Letter From Bahrain

Long ago, when I was young and idealistic, I never intended to be a journalist for more than a month. It is a shabby way to make a living, so my ambition was strictly short-term. Yet the career lasted longer than expected, decades, in fact. Life can be so strange. Even so, I did my best to ignore the sleaziness, manipulation and mediocrity that underlie the facade of polite conversations with public figures. It didn’t take long to discover that social connections and sublime ass kissing attained better results than mere talent and hard work.

One aspect I don't miss is the annual Christmas party. Held at a pretentious country club in a small American town, it is still hosted by the publisher; one of the great bores of all time. He’s always reminded me of a typical Rotary Club member I once saw at McDermott’s bar on Tamm Avenue, during the annual St. Patrick's Day celebration in St. Louis. The guy was shit faced drunk, passed out beneath the urinal. He just lay there on the dirty floor, resplendent in a finely tailored suit. The urinal leaked, yet he appeared unfazed by the whole affair.

Each year, at the start of the party, every guest passes through a mock receiving line with his eminenence, the publisher. Colleagues in the newsroom frequently talked about that awful "smell,” of the local chemical company, but that was nothing compared to the concentrated essence of his unwashed prick.

Perhaps it didn’t help that many of my role models were writers and artists who fell by the wayside. Many were the conspicuous victims of syphilis, while others just suffered, in general, from unruly abandon, poor health, or both. Some, of course, were plainly non compos mentis.

It's well known that in May, 1890 Vincent Van Gogh finally felt strong enough to leave the asylum at Saint-Remy. He settled at Auvers. Yet on July 27 he shot himself and died two days later.

Arthur Rimbaud was so discouraged by the poor public reception of Une Saison En Enfer, he abandoned writing at age 20. Instead he became a vagabond and worked as a gunrunner in Abyssinia. According to legend, he was also involved in the last days of the African slave trade. Rimbaud died at the age of 37 on November 10, 1891, reportedly from the complications of syphilis and cancer.

Guy De Maupassant, a leading member of Zola's Medan Group of Naturalists, was already under sentence of death from syphilis at the height of his literary career. All the same, he led a hectic social life and continually lived up to his reputation for womanizing. Insane by 1891, Maupassant was an inmate of the famous lunatic asylum kept by Dr. Antoine Blanche, where he died on July 6, 1893.

There was also the sad case of poet Paul Verlaine, who abandoned his wife and son in 1872 to live openly with Rimbaud. He was eventually sentenced to prison for two years after he wounded Rimbaud with a revolver, during an emotional breakdown in the summer of 1873. Contrition, prison, abstinence and pious reading produced a return to Roman Catholicism for Verlaine a year later. Nonetheless, he managed to die in a whorehouse on January 6, 1896.

Cora Taylor, the owner of a Florida brothel, accompanied Stephen Crane, who left for Greece to report the Greco-Turkish War in 1897. She sold the "Hotel de Dream," to become a female correspondent and follow Crane across Europe. Crane and Cora settled in England in 1899, where they bled themselves to death financially by entertaining a never-ending procession of guests and spongers on a grand scale. On borrowed money, Cora deposited the dying Crane in a sanitarium in Badenwiler, Germany - where he died on June 5, 1900 of tuberculosis. Crane was only 27-years-old.

Of course in January 1899, Friedreich Nietzsche collapsed on a street in Turin, Italy. Hopelessly insane, an utter imbecile, he was taken to a madhouse, but was soon released to the care of his family. He never recovered and finally died on August 25 in Weimar.

Paul Gauguin resigned from the Paris Stock Exchange in 1883 to devote his life to painting. A few short years later, when poverty overtook them, Gauguin's wife and their five children left him. The combination of total public indifference, illness and poverty provoked Gauguin to escape to Tahiti in 1891. He died in misery on the island of La Dominique in the Marquesas on May 8, 1903.

In 1892 the Abbe Arthur Mugnier convinced Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of Against Nature, considered by many as the keystone of the Decadent movement, to attend the
Trappist monastery at the lonely Abbey of Notre-Dame-d'Igny as an oblate. There he was received back into the Catholic Church. Huysmans' semi-monastic life, which followed a strict and austere observance of the Benedictine rule in a communal life of prayer and retreat, lasted for two years. His odyssey of escapism ended in atrocious agony when he died from cancer in May 1907.

By October 1910, life at Yasnaya Polyana had become intolerable for Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. He feared that his wife, Sofya Andreyenvna, who he considered insane, was prepared to kill him. Two days later after fleeing from his estate, Tolstoy collapsed in the train station at Astapovo, not far from his home. He passed into a sort of delirium, and is said to have muttered: "Search, always go on searching."

Yet for sheer audacity, there is no one quite like Naked Lunch author William Burroughs. A Harvard graduate, he was from a Socially Registered St. Louis family who professed and wrote about his homosexuality and his addiction to heroin. He had engaged in various criminal activities and was arrested on several occasions. Despite his homosexuality, Burroughs had a common-law wife and they had a son. However, in Mexico City he shot and killed Joan Vollmer Burroughs on September 6, 1951 during a drunken pistol game of William Tell. Burroughs was in his early 40s when he finally began to write about the shambles of his life.