The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  By the late 20s, Mayakovsky’s health began to suffer, and his depressions returned. Although he still kept a room at the Brik’s apartment, he and Lili were no longer lovers, and his infatuation with the much younger Tatiana Yakovleva, a White Russian whom he had met and fallen in love with in Paris, ended sadly when he learned that she had married, while he was stuck in Russia, for the first time denied a travel permit. When a major exhibition, “Twenty Years of Work,” devoted to his life and writings was panned, or worse, ignored, by the party critics, Mayakovsky took it badly. Earlier he had performed an act of deadening self-abnegation by joining the Committee of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), a group that had opposed his earlier attempts with LEF. He did this, presumably, to end the isolation he had more and more been subjected to, but it did no good. The Committee quickly reorganized itself into an inner core of hardliners, and an appendage group, made of Mayakovsky and a few other ‘minor’ writers.

  In early 1930, Mayakovsky’s depression grew, and his health got worse. The Briks had left Moscow for an extended stay in London. Although he and Lili were no longer lovers, he depended on her and Osip, and this was the first time both had left him alone in the apartment. His readings and lectures went badly, and in March he was admitted to hospital suffering from a nervous breakdown, but in truth he was simply exhausted. When he left after a short stay, friends noticed that he looked haggard and distracted. He sent telegrams to Lili, complaining that she didn’t write to him often enough; she replied, suggesting he find a “new text” for his telegrams. On 11 April, a week before the Briks were to return, Mayakovsky missed a lecture, something he hadn’t done before.

  Mayakovsky knew what was coming and tried to be with friends, but no one seemed to understand the state he was in; at one point he tried to telephone his friend from LEF, Nikoloa Aseyev, but was told he wasn’t at home. “Well, it means that nothing can be done,” he said and hung up. Other friends weren’t able to meet him either, and things were not going well between him and his latest girlfriend, the actress Nora Polonskaya. She was again much younger than Mayakovsky, and he had argued with her, jealous over her young friends.

  On 14 April, after spending the evening at a disastrous party, Nora and Mayakovsky argued again. He demanded she stay with him, but she insisted on going to a rehearsal. At 10:00 a.m. she finally managed to leave the small room Mayakovsky used as a studio in Lyubyansky Passage. She took a few steps down the hall then heard a shot. When she turned back and opened the door, the room was full of blood. Mayakovsky had kept the pistol he had used as a prop in Not Born For Money. It was loaded with one bullet. He had put barrel against his heart and fired. On his desk was a letter. It read:

  “To All of You: Don’t blame anyone for my death, and please don’t gossip about it. The deceased hate gossip. Mama, sisters, comrades, forgive me. This is not a good method (I don’t advise others to do it), but for me there’s no other way out. Lili, love me. Comrade Government, my family consists of Lili Brik, Mama, my sisters, and Veronica Vitoldovna Polonskaya [Nora]. If you can provide a decent life for them, thank you.”

  “The incident is closed,” Mayakovsky continued. “Love’s boat/ smashed on the everyday./ Life and I are quits/ And there’s no point/ In counting over mutual hurts, harms, and slights. Best of luck to you all!”

  Notes

  1 Quoted in The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 Walter Benjamin – Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno editor Henri Lowitz; translator Nicholas Walker (Polity Press: 1999) p. 342.

  2 No copy of the note exists; it was presumably destroyed by Henny Gurland during her journey to Lisbon, in fear, perhaps, that if found it would somehow compromise her. But on her arrival in New York, at Adorno’s request she gave him a verbatim account of it.

  3 Walter Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, 17 April 1931.

  4 Lee Siegel, Introduction to Gershom Scholem Walter Benjamin The Story of a Friendship (New York Review Books: New York, 2001) p. ix.

  5 Adorno remarked of Benjamin’s character that he was “so completely the medium of his work […] that anything one might call ‘immediacy of life’ was refracted … his private demeanour approached the ritualistic.” In On Walter Benjamin ed. Gary Smith (MIT Press: Cambrigde, Mass., 1988) p. 329.

