The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  9 The attraction that the image of the perfectly dressed, restrained Englishman had on the early avant-garde warrants a study; along with Vaché and Jarry, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa also sported a bowler and other ‘perfectly English’ attire.

  10 Ruth Brandon, p. 27.

  11 Mark Polizzotti, introduction to André Breton Anthology of Black Humour (City Lights: San Francisco, 1999). p.v.

  12 Jacques Vaché and André Breton War Letters (Atlas Press: London, 1993) p. 56.

  13 Ibid. pp. 57–58.

  14 Quoted in Polizzotti p. 87.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Breton, Anthology of Black Humour p. 294.

  17 Vaché War Letters p. 50.

  18 Ibid. p. 54.

  19 Ibid. pp. 48–49

  20 Ibid. p. 53.

  21 Ibid. p. 20.

  22 At one of the many and interminable meetings of the Surrealist group chaired by Breton, in which sex was the topic of discussion, he once threatened to walk out if Man Ray, Louis Aragon and Raymond Queneau persisted in their “promotion of homosexuality. “I am absolutely opposed to continuing the discussion of this subject …” Quoted in José Pierre ed. Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions (Verso: London, 1992).

  23 Vaché War Letters p. 54.

  24 4 Dada Suicides (Atlas Press: London, 1995) p. 7; Mark Polizzotti Revolution of the Mind p. 227. Jouffroy, incidentally, is associated with the philosopher William James’ own retreat from suicide and his recovery from what we are forced to call ‘depression’. During a period of deep existential despair – brought on by his acknowledgement of the ostensible scientific ‘fact’ of determinism – in which James likened himself to a catatonic patient he treated in a mental asylum, he pulled himself back from the brink of suicide through reading Jouffroy, whose ‘proof’ of free will – the fact that he could think of one thing rather than another – was sufficient encouragement for James to fight back. “My first act of free will,” James declared, “would be to believe in free will.”

  25 There is some suspicion that the suicide was prompted by his involvement in “some homosexual scandal.” See Edouard Roditi’s introduction to Crevel’s novel Putting My Foot in It (Dalkey Archive Press: Illinois, 1992.) p. xx.

  26 Salvador Dali, preface to René Crevel Difficult Death (North Point Press: San Francisco, 1986). P. ix.

  27 Ibid. p. xii.

  28 In the end Paul Eluard was allowed to read Breton’s address, but after midnight, after practically all the attendees had left, and in the dark.

  29 Ibid. p. xxv.

  30 Ibid. p. xiii.

  31 Even in death, Crevel sparked a Surrealist event. Word had got around that, against his wishes, his parents were to ensure that he received a proper Catholic burial. Breton and Co. gathered at the cemetery, intent on disrupting the proceedings. But in the end their vigil was unnecessary, as the parish priest made clear that the church does not bury suicides.

  32 Quoted in Terry Hale, introduction to Jacques Rigaut Lord Patchogue & Other Texts (Atlas Press: London, 1993) p. 7.

  33 Ibid. p. 8.

  34 Ibid. p. 6.

  35 From Jacques-Émile Blanche A Young Man of the Century quoted in 4 Dada Suicides p. 124.

  36 Ibid. p. 8.

  37 4 Dada Suicides p. 124–126

  38 Ibid. p. 120.

  39 Ibid. p. 122.

  40 Lord Patchogue & Other Texts p. 51.

  41 Ibid. p. 58.

  42 4 Dada Suicides p. 97.

  43 Ibid. pp. 122–123.

  44 André Breton Anthology of Black Humour p. 310.

  The Political Suicide

  “In a situation with no escape, I have no other choice but to finish it all. It is in a tiny village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life must come to its end. I would ask you to pass on my thoughts to my friend Adorno and to explain to him the situation in which I have found myself. I no longer have enough time to write all those letters I would dearly have written.”1

