Withdrawn Traces

by Sara Hawys Roberts

  Although many people are desperate to believe any evidence of Richey’s continued existence, it is fair to say that a large degree of scepticism surrounds the majority of these reported ‘sightings’. They are each largely based on one person’s reportage, and who knows how credible these witnesses may be, and how much their testimonies have been shaped by (possibly subconscious) wishful thinking?

  The only safe conclusion is that this variety of post-disappearance sightings from all over the globe is testament to the continued general fascination with Richey Edwards. It leads us to the central, over-arching question of this book: just what happened to him? And, specifically, and not over-fancifully, is it possible that the clues that he apparently scattered during his life could even help us to unravel the mystery of his vanishing?

  Chapter 12

  The Narrative Verdict

  ‘Meanwhile, the water suffers, though appearing to sleep

  And feels passing through its melancholy lethargy,

  The thousand shadows, with which it trembles endlessly,

  And which opens, in its surface, an enlarged wound.’

  Georges Rodenbach, ‘The Enclosed Lives’

  In his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning work, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker writes that humans live not just in the world of matter but in symbols and dreams: ‘His cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own self-worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper. And this means that man’s natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasures of incorporation and expansion, can be fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols and so unto immortality.’

  As conscious beings, says Becker, we are defined by our fear of death; our response is to pursue our own cosmic significance, in heroics. Human cultures are hero-systems, with various designated roles catering to varying degrees of heroism.

  Central to this book’s view of Richey Edwards has been precisely this aspect: namely, his blatant efforts to pursue his own transcendent symbolic meaningfulness, via the modern medium of rock music. Richey certainly knew the mechanics of the processes this involved; his sensibility emerging from academia and more broadly in postmodernity, a very self-referential and textually aware moment in our culture’s history.

  But Richey’s vision for what the Manic Street Preachers could signify was more deeply embedded in immortality-games and heroics than his three band members. By the third album he had parted narrative company with the other Manics, dissatisfied with their search for record industry success.

  For Richey, racked with lower self-esteem than his colleagues, the fear of death and its remedy in immortality were pressing matters of great urgency. Disillusionment with the less precarious path the band were taking saw him plunge into deep depression – his idealised self, defined by the drama and tragedy of a full-stop departure from the game, was incompatible with such mundanity.

  ‘Mental illness,’ says Becker, ‘is really a general theory of the failures of death-transcendence. The avoidance of life and terror of death become enmeshed in the personality to such an extent that it is crippled, unable to exercise the “normal cultural heroism” of other members of the society.’

  As we know, Richey’s personal mythology aimed far higher than his peers. But its failure, its coming apart, was all too public, and all the more painful for that. As James Dean Bradfield has said on many occasions, Richey just feared being thought a loser: ‘One thing I know is that towards the end, Richey became very obsessed with some kind of victory over himself. He really didn’t want to be a loser. But, because we haven’t got a clue what the fuck happened to him, people can’t take that as a testament in blood, that he failed or he succeeded. All I know is that, as I say, towards the end, he was totally obsessed with this idea of victory.’

  In the first half of 1994, leading up to his suicide attempt, it is possible to trace the deepening of his dread sense that his strategy was coming apart. He was faced with the prospect of keeping his head down in a mid-ranking careerist band in which he was not even the best guitar player. It would have been an excruciating compromise.

  We know that he had attempted suicide before, and so he may have done so again on 1 February 1995. The burning question now is whether we feel Richey spent the second half of 1994 reimagining his ‘hero-system’ in a way that allowed him to exit the band and survive. Imagining the specifics of what may have happened, there are many options, but they essentially boil down to three fundamental hypotheses.

  The first one, and the ‘common sense’ view of Richey’s fate that is held by the public at large and most Manics fans, is that he parked his car at the Severn Bridge and jumped into the waters of the Bristol Channel, his body drifting off never to be found.

  Richey’s condition in the months prior to February 1995 lends great weight to this suicide hypothesis. But it may also be thought to provide something of an alibi.

  The remaining Manic Street Preachers’ private opinions on Richey’s likely fate appear to be quixotic and somewhat self-contradictory. Strangely, they have managed to simultaneously hold to the firm conviction that he is likely still alive, while apparently not trying everything to trace their vulnerable friend and bandmate.

  James has commented, ‘I never think he’s dead. If it’s true, you feel like there’s got to be a body. It’s too easy to imagine that he’s not dead, that there’s been a rebirth of sorts. I’ve always been in love with rock ’n’ roll mythology, and I know I’m over-imaginative, but the scenario in my head is very vivid indeed.’

  In this, the Manics seem to be relying on several hopeful thoughts: that, placed beyond public view, Richey’s health problems did not worsen; that some harm has not been done to him by others; and that their own vivid imaginings in rock mythology have, in this instance, become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Apparently, the band hope Richey has overcome all obstacles in his desire to become a mythical figure. Yet in the weeks before disappearing, he was smashing his head against walls, lacerating his torso, and walking around London in slippers and pyjamas – very visibly unwell. What evidence is there to support their belief?

