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  The Suicide Academy

  A Novel

  Daniel Stern

  Contents

  Introduction by Anaïs Nin

  The Ballad of The Suicide Academy

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Part Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Part Three

  1

  2

  3

  About the Author

  For Elie Wiesel

  Who spoke to me of singing and silence

  INTRODUCTION

  By Anaïs Nin

  WE HAVE HAD TOO many pedestrian novels in an age of space travel. Daniel Stern is able to toss all the facts into space, to reverse their chronological monotony, to upset established curricula. To consider the off-balance of the absurd as human, black humor as a daily contingency, terror and death from new positions, may reveal new techniques for defeating destruction. Daniel Stern’s wit is not cold, or inhuman. He belongs to the new generation which is emotional, writing to be enjoyed, to surprise, to jolt, to charge and recharge. He uses mockery only to leap over the traps, not to separate us from experience.

  The Suicide Academy is a place where would-be suicides are invited for a day of self-examination and meditation, after which they must decide whether to return to the world or to put an end to their lives. “Here you’ll learn to live or die—and more—/You’ll learn the truth: that one of them is best.”

  A group of variegated characters is assembled who will have an explosive effect upon each other: Wolf Walker, director, his ex-wife, Jewel, her present husband, Max Cardillo, Gilliatt, the anti-Semitic Negro, Barbara, the director’s pregnant mistress, and a longer list of patients than the Academy was prepared to cope with. Appropriately, the landscape is all snow and ice.

  The point of view is multilateral and reality is multidimensional. In this game of the intelligence played by our own illogic, when Wolf Walker wakes he establishes the stability of ambivalence:

  He had been dreaming that Jewel was singing. The song was “Après un Rêve” by Faure, and the particular passage his sleep had snagged on was the repetition of the word reviens, reviens. The note was middle C.

  That was how I was going to begin this. But I don’t think I can tell what happened at the Suicide Academy in that elegiac tone.

  Here we slip into a surrealist world, relativity without center of gravity. We are dealing with the absurd, the irrelevant, the allegorical chaos of a world whose past hypocritical semblance of logic we can no longer accept. We are inside the Magic Theater of Steppenwolf, inside the nightmares of Kafka but in American equivalents—that is, with the weightlessness of humor. The psychological ironies are as accurate as they should be in a twentieth-century mind. The choice between life and death, creation and destruction, is always our own, but we prefer to blame other forces. The Suicide Academy invites us to meditate on the depth of our predicament, not in the seclusion of an old monastery but in an imaginary, transitional wayside station and in the center of drama, crisis, prejudices, distortions habitual to our daily life. It is not a meditation in quietness or isolation, although the snow landscape is vividly present and eloquent, as if its coolness were necessary to assuage the fevers and infections caught in active life. The place where we are to make our decision is invaded by visitors whose aim remains a mystery. There is no haven of objectivity or abstract cerebrations. Absurdity pursues and surrounds them all. The youthful, contemporary quality of the book lies in its main objective, which is to enjoy, not to explain, to be with all the happenings and to love whatever happens: Relationships which fail to catalyze, loves which miss their targets, wrestling matches which establish no victor, talks which add to distortions, ideologies which increase confusion, explanations which do not lead to a truce, all of them are there as in daily life, but Daniel Stern gives them the ebullience of wit, they float like lifesavers infused with the oxygen of lyrical delight. The dead clichés by which people defend themselves from change are bombarded in atomic dissolutions to invent new dynamics. Turning ideas upside down empties them of stale air and makes room for oxygen. The desperate aspect of our destructive impulses is transfigured into an allegorical dance on the snow, a tribal dance of desire. The message is directed to the senses: For example, we rediscover love through the strands of Jewel’s hair. Escapes, flights, evasions, the contemporary habit of splitting experience into a happening and of filming the happening, all is familiar. Max, the villain, is the filmmaker. “He shot them in quick, nervous clicks, like a spy recording some secret site on forbidden film…. [Were Max and Jewel] innocent film-makers or guilty film-takers?

