by Colin Wilson
DiaghilefFs protectorship was intolerable; this is hardly surprising. But unfortunately, Nijinsky’s marriage left him no better off. For his wife he was a mixture of god and child; she understood the child part only too well, the god part, not at all. It was the same with Nijinsky’s colleagues. He was ‘le dieu de la danse’, but from most critical accounts, he was a bungling choreographer whose ballets either defied performance or left the audience mystified. His Rite of Spring contains complex dancing parts which the dancers of his day declared to be un-danceable much as the violinists in Beethoven’s day had declared passages in the last quartets to be unplayable. He had taken Debussy’s Prelude a L’Aprls-Midi d’un Faune, and constructed to the sensuous, fleshly, drowsy music a choreography that was hard and angular. The ballet looked like a series of ‘flats’, a Greek vase design; in Nijinsky’s hands it lost the qualities that Diaghileff could so well understand—warmth, humanity, sensuality; it had substituted hardness, heaviness, angularity, violence. Hulme’s comment on Byzantine art might be applied to it:
...the emotion you get from it is not a pleasure in the reproduction of natural or human life. The disgust with the trivial and accidental characteristics of living shapes, the searching after an austerity, a. perfection and rigidity that vital things can never have, lead here to the use of forms that can almost be called geometrical.37
Hulme went on to state his conclusions from this angular art:
Man is subordinate to certain absolute values; there is no delight in the human form leading to its natural reproduction; it is always distorted to fit the more abstract forms which convey intense religious emotion.38
Nijinsky’s Diary shows us his capacity for ‘intense religious emotion’, and its style is correspondingly hard and angular. In the same way, his conception of the ballet was more than an attempt to follow Jacques Dalcroze’s theory that each note in the music should have a corresponding movement from the dancer; it was the effort of the Outsider to find expression for emotions that wanted to emerge like bullets from a machine-gun. With Nijinsky, the Outsider’s strain reached bursting-point, and his mind plunged into darkness.
The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents we have referred to in this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death: notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbours. We possess no other record of the Outsider’s problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems. Nijinsky’s Diary is the most unpleasant document we shall have to refer to in this book.
In this chapter, we have examined three distinct types of Outsider, and three distinct kinds of discipline designed to combat their ‘Outsiderishness’: discipline over the intellect, discipline over the feelings, discipline over the body. We have seen that none of these forms of discipline is complete in itself. Van Gogh and Nijinsky went insane; Lawrence’s mental suicide is really the equivalent of Nijinsky’s insanity: both men gave up the struggle and turned their faces away from the problems. Nijinsky’s madness was as voluntary as Lawrence’s enlistment in the R.A.F.
The most interesting observation to be made from comparison of the three concerns their degree of ‘lostness’. Nijinsky lived so close to his instincts that it took a great deal of complexity and confusion to wrench him away from his inner certainties and make him reason about those certainties. Lawrence, on the contrary, reasoned all the time, and never knew the ground of his instincts as Nijinsky did. Yet, here is the point: Lawrence could, with an immense effort, have thrown himself into comprehension of Nijinsky’s state of mind; he could, if you like, have become a Nijinsky in all essentials. Nijinsky could never have become a Lawrence; the effort needed to develop the reasoning powers would have separated him from his instinctive certainties long before he would be capable of writing a Seven Pillars. In other words, Lawrence was paradoxically the most ‘lost’ of the three, the most destroyed by self-doubt and yet the least lost. Nijinsky was the least lost because his instincts made a better compass than Lawrence’s intellect, and yet the most lost as far as his possible development went. If the ideal combination were a compound of Lawrence’s powerful intellect, Van Gogh’s mystical nature-love and Nijinsky’s realization of his body’s potentialities, then it would be better, as it were, to start from Lawrence and add the other two to him, than to start from Van Gogh or Nijinsky and try to develop .them up to Lawrence’s level. This is not to say that Lawrence was a greater ‘artist’ or what have you than Nijinsky or Van Gogh; I am not at the moment concerned with them as artists, but as Outsiders. As far as the Outsider is concerned, it is more important to have a powerful intellect than a highly developed capacity to ‘feel’.
But the most important assumption that is tacit in this chapter is that the Outsider’s chief desire is to cease to be an Outsider. He cannot cease to be an Outsider simply to become an ordinary bourgeois; that would be a way back, ‘back into the wolf or the child’, and Harry Haller has already stated that this way is impracticable, is no true solution of the Outsider’s problems. His problem is therefore how to go forward. Lawrence, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, all went back. All three were defeated, and our examination has told us something of why they were defeated. In the next chapters, we shall have to follow the hints picked up from these three men, and see how far other Outsiders have succeeded where they failed.