  This alternative theory that Richey Edwards survived is, of course, far more attractive, tantalising, and yet still impossible to prove.

  In 1991 comments for Vivid TV, Nicky Wire shared an intriguing vision of his future: ‘I just want a number one album in America, and then [to] retire to a concrete bunker like J.D. Salinger.’ Only a couple of years later, a member of his own band would pull off a disappearing act. We would be wilfully blind not to consider the obvious connotations.

  In the wake of The Catcher in the Rye’s phenomenal success, J.D. Salinger sought a completely private life, publishing his last fiction in 1965, and giving few interviews. His absence sparked the popular imagination, with numerous books and films charting attempts to track down the mysterious author. His self-imposed exile became a pillar of the Salinger mythology. Prior to Richey’s disappearance, the band mentioned Salinger more than once, always in relation to his bunker retreat.

  Speaking in 1991 to EP magazine, Richey said: ‘One of the best things I’ve ever read is J.D. Salinger. After his big success, The Catcher in the Rye, he locked himself away in a basement for twenty years. But he was still writing. He’s got stacks of manuscripts on his shelves, but no one’s ever seen them.’

  The interviewer asked: ‘Could you see yourself doing that?’ Richey replied: ‘I’d like to think so.’

  Is there a single instance of a rock band advertising the desire to suddenly vanish from view? It seems unprecedented. And yet, that one band who we know did indeed express such desires, and very clearly so, then went on to lose one of its members in circumstances of great mystery.

  Mythologising disappearance as a positive action was an idea very evident in the life and work of another of Richey’s favourite writers, William S. Burroughs. Anyone as familiar with Burroughs’s story as Richey knows that considerable stre
tches of his adult life were spent in exile in countries other than his native United States.

  Burroughs made a virtue of the act of ‘cutting’; not just textual or pictorial cutting, for which he was renowned, but severing ties with his immediate surroundings. Extending ‘cutting’ into the realm of personal relations, he pursued a personal freedom that involved leaving behind all that is familiar: one’s environment, closest people, previous life.

  Yet of all the writers, thinkers and cultural figures that Richey referenced, the likeliest candidate for a mythic typology that he may have emulated is French poet Arthur Rimbaud.

  Rimbaud completed his main work between the ages of 16 and 19, before turning his back on his life as a man of letters and vanishing from public view. He travelled the globe and settled in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), where he worked for an export company. Returning to France years later, to have his leg amputated, he passed away at the age of 37.

  James Dean Bradfield is sure that he personally introduced Richey to Rimbaud: ‘There is a kind of terrible irony there, because I remember I bought into the whole enigma of Arthur Rimbaud, the poet, when I was young. One of the only books I’d given Richey that he hadn’t read was A Season in Hell by Rimbaud, the book that created this interesting myth around the poet.’

  The remark seems to suggest that, had Bradfield not introduced into Richey’s consciousness the mythology of the exiled poet, things might have turned out differently. For the exile of writers like Rimbaud, Burroughs and Salinger suggest a route by which a living writer may experience a flavour of immortality while still alive.

  In those last months, Richey took definitive measures to link himself with Rimbaud. On tour in France in November 1994 he was interviewed for Melody Maker wearing a white boiler suit covered in lines of Rimbaud verse. As he peered into a tomb in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, the letters scrawled across his back read: ‘Once, I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed. Alas, the gospel has gone by. Suppose damnation were eternal! Then a man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?’

  Was this, in hindsight, a deliberately placed pointer, left for those seeking answers after his disappearance?

  Richey was also pictured wearing his Rimbaud overalls in the catacombs, a centuries-old series of labyrinthine tunnels dug beneath the streets of the French capital. Urban legend says the catacombs serve as the entrance to hell. Richey would have likely known that their officially designated entry-point, at Place Denfert-Rochereau, was chosen on account of the square’s original name: Barrière d’Enfer (Hell’s Gate).

  In the section of A Season in Hell entitled ‘Bad Blood’, Rimbaud distances himself from bourgeois standards, likening himself to various exotic races: Vikings, Mongols, Africans. He is compelled to overseas adventure: ‘My day is over; I’m leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs … I will be lazy and brutal.’

  These references prove Richey was at the very least cognisant of disappearance as a romantic trope. And on the day that he vanished, Richey left at the Embassy Hotel a box of texts which, blatantly and unequivocally, he knew would be deciphered in context with his vanishing that same day. The level of disappearance- and exile-oriented content in that box is extraordinary.

  If we make the assumption that the texts left in the Embassy gift box serve as a black box recording salvaged from the closing seconds of Richey’s journey as a Manic Street Preacher, then their contents provide details of his mind’s parting flight path.

