The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  *

  Although unread today, in the early twentieth century, Michael Artzibashev was one of Russia’s most popular writers. In pre-WWI England, he, along with other Russian imports like the Ballet Russe, was something of a craze, and no book was more popular than Sanine. A Nietzschean celebration of individuality and sensual freedom, its eponymous hero jettisons the Slavic gloom that characterizes most Russian literature, and glories in his own pagan common sense. Several of the characters in Sanine kill themselves, and at one point, attending the funeral of a friend who has shot himself, Sanine remarks impatiently “One more fool gone.” Like Wedekind, in this early work Artzibashev argued against suicide, and at the end of the novel, his hero, leaving behind the failed lives of his fellows, strides forth to meet the world “facing the jocund, lustrous sun … beneath the wide dome of heaven.” Unfortunately, Artzibashev didn’t maintain this optimism, and in later works, suicide wins out; in his next novel, The Breaking Point, practically everyone in it blows his brains out. Here a would-be suicide is saved by a faulty weapon.

  From Sanine (translator Percy Pinkerton)

  MICHAEL ARTZIBASHEV

  “No matter what road I choose nor at what goal I aim, show me the pure and perfect ideal for which it were worth while to die! No, it is not that I am weak; it is because life itself is not worthy of sacrifice nor of enthusiasm. Consequently there is no sense in living at all.”

  Never before had this conclusion seemed so absolutely convincing to him. On his table lay a revolver, and each time he passed it, while walking up and down, its polished steel caught his eye.

  He took it up and examined it carefully. It was loaded. He placed the barrel against his temple.

  “There! Like that!” he thought. “Bang! and it’s all over. Is it a wise or a stupid thing to shoot oneself? Is suicide a cowardly act? Then I suppose that I am a coward!”

  The contact of the cold steel on his heated brow was at once pleasant and alarming.

  “What about Sina?” he asked himself. “Ah! Well, I shall never get her, and so I leave to some one else this enjoyment.” The thought of Sina awoke tender memories, which he strove to repress as sentimental folly.

  “Why should I not do it?” His heart seemed to stop beating. Then once more, and deliberately this time, he put the revolver to his brow and pulled the trigger. His blood ran cold; there was a buzzing in his ears and the room seemed to whirl around.

  The weapon did not go off; only the click of the trigger could be heard. Half fainting, his hand dropped to his side. Every fibre within him quivered, his head swam, his lips were parched, and his hand trembled so much that when he laid down the revolver it rattled against the table.

  “A fine fellow I am!” he thought as, recovering himself, he went to the glass to see what he looked like.

  “Then I’m a coward, am I?” “No,” he thought proudly, “I am not! I did it right enough. How could I help it if the thing didn’t go off?”

  *

  When George Sterling’s poem A Wine of Wizardry was published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1907, it was hailed as the greatest poem ever written by an American author. Recognized in San Francisco as the “uncrowned king of Bohemia,” Sterling is little read today, and his name is familiar mostly to fans of Jack London; Sterling was the leader of an artist’s colony in Carmel, California, with which his friend London was associated. An intimate of the sardonic Ambrose Bierce and mentor to the poet Robinson Jeffers, Sterling was also an important inspiration for the third member of the Weird Tales triumvirate, Clark Ashton Smith, who along with Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, were the magazine’s most popular writers. Sterling’s lush, romantic style did not catch on outside the more European environs of San Francisco, and although at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, his name was carved on the walls along with those of “the immortals,” Sterling never became a national poet. By the 1920s he was decidedly passé. Sterling killed himself in 1926, ingesting cyanide in his room at the San Francisco Bohemian Club; he was fifty-six. According to Kevin Starr in Americans and the Californian Dream 1850–1915 (Oxford Univeristy Press: 1986), “When George Sterling’s corpse was discovered in his room at the Bohemian Club, the golden age of San Francisco’s bohemia had definitely come to a miserable end.”

  “Omnia Exeunt in Mysterium”

  GEORGE STERLING

  I

  The stranger in my gates – lo! that am I,

  And what my land of birth I do not know,

  Nor yet the hidden land to which I go.

  One may be lord of many ere he die,

  And tell of many sorrows in one sigh,

  But know himself he shall not, nor his woe,

  Nor to what sea the tears of wisdom flow;

  Nor why one star is taken from the sky.

  An urging is upon him evermore,

  And though he bide, his soul is wanderer,

  Scanning the shadows with a sense of haste

  Where fade the tracks of all who went before –

  A dim and solitary traveller

  On ways that end in evening and the waste.

