The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  He found the place unbearable. “Study is impossible,” he told a friend in a letter. “You can do nothing worth doing in this state of uncertainty, nothing other than to savour utter boredom, misery, spleen and gut-ache.”89 After spending a year under house arrest, he appealed for clemency, and was released. During that time Tina wrote only once, but Pavese rationalized this by saying she was simply protecting herself and other subversives, by avoiding any links to a known antifascist. Understandably, on his release Pavese was eager to see her, and he took the first train to Turin. But when he arrived he was told that Tina had married another man the day before. Pavese fainted on the platform. It was bad enough that he had lost his chance at love, which, he believed, would bring with it a home and family – symbols of maturity – but any standing he may have had with the other anti-fascists dissolved when it became known that he had pleaded for clemency. Other arrested subversives stoically endured their fate.

  When Pavese asked Tina why she didn’t wait and marry him, she told him that “you’re good at writing poetry, but you’re not good for a woman.” It was an answer he probably already knew, but to hear it from the woman he had just spent a year in exile for must have hurt. She also made it clear that it was his dependence on her that turned her away. It’s a banal reflection, but Pavese seems to have sought out women that, like his mother, would show him little affection; those that did, didn’t interest him. It was a ‘no win’ situation, and it’s little wonder that he could write acid aphorisms like: “A woman, unless she is an idiot, sooner or later meets a piece of human wreckage and tries to rescue him. She sometimes succeeds. But a woman, unless she is an idiot, sooner or later finds a sane, healthy man and makes a wreck of him. She always succeeds.”90 Yet, although this expresses a sentiment shared by many men who have wasted themselves on a woman, another aphorism makes it clear that it is not so much the woman who turns one toward self-destruction, but the dangers of love itself. “One does not kill oneself for the love of a woman,” Pavese wrote. “One kills oneself because a love, any love, reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our impotence, our nothingness.” If Pavese spent his short life seeking a woman who would love him and whom he could love, he was also seeking that which would make him feel most suicidal.

  After Tina, he didn’t have much luck. As he told Davide Lajolo, “the woman from Turin … ended it between me and women.” Much of Pavese’s subsequent writing has been combed, predictably, for signs of misogyny; Lajolo even has a chapter entitled, “The Other Women as Revenge,” in which he examines Pavese’s “contempt for women.” Women are raped, murdered, and abandoned in his writings and there are also intimations of his end, prefigured in the fates of some of his women characters. One of his last novels, Among Women Only, begins with a failed suicide attempt by one of the central characters. By the end of the novel, she makes another attempt; this time she is successful, and her death is an almost mirror image of Pavese’s own, taking barbiturates in a hotel room. “I am afraid nothing matters. We are all whores,” one of Pavese’s women declares.

  Nevertheless, he still tried to find a woman who could give him the love and stability he needed. Yet Pavese never mastered the knack of making himself attractive. He would use his intelligence and sensitivity to ingratiate himself, but the transition from sympathetic friend to lover was rarely made; his self-consciousness and detachment was unbridgeable, as was his sense of sexual inferiority. He was attracted to and became an intimate friend of one woman, but for five years never tried to kiss her; finally out of the blue he asked her to marry him. She declined. When he met the actress Constance Dowling in Rome, its understandable he would be taken with her: blonde and glamorous, she was also American, and Pavese had a passion for Americana. His university thesis had been on Walt Whitman, and Pavese had translated Melville, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Dos Passos and Faulker, among others, making modern American literature accessible to Italian readers. But although he enjoyed a brief happiness with Constance – and perhaps the fact that he was happy was the most painful thing about the affair, having what he had sought for so long soon snatched from him – it’s clear she wasn’t Ms Right. When she left Rome for the States, Pavese waited for her to return, but soon he received a letter telling him the affair was over. He was devastated and his final descent had begun. Months later, on hearing that he had won the Strega Prize and soon after had committed suicide, Constance simply remarked, “I didn’t know he was so famous,” sad indication of how much their fling meant to her.

  In his last days, Pavese took to inviting prostitutes to his office at Einaudi. They sat and talked, drank and smoked, but its doubtful he ever availed himself of their services. A few days before he took the room at the Hotel Roma, he met a girl at a dance hall, but more than likely he was tired of trying and wanted to stop. “Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of sadism,” he wrote in his journal on 17 August, echoing Otto Weininger. A few months before, the American critic F.O. Mathiessen, whose work Pavese admired, had killed himself, and its probable that Pavese took this as a sign.91 The night before his last, he made a few phone calls, asking people to dinner, but no one was free. He prepared his journal for publication – he had always written it with this in view – made the necessary arrangements, and, making what he felt was a conscious, rational choice, fulfilled the destiny he had embraced long ago.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Including Mary Wollstonecraft in my “Ten Suicides” is something of a cheat. Although she made two attempts at suicide, both were failures. Yet sadly, less than two years after her second attempt, she died from complications giving birth to her daughter Mary, later Mary Shelley, wife of the poet Percy Shelley, and author, among other works, of Frankenstein. That she died so soon after failing to kill herself is a tragedy and an irony; yet in her last years, spent with the writer William Godwin, first as friends, then as cohabiting lovers, and finally as husband and wife, she achieved the kind of happiness that had eluded her throughout most of her life. Novelist, essayist, historian, political philosopher, feminist and teacher, if her personal life was one of trauma and grief, in her creative life, Mary Wollstonecraft produced a body of work that establishes her as one of the most vital and original minds of her age. What makes this especially true is the fact that in the few months in between her two suicide attempts, when she was caught in the turmoil of depression, anger, fear and loneliness, she could produce one of the most influential works of the time, her remarkable Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.92

