The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  23 The bedrooms were in the upper part of the house, and as the coal gas used in the oven is heavier than air, and so sinks, the children were free of danger. Not so Trevor Thomas, who lived below her. He inhaled the fumes as he slept, woke up sick very late that day, and was later diagnosed with carbon monoxide poisoning.

  24 For example, the autopsy report states that she died on 11/2/63, but that her body was examined on 10/2/63.

  25 Janet Malcolm The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Granta Books: London, 2005). Highly recommended. Although the personal and literary complications and cover-ups that Malcolm untangles arose after Plath’s death, and are slightly tangential to my purposes here, some indication of what is involved can be gleaned from the fact that Hughes destroyed (or lost or misplaced – both were offered at different times as explanations for what happened to them) Plath’s last journals, even though, like Woolf, she was an obsessive diarist and clearly these last volumes would be of value in understanding her motivations and state of mind leading up to her suicide. Likewise unusual is the fact that Hughes, and later Olwyn Hughes, gained complete control over Plath’s letters, even those written to her mother and which were already in her possession. When Aurelia Plath wished to publish a collection of her daughter’s letters, she had to seek permission from the Hughes estate; not surprisingly, the letters published were subject to the same restrictions as was Anne Stevenson’s biography. Mrs. Plath was also denied permission to read the last letter Sylvia wrote to her, only hours before she killed herself – at least she was strongly advised not to, and accepted this.

  Hughes also took legal action against both Trevor Thomas, stopping the circulation of his privately printed memoir of Plath’s last days, as well as forcing him to retract a statement about a party being held at 23 Fitzroy Road on the evening Plath killed herself at which bongo drums were played; and A. Alvarez, for publishing the first chapter of his book, The Savage God, in The Observer under the title “Sylvia Plath’s Road to Suicide;” Hughes subsequently tried to stop publication of the book, which gives an account of Alvarez’s friendship with Plath in the weeks leading up to her death. Hughes changed the selection of her poems made by Plath herself for her collection Ariel, published posthumously; he retained only twenty-seven of her original forty-one poems; the poems excised make uncomfortable suggestions about their relationship.

  Strangest of all, as already mentioned, Hughes placed Plath’s literary estate into the hands of his sister Olwyn, who disliked Plath, and who had an inordinate influence over Hughes himself. Hughes, like Yeats, was a keen student of the occult, initiated into the dark arts by Olwyn, who was a devotee of astrology and other magical pursuits. After Sylvia’s death, Hughes remarked, “It was a fight to the death. One of us had to die,” implying that some kind of contest of wills was involved in their relationship, and he was concerned that Sylvia may have used black magic against him; there is a story that Sylvia had once skimmed a knife across the top of Hughes’ desk, collecting, among other things, his dandruff, fingernails and dead skin. Hughes was deeply interested in shamanism, and the ‘bongo drums’ Trevor Thomas reported hearing on the evening of the day of Plath’s death, may have been a means of exorcising whatever unwanted influence of Plath that remained in the house.

  26 An idea of the Hughes’ take on Sylvia can be garnered by the fact that the family’s chief concern was over how the scandal of her suicide would affect Ted’s reputation.

  27 Ronald Hayman points out that in order to prove that human behaviour consisted almost completely of prejudices, Otto Plath would skin, cook and eat a rat in front of his students.

  28 Ronald Hayman The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (Sutton Publishing: Phoenix Mill, 2003) p. 91.

  29 On 25 March 1969, Assia Wevill copied Sylvia Plath by gassing herself and her two year old daughter by Ted Hughes, Shura, in the kitchen of their flat. Although ‘with’ Assia at the time, Hughes was having an affair with yet another woman, Brenda Hedden. Hughes himself remarked, “All the women I have anything to do with seem to die.” One wonders if he ever asked why that may have been. Like Freud and Valery Briusov, Hughes seems to me to be one of my ‘agents of suicide’.

