LAST WRITES:The Literary Suicide Cult

LAST WRITES:
The Literary Suicide Cult

"Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail."
from A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens

The dues are high for membership in the literary suicide cult. Not
everyone can join. Not everyone wants to.
At one time, alcoholism was considered the literary disease of choice.
It
still is considered one. Earlier in the last century, epilepsy and
syphilitic illnesses
were linked to creative genius. Today, bipolar disease and depression
are readily
associated with writers, poets and playwrights. According to University
of
California psychiatrist Frank Johnson, a noted expert in the realm of
creativity
and madness, "There's a long tradition regarding inspiration as divine.
The more
modern technological version of this in medical literature makes
madness the
condition for writing poetry or doing philosophy."
Why does the idea of a link between literature and madness have such
a
hold on popular belief? The common belief is that extraordinary
accomplishments in literature make the rest of us nervous. There must
be something psychologically different or wrong about a writer,
otherwise, we would
all be able to write and create. Since we all can't, then there surely
must be a
psychological reason for it. A problem. With them, not us. According to
Harvard
University psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg, "We either worship them
(creative
artists) or we're jealous."
According to Rothenberg, "If people think mental illness is
somehow
making them creative it gives them a reason not to try to get better."
It correlates
that the same applies to alcoholism and drug abuse.
But alcoholism, depression, bipolar disorders, epilepsy and
syphilitic
diseases all take a back seat to suicide. Suicide is the Nobel Prize of
literary
psychological illnesses.
Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, John Berryman, Virginia Woolf,
Sylvia
Plath and Anne Sexton all committed suicide outright, while others like
Delmore
Swartz and Dylan Thomas all acted sufficiently self-destructive so as
to reach the
same end.
The link between literary creative genius and madness has a long
history.
Aristotle mused, "Why is it that all men who are outstanding in
philosophy,
poetry, or the arts are melancholic?"
In his book, The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity
and
Madness Controversy, Arnold Ludwig notes that creative people who are
mentally ill find themselves, almost by default in the arts rather than
in business or the sciences. He opines that "artists" draw on the
facets of their mental illness as a source of inspiration, whereas in
these other fields, they can be a hindrance to productivity. Ludwig
researched more than 2000 case studies of distinguished
men and women, trying to determine what circumstances combine to create
this
exalted-order of creativity, that makes historians sit up and take
notice.
Whatever one chooses to believe, there is enough clinical evidence
to
support the fact that mental illness and creativity, as well as
addictions of many
different shapes and sizes go hand in hand. Without a doubt, the
farthest reaches
of mental illness and its tragic aftermath can be viewed on the
grandest scale
among many literary giants. These "giants" are all, sadly,
card-carrying members
of the Literary Suicide Cult.
The following are charter members of the Literary Suicide Cult:

Since her suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become known as The
High
Priestess of Suffering. Hailed as one of the most remarkable poets of
the past
century by many critics, she never overcame the sudden death of her
father, Otto,
when she was eight years old.
While attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts in
1953,
her talents as a writer won her a position as a visiting editor at a
national
magazine in New York. There she struggled with bouts of mental illness
and
depression. In the summer of 1953 she attempted suicide for the first
time, was
placed in a psychiatric hospital for six months and underwent shock
treatments.
While studying in Englandnin 1955, she married the English poet (later
to
become Poet Laureate of England) Ted Hughes. After she and Hughes
separated,
while living with her two young children in a small two-room flat in
London (an
apartment where her favorite poet William Butler Yeats once lived) she
left out a
plate of bread and butter and a glass of milk for her sleeping
children, took a
dozen sleeping pills and stuck her head into the oven and gassing
herself to death.
Perhaps expecting to be found and revived, she left a note behind with
the name
and telephone number of her doctor, asking that he be called. She
was
pronounced dead on February 11, 1963. She was just 31 years old.
.
Her novel, The Bell Jar, which dealt with mental illness, became a
cult
classic. In 1982 she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
Collected
Poems, edited by her husband.
* * *
At ten years old, Hart Crane made the decision to become a poet and
spent
the rest of his short life trying to live up to that ideal.
Despite his reputation as one of the leading poets of the Jazz
Age
(1920-1930) he was tormented with self-doubt about the output of his
work, his
talent and his place in literary history. His short life became as
series of drunken,
homosexual escapades.
