in Amsterdam to furtive meetings in Buenos Aires with ex-French secret service agents on the run for Algerian War crimes. With all manner of absorbing or heart-pounding stops in between. It’s just a walloping story.
I can see I’m going to have to hire you to be my press agent.
The book could also stand as an offbeat showbusiness memoir. You’re forever hobnobbing with a Madonna or Tom Hanks here, a Bruce Willis or Sissy Spacek there. Don Ameche, Francis Coppola, Kirk Douglas. You’re having lunch with Peter Bogdanovich in 1996 when suddenly you get a huge epiphany that pulls you closer to the letter. Your experience with Fons Rademakers and the collapse of his Instant in the Wind project in 1987 is a poignant sidebar to the tale. Stewart Stern, the screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause and other Hollywood classics, becomes, in one scene, your partner in detection. Not to mention Kurt Cobain. It’s sporadically very glitzy.
It probably sounds like namedropping but that was my life. And each name—not just Cobain—was an important element in what was happening. Wally Boyd, the hero of the novel, was ultimately based on Stewart Stern.
Though he’s not a character in the novel or the memoir, the presence of Alfred Hitchcock can be felt in both books in intriguing ways. In your career as a movie critic, did you ever meet him?
I never actually spoke to him. I was on the set of his last film, Family Plot, and I watched him direct the last scene he would ever direct. Later, Tippi Hedren and her husband bought the screen rights to Shadowland and I got to know her fairly well and heard all her Hitchcock stories before she disclosed them to the world in her memoirs. That’s my only personal connection, but, yeah, I’m a huge fan, and the idea that endured from the days of the movie treatment was that the piece should be a kind of North By Northwest meets Vertigo under the ghostly shadow of Vincent van Gogh in ‘50s Paris.
A string of celebrated Van Gogh authorities also move in and out of the memoir. People like John Rewald, Ronald Pickvance, Irving Stone, Benoit Landais and, of course, Jan Hulsker. If for no other reason, the book justifies its existence by being a record of how the major Van Gogh experts of the last century felt about the question of a Van Gogh murder—which is, unanimously, that it didn’t happen.
Not unanimously. Irving Stone was very open to the possibility. And I think Hulsker came around to the idea, even if he could never accept Theo as the trigger-man. He definitely came around to the idea of the Gachet forgeries, and even wrote a preface to Benoit Landais’ book about them.
There’s also Theo van Gogh the filmmaker. A fascinating character who helped you get at his great-grandfather’s sequestered medical records. I found it strange, by the way, that you didn’t mention his tragic fate: that only a few years later he would be slaughtered on a busy Amsterdam street by a Muslim fanatic for making a film critical of the Islamic treatment of women.
I tried, but I just couldn’t find a way to fit the horror of that, or its bitter irony for me, into the flow of the memoir.
Why irony?
Because here I had been writing a novel about a Van Gogh murder in which Islamic extremism plays a large part in the plot, when, suddenly, touching me in real life, was another, more public Van Gogh murder and even crazier Islamic extremism. The irony seemed to be speaking to me but I never could decipher what, exactly, it was saying.
Perhaps it was asking you to link it to one of your main themes.
What theme is that?
The hidden dynamics of cultural power.
I’m not sure I understand.
You chronicle a clandestine cultural conflict that’s been going on between France and the Netherlands for a hundred years over who “owns” Van Gogh. In the novel, this generates much of the drama, but it’s also, more subtly, the engine of the memoir as well. Indigo, as you unveil it, is an operation to protect the cultural power of France.
I see what you’re saying, but I guess I was just not up to the job of connecting the fate of Theo II to this theme so I left it out.
Does the competition between the two countries still exist, by the way, or is it more a thing of the past?
It’s less noticeable, to be sure. France and Holland always seem to be doing joint Van Gogh exhibits these days. But that rivalry definitely still exists, probably as much as ever. I could give you examples.