  In a letter to Rachel, Jo listed the box’s contents from memory:

  Camino Real with Kilroy underlined (Tennessee Williams).

  Nietzsche.

  A rubbish book by a young middle-class girl telling me to write a book as an example of what could be published.

  Some sort of testament to socialism don’t know who the author is. An extract. Brilliant I thought.

  Photos of us, and W.B. Yeats’ house.

  Equus.

  And, of course, the Vadim Maslennikov note beside his bed. The author who disappeared without a trace! A book I regret giving him, just before the Thailand dates. He said in one of his letters that it was mind-blowing. Unusual for him to say something like that, I thought.

  One startling item is the ‘rubbish book by a middle-class girl’, with Richey’s accompanying recommendation that Jo write her own book. Presumably he meant a memoir, culminating in her time with him. This lends credence to her suspicion that Richey may have been ‘manipulating’ his experiences, even their moments together, to the point of ‘acting out’ for narrative effect.

  Tennessee Williams’s play Camino Real (1953) is a mythical-allegorical tale of trapped romantics caught in a small town surrounded by desert. Several are figures from history and literature – Lord Byron, Casanova, Don Quixote. The town, Camino Real, is both literally and metaphorically the end of the road for its characters, suggesting they are imprisoned in purgatory, or one of the circles of hell. But they retain some hope; if they stay alive, there is at least the potential for escape. As the Byron character says: ‘Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.’

  Richey underscored lines spoken by one character, Kilroy. He is an anti-hero but the audience roots for him. He neither understands nor accepts the rules of the situation and rages against his confinement, embodying American optimism and boldness. Before he becomes ‘an undistinguished member of a collectivist state’, Kilroy yearns to escape via the only possible way out – an aeroplane named Il Fugitivo.

  Peter Shaffer’s play Equus (1973) evidently held great importance for Richey, having also, as we have seen, been chosen as the vessel for his earlier suicide note the previous year. In the play, a mentally troubled youth, Alan Strang, blinds six horses by gouging out their eyes. The story revolves around his discussions with a psychiatrist, Dr Dysart, and Alan’s impact on the doctor, who comes to realise that his own life is safe, unimaginative and lacking passion. Alan, by contrast, has created his own mythology around ritual worship of the horse-as-god.

  A psychiatrist’s role is to render the abnormal normal, but the doctor admires Alan. Dysart has the option to ‘make this boy an ardent husband, a caring citizen, a worshipper of abstract and unifying God’, but comes to realise that straightening Alan out in this way is ‘more likely to make a ghost!’

  Nicky Wire reckons Richey arrived well-prepared for his dealings with psychiatrists, and his use of Equus prior to entering the Priory suggests as much. It also adds to the list of texts Richey referenced dealing with mental hospitals, psychiatry and madness – leading even his sister to question whether he may have willed himself into certain institutions.

  Another major theme is the relationship between young Alan and his parents. He divulges to the psychiatrist that his parents’ repressive nature forms the background to his sexual-religious worship of horses. The issue of a repressive Christianity plays a part, something that Richey hinted at several times in retelling his own upbringing, despite Rachel’s denial that any of the family attended church in Blackwood as much as Richey suggested.

  The theme of parent–child difficulties reoccurs elsewhere in the gift box. Jo’s item number 7 refers to Novel with Cocaine (1934), written by M. Ageyev, the nom de plume of a Jewish-Russian author, Mark Levi, then living in Istanbul. The teenage first-person narrator, Vadim Maslennikov, is self-absorbed, cruel, vicious and dislikeable – but completely honest. He has disdain for his mother, often lashing out at her. Jo recalls handing the book over to Richey at around the time of the Manics’ trip to Thailand in spring 1994, and says it became a shared favourite.

  Novel with Cocaine has fascinated Richey fans for the fact that its author handed over his manuscript for publication then fled without trace, never to be heard from again. Was this a duplicate scenario – Richey leaving a blindingly obvious heavy hint of his survival?

  If that notion seems tenuous, we can reveal an even more remarkable parallel. When Ageyev delivered his manuscript to a f
riend in Paris, he also gave them his passport. Similarly, on the evening before he disappeared, Richey was in his hotel room with a female friend, Vivian, and, according to reported remarks by Nicky Wire, made repeated offers for her to have his passport. Take it, he kept saying, he wasn’t going to need it. Surely no coincidence, considering a copy of the Ageyev book was lying right there in the room?

  Jo’s list failed to give more details on the book she described as ‘some ode to socialism’. Whatever it was, we could take it as a counterbalance to the kinds of politics usually associated with Friedrich Nietzsche.

  Nietzsche’s fabulist masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra fits perfectly with the running theme of exile, evident from its opening line, when a 30-year-old Zarathustra leaves his home for a new life in the wilderness. The prophet lives an ascetic existence for ten years, but – crucially – feels the strong compulsion to return, with new insights for humanity: