It Brings On Many Changes
The association between writers and despair looms so large that the artist Aaron Krach once spent a week checking books out of the New York Public Library, stamping the title page of each with the phrase “The author of this book committed suicide,” then displaying the results at an art gallery before returning the items to the library, where they presumably continue to circulate. Looking over the names of the 50 or so authors he included, my first response was to wonder how many others he’d missed.
Killing one’s self is a hell of an occupational hazard. But I’ve come to believe that writing can also be a way to resist suicide.
-- Lois Leveen at The Millions.com
In this little essay on suicide and literature, we also get this striking anecdote from Evelyn Waugh's failed suicide attempt.
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When Evelyn Waugh was in his early 20s, he was plagued by writerly despair. After sending a few chapters of his first novel to the writer Harold Acton and receiving a less-than-praising response, Waugh burned up the entire draft. He’d just quit a miserable job only to have a more promising one fall through. His friends all seemed to be launching into successful lives, while he was not. Recalling a line from Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris, “The sea washes away all human ills,” he copied out the quotation in Greek, carefully checking to ensure every accent was correct, and left it on the beach one moonlit night, beside all his clothes, while he swam out to sea to end it all.
But in a perfectly Waughian moment, as he swam he felt a sting in his shoulder. Then another. And another. The water was full of jellyfish. Their attack was so painful, he turned and swam to shore, donned his clothes, tore up the note, and went back to being alive. It’s a wry story as Waugh recounts it in "A Little Learning", the autobiography of his early life, but also a surprisingly poignant one, underscoring how easy it could have been for a temporary despondence to result in something as permanent as death.
-- L. L.
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Killing one’s self is a hell of an occupational hazard. But I’ve come to believe that writing can also be a way to resist suicide.
-- Lois Leveen at The Millions.com
In this little essay on suicide and literature, we also get this striking anecdote from Evelyn Waugh's failed suicide attempt.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
When Evelyn Waugh was in his early 20s, he was plagued by writerly despair. After sending a few chapters of his first novel to the writer Harold Acton and receiving a less-than-praising response, Waugh burned up the entire draft. He’d just quit a miserable job only to have a more promising one fall through. His friends all seemed to be launching into successful lives, while he was not. Recalling a line from Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris, “The sea washes away all human ills,” he copied out the quotation in Greek, carefully checking to ensure every accent was correct, and left it on the beach one moonlit night, beside all his clothes, while he swam out to sea to end it all.
But in a perfectly Waughian moment, as he swam he felt a sting in his shoulder. Then another. And another. The water was full of jellyfish. Their attack was so painful, he turned and swam to shore, donned his clothes, tore up the note, and went back to being alive. It’s a wry story as Waugh recounts it in "A Little Learning", the autobiography of his early life, but also a surprisingly poignant one, underscoring how easy it could have been for a temporary despondence to result in something as permanent as death.
-- L. L.
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