Dark Spring: In Memory of Unica Zürn and a Brief Note on a New Exhibition Reimagining Her Legacy

Photo of Unica Zürn by Man Ray (1956) and a flyer for the 

Dark Spring - syzygy exhibition ft. Vicky Wright's V-Effekt (2024) 

 

"There can never have been a spring more beautifully dark than this ..."

 

 

I. 

 

Unica Zürn, for those who might not recognise the name, was a German author and artist, probably most famous for her anagrammatic poetry, automatic drawings, and the notorious nude photos produced in collaboration with her Surrealist lover, Hans Bellmer, in 1958, in which she was bound so tightly with string that it cut into her flesh.

 

Born in the summer of 1916, in the Grunewald district of Berlin, Zürn adored her (mostly absent) father; had a stormy relationship with her (uncaring) mother; and was sexually abused by her older brother. 

 

After leaving school, she began working at the film agency which produced propaganda material for the Nazi Party, although Zürn herself was not a party member (and, besides, a girl has to make a living somehow).

 

She married a much older - and also much wealthier - man during the War and bore him two children. Unfortunately, following a divorce in 1949, Zürn lost custody of both bairns, lacking as she did the means to support them (or indeed herself).    

 

Deciding that she was more suited to a bohemian life rather than one of domestic drudgery and child-rearing, Zürn began to hang around the caberet circuit and frequent the bars and clubs popular with artists, whilst earning what she could by writing short stories for newspapers and dramas for the radio.

 

Zürn also became romantically involved with the painter and dancer Alexander Camaro, although it was her meeting with Hans Bellmer in 1953 that was to prove pivotal; the two of them fleeing Germany and relocating to Paris, where she became his mistress, model, and muse. 

 

Whilst in Paris, Zürn also began experimenting with her own artwork; if Bellmer secretly wished to slice up bodies, she was more interested in how to fragment language and produce a style of writing she termed Hexentexte (1954). 

 

Before long, she and Hans were very much part of the Surrealist in-crowd, mixing with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray ... and all the other usual suspects. But the good times were not to last and in 1960 Zürn experienced a psychotic episode - which may or may not have been triggered by her experiments with mescaline. 

 

Following this, dissociative states, severe depression, and suicidal thoughts became the norm and she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic (and not in the positive sense that Deleuze and Guatarri would later thrill to). If, on the one hand, she continued to produce new work, on the other, she destroyed many of her earlier drawings and writings.  

 

Long story short: in October 1970, 54-year-old Zürn committed suicide by leaping from the window of the Paris apartment she had shared with Bellmer, while on a five-day leave from a psychiatric hospital. She was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and, at his request, Bellmer was buried next to her upon his death in 1975.

 

One of Zürn's final written works was the semi-autobiographical Dunkler Frühling (1967) [1], which tells the story of an obsessive young woman as she has her first sexual encounters and experiences the onset of mental illness. 

 

Somewhat disconcertingly, Zürn's death seems to be foreshadowed in the text as the protagonist of Dark Spring also tops herself by jumping out of a window, although, as it rather poignantly says in the book: She was dead even before her feet left the windowsill.

 

This book has since acquired cult status, particularly amongst feminists, female artists, and those who find her life (and death) fascinating (even romantic). Thus it is, for example, one can wander around Hoxton on a sunny afternoon and come across a contemporary gallery space on Vestry Street running an exhibition entitled Dark Spring - syzygy [2] ...    

II.

There were only eleven paintings on show - two from each of the five artists featured in the exhibition, with an extra one for luck by Sadie Murdoch thrown into the mix - but I struggled to see how some of the pictures repurposed and re-routed the principles of Zürn's work, as promised in the exhibition press release (though I'm perfectly willing to concede this might be a failure on my part). 

 

I liked Murdoch's Pass-Way Into Where To (2022) - an ink-jet printed digital montage, operating, it is claimed, in "the field of power and absence, via the partial, the incomplete, the crop and the edit" (see Figure 1 below).

 

And I also really liked a canvas by Petra Williams entitled Floating Man (2024); not so much for the questions it posed re identity, isolation, relationship to others, the need to create one's own space, etc., but because the colours were so lovely (see Figure 2 below).

 

But perhaps my favorite work was a pair of pictures by Vicky Wright in her V-Effekt series (2024). For these at least gave us amorphous figures with distorted bodies and a layering of faces that one might expect and hope for in an exhibition inspired by Unica Zürn.

 

The writer of the exhibition press release describes them as anti-portraits and speaks of how their woozy painterliness troubles subjectivity, thereby obliging the viewer to reconsider the idea of the human self in relation to non-human elements, both demonic and animal (see Figure 3 below).        

 

Fig. 1 Sadie Murdoch: Pass-Way Into Where To (2022)

Fig. 2 Petra Williams: Floating Man (2024)

Fig. 3 Vicky Wright: V-Effekt II (2024)

Notes

 

[1] This short novel by Unica Zürn has been translated into English by Caroline Rupprecht and was published by Exact Change in 2000. 

 

[2] The exhibition at Cross Lane Projects (1st floor, 6-8 Vestry Street, London N1), runs until 19 April, 2025, and features work by Vicky Wright, Josephine Wood, Petra K. Williams, Sadie Murdoch, and Tracey Owusu. For full details and to download the press release from which I quote in this post, please click here.   