  30 Anne Sexton and Her Kind.

  31 Martin T. Orne, foreword, Diane Wood Middlebrook Anne Sexton: A Biography (Virago Press: London, 1991) p.xiii.

  32 Ibid.

  33 Ibid. p. 35. As with Virginia Woolf, there was a history of mental illness in Sexton’s family. Her great aunt received electroconvulsive therapy; her grandfather was hospitalised for a nervous breakdown; her father was an alcoholic; her aunt committed suicide.

  34 Ibid. p. 63.

  35 Ibid. p. xx

  36 Erica Jong “Remembering Anne Sexton,” New York Times 27 October 1974.

  Ten Suicides

  Yukio Mishima

  Probably the most spectacular literary suicide, certainly of recent times, was that of the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, who was born Kimitake Hiraoka on 14 January 1925 in the Yotsuya district of Tokyo. On 25 November 1970, before a literally captive audience, Mishima performed hara-kiri. His lover and disciple Masakatsu Morita, who would also attempt hara-kiri, after several attempts failed to decapitate Mishima as planned, leaving incomplete the kaishakunin part of the ritual, aimed to relieve the agony of disembowelment. Both received their finishing touches at the hands and sword of a third member of Mishima’s Tatenokai (“Shield Society”), a kind of private army that Mishima hoped would be a model for a new, right-wing Japan, recapturing the samurai glories of old.

  That day Mishima and his followers had taken hostage an army general at a Jieitai (self-defence forces) military base at Ichigaya. On threat of death, Mishima compelled the general to assemble the garrison, some 1,000 men. He then addressed them from the balcony, hoping to instil some of the patriotic and military fervour that, along with his narcissism and strange sadomasochistic fantasies, had become a central part of his self-image. He called for a coup d’état, a rejection of the ‘Americanization’ of Japan that had begun following WWII, and a reinstatement of the emperor. His harangues failed; the soldiers shouted abuse and obscenities. They had no interest in Mishima’s samurai dreams. As the abuse grew, Mishima shouted “Listen! Listen! Listen!” No one did, and by this time police helicopters were drowning out both him and his hecklers.

  Humiliated, Mishima returned to the room where they held the general. He tore off his jacket, revealing his naked torso. The general begged him to stop. “I was bound to do this,” Mishima replied. Then he knelt on the carpet, loosened his trousers, and grabbed the yoroidoshi, a foot-long, sharply pointed dagger. With his left hand he rubbed a spot on his lower left abdomen, then brought the point of the blade to its target. Behind him his lover Morita, shaking and sweating, raised his sword. Mishima shouted a final salute “Tenno Heika Banzai!” (Long live the Emperor!), then emptied his lungs. Taking one last breath, he exhaled powerfully and sent the dagger home. He made a deep horizontal cut across his stomach; blood poured onto the floor. Completing the incisions, his intestines exposed, he waited for Morita to end it. But as the shaking student hesitated, Mishima collapsed, and the blow only dug deep into his shoulders. Two more attempts failed to decapitate him. Finally, another follower, a student of kendo (Japanese fencing), grabbed the sword and finished the job. When it was Morita’s turn at disembowelment the panicky student did little more than scratch himself. The kendo student again took charge and quickly dispatched him as well. Then Mishima’s followers untied the general and surrendered themselves to the police.

  Its tempting to allocate Mishima’s death to the Political Suicide category – a right-wing offering to balance Mayakovsky’s leftist sacrifice – and indeed it belongs here to some degree, but Mishima’s politics were themselves an expression of his deeper narcissistic and morbid sexual fantasy life. Mishima’s interest in the samurai, the military and tradition have much more to do with his fascination with death, blood and beautiful male bodies than with any r
eal insight or concern with politics. From his childhood, Mishima had a morbid fascination with “death and night and blood” and the gruesome debacle of his gory death was something he had looked forward to for some time. His suicide was much more an aesthetic than a political act.

  Some idea of Mishima’s psyche can be gleaned from the fact that his first orgasm was occasioned by his discovery of a reproduction of a Renaissance painting of St. Sebastian, the Christian martyr, tied to a tree and shot with arrows. In his early autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask he writes, “A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk of a tree … Were it not for the arrows with their shafts deeply sunk into his left armpit and right side, he would seem more a Roman athlete … The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh, and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy.” The young Mishima unconsciously plays with himself while gazing at this sight, and is surprised when his ‘toy’ “burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication.” Years later, Mishima would famously pose for a photograph recreating this treasured scene.

