by Gary Lachman
Although Kleist found her unattractive at first, Henriette pursued him; her husband, a good natured accountant, apparently accepted the affair. Recently, Marie von Kleist (no relation), a woman Kleist had great feeling for, had left Berlin, and Henriette moved to fill the void. At one point, Kleist dramatically promised that he would do whatever she asked of him. Soon after this, listening to her sing to her own accompaniment, Kleist enthused: “It was so beautiful I could shoot myself!” Their eyes met and Henriette reminded him of his promise. He assured her he would keep his word. She then asked him to shoot her.
The couple decided on a plan. They needed an accomplice, and Henriette chose a close friend of her husband’s, whom she assured Kleist would perform the requisite duties. Writing their farewells and placing them in a sealed box, they chose a popular inn near the Wannsee, the appropriately named New Jug, as the site of their last days. In his final letters to Marie von Kleist, whom he had on several occasions asked to accompany him to the next world (and who had obviously declined) Kleist wrote, “Since my childhood days, in my thoughts and in my writing, I have been in constant contact with beauty and morality and that has made me so sensitive that the most trifling aggressions […] are doubly and trebly painful.”32 Like Anne Sexton, Kleist killed himself because he had no ‘numbness’; like Werther, he could find no place for himself in the world, and his idealism left him bruised at the slightest rebuff. It’s no wonder Goethe recoiled from him. Like Kierkegaard, Kleist could see the world only in terms of an ‘either/or’: either total triumph or a quick departure. His last letters display remarkable insight into his inability to reconcile himself with the world, and a delicacy of feeling toward those he was leaving behind. He also asked that his barber be paid what he was owed. For her part, Henriette left detailed instructions for a Christmas gift for her husband.
The couple arrived at the New Jug on the afternoon of the 20th. To the innkeeper and his wife, they seemed happy and carefree, but that night they were heard pacing the floor. The next morning they awoke early, and asked if a letter could be sent to Berlin. A messenger was found and the letter dispatched. They asked about the lake and if a boat could take them to the further shore. There was no boat, they were told, but it wasn’t a long walk. They seemed in fine spirits and in the afternoon asked if the messenger would reach his destination soon. They were assured he would; at this they seemed glad. They then asked that coffee be brought to them at a grassy spot, not far from the inn, overlooking the lake. This was surprising, as the weather was cold and a fog was settling. But they insisted and were generous with their thalers; as they walked away, the housekeeper wondered what might be in the basket Henriette carried and which was covered by a white cloth. She soon found out.
When the housekeeper brought the coffee, Henriette wondered if they couldn’t have a table and chairs as well. The housekeeper said the coffee would be cold by the time she could do this, but she insisted again. When these too were brought, Kleist asked for a pencil; when this was brought, Henriette gave the woman one of the coffee cups, asked her to wash it, and to bring it back. As the woman walked away, baffled by these requests, yet happy with the guests’ largess, she heard a shot. “A funny couple,” she thought, “playing with guns.” Then she heard another one.
When she returned with the washed cup she found them. Henriette lay on her back, her coat open and a small dark hole showing on her blouse. Kleist knelt by her feet, his left arm hanging over his left leg, his right hand, still clutching the pistol, on her hip, his head resting on it. The housekeeper understood what was in the basket. Bloody foam oozed from Kleist’s mouth. By seven that evening, Henriette’s husband, accompanied by the friend entrusted with the gruesome charge, had arrived; they had received the letter as the couple consummated their tryst. The instructions, detailed, considerate, and not unreasonable, included a request to be buried side by side. They were, but not before an autopsy performed on Kleist reached the conclusion that his brain showed clear evidence of “mental unbalance;” Kleist would have been pleased to know that the saw used to open his skull had broken. A failure by all accounts in his lifetime, today the Kleist prize is one of the most honoured literary awards in Germany.
