The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  Criminal types:

  Jean-Paul Marat

  and Louise Michel

  are among the

  ‘morally insane’

  revolutionaries on

  this illustration by

  Lombroso.

  Lombroso’s method, he hoped, would lead not only to understanding crime, but also for enlightened, scientific policies and even a prevention of crime and delinquence at the very root: by diagnosing, classifying and perhaps weeding out likely offenders before they were even born. A whole generation of scholars extended his research (in the introduction to his Nouvelles recherches de psychiatrie Lombroso himself mentions twenty-eight scholars who had recently published books on the subject). At the intersection where they converged, anthropology, justice and psychiatry made the scientific treatment of les aliénés into an established scientific discipline, notably in Germany, where the biological origins of crime were enthusiastically taken up by eugenicists.

  The scholar was fascinated by all types of deviance, from crime to madness, and even genius. The latter, he claimed in a weighty book, L’uomo di genio in rapporto alla psichiatria (1889, English translation, Man of Genius, London, 1891), was simply a lucky, fruitful form of insanity. Trawling a sea of literary sources (at times with remarkable credulity as to their factual accuracy) and drawing on research on mental illness, as well as on his professional experiences, to his surprise he ‘found [in genius] several characteristics of degeneration which are the basis and the signals of almost all forms of congenital madness’. Geniuses, he concluded, were simply freaks of nature who had been endowed with one capacity at the expense of others: ‘Just as giants pay the price for their height and their muscles by being sterile and of relatively feeble intelligence, the giants of thought pay through their psychoses for their great intellectual force.’

  Genius and madness have long been associated, often accompanied by violence and exclusion. Their marriage is part of the stock repertoire of Romanticism, and during the late nineteenth century Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Vincent van Gogh, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Schumann and Edvard Munch all dramatized psychological states and also suffered from mental illness. The experience of an uncertain rationality and the visionary horizons beyond became a part of art, as it had been a part of religion before.

  While an element of alienation from society and tradition was inherent in the very idea of Romanticism, the nineteenth century had also shown abundant literary instances of insanity: from Lucia di Lammermoor and scores of other noble but hapless operatic heroines to Georg Büchner’s desperate and murderous Woyzeck, from Dickens’s Miss Havisham and William Blake’s intricate and apocalyptic drawings to the protagonists in the stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann and the progressive derangement of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, to name but a few. At the turn of the twentieth century, a period permeated by phenomena like neurasthenia and sexual insecurity, by the dizzy sense of feeling the floods of change swirling around one’s ankles every day, one might expect artists to give a more forceful expression to this fantastical disorientation than ever before. Instead a baffling quietness is spread over the theme of madness, and if it was discussed, it was mostly in German-speaking countries.

  There are notable exceptions to this rule, of course. Nicolai Abelukhov, the anti-hero of Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg, roams around his city, terrified by his own violence and driven to irrational and destructive acts; Picasso’s eye alighted on the marginal existences and emaciated limbs of circus artistes, before plunging into the world of African ornament that would become Cubism; the Futurists in Russia and Italy positively revered violence, crime and ecstasy, and the infamous Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness can be read as a study in insanity, like August Strindberg’s hallucinatory Dream Play (1901).

  The graphic work of the Austrian painter, print-maker and novelist Alfred Kubin (1877-1958) might also have been conceived as a series of illustrations to Ernst Wagner and Daniel Schreber’s fantasies, so close was their intersection with their central images. Kubin knew neither of these cases, and created most of his graphic work before Wagner’s crime and Schreber’s publication. His etchings look like those of a latter-day Goya, a series of intoxicating, nightmarish visions in a wash of shadow and light. We have already encountered his War, an etching seemingly sprung from one of Ernst Wagner’s sexual fantasies: the god of war as barbaric colossus, a mountain of helmet, chest, shield, testicles and devastating axe, with feet of clay heavy as houses, about to be plunged into the mass of tiny soldiers. It is a rare moment of masculine power in his pre-War work. In most of Kubin’s etchings this force is on the wane. Men are thin, dried-up creatures, stooping, aged kings in front of hooded followers, bizarrely transformed and insubstantial. In one sheet, Madness, a bearded, pale-faced sufferer in a long shirt has his head chiselled open from behind by a shadowy, professorial ghost. Male power leads into the abyss. In retrospect, some of these graphic visions seem terribly prophetic: the monstrous and monstrously mustachioed walrus enthroned on a heap of skeletons; the strangely modernist tank entitled Government, ready to machine-gun all challengers; the ruined city across a churned-up landscape inhabited by tiny, isolated figures.