He fled to Mexico to escape his past exploits and to write.
Although
funded by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, he was unable to
produce
any substantial work. Depressed and filled with dread about his return
home to
his family, he committed suicide by jumping off the stern of the ocean
liner
Orizaba off the coast of Havana, Cuba and drowned himself. His body was
never
recovered.
At the time of his death in April 1932, he was well on his way
to
becoming one of America's finest poets, based largely on his single
volume, The
Bridge. Fellow poet and critic Robert Lowell called Hart Crane, "The
Shelley of
my age."
* * *
America's 1954 Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway suffered
throughout his life with depression. "The real reason for not
committing suicide is
because you always know how swell life gets after the hell is over," he
wrote.
Hemingway struggled with his personal "hell" throughout his illustrious
literary
career.
The dark demon of suicide appeared in many of his works. In one of
his
first published short stories, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Hemingway
writes
about one of his characters attempting suicide because he is filled
with despair.
Besides his critical and commercial success, his crisp, unadorned
writing
style changed American Literature and brought a new, hard-bitten
realism to the
literary forefront. Despite his fame and fortune, things never got
"swell" for him.
In 1961, mentally depressed and physically ailing, Hemingway went to
his cabin
in the woods and blew his brains out with a shotgun.
* * *
No literary suicide was more public than Yukio Mishima's. He
committed
Japanese ritual suicide, seppuku (disembowelment and beheading) on
national
television before hundreds of political followers. He had one of his
chosen
political followers behead him after he gruesomely took his own
life.
One of Japan's first novelists to gain international acclaim and
commercial success, he wrote, "My heart's leaning toward Death and
Night and
Blood."
A right-wing political fanatic, he led a group of followers who
desired to
return Japan to its past days of glory and conquest under a royal
emperor's rule.
His suicide was in protest of the decay of his country's moral and
ethical fabric.
On the day of his suicide, he had just completed work on his most
widely
read and successful, multi-volume series of novels, The Sea of
Fertility.
* * *
Known as America's eccentric poet troubadour, Vachel Lindsay
took
numerous walks across the country, preaching his "gospel of beauty,"
and
distributing his pamphlet, Rhymes To Be Traded For Bread.
His book, The Congo and Other Poems, (1914) was an infectious blend
of
rhymes, religion and ragtime. For almost 20 years he toured the country
exciting
listening audiences and ultimately exhausting himself. His many
eccentricities,
included dining out in public with life-sized dolls seated at his
table.
At 53 years old, he became overwhelmed with the fear of poverty
and
plagued with self-doubt. Despite the vast number of his works in print,
he felt he
was being neglected by both critics and his former audiences. He
convinced
himself that he was a failure. Sitting down to dinner one evening with
his wife, he
committed suicide by ingesting Lysol.
* * *
For many of those enrolled in the literary suicide cult, suicide is
the way
out of a frustrating, unsuccessful career. But not so for Ross
Lockridge, Jr. He
studied at Indiana University, the Sorbonne and Harvard University,
earning the
highest honors and garnering much praise and prestigious awards.
From 1943 to 1945, while living in Boston, Massachusetts and teaching
at
Simmons College, he wrote Raintree County. Critics hailed the massive
book as
"The first real representation of American culture in fiction."
The book became an overwhelming critical and commercial success
following its publication. It was sold to the movies and a successful
film, starring
Montgomery Clift, was released.
Despite the massive success of his first and only novel, he put a
revolver
to his head and blew his brains out at the age of 31 years old in his
hometown of
Bloomington, Indiana, just two months after the publication of the
novel.
* * *
Unlike Ross Lockridge, Jr., John Kennedy Toole never achieved critical
or
commercial success during his short lifetime. In fact, it took nearly
20 years for
his novel, A Confederacy of Dunces to get published.
He wrote the humorous novel in the early 1960s when he was in
the
service. The book was rejected by almost all the major publishing
houses and
remained unpublished when he committed suicide in 1969 by hanging
himself.
His mother took up the cause of her only son's literary quest and
finally
persuaded the novelist Walker Percy to read it. Percy recommended the
novel to
the Louisiana State University Press, a scholarly publisher that seldom
accepted
novels.
