by Gary Lachman
It’s unclear whether the morphine alone killed Benjamin, or whether his death was a result of the combination of exertion, the effects of the drugs, and his weak heart. Or again, whether he actually took the drug at all. Or, yet again, whether what he took was morphine or some generic sedative. The exact time, too, of his death is also uncertain. What is known is that the next day, when the police came to escort Benjamin and the others to the French border, they discovered that he was dead. In a cruel display of irony, the police then decided to forget the new regulations, and allowed Henny Gurland and her son to carry on with their journey. It may have been that their orders had again been changed, or perhaps they were mistaken about them in the first place. Again, as has been suggested, the shock of Benjamin’s death may have moved the guards and they may have allowed his companions to go because of this. If this was the case, and if Benjamin did commit suicide, then his death is a rare example of something good emerging from someone’s self-destruction.
That the myth that has grown up around Benjamin’s death may be rooted in muddle and sheer bad luck is possible, as apparently a great deal in his life was. Yet Gershom Scholem had no doubts that his long time friend had taken his life. Suicide was not something foreign to him. At the outbreak of WWI, Benjamin’s closest friend, the poet Fritz Heinle, and his fiancée Rika Seligson, gassed themselves. Fritz’s brother, Wolf, decided to follow suit, and, as Momme Brodersen explains, neither Benjamin nor any of his friends felt compelled to prevent him. As with Jacques Vaché, the war had provoked a kind of violent nihilism in Benjamin’s peers: “Those close to [Wolf] had adopted the same gesture, the same smile (of being over and above everything) and the same physical movements as he.”21 Scholem gives additional evidence that suicide was an option open to Benjamin, whether he was escaping from the Nazis or not. Diaries from 1931 show that Benjamin was not only a destructive, but a self-destructive character. Scholem speaks of Benjamin’s “increasing readiness to take his own life.” “This was probably due […] to his ‘general battle fatigue on the economic front’ and his feeling that basically he had lived his life in the fulfilment of his greatest desires.”22 A later diary of the same year was dated “from the seventh of August nineteen hundred and thirty-one to the day of death,” and began, “This diary does not promise to be long.”23
Although both the general social and political situation, as well as Benjamin’s own personal economic prospects, were bleak (throughout his career as a writer, Benjamin pretty much lived in poverty), another factor, not mentioned in other accounts, may have been in play. By this time Benjamin had read with great interest Hesse’s Steppenwolf – indeed, his experiments with hashish were prompted by the drug experiences depicted in the book – and the idea of suicide, latent in Benjamin, may have been stimulated by the novel.24 A year later, in 1932, in Nice, Benjamin again considered suicide, this time occasioned by his fortieth birthday; he made elaborate plans to carry it out, and wrote letters of farewell, but then suddenly abandoned the idea. On yet another occasion he wrote to Scholem, telling him of an evening he spent, drinking a glass of wine, waiting for a guest to join him. The ‘guest’, Scholem surmised, was death. Summing up Benjamin’s situation, Scholem wrote: “After all I have told here it is evident that Walter repeatedly reckoned with the possibility of his suicide and prepared for it. He was convinced that another war would mean a gas war and bring with it the end of civilization. Thus what finally happened after he crossed the Spanish border was not a surprising irrational act but something he had prepared inwardly for. Despite all the astonishing patience he displayed in the years after 1933 […] he was not tough enough for the events of 1940.”25
*
Mention of Benjamin’s fear of “gas war” which would “bring with it the end of civilization,” reminds us of another literary suicide who “was not tough enough for the events of 1940,” although his own death anticipated Benjamin’s by a year. Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz – otherwise known as Witkacy, a name he took to distinguish himself from his father, a well known art critic, painter and author – was perhaps the most important figure of the Polish avant-garde in the early twentieth century, although at the time of his death on 18 September 1939 he was little known outside of a small circle of friends and other artists. As fearful of the spread of western capitalism as he was of the rise of communism – both ideologies, he believed, spelled doom for the individual – on hearing that the Russian army had crossed the border into Poland (a result of the infamous non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin), Witkacy took an overdose of veronal and slit his wrists. His mistress tried to accompany him in death by also taking an overdose, but she survived.
