The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides
Page 27
Croft, who thought of Chatterton as “Apollo reincarnated,” and who compared him favourably with Milton, was fascinated with his story and had gathered a great deal of material about it. Loathe to let this go to waste, he inserted it in a long section of his book, which is based on the correspondence between Hackman and Reay during their two-year separation. Constrained to talk only of “matters of general interest,” for fear of being discovered by the Earl, Hackman relates to Reay his investigations into Chatterton’s story. See Kelly pp. 59–70.
72 Ibid. p. 135.
73 E. H. W. Meyerstein A Life of Thomas Chatterton (Inspen and Grant: London, 1930) p. 532.
74 Kelly, p. 29.
75 Richard Holmes Sidetracks (Flamingo: London, 2001) p. 12.
76 Ibid pp. 5–50.
77 Constance Dowling started out as a model and chorus girl before moving to Hollywood, where she appeared in a few films in the 1940s, the best known being Up in Arms (1944) and Black Angel (1946); she also starred in the 50s sci-fi classic, Gog. She was involved in a long affair with the screenwriter Elia Kazan, which ended when Kazan refused to leave his wife. In the late 40s, along with other B list hopefuls, she went to Europe and appeared in a few unmemorable films. She later married the producer Ivan Tors and retired from the screen in 1955.
78 Cesare Pavese This Business of Living (Consul Books: London, 1961) p. 24
79 Quoted in Davide Lajolo An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Cesare Pavese (New Directions: New York, 1983) p. 242.
80 The Business of Living p. 220.
81 Doug Thompson Cesare Pavese; A Study of The Major Novels and Poems (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1982) p. 2
82 Ibid. p. 8.
83 Edgar Allan Poe Complete Stories and Poems (Doubleday & Co.: New York, 1966) p. 812. “Alone” “From childhood’s hour I have not been/ As others were – I have not seen/ As others saw – I could not bring/ My passions from a common spring.”
84 This Business of Living p. 34.
85 Áine O’ Healy Cesare Pavese (Twayne Publishers: Boston, 1988) p. 1.
86 Quoted in Lajolo p. 50.
87 Ibid. p. 45.
88 Tim Parks “The Outsider’s Art,” The New York Review of Books vol. 1 no. 17, 6 November 2003.
89 Thompson, p. 7.
90 This Business of Living p. 33.
91 On 1 April 1950, F.O. Matthiessen, a Harvard professor of American literature, jumped from the window on the tenth floor of a hotel. A decade earlier Matthiessen had suffered a nervous breakdown, but it’s more likely that anxiety about his homosexuality and his left-wing politics in 1950s America – he had been investigated by the House’s Un-American Activities Committee – led to his suicide.
92 For the influence A Short Residence had on the burgeoning Romantic movement, see Richard Holmes’ brilliant essay “The Feminist and the Philosopher” in Sidetracks, n. 75 above. See also Claire Tomalin The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (Penguin: London, 1992) p. 228 “The theme of the book – a solitary traveller wandering through wild, rugged and remote places, and suffering from the absence of a lover – helped to set a fashion for questing romantic journeys. Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Mary’s as yet unborn daughter Mary, who sends her Frankenstein north at the end of his story, all read and followed in Mary Wollstonecraft’s footsteps.”
93 William Godwin Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1987) p. 210.
94 Ibid. p. 242.
95 Quoted in Diane Jacobs Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Abacus: London, 2001) p. 247.
96 Margaret Tims Mary Wollstonecraft: A Social Pioneer (Millington Books: London, 1976) p. 11.
97 Fanny Imlay, daughter of Mary and her lover Gilbert Imlay, committed suicide at the age of twenty-two in a Swansea hotel, taking an overdose of laudanum. The exact reasons for her suicide are unclear, although by most accounts she inherited a great part of her mother’s tendency to gloom and depression, while Mary’s second daughter, Mary Shelley, apparently received the better part of her determination and strength. By the time of her death, her half-sister had eloped with the poet Shelley, who was still married to his first wife Harriet. Godwin, who had become more conservative in his views, abhorred the act, and his second wife – disliked by those who knew Mary – had little love for her step-daughter. Fanny remained at home, out of attachment and respect for her step-father, yet it was clear she was becoming a burden to Godwin, who was facing mounting debts.
