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| The old Penguin edition - the latest Bloomsbury paperback has a rather uninteresting illustrationless blue cover |
Al
Alvarez’s book on suicide ‘The Savage God’ had a profound personal impact on me
when I read it in the early 1980’s. The study was originally published in 1971
but has aged reasonably well for the most part. Alvarez’s discussion on what he
calls the four great fallacies of suicide gives a flavour of the book; the
fallacies being that the young are more prone to killing themselves than the
old, that unrequited love is often a cause, that the weather somehow exerts a
malign influence over the mind of the would be suicide and that certain
countries make a national habit of doing away with themselves. On the fallacy
of age he says “it used to be thought…that suicide was inextricably linked with
young love. The paradigm was Romeo and Juliet – youthful, idealistic and
passionate. Yet statistically, the chances of Romeo and Juliet succeeding in
taking their own lives are far smaller than those of King Lear…..the incidence
of successful suicide rises with age and reaches its peak between the ages of
fifty-five and sixty-five.” He adds that suicide attempts peak between 25 and
45. As for “the suicidal great passion. It seems that those who die for love
usually do so by mistake and ill luck. It is said that the London police can
always distinguish, among the corpses fished out of the Thames, between those
who have drowned themselves because of unhappy love affairs and those who
drowned for debt. The fingers of the lovers are almost invariably lacerated by
their attempts to save themselves by clinging to the piers of the bridges. In
contrast, the debtors apparently go down like slabs of concrete, without
struggle and without afterthought.” On the claim that “suicide is produced by
bad weather” he quotes an early eighteenth century French novel that begins;
‘In the gloomy month of November, when the people of England hang and drown
themselves.’” He points out that there are two annual peak in suicide rates;
one is at Christmas (that period of forced jollity is enough to drive the most
strong minded of us to seriously consider putting an end to it all) and the
other is spring which does not always bring the expected improvement in mood
hoped for by the depressed and despairing and leads some hopeless individuals
to take their own lives. As for ‘suicide as a national habit,’ the French, as
in the passage quoted above, regarded suicide (along with flagellation) as an
English vice. In the early 1970’s when Alvarez was writing (and perhaps nothing
much has changed with regard to this particular trope) we thought it was the
Swedes who killed themselves in their thousands during their unending long
winter nights. Alvarez points out that the highest national suicide rates, at
the time, were in fact Hungary, Finland, Austria and Czechoslovakia. In 2012, according to the World Health
Organisation, Hungary had slipped to 16th in the world suicide
rankings, Finland to 33rd, the Czech Republic to 42nd and
Austria 54th. Today's suicide hot spots are Guyana, the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea, South Korea, and Sri Lanka. Poverty is cited for
the high incidence in Guyana, the totalitarian regime in North Korea it (in
South Korea the elderly kill themselves, not because of liberal democracy, but because
of poverty and the breakdown of traditional family support) and in Sri Lanka
the suicide rate is highest amongst the relatively young, 15-44 year olds. I
suppose no one should be looking for a useful discussion of social trends in a
40 year old book. Alvarez’s examination of psychological theories is almost as redundant
as his musings on the sociology of suicide. An entire, tedious, chapter is
devoted to weighing up the pros and cons of Sigmund Freud’s and Melanie Klein’s
versions of the death instinct; maybe my younger self found this stuff gripping
but psychoanalytic theory now seems as outdated as alchemy.
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| The death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis - a perennially popular exhibit at Tate Britain |
The book opens and closes with personal memoirs. The opening is a rather harrowing account of the last days of Sylvia Plath; Alvarez knew both the American poet and her husband Ted Hughes and last saw Sylvia alive on Christmas Eve 1962. The events of that night are mired in controversy as Alvarez’s obvious feelings of guilt and vague explanation of “responsibilities I didn’t want” in relation to Plath have led to speculation that he either rejected sexual advances from her or accepted them – either way he is seen as being in some way implicated in her death. Ted Hughes was furious that Alvarez published details of Plath’s suicide but ultimately his account of her suicide, fascinating as it is, answers none of the questions that have been endlessly raked over since her death. The book closes with a revealing and thought provoking account of Alvarez’s own suicide attempt. Literature is Alvarez’s vocation and the best pages in the book, apart from the opening and closing memoirs, are his discussions on suicide in literature from the classic texts of Seneca and Cicero to his own generation of poets and their immediate forbears Robert Lowell and John Berryman. There is an excellent examination of suicidal themes in the work of John Donne (“For Donne, however, suicide seems not to have been a question of choice or action but of mood, something indistinct but pervasive, like rain. After a certain point, a kind of suicidal damp permeated his life”), and absorbing accounts of the suicide of Thomas Chatterton and the attempted suicide of William Cowper.
Highly recommended.
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