Darkness On Christmas Day: Notes on Arthur Koestler (Overrated Novelist, Parapsychologist, Alleged Rapist, etc.)

Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983)

Photographed by Ida Kar (1959)
National Portrait Gallery

 

Nobody can write guiltlessly ...

I. 

 

There are some books which I have read once and then never felt the need to return to: Darkness at Noon would be one such novel, for example ...

 

Although originally written in German, the first published edition of Koestler's dystopian masterpiece - and, to be honest, pretty much the only novel he is now remembered for - was the poetically titled English translation of 1940 [1]. 

 

In brief - as I imagine most readers will be familiar with the work - Darkness at Noon is the story of an old revolutionary (Rubashov) who is arrested and imprisoned by the Party he served so loyally and tried for treason by the State he helped to build. 

 

Although the novel doesn't say so, it's clearly set in the Soviet Union and Number One is obviously Uncle Joe. For by the end of the 1930s, Koestler, like his good friend George Orwell, was bitterly disillusioned with the communist ideology he had once passionately embraced [2]. 

 

Critically acclaimed at the time - and overranked ever since on lists of great English-language novels of the 20th-century - Darkness at Noon provides a grimly fascinating insight into the revolutionary politics of the period and the authoritarian mindset. But, I still think that - like the more allegorical Animal Farm (1945) - having read it once, there's no real reason to go back and read it again.  

 

I mean, we all get the central idea: it's not much fun living under totalitarian regimes; be they political or theocratic in character. Even D. H. Lawrence - who was certainly a long way from being a liberal - came to this conclusion having arrived at his own dead end in The Plumed Serpent (1926): click here.   

 

II.

 

I have, however, other reasons for not wanting to re-read this novel; reasons that are more to do with my dislike of Koestler the man, rather than disinterest in his fiction ...

For one thing, it was alleged in David Cesarani's 1998 biography [3] that he was a serial rapist [4]. And, for another, Koestler was also something of a crackpot or, if you prefer, a parapsychologist; i.e., the sort of person who believes (without evidence) that there is real evidence for phenomena such as extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, and telepathy; the sort of person who also insists that every coincidence is meaningful (or synchronistic). 

 

Koestler's fascination with the paranormal permeated much of his later writings; see, for example, The Roots of Coincidence (1972), in which he argues that certain (occult) phenomena will never be explained by orthodox science which, in his view, is essentially - and dangerously - reductionist [5]. 

 

After his suicide in 1983 [6], Koestler left the bulk of his estate to the promotion of research into all things spooky (and pseudo-scientific) through the founding of a chair in parapsychology at a British university. 

 

Unfortunately, the trustees of the estate had difficulty finding a university willing to establish such a chair: to their credit, Oxford, Cambridge, King's College London and UCL were all approached and all refused. However, to their shame, the University of Edinburgh decided to grab the money on offer and agreed to set up a chair in accordance with Koestler's request [7]. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Interestingly, the German manuscript was lost for 75 years after having been translated into English. Thus, all versions of the work prior to 2015 - including the 1944 German edition produced by Koestler himself - were based on the English translation published by Macmillan.

      As for the title, Darkness at Noon, this was chosen by the British sculptor Daphne Hardy - Koestler's girlfriend (and translator) at the time - after the publishers rejected his original title, 'The Vicious Circle'. The phrase is adapted from the Book of Job: "They meet with darkness in the day time, and grope in the noonday as in the night." (KJV 5:14)

 

[2] Just to be clear on the extent of Koestler's committment to Marxist-Leninist ideology, in the early 1930s he left Germany and moved to the USSR, living for a time in Ukraine, which was then enduring what is known as the Holodomor (1932-33); a man-made famine - most likely engineered at Stalin's behest for political reasons - that killed millions of people. 

      Despite witnessing terrible scenes, Koestler endorsed the official Soviet version of events and claimed that the starving were workshy enemies of the people. He only resigned his membership of the Communist Party in 1938.   

 

[3] David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (William Heinemann Ltd., 1998). 

 

[4] To be fair, this has been challenged by later authors, including Michael Scammell in his 2009 biography, although even he concedes that Koestler could be sexually aggressive towards women and held firmly to the troubling view that 'without an element of initial rape there is no delight' in sexual relations (a remark made by Koestler in a letter to the woman who was to become his second wife). 

      See Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual (Faber and Faber, 2010); first published in the US under the title Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (Random House, 2009).

      But see also David Cesarani's review of Scammell's biography in Prospect Magazine (24 Feb 2010), in which he continues to insist that Koestler was a voracious sexual predator with a penchant for using physical force to get his way: click here.

 

[5] That said, Koestler also argues that there are direct links between ancient forms of mysticism and modern physics - if only the physicists would open their eyes and look (and if only they would listen to what Jung has to say).  

 

[6] I've no issue with Koestler having the courage to top himself aged 77 in 1983; he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1976 and then, three years later, with terminal leukaemia. However, some worry that he may have unduly coerced his healthy and considerably younger wife, Cynthia, into killing herself so that he'd not have to face the end alone (and she'd not have to live without him). As the writer Julian Barnes says, even if Koestler didn't talk her into it, neither did he try to talk her out of it. This is another controversial topic amongst scholars who choose to study Koestler.      

