The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  […] The only valid moral argument against suicide is that it thwarts the attainment of the highest moral aim by substituting an apparent release from this world of misery for a real one. But from a mistake to a crime is a far cry; and it is as a crime that the clergy of Christendom wish us to regard suicide.

  The kernel of Christianity is the truth that suffering – the Cross – is the true end and object of life. Hence Christianity condemns suicide as thwarting this end; whilst the ancient world, taking a lower point of view, held it in approval, in honour. But if that is to be accounted a valid reason against suicide, it involves the recognition of asceticism; that is to say, it is valid only from a much higher ethical standpoint than has ever been adopted by moral philosophers of Europe. If we abandon that high standpoint, there is no tenable moral reason left for condemning suicide. The extraordinary energy and zeal with which the clergy attack suicide is not supported by either any passages in the Bible or by any considerations of weight; so it looks as though they must have some secret reason for their contention. May it not be that the voluntary surrender of life is a bad compliment for him who said that all things were good? If so, this offers another instance of the crass optimism of these religions, denouncing suicide to escape being denounced by it.

  It will generally be found that as soon as the terrors of life outweigh those of death, a man will put an end to his life. But the terrors of death offer considerable resistance; they stand like a sentinel at the gate leading out of this world. Perhaps no man alive would not have already put an end to his, if this end was of a purely negative character, a sudden halt to existence. There is something positive to it; it is the destruction of the body; and a man shrinks from this, because his body is the manifestation of the will to live.

  Yet the struggle with that sentinel is, as a rule, not as hard as it may seem from a long way off, mainly because of the antagonism between the ills of the body and the ills of the mind. If we are in great bodily pain, or the pain lasts a long time, we become indifferent to other troubles; all we think about is getting well. In the same way great mental suffering makes us insensible to bodily pain; we despise it; if it should outweigh the other, it distracts our thoughts, and we welcome it as a pause in our mental suffering. It is this feeling that makes suicide easy; for the bodily pain accompanying it loses all significance in the eyes of one who is tortured by an excess of mental suffering. This is especially evident in the case of those who are driven to suicide by some morbid and exaggerated ill-humour […].

  Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment, a question which man puts to Nature […] What change will death produce in a man’s existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment, for it requires the destruction of the very consciousness which asks the question and awaits the answer.

  *

  L. H. Myers is best known, and that by only a few, for his masterpiece The Root and the Flower, a trilogy of novels set in an imaginary Medieval India, but which is really a philosophical and ethical indictment of early twentieth century England, specifically of the Bloomsbury set, through which he moved briefly and with much disdain. Myers was born in 1881 into a distinguished family. His father, the poet and scholar F.W. Myers, was one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research; the author of the monumental Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, he is also responsible for the word ‘telepathy’. As a boy L.H. Myers attended some of the séances conducted at the Myers household, and, along with a financial bequest, Myers inherited his father’s passion for the spiritual and metaphysical. F.W. Myers’ own interest in the afterlife may have been prompted by his love for his cousin’s wife, who committed suicide; there is some suspicion that Myers senior’s own death was in some way ‘willed’, in order for him to unite with his lost love. L.H. Myers was a contradictory personality. Although his novels are characterized by an extreme ethical fastidiousness and ascetic sensibility (one of his few literary friends was the novelist David Lindsay, whose fantastic A Voyage to Arcturus displays a similar outlook) Myers himself was an incorrigible womaniser; and although in his last years he committed himself to Communism, he maintained a substantial interest in a successful expensive French restaurant, Boulestins. Myers had a belief in the transcendental, but also a taste for racing. These contradictions took their toll, and Myers’ view of society, depicted in a sociological analysis which he destroyed before his death, along with an autobiographical work, was as unforgiving as his insight into himself. “Why should anyone want to go on living once they know what the world is like?” he asked. Myers answered that query on 7 April 1944 when, like Witkacy, fearing the coming collapse of western civilization, he took an overdose of sleeping pills. This extract from his early eccentric novel The Orissers, although not directly about suicide, displays the kind of unblinking self-analysis that eventually led Myers’ to his destruction.