  While the dominance of men was terrifying because of its mechanized violence, Kubin showed the erotic lure of women as perhaps even more terrifying and overwhelming. With the certainty of a dreamer, he combined the main forces of the period into images: sleek, black and engine-driven vehicles hurtle along an eight-lane highway leading directly between the thighs of a gigantic woman, into the darkness; a gigantic Salome with a huge mass of hair, her belly distended by monstrous fecundity, dances over a row of severed male heads; a female body with severed limbs is pierced by knives on a sheet entitled An Eye for an Eye; an insignificant and pitiable male figure with a tiny erection jumps head-first off a gigantic woman’s thighs and into her vagina (one remembers Gustave Courbet’s L’origine du monde), the most unequal of all unions.

  Size does matter: Kubin’s

  Salto Mortale drastically

  illustrates male fears.

  In 1909 the painter Oskar Kokoschka, then in the middle of an affair with Alma Mahler, the famously seductive and capricious wife of court opera director Gustav Mahler, premiered his play Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women). In this work a tribe of warring men meets a woman with a retinue of girls, an encounter that leads to cruel fighting, seduction, mutual mutilation and finally assassination, a bloody ritual of erotic ecstasy reminiscent of Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps in which all protagonists are gripped by an incurable fever which, the spectator learns, is the erotic impulse itself.

  In prose, there are indications of the fear of radical expulsion and alienation beyond the merely conventional or political. Arthur Schnitzler’s Leutnant Gustl finds himself abandoned to the night and to his fears, and blurts out a garbled stream of words as he expects the morning and his possible death in a duel; and in 1916 the most irreversible and cruel of transformations took place when the commercial traveller Gregor Samsa woke up in his Prague bed to find that during the night he had been changed into a huge black beetle. Kafka had arrived in literature.

  One writer, in particular, obliquely made the theme of madness and violence his own: Robert Musil’s ‘Man Without Qualities’ is Ulrich, the impassive chronicler of the world’s follies and his own. His calm rationality is shadowed by another character, a counterpoint to impassive reason, the axe murderer Moosbrugger, who has brutally killed a prostitute and is awaiting execution. Musil is likely to have read about Ernst August Wagner as he was writing his monumental work, even if the direct inspiration for the figure of Moosbrugger was Christian Voigt, another deranged killer who was tried and condemned to death in 1911. As with the apaches in the popular imagination, the violent impulse personified by Moosbrugger obsesses several characters in the novel, including the protagonist Ulrich. The phenomenon of random violence fascinates them; the instinctual brutishness of Moosbrug
ger’s force emerges like the antithesis of the nervous, constantly insecure thinking of those claiming to be rational.

  Artists no longer treated madness as a convenient trope, a sentimental convention. It had come closer, grown more real. While the fin de siècle had gloried in its rotten sophistication, in the elegant decadence of Oscar Wilde and the perfumed unreality of Maurice Maeterlinck, decadence had reappeared in the hideous shape of its diseased and evil cousin, degeneration. With its thirsty cult of health and vigour and its permanently shattered nerves, the early twentieth century had no place for creatures like this, and those who admitted to being overly sensitive found themselves on the steep and slippery slope to being branded degenerates.

