The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  Again like Mishima, fantasies of his death were sexually stimulating. “Mutual suicide,” he believed, was “the most sublime of couplings.”7 From the age of twenty-two, he repeatedly announced his intention to kill himself, and he had long planned to achieve la grande mort with his wife Caresse, preferably by flying a plane into the sun on the day he had chosen to cash in his and her chips: 31 October 1942. In the end, however, two days after a party given for him and Caresse by the poet Hart Crane – who would himself commit suicide two years later – and whose guests included William Carlos Williams, e.e.cummings and Cowley, he took his leave with another woman. While it is true that he made suicide pacts with practically every woman he was involved with, and these were many, why he decided to do it ahead of schedule remains a mystery. The event, which made the headlines, inspired cummings. “2 boston dolls;” he wrote, “found with holes in each other’s lullaby”

  Harry’s fascination with death began in WWI, when he served as an ambulance driver. On 22 November 1917, during the second battle of Verdun, after heavy shelling had destroyed his vehicle, he was amazed to find himself still alive. His good fortune shifted into guilt and afterward he commemorated the death of his fellow driver Andrew Davis Weld each year, on his ‘death day’. As his biographer wrote, “he formed his closest and most enduring friendship with a corpse …”8 Harry swore that if he should “escape this peril” he would “ever after lead a virtuous, uncomplaining life.”9 Like many such near-death resolutions, it came to naught.

  Harry continued to make similar grand resolves to change his life, which were generally forgotten the next day, and he invariably returned to indulging in every excess he could think of. These were considerable. He took to wearing all black, painted his fingernails black, and wore a black cloth carnation. On a trip to North Africa, he had a cross tattooed on the sole of one foot, and a pagan sun symbol on the other.10 He became a devotee of Poe, Baudelaire and other morbid, decadent writers. Drink became a particularly favourite pastime and Harry developed an amazing capacity for intoxication; later this included other de rigueur items like opium, absinthe and hashish. His capacity for revelry was legendary. He would throw lavish dinner parties in his bed, often ending with everyone in the bath. He arranged carriage races in the streets of Paris. Inheriting a huge collection of rare books, he gave them away after reading them, sometimes pencilling in ridiculously low prices and slipping them into bookstalls along the Seine. Like the equally excessive Aleister Crowley, Crosby developed a unique signature, attaching the image of a black sun to his name.11 An insight into his attitude toward life can be gleaned from this telegram, sent to his outraged Back Bay, Boston parents: PLEASE SELL $10,000 WORTH OF STOCK WE HAVE DECIDED TO LIVE A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE. He did.

  Again like Crowley, Crosby never grew out of an adolescent desire to shock the folks back home. His attack on Boston provincialism began with his marriage to the older Mary Phelps (“Polly”) Jacobs, later re-christened Caresse. She was already married and when Crosby fell in love with her, he threatened suicide unless she left her husband. She did and their subsequent marriage outraged both families. The couple didn’t care, as two days after their wedding they left Boston for Paris.

  For a time Crosby worked at his uncle’s bank, but the financial life bored him, and, fascinated by the bohemians of Montparnasse, he soon quit, announcing his plan to become a poet. Along with writing highly derivative decadent verse, this included pursuing Rimbaud’s “systematic derangement of the senses” with alacrity. As Malcolm Cowley writes, “he had set himself the goal of going crazy in order to become a genius.”12

  In 1927 Harry and Caresse started the Black Sun Press. Originally titled Éditions Narcisse, an apt name for a vanity press, along with their own works, Black Sun went on to publish some of the most important writers of the time, and it is this, with his suicide, that has established Crosby in literary history. D.H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, James Joyce, Kay Boyle (friend of René Crevel), and Hart Crane are some of the names associated with Black Sun, which specialized in producing lavish and highly collectible editions.13 Yet Harry wasn’t satisfied with simply enabling other writers to produce beautiful work. He was determined to be a poet himself, and although his autobiographical journal, Shadows of the Sun, displays neither an acute observation of the outer world, nor any profound insight into his inner one, Crosby applied himself to the task with tenacity. Again like Crowley, he ‘willed’ himself to become a poet, and while his work lacks any sign of natural talent, the sheer doggedness is at times admirable. Like Aldous Huxley, he read through the encyclopaedia, in order to “become an intellectual;” unlike Huxley though, the learning was superficial.

