The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides Read online

  To remain cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible business is no inconsiderable art…

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Is life worth living? This a question for an embryo, not for a man.

  Samuel Butler

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many people have helped in the making of this book. I would like to thank Phil Baker for suggesting I take up my publisher’s offer to do it, and for his insights into the curse of literature; Mike Jay and the inestimable Louise for a welcome break from its labours in the restorative quiet of Cornwall; Nicholas Christian of the Institut Français for information on the suicide of Henry de Montherlant; James Hamilton for needed material on Sylvia Plath and Albert Camus; Eric Lane, for his appreciation of the writer’s life; and other friends, too numerous to mention, for allowing me to ramble on about the dark thoughts and sad lives that occupied me while writing it. I would also like to thank Colin Wilson for allowing me to quote from his book Religion and the Rebel, sadly out of print; Penguin Books for allowing me to quote from R.J. Hollingdale’s brilliant translation of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols; and John Calder, for allowing me to quote from Tom Osborn’s superb rendition of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. I have endeavoured to locate the copyright source of quotations used in the book; if any have been overlooked, I offer my apologies and will happily redress any infringements. As always, my sons, Joshua and Maximilian, have been an inexhaustible well of inspiration; yet I would like to thank them specifically in this context, for providing two very good reasons for not following in the footsteps of the many tragic characters who fill these pages.

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  The Author

  Disclaimer

  1. A Taxonomy of Suicide: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” A sadly not exhaustive list. Criteria for inclusion. The inevitability of suicide. Peregrinus and Harry Crosby. Suicide and Depression. Kay Redfield Jamison. Writers and manic-depression. The Outsider. Suicide not necessarily pathological. A. Alvarez. A Taxonomy of Suicide. Rousseau’s disciple. Methods of Suicide. Jan Potocki. Reasons for Suicide. John Kennedy Toole and Ross Lockridge. The Unsuccessful Suicide. Gustav Meyrink, Guy de Maupassant, O.V. de Lubicz Milosz. Suicide, or Not? Graham Greene. Ambiguous Suicides. Arthur Cravan. Guy Debord. Malcolm Lowry. Jack London. The Slow Suicide. Kerouac. Fake Suicides. Fernando Pessosa. Aleister Crowley. Paris “a city to die in.” Agents of Suicide. Freud. Valery Briusov. Carlos Castaneda. Against Suicide? G.K. Chesterton. Too fastidious to kill myself. Little things and the mystical value of life.

  2. The Existential Suicide: Empedocles and Mt. Etna. Zeno. Lucretius. Socrates. Christ. Petronius. Seneca. Cato. Alan Turing. Ludwig Boltzmann. Philipp Mainländer and the suicide of God. Schopenhauer. The Nihilists. Nietzsche. Kierkegaard. Camus and Sisyphus. Dostoyevsky and The Devils. Suicide and freedom. Hermann Hesse and Steppenwolf. The metaphysics of suicide. Not all suicides kill themselves.

  3. The Romantic Suicide: “This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.” Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Tristan and Isolde. Romeo and Juliet. La petite mort. Axel. “As for living, our servants will do that for us.” The Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe. “I was never such a fool as Werther.” Charlotte Buff. The problem with ecstasy. Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Werthermania. The myth of copy-cat suicides. Finding a place in the world. Romantic death worship. The “dim vast vale of tears.” Das Lied von der Erde.

  4. The Surreal Suicide: Robert E. Howard. The birth of Surrealism. Parade. Apollinaire. André Breton and guns. Les Mamelles de Tirésias. Jacques Vaché. Total indifference to practically everything. Alfred Jarry. Vaché’s eccentricities. Homosexuality. Umour. Vaché’s death: suicide or accident? Breton’s homophobia. Is Suicide a Solution? René Crevel says “Yes.” Crevel, Robert Desnos and automatic writing. The Communists. Dali and Hitler’s “curvaceous fanny.” Ilya Ehrenburg and the Congress in Defence of Culture. “Please cremate me.” Jacques Rigaut. The revolver under the pillow. Theoretic suicide. “The General Suicide Agency.” The polite suicide.

