The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  Another ambiguous case is that of the novelist Malcolm Lowry, best known for his masterpiece Under The Volcano, an hallucinatory account of the last twelve hours in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic ex-British Consul, drinking himself to death in Mexico. The action of the novel takes place on the Day of the Dead, and the book is saturated in occult and mystical symbolism, much of it taken from the Tarot; one card with great meaning for Lowry was the Hanged Man. Firmin tempts certain death by frequenting a low tavern, the Farolito, and at the end of the novel is killed there by local fascists and Nazi supporters. Lowry’s own life, filled with alcoholism, broken marriages, poverty and failure, seems a long, drawn out descent into a personal hell, and at the end of it, the official assessment was ‘death by misadventure.’ Yet there is some suspicion of suicide. The cause of death was asphyxiation – Lowry choked on his own vomit after a terrific binge. Yet a bottle that had contained twenty sodium amytal sleeping pills was found empty nearby. Lowry had been battling his addiction for years with little success and may have simply given up. But as his biographer Gordon Bowker suggests in Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry, there is the possibility of foul play; it is possible that Lowry’s second wife, Majorie Bonner, with whom he had quarrelled ferociously on the night of his death, had given Lowry the sleeping pills while he was in a drunken stupor.22

  Another borderline case is the novelist Jack London. Associated with clean cut rugged boys’ adventure tales like The Call of the Wild and White Fang, London had a dark side, an obsession with pushing himself to the limits, a kind of ‘supersize’ philosophy of life. His capacity for food and drink was enormous and would in the end kill him, although it is possible that the overdose of morphine which capped off his hedonistic career was intentional. Although London could say that, “After having come through all of the game of life, and of youth, at my present mature age of thirty-nine years I am firmly and solemnly convinced that the game is worth the candle …”23 he would also keep a loaded revolver in his desk, ready to use against himself at any time.24

  Addicted to morphine and opium, London was a phenomenal drinker and was one of the first major writers to publicly confess to his alcoholism; his “alcoholic memoir” John Barleycorn shocked the readers of his adventure tales and in puritanical America, turned many against him. In his passion for excess, it is easy to see a subliminal death-wish, a desire to pass beyond the limits of the self. London admitted to once almost drinking himself to death in a binge, and on another occasion, as he relates in John Barleycorn, he drunkenly stumbled into San Francisco Bay and “some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me.” London drifted for hours with the intention of letting himself drown, but sobered up in the end and was saved by fishermen. The hero of his semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden kills himself, and in The Little Lady of the Big House the heroine, suffering from a mortal and inoperable gunshot wound, is helped by her doctor to end the pain by taking her own life.

  London may have killed himself or he may have died from the uremia that was killing him anyway (his kidneys were failing and filling his system with the waste product urea). Other suggested causes are a heart attack, a stroke, or an accidental overdose of morphine. Whatever may have killed him, like Ross Lockridge Jr. (and a cadre of rock stars), success, which he had a great deal of, was no fun for London. “Success – I despised it,” he wrote, and one wonders if the collapse of ventures like the palatial Wolf House, his schooner the Snark, and his huge Beauty Ranch – all expensive enterprises that proved dismal failures – were brought about by an unconscious wish for annihilation. London’s childhood with a depressive, unhinged mother – who lived with an astrologer and spiritualist after London’s father deserted her – his early years working at a canning factory, and his frequent need to adapt to difficult environments made him in many ways a survivor. His own social views were very much in line with Social Darwinism. Yet, as one of his biographers suggests, they also came at a cost. “Jack never developed a robust sense of self, and he would enter adulthood with little self-esteem.”25 Although driven by an urge to better himself (he was a determined autodidact) and in every way a self-made man, London was plagued by what he called White Logic: “the messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact.” For all his worldly success – he was, at one point, the highest paid writer in America – London never really felt good about himself. Possessed of a Nietzschean belief in the superman, he was also prone to a cosmic pessimism, a fatalism that prevented him from adjusting his behaviour when faced with the results of his superhuman excess. When the tide of drugs, alcohol, and a failing body started carrying him out to the cosmic sea, he may in the end have just let himself go.