A polymath, Witkacy applied himself to a dizzying number of disciplines, producing influential work in painting, theatre, and the novel; he also wrote important theoretical essays on aesthetics, most of them focusing on the problem of “Pure Form.” The novel, however, for Witkacy wasn’t an art form; it was a “sack” into which the writer could throw whatever interested him, and probably his most famous work in the genre, Insatiability, is a good example of his theory put into practice. An account of a young Pole’s adventures during the imminent breakdown of western civilization following an invasion by a Communist China (it was written in 1927, well in advance of Mao), it’s been described by Czeslaw Milosz as being “a study of decay: mad, dissonant music; erotic perversion; widespread use of narcotics; dispossessed thinking; false conversions to Catholicism; and complex psychopathic personalities.”26 For a reader used to the straightforward narrative of the realistic novel, Witkacy’s own authorial self in Insatiability can at times fall under this last category.
Among many other things (Witkacy’s novels tend to be rather large ‘sacks’) in Insatiability, Witkacy blended scenes of violent eroticism with critiques of Edmund Husserl, Rudolph Carnap and other contemporary philosophers. Husserl and Carnap were targets for Witkacy because he was a philosopher himself, one obsessed with “the mystery of existence;” his main work in this area is Concepts and Theorems Implied by the Concept of Being. He dedicated his life to confronting the primal questions: “Why am I this and not any other being? In this place of infinite space and at this moment of infinite time? In this group of beings, on this planet? Why indeed do I exist? I could have not existed at all;” queries that place him firmly in the existentialist camp, although Witkacy was plumbing these uncomfortable depths years before they became fashionable on the Left Bank. Along with these main lines of work, Witkacy threw himself into several other areas of exploration. He experimented with and wrote about a variety of drugs: peyote, morphine, cocaine, ether, nicotine and alcohol; in the 1920s, there were scandalous reports of drug and alcohol ridden ‘orgies’ taking place among his associates. After the suicide of his fiancée in 1914, just after his twenty-ninth birthday, in an attempt to get over his depression, he accompanied the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on his first scientific expedition to Australia and the South Seas. As a young man he cultivated the friendship of fellow artists like Karol Szymanowski,27 Arthur Rubenstein, and Sholem Asch; later his circle included Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz and Tadeus Micin´ski.
Yet although Witkacy shares being a political suicide with Benjamin, their characters are as unlike each other as can be imagined. Where Benjamin lacked spontaneity, even, perhaps, a personality – Adorno said of him that “there was something almost incorporeal about him … he seemed alienated from his own physis … he seems hardly to have been a person at all …”28 – Witkacy was a ‘multiple personality’, an instinctive and incessant self-dramatist who disconcertingly adopted numerous poses, guises and costumes in order to shock his acquaintances into a more vivid appreciation of life’s ‘strangeness’. Although Witkacy’s role-playing has echoes of Jacques Vaché, and his need to adopt different identities – based on a fundamentally weak self image – can remind us of Fernando Pessoa’s numerous ‘heteronyms’, there was something more serious behind these tactics, a concern with hum
an psychology that suggests more a parallel with the psycho-drama of the enigmatic Armenian esoteric teacher G.I. Gurdjieff, than with the narcissistic self-absorption of Vaché.29
Witkacy would ring a doorbell, then crouch down on all fours before it opened, in order to see the reaction to this. He wore cowboy hats and phosphorescent ties. While in conversation, he would suddenly turn away for a moment; when he turned back, his eyes would be covered with two halved ping-pong balls, their centres pierced so he could see through them. He had a talent for mimicry and would impersonate his acquaintances, often acting out elaborate scenes between them. He would gather a crowd of ‘odd’ visitors and then turn up with them at a stranger’s door. On one occasion he cajoled the poet Aleksander Wat into pretending to be an Italian aristocrat; during the course of the evening, Wat drank so much that he eventually became convinced that he was Italian, ran amok, and had to be restrained. At social gatherings Witkacy would give his friends various roles they were to perform, and he would scold them vigorously if they failed to take them seriously. He would see visitors in bed, in his night clothes, but on occasion naked. During a conversation he would suddenly adopt the role of a drunk, or a policeman. At a restaurant he would order a cutlet and when it arrived slip it into his wallet. He also had a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and would wash his hands several times a day, a ritual probably prompted by a fear of venereal disease which began after a visit to a prostitute in his youth. Yet, along with displaying Witkacy’s knack for absurdist comedy and existential psycho-drama, these antics indicated something else as well. “From periodical, most acute, ghastly fits of spleen” one friend remembered, “Witkacy switched to violent outbursts of biological robustness.”30
