DEATH BY YOUR OWN HAND

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33739, 11 January 1975, Page 9

DEATH BY YOUR OWN HAND

The Savage God — A Study of Suicide. By A. Alvarez. Penguin Books. 315 pp.

What is this strange world of the potential suicide that cuts out all the colour and sunshine of ordinary living, even when everything is going well, and seeks to pursue only its denial? Alvarez explores this intensely personal theme through the work and life of the poet, Sylvia Plath, various literary figures through history, and his own turmoil as an artist and critic. As a result the book becomes clogged with its own wealth of material, and therefore it is not as valuable a statement as it might have been. Nevertheless this reprint of a work first published in 1971 is as topical now as it was then.

To Mr Alvarez suicide now seems as much beyond social or psychological prophylaxis as it is beyond morality. It is a human characteristic which not even the most perfect society will erase, having within it a logic like that of a nightmare. Once a man decides to take his own life, he enters a shutoff, impregnable, but wholly convincing world where every detail fits, and each instant reinforces his decision.

In his historical survey Mr Alvarez describes how the ancient Greeks gradually tolerated suicide and legalised it. , . , Ancient Rome made it into a high fashion, and Christianity combined blood-lust and suicide into a seeking for martyrdom. Suicides in the Middle Ages were believed to have sinned against God and were punished even after death, but “melancholy” and suicide _ became popular in Elizabethan times as attributes of superior minds and

genius. In the Romantic era suicide became an idealised ending of life in its full flowering before deterioration took place. After the First World War art became ever more extreme, violent and selfdestructive, as in the “Dada” movement which was anti everything. This led to suicide as a casual matter, and the ultimate work of art. In art the new strategy of aesthetic sophistication, according to Mr Alvarez, is primitivism. As the pleasure principle becomes less pleasurable and more maniacally intense, so the death instinct seems more powerful and übiquitous. Mr Alvarez reveals painfully the feeling of the person who, for years, says to himself over and over again “I wish I were dead,” and finally listens to what he is really saying. He concludes that suicide is not for him now. His excellent study, for all its sprawling canvas, is a worth-while contribution to the widely-studied topic of ’’suicidology.”