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The Savage God is an impressive attempt to join approaches of literary criticism, intellectual history, biographical sketches, and
psychological explanations, especially psychoanalytic ones. It includes a moving personal memoir of Sylvia Plath; a lucid review of attitudes toward suicide through the ages, focusing on literary figures and their works; a thumbnail review of psychological explanations of the phenomenon; a penetrating essay analyzing the ubiquity of suicide among literary artists in the twentieth century; and a final chapter describing the author's own suicide attempt some ten years ago.
The form and personal tone of the book suggest that it is an attempt at self-analysis, and the last chapter is better seen as a preface. The author's need to understand the obsessional temptation in order to contain the desire for self-extinction, and then to exhibit these discoveries to as wide an audience as the mass media enable him to reach, has an analogy in the analytic situation. Thinking something, saying it out loud, and then knowing someone is listening—are three stages toward giving the thought real existence and binding truth.
To estimate the success of the book, then, requires a judgment of the depth of self-knowledge achieved; of Alvarez's ability to apply adequately formulated psychoanalytic explanations contributing to this self-knowledge; and his use of this introspective understanding in giving insights into the biographical, sociological, and literary material he has chosen. I feel that in spite of his extensive literary and sociological knowledge, the hoped-for comprehension of the painful psychic state of the person who wishes to take his own life is often missing—whether the artist discussed is Sylvia Plath, Thomas Chatterton, or himself.
It is appropriate to begin a review of the book with the crucial last chapter, since the denials and evasions of expected conclusions permeating much of the rest of this multifaceted study begin here. Alvarez d