The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  13 Darkness Visible p. 24

  14 It is a view not limited to the humanities. The physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg famously remarked that, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” In Weinberg’s view the universe, and everything in it, including ourselves, was created 15 billion years ago, when less than nothing exploded for no reason (the Big Bang). One almost prefers Philipp Mainländer’s idea of creation via cosmic suicide. Such pronouncements as Weinberg’s troubled thinkers like Camus, but our own post-post-modern sensibility, nursed on nihilism as on mother’s milk, accepts them as given and leaves it at that.

  15 The Myth of Sisyphus p. 19.

  16 Ibid. p. 13.

  17 H.G. Wells Experiment in Autobiography (Gollanz: London, 1934) p. 16.

  18 H.G. Wells Mind at the End of Its Tether (Heinemann: London, 1945) pp. 1, 4.

  19 The Myth of Sisyphus pp. 107, 111. The Greeks had a genius for images of futility. Think of Midas, Tantalus, even Penelope’s weaving in the Odyssey. It suggests that ‘the absurd’ is perhaps not as modern a discovery as the existentialists thought.

  20 Ibid. p. 13.

  21 Ibid.

  22 Ibid. p. 109.

  23 Ibid.

  24 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (translator Constance Garnett) (Heinemann: London, 1945) p. 142.

  25 Robert S. DeRopp The Master Game (Picador: London, 1974) p. 11.

  26 Hermann Hesse Steppenwolf (Penguin: Harmonddsworth, 1983) p. 33

  27 Ibid. pp. 34–35.

  28 Ibid. p. 35.

  29 Ibid. p. 39.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Ibid. p. 45.

  32 Hermann Heilner, like Harry Haller, and the unnamed H.H. of Hesse’s esoteric fantasy The Journey to the East, are clear indications that like Goethe’s, Hesse’s writings form “the fragments of a great confession.”

  33 For more on Hesse and the sixties, see my Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (Disinformation Company: New York, 2003).

  34 A theme taken up in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider.

  35 Steppenwolf pp. 58–61.

  36 Ibid. p. 206.

  37 Ibid. pp. 252–253.

  The Romantic Suicide

  Steppenwolf is an anomaly among Hesse’s novels. It’s the only one that takes place entirely within a city, albeit a city more aligned with Hesse’s psyche than with the Zurich and Basel upon which it’s based. Unlike the urban milieu of much existential writing, Hesse’s other fictions inhabit more exotic locales: an idealized Medieval Age, a mystic orient, a future utopia, or, in the tradition of German Romanticism, against the backdrop of a beautiful, idyllic nature. And while the existential suicide is led to self-destruction either as a gesture of his sovereign freedom, or, with Stavrogin, as an escape from a deadening half-life, like Harry Haller, the romantic suicide has a more emotional, even erotic, relationship with death. The romantic suicide has moments when, like Kirilov, he experiences a kind of ecstasy, an overwhelming feeling that, “Everything is good.” Yet, it’s precisely this ecstasy that undermines him. After his flights of deep feeling (which, more times than not, are triggered by the opposite sex), the return to the mundane world is a shock. Stolid, implacable reality remains, and the world, life, and self-consciousness become unbearable. Death, the great unknown, with its apparent promise of release from the cares of a troublesome existence, takes on an alluring appeal. As the lyrics of a sentimental pop song of the 1970s, about another suicide, Vincent Van Gogh, have it, many romantics came to believe that “this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you,” the “you” more often than not being themselves.

  Death has seemed the way out of inescapable situations for many tragic couples. Cleopatra followed Mark Anthony in suicide. The story of Tristan and Isolde inspired Richard Wagner to compose probably the most seductive piece of music in the repertoire, the Liebestod, “love death.” Romeo, mistaking a sleeping Juliet for a dead one, kills himself; and Juliet, when she awakes and finds Romeo dead, follows suit. The equation love = death seems somehow imprinted in the western psyche; certainly this seems the case at least since the late eighteenth century and the rise of the Romantic movement. Death and sex are so entwined in our cultural consciousness, that the sexual orgasm has even earned the sobriquet of la petite mort, ‘the little death’. The ecstasy of orgasm obliterates our rational consciousness, and, with any luck, for a brief while we enter a kind of trance, in which we are ‘dead to the world’. Obliteration of their rational consciousness is something many romantics sought, and the most obliterating experience of all seemed to be death. With this in mind, it’s strange to think that a session of mutually satisfying sex is something like a suicide pact.