  6 Walter Benjamin Reflections (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich: New York, 1978) p. 301.

  7 Ibid. Peter Demetz, Introduction, pp. xxiv–xxvi.

  8 Walter Benjamin Illuminations (Fontana Press: London, 1992) p. 249.

  9 Momme Brodersen Walter Benjamin: A Biography (Verso: London, 1996) p. 197.

  10 In spring 2002 I visited Port Bou and had the opportunity to see Karavans’ work and also the cemetery where Benjamin is said to be buried. The memorial, although subject to the ravages of time and vandals (local teenagers making their own mark on history), is a fitting tribute to Benjamin, its sheer descent to the waters below eerily embodying Benjamin’s own aimless and endless wanderings and fruitless bid for escape. In the cemetery, overlooking the Mediterranean, there is a grave with a plaque marked with his name, yet his remains aren’t buried there. In his book on Benjamin, Gershom Scholem wryly comments that the grave is “an invention of the cemetery attendants, who in consideration of the number of inquiries wanted to assure themselves of a tip.” He agrees with Hannah Arendt’s remark that “the spot is beautiful,” but considers the grave “apocryphal.” I can concur that, as Arendt says, “It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have seen in my life,” but during my visit I had no occasion to proffer anyone a tip. (Gershom Scholem Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship [Faber & Faber: London, 1982] p. 226.)

  11 Jay Parini Benjamin’s Crossing (Anchor Books: London, 1998) p. 280.

  12 Huxley, too, is in the ranks of the literary suicides. His own youth was saddened by the suicide of his brother Trevenen, after he failed to meet the high standards of achievement set by the Huxley clan; Huxley based the suicide of Brian Foxe in Eyeless in Gaza on his brother’s death. And Brave New World itself famously closes with the suicide by hanging of John the Savage, confronted with the choice between a primitive life on an Indian reservation, or the living death of conformity to the modern totalitarian state.

  13 It may be mixing subjects here, but this analogy makes me wonder if Elias Canetti had Benjamin at all in mind when writing of the bibliomaniac Peter Kien in his Auto-da-Fé, who, as mentioned earlier, burns himself to death amidst heaps of his collection. Benjamin was an obsessive bibliophile, and made a point of never reading many of the books in his library. Gershom Scholem admitted to being annoyed at the attention Benjamin would pay to bindings and other fetishes of the collector. “The enthusiasm with which he was capable of discussing bindings, paper and typefaces … frequently got on my nerves … I deny that metaphysically legitimate insights can arise from this way of evaluating books on the basis of their bindings and paper.” (Scholem, p. 71.)

  14 Peter Demetz, Introduction, Reflections p. xiii.

  15 One of his fellow inmates was Arthur Koestler who, much later, was another literary suicide.

  16 Walter Benjamin Reflections p. 4.

  17 Elsewhere I have remarked that Benjamin’s suitcase and Pessoa’s chest, which contained, among many others, the fragments that constitute his Book of Disquietude, and which today is still not completely exhausted, strike me as warranting a comparative study. Another item would be the pillow case belonging to the Russian Cubo-Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, in which he supposedly stuffed his numerous manuscripts and on which he allegedly slept during his last days, wandering through the chaos of the revolution.

  18 Hannah Arendt, Introduction to Walter Benjamin Illuminations p. 11.

  19 Walter Benjamin Reflections p. 303.

  20 As in many cases discussed in this book, speculation and uncertainty surround Benjamin’s last hours. For a detailed account, see Momme Brodersen’s Walter Benjamin: A Biography pp. 250–262, which I have drawn upon for this chapter.

  21 Erwin Loewens
on, quoted in Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography p. 70

  22 Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (Faber & Faber: London, 1982) p. 178.

  23 Ibid. p. 179

  24 Hesse in fact was one of the few well known literary figures of the time who praised Benjamin’s work; at one point, he even tried to help him publish one of his books. This should be kept in mind by leftist critics who often target Hesse as a proto-Nazi because of novels like Journey to the East and The Glass Bead Game, both of which employ the device of an esoteric, hierarchical spiritual society, a mark, for the politically correct and ideologically blind, of Hesse’s incipient ‘fascism’.

  25 Ibid. p. 224.

  26 Czeslaw Milosz, Introduction to Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz Insatiability (Quartet: London, 1985) p. viii.

