There is nothing very mysterious about the interest we take in self-destructive personalities. To be callous about it - and we are all callous when it comes to disasters relived on the printed page - their lives make excellent biographies. Not only do they suffer in a dramatic way: they do it more purposefully than the rest of us, with our dull sense of un-satisfactoriness, can manage. Sequences of chaos and catastrophe in the life of an artist maudit, which to an eye-witness must appear so messy, pointless and wasteful, are revealed by the historical assessor as deliberate strides towards the goal of oblivion. Death becomes, unmistakably, an achievement, if only in the sense retained by that useful French word achevé, meaning both 'brought to completion' and, in a more brutal tone, 'finished off' or even frankly 'killed'. Linguistically, the French are well-equipped to examine these morbid processes, and with perplexing modern exemplars like Artaud and Simone Weil to go at, they need to be.

LRB 18 June 1981 | PDF Download