Suicides

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Suicides

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1LolaWalser
Redigerat: mar 19, 2012, 9:34 pm

René Crevel (1900-1935), "face of an archangel", dead at 35... At fourteen, his distraught mother dragged him to witness the suicide of his father, body still hanging... According to some, that's what triggered Crevel's "hatred of women" and, mutatis mutandis, homosexuality.

André Breton, Salvador Dali, René Crevel, Paul Eluard:



Suicide: by gas. In his first novel, Détours, there's this sentence: Une tisane sur le fourneau à gaz ; la fenêtre bien close, j'ouvre le robinet d'arrivée ; j'oublie de mettre l'allumette. (A pot of tea on the range; window well shut, I open the gas; and forget to light it.)

2LolaWalser
Redigerat: mar 19, 2012, 9:33 pm

Seneca the Younger, (4 BCE-64 BCE), was ordered to commit suicide by his erstwhile pupil and later emperor, Nero, but as a stoic he must have considered such a fate many times before... especially when one remembers that in his life he saw the comings and passings of Caligula, Claudius and Nero...

The death of Seneca from Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea

In this production, Matti Salminen is got up too Gandalf-y for my taste, but his voice is so marvellous it pays to hear it, even if you must close your eyes.

(The best production of Poppea I ever saw featured a Seneca wholly naked at his death.)

Suicide: cut his veins in a bathtub, same as Petronius Arbiter.

3MyopicBookworm
mar 20, 2012, 9:35 am

What a depressing thread.

I did once read a book by Yukio Mishima.

4LolaWalser
mar 20, 2012, 9:45 am

What isn't depressing?

There'll be lots of Japanese here.

5varielle
Redigerat: mar 20, 2012, 3:15 pm

I'm sure there'll be lots of Hungarians too though none spring to mind at the moment. How about a little Hemingway? (1899-1961) Weapon of choice, a shotgun in the mouth. I seem to recall he pulled the trigger with his toe.

6LolaWalser
Redigerat: mar 20, 2012, 4:45 pm

That's right, hello, Papa!

It wasn't his first attempt, was it?

7theaelizabet
mar 20, 2012, 5:18 pm

I don't remember whether or not it was his first attempt. It was, however, similar to his father's suicide, wasn't it?

8LolaWalser
mar 20, 2012, 5:44 pm

I forgot about his father, right.

9LolaWalser
Redigerat: mar 20, 2012, 7:25 pm

Sergei Esenin, (1895-1925), appeared and disappeared like a particularly bright, terrifying comet. In thirty years of life he became famous, notorious and so beloved, droves of mostly young people followed him into death.

His last days and dying were a protracted, painful drama. One day he cut his veins and wrote his last poem, in his blood. (When I was a teen I heard from teen friends he had written it on the wall of his room; that's not true. He wrote on paper and gave it to a friend who looked at it only days later.) Later that day he hanged himself, but apparently didn't die immediately. He was also extensively burned by the heating pipe to which he had attached the rope.

The suicide poem, До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья (Goodbye, my friend, goodbye) ends with a famous couplet:

В этой жизни умирать не ново,
Но и жить, конечно, не новей.

(In this life, to die is nothing new, but living's hardly more original.)

Vladimir Mayakovsky replied with a poem ending with

Для веселия планета наша мало оборудована.
Надо вырвать радость у грядущих дней.
В этой жизни помереть не трудно.
Сделать жизнь значительно трудней.

(Our planet's not much for happiness.
One must snatch joy from fleeing days.
Dying is easy;
To live is difficult.)

Less than five years later Mayakovsky too would kill himself.

What grabbed me about this posthumous exchange--apart from the fascination and mystery of the personalities and the times--is that they are both right, and they are both always right.

Esenin on deathbed:



10LolaWalser
mar 20, 2012, 5:53 pm

It's interesting that "deathbed" doesn't really refer to the object--bed--does it. I mean, it's not like we carry around life-beds and death-beds; usually it's one and the same. So your ordinary bed becomes a "deathbed" if you happen to die in it, or even if (as I suppose in Esenin's case) people just deposit you in it, for the time being, until they take you away etc.

11LolaWalser
mar 20, 2012, 6:15 pm

The end of life, changing people and objects: body into corpse, things into death-things.

Things belonging to the living never seem quite so inanimate. It's as if our perception includes them into the living person.

I have a friend who thinks--or believes--that we are "shimmers" in a cosmic Consciousness; I never could understand what he meant, but now, maybe...

Ooops, no, lost it.

