The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  The novel that more or less has suicide as the main theme is The Possessed; in it two of the central characters kill themselves, and there are also some murders. Dostoyevsky wrote for a popular audience, and books like Crime and Punishment, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov are in many ways ‘thrillers’. (We can say this of practically all the fiction written by existentialists; given that they deal with ‘life at the edge’, they tend to evoke a ‘noir’ atmosphere; the anti-hero of Camus’ The Stranger, for example, is arrested for shooting an Arab.) Yet in focusing on crime, murder, suicide, and other dark aspects of human existence like incest, paedophilia, and madness, Dostoyevsky can throw a spotlight on the extremities of human life, and through this arrive at a deeper insight into its meaning.

  The plot of the novel centres around the activities of the radical Pyotr Verkovensky, who is based on the real-life anarchist Sergei Netchaev. A ruthless fanatic, who combined political idealism with the mind of a thug, Netchaev is believed to have been involved in the plot to assassinate Alexander II while imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress; when asked by his followers whether they should rescue him or focus on killing the Tsar, he replied unhesitatingly that they should kill the Tsar. Alexander II was removed, and Netchaev remained in prison, where he died of scurvy. The plot of The Possessed is based on an incident in Netchaev’s career. Posing as a representative of the ‘European Revolutionary Alliance’, Netchaev brought together small groups of student radicals into what he called “revolutionary committees”, which he planned to use to unleash a wave of killings. When one student thought better of this, the others suspected that he would betray them. Netchaev arranged for him to be murdered. One of his followers had conveniently planned to commit suicide, and Netchaev intended to have him write a suicide note, confessing to the killing and to various other crimes committed by the ‘revolutionary committees’. In the novel, this student is the ‘suicide maniac’ Kirilov. But while Netchaev/Verkovensky provides the action – there are several murders and a town is set on fire – the real heart of The Possessed is the existential drama of Kirilov, and his fellow suicide, Stavrogin.

  Although Kirilov and Stavrogin both commit suicide, they do so for very different reasons. As Camus suggests, suicide can be seen as an act of human freedom. This is how Kirilov sees it. And in a godless world, such an act is the paramount expression of the fact that Kirilov himself is God – or at least that there is no will greater than his own. Kirilov cannot believe in the Old Testament God, because he cannot conceive of anything more real than his own inner world, his subjectivity, his will. And to prove this, he decides to kill himself. Suicide is the one, ultimate irreversible act by which he can assert his absolute freedom. The logic isn’t easy to follow, and as one of the few likable characters in Dostoyevsky (most often they’re rather unpleasant individuals, like the anti-hero of Notes From Underground), one wants him to find some other way to show his freedom. But this willingness to give up his life at any time in order to express his freedom, creates in Kirilov a profound detachment from life’s pettiness and pointlessness. Like Graham Greene, he is aware of life’s “infinite possibilities;” and like Greene, by “risking the total loss” of the world, Kirilov becomes almost painfully aware of its beauty. He speaks of seeing a leaf, and its sheer ‘is-ness’ produces in him the recognition that “all is good.” (Again, this is another example of Dostoyevsky’s ‘visions of meaning’, and the reader is referred to the selection from The Possessed in the Suicidal Miscellany.) As he is about to be shot, Graham Greene’s ‘whisky priest’ in The Power and the Glory understands that it would be “easy to be a saint.” Kirilov knows this too. Verkovensky and his plans are irrelevant. Kirilov’s display of will is essential, and one has the impression that if Kirilov doesn’t kill himself now, the idea will haunt him, and that eventually, he will do it.

  But if Kirilov kills himself in order to express his freedom, Stavrogin does so because of too much freedom. Again, like the teenaged Graham Greene, Stavrogin has reached a state of spiritual emptiness, the accidie that attacked many Christian mystics, “a paralysis of the will, a failure of the appetite, a condition of generalized boredom, total disenchantment.”25 Like Hamlet, for Stavrogin, the world has become “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.” But if for Hamlet, the Everlasting has “fix’d his canon against self-slaughter,” Stavrogin knows no such hesitation. He will kill himself, eventually. But to get to that point, he will have to make a few detours.

