Anthony Bourdain, R.I.P.

I don’t know if anyone reads the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson anymore, but I turned to him almost immediately after I got the news that television host Anthony Bourdain had died of an apparent suicide. I was shocked. Bourdain’s TV shows were only incidentally about food, it seemed to me. They were about life: loving it, engulfing it and never, of course, tiring of it. It took a moment or two for me to recall that Bourdain had had a spot of trouble with drugs and that he was too thin, given how much he was shown eating. Something was wrong.

What was wrong was how the camera does not show depression. What was wrong is how we often accept appearances for reality. What was wrong is how the look of a person gets taken for the entirety of the person.

The Robinson poem I turned to is called “Richard Cory.” It was taught to me in school, the eighth grade, probably, but no matter what grade, it seems too cynical — too honest — to be taught in school at all. It is about Richard Cory, “clean favored, and imperially slim,” who is the envy of everyone in town.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

There you have it: a last line that has been with me most of my life. There you have it: the story of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade as well. She was yet another person to envy, yet another person of wealth and beauty and talent and sunny in all the publicity shots, who killed herself just days ago.

Edwin Arlington Robinson had a tough life. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times, but he never made much money — he was a poet, after all. He got a sinecure from President Theodore Roosevelt, who liked his poems and knew Robinson was broke. The poet died in 1935, leaving some indelible poems — “Miniver Cheevy” is another — and a last line that endures, like a bullet that entered in the eighth grade and has never been removed.

Anthony Bourdain, R.I.P.