A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
—NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS
The French Romantic poet and essayist known by the pen name of Gérard de Nerval was heralded as a major influence on the emerging Symbolist movement in the arts. He was a firm believer that marijuana and opium are necessary to free the spirit-muse within. He was the founder of the exclusive Club des Hashischins, where members such as Charles Baudelaire and Alexandre Dumas (author of The Count of Monte Cristo) gathered to smoke hash, drink laudanum, and conduct séances. He also turned into a tourist attraction of sorts, known for far-fetched eccentricities such as keeping a large red lobster as a pet, which he walked down the street attached to a blue ribbon. In the end, his destitution from the effects of his addictions became severe. One day he tried to pawn a leather strap he claimed was an antique, once owned by a famous actress dead two hundred years, but found no buyers. He went back to his flat, torched up a bowl of hash, and then tied the strap around his neck. He was found hanged from the window grate of his elderly aunt’s apartment at age forty-s ix in 1855. His suicide note: “Do not wait up for me this evening, for the night will be black and white.”
A man who possesses genius is insufferable unless he also possesses at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Friedrich Nietzsche remains widely known as an influential philosopher and psychologist whose massive writings during the late 1800s were considered controversial, never more than when he wrote: “God is Dead.” Although he labored in near obscurity during his life, many of his concepts proved brilliant and enduring. Nietzsche’s contemporary, novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky said: “[Nietzsche] is the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.” Nietzsche began to show signs of mental illness in his later years and required hospitalization. Some believed his mental state was caused by his obsession for philosophical thought, while others believed it to be a side effect of syphilis. After more than a decade in and out of insane asylums, and what he described as excruciating pain “two hundred days a year,” he died of a stroke, in 1900, at sixty-three.
There are no speed limits on the road to excellence.
—DAVID W. JOHNSON
The handsome French novelist Roger Nimier cut an elegant figure and presented a newer, more carefree model of the spirited artist, rebelling against the preceding generation of writers. He formed a movement that distanced itself from the darker themes of fellow Frenchman Albert Camus and his talk of nothingness, and equally dismissed Jean Paul Sartre’s persistent concern with politics. Instead, Nimier liked fast cars and wrote of young beautiful heroes seeking adventurous lives. At twenty-three he became a literary sensation with his first novel, The Swords, published in 1948. He was thrust into celebrity, representing a generation of youths who did not die in the war and who struggled with their personal and national humiliation of occupation and defeat. Nimier followed his debut with six more books in five years. Then he announced he had abandoned the novel, subsequently becoming a respected cultural critic. One theme persistent in Nimier’s books was an infatuation with car crashes. In 1962 he was last seen driving his Aston Martin at a blurring 150 miles per hour. This was not such an oddity for this speed-demon writer; what was unusual was that, according to eyewitnesses, Nimier hit the brakes suddenly and aimed the car, still going a considerable speed, in a beeline toward a triangle of concrete pillars, dying at age thirty-six. The next year a literary award, the Nimier Prize, was established for young French writers who embody his industry, though hopefully not his driving record.
There are many roads to a calm life.
—ROGER NIMIER
The famous existential writer and philosopher Albert Camus’ wife, Simone Hié, was a drug addict from the age of fourteen. For two years he tried to cure her morphine addiction, but the marriage ended when Simone bartered sex for drugs with her physician. Camus noted of his difficult love: “It’s a pity fairy tales cannot consist solely of beginnings.” Ultimately, the experience amplified his obsession with loneliness and fear of death, and arguably furthered his absurdist point of view on existence, leading him to conclude that “life is pointless.” Camus worked at a vineyard before he turned to writing and stuck more fervidly to the grape as his creative lubricant. After becoming the youngest writer to ever win a Nobel Prize in literature, Camus died in a car crash at age forty-seven in 1957.
Say anything you like, but don’t say that I “like” to work. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.
—MABEL NORMAND
Rising from poverty, Mabel Normand became the leading comedienne appearing in popular Keystone Comedies and in more than fifty flicks during the early 1900s. She was also one of the first female directors in Hollywood. Praised for her natural and gifted comedic timing, off screen she had a touch of the gangster in her. She also developed an addiction to heroin and alcohol during her heyday and was tied to a number of scandals, including the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, who was shot and killed only minutes after she left his house—and the crime not yet solved. By 1927 she was being sent to sanatoriums for tuberculosis and complications from dual addictions, dying in 1930 at age thirty-four. Newspapers compared Mabel to a “meteor which burns itself out by the very speed which gives it light.” On her deathbed, Mabel was asked to reveal the true circumstance surrounding the Desmond murder, but refused and died without divulging clues or fingering anyone.