The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  In The Dynamics of Creation, the psychologist Anthony Storr examines the psychological motivations at work behind creativity. Chapter titles like “Creativity as Wish-Fulfilment,” “Creativity and the Schizoid Character,” and “Creativity and the Obsessional Character,” may be off-putting, but unlike many psychoanalytic approaches, his book avoids the reductionism and outright absurdity often associated with Freudian accounts of art and artists; it also has the merit of being well written. Of the manic-depressive temperament, Storr writes that “his principal concern is […] to protect himself from the danger of loss of self-esteem; but unlike the schizoid person [who needs to detach himself from others], his self-esteem is much more dependent upon a ‘good’ relation with others. Like the schizoid person, he fears other people in some ways; but it is not so much the fear of attack or being overwhelmed, as the fear of withdrawal of love and approval.”7 Storr continues: “one could say that normal people become conditioned by receiving enough love as small children to expect that others will give them approval, and thus proceed through life with confidence. People who remain in the depressive position have no such built-in confidence. They remain as vulnerable to outside opinion as a baby is vulnerable to the withdrawal of the breast. Indeed, for such people, the good opinion of others is as vital to their well-being as milk is to the infant. Rejection and disapproval are a matter of life and death; for unless supplies of approval are forthcoming from outside, they relapse into a state of depression in which self-esteem sinks so low, and rage becomes so uncontrollable, that suicide becomes a real possibility.”8

  Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf all meet Storr’s criteria. After one of Sexton’s fits, which could include violence, random behaviour, and infidelity, she would often seek forgiveness and approval from her long-suffering husband; lying beside him as she did beside her great aunt as a child, her husband soothed her by stroking her back and saying, “That’s my good girl.” According to her friend and fellow poet Maxine Kumin, “Anne always had the notion that she was the most under-loved person in the universe. There could never be enough proof that she was loved.”9

  According to an account left by her neighbour – “the last person to see Sylvia Plath alive” – and who was himself poisoned by the gas she used to kill herself, Sylvia Plath gave the impression of being inept at the basic practicalities of life, and was always in need of help, yet “she tended to be a self-centred person, not letting herself become involved with other people’s problems. […] The world revolved around her,” something her neighbour had observed “in other creative people.”10

  And according to her biographer Mitchell Leaska, Virginia Woolf “needed the care and protection of someone whose devotion was unquestioned.”11 By all accounts she received exactly that from her husband Leonard Woolf, with whom it is doubtful she had sexual relations, but who ministered to her emotional, psychological and medical needs through a long, demanding and heartbreaking relationship. All three women needed continuous helpings of unconditional love. In some cases they received this; in others not. But even in the case of Virginia Woolf, who had the at times saintly Leonard to look after her, love and care wasn’t enough, and when the final descent came, she chose to kill herself, rather than face madness. Would Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath not have followed her in suicide if they had received sufficient love? According to Anthony Storr, “the person of the depressive temperament behaves as if he were insatiable; as if he had never had enough.” And he concludes, “It is reasonable to assume that this is in fact the case.”12 Sadly, reading the lives of these tragic characters, one comes away feeling that all the love in the world would not have been enough to fill the hole in their psyches.

  Virginia Woolf was born into a family and environment that practically ensured she would become a writer; it also ensured that, like the children of other famous parents, she would have to struggle to overcome a sense of being over-shadowed by them. Her mother, Julia Jackson Stephen, had previously been married to Herbert Duckworth, of the publishing family, and was descended from an attendant of Marie Antoinette; she was also related to a group of sisters, renowned for their beauty, who modelled for many of the pre-Raphaelite painters and photographers. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a respected literary critic, and founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Virginia’s home in Hyde Park Gate, London, was a centre for late Victorian intellectual life; Henry James, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and James Russell Lowell, were among some of the distinguished visitors, and this early familiarity with literary and scholarly people more than likely primed Virginia for her later celebrity as part of the Bloomsbury set.

