A. Alvarez - The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

To Anne

After us the Savage God
W. B. YEATS

The God Tezcatlipoca, he was considered a true god, invisible, able to enter everywhere, in the heavens, on earth and into the place of the dead. It was said that when he was upon earth he incited people to war, created enmity and discord and caused much anguish and disquiet. He set people against one another so that they made wars, and for this reason he was called the enemy on both sides.

He alone understood how the world was governed, and alone gave prosperity and riches, and took them away at will; he gave riches, prosperity and fame, courage and command, dignities and honour, and took them away again as he willed. For this he was feared and reverenced, for it was within his power to raise up or cast down.

SAHAGUN: History of the Things of New Spain

When I was at school there was an unusually sweet-tempered rather disorganized physics master who was continually talking, in a joky way, about suicide. He was a small man with a large red face, a large head covered with woolly grey curls and a permanently worried smile. He was said to have got a First in his subject at Cambridge, unlike most of his colleagues. One day at the end of a lesson, he remarked mildly that anyone cutting his throat should always be careful to put his head in a sack first, otherwise he would leave a terrible mess. Everyone laughed. Then the one oclock bell rang and the boys all trooped off to lunch. The physics master cycled straight home, put his head in a sack and cut his throat. There wasnt much mess. I was tremendously impressed.

The master was much missed, since a good man was hard to find in that bleak, shut-in community. But in all the hush and buzz of scandal that followed, it never occurred to me that he had done anything wrong. Later, I had my own long run-in with depression and began to understand, I thought, why he had opted for such a desperate way out. Shortly after that, I got to know Sylvia Plath in that extraordinary creative period which preceded her death. We used to talk about suicide at times but coolly, as a subject like any other. It was only after she took her life that I realized that I knew almost nothing about the act, despite the large claims to understanding I had been privately making to myself for so long. This book is an attempt to find out why these things happen.

It begins with a memoir of Sylvia Plath, not simply as a tribute to her, since I think she was one of the most gifted writers of our time, but also as a matter of emphasis. I want the book to start, as it ends, with a detailed case-history, so that whatever theories and abstractions follow can somehow be rooted in the human particular. No single theory will untangle an act as ambiguous and with such complex motives as suicide. The Prologue and Epilogue are there as reminders of how partial every explanation must always be. So I have tried to chart the shifts and confusions of feeling which led up to Sylvias death as I understand them, and as objectively as I am able. From this one instance I have followed the subject where it has led into less personal areas.

It has proved a long trail. When I started I innocently thought that not much had been written about suicide: a beautiful philosophical essay by Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, a great authoritative tome by Emile Durkheim, Erwin Stengels invaluable Penguin handbook, and an excellent, but out of print historical survey by Giles Romilly Fedden. I soon found I was wrong. There is a huge mass of material on the topic and it grows larger every year. Yet little of it is of much interest to anyone except the specialist, and even less has to do with what the layman personally knows of suicide. The socialogists and clinical psychiatrists, in particular, have been peculiarly unstoppable. Yet it is possible in fact, easy to plough through almost any of their innumerable books and articles without once realizing that they are concerned with that shabby, confused, agonized crisis which is the common reality of suicide. Even the psychoanalysts seem to avoid the topic. It gets into their work mostly by the way, while discussing other things. There are a few notable exceptions whom I duly acknowledge later but to a large extent I have had to piece together the psycho-analytic theory of suicide as best I could, from the point of view of an interested outsider who is not in analysis. All that is in Part III. But anyone who wants a full survey of the facts and statistics of suicide and a rsum of the current state of play in theory and research should go to Professor Stengels lucid and sympathetic study, Suicide and Attempted Suicide.

The more technical research I read, the more convinced I became that the best I could do would be to look at suicide from the perspective of literature to see how and why it colours the imaginative world of creative people. Not only is literature a subject I know something about, it is also a discipline which is concerned, above everything else, with what Pavese called this business of living. Since the artist is, by vocation, more aware of his motives than most other people and better able to express himself, it seemed likely that he would offer illuminations which sociologists, psychiatrists and statisticians missed. In following this black thread I have arrived at a theory which, for me, in some way explains what the arts are about now. But in order to understand why suicide should seem so central to contemporary writing I have gone back a long way to see how the theme has developed imaginatively in the past five or six hundred years. This has involved a certain amount of, perhaps, dreary detail. But I am not writing for the literary specialist and if that is how the book comes across in the end, I have failed.

I offer no solutions. I dont, in fact, believe that solutions exist, since suicide means different things for different people at different times. For Petronius Arbiter it was a final stylish grace-note to a life devoted to high style. For Thomas Chatterton it was the alternative to a slow death by starvation. For Sylvia Plath it was an attempt to get herself out of a desperate corner her own poetry had boxed her into. For Cesare Pavese it was as inevitable as the next sunrise, an event which all the praise and success in the world could not put off. The only conceivable solution the suicide can hope for is help of one kind or another: sympathetic understanding of what he is going through from the Samaritans or the priest or from those few doctors who have the time and inclination to listen, trained help from the psycho-analyst or from what Professor Stengel hopefully calls a therapeutic community specifically organized to cope with these emergencies. But then, he may not want help.

Instead of offering answers, I have simply tried to counterbalance two prejudices: the first is that high religiose tone though now it is most often used by people who belong to no church they would care to mention which dismisses suicide in horror as a moral crime or sickness beyond discussion. The second is the current scientific fashion which, in the very process of treating suicide as a topic for serious research, manages to deny it all serious meaning by reducing despair to the boniest statistics.

Nearly everybody has his own ideas about suicide and so more people than I could decently mention or thank have come up with references, details and suggestions. But I owe a great debt of gratitude to Tony Godwin whose conviction against all the evidence that I could produce this book made him arrange a generous advance which gave me the freedom to write it. My thanks, too, to the Arts Council of Great Britain for a grant which came mercifully and at a crucial moment. And to Diana Harte who struggled with the manuscript, typing and re-typing the thing meticulously. Thanks, above all, to my wife, Anne, who helped, criticised and, quite simply, got me through it.