Van Gogh and the Meaning of "Difficult"

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun (1889)

Wayne Koestenbaum, in his “Punctuation” (included in his delectable new essay collection Figure It Out), notes the absence of a comma in a sentence by Van Gogh:

“Very difficult very difficult,” Vincent van Gogh repeated without a comma, in a letter to his brother Theo. Vincent was in the last year of his life; fresh from the asylum, he busied himself with forecasts. “For there are splendid autumn effects to do … [T]he olive trees are very characteristic, and I am struggling to capture them. They are silver, sometimes more blue, sometimes greenish, bronzed, whitening on ground that is yellow, pink, purplish or orangeish to dull red ochre. But very difficult very difficult.” (“Mais fort difficile fort difficile.”) Is he bragging about the difficulty? Worried about it? Difficult for him, because of his addiction to infelicity, or difficult for anyone, even the most conventionally skilled?

No, I don’ think Vincent was bragging. And I don’t think he was worrying. When he said “But very difficult very difficult,” he was simply saying he found the olive trees of Provence hard to paint. He said this most vividly in a letter to Émile Bernard ten days after he wrote the above-quoted letter to Theo:

My god, it’s a mighty tricky bit of country this, everything is difficult to do if one wants to get at its inner character so that it is not merely something vaguely experienced, but the true soil of Provence. And to manage that one has to work very hard, whereupon the results become naturally a bit abstract; for it’s a question of giving the sun and the sky their full force and brilliance, of retaining the fine aroma of wild thyme which pervades the baked and melancholy earth. It’s the olive trees here, old man, which would be your cup of tea. I haven’t had much luck with them myself this year, but I’ll come back to them, at least I intend to. They are like silver in an orange and purplish landscape under a large white sun…. [October 8, 1889]

That’s what Van Gogh meant by “difficult.”