Despite, or perhaps because of Mary Wollstonecraft’s efforts, women’s prospects had changed very little, and Fanny could look forward to a life very similar to the one her mother fought to avoid. Mary’s sisters half-heartedly offered her a position teaching at their school in Ireland, yet Fanny was loath to accept it, dreading a life in provincial Ireland after a childhood amidst progressive circles; the sisters, too, were concerned about the recent scandal of their niece’s elopement, and had long since lost any love for their sister or her memory. Fanny’s suicide note is, with Crevel’s and Beddoes’, one of heartbreaking self-loathing: “I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain; but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as …” She had torn off her signature, hoping, at the last, to spare her family yet another scandal. Her identity was soon determined, and the undergarments she wore bore the initials “M.W.” Her suicide was seen as another argument against the dangerous ideas of her mother. Scandal and bereavement had still not done with Godwin; soon after his step-daughter’s suicide, Harriet Shelley drowned herself in the Serpentine.
98 Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794).
99 The laudanum attempt turns up in her unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria.
100 Mary Wollstonecraft A Short Residence (Penguin: Harmonds-worth, 1987) p. 69.
101 Ibid. p. 68.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid. p. 65.
104 Ibid. p. 73.
Part 2
A Suicidal Miscellany
A Ballade of Suicide
G.K. CHESTERTON
The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours – on the wall –
Are drawing a long breathe to shout “Hurray!”
The strangest whim has seized me … After all
I think I will not hang myself today.
Tomorrow is the time I get my pay –
My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall –
I see a little cloud all pink and grey –
Perhaps the Rector’s mother will not call –
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way –
I never read the works of Juvenal –
I think I will not hang myself today.
The world will have another washing day;
The decadents decay, the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;
Rationalists are growing rational –
And through the thick woods one finds a stream astray,
So secret that the very sky seemed small –
I think I will not hang myself today.
Envoi
Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrels toiling up the terrible way;
Even today your royal head may fall –
I think I will not hang myself today.
From The Notebooks of Samuel Butler
For Unwritten Articles, Essays and Stories:
*
In the fin-de-siècle, suicide clubs were something of a rage, having sprung up in cosmopolitan centres like London, Paris and St. Petersburg. It was perhaps in Mother Russia that they were most prevalent – the Slavic soul, as exemplified in Dostoyevsky, had a predilection for self-destruction. One famous club, The Black Swan, hosted by Nicolai Riabushinsky, was extremely popular, although how its membership was maintained is unclear. Here, Robert Louis Stevenson shows that London, too, had its own fascination with societies dedicated to a quick escape from the travails of life.
From The Suicide Club
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
‘Can you muster eighty pounds between you?’ he demanded.
Geraldine ostentatiously consulted his pocket-book, and replied in the affirmative.
‘Fortunate beings!’ cried the young man. ‘Forty pounds is the entry money of the Suicide Club.’
‘The Suicide Club,’ said the Prince, ‘why, what the devil is that?’
‘Listen,’ said the young man; ‘this is the age of conveniences, and I have to tell you of the last perfection of the sort. We have affairs in different places; and hence railways were invented. Railways separated us infallibly from our friends; and so telegraphs were made that we might communicate speedily at great distances. Even in hotels we have lifts to spare us a climb of some hundred steps. Now, we know that life is only a stage to play the fool upon as long as the part amuses us. There was one more convenience lacking to modern comfort; a decent easy way to quit that stage; the back stairs to liberty; or, as I said this moment, Death’s private door. This, my two fellow-rebels, is supplied by the Suicide Club. Do not suppose that you and I are alone, or even exceptional, in the highly reasonable desire that we profess. A large number of your fellow men, who have grown heartily sick of the performance in which they are expected to join daily and all their lives long, are only kept from flight by one or two considerations. Some have families who would be shocked, or even blamed, if the matter became public; others have a weakness at heart and recoil from the circumstances of death. That is, to some extent, my own experience. I cannot put a pistol to my head and draw the trigger; for something stronger than myself withholds the act; and although I loathe life, I have not the strength enough in my body to take hold of death and be done with it. For such as I and for all who desire to be out of the coil without posthumous scandal, the Suicide Club has been inaugurated. How this has been managed, what is its history, or what may be its ramifications in other lands, I am myself uninformed; and what I know of its constitution, I am not at liberty to communicate to you. To this extent, however, I am at your service. If you are truly tired of life, I will introduce you tonight to a meeting; and if not tonight, at least some time within the next week, you will be easily relieved of your existence. It is now (consulting his watch) eleven; by half past, at latest, we must leave this place; so that you have an hour before you to consider my proposal. It is more serious than a cream tart,’ he added, with a smile; ‘and I suspect more palatable.’
*
In June 1936, Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan and author of a host of ripping pulp yarns, mostly published in Weird Tales, was told that his mother, on whom he had a morbid fixation, would not recover from a coma. He took the revolver he often carried to protect himself from imaginary pursuers, walked out to the driveway, sat in his car, and blew his brains out. He was only thirty and at the height of his career, earning more income from his writing than any other inhabitant of his home town, Cross Plains, Texas. Unlike the fastidious H.P. Lovecraft, the other giant of Weird Tales fame, Howard was resolutely professional, and at the time of his death was about to crack the glossy market. Howard suffered from depression and paranoid delusions, and along with stories of King Kull, Bran Mak Morn, and the gloomy Solomon Kane, he was also the author of over seven hundred poems. The following shows that dark thoughts of death were not solely the domain of existentialists and nineteenth century Romantics.