12LolaWalser
Redigerat: mar 20, 2012, 8:03 pm

Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855), someone said, was "an incurable dreamer who preferred night to day, theatre to reality, Platonic passion to domestic economy, death to life". He said: "Dream is a second life."

He famously took out a live lobster on walks in the streets of Paris. He struggled with dire poverty. The loss of his mother when he was two affected him profoundly.

He battled with his devils long and valiantly--poetry, he said, kept him sane--but one night in January 1855 he lost.

Suicide: by hanging.



His last note, to his aunt: Ne m’attends pas ce soir, car la nuit sera noire et blanche. (Don't wait for me this evening, for the night will be dark and frosty.)

13varielle
mar 20, 2012, 7:26 pm

>6 LolaWalser: Papa H's wife had found him toying with a shotgun in the weeks or months prior and had managed to get it away from him and if I recall had him hospitalized for a while. Since he finally offed himself at 7 o'clock in the morning I guess he figured she would still be asleep.

14theaelizabet
mar 20, 2012, 7:40 pm

>12 LolaWalser: Nerval was the inspiration for the character of Lobster Man in Sam Shepard's early play Cowboy Mouth.

15LolaWalser
Redigerat: mar 20, 2012, 7:55 pm

#13

Wasn't Papa H a full-blown depressive all his life? At least I picked up that impression somewhere...

#14

I didn't know that, never read Sam Shepard. Whoda thunk it, the guy in Stetsons and undershirts hommaging the greatest French Romantic!

Wait, I can see it--boy grows up in some cactusy desert, and the weirdest thing he knows of is this ratty little book of luminously insane poetry--the daughters of fire, the tenebrous one, the Gothic arcana, the Un-consolation...

16varielle
mar 20, 2012, 8:11 pm

Papa H was treated for depression over the years partly fueled by alcohol, but also from some sort of inherited disorder that caused there to be too much iron in the blood. Maybe you medical types can explain it. He underwent shock treatments not too long before he died.

17LolaWalser
mar 20, 2012, 8:25 pm

Ack, hemochromatosis? Bad combo with alcoholism.

18Makifat
mar 21, 2012, 2:49 am

Let's not forget Cesare Pavese. His diaries (This Business of Living) seem to reveal the inevitability of his own end.

19Randy_Hierodule
mar 21, 2012, 8:05 am

5. I wonder what the last thing was went through his mind?

20Randy_Hierodule
Redigerat: mar 21, 2012, 10:12 am

What about those who, after having devoted their lives to gravity, hurl themselves like a challenge into the face of it: Herman Scheffauer, John Berryman, Gilles Deleuze.

Scheffauer was a fin-de-siecle poet of German ancestry and sympathies. He was based in San Francisco and knew Ambrose Bierce and George Sterling. If he is remembered at all, it is as an early translator of the works of Thomas Mann. Rimbaud in Les Illuminations wrote, "Je ne pourrai jamais envoyer l'Amour par la fenêtre" (I could never throw love out the window). Neither could H.G. Scheffauer: he murdered his lover and then threw himself out the window. H. L. Mencken records of Scheffauer that "in 1926 he began to show signs of mental aberration, and in 1927 he committed suicide in Berlin. He took himself off in a really gaudy manner, first cutting the throat of his woman secretary and then jumping out of a window."



Academic philosopher Gilles Deleuze also defenestrated himself.

American poet John Berryman (Whom we can name a candidate for the beard thread - along with Hemingway, if certain academics would have it theirway): Initiated into the cult of the savage god at an early age, he sacrificed himself by jumping off a bridge at 57.


21LolaWalser
Redigerat: mar 21, 2012, 8:46 am

Well we are up early for this morbid task! Who's the bearded one? He wins intro to another thread too. (Edit: okay, Berryman!)

I do not know H. G. Scheffauer, who, what?

Egon Friedell also died by self-defenestration, minutes before jackbooted thugs thumped on his door (in 1938).

There'll be several lovers' pact suicides--although it's not clear how agreeable both sides were to it, in the case of Osamu Dazai and Heinrich von Kleist.

#18

Out of my heeeeead!

Pavese is special, he gets a post all to himself.

22Randy_Hierodule
Redigerat: mar 21, 2012, 10:56 am

The Kleist pact is echoed well in a story whose title and author escape me - a sleeper awakes in the countryside to the spectacle of a haughty Spanish caballero swiftly riding toward him. The knight invites the stranger to a humble cottage and tells him his woeful and shameless story - he is a coward who preyed off his mistress - a young noblewoman - whom he failed to attend at a promised joint suicide assignation. Hoffmann? For some reason, I think the author may have been a Japanese.... Any idears?

