Withdrawn Traces

by Sara Hawys Roberts

  From all mountains do I look out for fatherlands and motherlands. But a home have I found nowhere: unsettled am I in all cities, and decamping at all gates. Alien to me, and a mockery, are the present-day men, to whom of late my heart impelled me; and exiled am I from fatherlands and motherlands.

  Nicky Wire has openly pondered whether Richey adopted a similar role for himself, half expecting him to return after years of working on a literary masterpiece, ready to blow everyone away with a work of great genius.

  In his January 1995 lyric, ‘Judge Yourself’, Richey tapped into his current fascination with the writings of Nietzsche. In the line about ‘Dionysus’ and the ‘Crucified’, he refers to Nietzsche’s opposition of Christian values with those of the Greek god of wine and theatre.

  When Jo listed ‘Nietzsche’ among the gift box of items, her handwriting then began to spell out ‘The Antich …’, before crossing it out. She later confirmed that this was the book she was left by Richey.

  In The Antichrist (1885), Nietzsche wrote: ‘The most spiritual human beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in severity towards themselves and others, in attempting; their joy lies in self-constraint: with them asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct.’

  Supposing Richey pursued such a life of asceticism as a positive option in 1995 – would that not require his becoming a completely transformed person? Nietzsche offers a possible explanation, resolved around the name Richey placed in that final lyric, that of Dionysus.

  Nietzsche says: ‘The word “Dionysian” means: an urge to unity, a reaching-out beyond personality, the everyday, society, reality, across the abyss of transitoriness: a passionate-painful overflowing into darker, fuller, more flowing states.’ The German philosopher described himself, in Beyond Good and Evil, as the ‘last disciple of the god Dionysus’.

  Automatically, we think of the various reported sightings of Richey internationally – in Asia, off the African coast; bedraggled, barely recognisable, but in his very survival somehow embodying all the points listed above. Richey may have had strong pangs of guilt, but his new passion, Friedrich Nietzsche, gave great encouragement in overcoming them.

  The hero, says Nietzsche, yearns to become his opposite, his anti-self. ‘He gains from this creative conflict with the opposite of his true being. The intellectual thus becomes the anti-intellectual man, of “perfect bodily sanity”.’

  Nietzsche’s philosophy of ‘self-overcoming’ offers us some explanation for how Richey may have become such a barely recognisable person, post-disappearance – that is, if any one of the purported sightings are true.

  How conscious was Richey of all this ‘Nietzschean superman’ theory as he counted down to retirement? For Christmas 1994, he received a card from the band, with pop-up Marvel Comics characters, and an accompanying 1995 diary on the same theme. Nietzsche’s influence on the two-dimensional pop-culture superheroes of comic books is well documented. Was Richey alert to the obvious analogy with what he was about to do, donning a mask and transforming into a new persona?

  We examine Richey’s Marvel Superheroes Datebook 1995. On its front cover is a picture of Spiderman in action; in the white of his eyes, Richey has written the same message he apparently left for Jo: ‘I Love You’. Turning the page, the inside cover has a monochrome picture of Spiderman, and Richey has written a speech bubble for him, saying: ‘Spidey say, Call myself Lyla-May’.

  This may have been idle doodling, yet we wonder whether it may show Richey had not lost his sense of humour and perspective – it could be saying he knew he was about to launch himself into a probably self-defeating transfiguration.

  Was he heading into a less public existence, where he might find the necessary space to explore what it was he needed to become? These were high stakes indeed. The Manic Street Preachers may have gone on to become heroes to many millions, but Richey would become … what? A superhero? Even if only to those willing to receive the signs, and with the wherewithal to interpret them. As Nietzsche said of his own writings, they served as ‘fish-hooks’ designed to catch only a rare few.

  The Embassy gift box also contained photos Richey had taken around London, including several of the outside of a house with a blue plaque, formerly the residence of Sylvia Plath, and earlier still of Irish poet W.B. Yeats.