  “… camera madness, focusing, clicking, and winding.”

  The whole group is swept into a surrealist voyage. It is not the walled-in nightmares of Kafka, constricted or claustrophobic. It is a dream of space, open, dazzling white landscapes, a mise-en-scène of joy, physical euphoria, muscular energy, in sharp ironic contrast to the constant presence of inarticulate and secret despairs.

  Jewel is full of seduction, as she should be, and allergic to truth. “[Her] entire self was tangled up in her body…. She was the triumph of the apparent: utterly white skin, absolutely blue eyes, blonde hair that was the complete absence of black, of darkness.” Jewel, allergic to truth as a man-made formula, not suited to her feminine labyrinth, her feminine need to be created.

  The ballet Jewel and Wolf, her ex-husband, dance on the ice is a lyrical flight: “… we loped out onto the ice like a team of fugitive figure skaters who had forgotten how to describe the classic figures and so were inventing new ones. Was there a figure Z? I’m sure we created one. Or a figure R2? I’m sure we invented it.”

  In every intelligent book, the key lies within. I am certain this is true of The Suicide Academy. It invents new figures. This is the secret of its elating effect. If during their marriage Wolf had refused to create Jewel as she had wished, now that she is contemplating suicide and has only one day in which to enact it or repudiate it, he is willing to create her at last and circumvent her own destruction. “I would operate, skillfully using memory, the arsenal of emotions, untapped hopes, buried hatreds masquerading in other guises, misplaced loves: the scalpels and sutures of my particular practice.”

  A key to the book, possibly its definition, can be found in these passages:

  Suicide was a grand, dark continent to be charted and I was its cartographer.

  Suicides were the aristocrats of death—God’s graduate students, acting out their theses to prove how limited were the alternatives. He had allowed Himself and His creatures. Their act was, at its best, superb literary criticism. At its worst—well, perhaps, it was this blonde loveliness [Jewel] not yet defined, and dying of its lack of definition. Giving away to dust the lovely outlines of those ever-so-slightly conical breasts, those long and tapering legs, that rounded cheek curving to indentation of shadowed eyes … all because of lack of shape. No! Suicide must be more than mere abortion. Part of my job had to be to save people for their proper deaths.

  The novel leaps from metaphysics to pugilism, from literature to jealousy, from race prejudice to mythology, from mental acrobatics to physical exertion to sensual adventures, disguising wisdom under its agilities. The ce
ntral juggler never misses. He is dexterous and alive to the dangers of seeking new ideas, new sensations, new expressions. He is a figure skater of language.

  The circle, you see, is at the heart of all human anguish. The sundial and the clock prove that if there were no circles there would be no time. If there were no time there would be no death. Thus—no circles, no death…. Most of our guests come to us suffering from circle fatigue. Repetition, full revolution and more repetition…. Then imagine the joy of the straight line: forward movement, change. Even if the straight line leads straight down into the earth. Think of it! An end to circles!

  In one sense the novel belongs with the theater of the absurd, but in another sense it goes beyond that: The contemplation of man’s irrationalities has another purpose. It is an exercise in imaginative freedom. Since logic has been proved by events to be another form of hypocrisy, this turning of ideas upside down to shake out falsities does not end up in negations but in potential liberations. It demonstrates that the habit of skillful questioning, juxtaposing, juggling is not a pastime, but a serious need for the seeker of truth. The academy symbolically burns to the ground. Built on ambivalences, all that remains of it is what each man rescues for himself out of the ashes, a world in harmony with his emotional vision, meaningful to him alone so that he can juggle himself into balance. A surrealist world in fact, obvious in history, politics, economics, science, which the Director of the Argentine Academy sums up thus:

  We must suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense inherent in that ambitious word. If there is, we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonymies of God’s secret dictionary….