They published the book in 1980. It became an immediate
commercial
and critical success. The New York Times Review of Books called it "A
masterwork of comedy." Toole, dead almost a dozen years by his own
hand, posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for the novel.
* * *
British novelist Virginia Woolf led an almost mythical literary life,
often
hob-nobbing with the world's literary lions. Her own novel, A Room of
One's
Own (1929) remains a classic.
Despite her many successes, she was forlorn by a passionless marriage
and
deeply depressed by the bombing of London by the Nazis during World War
II.
"They are destroying all the beautiful things," she wrote.
Despite her charmed literary and social life, in March 1941,
overcome
with depression and fearing for her sanity, she walked down to the Ouse
River.
There she stuffed several huge rocks into the pockets of her coat and
walked out
into the water to experience what she called, "The one experience I
shall never
describe." She drowned herself. Her body was not recovered until three
weeks
later after it had floated downstream.
* * *
Poet John Berryman was twice admitted to an alcohol treatment
center
during a brief five-month period. He emerged claiming to be fully
recovered and
that he had undergone a religious conversion.
He taught at both Harvard and Princeton Universities and his
collection of
poetry, The Dream Songs, won the prestigious National Book Award in
1969.
Tormented by doubts, fears and religious fanaticism, he leapt to his
death
from the Washington Avenue Bridge in his hometown of Minneapolis.
Literary
legend has it that he waved serenely to onlookers as he jumped. His
body landed
on the west side of the Mississippi River.
* * *
"My friends think I got well, but I didn't. I just became a poet,"
Anne Sexton
proclaimed. A poet, playwright and author of children's books, she won
the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1972 for Live Or Die. The suburban
housewife from
Massachusetts who learned how to write poetry after watching a public
television
educational program on writing sonnets had come a long way. But she was
never
able to outdistance the demons that plagued her.
She was part of a school of poets known as confessional poets.
Included
among them, were Robert Lowell, Maxine Kumin, W.D. Snodgrass and
Sylvia
Plath, who was close friends with Sexton. (Sexton, Plath and Kumin all
took a
writing class with Robert Lowell at Boston University in 1958.)
Her first book of poetry, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, explored
the
depths of her own mental deterioration and recovery, but as the title
implied, she
never fully recovered.
Her divorce, isolation and loneliness prompted her dependency on
prescription drugs and alcohol. She spent much of her life receiving
psychiatric
care and therapy. In 1974, after having lunch with fellow poet Maxine
Kumin, she
drove home and took her life by carbon monoxide poisoning.
* * *
Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1935 Richard Brautigan was a
novelist,
short story writer and poet. He was committed to a state hospital when
he was 20
years old for schizophrenic behavior and given shock treatments.
He moved to San Francisco and became part of the Beat Movement.
Trout
Fishing in America, his most well-known book, became an underground
classic.
Despite his many publications and several prestigious awards,
including a
grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he remained paranoid
and
depressed. Married and separated, he established residence in Montana
in 1972
and refused to grant interviews, lecture or teach for the next eight
years, although
he continued to publish.
In 1984, suffering from alcoholism and depression, he blew his brains
out
with a shotgun in his isolated cabin home. His body was not found for
several weeks.
* * *
Sara Teasdale wrote delicate, highly personal poetry. In her youth she
was
courted by the poet Vachel Lindsay who also committed suicide. Living
in New
York City, her marriage (not to Lindsay) lasted a mere two years. After
her
divorce, she lived in seclusion. She suffered from ill health most of
her life and
was bedridden for lengthy periods.
Her most famous book of poetry, Flame and Shadow, was published
in
1920. Even in this early work, death overshadowed the writing.
Her most famous poem, "I Shall Not Care," ("When I am dead and
over
me bright April Shakes out her rain-drenched hair...") was left behind
as her
suicide note to her female lover.
An extraordinarily sensitive woman and reclusive, she committed
suicide
by drowning herself in her bathtub in her New York City apartment 1933
after a
recent love affair had ended. She was 48 years old.
* * *
These writers represent some of the most talented and disturbed
in
the world of literature. W. H. Auden wrote that "A writer doesn't
finish writing,
he abandon's it." This too can be said of these artist's lives. They
did not finish
their lives, by their own hand they abandoned it.
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