  Perhaps the most extreme example of this erotic yearning for nothingness is found in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s influential Symbolist play Axel. Although little read and even less performed today, Villiers’ play had a profound effect on the literary elite of the time, especially W. B. Yeats, who was among the audience at the play’s first performance in Paris in 1894. The plot of Axel is somewhat convoluted, involving mystical societies and hidden treasures, but the central characters are the ennui-ridden Rosicrucian aesthete Axel d’Auërsperg and the ex-nun Sara Emmanuèle de Maupers. Axel spends his days studying occult texts and mystical philosophy in his castle, cut off from crude reality. When his philistine cousin Kaspar d’Auërsperg suggests that Axel enjoy himself by making use of the treasure his father has hidden in the castle, Axel runs him through. And when Axel discovers Sara, the renegade nun, who has come looking for the treasure, they battle, only to discover that they are soul mates. Yet Axel’s romantic world rejection is so deep that, after announcing their love to each other, he convinces Sara that their passion can only be consummated in a higher sphere, i.e. death, and suggests a dual suicide. Sara, more red blooded than the dreamy Axel, suggests at least one night of a more earthly passion, before they quit their mortal coils. Yet Axel rejects the idea with contempt. “O Sara,” he cries. “Tomorrow I would be prisoner of your splendid body. Its delights would have fettered the chaste energy impelling me at this instant. But … suppose our transports should die away, suppose some accursed hour would strike when our love, paling, would be consumed by its own flames … Oh! Let’s not wait for that sad hour …”

  Still not convinced that suicide is their best choice – after all, they are young, beautiful, rich, and have an entire castle at their disposal – Sara makes one last attempt to draw Axel back into the world. Compressing her argument into a single plea, she throws herself at Axel and commands him to, “Come, live!”

  “Life?” asks Axel. “No – Our existence is already full and its cup runneth over! What hourglass could measure the hours of this night? The future? … we have exhausted it… . As for living? Our servants will do that for us.”

  This haughty, “As for living? Our servants will do that for us,” became the motto of scores of delicate, world weary aesthetes that followed Axel in his world rejection. Although most associated with the fin-de-siècle, it’s a sensibility common to youth, whose idealism, as yet not chastened by the rough surface of life, finds the contrast between the world as it is and the world as it should be unacceptable. Unwilling to give up the ideal, they hold reality in contempt, and, in different ways, seek an escape from it. Most often the means of escape are drugs, but in some extreme cases, the preferred method is death.

  One romantic who sought in death release from an impossible situation, and whose actions are said to have triggered a spate of copycat suicides, was the unfortunate hero of Goethe’s early novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe’s novel of unrequited love, social barriers, romantic extremes and suicide, kick-started the period of Sturm und Drang, ‘storm and stress’, that blazed across Europe in the late eighteenth century, before blossoming into full-blown Romanticism. Yet Goethe himself soon outgrew this sensibility and remarked that by the time he had completed Werther
, he experienced a sense of freedom and deliverance which allowed him, more or less, to grow up. Goethe wasn’t lacking unsuccessful love affairs, but in writing Werther he recognized that, unpleasant and disappointing as they were, they weren’t as devastating as many believed. In later years, commenting on the fate of his hero, Goethe remarked: “I was never such a fool as Werther.” Women are delightful and love rapturous, but neither, Goethe implies, are worth killing yourself over.

  The novel, which has come to be seen as the first great example of ‘confessional’ literature, is based on two real life incidents: Goethe’s own brief unrequited loved for Charlotte Buff, who was already engaged to another man; and the actual suicide of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, an acquaintance of Goethe’s who killed himself over his love for a married woman.