  II

  How dumb the vanished billions who have died!

  With backward gaze conjectural we wait,

  And ere the invading Shadow penetrate,

  The echo from a mighty heart that cried

  Is made a sole memorial to pride.

  From out that night’s inscrutable estate

  A few cold voices wander, desolate

  With all that love has lost or grief has sighed.

  Slaves, seamen, captains, councillors and kings,

  Gone utterly, save for those echoes far!

  As they before, I tread a forfeit land

  Till the supreme and ancient silence flings

  Its pall between the dreamer and the star.

  O desert wide! O little grain of sand!

  III

  As one that knew not of the sea might come

  From slender sources of a mountain stream,

  And, wending where the sandy shallows gleam

  And boulder-strewn the stumbling waters hum

  And white with haste the falling torrents drum,

  Might stand in darkness at the land’s extreme,

  And stare in doubt, where, ghostly and supreme,

  Muffled in mist and night, the sea lay dumb, –

  So shalt thou follow life, a downward rill

  A-babble as with question and surmise,

  To wait at last where no star beaconeth,

  And find the midnight desolate and chill,

  And face below its indecisive skies

  The Consummation, mystery and death.

  *

  Leo Tolstoy did not kill himself, although his adulterous heroine Anna Karenina famously did, throwing herself in front of a train, to avoid the complications of an affair. Although most readers today find her actions somewhat extreme, Anna’s death ranks with that of Emma Bovary (see below) as one of the great literary suicides. Tolstoy did face suicidal urges, though, and in his existential work A Confession, he examines the moral vacuum that led him to the brink of madness. Curiously, it is precisely the emptiness of literary success that planted the idea of suicide in Tolstoy’s troubled psyche.

  From A Confession (translator Aylmer Maude)

  LEO TOLSTOY

  Some day I will narrate the touching and instructive history of my life during those ten years of my youth[…]

  I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing, and heartache. I killed men in war, and challenged men to duels in order to kill them; I lost at cards, consumed the labour of peasants, sentenced then to punishments, lived loosely and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder – there was no crime I did not commit, and for all that people praised my conduct, and my contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral man.

  So I lived for ten years.

  During that time I began to
write from vanity, covetousness, and pride. In my writings I did the same as in my life. To get fame and money, for the sake of which I wrote, it was necessary to hide the good and display the evil. And I did so. How often in my writings I contrived to hide under the guise of indifference, or even of banter, those strivings of mine towards goodness, which gave meaning to my life!

  To remember that time, and my own state of mind and that of those men (though there are thousands like them today) [Tolstoy means writers], is sad and terrible and ludicrous, and arouses exactly the feeling one experiences in a lunatic asylum.

  In spite of the fact that I now regarded authorship as of no importance, I yet […] continued to write. I had already tasted the temptation of authorship: the temptation of immense monetary rewards and applause for my insignificant work; and I devoted myself to it as a means of improving my material position, and of stifling in my soul all questions as to the meaning of my own life, or of life in general […]

  … but five years ago something very strange began to happen to me. At first I experienced moments of perplexity and arrest of life, as though I did not know what to do or how to live; and I felt lost and became dejected. But this passed, and I went on living as before. Then these moments of perplexity began to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same form. They were always expressed by the questions: What’s it for? What does it lead to?

  At first it seemed to me that these were aimless and irrelevant questions. I thought that it was all well known, and that if I should ever wish to deal with the solution, it would not cost me much effort […]The questions, however, began to repeat themselves frequently, and more and more insistently to demand replies […]

  That occurred which happens to every one sickening with a mortal internal disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition appear, to which the sick man pays no attention; then these signs reappear more and more often and merge into one uninterrupted period of suffering. The suffering increases, and before the sick man can look round, what he took for a mere indisposition has already become more important to him than anything else in the world – it is death!

  That is what happened to me […] The questions seemed such stupid, simple childish questions, but as soon as I touched them and tried to solve them, I at once became convinced, (1) that they are not childish and stupid but the most important and profound of life’s questions; and (2) that, try as I would, I could not solve them. Before occupying myself with my estate, the education of my son, or the writing of a book, I had to know why I was doing it. As long as I did not know why, I could do nothing, and could not live … when thinking of the fame my works would bring me, I said to myself, “Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or that all the writers in the world – and what of it?” […]

  I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed, and that I had nothing left under my feet […]

  The truth was that life is meaningless. I had, as it were, […]come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction […] there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death – complete annihilation.