 

[7] The Koestler Parapsychology Unit was established in 1985 at the University of Edinburgh. It aims to teach and conduct research concerning various aspects of parapsychology. The Chair is currently held by Professor Caroline Watt.

 

Give Me Convenience and Give Me Death

The Sarco Pod : every home should have one ...

 

 

I. 

 

Some readers might recall a news story from late 2021 which reported that someone had invented a 3D-printable [1] suicide pod and planned to demonstrate its practical convenience in the picture-postcard setting of Switzerland, where assisted dying or self-determined suicide - like public nudity and prostitution - is perfectly legal [2].     

 

Well, three years later, and I can announce the suicide pod - which is activated from inside and also contains an emergency button just in case the suicidal subject has a last minute change of mind or perhaps feels a tad claustrophobic - has finally had a fully successful first outing ...

 

 

II. 

 

Called the Sarco [3], the futuristic-looking pod works by rapidly increasing nitrogen levels (and thereby reducing oxygen levels), so that the suicidal subject lying snugly inside loses consciousness and dies in under ten minutes (giving them just enough time to count a medium sized flock of sheep if they wish to do so).      

 

Unfortunately, following the event held in a forest in Merishausen - a sparsely populated area on the Swiss-German border - the police moved in and made several arrests on the grounds that the anonymous volunteer - believed to be an American woman in her 60s - had not merely been given assistance in an unregulated manner, but had been incited into taking her own life (one would imagine that's going to be hard to prove in a court of law).

 

Officers also confiscated the Sarco pod - and, amusingly, took the corpse into custody.

 

 

III.

 

Although a German scientist (natch) by the name of Florian Willet - a leading member of the Last Resort [4] - was present at the woman's death, it is unclear whether he was among those arrested. Afterwards, Willet told a Swiss tabloid that the woman had enjoyed einen friedlichen, schnellen und würdigen Tod - which sounds like a bourgeois marketing slogan if ever I heard one! [5]

 

Meanwhile, the Australian inventor of the Sarco, Philip Nitschke, who had watched the woman's death via video link, posted on X that she had passed away - just as she wanted - in a beautiful forest and described her death as idyllic (i.e., picture-perfect).  

 

Before entering the Sarco Pod, the woman made a statement to her lawyer - who just so happens to be a director of the Last Resort and married to the good doctor Nitschke - that she was of sound mind; but do people ever know quite how how sane or crazy they are?

 

She also had the full support of her family, who doubtless acted with good intentions (and besides, it's certainly easier to pop mom in a pod than to provide palliative care).

 

Notes

 

[1] The capsule's Australian inventor Philip Nitschke - known by his critics as Dr. Death - doesn't plan to manufacture and sell his machine in the conventional manner. Rather, he intends to make the blueprints freely available online so anyone can download the design and, if they have a 3D-printer, produce their very own model.

 

[2] According to a government website, Swiss law allows assisted suicide as long as the person takes his or her life with no 'external assistance' and those who help the person die do not do so for 'any self-serving motive'.  

 

[3] This is obviously short for sarcophagus, which, as Síomón Solomon reminds us, is a term with a fascinating etymology that leads towards a dark poetry concerned with flesh eating stone and biting humour (or sarcasm). 

      In an email, Solomon also notes how on the side of the Sarco Pod is a quote from Carl Sagan, the US astronomer - We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself - obliging him to ask whether the manufacturer is "purporting to create some kind of death-vessel for cosmic self-consciousness".   

 

[4] The Last Resort are the Swiss branch of Exit International, a nonprofit organisation founded by Philip Nitschke that lobbies for the legalisation of assisted suicide. As far as I know, they have nothing to do with the notorious East End skinhead shop or the English punk band formed in 1980.

[5] Personally, as one who plans on leaping into an active volcano when the time comes to do so, I'm not particularly concerned with the bourgeois ideal of having a peaceful and dignified death. Having violently entered the world with tears, I'm prepared to violently exit screaming.     

Three French Suicides: In Memory of Olga Georges-Picot, Christine Pascal, and Gilles Deleuze

Christine Pascal, Gilles Deleuze & Olga Georges-Picot

 

 

I.

 

Last night, on TV, they were showing one of my favourite films: the British psychological thriller written and directed by Basil Dearden and starring Roger Moore; The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970) [1]. 

 

There are many reasons to love this film, not least of all because it allows one to get a glimpse of the French actress Olga-Georges Picot in a very fetching black bra. She's luscious. She's ravishing. And there are some men who would happily give up red meat to be afforded an opportunity to perv [2] on this Franco-Russian beauty [3] - including Woody Allen, who cast her as Countess Alexandrovna in his 1975 film Love and Death.  

   

Whilst biographical information on her life and career seems to be limited and incomplete, we do know that she commited suicide in June 1997 by jumping from her 5th floor apartment overlooking the river Seine.

 

 

II. 

 

Olga Georges-Picot's death came less than a year after the death - also by suicide and also by jumping out of a window - of the brilliant French actress, writer and director Christine Pascal ... 