  In 1772, Goethe, who had already earned some notoriety as the author of the drama Götz von Berlichingen, arrived in the small town of Wetzlar, near Frankfurt, sent there by his father to make contacts and find a career for himself. The twenty-three year old poet and playwright preferred spending his days reading Homer or Pindar and following his interests wherever they may lead. One place they led to was a ball held at Volpertshausen, a small village not far from Wetzlar. There he met and promptly became enchanted with Charlotte Buff. Nineteen, lively and “physically attractive in a rather conventional style,”1 Charlotte captivated Goethe and the next day he called on her family home. Charlotte’s father was the administrator for a wealthy aristocratic society called the Order of the Teutonic Nights; the social connections, grand farmhouse, and mixture of sophisticated and rural character appealed to Goethe, and this made the already alluring Charlotte even more desirable. Yet Goethe soon discovered another had got there first. Charlotte was engaged to Johann Christian Kestner, a serious minded thirty-one year old who, like Goethe, was attached to the Imperial Court. Unlike Goethe, Kestner pursued his career options with greater purpose; hence it was that after spending many hours drafting legal papers, he would show up at Charlotte’s home and discover that Goethe had already spent much of the afternoon with her.

  Kestner, who was as amused as he was annoyed at Goethe’s puppy love, knew the poet was no real threat. Charlotte was a sensible young woman who realized that Goethe could spend time with her being charming because he had little else to do; she also recognized that Kestner’s absence was the cause of providing the two of them with the wherewithal to get married and have a life together. Kestner, in fact, displayed the virtues of maturity, tolerance and patience that Goethe himself would extol in later years. Unlike many jealous lovers, Kestner could speak highly of Goethe. Writing to a friend, Kestner spoke of Goethe as “a man of many talents … a true genius and a man of character.” Although Kestner recognized that Goethe was “altogether a man of violent emotions,” he also saw that he exhibited “considerable self-control,” a virtue Goethe later found lacking in the Romantics that followed him. Goethe took to Kestner as well, commenting on his “calm and even behaviour, clarity of opinions, and firmness in action and speech.”2

  The three became good friends, not quite forming a Jules et Jim ménage, but establishing for a time something of a unit. Nevertheless, knowing well that she was already engaged, Goethe fell in love with Charlotte. His devotion and ubiquity at times irritated Kestner, whose work often drew him away. Writing in his diary, Kestner complained of Goethe that “however much of a philosopher he is, and however well-disposed he may be towards me, he does not care to see me coming to pass my time in pleasures with my girl.” Understandably, although he was “well-disposed towards him,” Kestner admitted that he did “not like to find him alone with my girl, entertaining her.”3 Yet for the most part Kestner tolerated Goethe’s attentions, and Charlotte herself never encouraged Goethe to believe they could be anything more than friends.

  Looking at the affair now, it seems clear that Goethe was probably more in love with being in love than he was with Charlotte. In any case, she was too sensible a woman to make him happy. The practical, orderly virtues he admired in her wouldn’t have mixed well with his poetic temperament, and she herself wanted a dependable mate, a ‘good earner’, which at that point Goethe wasn’t. What Goethe really wanted was for the situation to continue indefinitely. Consummating his desire in some act of betrayal would only make things sordid. Goethe was no seducer, at least not in this instance; the idea of the beloved, and the enchanting glow contemplating her gave to the world, was what he wanted. More than likely he already knew the truth of what his friend Johann Heinrich Merck told him: that if Charlotte broke off her engagement to Kestner in order to marry him, Goethe would head for the hills, a scenario he had already acted out on more than one occasion. Like the Romantics that followed him, the young Goethe “sought to make permanent the fleeting experience of falling in love.”4 The practical realities of human relationships would only be a bother.

  Such ecstasy, however, is by definition short-lived, and Charlotte finally brought an end to the daydream. She gently but categorically let Goethe know that anything deeper than friendship was impossible between them. After four months of worshipping her, Goethe finally got the message, and left. Charlotte cried when she read his farewell note, yet he and Kestner were soon corresponding. In Koblenz, Goethe met up with Merck, and was introduced to Maximiliane von La Roche, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the authoress Sophie von La Roche. Not surprisingly, he promptly became enchanted with her too. In Dichtung und Warheit (“Poetry and Truth”) Goethe remarks that, “It is very pleasant if a new passion awakens within us before the old one has quite faded away.” Fickle, perhaps, but his interest in Maximiliane weaned him off his dreams of Charlotte. Maximiliane, too, disappointed him; she married a merchant instead. But by then unrequited love was only one more of life’s continuous lessons.

  Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, an acquaintance of Goethe, Kestner and Charlotte, was a less robust soul than Goethe, and when it became clear that his passion for the married Elizabeth Herd would go unfulfilled, he chose a more drastic option. On the night of 29 October 1772, little more than a month after Goethe had left Wetzlar, Jerusalem shot himself with a pistol he had borrowed from Kestner. It’s a truism that life imitates art, but in Jerusalem’s case the parallel is striking.

  Jerusalem was among a group of people that Goethe knew in Wetzlar, but although they had studied law in Leipzig at the same time, they were never close. Jerusalem had a reputation as an agreeable and dependable character; the famous writer Gottfried Lessing knew him and thought highly of him, and while not engaged as a secretary to the ambassador of Braunschweig, Jerusalem occupied himself with philosophy, poetry and painting. Unlike Kestner, Jerusalem had a low opinion of Goethe, calling him a “fop” and a “scribbler”. In Dichtung und Warheit, Goethe describes Jerusalem as polite and gentle, and pointed out his appearance, remarking on his blue frock-coat, buff leather waistcoat, and breeches – attire that would become very popular in years to come.

  Jerusalem had a reputation for being eccentric. Kestner speaks of his habit of long walks in the moonlight, his taste for solitude and tendency to brood, and the social snub these character traits had cost him. He had a penchant for drawings of deserted landscapes and had written an essay defending suicide, but the most memorable feature about Jerusalem was his doomed love for the married Elizabeth Herd. Apparently Herd did little to encourage Jerusalem’s affections, and when he announced his love to her, she begged her husband to forbid Jerusalem entry to their home. Soon after Jerusalem wrote to Kestner, saying he was about to take a long journey, and asking for the loan of Kestner’s pistols, a not unusual precaution at the time. Kestner wasn’t suspicious and didn’t guess the use his loan would be put to. After setting his papers in order and making arrangements, Jerusalem spent the evening at his home, in front of a fire and a jug of wine, having told his servant to be prepared for an early departure. Then, some time between midnight and one am, Jerusalem shot himself with Kestner’s pistol, sitting in his chair, dressed in his buff waistco
at, boots, and blue frock-coat. When his servant found him the next morning, he was still alive. A great deal of blood stained the floor; Jerusalem had apparently dragged himself across the room to the window. A doctor was called but it was no use. When Kestner heard the news he rushed to Jerusalem’s rooms, realizing the real reason for the loan of the pistols. By noon Jerusalem was dead and he was buried that night. Goethe heard the story from Kestner and wrote back, telling of his meeting Jerusalem once in the moonlight and remarking on the young man’s loneliness. Taking his own experience with Charlotte, and Jerusalem’s sad death, Goethe brought the two together and created a classic of tragic Romanticism.

  When Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther appeared in 1774, two years after Jerusalem’s suicide, it was an immediate success. It told the tale of a passionate, poetic, idealistic young man, his ill-fated love for a woman betrothed to another, and his tragic suicide when that love was unrequited. It was clear the story was based partly on Goethe’s own love for Charlotte Buff, and partly on Jerusalem’s sad end. The fact that Werther’s suicide was only one among several indications – albeit the most drastic – that his idealistic temperament was ill-suited for coming to grips with life, went practically unnoticed. Understandably, the fact that it was based on a real life suicide overshadowed everything else. Kestner and Charlotte were not entirely pleased about their inclusion in the book, and the notoriety they earned from it annoyed them. The character ‘Albert’ (based on Kestner) became synonymous with a philistine sensibility, and to be called ‘an Albert’ was considered an insult. ‘Lotte’ (Charlotte) was suspected of being Goethe’s mistress, which she never was, and was the subject of abuse when her virtue became known. In a letter to a friend, Kestner pointed out that in the first half of the book, Werther is Goethe; in the second half, he is Jerusalem. Kestner made clear that although some of the incidents had a basis in their relationship with Goethe, many were pure invention. But to the general reading public, none of this mattered. What struck their imaginations was that the suicide was based on a ‘real’ character, and the strange triple entity of Werther – Jerusalem – Goethe became an overnight sensation. The fact that practically all of the novel’s readers misunderstood Goethe’s intent was ignored.