Among the numerous ancient and modern proponents of self-destruction discussed in A. Alvarez’s brilliant, controversial, and moving study of suicide, The Savage God,¹ the name of one distinctly odd but celebrated figure who has fascinated French writers is missing. It is that of Proteus Peregrinos, a Cynic philosopher who announced without any apparent cause that he intended to burn himself to death at the forthcoming Olympic games, and who, after declaiming his own funeral oration, proceeded to do so. There is something about the self-delusion of Peregrinos that finds an answering echo in the modern spirit with its tendency to play with fire.

Reading Alvarez’s book one is struck by the extent to which he himself, as poet and critic, is committed not only to the rehabilitation of suicide, but also to the Romantic aesthetic of the poet as willing sacrificial victim. Indeed, the view he expresses in his latest book elaborates the standpoint of his collected essays, Beyond All This Fiddle, where he proposed the desirability of what he aptly called extremism in art. Given the pressure of the modern crisis—extermination camps, atrocities, the possibility of nuclear destruction—the argument runs, the true, controlled, and serious artist (as distinct from the self-indulgent member of the vapid avant-garde) is forced into the role of scapegoat. “He pursues his insights to the edge of breakdown and then beyond it,” into the realm of mania, depression, paranoia, hallucination. Such an artist readily “puts himself at risk and explores his own vulnerability . . . under certain conditions of stress, a great work of art is a kind of suicide.”

The artist worthy of the name thus assumes the challenging and dangerous role of spiritual mountaineer in a world otherwise hostile or indifferent to heroism. He is engaged in some perilous inner voyage of discovery on which he has staked his very sanity and his life itself. He is committed to “psychic exploration out along that friable edge that divides the tolerable from the intolerable. . . .” Each person shapes his ideal in his own image, and Alvarez likes mountaineering.

In The Savage God Alvarez’s attitude appears highly personal, largely discursive, and historical rather than critical. The book, opening with a disturbing memoir of the poet Sylvia Plath who took her own life in 1963, and ending with a touching account of the author’s failure to do away with himself, contains within these poles enough themes for several volumes embracing different disciplines. I wish here to examine only one of those themes: the concept of art as a suicidal activity. How has this concept arisen? Has it indeed become dominant? What are its implications? To attempt to answer will entail visiting some of the same landmarks Alvarez does, though not with the same Baedeker.

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While, before the growth of Romanticism, the poet often had a high conception of his art as a divine gift or as a means of acquiring or granting immortal fame, he did not see it as a substitute religion. When Matthew Arnold wrote that “most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry,” he was projecting into the future something that was already taking place. In an important article written in 1924, the French critic Jacques Rivière remarked on the extent to which the idea of literature had been “permeated or contaminated by the idea of religion since the period of Romanticism. If the problem of the possibility and the limits of literature assumes such a tragic character today, to my mind, it is because it has taken over the place and the form of religion.”

One consequence of this phenomenon was that the poet saw himself in the role of priest. What use are poets in an age unpropitious to poetry?, inquired Hölderlin, who ended incurably insane. They are like holy priests of the wine god, he declared. But even more than they resembled dedicated priests, they were voluntary or involuntary sacrificial victims, scapegoats, martyrs. That early arbiter of Romantic tendencies and attitudes, Friedrich Schlegel, wrote: “Do not go and waste in politics faith and love, but, in the divine world of science and of art, offer up your most intimate being as a sacrifice so that the sacred fire of culture may consume it.”

That call to self-sacrifice for art, uttered between 1798 and 1800, would be only too widely obeyed. Especially as it was assumed that the artist was another death-conquering Orpheus or some kind of phoenix who would miraculously rise from the ashes. According to the poet-philosopher Nietzsche (who like the favorite poet of his youth, Hölderlin, would collapse in madness), one must be willing to burn in one’s own flame, and be reduced to ashes, as a necessary prerequisite for rebirth. Self-destruction was somehow to be a means of access to a higher plane or new creativity. (The idea that self-destructiveness or immersion in death can be sources of creative energy may be found in Alvarez’s writings on Keats as well as on Sylvia Plath.) Nietzsche’s Zarathustra professed a special love for those who did not spare themselves, and proclaimed that he esteemed only those works where the artist wrote in blood: “Write in blood, and thou shalt learn that blood is spirit,” he affirmed.

It was Goethe in his seventies who, chatting with Eckermann in 1824, recalled that like the pelican he had fed with the blood of his own young heart his novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which fifty years before had given the signal for one of the recurring vogues of suicide. The same image of the poet as pelican, the bird that according to legend offers its heart’s blood to feed the hungry, and an old emblem of Christ, was developed by Alfred de Musset in one of his best-known poems, where his Muse proposed that the most despairing songs are the most beautiful.