23LolaWalser
mar 21, 2012, 8:56 am

Was he sleeping beneath a tree filled with skulls?

DAMNABLY familiar, that story... but sorry, nothing specific. Valle-Inclan? Stevenson?

24Randy_Hierodule
Redigerat: mar 21, 2012, 4:46 pm

Not RLS (The Suicide Club!) and I don't think it was RVI (His nobleman was an ass, but lovable) either... - it concludes with the ghost of his mistress returning to drive him to transcend his life of braggadocio and for once - and at last - keep true to his word.

25Randy_Hierodule
Redigerat: mar 21, 2012, 1:48 pm

19: On a related note: Ambrose Bierce entered Mexico and disappeared. There is nothing but speculation as to what became of him: murder, suicide, Assumption into Heaven.

Poet, mentor to Clark Ashton Smith, and inveterate assassin of small animals, George Sterling followed his wife Carrie's lead in death (who followed her houseguest, Nora French's), by swallowing cyanide.

26LolaWalser
Redigerat: mar 21, 2012, 10:37 am

This is getting spooky--I was planning a thread on vanishings.

Your story, could it be Dumas?

27varielle
mar 21, 2012, 10:36 am

Here's a suicide song to ruin your day. "Goddamn You, Jim" by the Felice Brothers. http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Felice+Brothers+You+tube+damn+you+jim&vi...

28Randy_Hierodule
mar 21, 2012, 10:44 am

26: Neti, neti (nope).

29Randy_Hierodule
Redigerat: mar 21, 2012, 11:34 am

26: A thread on curious deaths might be of value as well (TN Williams, Marcel Schwob, Catulle Mendes - batches of 'em).

27: Thank you for that! In my to buy pile. I love those creepy rustic suicide/murder songs: Dock Boggs' and Nick Cave's catalogs come to mind as well as songs like Jimmie Rodgers' 'Gambling Bar Room Blues (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=078MsA9m2t0), and Frank Crumit's "Frankie and Johnnie" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwI76gO1v90&feature=related - Jerry Lee Lewis does a great version as well; Johnny Cash, uncharacteristically, gives the tune a Disney ending).

God forgive me, I almost forgot Mr Pat Hare: I'm Gonna Murder My Baby (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E26dBq-98Po).

30LolaWalser
Redigerat: mar 21, 2012, 11:27 am

Do it, do it! (curious deaths--not my province, but I'll keep an eye out for 'em)

#27 et al.--ahhh, one can tell spring is here.

31dcozy
mar 22, 2012, 2:10 am

How about suicides caused by ridiculous, not to say noxious, political beliefs: I'm thinking, or course, of Yukio Mishima?

32dcozy
mar 22, 2012, 2:11 am

And there there's always Hart "Man Overboard!" Crane. (I stole that from Gore Vidal.)

33Makifat
mar 22, 2012, 2:47 am

32
Isn't it true (ironically so) that Crane had a filial relationship with the inventor of Lifesavers candy? It brings to mind the Marx Brothers movie in which the woman falls into the water and shouts for a lifesaver. Groucho, unwrapping a candy and tossing it to her, is only too happy to oblige.

34Randy_Hierodule
Redigerat: mar 22, 2012, 8:49 am

Someone (5) asked about Hungarians:

Geza Csath. His check out had much in common with his nasty decadent stories (collected in The Magician's Garden). He shot his wife, then slashed his veins and ingested poison.

Sandor Marai, author of Embers and Casanova in Bolzano, etc., left Hungary after the second world war and settled in Italy, then, finally, in the United States. After suffering great personal loss and ill health, he shot himself in 1989 at age 88.

(On a side note, and a not altogether irrelevant one - suicide and Hungarianwise - I used to take my taxes to an Hungarian emigre who had served in his local Luftwaffe during the war. He died of old age. I owe a lot this year...).

35LolaWalser
mar 22, 2012, 9:19 am



All suicides are equal! We cannot judge the motivation! Well, we can and do, but in my opinion it's usually absolutely impossible to figure out the entire constellation of "reasons", circumstances and random little things that led to it.

Mishima, like Dazai, seems to have been one of those "in love with death". How does one tell whether his cast of mind led him to his politics, or vice versa...

