Books: The Taste of Hemlock

IN A DARKNESS by JAMES A. WECHSLER 160 pages. Norton. $5.95.

THE SAVAGE GOD by A. ALVAREZ 299 pages. Random House. $7.95.

SUICIDE by JACQUES CHORON 182 pages. Scribners. $7.95.

UNDERSTANDING AND COUNSELING THE SUICIDAL PERSON by PAUL W. PRETZEL 251 pages. Abingdon Press. $5.95.

In the past 15 years, something called suicidology has flourished in the U.S. as never before. Many good studies and much bad prose have resulted. Since 1957, for instance, more than 1,200 books on suicide have appeared. Most of them are technical, widely unread, prepared by (and for) sociologists, psychologists and suicidologists working in the 300 suicide-prevention centers now operating round the country. This spring, however, along with a flow of popular articles and television shows on self-destruction, a number of books have been published, all more or less aimed at the general public. Suicide, in fact, seems about to join teen-age druggery and air pollution as one of the glum preoccupations of the decade.

This sort of attention, it may be argued, is perfectly healthy. Suicide, after all, used to be punished by driving a stake through the heart of the victim (ex post facto). It is still to some extent a shame-shrouded topic. And if the 20th century has taken anything on faith it is the belief that talking about how sick you are is a step toward recovery.

Yet one is hard put to read these four very different books without some misgivings. For if the root reasons for suicide remain murky, among the likely contributory causes is the power of personal example, as well as what might be called sheer morbid faddishness. The more people hear suicide discussed as an honorable solution to the pangs of living, the more people—given other stresses—are likely to try it. It is statistically true that if anyone in a child's close-knit world commits suicide, the child's chances of eventually doing the same thing increase by as much as 75%.

Beside such rude behavioral correlations, rarefied debate about whether suicide is justified or not, as well as neo-Stoical huffing about the inalienable right of alienated man to do himself in, seems frivolous. As these books show, suicidology at first seems an almost abstract subject full of piquant and possibly significant details. Dentists, we learn, lead all professions in killing themselves—followed closely by psychiatrists. Women try suicide three times as often as men but fail much more often. April and May, not the dead of winter, are the crudest months; Hungary, not Sweden, has the world's highest national rate (29.8 per 100,000 people per year); divorced men are among the worst suicide risks. The accumulation of suicide theory and statistics, though, does little finally to illuminate what British Poet-Critic A. Alvarez refers to as the "shabby, confused, agonized crisis which is the common reality of suicide." And that reality does not seem an appropriate subject either for cocktail-party chatter or for purely literary exploitation. It is more like cancer, a mysterious plague that cries out not for philosophy but for a palliative.