The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides: Dead Letters

by Gary Lachman

Gary Lachman investigates the many links between self-death and the written word, bringing together an unusual gallery of literary greats including Goethe, Hermann Hesse, Andre Breton, Thomas Chatterton, Walter Bejamin, and many more.

Genres: Nonfiction, Death, History, Biography

321 pages, Paperback

First published January 22, 2008

About the author

Gary Lachman is an American writer and musician. Lachman is best known to readers of mysticism and the occult from the numerous articles and books he has published.

Reviews

[Greg]

I should, many a good day have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given great pleasure to my mother-in-law; and, even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her - but I won't dwell upon these trifling family matters.

--Lord Byron

David Foster Wallace's short story "Good Old Neon" begins with the short declarative sentence, "My whole life I've been a fraud". I know one isn't supposed to read the author into the narrator of a story and all of that shit our high school English teachers blabbed on about but I'm fairly sure that DFW felt this way at times. I don't know if anyone can be extremely introspective and self-consious and not come to some similar conclusion. At another extreme I strongly doubt that someone like Donald Trump ever feels any cognitive dissonance or feels like he is a fraud even though half of the garbage out of his mouth (at least on his reality TV show, which for a couple of years I took a perverse pleasure in watching but then I stopped and now I'm not even sure if it is on anymore, now I only watch people punch other people in the face for reality TV) were superlative lies.

I think that Socrates dictum of "Know Thyself" can be fucking lethal.

Like in A. Alvarez's The Savage God (shameless plug to go read my review for the book), this book starts with the question of why does it seem like so many writers end up killing themselves? Alvarez as a fellow-traveller of the suicidally inclined writers (tried to kill himself, friend of Sylvia Plath and one of the last people to see her alive) had tried to unearth an answer. Gary Lachman appears to be curious about this too but his book devolves into a freak show mucking around in the gossipy underbelly of great writers lives while hoisting up contemptible writers as being unfairly misunderstood. I think the different approaches to dealing with the same topic is due to temperament. I don't know anything about Lachman as a person but I'd guess that he's never had much of a problem with depression, or if he has it's been of the wearing all black and brooding about existential questions style (I'm not being dismissive, I get this idea because he is a grown man who seems really really excited still over existentialism and by his point and laugh style of writing aimed at writers who have some serious issues at living day to day lives without falling to pieces). A quick look at the titles of his other books, which deal with the occult and conspiracy theories and I can't help but think of him as someone who still gets an adolescent tickle out of trying to shock people in (I can't think of a better word, all I can do is picture the way some of my friends and I acted when we were younger) 'angsty' ways.

I'm being a bit unfair though, two-thirds of this book is quite good, it's mostly when Lachman deals with the Manic-Depressive Suicides (Woolf, Plath, Sexton (I know you tried to defend yourself against charges of sexism by picking three women, but the defense was weak, and all three descriptions were pretty much boiled down to hysterical-woman)) and similarly with what seemed to me any of the anxiety-based suicides. In these parts of the book it felt like Lachman was trying really hard to get the reader to laugh at the ineptness of the subjects. Walter Benjamin is especially put through the wringer in a way that makes me think that Lachman had been badly treated as a young man by one of Benjamin's essays, or maybe it was an over-compensation because he has some kind of hero-worship of Benjamin..... I just had the realization that a lot of what I didn't like in Lachman's writing could be an overcompensation for not wanting to take the easy or obvious position. It's very easy to gloss away all the imperfections of person and see a writer as a genius who life treated unfairly, and a book of all adoration to writers who killed themselves would be off-putting and macabre. Similarly it is very easy to be dismissive of someone like Otto Weininger, but maybe in his case it's justifiable and attempts to make him be a misunderstood genius just don't work, no matter how many other intellectuals found some of his work enticing.

I don't know why the tone of the book is so uneven and that is my big complaint. I think I wanted more from this book, I don't know what, maybe I wanted Lachman to have some big answer for me, but this isn't a book with big answers, it's more of a darkly entertaining collection of stories about authors and a selections of short works either about suicide or by writers who ended up killing themselves.

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

--Dorothy Parker

[Mark]

The sheer wealth of material available for inclusion in Dead Letters suggests that writers are an unnaturally melancholy bunch, but why? Do writers draw inspiration from the waters of some specially poisoned well that sculptors, composers or, for that matter, pastry chefs know not to taste? To be sure, there are plenty of painters and actors and all manner of people who have offed themselves, and writers who choose not to kill themselves far outnumber those who do; but the roster of literary suicides is extensive, impressive and illustrious, so much so that the question is more than academic: what is it about literature that makes writers reach for their revolvers?

Author Gary Lachman’s exhaustive survey of writer-suicides manages a neat trick: witty without cruelty, sympathetic without becoming maudlin, serious without taking itself seriously, Dead Letters presents a taxonomy of self-destruction that allows the reader to meditate on the strangely circular relationships between reality and the written word, the written word and the writer, and the writer and the ungraspable phantasm of reality.