Algeria is another cultural conflict in the novel—this one not at all hidden--that has its own track in the memoir. You tell of how it was always in the background of your childhood in France. You hunted down the veterans of Indigo largely through their later service in that war, and in doing so you worked closely with several of its most prominent historians. The actions of the two highest-ranking French politicians who touch the real story—François Mitterrand and Roger Wybot—were directly related to the politics of the Algerian War era. It remains one of the most tragic, controversial and influential events of the twentieth century, and yet—as you were engaged with its legacy over many years—I got very little sense of your personal feelings about it.
That was intentional. I actually developed a very politically incorrect sympathy for the Pied-Noir, the Algerian-born Frenchmen who, for reasons of political expediency, were ultimately ejected from their ancestral homeland with nothing but the shirt on their backs. Especially as I got to know so many of them personally. There is a huge and complicated injustice involved in their fate that threatened at times to overwhelm my feelings. So I decided I better keep those feelings out of the story.
Not only Andre Souard but other former DST and SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-espionnage) agents you spoke to expressed a fear of La Main Rouge, that fraternity of French secret service agents we spoke of before whose code of omerta was supposedly as strict as the Mafia. How seriously did you take this threat?
I took it very seriously. La Main Rouge was primarily a specter of the Algerian War era, but it was a real thing and there were several instances even as late as the 1990s in which it rubbed out some former member for divulging its secrets to the press or historians. Its threat hung heavily over every veteran of the French intelligence services I spoke to.
Did you ever feel yourself in physical danger?
Maybe a little. I recall getting a chill when Souard said to me early-on, “You know, if they (La Main Rouge) knew we were talking like this, they’d have no compunction about killing us both.” Actually, at around this same time, I was in the crosshairs of another gang of assassins that sent an even greater chill into my life, and if you sense a distinct strain of paranoia in the novel it probably originates from that source.
I think I better hear this.
In response to an article I’d written, I received a hand-scrawled death threat that the Seattle Police Department believed was from an offshoot of the same gang of white supremacists that had murdered Denver radio talk-show host Alan Berg. So they swooped in to protect me. They guarded my house. They followed me to work. They watched my daughter’s school. Fortunately, the gang was soon captured and my ordeal ended. But I’m here to tell you that the experience of knowing skilled and determined people are out to kill you is no fun at all.
What about that other kind of danger in a life-consuming enterprise like this? The psychological peril. You chronicle the way Van Gogh took over the lives of people like John Rewald and Jan Hulsker, and especially Irving Stone, the author of the Lust for Life novel. You refer, maybe more than once, to the “opium of Vincent.” How people can live in the paintings and letters in a way that might not be healthy. From the way you describe your experience, this opium also affected you.
It did, but not in the same way. Over those twenty-five years I can’t tell you how many times I read the letters and visited the Van Gogh sites in France, Holland, Belgium and England. How many Van Gogh paintings I stood before in the great museums of the world. I read, I think, everything significant ever written about him, and gradually became something like an authority. But it was all under the illusion that the more I knew or saw, the more it might give me insight into, or bring me closer to, that one essential mystery that concerned me: the content and fate of the Indigo Letter.
Did it?
Yes, I believe it did.
Is it fair to say that you identified more with Theo than Vincent? You acknowledge that in your own life, you played, for a time, Theo to your troubled older brother’s Vincent, and that this could be the genesis of your attraction to the Van Gogh story.
I’m not sure I identify with Theo, but I do feel sympathy for him. He was not quite the selfless martyr or even the astute mentor of his brother’s genius that the myth makes him out to be. But he was, on balance, an extremely good man who put up with a lot more from a selfishly needy brother than anyone should ever have to bear.
If he pulled the trigger on Vincent, do you forgive him?
That’s a strange question. I suppose I do. It may sound callous but Vincent’s death in Auvers came at just the right time, in the flower of an artistic vision and personal circumstances that joined together to create one of history’s most powerful and enduring myths. I’m not sure that another thirty years or so of his painting-a-day addiction and a slow death in a mental institution would have done him or us or his legacy any good. More likely, it would have hugely detracted from his glory.
