"Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide" by Lisa Lieberman

The asperity of Lieberman's wit is particularly welcome in this territory. She explains that French officials became increasingly alarmed as the vogue for self-destruction spread from the ranks of the elite to riffraff. Describing the response to a farm laborer's suicide, she writes, "the tone of the prefect's denunciation leads me to think that the real crime, when a member of the lower class took his life, was not suicide but the inappropriate social aspirations that motivated it." Killing oneself was seen as the province of heroes, poets, the nobility -- men of honor, not peasants.

For the author of a book meant to float the notion of legitimate, rational self-destruction, though, Lieberman sets the bar pretty high. After dismissing suicide over despised love as a kind of glorified tantrum, she surveys the lives of three brilliant women who epitomize the notion of the "tragic artist": Simone Weil, Diane Arbus and Sylvia Plath. Their curtailed lives are cloaked in another kind of romanticism -- that of the creative being too sensitive and/or pure to survive in our sullied, profane world. Lieberman makes pretty short work of the mystique in each case, pegging Weil and Arbus as enmeshed in self-loathing masquerading as concern for others and Plath as a sort of connoisseur of rage and misery, not so much self-hating as competitively morbid. (After all, Plath boasted that she performed the art of dying "exceptionally well.")

And so Lieberman wends her way to the three men whose lives seem to offer the best case for what she calls "self-destruction as a meaningful gesture": the Holocaust survivors Jean Améry, Bruno Bettelheim and Primo Levi, each of whom died by his own hand. It's here that "Leaving You" gets uncharacteristically foggy. What Lieberman seems to be saying is that if anyone has a legitimate reason to reject not just humanity but life itself, it is men like these. They have seen the worst that other people can do, and the worst in themselves.

And yet Lieberman has her doubts that even a suicide in extremis -- the case of a woman inmate forced to dance for a Nazi officer before being sent to the gas chamber, who managed to seize the officer's gun and shoot him before being shot herself -- can have much meaning. Bettelheim saw this as an example of "supreme self-assertion" and the reclamation of dignity. Lieberman, who declares that "dying on your own terms is still dying," wonders if this isn't a further indication of what she considers Bettelheim's "fairy-tale presumptions" about the ability to derive "hopeful lessons from a prisoner's suicide."

She seems to put more stock in the suicidal thinking of Améry, who "said that in Auschwitz all the poetry and philosophy he used to love became worthless." This was "the loss of his humanity. The loss, that is, of everything he valued: the consolations of beauty, empathy, rationality and truth." For him, the meaning of all those things, of anything at all, vanished in the camps and he could not get it back again after the war. Who are we, or Lieberman, or anyone else, to quarrel with his assessment of his situation? This must at last be the Good Suicide.

But what Lieberman doesn't leave us with is any sense of how to grapple with the case of a garden-variety suicidal person, one who hasn't survived one of the most degrading atrocities of the 20th century. Anyone who has dealt with a suicidal loved one can testify to how terrifying and confusing it can be, and Lieberman readily acknowledges the fear, pain, grief, guilt and anger that ripple through the friends and relatives of a suicide. Suicide is a profoundly aggressive act, as she states many times, and perhaps it is also sometimes a rebellion against an unjust authority or order, a statement against the intolerability of the suicide's condition, a radical assertion of autonomy.

However, some -- surely most -- people who want to kill themselves are indeed suffering from depression. They are quite likely to see their circumstances otherwise once they recover from their disorder. Rescued suicides have described a delusional "suicidal trance" and have thanked those who thwarted their determination to kill themselves once that trance is broken. Even if we allow that some suicides are a reasonable response to a horrendous and faith-decimating life experience, others clearly are not. And, most important, some people who have endured similar experiences do not kill themselves.

Perhaps it's a moot point; it is a universal human duty to try to prevent any healthy person from self-destruction, regardless of how good that person's reasons might be. Lieberman says that by denying traumatized, exhausted persons the legitimacy of their choice to leave the world, we reduce them to "victims with no control over their own destiny," and thereby erase their dignity, much as their past tormentors did. But the alternative is to permit the destruction of a human being who might later find reason to live, and that seems the greater crime. I'm perfectly happy to allow some of the dead the dignity that Lieberman calls for, but when it comes to living, all bets are off.

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