To call Dead Letters fun would be to diminish the gravity of its subject, but how else to describe reading about the many bizarre suicide methods Lachman chronicles? The ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles jumped into an active volcano. Polish writer Jan Potocki, convinced he had become a werewolf, filed the silver handle of a sugar bowl down to the shape of a bullet, had it blessed by a priest, and then shot himself with it. French poet Gerard de Nerval, most famous for walking a lobster on a leash through the Palais-Royal in Paris, hanged himself with an apron tie that he claimed was the Queen of Sheba’s garter.

Lachman divides his writers by the motives for their suicides, rather than by literary genres or historical periods, allowing him to jump back and forth across times and cultures. He identifies Romantic, Manic-Depressive, Political, Existential and Surreal suicides as classes, and also serves up ambiguous, fake, unsuccessful and possibly ironic suicides for our consideration. For instance, Mary Wollstonecraft unsuccessfully attempted suicide twice before she died in childbirth, making her death a quixotic non-suicide; as a teen, Graham Greene played Russian Roulette to relieve his boredom but never triggered a live round, so he’s not a suicide and not really even an attempted suicide, per se. Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, who published under a variety of pseudonyms, caused one of his pseudonyms to commit suicide in print, though he himself lived on. And what of the many writers like Jack Kerouac, who drank or drugged themselves to death slowly—suicide or not?

All of the famous suicides you already know are here—Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, John Kennedy Toole, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, Jack London—plus innumerable examples of lesser known and obscure writers who all reached the same conclusion. Lachman also offers poetry and prose about suicide from a variety of authors, the production of which gave some of them enough consolation not to commit the act itself.

Dead Letters may be a special interest collection, but for those especially interested, it’s a gem.

[Hind]

Let's see.

In all honesty, the book gives me mixed feelings. But let me comment that first of all, since I'm not familiar with the author nor his writing, I was impressed with the effort that was put to establish the relationship between writers and the written word which was, of course it was, the most important thing in their lives. Also showing how much some struggled in their lives. It seems there much effort put in the book, but for some reason I found it inconclusive in regards to few things.

I'm not sure what do I feel about the categorisations of suicide but I think it was a smart thing to do, and I also think he could've delved deeper into this and into the literary figures if perhaps the book was given enough time; or if he perhaps gave himself time to understand those he had written about, to give them room to elaborate on their lives and pains through their works that I'm not sure how much of it he read, to really have a bond with them, for I really think that perhaps then one could actually write about it.
No wonder suicide is one of the most onerous and demanding things to write about and perhaps the homework could've been done better(?).

There are few things he dismisses, and with regard to the women mentioned I was a little disappointed.
A good chunk of the book was great but I suppose that addressing manic-depression which sadly rendered these women into what seems to be the category of 'successful attention seeking spoiled little girls with daddy and mommy issues who were ruined because they will never feel they have enough love so they went hysterical' is what sort of unsettled me. There's more to these women, there is more to their mental states than one could see. And it is so hard to perhaps understand what they have gone through clearly. They suffered a lot and it seems that there was a dismissal of their agony. So that, I wasn't really keen on.
I know one can't be entirely objective writing this book, but since it was somehow subjective in nature, I think more could've been done, more emotions invested in such work. This could've been a great book.

But all in all I did somehow enjoy wrestling with the book and arguing with it contents.

[Colton]

Sometimes dull, but a thorough study.

[Zach White]

Something of a placeholder review until I've completed the book; this topic has interested me for a while, I've read the Savage God and have always taken a shining and longing for more information to a writer or artist who has struggled with depression, who has toyed with auto-death. This book, is well compiled, well researched.

At times, however, the thing preventing me from fully engaging with this book is the interjection of the author's personal beliefs about a subject. I do not know the author, his personal beliefs I do not feel are worthy of input among the breadth of the artists within the book. Whether it be Lachman maligning Marxism and the belief therein of Walter Benjamin (what relevance do you have to a discussion of the benefits and detriments of that movement, Lachman? Your interspersed personal beliefs drag me screaming from the purely historic relayment and conjecture you've been building), or what have you, but it's the purely personal opinions and conjectures that sit ill with me.

Why do I care what you think, Lachman? You've accrued a well studied collection of the lives of suicidals. Your opinion on political and social matters means nothing - while I understand a topic such as this is something you've clearly been enamoured with for years and you feel impelled to write yourself into the research as it's taken up some huge chunk of your life, when I read a line such as:

"How such a melancholy temperament, “born under the sign of Saturn, the star of slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays …” could align itself, however equivocally, with as superficial and shallowly optimistic a creed as Marxism, is only one of the many ironies in his short life."

I've not come to you for your opinions on political and social movements. Prove prior you have a reason to have come to that opinion and it will hold water; until then this is uninformed, blind personal interjections on what is primarily a collection of historical/literary essays - based in fact, not in interpretation. If it were based on interpretation, you would be expected to explain your thoughts and opinions. Don't drag your knuckles along the razors edge.