 

Interestingly, this multi-talented woman had often reflected philosophically on the question of suicide, and the first film she directed - Félicité (1979) [4] - opens with a suicide scene. Several years later, when asked by an interviewer how she would like to die, she replied: En me suicidant, le moment venu.

 

Well, that time came in August 1996, whilst receiving treatment at a psychiatric hospital in the Paris suburb of Garches [5]. Whether her suicide is best interpreted as a mad act by a mentally ill woman or a voluntary death by an unconventional woman with a penchant for transgressive behaviour is something I'll allow readers to decide [6].    

 

III.

Finally, let us remember Gilles Deleuze ... 

 

Deleuze was a philosopher very much admired by Pascal and one who, like her - and like Georges-Picot - also topped himself by jumping out of a window, when the respiratory conditions that he had long suffered from became increasingly severe [7].     

I remember the excitement news of this event generated in the Philosophy Dept. at Warwick, where I was doing my Ph.D at the time and had just started to read Deleuze's work seriously. Everyone wanted to know if his death came from within or without and pondered the question of whether it marked a loss of desire on his part, or whether the decision to terminate one's own individual existence as a way of affirming life indicates a final resurgence of vitality.  

 

In other words, was his suicide a logical way for Deleuze to show fidelity to his own philosophy, rather than merely a wish to end his suffering?

 

It remains an interesting question, I think ...       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have written about this in relation to Daphne du Maurier's 1957 novel The Scapegoat in a post entitled 'Never Give a Doppelgänger the Keys to Your Car ...' (17 June 2020): click here. 

[2] I'm paraphrasing George Costanza interviewing for a secretary in the season six episode of Seinfeld entitled 'The Secretary', (dir. D. Owen Trainor, 1998): click here.  

[3] Olga was was the daughter of Guillaume Georges-Picot, the French Ambassador to China, and a Russian mother, Anastasia Mironovich. She was born in Shanghai, in Japanese-occupied China, in January 1940. 

 

[4] Christine Pascal was born in Lyon in November 1953. She was given a starring role, aged twenty-one, in Michel Mitrani's Les Guichets du Louvre (1974). 

      The film portrays the infamous Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup in 1942, when French police assisted Nazi soldiers in the arrest of over 13,000 Jewish inhabitants of Paris and held them under inhumane conditions prior to their deportation to Auschwitz, where virtually all were murdered. Pascal played a young Jewish woman named Jeanne.

 

[5] Félicité was not only written and directed by Pascal, but she played the lead role too. It was a film that shocked many (even in France) with its explicit sexual content and provocative indecency and cemented her reputation as the mauvaise fille of French cinema.   

 

[6] Somewhat unfairly, I think, the psychiatrist who was caring for Pascal was sentenced in 2003 to twelve months in prison for failing to take appropriate action to prevent her suicide. 

 

[7] Deleuze, who had problems with his breathing even as a youngster, developed tuberculosis in 1968 and underwent surgery to remove a lung. In the final years of his life even writing became increasingly difficult and so, on 4 November 1995, aged seventy, he jumped to his death from the window of his Paris apartment.

 

Stone Me, What a Life! (A Brief Post in Memory of Tony Hancock)

The Lad Himself

Anthony [Aloysius St John] Hancock 

(1924 - 1968)

 

 

On this day in 1968, the English comic actor Tony Hancock committed suicide, aged 44. The perfect way to die [1] and the perfect age to exit this life [2]. So as well as his comedic skills, I admire him for his courage and his timing.

 

Hancock was found dead at his rented flat in Sydney, Australia, besides an empty vodka bottle and a handful of barbiturates. Apparently, he left several suicide notes, in one of which he wrote: Things just seemed to go too wrong too many times.

 

Which is a concise, clear and honest statement; qualities that I think are important in such a document, though I don't mind more philosophically cryptic last words, such as those famously spoken by Socrates to Crito: We owe a cock to Aesclepius [3].

 

What I don't like are outpourings of guilt, regret, bitterness, or recrimination; nor even a desperate last minute attempt at humour. If that's all you have to offer, then best to go in silence. For as Nanette Newman's young Existentialist character Josey might say: Why waste words when you can quietly waste yourself? [4]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] There are several posts on Torpedo the Ark in which I write in praise of suicide as the simplest of pleasures and set out reasons for so doing: click here, for example, or here and here. 

 

[2] Many people I admire died at 44, including D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Spinoza. It has always seemed to me a good age to take one's leave of this life, although, sadly, I missed my opportunity to do so some years ago. 

     

[3] For my thoughts on the death of Socrates and his famous last words, see the post of 30 October 2015: click here. 

[4] I'm referring here to a character played by Newman in Tony Hancock's first feature film, The Rebel (dir. Robert Day, 1961), who asks the crucial question: Why kill time when you can kill yourself? Click here to watch the scene on YouTube,   

 

 

Musical bonus: Babyshambles, 'Stone Me' - click here. 

      This 2007 track, written by Pete Doherty and Mick Whitnall, was inspired by one of Hancock's favourite phrases; as was the title of the debut album by Doherty's other band, The Libertines - Up the Bracket (Rough Trade, 2002). 