  Jo sees Yeats as the likely inhabitant of interest. There is an obvious overlap between the work of Nietzsche and Yeats; the German philosopher profoundly influenced the Irish poet, as well as the new generation of fascists across Europe. Supposing, then, that Richey had been consciously referencing both Nietzsche and Yeats, in the context of his disappearance, which elements common to the both might be relevant?

  Following Nietzsche, the heroes of Yeats’s plays embody the Dionysian ‘insistence on strength of will, passion, self-sufficiency, solitude and boundless self-overflowing’. Nietzsche and Yeats, considered together, add fuel to the theory of pre-meditated disappearance.

  Yeats’s famous poem ‘The Second Coming’ also feels like it has much in common with where Richey’s mind was travelling through that final year. The early-to-mid-nineties were chock full of millennial angst and what seemed at the time to be a gathering series of nightmare news events presaging apocalypse. The Holy Bible and his subsequent lyrics seemed to want to capture that atmosphere.

  We visit Cardiff University Library in the hope of digging out the link we instinctively know is there between Yeats and other references from Richey’s last known year. Something relating Nietzsche with Yeats with millenarianism? Or possible content linking heroic exile, mythology, modern history and the occult?

  Numerous titles catch the eye – Yeats’s Quest for Eden; Yeats, Neoplatonism and the Aesthetic of Exile; Yeats, the Man and the Masks; Yeats, the Poet as Mythmaker; Yeats and Nietzsche – An Exploration of Major Nietzschean Echoes in the Writings of William Butler Yeats.

  Sitting surrounded by decades of research on Yeats, the relevance becomes obvious to us, and it feels certain that Richey took a photograph of the Yeats commemorative plaque outside the poet’s former residence in London with some definite sense of purpose.

  We find a book called Yeats and the Poetry of Death – Elegy, Self-elegy, and the Sublime. The Poetry of Death was Richey’s first suggested title for what became The Holy Bible. And Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ ends with this apocalyptic couplet: ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’

  Bethlehem. In his last weeks, Richey spoke repeatedly of wanting to go to Israel. Why? Calling your last album by that title, poring over countless religious texts, plans for a journey to the Holy Land – are those the outlines of a personal mythology Richey was assembling for himself?

  Of course, the less delicate answer would involve something along the lines of his acquiring a ‘Messiah complex’, and losing sense of reality completely. In a 1995 letter to Rachel, Jo told how Richey feared losing his mind at Anson Court in late 1994.

  ‘I know I should have asked him about the voices. Can’t come to terms with the fact I could see he wasn’t coping, but still I left him. Perhaps that was part of the reason for his panic about being left alone in the flat. It was as though he felt he had no control over his own thoughts: “Something bad is going to happen if I stay in this flat.”’

  This is Jo’s testimony; a witness account from the person closest to Richey. Had he become psychotic or schizophrenic by the end? His friends, including the band, have suggested as much.

  While Richey’s photograph showed the blue plaque memorial to W.B. Yeats outside the poet’s home, we should not forget that the same house was also where Sylvia Plath committed suicide on 11 February 1963. Richey would have been aware of both and of the ambiguity in leaving behind such a photograph. As with so many other pointers, that picture may be read in favour of both hypotheses – suicide and survival.

  So, perhaps Richey pursued spiritual interests abroad?
Researching this book, we happened across someone who had heard this theory many times. A resident of Cardiff since well before 1994–5, she was acquainted with its music scene and had long known the city’s various tattooists. We approached her not to enquire after disappearance theories but to find out about an aborted tattooing session that Richey had booked in January 1995.

  As we talked, the woman said: ‘Most people think he went to Israel, don’t they!’

  ‘Do they?’ we asked.

  ‘Yes, living on a kibbutz.’

  We gave this theory no particular credence until Rachel raised the same idea: yes, Richey had been going on about heading to that part of the world just before he vanished.

