The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  As some have suggested, it may be irresponsible to think that the confusion, loneliness, despair and isolation experienced by many individuals of the ‘artistic temperament’ should not be lessened by the insights of psychopharmacology. The general feeling seems to be that if these can be eased, they should be. But consider this passage from Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, when the ‘melancholic’ priest Keegan, who sees the world as a “place of torment and penance” where we are sent to “expiate crimes committed in a former existence,” confronts the businessman Broadbent, who finds the world “rather a jolly place.”

  KEEGAN. “You are satisfied?”

  BROADBENT. As a reasonable man, yes. I see no evils in the world – except, of course natural ones – that cannot be remedied by freedom, self-government, and English institutions. I think so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.

  KEEGAN. You feel at home in the world, then?

  BROADBENT. Of course. Don’t you?

  KEEGAN. [from the very depth of his nature] No.

  BROADBENT. [breezily] Try phosphorous pills. I always take them when my brain is overworked.5

  It’s no coincidence that Colin Wilson, who himself came close to suicide in his teens, used this passage as the frontis-piece to The Outsider, his study of alienation, extreme mental states and the crisis of meaning in modern man. The Outsider, Wilson tells us, sees “too deep” and “too much” to feel “at home in the world,” and many of the writers and artists he discusses considered suicide as a real response to their alienation. The idea that their troubling reflections on life’s meaning could be excised through a pill seems a clear negation of those reflections’ value. Although it may be the case that his relations with people might have improved if he had, I somehow can’t regret that Kafka, who often thought about suicide, didn’t have the advantage of taking Prozac.

  Yet, understandably, most attempts to grasp this link between writers and, as the philosopher William James, who entertained suicidal thoughts, phrased it, “the pistol, the dagger, and the bowl,”6 have centred on depression. A. Alvarez titled his study of suicide – to which this book is indebted – The Savage God, and speaks of the urge as manifested in Sylvia Plath as “not a swoon into death, an attempt to ‘cease upon the midnight with no pain’ ” but “something to be felt in the nerve-ends and fought against.”7 Alvarez writes of the “shabby, confused, agonized crisis which is the common reality of suicide,”8 and of course he is right. In the majority of cases, which are not literary, suicide is a dark cul-de-sac in a trapped, despairing life. But when considering literary suicides, depression, as common and as devastating as it is, does not, it seems to me, cover all the bases.

  A Taxonomy of Suicide

  With this in mind, and thinking of how to structure this book, it struck me that I would have to do a ‘taxonomy’ or ‘phenomenology’ of suicide. Rather than look for some root cause, linking the different cases I had collected, I thought it better to simply describe and categorize them. There may not be an ‘essence’ shared by all the suicides in this book. There may not even be something like the notion of a ‘family resemblance’ a la Wittgenstein – who, incidentally, endured many a suicidal thought. But they do seem to fall into certain ‘types’. There is the Existential Suicide. There is also the Romantic Suicide. There is the Aesthetic Suicide, and, as I’ve been discussing, the Manic-Depressive or Melancholy Suicide. There is also the Political Suicide and the Surreal Suicide. Each of these will be looked at in some detail as we go on. There are also some sub-categories, like the Fame Suicide, mentioned above, and the strange category of Imitative Suicides. One striking example of this type is the case of Eleanor Marx, youngest daughter of Karl Marx, and translator of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which famously ends with the suicide of its heroine. Jilted by her socialist lover Edward Aveling, Eleanor was so impressed by Emma Bovary’s death that she ended her own life in the same way, by taking poison. The imitation was not exact, however. Emma ate arsenic, but in Eleanor’s case it was prussic acid.

  Some cases are perhaps unique, and it might be a good idea to begin our survey by touching briefly on some of the different types of literary suicide that fall outside of the main categories mentioned above.