  5. The Political Suicide: Walter Benjamin and Port Bou. The Last European. Apocalypse and narcissism. Under the sign of Saturn. Benjaminmania. Benjamin’s last days. The ambiguity around his death. “Passages.” Benjamin’s bad luck. Benjamin and Arthur Koestler. Gershom Scholem and Benjamin’s suicidal tendencies. Witkacy and the end of civilization. Insatiability. Drugs and existentialism. Witkacy’s acting. The emptiness of the self-dramatiser. Witkacy and Gurdjieff. Self-obsession and the need for other people. “I cannot do it myself.” The “collectivised, technologized, asexual beehive.” The Nazis and the Soviets. Mayakovsky, the attenuated revolutionary. “I immediately detested everything ancient.” Mayakovsky’s vanity. Poster boy for the Revolution. The Russian Futurists. Lili and Osip Brik. Mayakovsky’s masochism. Mayakovsky and Jack London. Fall from grace. “Life and I are quits.”

  6. The Manic-Depressive Suicide: Let Me Finish. The pursuit of oblivion. Alvarez again. William Styron and “the grey drizzle of horror.” William James. “A disorder of mood, characterized by sadness.” The Anatomy of Melancholy. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Manic-depression and women. Anthony Storr and The Dynamics of Creation. External approval insufficient. The insatiability of the depressive temperament. Virginia Woolf and sexual abuse. Writing and self-esteem. Wyndham Lewis. “The calm that always comes to me with abuse.” Writers’ insecurity. Compulsive journal writing. “I begin to loathe my kind.” The last days of Sylvia Plath. The coldest winter in 150 years. “I’m just having a marvellous dream.” The perils of biography. The girl most likely to succeed. Otto Plath sets an example. “How could such a brilliant man be so stupid.” Sylvia’s suicidal tendencies. Beautiful Smith girl missing at Wellesley. Spoiled, babyish, frightened. Escape from personality. “Oh, mother, the world is so rotten.” Ted Hughes. Christmas Eve 1962. Trevor Thomas. The Scarlet Woman. Anne Sexton meets Sylvia. “I might be good at being a prostitute.” Unable to function as wife or mother. Nana and sexual abuse. “A mental disorder that eluded diagnosis or cure.” A patient for life. Anne Sexton’s inadequacy. Fear of killing the children. Desperate housewives. Poetry as therapy. Death and other obsessions. A world without numbness.

  7. Ten Suicides: Yukio Mishima. Harry Crosby. Georg Trakl. Heinrich Von Kleist. Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Otto Weininger. Arthur Koestler. Thomas Chatterton. Cesare Pavese. Mary Wollstonecraft.

  8. A Suicidal Miscellany: G.K. Chesterton. Samuel Butler. Robert Louis Stevenson. Robert E. Howard. Klaus Mann. Colin Wilson. David Hume. Matthew Arnold. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Sadegh Hedayat. Friedrich Nietzsche. Frank Wedekind. Charles Baudelaire. Epictetus. Michael Artzibashev. George Sterling. Leo Tolstoy. Lafcadio Hearn. William Makepeace Thackeray. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Arthur Schopenhauer. L.H. Myers. Gustave Flaubert. E. M. Cioran. William James. William Cowper. Immanuel Kant. Plato. John Keats. Dorothy Parker. Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  Index

  Copyright

  THE AUTHOR

  Gary Lachman was a founding member of the rock group Blondie and wrote some of the band’s early hits. Before moving to London in 1996 and becoming a full time writer, Gary studied philosophy, taught English literature, was a science writer for a major American university, and managed a meta-physical bookstore.

  His books include The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse and The Dedalus Book of the 1960s: Turn Off Your Mind. He is also the editor of The Dedalus Occult Reader: The Garden of Hermetic Dreams.

  DISCLAIMER

  Despite the best endeavours of the editors, it has not been possible to contact t
he rights holder of the front cover picture of Yukio Mishima. The editors would be grateful, therefore, if the rights holder could contact Dedalus.

  Part 1

  A Taxonomy of Suicide

  A Taxonomy of Suicide

  If there is a problem in writing a book about literary suicides, it certainly isn’t dearth of material. There, are course, the familiar names: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Chatterton. These, I found, readily came to mind when I mentioned to friends that I was planning a book on writers who had killed themselves, or had tried to, or had written about suicide at some length and depth. But once I began to research in earnest and had moved past these well known figures, the field opened up considerably, and I found myself echoing that line from Eliot’s The Waste Land: “So many, I had not thought death had undone so many” – so many, that is, killed by their own hand.

