Sein zum Tode: Notes on the Case of Ellen West and the Work of Ludwig Binswanger

Ellen West (1888-1921) [1]

 

'She looked in death as she had never looked in life; calm, happy, and peaceful.'

 

I. 

 

I've been interested in the tragic (but also seminal) case of Ellen West since the Thanatology series of papers at Treadwell's in 2006 and, to be honest, I'm very surprised to discover that - apparently - I haven't discussed it in a post published on Torpedo the Ark before now ... [2]

 

 

II.

 

Der Fall Ellen West - Eine anthropologisch-klinische Studie was published in 1944-45 by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger [3].

 

It offers a fascinating account of a young woman's agonising struggle to die at the time and in the manner of her own choosing and is considered to be a crucial text within a discipline known as Daseinsanalysis (one that attempts to combine therapeutic practice with existental philosophy) [4].    

 

Ellen West already had a clinical history of depression and disordered eating by the time she came under the care of Binswanger at his Bellevue Sanatorium in the picturesque town of Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, in 1921. Her ten week stay here resulted in a diagnosis of bulimia nervosa and schizophrenia and, ultimately, the suicide that she had long desired.

III.

West was born to a Jewish family in the United States in 1888, who moved to Europe when she was ten years old. An intelligent and articulate child, who enjoyed reading and writing poetry, she was also said to be disobedient and prone to obsessive-compulsive behaviour. By the time she reached early adulthood, she already had an extreme fear of gaining weight and began taking an extraordinary amount of laxatives.

 

Aged 28, she married her cousin, Karl, and hoped for a child. But her eating disorder had left her in a frail and fragile condition and by 30 she was no longer menstruating and had fallen to a dangerously low weight below 100 lbs. (the average weight for a healthy woman of her age at that time was between 135-150 lbs).

 

If he hadn't noticed already, West's husband was forced to confront the truth of his wife's condition when she confided in him about her problematic relation with food, her addiction to laxatives, and her obesophobia, which, by this stage, was mutating into an altogether something different (and something philosophically more interesting).       

 

 

IV.

Towards the end of her life, death was West's great obsession; one is tempted to describe it more as her passion and paradoxical life goal (i.e., that which provided meaning and direction and which she didn't merely resign herself to, but actively strove to achieve).

 

She had arrived at the conclusion that being dead was better than being fat - and preferable to a life that felt empty and boring and required the constant consumption of food. And so, West chose to invite death into her life by indulging in dangerous activities, such as kissing children with scarlet fever, riding horses in a reckless manner, and standing naked in the cold after having a hot bath [5].    

None of these things did the trick, however, and West eventually died after leaving the Bellevue clinic with Binswanger's blessing [6] and swallowing a lethal dose of poison; something her husband consented to and witnessed, telling others that she had been in a strangely festive mood for several days prior. 

 

Herr Doktor Binswanger was also recorded as saying that Ellen looked 'as she had never looked in life - calm, happy, and peaceful', having taken full responsibility for her own existence and her own death. 

 

 

V.

 

So, what, in sum, do we learn from the case of Ellen West? 

We learn that for some people, sometimes, only voluntary death brings freedom and fulfilment. 

 

In other words, there are times when nothingness and non-being take on a desperately positive meaning and only in her decision for death did West, paradoxically, find her authentic self. As George Steiner writes, conveniently summarising Heidegger's thinking on the matter in Sein und Zeit (1927):

 

"Dasein can come to grasp its own wholeness and [...] meaningfulness [...] only when it faces its 'no-longer-being-there' (sein 'Nicht-mehr-dasein) [...] Dasein [...] has access to the meaning of being because, and only because, that being is finite. Authentic being is, therefore, a being-towards-death, a Sein-zum-Tode." [7] 

 

 

VI.

 

It's clear that Michel Foucault found the case of Ellen West particularly fascinating and he develops this thanatological line of thinking in his own work. She was, he said, a woman "'caught between the wish to fly, to float in ethereal jubilation, and the obsessive fear of being trapped [by] a muddy earth that oppressed and paralyzed her'" [8].

 

To embrace death was obviously to bring her life to an end, but suicide nevertheless enabled the brief experience of a "'totally free existence […] one that would no longer know the weight of living, but only the transparency where love is totalized in the eternity of an instant'" [9]. 

 

I'm not sure I know exactly what this means - but it sounds very beautiful and it's worth noting in closing how the case of Ellen West has inspired several writers and artists, including the acclaimed American poet Frank Bidart, whose long persona poem 'Ellen West' (1977) can be read by clicking here [10]. 

 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: 

Kopf Dr. Ludwig Binswanger und kleine Mädchen (1917-18) 

 meisterdrucke.uk

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The real name of the young woman at the centre of this case remains unknown; Ellen West was a pseudonym invented by her doctor, Ludwig Binswanger, who is believed to have based it on the character Rebecca West, in Ibsen's play Rosmersholm (1868), a central theme of which is the idea of suicide as one way to find meaning and freedom in death.

 

[2] I say apparently because I'm half-convinced that such a post was published on TTA but has since been deleted by Blogger. 

      The Treadwell's paper to which I refer was entitled 'Suicide and the Practice of Joy before Death'. It can be found in volume two of The Treadwell's Papers (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

 

[3] Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) was a Swiss psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of existential psychology or what he termed Daseinanalyse (see note 4 below). 

      In 1907, Binswanger received his medical degree from the University of Zurich and, as a young man, he worked and studied with some of the great shrinks of his era, including Freud, Jung, and Eugen Bleuler (who coined the terms schizophrenia and autism). He was, however, always a bit wary of psychoanalysis and arguably more influenced by the philosophical ideas of Husserl and Heidegger. Perhaps not surprisingly, Foucault was a fan of Binswanger's work, translating his 1930 essay Traum und Existenz from German into French in 1954 and providing a substantial introduction (the fact that Ludwig Binswanger's uncle, Otto Binswanger, had been one of Nietzsche's physicians during the philosopher's final years was doubtless something Foucault also found intriguing).

