The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  Not surprisingly, Weininger became a kind of a cultural hero among the many aspiring young Viennese geniuses and his work became a cause célèbre; his death triggered a string of imitations, and achieved in reality what Goethe’s Werther only did in myth. Like many in this book, suicide was something Weininger had contemplated throughout his life, although his views on it, like much else in his life, were often paradoxical. In a letter to a friend, Arthur Gerber, written in the time leading up to his death, Weininger wrote, “The man who fails in suicide? He is the complete criminal, because he wants life in order to revenge himself. All evil is revenge!” Yet in a series of brilliant aphorisms he wrote while contemplating killing himself, Weininger remarked that, “The suicide is almost always a sadist, because he alone wants to get out of a situation and can act; a masochist must first question all eternity whether he may, should, take his own life.” (Like Man and Woman, Sadist and Masochist were for Weininger Platonic Ideals or characterological types.)45

  Of death itself Weininger wrote, “I cannot comprehend life so long as I am living it … Only death can teach me the meaning of life,” an insight echoed a decade later by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. A great reader of Weininger, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein wrote, “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death … The sense of the world must lie outside the world … The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.”46

  Although Weininger is reviled today as an anti-Semite and misogynist, Wittgenstein, like August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, James Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford, and others recognized his importance. The poet William Carlos Williams was so impressed by Weininger’s ideas that he decided to marry a woman he didn’t love, because Weininger argued that sexual affinity, rather than love, formed the true bond between Man and Woman. He also believed that he himself fell short of Weininger’s criteria for genius, precisely because of his weakness for women. In The Female Eunuch, the feminist Germaine Greer offered an ageist and sexist backhanded complement to Weininger, calling Sex and Character “a remarkably rigorous and committed book by a mere boy.” Hitler, too, had a high opinion of him; speaking of Weininger, who he more than likely did not read, he is reported to have said, “There was only one decent Jew, and he killed himself.”47 Obviously, such remarks could not have helped Weininger’s reputation, and others were understandably less impressed. Elias Canetti refused to write an introduction to a reprinting of Sex and Character on the grounds that it was racist and sexist.

  Otto Weininger was born in Vienna on 3 April 1880 to a successful Jewish goldsmith. Weininger’s father, Leopold, was a strict parent who, recognizing Otto’s precocity, encouraged it. At an early age he took Otto to concerts, introducing him to the work of Mozart, Weber and, above all, Wagner; in later life, Wagner would become Weininger’s favourite composer. He promoted Otto’s facility with languages, and by the time he was eighteen, Otto had an excellent command of Latin, Greek, French, English, Italian, Spanish and Norwegian, not to mention his native German. He was also early on addicted to books, so much so that his father remarked, “There was one thing Otto would never share with anyone – his books. He lived in complete isolation with them.”48

  This youthful evidence of genius had the usual effect: Otto had little time for games and rarely played with other children. His father’s strict character had an equally powerful effect, and most accounts suggest that the rigid and hyper-serious Otto inherited his inflexible demeanour from his father. Of Otto’s mother we know very little, other than that Otto never mentioned her in his letters, that she was good at languages and that she, like the rest of the family, suffered under Leopold’s dominance, enduring his criticisms and demands while suffering from tuberculosis. If Weininger’s later musings on the Sadist and the Masochist have a basis in his history, its safe to say his parents provided the models.

  Weininger’s brilliance was evident in school, but, as with Thomas Lovell Beddoes, so was his unruliness. He often disrupted class work and followed his own inclinations, rather than that of his teachers, rejecting assignments and working on his own. This predilection for his own path was clear outside school as well. Otto’s friends remarked that he never read a newspaper and that “happiness was not part of his nature.” Young Otto had a haughty, sensitive personality and, like Heinrich von Kleist, would react violently if he felt his dignity was at stake. He was dedicated to ideas though, and liked nothing more than to stay up all night discussing them. As a friend recalled, “Abstract regions, from which others would turn away with a cold shiver, were his real home.”