  Such are the last words reportedly written by the German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher of culture Walter Benjamin. Benjamin had penned them in Port Bou, Spain, on the evening of 25 September 1940, presumably after he had swallowed the overdose of morphine that, by the next day, would kill him. The note was intended for Henny Gurland, later the second wife of the psychologist Erich Fromm; with her son Joseph, Benjamin, and a guide, Gurland was trying to escape the Nazis by fleeing France, crossing the Pyrenees into Spain, and reaching Lisbon, where they could board a ship for the United States.2 The “friend Adorno” is the neo-Marxist philosopher Theodore Adorno who, with hindsight, had the good sense to escape Europe before the tide of barbarism provided by Hitler and his henchmen made that impossible. Benjamin too, had many chances to escape before fate led him to the small Catalan village on the Mediterranean coast, just south of the French-Spanish border, where he took his life. Yet, although friends and associates urged him to leave, Benjamin maintained his position as “the last European,” assuring them that he was, “Like one who keeps afloat on a shipwreck by climbing to the top of a mast that is already crumbling. But from there he has a chance to give a signal leading to his rescue.”3

  The recipient of this remark, the Kabbalist scholar Gershom Scholem, Benjamin’s friend since 1915, had taken leave of what would become a very dark continent years before, and he repeatedly urged Benjamin to join him in Palestine. But Benjamin was never one to decide things quickly – he would, Scholem said, take forever to make a move in chess, exhibiting a “reckless indecision rooted in chronic depression”4 – and one wonders if sheer vacillation was as much an influence on his reluctance to leave as was his determination to see things out to the end. Another possibility, one rarely voiced (as, since his ‘discovery’ in the 1960s, Benjamin has become a major intellectual cult figure for the Left), is that his personality had a very strong self-destructive streak, as well as more than a touch of narcissism. While the Europe around him sank into cruelty and madness, Benjamin may have enjoyed his status as a last, lingering agent of reason and humanity.

  There was, too, in Benjamin an appreciation of the apocalyptic. Although cloaked in Marxist rhetoric, Benjamin’s philosophy was essentially religious, as Scholem would ceaselessly argue contra Adorno and Brecht (another of Benjamin’s friends), and his vision of history was messianic; he seemed to be awaiting some final, conclusive event, whether revolutionary or theological, which would restore the fallen world to paradise. In an essay on “The Destructive Character,” which, for all his obsessive mandarin courtesy and tact5, can apply to Benjamin himself, he says that such a temperament “knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away.”6 Benjamin was a reader of the anarchist philosopher George Sorrell and, like the Surrealists, had a penchant for violence. In torturously reasoned essays like “Critique of Violence” and his “Theologico-Political Fragment,” Benjamin leads the reader to see the need for the “violence of divine intervention” and the necessity for “sudden eschatological change.”7 Eruptions, cataclysms, disasters fascinated Benjamin, and he liked to imagine himself as a sole surveyor, walking amidst their ruins; “solitude,” he once said, “appeared to me as the only fit state of man.”

  In one of his most frequently quoted essays, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin describes history not as “a chain of events,” but as “a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”8 Looking at Benjamin’s life, it’s tempting to turn the metaphor on its author, and to see his choice of suicide as a final surrender to his inherent millenarian personality. As his biographer Momme Brodersen remarked, “The temptation to ‘solve’ all his existential problems in one go by suicide had followed Benjamin throughout his life.”9 How such a melancholy temperament, “born under the sign of Saturn, the star of slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays …” could align itself, however equivocally, with as superficial and shallowly optimistic a creed as Marxism, is only one of the many ironies in his s
hort life.

  Benjamin’s flight from the Nazis, his doomed last days and suicide, have by now passed into the realm of myth. In 1968, during the brief explosion of the student revolutions, the Institute for German Studies in Frankfurt was renamed temporarily the Walter Benjamin Institute, in honour of the post-humous hero of the New Left. In 1994, the Israeli artist Dani Karavans unveiled his memorial to Benjamin, “Passages,” an eerie flight of steps leading nowhere, cut into the stone of the cliff overlooking the Mediterranean near the cemetery where Benjamin is believed to be buried, although exactly where his grave is remains unknown.10 More recently, Benjamin’s last days have been fictionalised in Jay Parini’s moving novel Benjamin’s Crossing, in which the author takes poetic liberty and suggests that it was not the threat of arrest and the dead end of a concentration camp that killed Benjamin; rather, “It was the world itself. He could no longer attach himself willingly to its bleak trajectory.”11