36Randy_Hierodule
Redigerat: mar 22, 2012, 10:44 am

The last sentence of Nadja: "Beauty will be convulsive or not at all". An abrupt transformative event, after which interpretation is all that's left; the report of the big bang.

Something born of and bearing raw passion - in the event of suicide, an expanding absence that commands and devours all attempts at interpretation. Memory may not serve, but wasn't one of the ideas in Alvarez's book, The Savage God, that a career of poetry might be an hermeneutic convulsion? A struggle with an angel?

37LolaWalser
Redigerat: mar 22, 2012, 11:11 am

There's certainly a strong temptation to romanticise--this may not be the best word--to "tell a story" around the self-inflicted deaths of, specifically, poets (whether their medium was verse, prose, or life). To sing it, in a way, to epicise it.

When you look at Esenin and Mayakovsky, there's the gory reality, the harsh history, the unseen part of the iceberg, but stronger than that is the fantastic dramatic pas de deux which so inflamed my teenage self and friends (and countless others through time). It is like a performance and it becomes a performance, a living opera, l'opéra brut!

So yes, a career of poetry seems to cast a unique light and meaning on the suicide, unlike that of any other.

38varielle
mar 22, 2012, 11:31 am

If you count the ones who drank themselves to death or O.D.ed by accident we would have an incredibly lengthy thread.

39Randy_Hierodule
Redigerat: mar 22, 2012, 2:11 pm

There is a compulsion to know, which is to say, to explain, to make sense. To me, there seems to be no way around it. To the eye, there is only a perfectly round, perfectly scrubbed hole in a ceiling. The mess is gone, the body is buried, but the hole seems (emphasis on seems, I concede) to command a response, a narrative: beginning, middle, end: why? The event, to romanticize, is a shrubbery burning in the desert. It changes everything. To my eye, there is no meaning to anything and any light is a painterly light. Perhaps what a lovely thing, in anguish, to paint and die? Most of us get a job and move on.

As to all suicides being equal. I'm not convinced. Bloated grice, who would otherwise prefer to live - to name one, Hermann Goering - , take a tepid Roman bath to avoid a romantically just hanging, whereas persons uncounted - to name one, Walter Benjamin - who would otherwise prefer to live, do the deed to avoid being thrown to the mercy of the swine.

40citygirl
mar 22, 2012, 2:25 pm

This thread isn't some sort of suicide note, is it? Just checking.

I feel so boring now. I was just going to die in my sleep, 50 or so years from now, but now I feel pressure to think more flamboyantly.

41Randy_Hierodule
mar 22, 2012, 2:29 pm

Look both ways before you cross the street, darlin'. I get off at 5 (speaking of boring ;).

42LolaWalser
mar 22, 2012, 3:00 pm

#40

GOOD QUESTION!

(kidding, kidding...)

#39

No, Ben, I agree--certainly not the same, in fact I was thinking about Tolstoy's opening to Karenina--"every suicide is unhappy in its own way".

Absolutely not the same, then, but equal to me for the purposes of the thread (i.e. it doesn't matter whether Mishima killed himself because of his politics or this or that in order to list him). In connection with this, I was perplexed and annoyed by reading in a popular book on depression the claim that all suicides are a result of depression.

I think it is possible to kill oneself out of happiness, and joyfully.

It is possible to be happy and wish to stop living, perhaps precisely because one is happy.

#38

True dat!

43Randy_Hierodule
mar 22, 2012, 7:15 pm

And "nothing is funnier than unhappiness." Maybe that could be the lead in to my morts bizarres?

44LolaWalser
mar 22, 2012, 8:11 pm

Your call entirely...

Awaiting the bizarre ones monkeybrite.

45dcozy
mar 22, 2012, 8:23 pm

Something I wrote a few years ago about Mishima, or, more precisely, about a book that was sort of about Mishima: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fb20060521a1.html

46LolaWalser
mar 23, 2012, 1:28 am

Very interesting, David, thanks! So is that how the Japanese see Mishima, as a bit of a buffoon? Is he read much there? I had read a couple minor novels, didn't particularly grab me, but then Confessions of a mask left a tremendous effect, translated and all.

47dcozy
mar 23, 2012, 4:11 am

Japanese tend to tell me that Mishima is very difficult. This perplexed me at first, because in English translation he never seemed very difficult at all. Apparently, though, in Japanese the Chinese characters he employs are a bit arcane, at least to the run-of-the-mill Japanese reader.

(Thanks, spellchecker, for changing "Mishima" to "mismatch.")

48LolaWalser
Redigerat: mar 23, 2012, 3:36 pm

Thanks, spellchecker, for changing "Mishima" to "mismatch."

