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Sylvia's Suicide
Alvarez goes into Sylvia’s suicide with some detail, but I’ll only touch upon it here.
_ _ _
Around six o’clock that morning, she went up to the children’s room and left a plate of bread and butter and two mugs of milk, in case they should wake hungry before the au pair girl arrived. Then she went back down to the kitchen, sealed the door and window as best she could with towels, opened the oven, laid her head in it and turned on the gas.
…
Finally, Sylvia took that risk. She gambled for the last time, having worked out that the odds were in her favor, but perhaps, in her depression, not much caring whether she won or lost. Her calculations went wrong and she lost.
…
Even now I find it hard to believe. There was too much life in her long, flat, strongly boned body, and her longish face with its fine brown eyes, shrewd and full of feeling.... I sometimes catch myself childishly thinking I’ll run into her walking on Primrose Hill or the Heath, and we’ll pick up the conversation where we left off. But perhaps that is because her poems still speak so distinctly in her accents: quick, sardonic, unpredictable, effortlessly inventive, a bit angry, and always utterly her own.
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
_ _ _
From here, now that Alvarez is done with his prologue on Sylvia, the suicide that inspired him to write this book, we shall go on to his general treatment of suicide in society.
_ _ _
Around six o’clock that morning, she went up to the children’s room and left a plate of bread and butter and two mugs of milk, in case they should wake hungry before the au pair girl arrived. Then she went back down to the kitchen, sealed the door and window as best she could with towels, opened the oven, laid her head in it and turned on the gas.
…
Finally, Sylvia took that risk. She gambled for the last time, having worked out that the odds were in her favor, but perhaps, in her depression, not much caring whether she won or lost. Her calculations went wrong and she lost.
…
Even now I find it hard to believe. There was too much life in her long, flat, strongly boned body, and her longish face with its fine brown eyes, shrewd and full of feeling.... I sometimes catch myself childishly thinking I’ll run into her walking on Primrose Hill or the Heath, and we’ll pick up the conversation where we left off. But perhaps that is because her poems still speak so distinctly in her accents: quick, sardonic, unpredictable, effortlessly inventive, a bit angry, and always utterly her own.
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
_ _ _
From here, now that Alvarez is done with his prologue on Sylvia, the suicide that inspired him to write this book, we shall go on to his general treatment of suicide in society.