  Although during his lifetime Benjamin published few books and was virtually unknown – the bulk of his work appearing in newspapers and journals – and his great opus the ‘Arcades Project’ remained unfinished, perhaps unfinishable, today practically everything he wrote has been preserved between two covers, and most of this has been translated into other languages. A virtual ‘Benjamin industry’ has grown up around his writings, producing hundreds of texts, most of them as obscure and esoteric as the original. Even the image of Benjamin – metal rim glasses, tousled hair, bushy moustache, hand at pensive chin sporting a cigarette – has appeared on T-shirts and other popular paraphernalia. (The fact that, among other things, he wrote about hashish and popular culture has helped spread his reputation to readers not usually given to messianic neo-Marxist critiques of late-capitalism.) Yet, while much of Benjamin’s work still remains somewhat impenetrable for the general reader, many of his more immediately available pronouncements on culture and society have not fared well against the facts. In perhaps his most well known essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin argued that technology – in his day the cinema and radio – would be put to use in the service of the ‘revolution’, dissipating the elitist ‘aura’ surrounding works of art, and allowing the masses a hitherto denied access to culture. Admittedly it was an idea shared by other radical thinkers of the time, but one wonders how Benjamin would view the ubiquitous I-pod or tally up the revolutionary potential of Big Brother? Aldous Huxley, whom Benjamin quotes in the notes to his essay as an example of a ‘non-progressive’ attitude toward the technological advances in popular culture, seems, in Brave New World and elsewhere, to have hit the nail on the head, perhaps heavy-handedly but certainly more accurately than Benjamin and the other ‘radicals’ who envisioned the ‘masses’ ‘liberated’ by ‘mechanical reproduction’. As mentioned in the preceding chapter, the ‘revolutionary’ power of Surrealism added up to a glut of by now barely noticeable images crowding postcard racks and poster shops, and the only liberation enjoyed by the masses seems to be the freedom to purchase them.12

  It is perhaps a churlish thought, but one further wonders how pervasive ‘Benjaminmania’ would be if its subject had taken the repeated advice of friends and left his “crumbling mast” while he still had a chance and not continued on to an end that those closest to him, like Scholem, believed he was heading toward well in advance of Port Bou? I have read and continue to read Benjamin with much profit and sympathise with his plight, but there is something annoying about a man who refuses to leave a burning building, and at each suggestion to do so replies, “Yes, in a few minutes, after I finish this paragraph …”13 Whatever the intrinsic value of his work, and of course this is substantial, the cachet of being a martyr to the cause of radical politics, critical thinking, modernity and ‘otherness’ – the sacrificial victim of an unequivocal fascism – cannot have hurt the cult that has mushroomed around Benjamin since his death. As Peter Demetz ironically remarks, “for the last seven years of his life, Walter Benjamin was condemned to a way of life closely resembling that of the émigré extras in Rick’s Café in Casablanca …”14 Romantic to us, perhaps, but it must have been hell for Benjamin.

  Although Benjamin was not the only German writer to be led to suicide by the triumph of Nazism – Stefan Zweig and Klaus Mann are among some of the others – his death has become something of an archetype of the political literary suicide. The facts of his death seem to be the following. When it became clear even to Benjamin that he could no longer remain in France – having exiled himself there from Germany when the Nazis came to power – he decided to try to reach Lisbon where he would be able to use exit visas for the United States provided by Max Horkheimer, Adorno’s colleague at the Institute for Social Research, which had relocated from Frankfurt to New York, and from whom Benjamin had been receiving a barely liveable monthly stipend. Benjamin had already endured being corralled with other German refugees at the Stade Colombe in Paris in September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, and England and France declared war on the Third Reich. Although like most other refugees Benjamin was unambiguously anti-Nazi, the French authorities made no such distinctions, and announced that all Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians between the ages of 17 and 50 were to be interned as potential ‘enemies of France’15.