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Like the Hungarian writer, physician and suicide Géza Csáth33, the poet, dramatist and doctor Thomas Lovell Beddoes combined a career in medicine with one in literature. In Csáth’s case, the appeal of a medical career had much to do with his drug addiction; for Beddoes it was a combination of his obsession with death and dead bodies – he was, for Ezra Pound, “the prince of morticians” – and his strange conviction that the study of physiology and anatomy would lead to a new era in drama. Sadly, Beddoes’ careers in both medicine and literature were practically non-starters. Although he received his MD in 1831 from the University of Würzberg, he never practised professionally. And although he completed the work for which, if at all, he is known today, Death’s Jest-Book, in 1829, he spent the remaining twenty years of his life revising it, and publishing nothing. His ‘messterpiece’ itself, as it might be called, only appeared after Beddoes’ death. Although peppered with lyrical, if macabre beauty, it remains more an oddity than anything else and is, as one critic put it “perfectly adapted to remain unread.”
An uncomfortable air of frustrated energies surrounds Beddoes, partly rooted in his often thwarted homosexuality; among his several neuroses was an inability to finish his projects, hence Graham Greene’s sobriquet of “the filibustering medical poet.” Delay even followed him to the grave. After his death, his friend and editor Thomas Forbes Kelsall bequeathed his collection of Beddoes’ papers to the poet Robert Browning. Although Browning announced that if he ever became a professor of poetry, his first lecture would be on Beddoes, “a forgotten Oxford poet,” he himself stashed the MSS in a box and left them untouched for a decade; Beddoes, then, was doubly forgotten. The box, the MSS and Beddoes’ interminable revisions are reminiscent of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who kept a similar collection of scraps, fragments, and jottings in cramped, crowded handwriting in a similar chest; like Beddoes’, Pessoa’s best known ‘work’, The Book of Disquietude, remained unfinished. Like Pessoa, Beddoes committed his work to an unwieldy mess of notes, and like his MSS, Beddoes’ life was one of fragments and pieces.
For Harold Bloom, “Beddoes, in despair of his time and of himself, chose to waste his genius on a theme that baffled his own imagination.”34 That theme was death, and like Harry Crosby, Beddoes seemed to have little else on his mind. He made more than one suicide attempt. As one of the characters in Death’s Jest-Book says: “O Death! I am thy friend, I struggle not with thee, I love thy state: Thou canst be sweet and gentle, be so now; and let me pass praying away into thee …” In 1848, after failing to open an artery sufficiently enough for him to bleed to death – a sad showing for an anatomist – Beddoes’ leg became gangrenous, and had to be amputated below the knee. A year later, in 1849, at the age of forty-six, in his third suicide attempt, Beddoes finally managed to kill himself in a Basle hospital by ingesting a dose of curare, the Orinoco arrow-tip poison that a century later would become an accessory to general anaesthesia. There is a certain irony in this: one of Beddoes’ early tragic works was entitled Love’s Arrow Poisoned, an expression of the macabre black humour that coloured his life. In his suicide note, Beddoes wrote: “I ought to have been, among a variety of other things, a good poet.” He also added, in a bit of doggerel justifying the first remark: “I am food for what I am good for – worms.” Like the note pinned to René Crevel’s chest, “Please cremate me. Disgust,” this ranks as a searing expression of profound self-contempt.
Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born in 1803 in Clifton, Shropshire, and came from an illustrious and eccentric family. His mother was the sister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth and his father was the doctor Thomas Beddoes. Friend of Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, and Humphry Davy, Beddoes senior was among the early self-experimenters with nitrous oxide, in
haling the ‘wild gas’ and discovering its anaesthetic properties.35 He also had the strange habit of dissecting animals with his son in attendance. This was in order to teach children “accurately to distinguish the parts of the body.” Beddoes senior’s pedagogical zeal no doubt influenced his son’s later preoccupations, although he wouldn’t be aware of them; he died when Beddoes junior was only 5. Eccentric ideas were not unfamiliar to the maternal side of Beddoe’s family too. His maternal grandfather is said to have tried to divert the course of the Rhône, and to have invented a kind of carriage that supplied its own road, the so-called ‘walking barrel’.