In his Olympian maturity Goethe had come to dread the very idea of experiencing again the strange state of mind in which he had composed Werther. At the same time, however, he felt that the novel depicted a widespread and insoluble human dilemma, by no means limited to a personal case, and that it could arise whenever the sensitive individual was frustrated by “the narrow limits of an antiquated world.”

But perhaps the poet who responded most keenly to the theme of poetic martyrdom was the disdainful aristocrat Alfred de Vigny. He projected his own lofty sensibility onto the hero of his play Chatterton (1835), based on the suicide of the “marvelous boy,” a drama which in turn echoed a wave of solitary pistol shots. Vigny’s Chatterton is told, “You will always be somebody’s martyr,” and along with all those endowed with a special kind of creative imagination, he is “crucified” by an uncomprehending world. And Vigny spoke of “the perpetual martyrdom and perpetual immolation of the Poet.” Here it is not so much the deliberate choice of self-immolation envisaged by Friedrich Schlegel, the Peregrinos pattern consecrated by the moderns, so much as the martyrdom inflicted by a complacent, hateful, and unjust society, to which Goethe had alluded when, in connection with Werther’s fate, he spoke of the failure of the aspiring individual to adapt to “the narrow limits of an antiquated world.” (Both these elements, the voluntary self-sacrifice and the sacrifice exacted by a terrible hostile world, are to be found in Alvarez’s evaluation of the modern poet’s predicament.)

Discussing the poetic dilemma, Vigny distinguished between the rare poetic type on the one hand, and on the other the man of letters or the great writer who, he felt, were perfectly able to fend for themselves. The poetic nature represented by his Chatterton—and, by extension, himself—is more vulnerable than these. In this kind of poet, imagination, not vulgar reality, is dominant. Already for Vigny, in revolt against divine injustice, the pull of the imagination has metaphysical undertones. Imagination sweeps the poet’s faculties toward the unknown: “Sublime flight toward unknown worlds, you become the unconquerable inclination of his spirit!” But at the same time, in Vigny’s opinion, the poet is doomed from birth. The “bad fairy” who presides over his cradle is Poetry herself. Thus, for Vigny and his heirs, the gifts of poetry are ambivalent: they close the doors of this world while opening those that appear to beckon toward some higher state or revelation.

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A mere thirty-five years later and the legendary doomed “accursed poet” himself appeared on the scene in person: Arthur Rimbaud, the aggressive adolescent who would have no truck with God or received religion, and who was determined to go to the very end of everything, regardless of the consequences. He gave his poetic procedure for becoming a seer through the derangement of all the senses in the much-quoted letter of May 1871, where the poet is to embrace sickness, suffering, and madness for the sake of reaching “the unknown.” To be sure, this program (echoed in Alvarez’s description of the extremist poet pursuing his insights beyond breakdown) is no soft option. It is a form of martyrdom, a crucifixion willingly undergone for the purpose of seeing his hallucinations and visions. Rimbaud would become one of the saints of the modern poetic canon, and one of the cult figures of our day. Desultory attempts have been made to dislodge this astonishing prodigy, whose poetic peak was achieved between the years of seventeen and twenty, and who then fell from his hubristic poetic assault on the heavens (by way of hell) into the mute and brutish materialism of a trader in Abyssinia.

This urge to risk going to the very limit of one’s experiences (even if it meant madness and actual, or virtual, suicide) for the sake of returning with light from “the unknown” was clearly dependent upon the conviction that the power of the imagination was superior to that of mere reason. It was, in short, the continuation of the debate between intuition and control, instinct and obligation, the confrontation between rationalism and anti-rationalism which in the 18th century had been expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he made Saint-Preux and Lord Édouard Bomston propose the arguments for and against suicide in La Nouvelle Héloïse. Goethe’s novel, too, in which the frustrated dreamer Werther and his friend, the more prosaic Albert, respectively justify and refute the claims of suicide, belongs in this debate. It is as if suicide were the test case. But by the time one has come to Rimbaud, writing roughly a century after Werther, the situation has grown exacerbated. Anti-rationalism in the form of extreme demands upon the imagination now betokens violent reaction against the excesses of positivism and the exaggerated trust in science and material progress. Despite our disillusion or lip service to disillusion with technological advancement, a century after Rimbaud we are still largely both intellectually and emotionally involved in the dilemma occasioned by that movement of action and reaction.

