Solitude_A Return to the Self

by Anthony Storr

  The psycho-analyst Erik Erikson has postulated basic trust versus basic mistrust as the earliest nuclear conflict which the developing human being encounters. Although all of us probably carry with us into adult life some sense of paradise lost, most of us experience sufficient continuity of maternal care for long enough to establish basic trust in other human beings as the norm, mistrust only as the exception. But, if a child enjoys a particularly close relationship with the mother which is suddenly terminated before he is old enough to understand any possible reasons for such a betrayal, he is likely to mistrust all other human beings whom he later encounters and only gradually be persuaded that anyone at all is trustworthy. This was certainly true of Newton. Whiston, Newton’s successor in the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge, said that Newton was ‘of the most fearful, cautious, and suspicious temper that I ever knew’.24

  From 1661, when he first went to Trinity College, Cambridge, until he left for London in 1696, Newton remained predominantly a recluse, preoccupied with his work to the exclusion of almost everything else, with little social contact with other human beings, and no close relations with either sex. Newton’s distrust of others is attested by his reluctance to publish his work. He feared that critics would harm him and that others would lay claim to his discoveries. One biographer, Brodetsky, writes:

  He was always somewhat unwilling to face publicity and criticism, and had on more than one occasion declined to have his name associated with published accounts of some of his work. He did not value public esteem as desirable in itself, and feared that publicity would lead to his being harassed by personal relationships – whereas he wished to be free of such entanglements … Apparendy Newton hardly ever published a discovery without being urged to by others: even when he had arrived at the solution of the greatest problem that astronomy has ever had to face he said nothing about it to anybody.25

  Newton was touchy about questions of priority, as his bitter quarrels with Leibniz, Flamsteed and Hooke bear witness. He was extremely reluctant to own that he was indebted to other men’s work. Newton is clearly another example of an introverted creator who fulfils all the criteria postulated at an earlier point in this chapter. That is, he was avoidant of personal relationships, protective of his work against scrutiny, intensely concerned with autonomy, and used his work as his primary source of self-esteem and personal fulfilment. In addition, he suffered overt mental illness.

  When he was just over fifty, Newton became transiently psychotic. Some have claimed that his illness was the result of poisoning with mercury, which Newton used in his experiments. But whether or not his psychosis had a toxic origin, it resulted in an exaggeration of his suspiciousness to the point where he broke with his friend Pepys, and believed that the philosopher Locke was endeavouring to ‘embroil’ him with women. This paranoid episode was succeeded by a period of depression in which he wrote to Locke begging his forgiveness for having had uncharitable thoughts of him. Newton appears to have made a good recovery. He moved from Cambridge to London, became Warden and then Master of the Mint, and was also elected President of the Royal Society. He remained celibate, but his fame brought him considerable satisfaction and a wide acquaintance. George II and Queen Caroline are said to have often entertained him. He continued to revise his scientific publications and to work on his theological studies and his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended. He died in his eighty-fifth year.

  Kant, Wittgenstein and Newton were all men of genius who, however different they may have been in other ways, shared a vast capacity for original, abstract thought with a lack of close involvement with other human beings. Indeed, it could reasonably be argued that, if they had had wives and families, their achievements would have been impossible. For the higher reaches of abstraction demand long periods of solitude and intense concentration which are hard to find if a man is subject to the emotional demands of a spouse and children.

  Psycho-analysts will point to the obvious fact that these three men were technically ‘abnormal’, and I concede that all three exhibited more than the usual share of what is generally deemed ‘psychopathology’. Nevertheless, all three survived and made important contributions to human knowledge and understanding which, I consider, they could not have made if they had not been predomi nantly solitary. Would they have been happier if they had been able, or more inclined, to seek personal fulfilment in love rather than in their work? It is impossible to say. What should be emphasized is that mankind would be infinitely the poorer if such men of genius were unable to flourish, and we must therefore consider that their traits of personality, as well as their high intelligence, are biologically adaptive. The psychopathology of such men is no more than an exaggeration of traits which can be found in all of us. We all need to find some order in the world, to make some sense out of our existence. Those who are particularly concerned with such a search bear witness to the fact that interpersonal relationships are not the only way of finding emotional fulfilment.

  11

  The Third Period

  ‘In our navels, it is music, among all the arts, that isolates the individual from the society of his contemporaries, makes him aware of his separateness and, finally, provides a personal significance to his life regardless of his social or even personal loyalties. It is the one measure of survival which never fails …’

  Alex Aronson

  At the beginning of life, survival depends upon ‘object-relationships’. The human infant cannot care for itself, and is dependent upon the care of others throughout many long years of childhood. Toward the end of life, the opposite condition obtains. Although illness or injury may make the elderly physically dependent, emotional dependence tends to decline. The old often show less interest in interpersonal relationships, are more content to be alone, and become more preoccupied with their own, internal concerns. It is not my intention to suggest that old people do not continue to be interested in their spouses, children, and grandchildren; but rather to point out that the intensity of this interest somewhat declines. There is often an increase in objectivity toward others combined with a decrease in identification with them. This may be why relationships between grandparents and grandchildren are often easier than between parents and children. The grandchild does not feel that as much is expected of him by grandparents as is expected by parents, and may thus establish an easier, less reciprocally demanding relationship with them.