  It was a crowded house at Hyde Park Gate. Both parents had been widowed, and Virginia’s siblings included children from three marriages: Julia’s children from her first marriage, George, Stella and Gerald; Leslie’s daughter Laura (who was mentally unstable and lived with the family until she was institutionalised in 1891); and Leslie and Julia’s own other children, Vanessa, Thoby, and Adrian. Along with children the house was also crowded with books. Unlike her brothers, who received formal education, Virginia did not (a common practice at the time), but she made up for this by her prodigious and at times obsessive reading, devouring the better part of her father’s huge library; like many sensitive, introverted children, what Virginia lacked in life she made up for in the world of her imagination. Although Virginia had to compete with her siblings for her mother’s attentions, her father recognized her talent and encouraged her, and he declared early on that she was destined to make her living “writing articles.”

  The death of her mother from influenza in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, was described by her as “the greatest disaster that could happen;” it led to the first of her many breakdowns, which were usually characterized by severe mood fluctuations, nervous irritability and paralysing melancholy, and often required medical attention and institutionalisation. Yet the early and recurrent sexual abuse that she and her sister Vanessa were subjected to by her older half-brothers George and Gerald – revealed to a correspondent only late in life – more than likely triggered the moods of self-loathing and low self-esteem that would characterize her later depressive states.13 George, who was fourteen when Virginia was born, took to ‘fondling’ her when she was six, and apparently continued the practice until her late teens, camouflaging his furtive caresses with inordinate displays of brotherly affection. Although there is some debate over whether her marriage to Leonard Woolf was ever consummated – there is some indication in her diaries that it may have been, but the general belief is that it was not – Virginia’s erotic predilection for women – as in her famous affair with Vita Sackville-West – is well documented and more than likely had its roots in her early mauling by her half-brothers. That the Bloomsbury crowd was noted for its sexual irregularities was no doubt also an encouragement in this direction.

  Her mother’s death plunged Leslie Stephen into a prolonged and effusive mourning; Julia was not yet fifty and Leslie couldn’t come to terms with losing a wife a second time. The sight of her father reduced to tears and comforted by her sisters no doubt severely affected Virginia, who desperately craved his love and attention; she also secretly felt guilty over the fact that she had favoured him over her mother, with whom she felt she had competed for his affection. Her own relations with her mother had been difficult; deeply attached to her approval, she would fly into rages if she felt she was being slighted; for her part, Julia was sparing in the attention Virginia desperately craved, and was herself subject to dark, unresponsive moods. The family knew of ‘Ginny’s’ mood-swings, but accepted them as part of the family dynamic; the idea that she was somehow emotionally or mentally disturbed was unacceptable to them – again, something common at the time. Her half-sister Stella, who became for Virginia a second mother, took over the reigns of the family, and was her step-father’s comforter. Sadly, the emotional security provided by Stella was pulled out from under Virginia first by Stella’s
marriage, and then more severely by her succumbing to a sudden fever just after her honeymoon, only two years after her mother’s death. In 1904, when Leslie Stephen died, Virginia had another, more catastrophic nervous collapse. It was also then that she made her first suicide attempt and was briefly institutionalised, a pattern that would repeat itself at different intervals throughout her life.14

  With the death of their father, Vanessa, Adrian, Thoby and Virginia sold the house at Hyde Park Gate and moved to Bloomsbury, no doubt to exorcise painful memories (and the unwanted attentions of their half-brothers). They bought a house on Gordon Square, and in many ways recreated the atmosphere of their first home. At Cambridge, Thoby (who died of typhoid in 1906) had met Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes and, most importantly, Leonard Woolf. Thoby began to hold regular ‘Thursday evenings’ at home, when he would gather with his friends, a tradition that first Vanessa, then Virginia would carry on after his death; it was out of these weekly meetings that the famous ‘Bloomsbury group’ would emerge. Virginia had begun writing and publishing book reviews for The Times Literary Supplement, a journal she would be associated with for many years. Vanessa would marry Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf, who had joined the Ceylon Civil Service and had returned to London on leave, met Virginia and soon decided he wanted to marry her. At first hesitant, Virginia finally agreed. They were married in August, 1912, and were determined to earn their living through writing. Less than a year later Virginia suffered another nervous breakdown, plunged into madness and made another attempt to kill herself.