As the sonorous Victor Hugo with his middle-aged passion for Kabbalah and spiritualism expressed the clash between rationalism and anti-rationalism in his posthumously published poem, Dieu, the average man rejects the excessive desire to know, discover, and “go to the end,” while the poet longs to unite earth with heaven, the ideal with the real, and catch a glimpse of unknown worlds. Elsewhere, Victor Hugo distinguished between what he called normal consciousness and the lure of the abyss. “Every man . . . is free to go or not to go upon that frightening promontory of thought from which one peers into darkness. If he goes not, he remains within ordinary life, within the domain of normal consciousness. . . . For internal peace, this is obviously the best. If he ventures upon those heights he is taken captive. The deep waves of the supernatural have appeared to him. No man can view that ocean with impunity. . . . He will not renounce that fatally alluring abyss, that sounding of the unexplored deep, that indifference to the earth and to life, that entry into the forbidden, that effort to feel the impalpable and to see the invisible. He comes back to it again and again, he leans and bends over it. . . .” And sometimes he fails to draw back, falls, and destroys himself.

The poet thus appears in the role of Hamlet tempted toward the abyss. In Shakespeare’s play the possibility is envisaged that the apparition may be some diabolic spirit intending to tempt the sweet prince to the cliff top and draw him into madness. On the cliff top we are still with Alvarez’s imagery of the climb and the edge, the dizzy height or fall. Faust tells Mephistopheles how much he desires the abyss. There is surely a Satanic element in the urge to plunge to self-destruction in the quest for some unknown revelation, an element which Romantic poets from Byron onward, hypnotized by the reversal of values in Satanic revolt, found it so difficult to resist. They were haunted by the frenzied ride to the abyss. And Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, conjuring from the depths his “abysmal thought”—“Mine abyss speaketh”—utters first a cry of triumph and then a cry of horror.

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For many the cry of horror would come too late: they would be dashed on the rocks below. Contemplating this tragedy in Russia, Dostoevsky, with his deep prophetic insight into the dark temptations of the floundering modern spirit, stood appalled. Suicide (as Alvarez points out) was a subject he could not leave alone. But then Dostoevsky’s obsessive concern with suicide provides the key to his analysis of the moral sickness of the modern world.

For Dostoevsky suicide was the outward manifestation of an inner disease, the disease of self-will (which for Nietzsche, who acknowledged his debt to the Russian novelist, would be the supreme virtue). Suicide was the logical consequence of Satanic revolt and despair occasioned by the denial of God. Self-destruction implied the rejection of the divinely-ordered universe, with its insistence on choice, humility, and redemption through suffering. It meant the arrogant exaltation of human will in place of submission to divine will. Moreover, it signified that Russians had lost their roots through adopting false, foreign, socialist theories alien to their true, deeply mystic, and Orthodox natures. What Dostoevsky was fighting within himself as well as in the world was the power of negation that had overwhelmed him personally at the time of his dazzling debut. The force of negation remained so strong within him that he felt only devotion to the person of the Redeemer could save him.

In his novels and the journalism of his Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky analyzed various forms of suicide, including the despairing indignation of the embittered soul in revolt against the “absurdity” of the universe. To illustrate this he chose the tragic example of Alexander Herzen’s young daughter, who left an outrageously flippant note. This instance reveals, it is true, the less attractive side of Dostoevsky’s character, since it shows him riding his hobby-horse, his reiterated belief that the sins of the intellectuals of Herzen’s generation were visited on their children. Such suicides, Dostoevsky implied, were the ruinous consequences of mistaken modern ideas, atheism, and rootlessness.

While a number of Dostoevsky’s characters end in self-destruction, perhaps the most compelling of his suicides is the engineer Kirillov, a character who only took shape in the last stages of planning The Possessed, and whose rootlessness is of such a degree that he speaks Russian ungrammatically. Kirillov (whose article on the increase of suicides in Russia anticipates Dostoevsky’s journalism in the Diary) is the tragic embodiment of modern self-will. According to Kirillov’s crazed logic: “If God exists, all is His will. . . . If not, it’s all my will. . . . I am bound to shoot myself because the highest point of my self-will is to kill myself with my own hands.” To be the first to kill himself to prove that man is God, is Kirillov’s intention: “To recognize that there is no God and not to recognize at the same instant that one is God oneself is an absurdity. . . . But one, the first, must kill himself, for who else will begin and prove it? . . . For three years I’ve been seeking for the attribute of my godhead and I’ve found it; the attribute of my godhead is self-will! . . . I am killing myself to prove . . . my new terrible freedom.”

