 [Larger view] | The Savage God: A Study of Suicide
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 One of my most treasured books | |
| I used to read "The Savage God" whenever I was 'in the midst of a dark wood', which for me at least, seemed to occur once every three years. For some reason, the stories of other people's despair and suicide, including Alvarez's own attempted suicide always steadied me. His book is a very literate account of why suicide is such a waste of life and talent. I wouldn't call it a cheerful book, but for me at least, reading it is a very cathartic experience. Alvarez doesn't preach, he merely reports, but he has nevertheless written a very moving book. Read it especially if you are depressed. There is nothing like it on the bookshelves, except perhaps Styron's "Darkness Visible". | |
 The Not So Savage Book | |
| This work is not, properly speaking, a "study" of suicide. Rather, it is comprised of patchwork, non-integrated personal narratives and scanty overviews of psychological theories, literary histories and cultural backgrounds whose lack of integration- Indeed, lack of a coherent thread-do not for a "study" make. But the most bothersome aspect about this book, aside from the disjunctive nature of its content, is its detached, arid prose style. Even the personal accounts of his friendship with Sylvia Plath and his theorizing on the etiology of her suicide (already jejune from the outset, since Plath's is perhaps the most described and theorized over suicide in the last half-century, by friends and otherwise) to his own description of his own failed attempt, there is a listless, plodding quality to the prose, which lends a certain credibility to what Alvarez intimates about this attempt, that it somehow DID kill something inside him. There is simply a lack of vitality here, which makes for rather humdrum reading, regardless of the weight of the book's subject. Plath's own autobiographical suicide-oriented novel, The Bell Jar, is a wonderful benchmark of how the subject can be treated with verve and energy. If one is looking for a solid, non-fiction, overview of the subject written with energy, erudition and even whimsy, Robert Burton's age-old The Anatomy of Melancholy (mentioned glancingly in this book) is still the best and most helpful delving into the subject, both for those simply interested in the phenomenon and, more importantly, from those, like myself, suffering from depression or melancholy and contemplating the possibility of "felo-de-se". As a reader and a sufferer, I finished this rather bland blook untransformed. And I truly don't understand how this book of limpid prose and scanty overviews ever made it into publication.----Oh yes, forgot, he was a friend of Ms. Plath! | |
 The Savage God remains essential | |
| In The Savage God A. Alvarez looks at suicide from the perspective of literature to see how and why "it colors the imaginative world of creative people." To this problem, Mr.Alvarez provides no single answer. Time itself presents a layer of complexity that prevents the satisfying simplicity of a single explantory theory. Yet, in the post-Romantic/Classic era, the contours of an answer can be found that accounts for the suicidal pull today. Art in the modern era enjoys a less restricted scope than that of the classical world; the result is art that is more confrontational. What we find today is that "the more directly an artist confronts the confusions of experience the greater the demands on his intelligence, control and watchfulness." Present always is the risk of being overwhelmed by what one knows, or thinks known. Suicide colors the world of creative people precisely because their confrontation with experience is today inherently risky business. This does not hold for the Surrealists, determined as they were to lighten our load by mocking it, but for the "Extremist Poets," as Alvarez calls them, committed to a "psychic exploration out along the friable eduge which divides the tolerable from the intolerable..." it remains a threatening cloud. It has been over 30 years since the first appearance of The Savage God. Parts of the book show its age. A modern discussion would feature less Freud and more on neurotransmitters, and pharmacological findings. Moreover, it is very clear that Alvarez set the bar too high, attempting in the compass of a small book to survey the history of societal attitudes toward suicide while keeping individual artists, presumably representative of underlying attitudinal currents, in focus at all times. Yet, The Savage God still has its readers and has come to have the status of a standard reference on this dark subject. One reason for its continued appeal is that Alvarez brings to his discussion of actual suicides and suicidal tendencies an uncommonly rich level of thinking, understanding and compassion. His openining chapter on Sylvia Plath, his exposition on Chatterton, and his analysis of that movement toward negation, Dada, carry an insightfulness frequently missing from today's dry, case-history recitals. This is not a book that tries to duplicate the sterile language of a metropolitan hospital's clinical round. |