It wouldn’t be surprising if Witkacy’s penchant for constant novelty grew out of a need to fend off some deeper sense of emptiness. The philosopher Roman Ingarden said of him: “He was a man full of shyness and anxiety as to the essential value of his own artistic and scholarly achievements. He also frequently occupied beforehand and totally unnecessarily an aggressive-defensive position … In company he often behaved in an extravagant way in order to cover up for his discomfort and to overcome shyness … He could sense in himself some deficiency, some distressing void in the final core of his personality …”31 And not everyone was amused by his behaviour. The novelist Witold Gombrowicz, who said of Insatiability that it had demolished the genre of the novel itself “in a manner far exceeding the ruthlessness of a Virginia Woolf, James Joyce or Franz Kafka,” found Witkacy’s ‘theatre’ annoying. “From the first moment, Witkacy tired and bored me – he could never relax, was always tense, badgering himself and others with his constant theatricals, the urge to make an impression and focus everyone’s attention on himself, always toying with people cruelly and painfully.”32 Gombrowicz recognized that there was something “truly dramatic” to Witkacy’s ‘games’. Yet “one got the impression that something remarkable was becoming distorted and pushed to the bottom of painful tomfoolery.” Gombrowicz came to the conclusion that in Poland “superiority and inferiority are incapable of co-existing and instead plunge one another into farce.”33
Gombrowicz’s recognition of “the urge to make an impression” seems accurate, and can be seen in Witkacy’s fascination with being photographed, a trait he shared with the Japanese novelist – and fellow literary suicide – Yukio Mishima. Yet in practically every photograph I’ve seen of Witkacy, he is in costume, or in a ‘role’ and in some way ‘acting out’, and the effect, after a time, is wearying. A well known photograph of Witkacy, Multiplied Self-portrait reflected in Mirrors, has him in his army uniform – he was in the Russian army during WWI – facing a corner where two large mirrors connect. The viewer then sees four images of Witkacy – two profiles and two full faces – but, with his back to the viewer, Witkacy’s own face is hidden. His painting is also full of many self-portraits, most of them with ‘piercing’ eyes. Where is Witkacy? It seems clear that he himself didn’t know.34 Linked to this compulsion – the term doesn’t seem an exaggeration – is Witkacy’s professed need for other people, that is, an audience. In his drama The Mother he writes, “I am like some highly charged missile that is laying calmly in a meadow. But so far there has been no cannon and no one to launch me. And I cannot do it by myself – I have to have people.”35
Such self-obsession born of a tenuous ego not uncommonly prompts an attraction to suicide. At an early age, Witkacy developed a strange, near schizophrenic detachment from himself. He saw his own life and existence as an object of study. As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, he told his friends that he “would like to take a look at myself during my death, when full freedom is reached for interpretation of pure aesthetic experiences dissolved into one! I imagine the loss of the proportions of my body and the growing devastation of my consciousness. It must be very exciting. Perhaps someday I shall be able, at least for a minute, to imitate the work of death.”36 Unlike Thomas Lovell Beddoes – see ‘Ten Suicides’ – who developed a fascination with the dead body, Witkacy’s obsession seemed to be with the actual process of dying. This kind of self-obsession can also prompt profound feelings of dissociation. In 1913, while his father, with whom he had a long and difficult relationship, was ill, Witkacy lived with his mother at the boarding house she ran to supplement her income from music lessons. Witkacy felt a deep self-contempt, considering himself a parasite – he was twenty-eight and not earning any money; during most of his life he was dependent on his family – which resulted in a kind of ‘other self’ or Doppelgänger taking over his identity. He suffered hallucinations and hysterical fits and sought treatment from the first Polish Freudian psychiatrist. This crisis came to a head in early 1914, when, as mentioned, his fiancée killed herself, presumably over an affair with the composer Szymanowski. Madness, death and suicide not surprisingly became central themes in Witkacy’s work.