  Throughout the novel, Stavrogin engages in what appear to be rather strange, pointless acts, as if he had been possessed by Poe’s ‘imp of the perverse’. At a very proper social event, he kisses someone else’s wife. He pulls a retired general’s nose, bites the ear of an old man, and lets himself be slapped in the face without hitting back. He’s involved in a duel and lets his opponent fire first; when its his turn he merely shoots in the air. He admits that an imbecilic peasant woman is his wife, when practically every desirable woman in the book would be happy to sleep with him. Yet this is only the surface of his unaccountable behaviour, and in the ‘confession’ that was left out of early editions of the book, he relates a series of acts that the writer Merezhkovsky regarded as “the concentrated essence of horror.” “Stavrogin’s Confession” (originaly published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press; Woolf, of course, was another suicide) recounts how Stavrogin shifts from these odd but harmless gestures, to acts of sheer evil. He steals money he doesn’t need from a poor family, when he knows they will be devastated. He lets the young daughter of his landlady be punished for stealing his penknife, when he knows it has only been misplaced. He later rapes the girl and, although he could stop her, allows her to kill herself when she realizes what has happened. Through all this, Stavrogin remains impassive; he feels nothing, and his whole array of crimes is an attempt to shock himself into some sense of reality. They fail. His ‘freedom’ offers no resistance, he encounters no barriers, and he may just as well do good as do evil: the result is the same. Where Kirilov embraces suicide as an act of freedom in a world brimming with ‘meaning’ (“Everything’s good”), Stavrogin finally kills himself because he is weary of not existing.

  One writer who seems to have combined Kirilov and Stavrogin in one character is the German novelist and Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse. Harry Haller, the middle-aged existential hero of Hesse’s Steppenwolf, is another suicide. At the beginning of Harry’s journal, which makes up the bulk of the novel, Haller reflects that his life has become full of “the moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, luke-warm days of a discontented middle-aged man; days without special pains, without special cares, without particular worry, without despair; days on which the question whether the time has not come to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have a fatal accident while shaving should be considered […]”26 (Adalbert Stifter was a 19th century German writer who slit his throat with a razor.) Although Haller admits “there is much to be said for contentment,” after a short time it fills him with “irrepressible loathing and nausea”27 and he finds he must throw himself on the road to pleasure, or if that fails, to pain. “A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols […]” even, as Stavrogin did, “to seduce a little girl.”28

  Like Stavrogin, Haller too suffers from a sense of unreality which he cannot bear, and which he tries to relieve by drastic measures (although he is too decent to commit the crimes Stavrogin does) and he decides that on his fiftieth birthday, which is approaching, he will allow himself to give back the entrance ticket, and commit suicide. Yet, like Kirilov, Haller too has his moments when “Everything is good.” Sitting in a tavern, resting from an evening walk in which he bemoaned the cheapness and emptiness of the modern age (“I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people
to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafés with the suffocating and obtrusive music …”29), Haller sips a glass of wine. Suddenly, his despair vanishes. He is no longer the “beast astray, who finds neither home, nor joy, nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.”30 No. “The golden trail was blazed and I was reminded of the eternal, of Mozart, and the stars.”31 Harry is always having these flashes of poetry and the sublime, which blow away his dark mood and remind him that he is not a wretched “wolf of the steppes”, a lonely, solitary, unhappy man (a ‘lone nutter’, as we would say today), but something akin to the gods. Yet these moods pass, and he finds himself once again back in his discontent, considering the example of Adalbert Stifter.