[Oliver Clarke]

I discovered this book as I scrolled down a list on AbeBooks looking for anything by or about Harry Crosby that I didn’t already own. Having a morbid, thus far psychologically unexplained fascination with authors that kill themselves, this seemed like a grail of a find, and I quickly ordered the book. I have just recently poured through it, and what struck me most was how in the introduction, Gary Lachman speaks of how he first thought perhaps of comping an encyclopedia of literary suicides. I was left thinking this may have been a better option.

This book is definitely fascinating, and it is well-written, but Lachman lets his own personal prejudice and opinion sour his work. Harry Crosby, who I consider a literary icon and essentially a model after which I wish to fashion my own life, is belittled by Lachman’s insults as a ‘narcissist’ a ‘spoilt rich kid’, while other suicidal authors are similarly called ‘juvenile’ or ‘romantic’. Lachman also has a propensity for using the term ‘blowing his brains out’, which I found a fairly unsympathetic way to describe what these authors had done. Suicide is an extremely serious subject, probably the most important philosophical question that can ever be asked, and to reduce it to this line, despite its violent poetry, is reductive.

Furthermore, Lachman continually describes the authors he discusses as selfish. As someone who, once romantically drawn to the idea of a death by one’s own hands, a life lived and ended by ones’ own means, was changed in their perspective by real life experience, I found this a fairly basic and boring and plain incorrect way to describe a suicidal mindset. This all being said, Lachman is obviously a talented and engaging writer, and the book is well organised in to a section on the kinds of literary suicides, a discussion of ten authors who killed themselves, and a compilation of works by and or about suicides and death. It would however, have been made better as a dictionary or encyclopedia, without the authors opinions infiltrating the work.

[Zac Hawkins]

Why is it all my favourite authors either committed the most dramatic, ostentatious suicides in all history or failed in their attempts and where plagued by misery and sadness for the rest of their days?
Either way, its a reassuring tradition that manic depression isn't a feature unique to myself among creatives, a statement I'm sure is obvious but sometimes needs reminding of.

[Jay Rothermel]

Lachman does a good job of not "printing the legend" of these famous self-murdering writers in his survey of two millenia of that activity in Europe and the U.S. Reasons for committing suicide are contradictory and testimony of its perpetrators is obviously untrustworthy. Testimony of survivors, likewise.

"In a grimly fascinating book, Let Me Finish, the German academic Udo Grashoff put together an anthology of suicide notes, gathered from police records. Reading these, it’s difficult to argue with A. Alvarez’s assessment, quoted earlier, of the “shabby, confused, agonized crisis which is the common reality of suicide.” The notes Grashoff collected suggest that the motivation for most suicides fall within a fairly limited purview: unrequited love, debt, shame, sickness, an intolerable domestic situation. They also confirm that the only thing to come of most suicides is a nasty mess for someone else to clean up...."

Some of Lachman's suicides add insult to injury for those they leave behind: not wanting to make a mass, they go to a hotel, or put rubber sheets on their bed. Both Mayakovsky and Cesare Pavese in the notes asked for no gossip.

Others just seemed to drift inexorably toward suicide until they ended up painting themselves into a corner, and felt they had to do it: Walter Benjamin.

The footnes are not without their black humor:

"29  On 25 March 1969, Assia Wevill copied Sylvia Plath by gassing herself and her two year old daughter by Ted Hughes, Shura, in the kitchen of their flat. Although ‘with’ Assia at the time, Hughes was having an affair with yet another woman, Brenda Hedden. Hughes himself remarked, “All the women I have anything to do with seem to die.” One wonders if he ever asked why that may have been...."

Lachman includes a useful anthology of literary extracts at the end, and an index.

[Willy Marz Thiessam]

A rambling and obsessive multitude of suicide. Suicide is here considered part of an art form. The writer as suicide. A such there is no point to any of it, just one episode delivered in all its glory and tragedy. Lachman writes well, but for all of the brilliant scholarship he seems to find suicide as the ultimate moment in a writers career. In most, even here in each episode he relates, it is more incidental and almost an accident of timing. No the suicide does not make the man, nor the woman niether, instead we have colourful death that is more of an invitation to rubberneck than gain anything meaningful.

[Burcu]

I came across this book after having written two pieces on literature and suicide myself. It focuses on the actual suicides of writers, poets, artists etc., about which I have my academic concerns. However, there's a lot of information stored in the pages of the book and as such it's one of the better references out there. The structure could be a bit tighter with such a great potential. Some names get more intense treatment than others (which is normal to some extent) but the reasons for such choices are unclear (other than, I guess, personal preference). Since the aim of the work seems to be an overall look on literary suicides both fact and fiction, I would expect more of an integrated and justified approach there as well. As it is, it seems a bit scattered to my liking. I'm also not too fond of the sometimes-too-personal-tone and the jaundiced views that seems to have slipped in between the lines, especially since the topic at hand is too sensitive to be dealt with dismissively.

[Jennifer Connatser]

AWESOME book!!!!!!!