We recognize the serious assessment of modern pretensions that Dostoevsky intends to make through Kirillov’s frigid frenzy. After all, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra will teach: “Die at the right time. . . . My death I commend unto you, free death, that cometh unto me because I will.” And the intemperate Antonin Artaud, who suffered long spells of madness, confined in mental hospitals, declared: “By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.” Much impressed by Dostoevsky, Camus took his point of departure from the Russian novelist when he opened The Myth of Sisyphus with the observation that suicide was the one really serious philosophical problem.

Yet alongside the high seriousness, there is also a grating satirical intent in The Possessed. This aspect is reinforced by the reactions of the repellent intriguer, Peter Stepanovich, who needs Kirillov’s suicide for his own ends, and who, kept on tenterhooks, mutters to himself now (in relief) that the madman will do it, now (in frustration) that he won’t. Human pretensions, Dostoevsky would imply, are at once tragic and grotesque.

How accurate Dostoevsky’s prophecy was can be seen in two Nietzschean literary suicides who would probably have horrified Nietzsche: one, John Davidson, a minor fin-de-siècle poet; the other, Harry Crosby, a wealthy American expatriate in the Paris of the 20’s. Forestalling the Futurists, John Davidson sought to undo the past and throw all values into the crucible. One of the earliest of Nietzsche’s disciples in Britain, Davidson could not reconcile himself to the human condition, wanted to remake the world in his own image, and longed by his own sovereign will to “win the heaven of eternal night.” He disappeared in the waters off Cornwall in 1909.

As for Harry Crosby, he admired Rimbaud and Nietzsche (quoting “Die at the right time . . .”) and was obsessed by what he called the Sun Death. Deeply scarred by the 1914-18 war, he “set himself the goal of going crazy in order to become a genius,” wrote Malcolm Cowley, who added: “Out of his reading came the idea that . . . the highest expression of the self was in the act of self-annihilation . . . that ecstasy was to be attained at any price—death was the last ecstasy . . . life itself might be transformed into a work of art rising to a splendid climax— ‘to die at the right time.’ His suicide would be the last debauch, the final extravagance, the boldest act of sex, the supreme gesture of defiance to the world he despised.” His dream of making his suicide a work of art ended in a New York hotel in 1929 when he took his own life after shooting a young married socialite.

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Harry Crosby with his violent and pathetic hubris was a contemporary of the Surrealists in their first period, who issued out of the total nihilism and despairing destructiveness of Dada. He lacked, however, the grim “humor” of one of the heroes of the Surrealists, Jacques Vaché, an opium addict who committed suicide by taking an overdose, having first administered a similar amount to an innocent companion as a practical joke. The panjandrum of the Surrealists, André Breton, had known Vaché personally and always acknowledged his indebtedness to the wag who, from nihilist disgust and a desire to achieve total freedom, deliberately flouted all rational norms of behavior. Because it fulfilled their ideal of sheer gratuitousness, Vaché’s combination of murder and suicide could not be condemned by the Surrealists. There was reason for unreason and method in this madness.

The Surrealists were aiming deliberately at the destruction of reason and logic, the removal of all aesthetic and moral considerations. They represented the final flowering of the reaction against reason that manifested itself in the 18th century, and Breton admitted that they were “the tail” of Romanticism. Indebted to the discoveries of Freud, they insisted on the supremacy of chance and imagination, hence their concern with automatic writing, with spontaneity of expression and deed, with everything that lay beyond the control of the rational mind. “It is not fear of madness that will force us to furl the flag of imagination,” wrote Breton, who advocated the simulation of madness as a form of expression.

Clearly, it is one thing for the poet to endure the sacred privilege of being driven insane by Apollo, and another for him to cultivate or pretend insanity for the purpose of art or higher revelation. Similarly, it is one thing for the poet to transmute his pain and suffering into poetic form, and another for him deliberately to seek out agonies with this end in view. Feeling, not analysis, was king, though the extremes of both may surely be regarded as forms of tyranny. There must be no barriers to experience. Above all, what Breton desired was the elimination of all contradictions between “waking and sleeping (reality and dream), reason and madness, objectivity and subjectivity, perception and representation, . . . and indeed, life and death.”

It is scarcely surprising, then, that one of the early activities of the Surrealists was the organization of a symposium on suicide. “We live, we die. What is the share of the will in all this? It seems that we kill ourselves the way we dream. It is not a moral question we are asking: is suicide a solution?” We kill ourselves the way we dream: the frontiers of life and death were becoming blurred. Which was which? Could one be sure? Did it matter? In the midst of life we are in death: perhaps in the midst of death we are in life, even if this is not meant in a strictly religious sense?

