A.
Alvarez
THE ART OF SUICIDE
After Stephane MaUarme, after
Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Mo–
reau, after Puvis de
C
havannes,
after our own verse, after aU our
subtle colour and nervous rhythm,
after the faint mixed tints
.
of
Conder, what more is possible?
After us the Savage God.
-W. B.
YEATS,
The Trembling
of the Veil.
To put it most simply: one of the most remarkable features
of the arts
in
this century has been the sudden, sharp rise in the
casualty rate among the artists. Of the great premodernists,
Rim–
baud abandoned
poetry
at the age of twenty, Van Gogh killed
him–
self, Strindberg went mad. Since then the toll has mounted steadily:
in the first great flowering of modernism, Kafka wanted to tum
his
premature natural death from tuberculosis into artistic suicide by
having all his writings destroyed. Virginia Woolfe drowned herself,
a victim of her own excessive sensitivity. Hart Crane devoted pro–
digious energy to aestheticizing his chaotic life - a desperate com–
pound of homosexuality and alcoholism - and finally, thinking
him–
self
a failure, jumped overboard from a steamer in the Caribbean.
Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan drank themselves to death. Artaud
spent years
in
lunatic asylums. Delmore Schwartz was found dead
in a run-down Manhattan hotel. Camus died absurdly in a car crash.
Cesare Pavese and Paul Celan, Randall Jarrell and Sylvia Plath,