  Although Harry moved from his earlier fin-de-siècle obsessions into a kind of modernism – he was associated with the avant-garde literary magazine Transitions – his fascinations remained the same. In “Lit de Mort” he writes: “I shall die within my lady’s arms/And from her mouth drink down the purple wine/And tremble at the touch of naked charms/With silver fingers seeking to entwine./ My dying words shall be a lover’s sighs/Beyond the last faint rhythm of her thighs.”14 A later poem, “Assassin,” which Wolff describes as “a sometimes brutal, sometimes suicidal, sometimes visionary poem of more than a hundred lines,” begins “The Mad Queen commands: Murder the sterility and hypocrisy of the world, destroy the weak and insignificant, do violence to the multitude in order that a new strong world shall arise to worship the Mad Queen, Goddess of the Sun.”15 Further on, “the mirror crashes against my face and bursts into a thousand suns” and “I crash out through the window, naked, wide-spread upon a Heliosaurus … and plunge it into the ink-pot of the Black Sun …”

  Although the influence of Rimbaud is clear, and the dying fall of Dowson has been jettisoned, Crosby is fixed on the same point. As Wolff says, “Assassin” is “less a poem than a testament, and its art is almost overwhelmed by its pathology.” One last quotation seems to clinch this. “I the Assassin chosen by the Mad Queen I the Murderer of the World shall in my fury murder myself. I shall cut out my heart take it into my joined hands and walk towards the sun without stopping until I fall down dead.”

  How he could continue walking once his heart had been cut out is unclear, but its doubtful Crosby ever considered making sense. In another poem “Sun-Death,” (later titled “Hail Death!”), Harry name checks great suicides of the past: Socrates, Sappho, Cleopatra, Jesus, Van Gogh and others, and repeats Nietzsche’s injunction to “die at the right time.” The right time, according to Harry, was when “your soul and your body, your spirit and your senses are concentrated, are reduced to a pin-point, … the point of finality, irrevocable as the sun …” Only then can we “penetrate into the cavern of the sombre Slave-Girl of Death,” and “enjoy explosion” with her. And he warns against the stupid death of the Philistines, which can be nothing more than a whimper, and whose bodies and souls are “dumped unceremoniously into the world’s latrine …”16

  How running off to a friend’s studio in New York’s Hotel des Artistes with a newly married woman qualified as his “point of finality, irrevocable as the sun,” remains an open question. A few days before his death he had invited Caresse to jump with him from the twenty-seventh floor of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. She declined. Although she may have agreed to fly a plane into the sun in late October 1942, that was more than a decade away. Caresse, like Harry, had many other lovers and perhaps she was enjoying them too much to want to call it quits. Josephine Bigelow, however, seemed mad on the idea, although how much this was sincere and how much it was morbid pillow talk is unclear. They were extravagant people and they said extravagant things. A poem from her to Harry relates their shared delights: orchids, caviar, champagne, the number 13, the colour black. It also said what she knew Harry wanted to hear: “Death is our marriage.” At the time Harry was in love with at least four women: Caresse, Josephine, and two others, Constance Coolidge, otherwise known as the Comtesse de Jumilhac, and a woman he called t
he Sorceress. But then Harry was always in love with someone.

  He had bought an automatic a year earlier, had a sun engraved on it and took to carrying it. While Caresse, Harry’s mother and his uncle J.P. Morgan waited for Harry to arrive at Morgan’s townhouse for lunch, he and Josephine had other plans. When he didn’t turn up, J.P. was miffed and Caresse concerned. Later, at dinner with Hart Crane, there was still no word, and Caresse, knowing of Harry’s frequent rendezvous’ at his friend’s studio, telephoned the friend and asked if he would see if Harry was there. The friend knew he was; he had let Harry and Josephine in earlier that day, and he agreed to go and tell Harry to get in touch. When he arrived the door was bolted from the inside; when he knocked, no one answered. Eventually the building superintendent used an axe. Inside, they discovered Harry and Josephine fully clothed in bed. A fresh bullet hole was in his right temple, another was in Josephine’s left temple. In Harry’s hand was the Belgian automatic, engraved with the sun. A doctor who examined the bodies said that Harry had lived for two hours after Josephine. He had shot her, then, two hours later, shot himself.