  One such I might call the Fan Suicide. One disciple of Rousseau was so enamoured of his master that he blew his brains out at his grave; he is honoured with a tomb at Ermenonville, near Rousseau’s own.9 There is the philosophical suicide. The German Romantic playwright and short-story writer Heinrich von Kleist, who we will discuss in detail further on, may be the one case of a suicide over epistemological reasons; reading the philosopher Kant – not an enticing prospect for most of us – Kleist was led to blow his brains out. There is even a case of a suicide in the cause of literature. In Berlin in 1834, Charlotte Stieglitz stabbed herself to death, trusting her death would inspire her husband, the poet Heinrich Stieglitz, to greatness. Sadly, Heinrich remained a mediocre poet, and her sacrifice was in vain. Another example of the imitative type involves the Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes scholar Richard Lanceyln Green. There is the suspicion that he arranged his suicide to appear as a murder, in effect mimicking the plot of one of Doyle’s last Holmes stories, “The Problem of Thor Bridge.”

  Methods of Suicide

  Writers’ methods of ending their life can also be unique and deserve some classification. The eighteenth century Polish traveller, ethnologist and fabulist Jan Potocki, author of the strange work The Manuscript Found at Saragossa, was a student of the occult, a Freemason and a possible member of the secret society the Illuminati. In his last days, suffering from ill-health, family troubles and disillusionment with the outcome of the French Revolution, Potocki had come under the belief that he had become a werewolf, and he took steps to remedy this. Taking the silver knob of a sugar bowl, he filed this into a silver bullet, had this blessed by a priest, and then blew his brains out with it by shooting himself in the mouth. The French romantic poet Gérard de Nerval, mentioned earlier, was, like Potocki, a student of the occult; he is also famous for walking a lobster on a leash through the Palais-Royal in Paris. After two stays in an insane asylum and several bouts of madness, he finally hung himself with a filthy apron string he had carried for years and which he assured friends was really the Queen of Sheba’s garter.10

  Other methods seem exceptional in their severity. The poet Vachel Lindsay killed himself by drinking Lysol, a powerful cleaning fluid. The playwright Sarah Kane, at twenty-eight enjoying success and a promising career, was found hanging in a bathroom in London’s King’s College Hospital. And after two unsuccessful attempts at taking his life, as well as enduring harrowing multiple courses of electro-convulsive therapy, which many believe only worsened his condition, Ernest Hemingway blew his brains out with a shotgun on the landing outside his wife’s bedroom door; she had to step over his remains in order to get down the stairs.

  Reasons for Suicide: Failure and Success

  Of the many reasons for suicide, it seems obvious that failure would be a common cause among writers. In the case of John Kennedy Toole this is true. Toole’s novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, was rejected by several publishers in the 1960s and this, combined with depression and possible confusion over his sexuality, led Toole to heavy drinking and eventually to gassing himself in his car. Toole’s mother, a domineering woman, had absolute faith in her son’s genius and after his death, she continued to hunt for a publisher for the book. Eventually, through the help of the novelist Walker Percy, Toole’s novel was finally published, to great success. In 1981 he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and A Confederacy of Dunces has since achieved ‘modern classic’ status.

  Yet, success, too, is no defence against the literary suicide. In 1948, Raintree County by Ross Lockridge, Jr., an epic of the US Civil War, was published to wide acclaim and massive sales, the sort of response every writer secretly (and not so secretly) desires. The manuscript, which Lockridge had been working on while oste
nsibly doing a dissertation on Walt Whitman at Harvard University, weighed nearly twenty pounds, and was accepted by Houghton Mifflin almost on sight; he arrived at their offices carrying it in a battered suitcase. Prior to publication Life magazine ran an excerpt from it for a hefty sum. Lockridge also won an enormous prize offered by MGM Studios, as well as a movie contract (the film was eventually released in 1957 starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, and seen as another Gone With the Wind) and it was the main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Yet, two months after publication, and a day before Raintree County was announced as No.1 on the national best-seller list, Lockridge killed himself in the same way as John Kennedy Toole would twenty years later, by carbon monoxide poisoning. Lockridge too was suffering from severe depression, some of which was rooted in the anxiety such massive success often brings: the pressure of living up to the acclaim, the challenge, basically, of the second book.