  In 1898 Weininger graduated from secondary school and, after an argument with his father, who wanted him to put his multilingual abilities to practical use by entering the Consular Academy, registered at the University of Vienna. Here he studied philosophy, psychology, natural sciences and medicine, and again like Kleist, seems to have thrown himself into a massive self-improvement programme aimed at solving the big riddles of human existence. This resulted in his thesis, “Eros and the Psyche,” an early version of his major work. In 1901, looking for a publisher for it, he approached Freud. Although Freud later recalled Weininger as a “slender, grown-up youth with grave features and a veiled, quite beautiful look in his eyes,” and that he “could not help feeling that I stood in front of a personality with a touch of genius,” he declined to suggest Weininger’s work to his own publisher. He advised the young genius, whose work was much more metaphysical than scientific, to spend the next ten years gathering empirical evidence. “People want facts, not thoughts,” Freud said. Weininger replied that he’d rather write ten different books in that time. Freud also pointed out that he himself was working on a similar theme – suggesting a possible proprietary interest in publishing first – and passed on some of his own thoughts on bisexuality. One result of this was that when Sex and Character appeared, Freud’s friend and collaborator William Fliess sued him for giving his ideas about bisexuality to Weininger, and Weininger himself was accused of plagiarism.

  When Weininger received his Ph.D, his first act was to renounce the faith of his fathers and convert to Protestantism. Although a not uncommon career move for many assimilated Viennese Jews – one famous convert being the composer Gustav Mahler – Weininger had more philosophical reasons. Judaism, for him, exemplified the “extreme of cowardice;” the Jewish faith, he argued, was feminine, soulless, and lacked a sense of good and evil, something, he believed that could not be said of Christianity. Christ himself became something of an ideal, and Weininger increasingly adopted an ascetic lifestyle, specifically focusing on inhibiting his sexual urges.

  Weininger’s own sexual life remains something of a mystery. Some have suggested that his appearance precluded anyone falling in love with him. His father remarked that Otto didn’t have sex until his twenties, but there’s little evidence for this. There’s practically nothing about his relations with women in accounts by friends, aside from a single meeting with a “Miss Meyer,” whom, his sister reported, after an hour with Weininger said, “I have been with Jesus Christ.”49 Nietzsche remarked that ascetics adopt their stringent disciplines because of powerful sensual appetites; given the vehemence of Weininger’s remarks about women, and his powerful creative drive, one suspects he was profoundly attracted to them, but his dedication to his ideal demanded abstinence. There is also reason to suspect an element of homosexuality in Weininger, and that, like his Jewishness, his effeminate traits were something he had to fight against. There was also a possible masochistic strain in this; as his biographer says, “He seemed to enjoy using the ugliest self-hatred to destroy his own life through ascetic practices.”50 Nietzsche again: asceticism aimed at destroying sensuality often becomes a source of it. Weininger seemed to combine both the Sadist and Masochist in himself.

  By this time, Weininger had undergone a kind of psychic shift; he seemed to take the exact opposite of the course suggested by Freud, and abandoned empiricism entir
ely and embraced a kind of universal symbolism. “The scientist,” he believed, “takes phenomena for what they are; the great men of genius for what they signify” – a remark that could have been made by Swedenborg, Goethe or Blake. Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Kant, Wagner and Beethoven were his pantheon, and introspection became a central methodology; at twenty Weininger lectured at a Conference on Psychology in Paris on its importance. He became his own subject: he would look at his image in the mirror when he felt inspired, to see if the state made any change in his appearance. This increasing inward turn, combined with his inordinately high standards and iron discipline began to take its toll. He began to feel criminal urges, along with his sexual ones, and to have hallucinations – or, as he believed, to recognize the significance of otherwise banal incidents. Talking to his friend Gerber about suicide, Weininger told him about the link between a dog barking and death. Sitting in the Münchener Gasthoff, Weininger “suddenly heard a dog bark in a very peculiar, penetrating way which was then quite new to me, and at the same moment I had the inevitable conviction that someone was dying at that very moment.” The use of the word ‘inevitable’ prompts wonder. Months later, “in the most terrible night of my life … I literally had to fight against death … Just as I was falling asleep, I heard a dog bark three times in just the same way as that time in Munich.”51

