The Violet Hour (12 page)

The sensible, scientific response to his medical situation was unambiguous. But Freud continued to elude the sensible, scientific response. At one point, his doctors issued a whole written report of the smoking-related damage to his throat and palate, explicitly connecting nicotine to the recurring precancerous growths and inflammation: “specially noticeable this time is the widespread inflammation which…is the consequence of excessive smoking. There is every evidence that the inflammation develops first and that the typical leukoplakia appears as its sequel.” The report ended with the admonition: “The patient should be strongly advised to give up smoking.” When Schur showed Freud this report, he shrugged.

The shrug is the perfect gesture. Freud's smoking did not have a rationale: It existed outside words. It was itself an argument of sorts, an imposition of personality on the facts. He was responding to the warning by not responding. He would try periodically, in starts and stops, to quit, but it would not be possible for Freud to give up smoking, or he did not want to.

Schur himself was tormented on the question of Freud's smoking; he was too close to Freud, too much under his sway, to insist that he stop, but he was also responsible for his health and knew that his patient should stop smoking. He wrote later, “I asked myself repeatedly whether I was entitled, or even obliged, to insist more strongly on the enforcement of abstinence. Perhaps a personal physician with the detachment of Pichler would have done so. I could not, and in retrospect I realize that I should not regret this fact. It's questionable in any event whether such an attempt would have been successful.”

Freud's smoking had many meanings to him. Not only was it radically enmeshed with his creative process, to the extent that he didn't feel he could do any kind of meaningful intellectual work without it, but it also represented for him some sort of rebellion, some wildness, some expression of self he did not normally indulge in. He wrote at one point to Lou Andreas-Salomé, “I can report to you that I can speak, chew, and work again; indeed, even smoking is permitted—in a certain moderate, cautious, so-to-speak petit bourgeois way.” Which implies there is another way he would like to smoke. There is an excess, an indulgence, a letting loose of impulse that he craves or saw in his usual way of smoking: the immoderate, incautious, irresponsible Freud.

In this same vein, Freud corrected his early biographer, Stefan Zweig, in a letter: “I feel inclined to object to the emphasis you put on the element of petit bourgeois correctness in my person. The fellow is actually somewhat more complicated; your description doesn't tally with the fact that I, too, have had my splitting headaches and attacks of fatigue like anyone else, that I was a passionate smoker (I wish I still were), that I ascribe to the cigar the greatest share of my self-control and tenacity in work.” Of course, soon after writing this, he resumed passionate smoking.

His smoking, he suggests here, is crucial to his biography, to understanding his life and times. Freud is interested in this other story, this story written out in smoke. He is not careful. He is not correct. He is not the punctual, controlled, financially responsible, bourgeois Freud. “The fellow is actually
somewhat more complicated.” There is the wildness of his passion for cigars: It is the fire, the fuel, the fruitfulness. Elsewhere he calls it his “sin,” which is an interesting word choice for a man of science, a man so naturally disinclined toward religious frameworks. The word “sin” endows the habit with a glamour, a richness it might not otherwise have; it is his taboo, his vice, his irrationality, and as such it is crucial to him, it is animating.

Freud liked to call himself an “adventurer.” The adventure shows itself in his work, in the gargantuan act of imagination required, but it does not show itself in his life, which was, as Zweig pointed out, largely orderly, punctual, proper. His sense of humor revealed the rogue impulse, glimmers here and there of wickedness, or mischievousness, but he did not live the vivid, expressive life one might imagine in the father of psychoanalysis. His courtship of Martha Bernays was turbulent and a little wild, but after they were married, his romantic life remained, on the surface, quite settled, and he hinted that he and his wife ended their sexual relationship after the last of their many children. His explorations of an untrammeled id and libido were purely theoretical and on the page. Scholars have combed through his life for scandal, for the sexual obsession to be made real, which has led to heated speculation of an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, but there is no solid evidence that he acted on any attraction to her, or that there was any attraction at all. The one anarchic thing he did, the one vice he clung to, the one irrational pocket of destructive behavior, the one “sin” he could actually lay claim to, was his cigar smoking. During his impetuous engagement he wrote, “Smoking is indispensable
if one has nothing to kiss.” Smoking, he suggests, is a substitute for the sexual; it is the expression of the libido.

And smoking was also linked in his mind to certain kinds of love. Once when Anna was away on a trip to Berlin, he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé about losing her: “If she really were to go away, I should feel myself as deprived as I do now, and as I should do if I had to give up smoking!” This is a peculiar equation, of course, to talk about quitting smoking in the same breath as surrendering the extravagant devotion of your adult daughter. But they are both forbidden in their way, both complex, fruitful, unhealthy addictions he cannot bear to surrender. Anna never moved on; she never married or ran off with anyone and remained, unlike her siblings, in her childhood home. Freud wrote, in a moment of candor: “Sometimes I urgently wish her a good man, sometimes I shrink from the loss.” He was too attached to Anna and was painfully aware of the costs of that attachment, especially to her, and yet he was not willing to release her, to entertain the possibility of her leaving him for a fuller adult life. His willful and conscious cultivation of his too-close relationship with Anna is, like smoking, an enactment of something you are not supposed to do. They are both the impulse not resisted.

