The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  One might think that an account of a business trip would be unpromising reading, yet Mary’s reasons for heading to what was more or less terra incognita soon become unimportant, and her reflections on the natural scenery, the strange customs, and herself grip the reader from the start; Godwin declared that reading the book made him fall in love with her. Melancholy as she is, feeling herself as “a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind,”100 Mary is nevertheless visited by those sudden moments of delight that save Hesse’s Steppenwolf from an appointment with the razor. She speaks of feeling “that spontaneous pleasure which gives credibility to one’s expectations of happiness,”101 and recognizes that “the sublime often gave place imperceptibly to the beautiful, dilating the emotions which were painfully concentrated.”102 On approaching the Swedish coast she notes that “the sunbeams that played on the ocean, scarcely ruffled by the lightest breeze, contrasted with the huge dark rocks, that looked like the rude materials of creation forming the barrier of unwrought space …”103

  Although she provides fascinating accounts of the life and people she encounters, it is her response to ‘brute creation’ and sublime nature that strikes the reader forcefully. As Blake was doing in her own time, and as Wordsworth and Coleridge would after her, Mary was discovering a strange new world within herself. One word that continually comes up is imagination. “Without the aid of imagination,” she writes, “all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness.”104 In a letter to Imlay, who would scarcely understand her, she explained that genius was a product of a fusion of feeling and thought, of desire and imagination, and that she herself had a share in this. Unfortunately, as Mary would painfully discover, Imlay’s pleasures were rarely imaginative, and all her entreaties to him to cast off his lower self and become who he ‘really’ was fell, not on deaf ears, but on gross ones. He already was who he really was, but she couldn’t admit this.

  When she returned to England, Imlay didn’t meet her, as he had promised, yet he felt bound to provide a home for her and his daughter. He had by this time found another lover, one who wasn’t careless about contraception, and when Mary eventually found out, she decided again to kill herself. She walked along the river to Battersea, but found the area too busy, so she took a boat further down to Putney. She walked back and forth along the bridge in the pouring rain, thinking that if her clothes were soaked, she would sink faster. Then she climbed the railing and jumped. Her clothes still buoyed her up, so she wrapped them tightly around her. It was harder to drown than she thought, and before becoming unconscious, the pain was unbearable. Some fishermen had seen her and before she was pulled too far by the current, they hauled her out and brought her to a nearby public house. When she recovered, she was indignant and thankless, complaining that even her “fixed determination to die” had failed, although she did later remark that if she ever decided to commit suicide again, she would not do it by drowning. Her ‘suicide letter’ to Imlay had more or less made it clear what she would do, and soon friends arrived to take her home.

  Accepting that she still had to live, and that Imlay had another lover, she again proposed a ménage à trois; Imlay considered this briefly, yet both knew it was impossible, and Mary probably didn’t want it anyway. After a time her obsession eased and her one-time lover faded from her consciousness, to be replaced with other, more rewarding concerns.

  Notes

  1 Bizan Kawamaki, 1908; Takeo Arishima, 1923; Ryunosuke Akutagawa, 1927; Shinichi Makino, 1936; Tamiki Hara, 1951; Michio Kato; 1953; Sakae Kubo; 1958; Ashihei Hino, 1960 are some of the more notable examples.

  2 Henry Scott Stokes The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1985) p. 25. I am indebted to Mr. Stokes’ book for much of this section.

  3 Colin Wilson The Misfits (Grafton: London, 1988) p. 242.

  4 Malcolm Cowley Exile’s Return (Penguin: New York, 1994) p. 248.

  5 Although Bataille did not commit suicide, murder was something he did contemplate, planning the ritual sacrifice of a victim as part of the activities of a secret society he attempted to organize in Paris in the 1930s. A target was chosen but then unfortunately for Bataille, but fortunately for the intended victim, WWII broke out and the plan was dropped.

  6 Geoffrey Wolff Black Sun (Hamish Hamilton: London, 1976) p. 21

  7 Ibid. p. 83.

  8 Ibid. p. 61.

  9 Ibid. p. 54.

  10 An idea he may have picked up from reading J.K. Huysmans’ satanic novel, Là-Bas, one of whose characters, the Canon Docre, has crosses tattooed on both feet.

  11 Crowley exaggerated the initial A of his signature, fashioning it to look like an erect penis. The sun, of course, is also a phallic symbol.

