by Gary Lachman
Within a few months of the novel’s publication, Europe was in the grip of Werthermania, and Goethe became the most famous German writer in the world. As often happens with this kind of early success, Goethe spent much of his subsequent career trying to show he was more than ‘the author of Werther’; even his masterpiece Faust, which is a classic on a par with Shakespeare and Dante, was less known in his lifetime. The ‘Werther costume’ – blue coat, buff waistcoat, breeches and riding boots – became de rigueur among the young set. There was a Werther tea, a Werther cologne, young people took to taking long walks in the woods, reciting Homer and Ossian (one of Werther’s favourite poets), and torchlight processions made their way to Jerusalem’s grave. Pilgrims from all over Europe flocked to the place, and the site was included in the travel guides of the time. Werther style poems, plays and novels were bought and read as fast as they could be published, most of an inferior literary quality which, as can be imagined, hardly mattered. There were Werther fireworks, Werther wax figures, Werther songs, Werther porcelain, and Werther jewellery. Questions posed by the novel were hotly debated: should Lotte have continued to see Werther after she and Albert were married? Romantic displays of solidarity with Werther were common. A group of Englishmen toasted Werther over Jerusalem’s grave, drew their daggers, and made speeches, but evidence for the many Werther copy-cat suicides that remain part of the novel’s myth is scant. As Michael Hulse remarks, although there are a few deaths linked to the book (and these in fact were women), reports of a ‘suicide epidemic’ are exaggerated and “the young men of Europe contented themselves with dressing in blue frock-coats and buff waistcoats, and sensibly preferred not to pull the trigger.”5 But if Werther didn’t send a generation to an early grave, as has been reported, it’s popularity was dangerous in another, less drastic way. It was less as an endorsement of suicide, than in the way its many readers misunderstood Goethe’s message, that the book was a danger. That the book was nevertheless banned in Leipzig, and that a Danish translation was aborted did little to stop the spread of the Romantic sensibility that Goethe had purged himself of by writing the book.
From his creator’s point of view, that Werther was a fool to commit suicide over a woman is clear, but that is not the extent of his foolishness. Goethe’s younger contemporary Heinrich Heine pointed out that the social issues raised in the novel were as important as the romantic ones, and that if the book had been published in the 1800s, this would have been recognized. Werther’s problem – which we can assume was Jerusalem’s as well, and indeed Goethe’s at one point – was that he did not ‘fit’ into society. He is intelligent, idealistic, poetic: valuable traits all, but not ones that guaranteed that he would be judged as an equal by his social betters. Lotte’s rejection of his love is mirrored by the rejection he receives by the aristocratic society he encounters during his tenure as secretary to an ambassador, a position taken so that he could master his feelings toward Lotte. The ambassador himself he finds difficult to take. Werther finds him “extremely trying,” “the most punctilious oaf imaginable, doing everything step by step, meticulous as a maiden aunt.”6 Werther can’t understand why he must “despair of my own powers, my own gifts, when others with paltry abilities and talents go showing off, smugly self-satisfied.”7 “What people these are, whose entire souls are occupied with protocol and ceremony, who devote their devious creative energies, for years on end, to moving one place higher up at table!”8 Werther’s own intelligence and energy is often too vital to suppress, and he frequently contradicts or corrects his employer, behaviour that earns him rebuke and the admonition to control his “hypersensitivity”, and the advice that he must learn to “moderate it and divert it into areas where it can be put to proper use and produce its rightful powerful effect.”9
Werther tries to abide by these counsels, but something happens that makes him throw his position over. A count who appreciates his talents and is fond of him invites him to dine on the same evening that he held a regular soirée with his fellow nobles. Werther did not know that he, as a subordinate, should not be present, and so he lingered, although the turned up noses of the aristocrats were enough to make him flee. Then a young woman, Miss B., whom he had got to know and whom he felt had “retained a very natural manner amidst this inflexible life” and who accepted his request to call on her, arrived. Although his “heart always feels freer” the moment he sees her, he soon realizes that she was not as ‘natural’ with him then as she had been. “Can she too be like the rest of them?” he asks. Gradually the room fills and his presence becomes an issue. Eventually and apologetically, because he does truly like him, the count has to ask him to leave. Werther makes his exit, and drives to a hill to “watch the sun set and read that magnificent book in Homer where Odysseus enjoys the hospitality of the excellent swineherd.”10 Later he discovers that his faux pas is the talk of the town, and he hears from Miss B. that she had been warned against keeping up an acquaintance with him. The idea that he is being talked about enrages him. “I wish someone would have the courage to mock me to my face, so that I might thrust my sword through his body …” But thoughts of suicide are not far behind either. “I have snatched up a knife a hundred times, meaning to relieve my sorely beset heart …” Like the “noble breed of horses that instinctively bite open a vein when they are exhausted and feverish,” Werther too is “tempted to open a vein and so find eternal freedom.”11
But this humiliation is only the last in a series of unendurable conditions for Werther. “There is not a single instant when the heart is full,” he cries, “not one single hour of bliss!” In the evenings he resolves “to enjoy the next day’s sunrise, but I cannot quit my bed;” during the day “I look forward to the delights of moonlight, and then I stay in my room. I do not quite know why I rise or why I go to bed.”12
Werther’s problem, however, is not that of social snobbery, or of the impossibility of having Lotte. It is more than this. As John Armstrong points out in his book Love, Life, Goethe, Werther’s experience with Lotte, and with Miss B and the count, “seems to suggest something terrible about life.” Werther “regards love as sacred – as the most important emotion. However, there is no guarantee that love, however, ardent, will be returned: that the world will meet it and reward it. He feels as if the most valuable thing that he has is useless in the world as it is. Existence is perverse.”13
That “the race is not given to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all,” as Ecclesiastes pointed out long ago, remarking on a clear design fault in life, is something Werther has difficulty accepting.
