New York, September 27, 1913.
Suicide again presenting itself as the only way out, I was prompted to read over my diaries. As a result my sense of humor caused me to destroy the first one, dating from 1905, my fifteenth year. Full of childish struggles and events, at least until my eighteenth year, I could not let it live after my death. After my eighteenth year in New York, I began to face reality, but yet I could not allow even that part of the record to survive.
True, from my fifteenth year I have been in a bad way, but until several years ago a solution seemed bound to come. Suicide never entered my thoughts in those days.
Sex worried me, however, from fourteenth or fifteenth year. Mentally, only until my twentieth, but thinking without acting didn’t strengthen me.
However as this is a sort of last testament I must not waste time on those days. I hardly know how to begin and what to say, but something seems necessary.
I could not write the greater part of this even now, because I have realized since that it is altogether foreign to the spirit prevailing among the Anglo-Saxon, so-called, at least, and I myself am sufficiently contaminated with their spirit to feel cynical about it.
If these writings do come to print I can imagine cynical and damn foolish newspapermen writing about weaklings and degenerates in line with silly editorial in New York Times recently about suicide and another in the World on occasion of suicide of a girl who was tired of 20 cent dinners, to say nothing about those arch idiots and hypocrites, the Hearst hirelings with their talks about the idle rich and the good thing it is most of us have to work for little.
Of course, I do not compare myself to the average man. If I had no sense of humor I would have persisted and made myself a genius in spite of the hell life has been. Nietzsche could never have been if he was born in England or the States.
But I only feel at home when I read men of genius. Always without a friend, the average man is a stranger to me. Women have killed me, because with all my temperament and passion I have been too shy to ever have any love or outlet to my passion.
It is hard to say that if things had been different that such and such would be the case. Sometimes I have thought absolutely sincerely that if I had had enough money to be able to dispense with the daily grind, which, with its necessity of strong excitement as a reaction, has so impaired my will-power as to bring me from supreme egoism of imagining and believing myself to be a genius to a miserable death alone and away from home by my own hand.
At other times I have said that if I question myself honestly that with money I would have simply degenerated into a good for nothing vicious idler of the Thaw class.
Now, when about to die, I will be honest and say that the latter would have probably been the outcome, but it is by no means certain. After all I have been outraged and disgusted in the past after every fall from a certain standard and my love of books does die while I live. Who knows but that I might have got down to study and work and done something? Undoubtedly, I would have had affairs with women (had time and money permitted) under any circumstances, but drink and drug has never appealed to me, even in imagination.
I have been honest and sincere, particularly to the fine point on matters of honor, at least until I began to lose my grip on life. While I never got down and faced things, it was because I was incurably romantic, and when I finally began to realize life it came to me in such a series of shocks that independence would have probably made me a Baudelaire, without his creative work to balance the scale. With such an impractical, childish mother and failure of a father, uncongenial brothers and sisters, almost hating each other, with bad heredity on both sides and a hellish environment, a shy nervous, suspicious disposition, extremes of ecstasy and despair, ungratified passions, alone and friendless, how could I end otherwise than a suicide?
I claim that any man who commits suicide of necessity suffers more than any who continues to live. I don’t want to die. I cannot make any outsider realize by anything I can write how I have tried to avoid this step. I have tried every subterfuge to fool myself, to kid myself along that life wasn’t so bad after all. This record does not show up my humorous side, but I laugh as much as I feel like crying. I enjoy a comedy as well as a tragedy, am tickled by the very things that amuse the average American, and at a baseball game I actually feel like one of the boys, but where I differ is in my tragic and morbid side, and my keen sensitiveness.
Things which pass over most men afflict me with terrible force. My pride has stood in the way of my hope of success under conditions which exist in this country at present. I cannot indefinitely pretend as I apply for work that I am just like the rest. I cannot always conceal the resentment and scorn I feel as I interview business men and stand or sit before them as a mere stenographer. I, a fellow in spirit with men of genius, must show my references, call and beg and implore, for a miserable salary which I despise, must haggle for a few dollars more, the price of a meal.
The indignity of it all. I, an aristocrat at heart, of the aristocracy
of brains and sentiment, must elbow with the ignorant vulgar bourgeois who could not for an instant understand if they would.
What is the use? Death only holds forth relief. I cannot look back on a really happy day. Light-hearted and merry have I been on occasions, but seldom a day without morbid thoughts sometime or other, generally at night. If I could have had a mistress things might have been different. When I have gone out and had sexual intercourse with a woman who pleased my imagination I have slept well—seldom otherwise.
Sex has been my Nemesis, and to-day if I had money I would continue to live. Without it, the whole dreary past and prospective future is too much for me. With it I could dispense with the grind and do work after my own heart.
Of course, others have the grind, also; but the fact that they continue to live shows that they can stand it much better, and were born to it. I wasn’t. My whole nature is outraged by the life I have had to lead. Empty, cold, dismal, hellish.
Let the cynical hirelings of the newspaper whom Bernard Shaw well shows his contempt for, laugh and write editorials. The day will come when men will be allowed to live, not rot, the New York Times notwithstanding.
If a thousand men could be persuaded to commit suicide in protest, the powers that be would sit up and take notice.
Arise you Americans who have some blood in you and get rid of your Comstocks, Bryans, religious hypocrites and grafters, and let the so-called degenerates and insane men have a say, and if you do not live bigger and better, then you deserve what you get.
The majority is always wrong, and the minority of supermen and degenerates—Zolas, Ibsens, etc.—must band together and overthrow the whole damn system which drives the best, the most sincere and honest to suicide or starvation.
The December issue of THE GLEBE will present “The Azure Adder,” a one-act comedy by Charles Demuth.
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