      An English translation of Binswanger's most famous case - that of Ellen West - by Werner M. Mendel and Joseph Lyons, can be found in Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, ed. by Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger (Basic Books, 1958).  

 

[4] Daseinsanalysis was first developed by Binswanger in the 1920s under the name phenomenological anthropology. His thinking at this time was heavily influenced by Husserl on the one hand and Freud on the other. His key idea was that human existence (as a specific mode of being) is open to any and all experience and that die Lebenswelt significantly shapes an individual's self (thus, if you want to change the way someone thinks, you must first alter their lived experience of the world).

      Binswanger also believed that mental health issues - including schizophrenia, melancholy, and mania - often stemmed from the paradox of men and women living alongside others whilst ultimately remaining alone. As he developed his thinking and continued his research, Binswanger began to increasingly relate his analysis to the work of Martin Heidegger and following publication of his book Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins in 1942, he began using the term Daseinanalyse.

 

[5] Whether or not these activities constitute a practice of joy before death is something that you, dear reader, may decide upon. It might be noted that West also attempted to commit suicide on several occasions via more conventional methods; for example, she twice overdosed on pills, once threw herself in front of a car, and once attempted to jump from the window of her psychiatrist's office.

 

[6] As James Miller informs us, in her sessions with Binswanger Ellen West is "alert, amiable, and apparetly consumed by the desire to die". Thus, after consulting with two other psychiatrists - both of whom agree that her case is hopeless - Binswanger decides that she should be allowed home, even though he is aware that Ellen "will almost certainly kill herself".  

      See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, (Flamingo, 1994), pp. 74-75.

 

[7] George Steiner, Heidegger (Fontana Press, 1989), p. 99.

 

[8] Foucault quoted by James Miller in The Passion of Michel Foucault ... p. 75.

[9] Ibid.  

      Although Foucault didn't successfully commit suicide, he made a number of attempts to do so - including one in which he slashed his chest open with a knife - and always dreamed "'of violent death, of savage death, of horrified death' […] a death in which in its most inauthentic form is but the bloody and brutal interruption of life, yet in its authentic form, is the fulfilment of [man's] very existence". 

      For Foucault, then, as for Ellen West, suicide is the final desire or ultimate mode of imagining. Far from being a negation of the world and the self, it is rather "'a way of rediscovering the original moment in which I make myself world'". 

      Again, see Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault ... pp. 78-79. 

 

[10] 'Ellen West', by Frank Bidart, was originally published in The Book of the Body (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). It can also be found in Bidart's In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991). 

 

Thoughts Inspired by Three Short Stories by Chōkōdō Shujin

(The Tripover, 2025) 

Note: all page numbers in this post refer to this edition.

 

 

I. 

 

Our friends at The Tripover have a new book out; a debut short story collection by Chōkōdō Shujin that opens in a cabbage field and ends on the volcanic island of Iowa Jima, but mostly unfolds in that non-space of the excluded middle; the space that is in between here and there, now and then, fantasy and reality; the realm of fuzzy logic, dark limpidity, and what Nietzsche terms dangerous knowledge where imagination and memory meet. 

 

A good place for any writer to explore - even at the risk of losing their way ...

 

 

II. 

 

The name Chōkōdō Shujin will, of course, ring a bonshō bell for those readers familiar with Japanese literature. For it was originally the pen name adopted by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa; a writer viewed by many as a master of the structured short story who, tragically, topped himself in 1927, aged 35, after both his mental and physical health began to markedly deteriorate, leaving behind him over 150 short stories, as well as a wife and three children. 

 

Now, the author of this collection of tales writes under this name; honouring his dead hero whilst, at the same time, attempting to find his own voice and literary style. I have to say, that's either a brave and confident or foolish and conceited thing to do; a bit like a young philosopher deciding to publish a book under the name Zarathustra and thereby inviting comparison with Nietzsche.

 

Still, who knows, maybe it pays to call attention to oneself in this manner, though whether he’ll be nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize [a] on the basis of this book remains to be seen ...

 

 

III.

 

Of the ten stories assembled here, there are three that most captured my interest and so, rather than write a review of the book as a whole, I'd like to make some brief remarks inspired by this trio of tales and the themes of agalmatophilia, sexsomnia, and suicide that reside at their dark heart [b].

 

Meguri 

 

As someone who has written often on the topic of agalmatophilia, I was naturally drawn to the longest story in Shujin's book entitled 'Meguri' - a term which, like many Japanese words, has multiple meanings depending on the kanji characters used. 

 

In the context of this tale, for example, it may refer to the circulation of souls contained within the statue; or it could refer to the manner in which the statue patrols the house at night, looking for love or seeking revenge.  

 

The proganonist, Sōtarō Takeshita, is haunted by the sculpted figure of a Chinese noblewoman with slender, finely carved wrists to which - as a cheirophile as well as a statue fetishist - he is particularly partial. 

 

Her beauty is a pale and perfect combination of coldness and cruelty and ever since falling and cutting his head on the statue as a young boy, Sōtarō has had a strange bond with her; one sealed with blood. At night, she often stands by his bedside, silent and motionless, disturbing his sleep, before returning to her place in the parlour at dawn. 

 

The author doesn't say that the young man masturbates as she stands looking down on him, but he does mention the motion of his trembling hands and I guess we can take this as rather coy way of suggesting such (the strange bond between them is thus sealed with semen as well as blood). 

 

As the servant Tatsuo says: "The master of this house has always been like a lover to her …" [36]

 

Unfortunately, the statue also has a propensity to kill - particularly intruders who break into the house. Following one such incident, the police are called and Detective Nishitani of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police almost immediately suspects strange goings on involving the statue. For whilst her face was very beautiful, there was the look of "malice in her piercing eyes" [26]. 