In the sum-up, you say that you wrote the book in the subjective form you did and not as an objective history because “history is sacred and cannot be written from the testimony of questionable characters with an agenda.”
True.
But despite this affirmation of respect, it seems to me that the book displays a deep distrust of history. Everywhere you turn, you discover that an accepted history is a lie, often an outrageous lie.
That’s more true of recent history—history, say, of the last hundred years. As the bulk of history writers are in the sway of partisan influences and the need to knock down the thesis of the guy in the generation ahead of them. But in the long run I think the pseudo-historians—especially those who judge past events through the fashion of the moment—get weeded out and history has a way of working its way to a higher truth that we ignore at our peril.
You also write of how “in the age of Trump and Woke,” current history writing has been usurped by conspiracy theories of which you want no part. But isn’t Indigo a conspiracy and thus, your book, a conspiracy theory?
In a way, yes. But, the possible Gachet serial murder spree aside, we’re dealing here with one unusual instance of domestic violence that was covered up for nationalistic purposes by a small group of men sixty years later. Not some far-reaching historical conspiracy in a Dan Brown sense or delusional political cabal in a QAnon sense.
What about that Gachet murder spree? It’s quite a showstopper in both the novel and the memoir. Do you believe it happened?
I’m not sure. I think I do. Gachet was indeed at the bedside of all those suffering artists in their last moments. He was a homeopath with a knowledge of poisonous plants. Souard collected a body of evidence that I found very compelling. If it’s true, it can fit nicely in the Theo scenario, but the Theo scenario doesn’t depend on it. The Theo scenario depends on only one thing—the Indigo Letter.
In my reading of the book, there seems to be one single moral question that hangs over it and you keep returning to, which is: If you find toxic information that could harm or even destroy one of the world’s most beautiful and thoroughly positive legends—in this case, the sublime fraternal relationship of Vincent & Theo—should you expose it? Sell it? Profit by it? Can there any moral justification for such an act?
That is the question.
Midway in the story, because of your Kurt Cobain experience, you decide the answer is no. You decide to abandon forever any thought of building a persuasive fiction or journalism around the idea without the positive proof of the letter. But you also commit yourself to finding the letter and letting it speak for itself.
That way the responsibility for whatever came of it would be on the letter, not on me.
But you don’t find the physical letter. You find the witnesses who convincingly reconstruct the letter. And, after declaring you wouldn’t, you’re exposing the letter here in both fiction and memoir-journalism. What happened? Can you say a little about how your thinking on this evolved?
What happened was that time changed my feelings. First of all, certain facts were later revealed about the Kurt Cobain situation that, to my mind, took me off the hook for his death.
Yes, you acknowledge that in the book.
Time also took much of the sting out of the Van Gogh murder proposition. From the beginning, at the bottom of the fierce objections to it was the fear that it would destroy what Van Gogh was to the world. Picasso once said that Van Gogh “made himself” when he pulled that trigger and it’s true. Take away that unbearably poignant existential act that is the very centerpiece of the myth and what do you have? A lesser Van Gogh.
But the murder idea has taken root and that has not happened.
Fifteen years after the suicide first started to be publicly questioned, the Van Gogh myth is as powerful as ever. Maybe more so. The possibility of a murder by any number of suspects has been written about and dramatized in movies and endlessly debated. If the myth can survive all that unscathed I figure it can withstand the story and implications of the Indigo Letter, however much it raises the stakes. This realization, which took a while to evolve in me, gradually turned me around on that pesky moral question.
What are you going to call this memoir? The manuscript I read had no title.
I’m thinking of going with simply Indigo. The seductive hue of Vincent’s night skies. The name Roger Wybot gave the DST mission to suppress the letter and the nickname Jan Hulsker gave the letter itself. The color of intuition and mystery, or so the color psychologists tell us. It‘s almost too appropriate to resist, isn’t it?
Yes, a good title. But one that needs a subtitle.
