Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

FLAMED-OUT YOUTH

            I don’t think this comes into the “great minds think alike” category, because the idea itself is a fairly commonplace one. I, and probably you, have often thought it. But earlier this year, when I reviewed, for the Listener, American novelist Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the Future, this paragraph jumped out at me as a well-crafted statement of the idea:

“Dead at 29, Shelley became a literary martyr because the world loves poets and actors and some novelists who die young and never become jowly, dumpy, and arthritic, and they love them even more when they are tormented, hallucinating, and suicidal because the calm, reasonable artist, of which there are many, doesn’t deliver the same frisson. And so we gild their young corpses, hold them up to the light, and watch them glow.” (Memories of the Future p.87)

I like the way she mentions calm, reasonable artists and she could have added that there have been poets and novelists who lived a full, long life and were still producing great work towards the end (Tolstoy, Yeats etc.).

But the subject here is the glamourisation of those who die young.

Let me consider first the more ephemeral end of this phenomenon - those showbiz figures whose youthful death sometimes triggered an hysterical, but short-lived, cult. People like James Dean (killed in a car crash at 24) or Buddy Holly (killed in a ‘plane crash at 22). Dean appeared in only three feature-length films, but some critics have noted that the last of these (Giant) suggested that he was already settling down to mediocre, conventional Hollywood roles and his “rebel” image was already waning. Without his youthful death, there would have been no legend. As for Buddy Holly, certainly as songwriter and performer he was a more genuinely creative figure. But even a sympathetic biography I once read about him suggested that, with the inclusion of lush, orchestral backing to his later work, he was heading towards a career in bland middle-of-the-road music. Imagine Buddy Holly at 50 and you imagine a well-heeled guy whose inspired rockabilly style is a backnumber with no legend attached to it. Singer-songwriter Hank Williams (dead at 29) was at least as creative as Holly, but the odds are that a longer life would have seen him remain a leading figure in his durable Country genre.

I won’t linger over the more obviously self-destructive victims of youthful excess like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix – both dead at 27 of drug-abuse. Flaming-out was where they always intended to go anyway.  I lament a little more for the equally self-destructive Amy Winehouse (dead at 28), who was the only singer of her generation to have a genuinely Blues-capable voice. Even so, the cynic (i.e. realist) in me says that Joplin, Hendrix and Winehouse were going, artistically, nowhere in particular. “Better to burn out than to die of rust” goes a version of Neil Young’s nihilistic rock lyric, so Hendrix, Joplin and Winehouse got their wish.

Now for the more considerable literary figures who went down young.

My problem with Thomas Chatterton (probable suicide at 17, though it may have been a medical accident) is my suspicion that he may have been a one-trick pony, who was already written out. Isn’t he really remembered mainly for the very fact of his death itself? It was perniciously glamourised in Henry Wallis’ 1856 painting The Death of Chatterton, which doubtless encouraged many unhappy teenagers to think that suicide was a wonderful thing. I wonder how many people now actually read Chatterton’s fake-medieval “Thomas Rowley” poems – certainly impressive productions from a teenager, but this is really like saying “good for a kid”. The poems are curiosities more than anything, for all the Romantic talk of a “marvellous boy”. Poor Chatterton.

John Keats (dead of tuberculosis at 25) was certainly a much greater loss, though the undoubted masterpieces we have are still the voice of an idealistic young man. Without this early death, could he (like Wordsworth) have lived on, to write, in late middle-age, reams of uninspired, dull poetry after his real flame had gone out? The same thought occurs to me when I think of Sylvia Plath (suicide at 28). Wildred Owen (killed at 25 towards the end of the First World War) had a forceful voice, but his theme really was “war, and the pity of war”. Would he have had anything to say once the war was done? I keep comparing him with his long-lived friend and fellow-soldier Siegfried Sassoon, who wrote equally forceful (and much more angry) war poetry. It is for this that Sassoon is mainly remembered, though the autobiographies he wrote are still read (the three-volume factual ones; and the three-volume fictionalised “George Sherston” ones). Something similar could have been Owen’s fate.

I am much less ambiguous about Alain-Fournier (killed at 27 early in the First World War). Given that he was no child at the time of his death, I think it is likely that Le Grand Meaulnes – which appeared a year before he died – was all he had to offer the world, beautful thing though it is. I suggest that had he lived, his fate would have been like J.D.Salinger’s viz. producing one resonant novel about adolescence, and thereafter producing nothing much of note.

Of all the literary figures who died young, the one who I think held the greatest promise of all was Raymond Radiguet (dead at 20 of tuberculosis). He had already written three collections of poetry, one play, and two short novels, his best-known work being Le Diable au Corps. (Most of his work was published posthumously.) This was a young man who was beginning a very busy literary career. Perhaps the positive thing about his death was that he did not live to be completely absorbed into the coterie headed by Jean Cocteau, who was cultivating the younger man in all manner of ways.

There is one fiery teenage literary genius who did NOT die young (he died aged 39) and who developed the maturity to turn his back on the work that had made him famous. This, of course, is Arthur Rimbaud, all of whose poetic work was written between the ages of 16 and 19. I have expressed my views on him before on this blog (see both Arthur Rimbaud Twice Over and my review of Charles Nicholl’s SomebodyElse). In many ways I see Rimbaud as a rebuke to the glamourisation of those who died young, much as, regrettably, his own youthful bohemianism has been glamourised by wistful older men. Among other things, the arc of Rimbaud’s life shows that a great literary beginning was not necessary the prologue to a great literary life.

As you will have already noticed, dear perceptive reader, this week’s reflection has done little more than amplify the Siri Hustvedt paragraph quoted at the beginning. Even so, I am happy to have concurred with her. Youthful death is sad, but, in terms of art and culture at least, of itself it does not necessarily mean a great loss to the world. The “might have been” is as likely to be the “never would have been”. And in the end the “might have been” is only speculation. Perhaps the glamourisation of the youthful dead is really just nostalgia for our own dead youth.