The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  And indeed there will be time

  To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’

  Time to turn back and descend the stair,

  With a bald spot in the middle of my hair -

  ...

  Do I dare

  Disturb the universe?

  In a minute there is time

  For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  In cautious, polite London this kind of laconic response might have made sense, but the scandalous young artists of the Russian empire took an opposite view. Disturbing the universe was their very raison d’être. Mayakovsky & Co did their utmost to land ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’, as their 1912 manifesto was called. They wanted speed, danger, destruction, as Mayakovsky wrote in one of his poems:

  Soldiers I envy you!

  You have it good!

  Here on a shabby wall are the scraps of human brains, the imprint of shrapnel’s five fingers. How clever that hundreds of cut off human heads have been affixed to a stupid field.

  Yes, yes, yes, it’s more interesting for you!

  ...

  Today’s poetry - is the poetry of strife.

  ...

  When you tear along in a car through hundreds of persecuting enemies, there’s no point in sentimentalizing: ‘Oh a chicken was crushed under the wheels.’

  If the young radicals in Moscow and St Petersburg longed for a disruption of the stifling calm of autocratic rule, the prize for the most speed-besotted artistic nation must surely go to Italy, where an entire movement, Futurism, was devoted to the worship of cars, velocity, technology and violence.

  Futurism was the brainchild of one man, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), an Italian poet who loved being photographed in visionary poses and startling the world with extraordinary gestures and wild rhetoric. Born in Alexandria in Egypt and educated mostly in Paris, the young Marinetti had caught the French fascination with the car and with technology and speed in general, and he carried this gospel home to his own country. Futurism is probably the world’s only movement to be born out of a car crash. The key ideas, Marinetti would write, occurred to him when he drove his shining automobile into a ditch, survived, and saw the car rescued, ‘like a beached whale’. Henceforth, he decreed in 1909, when he proclaimed Futurism:1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

  2. Courage, audacity and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

  3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

  4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath - a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

  5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

  The surge forward had become the essence of life for those who understood, in Marinetti’s words, that ‘Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.’ Nothing would be suffered to bar the way of this glorious new time. ‘We want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.’ Instead, the world would be galvanized by a great, manly cleansing: ‘We will glorify war - the world’s only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman ... Art in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice.’

  Today it is impossible not to see an infernal stew of machine worship, badly digested Nietzsche (never an author for weak stomachs) and incipient fascism in these words, first published by Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, but they worked like a tonic on readers throughout the Western world. Finally the old guard and their values were called into question - not in a small literary magazine or a privately printed book of poems, but by a mass-circulation newspaper, for everyone to read. Marinetti and the friends who had joined him, though, had no intention of going into politics. They were preoccupied with seeing the world through the prism of speed and dynamism and with attempting to capture their impressions in works of art, wondering how movement (a process) could be rendered in a static image to show the true nature of an object and the energy driving it.

  Futurist painters experimented with fragmented or blurred images which borrowed heavily from Cubism. Where Picasso & Co had produced static scenes, however, their Italian followers used the shattered outlines of their subjects to suggest rapidity and force. Paintings with names like The Dynamism of the Automobile, Rhythms of a Bow, Speed of a Motorcycle or Abstract Speed (all painted between 1909 and 1914) were testaments to their determination. One of the most gifted painters of this circle was Giacomo Balla, whose Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) is a wonderful transformation of a very bourgeois motif. Painted from the perspective of a casual photographer or a passer-by, and coloured almost like a sepia photograph, the feet of the pet and its owner are shown in all phases of movement, with those of the dog creating a much busier, more intensive fan-like pattern. With true Futurist disdain for normality the painter was interested not in subjects themselves, but purely in their motion, in the very fact that their passing marked nothing but a moment of fleeting anonymity. Look away for one moment, the image suggests, and the canvas is empty.

  Other Futurists celebrated the speed-induced death of individuality and middle-class life. Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) attempted to paint pure states of mind, before devoting himself to portraits showing the very instability of what was in front of him. In his The Street Enters the House (1911), a woman looks over her balcony into a town square (see plate section). She is seen from inside the room, but neither she, nor the balcony, nor the square can defend themselves against the irresistible energy of the building site outside. Outside and inside, person and background become mingled in an infernal dance. The scaffolding erected by busy workers sticks like hairpins in the woman’s hair, a cart is driving straight through the cast-iron railing of the balcony, and four horses, escaped from the cart and from classical legend, clamber through the screen and out of the picture, while the figure of the woman itself is invaded by the colours and shapes of the town. Even the buildings surrounding the square, typically the guarantors of upright respectability, stand disjointed and inclined, as if bowing to the force of the workers. Bold, repeated diagonals give an impression of exploding strength.

