(Baroness Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven)
born 12 July 1874
born 12 July 1874
No spinsterlollypop for me
She came to Paris for the last year of her life. Did she know it was the last year of her life? Did she pick Paris the way some people pick a cemetery plot and a stone marker? The way they choose an epitaph, a final line by which to be remembered by?
If, as she believed, life and art were identical, death was the biggest scene of all. So why not choose the stage?
If she didn't know consciously, perhaps it was a premonition operating just below conscious awareness. We are all moved by underwater currents. Would a spread of Tarot cards have revealed her imminent death and, if so, would she have recognized it, accepted it, if it were pointed out to her with a red-nailed talon?
If you killed yourself tonight, it would be a tragedy. From the point of view of the present, all the days you might have lived stretch unlived before you like a series of unopened gifts. But is it a tragedy eighty-seven years later?
Not so much.
The Baroness Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven would have been one-hundred-forty years old today if she didn't, at some point, have to die. Even if she'd lived to the age of ninety, dying in 1965 instead of 1927, she'd still be dead for half a century.
Everyone she knew (and didn't know) when she died at the age fifty-two is now long dead right along with her.
Do you get deader as the years accrue? In two hundred years are you any more dead than you are after a hundred?
Is death still a tragedy after so much time has passed? If so, who can honestly say they truly feel it as such, that it isn't actually more accurately described as an abstract, intellectual reflection on the shared fate of humankind, specifically on your own mortality and the mortality of all those you love.
It has never been determined with certainty that she committed suicide at all.
Traditional she points Lightdipped toe tips.
By the time she arrived in Paris, she had worn out the patience of all but her most ardent friends, admirers, and apologists. And even the most ardent were tiring, faltering as she headed around the last turn for the finish line. They were all discovering that talking about Dada in the cafe, making Dada in the studio, enjoying an evening of Dada in the theater was something a lot different from lending Dada money, going on a beach vacation with Dada, having sexual relations with Dada. Even having lunch with Dada could be an alarmingly depleting affair. Over dessert, she told one of her last remaining friends, Djuna Barnes, about the revenge she'd taken on a hotel that had disappointed her expectations.
Djuna had a stronger stomach than most, but--
"That toilet wasn't fit to receive my shit. So I did my business in the morning paper after I'd done reading it and buried the package in the window box."
Her startlingly raucous laughter was like a tree full of crows. People at other tables turned to look. Where was that dreadful noise coming from? Djuna instinctively went for her napkin, as if to hide herself behind a fig leaf.
—there's a limit to everything.
Except the Baroness.
On the beach she strolls, stopping to kneel in order to examine more closely all manner of unwholesome things. Beside a drowned dog washed up on the shingle, she peers into it's empty eye socket. She looks up with a mad ecstatic gleam in her own meteoric eye.
"The brain is still alive with sea worms!"
Shrill insect chimes turn me Rigid
Visitors to the small apartment she rented on the Rue Vavin wondered at the disarray. Her dogs had the run of the place. Egads, the reek of urine and wet fur! Crumbs and crusts crunched underfoot, lay sprinkled across tables and sills, among unwrapped sweets, greasy meat scraps, and empty unwashed tins. Rinds of cheese went silently green in the corners. Junk picked up off the streets: materials for future art-works lay in heaps everywhere. Art, in fact, already, in themselves. The smell of all of it was ripe. An example of Dada housekeeping, perhaps?
"No," explained Barnes, who'd suffered through more than one uncomfortable afternoon, perched on the very edge of the Baroness's soiled, turd-spotted couch. "It's not bad housekeeping. She's sets the food out purposely. She's feeding the mice, you see. Every rodent in Montparnasse shows up. The salons of France have always had their share of vermin, but Elsa has done them all one better."
When contemplating my own suicide, an event aborted on at least two occasions and currently placed indefinitely on hold, it is the note, second only to method, that has been the subject of the most intense deliberation. What to say in your final speech? What words will suit all you've done, been, tried to be? How to make a final summing up before the ultimate silence? What tone to take? Serious, light-hearted, emotional? What won't be misunderstood, especially now that you won't be around to amend, annotate, clarify, re-edit, revise, redact, explain to fucking death what has been written?
For a writer this is an especially daunting problem. Writers are long accustomed to expressing themselves, it's true, but they're also aware of the infinite strategies for doing so, of writing in a thousand different guises and voices, and often in voices and guises not their own at all.
Probably this is why the suicide notes of writers tend so often to be brief. Virginia Woolf's is an exemplary model of the form. She thanks her husband Leonard for the life he's provided her, assures him that he couldn't have done more to make her happy, and that she was happy, happier than she had any expectation of ever being. She apologies for the difficulties she caused him being Virginia Woolf and that she wanted to spare him the trouble she knew she'd cause him if she continued being her, trouble she knew he'd willingly take on being the kind of man he was, but couldn't bear to see him suffer. Then she put down her pen, filled her pockets with stones and waded out into the river, life and life's work done.
I've considered that I might use the same note myself, with proper accreditation, of course, if the time comes; sometimes another can speak for us better than we can ourselves. Their words are unmuddied by emotion.
In the end, I think, for the creative artist, anyway, that it is the oeuvre that properly and best serves as a suicide note. The work in its entirety will best contain an expression of everything one had to say, hoped to say, couldn't say in all its paradox. Think Walt Whitman: I contain multitudes. It will be the most complete statement possible of one's unique life and the conditions prevailing upon one's taking leave of it. The rest will be silence, which says the rest.
In the end to say anything is more than likely worse than unnecessary, it is superfluous.
Elsa left no suicide note.
Here crawls moon—Out of this.
Ernest Hemingway had recently published some of her poems in the transatlantic review during that final year in Paris. Behind the back of Ford Maddox Ford who ran the publication with an eye fixed on respectability.