  As the dog began to symbolize death for Weininger, the horse did the same for insanity. “With the surety of a guiding thought,” he wrote, “I had the feeling that the horse represents insanity.”52 Death and insanity began to preoccupy him. “The danger of insanity,” he confided in his friend, “is always present in those who try to penetrate the discipline of logic and pure knowledge,” something that Weininger had clearly engaged in. One sign of his mental strain was the appearance of his Doppelgänger, or double, which he began to see very often; as the legend of the Doppelgänger goes, if you see him, you are nearing death. He asked his friend Gerber, “Have you ever thought of your own double? What if he came now? Your double is the man who knows everything about you, even that which nobody tells.”53 What nobody was telling, but what his friends could have little doubt about, was that the stress of pursuing genius, battling his lower urges and confronting an oblivious world was becoming too much for Weininger.

  In a strange document entitled “Condemnation,” written in November 1902, about a year before his suicide, Weininger likened his interior world to a house. Of what was going on inside it Weininger wrote: “A wild desperate activity, a slow terrifying realization in the dark, an eternal clearing out of things. Do not ask how it looks inside the house.” Shortly after this he made a kind of formal farewell to his family.

  Weininger seems to have had insight into the roots of his radical views. “The hatred of woman,” he wrote in Aphorisms, “is always only the not yet overcome hatred of one’s own sexuality.” And if, as he believed, “All genius is a conquering of chaos and mystery,” it was sadly also becoming clear that, “The genius which runs to madness is no longer genius.” In a perceptive essay on Weininger, one writer summed it up: “It may be that his passionate pursuit of truth led him to envisage a standard of maleness which he felt he could not sustain, and that this was what led to his suicide.”54 It’s reported that a partial lunar eclipse took place during his funeral: a fitting emblem, one that Weininger himself would no doubt have sought the meaning of.

  Arthur Koestler

  In 1999 female students at the University of Edinburgh, along with members of the Scottish Women’s Aid Centre, as well as some politically correct males, succeeded in removing a bust from the psychology department that had resided there for years without causing the slightest controversy. Most likely the many students who passed the likeness of the Hungarian-born English novelist, essayist, and journalist, whose estate at the time of his death in 1983, estimated at just short of a million pounds, had been bequeathed to the university, didn’t even notice it. Or if they did, they saw it as only one more monument to one more dead white European male, a breed whose collective cachet had depreciated considerably throughout the 80s and 90s.

  But the recent newspaper serialization of sections of a new biography of this particular dead white male had caused a stir – not surprisingly, as the excerpts published dealt with the scandalous and, if the assertions they made were correct, criminal sex-life of a highly respected literary and political figure. Sex scandals are commonplace in the British press, but rarely do they result in a university changing its décor. These scandals, however, centred around a charge of ‘date rape’, then, as now, an incendiary if ambiguous subject. And if the ‘series’ of such assaults on women the biographer placed at his subject’s door were substantiated by little more than his assertions – meaning he provided little, if any, corroboration for them – this was a negligible detail. Then, as now, the mere accusation was enough for the self-righteous to demand immediate action, especially as the female students involved complained that they felt ‘uneasy’ beneath the bust’s salacious stare. The university felt compelled to take steps, and to this day the bust rests in some undisclosed spot, where it is safe from attack and, perhaps more to the point, where its unseemly gaze can harm no one. The financial contribution associated with it suffered no such indignation.