  Richey was acutely aware of the counting down to the end of the millennium. From this thought shoots a wild theory: had he indeed looked to get to Israel, could he have planned on remaining there until around the turn of the century, before making a dramatic return, perhaps armed with his new literary masterpiece, or manifesto, or memoir?

  Is this too fantastical? Well, there is further supporting evidence in Richey’s late 1994 tattoo – a diagram of the entry to Hell, below Jerusalem, based on an illustration from a 1949 pressing of Dante’s the Divine Comedy.

  Dante’s work had become intrinsic to Richey’s efforts to relay his predicament. Many photographs taken of him in those last few months show him deliberately sporting his new inkings for the camera. There is one snap of him leaning against railings outside Anson Court, upper arms flattened out as they drape over his knees; another of him wearing a sleeveless hoodie, and awkwardly squaring out his shoulders to show off the deltoids. There even exists a blurry photo, evidently taken by a fan gazing up from street level, of Richey on the Manics’ tour bus. Through a misty window, he is captured pushing aside his sleeve to show the Jerusalem shoulder.

  Was he perhaps anticipating that people would later scrutinise and interpret just these kinds of clues?

  Dante Alighieri famously wrote the Divine Comedy following his enforced exile from Florence in 1302, the result of political rivalries. He is yet another name in that long list of authors Richey name-dropped who had lived or written about a life of exile.

  When we pore over Richey’s own bookshelves, they offer similar clues. We find a work by an American poet, Hart Crane, whose best-known work, The Bridge, was often referenced by Richey. Crane committed suicide by jumping into the sea, so it is easy merely to assume that Richey identified with this suicide component. Yet, as we leaf through its pages, one corner is folded over. Richey had marked a poem named ‘Exile’. And his literature collection continues to yield potential clues.

  The main character in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is a young man who meets another, very similar to himself, and falls under his spell. A series of murders follows – has the narrator been tempted by the Devil to carry out his mission, or has he gone insane? Part psychological thriller, part satire, there is also an element of meta-fiction, or the ironic use of standard tropes to show the work’s self-awareness as a constructed narrative. Very Richey.

  Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) tells the story of a seagull who ventures beyond the routine lives of other gulls. He encounters two fellow gulls who show him the way to a ‘higher plane’ through the perfection of knowledge. ‘I don’t mind being bones and feathers,’ he says ‘I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can’t, that’s all.’ Perhaps Richey also read Bach’s best-selling sequel, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)?

  Six Miles to Roadside Business (1990), by Michael Doane, develops on from the cult components in Apocalypse Now and Richey’s known interest in the Reverend Jim Jones and the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana. Main character Vance Ravel goes off into the desert wilderness of Utah to discover his true self and becomes the reluctant leader of a small hippyish cult. Images come to mind of that dreadlocked Richey spotted in Goa or the Canaries.

  Also on the bookshelves are several copies of Albert Camus’s A Happy Death. Richey had snapped up an armful and had begun distributing them to friends before his disappearance. In the book, Patrice Mersault goes on the run from Algiers, seeking happiness and a meaningful life. He discovers that these are found not in relationships, nor in money alone, but happiness is possible, given two criteria – sufficient solitude, and sufficient time.

  Mersault gives up on hedonism and nihilism, and arrives at an answer betraying Camus’s obvious debt to Nietzsche: ‘You make the mistake,’ says Mersault, ‘of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters – all that matters – is the will to happiness; a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest – women, art, success – is nothing but excuses. You know the famous formula: “If I had my life to live over again?” Well, I would live it over again just the way it has been.’

  As we progress through Richey’s book collection, it becomes clear we could locate messages in nearly all of them, and many of them would be highly fanciful.

  Yet Rachel sees the point of this line of enquiry, ‘Why would you take a box of all those books, videos and pictures to a London hotel? The things he thought symbolised him. It seems a bit pre-planned with whatever he was going to do.’