  Virginia had by this time started to write novels. She had started The Voyage Out (originally titled Melymbrosia) in 1908, and had finished it by 1913. But her breakdown following her marriage meant the book wouldn’t be published until 1915. Her second novel, Night and Day, soon followed. Both were conventional works; the ‘experimental’ novels she is most known for today – Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, Orlando – were a decade away. But as with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Virginia increasingly came to associate writing with her own sense of self. Her self-esteem, her worth as person, became anchored in her work as a writer. In later life, finishing a book would bring her close to suicide: when finishing The Years she wrote, “That’s the end of the book. I looked up past diaries … and found the same misery after Waves after Lighthouse. I was, I remember, nearer suicide, seriously, than since 1913 …”15 Delivering the final draft would leave her feeling vulnerable and exposed, certain that her work would be recognized as worthless and herself as a fake, and she would agonize over changes she should have made. The slightest possibility of error induced intense feelings of self-revulsion, which she would project on to others. During one of these states, after meeting an acquaintance, she wrote in her diary, “I can imagine […] how she (Mrs. Sydney Waterlow) cursed that dreadful slut Virginia Woolf.”

  On another occasion, hearing that the acerbic artist and novelist Wyndham Lewis, who was no friend of Bloomsbury,16 had written about her in his book Men Without Art, which includes pungent criticisms of Hemingway, Faulker, and Eliot, Woolf slipped into a paralysing state of anxiety. She couldn’t bring herself to read Lewis’ remarks, which, admittedly, are written in some of his most waspish tones and include the assessment that “she is taken seriously by no one any longer today.” (The book was published in 1934, after her ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novels had been published.) “Why then,” she writes, “do I shrink from reading W.L.? Why am I sensitive? I think vanity: I dislike the thought of being laughed at: of the glow of satisfaction that A., B. and C. will get from hearing V.W. demolished: also it will strengthen further attacks: perhaps I feel uncertain of my own gifts … What I shall do is craftily to gather the nature of the indictment from talk and reviews; and in a year perhaps, when my book is out [The Years], I shall read it.” She then makes an admission of a masochistic pleasure in feeling this way. “Already I am feeling the calm that always comes to me with abuse: my back is against the wall … and then there is the queer disreputable pleasure in being a figure, a martyr.” The paralysis continues, as does the masochism, “When will my brain revive? In 10 days I think … and then there is the odd pleasure of being abused and the feeling of being dismissed into obscurity is also pleasant and salutary.” Yet the real goal is the nothingness, a self-erasure more complete than mere obscurity: “I mind being in the light again, just as I was sinking into popular obscurity … I don’t think this attack will last more than two days … And how many sudden shoots into nothingness open before me … if only for a time I could completely forget myself, my reviews, my fame, and sink in the scale …”17

  Woolf’s insecurity about her work seems excessive, but a milder form of it isn’t unusual in most writers. All writers have second thoughts about a work, and it’s common to feel insecure when presenting your efforts to an often insensitive public. To expose yourself to criticism takes some courage, and in order to actualise what talent they have, writers need an enormous amount of self-confidence and self-belief, as well as an ego sufficiently strong to quiet the doubts that plague them. And if, as seems likely, having your work accepted is a means of gaining approval, it’s understandable that, as Anthony Storr points out, some writers become addicted to this. “Some writers,” he writes, “are so driven to produce short works in rapid succession that they never do themselves justice. The immediate rewards of journalism are seductive in this respect. Seeing yourself in print every week, or even every day, is immensely reassuring to some characters.”18

