Suicide. Reportedly. A shocker.
He had been “severely depressed.”
Much to think about here.
At the very end of his book on suicide, A. Alvarez (himself a failed suicide) writes that suicide is “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.”
And then too one thinks of the Stevie Smith poem:
Not Waving But Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
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David Foster Wallace writes about depression in Infinite Jest:
[I]t was as if a large billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not the slightest inkling was there. … It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. … I simply could not live with how it felt. … I understood the term hell as of that summer day and that night in the sophomore dormitory. I understood what people meant by hell.
******************************
It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. … It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed….
August 11th, 2014 at 8:00PM
He was the very best at a brilliant manic comedy that found, at light speed, all of connections between two or more things. He deserves a place in the comedy hall of fame with the Marx brothers, Lucy (not the fossil), Pryor, Rock, and Seinfeld and company.
It’s hard for a genius, with one style, to live with its passing – e.g. Georgio de Chircio as vs William de Kooning, who always seemed to move on to new dazzling styles.
I’m sorry he couldn’t be happy for the rest of what would have been the rest of his natural life. It would have been well deserved.
But, as I recently read in a great bio of de Kooning, or was it Gorky, nothing kills an artist as much as telling him/(jher) how great she used to be.
August 11th, 2014 at 8:03PM
Greg: I found myself thinking about it in somewhat similar terms to yours, though with an emphasis on the difficulty for the manically energetic to adjust to the simple fact of age. You can’t really do that much about slowing down when you hit your sixties or so; you’re supposed to find other ways of being. Maybe he couldn’t.
I also think it’s likely he backslid into addiction. He’d recently checked himself into rehab. Falling into addiction again after having been clean for a long time is – from what I’ve read – a very dangerous place to be.
August 11th, 2014 at 8:21PM
Of course there’s always a confluence of reasons for something like this. Ultimately it’s chemical. But I suspect that, as it presented itself to him, he knew that he was no longer funny in an original way. To (at my great peril) reorganize Wallace Steven’s* formulation; it must change in order to give pleasure. RW had not really changed from Mork. That’s not a condemnation. Almost everyone who is ambitious eventually is disappointed.
Still he was the Picasso and/or Braque of one era of modern American comedy. It may be arrogant of me to say that that should have been enough.
Ps I am the father of a professional comedian.
August 11th, 2014 at 8:44PM
Greg: To dig a bit more deeply – or maybe, again, just to rephrase what you’ve been saying – Could one say that his particular brand of comedy was so self-centered (I don’t mean that in the customary judgmental way), so narcissistic (again, I don’t mean this negatively, though I realize it’s almost always used negatively), so much about performing one’s brilliant peculiar self for large numbers of people, that when over the years this peculiar (age- and era-limited) self erodes, you’ve got very little left? One thinks here too of his history of addiction – Was it the sort of addiction to substances that hyper-wired performers need in order to come down – to leave the stage – at all?
(‘Cocaine, Williams told People magazine in 1988, “was a place to hide. Most people get hyper on coke. It slowed me down.“‘)
I suppose it’s a cliche said of brilliant self-destructive performers (most recently it was said about Philip Seymour Hoffman) that they have trouble making the transition from the stage to off-stage… But just because it’s a cliche doesn’t mean it might not be true…
Here’s Confucius:
Maybe this spectatorship wasn’t possible for him.
August 11th, 2014 at 9:06PM
Thanks. I’ll take a break and think, awhile, about your comment.
August 12th, 2014 at 8:04AM
In a sense, what’s surprising is that he made it to 63 – 33 or 43 might have seemed more natural. It’s a testament to his talent (and, no doubt, effort) that he was able to become a successful actor, rather than hitting that first wall like, say, Andy Kaufman. Still, when the headline describes him as a “manic comedian,” one can’t help but feel that a word has been omitted.
August 12th, 2014 at 9:58AM
That billowing, flapping horror of great darkness is there down in the depths of very many people, to judge by all my years of advising undergraduates, of talking with older people, and, yes, of introspection. It takes other forms, too — an endless gray, lifeless desert of blowing, gritty fine sand through which one must trudge forever; or undying life sealed in a forgotten coffin deep underground; or infection by some ghastly fungus that preserves your own shape, but slowly consumes your humanity, your consciousness, and all your power of action.
What is needed, I suppose, is not better medications or better counseling, but effective tools from which you can select the particular tool best suited to the condition of yourself and your moment. You use that tool to tinker a little more with yourself, as if you yourself were a work of art decades in the making, but also you are both the artist and the raw material from which that work of art must be made. In the process of slowly making and remaking that work of art you learn to live with your own human condition.
And no one tool works well for everyone, or every moment, or every work of art: you cannot sculpt marble with a painter’s brush, or paint on canvas with an actor’s voice.
What works best for me is taking on duties while cultivating dispassion towards myself, but empathy and compassion towards the others to whom I owe duty. But I am a pronounced introvert. The same tools may not work at all for someone else, or for any extrovert. Others need to find, by trial and error, tools that work for them. And the work of art, itself, is not a thing for anyone’s else gaze or admiration; it is a secret for yourself alone, or yourself and a bare handful of proven close friends or family. It cannot endure exposure or admiration.