  This change in intensity of involvement is partly determined by a decline in the insistence of the sexual impulse which, until middle age or later, compels most men and women to engage in intimacy. It may also be a merciful provision of Nature, designed to lessen the pain of the inevitable parting from loved ones which death brings in its train. Man is the only creature who can see his own death coming; and, when he does, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. He prepares for death by freeing himself from mundane goals and attachments, and turns instead to the cultivation of his own interior garden. Both Jung and Freud exemplify this change. They each survived into their eighties, and both almost abandoned interest in psychotherapy in favour of ideas and theories about human nature. In old age, there is a tendency to turn from empathy toward abstraction; to be less involved in life’s dramas, more concerned with life’s patterns.

  This change, like other aspects of human nature, can be most clearly seen in the productions of those who have left behind a series of works of abiding interest. When men and women of genius live long enough, changes in style become so apparent that it is customary to divide their work into periods, often designated ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third’, or ‘early’, ‘middle’, and ‘late’. The third or late period is relevant to the main theme of this book, since it is a time when communication with others tends to be replaced by works depending more upon solitaiy meditation.

  The significance of the first two periods in the life of an artist is not difficult to determine. Even the most gifted men and women have to learn their craft, and they are bound to be influe
nced by their teachers and predecessors. The first period, therefore, although it may be characterized by works of undoubted genius, is one in which the artist has usually not fully discovered his individual voice. Bernard Berenson defined genius as ‘the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training’,1 and as an artist becomes more confident, he gains the courage to dispense with whatever aspects of the past are irrelevant to himself, and enters upon his second period, in which both his mastery and his individuality are clearly manifest. In this period, the need to communicate whatever he has to say to as wide a public as possible is usually evident.

  The second period may occupy the greater part of an artist’s life, and many of the greatest geniuses have not lived long enough to enter upon a third phase in their creative output. Amongst composers, for example, Mozart, Schubert, Purcell, Chopin, and Mendelssohn lived such brief lives that, in spite of their astonishing precocity, they did not have time to show the kind of change which is manifest in the works of Beethoven and Liszt.

  Beethoven lived until the age of fifty-seven: not an advanced age by modern standards, but sufficiently so for his works to provide a good example of the three periods referred to. (This is, of course, a simplification to which musical scholars can find exceptions; but, in broad terms, the ordinary music-lover can at once hear what is meant.) Beethoven’s string quartets divide naturally into three groups. The first set of six, op. 18, were embarked upon during Beethoven’s twenty-eighth year and preoccupied him during 1798 and 1799. The first three of the set were published in June 1801, the second three four months later. Although no one else could have composed them, Kerman writes that ‘they reveal some clear traces of Haydn and some remarkably strong traces of Mozart’.2 They are certainly enjoyable, but not echt Beethoven in the sense in which the later quartets are.

  The three quartets dedicated to Count Razumovsky, op. 59, nos. 1–3, plus the so-called ‘Harp’ Quartet op. 74 and the Quartet in F minor op. 95, are generally grouped together as the ‘middle’ quartets. The Razumovsky quartets were written during the years 1804–6; op. 74 in 1809, and op. 95 in 1810. The early 1800s were years of immense activity for Beethoven. The ‘Eroica’ Symphony of 1803–4 represents an entirely new dimension in symphonic music. The Waldstein and Appassionata sonatas, composed mainly in 1804 and 1805, are quite different from any piano sonatas which had gone before. It is worth recalling that these ‘heroic’ works were composed after the Heiligenstadt Testament which, as we saw earlier, was written in 1802. Beethoven’s deafness was already severe, and later changes in his style cannot be attributed to increasing withdrawal into himself on that account alone.

  The Razumovsky quartets also illustrate this new departure. They reveal Beethoven’s power, energy and confidence as well as his capacity for depicting the deepest emotion. (Compare, for example, the moving adagios of op. 59 no. 1 and op. 59 no. 2 with the exhilaration of the finale of op. 59 no. 3.) These wonderful quartets are both entirely individual and also in a different category from the op. 18 set, enjoyable as those early quartets certainly are.