We can see now that we must examine all attempts at solution carefully, in case they are not really solutions. There is a way forward and a way back. Either way resolves the Outsider’s problems. And the Outsider can follow both ways at once; a part of him can go forward and press a discipline to its conclusion, another part accept a compromise like Lawrence’s mental suicide. In such a case, the man will claim to have found a valid solution of the Outsider’s problems, and in examining his solution, we shall have to apply the distinctions we have developed in this chapter—the three disciplines— and find if his solution would have fitted the Nijinsky type of Outsider as well as the Van Gogh or Lawrence type. If we detect a ring of truth in Hesse’s dictum that no man has ever yet attained to self-realization, we shall be predisposed to believe that no man has ever solved the Outsider’s problems fully.
What is certain is that the Outsider’s problems have begun to resolve themselves into terms of Ultimate Yes and Ultimate No; for the intellectual Outsider, the Existentialist form: being or nothingness? for the emotional Outsider: Eternal love or eternal indifference? and for the Nijinsky type of Outsider, the man of action, the physical Outsider, it is a question of life or death, the body’s final defeat or triumph, whether the final truth is ‘I am God’ or an ultimate horror of physical corruption. The last words of Nijinsky’s Diary are an affirmation:
My little girl is singing: ‘Ah ah ah ah.’ I do not understand its meaning, but I feel what she wants to say. She wants to say that everything ... is not horror, but joy.39
The Outsider’s problem is to balance this against Van Gogh’s last words: Misery will never end. It is a question no longer of philosophy, but of religion.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PAIN THRESHOLD
The title of this chapter is an expression coined by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience. This is how he defines it:
Recent psychology... speaks of the threshold of a man’s consciousness in general to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked.... And so we might speak of a ‘pain threshold’, a Year threshold’, a ‘misery threshold’, and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy minded habitually live on the
sunny side of their misery line; the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension.1
James goes on to ask:
Does it not appear as if one who lived habitually on one side of the pain threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?
This is the problem towards which our consideration of the Outsider has been imperceptibly leading us. Our findings point more and more to the conclusion that the Outsider is not a freak, but is only more sensitive than the ‘sanguine and healthy-minded’ type of man; Steppenwolf makes no bones about it, but declares that he is a higher type of man altogether. If by religion we mean a way of life that resolves man’s spiritual tensions, the Outsider will refuse to admit that the ‘sanguine and healthy-minded’ man has a religion at all; unless a man lives by a belief, the Outsider objects, then it is no more material to him than whether he believes that Mount Everest or Mount Meru is the highest mountain in the world. The Outsider begins with certain inner tensions; we have asked ourselves the question: ‘How can these tensions be resolved?’ and, in the course of our investigation, we have discovered that the healthy-minded man’s confident answer, ‘Send him to a psychiatrist’, does not fit the case at all. The next stage is to say: ‘Very well, let us treat it as a mathematical problem.’ Let us, in other words, ask the healthy-minded man: If your pain threshold lay as low as this, how would you resolve these tensions? The Outsider we are to consider in this chapter will illustrate a determined and objective approach to this question, but before we pass on to him, it would perhaps be as well to enlarge on the tensions, or rather the problems that cause them; in this way we shall have a broader idea of what the Outsider means by ‘Ultimate No’.
Obviously, we are back at Pessimism, and we could conveniently begin by mentioning the Shakespearean type:
As flies to foolish boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport...