  27 It’s been suggested that Jadwiga Janczewska, Witkacy’s fiancée, committed suicide after an affair with Szymanowski.

  28 Quoted in Gary Smith, ed. On Walter Benjamin.

  29 For more on Gurdjieff see my In Search of P.D. Ouspensky (Quest: Wheaton, Illinois, 2004).

  30 Jerzy Eugeniusz Plomien´ski, quoted in Anna Micin´ska Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz: Life and Work (Interpress Publishers: Warsaw, 1990) p. 288.

  31 Ibid. p. 110.

  32 Ibid. p. 292.

  33 Ibid. p. 294. Others shared Gombrowicz’s feelings. The philosopher, mathematician and painter Leon Chwistek, a friend of Witkacy from childhood, remarked: “He is a degenerate individual, equally removed from true art as from life, a perpetual embryo crazed by megalomania.” Bronislaw Mailnowski, who maintained a rocky relationship with Witkacy throughout his life, said: “I respect his art and admire his intelligence and worship his individuality, but I cannot stand his character.” Quoted in The Witkiewicz Reader ed. Daniel Gerould (Quartet Books: London, 1993) p. 341.

  34 Witkacy seems a good example of the type of individual who has a constant need for something to be ‘happening’ around him, who throws his own life and those of his friends and acquaintances into constant disarray in order to keep at bay some feeling of stagnancy. Again, the parallel with Gurdjieff is suggestive. Both Witkacy and Gurdjieff seemed to have a need to have people around them and to constantly control their actions and reactions by indulging in some form of ‘theatre’. For most of his career, Gurdjieff had a retinue of students whom he would submit to a variety of physical and psychological exercises, aimed at producing in them a sense of ‘wakefulness’. Yet one can ask how much these tactics were to the students’ benefit, and how much they satisfied a need in the teacher. Another character who falls into this category, although one less ‘serious’ than Gurdjieff, is the ‘magician’ Aleister Crowley, who adopted numerous alter egos and who seemed intent on having as much attention as possible paid to him and his exploits. For more on Crowley see my Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse (2003).

  35 Anna Micin´ska, p. 157.

  36 Quoted in Witkacy, Daniel Gerould (University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1981) p. 4.

  37 Louis Iribane, Introduction to Insatiability (University of Illinois press: Chicago, 1977) p. xxxix.

  38 The Russian novelist and essayist Yevgeny Zamyatin is credited with being the creator of the anti-utopian novel, a genre that, by the second half of the twentieth century, had become a mainstay of science fiction and ‘speculative’ literature. We, written in 1924, was first published in an English translation in the United States; a Russian edition was published in Prague in 1927. Although circulated in manuscript form, it was never published in the Soviet Union.

  39 Louis Iribane, p. xxix.

  40 Ibid. p. xxiii.

  41 Ibid. p. vii. Witkacy’s apprehensions about a coming totalitarian regime have been traced to his experiences in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. Poland was under Russian rule in WWI, and when Witkacy joined the army he was made an officer in the elite tsarist guards. Although he had had his life spared during the coup, he lived in constant fear of reprisal, as the tsarist guards were known for their brutality. Another incident made a powerful impression on him. On his return to Poland from Russia, Witkacy is said to have witnessed the senseless murder of his friend and mentor, the Symbolist poet Tadeus Micin´ski, who was mistaken for a tsarist general and attacked by a mob. Some accounts consider this traumatic experience apocryphal.

  42 Quoted in Witkacy, Daniel Gerould p. 19.

  43 A.D.P. Briggs Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy (Willem A. Meeuws: Oxford, 1979) p. 12. In this Mayakovsky resembles the beat writer William S. Burroughs, who in practically every photograph of him exhibits the same dead pan lack of expression.

  44 Ibid. p. 8.

  45 Ann & Samuel Charters I Love: The Story of Mayakovsky and Lili Brik (Andre Deutsch: London, 1979) p. 30.

  46 Quoted in A.D. P. Brigss, pp. 30–31. The Stray Dog Café was the testing ground of pre-revolutionary Russian poets, artists and intellectuals. For more on this, see my In Search of P.D. Ouspensky.