  The Slow Suicide

  London’s case raises the question of writers who may be seen as indulging in a slow drink or drug-filled suicide. That writers often have an unhealthy fondness for the bottle or drugs is well known. The Beat novelist Jack Kerouac is a case in point. After the initial success of books like On The Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac retreated into an increasingly esoteric prose style and an alcoholic solitude, effectively drinking himself to death while living with his mother; he died at forty-seven in 1969. Another is the decadent poet Ernst Dowson, a devotee of absinthe, opium, hashish, alcohol and other inebriants. Dowson, a friend of Arthur Symons, Yeats and others of the ‘Tragic Generation’, is described by one writer as “living almost hermit-like in a ramshackle house where he drank absinthe and took opiates in abundance.”26 He died at thirty-two of consumption, drink and overall self-abuse. Dowson’s poetry is filled with images and metaphors of ennui, world-weariness, decline and early death; perhaps his best known poem is “They Are Not Long,” with its cheery admonition that “They are not long/The days of wine and roses/ Out of a misty dream/Our path emerges for a while then closes/” In another poem, “A Last Word,” he wishes to go to “the Hollow Lands” where there is, “Freedom to all from love and fear and lust/Twine our torn hands/O pray the earth enfold/Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.” Dowson may not have had the strength to commit suicide, and his world-weariness may have been something of a pose, one adopted by many of his peers, but he did nothing to halt his sure drift into non-existence. Yet if we allowed his case and that of Kerouac’s (and sadly many others) to count as suicides, this book would grow unmanageable, and so I think we must leave them out.27

  Fake Suicides

  Some writers have a kind of ‘double’ relationship to suicide. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa didn’t commit suicide, but one of his ‘heteronyms’ did. Heteronym was the title Pessoa gave to the various literary alter-egos he created throughout his career; more than a pseudonym, Pessoa’s heteronyms – he had dozens – were actual complete other identities, with histories, psychologies, and literary styles all their own. One of these, the Baron of Teive, author of a work entitled The Education of A Stoic, is led to suicide through strictly logical reasoning. Believing in the “impossibility of producing superior art,” and deciding to kill himself after burning all of his works, the Baron works on one final piece of writing, a manuscript which will explain why it is impossible to capture in writing the literary works he imagines in his brain. As so often happens with Pessoa, this work, too, is only fragmentary, a literal testament to the impossibility of literature. The Baron has “reached the height of emptiness, the plenitude of nothing at all.” What leads him to suicide is “the same kind of urge that makes one go to bed early.”28 As Heinrich von Kleist had discovered (as we shall see), Teive sees that “the rational conduct of life is impossible. Intelligence provides no guiding rule,”29 and like Kleist, he concludes that there is only one option, suicide. “I feel I have attained the full use of my reason,” Teive writes, and so “that’s why I’m going to kill myself.”30 And after burning all of his previous fragments, he does.
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  Another of Pessoa’s heteronyms, Bernardo Soares, the author of the best known (in the English speaking world) of Pessoa’s works, The Book of Disquietude – although to call this enormous collection of fragments a ‘work’ is misleading – considers suicide as well. But, as is usual with Pessoa, his take on it is paradoxical. Pessoa/Soares writes: “The active life has always struck me as the least comfortable of suicides.”31 If that is the case, then Pessoa’s own life, which, aside from his considerable literary activity was far from active, may be seen as a long avoidance of this particular method of doing yourself in: he spent nearly all of his life in Lisbon, practically in the same neighbourhood, had few friends and probably died a virgin. Yet anyone who reads The Book of Disquietude can’t help but recognize its deep world rejection and unrelenting ennui, and, like myself, may feel that suicide was never far from Pessoa’s mind. It’s understandable then that he would find the idea of helping another poet fake his own suicide attractive. The poet in question, however, is more well known in his other guise as a magician, occultist and drug addict.

