A Brief History of Portable Literature Read Online Free

O’Keeffe’s friends were Walter Arensberg, Pola Negri, Prince Mdivani, Skip Canell, and Robert Johnson. This last seemed to Man Ray to be “marked by traces of a hollowing out, a rift, and the foreshadowing of death.” And he was clearly a very odd character.
    For a long time, Johnson had been showing up to all engagements carrying a very light briefcase, which everyone thought contained his paintings in miniature, until it was discovered that it was a picnic case containing a soup tureen, four trays, twelve dishes, six glasses, and a baroque silver teapot.
    But the oddest thing about Johnson was that, though reminiscent of Rigaut in certain ways, unlike him, he seemed in an enormous hurry to leave this world. On meeting him, Rigaut felt surprised, ashamed, and extremely unsettled in the face of a far more determined suicide. “Take a good look at me tonight,” Johnson said, “because I doubt you’ll see me again. In a few hours, I’ll no longer exist.” And indeed, soon after returning home, Johnson decided to finish the task he’d started long ago: consisting of a delicate piece of silversmithery. Johnson polished the handle of his baroque silver teapot until it was perfectly rounded and used it as a projectile with which to blow out his brains.
    What Johnson could never have imagined was that his death transformed him into a kind of Werther in New York; the city—from one day to the next, in imitation of Paris—began to teem with suicidal youths. Dazzled by that death by baroque silver teapot, they flung themselves from suspension bridges, but not before writing droll letters to judges outlining the many reasons for giving up this life.
    One of these suicidal youths, the brother of the sculptor Gaudier-Brezska, was thoughtful enough to dedicate the following admirable poem to his judge: “Tomorrow, the end. / The end, tomorrow. / Until tomorrow, the end. / The end, tomorrow. / To the end, tomorrow.”
    The wave of suicides was so huge that Skip Canell, a close friend of Johnson’s, asked Rigaut—since he was a recognized authority on the subject of suicides—to publish without delay a call to young people, urging them to desist from such suicidal inclinations. So it was that, at the end of December, 1924, a letter to the editor appeared in the pages of
The New York Times
, written by Jacques Rigaut.
There’s nothing to live for, nor is there anything to die for. I would like, Mr. Editor, for this letter to make clear to the youth of your city that the only way to show disdain for life is to accept it. Life isn’t worth the trouble it takes to leave it. . . . Suicide is very comfortable, too comfortable:
I
haven’t committed suicide. I wouldn’t want to leave regretting not having taken with me the Statue of Liberty, or love, or the United States. I send my most energetic protest against this absurd wave of suspension-bridge suicides. Youth of New York: choose sumptuous hotels if you want to leave this life. Some hotels are, frankly, rather literary. (After all, the world of letters rests in the hotels of the imagination.) In Europe they’ve known this for a long time and consider suicides elegant only if they happen in places like the Ritz.
     
    This letter led to an outrageous increase in the number of suicides as well as letters to judges (the opposite effect to what Skip Canell had hoped for). A letter written by Canell’s most beloved nephew is famous: “Your Honor, I’m pleased to tell you that I’ve chosen to commit suicide on the day when I’m due to inherit a large fortune from my uncle.”
    According to Man Ray, Jacques Rigaut’s letter helped the Shandies uncover a new characteristic: a radical rejection of any idea of suicide as a benighted romantic tic. “Rigaut’s text,” he wrote, “made clear that, of all of us, he was the only one who believed in suicide. The rest of us were sure that a hydroplane, for example, was a million times more attractive than the wind-blown mane, the