  That Harry’s initials and those of his creator are the same suggests that Hesse is writing about himself. And it is true that Hesse went through a spiritual crisis in middle age, a plunge into debauchery peppered with thoughts of suicide – including his fiftieth birthday as the day to end it all – which is depicted in the novel and in a series of poems entitled Crisis, written at the same time. Hesse had earlier brushes with suicide as well. A ‘problem child’ who rejected the authoritarian educational system of his day, in his teens Hesse ran away from the seminary at Maulbronn (later used as the setting for his novel Narcissus and Goldmund) where he was groomed for a career in the clergy; when found he was sent to a institution for the mentally retarded. Soon after he made his first suicide attempt, after being rejected by a girl seven years his elder. He made another attempt not long after, and throughout his life, which was filled with personal, marital, health and professional problems, Hesse’s mind always turned toward suicide as a possible means of escape. It was also a theme in much of his fiction, practically all of which is a thinly disguised account of Hesse’s own life and struggles. The eponymous hero of the early novel Hermann Lauscher kills himself. So does the schoolboy Hans Giebenrath in Beneath the Wheel (also published as The Prodigy). Heinrich Muoth in Gertrude takes his life, as does Klein in the novella Klein and Wagner. Emil Sinclair in Demian, written after Hesse’s psychoanalytic sessions with the Jungian Josef Lang, counsels another lost youth against killing himself. Hesse’s Indian alter ego, Siddhartha, in the novel of that name, makes an unsuccessful suicide attempt. And although it is not an outright attempt at suicide, Joseph Knecht, the hero of Hesse’s last and monumental novel The Glass Bead Game, spurred by thoughts of youth and the encouragement of his young student, yet knowing the danger, plunges into an ice cold lake and is overcome and drowns.

  Steppenwolf however is the novel with suicide at its centre. Hesse’s theme in all of his work is the reconciliation of opposites; he most often depicts this through the device of two characters, who embody the conflicting poles of this struggle, which was Hesse’s own. In Beneath the Wheel, for example, Hans Giebenrath, the gifted schoolboy crushed by the system, is the Hesse who was led to attempt suicide by the unfeeling teachers and ignorant philistines who disparaged his sensitivity and yearning to be a poet; Hermann Heilner is Hesse’s idealized self-image, the young rebel who runs away from home and school and successfully becomes a poet.32 Probably the most well known of these dual personalities are the world-rejecting monk Narcissus and the life-affirming artist Goldmund. Whether Hesse ever successfully reconciled the conflicts in his psyche is debatable; in Steppenwolf, however, he discarded the motif of embodying them in two characters, and placed them, Faust-like, in one.

  Because of its drug references, ample sex and psychedelic setting – Harry tries opium and cocaine, enjoys a threesome and experiments with homosexuality and most of the action takes place in the surreal Magic Theatre, reserved “For Madmen Only” – Steppenwolf was understandably a hit with readers in the 1960s.33 But the book’s essence, which most readers missed, can be found in the remarkable “Treatise on the Steppenwolf,” that Harry purchases from a mysterious man wearing a sandwich board advertising “anarchist entertainment.” What the treatise turns out to be, is actually an essay on the metaphysics of suicide.

  After delineating Harry’s own crisis in remarkable detail, and arguing that, far from being miserable parasites on society, Steppenwolves like himself are actually the “vital force of the bourgeoisie,” enabling it to prosper and grow, admittedly at the expense of their own happiness34, the Treatise focuses on the central issue of Harry’s and Hesse’s own lives. Its analysis arrives at some surprising insights. “To call suicides only those who actually destroy themselves,” it tells us, “is false.” There are many “who in a sense are suicides only by accident and in whose being suicide has no necessary place.” There are many “of little personality and stamped with no deep impress of fate, who find their end in suicide without belonging on that account to the type of the suicide by inclination; while on the other hand, of those who are to be counted as suicides by the very nature of their being are many, perhaps a majority, who never in fact lay hands on themselves.” The peculiarity of the suicide is that “his ego … is felt to be an extremely dangerous, dubious, and doomed germ of nature; that he is always in his own eyes exposed to an extraordinary risk, as though he stood with the slightest foothold on the peak of a crag whence a slight push from without or an instant’s weakness from within suffices to precipitate him into the void.” These individuals believe that suicide “is their most probable manner of death,” and while one might suspect that such characters are inherently weak, the opposite is actually true: “among the suicides are to be found unusually tenacious and eager and also courageous natures.” But these souls “develop at the least shock the notion of suicide.” They “present themselves as those who are overtaken by the sense of guilt inherent in individuals,” who find the aim of life “not in the perfecting and moulding of the self, but in liberating themselves by going back to the mother, back to God, back to the All.” Yet although “many of these are wholly incapable of ever having recourse to real suicide,” conscious of it being a sin, they nevertheless are suicides, for they see “death and not life as the releaser.”