This eccentric strain appeared in Beddoes as his aforementioned inability to complete a work, and in a predilection for creating or finding himself in unenviable situations. After attending Bath grammar school he was sent to Charterhouse where he proved “wilful, perverse, independent and precocious,”36 and where he occupied himself writing verse, Gothic tales, a novel in imitation of Fielding, and in inventing a slang language. A story told of this time gives us an idea of his character. Unhappy with the work a locksmith did on his bookcase, when Beddoes next met the man he gave him an impromptu hair-raising dramatic performance of his own death and descent into the pits of hell; the locksmith, terrified, rushed out, and it took much persuasion to have him ever return.
Beddoes’ independent streak carried over to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he once appeared at a tutorial with a large butcher knife to cut the pages of a book he hadn’t yet read. At Oxford he published The Improvisatore in his first year, a clearly immature work which was later suppressed. In 1822 The Bride’s Tragedy – his only completed verse tragedy – which showed his affinity with the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, appeared and was something of a success. According to Lytton Strachey, “In a single bound, he had reached the threshold of poetry, and was knocking at the door.”37 Unfortunately, Beddoes seemed to have stopped knocking before the muse opened up. He tried to follow The Bride’s Tragedy with other works, but his projects stalled, and he at one point proposed to continue writing under the pseudonym Theobald Vesseldoom.
In 1824, called to Florence by the ill health of his mother (she died before he arrived), he met Walter Savage Landor and Mary Shelley, with whom he shared an interest in corpses: Death’s Jest-Book is often called a kind of ‘Frankenstein’s monster,’ put together from bits and pieces.38 In 1825 he completed his degree at Oxford and began work on what he called “a very Gothic styled tragedy,” yet, rather than pursue a literary career, he decided to study anatomy and physiology. The ‘Gothic styled tragedy’, Death’s Jest-Book, was completed four years later. But Beddoes, insecure about his creativity and highly susceptible to others’ opinions, agreed to revise it as friends suggested, and spent the rest of his life doing so.
After leaving Oxford he went to Göttiingen, the beginning of his long self-exile in German speaking lands. There he proved brilliant but unruly. In 1829 he was expelled from the university for being drunk in the street. It was also in Göttingen that he made his first suicide attempt. He had become obsessed with discovering the mythical ‘Bone of Luz’, a kind of osseous Philosopher’s Stone, spoken of in Talmudic lore, and which was supposed to hold the key to immortality. Located in the coccyx, it was said to revive the dead. Pursued by Faustian furies, Beddoes was compelled to search for “every shadow of a proof or possibility of an after existence, both in the material and immaterial nature of man.” When his investigations into the seat of the soul proved futile, he tried to take his own life.39 His attempt failed, but he left Göttingen “penetrated with the conviction of the absurdity and unsatisfactory nature of human life.”40
He moved on to Würzberg to complete his degree, but was deported from Bavaria the next year for being a political agitator; he never received his diploma. Along with his interest in bodies and poetry (which Beddoes senior also wrote), and his knack for eccentricity, Beddoes junior had inherited his father’s taste for radical politics: this, death and his unfinishable work would occupy him from now on. He studied German philosophy, became a member of the Germania Burschenshaft, a radical student political society, and wrote inflammatory pamphlets in his adopted language. Indeed, Beddoes took to German so well that he remarked that English seemed a foreign tongue to him; linguistically, as in other ways, Beddoes became a “psychic alien … a man so essentially modern that his wandering existence becomes an appropriate metaphor for the contemporary human condition.”41 He settled in Zürich, where he was elected a professor of comparative anatomy, but the university authorities refused to recognize his election. His years in Zürich were relative happy, but antiliberal riots forced him to flee once again: he witnessed an army of six thousand peasants armed with pitch forks, scythes and knives depose the liberal government. His friend, one of the liberal leaders, was killed, and Beddoes barely escaped himself. From this point on, he had no fixed home and, like another seeker of immortality (and appreciator of death), the Renaissance alchemist and physician Paracelsus,42 Beddoes drifted from place to place, a strange solitary figure, with long tangled hair and his ever present meerschaum pipe.