      Doherty also wrote a song called 'Lady Don't Fall Backwards' after the book at the centre of the Hancock's Half Hour episode 'The Missing Page' (S6/E2, 1960), which can be found on his solo album Grace/Wastelands (EMI, 2009). 

      He also references Hancock by name in the lyrics to 'You're My Waterloo', a song on the third studio album by The Libertines, Anthems for Doomed Youth (Virgin EMI, 2015): click here.

 

Notes on Crosby and Crane: Pin-Up Boys of the Lost Generation

Harry Crosby (1898-1929) and Hart Crane (1899-1932)

 

La plus volontaire mort c'est la plus belle.

 

 

I. 

 

The initials HC mean different things to different people. 

 

For example, for poor souls suffering with an unremitting headache, they refer to Hemicrania continua, whilst for those to whom the health of horses is a concern, they refer to the connective tissue disorder hyperelastosis cutis.        

 

Then again, for students of organic chemistry - or those working in the oil and gas industry - HC is short for hydrocarbon, whilst for fans of the Tour de France, HC designates the most difficult type of mountain climb (one which is hors catégorie). 

 

For me, however, as an amateur literary critic, the initials HC bring to mind the two Jazz Age American poets Harry Crosby and Hart Crane ...

 

 

II.

 

Crosby and Crane sounds like a double act and, as a matter of fact, these two are often linked in the cultural imagination; not merely because they were both poets of debatable merit, but because each committed suicide at a young age (Crosby was 31 when he shot himself in the head in December 1929 and Crane was 32 when he literally jumped ship in April 1932).  

 

They met for the first time in Paris in January 1929. Harry and his wife, Caresse, had set up the Black Sun Press and were keen to publish new work by the most interesting authors of the day in de luxe editions. Crane was then working on the long poem by which he is best remembered, The Bridge, which he intended as a positive counterstatement to Eliot's Wasteland (1922).    

 

Crane gave Crosby the MS to read and the latter loved it, encouraging his new friend to complete the poem he had been obsessively reworking since 1923. For Crosby, Crane's poem was full of thunder and fire and swept away all the dust and artificiality of the times, reminding him of Blake and, one suspects, of what he aspired to in his own heliocentric verse. 

 

As one commentator notes: 

 

"Crosby's obvious excitement had its source not only in the poem itself but also in finding a work answering to his own theories of poetry and his own particular enthusiasms." [1]    

 

For example, both had a quasi-Futurist love of speed and modern technology, seeing in the machine a dynamic expression of man's essentially restless spirit and desire to self-overcome; both also valued open spaces in which to move; and both believed that poetry should not only look back to the past, but connect the present to the future and concern itself with the only themes that really matter: love, beauty, and death. 

 

At heart, then, both were Romantics in the era of Modernism; writers who sought spiritual illumination and a glimpse of some essential reality or lyrical absolute. It's no wonder then that despite his initial enthusiasm for the work of D. H. Lawrence, Crosby concludes that the latter is not his cup of tea:

"'I am a visionary I like to soar he is all engrossed in the body and in the complexities of psychology. [...] He admits of defeat. I do not. He is commonplace. I am not.'" [2]

 

This - and the fact that he can't really write for toffee - puts me off Crosby. I can't dislike him, but neither can I accept this son of one of the richest banking families in New England to be the real deal (despite the painted toe-nails and sun tattoo) [3].  

 

As for Crane, well, to be honest, I'm undecided, knowing as I do so little of the man, so little of his work. Many think him a genius and admire his highly stylised and difficult poetry - for its ambition if nothing else. And some scholars working within queer theory champion Crane as an exemplary outsider who struggled with his homosexuality (when not fucking sailors).    

 

  

III. 

 

In late November 1929, the Crosbys arrived in New York for what they planned to be a short visit. Hart Crane threw a party for them at his Brooklyn apartment on December 7th, where fun was had by all (including fellow poets E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams).

 

Three days later, however, Harry killed himself and his 21-year-old lover - Josephine Rotch, aka the Fire Princess - in an apparent suicide pact. It was Hart Crane who broke news of this tragic event to Crosby's wife and mother. 

 

Shortly after the funeral, Caresse returned to Paris and arranged for the Black Sun edition of The Bridge to be published in February 1930. Sadly, the reviews weren't great and Crane's sense of failure resulted in a creative slump. 

 

Although he desperately looked for "another great theme around which he might order his work" [4], he unfortunately never found such. Rather, having relocated to Mexico, Crane had simply discovered the intoxicating power of tequila.

 

Having attempted suicide on several occasions, Crane boarded a ship back to New York - the S. S. Orizaba - from where, on April 27, 1932, he jumped into the sea having shouted goodbye to a group of fellow passengers. He left no suicide note and his body was never recovered. 

 

Sy Kahn writes:

 

"Crane's death by water and Crosby's death by exploding bullet in his head, in retrospect, and with the testimony of their poems, seem inevitable acts of self-destruction. For both men death was not fearsome, but a portal through which they might find the tormenting, often elusive, absolutes they felt and sought." [5] 

 

He concludes:

 

"The parallels and similarities (even the accident of their initials) in the works and lives of these two poets express the literary vitality of the 1920s [...] In retrospect it seems almost ordained that these poets should have encountered each other before their deaths." [6]  

 

What a pity, then, that both of these young men had always been "too rich and spoilt" and left with no new pleasures to experience but suicide: "the last sort of cocktail excitement" [7].  