  Between 1806 and 1809, Beethoven completed the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth symphonies, the Violin Concerto and the Fourth and Fifth piano concertos, as well as a number of smaller works. In 1809 came the ‘Harp’ Quartet, so-called because of the pizzicato exchanges between the instruments in the first movement. It is a beautiful work, but perhaps should be regarded as a transitional piece which attempts no striking innovation. The same is not true of its successor, the F minor quartet op. 95. This is an extremely compressed, powerful, almost violent work. Beethoven himself named it quartetto serioso. Coming as it does at the end of the series of ‘middle’ quartets, some commentators have thought it closer in spirit to the series of the five ‘last’ quartets. Kerman writes:

  In the opinion of the present writer, and not his alone, certainly, the Quartet in F minor stands at the highest summit of Beethoven’s artistic achievement up to the end of the second period.3

  The next group of quartets, the five ‘last’ quartets, were not embarked upon until the 1820s. It is probable that the first of the group, op. 127 in E flat, was begun in 1822, but laid aside until 1824 to allow Beethoven to complete the Ninth Symphony. The last of the five, op. 135 in F major, was composed during August and September 1826. The substitute last movement of op. 130, written at the insistence of his publisher as an alternative to the Great Fugue, was completed later that autumn, and was the last music which Beethoven composed. He died on 24 March 1827. Martin Cooper writes of Beethoven’s late style:

  Nothing is conceded to the listener, no attempt is made to capture his attention or hold his interest. Instead the composer communes with himself or contemplates his vision of reality, thinking (as it were) aloud and concerned only with the pure essence of his own thoughts and with the musical processes from which that thought itself is often indistinguishable.4

  The middle three of these last quartets, op. 132 in A minor, op. 130 in B flat major and op. 131 in C sharp minor, were for a long period considered unintelligible. They certainly show a considerable departure from conventional sonata form. The A minor quartet has five movements; the B flat major quartet has six movements; and the C sharp minor quartet has seven movements. There are frequent, sudden changes of tempo, unexpected juxtapositions of themes, and unpredictable interruptions to the flow of the music. Kerman gives the illuminating tide ‘Dissociation and Integration’ to his chapter on opp. 130 and 131. After discussing that extraordinary and violent piece of music, the Great Fugue, which was the original finale to op. 130, Kerman writes:

  In all this, it seems to me indicated that Beethoven was working toward some new idea of order or coherence in the cyclic composition, an order markedly different from the traditional psychological sequence that he had developed in the earlier music. This new order is not easy to comprehend, because on the evidence of the Quartet in? flat, the idea was not entirely realized.5

  There is an interesting parallel to be found in J. W. N. Sullivan’s book, Beethoven, first published in 1927. After discussing the significance and usefulness of conventional sonata form to express psychological processes, he goes on to write:

  But in the quartets we are discussing, Beethoven’s experience could not be presented in this form. The connection between the various movements is altogether more organic than that of the four-movement sonata form. In these quartets the movements radiate as it were, from a central experience. They do not represent stages in a journey, each stage being independent and existing in its own right. They represent separate experiences, but the meaning they take on in the quartet is derived from their relation to a dominating, central experience. This is characteristic of the mystic vision, to which everything in the world appears unified in the light of one fundamental experience.6

  Wilfrid Meilers writes in similar terms about the Diabelli Variations, Beethoven’s longest piano work, which was published in 1823. He calls them

  a circular rather than linear work … Like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and despite the difference between the two composers’ approach, they rather see ‘a world in a grain of sand’, making us aware that experience is a totality in which the trivial and the sublime coexist.7

  In the last chapter of this book, we shall see that Sullivan’s and Mellers’s delineation of a central experience uniting opposites has parallels in the work of Jung.

  Sullivan is more convinced than Kerman that Beethoven fully expressed the new vision toward which he was striving. As an amateur, my own guess is that he did not completely achieve this. Had he lived longer, we might have had works which more perfectly exemplified the synthesis of elements, the unity which he was seeking. Most people would agree that he came nearest to it in the C sharp minor quartet, which Beethoven himself considered his greatest. As Maynard Solomon points out,

  A continuity of rhythmic design adds to the feeling that this is one of the most completely integrated of Beethoven’s works. But there are many pressures toward di
scontinuity at work in this Quartet: six distinct main keys, thirty-one changes of tempo (ten more than in opus 130), a variety of textures, and a diversity of forms within the movements – fugue, suite, recitative, variation, scherzo, aria and sonata form – which makes the achievement of unity all the more miraculous.8

  The last quartet of all, op. 135 in F major, seems to be a return to an earlier genre, perhaps a relaxation after intense spiritual effort, or an expression of peace attained. The question and answer ‘Muss es sein? Es muss sein’, which is the epigraph of the finale, probably had a trivial origin. Schindler connects it with Beethoven’s unwillingness to hand out money for housekeeping. But the fact that Beethoven placed it where he did may also be interpreted as a sign that this habitual rebel had reached some kind of reconciliation with fate.

  Beethoven’s last quartets strikingly exemplify the main features of the third period in a creative person’s life. Third period works share certain characteristics. First, they are less concerned with communication than what has gone before. Second, they are often unconventional in form, and appear to be striving to achieve a new kind of unity between elements which at first sight are extremely disparate. Third, they are characterized by an absence of rhetoric or any need to convince. Fourth, they seem to be exploring remote areas of experience which are intrapersonal or suprapersonal rather than interpersonal. That is, the artist is looking into the depths of his own psyche and is not very much concerned as to whether anyone else will follow him or understand him. These features are plainly to be discerned in the last quartets of Beethoven; but they are also to be found in the work of other composers, provided they lived long enough.