 

He interviews the young master of the house: 

 

"Nishitani's impression of Sōtarō was one of profound loneliness. Indeed, the young man seemed dead inside, as hollow as the statue, as if his soul had been stolen from his body." [30]

 

And, by the end of the story, that's precisely what has happened; Sōtarō's soul is stolen and imprisoned within the stone along with the lonely and tormented souls of many other poor wretches. 

 

That's probably not great; a bit like being in the sunken place that Chris finds himself in Jordan Peele's excellent psychological horror Get Out (2017). One is conscious, but robbed of agency and denied freedom of movement and the ability to communicate verbally with others.

 

Ultimately, the question of whether Sōtarō is dead, dreaming, mad, or perhaps suffering from locked-in syndrome (pseudocoma) isn't really answered, so I guess it doesn't really matter. Besides, human beings are remarkably resilient and can get used to almost any conditions: 

 

"Whether this was madness or death, it did not seem to be such a fearsome thing. It was far less unpleasant than his waking existence." [46]  

 

 

Nakajima Says

 

If ‘Meguri’ is a warning against the dangers of excessive masturbation - it leads to a loss of soul - then we might read 'Nakajima Says' as a warning not to daydream or meditate to the point at which one falls into a state of sexually violent somnambulism and one's thoughts begin to first fragment and then dissolve until "there is nothing left in mind, and only emptiness remains" [54]. 

 

This may be a desired goal for those who tie spiritual enlightenment to the overcoming of consciousness and moral agency, but I can’t personally see the attraction of sleepwalking along imaginary corridors or living in "an intense world of disconnection" [55]. No man is an island - even if his name is Nakajima.

 

Nor am I a fan of reaching a psycho-physiological state of numbness (hypoesthesia); building a BwO is an attempt to deliver man from his automatic reactions, it is not about becoming "free and empty" [59] of all feeling, gaiety, and dance so that one ends us belonging to that "dreary parade of sucked dry, catatonicized, vitrified, sewn-up bodies" described by Deleuze and Guattari [c]. 

 

However, I’m all for a little urban gardening; creating space for wild flowers and building a little pond for crabs and catfish to live. And if this is what Nakajima suggests we do, then that's great, although I’m extremely wary of the idea that this involves controlling the natural landscape and "requires an immersive contemplation of the ego" [58]. 

 

It turns out that Nakajima has a girlfriend - Sonoko - whose lovely name means child of the garden. She possesses, we are told, "the poise and mystery of a café waitress" [61] and no doubt her smile is ineffably sweet, her figure divinely slim [d]. 

 

But her beauty doesn't justify grabbing her hair and pulling her to the ground ... And Nakajima's sexual aggression, fuelled as much by Sonoko's silence as her appearance - "Why doesnt she scream or cry?" [61] - is as reprehensible as his desire to subdue nature and empty himself of all thought and feeling like a sleepwalking zombie.

 

Of course, it might be that Nakajima - if ever charged with rape or sexual assault - would offer a criminal defence based on a medical diagnosis of sexsomnia; a condition which can occur at the same time as other parasomnia activities and lead to an abnormally high level of sexual tension dangerously coupled with decreased inhibitions [e].  

Does living in a dream not only become a reality, but enable one to escape culpability ...?  

 

 

The Scent of Roses 

On the suicide of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 1927 

 

"No one could be surprised by Akutagawa's death [...] For two years, he had meticulously planned his voluntary death." [83] 

 

Indeed, the letter he left behind was so carefully crafted and revised, that it was more like a beautiful prose poem than a hastily scribbled suicide note stained with tears and full of errors. 

 

Akutagawa understood what it was to practice joy before death; i.e., to constantly imagine how best to construct a beautiful, stylish - some might even say chic - exit from this life and keep at hand the instruments that might facilitate such. 

 

In Akutagawa's case, this meant a small bottle of poison:

 

"Always the aesthete, he had no desire to throw himself in front of a train or from a roof. His vanity, too, was the reason for having decided against hanging, although he had attempted to do so on more than one occasion. Akutagawa was a strong swimmer, which precluded drowning; as his hands shook from the sleeping pills that he took even in the daytime, seppuku was not an option, despite his prowess as a martial artist." [87]

 

His wife, Fumi, appears to have understood her husband's desire for a voluntary death; her first words on discovering his body were to congratulate him:  "'I'm so happy for you, darling'" [84].

 

For to die at thirty-five ensured he would "always be remembered at the height of his beauty and talent" [85]. But it's not so easy dying at the right time; Zarathustra speaks of it as a difficult and rare art [f]. So well done Akutagawa, whose death was widely reported throughout the world and served as an inspiration to those who know their Nietzsche. 

 

What wasn't reported, however - and here comes the fictional twist in the tale - was that Akutagawa's close friend, the artist Ryūichi Ōana, could not bear the thought of never seeing his face again. And so, whilst standing alone by the casket, he found himself tempted to do something that even he considered monstrous; namely, remove the nails and open the rectangular pine box ....

 

"Ōana knew very well that the dead man in the casket would be quite unrecognisable after four days, when dry ice was in such short supply. There was no doubt in his mind that, if he were to see such a face, he would remember it with horror until the end of days. And yet he could not overcome the desire - no, the need - to see Akutagawa one last time." [89]

 

Shujin continues:

 

"With a strength beyond himself, he pried the lid from the casket, holding his handkerchief to his nose. Ōana was, indeed, startled. The face before him remained unchanged from the day he had painted the death mask, pale and at peace, his lips slightly parted, as though he had at last seen eternity and found himself in a state of grace." [89]

 

That's a nice way to close a story. 

 

And it reminds one of the famous case of Ellen West, who, like Akutagawa, also died after taking a lethal dose of poison, having spent her last hours reading, writing, and snacking. Her psychiatrist, Ludwig Binswanger, a pioneer in the field of existential psychology and much influenced by Heidegger, said after viewing the body of his patient:  'She looked as she had never looked in life - calm, happy, and peaceful.' 