  Pessoa came into contact with the notorious Aleister Crowley through their mutual interest in astrology, and on a visit to Lisbon, during which the Great Beast quarrelled with his current Scarlet Woman – his magical concubine – Crowley coaxed Pessoa into helping him with his prank.32 Leaving a forlorn lover’s note at a treacherous rock formation on the coast west of Lisbon, known as the Boca do Inferno – the Mouth of Hell – Crowley created the impression that he had ended it all by leaping into the sea. Pessoa explained to the Lisbon press the various occult symbols that accompanied the note and even offered the fact that he had seen Crowley’s ghost the day after his disappearance. In reality, Crowley had left Portugal via Spain, and he enjoyed reading the reports of his death in the newspapers; among his other addictions, getting his name in the press was high on the list. Eventually, though, he tired of the ruse and ‘miraculously’ appeared at an exhibition of his paintings in Berlin, once again getting his name in print.33 Pessoa, however, had a still more significant link to suicide. In 1916, his great friend and collaborator in Lisbon on the avant-garde magazine Orpheu, the writer Mário de Sá Carneiro, author of the novel Lucio’s Confession, committed suicide in Paris by swallowing five bottles of strychnine. He was only twenty-five, but like Dowson and others, was addicted to alcohol and opium.

  Sá Carneiro’s case suggests another category, which unfortunately I do not have the space to explore here: cities of suicide. Although all big cities have their share of suicides, there is something about Paris that gives the idea a romantic, poetic attraction. Along with Paul Celan, de Nerval, Gilles Deleuze, Sadegh Hedayat and others, Sá Carneiro seems to have taken seriously Rilke’s remark about Paris, in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: “So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.”

  Agents of Suicide

  Another category of suicides are writers who, while not committing suicide themselves, led others to it. The case of Goethe and The Sorrows of Young Werther will be considered at length further on, and in any case, in that instance, it was Goethe’s work, not the man himself, who was responsible. Here I am talking about the writer himself. It may be stretching it to include Freud in this category, but it’s not unusual today for Freud to be seen as more of a literary than a scientific or even a medical figure; and the fact that he was, say, compared to Jung, an exceptionally eloquent writer, helps.

  As books like Paul Roazen’s Freud and his Followers makes clear, the circle of Freud’s disciples was like a secret society; Freud even handed out rings to his elect, a sign of the follower’s acceptance into the esoteric clique. The flip side of this honour was Freud’s wrath toward apostates. At the start of the courtship, the dogmatic and dictatorial Freud would allow new members a certain freedom of thought; but this was only, as one writer put it, “so that the ultimate triumph of the psychoanalytic doctrine would be the more complete.” If it became clear to Freud that the newcomer had reservations, however slight and reasonable, about his theories – specifically the sexual basis of neuroses – then “there was a ritual of excommunication,” and the unbeliever was “solemnly anathematised and placed on a list of ‘prohibited persons’.”34 Jung himself, who Freud considered the heir to his doctrine, eventually broke with the master, and the experience was so devastating for Jung that it led to something like a psychotic episode. Jung survived and went on to start his own school of analysis; others were not so strong. One of these was Victor Tausk.

  Tausk was a brilliant individual who basically accepted Freud’s vision; his problem was that he was too brilliant, and his independence of mind, even when still working within the Freudian framework, troubled Freud. Freud wanted followers, but he didn’t want ones capable of thinking for themselves. Freud’s ire turned toward Tausk when Tausk came to the defence of the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, who, wary of Freud’s ideas, made the perceptive remark that, “Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it claims to be the cure.” Kraus also criticized Freud’s attempt to reduce the genius of men like Dostoyevsky and Leonardo to manifestations of penis envy. Eventually the true believers fought back, claiming that Kraus’ own attacks on the tabloid press of the time were an expression of his penis envy. Tausk would have none of it and simply remarked that the shallow Viennese press was worthy of Kraus’ attack. This was enough for Freud, and when Tausk, who was going through some difficult times, asked Freud for help – specifically to psychoanalyse him – he refused. Freud subjected Tausk to petty humiliations, suggesting that he submit to analysis with one of Freud’s students instead, and rebuffed any attempts to regain their former intimacy. Tausk plummeted. Soon after the rejection, he wrote a letter to Freud and one to his mistress, tied a curtain cord around his neck, and shot himself in the head, strangling himself as he fell back from the blast.