 

Notes

 

[1] Sy Kahn, 'Hart Crane and Harry Crosby: A Transit of Poets', in the Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 1, No. 1 (Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 45-56. The line quoted is on p. 47. 

      This essay can be accessed on JSTOR by clicking here. 

 

[2] Harry Crosby writing in his diary, quoted by David Ellis in D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 472-73.

 

[3] Without getting into issues of authenticity etc, let's just say that, for me, Crosby tries a bit too hard to be un poète maudit like his heroes Baudeaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, et al. Some people just are extreme and achieve a state of inspired madness without having to paint their nails. Ultimately, who gets closest to the sun - Van Gogh, or Harry Crosby ...?     

 

[4] Sy Kahn, 'Hart Crane and Harry Crosby: A Transit of Poets', Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 54. 

 

[5] Ibid., p. 55. 

[6] Ibid., p. 56. 

 

[7] These phrases were said by D. H. Lawrence with reference to the case of Harry Crosby; see his letter to Giuseppe Orioli [18 Dec 1929], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 600-601. 

      See also Lawrence's kind letter to Caresse Crosby (30 Jan 1930), Letters VII 634, in which he tells her: "Harry had a real poetic gift - if only he hadn't tried to disintegrate himself so! This disintegrating spirit, and the tangled sound of it, makes my soul weary to death." 

      He also advises that she not try to recover herself too soon; "it is much better to be a little blind and stunned for a time longer, and not make efforts to see or to feel. Work is the best, and a certain numbness, a merciful numbness. It was too dreadful a blow - and it was wrong."

On the Life, Death, and Shameful Maligning of Jill Bennett by John Osborne

Jill Bennett 

(as Aunt Pen in The Nanny, 1965)

 

 

Jill Bennett (1931-1990) was a British actress and - to her great misfortune - the fourth wife of overrated playwright John Osborne. 

 

Although born overseas (in Penang), Bennett was educated at an independent girls' boarding school in Surrey and trained as an actress at RADA. She made her stage début in 1949 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford upon Avon. Her first movie role followed two years later; a murdered showgirl in The Long Dark Hall (1951). 

 

Bennett went on to build a long and successful career on stage, film and TV. I remember her best as sexy Aunt Pen, in the Hammer horror classic The Nanny (1965), and as Jacoba Brink, a Soviet figure skater hired to train Bibi Dahl (played by Lynn Holly-Johnson), in the 1981 Bond film For Your Eyes Only. 

 

Her final film performance was as Mrs. Lyle in The Sheltering Sky (1990). She died - by suicide [1] - in October of that year, aged 58, having long suffered from depression which was in no small degree triggered and intensified by her disastrous ten-year marriage to Osborne (1968-1978).    

The latter, who was subject during Bennett's lifetime to a restraining order which prevented him from writing about her or their marriage, immediately wrote a scurrilous chapter about his ex-wife as an addition to the second volume of his autobiography. The chapter, in which he rejoiced at her death, rightly caused controversy; this wasn't simply looking back in anger by a bitter old man, this was a vile display of toxic masculinity.  

 

Bennett undoubtedly had her faults: maybe, as Osborne claimed, everything about her life had been a pernicious confection and sham. It's true also that she dished out many vicious insults of her own directed towards her husband; publicly mocking his impotence and deriding him as a closeted homosexual, for example. 

 

But, even if all's fair in love and war, you don't need to speak spitefully of the dead and show open contempt for a woman who has taken her own life; describing her suicide, for example, as a tawdry piece of theatricality, if "one of the few original or spontaneous gestures in her loveless life" [2].

 

Nor do you need to add that your only regret is not being able to look upon her open coffin and shit upon the corpse. This doesn't make you a transgressive author who should be celebrated for the brutal violence of their language. It just makes you a prick ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Bennett took an overdose of quinalbarbitone (or secobarbital as it is known in the United States).    

 

[2] John Osborne, Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, (Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 259.  

Musical bonus: In 1992, Bennett's ashes - along with those of her friend, the actress Rachel Roberts (who also died by suicide, in 1980) - were scattered by the film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson on the River Thames, while musician Alan Price sang the Leiber and Stoller song Is That All There Is? 

      Footage of the event was included in Anderson's autobiographical BBC documentary also entitled Is That All There Is? (1992): click here to watch on YouTube.

On Lunacy

The Moon: lovely to look at but ineffective

Still, today - even in Parliament - there are people who subscribe in all seriousness to the so-called lunar effect. In other words, they believe there's a magical correlation between the Moon and human biology and behaviour. As above - so below, as those with a Hermetic leaning like to say ...

However, a considerable number of scientific studies have found no evidence to support this belief. Thus, despite the insistence of poets, occultists, filmmakers, and various lunatics, it seems that the light of the silvery Moon does not make some individuals go crazy and others become excessively hairy.

Nor does the Moon control menstruation in the same way it controls the tides and Camille Paglia's claim that a woman's body is "a sea acted upon by the month's lunar wave-motion", is laughable. For whilst it's true that women's bodies are (like men's bodies) mostly water, so is it also true the Moon only affects open bodies of water - not water contained in bodies (and even if this weren't the case, there'd be an issue of scale to consider).

