Monk

Birds build - but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Poems”

After a break of seven months, I have taken back up Mr. A. Alvarez’s “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”. It is just as well that I mine the material for gems I want to keep, because the old paperback is literally crumbling in my hands.

In today’s installment, Alvarez points out a peculiar pattern in the frequency of suicides:

It declines in autumn, reaches its low in midwinter and then begins to rise slowly with the sap; its climax is in early summer, May and June; in July it gradually begins once more to drop.

Which strikes me as counter-intuitive, for I have taken it to be the case that the holiday blues are the worst, so that the dead of winter is known as the dead of winter for a reason. Indeed, I wonder if Alvarez’s information is outdated, as we recall that he published this book in 1972. Nevertheless, I like the suggestiveness of this counter-cyclical pattern between the general flourishing of life and the morbid reality of suicide, such that it is not Christmas and New Year’s Eve and everyone enjoying holiday cheer that finishes off your last hopes, but rather the even clearer signs of people living life and finding love in the heat of spring fever that leaves you cold and feeling utterly left behind.

It makes some sense to me. During the holidays, it is easy to find consolation in the obvious fact that a lot of other people are feeling miserable amid the ostensible cheer and merrymaking. And we know that more people loathe Valentine’s Day than celebrate it. Ah, but the enlivening spring, the cool freshness of the air, the rousing of lusty spirits: one feels profoundly alone in not being a part of this beach party with the bikini babes and their wet T-shirt contests, and knowing that you never will be.

“No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.”

-- Cesare Pavese

A. Alvarez, in discussing attitudes on suicide in the modern era, at least up to the time of his publication, 1970, argues that while suicide was no longer regarded as a mortal sin or an abomination, it still tended to be explained away as an aberrant event, whether because of young love, a Romeo and Juliet kind of tragedy, or because of the seasonal blues, or even because of national culture.

I suppose that our own era has caught up to Alvarez, in that we now recognize it as a more universal condition. Although few of us commit suicide, it is a common thought, that we could put an end to this nightmare that is our existence. Such may be part of the condition of conscious, self-aware existence, that you have this sense of choice, to be or not to be, whatever dreams may or may not come.

Before leaving Alvarez’s discussion on the acceptance and ease of suicide in ancient society, I will grab his quote from Seneca exhorting the same.

_ _ _

Foolish man, what do you bemoan, and what do you fear? Wherever you look there is an end of evils. You see that yawning precipice? It leads to liberty. You see that flood, that river, that well? Liberty houses within them. You see that stunted, parched, and sorry tree? From each branch liberty hangs. Your neck, your throat, your heart are all so many ways of escape from slavery... Do you enquire the road to freedom? You shall find it in every vein of your body.

-- Seneca

_ _ _

Closing the chapter, Alvarez reminds us that St. Augustine and Christendom succeeded in reversing these easygoing attitudes on suicide, going so far as to make it a mortal sin, with suicides even being called martyrs for Satan. He also notes that in modern times, these negative attitudes have themselves been walked back appreciably, though certainly not going back to the times of Libanius and Seneca. Suicide is now more of an amoral proposition and an intellectual curiosity.

Continuing on the subject of the acceptance of suicide in olden times, Alvarez relates how in classical Athens and some of the Greek colonies, the magistrates kept a supply of hemlock and were rather liberal in its administration for those who wished to shuffle off their mortal coil.

_ _ _

Whoever no longer wishes to live shall state his reasons in the Senate, and after having received permission shall abandon life. If your existence is hateful to you, die; if you are overwhelmed by fate, drink the hemlock. If you are bowed with grief, abandon life. Let the unhappy man recount his misfortune, let the magistrate supply him with the remedy, and his wretchedness will come to an end.

-- Libanius (ca. 314-394) quoted by Alvarez

_ _ _

I do not suppose this hemlock was available to laborers and slaves, but Alvarez does not say. They probably had to resort to homemade remedies. But I wonder about the women, the upper-class women.

In discussing the prevalence of suicide in earlier times, Alvarez raises the issue of race-suicide, whereby a people would kill themselves rather than suffer a grimmer fate, such as people about to be taken as slaves into the Roman Empire, such as Jewish peoples. Monk being Monk, I particularly fancied the discussion about the Spanish and the Indians of the New World.