I was thinking of something like: “The Story of a Novel, a Van Gogh Letter and Art History’s Greatest Whodunit.”
Not bad, but doesn’t putting the novel in there give away the ending? Telling the reader straight off that this story he is about to read is just, as you say, “grist for the mill of an entertainment.” How about this for a subtitle: “A Movie, a Van Gogh Letter and Art History’s Greatest Whodunit”?
Why movie?
Because you’re best known as a film critic, your story begins with a Van Gogh movie that doesn’t get made and the classic movie Lust for Life is such an important element of the story, practically a character.
That’s worth thinking about.
And another possibility for your main title is simply the name of this website—The Mystery of Auvers. I like it better because the book is more than just the story of the Indigo Letter and its relation to the mystery of Van Gogh’s death. It’s a journey into the larger mystery of the phenomenon of Vincent, and I can’t think of another book that comes anywhere close to it in defining the parameters of that phenomenon and celebrating the power of his enigma.
That’s kind of you to say, but I have a feeling a better book is embryonically percolating right now in the mind of some grammar school kid. It’s inevitable. The human race will never stop speculating upon and writing about and finding unexpected levels of wonder in the life and legend of Vincent van Gogh.
I think you’re underplaying this. I think your odyssey into the shadows of Auvers has to be one of the most gripping and illuminating detective stories ever. After reading it, I don’t see how anyone will ever be able to look at the Van Gogh story again in the same way. I think this has a chance of absolutely exploding.
I don’t really want it to explode.
Surely you can see the interest this is bound to arouse in a world that can’t get enough of Vincent, and fifty ways it could be nitroglycerin to the nations of Holland and France, the New York and international art worlds, and the scholars, critics and biographers of the Van Gogh establishment.
I’m not after controversy, or a media event. I’ve been there before and found that it’s not a good place to be.
What then do you want?
I would be very happy if the saga of the letter and its implications were to find its own little corner in the mythology of Vincent. To be both supported and denounced, it doesn’t matter, but taken, on the whole, as something that enhances the universality and infinite possibility of the myth—not as something just distinctly negative.
But don’t you, in your heart of hearts, believe you’ve solved the Mystery of Auvers?
I suppose I do, if I’m completely honest with himself, but I certainly don’t insist upon it. I’m accessible to a world of other possibilities and I enjoy debating them. Let’s face it. A solved-mystery is a lot less interesting than an unsolved one, and for that reason alone I’m happy to leave the door wide open.
What are your publication plans for the books?
I’m not sure. I haven’t had any connection to the publishing industry in decades and it’s a new world out there I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just self-publish them as eBooks. The Kindle versions of the other books have done quite well.
With your well-established reluctance to publish, I think you should turn it over to someone else. There’s are any number of people on this site with connections to the publishing world. Especially in France.
I hereby turn it over to you.
I accept. And what about this website? What is its future?
As I’ve said before, I think it’s reached its end in this current form. If you guys want to keep it going that’s fine with me. Otherwise, I’ll probably eventually take it down and reconstruct it as some sort of supportive website for the books.
If anything, what’s next for you in the way of writing?
I’ve devoted a lot of my time over the last few years to another complex historical mystery: The death of President Warren G. Harding on a voyage to Alaska in 1923. I’ve written a novel about it that sits in a drawer, and I’m considering doing another non-fiction companion book that works off it the same way Indigo works off Exile in the Light.
Is this a new genre? Tandem fiction and nonfiction.
Probably not. Very few subjects lend themselves to the conceit.
Have you ever stopped to consider how unusual it is for people like you and me and the others who follow this website to be obsessed to the degree we are in a mystery of the past? It’s not exactly normal, is it?
I suppose not.
I wonder what a psychiatrist would say about it.
I couldn’t guess, but the first thing I ever published was a magazine piece called “The Mystery of Ravenna Park,” about a grove of what were once widely considered the largest trees in the world that unaccountable vanished just before World War I. So I guess my mind has always worked in that direction. There must be a specific gene for it.