  They also know that suicide, “though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is far nobler and finer to be felled by life than by one’s own hand.” Knowing this, they are left to a “protracted struggle against their temptation,” as a kleptomaniac struggles against his.35

  As Hesse did himself, Harry Haller struggles against his temptation, and by the end of novel, among other things, he experiences a night at the Magic Theatre, which includes masochistic submission, group sex, terrorism, murder and even a “delightful suicide: you laugh yourself to bits.” He realizes the truth the treatise has made known to him. Although his ego yearns to be dissolved and his self obliterated in the embrace of the Mother, he rejects this path. “The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back,… but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Suicide, even, unhappy Steppenwolf, will not seriously serve your turn. You will find yourself embarked on the longer and wearier and harder road to human life.” He recognized the truth discovered in the Magic Theatre, that “the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.”36 He was, he knew, “determined to begin the game afresh.” “I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being.” And one day he would be “a better hand at the game.”37

  Notes

  1 Jorge Luis Borges The Total Library (Allen Lane: London, 2000) p. 336.

  2 There is little on Mainländer available in English, and for interested readers I suggest an article I came across on the net, and to which this section of this book is indebted. See www.thebigview.com/discussion/index.php Oddly, Mainländer turns up on quite a few Islamic websites, mostly in a note about the death of God and the virtues of suicide.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Jac
ques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence (Harper Collins: New York, 2000) p. 630.

  5 Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil (translator R.J. Hollingdale) (Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1977) p. 85.

  6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1969) p. 99.

  7 Elisabeth’s husband, Bernard Förster, however did commit suicide.

  8 Kierkegaard seemed to see the humorous side of suicide. In one of his books he tells the story of a man who walked around contemplating suicide. From out of nowhere a huge stone falls on him, and his last thought is, “Thank the Lord!” He also speaks of a horsefly which lands on a man’s nose just as he is about to throw himself into the Thames.

  9 Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus (translator Justin O’Brien) (Penguin Books: London, 2000) p. 11.

  10 Colin Wilson “An Essay on Albert Camus” in Anti-Sartre (Borgo Press: San Bernardino, 1981).

  11 William Styron Darkness Visible (Picador: London, 1991) p. 22

  12 Jean Seberg, perhaps best known for her part in Jean Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle, killed herself in 1979 with an overdose of sleeping pills. She was found several days later in her car in a cul-de-sac in Paris. She had previously tried to throw herself in front of train. A year later, her ex-husband, Romain Gary, author of The Roots of Heaven and other successful novels, shot himself in his flat in the rue du Bac. Gary is unique in being the only author to win the Prix Goncourt twice: once under his real name, and a second time under the pseudonym Émile Ajar. He also wrote books under the names Fosco Sinabaldi and Shatan Fotog. He was a film director, a diplomat, and in WWII a pilot with the Free French forces. Other suicides that Styron discusses are that of the political activist Abbie Hoffman, the poet Randall Jarrell, and the writer Primo Levi. Although many who knew Hoffman deny that his death was self-induced, they are unable to account for the fact that he had somehow swallowed 150 Phenobarbital pills. Although the official ruling in Jarrell’s death was ‘accidental’, he had been struck by a car while walking on a stretch of highway near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His presence on the road at night is unaccountable, and Newsweek reported the death as a suicide. Jarrell, too, suffered from depression, and had slashed his wrists while in hospital. At sixty-seven, Primo Levi, a survivor of Auswitch, threw himself down a stairwell in Turin.