_ _ _

More extreme still, the history of the Spanish conquest of the New World is one of deliberate genocide in which the native inhabitants themselves cooperated. Their treatment at the hands of the Spaniards was so cruel that the Indians killed themselves by the thousands rather than endure it. Of forty natives from the Gulf of Mexico who were brought to work in a mine of the Emperor Charles V, thirty-nine starved themselves to death. A whole cargo of slaves contrived to strangle themselves in the hold of a Spanish galleon, although the headroom was so limited by the heavy ballast of stones that they were forced to hang themselves in a squatting or kneeling position. In the West Indies, according to the Spanish historian Girolamo Benzoni, four thousand men and countless women and children died by jumping from cliffs or by killing each other. He adds that out of the two million original inhabitants of Haiti, fewer then one hundred and fifty survived as a result of the suicides and slaughter. In the end the Spaniards, faced with an embarrassing labor shortage, put a stop to the epidemic of suicides by persuading the Indians that they, too, would kill themselves in order to pursue them in the next world with even harsher cruelties.

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

_ _ _

Where is your god now, eh?

If very early Christianity was hardly averse to suicide, Alvarez argues that in warrior and pagan cultures, suicide was positively respected.

_ _ _

Thus in some warrior societies whose gods were those of violence whose ideal was bravery, suicide was often looked on as a great good. For example, the paradise of the Vikings was Valhalla, “the hall of those who died by violence,” where the Feast of Heroes was presided over by the god Odin. Only those who died violently could enter and partake of the banquet. The greatest honor and the greatest qualification was death in battle; next best was suicide. Those who died peacefully in their beds, of old age or disease, were excluded from Valhalla through all eternity.

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

_ _ _

Who do you suppose would throw a better banquet: Odin or Jesus? I am not a very raucous, he-man type of guy myself.

In calling up the harsh and even outrageous treatment that earlier Christian Europe accorded to suicides, Alvarez goes on to give what is a very surprising account of how ambiguous early Christianity was toward suicides. Like everyone, I imagine, I thought it was taken up in the commandment not to kill, but according to Alvarez, this did not become Christian doctrine until later in the Christian era.

_ _ _

They also reflect the difficulty the Church had in rationalizing its ban on suicide, since neither the Old or the New Testament directly prohibits it. There are four suicides recorded in the Old Testament - Samson, Saul, Abimelech and Achitophel - and none of them earns adverse comment. In fact, they are scarcely commented on at all. In the New Testament, the suicide of even the greatest criminal, Judas Iscariot, is recorded as perfunctorily; instead of being added to his crimes, it seems a measure of his repentance. Only much later did the theologians reverse the implicit judgment of St. Matthew and suggest that Judas was more damned by his suicide than by his betrayal of Christ. In the first years of the Church, suicide was such a neutral subject that even the death of Jesus was regarded by Tertullian, one of the most fiery of the early Fathers, as a kind of suicide. He pointed out, and Origen agreed, that He voluntarily gave up the ghost, since it was unthinkable that the Godhead should be at the mercy of the flesh. Whence John Donne’s comment in Biathanatos, the first formal defense of suicide in English: “Our blessed Savior... chose that way for our redemption to sacrifice his life, and profuse his blood.”

The idea of suicide as a crime comes late in Christian doctrine, and as an afterthought. It was not until the sixth century that the Church finally legislated against it, and then the only Biblical authority was a special interpretation of the Sixth Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” The bishops were urged into action by St. Augustine; but he, as Rousseau remarked, took his arguments from Plato’s Phaedo, not from the Bible. Augustine’s arguments were sharpened by the suicide mania which was, above all, the distinguishing marks of the early Christians, but ultimately his reasons were impeccably moral. Christianity was founded on the belief that each human body is the vehicle of an immortal soul which will be judged not in this world but in the next. And because each soul is immortal, every life is equally valuable. Since life itself is the gift of God, to reject it is to reject Him and to frustrate His will; to kill His image is to kill Him - which means a one-way ticket to eternal damnation.

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

_ _ _

This makes it clearer to me that suicide is an exceedingly difficult moral issue, at least for those of us trying to understand the suicide of others and suicide in general. Though, for the particular suicide, for the individual who has committed suicide, I suppose one has gone beyond debate and philosophy and that it is less a moral question than a raw existential question, and perhaps there is usually the sense that one has run out of options, whether this is in fact the case or is actually a desperate delusion.