During a ten month stay in London, Beddoes expressed his contempt at the state of English theatre by attempting to burn down the Drury Lane playhouse with a lit five pound note. Visiting Kelsall in Southampton, he locked himself in his room for days, smoking constantly, sinking into deep depressions. Visiting relatives, he arrived at their country house astride a donkey. Understandably, friends and family began to think he had gone mad. He himself remarked in a letter that he had become “a non-conductor of friendship.” In 1847 he returned to Frankfurt where he began a homosexual relationship with Konrad Degen, a baker nearly thirty years his junior. Beddoes’ affection for Degen was considerable: he once hired a theatre in Zürich for a night so that Degen, who we assume had thespian aspirations, could play Hotspur, with Beddoes the sole audience. A falling out with Degen led to Beddoes attempting suicide. At the Cigogne Hotel, he slashed his leg with his scalpel, one he may have used in dissection. When he failed to bleed to death, he was taken to the hospital where, like Cato, he tore off the bandages; he did this so often that eventually, as mentioned, his leg developed gangrene and had to be amputated. Beddoes told his family that he had fallen from a horse and the real reason for his amputation and later death was only revealed sometime after he was dead.
A reunion with Degen followed, and things seemed to be going better; they spoke of an Italian holiday, of literature and politics. Beddoes was able to walk and there seemed little to suggest that he would make another stab at killing himself. But during one walk, at a chemist’s Beddoes purchased the curare. When his doctor was summoned to his bed on the evening of 26 January, he found the poet-doctor insensible. He never regained consciousness and died that night. Among other things, his last note asked that a case of Moet Champagne – fifty bottles – be drunk in honour of his death, and that one of “Reade’s best stomach pumps” be purchased and given to his physician as a gift. Appropriately for Beddoes, when death came for him, it left a few jests in parting.
Otto Weininger
On 26 March 1827 one of the undisputed geniuses of western civilization, Ludwig von Beethoven, died in his room at Schwarzspanierstrasse 15 in Vienna. Seventy-six years later the address would become famous once again for another death. In the same room on 3 October 1903, shortly after the publication of his magnum opus, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), the twenty-three year old Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger shot himself in the chest. He was found the next morning, fully clothed and covered in blood, and was taken to hospital but died soon after. Weininger had only recently returned from Italy, where he had gone for a holiday, after completing the work for which, if at all, he is remembered today. That he banked a great deal on the book’s reception is evident from a remark he made to a friend shortly after finishing it. “There are three possibilities for me,” he declared. “The gallows, suicide, or a future so brilliant that I don’t dare
to think of it.” What actually happened can be seen as a self-fulfilled prophecy. Weininger had expected his work to excite critical acclaim, and while it was cordially received, it failed to make the stir he had hoped for. Disappointed in his masterpiece’s reception, and troubled by his own depressions, Weininger, who considered himself a kind of ‘Redeemer’, decided to end his life where one of his greatest heroes had ended his, thus forging a link between Beethoven’s genius and his own, genius in general and his own in particular being one of Weininger’s central themes.
Predictably, following his suicide, Sex and Character became a best-seller, ironically creating precisely the kind of heated debate and sensational notice Weininger had wished for. This isn’t surprising, given that the book made some startling assertions. Although Weininger begins with an idea that today, coming after Jungian psychology, doesn’t seem that radical – that everyone is really a mixture of both masculine and feminine psyches – from this point on he enters some very turbulent waters.43 Notoriously, Weininger argued that women were an inferior species, immoral, soulless and uncreative, who were basically interested only in sex and child-bearing. Men, on the other hand, were spiritual beings who were responsible for practically all the virtues and achievements of culture and civilization. While women are only concerned with sexual relations – they are, he said, ‘matchmakers’ by instinct – men have a mission to create and promote works of genius. This, of course, is hampered by the cunning and deceit of women.44 Equally inflammatory were Weininger’s remarks about Jews, or more precisely, Jewishness, which he saw as a decadent strain in human nature, not limited to one race, although in the Jews, Jewishness is understandably more prominent than in other races. As a Jew himself who had converted to Christianity, Weininger provided anti-Semites with much metaphysical ammunition, and to Jews he seemed a virulent case of Jewish self-hate. Embedded in these explosive views were Weininger’s exhortations to pursue the difficult task of becoming a genius, which he believed was possible through an effort of will and which, we can assume, Weininger believed he had accomplished in producing his work.