Although whether a scent of roses pervaded her room, I cannot say ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The Akutagawa Prize is a Japanese literary award presented biannually to a promising young writer. It was established in 1935 by Kan Kikuchi, then-editor of Bungeishunjū magazine, in memory of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and is sponsored by the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature.

 

[b] Let me say at the outset that this is not strictly speaking a faithful reading or critical assessment of the tales, so much as a perverse reimagining in line with my own interests rather than the intentions of the author Chōkōdō Shujin. Apologies to him -and his publishers - should they feel I've taken excessive liberties with the text and in any way detracted from the original stories.

 

[c] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans, Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 150. 

[d] Regular readers of Torpedo the Ark will recall the recent post on the sexual politics of waitressing (12 March, 2025), in which I referenced a poem by Robert W. Service that includes the lines "Her smile ineffably is sweet / Divinely she is slim" - click here.   

 

[e] The number of alleged sex offenders claiming sexsomnia as a legal defence is rapidly growing; the argument is that a person who commits an act whilst asleep (i.e., not fully conscious - even if their eyes are are wide open) cannot be held criminally responsible for that act; that there has to be intent on their part and the act has to be voluntary, for a crime to have been committed. 

 

[f] See Nietzsche, 'Of Voluntary Death', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). For Nietzsche, as the great comedian of the ascetic ideal, it is of course all about timing: 'Many die too late and some die too early. Still the doctrine sounds strange: Die at the right time.' 

 

 

Click here for a sister post to this one based on another tale found in Nakajima Says and Other Stories (2025). 

Dark Spring: In Memory of Unica Zürn and a Brief Note on a New Exhibition Reimagining Her Legacy

Photo of Unica Zürn by Man Ray (1956) and a flyer for the 

Dark Spring - syzygy exhibition ft. Vicky Wright's V-Effekt (2024) 

 

"There can never have been a spring more beautifully dark than this ..."

 

 

I. 

 

Unica Zürn, for those who might not recognise the name, was a German author and artist, probably most famous for her anagrammatic poetry, automatic drawings, and the notorious nude photos produced in collaboration with her Surrealist lover, Hans Bellmer, in 1958, in which she was bound so tightly with string that it cut into her flesh.

 

Born in the summer of 1916, in the Grunewald district of Berlin, Zürn adored her (mostly absent) father; had a stormy relationship with her (uncaring) mother; and was sexually abused by her older brother. 

 

After leaving school, she began working at the film agency which produced propaganda material for the Nazi Party, although Zürn herself was not a party member (and, besides, a girl has to make a living somehow).

 

She married a much older - and also much wealthier - man during the War and bore him two children. Unfortunately, following a divorce in 1949, Zürn lost custody of both bairns, lacking as she did the means to support them (or indeed herself).    

 

Deciding that she was more suited to a bohemian life rather than one of domestic drudgery and child-rearing, Zürn began to hang around the caberet circuit and frequent the bars and clubs popular with artists, whilst earning what she could by writing short stories for newspapers and dramas for the radio.

 

Zürn also became romantically involved with the painter and dancer Alexander Camaro, although it was her meeting with Hans Bellmer in 1953 that was to prove pivotal; the two of them fleeing Germany and relocating to Paris, where she became his mistress, model, and muse. 

 

Whilst in Paris, Zürn also began experimenting with her own artwork; if Bellmer secretly wished to slice up bodies, she was more interested in how to fragment language and produce a style of writing she termed Hexentexte (1954). 

 

Before long, she and Hans were very much part of the Surrealist in-crowd, mixing with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray ... and all the other usual suspects. But the good times were not to last and in 1960 Zürn experienced a psychotic episode - which may or may not have been triggered by her experiments with mescaline. 

 

Following this, dissociative states, severe depression, and suicidal thoughts became the norm and she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic (and not in the positive sense that Deleuze and Guatarri would later thrill to). If, on the one hand, she continued to produce new work, on the other, she destroyed many of her earlier drawings and writings.  

 

Long story short: in October 1970, 54-year-old Zürn committed suicide by leaping from the window of the Paris apartment she had shared with Bellmer, while on a five-day leave from a psychiatric hospital. She was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and, at his request, Bellmer was buried next to her upon his death in 1975.

 

One of Zürn's final written works was the semi-autobiographical Dunkler Frühling (1967) [1], which tells the story of an obsessive young woman as she has her first sexual encounters and experiences the onset of mental illness. 

 

Somewhat disconcertingly, Zürn's death seems to be foreshadowed in the text as the protagonist of Dark Spring also tops herself by jumping out of a window, although, as it rather poignantly says in the book: She was dead even before her feet left the windowsill.

 

This book has since acquired cult status, particularly amongst feminists, female artists, and those who find her life (and death) fascinating (even romantic). Thus it is, for example, one can wander around Hoxton on a sunny afternoon and come across a contemporary gallery space on Vestry Street running an exhibition entitled Dark Spring - syzygy [2] ...    

II.

There were only eleven paintings on show - two from each of the five artists featured in the exhibition, with an extra one for luck by Sadie Murdoch thrown into the mix - but I struggled to see how some of the pictures repurposed and re-routed the principles of Zürn's work, as promised in the exhibition press release (though I'm perfectly willing to concede this might be a failure on my part). 

 

I liked Murdoch's Pass-Way Into Where To (2022) - an ink-jet printed digital montage, operating, it is claimed, in "the field of power and absence, via the partial, the incomplete, the crop and the edit" (see Figure 1 below).

 

And I also really liked a canvas by Petra Williams entitled Floating Man (2024); not so much for the questions it posed re identity, isolation, relationship to others, the need to create one's own space, etc., but because the colours were so lovely (see Figure 2 below).

