A. Alvarez
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By: W. W. Norton & Company
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14
Average rating: 4.0 of 5
The Savage God remains essential 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.
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.
Personally I found the chapter on Plath overwhelmingly sad. The cover of paperback edition of her unabridge Journals carries on its cover a picture of Ms. Plath -- a youthful, optimistic young woman, with a wonderfully wide smile and bright, magnetic eyes. Mr. Alavarez knew her personally. His account of her time in London hammers home the tragedy of an artist who lost her footing on that "friable edge." This is a book which, once read, stays with you.
Editorial Review:
The aims of this fascinating, compassionate book are broadly cultural and literary, though the narrative is rooted in personal experience. "To write a book about suicide . . . to transform the subject into something beautiful--this is the forbidding task that Alvarez set for himself. . . . He has succeeded."-- The New York Times.
