The Savage God

"Yes, The Savage God . It came out in the 1970s and I’ve had for many years. He begins the book by talking about Sylvia Plath, apparently she was a friend of his. A lot, and especially in the creative world: Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway , van Gogh, Primo Levi. Just so many. Alvarez says a lot of interesting things. For example that many years ago, those who committed suicide were buried in the same area were criminals were buried. Because it was a sin. And I guess in some extreme cases of religion it probably is still a sin. Another thing that Alvarez says that struck me – and by the way he also tried to commit suicide – is that suicide is a messy business. But now scientific research is being done about it, it has become respectable, because everything that science touches becomes respectable. He also argues that although suicide seems like the solution in the minds of those who do it, that actually it’s a form of failure, just as divorce is a failure, at some level. And I guess those who try to commit suicide and don’t succeed, when they come to, often they don’t even say it was suicide they were thinking about, because it is too embarrassing. Alvarez calls himself a failed suicide. He also talks about things like the suicide cult. If the newspapers pay a lot of attention to suicide, there are those who want to imitate it. And he’s a poet so of course it’s quite literary. He talks about the Romantic poets, for whom dying young was glamorous. Also Shakespeare uses a lot of suicide in his plays. But I’m not that up on Shakespeare. It’s a language I never learned to appreciate because I never read it in Dutch and in English the language strikes me as very complicated. I never conquered Shakespeare – Jim tried, believe me. Alvarez also says he doesn’t feel it is a disease, but a “terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.” But in Jim’s case I wonder. Well, that’s the other thing that I speculate about. And maybe it is totally based on the need to feel that Jim loved us. But when his mother was in a mental institution, he went to see her and it was a very unpleasant thing. I wonder whether he may have thought that he would end up the same way and that he wanted to spare our kids. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Jim was very protective as a person, and I think maybe he wanted to protect the kids from having to see him like that. He felt enormous guilt when his mother died. Styron talks about suicide as a form of madness, and Jim’s mother was not mad, but certainly heading in that direction…So perhaps he felt himself heading in that direction and didn’t want our kids to have to go through what he had to go through with his mother. No, not anymore. Yes but also because I had no time to. Maybe this is a bad thing. But as you know my mother died right at the beginning of the war. I was never able to mourn her because I had already gone into hiding by then. And those brave people who were risking their lives to save, hopefully, your life, didn’t want to see an unhappy face. I always tried to be as cheerful as possible while I was in hiding. And I never really mourned Jim because I had to be strong for my daughters. That was the only thing on my mind – I have to get these kids through it. I have to bring them up, and I don’t want to be a miserable mother who wails and sits and weeps. So I never did. I didn’t begin dealing with Jim’s suicide really until I began writing A Hidden Life , which is why it took me so long, because it was a very hard thing to do."