  The bust in question is that of the polymath Arthur Koestler, most famous for his anti-Stalin political thriller Darkness at Noon, but also the author of a number of books in an embarrassingly wide spectrum of subjects, ranging from creativity, biology and behavioural psychology to capital punishment, ESP and the history of the Jews. The biography is David Cesarani’s massive tome of academic gossip, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998), described as both “richly documented,” and an “erratic” work of “moral prating”. The ‘date rape’ in question is that of the filmmaker Jill Craigie, wife of the later Labour leader Michael Foot, and allegedly took place in 1951. Craigie did not make it public until forty years later.

  Cesarani claims that Koestler raped other women as well, but it’s the circumstances surrounding Koestler’s suicide in 1983 that possibly places him in the same category as Harry Crosby and Jacques Vaché. On the morning of 3 March 1983, a housekeeper employed by Koestler and his wife Cynthia arrived at their house at 8 Montpelier Square in Kensington and found a note pinned to the door. “Please do not go upstairs,” it read, “Ring the police and tell them to come to the house.” Amelia, the housekeeper, telephoned friends of the Koestlers instead, who then rang the police. When Inspector David Thomas and a colleague finally entered the house they found Koestler in the sitting room, dead, upright in an armchair, a glass of brandy in his hand. Cynthia was lying on a sofa, facing Arthur, a whisky beside her on a coffee table. She was dead too. Also on the table were two wine glasses, both with a powdery residue, and a jar of honey, used to sweeten the drug they had taken. The powder was the remains of the Tuinal they had dissolved, a powerful barbiturate. An examination suggested they had been dead for thirty-six hours, which means they must have taken the drug on the evening of the 1st.

  At the time of his death, Koestler had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease and leukaemia for years, although he had kept this a secret for a long time, and, as his friend and fellow parapsychology investigator Brian Inglis remarked, he was “falling apart.” Others, like the writer Julian Barnes, who became a friend and chess-mate late in Koestler’s life, were also struck by his condition. His hands shook, he had difficulty concentrating, could barely walk, his eyesight was failing, and a recent swelling in his groin suggested the cancer was spreading.

  Koestler was a very vocal advocate of euthanasia; he was vice president of the Euthanasia Society (now EXIT) and had even written a ‘how-to’ pamphlet on killing yourself. That he would take his own life rather than allow himself to deteriorate further seems understandable. Indeed, his editor and literary executor Harold Harris, who saw Koestler for the last time a week before his suicide, knew, as most of his friends did, that he would not “quietly submi
t to the final removal of his physical and mental faculties.” Harris was even concerned that Koestler “might have left it too late.”55 “He was unable to stand, his speech was disjointed, and he clearly found it difficult to concentrate on what was being said to him.” What caused an uproar and remains today a controversial subject is the fact that Koestler’s wife, Cynthia Jeffries – his third – decided to join him. Unlike Koestler, Cynthia was in good health, and at 55 wasn’t yet facing the ravages of old age which Koestler, at 77, had begun to confront years earlier.

  Although up until her death friends believed she gave no indication of wanting to kill herself, when the facts emerged practically everyone agreed that it made sense that she had. By all accounts, including her own, Cynthia was absolutely devoted to Arthur – pathologically so, according to some observers. She had been in love with Koestler since they first met in Paris in 1949, when he hired her as a secretary, and she had worked for him on and off until they married in 1965, when she was thirty-eight, and he was fifty-five. George Mikes, a fellow Hungarian and close friend of the two said, “No one knows or will ever know what exactly happened between Arthur and Cynthia. No one knows how and when Cynthia decided to die with him. But everyone who knew them well can see the logic, almost the inevitability of her decision.”56 Harold Harris, who edited the unfinished joint autobiography of Koestler and Cynthia, published posthumously as Stranger on the Square, wrote that, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that his life became hers, that she lived his life. And when the time came for him to leave it, her life too was at an end.”57