  The Unsuccessful Suicide

  There are still other categories of literary suicide. One is the Ambiguous Suicide; another is the case of writers who attempted suicide, or were about to and, for one reason or another, were stopped, which I might call the Aborted Suicide. One of these, Mary Wollstonecraft, we will look at in some detail further on. Goethe, who is held responsible for a spate of copy-cat romantic suicides, and who will also be explored in detail further on, has the eponymous hero of his drama Faust stopped from killing himself by hearing the church bells on Easter Sunday.

  One case in which a book, or at least a pamphlet, prevented a writer from killing himself is that of the Prague occultist and novelist Gustav Meyrink. Torn between the demands of his life as a sober financier, and the pleasures of being Prague’s most extravagant dandy, Meyrink was at the brink of suicide when a pamphlet was pushed under his door. It was an advertisement for a book on occultism. Meyrink read the signs and decided not to end his life; when his Expressionist novel The Golem appeared some years later, it was a bestseller. The French short story writer and novelist Guy de Maupassant seemed to presage his own suicide attempt in his story “The Horla,” in which the hero’s mind is increasingly dominated by a strange extra-dimensional creature, and he is eventually led to kill himself. Many see this eerie tale as a vision of Maupassant’s own incipient madness, brought on by syphilis. His hero’s suicide, however, was wish-fulfilment. Maupassant attempted to avoid the fate of his brother, who also went mad, by committing suicide, but was prevented by his servant.11

  Another unsuccessful suicide was the Lithuanian poet, novelist, esoteric philosopher and diplomat O.V. de Lubicz Milosz, a writer little known in the English speaking world, although his reputation in his adopted country of France is secure. Milosz began his writing career as a symbolist and decadent, and at eighteen, was one of the habitués at the Kalissaya, the first American bar in Paris, where he was often in the group of would-be geniuses surrounding Oscar Wilde. Sitting at a table with George Moore, Ernest Lajeunesse and the poet Moréas, Wilde once remarked to a friend “This is Moréas, the poet.” Seeing Milosz come in he continued “and that is Milosz – poetry itself.” Milosz (who was the uncle of the Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz) was a devotee of Poe, Lamartine, Baudelaire, Novalis, Byron and Hölderlin, and he took part in café discussions at the Kalissaya and at another poetic watering hole, the Napolitaine. Yet, in spite of his decadent pose, Milosz was unhappy with notions of ‘art for art’s sake’, and in a letter to his friend Christian Gauss, admitted to being “horribly sad … with a sadness that nothing can vanquish.” “This life,” he told Gauss, “is horribly empty with its anxious loneliness surrounded by the idiots of the Napolitaine and the Kalissaya …”12 This loneliness increased and eventually led Milosz to a suicide attempt. As he told Gauss in another letter, on 1 January 1901, “towards eleven o’clock in the evening – with perfect calm, a cigarette at my lips – the human soul is, after all, a strange thing – I shot myself in the region of the heart with a revolver.”13 He botched the job, but his doctors didn’t think he’d survive. Unexpectedly he did, and Milosz was sufficiently moved by the experience to cast off his aesthetic garb and turn himself into a philosophical poet of a highly metaphysical and spiritual character.

  Another suicidal failure was the poet Charles Baudelaire, one of Milosz’s heroes. In 1845, Baudelaire’s extravagantly decadent tastes had depleted the inheritance he received from his father, who died when Baudelaire was six. His domineering mother and strict step-father took steps to curb the young aesthete’s expenditure, effectively impounding the funds, and doling out to him a small allowance. This humiliation, combined with his masochistic dependency on the illiterate, coarse and frequently drunk mulatto woman Jeanne Duvall, led Baudelaire to despair, and he tried to escape his fate by stabbing himself. Like O.V. de Lubicz Milosz, he bungled the job, which we can assume only added to his humiliation. The crisis however had a beneficial result; out of it Baudelaire’s first published writing, the Salon of 1845, was met with approval, and established him as a respected, if not well-paid, critic.14

  Another failed suicide, a somewhat tragic-comic and colossal one, was William Cowper, whose account of his fruitless attempts to end his life are too long to quote here but can be found in the Suicidal Miscellany at the end of the book.

  Suicide, or Not?

