solitary flight

§44 Suicide is art and artist

Suicide is art and artist, author and text. Suicide is literary and cathartic.

In 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther announced a twenty-four year old Goethe and galvanized the Sturm und Drang of German Romanticism. The pastoral, the unattainable Charlotte, the sensitive artist recording his days and nights of bliss and torment, the extremes of exultation and despair fusing-indistinguishable art and life, the frequent weeping, and finally, with an opened vein and a bullet over the right eye “I say amen. Charlotte, Charlotte! Farewell! Farewell!”[1]

Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol, in 1752, and died in London four years before Young Werther was published. At age sixteen, Chatterton invented and carried out a brilliant ruse. Composing poems in medieval script and style, he passed them off as Thomas Rowley, a fictitious fifteenth-century monk.

He made his way to London where he turned to novels, political writing, and satire. His life and work were little noticed, however, as Chatterton well knew; and his death was much the same. “No one came to identify his body at the inquest … He was buried in a pauper’s grave in the Shoe Lane Workhouse. He was still three months short of his eighteenth birthday.”

Yet, as Alvarez writes, in A Savage God, “within a generation Chatterton had become the supreme symbol of the Romantic poet.”

Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, among others, viewed him as their forerunner and patron saint. Yet even as a bright star discovered posthumously his work was only secondary. “What mattered was his life: the brilliant, untutored creative gift appearing out of nowhere, and his stirring combination of pride and precocity.”

“More important still was his way of death.” It cried out in the Romantic ideal: “the untimeliness, waste, pathos, the lack of recognition, the rejection and prematurity.”

Alvarez concludes: “For the Romantics, Chatterton became the first example of death by alienation.” Chatterton embodied the holy trinity of genius, melancholy, and premature death. Suicide was merely the crowning glory.

And what of Chatteron’s death? He was found lying on his bed, in a lodging house, “a horrid spectacle, with features distorted, as if from convulsions.” Unlike cyanide, preferred by suicides because it is quick and relatively painless, arsenic is the choice of murderers. Among other things, it is excruciating. Chatterton took arsenic.[2]

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[1] Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 87.
[2] Alvarez, A Savage God, 196-203.