 

But perhaps my favorite work was a pair of pictures by Vicky Wright in her V-Effekt series (2024). For these at least gave us amorphous figures with distorted bodies and a layering of faces that one might expect and hope for in an exhibition inspired by Unica Zürn.

 

The writer of the exhibition press release describes them as anti-portraits and speaks of how their woozy painterliness troubles subjectivity, thereby obliging the viewer to reconsider the idea of the human self in relation to non-human elements, both demonic and animal (see Figure 3 below).        

 

Fig. 1 Sadie Murdoch: Pass-Way Into Where To (2022)

Fig. 2 Petra Williams: Floating Man (2024)

Fig. 3 Vicky Wright: V-Effekt II (2024)

Notes

 

[1] This short novel by Unica Zürn has been translated into English by Caroline Rupprecht and was published by Exact Change in 2000. 

 

[2] The exhibition at Cross Lane Projects (1st floor, 6-8 Vestry Street, London N1), runs until 19 April, 2025, and features work by Vicky Wright, Josephine Wood, Petra K. Williams, Sadie Murdoch, and Tracey Owusu. For full details and to download the press release from which I quote in this post, please click here.   

Darkness On Christmas Day: Notes on Arthur Koestler (Overrated Novelist, Parapsychologist, Alleged Rapist, etc.)

Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983)

Photographed by Ida Kar (1959)
National Portrait Gallery

 

Nobody can write guiltlessly ...

I. 

 

There are some books which I have read once and then never felt the need to return to: Darkness at Noon would be one such novel, for example ...

 

Although originally written in German, the first published edition of Koestler's dystopian masterpiece - and, to be honest, pretty much the only novel he is now remembered for - was the poetically titled English translation of 1940 [1]. 

 

In brief - as I imagine most readers will be familiar with the work - Darkness at Noon is the story of an old revolutionary (Rubashov) who is arrested and imprisoned by the Party he served so loyally and tried for treason by the State he helped to build. 

 

Although the novel doesn't say so, it's clearly set in the Soviet Union and Number One is obviously Uncle Joe. For by the end of the 1930s, Koestler, like his good friend George Orwell, was bitterly disillusioned with the communist ideology he had once passionately embraced [2]. 

 

Critically acclaimed at the time - and overranked ever since on lists of great English-language novels of the 20th-century - Darkness at Noon provides a grimly fascinating insight into the revolutionary politics of the period and the authoritarian mindset. But, I still think that - like the more allegorical Animal Farm (1945) - having read it once, there's no real reason to go back and read it again.  

 

I mean, we all get the central idea: it's not much fun living under totalitarian regimes; be they political or theocratic in character. Even D. H. Lawrence - who was certainly a long way from being a liberal - came to this conclusion having arrived at his own dead end in The Plumed Serpent (1926): click here.   

 

II.

 

I have, however, other reasons for not wanting to re-read this novel; reasons that are more to do with my dislike of Koestler the man, rather than disinterest in his fiction ...

For one thing, it was alleged in David Cesarani's 1998 biography [3] that he was a serial rapist [4]. And, for another, Koestler was also something of a crackpot or, if you prefer, a parapsychologist; i.e., the sort of person who believes (without evidence) that there is real evidence for phenomena such as extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, and telepathy; the sort of person who also insists that every coincidence is meaningful (or synchronistic). 

 

Koestler's fascination with the paranormal permeated much of his later writings; see, for example, The Roots of Coincidence (1972), in which he argues that certain (occult) phenomena will never be explained by orthodox science which, in his view, is essentially - and dangerously - reductionist [5]. 

 

After his suicide in 1983 [6], Koestler left the bulk of his estate to the promotion of research into all things spooky (and pseudo-scientific) through the founding of a chair in parapsychology at a British university. 

 

Unfortunately, the trustees of the estate had difficulty finding a university willing to establish such a chair: to their credit, Oxford, Cambridge, King's College London and UCL were all approached and all refused. However, to their shame, the University of Edinburgh decided to grab the money on offer and agreed to set up a chair in accordance with Koestler's request [7]. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Interestingly, the German manuscript was lost for 75 years after having been translated into English. Thus, all versions of the work prior to 2015 - including the 1944 German edition produced by Koestler himself - were based on the English translation published by Macmillan.

      As for the title, Darkness at Noon, this was chosen by the British sculptor Daphne Hardy - Koestler's girlfriend (and translator) at the time - after the publishers rejected his original title, 'The Vicious Circle'. The phrase is adapted from the Book of Job: "They meet with darkness in the day time, and grope in the noonday as in the night." (KJV 5:14)

 

[2] Just to be clear on the extent of Koestler's committment to Marxist-Leninist ideology, in the early 1930s he left Germany and moved to the USSR, living for a time in Ukraine, which was then enduring what is known as the Holodomor (1932-33); a man-made famine - most likely engineered at Stalin's behest for political reasons - that killed millions of people. 

      Despite witnessing terrible scenes, Koestler endorsed the official Soviet version of events and claimed that the starving were workshy enemies of the people. He only resigned his membership of the Communist Party in 1938.   

 

[3] David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (William Heinemann Ltd., 1998). 

 

[4] To be fair, this has been challenged by later authors, including Michael Scammell in his 2009 biography, although even he concedes that Koestler could be sexually aggressive towards women and held firmly to the troubling view that 'without an element of initial rape there is no delight' in sexual relations (a remark made by Koestler in a letter to the woman who was to become his second wife). 

      See Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual (Faber and Faber, 2010); first published in the US under the title Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (Random House, 2009).

      But see also David Cesarani's review of Scammell's biography in Prospect Magazine (24 Feb 2010), in which he continues to insist that Koestler was a voracious sexual predator with a penchant for using physical force to get his way: click here.

 

[5] That said, Koestler also argues that there are direct links between ancient forms of mysticism and modern physics - if only the physicists would open their eyes and look (and if only they would listen to what Jung has to say).  