  The writer Graham Greene presents us with a case that could be considered either a failed attempt or an ambiguous one, but in my opinion, and Greene’s, doesn’t qualify as a suicide attempt at all. In “The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard,” Greene relates how he relieved his teenage boredom by playing Russian Roulette on Berkenstead Common. In his late teens Greene suffered from an acute case of ennui. He writes that “For years it seemed to me I could take no aesthetic interest in any visual thing at all: staring at a sight that others assured me was beautiful, I would feel nothing.”15 Here Greene echoes the ahedonia of an earlier, sometimes suicidal poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In “Dejection: An Ode,” Coleridge writes:

  Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew

  In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;

  I see them all so excellently fair,

  I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

  Coleridge himself considered suicide in his early years, when, as his biographer Richard Holmes relates, he lived a kind of double-life at Cambridge, alternating “wild expenditure on books, drinking, violin lessons, theatre and whoring” with “fits of suicidal gloom and remorse.” “He abandoned himself to a whirl of drunken socializing, alternating with grim solitary resolutions to shoot himself as the final solution to bad debts, unrequited love and academic disgrace.”16 Coleridge’s older brother Francis had in fact committed suicide and the influence of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which we will discuss further on, probably had something to do with these thoughts of self-annihilation.

  Graham Greene, however, hit upon an effective means of dissipating his boredom. Discovering a revolver among his brother’s things, Greene decided to try his hand at Russian Roulette, having read of Russian soldiers entertaining themselves in this way during long and dreary campaigns. Greene found some bullets and, loading one into a chamber, spun the revolver behind his back. Taking the pistol to the Common, he put the barrel to his temple and slowly pulled the trigger. He writes: “There was a minute click, and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into place. I was out by one. I remember an extraordinary sense of jubilation. It was as if a light had been turned on … and I felt that life contained an infinite number of possibilities.”17 Greene continued the practice, finding a “craving” for its effects. Eventually, however, the kick of not blowing his brains out wore off, and he stopped.

  Greene makes clear that his dangerous game, however, had nothing to do with suicide, although Kay Redfield Jamison counts him among her manic-depressives.18 Greene writes, “… this was not suicide, whatever a coroner’s jury might have said of it: it was a gamble with six chances to one against an inquest … The discove
ry that it was possible to enjoy again the visible world by risking its total loss (my italics) was one I was bound to make sooner or later.” And to insure that his possible death would not be taken as intentional, Greene wrote a verse and left it on his desk, which included the line “I press the trigger of a revolver I already know to be empty.”19

  Ambiguous Suicides

  Of other ambiguous or border-line suicides, the proto-surrealist Arthur Cravan is a good candidate. Cravan was a contemporary of Alfred Jarry, creator of the Ubu plays, and rivalled him in his eccentricities, combining a career in boxing – he once went six rounds with Jack Johnson – with aggressive, Dadaesque poetry. It is generally believed that Cravan committed suicide, throwing himself into the sea during a voyage from Mexico to Valparaiso to meet his wife, the poet Mina Loy; but an article by Charles Nicholl in the London Review of Books undermines this account, and suggests that he simply lost control of his less than seaworthy craft and sank; the voyage would in any case be demanding for even a highly competent sailor.20 Like many surrealists, Cravan however had a predilection for suicide, and once filled a Parisian hall with his announcement that he would kill himself in public. But when the hall was full, he promptly accused his audience of crass voyeurism and treated them to a lecture on entropy instead. (One suspects many wished he would have stuck with the advertised entertainment.) Cravan’s aesthetic ‘terrorist’ tactics would later be a major influence on the Situationist Guy Debord, who would commit suicide in 1994, shooting himself through the heart at his farm house in the Auvergne. Debord claimed that he wanted to see “whether one could live with the responsibility of committing an act of supreme transgression,” and his biographer Andrew Hussey spoke of his “supreme and sovereign act of self-destruction.”21 This is a refrain that will accompany many who choose what we can call the Aesthetic suicide. The problem with this and with all notions of ‘transgression’, is that there are no acts of “supreme transgression.” The other usual candidate for an act of “supreme transgression,” murder, has its own drawbacks, but, as we shall see, in the case of some aesthetic suicides, like that of Jacques Vaché, these were apparently negligible.