  James Dean Bradfield has admitted to often being left perplexed by Richey’s lyrics. One line, however, from ‘Peeled Apples’ (Journal for Plague Lovers) about a dwarf taking his cockerel out of a fight made him laugh out loud. Could the image have perhaps been lifted from another source? A dwarf, cockfighting; instantly, scenes come to mind from one specific novel, noted as one of Richey’s favourites, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.

  Were the Manics conscious of this reference? Certainly, the work has been documented as playing a place in the band’s genesis, setting off Nicky Wire’s long journey into serious reading after his mother, Irene, brought a copy home from Blackwood Library. It later became important to Richey, too.

  Under the Volcano (1947) tells of the last hours in the life of the British consul in Mexico, Geoffrey Firmin. Lowry’s original plan was for a trilogy of works based structurally and thematically on Dante’s the Divine Comedy, with Under the Volcano as his ‘Inferno’. Its message is clear: hell is a state of mind.

  Fully aware of his impending death, the consul, consumed by alcohol, nevertheless retains his ability to articulate his interpretation of the world around him as filtered through his unique perspective. This was said of Richey himself, and it is easy to see how Lowry’s novel became important to him and Nicky Wire.

  Something about Lowry and his masterpiece suggests it was as relevant as any work by Dante, Conrad, Rimbaud or Blake, and the Faust legend, to understanding Richey’s final months. Indeed, Under the Volcano references other written works in the same way Richey did – in fact, precisely the same authors. It was postmodern in referencing and being shaped by other works by previous writers; an element also to be found in works by the Manics, especially those of Richey prior to his disappearance.

  Was Richey quietly using Lowry’s incomplete trilogy as a model for his work, much as Lowry himself had used Dante? Was The Holy Bible album his ‘Inferno’? Were the writings left over to the band in early 1995 intended to become his ‘Purgatorio’? And was there maybe then a third installation, an album corresponding to Dante’s ‘Paradiso’, to be delivered when Richey returned home, possibly at the turn of the millennium?

  Does all of this evidence suggest Richey’s disappearance was not just the predictable falling apart of his time in the music industry, but the apex of his entire approach from the very beginning: his semi-detached knowingness and theoretical alertness? Does the disappearance constitute Richey’s wresting intellectual control over proceedings, rather than the end of him mentally? The issue essentially revolves around the extent to which we feel Richey retained a masterful authorship throughout.

  Was he writing this whole story?


  Our intuition regarding the truth about Richey Manic draw us to these kinds of answers. Very little has been done in terms of a proper official full-scale search for Richey, and thus no progress made in learning the empirical facts of the case. What we are left with is this, the narrative verdict – the narrative that emanates from Richey’s words and actions and seems to imply a planned disappearance and exile.

  Yet how does the survival theory respond to the grave doubts about Richey’s ability to survive in hiding, cut off from those he knew and loved, all the while having the latter’s suffering on his conscience?

  In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker writes: ‘One of the key concepts for understanding man’s urge to heroism is the idea of “narcissism” … It is one of the meaner aspects of narcissism that we feel that everyone is expendable except ourselves. We should feel prepared … to recreate the whole world out of ourselves even if no one else existed. The thought frightens us; we don’t know how we could do it without others – yet at bottom the basic resource is there: we could suffice alone if need be, if we could trust ourselves.’

  Is it realistic that Richey could reduce his life so drastically, and stay alive? Not only is it possible, but Richey had been repeatedly expressing the desire to minimise his life. He had also publicly craved a life of reclusion and exile. He may have managed both.

  How, though, might we square the facts of his mental and physical fragility with such a venture? Social withdrawal is often a basic fact of depression; utterly fearful of death, yet too scared to live, the depressive retreats into a kind of living death – clearly, Richey’s degrading relations with his life in music demanded such a departure.

  Yet as a rock star, his retreat was not that of your average citizen. Richey’s disappearance supplied him with a solution to his failing heroic status: now all at once simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, he had gone from being a media face to being a universal spectre flitting through the ether. His vanishing permitted him the otherwise impossible: an immortality upgrade.