  Along with the thousands of others who crowded into the football stadium, Benjamin lived for ten days in appalling conditions, sleeping on straw without blankets, eating nothing but cheap liver paté, with no facilities for washing or bathing. He was then sent to an internment camp at Nevers, a small town on the route between Paris and Lyon. The French, who were themselves taken by surprise by the sudden turn of events, made little or no provisions for their prisoners, and Benjamin, who was inordinately impractical (he blamed his mother for his “inability even today to make a cup of coffee”)16 had to fend for himself. He had the rare good fortune, however, of meeting a young man who was a reader of his work, and who gladly took on the task of taking care of the older writer (although only 47, Benjamin had the appearance and deportment of someone much older) and becoming, more or less, his servant (even in prison, Benjamin retained the habits of his upper middle-class background). He was finally released from the camp after more than a month through the efforts of the French PEN Club.

  Back in Paris, the reality of the situation finally hit Benjamin; yet he tried to continue work on his interminable ‘Arcades Project’, a practically indefinable study of the philosophical, social and historical significance of the Paris arcades (a similar work today might have the shopping mall as its focus). Although there is some controversy about this, it’s believed that the bulky suitcase Benjamin lugged with him from Paris to the Pyrenées contained a manuscript of his gigantic fragment, and he’s said to have told his companions that it was more important that the suitcase got to America than that he did.17 After Benjamin’s death, the suitcase was confiscated by the police; its contents were later scattered or destroyed. What exactly the manuscript he carried in it was, remains unknown.

  When Hitler’s army crossed the border and headed toward Paris, the city emptied, its fleeing inhabitants adding to the millions who were already heading south from Belgium and northern France. Overweight, inept, exhausted, and unhealthy (he suffered from a heart complaint), Benjamin joined the mass exodus. Before marching south, Benjamin managed to put the bulk of his papers in safekeeping, giving a collection of notes for the ‘Arcades Project’ to the renegade Surrealist Georges Bataille, who hid them in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he worked as a librarian. What he couldn’t take with him was confiscated by the Gestapo when they raided his flat. At Lourdes he waited throughout the summer for the entry permit to the United States; then, in late August, he went to Marseilles to collect the emergency visa Horkheimer had arranged for him. Not surprisingly, Benjamin couldn’t gather all the papers he needed to leave France legally, and he uncharacteristically quickly decided to cross the border into Spain without them. It was a wise decision: Pétain’s go
vernment soon agreed to hand over all emigrants found in Vichy France to the Nazis as well.

  At first light on 26 September 1940, Lisa Fittko, a guide not entirely familiar with the terrain, set out from Banylus-sur-Mer with Henny Gurland and her son, to cross the mountains into Spain. The previous day Benjamin had taken part in a hiking tour; when the rest of the group returned, he stayed behind, spending the night in the open air on the mountain. That morning the others collected him, and together they headed toward the village of Port Bou. Although Benjamin’s health required frequent stops, the journey went smoothly, and the route the group took had recently been taken by Heinrich Mann, his wife, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel. (One wonders if today it’s marked as the ‘escaping intellectuals’ hiking trail?) By the afternoon they reached their goal, and from Port Bou they hoped to journey to Lisbon by train, and from there to New York.

  But bad luck – something that Hannah Arendt claimed “was very prominent in Benjamin’s life”18 – was waiting for “the last European.” On announcing themselves to the Spanish police, the group were told that the transit visas which until then were valid, were no longer so, having been made null and void overnight. All refugees from France, they were informed, were to be sent back. Benjamin knew what this meant and not surprisingly he decided to forego the pleasure. Benjamin had written that, “The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble,”19 a sentiment echoed by many throughout this book. On that afternoon, after a long, exhausting and apparently fruitless journey to freedom, he seemed to decide it was worth the trouble after all. That night Benjamin is thought to have swallowed an overdose of morphine tablets, a supply of which he had carried with him for many years. He had in fact given Arthur Koestler, who himself was on the run, some of his stash when they met in Marseilles, just before Benjamin’s last journey. (Koestler was Benjamin’s neighbour in Paris, and the two were members of a weekly poker group – Benjamin had a weakness for gambling. Benjamin asked Koestler if he “had anything to take” in case “things went wrong;” when Koestler said he hadn’t, Benjamin gave him half of his own supply; Koestler remarks that Benjamin did this reluctantly, unsure if what was left would do the trick.)20