  Accounts of their relationship differ. For some they were desperately in love; for others, she was a nuisance Harry was eager to get rid off. For still others, especially Josephine’s husband, she was happily married and the idea that she was serious about suicide was absurd; it was clear Harry had murdered her. What exactly happened is still uncertain. Perhaps, dared to do it, he acted on impulse, produced the pistol, and followed through. Then, realizing he would be charged with murder, he decided that after all, now was the right time to die. There was no suicide note, except, of course, his poems, and this disappointed the press and the police. The tabloids had a field day in any case, but less than a week later the deaths were old news and were forgotten. As Geoffrey Wolff writes: “Harry’s shot was not heard round the world, nor did its bang reverberate beyond the merest instant.”17

  Georg Trakl

  On 2 November 1914, in a Cracow hospital in the early days of WWI, the Austrian poet Georg Trakl injected an intentional overdose of cocaine, after earlier being prevented from blowing his brains out.18 Traumatised by the carnage on the eastern front, by his drug addiction and by life in general, Trakl fell into a coma and died the next day. Three days later, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had anonymously given a large part of his inheritance to Trakl (another recipient was the poet Rilke), responding to a request to visit him in hospital, arrived only to find Trakl’s grave. It was perhaps provident that Trakl and Wittgenstein did not meet. Constitutionally incapable of handling any responsibility, even one as cheering as accepting a large sum gratis, when attempting to draw on the money Wittgenstein had given him, Trakl had run out of the bank in a panic, unable to deal with his windfall.

  The shyest of men, on trains Trakl preferred to stand in the corridor, rather than share a compartment with a stranger, and for much of his time he led a feral, vagabond existence, choosing to sleep in the woods around Innsbruck, rather than face contact with a landlord. In a letter to his friend Karl Heinrich, a year before his death, Trakl wrote: “I do not have easy days at home now and I drift between fear and helplessness in sunny rooms where it is unspeakably cold. Strange shudders of transformation, bodily experienced to the point of vulnerability, visions of mysteries until the certainty of having died, ecstasies to the point of stony petrifaction, and a continuation of dreaming sad dreams.” To another friend he wrote, “It seems to me that I wander around daily like a vagabond, at times in the forests which are already turning red and where marksmen harass the wild life to death; or I explore disconsolate streets in the bleak areas of town, or simply lounge around and watch the seagulls …” Dissolution, death, decay, madness, loneliness, and fear are some of the standard themes in Trakl’s dark, sombre verse. As one critic put it, Trakl’s life displayed the trajectory of a “progressively deteriorating personality,” and his death was the “culmination of a grimly logical pattern.”19

  Georg Trakl was born in Salzburg on 3 February 1887, the fifth of seven children of a successful ironmonger. Although brought up in a prosperous, bourgeois family, Georg’s childhood had its share of dissonances. His mother was Catholic, his father Protestant, and in his early years Georg went to a Catholic school in the morning, and received instruction in the Protestant faith in the afternoon. Neither of his parents had much time for him. His father, who was fifty when Georg was born, paid him little attention, especially in later life, when he might have benefited by his intervention. His mother, who suffered from depression and took opium to relieve the strain, spent most of her time locked in her rooms, caring for her antiques. Georg’s strongest bond was with his sister Grete, and there’s reason to believe their relationship was incestuous. She too, like her brother, became addicted to drugs at an early age, and like him she also committed suicide, shooting herself at a party in Berlin three years after Georg’s death. There’s little evidence Trakl had an emotional relationship with any woman beside Grete. He hated his mother, and at one point confessed that he could strangle her. His other contact with women came from his visits to brothels, and he is said for a time to have maintained a platonic relationship with an aged prostitute who would listen to him talk.