  Sent on a journey through Scandinavia – ostensibly a business trip on behalf of her one-time lover Gilbert Imlay – that she could travel successfully alone while burdened with suicidal thoughts is itself a considerable achievement. But with its theme of a solitary traveller in a strange and foreign land, encountering her own soul amidst the sublime beauties of nature, Wollstonecraft’s book exemplifies and anticipates the Romantic consciousness that would emerge in full force only three years later in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads.

  Yet Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence – as the work is commonly known – wasn’t the only remarkable work associated with her attempts at suicide. After her death, in an effort to deal with his grief, her husband William Godwin produced the equally groundbreaking Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman, perhaps the first work of biography in the modern sense. Godwin’s work was highly criticized at the time, not only for his candour in depicting the often difficult moods of his wife, and for making public the details of her unsuccessful infatuation with the artist Henry Fuseli, and her disastrous affair with the American entrepreneur Gilbert Imlay. What many found unforgivable in Godwin’s Memoirs was the attention he gave to her two attempts at taking her life. What we today would find essential material in ‘life-writing’ was, for Godwin’s late Eighteenth century readership, a serious breach of authorial etiquette, not to say an insulting disregard for the memory of his wife: the poet Southey, o
n reading the book, remarked that Godwin showed “a want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked.” Although both authors championed a life free from the constraints and hypocrisy of social conventions and accepted norms, when put into practice – with Mary in her own life, and with William in his account of it – they became targets of censure and indignation, most surprisingly from people who had hitherto applauded their efforts to challenge the status quo.

  Mary Wollstonecraft had a difficult childhood, one that produced, as her earliest letters reveal, a basic insecurity. Her father was a sentimental, bullying man, who was as apt to beat his wife as he was to smother Mary and her siblings in drunken affection. And although Mary received little warmth or attention from her mother – as a discipline, her mother often made the talkative Mary sit still for hours without making a sound – she would often sleep on the floor outside her mother’s door, in order to protect her from the arbitrary violence meted out by her father. Equally disturbing were the frequent relocations that were a part of Mary’s early years. Although he lacked any aptitude for it, her father was obsessed with becoming a farmer, and wasted an inheritance on ventures that soon collapsed, forcing the family to move on. It’s understandable that in later life, financial independence and domestic security became her central aims.

  Her road to independence started when she was eighteen; she left home, and took a job as a lady’s companion. Although it got her away from her family, like Thomas Chatterton, Mary resented being dependent on her employer and being treated like a servant. By this time she had also met and more or less fallen in love – platonically – with Fanny Blood, a young woman, as Godwin describes her, “of extraordinary accomplishments.” So important was Mary’s introduction to Fanny, that Godwin writes that it “bore a resemblance to the first interview of Werther and Charlotte.”93 This wasn’t the only nod to Goethe’s tale of failed love and suicide that Godwin makes in reference to Mary; the letters she wrote to her worthless lover Imlay, filled with ecstasy, despair and the obsessive pursuit of an unrequited love, were, he said, worthy of Werther, and in describing Mary as someone whose mind “seems almost of too fine a texture to encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to whom pleasure is a transport, and disappointment is agony indescribable,” he simply says that “Mary was in this respect a female Werther.”94 Both the early critics of Godwin’s Memoir and later modern feminists took argument with this association, yet its clear to any unprejudiced reader that Mary had the kind of temperament that we can only call Romantic.

  Mary’s attachment to Fanny Blood, who was two years older than her, is understandable. She saw her as a kind of model of self-improvement, something that Mary was determined on throughout her life. At this time, Mary’s meagre self-esteem was evident. She let her long hair hang limp, and wore dull, coarse clothes. She ate very little, and suffered from headaches, fevers, and feelings of gloom, characteristics that would remain with her throughout her life. (“You talk of the roses which grow profusely in every path of life,” she wrote Godwin, “I catch at them, but only encounter thorns.”95) Fanny, on the other hand, dressed attractively, could sing and play and drew well enough to earn money from it. As one biographer put it, Mary “could not love what she did not also esteem,”96 and finding little to esteem in her own family, she anchored this need in Fanny. Soon she asked Fanny to instruct her in spelling and composition. Eventually she would live with the Blood family, and so deep was her attachment to her friend that later, when Fanny had married and moved to Portugal, Mary would travel there to assist her in childbirth. Like some presage of Mary’s own fate, Fanny would die giving birth, and in memory of her great friend, Mary would name her own first child Fanny. She, too, sadly would have a tragic end.97

