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77 CHAPTER 7 The Contagion Effect “Teachers Ought to Be Careful in What They Assign” I first encountered the contagion effect when I was teaching a graduate course called Literary Suicide in 1994, from which arose Surviving Literary Suicide in 1999. The more I learned about the suicides of Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, the more examples I discovered of copycat deaths. Hemingway, for example, never forgave his father for committing suicide. The act haunted him his entire life and compelled him to write stories in which he attempted to exorcise his own obsession with suicide. Carlos Baker quotes in his biography a revealing canceled passage of The Green Hills of Africa. “My father was a coward. He shot himself without necessity. At least I thought so. I had gone through it myself until I figured it in my head. I knew what it was to be a coward and what it was to cease being a coward. Now, truly, in actual danger I felt a clean feeling as in a shower” (809). Hemingway regarded this suicide as a moral failure, and despite statements to the contrary, he felt little empathy for his father and none for his mother, whom he held responsible for his father’s death. Copycat Suicide Though he often wrote about suicide, sometimes autobiographically— Robert Jordan’s fear of committing suicide, as his father had done, is the underlying motivation behind his “heroic” death in For Whom the Bell Tolls—Hemingway did not want biographers to intrude on his privacy. “The suicide of my father,” he states sardonically, “is the best story I never wrote” (Mellow 570). It is no exaggeration to state that Clarence Hemingway’s suicide was a major factor in the formation of his son’s hypermasculinity and in his repeated defiance of death, whether it was on the battlefield, in the bullring, or on the plains of Africa. His disdain for those who killed themselves concealed the fear that he would share his 27460 part 02.indd 77 27460 part 02.indd 77 10/2/07 2:06:12 PM 10/2/07 2:06:12 PM 78 CHAPTER 7 father’s fate. One senses that his father’s suicide was a lifelong contagion from which the novelist never could escape. After Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, his son John recalled a promise that the novelist obliged him to make several years earlier when John was confronting a personal crisis. “After I left the army and was married, I was very depressed about what I was going to do, very gloomy. And Papa said, ‘You must promise me never, never . . . we’ll both promise each other never to shoot ourselves.’ He said, ‘Don’t do it. It’s stupid.’ This was after quite a few martinis. I hadn’t said anything about shooting myself, but I was obviously very depressed . He said, ‘it’s one thing you must promise me never to do, and I’ll promise the same to you’” (Brian 262). The antisuicide pact did not prevent a severely depressed Hemingway from shooting himself in 1961. Within a few years his brother Leicester and sister Ursula also died by their own hand, as did his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway in 1996 of a drug overdose. Copycat suicides followed the novelist’s death. Upon being told of Hemingway’s suicide, the Spanish bullfighter Juan Belmonte responded succinctly, “Well done,” and not long afterward he shot himself in the same way (Meyers 564). In one of the most haunting stanzas in his poem The Dream Songs, John Berryman, who committed suicide, as did his father, believed that fathers who kill themselves condemn their sons to the same fate: Save us from shotguns & fathers’ suicides. It all depends on who you’re the father of if you want to kill yourself— a bad example, murder of oneself the final death, in a paroxysm, of love for which good mercy hides? . . . . . . . . But to return, to return to Hemingway that cruel & gifted man. Mercy! My father; do not pull the trigger or all my life I’ll suffer from your anger killing what you began. (254) Like Ernest and John Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton also had an antisuicide pact. The two young poets met in Robert Lowell’s 27460 part 02.indd 78 27460 part 02.indd 78 10/2/07 2:06:12 PM 10/2/07 2:06:12 PM [3.136.18.48] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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