Lotte’s attempt to convince Werther that she is not the only woman in the world, that his talents, abilities and capacity for love will certainly find a place for him, are fruitless. Werther, Armstrong tells us, is on the road to ruin “not because of the faults of the world, but because of some flaw in his inner condition.”14 Werther is discovering the truth of Schopenhauer’s belief: that existence is an absurd game, and that desire only breeds unhappiness. Werther’s problem is that, as far as he can see, his deep feelings and longings can never be fulfilled in the world as it is. Goethe, who was no stranger to deep feelings and yearnings – indeed, in many ways he taught Europe how to have these – realised that such unappeasable desires can only weaken one for life, unless one develops the discipline to face life on its own terms. Like most of us, Goethe faced disappointment and humiliation, but he was strong enough to grow beyond the childish desire to knock over the chess board if the game wasn’t going his way. Werther is unable to do this. He refuses to grow up. Goethe is not saying we should jettison our feelings, our idealism and dreams and find a good job in order to get on in the world. But he is saying that our dreams and idealism are useless unless we can learn how to fulfil them in the world. Having written Werther, Goethe left the kind of rash immaturity that leads to romantic suicide behind
, and went on to become one of the greatest creative geniuses in history, turning his mind and vitality to a dozen things, from science to statesmanship. He turned his dreams into reality, rather than letting reality be destroyed by his dreams.
Unfortunately, the damage was done, and Europe (and somewhat later, America) witnessed a rash of romantic death worship. That poets seemed not made for this world was evidenced by the early deaths of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Poe, Baudelaire and dozens of other 19th century figures. Probably the most iconic ‘real life’ Romantic suicide – although, as we shall see, there is some doubt it was a suicide at all – was the death at seventeen of the boy poet Thomas Chatterton. That life seemed a “dim vast vale of tears,” and the poet destined to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” – or at least to want to – became part of the Romantic’s job description. Thomas Lovell Beddoes’ near-pathological death obsession – which we will look at in more detail further on – is perhaps the most unrelenting expression of a theme that dominated the cultural consciousness in the west for decades, reaching into the twentieth century, and late Romantics like the composer Gustav Mahler, whose Das Lied von der Erde is a sumptuous, seductive farewell to life, and the poet Rilke, whose Duino Elegies celebrates death not as a end, but as the ‘other side’ of being. The poet manqué Harry Crosby carried this idea to kitschy extremes, but for the most part the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen death on such massive scales – wars, genocides, natural disasters – that aside from adolescent excursions in the garb of ‘goth’ or ‘death’ rock, the idea of ‘worshipping’ it no longer strikes the imagination. Yet after the last gasp of tragic Romanticism in the decay of the fin-de-siècle, the literary suicide took on a possibly even darker character, as an expression of a grimly sardonic, stridently nihilistic ‘black’ humour, a macabre comedy most characteristically associated with surrealism.
Notes
1 John Armstrong Love, Life, Goethe (Penguin Books: London, 2006) p. 54.
2 Introduction to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther (Penguin Books: London, 1989) translated and introduction by Michael Hulse, p. 6.
3 Ibid. p. 7.
4 Love, Life, Goethe p. 57.
5 Michael Hulse, Introduction to The Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 12.
6 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther p. 74.
7 Ibid. p. 73.
8 Ibid. p. 77.
9 Ibid. p. 79.
10 Ibid. p. 82.
11 Ibid. p. 83.
12 Ibid. pp. 77–78.
13 Love, Life, Goethe p. 61
14 Ibid. p. 62.
The Surreal Suicide
Literary suicides seem to span all genres, including pulp, as the suicide at age thirty of Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan, King Kull and other brawny sword and sorcery heroes argues. (See the Suicidal Miscellany for Howard’s poem “Lines Written in the Realization that I Must Die”). But one literary movement, Surrealism, even more than existentialism, seems to have attracted an inordinate number of writers obsessed with self-destruction, individuals who either wrote about suicide extensively, play-acted it, or, in more than one example, went through with it. It can even be argued that Surrealism itself was founded on a suicide, although once again, there is some debate over whether the death in question was really a suicide or not.