The trigger for Witkacy’s actual suicide, however, was something other than his long fascination with death. As mentioned, Insatiability depicts the imminent breakdown of western civilization; as such, it’s been described as “a metaphor of total suicide.”37 Predating Huxley and Orwell and written in the same year that Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We was first published in its original Russian,38 Insatiability gives a demonic form to Witkacy’s long felt apprehension about a coming European catastrophe, a socio-political cataclysm that would result in “the ultimate metamorphosis of mankind into a collectivised, technologized, and asexual beehive.”39 Witkacy had long feared that modern man was moving toward a technologically propelled totalitarian society, in which the individual – specifically, individuals like himself, artistic, philosophical, and out of the ordinary – would become obsolete. As war clouds gathered once again over Europe, and the rise of both Fascism and Communism seemed to insure the collapse of western democracy (about which Witkacy held no illusions), Witkacy’s own personal depression and sense of failure combined to create an atmosphere of imminent doom. He had no money, his work had received repeated critical rejection, and his relationships with women were less than successful. By the late thirties, Witkacy had stopped writing plays and had practically given up painting, and had devoted himself almost solely to philosophy, beginning a long correspondence with the philosopher Hans Cornelius. Friends detected in him a growing gloom, and a return of his fascination with suicide. He spoke of it as a “necessity.” “There is much I could endure,” he told a friend, “but I could never stand to be tortured … What awaits us in the near future is one enormous concentration camp.”40
To another friend he declared, shortly before committing suicide:
You have no idea what a hell awaits this world … a hell very few will survive … Not a single stone will be left standing of our generation or our age… . We are the new Atlantis which is being inundated by a ferocious flood, along with all our theories with which we tried unsuccessfully to subdue life and to plumb its mysterious mechanism; with our hysterical catastrophism, as refine
d and heady as that whole decadent epoch of ours searching in vain for its compass, a cursed epoch … I feel as if I, too, am nearing the end, along with that epoch – I, who was always obsessed by a frantic desire to suck all the magic out of life and to discover its mystery, to transcend its laws and penetrate its most essential meaning.41
To another friend, Witkacy wrote: “I often think about suicide – that it’s going to be necessary to bring my life to an end a bit earlier that way, out of a sense of honour, so as not to live to see my own total comedown.”42
His “total comedown” was avoided by the outbreak of WWII. Witkacy was in Warsaw on 1 September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. He had volunteered for military service, but was rejected because of his age (fifty-four) and deteriorating health (like Benjamin, his heart was bad; he was also going deaf). So, like thousands of others, he joined the refugees fleeing to the eastern provinces, where it was hoped that a second front could be established. When the Germans bombed Brzes´c´, Witkacy and his lover Czeslawa Korzeniowska set out on foot into the Polish countryside, carrying knapsacks packed with food and clothing. Again like Benjamin, Witkacy was not really up to the journey; his legs were bad, and the couple had to make frequent stops. In the village of Jeziory he reached the end of his road. With the Nazis approaching from the west, Witkacy heard the news that on 17 September, the Russians had invaded from the east, intent on regaining land lost under the Tsar. Witkacy must have wished his prophetic powers were less acute.
