Channeling Sylvia Plath and Others on the Edge of Life

‘Euphoria’By Elin CullhedCanongate Books, 304 pages‘How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of a Suicidal Mind’By Clancy MartinPantheon, 464 pagesAs Clancy Martin’s subtitle suggests, there is no “suicidal mind” — only the evidence that we can gather of individual instances in which a person self-annihilates. Although Mr. Martin most often probes his many suicide attempts, he is constantly invoking the lives of others — most notably, David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and Nelly Arcan — and their accounts of suicide, their efforts to recover, and, in the case of David Foster Wallace, the ultimate failure to stave off suicide, no matter how eloquent the case he made made for living. Mr. Martin does not regard himself as beyond yet another suicide attempt, and he unsparingly describes his lapses into alcoholism that often presaged the next attempt on his own life. Yet he offers good counsel and advice, suggesting various ways to cope with self-defeat.For some, the proper dosage of drugs has been what’s saved them; for others, it has been exercise — though Mr. Martin notes that certain kinds of exercise (in his case bicycling) can even deepen a depression in the way that jogging does not. With no panaceas in evidence, Mr. Martin painstakingly shows how relapses into thoughts of death can nonetheless be part of a cycle of recovery, as he borrows from the teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous, which hold that departures from sobriety may not signal failure but only setbacks on the way to recovery.Mr. Martin cannot say what it is that drives the mind to thoughts of extinguishing itself, except that in his case he believes the drive to self-destruction began in childhood, and that it has become increasingly acceptable in the medical profession to see even in children the urge to kill themselves.Yet in cases that reach back to our earliest years, he rejects suicide as inevitable. He argues to those who are considering the possibility of ending the world for themselves that their feelings are an option but can be replaced with other options if — for a moment — the suicide considers that a life is never actually over after a death but continues to have an impact on those left behind.Mr. Martin’s position is not so much a moral one as it is tactical: Consider what you might be missing if you wait, hold out for a short time, when the urge to rid the world of yourself may pass.If this call for a moratorium on suicidal ideation seems unconvincing, Mr. Martin provides examples of others, including himself, who with the help of therapy and sometimes of drugs such as valium have gradually learned to live with and overcome suicidal desires. Mr. Martin counsels exactly what most suicides do not have: patience. He believes that over time, tolerance for one’s own inadequacy can be established. In Elin Cullhed’s novel, told from the point of view of Sylvia Plath in the last fraught year of her life, we see her isolation and impatience, living in a country home with few contacts with whom she can exercise the time Mr. Martin says it takes to talk yourself out of suicide.Plath is in fact euphoric because in her decision to end her life flows an energy and sense of greatness she has not heretofore experienced in her writing. It seems that in the very depths of her isolation and breakup of her marriage, she has found her creative voice. This paradox — the birth of art in the decision to die — will seem understandable to those who have read Mr. Martin’s book.The fact is, he has to admit, there are writers who have taken their lives shortly after completing their greatest works, which often deal with suicide. What he cannot know, and it’s something that “Euphoria” can only imagine, is what, in the end, the suicide has wrought: a triumph or a defeat?Neither Ms. Cullhed nor Mr. Martin foreclose the many meanings of suicide and its etiology, but both take the act as not to be dismissed or deplored in itself but as part of the struggle to live, even when that struggle may end in a self-inflicted death.Mr. Rollyson is the author of two forthcoming volumes of Sylvia Plath Day by Day.

Channeling Sylvia Plath and Others on the Edge of Life

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