 

[6] I've no issue with Koestler having the courage to top himself aged 77 in 1983; he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1976 and then, three years later, with terminal leukaemia. However, some worry that he may have unduly coerced his healthy and considerably younger wife, Cynthia, into killing herself so that he'd not have to face the end alone (and she'd not have to live without him). As the writer Julian Barnes says, even if Koestler didn't talk her into it, neither did he try to talk her out of it. This is another controversial topic amongst scholars who choose to study Koestler.      

 

[7] The Koestler Parapsychology Unit was established in 1985 at the University of Edinburgh. It aims to teach and conduct research concerning various aspects of parapsychology. The Chair is currently held by Professor Caroline Watt.

 

Give Me Convenience and Give Me Death

The Sarco Pod : every home should have one ...

 

 

I. 

 

Some readers might recall a news story from late 2021 which reported that someone had invented a 3D-printable [1] suicide pod and planned to demonstrate its practical convenience in the picture-postcard setting of Switzerland, where assisted dying or self-determined suicide - like public nudity and prostitution - is perfectly legal [2].     

 

Well, three years later, and I can announce the suicide pod - which is activated from inside and also contains an emergency button just in case the suicidal subject has a last minute change of mind or perhaps feels a tad claustrophobic - has finally had a fully successful first outing ...

 

 

II. 

 

Called the Sarco [3], the futuristic-looking pod works by rapidly increasing nitrogen levels (and thereby reducing oxygen levels), so that the suicidal subject lying snugly inside loses consciousness and dies in under ten minutes (giving them just enough time to count a medium sized flock of sheep if they wish to do so).      

 

Unfortunately, following the event held in a forest in Merishausen - a sparsely populated area on the Swiss-German border - the police moved in and made several arrests on the grounds that the anonymous volunteer - believed to be an American woman in her 60s - had not merely been given assistance in an unregulated manner, but had been incited into taking her own life (one would imagine that's going to be hard to prove in a court of law).

 

Officers also confiscated the Sarco pod - and, amusingly, took the corpse into custody.

 

 

III.

 

Although a German scientist (natch) by the name of Florian Willet - a leading member of the Last Resort [4] - was present at the woman's death, it is unclear whether he was among those arrested. Afterwards, Willet told a Swiss tabloid that the woman had enjoyed einen friedlichen, schnellen und würdigen Tod - which sounds like a bourgeois marketing slogan if ever I heard one! [5]

 

Meanwhile, the Australian inventor of the Sarco, Philip Nitschke, who had watched the woman's death via video link, posted on X that she had passed away - just as she wanted - in a beautiful forest and described her death as idyllic (i.e., picture-perfect).  

 

Before entering the Sarco Pod, the woman made a statement to her lawyer - who just so happens to be a director of the Last Resort and married to the good doctor Nitschke - that she was of sound mind; but do people ever know quite how how sane or crazy they are?

 

She also had the full support of her family, who doubtless acted with good intentions (and besides, it's certainly easier to pop mom in a pod than to provide palliative care).

 

Notes

 

[1] The capsule's Australian inventor Philip Nitschke - known by his critics as Dr. Death - doesn't plan to manufacture and sell his machine in the conventional manner. Rather, he intends to make the blueprints freely available online so anyone can download the design and, if they have a 3D-printer, produce their very own model.

 

[2] According to a government website, Swiss law allows assisted suicide as long as the person takes his or her life with no 'external assistance' and those who help the person die do not do so for 'any self-serving motive'.  

 

[3] This is obviously short for sarcophagus, which, as Síomón Solomon reminds us, is a term with a fascinating etymology that leads towards a dark poetry concerned with flesh eating stone and biting humour (or sarcasm). 

      In an email, Solomon also notes how on the side of the Sarco Pod is a quote from Carl Sagan, the US astronomer - We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself - obliging him to ask whether the manufacturer is "purporting to create some kind of death-vessel for cosmic self-consciousness".   

 

[4] The Last Resort are the Swiss branch of Exit International, a nonprofit organisation founded by Philip Nitschke that lobbies for the legalisation of assisted suicide. As far as I know, they have nothing to do with the notorious East End skinhead shop or the English punk band formed in 1980.

[5] Personally, as one who plans on leaping into an active volcano when the time comes to do so, I'm not particularly concerned with the bourgeois ideal of having a peaceful and dignified death. Having violently entered the world with tears, I'm prepared to violently exit screaming.     

Three French Suicides: In Memory of Olga Georges-Picot, Christine Pascal, and Gilles Deleuze

Christine Pascal, Gilles Deleuze & Olga Georges-Picot

 

 

I.

 

Last night, on TV, they were showing one of my favourite films: the British psychological thriller written and directed by Basil Dearden and starring Roger Moore; The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970) [1]. 

 

There are many reasons to love this film, not least of all because it allows one to get a glimpse of the French actress Olga-Georges Picot in a very fetching black bra. She's luscious. She's ravishing. And there are some men who would happily give up red meat to be afforded an opportunity to perv [2] on this Franco-Russian beauty [3] - including Woody Allen, who cast her as Countess Alexandrovna in his 1975 film Love and Death.  

   

Whilst biographical information on her life and career seems to be limited and incomplete, we do know that she commited suicide in June 1997 by jumping from her 5th floor apartment overlooking the river Seine.

 

 

II. 

 

Olga Georges-Picot's death came less than a year after the death - also by suicide and also by jumping out of a window - of the brilliant French actress, writer and director Christine Pascal ... 

 

Interestingly, this multi-talented woman had often reflected philosophically on the question of suicide, and the first film she directed - Félicité (1979) [4] - opens with a suicide scene. Several years later, when asked by an interviewer how she would like to die, she replied: En me suicidant, le moment venu.