  At the risk of bludgeoning the reader into a stupor at the outset, let me support this remark with a list, not exhaustive, sadly, but certainly representative. So, in no particular order, and in addition to those mentioned above – who died by gas, drowning, gun shot and arsenic respectively – we have Gérard de Nerval (hanging), Cesare Pavese (barbiturates), Yukio Mishima (hari kari), Heinrich von Kleist (gun shot), Georg Trakl (cocaine overdose), L. H. Myers (barbiturates), Robert E. Howard (gun shot), Jan Potocki (gun shot), Paul Celan (drowning), Walter Benjamin (morphine overdose), Guy Debord (gun shot), Gilles Deleuze (fall), Otto Weininger (gun shot), Anne Sexton (carbon monoxide), Empedocles (volcano), James Webb (gun shot)1, Romain Gary (gun shot), Jack London (morphine overdose), Arthur Koestler (barbiturates), Ross Lockridge, Jr. (carbon monoxide), John Kennedy Toole (carbon monoxide), Geza Csath (poison), Stefan Zweig (barbiturates), Klaus Mann (sleeping pills), Thomas Lovell Beddoes (poison), Hart Crane (drowning), Primo Levi (fall), Harry Crosby (gun shot), Richard Brautigan (gun shot), Sadegh Hedayat (gas), Vachel Lindsay (poison), Hunter S. Thompson (gun shot), B.S. Johnson (slit wrists), Sarah Kane (hanging), Malcolm Lowry (sleeping pills), Eugene Marais (gun shot), Jerzy Kozinski (barbiturates and asphyxiation), Philipp Mainländer (hanging), Mário de Sá-Carneiro (strychnine), Egon Friedell (fall), Marina Tsvetaeva (hanging), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (chloroform), Eleanor Marx (prussic acid), Henry de Montherlant (cyanide and gun shot), Sara Teasdale (sleeping pills), Adalbert Stifter (slit throat), René Crevel (gas), William Seabrook (sleeping pills) – and I think with any luck you get the idea.

  If we add to these the names of writers and thinkers who have either written extensively about suicide or in whose work or life suicide played a important role, the list swells to unwieldy proportions. Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Camus, Hesse, Wittgenstein, Kafka, Montaigne, Flaubert, Villiers de I’Isle Adam, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jorge Luis Borges are only some of the names. Others come to mind too, and to be perfectly honest it’s difficult to decide who to include and who to leave out. So, for instance, at the end of his novel Auto-da-Fé, Elias Canetti’s protagonist, Peter Kien, sets his library aflame and burns himself to death. Clearly this is a literary suicide (a very literal literary one) and also a symbol of the western intellectual’s self-destruction. And the eccentric hero of Knut Hamsun’s novel Mysteries. He kills himself, this time by drowning. Include these or not?

  Faced with this wealth of dark thoughts and saddening lives, I at first thought to compile an encyclopaedia, but I rejected this idea for two reasons. Encyclopaedia entries on most of these individuals exist already, and not only would I be repeating work already done, the structure of the book would require me to either standardize the space devoted to each case, and so lose a great deal of important material, or to have some very long entries and some very short ones. And this consideration led to my second reason. Some of the cases simply seemed more interesting than others. In some, as in the case of the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima and the American poet manqué Harry Crosby, suicide, their self-destruction, seemed an inevitability, and not because of manic-depression or some other mental instability, but because of who they were, their self-image and their self-obsession. Death, for both Mishima and Crosby, was an idea not far from their minds, and it was something they looked forward to, but neither were particularly depressive characters, unlike, say, the poet Paul Celan or the novelist Richard Brautigan.