  As a child, Mishima was raised as a girl by his authoritarian and neurotic grandmother, who kept him close to her side in her darkened sick room; he later admitted that he enjoyed being secluded with her, and like Mayakovsky and Witkacy, Mishima later developed hypochondria, specifically a food phobia. Returned to his parents at 12, he developed a semi-incestuous relationship with his mother, and his father, a brutal military type, tried to root out any incipient literary impulse he may have had. His favourite fairy tales were those which ended in a gory death of the hero – “I was completely in love with any youth who was killed” – and he had a particular fascination with Hans Christian Andersen’s “Rose-Elf,” whose hero is stabbed to death and decapitated while kissing a rose given to him by his love. While playing with his schoolmates he discovered a “force” within him, “bent … upon the complete disintegration of my inner balance … a compulsion toward suicide, that subtle and secret impulse.” During the war, as a teenager he worked at a kamikaze factory; realizing the planes were designed to be destroyed, he was enchanted by the fact that the factory was “dedicated to a monstrous nothingness.” As Japan was losing the war, with destruction all around, he felt “free.” “Everyday life had become a thing of unspeakable happiness. It was in death that I had discovered my real ‘life’s aim’.” These early images and thrills had a profound effect on Mishima, and his huge literary output, only a small fraction of which has been translated into English, can be seen as an attempt at working out the implications of these youthful experiences.

  Suicide among Japanese writers is not uncommon. Osama Dazai, with whom Mishima was for a time in a kind of competition, and with whom he shared remarkable similarities, drowned himself and his mistress in 1948. Yasunari Kawabata, Mishima’s mentor, and the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for literature, gassed himself 18 months after Mishima’s suicide. The list goes on.1 Yet, as Henry Scott Stokes’ brilliant biography of Mishima makes clear, “Mishima endlessly rehearsed his own death.”2 In 1960 he wrote a story, “Patriotism,” which glorifies hara-kiri. Five years later, he turned the story into a film, in which he took the part of an army lieutenant who disembowels himself, reminding us of Mayakovsky’s part in the film Not Born for Money, a striking parallel. In his novel Runaway Horses, the protagonist, a right-wing terrorist, kills himself. And in the film Hitogiri, Mishima took the part of a man who slices open his stomach. The bloody scene in the Jietai headquarters that late November morning was something Mishima had practised quite a bit.

  Like Witkacy, an irredeemable self-dramatiser, Mishima adopted many roles: a yakuza gangster, cross-dressing stage magician, body builder, family man, leather-jacketed motorcyclist. He was addicted to seeing images of himself, as the book of photographs of him posing in the nude on the seashore, or with a white rose in his mouth, Torture by Roses, suggests. All these examples of his inherent exhibitionism damaged his literary reputation, and are indications of his basic lack of identity. But the role he embraced more than others was that of the soldier. This was prompted by guilt over his avoiding military service during the war by telling the army doctor he was tubercular; Mishima seemed to wallow in masochistic shame over this, and it gave justification for his eventual self-martyrdom. He was also ashamed of his weak, short body and sickly childhood, and in his thirties devoted himself to physical fitness, a discipline he continued to his death. But unlike the German novelist Ernst Jünger, a decorated war hero, Mishima’s militarism was another expression of his fantasy life. The gruesome end of this particular fantasy was preceded by other gory displays. Initiation into his Tatenokai included drinking blood gathered from the cut fingers of the initiates, which Mishima flavoured with salt and passed around in a cup. Mishima’s fascist tendencies, ill-judged humour and determination to tempt his critics came together in one of his last plays, My Friend Hitler. One recognizes that the English initials of his “Shield Society” are SS.