  From The Orissers

  L. H. MYERS

  Each one of us has a fixed, unconscious notion of what constitutes his character, and is prevented from carrying into effect the behests of his imagination, by an irrational, but compelling instinct to conform with that accepted idea of himself. This compulsion is strongest when intimates are present. The unfortunate ego, partly in deference to the suggestion of others, and partly in self-protection against them, has encrusted itself in a hard shell. It has made public profession of a certain ‘character’, which its manner and behaviour are constrained to illustrate. This is its response to a need to exhibit a definite outline, by which its fellow creatures shall recognize it; but it is also – and, alas, more urgently still! – a response to its own need to possess a form by which it shall recognize itself.

  In the conduct of everyday life each one of us like to refer to some fairly well-defined conception of his own character in order to decide without trouble what to do, what to say, and even what to think. We require some rule of thumb in our current self-manifestations; for a perpetual effort of choice would be an intolerable burden. Do we not all habitually repose with a sense of satisfaction upon what we take to be our fixed characteristics – upon the supposedly fatal element within us? And of those given characteristics are not even the most trifling our pride? “Yes,” we reflect with complacency, “I’m like that. It is strange; but that’s what I always am.” What pride in discovering in the malleable substance of ourselves some streak supposedly resistant – something irresponsible, something demonic, something which the reason cannot coerce, nor the consciousness incorporate, something genuine, in fact – in the sense of being spontaneous, self-existent, and inevitable – when all the rest of the poor little personality is a make-up, in which the only inevitabilities are those imposed by helplessness.

  Man, then, assumes a character, and, having done so, can let the character-part play itself. But this sacrifice of variability has its disadvantages. The character develops at the expense of the perceptions and the imagination. The young man is apt to feel at times that he is investing himself in habiliments which cramp him. He would fain throw them off; but almost irresistible is the force of precedent; that is, the force of interior and exterior expectation. Besides it is only in moments of unusual excitation that the ego gathers the energy to rebel. For the most part it prefers to take its ease in an inert illustration of the public personality, which has, indeed, become “a second nature.”

  *

  As noted, the Portuguese poet and novelist Mário De Sá-Carneiro killed himself at the age of 26, taking a massive dose of strychnine in a small room in Paris. It was a painful and ignominious end, a far cry from the kind of fulfilment Sá-Carneiro envisions death to be in much of his fiction. It was also something the ill-fated poet had been moving toward almost inexorably. For most of his short life, suicide was not far from Sá-Carneiro’s mind. This is understandable; while still at school, Sá-Carneiro’s best friend blew his brains out in front of the class. Both boys shared the loss of their mother at an early age, and the absence
of an emotional ballast – hardly compensated for by an over-anxious nanny and an absent affluent father – led Sá-Carneiro to see himself as a perpetual outsider, forever waiting for life to “turn up.” Sadly, it never did, and even leaving Lisbon for Paris, the cultural capital of the world, did little to relieve Sá-Carneiro’s sense of crushing ennui. When his father married an ex-prostitute and, because of his extravagant life-style, was forced to cut off the allowance that allowed his world-weary son to remain in Paris, the thought of returning to provincial Lisbon proved too much. Sá-Carneiro had invited a friend to witness his last moments, but the poet’s screams sent him out in search of a doctor. As it was for his friend, Fernando Pessoa, madness was a constant preoccupation for Sá-Carneiro, and his work almost overwhelms with a feverish, delirious intensity. Paradoxes abound. Pessoa described him as a “sane madman,” and Sá-Carneiro himself spoke of his “healthy morbidity” and once complained that he was “dying of starvation, of excess.” Wedding over-ripe fin-de-siècle decadence with Futurist speed and brutality, Sá-Carneiro created an idiosyncratic prose, that rushes headlong into what he called “the Great Shadow.”