Ah Respectability, the Baroness's long and erstwhile foe.
Was the publication Ernest's barbed joke aimed at old pal William Carlos Williams, who'd once had an affair with the poet when she was young and wild. Now old and wild, notoriously eccentric and scandalously ribald, she was not exactly a conquest to crow about. Williams, married, seeking a respectability of his own, would have liked to forget that particular outtake, left it on the cutting floor of his life. Or, at least, have the public forget it, and his friends lay off it.
Another possibility. Did Hemingway genuinely admire the Baroness's uncompromisingly experimental work? A woman who dared to go where not even men like Hemingway, the big game hunter of writers, dared go?
Circumstantial evidence: Rumor persisted that his most arguably interesting female invention, Lady Brett Ashley, was at least partially inspired by the Baroness.
Every one fingertip must freeze to touch.
She was imperious.
She was impoverished.
Let's admit it, these two qualities do not go together very well in the minds of most people. We expect our beggars humbled, waiting modestly at the backdoor, shuffling, quiet, eyes lowered, hat in hand. Out of sight of the better company.
Not barreling through the front door wearing a chamberpot of stinkweed on her head.
At fifty-two, flat broke, her face beginning to sag and her once boyishly lithe figure in need of toning, she drew up fliers and posted them around the city advertising herself as an artist's model. In this way she eked out a living two hours at a time. "Eked out" being the operative phrase. But she was over the moon her what she took to be her success. No one, she remained convinced, had ever seen her a model quite like her, willing to do what she was willing to do. She wasn't just an artist's model. She was model as artist. "How excellent I am," she boasted to her friends. "Even more than I was before. I am!"
But just as things were getting better they were taking a turn for the worse.
Landlord problems.
Visa problems.
Money problems.
Money problems.
Money problems.
All the old problems. Problems without solution. Problems without a heart.
She moves, or rather, flees. She rents a flat in a big gloomy mausoleum of a building on Rue Barrault. It's a dirty, dangerous, unappreciative section of the city. No one could find it beautiful but someone whose palette is a trash bin Through the manipulations of a friend of a friend who knows a guy, she scores an audience with an official who could extend her visa, issue a proper work permit. She shows up looking like the Warrior Queen of the Gutter in one of her most outrageous improvised outfits: a colander crowning her head, a bra made of two soup cans, newsprint that had wrapped up fish guts wrapped around her loins. An empty birdcage served as a handbag. It contained a handful of rubbish grabbed up from a pail at random. Her half-a-calling card: a torn Queen of Clubs.
The official was scandalized. "Was she mad? Was it some kind of joke? Who would send this woman here? To me!"
And we ask: "Why then, at this most serious of moments, could she not give an inch? Do the sensible thing for once? Why did she choose an outrageous act sure to defeat her goal, piss off her last remaining friends, give the rest a chance to say 'I told you so'? If there ever was a time to play along, to be conventional, wasn't this, for god's sake, it?"
And you conclude: She's just self-destructive.
Yes and no. She always had an instinct for the jugular. She knew that these were the kinds of moments when Dada counted the most. When the pot was at it's peak, all the cards dealt, and they were calling your bluff. When it was a matter of Dada and Death.
She chose Dada.
In her case, Death was just along for the ride, sitting in the back seat, grinning ear to ear in admiration.
Upon that bloodcrest—mating a galoot.
"Just haul me off to the nearest landing and throw me in the water."
"Have Djuna sell me to a medical school."
These were the instructions she had for her funeral, dictated in letters to her friends.
Her grandfather had committed suicide. So did one of her husbands. She thought both deaths well-done; admired them, but doubted she had it in her to eliminate herself.
It was December, a Wednesday, a month and a day for suicides. The weather, too, was perfect for it. Rain and sleet. On the sidewalks, passersby bent against the gusting wind, holding their coats closed against the wet and cold. Their faces, when they could be seen, were twisted like faces painted by the inmates of an insane asylum. In other words, perfectly realistically, by those who could see behind the masks of normality they wore. Sad puddings, with their marks of weakness, marks of woe. Even the most common city street was a gallery of grotesqueries. Oh, the horrors you could see there any day of the week! What lives these people didn't live!
She lay in bed with her little dog, Pinkie, imagining it all. The dog's warm compact body tucked under her arm. Its little tongue occasionally licking her nose. The wind pushing in the windows and the ice following quickly with the lash. The whole building like a ship, hoving whereto?
On the radio came news that Lindbergh had landed in Mexico City. "I dared as fine as Lindbergh in my realm" she recalled writing in a letter to Peggy Guggenheim. "And I did it without the airplane," she added now.
And laughed.
And left the gas jets on.
I guess my point is that it's difficult to generate a sense of tragedy for a suicide who would be long dead today anyway. Those unlived days are swallowed up by, made less and less significant by all the days that followed beyond the natural human lifespan that could never had been lived anyway.
Time doesn't heal all wounds so much as erase the sufferer, place him or her at such a far remove they might as well be a fictional creation.
In truth, they are a fictional creation.
Even less than a memory, Elsa von Freytag Lorighoven is a figment of my imagination.
Such is the stuff a life is made of in the end.
Those last thirty years or so she might have lived and didn't—well, what do they matter now, what of them? If you think of a life as a work of art, as Elsa surely did, it matters plenty. Her life is an unfinished poem, a sympathy lacking a final movement, a painting left on the easel.
Or not.
Maybe the work was finished just as it was left. Maybe she'd put the finishing touch on it that December night. Maybe all that was left would be repetition.
A hellish fate for a Dadaist.
She left the door open for interpretation.
The door out of Hell.
She showed the way out. She didn't point. No, she simply left.
There.
Exit only.
With crab hat.
Laughing.
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