  Another disciple to receive the Freud treatment was Herbert Silberer “the most potentially brilliant and original of Freud’s followers.”35 Silberer made important observations about the strange half-dream state called hypnagogia, and in his book Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbols (1917), he explored the relation between unconscious imagery and alchemy years before Jung did.36 Although Silberer held Freud in high esteem, he also found much of value in Jung’s work. Silberer politely questioned Freud’s belief that the sexual theory offered a complete interpretation of alchemical symbolism, and suggested that this could also be seen ‘anagogically’, as an expression of a religious or mystical impulse, as ‘instinctive’ as the sexual one. He believed that his basic admiration for Freud would compensate for any differences of opinion. Freud disagreed, and cast the heretic into the outer darkness. When Silberer, increasingly puzzled by Freud’s rejection, offered to call on him, Freud wrote back: “As the result of the observations and impressions of recent years I no longer desire personal contact with you.” Silberer was shattered. A few years later, unable to throw off a sense of worthlessness, he hung himself from the window bars in his home. There must have been a touch of the morbid in Silberer. When he hung himself, he arranged a light so that when his wife came home the first thing she saw would be him.

  Another writer surrounded by suicides is the Russian decadent Valery Briusov, author of the remarkable occult novel The Fiery Angel, the basis of Prokofiev’s opera of the same name. Briusov was the magus of Russian Symbolism; as novelist, poet, editor and critic, in the early twentieth century, he was a supremely important figure in the literary cliques of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Like Paris and London, pre-revolutionary Russia was caught up in a obsession with the occult. Satanism and diabolism in particular fascinated the Russian avant-garde, and one expression of this were the several ‘suicide clubs’ that sprang up among the intelligentsia. Briusov dominated the scene and gathered a coterie of followers. Highly disciplined and cautious, Briusov was attracted to wilder, more ecstatic types, one of whom, the precocious poet Alexander Dobrolyubov, was thrown out of high school at seve
nteen for preaching suicide to young female students, apparently with some success.

  Another character who attracted Briusov was the novelist Andrei Bely, author of the modernist occult novel Petersburg. Bely, a highly labile and poetic character, was an infant terrible of Russian Symbolism. At first attracted to each other, Briusov and Bely soon developed a feud. Bely believed Briusov was trying to hypnotize him, and an occult war sprang up between them. This became the basis of Briusov’s The Fiery Angel. At the centre of the novel was the erotic triangle between Briusov, Bely, and the poetess Nina Petrovskaya.37

  Nina loved Bely, but he spurned her for the wife of the poet Aleksandr Blok. She turned to Briusov for help; Briusov had a reputation as a magician and she hoped he could cast a spell to win Bely’s affection. When this failed she became Briusov’s lover, plunging into a seven year long sadomasochistic relationship, involving drugs, madness and suicide pacts. But after using Nina as a model for his novel, Briusov lost interest in her and dropped her. Crushed, she left Moscow and later committed suicide in Paris, joining the ranks of Sá Carneiro, Paul Celan and others. Another poet Briusov got involved with after Nina also committed suicide was Nadechda Lvova. According to the poet V.F. Khodasevic, Briusov encouraged Nadechda’s suicidal feelings, and presented her with a pistol that Nina had once turned on Briusov himself. When Briusov ended their affair, she shot herself with it. Still another poet, the twenty-one year old Victor Gofman, was advised by Briusov to kill himself as well; he, too, apparently took the master up on this suggestion.