So, sorry Camille, but moon, month and menses are not synonymous and do not refer to one and the same phenomenon. It's simply coincidental that the menstrual cycle in women and the lunar cycle are both 28-days in length - and, in fact, even that's not quite the case; for often the length of the former varies from woman to woman and month to month, whilst the length of a synodic period is actually a consistent 29.5 days.

If it's surprising to find Ms. Paglia perpetuating lunar mythology in relation to female sexuality having built her model of feminism upon biology and constantly stressing the importance of hormones, it's no surprise to discover D. H. Lawrence was a great exponent of such baloney, believing as he did that the Moon is "the mistress and mother of our watery bodies".

Lawrence also upheld the popular belief that the Moon is somehow intimately related to questions of madness and suicide, particularly with reference to modern individuals who have, he says, lost the Moon. For it is the Moon which governs our nervous consciousness and soothes us into serenity when we are mentally agitated or disturbed:

"Oh, the moon could soothe us and heal us like a cool great Artemis between her arms. But we have lost her, in our stupidity we ignore her, and angry she stares down on us and whips us with nervous whips."

Thus, according to Lawrence, it's the the angry Moon which is responsible for young lovers committing suicide; "they are driven mad by the poisoned arrows of Artemis: the Moon is against them: the Moon is fiercely against them. And oh, if the Moon is against you, oh, beware of the bitter night, especially the night of intoxication."

To be fair, even Lawrence knows that this sounds like nonsense. He insists, however, that's because we're idiots. If only we opened ourselves up once more to the cosmos, then we'd understand that the Moon is a not just a dead lump of rock with an iron core, but a "globe of dynamic substance, like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon a vivid pole of energy" and that there exists "an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the Moon".

Break this relationship, says Lawrence - though I'm not sure how one might do so, anymore than one might counteract the pull of gravity simply by refusing to acknowledge its reality - and the Moon will have her revenge, like a cruel mistress.

The problem is that whilst Lawrence's lunacy sounds harmless enough, Quentin Meillassoux has shown how such correlationism has crept into and corrupted all post-Kantian philosophy making objects conform to mind - something, ironically, that Lawrence loathes and fights against elsewhere in his work.

Ultimately, it's not a question of wanting to disconnect or come out of touch with the universe; rather, it's about acknowledging the latter exists without us ...


See: 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

D. H. Lawrence Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2008).

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990).

The Case of Evelyn McHale (The Most Beautiful Suicide in the World)

Photo of Evelyn McHale, by Robert C. Wiles. 

For poets, there is nothing more romantic than the suicide of someone young; particularly if they take their lives with an element of style and manage to leave behind them a good-looking corpse. And no one has managed to achieve this feat with more success than an attractive, twenty-three year old bookkeeper, called Evelyn McHale, in 1947.

Hers is often described as the most beautiful suicide in the world and I’m happy to share this view. What makes her case so magnificent and not merely tragic (or mundane), are the following six points:

1. She chose a magical date, May 1st, an ancient spring festival, on which to make her self-sacrifice, thereby lending her death a certain mythical aspect or celebratory pagan splendour.

2. She chose the right method for her location. When in Berlin, for example, one should swallow poison or use a gun; in London, it’s appropriate to throw oneself from a bridge into the Thames, or onto the tracks of the Underground before an approaching train. But, as Serge Gainsbourg observed, New York is all about the astonishing height of its buildings. And so, when in NYC, one simply has to jump.

3. Having chosen, rightly, to jump, Evelyn then selected one of the two truly great and truly iconic modern structures from which to leap: the Empire State Building. This 102-story skyscraper, located in Midtown Manhattan, is, with its beautiful art deco design, the perfect place from which to fall to one’s death and since its opening in 1931 only a select number of lucky souls have had the privilege (and fatal pleasure) of plunging from this iconic site.

4. She was impeccably dressed for the occasion, with gloves and a simple, but elegant, pearl necklace. Before jumping she calmly removed her coat and neatly folded it over the wall of the 86th floor observation deck. She also left behind her a make-up kit, some family snaps, and a suicide note written in a black pocketbook, in which she asked to be cremated without any kind of fuss or service of remembrance. In other words, even in death, Evelyn kept her composure - which brings us to our fifth point:

5. She didn’t land with an undignified splat on the pavement of 34th Street; but, rather, with a crash onto the roof of a waiting car. And it wasn't just any old car - it was a UN Assembly limousine, as if she wanted to make an impression on the entire world. And impression, as we see from the photo above, is the key word here. For Evelyn literally impressed herself into the roof of the Cadillac, so that it seemed to fold round her, with metallic tenderness. There is almost nothing to suggest the terrible violence of the scene - apart from the ripped stockings and the absence of shoes.

6. She conspired with fate to ensure there was a photographer nearby to instantly capture the event of her death on film; thereby ensuring her place within the cultural imagination. Indeed, fifteen years later, Andy Warhol would incorporate her image into his work, just as he did images of other beautiful women, including Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.

