Books: The Taste of Hemlock

(2 of 5)

Those who think otherwise might start by reading In a Darkness. James Wechsler is a columnist and one of the top editors of the New York Post. His book is a personal memoir about his son Michael, who killed himself at age 26 after years of sporadically crippling melancholy officially diagnosed as schizophrenia. Wechsler is remarkably persuasive in his main purpose, which is to report—partly as a warning to others who may go that way themselves—the hopeless wanderings he and his wife and Michael took in the deserts of Freudian analysis before the end came.

Gobbled Pills. A succession of psychiatrists (clinically designated as Dr. First, Dr. Second, and so on, through Dr. Eighth) disagreed about treatment—alternately consigning Michael to incarceration or declaring him on the mend. Their consistent effect was to make scapegoats of the parents, cutting them away from the boy so they could neither help nor comfort him. The book's title, In a Darkness, remains an accurate description both of those who eventually kill themselves and of those around them who love them yet fail to help.

By contrast, A. Alvarez's book holds promise of cutting closer to the bone. Creative writers who attempt or contemplate suicide, Alvarez suggests, are likely to bear more eloquent witness than mere unlettered melancholiacs. Accordingly The Savage God begins and ends with an intimate look at two suicides, one successful (if that is the word), one not. The first is the death of Sylvia Plath in the winter of 1962. Alvarez, then as now poetry editor of the London Observer, was a friend of the lady's during her final months, and he describes, in confessional though sometimes disingenuous detail, meetings, at which she showed him some of her last poems. The second case is Alvarez's own suicide attempt, which he rather coyly refrains from mentioning until the final chapter of the book. Two years before Plath, he tried to do away with himself by gobbling (his verb) 45 sleeping pills.

Today nearly everyone is willing to admit that some people are better off dead. But Sylvia Plath was a better than pretty, more than brilliant young woman with two children whom she loved, and an extraordinary talent. Alvarez makes skillful use of her story, not merely to launch his book with a charge of emotion but to explore a basic Freudian concept of suicide as aggression against others—in Plath's case her dead father—turned against oneself.