  Who wants to be a degenerate? The refined nerves of the decadent poet gave him insights into mysteries. The freakish feats performed by the insane and by those tainted with the stigma of heredity had no such noble connotations. It was a time for artists to be vigorous and iconoclastic, pugilists of the pen and barbarians of the brush, raising ancient creative powers or looking into a future of machines and heroism. It was a time to become anarchists, Futurists, but not to succumb to the enfeebling whisperings of bad blood. Only a Thomas Mann could afford to describe, in his Buddenbrooks (1901), the history of his own family as a story of degeneration. His book shows a slow decline as one generation becomes less fit than the preceding one until the line is doomed to end with Hanno Buddenbrook, by all accounts a degenerate, a boy with an artistic bent who cannot stop dreaming of the oceanic soundscapes of his beloved Wagner operas, but is himself quite unsuitable for any practical task. Mann could write such a tale because his sense of personal superiority was too clear, too indestructible, to be impaired by his own story.

  One real-life Hanno Buddenbrook, the morbidly sensitive Rainer Maria Rilke, even made himself advocate and bard of those who were overwhelmed by the modern world. His novel Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) is one of the most disturbing artistic documents of incipient madness in the history of literature. Already in his Stunden-Buch (Book of Hours, 1903) he had described those who were lost on the seas of civilization:

  And there are people, flowering white, pale,

  and die, amazed, of this heavy world.

  Nobody sees the gaping grimace

  to which the smile of a delicate race

  distends itself in nameless nights.

  They walk around, bared of their dignity by the strife

  of insipidly ministering to the meaningless

  their clothes are wilting away on them,

  and their beautiful hands are already old.

  The crowd does not consider sparing them,

  despite their being hesitant and weak,

  only shy dogs living in no fixed place,

  trot after them silently for a little while.

  They have been given a hundred torturers,

  and, screamed at by every strike of the hour,

  they circle forlornly around the hospitals

  and fearfully await admission day.

  Popular Heroes

  If there was surprisingly little artistic resonance among the avant-garde to the theme of insanity and radical marginalization, the place that the idea of alienation held in the imagination of the period can be deduced from the huge popularity enjoyed by a particular branch of popular fiction: the detective story. The famous ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ or the woman in the Métro at the place de la Concorde did not know who Kubin was, and had never heard of Bely or Rilke. They read crime stories instead, intricate and effective romanticizations of outsiders and outcasts on either side of the law. Just as every period has its fixed tropes of insanity, it also has its very own popular heroes in stories of justice and redemption. The murder mystery and the crime story, creations of the nineteenth century, came into their own before the War. They were sold in their hundreds of thousands, often after being serialized in the biggest-selling magazines and newspapers of the day.

  The Scottish doctor Arthur Conan Doyle knew and admired Cesare Lombroso’s work and used the same kind of deductive observation for his hero Sherlock Holmes, perhaps the most famous figure in crime fiction. Holmes, whose fictional cases were serialized by the Strand Magazine from 1887 to 1915, was not just a deductive reasoner. In a country with a healthy disrespect for institutional solutions and a great reverence for eccentric amateurs, he was a singular figure in the mould of Lombroso’s genius. His all too active mind had to be calmed down with morphine or awakened with cocaine in between cases; he was a man oscillating between brilliance and disturbingly violent flashes of temper, to whom solving crimes was the ultimate intellectual challenge, as well as a necessary food for his overactive imagination. Little wonder, then, that earnest, clean-living Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard can do nothing more than arrive at the scene panting and puffing, to find that the great detective has made him look foolish once again. British crime writers have never placed much faith in the police. British crime was solved by gentlemen.

  France’s mystery novel hero Arsène Lupin was a very different creature. He too was a man of culture, brilliant and schooled in all arts. But he was not the detective. He was the king of burglars, stealing from the rich and giving to the deserving poor - a dashing, improbable creation:

  … the eccentric gentleman who operates only in the chateaux and salons, and who, one night, entered the residence of Baron Schormann, but emerged empty-handed, leaving, however, his card on which he had scribbled these words: ‘Arsène Lupin, gentleman-burglar, will return when the furniture is genuine.’ Arsène Lupin, the man of a thousand disguises: in turn a chauffeur, detective, bookmaker, Russian physician, Spanish bullfighter, commercial traveller, robust youth, or decrepit old man.