  From The Great Shadow (translator Margaret Jull Costa)

  MÁRIO DE SÁ-CARNEIRO

  The artist often considered suicide, as a cure for his anxiety. And then he would be torn apart by an infinite tenderness, a limitless pity for himself. Did he really have to destroy himself? Yes, it was perhaps his only salvation. How sad! And he imagined himself as someone crossing a bridge carrying a precious bundle which, when he was already close to his destination, he had to throw into the river in a final gesture of despair, since he lacked the strength to carry it any further.

  He had more than once decided, positively decided, to put a bullet through his heart. He had even got as far as buying a gun. In the end, though, at least up until now, he had always given up the idea with a feeling of great joy, a joy that soon dissipated: even if he didn’t commit suicide, he would have to die one day. If only not committing suicide could save him from death …

  *

  As mentioned earlier, Emma Bovary’s death so impressed the translator Eleanor Marx that she committed suicide in the same way. Yet the idea may not have been her own. When she discovered that her lover Edward Aveling had secretly married a young actress, in response to her distress, he proposed a suicide pact, which, however, he had no intention of honouring. Yet the idea appealed to the romantic Eleanor, and Aveling even went so far as to procure the prussic acid she used for her. Aveling was rightly castigated for his actions, yet no legal charges were made against him, although it seems clear that this was some form of manslaughter, if not murder. What is surprising is that a reader of Flaubert’s wrenching account of Emma Bovary’s last minutes should be prompted to follow suit. Perhaps no other depiction of suicide presents its results in such meticulous and off-putting detail.

  From Madame Bovary

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  “Ah, now it is beginning!” she murmured.

  “What do you say?”

  She rolled her head with a gentle movement full of anguish, at the same time continually opening her jaws as though there had been something very heavy pressing down upon her tongue. At eight o’clock the vomiting recommenced.

  Charles noticed that there was at the bottom of the basin a sort of white grit, attached to the sides of the porcelain.

  “It is extraordinary! It is most peculiar!” he repeated.

  But she said in a loud voice:

  “No, you are mistaken!”

  Thereupon, softly and almost like a caress, he passed his hand over her body. She uttered a piercing scream. He started back, terrified.

  Then she began to groan, feebly at first. A deep shudder shook her shoulders, and she became paler than the sheet in which her nervous fingers were burying themselves. Her irregular pulse was now almost imperceptible.

  Drops of sweat oozed over her bluish face, which seemed as it were congealed in the exhalation of a metallic vapour. Her teeth chattered, her eyes, grown larger, gazed vaguely around her, and to every question she only replied by nodding her head; two or three times he even smiled. Little by little her groans became louder. A hollow shriek escaped her; she maintained that she was better, and that she would get up very soon. But convulsions seized her; she cried out:

  “Ah! It is cruel, my God!”

  He threw himself upon his knees by the bedside.

  “Speak! What have you eaten? Answer, in Heaven’s name!”

  And he looked at her with eyes of tenderness such as she had never seen.

  “Ah, well, there … there!” she said, in a failing voice.

  He sprang to the writing desk, broke the seal, and read aloud: “Let no one be accused …” He stopped, passed his hand over his eyes, and read over again.

  “What! … Help! Help!”

  And he could only repeat the one word: “Poisoned! Poisoned!” …

  **********

  “Do not weep!” she said to him. “Soon I shall no longer torment you!”

  “Why? What has driven you to it?”

  She answered:

  “It had to be, my dear.”

  “Were you not happy? Is it my fault? I have done all I could…!”

  “Yes … that is true … you are kind, you!”

  And she passed her fingers through his hair slowly. The sweetness of this sensation placed an additional burden on his grief; he felt his whole existence crumbling with despair at the thought that he must lose her at the moment when, on the contrary, she was confessing for him more love than ever before; and he could think of nothing to do; he did not know, did not dare, the urgency of an immediate decision completing his confusion.

  She had done, she reflected, with all the betrayals, the meannesses and the numberless longings that had been wont to torture her. She hated no one now; a twilit chaos fell over her mind, and of all the sounds of earth Emma heard no longer any save the intermittent lamentation of that poor soul, gentle and indistinct like the last echo of a symphony that is dying away.