  Most of Mishima’s novels have an underlying sadism. In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, schoolboys murder one of their mothers’ lovers. In Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a monk burns down a temple because of its beauty. In Kyoko’s House, a narcissistic actor commits suicide with his mistress. In Thirst for Love, a widow falls in love with a young farm boy but kills him when he returns her interest. There is also a fundamental pointlessness. In the play The Damask Drum, the drum in question makes no sound when hit, a typical symbol. The essential emptiness and nihilism of Mishima’s work is often obscured by the jewelled language, reminiscent in many ways of another sadistic nihilist, Valery Briusov (see Agents of Suicide). At the time of his suicide, he had completed a vast tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, which has reincarnation as its theme, an attempt to infuse his work with something more than “night and blood and death.” But the characters involved in this saga of sixty years of Japanese history, are caught in the same pointlessness of his earlier works. Kiyoaki, the central character, is only certain of his love for Lady Satoko when she gets engaged to someone else; he then seduces her and makes her pregnant, which forces her to enter a monastery, where he can never see her. Similar predicaments await him in future incarnations, including that of the right-wing terrorist who kills himself in Runaway Horses. Like many morbid romantics, Mishima believed the only love worth having is an unattainable one. A better title might have been The Sea of Futility.

  Mishima’s fantasy of a new samurai age had nothing to do with politics, but was his attempt to impose his obsessions on reality, an attempt he more than likely knew would fail. As one writer put it, it was “rather as if Tolkien had organised a plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and put Gandalf on the throne of England.”3 That this fantasy included real blood and death is an expression of his capacity to compel others to share his solipsistic vision; it doesn’t take much to realize that, like many aesthetic suicides, Mishima had a strong belief that he was really the only person in the world, or at least that his subjectivity, his needs and appetites, were more real than anything else. While this may make for a powerful asset in writing, it leads to a dangerous disregard for other people, or at least to a tendency to see them as actors in your tale. The Japanese public, however, who had hailed Mishima as one of their greats in the 1950s, were embarrassed by his posturing and camp antics, such as starring in a trashy gangster film, and even singing the title song. By the time of his suicide, the general reaction was mild disgust, or an echoing of the response he received at the hands of his captive audience.

  Harry Crosby

  Like Mishima, the poet manqué Harry Crosby enjoyed an elaborate fantasy life, which culminated in a dual suicide on 10 December 1929, at a friend’s studio in the Hotel des Artistes in New York City. There is, however, some speculation that Josephine Bigelow, the recently married woman he was having an affair with, wasn’t as keen on ending her life as he was. For Malcolm Cowley, who knew Crosby in the Paris of
the ‘Lost Generation,’ his suicide “was the last term of a syllogism: it was like the signature to a second-rate but honest and exciting poem.”4 And like Mishima, Crosby is a good example of the aesthetic suicide’s disinterest in other people. For Cowley, Crosby was “self-centred without being introspective, and devoted to his friends without being sympathetic.” The son of one of the richest banking families in Boston and the nephew of the financier J.P. Morgan, Crosby had a considerable inheritance, which he had no qualms about exploiting in his pursuit of excess; as his biography makes clear, Harry “appreciated waste,” a sentiment he shares with the renegade surrealist and friend of Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille5. Reckless, indifferent to consequences, and with a “talent for carelessness,” Crosby is today seen by some as a great ‘transgressive’; most readers, however, will simply recognize a spoilt narcissist.

  Along with the usual retinue of extravagance enjoyed by rich kids everywhere – drink, drugs, sex, fast cars, fascinating hangers-on, including some of the literary greats of the time – Harry’s peculiar delight was the contemplation of death, his own, which he associated with and built up into a personal mythology of sun worship, patched together from as many sources as he could find. “I ponder death more frequently than I do any other subject,” he wrote, “even in the most joyous and flourishing moments of my life.”6 Although his poetry received some half-hearted applause from his more esteemed acquaintances – Lawrence, Eliot and Pound all contributed appreciations of his work to a posthumous collection, Torchbearer, admittedly commissioned and published by his own press, Black Sun – his poems are really one long suicide note. If he hadn’t shot himself and his mistress, he would probably be less known today than he is; even his biographer Geoffrey Wolff admitted that were it not for his suicide, he wouldn’t have written a book about him.