So the Surrealists seem to have felt. In his answer to the questionnaire, the handsome René Crevel, who suffered from tuberculosis and would later kill himself, declared: “Those men commit suicide who reject the quasi-universal cowardice of struggling against a certain spiritual sensation so intense that it must be taken, until further notice, as a sensation of truth. Only this sensation permits the acceptance of the most obviously just and definitive of solutions: suicide.” Here is expressed, in a kind of spiritual atheism or perversion of religious ideas, the notion that one can somehow courageously find a greater spiritual truth in self-destruction than in life.

This was one consequence of the charms with which the Romantic poets had invested death. Those poets who could say with Keats that they were “half in love with easeful Death,” who were actually longing for death, or who felt that only in death could sublimity be experienced, are echoed by the elegant and vacuous Jacques Rigaut, a drug addict whose suicide so fascinated his friend, once an associate of the Surrealists, the future suicide, Drieu La Rochelle. Rigaut declared: “. . . I’m on death’s side.” One of the early Surrealist leaders, the poet Paul Éluard, said that his entire living being “aspired to the majesty of death.”

How far André Breton went in confusing the frontiers of life and death in the name of a higher reality or “surreality” can be grasped in such pronouncements as: “And if you die, aren’t you sure to awake among the dead?” “Surrealism will admit you into death which is a secret society.” “It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence lies elsewhere.” These observations can be found in the first Surrealist manifesto of 1924, and must have fulfilled a deep need that had arisen in the ruin of all values. Yet how romantically perverse it was to suppose that, without faith and works, death could provide spiritual answers (or indeed any answers) that life could not.

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Such death-intoxicated notions, the culmination of the long “romantic agony,” have penetrated deep. So much so that they are the cause of a certain critical unease and uncertainty, for it is widely accepted that the poet is not quite as other men, that his gift may well exact a high price. To a certain extent, Alvarez’s views would seem to benefit from this tradition. But the extremist always has to go one better than his predecessor. Alvarez can justify what he calls, none too happily, the highbrow arts: “They survive morally by becoming, in one way or another, an imitation of death in which their audience can share. To achieve this the artist, in his role of scapegoat, finds himself testing out his own death and vulnerability for and on himself.”

Meanwhile, he candidly admits that this is taking place in an age when artists are consumed by doubt about their position and value in the world. The prestige of risk is dazzling indeed. But do we in fact demand so much of our artists, or does it make them feel more important to think so? Are they not like children shouting for attention when grown-ups decline to give it? Suicide is understood to be one way of proving sincerity and claiming attention. Camus quotes one modern Peregrinos who went so far as to kill himself in order to get his book noticed: “Attention was certainly attracted, but the book was judged bad.”

What has happened is that Alvarez has taken the models he especially admires (Robert Lowell—whose treatment of nervous breakdown in Life Studies encouraged Sylvia Plath to pursue “taboo subjects”—or John Berryman and Ted Hughes with their extremes of violence), and has elevated their aesthetic into a pattern for high modern art. Yet there seems a kind of falsity and pretentiousness in the poet’s attempt to relive and “manipulate”—as did Sylvia Plath—the terrible extreme experience of others (for instance in extermination camps or in Hiroshima), for the sake of art. It may well be that, up to a certain point, writers can only write in the way they do write. If that is so, then it is just as well for the critic not to try to mold their tastes and insights into a poetic ideal or standard. There exists more than one kind of art which merits the title to high seriousness.

The concept of art as a suicidal activity, then, like the despairing suicidal impulses of individuals, should be seen as a persistent, recurring, obsessive temptation rather than as the dominating factor in modern artistic movements. While we have no desire to return to the era when suicides were buried at the crossroads with stakes driven through their bodies, any more than we wish to deny the enlargement of sensibility once engendered by Romanticism and its heirs, we ought at this stage to perceive the dangers of the trend to aesthetic self-immolation, dangers surely outweighing the perverse glamor which any extremist doctrine or position always seems to radiate. This trend would inevitably, if pursued to its logical conclusion, bring about the end of the arts whose ultimate justification it claims to be. The combat would cease for want of combatants.

Must art swing between extremes? Must one reject the gift of reason—for it is a gift as much as the imagination—and must one hope in vain for equilibrium? The idea that the awful state of the world, its cruelty and evil, the possibility of its imminent end, actually require the deliberate risk of madness or self-destruction on the part of the artist seems to me a high-sounding fallacy. The options available to the artist, even today, need not be so limited as Alvarez would suggest. For a start, the artist might reexamine and query received notions about his role. Instead of trying to “come to terms” with inner or outer violence, he might contemplate opposing it. And, insofar as he is able, he might consider resisting so vain and self-defeating a role as that of Peregrinos.

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¹ Random House, 299 pp., $7.95.