  12 Cowley p. 259.

  13 It is interesting that another poet, a younger contemporary of Crosby, René Daumal, was, like him, fascinated with death, and in his early work, adopted the black sun as a symbol of “the beyond.” See his collection Counter Heaven.

  14 Wolff p. 190.

  15 Ibid. pp. 239–241. Again, the parallels with Aleister Crowley are striking. See Crowley’s infamous Book of the Law which contains passages such as, “These are dead, these fellows; they feel not. We are not for the poor and sad: the lords of the earth are our kinsfolk. […] We have nothing with the outcast and unfit: let them die in their misery … Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak: this is the law of the strong … […] Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not …” I’ve not come across any reference to Crowley in any literature on Crosby, although they were contemporaries and Crowley was known in the Paris and New York of Crosby’s day. It’s almost a pity Crosby was unaware of him, if he was. Crowley’s philosophy of, “Do what thou wilt” would have appealed to him; he had a natural talent for it, as Crowley did for excess, indulging in monumental amounts of drugs, strange sex and other inebriants. On second thoughts, it was perhaps a blessing that the two didn’t meet, as Crowley, for whom the sun was also a powerful talisman, would more than likely have manoeuvred large portions of Crosby’s fortune into his own pockets.

  16 Ibid. p. 242.

  17 Ibid. p. 305

  18 Trakl’s death is reminiscent of another literary suicide. Like Trakl, the Hungarian doctor, short story writer and music critic Géza Csáth (pseudonym of Josef Brenner 1887–1919) may have pursued a medical career simply because it would provide close proximity to drugs. Csáth begin smoking opium in 1909; a year later he was injecting large dosages of morphine. After several years working at a clinic, he took up practice as a country doctor in 1913, most likely in order to indulge his habit undetected. By the time he was discharged from service in WWI, he was showing signs of physical and mental decline. He carried knives and had members of his family followed by detectives. Finally, as his infant daughter watched, he shot his wife. Committed to an insane asylum, he made an unsuccessful suicide attempt. He then escaped; en route to Budapest, he was stopped at the Serbian border. Following a brief struggle with the border guards, he swallowed poison and died. For more on Csáth see The Diary of Géza Csáth (Atlas Books: London, 2005) and The Magician’s Garden and Other Stories (Columbia University Press: New York, 1980).

  19 Francis Michael Sharp The Poet’s Madness: A Reading of Georg Trakl (Cornell University Press: London, 1981) p. 17.

  20 Quoted in Jeremy Reed Bitter Blue: Tranquillizers, Creativity, Breakdown (Peter Owen: London, 1995) p. 98.

  21 Ibid. p. 97.

  22 Ibid. p. 102.

  23 Francis Michael Sharp The Poet’s Madness: A Reading of Georg Trakl (Cornell University Press: London, 1981) p. 24.

  24 Ibid. p. 31.

  25 Ibid.

  26 Some accounts give 22 November as the date of Kleist’s suicide, and he himself was unsure of the exact date when writing his last farewells, another example of the uncertainty associated with his life. Oddly, the 22nd is the same date as Harry Crosby and Josephine Bigelow’s dual suicide. There is no indic
ation that Crosby was aware of Kleist’s earlier pact.

  27 Joachim Maass Kleist: A Biography (Secker & Warburg: London, 1983) p. 35.

  28 E.L. Doctorow Foreword to Heinrich Von Kleist Plays (Coninuum: New York, 1982) p. x.

  29 Thomas Mann “Kleist and his Stories,” preface to Heinrich Von Kleist The Marquise of O and other Stories (Faber and Faber: London, 1960) p. 13.

  30 Maass, p. 264.

  31 Quoted in David Luke’s and Nigel Reeves’ Introduction to Heinrich von Kleist The Marquise of O and other Stories (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1978) p. 7.

  32 Maass, p. 267.

  33 See n. 18 above. Another writer-physician that Beddoes shares obvious similarities with is Georg Büchner, like Beddoes a writer of fragments, as evidenced by his Woyzeck (1836). Büchner’s father, like Beddoes’, performed dissections with his son present. Both travelled and during his years in Germany, it’s possible Beddoes and Büchner met, although there is no corroboration of this.

  34 Harold Bloom The Visionary Company (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1971) p. 444.

  35 For more on Thomas Beddoes and nitrous oxide, see Mike Jay’s Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (Dedalus: Sawtry, 2000).

