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.
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