  **********

  It was not long before she began to vomit blood. Her lips became more tightly compressed. Her limbs fidgeted restlessly, her body was covered with brown spots, and her pulse slipped under the fingers like a tightly stretched thread, like a harp-string about the snap.

  Next she began to scream horribly; she cursed the poison, abused it, besought it to make haste, and with her stiffened arms pushed away everything that Charles, in an agony greater than her own, strove to make her drink […]

  Her chest began immediately to heave rapidly. The whole tongue protruded from her mouth; her eyes, as they rolled about, grew pale like two globes of a dying lamp, till she might have been thought already dead had it not been for the frightful acceleration in the movement of her ribs, which were shaken by a furious breathing, as if the soul were making leaps to set itself free. Félicité knelt before the crucifix, and the chemist himself wavered a little on his legs, while M. Canivet looked vaguely out of the window into the square. Bouornisien had again fallen to praying, his face bowed over the edge of the bed, and his long, black cassock dragging behind him on the floor of the room. Charles was at the other side, on his knees, with his arms stretched out towards Emma. He had taken her hands and was pressing them, as at each beat of heart they gave a jump like the rebound of a falling ruin. As the death-rattle grew louder, the priest quickened his prayers; they mingled with Bovary’s stifled sobs, and sometimes everything seemed to be lost in the dull murmur of the Latin words, which sounded like the tolling of a death-knell.

  Suddenly there was heard on the pavement outside a noise of heavy wooden shoes, together with the scraping sound of a stick; and a voice came up, a hoarse voice, that was singing:

  “Souvent la chaleur d’un beau jour

  Fait rêver fillette à l’amour.”

  Emma raised herself like a corpse that is galvanized, her hair in disorder, the pupils of her eyes fixed, and di
lated wide.

  “Pour amasser dilieimment

  Les épis que la faux moissone,

  Ma Nanette va s’inclinant

  Vers le sillion qui nous les donne.”

  “The blind man!” she cried.

  And Emma burst into laughter, cruel, frantic, despairing laughter, fancying that she could see the hideous face of the poor wretch standing out in the eternal darkness like a crowning terror.

  “Il soufflé bien fort ce-jour-là

  Et le jupon courts’envola!”

  A convulsion flung her back on the mattress. All around her drew near. She had ceased to exist.

  *

  Like Schopenhauer, the Romanian philosopher Emile Cioran held a highly pessimistic view of human life, something that can be gleaned from the titles of his lucid, aphoristic works, for instance On the Heights of Despair, A Short History of Decay and The Trouble with Being Born. Although suicide preoccupies his reflections, Cioran himself did not indulge in it; his reasons for abstaining may be detected in the brief selection below. A resident of Paris from the late 1940s, Cioran moved among its literary and artistic figures, becoming friends with many of them, including the poet Paul Celan. A fellow Romanian, Celan lost his parents to the Nazi death camps and was himself sent to a labour camp for eighteen months. His most famous poem, “Death Fugue,” depicts in cryptic brevity the horrors inflicted on those of his and his parents generation. Celan came to prominence in the 1950s, his poetry providing an unflinching insight into the dark side of history. Celan’s own psyche was understandably shaken by his experiences, and when he was accused of plagiarism by the wife of the German poet Yvan Goll, he suffered a nervous breakdown. In the 1960s his depression and paranoia increased, and after attacks on his wife, Celan spent a month in a psychiatric hospital. A great reader of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who never apologized for his own involvement with Nazism, after the two met Heidegger is reported to have said “Celan is sick – hopelessly.” He became suicidal and threw himself into the Seine on 7 April 1970. Cioran claims that he ran into Celan just before he killed himself, and tried to cheer him up. If true, there is an irony here of mythic proportions: not only is Cioran an unlikely candidate to cheer anyone up, in his early, Romanian years, he briefly espoused an admiration for the Nazi ‘experiment’, although, unlike Heidegger, he later renounced his naïve enthusiasm.