  36 James R. Thompson Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Twayne Publishers: Boston, 1985) p.

  37 Lytton Strachey “The Last Elizabethan” from Books and Characters at http://www.djmcadam.com/last-elizabethan.html

  38 They also both shared a title: The Last Man. Predictably, Beddoes’ tragedy wasn’t finished; Shelley’s was her second novel.

  39 Ibid. p. 6. The search for the physical location of the soul has an impressive pedigree. René Descartes, father of modern rational thought, believed it was located in the pineal gland. Before his transformation into a religious thinker, the scientist Emanuel Swedenborg devoted many years of his life to the same pursuit. Today it continues in the work of neuroscientists, and is focused on the cerebral roots of spiritual experience; hence, popular magazine articles about such things as the brain’s ‘God’s spot’.

  40 Thompson p. 6

  41 Ibid p. 1.

  42 One of Paracelsus’ aphorisms is, “Decay is the midwife of great things.” He believed putrefaction was the key to life and transformation, and once, lecturing a group of learned dons on its virtues, he produced a plate of his own faeces as evidence.

  43 Jung called the feminine element in men the anima; the masculine element in women he called the animus. More recently, another possible literary suicide advocated ideas very similar to Weininger’s. In June 1981, police were called to the Highgate, North London home of Charlotte Bach, who in the 1970s had developed a reputation and following as a kind of sexual philosopher and guru. Bach’s central idea was, like Weininger’s, that human beings contain elements of both sexes in their psyches, and that one’s personal evolution and development depends on the way in which one integrates these polarities. Bach developed a complicated system of what we might call ‘evolutionary transvestitism’ and tried to express it in an enormous work, Homo Mutans, Homo Luminens (which might be translated as ‘Man the Changer, Man the Light-bringer’), and a later volume Man and/or Woman. Her central teaching was that one could either accept or reject one’s psychic other (male for women, female for men), and depending on this, one would either develop or remain stagnant. (And it has to be pointed out that rejection is a positive thing in some cases, just as acceptance is a negative one in others.)

  Bach found support in some high places, coming under the wing for a time of Colin Wilson, whose book, The Misfits (note 3 above) gives a detailed account of her ideas and history. What no one knew, and what the police who came to her flat discovered, was that Charlotte was really a man. When they examined the body, they found that the breasts were false, and that the knickers concealed a penis. Charlotte was really Carl Hadju, a Hungarian con man, hypnotist, novelist, kleptomaniac and, possibly, murderer, who had deceived his followers for years. He had also, it seems, deceived himself, as in his (or her) system, a person with a powerful contrasexual component and who gives in to it – a very masculine woman who goes butch, for example – loses all chance of using the psychic tension for self-development. Charlotte/Carl had evidently done just that, and accounts of her time prior to being found dead indicate she had been depressed and ill. Although there is no evidence that he/ she consciously took his/her own life, circumstances suggest a possible suicidal intent. Neighbours called the police after milk bottles had accumulated outside her door. It’s quite possible that, depressed at her own deceit, he/she simply ignored whatever symptoms were present, and allowed himself/herself to die. See also my article “The Strange Life of Charlotte Bach” in Bizarre winter 2002

  44 In defence of Weininger it has to be said that other, somewhat less contentious voices raised similar themes. In his philosophical comedy Man and Superman (1904), Bernard Shaw argues that, contrary to popular belief, men are the dreamers who create civilization while women are down-to-earth pragmatists, who want to secure men’s energies for their own ends, which, as Weininger believed, were basically child-bearing. Also contrary to popular belief, in Back to Methuselah (1929), Shaw argued that women came first, and created men in order to help with their labours.

  45 Although C.G. Jung mentions Weininger briefly in his own Psychological Types, it is unclear how much of an influence Weininger’s system was on Jung’s.

  46 Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1969) pp. 145–149.

  47 One of the more dubious appreciators of Weininger’s work was the Italian Dadaist and esoteric philosopher, Julius Evola. Assimilating Weininger’s views on women, race and genius, Evola developed his own system of spiritual racism, with which for a brief time he ingratiated himself with Mussolini. He also tried to interest the Nazis in his ideas but had less success. In the 1970s and 80s Evola’s ideas formed an ideological justification for several right-wing terrorist acts in Italy, resulting in several deaths, and in recent years his work has seen a resurgence among some New Age and spiritually oriented readers in the United States. For more on Evola see my article “Mussolini’s Mystic” in issue 191 (December 2004) of Fortean Times.

