Denver, Colo., February 5, 1913.
To go back to my story, after deciding on January 10th to commit suicide on May 10th, my troubles became worse instead of better. The will to live rebelled against this decision, and I endeavored to drown the still small voice, and succeeded in doing so, only to have it come up again.
Only one reaction in Chicago, however, amounted to anything. In my usual impulsive, emotional manner, after reading Shaw’s “Quintessence of Ibsenism,” my old feelings about art and literature returned with force augmented by the depth of the preceding condition of pessimism and hopelessness. For a week I felt like a genius, went about full of esthetic feelings, courage. I exercised twice a day, thus conquering an habitual physical laziness, walked with a springy step, inhaling the cold air enthusiastically. In short, it was the same old story.
I fed my esthetic feelings at the art gallery, library, and theatre. I attended several performances at the Fine Arts Theatre of the Irish Players, and enjoyed their simple, honest humor.
By Friday it began to peter out. Depression, unaccountable as usual, began to come over me. I shook it off, but it could not be gainsaid, and on Saturday night, January 25th, I attended a performance of Strindberg’s “Creditors” and “The Stronger” at the Chicago Little Theatre, with ill-suppressed feelings of impending disaster, which, however, I realized, as of old, were temporary and unfounded, perhaps, but nevertheless enough to give me hours of hell, hell, hell.
The circumstance agreed with my mood, and in a way awakened my ambition to have my own work performed and read, but the realization after of the work, utter lack of appreciation of such work of genius by the general English and American reading public, and moreover, the ever present dislike and fear of going back to office work and working on from year to year to no purpose, until insanity or death ended it all,—brought on all past forebodings, and I went down to the closed district, found a woman, more, two, and disgusted myself with life to the limit; went home and cursed, raved, and what not, until exhaustion brought on fitful, wild slumber, and I awoke with a headache, weak, repentant, defiant, and I know not what.
I might right here give the immediate supplementary cause of my suicide decision, over and above those enumerated.
As long as I was at work I still had hope. In Havana I was weaker, felt more poisoned physically and mentally than before or since, but the thought of artistic success sustained me. I looked forward to dropping the intolerable burden on finishing my work there, and going ahead and becoming a writer.
This kept me on through it all, when I worked on sheer nerve and every day was an agony. In —— I still cherished the delusion—I was a genius, a superman, and would show them all.
When I settled down in —— and bought a typewriter I started typewriting my shorthand notes, put down in Havana, describing my moods, passions and various mental conditions, having in mind writing a book, “The Youth Who Was Prematurely Tired” . . . . mental struggles and states.
On getting down to it, however, the thought that if I was to do anything it must be done while the money I had saved by scrimping, scraping, sacrificing social life, amusement, almost everything,—lasted, which would not be any too long, and then, the old agony of uncongenial hellish work,—this thought took away everything.
The bottom fell out, and from that time on, last September and October, I have steadily lost all confidence and hope in myself, and my grip on life. The thought of going back to work . . . . the mental state of which it had been the product, haunted me unceasingly.
I dared not face the situation. I quarrelled at home, with reason, however, fled to Arthur’s house in ——. The wild idea I had conceived in . . . . of disappearing, going away secretly and suddenly returned. No matter where I turned there seemed no refuge from my own diseased mind. Wild anarchical schemes entered my head. Now I understood why men killed, went insane. Before I had experienced passion, good and bad, honest and dishonest, clean and sane, and unclean and insane, poetic frenzy, glowing emotional enthusiasm, and now new ranges of wildness came to me.
I cursed myself, my parents, heaven and earth; then the reaction brought sorrow and spasmodic attempts at reparation.
I destroyed my books and objects of fond remembrance, the next day repented and endeavored to undo the damage. This began in Havana, continued in —— and became worse in ——.
Then in a sudden impulse I decided to go away from it all, using the excuse of going to California with my aunt, then to Chicago, which I really intended to do.
In Chicago I at first felt like making a new start, but after accepting a position, I had a foreboding I should fall down on it, and I cursed the social system and employing class for not offering me a living salary for just as much work as I could stand, and have leisure for writing, study, etc.
Death seemed preferable to working, and, dreading to go back to what it had represented in Havana and New York previous to that, I made the suicide decision. The reasons enumerated all came to me night after night as I lay awake, and I called for death . . . . it was this dread of work that finally took the ground away from under my feet. I felt in my heart that, with a weekly income of $20 to $25 I would persist and fight my mental disabilities, finding consolation in reading, studying, especially philosophy and writing. My idea would be not to write with the idea of making money, but of making literature.
I got cold feet whenever I thought of the sordid commercialism of present American authorship. My ideas and ideals, delusions, illusions, call them what you will, were too strong to face the facts.
I had wild ideas of laying my case before some rich man, or at least some institution endowed by one, seeing if they, out of pity, sympathy, or some other feeling, could be induced to allow me an income of $20 to $25 per week, and not require of me definite results.
I thought of going to sociologists, insanity experts, those whom we read so much about in the papers, who are always talking of reform, eugenics, social service; but the realization that these glittering generalities meant nothing to one poor, weak, degenerate individual like me, deterred me.
Two other reasons kept me back, the first self-respect; for despite my weaknesses and downfalls, I still had an inordinate pride, and repulsed pity, sympathy, and felt how humiliating it would be to depend on some one else like that even were such a wild idea possible.
Wild idea, indeed. I remember the letters I wrote in the heyday of my ambition and enthusiasm, to Carnegie, Patten, E. H. R. Green, and several others, asking for a hearing before some board to further education—and the fact of hearing nothing.
Time and again I had bitterly reflected what good is all this charity, social work. It is all general, where does my personal case come in, who is there to give me a little human consideration, a helping hand, encouragement, sociability, love?
Reformers, women reformers and social workers spend their efforts in closing up districts, scattering prostitutes, making it difficult to gamble and generally taking away the means for such as me to forget our troubles now and again, but not a hand is lifted to save me from insanity or death by my own hand.
Outside of this feeling of death being preferable to the humiliation and shuddering at the shocks to my sensitive nature which would be engendered by making public this record, there was the additional feeling that instead of freedom from the bondage of poverty resulting from such an appeal, confinement would be the result.
I dread this about as much as going back to work, because the sanctity, jealous regard and fear about my personality, my individuality is such that if I thought that the result of an appeal would be confinement, I would welcome death as a gift from heaven.
I am an agnostic, and, philosophically at least, an anarchist. I want to be free, to glory in liberty; to have no boss, to be able to develop my intellect. To do this I am willing to pay the price of keeping within the law, to refrain from indulging sexually more than seems absolutely necessary, but I cannot look forward to being fed and given a place to rest in, and otherwise allowed to develop in my own way, but not being allowed freedom of action and residence.
I am not insane now, but any attempt at coercion or confinement would drive me violently insane. I should beat at the doors of my cell, curse everything and die raving, and it is the fear of confinement that keeps me from submitting this to those who could probably save me if they would.
Before the day when my last dollar is gone comes I may in desperation [decide] to risk this, in the hope of being allowed to live in my own way rather than commit suicide, but I don’t know.