Ha. In Clive James' piece on Fellini, at least in the edition I had, Milo Manara was renamed "Marinara"--four times on half a page. It could have been the spellchecker (and down the line, some wretchedly bad editor, if any was employed), or it could have been James himself, I've never seen collected in one place so many errors of fact, and grammar and spelling in foreign phrases.

49dcozy
Redigerat: mar 23, 2012, 9:00 pm

Coincidentally, one of the most typo-ridden books I've read was the New Directions edition of Mishima's Patriotism. I wrote about it here (message #34): http://www.librarything.com/topic/81276#1804668

50LolaWalser
apr 10, 2012, 9:01 am

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) once hoped to use medicine to discover the soul.

And I just discovered this poem I knew since childhood is by him:

Dream-Pedlary

IF there were dreams to sell,
What would you buy?


Apparently he was obsessed by death all his life.

Suicide: by poison.

Critics have said:

"No nineteenth century English poet with whom I am acquainted, ever promised more and performed less than Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose verse, like his life, was a wayward fragment…"

"“‘Death’s Jest Book’ is a nightmare rather than a drama, and should be judged, if one must judge it, for what it is, not for what it might be, or should be."

Innnnteresting.

51varielle
apr 10, 2012, 11:25 am

It appears the Japanese have a suicide hot spot near Mt. Fuji. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2127414/The-suicide-forest-Japan-Mystery...

52LolaWalser
apr 10, 2012, 11:36 am

And again the Japanese weirding out everyone else!

A hundred a year... I suppose they can't very well patrol the whole forest 24/7.

But it seems people go there expressly to commit suicide, which is a bit different from living someplace everyone is killing themselves.

I expect the proximity of Mt. Fuji may be a factor... (In spot choice, not the reason for suicide.)

Mr Hayano believes it is a symptom of an increasingly impersonal and lonely way of life that emerged with the internet.

With you there, Hayano-san.

53dcozy
apr 11, 2012, 2:57 am

The Japanese culture preference for suicide vs. The American cultural preference for homicide.

Discuss.

54LolaWalser
apr 11, 2012, 9:10 am

Introverts vs. extroverts? :)

55gilroy
apr 11, 2012, 12:05 pm

I thought this thread was going to be about the drinks...

56tomcatMurr
apr 11, 2012, 12:23 pm

53> lol

57Sandydog1
maj 15, 2012, 11:02 pm

54> lol

59Randy_Hierodule
Redigerat: maj 16, 2012, 11:37 am

One of the more interesting curious deaths (which would, if it has not already, make an interesting novel) was that of Victor Segalen, author of Rene Leys. He was found dead in a forest, an open copy of Hamlet near his corpse:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/aug/15/making-a-fetish-of-mystery/...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11625282

60mousse
maj 16, 2012, 12:37 pm

Hi, I usually don´t post, just lurk. Anyway:
Primo Levi: It is 25 years since he died. He had fallen down the stairwell of his apartment block. Many belive he killed himself.
But he left behind one of the most compelling accounts of surviving Auschwitz-If this is a man.

61LolaWalser
maj 16, 2012, 2:30 pm

#58

"Death" and "humor" together in tags: good sign.

#59

Most interesting, would love to read the medical article. Sticky with blood & wounded ankle--wtf? What did he die of exactly?

#60

There are two kinds of suicides I find especially unsettling: that of children, and Holocaust survivors. The former seem too young to have suffered so much, the latter seem to have survived the most anyone can suffer.

Paul Celan. Bruno Bettelheim.

62Randy_Hierodule
Redigerat: maj 16, 2012, 3:43 pm

Unknown. The NIH article concludes that based upon a study of his literary characters, that suicide is the likely cause of death - but nothing more precise than that.

63LolaWalser
jul 15, 2012, 5:37 pm

Vsevolod Garshin lived only 33 years (1855-1888), but in that time he experienced war, as a soldier against the Turks in the Balkan campaign, literary fame, and mental sanatoriums. I recently read a story of his (Attalea Princeps), a lovely fable about a tropical tree trapped in a northern botanical garden, who decides to escape at any cost, and begins growing, skyward.

It doesn't end happily.

Garshin jumped from the fifth floor and took some days to die.

The Wikipedia entry has a link to an article about a curious instance of mass hysteria prompted by one of his public readings: From Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture

64jbbarret
jul 18, 2012, 9:08 am

On Suicide by David Hume published by Penguin, Great Ideas