  In my cold fever, whether due to the heightening of my fears or to alcohol, I saw the landscape as a calligraphic wonder. The thinning line of trees casting elongated shadows on the snow, like a prayer book in a foreign language, but which one knew by legend to hold a famous and beautiful verse; the long line of uneven rocks scattered in a shaky hand, stretching from grass’s end to the shore. First larger then smaller, light-burnished colors then blackened gleaming shades all straggled with seaweed, strophe and anti-strophe, unfinished statement of stone and sand. And the flights of sandpipers hurled at the sibilance of shore-froth hissing them back then enticing them to return to the edge, fragments of alien texts, sacred letters whose meaning had been forgotten, old feathered prophecies, creations of inspired astrologists of earlier generations….

  I told her, then, of my reading the landscape the way I read the sky when I was a child. Stuck with logos from the start, that was me. The world as untranslatable language.

  We live in the midst of a black plague, a plague of hatred. This book is an antidote to the epidemic affecting us. Surrealism as a cure of nausea. The Suicide Academy is ultimately the book of a poet, which means he flies at an altitude above the storms of destruction, above neutrality, above indifference, and therefore beyond death.

  The Ballad of The Suicide Academy

  HERE YOU DO NOT dare to dictate terms.

  Fill out your forms (Remember date of birth.)

  Forget despair; it’s no concern of rocks or earth.

  Inheritors? The Academy or the worms.

  Amnesty—to change your mind and help you live …

  To douse the light that will not let you sleep?

  Listen to your neighbors, hear them weep.

  Take a breath—exhale—and then forgive.

  Were you crippled in your youth by some assault?

  Or did a mother’s unconcern undo you?

  What did you do? Or was it done to you?

  Precisely whose the innocence, whose the fault?

  The day is long; the grounds are wide and white.

  There’s time enough—correct your lingering errors.

  Wander, learn; domesticate your terrors.

  Choose tranquil blindness or an anxious sight.

  I, Wolf Walker, welcome you as guest.

  Check your rage, self-pity at the door.

  Here you’ll learn to live or die—and more—

  You’ll learn the truth: that one of them is best.

  Here the snowy peace from dawn till night

  Cancels every debt—yet all will pay.

  Even the aging, poor, generous God

  Who gives again all he has to give: a day.

  Part One

  1

  WOLF WALKER WOKE. HE had been dreaming that Jewel was singing. The song was “Après un Rêve” by Fauré, and the particular passage his sleep had snagged on was the repetition of the word reviens, reviens. The note was middle C.

  That was how I was going to begin this. But I don’t think I can tell what happened at the Suicide Academy in that elegiac tone. What I need is the guts to tell it strong—and where an elegy seems to be called for I won’t merely be elegiac: I’ll weep. For myself, for Jewel, for mad Max Cardillo—even for that son-of-a-bitch Gilliatt.

  On that day the events of which I’m concerned with I—Wolf Walker—did wake hearing the Fauré song just as it had sounded when Jewel and I were married and I’d accompany her faint, sweet vocalizations with my crippled chords. But I refused to allow myself any “reviens” type of self-indulgence. I dressed quickly and prepared for the day.

  I was in a bitter mood. As bitter as the cold that lay like a dead hand on the sloping white lawn outside my window. The white was snow—the first snow of the new year: January 2. The day’s roster would be light. New Year’s Day is always murder and this one had been no exception: one of the best depression days. Hangovers, blues and a false sense of clarity—a kind of despairing 20/20 vision that seems to see down to the end of time and beyond.

  Eighty-two people. What a mess! The Academy was set up for a maximum of fifty. Others have a larger capacity—the one in California, for example, which I visited when I was in training, could handle eight hundred a day. But I wouldn’t want to be Director of that one. I took the job to get away from the world, not to run a whole world of my own.

