September 1941

The thought of suicide is a real comfort to me: sometimes it’s the only way I can get through a sleepless night.

On such a night – and there were plenty of them – I used to dismantle my Walther automatic pistol and meticulously oil the metal jigsaw of pieces. I’d seen too many misfires for the want of a well-oiled gun, and too many suicides gone badly wrong because a bullet entered a man’s skull at an acute angle. I would even unload the tiny staircase that was the single-stack magazine and polish each bullet, lining them up in a rank like neat little brass soldiers before selecting the cleanest and the brightest and the keenest to please to sit on top of the rest. I wanted only the best of them to blast a hole in the wall of the prison cell that was my thick skull, and then bore a tunnel through the grey coils of despond that were my brain.

All of this might explain why so many suicides go wrongly reported to the cops. ‘“He was just cleaning his gun and it went off,” said the dead man’s wife.’

Of course guns go off all the time and sometimes they even kill the person holding them; but first you have to put the cold barrel against your head – the back of the head is best – and pull the damned trigger.

Once or twice I even laid a couple of folded bath towels under the pillow on my bed and lay down with the firm intent of actually going through with it. There’s a lot of blood that leaks out of a head with even a small hole in it. I would lie there and stare at the suicide note that was written on my best paper – bought in Paris – and placed carefully on the mantelpiece, addressed to no one in particular.