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Still pursuing the theme that suicide is not merely a function of social malady, Mr. Alvarez notes how there can even be an inverse correlation between social welfare and the suicide rate. We also get to see George Orwell in this excerpt.
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It goes without saying that external misery has relatively little to do with suicide. The figures are higher in the wealthy industrialized countries than in the underdeveloped, higher among the comfortable professional middle classes than among the poor; they were extraordinarily low in the Nazi concentration camps. Indeed deprivation can be a stimulus. Witness the classic case of George Orwell, who, after he left the Burma police, deliberately turned his back on all help and opportunities, and by choosing to be “down and out in Paris and London,” turned himself into a serious artist.
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
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It goes without saying that external misery has relatively little to do with suicide. The figures are higher in the wealthy industrialized countries than in the underdeveloped, higher among the comfortable professional middle classes than among the poor; they were extraordinarily low in the Nazi concentration camps. Indeed deprivation can be a stimulus. Witness the classic case of George Orwell, who, after he left the Burma police, deliberately turned his back on all help and opportunities, and by choosing to be “down and out in Paris and London,” turned himself into a serious artist.
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