  Gifted with humour, boundless ingenuity and a truly French disrespect for all authority, Lupin was not, in fact, solely the creation of his author, Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941), who even made his master criminal go head-to-head with the British icon in the unsubtly titled novel Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmes (1908). Lupin had a real-life inspiration in one of France’s popular heroes at the time, the anarchist Alexandre Marius Jacob (1875-1954), who became famous for his daring, imaginative crimes, as well as his unbusinesslike chivalry and wit.

  Jacob, born into a poor Alsatian family, had joined the navy as a cabin boy at the age of twelve, had become involved in anarchist terrorism and was sentenced to prison for explosives offences. After his sentence, he could no longer find a job and so decided to serve the cause of anarchism in a more direct, less orthodox way. On 31 March 1899 he and two accomplices went to the Marseille office of the Mont de Piété, the pawnbrokers, arrested the leading cashier for embezzlement, impounded 400,000 francs as evidence, and then calmly delivered his prisoner to the Palais de la Justice. Before the confusion could be cleared, the ‘inspector’ and his two assistants had vanished. This was the first of many coups whose trademarks were cunning and style. Arrested, Jacob faked insanity and escaped to southern France, where he set up a gang, the travailleurs de la nuit. In the following years, stories about his daring and most of all, meticulously planned, robberies filled the popular papers. He would steal only from the rich and would always give part of his profits to anarchist causes. When once, on burgling the house of a sea captain, he found that his victim was the French writer Pierre Loti, he put everything back in its place and left a note: ‘Having entered here by mistake I could not take anything from someone who lives by his pen. All work deserves payment. PS: Enclosed ten francs for the broken glass and damaged shutters.’

  Gentleman-burglar: Marius Jacob,

  the real-life Arsène Lupin.

  Jacob’s epic crusade against unjustly held private property finally ended when a policeman was fatally shot during a chase. Jacob was arrested in 1903. During the months leading up to his trial, he penned an impassioned justification of his acts, an anarchist interpretation of Darwinism: ‘Since you primarily condemn me for being a thief it’s useful to define what
theft is. In my opinion theft is a need that is felt by all men to take in order to satisfy their appetites. This need manifests itself in everything: from the stars that are born and die like beings, to the insect in space, so small, so infinite that our eyes can barely distinguish it. Life is nothing but theft and massacre. Plants and beasts devour each other in order to survive.’

  Instead of collaborating, men exploit one another, Jacob wrote.

  From top to bottom of the social scale everything is but dastardy on one side and idiocy on the other. How can you expect that convinced of these truths I could have respected such a state of things?

  A liquor seller and the boss of a brothel enrich themselves, while a man of genius dies of poverty in a hospital bed. The baker who bakes bread doesn’t get any; the shoemaker who makes thousands of shoes shows his toes; the weaver who makes stocks of clothing doesn’t have any to cover himself with; the bricklayer who builds castles and palaces wants for air in a filthy hovel. Those who produce everything have nothing, and those who produce nothing have everything. ...

  In a word, I found it hateful to surrender to the prostitution of work. Begging is degradation, the negation of all dignity. Every man has a right to life’s banquet.

  The right to live isn’t begged for, it’s taken.

  Jacob’s eloquence won him no sympathy from the judges and he was condemned to banishment for life. After seventeen escape attempts, he was finally released in 1927. Always faithful to his anarchist convictions, he led a quieter life now. When, in 1954, he found that illness and old age were overcoming him, he injected himself with an overdose of morphine. His parting letter, a final, characteristic gesture, ended: ‘The linen has been washed, rinsed, dried, but not yet ironed. I’m too lazy. Forgive me. You will find two litres of rosé next to the bread basket. À votre santé.’