 

Well, that time came in August 1996, whilst receiving treatment at a psychiatric hospital in the Paris suburb of Garches [5]. Whether her suicide is best interpreted as a mad act by a mentally ill woman or a voluntary death by an unconventional woman with a penchant for transgressive behaviour is something I'll allow readers to decide [6].    

 

III.

Finally, let us remember Gilles Deleuze ... 

 

Deleuze was a philosopher very much admired by Pascal and one who, like her - and like Georges-Picot - also topped himself by jumping out of a window, when the respiratory conditions that he had long suffered from became increasingly severe [7].     

I remember the excitement news of this event generated in the Philosophy Dept. at Warwick, where I was doing my Ph.D at the time and had just started to read Deleuze's work seriously. Everyone wanted to know if his death came from within or without and pondered the question of whether it marked a loss of desire on his part, or whether the decision to terminate one's own individual existence as a way of affirming life indicates a final resurgence of vitality.  

 

In other words, was his suicide a logical way for Deleuze to show fidelity to his own philosophy, rather than merely a wish to end his suffering?

 

It remains an interesting question, I think ...       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have written about this in relation to Daphne du Maurier's 1957 novel The Scapegoat in a post entitled 'Never Give a Doppelgänger the Keys to Your Car ...' (17 June 2020): click here. 

[2] I'm paraphrasing George Costanza interviewing for a secretary in the season six episode of Seinfeld entitled 'The Secretary', (dir. D. Owen Trainor, 1998): click here.  

[3] Olga was was the daughter of Guillaume Georges-Picot, the French Ambassador to China, and a Russian mother, Anastasia Mironovich. She was born in Shanghai, in Japanese-occupied China, in January 1940. 

 

[4] Christine Pascal was born in Lyon in November 1953. She was given a starring role, aged twenty-one, in Michel Mitrani's Les Guichets du Louvre (1974). 

      The film portrays the infamous Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup in 1942, when French police assisted Nazi soldiers in the arrest of over 13,000 Jewish inhabitants of Paris and held them under inhumane conditions prior to their deportation to Auschwitz, where virtually all were murdered. Pascal played a young Jewish woman named Jeanne.

 

[5] Félicité was not only written and directed by Pascal, but she played the lead role too. It was a film that shocked many (even in France) with its explicit sexual content and provocative indecency and cemented her reputation as the mauvaise fille of French cinema.   

 

[6] Somewhat unfairly, I think, the psychiatrist who was caring for Pascal was sentenced in 2003 to twelve months in prison for failing to take appropriate action to prevent her suicide. 

 

[7] Deleuze, who had problems with his breathing even as a youngster, developed tuberculosis in 1968 and underwent surgery to remove a lung. In the final years of his life even writing became increasingly difficult and so, on 4 November 1995, aged seventy, he jumped to his death from the window of his Paris apartment.

 

Stone Me, What a Life! (A Brief Post in Memory of Tony Hancock)

The Lad Himself

Anthony [Aloysius St John] Hancock 

(1924 - 1968)

 

 

On this day in 1968, the English comic actor Tony Hancock committed suicide, aged 44. The perfect way to die [1] and the perfect age to exit this life [2]. So as well as his comedic skills, I admire him for his courage and his timing.

 

Hancock was found dead at his rented flat in Sydney, Australia, besides an empty vodka bottle and a handful of barbiturates. Apparently, he left several suicide notes, in one of which he wrote: Things just seemed to go too wrong too many times.

 

Which is a concise, clear and honest statement; qualities that I think are important in such a document, though I don't mind more philosophically cryptic last words, such as those famously spoken by Socrates to Crito: We owe a cock to Aesclepius [3].

 

What I don't like are outpourings of guilt, regret, bitterness, or recrimination; nor even a desperate last minute attempt at humour. If that's all you have to offer, then best to go in silence. For as Nanette Newman's young Existentialist character Josey might say: Why waste words when you can quietly waste yourself? [4]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] There are several posts on Torpedo the Ark in which I write in praise of suicide as the simplest of pleasures and set out reasons for so doing: click here, for example, or here and here. 

 

[2] Many people I admire died at 44, including D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Spinoza. It has always seemed to me a good age to take one's leave of this life, although, sadly, I missed my opportunity to do so some years ago. 

     

[3] For my thoughts on the death of Socrates and his famous last words, see the post of 30 October 2015: click here. 

[4] I'm referring here to a character played by Newman in Tony Hancock's first feature film, The Rebel (dir. Robert Day, 1961), who asks the crucial question: Why kill time when you can kill yourself? Click here to watch the scene on YouTube,   

 

 

Musical bonus: Babyshambles, 'Stone Me' - click here. 

      This 2007 track, written by Pete Doherty and Mick Whitnall, was inspired by one of Hancock's favourite phrases; as was the title of the debut album by Doherty's other band, The Libertines - Up the Bracket (Rough Trade, 2002). 

      Doherty also wrote a song called 'Lady Don't Fall Backwards' after the book at the centre of the Hancock's Half Hour episode 'The Missing Page' (S6/E2, 1960), which can be found on his solo album Grace/Wastelands (EMI, 2009). 

      He also references Hancock by name in the lyrics to 'You're My Waterloo', a song on the third studio album by The Libertines, Anthems for Doomed Youth (Virgin EMI, 2015): click here.

 

Notes on Crosby and Crane: Pin-Up Boys of the Lost Generation

Harry Crosby (1898-1929) and Hart Crane (1899-1932)

 

La plus volontaire mort c'est la plus belle.

 

 

I. 

 

The initials HC mean different things to different people. 

 

For example, for poor souls suffering with an unremitting headache, they refer to Hemicrania continua, whilst for those to whom the health of horses is a concern, they refer to the connective tissue disorder hyperelastosis cutis.        

 

Then again, for students of organic chemistry - or those working in the oil and gas industry - HC is short for hydrocarbon, whilst for fans of the Tour de France, HC designates the most difficult type of mountain climb (one which is hors catégorie). 