  The Manic-Depressive Suicide

  In a grimly fascinating book, Let Me Finish, the German academic Udo Grashoff put together an anthology of suicide notes, gathered from police records. Reading these, it’s difficult to argue with A. Alvarez’s assessment, quoted earlier, of the “shabby, confused, agonized crisis which is the common reality of suicide.” The notes Grashoff collected suggest that the motivation for most suicides fall within a fairly limited purview: unrequited love, debt, shame, sickness, an intolerable domestic situation. They also confirm that the only thing to come of most suicides is a nasty mess for someone else to clean up. Yet one note in particular expresses a sentiment shared, I think, by the subjects of this chapter. In her last words, a young woman, intent on ending her life, debated with her friends and countered the arguments she believed they would make in order to stop her. She agreed with them that killing herself would “accomplish nothing.” But this, she explained, was precisely the point. That was exactly what she wanted to accomplish: nothingness. Death offered the only access to the oblivion she desired. The cessation of existence was her goal and in the end she reached it. The pain of ‘being’ was simply too great for her to bear and suicide was the only way to avoid it.

  Such psychic pain is of course associated with depression. As William Styron writes in his account of his own depression, “mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the grey drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from the smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.”1 Styron remarks that in his case, the pain was “most closely connected to drowning or suffocation,” and he goes on to comment that William James, who battled depression for many years, hit the mark when he wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that, “It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.”2 James continues: “Such anguish may partake of various characters, having sometimes more the quality of loathing; sometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or again of self-mistrust and self-despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear.”3

  As defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder IV published by the American Psychiatric Association, depression is “a disorder of mood, characterized by sadness and loss of interest in usually satisfying activities, a negative view of the self, hopelessness, passivity, indecisiveness, suicidal intentions, loss of appetite, weight loss, sleep disturbances, and other physical symptoms.” For Kay Redfield Jamison, whose own account of her manic-depressive illness, An Unquiet Mind, was a bestseller, “Manic-depression, or bipolar illness encompasses a wide range of mood disorders an
d temperaments.” “Occasionally,” she writes, “these changes reflect only a transient shift in mood or a recognizable and limited reaction to a life situation. When energy is profoundly dissipated, the ability to think is clearly eroded, and the capacity to actively engage in the efforts and pleasures of life is fundamentally altered, then depression becomes an illness, rather than a temporary or existential state.”4 A less specific account, embedded among the dozens he culled from a variety of sources, was offered by Robert Burton almost four hundred years ago, in The Anatomy of Melancholy. Melancholy, Burton writes, is, “A kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion.” And with a succinctness rare for Burton, he went on to boil the malady down to a single characteristic, calling it “an anguish of the mind.”

  That the writers I look at in this chapter – Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton – suffered such an anguish, is clear from the accounts of their lives.

  A reader may wonder at the wisdom of selecting three women writers as the subjects of a chapter on manic-depressive suicides. Although men clearly suffer from it as well, according to one authority, “major depressive illness is more likely to affect women”5 than it is men; why this is the case still remains unclear. Yet there’s another reason I’ve grouped these writers together. In the cases of Woolf, Plath, and Sexton, their depression and their writing were powerfully linked, so much so that one almost wants to say that if they weren’t depressives, they might not have been writers, and vice versa. Virginia Woolf invested so much importance in her writing that even the mere possibility of a bad review was enough to plunge her into despair. In the case of Sylvia Plath, it’s arguable that her reputation as a significant writer stems at least in part from the fact that she killed herself. And Anne Sexton is one of the few examples of a poet who discovered herself as a writer through using writing as a therapy to overcome her depression. In all three cases, writing, and the individual’s mental and emotional state, her very self, were in a strange and ultimately final relationship with her death. About her friend Sylvia Plath, with whom she swapped stories of failed suicide attempts, Anne Sexton remarked that “she had the suicide inside her. As I do. As many of us do. But, if we’re lucky, we don’t get away with it and something or someone forces us to live.”6 Sexton herself was ‘lucky’ several times, as were Plath and Woolf; all three made many attempts to end their lives, and failed at them all – until, of course, their final attempts.