  It had come to this, that I, a healthy, fortunate man, felt that I could no longer live: some irresistible power impelled me to rid myself one way or other of life. I cannot say I wished to kill myself. The power which drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and more widespread that any mere wish […] All my strength drew me away from life. The thought of self-destruction now came to me as naturally as thoughts of how to improve my life had come formerly. And it was seductive that I had to be wily with myself lest I should carry it out too hastily […] it was then that I, a man favoured by fortune, hid a cord from myself, lest I should hang myself from the cross-piece of the partition in my room; and I ceased to go out shooting with a gun, lest I should be tempted by so easy a way of ending my life […]

  My mental condition presented itself to me in this way: my life is a stupid and spiteful joke someone has played on me […] I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning – Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort? […] One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud!

  […] I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about, wishing to find the road. He knows that each step he takes confuses him more and more; but still he cannot help rushing about.

  It was terrible indeed. And to rid myself of the terror I wished to kill myself […] The horror of darkness was too great, and I wished to free myself from it as quickly as possible by noose or bullet. That was the feeling which drew me most strongly to suicide.

  I found that for people of my circle there were four ways out of the terrible position in which we are all placed.

  The first was that of ignorance. In consists in not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity […]

  The second way out is Epicureanism. It consists, while knowing the hopelessness of life, in making use meanwhile of the advantages one has […]

  The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists, when one has understood that life is an evil and an absurdity, in destroying life. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead that to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope around one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater, and for the most part they act so at the best time of their life, when the strength of their mind is in full bloom, and few habits degrading man’s mind have as yet been acquired.

  The fourth way out is that of weakness. It consists in seeing the truth of the situation, and yet clinging to life, knowing in advance that nothing can come of it. People of this kind know that death is better than life, but, not having the strength to act rationally […] they seem to wait for something […]I found myself in that category […]This was repulsive to me and tormenting, but I remained in that position …

  *

  The Irish-Greek-American-and naturalized Japanese writer Lafcadio Hearn is one of the great eccentrics of literature. Starting out as a tabloid journalist specializing in the sensational and macabre in cities like Cincinnati and New Orleans, Hearn later went to Japan on assignment, and wound up staying, becoming the nation’s official spokesman to the West. In this excerpt, Hearn shows that the kind of Liebstodt we associate with Wagnerian excess is not foreign to the psyche of the Far East.

  From “The Red Bridal”

  LAFCADIO HEARN

  Falling in love at first sight is less common in Japan than in the West; partly because of the peculiar constitution of Eastern society, and partly because much sorrow is prevented by early marriages which parents arrange. Love suicides, on the other hand, are not infrequent; but they have the particularity of being nearly always double. Moreover, they must be considered, in the majority of instances, the results of improper relationships. Still, there are honest and brave exceptions; and these occur usually in country districts. The love in such a tragedy may have evolved suddenly out of the most innocent and natural boy-and-girl friendship, and may have a history dating back to the childhood of the victims. But even then there remains a very curious difference between a Western double suicide for love and a Japanese joshi. The Oriental suicide is not the result of a blind, quick frenzy of pain. It is not only cool and methodical: it is sacramental. It involves a marriage of which the certificate is death. The twain pledge themselves to each other in
the presence of the gods, write their farewell letters, and die. No pledge can be more pro-found and sacred that this. And therefore, if it should happen that, by sudden outside interference and by medical skill, one of the pair is snatched from death, that one is bound by the most solemn obligation of love and honour to cast away life at the first possible opportunity. Of course, if both are saved, all may go well. But it were better to commit any crime of violence punishable with half a hundred years of state prison than to become known as a man who, after pledging his faith to die with a girl, had left her to travel to the Meido alone. The woman who should fail in her vow might be partially forgiven; but the man who survived a joshi through interference, and allowed himself to live on because his purpose was once frustrated, would be regarded all his mortal days as a perjurer, a murderer, a bestial coward, a disgrace to human nature.

  *

  Werthermania understandably provoked a backlash. Thackeray’s spoof takes a very common sense view of superheated Romanticism.

  “Sorrows Of Werther”

  WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

  Werther had a love for Charlotte,

  Such as words could never utter,

  Would you know how he first met her?

  She was cutting bread and butter.

  Charlotte was a married lady,

  And a mortal man was Werther,