After his prologue on Sylvia Plath, Alvarez begins part two with a weird, macabre anecdote of a suicide that is even odder than the one we opened with, about the school teacher who cut off his head in a sack so as not to make a bad mess. He quotes from the letter of a Russian emigre in London writing to his sister.
_ _ _

A man was hanged who had cut his throat, but who had been brought back to life. They hanged him for suicide. The doctor had warned them that it was impossible to hang him as the throat would burst open and he would breathe through the aperture. They did not listen to his advice and hanged their man. The wound in the neck immediately opened and the man came back to life again although he was hanged. It took time to convoke the aldermen to decide the question of what was to be done. At length the aldermen assembled and bound up the neck below the wound until he died. Oh my Mary, what a crazy society and what a stupid civilization.

-- Nicholas Ogarev, quoted in “The Savage God”

_ _ _

By this colorful example, Alvarez gives us the flavor of how suicide was treated in Christian Europe until modern times, such an execrable act it was deemed, perhaps worse than rape. He has some interesting observations, though, about the Christian grounding of this perspective, which we shall save for next time.

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.

Sylvia is still happily regaling Alvarez with her latest poetic efforts, and this includes perhaps her most famous poem, “Lady Lazarus”. What makes this happy occasion and this poem especially significant is that she had only recently made another serious suicide attempt, driving her car off the road, as she now relates to Alvarez. This was her second or possibly her third such attempt, and “Lady Lazarus” is particularly about this penchant of hers to play thus with death.

_ _ _

In life, as in the poem, there was neither hysteria in her voice, nor any appeal for sympathy. She talked about suicide in much the same tone as she talked about any other risky, testing activity: urgently, even fiercely, but altogether without self-pity. She seemed to view death as a physical challenge she had, once again, overcome. It was an experience of much the same quality as riding Ariel or mastering a bolting horse - which she had done as a Cambridge undergraduate - or careering down a dangerous snow slope without properly knowing how to ski - an incident also from life, which is one of the best things in The Bell Jar. Suicide, in short, was not a swoon into death, an attempt “to cease upon the midnight with no pain”; it was something to be felt in the nerve ends and fought against, an initiation rite qualifying her for a life of her own.

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

_ _ _

From my old classroom discussions, I got the idea that Sylvia’s suicide attempts were less a physical challenge than a test of destiny, that is, when she would get abysmally depressed and start to wonder if life were worth living, she would make a significant attempt on her life to see if she were meant to live, that her attempts would not be truly conclusive, such as a gun to the head or a leap from a tall building, but neither was it a cry for help, but more like a roll of the dice. If she survived, then she enjoyed a certain emotional uplift in the belief that it was not her time yet, like she enjoyed a kind of certainty, a clearer purpose.

_ _ _

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——


A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot


A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.


Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——


The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.


Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me


And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.


This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.


What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see


Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies


These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,


Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.


The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut


As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.


Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.


I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.


It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical


Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:


‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge


For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.


And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood


Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.


I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby


That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.


Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——


A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.


Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.


Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

-- "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath

_ _ _

One more note. In her poem “Lady Lazarus”, Sylvia had an additional line, so as to read:

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
I may be Japanese.

Alvarez relates what happened to that last line.

_ _ _

“Why Japanese?” I niggled away at her. Do you just need the rhyme? Or are you just trying to hitch an easy lift by dragging in the atomic victims? If you're going to use this kind of violent material, you've got to play it cool..." She argued back sharply, but later, when the poem was finally published after her death, the line had gone. And that, I think, is a pity: she did need the rhyme; the tone is quite controlled enough to support the apparently not quite relevant allusion; and I was overreacting to the initial brutality of the verse without understanding its weird elegance.

-- A. Alvarez, "The Savage God"

_ _ _

Now when I read the poem, I cannot just forget about the 'Japanese' line, so that I effectively read it both wise, and I am not certain which is better. I do like the added rhyme, and it adds a certain dark whimsy to the poem, but I don't know if the final, more restrained version is hurt by the absence of the line.

I don't think she is Jewish, and if I'm right, I don't see why it would hurt to bring the bombed Japanese into the picture; in fact, without it, one has to fight off the notion that she is Jewish and therefore has some personal right to the claiming of Nazi atrocities. In any case, I imagine I will read the poem both ways from now on, with the debate remaining ongoing in my mind.

_ _ _

And let's not lose sight of the poignant fact that this poem is published posthumously. You cannot count on miralces again and again. Though, I guess the show goes on, and we do continue to buy the wreckage of the life of this pure gold baby.




What she reads here is even more slightly different than the final version that comes to us, and I am more inclined to think this version she reads is the better one.