On the whole, and apart from these occasional allusions, Freud resisted any sustained analysis of his cigar smoking; it was somehow off-limits, separate from the analyzable world. He analyzed himself extensively in
The Interpretation of Dreams
and elsewhere. But he did not analyze his relation to smoking, complex and impassioned as it obviously was; he did not discuss
his continued commitment to smoking even in the face of illness and the explicit prohibitions of doctor after doctor. He seemed to be living the idea that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

There is some question about whether Freud actually ever made this legendary comment in a speech he gave to students at Clark University in 1909. He did, however, carve off cigars as a private matter, something to be kept apart from the interpretive digging of his method, in a letter to Ernest Jones: “If someone should reproach you with my Fall into Sin, you are free to reply that my adherence to telepathy is my private affair like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking, and…inessential for psychoanalysis.” Smoking, then, is in a special, separate category: He does not want it to be analyzed. It is something he does beyond analysis. It is his own mystery.

In a slender, controversial book, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” which came out in 1920, Freud raised the possibility of a silent drive toward death, a secret desire for annihilation animating each of us. He wrote a line many analysts would resist, finding it too extreme, too sweeping, too unsettling: “The aim of all life is death.” And in this strange, speculative work, he began to address the irrational draw toward death, the desire for it, the mysterious attraction of undoing oneself.

In his own life, he occasionally alluded to a despair (or, as he often called it, “indifference”) that pulled him in that direction.
When his favorite grandson, Heinerle, died at the age of four and a half of tuberculosis, he hinted at a grief so wild and consuming that he couldn't enjoy life. “It is the secret of my indifference—people call it courage—toward the danger to my own life.”

In Freud's lifetime, biographers and other analysts tried to connect his theories of Thanatos—an innate attraction to death—to his own grief or morbidity during this period. They argued that he had dreamed up the death instinct in grief after his daughter Sophie died suddenly of influenza in 1920, out of some sort of depression or excessive mourning, but Freud quickly pointed out that he had shown drafts of the book to colleagues long before Sophie caught the influenza that would kill her, and so they were mistaken.

Still, there was always an undercurrent, an attraction, a despondency that every now and then found voice in his letters and work. There was something in the theory of a death instinct that flickered through his personal writing over many decades, that had already appeared in traces, in shadows. The formal postulation of a “death instinct” is in some sense the culmination of a romantic notion, much like his nexus of romantic notions surrounding smoking. There is a perverse beauty to the idea of the death drive; there is a poetry to this disturbing theory, just as there is a poetry to Freud's reflections on smoking. He found the “death instinct” beautiful, seductive.

Freud conceived of the death drive as a force one is powerless against: “The dangerous death drives are dealt with in a variety
of ways…but in the main they undoubtedly continue their inner activities unchecked.” The author of these words is the Freud who shrugged when Max Schur showed him the doctors' report saying he should quit smoking, the Freud who lit a cigar in spite of the doctors advising him not to exacerbate his cancer. There is a sense, in his smoking, in this untouchable, unanalyzable subject, of the death drive continuing its “inner activities unchecked.” Indeed, Freud saw himself as powerless to quit, even if he had wanted to, which he may not have in any sustained or convincing way.

Other analysts were uncomfortable with the idea of the death drive. Was it too extreme, too overblown, the idea that everyone is propelled or driven toward extinction? Could it be anything more than a majestic or mythic fantasy? But in a certain sense it doesn't matter. Whether or not the model of the death drive comprises an accurate portrait of the human psyche, it did give an accurate portrait of Freud's personal conflict.

Even though Sophie's death did not feed into the creation of the theory, the analysts and biographers may have been right in their instinct that Freud was in some other, more obscure way writing about himself. Is it possible that there was an extravagant longing for death, a positive desire for it that had begun to fascinate him? Freud wrote of the life and death drives, “life itself is a battle and constant compromise between these two urges,” and it seems entirely possible that this battle was something he lived through, something he felt very much at work in his own days.

He did sometimes articulate a fairly straightforward wish for death. He wrote to Stefan Zweig: “Although I have been uncommonly happy in my house…I cannot reconcile myself to the wretchedness and helplessness of being old, and look forward to the transition into nonbeing with a kind of longing.”

Was he, then, both the good patient trying to gain more time for his work and life and the bad patient smoking himself to death? Were both those drives equally irresistible, irrepressible? Take Freud, sitting in his leather armchair, enveloped in a cloud of smoke; take this erratic, stubborn, glorious pocket of misbehavior, the match moving toward the cigar: It would be too simple to say that Freud wanted to die, but it would also be too simple to say that he did not want to die. He would write later, “Only the collaboration and the conflict between both primal drives, Eros and death drive, explain the colorful variety of life's phenomena, never one of them alone.”

For Freud, smoking would represent the choice, the exertion of will on unpromising circumstances. Part of his smoking was a resistance, a rebellion, a declaration of himself. He wrote, “annoyed that the discomfort will not give way, I am again sinning more.” He could do nothing about his declining health, but he could smoke. He could assert his power over the long hours of an afternoon. He wrote in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” “What we are left with is that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.”