  An Italian Nobel Prize-winner, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), was also the first writer to make a technician, a cinema projectionist, the hero of a novel. Shoot: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1915) is the account of a man whose function makes him see the world in a different light - from the stare of the projector’s eye. ‘I also know the external, mechanical contraptions of life which are always in thunderous, vertiginous motion, without a break. Today it is this and that, one thing or another that must be done; you’ve got to run, watch in hand, to be there on time.’ Gubbio knows that his function is only that of a second-rate machine, and that a clever mechanism could replace him altogether, and he suspects that machines may be after more than just his job: ‘A machine is made to act, to move, and it needs to gobble up our soul, to devour our life. And how could they could give us back our soul and our life, with their centuplicate and continual production?’ It is obvious that Pirandello did not share the Futurists’ boundless enthusiasm for the machine age. For his hapless character, the question is not so much that the battle lines are drawn, but that the war is already lost: ‘From long habit, even my own eyes and ears have begun to sense everything in the guise of this rapid, quivering
, ticking mechanical reproduction.’ At the end of the novel, Gubbio is as much invaded by the machine age as the woman in the Boccioni painting. He no longer knows where his body ends and the machine begins, and he capitulates before the ceaseless, remorseless efficiency of the machine. ‘I cease to exist. It walks now, on my legs ... I form part of its equipment.’

  After 1914, an even more rueful, fearful note crept into writings about the speed of life, nowhere more than in the long essay Some Aspects of the World’s Vertigo by the French novelist Pierre Loti, which was published in 1917:

  Having been knocked off balance by our knowledge, today we know that underneath us there is nothing but emptiness ... an emptiness that falls vertiginously, the emptiness into which everything is falling without hope. And, at certain hours, one grows heavy with the thought, it becomes an anguish to realize that never, never we or our ashes, our last dust, will be able to repose in peace on something stable, because stability no longer exists and we are condemned, after life as during it, to career around in that dark void ... we have no point of reference which would not be caught up in the vertigo of movement, and this frightening speed can only ever be evaluated relative to other moving things, to other poor little things ... which are also falling.

  While artists were very much alive to the possibilities and dangers of a technological future, in Europe’s most thrustingly dynamic economy, imperial Germany, the idea of speed and of an all-conquering era of dynamism was regarded with deep scepticism and so found almost no resonance in the arts. Amid the roar of a rapidly expanding economy, of increasing urbanization and modern technologies, the writers who defined the period were aesthetes like the young Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the notoriously delicate Rainer Maria Rilke - swan songs for a dying kind of bourgeoisie the Futurists had vowed to destroy. More radical, engaged artists such as the graphic artist and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz or the playwrights Gerhart Hauptmann and Frank Wedekind chose social criticism over aesthetic proclamations.

  If technology did make it into German artistic works it was often included as a warning: Musil’s The Man Without Qualities begins with a car crash, and in The Loyal Subject, a novel by Heinrich Mann, the grovellingly monarchist protagonist ‘meets’ his Kaiser by running alongside his car and shouting, ‘Heil! Heil!’ again and again, almost fainting with breathless hysteria. Expressionist poets and painters showed a world in turmoil, using techniques that borrowed (visually and verbally) from telegraph style and the fast images of cinema.

  American Nervousness

  The growing speed of daily life, of news and work and play, was a fetish of artists and industrialists alike, as well as an important factor of everyday experience. Not everyone proved equal to this pace, and in Germany this effect was especially marked. Never before had so much social change occurred so quickly. At the same time, an illness of epidemic proportions crept up on those who lived life in the fast lane. From factory workers to heads of state, from telephonists to high-school teachers, people complained of having ‘shattered nerves’; overwhelmed and disoriented, tens of thousands were treated in psychiatric hospitals and sanatoriums which shot up like mushrooms.

  The symptoms of this mysterious condition had first been described in 1869 by George Miller Beard (1839-83), an American doctor with a penchant for spectacular therapies, who observed in an alarming proportion of his patients a malaise that he called ‘neurasthenia’ - an exhaustion of the nerves. Beard’s treatments for this mysterious disorder ranged from cannabis and caffeine to wine, ‘particularly claret and Burgundy’, and to electrodes applied to the bodies of his patients. ‘American Nervousness’ reached across the Atlantic. Beard’s work was translated into German in 1881 and his diagnosis became a convenient shorthand for a cluster of symptoms that doctors were observing more and more in their patients.

  ‘There is a large family of functional nervous disorders that are increasingly frequent among the in-door classes of civilized countries,’ Beard wrote. ‘The sufferers from these maladies are counted in this country by thousands and hundreds of thousand; in all the Northern and Eastern States they are found in nearly every brain-working household.’ The patriotic doctor could not suppress his pride at this state of affairs. Neurasthenia, after all, was the disease of an advanced civilization, and ‘no age, no country, and no form of civilization, not Greece, nor Rome, nor Spain, nor the Netherlands, in the days of their glory, possessed such maladies’. Hard-working and increasingly productive, America was indeed the most advanced country on earth. In 1901 the writer John Girdner suggested a different name for this mystery sickness: Newyorkitis, a special inflammation of the nerves resulting from life in big cities.

  Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Europe had an ever-growing number of large cities of its own, and with them came a wave of neurasthenic patients. What shocked the medical establishment (and no doubt added urgency to the problem) was that this wave of nervous exhaustion had nothing to do with the hysteria that male doctors had long diagnosed in women. Grown, professional men were collapsing. Judges, lawyers, teachers and engineers were suddenly unable to cope with their lives. The historian Joachim Radkau has analysed the patient files of several German mental hospitals during the years of the Kaiserreich, imperial Germany. The patients’ testimonies paint a vivid picture of the symptoms they were experiencing, as most of them were only too happy to talk. One even had prepared a 55-page dossier on himself.

  A 21-year-old man at a private sanatorium told a fairly typical story: Another patient, a Junker from East Prussia, was judged in 1905 to be ‘Very irritable. Since 5 to 6 years always at work, many honorary posts, etc., a large effort, also constantly looking to increase his fortune, overworking on his estate. Since the birth of his last child, the patient has only the idea to make more money, even though wife and child are excellently looked after. Sexually very excitable, also in his marriage. Always a heavy smoker, 30-35 cigars a day.’

  The nervousness had already come in my earliest childhood. I can remember that I often fainted and that the whistle of a locomotive could shake me to my foundations ... I was always excited and would explode at the slightest provocation. If I had to be in a crowd, I felt dizzy. I would involuntarily feel my heart and be convinced I was suffering a heart attack ... For years I suffered from thinking that I would not be good enough at my job, an idea that made my heart race every day.

  Overwork was a common theme in the patients’ histories. In fact, the condition seemed to target those who were most successfully living the lives of modern people - mobile, professional, hard-working, often with university degrees. One man had built up a business in London and was earning well, when he broke down. ‘Overwork given as the reason for heavy fits of vertigo, unconsciousness, mad babbling and convulsions,’ notes the doctor. The patient went to his native Germany to recover for two years, and then picked up his London life. ‘Here he began to feel drawn to a puella publica [prostitute: doctors liked to veil morally contentious references in Latin] and thought of marrying her. When she emigrated to America, the patient developed depressions, a constant pressure in his head, constant thoughts of suicide, nervous pains in back and arms.’ Another businessman who had gone to Argentina, where he came to be called ‘the nervous man of Buenos Aires’, had a similar story to tell: hard work and hard play, irritability, ‘sexual overextension’, breakdown and shattered nerves. The relationship between sexual activity and neurasthenia was a common motif. ‘I am 26 years old,’ relates a patient at the Ahrweiler clinic in 1907. ‘During the last years, my mother suffered terribly from neurasthenia. During the 16th year of my life I began with my onanism. My first neurasthenic symptoms date from that time: a tiredness of the brain, a functional debilitation of my lower spine, broken sleep, dejection, depressed spirits, etc.’ Later he sought relief by taking up smoking and visiting a prostitute, but his condition deteriorated.

  Who, then, was neurasthenic? A survey of one mental hospital in 1893 found that among nearly 600 cases,
there were almost 200 businessmen, 130 civil servants, 68 teachers, 56 students and eleven farmers (there were no manual workers at this clinic). Neurasthenia, the overheating and exhaustion of nerves, affected mainly white-collar workers, overwhelmed by the demands placed on them.

  During a switch to a new system of telephone wiring in Berlin, one observer noted how the challenges of technology could be too much for workers who were only just coping. The changeover had its hitches, and the women on the telephone exchange were finding it difficult to cope:

  Many calls were not connected, a large number of connections was impossible, the acoustic signals did not work properly and the callers became impatient. This provoked our workers all the more, and finally one burst out in compulsive shouting, and before long most workplaces were affected and the telegraph director, who happened to be in the room ... wrung his hands, crying ‘My poor girls! my poor girls!’

  After 1900 an increasing number of workers began to complain about nervous exhaustion even if they remained in the minority, and treatment for members of their class was rare. ‘As my work was done with machines, with the rollers used in the ovens, which now employ 80-100 people,’ a metal worker told his doctor, ‘well, you can see, if you work for forty-two years in this roaring and noise, how that can wreck an old man’s nerves. I sweat all day, I feel afraid. I often cry like a young child, I cannot sleep at night ... Several other workers have the same disease. One was pushed so far that he slit his throat.’

  People at the frontiers of technology - telephone operators, typesetters on new, faster machines, railway workers, engineers, factory workers handling fast machines - and those at the heart of the rapidly growing economy such as businessmen and administrators were most vulnerable to the symptoms that were grouped under the name neurasthenia, or extreme stress, as we might call it today. One German doctor called illnesses of the nervous system ‘the pathological signature of the time in which we are living’. The American doctor Margaret A. Cleaves simply stated: ‘The work of the world is largely done by neurasthenes.’