As for the student photographer, Robert C. Wiles, he also struck it lucky that day; his astonishing photo of Evelyn was published in Life Magazine as a full-page 'Picture of the Week' in the May 12 issue. It was his first - and last - photo ever to be published and one likes to imagine he hung his camera up after taking this perfect shot, but I don't know if this is true or not.

I'll stop here - but I could of course talk about (and darkly caress) this topic forever. For Camus was right: there is only one truly serious philosophical question - and that is the question of suicide.

Francesca Woodman: An American Genius

Francesca Woodman: Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 (1976)

Tate / National Galleries of Scotland (AR00352)

© George and Betty Woodman

I have to confess that I only recently came across the work of American photographer Francesca Woodman, but I was immediately fascinated by her beautiful (often disturbing) black and white images which have a queer, gothic and surreal quality that is seductive in the sense that Baudrillard gives the term. That is to say, the photos partake of a game of slow exposure that is all to do with appearance and disappearance, and playing with the signs of sexuality and self-hood.

Woodman works in a manner that is not only highly stylized and disciplined, but also ritualistic and fetishistic; a combination of primitive magic and aristocratic aestheticism. She turns her own body into just another object, semi-exposed, but mostly withdrawn and concealed, existing in relation to other things (chairs, doors, mirrors, a bucket full of eels) that are equally real, equally fragile, and equally mysterious.

Born in 1958, Woodman was only twenty-two when she committed suicide in 1981, pissed, apparently, with the slowness with which her work was garnering critical attention or achieving commercial success. In a letter to a friend (written around the time of an earlier attempt to end her life), Woodman says she’d rather die young and leave behind her a delicate body of work, than see herself and her pictures fade away or be slowly erased by time.

Death, she realised, would be the making of her; for hers, like Nietzsche's, would be a posthumous existence. And this tragic realisation, coupled to her precocious talent for blurred image-making, makes me very fond of dear Francesca: an American genius.

Suicide by Tiger (The Case of Sarah McClay)

Tipu's Tiger (Victoria and Albert Museum)

In the news at the moment is the case of zookeeper Sarah McClay, who was killed by one of the big cats in her care. 

Although the police have ruled it out, the suggestion was made (much to the anger of her family) that the young woman could have entered the animals' enclosure with the intention of ending her own life: suicide by tiger, as it has been described.

I have to say, this idea is one that greatly appeals to me: not so much in a fetishistic manner - though, for the record, I've nothing against those vorarephiles who are aroused by the thought of being eaten alive by wild animals - but simply as a method of taking one's leave from this world.

Better, surely, to die in the jaws of a magnificent beast, than beneath the steel wheels of a tube train. One might imagine that one is passing directly back into life (quite literally becoming-animal) and derive a real element of joy from that.   

Michel Foucault's Simplest of Pleasures

 

Portrait by Rinaldo Hopf (2004)

Michel Foucault was always deeply attracted to the idea of suicide as one he could darkly caress and think of primarily as an aesthetic question, rather than as a moral problem. He encouraged everyone to carefully choose and prepare their own death: to arrange the details and shape it into a work of art.

Of course, he appreciated the fact that suicide doesn't always result in a beautiful corpse and there are often discouraging traces left behind. It's obviously not very nice to have to hang yourself in the kitchen and leave a blue tongue sticking out of your mouth; or to jump from your eighth floor apartment and leave tiny bits of brain on the pavement for the local dogs to sniff at. Having said that, much of this unpleasantness could be avoided if we revalued suicide and made it easier and acceptable to kill oneself. 

In an interview entitled The Simplest of Pleasures, Foucault envisions a time and a people to come who have accorded suicide the highest status. Such people will hold suicide festivals and suicide orgies and establish places where those planning on suicide can seek out potential partners.

Indeed, Foucault says if he were to win a fortune in the lottery, he would personally open a suicide hotel where people who wanted to die could go and spend a weekend, enjoying themselves as far as possible before happily checking-out, liberated of every identity.

To think of suicide in this manner - as a question of style and as something not only admirable, but chic and playful - dissolves the depressing interiority that those who would make of life and death a tedious psychodrama insist upon. Death should not be another opportunity to pass judgement; nor should it be turned into a banal biological fact with which to smother the imagination. 

And suicide should not be left to a minority of unhappy souls who frequently make a mess of it and thereby bring the entire concept into disrepute. Each one of us needs to address the issue of how best to make an exit from this life - not waste time asking why it has to happen, or praying there's an afterlife.

Suicide Note

Photo: Adam Rowney, Suicide Rainbow, 2009

I have always been attracted to the idea of suicide. Not because I feel particularly world-weary, or prone to morbid thoughts, but because the act of suicide seems to me to be one that shows tremendous courage and which, paradoxically, takes away life out of a love of life. That is to say, in choosing to die freely and in a manner of their own devising, the suicidal subject offers a form of vital affirmation.  

I would happily kill myself tomorrow were it not for the fact that a very great deal of time and effort is required to produce an originally stylish suicide and I am, alas, fundamentally lazy. Thus whenever I begin to imagine the meticulous preparation that is required - arranging all the details, finding all the right ingredients, shaping the entire enterprise into a true practice of joy - then too do I think: 'Well, maybe the day after tomorrow ...'

And I remember also the following verse by Dorothy Parker:

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.