  It’s possible the suicidal impulse that ended his life appeared early on. As a child he’s said to have thrown himself in front of a frightened horse, and to have stepped in front of a moving train. On another occasion, this death instinct resulted in a darkly comic incident. Sometime between the age of five and eight, Trakl walked into a pond until it was over his head. He was only saved because someone saw his hat floating on the surface. Apocryphal or not, this image seems to convey some essence of Trakl’s brief and failure-prone existence. With Walter Benjamin and Anne Sexton, Trakl comes across as a master of ineptitude. A poor student, he had to repeat classes, and eventually had to leave school, failing to complete his courses at the Gymnasium. Poor academic results are not unusual in poets, but in Trakl’s case the tendency was amplified by the drug habits he picked up in his teens. By fifteen he carried a flask of chloroform, and was dipping his cigarettes in an opium solution. This early indulgence later led to continuous use of morphine, veronal and the cocaine that eventually killed him. Alcohol, too, became a frequent crutch, and Trakl once described his life as “days of delirious drunkenness and criminal melancholy.”20 There’s a story of Trakl’s parents coming home one afternoon and finding Georg laid out on the sofa, stoned; on a later occasion, he slept outside overnight in the winter, drunkenly insensate to the cold and snow.

  Like Anne Sexton, aside from poetry, there was very little Trakl was good at. As the poet Jeremy Reed remarked, Trakl was reluctant “to accept responsibility for living.” “Unable to commit himself to life, and constantly delaying the process, [Trakl] reverted psychologically to states supported by primal, mythic consciousness.”21 A kind of poetic Peter Pan, Trakl was sent into a panic by any need to deal with the necessities of life. His poetry, Reed writes, “anticipated apocalyptic catastrophe on an inner plane, but he was little physically qualified to deal with the reality.”22

  Trakl was probably introduced to drugs by a pharmacist’s son, who pilfered them from his father’s supplies. Failing to complete his schooling, Trakl hit on the idea of apprenticing himself to a pharmacy, thereby insuring a steady source while incidentally learning how to make a living. (Throughout Trakl’s brief mature life – if we can call it that – the need for money to buy drugs was a constant concern.) In 1905 he began his three-year term at the White Eagle pharmacy in Salzburg. Around this time he became friends with a local bohemian, Gustav Streicher, a playwright who seems to have put Trakl on the road to becoming a poète maudit. Streicher encouraged him to write, and Trakl produced two plays. Both were performed, but received bad reviews. Trakl also had his first work published in a Salzburg newspaper, a piece of impressionistic prose, lost to us now. By this time he was looking the part of the Rimbaudesque bad boy – long hair, sideburn
s, unkempt dress – drinking and smoking almost continuously. A friend at the time described him as “sullen, testy, arrogant, self-conscious and tired of life.”23 He announced that he had decided to kill himself so frequently, that one exasperated friend replied, “Please, not while I am with you.”

  Finishing his apprenticeship, to complete his training Trakl entered the University of Vienna. Here he spent most of his time carousing with friends. One important contact was with the critic Hermann Bahr, who helped Trakl place three poems in the Neue Wiener Journal, his first publication outside of Salzburg. In 1910 he completed his university training, and that year Trakl was faced with the necessity of fending for himself. His father died, and with this the small allowance he was granted ended. Trakl faced the poverty he would know for the rest of his life. One way to avoid the horrors of everyday life was, ironically, to enter the military, and Trakl began a one-year term of service in the army. But this was only temporary, and after his year he was faced with the same problem. He tried to work at a pharmacy in Salzburg, but the experience was catastrophic: dealing with customers so unnerved Trakl that he would sweat through several shirts in a day; finally he quit. He would, more or less, remain unemployable for the remainder of his life. After finally getting a position he sought in the Viennese bureaucracy, he quit after only two hours. Other jobs fared similarly, and his attempts to emigrate to Borneo or Albania in search of work also failed. From this time on, Trakl’s search for some secure perch in life was coupled with his need and inability to establish a firm identity.