  Although Mary was at first in awe of Fanny, she soon outstripped her. Where Mary had a vigorous, fiery, determined character, Fanny was timid and shy and, as Mary soon discovered, as conventional as other women. Mary was never timid and shy, and she also soon proved herself a capable character. She had tended her ill mother until her death, and when her sister Eliza suffered a nervous breakdown, prompted by a bad marriage and postnatal depression, Mary took charge, taking Eliza away from her failed home in Bermondsey, to set up a school in Newington Green. There Mary met the celebrated Dr. Johnson, who was impressed with her conversation. Mary, however, was more impressed with another doctor, Richard Price, one of the dissenters she met on the green. Unlike the cynical Dr. Johnson, Price believed that men’s will and determination could better the world, and that in a just society, our better natures would have an opportunity to emerge, a belief that Mary too held strongly.

  Mary’s will and determination would have many chances to show their mettle. When she returned from Portugal, she found the school floundering. She arranged teaching positions for her sisters and was forced to accept a job as a governess in Ireland – not, however, before writing her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Predictably, although the opportunity to travel again was welcome (she was one of the most travelled women of her generation) Mary didn’t relish her position as governess, and her outspokenness and dissatisfaction with the trivial concerns of Lady Kingsborough soon led to her dismissal. She was put on the road to destiny by meeting the publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson recognized her talent, and soon had her reviewing for his new Analytical Review. Through Johnson Mary met radical figures like Tom Paine and, more importantly, Godwin. Although there were clearly women writers before, Mary, as a freelance critic and essayist, considered herself “the first of a new genus.” Johnson also published her novel Mary and her children’s book, Original Stories. Soon other works appeared. A Vindication of the Rights of Man, originally published anonymously, was her response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. And Tom Paine’s Rights of Man prompted her most famous work, Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

  Although in Vindication of the Rights of Woman Mary played down the importance of sex in the ‘rational’ woman’s life, her own passions and desires began to make trouble for her. The artist Henry Fuseli, who she met through Johnson, was already married, but this didn’t stop Mary from developing a ‘rational desire’ for him. So rational it was, that she proposed a ménage à trois between herself, Fuseli and his wife. The career-minded Fuseli, however, was shocked, as was his wife, and Mary discovered that the kind of freedom her friends lauded in her writing was not necessarily welcomed in their lives. To avoid humiliation, and to get over Fuseli, she travelled once again, this time to France, where she witnessed the Terror of the Revolution at first hand. On showing horror at the blood-soaked ground below the guillotine, a friend warned that, for her own safety, she had better keep her opinions to herself. She later wrote a history of the revolution.98

  Yet another danger was in store for her in Paris. Here she met the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, and all the frustrated passion of her unconsummated attraction to Fuseli found a target. Mary and Imlay became lovers, and soon she was pregnant – an imposition that Imlay quickly regretted. Although she had anticipated a life together based on mutual respect and lofty ideals, which she mistakenly assumed Imlay shared with her, Imlay’s interest in Mary soon faded, and, after a brief time in Paris and then Neuilly, they would never live together again. Although on more than one occasion, Imlay declared her as his wife – for her protection in Paris he had registered her as such at the American Embassy, after England declared war on France – they were never technically married. By all accounts, Mary had conceived a love for a man who was unworthy of her, but her idealized picture of Imlay, like that of Fanny, worked against her. If she could not love where she could not esteem, then Imlay must be someone worthy of her esteem, even if, as practically everyone around her knew, he wasn’t. Readers of the Letters to Imlay, published by Godwin, soon recognize the link to Werther. She may have been sexually passionate about Imlay, and the need for little Fanny to have a father was also a concern, but the impression one gets is that Mary refused to recognize
that her love was misplaced and that she was the captive of her own ideals.

  She made her first suicide attempt in London in 1795, after being apart from Imlay for months, and suffering his repeated indecision about their relationship; although to everyone else it was clear he was through with her, he still showed her sufficient concern to keep her hopes up and more or less told her it was “up to her,” a typical male stratagem to avoid responsibility. The laudanum she took, however, only made her wretch, and when Imlay realized that she was serious, he decided to send her on her Scandinavian adventure.99 He may have known that throwing herself into some purposeful action was the best thing for her, or he may have simply wanted to get her out of his hair. Mary, too, must have seen his request as a means of holding on to him, even if it would be at some distance. A ship Imlay had an interest in with a considerable cargo – £3,500 worth of silver, a fortune at the time – had been lost off the Swedish coast, and it was Mary’s task to find out what had happened and recover what she could of his investment. That a woman who had just tried to kill herself would embark on such a voyage is surprising. That she brought along her illegitimate baby daughter and an inexperienced nursemaid smacks of Romantic fiction.