Carrying the Weight of the Word (Redux)

Sportswriter Red Smith is alleged to have said something to the effect of, “There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Good writers spill their souls carefully and deliberately. They weave words to link their minds and hearts to those of their readers. Many of those who do it best are the ones who quite possibly feel or think too much. Scientific research suggests that poets and writers are more likely to suffer from mental illness and substance abuse. In fact, one study notes, “compared to the general population, bipolar mood disorder is highly overrepresented among writers and artists.” Many with bipolar disorder produce their best work during manic periods. (I know I do.)

After some cursory internet research (no, I don’t capitalize “internet” even though most do. I don’t think it deserves proper noun status, seeing as there is only one internet, but I digress), I compiled a short list of writers who are known to have suffered from mental illness. I have taken the liberty of listing them in order of my least to most favorite (more or less) along with necessary notes about each: Graham Greene (Never read anything he wrote, so he gets to head up this list.), Eugene O'Neill (Never read any of his plays, but I have at least heard of some of them.), Charles Dickens (Had to read a fair amount of his dreary, wordy works in college. Not a fan.), Patricia Cornwell (Haven’t read anything she has written, either, but I’m sure if I did, she would garner a more favorable spot on this list.), Joseph Conrad (I had a horrible lit professor who made us read Lord Jim. Dreadful experience.), Henrik Ibsen (From what I remember, the plays of his that I was forced to read were eye-glazing at best.), Isak Dinesen (I listed her here because I get her name mixed up with Henrik Ibsen’s. I used to think she was a man. I never read Out of Africa, but the movie put me to sleep.), Sidney Sheldon (He was big in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I think. As far as I’m concerned, his best work was I Dream of Jeannie.), Emile Zola (Never read anything he wrote, either, but he was French, so he gets extra points for that.), Herman Melville (I know I should say that I read Moby Dick and liked it, but I would be lying on both counts.), William Faulkner (Of course he was depressed. I know it depressed me just trying to read some of his stuff.), Ivan Turgenev (Also never read anything of his, but it could not have been as good as Dostoevsky.), Hermann Hesse (I read his little book Siddhartha when I was in college. I seem to remember thinking that it would be cool if I liked it, but I honestly just didn’t get it.), Tennessee Williams (I remember reading The Glass Menagerie and wishing I could shatter all those stupid knick-knacks.), Henry James (Don’t think I ever read any of his writing either. I get his name mixed up with Henry Miller, who was much more interesting, and surely had demons of his own.), Ralph Waldo Emerson (I confuse him with Henry David Thoreau, who was even more boring.), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (On my favorite refrigerator magnet: “Nothing is worth more than this day.”), Dylan Thomas (“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”), Mary Shelley (I love it that a woman dreamed up Frankenstein’s monster. You know she had some mental issues.), Allen Ginsberg (I would have loved to party with that guy.), Jonathan Swift (Anyone who created a place like Lilliput and made up words like “Glubbdubdrib” and “Houyhnhnms” had to be a bit off.), Leo Tolstoy (I am glad to say I never read War and Peace, but I regret that I never read Anna Karenina, which has one of the best lines in literature: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”), Hans Christian Andersen (He was Danish, so I may be related to him. I am one-quarter Danish. Not sure which fourth of me it is, but I think it’s my skeleton. He wrote some of the best fairy tales ever. My parents used to refer to me as The Princess and the Pea because apparently, I was a little high-maintenance as a kid. I think his masterpiece was The Emperor’s New Clothes.), Robert Louis Stevenson (I remember him mainly because I used to play this card game called “Authors.” He was one of them, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and Louisa May Alcott. Why she got picked to hang out with those men is a mystery. Maybe she was a groupie, or maybe they thought she would bring her Little Women with her.), Jack Kerouac (Another one I would love to have partied with. Still haven’t read On the Road, but it’s been on my list for years.), Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions is on my list, too.), Franz Kafka (No doubt he was crazy. The Metamorphosis is proof.), F. Scott Fitzgerald (I always wanted to be Daisy in The Great Gatsby because she got to have the 1974 version of Robert Redford fall in love with her. In the new movie, it’s Leonardo DiCaprio, so I still want to be Daisy.), Emily Dickinson (A recluse who was said to have always dressed in white. Something I would never do. White is just a spill magnet. When I wear white pants, no matter what time of the month it is, you can bet that my period will start. Anyway, in her poem that begins My life closed twice before its close, she wrote: “Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.” Not completely sure what it means, but that’s what makes great poetry, I guess.), J.M. Barrie (Love him not just because he wrote Peter Pan, but because Johnny Depp played him in Finding Neverland.), Edgar Allan Poe (Gee, which of his writings might make one think he had some mental problems?), Honoré de Balzac (I loved Père Goriot, which was like a French version of King Lear, but the real reason he is so high on this list is because there was a hideous statue of him in Paris near where I lived back in 1988. It was a replica of the one at the Rodin museum there. I am told the replica was even more hideous than the original.), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood is one of my favorite books. I guess that makes me a little crazy, too. He was friends with Harper Lee, who wrote the Best American Novel Ever, To Kill a Mockingbird. Some say Capote actually wrote it, but I don’t believe that.), Mark Twain (He supposedly said, “Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.” Amen to that. Plus, Huckleberry Finn was probably the Second Best American Novel Ever.), and Dorothy Parker (She was an alcoholic who survived several suicide attempts. One of my idols. I like to think I was her in a past life, but she died after I was born, so I guess that’s impossible. Her poem, Résumé, sets out my philosophy of life quite well: “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.”)