  In other cases, more understandable and external reasons led to the individual taking his or her own life. Illness was the motive for the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the short story writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, incipient blindness for the novelist and dramatist Henry de Montherlant (who, incidentally, once considered writing a handbook on suicide), and escaping old age for the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. All of these people are interesting because of their life and work, and that they committed suicide sets them apart from most other people. But their suicide itself isn’t a focal point of their lives as it is, say, with the tragic French Romantic poet and writer Gérard de Nerval, who hung himself in a decrepit alley in Paris after battling years of madness and poverty, or the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, whose brilliant and extreme ideas about sex, race and genius led him to take his own life. In these and other cases, the suicide doesn’t seem something ‘tacked on’ to their lives, something that, given other circumstances, may not have happened. With de Nerval, Weininger, Mishima, Crosby and others, their self-inflicted deaths have, as I’ve said, an aura of inevitability. And while I am aware how romantic such considerations seem, I nevertheless find them difficult to ignore.

  If he hadn’t shot himself, it’s doubtful that Harry Crosby would be remembered today solely on the strength of his poetry, or as something more than a rich literati groupie, hovering in the vicinity of Hemingway and others in Paris in the 1920s. Perhaps more than anything else, this says something about the power of suicide as a publicity stunt, an idea not limited to moderns, as is evidenced by the case of the Greek Cynic philosopher Proteus Peregrinus, who capped off a turbulent career by publicly cremating himself in the Olympic flame in AD 165. Lucian’s account of Peregrinus’ self-immolation, “On the Death of Peregrinus,” pictures him as an exhibitionist, eager for fame, and given that I am talking about him here, nearly two millennia later, he seems to have achieved some of it. But Crosby’s death, narcissistic, juvenile and murderous as it was (he took a lover with him, unwillingly by some accounts), it nevertheless remains, for all its stupidity, something more than a headline grabber. Ironically, it was the meaning of his life.

  So, for some, we can say suicide presented itself as a practical solution to a pressing problem. For others, however, it had a deeper, more vital meaning.

  Suicide and Depression

  That writers and poets seem to be prone to suicide has not gone unnoticed. More times than not, the connecting link most often suggested is some form of manic-depression – or, put less medically, melancholy. “Why is it,” Aristotle asked, “that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?” One answer to this question is “Are they?” One could, I think, produce a list of men (and women) outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts that are not melancholic, or at least no more melancholic than individuals less outstanding in these fields. One can be moved by Weltschmerz without being overwhelmed by it, and the list of writers and poets (and artists and composers) who didn’t kill themselves is longer than the one above. Yet, it is clear that in some way Aristotle is right. Painters and composers are also melancholic, and they kill themselves too, but the numbers of suicides in their group seem smaller than those among writers.

  “That such a final, tragic, and awful thing as suicide,” writes Kay Redfield Jamison in Touched by Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, “can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.”2 Yet although, as she states, “recent research strongly suggests that, compared with the general population, writers and artists show a vastly disproportionate rate of manic-depress
ive illness,”3 one of the arguments of this book is that, as in the case of Mishima, Crosby and others, not all literary suicides are the product of depression. Or, to put it another way, to equate all thoughts of suicide (and the act itself) with symptoms of manic-depression (or some other pathological condition) strikes me as overly reductive.

  It may be unfashionable to think so, but angst, it seems to me, is something more than a chemical imbalance. The poet Robert Lowell once remarked about his own recurring manic attacks, “It’s terrible […] to think that all I’ve suffered, and all the suffering I’ve caused, might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain.”4 Lowell’s suffering was real, and I would not deny him his salt, but I want to argue that existential concerns about the value of life, and what we might call ‘aesthetic’ concerns about the freedom to leave it under one’s own steam, are not necessarily manifestations of a pathology. Indeed, the whole shift in thinking about our inner states from a philosophical or metaphysical point of view to a medical one (melancholy as a state of mind, as opposed to manic-depression as a pathological condition) is something I find troubling. Clearly, I’m not suggesting that people who benefit from anti-depressant drugs should cancel their prescriptions. Nor that in many, probably most cases of suicide, depression is the root cause. I am saying that the reflections on suicide of writers and thinkers like Camus, Hermann Hesse, Dostoyevsky and others, which we will discuss further on, are something more than the morbid thoughts produced by a pathological condition. When breaking off a course in psychotherapy, the poet Rilke, no stranger to thoughts about death, famously remarked that “if my devils leave me, my angels will too.” Rilke continued to be troubled by his devils, and he continued to write some of the most powerful poetry of the twentieth century. If I am here subscribing to the ‘tortured genius’ school of romanticism, I make no excuse for it.