 

For me, however, as an amateur literary critic, the initials HC bring to mind the two Jazz Age American poets Harry Crosby and Hart Crane ...

 

 

II.

 

Crosby and Crane sounds like a double act and, as a matter of fact, these two are often linked in the cultural imagination; not merely because they were both poets of debatable merit, but because each committed suicide at a young age (Crosby was 31 when he shot himself in the head in December 1929 and Crane was 32 when he literally jumped ship in April 1932).  

 

They met for the first time in Paris in January 1929. Harry and his wife, Caresse, had set up the Black Sun Press and were keen to publish new work by the most interesting authors of the day in de luxe editions. Crane was then working on the long poem by which he is best remembered, The Bridge, which he intended as a positive counterstatement to Eliot's Wasteland (1922).    

 

Crane gave Crosby the MS to read and the latter loved it, encouraging his new friend to complete the poem he had been obsessively reworking since 1923. For Crosby, Crane's poem was full of thunder and fire and swept away all the dust and artificiality of the times, reminding him of Blake and, one suspects, of what he aspired to in his own heliocentric verse. 

 

As one commentator notes: 

 

"Crosby's obvious excitement had its source not only in the poem itself but also in finding a work answering to his own theories of poetry and his own particular enthusiasms." [1]    

 

For example, both had a quasi-Futurist love of speed and modern technology, seeing in the machine a dynamic expression of man's essentially restless spirit and desire to self-overcome; both also valued open spaces in which to move; and both believed that poetry should not only look back to the past, but connect the present to the future and concern itself with the only themes that really matter: love, beauty, and death. 

 

At heart, then, both were Romantics in the era of Modernism; writers who sought spiritual illumination and a glimpse of some essential reality or lyrical absolute. It's no wonder then that despite his initial enthusiasm for the work of D. H. Lawrence, Crosby concludes that the latter is not his cup of tea:

"'I am a visionary I like to soar he is all engrossed in the body and in the complexities of psychology. [...] He admits of defeat. I do not. He is commonplace. I am not.'" [2]

 

This - and the fact that he can't really write for toffee - puts me off Crosby. I can't dislike him, but neither can I accept this son of one of the richest banking families in New England to be the real deal (despite the painted toe-nails and sun tattoo) [3].  

 

As for Crane, well, to be honest, I'm undecided, knowing as I do so little of the man, so little of his work. Many think him a genius and admire his highly stylised and difficult poetry - for its ambition if nothing else. And some scholars working within queer theory champion Crane as an exemplary outsider who struggled with his homosexuality (when not fucking sailors).    

 

  

III. 

 

In late November 1929, the Crosbys arrived in New York for what they planned to be a short visit. Hart Crane threw a party for them at his Brooklyn apartment on December 7th, where fun was had by all (including fellow poets E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams).

 

Three days later, however, Harry killed himself and his 21-year-old lover - Josephine Rotch, aka the Fire Princess - in an apparent suicide pact. It was Hart Crane who broke news of this tragic event to Crosby's wife and mother. 

 

Shortly after the funeral, Caresse returned to Paris and arranged for the Black Sun edition of The Bridge to be published in February 1930. Sadly, the reviews weren't great and Crane's sense of failure resulted in a creative slump. 

 

Although he desperately looked for "another great theme around which he might order his work" [4], he unfortunately never found such. Rather, having relocated to Mexico, Crane had simply discovered the intoxicating power of tequila.

 

Having attempted suicide on several occasions, Crane boarded a ship back to New York - the S. S. Orizaba - from where, on April 27, 1932, he jumped into the sea having shouted goodbye to a group of fellow passengers. He left no suicide note and his body was never recovered. 

 

Sy Kahn writes:

 

"Crane's death by water and Crosby's death by exploding bullet in his head, in retrospect, and with the testimony of their poems, seem inevitable acts of self-destruction. For both men death was not fearsome, but a portal through which they might find the tormenting, often elusive, absolutes they felt and sought." [5] 

 

He concludes:

 

"The parallels and similarities (even the accident of their initials) in the works and lives of these two poets express the literary vitality of the 1920s [...] In retrospect it seems almost ordained that these poets should have encountered each other before their deaths." [6]  

 

What a pity, then, that both of these young men had always been "too rich and spoilt" and left with no new pleasures to experience but suicide: "the last sort of cocktail excitement" [7].  

 

Notes

 

[1] Sy Kahn, 'Hart Crane and Harry Crosby: A Transit of Poets', in the Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 1, No. 1 (Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 45-56. The line quoted is on p. 47. 

      This essay can be accessed on JSTOR by clicking here. 

 

[2] Harry Crosby writing in his diary, quoted by David Ellis in D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 472-73.

 

[3] Without getting into issues of authenticity etc, let's just say that, for me, Crosby tries a bit too hard to be un poète maudit like his heroes Baudeaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, et al. Some people just are extreme and achieve a state of inspired madness without having to paint their nails. Ultimately, who gets closest to the sun - Van Gogh, or Harry Crosby ...?     

 

[4] Sy Kahn, 'Hart Crane and Harry Crosby: A Transit of Poets', Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 54. 

 

[5] Ibid., p. 55. 

[6] Ibid., p. 56. 

 

[7] These phrases were said by D. H. Lawrence with reference to the case of Harry Crosby; see his letter to Giuseppe Orioli [18 Dec 1929], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 600-601. 

      See also Lawrence's kind letter to Caresse Crosby (30 Jan 1930), Letters VII 634, in which he tells her: "Harry had a real poetic gift - if only he hadn't tried to disintegrate himself so! This disintegrating spirit, and the tangled sound of it, makes my soul weary to death." 

      He also advises that she not try to recover herself too soon; "it is much better to be a little blind and stunned for a time longer, and not make efforts to see or to feel. Work is the best, and a certain numbness, a merciful numbness. It was too dreadful a blow - and it was wrong."