  But although “many journalists cannot face the long period without reward demanded by writing a novel”19 – or a book, for that matter – Virginia wasn’t one of these. She was no beginner. She did devote herself to producing longer, more serious work than book reviews and articles; by the time she became a target for Wyndham Lewis’ criticisms (which, on the whole, I find accurate) she had already published several novels, an important feminist essay (A Room of One’s Own) and been applauded as a serious exponent of literary modernism. But even this wasn’t enough to confirm her self-belief. After each book, the props holding her up would fall away, and she would drop into a terrifying and debilitating madness. As her biographer writes “without writing Virginia’s world became unreal, menacing, and she herself reduced once more to a state of helpless passivity.”20

  It’s no wonder then that she kept a journal for decades: the act of writing itself, although not foolproof, could at times keep the madness at bay. The danger with this, as with many obsessive journal writers, is that life then is no longer something to be lived; it becomes a source of material for writing – when, that is, it isn’t too overwhelming and threatening. But that life was often overwhelming and threatening for Virginia is clear from her journals. Although even to the end she followed the journalist’s credo to, “Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable … I will go down with my colours flying … Occupation is essential”, it was precisely this acute observation that at times pulled her under. It was through this “inexplicable susceptibility to some impressions,” she wrote, “that I approach madness.”21 Once, looking at a house to rent, she observed with disgust that the rooms were “rank with the smell of meat and human beings.” Other people struck her as particularly offensive, “I begin to loathe my kind,” she wrote, “principally from looking at their faces in the tube. Really, raw red and silver herrings give me more pleasure to look upon.” Although when the illness was upon her she would deny that anything was wrong and would often refuse treatment, in her lucid moments she could recognize that things were not right. “She would discuss her illness,” Leonard Woolf wrote. “She would recognize that she had been mad, that she had had delusions, heard voices which did not exist, lived for weeks in a nightmare world of frenzy, despair, violence.”

  It was in one of these lucid times that, feeling the darkness approaching again and no longer having the strength or the motivation to face it (her reputati
on, she felt, had diminished, as did her income from her books; after WWII it would decline sharply) she decided to follow one of those “shoots into nothingness” whose appearance comforted her. Leaving Leonard what must rank as one of the most heartbreaking farewells (“You have given me the greatest possible happiness,” she told him. “You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came …”), on 28 March 1941, after filling her pockets with stones, Virginia walked into the river Ouse, near their home, Monks House, in the village of Rodmell in Sussex, and drowned herself.

  On the night of Sunday 11 February 1963, after leaving them glasses of milk and slices of bread for breakfast, although they were too young to feed themselves, Sylvia Plath opened the window of her children’s room in her maisonette at 23 Fitzroy Road, in the Primrose Hill area of North London.22 Then she carefully sealed off her kitchen door on the floor below with towels and adhesive tape, left a note on the pram to call her doctor, laid out a cloth for a pillow, turned on the gas, and put her head deep inside the oven. When an au pair who had come to help with the children arrived the next morning, she heard them crying, but was unable to get into the house. Eventually, with the help of a builder, the door was forced. Immediately they smelled the gas. The children were shivering but unharmed; London then was in the grip of the coldest winter in 150 years and the house was barely heated.23 They then opened the kitchen window, turned off the gas, and pulled Sylvia into the living room, where the nurse tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was too late. Sylvia was dead; according to the doctor at University College Hospital, who examined her body, she had died at around 8:00 am, although an earlier examination at the scene suggested her death had occurred sometime between 4:00 and 6:00 am. Trevor Thomas, who lived below her and was the last person to see her alive, claimed that at around 12:30 am he had seen her in the hallway of the house, “with her head raised with a kind of seraphic expression on her face.” When he asked if she was well, she replied, “I’m just having a marvellous dream, a most wonderful vision.” If this was so, then she must have finally decided to go through with it not long after Thomas spoke with her.