  But this is no allegorical crap about how the Suicide Academy is really a microcosm. Don’t let them kid you. It’s just a place where people come when they want out of everything for good. They get one day—one rather ingeniously planned day, if you’ll pardon the modesty, since as the Director I’m one of the planners. (In fact I’m such a goddamned great planner that on this icy, ass-freezing day after New Year’s Day part of me was freezing up inside because of the trouble one of my plans was getting me into.)

  Anyway, they get one day to decide, no more. I’ve had them clinging to me, whining, begging, bribing—anything to get a little more time. Of course that kind usually goes back and lives. Very insincere type.

  2

  ENTER GILLIATT. MY ASSISTANT, my shadow, my gadfly, my black enemy, my firm and dangerous right hand. But not this very instant. First—I did my exercises. Twenty pushups and ten sit-ups. Living at the Academy swiftly convinces you of the body’s importance; the importance of testing it against some simple object or force, like the morning’s inertia.

  Thus, winded but readier for the day, I began walking down the winding pebbled path that led to the Main House. The Academy was located in the hills, but it was only a half-mile from the sea. Underlying the whirr of the wind, you could always catch a faint sea sound. When the weather was warm I would go down to the sand dunes that faced the sea. I had little time to myself with such a demanding job—but sometimes there in the faint heat of early dawn, stripped to the skin, facing the little waves still dark and bitter with night, I was an uneasy king of a sparse but perfect country. The dunes, still yellow with the last of the moon and not yet white with the first of the sun; and the sky, slowly releasing itself from the night. Against such a landscape what can griefs say? They’re dumb; dumber than the sea—or that marbled mute sky gradually invaded by morning colors as vivid as sounds.

  At such moments I saw the neutrality, the official indifference required of us all
at the Academy as a magnificent deliverance. What better way than to imitate the stolidness of stones that rimmed the shore—the silence of the sky—to live a truth as gritty as the sand?

  I bring this up now because on this January 2 my discipline, my official loyalty was in question. In fact there was an emergency meeting of the Board of Management called for four in the afternoon. Instigated by Gilliatt, my friendly neighborhood nemesis, my own, personal, house anti-Semite, it was to investigate the charge that I was partial to turning the Academy’s guests to the choice of life. The charge was ridiculous! It arose out of a course about which I’ll tell you later—a course I’d instituted in November, to balance out the curriculum, called Actualities of Death.

  That morning as I walked, I grew more and more angry. How dare they question me? Those black trees trembling under their white burden—that sweep of slope that leads the eyes down to the little crossroads and beyond to the bare apple orchard with its soft down of evergreen fern. This landscape has been looked at by so many suffering eyes it has been wiped clean of value. Like me, Wolf Walker—never mind what my name used to be; I am as clean as those hills that create a kind of false twilight if you stand at a certain angle to the sun. How could I not be neutral, if only out of gratitude? Think of it—not to have a fate. To live suspended between the earth and the sky! To live in a world in which only others must choose! What could be more beautiful? Only that patch of green that obstinately sticks out from underneath the stifling snow near the Main House. And these hills that rim my life. We are both immortal, these hills and I. No, I am not being overly ambitious. Simply by means of this very disputed neutrality, the hills and I share. How could I give up such a magnificent identification for the sake of a sterile humanism? Men? If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. Women? A little less so. But still so. (Reviens, I had dreamed. Well, that was for dreams.) A stroke of genius to build Suicide Academies amid cold, bright landscapes in which death is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter who is speaking now, the hills or me. Or that massive stone, the Sick Rock, half sunken in the middle of the hill that leads from my apartment to the Main House and the complex of activities buildings. It has a sun-heated look as if it would burn the hand; but it’s actually cold as ice. That stone, ridged with time, teaches me the foolishness of partiality. It is cut and cross-cut with thousands of initials. Yes, they come to the Academy in pairs, sometimes. Often they’re still enough in love to scratch their initials on that stone while waiting for a guide to take them to a class or a rest period or, perhaps, the final choice. There is a tendency to forget that stone is the classic choice for marking a grave precisely because it is the most natural of materials—by which I mean totally insensitive.