Books: The Taste of Hemlock

(3 of 5)

Alvarez's closing account of his own suicide attempt serves little purpose, beyond proving that he, too, is a member of the club. He recalls how his parents used to talk of putting their heads in the oven and adds that for years he went around repeating "Iwishiweredead" to himself. But why? And how did he feel as the final, slow, nightmarish slide toward darkness took hold of him in his 31st year? Did he do anything so prosaic as hide the pills in those spare moments of common sense when he wondered, as he must have wondered, what effect his death would have on his small child? For all we learn, Alvarez might just as well be a tongue-tied stockbroker. The only flash of revelation comes after his recovery. He speaks of the source of his earlier despair as a prolonged adolescent expectation of life. Afterward he realized that he was simply and undramatically unhappy: "I had accepted that there weren't ever going to be any answers, even in death."

Coals to Newcastle. Daniel Defoe was once put in the stocks in 18th century London for writing a treatise against the political power of the church. He promptly penned a poem about the experience and had it hawked in the very street where he was taking his punishment. A similar entrepreneurial taint clouds Alvarez's effort. He makes a fine brisk guide to changing historic attitudes toward suicide: Roman Stoics practiced it gladly; romantic poets preached it madly; the early Christians pursued de facto suicide by avidly seeking martyrdom, until in A.D. 412 Saint Augustine declared the act a mortal sin. Alvarez also offers a fascinating chronicle of literary figures who espoused, contemplated or tried suicide—Montaigne, John Donne, Cowper, Thomas Chatterton, Dostoevsky, and so on up to Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway. It is only toward the end that one realizes Alvarez is thesis pushing, that the book is as much apologia as inquiry. His questionable message: the 20th century is the age of death. But, Alvarez argues, because mankind is only numbly aware of this, the risky purpose of the creative writer must now be to force his audience "to recognize and accept imaginatively . . . not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified." This mission may be regarded as carrying coals to Newcastle. Alvarez, however, clearly feels quietly (and personally) Promethean about it all.