In spite of Ms. Parker’s wise advice, a good handful of writers with mental illness have been known let this life take the best of them. One of those was David Foster Wallace, whose death inspired this essay. In September of 2008, at the age of 46, he apparently found it necessary to hang himself. I admired his insight and ability to express his view of the world, even though his writing could be somewhat verbose and dense. While I would read his work and mentally edit some of his paragraph-length sentences, I still savored each word--until the weight of the words (and of the book itself) would tip out of my sleepy hands. He was one of those writers I read not necessarily for the pleasure of reading but for the pleasure of his writing. I think he was often drunk on his own swirling thoughts and swam self-indulgently in his philosophical musings. I can certainly identify with that, but it's really too deep for me. I prefer shallow. Less chance of drowning.

The news media called his death “an apparent suicide.” Usually hangings are, I guess. Unless he was strangled, then someone hoisted his limp, heavy corpse up into a noose. It could happen. I could see it in a dark comedy. Maybe I have. Funny stuff. And “apparent suicide” hangings also bring to mind the Most Embarrassing Way To Die: autoerotic asphyxiation, which, by the way, is not the way David Foster Wallace died. According to reports, he was just seriously depressed and off his meds. It has been rumored that that is the way lead singer of INXS Michael Hutchence died. Even if it isn’t true, that’s what people like to think. Sex sells. Especially when it comes to that guy. He was hot. But seriously, people would rather believe a death was accidental (albeit embarrassing) rather than intentional. And poor David Carradine, if he accidentally died while trying to achieve orgasm, he went to a hell of a lot of trouble to get off. Bless his heart. But I digress.

Creative types have been known to take themselves out of their own misery with dramatic exits. Kurt Vonnegut described suicide as “the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers.” Ernest Hemingway blew his brains out with his favorite shotgun. Hunter S. Thompson shot himself, too. His suicide note supposedly read, “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your (old) age. Relax — This won't hurt.” I was glad he left a note. (I think his could have been a little more “Gonzo” but he was depressed, so I'll cut him some slack.) Writers should leave notes. In fact, anyone who has the balls to kill themselves should have the courtesy to explain why. Another “apparent” shooter was Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. He left a rather rambling note. Not his best work. At the end, he wrote, “I'm too much of a neurotic moody person and I don't have the passion anymore, so remember, it's better to burn out, than to fade away.” That’s it, Kurt, steal a line from Neil Young. I wonder how Neil felt about that. Honored, somehow, I bet. I would if someone quoted me right before blowing themselves away. Vincent van Gogh is rumored to have shot himself as well. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t the gunshot that did him in so much as the infection he contracted right after it. That would suck to fail at a suicide attempt—at least if you really, really wanted to die. You think he was depressed before, how depressed was he to know that he fucked up his own suicide? How embarrassing.

In This is Water, a commencement address David Foster Wallace gave in 2005, he said, “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”

Speaking of water, Spalding Gray (apparently) drowned himself. I remember wondering if he thought he was Swimming to Cambodia, but that was in poor taste. Virginia Woolf was a drowner, too. She filled her skirt’s pockets with rocks and strolled into a river after writing a lovely note to her unfortunate husband. It included these words, “If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.” Yep, I bet he was really pleased to get those compliments and I’m sure he felt like the happiest man in the world that day. (Maybe he did, if she was such a Debbie Downer.) I think it takes an extra measure of courage to drown yourself. I imagine it’s a lot of work, fighting your breathing instincts and all. Like trying to tickle yourself to death, or win a staring contest without blinking. Or sneeze with your eyes open. Hard work, that.

Sylvia Plath, who was only 30, went to a lot of trouble to die. She made sure her kids were asleep (which was thoughtful), then sealed off the rooms before turning on the gas and sticking her head in the oven. I’m not a very good cook, so I might not choose that option. I would probably singe my hair and burn my neck before realizing that I just needed the gas and not the heat. Poet Anne Sexton pulled a sort of copycat suicide a little over ten years later. She did the old car-running-in-the-garage trick. I guess the standard combination of alcohol and pills just isn’t dramatic enough for the more creative types. Simply going to sleep is far too subtle and smooth. It doesn’t make a statement. I think the statement must be at least as loud as the noises in their heads. They want their inner pain to scream on the outside. Or maybe they are numb and need to drop a bomb in order to feel something. How better to show how dead you are (or want to be) on the inside than to act it out? With as much drama as a miserable artist can muster.

Why do so many writers and artists kill themselves? Is it creativity overload that drives them to death? Some sort of tortured genius that the body can't sustain? I think most writers struggle with a sense of apartness. A heightened self-consciousness. Trying to answer Why am I me? Good writers are observers who can choose words well, even effortlessly, and put them in a certain order such that readers respond with emotion, thought, adrenalin, comfort, or connection. Creative people can take in too much. More than the mind can manage. A sensory burden. They carry so many sights and sounds that simmer and stew until they boil over onto scraps of paper, or a computer screen, and into a book or poem if they make the cut. Or the opposite happens and the words just won’t come anymore. And the emptiness becomes the burden. How can artists who have such skill at relating life let life kill them? They carry the weight of the world in their heavy hearts and troubled minds, but it’s the unwritten words that weigh them down. The very things that connect them to the world can also disconnect them from it. Just like a noose.