  48 David Abrahamsen The Mind and Death of a Genius (Columbia University Press: New York, 1946) p. 15.

  49 Ibid. p. 124.

  50 Ibid. p. 177.

  51 Ibid. p. 88.

  52 Ibid. p. 182. It is of course easy to see in this merely the onset of Weininger’s madness. Yet it pays to recall that practically all poetry and metaphor is based on precisely the same type of associations, and that while Weininger and other artists (the Strindberg of the Inferno period comes to mind) are just as susceptible to madness as the rest of us – more susceptible according to some authorities – they are also privy to insights and perceptions denied the rank and file. Symbolism, the most important aesthetic movement in the nineteenth century, is based on similarly odd correspondences and could be seen by a particular literal mind to be nothing more than evidence of insanity; indeed, Max Nordau’s once very influential Degeneration (1892) did precisely that. Weininger’s last works, only published after his death, On Last Things and Aphorisms, reveal a subtle and poetic mind, often on a par with Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, trying to convey the insights that came to him in his heightened states. It would be a mistake and irresponsible to label him a misogynistic racist and leave it at that, while ignoring the many flashes of genius found in his work.

  53 Abrahamsen p. 50.

  54 Ellen Mayne “Otto Weininger on the Character of Man” (New Atlantis Foundation: Sussex, 1982).

  55 Harold Harris, Introduction to Arthur and Cynthia Koestler Stranger on the Square (Hutchinson: London, 1984) p. 11.

  56 George Mikes Arthur Koestler: The Story of a Friendship (London: 1983).

  57 Harris, p. 14.

  58 David Cesarani Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (William Heineman: London, 1998) p. 555.

  59 Arthur Koestler Bricks to Babel (Ra
ndom House: New York, 1980) p. 10.

  60 Arthur Koestler Arrow in the Blue (Collins: London, 1952) p. 116.

  61 Arthur Koestler “Return Trip to Nirvana” in Drinkers of Infinity (Hutchison: London, 1968) p. 209.

  62 Arthur Koestler Arrow in the Blue (Collins: London, 1952) p. 34.

  63 Cynthia Koestler Stranger in the Square p. 160.

  64 Arthur Koestler, Ibid. p. 65.

  65 Cynthia Koestler, Ibid. pp. 112–113.

  66 Cesarani p. 554.

  67 Ibid.

  68 The comparison with Rimbaud goes beyond mere age. In one of his last poems, the “African Eclogues,” Chatterton hits a note reminiscent of the Le Bateau Ivre a century away. “On Tiber’s banks where scarlet jasmines bloom/And purple aloes shed a rich perfume;/Where, when the sun is melting in his heat/The reeking tygers find a cool retreat/Bask in the sedges, lose the sultry beam/And wanton with their shadows in the stream/ …”

  69 Quoted in Linda Kelly The Marvellous Boy: The Life and Myth of Thomas Chatterton (Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London, 1971) p. xix.

  70 Parisian Diarist, quoted in ibid. p. 104.

  71 The main story in Croft’s book – actually an early version of the non-fiction novel – was that of James Hackman and Martha Reay. Reay, thirty-three, was a singer, and the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, who was twenty years her senior; Hackman, twenty, was an officer. Hackman and Reay met and became lovers, but she was prudent enough to realize that Hackman would not be able to support her and the children she had by the Earl. Although sent away for two years, Hackman remained infatuated with her, and on his return, tried to re-ignite their passion. He had been offered a position as a parson and would be able to afford a family. Yet Reay, dubious about starting life again at thirty-five with a much younger man, declined. Hackman persisted and, in an attempt to dissuade him, the Earl had Reay’s duenna advise him untruthfully that she had already taken a new lover. Hackman was shattered and determined on suicide, which he proposed to commit at his ex-mistress’ feet. Waiting for her outside the Covent Garden opera house, he suddenly changed his mind and shot her instead, then clumsily tried to shoot himself, but only managed to wound himself in the temple. He fell into the gutter, crying to the bystanders, “Kill me, kill me!” He was later executed. On the ground next to the pistol that Hackman used, was found a copy of Werther’s last letter to Charlotte.