Posted on 01/28/2008 7:01:32 PM PST by forkinsocket
From bullets, to poison and even swords, over the years writers have taken their own lives in an atonishing number of ways. Gary Lachman, a founding member of the rock group Blondie and now a full-time writer, explains ten fatal characters ‘So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.’’ T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland
1. Empedocles – jumping into a volcano
Legend says that Empedocles, one of the earliest Greek philosophers, killed himself by secretly jumping into Mt. Etna in Sicily; his idea was that the volcano would destroy his corpse and people would think he had been transformed into an immortal god and had been raised to the heavens. This ruse was uncovered, however, when Etna, not agreeing with Empedocles' plans, threw up his golden sandal.
2. Thomas Chatterton – poison
"The marvellous boy," as Wordsworth called him, committed suicide at seventeen, defeated in his battle against an uncaring, philistine London, which he had hoped to conquer after leaving his provincial, mercantile Bristol. Ignored or rejected by those who should have recognised his gift, Chatterton was left to starve in the archetypal garret, too proud to beg or even to accept help when it was offered. He struggled valiantly and defiantly, writing his poems, articles, and stories, sending them to editors, only for them to become lost in the wash of hackwork flooding Grub Street, or worse, printed without payment. Finally, his fate became unbearable and he decided to end it all, tearing his last poetry to bits in his death throes, succumbing to the arsenic he took that dreadful night of 23 August 1770 in Brooke Street, Holborn. There is a chance, however, that his death was really a result of an accidental arsenic overdose, which he took in order to cure a case of syphilis.
3. Heinrich von Kleist - gunshot
On 21 November 1811, on a grassy knoll overlooking the Lake Wannsee just outside Berlin, the playwright and novelist Heinrich von Kleist put a bullet through the heart of his companion Henriette Vogel, a 31-year-old woman with incurable cancer, and then placed the barrel of the gun in his mouth and fired.
4. Gerard de Nerval – hanging
A student of the occult, he was also famous for walking a lobster through the Palais-Royal in Paris. After two stays in an insane asylum and several bouts of madness, he finally hung himself with a filthy apron string he had carried for years and which he assured friends was really the Queen of Sheba’s garter.
5. Jack London – morphine overdose
Addicted to morphine and opium, London was a phenomenal drinker and was one of the first major writers to publicly confess to his alcoholism. In his passion for excess, it is easy to see a subliminal death-wish, a desire to pass beyond the limits of the self. London admitted to once almost drinking himself to death in a binge, and on another occasion, he stumbled into San Francisco Bay and “some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me.” London drifted for hours with the intention of letting himself drown, but sobered up in the end and was saved by a fisherman.
6. Virginia Woolf – drowning
Leaving Leonard Woolf what must rank as one of the most heartbreaking farewells (“You have given me the greatest possible happiness,” she told him. “You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came…”), on 28 March 1941, after filling her pockets with stones, Virginia walked into the river Ouse, near their home, Monks House, in the village of Rodmell in Sussex, and drowned herself.
7. Ernest Hemingway – gunshot
Hemingway was a writer with an interest in the question of suicide, a question which he eventually answered by blowing his brains out, although there is good reason to believe that the electro-shock therapy he received as treatment for his depression, and which left his memory and his ability to write in ruins, was what finally sent him over the edge.
8. Sylvia Plath – gassing
On the night of Sunday 11 February 1963, after leaving them glasses of milk and slices of bread for breakfast, although they were too young to feed themselves, Sylvia opened the window of her children’s room in her maisonette at 23 Fitzroy Road, in the Primrose Hill area of North London. Then she carefully sealed off her kitchen door on the floor below with towels and adhesive tape, left a note on the pram to call her doctor, laid out a cloth for a pillow, turned on the gas and put her head deep inside the oven.
9. Anne Sexton - gassed herself in her car
Divorced, living alone, estranged from friends and family, she had been emptied by her misery, and her alcoholism had deadened her creativity. Her suicide, though not unexpected was a surprise. There was no note, no warning. After a final lunch with her long time friend Maxine Kumin, at which she seemed normal, at least for her, Anne, got into her car in her garage and turned on the ignition. The radio was playing. It was the act, her therapist wrote, of a lonely and despairing alcoholic.” In a tribute to her in the New York Times, Erica Jong wrote, “Anne Sexton killed herself because it is too painful to live in this world without numbness, and she had no numbness at all.”
10. Yukio Mishima – hara-kiri
On 25 November 1970, before a literally captive audience, Mishima performed hara-kiri. His lover and disciple Masakatsu Morita, who would also attempt hara-kiri, after several attempts failed to decapitate Mishima as planned, leaving incomplete the kaishakunin part of the ritual, aimed to relieve the agony of disembowelment. Both received their finishing touches at the hands and sword of a third member of Mishima’s Tatenokai (Shield Society), a kind of private army that Mishima hoped would be a model for a new, right-wing Japan, recapturing the samurai glories of old.
Extracted from The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides: Dead Letters by Gary Lachman, published by Dedalus on February 7, 2008, priced at £9.99.
Interesting take on the work.
Millions of people read the National Enquirer. Millions of Big Macs are eaten every day.
"Popular" does not equal "good".
L
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