The term ‘Surrealism’ became part of our cultural vocabulary in 1917, coined in Paris by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire in the programme notes for Erik Satie’s ballet Parade, which featured choreography by Massine, a backdrop by Picasso, a scenario by Jean Cocteau, and a performance by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The ‘new alliance of the arts’ that Apollinaire celebrated in the notes was really not that new – the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total art work’, had been a staple of Symbolist aesthetics decades before – but Satie’s score for typewriter, propellers, sirens, Morse code and other forms of musique concrete prompted Apollinaire to call Parade a work of ‘Surrealism’.1 What exactly he meant by this is unclear; the general idea, however, is that in Parade art had done life, or reality, one better (’sur’ refers to a kind of addition, as in ‘surplus’ or ‘surcharge’). Apollinaire had at first considered adopting ‘Supernaturalism’ for this new trend in art, but this term was already in use and had already acquired a clutch of literary and philosophical interpretations which would only have confused matters. Apollinaire’s own stab at defining the new term, Surrealism, is suggestive, but is hardly the stuff from which revolutions are made. “When man tried to imitate walking,” he wrote, “he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. He thus performed an act of Surrealism without realizing it.” New, creative and unusual at the time, ‘surreal’ has by now become a clichéd term used to indicate anything ‘strange’ or ‘weird’ and has really lost most of its true meaning, as is also the case with ‘existential’ and ‘romantic’. Its once shocking images and unlikely juxtapositions are run of the mill, adorning everything from T-shirts to shopping bags, enjoying a ubiquity the Surrealists themselves once sought, without, however, triggering the profound transformation of life they hoped to achieve.
The name most associated with Surrealism, however, is not that of Apollinaire, but of his one-time protégé, the poet André Breton. Appropriating the term from his master, who seemed not to appreciate the marketing value of a good ‘brand’, Breton became its spokesman, promulgator, ideological leader and notorious ‘Black Pope’, ruthlessly excommunicating those who fell foul of his stringent aesthetic and political criteria. Yet although Breton became the name associated worldwide with Surrealism, the ‘living face of Surrealism’, at least for Breton himself, was that of a character who could barely be called a literary figure at all. In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton made a pronouncement that, for good or bad, has become one of the most quoted examples of what something ‘surreal’ would be like. “The simplest Surrealist act,” Breton declared, “consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd”2 – and with this in mind, one wonders if the proliferation of terrorism and ‘motiveless murders’ in the twenty-first century indicates the victory of Surrealism after all … For all his bellicose pamphleteering, however, Breton does not come across as a violent man, yet the trope of guns and suicide is something more than posture and rhetoric; at one Surrealist shindig, Breton wore a pair of pistols strapped to his head, and at the Dada festival of 1918, realizing they needed a real show-stopper to end their sketch S’il Vous Plait, Breton and the poet Philippe Soupault (with whom Breton collaborated on the first work of ‘automatic writing’, The Magnetic Fields) decided to put their names in a hat, and which of the two was picked would close the show by blowing his brains out, a nod, perhaps, to Arthur Cravan’s aborted public suicide a few years earlier.
Breton’s fascination with guns and suicide can be traced to another early surrealist event, again involving Apollinaire. A few weeks after the success of Parade, Apollinaire’s play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Tits of Tiresias) was performed at the Conservatoire Renée-Maubel, a tiny theatre on the Rue de l’Orient in Montmartre. The audience had to wait for hours for the play to begin, and were hardly in the best of moods, and once it had started their frustration only increased at what they saw on stage. Soon into it, a riot broke out, and the crowd, which included Matisse, George Braque, Modigliani, Ferdinand Leger, Cocteau, Breton and others of the Parisian avant-garde, were, as one witness put it, “howling wildly.” During the intermission the ruckus became even worse, and Apollinaire himself mounted the stage to call for order. At this point Breton noticed a military officer in the front row, standing up and waving a pistol, evidently about to open fire on the mob. Realizing who the ‘officer’ was, Breton rushed to him, and prevented him from firing the gun; he even managed to calm him enough to sit down and watch the rest of the show, which, they later both admitted, was something of a disappointment. Tiresias’ tits were not a
big hit, but the evening was nevertheless crucial for Breton. “Never before, as I did on that evening,” he later said in an interview, “had I measured the depth of the gap that would separate the new generation from the one preceding it …”3 The figure that Breton had just prevented from carrying out an act of aesthetic homicide was very familiar to him. It was indeed his friend, Jacques Vaché, whom he had only recently met, yet who had, and would continue to have, an enormous influence on Breton and, through him, on twentieth century art and culture. “If ever someone’s influence touched me to the core,” Breton said of Vaché, “it was his.”4