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To be or not to be? That is the cliché: In the wake of Spalding Gray's sudden disappearance, REBECCA CALDWELL examines the notion of the tormented writer (REBECCA CALDWELL, January 17, 2004, Globe & Mail)

At a moment of darkness in It's a Slippery Slope, one of Spalding Gray's celebrated, autobiographical monologues, he speaks with some spell-binding frankness about the difficulty of coping with his mother's suicide. He had just turned 52, the same age his mother was when she committed suicide, and was haunted by the worry that he might be tempted to do the same thing.

His admission of his own suicidal fantasies -- jumping off the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland while on vacation with his wife, Ramona; of overdosing on Quaaludes and slitting his wrists in a hotel in New Mexico -- are recorded in his painful yet companionable style, prompting laughter and shock, particularly when his own defeatism is defeated: "Where would I even find Quaaludes in this day and age, and once I did, and took them, I'd probably feel such an incredible state of well-being that I would not want to kill myself."

But when Gray went for a walk last Saturday night and vanished into the streets of New York, it seemed that one hidden fantasy may have at last come true, and the monologist's voice may have no scripts to deliver in the future.

Gray's disappearance is a startling, troubling event, and one that hopefully might still have a happy resolution. Certainly he is but one in a lengthy scroll of authors who have suffered from depression and other mental-health problems, including T. S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Herman Hesse, Charles Dickens and Emily Dickinson, to name a very few. And some, such as Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, did eventually take their own lives. Apart from their works, their legacy has forged an apparent literary tradition that writers must suffer for their art, making depression almost as much of a cliché for writers as spectacles, all-black outfits and Underwood typewriters.

This story just can't end well, can it?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 20, 2004 8:21 PM