It is the problem of the uncertainty of life, of how man can set up any aim or belief when he is not certain whether he will ‘breathe out the very breath he now breathes in’. A lesser-known example than Gloucester’s lines is the Duke’s speech from Beddoes’s Death’s Jest Book:
The look of the world’s a lie, a face made up
O’er graves and fiery depths, and nothing’s true
But what is horrible. If man could see
The perils and diseases that he elbows
Each day he walks a mile, which catch at him,
Which fall behind and graze him as he passes,
Then would he know that life’s a single pilgrim
Fighting unarmed among a thousand soldiers .2
It is worth mentioning here that Beddoes’s negation ended, like Van Gogh’s, in suicide. His plays breathe a sort of romantic death-worship that probably owes something to Novalis and Tieck; they remind us of Keats’s:
Now more than ever it seems rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain....3
In this connexion, too, we might mention many writers of the nineteenth century, especially of its last three decades; and the poets Yeats called ‘the tragic generation’: Lionel Johnson, Dowson, Verlaine, Corbiere, men who are the tail-end of nineteenth-century romanticism; and their immediate forebears, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Lautreamont and the Italian Leopardi. James Thomson’s ‘City of Dreadful Night’ deserves more space than we can afford to give it here, as being a sort of nineteenth-century forerunner of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’, with its insistence on the illusory nature of the world:
For life is but a dream whose shapes return
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night... we learn
While many change, and many vanish quite
In their recurrence with recurrent changes,
A certain seeming order; where this ranges
We count things real; such is the memory’s might.4
Which invites comparison with:
Unreal city
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn .. ,6
De Lisle Adam’s Axel belongs to the same period, and its hero would almost have served as a symbol of the Outsider as well as Barbusse’s hole-in-corner man: he, the young Count Axel, lives in his lonely castle on the Rhine, and studies the Kabbala and Hermetic philosophy in his oak-panelled study; in irritation at the vulgarity of his ‘man of the world’ cousin, the Commander, he runs him through with his sword. In the last Act, he and the beautiful runaway nun Sarah stand clasped in each other’s arms in the vault of the castle, and vow to kill themselves rather than attempt the inevitably stupid and disappointing business of living out their love for each other. ‘As for living, our servants can do that for us.’
They follow the Strowde-Joan Westbury dilemma to its logical conclusion, and kill themselves. Strowde and Joan are not so different from Axel and Sarah; they are only less tormented by ‘lack of pattern and purpose in nature’; they commit mental suicide, like Lawrence.
But most of these poets of the late nineteenth century were only ‘half in love with easeful death’; the other half clung very firmly to life and complained about its futility. None of them,
not even Thomson, goes as far as Wells in Mind at the End of Its Tether. But follow their pessimism further, press it to the limits of complete sincerity, and the result is a completely life-denying
nihilism that is actually a danger to life. When Van Gogh’s ‘Misery will never end’ is combined with Evan Strowde’s ‘Nothing is worth doing’, the result is a kind of spiritual syphilis that can hardly stop short of death or insanity. Conrad’s story Heart of Darkness deals with a man who has brought him
self to this point; he dies murmuring: ‘The horror, the horror.’ Conrad’s narrator comments: ‘...I wasn’t arguing with a lunatic eitherHis intelligence was perfectly clear; concentrated ... upon himself with a horrible intensity, yet clear....But his soul was mad. Being alone in the Wilderness, it had
looked within itself, and ... it had gone mad: he had summed up; he had judged; “the Horror”. He was a remarkable man.’6
‘The horror’ was the constant theme of the Russian Leonid Andreyev; his story ‘Lazarus’ presses the theme of the fundamental horror of life to a point where it is difficult to imagine any other writer following him. Hawthorne’s ‘Ethan Brand’ might be mentioned as another treatment of the same theme that probably sprang out of Hawthorne’s own experiences of religious doubt. Hawthorne’s Outsider flings himself into a furnace to escape his vision of futility.
The subject is unpleasant to dwell on, and further enumeration of treatments of the theme will serve no purpose here, so we can conclude our survey of ‘life-denial’ by quoting an example taken from James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. James is writing of his own experience of nervous collapse (although he does not actually say so in the book):
Whilst in a state of philosophic pessimism, and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight... when suddenly there came upon me, without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously, there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day... moving nothing but his black eyes, and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing I possess can defend me from that fate if the hour should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid in my breast gave way, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this, the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before.7
It is interesting to note that Henry James, Sr., the father of William and of Henry the
novelist, had a similar experience, which he records in his book Society, the Redeemed Form of Man: 8
One day towards the close of May, having eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at the table after the family had dispersed, idly gazing into the embers of the grate, thinking of nothing and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion, when suddenly—in a lightning flash, as it were—Tear came upon me, and trembling made all my bones to shake’. To all appearances it was a perfectly insane and abject terror without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape, squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck, that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy. I felt the greatest desire to shout for help to my wife ... but by an immense effort I controlled these frenzied impulses and determined not to budge.... until I hadrecovered my self-possession. This purpose I held to for a good hour... beat upon meanwhile by an ever-growing tempest of doubt, anxiety and despair....