“Lines Written in the Realization that I Must Die”
ROBERT E. HOWARD
The Back Door gapes and the Black Wall rises;
Twilight gasps in the grip of Night.
Paper and dust are the gems man prizes –
Torches toss in my waning sight.
Drums of glory are lost in the ages,
Bare feet fail on a broken trail –
Let my name fade from the printed pages;
Dreams and visions are growing pale.
Twilight gathers and none can save me.
Well and well, for I would not say:
Let me speak through the stone you gave me:
He never could say what he wished to say.
Why should I shrink from the sign of leaving?
My brain is wrapped in a darkened cloud;
Now in the Night are the sisters weaving
For me a shroud.
Towers shake and the stars reel under,
Skulls are heaped in the Devil’s fane;
My feet are wrapped in a rolling thunder,
Jets of agony lance my brain.
What of the world that I leave for ever?
Phantom forms in fading sight –
Carry me out on the ebon river
Into the Night.
*
Like the Austrian novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig, who with his wife Lotte, killed himself with an overdose of veronal in Brazil in 1942, despairing at the collapse of western civilization, Klaus Mann was also a victim of the brutalisation of culture perpetrated by the Nazis. In 1949, Mann died from an intentional overdose of sleeping pills in Cannes. Son of Thomas Mann, Klaus never really escaped from the shadow of his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship. His homosexuality too, caused him much anxiety. Losing his German citizenship in 1933, Mann became a citizen of the world, moving to Amsterdam, gaining Czech nationality, and finally living in the United States, first in Princeton, later New York. His most famous work, Mephisto, based on the career of the actor Gustaf Gründgens under the Nazis, first published in 1936, was the subject of a long legal battle in the 1960s, providing Mann with some posthumous fame. Here he calls on his intellectual comrades to shock the world with a wave of mass suicides, rather like Alexander Trocchi’s infamous call to his fellow writers in the 1960s, to engage in shooting up heroin en masse.
From Europe’s Search for a New Credo
KLAUS MANN
A weak, dissonant chorus, the voices of the European intellectuals accompany the prodigious drama. I have heard many voices on my travels, some aggressive and arrogant, others gentle or flippant, passionate or sentimental. I have yet to hear the harmony of coordinated sounds, the concert of reconciled or peacefully competing forces.
“There is no hope. Whether we intellectuals are traitors or whether we are victims, in any case we’d better recognize the utter hopelessness of our situation. Why fool ourselves? We’re done for! We’re licked!”
These words were uttered by a young student of philosophy and literature I met in the ancient university town of Uppsala, Sweden. What he had to say was certainly characteristic, and l believe his words echo the beliefs of your intellectuals in all parts of Europe.
He continued: “we’re licked, we’re through. Why not admit it at last? The struggle between two great anti-spiritual powers – American money and Russian fanaticism – does not leave any room in the world for intellectual integrity or independence. We are compelled to take sides and, by doing so, to betray everything we should defend and cherish. Koestler is wrong when asserting that one side is a little better than the other – not quite black, just gray. In reality, neither side is good enough – which is to say that both are bad, both are black”.
He said a new movement should be launched by European
intellectuals, “the movement of despair, the rebellion of the hopeless ones. Instead of trying to appease the powers that be, instead of vindicating the machinations of greedy bankers or the outrages of tyrannical bureaucrats, we ought to go on record with our protest, with an unequivocal expression of our bitterness, our horror. Things have reached a point where only the most dramatic, most radical gesture has a chance to be noticed, to awake the conscience of the blinded hypnotized masses. I’d like to see hundreds, thousands of intellectuals follow the examples of Virginia Woolf, Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig, Jan Masaryk. A suicide wave among the world’s most distinguished minds would shock the peoples out of the lethargy, would make them realize the extreme gravity of the ordeal man has bought upon himself by his folly and selfishness”.
In a trembling voice, he said to me, “Let’s sign ourselves to absolute despondency. It’s the only sincere attitude, and the only one that can be of any help”.
While l thought of the black future the young men and women of Europe must visualize for themselves, the university student added, very softly, while a faint, timid smile was lightening his pensive young voice: “Do you remember what that great Kierkegaard has told us? The infinite resignation is the last stage prior to faith … Therefore faith hopes also in this life, but … by virtue of the absurd, not by virtue of the human understanding”.